Live from the Mandalay Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at IBM Insight 2014. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here inside theCUBE live in Las Vegas for IBM Insight. This is IBM's premiere show around big data analytics, formerly called Information On Demand Now, rebranded as IBM Insight. I'm John Furrier. I'm with Dave Vellante and our next guest is Steve Mills, Senior Vice President, Group Executive, Software Assistant with IBM, Industry, Legend, Leader of the Helm, Captain of the Ship, welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you again. Always great to be in theCUBE. We love chatting with you. It's like, yeah, tech athletes roll on us, please. You're on the day to day, IBM is still on course. I mean, the shift is not happening. You guys are staying on vectoring into this market, cloud mobile, software descent and the value proposition. This show's focused on the big data analytics. We talked to you recently at Pulse. What's different? And just quickly break down the core thing between this and the other event, Pulse, and now Comical Interconnect. Well, obviously this event's very much focused on analytics, information management, so whether it's data warehousing, database, big data, little data, structured, unstructured, SQL, no SQL, SQL on no SQL, every conceivable combination of technology associated with all things analytics, right? And so that'll pick up all kinds of areas, including things like internet of things, which is very much a big data challenge. Security, these days, cybersecurity, big data challenge. Fraud, any money laundering, obviously into sentiment analytics and customer relationship. And so it's a very broad range of topics, but they're all tied back to this whole area of analytics and data. So one of the things we're seeing in the theme here is speed, large-scale analysis software, right? So this is you're in the software systems, you're the head honcho there. So talk about what's going on with the cloud dynamic, okay? You've got large-scale computation available, softwares at the center of the value proposition. The new models are emerging. Ray Wang calls this area of insight around the future where IBM is going to really shine with their software. So you're leading the software team at large scale. Cloud is large-scale. What are the things that are in place and where do you guys see the leverage for IBM? Well, you know, specific to cloud, cloud is obviously a dimension of what the market is doing today. And it relates to where do things run? Where can I run things? And can I, through leveraging cloud-related deployment, can I get better leverage on economics? Can I move faster? Can I be more agile? I mean, there are a lot of different attributes that customers are seeking as they talk about the cloud. I think this morning in the main tent, we talked about the new announcements, new things. And there was a lot of focus on analytics in the cloud.  And to what extent can shared cloud services be a way in which customers can more rapidly get at these capabilities, solve some of the underlying problems and get to analytics? In a consumption model that they want, which is cloud-like as a service. Yeah, it's certainly many want that. But by the way, they want a lot of things. Yeah, our customers want it. You know, that's the definition of your customer. We want quality. Thankfully, they're coming to you asking for a lot of things. So they want in the cloud, they want on-premise, and they want hybrid, something in between. Where, well, I'm not sure I want to move all my data to the cloud. A regulated company, my data's important, maybe I'm not quite ready to put the data in the cloud. Can you give me analytics capability? Can I leverage cloud? Are cloud services in some way? Can I keep my data on-premise? Can you give me a hybrid? Can you overflow? Maybe the data is not as critical from a regulatory perspective. Which case, how much analytics could I push out to the cloud? We have customers that are very interested in leveraging our grid technologies, platform software, doing Hadoop and big data analysis, using those technologies, ideally suited to a large cloud-based grid type of thing. So lots of scenarios and this ability to mix and match and pick the way you want to go is one of the unique aspects of the IBM portfolio. I wonder if I could ask, you had talked about earlier the information management data warehouse, integration, Hadoop, NoSQL, SQL all coming together at this event, and it seems to be coming together. Why is that? Is that because of the cloud? Can be this transport data is a transport? Normally these things are very, or historically, very fragmented for the horizontal layers. Is that changing? Well, first of all, our clients are telling us they want to be able to look at it holistically. They don't view what is available to them necessarily from the perspective of any one mechanism being the perfect answer to their business problem, but rather it's the combination of technologies. And look, we're uniquely positioned to do that. We've been in the Hadoop distribution business for years. We've obviously been in relational database, but we've done non-relational, document stores, image, video, all kinds of things in all these different domains. IBM is unique in that regard. So when we run an event like this, we're putting all the pieces together. That's what the event's all about. Show our clients all the different things that come together. Show them, by the way, how our business partners fit into those offerings, the kinds of things that they're doing, and take them through the full, you know, if you will, structure from end to end of all the possibilities, and then work with them on how do we grab at that portfolio and match it up to our business needs. I think you guys are doing a good job by having these mega events, because there's a lot of crossover between customers. Some might want a little bit of big data, some DevOps in here and there, and there's no clear general purpose product anymore. So I got to ask that question. You mentioned that they want this integrated model. You're seeing integrated suites or stacks where there's a lot of mixing and