Welcome back everyone, Cube's live coverage at Google Next. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've got Savannah Peterson here. We've got Rebecca Knight, Rob Stretchade. We've got Dustin Kirkland coming in. He's our guest analyst host, platooning in for a couple of segments. But he's also the VP of Engineering at Chain Guard, also a Cube contributor. Great to have you on Dustin. We've got two Cube alumnus, other analysts, for this analyst angles. We're all going to analyze. So we've got Andy Therai, who's with Constellation and Sargeet Chowal, founder and CEO of Stack Plane. Guys, great to have you on. Dustin, great to see you.  Dustin's certainly not an analyst, but he's got the analyst kind of mindset. He can analyze just as good as anyone else I know. Like myself. See some analysis. Like myself.  First up, this show only eight months ago was in Moscone, getting all this content together in eight months with the backdrop of the industry changing so fast, and how many papers have dropped in eight months, how many new things have happened in AI at all layers of the stack? It's been quite a remarkable run. Dustin, we'll start with you, your observation on this show right now. Yeah, I actually think it's kind of refreshing to get out of Moscone and San Francisco and do something a little bit different here in Vegas, but I think the Google-y-ness of the show is definitely palpable. It's a lot of energy, a lot of startups, a lot of integrators, systems integrators here, and the AI bits have gone very much from the lab into prime time, and the demos are, I think, much less hand-wavy and much more real, much more tangible. They brought a lot of the last event to the table this year. Sarji, what's your take on the show? Real quick, hit off the gate. I think out of the gate, Google is getting into their module, which is they are greater search, they are merging search. They are grounding AI with the search, that's big. And their new AI model, Gemini 1.5 Pro is in public preview. That's huge, the demo was, I think, awesome. So that's there. I think the equation is simple for any vendor and they are getting that. So more partner-friendly, plus more developer-friendly, means more customer-friendly, and they get that. We'll see if they can pull it off. Andy, your take, what's your take on the show?  So a couple of things that stood out to me, we'll double-click on that, of course. The one that was about the Gemini 1.5 Pro, the context of Windows, one million tokens, I don't know if you guys realize that. Yeah, and the headroom is up to 10 million. That's the point. I was talking with them saying that, okay, why are they going to stop at one? And they were like, we can go up to 10, but the market is not very important. I'm not sure it's public information, but it is now. Now it is. You started it, I did, so I'm safe. It's a token world we live in now. So that's one, that's a massive model. But what's more impressive is because everyone else is starting to build the massive, massive and massive models, what Google has realized is that that's not the only way we're going to serve. So they also came up with distillation of models and smaller language models, so they're able to take the nano models and then that's what they put in their phone and Google Pixel phones, and now it's also running on Samsung models too. So they're going both side of the large models, as well as the nano and smallest possible models. So that's one major difference that I noticed. The second one that he was suggesting earlier, that Google has always been about, I give you everything as a platform or as API level service. They were never concentrating on developers to come in, I give you workspace and I'll give you the whole nine yards, but never went to woo the developers. Now the day two, as you have noticed that, the whole thing, the developer was completely unfocused. So those two kind of stood out for me, totally different than the previous. Well we'll unpack that and again the dust in the stack model is we've seen, obviously we know what stack is, infrastructure, middleware, applications, generically, Google, the perfect storm has kind of happened for Google, if you think about it, we're celebrating the 10 years of Kubernetes, a major success, by the way, that could have failed at any point in the first three years, okay? So that community just is celebrating and they're so awesome to see that success. Containers, serverless. You have that kind of orchestration layer and then at the bottom of the stack, Google's got full scale, always had that. The workspace, the Gmail, that suite, people use it, but with generative AI, that's the application consumption layer and then of course, the data piece with BigQuery, so let's break down what you guys think about, and by the way, the ecosystem you mentioned are the key things. Three layers of stack, they're innovating on all three with AI throughout, what's your take on that, what happened with Google, why are they getting it right, why is this working? Yeah, I'm going to start very much with Kubernetes. It was just three weeks ago, some of us were in Paris for KubeCon here on theCUBE. I look around this expo floor, many of the sessions, many of the organizations that are exhibiting here, and there's a lot of this, and Google Cloud in general, I think owes a lot to Kubernetes and Kubernetes being the backbone of what makes Google Cloud work, what makes it different. You mentioned the 10-year anniversary, it's taken 10 years to really take something that was an internal Google implementation for all of G Suite and Gmail and YouTube, to take that, put that into open source, make that available to everyone, anyone, competitors, other clouds as well, but that's very much the foundation for a lot of what we're seeing here. And they're cross-cloud, cross-network, they're calling it, what are they called, cross? Cross-cloud network. Cross-cloud networking, I get confused between what VMware is doing, but that orchestrationally fits beautifully in with a lot of that AI stuff because serverless fits in nicely. Now developers are going to get sweet from this, so the developer angle on this, Sarjeet, is strong. What's, is there a there there right now and what's the view look like from a developer standpoint or a company trying to build on top of that cloud? I think my gripe with Google was for many, for the last three, four years, definitely I've been screaming loud and clear that you don't show empathy towards enterprise developers. And developers, normally people who are like, stay at the surface, they take developers one persona. No, they're 20 plus types of developers. You know, you're gaming developer front and back and there's just so many types of developers, like data science start developers now, right? So they finally talked about enterprise language through Spring, Spring and Java are like this, right? So they talked about Java, Spring, on the main stage. I was happy to see that. A lot of people, other people are happy. My tweet, I can tell from my tweet, tweet temperature, tweet temperature tells me that people are happy with that announcement. So that's one thing. And I had a round table with the richest rotor and a few other Googlers and a few other developer focused analysts, if you will. I said this, SDKs make you more like vendor lock-in issues. That's my SDK, you code to me. Then Libs, which are in the languages, they make you more like a language dependent.  Developers love APIs, it's the age of APIs. If there's API, I can use any language I want, right? So it sets me free. And they have to go there. That was my sort of guidance to them a little bit. And also, it's right. Well, the APIs can help their developers code too, the whole coding thing that's going on. Yeah, the APIs, of course, that is simple thing.  