Welcome to another edition of Thinking Things Through, Thinking Critically in Critical Times. I'm your host, Michael Sukoff. Today we have with us for a second time Michael J. Thompson, who's a professor of political theory at William Patterson University in Wayne, New Jersey. We're going to be discussing what is critical theory, part two. As some of you may recall, if you were with us in early May, we had Michael on at that time and started a discussion about critical theory, what it is and why it matters. In the interest of full disclosure, again, Michael Thompson and I have known each other as professional colleagues for a number of years. And both of us currently are working on books in the general area of critical theory as we are going to discuss shortly. Welcome to the show again, Michael. Welcome back. Thank you, Michael. Thanks for having me back. Great. Now, as I mentioned last month, you've written a lot in the area of critical social and political theory, which we'll get into in a moment. You've also written widely in the related areas of critical reason, the politics of inequality, political judgment, and the decline of the individual in late capitalism.  Again, is there anything you'd briefly like to add about your background and interests? Well, I think just that big part of my life is teaching and engaging with students and also that's a real big part of the critical enterprises. I think expanding critical citizenship and engagement. Certainly, and some of us intellectual types might refer to that as critical pedagogy. Yes, that is true. All right, well, before we dive in here, Michael Thompson, I wanna share something. In our last show, you and I were discussing the Frankfurt School, which was the original group of critical theory that came out of Germany in the early 1920s into the 30s and beyond. And we were discussing the issue of nuclear weapons and the dangers of a nuclear war. And at that time, I said that I wasn't aware of any of the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, the original members. And we mentioned some of those names. Having ever said a whole lot about the nuclear arms race or nuclear weapons, and I soon realized I was mistaken. I just wanna read a brief part from an introduction from a famous book by Herbert Marcuse, who was one of the original critical theorists. This book was written in 1964 and it was called One Dimensional Man. So let me just read maybe the first paragraph. Whoa, does not the threat of an atomic catastrophe which could wipe out the human race also serve to protect the very forces which perpetuate this danger? The efforts to prevent such a catastrophe overshadow the search for its potential causes in contemporary industrial society. These causes remain unidentified, unexposed, unattacked by the public because they recede before the all too obvious threat from without to the West from the East to the East from the West. And of course, this is referring to the nuclear arms race and the Cold War that was taking place back at that time between the United States and what was then the Soviet Union now Russia. So I just wanted to set the record straight as far as I was concerned that Marcuse and as Michael Thompson has mentioned to me off air, some of the other critical theorists have also addressed the issue of the nuclear arms race and the dangers of a nuclear Holocaust. Okay, well, I wanna continue our discussion from last time and let's start out Michael Thompson if you don't mind. In our last conversation, you were reviewing for us some of the main dimensions of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and one of those dimensions that you pointed to, well, you pointed to the concept of critique and the related concept of judgment. So maybe you can remind us what those two terms mean, how were they related? And then I wanna get into that dimension of critical theory. Yeah, thank you, Michael for reminding us about that. I think the core idea to remember is that the word critique, which in English and German are actually the same word, critique and critique and in French all derived from the ancient Greek word for judgment, to judge something is to know, is to be able to distinguish things based on their values, whether they're good or whether they're bad, whether they're true or whether they're false. So in a lot of ways, critique critical theory was really concerned with the problem of restoring to everyday people the capacity to think through their world in a way that was critical. Because you have to remember what they were witnessing was, and as early as the 1920s and 1930s and it's much more the case today, what they were witnessing was the eclipse of the individual. They were witnessing technological, political, economic systems that were becoming so large, so alienating to each individual that individuals were losing the capacity, the ability to think independently. And you have to remember, this is the fundamental building block of what democratic civil society is, the ability for each individual to think through their world. So critique is really fundamentally about restoring the ability for people to think through the world that they live in, to say, this system is good or bad, this form of technology is good or bad, this law is good or bad. That's fundamentally, I think, what judgment and critique are. Thank you for that. It's a very coherent clarification. So what I wanna engage with you about now is, well, let me just say this. I think there are two dimensions of critique and one has to do with evaluating whatever it is we're looking at, whether it's a congressional hearing or something that's going on in front of us or a newspaper article or something on YouTube. Evaluate it in terms of its factuality, okay? I mean, criticism as critique, as criticism certainly involves trying to assess the truth or falsity of whatever we're looking at. Would you agree with that? I think it's not just truths or falsity, what the critical theorists always important was, truth and falsity can become relativized. Well, because what is true in one context may be false in another context. I think what's really significant about the Frankfurt School idea of critique is that it forced us to ask, what kind of society is making the thing that I'm thinking about either true or false? What kind of society am I living in? And so it's not about just evaluating that one article or the one hearing. It was about asking yourself, how does this fit into the overall system of the social world that I live in? And that is what's being lost. If you're lost in the particulars of the news, you're failing to grasp that you're really living in these large scale systems that themselves may be false. And false in the sense that they are promoting a false form of life, a form of life that does not actually enhance and develop us as individuals, as rationally thinking beings, as effectively feeling beings. So really when you ask about critique, it's really about asking, what is the social system in which I live in? Is that a false world? Or is that a true world? And a true world is a world where each one of us are able to live in a kind of free way and develop ourselves as free, self-reflecting individuals. And in that respect, the world we live in is a false world. It doesn't work. No, so what I hear you really stressing about the critique or the approach of critical theories is values are very much a part of evaluating anything that we're experiencing, reading about, watching, that we cannot separate the facts, quote unquote, facts of what is happening with the values we place on what we're looking at and how we judge whatever it is we're observing as you said, true or false or maybe good or bad or promoting a more healthy, fair, fairer, freer form of existence. And I think it's really important to add to that is that that's a very important contribution of critical theory is to make us think again about values and what we value and why we should value it. In other words, I could say to you that introducing a particular reform in a school system at a university, say it'd be more efficient for students to be able to finish school earlier if they don't have to take literature or philosophy. And that may be true, but it's not true education if people go through school without being exposed to literature and philosophy and art. So it's a question of the values determining what we consider to be true. And our society, I think that's what's really important is the society that we live in now is increasingly becoming dominated by values that are really rooted in economic life. In other words, capital. It is rooted in efficiency, the production of surplus and consumption. Those are the values that are slowly but gradually dominating all forms of other values, values of equality, values of justice, values of individual development. These are values that are being eclipsed by values that are rooted in and a techno economic administrative world. And the critical theories of the Frankfurt School are really the first ones that really put this on the agenda for intellectuals, but also for common citizens. The idea is that we should really be thinking through our world about how the powerful are able to impose their values and make them our own. Now what you just said is extremely provocative in the, it's not provocative for someone like me and you who may obviously agree with what you just said, but let's bring this down to the street level, the ordinary person. For example, who may not agree with what you just said. The proof I believe is always in the pudding. So let me just put this example out here and see where we go with it. The January 6th insurrection, we've been watching, many of us have been watching these hearings on television, on C-SPAN, on MSNBC. These hearings that are dealing with what happened on January 6th, and by that I'm referring to the events at the US Capitol on January 6th of last year where a number of people, quite a large crowd, stormed the Capitol building, broke in, and for a while it wasn't clear whether some of our lawmakers who have been elected to serve us, their lives would be in danger, okay? So, thinking about that occurrence and thinking about these hearings, how would a critical theorist or someone who's using critique in the way that you've described look at what they're observing there? Let's say they're just sitting at home watching the hearings, there's a lot of information coming towards them, and there's a lot of judgment going on by the members of the committee. I'm assuming we're watching it on C-SPAN where there are no pundits making comments interpreting things for us. How, taking that example, how would you use critique to understand and evaluate what we're watching? I mean, simply put, I mean, what we're watching is in real time the destruction of American democratic life and democratic institutions. What these hearings are showing is not simply that a group of people tried to raid the Capitol, what the hearings are demonstrating is a pattern of activity by the former president, Donald Trump, to try in some way to forestall the legitimate transfer of power. So I think what a critical theorist should be, I mean, saying is asking, what are the dynamics in my society that leads almost half of the population to continue to follow a person, Donald Trump at a party, the Republican Party, which are literally becoming authoritarian and neo-fascist. I really believe that is the critical theory question. There, the pattern of behavior and the activities that are occurring, I mean, in terms that are being mapped out by the committee are remarkable and remarkable for their robustness. And what makes over half the population believe in the lies. There's something about, see, I think what's crucial here is what we're really seeing is an exercise, an example and mass manipulation of consciousness. This is a fundamental idea of critical theory. You know, the critical theorists were really schooled in this because they were living and they ran away from Hitler's Germany. And they saw the way that a small group of people were able to harness radio, the film industry, max forms of media for the first time to effectively mystify and disinform a massively enlightened public, Germany. And I think what we're seeing now is a rerun of these events. So in many ways, the January 6th hearings are remarkable not for what they're showing us, they're remarkable