matching. So as a grandmaster on the chessboard, you've been in the industry for a while. Can you correlate this to other trends and inflection points? Because now you're seeing customers saying, okay, I'm going to build a stack for this application and workload and be good with it. And that's a great solution. It might not be up to shelf. It might be something that can cobble together some really cool technology, a little Watson here, a little data fabric there, and some computing. What does this all mean? Help us tease this out. Look, I think when you step back from all of this, you look at it both historically and in terms of what the technology permits, you begin to see an evolution that's taken place around information technology. And when it's expensive and complex, you tend to do it in smaller chunks, more in isolation. I want to solve a series of problems. But time passes. Decade after decade, you're buying more technology, adding technology, and you hit certain inflection points where the cost of computing comes down, network bandwidth goes up, the possibilities of being able to do things more flexibly now come into focus. And frankly, the client says, aha, wait a minute, I always wanted to do these things in combination. It just wasn't affordable before. I had this pattern, but nobody could respond to me. The vendor community didn't have a solution. It was always too expensive to bring it together. Well, guess what? This confluence, big data, analytics, mobile cloud, all these things allow us to begin to put things together in ways that frankly, we would have struggled 10 years ago to put together in the same fashion. So what you're saying there is is that, and then we heard some comments on theCUBE earlier where the old software would throw away skew data that was off the median because it just didn't have any way to explore that. What you're saying is now you have the ability to go in and do things that you could never do before because of the low barrier of entry for the high performance stuff. The affordability's there. The cost of computing's coming down. So from a value standpoint, what does that mean for the customer? That means a variety of new choices, right? That's where analytics is. Well, it means solutions that they could have only have dreamed of before. Now they can afford. They can find patterns and relationships that they can monetize they couldn't find before. They can hunt out the hidden jewels, the weak signals, the things that sometimes eluded them. They're now in a position to actually apply technology in an affordable way. They're able to do something that perhaps could have only been done a decade ago in a research lab, or by a heavily funded government entity that did it some special project. Now this stuff is available, literally to be deployed in businesses of all sizes. The cloud opens that aperture to almost any company of any size, and the speed and performance of the hardware makes it possible now to do things that previously you just would have passed on. But some of those things you could do in the past with a services led engagement and IBM could bring in services on top of all these technologies. How is that changing?  Are customers getting more self-service? Are you partnering in a different way with customers? Talk about that. Well, I think that the requirements for skills remain every bit as high, if not higher than ever before. Right. You know, the technology moves, the affordability improves, and the bar gets raised on the kind of challenge that many of the customers here are very adept at standing up basic data warehouses, reporting systems. They've had those for years. It's familiar technology. You know, now they're going to move to the next level, right? Increase the size of the data, the velocity of the data, and suddenly the degree of difficulty now goes up. I mean, no one here at this conference views a terabyte as being a hard thing to do. In fact, they're all talking about hundreds of terabytes, and many are talking about pet-a-scale, pet-a-bite scale. Now it used to be, we used to run contests in the tech industry back in the 90s who had the first terabyte, full terabyte database. Yeah, how big was the room? Yeah. Who was a terabyte database, you know? And there were very few terabyte databases. That's nothing today. That's trials play. You can buy a thumb drive. It's a terabyte. You know, we can stand up a pet-a-bite of storage, pet-a-bite of solid state storage inside of a single frame today. You know, just amazing density is possible. So that puts pressure on the software. So let's get back to the software piece, because now you have unlimited storage essentially. I mean, not unlimited, but you know, it's not a lot. A lot, you know, it's not available. That means the streaming of the ingestion of data. So call it data exhaust. Call it, okay, I want everything that's connected to my network, Internet of Things, where people are things.  Now I got to do something with it. It creates more noise. The noise barrier is really hot.  You know, do I want to look at all of it? Does it matter? I mean, if I'm looking at financial markets, I probably care about every piece of data. If it's an Internet of Things project with a power company and you're measuring the grid, a lot of it is just status information. You don't care about most of it. But the perturbations and the changes you care about a lot, you know? So you may ingest more data per day than almost anybody else is outputting, but yet you only care about a modest percentage of it. You know, so you get this range of scenarios. And the jury's still out on all of this. It's still early. So we were, Dave and I were talking about some of the new companies like Splunk, ServiceNow. A lot of these cloud, born in the cloud like companies, well, they weren't necessarily born in the cloud, but they're now in the cloud where you have the land and expand business model that and the customer's consumption is kind of, they, you know, buy before I buy by the drink, take a POC, grow it.  