Okay. Hello and welcome to episode 94 of The Market Maker. And again, I am being left solo for this one. Piers, I believe, might actually even be on a plane as we speak. He's flying back from Sydney, Australia. He's been out there all week with our clients Citadel and Credit Suisse. So unfortunately for him, he's not been sunning himself on the beach. He's been actually doing some work. So all good. But yeah, in this episode, I'll keep it fairly brief. I just want to touch on really two points. It's been fairly quiet, I would say on the macro front, nothing too exciting. Certainly if you can cut through the noise of mainstream media and not get too head turned by UK house prices moving down to their slowest or fastest deceleration, let's say since the financial crisis. Or if you can escape the Harry and Meghan Netflix release headlines, then you're doing a better job than I at this point. It's hard to fight through the noise. But I'm going to talk a little bit about Goldman Sachs and crypto. And I'm also going to talk about right credit Suisse shares are actually up today outperforming the market. And so that's what's on the agenda. But before I begin, if you follow us on our social channels, you might have seen that we have launched a retrader competition this week. The retrader is a mobile app and we've basically captured the tick data from the CME exchange in Chicago and accelerated time into a compact two minute retrade of a real historical event in markets from 2022. There's been a ton of those big episodes of volatility, but I picked three, the invasion of Ukraine, UK mini budget, and also then the situation that happened with US inflation and subsequently interest rates. So all you need to do is follow the link, wherever I share this episode, if you just go to the show notes, it'll take you straight to the competition registration form.  It doesn't matter about your P&L. The, as long as you complete all the games, when it'll be picked at random, the deadlines, the end of this year, the win will be announced at the beginning of 2023.  So yeah, go for it. I wish you well. But yeah, let's dive in and let's talk a little bit about Goldman's and crypto. And the reason why this came into the spotlight this week, Reuters released an exclusive article talking to the US investment bank. And it comes at an interesting time because obviously at the moment, the dust has kind of somewhat settled on the FTX fiasco, albeit I keep seeing, keep seeing him doing interview rounds at the moment he's definitely milking the moment is our SPF. But why is why is Goldman's name tied to this? Well, first thing is the relative easy picking and what I mean by that is that the implosion of FTX has heightened the need for essentially trustworthy regulated cryptocurrency players and big banks have seen this as an opportunity to basically pick up some of that that flow. Now, you know, you might think well, if I'm trading Bitcoin, why do I need trustworthy regulated crypto players? Well, that's it. We're talking about institutional flow, which makes up the largest proportion of volume. And obviously just given what's happened, it really has laid bare the situation currently that we have with other players in the market like your FTX. And then you step that up, you've got finance, but then you've got these other more traditional regulated parties like your Goldman's for example. And so they've just hoovered up a lot of that business. So it's been positive for them in that regard. According to their head of digital assets who spoke earlier this week at Goldman's were saying that look, while this is a setback obviously in terms of sentiment FTX was kind of like the poster child. It was quite central to the ecosystem. I think there's no doubt that that's had an impact on broader sentiment, but the point he was making is look the underlying technology continues to perform and that's what Goldman's is positioning themselves for as a long term strategy pivot and Goldman's has invested in 11 digital asset companies. They provide everything from compliance, cryptocurrency data, blockchain management. And if you want to see the kind of breakdown of all of these different investments then just jump over to my LinkedIn account and check out one of the posts I did this week is a really great diagram I found of all of these different investments. And I think it's really interesting for you to see how these banks are oppositioning for the future. And definitely to get a bit of under better understanding of how a more traditional based bank is approaching the technological shift that we're going through at the moment. Now, the other thing here, the other offshoot of the FTX debacle is the fact that Goldman sees this is a great recruitment opportunity. If you think about it, looking at the broader tech space, November was brutal for tech job cuts. I was just looking at the numbers before I came on to do this and if you just took meta Amazon and Twitter alone, you're talking about 30,000 job cuts in one month. Now, if you look at the year to date so far and looking at just the tech sector, you're talking about 100,000 jobs. So there's definitely an ability to pick up engineers for example at this present point in time. Goldman himself, the head of digital assets as has said his teams kind of find at the moment I think their team overall is about 70. I think they've got a seven strong crypto options derivatives trading desk. So it's pretty small but they are building out their private distributed ledger technology at the moment. And on that side of things talking about blockchain. I can't wait for q1 to come around because we are going to be launching our blockchain simulation. And that's going to be hitting the hitting the tape going out to the masses in q1 so yeah super excited to get that out to all of our clients. But yeah so overall the main crux of this is that you know now sentiments kind of steadied a little bit in the wake of that that FTX meaningful moment in the kind of milestones of crypto adoption. It's been quite interesting to just see that those major players there have just been picking at the bones and actually one company's losses and other companies gain in this instance and Goldman's definitely has been a part of that. All right, the other thing is Credit Suisse I said that their shares were up there for about 3% recording this on Friday morning so they're actually out performing the market, which sounds a bit odd because their shares have obviously been hammered of late, but credit Suisse have just completed a 4 billion franc to pronged capital increase so dollar terms, talking about 4.3 billion US dollars. Investors agree to buy 98.2% of the stock on sale in a right software to raise about two and a quarter billion Swiss francs and the remainder of the stock will be sold in the market at or above the offer price of around to 52 francs a share. The next issue was the second leg of the banks capital raising. So, the firm