Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Adobe Summit 2019, brought to you by Adobe. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Adobe Summit 2019. Here for two days, I'm John Furrier, Jeff Frick. Our next guest is Mark Lenhard, SVP of Growth. Part of the big news is the Adobe Commerce Cloud, Mark formerly with Magento now. Adobe, great to see you, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me, it's a real pleasure to be here. So very impressive Adobe with their creative products and their end user applications. Really great stuff, people know it. It's a cloud service, the transformations happened. But what's really happening too is this platform continues to get built. You guys with Magento, one of the big pieces of the puzzle. Marketo's got a big piece over there.  Big news here. What's the Commerce Cloud about? You guys announced it here at the show. When is it going to be available? What's the features? What's it do? Give us the overview. No, great, and again, thanks for having me. It's really been a wild year with the Magento acquisition coming in, really folding into a suite of products on the experience side that really are designed to really help companies transform themselves and really own the entire customer experience all the way from discovery through to buy to through renew as we saw this morning. And Commerce really fits in there nicely in the buy section. And what was announced today with Adobe Commerce Cloud is the opportunity which available now for our larger merchants and enterprises to get the core Magento platform, which our customers know and love, but get that in a way that's managed by Adobe, is more fully integrated into the other products and services so you can deliver that full customer end-to-end journey. And with some enhanced features, which will happen over time, particularly as we get to more data-driven insights and over time sensei and AI-powered tools. You know, I love looking at slides because you can tell a lot by a slide, right? When the lay them out, these keynotes, actually kind of architecture slides. What I think is interesting about the Adobe Experience Cloud is it lays out nicely because you have cloud modules if you will, or building blocks. You've got the ad cloud, the analytics cloud, the marketing cloud, and the commerce cloud. And you've got platform underneath enabling that. So a lot of nice decoupled but cohesive elements to it, which really is a testament to kind of how they're laying out that experience cloud and experience. What is the commerce cloud's role in that? Because you guys have to be highly cohesive to do the kind of levels of commerce that's demanded in B2B now. It's changing to more like a direct-to-consumer business model, so it's a consumer-like marketing function in a B2B context. How is that changing what Magento was and what's it turning into as the commerce cloud, specifically? Well, you know, a lot of it is just really leveraging a lot of the features and functionality that Magento had. It really just fit in really, really nicely into that user journey, right? And so where Magento is really slotting in nicely is in that buy section, right? If you've got discovery, buy to renew, buy all the way through to renew, Magento and the core platform there really helps deliver that so that our customers, whether they're B2B or B2C or they're trying to go direct-to-consumer, they're able to develop that content, that rich content, market to those customers, drive them to Magento, enable them to transact and then actually renew and do everything from digital products to consumer or to physical goods. It's interesting, you look at the slides too, it feels like an operating environment, right? Because you've got cloud, you guys are on cloud. There's a lot of touch points with other pieces of the system, it's an operating system basically, not most, not technically, but a platform. You've got to put some platform, you've got to talk to things, so data I can imagine is critical.  How important is the data architecture? Can you explain how you guys look at that because now you come into the Adobe Fold, they're data-centric, data's super important, we heard that in the keynote. What's the role of data in all this and how do you see that? So it's absolutely critical as you mentioned and being able to harmonize that across the platform and be able to have all of those pieces talk to each other so that you can get everything from behavioral data up front, I know what you're doing on a website, I know what you're doing on Instagram, other platforms to, I know what you're transacting, I know what you're buying, to I know what you're renewing on and what you're coming back to do. Be able to pull that all together and not just pull it together in a data cluster, but to be able to actually take those insights and, or sorry, take that data and develop insights out of it and then most importantly take action on it. And so one of the announcements we made really was around analytics and as we pull that into Adobe Commerce Cloud, enabling our Adobe analytics to have some dashboards that roll out, we know e-commerce really well whether it's B2B or B2C, we know what those customers, those merchants need to look at, be able to spin up those dashboards right away so they can not only gather all the data, but start seeing the insights immediately so they can take action. Mark, what I thought was kind of interesting is everyone used to think that the transaction was the goal, right? It's all feeding, the funnels all feed to try to get that transaction. What we heard today, what's so important is that a transaction is just one piece of a much broader experience, right, is the word, really of an engagement and an ongoing relationship with that individual whether it be a company or a single person. So I'm interested from your point of view, you guys are all about the transactions, it's funny, it's weird it didn't happen earlier. Adobe's all about the creative and the marketing and getting it up to that point of transaction, but it's really, you guys just want to get in kind of a virtuous cycle where it continues to have multiple transactions and multiple experiences that support each other as opposed to being really standalone. No, that's, I think I agree with that.  You definitely want it, and it's necessary. I can't remember the word that he's in the keynote, right? It's definitely important, but it's not the pinnable kind of goal. It's part of the entire experience, right? So when customers are buying today, they're buying experiences, and those experiences include the actual purchase they're making, right? The product, the digital or physical that they're making, but it includes all the way up to that experience, all the content they see before then, how they experience the brand before then, and then likewise, after the transaction, right? How does the brand follow up and interact with the customer afterwards? Most of our merchants, all of our merchants, all of our brands are looking to have lifelong relationships with customers, and so that entire end-to-end experience is important. Mark, talk about the community aspect. We covered your show, Magenta, before the acquisition last year. The queue was there. We were, I was very impressed. I had no idea the depth of community that you had in that company. When you guys came over, what was the feedback? What's the result? What's the plan? Can you share some update on impact of the community and the role of the community for the Commerce Cloud? Absolutely. I mean, the community for us is near and dear. I mean, it is the core of who Magento is and was, and is transferred over now to Adobe. You probably heard this morning, Shantanu talking about how important, as soon as you got out on stage, how important community was. The Magento community, but the broader now, Adobe community. We've got about 375,000 community members. These include developers, partners that are really core to the functionality. About 50% of our code is developed by the community and developers in the community that submit that code back to us, and they're the lifeblood of how we grow and support the business going forward. So what's the fit between Adobe and Magenta? Because you mentioned something that's, might be kind of a nuanced point. You have very community, a lot of open source, you've got a co-creation on the product side. Adobe's a creative entity. Talk about the fit between your culture of Magento and the Adobe culture and where they are today and where they're going. No, there's absolutely some overlap in our community and a lot of our partners are out helping our merchants create content, right? Create that brand experience and they leverage the creative side, right? And the products and the suite of services that the creative side of the house provides and then that feeds in directly into driving awareness and marketing and sales. So a lot of overlap there. Growth question for you or kind of more of an operational question. You know, in any major shifts, certainly cloud, we've seen that, it's here for a long time, but as you start to see new apps and new kinds of business models emerge that are continuing to transform, operationalizing new things is very difficult for an enterprise or a business. And it's sometimes culture, sometimes it's tech IT, sometimes it's just dealing on know what the new environment's like, tools and technology. So getting something operationalized that's a game changer is hard. How do you look at that? How do you guys approach that market and go to market on how you guys deal with the marketing mix? What are some of the things that you do to take something that's new and new capability and operationalize it for a customer? Yeah, there's a couple of things. One is the culture at which you develop, right? So the people, and really working to train and develop a culture and hire the right talent that is, quite frankly, just open to change, right? That you've got to be agile, because I could come in here and tell you five things you've got to do today. Tomorrow, it'll be totally different, right? And so you've got to be agile and build that culture of agility. The other thing I'd say is, you know, find partners who will help you simplify the problem, right? It's very easy to create a lot of complexity when you've got change, but you know, Sean said you did a great job this morning kind of showing the dashboards that we use internally. And that was through a lot of work and a lot of process to get that, but we had to simplify it down into what are the key metrics that you really need to watch? And I'd say that's the third thing is you've got to follow data. You've got to be data-driven and develop insights out of that data, because things are too fast, moving too quickly, to have years to develop a gut reaction to it, right? You've got to see the data and you've got to see it when it happens in real time. And moving fast, gut's good, but you're going