My question to you is, what do you think about the concept of hell or hell?  If I… if I am sitting here and I am blissed out totally, look at my eyes, it looks like I am always toned. Yes, never touched a substance, but this is the most complex chemical factory in the world, is that so? Do you agree with me? The question is only, are you a great CEO or a lousy CEO of this chemical factory? If you were a great CEO, you would keep this all the time, blissed out, right chemistry. If you're a lousy CEO, you produce bad chemistry and you think it's because of this one or that one or that one. So for some reason people are feeling miserable. Their chemical factory is not going the way they want. They can call it sadness, they can call it misery, they can call it depression. So when this is feeling like hell, we hope that somewhere when we go up there, that everything will be fantastic. Harshita means, you know, blissed out. So this happened, this happened in Alabama. You know, Alabama state, it's a special state. It's a different kind of state, hardcore religious state. So in a Sunday school, a Sunday school teacher was going all out, full rhetoric, full force.  So catch them young policy. In his full rhetoric he was going and children were sitting like this. Suddenly he stopped for dramatic impact. He stopped and he said, What do you have to do to go to heaven? Little Mary in the front bench stood up and said, If I mop the church floor every Sunday morning, I will go to heaven. Absolutely.  Correct. Another boy said, If I help people who are in need, I will go to heaven. Correct.  Well, that's a qualification.   Yes? One of these things we will do depending on your culture. So one thing is very clear, you will put your body back into the earth and it's a very eco-friendly thing to do. So you left your body and went to heaven. So what is in heaven? In Hindu heaven, food is very good. If you are a foodie, you must go to Hindu heaven. Nala himself will cook personally for you. He's the greatest chef. If you go to another kind of heaven, white-gound ladies will float around in the clouds. If you like that kind of ambience, you go there. If you go to another heaven, you will have virgin problems. If that's what you're looking for, you go there. But you went there without the body. What do you do with good food and virgins, I'm asking? You don't have a body? These are all bodily problems, isn't it? No body, what do you do with food and virgins? In the Hindu way of life, there is a thing up there in heaven, there is an akshayapatra. How much ever you eat, food will always be full. Well, when you go without a body, food will always remain full in the vessel. And they will always remain virgins. So we have been doing this for a long time. This was one simple way. You must understand the managerial skills of the traditional people. This was a way of managing humanity. You're miserable. Oh! Don't worry, when you go there, everything will be okay. So less. So if it is a psychologist saying these things, it's okay. But you really made them believe everything is going to be better somewhere, you can mess up your life here. That's not good. Everybody is in deep state of suffering, don't worry. When you go and sit in God's lap, everything will be okay. It's a psychological tool. It's fine when people are in extreme states, but don't brand it and sell it everywhere because it's not going to work like that. So now heavens are collapsing in people's minds. Why there is such an increase of consumption of alcohol and drugs on the planet is mainly because still people are not articulating it. But in their minds, heavens are collapsing. How many of you are thinking, one day when I go to heaven, everything will be fantastic? Not many of you, I'm sure. But in the previous or the previous generation, if you had looked, the numbers were quite significant. So heavens are obviously collapse… collapsing in human mind because if you ask three questions, all the three heavens will collapse. Yes. So now once human intellect became active, inevitably at last questions, if you ask questions, these things will collapse. So people are trying to have alternatives right here that they're getting drunk and drugged right here. To be healthy, they need chemicals. To be peaceful, they need chemicals. To be joyful, they need chemicals. For everything, they need chemicals. I want you to know this, seventy percent of U.S. population is on prescription medication. The most affluent nation on the planet, why does individuals and society seek affluence? Because the first step of affluence is choice of food, choice of nourishment. The second step of affluence is choice of lifestyles. The most incredible variety of food is in front of you and enormous lifestyle choices are there. And in this society, seventy percent of the people are un-pharmaceutical, you know, prescription medication. This clearly shows if you do economic development without also cultivating human consciousness, our wealth will become our biggest problem. So we are still on the threshold of economic development. This is the time where we have to invest in evolving human consciousness. So if individual evolution in terms of becoming conscious doesn't happen, you will see ninety percent of the population will fall into chemicals. When they fall into chemicals, I'm not talking about this as a moral thing. If ninety percent of the human population goes on constant usage of chemicals, the next generation that we produce will be a generation which will be much less than who we are. And that's a crime against humanity. Every generation, the next generation that comes must be at least one notch better than who we are. If we produce a generation less than us, then we have committed a crime against humanity. We have taken humanity backwards. And that is what will happen if chemical usage multiplies and it is going wild. This is the time to raise consciousness. That's why we are here with you to blow your mind without cocaine.


Welcome to Learning English, a daily 30-minute program from the Voice of America. I'm Ashley Thompson. And I'm Dan Novak. This program is designed for English learners, so we speak a little slower, and we use words and phrases, especially written for people learning English. Coming up on the program, Faith Perlow has a story on reducing food waste in the United States. Andrew Smith and Gina Bennett have this week's health and lifestyle reports on efforts to get lower-cost medications in poorer countries. Later, Andrew and Jill Robbins present the lesson of the day, but first... When Sean Rafferty first worked in a food store 40 years ago, anything that was not sold got thrown out. But on a recent day at his store near the New York City area, he was preparing boxes of bread, vegetables, and milk products to be picked up by a food bank. It is part of a program in New York State requiring larger businesses to donate food and, if possible, reusing small leftover pieces of food. New York is among a growing number of states trying to limit food waste. They are concerned that it is taking up space in landfills and adding to global warming.  Food waste, including meat and vegetables, releases methane gas after being put in a landfill and saving unwanted food helps to feed hungry families. Worldwide, about a third of food is wasted. In the United States, it is 40%. The U.S. spends about $218 billion each year growing and producing food that is wasted. About 57 million metric tons goes to waste, including 47.5 million metric tons that ends up in landfills. What's shocking to people often is not only how much we waste, but also the impact. Said Emily Broad Leib. She is a Harvard University professor and director of the school's Food Law and Policy Clinic. Food waste causes about 8% to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. In 2015, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency announced a goal of 50% food waste reduction by 2030. That has led to a number of state government efforts, along with smaller non-profit efforts. 10 American states and Washington, D.C. have passed legislation or created policies to reduce, compost, or donate waste. The states of California and Vermont have programs for turning people's food waste into compost or energy. Connecticut requires businesses, including larger food sellers and supermarkets, to reuse food waste. Farmers in Maryland can get a tax credit of up to $5,000 per farm for food they donate. Several states have joined New York in creating systems for food donation. Rhode Island requires food sellers, servicing schools and universities to donate any unused food to food banks. And Massachusetts limits the amount of food that businesses can send to landfills. As of late October, New York had sent 2.3 million kilograms of food, about four million meals, through its Feeding New York State program. The program supports the state's ten area food banks and is hoping to double that number next year. Certainly we should be reducing the amount we waste to start with, but then we should be feeding people before we throw food away, said Sally Rowland. She is with the New York Department of Environmental Conservation. Despite New York's success, some worry not enough is being done to meet the 2030 goal. Broad Leib and others have called for a national effort to coordinate the various state and local policies. Catherine Bender is a University of Delaware Assistant Professor of Economics. She said donation programs are helpful, but she worries they might put the responsibility on nonprofits instead of businesses. The best solution for food waste is to not have it in the first place, Bender said. If we don't need to produce all that food, let's not put all the resources into producing that food. I'm Faith Perlow. South Africa and Colombia are among the countries aiming to push drug companies to permit low-cost versions of drugs for deadly diseases. The drugs are for people with drug-resistant versions of tuberculosis, or TB, and with HIV-AIDS. One target is the drug Badakulin. It is used for treating people with drug-resistant tuberculosis. In South Africa, TB was blamed for the deaths of more than 50,000 people in 2021, making it the country's leading cause of death. Johnson & Johnson is a U.S.