Hi everyone, I'm Rudra Roke, part of the Contrail team and today I'm here to present a couple of new things that we've introduced in the open Contrail solution. The first one is service chaining version 2, it's a new way to do physical, virtual and container-based services and just the concept of container networking, we are working on Kubernetes, Mesos and any other solutions and how to plug in OpenContrail in all the solutions. So to begin with I'll just give a recap of what OpenContrail solution looks like. We have a Contrail controller in HA mode wherein we run our config node, we serve REST APIs, as well as complete BGP-based control mechanism to manage a set of compute nodes. So here you can see that we have a couple of hypervisors, this could be Linux hypervisors or ESX as a compute, any of those hypervisors we currently support. We have a kernel module which is the V-Router and that runs on all the hypervisors which are controlled by the Contrail controller. You could have any of the different orchestrators, OpenStack being one of them. We also in the OpenContrail solution support managing or interfacing with actual gateways. The gateways could come from any third-party network vendors. So you could plug in your compute node and actually go out to the internet directly through the gateway unlike many other solutions where you would need a software gateway in the middle. So there's no single point of failure in terms of software gateway here. There's two levels which is the common framework for anything in the overlay world. You have the physical infrastructure and then we have the complete overlay networking. Here in this example everything that we create has a concept of fundamental concept of virtual network. So think of various virtual networks and in OpenContrail you can only connect them through network policies. So the basic advantage is that within the network any of the VMs can talk to each other in the example here being you have a green virtual network, a blue virtual network and a yellow network. They can talk to all the VMs within the network and talk to each other but as you want to go from one network to another network you need to connect them using a policy. Now that policy is kind of different than security groups where you instantiate the security group on a particular VM. In case of policy you apply that to a full virtual network so it's automatically inherited to any VM that is launched in that virtual network. By default everybody in the green network can talk to each other but when they want to go to blue we have a policy saying only HTTP traffic can go through and that policy would trigger in for everything. The important concept that I'm going to continue on is the service chaining. So if you notice there's a blue network and the yellow network we have forced by policy that any traffic between the blue and yellow network has to go through a firewall in this case could be any other service and it's a pluggable module so it could be any third-party virtual service whether it's physical, virtual or container-based. So essentially here we have a VSRX, a virtual SRX that is sitting between and ensure you can apply firewall rules on that VSRX itself. The improvements that we have done in v2 but before I jump on to v2 which we've just released I wanted to talk about v1. In v1 when you instantiate a virtual instance open-contrail would go ahead and manage the life cycle of the virtual machine. So if you have a firewall, a load balancer VM or any other VM which offers some kind of service the open-contrail service would actually launch the VM, in fact scale out the VMs based on your need for throughput is higher. So in that case we would be the bottleneck in some sense in various ways. One thing if you have many NOVA attributes such as availability zones, force-hosts or even cloud-init scripts that you want to pass on to the VM we wouldn't be able to do that that easily. We would always have to catch up to the orchestrator solutions. The second thing was we could not leverage so much happening in the open-stack community in terms of heat so we have kind of introduced a new concept called service chaining v2. So as opposed to managing a VM what we are doing is now managing ports. So abstracting this one level away from a virtual machine to ports gives us in fact uses a massive advantage because now you're abstracting the ports from whether it's attached to a virtual machine, whether it's attached to a container v-th port or whether it's attached to a physical appliance. In all cases there is a concept of logical port that exists and if you create a port tuple is the term that we're using as part of v2 and use that port tuple to create your service. So if I'm saying virtual network 1 to virtual network 2 always goes through this port tuple. Now what that port tuple is attached to is another level of abstraction and that gives us tremendous advantage of leveraging everything that the VM orchestrator actually offers. So in case of NOVA you can pass cloud-init scripts or anything else that NOVA can do. Similarly since the user is actually responsible for launching the VMs you could use heat templates to launch the VM and that gives you things like basically scaling out. So heat has this automatic scaling based on feedback from Cilometer. If you have height if the throughput is going low CPU utilization is high heat would actually autoscale the VMs as in launch many instances of that particular service. So your firewall could automatically scale out based on Cilometer analytics feedback and so those are the kind of advantages that you have by binding to a port as opposed to actually managing the lifecycle of the VM. Now heat is in effect managing the lifecycle of the VM. We have few other advantages here in terms of what we are offering is you can launch services in active active mode so the traffic is actually distributed. Open Contrail being a full L3 overlay has a notion of ECMP by default in every V router so you're automatically distributing and spraying traffic across a scaled-out model. It also has active standby we use something called route preference and allowed address pairs a combination of those things to actually do active standby of traffic. So you can go through one service chain and if that fails then we actually move on to the other and to do that we actually have a concept of service health check. So this is an interesting concept because as you're going creating these multiple chains what happens in that case is if one of the services one of the firewall instances is not working fine traffic stops going through but you're not able to detect that because the VM is still up and running that offers the service. So in that case we have a health check that you can configure to actually go ping do a URL get to see if the service is actually up and if not then we bring it down we bring the route preference down and the other chain would go active. The other thing that I wanted to talk about other than V2 was what we have the work that we are doing with Kubernetes and with Mesos. I'll focus on Kubernetes today. So as you're aware Kubernetes is the Google open source orchestration and has a concept of services pods containers labels. It offers a flat networking architecture today. There are of course various solutions trying to solve that and open control is one of them. So whenever you're launching a pod this fundamental concept of defining a pod and pod has a name and it offers DNS based service to an outside entity and how to use that pod. There's a concept of labels that we use to associate all the Kubernetes concepts into contrail concepts. So whenever you have a tag as network tag we create a virtual network out of it. Whenever we have a network access tag so let's say you have a service Redis and it's offering network access for another entity. We would create a front-end entity and Redis a network policy as I mentioned earlier everything in contrail is through network policies. So you create two virtual networks for each of the pod slash services and then we automatically use the tag to create a policy between the pods. So what you notice here is fundamentally you moved away from a flat structure to a completely policy-driven isolated structure. These pods cannot talk to each other by default. They can only go through if the policy is enabled and connecting the two. This is an example of how typically you would do a pod definition and the tags would help you to communicate with each other. So what we've had to do is we've added a listener it's called the cube network manager and that's a plug-in which listens to the cube API server and any messages that go on. We listen to those messages and we convert them to open contrail specific messages and program our forwarding engine. So whether it's a new network that needs to be created whenever you launch a new service or pod or whenever you want to connect to pods all the translation happens by the cube network manager. This runs on the master. All the contrail controller demons are containerized in fact. So if the config node, the analytics node, the controller everything has been containerized to run in this environment. On all the minions which means all the compute nodes of Kubernetes we also run a cubelet. We replace the kernel module which handles Docker networking or Linux bridge. We replace that with our vrouter. So again it's an L3 overlay with open contrail. The vEat whenever a pod comes up, the vEat is plugged into our vrouter. So our vrouter is fully aware that a new container has come up and it then talks to the controller, exchanges all the information in terms of IPAM or anything that we need to do. So fundamentally the solution is we also provide ECMP to services within open contrail but overall benefits are you're providing multi-tenancy solution in networking. There's complete isolation of tenant and pod traffic as I mentioned earlier and overlay in open contrail is through the network policy mechanism that we have and it's a seamless integration between private and public clouds also we've set up two Kubernetes clusters to talk through two MX gateways across data centers as well as you can actually go from your data center to Amazon and back through this mechanism. With that I wanted to mention that all the security features that we have in our service chaining Sushant is going to cover that in terms of CSRX and VSRX offerings. Thank you Rudra. My name is