So they're reinvesting all their profits into growth. So I got to ask you the business model question, you know, as the general looking over the battlefield, you see the skirmishes of these young companies coming up, they're public, they're losing money, they're reinvesting it all in. That business model viable for you guys? You guys going to come in? How do you guys roll out to that landscape with a cloud like business model with all those assets? What's your, how do you view that as a business? Well, I mean, it's always been the case that the things that have been around for a while are the ones that make money and the things that are new don't make money. And that's been the case forever. It's not like this is all of a sudden a new phenomenon. Bubbles, Silicon Valley's been there before. You know, I'm involved with startups and you know, obviously in IBM we've invested in many technologies that took years, you know, five, seven years or more to finally get to the point we're now making a buck on this.  So we're quite used to that. You know, we invest over six billion a year in R&D. We do a lot of new things that we know have long-term payback, but we have a hundred billion dollar company. And we do a lot of things for customers that they pay us for every day. And obviously there's a margin there associated with the value we deliver.  So we're our own banker in that sense. And we do a lot of things that we know have a long-term proposition around making money, but we're not going to see that money in their term time. But on the business mix side though, have you seen some changes with the cloud? Kind of not forcing your hand, but just adapting to the marketplace. You guys have been very adaptive. You have great sales force. You've got a great field service force. Has the customer consumption of the technology? That's a lot of very service-oriented components. You mentioned a few of them. Has that changed anything? There's a lot of reconfiguration of the... Well, the good news in the market is that the customers are doing all the above. They're doing everything. You know, I think sometimes there's this illusion that you read about the hot new things and well, everyone's doing that. Well, it's true. A lot of people are doing it. But they're also doing a lot of things that we're no longer talking very much about that are an integral part of the way they run their business every day. This is a very, very big market and businesses are investing across a spectrum of activities. Clearly, we need to continue to invest as we have been now for many years in the new things they're doing. Cloud, analytics, mobile, social, security, hot growing areas. We need to bring those capabilities onto traditional platforms and systems because that's what keeps those platforms and systems vital and growing. So, you know, we have over 100 SaaS offerings in the IBM portfolio today. Cloud represents a big chunk of revenue for us. Certainly, nothing to sneeze at big in terms of the industry. But frankly, modest when you measure it against a $100 billion aggregate company. And that's one of the things that we grapple with is we're always going through these transitions and the idea you move the investment to where the market's going, you build mass and we've put tens of billions of dollars of revenue on the boards in these new CAMs related areas. But we're on a journey to $100 billion. And they're still not big enough to offset the decline in the other stuff, right? So, slow growing things, fast growing things and that's the world we live in. You got to make the bets. I mean, you got to make the right bets. But the rich keep getting richer in the software business. And it's true. And I had to miss your comments last September in Greenwich. I had to leave early, but I read them. You talked about the percentage of contribution in software versus hardware and how you guys are changing your portfolio. But as they say, the rich keep getting richer. There aren't a lot of new vorice. I mean, maybe Salesforce, I guess Salesforce is one. Why is that? And does that continue? Well, I mean, we all understand that in these shiny new things, the valuations relate to the way the market forward values, the stock price, right? It's not that they're getting rich off of the net profits of the company. Especially the private companies. Notable private companies. The net profits are not obviously where the money is. The money is in the perceived value associated with working on the next new thing. And so you're given that forward value benefit, right? And certainly more than a few million. And someone already, that's irrational on the private side. But more than a few millionaires that have been minted in the tech industry as a result of those kinds of things. But it's one of the things that brings energy. Obviously, the venture firms bring liquidity and that funds the innovation. And they're going to be winners.   And we're an acquirer of these companies. You can argue it's overfunded, but isn't overfunding in a way a good thing? You get good innovation. You get to identify value. I think it's a good thing from innovation, from an economic perspective. It's that liquidity. If you can, the multiplier effect on liquidity, the creation of liquidity is incredibly important to power the economy. And if that's backed up with good successes and things that really contribute positively to employment, to the GDP, then it's a great use of cash. On the other hand, if you build a lot of companies that go into chapter 11, that's not so good.  I mean, every now and then you'll pop a few billion on a company, but generally speaking, you guys are very disciplined.  