All right, welcome everybody to this interview. This is part of a project that I call, we call ingenuism. It's a project that I'm involved with with my business partner Robert Handershot and my co-author, Don Watkins. It's a deep study of progress and human flourishing inspired to a logic stand. Much of the content is inspired by a guest today, Matt Ridley. You can find out more about ingenuism and ingenuism.com where you can subscribe to our sub-stack newsletter and coverage you to do so. And we also have a podcast and you can find interviews on our YouTube channel. So just search ingenuism on YouTube and you will find it. So I'm really pleased to have with me today, Matt Ridley. Matt is of course a well-known science writer, most recently of this book, which we will be discussing, whoops, there it is, Vival with Alina Chan. Previously, he wrote his book on how innovation works, which I interviewed him on, must have been a year or two ago, I can't even remember anymore. And of course, he is famous as the rational optimist and we will ask him if he still is. You can ask Matt questions on the super chat. So feel free to do so. I am monitoring it. We're doing this live for that purpose. So, Matt, welcome. Daron, it's great to be back on your show. Thank you so much for inviting me. Oh, my pleasure. I actually got a pre-publication copy of the book and managed to read it last week. And I have to say, in spite of the depressing topic, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It reads like a detective story. It could have easily gotten bogged down with a lot of details and a lot of science speak. And yet, as you always managed to do, it read, it was easy and it flowed nicely. And it presented, I thought, a very fair perspective on all the different possibilities in terms that we know of. We don't know what we don't know in terms of the origin. So yeah, thank you for writing this. Well, a lot of the credit should go to my co-author, Alina Chan, a brilliant young scientist who's been pushing for proper investigation of exactly how this pandemic started for nearly two years now. And she's extraordinary. And it was a real pleasure and privilege to work with her. Although I only met her for the first time 10 days ago. I heard. So you did this all virtually. That's amazing. So tell us a little bit about how you got started on this.  You've always been focused on the positive, if you will, innovation, progress, explaining it, giving out kind of the scientific context for it. How did you get involved in this particular project? Yeah, well, you're right. The pandemic is a setback for those who believe in progress and optimism. I did, in the rational optimist say that one of the things that could derail progress in the 21st century was a pandemic. I later said, I don't think it's gonna happen because our genetic technologies are getting so good when I was wrong there. But to some extent, I think I owe it to myself to understand why this setback happened. But I think the world deserves an answer. There are maybe 16 million people dead now. That's an enormous death toll. We owe it to them and their families. We also need to find out in order to prevent another pandemic. And I think we have to bear in mind that bad actors are watching this, excuse me, watching this episode and saying to themselves, we could wreak havoc with a virus. So we need to show that we're gonna find out how it happened and track down anyone who started it. I don't think anyone did start it deliberately, but I think it's possible that an accident in research happened as we argue in the book. And that needs to be found out if it's the case. So it's very much been a project that I didn't wish on myself.  I just think this is too important not to find, this is the most important question facing humanity at the moment, I think. We've got a devastating pandemic that's killing millions and we don't know how it started. That's not good enough for me. I wanna find out. I wanna turn over every stone that might show an answer. What is the importance of how it started? So what could we learn if we knew whether it was a direct transmission from animal to human or whether it came from our lab? Obviously, if it was an engineered, there's lessons there, but why is the origin so important? Because if it came through the wildlife trade from a food market, then there are very clear lessons that we aren't doing enough to stop these viruses getting into the human race from that means. If it came because of cutting down forests, we need to look into that. If it came because of a bio warfare program, we need to look into that. If it came because of a laboratory accident during well-meaning scientific research, we need to think again about how such research is regulated. Of those various possibilities, the ones that we think very clearly are still plausible and the others really are not at all plausible. The ones that are plausible are that it was something to do with the wildlife food trade or that it was an accident in a research laboratory. And the evidence for those two is what we examine at great length in the book. And we both started out thinking the wildlife trade was more likely, but the research related accident couldn't be ruled out. We now think that the research related accident is more likely. We lean towards that explanation. The more we found out the weaker the food related explanation has become and the stronger the lab related explanation has become. So obviously we can't go through the whole book and all the details that you provide there, but can you give us an outline of each one of those hypotheses, of each one of those possibilities? The food market, the natural, kind of a natural transmission in the lab leak theory? Yeah. Well, in outline, many of the early cases in Wuhan were close to or associated with a market where food was for sale. As it was called a seafood market, most of it was seafood, but we also know that some wild animals were sold in that market, not very many, but some. And that very much echoed what happened in the case of SARS, a very closely related virus that caused an epidemic in 2002, three in Southern China, much further south than Wuhan. And that was very quickly identified as having been started mainly among food handlers, among chefs and market traders and was being caused by, they were picking it up from animals called palm civets and a number of other animals. And these animals had somehow acquired a bat virus. It became clear also that this was a virus from bats. So why not the same explanation? This time seems to make a lot of sense. It does seem to be a bit of a connection with the seafood market. The problem is that as time has gone by, they've tested animal after animal and they've not been able to find a single one carrying this virus. 80,000 animals have now been tested in China. It shouldn't take two years to track this down. As for the early cases, China has simply not been forthcoming about what the professions of those people were, what their locations were, et cetera, et cetera. We just, we don't have a good contact tracing pattern for the early cases. Now either they've got one and they're not sharing it with us or they haven't done the work properly, both of which are rather disturbing possibilities. Meanwhile, we have to look at another possibility, which is that Wuhan is not where these viruses live naturally. In the previous pandemic in Guangzhou, that is where these viruses live. But lots of testing has been done on bats in and around Wuhan city and they don't carry this virus. The virus lives 1,000 miles to the south in bats that live in that region in Southeast Asia and Southern China. So the question is how it got from there to there. And there isn't a very big wildlife trade to Wuhan, not nothing like as big as there is to Guangdong province. But what there is is a lot of scientists who go from Wuhan to Southern China sample bats for viruses, take the samples back to Wuhan to a particular institute called the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is the leading institute in the world for studying bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses and has published more papers on it than any other topic, has collected more samples, has a bigger database than any other. And at that lab, they do experiments with those viruses that include sequencing their genomes, altering their genomes, testing their infectious ability in human cells, testing them in humanized mice. And we know that among the viruses they took to Wuhan were some that were very closely related to this virus. And we know they were sequencing one of those viruses in 2018, and they may have been looking at others similar ones. So it's not unreasonable to say, are you sure there wasn't an accident? Now, the response from the Chinese lab has been saying, we've looked into it, we don't think there was an accident. Well, in 2003-4, SARS infected researchers at least four times, twice in Beijing, once in Taiwan, once in Singapore. And in three of those cases, nobody knew how it happened. All they knew was that a researcher working on SARS in the lab caught SARS. And since there's no SARS in the community, the only way they could have caught it was in the lab. So, and this virus is far more infectious than SARS. It's far easier to catch. So if it was in a laboratory, a researcher would be almost bound to have picked it up. And he might have thought he was just suffering from a cold, because one of the worrying features of this virus is that it is so mild in younger people that they wouldn't make a big deal out of it. And the intelligence community tells us that three researchers from that institute were hospitalized with what sound very like symptoms of this disease in November 2019, which is about the right time period. Now, I can't independently confirm that. I don't have security clearance to know what the source of that information is. But in the end, a bat-born SARS-like virus causes a pandemic starting in a city which has the biggest research program on bat-born SARS-like coronaviruses. That deserves our attention.  Of course, it was something to do with the food market, even though we found no infected animals. I'm sorry, they're not being responsible. So a lot of people say, you know, this lab was a, you know, the most secure lab, right? Category four, whatever they call it, and the probability of something escaping for category four is very low. But one of the things you document in the book is that they weren't doing their SARS research or the bat-virus research in that particular lab. Correct. The only category four, which is the highest security level lab in China is at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It opened its doors a couple of years ago. It was built with the collaboration of the French. But that's not the lab they've been doing this work in. They've been doing this work in biosecurity level three for the humanized mice experiments and biosecurity level two for the human cell experiments. Now, two is nothing really more than make sure you're wearing gloves.  