Sushant and the product manager for the data center security in the Juniper network team. I'm going to share a couple of very interesting announcements that we made this in the summit. So the first one is about the 100 gig VSRX. For those of you who are not familiar with VSRX let me give you a brief overview. So what we have is the industry's fastest virtual firewall. We do 17 gig large packet or 4 gig iMix with only two VCPUs and 4 gig of memory. We use DPDK internally and then we run we have integrated with OpenStack we have plug-in and driver that's available for free. So what we did is with two VCPUs we are able to achieve 17 gig so we added more VCPUs to the single instance and we saw that the performance was scaling linearly and with just 12 VCPUs we were able to hit 100 gig large packet throughput. Another thing I want to stress here is the host that we are using for this particular test is a two socket Intel Xeon host machine. Each socket had 12 cores. So essentially we were just using one socket to achieve this 100 gig performance and the entire second socket is free to run other workloads or other VNFs on the same host. In terms of performance comparison with the existing VSRX and the new VSRX so as we added more VCPUs the performance scale linearly and not only did the basic firewall throughput increase but even the advanced services throughput has gone 5 to 6 times. So one particular thing that I want to stress upon is the IPsec performance so with single instance now we are able to do 4 gig throughput. The main use cases for such 100 gig firewall is if someone is virtualizing CG firewall then the main requirement there is having carrier-grade NAT and high performance firewall and with 100 gig VSRX we think we have a good use case there. Moving to the other announcement that we have made is the CSRX. So what we have done is we have taken all the features that we support on the VSRX and we moved them into a container and this is what we are calling as container-based SRX. So it's a firewall built in a container this is the industry's first container-based firewall. It has complete security feature parity with the VSRX. It doesn't have routing features but the security features are all there. The codebase is singly sourced from the VSRX codebase so essentially what it means is any fixes that go into the physical SRX get applied into the virtual SRX as well as the container SRX and we retain the same management management layer with the virtual firewall. So if you have built automation or tools around physical firewall you can repurpose them to use virtual firewall as well as the container-based SRX. In terms of value proposition so the main value proposition is the elasticity because there is no static reservation like in case of a VM you can provision more instances on a single host and the resource consumption grows as the traffic to it increases and then it adds greater agility to the environment. The boot up and restart times are under one second so this adds the agility to the customer in environments and then it also adds to the cost savings for the deployment because the customer is no longer required to choose one monolithic application they can choose the services they require and only deploy them. Also you should see that the container is only using resources for the services it's actually running at point of time so the resource consumption is restricted to the services that are enabled on that container which also converts into cost savings for the customer deployments. We have a brief comparison between the VSRX and CSRX so VSRX supports complete routing and firewalling features. In terms of CSRX it is doing the security services and then in terms of CPU requirements VSRX requires two vCPUs statically reserved for it while CSRX would would take up CPU and memory resources as it actually as the traffic to it grows so when there is no traffic in an idle scenario the memory consumption is about 40 to 50 meg and even in terms of the image size you can see that the CSRX image is only 150 MB so it's very easy to download deploy and get started in your environment. I'll talk about couple of use cases where we think that CSRX has a play so the first use case is the cloud CPU use case in this use case the managed security service providers would want to provide security services to a large subscriber base so the requirement there is to instantiate a virtual security instance for each of their subscribers and when the subscriber base is as large as let's say tens of thousands of them the resource requirements to actually provision so many virtual instances is very high and because VSRX consumes less resources and the individual throughput requirement of each of those subscribers is not high you can now provision lot more subscribers on a single host and so this converts to cost savings and the opaque savings for the operator even in the UCP use case where some of the VNFs are running on the customer deployments the the system requirements on the UCP box are also very low because of the low resource requirements by the CSRX and one thing I want to stress in this scenario Juniper can provide end-to-end solution in that control can do the service orchestration and CSRX or the VSRX here can be providing the security services in the second use case I want to talk about is the micro segmentation we have a demo of this at our booth where we can talk in more detail but the idea here is the security groups within the open stack can only provide limited limited security options so to to provide advanced security to the VM workloads we can actually provision a CSRX against each VM workload and the traffic to the workload and outside of that workload will actually go through the CSRX and the user could go to the horizon UI and apply the security group rules and those will convert into policies that get applied on the CSRX so you would actually be able to apply these security policies at the VM workload level instead of on a network level or on a subject level right again we have the integration with open stack and the demo is at the booth we can also do this with contrail where the the QBR now becomes the V router within the contrail environment like I said if with the CSRX if anyone is interested in beta please do reach out if you have other use cases where you think that CSRX would fit better do reach out to us and if you have use cases for the 100 gig VSRX please do reach out to us and please do stop by at our booth to look at the demo for the CSRX and the VSRX that we have thank you everyone thank you


Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante. We're live at EMC World, Silicon Angles Continuous Coverage, wall-to-wall coverage of EMC World. We're here with Mike Capellis, who's the CEO of VCE. Mike, welcome back to theCUBE. I don't know if you remember, but our very first CUBE was two years ago in Boston at EMC World, and you came on with Joe Tucci. We had a great conversation. My co-host asked Joe if storage was sexy and Joe didn't really think so, but. So welcome back. You know, I actually remember that. We were telling the story about how I ended up as I was mining my own business and then Joe into a baseball game and somewhere between one beer and one hot dog, I ended up, you know, working with him at VCE. Yeah, so we're also here with Stu Miniman, who follows converged infrastructure for us. So Michael, I was just in your session upstairs with the analysts. I thought it was good. I got some good questions out of that. I mean, analysts sometimes ask good questions, sometimes not, but I thought your brief history lesson was good. You used to talk about VCE, it came out in 2009, and what I always liked about listening to you talk about this is you have a practitioner's perspective. You know, you're not just a marketing CEO talking points. Talk a little bit about, take us back to the vision that you guys had with VCE and why that's so important from a practitioner's perspective. Yeah, so I mean, so VCE was actually formed, those of you who don't know, it is it was a venture that was formed between EMC Cisco with participation by Intel and VMware, and people ask how it sort of originated. Well, it actually goes back a long time, and I have two parallels that you make. If you think about the world of networking, you know, we're around networking and we had fixed networks and data networks and point to point and those see whatever. And you know, the IP networks came along, you said, I'm going to write one place and I don't have to know or care where the physical layer is underneath it.  Well, between both companies, between both Cisco and EMC, we said, well, we know that there will be a convergence of where the network starts and compute ends. What's the blade? What's the switch? How storage fits in? And then of course, EMC through Joe, getting together with VMware and how virtualization. So when you looked at the pieces, you had compute, networking, the interconnect, storage, virtualization, the connect. And we said, we can develop an alternate model, which is very quick, not constrained by the things normal big companies and be able to create really the next, literally x86 class mainframe by using the best of capabilities. And everybody's familiar with big mergers. I might know a little bit about that. And so it was an alternate way to do fast innovation using the best technology components under the understanding, just like networks, there would be convergence. Yeah, so I didn't realize, I guess, I thought about what you just said about x86 mainframe. You guys actually copied IBM on that front, not with the x86 mainframe, but the mainframe, right? So in a way, you were trying to conceive of this software mainframe, as Maritz calls it, with the x86 base mainframe. Now I wanted to follow up on that.  