Hello and welcome to the Grand Line Review, your source for everything one piece, and today we will be casually maneuvering our attention to the ever building storm that is the Revolutionary Army. Undoubtedly the most mysterious faction within the series and full of highly renowned figures whom we will be ranking here today. And how will we be doing this? Well, the same way we did it with every other faction through a straight up popularity poll. Also known as the only system we have that even comes close to an empirical form of measurement. And so I put up said poll in the community section of Grand Line Review and it received an incredible 15,090 votes over 8,095 voters. And if you're wondering why there's a difference between those numbers, it's because I allowed you to vote for multiple characters in this poll. So for example, you simply could not choose between Morley and Bella Betty, then that would be fine because you can just vote for both. And speaking of today's funky game thing is going to be challenging you to guess where Morley is going to place on this poll. There are 14 named members of the Revolutionary Army that were after grabs. So I want you to pick a place between first and 14th. Let you think Morley is likely to end up in. However, if you guess incorrectly, then you will need to pay the price by subscribing to the Grand Line Review, which will also provide you with regular one piece content uploaded straight into your YouTube feed. So if anything, it's more like I'm paying you for being wrong. I should probably rethink this whole game structure. But with that out of the way, let's begin where Morley is not. And that is 14th place, which is inhabited by Terry Guilteo. And who is Terry Guilteo, you ask? Well, he's this guy. And despite his mere 49 votes, he's far from irrelevant. You may initially mistake Terry for another miscellaneous member of the Revolutionary Army because he shares their similar aesthetics, but Terry is actually a fairly highly ranking officer who is first seen in the return to Water Seven Ark, telling Dragon about Luffy defeating Crocodile as well as the Annie Sobby incident. And obviously Terry had no idea that Luffy was Dragon's son, but then again, nobody did. And sadly, we haven't seen much of, if any of Terry since then. And the only reason why we know his name is through the fun of data books. So let's move on to someone hopefully less obscure. And we haven't quite hit that mark there because in number 13, we have Ahiru. Although to be fair, Ahiru should be a much more familiar face than Terry Guilteo because she was introduced in chapter 905 and actually holds an incredibly important position as the deputy commander of the East Army. The East Army being the one that is commanded overall by Bella Betty. And Ahiru also happens to mean duck in Japanese which follows an intriguing minor motif that you may or may not be aware of where Oda has a tendency to name female characters after birds, which obviously doesn't apply to everyone but there are a startling amount like Sudo, Kuina, Nojiko, Hina, Mozuki, Wichigi and even Robin, all of whom are named after birdies. So Ahiru joins them in this intriguing sub theme. Good on her. But now in number 12, we have a more familiar face with Bunny Joe. And I would like to emphasize the whole familiar face thing because knowing his name would be pretty unlikely. However, Bunny Joe is who I think of as the stereotypical revolutionary army member who has some great prominence in the series as the man who led the forces that liberated the bridge nation of Tequila Wolf. Very notably freeing Nika Robin in the process as well as escorting her to the headquarters of Baltigo for Robin to begin her highly mysterious two years with this organization. And I will say that anime watches will probably be far more familiar with Bunny Joe because his role was pretty heavily expanded upon and he even got a brief fight against some guards. Whereas in the manga, he actually appears as part of the straw hat separation cover story. And apart from that one drawing we still have yet to see anything else of him really. So that's why we're hopping into number 11 which is Morley, a placement that makes me both happy and sad. Sad because I'm shocked that Morley is this far down but happy because everyone who did not guess 11th place now has to subscribe to the channel. So that does ease my pain a bit and please do let me know in the comments if you are a new recruit of the Grand Fleet because I wish you the warmest of welcomes. As for Morley though, you guys messed this one up. I mean, sure. I can understand that he may not be the most popular of the four commanders. Those guys are all pretty unique and funky in their own trademark code away but Morley just has such character about him. A giant or karma with an interesting devil fruitability and a habit of completely misreading any and all situations such as when he accused Peach Beard of having a crush on him. So yeah, 134 votes, it seems a bit low to me especially when multiple votes were allowed. But hey, that's why I do this because I love to know what the fan base at large thinks and apparently we don't think too much of Morley. So next up we have number 10, another commander being Lindberg who very excitingly is a mink as well as some sort of mad cat scientist. However, I will say that of all the commanders, Lindberg is the one that I probably take to the least even though I do admittedly love his semi-steampunk aesthetics. I think it's because in the debut chapter of the commanders Lindberg just had the least to do though. Like we saw the powers of the other three all of which were incredibly intriguing and then Lindberg was just sort of there saying that he had new weapons but not actually using the new weapons. So he just ended up being the weakest impression for me. With that said, I'm certainly looking forward to seeing more of him especially because he is a mink and that could mean a potential too long transformation even if Lindberg seems like the less head-on fighty type. So cracking the top 10 even further in ninth place we have ended up with Hack managing to accrue 251 votes. And Hack is an interesting guy probably best known for claiming to be a friend of Jinbei as well as being defeated by Bartolomeo in the Corridor Colosseum, which is memorable to me because it involved Bartolomeo urinating mid-battle and Hack falling into this taunting trap. But due to the color of his hair and the various spots on his face, you could be forgiven for thinking that Hack was a fairly old fisherman. He has that wise and martial arts master vibe about him. However, in truth, Hack is a mere 38 years old. It's just the combination of his color scheme and texture as a Japanese soldier fish that makes him appear that little bit beyond his years. And something very interesting to note about the revolutionary army at this stage is that our last three contenders have been a fisherman, a mink, and a giant. Not many factions can claim to have united that sort of spread of individuals. And in fact, the revolutionary army might be closer to achieving Big Mom's dream of uniting all of the world's races than she ever will be. But moving on to someone who is very human now, we have Bello Betty in eighth place who has been mentioned a couple of times at this stage. And I would say that Bello Betty stuck out immediately in the minds of many fans for two key reasons, which are showcased in Otis very commonly used design choice for women wearing jackets with no shirt. However, Bello Betty possesses one of the more insane and I think heavily underrated devil fruits in the series which is known as the Kobukobunomi, which can increase the fighting spirit and even the physical strength of those around the user provided that they are encouraged directly by the words of the user. And this makes Bello Betty one of the greatest assets of the revolutionary army because her ability can single-handedly change the outcome of any large-scale conflict. Not the greatest of powers to use one-on-one, but then again, that's not what the revolutionary army is all about. Pretty scary though and I have no doubt that she will be absolutely integral in whatever their ultimate plans are. But now for number seven, we have a character who I feel gets forgotten about within this cohort being Inazuma who managed to gather an impressive 441 votes. And Inazuma of course, first appeared in the Impel Downock as the deputy commander of the G army. But Inazuma is also a great candidate to be the MVP of the entire Paramount War saga, having saved the lives of both Luffy and Bon Clay briefly facing off against Magella one-on-one and being the person who quite literally created the path for Luffy to reach Ace's execution platform. I also greatly enjoy his split aesthetic, very simple, but very effective. And this is also reflected in how he switches frequently between being a man and a woman. So Inazuma is duality incarnate and it's nice to see him this high up in the rankings. As for sixth place, we have a surprising one for me because it is Karasu, the commander of the North army. And if we're keeping track here, this does make Karasu the most popular commander according to this poll and yeah, I probably would not have predicted that. At the beginning of this, I would have bet a fair bit on Bella Betty attaining that position, but then again, what is not to like about Karasu? He has a mysterious yet cool vibe about him as well as access to some level of comedy, judging by how easily infuriated he becomes over seemingly arbitrary factors. But the thing that usually has me thinking about Karasu is obviously his devil fruit. Unlike Morley and Bella Betty, we don't have a name or description of his power, which is troublesome because it's very difficult to pinpoint even what basic type of fruit it is. Karasu at face value displays the qualities of both a Zoan and a Logia being able to turn his body into crows. And that brings up many questions. Like is he a Logia user who molds his element into the illusion of crows? But if so, what exactly is that element? Or is he some kind of special Zoan that can transform into an entire murder of crows rather than just one? Or it could be neither because that is the wonderful mystery of Karasu. All right, top five time now and we are starting off with Koala who marks a skyrocketing of votes, sitting at 1,758, which is more than three times the amount Karasu received in sixth place. Meaning that these top five candidates are clearly considered in a league of their own. Koala for very obvious reasons I think because of all of the revolutionary army members, she is one of the rare few that we know the backstory of. Having appeared in the Fisher Tiger flashback and managing to melt the cold fierce hearts of most of the some pirates, most, definitely not all. However, in a grand sense of tragedy, she would also inadvertently lead directly to the demise of Fisher Tiger himself. But as a result of this, it's very easy to get on board with Koala. I mean, she hasn't done much, if anything in the modern day, but her presence is always appreciated because she does have deep connections to the history and key figures of this series. Meanwhile, in an almost 800 vote jump, fourth place is inhabited by the one and only Emporio Ivankov, a truly unforgettable character capable of reaching both the heights of action and comedy and not only that, but Ivankov can also mix the two, creating a truly unique presence within the series. And to me, Ivankov is just the epitome of Oda. He is a character who proudly displays that Oda is never afraid to delve into more left field ideas, even for exceptionally prominent characters. And that's just one piece, and that's why I love it. However, I will say that Ivankov's existence did have quite an effect on the fan base at large because due to the horror horror to me, it is now possible to theorize that literally anybody is the mother of literally anybody else. But otherwise, Ivankov is fantastic and I am very much looking forward to seeing him kick into action once more. A very opposite style of character now, because in third place we have Bartholomew Kuma, who I will note did significantly better in this poll than he did in the Warlord ranking. And bronze medal is nothing to scoff at. It's not all that surprising though, because in this pool of characters, Kuma is a prominent enigma, a burning question that needs answering at all costs. And I could continue, but talking about Kuma usually just results in me listing all of the things we don't know about him. So I'm going to move on to something we do know, which is our second place finisher, MonkeyDragon, who really did not be Kuma by very much at all. Less than 80 votes between them, but our revolutionary leader prevailed, at least in this case. And really it was kind of a toss up for me as to how well Dragon was going to do here. He's traditionally quite a surprisingly unpopular character in Japan, but definitely seems to hold more prevalence in the West. And yeah, there are quite a few characters who I could have seen ranking higher. However, there was only one who actually managed to do it. And that is, of course, Sabo. A fair bit higher as well, holding the prestige of being the only character in this poll to receive over 3,000 votes and thus becoming the undisputed victor. And this is less surprising because Sabo is Sabo. It's hard to argue with the popularity of a character who is so specifically designed to be cool, as well as one so intrinsically linked to our protagonist in a way that even the straw hats aren't. In addition to that, a lot of Sabo's existence is directly associated with the inheritable of Ace. And all of this in combination is going to make him a very well-liked lad. So with that, all I can say is congratulations to Mr. Sabo for his win here today. Not everything else was quite cut and dry though. There were a lot of close calls, which I find simply fascinating. So please do comment with any other polls that you might like to see in the future because I do very much enjoy learning more about the One Piece fan base. But what do you guys think? Please do leave your thoughts in the comments below or even join my Discord server. And if you'd like to see more videos like this, then please do go and check out some of my other content or even subscribe to the channel for more glorious One Piece business uploaded straight into your YouTube feeds. But for now, this has been the Grand Line Review and I'll see you next time.


