Hello and welcome to The Shakedown. Our mission is to inform people about how the criminal justice system works, the real people impacted by the justice system, and methods to improve justice through compassionate and casual conversation. Posts of The Shakedown share over 50 years of combined personal experience dealing with Texas prisons and working to change the criminal justice system. And now here's our show. I actually have a question for you guys just because we are talking about the access to it. It like depending on what obviously I don't know how like in depth you guys go just yet on like your stories but um what was the access to mental health there? Was it just seeing like a counselor and getting on meds if you needed it or they're really my experience. Go ahead Dave. Yeah, you got more.  I was in there longer than these guys and I've seen different areas of kind of how they dealt with the situation in prison you know in the early 90s remember I got in there there was a lot of people that would try to you I mean there still are but it's not as prevalent as it was then because you know the work regimen was so brutal I mean they put you in the fields and all that and they wake you I mean I don't want to go I don't want to want to get into the description of what goes on in the fields but it's back breaking and it's more than a lot of people think so these guys try to use they try to fake mental illness to keep from you know to get some kind of some kind of medical reason why they can't go out to the fields or why they can't work or why they can you know some kind of to better their situation and so the the medical staff was so they it doesn't matter I mean you have if you don't have some kind of um demonstrable uh uh mental illness I mean you're I mean it's got to be to the point where there's just no denying it and maybe even then uh uh they still wouldn't help you because they feel like everybody that goes in that they treated everybody that went in there as if you're just trying to get out of work and I can speak to so I went in there and uh I have I have epilepsy and I have I don't have grand mal seizures I have petty mal seizures which means I have like small blackouts right and so when I was trying to get my like when I I tried to get like when I first got diagnosed I got put on all sorts of different medications like to to figure out your dosage on what's going to work and what's not going to work it took years it took years to figure it out and we finally got the dosage right finally got a schedule right and then no more seizures and then go then got um then I got locked up and then they're like no you can't have your medicine what we might first is just said you don't have epilepsy I was like we don't have in our records you didn't say it when you first came in I'm like yes I did I did say it and then they and then they're like and then they said well we're going to give you this I'm like that's not my medication that's not the same thing it's not that doesn't it doesn't work then they then they're like well you need to have a seizure in front of us like if you're going to have a seizure then you have to have it in front of us and then you can do it then you then we'll give you your medication let me just kind of drop like abracadabra what do you mean like a seizure in command like they say yeah like let me just grab my fingers let's go they're like they're like when you feel like you're going to have a seizure then you need to come to medical and then you need to show us I said I don't have grand mal seizures first of all so you can't really see it and they're like so you can't it's not like you're going to get a show I just black out and that's that's it and do they not know you're in a prison the point of being in a prison is you just can't walk around you just can't walk around whenever you want to you're locked in a cell right also like these are medical professionals talking to you about this correct or what they are they're not doctors they're not nurses they're what they're called they're providers is what they're called they're medical providers they're they don't have any sort of licenses or anything like that no no they do oftentimes it's uh oftentimes it's like a punishment for some kind of offense a lot of I'm not joking I'm not I am no that makes complete sense no one wants to work no no medical care individuals are working because it's horrible they no they hate it there they and they're also one thing we haven't mentioned they are trained all of them are trained that we all lie all they are all trained that we are liars but another thing that they don't really care because like the doctor there he's working a 40 hour week he's making probably a hundred grand a year for doing nothing you know he just goes in there and sits around surfs the internet and goes home yeah I've seen some that do care don't give me that you know you can't paint right like that there's one or there's a few for sure there are there's you know and it's that's one of the things I wanted to ask you about is you know how do individuals and rainforest is always really big on this whole idea that you know don't just complain about something be the change that you want to see you know that so you know what the what does every what does each one of us have to do to to uh to better this situation to bring us closer to the to the to the ideal healthcare situation for mental health I mean and another question on top of that is yeah and what what do you I mean in your mind what do you see is the ideal I mean how would you envision a world where mental health is dealt with uh properly okay so I'm gonna I'm gonna do this backwards so I'm gonna answer that question and then the other one because I have ADHD and that's the forefront um so um my I guess ideal perfect world with mental health is everybody's treated as a human we still we I have so having borderline not a lot of people know a ton about it it's BPD for sure it is not bipolar disorder um it is completely villainized because it's in the same cluster B as narcissistic personality disorder antisocial personality disorder and histrionic personality disorder and who had all three of those that were well known serial killers so as ridiculous as that sounds we get grouped in with them somebody saw on a true crime podcast that Jeffrey Dahmer may or may not have borderline and they're like oh like you and I'm like I don't eat my friends thank you so you know it's it's like there are varying degrees of different mental illnesses we are not awful people and we get villainized a lot like therapists will it's very hard to find a therapist that will treat borderline because it is so all over the place like it's it's very black and white so you can absolutely idolize somebody the next day and spit on their grave the next or yeah idolize them one day and spit on the grave the next and you don't know why it is just switched so therapy is really really difficult for a lot of therapists and I get they have to protect their peace and stuff like that so I you know I've been bumped down to um CPTSD because I don't have seven out of nine I've got like five or six out of nine at this point characteristics but that's just we're villainized we are not understood we are villainized and I feel like a lot of people that deal with very complex mental disorders or just misunderstood mental disorders are just kept at arm's length and I feel like perfect world mental health is a privilege it's almost a requirement not that like you have to go see a therapist but I think therapy would be good for everybody whether you are just dealing with some work stress or you know you're a new parent or something like that um the ADHD also gives me very long-winded answers so sorry but yeah so you know I just I feel like we need to start treating mental illnesses like we treat people with physical illnesses like you have diabetes you need medication to stay alive you have depression and anxiety you need that medication to a lot of the times stay alive why do we sit there and go do you really need it do you tell a diabetic do you really need your insulin do you do you no we don't we're like you need that to function so why are we doing that with you know people seeking therapy and seeking help and trying to undo generational curses or undo their trauma or undo whatever the fuck is going on in their head sorry didn't mean to first um whatever's going on in their head so I think that when we start really humanizing mental illness as a whole is when we're going to be making a change and for the second technically the first question of what can what do what do I think you guys I it sounds ridiculous but writing your representatives writing your congress people annoying the shit out of the governor because it's not going to change unless somebody on the up and up decides that it needs to change so the more people that are in their ear going this is a problem we need to find a solution the more the squeaky wheel gets the grease or whatever that saying is I really feel like the more we're we're talking about it and the more we're annoying our representatives that this is their job the more we may actually start to move things in a different direction how do you so when you're talking about that and writing your congressman one of the big things that comes up in congress a lot is they do talk about mental health and it is it's