So you guys, that's a three year time to market advantage that you have. Now there are certain things about IBM's system that I like, codifying all that knowledge. Now I'm trying to figure out how much of that is real, how much of that is good marketing. Can the industry actually take those learnings, codify it, and embed it into systems so that those systems are intelligent in a way that can align to applications and workloads? Yeah, I think you've actually hit on the two most important things. Everybody talks about the different offerings in the marketplace, you know, everybody's xconverged, somebody's reference architecture. What really defines this is you really do have to look at applications and workloads. The answer is, well, what do you use? Well, it depends on what you're trying to do. So if you take what IBM has done, and by the way, I'm incredibly respectful of them. They've been around a long time, and obviously their reputation speaks for themselves. But they were trying to say, is we have an understanding of the software stack that allows you to be able to take and to deploy applications in a very robust way, ensuring all the things you need from mainframe class, you know, reliability, robustness. They then took, and they put their cloudburst layer on the top of the stage. Now we'll add some feature function here to give it the kind of things you need for services in a cloud layer. The ability to do dynamic portals to be able to do monitoring and metering all that stuff. So you know, I mean, one thing I like about what IBM does is basically when IBM jumps in the fray, they have validated the market and high tide floats all ships. So this does say they will approach it from their stack, which their knowledge of them, they certainly understand the applications world, will approach it from a view of saying, we have taken the absolute best in class components. You know, Cisco with their innovation and lead and networking down through the fabric and into the Intel blades, storage, virtualization, and we will approach them both sides saying, this is a new way to deploy infrastructure. As you need it, where you don't have to know where care with that physical areas, then let the applications come and determine what the workload is, depending on what the need is. Yeah, so the validation point is key. And now when EMC quietly put in its 10K, the numbers that they had to report because it was getting so measurable, Stu and I sort of squinted through those and we tried to reverse engineer them and build a little VCE model. For the purpose of saying, well, how big is this thing really? And it's quite large. Now, of course, the other point is, you guys are investing a lot of money into it. And so, if you looked at it from a VC standpoint, wow, this is really an expensive endeavor. And so what we did is we said, well, let's look at the market. Why are people doing this? The market's absolutely enormous. We quantified a $400 billion TAM because it's everything. It's compute, it's storage, it's networking and it's the services and software around it. And we made a point that the services and concepts should decline. But still, we're talking about an enormous market and it's almost like government's investing in things.  Well, so first place, this gives me an opportunity to set the record straight on one thing. And God knows the audience doesn't want an accounting class, but I'm going to offer one anyway. The way the business model works is, when we sell a V block, and this is fully disclosed in all financials, is EMC picks up the revenue on the margin of their products. Cisco picks up the revenue margin of their products and what is left is reported is only the expense. And as Joe Tucci says, the bigger the expense, get the more successful we are. So people sometimes look and say, well, that is actually the profit. It's not, the profit's already been taken. And internally, VCE has like any normal company, a P&L based on a stand-alone. So don't confuse the reported expense number from the profitability. And we didn't, that's what I say. We tried to do both of them. Now, back to the relevant point. Because that's an important point, because what you're saying is that Brian Gallagher's P&L takes profit from that and Rich DePolitano's P&L takes profit. We had Rich on earlier. He's saying, wow, I love V block. I'm making, it's a big chunk of my business. So that's, we get that. And that's a good thing. All right, so anyway, continue. I'm sorry. So the point you were making is how big is the market? Well, the question you want to ask is, at what point and at what adoption level do you have where converged infrastructure starts to represent a relative percentage of the market? And so what we're already starting to see is you start to see where somebody will make a decision to actually deploy applications this way. And that decision will actually sort of define what they do in switching for the entire data center, server for the entire center and compute. So I mean, we look at the compounded growth rates. One of the reasons, I'm kind of a common sense guy, is why is that the case? Well, the value proposition says, I can deploy it. I don't have to do any release management. Don't have to do any configuration management. I can actually start to think about just deploying infrastructure, which is really the cloud model, when I need it, as I need it. The V block has been optimized so that it is in perfect balance relevant to most application loads. So when you try to do it on your own, you're always over by the storage, under by the compute, and you never get it. So the reason why it continued to grow is customers are saying, the goal here is the fastest possible deployment of applications, the most flexibility without having to know where care with the infrastructures, and it's a compelling common sense value problem. So, go ahead. So we talked about the different components that make up the converged infrastructure, where there's really been an opportunity in the market is from the systems management, rather than individual product management, and the convergent should change the operating models. So can you talk a little bit as to what VCE sees as their role there and where are you driving things? Yeah, so what is really interesting is you have to think about things differently when you start assuming virtualization is the way you deploy. In a traditional style world in systems management, it said, I have an application and I have a system, and the way Dena said to operators, I have clusters. I have a mainframe cluster over here that runs some financial applications. I got a Windows world over here that runs some web serving. I've got a Unix world over here that does something. And so we built system management to say we have a one-to-one relationship between the application and the system. Throw 1,000 VMs in, it doesn't know anymore. And so we have actually taken a very different look at systems management by saying I have, at the element level, or defined as the compute engine, the network level, and the storage level, I have all the information about the components. Let me just extract and identify those components. I'll pass that information up to the virtualization engine which says, now what do I need? I need to know which resources deploy, I need to know how to do it, I need to be able to address what pools I want to use. So we took an opposite world, instead of looking down here going up, we said let's look at system management from what does the virtualization layer do, go down, automatically discover and literally strip out layers that you don't need anymore. And so the answer to the question is, well, what do you do for systems management? Is we inherently take advantage of all the capability that's already there and only add those things to the virtualization that it needs to do resource management. It's a very different view. I thought Andrew Reichman from Forrester asked a really good question. He didn't close it right, but I can say that. It's easy for me to say, but I thought his question was one of the better ones I heard. So I'm going to re-ask it here and maybe talk about it. He said, you guys talk about best of breed. And he said that, and I buy that EMC storage and Cisco networking, but he said the Cisco compute piece is somewhat speculative. That's the way he said it. And then he asked, this is where he blew it. He said, is that holding you back? And you were very nice. You could have said, we're crushing it. What do you mean is it holding us back? So that was the wrong close. But what I thought was, could it potentially be a barrier down the road? I wonder if you could address that. So the way we answer that question is that, first place is, let's remember the way we think about this, and we do think about it differently. We don't think about it as just a blade or a processor. What the UCS is, is you start with very dense, high performance IP switching. You put a fabric into it that allows you to go down to the compute engine and you actually have a zero latency configuration between network and compute. At that point, we certainly can adapt through Intel and our partnerships. Intel technology adoption, the fastest possible rate. To that, we embed storage and we natural virtualize. The question isn't, just is it, do you have a better faster blade because Intel basically is providing the core? We are actually delivering something very different. It is the integration of the switch with the fabric, with the compute, to deliver an integrated approach which dramatically changes all the value proposition. So, somebody else got a different question. If you only want to run a very low end server as a single application, it's probably not the thing. If you want to manage applications and actually create compute as a utility, then it's a very different question. And the other thing you said is you're not going to do, some of the things that, some of the workloads and applications that V-Blocks is going into, you're just not going to do them on a reference architecture. Well, again, I always like to differentiate the market. A reference architecture, and we're fine with that, Cisco EMC is supporting those, is a very different thing than a system that's integrated. If you want to go out, one of the analogies I mean, would you ever build a mainframe on the shop floor and then try to run mission critical applications? Probably not. Would you take some storage and some switches and a server and build it on the floor and be able to run a Windows, maybe you want to run some exchange or SharePoint. So, there's a set of class applications or even some customers who have their own IP they want to apply, that will be for some class of application. V-Block is actually something very different. It's an integrated system that you can run, mixed workloads, and it is in fact a much higher abstraction.  Well, it depends what your applications are.  