From London, England, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, Covered, Discover 2015. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in London at HPE Discover. That's HPE Enterprise, the new formed entity as part of the split, fully official as of November 1st. This is theCUBE's exclusive special coverage of HPE Discover in London. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon National. My co-host Dave Vellante, it's our flagship program theCUBE where we go out for the events and extract the signal from the noise. We're here with Rick Lewis, SVP and General Manager of the Converged Data Center Infrastructure Group at HPE. Runs the show on the new stuff. Congratulations, welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you. Thank you, it's great to see you guys again. So there's always good innovation. Obviously the big splashy announcements, you know, that's more business driven. We saw with Azure and the announcement, really more of a partnership thing where it's a future direction, a lot of press around that. But the other most notable press is what's going on in your group. Really defining a real stake in the ground around next generation modern infrastructure, a new era as you guys call it. And it really is about what DevOps brings to applications in the data center and beyond. So I got to ask you, you got your new announcement around this synergy, composable, very cloud like. What's the game changing aspect of this key announcement? I think the simplest way to say it is it's your infrastructures code. Cloud developers have this thing they say, you know, we love the fact that this infrastructure is infrastructure's code. We just log on and we say, I need this much compute, I need this much storage, et cetera. But that's off in a public cloud somewhere. There are applications that for data access, you want to share data between different applications or for security and compliance or for performance or even for cost. Some of those applications don't belong in the public cloud, some do. For those that don't belong in the public cloud, I'd like to be able to have that same development model, which is my infrastructure except experienced as code. My infrastructure as code would mean I could use it for my traditional applications as well as my new mobile cloud applications. Seamlessly I can flex resources. It's a beautiful thing. We're really proud of HPE Synergy. One of the things that we were pointing out earlier in an interview with K.C. Choi was the evolution, the progression just in the past five years and even 10, how we've gone from service-oriented architectures, web services and just even recently just microservices growth, cloud, how things have changed. And a new era of talent and workforce is on the doorstep and proliferating enterprises. And they've never actually loaded Linux on a machine. They don't even know what it means to actually unpack a box of software and load updates and patches. This is the new ethos of DevOps. So agility, rapid iteration, these are terms that have been kicked around certainly in the queue for the past few years. This is the DevOps ethos now going mainstream. The core thing is real time. They want API access. They want asynchronous inputs, outputs. They want edge of the networks, but it's not just physical, it's virtual. And virtualization has changed the game. So what post virtualization, what's the big enabler now? Because you're seeing the infrastructure code as something that people want. Yeah, yeah. Operationally it's inefficient. Business models are changing with applications. But what is the enabler beyond virtualization right now? So what's interesting is we took a new approach with this infrastructure and we built it out of three key elements, if you will. The first is a fluid pool of resources, compute storage and fabric all in the same infrastructure that can be flexibly assigned to any given workload. And you mentioned virtualization. They can be assigned in a virtualized workload. They can be assigned in a bare metal workload. They can be assigned in a container workload. So you don't have to be in the virtualization paradigm. That's a great paradigm, but we have customers who still buy our convert systems to do bare metal software running and they want that same degree of flexibility in assigning resources, et cetera. So first thing, fluid pool of resources. Second thing is really around a software API, a set of software intelligence wrapped with an API that hides all the complexity of what's going on underneath that hardware and makes those resources available. Is that like orchestration stuff and like figuration? It's really like software defined storage, software defined networking, software defined management all bundled together to operate on this fluid pool of resources. And the last is that unified API, which is what gives you access to all this infrastructure as code. And in most cases, you can deploy infrastructure to go do a different workload in a single line of code with our composer that's native inside the box. So one view composer sort of fits in here. That's absolutely right. So we built upon our HPE OneView technology, except in this platform, it's embodied on a specific device called the HPE OneView composer that sticks into the box. And you've got decades of experience around open view. So how does open view and one view relate? Interestingly enough, a lot of those resources, some of them are from right where I live, which is Fort Collins, Colorado, ended up going from open view at one point into one view. And it's all about simplicity of the management experience of cross complex, hardware and software. In this case, we've taken a lot of complexity out. So you've built on top of that experience. And so if I were to say, what's the secret sauce? You'd point to those three things. I'd say the fluid pools, the software defined intelligence, and the unified API. That's the secret sauce that's underneath here. All of that put together, it boots up ready to run workloads immediately and flexes resources dynamically to meet the needs of the application. So why is this not another, help people understand it, it's not another converged infrastructure. You got hyper converged, how are you different? Great question, there's a whole lot of things. So there's kind of traditional infrastructure that people bought that's really siloed. You buy it and I've got my compute over here. I need a set of guys to merge that with the sand storage. I need another set of guys to work on networking and a whole bunch of complexity. Converged to some of that complexity out, it took those complicated things, a big compute farm, storage, sand, and some networking, bundled those together. And we test out the complexity and deliver it to a customer so that they can just use it, right? So it's simple to the customer, but we had to do a bunch of work to test the complexity out of it. Hyperconverged was another step in the right direction because it made that a little bit simpler. It took a building block approach and said, look, we'll put a simple user interface on this and allow people to deploy directly to use a workload. And if they add more capacity, then it immediately becomes present to be able to go on most workloads. But both of those paradigms that converged and hyperconverged, those steps in the right direction to remove complexity are not dynamic in nature, meaning those resources, a converged system set out to run a certain number of VMs, you put it in place, that's what it does. Don't mess with it, don't change it, don't upgrade firmware because we need to retest all that. This composable infrastructure is dynamic. As you add components, the HPE OneView composer notices, hey, he added more storage, I can now apply that to workloads. And when that workload stops running, I can return those to the pool dynamically. Doesn't matter what slot they're plugged in, doesn't matter any of that. It's just truly composable in one nature. It's policy-based, exactly right. That's an awesome thing. So I got to ask you about the synergy thing. I'm reading the line here from the announcement. HPE Synergy provides a single infrastructure for all applications and operational models from traditional to cloud. So with that being said, great messaging, I love that. But I want to ask you a specific question. Talk about the difference in cloud-native and traditional