the villain it's the reason that there's school shootings it's the reason that there's this or that and the the what ends up being the result of that is well we just anyone who has a mental health problem we need to take away more of their rights like yeah that's not how that works yeah and so how do you take what you're saying and then turn that like make it so that they're not taking away rights we're getting everyone help I think a lot of mental mentally ill people and mental illness in general is not seen as an actual illness it's seen as a problem that we just want to shove in the closet and pretend doesn't exist so we pretend to do things and we talk a big game and then we're just like okay that goes in the closet and we don't know more we don't have to talk about it anymore like we only have to talk about it when it's in our faces and we need to humanize it I'm sorry I'm gonna keep jumping over you know you're coming into prison in the early 90s I can remember that they uh they made a lot of attempts to uh to kind of turn prisons into a quasi uh mental health treatment thing they would take these prisoners that were convicted of of crimes and and then turn and then while they're in prison all of a sudden now now that you're mentally ill and and um they're gonna try and treat you it was a it was a what I'm trying to say is is that they were using prisons were a very convenient way to get this to get a problem out of the public's face it's not it's not a problem anymore if you can just you know chunk these people in prison just throw it just throw them outside of the view of everyone and that's that was a whole lot of what was going on it's really sad I was always taken by the the uh catch 22 situation that they wanted both ways when you're standing in front of a judge a da will will go on and on to a jury or to a judge about how competent you are and how you how in control that you were and how thought out any crime that you may have done was you know to uh to illustrate just how culpable each individual is to get you as much time as they possibly can and then as soon as you walk in the door they they they can't wait to tell you how crazy you are and that you're dangerous because of your craziness and so you can't be let go they even came up with uh I mean and don't get me wrong this is for a small subset of very unlikable people sex offenders but they came up with a thing called a um uh what it's called a commit civil commitment now it's that this idea started in florida sometime in the 90s where you had a guy that was done with his prison sentence and they and everybody started panicking because they were saying he was nuts which I they were saying was crazy and that they didn't want to release because he was dangerous because he was crazy which in my mind for the first thing I thought was if he was so crazy why didn't he go to an insane asylum why was he in a prison he would have never had you wouldn't be dealing with this issue right now if you didn't send him to prison you he would have been getting treatment this entire time so uh judges can't you know said of course you can't keep him in prison any longer than his sentence he has to be let go so they came up with this concept of civil commitment that that they were going to have doctors going to examine you and that if they determined that you were uh weren't saying well then they would take you straight from prison and then put you into a mental institution and and and they where they could keep you indefinitely and they and they're doing that right now but they're only doing it with sex offenders but I've seen how you know things oftentimes start with the uh the people that you can at least uh you know um uh defend like sex offenders and once that ball starts rolling then it gets into everyone it's going to get real ridiculous which is concerning yeah because I was going to ask you were they actually treating or were they just shoving a bunch of pills down people's throats and being like you're cured if yes there's a there was a lot of the pill thing that that's primarily what was going on there's it was thorazine whenever I first got there was like the main thing and you know it's and other over time you know other drugs have had the popularity they were over prescribing them to people I mean guys were walking around just just just dead eyed and drooling and medication I'm not not getting medication at all I think medication is fantastic when used properly and also used with therapy and coping skills and life skills and stress management so I'm not knocking medication at all I'm just saying like you can't shove a pill at a problem and call it a day that's not how that works definitely not what that's what Dave was talking about at the beginning he was talking about the thorazine shuffle that a lot of inmates especially at medical units that's what they you would you would see them walking around on I mean they call pill window in that case I have not heard in a minute oh yeah see a lot of people you know and then you have that's just crazy because yeah they just want to medicate them to keep them calm give them a tv as a babysitter and you know that kind of that's kind of how it is in like the I guess real world as well like they just want to give you pills and if the pills don't work well why don't the pills work you just haven't found a pill that works I medication doesn't work on me therapy does medicate I have been on I got a list longer than like some kids list to Santa on medications I've been on and they didn't work what worked was unpacking a lot of things in therapy and stuff like that and like I said I know friends I have friends that are on medication and that medication has saved their life but it you can't just shove a pill at somebody and call it a day that is it's not it doesn't how that works the math ain't mathen and you know that's you know you talk about that you know the guy um the guy that started valium or whatever it's like these big pharma companies they just push push push push push pills well because it's a profit you know it's like exactly totally it's like you know they don't want to see people go to therapy because that means the medication won't work and if they do see therapy they want to see you on Adderall or this or that or Xanax or something else they want to see you on something some kind of drug because it lines their pocket you know yeah or you get like where where I live in western New York we have such such a terrible like awful opioid crisis opioid crisis that you can't get meds that people actually would need for mental health like trying to get Adderall around here is insane oh Houston Houston's the same way there's no pharmacies in town that have it no and like I got off of it because I had there was such a shortage and it worked like the first round that I was on it it was great and now I found different supplements that work a little bit better along with just ADHD management but I mean that's the thing like but I've got friends in other states that are like yeah I got a Xanax prescription like no problem and I was like you can get Xanax like they're not prescribing it here yeah it's in Houston that's a big thing is Xanax everybody and so you can't get Xanax either and so they got all this fake Xanax coming you know that runs through that smart well you know so um Kerry Blakinger uh she has a podcast right she was talking about she went to tested a bunch of Adderall in Mexico unless the Adderall she tested tested for methamphetamines and not amphetamines and a lot of that coming over here and getting sold you know pharmacies yeah I could tell every single time I could tell which batch of Adderall actually worked because I would get a new manufacturer like almost every time every other month I had a new like it was either the amphetamine salts or like the D something or whatever yeah and one would actually work and the other one I was like why am I taking this because I'm not doing shit you know so I'm not surprised that things are being manufactured not correctly yeah that does surprise me either because they're gonna they're just going you know and big pharma just wants their money they don't care and you know that's a part of the problem too is they don't care no they won't as long as they're making a profit who cares about whether it's actually working or if it's you know actually good for somebody's system exactly it's all sure all the money right and inside we didn't talk about so one well like they really did not want inmates to have medications because that kind of that cost them money and then two if you actually were able to get your like hands on like if you could prove that you had this condition and like could get all the steps to go through it they did have a psychiatrist at most of the id units they I don't think they were at the transfer facilities but like at the the long-term housing units that you had like like if you were in prison for five years you weren't going to an id unit so you would never there wasn't even be possible to like see one unless you got shipped to an id unit um and then for for those for a long haul you go to an id unit and then they you go see a psychiatrist the psychiatrist um which I also think is only at certain units had psychiatrists not all of them did they would they would just basically regiment your dose of what medication you were on which was going to be some generic