-based drug and medical technology company. The company owns a patent for the drug Badakulin. Patents legally protect a company's right to manufacture and sell a product that it developed or owns for a limited time. The legal protection prevents other companies from making the same drug without permission. In recent months, activists have protested efforts by Johnson & Johnson to protect its patent. In March, TB patients asked the Indian government to make a lower-cost copy of Badakulin. The government agreed, saying Johnson & Johnson's patent could be broken. In July, the time limit for Johnson & Johnson's patent on the drug ran out in South Africa. The company extended the patent until 2027 under South African law. However, activists became angry and accused Johnson & Johnson of trying to make a lot of money from the drug. The South African government then began investigating the company's pricing policies. South Africa had been paying about $282 per treatment course, a full group of treatments. This was more than twice as much as poor countries involved in the Swiss-based Stop TB partnership paid. In September, about a week after South Africa's investigation began, Johnson & Johnson announced it would not enforce its patent in more than 130 countries. This would permit other drug makers in those countries to copy the drug. Christophe Perron is a TB expert at Doctors Without Borders. He called the decision a big surprise. He said protecting patents is central to how most drug companies plan their businesses. In October, Columbia announced that it would permit a third party to make the HIV drug Dolutegraver without permission from the drug's patent holder, Vive Healthcare. The decision came after more than 120 groups asked the government to let more people use the drug, which is supported by the World Health Organization, or WHO. Peter Mabardouk is with the Washington, D.C. non-profit group Public Citizen. He thinks the Colombian government is trying to take control of its treatment of HIV after not having enough vaccines for COVID-19. He noted that Brazilian activists are pushing their government to do the same. However, some experts say more needs to change before poor countries can produce their own medicines. Petro Terblanche is managing director of the Biotechnology Company, Afrogen Biologics, based in Cape Town, South Africa. She said African countries produced less than 1% of all vaccines made around the world when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. But Terblanche said Africa used more than half of the world's supply. Afrogen Biologics is part of a WHO-supported effort to produce a COVID vaccine using the same mRNA technology as those made by U.S.-based drug makers Pfizer and Moderna. Terblanche also noted that African countries need to improve their ability to deliver vaccines. If we can't get vaccines and medicines to the people who need them, they aren't useful, she said. Lynette Kinelwe Mabote Ede is a health care activist who has ties to the nonprofit treatment action group based in New York City. She noted that South Africa has no clear law permitting the government to take legal action against a patent or a patent extension. The South African Department of Health did not answer questions from the Associated Press about patents. In its yearly report on TB released in November, the WHO said there were more than 10 million people sickened by the disease in 2022 and 1.3 million deaths. After COVID-19, tuberculosis is the world's deadliest infectious disease. It is also now believed to be the main cause of death of people with HIV. The WHO says only about 40% of people with drug-resistant TB are being treated. Zolawa Sifumba, a South African doctor, found she had drug-resistant TB in 2012. She went through 18 months of treatment, taking about 20 pills every day in addition to daily injections. These left her in severe pain and resulted in some hearing loss. Bedakwilen was not a standard treatment in South Africa until 2018. I wanted to quit treatment every single day, she said. Since her recovery, Sifumba has been pushing for better TB treatment. She said it makes little sense to charge poor countries, which have more cases of TB, high prices for necessary medicines. She questioned why poor countries would have to pay a lot for medicine. If the lower-income countries can't get it, then what's the point? Who are you making it for? She said. I'm Gina Bennett. And I'm Andrew Smith. That was Andrew Smith with this week's health report. Andrew joins me now to talk a little bit more about the story. So I was hoping you could explain a little bit more about what a patent is for a product. A patent is a legal protection a government gives to a person or a company that has created a new invention and the government can also give a patent for a new way or process of making something. The reason governments give patents is that more people or businesses will want to create new things if other people cannot copy their methods or inventions without permission of the patent holder. Just like owning a house or owning a car is considered owning property, owning a patent is owning what we call intellectual property. The patent owner has the right to decide whether or how that property may be used by others. And how do medical patents work? Medical patents generally refer to drugs or medical devices like a tool a doctor might use for doing surgery or something to support a bad knee, for example. Medical patents on drugs made in the United States have time limits, usually about 20 years. So after that, other companies can make the same drug, but drug companies will often change just a small part of the drug and then ask for a new patent. What happens is this can extend the patent for several years. One of the things people were upset about in South Africa was when Johnson and Johnson extended their patent on their TB drug until 2027. But as the article states, Johnson and Johnson later changed their policy and allowed other companies to copy their drug.  Why do experts and activists see that as a problem? There are at least two reasons. First, there are many more cases of TB in poor countries than in wealthy ones. Second, drugs protected by patents may be more expensive than drugs the countries could make themselves. Activists think it is unfair to extend patents and high drug prices in poorer countries where people can't afford it. And experts worry that without access to more affordable drugs, fewer people will receive the treatment they need. And with tuberculosis, that can lead to many more deaths from infection. Interesting. Thanks again for joining me, Andrew. You're welcome, Dan. Happy to join you. And I'm Andrew Smith. My name is Jill Robbins. You're listening to The Lesson of the Day on the Learning English podcast. Welcome to the part of the show where we help you do more with our series, Let's Learn English. The series shows Anna Mateo in her work and life in Washington, D.C. In Lesson 43 of the Let's Learn English series, Anna is on her way to teach a ukulele class. She realizes that she has lost something important. Let's listen. Hey there! Tonight, I am teaching my ukulele class. It is far away, so I am going to ride the metro. Oh no! I lost my wallet! It has my metro card, my credit card, and my money! Oh no! It's times like this. I remember my father's important words. He said, Anna, never! No, wait. Always have emergency money! It's empty! Time for Plan B. Extra emergency money. No! It's empty too! Anna, it's time for Plan C. We often talk about having a Plan B for when something doesn't go as planned. Anna tells us her father said she should always have emergency money. In the video, we see her pull an envelope out of her bag, but it's empty. The same thing happened with the envelope in her boot. What do you think her Plan C will be, Jill? Anna has made some good friends, so I think she'll call one of them to ask for help. Let's find out. Listen for the way Anna asks her friend for a favor. What's up? I'm stuck downtown without any money. Would you be able to come downtown, please? Anna, I can't. I'm too busy. I have to give a big presentation in one hour. Sorry. That's okay. Good luck with your presentation. Thanks. Time for Plan D. More friends may be getting phone calls, it seems. It's a little awkward, isn't it, to ask friends for money? Did you notice how Anna asked Marcia for help? I did. She uses a modal verb would as she asks. Would you be able to come downtown, please? This sentence pattern is common when we feel we might be asking someone to make a big effort to help us. When we ask, would you be able to? We are being very polite, and giving the other person a chance to say no. We could say that we are afraid we might be imposing. That's spelled I-M-P-O-S-I-N-G. Imposing on someone by making a request for something like borrowing money. To impose is to expect someone to do more than you usually ask them to do. Another phrase we use if we feel we are imposing on someone is would you do me a favor? Let's listen to find out how Anna asks her other friends for help. Listen for a modal verb. Hey, Anna. Things are great. What's up? Well, I was wondering if you could give me some money. What? See, I lost my wife. I wish I could. I'm at the airport with my mother. Her flight leaves in two hours. I do wish I could help. Thanks. Hi. I'm Andrew Smith, and you're listening to The Lesson of the Day on the Learning English podcast. Did you hear a modal verb listeners? We hear Anna using another modal verb, could, when she asks Jonathan to give her some money. Like would, the modal verb could softens the request and makes it more polite. Well, I was wondering if you could give me some money. Jonathan uses could two times when he answers. Anna, I wish I could. I'm at the airport with my mother. Her flight leaves in two hours. That's okay. I do wish I could help. Thanks. Hi. So everyone is being polite, but Anna is still stuck without any money. There's one more thing about the language we hear in this lesson. Anna says, Well, I was wondering if you could give me some money. We use wonder in polite questions, like this. Andrew, I wonder if you're going to be busy tonight. No, I'm not busy. Why? Well, I have a project I need help with. I need a tall person who can reach the top shelves in my office. Hold on a minute there, Jill. I'll be glad to do you a favor. But first, let's get back to the story. Anna has one more friend to call. Ashley. This is serious. Time for Plan E. Hello. Hi, Ashley. Whatcha doing? Ashley, I was wondering, would you be able to come downtown and could you give me $20? Anna, I can't. I'll pay you back the money. I promise. Anna, I'm not worried about the money. I'm babysitting. Ashley is caring for a young child or babysitting. So she can't come downtown to help. What is Anna going to do? I remember she said she was going to her ukulele class. Maybe she can use her music to help her ask for money. Let's listen and find out. Well, Plans A, B, C, D, and E did not work. Think, Anna. Think! Time for Plan F. Won't you give? Thank you very much, sir. Would you give me money to give? Oh, thank you very much. Could you give? Won't you give me money? Until next time, won't you give? Listeners, at the end of this lesson, you can hear Anna busking. That's a word we use to describe when someone performs on the street and asks the people passing by to drop some money into a hat to show their appreciation for the performance. To see her and Dr. Jill in her role as a passerby, go to learningenglish.voanews.com and watch Lesson 43 of the Let's Learn English series. You can also find a fun board game in the lesson for practicing polite requests. Listeners, have you ever lost your wallet or something important like Anna did in this lesson? What did you do? Write to us at learningenglish.voanews.com or in the comments on our YouTube channel. And remember that you can find us on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. Thanks for listening to the Lesson of the Day on the Learning English Podcast. I'm Jill Robbins. And I'm Andrew Smith. And that's our program for today. Join us again tomorrow to keep learning English through stories from around the world. I'm Ashley Thompson. And I'm Dan Novak.