So, I'm wondering if you could address the service provider market, because we see, you know, rather than, most enterprises have multiple applications, service providers very much a scale out architecture, but I understand you guys have been doing pretty well there, so maybe you can address how that fits together. Well, depending on what class of service provider you look at, because you have SIs and so on, but let's just use what would be the traditional. If you're a service provider and you've been running a network, what is it that you used to do? You manage the network, you put IP on top of that, and what you sold your value, your customers, you don't have to know where care where the network is, I'll do billing for you, I'll do quality of service, I'll be able to differentiate SLAs. So the first thing I said, well, if I'm there, could I now start to sell other higher level forms of compute? Drop in a V-Block. V-Block goes in, you can now sell the entire infrastructure as a service, not only with compute networking and storage at that level, but the actual network underneath it. You have your tools for the differentiate quality of service, I got that, I can bill it. So it's a natural, and then you can consume it as you need it, if you need more, you add another V-Block. So it's a natural environment for the service providers, and by the way, as you know, these are very technically bright people who are used to running things at enormous scale. And I want to come back to this, so service providers, you think service providers, you think of large infrastructure and repeatable, so I want to come back to the reference architecture discussion, because I personally think that the reference architecture, you guys doing a reference architecture would dilute a core value proposition, in my opinion. At the same time, the channel's clamoring for reference, and reference architecture is a bigger business because you could define it pretty much any way you want. My question is, are you going to do a baby V-Block, and can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, so we agree. So the way we sort of think about this, and one of the things we're particularly proud of is, particularly at some stage of your evolution, you want to make sure you have a great customer experience, and that's something we're particularly proud of. So what we said our first foray into that was, we have a bunch of large customers who actually want to do a remote office deployment. So we said, aha. So we have been developing a product, which is a lower end product, which is for remote distribution to be used with our bigger engines. They're called 300, 700, but whatever they're called. That's step one. What we'll learn from that are the characteristics of what you now need to do to build a V-Block, which is stand alone, which has different requirements for manageability and some other things. We have been working with our channel partners to define what are those characteristics. So the natural evolution, by the way, of all technologies. You come in early, you get enterprise customers to validate it, you then start to vote for the channel, you then validate that, you develop a remote office integrated system. From that, you develop a more stand aligned product, you take that product through the channel and offer it as a stand alone. So this is classic evolution, step by step. We will be there. We're not going to pre-announce the product, but we are in active discussions with partners on requirements for a stand alone product in that market. The second reason to be honest with you is we've actually had so much volume and scale. Demand hasn't been a problem so far. So I wonder if you could speak a little bit more to the channel. There were a little bit of bumps in the road, I'd say, kind of the first 12 to 18 months. I agree with that. And kind of the whole Acadia model got sorted out to VCE. I think signals we've gotten there, things are better, but there's a big fight in the channel for who's going to own that piece. Well, so when we started the model, it was a service model. And I mean, I'll have to admit, I kind of had a point of view on that. Having a service model is competition with the channel. So, okay, we're not going to do that. That's where that business is. So I was bumping the road. Second bumping the road is we had a reference architecture for a very complex product. And what is the classic step of channel deployment? You have to mature the model. You have to mature the product. It has to be repeatable. You have to have tools. And so as we came up that curve, I mean, it is classic. A very complex product in early stages is not terribly productive for the channel. A mature product with services value added content with tools is pretty good. So we came up and we got a little bit of positioning by different parties. We're also doing a little bit better of being much more consistent in, this is what we're going to do with not, you noticed how clear I was. This is what we're going to do on the commercial product. It's extremely clear. So we had some bumps in the road. Part of it was just maturation. And I do think right now we are recruiting partners. We're very clear. We're not going to compete by offering services at the end product, you know, for an SP. We're not going to offer software directly. That is for our ISVs. And we are going to offer infrastructure and a deployable model for the channel. But this is a channel model. 2020 hindsight, I think we could have done a better job of communication. We could have stepped it a little slower and we could have matured the processes. But it is a lot better. Yeah. Mike, you seem pretty charged up about this current role.  I mean, but you seem really passionate about this initiative.  Well, first place, you've known me a long time. Do I ever not have fun? There are a couple of WorldCom days that weren't quite as much fun as some others. But you know, these things happen. You know, bankruptcy and fraud weren't the greatest technological attributes for a brand, but we kind of got through that. So I have a couple of views on this. What do you want to do? You want to do something that's really, this is really moving markets. It has the great benefit of having Cisco EMC and VMware. Could you ask for better technological partners to scale it? And you do also like to work with people that you like a lot. I've known Joe and John a long time. So you know, it has been relevant to the market. I love working with the kinds of young teams and creating the culture of a can do. And so, yeah, sure it's fun. That's great. And I know you rock and roll aficionado. So we actually, we were down at Sapphire last week. We heard Van Halen. I hadn't seen them since the 80s. And we're okay. So your favorite U2 song? My favorite U2 song, I would say Bloody Sunday. It's my favorite U2 song. Every once in a while it's a beautiful day in the BC world. Yeah, you know. How about your favorite rock song? For me it's too cliche, I don't know. But do you play it? Do I play it? No. No, no, you play? No. Well, I'm a hack. Yeah, okay. Yeah, favorite rock and roll band. Favorite rock and roll band, Clash. All right. Love the Clash. There you go. So we've concluded that. How are you? You know, I like just about everything. And everybody says that. But I mean, some have been about hack on the guitar. The first song I ever learned to play on the guitar was Green Day. So that was the place I kind of started. You know, it was kind of adorable. But I go everywhere. I mean, you know, the next one I think was Life Outs was the next song I learned to play. So I kind of go all over the place. So who's the entertainment this week? Maroon 5 this week. Maroon 5? Oh, okay. Staying last year at Sapphire was very good. So David Lee Roth was the lead singer. But his voice is going. So they had to crank up the guitars and you couldn't really hear it. All right. So we're getting low on time. I do have one more question I want to ask. I'll be back. Ask something beautiful here. Okay, all right. Well, come on. So VCD is up to 1,000 people. How do you maintain that kind of startup atmosphere and keep it going as you kind of, as you said, stabilize the product line? Well, I think what happens is, you know, you have certain things you believe in and you kind of, as you bring people on board, you kind of get a sense for, do those attributes work or those attributes not work?  One of the ways you move fast is everybody we hire has a pretty strong technical orientation. So I don't have to sit here and explain what it is. So we have certain things that we look for. And that is that you got to be passionate about this business.  You know, over time, you know, everybody doesn't have to look exactly the same because culture is about diversity of thought. But you do sort of get a feel. And right now, it's a place people want to come work. All right, Mike Cappell, to me, the embodiment of strategy and execution, congratulations on the progress that you've made. I really appreciate the candid conversation and thanks very much for coming on the queue. It's really a pleasure to have you. Thank you. All right, keep it right there. We'll be right back with SiliconANGLE.tv's continuous coverage, live from EMC World. Be right back.