of something and of the limited medications it's not like you'd have a full pharmacy there to choose from and that that would be be it and that's what that's what guys have at prison and like if you wanted to have a visit like you say hey I need to go visit the psychiatrist the psychiatrist or you need to go get on some sort of medication or like do something at medical you'd have to send an i-60 in one day it might get responded to that night or the next day then you'd get called in um and it's going to take usually minimum it's probably going to take two hours like usually you have to sit and wait to get called in um that's another hour right you're going to get caught and count at least once you usually get caught and count twice especially if you're going to go see it like a psychiatrist because the psychiatrist takes their sweet time they're just trying to get through the day with this little work as possible and they're and they're just gonna um and then you're going to get caught and count at least twice but that's assuming that the officer at the your dorm says like um what is it you're they they listen to your lay in like the a lot of times they won't they won't even abide by it because you're let you have a lay in that's what's supposed to let you go to medical sometimes officers like no they'll call it out and that's fact and so then you don't even though you have a pass to go to medical they won't let you go and sometimes you get to medical and medical would be like hey where'd you been and we're like you're like well if i could have got out of myself or if i could have got out of the trusty camp i would have been here but they wouldn't let me out and you know and it's just it's just because they don't care again you know it's like the dorm boss doesn't care they just like it's just sad the whole thing i'm so glad to be away from there they don't see 90 of you as human beings that's really probably boys don't you they're they're trained not to see us as human beings i mean i think huh what what do you think dave come on no i was gonna say i think that you know that for the most part that people that are incarcerated get more therapy from the volunteers that come in through like the religious organizations because those people actually care you know and that was gonna be it's not a lot they don't get much but it's like at least they get something you know they're getting you know that was gonna be another thing i was gonna ask heather yeah heather uh uh said that one of the things that you want you know people to do is to write their their representatives and that's all that's that's very smart that's i mean it's a good idea but i i i'm wondering if there's another you know that's that's a top down kind of solution i wonder if there's a bottom up solution like it's something that that we all can do or something that we can get together and do that could that could be a start to help one person you can find shakedown merch graphic novels and other projects at waywardpress.com that's w-a-y-w-o-r-d-press.com if you would like to support the shakedown get exclusive content and watch episodes live you can support us at patreon.com slash the shakedown like subscribe and leave a comment to give more on that inner peace he so richly deserves


Hello and welcome to the video lecture on bidirectional shift register. Myself Mitz Enes Naik. At the end of this session, students will be able to describe the working of bidirectional shift register and they will be able to implement N-Bit bidirectional shift register. So before moving towards the concept of bidirectional shift register, you have to recall the basics of shift registers and their basic mode of operations like CISO, CPO, PISO and PIPO. So let us see more about it. So the bidirectional shift register is a type of shift register in which the data bits can be shifted either from left to right or from right to left, bit by bit means here serial in and serial out, shift left and shift right operation is allowed. So how many number of flip-flops we can use there, we can call it as N-Bit bidirectional shift register. For example, if we use 6 flip-flops then we can call it as 6-Bit bidirectional shift register. So this is the 4-Bit bidirectional shift register block diagram. Here 4-Bit flip-flops are used and each and every flip-flop is fed with the output of OR gate. Here the input of OR gate is fed with 2 AND gate outputs. As you can see here the OR gate 1 is fed with AND gate G1 and AND gate G5. Like that there are 8 AND gates and 4 OR gates available in the specific manner. As it is synchronized circuit the common clock is given to each and every flip-flop. Now we can call it as the flip-flop D0, D1, D2 and D3 and the corresponding outputs are Q0, Q1, Q2 and Q3. Now there are two input lines given. First is serial data input which is connected to gate G1 as well as it is connected to gate G8. So we will see what is the purpose behind this in the upcoming working section. The second input line is right-left bar. Here the right-left bar is also called as mode signal. It will allow the circuit to work as either shift-left or shift-right operation. The connections are like this. The first connection is output Q0 is fed to gate G2 of the next input logic of flip-flop. Output Q1 is fed to G3 that is input logic of next flip-flop D2. Like that so on each and every output of previous flip-flop is fed to the input logic of next flip-flop. There is another connection available. The output Q3 that is the output of last flip-flop is fed to gate G7 of the logic input of previous flip-flop D2. Means each and every output of the next flip-flop is fed back as input or input logic to the previous flip-flop. So two way connections are there. So we will see the working of this. First we will see the shift-right mode. Later we will select the signal-right-left bar as 1. It will allow the circuit to act as right shift mode. So let us take an example. We have to display the output 1011 that is the output at Q0 will be 1, Q1 will be 0, Q2 will be 1 and Q3 will be 1. Now it will enable G1, G2, G3 and G4. As we know the AND gate act as an enable circuit when one of the input is high and in that case the output of that AND gate will be whatever the output we are giving to second terminal. So in this case due to right-left bar 1 we are going to enable gates G1, G2, G3 and G4. So the output of these AND gates are the serial data coming to second terminal. Now in this case the AND gates G5, G6, G7 and G8 are giving the outputs 0. So at first clock cycle we are going to select the input of the given bit stream 1011 and in that we will select the rightmost bit 1. So the input to G1 will be 1 and the output for the flip-flop D0 will be 1. So in this case at clock pulse 1, Q0 will be 1. Now in the second clock pulse the data will be shifted towards right by 1 and the second one will come to output of Q0. At the third clock pulse the data bit will be shifted towards right at D2, D0's data will be at D1 and new data will be at Q0 that is the data is 011 and at the fourth clock pulse all bits are shifted towards right 1 by 1 and finally we will get the data 1011. So this is the tabular form of shift right mode according to the clock pulses and similarly we can show the illustration of shift right operation of BSR. Now we will move towards the shift left mode. Here the reverse procedure will be there, right left bar is provided with input 0. So it allows the whole circuit to act as the shift left mode. So again we will take the input bit as 1011 and we have to display the same bits to Q0 up to Q3 that is 1011. Now we have to select the leftmost bit of this bit stream that is 1. So it will enable now the gates G5, G6, G7 and G8. In this case the gates G1, G2, G3 and G4 will give the output as 0. Now at the first clock cycle the input is given through the serial data input to the gate G8 and here the input is 1. So the output of this AND gate will be 1. Now this output is given to OR gate and which is provided to D flip flop which will result into the output Q3 1. According to the structure the output is fed back to the input logic of previous flip flop. So here in next the bit will be shifted towards left by 1 and the new bit will be appeared at the output Q3. At the third clock pulse the bit is shifted towards left by 1 and the bit of Q3 is shifted towards Q2 and new bit will be appeared at Q3 that is the output will be 1011. Next clock pulse will move the bits towards left by 1 bit and finally we will get the result 1011. Now this is a tabular form of left shift mode according to the clock pulses and serial input given to the inputs input lines. So first we will select here Q3 as we have to move from left right to left. So first we will select here the output Q3 and from Q3 up to Q0 we can show the tabular form like this. Now I will request to stop the video for while and you have to sketch the waveform illustrating shift left mode. Welcome back. So the illustration of shift left mode of BSR can be shown like this. I hope your answer is similar to this. Here are some applications of N-bit BSR. So N-bit BSR can be used in scanning circuit, time delay circuits and calculators and some ICs can be shown here. IC74671 is 4-bit bi-directional shift resistor, IC74HC194 is 4-bit bi-directional universal shift resistor, IC74HC198 is 8-bit bi-directional universal shift resistor. These are some references. Thank you.


