Alright, what do you think these dots represent? What kind of data? What do you think the data represents? Oh, no, but I do have one of those dots. There would be a lot more dots than that. Yeah. High speed internet? No, it's actually got nothing to do with the internet. Sorry to disappoint you. No, but it is sheep-related, actually. Sheep accidents, no. Any other guesses? No, but related. Stockyard locations. And I found there's such an interesting map to look at, because when I saw it, I realised I'd never seen data like this, like, who would make this map and why would they make it. But it's really fascinating to see and go, oh, look at, like, in the Gisborne region, I can't, for those of you that... I've got no pointer, but like the top right, kind of, the big hustle on the right-hand side. You know, that's like the Gisborne region. I had no idea they had so many stockyards, and you look at a map like this and think, what does that mean for the industries and the communities around it, and kind of get to learn about our country through a lens that we don't otherwise see. So, what is Wiki New Zealand? So we are bringing all of New Zealand's public data together in one place online and making it so that everybody can use it, so that it's visually explorable. And so, for example, if you look at this, this is data showing industry finance spend on R&D as a percentage of GDP. And if you look at that and go, right, what are the trends? What does it say? It's going to take a little bit longer than if you look at a graph like this. So I used to work at a think tank called the New Zealand Institute, and during that time we did a lot of research, whether it was on social, economic, or environmental kind of issues, and we would always start by running the numbers and going, right, so how does New Zealand perform over time compared to other countries? And then we would go out and present to a lot of people showing really simple graphs, and people would frequently be really surprised when they got to see data and see, you know, whether it was New Zealand's GDP per capita compared to other countries, or that we have the highest rate of youth suicide. And so I came to realise that, whilst there is a huge amount of data that's already collected, it is too hard for most people. It's not accessible because it's spread across, like, hundreds of different websites and held within thousands of different databases and spreadsheets. So data like the stockyards, that's sitting there, and it's just typically too hard for most people to go in and use to map. And so we are bringing it up one level into visual form, but not taking it further. So we're not trying to tell people what to think. We want to work for people about how to think about data. And so here's another little graph. So this is, you know, like a typical graph that would have on Wiki New Zealand a number of visitors to New Zealand. You can see there, Australia. China is just over the US now in the last couple of years. And it's been really interesting. So I had the idea for Wiki New Zealand about almost three years ago, actually, and we launched the current site, which you'll see at wikinewsland.org, and that was just me going, right, so let's just start this with what people think we threw together like a WordPress template with some high charts and stuff, and just went for it to explore and see what people would think. And the response was amazing to see how many different uses there are for people with data. Once they could actually get their hands on it and use it without having to spend hours kind of finding it and thinking of the questions to ask in the first place. And so we've been on quite like a journey in the past couple of years. And since then, like we won the Australia and New Zealand Internet Award last year, that's what we're doing is the first of its kind in the world. And it's been, because I didn't come from the data side of things, so the open government data kind of movement isn't where I started. And so I don't know that much about it. And so I just kind of started at the user end and thought, what if everyone could use data? And since then have realized that when people have been talking about, you know, how to make data accessible for people and open data, that it has been focused on current users. And that tends to be people who want like APIs or machine readable formats and so that's what the whole kind of principles around data have been set at. But when I kind of started at this scene and it's like, oh, what if a seven-year-old wants to use data? What would that mean for how we structured all our data systems? Or what if a 42-year-old tow truck driver in Hawkes Bay wanted to be able to know how many accidents occurred in his region over time? What would that mean for data kind of requirements? And that's kind of set up the whole structure of how we've been building the new backend for bringing data together and how we display it, which I'm Nigel will kind of do a demo of soon. So it's been really exciting actually just to see that when you actually empower people with information that they haven't been able to get before the different kinds of questions that people can answer, that you don't even know to think of. I had someone the other day, we kind of share an office space with the jewelers and the guy came up to me and was like, oh, you do stuff with data, right? And I was like, yep. And he said, is there any way to know how many diamonds get imported into New Zealand? And I said, yeah, give me 15 minutes. And I went to the stats NZ site and found the value of diamonds imported by month for the last 8 years and sent them through a graph and he came over and was like, well, so we import x% of New Zealand's diamonds and I don't know what he's going to do with that information, right? But that data is sitting there and you just have to know what 18 clicks to use to get to it and you have to know how to make a graph. So that's kind of our whole purpose is getting people to use data about New Zealand and not just public data but also using private sector data. We have some companies that collect huge amounts of data or companies like Chorus and stuff as well that want to put their data into one place. It was interesting actually having the realisation that New Zealand's data is essentially organised by source and by that I mean if you want to use data the first thing you have to answer is who collected it. And that makes a lot of sense because it's an agency and you've collected all your health data and you put it on your website and you make it available for people in spreadsheets. But from a user that's as silly as having a dictionary ordered by country of origin where you open it up and you first have to know where it came from. If you don't know that the Ministry of Health exists or you don't know that there is a survey called the Household Income Survey you will never know how to get to that data. You're searching by source or by data set that you actually start just thinking of data naturally around what's the topic that I want to explore. And in terms of what impact I believe it will have is I think it's really like if someone had talked about something like Wikipedia before we ever used it and said I'm going to make an encyclopedia that anyone can edit and anyone around the world can do it and add to it. I don't think anyone would have thought it was a dumb idea that we could have really understood how much of an impact it could have and how we would come to use it like every day, multiple times a day for lots of different purposes. And similarly I feel like when we actually kind of enable everyone to use data that we can't even begin to imagine what the outcomes of that will be. Like I think sometimes around not everyone used to be able to read and that meant that some people were writers of content, some people were readers of content and others had like relider in those intermediaries to be told what was written or what it meant and what it said. And similarly I feel like right now with data most people have to rely on other people to translate it for them to analyse it or to tell them what it means and so I think that it's just a whole new language that we will be able to use that everyone, whether it's a 7 year old writing a story or someone running a business or having an argument with a friend about how many possums there are and if they're increasing or decreasing that it will kind of really change how we can all think. And if you've got any questions as I'm going like we're pretty small groups that just yell out, ah but you'll need the microphone I think or get in trouble. Okay thank you. In terms of wiki being a wiki and being something that is collaborative right now when you see the site it's not really evident that part of it but I really strongly believe that to get the best representation of data in New Zealand that it will come from collaborating and from drawing from experts. Like we will never be the domain experts probably on anything actually and so to be able to have a system whereby experts are able to contribute and help with auditing of content and adding graphs and making recommendations and helping kind of create the different sections is really valuable. It is different in that I think data is a really dangerous thing for people to be able to play with live and so there is like an auditing and publishing process but that I think is going to really make a really rich and kind of I don't know it kind of one of the examples that happened early on was I had a graph that showed the official age of retirement for OECD countries and I got that data from the OECD just as it was with the label and put it up on the site and someone emailed me a couple of weeks later and said just so you know like that there is no official age of retirement in New Zealand and sent me some links and I was like I didn't realise that the OECD had kind of a short cut how they named the data set and so I was able to then go in and edit the title and send it back to the person and go right you know it was more accurate but there is no way that I would know that you know without engaging experts around the table so it's pretty kind of it feels pretty special actually to have people that are willing to contribute and that care about their content areas and to come together and create a resource for everyone to use oh that was that one sorry but it has actually become to mean a whole lot more like in terms of the collaborative nature of the organisation like we've had, it feels like we've had hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of people's time contribute to what we're doing and I'm sorry I don't have lots of cool screenshots and stuff to show you because we're just going live with the new version in about three weeks right? but it's