Our next speaker, my Antipodean colleague and dear friend, Ben Shuri, has put a tremendous amount of effort into making his restaurant Attica a safer and more enjoyable place to work, especially over the last few years. In conversation with accomplished food journalist Lisa Abend, Ben will explore what it means to realise the potential of your team and to create a workplace based on equality and fairness. Please put your hands together for Ben Shuri and Lisa Abend.  I first met Ben at the very first mad and ever since then we run into each other at different events around the world and he's always one of those people that I seek out because time and again, including in that very first conversation, he has proven himself to be someone who thinks about the big questions and not only thinks about them but acts. He's somebody I've seen whether it's about talking about overfishing or indigenous rights or his own kitchen culture, translating his deeply felt ethics again and again into action. So we're going to have a conversation today and we thought this time we would invite some other people to sit in on it. Do you want to start off with the title here? Yes, so No More Cockroach was the title, there it is, No Cockroach. Do you know what Cockroach is? I really have no idea, why don't you enlighten me? Well, it's generally when a few angry white men get together to complain about their lives through music and it always proposes the question to me, what have they got to complain about? Not a hell of a lot. Okay, well, I did see you complain not very long ago. I saw some real anger with an Instagram post that you posted. Not that long ago, but I felt it up here. It came about because I had got a message, a direct message from a young man, a very misguided young man. Indenigrating woman in relation to a photo of a friend's dish that I posted on my timeline and I've never got a message like this before and I was shocked by it, like really shocked and I know to the woman in the room, it's nothing shocking to you, but for me to be confronted with this, to be confronted with the fact that this young man clearly thought that that was something that would impress me, rarely questioned everything. You know, I questioned my own leadership and my community. Had I been doing enough publicly? All the things that we'd been working towards at the restaurant, clearly like this young guy never heard of them because if he had of and he'd listened, he never would have sent this horrible message to me. And I sat on it for probably a week, maybe five days and every day, all the time I thought about it and I thought about what it meant and I thought about shaming him about reposting it and putting it out there, but I ultimately come to realize as the message says that it was a much bigger issue and I didn't feel like just addressing the individual really proved anything and it removed maybe my responsibility even and so I posted that and that was it was somewhat difficult to write and I read it to everybody in my team and to be honest I was so deeply ashamed by what he had said that I broke down and it's just unacceptable on the deepest level to me. It's profoundly unacceptable and I just wanted to express that and this is the only way I knew how, yeah well it's one of the things that struck me about it when I saw it is I think you know I could see you feeling like you had to give voice to what is acceptable and unacceptable male behavior but I also thought in some ways you are almost channeling an experience that is very common to women in the sense that you didn't see this coming you didn't ask for it it just popped up right and I think that's an experience that's so common to women whether you are a chef or a journalist you publish something and somebody decides to write in the comments section something that is derogatory or sexualizing or if you're a cook in a kitchen I think you know that there's a lot of discussion about jokes in the kitchen and what's appropriate I know it's not appropriate and I think one of the things that might be hard to understand about why that can be problematic is that if you're a woman and you are in the kitchen working as hard as you can like everybody else and then somebody makes a dick joke or some other sexualized comment it immediately reminds you that you're not actually equal and I sort of saw you channeling that in some ways with this comment as well yeah and it absolutely it's it's very very hard for a man to understand what it's like to be a woman you know it's just it's impossible for a man to understand what it's like to be a woman especially a white man it's on it's impossible for us to understand that because we will never experience the gender inequality we will never we were born in the beginning with such privilege and such benefits and my as I we were arriving this morning on the boat my 13 year old son Kobe texts me about the terrible massacre that happened overnight in America and I felt compelled to ring him about it so he had that discussion and he said what are you doing today and I said I'm speaking at this symposium and he said what are you speaking about I said I'm speaking about fairness and he said are you speaking about the thing that you posted on Instagram to dad a little bit and I said yes that's a part of the conversation and then I said he said what I said what do you think about you know gender inequality what do you think about women's rights and he said I think it's horrific I think it's horrible and then he went on to tell me all the things that bothered him about it like woman not being treated as equals woman not having equal pay and it was it was quite a little conversation to be having with a 13 year old certainly you raised him well well I don't know if I raised him well or not but he I mean I think he thinks independently of me you know and I don't know maybe that is like a glimmer of hope but right now like in this moment we're all living men and women together and we have to deal with the situation now like you know here's the hope young men and women who are coming up young boys and girls are the hope but right now we have to talk about what's happening and we have to confront it somewhat you know and I think I think from for men they're very scared of that well I want to I know that that's something that you've dealt with quite directly at Attica and as Kylie mentioned and as you yourself have mentioned you have succeeded in creating a different kind of kitchen culture there and I definitely want to talk about that in a few minutes but I thought maybe we could start by you stepping back a little because when you've been how when did you first go into a kitchen how old are you the first time I was ever in a commercial kitchen was when I was 10 okay we'll leave the child labor laws right New Zealand okay since you've been doing this since you were 10 years old I imagine that the equitable culture is not always a part of the kitchens that you experience can you tell us what I was like a bit I'm just coming up did you were there women in the kitchens where you work did you witness inequality or mistreatment yeah there were women in the kitchens growing up I didn't follow the traditional path in cooking I've not worked in the great restaurants of the world I worked in New Zealand in small town and there was there were women in the kitchen I didn't witness the terrible inequality that we're witnessing now but maybe also like I wasn't always aware of it either did I witness inappropriate behavior yeah I did but yeah well I worked for a head chef and on the line at night he used to tell me about how it sounded to have sex with his wife I was 17 and he just he was a direct conversation but that he would have with me and he seemed to think that that's something that I would want to hear again this is not something that I wanted to hear but then I didn't have the courage of my convictions to speak up about it I wish I had had the strength to speak up about it and you can make all of the excuses under the world why as a man you wouldn't speak up about it but it doesn't matter I didn't and how do you see that I mean if I asked you what were the kitchens like in terms of bullying or verbal abuse did you witness that and do you see any relationship between those things yeah I mean for sure I think you know I had a I had a job for a year in Wellington in New Zealand which was incredibly volatile environment a kitchen where because you know if you shined you would likely get punished if you shine a little bright you know if you tried too hard to make the cooking better somebody older and bigger than you would want to physically harm you and I remember being chased in that kitchen and being close to being beaten and a friend who was the head chef was one of two head chef save me and I remember the same person that wanted to beat me because I made a duck sauce properly was the same person that would have beaten a young woman in that kitchen had it not have been for the same head chef who saved her as well and sadly that that head chef is no longer with us he passed last year he took his own life and he was such a good guy you know who's a good person in a negative time you know it was somebody who you know like who shepherded us and he shielded us from this horrible environment that I endured for a year and a half who we all endured where drug taking was super common in fact it was incredibly uncommon to not and I was the only one one of the only people who didn't and the hour was a course we're just horrific as we all know but even more a little bit more horrific than normal with seven till midnight and no breaks and then you had to deal with this constant fear of like trying too hard or shining and otherwise you might you know that might be very confronting to somebody and they want to beat you for it you know okay so I think I mean you've you've just mentioned a lot of different negative aspects of a culture that a lot of people here come up through and come to think of as normal right I mean I think a lot of the ways in which these practices are perpetuated is that it's almost like they're passed on from generation to generation because it's what you learn because you are so young when you start and it's what you know but you made an active decision to change it so can you talk us through that I mean you you came on board at Attica's head chef in 2005 is that right yeah what was it was it where you wanted it then how did it start for you then like I you know I wasn't such a good guy then you know that first year like I was very insecure I was a 27 year old head chef who had no idea about how to behave really I mean I mean I couldn't meet my own expectation I couldn't meet my own goals and it was just two of us in the kitchen then it was myself and my best friend and I recall bollocking him for overcooking the fish you know it was me that was overcooking the fish not him like I hadn't taught him properly and I like bollocked him for it and that was a reflection on me not him you know but he had to cop it and he's such a good friend that we were able to get past that and we're still best friends to this day but I live with the guilt of yelling at him like that that's something that I think about every week almost you know like that here's this person so dear to me and this is how I treated you because I was shit basically like I couldn't reach my ambition I wasn't skilled enough as a head chef or as a person to be able to reach what I wanted to reach through cooking so I took it out on him and how did things start to change well I mean I think he left after a year so he was like you know what dude like you know you're my best friend but like you know you need to like yeah you need to be better than that you know and and so I guess I started to learn that pretty early on that that performance was based to the way you feel how the way the team feels how happy the team is if you're unhappy in cooking it's very very hard to reach your potential if you're angry you're losing control you're losing control you're not doing anything that's quality so in service in the moment when something goes wrong and the automatic response historically has been to rage you're just losing control of