Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Cube Pod episode 36. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante here, extracting the signal from the noise on a Friday when we do our recordings. I'm in Palo Alto days in the Boston office in Marlboro, Massachusetts. Dave, great to see you. Great stuff. Just landed from Austin. It's not really in Texas. A morning eye, not a red eye. I got my Bruins shirt on again. I got a lot of great fan mail on the Bruins shirt here. So go Boston Bruins. Big fan, as you know, even though I live in California. I love the Sharks too, by the way. So, like the way the Bruins thing, but a lot going on. Let's just get right to some main news. So let's get right to the big story in Silicon Valley, which is and reverbing the crypto world is Sam. Bankman free goes down in a hallmark landmark. I shouldn't say, I shouldn't say landmark fraud case.  It took literally record time, no deliberation, done guilty as charged. No defense. That's done in the books. Finally, that and you got lucky too, by the way, the press didn't could have been more more on this, but with the Israeli war and all the other distractions, he got away easy by not being totally publicly fleeced on this thing because he's just a tool built everybody. So we'll see how that turns out. We'll see what the sentence says. More regulation conversation. Biden put out an executive order around guidance around AI and a scaring people. And a lot of people come out of the woodwork. Andrew Ning, who's the founder of Coursera and part of Google Deep mind basically said, regulation is scary. People will get into that. Kube cons coming up next week, which is a big cloud native conference by the cloud cloud native foundation. Linux foundation will be there super computing after that. One of our cube analysts, Dustin Kirkland got a new job came out went back into the to the start up world to be VP of engineering at chain guard. So shout out to our cube guest analyst, Apple earnings, not as good as they hoped services carry in the day for Apple. And then finally, my rant is going to come up Dave solar wins. CISO gets sued by the SCC. And that's going to be a huge discussion putting shocks throughout the security system. Why him? Why not the data engineering guy is the whole wire is even a private company, even responsible for what should be the responsibility of other people. People are freaking out more AI conversations. You were at tech del del tech world. We're going to unpack what's going on inside the ropes. I know it's an MDA del tech summit del tech summit. Yeah, del tech summit. Yeah, I should say. And then finally, what I thought was the most coolest thing out there this week is the new Beatles song. Okay, John Lennon had recorded some stuff in the seventies and a software engineer had decoupled his voice from the piano on tape. And it's just a remarkable story of archaeology around musical archaeology, the creativity of the Beatles, the shared fascination with technology. I'll see if jobs were alive, he'd be totally stoked because you know, he loved the Beatles and it really marks the completion of the last recording that John Paul, George and Ringo did together. Okay. And with AI, this kind of reboots one of the most popular influential bands in the history of music Dave. So this Beatles song is pretty awesome. And it's very cool. So I give that the cool factor big time. But it's been a really interesting week. I was also at Palo Alto, Jeremiah O'Yan and Chris Ye with Blitzcale Ventures, a new firm they're putting together at a Palo Alto meetup with demos, all the hottest AI startups called the Lama Lounge. And it was packed. I was giving a little demo of our Cube AI. Saw a lot of old timers and OGs coming together. The young guns are out. Dave, it reminds me of the early days of the web and web 2.0, but much faster incubating. So just so much going on this week. Was it the Hanna House? It was amazing. Hanna House, was it? Is that called? The Hanna House, which was the old varsity theater. And SAP sponsored that back in the big day-to-days, remember? We did a big there one year. Yeah. It was great. It was great. It was awesome. And you should have seen the excitement. I was checking it out, the demos and people were just showing their product. I brought my laptop because I thought it was like the old school meetups where people just hanging out. No, it was it was rocking. High-paced, much faster. And I was talking with Ross Mayfield, founder of Social Tech. He works at Zoom now. He's a web 2.0 legend as well. And he and some folks who from the industry were talking about how slow it was in web 2.0 compared to this. It was a slow, slower boil in terms of the innovation than it is now. It's much faster. So these meetups, it's just faster. And it's interesting. I mean, you were at the Dell tech thing. What was going on down there? I mean, because they just had a big announcement with Meta. And they're putting in there.  Remember, this is NDA. And then it was funny. I said, you know, when you're asking questions, of course, you know, we love to ask questions. So they say state your name and your firm. So I said, this is Dave Vellante from the Cube Research, formerly Wikibon, and that is not NDA. And so, you know, that got a few chuckles. But it was really good. That's what I could tell you. There was a lot of analysts there. It was in Austin. There was definitely executive presence. You know, no surprise, right? Dell always brings the execs to these things. And but this was a three day deep dive. It's still going on. I had to leave early because I got a commitment and home tonight. So I, you know, going from Austin to Boston, it's not easy to get back here. You either got to leave like, you know, 7am and get back at noon or you got to leave later in the afternoon and get back at midnight like Stretchy's doing. So Robin holding down the fort. And they're doing deep dives. Like, like really, they went deep. They unveiled roadmaps. We debated. We aligned on a lot of stuff. They're probably, there were a lot of analysts there. I won't even say the number. And a lot of smart people. The thing about Dell is they have the end to end spectrum. So you get people that really know client and devices. Guys like Bob O'Donnell, who's like, and he's more general than just devices. Like he knows, but he knows Apple really well. He knows client stuff really well.  It was, it was a packed event. And really, really good content. I again, I'm hesitant to say like exactly the format because there was they were really emphasizing NDA, but I came out impressed. It was one of the best analyst events I'd ever been to. And they had customer input, partner input, awesome gen AI conversation. They actually, they actually doing a lot more than people realize, I think. Well, I wasn't under NDA since I wasn't there. So I'll tell you what I think's happening. And of course, I can connect the dots because I wasn't there, but I could figure out from what I saw was there and I figured and seeing what's going on the way. I saw some posts from on the on the llama news. It's clear that Dell sees AI is coming fast. And, and, you know, Kelsey Hightower, who is a great cube alumni legend in the cloud native world, wrote a post that says if laptops keep getting faster, cloud based developer tooling is going to become less appealing. These machines are so powerful that most the value add can run locally. Maybe we'll get a hybrid model SAS running locally, but it's clear where things are heading. I had said and then someone wrote a MacBook Pro can do all those llamas. Okay. Here in the pod, we said this. I also said it to Dell is that they have an opportunity to bring a generation of new users that will use powerful laptops and servers to do all their local programming and then also train models and then put it in the cloud. So there's going to be a surge of on-premise. And if you look at Matt Baker's post on LinkedIn and talking about the llama announcement with meta and their commitment to that, you got to be thinking that they're on this because Dell, as you pointed out, successfully transitioned from the web. We debated this on the cube. I mean, oh, Dell went from, you know, when the web was mail ordered, when mail ordered to the web, they transitioned that. I think they're poised to transition. I think, yeah, they were probably really low key because they don't want to telegraph their moves, but I can tell you right now, I bet Dell's doing that. So to me, you're seeing a lot more processing and compute. And remember how developers posted on the cloud, Dave, local host, code on the machine, put it to the cloud. So I think you're going to see a renaissance in hardware like we've never seen before, especially as the silicon game gets better, especially as people want more GPUs, as they want more TPUs and compute. We had a quote on the cube. Remember in SuperCloud, Vikram said compute should be oxygen. It should be free. Free. So I can share this with you, which is not NDA because I got this at the Dell financial analyst meeting. Sam Bird was there. He's the head of Dell's client division. And he talked a lot about processor diversity, a.k.a. not just, I mean, you're talking about Intel, AMD, ARM, dot, dot, dot. And he also talked about NPUs inside the processor. And of course Apple's been doing this for years. So they're kind of catching up to Apple on that front. But look at what Apple's done with the M series, right? I mean, and so, of course, the whole industry is going to follow. Apple's advantage is they design their own processors, right, with their ARM based systems. But so, yes, I think you're making some really good points there. And the whole Lama two thing is interesting, John. I have talked to other sources at Facebook. They don't really know how, like what percentage of the downloads actually are running Lama two on prem. Like we use Lama two, but we're using it in the cloud. But they don't really know, well, I say we use it in the cloud. It's actually sort of an alternative cloud. But so, so they don't really know that, you know, what percent is on prem, but they can like look at who's downloading and say, well, these are like financial services companies and insurance companies who have a lot of data, like sensitive data, healthcare companies on prem. And they got data centers. So they can infer that a large proportion of the downloads are actually being applied to models, oftentimes with retrieval augmented generation, on prem. And so that's Dell's play, right? Dell guys like Dell, HPE, Lenovo, IBM with Watson X, that's kind of hybrid AI. Yeah, it runs in the cloud, but it's also going to run on prem. And of course, the edge. So Dell is, I think, very well positioned there. And I, you know, that's again, that's not NDA. They've talked about that a lot at Dell Tech World and all the financial analysts meeting. I mean, apps got to run somewhere and they're going to run on computers, they're going to run on laptops, they're going to run on edge devices and, you know, data and computer moving to the computer is going to be the compute engine. And this, this retrieval rag, you call it, retrieval automation generation. That's a huge trend, mainly because it treats data differently and for retrieval.  If you look at rag, it's all math based and they do all kinds of these embeddings. It's a good way to get data and then get these similarities together and allows you to pull in things that are similar. But again, you got to have good data. I think this data hygiene thing is going to be a huge part of that. So I think, you know, Dell's position, all these companies are positioned on prem because the cloud's going to be expensive. Yeah. And, and, and it's going to be a huge cost. So well, at re-invent will be very interesting in a couple weeks. I'm going to ask Adam Szelewski that question around cost. Is that the blocker? So, yeah, but so just to stay on Llama 2 for a minute. So they, you know, they, they announced Llama 2 in July, I think, and they announced a 7 billion parameter, 13 billion, and I want to say 70 billion parameter version. Now, just for comparison, POM from Google is probably about 500 billion parameters. And I think open AI, you know, people speculate it could be a trillion. So the point is models are shrinking and you can do a lot with smaller models, as we know, with what we've done with CUBE AI. And these on-prem models and RAG, basically what they do is they take a highly clean, cleansed corpus of data like our CUBE data and they complement the LLM and they vector in that high fidelity data and then they send it back to the foundation model. So the results are much better, they're cleaner, there's less elucination and more accurate. And then obviously you got to train them, you got to put in the right guardrails and governance, but that's the trend. I mean, it's relatively straightforward to do if you've got a good engineering team.  