You're watching Bianca Renee today and Valentine's Day is just around the corner now when I think of Valentine's Day I think of the word love and I'm gonna talk about three things that I absolutely love one You know, I love my curls to I love products that actually work for our curls and three I Love affordable products now You've probably spent enough money on your boo that's Valentine's so you might be a little low on cash So I'm gonna give you an affordable product that will make you love your curls, which is The brand dippity-doo girls with curls the name is so fun like dippity-doo to just say it dippity-doo and dippity-doo it's just Well, I like saying it and the packaging actually says girls with curls It doesn't get more girly and Valentine's Day than these cute pink bottles So the first one that I want to talk about is actually a gel. This is the girls with curls Gel or jelly has a little accent to ease I make it jelly Let's call it jelly and it says it's for dry frizzy hair. Oh, yeah, this is like in French Oh, it must be jelly Now I'm making stuff up So on the bottle it says it's going to shape shift into soft frizz free curls And I am here to testify for that. It says it's going to have a light hold which it does Let me tell you first of all that this is my day one hair You guys know how hard it is to make your curls look good on day one I struggle with this all the time and I'm quickly starting to learn that using a gel gives me better Volume on day one than like a cream. So today I applied just the gel on its own You know, I like to try one product at a time and these are the amazing results that I got now this container you get 11.5 fluid ounces. It's a huge heavy tub of gel and guess how much it costs 599 When you go to naturally curly dot com, you'll see they're having a Valentine's Day sale So everything's 20% off making the 749 price down to 599 $6 for all this and it actually works Yeah, so here are my favorite things about this gel one has a cute packaging to you get 11.5 fluid ounces Three just when you thought you couldn't get any girlier the actual gel is pink too and it smells so good It's it's just like a very refreshing I don't even know what this It just smells good. Okay, just take my word for it and it also goes on You know like a gel but it doesn't leave your hair with a hard crunch It's a light hold and after I did diffuse the crunchiness was gone And I'm just left with beautiful volume. So in today's video I'm going to show you how I applied the gel to my hair right out the shower and got these amazing curls And then we're gonna come back and do some curly hairstyles for your Valentine's Day date using the curl boosting moves Alrighty now we are here fresh out the shower I use shampoo and conditioner and then I wrap my hair in a cotton t-shirt that way I don't get any frizz Then I'm gonna grab the Dippity-Doo girls with curls jelly add a little bit to one side by raking and Scrunching just rake and scrunch and you're gonna do that to both sides to evenly distribute the product Then we're gonna flip our head over and also apply some to the very top of our head to avoid any frizz Because then I'm gonna let this air dry for two hours and come back And voila two hours later. These are your curl results. Look how defined they are You will see that there is a slight hold So I'm going to grab my diffuser and the diffuser will get rid of any crunch that there might be and you're left with these Amazing defined curls. Just look at that. Just take it all in then I'm gonna flip my head back and forth This might not actually do anything, but you know, it's fun Then I'm gonna grab my pick and pick it out for extra volume I personally like it very big the bigger the better and that's all there is to it So now I'm gonna get dressed and come back And we're back That is how we got to this point, but look how amazing my hair looks super defined day one volume It's super cheap and it worked all on its own So now let's talk about some curly hair styles you could wear on your date Style number one you could always rock your hair down big and proud now because of the dress that I'm wearing see how It has this like a cut shape So it's kind of going up to my neck if I do wear this cut I usually like to put my hair up So the easiest one you could do is literally a pineapple. Yes The same thing you do to go to sleep could also be rocked out about in public So we're just gonna grab all of your hair. We're gonna push it all the way up to the front and There we're just gonna pull a scrunchie around it one time Bloop Look at that. Just let it droop over to one side Whatever is your good side and look at that elegant Fancy updo Now for these next hair styles or will as I had to sit down because I need a mirror to see what I'm doing now We're gonna take this one out Good as new the power of a pineapple and now we're gonna do something so we could really see Your beautiful face and get rid of these little bangs if you have them So I'm just gonna grab the section that looks like bangs And I'm just going to flip them back and push it up Now we have a little pompadour Now I'm going to grab the dipty-do girls with curls curl boosting moves to get rid of any frizz on our hair Just gonna squeeze a little bit of this and just get the front area right here There we go. Oh, this smells so good Also add some shine if you can tell and we're just going to grab them again And push it forward grab a bobby pin Just like that. Okay, so now let's take this one out and try another We're gonna just put this up in the front and let it wait for us Like that now we're gonna put the rest of our hair up Into a high ponytail This works really good just look it back And then you want to put the ponytail as high as pops like so and then we're gonna take out this part And there you go Just kidding. And then when you pull it back, you're gonna push that part forward Just like we did before Find your bobby pin that wants to just appear and at this point You can make it as neat or messy as you'd like and there is the completed look an easy updo So that is exactly how I style my hair. We're using the dipty-do girls with curls products overall I love them. They work perfectly on my hair. They are defined really easy to use and I love how Affordable they are. I love them so much in the sake of Valentine's Day and the lovingness and giviness that comes with it I'm gonna do a giveaway and give one of you these two products And all you got to do to enter is follow me on Instagram at Ms. Bianca Renee Follow them on Instagram at ddgirlswithcurls and then leave me a comment on this photo And just tag somebody that you love write a little note saying I love you because blah blah blah You could tag your boyfriend your girlfriend your best friend your mom grandma whoever's on Instagram And just say something nice that might cheer up their day Then I will read all the comments and choose one lucky winner to win both of these prizes and the best part is you can be in Canada I'm opening up my giveaway to US and Canada so as long as you have a US or Canadian address you are eligible to win these prizes Before you go ask that you please give this video a thumbs up and subscribe I post new videos every Sunday and lately I've been sneaking in a second video every week So make sure you hit that bell down below so you're notified as soon as I post a new video And otherwise I will see you guys next week, and I hope you have a beautiful and happy Valentine's Day Thanks for watching Bianca Renee today


Yeah, we on Boss Talk 101. You about some of the stuff that I seen, things was on Spliffs page, you on there a lot. That guy, anyway. Yeah, that guy, man. You're just like that guy. I wanna know about, it was a thing I read or heard that you had something with, took half a million dollars from Sillignite or something. What was that? What was that? I wanna hear about that. That's why it's on the internet. I'm looking at what I'm looking at. I need an answer for this. I see, that's why I'm saying, this is why I say, they don't let Bodyhunter BJ relax. That's the stuff that popped, the stuff that I'm looking at. I watched it, bro. I pushed the button, right? And I say, put in the information for, I didn't know your name was Amino Cappuccino. I said, BJ, the bounty hunter. Baby, let's get this information. He come into town and split pop up, boom, horns or something like that. I said, damn, sit down, there it is. Okay, all right, I gotta ask him about this. So he did well with the world class Wrecking Crew.  I didn't even know the nigga was even, I was mad cause Supreme at Com and I say, no, I don't know if I want that cat, he don't know nobody. But then when I look, I say, oh, hell, I got me something here. So what's that a real thing? I didn't look at it cause I wanted to get it from you. All right, man. Let me let you bring it. Relation with you. Check this out, man. Again, cause I tell this, I tell, and it's not a story, it's my livelihood. Like I tell it, what separates me from castles in that? These are my real true livelihoods, what I went through, what I live, man. You feel me? I met Simon who ended up becoming a good dear friend slash business partner of mine for 20 something years now, right? I met him on a negative level. Simon.  Shugnaite is AK Simon, Simon says. That's where you got his death row nickname from Simon says. Simon says gold. You tell them niggas gold, they going, you feel me? Well, I wouldn't want them gold niggas. Feel me? I'm a negative niggas gold. Free to homie. So yeah, free to homie Simon, man. So check this out. The way I met him was I was summons to a meeting from other generals. Feel me? Big homies, Terry Carter, Rest in Peace. Feel me? Uncle Mike, you know what I mean? I was summons to around Terry Moses. No, Terry Carter. Carter. Terry Moses is my big homie though. That's your big homie. They wrote the book. Yeah. I'm in the book. Yeah. Yeah. So I was summons to this meeting. Me and Rat Dogh, Willie Dogh, AK Rat Dogh, Rest in Peace. You know what I mean? My, my, my, my, my, my pertinent crime, my role, everything. We summons to this meeting. So me having a broad mind again, like I do, and that's why he bought me to the meeting. Because they know this A1 here at torpedo, to he he own pointing he's smarter about it. So if we send him and he go, He gon' go right.  He gon' make everything work. This is where I was bought in. Big homies bought me and laced me. You know this nigga, Simon Schill, yeah, I heard a nigga, man. I heard a fat boy, man. He football player, slas, did a few bounces for Bobby Brown, and what about the nigga? Well, look, man, we gon' show you niggas how to build your own production company and I'll get your niggas out the street, legitimate. Now, at this time, I'm already going through a stage with my life where what can I do to take this damn dirty money, man, and really get myself about this situation?  And I just put the peace treaty together in 1992 with other cats collectively out to join down Pyrrhicorps, High Sienna Village. So I'm one of the advocates to represent the Da Moussa from this peace treaty. So I'm now, I'm torn between, like I said, a part of me still BJ in the streets and then I'm developing this Nino-Capitino characteristics. You feel what I'm saying? So, but Nino is overpowering BJ. So I'm battling these alter egos, bro. Because soon my phone rang, I'm out in the street, I'm in it, and then I'm in a motherfucking meeting, man, two days later. You know what I'm saying? So I had to really tell myself, wait a minute. You can really see how the foundation of that kind of behavior leads up to people like the nipsies of the world and people like that. Exactly, bro. You can just see how that. And it's crazy you're smoking and we go back on and re-innovate on it. He was in his stage where he was building that to where it would have pulled him away from eventually collectively. Cause he didn't have to be there. He built that already. He ain't had no business there and he didn't have to be there. But it was the foundation of the family of it, the community. He doing the same thing I'm doing here. Right. The exact same thing. That's why I went to his store.  