been amazing like every person that's part of the organisation that now gets paid started as a volunteer and I didn't really realise the true power of like a like a crowd and people being able to when I think when you know when you're when you're selling a company and you want to go oh I've got this product thing and I want to sell it to you and you know you try and solve it all for yourself and I've worked from the private sector and software companies before with that kind of model and then when we came to making Wiki New Zealand I thought it has to be different like it is different and we and started bringing people on the journey and creating an environment where anyone felt like they could input their idea and help us expand it and the power of that is almost indescribable in terms of what we've been able to do and getting into like government and getting them excited about what we're doing and different agencies and different technical experts and it's um I need to reflect on it a bit more actually because it's something that I never imagined like when I first started what actually happens when you go hey this is ours you want to help me make it and what that means so some of the stuff that we've been doing so when we first started and and we just kind of whacked up the current site and threw together stuff in the back end to see what we could do every graph was made like from a different excel spreadsheet and then uploading it was just really manual and painful but I didn't want to spend a lot of time and effort developing a whole system before we knew if we actually liked it and so what's been really exciting in the past kind of six months is designing and going to see if they can go right so you want to use this and so let's actually design it a bit more properly and um and um working with Nigel and his team at opcode to help kind of shape that and so I want to show you that we've only shown maybe like six people before um like outside of our little team what we've been um developing and it's really cool to finally see it live in terms of you know like all the data that we have is collected in pretty rubbish inconsistent formats with excel spreadsheets and merged files and extra columns and lines added for prettiness and when it comes to doing something useful it's not ideal haven't even got to silverlight plugins showing data PDF you name it random XML all sorts of well rubbish yeah yeah well formats designed by statisticians like the the legit the valid and stuff but they're so hard to understand and not for the average person certainly not so if we solve that problem once hopefully nobody else has to solve it is the idea behind the system we should probably show the spreadsheet first I know you're going to do the the easy one of these I'll do the easy one first alright so the system we are making so yeah source documents um files such as spreadsheets CSV files PDFs as mentioned that come from sources which are places like statistics New Zealand and so on so we've got a whole bunch of these in the system already the easy one was this one here time series 1996 to 2014 from the Ministry of Education it's a whole bunch of data that the Ministry of Education produces about students in New Zealand schools so it starts out as a spreadsheet with goodness knows how many sheets in it uh we'll show you an example of one of the ones that they give it later yeah so we jump into here oh in fact the first sheet is a table of content of all the kinds of data that they put in one big spreadsheet and they publish so if you actually wanted to know something from the Ministry of Education this is the format that you currently get this data right you have to download a big spreadsheet find a table that you're interested in and then try and do something with it like use Excel's graphing function to make it chart perhaps so we're going to extract some of this data out of this spreadsheet and into the database in a much more usable format so what we have here along the top here are the sheets it goes on and on and on um this is student role by student funding gear as of 1st of July 1996 to 2014 this is actually a simple table quite a simple table this is a two-dimensional table there are um this is school year levels of funding year levels down the first column and across this row is the year from 96 to 2014 so what we're going to do is extract all of this data the first thing we do is we take hey how about you do the driving yeah so I can hold this so you take the funding year column and you edit as a key data exists as tables tables are multi-dimensional and have a set of keys and each um thing of keys has a value so in this case for example funding year year 1 and then um actual year 1996 has the value 63863 this is just going to be a two-dimensional table quite easy to understand so we're adding that as a key funding year level and then we're adding the second key here which is the year in which that data exists and so now I can kind of select there like they'll end up being like a lot of different units that are strong typed yeah so one of the key things about this system that's different from a system you may have heard of before um called N or other such examples of open data is that often they grab just the raw data the raw numbers and they publish those to you and typing information is not included so you get given a number but you're not told whether for example you get given a dollar value but you're not told is this a New Zealand dollar in 2014 inflation adjusted with or without GST um there are other examples of types as well that you get that are great some numbers are just numbers some numbers are percentages um such data such typing information about data is not often kept and that's one thing that we do very well here so we get to say that this is the the years are actually years we say that they're years which means that if the spreadsheet had um like year ended 1996 year ended 97 because some brain dead person who created the spreadsheet decided that was a good way to write them our extractor looks at those you tell it those are years and the extractor understands that it can in fact pull those out and turn that into that must mean 1996 that must mean 1997 and so on and so forth so it all becomes very consistent and so just um what the actual values are the number in the student role so that number right yes so in this case the numbers in the grid are just straight numbers numbers of people and thus a table has been created which you can see what have we got here so we have funding year level values down the left here and then the year and then the value for that so the total in 1996 was this the unit of those values is a number and the number is called the student role at that time how many 400 isn't there so if you scroll down a bit we can see that it's grabbed all of them out so you can see all of the individual cells have been taken out and they're all stored in a nice consistent format they're all strongly typed they're all ready to go you can drop the Excel spreadsheet at this point the data is in a nice consistent format in the database and from here we can move on to doing more interesting things with it alright so that's a pretty simple one here's another example of a spreadsheet that's less awesome where for example these can you see my little cursor yes because it's there these are actually merged cells and this one here is the heading so it says gender and then male and female but these cells have been merged together this is real data from the MSD ministry of social development that's right New Zealand benefit numbers and so this is what they do right they create a table and then they go we're going to put formatting around it they've clearly managed to clear out the lines that divide up the cells so that they've only got grids in the place where the data is some of them do what they put tiny little columns that are green to make fancy borders these are done with actual cells and they colour the background of the cell because they don't know how to drive Excel this is the kind of thing that we are working with and trying to get around we were thinking of making a mix tape of our reactions when we come across datasets it's pretty interesting you get a lot of why would they do that kind of coming along so we imported that that same spreadsheet here and so yes one nice thing about extractors is you can see all the formatting has disappeared we have only extracted the numbers out of it we don't care about the formatting it would be nice to fix up the the cell widths perhaps a little bit but in general the important information is there and all the extraneous fluff is gone alright so when we're coming to extract this we can talk about it yeah you have a talk about that okay so I'm going to add this selection as a key and call this minor categories can you guys read what's in the cells or should I read out that kind of what I'm okay cool and that's text but of course some of these are kind of headings and so what we can do is split this key and then record the specific ones that we want to be marked differently so that's the gender one the ethnic group label the age group and the continuous duration and start recording and call this the major categories and this is also in text and then we have this here which we will add as a key which is September 2014 it's the quarter so quarter and in the future here the type will be added where that will become a strong type but for now I'll just put it text otherwise I'll break it here are the benefit types and some of these are merged cells again but if we add selection as a key benefit type and this one which is a you'll see like it's like number percentage number percentage alternate rows which isn't ideal when you actually want to come and use it so if I add the selection as a key and say type and save that text then I can say use this key when selecting the value units and so when I don't have that selected there's only one option for a value unit and value label and when you select that there's two and it says where it equals number I'll call that number and select number and where it's percentage and again we haven't added percentage yet so I'll just select number for now but that will probably be there next week and when I press save extraction I'm going to there's going to be some things that are broken but I'll show you what we get so far so it says that there's some problems with the extraction but that it has been split out so age group is now has been separated out from the major and the minor categories the benefit type whether it's a percentage or number the value etc but I think there'll be two things broken did I so one thing is that failed to pass the number NA and the other is that the minor categories can't be empty so I just want to show you how