IT because this is interesting what you guys are doing. You're basically having an architecture, not a solution, an architecture with composability, which is programmability or service management, or microservices, whatever, making it programmable, which is cool. You're not forcing a solution down someone's throat. It's an architecture. They're different animals, cloud-native and traditional. Can you talk about the differences in the new ones? Absolutely. So first thing we got to talk about is what's the difference between a traditional app and a cloud-native app? Traditional apps are your things like ERP, database. They're really meant to run the business. They're typically behind the scenes and as long as they stay up and running, everybody's happy. The definition of success for a CIO on a traditional app is, I never want to have anybody hear about that stuff running, right? The definition of renegotiation, that's another animal. Exactly. Cloud-native apps are written to empower the business. They're at the forefront where IT is driving the business. So the CIO there is being relevant to how the business generates profit and growth. And so that's things like airline check-in applications and financial transactions. The face to the customer of the company becomes the app itself. So it's absolutely key. The unique thing is those traditional apps don't change very often. Those cloud-native apps, they change all the time because you want to run promotions, you want a new app, somebody's on their phone and they say, why doesn't it do this? I want to roll that out. So multiple times per week, it demands flexibility and demands. You're shipping code at a higher frequency than over here. Exactly, exactly. So if you're going to support that environment, some analysts have said, even conventional wisdom has said, well, then you have to do that in a public cloud because then you don't have to go procure infrastructure and deploy it and get it configured and set up. You know, in some studies we say it takes 28 days from when you have infrastructure to get it ready to run a specific workload. You can't do that if you're dropping out a cloud-native app all the time. And so what you need is infrastructure that instantly deploys, manages itself and has workload templates that immediately can say, put this in a Docker container and run it and boom, it's running. And a lot of people point to some successes in the market. We're in kind of the first generation of cloud-native. You're seeing startups that are turning into unicorns. You know, certainly they have no legacy. They have a clean sheet of paper. So they built cloud-native where data is at the center of the value proposition, using data in real time, these kinds of things. Then they kind of bolt on ERP as they grow in CRM. So it's the other way around. So what does it mean for the CIO that has that legacy? What's that architecture enable him to do? What are some things that you see happening? Some successes you've seen? The beauty of a CIO who has, and quite honestly, what will sell the infrastructure to do for the near term, 80 to 90%, people are going to use it for traditional. But what it's given them is future proof. I don't have to assume, okay well this is my traditional infrastructure and if I want to move my operation into cloud-native, if I want to hire developers and have them have a way to use our infrastructure, I don't have to think that's a different paradigm and that I'm going to have to go out and buy new infrastructure. This stuff works for that from the get-go and it's not a feature that we're going to add later. Immediately they can transition to that environment. So we actually think it'll accelerate the move to cloud-native applications and in-house app development. Rick, what does a solution like Synergy do to things like a standalone blade server or a standalone storage array? Are they going to sort of go the way of the past or is there still demand from the channel to configure those types of independent pieces? There are customers with different preferences for what they want to do. For some, they'll always feel like I just want to get a stack of compute, a stack of storage and a stack of networking and I want to have my guys put that together because I want to be in control of that. And we're the number one player in one of those spaces which is the server platform and we'll still continue to sell a ton of that infrastructure and that's A-OK. But there's a segment of the market and in fact it's the growing part of the market. We think compound growth of about 15% per year for the converged space. This is converged on steroids, right? This is being able to do that in a way that is dynamic and flexible and for that segment of the market we think this is what they're going to buy in the long run. Does that dynamism at all change the security model? Can you talk about the security model and how it's affected by this approach? Sure. One of the nice things is when you're in control of all of the pieces of infrastructure and more in control of the layers of the software definiteness that's in the stack, you can control more of the security. You can reduce the risk. So we think that there is reduced security benefit from going in this direction as well. Still we'll have customers that go their own route. We have plenty of tools we sell for security on that. It's all, you can do it either way. It just depends on a customer's consumption preference and whether they're really oriented towards implementing infrastructure and having that expertise to build in-house or whether they're just saying I want to run some workloads. Just give me hardware. I don't want to deal with any of them as you take care of it for me. I want it to be flexible like a public cloud. Send me some infrastructure. This is perfect for you. So great news of the day. I want to talk about the organization that you're running on HPE. You've been operating as a split company, I know prior to November 1st, but now that the official split I know she's wearing your bling-bling there, your flair as they say. It looks like a little Star Trek, beam me up, Scotty, transporter thing. But talk about the organization. I mean, we see DevOps all over the sessions over there. We see Docker here. What is the internal scene like? Share with the folks out there what's going on here because it just seems like a, almost like the weights are off everyone's shoulders. They're not carrying these big rocks around. It's like a relief. But also there's a swagger. Talk about, can you share some insight into the color around what you're doing and cool things you're developing? I'm a good person to ask that question. I've been wearing essentially the same badge with the same rough logo with the HPE on it for 28 years straight out of college. So I'm a good person to ask because you'd say, well, don't you feel like you lost something, anything? Loved every bit of HPE. It's been a fantastic ride. Really excited about Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And the reason is because I would say the personal systems environment has gone through a massive transformation, right? Mobile devices and tablets and all that kind of thing. I think we're at the forefront of the similar thing in enterprises. And it has to do with being able to be dynamic, to be flexible, to really change what data centers look like from the way they looked 10 years ago into a new model. And I think composable infrastructure's on the forefront of that. And I love the fact that I'm part of a company that can really focus in on this is how it's changing and how it's changing is transforming to a hybrid infrastructure at the core. And you're in Fort Collins. Is that where the main group is in Fort Collins? I have people in Fort Collins, Palo Alto, Houston, Bangalore, we're all over the place. The Geek fact is pretty high at Fort Collins. Yeah, the Geek fact is pretty high. I mean, really, Fort Collins, you have a lot of guys that have a lot of stuff with hardware and software. Hardware, software, HPE OneView, lots of resource there. We're globally distributed, but we have a lot of talent. And I always say, I think I work with the smartest people on the planet. So with the new HPE balance sheet, have you created a new shopping list for Meg? You know, not exactly, but it certainly gives us new alternatives and ideas that we can float. And one thing that's great