for the fact that so few people are actually moved from their original beliefs unlike Watergate in the 1970s. In other words, society has so hardened itself against critical reflection and judgment that very few people are even persuaded from their original positions, whether they didn't like Trump or liked him, that public opinion is frozen. People are still supporting Trump-backed candidates. This is a very, very different political and cultural environment from what we saw in the United States even in the early 1970s with the Watergate hearing. So I think as a critical theorist, what it opens up is the question, what would drive a society which has a robust history of democratic institutions and culture to actually follow someone who would destroy those institutions? And I think that question is the question that itself is very polarized in American society, which leads us to the question of like, well, why would people follow someone who is clearly against the values of liberal democracy? So the January 6th hearings are remarkable to me because of how few people are actually being persuaded, how few people are actually changing their positions when it's being displayed to them that there are still openly anti-democratic forces in this country that have broken the law and are not being held accountable. Right, right. Remember, let me just add something about this here. Critical theory is primarily at the end of the day about our consciousness. What makes us aware when something is going wrong? What prevents us from becoming aware when there is injustice? When there, Wilhelm Reich, the famous psychoanalyst said, the real question is not why does the person steal, right? The question really is, why don't they steal more often? Why don't they rebel against the system? The real question is why people support a system that is actually against their own interests and against their own common good, destruction of the environment, economic inequality, exporting of jobs, you can go up and down the list. And why would people who are the most abused by the system support the elites that abuse them? That is a fundamental question for critical theory. And it's a question that's just as relevant now in the United States as it was 80 years ago when it was first posed. Right. You think I will use the collective pronoun we, meaning anybody who's thought about the questions you're raising now, have we started to understand why that what you're describing is the case in our society today? I would suggest to you that since the era of what we call neoliberalism or the resurgent kind of marketization of society, commodification of the world, starting in the 1980s moving forward, that you're witnessing an increase in mass anxiety in our culture. Individuals experiencing forms of insecurity economically, they're in terms of the family life, drug abuse and drug use has gone up, alcoholism, suicide.   And I think what you're seeing is an increasing form of anxiety and there's two ways you can respond to this. On the one hand, you can get aggressive and angry and move toward what Eric Fromm called group narcissism, racial identity, things like this. That's the response of the right. That's the response of the right wing. The other response is dissociation. Whatever, the whatever culture of like, whatever I'm just wanting to do a joint and just zoom out or I just can't deal with it. So I'm just not going to do it. And so you get this whole culture on the other side which is dissociated from what's happening. So what I would suggest is the culture is becoming so precarious. People's lives, the inequality, the middle class is disintegrating, is almost crumbling to nothing. Generation Gen Z, what we call Gen Z, looks to the future as like your climate changes that destroy us. I might as well not even have children. There's a sense where each one of us has our own forms of anxiety but that the anxiety itself creates different political responses. And I think that that makes you, when you experience anxiety, the first thing that goes is thought, reason, reflection. Because you're in a state of panic. You're in a state of fear. And I think what anxiety does is make you less reflective, less rational. And that's one of the reasons that our society is polarizing and becoming so dogmatic, left and right. Right, right. We're more than halfway through the show which I'm not surprised. But I guess I wanna raise a slightly different question and it may take us a little bit away from some of the things you just said. But one of the concerns I have is when I watch hearings like this, of course it's been very moving for me especially when I watch the testimony of Wondreya Arshe Moss and Ruby Freeman, her mother testifies to what the horrible things they've experienced just as a result of doing their jobs and counting ballots and so forth. I mean, that was extremely moving testimony for me. And that kind of cuts through a lot of the, here's what happened and why and stuff. It's like these people in trying to do what they thought was their responsibility or duty as citizens of this country were demonized, attacked by the president of the United States, their lives have been threatened. So I guess where I'm going with this is so that we have that kind of experience of, an emotional dimension of what some people have experienced as a result of all the events that led up to the January 6th insurrection. And at the same time in the discourse and the discussion in the hearings, there's often are references to democracy and this is a threat to democracy but what often never gets addressed is what are we talking about when we say democracy? So this is a perhaps a related aspect of critical theory as critique and judgment is how do we, when we're presented with certain kinds of values like democracy or freedom. Number one, how are those concepts presented to us in the context, let's say of a committee hearing or a news show or a pundit giving us their opinion about something that's gone in the world. Well, the definition of the word, right, this is a very important idea and it's, and I think, first of all, let me just say, whatever democratic institutions we have are under threat at this time as in no other time in American history. So however you construe democracy, the idea that there'll be a rule of law with some representative government, those institutions are under threat. But let me just say, I agree with you, I think part of what imminent criticism is a technical term, but the idea of critique is, is to take a word and begin to open it up what you believe it means, inquire, what does democracy mean? What does the word come from? What's its history? Do not accept from the outside world what the definition of a word means or what the, or don't assume you know what it means. Don't assume you know the words, the meaning of the words that you use because they haven't been interrogated. You need to inquire, reflect on what they mean. That's the beginning of the openness of mind that's required and that's what critique is. Opening up the things that we think we know to what we may know. And the challenge is for any citizen or participant in the culture and politics of the United States is learning how to do that. Well, you don't live in a culture where you're taught to do it. You live in a culture where things are very top down. So the TV tells you what the thing, the radio tells you, the internet tells you. But what we need more is our ways of learning that are dialogical where people talk to one another, where people share in a safe way. This was the educational world that many of us came from before the internet. And that's the educational world that bore democracy like in ancient Greece. That's what you need. Humane, non-mediated through technology forms of discussion and thinking and inquiry, reflection and question and answering. That restoring that to the human experience will also restore critique and democracy. So as our last question as we wrap up, how can we bring about those kinds of conditions? What would they look like? What would... Social movements, at the core of it all are social movements. Political life in the democratic world is brought to people saying we need something different. And what I'm suggesting is we think about what's different and as being more human, more engaged and try to reproduce that in our everyday life. Right. Well, thank you so much, Michael Thompson, as before we've run out of time, but that's all the time we have for today. But I hope we'll have you back again. We've been speaking with Michael J. Thompson. Yeah, great. Professor of theory at William Patterson University in New Jersey. Thanks so much for joining us today again, Michael. Thanks, Michael. Great. This has been Thinking Things Through, Thinking Critically in Critical Times on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Michael Sukoff. Please join us again two weeks from today at the same time, wherever you may be. And please do communicate with me with your questions, comments about the show. If our engineer is able to at this late time in the broadcast to put my email address up on the screen, that would be great. Otherwise, it's Hawaii is Calling, three words. H-A-W-A-I-I, second word is, I-S, third word calling. Hawaii is calling at gmail.com. Please join us again two weeks from today, wherever you may be. Mahalo, thank you. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.


Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering .conf18, brought to you by Splunk. Welcome back to Orlando, everybody. Of course, home of Disney World, I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. We're here covering Splunk's conf18, hashtag conf, sorry, hashtag SplunkConf18. I've been fumbling that all weeks too. Maybe by day two I'll have it down. But this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Phillip Adams is here. He's the CTO and lead architect for the National Ignition Facility. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. Super interesting off-camera conversation. You guys are basically responsible for keeping the country's nuclear arsenal functional and secure. And effective. Yeah. And effective. So talk about your mission and your role. So the mission of the National Ignition Facility is to provide data to scientists of how matter behaves under high pressures and high temperatures. And so what we do is basically take 192 laser beams of the world's largest laser in a facility about the size of three football fields and run that through into a target the size of a BB that's filled with deuterium and tritium. And that implosion that we get, we have diagnostics around that facility that collect what's going on for that experiment and that data goes off to the scientists. Wow. Okay. So and what do they do with it? They, they model it. They, I mean, that's real data. So they use it to model real world nuclear stores. Sometime back, if you actually look on Google Earth and you look over Nevada, you'll see a lot of craters in the desert and we aren't able to do underground nuclear testing anymore. So this replaces that and it allows us to be able to capture by having a small burning plasma in a lab. You can either simulate what happens when you detonate a nuclear warhead. You can find out what happens from a, if you're an astrophysicist understand what happens from the birth of a star to full supernova. You can understand what happens to materials as they get subjected to, you know, 100 million degrees. For real? For real. So, well now, so some countries North Korea in particular up until recently was, was still doing underground testing. Are you able to, I don't know, in some way shape or form monitor that or maybe there's intelligence that you can't talk about but do you, do you learn from those or do you already know what's going on there because you've been through it decades ago? There are groups of the lab that know things about things, but I'm not at liberty to talk about that. I love that answer. Okay, so maybe you could talk a little bit about the importance of data.  