My name is Zoe and this is my presentation for the for the end of this hyper ledger mentorship project. I'm from Fort Collins Colorado in the US and currently attending Colorado State University. This is my last semester of my computer science degree. And I worked with Igor and even on the blueprint like interface for ERO has special instructions project. So the initial goal for this project was to create an intuitive blueprint like interface with block representations of ERO has special instructions for users to have a more approachable and easy way for them to build their own smart contracts. The web application that I created also allows the user to save programs that are currently in development both in JSON and raw byte formats. And those saved programs can be loaded into the application for modification and expansion at any time. The tools that I use to build this web application include the, the majority of the application is written in JavaScript there is a tiny bit that's written in TypeScript. And then I also used react and react strap for some, some components that I used for the application. The first objective was to create a visual interface to construct smart contracts with the block representations of ERO has special instructions. The second objective was to have the ability to save and load programs that are currently in development and the third objective was the ability to serialize the constructed program into the raw byte representation of ERO has special instructions. So my project deliverables this was my original mock up of the application design using Figma. I originally I took a lot of inspiration from Blockly. The web application written and created by Google to aid in like the learning of kind of initial coding practices if you are familiar with that application. So these, these are the, these, these blocks in black are the block representations of the ERO has special instructions on the right demonstrates what I had originally planned for how the menu would work that you would be able to have all of these categories for the type of instructions that you were able to use in order to build your smart contract that it would pop out on the side and that there would be a, a panel on the right that would show the JSON or the raw byte representation of what you were creating in the workbench in the middle, and then there are the save and load capabilities as well as kind of the delete all button there. This is ultimately what the app looks like as of right now I was, I was luckily able to get in contact with some more like UI specialists who were able to help me kind of refine the design of the interface. There were, there were some features of the original interface that I wasn't able to have just the way that I wanted for instance the menus collapse down instead of collapse out, and I had initially planned on adding a drag and drop feature for the block similar to how Blockly does it. But I, I came up with this add and delete via the plus and X buttons that you see in the instructions and the workbench blocks. So, the execution and accomplishments I was able to create an application that allows the user to create smart contracts using block representations of your special instructions I was also able to add the save and load feature which allows the user to continue working on in progress programs. I also attempted at length to have the application connect directly to the server to submit the instructions directly to the ledger as an optional objective. This however is currently unfinished it's in progress. So we're just a couple of unforeseen compatibility issues with the front end that I created and the JavaScript library that I was attempting to use. So we kind of ran into some issues there. I'm most proud of the design of this application. As this was my first web application design I was able to receive a lot of useful feedback during this process that allowed me to improve upon my initial mock up. And overall I found expanding on my knowledge of how to use react and JavaScript to create all the individual components all the blocks and dictate their behaviors to be the most challenging, along with understanding how to utilize the Eroha JavaScript library. Recommendations for future work definitely finishing client capability for this application would be the most useful additional feature. It would also be useful to add more blocks to represent additional instructions to expand on what the user can currently create. As it stands, the application is only supporting some of the more basic instructions. But there are more complicated instructions things like triggers or expressions that could be added to further to give the user more tools in building their their own smart contract. So the output I kind of put together just like a little demo video to demonstrate how the application works. This is just kind of, this is demonstrating how one would create kind of a base case so registering a domain being able to register an asset or an account and an asset to those domains be able to name them. And here we go. This just kind of shows how the menus open up. You can use the the add buttons there adding the name of the of the domain. When you're registering an account you can name it you can add a key and then the drop down will contain any and all previously registered domains so that the user doesn't have to type it in every time. Similar, similar with the asset. And then this is the mint or D, D mint or burn, I guess, instruction where you can add currency. And then to the asset and the account. This is demonstrating the save feature you can save as both Jason and what and as a bite array as I have previously stated, and then you can erase the workbench to start over as well. This is demonstrating the load feature that you can indeed use files that you had saved previously to load your previous work into the workbench. So that So the insights I've gained I received valuable advice and feedback from professionals that have helped me grow as a web developer. I mentioned this was kind of my first web application that I've designed and implemented kind of from start from scratch. So it was really, it was really great to get feedback from a lot of different individuals from from different backgrounds. Yes, one piece of advice that I'd pass on to other mentees is to really accept any and all feedback as an opportunity to better yourself as a developer, I think that that has been by far the most rewarding aspect of this internship is to really be able to present your work for feedback and and hear that feedback and be able to implement it and see how you grow as a developer in real time. So, yeah, thank you to my mentors thank you to everybody else who helped me in this process. And that's, that's the end of my presentation. Thank you Zoe. And thanks for the demo as well to just to get a sense of the application that you built. I do see your both of your mentors Igor and even here. Do you have anything to add to what Zoe presented. So, yeah, hello everybody. I'm Igor, one of the mentors. So yeah, thanks a lot to Zoe for presentation and for work. It was really difficult to guess internship in the way that is your version two is still in development and so it was really working with the rock version two so. Yes, some of the interfaces were changing as a client library documentation was a bit difficult. Yeah, and also this internship required a lot of experimentation. In terms of, yeah, just getting the right interface. We gave only like some inspirations as tools that I might look into, but yeah, the whole design and ideas behind the UX UI. We're totally hers. So, um, yeah, that's great. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, so I, you know, that's part of the intent of our mentorship program to give you know those who are new to the open source projects and community chance to experiment under the guidance of seasoned community members like you, Igor and even. Thank you Zoe, I don't have a question for you. How did you hear about mentorship program at your in Colorado State and how did you come across this opportunity. Um, I, so I had applied for a couple of Linux Foundation mentorships the summer prior. I'd been told about them by a peer somebody that my academic advisor had linked me up with and she suggested that I try my hand at participating in open source mentorships. I had applied last summer, but just my, my skill level just wasn't where it was at in order to be a sexual. So I, I didn't receive a mentorship last summer. But then when I was looking into what I would like to do this summer. I heard, you know, all of the positive things that my peer had said about Linux Foundation mentorships, and I, and I decided to apply again and luckily it worked out this time so that's how I, that's how I came to be here. So that's good to hear. And hopefully you're going to be an ambassador on your campus to help us get the word out. It's not just hyper ledger mentorships. Yes, so so the Linux Foundation is called LFX mentorship. So if you go to that platform, you will find, you know, of course during the summer, they're, you know, the most number of projects that mentorship projects that the different foundations offer, but throughout the year their opportunities out there. So I appreciate you staying in the, you know, continuing contributing to this project, and also staying in the hyper ledger community in the open source community and help us spread the word on your campus about getting involved in open source. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Thank you so much.


Yes, welcome to another episode of Let There Be Talk, episode number 687 today. It will be a solo episode. Welcome aboard. I just got back from Fort Collins, Colorado. Four headlining shows at the incredible Comedy Fort, which is over the last couple of years, risen up to the top five clubs in America in my eyes. And a big shout out to David Rodriguez, the owner, and Chase Bernstein, who featured for me. But a huge shout out to a lot of people that came out. There was four sold out shows. And that is probably one of the few times that I have sold out the weekend. And that is a mystery to me how, you know, you can get it all lined up at some places and other places you can't, but it was great. I didn't know if it was going to be any good. I had no idea that spring break was happening. There's a college like two blocks away from the club. And you never know when you're booking stuff. You just don't know. I don't know when anything is, you know, I don't know, like I'll show up somewhere and I'll be like, ah, fuck, it's Easter. No idea. To me, they say you want to do these gigs and I go, yep. And I jump on it. And then when it comes, I'm like, ah, what the fuck, Cinco de Mayo, the worst time to gig besides St. Patrick's Day, which is this Friday, I just saw that on my calendar.  They're not even holidays really. I mean, what are they? I don't know. Anyway, so it was great to be out in Fort Collins again. And man, I would shoot a special in there. It's such a magic room. It's just basically if you've ever been to UCB in Los Angeles on Franklin, it's kind of like a mini UCB. And it just has this vibe. The laughs pop like crazy. It's called the comedy for it because of Fort Collins. But it also feels to me like a cool fort. It actually is like a comedy for it. Great food around there. And the weather was good. It was 50 degrees. Snowed like crazy the week before, but great weather. They got this place. It's called illegal Pete's. And it's like what Chipotle wishes they were. I wish there was an illegal Pete's all over America. It's just super clean. I guess it's local produce and stuff. So it just tastes fantastic. And their hot sauce is amazing. Illegal Pete's. And then they got another place that's been there like 100 years or something. I think it's a silver, silver diner. So good food. Amazing comedy club. The owner, David, is just fantastic. So yeah, man, thank you for coming out. And some people had seen me there in July and came back out again. And thank God I had a bunch of new material. I've been working on a new bunch of new material. And I would say this weekend, I'm finally feeling pretty good about running an hour after being down all this time since COVID. Running an hour is just so, it's so insane, man. It's absolutely hard. I don't care what anybody says. It's easy to run a shitty hour, just be up there, do crowd work and tell some mediocre jokes, but put together a full hour that has a great thread and kind of a semi-theme. It's almost impossible if you're not doing it every weekend.  