from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE Conversation. Hello everyone, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California. The CUBE headquarters, I'm John Furry, CoastalCuber, guest here is Megan Eisenberg, CMO of a new hot company called Trip Actions, formerly the CMO at MongoDB. Before that talk you signed, we've done each other some advisory boards. Great to see you. Yes, great to see you as well. Exciting new opportunity for you at Trip Actions, just transitioned from MongoDB, which by the way had great earnings. They did, I'm proud. What was the big secret to MongoDB's earnings? Tell us while it's fresh in your mind. I think they're executing and their growth is amazing. They're bringing their costs down. I mean, they've got product market fit, their developers love them, and so I'm proud and not surprised.  Yes, it's exciting to see the process, people, technology all coming together and seeing them scale and do so well in the markets, yes. Being here in 20 years living in California, Palo Alto, you see the rocket ships, ones that flame out, the ones that make it, and there's a pattern, right? When you start to see companies that are attracting talent, ones that have pedigree VCs involved, raising the kind of rounds in a smart way where there's traction, product market fit, you kind of take special notice and one of the companies that you're now working for, Trip Actions, seems to have the parameters. So it's off the pad, it's going up into orbit. Yes, we're taking off. You guys are really growing. You got a new round of funding, $150 million. Yes. Unique application in a market that is waiting to be disrupted. Yes, I mean, it's 800. Talk about the company you work for, Trip Actions. Trip Actions is a fast growing business travel platform. We service customers like WeWork, Slack, Zoom, Box, and we're growing. We're adding 200 customers a month and it's amazing just to see these fast growing companies, right? When they hit product market fit, I think the keys are they've got a massive addressable market, which we have 800 billion online travel. They're solving a pain and they're disrupting a legacy, the legacy providers that are out there. We're three and a half years old and we are really focused on the customer experience, giving you the choice that you want when you book, making it easy down to six minutes, not an hour to book something. And we've got 24 seven support, which not many can compete with. You know, it's interesting. You know, look at these different ways of innovation, especially SaaS and mobile apps.  Yes. Once you get that unit economics visibility, it's a great SaaS. It's occasions happened. But now we're kind of in a chapter two. I think you guys kind of fit into this chapter two where it's not just SaaS, because you know, we've seen travel sites get out there, you can book travel. This chapter two of SaaS is about personalization. You see machine learning, you got cloud economics. New ventures are coming out of the woodwork where you could take a unique idea, innovate on it and disrupt a category. That seems to be what you guys are doing. Talk about this new dynamic because this is not just another travel app what you guys are doing. You guys have a unique angle on this, applying some tech with the corp. Talk about that, that this chapter two kind of SaaS business. I think when I think about chapter two, I think about all the data that's out there. I think about the machine learning. I think about how we understand the user and personalize everything to them to make it frictionless. And these apps that I love on my phone are because they know what I want before I want it. And I just took a trip to Dallas this week and the app knew I needed to check in. It was one click, told me my flight was delayed, gave me options, checked me in for my hotel. I mean, it was just amazing experience that I haven't seen before. And it's really, if you think about that business travel trip, there's 40 steps you have to do along the way. There's got to be a way to make it easier because all we want to do is get to the business meeting and get back. We don't want to deal with weather. We don't want to deal with hotel issues or flight changes. And our app is specific to when you look at it, you've got a chat 24 seven and someone's taking care of you, that concierge service. And we can do that because the amount of data we're looking at, we're learning from it. And we make it easier for travel managers. Half the people go rogue and don't even book through their travel solution. It's because it's not tailored to them. So this is the thing I want to get at. So you guys aren't like a consumer app per se. You have a specific unique target audience on this opportunity. It's travel management. I'm going to date myself, but back when I broke into the business, they would have comes like Thomas Cook would handle all the travel for Eulah Packard when I worked there in the 80s. And you had these companies that had these contracts and they would do all the travel for the employees. Yes. Today it's hard to find those solutions out there. Yes. I would say it's hard to find one that you love. And Trip Actions has designed something that our travelers love. And it is, it's for business travel. It's for your business trips.  And making sure that you can focus on the trip. Focus on getting there. And not just the horrible experience we've all had it. I travel a lot. I traveled certainly back and forth to the East Coast. And to take those problems away so I can focus on my business is what it's about. So just to get this right. So you guys are obviously unicorn of the funding you have, great valuation. Growing like crazy, you got employees. So people looking for jobs because they're hiring probably. Yes. But you're targeting not consumers to download the app. It's for businesses that want to have company policies and take all that pressure off of the load. So I as a user can't, by myself, can't just use the app, or can I? No, you can. No, no, that's the whole thing is that as a user there's three things we're providing to you. One, inventory and choice. So you go and you know all the options. You get the flight you want. It's very clear in our, we have a new storefront where it shows you what's in policy, what's not. So we've got that. It's ease of use. It's booking quickly. Nobody wants to waste time dealing with this stuff, right? You want to go and book quickly. And then when you're on the trip you need 24 seven support because things go wrong. Airlines travel gets canceled. Weather happens. You need to change something in your trip. And so yes, the user has the app on their phone, can book it, can do it fast and can get support if they need it. So stand alone, users can just use it as a consumer app. But when you combine it with business that's the magic that you guys see. Is that the opportunity? Yes, I should say as a consumer, as a business traveler. So you're doing it through your company. So I'm getting reimbursed. So for the companies, the company's your customer. Yes, the company's our customer. The user is the traveler. Yes. Okay, got it. So if we want to have a travel desk in our company which we don't have yet. Yes. It would, we would be. We would sign up as a company and then all your employees would have the ease of use to book travel. So what have been, what's the sum of the numbers in terms of customers you have? So 200 month over month. Yes, we're over 1500 customers. We're adding 200 a month. We've got some