about Meg and the EC is they're open to all ideas on how we improve the environment for customers. And they're big fans of innovation. I can't tell you how nice it is to have a CEO that's a huge fan of innovation and wants innovation reviews. Meg's coming to Fort Collins to review our project and our business just to see, show me more about the technology. So, big fan and it's great to be part of. So on that, on Jay's point, there's organic growth which you guys are doing in turn last year. A lot of talent. Absolutely. The inorganic is an interesting opportunity. Wikibon and SiliconANGLE and the CUBE team are looking at it. Grace Lee, our analyst at Wikibon, is looking at the DevOps market and cloud native in this particular. And you see the market, certainly the capital market is still flush now. Start of the bloom is coming off the road. So there's going to be a lot of buying opportunities for you guys. Certainly there's an area that's got a lot of white space. So have you guys identified any white space area that you like, that you're doing inorganic and organic in that you could share? I don't have a specific area that I can share but certainly we're going to look at all alternatives to make sure that we're a leading player in this new emerging market.  We're moving fast. And we have such great innovation inside of HP that we have a few tricks up our sleeve that we haven't let go yet and watch this space. Okay, so I got to talk about the developers because in the developer market now, cloud native is pretty clear what the trend is there. They want to agile certain tools and certain infrastructures code. We've seen some track record of some patterns that are repeatable certainly in the DevOps side. When you bring in traditional IT, they call it cloud ops, it's a different makeup. DevOps is kind of coming in, some people are afraid of it, it's more engineering, it's not so much coding. How do you talk to customers when they talk to you about this? And what's the conversation like? I mean, translating DevOps to IT is not easy, mindset-wise, and too, talent gap. Yeah, so for us, what we're really focused on is enabling DevOps. Meaning to me, and from our point of view, DevOps is really about reducing the amount of separation between the operations side of the house and dealing with a whole bunch of infrastructure issues and how hard it is to update firmware and those kind of things. And the development side of the house that really, frankly, doesn't want to deal with infrastructure just wants to develop. And so we have specific features in synergy around simple firmware updates that blast out from an image streamer. Our goal is to bring DevOps together, enable it in your infrastructure that's on-premise. And so figuring out exactly who's going to use that, you can still have an operations team and a dev team that use that infrastructure, or you could put this infrastructure just in with your developers, and it's easy to figure out. We have demos on the show floor that show here's how you point and click to deploy applications here. Here's how to set up a test dev environment instantly with the infrastructure the minute you get it. Here are templates that drive all those behaviors. So that's what we're about. It's interesting, we talk about this all the time in our research and media meetings, production meetings around the cloud. And Bill Hilf was on earlier, and I wish I had more time but we could be cutting it over to the key notes. I asked him on the closing question and I'll ask you the same. Cloud certainly looks like, we predicted this, turns out it's looking like it's going to happen, that the cloud will take a long tail distribution, depending on how fat the torso and the neck is on the probability distribution, but that long tail, you're going to have the big three or four public cloud guys, and then a series of private clouds. Where you can envision a Bank of America, or Fidelity, or Wells Fargo, or a big insurance company, or any company that's large, will probably have their own cloud, or a mixture of hybrid here and there. How do you see that vision? What's your take on that? Because that would indicate that's, you're going to be in a good spot for a TAM, your total just market's going to be significantly bigger, because it's not so much public cloud solution as it is creating these converged clouds, if you will. So what's your vision on this? Pretty much every customer we talk to, their view about it, even though there's tons of energy around the cloud, is not that it's going to be a cloud or no. Hybrid infrastructure is what they tell us all the time. It's going to be a hybrid world. The mix will change over time, but it's going to be a hybrid world. And if you look at the super growth in cloud land right now, private cloud is growing faster than public cloud, and we take that very seriously. So we want our solutions not to avoid the cloud, not to stay away from that. We want people to enable to put the workload in the right spot. If it needs to be in the public cloud, which some things perfectly belong there, and you heard about some of our partnerships today, it should go there. If you want to enable a private cloud, we're going to make that the easiest thing that you could possibly do. And if you want traditional architecture, we're going to do that as well. So we're really about enabling customers to be their trusted advisor for how to implement a hybrid infrastructure, which includes all. Final question, and we're going to wrap up on time here, but I want to get your take on, you were part of the keynote team up on the big stage. So Meg and the whole senior leadership's up there. It was an honor. I want to share with the prep, the preparation, obviously the messaging is pretty tight. But as you go out on the stage to present the new HP, what was it like, and what's your feedback? Have you gotten used to it? Yeah, oh, I just winged it. No, I didn't. We spent a few rehearsals and things like that. But honestly, what were you trying to convey? Did you get it across? And what was the feedback? I think the real key message is, we have something new here that's a game changer. And what it's about is your infrastructure's code. That's the key message. What does that mean? It works well for traditional and it works well for the idea economy style apps where the IT is at the forefront of generating profit and revenue for the business. And we think we're the only people who have composable infrastructure. They're competitors that'll say they have composability and things like that. But really there are three key things that I tried to make sure came across that really tell me when you have composable infrastructure. The first is you have to have flexible fluid pools of resources, meaning compute, storage, and fabric, all in one domain that you can allocate appropriately. Why? Because an application needs compute, storage, and fabric to be able to run. So if you can only do one of those and you don't have storage, you're not a composable infrastructure, exactly right. And the second thing is you really have to be able to deploy in any environment. You can't just say, well, we have composability as long as you use a virtualization paradigm, because for a lot of our customers, there are applications, particularly in the traditional space, that want to run on bare metal and they want that same deployment experience that's super simple. And the final thing is, it has to have a unified API. If you have a different API for your storage and your compute, or you have a hierarchy of managers of managers that you have to interface to get all this infrastructure is working, it's not composable, it's not being managed as a unit. Exactly, so there'll be a lot of people saying, we have composability. We believe we have the world's only true composable infrastructure. Congratulations, as we say, that's the DevOps ethos, bringing that infrastructure as code, enabling rapid deployment of innovation and growth for new opportunities, revenue growth for enterprises. Thanks for sharing that great insight on theCUBE. We appreciate it. This is theCUBE, we're data-driven media. We get all the data, share that with you, right from the senior execs at HP. Rick Lewis, Senior Vice President General Manager, Converged Data Center Group within HP Enterprise. We'll be right back with more here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back.