everything nothing is improving in that moment nothing is is getting better or fixing the problem for the customer so you need to create an environment where instead of fear you need an environment of honesty because the other thing is if you have a system of fear in the kitchen as soon as that person makes a mistake they'll hide it and then that that mistake might reach the guest and if you have a system where people aren't scared of you a system of fairness a system of honesty that's based on trust you will implore them to come to you immediately with the mistake and then you fix it together as quickly as you can to salvage the best out of the situation if you're losing control if you're not in control of your tension that won't happen and the quality will be much worse and that was what I found early on like it's so interesting you say that though because I've heard literally chefs say I want my cooks to fear me because if they don't fear me the food won't be perfect such garbage if they don't fear you the food will be better like isn't that what you want like don't you want to be in an environment that you feel good about going to every day like you look everybody in the eye and like genuinely feel something for them you know compassion or love or energy and you're gonna work towards something that's awesome but not at the sake of smashing people so how did you I know a big turning point with Attica came three years ago when you bought it can you tell us like at that moment where you're sort of starting your business again in some ways not from the ground up but you have an opportunity to make it exactly what you want sure how did you approach that this question of of fear well I think it for me it came from going through 10 years of madness with just ownership that just wasn't good you know I was the chef and I could never do what I really wanted to with the business so when I had the opportunity to buy it which was a lifelong dream that I never thought I would realize and it is it is possible I own it by myself and but I wanted I wanted to look at it differently I wanted to look at it as to be try to be like the best small business in Australia not the best restaurant but actually like the best small business and try to take kind of the fact that it's a hospitality business out of it because we've never taught anything positive in businesses as hospitality workers really like we always taught the wrong things people are doing too many hours people are losing their cool I mean the the behavior and restaurants just it's just crazy compared to the behavior it doesn't mirror our society you know we're off in the wild west a little bit so my my my idea and my wish was to create the best most ethical small business that I could you told me that you you thought that that had to be incorporated into the very business plan from the start yeah how did that work for you yeah I think I think you know I wanted to set a moral agenda from the beginning because because I have a conscience some would say it's strong and I can't leave the restaurant at the end of the night and sleep if if it's been bad you know if the culture is bad and toxic and people are doing things to each other which aren't cool I personally I kind of live with that so it's somewhat of a selfish thing first you know like how do I feel about it how does how does everybody else feel about it you know so that was as the business owner that was kind of the agenda and that's a process you know that's not like magically you wave a wand and everything's spot on you know like but it's something that we work out every day you know there's never a day where we don't try to be better in that regard and it kind of comes back to the question of like what's the point of being kind of the best at anything like the best at cooking the best restaurant in the world if it's not fair if it sucks for everyone that works there including me like there's just no point to that you know everything every accolade is completely meaningless if it doesn't feel good you know if it if it's not right you know and uh so those are the questions you know that we ask ourselves and did you I mean were you able to come up with uh concrete measures or or tools that would help ensure that you had both on the on the equality section but also on the people feeling good section how did you like create that so a couple of things I think um the way we hire people is a bit different we hire people based on attitude uh and heart not generally on skills it's very difficult to teach somebody to be a good person it's easy to teach them how to make a source so that's a big that's a big thing I don't care if you worked in the great restaurants of Europe in fact you know maybe it's even going to go against you if you come to Attica I want somebody who really believes somebody who's kind and I want to be able to see that in their eyes in the interview I want them to have a positive attitude and I want to know that they're going to treat other people with respect those are the main things that I care about I got to work with them every day I got to feel good about being alongside them everybody else does too we're a team of 40 and it's really critical to the culture of the restaurant that that is the way it is another thing that we did was um about six years ago I felt this and we all feel this in some level I believe in restaurants but there's often the disconnection between the front house and the kitchen it's two quite separate jobs in fact um within one business you know and it's important to understand the roles of both those jobs and they're both of equal importance but I always felt like there was a disconnect but in our team so I came up with this idea called staff speeches and twice a week we gather around in the dining room everybody who's rostered on that day and we sit in a circle there's a roster and each day that we have this there's somebody assigned to um have a speech to do a speech and they have to prepare that speech it's a great honor to be able to stand in front of your peers and give this speech and so um they the only real rule is that it kind of it has to be positive and in regards to being positive I mean that it can't be kind of just a session of complaining about you know work like it has to be kind of something constructive it can be something hard in your life and we've heard um you know conversations about um suicide um mental health issues um you know a young woman whose family fled uh North Korea to South Korea we've had so many heavy heavy conversations in the last six years like the heaviest and sometimes they leave you feeling deflated like oh and now it's four o'clock and we've got to get ready for service you know and but but my idea was that I hated feeling like I was a number in a business you know and prior to owning my own place I I often did feel like I was a number like oh it didn't matter because I was a quiet person and it really it really felt like it stripped my identity a little bit you know like I like nobody likes to feel like they don't count you know and it wasn't about like hey hey look at me it was just like I can contribute too and I really wanted to avoid that in our workplace so I wanted to give every single person that works here the opportunity to stand up and say something about themselves for 15 to 20 minutes and by doing that the idea was that the person that's right out the back in the you know the pot wash and the person that's right out the front maybe doing the glasses in the dining room those two people maybe they only cross paths once a day now they don't know anything about each other they ever have a conversation because there's no opportunity to they're really in separate worlds you know and when there's conflict between those two people it's mostly because they don't know each other you know they can't understand that person's perspective or point of view so by giving them a voice to be able to express themselves in a positive way or even a hard story that's where it is you get to know them a little bit now you you can't possibly feel empathy for somebody that you don't know like in a restaurant especially when the shit's hidden the fan you know so what's happened is that through this through people getting to know each other a little bit more intimately in the workplace that when something does go wrong people just pull back a little bit they don't jump down their throat aggressively because they know that you know maybe this person is bipolar and I've talked about it maybe they were abused so badly by the chefs that they work with in France that they're very scared especially around men it's important that they know that so that they can treat each one of us as individuals not just as hospitality worker all human beings and that that was the idea well I mean it seems to me like it was it was an important insight that that treating people with respect depends first on empathy right and and seeing them as seeing them as people right what about at the logistical level I mean do you find yourself hiring for gender balance for example sure yeah we want to we want a very I mean the business operates best when it's a it's even a split of men and woman as possible it's just a fact you know it's um when there's too many men in the kitchen I don't like it I don't like the feeling you know right now there's a and it's not always like this but right now there's a 50 50 split exactly I paid the wages this morning so that's how I know that which is which feels good you know like it just feels good and it's uh you know we never employ people based on their gender like but we would always want to have a good balance we want to employ people on their merits I don't think by employing people on their gender alone is helping anybody at all so for me you know that's what it is you know well I want to I want to go back to to Kylie's point about leadership because it's one thing to feel these things in in yourself and to try and behave ethically for yourself but you're managing a whole team and you can't you can't necessarily guarantee that at any moment they're going to behave everybody on that team have there been challenges for you or times when you have had to confront people working for you that we're not living up to your values and how did you deal with that yeah absolutely um we have a management team which is uh two women and two men and early into my ownership um our operations manager Kylie who's here today came to me with a problem sorry this is a little upsetting because it's a feeling of failure when something like this happens in your workplace you know like I'm like I try to be a role model to them and like when somebody is like worm their way in who's not right like who's got the wrong shit going on their mind you feel like you failed and you take it personally oh so personally so personally and somebody like this was in our team and I wasn't aware of his characteristics and he physically you know I don't even know how to say it like he he manhandled a men and woman particularly men he threatened female members of our staff he intimidated our manager and this happened when I was on holiday and I came back and learned of this on the first day that I was back and to cut a long story short that was the last day that he ever had at Attica there's just no other thing to do despite the risk despite that that shit could come back to me why was it risky well because it's risky but from even from a labor perspective you know like to just say man like you got to go like this behavior is outrageous like this goes against our culture you've hurt people you've hurt me you got to go like I can't tolerate you and I don't care about the risk to my business or to the company you have to go now and that was what happened and we needed that position filled like we're a small team and we didn't have anybody to do that so that led to Kylie who works nine to five pitching in that led to me being on the floor in the dining room for six months and we were so scared that we were going to lose a hat or a star we think we came pretty close hey because of what he did and because of the decision that I made but you know what like if you didn't draw a line in the sand at some