So, I think that you can see in terms of the values that people adopt, in terms of the beliefs that they hold, in terms of the important decisions that they make, people tend to herd and frequently this can lead to very inefficient results. In 2007 and 2008, the world experienced the financial meltdown. And what we discovered disproportionately in New York, but all over the world, is that all of the major investment banks were investing in these mortgage-backed securities. All of these mortgage-backed securities essentially lost all or nearly all of their value. And the question is, why did Lehman Brothers invest in these mortgage-backed securities? Because that's what Citibank was doing, and that was what Goldman Sachs was doing, and that was what J.P. Morgan was doing. So everybody was getting protection from the herd, because I'm not going to be in trouble if everybody else is doing it. And everybody else assumed that all the other people were smart. And actually, nobody was smart. Nobody did the appropriate due diligence. Nobody was willing to stand out for the crowd. Each was getting a little bit of benefit because they were getting an extra 2% return on their money. In exchange for that, they lost all their money and eventually almost brought down the world financial system. And the United States and Europe and even China are still suffering from the aftermath of this particular event. If you talk about the stupidity of her, she can also say there is a kind of wisdom in crowds. Well, the original, there's a very famous book by a man named Suryaki who wrote about the wisdom of crowds. And in some things, there's more wisdom, but we're poor at extracting it. Many people will want to be sort of not shown up as being ignorant. So if I ask you, here's a question that I frequently ask, is the population of Turkey more or less than 100 million people? When I asked that question at my faculty, a significant majority voted for more than 100 million people. It's actually around 80 million people. The reason was the first few people who put up their hands, put up their hands for more than 100 million. And then everybody sort of said, well, I don't really know the population of Turkey. So I'll put up my hand to go along with that. If we had started off to say who knows the population of Turkey, who's fairly confident about the population of Turkey, then we would have gotten the wisdom of crowds because then we would have had those people voting first. So the question is, how do you sort of separate people out of the herd and have the most knowledgeable people operate as the leader? It's also true vis-a-vis values. I'm going to ask a question today. I have no idea what the answer is. I'm going to ask, say, we're all familiar with the recent experiences with the war between Israel and Amos. Do you assign primary responsibility to Israel, primary responsibility to Amos, or do you think that there's plenty of blame and they're roughly comparably responsible? I suspect that there will be a disproportion in one way or another, and that if I told some people as Stooges to vote the other way at the beginning and put their hands up quickly, I would get a tipping, that I could get more people to blame Amos or more people to blame Israel. Because on a very delicate subject, you don't like to be in the minority. So to some extent you want to appear smart, to some extent you want to appear knowledgeable, to some extent you want to appear that your values aren't so dramatically different from those of the other people in the room.


My first small step in my career was entering into mechanical engineering to obtain my bachelor's degree in Korea. My second small step was entering graduate school to obtain my master's degree from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. My third small step, actually it was turned out to be a big step later, was attending Purdue University to obtain my PhD degree. One giant leap in my career was becoming a senior vice president at Samsung Electronics where I led laundry product R&D for 11 years. My name is Sungjin Kim. I got my PhD degree in mechanical engineering at Purdue in 1991. I am a Purdue engineer.


What's going on everyone? Sam here with Layton Sports Cards. I'm ripping one box of 2022 Panini XTWWE hobby for Amane S. So good luck Amane. Again, I apologize if I'm not saying your name right. I know you left the correct pronunciation in one of your order notes. Think I've got it? But I'm not 100% sure. So again, I do apologize. But I believe that's kind of what you're looking for. All right, here we go. What's up Gary? Got rookie is Oliver Carter, 68 out of 199. Is this all card ship? Yep, all card ship. All right, sounds good to be getting all your cards on. Nice. Mustache Mountain. Cool. My first time opening this. I'm not 100% sure. I mean, I know what it looks like. I've top loaded it before, but purple is Valkyrie. That is 54 out of 99. Ludwig Kaiser. That is on the memorabilia card. Not numbered. Superstar worn slash used material. Nice one there, Amane. And Kushida. Shaina Baszler. Not numbered on that one. Don't think it leaves, right? Yep, not numbered. Insert. Angelo Dawkins and Finn Baler. That is Dolph Ziggler. Triple H on top there. Cool. Based on the back there. Kit Wilson, rookie, gray rookie on the back. It's kind of like, I guess an insert or like a not numbered colored variation. Highlights, Raquel Rodriguez. Cool. Not numbered on that one. Chad Gable. Autos, Bianca Belair. Nice. On the NXT signatures. On card. There you go Amane. Nice hit there, buddy. Heck yeah. Take a Bianca Belair. That's a solid. That's got to be one of the more solid ones in the set. Bailey on the back there. For sure. That's cool. NXT highlights, Oshka. Alexa Bliss. Flash legend rookie. This, that is Tideye of Tyler Breeze. Three out of 25. Nice. It's a nice low numbered one for you there Amane. Very cool. Next pack, here we go. Blue back here. Yeah, rookie of Tiffany Stratton. Or yeah, Tiffany Stratton 101 out of 149. Nice. On the blue. Nakamura. Three packs to go here. See what else we can get out of this. Shinsuki Nakamura. Got blue is Grayson Waller 131 out of 149. Nice. Got a lot of numbered stuff so far. And last pack. Good luck here Amane. Peace. That'll do it for your box there Amane. Congrats on all the hits. We'll get them right out to you. Thanks again.