And I think that if I could do like 10 weekends in a row, man, I would just be smashing. But I felt pretty damn good about headlining. I got to say that. And thank you again for everybody that came out. Oh, what have we got? I got on the list here. Gary Rosenton passed away. And this is just horrific. He was the last original member of Leonard Skinnerd. I've said it over and over years and years that I love Skinnerd. And he's gone. I never went to go see Leonard Skinnerd after the plane crash. I never saw him before the plane crash. But after the plane crash, I never went to see him because it just was not, didn't feel right to me. And I stuck with that the entire span of the Skinnerd lineups all the way up until last night, I believe they played. Gary Rosenton's gone. They're out there playing. And it is a full blown cover band. And if you're one of those people that was like, I never saw Skinnerd, so I'm going to see him. Well, you're not seeing Skinnerd. You're seeing the name. You're seeing the name Leonard Skinnerd. But there is no one in that band that is an original member of Leonard Skinnerd. It's a lot like going to see Fornner. And you know, my rage on Fornner, I just, you know, I can't really blame the band anymore because the people go. And I don't know if they don't know or they don't care or they got free tickets or what. But I just can't imagine going to see Leonard Skinnerd right now with no original members. That is just mind boggling to me. That is a tribute band. That is what that is. And that's what Fornner is. And a lot of bands have like one member left. And you know, I get it. They got to make a living. I'm not knocking them. I'm just saying you're not going to get any of my money or respect. It's crazy to me. It is crazy to me that Rosenton died a few days ago and there's the band out there playing a couple nights later with a video behind him like, yeah, he passed away but we're still here. You know, so I don't know. That's a mini rage right there. I'm not really curious about it because like I said, I never went to see Skinnerd even when they had a lot of the original members. Just didn't feel right to me. But now, oh man, I couldn't imagine. You know, a lot of those bands, they say that like, you know, they were going to do that farewell tribute to Skinnerd years and years ago, the first run. And they've been going every since. So Gary Rosenton, one of the greatest guitar players of all time and songwriters. And I truly believe totally underrated. Totally underrated. If you have not seen the Skinnerd documentary, I would highly recommend this. It is just incredible what this band created, the greatest US rock band. I was talking to Greg Dooley about it a couple of days ago and you know, there's the argument, is it ZZ Top? Is it Aerosmith? Is it Van Halen or is it Skinnerd? And I would say for me, it's definitely Skinnerd. Aerosmith is definitely up in there. And Aerosmith still running all the original members, although I do not think that the drummer is in the band anymore or he's injured or something's going on there. But you know, you cannot deny how powerful Skinnerd is. I think the greatest rock footage of Skinnerd is that day in the green. There's like three songs from the day in the green when they played and to watch that Free Bird and Gary's slide work on the SG, it is unreal to see 65,000 people. I posted it on my Instagram. Just going crazy for Free Bird. Free Bird never gets old to me. I was talking about how I want to invent this app to where you could plug it in on your stereo or your car radio and it won't play songs that you don't ever want to hear again. I call it Nope.  And it's like, they got so many good songs. So Nope. Anyway, with Skinnerd, I never pass on Free Bird. I don't change the channel. It's never gets old to me ever because to hear that guitar outro, it is just unreal to me. And it never gets old because you just listen to it and you go like, first of all, recording that in the studio.  And yeah, Steve Gaines, once he's in there and they're just doing the three guitar attack, Dan the green. Anyway, Rosenton, go check out that footage and check out the documentary. If you have not seen the documentary, it is just a scorcher, you know, they got together. Rosenton wanted to play baseball, which is crazy. He wanted to be on the Yankees. Can you imagine if that would happen? He was like a great baseball player.  And Rosenton's tone. His tone is incredible. I posted a video of me seeing his 59 Les Paul Bernice at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Ohio. Years back, I was doing a comedy club there and they invited me down. I went recently with Marcus King and the band and we went on one of those backstage tours where they take you behind the scenes and show you guitars that are in the vaults. But when I went solo, I went back there and which by the way, I saw Joe Bonamaso went recently and they had Alan Collins, Karina Explorer there. So when I went there, like you wanna see something special and they just have these drawers and they just split out this drawer and there it was Bernice, it's 59 Les Paul.  And I've told the story before but I'm just telling you right now as I'm reminiscing over Gary Rosenton. That guitar, I looked at it for about a half hour. The back, the fretboard, the pickups, the patina all over the finish, the color, perfect kind of faded honey amber, unreal. Just to see that guitar and look at it right there and go, that's his Les Paul, which I wonder where it is today. There's gotta be a battle going on behind scenes. Hopefully his family has it. I don't know what's going on but he had that killer SG and he had that Les Paul. And one of my regrets I sold, I had the Murphy, Gary Rosenton, Les Paul Reissue. And I sold it to this guy that worked at Bill Wall Leather. All right, that's one of my regrets. Regrets selling guitars was that one.  You know, if it was here, I wouldn't be playing it but it was a really cool guitar. He had put the gold hardware on his Les Paul and it was all worn out like the pickup covers and stuff. And it just looked so cool. And I had one but I would love to know where that 59 Les Paul is today because they said those guitars are on loan from time and time again. Like they loan it to the Rock and Roll Hall fame then the people get it back, then they loan it again. So it'd be really cool to know where that is. And I wonder if it's gonna go up for sale. I'm sure it will. And I wonder how much it'll get. Now, if you watch him on the day in the green footage he's playing all the slide stuff on the Gibson SG. And I never got to talk to Gary. I wish I could've because I would love to ask him what would make him go back and forth? Why would he be on the SG sometimes and the Les Paul other times? He played the Les Paul a lot. And man, hopefully that SG's around still too. They did do an SG reissue of his guitar also. So Gary Rosenton, fly high my brother survived a plane crash, multiple heart attacks, heavy, heavy drug addiction, a brutal car crash that that smell was wrote about, hitting the oak tree, oak tree up in my way. This guy had nine lives, man. He was real deal. The guy lived it hard. And that's that old 70s rock and roll star, man. They just, they were out on the road all the time, lonely, pre-sell phones and all that, just being your hotel board partying on, man. So Gary Rosenton, last original member of Leonard Skinner. And still to this day, I would say weekly, I play that one more from the road. That's one of the greatest live records. I absolutely love it. Burr and I did the Fox Theater in Atlanta where that was recorded. We did it last year. And when you walk on, it says, play it pretty for Atlanta. I was so fired up to play that place, the Fox Theater, still think about it to this day, just being in there and then saving that place. It was going to get the wrecking ball. And they said, look, we'll come and play three nights free, donate the money to save this place. And that's what they did. And they recorded it and put out one of the greatest live records ever by a rock band. Steve Gaines is new in the band at the time and Cassie's brother. And it was just magic. It caught magic, opened with working for MCA which is one of my favorite Skinner songs, just a song about getting a record deal and warning the people not to rip them off. Great lyrics, great band. And yeah, it's gonna miss him. Gary Rosenton, man. Keep rockin', brother. Last night, Oscars. Oscars were happening last night. I was talking to somebody in there like, yeah, I don't watch that, man.  I always know what that means, you know? But, you know, the Oscars were fantastic last night. I watched them, of course, coming off the year of the Chris Rock slap. I can't believe it's been a year. That Chris Rock slap felt like it was maybe about six months ago. And, man, it's still news because Chris just dropped a special and he did the big closing bit on the Will Smith slap. And, man, it's just a funny world we live in just to think about Will Smith. Slap that fucker on the face. Didn't get arrested. Didn't get any kind of, you know, any kind of criminal stuff. Struck a man on TV. Wow, I wonder if he'll ever bounce back from that. You guys think Will Smith will bounce back from that slap? It's pretty, pretty wild. They made some great jokes on it last night. There was some good jokes on it last night. I gotta say, you know. And also, shout out to Lady Gaga.  Unreal how great she sounded. Gaga is a real deal, man. She just is way up there in my book. Write songs, plays instruments, sings for real with no auto tune. Now I'm not the old man going like, that's how you do it.  