Welcome to this session in the course computer programming. In this session, we are going to look at another complex problem of handling strings, which has multiple words in a single sentence. To recapitulate, we have studied the representation of strings using carotide arrays and have seen how strings can be manipulated in C plus clause. In particular in the last session, we discussed how to separate first and last names in a single line. We will now see a generalized approach to solve such a problem. The problem stated again is to read an input sentence, which contains multiple words. These words are separated by one or more blank spaces. Notice that there could be blank spaces even at the beginning or even at the end. Our job is to separate each word, storing it in appropriate arrays. We have to print all words including the count of words. The moot question is that we do not even know how many words are there. So, would it be correct to assign a separate name for each word? The approach to solve this problem is we will read the input sentence in a car array called sentence 200 for example. We expect a sentence to be not more than 199 characters long. We do not know the number of words and therefore, we cannot individually use named array for each word. What we will do instead is we store the words in a two dimensional car array, car word 50 to 100. Notice that this two dimensional array provides for 50 words, actually 49 words. Each row is used to store one word. No, in fact, this array provides for all 50 words, but each word can have at the most 199 characters. Remember, a row will be used to store one word. Each word is a character string and must be terminated by a backslash 0. So, a word can contain up to that is 199 characters match. The approach that we use is the same approach that we did last time. We scan the given sentence one character at a time. Let us look at what happens when we start scanning. Here is a sample sentence. Some blanks, hello, blanks, words, blanks, how, blanks, r, blanks, u, some blanks. This backslash 0 here will actually be inserted by our input operation. The input sentence will end with a backslash n which is the new line character or when you press enter, but this will be replaced by our get s function with a backslash 0. So, therefore, hello world, how are you? A sentence with blanks all are in between and outside will look like this. What do we wish to do with this sentence? We wish to ignore the first three blanks, put hello into consecutive locations for the 0th row of word. So, h, e, l, l, o followed by a backslash 0. We again have to ignore the subsequent blanks till we encounter the second word. This word is word which we wish to put into the first row of word. How will be kept in the second row? R will be kept in the third row, u will be kept in the fourth row. So, 0th, first, second, third, fourth rows will be used because there are exactly five words. At the end, we will come out of the iteration and we should print all the words that we have discovered so far. This gives you some details about how we design the program. I have reproduced the word here, the sentence here again. Please note that this sentence has many words and it has several blanks. Now, I am going to scan this sentence character by character, character by character like this. In the process, whenever I encountered a word of characters which are consecutive non-blank characters, I must put it in one row of the words added. If there are blanks, I need to ignore them. So, when we scan the sentence, let us say using an index i which is initially 0, all that we do is within the iteration ignore blank. If we encounter a blank, simply ignore it, continue scanning. Somewhere, we will come across non-blank characters. When we check for non-blank character, we will have to put it in the current word. So, obviously, the current word, the word count or the character count for that word will all have to be initialized properly. Since we are going to use a two-dimensional array, the current word will be indicated by an index which refers to a different row of the word when the word changes. Within a word, we will increment the character count which is maintained for each word. If a non-blank character is followed by a blank, observe here. O is followed by this blank. Current word ends. Hello as ended. When that happens, we will insert a backslash 0 in the current word. Reset character count to 0 because for the next word, we have to start counting characters again. We will increment the number of words which is stored in a variable numbers and we start the next word. Notice that numbers can also be used as an index for the row of the two-dimensional array word because that represents the number of words. Here is the program which will separate out all words in a sentence. Notice a traditional style commenting slash star followed by slash star. This permits us to write multi-line commands. It says that program which counts the number of words and prints them. It validates all spaces means it ignores all spaces before after and in between the sentence. Finally, it prints all words and the word count. These are merely standard initial declarations of include statements, namespace and integer main function. We define variables and get the input. Variables are sentence which is one single sentence character. The words matrix which is 50 rows by 200 columns in i is the index which we will use for scanning the sentence. Character count is the count within each word. Length numbers, numbers is the number of words and that is set to 0 to begin with. I enter a string. This string is read by using a greatest statement and I now scan the sentence. So, this is the major outer scan through which I propose to assemble all words for i equal to 0. Sentence i not equal to backslash 0. Notice that I need not even bother to find the length of the sentence because I have to scan the complete sentence till the backslash 0 character is encountered. Please note that once I go inside this loop at any point in time, I will be looking at the ith character of the sentence. Let us see what do I do with the ith character. As we outline in our program design, if the ith character is blank, I simply continue with the next iteration which means I ignore the blank. If the ith character is not blank, that means I have encountered a non-blank character which must be inserted in the current word. So, what I do? The ith character of sentence I insert in the character count of current word which is indicated by numbers. I increment the character count by 1 when I finish this. Ordinarily I would have gone back to assemble more characters. However, I check if the next character is a blank or if the next character is a backslash 0. This will indicate the end of this word. Let us go back to the previous slide and examine what we mean. Please note that if this was the non-blank character which I just inserting in the current scan, the next character is a blank. Similarly, the next character here is a blank. Whenever that happens, my current word has ended and that is why what I do now here is that if the I plus 1th element of sentence is a blank or a backslash 0, I terminate the present word which means in the current position which is character count position, I insert a backslash 0. This word has terminated. So, the next word has to start. I increment the number of words, numbers and I reset character count to 0 because in the second word which is the next row of the word matrix, the character count will start from 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 for a new word. That is all I need to do. When I finish this, I will come out here. This is the end of this expression and when I come here, I have finished the entire scan. Notice how beautifully in a single scan of the sentence, I have been able to collect all the words that were there inside the sentence separated by blanks. All that I need to do is I output the number of words which is given by the variable numbers and for each of those words, I simply output words I. Notice that words is the two dimensional array, but C plus plus understands if I just put words I that means the ith row. Since ith row represents a valid string C plus plus permits me to use this as if it was a one dimensional array with the name words. This will output the ith word, I varies from 0 to numbers, I would have got all my words printed. In summary, we can now handle character strings in C plus plus. In real life, however, we need to handle character strings which are part of a large text file. Consider our programs themselves. C plus plus compiler will have to handle these programs which are nothing but lines of text and they contain many symbols not just blank spaces semicolon and or less than, greater than. We need some specific programming techniques to handle such text which is full of all kinds of symbols each one having its own significance. From point of view of computational exercises, consider an example of a data in a spreadsheet which can be saved as a text file in what is popularly known as a csv format. It stands for comma separated values format. We will be including a practice problem which will illustrate such a requirement. We will note, however, that when we want to handle large text, large number of lines containing large number of words, punctuation marks etcetera, we will need to know how to handle files in C plus plus. Thank you so much.