point and say people are more important than a star or a hat then what what are you doing it for like how can I look in the eye of anybody else who had been affected by this person and say to them oh yeah guys you know it's going to be great today let's go you know but dude you let this person do this to me you know like what do you stand for you're saying one thing and you're behaving another way so what do you say to your colleague somebody who is a head chef or has his own restaurant and discovers this kind of behavior but is worried that as I've heard from people that I've interviewed uh when they've reported something like harassment told yeah I know but he's a really good chef and then I'd have to fire him when you hear that kind of thing I'm in the industry as a whole how do you respond to your colleagues oh I mean it's it's really black and white to me you know like I'm sorry I know it's it could be difficult I suppose like it has it just has to happen you have to make a strong decision you have to look at the facts and if somebody it's super dangerous to allow somebody like that to stay in your workplace you know like what the hell it's not even a question for me you know like it just no question there you know it that person has to go that person's rotten you know you can't fix that if it's bad enough it you can't fix it and uh and it will write everything else you know and I've I've also been there as well well one of the I think one of the challenges is creating an environment not just I mean as you said with the with your staff speeches where people feel understood but where they trust that if something does go wrong or where they're not being treated fairly that they there's venues and they trust that it will be dealt with right and that and it there will be some kind of response because oftentimes there isn't how have you handled that have you discovered any ways to make people in your employee feel comfortable with coming forward with that sort of thing yeah that is something that is on my mind a lot especially um especially if you're I'm an I'm a man and I own the restaurant particularly if you're a woman I'd like to think that that any woman in my restaurant could come to me with any problem without fear but I also know that that's not the way it is in society either and so that's why it's important to have woman as senior managers in any restaurant as well and empower them and allow them to make decisions and that's what happens at Attica you know we have Kylie an operations manager capacity and she helps set the moral agenda along with me that's been hugely influential on me as a man but even beyond that I've been thinking lately and this is only really an idea but what would happen in a restaurant if something happened and what would happen if for hypothetically if a young woman or a woman of any age had been sexually harassed by a man in your venue and was scared to come forward because that person had been working there a long time and it was known that we had a very close relationship which is the truth in every restaurant including mine what if they thought well this happened to me but I said Ben talking and laughing with this man every day he won't believe me he won't do anything about it and I'm not going to say anything because I'm scared to say anything what if what would happen then so there's this idea that I had about there being another person that's not connected to the restaurant which is a person that you could go to somebody respected in the community like kind of like a restaurant ombudsman so that you could go to outside of the restaurant and you could talk to them about the problem and that person would hold the restaurant accountable if the right action wasn't taken that's such an amazing idea because I mean it's it's it's really innovative and I think one of the things that has struck me as an observer of this industry especially among restaurants and chefs at your level is that you're all so innovative when it comes to food and yet in many cases in most cases you've inherited a brigade system that dates back to the Franco-Prussian war literally and nobody's ever changed it and no one ever thinks to innovate that and it sounds like maybe I seem you still have a brigade do you a brigade I mean do you consider it a brigade we don't have brigades in Australia right we just have people that work in kitchens I mean there's some level of hierarchy but yeah okay it's pretty even but you're you're trying to sort of affect the structure of the kitchen I mean everybody is as important as anybody else all humans are of same value it's not it's just you know we place these kind of measures on on kitchens and we say some people are more more more important than others because that's how we control and discipline things but for me like if you do that too much what you do is you have a bunch of junior staff who can't think for themselves who won't call out things when they see them we're wrong won't fix mistakes so I try to make sure that everybody feels like they have proper ownership it's not just like a thing that I'm saying it's actually something that I believe in you know that if you actually have you know if you actually invested because you believe that it's a good place and and you are told hey you can affect a positive outcome in the service tonight just as much as any other person be the person that picks up the piece of rubbish on the floor and doesn't want to get recognition for it just do it as your very being you know so that's kind of what I try to promote you know that again it comes back not feeling like a number you know and I mean we we don't have time I don't think to go into much of this too but I know that you've also taken on questions about hours and how many what kinds of yeah what kinds of hours you're asking for people which has an impact just on everybody's general quality of life and whether they actually have a life but it can also impact whether that you know whether women feel like they can stay in the industry as well and if you look at something like that and you look at what you're saying about trying to diminish the the nefarious effects of hierarchy I want to go back to that question about you know that I brought up in the context of fear has it affected quality do you feel like you're a less lesser restaurant at the level of cuisine because of it no I think I mean we've we are working at most 48 hours in the kitchen or less in the front house at most 45 hours or less that's across four days in the kitchen so they have the staff have three days off I mean the quality is better than ever like there's just no comparison you know what I'm asking for I'm not talking about being all lovey-dovey and being soft as some people have have accused me of you know it's not what it is it's like I don't need 48 hours I need an elite 48 hours from you you know I need you to be great for 48 hours then I need you to go and forget about this and have a great life and concentrate on some stuff that's good for you have breakfast with your boyfriend or your girlfriend or your wife or you know like whatever like I don't care please just don't don't be here and at the start of this we literally had to police it like I'm there first same time as Kylie we see in the camera staff coming like two hours before their shift literally we had to go out there and say go away like you can't be here you know like US shift is not starting so please go away have a coffee I don't care um and so it was a really big cultural shift for them as well because they never ever work like this you know they they always sort of everybody subscribes into this you've got to do the hours you know you just got to do the hours otherwise you're not hardcore you know which is such nonsense what about if you did less hours and you did them a lot better you know I think there's something in that and there definitely is something in that Attica that's that's how it is and and the food is better than it was um and the but the culture particularly the the environment the atmosphere is like the best of all time you know and it's not to say that I'm not sitting here saying we're perfect and that's you know we live in a bubble that we don't affect it by everything the same as you guys affected but but but but the culture is excellent you know and and people are like genuinely happy and they can do things they can get a haircut you know my last question for you yesterday um during the q&a session there was a man seated over here who asked about male male role models and where like how do you encourage men to step into that role for other men um you seem like somebody who might be have some insights into how to do that do you any tricks uh whoo how do you be a male role model um I mean I think it's like uh it's a daily battle you know to be honest like I think uh I had this I had this awesome conversation with a dear friend last night about how it was to recover from alcohol and drug addiction um and he was telling me how it was an every day thing here's the choice every single day to not take drugs every single day every moment of his life he's deciding not to take drugs and not to take alcohol and I would liken it to that somewhat every single day many many many times a day you have to think about equality in your workplace if you're a man you just have to it has to be on your mind as a constant thing you have to hold yourself accountable in my opinion too forever and a day actions will speak louder than words okay I think we should end it there thank you thank you


Hello, hello, I think we're live. Yeah, we got six minutes. So if you're hopping in or if you're already in and you have some questions for me, I'd be happy to answer them. Just throw them in the chat. I think everything's looking good right now. I never know. So let me know if it's looking good or not. Yeah, yeah, I'm just gonna wait for a couple minutes until 2.30, that's when I'll start. But yeah, again, just hit me up. Ask me anything in the chat before we start if you want. Hey, Hugh, welcome, welcome. How do I sound? Do I sound glorious? Tyler, what's up? How's it going, homie? So I just got this new mic. Tyler, you might be interested. I had one of these guys for the longest time, but it was just so just like bassy and crunchy on the top. And I was just, I was just over it. I was, I was tired of like just being like this all day and never quite getting it right. And anyway, got one of these, one of these beta 57A's. I love it. Thanks, Tyler, thanks. I got my Friday hair going on, which is, I did it yesterday, but today it's just leftover. Alrighty. Oh, the new one, the new mic is the Shure Beta 87A. This one right here. It's legit. I love it. It's got a little bit more of that like mid bass. Still got that kind of upper mid catches that like timbre when I got it, but yeah, not all like all sizzle and all bass. What time is it? Got a couple of minutes still. Thanks, dude. Oh, I love the love. I mean, he's lying. He picked it up super fast, super fast. Just kind of like made me upset actually how fast he picked it up. I was like, man, I like do this for a living and it took me way longer than this. I like to take credit for it, but it was probably all you, Tyler. Right, one minute to go. I was thinking I would change courses and I would just do that. What's that thing where you just listen to people really loudly, take drinks of water or whatever. I know. Hey, how's it going, Joseph? Welcome. All right, it's 2.30. Let's get on with this. Thank you so much for joining me and I appreciate you coming along to suffer through this exploration of Reach UI with me. If you're not familiar, Reach UI is pretty cool. You can find it at reach.tech. This is created by Ryan Florence. He's doing workshops, online courses and consulting. You can find his courses here, but then over here there's Reach UI and this is an entire UI library. He's building these components out piece by piece. And the goal of this library over other UI libraries is to be fairly unopinionated about style, but very opinionated about getting the right attributes and things in place so that you can have accessibility. Now, that's not an easy problem. It's not an easy challenge because there's all