You talk about 100 SaaS acquisitions, basically, or SaaS products, many of those acquisitions. Some we've created, some we bought. And so, I'm presuming that hasn't changed, that investment discipline, right? We're talking about that a little bit. Well, we're held to a different standard, frankly. We're not in a position to not deliver on earnings and cash. We're a different kind of company to invest in. And so we think very carefully about how we use the shareholders' money. And are we buying things that we can get a good return on? We look for synergy with the rest of the portfolio. We look for a lift. We look for- It's also integration costs too. If you misfire on an acquisition, if you overpay and it's not the right call, there's also the cost internal, right? Overpay is always bad. Yeah, it always is. Overpay is always bad. But if you look back 20 years, what's it been a better use of cash? Acquisition or R&D? I know it's kind of a loaded question. Can you give us an honest opinion on that? We really can't do, no. Clearly, given the IBM franchise in the market, the R&D investments that we make are absolutely critical. We would not be where we are today had we pulled back on R&D. And we could have invested money in buying companies that would not have gotten us to where we are. And there are massive franchises out there. The 28 million mips of mainframe capacity installed in the world today. The world's businesses run on these systems. That's a level of investment that we have to make uniquely. No one else has that knowledge and expertise. So there's a lot of... R&D is critical. I think you guys really did the right thing. And also you're staying on the right vector in the market. You guys are eyeing the prize. We can see it with the big data and the systems. There's a lot of stuff that's kind of, you're kind of like getting modernized on with the customer. But I think you guys have a good track. I've been very impressed with that. But, and I got to ask you though, there's some, besides the tuck-unders and product kind of buyouts you might do that. It might be someone that pops up. Hell yeah, pluck them in, put them into the portfolio. What is the game-changing area that you're watching the most right now? In terms of turbulence, where there's opportunity that's, the need's de-risking. That you're like, okay, is it, where's the straight and narrow on the business that you see and where's the area like, okay, and what's in that sector over there? Well, I mean, in these critical areas that go under the acronym CAMHS, we're obviously looking to... CAMHS stands for? Cloud, analytics, mobile, social, and security. These are some of the hottest growing areas in the industry today. So we're invested in all of them. And obviously you want to invest wisely so you can make poor decisions. But the fact of the matter is that those are the fast growing opportunities. You want to ensure your development dollars are going in that direction. You go to market structures are moving in that direction. That is something that is, you absolutely have to keep pace with. And you can really never run fast enough. And that's a mix of organic. We report on these things every quarter. We talk about how's IBM doing in these new areas. These have been very solid significant double digit growth spaces. Cloud, 40, 50%, strong analytics growth, big mobile growth. But look, that's where the market's going. So we like to grow that fast, but we also know those are fast growing spaces. So we're certainly grabbing, if you will, our fair share. We'd like an even bigger share who wouldn't. We got to keep moving the investment, moving the skills, moving the resources. In that direction, it's what builds the IBM of the future. And software is the key component of all this now. You're seeing that clearly out there. But it's the defining technology it what enables that capability. By the way, software has to run on hardware. At least the last time I was in the lab, that was true. Gotta run on something. And so there are investments there that are critically important. And the customers often can't get at the value of the technology without assistance. So that could be IBM providing assistance or it could be the thousands of business partners that are here at this event providing assistance. But you're sharpening your hardware focus and narrowing it. There are a lot of skeptics out there. Why are they wrong? Well, because these are good hardware franchises that do make money. And we've obviously honed in on where the profits are. IBM used to be a much bigger hardware business. We shared this with the Wall Street analysts earlier this year. At one time, IBM, 1980, IBM was more than 80% hardware. In 2013, IBM was 17% hardware. Dramatic shift, services and software. So we're endlessly rebuilding this company. And that rebuild of the company is always focused on where are customers going? What does the technology allow that opens the floodgates on the next new thing that they want to do? Because their aspirations for using technology to change their business are what we have to tap into. It's interesting, on those years you mentioned one of the things that was really in place was kind of an end-to-end stack. You had SNA architecture. Remember the day you had networking protocols? So a lot of stuff was wired in with the hardware. So again, that was proprietary in some cases, IBM. But now you've got cloud, you've got a conversion infrastructure. Kind of an interesting wiring going on, but it's open now. So are you guys looking at that? Because we see Oracle doing the same thing. They have very specific solutions that really work well with workloads. So is that kind of the thing, stay standard and open? And is that the stack model? Is there a certain criteria? Certainly what our customers mean. Look, those that vote with their dollars, the customers, they want their cake and they want to eat it too. That's what I'm saying. Faster, cheaper, smaller. But by the way, they also want it integrated, but they want it open. They want it modular. They want to be able to mix and match. They want to be able to make changes. So they want all the above. But by the way, make sure it works well. So those demands are there. Do people really care if it's a proprietary piece of hardware, if it runs really well and fast and no one really interops with everything? I mean, I think openness is important. At the same time, they know that once they make an investment in any technology platform, there's an aspect of them therefore being on that platform and the cost of changing. So they want to know the vendor is investing in the platform. It's hardened. And by the way, they want to know that you're pursuing an open strategy such that more possibilities emerge for them, not just from you, the provider, but also other companies are coming in and supporting that environment. I mean, openness is about building ecosystem. So