I've loved geeking out in my career to talk to your team, really smart people, you know, some sizable budgets and, you know, build, you know, supercomputers and the like. So, you know, how important is data and, you know, how's the role of data been changing the last few years? So, data is very critical to what we do. That whole facility is designed about getting data out. And there are two aspects of data for us. There's data that goes to the scientists and there's data about the facility itself. And it's just amazing the tremendous amount of information that we collect about the facility and trying to keep that facility running. And we have a whole, just a line out the door and around the corner of scientists trying to get time on the laser.  Some of these experimentalists are waiting up to like three, four years to get their chance to run their experiment, which could be the basis of their scientific career that they're studying for that. And so, with a facility that large 66,000 control points, you can consider it 66,000 IoT points. That's a lot of data. And it's amazing some days that it all works. So, by being able to collect all of that information into a central place, we can figure out which devices are starting to misbehave, which needs servicing, and make sure that the environment is functional as well as reproducible for the next experiment. Yeah, well, you're a case in point. When you talk about 66,000 devices, I can't have somebody going manually checking everything. Just the power of IoT, is there predictive things that let you know if something's going to break? How do you do things like break fix? So, we collect a lot of data about those end point devices. We have been collecting them and looking at that data in the Splunk and plotting that over time, all the way from like capacitors to motor movements and robot behavior that is going on in the facility. So, you can then start getting trends for what average looks like, and when things start deviating from Norman, set a crew of technicians that will go in there on our maintenance days to be able to replace components. Philip, what are you architecting? Is it the data model, kind of the ingest, the analyze, the dissemination, the infrastructure, the collaboration platform, all of the above? Maybe you could take us inside. I am the infrastructure architect, the lead infrastructure architect. So, I have other architects that work with me for database, network, sysadmin, et cetera. Okay, and then so the data presumably informs what the infrastructure needs to look like, right? I.e., where the data is, it is centralized, decentralized, how much is it, et cetera. Is that fair, assertion? I would say the machine defines what the architecture needs to look like. The business processes change for that in terms of like, well, how do you protect and secure a SCADA environment, for example, and then for the nuances of trying to keep a machine like that, continually running and separated and segregated as need be. Is what? As need be. Maybe, yeah. What are the technical challenges of doing that? Definitely, you know, one challenge is that the Department of Energy never really shares data to the public. And for, you know, it's not like NASA where you take a picture and you say, here you go, right? And so when you get sensitive information, it's a way of being able to dissect that out and say, okay, well, now we've got a user community of folks that now want to come in remotely, take their data and go. So we want to make sure we do that in a secure manner. And also that protects scientists that are working on a particular experiment from another scientist working on their experiment. You know, we want to be able to keep swim lanes, you know, very separated and segregated. Then you get into just, you know, all of these different components, IT. The general IT environment likes to age out things every five years. But our project is, you know, looking at things on a scale of 30 years. So, you know, the challenges we deal with on a regular basis, for example, are protocols getting decommissioned. And not all the time because a, you know, the protocol change doesn't mean that you want to spend that money to redesign that IOT device anymore. Especially when you might have a warehouse full of them in the backup, man. So, and obviously you're trying to provide access to those who have the right to see it. Like you say, swim lanes, get data to the scientist, but you also have a lot of bad guys who would love to get their hands on that data. So, how do you use, I presume you use Splunk, at least in part in a security context, is that right? Yeah, we have a pretty sharp cybersecurity team that's always looking at the perimeter and making sure that we're doing the right things because, you know, those of us that are builders and they're those that want to destroy that house of cards. So, you know, we're doing everything we can to make sure that we're keeping the nation's information safe and secure. So, what's the culture like there?  You know, to have like 15 degrees, CS expert. I mean, what's it like? Is it diverse environment? Describe it to us. It is a very diverse environment. You've got PhDs working with engineers, working with, you know, IT people, working with software developers. I mean, it takes an army to make in a machine like this work. And, you know, it takes a rigid schedule, a lot of discipline. But also, you know, I mean, everybody's involved in making the mission happen. They believe in it strongly. It's, you know, for myself, I've been there 15 years. Some folks have been there working at the lab 35 years plus. So, all right. So, you're a Splunk customer, but what brings you to .conf?  Is this, have you been to these before? Yes, you know, so at .conf, you know, I really enjoy the interactions with other folks that have similar issues and missions that we do and learning what they have been doing in order to address those challenges. In addition, staying very close with technology, figuring out how we can leverage the latest and greatest items in our environment is what's going to make us not only successful, but a great payoff for the American taxpayer. So, we heard from Doug Merritt this morning that data is messy and that what you want to be able to do is be able to organize the data when you need to. Is that how you guys are looking at this? Is your data messy?   And you may or may not know this. It's kind of before Splunk and after Splunk. Before Splunk, you know, we spent a lot of time in traditional data warehousing. You know, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what content we wanted to go after. ETL and put those, put that data sets into rows and tables. And that took a lot of time. If there was a change that needed to happen or data that wasn't onboarded, you couldn't get the answer that you needed. And so it took a long time to actually deliver an answer about what's going on in the environment. And today, you know, one of the things that resonated with me is that we are putting data in now, throwing it in, getting it into an index, and, you know, almost at the speed of thought than being able to say, okay, even though I didn't properly onboard that data item, I can do that now, I can grab that, and now I can deliver the answer.  They were trying to get it to do things that it really just wasn't designed to do. So they would chase Intel, every time Intel came up with a new chip, they'd say we need that, because we're a star for horsepower.  You know, it has its uses, but it's the right tool for the right job, horses for courses, as they say. Is that fair assessment? That is exactly where we're in. We're in very much a hybrid mode to where we're doing both. One thing I wanted to bring up is that the message before was always that the log data was unstructured content. And I think Splunk turned that idea on its head and basically said there is structure in log data. There is no such thing as unstructured content. And because we're able to rise that information up from all these devices in our facility and take relational data and marry that together through DB Connect, for example, it really changed the game for us and really allowed us to gain a lot more information and insight from our systems. When they talked about the enhancements coming out in 7.2, they talked about scale, performance, and manageability, you've got quite a bit of scale and I'm sure performance is pretty important. How Splunk doing, what are you looking for them to enhance their environment down the road? Maybe some of the things they talked about in the Splunk next that would make your job easier? One of the things I was really looking forward to that I see that the signs are there for is being able to roll off buckets into the cloud. So the concept of being able to use S3 is great, great news for us. Another thing we'd like to be able to do is store longer live data sets in our environment and longer time series data sets and also annotate a little bit more so that a scientist that sees a certain feature in there can annotate what that feature meant. So that when you have to go through the process of actually doing a machine learning algorithm or trying to train a data set, you know what data set you're trying to look for or what that pattern looks like. Why the S3 is signed with you, just because you need a simple object store with a get put kind of model and S3 is sort of a de facto standard, is that right? Pretty much, yeah, that and also, if there was a path to, let's say, Glacier, so all the frozen buckets have a place to go because again, you never know how deep, how long back you'll have to go for a data set to really start looking for a trend and that would be key. So are you using Glacier or not? Not very much right now. There are certain areas, my counterparts are using AWS quite a bit. So Lawrence Livermore has a pretty big Splunk implementation out on AWS right now. Okay, cool. All right, well, Phillip, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your knowledge and last thoughts on Conf 18. Things you're learning, things you're excited about, anything you can talk about. This is a great place to meet folks, to network, to also learn different techniques in order to do data analysis and it's been great to just be in this community. All right, well, thanks again for coming on. Appreciate it. Thank you. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. We're at Orlando Day One of Splunk's Conf 18. You're watching theCUBE.


We are the women of the PMC Lawson Cancer Center. We are here to support your journey, deliver hope, and provide solutions that will advance your care. Our purpose is saving lives. From November 14th to 18th, the Kentucky Blood Center is hosting the 35th annual Big Blue Crush. The Blood Drive acts as a competition between Kentucky and Tennessee to encourage football fans to donate during the holiday season. Donations can be made either by appointment or walk-in. Big Blue Crush is an annual competition that we have versus Medic Regional Blood Center in Tennessee. This is actually gonna be the 35th edition of the competition. It used to line up with the Kentucky Tennessee football game. Obviously the schedule for football has changed a little bit, so that game has already happened. But it's on the calendar specifically for in the middle of November every year to help with the blood supply both in Kentucky and Tennessee. The Thanksgiving holiday coming up, that is always a time when the need for blood is gonna go up. People are traveling more. The holidays, just naturally, we are going to have an increase in demand around that time. On top of donating for a good cause, all donors will receive a football school long sleeve shirt. One lucky winner will receive four tickets to Kentucky versus Louisville on November 26th at Kroger Field. As far as the football school shirt is concerned, every donor that comes in and donates is actually gonna get that. It's kind of a nice honoring the football team's recent rise of the last few years. It's a cool item we think folks are gonna really like with the football school shirts. And in addition to that, every donor that comes in is going to be registered to win four tickets to the UK Louisville football game later than November. I'm a big believer that folks wanna give back and wanna help. And this is something you can do to help your community that doesn't cost anything but a little bit of your time. You know, it only takes again 45 minutes an hour and with the way we split the blood, you're gonna save up to three lives. So if you're looking to give back and looking to help your community, I can't think of something that has a bigger impact than it's easier to do than giving blood. Reporting from Mountaintop News, I'm Nick Colum.


