Well here we are another year come and gone and I just realized that I wore this same shirt in the video from last year too so I don't know what to do with that but whatever cool it's tradition now but this year wound up being different than I anticipated in terms of you know books and stuff I read because it started off really really strong like the first couple books I read this year were like the last part of the broken empire trilogy and or economics and so I was thinking yeah this is gonna be great but around spring time so not long after I moved it started to go downhill precipitously well that sucks and weirdly enough as you'll see later I read several book series that followed that exact pattern you know starting off strong and then just completely collapsing by the end I don't know why that is but hey I felt the need to mention it and to be honest I feel like I I just read too much damn young adult stuff this year like it's what the audience demands so sometimes you gotta give the people what they want but man I watched too much or I read too much YA stuff this year that said there's plenty of stuff to enjoy this year and there was plenty of stuff to mock this year and there's plenty of stuff that I don't know you just you think you read it and you think about it and go huh that's weird uh so let's do that and also keep in mind that this is just stuff I read this year this isn't necessarily stuff that came out this year and also if I mention something there will probably be spoilers so just be aware but yeah let's uh do best and worst of 2023 let's go this is the introduction song it's not very good but it's not too long so the biggest letdown of this year by a pretty big margin was the lost medal and technically I did start reading this one at the end of last year but I didn't finish it until this year and it wasn't featured in last year's list so fuck it it's it's it's here this time uh yeah the lost medal it was um not horrible but there was about six years of hype behind it you know because there's six years between the bands of mourning and the lost medal and the bands of mourning had an insane ending which made people super excited and we just wanted to know what happened next we wanted to know how Wax and Wayne's storyline would uh get wrapped up and how that would possibly lead into the greater Cosmere a bit but it um it wasn't that you know the whole thing really just felt like it was a commercial for more Cosmere stuff and that's a big part of why I haven't been reading much Cosmere stuff lately is because like I haven't touched any of the secret projects or anything yet like I'm not saying I'll never read them I just am not that excited for them partially because in the not just lost medal but a couple books before that as well it just feels less and less like these are self-contained stories which tie together in some ways and more like just hey look we're gonna do cool stuff later if you don't understand this reference then this isn't gonna make sense but if you do then it's really cool and it's just it's just getting more and more annoying and obnoxious and I'm not into it and the lost medal even on as its own thing it's good again pretty good solid conclusion but it doesn't really feel like it's meant as a conclusion it feels like it's just advertising other stuff the weirdest book I read this year no contest it was struck by Jennifer Bosworth and this one is I mean it's about a girl that's addicted to being struck by lightning and I mean I say that and you're gonna wonder what happens next and what happens next well there's two cults there's a massive earthquake which destroys most of Los Angeles there's people who have weird X-Men powers there's a skyscraper with an eternal rave to celebrate the end of the world like it's people just partying going yep we're all gonna die soon might as well make the most of it and that's like a major part of the end of the book the climax of the book okay it just what am I meant to do with that like and don't get me wrong I like struck you can go watch my video on it if you don't believe me I liked struck it's a good book it unfortunately leaves itself very open for sequels and seems to be baiting sequels really hard but we're never gonna get any because the author not only has remarried and changed her name but she's also just not interested in being an author anymore it seems she's working on other stuff which you know good for her but it's been like 12 years we're never getting more struck but yeah good or bad it was the strangest thing I read this year the runner up for the strangest thing I read this year was breathe and its sequel resist by Sarah croissant I I described this book in my review of it as an edgy Lorax ripoff and yeah that's basically it it's like humans destroyed all the trees so now there's not enough oxygen for people and so now they just live under big domes and they have to pay for air like that's just that's a thing that happens and that is the plot of the Lorax movie and even outside of the main premise it's just a strange book series with strange things happening like apparently oh okay outside you actually can breathe you just have to condition yourself to do it so you have to get used to having less oxygen or how there's a cult except the cult is kind of not evil but they're kind of our evil and then no one is sure who the villains even are in the final battle it's just there's a big final battle it's it's a weird and not particularly good book series but it's it's not as weird as struck the best nonfiction I read this year was easily street sword practical use of the long blade for self-defense stupid light is reflecting weird there you go practical use of the long blade for self-defense by Phil Elmore I'm sorry I keep meaning to do a video with this but uh I haven't gotten the chance to and the only reason that's the best nonfiction I read this year it really should be this one black flags the rise of ices because this is a fascinating book but I'm not finished with it yet so I don't think you would be right to put it on the list so street sword that's the best nonfiction this year the funniest book series I read this year is easily the flintstones comic from 2016 because man even just thinking about it for a little while makes me chuckle like seeing all the weird stonepunk technology in the flintstones was always amusing always gave me a couple of laughs even when I was a little kid but seeing that done to an even greater degree here and with even more modern technology done in a stonepunk version is great here but on top of that it's also just very biting political slash social satire like especially if you look at it uh based on what was going on in the united states politically back in 2016 this is a there's some pretty clear parallels here which it's making fun of uh and it's all just in a weird setting so there is some separation between that and the real world which helps prevent it from feeling like it's you know being preachy or anything and even outside of that there's some great jokes here like there's a soldier with ptsd who calls the suicide helpline and they put him on a hold as soon as he calls and he says all right but this better be some damn good old music like yeah there's some really good jokes in there runner up for the funniest book i read this year is easily swooned because swoon is a stealth parody of twilight like you know there was twilight with sexy vampires and then a whole bunch of other books ripping off twilight about sexy boys who are some other supernatural creatures sometimes they it was just vampires other times it was like fairies or leprechauns or werewolves or whatever and swoon is again it's a stealth parody it doesn't really advertise itself as such so it might be a little while before it becomes obvious but it instead of being about sexy vampires it's about a sexy ghost who later turns into a sexy golem and he tries to get revenge on people by making old people have orgies and stuff like it's swoon is a hilarious book it's not for everybody i don't think but it's a hilarious book i loved it the book series i read with by far the most missed potential this year and if you've seen my video on it it should not be hard to guess what this is it's red queen you know again not a good cover here i've seen people describe these covers as great i don't know what they're talking about i think red queens covers are terrible but whatever that's just me and i'm not here to talk about the covers either i'm talking about the missed potential because it's a pretty basic setup for a story just okay girl discover she has magical powers and is going to be made one of the elite nobility who run the country but she has to hide who she really is and then there's also a rebellion that goes off like that that's a pretty basic setup for a story but there are so many points where it brings up the possibility for doing something really cool not even necessarily unique but at the very least interesting or something that would be fun to read about or something that would be cool to read about or at the very least just you know something something beyond the absolute most basic surface level stuff they have so many opportunities to do that they could go into detail about things like the morality of war and terrorism because there are parts where yeah the main characters do some unpleasant stuff but they don't really dwell on it or the trauma that all this violence could happen i'm just gonna eat that all this violence could inflict upon not only the main character but other characters as well or how about the silvers the ruling class of this world actually being puppets of other people like i thought that was going to be an actual thing here or at least i thought that would be cool and just nothing nothing happens you know red queen was really just obsessed with writing tropes and then only giving them the barest of explanations and justifications for why those tropes exist but not really doing anything else you know there there's no subversion there's no surprises there's there's nothing there's nothing there and that's part of why i disliked it so much the biggest shock i had this year was realizing that servants of fate is erotica now servants of fate was something i read earlier on this year and i'll tell you right now it's a good book series or at least a decent book series because i did like the actual story of it and there's some of the characters and stuff who i were i was really into as