We'll see what comes up at CUBE com, be very interesting to see that. And if you look at the AI earnings, you saw earning season is kind of in full swing, I don't know if you noticed, Dave, but there's no sign of re-acceleration in the software business, but you saw some winners in like certain areas like some cloud, the cloud players, Shopify was up, JFrog was up, Palantir was up, Fastly was up, but you know, all the other software guys are down, zoominfo, paycom, bill.com, Confluent, Alasian, Procore, all the traditional software SaaS people getting killed. Microsoft, Microsoft was the most notable to me of earnings because they're, they really specifically, I mean, other than NVIDIA, nobody's really come out and say, we have AI, generative AI revenue. Microsoft said it was a 300 basis point tailwind, so three percentage point incremental tailwind to Azure revenues. So, you know, you could do the math on that, you know, whatever you think. Is that because they were well positioned with the products? I mean, they had, was it because of their office suite and integration, or was it open AI subscriptions? What do you think that was? I think all of the above. I think definitely open AI subscriptions, open AI usage, and they're pushing pilot, co-pilots at $30 per user per month to all their, you know, 365 users, which is expensive as hell. But actually, have you, have you used that at all? Have you played around with Microsoft's co-pilots on 365? No, I haven't used it, but I've seen it in action. And it's, it's pretty frigging impressive, John. I mean, the things you can do and, you know, drafting notes and setting up doing, doing things in Excel that used to be so complicated. And it's, it's pretty powerful. You know, on the one hand, you're like $30 per user per month. Wow, that's expensive. But it's powerful. What did you use it for? What was your use case? So I didn't use it, but I, somebody showed it to me. They were like, look at this. It was like watching VMware for the first time, you know, spin up virtual servers.  I'm gonna take a look at it. Yeah, they were, you know, basically writing documents.  I mean, they have templates, but, you know, the templates never really looked the way you want them to look. You're basically setting this up with natural language. It, it was very powerful.  I mean, we're doing ton of interviews, leading up to reinvent and we just had super cloud. So to me, clearly, you know, I got a little essay.  There's conversations around, do we, do we limit AI, right? Do we engineer it first? Do we limit it first? And there's a lot of young people who are like thinking, hey, why don't we just, we got to regulate it. And they don't even know what they're doing, right? So, you know, there's, there's all kinds of approaches. And the key, the key that's coming out of it is that the personal information space that you're mentioning with this co-pilot is really important. Help me do my job better. Help me do my documents or PowerPoints or set up meetings, AI-driven personal assistance. It's going to be a big deal. And that's going to be an instant low-hanging fruit. Those chatbots that were lame will become better. And then you mentioned the data retrieval and augmentation generation. That's where I see the business value, right? You used to see businesses.  People have all these data reserves. They have exhausts. Remember the term exhaust? And so you're going to see, you know, better retrieval methods, better use of data. That's like what people are working on now. And I think that's what you're talking about with Dell. And I think Dell's right on that. And then I think the third area that's coming out of this is where that what happens next is once you start getting the value in the business side and that consumerizations happen, you start to get into new business lines or new data sets emerge. I saw one company I interviewed, they said they're in the aggregation business. Now they're actually aggregating data from other sources. They never could do that before. So you're seeing new competitive advantage features coming from their app or service around new, new untapped potential around these data sets. And then finally, the fourth area of the AI is cognitive reasoning. That's where it starts to get kind of like squishy. So and that's like, like doing things like high stake drug discovery, doing molecule impact analysis high end stuff that was unattainable that you could do the AI. And I think those are the key areas that are coming out of all of our research as the key landscape areas of use cases and opportunities. And I think the legal stuff, the regulation jumps to the fourth one. It's we're not there yet. The reasoning and all that stuff it's happening is that people are working on stuff, but we're so in the we're so in the early innings or not even game time around this because just now it's about personal, the co-pilot helped me do a better document, write a press release, helped me write a story, do a PowerPoint.  And then once the reasoning and the so-called, you know, machines are taking over, that's down the road. So I am anti-regulation and people are like, what do you mean you're anti-regulation? Don't you want guardrails? What guardrails for what? Okay, this safety issues, I get that. But I think that's just, you know, something that people just thrown out there to scare people. And this is an issue. Andrew Ning, who's the founder of Coursera and DeepMime wrote a tweet and said, he's not so much against regulations about how people are freaking out and scaring young people and getting into the field, Dave. Well, like, oh, that's interesting. So, you know, several things on that. So first of all, the couple of things that came out of SuperCloud 4 we'll have in SuperCloud 5 coming up soon in November. But that whole idea of exhaust and model collapse when the LLMs are creating their own data and generating their own data, then, and it's a probabilistic model, it increases the chance of over-rotating on the highly probable and it misses the less likely and you might think, well, that's no big deal. Why is that a problem? Well, in healthcare, that could be a huge problem. If it misses the outlier. The other thing is on regulation. I think a lot of the big guys actually, they don't mind regulation because they know that's going to be a barrier of entry because they can afford to work their way around it. The old term regulatory capture where the rich get richer with government. And the last thing, when we talked about this, I think last week on sentiment AI, artificial general intelligence where the machines actually take on human consciousness and I'll repeat it briefly, but somebody who was the guy from Intel at SuperCloud 4 said, well, what if we're already there just to mind a mind of assume we're already there.  The only reason to bring that up again, just not to repeat it, but you know, in talking to technologists, John, all the building blocks are there to actually create artificial general intelligence. If you'd like draw the curves, you basically need more compute power and more data.  I used to not worry about it, AGI, but I start to worry about it now that all the foundational elements are there, but you need more compute and you need more data, which we know we're going to get more data and more compute at some point, quantum is going to be here and quantum just keep getting better and better and better. So it's actually in who knows how long it's going to take? We have no idea. Look at, generative AI came out of nowhere. Yeah, but I just saw the founder of Signal. She's really technical.  She was poo-pooing generative AI. So in the tech circles, it's all like, it's been around for a while. This is just a kind of new window dressing around seeing something on the consumer side that's an interface. That's just chat GPT. So there's not a lot of in the elite circles like, come on, it's a yonor. Come on, let's get real now for us mere mortals where people in the mainstream, it's magical. So if you actually look at generative AI today, what is it actually doing? And I just laid out the four areas I think are the most important, your little buddy sidekick, discover those data treasures that you have in your company, unearth the value, taking on big tasks, decoding business data, that's going to be value. And that's not threatening. There's no there there in terms of threat of AGI because no one's actually going to use generative AI to run things because of the hallucinations. And I think your power law that we're putting out there that we built is on point because the power law that we are talking about the size of the models, we're going to see an alchemy of that models. And what's going to happen is no one's going to put up with hallucinations. This is why the fear comes in. So the hallucinations has caused everyone to go, whoa, it's not ready for prime time. Well, that's not true. What you're going to see is special specialized models. And this was again, validated for multiple interviews this week I had with people that specialized models will emerge. I interviewed facts that big financial services coming day. They have generative AI in production. And you know what they're using it for? To make their data sets freely available in Amazon's marketplace as data as a service because they have good data. So when you have good data, you can manage hallucinations. So that's going to be the engineering trick. So my prediction is AGI is fantasy. That is never going to be an issue at least for a long, long time because the reasoning the reasoning is not that good yet. To be that good. So are people afraid that people are going to use AI to make decisions? That's a human decision. That's different.  That's going to be the big challenge. And everyone's going to focus on this problem and it is about one simple thing. Is it real? Or is it not? That's going to be the question and that's going to be the focus and not is AI going to hurt us and what's tech? Because a lot of these guys the big guys want to stall and prevent the startups from getting in. That's what Andrew Nning was saying is like it's and we called it out in the queue. Cue many pods ago. I said it's all a scam, Dave by the big guys to hold the market down. Okay. But so kind of ranting too early here. No, it's good. My other rant is going to be the CISO. But we did say that. We did. We definitely said that at the time. We thought Elon in fact, you know, who started that letter was sort of trying to slow down the market because he just announced this week. He's going to do something with X AI or whatever he's going to call it. But so okay. So your friend from Signal who's a super alpha geek, I have a really, I have a really great contact, a friend of mine who's I honestly agree with her. I honestly agree with her by the way. She went way over the top but she's kind of right. I heard her commentary. She was just poo pooing it totally. It is it is remarkable what chat GPT can do. So I mean, regardless of how come, how come you didn't invent it? So anyway, but but nonetheless, she's super smart. We kind of did. We kind of did with the QBI. But wait, wait, wait. So I have this contact. He's deep, deep deep inside the government. And and he's not he's not in in the government but he's a contractor. And I meet with him pretty regularly. We talk and he's like super into AI. Has been for years. He's the one who told me about Eliza. If you look up Eliza on Wikipedia, it's like in the 1960s. It was like, he said, this is just a better Eliza. Back then, it was like a mainframe. It was probably an IBM mainframe. People were interacting with it and they were like, holy cow, this is like magical. And his thing is, and he really knows AI, but he's, you know, biased, right? Because he's got a perspective. He said that this is basically pattern matching in a database and some powerful search. It's not a learning system. And that is what, you know, he sees as true AI. And that's why he's really down on full self-driving. He's like, full self-driving is like, you know, Elon says it's next year, next year of a year. It's, he says, he's used a line to me. He says, there's a reason why we don't start driving, allowing people to drive until they're 16 because the cognitive development takes some time.  