it's okay to have a hardened solution encapsulated together as long as there's choice. Kind of what you're saying, right? Open means choice, right? Not locked in. Open means choice. Well, and the proof is in the ecosystem, as you're saying. And the ecosystem tends to be the test of that, right? The truth is the larger the ecosystem, the more sense of openness that exists. So it's a subtle definitional issue. And then there's a technical view of openness which is very absolute. Keep you honest. The ecosystem keeps you honest, right? And then there's another view of it which tends to be more driven by choice, right? Which can be ecosystem related. So IBM's always had a pretty heavy planning culture. Given the push toward agility and now the contribution of the ecosystem as a sort of an adjudicator of openness, has that, and I know you've changed in terms of speeding up your planning culture, is it changing again? Are you moving faster of the things that you're doing internally to speed up decision-making? Well... Be more agile, all the buzzwords associated with that. We work with a lot of companies and we acquire a lot of companies. We don't have a problem being as fast as others are, all right? So there are always these notions, somehow or other, if you're big, you can't be fast. And that's just simply... So it's a misperception. And that's just simply not true, right? Because we're constantly moving people, we're moving technology. It's a relative term. We're making changes. We had nine months go to marketing on Watson. It's a herculean. We're making changes all the time.  So we've been very good at getting things out the door and out the door quickly. As always, our customers expect us to not just deliver quickly but also deliver reliability, scalability. You know, we're held a fairly high standard. We have to make sure those things are, you know, evident in what we do. I think that very often there's a real need for creative discovery. In other words, you don't find out what the market really wants until you go to market. So you can build in the lab, you know, forever and never get it right. Or you can go to market quickly with something that's less than perfect, you know, and then refine it, refine it, refine it. It'll run through, that's agile, right? You know, and I'm sure if you talk to many customers that are here, they can tell you stories of things that IBM delivered to them and they say, oh, I wish it ran better the first time I got it. But the good news is I got it and then they worked on it, worked on it, fixed it, upgraded it, improved it, you know, and I'm on version 10 today. And they like it and they're happy. Yeah, yeah. And IBM, you did exactly what you promised to do. And when I was an early adopter, I tended to suffer a little bit with some of the rough edges on the code, you know, but I saw you innovate rapidly and you moved to market leadership with your technology because you were dedicated to rapid innovation. And the alternative is to have a product that has way too many features that they don't want, that's sub-optimized. Or where you're trying to come up with the pluperfect integration model with all kinds of things. You missed the market. You know, nicely fitted together and you missed the market, right? You missed the market.  I'd rather be fast and I'd rather have the market direct me to where I need to go long-term than attempt to figure it out in the lab. Steve, we really appreciate you coming on and we love talking with you. It's like talking to sports. It's so much fun for Dave and I. We love talking to industry trends and whatnot. But I'm going to ask you, what's next for you? What are you working on now? And what are some of the highlights of what's in the moment for your next couple of months? And also share with the folks something about IBM that they may not know and that would shed some positive insight into what you're working on. Well, I'm just relaxing here in Vegas. I'm the cube hanging out. I'm going to talk more if you want. Who's going to win the World Series? Giants or a KC? No, we don't want to get into that. Well, you know, our passion, our obsession obviously is technology and the next things that can be done technology. There's probably nothing that we're doing in IBM that excites us more than what's happening around Watson, around cognitive computing, around inferencing technologies and all the different things we bring together to make the Watson system. We're working on a lot of fascinating things in hardware design and systems design that begin to use the structures in a way that start to do a better job of mimicking some of the decision-making characteristics and profiles and patterns that we're seeing customers want to get into. There's a fascinating, it's not that computers are in any way human or becoming human, nor will they take the place of humans, but they're taking on attributes that have more and more human-like characteristics. I think one of the most incredible things we're working on is we're working on ways in which Watson, as a technology, can see, you know, of the five senses that all of us have, the one that delivers just an extraordinary amount of information at an incredible rate is site. Site is an amazing learning mechanism and a product that can see, and by seeing, I mean, it's just not a collection of pixels, but there is an interpretive engine behind it that you're now taking in sensory input and new things, new entities, new relationships, new aspects of a particular problem now, the richness that comes from being able to add another sense, if you will, into a tool like Watson, is really just extraordinary. So, I mean, we're clearly just scratching the surface, but of all the things in the technology world we're working on, that's one that obviously has this tremendous attention. It's super popular in the mainstream, but it's also got this really interesting data intelligence layer fabric that's developing out of it, and I was commenting to Ray Wang earlier, so the demo last night, I cut the line, hey, come on, I want an accident. Wait, yeah, it's just small. They didn't say that, but that's my interpretation. And I said, and I started kind of complaining to