And that's fine if you're working with a virus that you know can't infect humans, which is probably what they thought about most of these bat viruses. But they were looking for bat viruses that had the capability of infecting humans. That's why they were looking. So it does seem odd to have been doing those experiments at biosecurity level two. And experienced researchers, the most experienced coronavirus researcher of all, Ralph Barick, is among those who've said that doesn't sound right. They should have been doing this work at a higher security level. So since the book came out and it came out this week, but since you wrote the book or finished the book, there's some new evidence. I saw an article you wrote recently or I guess last week, a documentary that evidence about the potential lab leak theory. What is that? There was one bit of evidence we just managed to squeeze into the book just before we finished editing it. And there was another bit that came out just too late. And that was that a very similar virus has now been found in Laos in the country to the south of China. Slightly more similar than the most similar one we knew about so far. And so everyone said, oh, well, that's fine. That lets the scientists off the hook because they've got no connection with Laos. These are Chinese scientists working in China. Well, very shortly after that, a document was leaked which showed that the EcoHealth Alliance, which is this US based foundation that coordinates a lot of this virus hunting work in China and neighboring countries, had been collecting similar viruses to this in Laos among other countries for a number of years but had said to their funders in the US government, in order not to have the complication of dealing with subcontractors in Laos, we would like to send these samples that we collect to a partner that we already work with which is the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So these samples from Southeast Asia will be sent to Wuhan. Now, so therefore the discovery of a Laos connection or a closely related virus in Laos doesn't exonerate the Wuhan Institute of Virology at all nor does it convict it, of course. It doesn't produce direct evidence either way, but that's an example of the kind of things. Now, the one thing the Laos virus lacks that SARS-CoV-2 has got is a feature called the Furin cleavage site. This is a little feature that makes the virus highly infectious. It's one of the main reasons we're having a pandemic rather than a local outbreak. And that's a very odd feature because although other coronaviruses have this feature, no SARS-like coronavirus has ever been found with it. Thousands have been looked at, none of them have ever been found with this feature. So the question is, could that have been put in deliberately? Well, putting Furin cleavage sites into viruses has become a bit of a hobby actually of virologists over the last 10 years. There's been at least 11 experiments to do that. One of them we now know was planned by the EcoHealth Alliance with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2018. They asked for money to do exactly this for a SARS-like coronavirus. They said, if we find a novel SARS-like coronaviruses, we would like to put in a novel Furin cleavage site and see if it makes it easier to grow these viruses in cells in the laboratory. Now, you would think that the EcoHealth Alliance, which is a US-based foundation and whose president has been involved very closely in the World Health Organization investigation into this might have volunteered this information some time in the last two years, but it came as a result of a leak of a document at the end of August, the beginning of September. It's a pretty extraordinary state of affairs that even in the West, let alone in China, people like me and Alina Chan, who want to find out what happened, are left scratching around with readable information requests and leak documents to find out what our money as taxpayers was funding in these labs and what they were planning to do with it rather than proper transparency. So could the Furin cleavage site have been a, could it be a result of a natural mutation? Yes, it could. There's no question that that's true too. There is a case of a virus, not a very closely related one, that appeared to evolve a Furin cleavage site in the laboratory. What happened was that there were some very rare variants that had it already. And this is right in the middle of the spike gene. The spike gene mutates a lot, but it is an insertion. That is to say, it's a chunk of text that got put in somewhere. It's 12 base pairs long. So it's 12 letters of text in the genome.  It's not a question of just changing one letter here and one letter there. You can get a Furin cleavage site by changing one letter here and one letter there, but this didn't happen this way. Because we look at, you can see the sequence. It's exactly the same in all the closely related viruses or pretty well, exactly the same up until that point. And then suddenly there's a gap in all the other ones and there's a sequence in SARS-CoV-2. So, and by the way, you could put such things in without leaving any trace. I mean, genetic engineering of a seamless kind has become routine these days. So to what extent, what would somebody who thought this was a natural occurrence, what would they say to counter that, right? I mean, it would be, you know, this is not, because this is not obviously definitive proof that this was tinkered with. Completely right. There is no definitive dispositive proof either way. You know, I mean, all we need is an infected animal from before the outbreak and suddenly the story changes or a laboratory experiment report that shows that this experiment was done. Either of those things would be dispositive. We haven't got either of those things. Go ahead. I was just gonna say what Christian Anderson said about the fear and cleavage site when it was first raised as an issue was don't worry, we'll soon find relatives out there in the wild that have this. You know, come on, we only know of a few of them. Well, we now know of a whole lot more. We know these Laotian ones. We know a couple from Cambodia. We know one from Thailand. We know others from Southern Yunnan. There's even one from Japan, although it's not very closely related at all. And none of them have this yet. So the more we discover that don't have this, the less good a prediction it sounds that don't worry, we'll find one with this feature. One of the things that struck me about what the evidence you presented in the book is the extent to which both the Chinese and the EcoHealth Alliance seem to resist A, providing information, B, when they provide information, it seems to be partial.  It seems like what do you think the motivation is? What is going on here? Particularly for a US-based group who should be accountable, that gets obviously grants from the NIH and from other government entities, you'd think they would be accountable or somebody would hold them accountable. Well, it would be pretty devastating for their reputation, for their funding and everything. And I understand that. Just imagine, the purpose of the work they were doing was to avert the next pandemic. That was the job. They said, give us lots of money and we will go out there and sample viruses from bats all across Southern China and Southeast Asia and we will find the ones that threaten to start a pandemic because they're on the brink of being able to infect human beings. And that will be very useful because then we'll be able to test for them, we'll be able to tell you when an outbreak is happening that can turn into a pandemic, we'll be able to stop it in its tracks. Now at the very least, that project failed. It did not predict or prevent this pandemic. Okay? At the worst, it may have caused this pandemic. And that is something that is simply unthinkable to these people. It's not impossible that it happened, but it is unthinkable. They don't want to think it. And I understand that, but it's not our job to worry about how they feel about it. Our job is to find out what happened. But you would think that they know, right? At least the Chinese know one way or the other what causes it. If three people in the lab got sick in November, if that's true, then somebody knows that if they had been working on a virus and doing these gain of function research, we'll talk about that in a minute, then they would know that they had done that research and were trying to tinker with it. But we're getting nothing. Well, there's a database with 22,000 entries in it, 15,000 of them from bats. These are samples and sequences of viruses, mainly, collected from bats over several years. It exists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It was accessible online, although some of it was password protected until the 12th of September, 2019. And at two in the morning on that date, it went offline. And it's never been accessible since. Now, the purpose of that database, as I say, was to give us a bank of information that would help us in the event of a pandemic. Well, which pandemic are they waiting for? To bring that back online and tell us. Now, when you ask Peter Dazak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, whether he has asked his close colleague and friend, Xi Jinping Li of the Wuhan Institute of Virology to release that database, he says, oh, I haven't asked her for that, but I know what's in it, and it's of no relevance. And then all the more reason to release it, if it proves that there was no virus in that database that is at all closely related to SARS-CoV-2, fine, show us it. What are you waiting for? Is it because you want patents on the diagnostic tests for future viruses or something? It is extraordinary. Now, I should add at this point, we found that with some very honorable exceptions, mainstream scientists, mainstream journalists, and even mainstream intelligence agents are not much help to us. The people who've been most helped to us are open source analysts, amateur internet sleuths who know how to research the obscure corners of the web to find Chinese documents, theses, databases, research reports, grant proposals. And these guys are extraordinary. There's a guy called the Seeker in India who came up with some incredibly useful information. There's a Spaniard called Francisco de Rivera in Madrid who just simply ended up creating an enormous spreadsheet on which every serial number of every virus that he could track down what information was had about it and it was a very useful bit of work, et cetera. But no thanks, as I say, to official sources. I mean, these guys are, you know, both those people I've mentioned are kind of working in their basements in their spare time. I mean, that was stunning. The fact that, you know, the work that these guys are doing should be what journalists are doing. And we certainly should have scientists involved in this. And it really shows the power of the internet. You couldn't have done this 20 years ago. That's right. And the power of this connection, this connected world we live in, as you said, the people in all kinds of countries sharing information, digging through the web, discovering things, bringing it to the forefront. What did you have to do in order to verify that the documents were real? I mean, because it is a mess out there, we all know there are lots of crazy conspiracy theories. I think one of the, I initially responded negatively to the lab leak theory primarily because of where it was coming from. You know, places where lots of people dealt with conspiracy theories. How do you separate what is a conspiracy and what appears real? Absolutely. Well, this has been a really tough thing for us to do. And there've been many times when Alina Chan and I have said, can we trust this document? Do we think it's real? What can we do to find out whether it is real? And, you know, right at the end of finishing our book, we had this problem with this so-called defuse proposal, which was the one in which the proposal to put the fear and cleavage site into cells like coronavirus was proposed. And we did everything we could to independently verify this.  And effectively it has been confirmed by EcoHealth Alliance and well, you know, we managed to get sources within the Pentagon actually to verify it. So sometimes things like that have helped us. But it's also been very helpful, Alina speaks and reads Chinese. So we're not relying on translations of documents. That's quite important. And, you know, in the case of the theses dug up by the Seeker, you know, you can go and look at these databases where he found them. And for a while, they were still there. Of course, within a few days they'd gone.  