these attributes that you need to have in place that sometimes you need to have control over and can't be fully automated. So he's done a really good job of kind of riding that line and giving you some components that work out of the box while still giving you the power to kind of customize things as you need. Now, I really haven't had any time to get my hands on this for myself. I've just talked with him a little bit about it from time to time. We did a React podcast episode on it. Gotta get my typing fingers going. Let's see what episode it was. 22, we talk all about accessibility and all the things that Reach UI is giving you, all of the things that he is doing to make sure that you get certain accessibility promises out of the box. So if you wanna find out more, just go to reach.tech. Today, I am hoping to explore this menu dropdown. Now, I'm gonna be totally honest. I actually don't know if this is gonna be a good fit for what I need to do, but I wanted to give it a try. So what do I need to do? If you've been following along with the other videos, we've been building up this tabbed navigation UI and this was from a spec that two of our designers, Travis and Angela made, which kind of just set all the boundaries for the margins, the tabs, like how these things all look and interact together if you got a title, like where these buttons are if you don't, et cetera, et cetera. So we built all that into these components. The last video that I did, or the last stream that I did was a bit of a train wreck when I tried to put this in our kind of Lerna-powered monorepo. I could not get it working. I had been away from that code base for too long. So I decided to kind of not continue with that. I'm gonna have to figure some things out because it's a little bit busted at the moment. So I thought I'd continue the actual UI development of this, this all kind of breaks terribly if we go to these smaller screens. So we need to have a mobile-friendly version of this. Now that wasn't in the spec that we were given, but I do know our apps and I know that we have a bit of a convention for this. So this is roughly what these components are going to replace this little like tabbed subheader thing that we have here. And if we go to our mobile view, we'll see that those collapse into this dropdown right here. You can expand that. It does a little, come on, gonna reload. Okay, if we expand that, it kind of darkens out the background. I don't know if we'll get to that today. My wife is hosting a, what is it, bridal shower today? So I actually have to get out of here in like 40 minutes. So I just wanted to see if reach UI would be a good fit for this dropdown setup. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. We shall see what we shall see, but this is the goal. We want to go from the desktop view, which we have right now to this kind of mobile dropdown arrangement. So let's dive in. Okay, I got my code on this sandbox. So I can post this URL in to the chat if you wanna fork it and play around. Okay, so first of all, let's give ourselves a little bit of a place to work. You'll notice that I did not fix my key repeat. So I'm like stuck on ones. I'm not gonna make you suffer through that now. Okay, cool. So we kind of carved out a new space for ourselves to work. And then what are we gonna need to do? So these are the reach docs. He has an alert and alert dialogue, dialogue, modal, menu button. And then this is kind of, I guess menu button is the kind of accessibility term for a dropdown. He has the documentation and the source here. He has a little bit of an example here. So you can kind of see that this is what's going on. If I click on one of these, it does an alert. I know that what I'm gonna be using this for is gonna be, these are gonna be anchors. So right off the bat, I'm thinking maybe this might not be a good fit. So we might end up ditching this, but again, we'll see. So he has the installation up here right upfront, which is perfect. That's what I need to know. So if we want, we can just add reach menu button. This is all kind of separated out. Now, if you're not familiar with this, if you're kind of used to seeing like npm install menu button, this is an org scope. So it allows, if you're familiar with npm, modules can have scopes. So let's see. I actually don't know how to find the scopes. Here, let's find that module and then we can see if we have the, see if it lists all of the modules in scope. Interesting. So it doesn't actually show the org. That's really weird. Anyway, this is an org and I've been seeing this a lot more, which is pretty cool. So Babel has recently changed all of their plugins and stuff to use this scope, which is really cool because now they can control that scope and not have to worry about coming up with like really kind of abstract fixes for certain things or worry that someone might steal the name for that package. So anyway, so that is what that is. If you're kind of unsure about what that little at reach was in front of it. So let's grab this and let's go into our code sandbox, which I moved. Now in code sandbox, let's see, we're gonna go over here to our prod. Let's see. Oh shoot, I clicked away too quickly. We wanna add this as a dependency right off the bat. Okay, cool. Now, typically we would add this in our package JSON, but since we have this UI, we will do that in the UI, which will update the package JSON for us. So we'll paste that in, reach menu button, that's the one, and we just click on that. You can see that added it to our package JSON. Let's see if we can import that now. Let's see, how is he doing this? Okay, so this module has named exports. So when there's names named exports like this, we can import them in a variety of ways, which is pretty cool. I love seeing that. Let's just copy what he has. Perfect. And I am gonna do the same with this. I'm just gonna copy this example and see if we can just recreate what he has. All right, so we have that. Okay, got that. Then the should alert still. Yep, perfect. So drop that down. Cool, now these should be keyboard navigable. So right now I, so I hit tab to get in space to open it, escape to get out, space again, open it, escape to get out. So we're getting a lot by default and really what did we do here? We didn't do a lot. We copy this, we have the menu component. We're using that menu button. This is all under our control. So we can change this to was up and that works. Cool. And then we have this menu list, which is, you know, once this is exposed, we see that and then each of these menu items. Super cool. Now these aren't doing a lot. I'm not sure what these menu items do. Let's go see what they do. Oops, that didn't work. Menu item handles menu selection must be direct child of menu list. Okay. So if we want, this is how he has given us, so he's given us attributes for styling these. If we want to style them with CSS, I believe if I'm not mistaken, they probably take, oh, it looks like my stream health is suffering for whatever reason. So hit me up in the chat if it's kind of getting insufferable and I can kind of see why that might be. But yeah. All right, so ours is unstyled at the moment. I'm kind of curious what we get by default. So I'm gonna maybe poke around in that. Printer's going, printer's in my office. Means Nelly's gonna be coming through that door any second, which is gonna be super fun. I'll have her say hi. Okay, so what do we got? So we got this button we have. So it gets an ID. He's putting some kind of hash on there, it has pop up, menu, like magic. I can predict the future. The profit, fantastic. Anyway, so as we click those, the RE expanded attribute changes from false to true, which is great. That's exactly what we want. And then it looks like we're getting this react portal. I can't inspect that because it goes away as soon as I leave focus. So I'll probably have to ask him how we do some inspecting on that. And for right now, yeah, that's how things are going. Okay, cool. That is cool, no problems. Let me just see if anyone's, okay, cool. Okay, awesome. So I'm really pleased so far with how that works. Let's see if we can just kind of style some of these things. So right now we have just this gray background around that. So let me snag that color and see if we can add that. Where do we need to add that? All right, so menu doesn't take that. That's fine, doesn't need to. Maybe we can put it up above a level. There we go, okay, cool, cool. That's good. Let's see, so let's see if we can directly style these buttons. I'd prefer not to have to jump back and forth between a CSS file right now, but I will if I have to. Okay, cool. So we have, we can choose the color of that directly, which is awesome. Let's add some padding. I know that that's what we have here is likely. Let's see, it's probably gonna be on like eight pixel increments. Yeah, so 16, we got a 16 pixel border there. Let's change the line height to 32 pixels. Oh, I always forget that that's not. With 100%, okay, cool, cool. So one thing I'm noticing right away is that this is kind of like going below what we had before. So like in our experience currently, it all kind of shows up in this same box. So the portal kind of like takes it out of that. I don't know if that's a huge problem, but if we're trying to match this, doesn't look like we might have control over that because reach is doing a lot for us. So now one thing that I'm thinking that we might not need, what's the, one reason I'm thinking we might not need reach is because these menu items are really just gonna be anchors. So when this thing compresses down, they're just gonna be anchors where you basically expand this thing and send them off. So I don't know. I don't know about the accessibility of all this stuff. So we'll kind of see. Let me see what happens if I just put an anchor in there now. Okay, so it doesn't, let's see. So I don't know if I'm, okay, I'm not. So I can still navigate between the items, which is cool. And it's something that it doesn't like. So if I tab in, I can go up and down. Oh yeah, here we go. It looks like he has an example of an anchor. So he's using this style, which I talked about in like a previous video where you can basically provide the component that you want. So I'm assuming that these are probably buttons under the hood, even though I can't inspect them. That by default, these are buttons, but he takes a component prop. We had taken that in previous videos as as. So it looked something more like this, but it's the same idea. So we can take a component. That's cool. So that's actually what we're gonna be doing. So I'm gonna delete these.  I'm going to use this menu link, which I'm certain gets some type of accessibility treatment or default attributes. So it takes an href cool text. Perfect. Let's see, what do we have in some of these as example buttons? Or example routes. I guess it doesn't matter. Oh yeah, so you can see this is where we have the as h1 stuff going on. Okay, so we have this, we have, so this would likely be the name of the active route or target route. Oh shit, it's some type of keyboard shortcut that I think took me to the previous version of this thing. Wow. Really apologize, I'm not a terrific live streamer am I? Okay. We are back in business. Okay, so that's gonna be the target route. Since we're in here, I wanna see what else we get. So we're looking at the menu item right now. We're kind of seeing what props it takes. I'd like to see a little bit more, learn a little bit more about this component. So let's see menu item. See handles menu selection must be direct child of menu list. Okay, we got that so far. These are the CSS selectors. I wanna see the style guide thing real quick. Okay, so if I wanted to import the base styles, I can import them through reach menu button. That is super cool. Let's try that out. It's possible that I'm overriding them. Okay, cool, yeah, so I'm overriding them for this one, but you can see that it works for this one that I had not applied any styles to. Okay, cool, killer, awesome. So that is cool. So each of those come with their own style. That's just at the slash style.css from the package name. Great. And then yeah, so it's perfectly acceptable that we're using this. We can use any number of other styling options if we want. That's good to know. And then the element selectors. So these are things that are guaranteed. These are attributes that are guaranteed to be on their data selectors, so very cool. Okay, cool, so we're on the right track for the most part in terms of styling it. We're not doing anything wrong at this point. Menu item. Now, so it takes an element prop or element props. So this is a spread. So let's click into that real quick. I think I know what this is gonna tell us. Man, my internet.  