It's not anything to fear. And he's like, oh, yeah, it is actually. And because if and when it comes, and it will come, there's a lot to fear. And so that's why, John, I'll just share with you. That's why every time I talk to the AI, I say please and thank you. Just in case. Well, the over the top, the brain, Andrew was saying, the first of all, people are saying AI is going to cause our extinction. That's like overblown. But here's my point of that. So, I think it's it's an evolutionary tech trend. So the reasoning is just not good enough. And I agree with your friend there. I think it's just, it's going to get better. So here's an, here's an example. I was talking about this last night with a bunch of old and young, smart people at the Palo Alto AI event at the Lama Lounge at Jeremy O'Yan, Jeremiah O'Yan put on with Chris, just for Chrisie. And I said, back on the web in 1996, HTML was the format for web pages. Okay.  What would you have? You had a PC. We all had PCs. We had Windows. And then how did you get to the internet?  AOL. How? How? How? Which, what was the mechanism? Yeah. You had a modem. You had dial-up. Modem. Yeah. What was the speed of the modem? It was like 96. 19, 2,400, 9,600, 14, 4, K. So people don't, young people don't remember this. They probably heard it. It's like that. You know, the phone connecting. And it was like, it was so slow.  It was K kilobytes, K, B, not M, B, or G, B. And we were like loving it. Like, oh, it's amazing. They weren't gigamillionaires. They weren't gazillionaires. Yeah. All right. So, okay. So we weren't gazillionaires like that AT&T commercial, which I love. So bandwidth was a dial-up and web pages loaded slowly. And HTML was simply character-based. There was not a lot of imagery because of the graphics were slow to load. So the question at that time, and I remember I was working with on my first startup, which was keyword navigation. You type a keyword, go to a web page, which was a new concept. People were like, why would I type a keyword? I don't like a type of URL. Okay. That's now standard. One of the side projects we were doing in parallel, so besides keyword navigation, the name server was HTML, reduced instructions at HTML. So in other words, making HTML load faster, Dave, on dial-up. And so you say, okay, that's a really good problem to solve because if you looked at it, Dave, it said, okay, at that time, the problem was the page loads slowly. So I'm going to ask you a question. You're the investor, Dave. You're the VC. I got a business proposition. I have technology that helps web pages load faster on modems. Do you invest or not? Is that a good problem? I don't want to put you on the spot. Horrible.  I mean, looking back. Why? I'm just trying to think. The speed, my point is, the speeds get better. So that problem goes away because the next iteration modem is faster than you get broadband. So what happens is the entrepreneurs went to solve bigger problems, not that immediate problem that goes away with evolution of the technology. So the bandwidth gets faster. There's more faster pipes. There's more data centers. So as people came onto the internet, it was faster to load. It was more graphics, full motion video. The processors got better on Intel machines from 386 to 486 to Pentium. So my point is with AI, this is the same exact thing is going to happen. It's nascent and early.  The real problems is scaling with the onboarding of AI. It's a whole nother mindset. So these young kids are like, oh, that's a good way to look at it. Well, don't solve the wrong problem. What will be solved by the evolution of the wave of the category? Is compute going to be faster? So yes. Yeah, definitely compute. You're going to have more bandwidth. You're going to have more GPUs. Rags going to get better. More data. You're also going to have just a compendium of alternative processing power in terms of CPU, GPU, NPU, AI accelerators. All that is that the combination, the combinatorial factors. This is something to think about. We've talked about this before, but I'll repeat it. The combination of those factors that I just mentioned are blowing away Moore's Law. They're 2.5 to 3.5 times greater performance per annum improvement than Moore's Law. Now, power per watt, performance per watt becomes an issue, but that's why I love ARM. But I mean, we're talking about processing power that's 2.5, 3X that of Moore's Law's curve. So the curve's bending. Look at what happened with Moore's Law, right? Everybody used to talk about it all the time. Thomas Friedman, oh, Moore's Law, Moore's Law, Moore's Law, Moore's Law. Every time he came on TV, it's amazing. And it was amazing. But this is like, order of magnitude, more amazing. Well, I'll tell you right now, to me, the rise of the super cloud architect and operator that we're talking about is this foundational infrastructure. The middleware is going to be a big deal. Understanding AI architecture is going to be probably the biggest competition. I interviewed a company this week. They do data engineering, the fastest growing category in platform engineering, which is managing data pipelines. Okay. You did a story on Uber, right? This is the conversation again we had last night. Databases have to be integrated based upon what the use cases are.  So you're going to have a road ahead that's going to look a lot like multi-cloud, multi-AI environment. So an AI system has to emerge, Dave. It has to emerge. So to me, it's very clear that there are things that will solve this fear that AI is going to take over the world and destroy society. So I'm bullish on AI for that reason because the same thing happened with the web. Early on, it was very nascent. People poo-pooed it. Oh, the web's a toy for kids. It's not real. It's so slow. Look how elementary the graphics are. And then what happened was the utility of it was so powerful. As you pointed out with ChatGPT, it cannot be ignored. The consumerization of AI has made it a thing and expectation. And I believe every company and Snowflake just announced something this week too. I'm looking at our feed here and it's looking at angle. They're now into AI. I mean, a year and a half ago, like, AI is not really important for us right now. They're now got it, right? So you're seeing that, Dave. Big time. AI is everywhere. Why? Because everyone expects it. Call it AI washing. What do you want to call it? It's coming, just like the web did. So it's, again, this whole argument, it's a no-brainer. And I get nervous that the fear-mongering is going to come for it. Now, that being said, I want to ask you a question because we always rant about the government. Who's faster? The government, industry, or entrepreneurs? Let me think about that. Actually, I led the witness on that one. All right. So the government's not fast at all. So they shouldn't be even me involved. Even industry itself, this is why I'm kind of like watching these big so-called tech titans say, like Sam Altman, oh, yeah, we got to do it.  I think he's totally blowing sunshine up everyone's, you know what? And just trying to slow things down. So industry wants a stall. The entrepreneurial side of it's booming. So the question is, who should be responsible for the social aspect of how AI gets brought to the market? If you assume things are going to get better, like the bandwidth problem with the web, I think the entrepreneurs should drive this. I think let the chips fall where they may and have some sort of entrepreneurial code that says, hey, do the right thing, which is don't go out of business, make some money, but don't do AI for bad. So this is going to be very interesting to watch. I mean, that's my take. What's your take? I mean, I don't think I have the answer, but I do know this, that the government is not, is not going to be able to predict what's going to happen. And whatever regulations they try to put in place, I can almost guarantee there will be unintended consequences that will end up favoring some, more likely the rich, either rich get richer. And generally speaking, if not done properly, which oftentimes when it comes to big tech regulation, the government has failed miserably in my opinion, it makes the U.S. less competitive. I think it did that when it broke up Ma Bell. The European mobile companies, technology, telecommunications companies dominated for the longest time. Bell Labs is owned by Nokia as an example. IBM became a shell of itself. I mean, I don't think the government's track record has been good at all. Now, having said that, you definitely want the government to be in conversation with industry and with entrepreneurs and to have a clue, but they have to be very careful, in my opinion, as to how they act. This is the other thing about democracies, John, is that China can just say, you can't do this, boom. Jack Ma, you're in the penalty box. No ant IPO, done, boom, by decree. That couldn't have happened in the United States that quickly. So the question I have back to you is, is that an advantage for China that they can make proclamations and determinations like that? I don't know. China, of course it's an advantage when you have an entire government's orchestrating together, colluding with it as one state, is definitely an advantage. It's not, it's called communism, dictatorship. That's what they're doing and they're running everything. Yeah, but does that accelerate innovation or does it potentially start from innovation? They steal innovation. They don't do any innovation. They're stealing it all. That's what's proven. Look, the government should not be involved in anything. They're just, they just sue, SEC just sued, the solar wind, CISO, Chief Information Security Officer. Let's rant about that. You go, do your rant, because that's unbelievable. Well, let's hold on. Okay, let's rant on that now. We'll come back to the news on the AI regulations. But the SEC suing the solar wind CISO for knowing that he could have stopped the fraud. That is unbelievable. It's unprecedented. And by the way, why the CISO? Why not the data engineers? Why not everybody? And by the way, it was a private company. They're not really the government. It's in the private sector. And so this is just creates massive problems. It was no fraud. There was no other action. There was a hack. Maybe he didn't do the patch. He's got operational challenges. This opens a can of worms. And by the way, every company in security has to hire their own, quote, militia to defend their companies from cyber warfare. We've been talking about this in the podcast. I've been ranting for everyone who knows me. Knows I've been ranting howling at the moon for over a decade that every company has to defend themselves against foreign adversaries fighting a digital cyber war that our government is letting happen. And so what's even worse now is the government's flipping itself on its own people and companies. So it just opens up way too much problems in my mind. Because then why him? Why is he accountable? Why isn't the SREs who's in charge of the infrastructure? Who's in charge of platform engineering? Who's in charge of buying the endpoint protection? What's device? Who does only threat detection? Is it a threat detection problem or is it the data protection problem? Why not the CEO hired the CISO?  