You gotta be extra blown away that she is the trifecta. Voice, songwriting and musician, which is so crazy rare in that world of pop. And I don't even consider her like a pop star at all. I consider her a full-on artist. She basically kind of just took what Madonna was doing and just crushed it a thousand times higher. Cause Madonna, I'm not sure she wrote her songs and I don't think she played in an instrument. There was a time where she was just kind of pressing some strings. Monty Pittman taught her some guitar. I know that. But, you know, Lady Gaga, just killer. Just killer. She crushed it at the Academy Awards. And also, by the way, I always watch the Academy Awards every year. And this is the first year where I hadn't really seen any of the movies. And I've been talking about it on my podcast for a long time, how I just haven't gone to the movies. And it was something I did every week and I got to get back into the rhythm of that. It's such a great escape. I would go solo, usually on a Tuesday at like noon and see a new movie every week. And I just, it's hard for me to get back into it. And I don't know why, but I need to start doing it. It also really helps with writing comedy. You know, not writing about the movie, but maybe stuff you see in the movie jogs some jokes in your brain. So I gotta do that because a lot of the movies that were up for best picture looked great. Now, I had seen Elvis on an airplane flight and I had seen Top Gun at the theater, which I loved, Maverick. But there's some movies on here. Let me get the list that I really, you know, look like films that I would love. And I'm gonna see them. Of course, everything everywhere, all at once. Just, I know I'm gonna love this movie. And Ian Edwards had said, you need to see it. And that was like a year ago, I remember. And I kept trying to go see it, but I was out on tour with Marcus King and there was just no time to go to the theater and sit down for a couple of hours. And there's a few movies I don't wanna see on my computer. You know, I don't have a TV. And my rule was always, if I don't see it in the theater, I usually don't see it. But I know all these movies in LA will be back in the theater for a couple of weeks because of the Oscars hype. But I really wanna see everything everywhere, all at once. Tar, I heard is fantastic. And I love Kate Blanchett, I absolutely love her. She's just a killer actress. Triangle Sadness, I saw Woody Harrelson is in that. I don't know what that's about, but I think I need to see that. Women Talking, I heard is fantastic. All quiet on the Western Front need to see that. I'm always into these war films. And Avatar, I mean, I should see it, but I probably won't see that. But the Banshees of Inna Sheeran, I've got to see that. And the Fablemen's, which is the Spielberg, basically a story about his life. I watched the Oscars last night, Gertie and I. I was just so burnt, man. That clock change, which is this is the time zone that our time, you know, this side of the clock is what I love, where it gets dark later.   I like this one where it stays light till around nine.  I'm ready for bed and I got to go out and do comedy. I'm like ready to go to sleep. I like four in the afternoon. But anyway, I want to go see those movies. And I came home fried from Fort Collins, only a couple of hours sleep, took a nap, then woke up and started watching the Oscars.  I liked it a lot. And I, oh, I was funny because I watched the Oscars for all kinds of stuff. I love fashion, you know?  Look at those billionaires on the red carpet.  Hey, my people, they just trashed me. Trash successful artist. Damn, fucking, fucking, man, fucking, man. I love watching the fashion. I look at the watches, trying to see the watches. Omega's paying everyone to wear watches this year. Rolex had a million commercials in between the Oscars. Wild, you know? Lenny Kravitz was, oh man, Lenny Kravitz looked great. Sounded great.  I remember the first time I saw Lenny Kravitz, he opened for Tom Petty on that free falling into the great wide open tour. Oakland Coliseum. And that Lenny Kravitz first record, Mr. Cab Driver and Let Love Rule. All of that record is so good.  And I'm thinking about, look how Lenny Kravitz, how long he has been killing it.  He looks great. He sounds great. He puts out, each record always has some fire songs on it. Still got that Craig Ross on guitar with him. And, oh yeah, my man on the drums.  What else was good on there? Oh, the whale. I want to see the whale. That's what I want to see because I heard, you know, what's his name one? Let me get this here. The whale, what was the guy's name on the whale? Shit, man. Where is it? Here it is, Brendan Fraser. Wild story on this Academy Awards. Brendan Fraser, he beats out basically the kid that played Elvis, Austin Butler. And I was kind of happy about that because Austin Butler, he did a great job as Elvis. But, you know, I like when somebody creates a character from scratch.  But, you know, what I saw from the whale clips, I was like, man, like the makeup and everything he had to go through. I'm like, I'm in on this. Also, I don't like to read what these movies are about. I can see, you know, in my mind, I'm looking at the whale and I'm like, well, he's a heavy man. So it must be like some nickname that he got in school. Here comes the whale in my mind. That's what I'm thinking what it is about. But I don't know.  We will see. I don't like to Google and find out what it's about. Anyway, so a lot of movies I'm gonna go see this week. I'm off for like three weeks.  I work every night. Comedy store tonight, by the way. And gigs all week here in LA, but I'm not on the road. So I kind of wanna dig in and watch some movies and fire up some joke writing, you know.  Like that's somebody dressed up as a cocaine bear. This is throwing cocaine around. I love it. Back in the days, you can just talk about cocaine at the Academy Awards. Everybody was on it. 70s, whole crowds in between commercials, slipping in, doing bumps, doing commercial bumps, coming back, just squirming in their chair. Can't wait till we go over to Spagos and do some drinking with Jack Nicholson. Yeah, Spagos. Oh man, Academy Awards. All right, anyway. I want to see those movies.  The thing just crushed it. What else we got going? Let me see here. I'm just, I was supposed to interview Phil Lewis today. And I don't know. This is Phil Lewis. I was just talking to Chase about this. How I used to, when I sold motorcycles, there was this guy came in on Tuesday. We were always closed on Monday. He came on Tuesday, an hour late.  He's like, no, I'm not. He looks at his watch and forgets to set it forward. Anyway, Phil Lewis said that he forgot to set his clock forward here on Monday, two days after. So I don't know, maybe reschedule this week and get them on, Phil Lewis of LA Guns, which is, I was doing all my research to interview him because I've seen LA Guns since 1988. And I gotta tell you, Phil Lewis, he's a great singer. He has his own sound and he can sing like a motherfucker. And that band in 88, 89, they were powerful. They weren't your tumbleweed, sunset, strip rock. They were, these guys, I saw them open for ACDC. They did an ACDC tour and full respect.   These guys were destroying it. And for a couple of records there, they were just unreal LA Guns. So hopefully we'll reschedule. They got a new record coming out called Black Diamond. Tracy Guns produced it. And I gotta tell you, man, I'm gonna tell you this right now, it's a pretty goddamn good record. Here we are in 2023. They've been a band since 1987.  Damn good. Some of it sounds like Zeppelin. Some of it sounds like Sex Pistols. It's kind of edgy and all over the board. So hats off to them. And hopefully we'll get Phil on here rescheduled. So that's why I'm just kind of here on the couch doing this bonus episode, which are not bonus, solo episode, which I love doing the solo episodes. And it seems that people dig them also, which means a lot to me because, you know, they're fun just to sit down and press play and see what comes out. I will tell you this, somebody turned me on to a couple of bands I got turned on to this week. One of them is Looking Glass. And it's not that 70s looking glass band.  This is insane. Something in the water over there. You know, like in America, we got these little pockets like Seattle happened from 90 to 92 or whatever and Detroit Motor City sound and the San Francisco psychedelic hippie sound. These are all like really short scenes. You know, like one or two years, but Australia. And of course America has produced some of the greatest bands all the time.  How many great bands have come out of Australia? And this band, Looking Glass, Stoner Rock, I'll tell you right now, they got an EP that came out in 2006 and I'm just hearing about it. Somebody sent me this song, Acid Tongue.  I was like, wow, how have I not heard this band?  And it's just unreal. It's a five song EP, Acid Tongue. Check it out. Great album cover. I'd love to see these guys. 2006, Unreal, that I have not heard of this band. But now I'm gonna spread the word on it right here. And then the other one that somebody turned me on to that I thought was pretty damn good is, let me look here, gotta get this.  What else? Will Cowie, but it's got a lot of country in there. And here it is right here. So somebody turn me on to it. The song I saw on YouTube was Darlin' Corey, Arkansas Traveler. I guess it's two songs. Daniel Donatos, Cosmic Country. I hope I said his name right, Donatos. I hit up Greg for the mother hips and he said he'd been listening to this kid for years.  It's a custom shop, slab board, fret board, slab board, fret board.  And there's this live video from their sold out show at the Brightbox in Winchester, Virginia. Now I've done zero research on where they're from or who they are or anything because I just got turned on to them and I'm looking forward to digging into it. But this guy can play and he can sing and a lot like Marcus King, man. He's, I still got to check out the songwriting, but from what I heard, I was way into it. And they look cool.  This guy is unreal on the B3 and the piano. So Daniel Donatos, D-O-N-A-T-O-S, cosmic country. Really good, I posted it up on my Twitter. So check out that, the clips on the Twitter, which by the way, this other guy, it's real people turn me on to music all the time.  Sometimes I hear it in a restaurant or a coffee shop or airplane or something.  