already raised 1.76 billion francs through a private placement last month to investors including the Saudi National Bank, which will become the larger shareholder with just under 10% Obviously, why is all this happening I think it's pretty obvious, shoring up their finances to address investors concerns is the main thing after billions in losses over the past two years recent client defections and asset outflows have been fairly violent, as we know, in recent months. So the funds are going to help pay for the exit for for the firm to exit from large parts of its investment bank and also the 9000 job cuts and the various packages that go along with that as well so their shares are up. And again, why, why do you a rights issue like this well it's a good way to kind of tap into your existing shareholders, when there's a time of general weak sentiment perceived around your company from external parties who then you would otherwise go to to raise capital in this way. It's a way of trying to plug the hole. And, you know, would you want to participate in that, that rights issue. Well, this is all to do with the belief or not whether you think that they can pull off this aggressive restructuring plan that's already been done. So, yeah, at the moment, they're off their lows but in context they're up about 3% at the moment today, but for the year to date performance, they are still down around two thirds of where they were trading at the beginning of the year so still heavily discounted. And then final thing to mention, of course, is the football World Cup obviously still going and despite lots of shocks exits from big names like Germany, Spain, England are still alive and kicking. And they're going to be playing France of course the quarterfinals this weekend so I've got a couple of stats for you the winner of which will go on to face either Portugal or Morocco. So, could be a very interesting prospect of moving further through the tournament should be progressed through France. It'll be the first time the two sides have met in a knockout round of a men's major tournament England, looking at the stats, because obviously, being an analyst after throw somebody's at you. If you hold the upper hand they've had 31 previous meetings with 17 wins compared to France is nine, but 10 of those victories were before 1950 England have lost four times, and one only twice this century. So, history has flipped. More recently France might have the edge here. The teams have met twice at World Cups with England winning on both occasions actually to nil. Of course, in the infamous 1966 where England one their soul title, and then England 131 in 1982 as well. So, there you have it. Now, what do I think it's going to be well I've plugged in into my my model, and it's churned out that the end result is going to be one one penalties. England win. I'll leave it at that. Alright, have yourself a great weekend. Check out the show notes for the retrater competition competition entry form. And yeah, I'll speak to you next week. .


But in a world full of volatility, we have to look at who is our community and what resources do we have to support us in that network, whether it's finding a job offer, whether it's the emotional support we need in moments where things are difficult, losing a job, being forced to move, having a breakup or a change in your relationship. It's also the knowledge you need, the inside information, the job opening, the opportunity all comes from this network. So when we're seeing our X Factor members feel isolated, being top performers, being successful in their careers, working hard to move forward, feeling that their social ties are weakened over time because many of us, let's be honest, make most of our friends in our adult life in high school and college because everything is geared to be social. Everything about that experience is geared to be social. Join the team, join the club, participate, join a frat, join a sorority. And then all of a sudden we start making these decisions on our own path to carve out the life we want for ourselves and those decisions mean shedding some of those relationships, moving away from people that you felt connected to. When we look at what's happened to most of our community resources, right? We look at the rise of secularism. We had John Taffer on to talk about the corner bar and the disappearance and the move towards man caves and the move towards you building expensive home theaters so you don't go to the movies anymore. We're building more and more of our life around isolation too. We're drawn to the PlayStation five. We're drawn to the Netflix versus the choices our ancestors had to be social, to be a part of a community, to join clubs. So we have to work against the tide. We have to work against these forces to build the relationships and the community in our lives that matter. And when you recognize this, when you realize that you're falling into this trap of being a bit of a lone wolf, of choosing more isolation in response to the stress, the volatility, the media, the external forces that are making us feel worse about situations, we're doubling down on the exact things that harm us, that move us further and further away from the people, the relationships, the success we want in life. So when we look at all of these forces, for many we have to break out and make a singular choice around how do I put myself in a situation to build and foster the relationships that I need to get ahead? That's gonna mean taking out the AirPods. That's gonna mean going to social events. That's gonna mean seeking out communities. And that's gonna feel difficult and challenging. Why? Because it's fraught with potential failure. It's fraught with potential rejection. And we know that we want, as humans, to feel safe. We wanna feel heard, valued, accepted. But in order to find that tribe, in order to find that community, we're gonna have to go through some difficult choices to get there. In a way, we become victims of our own success, combined the last three years of lockdowns and pandemics and stuff, with this glorified view of what would it be like if I just had an awesome man cave with arcade machines and a PS5, a home cinema, right? You work hard, why not build that man cave or this entertainment center at home that then, after a hard day at work, working on your project, working on your business, whatever it is, to relax in this comfort zone that you've afforded yourself, that you look forward to. And it really takes a conscious effort to say, wait, I'm done with my work now. Time to close the laptop and not fire up the PS5, not fire up the home cinema, but actually take that extra step, which takes effort and pushes you outside of your comfort zone and will go and dial up your inner critic and then actually step outside of your home or your workplace and meet people. Do that scary thing that's known as going to a bar, going to a social event, going to the cinema, going to meet people.