Ray Wang, he's like, dude, nine months go to market, that's Herculean. So, pretty big accomplishments with Watson. I mean, is that how you guys see it? Are you guys hurrying up, peddling too fast, or taking your time? Well, no, I mean, I'm constantly encouraging the team to go faster, right? You know, everything built. But not at the expense of quality, right? Because you have some big customers. No, I mean, they obviously have to be able to meet the customer needs and requirements, but the knowledge that you develop is something that you build upon, right? And when you talk about something, you talk about moving faster, you're moving faster off the back of the things that you've learned that work. How do you capture that? There are patterns in relationships, that becomes the base in which you then move forward, and it widens the aperture on the kinds of things you can do. So, what began as a relatively small number of customers, early adopters, getting on Watson now was quickly moving to be not just dozens, but hundreds. And we have many hundreds now that are queued up going into 2015 that want to take advantage of this technology, advisory services, and not just some of the leading edge to the limitless application space, but all kinds of things where advice is required, right? And wouldn't we all love to have an advisor, right, that had all the facts, all the data, all the information? Well, Apple series train the mainstream on this notion of, you know, what's the score of the Giants game? They could parse that pretty quickly. There are facts. There's a difference between facts and advice. Yeah, yeah. So, facts is just, you know, hand me back exactly what that is, and there's not a lot of choice. But advice means I have choice. It's ambiguous. It's unclear to me. What are the best choices? And what's the evidence that supports the choice that the system is telling me to make? That's what Watson does. That's what Watson does. It's extremely hard to do. No, it not only gives you an answer, it gives you multiple answers. It shows you why it chose the one that it chose, and then it gives you the evidence back that allows you to go, aha, now I understand why that is the right answer. I'm going to act upon that advice. Or, that's triggered a new thought. I'm going to put in some more information, see whether or not the advice changes. I'm going to explore this topic even further. You know, and so you think about it in all kinds of domains, whether your job is advisory, you can think about academia, you can think about some very tough problem solving.  Or you as a consumer had an advisor. Yeah, you could have an advisor, you know, all folks out there, how hard this is to do. I mean, we always say this is super hard. It's why we, all the geeks get loved, Watson, because they know how hard it is. But in your own words, how hard is it to really do the difference between, what's the score of the Giants game, how tall is the Empire State Building, versus a medical scenario with predictive, prescriptive? Well, it's profoundly different and difficult, in the sense that we've had search technologies for many decades. So long before anybody, you know, understood anything that we see on the web today, obviously there were search technologies out there. Finding facts, you know. You put in a simple request, it brings you back facts, add another one, it brings you back facts.  It's a huge challenge. You know, true and correct, right? Then you take inferencing. Inferencing is a set of concepts that have been around for forever. Within computer science, these are 60s and 70s concepts that were pioneered, you know, going back literally 40 plus years ago. Early AI stuff, right? The problem was is that, you know, could I ever build anything that was flexible? I could build inferencing in a set domain, but I couldn't have a product that matched many domains. You know, so flexible ontology. That's a linguistic ontology kind of thing. Flexible ontology, right? And then if I could create a product, would it scale to a large number of users? Because it used to work well with a couple of people using it. But could it work well with thousands of people using it? You know, that flexible ontology, that ability to... And the user interface, how they're accessing it. Understand language. You know, that ability to continue to feed the system and continue to increase the amount of information it has because it's ability to get at the truth increases with the quantity of data.  And once you get into that domain, the number of things you're not going to know about become relatively small, you know? And that's the amazing thing the computer does. Because none of us can remember all this stuff. And even the things that remember, sometimes we question whether or not we remember it correctly or we're right. So imagine you had an advisor that never forgot, right? That always made the same associations, right? That didn't make a mistake along the way. And that gave you statistical accuracy to seven decimal places as to whether or not the conclusions that it is reaching really matches true statistical probability versus what your brain does, which is, yeah, that's pretty close. Or I got too much information in overloading. And we all know this, you know, we all make assertions and assumptions and we've all in our lives declared something to be true and we know it's true. And then what happens? We find out, well, it wasn't exactly what we thought. It wasn't because we were 100% wrong. It's because we just couldn't assemble all of the facts in our head, you know, at the moment to be able to reason through the right answer and we ended up in the wrong spot. You know, that's exactly why it's so exciting. You just basically outlined three major functional areas in the computer industry in one sentence, like all integrated in. Ingestion, computation, software, user experience. Man, it's super exciting. So once it could only improve my golf game, I'd be a happy man. It's called a virtual golf, fantasy golf. You played yesterday, but you don't know it yet. It's predicting your score. You shot. Don't show up. Yeah, sadly, my score is predictable. Dave Mills, great to have you on theCUBE. We love chatting with you. We could go another half hour, but the planes are backing up, as Dave said. Appreciate the time. Thank you. And supporting theCUBE. We love what you're doing. Dave, thanks. Watson and Analytics is a cognitive, predictive reasoning all coming to help us out. Powerful software here at IBM Insights. It's all about the insights. This is theCUBE, sharing our insights with you. We'll be right back after this short break.