to apply that to data as well, so this is key. So how about the- If you've got the right platform, and we're trying to develop very real-time, relevant, rich platform that you can get that data out in a way that's digestible, so you can take action. How does a company take advantage of the data that they have? What are some approaches that you guys see as low-hanging fruit use cases? Some people would be overwhelmed with data either. The number of data we hear from your customer at the Dollar Shave Club talking about, there's so many data points coming in from multiple directions and going out in multiple directions too, on the channel, whatever you want to call it. How do you get your hands on that data? It's overwhelming. What's some approach that people can take? So a couple of things there. One is decide before you even start looking at data what do you think is important, right? So really simplify and clarify it down to what you need to be tracking. And then it's very easy to have 20 different systems that you bring in all separately and try to stitch them together. It's more important. One of the things you try to do with Adobe Commerce Cloud is bring together something that's already kind of pre-integrated together to make it easier to kind of get up and running and get going. Because it is very difficult to pull all that together unless you've got a framework of things working together. And then having the dashboards pre-built so you can get up and running. And then over time you can tweak it and customize it but getting those core insights out there. We were just talking on camera before we started about operational AI versus operational data versus trying to boil the ocean over. And that's the best practice or approach you see. Yeah, I call it a little bit of more operational AI which is so many different use cases for making data-driven decisions and things that are really top of mind for merchants today. We hear a lot about one-on-one personalization which is super important, particularly as you move from being computer-based e-commerce to mobile to voice. Getting that personalization right is critical. But there's a lot of things on the back end too that can happen. How do you tag pictures? How do you tag merchandise? How do you really streamline the fulfillment process? So you're getting the product from the right place to the right person as quickly and cheaply as possible. One of the questions, one of the comments on the keynote I thought was great from the engineering part, talk track was open data, open APIs. Very critical, we're big believers of that. But as customers are challenged with first-party data, they're relying on these platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and other things that are not necessarily being more open. The stricter access to the data, I mean Twitter's all got data out there you can get that data. Hard to get LinkedIn data, it's hard to get Facebook data. How do you look at those silos? How should customers be thinking about their data strategy, knowing that some of it might only be able to get through scraping or other techniques? It can't be reliable. So how do you guys look at that? What's the approach? Do they have more first-party data on their site or is there a methodology or mechanism that they could deploy? So no silver bullet, but I think first and foremost, we always have to keep the customer first, right? And so trust and transparency is of the utmost important. And so it's important, and we do this in everything we build today, is to be able to build that trust and transparency, both with our own direct customers, the merchants we may have, but also it's equally important, the trust that we're building for that merchant with those end customers, that has to be paramount to everything else. So when in doubt, err on the side of creating real deep trust and transparency with customers. That's awesome. Talk about the culture at Adobe. You're now part of the company from Magenty. Is there a good culture there? Good fit, as you mentioned. Absolutely. For the folks watching here and seeing the keynote, the company's transformed and continues to transform with cloud, with data, on the right way from our estimation. For the folks that might not be comfortable or might not know Adobe, I should say. What is it about? What's going on at Adobe? What's the magic here? What's the top story? There is a lot. There's a lot going on. And the integration with Gento over the last, I guess nine months now, went by fast, it's been phenomenal. I think, as you said, not only has there been a strategic fit between the product set and what Adobe's trying to do overall, but a cultural fit as well. They're really dedicated to creating an environment where people can thrive and being respectful of individuals and really driving and helping transform the world. And so when you've got a mission of really, how do you help digitally transform whether it's B2C or B2B customers? It's amazing. There's just a lot going on. Final question. What's your plans for this year? What's your goals? Grow the commerce piece, get it shipped and get it available. What's your objectives? Continue to scale up a platform which is just phenomenal. The only one in the industry that really delivers great B2C and B2B experience is and really scale that up and help deliver, particularly for our larger mid-market enterprise customers, help them deliver on the promise that is the digital age. And for customers, what should they be thinking about now? You know, it goes back to, how do you really develop that customer journey that builds a brand, right? The most important thing is your brand and what you're doing there and how do you, the end user customers have higher and higher expectations these days and how do you really follow them through the entire customer journey? It's been the holy grail that we've been chasing for a long time now. We're getting some visibility into it. Yeah, absolutely. It's really coming to fruition. Mark Lenhard here on theCUBE. Thanks for coming on and sharing your insights. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. I'm John with Jeff with Mark. Stay with us for more after this short break.


So thank you, Thor, for giving us a recount of your experience on the game day, and congratulations on being a part of the winning team. That is the exciting part, and I'm literally, I can't find my slides, so. Yeah, we're doing it this way. And I just accept that. Yeah. Yes, Inter Newbug is definitely on there. So, what's that? Sorry, I got one. Yeah, right. I broke my glasses yesterday. So, okay. So we start off the game, this is a game scenario, right? So the whole concept of the game itself is to ensure that we have a concept, and a part of an idea for people to latch onto. So there's role play, and the concept of the role play is to get up and to just basically be the CFO of a startup, right? So you just walk up and you're like, you guys are all, I don't know if you know it, but you were all fired from your jobs yesterday, and that's why you're here now. And then we give a little bit of information that's associated with the experience like, hey, we were running this company really great, but then a couple things happened, some people quit, like all of them, and then we've started to get some customer feedback. And the concepts there are to get into the specific quests. Now, a quest has an objective, right? So in this case, what we wanted to do is create a social aspect. You want to make sure that you can create, generate some sort of common application that can be shopped around to other teams. So if you want a good experience, right, you want to build in that connection, right? So what we do is we build a game. That game is then served out from a, like in this case, an instance, we were using Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the Cloudy Hops. And then you're capable of playing the game, but then you're also capable of getting other people to play the game. And when other teams play the game, you get points. So you want to shop around to make sure that happens. And effectively, that gives the, each one of the team members, an opportunity to participate, regardless of the level, right? So the reason you want the social aspect is because you're going to have people who have zero level experience with the products that you're trying to showcase, and you're going to have people who are expert level. And you want to make sure that you've covered, you know, the gambit of things that can be, that can be associated. So somebody has to choose a more social role, they still can. And that kind of goes along. I mean, in my opinion, that goes along with the sentiments of the way that we handle most things in the open source community. So you want to make sure everyone stays included. This one, so that was, this one, the Cloudy Hops. That's, this has a modified Flappy Bird in it, by the way, that has a red hat hat as the Flappy Bird. Right, that's right, that's right. That's right, yeah. Doesn't work, yeah, yeah, that's right. Hence this customer experience, right? So good thing you were there. And then this one, the Goldfish, we actually did a, there was a Rick and Morty Concentration Game. And we took the Rick and Morty Concentration Game and then rebranded it as a red hat concentration game. So we used a lot of red hat icons to build out the structure for it. The way that those, the way that that, you know, translates is you expose it on the, on the OpenShift or like, I mean, in this case on a rail box. But the concept is to expose that interface for, for access and then to make that social experience happen. This game is built on Ansible and Ansible Playbooks and centers around the experience of having emerged conflict that you've got to figure out how to resolve in the, in the configuration. There's a team dashboard. The dashboard has all the information, provides the, the experience. And this is what it looks like. You end up with a, a hash on that screen that takes you, that basically takes you to your own console. So once you put the hash in, you get a table number, which is so everybody can use that. Thor said he thought they should use one laptop instead of having two laptops. The one laptop would have the, the team dashboard on it. But with two laptops, you can have the same team dashboard on two laptops. If you, if you have four players, those four players can do that. And the way that the, the, the event engine that we use is established. You can do that with teams that are in different, different countries effectively, right? So the, the concept of the game day is not something that is localized. It's something that we can in fact bring to all of the, the members of a team, even if they're not geographically located in the same, same place. When you log in, you end up with access to the quest itself. And since I'm having trouble with my slides, the, the quest is effectively the part that is the