significant growth. It's amazing to see product market fit. And the cost of the solution, tell us about how people buy it. $25 of booking and there's no add on cost after that. If you need to make as many changes as you need because of the trip calls on it, you do it. So basically per transaction. Yes. Small little fee, $25. Yes. Okay, so how do you guys see this growing for the company? What's some of the initiatives you guys are doing? A new app? Yes, I mean. CMO, what's the plan? Yeah, so I mean, it's a massive market, 800 billion, right? And we've only just started. We've got a lot of customers but we've got many more to go after. We are international. So we have offices around the world. We have an Amsterdam office. We've got customers traveling all over. So we're continuing to deliver on that experience and bringing on more customers. We just onboarded WeWork, 10,000 travelers and we'll continue to onboard more and more. So as head of marketing, what's the current staff? You have openings, you mentioned you had some open recs. Yes, yes. You looking to hire, you going to build out? I've got 20 open recs on the website. So I'm hiring in all functions. We're growing that fast. And what's the marketing strategy? What's your plan? You have a little teaser on thinking, core positioning, go to market. What are some of the things you're thinking about building out? Marketing cloud stack kind of thing. What's going on? All of these things. My three top focuses are one, marketing and sales systems, making sure we have that MarTech stack and that partnership with the sales tech stack. Second thing is marketing and sales alignment, that closed loop. We're building, we're building pipeline, making sure when people come in, there's a perfect partnership to service what they need. And then our brand and messaging. And it's the phase I love in these companies, it's really building. And it's the people process and technology to do that. And the core positioning is what customer service, being the most user friendly. What's the core positioning? We're definitely focused on the traveler. I would say we're balancing customer experiencing, making sure we get that adoption. But also for the travel managers, making sure that they can administer the solution and they get the adoption and we align the incentives between the traveler and the travel manager. And customer profile, what small medium size business to large enterprise. We have SMB and we're going all the way up to enterprise. Yes. Has it been much of a challenge out there in the business travel side? I just don't know, that's why I'm asking. It's like, because we don't have one. I can see our cube team having travel challenge. We always do. Yes. You know, centralizing that, making that available, but it would have to be easier. Is it hard to get, is there a lot of business travel firms out there? What are some of the challenges that you guys are going after there? Well, I think what matters is one, picking the solution and being able to implement it quickly. We have customers implementing in a week, right?  And so it's pretty fast onboarding. And we're able to tailor solutions to what people need. What are some of the policies that are typical that might be out there that people like? Yeah. So maybe for hotels, you may have New York and your policy is $500 a night. I would say a normal typical behavior with someone would book it at $4.99. They go all the way up to the limit. We've actually aligned our incentives with the travel managers and employees in that if you save your company money, you save and get rewards back. So let's say you book it for $400. That $100 savings, $30 goes back to the employee and rewards. They can get an Amazon card, donate to charity, charity, whatever they'd like. So they kind of act like an owner because they get a kickback. Yes. So that's how you're going to address adoption. Yes. So what are some of the adoption concerns you guys building around with the software and or programs to make it easy to use? I mean, we're constantly thinking about the experience. We want to make sure just, I mean, I think about when I used to drive somewhere, I'd pull out a map and map it out. And then I got lucky and you could do map quests. And now you have ways. We are that ways experience when you're traveling. We're thinking about everything you need to do that customer when they leave their front or all the way to the trip, all the things that can hang them up along the way we're trying to remove that friction. That's a great example. In ways is such a great service. Yes. These Google Maps or even Apple Maps ways, everyone goes back to ways. Yes. Yeah, I don't, I mean. In ways did cause a lot of street congestion in the back streets of Palo Alto. Yes. Well, we're going to expedite our travelers. Well, it's a great utility, new company. What attracted you to the opportunity? What was some of the, because you had a nice gig going on over there, MongoDB, what was the motivation to come over to the hot startup? Yeah, you know, I love disruptive companies. I love massive addressable markets, good investors, and an awesome mission that I can get behind. You know, I'm a mom of three kids and I did a lot of travel. I'm your typical road warrior and I wanted to get rid of the pain of travel and the booking systems that existed before trip actions. And so I was drawn to the team, the market and the product. That's awesome. Well, you've been a great CMO. Your career has been phenomenal and great successes.  You know the challenges of juggling all of this. Life is short. I'm going to be using these apps to make sure you're on the right plane. I mean, I know I'm always getting back from my son's lacrosse game or event at school. This is, these are like, it's like ways. It's not necessarily in the travel portfolio, but it's a dynamic that the users care about. This is the kind of thing that you guys are thinking about, is that right? Yeah, definitely. I mean, I always think about my mom when she worked in having three daughters and I work and have three daughters. I feel like I can do so much more. I've got DoorDash. I've got Urban Sitter. I've got Waze. I've got Google Calendar. I've got trip actions, right? I've got all these technologies that allow me to do more and not focus on things that are not that productive and I have no value add on. It just makes me more efficient and productive. Talk about some of the tech before we get into some of the industry questions. I want to talk about some of the advantages on the tech side. Is there any machine learning involved? What's some of the secret sauce on the app? Yeah, definitely. We're constantly learning our users' preferences. So when you go in, we start to learn what hotels you're going to select. Where do you like to be near the office? Do you like to be near downtown? We're looking at your flights. Do you aisle, window? Nobody wants middle. Okay, sometimes you got to take it. Yes, but we're learning about your behaviors and we can predict pretty closely, one, if you're going to book and two, what you're going to book. And as we continue to learn about you, that's why we can make you more efficient. That's why we can do it in six minutes instead of an hour. That's awesome. So Megan, a lot of things going on. You've been a progressive marketer. You've loved, you've done tech-sav, you've done a lot of implementations. But we're going to see change now where people got to think differently. They got to think, okay, I need to bring on an app for your case with