You're like an excuse generator. You think they're doing another excuse? This is what happens in slaughterhouses. This, they're trying to escape. Do you think it's funny? We're not, we're not. I'm asking, cause I've been doing it for years, like, and some people do genuinely don't care. Do you use care? Do you care about animals? Do you? Some people just don't care about animals. Cause they don't have empathy. I went vegan because I don't want to pay for this because I've stopped cameras in slaughterhouses myself. I've been in factory farms myself doing investigations. They keep this stuff hidden from people. So these, this is all secretly filmed. Without their permission, they didn't know that the cameras were there. So this is what they normally do? Yeah, and if you see BBC going to a dairy farmer, they pre-planned it. These places are all kept squeaky clean. They propagate this to the public. They show you like humane, high welfare, green grass, all that. It's nothing like that then. How do you get fruit here? Show me your arm. Show me your arm. I'm not. Okay.  Should all of the light dissolved. I've been vegan nearly 10 years. All nine essential amino acids are found in all plant foods. Even lettuce will have all the amino acids, but it will just be low on protein. So you can get beans, legumes, tofu, seitan, which is super high on protein, actually. It's like 80% protein, seitan. What do you think of the mocha meats in McDonald's? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a good stuff, yeah. Good, go for it. Actually my big healthy. Who goes into McDonald's for health? Do you? Do you go, oh man, I want a macros for my health. Do you go into macros because you want a burger? True? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when you want a vegan burger, you don't go, oh, it's not healthy. Like, bro, see me as a vegan, right? I'll eat healthy food. I'll eat fruits, I'll eat smoothies and whole grains and fruits and vegetables, but when I want some chocolate, I'll get some vegan chocolate. When I want a burger, I'll go to get the McPlan. You can be athletic as a vegan. You don't have to worry about protein as long as you're having a wide variety of whole foods. You know, and you can have some processed food, which is fine. Like, you can have a bit of junk food here and there. Like, naturally all your food's out. Who cares what we naturally are? Really.  Yeah. All right. It kills your entire family. I'm 100%, watch me. That's what I would call justified. But what we do to animals, they're innocent. They did nothing wrong. They didn't hurt anyone. They're not trying to attack my family. They're vulnerable beings. That's unjustified. I think smart. So, I think they're more intelligent than dogs, yeah. What you should care more about is sentience. You know, the difference between intelligence and sentience? Yeah, yeah.  Intelligence is just logic in how you can calculate things and think of intelligence like a computer and sentience like your experience, everything you feel and see and consciousness. So, what matters more, intelligence or sentience in terms of morality? Intelligence. Intelligence. So, I should have more rights if I'm smarter than you, yeah? Probably, yeah. So, I should have more rights than all of you? Yeah, because we have more rights than all of you. I'm smarter than you because you're not vegan. We swear, that's correct. I'm smarter than you because you're not vegan. What do you think about vegetarians? They still consume dairy, eggs, leather, wool, all this, all this. Vegan is an ethical principle about animals. That you... Oh, my God. It emanates out to all animals that are sentient. Do we have a duck, a genie? Yeah, probably, he's like some roadkill on the floor if I was going to die or whatever, for sure. Yeah. But I'm not in that situation, man. We've got a choice now. What do you have to kill it? What if it's like zombie apocalypse? Oh, yeah, different, bro. I'm killing... Mate, zombie apocalypse has gone down. But we're here right now. There's no zombie apocalypse. There's no survival situation. How can you justify not being vegan? Well, what people in third world hunches to recognize people, too. It depends what you mean. Which country, Tommy? Laos. Laos? Yeah. Laos, they're eating rice and vegetables and bananas and soy tofu, cheapest food per calorie on earth is rice. So third world countries should be having plant foods, not feeding all their plant foods to animals to eat the animals. I still think animals should have rights in third world countries. I think we should be trying to get food to people in third world countries and stop feeding all the food to animals and eating the animals. Because chickens and pigs... What are chickens and pigs eat? Harvested crops. What do you think about Uncle Jake? I chatted to his brother. He doesn't care about animals. He told me he doesn't care. I don't care at all. There's nothing he can say to want to convince him. Yeah, don't really care. You don't care about chickens? So I can stomp all over them then, eh? Yeah. So should we not be cruel and stomp the animals? I think it's called a killer animal. I don't know if it matters if it's pain or... It's an animal. I think it matters to the animal if you torture them first, but I think it also matters that you murder them and take their life from them when we didn't need to. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, bro, what are we going to eat? I've been vegan for 10 years, bro. You can get vegan every... I'll just explain you can get vegan everything, but I think it's a little bit catarious. Yeah, do you think the fact that you like the taste of something justifies killing them? Yeah, because I'm an animal, though. Biologically.  