I recently stopped to give a homeless person some money as I walked away this guy crouched in a doorway shouted after me my name's John so I went back and I crouched down next to John and apologized to him for not asking him his name told him my name shook his hand as I walked away I realized John was teaching me something and all of us something and that's this I think John was saying love just doesn't see your need love ask you your name love wants to know your name love wants to know who you are asking homeless people their name I think he's hugely important because it is a donation of dignity but a time in their life when they feel they have none some of you have maybe been there and I passed this on because as we enter this Christmas season if you engage with a homeless person don't forget to ask them their name and give them yours love you guys


For Pikeville Police, receiving letters of appreciation is more than just a kind gesture. Everybody in this building, all the police officers here, all the staff here, we have a special place for children and all law enforcement officers do. And it was just so great to see that. It just makes us know that we're doing something right. Last week, Betsy Lane Elementary's first grade class made drawings to show their appreciation to Pikeville Police. My daughter came home last week and she had a little packet. And it was a surprise for me, which I sent you the picture and it said to Dad. And it was letters of appreciation from her first grade class. From understanding the librarian, come up with the idea to do appreciation letters to first responders and community helpers. And so my daughter told the class that her dad was a police officer. So they all wrote letters, colored pictures for me and all of them were great. I looked and read all of them and I kept all of them and I'm going to keep all of them forever. It was just a great gesture and it humbled me. It was really cool to see those letters from my daughter and her class. We have coupled that with cutting-edge technology, providing them the best equipment and operating rooms available. The result is comprehensive cardiac care for the people of our region that is second to none. The Hart and Vascular Institute at Pikeville Medical Center. And while the department's goal is to be respected by the community, Khan says receiving letters from kids means more than anything else. We get letters from schools and from kids and from grown-ups all the time here. And it means that we feel like we're a community partner. And we feel like that we're doing our job when people appreciate it. And it feels good to be appreciated. It's one of the things where we get out here and we do everything we can do to help the community. And when somebody recognizes it, it makes you feel good. We don't expect it, but we like it. For Mountain Top News, I'm Joel Hodgell.


An independent artist who doesn't need any help really means they're poor and cheap. You grew that? Yeah. You say yeah? I agree. That's interesting. My least favorite sentence of the modern decade. Independent and don't need no help means poor and cheap. That's what that means.  They don't want to invest in themselves.  All right. So he just differentiated right there. He kind of playing tricks right there. Yeah. Independent people, poor and cheap. They don't want to pay for nothing. They don't want to invest in themselves. But he said real independents. So there is a differentiation. All right. But I think I know what he means. New York independents are not like West Coast and Midwest and down south. Mid-West independents and down south and West Coast independents. They got money. Yeah. They're doing it really independently. New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Boston. Independent me. I don't have no money. Can you do shit? Can you do everything for me for free? Because I'm dope. That's not independent. When I own, you part of my label. You're going to get 59%. John's going to get this Lambo right here. Yo, he killing the sales pitch, bro. You heard that pitch before, haven't you? Sadly, I have. Hey, man. Yo, stop with the sales pitches.  First of all, I'm a grown able man.   Don't do that to me, bro. And it's like you only here because you saw something I was already doing.  Offering them that.  Don't disrespect me like that, man. Come on. That too. How many times y'all heard that talk? I've heard it for 20 years. So many times. Any of them bless you back? No. No, and they're not. But that's exactly like look at the marketing, y'all. Oh, then at the end he said if any of them bless you back. See, now he is, he alluded to a whole another issue where some artists aren't necessarily grateful. But that's, but hey, we're going to assume we're only dealing with the tried and true. The good, the good folks, the dope artists who got carried and naturally he put the homies on or whatever you want to say it. The statement though here that we got to address independent artists who don't need any help really means they're poor and cheap. For me, this is a battle of semantics and this is why I talk that no labels necessary talk.  Not because of the, oh, we don't sign to a label, not even that side of it.  Right? Who's actually independent or not? Right? Now, oh, this artist is independent and I'm being sold a dream that I can accomplish that in the same way that he did it independent. And I'm not really independent, right? Or you got people who are in a deal and they actually do support. I have like label type support and they think they're independent. Right? And so they are, they're not selling the dream like in a lie standpoint. They just don't really know what the situation and differentiation is. So this is why I always say no labels, just build your business the way you want to build your business. It don't matter if someone thinks you're independent or not. Unless you're going to make this your brand and you're going to like, I'm chance to wrap or flying the independent flag or any other artists who are out there making it a core part of their brand, which I think is dangerous. If you don't commit to that long term, you know what I'm saying? It's unnecessary. Yeah. Like independent, like these are all semantics. Do you have ownership? We just talked about Ray Daniels having that clip where he was like, well, some of these artists really don't have them on ownership. They say that they own it, but it's really in a situation where if they don't continue to pay up to a certain amount, they still won't own their masters. So it's the semantic of you literally do not own your masters because I just bought it up off you or you gave it away as a part of the deal. Or you own it. However, like a house, you still need to pay that mortgage payment year after year. And until you finish your mortgage payment, which is still better than the regular deal.  Right? Like, so I got a house at any time.  Right? Yeah. Yeah. Like, but that, but we wouldn't be caught up by most of these tricks if we just paid attention to what's good business or not. And what's the best business decision to make based on where I am. It doesn't matter if this person did this better there or this label, because now I don't want to make a business decision just because it's a label that's been told. Like, I don't want to not be independent because people may be an independent cool. And now I'm afraid to sign. It's all these mental games that people play. And I feel like it distracts from the actual goal, which is do good business. That should be all that she wrote do good business and the people who are quote unquote, poor and cheap. Those are the people are distracted and stuck in the idea is, hey, I'm independent. And because I am independent, there's going to be some people who are out there that look at me as a charity case. I think the sentence that's throwing me off in this headline is that doesn't need any help. Because from my experience, man, independent artists are not shy about letting you know. That, I agree. They need help. I agree. What I was saying earlier is I do hate the way that independent has become synonymous with broke in the artist mind. You've gotten the deals, but they leave with a, hey, Sean, love what you do. I see y'all do great work. I saw your prices, but I'm just an independent artist. Okay, like most of you think we're working with an independent artist. So like, what are you saying here? Which is a, most of the people that we work with are independent artists. People actually don't know that. At least 95%, you know what I'm saying? Like independent. So when people be asking me, yo, how can independent artists get money to do these things? That's why they're like, hey man, I don't know, but I watch 40 people a month figure it out. I don't know where they get it from. I don't ask any questions, but at least 40 a month I see figure it out. Add on top of the artist I see online, who maybe I have a good relationship with to know that back in. Add on top of that, my artist friends who I know their situations very intimately, you know what I'm saying? So I got trained out of that mentality a long time ago. Like probably my first year of being a marketer, but once the first independent artist dropped the bag on me, I was like, oh, so the ones out there do have money. So that's why I agree with the sentences. I don't like that artists use those terms interchangeably. You know what I'm saying? They don't want to say, hey Sean, I'm broke. I can't afford to serve.  