And this was still speculative. And then the Wuhenen Institute of Virology published an addendum to their paper, which effectively confirmed a bunch of stuff. You know, they gave a number for how many viruses they had collected in one particular location. It was 1,322. Francisco had by then worked out several months before that they had 1,320 viruses from that location. So he wasn't far out. And he's not a biologist, he is, but the Seeker's not. No, the Seeker's not, Francisco's not. Rossano Segreto is, she's a genomic scientist. She's, you know, a professional scientist. Some of these guys are Yuri Degin, who's an incredibly important figure in this as a Russian biotech entrepreneur. Francisco is basically a technology consultant. Gilles Demineur, for another guy who's been very important, New Zealand-based guy, is basically a data scientist. So they're good at digging stuff into the dark corners of the web and finding... Yeah, well, what did he do? Well, the Seeker said to us was, I just know how to make search engines work for me. I wish I had that skill. Exactly, you do. So I want to talk a little bit about gain of research, gain of function research. If you could tell us what that is and then give us the best positive argument for why we should do it, right? And then we can talk about what the risks are related to it. Yeah. Well, there was a big debate in 2014, 2015 over something called gain of function research. And it blew up for two reasons. One, because of a couple of experiments done on influenza, done very responsibly and very careful conditions in a very safe way. But the purpose of which was to see how easy it was to turn a bird influenza virus into a mammal influenza virus that could be spread through the air. And the answer was it was quite easy, genetically and evolutionarily. So that's useful information that came out of such an experiment. But it's also a dangerous experiment because if one of the ferrets that got infected in one of these experiments, you know wasn't properly disposed of and somebody breathed in while they were handling its body, then suddenly you've got a pandemic on your hands that's more dangerous than it would have been at the beginning of the experiment. So that was what the debate was all about. And around the same time, there was a series of high profile incidents in US laboratories, including the discovery of smallpox including the transmission through the smallpox samples that should have been destroyed previously including a dangerous type of flu that was sent through the post which it shouldn't have been, you know, et cetera which reminded everybody that for all your protocols things can go wrong in labs. So a bunch of scientists called themselves the Cambridge Working Group campaigned very hard to say, we are going too far. We're doing stuff that is well motivated but it's probably not worth the risk and we ought to pause it and stop it. In 2014, the Obama administration did begin to did pause funding for that research federal funding for that research. That pause was lifted in 2017. In any case, the pause had lots of exemptions in it. If you're working on animal viruses and you weren't testing them in human beings then maybe it was okay. It was very easy to continue some kind of this research. A lot of people felt that the pause was was honored in the breach rather than in the way it should have been. So this event has clearly revived that. Whether this pandemic began this way or not I personally as a huge fan of biotechnology as somebody who's always supported it is the best possible way to improve the planet for human beings and for the environment am shocked by how far virologists have been going in terms of taking risks with experiments. The rewards of which are not noticeably huge. Yes, it's helped to know how easy a virus could turn into a pandemic. But is it worth risking starting a pandemic while doing that? I don't think it is. So if this debate continues even after the discovery that this pandemic actually had nothing to do with such research which is possible I will be among those calling for greater precautions around this research. Is there anything to be said that this could advance discovering cures, vaccines, ways in which to handle pandemics much better in the future? Is there an argument like that to be made? Yeah and you know related specifically to this work on SARS like viruses there was a debate between two groups of virologists just a couple of years ago in which one group said look I think there are better ways of preparing for a pandemic than this. We're not convinced that that is actually the best way of preparing for a pandemic. How about we do more testing in human beings? We do you know we work on making vaccines easier to develop etc. But the other group said well actually no because one of the things we're doing is that we think we can come up with a pan-coronavirus pandemic sorry a pan-coronavirus vaccine that will enable us to vaccinate everybody before against any kind of coronavirus pandemic and that would be a wonderful thing and we deserve the Nobel Prize for getting that sort of thing and actually you know it's not a bad ambition to have but you know I say again they didn't achieve that. I mean some of the ideas they came up with were also a little bit wacky. I mean they were talking about spraying a mist into caves of a vaccine which they hadn't yet invented that would immunize the bats against these viruses. They were talking about developing an app that soldiers could have on their phones alerting them to the proximity of disease carrying bats. Well I can't believe that's really a priority for the Pentagon. I always worry about these things anytime we put limits on scientists and I know you do too because I mean the whole point about ideas having sex well they have to meet and they have to generate more ideas but it does seem like this is one of those cases where the downsides are so significant as in the upside at least seemingly are limited. Well you know one of the things that worries me is the degree to which this will reinforce the concerns of an anti-science move. So that was my next question Max. People who are anti-GMOs you know quite a lot of these freedom of information requests are being driven by what for me are uncomfortable bedfellows people who are campaigning against GMOs and things like that. So yeah that was going to be my next question is what do you think I mean not just not just the origins but just the whole COVID phenomena the way we responded the way different governments responded the way this has become tribal and political. Do you worry about people's attitudes towards science towards progress towards innovation as we move here into the future? I do I mean you know let's not forget that the development of vaccines was a triumph for science a triumph for technology a triumph for knowledge you know the work on messenger RNA technology that led to these rapid vaccine developments has been going on for 20-30 years it was a fairly neglected field but it's now shown what we can do and I think the result is that from now on we will be able to turn on a new vaccine for a new threat much quicker than we'd been able to do before. That's a thrilling prospect and if you look at vaccine development before the pandemic it was a terribly slow business still if anything it was taking longer than it used to and I dug out complaints from people in this field from 2019 saying before the pandemic began saying I'm sorry but you know the we really got to get better at producing vaccines and an organization called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation backed by people like the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust was starting work from 2017 saying we've got to get quicker at making vaccines because otherwise we're going to be taken by surprise by a pandemic it didn't get going soon enough but I do think that out of this pandemic such stuff will come but also out of this pandemic will come a lot of people who have lost respect for scientists either because they're anti-vax and you know I'm pro-vax myself but I do worry that making vaccines compulsory tends to cause you know tends to backfire and also the model you know the scientific modelers who told us with absolute certainty that there was going to be a spike next month or there was you know we needed to lock down now when we and you know the UK we were told if we if we ended all restrictions in July there would be a catastrophic number of deaths by September, October we've had nothing like that so I do think modeling scientific modeling which is a branch of science I've had it in for a number of years deserves a good critical look after this pandemic but I worry that if I say things like that other people will say yo see we can ignore all science you know and I you know I worry about bad scientific practice dragging down the reputation of all science and and what's happened in the US but I think this happened in the UK as well is the scientists got involved in the politics and and you couldn't separate them you know Fauci is now a political figure he's not a scientist anymore and and no matter what you think about Fauci much of the debate is is couched in in politics and I think the same thing happened in the UK where all these scientists from Oxford and elsewhere which does bring us to I know people are curious what's your opinion of Fauci but in particular with respect to you know this this gain of function research and the lab leak I know he's had some exchange with Senator Rand Paul over this do you have any opinion about what he knows what he's hiding or what he or is it is or is he really is it really clueless as he claims to be well I try and stay out of that particular one for two reasons one because it's as you say a US political row I'm not US based I don't I'm not close enough to to decide who's right and who's wrong and the other reason is because there is there's clearly a you know a sort of gray area of interpretation here and and for me the the big deal is what happened in China and I don't think you know if we spend too much time focusing on whether or not someone is misleading someone else within the United States we to some extent let off the hook what was happening in China yes there was gain of function research funded in the US probably just within the spirit the letter of the rules if not the spirit of them yes some of that money found its way to China to support work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology but no it wasn't their main source of income most of these experiments were being funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences not the Eco Health Alliance behind that the the US government so so I on the whole I think the Rand Paul Anthony Fauci disagreement is a sideshow and I kind of want to keep it that way but I recognize that it's not an unimportant sideshow so somebody's asking about the one of the other hypotheses that were presented by the Chinese which was which which they really promoted which was the frozen food scenario which you cover in the book so it is is that is that even a possibility and then if not what is the most plausible case for an you know a direct animal to human transmission what would the Chinese argue is the most likely scenario right well just think through you know let's remember that in February we were confronted with a press conference jointly from the World Health Organization and the Chinese scientists saying we've looked into this and our conclusion which we've all signed up to is that a frozen food import origin for this virus is quite likely and a laboratory accident origin is very unlikely so they were deliberately saying one is much more likely than the other just think that through