Hey, welcome back everyone. Day three of AWS re-invent 2020. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, co-host of theCUBE. Dave, 10 years for us. The leader in high tech coverage is our slogan now. 10 years of re-invent day. We've been to every single one except for the original, which we would have come through if Amazon actually marketed the event, but they didn't. It's more of a customer event. This is day three. It's the machine learning, AI keynote. Swamy's up there. A lot of announcements. We're going to break this down. We've got Andy Thigh here, Vice President of Constellation Research. Andy, great to see you've been on theCUBE before. One of our analysts bringing the analysis commentary to the keynote. This is your wheelhouse AI. What do you think about Swamy up there? I mean, he's awesome. We love him. Big fan of theCUBE and we're a fan to him. But he got 13 announcements. A lot. A lot. So, well, some of them are. First of all, thanks for having me here. And I'm glad to have both of you on the same show attacking me. I'm just kidding. But some of the announcement really, sort of like a game changer announcements. And some of them are like, meh, just to plug in the holes, what they have. And then- A lot of golf claps. Yeah, right. And you could have also noticed that by when he was making the announcements, the clapping volume difference, you could say, which is better, right? But some of the announcements are really, really good. Particularly we talked about, one of that was Microsoft took that out of having the open AI in there, doing the large language models. And then they were going after that, having the transformer available to them. And Amazon was a little bit weak in the day area. So they couldn't, they don't have a large language model. So they are taking a different route, saying that, you know what? I'll help you train the large language model by yourself, customized models. So I can provide the necessary instance. I can provide the instant volume, memory, the whole line, yeah. So you can train the model by yourself without depending on them kind of thing. So Dave and Andy, I want to get your thoughts. Because first of all, we've been following Amazon's deep bench on the infrastructure pass. They've been doing a lot of machine learning and AI, a lot of data. It just seems that the sentiment is that there's other competitors doing a good job too, like Google, Dave, and I've heard folks in the hallway even here, ex-Amazonians, saying, hey, they train their models on Google and then they bring them to SageMaker. Because it's better interface. So you got Google making a play for being that data cloud. Microsoft's obviously putting in a great kind of package to kind of make it turnkey. How do they really stand versus the competition guys? Good question. So they each have their own uniqueness and the variation that take it to the field, right? So for example, if you were to look at it, Microsoft is known for its industry related things that they've been going after, industry verticals and whatnot. So that's one of the things I looked here. They had this omics announcement, particularly towards that healthcare genomics space. That's a huge space for HPC related AI ML applications. And they have put a lot of things in together here in the SageMaker and in their models, saying that, you know, how do you use this transformative to do things like that? Like for example, drug discovery, for genomics analysis, for cancer treatment, the whole nine yards, right? That's a huge volumes of data though. So they're going in that healthcare area. Google has taken a different route. I mean, they want to make everything simple. All I have to do is that I got to call an API, give what I need and then get it done. But Amazon wants to go at a much deeper level, saying that, you know what? I want to provide everything you need. You can customize the whole thing for what you need. So to me, the big picture here is, and Swami references, hey, we're a data company. We started to talk about books and how that informed them as to, you know, what books to place front and center. Here's the big picture, in my view. Companies need to put data at the core of their business. And they haven't. They've generally put humans at the core of their business and data and now machine learning are at the outside in the periphery. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook have put data at their core. So the question is, how do incumbent companies, and he mentioned some, Toyota, Capital One, Bristol Myers Squibb, I don't know, are those data companies, you know, we'll see. But the challenge is most companies don't have the resources, as you well know, Andy, to actually implement what Google and Facebook and others have. So how are they going to do that? Well, they're going to buy it, right? So are they going to build it with tools? That's kind of like you said, the Amazon approach. Or are they going to buy it from Microsoft and Google? I pulled some ETR data to say, okay, who are the top companies that are showing up in terms of spending? Who's spending with whom? AWS number one, Microsoft number two, Google number three, Databricks number four, just in terms of, you know, presence. And then it falls down. Data robot, Anaconda, DataIQ, Oracle popped up, actually, because they're embedding a lot of AI into their products and, of course, IBM. And then a lot of smaller companies. But do companies generally, customers, have the resources to do what it takes to implement AI into applications and into workflows? So a couple of things on that. One is, when it comes down to, I mean, it's no surprise that the top three are the hyperscalers because they all want to bring their business to them to run the specific workloads. On the next biggest workload, as he was saying in his keynote, are two things. One is the AI, I'm all workloads. The other one is the heavy unstructured workloads that he was talking about. 80%, 90% of the data that's coming off is unstructured. So how do you analyze it? It's such as the geospatial data he was talking about, the volumes of data you need to analyze, the deep neural network you ought to use. Only hyperscalers can do it, right? So there's no wonder all of them on top. For the data, one of the things they announced, which not many people paid attention, there was a zero ATL that they talked about. What that does is a little bit of a game-changing moment in the sense that you don't have to, for example, if you're trying the data, if the data is distributed everywhere, if you have to bring them all together to integrate it to do that, it's a lot of work to doing the ATL. So by taking Amazon Aurora and then Ratchet, combine them as zero or no ATL and then have Apache Spark applications run on top of analytical applications, ML workloads. That's huge, so you don't have to move around the data. Use the data where it is. I think you said it. They're basically filling holes, right? They created this suite of tools, let's call it. You could say it's a mess. It's not a mess because they're really powerful, but they're not well integrated and now they're starting to take the seams, as I say. Well, yeah, that's a great point. And I would double down and say, look it, I think that boring is good. We had that phase in Kubernetes, hype cycle where it got boring and that was kind of like, boring is good. Boring means we're getting better, we're invisible. That's infrastructure, that's in the weeds, in between the toes, details. It's the stuff that, you know, people, we have to get done. So, you know, you look at their 40 new data sources with data wrangler, 50 new app flow connectors, Redshift, AutoCAD, this is boring, good, important shit, Dave. It's like, you got to get it. And the governance is going to be key. So to me, this may not jump off the page. Adam's keynote also felt a little bit of, we got to get these gaps done in a good way. So I think that's a very positive sign. Now, going back to the bigger picture, I think the real question is, can there be another independent cloud, data cloud? And that's to me, what I try to get at my story in your breaking analysis, kind of hit a home run on this is, there's interesting opportunity for an independent data cloud. Meaning, something that isn't AWS, that isn't Google, isn't one of the big three that could sit on it and so on. Let me give you an example.  They were like talking, well, Databricks and Snowflake are basically batch. Okay, not transactional. And you look at Aerospyte, I can see their booth here. Transactional databases are hot right now. Streaming data is different. Confluence different than Databricks. Is Databricks good at hosting? No, Amazon's better. So you start to see these kinds of questions come up where Databricks is great, but maybe not good for this, that and the other thing. So you start to see the formation of swim lanes or visibility into where people might sit in the ecosystem, but what came out was transactional and batch the relationship there and streaming real-time and versus the transactional data. So you start to see these new things emerge. Andy, what's your take on this? You're following this closely. This seems to be the alpha nerd conversation and it all points to who's going to have the best data cloud, say data super-clouds, I call it, but what's your take? Yes, data cloud is important as well, but also the computational that goes on top of it too. Because when the data is unstructured data, that much of a huge data, it's going to be hard to do that with a low model compute power. But going back to your data point, the training of the AI ML models required the batch data. That's when you need all the historical data to train your models. And then after that, when you do inference of it, that's when you need the streaming real-time data that's available to you so you can make an inference. One of the things what they also announced which is somewhat interesting is, you saw that they have like 700 different instances geared towards every single workload. And there are some of them very specifically run on the Amazon's new chip, the inference in two and the training on TR-1 chips. That basically not only has a specific instances, but also is run on a high-powered chip. And then if you have that data to support that, both the training as well as towards the inference, the efficiency, again, those numbers have to be proven. They claim that it could be anywhere between 40 to 60%? Well, so a couple of things, you're definitely right. I mean, Snowflake started out as a data warehouse that was simpler and it's not architected in its first wave to do real-time inference. It's not.  It's copying, it's customer-driven because they probably walk into an account and they say, hey, look what Snowflake's doing for us.  