Welcome everybody back to the Segal Talks here at the Markney Segal Theater Center at the Credit Center CUNY at the City University of New York in New York City. New York is at the moment the epicenter in the world of the corona crisis. Again we had over a thousand theater center at the Credit Center CUNY. We had people in a day and so we are contributing and listening to the artist to find a way to cope with this crisis, to find meaning in these days in these unprecedented times. And as always artists have been on the right side of social programs of justice. And we should have listened to them much, much better they detect things they anticipate the future that so many plays poems or ideas for the stage deal about deal with and so today we have two representatives from Eastern Europe or more mania. It's a great honor to have with us Michaela Tragan who was with us at the Segal Center already for the Penval Voices Festival and we have also Michaela Michaela with us and they will tell us a bit about the situation in Romania and Bucharest. The Segal Center always has British academia and professional theater, international and American theater, but in these days we feel it's really a responsibility to listen to also hear from all parts of the world where our theater colleagues and theater performance how they experienced this crisis. And so we get a perhaps a better view of the world, but also of their real thinking about it and the philosophy behind their words so Michaela's hello both. Where are you guys are you in Bucharest and what time is it. It's 7pm. Yes, we are both in Bucharest. Yeah. Yeah, they are. I think there's a small echo I don't know if it comes from my phone or if anybody has listening to the talk at the same time. Maybe how around can help us but it sounds like somebody has the live stream open on their computer and I go ahead and double check and make sure you have all your windows closed. Maybe one of yours. Maybe it's how around. So this is live as you guys. It looks like you may be having a little extra audio. Can you.  Okay, try to shut out of the programs again so Michaela. Tell us. Yeah. Yeah, these are the echoes of the virus so maybe it's already in the in the thing so Michaela Michaela I think how one said it might be on your computer. Could you get out of zoom sign out completely and then rejoin us and make sure everything is closed. If you close your browser window that should also help it. If you have Chrome or anything else open. Yeah, she is really doing it. And so Michaela. Tell us a little bit. What's going on in in Romania for how long have you be in in self confinement in your apartment or maybe not maybe you can go out what's going on in Romania. No, no, no, actually, no, there are many restrictions here in Bucharest and since 16 of March, actually. And actually the police are giving us big super big fine so everyone is afraid to go outside. So what is the idea you set to stay at home or you can go out visit you can you go take a walk in the park and you go shopping what is the idea. Only only with only with a document with a kind of declaration, you know, like, allow us to get to get outside and we have to specify the reason for which and we are allowed to go to the stores, or yet to move a little bit but the parks are closed so we can't really move. And, yeah, and maybe if we have a medical urgency we are allowed to get out but actually know there. I mean, the we are really afraid of the police and with, I mean, I know that all my friends we are just isolated in the in the house and nobody's getting out. I mean, and you are afraid what from the police. What would happen. They, they give big, big fines actually are the biggest fines from Europe I understood I just read an article about the like they can get to around 4000 euro yeah actually like 4000 euros incredible, which is about $5,000. Yeah, exactly. And we just experienced all these few last weeks a lot of abuses from the police, especially towards the Roma community.  Tell us a bit I know, and our viewers might not know they might not have read about you are part of the Roma community in Romania. So tell us a little bit about that experience. Yeah, actually, when everything started, a lot of Romanian immigrants started to come back to Romania immigrants from Germany, Italy, Spain and so on. And among them a lot of a lot of Roma but they were not welcome back. And they just been seen like the virus like they come with the virus and they don't keep the confinement rules and so on and just, we just saw the talk online harassment. It started like that. And after the police going to the, to the communities and just beating up children, men and Roma women. Can I stop you there? Can you say that again? The police goes into family houses or in the community and is beating up women and children because they think they are carriers of the virus. Yeah, exactly. And because, because they argue that they don't keep the confinement rules like they don't stay isolated but actually they are living in big, they are like big families and they are living many of them they are living together. So yeah, it was just the reason to, yeah, to entitle all this violence against Roma families and Roma houses and Roma communities. And we just saw this like, not only in Romania but in the whole Europe like I've just read reports from Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia, yeah. So I've been distracted by all these things in the last few weeks and I just hope that everything will come to the normal because it's invariable. So where do you live? How is your living situation in Bucharest? Where are you and what neighborhood? It's like, I'm a privileged Roma person because I'm living exactly in the center of Bucharest in a flat with a lot of white people so nobody will come to my door. Even, even that my mother was afraid of this, like she just, she just told me like few days ago to stop posting about the racism and all the violence towards Roma people because she's really afraid for me. And I just tried to calm down her because I'm living in a very good neighborhood here in Bucharest and yeah, among white people so probably I'm not the target. Where does she live, your mother? My mother, she lives in another city, actually she lives in a Roma neighborhood and she, I mean she's happy because she has a kind of garden and she can get out from time to time but yeah, like everyone is afraid of it. So, we just wait now for the 15th of May, like in two weeks, we'll be allowed to get out without this declaration. I mean, we'll be allowed to get out only wearing a mask, a protection mask, so I really hope that the things we try will improve. And yeah, because now it was a lot of fear, I don't know how the other Mihail experience disguises, but for me it wasn't easy. And yes, I've been distracted from my work by all these violence. So has your mother seen those police portalities, it's happened to friends or family? It happened not to my family, but yes, friends, like for example to friends or people whom I've been working in the past in the Roma neighborhoods because I've been working a lot with Roma women from the Roma neighborhoods in forum theaters and so on. Yeah, like the monologues you showed at the Segal were based on lives of the women, right? Yeah, and exactly, and friends of them and like the police just abused them, they were just there in the Roma neighborhoods. We have here two or three Roma neighborhoods where mostly Roma people are living. So yeah, I heard a lot of abusive situations also from the other cities around Bucharest, like the police just trying to intimidate them. I have friends who are living there and they are afraid to go outside to the store because like a lot of police is around it and they try to intimidate them. And I just spoke with a friend that she has two uncles that they are disabled and they were really scared by all these graves of the police. Do you think the police is ordered to do that or do they do that on their own or is there an order out from?  We can't really rely on our government that really took the power now and not in a good way at all. So they are not, of course, like the Roma organizations, NGOs, like the Roma movement tried to complain and make petitions and so on, but there is so much hate speech now. I just feel that the racism increased so much now during the pandemic that there is nobody here to defend us, to defend the Roma community. So it's tolerated if not perhaps encouraged. Exactly. The media also is encouraging a lot the hate speech, like every day we just read the racist articles about how Roma people, they don't respect the confinement rules. So this is why the police try to make them to respect the rules in a very specific way. Yeah, that is shocking to hear. Of course, there are different traditions of living together, different ways of living together over centuries, and they have a need to be respected.  I'm shocked to hear that. I haven't read that anywhere. That should be on front page news. It's shameful. And for sure, not a good sign for the Romanian country to also have this, of course, next to many other things, but this is a reality there. Mihailov, thanks for being back and sorry about that. Typicalties, we should have checked that earlier. We didn't hear it when we do the soundtrack. But things do happen and who knows how other viruses are infecting our communication. So tell us a little bit, how are you experiencing this? I will just say a little bit about what Mihailov said because I think it's very important that all this emergency state, in fact, encourages and emphasizes different types of violences. And the fact that we have very, how to say that we have governments who don't really take care of their citizens, that's a problem that we saw in Romania. This month, for instance, we also saw a government which was completely incapable of protecting the citizens who went to work abroad, who went, who left Romania in very precarious conditions because they have no possibility to work here. So they had to go to Germany and we assisted at various, we saw various images which were really, really... What did you see? What images did you see? We saw, for instance, in an airport, in Cluj, in like thousands of people, very desperate because they had no possibilities to stay here and to work in Romania. They were leaving the country with no measures of security and they went to Germany and to work there and we also heard about and read a lot of articles about the conditions they worked there. Of course, we know this happened also before, but when you say that citizens that in our country we are not allowed to leave our homes and when you see such images, in fact, you are confronted with a very unstable and with a very problematic state. And I guess all this month we saw the incapacity of the government to really protect precarious people, to really have a standpoint and to really, in a way, fight for all these people. And this is really, really, it's very violent to see all this going on. Yeah. Let me just... So everybody has to stay at home, but seasonal workers like Romanian workers who, for example, worked for asparagus, season or others, they were allowed to go out with no security measures together in big groups.  