for a moment first of all there's no evidence at all there's no individual piece of frozen food that had the virus on it secondly are you saying that somewhere in southern China there's a hog badger farm where he farms hog badgers which happens and he drops them up and put freezes them and ships them off to markets all over China most of them go to Guangdong province but a few go north to Wuhan and it so happens that one of these samples one of these shipments has a dangerous virus on it the virus somehow survives the freezing and the shipping even though that generally isn't great for viruses but it never infects the farmer it never infects the people in the food handling factory it never infects the people in the freezing plant it never infects anybody along the way it never affects anybody in Guangdong province or any other province that receives these shipments it only infects people at one market in one city which doesn't have a great deal of this stuff being sold in it in the city of Wuhan and then it disappears you know we get one shipment that does this but we test the samples in early January 2020 they did that no they couldn't find this virus they found it on surfaces in the in the market where people infected people had touched things but they could not find it on any stuff that was for sale in the market so I'm sorry but that really does stretch credibility to the limit when Peter Dazak was asked about that he said but we found that they were selling hog badgers and ferret badgers and bamboo rats in this market and later evidence came to light which they didn't know at the time that some of these animals were live when sold so that he said is dynamite that is direct evidence no it's not what you've got to find is that one of these is infected and do you think they're suppressing any of the animal results well that there is an interesting possibility which is that the Chinese authorities are just as reluctant to come up with a live animal trade explanation of this pandemic as they are of a laboratory one why because traditional Chinese medicine has been encouraged by Xi Jinping's particularly in the last few years he persuaded the World Health Organization to recognize it as a form of medicine for the first time in 2019 and it's based on selling wildlife products behind that there has been official encouragement of wildlife farming of civet cats and hog badgers and so on being reared on farms not just sheep and cows and pigs but these other wildlife animals being reared on farms so there's been specific encouragement of this it's a big trade and it's been growing so I think there's people in the Chinese authorities saying we don't want to blame that because that would cause all sorts of problems and we don't want to blame the lab so let's blame frozen food from I don't know Vietnam or Australia or somewhere maybe they come up with a theory that it's from North Carolina right well they yes in a one point at one point and a Chinese spokesman said have you noticed there have been incidents at Ralph Barrick's coronavirus laboratory in Chapel Hill North Carolina why aren't we investigating them that's much more likely because they've had these incidents well a the disease didn't start in North Carolina it started in Wuhan and b incidentally there are no horseshoe bats in North America and these viruses come from horseshoe bats so when Ralph Barrick was working on these kinds of viruses he had to get sequences from Wuhan and then use those sequences to create viruses in in the in the laboratory so yes it's completely possible that someone might get infected with a similar virus in Chapel Hill but why that should lead to an outbreak in Wuhan not very likely so do you think the Chinese as the optimal outcome is that everybody just forgets about this that they never we never find out definitively where it comes from and they'll just delay and postpone and send up you know send us in all kinds of directions to avoid finding the source is that what's motivating them at this point yes I think roughly that is and if you think about what happened in the early months of this pandemic when the Chinese authorities did some very odd things they persecuted and punished anybody who talked about this they denied human to human transmission for far longer than was wise thus allowing to escape they published the genome of the virus and compared it with a genome that they knew about but changed the name of that other genome to obscure its origins and didn't link to the fact that it was involved in an outbreak where people had died you know there was a bunch of stuff that was you know keystone cops like in its clumsy attempt to deflect attention and blame and so on and I think it's important to remember that at that time they didn't expect this to turn into a global pandemic with the kind of attention that it's had at the time we were thinking this would be a little local outbreak in Wuhan I mean I certainly went on thinking well into February that this was like SARS it would blow over in a month or two and you know it the fact that it then turned into a global pandemic meant there was far more attention on these decisions they'd taken in the first month than they would have expected but in terms of what they hope will happen now there's an interesting parallel Svedlovsk 1939 Soviet Union 80 people die of anthrax there's a plant in in Svedlovsk that is thought to be a bio warfare plant working on anthrax is there a connection the Soviet authorities say no international scientists demand a right to inspect they get it they brought in they look around they say well actually you know we think the Soviets are right about this it it wasn't and everyone said and everyone says fine and it goes away five or six years later the Soviet Union collapses and scientists then from that plant then come forward and say actually you know what we were lying we did leave the filter of an exhaust pipe on a particular day by mistake and it led to anthrax being sprayed downtown from our lab and that's why 80 people died now if the Soviet Union hadn't collapsed we'd never have known that yeah and indeed we'd have thought that the whole story was exonerated because international scientists have been involved in looking into it I mean one of the things that scares me about you know what we expect is behavior from China we'd expect it from the Soviet Union those political systems are built to hide and and to prevent information from getting out one would have hoped that China was changing but I think the last few years have shown us that they haven't what scares me is the is the is the is the lack of transparency in the US from from agencies like the equal health alliance who must know more than what they're telling the world and telling scientists and so yes the blame needs to be placed on China I agree with you but it's it's a little spooky when our own governments are playing the same game that the authoritarians are I agree with that and it it's it's shaken my faith in western countries but at the same time I still don't I don't I mean some senior scientists have said to me look Matt of course they were secretive that's what communist regimes do and I've said to them I'm sorry how is that supposed to reassure me why should I let them off the hook just because they're communists and if that's the case we shouldn't be funding research in these countries we should be very careful and how we cooperate with them and how we engage with them it seems to me if they're going to hide stuff then it's not my tax money they should be going to to be funding these things well I I do think that I mean you know we've we've been keenly cooperating on scientific issues with China for two or three decades now and it's brought enormous benefits in both directions but they've been increasing worries about the degree to which either corporate or government espionage is involved in some of these collaborations and I think under Hu Jintao and a sort of relatively liberal leader it was going along fine under the much more authoritarian regime that Xi Jinping is increasingly asserting I think we need to think very hard about some of these collaborations I agree and this this should be a this should be an important piece of evidence or something to think about so somebody has a question that is more broadly about COVID so do you think do you think we should now consider COVID as a seasonal flu like where we take a you know like a seasonal flu shot once a year is that what's going to happen is it endemic indeed to to human populations now? Roughly speaking yes the case fatality rate is now down to somewhere around 0.1% in most people particularly in younger people that's pretty similar to flu we don't try and shut down society because of flu and so I think that's I think you know it's probably evolving to be milder too I think there's some evidence that the Delta variant is much more infectious but not more virulent slightly less virulent and I think that generally tends to happen you know don't forget there are 200 different kinds of virus that cause the common cold none of them kill us or at least hardly ever kill us and four of those are coronaviruses which probably began with nasty pandemics that then settle down to being much milder viruses so I think that that is the way we're going to go I don't think we can eradicate it because it's in our animals too I mean I was talking to a neighbour of mine who has had COVID in the last couple of weeks and her cat has now got it and I read somewhere that the deer in Michigan you know a significant percentage of the deer in Michigan have it which is that's a scary thought isn't it so yeah so do you think this is are we going to see an increase in research on viruses is this is this kind of the wake up call that people needed COVID for more innovation more science more investment in protecting us from the next pandemic certainly the you know the mRNA is very promising not only for this but also for malaria and other things but is there going to be a positive outcome from this not that anything would justify what we've been through? Yes I think I do think that I think vaccines in particular will get a huge boost if that's not a pun and the the the the the biotech century is going to get a kickstart out of this I've believed for some time although not with enormous confidence that whereas the last 50 years were dominated by computers and communication innovation and the previous 50 years were dominated by transport innovations the the next 50 years are going to be dominated by innovations in biotechnology and I suspect that that'll be one of the consequences of the pandemic that we'll see much more of that. So in the end are you still a still a rational optimist? Yes I am you can sense a tiny hesitation in my voice there I'm very aware of the fact ever since I wrote the rational optimist in 2010 in every year people have always said to me are you still a rational optimist I mean have you seen what's happening in Syria have you seen what's happening in Ebola have you seen what's happening in Ukraine have you seen what's happening with the the euro crisis you know there's always been a reason every year to dent my rational optimism and I've always said well yeah but in the big picture on the whole things are getting better look what's happening in Africa you know incredible declines in malaria mortality and child mortality generally in living improvements in living standards lifespan etc etc much greater you know it's been a great decade for Africa compared with previous ones and it's the poorest continent so I retain that general rational optimism but the pandemic has reminded us that the black swans can knock us off of course it might be an asteroid next but you know we shouldn't forget that more more disturbingly there's an internal phenomenon in human society happening