Live from New York, it's theCUBE. Covering Big Data New York City 2016. Brought to you by headline sponsors, Cisco, IBM, NVIDIA, and our ecosystem sponsors. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. We're back at NYC. Jim McHugh was here as the vice president and general manager at NVIDIA. Jim, good to see you again. Good to see you guys. It was good. Monday night, we had an awesome event with you guys. We were thrilled to partner up with you. You must be happy. It was really successful. Yeah, a lot of great customers came out of that. A lot of conversations going on. That was a great event. So you gave a keynote on Tuesday. You gave another talk in like an hour. What are you even talking about? I mean, it's the hot topic here, is AI and deep learning. Yeah, so yeah, that's exactly my talk. Was really pretty fantastic on the other day. If you do say so yourself. You know, I was in the company of geniuses, really. So when you follow Yann Lacoon, who is like kind of the godfather of machine learning, AI, and he was on stage and you get to go up and follow him, it's pretty exciting. He was one of the first customers of my DJX One. So he was the first customer on the East Coast that we delivered to a couple of weeks ago. They've already using it. But the talk there was about what's deep learning doing? How are we using it? And how is everybody taking advantage of it? And focused a lot on our activities and autonomous driving, because there's been a lot of talk about self-driving cars in the market. And it's really interesting how people don't even really understand what it's about. Like they think smart cameras, radar, and there's been some debates and the press about that. But it's much more than that. Because those are just detectors. And really is, you got to detect, but then you actually have to understand. You have to be able to see, hear, understand what's going on, make intuitive decisions. And then there's an action plan from there. And so that's what we're working on, is that whole component. In fact, we have a car that's built. It's called BB-8. And BB-8 didn't just, wasn't programmed. BB-8 is learning. So what we did, we put eight cameras around the car and just drove BB-8.  You got to test it in the parking lot. After 3,000 hours, it's driving on the streets of Jersey. And it's going down country roads. Most people think in self-driving cars, it knows the lanes, right? And knows how to stop. There's no lanes on the country roads in Jersey, right? So he's just driving around in the rain, doesn't care, right? Because it's super human. AI cars, they never stop thinking, they never stop working, and they never get tired either. So it's pretty cool. They can see both ways at the same time. We've got the Google cars come down our street and make a very challenging left hand turn. They come in batches, they'll come 10 in 15 minutes. And I'm sure they're just teaching them because there's all kind of trees in this, that. But they can literally look both ways at the same time. Oh, they're looking all around it. They know exactly where it's going on in their component. Well, I remember several years ago when I was out visiting, I saw my first Google car, you know, a while ago, right? And now every time I go, you see multiple. But it's interesting to me how that whole business has exploded. I mean, so what happened is just that people saw the possibilities, or a bunch of Google engineers left, and it was just sort of open source. And the guys at Google are smart, but they're not the only ones leading, right? It's honestly, it's deep learning. It's the ability to teach the car, right? And the car is learning intuitively, because you're just throwing all this data at it. It's getting all this camera components going from there. But it keeps, it's even actually more interesting than that, right? Nvidia, right? Where the graphics guys, you know, I like to say we became known for handling the most demanding users in the industry, gamers, right? Yeah, right. Well, guess what games are? You're simulating, you're creating a reality. We can now do augmented reality or using that to train cars. Because you can't find every possible situation on the streets of New York or on the streets of Palo Alto or wherever. You actually have to create it, right? You know these things are going to come up, and you don't have to put the car through that to teach it. So we're using augmented reality to do a lot of this as well. And I think so many people don't understand too kind of the second order impact. Like you said, while the car is driving around, whether it generally doesn't crash, but it's picking up all types of data on the way that roads actually work, the way bicyclists actually behave, the way pedestrians actually behave. So every run, it's really getting so much data in the way the real world of the streets work that most people don't really get that.  But AI robots are coming like crazy. Berkeley has one that's called Brett. It's one of my favorites because it's the Berkeley robot for the elimination of tedious tasks. And that's how it came up with the name. So it's a great name. But Honda has Isimo. And really what these things are doing is they're learning. Like Brett was taught to stand. And the goal was get your head as high as possible. No programming, no other than that. And it just kept trying to get his head higher and higher. And then it stood up and it learned how to stand up. Then learned to screw a cap on. Isimo's kicking soccer balls, going all this stuff. But what they're going to eventually be is be able to learn the task that we don't want to do, the tasks that are too tedious for us to do, but also tasks that are harmful for us to do. And in Japan it's really big because of the aging population. They need caregivers, right? They need people to take care of people. People that can know when pills need to be taken, know how to do all that kind of stuff. And it's really astounding how fast these things are coming. So I love that because that's kind of incremental. But it's also, people are concerned, right? They say, well, machines are going to replace humans. But machines have always replaced humans. But now they're starting to do so in cognitive tasks. But the list of things that machines can do, or if humans can do that machines can't, is dwindling, right? Every year you look at it and say, okay, because robots used to not be able to climb stairs and other climbing stairs. Climbing stairs and just climbing stairs. And there's so much research going on. And it's funny because people say, well, yeah, it's in research. No, but the way this space is working, AI and deep learning is happening so fast, it starts in research. It's the Yanlacuns who work at Facebook as well, right? You know, you guys met Claudio the other night for Claudio Silva who's at NYU, but he's the guy behind baseball doing a lot of the smart stuff they're doing there. So it's really, really cool stuff going on. I saw some tweet about, will robots take the place of lawyers? And I'm like, well, who can go through how much case law faster?  Absolutely, yeah, they can learn, they can just study. That's the thing about this, they don't forget. They just continually learn. And then that knowledge that they learn, it stays with them. Somebody said to me, well, machines won't be able to negotiate. I'm like, why not? Yeah, how do you program it?  Well, the big component really why this became popular, and it's kind of funny, but it's only been since last December, the game ago lost to the champion lost to a computer. And there was a move, I think it was like move 37, the computer chose the center square. And the commentators, if you were watching said, oh yeah, it's a glitch. No one would take that move or whatever. It shut down the game really quick. It won. It was just like the move. The judo move, let's go. That no one would have thought. And it was the turning point in the game. And the computer just won, because no human would have been able to see all those patterns and going from that. To get there. And to get there. The other fun thing that you mentioned on Monday night, and I learned long ago in describing services, the key is not to have a better numerator with the variables to change the variable. And you asked a bunch of the panelists really to compare before and after using the GPU technology. And it's not, it's fewer days. It's from days to hours to minutes. You know, you're changing the variable by which you measure what you can accomplish. Pretty crazy numbers that came out of that. Well, that's what was kind of crazy the transition I made this week where I'm standing with the geniuses of AI and deep learning.  And now we're talking about acceleration of database, acceleration of analytics and going from there. And, you know, I'm kind of telling people our goal is so you don't have to sit through another 4V presentation, right? If we have to talk about volume, velocity, variety, I think that the first time has been mentioned in three days. Let's just put it in there. And because if you have to wait for a query for 10 seconds, but on your average dashboard or as you're looking at the data, there's 10 to 15 queries. 10 seconds times each of those just adds up to too much time. You're not exploring the data. You're not going through it. So when a GPU solution like Kinetico or MapD or Scream that was here the other night, you're already on to your third or fourth exploration of the data while the first guy is still waiting for it to return. Yeah, well. Just because milliseconds versus over a minute is... Especially when you're buying it to big, big, big data sets, it really adds up. Well, the funny thing is a lot of people say, well, how many use cases are there really for that? And there's a lot more than people realize because it's a game changer. So it opens up whole new sets of applications. Well, isn't it funny that one of the most expensive, one of the most treasured people who work for you, a data scientist, we frustrate them. I mean, where's the goal in that? You know, you're trying to keep the guy there, give him the tools that allow him to explore. Data scientists are really creative people. They like to explore data. They like to go through the data. But if you make them wait, they're going to get frustrated. They're going to go, okay, how do I get to the answer? And they're going to get the answer and they're going to go from there. Because if you're not going to give them the tools, they can't get to, they can't discover those new things. The outliers, the long tails, they're going to be frustrated and stuck. Yeah, there's artists, they're artists in a way. You mentioned a couple of your partners, Connecticut, MAPTI, others. The ecosystem is really interesting around NVIDIA. Talk about that a little bit. So it's come quite fast actually, like everything that's going on. You have people