So it's like ridiculous. And so it's just, it's just so counterintuitive. It's just, I'm so like weeded out by this because it makes no sense to me. If there's some smoking gun in there, you know, maybe that he was complicit in it. Maybe, I don't know, but based on what I know and can see from our reporting, he was just a CISO. He didn't patch it. Okay. He missed the patch. All right. He ignored the flaw. But what does that mean? Right. I mean, he misled the public. You kidding me? The companies go out of business when they get hacked. He misled the public. It's not his job to be a public relations. Okay. It's jobs to protect. You know, and by the way, why would you share more information to the outside world when you're going to know you're going to get screwed by the hackers? Okay. They, they, they alleged that he concealed security fee failures that led to nearly two year long attack called Sunburst. Okay. It was carried out by Russian hackers, inserted malicious code into SolarWinds Network management software used by thousands of customers, including the U.S. government agencies and private companies. The SolarWinds hack was one of the most sophisticated hacks that was the, the, the, the supply chain hack heard around the world that look, think about what CISOs and SecOps teams have to deal with. This is a, this is a good rant, John, because the, the partnership between government private private industry and government is broken in so many ways.  And I'm not saying they should give free passes on this, but, but wow, that, that was a shock. So that, first of all, so I'm going to quote, I'm going to quote some of the, some of the text here from our story from our SiliconANGLE reporting. From the time of the initial public offering in October, 2018 until January, 2021, SolarWinds and Brown. Okay. Timothy Brown De, quote, defrauded SolarWinds investors and customers through misstatements, omissions and schemes that concealed both the company's poor cybersecurity practices and it's heightened and increasing cybersecurity risks, the lawsuit says. It goes on to say SolarWinds public statements about its cybersecurity practices and risk painted a starkly different picture from the internal discussions and assessments about the company's cybersecurity policy violations, vulnerability and cyber attack. Okay. They're under attack. Okay. He's freaking out. You know, loose lip sync ships. He's probably didn't want to say anything. Again, public company, time of kind of war, wartime. You need a wartime conciliary when you have these kinds of situations. Okay. This brings up a good point, Dave. When I was at the Mandion conference and you were at CrowdStrike, one of the things that came up was, was AI could be used for all this compliance stuff. Now, think about the compliance the CISO has to go through. Imagine getting attacked and you got to go in and report like file paperwork to someone.  It's like you got to take care of what's happening. Your house is on fire. Bombs are dropping. Bombs are dropping cyber warfare. And so what Mandy and I were talking about was, and this came up big time, you could actually automate a lot of the compliance. So I think this is where I was getting at the some of the AI things in my, in my essay.  This was a human problem. He didn't report it. Okay. It's a public company. Maybe the investors should know they're under attack. Okay. Well, what do you do? I mean, this is where the security industry is really challenged because they were already having a hard time defending themselves on threats and protecting their data, right? Well, plenty of companies doing, trying to do it.  The bad guys are winning. And this puts another rock on their shoulders to carry in a war they're already losing. This is a great topic. I mean, the SuperCloud 3 covered gen AI and security. We have on December 12th, we have basically a SuperStudio event with Dell support where we're looking at the, what used to be an adjacency between data protection, like backup and recovery and cybersecurity, those two worlds are colliding. We've got some great guests to talk about this stuff. To your point about automation and AI, one of the areas where LLMs and generative AI can be super helpful is like just simple like reporting to your point, automating runbooks. People hate writing. Remember, like after a Zoom meeting, people would type up the notes. This is what we talked about. Now you just push a button. Boom. And there you go. And by the way, Microsoft's got actually some pretty good capabilities there as well that I saw.  If you press a button and you're in the paid version, it gives you the highlights. Yeah, highlights, it summarizes the meeting. And I actually from what I saw on teams, I'm not a fan of teams. I trashed Chime the other day, but I used, I had a meeting. I used Chime the other day. It actually was better than I thought it. They must have made some improvements. I used to hate Chime, but it was actually really good. It was much more intuitive. Yeah, back on the Chime bandwagon. Nice. Yeah, I wouldn't say I'm on the band.  You get used to one, right? I'm on the bandwagon. I mean, I didn't say I love it, but I wasn't hating it. It's much better than I remember. And in teams I don't like, it's just not intuitive to me, but the summary of the meeting was kick ass. But well, that's a good rant, John. It's pretty scary. Yeah, we're going to put a pin in that. We're going to come back to this. It's going to be an ongoing thing. Again, that whole security thing brings us back to AI. We got there from the AI regulation. So let me just give you the rundown. I want to get your reaction to this. So here's the current AI regulation news for the week. It hasn't arrived. Biden signs an executive order directing AI companies to develop safer AI, which I have no problem with. In fact, one of our CUBE alumni, Reggie Townsend, Reggie Townsend from SAS, was in the White House. So shout out to Reggie Thompson at SAS and SAS team. I just impressed with the people over there at SAS. Reggie Townsend, right? Yeah, Reggie Townsend. Yeah, awesome guy. He was featured on SuperCloud. He's on the ethics side of AI. He's got a very interesting perspective, great video. Search Reggie Townsend at CUBE and watch that video if you're interested. He's really got a good voice on this. We're going to do more with him. David Strom on our team put up a great analysis on this executive order. It's promising. He writes, but it's going to be tough for the U.S. to govern AI effectively. And there's a lot more detail that he links to an Ernst and Young report. I think it's toothless in my opinion, but I don't want to put a wet blanket on all the good work that the people in the industry are doing. So I kind of support it. It's an executive order. Okay, just leave it there, whatever. Okay. The Office of Management and Budget put some meat on the bone as well. They released a draft of AI guidance for federal agencies. That's out. So we'll see what that looks like. And then in the EU, a parallel effort that actually started earlier, Dave, 28 countries signed Let's Lead Declaration of AI Safety. Okay, so this is kind of a whole another ballgame around the European side. The U.S., the U.K., China, and 25 other countries signed a declaration stressing the need to address the potential risks posed by artificial intelligence. So now it's during a high-pile summit in the European Union. So that's interesting there. And then finally, it's just we had the AI event last night with the start-up. So, you know, as far as the start-ups are concerned, it's more productivity stuff, Dave, to your point. I would say that I watched all the start-ups like it doesn't start as presenting. A lot of them were like about productivity, not a lot of game-changing stuff. So, maybe I just had a bad view on it, but I thought it was great from that standpoint. The thing that jumped out was the Google brain founder Andrew Ning who said the threat of AI is overblown. The threat of AI of human extinction overblown also went on to say that. I love the Kelsey Hightower comment around the AI being used on local machines as well. That's kind of the highlight of the news. What else is happening here? Oh, Google Cloud Vertex Search adds new enterprise-ready features. Snowflake added a slew of announcements. LinkedIn's got an AI coach, chatbot coach, they're getting a new job. The earnings run down. It was amazing. AMD was initially looked like they were losing ground, and then they came back. Lisa Sue was amazing. Samsung says its chip business is going to recover. Jayshree Ulaos got Arista Networks, Stocks Poppin, Commvault, Sanjay Merchandani doing a great job down there. Qualcomm had their thing, the Snapdragon Summit. You know, that's kind of interesting. Rapids 7 got hit negatively. Jayfrog beat. Confluent got hammered. Extreme Networks beat. Rapids 7 beat. Didn't think they had a revenue check. No, hammered up. Sorry. Rapids 7 did really, really well. Extreme Networks was the one that was saying that they beat, but they got hammered.  I thought Apple's earnings were actually better than I thought they were going to be. They had massive services. Do we have revenue decline? I know, but the services, to me, sets them up for the future. I love that. I agree, yeah. Oh my God. I do. Yeah, exactly. You know, Fortinet, that's a story of the first disappointment is rarely the last. You know, Informatica, saying things are good, but they did a layoff. Western Digital splitting in two. Broadcom still expects there's a VMware acquisition. That Western Digital story was very interesting to me, that Western Digital. Western Digital splitting into two companies, right? That, let's talk about that. Yeah, I mean, I just caught it, but they got an activist investor in there, Dave. And remember, they were a customer of ours and we haven't heard from a while. So it's funny when the cube customers go dark, something's wrong. That should be like a bell weather in our little cube index. Stock following. Elliott management, right? Same company that basically took down EMC and enabled Michael Delt. Think about it. I got to go to the quickest side. Can you imagine if there's no way that Dell could have bought EMC in this interest rate environment? Never could have happened. I mean, talk about like having the balls to react, to act when interest rates were low, which that's kind of my rant is, you know, it's Druckenmiller ranting on the Fed, but we can come back to that. But yeah, Western Digital splitting up, splitting the hard drive business from the flash business. Now, one would think it would make total sense to have those two businesses together, but Elliott thinks they can maximize the value of shareholders if they split them up. Kind of interesting. I think, you know, you know, that's a good point about the zero interest rate thing. Because if you think about that's almost like very junk bonds like 80s, what they did, what they're doing, right? So it's interesting how they could never pull that off here. But I mean, again, if you look at the earnings, Dave, look at the list here. It goes on and on. Well, by the way, we'll come back to that Western Digital. Yeah, it's splunked. There's a huge private equity gutting going on. I don't know if you noticed, but yes, the bond market, the interest rates that are due. I saw a bunch of graphs this week on Twitter from Trent Griffin, who's been tracking a lot of the bond maturity dates coming. It's going to be a bloodbath. And people don't think this recovery is going to come out soon. If you look at the stocks that we just talked about, the ones that are hurting in those software companies and the ones that are winning in the picks and shovels for the next generation. So again, if you squint through the landscape here, you're seeing the rise of the cloud collision that we're going to cover in SuperCloud 5, which is battle for AI supremacies on point. The web was a shift. AI is a shift. And the stakes are high, Dave. This is a massive wealth creating opportunity. This is a massive entrepreneurial opportunity.  