And they go, oh, that's a good idea. Let's do that too. You saw that with separating compute from storage, which is their tiering. You saw it today with extending data sharing, redshift data sharing. So how does Snowflake and Databricks approach this? They do it with ecosystem. They bring in ecosystem partners. They bring in open-source tooling and that's how they compete. I think there's unquestionably an opportunity for a data cloud. Yeah, and I think the super cloud conversation and then SkyCloud with Berkeley, Paper, and other folks talking about this kind of pre-multi-cloud era. I mean, that's what I would call us right now. We're kind of in the pre-era of multi-cloud, which, by the way, is not even yet defined. I think people use that term, Dave, to say, oh, it's some sort of magical thing that's happening. Yeah, people have multiple clouds. They end up by default, not by design, as Dell likes to say. And they got to deal with it. So it's more of their inheriting multiple-cloud environments. It's not necessarily what they want in the situation. So to me, that is a big, big issue. Yeah, I mean, again, going back to your Snowflake and Databricks announcements, they're a data company. So that's how they made their mark in the market, saying that, you know, I do all these things. Therefore, I had to have your data because it's seamless data. And Amazon is catching up with that with a lot of their announcements that they made. How far is it going to get traction to change when it has to see? Yeah, I mean, to me, there's no doubt about it, Dave. I think what Swami's doing, if Amazon can get corner the market on, out of the box, ML, and AI capabilities so that people can make it easier, that's going to be the end of the day at TellSign. Can they fill in the gaps? Again, boring is good. Competition, I don't know. I mean, I'm not following the competition, Andy. This is a real question mark for me. I don't know where they stand. Are they more comprehensive? Are they more deeper? Are they have deeper services? I mean, honestly, it shows all the different capabilities. Where does Amazon stand? What's the prospects? Particularly when it comes to the models, so they're going at a different angle that, I will help you create the models. We've talked about the zero ATL and the whole data. We'll get the data sources in, we'll create the model, we'll move the whole model. We're talking about the ML Ops teams here, right? And they have the whole functionality that they built in that they've matured over the year. So essentially, they want to become the platform when you come in. I'm the only platform you would use from the model training to deployment to inference to model versioning to management, the whole line, yes. And that's the angle they're trying to take. So it's a one-source platform. What about this idea of technical debt? Adrian Kharkov was on yesterday, John. I know you talked to him as well. He said, look, Amazon's Legos. You want to buy a toy for Christmas, you can go and buy a toy. Or do you want to build a toy? If you buy a toy in a couple of years, it could break. And what are you going to do? You're going to throw it out. But if part of your Lego needs to be extended, you extend it. So, you know, George Gilbert was saying, well, there's a lot of technical debt. Adrian was countering that. Does Amazon have technical debt? Or is that Lego blocks analogy the right one? Well, I talked to him about the debt. And one of the things we talked about was, what do you optimize for? EC2 APIs or Kubernetes APIs? It depends on what team you're on. If you're on the runtime team, you're going to optimize for Kubernetes. But EC2 is the resources you want to use. So I think the idea of the 15 years of technical debt, I don't believe that. I think APIs are still hardened. The issue that he brings up that I think is relevant is, it's an end situation, not an or. You can have the bag of Legos, which is the primitives, and build a durable application platform, monitor it, customize it, work with it, build it. It's harder, but the outcome is durability and sustainability. Building a toy, having a toy with those Legos, glued together for you, you can get the play with. But it'll break over time. Then you got to replace it. So there's going to be a toy business, and there's going to be a Lego's business. Who are the toys in AI? Well, out of the box. Who's out of the box? So you're asking about what toy is Amazon building?  If people can have out of the box. What about Google? What about Microsoft? Are they basically more building toys, more solutions? So Google is more of building solutions, angle, like I give you an API kind of thing. But if it comes to vertical industry solutions, Microsoft is ahead, right? Because they have had years of industry experience. I mean, there are other smaller clouds that are trying to do that too. IBM being an example. But now they are starting to go after the specific industry use cases. They think that through. For example, the medical one we talked about, right? So they want to build the health lake, security health lake that they're trying to build, which will keep a compliant. It'll provide all the European regulations, the whole line of eyes. It'll help you personalize things as you need as well. For example, if you go for a certain treatment, it could analyze you based on your genome profile, saying that the treatment for this particular person has to be individualized this way. But doing that requires enormous power, right? So if you do applications like that, you could bring in a lot of this, whether healthcare, finance, or what have you. And it'll be easy for them to use. What's the biggest mistake customers make when it comes to machine intelligence, AI, machine learning? So many things, right? I could start out with even the model. Basically, when you build a model, you should be able to figure out how long that model is effective. Because as good as creating a model and going to the business and doing things the right way, there are people that they leave the model much longer than it's needed. It's hurting your business more than it is. You know, it could be things like that. Or you're not building it as possible, AI or later things. You're having a bias in your model. That are so many issues. I don't know if I can pinpoint one. But there are many, many issues. Responsible AI, ethical AI. All right, well we'll leave it there. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. Here at day three at ReInvent, I'm Jaffer at Dave Vellante. Andy's joining us here for the critical analysis and breaking down the commentary. We'll be right back with more coverage after this short break.


The makers of Wrigley's Spearmint chewing gum invite you to enjoy life, Life with Luigi, a comedy show created by Si Howard, directed by Mack Benoff and starring that celebrated actor, Mr. J. Carol Nash, with Alan Reed as Pasquale. The makers of Wrigley's Spearmint chewing gum are glad to bring you Life with Luigi because they feel it's a friendly, good-natured show that offers you relaxation and enjoyment. And you know, Wrigley's Spearmint chewing gum offers you relaxation and enjoyment too.  Wrigley's Spearmint gum tastes good, it's refreshing, and the good easy chewing gives you comfort and satisfaction. So chew Wrigley's Spearmint gum often, every day. Millions enjoy it, and you will too. Now, Wrigley's Spearmint chewing gum brings you Luigi as he writes another letter describing his adventures in America to his mama-basco in Italy. Dear mama-mommy! It's now summertime in Chicago, and everybody's feeling very, very hot there. Last week, I'm reading a paper in a weather column and it's a max temperature, 102. Next of day was a max temperature, 103. After that, there's a max of 104. But yesterday, I see that a max of the temperatures is at 98, they must have given a max of penicillin. Well, anyway, now he's back to normal. But one thing they got in America, mama-mommy, to keep it cool, is called air conditioning. I'm explaining you what's this air conditioning. In the wintertime, you've got a good chance to catch pneumonia. But in case you're missing in the winter, then there's air conditioner, which is to give you a chance to catch it in the summertime. But the strangest thing about America is that there's summer vacation. City people, they run to the country. Country people, they run to the city. Seashore people, they run to the mountains. Mountain people, they run to the seashore. Mama-mommy, it seems like nobody's to take a vacation, they're just to change into places. Hell is a hot, hot night, and it would be nice now to take a walk in a park. But it's a time for my night school to class, and I'm rather be there than any other place. America, I love you. You're like a papa to me, from the ocean to ocean. All right, class, class, it's a hot night, so let's pay attention, I'll call the roll. Mr. Basco. Present. Mr. Harowitz. Present. Mr. Olson. Mr. Schultz. PUSH-PIRE-ING. Mr. Schultz, you are present, you are not perspiring.  Thank you, fellow boobers. Tonight I'm hotter than a bald head in the bleachers. Please, Mr. Schultz, it's hot enough. Why must you remind us? Miss Spaulding. Yes, Mr. Harowitz? If you would be so kind as to listen to a suggestion of mine, I would like to make it. Yes. One of these hot days, why can't we hold our class on the beach? Harowitz, that's a wonderful idea. I haven't ever been to the beach before, and I'm a like to go. Well, it's a cool suggestion, but what could we possibly study on the beach? Why could you possibly study on the beach? And not on me. Mr. Schultz, please. Oh, no, but Miss Spaulding, we could have studied history, we could have studied spelling, and we could have studied anything.  Miss Spaulding, I think I gave birth to a good idea. Not only could we start the lessons, but we could bring along sandwiches and we'll make a beach party. That sounds very good. Yeah, please, Miss Spaulding, let's go, huh? Miss Spaulding, if I may be permitted a few words. I don't like the idea. I don't think we should have a class on the beach. Oh, stop, Olsen, you can come along too. On a hot day, there's nothing like having a long, a wet blanket. Besides, I do my homework in the daytime, and my schoolwork to me is more important than wasting an afternoon on a hot, crowded beach. In other words.  That's not true, Schultz, I haven't got bandy legs. No, Olsen, when you cross your legs, your knees are still 11 inches apart. And you wait a minute, Schultz.  You should see me in the bathing suit.  Oh, come on, Olsen, what do you say? You coming too, huh? Oh, yeah, by you and me, I think I come. Oh, and I would like to bring Mrs. Olsen too. A wonderful idea. My wife, Esther, would love to come along too. All right, and I'll bring my wife too. Yeah, but wait a minute, the class, I'm a nogata wife, so what am I gonna do? Out of luck, I guess, sir. Out of luck, yeah.  Well, you've got to get a girl for Luigi. That's right, Olsen, how? Yeah, no, wait a minute, Luigi, tell me this. Can you wits like this? I don't know, I don't know, but I'm not gonna try. Don't worry, he'll get a girl. Luigi, when you see a beautiful girl on the beach, you walk over and ask her what time it is. Oh, but it's sure, sir, I'm always a carry-watching in my pocket. Can you ask her what day it is? What month it is, what year it is? Yeah, but it's sure, sir, I'm always a carry-little pocket calendar too. Then you walk over to her and ask her for a light. But it should, sir, I'm always a carry-match is in a pocket, sir. You know something, Luigi, you must be wearing the bulkiest bathing suit in Chicago. Wait, wait, wait, wait, Luigi, I got a girl for you. Shirley Smith, or you should see a doll, a picture for a girl. Yeah, but how do you think this girl is gonna go with me? Why not, Luigi, a fellow like you I'll always recommend to a girl. Thank you, Harowitz. Well, everything is all settled, except mishpolding. What about you? Are you coming with us tomorrow? You haven't said a word. Well, I don't know, I... Oh, come on, mishpolding.  Well, I'd like to come, but... I don't know what you're gonna look like with a bathing suit. Well... You should have more respect. Your old son don't interrupt when Mr. Schultz is speaking. Gee, my friend. Hello, Luigi, hello, hello.  I'm... I'm so happy. Tomorrow I'm going to the beach, and I'm going into the water for the first time. Hey, Luigi, that's wonderful. Rosa, she's crazy about the beach. I had to wait till you see her in her new bathing suit.  