interaction for the players. So we have a event engine that effectively covers the whole thing, right? And then we have multiple accounts for each one of the, each team gets their own account. So for one table, so if you have, if you have, you know, one table with four seats, and everyone is playing on this table, that's one, one player account, right? So if you, if you look at that, you would think about it as one AWS account. Now the event engine has a master account. So this main account here includes all of the, the requirements for the game. So you would see one cloud, we, we do this with dev ops, of course. So you get one cloud formation template that deploys the entire infrastructure for, for the main account. And that main account becomes the control, the command and control for the entire game. And then as a developer, as someone who is developing for the game day, you're, you're building out a cloud formation template that has all the, the content in it. Now for our internal games, right? This may, it would probably be more, this would be all that you would do. But for Red Hat, we've, we determined that there are some things that we can't deploy in, into the configuration here based on policy requirements. And so instead of just using the team accounts here, we're working with the demo team. And the demo team at, at Red Hat has provided us the ability to stand up additional customer resources. So that as we, as we interface here, right? So this basically is an event loop, right, with a dashboard in it. So, so the dashboard, the dashboard for the game is, is exposes the, the the content from the cus, the, the team account to the, to the main account. The main account then can do monitoring. It can do command and control in the association. And then you get back a score. So with all of this, with all, with the way this works, we'll have, we'll have resources here that are monitoring and managing the game. This is where your event engine is. So as, as the players make changes to each one of the individual quests. And the quests are actually here deployed in the master, in this main account where the, the players don't have access. The players have access to all the resources that are down here. This is where you're deploying instances. And you're, you have different kinds of, of applications running on top of having the ability to have an open shift configuration on this side that's deployed through Agnostic D. And if you haven't, if you haven't seen Agnostic D, this is the tool that the demo team is using to create all of the configurations that they provide through the demo portal. So any of you who are looking to learn about services, right, on top, on Red Hat would probably go to the demo portal. So you'll understand the infrastructure that we're using for the game because it is immediately available. So as a, as someone who's wants to build a quest, if you want to build your own Goldy Fish, right, you would create a template using the, the development kit. Now the development kit provides you an entire configuration that, that lives instead of in two accounts, right, instead of being set up in main and team, the, it combines the two so that as you're working, as you're making modifications to the, to the configuration, like let's say you wanted to build out an open shift configuration on the demo portal, you build that out, it's successful, you deploy it, you deploy the infrastructure to support connecting to it, right, like instances that you can use through terminal or, or a, or through a, a graphic display, you would then be able to take that, that entire configuration and deploy it in a single account while you're doing your development process. So what we do is we carry the development process in a single get repository, and then that way we can split out what goes into the main account for control, and we can split out what goes into the team account into two different templates. Any questions so far? So one of the other things that we wanted to cover is scoring. In the gameplay, we want to make sure that people are engaged and that the experience is something that makes them, that they feel their progress. So you want to have various stages of scoring. Each one of the opportunities for, for building score can be greater or lesser, it all depends. Usually they're attached to actions. So if we go back to looking at the quest itself, these quests will have individual components, like for example, the first thing you do in the, in the Cloudy Hops game is to identify the endpoint that the game will be, will be served from, right? So that's identifying what the URI is for that specific server. When you identify what the URI is successfully, you get points, right? When you, when that URI, when that URI is identified and the Cloudy Hops no worky, then you get, you get no points. So, so you have to determine exactly what parts, what component parts are, are functional, what, what or not. And then add hints. So now, now that I know that my score is greater or lesser based on success, right? Then I can say if I want, if I want to score for an endpoint, so you gave me an endpoint, I give you a thousand points. You ask for a hint because you don't know what the endpoint is. I give you negative six, right? Something like that. And that's not, that, you know, this represents like a very small, like a, like a basic hint, right? And incrementally, you know that everybody's going to get a thousand points for the, for the, for the endpoint, but not everybody is going to really realize exactly what needs to happen to get that endpoint in place. So they're going to take one of those little hints.  And just that subtraction of like the smaller amount of points, you end up with very interesting variations on the scoring. And we saw that yesterday. The first thing, was it you, Thor, who was like, how did we get? No, it was Marcel who said, how do we get negative points? But it didn't matter. It got a couple million after that. So, and this represents like a first, so, you know, these are first attempts. Game complexity is in the next step in our process, right? Is understanding that you have, if you've achieved one thing, that can't be the end of the game, right? We want this to go on. We want people to feel the, the experience and the, and the warmth of an actual production, right? We don't want them to, to be able to rest. So as you build out these quests, we don't, no rest for you. That's right. Well, I mean, if you're going to win the game, come on. Like if you're going to, if you're going to mean, if you're going to maintain their attention and the commitment, there has to be some next level. And so what we do is we build out multiple layers for each one of the individual games. For Cloudy Hopson and Goldy Fish, we don't have as many levels as we would like to have. We're working on that, right? So love to have your help in doing that. And then the, so the complexity means you have to layer in more of the, more of the company vision, right? So a lot of what we do there is, so to add networking complexity, we have a team, a security team, we call Threat Slayer. And we use Threat Slayer for a lot of things, like Threat Slayer comes in and actually has to, you know, has to apply policy. And if you've ever worked in a cloud environment, there's identity access controls, there are firewalls, there are access control lists that are so independent of the, of the expectations of, like a basic instance that the hunt can, you know, can be quite complex in itself. So we add complexity with our metal band turned security team. And, and we use other, you know, other opportunities, natural disasters, complicated, complicated action. So what we would like to have in that process is, is something, some next level of complexity so that those who are actually achieving at the lower levels can move upwards in that game. We can do a game day for up to 72 hours. So the more complex, the higher number of quests that we have, the easier it is for us to sustain attention and entertaining, entertainment value in those, in those 72 hours. It's really helpful to have, to have a goal in mind that is directly associated with a specific service. Cloudy hops obviously is, is structured around two things, which is just basic service enablement, right, and, and, Essie Linux controls. And then their container based system has, or I'm sorry, the Goldyfish configuration has a, a goal of building container, a container based system that is managed on your, on, on a rail work, a rail system, a rail server. With the added complexity of ensuring that you have an Ansible playbook that is fully functional for the, for the process. And building out and running the Ansible is kind of the, the strongest methodology that we want to, we want to pass through on best practices. But that doesn't mean that the winner is going to use that Ansible playbook. And that is kind of one of the other things that I wanted to talk about is there's a seemingly random pathway to success. And part of building out this game is discovering how people shortcut your, your practices. And then how that, how that, how, how to score that, right. So for us, the idea is to help people along in the context of the best practices. So, and we know those, they're observable, but that doesn't mean everyone is going to be able, is going to know exactly where to look. We were laughing about this yesterday is that they're, they're almost everything that we had, if you followed the, if you had gone to the rail, the rail documentation, you actually would have found the steps to fix, you know, to fix the problem. But nobody went to the documentation. So, so as a result, we saw a lot of different things. And there was a, we, we had an interesting debate, you know, just, just by having someone solve a problem in a way that was non-standard. One of the, one of the teams literally stood up secondary architecture and wanted to, you know, like, rebuild everything on CentOS Stream 7 and then did a deployment. And so the deployment, the deployment was effective. It worked, but it didn't score them any points. And the interesting part of that was that this was, you know, because this happens in, in a, in a cloud environment, one of the principles of building out cloud, cloud infrastructure is to remain lean, right? So they actually extended the architecture, they doubled the infrastructure requirement by standing up a secondary instance. So there was a question about whether or not this was, you know, they had achieved the goal. And, you know, we had, we sort of step back, looked at it from both sides, tried to determine what we thought was right. And then just generally agreed that this was an infrastructure mistake. So, and that brings me to the score, like the scoring events themselves are deterministic in that, in the basic way, but then there is some room for us to identify and apply some changes to those, to the, to the point structure, just to make sure that if someone is working and they're discouraged or they don't understand, that doesn't stop them from getting some sort of an advance, you know, that we, you know, to feel like they're still part of the game. And this is also a part of, of the, the structure and practice around this, is that you have to build some compassion into the experience, otherwise you may lose your audience. And lastly, before we just start generally talking about it, or maybe I can show you some code, is, is the, the prize structure. So obviously this is unicorn rentals, and unicorn rentals needs to have something that is mildly representative of unicorn, of the unicorn experience, right? So we try to put things together that are glittery and fun and not practical. Because one of the things that is interesting about the game is the, or the, the thing that is interesting about the game is the play. And it shouldn't be a competition. It should be something where everyone is excited to participate and everyone is, is happy when, when, you know, they finish and they, and they can they don't feel so heavily invested that there's a sense of fairness or, or, or complexity, complexity in their, in their vision of the game. So we don't want you to, we don't want you to feel like you're, you're missing out, right? Which is why we gave a baby unicorn and not a full-size unicorn to the winners this time. We rent them. A lot of times, you know. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And that's, you know, that's a point that really made this business what it is today. So the prizes themselves need to be simple and they need to be, they don't need to be heavy investments. And my favorite one, my favorite prize to give out is having your name permanently taped to a, to a plastic unicorn statue. Okay. So with that said, configuration management is really the, the next step in this. And how we get to the configuration management is through what we call the Quest Development Kit. The Quest Development Kit has all the, the things that go in the main account, right? And that's a bunch of Lambda functions and some, some serverless configuration stuff that sets up all of the event-driven actions that come down here.   This part is kind of hard-coded. There's no, there's not a whole lot that you can change about how the events are structured, but what events are, are trigger points and how those are evaluated is part of the Quest experience that you would put in this, this command account. The command account interacts and executes within the context of the, of the player account. So the player account is leveraged for anything that is, that the user is, like, the player is capable of doing. So if you, if you wanted to have, Adam and I have talked about this before, if you wanted to have a full, you know, a full open build system in the cloud, right? We would set up the open build in the team account and then we would identify actions, notifications that would then trigger, trigger point scoring or identification of the, of the unlocking of specific tasks in the Quest until we get to such a point that we feel like that, that section of the task has been completed. Once that's completed, other things can happen. So a layer, a second layer, can be activated at a later time, right? So as you build, you build one and then you'll build a single action and then you can build a secondary action and a tertiary action and N number of actions, right? After that, that can be enabled in succession on that, on that same Quest. Yeah, the sky's the limit. Application space is built in Python, but there is a TypeScript version. So almost all of the work that you're going to do will either be in Python, CloudFormation scripts, Ansible or TypeScript. Although secondary actions, like if you have something that's functional inside of an application, you can do it from there. Um, Roadmap. So we really enjoyed building out two rail server configurations for the game day, but we are focused on ensuring that we cover the gambit of rail products so that we can make those available to the general, just generally. And we want to start with a modernization component. We have a slot for a Quest at AWS ReInvent this year and we're really looking forward to that. And we want that slot to be filled with an OpenShift configuration. So we are working diligently on building out support for the Corkus Coffee Shop as a component part of the Unicorn Games industry. We are working on the Unicorn Cafe. So the Unicorn Cafe will be our next Quest and that will include some modernization steps to get an application onto OpenShift using various components of the OpenShift infrastructure and we'll be using that for, using that to secondarily extend that into space, which is our edge component. So once we have a successful Unicorn Cafe, we'll launch the Unicorn Cafe into space. And we'd love to. Can I ask you questions before I go though? Sure. Well, so in the early days of the game, that happened a lot and it is quite possible for us to take that kind of action. One of the things that we're doing here is we're creating the social experience and you can bring that on and then in fact, if you've got, like let's say, from your main account, from your command center, your command center can make determinations based on anything. So like if one team had all, like if every other team was using one team as a central source for their game or for whatever it is, for whatever action, like we've built reverses. So literally we have like applications that are just reversers, right? Like you just throw, it just throws a word in, reverses the word and then provides a hash and so you get, the response is the hash and the reverse of the word and the hash gets you points. So if everybody was using the same reverser, right? So if the endpoint came from the same team, then you could probably, you could do something like hit the next level of the game, right? Like destroy all of their networking, right? And so that is definitely a part of the process. You can make those modifications. So the kit will allow you to do that and you can, we can do that in all in the same, you know, consistently in a single account. The, in terms of the technology that you can use, the, because we're connected to the demo team, we can use anything that's in the product suite associated with Braille and OpenShift and then, and actually we can extend that all the way up through the IBM suite. So plus everything that's associated with, with AWS, of course, right? Any secondary service or connected service, we could do that as well. Yeah. Any other questions? Yeah, thanks. Thanks for being here. Oh yeah, I understand. Yeah. Have you been using some kind of messaging system? Yeah, well, of course. So inside of Amazon, inside of AWS, the AWS infrastructure, there is a simple notification service. So we use a simple notification service to cross into, to cross from one account to another. And then we use a queuing system to identify, so that if there are messages that we need to, to carry into another application, we use what we call the simple queue service and the simple queue service is, is there for that. A lot of it is also fired off of the, some simple serverless, serverless applications. So there's Lambda functions and there are container based workloads that for, for larger scale decisions or chains of Lambda functions that, that in fact we'll do, we'll process some of those events in a way that's consistent with the score board and the game and update the databases that are associated.  And that, that is the way that you get, you get support for that continuous feedback. We also have on this side, we have access to streaming services, so we can use Kafka over here, we can use standard message queue on the, on the demo side. So all of the work that we're doing that is connected to the, the Red Hat portal is, is communicates, communications from here and then we have an application endpoint. That application endpoint is something that's, it's not shared, right? So this is strictly set for each team. So each team has their own environment and that environment then is configured for providing information to them and then also feedback into the main, into the main account. So as you make changes here, we use an, we have an API that the, the OpenShift configuration can call and make, and, and make chain, you know, make updates or changes here. All the basic cruddle. Anything else? Well, I'm excited for anyone to do, to do the work. If, if you're interested, please drop us an email and we will, we will get back to you and make sure that you have everything you need in place to, to work with us on the quest. Thanks for being here. Yes. So if we, so, yes, we are, we are breaking everything in a way that is consistent with how, with how this works. And a little bit of history there is that Game Day is based on the, the application that, the way that we build applications like new services or new, new region launches. We, we establish a stress test for Amazon. This is like a basic practice for Amazon is you set up a, or it's a basic practice for anybody who's deploying a service for themselves. But you stress, we stress test pretty, pretty significantly. Test scale, test, test the application sustainability and, and resilience. And then, and then make determinations on what we need to change, right? So whatever fail, you know, you look at what failed or you stress it, you look at what failed and then, and then everything, you know, and then go back to the drawing board and figure out what you need to change in your design. Same thing here. You stand it up, you get other people to use it. That, you know, then we will either simulate that, that there has been a failure based on that stress test or we can, you know, in fact, we may have a stress that, that like literally kills, kills it, right? You might have an auto scaling group that's too small or something like that.   That is the, you know, that is the project plan. Now, the reason I wanted everybody to come to this talk was because I want them to think, to imagine those possibilities, to understand that from the perspective of being someone who develops a game and then takes that back and takes the development kit and provides us something that can fit into the game experience or, you know, inside of the community-based products that are associated with, you know, with the Red Hat ecosystem all the way up through, all the way up through the more advanced products. We chose to highlight Corkus because we think that that's a very good fit for the OpenShift experience and targets some people that we think are a little bit more, have a little bit less experience around modernization but really want to have more experience around modernization. So we think that they're, they're going to be very excited about the next, the next iteration of our games. I'm glad you had a great time. Any other questions? I think we can leave it, leave it at that then.