Good afternoon, folks. Steve Rhodes coming to you live from the shores of mostly cloudy and a bit drizzly. Delray Beach, Florida. This year, 2 p.m. update. And currently we have all the U.S. and C's trading the downside. The Dow's off 92 points. That's about three tenths of a cent. The S&V a half a percent or 21 points. The Nasdaq six tenths or 77. The Russell 2000, which did the Russell 2000 equity future contract did generate a Gartley sell pattern yesterday. That's back about nine tenths or 16 points. The S&V is off four tenths, 12 points. Tranny's off a half a percent or 64 points. Spot politics is trading higher. So below it's 50 day exponential moving average. That may be its target to the upside. Gold's off five bucks. Silver's down 29 cents. That's about one or three tenths percent. Lights recruit is back 27 pennies. Natural gas have a nice day. It's up 22 cents. Trading out an 8.92. Three year treasury is up seven ticks. He's trading out at one to 37.05. So what we have out here, folks, no different than yesterday. It is a consolidating market. We'll put up our cash in to see charts out here and you'll see a number of different rectangles. You see that in the Dow price approaching the bottom of that consolidation. Same thing for the S&P. The Nasdaq's got quite a bit of ways to go before it gets down to the bottom of its consolidation pattern. The cash in to see for the Russell 2000 did not generate a Gartley sell pattern. It is the Russell 2000 equity future contract that did. Odd's favorite price to go target. That's the Russell 2000. It's Red Oster and Chainsline. That price target right now about 1841. Semi's are actually below the bottom of their consolidation, but they've also closed the gap. And so I probably moved that consolidation pattern down just a tad out there. The bottom of that gap was at 3,006. We're at 3,007 right now. Got a nice TT9 count top inside the transports out there. That suggests to move down to 515 over time. Nasdaq composite consolidation out there, New York Stock Exchange actually has an A to B equal CD to the upside. The price may be targeting 15609. That is its Red Oster and Chainsline. Now, you'll see Red Oster and Chainslines on each of these. If price somehow gets below that, that tells us about a market that wants to head lower. And when I say head lower, the price targets would become the most recent swing lows out there. That's what it would take in order to get that kind of a change in trend signal. Otherwise, what we've got here is a good old fashioned boring. And I do mean boring consolidation pattern. Folks, stay tuned because what's coming up next is anything but boring. It's your favorite polar bear, David White. After that, Tom O'Brien, I'll be back with you tomorrow at one o'clock. Have a terrific Thursday. Be safe out there. We'll see you soon.


Today's throwback. Remembering Dele Giewa and other slain and ambiguous journalists today, International Day to End Impunity against Journalists. Dele Giewa's gruesome murder remains a troubling chapter in Nigeria's history and a stark reminder of the pervasive culture of impunity surrounding security officers. Dele Giewa, a renowned journalist and founding editor of now defunct news watch magazine was statistically killed by a letter bomb while having breakfast with a colleague, Kaede Shoyinka, on October 1986. The Sunday morning incident sent shockwaves throughout the nation and world as it was a brazing attack on press freedom and a blatant act of violence against a journalist known for his stylistic and fearless reporting. Dele Giewa's mother raised serious questions about the safety of journalists who dared to uncover truths and challenge the status quo. What makes this case particularly upsetting is the lack of accountability and justice that followed. Despite widespread speculation and demands for answers, the investigation into Dele Giewa's mother seemed to have stalled, eventually leading to a culture of impunity for those responsible. This incident served as a grim reminder of how security officers and powerful individuals could evade the precautions of their actions. The tragic event not only silenced a prominent voice in Nigerian journalism but also highlighted the dangers faced by journalists whose works exposed corruption and challenged the establishment. It cast a shadow on the freedom of the press and the fundamental right of citizens to freely assess unbiased information. Dele Giewa's mother serves as a somebody reminder of the need for a robust and independent justice system capable of holding those in power accountable for their actions. It also underscores the importance of fostering a culture that values and protects press freedom, ensuring the safety of journalists as they carry out their vital role in society. In conclusion, although the impunity surrounding Dele Giewa's mother may have persisted for nearly three decades, it is crucial that we continue to demand justice and honour his memory by advocating for a society where no one is above the law, the godness of their position in and out of power. And that's it on the show tonight. Bola Hoba. Have a good night.


Lead Council to Nnam de Kano Ifani Geofo has asked the federal government to produce his client in court on Thursday. Geofo made a call while accusing the representatives of the federal government of attempting to delay the trial. Addressing a world press conference on the latest developments regarding Kano's upcoming trials, Geofo accused the office of the Director of Public Prosecution of deliberately refusing to present any of its representatives to honor the invitation for an agreement. We produce in court to face the trial tomorrow. Thankfully, the Director of Public Prosecution of the Federation has do bilatedly filed a seven-count amended charge along with an evidence of completion of investigation. So there's no excuse or place to hide whatsoever again to justify doing the controlling because what, as part of the document, the servants accompanying the amended charge, seven-count amended charge, they also filed an evidence of completion of investigation in the matter. So there's no, they cannot now hide under the guise that the matter has been investigated on any offense. So the investigation has been concluded. So tomorrow we're expecting to be in court. Nnam de Kano is a citizen of the United Kingdom and he had a history of standing by to face his trial. That standing by, that readiness for his trial was not broken by him. It was broken by the prosecutor himself who turned around and renditioned him later. You cannot profit from your own wrong. So even though this type of thing has not happened before in Nigeria to the point of bringing it before the judicial authorities, it has happened now. So it's before the judicial authorities to make a ruling on it one way or the other. But I can tell you that our theory, our position will prevail.