Do I understand that right? Yes, yes, yes, yes. You understand it right and all the declarations and all the... when the government was asked and when the president was asked how could this be, how this was possible, all their affirmations were completely outrageous if you really see the situation. The fact that you have no protection for all these people because all these years you haven't cared about them and all these years you haven't had as a state politics of protection of all these workers. And we saw people who couldn't, I don't know, go from Italy to Romania, who just called the embassy and nobody answered them, so desperate people, desperate care workers, yes, so there were quite violent images. So seasonal workers would try to get back to Romania and Romania would not let them in? No, no, I'm talking about the moment when Romania said that it's very, as Mihaila explained you, that it becomes problematic for an Italian who was working abroad to come back and the Romanian government said you shouldn't come back because there is coronavirus and it's very problematic. And all these people in different other countries, Italy, Spain, they just found without any support and any financial need. And we had like, I don't know, women who were working in Austria and the people they cared about, they were old, they died and the women had no possibility and no financial support from the state. To come back to Romania. To come back to Romania, yeah. But were they asked to come back and, or did the government say stay where you are? So in one hand thousands were allowed to leave in chaotic circumstances without masks to do, to work as former, ignoring all health advisories, and then the people who are already outside are not supported to come back in a way that is safe, is that right? Yes, they are not, they are not supported and they are not even encouraged to come back. I mean, they were said you should remain there, you should try to remain there, even if for some of them was completely impossible to remain there because they had no financial support and they had no possibility to remain there. And that is totally shocking. We had a call from an early on in India with Anarupa Roy. It was a great puppeteer and she said she looked out of the streets to New Delhi and 500,000 people like these seasonal worker people who work in people's home, 500,000 try to leave New Delhi on feet with children on their back and their belongings in the suitcase. Some prepared to march a thousand kilometers without food help. So they started to leave and they also were, I guess, attacked by the people on the road. People had to feed them but people said we can't do that. Then state borders closed, they were sent back but they had no place to go and many people in New Delhi do great work to try to care for them. I was not aware that such a, the traumatic circumstances are also happening in Romania and what do the Romanians say? How do the Romanian people look at this? Do they think it's just a small minority? It's not a big problem. Is there a civil dispute about this? Yeah, I mean I'm just, I mean we have only the social platforms now where a lot of people are, is more and more present and of course like they argue always like is this more leftist part who really try to support and talk a lot about these workers and what was happening in the position of the government. And yeah, it's the other side who is supporting the government, I suppose. But yeah, we just, for example, we just wait it now to see how the situation after the emergency state will improve, like what will be allowed for us and we just, I mean I just talked with Mihaila before about this, like do you have any news about theater? What will happen? They will open the theater and actually we don't know anything now from the, I mean they just announced that they will reopen the museums. But I just deviated a little bit from the topic. But yeah, I think a lot of people like in Romania, I mean they don't believe that the virus exists, like I saw a lot of this, like, and especially the old people, like we, it's very funny the situation. I don't know if Mihaila knows more because I know that she has been working with more old people in theater the last years. But like what we experienced here in Romania is like the people they don't really believe that the virus exists and they just fight. And there are a lot of conspirations regarding this and why the government wants us to believe that this virus exists but actually no. And yeah, I mean I think there are many different opinions regarding all this situation and coming back to our position as theater makers, like we are really confused about what is going to happen in the next month for us because like you know, like the, we heard that the museum will be reopened but there is no solution how the theater will be reopened and I don't think this season, this stay season will, will, our, will, we're going to work again. Yeah, and I guess what is really, is really problematic is that they, I mean we are not confronted with any plan. We don't know how it will happen, when it will happen as Mihaila said when the theaters are going to be to be open in what conditions. And of course there are a lot of problems for independent artists, for artists who are very, who are dependent in a way on, on every project because if you know if you just have independent projects and your projects cannot be, cannot be your theater pieces cannot be performed so and you don't know when, or if they are going to be performed. Of course your precarity becomes more and more problematic and nobody really, really talks about this. Of course they imagined a little help, let's say financial help for the artists who are independent but also with a lot of bureaucratic aspects. But in fact what is really in a way, what we are afraid is that we are, we don't have a plan and nobody really knows what is going to happen. And of course those who are really depending on projects and are really like, if I know I will have my piece done or not for those people is really, really complicated. And it will also be because we are in a country where all the independent sector all the independent artists in fact are financed only by one, one financial source, so we have one financial source for the whole country, for all the independent artists and it's really, really problematic. So, is there a free press in that sense where people, the television news and in writing do you feel people are informed in a way about the virus and about the situation in Romania, with all the problems and the situation of artists, is there access to information? I think in my opinion yes, like I've seen a lot of news on television and I think yeah the people are informed and this is why it's like very funny for me that I meet, when I meet old people outside or to the store, they have all this conspiracy in their mind and they don't really protect themselves and because when I go outside I really try to have a mask and everything and I see a lot of old people that they don't really use protection. So, yeah, I think I forgot the first question. So, that's perhaps of the history that governments cannot be trusted, people will not trust whatever, when something even real in a way comes up. And going back to the information, yeah, I feel that yes, there's a lot of information, like I don't know if it's because of me, I have access to all this information, but I feel that people, they are really talking about this, it's like, yeah, it's the first topic. Is the government doing a good job in Romania? No, it's not, it's not, it's not because as I said they are, in my opinion, they are more concerned about little enterprises and about the business sector and about going back to economy and they are not so concerned about different, about precarious people, about people who cannot have the privilege to stay home because they cannot, who don't know if tomorrow they have a job or they don't have a job. So, this of course, there has to be an interest in economy and I can completely understand it, but the price I guess is sometimes is too big. And the fact that the government in all its public debates and doesn't have solutions or tries to not to see the realities of different other categories, it's really, really problematic and we see it every single day. And how are the infection rates and people dying, is it moderate, has it arrived fully, is it behind you? I think we didn't reach the peak, like in this moment, you want to know about the cases. I think there are 40,000 around, yes, around now and 860 deaths, something like that, yes, I just need more. But people are not very, I'm not tested, you know, so we don't, we really, really don't know exactly because they are not tested, so we cannot say. No tests available and. Yes, so we cannot say very clearly what is the real situation, in fact. And one doesn't know how many people have died because of it because it's not always counted right and the interest of often is to project a social order, that's not really there. For you as leader artists, is there help that you said that one organization, for you is someone offering you help. I assume for the next five, six months everything has been canceled, I assume, is there help for you? I mean, it's a little help from the government, from the independent sector. So you had to apply with an email or? Yeah, we have to, yeah, it's very bureaucratic as I said, it's really like I tried to do this and I gave up at some point. What did you have to do, let me know.  So yeah, there was this, this condition to receive this help and actually is only until now, only in May. So I don't know if, if the independent artists, they are going to receive more help after this date. And it's like, if I'm not wrong, is, is around $500. It's not a lot. Yes. And yeah, and you have to make, yeah, to make this application that is like, for me, didn't work. But we'll, we'll not, we don't know what is going to happen after this date, after 15 of May. I suppose they, I mean, the correct will be just prolong this, this little help.  Mihaela, how is it for you? I have a privilege in the sense that I'm also having classes at the university in Bucharest, so I'm also there. And from this, you teach playwriting or, yes, I'm teaching playwriting. So from this point of view, I'm, let's say more stable. So we have also problem with the space we have the replica center because he's an independent space and now because we don't have any, any kind of activities we really don't know if if or for how long we will be able to to have the space in Bucharest because we have to pay the rent and all other things. So, yeah, it becomes so it becomes more and more difficult in fact to be an independent artist in Romania these days. So how is the situation for for for these kind of as you call it independence theater how, how well, let's even before the bar how well is it fun to do people come is there a need for it. Is it a small audience a bigger audience how, how, how are you connected to live in Bucharest. And of course in the independent spaces in Bucharest are not so big so it's less than 100 people that you can have. It's quite difficult because we are not we don't get to finance for the space we get financed for projects, and we have to be sure that we always put some money aside in order to be able to to have the rent page. But I guess in the last years the independent sector quite developed what it's a pity is that some independent spaces, because the financial conditions are very precarious they just disappeared. And they were really, really important, but so it was very difficult for them to keep on to keep on going and it becomes more and more difficult in these times to to be able to to pay the rent and all the other, all the other things as I said but I think it's I think it's important that they created an audience and that they developed an audience and sometimes, I guess also Mihaela can say because she does amazing things with her company, they did more for instance than the public sector. And it's also important because we have very, very few for instance public theaters who are really, really eager to collaborate with the independent sector. We have the Jewish theater we have the small the small theater but these are very it's it's it's very in a way of course it's good that it is, but it's not enough it's less than than enough and this is also a problem. Public theaters the problem with them in Romania is that they are most of the times they are interested only in productions, in productions that don't don't risk that don't, for instance, I don't know approach let's say, political or social themes they quite they they they don't want to go into this, apart from the exception I told about. And it's difficult for you as an artist who has an interest in various topics and who is in a way social or political, it's quite difficult for you to to connect with them and yeah, you, you see they are quite not interested.  