business travel. There's real policies there. So you want to also make it good for the user experience. Again, people-centric. This personalization has been kind of a cutting-edge concept now in this chapter too. A lot of CMOs are either there or they're not or trying to get there. What are you finding in the industry these days that's a best practice to help people cross that bridge as they think they crack the code on one side and then realize, wow, it's all another chapter to go? You know, I think traditionally a lot of times we think we're aligning very much with sales and that matters that go to marketing sales aligned. But when it comes to products and customer experience, it's that alignment with marketing and the product and engineering team. And really understanding the customer and what they want and listening and hearing and testing and making sure we're partnering in those functions. In terms of distribution getting the earned concept, what's your thoughts on earned media? Yeah, I mean, I definitely think it's the direction, right? There's a ton of noise out there. So you've got to be on topic. You've got to understand what people care about. You've got to hit them in the channel that they care about. And very quick, right? You don't have time. Nobody's going to watch something that's 30 minutes long. You get seconds. And so part of the earned is making sure you're relevant, what they care about, and they can find you.  Huge part of it, yes. And understanding the influencers in the market. Who's talking about travel? Who is out there leading in these areas that travel managers go and look to? Making sure we're in front of them and they get to see what we're delivering for them. I like how you got the incentives of the employees to get kind of aligned with the business. I mean, having that kind of perks. If you align with the company policies, the reward could be Starbucks card or vacation or more time. Whatever the company wants. This is kind of the idea, right? To kind of align the incentives and make the user experience, both during travel and post travel, successful. That's right. Yes, making sure that they are incentive to go, but they have a great experience. Okay, if you'd explain the culture of the company to someone watching that's maybe interested in using the app or joining you guys as a team, what's the trip actions culture like if you had to describe it? Yeah, I would say one, we love travel. Two, we are fast growing, scaling and we're always raising the bar. And so it's learning and it's moving fast, but learning from it and continuing to improve. It's certainly about the user, all of the users. So not just the travel manager, but our travelers themselves. We love dogs. If you ever come to the Palo Alto office, we've got a lot of dogs. We love our pups. And just building something amazing. I mean, it's hard. The employees got to know that it's a rocket ship. So it's great. You got to hold on. You got to run hard. You have the right personality to handle the pace because you're hiring a lot of people. And I think that's the part of the learning. We need continual learning because we are scaling so fast, you have to reinvent what we need to do next. And not a lot of people have seen that type of scale and in order to do it, you have to learn and help others learn and move fast. Well, great to see you. Thanks for coming and sharing the opportunity to give you the final plug for the company. Share what positions you're hiring for, what's your key hires, what are you guys trying to do? Give a quick plug to the company. Yeah, so I mean, we've grown 5X in employees. So we're hiring across the board from a marketing standpoint. I'm hiring in content and product marketing. I'm hiring designers, I'm hiring technical. I love my marketing technologies. So we're building out our tech stack, our website, pretty much any function. All right, you heard it here, trip actions. When you get the product visibility, those unit economics as they say in the VC world, they've got a rocket ship. So congratulations, we'll keep an eye on you. Now that you're in Palo Alto, you can come visit us here anytime. Yes, I'd love to. Megan Isenberg, CMO, trip actions here inside theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.


From Manhattan, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit, New York City 2017, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome back live to Midtown Manhattan, along with Stu Miniman. I am John Walls, we're here on theCUBE, and we're wrapping up our coverage here at AWS Summit. Again, kind of tough to get a feeling for just how many folks were here, but somewhere in that $7,000, $8,000 range. And most of them are still here, I think, out on the show floor here behind us. Good keynotes this morning, good programming throughout the day as well, and then really good buzz here on the show floor. So, good day, I think. Ready, W.S. Stu, and we've talked about it. It is kind of remarkable to see the number of people who turned out for a regional show. Yeah, John, you know, I've been to some shows at the Javits Center where people wander in, they get some swag, they look for a free beer and a t-shirt, and that's kind of there. These people are, you know, kind of digging in.  There was one on VMware, and VMware on AWS, and it was not only the seats, which it was usually, it's like, oh, come on, come get a prize, and things like that. There was five rows of people standing, pressed in, and asking questions about like, and how do I set up the networking on this, how does this work, things like this. So, it's like a mini AWS re-invent. So, they're a big show, one, we've done the QBAT a number of years, I've been there a number of years, I commented on our intro that this is larger than the first Amazon re-invent that I went to, like four years ago. How about that, in that sort of period of time? Yeah, and that's one of the things about Amazon, and really just public cloud in general, and all these technologies, the growth and the speed of change is just amazing. It used to be, we talked from a software standpoint, it was like, okay, well, I'm tied to that Intel release of every 18 months that I'm going to click out. Then it was like, okay, we kind of go to a yearly cycle. Now, it was more like, well, not only is a lot of software released continuous integration and continuous deployment CICD, which sometimes it's every six weeks, sometimes it's daily, but Amazon's releasing new features every day. We had, we talked in the intro, it was like, oh, there were three major releases, and we had the guy on talking about the machine learning stuff, and he's like, oh, you mean the three announcements that we had in machine learning, and we're like, oh, we only heard about one of those, but you had a couple others underneath there. Oh, let's talk about the F1 compute instance and the FPGAs. There's always so much in Amazon. When you go into any environment in the little boxes that they put in there, and you start peeling the onion, it's just, it's impressive, and that's what, there's just depth and customers are interested in it, and people are using it. I was used to so much of my career where it's like something gets announced, and a year later it's like, hello, is anybody using this? As opposed to, at this show, a bunch of the announcements, I already talked to a bunch of people that have been in private beta, they've been testing this out there, they're excited about it, and because it's just so easy to get on all of these new