Yeah. You know what I'm saying?  So now I go to work. A big brawl jumps out with the West Side probably. And my thing was what I really, what really, really got me involved and got me on him was when he bought about the separation with the power rules. Cause I'm like a, so I'm a real diamond, bro. I'm a real blood from Nixon Garden. And I love my homies from Six Dudes brands, the Power Rules, Swines. I got homies from all over, bro.  We ain't number one in the law sentence when it comes to the blood situation, bro. Not trying to boast and brag on, but giving facts and can't no nigga battle that. That's what it was. Power Rules was the original, the originated, be dogs before us.  Nothing but fear. And that was for every motherfucking body, period. You know what I'm saying? So that character, bringing that character involved to this situation is what brought me about to smash on it. So me smashing on him and taking the half a million, we end up getting a record deal, you know what I mean, a production deal. How'd you take the half a million? How'd you articulate that? You pretty sure? Well, I mean, it's simple. Check. Sometimes get in there. This media games, I'm learning. I'm learning. I'm trying to get in there. Articulate that, say word for word how you done took this brand from this. Yeah, I wanna know. It's gone a long time, look at that single. On the movie, I mean, come to death, bro. I'm there, I'm like, how you gonna get that money out of him? You know what I'm saying? See, that's the thing about it. Y'all seen that, remember, y'all got it, remember money out of you.  I'm the nigga on the other side of the coin, homie. Yeah, you seen sugar, but you didn't see Bonnie and the BJ. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't know about Bonnie and the red dog. Yeah, you seen sugar.  Not just Bonnie and the BJ, he got hit two times by the Bonnie Hunters. How about that? See, if y'all didn't see that because it wasn't publicized. That's right.    Wait, wait, wait. You asked me the negative. See, one thing about me, when I talk, that's my ninja. That's my homeboy. Right. You feel me? I ain't against the grating with the niggas. Yeah, we want him free. I heard we want him out. He did wrong shit, bro. He's no different than any other human being, man. Yes, for sure. You feel me? He did wrong shit, but nigga, I know for a fact the greatness he did because I was with him, I was around him. So that's why I always give him his props.  Y'all ask me the question. I'm giving you a story. But you gotta understand, half a million, half a million wasn't a lot of money really to him during this time. No, half a million, a lot of money. No, no, no. Who wanna lose it? No, you don't wanna lose it, but this guy was dealing with a lot of money during this time. Am I right? It's not about them, see, here's the whole thing. It ain't about, for me and for us, it's not about the half a million. Correct. It's who you took the half a million from. I get it.  Now I've been getting money. Feel me? I bust real niggas outside of here and take their money. So it ain't about the half a million. It's about who got the half a million. Oh, this the nigga that took 20 million from these niggas over here?  It was the challenge for us. That was the thrill of the tank. The thrill of the tank. And you took it. Took it. Yeah, we on Boss Talk 101.


The study found that nurses from Rapparine Public Hospital had lower levels of knowledge, attitude, and practice of fluid therapy compared to those from private hospitals. This suggests that more education and training should be provided to nurses at Rapparine Public Hospital to improve their knowledge, attitudes, and practices regarding fluid therapy. This article was authored by Nazar Ramadhan Othman and Abbas Abdelkader Ahmed.


Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18. We are here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We are joined by John Donahoe, who is the president and CEO of ServiceNow. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It's great to be here, Rebecca. So I want to talk with you a little bit about what you said on the main stage this morning. You said this is your first year, your anniversary of joining ServiceNow. You said when you got here, you could barely spell IT. But when you reflect back on this year, what has been sort of the biggest surprise challenges and surprises about leading this company? Well, I would say a couple of things. One, I've sort of fallen in love with our customers. And the challenges and opportunities they have. And what I spoke about this morning, this digital transformation thing, even a year ago, it was a bit of a buzzword. It's a reality for CEOs, for companies, and therefore for CIOs. And then the second thing that is, as I talked about it, I think very exciting is the role of the CIO. The role of IT is transforming before our very eyes out of necessity because technology is here to stay. Technology is driving strategic change at every company. You can call it a digital transformation, you can call it a tech transformation. And CEOs need the most technically savvy leader in the C-suite to help with that. And that's often the CIO. And so I think that's an enormously exciting opportunity for the people that are our traditional customer base. And then the last thing I'm thrilled about is how many companies are saying that ServiceNow is a strategic platform of choice going forward, far beyond just IT. And so that's something to roll build upon. I was struck yesterday in the financial analyst session, you shared with us your meeting with the board. And you said to them, look, if you want to clean this thing up, flip it, whatever, don't hire me. I'm here to build a sustainable company, a enduring company, I think is what you said. And the attributes of an enduring company that are purpose-driven, they both innovate and execute, they invest in talent, and they have a will to win, they got to fight in them. A lot of good sports analogies there. So okay, so you've set that framework. Where do you see this thing going in the next near-term, mid-term, and long-term? Well, we've set, I think it's really important to set the aspiration of what it is you're shooting toward. I have been surprised how many customers have responded well to the statement that we aspire to create a built-to-last company. It starts with the purpose, I defined our purpose, and that purpose is a long-term investment and our employees are already deeply resonating with the purpose. And then comes the hard work. The hard work of how you bring the purpose to life. And our purpose and our product and the work we do with our customers all fit together. You talked about automation. And many executives that we talk to kind of run away from that. We don't want to talk about automation because it implies we're going to replace humans. You said, hey, we're at the center of automation. We have to take that issue head-on. What's the conversation like with the executives and customers that you talk to? Well, the first thing is I think you have to look at the data, which is what I've spent time doing. And two things jump out. One, if you look at where automation is really going to have the biggest impact, it's not in any given job. It's actually the third of all of our jobs that are repetitive, administrative, redundant. So we need to automate the low-value added parts of all of our jobs, and then that will free our time up to leverage our more creative capabilities to add more value. And so if you look at both at a micro and a macro standpoint, where automation is going to impact jobs, it's not a given category. It's more of a horizontal cut of all jobs. And then secondly, looking at aggregate job creation, I've done a fair amount of work with James Manica at the McKinsey Institute, who's the global student. He's got to think the best objective macro study about job creation. And there are going to be some jobs there'll be fewer of, and other jobs there'll be more of. And how do we migrate the skills migration so that people have the skills for the jobs of the future? One of which by the ways, things like being a ServiceNow administrator. You do not have to be a computer science major or an engineer to be a ServiceNow administrator. You have to like technology. You have to embrace technology. But you can do it as a mere mortal. And so we're looking at ways of how do we help retrain people to have the skills to create one of the jobs that we're creating through ServiceNow administrators. John, you talked to a lot of people, I think five or 600 customers in the last, since I met you a year ago at ServiceNow headquarters. We obviously talked to a lot of people on theCUBE. And no question, every CEO that you talked to was trying to get digital right. They understand it. But there's somewhat of a dissonance. And I wonder if you sense it, and I wonder if you could talk about how ServiceNow can help. Where the C-Suite gets it and they're driving for that. But when you go below the line, there's a lot of sometimes complacency. Not in our industry, not in my lifetime. I'll be retired by then. Do you hear a lot of that? And how can ServiceNow help increase the urgency? Well, I'd say a couple of things, Dave. One is the C-Suite gets it, but not every C-Suite's role modeling what's necessary. Without the cross-functional leadership, the partnership of IT and HR and the business units. Then what happens, by the time it goes two, three levels down, people have functional identities. And so people role model, behave in the way they see their leadership team role modeling. And so if that C-Suite is embracing technology and understanding technology demands cross-functional engagement to deliver great customer experiences and employee experiences, then it makes it a lot easier to three steps down. The second thing I think C-Suite people need to do is be able to say, we take if off the table. We set, I talked about top-down goals. Most people are scared of a top-down goal. The problem is if there's not a top-down goal, then people can debate if we need to make this change and how. But if the CEO, the C-Suite says, we are going to improve the employee experience and I'm setting this goal, then it's when you go a level, two levels down, it's not if. No, no, they said if. Now our job is how. And so I think leadership has to do its role. And I think the C-Suite and leadership's learning how you lead in a technology-enabled environment. So leadership's the key and the CEO is really leading that digital charge. And C-Suite, I think the whole C-Suite set of leaders and partnering and reaching out to one another. So I mean, as you said on the main stage, in many ways the technology is the easy part. But what you're talking about is the hard stuff. Yes. Because this is the real change management and it's human led. So what are you hearing, what are you seeing and do you have any ideas for best practices? I mean, as you said, the C-Suite needs to embrace it. And then push that down. But how do you, what are some of the things you've seen at that work? Well, here's some of the things that we're trying to you to contribute toward that. Because obviously we're a software platform. But one is to do what I did this morning, which is be more articulate about what best practice looks like. What is best in class? So that anyone in any organization can go to their boss and say, oh, this is best practice. This is best in class. We need to emulate this. And here are the returns we can get if we emulate it. So one is just hold out the successes, successful examples and illustrate what's required. That's why I kept saying over and over this morning, employee