How, how is the reception of your work. I think in the last two years the, the work have improved in the, because like we, we started to collaborate to yeah with few state theaters that they were eager to collaborate with us and this was a big step for us and especially for our community because whatever ever Roma production was in a state theater. And I think I have the impression that all the independent sector in Romania, we have our own audience. I mean I have this feeling you know that the audience, the jubilee pen audience is also going to replica, or to other independent companies that they we are doing more theater they are specifically interested in this kind of theater this is why we wanted to penetrate it also the mainstream audiences and have productions in the state theaters where the audience is less aware, let's say, about all these topics and they are used with another kind of theater that, yeah. And I have the, I have the impression I mean the last three years for us in jubilee pen they were really good because like we had the production with the juice theater. And we had another production with another state theater from another city that Roland Reimuretciano that I really, I really like their, their productions and their repertoire. And I think there is, we had a good feedback, of course, like everything is very new somehow for the audience like even seeing a whole Roma cast on the stage. It's a big thing, you know, for an audience that never was used to see this, or like the last year we, we, we work in this small theater in another cities, because like if Bucharest is somehow more used with political theater and with the topic that we are working with, like in the small cities the things are not the same. So it was, it was very interesting and I think this is a work that we have to do, like to just penetrate more state theaters and go to these cities, you know, where the audience is not, never have seen, you know, a whole Roma cast on the stage or, you know, like we just had this last show about Roma futurism and about the future. About technology, by the way, we really cursed Boris Johnson, and when he catch coronavirus, we thought that is because of us. Okay. Yeah, you did some witchcraft, which you put in your place. Yes. Yeah, it was actually techno witchcraft and it was very funny really laughed because we focus the whole show is about the computer virus. Yeah, and we just cursed fascist politicians from Europe and one of them was Boris Johnson and it was very funny when, when we heard that he has coronavirus that maybe like our curse. Coming from Germany of course I feel it's a tough word to use fascism when it has to be careful, but certainly lots of politics he implemented and his goal to get the UK out of the European Union. And there's something we do not support or wish it would, it would not have happened for. I know even in Germany is the Gorky is one of the first theater that put on Roma plays also we haven't really seen that we haven't really focused on that important, you know, an issue that is that is out there where theater also really can can communicate something and can, and can, can tell stories. Why do you guys do theater in Romania, but what is what is making your motor work why, why doing this in such difficult circumstances. Yeah, I feel that I am is very important to be here I feel that Romanian need us. And yeah, specifically because like I feel I mean comparison with Berlin I think Berlin is, is more used with Roma production somehow. And of course like Roma army was the first showing Gorky was, you know, on a big stage and so on but there were all these years small productions and like Berlin audience they they had access somehow to Roma theater. And I mean, of course like many times I'm thinking of moving from the city and I am fed up with everything what is happening him. I mean in the last years I had the privilege to travel a lot and working in other countries so it was easier to stay here from time to time and to work here. But I feel that the work that we, we do like me and my, my colleagues from Juvelepen like it's very needed here in Romania because like here is a special environment we have a whole history of racism here and we don't I mean this is why now we Roma people are so abused because it's not this collective you know memory about the slavery Roma slavery holocaust and so on. And we, we have to do this work through through art like and many, many times like after our shows like I'm just surprised that people they don't know anything about Roma people here in Romania, even if we are living here for a centuries you know, so I think. Yeah, it's, we have to be here and we like the work that we do is very important, especially here. But yes, I'm really thinking many times like just leave the country and I have these impures that I have to leave. And sometimes yeah it's a lot of it's a lot of pressure because like having this responsibility as an artist you know it's a lot of pressure to talk about this topics in your art. This is why the last year I've been working so much on Roma future for my futurism and developing this topic about Roma people in the future because like we as theater makers we always feel this pressure to talk about this unknown and recognize the past operative past and operative history. And this doesn't give us space to think about us in the future or having access to, to technology or imagining as exploring the space or so on. And yeah, I mean it's, it's not easy but I think it's meaningful at the end of the day to do this here. How was it for you meet me. For me in a way. It's like Mihaila said, I guess for me theater is also responding to some local realities and I think it's, I feel more connected to our political realities and to, to the view. I can put on. And I think it's important that mean replica. We developed a lot of activities in schools and in high schools, and we went to. We also wanted to go to schools. Which are not so privileged and to work with, with kids who don't have access to, to shows for instance we have worked and have done different, different shows or different debates with kids who have never stepped into a theater and for us was really, was really important to to go there and to keep contact to all this to all these kids. Not only because we say that we, it's important to do theater for kids because we have the audience of tomorrow. Now for us, it's important to have to work with kids and teenagers because we think they could be more involved in this political realities and more aware of this and they could respond to this. Because in a way, probably, you know, or you don't know that when you say political theater or socially involved engage theater when you say this in Romania it's quite, it's not so good. Also because we tend because of our history sometimes we tend to, to make to when we say political theater we think about propaganda because we have this history in communism, but I guess it's very important to talk about this in our days and to try to, to create in a way a different kind of contra propaganda through theater and to bring about subjects and themes who are perceived only from, from one perspective as Mihaila said or to give them a broader broader significance and also to have, to allow different other audiences to have access to theater because theater in my opinion and I'm sure also in Mihaila's opinion and her group should be for everyone and should be and everyone should have in a way have access to, to, to imagining realities and changing realities through theater. So I guess this is one of the, in a way the, the, yes the motives we are still here. Yeah. And also Romania has a great, great history of theater I think it's one of the countries also in, in Europe that for a long time, we have of course, Andrei Shaban who is well known Moshe Azur who comes out of the Yiddish theater the Jewish leader also in in Bucharest, but, but there has been so many Romanian significant directors coming out who have also fought for social justice so I think, and every system needs updates so I think what you guys do also from the fringes from the marginalized distance to the center you know you perhaps much clearer view of a, of a Romanian society or filmmakers at the moment are so significant that worldwide so lots of it is going on but they are yeah great great problems out there, since the opening of the building wall and, and it is something to work through and their work is needed it's truly shocking to hear that even now there's police brutality for clearly only erases reasons. And we heard from African American playwrights who are with us also that they feel their families who by the way are making wills, you know they say they work in the health industry in the service industry. They don't have they say bank accounts they don't have jobs and they be forced now to make make our bills and the white America looks at us as we are the ones who bring the diseases because they have higher percentage of diabetes and perhaps sometimes from from personal medical problems and that they are now looked at as the ones who carry the disease even so we all know the virus does not distinguish between race and class and culture so it's a it's a shocking thing to do and it's a brave of you to do be out there and do your work. Do you feel the time you are experiencing now is has an impact on your artistic work and maybe you are now in book rest in your in your rooms and it's a time to think. What do you do all day and is anything changing in your in your in your view of the world. Totally I mean to be to be honest I haven't been so creative this weeks and I just decided to not feel guilty about this. Because like it's really a difficult difficult time and with everything that happens so. I mean at the beginning I was just happy that I have time to rest thing that I didn't have before but yeah after two weeks it became too much and I am. I honestly I don't I'm not doing anything creative I'm just reading things or and the watching or the movies that I couldn't watch before because I hadn't have time. But is is very difficult for me I mean I mean I try I try to write I wrote some articles but I couldn't write anything more like I didn't feel that I have the the mentor space to. To write a play or to do really something important I I don't know how how Mihaila feels about this but for me like I couldn't I feel that I I don't have this this energy now to do this. Yeah for me I have classes on zoom and it becomes more and more difficult. I guess I in the beginning I thought it would be I don't know it would be like a life classes. It would be like going to university but in fact it's not and I guess it's also. In a way the motivating also for the for the students because they don't seem to have any perspective and it's really tough for those who are going to to finish in fact this to graduate this year it's really really tough for them. Because they should have finished their shows or their place and it's a little. I mean I was every single day when I have a class I'm I in a way face this this question but why am I doing this. Why do I have to finish my thesis or my play and I guess it's quite it's quite an important question. And I was of course in the in the last weeks I had ups and downs. I try also to stay with my child because he's four years and he couldn't go to kindergarten and it begins to be more and more difficult. Also for the kids and also for us because we have to work from home and being with the kids all the time it's not so easy when you have also to finish things. Yeah so as me how I read some things I just watched movies but I didn't try to too much. But I guess it's also OK to to have I mean to think about this and I'm also a little bit fed up with this discourse that we should be very optimistic and bury like. to be very optimistic and very like, try to do the best of our times. I'm a little bit also fed up with this discourse and also with the discourse that we should all be happy that we are going back to normality because I think we should question more and more what this normality meant before and what's normality we would like to embrace because I think this is really, really problematic. Do you feel people in Romania that will question deeply, what is happening, will something be happening when this is over? Do you feel there is a change going to be coming? Not really, I really hope that now is the time for the revolution that we always hope to happen and yeah, exactly how Mihaila said, when we'll come back to this normal, we should question what the normal look like. But yeah, I don't think that many changes will happen. I mean, I try to keep distance from the social media, but at the same time I can't and I'm just following people and I don't feel that something will happen like this revolution that everyone is hoping for will not really happen and it was really a lot of disappointment now with all the measures that the government took and we just felt, I mean, I felt powerless, yeah. Yeah, more or less I have the same impression that not big changes will be because I think the people who decide and who have the power, they really don't question the system, for instance, in theaters, I doubt that the people who are managers of theaters will really, really think about the system of production, they have been before, I doubt they will really do this kind of reflection and try to, in a way to think