well the world that takes place in is kind of interesting but it is just erotica you know like a little while into the first book i when it was going into a lot of detail and spending a lot of time describing characters like genitals and stuff i was like okay i think this might this might be smutty erotica such stuff uh what's going on here and then the first sex scene came and i was like okay yeah this is this is basically just porn and you know the story and everything could have been better but overall i did enjoy it it's just it really caught me off guard because it wasn't advertised as erotica the most boring fantasy i read this year i don't know if i'd call it the worst but by far the most boring is Leviathan by r.m. huffman and man this is another one that had at least some potential to be cool and interesting but it just did nothing with it because it's literally just a bible freak rewrote the story of noa but then sucked out all of the character all of the theme all intrigue and most of the action you know like there there really is nothing there that is interesting like it the only reason that someone would like the character of noa as he's portrayed there is if you're already a weirdo religious person who is just obsessed with noa and thinks yes he is amazing he is god's chosen person he's the best ever we love noa isn't that right like that there's no reason to actually like him but the story just accepts that you do like him and look up to him so rather than seeing somebody go on some sort of journey and do stuff that's great he just is great you know and so for that reason leviathan was the most boring fantasy i read the book series with the biggest drop in quality from beginning to end shouldn't shock you if you've seen my video on it it just came out a couple days ago is everneath of course if you haven't watched my video on this go go do that i know it's long but just go please go do it because i need to justify spending that much time on it and man the first book wasn't perfect it had some issues in there which i pointed out but it was the first book was a cute romance with some tragedy and a you know an actual story where the characters were working towards some sort of goal and overall they were decent people except for the villain but then in the later books a magical rapist turns out to be the love interest and the main character literally kills thousands of people and never even acknowledges or thinks about the fact that she did that that is in no way an exaggeration go watch my video if you don't believe me it was it was nuts and so yeah this book series started off as genuinely good i enjoyed it but by the end it's one of the worst things i touched this year it was horrible the runner up for the biggest drop in quality from a book series this year from beginning to end was the dust lands trilogy aka blood red road because the first book is just called blood red road and again the first book is just like everneath it's really solid it starts off with a girl witnessing her brother get kidnapped and her father is killed by these strange men that come to their home and she sets off to rescue her brother like it's a simple goal that she's working towards and she has to go through a lot of trouble to get there and again the first book isn't perfect but it is a good adventure story where we're following this young girl who's thrust into very difficult circumstances and is fighting against horrifying odds just to save her loved one you know it's it's great and the end of it is still open for sequels obviously but it does wrap up the story pretty well and then we get into the second and third books and it's about this weird half-assed revolution and then at the very end they literally defeat the villain by pointing out to his followers that the villain's son is deaf again if you want context you're gonna have to go watch that but like you know it's just it started off as good and then it just loses all steam it loses its own identity and just like everneath the two of them have some weird similarities because they're both trilogies they're both were following trends in the young adult market at the time that they came out and they both started good and then you know fell off obviously and then they both feature a love triangle between the main character who is a girl and two men and in both cases one of the men that they're in a love triangle with is named Jack and both of them choose Jack and are in a relationship with him at the end of the series like that's that that there's weird similarities here is what I'm saying that's weird the best science fiction I read this year goes to the Empire of Man series by David Weber and John Ringo and this one again it's a simple enough setup it's about a prince of an galactic empire who gets stranded on a planet full of barbarians alongside his marine bodyguards and they have to literally walk to the other end of this planet so that they can reach a spaceport and then they have to take over that spaceport so that they can commandeer a ship and go home and this isn't really spoilers because they bring that up like before they even land on the planet as they're running away they're like okay that's our plan and then it takes them three books to go through it and then even once they get off the planet there's still some more issues they got to deal with once they get home so like it's a very personal story following just a couple of people in any real depth but it's still very expansive because you see how they're affecting entire civilizations but both when they're you know just a relatively small group on this planet and once they go out and start affecting the entire empire I really loved it because like it's it's pretty clearly military science fiction yes but it's also a space opera and it's been a long time since we've had well okay I was about to say it's been a long time since we've had a proper space opera and that's not true we've had a couple over the past few decades but it's been a long time since we had a lot of good ones you know and if more people would take advice from stuff like empire of man or the expanse then yeah we'd be in a good place the worst romance I read this year again shouldn't shock anybody it's from everneath it's nicky and coal now I know that coal is ultimately the losing leg of that love triangle and nicky winds up with jack like I said it's just a minute ago but still the fact that he was a love interest at all is just gross because again he is a magical rapist like that's that's all there is to say about him really he's a magical rapist he lies to her he abuses her he manipulates her he does this magical ritual to her thinking that it will kill her but then it turns out it doesn't and that's just a happy accident on his part like he would have gladly killed her if he needed to like he's not a good person in any way and the fact that the two of them had a real thing going on even if he dies at the end to redeem himself please note the quotes around the word redeem himself is just it's just gross the runner-up for the worst romance I read this year is from night bane which is the sequel to lightlark if you were unaware and that one is going to be isla and grim grim is also a magical rapist why is this such a common thing that's weird whatever not important yeah those are both books where one of the love interests in a love triangle is a magical rapist but grim isn't as bad in night bane as coal is in everneath so I guess I just I don't know he's not as bad he's the runner-up that's still a spot in the hall of shame worst protagonist I read this year give me a drum roll everybody it's everneath again it's nicky from everneath I hate everneath I really do again if you haven't watched my video on it just go watch it seriously there's so much context you're missing here but nicky is literally a mass murderer at the end of the series and it just it never even comes up like like the last couple of chapters after she murders thousands of people she never stops and goes oh wait I just murdered thousands of people and she it'd be one thing if she thought about it and then found some way to justify it because you know there were some justifications at least that I could think of but she it just never even crosses her mind she's a horrible person and even though she started off as an okay protagonist by the end she just no the runner-up for the worst protagonist I read this year easily easily violet soren gale from fourth wing also get it she's a dragon rider she soars on the wind she's soaring on the wind she's soaring on the gales soren gale do you get it yeah that's that yeah that that name had more thought put into it than everything else in that book combined like fourth wing absolutely horrible for a lot of reasons violets a bad person she's stupid she's selfish she she doesn't you know mass murder people the way that nicky does but you know she does some questionable stuff and no one ever really calls her out for it she's also just amazing just because she's the main character so she's amazing at things and they try to make her disabled in order to make her like relatable and give her flaws but then her disability doesn't actually affect anything it's like no she's she's horrible but she's not as bad as nicky and I mean she at least has some personality that's something third place for the worst protagonist I read this year is again Noah from Leviathan like he he suffers from a lot of similar problems to violet soren gale where he's just amazing just because and he does morally questionable things but it's fine because the author agrees with the morally questionable things he does and the author doesn't have the self-awareness to acknowledge that the things he's doing are morally questionable it so you know that's all fine he's just amazing just because and he doesn't have much personality because that he's getting married to his cousin it's like just a lot of stuff man a lot of stuff it it's hard to get through but you know again Noah doesn't do as many bad things as the other two so he's slightly lower the best protagonist I read this year is prince roger mclintock also from the empire of man series and man if you had told me that right at the beginning of the first book I don't think I would have believed you but his journey here is genuinely fantastic like I don't know if I'd call it a redemption arc per se but watching him go from a spoiled not entirely useless but mostly useless prince to being an actual emperor