start seeing what you can do. And you know, I'd say fast, but these are guys that have been working on their product for a couple of years, right? So they've been at it and doing it. But people are starting to see what accelerated databases can do. And you're not learning a new skill set, right? SQL and going from there. And then you're seeing what you can do with accelerated interaction with the data, accelerated visualization, right? So the dashboards that we're all looking at right now are nothing compared to what people are going to be using a year or two from now, where you're actually going to be intuitively going through the data. And then it keeps banding out, right? So you saw the other night, how many accelerated database companies there are now, right? So, and different options coming. Accelerated visualizations can be one of the coolest things. You know, there's a company called Graphistry. Graphistry will be a part of my presentation for about an hour. But Leo's here as well, the CEO, and he's going to be presenting. And they are able to point Graphistry at a Splunk log. And if you look through a Splunk log, it's not the most exciting thing that you're going to be looking through. But if you can actually visualize it. So imagine it's like the top security things that happen that day. And I can visualize these IP addresses or where the big clusters have been. And I can see the entry points in the exit and how everything comes together. And I'm looking at hundreds of millions, right? Going across the networking activity. I can then narrow in further and get down this, you know, two million. I can get down to 100,000. I can keep exploring the data to where I want. And it's doing all the correlations that I'm seeing, which has been quite impressive. Well, what people need to understand, if you try doing this with a conventional visualization tool, like a tableau or a click, it would just bring it to its knees. It would just stop. It would choke. Yeah, you can't scale out enough. There's not enough real estate to keep adding, you know, more power, more power, more power. So that's why, I mean, my DGX, it's actually quite popular. It's kind of nice to see people come over and petting a server, right? It's like, it's a super company, right? It has eight GPUs that are on an NVLink board. There's no bottlenecks. They all communicate with each other. So it's the equivalent of 250 X86 servers. And people are like, well, how much is that? I'm like, well, if you want to say 10, a rack, that's 25. That's basically a row in a lot of data centers. We got a lot of questions after Monday night in terms of the market for GPU versus CPU. What's it going to look like in five years? You must get that question a lot. Well, I tell people, it's a new computing model. It's really a change in the world where you're allowing billions of software neurons to talk to trillions of connections and they're all being trained and learned at the same time. It's parallel processing. Everything we do is parallel these days. So you'll need CPUs. There's certain things that are serial, but the market's changing. It is the new platform and a new way of doing software. All right, good, we got to go. Jim, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Good luck on the talk. All right, thanks so much. It was fantastic partnering with you guys on Monday night. Really pleasure. Okay. All right, keep right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest of theCUBE we're live from Big Data NYC. Right back.


Okay, Linda, we're going on. We're going on. No, I was listening to you out there. Okay, and welcome to the first episode of edX live. We're here to address the demands of the future by exploring the juxtaposition of business and higher education. Together, we'll have open conversations in a safe space, cross pollinate ideas, break glass and learn from each other's expertise about how we can transform for the better. My name is Anand Agarwal, edX founder, to you, chief open education officer and MIT professor. I am joined by Rahul Varma, Accenture Technologies chief talent officer, and Arthur Levine, co-author of the book, The Great Upheaval, Higher Education's Past, Present, and Uncertain Future. He's also a distinguished scholar of higher education at NYU, president emeritus, and senior fellow at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and president emeritus of Teachers College at Columbia University. So welcome, Rahul and Arthur. To those joining live, we are so glad that you're all here. You are welcome to draw up a question for any of us in the chat. We will first have a conversation and then address as many questions as we can during our enlightening round towards the end of our time together. Okay, so thank you again, Arthur and Rahul, for joining us in this inaugural session of edX live. Okay, so let me start with you. Oh, fantastic. So let me start with Rahul. So Rahul, you described a moment when your group's chief executive called you urgently just as COVID hit two years ago. Can you share for us what he had to say? What he had to say? Thank you, Anand. It's a huge privilege to be here with you and Arthur for the very first edX live session. And as you mentioned, I lead HR for Accenture Technology Organization, which is about 365,000 technology professionals around the world. And the moment when COVID hit, which was about this time two years ago, can you believe it, literally within the first couple of weeks of COVID hitting, what we actually started to see was this dramatic impact on our clients and industries all around the world as well as our people. And one of the things that started to happen was travel shutdown, manufacturing got impacted, several industries just experienced an immediate cessation of services. And for a professional services business like ours, which is all that we have to offer is the skills and capabilities of our people, we saw several thousand people coming back because they couldn't work at our client sites. And in that moment of panic, the call was from Paul Daughty, the CEO that I work with every single day. And the question was Paul could actually see through that and he could see that through this entire uncertainty, our clients are going to need help and support, but they're going to need that in different ways from what they needed in the past. And literally over the next few days, we came up with a big reimagination of our learning curriculum. So we could scale our people into what we knew our clients needs for tomorrow versus what they needed today. And we call that program emerged stronger because it was our belief that by investing heavily in the learning of our people and in upskilling them in new areas, we would be able to provide opportunities for them and support our clients in ways that we could. So yeah, that was the moment about two years ago now. Fast forward two years, over 100,000 people got upskilled through that program in the next 18 months or so. No, that's absolutely a remarkable marvel that you were able to move on a dime and upskill this many people. What I did notice in what you have to say was a telling lack of your use of the word university or college. In your whole discussion about upskilling 100,000 people, that word that's so close to my heart, having been a professor at MIT for 34 years, and I didn't hear you say university, but we'll come back to that.  It seems that many companies, universities and learners, just as Rahul explained, saw the pandemic as an incredible opportunity to come out stronger, or in other cases, a forcing mechanism to fully explore their virtual education options. But Arthur, you note in your book that the pandemic only accelerated trends that have been developing for decades. So you're saying all of this stuff that we thought we were doing at edX and what Rahul talked about at Accenture as being some radically new and innovative, you're really pouring ice cold water on our brilliant dreams here. And you're saying that these trends have been around forever, and all the pandemic did was kind of accelerate them. Can you explain what you mean? And that was particularly struck by your writing under my use of the higher education consumer as part of it. So I'd love to hear about what you have to say about that. I wasn't very clear. What I was trying to say was that the pandemic wasn't an interruption. It wasn't like a hurricane. It wasn't like an earthquake. What it was was an accelerator of things that would have happened. And both of you with the cutting edge of what is happened. So in essence, what we saw during that period was in terms of things that might have happened or will happen, more colleges were pushed to the brink in terms of survival, online education, which would have occurred, just occurred at 100% of campuses, greater need for upskilling and reskilling, owing to automation, owing to the decreasing half life of knowledge.  And finally, what all this did was encourage a whole bunch of organizations for which you two are the models to come into being and provide more content and provide for distribution of that content, which would give students more choice. It would have happened, but it happened now and it happened fast. You mentioned giving students more choice. In reading your recent amazing book, you talk about the rise of the higher education consumer, giving more choice to the consumer, where you have begun to equate a student with a consumer. What's different now about their power in the marketplace? Tell us more about, you know, this kind of thinking where this transition from a student to a consumer, how do they change their power in the marketplace? Well, first the marketplace changed. Many, many more providers and they're not all colleges and universities are out there. They can take programs that edX or Coursera, or any of the other organizations that exist. And those are happening fast and curiously. The other thing that happened is they've had new kinds of experiences. So they've seen Amazon. They've seen Netflix. They've seen all the music options. And everybody increasingly universal is the Internet and digital access. So they're going to ask for exactly what they asked for from the other options that aren't universities, which is to say, I don't want to go to a fixed location. I don't want to do this. I'm fixed hours. I want 24-7. And I want to determine what I'm going to buy. And on top of that, maybe I don't want a whole degree. I want a piece. I want an article, not a whole newspaper. I want one song, not a whole album. And they're applying the same kinds of expectations in terms of individualism and service increasingly universities. I think you're right on, Arthur. It's something I've noticed as well. And I describe this as a pivot to learner centricity. So many of our industries pivoted to becoming consumer centric. Just the fact that you take Airbnb, for