And most precise language are computer languages. They're only less than 200 keywords in any programming language. It's very finite set of keywords. And it's simple stuff. Andy, so this is an event, as Dustin pointed out. They've got the package, developers are there. They don't, 600 announcers, they paired that back to 250 and they still was hard. But this show, there's no Jensen. It's just all Google. There's no window dressing out there. So they bring in a lot to the table and I think, to me, the big takeaway is, yeah, there's some man in there. I mean, I think the video stuff's pretty cool. You think it's not, but if you look at what they did, there's little things in there. They had, the bottom of the stack, they had the processor and the TPUs coming. They had the Vertex 130 models, Gemini 1.5. They had grounding in enterprise data, not just Google search. And then little things, automatic side by side, rapid evaluation, big query with vector embeds now and cross modal reasoning, okay? This is now could be the engine. So, no Jensen, they don't need that hype. They're just saying, we got it. They're saying, we got the package. So, what's your take on that because, or what's our analysis? Do they finally have the equation? Does Google finally got it? Certainly there's booths here. There's parties from vendors and ecosystem. I think so. I think they do. And as you pointed out, if you get Jensen, they get distracted. Everybody talks about Nvidia and Jensen when you get that. It's a good thing they didn't do it, right? I mean, their TPUs are equally good or even better than GPUs. But here's the problem that Google always had and not just with Google, with any cloud vendor for that matter. In order for you to train all these larger models or in order to keep those workloads, you need to have the data in your platform. So if you don't have the data, the customer is not already on their cloud. I mean, they are talking about a federated training of the models, which is a possibility, but it gets a little bit slower. But if the customer is already there, you need to keep them there instead of moving somewhere else. So some of the unknowns was what they made. For example, we talked about the code assist. I actually like that, the 1.5 Pro, the code what it generates is actually very, very good. It's much better than GitHub, from based on my conversation with the C level. So they like that. But the problem is, again, when it comes to GitHub, it's already strongly integrated with the Visual Studio, which means if you are that ID development shop, that's where we're going to go. But if you're using other things in the market, like JetBrains or, you know, even VS Code, they're integration web, if you're going to go that model, this could be an answer for them. But more importantly, that a lot of people didn't give a credibility for this. I was impressed by that when they were talking about it. The tool said what they released for SREs about finding the root cause analysis, keeping the lights on, having it up and running, optimize it on the cloud. That used to be extremely complicated. Now they were able to do a conversation, natural language conversation, find that up and running. I thought that was pretty good. Yeah, and that brings up the model aspect. Dustin and Sarju, I want you to weigh in on this. Do they have the package now? And the word MLOps has only spoken a few times on theCUBE here, but they're saying not only machine learning ops, model ops, right? So now you have models coming in. So the operating angle's interesting here. Now you got the Kubernetes piece as well. So you got an operating concept, the business transformation about building new products. So do they have the package and is MLOps back and different? It's super interesting that you bring that up. I mean, Google's brand is strongest with consumers. And now we've got this Google Cloud thing that's much more enterprise focused. I don't think Google has yet brought those two together. I think some of the work around models is what's going to make what Google Cloud does uniquely. Actually bring that home to the way it affects not just developers, but absolutely everyone. Through developers, through those models, but absolutely everyone. I'd love to see at some point a show or a combination of expos that combines the Google Cloud story and the Google's consumer business story as well. Yeah, I think those lines are a little blurred and that confuses the heck out of the market when they're sending the message. Like we are talking with the workspace and the enterprise, like developers in the same sort of keynote, it gets a little harder, right? And also another side note is that CTO not being on the stage was like also people pointed out who's your CTO, right? So I think their key main leaders have to be on the main stage as well so people know their personalities, right? So because they compare that with, you know, AWS and Warner is like killing it, you know, on the day three or day two of re-invent and here we have some weakness. So like, I think they have, they are getting- Do they have the package? They have the package. Like I just said in the beginning, like more partner friendly plus more developer friendly. That means you are more customer friendly. I think that's it. But having said that, they still have to do a lot more work on the enterprise-y side of things, you know? Like having empathy for the legacy workloads and not talking about the green field all the time. So they have a reliance that they have to bring in the partners. There's a concept I call, I talk about feature proximity, right? AWS has a wide width of features, right? But Google was seen as best of the breed in a couple of categories. And Abhishek Singh from Everest Group and I had some discussion during the breaks here during Analyst Summit and I think they are addressing that problem. Now they look like a best platform versus best of the breed. We know the data science, you know? Like you come to us for- We'll see. Well, look at, remember, a lot of these announcers were in preview. Yeah, that's true. But remember, we look at AWS, what's happened to them. They do so many announcements every eight reinvents, like zillion, and then some of them just get abandoned or some don't follow through. But you've got to worry about what's going to come out and what's going to be implemented. You talked about MLops. And MLops is an area of coverage that I do. And I ask them some tough questions about how do you do the model decay monitoring and model measurement and the model, you know, drifting and, you know, even the data drifting and all that concept drifting and the whole line, yes. They have some pretty decent answer for it. It's not in working yet. It's in a public preview. People can use it. But I thought it was pretty cool. They were able to do comparison of that, do evaluation of that. You could do a model monitoring, evaluation and, you know, measure it. They have some measures in place. Like you said, which one's of this going to see the light of the market and which one is not? Who knows, right? So that's where the problem is going to be.  I think the clear trend for me that validates this show, well, coming from the show is that we've been speculating about models will integrate with each other. You'll see small models that are small, but very valuable. Enterprise will have their own models that are going to be proprietary to their IP, not proprietary, I guess, the proprietary word. I think the clouds will differentiate themselves to some extent with what models are natively available, best tuned, and just there, already there.  