experience is not just an HR issue. Employee experience is not just an IT issue. You need a powerful team of CIO, CHRO, other functional leaders. And then the second thing I think is getting people in IT to see themselves a little bit differently. We have a CIO track going on upstairs with 100 top CIOs. And the whole day is around driving culture change and CIO is leader. And I think good leaders, they don't just allow a label to be attached to them. They invest in themselves. They build their skills. They build change management skills, communication skills. And I think whether it's a CIO or IT, if they're going to have the kind of transformative impact they can across the company, they need to build their technical expertise along with other skill sets. You heard Andrew Wilson talk about that. And they need to learn to speak business and not just IT. John, I want to push on something that I'm discerning from you guys and get your reaction. So obviously cloud, you guys are born in the cloud. Cloud is a tailwind for you. We've seen the classification of business. But we seem to be entering a new era. Moving from a cloud of remote services to one of its fabric, the ubiquitous fabric of digital services. So my question is around innovation. You talked about that as one of the key attributes of an enduring company. What's the innovation equation going forward? You know, it's not Moore's law anymore. It's not cloud, mobile, social, big data. At least it doesn't feel that way anymore. Is it machine intelligence combined with cloud? What do you see? I think it gets down to actually to what I talked about this morning, user experience. I think machine learning, I think AI is going to be a commodity functionality. We're going to get it from AWS or Azure or Google, the cloud infrastructure providers, whether it's natural language processing, whether it's the kind of machine learning capabilities. That's going to be sort of available widely. Then it's our job as a software platform to build that into our platform. So we built machine learning capability into our platform. We built chatbot functionality into our platform. We built leading edge mobile capability into our platform. And again, I'll call that, I don't know if it's the easy part, but that's our job in this equation. The hard job then is how you apply that to real world use cases. Whether you're applying using real world data sets, specific customer data sets, and real world workflows and use cases.  We bought a machine learning company a year ago called DX Continuum, great machine learning team, great machine learning technology. We rebuilt it inside the ServiceNow platform, okay? And I don't believe AI is a horizontal platform. Is I don't, you know, we call it a name and after a dead scientist, that's not what we're going to do and I'm not casting judgment on it, but it's not a solution looking for a problem. We built machine learning into our platform and then said we want to be the first user, we want to use it on a specific challenge. So the case we used it on our own inbound customer support. We have about 800 customer support agents that serve our customers. About 11% of their time is spent on something we call incident categorization and incident routing. Sounds kind of grunty terms, but when a customer calls with a problem, we have to be able to identify what that problem is and then route it to the right person to fix the problem. So 11% of our people's time was doing that. That's not a fun task. So we turned on machine learning and within two weeks, the machine was categorizing the issue and routing it more accurately than a human can. So now what happens is our customer's problems are getting solved faster and the 11% of those resources, those customer support resources who are engineers in our case are focused on solving customer problems, not doing what felt like an administrative task to them. And so I think the actual application of machine learning, the actual application of many of these technologies, it's the application that's going to matter, not the invention. So a lot of what you said makes sense to me because you're saying that your customers are going to be buying essentially that machine learning capability in relative and applying it in very narrow use cases to solve their business problems rather than trying to build it. And you do see some companies trying to maybe get out over their skis and over rotate to try to build some of that stuff. That's going to come from the technology supplier is what you're saying. If we're doing our job, the infrastructure providers, the software platforms like us, we're doing our job, we're making it easy. Another small example will be mobile. I talked this morning about companies everywhere need to build mobile experiences. And so they're wondering, do I need to build a mobile design team, a mobile coding team? If you're a bank or a utility or an oil and gas company or a retailer or platforms like ours, make building mobile experiences really easy for them. So we're trying to build that mobile capability, that design capability, that design thinking, the mobile capability into the platform so they can just get out of the box functionality and they don't have to have their own mobile designers. They don't have their own mobile engineers. They can just be saying, how do I want to use mobile inside my company? And then they're taking our mobile platform, if you will and creating mobile applications and mobile experiences that are relevant for them. So your brand identity is now making work better for people. When you are doing your blue sky thinking about the pain points that employees feel and that job candidates feel because they're another important part of companies trying to keep their people happy, what do you see? I mean, as you said, the next three to five years are going to be, the revolution is going to be in the workplace. What do you see as sort of the biggest challenges that you want to help solve? Well, let me just take a simple use case that comes to mind as you mentioned that. Let's take from the time you start being recruited for a company, let's say you get hired and get started. So the recruiting process, you're sending a resume and you don't know if it got in, didn't get in, if anyone, someone may or may not contact you. You may get an interview, you got to find out where you're going, if you're going, did you get called back? Maybe you get an offer letter, it comes, you get it all set. All kind of, I would call an unstructured workflow. Let's say you get hired, then the onboarding process. Onboarding is a classic unstructured workflow. You got to go to security to get your badge. You got to go to facilities to get your desk. You got to go to IT to get your laptop or mobile phone. You got to get to another part of IT to get your email credentials put on. You got to enter your information into the payroll system. You got to re-enter your same information and pick a healthcare provider. You got to re-enter the same information and get in the T&E system. You got to do all this compliance training. You're painting an accurate, onerous picture of what it's like. And that's why, this is your first impression of the company you're joining. Now there was no reason, they took my mobile phone away from me so I'm twitching. There's no reason why there shouldn't be an app that says, a recruit says, I want to interview the company, they download the app. They submit their resume based on the app. We give a response in the app. They say, oh, my resume was accepted and they want me to do an interview and they want me to be in Santa Clara next Wednesday at 8 a.m. And here's who I'm going to be meeting with. And here's their background in the app. Then they do the interview, let's say they get invited back. Who they're interviewing with, where? Inside the app, okay? Let's say then they get an offer. Well then the app has more permission and the offer comes through the app. You can print it or you can read it. Then onboarding starts. Onboarding can be a seamless experience. It still can connect but you enter your data in once. It pre-fills all those systems.  And all the complexity is hidden underneath it. That's what we have in the consumer world, our lives at home. When you buy something on eBay, all the complexity is hidden. When you pay with PayPal, all the complexity is hidden. There's no reason why all the complexity can't be hidden in the recruiting and onboarding process. And so the technology's there to do it, but it's managing all the workflows, managing all the processes underneath so you can pull that together into a seamless experience. And that's the kind of experience that's funny. I have four grown kids. My daughter, she started working, I won't say where, but a major technology company.  Why isn't it a mobile app? And the millennials will start demanding this. And so I just think there's so much opportunity to make our lives at work feel more like our lives at home. And you just described the capability that allow you to reach your aspirations of the next great enterprise software company. When we think of great enterprise software companies, we think of Oracle and SAP, you're nothing like Oracle and SAP in my opinion. And then of course you think of Salesforce, different. You're not an SMB. How should we be thinking about the next great enterprise software company? So this, I think this is a really important question, Dave. And I look at it through the eyes of what I heard from the 500 customers. And here's what I heard. They're embracing digital transformation. They're embracing cloud. They're embracing cloud at the infrastructure level, figuring out their data center strategy and how much they embrace public cloud. And then at the software platform level, they're saying we want to have four to six strategic platforms. And often it's the born in the cloud platforms. Often it's Salesforce and Workday and ServiceNow and maybe Office 365 or Google for email or communications. Maybe if they have a supply chain, SAP. And they're saying I want those platforms to work well together. So no one platform should be claiming they can do everything. Each of us needs to figure out what's our role and how do we work with one another. And our role, ServiceNow, I'm proud to say is one of those strategic platforms. As I said earlier, people see our capabilities as being connected tissues, helping to pull those platforms together. You know, in the onboarding example, we pull all the data sets and platforms together. By the way, we don't slap our brand on top because actually employees want to see their own brand. They want to see their own company's brand. They don't want to know what the enterprise is all for a brand underneath it is. They just want to have a great experience. And so I don't view it. I think the winning enterprise software, I see a chance for Salesforce and Workday and ServiceNow and Microsoft to all be winners and delivering this feature for companies. Where you are the platform of platforms though, correct? But it's not, and I'm being very careful the way I say it. I'm not saying we're the top dog. Sure. I'm saying what we're good at is cross-functional workflow. Actually, it's probably the gruntiest of all those things. And you're the best at it. And we're the best at it. You are. And our brand, we're not forcing our brand everywhere. That we're doing it in service to our customers. And so I just want to always be listening to what our customers want. That's going to be our North Star. They're going to guide us. It always has been. Fred Letty started that from the beginning and that's what we're going to continue to do. Well, John, it's always a pleasure having you on theCUBE. So thanks so much for coming on our show. Great, thank you very much, Becca. Thank you, Dave. Great to be here. Thank you, John. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge 18 in just a little bit.