Believe me, Luigi, she's a sight... That I can't believe. You wanna please the first guy?  You see, I'm going out with a girl. Nice and nice a girl. Her name is Shirley Smith. Look, Luigi, I'm trying very hard at the control of myself. If you need a girl to take to the beach, why, you know, ask her my Rosa first. Well, Pascuali, the whole... The whole thing is happening so fast, that before I knew anything... That's the trouble with you.  When all the time in my house you can find a nice plump turkey. You're so right, Pascuali. Rossi is a real turkey. That's a funny thing. When I say it, it's a come-out-of-difference. Look, Luigi, tell me something, will you? What's this that Shirley Smith's got, eh? Hello, Pascuali. Hello, which is to say that she's a beautiful... Ah, but only beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. That's what he said. All right, all right. What if a girl is a beautiful and she's got a nice shape with pretty hair and all that? That's another thing. My Rossi has got something none of these girls has got. Do you know what that is? 250 pounds, yes. No, I mean a character. And don't make so much fun about her weight. I want to tell you something. When you marry a girl, you should take all you can get for those lean years. You know, Luigi, how they always are talking about bad times. When it comes to depression, my Rossi is going to go ten years without eating. I feel like he's a busker. Isn't that what you're talking about? Horowitz has already made the date for me. So if you're excusing me, I'm going out now to buy me a nice bath in a suit. All right, then go, go. You're so anxious to show off to a girl with a fancy bath in a suit.  I got a good notion. Bath in a suit. Sit down, a little pumpkin ahead. Sit down and what for? Sit down, I'm going to talk to you. Look, no matter what's happened with you and Rossi, you and me, we're still friends, Luigi. You know that.  You know that. I always want to help you. Oh, thank you, Busker. That's nice. And I'm elected to hear you say that. Sure, Luigi. I'm going to help you like a mama tiger to help a little baby deer. That's nice. Luigi, when you go out with a girl, here's my advice.  You want to spend the money on a girl. Well, sure. That's right, Busker. But I'm going to get a bath in a suit. That's where I come in. I'm going to give you one of mine. Thank you, Busker. Busker, you're so good at it to me. It's nothing. But wait, wait, wait to you. Hey, you were a size of 54. Look, Luigi, this is a French style of bath in a suit. You've got to figure with a foreign exchange. Oh. You see, three francs is the worth of one American dollar.  But, Busker, my size is a 38. Let me finish. When you trade from a French to American, they always give you a bonus. So you take 18, you add a 20, you've got a 38. 38? Oh, that's a just my size. Oh, you lucky puppy. Oh, Luigi, are you going to look a good in this bath in a suit? It's not the ordinary type. This one's got a stripes. Stripes? Only on the shirt. Shirt? The latest model, only half a sleeve. Half a sleeve. And you should see the trunk, Luigi. It's got the new look. New look? That's all right. It comes down below the knees. But, first of all, Luigi, in the back, it's got a little holes, especially if across the veneration. That's called the peek-a-boo type. That's the sound of a very, very modern, modern. Modern. Luigi, you know how summer suits is a show of a picture of a girl diving and it's a, say, champion on it? Yes, I see that. Well, on this suit is a picture of a man smoking a cigar and it's a say, voter for President McKinley. It's a sound of wonderful. Sure, Luigi, when you walk on the beach with this girl, Shirley, nobody's going to look on her.  Before we return to life with Luigi, here's an easy way to get more enjoyment and satisfaction out of the things you do during the day. From time to time, chew a stick of refreshing, delicious, wriggly, spearmint gum. You see, chewing on a good piece of gum just naturally helps you feel better and enjoy what you're doing. Gives you a little lift and makes things go smoother and pleasanter for you. Wrigley spearmint gum tastes good, too.  Enjoy it often. At home, at work, wherever you are. Remember to get Wrigley's spearmint chewing gum. Healthful, refreshing, delicious. Now, let's turn to page two of Luigi Basco's letter to his mother in Italy. And so, mama mia, soon I'm going to meet all of my friends, and this girl is Shirley at the beach. I hope she's going to like me. A little while ago, Pasquale is bringing his, in his bed in his suit. Nice and neat, all packed up. It has a funny smell, so I'm asking Pasquale what it is. And his tell me it's a noop but a fume that's called Evening in the Mortables. Well, soon the mama mia is going to be my first time at the beach, and I'm going to meet this girl, Shirley. I'm going to hardly wait. Luigi, my fellow boomer. Hello, Schultz, are you all ready? Ready, am I ready? Well, look at me.  Schultz, hey, you mean to feed an army? Don't tell me about my sandwiches. Look, come on, Luigi. All right, Schultz, tell me what I should do to make good impression on this girl, Shirley. Now, Luigi, take a tip from me. Girls go crazy about fellas but make love to them. Oh, Schultz, what are you talking about? You make a lover to a girl on the first date? Sure.  But Schultz, Schultz, what if we go in the water? You do the same thing on your whole feet.   No, Luigi, believe me. I know girls. In Italy, you serenade a girl under a balcony with a guitar.  But in America, you take her to the beach, you buy her a humburger and a root beer, and you spend the rest of the day trying to get a return on your investment. Oh, Schultz, Schultz, you know something? You make me feel better already. I'm not going to be so nervous now. Well done. Good, Luigi. Come on, we got to go. Who are we going to have fun under a beach? Healthy exercise, walking, running, jumping, swimming. Oh, my homatism is killing. What a crowded beach. You're right, Schultz. You can't even breathe. What do you know? Down there by the pier, a hot dog fainted and was squeezed too tight in the road. Well, there's Olsen. We'll all be together as soon as Luigi comes out of the locker room. No, Olsen, where is your wife? Well, while walking along the beach, we got separated. Where is your wife, Olsen? She got lost in the crowd. Schultz, where is your wife? Well, we got separated too. It wasn't easy, was it, boy? Look what's coming. Just look at her. Ain't you glad we lost our wives? Hello, everybody. Mr. Olsen, Mr. Horowitz, Mr. Schultz.  Say something. Mr. Schultz, that's the first time I ever heard you say present. And perspiring. Miss Paulding, in that bathing suit you look, you should pardon the expression, hoo-ha. Thank you, Miss Paulding. You look just beautiful. Himmer class will never be the same. Look, look, look, everybody. Here comes Luigi. What is he wearing? Looks like a tent from Army Zerblers. Hello, everybody. Look what my friend and Pascalee has done to me. He's giving me this abiding suit. Well, Luigi, it does look a little big. Big? You're going to have to swim with the right hand so that the left hand can hold up the pads. Sure. And just look at those holes in the back. Yeah, but Pascalee has told me not to sew them up. That's to let in the light. Let in the light. You've got enough room over the holes for Venetian blinds. Hello, please, please, please, please, please, friends. I'm going to feel terrible. If you don't mind, I think I'm going to go home. Please tell the girl she's here. You stay right here, Mr. Basko. I don't blame you for feeling terrible the way we're all talking. Now let's all help him. Good, good. But what, what, what are you going to do? Let's form a circle around him. Huh? Come on now. I have a sewing kit. Now the first thing we'll do we'll cut off the bottom of these trunks. Oh, yeah. And it's a pleasure to get rid of this old shirt. That's good. Now give me a safety pin, Miss Baldy, and I'll pin him back over here. I should be very good at this. I had three babies. Now we'll just tack it up over here. Here. There, Mr. Basko. Now doesn't that look much better? Yeah, it's much better. Everybody's a big drafter. Well, well, thank you, friends. That's really helping me out. And not a minute too soon. Here comes Shirley. Yoo-hoo, Shirley! Come on, everybody. Let's all go for a swim and leave those two alone. No, but wait, wait, wait. Do you think I'm looking right to Shirley in this, this pants thing? Oh, I wouldn't worry about her. She seemed like a very nice girl coming down here. Luigi, just be yourself. If girls was only interested in bed and trunks, millions of dummies in store vendors would be married tomorrow. Come on, everybody. Ooh! Look at that zoot that she is wearing. Hello, Luigi. Oh, hello. Hello. You're not very talkative. Oh, well, um, aren't you going to say anything about my new bathing suit? What suit? The one I'm wearing. Don't you like it? What is it? Oh, what are you staring at? It's a polka dot suit. Mama Mia won the dot. Hey, cutie. I noticed you coming out of the locker room. Do you have any trouble with any of the characters around here? Just holler for me. No, I'm having no trouble at all. Excuse me, Mr. Who are you? I'm the lifeguard here. A lot of the girls around here call me muscles. Oh. Hey, you, can you do a double somersault? Oh, me? No, no, but I'm going to wiggle in my ears like a rabbit. Ha! Now, watch this, cutie. Don't step on my sandwich. Hey, that's a simple one. Why don't you think of it, baby? Quite impressive. Ah, nothing at all. Two weeks with the barbells, and I'm ashamed to show such an easy stunt. Hey, Busty, you think you want to try that one? Nope. Oh, what can you do? Well, let me see. Now, I can... I can make it like a chicken. Why don't you lay that egg? I'm pretty fast. Now, Dimples. Now, watch this. I stand on my hands. I go into a one and a half flip-flop and I land on my toes. Watch. Don't step on my sandwich. Pretty good, huh? Only two guys on the beach can do that one. Me and Mr. Shoulder Muscle of 1949. He keeps falling on his heels plenty of times. Boy, I'll bet you must spend a lot of time practicing. Ah, three, four hours a day. Now for my specialty. In this one, I take a running broad jump, land on my hands, flip over into a headstand and... Don't step on my sandwich! Head, fry up. Now, come on with me, cutie, and I'll show you. Now, wait a minute, Shirley. Don't, don't go. Look, I'm going to try that semi-trick and I'll watch everybody. First time I've been to... Mohammed! Hey, look at that bathing suit come apart. What is that there? A safety pin? You better call a diaper service, kid. You do for a change. Wait a minute, Shirley. Mom and me, she's to go away with him. Hey! I've been looking all over the beach for you. Hey, what's happened to my bathing suit?  My friends and I tried to fix it up, but it's no use. Pascuali is my first day on the beach and is the worst day in my whole life. Ah, what are your friends and all about a style? Luigi serves you right for trying to step out of your class.  Maybe you're right, Pascuali. Sure, I'm right. Well, Luigi, I've got to pep you up now.  I've got to call her over. Rosa! Rosa! Rosa, near my little clam shell. Say, hello to Luigi. Hello, Rosa. Well, Rosa, don't just stand there looking at Luigi. Say something nice. Luigi! I don't think there's enough sand on a beach.   I am, Luigi. Oh, let's go in for a swim.  I thought you was the one away with that laughter. What?  