and being essentially a bloodthirsty barbarian who knows how to keep himself tempered at at least when necessary is genuinely fascinating to watch and also just it's great you know I love seeing his journey and I again I don't know if I call it a redemption arc per se but you could consider it one and if so it's probably the best one I've ever read or at least one of the best ones I've ever read and just I don't know what watching him his journey was fantastic you know some protagonists are great from the beginning others have to grow on you and roger mclintock definitely grew on me the best book series I read this year is the dark prophet saga aka or economics because you know the first book is or economics now I've only read the first two books here because I read them both as audiobooks and the third one is out but it doesn't have an audiobook yet so I'm just like waiting for that to happen whenever it happens it happens but you know I'm excited for the end and man it's just it's a great story you know it's not especially derivative of other adventure or fantasy stories I've read over the years but at the same time it still feels really familiar you know it's about a washed up old adventuring hero named gorm ingerson who gets roped back into being a hero and has to go with this party on a quest and then that blows up and becomes a much bigger thing in a much bigger conflict in the second book and man it's just it's just great you know it has great humor it has fantastic satire of the real world not just real world you know economics and it's not surface level either goes pretty deep but like real world economics it and real world governments and stuff but it also pokes fun at and I don't know if I call it a parody per se but it does poke a lot of fun at like fantasy tropes and the way that rpgs work particularly dungeons and dragons because a lot of the world building here is based in broad strokes on dungeon and dragons and the world's there it's just I don't know it's fantastic and it's really fun and lighthearted at first but then it has some really really dark twists and the story gets much more serious in fact this is one of the darkest things I read this year and I read the last couple of broken empire books this year but you know it's not crazy over the top dark and that never overtakes the story you know like these characters are still the same characters we knew before and even if they're traumatized and have some serious issues not just in the past but in the present they are still the same goofy dudes we knew and after fantasy has largely been going in a darker and darker direction in the past like 15 years it is really nice to see something that is dark but it serves an actual purpose and it doesn't let the darkness overtake everything you know so dark prophet saga genuinely amazing fantasy books if you're looking for something fantasy at all give those a shot and if you find the humor or anything off-putting and you think it's just going to be silly and goofy throughout just read until the end of the first book and then come back to me the best protagonist with lightning powers I read this year oh this is a three-way battle because for some reason this year I read three different books where the protagonist was a girl a teenage girl who has lightning powers or I guess technically one of them is 20 years old but you know what close enough you're all children to me but yeah I read struck I read a fourth wing and red queen all of whom had protagonists with lightning powers for some reason and all of which I didn't really know about going into it and the best protagonist of those three is Mia Price from struck look it's not a high bar to clear but Mia was at least you know as one she was an actual character she wasn't a total blank slate and number two she was likable enough and you know did good things and didn't kill a bunch of people for no reason or anything uh second place is violet from fourth wing because as awful as she is when it comes to protagonists I will take one that I hate over one that has no personality at all and third place is mare from red queen like again mare is I guess more likable than violet but there's just nothing to her you know she's just the main character girl and she has lightning powers so yeah I Mia price wins now the runner up for the worst book I read this year is going to be pariah yeah I when I put out a video on this I I said pariah is the worst book I've read this year so far and that was that was good instincts James because you knew it was going to get worse than that and pariah is pretty bad though I don't blame you if you've never heard of it it's basically about a bunch of people trapped in a building after the zombie apocalypse and they're all slowly starving and then one day a girl walks by and the zombies are all just leaving her alone and they want to know what's going on there and that that might sound intriguing but they don't really do anything with it so because there's basically no plot here every character is an asshole there's nothing in the way of identifiable themes or world building because we don't know anything about what's going on outside of this very small area which I mean that could be fine but again there's no plot so there's like that there's nothing to distract us there but the real the real sin of this book is just the way it's written because that is actually disgusting like there's no easy way to put this there's a scene in this book where one of the main characters describes a woman as sexy by comparing her to prisoners during the holocaust disgusting I'm not making that up it just like when I read that line I was still relatively early in the book but I knew from that moment forward like okay I'm going to fucking hate this thing and I was right it didn't get better after that I can't say it got worse than that but it didn't get better either so yeah pariah easily easily the second worst book I read this year and it's not a big jump from pariah to the number one spot I'll say that and the absolute worst thing I read in 2023 that there's a couple of good guesses you could put here but at the end of the day I had to put it as fourth wing like fourth wing is the worst thing I read this year like to the point where I'm just not touching the sequels ever I don't care if it would get me a lot of attention or anything I number one I don't want to give the people making this more money because that just encourages them and number two I just do not have the mental energy to go through that shit I just I just don't anymore I I hate fourth wing so much there is pretty much nothing in that book worth praising it's 500 pages and there's nothing good there like it is just porn pretending to be young adult fantasy pretending to be adult fantasy like that that's the simplest way I can think to describe fourth wing violet is as I said earlier stupid selfish she's disabled because she has uh eds but that that doesn't affect her that much you know and I mean sure there are forms of eds which are extremely debilitating but the form she has isn't really that bad and so she doesn't really come across as disabled and even if she did she just sort of powers through all of her obstacles so there's nothing going on there and she's just great at everything and gets hot boys just just because you know if you're looking for porn like okay there is smutty stuff in here there's graphic sex scenes but they don't come up until 370 pages in so even if you're looking for that it's a bad example of that sort of thing like people got on me for calling it porn because again it takes forever for the porn to start but like it's still porn even if it takes forever for the porn to start guys I don't think I mentioned this in my video on it but you know violet again she's disabled she's physically weak as they put it but she has lightning powers and she's a dragon rider so couldn't they just have her fly around and rain lightning on their foes you know be like a fantasy version of an a10 warthog wouldn't wouldn't that be cool wouldn't that have been a way for her to work with her disability instead of just ignoring it what that that would have been cool in my opinion but whatever I guess nobody cares what I think and then their government is just evil but more than that they're just stupid like most of the stuff their government does that comes across that's supposed to come across as evil just looks stupid like for example the dragon rider academy students are just allowed to murder each other for literally no reason it's it's not even like they have organized duels or anything they're just allowed to murder each other whenever they want for no reason and they also just go through stupidly dangerous testing like not even stuff that could be dangerous but there's some supervision and safety in the way you know to like teach you something and it's just if you fuck up really bad or get really unlucky you die it's just like stuff that is designed to kill you and if you get lucky you get past it and you learn nothing you know like there's just so much dumb shit here but probably the dumbest is that the main character is you know forced into this by her mother but a lot of other people are you know also conscripted or they volunteer for this academy you know to go through all this dangerous stuff so that they can become dragon riders but then also the children of people who led a rebellion a while ago were also forced to become dragon riders and they were forced to do it as punishment so number one you're taking all these people who are a security risk and giving them the most powerful weapons in your kingdom but also you're doing this as punishment but also you're just allowing your regular kids to do it at the same time none of this makes sense absolutely none of this and it becomes even more fucking nonsensical when you get to the latter chunk of the book where Violet is like shocked to find out that her government is evil i don't even know how her government's evil or what exactly they're doing that is evil all i know is that they're apparently on the wrong side in the war that's going on but i have no context in order to understand what's going on so maybe people who have read the second book could explain that but i don't care i just fucking don't and then you know obviously everybody tries to kill Violet just because you know again she's the main character she's the best like it's just fourth wing is just pure wish fulfillment which isn't inherently