features. Right, and you, I mean, we've seen it here, we've heard from many people here from a lot of different walks of life. You mentioned some of the past shows, AWS Public Sector, I was at that not too long ago in Washington DC, and you see a company that has its units very focused and very driven and doing very well, and they have the right relationships. Buzzword, serverless, right? You heard it a lot today, serverless applications, serverless computing, from more than one source, we heard it from several folks, and so obviously this is not just a popular piece of nomenclature for the day, this is a trend, a theme that's going to be evolving and maturing over the next year or two. Yeah, I mean, everybody, for the last couple of years, they've kind of been looking at it with their head sideways. I'm not sure that I understand it. We talked to two companies today. It was iopipe and a Cloud Guru that their company, their IT infrastructure, was all built on serverless. And they're both got funding recently, so this isn't just, oh yeah, some developer does some cool stuff on the side, microservices, buzz, buzz, things like that. We talked to, FICO is using serverless for their admin functions. Certain areas they're not ready to roll it out across the board, governance, compliance, things like that, I need to understand it. It is still very early, but that being said, there's a lot of usage in it. Last year it was, oh, if you want to develop for the Alexa platform, the Amazon Echo type thing, that uses serverless, so we're seeing lots and lots of cases that really is a new way of architecting the way to roll out really microservices driven applications. And when we talk about the big challenge of our time, is it's distributed architectures and how do I have new applications? We talked to a number of companies today, moving from the old way of doing my application to building new applications, that's the long pole in the tent. This is not something that happens overnight, but I can start playing with it in a much smaller form factor and do it for pennies, not years and millions of dollars. So, there is really, serverless is really, in many ways, eclipsed kind of the containers discussion for the hot buzz in the industry. Kubernetes fits into that whole picture, but not just serverless in general, but AWS Lambda is the leader of the pack out there. And yet another reason why Amazon's just going strong, the revenue's still doing well, keeps adding to what they're doing. And you don't hear many people griping when you walk around the show floor as to what they wish they had, or of course, yeah, it's just, it's very positive experience. Yeah, I mean you hear criticism saying, it only had 42% growth year to year. Yeah. Not what it used to be, but 42, as you know, most people would gladly be in that position. What about, and your thoughts about the maturation of the cloud? You mentioned transformative and things are evolving and growing, I mean, so where do you put it now? I mean, it's this second phase, next phase, late phase. I mean, where are we in terms of what's happening and what AWS is making happen? Yeah, so a couple of years ago, we knew that cloud is here to stay. There's still the joke, a friend of mine in the keynote, 20,000 people registered for this event and it was like, well, you know, I guess this cloud thing might have legs. Right, we were. So, you know, it's a, we are still early in the overall, you know, wave of this. I've been in a number of conferences this year that we've done theCUBE on. You talk about the infrastructure companies and companies that have built on virtualization. They said, you know, we went through a decade of tremendous growth with virtualization. Virtualization's still very important. Amazon builds their instructor not on VMware, but they leveraged virtualization technology. But the next 10 years will be this huge wave of, really that, you know, going up the uptick of the S curve. So we're past, really, if you think about that the classic crossing the chasm, you know, we're in the early majority, going to mid majority of the people using it and there's just, you know, no shortage of new use cases that people can use it for. You know, we've talked to lots of companies that start up and say, I'm just leveraging cloud because it's easy. There's VCs that look at that as how to get involved and as I've just mentioned before, there's companies now that are building themselves on serverless. So this is even kind of the next piece that follows these waves. So we are early in cloud. If you look at kind of the overall cam of IT, public cloud is still a very small piece. At Wikibon, we've been talking for the last, I think two years about what we call really the multi-cloud environment. There's true private cloud and there's public cloud and how do I get that operational model that I can scale, I can build a really a distributed architecture. I shift more to operational expense rather than a capital expense. So it's flexibility, it's agility, it's speed and you know, it's very interesting and exciting times. There's no more exciting time to be in tech than today except maybe tomorrow because we know the only thing, the only thing constant is that the pace of change keeps increasing. It does increase and two big drivers of that. We heard a lot again about the artificial intelligence, machine learning, how would you rate or how would you characterize the impetus that they're providing in terms of pushing the envelope? Yeah, so absolutely, there were some good announcements today, I don't know that there's any today that you'd say I'm going to look back five years from now and be like, wow, I was in New York City when that was announced. But just in general. But in general, let me say one of the things that I didn't hear today, it was a little bit disappointed.  You know, definitely they're committed to it, they're, you know, making developments, but it's, you know, maybe something will come out in beta soon, I would expect by the time we get to the re-invent show in November that we will have more clarity here. I was hoping to hear that more. And that was something that didn't come out of Amazon, but they're embracing it. Customers are asking for it. Developers, there's a groundswell on that. So they're involved with it. Lambda, serverless, absolutely. Amazon is at the vanguard, they're pushing things forward. Machine learning and IoT. Amazon is at the table, it's still very early, they're driving a lot of things forward. Yeah, you know, getting up from John Furrier, it's like, come on, there's no Bitcoin discussed today. Why is that?  That being said, it's not a winner-take-all, it is a multi-cloud world. You know, most of these environments, you know, we talked about even, if I do serverless, if I architect them a certain way, I can move them, you know, and make changes, Kubernetes the same way.  Well, it is, and you speak of impressive reinvent, just about two and a half months away, three months away, we'll be out there as well. Huge show, probably one of the larger shows by far that we attend, and looking forward to that, and seeing you down the road, always a pleasure to be with you. Thanks so much, John. Great job, as always. Stu Miniman does an outstanding job providing analysis for Wiccabot. So on behalf of Stu and for all the crew here at theCUBE, we thank you for joining us here at the AWS Summit here in Midtown, we've been live at the Javits Center. Have a good week, and we'll see you down the road here on theCUBE.