Maybe I'll take these warnings more seriously. It's lower than the recommended bit rate. We're making room. Yeah, 128 is significantly lower than 2,500. Okay, oh, my word. Okay, we'll come back to that as soon as this little do-hacky-stop students thing. Okay, so it'll take children. Obviously we've seen that because we're passing in the text nodes, which are children, obviously. On click, which we've saw in the case of it being a button and you tap it and the action happens. On key down, I didn't do anything with that yet. On mouse enter and on select. Now, so it looks like the href is being passed along into the as component. So we could effectively give in any component that we wanted. And have those props passed into that. So that's super cool. See, spread. This example, the on focus prop is passed down to the element. Okay, so this is like, if we wanted a more complex example, I think, we could basically... Okay, yeah, never mind. I'm not even gonna go into that. We could basically force the state of it based on external state instead of the internal state that the library manages for us. I don't care at all. I just want it to do its thing. Okay, great. Menu link. So this I'm kind of curious about because maybe this is... And I was linking to different pages in the menu. By default, it works with reach router but also accepts any other kind. Okay, so this is if you were using reach router. So this is good to know in future cases if this page is being managed by reach router, I can use that menu link instead of a standard href and be able to do the relative links controlled by reach router. Okay, cool. Yes, so we saw this already. This is where we're passing the anchor tag in as a component and passing that href along. Okay, I'm not super worried about this stuff yet. This is some accessibility stuff around icons. We just need to hide certain things. Okay, cool. And then this talks about the accessibility of the keyboard navigation. So if we hit enter, that should open and close it. I don't know why this page refuses to load. So let's tap into that. We'll hit enter. That opens and closes. So, uh-oh. Oh, I accidentally selected the thing. I obviously don't do a lot of keyboard navigation. Okay, I'm gonna shut this one down because it's not getting us anything. Arrow up and arrow down. We saw that already. Enter selects, which we just experienced by accident. Escape closes, tab. When you're in the menu is no effect. So you can tab into the menu. But once you're in there, tab doesn't do anything. Cool. So we are actually getting all of these promises for free. Still a question of whether or not we can style it the way that we need to, but that is fine. I am going to kill these styles for now because we don't, I wanna have control of them. So, let's see. One thing that I'm thinking right now is that in order to kind of get that effect that I have before where these kind of connect to this button. One thing that I could do is have another div that gets this gray background around the outside and put it around this. So I'm gonna do, I am gonna do that. So we're just gonna insert another div effectively and see if that allows us to do what we need to do. Interesting, so I'm super cute. So if I put other content down here, it's always going to the bottom. Bottom, why is that? That's stupid, I didn't put any markup around it to make it go further down. That's super curious. Let me see if there's anything about the portally nature of this. Let's see anything so far. Maybe that's handled in the CSS. Let's add that CSS back and see if that changes anything. Okay, cool. So it looks like by default, it's going to shove all of that kind of wherever this menu is. It's gonna shove it into the bottom of the document. So no matter what content we have, it's gonna shove it into the bottom as we see below all of the rest of the content, which is not desirable. And if we want to solve that, we need to solve that with CSS. So as soon as we import the default styles that he gives us, we see that it attaches appropriately to this thing. So there's two problems that I have in terms of doing the thing that I need to do, which is right now this is kind of, it's being presented as an overlay. So question one, can I make that expanded in place? And in question two, what are those selectors allow us to do that? Let's go back into here. Go back over to style guide or styling guide. We might also be able to, so this is the inline styles. Yeah, so the thing that we're looking to style is that menu list. Feels like my internet is like completely broken at this point. There's anyone still watching. Can you just tell me that you're still there and you can still see me? I upgraded my internet plan and everything. I thought this was gonna be awesome for all involved. Let's see where we're at. So frustrating. If you stream and you have advice for how to make all this stuff work, let me know. This is like my fifth or sixth. And every time I tweak one option in OBS to see if I can get it to stream a little bit more smoothly. And it always kind of devolves to this where I'm just like under streaming bits and it's super frustrating. Okay. So styling guide refuses to load. We want the menu list style. So I'm curious if we can add that style directly in place on the menu list as well. Oh, sweet. Okay. So let's forgive about the styles right now. So we have, we got that pink background. Perfect. What if we do, see if we can make it position relative. I always forget not to save. Like save is so ingrained in me but I always forget that every time I do that it's going to spit me back to the top. Okay. So we can't control that there. Let's see if we can finally open this style doc. Feeling a little bit caught between a rock in a hard place because I cannot inspect this menu. So I can see that it opens but I actually, once I click on that I lose this focus which is kind of frustrating. I wonder if we get anything better with the React tools. I can't see how we would but it's worth checking out. But then also I can't open this URL for whatever reason. I'm blaming it on my internet speed because it's obviously struggling. Yeah. This isn't going to be helpful because inside this code is sandbox environment and particularly it's hard to find those components because they're all in shadow DOM land I believe. Hmm. Well let's try this. Can we get to unpackage? Yes we can. So we're going to do reach menu button. Awesome. We're going to find those styles.css. Perfect. Okay so let's see what styles we're getting. So I think this is the data reach. So this is the data reach menu item. Data reach menu list. I'm assuming that this is what we're looking for. No menu. So this is the one that's position absolute. I wonder, I'm curious if we can change that to make it relative. Doesn't look like it at least not in here. Okay. Let's go into our file editor. Open up the CSS file that comes with this. Let's copy that whole thing. No dice there either. Let's go ahead and take these styles out. Hello again. Take those styles out and we'll just have our styles and let's copy this whole thing in there and see what we get. This is duplicate now. So even though I've removed the styles that were coming in from here, they should be coming in through this file now and now that we've copied and pasted them. So we should see the same thing. Okay, perfect. Now I know that everything in here is styling it. I don't have to worry about some cascade or inheritance thing. Let's see what's going on. So if I take this out, oh come on code sandbox. That's not how you comment out CSS. That should hit the bottom now. Yes, it does. Okay, perfect. So we're gonna change that to relative. Oof, okay, cool. So this is definitely not something that is intended to be used in this way where we kind of insert an element, kind of like write inline. Yeah, okay, bummer, bummer, bummer, bummer. Again, at the beginning of this, I was saying I'm not totally sure that this is even gonna be a great use case for Reach Router, but I really did like the idea of being able to kind of get some of this accessibility by default. I'm not opposed to the dropdown. So maybe just for the sake of today, I'm going to kind of keep on. I have to leave in about like 10 minutes anyway. So let's just keep on. Let's kind of, let's keep styling these things in the same vein of our app and see what happens. So change this to mobile. Let's check out these buttons. So what are these buttons? Oops, what does that look like? So we have a border. I'm gonna style them this way. It is a bummer that we have to keep clicking into those every time we wanna look at it, but I am glad that it makes it better for keyboard navigation. This is background color like fa, fa, fa. Do re mi fa so la ti do. Okay, what's the color on those? That can't possibly be right. Oh, that's that one. Okay, cool. Am I seeing the hover? Okay, anyway, it's probably this. Okay, so that's the active state. Curious with this window if we can make it 100% with two. Okay, so when the menu comes in, font family, split block, position absolute. Okay, we're getting closer. Where's that pink line? Okay, so it appears that it's anchoring it on the right. Okay, man, oh man, I'm really kind of at a loss. I'm having, I think I'm probably gonna have to figure out how to, like how it is that I can, so as I'm working with this, I'm a little bit lost, I guess, so I'm feeling pretty lost in terms of how I look at these. I'd really like to see the DOM representation. It kind of feels right now, like I'm in that space that I was like for a long time ago, kind of without the Chrome Dev tools. I'm gonna try one more thing to see if maybe I can render this element all by itself. I know that it says it has to be rendered in a certain context, so maybe I can recreate that contents text, but I really wanna see if I can state is undefined, okay. See if we can just back into as little of this as possible. What was it? So it has to be wrapped by a menu list. Okay, so we don't have a ref now, which means that I probably need to wrap it in a menu, which means that it's all gonna disappear. Other than that, or it's pissed that I have two of these. Yeah, so I have no way of presenting it. Let me see if I can just use these CSS to force, see if these are display block. Is there like a, when are they hidden? Okay, let me see if I can force these to be open. So as I was saying, there are some back doors to kind of force the state if I wanted to. This I'm gonna have to import another component. Let's see, okay, so maybe I can change this and just force it. No, I don't see where I'm actually applying the state. Okay, well, I do have to go. Thank you so much for watching. I'm sorry that this was not more fulfilling, but we do kind of get to explore a lot of the reach documentation, some of the components. I'm super bummed about a bunch of things, but now at least I have questions. So first of them is, how do I inspect these things? Like if I want to style up an element, is there a way to just insert it directly into the DOM and like style it up that way and then place them in? Is there a way to kind of like pause that like execution of everything so that I can inspect those items when it's open? What's the best way to kind of like force a state on these? Like how deep do I need to go? I don't see anything that suggests how I could say like, hey, make this thing open all the time just so I can debug it and style it. So yeah, so those are my open questions right now. If you have more questions too, let me know and we'll kind of try to sort this thing out together. So yeah, thanks for watching. Hit me up on Twitter if you have any questions, twitter.com-chantastic is where I'm at. Thanks for watching.