example. Previously, I would have to call a hotel and they would act high and mighty. And it's just so hard to get through. But Airbnb, for example, it really makes things consumer centric. I can, with the click of a button, I can decide where I want to stay, compare a bunch of options, and very quickly make a reservation at a decent place. And so similarly, I completely agree with you that just as education becomes more learner centric, our universities and colleges and company training centers for that matter need to be able to meet this new demand. It means that universities must meet student demand to be flexible and create workforce aligned education. In other words, we're going to hear, continue to hear leaders like Rahul talk about training that they have to do themselves without college or university participation, which is not not that good, not great for universities. And so learners want more online options for flexibility and even when they're on campus. So the online learning option is simply more flexible by its very nature. So let me, let me stay with you for a little longer, Arthur. This is pretty scary. If universities ignore the new realities of COVID, these new realities which COVID has introduced to higher education, and you know, many universities are talking about regressing to the past, which is let's go back to the good old days before COVID. You know, I like to argue the good old days are in the future, but what do you see in the future of these universities that regress to the past and do not embrace the lessons of COVID? What do you see happening, happening to them? I just agree with you. You can't go back. There is no back. We can't be 2019 again. So the question is, what do we do in the future with a changed marketplace and also different kinds of institutions are going to be affected in different kinds of ways? So that in the Northeast, in the Middle, Atlantic, and in the Midwest, when we have our demographics going to play havoc with those universities, we have a huge number of universities and colleges, and we don't have the population to feed them. The end result is that we're going to see significant numbers of small private low endowment, low selectivity institutions close. Second thing that's going to happen is some institutions are going to have some institutions like MIT are going to have time to adapt to the changes that are occurring. And those are institutions that have a value added. Research universities, the top research universities, we need researchers. We need to train next generation of researchers. We need research. They're going to survive. Maybe not the numbers we have, but they're going to survive. And 18% of all college students right now are full-time residential and 18 to 24. Well, some people still can want that residential experience and that collegiate experience, and we'll see survival there is evaluated. And finally, if you look at the rest of higher education, they're really in a competition for their lives. The greatest risk are regional universities and community colleges. And the reason is they have the kind of population that's migrating to edX, that's migrating to Coursera, that's choosing the other online options. During the pandemic, higher education was 2 to 4% of its involvement. Those organizations increased. The new providers increased. Some increased by as much as a third and grew by millions and millions of students. So that's really the fate that lies ahead. That's for sectors, not for individual institutions. Individual institutions have options. You know, it's pretty scary and we'll come back and look at what might be some solutions. But before we do that, based on what I'm hearing, we are anticipating that many institutions simply won't get the message. And this is a real shame. So Rahul, in light of this, and for many other reasons, I've heard you call for the global corporate world to become creators of talent rather than simply consumers of talent. So traditionally, universities have served the purpose of creating talent. Now, this is scarier. So what's changed and what does it mean philosophically and practically for a company to move in that direction? Well, this comes from a deep belief. Many times we can actually think of us as silos, universities on the one end, companies on the other, and the job of the universities is to actually create talent that we just go ahead and consume. But I think the rate of change that we are seeing, that is technology driven, that is with all the other geopolitical circumstances and so on that are taking place, I think the rate at which we need to adapt requires us all to come together, but come together in different ways than we have. Traditionally, my peers in the industry would go and believe that their job is to be able to consume talent for themselves. And my realization is that it is not just our job to do that, but we have to actually create talent for the world. A few years back, we had a tech vision. So we published one every year and a few years back in 2013, we said every business, a digital business and many industries didn't get that. Now, to Arthur's point, the pandemic actually accelerated what was already happening with this dramatic increase in cloud computing and digital acceleration. Now, every company needs to be a digital company and therefore almost every professional needs to be a technology professional. So if you have to do that, then I think the core job becomes one of being able to create talent for ourselves, but also for the society. And for that, we need to be able to partner across the ecosystem. So Accenture partnering with Google or Microsoft or Salesforce, along with an MIT, along with government and NGOs, because I think there's another factor that we need to keep in mind is that through the pandemic, inequality has actually accelerated dramatically. And I think when we get to points in human history, where 645 billionaires grow their wealth at 43% at the same time and 160 million people get pushed into poverty, unless we are proactive at changing the models and making the playing field more level, we're actually going to come at a tipping point in society, which has happened in the past in human history. So there are many reasons I believe that we need to be creators of talent, but I don't think we can do it alone. I don't think anybody can do it alone. And that's where I think new models need to emerge. So Rahul as a professor, your last statement gives me some hope that we are going to have a role to play in the future, of course. So I love this notion of democratizing education. I mean, edX has been founded by Harvard and MIT. We've grown to 43 million learners from every single country in the world. And we are democratizing education where we've launched not just individual courses and certificates, but also entire degrees, for example, the data science degree from UT Austin for $10,000. And so we are democratizing education all the way from courses to boot camps to exact care to complete degrees from our edX and 2U partnership. But I also like what you said about how it's not going to be creating talent and not going to be completely by ourselves or by oneself. It is going to be about equitable partnerships and innovative ways of creating new kinds of programming. And then you also talked about how all businesses, and I would say that whether it's companies or universities, really have to go digital. They really have to be thinking digital first because the consumers, our students, are digital natives. And if we don't think digital first, then how on earth are we going to become learner-centric? And so I think there's a key lesson in there. So let me ask you to expand a bit more, Rahul, on what you meant by these partnerships between corporations and universities to create new forms of learning. So tell us about it. How did you get started? Can you share some specific examples? So rather than it being amorphous, we can really get our hands around it. And any lessons you've learned from that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And let me share maybe two or three concrete examples, but I'm just actually going to go back in time before we even come to the pandemic because to Arthur's point, I think this trend started to happen much before. So years ago, I used to be the HR director for Accenture in India when we were 200 people back in 2001 at a time when we decided to go into the technology business and then into the operations business. In the seven years that I was in post, we grew from 200 people to 40,000 people in what was then the biggest organic growth story in the world. And when you were looking to actually create talent at the speed we needed to and bring in the technologies that our clients were asking at that time, any amount of corporate training we had couldn't do it. Any amount of trying to take in people from the engineering colleges that I wouldn't have been possible. That gave birth to probably one of our most cherished partnerships which happens to be with MIT, 20 years old now, started with Accenture Technology Academy and some of your peers in MIT started to create courseware for us which we then through a combination of digital and physical means started to give out people. And what we then saw was that people that were working full-time jobs, their desire and hunger to be able to consume that kind of learning and gain certifications when you would have something that's actually endorsed or certified by MIT. That was just phenomenal and tens of thousands of people over the next few years have gone through and gained those certification programs. And when professors would come to India or the Philippines or elsewhere, we wouldn't have, we would have standing room only. There were like 500 people that would show up just to hear these professors. So that was 15 years ago. Fast forward to now how we're creating talent. I think the couple examples I'd give, one is from South Africa. So in South Africa, we were seeing that our technology business, just the demand for the technology business was far outstripping the supply of talent in technology in South Africa. And our technology leader in South Africa realized that this was happening at a time when there was rampant unemployment in the country. So he went out to one of our partners, Salesforce and to a government agency, Capacity is a jobs fund. And together they came up with a co-funded model to be able to upskill in the next 24 months, 500 people and about a thousand certifications that would make people job ready with a commitment that Accenture takes, Salesforce would take and others would take. So that's a real concrete example of how that happens. Another one is an example in India. We have a program called Ahramb in India, which means beginning in Hindi. And what we've said is that technology should be the preserve of all. So we have gone to