bad but the fact that it's not even trying and the fact that people are hyping we're hyping it up so much and talking about how amazing it is because you know it just gives them exactly what they want in the exact way that they want it all the time instantly that just set me off that just pushes all of my buttons and you know what just i fourth wing deserves to be the bottom of the list here okay because it is by far the worst thing i read this year i don't care if people are gonna get salty at me with about that they're gonna go oh you only hate it because it's roman fuck you okay i have an hour long video talking about all of the problems i have there none of which are that it has a big focus on romance because it really doesn't even have a big focus on romance like the main love interest is a guy named Zaden who falls in love with Violet just because she's the fucking main character like there's no moment in the book i can point to where they really fall in love and start to like each other they just they each think the other is hot from the beginning and then after a little while Violet realizes okay Zaden isn't actively trying to kill me so i guess he's fine and then just that they're in love now like that's it there is basically no romance here it is fucking porn it is wish fulfillment okay like if you if you like it just be honest with yourselves about what it is so uh that's the end of that it's like uh another year has gone by uh we're all a little bit older than we were last time i did this but you know it's uh that's just life you know time moves on whether we want it to or not and in terms of books yeah 2023 could have been a lot better for me but in my personal life things went okay and i hope the same can be said for many of you you know i finally live on my own don't have to deal with roommates or family or anybody you know i'm just i'm here but you know things also haven't been perfect you know i tried adopting a cat a while ago but i just had so much anxiety about not being able to take proper care of him that i had to send him back and that broke my heart but you know he got adopted he has a decent family now and i wish him nothing but the best and i mean in terms of youtube as well this is uh i had a bit of a iffy period during the summer but i heard a lot of other people did too and i realized uh after that where i you know made that video just saying hey i'm changing up some things on my channel and i also took a bunch of advice from the people watching and used as much of it as i could and things are looking up now you know channels doing better but i'm also realizing that being on youtube is very much a push and pull between things i want to make and things that will sell you know like these things these aren't mutually exclusive there is overlap between them and i think any youtuber watching this can probably uh identify a bit with this but there that overlap uh is ideal but for some people there's only a little bit and some people there's a lot you know i didn't read fourth wing because i wanted to or because i cared about it at all i read it because a lot of people wanted me to so i was like okay fine we'll check it out and it was terrible you know red queen wasn't as terrible but again i really only picked it up because hey i figured people wanted me to talk about it and that was one of my best performing videos this year you know so i it worked out okay i'm not complaining too hard but i think that is a struggle that even if you're not a youtuber every creative person has to deal with or at least every person who does creative stuff professionally has to deal with you know what sells and what you want to make is not always the same thing and you know ideally you can make the overlap as big as possible but it's never going to be 100 but whether i succeed or fail i'll always have you you know i i'll always have at least a couple of people who are into my stuff and that that really does mean a lot you know and outside of youtube i was able to work on my own book a whole lot more i didn't quite finish editing or anything but you know that's life gets in the way sometimes and i i know i mentioned a while ago i wanted to write like a parody book uh like a parody young adult fantasy thing that wasn't again it wasn't a super obvious parody it was a stealth parody kind of like swoon but uh i want to do that for nano rimo and i realized i was spending a weird amount of time on it and so i just decided okay that time should just be spent on my other book that i'm writing so that's just what i did maybe i'll get to it one day i do have like an actual outline and everything written but hey uh life happens and i can confidently say that throughout all of 2023 i was just always tired but i can also say that i was always progressing you know i took a lot of time to try and be better in a lot of different ways and i hope all of you did too so if you're watching this i hope you have uh merry christmas or happy holidays whatever you may celebrate or may not celebrate have a happy new year and here's to a bunch more books hopefully better ones in 2024 goodbye hello people watched until the end why why would why would you do that nobody watched us to the end of youtube videos but you know what thanks for doing that i appreciate it and a huge thanks to all my patrons whose names you see right here they are oppo savillainan olivia rayan brother santotes buffy valentine carolina clay chib zahoy dan and selie bitch dark king dio echo flax jalal dalool james m lexie delorm lyza rudakova lord tiebreaker michael and katie hake microphone mist boy mitzimona ruby reviews sad martigan psych xs selene sillier the vixen stone stairs tesla shark vaivictus vimex zole and wesley oh my goodness i love all of you so much if you want your name on here then consider donating to my patreon page you also get early access to videos and some exclusive content which you know if you actually like me for whatever reason that then you know that's probably beneficial and if you don't feel like doing that then you know just like the video comment subscribe to the channel that that you know all that stuff goodbye


The current DDoS problems that have been caused by cheaply developed IoT devices, so the last six weeks we've seen the record-sized DDoS attacks broken, and they're broken again, and they're broken again. And the dim one two weeks ago took out a big chunk of the agency board of the US and went for most of a day. Earlier last week the same botnet, not as a DDoS, just as part of its probing and scanning to recruit more machines, accidentally took a million subscribers in Germany offline. Like, you're dealing with a serious threat when your accidental collateral damage is disrupting communications to hundreds of thousands of almost a million people. So this is sort of like what can we do? What if anything? I am attached loosely to a group called the Online Trust Alliance, which operates out of the US by my name Craig Spiesel. It deals on a whole lot of fronts. We're building more trust for the infrastructure, the internet, basically. So browsers, advertising, email practices, email medication, but also now IoT. And I will not attempt to cite this from memory, so I actually loaded my browser, which I now can't find. But the framework that was produced, and I was loosely involved in this, recognised that there are at least five major groups of actors. It's not something that any one group can tackle. So the idea that the LGA manufacturers are entirely at fault is tempting, but it sort of misses the broader context. Developers, certainly, and a really big one is that programmers are not security engineers. If you haven't spent years of your life breaking into computers, you do not have the expertise to secure them, even if it seems like you should have it. If you really haven't done it for real, then you are not capable of defending the must-findest you can. That's the biggest problem. There are millions of these cameras built by people who knew nothing about security, but imagine they did. So they built systems that were vulnerable and that are now being turned into waiting spaces. There's a bunch of algorithms like best practices, but the big one is start by assuming you don't know what you're doing. The supply chain stuff, so retailers, distributors who only sell reputable stuff don't sell El Chippo crap, because for sure, you'll get bitten if you do. ISPs love, like, hey, this is not our problem, we just carry traffic. We don't want to get involved. If our customers have infected machines and they're spewing garbage, that's not our problem. Yes, it is. That requires regulatory change, but it's an area where ISPs are currently freeloading because they don't have to fix it, so they're not incurring the costs of containing customers who have compromised equipment. And then finally, the regulatory stuff to support that. So this was part of a much longer talk, trying to pack in two minutes or three minutes, but to make the point that there's no sortable here, but there are a whole lot of initiatives that are possible and or already in progress to strengthen the environment and to hopefully, over the next couple of years, turn the tide the other way. It's happened a few times with the film we've gotten this big. There's some course of hope with IoT, particularly I'd suggest for people who produce tools for IoT. If you produce complete systems that are already R-secure, that are sort of like Spark Core versus Arduino, we'll take Arduino, build our network stack, they're inviting attack. Start with a device that assumes that it can't defend itself and that depends on cloud service to do so, you've got a fighting chance. There are things that can happen at the engineering end, but there's a bunch of other sort of commercial government events that can happen. So that was the compressed version of topic one, which got an awful lot of ticks. Any questions on that? I have it and it's almost certainly not useful because it's quite difficult to react. If you've got intelligence about deployed machines and you're like, oh, they're vulnerable and the vulnerability is in the bit of the firmware that you can't upgrade remotely, then congratulations. You've put more plague devices out in the world to help criminals attack the rest of the network. So it's more, I feel technically the thing is to move towards platforms that assume that IoT devices which are computationally constrained and often power constrained aren't capable of