This is going to be the great reset of this generation. You're going to see the winners and losers start to form and you're starting to see it right now. The old software companies will die. Shopify is doing great. You know why? Because everyone's using Shopify. Their headless system is booming. And so you're seeing the picks and shovels. Amazon doing well. Broadcom. I think the Broadcom is going to take a little bit of punishment. Maybe they take the medicine, but they're taking a massive combination with VMware. I think they're going to come out of that stronger. Apple, of course, they got services going to float the boat there. That could even go to a zero margin. Revenue model of services can continue the marketplace there. So I'm not saying zero, but like if services can you to grow, it's going to offset their hardware margins. Obviously services are high gross profit, as you know. Splunk is an acquisition with Cisco. I mean, all the signs are there, Dave. Right. Look at the winners. Storage. Chips. Observability. Software development tooling. Platforms. Anything that's got a platform that enables value and sets up automation with AI is going to rise. Well, it's interesting. Both Dell and HPE. I was physically at the Dell financial analyst meeting. I watched the HPE one remotely. Didn't get the invite to the in person or I would have gone, but Matt Eastwood went and I was talking to him about a little bit. Both companies are projecting stronger momentum in compute than they are in storage. And it used to be storage was the much better business. And I guess it still is from a gross margin standpoint in profitability, but compute with AI is now the bell of the ball, you know. But you were mentioning the interest rates and the bonds. So this week, it's not really a rant, but it's semi-rant. Stan Druckamiller was like ripped. Janet Yellen and the Fed basically saying, look, they had this opportunity. And he said, basically Druckamiller said, it started with Trump and Mnuchin. They basically, you know, I think ran a, I think he said a trillion dollar budget deficit. So they cut taxes. Economy was good. They could have, you know, paid down some of the debt they chose not to. So that ran up to debt. And then you get the COVID hit. So of course, they had to spend money. And then the Biden administration came in, spent more money. His point was that there were several periods of time when the Fed could have issued, you know, longer term debt, 30, 40, 50, maybe even 100 year debt. I can't say. But I asked somebody who would, who had an opinion on this, who was in the know, you think there would be demand for a 100 year bond? And the answer was, this person would know. Yeah. Absolutely. Governments used to want to, you know, rest and vest. Just park it. And so and so the whole, the point is that, that we miss this opportunity. So, okay. So now what do we do? And this is, this is kind of my rant.  Nothing else matters. You know, it's defense, social security, and Medicare or the big three.  You have to have strong nation, but you can cut some. But social security and Medicare absolutely have to be cut. You got baby boomers coming in now. It becomes insolvent in nine years and it's going to be just a massive portion of the federal budget, you know, by 2030. And nobody's willing to talk about it. Not Democrats, not Republicans, no senators, no congressmen. Nobody wants to talk about taking entitlements away. Instead, they're doing cost of living increases. It's madness. Yeah. Yeah. And so. I'll tell you right now, the counter that cyclical cycle around what's going to emerge on the debt for bonds and interest rates. Loans and bonds are coming due. Big time that's financing all this stuff. On the startup side, Q3 was a terrible numbers for startup valuations and round sides. And so, valuations and cash was bad. Down rounds were dominantly 20%. Down rounds were being prominent 20% of all rounds in the quarter. Nine straight months of high down round frequency means a reductive in valuation. Worst quarter on record, on startups in the card database which manages like over 1,000 rounds. And then median C rounds are down significantly. So here's the data, Dave. So if you look at the seed round, the body called price seeds, that's kind of the new series A. It's back to 2004 or five levels, Dave. You're looking at 50%, 50% title of all cash raised this past quarter for startups. It was 50% title, amount of cash raised 3.4 million. So 50% of the 500 to 1000 companies raised at the 50% title, 3.4 million in the pre-seed. On the 75th percentiles, 5.0. Valuations at the 50% title was 13 million. 70% was 20 million, pre-money. That's kind of like what it was back in the day, classic VC. Almost a full reset. Again, price seed was the old series A. Series A is the new B. So series A funding, 50% title of cash raised was 10 million. Dave, that's it. 10 million. High end was 17 million. So it's in the valuations with 39 and 60 million, respectively. We're seeing a very, very bad funding cycle for startups. It's really the worst I've seen.  Or at that time, I could have probably got 10, but you know. A 5-on-8 post? No, that's, post-money was like 17 million. Okay, 5-on-8 pre. No, no. No, no, I think it was a 3-on-5. It was roughly 30%. It's in these numbers, basically. I think it was, it might have been like 10-13. I got to look at the numbers, but I can't remember. But this is old school, old school VC. So it's going to be very interesting to see how the angel market reacts to this, given that the AI startups don't match up. That's why the scuttle button, the valley is go small, small ball. Yeah, but I mean, but companies made money, VCs made money back then. It just got so stupid, right? And then the other thing that you mentioned, you sort of referenced as PEs, private equity firms.  I mean, absurd, right?  But, you know, if you put in money, you know, late in 2021, right? You're seeing valuations get cut in half. It's that sort of UiPath syndrome. Remember, UiPath at one point, and I think at $30 plus billion valuation, people were putting money into the series, whatever it was, series F. And, you know, now it's worth like $10 billion. So, you know, they're feeling the pain. Snowflake investors who came in late, like the Warren Buffets, you know, they got in prior to the IPO. The IPO went out at $120. Stock's trading at, I don't know, some of the $140s, $150s, you know, it's hovering around there, bouncing around. So, they're still making money. But who knows? That could change, too. I mean, you know, that's a stock that's still priced for perfect execution because of the Slutman-Scarpelli factor. Who knows about Databricks?  But who knows if they're even marking to market? You know, it's hard to tell. All these private funds that are in there, they're marked at basically either par with what the investors put in.   But if they mark that to market, it'd be down by half. But they get paid on the current mark, which is not to market. Yeah. I mean, the economy is going to be a very rough ride. I'm very interested to see how these next earnings sees us and what comes out of re-invent, Dave. So, let's just quickly wrap up what we're doing on KubeCon, Supercomputing, SuperCloud 5. We got, really, I'm going to be essentially on the road this entire month. I think I'm home one week. You too. I'm going to Miami next week. Five days this month. I'll be in Palo Alto. I'll be in Chicago for KubeCon, C&C, Aff Linux Foundation. That's going to be always great. We've been to every single KubeCon, every single one since the beginning. I'm doing, yeah, that's awesome. And DockerCon, I'm doing two events next week. One in Miami, the Cisco Partner Event, and they're having a partner, I mean, an analyst summit as well. I'm going to see Ziaz will be down there. Carolina Melanasi said she's going to be down there. And then I'm going to IBM. Bob O'Donnell's going to be at Cisco. I'm going to see him at IBM. He's coming in a little later. I'm going to go in early for dinner because I haven't been to IBM's analyst thing in a while. So, I lost touch with them. So, and I'm excited about IBM, John. The data shows Watson X's.  So, I'm kind of excited for that.  We'll get super computing. It's in Denver, super computing, where all the chip action is happening. That's the same week as Microsoft Ignite, which will have team coverage from Cube Studio. So, that's the same week as super computing. And then we're HPE Discover, which is the same week as re-invent. So, we basically have SuperCloud 5. We'll be pumping content from Barcelona. We're taking our previous Microsoft Ignite coverage and we'll be pumping in our editorial content from re-invent. We got Live Studio and Palo Alto, SuperCloud 5 people coming in. We just, I don't know if we put it out yet, but we're doing a call for guests. I know we've already got some guests lined up. We got a lot of questions on this. I just want a quick clarification and a little PSA. So, Cube will be at re-invent, okay, capturing editorial content. We have no sponsorship on locations. All our team's investment to go on site with the press area, getting all the top executives, but exclusive with Adam Sileski. We're going to have all great content, no paid sponsorship work on site, all editorial, our investment. We're going to put money out of our own pocket to be there. At the same time, we're having an in-studio program. Savannah Peterson, Lisa Martin will be hosting in Palo Alto a live stage performance for two days, Tuesday and Wednesday. Chuck Alley and the team will be putting that together. We're going to be broadcasting more content in Palo Alto. And what thanks to our great network of SuperCloud supporters, that's happening. And what's going to happen is you're going to see a ton of content. So if you want to come into the studio or be part of the program, we have a request for speakers, request for panels. We want to bring your own panel together. We can do that. How we should do that is going to do it again. If you want to talk about the battle for AI supremacy, that's the title of the SuperCloud. It's going to be a special edition. And we are super excited. We're going to have so much editorial content. We're going to be on the ground in Vegas, reporting back to the studio team. They're going to put a stream together in studio commentary and reaction from experts in our network, in our community. So it's going to be a unique first for theCUBE, a monster event. There'll be more content raining down from theCUBE than ever before. It'll be a reinvent like you've never seen. It's going to be chock full of content. Of course, our cubeai.com where it's going to be tuned up to help you figure out what the best stories are. So go to theCUBE AI and check that out, little plug. But type in things like what is platform engineering or platform consolidation? Is FinOps relevant? How do I do cost optimization? Things that have been set on theCUBE from our experts are now indexed and with fast retrieval with our RAG system, our automation generation. It's super great right now. It's getting better. And it's only in alpha. So check it out. So David wanted to clarify because they got a lot of questions. Are we streaming live from the show floor? No, we'll be sending content back to Palo Alto. And we're paying on our own pocket to be there because we want to get the most important stories and we'll do whatever it takes to get those stories. So quick clarification and plug for theCUBE AI. Next thing you know, you're writing songs for theCUBE. Like the Beatles. So my breaking analysis was this week. I'm digging in deep to the Gen AI power law that you, Rob Streche, and I have been evolving and getting feedback on. So I'm digging into that, getting into to retrieval augmented generation, RAG models, really looking at some of the things that we've learned, bringing in some of the ETR data, talking about sort of on-prem and hybrid AI. So look for that for sure. I'm going to send you some notes, Dave, because I have a long set of, I've been doing a ton of research on vector databases, vector and RAG. So here's some stuff there. I'm going to send this to you right now. Folks, thanks for watching episode 36, Dave. Any final comments you want to make before we break this down? I just, you know, I continue to believe that AI, I believe the hype that this is going to be, Gen AI is going to be super transformative, maybe not so much, you know, in the form of chat GPT. I mean, but that was the catalyst that has awakened everybody's sense of the potential of this new generation of technology. And I think I guess what I would say is, the key is going to be finding the use cases, making sure you got the right business model, and then showing value, because if you do that, you're going to get money to refund and reinvest, because right now the Gen AI stuff and the AI stuff is stealing from other budget items, and that can't last unless you can show value and then do share gains. I'm just excited. I'll just continue to reiterate, I'm drunk on AI still every day. This has been an amazing run so far. I think it's not even just scraps and serves. I think we're going to see an explosion of innovation if it doesn't get thrown the wet blanket of regulation on it. I think we have to let the, let the, let the chaos rain and then rein in the chaos to quote the famous Andy Grove. So I think this is going to be a seismic shift like the PC revolution and the web combined, bigger than those two forces. I see generation shift. And again, front row seat, Dave, like we've had for 13 years to queue, that's going to be great, great run. So we'll continue to bang it out. And oh, by the way, it's now public. Dave put it out there that the wiki bond is being renamed as the cube research and advisory. We're going to rebrand that site and continue our legacy of providing great content. So Dave, I know you've been working hard on that. Can't wait to see the news next week when it comes out, but a little preview there for the folks who made it this far. All right. Thanks, John. See you next time. See you guys.