So here's the thing about your model thing, right? So when you take a larger model, when you distill into small models, one of the things what they're doing is called a model cascading. So you don't have to have a bigger model at the edge locations to do something with that. You can have a model that'll work well for you in that particular location. You can cascade it to another model either on cloud or next location. So that's going to be huge, not only with mobile, but with IoT when the models move there. So I think they got a leg up on that because I haven't seen anybody else doing it successfully, we'll see. That's a good point. Let's bring up a segment we're going to do, we've never done on theCUBE before. We'll do it here because you just made me think of that with your answer. It's something new you learned. Yeah, there you go. The question for each of us is, what did you learn at this show that's on your radar that you wasn't before? I'll start. What's on my, I'm going to continue to pursue. This whole performance game of token price performance, how many tokens per second is being gained. So I'm watching and I've been sniffing around and trying to understand this. It's energy per token, jewels per token. So there's a lot of price performance games going on. Also the nanometer game, seven nanometer, three nanometer on the semi side. So, but what's on the table for me now I'm looking at is that, what are the claims around performance? Because with tokens, the pricing is going to be on how fast you can do it. And there's claims out there. We do X tokens per second. Well, hell, if you're back loading it with a lot of energy. So that's on my radar that wasn't before I came in. I got a lot of validates, that's new information and we're going to keep an eye on that token angle. Dustin. I think you just put that on my radar now. Okay. I mean, I'll react to that more than, but yes, the pricing I think has started to come into focus. How are we going to be charged for AI insights, AI model tuning. The back end infrastructure and what the cost is there. Yes, there's some capital costs, but ultimately it ends up being very much, you know, the operational costs. You mentioned ML Ops, it's the people and the energy it takes to keep that running. Gaming that, that's interesting, but I guess inevitable if that's how, if that's how we're going to be charged for it. Well, that's the constrained energy. I mean, so it's like, who's got the better chip? What's on your plate? Yeah, it's not new, but it solidifies my thinking. The models are going to be commodity. It's just, right now there's a lot of noise around models, everybody's talking about AI models. All or some. I would challenge that all models are going to be commodity. Yeah, most of us, the bigger. You're not even me, Commodization. David had a big argument on our part on this last part. You're throwing more data, better model, everybody's training it, it's the same algos, but you still have to write an application. You know, application is codification of business rules. There are laws in every country, every city has laws. That is the codification. That's how we build the systems. All the examples you will see on the main stages here AWS re-invent, they show you one thing. Oh, it does this. So what's the issue that's on the table? What's new for you? Yeah. The models? No, no, it's not new. It's the solidification of the fact that programming is important than coding. System thinking, architecture is super important and you cannot ignore that. That's a reminder to myself that, hey, we have to remind the market and everybody else that, hey, this is noise. Noise is part of the game, I usually say that. But, like, it... Well, my feeling on this whole commodity thing is all models are evolving so fast, it's going to be an obsolescence game. Because if your model's obsolete or stale and not relevant, you're done. Now, I think the large language models, like OpenAI will probably be commodity because it's going to be vanilla. I think the specialty models is where the IP will be because the workload and the data will happen. So if Miesville comes out with a better crawl than, say, OpenAI, if they don't innovate and iterate on their model, they're obsolete. Is that commoditizing? So it's not a race to zero because it's a power law, right? So they're either going to be big and commodity-valuable or whatever. By the way, it takes decades... For the long tales where the value is. It takes decades to make the change. During 2009, 2009 after, during the dot com, we wanted to bring XML and commerce one and change the world and kill EDI. But no, we're still doing that. It just takes four hours. So we're just in the beginning. There's a lot of noise. Be careful. Make sure you focus on your application. This group here should do a podcast. It's because it's an hour. We're going to be popping in time. Andy, what's new for you on the radar that it wasn't before that you've, that you cleaned out of the show that's important and you're going to track? I'm surprised none of you mentioned that agents is pretty big deal, right?  So if they drop today, your 1.54 million into token, next week somebody's going to come and beat it. The week after that someone else is going to beat both of them. So it's not the bigger model is going to perform well. How are you going to specialize the models to do that? Agent is one option and wish you can customize the agents to do your job. So take the whole enchilada and then specialize it specifically. That's one differentiator. The second one is the model efficiency that I love it. Like I said, don't go with big.  The model efficiency is going to be big. So those are the two that came out. So agents is the new focus you see on your right now? I mean there are others who are doing it too equal enough co-pilers, but there's agents and building efficient agents and building efficiency, model efficiency because the building of bigger models, you know how much it costs to build that? And we talked about that. See, the model retuning, this is another thing that they have somewhat of a differentiator.  You can take that model and retrain them, retune them, fine tune them with your enterprise data. That can be done in a matter of hundreds of bucks. That could be a total differentiator as well. I'll add one completely out of left field. And it's something that I think your interview with Karen yesterday on theCUBE really brought to the forum, put on the radar for me. And that's how big of an opportunity the federal sector, the government sector, is for Google, especially around AI. So what I need to do is, yeah. So what I need to do is, we didn't talk about that, you know what I'm saying? No, they have a huge opportunity. Antiquated, the cross modality reasoning is perfect use case for the government. She pointed out that, you know, Google not doing business in China is actually an asset for Google to hear. She volunteered that China comment. She did, I watched, I saw that comment.  