What's going on everyone? Sam here with Leighton Sports Guard, German 23, Panini Immaculate Collegiate, Football Hobby, Five Box, Full Case Break, Number 17, Random Team Style. There's a look again at your random results. As always, you can find those on the website, under the results tab, as well as the link that's in chat. So good luck. Here we go. Play four and here's you, Pew. That was one of your boys. That was not. Is there any friend in the question? Yeah, I know. The audacity. I looked up his address. I put him offline. 35 of 75, Tony Pollard. Let's go into the Cowboys. Deuce Vaughn, also going to the Cowboys. Nice one there, 53-99. Again, any guy still in college, i.e. mostly it's going to be Quinn Ewers, Caleb Williams, or Arch Manning, ran to everybody. Any duels of multiple teams, we ran to those two teams. 55 of 65, that is going to be Cedric Tillman going to the Browns. Tennessee Volunteers. 14 to go on our mixer, guys. 14 spots left. Nice one there. Congrats, Browns. That breaks next. It's got a filled filler up. Got A.T. Perry for the Saints. Nice one there. 4 of 99. Go Deeks. Wake Forest, the Lum. 92 of 99, that is going to be Bijan Robinson. According to ESPN, Xavian Valide is a Pittsburgh Steeler, 95 of 99. This is according to ESPN, so he must have gotten cut recently by the Texans. That's going to go to Pittsburgh. He's currently on the Pittsburgh Steelers roster. Congrats on that one there, Pittsburgh. All-Modern Wake Forest.  That's not an easy school to get into. Who are some big alums out of there? Well, obviously, Tim Duncan went there, right? Wake Forest. Tim Duncan at Wake Forest. Oh, against Forest. That makes sense, because ACC, right? All right, here we go, guys. We've got a Bo Jackson to 99. That's going to the Raiders. Nice one here for the Falcons. 2 of 2, Bijan Robinson, the Jumbo Nike Swoosh. Congrats on that one. Jumbo Nike Swoosh of Bijan. Nice one here. It's going to be a Michael Wilson going to the Cardinals. Michael Wilson. Chris Paul, Mugsy Bogs, yep. Jeff with a photo spot. Corey with a photo spot. Clayton, 10-box spot. Cesar with a photo spot. We're down to 11. 11 to go, Shawn. What do you think of that? 11 to go on photo, guys. Nice one here for the Chiefs for She-Rice. 7 of 10 on the Bullpatch RPA. Yeah, Bijan Gloves Swoosh. That's what it was. Is that you, Spencer? Spencer, did you have? Yeah, let's go, Spencer. Grats, buddy. Yeah, Michael Wilson. He could be good for sure, Chris. Michael Meyer. That is going to be 15 of 65. Going to the Raiders. Let's go, Spencer. Going to the Raiders, Michael Meyer. And you can mag this one. 10 of 10. Anthony Richardson. Going to the Colts. Congrats to Indianapolis. That's awesome, dude. Who's got the Colts? Where are they at? That is going to be... Nate M. Congrats, Nate. Here we go, Nate. Anthony Richardson, the Week 1 story. That was a great box right there. That was one of the better boxes of this product I've ever seen. Jeff with the Falcons and NTPYT. Jeff, you are the man. Thank you, Jeff. Jeff A. Thank you, buddy. 11 to go. Breaks next, everyone. Spots are coming in quickly. Hot and heavy, everybody. Sad to say it's a Texan fan. At least he's got Stroud, though, Chris. Stroud looks like he could be really, really solid as well. Hopefully, him and Fields could break that Ohio State quarterback curse. Stroud? I think he's good. Derrick Carr. Going to the Saints. That'll go to the Saints to 75. Fair. Max Duggan. Nice one there. Five of five. Going to the Chargers. Yes, Chargers. Fair, MLG. HVAC. It would be the Stars and Stripes RPA, either number 225 to 10 or one of one. We've got Darnell Washington. Nice one there on the Bullpatch. Chick-fil-A Bullpatch. Going to the Steelers. Going to the Steelers. 32 spots total, so all teams are in on that one. Nice one there, Steelers. Going to the Titans. That is going to be a Tyjay Spears. They have a nice 30-yard touchdown in the Titans second game. Nice one there. Tulane Green Wave. Nice one here. Going to the Pittsburgh Steelers. Joey Porter Jr. Premium patches. Rookie autographs. Platinum. Is that a one-on-one? Hold on. Hold the phone here, everybody. Hold the phone. Paches. Premium patches. That's what it's. Premium. Platinum, one-of-one. Going to the Steelers. Congrats, Pittsburgh. Platinum, one-of-one. Congrats. That's awesome, dude. There we go, Steelers. Pittsburgh. Eric W. Congrats, Eric. There you go, my man. One-on-one. And going to the Broncos. Marvin Mims, 34-99. Congrats, Denver. That's son of the great Steelers linebacker, Joey Porter. He played Miami. I think he did, right? Joey Porter. I think towards the end. Yeah, he played in Arizona, too, toward the end. Yeah, I think the 10-box are just sold out, Jeff. I think it literally just sold out. Micah Parsons going to the Cowboys. Yeah, 10-box, I believe, is sold out. I'll double-check, but I'd imagine at this point it is. 10-box, Tuesday sold out. We just got to get that mixer sold out. Mixer, PYT, and upper deck credentials hockey. That's all we got left. Kelly Ringo. That'll be going to the Eagles. Jumbo Jersey, 99 of 99, or 66 of 66. Whatever you want to think. Zach Evans. Nice one there. Going to the Rams, 14 of 25. Got Jaden Reed. That is going to the one-of-ten. Going to the Packers. Just took me three perfect, perfects for a hit. You just got to get good. That's all it is, Spencer. You got to get good, kid. Get good. Get good. Got Minka Fitzpatrick, Immaculate Ink Blue. Going to the Steelers. This is the first time I've pulled this guy out of this product. This is awesome. See if you can guess, Sean. See if you can guess, baby. Going to Cleveland. Going to the Browns. That's going to be Johnny Manziel. Johnny Football, 90 of 99. My gosh, man. In 2023, that's wild. That's cool, though. I mean, Absolute Legend, Heisman Winner, probably Anem's best, one of the best Anem QBs of all time. Really cool one there. Yeah. Unbelievable, like, lifestyle that guy lived. Never watched film. I had to fly out with a dude at 125 power. I do generally think, Spencer, if you got good, it wouldn't happen. This is going to be going to the Bears, DJ Moore, it's a 99. Ooh, Justin Herbert, 22 or 25 or 25. Player Warn, nice one there for the Chargers. Congrats, LA. Blaze, selling us out on NTPYT. We're sold out on the Picker Team case. Sold out, Sean. Let's go. Let's go. Thank you all. Two breaks remain on the day, everybody. Eric Gray, 48 of 99. Going to the Giants, Eric Gray. Going to the Finns, Devanna Shane. Nice one there. Congrats, Dolphins, Devanna Shane. Well, we've got to A, Chris Rodriguez Jr. That'll be going to the Commanders. Commanders. He had a fumble yesterday against the Ravens. And they're up losing. And one of ten, going to the Lions, Jameer Gibbs on the RPA. Okay, congrats on that. Detroit, Detroit. Commanders, Cole Menders. And empty, empty. Let's do a quick recap. No randoms. We've got to do that, sweet. Start with your jerseys. You've got Justin Herbert, Kelly Ringo, Max Duggan, and Duzvon. Autos, we had Devanna Shane, Chris Rodriguez Jr., Eric Gray, Johnny Manziel, Jaden Reed, Zach Evans, Marvin Mims, Taijai Spears, Darnell Washington, Michael Meyer, Rishi Rice, Michael Wilson, Xavian Voloday, Bijan Robinson, A.T. Perry, Cedric Tillman, Minka Fitzpatrick, and Jameer Gibbs. Nice ones there. We had our Magged Cards. That is going to be the Bijan, two of two. A Joey Porter Jr. Premium Patches, Rookie Autograph, Platinum, one of one. And Anthony Richardson, ten of ten. Gold auto. I'll do it for the break, guys. Thanks again for the fill. Up next is our mixer.