Not knowing, but the emotional wall is strong. I get so many of these DMs brother. And my thing like, you know, I know some people, especially when I talk, apparently people think I'm just being like hard on folks.  It's not even hurting me. It's hurting you just like the idea of the broke artists, the starving artists. Independent is the new shorthand for the starving artists. And that whole propaganda campaign that has inflicted the creative community has allowed creatives to be cool with not having money and allow other people to take control of the business and take the money. This is where we go back to the idea of no labels, unnecessary creative currency. Your creativity is the currency. It's other people who are trying to convert that currency, but you need to be the one who creates that, converts that currency into dollars, right?  It might be harder to make money than some fields, but we all have to figure it out. Like create creative fields are the hardest to figure out in terms of how to make the money. But nobody is going to care. Nobody is going to care because everybody still is trying to figure it out themselves, even if people in a better position. It's still hard, especially if they're trying to make progress. So like Brett, it's already hard enough to make money. Don't make it worse on yourself by selling yourself this idea that you have to be in that position just because you are independent. That's the way I see it. I agree, man, because that's a lot of independent artists I had figuring it out. And that should be the narrative, right? We can't only hold it against them so much that they only get access to so many platforms. But like I said, for the last three, four years of my life, I've been watching independent artists that come through the agency to figure it out. So that completely changed my perspective of indie artists. I'm like, man, first click for me, too, we had this one client who, I remember did a campaign with us, then you worked on it, it didn't go that great. We gave him a refund and he came back. Oh, yeah. Years later, well, not years later. The next year, did a campaign because he liked the fact we gave him a refund. Apparently, that's this wild concept of music. And I remember like the first two months of the campaign went well. He maybe spent like 10K. And then he was like, how can we gas it? I was like, bro, you got like four more thousand dollars.  And then he was like, all right, give me like three months. And he came back with it three months later. And I was like, where'd you get the money from? And he's like, man, I have a production company.  And like when artists wanted bad enough to figure it out. Oh yeah. You know what I'm saying? And that's been the biggest thing I've learned. But when I come across artists, I can always tell how bad they want it, by how willing they are to figure it out. Like the money barrier is the wall that stops you. You don't want to harden up. You know what I'm saying? But the ones that see the wall, they go like, damn, man.  Let me take some time to step back and figure out how to get past this wall. Those people, I believe in it. You know what I'm saying? I don't know how you did it. I don't know where you got it from, but you did do it and I respect that. We need more of that narrative out there. We do. Artists should share their stories more on how they got the money that helped them get to a certain place. I know artists don't want to talk about the money, but that's part of why I'm so passionate in this space. It's just like, yo, the money is serious. We need artists to talk about the money, have that as a regular conversation so people can have a realistic expectation of what it looks like, what it takes. And we go back to these same labels. Artists are so caught up in this path and thought of the label of what it looks like to be an artist, music artist specifically. We're not in that era no more though. There's so much more to being a music artist. And I want more artists to, again, this poor mentality, realize that they can make money in different ways and have this full blown creative brain and not have to worry about not being labeled as, oh, I'm just an artist.  Do whatever you need to do.  You start making money that way or you a videographer or you got a production company, whatever it is, turn that creativity into currency and then apply that to your music or then bridge the gap into your brand if it is something that's all front facing. But a lot of artists get caught because they're taking the old system, here's the label, and then saying, I want to be independent. So they're separating themselves from the old system but then they're trying to still act in just success by the old system way of doing things. The system you said you don't want to be a part of. Exactly. You know what the beauty is? Once you're not in that box, that system, all these opportunities open up. Like you don't have to do a traditional concert and you don't have to do it at a live nation venue. You could do it at a random venue that you find yourself or outside or whatever kind of weird retreat and private event that you want to create. You don't have to do the traditional concert at all. It could be like more of an event or a series or something like that.  You can have merch and have your own brand or whole clothing line, whatever all your creative talents are, you can just build out your world and your music happens to be a part of it. Open your mind because the box that exists that the industry is built on wasn't built for independent artists. You know what I'm saying? So that's the kind of stuff I started thinking about when I hear it is. What artists associate with independent is just very clear in terms of it being one of the many boxes and limiting beliefs they create for themselves. That's the term. They create a lot of limiting beliefs without even knowing that they do and it's making the game more difficult than it is. And shit, we all do that in different parts of our lives. Music executives do that. So here's something for the music executives. You don't need a label either. You don't need some big time music exec or artists or anything like that to build your career, right?  We just talked to JR the other day and I was asking, remember I asked JR if you were starting out today, do you feel like you would still need to go through a label or something like that just to get the knowledge and then come out and pop out as you are? And he was like, nah, today you can get mentors or get connected with people but he would never be a part of the label system as an entrepreneur in music, right? They niggas got consultation fees. Right, right. Like you just pay them, you get the advice and you act on the advice, right? A lot of young music executives are still trying to chase the industry in the same way artists are.  You know what I'm saying? I don't want to say basically it was an independent label. Right, and me, I've never worked with any kind of label, any type of internship in music, zero connections. The start of it just moved the way I moved, right?  Y'all need to start looking at the label system and figure out how you can build independently too. How can you provide value for an artist maybe you build a video production company and then get good at that and then help them and barter that way, provide value and then y'all build. Maybe you become a producer, whatever that looks like there's so many ways you can make money and then build at the same time. That's what we do. We market it, right? We help with marketing and then we've built from there, period. And y'all, thankfully for the internet man we're in a position where you talk loud enough the right people will come. You're not the only ones with that ability, you know what I'm saying? You talk loud enough, you yell your message long enough the right people will start to get it. We need to talk louder actually. We working on that. We're about to talk a whole lot this year.   That's what you want actually. But that's a whole other story. This is another clip from No Labels Necessary. I'm Brain Man, Sean.