TheCube presents HPE Discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. Hi everybody, welcome back to theCube's coverage of HPE Discover 2022 from the Venetian Convention Center, formerly the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas, Dave Vellante with John Ferrier. We're here with Brad Parks who's the Chief Product Officer at Morpheus Data and Brian Thompson who's the Vice President of GreenLake Cloud Product Management at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Gentlemen, great to see you. First time on TheCube. Wow, I just assumed we've known each other for so long. We've been around a long time now, I'm happy to be here and thanks for making the change. Yeah, you've put a lot of people on TheCube. Morpheus Data, when we first met, I mean with your new role here several years ago, give us the update, what's Morpheus do? Why do people need Morpheus? People need Morpheus because IT is messy, right? Technology promise, simple, better, faster but it's only gotten more complex, more heterogeneous over the last decade. We are a unified orchestration and automation platform that makes kind of the messy labyrinth that is enterprise IT kind of simpler to navigate. Primary use case is self-service for developers who want to push a button, get a database and an app stack deployed into their on-prem or their public cloud without having to wait on IT. So you've been through the hyper-converged world, you've seen all that hardware come together, the VMware, Nutanix, of the world's kind of hardware. Now you got this software abstraction where you got operations, you got AI, you got all kinds of ops, AI ops, dev ops, data ops. Yeah, machine, you know, they're all there. And so you got developer environments, you got operating environments, it's just getting more complicated at scale. This is a huge challenge, you guys are tackling this. And then by the way, throw an automation in there too, right? So all that's kind of coming together. How does self-service work? All that complication. Well, so I was just talking about the Robert Christensen, I know he's probably think he's been on theCUBE, he's on the Fidelmas team. And the Venn diagram that we see in hundreds of enterprises we talk to is there's a need for central platform engineering at an enterprise to enable developers to hit a button, get their database, run an IPI line, get their app stack deployed. They also want to do the same thing with Kubernetes, right? Microclusters deployed, you know, out of service. Same thing with Terraform and Ansible. There aren't enough skilled operators who have moved up that stack, so you have to automate and canonize that knowledge and make it easy. Brian, one of the sort of pillars of GreenLake and as a service is data. And we see a change in the way data platforms are being architected, data organizations. And one of the things that is a critical principle of sort of what we see as the new data era is self-service infrastructure. Where the operation of the technical details are an operational detail, not the be all end all, you have to go beg and get data out. Okay, so you guys are building out, I think consistent with that principle, self-service infrastructure. So where does Morpheus fit in in terms of that objective? What's your relationship like? And help us understand that. Yeah, within GreenLake specifically, thinking this is a broad portfolio of different as a service offerings. Part of that key is meeting customers where they are and where they want to be. So we have that array of things which are fully self-service if you will, but serving an IT admin type of persona. So it's where as a enterprise, I still have those resources. I want that granularity of control. All the way through, how do we deliver some of our more advanced cloud services? Really trying to serve the end user to your point, how do I empower application owners, developers to bring in and work with those services? This is key in some of those cloud services we're delivering. Morpheus is a key component that we work as we bring to again provide those interfaces. How do I provide everything from API CLI through a GUI experience that can span across multiple form factors, bring together that more of a homogenous experience? What options are out there to solve this problem today? I mean, what are the best practices? Is it do it yourself? Is it a little bit of VMware here? A little bit of other tooling there? What do you see out there in the marketplace? I'll give kind of my perspective kind of outside the tools that we see when we walk into an enterprise. You got a company that's got a lot of VMware, maybe a little doontanix, they've got some AWS. They want to use OpenShift for their clusters. They got Terraform and Ansible and they got ServiceNow. And there's a poor IT ops team in the middle trying to wire all that together. And each of those domains have tried to go up this hill. VMware has done it with vRealize Automation. OpenShift will say, no, we're the way. And you can use Kubevert to do your virtualization. ServiceNow will say the same thing, right? So our goal is, we started in the middle, right? Middle app, right? We started unifying that for self-service for developers and finance teams. And we're agnostic. We don't have a dog in the fight, right? We don't have a hypervisor business, a hardware business, an ITSM business. We're all about bringing the pieces together. But that said, we work with partners like HP. You have a footprint of thousands of customers who are solving that same problem and need to move up stack. So it's been a good win-win. So you're not trying to be the cloud operating system, per se. I mean, the way VMware wants to be. Or you could even argue, well, I guess open. You got the hyperscalers coming down. You got VMware moving up. But again, they all, at the end of the day, are trying to control their cash cow, right in their hardcore business. We want to make them all transparent. So your bet is it's gonna be all of the above. That's not gonna change, right? That's the complexity. Is that right? Or do you think they're gonna consolidate? No, I think there's definitely something to that. I also think there's enough disparate technology that's not gonna be one size fits all or one to rule them all. In fact, I think that's part of the examples. In the past, like private cloud, as we announced yesterday, private cloud for enterprise, it's not a new term. People do that for quite a while now. But they are typically fairly brittle, hand rolled, disparate technologies. Some poor IT team trying to hold it together. So where we can provide that kind of life cycle management in a cloud operating model, remove that complexity and provide that stability and in that experience across, what will be interchangeable parts at times. I think that's really the direction. Yeah, you guys talk about this whole, it's starting in the middle. I like that because there's a skills gap as well, right? Not only is there a challenge on IT that transforms, there's not enough people actually know how to manage a Kubernetes cluster and spin one up. So there's been a rise of managed services. We're seeing come out of the woodwork, almost in all areas where it's complex. How does that fit into the makeup as customers engineer or re-architect or just evolve to edge on-premises and public cloud in a cloud operating way? Because if I got managed services, do they just plug in? I mean, you're orchestrating services, managed services, all the above. Take us through this dynamic because we're seeing more and more customers saying, just give me the service. I know from our perspective, this kind of goes back to that portfolio of meeting customers where they are. There are some that have that expertise in house, they're opinionated, they just want a different consumption model. But on the other side of that, it's difficult to attract and retain that type of talent. And if I have limited resources, am I going to focus on the care and feeding of that underlying infrastructure or am I going to try to up level and focus on things more strategic to the business? So that's where we've certainly been focusing. And I think this type of management capability is what feeds into that. Right, talk about the trust aspect because if I'm going to do a managed service, it better work. I need to trust it. It's not a zero trust environment. It's actually a trust and verify. But you're seeing the software supply chain as a big discussion point. Developers don't want to have to get back off their CDC pipeline to go in and manage stuff. So a managed service has to be verified. There's a huge trust factor in there. How does, what's the status of this now? Is it real? I think one of the, one of the things we see in terms of trust, organizationally, I mean, people in process is always harder than the tech usually. And a lot of the trust is just internal yet, developers don't trust the ops team, right? Security doesn't trust anybody. Finance doesn't trust who's billing them. Part of what we do as a stack is we give each of those stakeholder groups the ability to get their core needs without getting each other's way. And from a delivery perspective, where we partner with HPE is we are, we're a platform framework, we're a technology provider. We're inside, you know, products like the private cloud. We work with their GMS team, the managed services team, if they want to take on more of that operational concern, right, they use us. Or if the customer wants to manage it themselves. So we, we're all about enabling them at the end of the day and HPE brings them. And how hard, Brad, is it to unify? Unification is a great word, a lovely, let's unify everybody. So how hard is that? Can you scope that problem statement for us? What does that mean? I'll separate it from a technology perspective and then the people process. So a lot of the traditional people that have played in that space, the do-it-yourself you mentioned, right, scripting it all together is hard, right? And if you change from cloud A to cloud B, you're set back six months. Like why we exist is we want to very quickly pull the pieces together. We can usually get a POC up and running in about two hours, right, that's a self-service VMware private cloud, right? That doesn't mean you've solved the organizational inertia, you know, that takes time, weeks, months, and that's where people like Accenture, GreenLake, other SIs, other channel partners bring that together to help make that change happen. How mature is the platform? Where are you in terms of determining product market fit? Are you scaling at this point? The great part about our origin story, right, we got our start as an internal tool set inside a two and a half billion dollar private equity firm that was transforming IT at dozens of companies. So we were built for the use case.  