What's up everybody, Jason here for jazzybyscasebrakes.com. We're giving away one definitive divisional case break spot away with this 2022 Topsperstein baseball pack break number one. Again, we'll do the break, randomize the teams, distribute the hits out of the one loose pack here and then at the end we'll randomize the name. Top name gets the definitive random division spot which again, it's a full case of definitive random divisions and it'd be a $1,250 spot right there guys. We have three left straight up, we're trying to do two more pack fillers and hopefully sell those spots straight up but a very, very nice break right there. So here we go. Nice roll it, boom. Six and a five, 11 times, good luck. Let's do the break first, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11. Steve Birch down to Harry and we got 11 times, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. Lana Braves down to the Detroit Tigers and again, it's a quick little pristine pack which again, you can have some really nice stuff coming from a fresh little box but no trades guys, just think to what you got. I'll let you see your teams though really quick. Doesn't say no vet based ship so I guess we'll ship everything. I'll give you like 30 seconds to look at your teams and then Kobe yes did get the Jets in number five, good luck buddy. Jets are off the board in number five. Gary got a couple of teams here, looks like Yankees one, two, three, four, five. Yankees off the board, two, three, four, five. And then got the angels in three, four, five. All right here we go. Switching into the pack filler really quick. A pack, within a pack, nice O'Neill cruise rickie. Josiah Gray, autographed there for the nationals, very nice Steve Birch and I think you got another autograph here. Max Kepler, wow what a great pack. Minnesota Twins, that's Logan. Two autos are already right there out of that box fold. Very nice. Switch scenes and now let's do the giveaway. So remember, name at number one gets it. Good luck guys, roll it. Five and a four this time, nine times. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. And ninth and final time guys, good luck. Boom, nine times. So 29 sad people guys, I'm sorry, only one winner. Just missing out with Steve Birch but at number one is Tyler Brenner, wow, look at that. Boom, you have a divisional spot now buddy. Five and a four, nine times, so we're going to paste your name in the divisional spot and like I said, we can sell two more pack fillers plus those three straight up spots, we can break a case of definitive random division tonight. And that'll be pristine, pristine one. Appreciate it guys, jazbscasebricks.com.


Yeah, welcome back to Think Tech. This is the military in Hawaii. Today we're going to talk about the ninth mission support command with Brigadier General Timothy Connelly. Welcome to the show, General. Thanks, Jerry. I appreciate you having me on. It's a pleasure to be here. Sure. Well, tell us what the ninth mission support command is. You're running it. How big is it? And I get the idea that it's about supporting the reserve. Am I right? Well, more specifically, it's actually about supporting US Army Pacific and Com Indopecom. So the commander of Indopecom, Admiral Aquilino, and the commanding general of US Army Pacific, General Flynn. And the ninth mission support command is an Army Reserve formation as opposed to an active component formation. But we're unique in that most Army Reserve formations across the continental United States are assigned to the US Army Reserve Command. The mission support command is unique in that we're an Army Reserve unit, but we're headquarters, but we're actually assigned to US Army Pacific and under their operational control, which gives the US Army Pacific immediate access to being able to use our capabilities anywhere they're needed. Where's your command located? Is it Camp Smith or somewhere else? No, we're located on Port Chapter. There's about 3,500 soldiers in the command. About half of them are here in Hawaii. The other half are spread equitably, as I'd like to say, between two locations up in Alaska at Joint Base Elmato-Fritzen and Port Wingray. We're the only Department of Defense presence down in American Samoa, and we also have a great Army Reserve Center and Army Reserve soldiers from the 9th MSC out in Guam in Saipan. In fact, in Saipan, which is a separate American territory from Guam, which is also an American territory, Saipan is part of the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands, and in Saipan, we're also the only DOD presence in Saipan. I also have a brigade level headquarters stationed at Camp Humphries in Korea and at the attachment at Camp Zama in Japan that works with US Army Japan. So before I go forward, I have a lot of questions for you. I just want to tell you that when I was in the service, I was ordered to fly from, let's see, Yokosuka in Japan to the East Coast, and they put me on this kind of space A flight that stopped in Elmendorf, and I had my tropical khakis with me, and it was for freezing, and I never, you know, I couldn't get on the down-line flight, so I sat there for 24 hours in the airport at Elmendorf. I guess it was an Air Force facility, and I waited 24 hours for the next leg of the flight, and as a result, Elmendorf has left an impression on me from then till now. I still think of it in terms of sitting there freezing my Okoli off for a full day. Elmendorf, Alaska, there you go.  I would always think that a flight from Japan to the continent of the United States would pass through Hawaii, so maybe you drew the short stick, especially if it was the winter. Yeah, short straw, I should say, but for short, Alaska is beautiful, and I'll answer all your questions. I got so many great stories to tell about this command. I was just in Alaska a month ago out on Koliak Island watching our engineers do a road construction project, and it was just beautiful. It's beautiful up there this time of year, but if you went through the dead of winter, yes, you will suffer. So tell me what, you know, what does the support command do with these 3,500 people that are scattered from hither and yon? It's a huge geographical area, and it's a big force. What does it do? Well, like I said, we're an army reserve formation, so the soldiers that we have in our formations are from the places where they serve in uniform. They're citizen soldiers.  But one weekend a month, two weeks out of the summer, and whenever I have them mobilized on active duty, they're doing great things in service of this command and usurpak in the greater Indo-Paycom area of responsibility across the Pacific. The 9th MSC is a very diverse formation, both in terms of the individuals that serve here, because as you know, there's literally dozens and dozens of different ethnicities and cultures and languages in the Pacific, and the 9th MSC has them all, as well as diverse capabilities in this command. I have a maneuver enhancement brigade. I have a civil affairs brigade. I have the only infantry battalion in the army reserve. We have an awesome horizontal vertical construction battalion. I have a military police company down in Guam. I have a theater signal company here in Honolulu. I have a school house, the 4960 multifunctional training brigade that teaches soldier skills such as engineering and medical and quartermaster, and also teaches our officers on command and control and leadership out of our command and general staff college course that we teach here. I also have an awesome army reserve hospital, if you can believe that, with over 400 medical professionals assigned. Most of them are army civilians in the medical community, so the commander of my hospital is a neurosurgeon, and the hospital is filled with doctors and dentists and nurses and nurse anesthetists and medics and medical planners and logisticians all from this region and up in Alaska and down in Guam. It's really an impressive capability here at the 9th MSC, and you'd be surprised to learn as an army reserve formation how much U.S. Army Pacific leans on us to bring capabilities to bear to solve the hard problems that we're solving out here. Is it the only MSC around, or are there others in other parts of the world? Well, so there are three MSCs, mission support commands, in the army reserve. One out here in the Pacific almost signed to U.S. Army Pacific. There's one in Europe, the 7th MSC, a slightly different type of formation, but they're assigned to U.S. Army Europe and provide, they're also assigned under the operational control of U.S. Army Europe and provide similar capabilities out there. And there's also a first mission support command based out of Fort Buchanan in Puerto Rico, and also a very diverse formation down there that provides us with a great connection not just to Puerto Rico, but to the greater Caribbean and the army south and southcoming or. So if I'm, you know, joining the army as a reservist, I guess that's still, you know, an enlistment possibility. Do I want to be in an MSC as an MSC, you know, good duty, so to speak? Is it something I would want to choose if I could? Well, I think if you live in Hawaii or Alaska or Guam or Saipan or certainly American Samoa, it's a great opportunity. You know, there's a lot of people that want to decide, you know, in high school, either enlisted or going through college through RTC or otherwise, they decide they want to serve in uniform, but they really like where they're from. Now for the soldiers, there are a lot of soldiers out there that, you know, they want to make a military career. They want to go on active duty and by, for sure, I encourage them to put on the uniform and go on active duty. But there are many, many soldiers out there, many people out there. And I talked to the high school kids in Hawaii often about this. I've been out to many of the high schools in the Hawaii area and down American Samoa even. And I give them my talk on options and opportunities. And I give them this talk only because, you know, when I went through high school, I don't really remember many people coming to talk to me about the military. So I like to talk to the kids about this. And just to tell them, look, if you want to leave home, but you don't want to leave home, you can join the Army Reserve. You know, you go off to the same basic training and same advanced individual training courses that your active component counterparts get. And you get to be paid while you're there and doing it and you get turned into an American soldier, which is awesome.  