The Global Environment Facility Small Grants program, which is implemented by UNDP, is supporting St. Lucia's efforts to integrate research and innovation into the apiculture industry. Jesse Leos reports. Since 2012, JeffSGP-UNDP St Lucia has funded 13 apiculture projects totaling EC$1.6 million. Already successes have been achieved in producing byproducts such as soap, shampoo, lotions, candles, muscle pain relief creams, granola and mead, which is a delicious wine. This investment has already contributed to a 15% increase in honey production, trained over 200 beekeepers, and increased their income by 40-60%. Recent testing of St Lucia's honey by a laboratory in France has confirmed its suitability for exporting to the European Union. Driven by a vision which focuses on research and innovation, JeffSGP-UNDP, the Government of St Lucia, the IANOLA Apiculture Collective and other NGOs, will establish the Apiculture Research and Learning Institute, ARLI, as a Centre of Excellence for Research, Innovation and Learning in St Lucia and the Eastern Caribbean. What is the mission of ALI to contribute to a sustainable climate-smart environment for pollinators? So we are going beyond bees to look at all the pollinators in the environment in St Lucia through a programme that is science-driven, important to us, develops and nurtures strategic partnerships, mutually beneficial partnerships, builds capacity and generates benefits for communities. We believe Apiculture has those attributes to uplift our rural societies and to contribute significantly to our economy. According to the Law of Diffusion of Innovation, approximately 2.5% of any population are the real innovators. These, when behind with the early adopters representing 13.5% of any population, will provide the impetus for sustainable development. JeffSGP-UNDP has targeted such pioneers to begin to push us beyond the frontier of science, agro-processing, agriculture and biodiversity in St Lucia and the Eastern Caribbean. The IONOLA Apiculture Collective fits within this pioneering category and has been breaking new ground in this area and will lead us with local and international partners to where we have not been before. We are a collection of young and old beekeepers together, working to try to elevate the industry and embrace not just the craft of beekeeping but also embrace the science of beekeeping. The science is the most critical important thing that we have left behind and what we've focused on in our organisation is to focus on the science, to try to understand what's happening with our bees, where they are failing and where they are not failing and how we can improve the ecosystem around and the analysis of the diseases possibly that bees are carrying. During a recent site visit to the IAC Apiculture Training Centre in Castries, a delegation from the Embassy of Taiwan led by Ambassador His Excellency Peter Chen was introduced to the vision and mission of the Apiculture Research and Learning Institute toward the Apiary at VG and participated in an interactive session of candle making using beeswax. Taiwan provides a broad spectrum of assistance to Senutia including agriculture, education, technology, business, health, etc. and we committed to work with Senutia government to achieve UN sustainable development goals and also enhance resilience to climate change and we look forward to working with all stakeholders and partners to benefit all Senutians in the region so I truly believe when we work together we will share a better future. In the long run the Apiculture Research and Learning Institute is expected to serve as a multi-purpose field research centre that will focus on growth and optimization of the apiculture industry mangrove avifona and coral species restoration and the establishment of a vibrant diverse and authentic apitarism experience in St. Lucia and the Eastern Caribbean. To achieve these objectives Arlie will create strong mutually beneficial and enduring partnerships with Sanket Senevis, Dominica, Grenada, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago and Samoa as well as with local regional and international universities and research centres. For the Government Information Service I am Jesse Leance reporting.


We are continuing on a series of the 10 characteristics of these people of success in the dunya and in the akhira. We talked about being truthful with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala with your creator as the first principle.  And those were the first two. The third one that Abdullah Ansari, the great sage of the 5th century, says on the 10 characteristics and habits of successful people in the dunya and akhira is that how do you deal with friend? He said, ba-dustan bin nasiha, with your friend deal with him with nasiha. The prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam said ad-dino nasiha. The religion is nasiha. It's sincerity and sincere counseling. And friends are one of the great blessings of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala if you're blessed with the good friends. Because good friends are really like a treasure house that's always there for you.  The prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam was asked in Sahih Muslim that how do we pick a friend? Who do we choose as a best friend? And he said, choose the person that would remember Allah with you. But if you forget, he would remind you. And if you forget, she would remind you. That's a friend, someone who would remind you about Allah if you go in the state of gifla, but always is a person of virtue, person of high level of virtue in ethics. So, but what about bad friends?  The prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam said, al-maru ala dini Khalidi, a person is in the religion of his friends. In other words, they will affect you, not just physically, but mentally and spiritually as well. Maulana Rumi has a beautiful poem. In the Muslim, he says, Tatawani miguris az yarabad, yarabad batarbu ad az marabad. Run away from a bad friend, run away from a bad friend, because a bad friend is worse than a poisonous snake. Marabad tanha atura barjan zanat. A bad poisonous snake will harm your body, but a bad friend not only will harm your body, but it will also harm your spirit, your iman, your faith, your religion. And this is why it is important to be surrounded with good friends. And if you have good friends, subhanAllah, what a great blessing. And if you have bad friends, to run away from them as though you run away from a poisonous snake. Now, nasiha, giving counseling to a friend, how do we give counsel? Maulana says that don't give counsel to a person when they're in a state of intoxication, when they're drunk. In other words, you have to wait till they're sober. And this is a spiritual meaning, not a physical meaning. Giving counsel, Sayyidina Ali said, if you give counsel in front of people is as do you put them down. It's not really a counsel. It's not really nasiha.  