I'd fix that yeah so NA is the person who's made the data is actually put NA in the cell instead of a number yeah so you see that kind of around here we can do a lot of it yeah yeah all sorts of rubbish people can put in there we're trying to figure out yesterday so there's a sheet that Amy's been working with cells that have N indicate less than 5 but everything in the spreadsheet has been rounded to the nearest 10 and so it seems that N should really equal 0 but that also is incorrect yeah so there's lots of like little things that we're trying to build in and understand that again causes a little bit of colourful language yeah so that's New Zealand for example lots of the data that they publish some of the cells will have S for suppressed for some reason that number's been suppressed or C for confidential is another thing that can happen from time to time so we need to be able to do it but I just assume the grid is just simple numbers not at all so to get around that I can just add a roll with the values and so when it is equal to NA then skip this row column and done and the other thing is that so right now some of these around the splitting of the keys isn't coming through so this key here goes from B6 to B23 so it still includes the darker red cells so I need to add a roll that when it's empty because it's been assigned to something else to skip this column or row and so that should now work yeah so all those NA's have been removed and um at this point at this point just pulling the data apart before you start reinterpret yeah exactly yeah so that's the extractor was it a question or are you on it now is there any sort of audit trial for your conversion process like who did it and what decisions you made along the way about what the data should mean or possibly mean I'm going to hand it to you got it fully intended that there will be one not one existing in the system now but the way it's done at the moment every step is stored so we know what was done what happened we also know who did it as well and we plan for that information to be available all the way through the system so apart hasn't been shown here we'll talk about that a little bit is the part where charts are made from this data and the plan is such that you could potentially click on you know tell me about this chart thing and it will go well this chart was created from data was created in this way from this spreadsheet or these ways from these spreadsheets so let's see the extractor part of the back end and then from here do you want to talk about the tables and the chart designer oh yeah sure so we've got an extraction out of here something a little bit tricky about how these work is that they're constantly updating the data right so every three months the Ministry of Social Development publishes the next set of benefit numbers from the last three months and so they put out a new spreadsheet and it'll be a pain in the butt to have to go through this all the time what's more the new spreadsheet has only got the latest three months of data and you know it has data from the past five years basically a rolling five-year window but we want to kind of keep it forever right so having made an extraction what we really want to do with it is create a table and a table is kind of the canonical store of these extractions a table is made up of one or more extractions so from here I won't create one from this but you'll see a table looks very similar to an extraction again same thing list of keys and the values for those keys but an extraction can be made up of for example when we start importing the MSTs data the five years of data we could get out of the first spreadsheet that they published in December 2014 and then when they published their update in March 2015 we can go in there we can make an extraction of the last three months we can add it to that table so that we have now the table just being extended further with this data so tables are really the the store of data the extraction thing is nice but ultimately it all ends up being a table from tables we have a public API as one output this is a HTTP JSON API so you can request all of the data from this table and eventually we will make it so that you can request give me all the data from this table where the year is 1983 so on and so you can take all this into your system and do with it what you will do is that we will also include the strong typing information so that you can compare across data sets which is a nice thing so Ministry of Social Development use one definition of the New Zealand dollar all of theirs are 2010 inflation adjusted and then the data that some other place uses they never adjust for inflation we will provide it out the API all adjusted in the manner to which you require same with things like miles versus kilometers if a sheet this data comes from America all the distances are miles but over here New Zealand's data is all in kilometers then we will provide a mechanism such that they can all be converted to kilometers so you can compare them consistently across data sets so it's tables and the API so the API will be available for everyone but we will also use it to feed into Wiki New Zealand the front end and that will have ultimately tens of thousands of graphs and simple maps that you can kind of play with and explore but we will be building those using something called the chart designer that we're creating at the moment that will ultimately be something that other people can use as well and do you want to talk about the details of that or do we not really know all of them yet yeah so we have a hypothetical view of it we're designing it now the general idea being that you can take sets of data out of these tables and just go I want to chart that please and that's all you have to do and it will put them on axis for you and show you them and then you can adjust it but say I want the data from 1990 to 2010 only please and so on where there were NAs what would probably happen is that the if there was a line chart say given year probably get a hole just automatically provided the idea being that you can take data from any table and start playing around with it and chart designer make all sorts of different types of charts with data from multiple data sets so if you want to graph benefit rates against cheese consumption for example it should be as easy as finding both of them trying to put them together and then start playing with how it looks yeah it's kind of one of my questions as well there's some way for you to kind of get some dynamic let the data be intelligent in a way where you can actually have dynamic correlation so let's say you've got all these various data sets and just throw them all together and see which data sets start to show correlation so like I said income versus cheese consumption versus violent neighbourhoods or whatever the case may be so you can actually start challenging some preconceived you know correlation is not causation kind of thing is that possible? yeah so there's that website isn't there I forget what the guy's name is called yeah Getmunder? I can't remember with all the charts the crazy charts yeah crazy charts that show things like consumption of cheese in America is 99% correlated with like reports of nightmares or something like that like really yeah so this guy does that and we were looking at that initially and going it would be really awesome if the system could do that and I think in time potentially it could it's not something that we do right now it probably won't be this year but yeah but absolutely but also you could take our IPI and do that yourself yeah and then let us use that maybe and but when you come like instead of coming to Wiki New Zealand and just being a chart designer and you know you have to figure out what data to use to build something like when you I think the difference between a lot of sites that have data that you can do things with is that it's important I believe for people to come and arrive and see something to start with because if you don't know how to think about it or you don't know what how to build a graph it becomes too hard and so we will like internally and grow a team and make lots of graphs ourselves and put them on the site and then others can come along and either create their own or edit ones that we've already created in terms of what we're doing organizationally we have been working with some government agencies and are doing a kind of a proof of concept at the moment to demonstrate the value of what we're doing with the goal of it being like an all of government service where we can do be the accessible and the dissemination platform for all of New Zealand government which is a really exciting question You ever had any issues with copyright, particularly Crown copyright? We haven't yet but in saying that we are taking a lot of the data that's already sitting there that's already been made available but not accessible but we're trying to really work with the agencies not just stand there and take things and we are kind of at the moment with part of the concept is defining a methodology with how we engage with everyone and getting them to sign off on the methodology because some agencies are really concerned around the metadata that follows the data through the system which it does and when people take it out of context what they can do with it so we haven't had big issues but we're really cautious of that We'll work through that While they have Crown copyright that doesn't mean that they get to keep it to themselves exactly they are not required to release it They are now but there are baby steps to get there Hi I was just wondering how does your site deal with big data sets like stuff that's available from data.gov.nz or reference there When you say big data sets what do you mean exactly because there aren't many big data sets like true big data sets especially public ones like a lot of the data from data.gov.nz Yeah which kinds of data sets I don't know I can't put an example out of the air but I know that there are some quite big data sets available I was just wondering is there like a size limit to the data that you guys can deal with or have you thought about that I'll just borrow this one Yeah so there's no real practical size limit yet but we're also not the type of data that blows out to say many petabytes or anything like that A lot of the stuff as you can see is already aggregated so number of children on the school roll in this year is already an aggregated number if we were to take in as perhaps what might be nice one day to take in like a raw feed of that information and anonymise it and such like ourselves we would have problems but right now the data that we're getting is often already aggregated number of cancers by year and such like that these are already aggregated numbers with