And I learned that they have a board structure. That was, I think they nailed the public sector. And of course, Kevin Mandiant's on the board who's a legend with Mandiant threat intelligence. So, all right guys, thanks so much for the analyst angles. One last lightning round question that we'll break. What are we going to see next year? What do you see the progression going? What's the next dot connect? I'll start. I think ecosystem has to be successful for Google. They have to nail it. They got great commitment here. People stand in tall with their booths, their parties. Will that convert? Will they address what's kind of going on in their mind? Which I can see, and I've not heard directly, but I can sense it. There's a little bit of cognitive dissonance. Am I making the right bet? I like this new car I bought. Do my friends like it? What, so you got to address the ecosystem. Without an ecosystem, cloud doesn't work. And I think Google's got a great workspace application layer with AI infused throughout. They nail the ecosystem. The puzzle is complete. And that's what I'm going to look for next year. Dustin, what do you think is going to happen? I think there's going to be a real drag race between TPUs and GPUs. And I don't know which one is going to win. I think very much to your point, TPUs have some advantages here. The question that I think might be answered is whether or not Google takes TPUs and makes those available outside of Google Cloud or keeps that as the crown jewels and exclusive to Google Cloud. I don't have crystal ball here, but I'm watching. I'm watching with popcorn. Yeah, so, Dustin, I'm with you. I think if you look for Tensor, you know what viewers, Google Tensor, what Tensor is, it's a multi-dimensional vector. It's even more complex than the vectors. Like, you know, so Google has more secret sauce.  But you think there's going to be a little game-changing chip action. I think so. I think they're holding some stuff back. But, okay, I think to win the market, you have to have practitioners in the market. You have to ground your business with the skills of gravity. So you have to train a lot of people. And another thing is we cannot mix the vendor economics with the enterprise economics. And also, the third pillar is the practitioners economics. I talk about that too. How practitioners will make money. If I get the certification on AWS, will I make more money as an individual or if I go with Google? That is important. You have, as a vendor, you have to address that. As an enterprise, you have to keep an eye on your economics, keeping in mind the vendor economics as well as the practitioner economics. So these are the three pillars of economics. Keep an eye on those and then play well. We'll keep an eye on that for next year. Andy, wrap it up. What are you going to see next year with Dots Connect for you? And Google. The reason why Google didn't become much successful in the cloud, where IBM, Oracle, SAP, and others nailed it is because they went after the industry use cases. Google is still not doing that. That's why they brought big guns in. They brought TKN from Oracle to figure out how to go after the industries. So which means you need to start building, look, anybody can build models. Even the smallest of companies, well, it's not smallest when they are unicorns, two billion valuation. Two billion, yeah. Anthropics of the world and others of the world when they come in, they could build a bigger model. But that's not going to solve the problem. Your differentiation is going to be very minor. So you're going to have to build industry-specific use cases, industry-related things to solve it. And that's one differentiator that I see that going forward. The second would be that the model, specialized models for specific industries and specific differentiators for that. I think if they moving in that angle, specific use cases for industries, they could win that. All right guys, great analyst angle segment. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Went a little over, but you know we're breaking it down. We're analyzing it. We're going to look forward to a lot of great stuff for next Jump Jump 4. We'll be right back with more after this short break.


Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another CUBE conversation from our fantastic studios in beautiful Palo Alto, California. Today we're going to be talking about what infrastructure can do to accelerate AI. And specifically, we're going to use a relationship, a burgeoning relationship between DDN and NVIDIA to describe what we can do to accelerate AI workloads by using higher performance, smarter, and more focused infrastructure for computing. Now to have this conversation we've got two great guests here. We've got Kurt Kukine who is the Senior Director of Marketing at DDN and also Darren Johnson who is the Global Director of Technical Marketing for Enterprise in NVIDIA. Kurt, Darren, welcome to the CUBE. Thanks for having us. Thank you very much. So let's get going on this because this is a very, very important topic and I think it all starts with this notion of that there is a relationship that you guys have put forward. Kurt, why don't you describe it? Sure. Well, so what we're announcing today is DDN's A3I architecture powered by NVIDIA. So it is a full rack level solution, a reference architecture that's been fully integrated and fully tested to deliver an AI infrastructure very simply, very completely. So if we think about how this is going to, or why this is important, AI workloads clearly have put special stress on underlying technology. Darren talked to us a little bit about the nature of these workloads and why in particular things like GPUs and other technologies are so important to make them go fast. Absolutely. And as you probably know, AI is all about the data. Whether you're doing medical imaging, whether you're doing natural language processing, whatever it is, it's all driven by the data. The more data that you have, the better results that you get. But to drive that data into the GPUs, you need great I.O. And that's why we're here today to talk about DDN and the partnership of how to bring that I.O. to the GPUs on our DGX platforms. So if we think about what you described, a lot of small files often randomly distributed with nonetheless very high profile jobs that just can't stop midstream and start over. Absolutely. And if you think about the history of high performance computing, which is very similar to AI, really I.O. is just that. Lots of files, you have to get it there, low latency, high throughput. And that's why DDN is probably nearly 20 years of experience working in that exact same domain is perfect because you get the parallel file system which gives you that throughput, gives you that low latency, just helps drive the GPU. So you mentioned HPC from 20 years of experience.  But now we're moving into the commercial domain. You don't have graduate students running around. You don't have very low cost, high quality people. You're just, you know, a lot of administrators who nonetheless good people, but lot to learn. How does this relationship actually start making or bringing AI within reach of the commercial world? Kurt, why don't we start with you? And that's exactly where this reference architecture comes in, right? So a customer doesn't need to start from scratch. They have a design now that allows them to quickly implement AI. It's something that's really easily deployable. We've fully integrated this solution. DDN has made changes to our parallel file system appliance to integrate directly within the DGX-1 environment, makes that even easier to deploy from there and extract the maximum performance out of this without having to run around and tune a bunch of knobs, change a bunch of settings. It's really going to work out of the box. And the, you know, NVIDIA has done more than just the DGX-1. It's more than hardware. We've done a lot of optimization of different AI toolkits, et cetera. Talk a little bit about that, Darren. Yeah, so, I mean, talking about the example I used, researchers in the past with HPC, what we have today are data scientists. Scientists understand PyTorch. They understand TensorFlow. They understand the frameworks. They don't want to understand the underlying file system, networking, RDMA, Infiniband, any of that. They just want to be able to come in, run their TensorFlow, get the data, get the results. And just turn that, keep turning that, whether it's a single GPU or nine DGXs or as many DGXs as you want. So this solution helps bring that to customers much easier so those data scientists don't have to be system administrators. So a