Oh, I was just trying to get rid of him. Oh, come on, Luigi. Let's go in the water. Oh, Shirley, it's going to be wonderful. Ah, just a minute, lady. A man is a half a married man. And if anybody's to try to steal a hammer from my daughter, I'm going to put her my foot down. Wait a minute. Look out the postcale. Who threw this potato salad into my face? I told you not to step on my face! Hannah, so, mami, what I thought it was going to be worse today in my life turned out to be very nice. Oh, that, Shirley, is a wonderful girl. After that, I'm going to bring her home from the beach. We're standing at a hallway, having the best time of my life.  And then when I'm going to say goodnight to her, Shirley is going to lean over to me and say, ain't you forget something, Luigi? Well, I'm feeling in my pockets. I got in my watch, in my pocket of calendar, in my matches. So I'm going to say no.    I'm going to have a son, Luigi, basketball and a little immigrant. Friends, the makers of Wrigley's Spearmint Chewing Gum hope you enjoyed tonight's episode of Life with Luigi. And they want to remind you that it's a good idea to have a few packages of Wrigley's Spearmint Chewing Gum in your home at all times. Give Wrigley's Spearmint to the children for a treat between meals. They love it, and it won't spoil their appetites. Enjoy Wrigley's Spearmint Gum often yourself. The good chewing will make the time pass more pleasantly for you. And pass Wrigley's Spearmint Gum around when you're entertaining your friends. It's a friendly gesture that people appreciate. So next time you go to the store, get a few packages of refreshing, delicious, Wrigley's Spearmint Chewing Gum. It costs so little. Tastes so good. And it's a treat that just about everyone enjoys. The makers of Wrigley's Spearmint Chewing Gum invite you to be sure to listen next week at the same time when Luigi Basko writes another letter to his mama Basko in Italy. Life with Luigi is a Sy Howard production. Pat Burton is associate producer. The script is written by Mac Benhoff and Lou Derman and directed by Mr. Benhoff. J. Carol Nash is starred as Luigi Basko with Alan Reed as Pasquale, Hans Connery as Schultz, Jody Gilbert as Rosa, Mary Schiff as Miss Balding, Joe Forte as Horowitz, Ken Peters as Olson with Lucille Alex, Ed Max and Gerald Moore. Music is under the direction of Lud Blusken, Charles Lyon speaking. This is the CBS Radio Network.


One value that I like a lot in best ball leagues over on Fandle is Zach Moss who's being drafted a hundred and seventh overall on average. Now he's going to be sharing a backfill with Devon Singletary, but Zach Moss is the bigger bodied running back between the two players. Devon Singletary only had two goal line rushes last year, so I think Zach Moss could take on that role. And the best part is you don't have to choose which running back is going to go off in a given week in a best ball format. It's going to choose for you. That's why I like Zach Moss on a run heavy team. There's also Deontay Johnson who I like a lot, who's just going a little bit ahead of where Zach Moss is being drafted. Last season we had a great, great rookie wide receiver class. Deontay Johnson with a circus at the quarterback position ended up leading that rookie class in receptions with Ben Rothesberger back. I'm expecting big things and a big year two breakout from Deontay Johnson.  He only saw 93 targets, but Washington also ran the second fewest offensive plays that we've seen any team run since 2011. There's going to be natural regression there, more volume for that offense, and there's not a lot of competition there. So Terry McLauren could push the 25, 26, maybe even 27 percent target year range, making him an awesome, awesome value.


Today we're going to dive into a critical enabler of meaningful connectivity and that is innovation. As an entrepreneur, it's important for you to test your products, to continuously test your products and to be willing to accept feedback. You might not get it the first time, but it doesn't mean that you failed. We are working on making sure that we have digital innovation policies in places, but also making sure that the legal framework is available. I firmly believe that innovation is a creator of opportunity. Educating, empowering with digital tools is the most important issue. We can build all the infrastructure if we're not able to use it or don't know how to use it. It's useless. Education is one of those key things where the infrastructure really can make a big difference. Ensuring that every child can have broadband network connectivity and access to the world's knowledge and information through 3G, 4G and now 5G. So I think that will also help with spurring innovation for generations to come. At UNFPA, we believe that innovation is a major, major game changer to accelerate progress for the Agenda 2030. Investing in supporting local ecosystem and build on collective brain power for young people is really a smart investment. One of the best ways to drive innovation is just making sure that the needs or ideas of underserved groups are brought to the foreground. And over and over again at IFC, we find that addressing these underserved groups both drives business and development impact. I needed funds. I needed somebody to believe in that idea from the very first point. And I also needed to have somebody to help me understand how the different players in the industry interact to make the ecosystem work. I also needed a mentor, a female leader in the business to help me, like to help me believe in myself much more to know that I can actually do it too. I'm going to ask each panelist to tell me in just one word what they would most like to see coming out of the WTDC conference. Impact. Hope. Collaborations. Innovation. Hope creation. Inclusion. Change. Transformation. Innovation. This is the decade of action as we've heard. And by innovating with digital technologies, I think it's our only hope to be able to leapfrog the opportunities and actually achieve the 2030 Agenda.


Welcome to Think Tech on Spectrum OC16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things that matter to tech and to Hawaii. I'm Lisa Anderson. And I'm Cynthia Sinclair. This week, we'll look at the 2019 U.S.-Hong Kong-China Forum presented by the Hong Kong Business Association of Hawaii at the Lawniakea YWCA. It featured an array of business speakers and panels examining the business climate and prospects in Hong Kong, China and Hawaii. Everyone knows that prosperity is enhanced by trade. This has been proven over the centuries. Trade and the resulting system of globalization has driven innovation, competition and quality, efficiency in markets and the allocation of resources, as well as global governance standards and stability. And it is obvious that how we respond to today's challenges will determine the next stage of the global, national and local economies. As the U.S. pulls back from globalization, China is advancing. The One Belt, One Road Initiative is Beijing's grand strategy. Will this great power rivalry define the 21st century? And with what effect? And how should global business navigate the resulting uncertainties? I'm here with Roger Epstein, who is a tax lawyer but who has done a lot of work in China. And that's why we're talking about Belt and Road, the Belt and Road Initiative, formerly known as One Belt, One and One Road. That's changed though. You could not argue that this is One Belt and One Road. This is many belts and many roads. It gurges the Earth, at least the Earth, as far as Asia and I think even some parts of Africa and Europe. We are not part of that Earth. Yeah, so let's talk first, in the first part of our show, about what it's doing, involved how it works the second part of our show let's talk about the American participation or not and if not what effect on the US you know because this is a global initiative yeah so I guess it was 2013 Xi Jinping decided going to do this and actually in my view it followed what he did with CCTV CCTV was a China news network in China and he decided or they decided back in the early the ought years to make it global and they did they made the China news network or something and there are 44 stations now all over the world and they are pumping out pro-China news all over the world yeah so they became global in terms of the information and propaganda and that would that worked so then this follows this is economic development all over the world right right oh yes and and the the the overall picture is here's places where there isn't adequate infrastructure either by land autos rail trucking or by sea which is the road so maritime so that the grand scheme of the Chinese is to lend money and build out the infrastructure in all these different countries so that you recapture the Silk Road the old Silk Road from China to across Europe and very very incredibly big undertaking and in my mind very thoughtful as I think the Chinese are in in economic matters to me China it sees the United States is where they want to be now things are definitely changing and the Trump administration has decided what's in it for us we need to protect ourselves I think that's exactly where you don't want to be as the world changes you want to be part of the change talking about the Belt and Road we had a competing kind of project with many of the leading the larger more established capitalist countries over there called the Trans-Pacific Partnership uncle Donald got us out of that and so now we don't even have we don't have anything and some of those players are trying to reform the the Trans-Pacific Partnership some of them are talking to China certainly we're out of it with these profound changes in the global economy the world needs a new convening platform to reflect and engage the competitive positions of emerging economies to address the future of public and private partnerships and to identify solutions for cross-border issues that affect us all in the program at Lawniakea the Hong Kong Business Association of Hawaii brought its flagship conference back to Honolulu to address a range of topics including economics trade investment urbanization infrastructure retail technology entrepreneurship and of course US-China relations as you know you saw the TV all the time about the China and US trade had conflict yeah so people call it trade war but I don't want to call it a trade war but it's a conflict so back and forth and I thought this put us a US resident or businessman it's just in a very odd position so especially like you want to do trade with China yeah a lot of trades with China actually you will be surprised may not be Hawaii but a lot of trade Hawaii should be interested Hawaii should know about these things participate at least in the conversation yes so and I thought because also I am a Chinese immigrant from Hong Kong and I also I also thought is put us in an awkward position because of they've been fighting for the trade so I hope that we can put in a program so everybody have a dialogue so we can talk about it and hopefully we can find a solution you know to to talk about program here I mean you have speaker after speaker I know you have a real you know this is a we have actually creative talent yeah eight our town speaker three of them are directly from Hong Kong and five of them is full from a US mainland yeah so when we do a show or a movie we always ask ourselves what is the takeaway what takeaway do you want people to get from this program on yes it's very clear that we have to two side of it morning and the afternoon the morning side we are focused on the US and China trade policy and relation so hopefully that the audience or the participant will learn and or participate in the dialogue and conversation after the the panel they addressed it and hopefully that we can find a common solution to solve at