that stuff we don't really have a problem right now Not sure if we're in question time or if you've still got more to go Just curious what your business model is how you're funded and also what your outreaches like this is really interesting how are you going to get it out there into the hands of people so they know about it and can start to use it A few things I missed saying we're a registered charity in the same way that Wikipedia is a charity and I think people would treat it quite differently if it was a commercial organisation I set up Wookie New Zealand to be a charity from the start but I do think of it more as a social enterprise in terms of how we behave I don't think New Zealand is large enough to fund what we would need to do this well just through individual donations so we've worked towards a couple of different revenue models one being the people paying the service to put their data on and that's what we're working with government at the moment to prove that so they're paying us to start and to do that with a bunch of data sets and part of that will be to do a cost benefit analysis report to say what this would look like going forward and some of the private partnerships we have are similar where they are paying us to put their data on and then it might say proudly presented to you by chorus or whatever in addition to that and which is part of the discussion that I'd kind of like to have and to drill what you think is what we're developing in the backend now with the platform Grace is I think it's really valuable to lots of uses and when I first showed it to someone they said I already know who in the UK would want to buy this for the government there to use and I don't know what to do about that because I agree that there is a commercial model for packaging part of this up as a product and selling it into other countries or other or large companies that have lots of data that want to do things with it but we're not a commercial organisation we our purpose, we're really purpose driven our purpose is to get people to use data about New Zealand and we've benefited hugely from open source stuff that's how we started was throwing things together that already existed that were shared with us and I don't know what the best thing is to do with what we have now at the border level we've been having some interesting discussions because we're not in it to make a profit that's not why we're here but we can't theoretically if there was an opportunity to make money from what we have that can be directed towards the purpose of what New Zealand like that's what as governance you're supposed to do so I'm really curious about if there are models or what you think about how something like this could be best treated so that it is freely open for people to use and how you can imagine that working can still have a sustainable model that makes sense does anyone have any thoughts on that have you got a question rather than an answer to that another question interesting media have you been used as source by media and the other question is how's your output and your work licensed for that sorry I didn't answer the rest of your question before either so we've got two main audiences to start with which is schools and SMEs so small to medium business owners and we haven't been trying to do big pushes of people using it when we first like I think we've had about 130,000 users also in the last year or so kind of making up numbers but we haven't tried to do a big push and now that we are building the new front and back end we are thinking about what we're going to do for that part of that will be going into schools and talking to schools and universities about how people can use it and that's been really people, teachers have been really excited about that part of it is partnering with people like NZTE or MB to go around doing workshops and with business owners to say this is how you could use data but I think one of the interesting things is we're almost going to end up with hundreds of marketing arms because when people put their data on Wiki New Zealand then they start driving people to us and saying you have to go and find our data here now and then they are kind of advertising that to all of their networks and then the people that come will stumble across other data sets and when we started we got quite a bit of media attention and I did a TED talk and stuff and I've just kind of tried to halt that a little bit until we're ready to really sell it but I'm not people seem to like it and it's free to use and it's valuable so the spreading of it is not something I'm worried about at the moment in terms of sorry, media itself using it that's they're kind of like our next down of who we would like to focus on but I know that I almost feel like we need to kind of prove ourselves a bit more and have the brand a bit more respected and known before media will take exactly like our graph posts and use them but we're like I've talked to people about being involved in some of the journalism training schools and things and they're keen to get me involved in that but I just want to be kind of ready and have everything a little bit more robust before jumping into that. Question? So through your work are you actually trying to foster the adoption and the use of permissible licenses like Creative Commons and GPLs and the like so both from the people that you source the data but then also making the data available downstream so try encourage the whole ecosystem to basically keep the data open? Definitely, like all our stuff is by 3.0 kind of open Creative Commons stuff if people have given us data that have different licenses we'll display those and just retain whatever licensing they require but to date we've been able to get everything as 3.0 and encourage that. Have you seen your suppliers adopt permissive licenses because of the work that you've... No but that's probably because we're starting with low hanging fruit and data that's easy to use and what I think will happen is that the people that are a bit nervous about it don't understand the whole system yet they don't understand how people will reuse it and the data that will stay associated with the data so once they start seeing that and seeing examples and trusting the brand more then I do think that will happen. Yeah, there could be a snowball effect regarding that as well you start out with people getting their data on it and then they see what people can do with it and they go wow this is awesome, we want to be on this and then we say to them well if your data is not Creative Commons then it's a little bit difficult and they go maybe we should do that. You talk about the trust of the data and at the moment if you're thinking about something like Wikipedia where you have lots of people guarding the data and making sure it's being checked and it's correct and the source and the veracity of the data is good how do you do that with data that people are generally going to upload for graphs into the Wiki New Zealand space like will you do secured pipelines directly out of Stats New Zealand where you maintain the pipeline and no one actually touches it so you know it's a direct reflection of the data from that office or how do you plan to handle that sort of side of things. Yeah that's a really important piece that we'll live and die on right is getting all that right and you can't just arbitrarily upload a data set and suddenly have that as part of the system it does need to go through our kind of auditing processes and checking and you can see who's changed what and when and why and that's transparent for everyone some of those processes we haven't defined yet because we haven't had to and when we start scaling out and having 50 people sitting around the country importing data of those systems we really robust will probably have everything imported twice so that you can you know compare and if they're the same then it's fine and if it's not someone's yeah totally the biggest way to get round that is just by operating entirely transparently and if you see a mistake or if people know and then they feel free like they can actually that they're involved in the community enough to go hey this is wrong and then we figure out why I think that's going to be the biggest way that we win and that's it win through collaboration


We're back with the breakfast and it's you know the very fastest you know segment here if you like to see your topic for us we're looking at the power sector especially generation however there's been several reports about you know our generating capacity and the fact that we've lost resources the availability of generation capacity in Nigeria's power sector dropped again in 2022 as it crashed from six million three hundred and thirty six thousand point five two megawatts recorded in 2021 to five million three hundred and forty six thousand point eight two megawatts as of okay that's uh five thousand of course five thousand three hundred and forty six point eight two and of course six thousand three hundred and thirty six point five two uh bells of last year data being made available to electricity generation has been reported it was also observed that the annual capacity payment lost to power generation companies had increased to 1.8 trillion era as data from the document for the showed a decrease in the average utilized power in 2022 now figures obtained from the power generation companies indicated that while the average quantum of electricity utilized in 2021 was around four thousand one hundred and eleven point nine eight megawatts it dropped to three thousand nine hundred and forty point five four megawatts you know in 2022 the document and power generation trend uh that's between 2013 where it was privatized to uh 2022 showed that Nigeria's average availability or available generation capacity fluctuated between four thousand megawatt and seven thousand seven hundred megawatts since the sector was privatized uh then in 2013 so there are too many questions around you know generation of power if we're looking at the power sector uh what exactly is responsible for the stagnation of power generation since it was privatized and all of the excuses for privatization and now how do we solve the problem of unutilized generation because there's one thing to say we're not even generating enough to cater for the population uh that we have 218 million persons uh but what do we also do do we evacuate all of the power that we generate or that's been generated these are some of the uh conversations that we like to understand and have answers so this morning to make sense of all of that Nika Gule joins us. Nika is so good to know that you're joining us this morning uh for Makadi. Thank you very much Misi. I'm happy to be here and good morning to our viewers. So but really let's let's talk