This is the animation minute as always let's start with Jaws for this time only one, but this time It's a big one. They're hiring for spider-verse. Here's the first look for the next Walt Disney feature movie very interesting Very curious. There's a new Star Wars game coming out. It's called Star Wars the clips definitely has some really cool looking shots No idea what this is about but watch the trailer still a tool I haven't installed yet, but I will very soon So I tell myself but check out lots of free in-depth tutorials Adam State annual survey about compensation across all levels That's always good to know. This was a great short to begin with But also loved seeing the behind-the-scenes the renders and all the work that went into the short So check it out. I also love seeing 2d on top of 3d work. It's very cool sequence check out the full one nice way to Simon I love this I love the tricky aspect of all the packages coming in it's great clip speak of great clip Kevin Perry always Delivering such high quality stop motion. It's insane. I love seeing the behind-the-scenes as well Just how he does all this. It's so cool. Speaking of cool. This is a cool 2d sequence. Make sure to check it out It is 50 seconds long and awesome and speak of awesome since I am transitioning with everything here That's such a great cycle. Come on. It's so cute This is a great breakdown. So make sure to check out the YouTube channel to watch the whole thing It's really nicely done. Awesome art love this one. The eyes are great It's when you get this and I made it This is such a cool demo. I love it. It looks so great and speaking of unreal Make sure to check out the matrix awakens unreal engine 5 demo. Absolutely insane. This has such subject vibes It's a great looking pixel art game. Check it out. Speak of pixels. I love these are great Love the backgrounds love this character and speak of character. I love Sonic is always awesome And that is it kind of finish with pixel art, of course, you can find the animation minute every Monday on my channel at 10 a.m


Okay, we're back, we're live, we're doing Corona Watch as we do at noon on Wednesday. And we have a really, really, really special guest today, Dwayne Gubler, he joins us remote from Utah where he has retired the third time. But Dwayne went to Johns Hopkins and studied all kinds of science. And his degree is not an ordinary PhD, it's a PhD in science and it's more demanding than an ordinary PhD. And from there he spent time, G, all over the world with the CDC and the National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization. He's been through it and it was in his faculty with the John A. Burns School of Medicine and then he left, G must be 10, 15 years ago, to go to Singapore, courtesy Duke University and the National University of Singapore where he had a laboratory, a laboratory he always wanted for infectious diseases, that's his specialty. He's since retired, but he's left his mark on Singapore. In fact, they wanted him to be, he made him an honorary Singapore citizen, which is really something. So, G, you've really been around, Dwayne, and I must say that since I have known you, I have found and treated you as a guy who is 10 feet tall. Our viewers cannot tell from the photograph, from the video, but you are 10 feet tall. You are a world name in infectious diseases and it's an honor, beyond an honor, to have you on our show today. Thanks for coming around, we really appreciate it. Well, thank you, Jay, for inviting me and I only wished I was as tall as you think I am in terms of you. Well, we can disagree on that. Anyway, today, you know, the question before the house is why is COVID-19 so contagious and what we could do, what can we do about it? How much do we really know about it? You have studied all kinds of infectious diseases and you know, what is special? I think there is something special about the coronavirus. You've seen it, you've studied it. What do you think about it? Is it more of a threat than others? Well, that's hard to say because we don't know what the others are. If you look at what's happened in the past 30 or 40 years, we've had a series of major epidemic and pandemic that have swept the world and it's hard to know what the next one is gonna be. We have a problem, Jay, of what I call circular migration. People moving from rural areas into cities and then back to the rural areas to visit family and harvest crops. They're constantly introducing new pathogens that have been infecting people for thousands of years and introducing them into crowded urban centers that have 10 to 20 million people. And every one of those urban centers has a modern airport through which millions of people pass every year and it provides the ideal mechanism to move pathogens around. Now, most of these pathogens, which are usually animal sites of one kind, don't really take in humans. There's not secondary transmission. But once in a while, we see one like the corona, SARS Corona 2 virus that is highly infectious to humans has secondary transmission and moves very rapidly around the world. SARS was another one of those in recent years, in 2003. Others like NEPA encephalitis weren't as infectious and didn't spread, but there are many other viruses. We estimate over 500 viruses in animals out there that have the potential to move into humans. Of those 500, we know that 100 of them will actually infect humans. And so I don't know whether this one is really special in the sense of its pathogenicity and infectivity or not. I think there are probably others out there that are just as bad. You know, one thing I just noticed yesterday was in Japan, which has its own problem about coronavirus, it's pretty serious emergency right now. There are people investigating the notion of micro droplets, micro droplets, not a sneeze or a cough, but breathing and talking. And they use slow motion photography, some kind of infrared photography and to see the droplets, which are very, very small. I don't know what very small is in that context, but it's like 0.01 micrometer or something. And you can see them in the room and they stay in the room. And the people who spray them leave the room, someone else's comes in the room and just kind of explains, and it doesn't take a whole lot of virus. What do you call them, virion? It doesn't take a lot of virus particles to infect you. And so if you walk into that room, you're in trouble. This sounds like it's way more contagious than we originally thought when everybody talked about sneezing and coughing and touching surfaces. It's in the room and there's not too much you can do about that except I suppose open the window, go outdoors or treat the room. I think this makes it very contagious and that's why we're having all these issues about, what do you think about that? Is this new? No, it's not new, but it's certainly true. And we're learning more and more about aerosolization and how pathogens that are transmitted by the respiratory route move. If we look at the pandemics that have occurred, they're generally of two types of transmission. One is the respiratory route and that's of course the most important. The other is by mosquitoes and that's where my specialty lies is in mosquito transmitted diseases. But the respiratory route is the most important and when you cough or you sneeze, you expel respiratory droplets.  And if it's a closed environment and no air movement, no good ventilation and other people that are in the room can be infected. There was an incident in Washington state recently where 75, I think I forget, 60 people I think it was attended acquire practice. And two or three days later, they had people coming down which was turned out to be COVID-19 disease and 75% of that acquire became with SARS-2 virus and then clearly it was all due to aerosolization and respiratory droplets in a confined space. One of the most dangerous places you can go when there's something like COVID-19 spreading as a elevator, you get in there, there's absolutely no movement of air and if someone sneezes or coughs, you can rest assured you're gonna breathe it in. Well, what can you do about it? There's all this talk about masks and we had a, I think a false start in terms of public information. We talked before the show about the intersection of politics and politics and science. And I think we got some bad information about masks and the use of masks and people were led to believe, most people still do believe that the only person who should wear the mask is the person who has the disease. But in fact, if we have a spray going on in the elevator or in a room with no ventilation, I think I'd want a mask. I want a really strong mask. So I didn't breathe that in. It's a mask help. What do you think about this? Well, there's, as you say, it's controversial. A mask will not protect you against most masks. The surgical masks that most people use will not protect you against the aerosolized virus. They will protect you against the larger respiratory droplets, but those are relatively unimportant by comparison. And so one of the reasons why masks were not recommended, and they are recommended now, but have not been recommended, is that the argument is, is that if people are putting masks on, it gives them a false sense of security and they think they're protected and they'll do things that they're not supposed to, i.e. not be conscientious about social distancing and so forth. So without any doubt, masks can reduce some transmission to really prevent infection and it doesn't prevent 100% protection against aerosolized virus. You need what they call N95 masks, which will filter out most of it if it's fitted properly. But most of the masks that you see don't fit properly. They don't filter out the aerosolized virus. And so it probably is maybe, probably doesn't help a whole lot because people take chances they otherwise wouldn't normally do.  Let me go to that. So you have entryways, entryways that ultimately go into the respiratory system. And we've been told that it's the nose, obviously you're breathing air into your respiratory system.  And people have said, well, it's the eyes and they wear these plastic masks in order to prevent the spray into the eyes. And I've even heard the ears because the ears can also drain into the respiratory, into sinus into the respiratory system. But, you know, how true is that about the eyes? That seems to me like that's a bit of a long shot to get from the eyes into the lungs or for that matter from the ears into the lungs. And the really risky part is the nose and the mouth. Am I right about that? No, the eyes are important as well. If you, I don't know what they ever use, eye drops or not.  