But you do it in privacy and with beauty and with ihsan. The way of our religion, the way of our Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam is always to go to the positive, not to go to the negative. So if someone is doing something wrong, you always tell them that, listen, you're too good, you're too beautiful to do this. And you tell them their deficiency because the believer, the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam said, Al-Mu'minu Mir'atul Mu'min, a believer is a mirror of a believer. And one of the nature of the mirror is that it shows the beauty and it also shows the aib in the deficiency of the person. And it shows the beauty so that the person be grateful for that beauty that Allah has given, but it also shows the deficiency so they can rectify and make themselves better. And this is the nature of a believer and of a friend that we give sincere advice and if our friends have deficiencies and they're doing things that are wrong, we say it in the most beautiful way to them in the privacy of the two. Not in public, not on Instagram, not on Facebook, you don't tell people that aib in the deficiency in public, you say it in private, but you say it in the most beautiful way. Because this is the way it's not, they said it's not what you say is how you say it. So may Allah give us to do that to be good friends to people and to be a beautiful mirror that shows the beauty some and also shows the blemishes of people and tell them how to rectify themselves and may Allah give us good friends that they do the same for us. Now, the second thing, the next thing that this is the fourth thing, he says, How do you deal with your enemies because you have friends, you have enemies, everybody has friends, everybody has enemies. We know that our Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam, the best of Allah's creation, he had enemies, everybody has enemy, even though he had control over his nafs where he didn't have a button to be pushed. The Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam was buttonless. Nobody could push his button to get him angry to get him. No, he was always in control of his limbs of his body of his of his spirit. Everything was under his control. Nothing controlled him except Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. So, the Abdullah al-Sadi continues, he said, with your enemies deal with them with him, with forbearance, with gentleness, because you don't want to add fuel to the fire. If you have an enemy and you're harsh with them, you're just going to make the situation worse. Lauzu said, the great Chinese philosopher, he said, look at the rocks and look at the water, the harshness of the rocks and the gentleness of the water. But he said, the water, the power of water is that it penetrates through the rocks. And that's the beauty of gentleness. Gentleness is control strength. Gentleness is controlled power. And that's the beauty of gentle people. They're actually very powerful people. They're actually strong people, but they have control over their strength and they're gentle and beautiful. And may Allah make us amongst those who are gentle and beautiful because with harshness, you will create enemy. With gentleness, you win your enemies. We need to turn enemies into friends. And this is the teaching of our Prophet, sallallahu alaihi wa sallam. And he always turned his enemies into his friends. Now, look at the way he dealt with Omar ibn al-Khattab before, who was the greatest enemy of Islam. One of the greatest enemies of Islam was Omar ibn al-Khattab and the other one was Abu Jahl. These are the two people that they were enemies of Islam. The Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam raises his hand and makes a dua. And this is a Sahih hadith. Allahumma a'iz al-Islamah.  But what? What is he making dua for? He's saying, with the one of the two Omar's that's beloved to you, either with Islam of Omar ibn al-Khattab or Islam of Abu Jahl. One of these two, give a aizah to this religion with the Islam of these two regalain. This one of these two, whoever is most beloved to you, give dignity and honor to this religion. This is the dua. And this is why Ibn Omar said that the dua of the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam was accepted. And my father is the dua of our Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam. And that's why Omar ibn al-Khattab is in a category of his own because every Sahaba got dignity with Islam. But Omar ibn al-Khattab gives dignity to Islam. And he's in a maqam of his own because he's the answer of the dua of our Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam. The Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam didn't make dua against Omar that he's our enemy. And there you know, may Allah destroy it. No, he never made, he never added fuel to the fire. He made dua and he was gentle with them until Omar became Muslim and he became the, we know the story of Omar. The greatest conquest after the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam passed away. And after Sayyidina Abu Bakr, the greatest conquest that came in the history of Islam was during the time of Sayyidina Omar ibn al-Khattab. And may Allah turn all our enemies to friends. We want to turn our enemies to friends and not make dua against our enemies, but make dua for them that they're guiding and they become our friends, inshallah. Jazakallah khayran. Wassalamu alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh.


Welcome back everyone, live here from the show floor, the CUBE coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, CNCS. North America show, we've been to every KubeCon, Europe, North America, since inception, watching the journey of this ecosystem grow, developers, startup, entrepreneurs, open source contributors, big companies, end users, hyperscalers, all kind of adding to the innovation. This year, it's all about next-gen AI and standing up the infrastructure to enable platform engineering. I'm your host, John Furrier, Rob Stretchy. We love platform engineering, Rob. We've got two great guests to break it down for us. It's Yibu Dhani, co-founder and CEO of Ralphie Systems, CUBE alumni, and Vanshee, son of Jiralla, principal architect of Cloud and engineering platforms with American Airlines. Great to have you on again. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. What a show. So, Kubernetes is getting boring, as they've been saying, but it's actually now out there, people are running it. You've done a lot of Kubernetes over the years, seven years? Yeah, since seven years, I've been working with Kubernetes. Initially, I started with Docker, and later, Kubernetes adoption has gotten. Yeah, it's been seven years. Yeah, it's been seven years. What does that translate into? Into cloud-native years, 70 years. Seven times seven, we're all dogged. That's a huge, by the way, that's a big journey. Just curious, where's the progress now? Talk about where we are, because I think we've seen the first wave of how do I stand it up, how do I manage the clusters, get it operational, and then once that happens, the next wave of things happen that you're enabling, because you're standing up workloads. What's the progression, where are we? I would say that there's a small class, I don't know, what percent, but five to 10% of people who've been doing this a long time, well, she's one of them. He's been doing this for seven years, right? So that class of people are now at a point where, well, they've seen it all. So they know exactly what works, what doesn't work, and they have a lot of opinions around, you know, best practices around platform engineering. There's a second class of people who maybe started two or three years ago, when Kubernetes became sort of interesting, and those are now getting to a point where they're going, oh my God, this is really, really hard, what do we got to do? And look, last year when we talked about this, we talked about this concept of platform engineering, which has now become a thing, right? It's become a thing, and what I'm really happy about is the word that you just used about Kubernetes has become boring. I think that's the most important thing, because boring, I mean, we kind of joke about this, but boring really means it's becoming a standard. Standards are boring, right? But it has become a standard. Everybody understands that they have to build a platform engineering program to start with Kubernetes, and look, selfishly, that's very good for business. It's kind of like Linux, we don't really talk about Linux in a most innovative way, but because it's already done its thing, and it's enabling a lot more value. I love that analogy, I think that's cool. I got to ask you on the Scar tissue side, because you know, when you go through these early waves, now, you know, we saw Kubernetes early, as you know, we bought the same page here, it kind of orchestrates, which is standard. The enablement is key, the disruptive enablement, but the Scar tissue from the early days, Vanshi, take us through, what was the learnings early on? What did you get through? Because you now