And then I spread the word, but it's funny. This guy tweeted at me today and he said, when you get a chance, check out the new rock band. I'm not gonna say the name because I don't even wanna promote the band because I hated it so much. And you know how I always say, promote what's great, not what you hate, that's why I'm not dropping the band name. But it was awful. It was awful and it was like really bad 80s rock. And there seems to be this resurgence of bad 80s rock. And I've said it over and over where people go, these guys are keeping rock alive. And it's not even close to the truth. And I've said it a million times how rude that is to bands that have been playing rock for the last 20 years, like Arrival Sons or a Mastodon or all these bands that are crushing rock bands, Neil Francis, Marcus King, tons of great, great bands that have been playing rock. And for some reason, these people that just have a small mind and a small thought of what they think were the good old days, no good music anymore and all that. It's funny how they think, well, this band, they got a wallet chain and they, you know, yeah, yeah, come on baby, yeah, get in the back seat. It's mind boggling to me because the songwriting is atrocious and it's like SNL spoofs. It looks like a Saturday Night Live parody of an 80s band. A lot of these bands, I would say about 95% of them that I've seen and I know I grew up like, if you, let's just say this right now.  It's not even close, man. They're basically versions of the bad versions of the bands that were way, way down there on the 80s hair metal list. And it is very interesting to me how I think are people listening to the songs or are they just going for the look? Like here's somebody saving rock because they got like some tight pants on and a wallet chain and long hair. And it's always, not always, I'll get surprised but it's always some really bad easy chords, A-C-D or G-A-B and then always bad lyrics. Always bad lyrics.   Now, if you're into it cool, that is totally cool but to save their saving rock or these guys are firing up the rock world again, it's just really lunacy. Anyway, so it was great to hear this band today that I was turned on to and I was pretty fired up about it, Cosmic Country. And also, of course, like I said, something from 2006 that I had no idea about, looking glass, I don't know if you could see this now you can't, it's gonna shut up. There, there, there, there, there. This, you can kind of see what the cover looks like. Anyway, looking glass, check that out. Also, I do wanna shout out once again, thank you to everybody that's joined my Patreon, new Patreoners out there. Amon Connor, thank you so much. Javier Gago, David Lassiter and Hugh Craig, the return of Hugh Craig, thank you. And Trash Hook, Trash Pork, that's the name they have down. Joining the Patreon, thank you so much. Hoping to do a Zoom maybe tomorrow, Tuesday the 14th. One thing that I will say, and I wanted to mention this earlier, and I slipped on it, but it was really, I was really emotional last night watching the Academy Awards for two reasons. My mom used to love watching it. My mom loved the Academy Awards. She's the one that got me into it when I was young. And she just loved watching the stars and she dug all that stuff. And it just, I was just dying. I was choking up there in my bedroom, laying down, watching it as these people would win and they'd thank their mom, all of them immediately last night. And it was really just brutal to me. It was just, I'm never gonna get over my mom being gone. And I get these severe pockets of emotions that just, I just start falling apart. And last night was one of those nights because I had said this before, I was hoping my mom would live long enough to where I would have some great success and be able to thank her on some kind of platform. I always thanked her whenever I was doing something or I would call her. And, but I really wanted to have some success, be able to set her up.  One of the reasons was to be able to let her just chill in the back half of her life, because it was just, social security and it's just horrible growing old on your own with no money. It is a reality that could happen to me and it's just the truth, but I love what I do. I mean, I love what I do. So, I gamble on it. And go as long as I can, till I can't do it anymore. But to see these people, a lot of their moms was still alive and they got to thank them. It was just amazing to, you know, it's wild. I was just, I don't know, I was tore up. I was tearing me up because I was like, God, my mom. See, you know, I mean, I had a headline for four shows this weekend they were sold out. I would have called her and said they were sold out.  That's the hardest part. I remember Burr was like, yeah, you got to grieve as much as you can.   So, I try to keep it together and, you know, she would have been 79 on the 15th. I love you, mom. And happy birthday and fuck, man. This cray, it's rough. It is rough. Thanks everybody for real, tuning into the podcast every week means a lot to me.  I love doing it. I love doing it for you guys. Let's see. No road dates. I got one coming up with Burr in Texas. When is that? It's on his website, billburr.com. Tickets are on sale right now. We're doing Texas, I believe on the 14th of April. And then we're gonna go to the MotoGP. I cannot wait for that. And then I'm with Burr this week in LA or next week, a benefits show on the 21st.  But some Burr dates, some more headlining dates. Oh yeah, and I'm gonna be in Vegas Easter week. So April 3rd through the 9th, I will be at the comedy cellar at the Rio Hotel. Gertie will be there with me. Gertie loves a little Vegas. Pulling up to the tables, right, Gerts? Gertie. Oh, real quick, sponsor. Gotta love these guys, Standard and Strange. My one stop shop for everything. Boots, leather jackets, denim, and good vibes. Standard and Strange, New York City, New Mexico and Oakland slash Berkeley, California. Tell them I sent you. You'll get a little tasty discount. Standardandstrange.com or their Instagram. They got all the best stuff. Momotaro denim, which is what I wear. Real McCoy's jackets. I got a Real McCoy's Varsity jacket recently. I'm loving that thing. A lot of Real McCoy's. I think Real McCoy's is the greatest brand of all time ever to come out of Japan. And they do an excellent shot style deep pocket, not shot, sorry, excellent style Buko. And they do have a shot style, kind of a regular leather jacket, but I like the Buko deep pockets. I like the Buko J100s. Standardandstrange.com. Also dogfoodtimemigosdog.com. They got a special going on right now. Go to amigosdog.com, sign up for a subscription. They deliver to anyone in Los Angeles area to bring the dog food right to you or go to Erwan or the healthy spot and pick up some Migos Dog. Human grade food made in Malibu, California. Gertie has been eating this stuff for about seven months now. I noticed her fur is amazing. She's eased up on the crazy itching and allergies. She doesn't have any of that. And her poops are amazing. Gertie's poops are amazing. Anyway, Migosdog.com. If you want your dog's poop to be amazing, check out Migos. Amazing food. They've got duck, they've got beef coming out. What else they have? They have salmon. Gertie does the salmon. Amazing poops. Yes, Migos.com. And a lot of new merch. Dean Delray, the merch is restocked, the peri-shell shirt and the Gertie hoodies. DeanDelray.com for merch and your tour dates. Okay, a couple more things and then we will get out of here. Thank you again for tuning in and thank you for coming out to the shows. I'm looking at my notes here and it's so funny. There's a note here. It says alter who rehab.  It was like a couple of days ago I was reading some notes and there was a name on my jokes. I had like a long strip of notes for headlining. I kind of write down everything, bullet points. And I just like to write out all the jokes, not the whole joke, but before I go on. And then I wrote down this name. And it was like, you know, Harry, I don't know. It was some name, you know, Billy, Billy Sam. I don't know.  And then I got to the jokes and I was like, what is that joke? I was looking at it for like 10 minutes.  What is that?  Cause that's how I write down the jokes. Where's the thing? If I had one here, I'd show you. But I got to write down the jokes.  Anyway, Billy Sam, then I realized it was someone that I had to put on the guest list.  So dumb. Ooh, yeah, Gertie. Anyway, okay. Oh, one last thing. This is one of my last thing I got on the notes. So, you know, rolling, you know, I always say, like I said earlier, promote what's great, not what you hate. So Rolling Stone had put together a list of, I think it was like the top 10 worst metal albums and St. Anger was in there. First of all, why even do that, Rolling Stone? Like that's a sad year. Let's put together a list of the top worst albums. Like, why? Who cares? If it's bad, why do you want to let people know? Also, some people, your readers or whatever, might love those records. It's crazy. So there was St. Anger, of course.  I've been talking about it for years.   It's a lot like when my other favorite metal, St. Anger's not my favorite, but when my favorite Metallica album, Justice came out, people were like, ah, you know, the no bass. And I don't understand the songs that are long and weird and ah, ah, ah.  It's a goddamn metal record, man. And so, you know, I just shout it out. Hey, just wake up, people, this record's great.  And that's why I don't engage with people on Twitter ever.   So, you know, some guy goes, stop dying on that hill. Stop dying on that hill, dude.   Dude, why don't you just stop dying on that hill.  Stop dying on that hill.   Stop dying on that hill. Unbelievable.  I like St. Anger. That's how it is, dude. That's how this world is. We all like different stuff.  It's weird.  It's crazy, right, Gertie? Uh-oh, Gertie. Gertie's getting the blanket. Anyway, relax, people. Relax a little bit out there, you know?  You know what I'm saying?  You probably love broccoli.  It's just how it is, man.  Oh my God, it's all great. We love everything. Everything's great. Everybody likes exactly what I like, so these are the people I'm gonna align myself with.  Anyway, keep the candles lit, everybody, and see on the Patreon and see out at the Comedy Clubs and go check out that couple of those music recommendations I've given you. And I love you guys, keep the candles lit.