underrepresented populations, people with disabilities, transgender people, a lot of women centric non-stem degrees. And we've come up with these boot camps, which again, we have course where that we partner with universities on. But the whole idea is to be able to create these kind of partnerships that accelerate people getting into employment and having a career trajectory that people devote. So just a few examples. No, that's fantastic, Rahul. It's really great to see how you've been putting together these cutting-edge examples. And it goes back to Arthur's point, which is many of these trends were started by innovative pioneers like yourself. And what COVID did was really democratize the innovation across the entire industry and accelerated. You also mentioned that at Accenture, you had standing room only because people got good learning and they also got certificates from a top institution like MIT. So you were doing this well before we started edX. And to those of you when you started edX in late 2011, we partnered with some of the top institutions. And today we have 230 of the top institutions in the world, including even companies, offering content to edX from India, IAM, Bangalore and IIT, Bombay, MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford, Cambridge, Oxford, RIT, Columbia, NYU. The list goes on and on. Just an amazing group of partners. And what I'm seeing is that the learners all over the world, it doesn't matter where they are, not only care about the learning, but they also love to see the certificate, the validation from top professors and industry specialists that give them the credential. And it's so confidence building and so motivating for people all over the world. So it's completely validating of all that you said. One little question I have for you there is that universities are good at creating degrees. But all that you've talked about so far is about upskilling and kind of the just-in-time learning. Do you think we universities are going to be able to help you with kind of the cutting edge, just-in-time re-skilling? Because one could argue, we are really good at two or five degrees. But you can respond very quickly. Do you think we will be able to help with cutting edge re-skilling? Well, the short answer is I absolutely believe that you can and you already are. But I guess there's a paradigm because, as you said, the universities think longitudinally over a period of time, immersive learning and so on. But thoughts of what you do, I think for anybody to take up a new skill, they have to start with the right fundamentals and the right foundational experiences. And I think that's where the universities come in. And I think those partnerships are going to be more vital than ever. But to Arthur's earlier point, I think it requires a re-imagination at a faster pace. I think that's key. And it's fantastic to see so many at Accenture advancing their careers, whether in South Africa or other parts of the world, the building capacity for nations and keeping their learning pace matched to the pace of technology. So Arthur, our questions for you. In all of this, we're seeing a dominance of time bound degrees diminishing. We're looking for cutting edge, re-skilling and upskilling. But the motivations of learning have been pretty consistent. In light of this, how do you see this new species of consumer demand? This consumer demand for just-in-time learning, for the right size learning, quick learning, how do you see this demand transforming the traditional idea of a university? What universities have done historically, I think, is they've offered just-in-case learning, which is, you're going to study these subjects for four years, just in case you need them. And we think this is what you really need. And suddenly, we find all these people are coming for the reasons we talked about earlier. They're showing up. What they're saying is, teach me Swahili by Thursday. I want to learn this new computer language by next week. And we're going to see this huge uptake. And just as you both said, people want upskilling and re-skilling.  Upskilling and re-skilling is going to occur throughout your lifetime. And if I had to put my money down, what I'd say is, the new majority of our education is going to be those people who want just-in-time education. And what remains to be seen is the role the university is going to want to play in that. Universities bring real strength to some of these things. I had an experience recently, which sort of underlined who Rahul was talking about. I visited a community college. And this community college had just been given this piece of technology by the corporation down the block. And they were thrilled. The reason the corporation down the block gave it to them is that it was now out of date. It had been replaced by a newer technology. So what that meant was, this university was teaching this area yesterday with technology that was two generations old. Tomorrow, they're going to teach it with technology that's one generation beyond. It's imperative that there be partnerships between higher ed and corporations. But because corporations are getting technology, but higher education may well be added in other subject areas that corporations need. So the partnership would be extraordinary for both. A good point, Arthur. Very briefly, cutting back to you, Rahul. We have some our chat and questions has been lit up and there's some incredible questions there. But very quickly, where do you think the corporate world is going to go in terms of degrees? You know, degrees versus more modular learning, which are focused more on skills. Where do you think the corporate world is going to go? Are degrees going to continue to be the gold coin of the realm or are we going to go to something else? If I were to make a prediction, my prediction is that's not going to be the importance of degree I think is going to diminish more and more as time goes by. And there are a few reasons for that. One is that a smaller and smaller percentage of the world actually can access degrees because access to higher ed and degrees is highly correlated to family income and so on. So going back to my previous point on inequality, but more so, I think we actually don't need somebody to have a four-year degree to do many of the things that they need to do in the corporate world, as long as they have a good mix of professional skills, the right kind of technical skills, and essentially the high learnability, if they can actually come in with those skills, most corporations can prepare them for a career ahead. And then it's again, kind of having modular learning on a continuous basis to continue to keep skilling people up rather than kind of this kind of longer term, longer degrees. I know not a great answer to- No, I think that the risk of firing up some debate and some of the questions related to that is, I certainly think that the degree is not going to go away. I think that some of these new modular stackable approaches like the micro-bachelors, where you complete the micro-bachelors from university chemistry and from Harvard on edX or intro to computer science from NYU on edX, you take that and then you accumulate credit. And then these are skill-focused micro-bachelors or micro-masters programs. And then one fine day when you've accumulated enough of them, you get a degree. So there might be something in the best of both worlds where you get cutting-edge skills along the way and you still get a degree. So here's a question from the audience. It seems that higher education systems as a whole are often resistant to many of these changes, whether it's a modular stackable learning or skills-focused or online learning or digital transformation. What do we need to do? This is sort of like a silver magic answer here. I'd love to hear from both of you very quickly. What do we need to do to help more institutions enact? What do we start with you, Arthur? You know, we've been through this before. During the Industrial Revolution, the classical colleges that were teaching the trivia and quadrillion were transformed into universities because one worked in an agrarian society, the industrial society needed something different. And we did it by stages. First, it was criticism. Oh, my God, these institutions are so far behind. They're too expensive and they were irrelevant. And then higher education responded and they said, no, you're wrong. We're right. What we're doing is good. And then they followed a period of experimentation. And that's where we are today. What we're going to see is lots and lots of experimentation. And as we go along, some new models emerge so that these ideas are terribly important. The reality is higher education, as you were saying, on what happened is we're moving from a time in which the focus was on fixed process, on institutions, on fixed time. And what you said was it's going to become more student-centric. And it is. And when that happens, we're going to focus more on voting. And learning makes more sense to focus on the outcomes of voting than it does to focus on how long we were taught about voting. That leads to exactly the kinds of certifications that you're talking about. It's inevitable. The question's only one of speed. But I'll... Yeah, I completely agree. I think to me, I just kind of hone in on the experimentation over here because I'm very keen to start experiments and scale some of them. So what if we could have partnerships where universities and corporates come together and create something like an enterprise university, right? So where you actually scale up people for specific careers in industries. So those kind of experimentations would be good. And one of the things... Look, I grew up in a university. My parents were PhDs and so I have huge enduring love for universities. Part of what I think the universities also need to see as their responsibility is not just skill building and career building, but character building. And we have seen a lot of the shadow side of progress, right? The big tech product companies coming in. There's a whole shadow side of that when that goes unregulated. And I think more and more, we need to be able to build character and not just skills and people. And I think universities are foundational for that. Here, here. Go ahead, Arthur. I was going to say that one's a big concern for me. And I think universities have always, and the students who've come, have always gone for vocational reasons. They want the jobs. But the reality is, we force them to take other kinds of learning. We call general education, common learning. And in all the things we're talking about developing in terms of certificates, I think there's a grave danger of losing all common learning, which would be a terrible thing in a time in which our country is so deeply divided and puts enormous burden on secondary schools to pick up that learning if post-secondary providers don't do it and students don't want it. I think we just have to be very careful. There's a real lesson in there, Arthur and Rahul, in that we just need to be sure that as we go to more modularization and skills focus in future learning, we need to be sure that some of these modular certifications are in those very character building disciplines. Data from MC Burning Blast shows that people with a computer science degree get jobs at a particular rate. But if you have a computer science degree and you have a proficiency in writing, you actually do much, much better. And so many of the humanities, you know, writing, speaking in the teamwork, team building, these all character building traits will continue to be important. And as we think of modular learning, we need to be sure that some of these modules are in those human skills areas. But here's a very interesting question for you, Rahul.  