got developers just want a code. Yes, and so yeah, definitely. So when we started initially learning, adopting Kubernetes, right? So at that point of time, just bringing up a cluster, deploying your application, and just testing out how Kubernetes is, and when developers started using it as a front end platform, so we have got new applications that want to test different variety and wide ranges of applications that they want to come in, right? When that has increased a lot, now the clusters have, now we have scaling the clusters along with the number of applications that's coming in. So when that cluster is scaling, the front end needs to be robust for the developers. They do not care about how my platform is, what my server is, where we are running on. So the developer platform has kicked off, where developers doesn't care about Kubernetes, where that's where the platform engineer comes in, where they do the heavy lifting there, they don't make developers very hard and complexity understandable of Kubernetes. So that's where the adoption on the developer experience has increased, and keeping up with the platform engineering, the challenges definitely are scalability and monitoring, especially in the monitoring and observability piece, right? So when we are scaling the platform, about hundreds of clusters that we are running in, observability has been a biggest challenge, and the other biggest challenge was security. Right, wide range of applications, so securing them is a biggest challenge. Yes, I mean, that makes sense, and we've been hearing that all day long. It was one of the main themes this morning in the keynote was security, and I think we've had numerous guests on throughout the day today talking about it, especially when you think about how security is not just about the technology, it's the social engineering aspects, and how you have zero trust and built in and things of that nature. How are you taking steps to kind of address these challenges, I guess? So again, security happens at different layers. So the front end, when we come in with enterprise tools, apart from the Kubernetes ecosystem has to build around, with respect to the front end web app, when they're using the web apps, the web application firewall, the WAFs have to be developed, and the core Kubernetes zero trust, when we talk about zero trust, we need to tap into the image securities, the build pipeline securities, and also the runtime scans. So the security has to scan across from where it starts to where it runs. So it has to go to all the layers, and it has to be at all the layers that needs to be secured. So that will be a biggest challenge to go into different types of tools again, right? So not even a single tool that's all. You know, customers are the developers. You got to spin up an environment for them so they can do their job. Data scientists, now you're going to have AI developers, which probably will be everybody. Yes, and today I was looking into broader use cases of Edge AI ML. So the Edge has been adoption last three years before Edge was about 10% or 20%. Now it is like 30 to 30, 40%. Edge has increased its adoption too. So now when we're tapping into the Edge devices, or IoT devices, security going into that layer is again the biggest thing that needs to be solved. So with your, I mean, you're in an airline, right?  Do you have Kubernetes at the Edge in all of these different locations? Or is it, how are you actually using Kubernetes? So we are actually using Kubernetes in different platforms. Our baggage platform is one of the platforms that is on Kubernetes clusters. And we have our centralized developer platforms on the front end, which is on the backstage. So that is also on the Kubernetes platform. And there are internal microservices, a lot of microservices and internal applications that are hosted across multiple clusters. Again, our adoption into Kubernetes is again, as clusters of the service where we give each cluster to the teams that are independent. And also namespace service where a single cluster is spanned for multiple use cases too. I see if you got to love the American Airlines customer you have there, because they got the scale, they got the technical shot, but there the environment is just going to grow. So it's like, this is kind of like the moment when we first met, we kind of saw the Kubernetes vision it's playing out, it's called platform engineering. And Kubernetes is invisible, it's under the covers. Yeah, it was always an enabler. And so the first time John and I spoke about this, I told him that very soon we won't have a show called KubeCon because it doesn't make any sense. It should be hidden. And of course we still have it soon enough, right? We'll call it something else. Maybe we'll call it developer portal con, I don't know. Well, I mean the cloud native con to me makes a total sense. Maybe that's where we're going, but look, this was always the goal, right? And you always talk about Linux as the analogy. These things, once they become well understood and standardized and use the word environments, right? Once we understand what an environment actually looks like they become commoditized to the point that they're just no longer important to the developer. I'm looking forward to that because actually, again, good for business, but this is the right progression for any new technology. It's a 10 year cycle, right? And after 10 years, it doesn't matter anymore because it's part of the fabric and let's go work on the next set of problems. I think we are pretty close to that. Two years from now, we're there. But yeah, sorry. Go ahead. As you said, right? Previously, the technology lifecycle was maybe about 10 years, but now it's rapid. It's like five years, every five years, net new technology and it's like, it's at a very exponential rapid pace that we are moving to. It's interesting, this month I shared on social. Fifty years is when TCPIP, first memo went out with Vinsurf and Con that became the internet at that pre-web. And that moment opened up the interconnection standardization, which Kubernetes is orchestrationally, but it will go like Linux. It'll be invisible to the point where it's just there and everyone loves it, it works, does its job, and it does things around it, it's just through the way. So the next question is okay, what's that next level of abstraction? We were just riffing about compute being widely available at the edge, semantic layers. If you take AI going out further, the infrastructure has to be large scale, programmable, stand it up, tear it down, at will, machines doing it. It's very much an automated kind of playbook, best practices kind of thing. This is the modern IT. Indeed, so funnily enough, because you said the word environments, so we launched a product today called Environment Manager. Because we've seen this all along where developers see when a developer says I need compute to do my job. They actually don't mean Kubernetes. They actually might mean Kubernetes, but they mean Kubernetes, maybe a namespace, I need a pipeline, I need that S3 bucket because I'm going to have my data there. Oh, please bring up a model for me so I can test bedrock versus, I don't know, Lama 2 for, this is an environment. So what does it mean to templatize environments so that IT can build them on the fly and make them available, again, as environment templates. This is something that, John, we've been working on this for a long time. Right, like we started as a Kubernetes company knowing full well that we will not be a Kubernetes company eventually. It has to be a high level abstraction. We launched it like a 1.0 of that today. We have customers who've been testing it for a while. It's phenomenal. Truly, like the vision always was what is that one button a developer presses and says, give me an AI workbench. By the way, today you can try this out with our product. Give me an AI workbench. It's going to build you all the 70 tools that you need to actually do your testing. It's going to build it for you. It's awesome. It's like a 