It goes right down. The reason the eyes, the nose and the mouth are because you've got mucus membranes there, the cells that are highly susceptible to infection by a number of viruses. And so all three areas are susceptible to infection. And it's hard to, yeah, you need to protect them all. Best policy. So now the virus gets into your system. The virus is in your nose and it's going into your lungs. Does this happen in seconds or minutes or hours? Is there anything you can do? The virus infects cells and replicates. It replicates and so it's not instantaneously that it gets into your lungs. No, it has to replicate. And as the virus gets and builds up populations, it'll then migrate to other parts of the body, including the lungs. So unfortunately, we don't have any antiviral or any prophylactic that will prevent that from happening. So when you treat a surface that has this virus, these particles of virus on it, you use a percentage of alcohol and all that. But in fact, some mouthwashers have alcohol in them. And I'm wondering if it helps it all once you think you've been exposed to the gargle with alcohol because the virus particles are in that part of your throat. And presumably that would break the lipid oil on the surface of the particles and make them inert. Does alcohol in the form of something you ingest, does that help? I don't know, Jay. I can't answer that question. I would guess that most of the mouthwash that you would use has a very low concentration of alcohol in it and probably wouldn't be preventive. But if it's alcohol, it might do some good. But I would doubt it. I wouldn't count on that. The best thing to do is decontaminate your surfaces and wash your hands good so you don't transfer it and do practice social distancing so you don't breathe it in. You can't be 100% protected, but you can decrease the probability. So right now there's nothing that stops it. And if we look at the researchers, try to figure out what they're after. And by the way, I've come to believe that there are researchers all over the world working on this, some really good people in the US and elsewhere in many labs and they are collaborating big time on the internet and they're sharing information, including the genome came from China and the like to try to figure out how to stop this thing. And maybe we'll have an early response on some kind of drug that will make the virus inert. But I just wonder if you have any idea what the direction of that research is. So you have the spikes on it. The spikes connect to a healthy cell. The spikes allow it to replicate. If you can diffuse the spikes somehow, then you can stop it from replicating. I mean, what is the theory of slowing this virus down biochemically? Well, there's a lot of different directions of research and you're correct that there are thousands of scientists all over the world working on this, but they're looking at two or three different areas of research. One is that you're talking about is an antiviral that could act either as a prophylactic or as a treatment after a person has been infected. And that antiviral could act in any number of ways, but the ultimate goal is to prevent replication of the virus and kill it before it's to the lungs, to the deep lung and causes severe disease. The spikes that you're talking about, those are, they have receptors that allow the virus to enter the cells. And the other line of research is to try and develop vaccines. One of the things that's been, that's in actually preliminary clinical trials is actually a peptide that blocks that receptor from, and prevents the cell, the virus from entering the cell. So there's a lot of different avenues of research that are being conducted. Probably more working on vaccines than there are on antivirals, but antiviral is a tough nut to crack. They're looking at a lot of old drugs that have been developed for other viruses or tested for other viruses. They've been in many people so that they're considered to be safe. Clarquin is one of these drugs that they've pulled off the shelf. It's an old malaria drug that a lot of physicians are claiming has some effect, but as Fauci points out in his briefings, there haven't been any clinical trials on this, so we really don't know how effective that drug is. It's more anecdotal work reports from physicians who are using it with individual patients or a small number of patients. And so there's no controls to actually show for the fact that it is efficacious. But there are a lot of old drugs out there that have been developed for other viruses and they're testing those. So hopefully some of those will show some promise and actually turn out to be a good antiviral for it. So there's a lot of research going on in that regard but don't hold your breath. We've been trying to develop an antiviral for the flavor viruses for 50 years, 30 years, and we still don't have one. It's not an easy thing to do to develop a... And the problem, part of our problem with both the drugs and the vaccines, Jay, is that we don't have a good animal model for a lot of them. And so it's difficult to measure the efficacy without going into humans and that's unethical in today's world. Well, you know, not that I really know anything about this but it strikes me just to integrate what I've seen on television and read in the papers is that we have the genome and once we have the genome, we can see how the RNA works and the various components and how it's set up. And once we know that, I think we do know that, then we can do gene splicing potentially. And gene splicing, of course, is very frontier and CRISPR is very frontier. But the idea would be to find a way to splice this RNA, to change the genome of the virus and to make it inert using, say, a bacteria which has the power to do that. Is there anything going on about that? What do you think about that as a possible line of investigation? Actually, it's a very, it's relatively new, not really new, but a new line of investigation. People are looking at it for a lot of different pathogens and it shows a lot of promise. I mean, there are ways of doing this but the problem you have with the virus like SARS-CoV-2 is it's new, we have the genome, we know what it is but to actually re-engineer it won't work because the wild virus is out there.  And so how will you, you need to develop something to protect against that old virus, not develop a new virus. And so I don't know that gene splicing is a good thing to do for this particular virus. Well, you know, in talking about the epidemiological side of this, yes, it is all over the world and I'm not clear on one thing, maybe you can help me, Duane, is that how many varieties of this are there? Because virus and mutation are almost synonymous, not only that the virus get created by mutation but the virus itself mutates. And if you compare the virus and say the US as a hotspot and Italy or Spain as a hotspot or Japan now as a hotspot, you're gonna find it's different but the virus may be similar, but it's not the same. And so what's happening is the virus is mutating while we watch, while the pandemic goes on. Am I right about that? I think you're right about that. Whether or not that would influence our ability to have a good antiviral or a vaccine against it. I don't know, no one knows at this point, but our experience with other viruses that have multiple subtypes, if you will, of the virus suggests that for flu example, that virus mutates and the vaccine that you develop this year is not truly effective next year. Flu is a rather special bug though because there's something like 144 different combinations of the hemagglutinin on those viruses that can change its genetics. We don't know how coronaviruses relate to that. We know that they probably mutate. We know from our experience with other viruses, those mutations can actually have a tremendous effect on phenotype expression, phenotypic expression, make them more or less virulent, make them attenuated in some cases, give them higher transmissibility, greater epidemic potential, if you will. So we don't know, it's too early in our knowledge of this virus. Give us a few years and we'll have a better idea of how frequently the mutations occur and what impact that those mutations have on the epidemiology and clinical expression of the viral. So there seem to be a couple of possibilities. One is the antibodies from people who have recovered and it reminds me of insulin, which was originally made with fetal pig material and you had to kill a lot of pigs to get the insulin, but then they found a way to make it artificially and all of a sudden we have insulin for everybody. So query, can we take antibodies, which, I mean, I'm not sure that it's actually effective, but can we take antibodies from people who have recovered and then make those antibodies artificial and then spread them around the world to have the same effect on large populations? That there's a very active area of research that's doing that very thing. You're talking about two different things here. You've read about the plasma treatment taking plasma from convalescent patients and using that, infusing that into patients. That's an old, old, old method that's been used for years and years. And in fact, at CDC we always used to keep anti-viral plasma against viruses that we didn't have any vaccines for and that was used for treatment when someone had a laboratory accident and accidentally infected themselves. So that's actually, I think, being tried right now with COVID-2 virus. The other is though to actually manufacture the antibodies that you can actually then use for therapeutic purposes. They're called therapeutic antibodies and these humanized monoclonal antibodies should be, could be very effective if we develop the right ones. Yes, and that's a very active area of research. I think there's one fellow in New Jersey or somewhere that's already developed a monoclonal antibody for COVID-2 and it's going into trials as we speak. And that would be synthetic rather than just taking it out of the plasma of a recovered patient. Yes. One other avenue I wanted to ask you about is, so now the virus gets into your lungs and it creates an inflammation, huge, huge inflammation in your lungs, which is so fragile. Both the oxygen exchange cells and the breathing cells are affected and the inflammation creates all kinds of, let's call it schmutz in your lungs and you drown and you can't breathe very well. So the question is, what can we do about this inflammation? This is the body's own immune system is what's killing the patient. So we have to moderate the body's own immune system. Are there drugs? Can there be drugs? Is there any research going on to minimize the inflammation and thus the immune reaction that is so damaging to the patient? You know, Jay, this is an area that I don't know a lot about, but I do know that cytokine storms that you're talking about that can influence that type of pneumonia. There's a lot of research going on and a lot of other diseases create cytokine storms as well. You know, the hydroxychloroquine that is given, one of the reasons they think it is effective, the ones that are using it, is that it's an anti-inflammatory drug and it reduces the inflammation in the lungs. And so it's an area of research. I have not read much about any progress in the area other than with hydroxychloroquine. Perhaps they're in some of these experimental therapies, they're combining HIV drugs with chloroquine and it seems to be effective, but whether they're anti-inflammatory or not, but the key is to reduce the inflammation, you're correct. We only have a couple of minutes left and I wanted to ask you about vaccines in general.  