Hey, Happy New Year! In the beginning of a new year, a new decade even, it's always time for reflection. And of course to look forward to think about what's ahead of us, to set new goals. So that's today's topic. What will the 2020s be like? I'm in Miami today to talk to one of the world's leading companies in video surveillance. And just by looking at their numbers, their growth, it's fair to assume that this industry will be something very important, very big, in the way we shape society in the decade ahead of us. One thing I often talk about when I tell people about the future is to separate the unknowns from the knows. Successful companies like Google or Amazon or Facebook, they are not where they are because their founders were good at guessing or predictions. They are where they are because they were focused on what's possible in the now. I know this sounds like a no-brainer but think again, most business leaders, most companies out there, they are focused on success in the past. I mean, take the automobile industry for example. How come a newcomer, a startup like Tesla, had to enter the market to shift focus to what's actually possible in this present moment? And then as if this wasn't enough, most leaders are also focused on what's unpredictable, like politics, trade wars, the stock market, interest rates. Wouldn't we love to know all those things? And we never will because it's complex and thus depends on many interrelated factors, many unknowns. This is totally unpredictable. So instead of this, I suggest you switch focus to what we know about the now. So what do we know about the 2020s? Well, one thing we do know is that everybody in the developed part of the world have access to advanced connected devices. The smartphone was the true revolution of the last decade and now it's just a fact. And with this technology, everybody are producing and consuming data in a way that is changing every aspect of society and what it actually means to be human. And as I said to you about surveillance video, this technology will be everywhere, in everything. You will have wearable devices as well as devices all over society. You want to know where to find parking? Well, just check it live and there it is. You want to know about your health, your blood pressure, how are you right now? Well, just check it. Forget about doctor's appointments. You want to know about your emotions even. I mean, how does work make you feel? What does a Monday morning truly mean to your health and your body? Well, you will probably very soon in two, three years have a wearable device with capabilities to give you that information as well. But all this knowledge will come at a cost and the cost is privacy. To get data, you will have to give data. Now, if you're like most people, you probably don't think of privacy as a problem yet. But what if everything you did was registered and not only what you did but your physical health when doing it or your emotions when doing it? You still don't see a problem? So what if your boss just asked you why you felt nervous last week when he wanted to talk to you about your career? Or what if the DMV suddenly just revoked your driver's license because of your emotions in Monday morning traffic? Or what if your life insurance company called you and they changed the policy, double the price as they wrote in the letter because of your lifestyle? Now you see the problem, don't you? With all the technological solutions out there in this moment, I am 100% sure that this will be one of the big topics for the coming decade. Data rights and the way we think about privacy. Not only is it a big topic, a big debate, but it's also a very important one thinking about the future. The decisions we make now in the coming 10 years will most likely define the way we think of a free society for all future generations. Now talking about a decision that will shape society for all future generations, we have one more of those big topics, big questions and of course that's climate change. According to all science, to everything we know in this moment, in this now, the action we decide on or the lack of action we decide on in this decade ahead of us will determine if the ecosystem on this planet will be something similar to this so our grandchildren can have a similar life or if a place like this like Miami will be underwater. So that's my prediction for the roaring 20s ahead of us. Strategy and marketing like in the old days will be replaced by surveillance and manipulation as a business tool and because of that data rights will be one of the biggest topics. That in sustainability. What do you think? You want to add something? Feel free to go ahead in the section down below and like always if you want more hit subscribe and I'll see you in the future. Music


which I think this is a good time to segue into that, was work-life balance. Woo, I tell you what, you could do probably a whole week-long episode on this one. I can give you what I've learned. I mean, you have four boys. Because that's so true. Oh, man, it is so true. And what are they doing? Going up, my dad wasn't around. He was a travel and salesman. I do not hold that against my best friend, who was my father, okay? He did what he had to do, put food on the table. I do not hold anything against him for that. But there came a point, I think I was about 13, 14.  So I got that time back with my dad. I do not want my boys to go ahead and not have me there growing up during these magical, very chaotic, crazy years. So to answer your question, the work-life balance. This is real. A lot of entrepreneurs that start the companies and a lot of companies that are growing their businesses, you put so much time in at the office. So many of these guys are grinding 70, 75, 80 hours a week. If you think about that for a second, 80 hours a week. I mean, that doesn't leave a whole lot of time to tuck the kids in the bed, to do the date nights with the wife or the husband or the boyfriend.  So what I would say is, these are some of the tips and tricks that I've learned. Now a few years ago, I was heading towards a divorce, Eric, at about 150 miles an hour because I did not have this work-life balance. Business, woo! One at a time was a 10. Financially, I was up there around a seven. The family life, about a two. You can't have that. You can't go off to charts on business but have a score of two when it comes to the family because like my dad always says, not to sound cheesy or anything like that, but your business doesn't cry at your funeral. It's very real. It's very, very real. So your family is everything. So what I do now is, actually a few years ago, I went and met Larry Broughton. He's got a mastermind program out of California. Former Green Beret, he owns the Broughton Hotel chain in California. Very successful, extremely kind man. It was in his mastermind class. And he taught me that there's many facets to your life and you can't focus on just one to excel at.  And you gotta go ahead. You gotta make sure you fill up every bucket. Because if you just focus on filling one bucket, your life's off balance. So I started doing that. I started making sure I was spending time more at the gym, spending time with family. So when it goes into the family, what I try to do is I try to get home by like 430 every day. So we can have supper at five o'clock and sit around the table, shut my phone off, throw it on the charger, try to keep it off for the whole night. So the kids go to bed, then I hop on my laptop on my phone when I'm sitting in bed with a wife. She's working on college papers, so on and so forth. But around that dinner table, you won't believe how many laughs we have and the magic that happens with these little kids around that table when we're eating at dinner. That's how you connect. That's how we connect. That's how people have connected. I mean, I don't know how many years, hundreds, thousands of years, breaking bread, right? Yeah, yeah. Can you tell us how much magic happened? Chris, can you really quickly just tell us your son's names and ages just to put some context? I got Gavin. Yeah, Gavin James. He's eight years old. I have Allyn Christopher. He's four years old. I have Lincoln Frederick.  And then I have Finnegan and he is one and a half years old. All right, thank you. So four boys, married my high school sweetheart, Irish Catholic, very, very, very exciting time in my life with these young boys. But yeah, so we make dinner fun.  And these are the times they're gonna remember. So I'm just trying to be there for them at the same time, building a company. And it's just a balancing act. Now, I don't think anybody's ever figured it out. So I think we just have to go ahead and every day take the temperature, you know? Are we filling up each bucket properly? Are we going ahead and we filling up each bucket equally? I think if you do that and just tune into that every day and be conscious about it, I mean, that's the best way to do it. Here's also the biggest advice I learned from my wife and it's one of my 2020 goals, live in the present. Us as, you know, C-suite level, employees in a company or CEOs or entrepreneurs that work within a company even, we're so focused on tomorrow or so focused on next week that sometimes when we're at home, we forget to live in the present and we miss some of the magic around us because we're so focused on the future. So one of my goals for 2020 is to live in the present and be conscious about that and to try to slow things down and enjoy my boys and my wife and my friends and everything in the present. So I hope that helps somebody out there. No, no, definitely.