3D printer. Just give me my IT environment. Yeah, give me a call. Yes, that abstraction is at the next level now as we've discussed, right? So previously abstraction was about clusters. Now the abstraction is at a layer that I want to test it out end to end with everything with a single click of a button. I need my whole platform. Whatever I need, all the bells and whistles, it needs to come up. I got to bring up some of the problems that you saw. I saw some of the notes we were preparing for this about guardrails and challenges, but you bring up this instant provisioning kind of concept of just standing up. When you have platform engineering teams that don't have the best practices nailed down, a lot of the faults can come in. For example, the big cloud flare snafu last week was because one of their mission critical modules didn't go through the best practices. They were shipping so much code, they were too agile. So you start to get into the mindset of getting a little slower, but making sure, because if you're going to be scaling with automation and reasoning and generative AI-like techniques in the future, which we're just basically saying, you got to get stuff into a best practices playbook or some sort of, otherwise it could break the whole thing. What's your opinion on that? Definitely. So I mean, my analogy to platform engineering is building a city kind of a thing, right? You're planning for a city. So when you're planning for a city as a platform engineer or an architect, you need to have the proper planning and guardrails across where to build and what to build and what to be allowed and what not to be allowed. So at the same time, you need to have limits and limitations. So you need to have best practices baked into your pipelines, your code, everything but whatever you run it. Otherwise, definitely when you are ready, as I just scale, we all see a lot of things that we don't have to. So definitely we need to tap into those. That highlights what we've been saying, Robin theCUBE, about systems mindset for this role. This is not your average developer. This is a unique position. Persona, data engineering falls in the same category. If you don't know what a city looks like, you can't plan for one. Yes, you can envision it. Most people cannot envision what that city's going to look like. I'll tell you the most interesting problem we've seen in the industry.  So we talked to CTO, CIOs. And their biggest issue is they have all these, even this economy, they have all these slots open for bathroom engineers, they can't find them. Because this is a very, very tough skill to acquire. And then of course, apply to multiple companies. And by the way, skills gap is not the only issue. It's also the attention to, I don't care what happened in the past. Absolutely. And AI takes advantage of legacy opportunities, right? Yes, you just told my word. The skill gap, the skill gap, definitely. Yeah, and I think also it's not just the skills gap. It's so many different skills. If you're not using automation, if you're not using something that aids in that plan. Because as platform engineering is yet the new IT, and you have some aspects of DevOps in there, you have a lot of IT ops, which has kind of been subsumed in there. And it's kind of that mishmash of layers of different technologies you need to understand. And then you bring in multiple hypervisors, multiple flavors of Kubernetes. It's not straightforward. Yes, definitely. And I'm sure this is how you're approaching it. Yeah, definitely. So because, again, it's not even, the platform engineering when you take it's not, as you said, it's not one, right? So it may be a multicloud, it may be a hybrid, or it may be spanning across your data centers anywhere. So the complexity is such, unless until you are going through the journey and path, it's not one kind of distribution, or it's not one kind of a place you are in. So there's a lot of technologies, a lot of tools, a lot of places that you are in. This much of complexity needs to be understood. You can't buy general purpose software anymore, or any kind of general purpose anecdotes or flavors. You've got to really engineer the system architected, like you said, the city. And I think this is where I guess like to kind of wrap up the final question on everyone's mind is, okay, platform engineering, DevOps, platform engineering, and now generative AI, you got the progression, DevOps was introduced as code, platform engineering kind of modernizes, kind of mainstreamed it a bit. That's like a departmental thing, hope for simplifying it. And then with generative AI, what's next guys? So where do the dots connect for generative AI? Because as you said, push a button, there's magic going on behind the curtain. So that's got to be some sort of generative AI data involved. What do you guys see, generative AI and platform engineering kind of connecting? What clicks out of the gate? Where does it scale? Okay, so the generative AI, where it goes to us, my concerns would be no code or low code automation platforms, where everything will be westerned to automations, where anybody who is using the platform will not worry about code, will not worry about server, they will be very close, very at a granite level, the functions will be for the enterprise where they don't worry about what server you're running on, what infrastructure you're running on. The AI makes it more dotted to more thick line where whatever you need it, at a footprint, it's like you just run it like it will fit it up. Everybody in this industry, across the world now, everybody's got a co-pilot now, right? So I guess we got that one too. So we built one, just to see what happens, right? So the initial path we took was, we said, look, we have some pretty good documentation, let's just train this on our documentation, that's pretty cool, that's kind of nice. But in the process, and we showed it to people, what we figured out is, it's kind of nice, but the real problem is not that, the real problem is, like when you drive your car, drive a Tesla for example, right? How many API calls are being made in the back to make every decision, right, at every speed? Okay, I am a very distracted driver, so I love my Tesla, so it always catches me. By the way, I turn on autopilot instantly, right? The minute I can, I do, because I'm a distracted driver, but how many API calls are being made? If all these calls went to OpenAI, right? Or ChadGPD, man, that's a lot of money. So we had to think about that. So these are the problems we're thinking about right now in our company. How do we cash these calls? But I'll tell you the most important learning we've had right now. We've been able to build a model where, when we see somebody work on a platform, the copilot is able to guess what they're going to do. It says, I think you're going to do this. And if you're going to take this path, here's how. So how do we literally build an auto-complete for infrastructure? That's, this is not my words, I'm a head of products, it's his idea. But it's a pretty cool idea, right? How do we do an auto-complete for infrastructure? Right, and then what happens is exactly what Ramchit just said, right? If you have a skills gap, solve it once and for all. Anybody should be able to do it. You don't need specialized skills. I think that's the right way to think about it, right? I see, Benchie, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing, we got to leave it there. Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on your seven-year run and more. And we've got a great partner in Raffi Systems. Great to see you, and you're right. Kubernetes is going to go in the background and welcome to the distributed computing instant infrastructure world of future. Thank you very much guys. All right, we'll be back with more coverage. We'll unpack this later, believe me, these guys aren't going anywhere. We're going to get back to them in another day or so on theCUBE, we'll have them back soon. We'll be right back with our wrap up of day one after this short break.