Our final session of the day, we're delighted to have from California or maybe from recalling it from Hawaii, Jody Evans, one of the founders and leaders of Code Pink and who continues to lead the way for all of us. Jody. Thank you, Jonathan. Well, it's so lovely to spend the day with you passionate essential workers for peace. I'm inspired by your commitment, the campaigns and your many years of work. And every day I'm grateful to the amazing community that is mass peace action. It is also awesome to be together to celebrate the victory of those who have created the conditions that we can all say, nuclear weapons are illegal. No moral but now they are illegal. That is firm ground to stand on that is a shift in the narrative.  The ground we stand on is firmer and has been created by those outside the hegemony of the United States. Those in the global south to think and I hope we remember to keep them in our hearts during our activism and engage as we engage here in the empire as too many of them bear the brunt of the war economy daily. I come to you from the west coast of Turtle Island the land of Tongva people. 18 years ago I flew to DC to call code pink with media Benjamin to George Bush's color coded alerts, frightening the US to war. I had a primal scream of no I wanted to deliver outside the White House ended up staying for eight six months, and now over 18 years as a war begets war begets violence begets more atrocities. Before threatening war in Iraq, I worked in Watts, teaching life skills to gang members who had been left behind by an extremely racist system in Los Angeles. It was a place where 20,000 people had been killed in an inner city war zone from 1980 to 2000. I was working with Achilles Charelles who negotiated the peace treaty between the crypts and the bloods before the Rodney King uprising. I learned from that work that the young man I was working with all had fathers who were soldiers in the failed war on Vietnam. That war had come home to our city and no one acknowledged it or talked about it. So I flew to DC to say no to another war on another group of innocent people. No to using lives of innocent people to kill innocent people, no to killing for greedy needs and no to using taxpayers money for another failed invasion of another country. Like Korea, like Vietnam, that most people seem to have forgotten the US had lost and where millions of innocent people had died. And there we were all of us 12 million of us globally saying no to war and it didn't matter against the most bold faced outrageous lies. We have watched the insanity of war, the volume of weapons and the amount spent on violence continue to escalate, because war is an addiction, as David Swanson reminds us that we have failed to take into detox. We just keep engaging with it like it will listen to reason, which I love that Erica find this morning talked about, you know, earlier about that. Years ago, it could pink, we can, as we continued our endless efforts to end war. We truly understood, like I did in the neighborhoods of Watts, that to end, we were not going to be able to end war until we ended the war economy.   We can see the home of the war economy. It is rendered is sick, it is dying, it is starving, and it is torn to tatters the very fabric of society. There is also a peace economy. It is the giving sharing caring thriving relational resilient economy without which none of us would be alive.  It is the war economy that devalued privatized and squeezed the life out of them over the last 4050 years. As a peacemaker I asked myself daily how am I creating conditions conducive for life. At every level the war economy is destroying life, and war serves it. We can't end war until we end the war economy. Jim was speaking to it just minutes ago. At Code Pink we have 21 ways to help us divest ourselves from the war economy habits that we've been acculturated to like frogs and boiling water. Things we as peacemakers aren't ourselves aware of, and you can find those lessons at Code Pink, the peace economy but today I want to talk about a few of those habits that help the war economy thrive. It creates conditions for us to feel alienated and that we live in scarcity instead of abundance. The habit it creates in us is the habit of being transactional and not relational. The war economy has forced us to behave transactionally to survive, and we all need to break that pattern and become relational to build the movement we need. The culture of transaction creates the conditions that allow the warmongers to feed lies that arise fears that make people act against their own best interest and the best interest of others. We can all learn from Reverend Barber who took the time and attention with moral Mondays to be relational to build trust to present contradictions to the lies they were living with and acting from and affect the culture of his state. And from that that he and Reverend Liz, the O'Harris have continued to cultivate the peace economy across the country with the poor people's campaign and national call for a moral revival. We are here together working to end war because of our empathy, our love of others, our heartbreak at injustice and violence and our desire for a healthy future for the planet and her people. We need to stay tapped into that. It needs to be reflected in how we treat each other and where our work for peace is rooted. Let that always be our work that others can attune to because to grow first, we need to be coming from love to exercise our relationality we need to bring ourselves more closely related to our local communities. Those who are at the greatest effect of the war economy, those right now suffering the results of the war economy. The coping we are cultivating our piece local peace economy as part of our work. If we truly know we can't in war until we end the war economy then we must be cultivating what is missing we must be cultivating the values of peace, where we live. That ends with listening. It takes stepping back and listening. We tend to show up with all we know the war economy itself is full of hubris and the fulfillment of their needs at the cost of everyone else's needs and lives. This but the needs of the greedy war economy, no matter how rational, and how true the facts we raise about us abuse and violence, and how it comes home to militarize the streets of our cities. It has a pattern not to listen. So ours should be one of listening to be effective and growing the movement and growing the power we need. We must listen to those at the effects of the war economy. Michelle really nailed that just a few minutes ago. We are here with us in the peace are in peace communities together, we are here today, being nourished and inspired, educated to be more effective in our work. But how to expand ourselves to also engage with those who are at the greatest effect of the war economy, not as a transaction of how to use them for our needs, but to truly show up for them with our love. What started happening in history when societies became more complex. So I say let's start with the