about, I don't know what, because we are talking about theater means being together but what this togetherness means in fact and for lots of theaters, this means nothing. We have public theaters which are financed by, who have public money but how public are they? Are they public for whom they function in fact? There are questions that they should, I mean, they should try to reflect on and I doubt they will really do because it's more, in a way it's easier to be, to keep your activities as you have had them before and really not to really reflect on what you could do better and in a way try to put aside the system of production which becomes more and more obsessive and the fact that one shows more ends and you have to produce another one and then another one and then another one, really not have time to reflect on them, to create also other, let's say, I don't know, territories of togetherness and I think it would be nice if people would take this time to reflect by, I really doubt. What would you guys dream up if you could for these? I like this phrase, the territories of togetherness for theater, what would you dream of? What would you like to see in Bucharest in Romania? What would be the change you would embrace? Ooh, I think, yeah, more support for independent sector and like personally, I really, I just repeat this every time. I would really love to have a Roma State Theater in Romania in the future. If this will happen, yeah, it would be clearly a change. Do you have a theater, a stage that is a Roma theater dedicated to your work and culture? Yeah, we never had in Romania and we just request this, we requested all these years, but like nobody wants to hear us. But yeah, this will be a real change. But I'm not so, I really don't think that this will happen. But yeah, more support for the independent sector will be, wow, will be something that we all need. Yeah, I totally agree with Mihaela. And also for those who I don't know to our managers of theater, in a way to give birth to more possibilities because to invent more frames and to try to have more different artists, even if they are theaters, I don't know, I would like to see, for instance, more choreographers working in theaters with different other artists. I mean, to be more open to different other formats or shapes or different other ways of framing performance, I don't know, performances and other things because I think this is something that really lacks in a more broader perspective that those who really have money because they have theaters and they have people who are employed there, they could allow more easily than us. We are really dependent on funds. We are really dependent on a deadline. We are like very, we have to be very strict. We are also in cases of Mihaela actresses, producers, cleaning stages and other things. So we are doing a lot of things and sometimes, unfortunately, our creativity lacks in a way because we have to do all these things. But I think it's really, you are really lucky if you are working today, if you are the manager of a public theater today because I guess you could imagine more things and it's a pity that those people who are there really don't give birth to various possibilities of creating theaters. So we hope that anyone of those theaters are listening or people who are in charge of it and I think these are significant changes. They actually create better theaters. I mean, it's human rights as we think, access to health, care, access to education and access to the arts. And we know that the product, this theater is better if it's open, if they are in that post-traumatic way. There are different elements existing next to each other in the same order, whether it's movement, light, writing, choreography. And this is an ensemble work, a significant different languages, parallel on stage. And also as Milo Rao said again, what he tries, also Oscar Eustis just said from the public theater in New York, perhaps, it also has to get out of the spaces into the rooms of the city, whether they are outside or inside in different forms. Milo Rao said they are planning that they cannot go into the space anyway. Perhaps artists will inhabit or people could come all day and go on the theaters in installation to use it in a different way, but to really create a dialogue with the city and there's so much to explore and to build on. So I think what you are thinking about or dreaming about is really also needed to get a better theater, to get a contemporary theater. And of course there should also be the plays of the history which you do have. But I think as Hans-Sies Lehmann said theater is a house, it has many rooms, but they also have to be new rooms that are inhabited and they have to be like in a museum where you have different centuries next to each other represented in art. It should also be in the same way. Again, I'm shocked to hear about the police brutality. I know that also Romania will be European capital of the culture, right? Is it next year in Sibu? Yes, in 2021. Actually, yes, the next year. So are you invited for that, Michaela? I don't know about replica, I suppose. Yeah, we are invited for some events. Actually, some of them should have been happened in May, but of course they are cancelled. So, yeah, I mean, we receive some some proposer to be there to participate with our shows there and even to organize bigger events together with others. So I think it's important that we have bigger events together with other collectives there, but now everything is unheard of. So, yeah. Yes, we have also invited by the National Theatre, but we don't know if we are going to do something or not because there are also financial problems with the capital and there are different kinds of problems they are facing. So, nothing is really sure. Yeah. Is there anything you would like to say, would you say to fellow artists or people, or listeners, but also people in Bucharest and their houses or so, what gives you meaning or what do you feel is significant to focus on at the moment? What should we be doing? Yeah, I don't know if I have an answer now. I mean, I haven't been thinking about this. I really hope that this sort of situation will bring us together. Yeah, I think. And also like how Mihaila said, like also the public state, the state theater, they will just rethink themselves and their artistic practices and so on, because like we are doing a lot of us independent theater collectives here in Bucharest, we are doing a lot of work here, you know, that the state theater, they don't do it. And we learn how to make responsible art, you know, and respect for the regarding all groups, things that we don't see in the state theaters, you know, like many times I've been amazed to hear about, you know, like situation, like, yeah, anti-feminist situation that happened in theaters or, you know, like we had this recently, this, I mean, not so recently, but this scandal with this big director, Jolda, that is also in German, you know, that was slapping an actress. And we felt that, you know, this is the moment. He was slapping an actress. Yeah, exactly.  Yeah. And actually the director of the theater, he tried to, to defense Jolda, not the actress, and this was, wow. Unacceptable, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So I don't, I don't think that the state theaters, they have the awareness that we have, and they occasionally question it, you know, so I really hope that they, somehow they will be influenced by our practices because like, I mean, in this moment, like I'm not really interested at what is happening in the state theaters, and I'm not going to see plays. They're very rarely I'm going like theirs. So I really hope that we, somehow we will come together and the rights of the independent artists here will be, yeah, more defended. And we, we can influence them. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Mihaela, Mihaela, what do you think? I don't know. It's quite a, it's quite a difficult question. I would say that it's important in a way to, to think of this period as a time of, of changing a little bit. And I think that it's important to think about our, our former normality and not too long for, for coming to that normality and to hope that, that normality is really lost. I hope it is lost because from many perspective, it was very, very problematic and try to invent new, new normalities and more inclusive and more reflexive. And in a way you're more careful to, to these possibilities of change. I guess this would be not to cry for what we lost, but to hope we'll, we'll invent new, new normalities. What you might, what you might gain and that a new normal should not be the old normal. And that perhaps, you know, art and culture can contribute as a Romania, who's the host as the European capital of arts. In the coming year. So I thank you for, for sharing. I know that says not easy and we don't know enough.  We would have talked to other artists who would hear different perspective. But this is how our Mikaela's are experiencing this moment. And it's very serious what they say, what they think about. We are part of the world theater community. So we admire you. It's important what you do and also staying in your place to act locally, but to think globally. And we are connected to the contemporary world and theater. And, and we hope that we all will be back to the seagull. And one day. And to our listeners, thank you for listening in. I know how much is on your plate. All day, maybe even now for lunch in New York for the way, but it's been, it's been difficult times. And we also don't know what will happen. Over a thousand people again died in a day. In America. And it's, it's devastating and about zoom classes. The first students are suing universities to get their monies back. They feel zoom is not adequate, you know, so how do we really in America where you pay a lot, you know, how does, how does that whole system really working? And not so everything that's not working. It shows Richard Shekno said it's like a quoting a friend. It's like a nuclear reactor, which has a meltdown, but the roof is open. And we look into it. It's a disaster. Everything that didn't work before is not working at all. And, but there's hope. And as always, perhaps to learn something out of crisis. And sometimes money has to come to a crisis. So tomorrow we have Sue Laker Alana from India, who will talk again as a second guest from that great, great continent to tell us about the reality in India. During the Corona time, but also what it means for theater artists. And then we have a step, a step, Stacey Klein from the double-edged theater in upstate New York, who runs the out of the farm. And, and a step on the more so from the New York city, Middle Stiff family circus, you know, to see what are those communities doing? How do they experiencing this, this, this moment that is unprecedented. And as you guys said, and we don't know what will happen. And what is waiting for us. If it's hard on the theater community, on artists, they are the first on the line in a society, but they contribute so much. They produce imagination. And we have to have that in order to imagine a better world. And so much, so many problems. We do have racism, you know, phobia and others. They come from a lack of failure of imagination. So this work is significant and important. And I hope we have, maybe one day you will look back and say, this is when I said, we should have a Roma theater. And maybe one day you will get it. It should be there. And so we have to have that in order to imagine a better world. And so we have to have that as we should have a Native American theater, a stage at least one in the United States. There's not. So this is a big global, a global problem. So again, thank you all for, for listening. Thank you for how round for hosting us to the Segal team. And I hope you will have time to time in tomorrow. Thank you all very much and to all listeners again. Thank you for taking the time to listen. Thank you. Thank you guys. And I hope that we will have a great time. We need to have great artists and great work to see. We also need great audiences and people who are interested because ultimately it's about them to also see that we have to act, that we are called to act, to be part of change. It's not just happening on the stage, but something is changing that we all are called for to be part of the change we want to see. Thank you very much. And thank you again and have a great, great dinner, I hope. And in the remainder, this was important for us to hear, to hear from you. Bye-bye.


Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's the Cube, covering Oracle Open World 2015. Brought to you by Oracle. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live at Oracle Open World for exclusive coverage from SiliconANGLE's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, the Wikibon analyst for infrastructure and cloud. We are on Howard Street. They closed down San Francisco to 60,000 attendees. This is our sixth year now officially out on the street, down in the exhibit hall that we used to. Now of course we have Cube alumni and great guest there on Ray Wang, who's the principal analyst and CEO of Constellation Research. Ray, welcome back. Great to see you. Hey, thanks a lot man. This is awesome. We are in Howard Street and it is happening. You have been a follower of Oracle.  And I know we were seeing earlier in the Cube is that you don't see Larry Flinch right off them, but five years ago he looked like a deer in the headlights. He really did. Folded into the same slides from years past and it was like almost a critical moment in his mind. You can see him on stage, almost smoke coming out of his ears like, damn, we better do something. I need a bigger boat. I need a different boat. Whole new games changing. Client servers coming to an end. These are the thoughts, this alter ego that I'm putting words in his head but you've commented on this. This is a new Oracle. And talk about that transformation from that deer in the headlights moment five years ago with Larry Ellison too now. Well, definitely. Fast forward five years. He got the bigger boat. He won the race. You're definitely right there. But no, it's real religion around the cloud. I mean, even just three years ago, right? It was like, oh, we don't need multi-tenancy. Now it's like multi-tenancy database, multi-tenancy storage, multi-tenancy, everything. And so I think he got cloud religion but there are two ways to look at this. The original Oracle customer base, I don't think they were ready for the cloud five years ago.  We've been vaginalizing the cloud for 16 years, right? Now it's mainstream. And like in true Oracle fashion, they've jumped in and said, okay, we're all in. And that's what we're seeing right here. So I got to get your take on this, critical analysis on this. Has Oracle done their homework? Because they're trotting out the messaging, hey, we've been here five years. We've done the work. We have product. Mark, he was asked on CNBC by John Ford. Are you determined to get into the cloud business? He's like determined playoffs. We are here, right? I mean, like that is, they're putting up numbers. So they're claiming full cloud offering. Have they done the work? Is it truly cloud? Well, a lot of the components that were required to build fusion were part of the things that you need to do to get to the cloud. The story that Larry was talking about on day zero, on day one, if you look at this day one in the evening keynote was, you know, we started out with apps and we had to build, you know, a way to host those apps and we had to build the infrastructure for those apps. So I think Oracle for the companies that are out there, it's probably one, they have all the tools to get to the cloud. Now the question is, how do you get that to scale up? Yeah, Ray, it was interesting. Some of us heard the message, Mark Hurd said, you know, in the future there's going to be two clouds and Oracle is going to be one of them. And we're left scratching our heads a little. You know, what do you make of the cloud messaging? How does it jive with what you're talking to the customers about? Yeah, so a lot of predictions about how many clouds are going to be out there. We know in the public business, right? It's going to be Amazon, Microsoft, and maybe someone else. And that may be where we see Oracle fit in. But if we're talking about secure clouds and what's actually happening, we once again see IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and maybe someone else. And so I think there is going to be cloud consolidation. I don't know if we're going to get the two clouds in like five years. I think that's probably bold to say, hey, we're going to be one of them. But for cloud applications, that's a very different thing. If you're looking at suites, right? We saw a whole bunch of companies that were best to breed applications that suddenly their company has become a feature inside a product suite. We've seen product suites that have actually become a piece of a platform. And so that consolidation is definitely happening. And so we see that that's a big piece of actually where an Oracle customer looking at this is saying, okay, here's what's actually happening. The consolidation is happening. I'm betting on the red stack. The red stack is going to carry me through. So it's not a winner take all. It's winner take most. Winner takes most is what's going on here. Yeah, I guess, you know, one thing I look at the cloud, Oracle so long had control over customers with their licensing model. And it sounds like, you know, enterprise cloud has a lot of the same moments. I can't just take it anywhere. It's not just, you know, it's not as flexible as some offerings that I see out there. What do you hear about licensing? And I mean, the cost of the cloud, it's not going to be a cheap story.  There's still a lot there. Well, it really depends on how you look at the pure of the cloud. If you're looking at a five-year cost savings, yes. If you're looking at 10 years, it gets a little dicey. If you're 15 years out, now we're talking that it might be actually better to own. And so you raised a really good point. What we're worried about really is cloud vendor lock-in. Right? We've had the cloud bill of rights for the last, I don't know, eight years. And one of the things that we're afraid of is in the cloud, you don't own anything. Right? And so if there's any place where you're going to see more lock-in, it might happen in the cloud. And that's one of the areas where people get scared of. Now, for Oracle customers, though, it depends what you're doing. Right? A lot of people have just been taking the Oracle instances and basically consolidating the vendors they're working with. So they are getting cost savings. So as the number of vendors disappear, and Oracle goes into a market, they're getting the cost savings space out of it. Is it a lock-in? That gets very dangerous. You mentioned multi-tenors. In memory is a big theme here. Integration is a theme here. Also security and data in motion. Data is the center of the value proposition for Oracle. That's the message. How do you reconcile that? As an analyst out there looking at the other competitors, data is the center. The integrated stack. What's your take on all this from Oracle? Well, data is a big piece, right? But it's not all going to sit in big data warehouses and data centers. Actually what's happening, the integration is going to be key. We think that 60% of all mission-critical data by 2020 is going to be outside your four walls. So the ability to access data very quickly, match that data, take some context, send a recommendation engine up against to make a decision, that's actually what's at play. And so we see a lot of that happening in your other show over in Las Vegas. So I've got to ask you, so I'll say it, I'll be an insight. Dave Vellante is back here. He'll be here tomorrow. So one of the things we're seeing has always been about Oracle, the red stack, but now it's a horizontal play. And I was speculating that Oracle actually could be one of those top three and win it all if they can by going beyond the red stack. We're hearing messages open. We see James Governor from Red Monk here. There's more of an open message here on top of it. So that kind of teases out this enabling platform. So it's not just a vertical application, Oracle, it's a platform where you have, certainly their apps, you know, ERP, CRM, and ACM. But now they're saying, okay, ISVs and startups, Hadoop, whatever. Work on that. So that's a platform play. We talked to about 30 ISVs who are building on top of Oracle. And one of the interesting things we heard from them was, they're partner-friendly, right? I wasn't expecting to hear that. They said they're more partner-friendly than Workday. They're more partner-friendly than Salesforce. They're more partner-friendly than SAP at this point in time. And a lot of the tools they want are in there. And that was something I was not expecting to hear. Do you think Mark Hurds had an impact here? Because we saw, we met with a guy from SuccessFactors. There is basically a forward-looking ... No one's looking in the rear-view mirror. There's a new Oracle. Comment on that. Do you agree? Is this a new Oracle? Is this legit in terms of these feedback?  