It's my pleasure to welcome you all to today's lunchtime lecture. I'm Nathan Hill, I'm director of the Trinity Center for Asian Studies. And I would like to introduce today's speaker, who is Professor James Leibold, the head of department of politics, media and philosophy at Latrobe University in Melbourne. And he's, he's also a senior fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. I think one can say one of the world experts in Chinese nationalities policy. And he'll be giving us this talk teaming Mongolia, Xi Jinping's agenda for coercive nation building in the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region. Thanks very much, Nathan. Thanks for the invitation for the Trinity Center of Asian Studies for hosting my talk. This talk is really based on some new research that conducted looking at the implementation of Minzoo policies in the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, and really builds on, I guess, over two decades of work trying to track changes in Minzoo theory, Minzoo policy debates. I'm, you know, I'm new to Inner Mongolia, I don't speak Mongolian. Lucky enough to travel there a couple of times when I was living in China, but I'm going to kind of steep learning curve here, but what I'm trying to do is apply some of the previous findings that I've been able to gain looking at policy debates as well as some of the more recent work I've been doing, looking at policy implementation in Xinjiang to Inner Mongolia. And part of my aim here is to widen out our perspective and to look at the way in which what's happening in China in terms of this kind of a slimmer to turn is occurring at different places and in different ways in different parts of China. So this is based on an article that's forthcoming in the China Leadership Monitor. I'm going to try to speak for 30 to 40 minutes, try to aim for 30 minutes. So we have plenty of time for questions and discussion. And I really want to kind of start with a kind of wider lens of looking at recent changes in ethnic policy before I kind of turn to the situation in Inner Mongolia. You know, language as I'm sure we all know and I know Nathan knows very well is really all about power. So my researchers have tried to really offer a close reading of Chinese language discourse on Minzhu, a term that is deeply polycelemic and highly contested. In fact, I would argue you could chart the kind of evolution of Chinese thinking on ethnic policies and theory in the PRC by looking at the altering glosses in English for this term Minzhu. Much of its history means it was translated as nationality, really giving a nod to the idea that China was a multi-nation state with 56 officially recognized nations. Yet these nations, of course, we're never equal in terms of size and power. Marking one of the fundamental tensions in China's approach for managing its ethnic diversity. It's got what my colleague Tom Mulaney called a kind of odd calculus of 55 minorities plus one supermajority somehow comprises one nation state. And that's really the key challenge that Chinese policy members has been dealing with. And of course that one supermajority, the Han is always function as a kind of core, the normative core, the standard for the nation, a kind of seemingly unmarked signifier of modernity and Chinese-ness. Yet until recently, you know, the so-called Minzhu went to you or the Minzhu question or problem was really viewed as a kind of long-term one with gradual uneven pace of development viewed as a kind of key to its solution. China was seeking unity through diversity, with the original emphasis really on this idea of diversity as a part of Fei Xiaotong's 1988 idiom of the Chinese nation's Duoyuan, which is an idiom of unity or the structure of unity and diversity. In order to safeguard this process of autonomous development, the party state adopted a range of policies in the 1950s. There were then institutionalized in the 1980s and in these policies really by international standards were incredibly progressive. The formal recognition of minority languages, cultures and religious practices, their constitutional protection for equal status to a system of regional autonomy that at least on paper promised to allow minority nationalities like the Mongols to be masters of their own home. And then third range of preferential policies, think of them as affirmative action policies to protect and support minority nationalities with their autonomous development. It was believed that by assisting with this development of minority nationalities. Of course, each according to their own pace and traditions, but China would slowly but surely move towards a collective sense of unity that national differences would disappear in the wake of class solidarity and kind of traditional Marxist thought. But of course, you know as as as China grew more powerful under Deng Xiaoping in its external environment altered so to do its means of policies, or what is now glossed as its ethnic policies with means who now rendered in English as ethnicity. Following the collapse of the USSR and in 91 a range of really influential scholar officials. Such as bed as my wrong, the United Front work departments to a tune, as well as Tsinghua University's who on gum began to call for like an urgent rethink of China's Minzhu policies, in order to forestall what they believe would be an inevitable collapse of China along its ethnic seems like the USSR, or you believe that if it was the Soviet, they argued that current policies placed too much emphasis on Minzhu differences and peculiarities, and not enough on a shared belonging culture and identity without urgent nation building they argued China's was under threat. Huangang and Julian He put forward this idea of a second generation of ethnic policies, one that would remove administrative and institutional barriers to national cohesion and permit interethnic as well as interregional mobility in Mingling. The party state also believed that it was important to kind of scale back and ultimately eliminate Minzhu-based preferential policies, as it was argued, that these helped to strengthen ethnic attachments. Some even went so far to call for the entire elimination of the system of regional ethnic autonomy, which would require the revision of the Constitution and maybe even the repeal of the 1984 law on regional ethnic autonomy. Of course, ethnic, in their view of a new generation of ethnic policies, ethnic identities weren't to be removed completely. Rather, colorful costumes and songs like we see here in the children walking across the burdened stadium in 2008 could remain. But the focus really needed to be on a single shared Guozhu, and this is a term that Huangang and Huli and He turned back to, a concept that was first coined by Liang Chi-chao and then used quite frequently by Sun Yat-sen. In this idea of a Guozhu, I've kind of rendered in English in the past as a kind of state race, so I do think it has a racial eugenics element to it. The goal here was to achieve unity from diversity. As Professor Xiong-Hung Xin argued when he inverted Fei Xiaotong's formulation to E.T. Duoyuan, arguing that unity is foundational and diversity is derivative in a recent article. So against that backdrop, enter Xi Jinping's stage right in 2012. Now, like most policy areas, Xi really sought to put his own stamp on the Minzhu problem. And I've written about this in the past. He doesn't really come to the job with a lot of experience dealing with this issue. It'd be interesting who he turned to as an advisor. Long Huning clearly plays a role, but I also feel that people like Jue Chun also had the ear of Xi Jinping. And so he clearly borrows quite heavily from those advocating a second generation of political policies. But what we see is that it's not a complete match, a one-to-one. And in fact, he sought to kind of take ethnic policies in a slightly new direction, a real return to Mao in an emphasis on the importance of ideology, education, and culture. The superstructure, rather than base, was going to ultimately solve the Minzhu wenti. His self-declared new era required the adjustment of Minzhu work. One needs to realize that economic development alone would not solve the Minzhu question, but rather it required a focus on cultural and spiritual work. In 2019, Xi stated that cultural identity is the soul of the nation, the root of national unity. His concept of forging the collective consciousness of the Zhonghua Minzhu has been declared the kind of main line of Xi Jinping theory on nation building work in the new era. And this concept of forging collective consciousness, the key verb here really is this concept of Julao, which literally means to forge or to smelt, suggesting that the party state needed to adopt a really interventionalist approach to building collective identity in the PRC. And as a result, educational ideological work were really deemed the kind of main battlefield in the drive for cultural security, requiring party officials and educators to, in Xi's word, plant the seed of patriotism in the souls of every Chinese citizen from infancy and ensuring language, again, being very important, that Putonghua medium education was universalized, as was patriotic education throughout the entire country. It also required the promotion of inner ethnic mingling and mobility, a desire to really break down these autonomous regions. They could remain in name only. In fact, one of the things that Xi did was to state that the system of regional ethnic autonomy was a foundational principle of socialism with Chinese characteristics. It would stay, but it would stay largely in name only. And what was required was to, you know, to kind of transmigration of Han into the frontier and the movement of minorities out of these regions, you would break down the attachment that minority groups had with these regions and essentially render autonomy hollow. The term doi-yuen-yi-ti, this feishou-tong term, is actually still used by Xi and party officials. It's an incredibly resilient and a robust concept, but now is probably best translated as I've been playing with this multiple, beginning single essence or even out of many one, which is actually the same rendering of the Latin term e plervus unum, which is inscribed on the great seal of the United States. And in fact, much like the kind of China dream, one could argue this rendering of doi-yuen-yi-ti is clearly drawn upon the American model and a kind of idealized view of the American melting pot. So with that as a bit of background, what I wanted to do in kind of looking at the Inner Mongolia was just to use it as another example of look at the way which of these, this new policy agenda was being implemented in Inner Mongolia. Now, Inner Mongolia is not, it's not the Xinjiang is not Tibet. And that was my kind of starting starting points. And as I said before, I'm still on a learning curve here to understand, but clearly Inner Mongolia had a stronger level of autonomy than the other two regions. Clearly it was an area of concern for Xi Jinping. It was the first ethnic minority region he's visited. It's the only one he's visited twice. He's met numerous times with the Inner Mongolian delegation at the NPC. And this concept of Inner Mongolia as being a kind of model autonomous region was something first coined by Joanne Leibach in the 1950s. And it was sort of seen as a badge of honor. You know, the Mongols were the first to kind of join the PRC, but it's also been used often to castigate the region and Mongolian officials when they are believed or perceived to have failed to live up to this lofty title. And that's certainly what happened in 2020, August and September when a educational protest movement broke out. And we can see the party state, the system, the central party in particular coming down quite hard on Mongolian officials for not falling in line. So without going into detail, I think some of you would be aware of what prompted the language protests the party state tried to ram through a series of really highly contentious changes to the medium instructions as well as textbooks in the region's Mongolian schools. And as a result, parents took to the streets and students led a school boycott that really captured the attention of the international media. So in my forthcoming article, what I sought to try to understand is what really happened after the gays in the international community turned elsewhere. So I really wanted to kind of understand not what happened during the protest movement, but what happened afterwards and unpack what I argued is a kind of toolkit of control and transformation that Xi Jinping and the party center used to attain in our Mongolia. And so in the article, I look at kind of four features in particular, and I'll just go through each of them briefly. The first one is often the kind of knee-jerk response of the party state system when there's any form of instability that is to bring society under control. And under Xi Jinping, we've seen the party's mechanisms of control really strengthened with new innovations about human and automated forms of surveillance and control and real strengthening of the party at the grassroots. And that investment pays dividends when you have unrest like you had in 2020. And what we saw is that where possible, authorities first sought to incentivize compliance. There are a number of cases of them offering carrots for students to bring back fellow classmates into school. But when these carrots failed, the party state quickly turned to the stick in Tongliou city, which is home to over a hundred Mongolian medium schools with nearly half of the city's population being ethnically Mongolian. The police started posting CCTV photos on their Weixing account, calling on residents to dob in their fellow citizens for picking quirls and provoking trouble. I was really quite a gobsmacked when I found that these posts are still up on Weixing and haven't been taken down. And I mean, this is a series of surveillance footage of people looking for other civilians to sort of dob them in. As opposition continued to linger, the authorities turned to more blunt tactics, including the expulsion of students and the dismissal of their parents from state employment, the imposition of mandatory legal training, blacklisting, severing of social benefits, and even detention and formal arrest should all other efforts fail. And unsurprisingly, within two months, students were back in school, order was restored, and then the reeducation campaign began. And that's the more interesting part for myself, and it's sort of how do you elicit kind of slow change and rewire a society and its population over the long term. So in the immediate wake of the protests, you had both regional and central party officials like Shui Tai Feng and Wang Yang, castigating local officials, and talking about deep-seated problems in ethnic work and calling for a kind of urgent rectification campaign. And sure enough, in December, the new head of the Education Bureau, Huang Ya Li, launched a new ideological campaign around Xi Jinping's pet phrase of forging a collective consciousness of the Zhonghua Minzhu. And throughout 2021, I used a lot of Beijing posts to track this. You could see that staff and students across the entire educational system in Inner Mongolia were subject to a barrage of patriotic training and propaganda. Here is just one screenshot from a local news report where you can see students at the Tongliao Mongol Kindergarten School learning the spirit of revolutionary heroes who had died for the nation in the anti-Japanese resistance war in order to deepen their love for the nation. This is what the propaganda package asserted. In the paper, I also provide some analysis of a leaked internal training pamphlet that was used as the key text throughout this educational campaign. Half of it is just filled with quotes from Xi Jinping, but the interesting pages near the back are quite explicit in warning local officials that they had fallen behind Xinjiang and Tibet in educational language reform, really kind of using this notion that they were supposedly the model ethnic region, but they were really falling behind the other regions. It also asserts quite clearly that unity is a pre-supposition and foundation of ethnic autonomy and also argues that no ethnic region belongs to a single ethnic group. So it's not really the inner Mongolian autonomous region, it's just a autonomous region of the Chinese nation. I also provide some coverage, only because I've recently managed to download them of a series of new readers on Xi Jinping thought which were introduced across all of China in September, along with new regulations requiring all kindergartens this one to use Putonghua medium instruction, which wasn't the case before. The readers, and I'm happy to send you your copies or show you where you can download them, they do make for a really interesting reading. There's four of them, depending on the level of the students. The middle picture here is the first lesson and page of the junior elementary version of the reader, where, as we can see Xi Jinping is front and center. And on this very first page, students learn, quote, we all Chinese, we all deeply love our motherland. As grandpa Xi Jinping says, love of one's motherland is the deepest and most enduring sentiment in the world, the source for achieving individual virtue and the foundation for rendering emeritus service. The photo on the far left is another screen from another lesson on what I call Xi's button theory, where students learn, quote, if you don't get the first button right in life, your value system will be deviant and your social orientation crooked. So as we can see in these textbooks and the larger education system in Inner Mongolia, it's really a push for both cultural and ideological conformity. So those two elements are simultaneously at play. The other element of the crackdown was purge of local officials. So recent research has really demonstrated that Xi has been effective in using both his anti-corruption campaign and personnel appointments to strengthen his personal authority and control over the party. This was also the case with frontier regions like Inner Mongolia, take for example, the current party secretary, Suretai Fung. So I've been a lot of time trying to understand Suretai Fung originally thought, well, he's described as a classmate, Li Keqiang. So maybe he's not Xi's man, but the more you dig into it, you can see that there are clear connections between Xi and Suretai Fung. So Suretai had served as Xi Jinping's deputy at the party school from 2007 to 2010. And then he was hand-picked to become party secretary of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in 2007, where he was praised for expunging overt symbols of Islam and retarding religious extremism and carrying out Xi's agenda for a sinicizing religion. And so at that time, there was real concerns that extremism was going to creep out of Xinjiang and Ningxia was seen as a really important battleground. So Suretai got this really important assignment and after two years of success, he was then tapped on the shoulder to go to Inner Mongolia. And I'm pretty convinced that was because she trusted him and she believed that he could go into the region and implement his nation-building agenda and really try to tame the region and bring it under closer central party control. But of course, he was not the only one active there in terms of purging personnel. Within months of the language protests, the Central Commission for Disciplinary Inspection launched what are called a routine inspection of the region resulting in the purging of thousands of senior Inner Mongol and Inner officials, both Han and Mongol alike throughout 2021. And so there's lots of evidence that you can bring to bear looking at this through a whole range of sectors. But one of the things you see is that of course, the bar for loyalty appears to be a much higher for Mongolian officials, particularly in the educational sphere. Take for example, Miss Gauwa who is a celebrated Mongolian educator who actually won a state award as a Hero Ethnic Unity in 2007 when she was a principal of the Tong Liao Mongol School and she helped to increase its student enrollment by five fold. She was eventually dismissed from her role as a party secretary at the Tong Liao Education Department in late December and then expelled from the party and convicted of corruption in June of this year. Similarly, the very high-profile chairwoman of the autonomous region, Bu Xiaolin, who is the granddaughter of the revolutionary and Mongolian hero, Ulan Hu, was formally stood down in August of this year after being largely absent from public life for over 10 months. Now, there was no reason given for Bu's removal but she wasn't of retirement age and it's possible that she'll be given some kind of ceremonial role. But it's quite clear that she was clearly demoted either because she didn't implement this policy strongly enough or that somehow she was resisting it. And there she joins two former Mongolian chairs of the region, Yang Jing as well as Batar who have been dismissed from public office under Xi Jinping. So it was a real attempt here to remove particularly senior Mongol party officials who were deemed as being disloyal to Xi Jinping. Bu Xiaolin was replaced by another Mongol official, Wang Lixia, who had spent most of her career actually outside of the region, suggesting a kind of concerted effort to weaken the links between Mongolian officials in the autonomous region with, as I said, loyalty really emerging as the key determinant of promotion in Xi's China.  One of the reasons why Inner Mongolia was one of the last frontier regions to adopt Putonghua medium education is it's really strong tradition of Mongolian medium education which was really underpinned by a strong legislative foundation. Reid, if you get a some chance, the 2005 regulation on the Mongolian written and spoken language work, which stipulates quite clearly that written and spoken Mongolians should be the lingua franca of the region and that it is quote an important tool for exercising autonomy. A more recent regulation 2016, regulation of ethnic education also codifies really strong administrative as well as financial incentives to support Mongolian medium education. So it was quite clear after the crackdown that these two laws could not stand. And in fact, in January of 2021, the legislators affairs committee of the National People's Congress made a ruling that these regulations and other regulations like that were in violation of article 19 of the PRC constitution, which calls for the promotion of Putonghua. So with the laws rendered null and void, the regional government then drafted two replacement laws that it tabled recently for consultation. And these new draft regulations on education and the promotion of Putonghua will go into effect on 1st January, 2020. And they mandate that schools adopt the correct view of country, history, nation, culture and religion and promote Putonghua as the foundation of the region's education system. The regional government also enacted a new set of regulations promoting national unity. It revised its civilized behavior regulations, which are quite remarkable actually in government just about every facet of life, but also wrote into it Xi's concept of forging a collective consciousness of the Chinese nation. And the theory could lead to the punishment of anyone who was not demonstrating a firm footing of that theory. And then finally, they also revised quite recently there's a lot of change, a lot of legislative change in a very short period of time, a change to the extra point system on the Gaokao where ethnic minorities used to receive extra points that essentially going to be phased out in a short period of time, winding back these minority preferential policies that is another key element of Xi Jinping thought on nation building in the new era. So just sorry, some concluding thoughts before I finish up. So the Chinese Communist Party has long used a carrot and stick approach to ethnic governance. Under Xi Jinping, we've seen the party center turning to more coercive