But you get to serve in uniform with your Army Reserve unit. And you're available as a mobilization asset when your nation needs to make the call and potentially have you go and do some hard things somewhere. Well, that was a pretty good pattern to follow. You know, you can have it your way. I wonder about the mobilization aspect, though. I mean, I can't think of too many moments in the past 20 years, for example, where the reservists have actually been called up. Can you? Well, I think, well, I can give you a number of examples just in the four years that I've been here at the Night Miss and Support Command. It's not always for a contingency, in fact, more often than not, it's not for a contingency operation. Just back in 2018, when Taifu and Yutu swept across Guam and Saipan, and really, Guam and CNMI and essentially Flatt and Saipan and Tini and 350 soldiers out of the 9th MSC were mobilized, both at Honolulu and this headquarters and 300 more at Guam. And we let the cleanup on Saipan, mobilized down there for several months to help the mayor of Saipan and the citizens of that island. The Marines covered down on Tinian, which we are greatly appreciative of, and the Guam National Guard covered the damage that was done to Guam. That's just one example. And then when the pandemic started, and in particular my hospital and my headquarters, we were essentially, we mobilized nearly 500 soldiers here in the Night Miss and Support Command on active duty so that the Army Reserve in the Pacific was postured and prepared in all locations here in Hawaii, up in Alaska, down in America, in Samoa and out in Guam and Saipan when required to respond to our nation's calls and support FEMA activities to support COVID response. A lot of our doctors and a lot of our other capabilities were brought to bear to help bring relief to the civilian community that was trying to get their arms wrapped around this pandemic. That's great. I mean, there's two schools of thought. One of them is that the military in Hawaii can help us in time of extreme weather or natural disaster, what have you, and we should feel comforted by that. There's another school of thought, and I'll be asking you about this, which says that the military in Hawaii has its own mission. And in terms of the priorities, that mission will have the priority, so you shouldn't count on the military helping you in times of extreme weather or natural disaster. Which one is right? Well, I certainly think the former is right. I mean, natural disaster response across the Pacific in Hawaii, Guam and Alaska in particular, of course always starts with local authorities, and when the local authorities get overwhelmed, typically they go to the governor for help. And the next thing the next group they call out is the National Guards of those states. I'm not the National Guard. The Army National Guard, I have great friends across the National Guard formations in all of those states in Hawaii, Alaska and Guam. But when local authorities get overwhelmed, the National Guard steps in. But there are times when the Guard at any particular state either doesn't have the required capabilities or it simply gets tapped out, and in which case the defense support to civil authorities mechanism kicks in, and the state requires support from FEMA. FEMA gets authority to work with the Department of Defense, and then we engage either from the active component, the first component of the Army, or the other component of the Army that is a federal force, and that's the Army Reserve. And with the right authorities, then we kick in with our additional capabilities. But I think that we certainly prove in time and time again whether it's, now the Guard handled a volcano crisis on the Big Island when the lava flows came through. The Guard in all three states and the Army Reserve and the active Army and USERPAC all worked together to help with COVID response. And I certainly think that we proved between Guam and Saipan that the USERPAC of the military in particular were ready and did answer the call when those reasons were devastated by Taizuma and you two. Yeah, you never know these days.  And we talk about volcanic eruptions. We have one going on now. It just started, not bad yet. It's at the level of tourist interest right now. Could get worse. In any event, you know, I want to ask you one very interesting and unique thing, quite unique thing about MSC. And that is, it has an historical connection with the 442nd and the 100th Battalion. Can you talk about that? Well, sure. In fact, I just had some awesome members of the Nisei legacy and the lineage that they bring to the table. But the 100th of the 442 infantry regiment, it is the only infantry battalion in the Army Reserve. So the Army Reserve is, you know, over 200,000 soldiers and civilians spread across 21 time zones around the globe. And we're replete with the robust levels of combat support and combat service support capabilities. Our combat arms forces are primarily in aviation and engineering and the like, whereas your more traditional combat arms forces in the Army are in the active component in the National Guard, your infantry, your armor, and light and fill artillery. But the 100 of the 442 is the only infantry battalion in the third component of the Army to sign out here in the Pacific, where it has a strong historical lineage to its performance in World War II. It is widely known as the most decorated unit in the history of the United States Army. And I don't mean just the Army Reserve. I mean, the entire United States Army and the history of its existence, the 100 of the 442 is the most decorated with, you know, well over 100 plus Medal of Honor recipients. It's also the unit of former Senator Daniel Hanoi, who is also the namesake of many things in Hawaii, but also including this very Army Reserve center that I sent it now. And we call it an Army Reserve Center, but it's more like a beautiful campus because we take great care of it so that our local soldiers have a great place to come in work and train when they come to the Battle Assembly. Just two months ago, and I had less than two months ago, I had Lieutenant General Jody Daniels, the Chief of the Army Reserve, the first female Chief of Army Reserve, career MI officer, brought her out here to see what we do out here in the Pacific. And among many of the things that I showcased to her, I brought her out to PTA for two days with the 100th Battalion. And she spent two days on the ground in the dirt with those infantry soldiers, lots of them do. Squadron platoon, live fire. There were fire and live tow missile rounds, and she actually got to go see the mortar section, the mortar platoon, hang some mortar rounds. So she got to drop the mortar rounds and herself probably fired about four or five mortar rounds herself, and they got to experience all the awesome things. You know, the 100th and the 442, people often talk about their historical lineage and most decorated unit in the history of the United States Army. And somehow, for some people that equates to, oh, there must be some sort of honor ceremony now, like the old guard. But that's not them at all. They are a legitimate, full-up, light infantry battalion trained to fight and win our nation's wars just like any other infantry battalion in the Army today, and they are very good at it. You're telling me that there are people right now in the 442nd who are doing duty for the United States Army in the 442nd today in 2021? Oh, yeah. If that wasn't made abundantly clear, yeah, absolutely. In fact, we just had a brand new battalion commander take over, Lieutenant Colonel Perkins, career infantry officer fired up and ready to go. But they take right now, in fact, just to give you an idea of how things go often with the local community in the 9th MSC, I've established with the commanding general of the Hawaii Army National Guard, Brigadier General Moses Kiavi from the Hawaii Guard. Good friends over there at the Guard. I've established a cross-component partnership with the 100th Battalion in the Army Reserve in the 9th MSC. It's partnered with the 29th Infantry Brigade Combat Team out of the Hawaii Army National Guard. And they're on a three-year training glide path, if you will, a path towards building collective readiness where the Infantry Battalion here has the opportunity to plug into a brigade higher headquarters and train, learn how to train and operate together on the battlefield together.  They're going to do another collective training exercise together next summer. And then ultimately, the summer after that, they'll go to the Joint Readiness Training Center at Polka, Louisiana, and do a very robust collective training exercise together. And it's just a great partnership. It's great to work with the Hawaii Guard, great to partner with our fellow citizen soldiers from the National Guard side of the house in such awesome training. But the 100th Battalion from a fighting capability perspective to get directed at your question is absolutely alive and well. You know, I can just see two guys in a bar talking. And one says to the other, what unit are you in? And the other says, I'm in the 442nd. And the first guy falls down. He's in a dead faint. Okay.  Yeah, I'll tell you, the soldiers today, they embrace the spirit of the brave heroes that came before them. I can say that without a doubt. I watched them perform in tough conditions at day and night. You know, just over in PTA. So the tradition continues? Tradition absolutely continues. I got the Echo Company down in Guam. I got Bravo Company down in American Samoa. The soldiers that fight out of American Samoa, they are fierce competitors and, you know, just military athletes. If you ever need someone to help you carry around about 150 pounds of ammunition on their back, just call somebody from Bravo Company and they'll take care of you. So what's it like to be? What's it like to be in the reserve in, you know, one of these units and subunits? I mean, how often do you have to go? I suppose there's a lot of different kinds of things you could do. But how many days or hours per week, per month, are you expected to provide? Is it the same for everybody or different? And can you give me a handle on how much you get paid as officer or enlisted? Just a rough idea. Because, you know, I was in the Coast Guard reserve and after my active duty, I was always surprised how much they paid me. It was impressive. Also, you know, what do you have to do? What do you have to beat to succeed in these jobs? Well, so that you've covered a lot of terrain there. Why don't I start with the last question? What do you have to be? Well, in the Army, there is a vetting process to get into the military. And the military loves folks that are fit, loves folks that do relative well in school. But, you know, what I would encourage all the kids out there to do that, if they're interested in enlisting in the military after high school or during their senior year of high school, go see the recruiter. And you'll sit down and you'll take an ASFAB test. And that recruiter, if you're really interested in doing certain things that the Army or the Army Reserve and the Pacific has to offer, they'll set you on a right path of preparation to make sure you're getting trained and fit and studying the right things you need to study to do well in that ASFAB so that once you get that GT score and it's high enough and you demonstrate a level of fitness, the military, you know, we don't take folks that do drugs. We encourage kids throughout high school to keep a clean record, don't get in trouble with the police, you know, be good model students and citizens in your local community. And, you know, so you can pass a background check. So when you come on board, those types of things are an issue when the recruiter wants to work with you and get to get to the square way of the contract so that you can join the military. There's a lot of benefits in joining. Even the Army Reserve or active duty, you get access to a lot of benefits, medical benefits, educational benefits, the GI Bill. I know many, many soldiers that have paid their way through college based on their ability to join the Army Reserve and put that uniform on. And a lot of people are just very reluctant to take that step. They just think it's such a huge leap. But once they do, I've rarely met anyone that regretted it after the fact. So as far as pay, I'm not going to pretend to memorize the pay table, but I will make one thing clear. The pay of a soldier at every level enlisted an officer alike is a matter of public record. All you have to do is Google it or go to your internet search engine of choice and put in 2021 military pay tables and you will be brought right to the internet site that shows what you're paid from E1 all the way up to the 4th star generals of the Army. And it's broken down also between active duty and reserve component. So when you come in and let's say you join the military and you work your way up to E5 or E6, like Sergeant Acevedo sitting here in the room with me, and you draw one week in a month, you go to that pay table. It's going to tell you, hey, you're in E6 and you've been in service for four years. It's going to tell you how much you can expect to make in base pay. And then when you're also in the military throwing