So I was on a family holiday to Wales. This was a couple of years ago, maybe, and we just like got to a service station.   So I went to go get a coffee. I came back and my grandma, who was 78 at the time, on crutches, she's got a bit of a dicky leg, had been racially abused by some lads in a car who started shouting, G had at her and allowed her work by on this, that and the other. Now my grandmother is a Muslim, but she doesn't wear hijab. She doesn't even wear a Hamza the way I do. There are no outward signs of her Muslim-ness at all. So you've got two options, which is either number one, these boorish, thuggish, racist guys in a car had particularly refined halal detectors, or the language that they had to hand, which was one around signifiers of Islam could be applied to anyone who was brown enough and looked South Asian. So once upon a time, what they would have shouted was Paki, despite her not being Pakistani, what they might have shouted would be something like Wog, which was applied to both South Asians and Black people, whereas now the set of the signifier here you have is to do with Islam. So you can see that Islamophobic language is being mobilized and deployed at simply anyone who isn't white. And this isn't just something that you see in terms of street racism. Jean Charles de Menezes was not Muslim, but he was brown enough to die as one. And so I think that when we think about how Islam works as a floating signifier, is that it is remarkably sophisticated as a technology of governance, because it works in terms of security apparatus and constructing threats to the nation state, existential threats to civilization. But it also works absorbing the kind of racialized hierarchies around phenotype that have existed. What's a phenotype? Phenotype is like skin color, hair color, eye color, hair texture, that kind of stuff. It's a genetically inherited trait, right? Yeah, genetically inherited trait. And so we talk about like racial phenotypes, because you know, race is a social construct, I'm not blowing anyone's mind with that, right? So, you know, go check out Ash's old videos from our media. Yeah, no, this is how I started out is by talking about the history of racialization.  If you remember when Lee Rigby was killed, and I think it was Nick Robinson who said that the murderers were of Muslim appearance while they were in Western dress. What was of Muslim appearance about them? And also they were they were Sub-Saharan. They were Nigerian, right? Yeah. So it's like West Africa, it's like the Mecca, you're talking, this is like six, seven, eight thousand miles, a long way, bro. So what he meant was not white. So of Muslim appearance just meant not white, placed in a context of an elevated security threat, which makes you think Muslim. So it obviously has a relationship to racialization. Also, and this is more of a historical tangent, if you want to go back to the scientific racist categories which are developed in the 19th century, there were social Darwinists who talked about homo-Islamicus, Islamic man. Wow. So there was actually a scientific bracket for Muslim.  It's really definitely. Because I mean Islam goes from like Borneo, Indonesia, all the way to West Africa.  Wow. It's half the planet. But so that's why I think that it is racism.  Black people aren't a race either. Right? That's also, you know, a product of historical and social forces and they experience racism. I mean, I'll give you a concrete example of this. You gave them as well. I was arrested in 2011. And when I was picked up, this is, you know, I won't send traffic to a right-wing site that talks about it, but it's documented. If you want to look, you know, my former, my mother's name is Aaron Peters. That was her name after she got married. It's not my name. It's not my father's name. I made a name. And so when I was picked up by the police, finally, they got a spotter card, they recognized me at a Scottish eviction. I remember that day. God knows why I went to Scottish eviction after doing something silly, after breaking into a bank of the Weeby bin on a protest. Waving everyone in like Lady Bountiful. So they got me and they were like, what's your name? Who are you? And I eventually gave them my name, which at the time was Aaron Peters, which was my mother's married name. Bastani is my father's name. And they just didn't believe me. They did not believe that my name was Aaron Peters. And the guy who picked me up actually, the arresting officer was an Iranian British guy. And then his colleague was a white British guy. And they just, they honestly didn't believe me for about several hours. And they thought that when they were going to go to my house, it was going to be full of, by the way, this is a cancer terrorism unit, right?  You know, I'm not, Michael and I differ a lot from the sort of disband the police people on the left in terms of short term demands, very short term demand is getting rid of the TSG and really scaling down cancer terrorism around this stuff. But yeah, you know, they, they racialize, I would, I would, I would advance the vast majority of the people that they arrest as, as Muslims, they're racializing them as Muslims.  And this thing racialization is a social process is not a biological one. And I think that's the thing that people miss is that we've seen the racialization of Muslims transform since 2001. We're in a strange position where we're not looking at that as a historical artifact, which exists, you know, decades and centuries in the past. This is something that we're living. And I'm sorry, but Twitter, you're just going to have to get on board with that.


The federal government has launched the Technical Vocational Education Training Maximization Program, TEVEX, TMAX, for 2,000 beneficiaries in Nassarawa State. The program being spearheaded by the senior special assistant to the president on education intervention is targeted at training 15,000 Nigerians on technical and vocational skills across seven pilot states in the country. The report. In June 2022, the federal government inaugurated a Committee on National Poverty Reduction, a growth strategy to take 100 million Nigerians out of poverty by 2030. One of the core interventions approved by President Mohammad Buhari is a technical vocational education training, maximization program, TEVEX, TMAX. Give Nigerians is teach them, give them skills that can transform their lives. So we're giving them skills. We're also going to do for some for the students that are going to come for the training. We're going to give them transportation stipend to ensure that they can come. You know, but the key thing is that we want Nigerians that want to learn, Nigerians that want to improve themselves. People that are going to take it serious. It's a very intensive training. The very best students will get starter packs at the end of the training. Those that do very well. Not all students will get, not all of them will get starter packs, but those that do very well and pass the assessments are going to be said by ITF. We'll get starter packs. So we are confident that if Nigerians take it serious, you know, we can add skills to them and we can improve their life ultimately. The program is aimed at equipping Nigerians with the requisite skills to be self-reliant. The senior special assistant to the president on education intervention is in Nassarawa state to launch the program for 2000 Indians of the state. Students between the ages of 18 and 35 years old are considered possible beneficiaries. The program is a step in the right direction for the Nassarawa state government and would complement its efforts at providing technical and vocational training for Indians of the state. The presidential team is also meeting with operators of T-Vert centers across the state to address them on the rules of engagement. For the T-Vert centers operators in the state, they are ready to hit the ground running. They're 100% prepared. Because of this information, we revisited our center, renovated the structures and other things that are necessary for training the people that they will give to us and we treat them properly if we are given the opportunity by the grace of God. We are in this for a long run. So the whole essence is to be able to train 100 million Nigerians in the next 10 years. So the goal is to be able to get 100 million Nigerians out of poverty by the year 2030. So as a private sector company that is partnering with T-Vert, we are excited, we are prepared and we will do phenomenal UL for this project to succeed. Registration for the program will commence on www.t-max.ng in seven pilot states across the country which are Gombe, Ogun, Lagos, Edu, Enugu, Kadina and Nassarawa states. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.