reference architecture that makes things easier, but that's more than just for some of these commercial things. Also the overall ecosystem, new application providers, application developers, how is this going to impact the aggregate ecosystem that's growing up around the need to do AI-related outcomes? Well, I think one point that Darren was getting to there, and one of the big effects is also as these ecosystems reach a point where they're going to need to scale, right? There's somewhere where DDN has tons of experience, right? So many customers are starting off with smaller data sets. They still need the performance, a parallel file system in that case is going to deliver that performance. But then also as they grow, right, going from one GPU to nine DGXs is going to be an incredible amount of both performance scalability that they're going to need from their IO as well as probably capacity scalability. And that's another thing that we've made easy with A3i is being able to scale that environment seamlessly within a single namespace so that people don't have to deal with a lot of, again, tuning and turning of knobs to make this stuff work really well and drive those outcomes that they need as they're successful, right? So in the end, it is the application that's most important to both of us, right? It's not the infrastructure. It's making the discoveries faster. It's processing information out in the field faster. It's doing analysis of the MRI faster, helping the doctors, helping anybody who's using this to really make faster decisions, better decisions. Exactly. And just to add to that, I mean, in automotive industry, you have data sets that are from 50 to 500 petabytes. And you need access to all that data all the time because you're constantly training and retraining to create better models, to create better autonomous vehicles. And you need the performance to do that. DDN helps bring that to bear. And with this reference, architecture simplifies it. So you get the value add of NVIDIA GPUs plus its ecosystem of software plus DDN, it's match made in heaven. Darren Johnson, NVIDIA, Kurt Kukine, DDN, thanks very much for being on theCUBE. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. And I'm Peter Burris. And once again, I'd like to thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. Until next time.


Hello, everyone, and welcome to the very first edition of Toffee TV USA. My name is James Boyman. I am joined by my associate and co-host Ryan Williams. We are coming to you first show. We are going to be bringing you stateside opinions on Everton FC, of course, the reason that everyone is here.  Yeah, legally. Yeah, I'm thrilled to be here. We've talked about this a lot. You know, we have a really good relationship with the guys at Toffee TV, Baz in particular. We're just happy to be here. You know, hopefully we'll be able to pride a little different perspective on things than what's typically out there. Certainly, we'll do our best to try and bring content that's befitting of what people have come to expect at Toffee TV for those that are familiar with the stuff we already do with the American Toffee podcast. You know, we do tend to be prepared, bring our American takes, and we'll try and continue to do that. I do think it's important, though, for people to know that this is not. This is not a place for hot takes, shall I say? Yes. No, this is a this is I think both Ryan and I, if nothing else are reasonable guys with sometimes you may not know that if you've ever interacted with Ryan on Twitter, pretty well reasoned, well spoken. We try to try to be very authentic with our takes and our opinions. So you'll never catch us saying something just to be provocative or stir the pot. So we do try to give the best analysis we can. We do bring a lot of stats to the conversation. So if you are a big proponent of the proverbial eye test, you may find some of your perceptions challenged in listening to us. You may become frustrated, but we hope you give us a chance. We hope you enjoy the show. Yeah, and we appreciate feedback, too. You know, we want to deliver content that's a little different and unique, but valuable, so please don't hesitate to ping us. I think you know where to find us, at least on Twitter. Otherwise, hit us down below and let us know what you guys think. And we'll adjust accordingly. We're new to this as well. So this week at least we're going to try and get into some news again from our across the pond viewpoint. It's the week after Newcastle. And while that was a tough result and certainly an interesting experiment with the Christmas tree, of course, we had a lot of players out. So arguably that was maybe the bigger root cause. It would be hard to not consider maybe Everton thinking about doing some business in January. I'm sure Carla wasn't particularly satisfied with everyone coming in there. And there's definitely a big drop off from from the starting eleven in certain places. So James Hommes, we have a very interesting rumor that has hit us this week. I think some were a little bit surprised by and the mirror appears to have broken and linked us with none other than Isco midfielder Ray Almadrid. Again, I understand Everton simply becoming, you know, Ray Almadrid being a feeder club for Everton at this point is how it should be. Right. I guess. Yeah.  I believe is I think his parents are actually his dad is his agent. The rumored arrangement would be alone in January and an obligation to buy in the summer for 18 million at minimum, I think. So what do we think about this one, James? I mean, unfortunately, America has been subjected from a media standpoint to wild rumors and speculation recently. I know the English tabloids are definitely no stranger to that type of thing, especially in transfer rumors. Do we think this one has legs or not? It seems reasonable to me to think that that Carlo is a player who's complimented him in the past. He recently called him a fantastic player, said he has fantastic memories of him, but not currently thinking about it, which is a typical Carlo response downplaying, not really a denial, though. No, it's not. It's not. It's definitely not the conditions that he would come under. I think obviously signing players from Real Madrid and he is a quality player. Do we need another attacking midfielder that seems to have been like our primary transfer target over the last three or four seasons? But he is certainly better quality than what we currently have in the squad bar, maybe one or two players. I mean, you're talking about bringing in players from Real Madrid. It's hard to hard to turn someone like that down. But for the price and the age, I do have some pretty legitimate concerns. We talk about Everton's long term transfer strategy and what we want to what we want to be able to build. And that's a sustainable process by which you bring players and grow them and sell them at a profit. That's what the best clubs do. That's what Everton need to do. He's certainly not that. And as our summer business largely was this year, older players that can immediately improve us, but the long term prospects maybe not as good. Yeah, you've heard my take on this before on the pot. I'm always talking about investment and I have a little bit of a finance background, so I can't avoid it. But truly, if you're going to invest in, I don't have it. Do I? That's that's yeah. But it doesn't matter if you're going to spend money, much like Everton is to investment in stocks or whatever. It's no real different than necessarily player recruitment and that is spend wisely. So either you're going to look for a basic growth strategy or value strategy this summer. I think we got a lot of value for our money. And clearly, Carlo said, we need some leaders. We need some more experienced players. You know, a lot of these clubs that are buying young already have that experienced core. Maybe Carlo feels the need for more of these guys. Then again, I can't help but think some of this may just kind of be speculation. I mean, we noted that a report came out. I think it was last week from Spanish Channel Movistar before Real's win against Barca. I don't know if you saw this video too, it's been out there. Isco is in the stands sitting there next to, I think, Marcelo. He's talking to Marcelo and his comment is translated in English is if he has to take me off, it's in the 50th or 60th minute of the game, says Isco. Sometimes at halftime, if he has to bring me on, it's in the 80th minute. So Marcelo apparently cracks up about this and Luca Modric is in the back smiling and whatever. So this I don't I don't I think that's a pretty innocent comment. I think it's honest, but I can't help but look at his minutes.  