So we've been outbound since 2015, right? We were top of the stack ranking, you know, all the MQs, all the quadrants, all the analysis. So we think we're there, product market fit. The nice thing is customers have actually moved to where we are, right? Five years ago, cloud management meant cleaning up the lift and shift mess. Now it's automation, platform engineering, so it's a fun time to be us. It's operationalizing, they're operationalizing. What's your go-to-market model? Maybe you could double click on that. Through partners, so honestly, through HP is a big one, we're small, right? We want to be the best unified platform we can be. Our go-to-market is via technology partners like HPE, right? The other systems integrators, other channel partners globally, so yeah. So then you've got kind of a tiger team overlay, Salesforce, is it? Yeah, we've got teams globally. So we've got about 700,000 workloads under management around the world, about 70% of those are on-prem, Vmware Nutianics, the rest are up in the public cloud, so we work with partners, solution providers, services engines to help deliver that to customers. What do you make of the $61 billion acquisition of Vmware from Broadcom? I think your analysis was spot on. It is going to be a war of what is the most profitable to that new Broadcom business and things like, if you realize automation, some of these fringe products that are core to customer use cases but may not be driving a lot of bottom revenue for Vmware, I think are going to be on the bubble and we've seen more interest in the last few weeks from people who just want to hedge their bets, right? They want to be able to switch from hypervisor A to hypervisor B, or cloud A to cloud B without being locked in to anyone's stack and that is why we exist. You want to comment on that? I mean, for HPE and from a GreenLake and even just historically, right? It's about customer choice. We have a strong relationship with Vmware. We have, I don't know how many bajillions of servers out there running Vmware that we support with. So it's all just looking at that ecosystem and helping deliver those customer solutions and outcomes is our focus. All right, thank you. Brian, talk about the GreenLake success with partners. We're seeing ecosystem is a big part of that and we know the formula for ecosystems, create value. What is the pitch that GreenLake's making for the marketplace right now to attract more folks to build and or integrate into the platform? I mean, GreenLake started with a vehicle of how do I start to deliver an OPEX model, a consumption model for traditional infrastructure that we've been providing. More and more as the services and solutions really have emerged and evolved. It's gone from how do I just give you kit and a consumption model for it to now looking at embedded solutions with third-party ISV software, building or wrapping those services around it, really delivering outcomes and solutions. You're seeing and hopefully you saw just from announcement more and more of that where we have kind of turnkey solutions with key partners. How do we bring a marketplace ecosystem together? How do we help enable those kind of full solutions? Because we're not going to build it all ourselves, right? We want to make sure that we can deliver those outcomes. So marketing is often and should be ahead of the actual product. The early days of GreenLake, it was really a financial model. Where do you see GreenLake today? How far has it matured? We saw some of the announcements yesterday. We saw some demos. Where are we at? So this actually I think really the exciting part is you might have heard Antonio referred to as that journey to one. Each of our different businesses within HPE, they've all been building these cloud services in GreenLake enabled services. But as you saw Fidelma share the path to the HPE GreenLake cloud platform, that really is bringing these services together into a functional platform, right? Common identity, common telemetry services, bringing these together as now integrable, interoperable services. Like you're starting to see that come together and you can really see the Chrome trail of where we're going with a very powerful hybrid cloud experience, right? Spanning private, public, on-prem, Kolo and a full solution set within there. So that's the exciting part for me. And Brad Morpheus will be a capability inside of GreenLake that a customer can consume. Do you have to write to GreenLake APIs to enable that? Or is it more just certify that you work inside of GreenLake? What has to get done? I'll say a lot of what they've done is actually written into our APIs. We've normalized hybrid IT. We have a database model of every load balance or cloud endpoint automation tool. So we're all about making it easier to consume IT and the vision that Fidelma and HP has around GreenLake fits very well with why we exist. So they're able to extract metering data from our API. We know who provisioned what, where, how much they spent. So we're a good repository and platform partner for them to build. It's great for that console that you guys have. Yeah, you got the open APIs. You publish those. You guys take advantage of them. And then boom, then you can consume. Got it. All right guys, hey, great to see you again. All right Brad, thanks for coming on. Hey, thanks for having us on. Our pleasure, great stuff, congratulations. Okay, keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2022 from Las Vegas. We'll be right back.


Hi, and welcome to Bright Minds from TicMill. I'm your host, Patrick Munley. In this series, we're setting out to answer some of the most commonly asked questions around investment and trading through entertaining and insightful conversations with seasoned insiders. A recent Fidelity report on women and investing found that 67% are now investing in addition to their pension plan up from 44% in 2018, and that women outperformed their male counterparts by 0.4% on average. Despite these figures, women in general rated their confidence levels in their own abilities as low, with only 33% expressing confidence in their ability to make investment decisions. Today we're joined by Phoebe Shamier. Phoebe manages bespoke discretionary portfolios for private clients, trustees and financial advisors, and has over 10 years experience in financial services. She is also the co-founder of Femalefolio, a group set up to empower women to write their own investment stories. Phoebe is also co-host of the She Wolf Investor podcast. In this episode we'll be discussing the gender investment gap and the reasons for it, why it's bad for the market and how we can fix it. We discussed recent research around the performance of male versus female investors, and what we can learn from these findings, plus we give advice for women looking to get started in the world of investment and trading. Christine Lagarde, the chief of the European Central Bank, has stated in a report in The Guardian that male domination of the banking industry made the collapse of Lehman Brothers more likely, and she urged further reforms to prevent a repeat of the financial crisis triggered by its failure over a decade ago. To quote her directly, as I've said many times, if it had been Lehman's sisters rather than Lehman Brothers, the world might well look a lot different today. Phoebe, welcome. Could you start by telling us a little bit about yourself and your career so far? Hi Patrick, thank you so much for having me on the show. I'm really excited to talk about this topic because as you've alluded to in my intro, this is a topic that is close to my heart. I've been working in financial services and servicing clients in their wealth management and investment management for over 10 years now, and the journey towards focusing on female investors, or the lack of, really started when I started my position as a senior investment manager at Brooks MacDonald. It's a question that I asked in my interview, why are there so few women running money? The industry average I think is 17% or something like that in the UK, and that really spurred on my CIO, my manager, to propel me forward and explore this further. So why did you set up female folio and how did that come about? So with the autonomy of trying to make more of that question, why there are so few women in the industry, and also another question that's completely tied to that, why there are less female investors than male investors, I began trying to think about the barriers that exist that stop women from investing their money, stop them from taking that step over threshold from saving their cash to doing something that generates more from their money, and I came to understand that there was other women in the business who also felt the same way. So that's how female folio was born out of a common interest amongst women in the business, and through that, and through a variety of expertise from investment management, financial planning, to marketing, we were able to create something that really went a lot further than we all thought it could have done originally. Right, okay. In terms of the reasons for the disproportionality, the low number of women investors, what do you think from your experience is the cause of that? You could put them into two brackets. You've got the generalised systemic issues that exist through decades upon decades of history, and then you've got the more immediate day-to-day constraints that we face. So if you think about finances, money, the world of finances is an industry that's been dominated by men, and so it's been created by those men and appealed to other men, but we're now living in a world where women work, that's not new really, but women are earning more and more wealth in their own right, and they're due to inherit a large amount of money in the coming years. By 2025, 60% of global wealth will be in the hands of women. So it's really important that women are equipped and they know how to make the most out of that wealth, and due to the historical gendered factors, we perhaps haven't built up that knowledge and that confidence that we need now that we're in a position to invest. I also speak to my female clients or potential female clients who feel a slight risk aversion or are more aware of the risk, so they shy away from investing, which is more risky than cash, but they also need to understand the risk of not investing, that if they are holding cash and large sums of cash, that cash is getting eaten away by inflation every month, every year, and you've got to outpace that inflation if you're looking at a long-term investment horizon. Interesting, and just from your personal perspective in terms of you talking about this male-dominated industry, how did you decide to move into the investment industry yourself? Well it was a bit, it was chance and luck. I came out of university having done a degree in history of art in Italian, and I came back to my family home, which is Jersey, and I thought, right, I'm going to earn a bit of money and then I'm going to go off to London and do something creative and amazing. I had a friend, a recruitment agency, and she got me this fantastic job in a wealth management arm of BNP Paribas, and it was amazing. I really enjoyed it, I enjoyed making connections with the clients, working my way up, I went straight into my exams, and it was a very fulfilling role that suited me, and I got to know, I got to know the industry and working in investments and understanding the economy, it's very relevant, and so it just kind of went from strengths to strengths from there, but I think that it was very much chance and luck that that was the first job that I got and I enjoyed. I'm not sure that I naturally would have inclined to working in the financial services, it's something I've learned, and I think role models are really important because it's seeing yourself sort of represented in a similar role, so when I first started working in wealth management, I had a female boss, she was the head of wealth management there, and it was really encouraging to see basically an all-male team run by a woman, which was really cool, really cool, and I think that it makes you aim higher for young women coming into the workplace now, I think it's really important to be able to see women in those roles. Interesting, and so in terms of that learned experience of moving into the field, could you share some of your experience as a female investor in what has been predominantly a male-dominated environment, and particularly any good or bad experiences you've had along the way and how you've overcome any challenges you've faced? With it