methods of control and homogenization as its tolerance for diversity, Wayne. The emphasis is really on standardizing and normalizing Beijing's controls across the nation while also creating a uniform set of ethno-cultural norms in frontier regions like Inner Mongolia. As a result, Mongolian identity, like those of other non-Hong Kong communities in China is slowly but steadily being hollowed out. This sort of slow violence is chiefly structural and not really defined in any single event or policy action. Rather, it's particularly outside of Xinjiang, it's really the kind of glacial drip and largely hidden altering of what it means to be a citizen of China and the norms that define that identity. Of course, ritualized performances of exotic ethnic otherness remain often through fetishized costume, song and dance assemblages performed for the voyeuristic pleasure of visiting Han officials and foreign tourists. Meanwhile, in the main stage, Mongols and other indigenous communities are being taught to dress, act and speak in accordance with Xi Jinping thought in state schools. Yet as I pointed out before, I think it's so important to keep in mind that Inner Mongolia is not Tibet nor is it Xinjiang. Regional variation remains and so do local forms of resistance. Xi's mandate for cultural nationalism and ethnic assimilation has been rolled out at different paces and under different local circumstances. In Inner Mongolia, at least until recently they did exercise a greater degree of autonomy than those risk of regions where national security fears propelled a more heavy handed and securitized approach to stability maintenance and nation building. The party's methods in Inner Mongolia are far more subtle and less visible. Making them, I would argue, more insidious to ethnic cultural diversity in China over the long term. And I'll end there and welcome your comments and questions. Very near the end there, you made the point that maybe more soft policies are more effective. If I were a friend of Xi's, let's put it this way, I would caution that if you overplay your hand it might dialectically produce the opposites of your intended goal. Do you think there's any, like, do you think that's a consideration at all or? I think the Chinese approach to governance has always been quite methodical with the long-term view. But at the same time there has been a kind of frustration continually with the Leninist party system that because it's so complicated, so bureaucratic, you know, has different, you know, often conflicting interests built into it, but sometimes the system itself becomes a bit gummed up and less effective. And so when the Parshay system perceives there to be a kind of existential threat of sorts, it often resorts to this kind of campaign style governance that does lead to more extreme policy responses that commit devastating consequences. And I think that's what we saw in the case of Xinjiang, there was this real perception of fear that the region was spinning out of control, that you had all these terror attacks that she at that time was in the early years of his rule, didn't want to look weak. And so you have a pretty extreme policy response of the rounding up and mass internment of Uyghurs in these reeducation camps. That's quite an extreme policy response that I don't think is the party's preferred mechanism of transforming its ethnic minority populations. Really, if you look at its approach to this issue, say over the last decade, 15 years, the more I study it, the more I see kind of Xinjiang as the outlier, the exception, the preferred approaches is a softer, less overtly coercive approach. I think the party state always prefers if it can to use carrots over sticks. And in the case of Inner Mongolia, you really, with the exception of that real intense crackdown in September, late August, it's been coercive, but not overtly coercive. It's subtle through the change to the legal system, purging people, new appointments, a bit of ideological campaign mixed in to kind of slowly bring the region to bear. And so I think that's the preferred mechanism, but of course it also, there's regional dynamics at play and here I haven't completely gotten my head around this, but there's something about Inner Mongolia that where Xi's control is quite weak. I actually think his control in all the frontier regions when he came to power was quite weak. The frontier regions have long been seen as breeding grounds of the Tuan Pai, this party school faction. And so when it comes to power, none of these people are really Xi's men in those areas. And so it's been a slow process of kind of finding officials that he trusts and removing others that he didn't trust. And I think in particular Inner Mongolia appeared to be one that was really resisting more so than say, certainly Xinjiang was brought under strong control under Xinjiang war and as was Tibet where he was previously. So yeah, there's something different about it. And I guess that's what one of the things I'm trying to do with my current research is really look beyond, look at the diversity of the way policies are implemented across China as it relates to ethnic issues of hoping to look at the South of China.  I mean, looking at Yunnan or Guangxi to get a sense of what the dynamic is down there. This seems classic. I'm a historian of colonialism and this seems kind of classic colonial behavior. You know, the, the British in Ireland or plenty of examples of colonial powers promoting their language of the expense of indigenous language, but it can be for reasons of just kind of chauvinism of, you know, just genuinely believing that their language is superior and their culture is superior. Or it can be an explicit effort to suppress the native language because it's seen as a source of subversion. What's the balance, do you think, between those two motivations for, for Beijing here? Do they, do they, is their long-term plan for no one to speak any ethnic minorities, any ethnic minority languages because that's a possible route to subversion or is it just they want everyone's first language to be put on hold because that's the, the national language? I think Isabel's a bit of both. It's usually the case. There's definitely chauvinism at play, a belief that, you know, Chinese cultural norms are superior. There's a long, held belief that, you know, ethnic minority cultures and languages and religious traditions are somehow kind of backward. You know, there's this trope going through that, you know, that you can't learn modern sciences in Uyghur or Mongolian, you know, that if you really want to bring China into, into modernity, you know, the vehicle has to be put on hold. But, you know, in fact, most colloquially, most people refer to it, you know, as Hanyu, you know, the Han language, you know, which kind of gives the way that the fact that what we're talking about here is not the common speech. It's the language of the majority, but there's also that concern of subversion that this language, you know, because a lot of these minority communities have diasporic populations across the border. So it can be used as a language of subversion and splitism, you know, with Xinjiang and Uyghur. You've got concerns about, you know, Arabic and, you know, somehow that would feed into kind of the global jihadist movement that, you know, we don't know what these people are saying on their online chats. And so I think both those things are certainly at play. And there's been a real concerted effort to, you know, push the universalization of Putonghua under Xi Jinping. This was not a, even though, you know, it is, you know, it was in the Constitution in Article 19. I mean, the Constitution itself is contradictory because I forget the, is it Article 4, the article, it talks about ethnic minority rights, says they have the right to promote their languages. And so there's this indoor contradiction within the Chinese Constitution. And in the past, you know, there was an acceptance that minority languages were accepted and should be allowed to be used, you know, that they had to be used in government and legal terms in autonomous regions. But we've seen a real push to universalize Putonghua and really to kind of push out minority language education that really, you know, we can really mark that with the arrival of Xi Jinping because, you know, going back to the thing I was saying before, the importance of ideology education, this is seen as a real key issue under Xi. Urbanization is a key policy. It has numerous elements to it, clearly as an economic component to it, but it's also a cultural component to it. And there's, you know, an environmental component to it. But for minority communities, whether it be Mongols or Tibetans, it's really about taking them off their land, bringing them into cities where they can, you know, receive state education, be incorporated into social services, state surveillance, and to kind of sever that connection between the land, the identity and the culture. That's been happening quite extensively in Inner Mongolia. It's a long source of tension.  It's intensified, particularly as you noted through mining, you know, which is a massive revenue generator for Mongolia, which is, you know, one of the strongest economies in China, but it's a great source of tension between, you know, the indigenous community and the Han settler, colonial machine. Just a side note on Wolf Totem, a fascinating book which I've read, actually a big part of that. You've got to read the Chinese as well, because the Chinese has a long kind of appendix, which makes a fascinating reading. In a kind of formal life, I spent a lot of time in chat rooms amongst Han extremists. I kind of think of them as kind of Han nationalists that inhabited parts of the cybersphere. And they were incensed by this book, Wolf Totem. They argue that this was an example of, you know, the minority communities preparing for kind of genocide that they completely bought into the fact that, yeah, they were sheepish, you know, they've got it up on us, you know, they've got this martial tradition. And what was needed to fight against this is kind of a new generation of barbaric, nomadic invasion of China. And these people were completely opposed to many of the ethnic policies that then were critiqued by people like Mao Rong in Huangang. There was a lot of resistance to these policies amongst ordinary Han citizens who saw them as undermining Han privilege and power. And, you know, so in addition to being a kind of intellectual move to rethink and political move to rethink ethnic policies, there's a deep kind of social element to it as well that we see anywhere you have tensions between majority and minority populations. I think you're completely right. I mean, I think sometimes, because it's what we do, at least it's what I do, we look at what's happening in autonomous regions to minority communities to these sites that this is part of a kind of wider agenda of thought and behavior control. It's about, you know, it's about shoring up the control of the party state system and ensuring she is at the very center of that and stamping out any forms of resistance, but also transforming China and Xi's own image, regardless of whether you're kind of, you know, a Han middle class person in Beijing or, you know, a peasant in Hubei or a Uyghur in Kashgar. Of course, the requirement for change is a lot higher in those communities that are seen as having kind of a low suger, you know, sort of low bio quality, like, you know, Uyghur farmers, but, you know, the desire for transformation is there and it's there across the board. But we also appreciate that kind of the local dynamics as well, you know, there are common trends here, but, you know, she doesn't, you know, he's not so powerful that he can control all of China, you know, with a click of a mouse, at least not yet, and there's tremendous kind of regional variation across China and it's a vast country with an incredibly complex bureaucratic system. Thank you very much for this super interesting talk and discussion and also for staying up so late on our behalf.