that bothers me and that at three in the morning turns me into an irrational pessimist and that is the turning of our back on the Enlightenment the increasing cultural revolution that says we don't believe in evidence we don't believe in reason we basically think that those are old white male values or something like that I don't know how far that could go you know look at what happened in Cambodia or or in China in the cultural revolution that was under an authoritarian regime I'd like to think that in a free society will always be able to rebel against too much cultural despotism if I could put it that way but I have my moments of doubt these days I think we all do yes and part of the turn against the Enlightenment is the turn towards more authoritarianism goes hand in hand the Enlightenment was the error that led us towards political freedom and if we lose we lose reason we lose I think at all we we it's quite a fragile flower yeah it's rare in human history so um what's next I know it's a weird time to ask you about this but is there another project is there something you're writing about? I've just written two books in two years I mean you have to defend the Enlightenment here man I completely understand I completely understand I'm just eager for the next one thank you so much yeah well absolutely I you know I did want to ask you this and I don't know if you have a minute just to say something about this there was a touching piece in the in the book about the kind of the heroes in China who and this is kind of to counter the authoritarian nature of the regime which we know is very evil and a lot a lot of bad things but there were some people Chinese citizens who risked their lives and and risked their freedom early on in the pandemic to to warn us and and I wonder if you could just say a few things about that and then and then I'll let you go completely yeah thank you for that opportunity because you know we're not picking a fight with the Chinese people here quite the reverse you know they've suffered terribly in this and most Chinese people are simply wonderful people and early in the pandemic in particular there were a bunch of people who tried to get information out to the outside world about what was happening spoke very openly and at huge risk to themselves and then were either disappeared or reprimanded or fired or so-called rectified in really unpleasant ways and this is a huge reminder of the fact that you know just as the Soviet Union collapsed and we discovered that actually it's people did want to be free after all despite what we've been told the same is true of China that there are there are good people doing good work trying to help and freely communicate with the rest of the world and they are they are the really unsung heroes here um and I hope by the way that among them are people who are thinking of ways of blowing the whistle and coming out to the west and telling us a lot of what happened with one or two people have already done that but not from right in the heart of this story and uh we've Alina makes this point very well again and again we've got to look after such people if they do come out you know at the moment there's not a lot of incentive you know you you get a couple of interviews on Fox news and then you're kind of tossed aside um I think we've got to make it clear that such people are welcome in the west and we would like to hear from them yeah it sounds like that is maybe the only way we'll find out what actually happened somebody knows yep thank you Matt I really appreciate this this was this was a lot of fun I've enjoyed the conversation thank you good good hopefully next time it'll be on something more more positive and invigorating but uh but we need to cover these stories we need to cover all these stories as well I thank you all for for listening today really appreciate your support don't forget uh in genuism.com you can subscribe to the sub stack don't forget to share the video to like the video to do all the things you know how to do on social media let's get let's get word about uh match new book viral the search for the origins of whoops there we go of COVID-19 let's get it out there and get it sold thanks Matt I hope to catch up with you in London one of these days please look me up when you get the chance good bye


This is SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's exclusive coverage at HP Discover live in Barcelona, Spain. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm John McCose, Dave Vellante. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. This is our end of day wrap up. Our final report, we're going to actually put together our editorial independent coverage analysis and commentary around HP Discover. Three days of amazing interviews. We went wall to wall day one. We interviewed all the top executives. We interviewed all the thought leaders in HP, except for Meg Whitman, Bill Vecti, and George Kedifa, the EVPs. We're all tied up. Did not make it on theCUBE. Want to make note of that, that we did not have a chance to talk to those folks. So our comments and editorial here will be a reflection of the fact that we didn't get a chance to ask them any direct questions. But what we're going to report is a synthesis of the compilation of all the interviews we've done here at HP Discover. Dave, another great HP Discover, our fourth event. We're going back to 2010, where actually in Barcelona we brought theCUBE to a small event and a lot's changed here. So let's start, Dave, a little analysis of this report. We're going to file here via the CUBE interview around HP Discover 2013 in Europe. Let's talk about first the show and then the marketplace. So what's your take on the show so far in terms of the size, the people, your vibe, and just your observations? Well, John, anytime you're analyzing HP as a whole, it's like talking about the government. I mean, the government is not one government, right?  Now, Meg Whitman's challenge is of course to stitch all those together and create a vision and her vision is that new style of IT. But nonetheless, you've still got a lot of divisions that are driving revenue, driving cash flow, ideally driving profitability that largely have distinct strategies. And where there are synergies, you could see HP stitching those together, and that's what I think HP Discover is all about. It's a big show. Take IBM for instance. IBM doesn't have a single big giant IBM show like this. They've got a zillion little IBM shows. HP's the exact opposite. They don't have many smaller shows. I mean, the Vertica show for example, the Vertica user conference, but generally speaking, this is the big customer event for HP. And as they say, it's very fragmented. Meg, I think put forth a good message, but I think just the show itself underscores how many different parts of HP there are, how big this organization is, and how complicated it is. Yeah, I think Dave, one of the things that's clear on the show here is that it's got a good vibe. I will have to say for my three days here on the crown, and talking to the customers and the HP folks, is you can see the entire layout of HP. If you want a holistic picture of what the organization's about and try to want to understand how confusing it is. It's a monster. It's a huge company, I mean monster in kind of a big way. There's a lot of different areas of expertise, but they lay it all out here, and it's a chance for customers to come in and weave around. I got to say, I do agree with Bill Vecti's interview on Bloomberg that to be here, you got to feel it. And it does feel different. It feels different than Frankfurt. You can almost feel the upgrade in energy, the upgrade in optimism, a spring in the step from the key executives, the business unit leaders that we've talked to, the senior vice presidents of HP. So clearly, there's no cloud around HP. I have to report that there is really no cloud. Now there are some things we will get into. I do have some commentary on some of the management and some of the approaches I think, maybe a little bit orthogonal to what I think they should be doing, but overall, a lot of things are snapping in the right direction. They are vectoring the right course. We'll get into that quickly. So first update, let's just discuss the marketplace. So competitively, the marketplace is pretty dynamic. You got cloud, mobile and social, big data, security, themes we've been covering since 2009, and obviously converging infrastructure and storage. You've been covering for a very long time. Big data taking center stage. When you walk in, it's about big data and cloud. Two of the main anchor concepts here is cloud and hybrid cloud and big data with vertical and autonomy. What's your take? What is your view? Let's see, hyperscale, obviously, on the good bridge of our side and a bunch of other stuff around data center, obviously storage. What's your take around the market? So, let's talk about the market. So the market's huge, right? It's trillions of dollars in revenue every year. Now, when HP made the decision to go out and acquire Compaq and acquire EDS, I mean, essentially said, okay, we're going to play in all markets, hardware, software and services. HP's deeply embedded in every market segment. So I've said a number of times over the past several years, HP has to shrink to grow and that's exactly what's happening. I don't know if you picked up on it, but when Antonio Neary was on, he mentioned HP is a $125 billion company. Well, it just ended its quarter and it's actually a $112 billion company. So it's shrinking before it can grow and I think it's got some ways to go here. And that is, you said there's no cloud around HP. There is a cloud in terms of growth. Companies like IBM and HP, the cloud around them is they're not growing. And if they're not growing, their stocks don't do what their shareholders want it to do. But there are some mega trends out there today that we have to highlight and was brought up in multiple occasions. That is mobility and security. Right, so let's highlight though.  Cloud. You got cloud, right? You got social. So let's break those down. We also heard of developer focuses. For the first time I've heard HP talk about developers with big data. And we're going to talk about that when we talk about HP software business in a little bit more detail. But let's start at the high level. So let's talk about cloud. For years HP talked about cloud. You know, it was private cloud. We go back to 2010, we were at VMworld. You know, HP had a good story around private cloud. Back at that point, John, you remember, one of our talk tracks was the gap between cloud service providers and infrastructures of service providers like Amazon and what's happening within IT. And to close that gap was going to be a lot of work. And that gap has closed somewhat. But you see companies like Amazon, driving revenue, driving growth. Yes, granted from a much, much smaller base. But we're talking about a significant, meaningful three and a half to $4 billion IT company that's growing at 50, 60% a year. So that is a big challenge. So they don't have to make a profit. You've made this point before that they have a profitless business model. They don't have to make a profit. They can keep growing and their stock price keeps going up. Companies like IBM and HP, they throw off tons of cash.  