being a male-dominated industry, much of what I've learned and much of the good work that I've seen has been modelled by men that I've worked for and with. I don't ever want to sound anti-male, it's pro-female, you know, this initiative. They've paved the way, but there's always room for more diversity and more diversity of thought, and that's a whole other realm there to talk about, but in terms of what I've experienced along the way, yes, there's been some excellent role models, there's been the old-school role models, and the way that they interact with clients is perhaps it needs to be updated, there needs to be more inclusion for the female partner in a relationship to become more involved in the finances. Often much of the money conversations happen between the male advisor with the husband, and it's really important that we open up those conversations to the women in the partnership, because you don't know what's around the corner. Women are sometimes thrown into very difficult situations if they lose their partner or they go through divorce and they're starting at square one and they don't have any level of financial literacy that gives them any confidence to move forward, it can be completely overwhelming. If you think about more working-class environments, the woman actually tends to run the purse strings in that type of situation, and so they have a very rudimentary knowledge of trying to put money aside and save for things, but like you say, to move to the next level, they need a fresh perspective in terms of the education they're facilitated with or how they even access that education. It can be challenging for people. Yeah, absolutely, and it's interesting what you say about women controlling the purse strings to the general household budget. We generally do. We're deciding which products are being put in the cupboards in the home. Most of the time, women are deciding what house you're going to buy and then what tiles you're going to use. The home is one of the biggest assets you'll ever own, so that's quite a lot of responsibility, a lot of financial responsibility, but we don't necessarily directly think about it that way, but you're absolutely right. Whilst we're really good about thinking about cash, budgeting, controlling a household spend, making sure it all makes sense and it tallies up, fantastic at that. Women are so good with cash. We are just not so good at investing. So in terms of the female folio and how you get clients on board and once they're on board, how you help to direct them and develop their knowledge and know how, is it something whereby they're moving towards being self-directed or is it that you're going to be in a consistently advisory capacity as they develop anyway? It really depends from client to client and a woman to woman because when we're talking about our general services that we're offering as a discretionary investment manager, there's a certain level of wealth required to warrant that cost. So female folio, as it is, is a brand and a network and it brings women into an environment where they can start having conversations about money, not feel like there's any silly questions, they can engage with other women and other investment professionals and have those conversations in a way that they haven't yet been having and then obviously the service level going forward is tailored to them. If they want to have a female investment manager, that is an option. If they don't want to, that is also an option. I mean, there's a lot of the baby boomer generation who actually feel more comfortable with a man managing their money.  It's just, you know, we are trying to appeal to a demographic that hasn't yet been spoken to in the main. Now, when we talk about younger women, millennials, Gen Z, it's very much about igniting that curiosity, making them realise or understand an avenue to investing and doing something more with their cash, but it's not necessarily an ongoing service level, it's more being part of a network and a brand that they can tap into where we're providing them with educational blogs, podcasts and events that they can attend and engage with other women. Yeah, I mean, and I think in terms of Tick Mill, certainly that's something that they could think about promoting on their platform in terms of having, like you say, not necessarily forcing the issue in terms of acting from an advisory capacity, but more facilitating a network and an exchange of ideas is important. Absolutely. I think part of the problem and what is in our sphere of influencers women is that we do need to start talking about money. Perhaps men are better at doing that and talking to their friends and their colleagues about what they're doing with their money and I'm not sure that women find that so easy to do. And in terms of going back to the study, the fidelity study that women actually, the margin outperform men in terms of investment, what do you think drives that? We've looked at this at female folio as well, it's just such a fantastic point to look at because for all of our lack of confidence maybe in investing, that is all it is because we do have the ability that research shows that women actually do perform better when they invest and I think it's down to a few factors. One of them is patience. I think women set their sites on the long-term goal by a good solid sound investment that perhaps they've done their own fundamental research on or they've relied on a professional to do so and they hold that and through thick and thin, volatile times and that's how you can have a really good investment strategy. There was a warwick business study and they looked at male and female investors and the women traded a lot less than the men and again it's that chopping and changing coming in and out because as we all know it's very difficult to time the market and what is on your side and what you can try to guarantee is time in the market and that long-term growth. For women a lot of the time when they're investing they're thinking about the purpose to be on the profit so yes the capital uplift of x percent is fantastic but what does that mean? Does that mean I can retire at 55? Does that mean I can put my children through university? Does it mean that I can leave a legacy? So I think they set their sites on those and that's what they work towards and they maintain that long-term goal. One thing that stands out to me is that women tend to be far more risk averse than men so the male investors tend to have a more gungho approach to things and are prepared to amp up leverage or extend bigger risk than females in general. Is that something you've found in your experience? If we're speaking generally if we're doing kind of a risk assessment on husband and wife you're going to probably see the husband's risk attitudes a lot higher or a bit higher than the woman. Not always though mind you but I think that comes down to the financial literacy aspect of it because they perhaps understand the mechanics of the financial markets. I think it's really difficult to say that women are risk averse and to keep on saying it because I think it's quite self-fulfilling. I think that women are do shy away from risk either from a lack of knowledge or because they are just more risk aware and I read some articles on this and some of it comes down to the very real reasons as to why women should be more risk averse and that comes back to the fact that a woman's financial journey is a lot bumpier than a man's yet we're living in a financial system that is built for the male trajectory of going up in the workplace reaching the peak of their career and retiring. Women are going to come into the workplace probably on a lower salary because the gender pay gap still exists. She might not progress through as quickly and as smoothly as her male counterpart because it's likely that she might take a break from her career to have children and take some unpaid leave which impacts her pension contributions. She then may go part-time or leave work and then that really stalls the career progression and then at the end of it all she's got to live longer than her male counterpart off a smaller pot so there's reason for women to be more risk averse because there's these pressing matters that happen along your lifetime where you have to call upon your capital perhaps and you know you can't just simply say I've put my money into a high risk investment and I'll see that again in 30 years time it might not be the case for her. Yeah that makes sense really really good perspective on that just thinking about your own journey and where you've got to now and thinking about women listening to this and wanting to get involved in investment or trading what sort of advice practical advice I guess would you give your female counterparts? I would definitely start talking more about money and investing and chat your friends and chat your colleagues your mum your sister and the men in your life because I think that we all need to like wise up to what everybody's doing and realise it's not kind of this big scary elephant in the room that you can't ever approach and then you know we do have the internet at our fingertips and we've got to be careful because it is full of stuff that is true and false and you know you can't guarantee that you're going to get good advice and I'm not saying go to the internet for advice otherwise I wouldn't be in a job but you know there are apps where you can invest your spare change and you kind of to a certain extent get to know how the investment markets work you get a feel for what it's like to lose money and to gain money through investments and you know that is just testing the waters that's dipping your little toe in but if you get to a point where you're ready to put a regular amount away every month you know a young professional who's earning a good salary and perhaps her outgoings aren't aren't too catastrophic and she can put a couple of hundred into a well diversified fund there's plenty of platforms for that and there's also kind of investment houses that will offer that at smaller value clients and I know that we offer free conversations with young people who are exploring and I'm sure they do the same thing just to show you that it's there and it's possible and then if you're on the other side of the scale and you do have a significant amount of wealth I strongly strongly suggest that you go and seek out the advice of a financial planner or financial advisor because they really look at everything according to you according to your life they factor in tax estate planning and they really that they forecast a financial plan for you so you can really see it laid out and they will try and maximise your wealth for you and make it very personalised excellent Phoebe Phoebe thank you so much for your your time today and your perspective is is fantastic and I will certainly take away that phrase purpose before profit thanks Patrick it's been a pleasure is there anywhere that listeners can go to to follow you online or to to to reach out to you absolutely so we've we've got the website which is femalefolio.com and on there you know you've got all of all of the contacts all of the group on there the female folio team links to our podcast links to blogs and of course our upcoming events are on there and if you sign up to the network you'll get emailed and notified of those fantastic thanks again Phoebe and thanks everyone for listening to Bright Minds from Tick Mill while through these conversations we offer tips and insider knowledge nothing on the podcast should be considered financial advice and we actively encourage listeners to seek professional financial advice as Phoebe suggested whenever they can thanks very much everyone