defending themselves on the open internet because they should have tightly controlled communication channels to a back-end service that deals with the real problem. And this is the spark or political approach. You don't bring a knife to a drone fight. That's the deal. You're up against a botnet with something in the vicinity of a hundred million devices on it. You can't win if you fight. The best you can do is to narrow the attack surface so that you're never ever, at least low-power devices, so it's that different way of thinking about the problem. I'll jump briefly to the other one, which is ham radio, which we're almost as many ticks. And so this was actually a question for the audience, is what do you know about ham radio? Do you have interest in it? Do you see use food in Singapore? My personal interest is space because that's somewhere that the telcos don't go. But the biggest issue in Singapore is always, well, we've got 3G and smartphones everywhere. Why is ham radio interesting? Particularly for those who've taken the box, any comments, thoughts, questions, ideas, answers? Zombie apocalypse. Yeah, so, okay, so that's not quite as crazy as it sounds in the sense that in areas which are much more thinly populated, telcos cannot profitably run networks that are as dense and as run over Singapore's. So in large chunks of Australia, the U.S. and some parts of Canada, you really do have situations where you've got major events that are run beyond the range of mobile networks. So logistics where you can't phone someone or get them on your phone, and your chat app is a bit alien to most people now. At that point, ham radio gear becomes appropriate because volunteers can just build networks and get operating. Then the other is, yeah, floods. So a flood arrives. The telco, the Bontau goes out because both grids feeding it around the water simultaneously. Engineers can't get to the tower to fix it and even if they could, they've got to wait for both grids to come back and they've got to wait for the roads to not be underwater. And so the scope in those sorts, not so much the zombie apocalypse, but certainly floods and fires and earthquakes and those sorts of things. The scope, again in Singapore, the place is so dense and so well managed. I'd be surprised if there was ever scope in order to do better than telcos under the watchful eyes of INDA. Things will go wrong. And I understand during today's thing there's been some major fire outage in Singapore. So certainly stuff goes wrong, but the recovery time is extremely short. It's measured in hours and many days, not months. Whereas in, say, Haiti or the Philippines last year or even Louisiana where major floods take out communication infrastructure for weeks or months. Yeah, I don't think that problem exists in Singapore. So I'm still interested in Singapore, Maria, but I'm looking at where people have other interests. Are radio equipment vulnerable to electromagnetic pulse? Pretty much by head and mission, yes. Yeah, so maybe pulse is just a radio transmission on every frequency something. It's like with a lot of energy behind it. So it is possible to make hub and devices, but it's difficult. Yeah, an EMP device would sort of revert almost any advanced city to the stone ages. Yeah, right, yes. But if it's connected to an antenna at the time, that's okay. So you're going to have reserve gear in... I mean, the protection's not difficult. It's just a steel box. But it's got to be in that situation and not connected to an antenna at the time or it's useless. So that's the trade-off. Okay, I should now yield the floor to the other lightning speakers if they're around. I'm starting to smile at this. Anyone else who wants to speak? Yeah, you can go for any talk. Followed by a travel ride. How was your day? Is any first time to see you? Do you want to share your questions? Or what do you want to do? What work would you do? A little bit about my project. Oh yeah, I forgot to thank Michael and... Hello, my name is Kevin. I come from the U.S. I'm working on a project in Payaleba. It's a mixed-use development project. That's... What that means is it's a property development that has many different property types in it. So we have a retail shopping mall. We have three office towers and we have three residential buildings. It's positioned to be the next CBD, the Eastern CBD, per se. A company that I work for actually developed the Western CBD in Journal East. So we're looking to repeat, but also upgrade the precinct, what we call it, the whole master plan as well. We have 12 hectares. We have four hectares. So there's a lot of opportunities for all the technology to get involved. Anything that requires spatial infrastructure, management, and user experience. I heard someone talked about drones earlier on. Vanessa talked about ultimately reality that can enhance our retail experience. I'm actually looking... I was really focused on the infrastructure piece on the fiber optic network at HET net. If you guys are familiar with some of Singapore government's new initiatives in Journal Big East, we're looking to migrate some of that high-tech, high-end with never seamless technology to us. We're looking to operate Wi-Fi in a campus style, kind of like Google campus or Facebook campus. If you guys have been one wireless, one code instead of walking into a shopping mall that you see probably 20-year or page two lists that really impacts on your experience. So the chain here has done a very good job. And then the one is really Telco. We're looking to work with Telco to bring in the best fiber lines to our residential condos. Really, there's quite a bit happening in this mixed use precinct. So if anyone has good ideas on what they can do to improve space from safety, security, from using drones to survey our building, whether there's any cracks or energy monitoring helping us to reduce energy. We actually work very closely with the IMDA. We have an MOI with them that was signed in September to encourage startups to work with us. The company is called LEMLEASE. It's actually an Australian company, but very fairly international headquarters in New York and London and here in Asia Pacific, the headquarters is in Singapore. So we're looking to really tie that in with Smart Nation. And those Smart Nations, for some of us Westerners coming here as big brother, but I actually think Singapore does a very good job governing its country. It's not like other countries where the election is a bit contentious. But yeah, we're really looking to utilize this Singapore as a testbed to scale to other parts of our operations worldwide. But for now, LEMLEASE is actually just known for shopping mall operators. So we run 313 Somerset. I run Drone Eastmore and we're on corporate parade. And the next one is Allen Mark Porter, which is the project that I'm working on. So thanks very much. Just got a quick project. I'm working on that to share with everyone. So briefly, right, what I do is that I'm currently community manager for NIMS. And NIMS is Asian's WebMD. That's how WebMD before. Yeah, WebMD is a place where you can look for drugs. Drugs.com, Metscape, all these drug farmers will go with it. So NIMS is a place where we write drug reference data to hospitals, clinics, and patients, nurses, GPs to 13 markets for the past 50 years. Numbers, numbers, numbers. Alright, so this is our page. So I've been given a challenging problem. So the problem here is that currently we have 14,000 active doctors on our network. And we are looking to engage them. The engagement rate is probably like 5% or even less than that. Of doctors that are on the platform that's engaging each other, talking to each other, like doctors that is having this open source culture, this bar camp, this kind of concept that we are working on here. The thing is that doctors are a relatively hard market to share their ideas and share what they have in mind and collaborate with each other. They're pretty closed. So just open up to everyone. If you're not of any doctors that's in the market and project an idea or something that you really want to work with, they're passionate about. They want to work with people who are industry partners. And you want to get funding and things like that. They can come and speak to me. And I think this is something that we want to open source medical communities. That's something that we want to do. And that it's tough and we're trying to bring them to the market. Thank you. What do you want? Our platform is community.mames.com community.mamesmims.com Just a quick question. Who are the target audience? The target audience here is medical healthcare professionals in four markets. Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Philippines. Thailand and Philippines. So it looks fancy learning page but to be honest we're still looking for more people to come in and discuss. But we are at the end of the day trying to see how we can get this on the grassroots level to talk to people and really understand how doctors can come together. So it's not really about webpage. Web page to me is it's just something that is a tool. It's not a platform. The real platform is people on the ground talking about projects being really invested into it. To me, that's a real platform. What's the website? If I had to compare and I think for doctors what they care about is the internet quality. Like for those of us who are doctors there are a lot of options to deal with. So you guys have ideas that is open for all but that doesn't need that time to execute it. So there's always a disarmament between people because you actually go looking for the actual name. It's like I'm assuming perhaps you want it by that age but you need like that open for the first time to deal with it. So if you want anyone to give you a thing thank you so much. The gentleman just now mentioned smart nation. One of the interesting things is actually and I have to talk to my talk about Nobel Prizes. Smart nation, great. But intelligence and creativity actually two different things. I think most of you agree with me on that. Let me give you an example. And I'll reference AI and do you know who's and what book is Ender's Game? Orson Scott cards? Ender's Game? Okay. Now there are two scenes in Ender's Game which I think actually quite relevant here. One is where major if you can visualize this, right? How do you figure out which one was a mothership? It was a pattern recognition problem wasn't it? It's a pattern recognition where you see all the ships. The