about this uh what are your thoughts an overview of this uh report. This report is overwhelming because the power situation in Nigeria is shameful, shameful because Nigeria is a gas producing nation and all over the world as we speak today regardless of the developments that are happening in the renewable energy sector gas is the largest source of power generation in the world as we speak today so to think that a country that is a major gas producer in fact Nigeria has more gas resources than could wear that this nation is unable to generate transmit and distribute electricity to her citizens is very shameful this is one of the things that Nigeria shouldn't be suffering from but because of the ineptitude in our leadership we are suffering Nigeria should actually be generating close to 200,000 megawatts of electricity per day because that is the global average that is the global benchmark that you generate 1000 megawatts per one million people so if Nigeria is 200 million people and above then our electricity generation should be getting to the 200,000 megawatts and we are doing 4,000, 3,000, 5,000 as the report you are quoting is showing imagine that you should be earning 200,000 but you are only earning 4,000 never poverty will not flee from you and that is why Nigeria is paying down in poverty because there is a direct correlation between electricity and development in this modern industrial and info age if you have no electricity you can never have development so it is shameful is the submission and my summary to this report well we know that the figures have been dropping since 2018 I mean at some point it felt like it was better but from 2018 the figures you know keep dropping but looking at the sector entirely we have been looking at 100 megawatts growth in the past sector for a very long time now that's an annual thing especially since privatization so my question is do you think that we have a future there's a future of a par generation in Nigeria with the 100 megawatts growth that's been recorded in the sector at 100 megawatts increase in generation per year there is no future it is abysmally so low it can never be said there's a future but you see like we said the other day we can no longer be advising president Buhari because he has five months left in his tenure I believe that president Buhari will be by now writing his handover notes so our attention is turning to the new government that will take power on May the 29th to that government I want to say that you can bring hope you can bring the future into the Nigerian power sector in very easy ways number one Nigeria is producing gas and a large quantum of that gas is being fled once the next government comes into office they should stop gas flaring and what did you do with the gas you channel those that gas into turbines let's see the concept of power generation using gas is so so simple there is an equipment that is called a turbine when you install that equipment you put gas into that equipment on the other side we come electricity it is as simple as that and these turbines are available all over the world they can be both of the shape some can be manufactured within weeks a turbine is manufactured because the technology is already there it is tested it's been there over time and it's just for the next president to commission a tax force that will start installing turbines all over the Niger data so that the gas that is being flared today will be powered into those turbines and electricity will be generated for Nigeria you see the other thing is we have a transmission capacity of about 12,000 megawatts and generation so far as you have seen in this report is hovering between anything 3000 to 6000 so that means there is capacity on transmission where if this electricity that will be generated by these turbines is pushed in transmission will carry it and when transmission carries it it will then go to distribution when it goes to distribution you can see clearly today that there is a market for electricity that is not being fulfilled anywhere there is power failure in Nigeria today that's a market that distribution is unable to fulfill so the next government can set off this tax force and I tell you with these six months we are going to begin to experience major differences in the electricity sector and we will no longer be talking about 100 megawatts increase we'll be talking about thousands five thousand ten thousand increase yearly until we at least get to like 50,000 then we'll begin to know that okay we have started making progress in the electricity sector so that is what the next government has to do and I'm not yet speaking about the other energy sources that we have Nigeria has an abundance of energy sources we have the sunlight daily almost eight to ten hours of pure sunshine we go to Europe now it's winter that we not see sunshine for more than two hours we have water all the rivers can be converted to hydro electricity then we have the wind we have the wind if we go to the bad beach in Lagos it's first turbines with turbines and electricity will be generated for the entire Lagos we try you need any other source and you know the difference between wind turbines and solar is that solar you need batteries because in the night there will be no sun for wind the wind is 24 seven so you don't even need batteries you don't generate the heat from the wind turbine and supply to Lagos and you are sure that that wind is going to blow for 24 hours a day in fact it's just a low-hanging prepair so 100 megawatts is abysmal but the next government can actually make it five to ten thousand megawatts if they do the right things so the right things you have said would be what do you want to go through that again systematically yes so the right thing will be first instead of flaring our gas in the Niger data install turbines which are very much available because the technology is well known is tested it's been there over time install the turbines pipe that gas into the turbines or the other side of the electricity that's one number two begin to tap into the renewable energy sources every river in Nigeria should be dammed when you dam a river this is the economy that develops from that dammy number one hydroelectricity will be generated for the communities around number two you can use that for irrigation that's agricultural number three you can use that for fishing number four you can use that for drinking water so the simple concept of dammy a river this is the economy that develops from it i must say i can tell you that there is no community in Nigeria that does not have a river very recently i flew on on a plane from Abuja to Ula in Adama state it was the first time i was flying to the north not east and i was so so so surprised to see the quantum of land that Nigeria has for agriculture and the number of rivers i saw below as in like every community i was in rivers and that's that was electricity for you and so we talk about the gas turbines we talk about the the water dams we talk about wind turbines wind turbines on the bad beach and they are going to rotate every day 24 several generating legal i mean electricity for the entire southwest yeah then we we're talking about i don't even want to talk about things like biomass you know because these water sources are even in love you have the sunshine there pure sunshine eight to ten hours of sunshine guaranteed every day go to every community and install the to the solar panels and generate electricity and give them there you know if they have anything left put in the national grid so this is the things that need to happen the entire electricity sector needs to be unbounded because you know one thing now people talk about privatization but you see we privatize generation we also privatize distribution but there is a a behemoth in between that is called transmission transmission was not privatized it is in the hands of a government that does not have money a government that is going to pay salaries that government has not been able to increase the capacity on the transmission so what he means is that if you generate transmission must carry it first and if transmission is not there your generation is useless for you to distribute transmission must give you that power to distribute if they don't give you that power to distribute you have nothing to distribute so why has government created this bottleneck between a privatized generation and a privatized distribution so the next government must have to unbundle the whole of this thing privatize the entire value chain on the power sector and I tell you messy look the opportunities are there because we are a country of 200 million people that is demand that is demand for electricity and then we have the energy sources so what is left put them together you know you know that's going to be that's that's going to be you know another part of the conversation so we'll definitely get to that part where if we have the market and the question will follow whether or not we have the market for all of that but when you say a country that does not have money is it a country that does not have money or is a country that is wasting money wasting resources or has been very you know flamboyant with her resources some people will say is a I know I'm bare government what joint parties not necessarily physical parties but you know with the way we are locating resources to things that are not priority is is what people have talked about but I like also to also talk about this issue of the fact that we're not even generating enough to meet up with the standard universal standard of generation and also to meet up with our population but also have the point where even with the fact that we are still grappling with four thousand three thousand megawatts we're still unable to evacuate all of the powers that we have generated all that we have generated and so we're still you know around one thousand megawatts and three thousand seven hundred megawatts I mean what exactly is the problem that we're not even generating enough but as much as we're even generating four thousand we're not even still able to evacuate all that we have generated what is the problem and how do we solve it but thank you very much before I answer that question I want to touch on the very valid point that you have raised about what is Nigeria's problem is it that we don't have money or we're being wasteful with the money that we have I think it's both both because Nigeria's federal government budget I mean this budget that President Buhari just signed of two trillion if you convert that into dollars it's not even up to forty billion dollars it's not even up to forty billion and the same yesterday that President Buhari was signing that budget we've been told about Apple Apple the maker of iPhones and iPads and all of that