essentials with the basics. What sustains life, food, care, love. In my community we discovered there were 3000 homeless use so I went with food on the weekends and over the months we listen to their needs and engage the community and delivering them clothes backpacks condoms healthcare mental health counseling. It's rooted in love and understanding that the war economy thrive, they are homeless, and that it too won't end until the work on the end. This transformed our community food is now grown along sidewalks, the homeless use of food, the model of loving them has become a formative light and the entire city of Los Angeles, and a world where not in our backyard is a solution to the unhoused. The last piece of land near the beach has been allocated for the housing of the unhoused. It was a short process. We call it planting seeds of peace. You can do that locally and find out how it could pink in our 1 billion rising gardens, because we need to be nourishing each other instead of the malnourishment of the war economy that will change hearts and minds. In other areas, we have to be constantly addressing culture, corporations, Congress, Congress responds to culture in the will of the people when and only when they are not totally bought off by corporations. We want to be putting our attention to Congress, but we are small and how some of that attention has to go is our engagement in other movements and seeing how we can serve them and help them grow in the understanding of how war serves the war economy that is the bane of their existence. Culture. That means taking on the lies we swim in like war doesn't like keep anyone safe or secure. It steals from the future and from the planet and it rips the fabric of society. Where are the movements working on the health of community. Who is working to end private prisons and militarization of our police, join Black Lives Matter to fund the police and abolish prisons to get to the goal of defunding the Pentagon. It is now fully obvious that white supremacy, which is the roots of the war economy has fully infiltrated both the military and local policing. It is clear who their allegiances are to not to safety and security and the needs of the people, but white supremacy, which is what the US is as it invades and bonds people of color across the world for its needs. How can members of Congress now agree to fund that after feeling that reality. Don't worry, they'll come up with excuses. Or another lie that the money spent and the lack of transparency, transparency is all for national interest in the care of US citizens. No, it has always been to take care of those in power and the 1% and the corporations. Find the movements taking on corporate greed and violence and make this also our work. Many of them are the environmental movements as the war economy is destroying the planet and they are taking them on. And I'm in taking on those investing in fossil fuels or join with the indigenous communities like one on a la Duke who and others working to stop line three in Minnesota. Top down is the work army. We must come to the place of listening developing relationships of trust and understanding which takes time. We need to take the time and come back with information that relates to what is real in their lives and build trust that they too have a strong ground to stand on that is rooted in peace. As an activist I've always understood that activism is affecting the person closest to you, why, because we change our minds with information from someone we trust. And then we must take on the media that is the oil on the fire of war, spreading it wildly, which means we must cultivate authentic culture and take ourselves off the diet of the Hollywood kitsch. The fact that it was Bernie and his jacket and adorable mittens that became the mean for the inaugural because he was authentic and stark relief to the manufacturer show. People are hungry for authentic experience that authentic experience is happening in our communities. That is the power to expose the lies. We will find inspiration being together and inspiring each other telling our stories. That means more finding more time to engage with cultures that are rich and old and wise. Corporations the ruling class the 1% the elite however you name it the ones who think they benefit from the war economy and their short sighted greed. They are also driving forces and power behind the war hegemony of our minds. They benefit from all of it fascism arises from it, the Molotov cocktail, made of the ruling class in the war economy is patterned to drive the system to fascism. Without regulations and accountability to hold back the addiction to war and greed, it will destroy all of us. As with all addicts they are blind to their own destruction. We take them on with our divest from the war machine campaign and black rock the poster child of the war economy. The years of taking on Larry Fink has made him too toxic to fulfill his dream of being in the Biden administration, but it isn't a revolving door of corporate power and political power is not a revolving door.  So don't let Congress push more laws to control terrorism, they need to change their behavior in said. So Congress. They are affected by the ruling class of which they are members and the media. We have to encircle those in power and squeeze them back. Send them retreating as we expose their dirty laundry and lies and violence at the core of their votes in action. Trust in all three areas the media corporation and Congress are at an all time low. So, why do they have the power, and how do we take that power and build the power. Here is our opportunity. We have the greatest capacity right now. We have them on their heels. We have to remember that Biden didn't win the election he was a lesser of two evils, and it was him or a dystopian future that bars too low. It is up to us to raise it people want the bar raised. They don't want to be in the gutter behind barbed wire. We have to believe in each other create trust and connections across movements divest ourselves from the systems of oppression and be engaged and in action. Every day we must be the building blocks of trust and the truth we can stand on the breathtaking Amanda Gorman said in her, the hill we climb at the inauguration, we lay down our arms, so we can reach our arms to each other. To embrace her words and free our arms for hugging those in our communities at the greatest effect of the war economy. Let us remember racism as a result of the war economy, not just poverty and the militarism in our streets. We must never be funded as they are intended to kill the child of another mother, and let us not allow the story out of the Biden administration that we must prepare for war with Russian and China, because for preparing for war itself is the path to war. We instead need to model reaching our arms to each other and cooperation and peace. We need to have our world need peace. They need the peace economy culture and habits. We cannot be sidetracked by their lies. Thank you. Thank you Jodi that was an incredible