You ask, how long is it gonna take to get a vaccine? And it's an optimistic thing because we're not sure we can get a vaccine, but let's assume that we have the talent, we have the resources, we have the scientific background to get a vaccine. It seems to me that a good part of the year or 18 months track of that effort is in the trials. And trials are a matter of finding patients or trial subjects who will tolerate it and then making close notes about how it works with them, whether it's efficacious, whether it's them, it's injurious in some way. But it sounds to me actually, and I think Bill Gates would agree, he's been very high profile on this, is that you have to use the best technology you can find and one of the technologies involved in trials is information technology, it's databases. So isn't it true, or my theory anyway, I'll bounce it off you, is that you can move faster on that 18 months. You can move faster on clinical trials if you can use AI or other high speed information technology. Wouldn't that shrink the amount of time it takes to develop a vaccine? I don't want to say no, but my gut feeling is no, it won't increase the time. The problem we have is that if you give an experimental vaccine, give a vaccine to an individual, it will take 30 days minimum for you to usually find out that it's immunogenicity. Does it actually produce the result in producing antibodies, anti-viral antibodies? But that's just the first step. Then the next step is you've got to follow that patient for probably at least a year to find out if the antibodies wane and become undetectable or not protective any longer. And this is all assuming that you've done the safety, phase one safety trials to make sure that it's a safe vaccine. But then you've got to follow that patient or those recipients for ideally for several years to find out if there's any adverse, long-term adverse effects. And if it actually prevents disease against the virus that you've produced it against. So I'm not sure. People say 18 months, yes, FDA can fast-track it and short-ticket it a lot of the, but you're dealing with the unknowns there because you don't know what the long-term effect of that vaccine is going to be. So the safe thing to do is to 18 months is I think if we have a vaccine in 18 months, I'll buy you up and I'll see you J.J. or more.  No, I'm just in today's world with the IRBs and the human trials. You don't have, in the old days, we could do human trials. You could actually put the experimental vaccine or the candidate vaccine in humans and actually measure the effect. Can't do that anymore. We have to use animals and so there are just so many things that delay this process if we're gonna have a safe vaccine.  You're asking me all these questions, you know the answers to them. But you know, as well as I, if we put a vaccine developed in 18 months into people and then six months down the road or a year from now, some of the developed adverse events, whether it's a vaccine related or not, there's gonna be litigation out the Gazoo. And so you just have to, in today's world, we need to be a little more cautious. Yes. And I think back to your point about AI and models. One of the reasons we have the fear and the panic we've had driving this epidemic or a pandemic is the models, the models, you know, they project numbers that are out of this world and it scares people. And they're all magnitude or several magnitudes higher than the actual figures really are. So what we need to do is step back, do some good old basic epidemiology clinical and epidemiolab work and find out what this virus is doing and then start projecting. So, you know, just in the way of, I guess I'll use the word speculating, but speculating on the basis of, you know, all your knowledge of the subject, how do you see this unfolding? How do you see it coming to an end? I mean, because sometimes they correct me, but sometimes viruses, epidemics just come to an end all by themselves. They somehow end. How do you see this unfolding, you know, into the future? Not only in terms of the science, but in terms of the, you know, social and economic effect. Well, again, I will say I don't know, but I will speculate a little, I guess. I think number one, the case fatality rate's gonna be a lot lower than the models projected it would be. That being the case, I talked to Rob Kay here a month ago, I guess, and told him looking at the preliminary data, I would treat it like a severe flu and focus on mitigation in reducing transmission, i.e., social distancing, cough and hand hygiene, et cetera, all of the things that we know reduces exposure. And, you know, I think the impact that it's gonna have, if we lock down this country economically, the implications of light New York, it's gonna have a tremendous economic impact and it's gonna come back to what I projected 10 years ago in 2010 at this policy meeting that it's gonna threaten the economic security, not only in the country, but at the world. So, the public health act of the economic security to be worth the disease itself. So, I think we need to be very cautious about how we proceed. I think all of the evidence from China and from this country definitely suggests that the so-called things that we're doing, quarantine, self-quarantine, actually working and decreasing transmission, that decreases a lot on the healthcare system and we can manage that while maintaining, maybe not business as usual, but some business going on without shutting down the economy. I really think that we need to be cautious about shutting down the whole economy. Now, one thing about the coronavirus is we don't know whether it will just disappear like SARS did or whether it will become endemic like influenza is and come back year after year after year. We still don't know that. It's a highly transmissible, it seems to do well in humans, but keep in mind it's not a human parasite.  It's a humans or unnatural hosts and unnatural hosts tend to get rid of these parasites unless it's really well adapted. So, it's going to take us a year or maybe longer before we know exactly what's going to happen to this. If our containment or our mitigation efforts are good we probably won't build the herd immunity that we need to stop the epidemic. It'll peter out itself. And here again comes back to your comment about mutations. We know that viruses mutate and those mutations sometimes reduce the virulence of the virus so that the viruses can go underground and we know that this virus can already be transmitted in asymptomatic cases. That's one mechanism that allows the virus to develop endomicity. So, bottom line, we don't know yet. Price of liberty is eternal vigilance, isn't it? Yes. Well, no, you know, we've been saying for years, people in my field, that we need to do a better job of surveillance. We need better laboratory-based surveillance. We need to set up pathogen discovery programs. This is what we did in Singapore and what we tried to do in Hawaii. Pathogen discovery programs that will allow us to detect, identify and contain these bugs before they get on airplanes and fly around the world. And that's desperately needed. If we had done that with this virus in February, we'd have had a much smaller problem on our hands today. Well, that takes me to one last question which I think I really need to ask you. And that is, where does testing fit in all of this? Have we done a good job? What can we do better? Is testing still relevant or is it beyond testing? How do you manage an epidemic, a pandemic using testing? You don't manage it using testing. You manage it using mitigation efforts. You use the testing to help you decide where best to apply those mitigation methods. You need good testing. This is what I see with the PCR test that has been to identify this. You know as well as I do, many of these tests will be false negatives or false positives. And the type of sample you take it, who takes that sample, where it's taken from, how it's processed after it's taken. And the technician doing the test all influence the results that you get. And drive-through testing, this is where public opinion is driving decision-making. I wouldn't bet the farm on the results of those drive-through tests. I've not seen any efforts to validate whether the tests are accurate or not. But testing plays a very big role in your surveillance system, Jay. You know that you've got to have reliable tests and you use those tests to know how much transmission is occurring and where it's occurring so that you can target your control efforts appropriately. So testing plays a critical role. But going on testing everybody in the country doesn't help a whole lot. Well, I've become aware that there's two kinds of tests for coronavirus. One is the PCR and the other is the antibody test. And they both give you a different view of what's happening in this patient. And I wonder if it's possible to put them both together and use both of those testing technologies in the same test and get a better handle on what we really have at a given patient? The answer is yes. The answer is yes. And we need to get to know the virus a lot better. But for a lot of viruses, we have combined tests like that where you actually monitor certain antigens that are associated with viremia with the virus. And the other component of it measures the antibody. And primarily IgM antibody because it's an antibody that comes up fairly fast and is protective. And so you have a combined antigen antibody test and you can use it. You can actually use it in point of care. But the problem is, I know that my group in Singapore have developed an antibody test early on. They've been using it now for a month. And I understand CDC and some of the other companies have developed antibody tests too. But my guess is they're focusing on point of care tests and those are usually lateral flow tests which have a very poor sensitivity and asbestosity. I don't know how good they are. The key is to validate these tests before you spend a billion dollars on that basis. The results, same as models, you need to validate them before you make major policy decisions. Ever think about coming back into the fray?  Well, I get probably two or three invitations a week to get back in the fray. But, you know, I'm 81 years old, Jay. You know, these days you're going to watch out. And my wife thinks I ought to settle down a little bit. Well, thank you, Duane. Duane Goebbler, a researcher par excellence, a global research infectious disease closely connected with Hawaii. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your discussion and all the points that you've helped us with. Aloha. Thank you.