So that's, they're hampered by that. So thinking about cloud, that's a growth opportunity for HP. For years they talked about it. They bring on a guy like Sargillai and they start really shoring up their cloud. So I would, I have to say, I'm now convinced that HP really has a cloud offering. I wasn't certain until really mid this year that they had a cloud offer. So Meg Whitman said, we want to focus on the business that we need to be in. That's a main emphasis or maybe she didn't say, I mean we heard her someone say that she said that. I can't remember specifically where that quote came from. But that's essentially focus, the focus issue. So of the, of the mega trends in the marketplace, Dave, which ones are they betting on? Which ones are they kind of like just playing with from a high standpoint? That's a great question. So you agree they're betting on cloud? Yeah. No doubt. So IBM talks about cloud two. They had to go out and buy soft layer. In your view, John, does HP have to make an acquisition like that to get into the game? Or are they in the game? On the cloud side, I think they're in the game. I would agree. I think after, when I was talking to Biri Singh, who's no longer with the company, he was doing God's work for HP.  And there was a kind of a crew of people working on that cloud model. Amazon was already making strides. And then when Sargillie took it over, they really had a fragmented offer. We even asked Dave Donatelli, which we'll talk about in a minute, his no longer his role in the company. But when Donatelli came in, we asked him, he's like, I'm not in the big data. That's a different division. So you had silos of big data. And Sar emphasized that yesterday and cleared up that positioning. But it was so confusing. You had no idea who ran cloud. You had silos competing sales. It was a disaster. I felt it was confusing and hard to understand and articulate. Because in the enterprise, the cloud market is different per customer. It's not as easy as saying, here's a public cloud. So since Sargillie took it over, we've seen the vector change. They are absolutely in the right direction. This build and operate and consume segmentation is really the right approach. Cause you have decoupled functions, highly cohesive elements around it. Clearly they have a cloud. Now, can they do acquisitions? Yeah, I think they should do some tuck-unders to get some acquisition help from talent. But more importantly, I think OpenStack is a big opportunity. I think HP could be the modern leader in moving the ball down the field with cloud. Right now, I just don't feel that HP has the leadership on the cloud. Mainly because Dave, they were been weak on execution and traditionally in the past, Sargillie brought an execution focus and the Martin Fink appointment is interesting cause he's going to nail the open source. That's great for the OpenStack positioning, but I don't think he's had an operating role. So the risk for HP right now in the cloud is they have to continue to execute. The execution focus for the cloud is paramount because you got DevOps, you have a rabid growing enterprise market that wants building block, cloud and OpenStack-like functionality. HP has the tool chest across the company to augment the cloud offering. So yes, they do, they have cloud, it's real. They can augment it with a lot of things internally and externally. So yes, on the acquisition, no major acquisitions, but I definitely would not buy- It's not a do-over. I would definitely not buy a soft layer. But it's not a do-over. No, it's not. Okay, I've been buying soft layer, but I was not high on that. I don't think that was an answer. I think that's going to be more like Rackspace, and I think Rackspace has not succeeded in the OpenStack foundation because they're not a software company. So a hoster turning into cloud is okay, but I just don't think they can go the distance with the muscle when you're talking about software to find data center. And I think the strategy is good. I mean, Margaret Dawson articulated that strategy as essentially the bumper sticker on it is hybrid, hybrid cloud with customer choice. And I think that's a good strategy. Now, it's like Jerry said on the Cube at AWS re-invent when he came back from Hong Kong. Jerry Chen, he said, OpenStack's trying to be all things to all people. Amazon's trying to be one thing to all people. So HP essentially is trying to be all things to all people. That's harder, it takes longer, but it gives you a bigger market opportunity. Let's talk about the business now. Business, the model of HP. Obviously the staying in the printer business and the PC business is great. The enterprise business is enterprise group now run by Bill Vecte. It's looking good. We're looking that over from Dave Donatelli who's no longer leading up that effort. We'll talk about that in a second. And then you have a lot of variety of excellent innovation around moonshot and technology to convert systems by Tom Joyce. We heard from that really good. That should start competing with VCE and Oracle.  And you got Antonio Neary heading up servers.  So let's start with Meg Whitman, let's start at the top. Meg Whitman's keynote was very clear, Dave. It was essentially a recycled speech from her previous keynote. You know, the captain on the bridge, be on the captain, see the bridge, love that message. She had a picture of Bill and Dave which I liked. But she added in some new things in here that I wanted to highlight. I thought it was very interesting. HP makes it, we back it and we service it. That's a message that she had. The foundation is being poured for a new style of IT right now and they want to be in that. And she highlighted storage obviously and moonshot as a futuristic, kind of a window dressing but real trend for HP. So I think Meg is doing a good job of consolidating and mobilizing the existing team. I think one of the things that we've pointed out in the past as the opportunity for HP, Dave, is the management team. You know, with the late Leo Gaum when Meg came in, she had to do two things. One, show up the financial structure of the company, get the finances in order and appease Wall Street and target a Wall Street target audience as well as fix the products and get the management team pulling in the right direction. It's clear that's happening. So I think she's doing a good job on that. Well, I'll just add to that, John. Personally, I think HP's got upside. I mean, look at the stock price that's been hammered. It's a $112 billion company trading it, valuation of just over $50 billion. So it's got a long way to go. To me, HP should at least be trading at one X revenue. At least, so I think there's a lot of upside there. I think HP, I would be a buyer here. I would be looking for opportunities to buy HP because I think that the cash flow, their ability to pay down debt is very good and their customers love them. Now, I'm not buying them for growth.  Okay, so, but I think there's upside there. Let me ask you a question. What do you think about the management team? Meg's management team, again, just to reiterate, they were not here on theCUBE. We did not have a chance to talk to Bill Vecti or Meg Whitman in person or George Kadifa, but George has been on theCUBE before. So we have a good feeling of what we understand, what he's working on, what's your take. And then we've also talked to all the SVPs here on theCUBE, Dave, but what's your take? Does Meg have the team to pull it off? Where are the strengths and where are the weaknesses and what's the opportunity? Well, I think we're seeing that team is in transition. I mean, we know Dave Donatelli's on theCUBE a number of times. We know what he is and we know what he isn't. Dave Donatelli's not a big slick marketing guy who's going to get up and give this great presentation, but he is going to make sure that guys get done.  So I don't know in the enterprise group what that transition's going to look like. I don't know Bill Vecti, I've only met him once. He, as you say, he has not come on theCUBE. I thought he gave a great keynote. I thought he was very smooth. And frankly, I think he gave a better keynote than what I've seen Donatelli give in the past, but keynotes were not Dave Donatelli's strength. Execution was Dave Donatelli's strength.  I just don't know the answer to that in the enterprise group. George Kadifa, I've always been very impressed with George Kadifa. I like the fact that he understands the software business. He's got software chops. He came from Oracle, but I still do not like what HP's doing in the software. We want to talk about that. Let's talk about Dave Donatelli. Okay, so he's been on theCUBE multiple times. He's no longer running the enterprise group. He's in some strategic projects, which means looking at some new ventures. Yeah, that's what it means. He's not here. So Dave Donatelli is in here. He's doing start-ups, right, or acquisitions. And he's not doing acquisitions. There's no official word that he's out yet, but you know, everyone's speculating. No, I'm just saying, they just put him in a box, right? And said, okay, done. I mean, let's be honest here. We're independent media. I mean, we can say that, right? Even though we're on the home court. Let's stick with the facts, right? The facts is he has not left the company. But he has created a really awesome group of people. And one of the things I want to ask you is, do you think there'll be any fallout from the Dave Donatelli being removed as the head of the enterprise group and Bill Vecte taking over? Do you think it'll be a Vecte bringing in his own crew?  What's the feeling? I think it'll be a mix. I mean, I think you got to give Donatelli credit for the focus on converged infrastructure. When he came over from EMC, he was focused like a laser on that whole converged infrastructure piece. Now, of course, he had his hands tied for a while because EMC's law department's like a P&L. They kept him from working in storage for a while, but you knew he was going to bring that whole converged infrastructure vision to HP. He did, they're executing on that. You're seeing that now run by Tom Joyce. You're seeing it growing at roughly 50% per year. That's working. So if I were Mag or I were Vecte, I wouldn't mess with that. Now, there's other pieces that you're seeing. You've seen some changes in ISS. We saw Antonio Neary here taking over from Mark Potter. You're seeing some adjustments there. Mark Potter, they'll move the CTO, which is a great role for him because he's technical. Yeah, he is technical. So they're turning some dials. They're not throwing away the baby with the bathwater. They're saying, okay, we need to optimize that piece of it. HP is a fault-tolerant organization. You unplug one person, it's not going to crash and burn, but if you start removing a few other pieces, then you're going to have some slowness. So I think Tweaks are, I fully expect that Vecte's going to make some Tweaks, going to bring in some of his own people, but not going to do a rip and replace, because again, when Donatelli came in, I would say them in the Enterprise Group, they didn't have a really a storage strategy at all. They didn't have a converged infrastructure strategy at all, and they had a big server business. So the server business is still big and still market leading, as we heard from Jim Gontier. The storage business, the three power acquisition, that was under Donatelli, and that is, as I call it, the gift that keeps on giving and networking, even though, of course, Donatelli didn't buy the networking group, put Bethany Mayer in charge, and that seems to be having a market impact. So that's my take, John. What do you think is going to happen in that group? Well, Dave, I mean, I try to read, you know me, I like to try to read the tea leaves, right? So like, oh, they're closing the hall down, we're wrapping up here at the show. So here's my take on HP. If I put myself in Meg Whitman's shoes, okay, I'm looking at, I took over an HP that was battered, reputation-wise, okay, off the turn at the top, solid company, we've always said HP has a zillion assets, R&D was cut by Mark Herd, and then there's also some weird maneuvering when Leo came in, okay, clean all that up, that's done. When you come in, you have to move the battleship. As I said in my blog post, Meg Whitman is the captain on the bridge of their own ship with the team, and you got to get the battleship moving in the right direction, job one. So you have to assess the team around her. But like I said in my analogy, when we opened up the segment is, I use a downhill extreme skiing example.  So I think Meg Whitman, if I'm in her shoes using my skiing analogy, I'm saying to myself, okay, I'm going to pick my spots. I got to make four turns over five years, four major moves. Hit that spot, pivot to the next turn, move down that black diamond slope because she has no room for mistake because it was already fragile to begin with. So walking in her shoes, Dave, I think that's the issue. So, and she's doing that. You can really see in her maneuvering that the feedback is from the people. She's an enabler. She's not batting people over the head. She's not driving instilling fear in them. Very collaborative. You got Antonio Neary, great guy. That's the new culture you're seeing in HP that she's in fostering, teamwork, cohesiveness. At the same time, performance. And we'll talk about their performance. So the thing that she needs to focus on, in my opinion, is not risking the turns, not slowing down. For instance, you got cloud, you got software defined networking, you got three par. These are areas, for instance, I think are killing it. You got Vertica that's doing great and autonomy is going to be infiltrated throughout the organization. These are major assets. If you slow down that integration by making too many personnel changes, then that's dangerous. I think that could slow down the recovery. So I'm watching for what happens with the management team. I personally think the management team that she has right now is very solid. I think it's a great group of people. George Kedifa, we've met with and interviewed multiple times, solid guy, understands the marketplace, knows the M&A market, Silver Lake, Oracle, great executive. You got Martin Fink, open source guy, knows technology. I'm not sure he's got a lot of operating experience, but you got Sargillie, right-hand man, who knows cloud and has turned the cloud around and has continued to execute. You got the enterprise group that now Vecti's taking over for showing growth off the hangover from the Donatelli. That group is solid, great business. They have a historical track record, 70 years of market share leadership and servers, great group. When you look at the moonshot, you look at the pod, these are emerging markets. And you get the printing business is printing money, right? Still continues to print money. So I think HP overall solid may cannot wait. So the question is going to be on Bill Vecti, what does he have up his sleeve? This is a new role for him. I think he's kind of cutting his teeth into a big operating role, Dave. So Vecti's got a great team of direct reports. We'll see what his moves are. And again, if the politics don't get too hairy, I think HP is definitely going to clear the runway on this turnaround. I think that is going to be the key thing. Management personnel, how they handle some of these market forces. Right now it looks great on paper. The execution looks good. They just got to keep moving the ball down the field yard at a time and look for the big passing play for a new black swan-like product. Yeah, I mean, I got way in there. So, I mean, as I said, from a financial perspective, I'd be a buyer of HP here. If I were a customer of HP, I'd be very comfortable buying the company's technology. I trust HP. It's notable the customers want HP to win, John. I mean, they were clapping in the audience when Meg said, hey, HP is here to stay. Having said all that, and despite notwithstanding your, I think, very positive outlook, HP's got to do better. They got one business that's growing, the enterprise group, and it really ain't growing that much. It's 1.8%. I'm not happy with the performance of the software business. HP's software business is between $6 and $7 billion. It's like 6% of the company's. It's declined 9% in the last quarter, year on year. And of course, the reason was there was a big deal from GM last year. Take the deal out there, still shrinking 2%. This is a $6 to $7 billion software company. It's got to grow. I mean, even Oracle's growing. It's not growing that much, and Oracle's $37 billion company is growing. So they got to do better. Let me ask you a question. And the challenge is, in my view, they don't have the portfolio. They got Vertica. Love it. Big data piece. But Vertica by itself is not big enough. Exactly. Autonomy, interesting what they're doing with autonomy. We heard Robert Jung say, we really haven't figured out the business model yet. So I'm not happy with their software group. And I've been saying this for a while. They've got to do much better. Is George Kadeep for the person to turn it around? Yes, but he's somewhat handcuffed because as Meg said to me last year, at the analyst meeting, we're not doing any acquisitions until we pay down the debt. So if you're in HP software group, you're somewhat handcuffed. I think they've got to get to the point where they have to start making small acquisitions that are more strategic. Let's come back to that. I want to drill down on the performance of their business. Obviously, the only thing that was up was enterprise group. But again, that was under Bill Vecti. But again, he just took that over from Donatelli. So we're going to give Donatelli the credit for that run, that run of performance. But Vecti's still yet to be proven. Do you think that HP understands the market realities?  I do. I think HP is very much in touch with the market realities. I don't think at all HP has its head in its sand.  Those customers give them great feedback. So I think they know what's happening. So check the box on the market. They get the market. They get no question about it. The conundrum is. Products. And they're so penetrated into these markets. It's hard to grow. And number one, number two is, under her, they really starved R&D for a long, long time. You can't just fire up that engine again. So that's why I keep talking. That's why I found the think move interesting, right? Martin Fink coming over from labs to cloud. It's a sign of- Explain what you mean by that. Why is that interesting? Well, okay, so he's running HP Labs, which would need his Prith Banerjee left. So he took it over. You got a lot of focus on there. Meg's saying she's doubling down on R&D. Why move a guy who's new in the position with a vacuum on that position? No one's stepped into that role. Why would we move them so fast? Obviously cloud is a strategic and operating objective for them P&L. Why would you move them over there? He's not really have a lot of operating experience. Is that to kind of kind of watch over the store? Is there an actual specific role? Have not heard that yet. I want to dig into that further. And when I talked to Martin- So you know, I got to jump in again. So Meg says that she's doubling down on R&D. R&D declined sequentially. Now, the decline is a percentage of revenue probably stayed roughly the same. I don't see HP doubling down on R&D. I mean, they're spending a few billion dollars a year on R&D. Okay, so they understand the market reality. I think they got to spend more. And the problem is they can't because they got to pay down their debt. They can't pay up here. So that's when you say to the understand the market, yes, but they've got some shackles on them that's just going to take time. That's why Meg says I need five years. She's right. She's smart. I would definitely say this. I would try to do it in three and say five, do it in three, right? Everyone wins. But here's, we'll see if that happens. But, you know, under promise over deliver, she's smart. And then we've got to, we've given her props for that. Okay, so one, they understand the market reality is check. Two, business performance right now needs to increase. So if you take the analogy, Dave, to go back to that point. If it's the battleship that moving very slowly, throwing off a huge wake, nuclear engine underneath. You know, now it's time to crank the engine. Do you think that HP has a straight and narrow right now? Are they on the right vector? Or is the battleship still aligning up? So the question to you is twofold, straight and narrow? Has it moved on the vector? And is it just run and crank the engine? Or they still got some aligning to do? No, the latter. They still got some work to do. I mean, half their business is PCs and printers. 50% of their revenue. Am I happy with their PC business or you? I mean, I know. So you think that right now. Meg's on CNBC saying PCs are not dead. The desktop is not dead. Okay, great. So you're saying that they're not yet in the right businesses? They're in the right businesses, but they don't, they're not, you said, are they ready to just throttle the engine? Yeah, meaning they've picked their markets. Now it's execution time. Yeah, they're still, which markets are they meeting? They're still pairing the dead wood, right? They're still, we're still in storage. We're transitioning from the EVA, moving to the three-par model. In PCs. That's a product discussion. Okay. Are they on the vector markets that they're picking? They're in every market. That is true. I mean, what market are they in? So to me it's a matter of getting the portfolios right and having the right, you know, product suite. So let's talk about the process. What are the successes to you? What's the number one group that you point to is the shiny bevel for HP? And what are the, start stack ranking the groups? Looking at the numbers, looking at the technology portfolio kind of combined. I would say, I would say, because my issue again is growth. How does this company start to grow again? That's what everybody wants to know. So I'm not actually going to, my surprise some people, I'm not going to talk about the hardware infrastructure piece. I think it's big data. I think what they're doing with Vertica, Vertica, you said it the other day, they got Vertica for a song, $340 million, which maybe at the time was, was, you know, everybody thought it might have been a little expensive. That is a crown jewel. With Vertica and Haven and Autonomy, they can actually participate in that big data business. They can compete with the vision that Maritz is putting forth with Pivotal and what Cloudera is talking about and others. I think HP could really demonstrate from some growth there, but as you well know, the key to that is developers, John. And that's where I think you have a lot of expertise and a lot of value add in this discussion. Don't you agree that HP has to appeal to developers in order to tap that opportunity? You know, Dave, I feel strongly that this, the new HP, if they want to be software led in all aspects of their business, because this is the future. They're seeing the commoditization of hardware and with their value, with their supply chain, I mean, their supply chain advantage, HP could be in any market with a device. And that means wearable computers, sensors, every single market. They have a huge competitive advantage on the supply chain. Okay, so right there, they can compete at any given moment in any market. So that being said is key. No problem building a device. Software drives everything. So from whether it's from the dorm room to the board room and everything in between, HP can be successful if they have the right software architecture. So to me, they cannot do that without developers. Amazon and the cloud, the two biggest areas for focus for HP, cloud and big data, are emerging for HP. They're getting organized. Sargalize got the right track with OpenStack. We heard from George Kedifus folks here in autonomy that they're going to, and Robert Young-Johns, they're going to have developer conference. Vertica has a user conference, a quasi developer conference. They need to look at the success of Amazon in the public cloud and how developers look at that as a great resource. Cloud is the new development get data. So with big data, you're seeing guys coming out of college that are programming in Scala, Python, C to Java, across the board. New coding is going down across all platforms. So if they want to be, they want to win from the dorm room to the board room, HP has to win the developer market. Because if you hear about what's going on, whether it's IT service management, software defined data center, big data, it's all about ecosystems. You're seeing the platforms in all sectors of HP. And platforms need developers, and they need ecosystems. In order to compete effectively, you need to have an ecosystem. And that's why I'm watching some of the management actions and the press releases in their conversations because I'm looking to see which managers at HP get the developer ecosystem across the board of the company. And I got to tell you, I would give them a good C minus on this area. And that's a gift in my opinion. I don't think HP does a good job with developers. I don't think they would grade themselves a tire. I mean, this is a new realm for them. We heard from Robert Young-Jong yesterday that they're just starting to think about executing on this strategy. So- They need to be A plus with developers. Because now the enterprise, we asked- Yeah, in order to tap that market that I said was number one, you said what's number one, they've got to be A plus with developers. Here's a kid that I'll share with you. That's one of my happiest moments on theCUBE this week. We interviewed the CIO, the global CIO of HP here on theCUBE. And I asked them one question and I really wanted to know. And he answered it beautifully. And this really to me is a proxy for the marketplace that we're just talking about. The CIO, I asked, hey, you know, you've converged Zillion data centers down to seven or a few data centers and rationalized Zillion applications down to seven. Small numbers. I said, how many developers do you have on staff? He said 3,000. And I- You said, that's an army. That's an army. It was a direct quote. That is the blueprint of success for all enterprises. HP does have a kick-ass IT enterprise system. They've had it for years. Going back to the 90s and the 80s, HP has always had great IT, just like EMC and IBM and others. But HP in particular really has a great internal. Now you go back and ask customers, how many developers do you have? I guarantee you, it's not armies. They're outsourced to the hilt. And so what they're all doing now is they're all building in DevOps and CloudOps and big data. So you're going to see enterprises start to adopt more developer focus internally. And I think that new in migration of developers in the enterprise is a huge opportunity for HP. And that's what, that's to my point about, they have to be in A. And it's okay to start right now. They can still win, because it's not the same game as Amazon. So developers is going to be a strategic weapon. And quite frankly, let's look at the management team. Who knows developers? So you asked me about that. So that's the software. And then obviously the other piece is this whole converged infrastructure. But I see that as evolutionary. I think if they don't do that, they're just going to lose market share. The other thing I want to talk about, you asked them, are they in the right markets? I said they're in all markets. They're actually not mobile, right? And you know more about mobile than I do. But what's your take on HP's mobile strategy? I mean, Meg's talking on CNBC, the desktop is not dead. That's not the message that a company of HP size needs to be sent. That is not the message Meg Whitman should be sending on CNBC. What Meg Whitman should be saying on CNBC is we have an unprecedented advantage with supply chain. We could be in any business we want. Right now we're taking care of our knitting. And that's what we're doing. And you see in the financial performance that she's just out laid out on her earnings, which is great. I mean, you're seeing a stock buyback. You're seeing a dividend. This is a signal to the Wall Street that look, we have a financial future that's not going to go under. And that's a message to customers. So I got to give Meg four stars on that one. That's a really, really good thing. Once you get the financials up, then it's the straight and narrow in the markets that you're competing in. And that's what we were just talking about. I think they do not have it. Mobile is table sticks. I think HP has to absolutely be in mobile with a product because you're going to see, bring BYOD come out and look how fast Samsung Dave got into the market. And I said this with Android, you don't have to be liked as good as the iPhone, just be almost good enough. Be a second player, third player and then shoot for number one. HP has the muscle to build the kind of device to do that in terms of expertise in manufacturing and supply chain. Question is, do they have the management that understand it? And I think that's the issue that we're looking at here. If they can get guys who understand mobile first, they can do a great job and then get mobile out, internet of things, wearable computers, sensors. If they're going to be in the big data business and want to have an end-to-end edge device, they have to be in that business. So to me, it's like, until I see a mobile device, HP's just going to be this enterprise company. And then if I may, back to EG, I mean storage, you got three part of the gift that keeps on giving. Tracking their flash, tracking their all flash array piece. We heard some positive news from customers this week. Let's see that keep going. I like, I was impressed with Bethany. I mean, I think she's doing a good job, Bethany Mayor. What are your thoughts on networking? Again, that's a business you track closer than I do, but... I think Bethany is humble, executive, but she's very talented, right? So what they've done with SDN is they have an unbelievable business. It's a great business. They have three common there. But the software-defined networking, they've had core competency and open flow going back to the first ones to ship the port. She's moved the ball down the field. I think she's in a good position. She's a great executive. She's going to continue to do good. It's not that complicated. Network virtualization, accelerate development, ship product, no-brainer, and make sure all that software and that expertise goes up into a converged system, which is Tom Joyce's organization. Because the real game changing action will be hyperscale. So I think that's a big thing for her. Yeah, okay. And then, you know, the last thing, the last comment I really wanted to make here was, I come back to my R&D thoughts. I mean, HP, industry leader, they can be the muscle for OpenStack. I just want to see, when I hear Meg say, we're doubling down on R&D, I'm not buying it. I mean, IBM's a smaller company and they spend twice as much as HP does on R&D. So I want to see more there. I want to see more coming out of HP Labs. I wish she would dam the torpedoes with Wall Street just a little bit and spend more on R&D and get back to HP's roots, which is in vent. Okay, so I want to ask you one final question and we'll end this segment here.  What did you walk away with? What new information, either validating something that you've been thinking about or other new information for Dave Vellante that you observed or acquired? I would say this. Here's how I would say this. As long as HP has competent management in place, it can't lose, in my opinion, because it's got great products. It's in every single market. It's got the financial muscle and its customers want HP to succeed. That, to me, is critical. You don't always see that. A lot of cases, a lot of times in the IT business, when a company falters financially or otherwise misses a product cycle, the customers walk. HP customers are very, very loyal for good reason. HP puts the customer first. They've always focused on the customer and so that, to me, is confirmation of something that I've always felt very strongly that HP won't lose as long as its management sets the ship in the right direction. Okay, my observation is a couple things on the company side, one, I think that Bill Vecti inherited an amazing enterprise group. I think the enterprise group is really poised as it's kind of coalescing together. I think that group is going to continue to do well. I think as long as they don't screw that up, the performance should be good. So if it starts falling off a cliff, then I'm going to get nervous, but I think the enterprise group is poised for success. Given the focus, given the market, I think they're in a good position. So that's why I ask some of the questions around the server. On the cloud side, I think Sargillai has turned that around. I think that's going in the right track. I think getting into OpenStack in a big way and leading the industry and continuing to add on and be a player in the cloud is great. And then autonomy, I like autonomy is doing, augmenting into Vertica is not the main headline player, but getting their capabilities infiltrated throughout the organization. And Robert Young-John said that they want to just get this out there and get it into all the different product groups. But that being said, Dave, two observations that were validated here for me. One, old is now new again. And what I mean by that is systems programming and the old systems days of computer industry is back. If you look at the architecture of the hybrid cloud and big data, it's basically an operating system. So the stuff that we were learning in the 80s and computer science is now back, but on a completely different distributed scale, you got open source weaved in there. So old is now new. It's seen the same paradigms all retrofitting in notification, network management, all being played out on a whole different paradigm, but same concepts and paradigms. The second thing is on the big data side, everyone talks about business workflow, business process improvement. You see some of that stuff with autonomy. I think people are really missing two aspects of data that I didn't hear much from HP on. I think it's an opportunity. One is machine data and human data. So the three data sources, machine, business and human. Everyone focuses on the business. What validated from here is Robert Young-John's comments that they're focused on both machine, business and human data. And I think the human data is an area that's going to really play into social media, internet of things, new data source. So I think that's going to be a new phenomenon that's going to continue to fuel the unstructured data side of the business. So old is now new, machine and human data will be a big part of the fabric of computing. So to me, I think HP is in all the right markets there. I think they're poised for success. Enterprise is looking good. Cloud is on the right track. If they can nail the OpenStack equation, they should do that well and continue to add developers on that, that's great. That's a big bet and then a good one, right? Okay, that's the final report here of HP Discover. Again, I give this show a very solid, good grade. Give it a good A minus, Dave, because one, I didn't see some of the props I wanted to see. I didn't get a chance to see. Talked to Meg Whitman or Bill Vecti. So that was giving the A minus on that. But overall, great vibe, good energy and great conversations. I think the best Discover we've been to. Yeah, by far the most energy, most relevance. The message in the story was pretty solid. So that's it, that's the live coverage. It's a wrap here inside theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. This is Dave Vellante, my co-partner here, co-host, co-founder of Wikima.org. It's a wrap from Barcelona, Spain. We'll see you in our next CUBE visit.