And I don't think that's something he's accustomed to. I mean, he hasn't really gone a lot and he has been pulled at halftime. So, yes, I think it makes sense. Clearly, Carlo likes the player too, but I can't help but thinking if this were to happen logistically, we'd have to move some players on. Don't you think? I mean, I think his wage is what we looked at was two hundred and ten thousand pounds a week. And that may be on the low end. We saw some higher estimates that would make him by far most expensive player. I don't know, James, what do you think? It just seems to me some other people would have to move. He can't play some different roles. So I don't know what your take is on that.  And to your point, Ryan, the wages, I mean, that'd be almost double. But I mean, rumored Hamas on what? One hundred thirty five. Yeah, so something like that. So he'd have to take a wage cut that that goes without saying. But for a player at his age, who's who's days are effectively numbered at the top level, you'd have to think he'd be willing to compromise to some extent the same way Hamas did. And, you know, I don't think anyone's looking back and saying there were the concerns about Hamas before he came in. No one's thinking about that now. He's far and away, our best player. So I think this goes to the type of player that has that same ceiling and can potentially have that same impact. But moving players along is something we definitely have to do, because although we are thin in quality at the central mid position, we are not thin in depth where we have all these players that can theoretically play there, but clearly based on last weekend and weekends past, Andre Gomez has we have a lot of concerns about what he actually contributes in a positive manner on either side of the ball. And of course, Guilfee Sigurdson, the proverbial scapegoat of the Everton fan base running down his contract, he'll be gone. Hopefully sooner rather than later.  But for the cost, it's a decision I'd ultimately leave up to Marcel Brands. But if the logistics work out, I would be extremely happy to have a player of his quality to the team. If you think about it, we're going to have to make a decision this summer, summer on Bernard and Guilfee. I know Guilfee is playing a lot and he can play in a lot of different places. But I don't think he's been particularly effective. I think maybe he's just not just lost a step, but we've talked about his lack of agility. He just doesn't receive the ball well in dangerous spots. So so let's say in theory that those two guys both had offers, too. I think that's worth noting in the summer. Bernard had an offer that Carlo turned down by all accounts. Robo wanted him. It wasn't a massive fee, but, you know, he's in essence came for free, but he's on big wages. Guilfee had an offer from Saudi Arabia from Al-Halal, which it doesn't sound like he's entirely ready to leave Europe yet. I get that. I'm sure he'd be making a pretty penny down there, though. One of these guys would have to move, you would think. I could see Bernard going. Rome is kind of sitting the table, maybe he'd come back. And I can't help but thinking Andre Gomes has just not been. People say it's the injury, but I still think him, how effective he was in the past. He's very good at linking play and helping with buildup. But he's not a good defensive player. He's an active defensive player, but he's too easily dribbled past. He's not positionally disciplined. And ultimately in the final 30, he's not particularly creative. I don't know why Carlo thought this weekend, the Christmas tree with those two guys sitting behind Dom, we're going to be the people that could either feed to Dom or feed it to Enkunku or, you know, John Joe Kenny on the wings who seemed reluctant to go forward. So thinking of that, if any of those guys moved out, they all kind of play a little different roles. It seems to me, Isko might be able to play in a couple of those different roles. The question is, can he deliver value for the buy beyond what those guys produce? Because look, he's going to be expensive. Say he's even on a higher wage than those guys, even if you can move them out. How much better is he from those guys? What are your thoughts? I think he's an immediate step up over someone like Andre Gomes. I mean, you look at the, we have the comparative stats on the, on the notes here. And I mean, Pat, he, he is an incredibly accurate forward passer of the ball. He's, he's substantially better than everyone besides Hama is essentially moving the ball forward, a really good long passer of the ball, better than, better than any, actually Andre Gomes and Hama's both lead are midfielders there. So not quite as good as them, but passes into the final third. He's off the charts up there with again, stats that Andre Gomes is actually on paper looks really good at, but hasn't quite delivered so far the season needless to say. Again, his stats do jump out at you, but it's not at the level that you might expect. And part of that's down to playing time. Again, if you're not given the opportunity to play, it becomes really difficult to make an impact. And of course, it on is really picky about the personnel that he, that he employs. And he's been known to freeze players out. I mean, there's so many examples over the past few years. So it's, it's almost unfair to try to predict what he'd be able to do at Everton, but in a midfield that has sufficient legs behind him, like Decoray and Alan, I really think that would, that would give him the ability to unlock his true creative potential. And you think playing him and Hama's didn't play too frequently together at Madrid, but perhaps that could be a partnership that would be really impactful in that type of Christmas tree formation that we saw. And we know that Carlo has historically liked Hama's and Isco over Sigurdsson and Gomez. Oh, that is, far, far, far. Come on, give me that. I'll take that all day. Yeah, I think what's exciting about it for me is, you know, so I did take some time to look at him this year because we all know the player. He's a fairly well-known player, just to see if it was the same guy. And look, he's not the paciest guy. And anytime you see a guy that's maybe not, doesn't seem like a superior athlete, I think it's worth questioning going into the Premier League. It is a fast athletic league, but the guy is still so strong on the ball.  