that their market capitalization just fell below the two trillion dollars mark for the first time in a few years two trillion dollars and Nigeria a country of two hundred million people were signing budget of forty billion dollars forty billion and we're making a match out of it so the money number one is not enough but then W. Jopadi is that the small money that we have is being looted is being wasted so that is why we are paying down where we are now when we come to the question you have raised about generation and what needs to be done you see the problem in Nigeria is that we try to do things but maybe because of vested interests or whatever we don't do them the right way the generation privatization process has happened and a chunk of the power power plants are now in the hands of the private sector but the private sector is not going to be able to generate what transmission cannot carry they are not going to be able to generate what distribution will not be able to supply now transmission number one is in the hands of the government which is a bottleneck then distribution was not privatized in the right way you will see that there is no major power player in the whole world that is in the distribution sector it's different from when we privatize telecoms when we privatize telecoms the MTNs that came the AT Salas and all other that came were already players in the telecoms sector in the region and as well in the world you know and when they came in they were able to come in with their money their expertise their technology to change the telecoms sector in Nigeria the distribution that has happened in Nigeria I mean we know the owners majority of the owners are politically exposed persons you know they have no pedigree in the power sector they don't understand the industry they don't even have the money to invest and so that has now become a problem on the soul so you can see that these are the issues that are involved in the whole value chain of the of the power sector in fact if you ask me I will say that generation is the least of the problem because the people who have invested in in in in generation they have capacity the last of Tony Elumelu they have the capacity to increase capacity in that sector but transmission is a bottleneck which the next government must unbundle and then distribution privatization has to be redone so that it is now giving to those who are major players in the power sector who have what it takes to change that sector until we do this we'll continue to have these conversations and there will be no change well um so let's even talk about the fact that we have a vision called vision uh you know 2030 right and so we're looking at vision 2030 generating 30 000 megawatts is it viable with 100 megawatts annually for a period of time it's certainly not viable at 100 megawatts a year increase in power sector generation if you if you want to move from so 100 megawatts means you need 10 years to have 1000 megawatts so for you to get to 30 000 that means you need 300 years no it's it's not achievable but look let's see the opportunity here because you need 10 years you need 10 years to do a 1000 megawatts because we have to go to 30 000 megawatts 300 300 years because 10 years will give you imagine me reading those figures as you know five million and six million i apparently i'm sure i was looking at some other thing i was looking at us in a different light but we need just 700 because i mean if we if we if we say that okay 100 is what we're doing and then in terms of growth so if we can increase the capacity to say about 700 800 then we probably would be there so what's exactly the issue 20 30 is not far from us we've talked about 2023 today we're here in 2023 2025 is not far you know you talk about 2030 is as close as we're looking at it now so um if it's not viable what exactly is left how much more of the megawatts do we need to make 1000 so we can get there is it that we lack the capacity what exactly is the challenge because that's what we have so there's a vision there's a plan by the government of course which is led by the buharis administration and we know that you know this is actually futuristic we hope that the government comes the next government comes in place and they're also looking at this direction but can we get to you know 30 000 megawatts by you know 2030 so i might see you have touched on the nerves of the conversation and as you say what's the issue what's the challenge there's only one issue there's one challenge in this whole thing we're discussing and the answer is simple the government is superintendent over the power sector the government is a player in the power sector and i can tell you globally any sector where the government is in charge doesn't do well and when you now look at nigeria where institutions are not strong and all of that it really compounds the problem what is the simple solution the simple solution is to do to the power sector what we have done to the telecom sector i don't know how you were there but messy when i was growing up for you to make a phone call you will go to night's office maybe in the midnight and go and kill and then buy those cards and try to make a phone call you know the night had this one we called not mine not which was their their mobile phone then which was only available in big cities like abuja and legos you know they were in fact a minister a minister in the government as a den say telephone was not for the poor this was the kind of shenanigans that we're hearing in the telecom sector why because a government bishimoto called night care was in charge fast forward to the 2000s when privatization came in and the nts came in and they brought their money their expertise their technology today we have phone coverage from an average of about 500 000 lines before privatization nigeria is having uh almost 200 million lines of telephone today and the contribution to the gdp is humongous for a mere less than one percent we're talking about 20 percent now so that it won't happen very privatized so the simple solution to this is that just hand over the power sector the same way we did telecom with the private sector and once you do that messy look you will not even know that this is nigeria again because the power sector have a bigger impact on the economy and development than even the telecoms and you know everything is in place we started to talk about demand there was a professor that sat a professor in legos he said he's a professor in the power sector he sat on tv and was saying that oh nigeria one of the problems in nigeria the truth sector is that there is no demand and i wrote an article to criticizing i want to read the article i appointed the professor to the fact that anywhere in nigeria you see a generator anywhere from the a better passenger generator to the humongous 500 uh mega uh i mean uh 500 kva that you see even 1000 kva that you see in nigeria that is demand that is not fulfilled by the electricity sector the generator in nigeria is demand that the electricity sector did not fulfill if the electricity sector fulfill that demand the generator will not be there so there is demand then the energy sources are there will discuss about them what is there for life is just to convert the energies uh energy resources them to where the demand is so that we can carry all the generators who are planted every place and and export them if nigeria has 24 seven bar supply we need a generator again now we need to go i mean you have said that we have the markets because i was going to ask that if we do have a market i mean what's the essence of saying that you have a market and then you don't have the structure so if you say we have a market what is the you know dynamics uh surrounding it so we have a market and like i said every generator in nigeria is demand for electricity that is not being fulfilled so the simple dynamics here is this we have the supply we through the energy resources we have we have the market what is in between is to be able to convert those energy resources into electricity transmit it and distribute it but this cannot happen if the government is superintendent over the sector the government must let go the electricity sector the way the detail it comes that is the answer well we have to go down it's as good as almost saying yes we know that we have the market but what happens when we're not utilizing the market what structures do we have in place have we been able to sort out the basic necessities at the end of the day you begin to ask yourself do we really have a market because if we do have a market then we'll be walking towards all of that but nika gule it's been quite interesting talking about this with you this morning on the breakfast thank you so much we appreciate your time thank you very much messiah have a nice day have a nice day viewers and we continue to repeat it go and get your voters cars i know that i make us immediately easy voters cars are either the local government or the world some of you are in Lagos abuja you have to travel to your world or to your states local government to collect them pay please go because that is an investment we need to take back our country all right that's it this morning we take a break when we return we'll be looking at our second conversation i mean stakeholders have decried the government's not being responsible for ensuring the takeoff of the mro just stay with us when we return we'll talk some more