an active duty order of some sort, whether on active duty, you also get additional entitlements. You get a basic allowance for housing. If you're living off post, you get a basic allowance for subsistence. This is all in addition to your base pay. So in addition to your base pay, they're giving you an allowance for housing and allowance to give you an ability to put food on the table. I'm going to have to talk to you, Sergeant Major. Hope I'm not too old for this. We'll bring you back. You're happy to have you back. You can always use a good lawyer. I have actually, for a time, I was a military judge, a matter of fact. Anyway, so I wanted to ask you also about change. There's nothing so constant as change itself. Everything changes. And our geopolitical position in the Pacific is certainly very important, and it is changing. It is changing because we want it to and because we need to have a change to comport with other changes, to win the deal that the president made with Australia and Britain over nuclear submarines. It's an example of a dramatic change in the Pacific. So I guess my question is, how will these changes affect MSC? Where do you see MSC going in the next few years? Is it sort of relative to the Army in general, relative to the military in general, and in the Pacific in general? What kind of evolutions do you see happening? Well, I think that's a great question. I think the biggest evolution that we've seen relative to the ninth mission support command, again, under the operational control of US Army Pacific and General Flynn, and General Flynn who is educating us and educating the Army on what it means to have a theater army out here in the Pacific. There's two theater armies in the world, US Army Pacific and US Army Europe, and the theater army is responsible for all land component aspects. So the things that we need to do across the Pacific are to assure our allies to turn our adversaries and ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific. And General Flynn, thanks to his leadership, has challenged the ninth MSC, among other things, to... We've adopted an area across the Pacific Island countries, commonly referred to as Oceania, so countries as far east as Fiji and Tonga and as far west as Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste, and all the Kopa states, Palau, the Republic of Marshall Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia. The ninth MSC has been given the awesome mission to partner with the United States embassies in all of these countries and establish a presence with all of them. So with many of these countries, I have boots on the ground wearing the ninth MSC patch and they're working with the US ambassadors from all of these nations to help bridge ties between not just the Department of State in those countries, but also with the host nation governments and the host nation militaries for the countries that have them. And the whole idea is with this is to ensure these countries and these embassies that USERPAC is an important lead element in the Pacific for the Department of Defense and Indopacom is present and engaged with these countries and we're working with them and working through their concerns and we're working to support each other. We're not just working to make them better, they helped make us better as well in these countries. The ninth MSC, because again the ninth MSC is from the Pacific, all of the countries I've mentioned, I can almost guarantee you, I have soldiers in my formation as American citizens who are actually from these countries and they're from these countries, they have family in these countries, they know the culture, they speak the language, when we sit with and many of the soldiers that are from these countries are part of my team that's executing Operation Pacific Island countries across Oceania and this is just one example, this is a main effort of what the ninth MSC is doing in a very real sense, to help USERPAC with ensuring a free and open Indo-Pacific, making sure that we have the right partnerships in place to have access to these countries where we need it. But we're also engaged in many other areas, you know my three to two civil affairs brigade which is very engaged in Oceania is also engaged up in Japan, I have my three or third maneuver enhancement brigade is partnered with Regent Marianas, we're just we're engaged in adding value, I like I said this is at a recent USERPAC commander's conference, I looked at the around the room so all the different commanders that are part of USERPAC and report and are accountable to General Flynn and I said if you're in this room there's a pretty good chance the ninth MSC has some sort of partnership or relationship with you and that's and that's the absolute truth whether it's be the Guard or the 25th ID or the 8th TSC or 8th Army or US Army Japan or Regent Regent Marianas out in Guam it's just it's an amazing organization no more blessed than I deserve to be able to be able to command it. Well I wanted to ask you about you know Afghanistan you know we had 20 years there the army was involved for sure over that 20-year period sometimes more sometimes less depending on troop levels and now if that's over we're not there anymore so my question to you is here we are halfway around the world how did Afghanistan affect the MSC your MSC and how did the departure from Amazon how will that affect your MSC going forward? Well so so the Afghan the the situation in Afghanistan is certainly complicated right I served a year in Afghanistan myself back in 2009 and you know people will probably debate for years whether or not we should have stayed or gone and or whether or not we did it right or did it otherwise that's that's really not my place to say in this particular discussion I you know that even the some of the senior leaders of the army did express some concerns it put some messaging out that that may that perhaps there were there were soldiers out there that were that were having some mixed feelings about what had happened in Afghanistan and and and that would be necessary for us to extend resources so they had someone to talk to and if they felt like they needed someone to talk to about how they were feeling in case they were feeling in confusion and and the reality is that there are some soldiers out there that are having those feelings and and I want those soldiers to you know somehow be able to fight you know if they need to talk to somebody just like we did during the pandemic and the pandemic was bringing people down and last year last year we went through a significant period of of civil unrest and racial tensions and the and the results of the Fort Hood investigation came out these were all hard topics and I think the Afghanistan situation is is similar in that it's also a hard topic that we as leaders need to be able to sit down with soldiers and be willing to have hard conversations and I think the senior leadership of the military has encouraged us to do that to sit down let soldiers feel like if they have something they need to get off their chest they can do that and and so the impact on the 9th MSC I think from a soldier morale and motivation perspective um has been uh has been mitigated to the degree that I think I I've tried to do my part and my command sergeant major has done her part and all of my leaders have done their part to make sure that through all of this this period of discord I'll call it whether it whether you know going all the way back to last year in the start of the pandemic and again the racial tensions and the civil unrest and then Afghanistan now that soldiers simply have someone to reach out to and talk to whether it's mental health professionals or chaplain or just having a battle buddy I say here all the time in my own command have a battle buddy be a battle buddy and be awesome to everyone and uh you know I I just tell soldiers you know being awesome to everyone's all about just treating everybody with dignity respect and a genuine sense of inclusivity and you know the chief you know the chief of staff of the army has said you know if we could just crack the code uh and treat everybody with dignity and respect uh the army the army would be able to uh resolve a lot of the issues that that faces today yeah in many many ways the military is um you know it's uh it's the repository of national values just as you say uh one last question general I just one last question and uh they're gonna tell me to get off already that is you know what's it like being a general how do you get to be a general in the army and when you wake up in the morning as a general um do you have to put your your trousers on one leg at a time uh or can you put you know your trousers on both legs at a time how does that work well uh you know I've often said the moment that you think you should be or want to be a general uh might be the moment that you probably shouldn't be one um it's uh it's a tremendous and awesome uh responsibility and obligation and you have to enter it with a degree of humility um and an open heart and open mind and the willingness to engage with soldiers at their level so that you understand what they're going through and don't lose connection with uh what what what it is really we're asking them to do and in the army reserve that's even harder right because for a multiple of two reasons uh we get fewer training days a day uh I'm sorry we get fewer training days a year uh but by and large we're asked to perform in the battlefield uh on part at the same level as our active component counterparts because you know once you get there the enemy doesn't say oh I'm not going to shoot as many bullets at you guys because you're you're they're you're component that's not how it works um so I've tried to focus my general ship on uh doing good you know I've had a couple of senior leaders give great advice when you become a general officer as user rank for good I try to take that to heart and uh use it uh and um and you know you just you just need to embrace a notion of humility because at the end of the day nobody fights the fight alone it's all about the team and uh you know being a general and being a commander I think it's just all about understanding that when you're in charge you gotta take charge and when you're in charge you gotta provide vision uh provide guidance and make decisions and and after you do those things and you still haven't covered down on everything you have to assume risk on behalf of your subordinates so that they have uh so that they feel empowered um with with with the resource to to get after the things that you're asking to get out you know those principles don't don't are not limited to the military I have to say those principles are a good lesson for leadership everywhere and anywhere and good good rules to follow um so if I want to know more about MSc if I want to know more about becoming a reserve where do I look where do I go I think a great place to start uh you would go to www.usar.army.mil uh is our is our website um you can also go to goarmy.com and uh and and if you go to goarmy.com there'll be a link for your recruiter um and then if you if you if you go to usar.army.mil or or usar.army.com and you go into the supported command sections you can you can uh work your way through there and find the nice mission support command and our local phone numbers um it's always easy to find a recruiter and uh you can also follow us on the facebook just just type on facebook ninth mission support command or ninth msc or an instagram uh as ninth msc or ninth mission support command uh and uh encourage everyone out there to follow our pages uh we're always posted awesome stories I got a great public affairs section that's post that always post great stories about what we're doing in oceania what the 100th Italian is doing in training whether it be on pta or elsewhere and what the rest of our formations are doing across the pacific up in alaska out in korea uh down in american samo and whatnot so please follow us on facebook or instagram um i think we have a couple other social media uh avenues out there as well and ask that everyone jump on those and uh and follow us we're going to do a general timothy connelly thank you so much for joining us today it's really been great to talk to you and to learn from you thank you so much it's your time to appreciate it