It is. But is that consistent across this new ecosystem? I think we have a different Oracle. I wouldn't say it's a completely new Oracle. On the sales side, yes. What they did, a lot of the salespeople had left. They got into Salesforce. And what they did was, they started from scratch. They brought in a whole bunch of new recruits, trained them, worked them up. And you've got a very, very different Oracle sales team to start with. Then you think about the acquisitions that have occurred across the board. What they've done is, they've actually brought a little bit about what it is to run a best-of-breed organization. And when they brought that back, I think Oracle's slowly been absorbing, saying, hey, this is what we need to change to go after net new customers, as opposed to just keep serving the stack. Let's look at it. Let's drill down on that. Let's talk about the innovation strategy for Oracle for a minute. And let's break it down to organic and inorganic. You mentioned acquisitions. Really good job on the M&A front. They picked best-of-breed. They go after good management teams. Then the integration seemed to go well, certainly marketing cloud seems to be doing really well. So I want to get you to take on other sectors on the M&A. And also the organic. We talked to all the product guys here. There's some mojo there. So look at it. $5 billion in R&D. They're pushing the envelope on that. How do you balance that? How do you share your knowledge on what you've learned and what's your view on organic and inorganic? Yeah. On the organic side, just look at JD Edwards. The new release is out. People are super excited. There's stuff in JD Edwards. People are like, JD Edwards, what do you mean? JD Edwards. I mean, there's all these new features in there. They're adopting anything that you need to digital transformation last mile. I mean, that's JD Edwards. People are like, oh, okay. I didn't realize that. If you think about what's happening in the cloud ERP, we saw massive uptake in cloud ERP and vendor selections. So that's the financials. That's the non-manufacturing aspect. They just announced manufacturing cloud, commerce cloud. I wouldn't be surprised if they announced an ERP that actually addressed manufacturing later down in the year. And so we're seeing that happen on the product development fund. But the interesting thing is really what's actually happening in the middleware and in the stack. A lot of the optimization that was done on the Sun side, a lot of the optimization that's being done on the middleware, the product teams are pushing really hard on the middleware team saying, we can't use what you have. Fix this. You can't use this have. Improve it. And they've been getting a lot of pushback to make that happen. And they also got some innovation under the hood. We got Super Cluster. You got the M7 stuff. I mean, they got encryption on the chip end-to-end. You got John Fowler flexing the sun DNA now in the engineered systems. What's that impact? You look onto software, right? We've seen the commonization of stacks all the time. So if we're to project 20 years out, will we see two clouds? I'd still say three. But I mean, we're getting down to the fact that we're compressing all the innovation down the stack all the way from software down to chip. Think about what Intel was pitching out here on their keynote. So talk about new architectures. IoT is a big area. Your company's focused on this a lot. Oracle's talking about IoT. What do you think about IoT in general? And how do you grade Oracle on what they talked about at IoT? I think we got a lot of early stuff in IoT. And I think Oracle, once again, is taking its time with IoT. I think they've got a lot of projects that kind of show where they can deliver. But there aren't any big announcements in the traditional way. Say, here's IoT. Here's our stack. Here's what we're going to apply. Not like we saw it on Amazon reinvent a few weeks ago. Or GE, right? If you're a predicts. By the way, GE was at both shows. They were at AWS. They're here, too. They're here while they're hiring. They're hiring. They're software companies. You see those TV ads? I mean, GE is really interesting what they're doing. Huge opportunities. No. The interesting thing about GE is that they are going after this market. And they get that because they've been going after machines. They don't sell products or services anymore. They sell an outcome. I'm going to give you 99.99% of time on an engine. I think that's where we're going to see where IoT is playing one role. I think the other place is is Oracle has a lot of opportunities with what they're doing in field service. Inside the field service capability, I want to be able to figure out preventative maintenance. I want to figure out when a machine is going to go down. When a part is actually going to go down maybe six to seven days before it happens. Is GE two-timing or three-timing and playing the field? You got them on re-invent saying that they're a hundred-year partner. They're here on the Kino with Larry Ellison on stage. I mean, how do you make sense of that? I think GE wants to be like the neutral body in IoT, right? Switzerland? It's the industrial internet consortia, right? Okay. So back to IoT. So we're going to get that out of the way. I think GE is trying to do Switzerland. I think they're playing the field. That's my opinion. And I don't blame them for that. I think it's a good call. IoT, the debate is is IoT a platform market or a tool market? No, neither. It's not a platform market or a tool market. It's a marketplace market. I'm brokering information and insights.  Here's a connector. Here's a switch. You have to start saying like it's scenes and settings, right? John, we go to work. I know who you are. Your scene is going to work. Your setting is the car. Your setting is the lobby. You're in the elevator. It says, hey, I know you're on the eighth floor. Your boss is on the tenth floor. Do you want to do a 15-minute meeting? He's wide open. And by the way, you're on the fifth floor. What do you want to do? I'll take the cake. Take the cake. Forget the boss. We'll remember that. The next time this cake, we'll show you the cake first. That's IoT. What we're trying to do is take the sensors and get context delivered and we're brokering those insights. But that doesn't reconcile with the fact that if you have data silos on a platform base, the ingestion has to be somewhere. And fast. Where? What is it? What's your take on that? And that's where the platform wars are going to happen. But the point is the values and the networks not in the platforms. The platforms are going to aggregate that. The networks are going to broker this information for aggregation, for benchmarking, and for actually marketplaces. So this is the data identity issue meets in memory, in line, data in motion. Because as I take the elevator for deciding cake or boss, one system has my cake persona. The other one has my work persona. I mean, I got to pull that out of the two systems. We got to figure out what the systems are. And think about it. It's just simple here. We're in the middle of Howard Street. What would a 10 by 10 booth cost for Howard Street? Well, I got satellite imagery. I got traffic data. I got Verizon cell phone I've got Trilio. Okay. It might be a thousand dollars for the first hour. It might be 1500 by the time we get to noon. It might be 5,000 by evening. So I got to ask you the question. We were saying earlier that Oracle's the Rodney Danger Field of Cloud. They don't get the respect to quote that old line. Do they get the respect? And will they get the respect based on what you hear today? Because some people won't even put an Oracle in the top three or four cloud vendors. So, you know, I'd see them clearly put some mojo out there. What's your take? I think they're definitely top three cloud vendors operationally. If you don't have a developer tool, developer base, your infrastructure as a service is in trouble. If you think about, you know, applications, Oracle has a big market share in applications. Definitely a top three is not top two. And if you think about just mind your own cloud. So you've got 60,000 people here that are looking at where Oracle's going in the cloud. What's your take on Oracle's big bet as we wrap up here? Obviously, Microsoft's a competitor. You've got the Amazon taking shots at Oracle, which makes sense. You always punch up, as they say, but you've got Microsoft kind of sticking to their knitting on their install base. Oracle kind of doing the same thing. Is there something that Oracle is doing that's unique, that's a bet that potentially could win it all or lose it all or fall flat? I think Oracle's been sticking to the same strategy they've done for years. Take the stack, consolidate against the vendors in there, inject innovation along the way at the right time, and then keep delivering on it.  I mean they just announced what doctor support this is. So doctors are going to show up in Oracle. Do I need to go to a separate vendor on Docker? No. Do I need to go to someone else for SQL and Hadoop? No. That's what they've been trying to do, is get you to be one stop shopping and drive down the cost. What do you hear about their open strategy? Do you think they're going to be open? That is a tough one. I think there's the allure of open and not having to develop the code. And then there's the real thing about how do we make money and how do we behave and open? I think that's going to be a critical massive opportunity. Here's the reason. They've got a developer platform. They're actually investing in this. We're actually seeing a lot of the product teams work closely with the ISVs to get product out the door. Like I said earlier, we talked to 30 ISVs. They're really excited. I haven't seen them this excited about Oracle in a long time. And this is happening at the same time where they're seeing the market actually converge into like four or five players. What's new at Constellation? Share some recent research. Obviously your book has been great. I think you actually might have coined the term. What's up today for the book? Your stuff and research. What's going on? Disrupting Digital is the best seller at Harvard. It's awesome. We've been talking a lot about it. We're doing here at the Leader Circle event. In Constellation, we're going to make a big announcement on the third. We're going to announce the new product. And we also have our event coming. We've got 100 CXOs, 50 executives, and 20 folks that are on the way up, all converging 300 people at Half Moon Bay Ritz. We're going to do a New Clock Speed gigahertz. Great, we'll be coming up on the Cube. Thanks.  We're on a multi-program. So look into the link in the chat box. Go to all the The snippets of the highlights, you probably have some on the web before he even gets off here and the cube. Check those web gems out, search on the hashtag, cube gems. Did I say web gems do cube gems? Sorry, I'm moving my ESPN. Ray, thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. We'll be right back more from Howard Street after this short break.


Life is eternal. There is no such thing as biological life. There is no such thing as genetic life. DNA matters nothing in the kingdom of heaven because there is no bodies and DNA. There aren't any molecules or electrons in heaven. If you call energy of this world something that's not even real. Energy of this world, whether it's atomic energy or photosynthesis or energy you feel in your body when you exercise and take vitamins. No, no, no. Nada, nada, nada. Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. We have to look inside ourselves to find the truth. We cannot believe that we're going to find it in form because God didn't create the form and will never find our true self in the form.


Welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in our Palo Alto studio for a special presentation with Kong Inc. Kong is open sourcing its AI gateway for democratizing multi-LLM usage. And I'm here with Marco Pallandino, co-founder and CTO of Kong to talk about the news. And more importantly, the AI productization as every company starts to go into AI and figure out from a developer standpoint and infrastructure, multiple LLMs are out there and how do you put them all together? Marco, great to see you. CUBE alumni, thanks for coming into our studio. Thanks for having me here. So great news you guys have here. You're the brainchild behind obviously CTO and co-founder, Augie, who was on theCUBE earlier. You guys are doing great. And congratulations on all your success. Developers love you guys. You guys are known for tools. But now as AI comes, you got more than tools, you got a lot more things developing around AI. This is a big part of the news. What is the news? What's important? Well, so the news is that Kong is open sourcing a new AI gateway that will help developers be more productive when building AI applications and will help organizations have visibility on what is the AI traffic that all the teams, all the applications are generating across the organization. So the big challenge today we're hearing is that what do I do with AI? How do I set up my infrastructure? What is the models? Which ones for me? How do I do it? How do I productize AI? Every organization will have to do this. This is not even a question. So what are developers doing? What are some of the best practices that are needed to put in place to get this going? We're early on, it's embryonic. It's just starting, it's accelerating every day. What do you guys see? And when does this news hit that mark? Yes, so in the past few months we worked with developers and organizations that started building AI to ship in their products to build new experiences. And we noticed that developers, they keep doing the same things over and over again. And so we thought that there could be an opportunity for us to provide modern AI infrastructure to accelerate their productivity as they're building these new AI applications. For example, when a developer wants to use or integrate with AI in their applications, they're going to be trying with one or more LLMs. They're going to be then building a fine-tuned model, perhaps self-hosted, that are going to be running themselves. And then they're going to be managing credentials, metrics, observability, and logging information. And so every developer in the organization who is implementing AI has to go and build all these cross-cutting concerns that are required for productization of AI. And so with the AI gateway, what we really wanted to provide is a set of capabilities out of the box for multi-LM consumption, for security, for credentials, for prompt engineering, that at the same time also give visibility to the architects and the platform teams on what is the AI traffic that's being generated to incentivize responsible usage of AI from the organization. So I'm going to read the subtitle to the news that the company, Kong, unveils free open-source, no code, plug-in, suite, featuring support for multi-LLMs, advanced prompt engineering, AI analytics for fast and secure, high-performance AI adoption. Obviously, we know you guys have security built in, although probably didn't want to get in the headline. That's essentially the news, okay? So how did you get here? And then let's get into the news and unpack specifically what that means, because I want people to know your background first, but Kong, you guys have been doing this, it's not like you just woke up one day and said, we're going to do this. How did you get here? And then we'll get to the news. Well, Kong is a provider of API infrastructure, modern API infrastructure. So we provide API infrastructure for the cloud, self-hosted, we provide service mesh products. So we do pretty much everything that needs to be done when it comes to the full API lifecycle, developer portal, service catalogs, API catalogs, and so on and so forth. Now, obviously APIs are being driven by the digital use cases that we are developing in the world. And so a big driver of APIs has been mobile in the past, another driver of APIs has been microservices, as we all know. And of course, AI, it is yet another digital use case that's incentivizing more API adoption. The more AI and the more API we have in the world. Why is that? Well, with AI, we can either use AI, train AI, or have AI interact with the real world. And whether we use it, whether we train it, whether AI is interacting in the real world, there's always going to be an API to, as an entry point, to be able to do this type of operations. And so it's a natural extension of the API use case. And I noticed on your blog post, you wrote last month in January that you had some stats on how much traffic is API traffic, it's like over 80%. Over 85% of the world, the internet traffic is APIs. So obviously APIs is happening, it's gonna be part of the connect, I think it's gonna be part of the connective tissue, but I think more importantly is the rise of the open source AI and LLM's foundation model specifically brings this democratization of AI technology concept to the table. We're seeing it play out in real time. So this product you guys have is an open source plugins part of the gateway explain, okay explain how it all works because we know the gateway three six, that's con. That's right. Okay. And then you got the open source plugins. What does this announcement mean for the tech community to explain specifically what's happening with the product? Yeah. So first and foremost, the AI gateway to your point, it's fully open source. So it's free to use. Anybody can go and download or run it in the cloud for free, right? It's not a commercial product offering, it's a open source offering. Kong itself has an ecosystem of plugins that allow to expand what the product does. And so we have built plugins, six plugins that allow us to perform L7 AI operations on top of any type of AI traffic that the developers are generating. So the six plugins are AI proxy for multi LLM consumption with one endpoint. And then it also provides a way for us to store credentials and logging and metrics and so on. We support six different LLM providers off the bat. We support OpenAI, Azure AI, Coherentropic, Mistral and so on and so forth. And then we have shipped plugins for prompt engineering. So plugins to firewall our prompts, plugins to create templates for our prompts and plugins to be able to set a mutual context on every request so that we can centralize, manage our prompts without having to update our applications every time there is a change that's needed in our prompts. That's quite important for improving our productivity when it comes to AI. But then there is two plugins that I'm quite excited about. And these are the AI requests and response transformer plugins. These plugins allow us to integrate AI in our existing API traffic without having to write any code. So up until now all the other plugins imply that as a developer I'm building an integration for AI that I'm writing codes to make that happen. But with these no code AI plugins we can get the benefit of AI on top of existing API traffic without having to write any line of code. That is the easiest way to start enriching, augmenting our API traffic, existing API traffic with AI. So integration ease of use checks the box. Correct, I mean there is a whole set of orchestration that is possible on top of LLMs using these new AI plugins that organizations are looking forward to use. So we work with organizations that are leveraging LLM providers in the cloud. They're good, they're quite expensive. Most organizations they are going to be building their own self-hosted model. And so they want to essentially orchestrate what is going to a cloud more expensive LLM, what is going to a self-hosted LLM and being able to create fine-tuned models that they host themselves because there is a better value if they do it themselves. So the naysayers will be out there, well okay you got developed, what about the no code? Because there's a whole revolution coming for no code, low code. A lot of IT folks aren't slinging code but they're slinging IT. What's the no code angle here? Well so the no code plugins are quite exciting. I can take any existing API I'm running on Kong and I can augment and reach or transform that API traffic, either the request or the response using any LLM provider that we support. For example, let's say that I'm entering a new country. I'm an organization, I'm expanding into a new country, into a new market and I need to internationalize or localize my API in a different language, let's say French. I can use one of these no code AI plugins to say whenever there is a client that's making a request from France, automatically translate that response into French in such a way that we do not have to do it ourselves and we don't have to write an integration to change our applications. Everything is done on the gateway so by the time the application receives the response it has already been translated. This is one of many use cases that can be implemented with these no code plugins. What's the impact of the tech industry? What's the benefit that HAP comes from this? IT operations is automated, API has become scalable. What's the folks watching out there who are in the industry? What's the impact to the tech side? Well, look, AI at the end of the day is a tool to do some jobs, right? It is a tool for a whole series of operations that we can perform to make our applications more intelligence to make them smarter. What we are doing is to provide the easiest way to bring this type of intelligence inside of the applications themselves. So our goal as a technology vendor and technology provider, it is to make developers more productive. But at the same time, it is also to allow the organization to productize their AI applications. There is a big problem right now where the organization doesn't really know what is the AI traffic that's being generated by the applications. And it's quite problematic. What if we leak customer data? What if we leak sensitive information into an AI model that could potentially be a catastrophe? And so being able to enforce a lifecycle for AI productization using Kong, using these new AI plugins allows the organization to stop being blind on this AI traffic and being able to finally get a hold of it. The goal is responsible usage of AI to bring that intelligence at the end of the day to the end users that were catering to. Nobody wants to fly blind. Nobody wants to fly blind. And when it comes to AI, it's even more important. We've been seeing already incidents where data was leaked that shouldn't have been leaked into an AI model. And so with these plugins, the organization can enforce processes and procedures to make sure that the AI adoption is responsible and does not damage customer data. Yeah, I like the AI proxy concept you mentioned earlier. I want to get into that for a second because you're seeing a lot of activity on the RAG side, the Retrieval Augmentation Generation wave. A lot of hot stuff going on there. But it's interesting. You don't get the same response every time. And so your idea of instrumenting observability I think is right on the money. You're going to see a lot more need for measuring things, whether it's results, having memory, what's going on. There's a lot of weird data coming out of these LLMs because sometimes you're getting different responses. Sometimes you don't know what's good. You keep that. I mean, this is a whole new infrastructure going on. So, okay, entrepreneurs are going to work on this. Developers are going to work on this. So I see a lot more interaction with that kind of raw traffic, raw data because people are trying to figure out what's going to be the set piece that they can install or run for their LLMs. And I believe LLMs will work together. We are already in a multi-LLM world. When it comes to AI adoption in an organization, it's never going to be one LLM. It's going to be more LLMs, whether they're in the cloud, whether they're self-hosted, whether we're trying to orchestrate for cost savings or performance improvements. At the end of the day, it is going to be multi-LLM. Obviously, integrating with multiple LLM providers or technologies, it's quite of a task, right? We don't want our developers to go ahead and reinvent the wheel every time. So with AI proxy, we have created one interface that we can use that's open AI compatible and it allows us to use any AI provider that we support without having to change our code. So at the flip of a switch, we can go from one LLM provider to another and the applications do not have to be updated. Everything can be managed by the control plane of Khan Gateway, which is quite awesome, maybe. We're going to have to have you guys on our SuperCloud next edition next month. We're going to do a lot more AI. We put out on our Wikibon and our now Cube research team, we put out a power law last year, got a lot of criticism, but now people are like, okay, we were right on this one, as we normally are on these things, that there's a power law of the big models, proprietary, it's ironic they call them proprietaries, this will be open, but the proprietary, and then the long tails getting fatter around the neck and torso, and then the tail is specialized. So, yeah, we kind of brought this notion of specialized models. I know it's cruel, I can't trust in their heads, but as it turns out, this is kind of what's happening. The data shows that an open source is seeing a lot more and the torso being more relevancy, seeing more data coming in, which means you're going to have specialist models, specialty models, proprietary in the sense of company having their own proprietary data, not proprietary in open AI, but seeing this power law of LLMs and foundation models. Yeah, and as a matter of fact, to add on top of that, one of the things that can be done with AI gateway that Kong has just announced, it is to be able to train a specialized model based on my API traffic. The API traffic that every organization generates, that is the interface of the business.  