mothership was not in the middle of all the Ender's spaceships. It was to the site. So major record was only one who figured it out. Pattern recognition. Intelligence, AI specifically is primarily pattern recognition if I'm not mistaken. You know there are some extension to it but for right now let's just assume that intelligence is primarily pattern recognition. So in Ender's Game major record was intelligent. He saw a pattern he took advantage of it he launched his missile at the mothership and obviously killed the hide essentially, right? So that's intelligence pattern recognition. Then in the situation where Ender was entering the wall, right? Okay. So what did every other platoon did when they walk in? They have gravity they're cat walking in. The mental assumption they were physically constrained by the fact that they had gravity they walked in, no gravity but mentally they're still constrained by gravity. What did Ender do? There's no doubt. Space has no doubt. So in this case his creativity allowed him to break the pattern of we are still constrained by gravity, right? Intelligence pattern recognition creativity breaking patterns. In this case, pattern of thought. So the reason I came up with that is because one day I was actually talking to a computer science professor of Ender's Game and I asked him, what are your lessons from Ender's Game? He said he's in all solos. I said, AI, intelligence versus creativity and imagination. He looked at me and said, that's actually pretty good. He was the number two guy in the computer science department at MIT by the way. He was actually quite taken by that. I said, next time you go to MIT please visit me. So Singapore is very focused on spot nation. That's intelligence. What is Singapore doing with respect to creativity? Anyone? Any ideas? They're doing what everyone else is doing. Hire the best experts in creativity send them out there. But what kind of educational culture do we have here? In Singapore? Last exams. In my novel talk, right? In my talk about Nobel prizes what was the motto of MOE? To mold the future of the nation. Mold. Stick to a mold. A mold assumes that, you know what? It's needed. Where is that room of freedom for creativity? Freedom of expression. Freedom of thought. I'm in trouble. Any IoT devices here? Oh my god. But that's a question for Singapore because I remember reading Vivian Valokrishnan saying something to the effect that smart nation will get us for the next few decades. What's that? What's after that? Does he know? No one knows. No one knows because they're still very much stuck in with smart people.  It's about 108 by the way. Because IQ tests are normed against basic calculations. US if I'm not mistaken. So US is basically 100. Singapore is 108. By ethnicity I believe the Jewish is about 112. So it's just interesting. I've seen essentially. So Singapore has a challenge of being able to break out of the mindset that intelligence is going to be the key. It's actually not. It's creativity. It's innovation. How do you nurture that? How do you sustain that? How do you bring that up? In the midst of education culture that says what? Passing exams. Old test papers. The MOE itself says more of the future of the nation. So the challenge is how do you share from intelligence to imagination? There was a recent Nobel Prize winner who unfortunately passed away. Actually an American guy by ethnic Chinese, Roger Sien, T-S-I-E-N. It was based, I believe, UCSD, University of California at Santa Barbara. If I'm not mistaken, San Diego, I don't remember which. But the dean of the department says the smartest people are not the most creative. To be creative, you need to take risks. If you're a conventional thinker you do the traditional thing. Thank you. Thank you very much for having me. It's my first time to have such a fascinating broad audience. So I'm very happy to be here. A very concrete thing. I'm recruiting for three things. So I came here to sing for this year. And I work in the one-off tech hub in the corporate side of things. So just to pick up on what people have been saying. It's very hard to fight this whole groundswell of people defining success and work in intelligence in a way. And we are, I guess, at the point here of trying to swim against the tide to kind of make creativity work and profitable. So I work in MSc, a pharmaceutical company, in the data science unit. And I'm looking for both an intent as well as a full-time person. We have a team of about 23 going to 25. And so of course, philosophically, we don't believe in just grades. So come and talk to me. I believe very strongly that people should not be reduced to grades or IQ or because there's only a very narrow representation of the complexity of a person. So we will set you things like a task that will approximate what you do at work and you will just meet people that you really will work with. And that's our approach. It's very, very slow and it's not scalable, but I don't really care. And so please come and talk to me if you have a data science background, both on the experimental science side as well as the blockchainization engineering side. Open to both. We'll take you as your case-by-case basis, number one. Number two, I'm involved with a group called TND. It goes for the next billion. And I think it's a nice clear on the words. It's not just the next billion, but also helping people here in Asia, the next billion people as they move into the middle class. We think, you know, we can let Silicon Valley go and solve the top 1% or 0.1% extra kind of problems, but we really want to solve the real problems for a billion people here in Asia. And the team of the fund is data. I'm very much a data person, and in my single, you know, bias sample size of one, lots of tech is data. The three teams are IoT, AI and AR, VR. So we just see IoT as the future of data collection. AI is the future of data processing and VR is the future of data interaction. So I know I'm actually true-haunting a little bit to make it fit this nice little three words, but then it's a data play. So if there are data people there, companies in the space, please come and talk to me. Finally, my younger brother, he has a nine-to-five as a data architect in DBS, and his fight tonight is he has an IoT company. So we are in this together, and it's also a problem. For the IoT company, it's called Loretta.io, like, you know, Loretta and the bonds, Loretta.io. And we're looking for UI, UX, front-end, so recruiting for these three things, data science people in terms of full-time, startups in there, IoT, AR, AI, and number three, looking for a UX person. If any of these three things appeal to you or your friends, please come and talk to me. Thank you. Yeah, talk about technology again. Sorry, if any of you are my coding, character in coding talk is very, very much on your own. So any of you here have heard of GraphQL, right? That's the first thing I'm going to talk about, I guess. So this thing is developed by Facebook, and then any of you here have heard about API? Yeah. Right. So GraphQL is essentially API. It's a way of building API. So then, you know, I'm just like, dummy it down until I get a common ground. Any product manager here? No product manager?  Next time if you're in like a developer meeting, just throw in GraphQL just for fun, just for kicks. To annoy the developers. I'm a developer myself. So GraphQL, so you must have heard of like APIs and like RESTful APIs, right? The idea of RESTful APIs, you know, you have create, update, get, and then delete. You know, these are the actions. But the problem is that API discovery is around, and then API is also not flexible enough. When you get, you get, you know, the whole list of entities and objects and the fields are predefined based on API destination or schema of your database or whatever. And then that's why API has to be versioned. And then that's just a whole lot of hassle going there. And then you have to know what to query in order to get what you want. And then in order to filter data, the API has to allow you to filter data. You can say like question mark, you know, wireless fields, and these are only the fields that I want. And then with GraphQL, all these are built in GraphQL's definitions. So the idea of GraphQL is that you can query an API with something like, let's say you want, I actually don't know the, let's say, you're calling for, let's see, I don't know, a customer object. And then for a customer object, you only want customer ID, sort of name. And that's it. So that's, the customer table might be super huge, but, you know, you only want the two fields. And then you can query it in this way so they only get this. But then at times, you also only want customers with ID in five. And in this case, you can filter the data as well as slicing the data. So GraphQL gave you this flexibility. You can just forget or list that request. So you also have ways of putting and updating your data. So that's what GraphQL is. And then, but I want to introduce not just GraphQL, GraphQL is great, and then you can want to look into it as like, I feel like that's the future of API. And then there's also this thing called protocol buffer. Have any of you here heard of protocol buffer? Right, protocol, have any of you here heard of JSON? No. XMLJ is not, these are like data formats you use for transferring data, right? So, and then protocol buffer, protocol buffer. Protocol buffer is similar. It's in a similar kind of glass of things in the data format. So then you use it to define data schema. So if you marry GraphQL with protocol buffer, it's a great world out there. I mean, I'm not going to elaborate too much, but think about it. This defines schema. This defines your API. Schema marries API, you have everything you need. I'm just going to leave that out there. And then I implemented this for my company Hackathon. It was in Python. So I pretty much did some like met up programming in Python to just like marry this too. And it was great. I won third prize. That speaks to how good this thing is. And then unfortunately, you know, my company has open source policy, so it's not open source yet. But it will be at some point, hopefully. But this idea is free. Anybody can just take it and go around with it. And then, so any programmers out there, you will be taken. That's it, thank you. I think we are done. Everybody hungry? Yes. So I think if you're keen, we can find some people and go and get some coffee or something. That's the last time for coming.