I mean, there's the video, there's the background, there's the man, four time NBA champ, John Sally joining us now. Uh, hold on. What's going on with your back on this morning? I'm in out of space. I'm always in out of space. I'm not an alien, I'm in out of space. What's happening? Good vibes. No, this is good, man. We want to talk about everything, honestly, and pick your brain a little bit, so much going on in the league. I think the big story last night has to be the return of Draymond after the long suspension coming off the bench. They don't look great. For you, in your opinion, does he need to change the way he plays? Are they at rock bottom? What is your take on the way this warrior team looks right now? I was with us, you know, not to brag, but you know, Chicago Bulls had us in for the Ring of Honor last week and I'm sitting next to Steve Kerr and I go, when's Draymond coming back? He said Monday against Memphis. He goes, sound, they scored 75 on us in the first half. I said, I know is why I asked why it was Draymond. So I believe he's the energy. I said this on another show that I won't mention undisputed and I said that I thought he was the energy of the squad and you know, you can be upset with the way he is, the way he comes in, but I've never seen, well, I haven't seen in a long time a player who plays every game and who is intense and inside of that game. Now, yeah, he did grab somebody by the neck in a full Nelson, which I totally understand. Some people that walk up to me, I want to put in a full Nelson, but, and he did get his jersey ripped, but he was being a protector for his team. You know what I'm saying? Imagine somebody coming up to Louisville and pulling one of the curls out of his head. You know what I'm saying? You know, you can't do that. So you need somebody up there doing that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Rishi Wallace, he said that, you know, that 2004 Pistons team is to blame for all his antics, basically the bullying that he does was from hanging out in that locker. Are you buying that? I'm buying it. I'm buying the fact that he's from Central Michigan. He's seen what it takes from that 2014.  It's that mentality that you have to take when you want something. It's very American, very American. So I, I think, I think him being a strong minded, but as an intense player, like they can say what he wants to be that in between height and to be able to get there and hit a three when necessary, go to the basket, play the toughest defense on everybody.  This is, this is an important piece of the game.   How would he fit on those, on those groups? He would fit great. I don't, I don't know if he would take the place of Dennis Robin is no one can take the place of big man. But the mentality is definitely there. It's definitely somebody we would want on the squad that thinks about us first. But Bill and Bear used to have this attitude and this mentality. I remember I was playing against Atlanta Hawks and you know, I went to Georgia Tech. So my whole four years in college, I'm playing against Dominique and Tree Rollins and, and, and, and the like. And when I got up to, I think Thanksgiving, I was more comfortable with those guys and I wore the pistons. And so I went to Kevin Willis's house with Thanksgiving and all kind of the next day they dragged me up and down court. They elbowed me in different ways and Bill and Bear says, it may be your boys, but when they're wearing, when you, when you're wearing these colors, these are, you're our guy. And I never forgot. I'm glad it happened my first year. I'm glad it happened within the first month of me playing because when I went to play against MJ, you know, we're both fraternity brothers, Omega Sapphire Incorporated, the best fraternity in the world. And I put them on his back. He was like, man, you wanted him. I said, MJ, I've always been one of them. But after the game, I'm all over you, right? I loved, I loved the Ferrari. Nobody hanging with me after the end of the game. But listen, that mentality of us against the world is that why you see that you see those t-shirts say Detroit against everybody. So Draymond has that mentality of us against the world. And he is right. When we look back in 10 and 20 years, we're going to realize Draymond was right. It's them against the world. And he has to be the intimidated he is. He has to be the intense player he is. I would, you know, I'm sorry. He had to take so many, you know, games off, but both of you guys know if you can get a break in between the season, take it. That's a fact. So where the game is today with the physicality, would do you think a bad boys team like that will work in today's game? Would it be so different? No, I don't because I think now we realize back when I played well, a while ago, I would say players were making not as much money as they were making now. So now players off Fortune 500 companies coming in as as ice ice. George government would say is they get paid on potential. They're not getting paid on talent.  And they're getting paid according to what the the person last year got paid. So they got a new contract. If you get paid, whatever you pay, number 10 last year is going to be at least 20 percent more this year. So a lot of that would not have worked. Plus, I think this game is an international more of an international game now in Asia, and it's not good when players show what they consider to be insubordination to the referees or to the yelling and arguing. They don't want that kind of mentality or that kind of game in front of their audience. So we had to change it. And I think it's I think what we did. Everyone keeps saying that we were the bad boys. But if you ask George James Worthy, James Worthy was like, they're not bad boys. They just play hard. It's the Celtics who were doing the dirty ones doing all kind of stuff. Yeah, I'm telling on them, those Celtics. You know, it's I can't even celebrate anymore without getting teed up. But I when you play, John, it was probably for a lot of us considered our favorite time of the NBA and the names that get brought up all the time. And it usually is on the heels of a Dreymon moment because we bring up Mahorn and Lane beer and all those guys. Were you ever intimidated by any of them? Was there one guy that you just sort of wanted to stay away from? On my team? No, anywhere, anywhere, like in the time you played, yeah. No, no, like we would come in, drink all the drinks, smoke all the smoke and girl all the girl. So we would we would have won. You know, if your girl came to the game, you know, the boy boys at the end of the game, she would have at least five numbers on a piece of paper. They wouldn't work, but we would we would definitely we would definitely make you think about hating us the next time you played. No, we we were the guys who were black. The reason we took on the persona of the Raiders, Al Davis and my guy, Ronnie Rothstein. Not Ronnie Ross, Ronnie Ross, it was coach Onstein. Onstein made sure we had all this Raider gear and Bill and Ben was like, hey, we're going to be like the Raiders of the NBA. So, you know, we were thinking of manifesting that mentality that we were going to be the bad guy and everybody remembers the bad guy. That's why they talk about our team, which was 35 years ago when our first championship. They still talk about us, but, you know, him talk about those teams of Milwaukee or or those those bad teams in San Antonio. They talk about us because we left a last impression, I would say, in their brain. Yeah, the branding before branding was even a thing. Well done. Look, Isaiah Thomas has who knows? Like we know what MJ thinks and sort of a lot of that was brought up again in the last several years. But for you, is he misunderstood by the rest of us? Like, what kind of guy is Isaiah? So misunderstood. OK, well, how tall are you? Six. How tall are you?  OK, Michael, he was six one, giving them more than 20 points a game. Passing the ball with the same at the same time and a team that no one was paying attention to in the middle of the country. He literally took this team from he was 19 years old to winning championships two in a row. And, you know, it just it didn't fit into, I guess, into the program or into the script, because we really changed the way things were. And Isaiah was the catalyst for that. He was Zeke was always the one that had to take all of the pressure.  So he was misunderstood. I think a lot of people wanted to jump on him and say he was the reason Michael didn't get them, didn't get the ball. And I remember them saying that he didn't want to give him the ball to all star game. I watched Isaiah give him a bounce the ball on the ground slam dunk. He wanted to give MJ the ball. And then when they talked about him not going into on a dream team, that was political. It had nothing to do with that. Because if if you put Isaiah on the squad, you can't have stopped him. Like, and they need it. If you watch it, they needed the team to look a certain way. And Isaiah was was going to outshine all of them. And you put Isaiah in a situation, he's going to dribble it, shoot it from deep, make you look back on the basket.  Remember, they put Christian Leighton in front of Shaquille O'Neal. So obviously, yeah, we obviously is had nothing to do with what the talents are. It was what the team needed, what they felt and needed to look like at the time. So he's totally misunderstood. Yeah, John, moving on to the Detroit Pistons of today. They're four and 36 historically, historically bad as a former piston. How frustrating is this, you know, beginning of this season, Ben? Or you don't really care. I do care. CP, of course, I care, man. I, you know, we have out of all my teammates, we have a chat that I have with the Pistons and I left the Pistons in 1992. I only played six years there, but we still have this this this unit, I would say. The fact that they've never hired one of one of any of the players that won championships for Detroit. Yeah, Rick Mahon does does play by play. Vinnie Johnson did do play by play. That's it. Bill and Bear went and won two WNBA championships and they still didn't get a shot at being a coach there. They have picked around our team not to take that. And they tried everything they could to try to, you know, get to something new.  Bill and Bear is a great coach, would have been great for the organization. It would have kept it all in house. What happened to the Celtics? They hired their ex players. And when they hired those ex players, they have, I think, 17 banners, 16 banners. It's what they used to do. It was a smart thing to do. It kept the mentality of the team intact. And I think they're doing it every other way has hurt the squad. Interesting. So let me ask you this. No, that's we I didn't have I didn't expect that perspective, but it makes a lot it makes a ton of sense, man. And let me ask you this. You played a year in Chicago, won a ring with MJ in 96. You got to tell me what that was like. That's like my my glory years of that's when I learned to be a basketball fan. What was what was that year like? Man, let me tell you something. So first, the Barthol said it was the first of its kind. Had a track inside Olympic lifting Olympic style weight weight room. It had a swimming pool. Had three rooms for massage therapy to sign your name on the top. Well, you had to sign your name because Michael and Scotty's was put there in ink. So everybody after them. But it was like traveling. I mean, it was like being with the Beatles, Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson, all at the same time. It was I remember we pulled up to the the hotel in New York, the plaza. And I'm from New York and I have walked around it. I've been the bird of bird of Goodman across the street. I was right across from Central Park. And we pulled in the back and I didn't even know there was a back. And we got we got out and we got ushered in. And we went upstairs and it was this this unbelievable layout. Like I thought I was at a ball or a gala or something like that. Gala for those who don't speak the language. And I and they handed us the keys.   