We can train new models using Kong gateway based on our live API traffic in such a way that we can then provide better AI applications that can interact with that information. Let me give you an example. Let's say that we have an API that allows users to, it's an online marketplace, so users can put things for sale, they can buy things, they can search for things. All of that is API traffic. We can take that API traffic, feed it into an LLM to fine tune our model, and then we can create an AI support bot, which in real time is going to be able to determine what the user has done on the website, based on that API traffic, if they have a problem with an order, or if they want to refund, they know in real time exactly what's been happening. You know, there's so many innovation areas there. I mean, just the idea that API traffic can be harvested and automated for the business usage becomes super valuable, and then that changes kind of the business model opportunities. I think you can see companies have to look at that, which brings up the second question to that point, it's okay, I'm a company. I see my traffic, API traffic, I'm going to build an LLM, but now I have my friend's company that I'm working with, he's a partner, but we're different companies. He's got data, I got data, maybe different credentials accessing the system. How do I interact with his LLM? Because this multi-LLM thing, I think will be the new building blocks of how companies will integrate with each other. I think you are touching on something that's revolutionary. When we think of platforms today, what is a platform? A platform is something that allows us to access data using an API or access a service using an API, and up until now, platforms were either data or services. Either I can do something with it or I can access data from the platform, and there is going to be a third dimension moving forward, and I think that this is going to be the decade of this third dimension, which is a models, AI models and LLM, that is yet another thing that is going to be part of that platform. So what is a platform? A platform can be data, can be services, and can be unique intelligence that only that platform has, that can be used to an API by any other provider. Like in your example, I could interface with someone else's LLM and start using it, and how you do that, to an API. This is exactly why when you have these market transitions, some companies don't make it some do, because what we're talking about here is a complete transition to a new thing. Absolutely. So okay, that brings up like in history of, I'm kind of a historian myself. I look at the history of my career and journey. Every transition builds on the last one. And so okay, we've got Linux, we've got an operating system, got distributed computing. AI is different, it's a neural network, it's got foundation models, it's got, so is there an operating system emerging that's coming? Yeah, there is. And it's got to be open. It's got to be open, yeah. What's your vision on that? Give us your thoughts on, what's that going to look like? Is there a Linux for AI in the future? Not Linux itself, but something needs to operate this. I think that we will see the Kubernetes of AI emerging at one point. And that Kubernetes for AI, it is going to be open source. I think open source is yet again, going to be the driver of massive innovation in the enterprise and in the developer ecosystem. Likewise for containers, open source, likewise for managing events and APIs. I mean, Kong itself comes from an open source background, AI is also going to be, the open source AI models are going to be the ones that are going to be defining this decade. And so what we're waiting for is to determine what is going to be the new Kubernetes, so the new platform for AI, what open source technology is going to be the one that everybody will build on top of. And I think that part of it is based on the intelligence and the capabilities of these open source models, which by the way are catching up, they're getting smarter and smarter. And the other way is the governance of these open source model. I think that we're waiting for the right intelligence delivered in the right open source packaging with the right governance model to essentially find our Kubernetes for AI. I think the AI gateway governance piece is huge because if you have control and compliance over the traffic, AI traffic specifically, they can use it. And then that can change the privacy, ownership potential challenges, because who owns the traffic? It's kind of a new thing, right? If I own it, is there privacy? So this becomes a whole nother level of who owns the traffic? I guess there is a whole level of compliance, security, data protection, that needs to be implemented when it comes to AI because some of this information obviously is sensitive and private. The point is we can't even start looking into it if we don't know what the AI traffic is that the applications are generating. So at the end of the day, we have to incentivize developer productivity and agility while at the same time, responsibly knowing what are the prompts that they're asking AI to, the operations they're asking AI to perform, what is the data that's been fed into this AI? And this is not a concern for one team. It's across multiple team, which is why we're working with organizations and enterprise that were telling us, hey, we were thinking to build an AI gateway to ourselves, but now that we know that Kong has shipped one, we might as well use Kong because it turns out they're already using Kong for their API processing. So they upgrade Kong and all of a sudden they have an AI gateway ready to go. Great stuff. I love it. I think you guys are well positioned when Algi was in here. I think we are agreeing that it's a whole nother way. It's just beginning. What do you say? We're on the right wave, but we had the wrong surfboard. And now we got the right surfboard on the right wave. Look, I think we're just at the onset of everything that AI can do. And part of what AI can do is going to be determined by the AI platforms and tooling that we adopt that determine how to do things. And we're seeing in the ecosystem, I mean, it's very vibrant. There's things coming up every day. And I am quite personally excited about everything that's been happening in the ecosystem. And of course, the work that we're doing open source also wants to add another capability into this open source ecosystem that we think is going to be that defining characteristics of AI in this decade, the fact that it is going to be open source. And by the way, cloud and proprietary models, they have their place and there is value in some of the data that they host. But as open source models catch up, we're seeing lots and lots of adoption of open source models versus cloud. Cheaper to run, you own the data. I mean, it's an old brainer. It's a trade-off, right? It's a trade-off. Okay, final couple of questions before we get into what's going on with Kong for the next steps. Future of AI integration is one, people thinking a lot about that safety, you're a lot about that. And then future headroom for developers. And then advice for organizations to effectively deploy it. It's on everyone's plate right now. I got to get my developers lined up. I don't want them getting in the weeds on infrastructure. I want them to be developers and write code, or in this case, no code. What's the future of AI integration is going to look like from your perspective and what's your advice for organizations? Well, I think that the most forward-thinking organizations are the ones that are thinking of a playbook for AI adoption in the organization. Many organizations are experimenting with AI, but in order to go to production with AI, there must be a playbook that the organization can follow to reduce the risk of deploying AI in production, while at the same time making sure that developers are productive they're not reinventing the wheel. So we're seeing organizations that are starting to build these playbooks. So AI becomes productized like any other product that we build. And therefore there must be a life cycle for the deployment of new prompts, for the updates of these prompts, for the decommissioning of older prompts. And there must be a whole life cycle that manages that AI adoption. And so organizations that are doing it right are thinking of this from a very pragmatic standpoint. How do we build an AI playbook? And typically organizations that are building an AI playbooks are the ones that are thinking of this from the platform team standpoint. They are collecting requirements from their application teams. They want to integrate AI in the applications and so they're correcting those requirements to offer AI as an internal service on the platform. So every organization in the world obviously has an internal platform where the customers are the teams that are building things on top of the platform. And part of the platform it is going to be AI. AI is going to be this box that is now going to be available for everybody to use in such a way that the developers don't have to think about how to use it responsibly. They can use it responsibly since they won because the platform team is in charge of making sure that the service is always safe and reliable. To close out, give a quick plug for the Kong situation. You did this product with your team. You got a vision that's right online where the market's going. You kind of where the puck is coming. Kind of, as they say, skates with the puck is you're there. This API economy is transitioning to AI. Okay, great.  You're in the midst of it. What's next? What's next for Kong? What are you guys doing after this? Well, there's a lot of things that we're doing right now. I mean, we just announced that we crossed a very important milestone for the business. As a founder, we crossed $100 million over ARR. As a founder, I'm here in the business of building a long-lasting organization, one that can support the digital transformation and AI transformation that all of our customers are doing and performing. And so for Kong, all I can say is that we are always going to be at the forefront of innovation. We want to be enablers of transformation and we're always going to be providing innovation that our customers can leverage in the case of AI with the AI gateway and other tooling that they can allow them to be successful. So it is important that we keep innovating because our innovation can then be used out of the box by all the customers that need to create the digital world that we live and breathe these days. You and your co-founder, exceptional entrepreneurs, you pivoted successfully to Kong from an API product that was ahead of its time. Timing's everything, as they say, but you guys have done a great job. Congratulations. Your advice to other entrepreneurs, because we're living in, you mentioned this earlier, and I believe it's to be true, we're living in a time that's special for entrepreneurship right now where the ability to get a product to the market is potentially easier with AI here. With AI is a generational shift too. A lot of the young entrepreneurs are coming in. That's some of the old systems folks are coming in because it's a new system being developed. So you have this really a generational and a collision of culture coming together in the entrepreneur development circle. So there's a huge new game coming. What's your advice for the folks out there on how they should optimize their thinking and their time as they attack some of these problems that AI is gonna surface where there'll be a solution where they could potentially grab a big white space, category creating opportunities, disrupt an incumbent. What would be your advice on how to optimize their time and their energy? Yeah, so speaking with other entrepreneurs and the mutual sentiment of AI is that AI can be as disruptive as the birth of the internet. We're looking at fundamentally, to your point, a generational shift in technology that's going to be enabling a whole new world that didn't exist in a few years ago. And so the right way to capture this opportunity is to focus on the end user problems that we're trying to solve for. You know, at the end of the day, technology, I'm a big believer, it's a mean to an end. And so being able to focus on what that end is going to be, how we can build better experiences for our customers, how can we simplify usage of our products and how AI can help achieving those goals, focusing on what's the end goal, then working backwards from there, how does AI fit into that? I think that's the right way to think of, not just AI as a problem, but of any problem that anybody's trying to solve. What is that we're trying to solve for? I think that sometimes the mistake is being made when we are focusing too much on the technology per se, and we do not connect the technology with the outcome, then it becomes a lab type of task or it becomes an experimentation, it's not real. So we have to make it real and the only way to make it real, it is to connect with the end users and the outcomes that we create for them. And it gets better every time, it evolves, it's gross. Marco, great to have you on, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Yeah, fun conversation, thank you. Marco Palandino's co-founder and CT of Kong Inc. Kong Open Source is their AI gateway, democratized multi-LLM usage and more. This is theCUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching.