All right, so let's talk about America because God, I mean, the number of people out there, the number of people out there who claim to be, you know, claim to be pro-America, pro-freedom, the number of people on the right, on what's called the right, whether that is, you know, whether that is the conservative right or whether that is the libertarian right, particularly the paleo-libertarians or the Mises Caucus or however you want to call it.  I don't know. I mean, it's hard to tell exactly what motivates this attitude.  So, you know, 9-11, we start with 9-11, 9-11 happened and the immediate response of the Ron Pauls of the world and many of the libertarian anarchist kind of wing of the libertarian movement was, we asked for it. It was America's fault. We've been intervening in the Middle East forever. We've been interfering in Muslim lives. I mean, these are peaceful people. These are wonderful, friendly people. This is me embellishing a little bit. They just want to live their lives. They have different ideas than us, but who are we to judge other people's ideas? I remember this portion of the libertarian movement is dedicated to moral and epistemological subjectivism.  We keep interfering in their business. We put troops in Saudi Arabia. You know, we just, we just, we go to places where we don't belong and we just upset them. And the same is true. This was after 9-11, but the same is true of any Iranian hostility towards the United States. Any Iranian, I mean, the Scott Horton, I think his name is, who is now their guru when it comes to foreign policy. I mean, he is the God of foreign policy for the libertarians. Oh, no, Iran is a peaceful country. They, you know, they're part of the, part of the Judeo-Christian Islamic tradition. They just want to live their lives and we keep interfering and we keep doing this stuff. We killed, you know, we didn't kill, we helped oppose their prime minister in 1950, something, I forget the exact date. And we helped the Shah of Iran come to power. And the Shah of Iran was this brutal guy. He happened to have been secular, but he was a pretty brutal guy. And, and therefore they, the Iranians hate our guts.  I mean, indeed, Ron Paul recently, I mean, over the last few years has been saying that the reason Venezuela is such a basket case. Look, Chavez wasn't a bad guy. Maduro is not a bad guy. You know, the fact that the socialists, it's okay that the socialists, it's okay to have socialism over there. There's nothing wrong with socialism. People choose socialism. Who are you to tell them socialism is no good? That is so authoritarian.  It's authoritarian for you to say capitalism is better than socialism, freedom, free markets are better than anything else.  Ultimately, it has to do with American sanctions and American interference and American attempts to destabilize the country. I mean, just go and look at Ron Paul's website. And you can find all this. I mean, this is Venezuela. So he defends Venezuela, Scott Horton and the rest of them defend Iran. I mean, it is no accident that you hear almost nothing about the amazing girl led girl as in high school and young women in college. I mean, women who are in the 20s and in their teens are rebelling in Iran right now against the mullah. They're taking off their scouts. They're taking off the hijab that they and they declare they're demanding the demanding the replacement of this regime, the demanding that the mullahs go away. You would think you would think that this would be all over the place among libertarians that this would be, wow, here, here a young woman fighting for their liberty, fighting for their freedom, fighting to against oppression. But you know, my guess is a lot of a lot of these people think that this is all they agree with Khamenei, the supreme supreme leader. This is the this is the regime. People like Scott Horton want to defend the supreme leader of Iran. They probably agree with this. This is a country that has a supreme leader. They probably agree with the supreme leader of Iran that this is all just an American scheme to undermine legitimate Iranian interests. It's all to undermine Iranian sovereignty. These young girls are just paid agents of the CIA. That's the Iranian line. And I have a feeling that there are people in the United States who support that line, support that line. And of course, you know, so we've covered Venezuela. We've covered Iran. We we've covered Saudi Arabia and 9 11. And then of course, there's Russia. And you know, it's it's this is not Russia's fault. They're just trying to defend themselves. This is all just a provocation of the United States. We have ambitions to establish an empire. Those ambitions entail taking over all of Eastern Europe. And so we have foisted NATO onto Eastern Europe. And as a consequence, the Russians seem the Russians are defensive because they are convinced that NATO is going to launch a war against them. All that's happening in Ukraine is this is just a self defense preemptive strike by the Russians in order to protect themselves against evil NATO, which is known to have ambitions for taking over, you know, countries and and and and trying to assimilate them into the American Empire. That's the story. That's a story you hear from conservatives, from Namchomsky, from the nutty left, and from the Mises caucus and the nutty libertarians. This is indeed the story that almost everybody who despises America and despises anything that America does in the world has it promotes and and have embraced. So is there any validity to the story? One of the things that the story relies on and that really all of this foreign policy nonsense relies on is the theory of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism as in the leftist theory of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is the claim that all cultures are equal. There's no difference between America, between Venezuela, between Iran, between Saudi Arabia, between Russia, between al-Qaeda and ISIS. They're all cultures. They're all people making choices. There's no difference between North Korea and South Korea, North Vietnam and South Vietnam. It's if it's the world of the people, they're all equal. You can't rank culture. You can't approve of some and disapprove of others.  This is a theory that has been promoted by the left, but it has advocates on the right, on the subjectivist right. If you hold subjectivism, then who are you or who is anybody? Who is anybody to decide what is right or wrong, better, worse, superior, inferior, by what standard? There is no standard the subjectivist would tell us. America, this is violated rights throughout its entire history. You know, the left was emphasized, the left will emphasize slavery, colonialism, and the Jim Crow laws and racism. The right, particularly the libertarian right, will emphasize taxes. They hate the civil war, of course. The right will emphasize the welfare state, particularly, again, the libertarian right. They will emphasize state intervention in the economy, subsidies, bailouts of banks, and on and on and on. And in that, again, the left and right are not that different. And in that sense, there was a, look, America is statist. America, the government uses coercion, uses force against its citizens. So does the Iranian regime. So does the Venezuelan regime. So does the Russian regime. All of them are equal. And indeed, if all of them are equal, then the one we have to suppress, the one we have to put down the most, and this is certainly true of the left. And it turns out now that it's equally true of, I don't know, call it the paleo right or call it whatever, whatever kind of right you want, the libertarians and conservatives. What we really need to do is suppress the culture that is most powerful, the culture that is most successful, the culture that is done the most, the better human life. And that is the American culture. That is an any egalitarian view of anything means chopping down the able, chopping down the best, pulling down and knocking down and hating and despising the best. And that is America. Because in order to make all cultures seem equal, in order to make all cultures seem equal, you have to, you have to take the best culture and make it seem really, really bad so that it quates with all the others. So Putin is the same as Biden, is the same as the Supreme Leader of Iran, is the same as Maduro in Venezuela, is the same as whoever. Pink. It's interesting. I haven't seen much about China from these people, although I suspect there's a deep hatred and resentment of China as well. So is it all true? Is America the same? Is America as bad? Is America worse? I just hid Matt T. Kat from the chat. It's just distracting. It doesn't add any value.  And there's just no point. So I hope you guys appreciate the fact that you don't have to read his nonsense anymore. You know, I'm pretty tolerant for these guys, but there's a limit.  So anyway, done. He's gone, at least for today. I don't know if hiding the user from the channel is forever just for today. I'm not sure. Yes, Good riddance, I think is right. So is America the same as everything? What would you use as the principle? To guide this? So I mean, in my view, and I think you know this, America is the greatest country in human history. America was founded on fundamentally the right principles by which a country should be governed. I am not an anarchist. I believe government is not an necessary evil, but a necessary good. It is necessary for capitalism. There is no such thing as an alcocapitalism. Capitalism requires government. It requires an entity that holds the monopoly over the use of force, over the use of a territory force in protection of property rights. It requires some monopoly on a particular geographic area that protects property rights. And the reality is that as bad as America is, and as bad as America has been, no other country in human history has come close in protecting individual rights to what America has done. Certainly none of the countries that these libertarians seem so eager to defend Russia, Iran, Venezuela. It is interesting why they hate China so much and yet they love all these other countries. Have to think about that. The founding principles of this country are the right founding principles. They were not applied consistently from the beginning. They were not fully understood even by the founders from the beginning. But they are the right principles. The idea of individual rights, the idea of ineliable rights. The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are rights. I mean I would have added property, but once you get the right to life, property is obvious. And liberty and the pursuit of happiness are obvious in a sense as only one right, which is the right to life as I ran articulated. So they got a right in the beginning. And as a consequence, in spite of the fact that they were never consistent about it, they never applied it consistently, in spite of the fact that from the beginning the American government violated rights, this country was the freest country in human history, in spite of its racism, in spite of the slavery, in spite of the Jim Crow laws, in spite of taxes, in spite of regulations, in spite of the crazy banking regulations that existed in America really from the beginning, in spite of all of that there was less of that horror than in other places. And yes, you could argue if it's not perfect, it's evil, but that would be absurd. And if the standard is human life, if the standard is human prosperity, if the standard is human flourishing, God look what's happened over the last 250 years. And shouldn't we, by that standard, look at those places that have facilitated that flourishing and celebrate those places and want to make them better, want to improve them, want to recreate what made it possible for them to achieve this flourishing. But fundamentally, shouldn't we be focusing on the things that made it flourish while condemning the things that doesn't, evaluating the country based on both not just based on the bad. And this country, this country has been in its history overwhelmingly good, overwhelmingly good. And as such should be celebrated. And again, overwhelmingly good, not only when Republicans win power, not only when this party or that party has nothing to do with that. The principles on which it's based were good. And it deviates from them all the time. But the principles are there. So even today, we are not as economically free as we once were. And that is a tragedy. We're not even economically free as we were 30 years ago, based on the Economic Freedom Index. And there are countries in the world that are more economically free than the United States. But it's not Russia. And it's not Iran, and it's not Venezuela. So at least in comparison to those countries, we should be celebrating America and condemning them. But economic freedom is only not the only type of freedom. We have in this country, free speech, or one of the few countries in the world where you really do have free speech, where your First Amendment rights are protected. They're being chipped away at in all kinds of directions. Yes. But still, we don't shut down TV stations we don't like. Although they do want to regulate Twitter and Facebook because they don't like them. We don't put people who say things we don't like in jail as compared to Venezuela, Iran and Russia. We're a bastion of free speech. A bastion of free speech, not moderately huge.  I mean, this is new in America. But in Russia, God, you don't not want to be gay in Russia.  Believe me, in Iran, in Iran, you just get hung.  I mean, our sexual freedoms, now we're backtracking on abortion, which is tragic and horrific and sad and bad, and we should fight it. But overall, our social liberties, if you will, we're probably better protected today than we were 50, 60 years ago.  So yeah, America is not perfect. It's far from perfect. And the government in America is doing horrible things, primarily to Americans. And we should condemn it. And we should we should fight it. And we should educate people about how America can be dramatically better. But we still don't have we don't have political prisoners in America.  And by the way, when it happens, for example, in Russia, it's not hidden. When Putin tries to kill one of his political opponents, it's not like it's a secret. It's just accepted. Now, just that would put Russia in a different category than the United States, a different category.  And those are essentially different countries. So what is being defended here? Why do we care about Russia? Yes, they have nukes, but short of nukes. Why do we care? What is good about Russia and what way is Russia our ally and what way is Russia part of Western civilization? No respect for the individual. No economic freedoms. No social freedoms. No political freedoms. What is it about them? The Western, the white skinned. Is that it? Is that what makes them Western? Is that what makes Putin an ally? Well, is it maybe that they hate the left? I think for Jordan Peterson, that's what makes it. They hate the left.  Ally, Western civilization, they must be the good guys. Poison your political advocates, you know, opponents. Who cares? Put people in jail for speaking up. Who cares? Regulate and control the entire economy. Who cares? A president who has siphoned off hundreds of billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars into private bank accounts in Switzerland.  They hate the left. We love them. Indeed, the Iranians hate the left even more than the Russians, if that is possible. Yeah, I mean, the Iranians want to put women in their place. They want to keep women at home. They want to keep women covered up only for their husbands.  They know the place. They know how to take care of their women, right? God admire those Iranians. They hate the left. Can you imagine? Can you imagine having a discussion about transgender in Iran? You know, they hang people in Iran from construction cranes. That's what they do to trans people in Iran. They hate the left. This is good. And Venezuela, well, I don't know. Do they hate the left? They just hate America and that's good enough. It's good enough. It's stunning. I mean, in the world in which we live, there's like a handful, maybe two handfuls of countries that you can say good countries and the rest are garbage. Not the rest. I mean, and then there's a group of countries maybe that are kind of still struggling to figure out if they belong to the good group or the bad group, but they're struggling. They're in this middle. Maybe that's the vast number of countries. They still don't know. And then there's a group of countries that are clearly evil.  That are clearly anti everything we represent in the West. Clearly antagonistic to human reason, human individualism. Clearly, clearly anti-freedom. And yes, you'd have to include Venezuela, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Russia in that group. But no, Russia's the victim. The United States is the real bad guys. What does that tell you about these people? What does that tell you about these people? All wants me to list them. Sure, America, the United States, most of Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan. Those are the better countries. I mean, any thinking person knows the list. And by the way, it's an easy list to figure out. Because all you need to look at is immigration flows. What are the countries people want to go to? What are the countries people want to escape from? We want to go to America. We want to go to the UK. We even want to go to France and Italy. God knows why, but we want to go to France and Italy. Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, New Zealand and Australia. Yeah, sure. New Zealand, Australia on that list. Again, flawed, certainly during COVID, super flawed primarily because they learned everything and how to deal with COVID from China. But immigrants want to go there. And where do immigrants want to leave? Well, hundreds of thousands of Russia, Russians have left Russia. And if you open up the borders to the United States, they'd all come here. And then there's a bunch of countries kind of in the middle, you know, probably Mexico, most of Latin America that are still waving between these two. But look, Cuba is on bad side. People want to leave Cuba and come to America. I mean, just look at immigration flows and you can tell which are the good countries and which are the bad countries.  It's always America's fault.  So yes, America deposed the prime minister of Iran in the early 1950s. Why? Why? Well, basically because Iran was stealing, confiscating, nationalizing oil assets of the West. Now they ended up letting the Shah do it anyway. So again, inconsistency, hiding the true motivation, not asserting itself, not declaring it's true goals. But yes, America should have defended the property rights, its property rights, its company's property rights, its citizens property rights in places like Iran and Saudi Arabia. And the fact that they didn't, we're paying for today with the power we've handed over to OPIC, which by the way cut 2 million barrels of oil today from production in, you know, in siting with the Russians to drive all prices up. So yeah, the U.S. does terrible things usually because they were appeasing. So we protected the royal family of Saudi Arabia forever. Instead of asserting our claim on that oil that was owned by French, British and American oil companies. We forced the French and the British to vacate the Suez Canal when their companies owned it and Nasser nationalized it illegally, immorally. We let the Iranians take our embassy and did nothing about it.  We let them threaten Americans and did not. Yes. So America's wrong in its foreign policy because it's been so weak. And at the same time, we've subsidized the rest of the world. We protected Europe and we protected Asia. How awful of us? I mean, this is, this is the thanks we get. I mean, the fact is that it is the American quote world order, if you will, the fact that America has protected the sea lanes since World War Two till today, the fact that America has provided a nuclear umbrella over Europe and much of Eastern Asia that has created some of the greatest prosperity in all of human history. There's more people out of poverty than in a lot of human history that is facilitated. The growth in international trade, the growth in wealth all over the world on a scale nobody could have imagined. And you could argue whether American resources should be deployed in this way or not, whether it was just to American citizens to deploy them in this way. But in terms of benefiting the world, we've been a massive benefit to the world, a massive benefit to the world. NATO. Is it really American imperialism that is driving the expansion of NATO? Really? I mean, if you go to Poland, do they feel like they're under the thumb of the Americans?  Why has NATO expanded into Eastern Europe? Because the Eastern Europeans demanded it. It's because the Eastern Europeans felt unsafe. And because the Eastern Europeans wanted an American subsidy. They wanted America to subsidize their defense. They wanted America to subsidize and provide them with the nuclear umbrella. They wanted America to fight to save them from the Russians. Now, you could argue that's bad for America, but it's not bad for Eastern Europe. And why shouldn't Poland, fearing Russian aggression, want to sign a treaty with its neighbors to protect itself? How is that imperialism? How is that bad? Why shouldn't Ukraine, a sovereign country recognized even by Russia, indeed, created arguably with the fall of the Soviet Union by a popular referendum sanctioned by Russia? Why is it not the right of the Ukrainians to engage as a sovereign country in a defensive treaty with whoever they want? Oh, no, no, no, no. The Russians will be offended. The Russians, the beacon of civilization, the beacon of freedom, the beacon of liberty, the libertarian mecca, they might be offended. We can't do, we can't offend the Russians. So it truly is stunning. I mean, this goes back to Rothbard's perversion of the libertarian movement. It goes back to Rothbard chewing the North Vietnamese on, even though they were communists. You think the opposite of libertarians. They were communists, but he was chewing them on. How dare the United States try to preserve freedom in South Vietnam? Now, I ran objected to the war, but I ran objected to the war, not because how dare the United States preserve freedom in South Vietnam, but that it wasn't in American interest to sacrifice its young kids for the sake of South Vietnamese. But she was for South Vietnam. She was for fighting communism. She was for a country defending itself against communism. Rothbard's view was, well, it's the will of the people. Communism is the will of the people. Cool. Soviet. Just go look online at all the libertarians defending Putin. All the libertarians defending Russia and blaming the United States for all the problems in the world. Go look at Ron Paul's website. Go look at Dave, whatever, comedian Dave. Go look at what the libertarian movement is really like. So go now.  So go to Ron Paul's website.   No, I'm not going to debate any of these people. Anybody associated with antiwar.com, I will not debate. So in this kind of nihilistic, subjectivist view of international relationships is, is despicable. Yeah, I mean, I know libertarians in Russia. I know libertarians in Russia. The better ones are the ones who land up in jail. The better ones are out there protesting the war. They're not saying, oh, Russia has a right because NATO I mean, maybe some of the ones inspired by Rothbard. Maybe it's a small minority of libertarians, but it's the libertarians that are running the libertarian party and the libertarians that are representing the libertarian movement these days.  Good.   I suspect there are a number of libertarians that the whole of the Mises Institute is like this, that is basically not so much pro-Putin, but anti-American and blaming America for every problem that exists out there. You know, the I know that the independent institute was like this. All of these people, right? I mean, I know after 9 11, the number of libertarians that came after me came after anybody who tried to defend America, anybody who tried to say that this was not our fault, that this is an ideological battle, there are dozens and dozens and dozens of libertarian intellectuals who advocate for this position. It's not some fringe minority within the libertarian movement. I mean, I wish it was. And then, of course, there's Takako Carson. So it's not just libertarians. It's it's it's conservatives as well. And you can see them all over Twitter, defending Russia. Every time you post something about Russia, defending Russia, party line propaganda out of Russia. Putin is the hero. They love Putin. And that is Jordan Peterson. I mean, it's it's a white swath of American populist that is barred into multiculturalism.  And yet they are the left. Collectivism, subjectivism. It doesn't matter if it's left or right. They're all the same. Yeah, you've got even got Peter Hitchens in in the UK. I mean, you can imagine Christopher Hitchens rolling in his grave, swaggering his finger at at at his brother. No, this is not a fringe view that blames America for 9 11 and blames America for what's happening in Russia, or what's happening in Ukraine, that blames America for all the problems in the world. Not a fringe view. So is America exceptional? Yes. Certainly in its founding.  Could be a lot better. There's a lot of work to make it better. But to make it better, we have to first realize what its virtues are.  And we have to be willing to fight from that basis. Not start with how awful it is how bad it is and how the same it is with everybody else. Because then we're not being objective. And we really have no clue what we're fighting for. I'm not fighting for anarchy. I don't want to fight for subjectivism. I don't want to fight for any form of collectivism. So they hate America because they reject objectivity. They hate America because they refuse to have actual standards. They hate America because they view everything as the same. Because fundamentally, they are moral egalitarians. They believe everything is the same. As long as it's willed, as long as it's somebody's desire, it's fine. Who are you to judge somebody else's desire? Who are you to judge somebody else's culture? Even if that culture oppresses the individual? Since when is the individual the standard?  If you dig just a little bit deeper, America is a good country because at its foundation are great ideas. And those ideas that need to be fought for. And those ideas that need to be recognized for the greatness of Fort Ford. Travis, thank you for the support. Really appreciate it without a question. So that's why I singled him out. Thanks, Travis. And if you put them all together, if they're all ideas are the same, egalitarianism, when it comes to ideas, yeah, you lose the plot. If you think Islamism is the equivalent of Americanism, if you think the Muslims attacked us because we pissed them off, rather than attacking us because of our ideas and because of their ideas, you don't know what you're talking about. Of course, you can blame the US for making mistakes, like funding the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, or being sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, as the Obama administration was. There are lots of things you can criticize America. But then the criticism has to be from the perspective of freedom, from the perspective of liberty and from the perspective of individualism. And the criticism needs to be from the perspective of what is morally good and what is morally right? What is morally just? It's not from the perspective of all those poor, poor Putin is just trying to defend his people. That cannot be the right perspective. Yeah, to this day, America is defending Qatar, Qatar, that is one of the biggest funders of ISIS and al Qaeda and the rest of them. Right? Yet we protect Qatar, we protect the UAE, we protect Saudi Arabia. America is weak in its foreign policy. It's not judgmental enough in its foreign policy.  The problem is not that America is too assertive, that it's not assertive enough. It doesn't differentiate enough between the good guys and the bad guys. And that they're willing to tolerate and to sanction some pretty bad and evil regimes, including Russia's. We should have called Putin years ago, in 2008, when he invaded Georgia for no reason. In 2014, when he invaded Ukraine. I mean, Putin should have been called out long ago when he poisoned Russian dissidents on wet on other countries soil. That's when we should have called him out, not waited until he got so bold as to launch a full blown war against his neighbor. So the thing we need to really be aware of in the world, in our lives, in the people around us, in our political allies, so called allies, is more subjectivism and moral egalitarianism, judge and be ready to be judged, have standards, be willing to declare the good, realize that maybe the good is flawed, but it's better than the evil. Be willing to call evil evil. People just, yeah, anyway, so subjectivism is the enemy here. And it's it's left and right. It unites them. You know, remember Dugan, you remember the show I did on Dugan?  There's no difference between today, the left and the right in its different variations. They're both collectivist and the both subjectivists. And they're both mystical. It's just the mysticism is, you know, tinged differently left and right. The left worships Mother Earth and the right worships a Judeo-Christian God. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to youronbrookshow.com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star locals, and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those, any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course subscribe. Press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. And for those of you who are already subscribers and those of you who are already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.


From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to theCUBE's Boston Area Studio. Gonna be having a different conversation today. We often talk about cloud and data and all the various technologies, and we're going to talk about a different application of them in the customer experience space. And to help me to do that, Thoughtler in the space, Steve Pappas, who's the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Pan Viva. Steve, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me, this is great. It's, I go back in my roots and my first job out of school, the company I started with, puts everybody into customer support. There's no better way to kind of understand how something works and how people interact with technology as well as the product, than taking those phone calls when something goes wrong in customer support. So I have a little bit of experience in the CX space, as I believe you call it these days, watch from the technology space, the call centers and all those kind, but maybe start us out when you say CX, you're in 2019, what's the scope? What are we talking about that? And we'll go from there. That's a great place to start, Stu, because really when we're talking about customer experience or CX as being known, we're really talking about what is the customer's experience when they're interacting with our organization or they're even transacting with our organization. So if you think about it, there's probably the three things that they could do with a company. They can either interact with them and get some information. Maybe they're checking on a rate for a mortgage or looking for a car loan or getting a claim information from their health insurer or they're transacting, they're buying something, they're conveying some kind of a transaction together or there may be more of a back office approach to it so that someone's operating on behalf of the customer. So when we think about all of those three dimensions, it's really about was it frictionless? Was it easy to do? Did they get to the point where they felt delighted and they're willing to provide a reference or a testimonial because they're gushing because the experience was so good. They got what they needed and they're willing to tell people about it. Yeah, that's great. It reminds me, you see frictionless, it reminds me of what we've talked for years about with cloud computing. You talk about bringing joy and having authentic conversations, what we've been talking about for years about how social media and engagement should be. I have to think that the kind of balanced interaction between people and machines and technology have to be a hot button topic there. One of my favorite events that we did a few years ago was with the MIT talking about automation. Are the robots going to take over everything? And what we know what tends to work best is that there needs to be a balance of the robots, chatbots, whatever they are and people. It can't be all of one or even all of the other because it either gets too costly or the experience might not be optimal. Yeah, I think you're exactly right. I think all of those different things have their place and if you think about it, it's kind of like the pie. You're adding pieces to the pie. So you're adding the chatbot as another method or another medium that someone can interact with the organization, but it's not the be all and end all. There has to be a level of human aspect to a lot of things. I'll give you an example.  So there has to be, we have to temper what types of technology we use with what areas and we have to be thinking about the customer. I always advocate that you always think about the customer at the center of the universe and make sure the customer has a seat at every decision table. So when we're thinking about bringing technology into organizations, we have to think about, well, how does this make the customer's experience better? Does it help them? Does it make their interaction with us better? And overall, does that technology make the types of customers and lifetime value increase for us as organizations?  I need to think about everything they're doing because if they change and they leave us, what are we left with? Bring us into customer experience. What does that matter? How do we get beyond lip service of talking, yeah, it's great to listen to the customers but I got to worry about my bottom line and my employees and my stockholders and things like that. Sure, well, today, if you think about customer service, good customer service, every company in the world is talking about it, right? That's the baseline now, right? That is where we begin and we're moving up from there to a level of customer service. So if we're thinking about customer service as it has to be good, but how do you get from that good to great scenario? It's, well, how do we train our people? How do we make sure that they're empowered to provide the customer with all they need and give them a little bit of decision making power when it makes the difference of keeping that customer for life and maybe their children and their friends and relatives or potentially losing them at that single interaction. So when we're thinking about the bottom line, we always have to think that every interaction could be the last interaction but also every interaction's an opportunity to make that relationship better. So we have to think about that in terms of how we do things as well as what technology surrounds that and obviously the negative side of customer experience is if we do it wrong, we're certainly losing but if we do it right, it's exponentially better. Yeah, I'm curious, Steve, what your thoughts are, how do I measure that? The B2B world, we talked about the Net Promoter Score, NPS and some people, we love it and it's great when you see a high Net Promoter Score but when you understand the details and what goes under it, that's only part of the picture and boy, do I agree with you about, if you have that opportunity to talk to a customer and turn around, if you spend any time in the space, I know it's great when somebody comes back and has something good to say but if somebody comes and says something bad, it's usually only the tip of the iceberg, there's other people that can have it and you have to take that opportunity to turn it into something good. So metrics and how do we measure whether we're doing good or bad in the space? Absolutely, well, the contact center itself is metriced to the nth degree anyway, right? Net Promoter Score is one dimension of how we have to look at things. I'll tell you a story that I recommend to every C-suite person that I interact with and I'm a member of a lot of associations that the best thing that they can do is spend time in the contact center. Double-check into those calls, not only is it the best focus group you can ever pay for that you already have but also it allows for a C-suite, whether it's the CEO or the Chief Operating Officer or CFO, it allows them to understand really how the interactions are happening between the customer as well as the organization but it goes a step further. Not only do you measure the customer satisfaction levels but you also need to measure your employee satisfaction levels that way too because having employees that have the tools necessary to provide the best service possible as well as make sure that they have the training, they have the empowerment to do it. Once you have those things in place, I always say that the CEO and others in the C-suite should be listening to those calls to understand does the employee have all the right tools to make that customer interaction better and to extend that customer lifetime value or not and that's one way which is much more of a qualitative versus the metrics but it's one that's missed all the time and I have CEOs tell me time and time again after they've done it, it was absolutely enlightening for them to say I never saw that part of the business from that vantage point. Yeah Steve, bring us inside those call centers a little bit, I've got a little bit of background but it was often overworked, underappreciated, very much metrics, there's the big thing on the wall saying how long the average call's been waiting, have you hit the number that you've needed to do? Has it gotten better, what's it like in these environments today, how is the outsourcing was a big push for a number of years, what's it like in those calls? So outsourcing is still a big thing, a lot of companies, a lot of US companies have started bringing some of the things back in house too when they found that the metrics might not have been there, but they're also holding their outsources to a higher standard now, right? So they're providing not only the training but what I'm seeing as far as trends is they're providing the how-to much better. They're realizing that having a single source of truth that your employees are using, your customers can access via self-service as well as the outsourcer is really the key to making all of this work so that you have the portability of process much better. Now the call centers are there, I'll tell you, they're getting much better because they're starting to move more onto the knowledge side as well as the process side. They're looking internal. It's not good enough for them to say, well, it's been working fine, right? It's now to the point with how much better can we get it to work, right? How do we get the last mile? How do we get to the point where these customers are willing and called back to say, hey, I had a great experience? So we're finding that one of the keys was making sure that the employees, the people on the front lines, have what they need the second that they need it, right? Not to pop their head over the cube, not to escalate to a help desk, right? Because that just increases the overall cost of a contact center, not to be shuffling through papers or flipping the pages of a binder every few minutes, but giving them the tools that they need so that A, they know exactly what the process is. They can remain compliant with the process. They can navigate the myriad of applications that are open on the desktop, as well as know how to make sure that they say the right things. They avoid saying the wrong things and they don't come across as robotic. And that's one of the keys that is happening now. And we see that trend happening more and more in contact centers. And I probably walk in and out of about 150 of them a year and see them from the inside. You know, the one thing that I always look around in a contact center is if there's lots of sticky notes around the monitors, if there's lots of binders on the desk and papers up on the cubes, there are process problems. There are opportunities to make that organization run a lot smoother on behalf of the customer. All right, Steve, related to CX, one of the topics you've written about is Omni-Channel. Maybe you can explain what that is and what you're finding. Sure, so Omni-Channel really is geared around how do we communicate with our customers, our partners, our dealers, our distributors, et cetera. So how do we communicate properly on any channel necessary that the customer wants? We always say that it used to be multi-channel, right? We would have the telephone, we would have maybe the IVR is giving them directions and allowing them some information when they call in. But now customers want to be communicated with on Skype or Slack or Facebook Messenger or Twitter or Instagram or various other methods that are accessible to the consumer. The consumer has a lot of information as well as a lot of power at their fingertips now that they probably didn't have 10, 15 years ago. Now the Omni-Channel is really geared around creating a universal way of communicating with the customer where they want to be communicated with. And we say that that's probably the best channel is what does the customer want, right? Where are they? So how do we get to them where they are? And to make that work, there's technology involved. And also if we want to say, well, how do we take care of our customers at two o'clock in the morning, maybe with a chatbot so that they can get some of the information that they need when they need it. It's all about time, right? The thing that we're trying to solve now is the problem of time. How do we make sure that we get the information into the hands of the person that needs it? Whether it's our employee or it's our customer or maybe our third party dealer, distributors, et cetera. How do we get that information in a timely manner so that they can do something of action of value, right? And that's really the key. So Omni-Channel really is gearing around how do we maintain all of those? But some of the keys to it, and I'll want to put those out there, is we have to curate content better, right? We have to look at the fact that you don't write a procedure for the employee to speak over the phone the same way you're gonna write for Alexa as a virtual assistant to be speaking out into the air, right? So we have to think about content curation as what are the multiple versions of the same thing that need to be housed in one place and then how do we orchestrate them at the moment of need when Alexa does call in and says, I need information about your hours. That information and the version of that content has to be pushed in a sub-second method to go to the right channel at the right time in the right format. Yeah, that machine-to-machine discussion is added a whole new dimension for a lot of companies to try to solve that. Yeah. Great, give us, here towards the beginning of the year, we're still at 2019, give us a little bit, look forward. What are some of the big challenges? What are the things that are exciting you as we look throughout this year? Sure, so I think we're really looking forward to more companies understanding the customer, right? And by that, I don't mean that they have to go through an entire customer journey mapping but that is a good place to start. But at the end of the day, you have to make sure that the operator number 24 in Omaha, Nebraska knows the result of all that journey mapping. So there has to be a third dimension, if you will, after you've done your analysis and your mapping is how do they execute on all of the stuff that we found in the customer journey mapping? How do they execute at that point, that whole face of business happening for the benefit of the customer as well as for the employee satisfaction? So we're seeing that customer-centric conversations are increasing. Now by that, I mean that companies are looking for what are all of the methods, all the simple methods that we can incorporate today, which doesn't necessarily mean bringing in all kinds of technology, what are the methods that we can start bringing in to make our employees feel empowered around the whole customer experience paradigm? So that I'm seeing is happening. The other one is, as you refer to Jeff Bezos, is whenever you have a decision happening in your company and you've got the conference room table, put one chair over there and just put the name customer on the chair and allow the customer to have a decision. Allow the customer to have a seat at the decision table. And by that, I mean that always think as you're making your moves within 2019 and 2020 and beyond is what does it mean to the customer? How does that going to affect the customer? And will it be positive for their experience? Those are the types of things that are getting real exciting that companies are finally starting to look at those and they're not saying good enough is good enough anymore and they're not looking at, well it's, the whole operation is factored into the cost of doing business. They're all starting to say, how can we do better? And mostly the thing that's driving that is that they have to get better at customer experience because if you think about it, price, everybody knows the price now. They can search for everything that they're shopping for and they know who's got the same price and pretty much there's an equilibrium on that. So if price is one thing and size and color and all of those things are similar and all of the components of that are similar across the board, what are companies starting to compete on? Companies in 2019 and 2020 are gonna start competing on the experience. So if you think about one of the best competitive advantages now moving forward is what's the experience that we give over and above our competition? And that is so important, we're seeing the trends moving to that and honestly that's what really starts to excite me as companies are moving down this path. Great, and Steve, one of the things I know is that you've written a number of things on this topic. If people wanna learn more about CX, what are some resources that they can go to which I understand not trying to pitch resources, to pitch product from Pan Viva, but really thought leadership in a different place. We also work with a lot of thought leaders and we only approach it from an educational perspective. Matter of fact, we just published a new e-book on customer experience. All the tips from 10 industry leaders in customer experience and that's available on our website at panviva.com. They can connect with me at Twitter, SXP01 or by email at espapusatpanviva.com and I'm happy to point them in the direction of any of these resources that fundamentally will help them start a workshop inside and start the thought process of how can we get better on behalf of the customer. All right, well, Steve, really appreciate you helping to educate our community a little bit more about the CX space and definitely do check out, either reach out to Steve directly or check out the panviva.com website to learn more and be sure to check out thecube.net for all of the upcoming shows as well as the archive of everything we have. If you go into the search box, you can search on topic, company or person. We've got the database of thousands of interviews that we've done in the past. So, once again, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCube.


April 3rd is U.S. Army Europe's ready and resilient day, SHARP. All user personnel are required to view the film, The Invisible War, a documentary about rape and sexual assault in the U.S. military.