His vision is there and his technique is unbelievable. And he can dribble. He can move. He's shifty. He could change pace. He can get away from people. He does a lot of the things that we see Andre do at his best, roaming in his own zone, linking play, but the difference is, when he gets into the final third, he can do damage too. He can play more as an attacking mid. So I did watch him play his first 45 minutes with Cadiz. That's my Spanish-speaking self right there. Or Kediz, you know, if you're just going to be all English and boring about it. But in all seriousness, he did look about the same player to me. The movement was there. He's great at finding space too. I just see if he's going to play as that third midfielder that we've seen early with kind of on the left side, sitting deeper in the half space. I think he'd be fantastic in that position. He'd be a massive upgrade over Andre. No, he's not as active defensively, but he's not a wimp either. I mean, he's got some strength to him as well. And he's so good at taking care of the ball. If he played up instead of Guilfee, where I know Guilfee's been playing deeper, but ideally you want someone who's more of an attacker. Much like we said with Hamas, when we went through the massive recording we did in the Toffee podcast about him, Isco can receive the ball in space in advanced positions and take care of it. I know he'd be expensive. I wouldn't want to keep getting older guys too.  He dribbles all over the place. 45% success rate, but dribbles. He can make passes under pressure. I don't know. I love his receiving percentage. That for me is such an important stat. I think it's kind of the next generation to focus his statistical analysis. It's not just the passer. It's the ability of someone to receive it. Guilfee is awful at it truly. You have to put it right on his feet. It's so difficult for him to find space and receive it. Now you give the ball to Guilfee on his feet in a dangerous spot. He's excellent. But is that value a skill? I don't know. Anyway, I think we acknowledge that this would be very expensive. It would be curious. When I watched him, he was playing kind of in a roaming midfield position in a 4-2-3-1. He had great liberty. I don't know if that's exactly how we would play here. Bernard's a little different. Bernard's pace, he kind of attacks off the wing, but Isco has played on the wing as well, too, and been rather effective. I can't help but think he'd be a pretty significant upgrade. But man, I also can't help but thinking that's a big wage. Can we make it work? And I would be very concerned if we continued to buy the aging players. We just don't have the same level of revenues at the top six, but 18 million might be significant value. I don't know. Final take on Isco? Yeah. The only concern I have is that you talk about, no, he's not the Pacis. His technique is unbelievable. Yes. Is he too similar to Hamez where if you were to play Hamez on the wing, maybe Isco on the other wing outside, does that limit our ability? The Premier League is a fast league. There's a lot of Paci outside players. Yes, we know Hamez has the quality shines through. He doesn't need to sprint. He doesn't need to be Paci. But if you have too many players like that in your squad, I mean, at some point, you do need the Richarlison on the opposite flank to be able to get in behind players. So would he really fit in a lineup? And you think we're not going to buy him if we're not planning to play him at week in, week out. So what does Carlo make that fit? And frankly, the Christmas tree seems like the most obvious solution to that. But you can never have too many quality players in the squad. And I think another player with his pedigree coming in, again, just lifts the level at the club that much more, improves other players around him. And we could see bigger things from the rest of the squad as well. But we definitely need legs around him. There's no question. And I can't help but see how bad our right side was this weekend and think those are obvious areas of improvement. But look, hey, we still got a ways to go as a club. I know we're happy at our start so far. And it'll be interesting to see what happens when we get some people back this weekend. All right, transitioning to our next item of news. I know it's not the most busy week, but I would be remiss, James, if I didn't bring up an incident that happened earlier this week from Alexis Nunez and none other than our favorite ESPN individual personnel. Does he have personality? Mark Ogden. And I don't know if people all saw this, but he was on Twitter. Apparently he claimed and apologized. It was off camera. But he, in essence, was telling he's bored with Harry Kane and making fun of the way Harry Kane speaks. I know you saw it. I'm sure your reaction was same to me. Obviously, this is the individual that brought us our lovely story on how the best Everton can do is not Carlo Ancelotti. There's no way we could get him. There's no way we could get Carlo Ancelotti. David Moyes is about it, James. And thankfully, he was very wrong.  And oh, he was very wrong. In this instance, I thought this was, I don't care if it's not being recorded or not. Incredibly unprofessional. I don't know what your thought is, but obviously we don't subscribe to that. Maybe that's the bigger point. Yeah, I mean, firstly, I think ESPNFC, the standard of their analysis is generally quite poor. Gabriel, let's back up, Gabriel. Mark, he's all right. Yeah, true. Good, but it's a thin, it's a thin roster. And I mean, poor Mark Ogden in some ways, because that take on David Moyes being the best ever drink and get is going to haunt him. I'm surprised he hasn't deleted the tweet or just like purge the article into oblivion because it is one of the worst age takes I think I've seen. He doubled down on it later. Remember he said in the next tweet, I still think six months later, David Moyes would be a better pick.  I mean, some of the language in there was just, I mean, some of the lines like the painful reality is that they are currently only an appealing option to the likes of boys or Mark Hughes out of work, old school managers who will take on a difficult job simply to get themselves back in the game.  It's spiteful intentionally. High and mighty and it just reflects, I think the overall media landscape, football media landscapes attitude towards Everton or any team that isn't one of the big six starlings. It is so condescending. It is disrespectful to say that we're incapable of signing a coach of his caliber. To be fair, I was not totally sold when the rumors started breaking up. You bring in Ancelotti. Yeah. But you look at the project, you look at bringing in someone like Marcel Brands and like the foundation is there for a positive project. For him to seemingly just dismiss all of that as out of hand, the new stadium on the way, all of these things that I think are quite a compelling pitch for a manager like Carlo Ancelotti, even though he's managed at the top for a long time. And then the thing about Harry Kane again, it's not supposed to be recorded. It gets released. So he has egg on his face. And he of course comes out with a profuse apology and because he doesn't want to never have be able to speak to anyone associated with Spurs ever again, but it never really felt authentic. I mean, it was, it's the type of conversation that you would over here and like a break room at a workplace and because we're in this weird virtual world, it gets overheard and gets released to millions of people to be ridiculed. So in some ways I feel for him, but you have to be more, more conscious, conscientious of what you're saying than that. And he wasn't. Would you ever really say that? I still struggle to think what he said, like, could I see myself almost mocking that? I don't know. And maybe I think, I think probably the biggest message here, I think for us is, and maybe this is, this works the toffee TV too.  