Some people call it the great resignation. Some people call it the great talent free shuffle and so on. How do you think in terms of companies retaining people, retention of great talent has become one of the top priorities of companies? And Rahul, for you yourself, you know, as the chief talent officer for a company that grew from 200 to 40,000. That's incredible. So as a chief talent officer, do you think that education and learning has anything to do with retention in this incredible age of the big reshuffle? Yes, it's such an amazing question. As you can imagine, I spend a huge amount of time focused on it because it's a global phenomenon. It's a cross industry phenomenon, of course, in a people business. It's a big deal. Couple of interesting facets to this though. We've had previous cycles of hyper-retrition, right? Go back to the dot com boom era or, you know, whenever we've had Wall Street led cycles, we've seen hyper-retrition before. There's a big difference this time around than what we've seen in any of those cycles. And that is that people are leaving not just for better opportunities, but they're also leaving because they do not want to carry on the lives the way they've had before. There's a disconnect that they have experienced with work, with the companies at the end, with the way that they're leading their lives. And that's a big difference from before because it's a pretty significant percentage of people that are leaving without anything in hand. Yeah, but without a future, people are leaving without a job in hand, right? Without a job in hand, exactly. So when you kind of peel that, there are a couple things that come back. And that's why the companies need to have a different approach towards retention than they've had in the past. And one of the biggest things we've seen is that people are also leaving because they don't feel valued, don't feel valued by their team members, don't feel valued by the supervisor, don't feel valued by the company. They see themselves as the means of production and so on. And so a big thing that we have to focus on is creating an authentic sense of belonging where we show up as our vulnerable, authentic selves, which gives permission for people to be who they are, to be able to live their imperfect lives on screen. Because in the next room, they could be taking care of a COVID patient in the house. They could be homeschooling their kids who are running around in their homes as they didn't need to do. So where does learning come in? I think it comes in in different ways. We have to continue to invest in the learning of our people. We've also got to invest in learning in areas that we didn't before. For instance, the importance of mental health, holistic well-being. These are now firmly within the four virtual walls of our of our organizations. Whereas previously, they were the preserve of outside of, you know, they were not in our job descriptions, we didn't have to do that. No, that's amazing. And I know we're going to run out of time, Anand, but I've had a question in my mind for you, which I'm going to take the opportunity to pose right now. So let's roll life back 34 years and or even more than that, you know, as you emerge from IIT Madras and then, you know, or after Stanford. So if you want to roll back your life, 34, 35 years at this point, but that was in the year 2022, what different choices would you be making today about your career? You know, I've heard about flipped classrooms and so on. But this is the first time I've been on a flipped panel. And I'm certainly taken, taken aback. But, you know, rather than your question, you know, if I were to rewind my life, I think everything was so, I didn't plan a whole lot. And I sort of took it by, you know, I didn't have any long-term plan or vision, never in my wildest dreams realized that I'd be spending the last 10 years or the previous 10 years of my career leading a nonprofit. You know, in India, I come from the community called Banyas. And those are hardcore business people. And so my ancestors are probably rolling in the graves thinking of me as the head of a nonprofit. And so you can never tell what the future is. So all through in my career, I've sort of looked around me at the moment and, you know, done what I thought was exciting and interesting at that moment. And life completely takes you with all kinds of twists and turns that you absolutely never dream about. And so if I were to rewind my life, I just would not, I would continue doing the same thing. You know, look at what's available now. And if I'd watched this webinar session, Rahul, I would have heard this key message from you that, look, we need to be digital first-aid universities. And if I got to be a university leader, I'd be going around saying, oh, my God, what are we doing about digital transformation? And then Arthur, you know, if I was a university leader, I'd be thinking, oh, my God, I have to be more learner centric, more student centric. And then specifically, what does that mean?  So I would just play by played by you're based on the surrounding, surrounding environment. But I do want to go to this. These two questions are, I think these are going to create a fight. So this question is actually from from a product lead at the smart energy water, you know, who says she says, with so many great project management and business management courses like on scrum and risk management and product management, you can get all of these short courses and short certificates. Given that and the high demand for these skills, where does that put the value and need for an MBA? Arthur, you want to take this? Yes, I was really hoping not to have first crack at this one. I don't have a very good answer to this one. I don't, it really goes back to the set of issues that you've raised already, which is that what's the future of degrees versus other kinds of credentials. Certainly business schools like Sloan and the Harvard Business School in your area have made dramatic changes in terms of offering certificate programs. Will the MBA continue to be the jewel? Perhaps or perhaps a whole bunch of certificates will be stackable and lead to an MBA. I think the jury is out on this one. That's a good one. Rahul, completely related to that, one of the people in the audience somehow seems to equate a degree with high price and prestige and privilege, while the shorter programs and certificates are more affordable with like a lower track and saying will society create a two-track system sort of like a first class and an economy class. Now, I vehemently disagree with that. Arthur, I see you shaking your head, but Rahul, what do you think? Will our society get into two classes where the rich and privileged can afford a degree or where do you see this? I would argue that that's where we've been for several years already, that if you look at who actually gets to go into higher ed and some of these most prestigious institutions, there's a very, very high correlation with family income. But what I believe very deeply in the core of my heart is that potential is greater than pedigree. And so I think there's a reinvention to be had where the cost of education cannot continue to be such that it is the highest debt category in the country across all debt categories. I just don't think it's okay to do that. That's why this conversation is just so, so important. And I think these certifications will continue to be important. I think it gives more choice to Arthur's point. I think it brings more inclusivity. But I think also what we would like to see going forward is the price of education coming down and having more accessibility all around. Fantastic. I think this was well put Rahul. And so with that, I'm going to draw us to a close. Can I just one quick comment? Jump in. That's my biggest fear about all the things that are occurring, which is I think there's a very great possibility unless we take policy action that will create two separate non-equal systems of higher education. One for the wealthy and one for the poor. We need to be careful where we merge the two with the stackable, the modular approach where it's not one size fits all. So to wrap up, I mean, you guys were just fantastic, including the flipped panel here. You know, just something that will stay in my mind indelibly seared in my mind is potential not pedigree. Oh my God, I love that. Second one is, you know, the digital university, big time, the Arthur to your point, we need to be focusing on the consumer where the consumer is about the learner. And also that we need to create better partnerships to create skills focused learning where universities help train people and companies and companies maybe come in and offer courses within universities. So create a much better back and flow, a back and forth flow. And so I've learned a lot. I hope all of you who've joined in have been as enthralled as I am by the incredible pearls of wisdom that my colleagues, Arthur and Rahul have talked about. It's just been fantastic having you all. So thank you, Arthur and Rahul again. And I hope to see you all soon. Thank you all. Bye.


What I would suggest make an Excel spreadsheet write down all the binds in it that you're comfortable using and then Write down all of your abilities like plan everything right all the way to 60 everything that you're gonna need Obviously, there'll be more rooms. We don't know about but At least your base kit and your consumes And and the NGI and just things like that weapon swaps general macros just try and try and think of as much as you can and just Prioritize it by how important it is right put it in like three different categories like Important like fast or important regular use And then sort of less important where you don't need to use it that often or be that quick with it and Then like a bottom tier one, which is just like it's good to have it banged But you you don't need it on a decent bind really


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