Tonight, Iran launched a large scale of coordinated attack on Israel. The regime in Iran fired a massive swarm over 200 killer drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles towards the State of Israel. Together with our allies and partners across the region, we are operating in this very moment to defend Israel from Iran's attack. So far, we have intercepted the vast majority of incoming missiles by Israeli systems. So far, we have intercepted and are continuing to intercept dozens of attack drones as well as cruise missiles and ballistic missiles outside of Israel's border. A number of Iranian missiles fell inside Israeli territory, causing minor damage to a military base with no casualties. Only one little girl has been hurt, and we hope she will be well. The Iranian attack is ongoing. Our plans are in the air. Tonight, white-scale attack by Iran is a major escalation. Together with our allies and partners, we are operating at full force to defend the State of Israel and the people of Israel. We will continue to fulfill this mission.


Welcome to your end of year guide. This guide is for admins who used CSV to roster this year and plan to roster with Clever or ClassLink next year. End your year in four steps. Add student IDs and merge students. Archive classes. Archive student accounts. Then request CSaw in Clever or ClassLink. Before we get started, make sure you're signed in to your CSaw for Schools admin account. If you're a district admin, you'll need to complete the following steps for all schools in your district. Access each school's dashboard by tapping on the school name on your district dashboard. First, add student IDs and merge students. Student IDs keep student portfolios together from different classes in years. Each year, check to make sure all students have a student ID and merge duplicate journals to ensure students have access to historic data in one cohesive journal. On your school dashboard under admin tools, tap assign missing student IDs. Type in each student's student ID. If you are switching to Clever, these IDs need to be student SIS IDs in Clever. If you are switching to ClassLink, student IDs need to be the student source ID in ClassLink. Just make sure student IDs stay the same year over year. Pro tip, you can use the filter by class feature at the top of the screen to add student IDs by class. When adding IDs, you may see that an ID is already in use. This means there are multiple journals for the student. This can happen if a student is in multiple classes and different accounts were created for them. An option to merge will appear. Tap click here to merge and follow the prompts to merge the two journals into one. Make sure the information is accurate. This step cannot be undone. Repeat the process for all students here. It is important to note that an email address counts as a student ID. If students have an email address but do not have a student ID, they will not appear under assigned missing IDs. If student email addresses are in Clever or ClassLink and they match the emails that currently exist in CSaw, the account should update when you sync with Clever or ClassLink in the fall. Now that all students have a student ID and duplicates have been merged, bulk archive classes to ensure you have accurate analytics. And so students are able to easily toggle in and out of next year's classes instead of posting work in their previous year's class. On your school dashboard under admin tools, tap archive old classes. Select a date to archive classes created before that date. We recommend choosing the last day of school or the day you plan to archive classes in order to capture all of the classes that were created before that date. Tap archive classes and you're done! Once you archive classes, you can bulk archive student accounts. You need to first archive classes because you won't be able to archive students if they are enrolled in an active class. Archiving student accounts will ensure you have accurate analytics and billing. On your school dashboard under admin tools, tap archive student accounts. CESA will tell you exactly how many students are going to be archived. Tap archive old student accounts to continue. Don't worry, archiving student accounts does not automatically delete them. No data will be deleted without your knowledge. Archive students will still be in your dashboard, but they will not be taking up licenses. You can restore them at any time. Once you tap archive accounts, you're all done! Finally, request CESA in Clever or Class Link. Sign in to your new Clever or Class Link admin account. Clever users, click applications, then add application. Search for CESA and follow the prompts. Class Link users, install roster server. It's a different app than the SSO app. Class Link roster server makes one roster format data available to CESA and is where you configure your sharing rules. And that's it! In four simple steps, you've set yourself up for a smooth back to school with CESA. At the start of next school year, you will complete all setup steps, including completing a full sync. Don't worry, we'll walk you through how to do it. Find setup steps and resources here. We recommend bookmarking this page for quick access. Thanks for joining us today! See you again soon!