Good morning everyone, live on the show floor of Dell Technologies World 2023, Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante. We have been here since Monday night, theCUBE after dark, we started all day yesterday. We've just had an amazing master class conversation with the COO and vice chairman of Dell, Jeff Clark. Dave, so much to unpack. We only have a few minutes and we've got a great lineup of guests today to continue the conversation. Yeah, Jeff Clark's amazing. I think he's the only guy here more tired than I am. I mean, he's got great energy. He leaves it all on stage. It's funny, he said, you know, I don't really like doing that. That's not my favorite thing to do. I like solving engineering problems, but you'd never know it when he's up on stage. He's a really, really strong presenter. Clear thinker, he rattles off all the patents, the products, one after the other. He keeps it all on his head, uses no notes. I'm really in awe of his capabilities. But yeah, big week, it's AI, it's the year of AI in Project Helix. We were asking one of our guests earlier, would you have announced this had it not been for ChatGBT? And they said, yeah, we would have announced it, for sure. And they kind of explained that. But I think people would not have paid attention as much as they will now. Now, Dell Stock's not going to get a big lift and not considered like an AI play. Although, you could see how AI could definitely lift their business in a lot of infrastructure companies. I mean, when you think at least about the internet, when it first got started, in terms of commercial internet and wide user adoption, it was the pick and ax companies. It was Cisco, certainly companies like Dell, EMC, Intel.  I think AI potentially could do the same. Of course, Nvidia is really the hot company now. Their stock's going crazy. But it's interesting, when you look at the analyst estimates, they've only increased their revenue on Nvidia, just a couple points. So you're like, okay, so this is this hype, right? The stock's running because it's hype. I think a lot of hedge funds are selling it and taking some profits. They're announcing tonight, so we'll see. But, and there's supply challenges too. Getting GPUs, AMD potentially coming out with some competitive GPUs. It was interesting to hear Jeff Clark, he described exactly what we've been talking about for a couple of years now, which is the connect-centric environment. Not just the CPU or the GPU. It's the CPU, the alternative processors like GPUs and NPUs. We've talked about that a lot. But also the interconnection components, the NICs, the RAID controllers, the accelerators, all that in balance. Kim Laynar is coming on later on. She's a sort of real star at this, you know that workday commercial rock star? Well, she's a rock star, I'm sorry. And so we're going to talk to her about that and dig into that a little bit. But I think that is a fundamental shift that we're seeing in the industry. So I'm kind of excited to see Project Helix and see where that goes. I mean, Dell does have a good, seemingly a track record of announcing stuff. So what they're doing is they're basically, as Jeff said, we used to never pre-announce. So they're now they're pre-announcing. Part of that, by the way, is to give customers direction. The other part is I think the signal, hey, don't leave, you know, kind of the old freeze the market play. And then a year later, announce something that will ship sort of, I don't know, six months later. And the sum of that will ship now. And so the project frontier was like that. And, you know, the block and file storage for, for the cloud, for AWS and Azure, et cetera. That is super cloud. I mean, it is sort of the fundamental definition of super cloud where you have an abstraction layer across clouds and it's on-prem. You've got a super pass that's purpose built for making sure that there's a common experience, that there's lowest latency as possible, that you can do recovery, all those things and make it all programmable. So that is what multi-cloud should have been. You know, what we call super cloud. And then it was really encouraging to hear, Jeff Clark, based on, you know, your question and my question about, you asked what's different about the edge. And then he said, no, that common storage layer stretches out to the edge. So that is good news. And that's a trend that we're seeing Microsoft this week at Build announced this thing called Flex, which is trying to do what Snowflake does. I think Snowflake's well ahead of them, but basically building data apps and extending that throughout its ecosystem. So, yeah, a lot going on here and a lot going on in the industry. Dell Innovation Flywheel is spinning, right?  And I think it's also an accountability factor that I like about they pre-announce, they deliver a year later, they commit to GA and regions where products and software is going to be available. And I think I have a respect for that from an accountability standpoint because from their lineage, the EMC days, as you've told me about, a lot of things announced never delivered or projects never productized. And we're seeing this consistent trend with Dell projects, products within a pretty impressive timeframe.  I think generally people don't see Dell as the innovator per se. What I look at Dell, much in the same way as I look at Oracle, although much different. Oracle's going to kind of red stack and everything's Oracle, Oracle, Oracle. Dell's sort of open ecosystem, Oracle software company, very high margins.  But I will say this, they give both companies very high marks because they take their R&D, they apply their R&D and it turns into products that can generate revenue. This is something I've been very critical of IBM over the years. They will do a ton of stuff in R&D. Look at Watson. I mean, Watson could have had to run a table. I mean, 2011 it was like the most exciting thing going, right? When Watson beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy. But they were never able to really commercialize that to the extent that it drove leadership and gave them the imprimatur of innovator. I think companies like Dell, they'll take innovations that are broadly across the industry. These masks are everywhere. They are everywhere. In our hotel rooms, it's crazy. Hey, there was a big hatch. But so they'll take these innovations that are widely understood across the industry. Dell clearly understands them and they look at, okay, very straightforward. You heard Jeff Clark. He's a very straightforward individual. How do we apply those to help our customers in our, you know, and adopt our products and, you know, to simplify things, you know, drive revenue for the company, obviously drive value for the customer. And so they've done a good job at that. I wouldn't necessarily say the industry looks to Dell as the innovator. I mean, innovators are like open AI. It's, you know, very clearly the cloud guys from the standpoint of AI.  And so within that world, within that layer, I would agree they are developing a methodology that is flywheel-like. So I think I'll give them that. And I think they've got a lot of work to do. I mean, they've got to get Apex to where it can be broadly adopted. It's got more services, more ecosystem services. I want to see large language models as a service, right? Because that's what the cloud guys are doing. And so right now, you know, 80, 90% of the conversations, if not a hundred percent of the conversations with customers are, how do I take advantage of this? And they're looking at, you know, what can I buy today that I can experiment with? And, you know, Dell's announced some things that you can't experiment with. But it's easier to experiment in the cloud. I mean, let's face it. I want to unpack a little bit in the few minutes we have left here. Your comment in comparison, comparing Dell with IBM and some of the missed opportunities that they've had or how they're different. How much of that is cultural? Because the interesting thing to me about Dell is it's been led by Michael for 39 years now. Jeff Clark's been there 36 years. Cultures must be dramatically different, but it's challenging to have a leader around for that long and be able to shift culture and pivot as quickly as they have so many times. I think it's easier for Dell. Because you have a founder led company, I think it's much more difficult for IBM.  IBM's doing, you know, big, big ideas that never really come to fruition in the way that you would expect. Dell's kind of the opposite. You know, little singles that drive a lot of runs. And that's kind of how I look at Dell. And I think because Michael Dell, the CEO, his name is on the logo, I think that makes a big difference that, you know, he can set the agenda. I think it's much harder, you know, for an IBM.  He completely changed the company's culture to focus on services after they bought PricewaterhouseCoopers, PwC, became a services company. And so products became secondary.  They basically paid global foundries to take their microelectronics business, their semiconductor business. IBM was the leader in semiconductors in the 80s. They had fabs and they were, you know, fabulous, you know, company in that regard. They were a leader in database. And they kind of, when Gersner made that shift, we were talking to Jeff Clark about the horizontal industry structure. When Lou Gersner chose to turn the company into a services first, they lost that product edge, which was a good call. It saved IBM and they made a ton of money over the Gersner years.  But, you know, they never had, they never got back their product chops.  So you had this transition of leaders at Dell. You've got consistency at the top. And so Michael Dell could say, hey, we don't want to do our transition as a public company. We're going to go private in 2012. We're going to address the challenges that we have in private. And so that we don't have to be on the 90 day shot clock. We used to talk about that all the time. You know, the zero interest rate environment. We're going to use our brains and our leverage and our largesse to actually acquire a $65 billion value company, EMC, that comes along with VMware. We're going to do that. This is what we're doing. This is how we're going forward. And then we're going to use that. Essentially, VMware is a piggy bank to restructure our debt. We're going to de-lever. And then, you know, five years or seven years later, they come out with really clean balance sheets and, you know, an amazing new company. As you know, I was a fan of spin-in. I would like to see more software content, but there were a lot of reasons that Michael Dell and his investors, you know, wanted to have that structure. So, you know, I really respect that. My point is, you've got a CEO leader, founder led company, there's always clarity. You can see it from top to bottom. And then it shows. Last question for you, Dave. You had a chance to sit down with Michael Dell yesterday. What, anything in your conversation, you've had the opportunity many times to talk with Michael and he loves coming on theCUBE, which is so great. What surprised you in the conversation that you had with Michael yesterday? Any nuggets that you want to share with the audience? The biggest surprise to me was when I asked him, you know, basically I was asking him, if you were 25 again, what kind of company would you start? And then he kind of, you know, as a gentleman that he is kind of corrected me, he said, if I were 19 again, because that's when he started, PC's limited, I would focus on healthcare. And that was, it was an epiphany for me because basically what he's saying is, the healthcare industry has so many deep problems and the technology industry in healthcare, especially now with AI, are colliding in a way that technology can drive transformation of that industry from a standpoint of efficiency, from the standpoint of solving the hardest problems, whether it's cancer or disease or predictive medicine and basically compliment doctors, maybe even doing some things that a doctor can't do because they don't have all the data sources, et cetera. So that was really eye-opening for me. And I think if you're in your teens or your 20s, you should think about how technology and industry are coming together, not just healthcare, but finance and manufacturing and many others. And so that was really eye-opening. I love that, fantastic. Well, Dave, we've got a great day three lineup. Alison Dew, the CMO of Dell is up next with us. We're going to be talking with Broadcom. There's going to be a show and tell. We're going to be talking with Doug Schmidt about services and how Dell is really revolutionizing that. We're going to expand more on the Dell Broadcom partnership and we've got a really great customer edge story we're going to wrap with which is going to tell you how growers are becoming data scientists. You're going to want to stick around. Alison Dew, CMO of Dell, up next.