Like to me, if that's how you genuinely feel, maybe that's how this guy is, but I know I don't feel that way. I never feel compelled to genuinely give some sort of crazy opinion on things. And I think that's important. I hope the audience knows, and I know this is a big responsibility for us joining toffee TV and representing the US, which we take seriously. But I'm telling you, you will get honest takes from us, you will not get hot takes like this. If we give insight, we'll hopefully back it up with something. And that's what, that's what I don't understand about this. I mean, this is all speculative junk. The only reason why you write this, I think, is either that elitist standpoint that you mentioned, or you're just, I don't know, you just want to irritate people. I just, I don't understand what good can come from that personally. Stir the pot, stir it up good. All right, well, the less said about Mark Ogden, the better, but I do hope to continue to see that tweet, retweeted onto my timeline and quote tweeted until the end of the world. Bookmark it. Yes. Yeah, save it. Now the last little bit of news we did want to talk about was the announcement for regarding Everton in the community. Obviously any Everton fan, regardless of where you are geographically in the world takes great pride in the work that EITC does in the Liverpool community and everywhere else. And as a result of that work, they have been shortlisted for a total of 14 awards at the upcoming Northwest football awards, the sports biz awards and HR magazine awards. I mean, this is Everton to a T, right, Ryan? The work in the community is runs in parallel and it is sometimes, I wouldn't say it's the focal point, but it is very, very important to the identity of the club and the spirit of the club and something that every fan takes great pride in and respects. Yeah, it's such a critical part of the club too. I think it's the people that are reflective of this type of care of the community too, at least for me personally, that really attracted me to the club and what made me fall in love with it. It's really the individuals you meet and how warm they make you feel, I think. For us, so we've always, and this is probably interesting for the audience or at least a different angle, it's different being an American. We didn't grow up necessarily with the club as little kids like we did maybe some of our own hometown sports, but we do recognize how important this is to the ethos of the club and we talk with a lot of different people, a lot of obviously local Liverpool folks or people that grew up there and talk a lot about what's important in terms of the identity of the club. I know you feel the same way I do. We feel like, look, if we're gonna talk and represent the American Toffee fan base at all, and it's a massive community, we're a very small part of it, but we are part of it and we are talking, it's something we like to do. I know at the American Toffee Podcast, we always recognized our responsibility to continue to convey those things. I just think, and let's be honest, I mean, I've gotten grilled on Twitter in other ways from Scousers and other people that are skeptical of foreign fans and I know some people are very defensive about that too and immediately have our back and stuff, but I think it's something worth talking about because I know I would be fearful a little bit, you know, at least in the back of my head if I saw a bunch of carpet-bagging Americans jumping on the bandwagon and here we are purchasing international stars with 50 million Instagram followers. I know we talked about that at length. I know that's something in social media and followers and stuff that you're definitely right on the edge of more so than me. I don't know, I mean, I think there's an important point here and a responsibility that we have. Don't you agree? I completely agree. And I think with Everton being such a historically massive club, but obviously recent times have not met the standards and they'll set an easy optimum that the fans all expect nothing but the best is good enough. I think that there's a large contingent of existing American fans that obviously didn't hop on the bandwagon that have been for fans, excuse me, for years, decades, and they really buy into what the club is all about and that's no one, no one, no American fan of Everton is a bandwagon fan. But what's important, agree. Yeah, but it's important to recognize that if the club do go on to achieve the success that we all want and desire, that there will be new fans taking notice, paying attention, and we have a responsibility as newer fans ourselves to be able to communicate the core values of the club and make sure that they recognize that this isn't Glory Hunter FC. This is a very authentic true to its roots English club and you need to be conscientious of that when speaking and I do think that with Liverpool, I hate to say their name on the show, but having achieved so much success and achieved this global fan base, there is this undercurrent of pride amongst Everton fans that they have the local authentic, largely local fan base. And it can be a little scary to start to see people, tourists come in. I mean, we made, Alex and I was no longer on the show, made the trip over in March and it was quite expensive. It was a dream of mine to have gone over and the people there couldn't have been nicer and everyone that I met was a little taken aback by the fact that we were there to see Everton rather than Liverpool, which is fair, but then you start to talk to them and they recognize that you're not there to glory hunt. You do pay attention and it is, again, then you're welcomed into the community with open arms. You're at the brick, you're at the Winslow, having a few pints before the match and it's one big family. And I think that is so encouraging, inspiring and what I believe to be the most appealing part about being an Evertonian outside of anything that goes on on the pitch. Yeah, I think the key is really foreign fans and increase in global following of the club is perfectly fine as long as it's the same core values and those are the people that really following it. And it's not truly tourist FC.  I mean, we need to continue a toll of, extoll the virtues of caring about the fans and the community and their wellbeing, combating things like mental health with the Blue Family campaign, which is really cool, celebrating diversity all together now, we know about that. And look, let's be honest, the whole discrimination take on the kick it out, the third kit launch was totally awesome. Amazing, amazing. Yeah, totally great and it's a sweet kit, but beyond that, and we try and have an appreciation for the history of the club. I'm not the youngest guy in the world, but maybe my history of the club goes back a little farther than your average American, but still, I mean, it's nothing compared to some of the people that we've had on the American Toffee Podcast and talk to when we've been over there and I've been over there too. And it's really special in what makes it neat. So we promised you viewers at Toffee TV that we will do our best to try and continue that ethos and hopefully we'll have more and more opportunities as we go to share some of the special things that are happening in America that I think reflect those as well. We've done it on the American Toffee Podcast, we're gonna continue to do it here on Toffee TV USA. And I think pretty much that's about, that's about wraps for us, James, if you wanna send us out of here. Yeah, that'll do it for us folks. I hope you enjoyed the show, as Ryan said at the beginning. If you did enjoy, subscribe to Toffee TV, the links below. If you would like our content specifically, please check out our podcast, American Toffee Podcast, available on all platforms. Follow us on social media, link tr.ee slash USA Toffee Pod will take you to everything you need to find. And we'll be with you guys weekly from here on out, barring any set packs or anything like that, barring, so we hope you enjoyed. And until next time, up the Toffees.