You know, that kind of stuff. Man, I had a huge room. I thought I was balling. I said they gave me the wrong room. I'm not giving this up. But Michael and Scotty and Dennis and Phil had the suites upstairs. Wow. And I was like, yo, I'm going out with Randy Brown and go, where are we going to go? I said, why should we go anywhere? Like this room, I'm not leaving this room. You know what I'm saying? I'm stealing one of these one of these silver plates, platters and bringing it back to the crib.  It was it was, I would say. And then we were flying on MGM flight. So you guys wouldn't notice, but MGM used to have this plane that all the celebrities just to fly in the red eye. Like CPU would have been on a MGM plane with it. It looked like it looked like one of those planes you get on now, right? It looks like a Virgin plane. It had a bar. It had different looking flight attendants. It was it was unbelievable. You know what I'm saying? You didn't have grandma flight attendants. Oh, I forgot your brother. No, it was like what? And we were flying this all over. And I mean, Michael had his security and it was a trip because Michael's plane would take his security ahead, which was I think about this man, if they would fly on his dead ahead, Michael would fly on the plane with us. And the the I don't gamble. Well, I have, you know, been to some nightclub, so I guess I do gamble, but I don't gamble the gambling on this plane, right? God bless it. So Jack Haley, good guy. Jack Haley playing those games and when they be pissed and Jack would be like, I got him the dates out and he was like, you know, look, stocks. It was it was the food was better. I mean, I think I had a great pineapple from Costa Rica and the farmer bought it to the plane. That's how that's how it was. That's how it was. It was it was it was the best best basketball experience I've ever had. And I realized what it's supposed to be. And that's what it's supposed to be. Pat Riley, I heard, does that. He makes the experience. The plane is unbelievable. It makes you when you when you quit, when you quit, it makes you have depression because you have to go back to Southwest, even though I love Southwest, not trying to hurt Southwest. Shout out to Southwest. I don't want to mess with your sponsors, but it puts that in a whole different you want to you want to be there. Like when they invited us back for this Ring of Honor last week, my first answer was yes. And my second answer was yes. That's great. This organization is Mr. Shout out to Mr. Rides off. That's dope. That just makes me jealous. You know what? Speaking of the Ring of Honor, the viral moment was the worst moment of the entire thing when of course, the home of Krause is on the Jumbotron because Jerry Krause is being celebrated and of course, Chicago fans don't have great feelings. And they booed to be in that moment. What was that like? I was sitting behind, feel like right almost next to her. Like and I saw her going like this and crying. I felt really bad for her. Yeah, really bad for her. And that would have never happened on any other team. Like it wouldn't have happened in Detroit, but maybe if you played in Philly, the crowd would have thrown some at him. But it wouldn't happen. But the crowd in Chicago is so embedded. The fact that they knew who love was, they knew who Red Cur was. They are everybody being on it. I saw one of my heroes and I was next to him. Was artist Gilmore. And I when that happened, I felt for her. Ron Harper put his hands on her shoulder and then everybody started touching it. They started cheering because they realized it wasn't Jerry. Jerry wasn't there. Jerry's dead. Yeah, you know, it's a Chicago. It's a Chicago thing. I'm saying it's like you say Al Capone, you know, I'm saying they still they still are happy about having Al Capone. So it's a different city. They have really, really, really feel for that. And then I think the show that really put a hole that could never be filled was Last Dance, because when you watch Last Dance, you real raw eyes, Jerry was being a general manager. He was having to make the team young. He was having to change things and they didn't want things to change. They wanted it to run until the wheels fell off. And Jerry was having to make moves. I mean, think about the smart moves he has made. One, hiring me when he should have very smart to Tony Kuko. Tony Kuko being on that squad, they leave him out. They I'm glad he is mentioned like he's supposed to. He was one of the greatest players I've ever played with. But wasn't even overshadowed by Michael and Scotty because he proved that he was a great player. But, you know, they looked at it at that time as a threat or was changing something when they could have looked at it as he was adding to the squad. And and they should have because Tony Kuko was a great, great player, great guy, too. So I feel sorry for his for his widow for that. They're going to have to realize that. And I remember those people used to call us Detroit Pistons classless. That was classless at the time. But those teams are very emotional. I mean, after Scotty saw the last dance, I don't think he is coming back. He came back to Chicago. I heard to promote his alcohol, but nothing else. Yeah, that's actually awkward. All right, so you play in the Bulls that single season.  When you signed the deal with the Lakers, rumors were had something to do with Shaq. Is that true? Yes. OK. Well, this is what happens. I'm living by five doors from Shaq in Beverly Hills. He doesn't even know I stay in shape, you know what I'm saying? I don't want to bother him. But I'm watching the game. And it was it was the shortened season and 1999 and I called Phil. And I said, hey, man, you're not going to let these two guys, these two great guys, not win championships, man, you got to come back. And we put that triangle in these guys who win five, six championships in a row, just like in Chicago. And he said, who you've been talking to? So I said, well, you know, I don't really talk to that many people. What do you mean? He goes, well, I just signed the deal, but no one knows that. How did you know to call me?  The universe looks out for me, Phil. And he goes, you in shape? And I said, yeah, I stay in shape. Yo, man, I was eating Oreos at night, peanut butter, jelly sandwiches, ice cream. You know what I'm saying? And he said, well, go down to UCLA and Jerry's down there. They got some runs to let him see you, you know, play. And I said, when he said about two weeks, Jerry be back, man. I was I was on the track every day. And then when I got in there and this is this is not a hit on them, but it was Olden Polonies and Benoit Benjamin and they were playing in there. And when I looked and it was I got to play against these two.  Man, I put on a show. Nice. I put on a show.   And I put on a show and you know, Jerry was like, oh, great. This is going to be great, man. When I got in, I said, I live five doors from Shack and we run an offensive. Right. And and and Tex winners, man, is, you know, going his way about. And I was like, hey, you can't teach these guys the way you taught us to play. We have a thing in a triangle called away, we're almost out of time, John. Oh, OK, you have to come back because we're going to need like six hours of stories with John Sally. I know because CP even say anything. He just looking over there. No, I need you to come back tomorrow. So.


Okay, it happened. Thought this was gonna happen, but I didn't think it was going to be this bad. Andrew Depp and Supernatural just confirmed that yesterday's episode, episode 13, is the last episode that's going to air for a while, possibly indefinitely. Definitely not indefinitely. They're gonna finish this show somehow. They've already shot most of it. They just need to edit it together. But I cannot believe we are going to go through another hiatus. Now this one completely makes sense though. It is definitely in the best interest of the crew, the cast, everyone associated with the show, everyone in the film industry in Vancouver right now.  But it is for a good reason. It is for safety. However, it's just unfortunate because this follows the, what, the third break since the mid-season break? There's obviously the mid-season break, which happens over the holiday months, but then in return for like two episodes and then it went away again for like a couple of weeks, then an episode and then it went away for a month and a half. And we just got our first episode two weeks ago.  Was their plan to basically have it consistent from April to March because what, four, four weeks each? So eight weeks, seven episodes maybe because usually supernatural ends mainly the middle of May. So really from the end of March to the middle of May, that was their original plan. They could have done this so much better. The pacing of this has been so slow. And I don't remember it being like this with supernatural season 13. Obviously it made sense because there was the writer strike, but they at least kind of gave the fans an idea of, hey, we're going away, but we'll be back here. I don't remember having the sense of where the hell the supernatural go like I did with season three. And season three you had 16 episodes, whereas season 15 is 20.  However, considering all this, he might have a chance to save face, but two different results.  He could finally maybe realize something.    I'm not going to feel it as badly. These two options are definitely what Andrew dab is considering because I don't I honestly don't know how the show is going to end well. It has been mediocre this whole season. The only episode that's been decent, I would say this is the one they brought Eileen back because while that was fan surface, he at least had some decent writing and some decent character development for her and the relationship between her and Sam. Everything else in the season has been mediocre for a final season of this show. It's been pretty lackluster guys. I do not have much confidence in this ending with anything but a whimper and the whimper is a stretch. Anyways, you guys give me your thoughts on this whole hiatus thing. What do you guys think about this? What do you think that dad might do with this extra time? Give me your thoughts and whatnot in the comments below. If you like the video, leave a like and if you're interested in more, subscribe. Otherwise, catch you guys next time. Thanks for watching the video. My name is Knitz and you might remember me from the animated cult classic TV show Undergrads. It's been a while, but I'm happy to say the click is finally getting back together in an all-new movie thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign. But we are still asking for your support. To see any and all updates about the upcoming Undergrads movie, be sure to check out and like the Bring Back Undergrads Facebook page. And with any luck, we'll see you guys soon.