Hey YouTube, here we go again. As soon as this controversy started with Omar and her controversial anti-Semitic tweets, I knew the media would eventually circle the wagons, cast Omar as the victim, and then refocus outrage on Republicans.  The New York Times reporting the issue has touched off a furious debate between older House Democrats and their young liberal colleagues over Representative Ilhan Omar as being singled out for unfair treatment over her statements on Israel. It would appear that the hardcore alt-left of the Democrat Party is well on its way to taking the reins, and we're seeing them use the exact same kind of intersectional race-based strategies that we've seen left-wingers using on American university campuses. It's my prediction that from now on, any kind of criticism coming from white people or coming from people who aren't left-wingers will automatically be dismissed, and you can guarantee that whoever that critic is will be attacked by the media as a racist, a sexist, a xenophobe, or an Islamophobe. It's always been that way in the media when it comes down to Republicans vs. Democrats. But I think it's about to get way crazier and way more prevalent with the addition of these extremists. It's the pushback from Congresswoman Omar saying, is it not allowable to criticize Israel in any way without it being called any Semitic? Absolutely, it is legitimate to criticize Israeli policies. However, Omar has shown a pattern of tweets and statements that hearken back to old Jewish stereotypes and the idea that Jews have hypnotized the world. Not to mention Omar doesn't believe that Israel has a right to exist. She supports a terrorist organization and the Palestinian government known as Hamas whose charter openly calls for the eradication of the Israeli state and Jews worldwide. The Palestinians regularly fly swastika flags and they indoctrinate their children with very Nazi-esque propaganda. And this isn't particularly surprising considering that the Palestinians allied with Hitler and the Nazi army during World War II. But alas, you're not going to hear any of these facts on MSNBC, CNN, or any of the other networks except for maybe Fox News. It's also laughable to hear Omar and MSNBC dismiss critics saying, quote, we can't criticize Israel without being anti-Semites? I would turn that around on them and ask, can we discuss immigration without being called racist or xenophobes? Can we criticize Islam without being called Islamophobic? I highly doubt it and I doubt this NPC reporter has even ever considered that question. Furthermore, she has been the target of some anti-Muslim attacks from outside folks as well, and there's this general feeling of how hard do you want to pile on one freshman congresswoman. Got'em. There it is. Of course, her anti-Semitic rhetoric should just be ignored because, quote, outside folks and I gotta say, that's some real hardcore journalisming right there. But these folks allegedly attacked her for being a Muslim and so that means she gets a pass. Isn't it funny how the media always seems to coordinate on a narrative to deflect any negative press from the Democrat party? And by playing the Muslim card, you have now successfully put the attention right back on those dastardly anti-Islam folks on the right.  They're trying to keep the spotlight on this. Congresswoman Omar is one of those young rising stars within the party. It's just another distraction from the things they're trying to do in the house. Democrats would like very much for this issue to go away.   Back in the day, back in the late 90s and the early 2000s, people in the media would often say that we need to, quote, move on from Democrat party scandals that they really didn't want to talk about. And that is, in fact, how we ended up getting the Democrat organization called moveon.org. It was originally formed to get media attention off of Hillary Clinton scandals. I've touched on this a little bit in the past, but back in 2010, a private journalist forum was exposed called Journalist. On this forum, journalists and media figures from all kinds of different publication and networks would coordinate on talking points in defense of Democrats and attacking Republicans. And of course, the media never talks about this, but during the WikiLeaks document dumps, it was exposed that the media and the Democrats have been coordinating to defend Hillary and attack Republicans. It looks like nothing has changed. And as pessimistic as it sounds, I wouldn't expect it to ever change. These people have a grip on power and they're never going to let it go. All we can do is continue to expose them and help enough people wake up and turn off their TVs. One last thing, folks. I want to introduce you to a very talented supporter and friend of mine named SJG Perspective. He's got a really entertaining YouTube channel where he creates parodies and provides commentary on all the latest news items. Go on over there, check it out and hit that subscribe button. Thanks.


political tensions in the workplace. Chances are you've experienced, especially during this political cycle we've been in. There's been so much polarity, especially with the recent candidates. And so joining us now to talk about talking politics in the workplace, some things to think about. We have Jason Troy, Workplace Culture Expert. Thank you so much for joining us. Also, you have a book, Social Wealth, that you talk about as well. But first of all, let's talk about right now, it seems that with political tensions and the discussions we're having in the workplace, it can be even creating a headache. So what are some things? Are you seeing this as something that could be a problem? Yes, because political tensions are really at an all time high in the workplace because of polarizing force of both candidates that are out there today. And we've seen this throughout the primaries and now as it's going head to head, it's going to, I think, even pick up steam. And we're only in June, too, so we have a long ways to go. And in the workplace, it's not that you can necessarily ban it. We're free speech, but you need to manage it, right? What are some ways or what are some suggestions you have?  So I would say one, don't put that up because it'll also alienate other people, especially people who don't agree to your point of view. I would say second, it's better not to even discuss politics in the office because it's very difficult for people to draw the line. Most people tend to go over the line and you're not going to convince someone anyways right now. I mean, someone who's voting Democratic isn't going to vote Republican and vice versa. So it's just going to cause a lot of tension. And I would say the third thing and bringing it up is that it can actually hurt you because if your manager or supervisor doesn't agree with your point of view, it could stunt your advancement in organization and perhaps even your employment. And I do want to shed some light on this. 25%, there was a study done, 25% in Society of Human Resource Manager. They say that they are seeing these tensions in the workplace.  Do we talk to our manager and then what should the manager do? Well, yes. And I think first of all, you want to talk to the other person, right? And I think often what happens when you're in a conversation with someone, you can say to someone, hey, let's agree to disagree and move on. Or I just don't like talking politics in the office. Let's talk about something else. And I think that often can work. But if there are people that do not draw the line, then I think you need to talk to a manager or supervisor and let them know that an individual, I've tried to discuss things with them. They will not stop. And so I need some help in order to get some order so I can actually do my job and not feel like there's conflict or aggressive behavior because I don't agree with them or I don't want to discuss politics. Jason, thank you so much. Some good stuff we need to think about before we head on out to work. We appreciate your time again. Jason Troy is there with us. He has a book, a culture book on workplace culture. Social Wealth, you can check that out. You can also check this interview out on our website, Nebraska.tv. We're back after this.