least the Hawaii and Hong Kong China problem not necessarily the national problem right so we cannot control but in the afternoon it's a practical business advice by all our speakers which is including Gerald Sabina I would I would expect nothing less yes you know from time to time you see little points of resistance by Beijing is a no you stay there Hong Kong we have our plans for Hong Kong and you are not the masters of your destiny we are but but that may or may not carry because the real momentum here is that Hong Kong was is and to a large extent will continue to be the gateway business wise to China am I right partly I think now what it what has happened quite frankly is that you've got direct lines to other parts of China from the outside and that that's not just North America but also South Asia and in Europe so Hong Kong is in an evolving situation to put it nicely you do have the you know two systems one country approach which some people would deem to be eroding within Hong Kong Singapore has looked very much as a potential counterpoint if not right to Hong Kong so we're in a state of flux Hong Kong still is a major way in but it's not exclusive and as you know right across the border there was a now a metropolis of Shenzhen previously it was just a relatively small village and now it's one of the largest larger cities in China as direct actions was everywhere in the world that's right and is developing to an IT and an AI powerhouse the forum convened a diverse group of speakers including diplomats officials academics executives entrepreneurs and opinion leaders from the East Hong Kong and the West Hawaii in the mainland the dialogue among speakers and participants was productive and stimulating it was designed to promote understanding on important issues to identify opportunities including trade globalization and competition and to explore possibilities of public-private partnerships investments and initiatives the discussion covered US-China relations and trade the new economy in the smart city the one belt one road initiative the financial and capital markets outbound investment from China the Chinese consumer retail and e-commerce markets and the state of innovation technology and entrepreneurship in the morning the forum helped us understand the current economic environment in the US-China trade dispute and get a handle on China's economic plans how these sea changes will affect the growth or decline of the global economy and thus our daily lives and how we can find solutions to current and future economic and geopolitical challenges I think what I want to do is really give you a an idea of how grand the project is initiative and it is simply too big for China to embark on in terms of the project now having said that I think I agree with the previous speaker I think Richard made a very good comment in terms of Bell and Roe and also Southeast Asia and South Asia simply said this is very different from Marshall plan of 30 40 years ago when US and the West and Europe were have been had been fully engaged in helping emerging market economies building roads and hospitals and blah blah blah blah blah blah now the difference is really is this is a pretty new initiative since 2013 and frankly many of the projects have been improved and funded but it's only five six zero so no one knows exactly what the implication is and I just want to highlight and point out that I totally agree with Richard in terms of Bell and Roe would not be successful globally period that's just simply too big an initiative for China to embark on now China has three trillion in reserves it's going to be burned very easily with all the project financing and funding and also more importantly being so proximity to Southeast Asia South Asia I think China has a very good chance of succeeding in Southeast Asia because of proximity in particular with provinces in central and west China as well as Hong Kong Greater Bay Area I think this is not a coincidence when you look at Bell and Roe initiative that was introduced in December 2013 that the Greater Bay Area recently introduced actually has been in planning for many years so I think China recognized that really the Bell and Roe initiative is a great concept very big in terms of investment resources and simply put that maybe China I think the government leadership properly realized the last few years that to succeed in some of the section of regions of the world in terms of BRI Southeast Asia South Asia would be the logical choices and more importantly I think is the allocation of resources being so proximity to the market and some of the projects that the previous speaker mentioned reflects that I think we have talked about AIB funding and certainly there is a lack of funding from ECA's you know export credit agencies EBRD even Japan Bank for international cooperation is also will be engaging with AIIB and just give you a different perspective there are currently I think probably close to 35 projects being approved and funded some of fully funded some of partially funded in about in terms of dollar value less than 8 billion dollars from AIIB now of the 35 projects only one in China less than half a billion dollars even though China is the largest shareholder but AIB actually was set up mirroring that of the World Bank ADB as well as EBRC so World Bank and I'm sure Mr. Sumida knows about it World Bank largest shareholder is US followed by Japan I think each has something like 19 to 17 percent respectively and also other countries and but the ADB Japan is the largest shareholder followed by US so I guess China has been actually following the AIB model has been following learning from the World Bank and the ADB so the funding aspect is very key to the success of the project because you need commercial banks to be involved certainly and I know a fact that all the top 10 Chinese banks these are not policy banks have already set aside probably each bank in excess of 200 billion dollars in the Bell and Rope funding and they have actually chosen Hong Kong to be the regional funding source center for all the BRI projects on behalf of China in the afternoon the forum covered practical information and advice about doing business in Hong Kong and China how global businesses can tap into China's most promising opportunities and cross-border foreign investments first and foremost question is where is the funding so the Chinese government has actually set up the Asian infrastructure investment bank AIIB to provide the initial funding for a lot of the projects an initial capital of 100 billion US dollars has been put aside for the initial funding for a lot of the projects and for the AIIB there are now more than 80 approved members with more than 60 funding members a lot of these funding members are actually countries from the West like the UK France Germany and so on so you can see that the initiative has actually got a lot of the support from the international country for TDC we try to promote the Belgium Rope business opportunities starting from the easiest projects that is close to Hong Kong and also under our influence so that's why we set priorities and we help companies to explore the business opportunities at the nearest markets in Southeast Asia first so Southeast Asia is the top priority among all the regions in the Belt and Road routings we have already brought a lot of the business dedications or even organized exhibitions in many Southeast Asian countries including Indonesia Malaysia and so on and even Vietnam so that we can capture those business opportunities there essentially Hong Kong is a trading hub so we try to promote our trading relationship with all these countries in the Southeast Asian countries this shows in effect the goal of China to reach through Europe the Middle East Africa and the northern part of the continent and it's already been summarized these are some of the scope of the geographic and economic perspectives for the Belt and Road 62% of the world's population 23 trillion combined GDP of all countries involved and in the five years since Belt and Road is first initiated we have as of last year about 117 countries that in one way or another are participating just by way of comparison if you look at the other regional trade arrangements that exist including TPP in its original form and then TPP X minus the United States in its current form one Belt one Road with China and without China RCEPT and the FTA AP you'll see that one Belt one Road is clearly the most extensive and largest in terms of numbers and coverage the forum also helped us learn how Hong Kong is a technology hub for entrepreneurs and startups who want to tap into Chinese capital and financial markets and it provided great opportunities for networking and deal-making among participants speakers and sponsors I think today everyone comes over here to look for business opportunities and that's why we try to promote the Belt and Road initiative because we think that you can all share the business opportunities arising from the initiative well basically as Jay mentioned the Belt and Road initiative doesn't consist of only one Belt or one Road the Belt actually means the Silk Road economic belt and the Road is a little bit misleading because it actually means the 21st century maritime Silk Road is the maritime routing instead of land routing so it actually consists of a lot of routings but then I think for the time being we don't need to bother about the exact location or the exact exact pathways of the Belt and Road we just look for the business opportunities arising from the Belt and Road initiative as Jay mentioned it is a very important initiative because it is a major globalization project initiated by the Chinese government but the intention of the Chinese government is for everyone to participate so that everyone can share the opportunities arising from this initiative because China alone cannot take up all the projects it's such a huge project it may last for a few generations so it's not just for our generation to enjoy the benefits but it's for our children even for our grandchildren to continue the effort in order to bring it to fruition and to have the final result of this globalization process want to know more about the Hong Kong Business Association of Hawaii check it out at hkbah.org or facebook.com slash hkbah and now let's check out our think tech schedule of events going forward think tech broadcasts its talk shows live on the internet from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays then we broadcast our earlier shows all night long and on the weekends and some people listen to them all night long and on 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with us let's think together we'll be right back to wrap up this week's edition of think tech but first we want to thank our underwriters okay synthia that wraps up this week's edition of think tech remember you can watch think tech on spectrum oc 16 several times every week can't get enough of it just like synthia does for additional times check out oc 16.tv for lots more think tech videos and for underwriting and sponsorship opportunities on think tech visit thinktecawaii.com be a guest or a host a producer or an intern and help us reach and have an impact on Hawaii thanks so much for being part of our think tech family and for supporting our open discussion of tech energy diversification and global awareness in Hawaii and of course the ongoing search for innovation wherever we can find it you can watch this show throughout the week and tune in next sunday evening for our next important think tech episode i'm elise anderson and i'm synthia sinclair aloha everyone