You're often like an animal, bro. You don't act like an animal in nature.  I think I would. You'd die. But I'm an animal. Well, you're not a predator. Wait, so it's a shark, you're not an animal. Mate, you're not an apex predator, dude.  You go to the shop, right? I do. You know where you eat animals, but they've been processed for you. They've been slaughtered for you.  Nobody. I wouldn't do that. I honestly didn't think you could. I honestly don't think you have the heart. I don't think I could kill a chicken. I don't think you could stab a knife into a bird right now. Do you know any animals like an animal does in nature when they need to?  Yeah, but you consume other animals and then the other things, anyway, is that's the circle of life and you have to eat something to kill it. It's actually the circle of killing, needless killing. Circle of factory farms, slaughter and torture. That's what it is. It's got enough of it. You walk in the shops, you buy your meat, you've got a choice.  How old are you, bro? You're only young. You're only young.  Uh, 15. 15. You're wise. What do you think about this, bro? I think that needs to change their ways. With obviously this, I'd still eat meat, but this is a bit more of the wrong thing to do. It wouldn't stop me from eating meat. Every action you take has a reaction. Yeah. So when you go and buy this meat, this is what happens to the animals, yeah? You're comfortable, you're happy with that. I'm not happy with it, but meat is meat. That's like my mentality. You can get vegan products, you know that. Yeah, I think when vegan products get developed more with, like, under, like, tested properly, because right now when vegan meats, like, the only one that I'd eat is tofu right now. So you wouldn't eat a McPlan? Nah. Why not? Tofu kills meat. You went to health, aren't you? That's right, you just told me before. So tofu is great. Tofu, what did you say? Tofu kills more animals? You got evidence for that? I've literally seen a tofu farmer see it. They kill, like, all the insects and all, like, the... Tofu farmer, right?  I haven't seen him. Oh, OK. They talk a lot of these people, anti-vegan dumbasses, they just... They're trying to go out vegans. They don't have any evidence for their claims. If you think growing plants kills more animals than killing animals, you need to provide evidence. Because most of the soy on earth has been fed to animals that people eat, so you've got to calculate the plants that the animals are being fed to. Everything is processed, everything's cool. It's all for profit. Some people make excuses, other people take the information on and they take action. There's two types of people in the world. Are you going to take action? I don't know how to take action. The meat is already in front of you, so the animals are already killed. But I think the best way to make a difference is to go and, like, burn these small monsters here. Burn the slaughterhouses down? Yeah. Are you going to do that? The best thing to do, the legal thing to do would be just to put them out of business, stop giving them money, boycott them, because they only kill the animals for you guys. But then other dudes would just eat the animals. Yeah, they'll just eat it. Yeah, but other people do horrible things all the time. We can't just go, oh, other people are going to do it. Therefore, I should contribute to it, because there's animals that just get slaughtered just for you. It's useless. Just for you. If I stopped, I'm going to change it. I could make that argument for murder, too. You could say, if I didn't murder this person here, people are still going to get murdered, so I'm just going to go murder people.  Does that make you better than us? In terms of what? In terms of animals. In terms of kindness to animals, 100%. What you are contributing to to animals is evil. It's unjustifiable. It's f***ed. I'm doing my best to try to stop this from happening to animals. You were a vegan when you were, like, 24, 26. 26. If you were a vegan since you were, like, 10, I probably wouldn't be, like, the same age. You've been vegan for 10 years, nearly. Yeah, but you're not growing after, like, 21, mate. They're saying, oh, you're talking about health.   Most people, because they don't get the same amount of protein. Vegan diets can be healthy for all stages of the life cycle, provided they are adequately planned, well-planned. Most people don't have the money for nothing. It's another excuse. You're like an excuse generator. But you can't let... Another excuse. People don't have money. People don't have money for the... Remember, I just told you that what's the cheapest food on Earth? Rice. Rice. Lentils. Bread. If you're, like, on a farm. How can you use the argument at cost too much? If you're on a farm and you're all dying. Do you answer questions? How can you... How can you use the argument that it cost too much? When is the cheapest food in the world? You won't have a healthy diet, will you? Yeah. You'll mean the healthiest foods are also the cheapest. Okay, what's the healthiest? Fruits, vegetables, beans, grains, legumes, lentils. These are all the healthiest foods. Yeah, like... Nuts and seeds stuff. Tofu's cheap, man. It's, like, two quid a block. That's not cheap. What are lentils, actually?  Dry lentils, dry beans. Dry...    Yeah, if I had actually... I'm saying if you were starving, would that be lost? If you were starving, I'd eat meat, yeah. But I wouldn't go at the same time as the guy who's eating my whole life. Bless you, my friend. But these are terrible, terrible, terrible excuses, you know. How does it tell... Are you saying that a guy who's always eating rice his entire life is going to be, like, at the same level? I'm saying you don't need to eat animals. That's my argument here. Not... What about that man over there? I'm just saying you don't need to. And I'm saying where they're in poorer countries, the plant-based foods are the cheapest. That's what I'm saying. What if I still want to? That's a more honest argument.  You're saying this excuse, that excuse, this excuse. When you could just say, I don't give a s***, I don't want to change. That's honesty. You say I don't care enough about animals to change. That's being called being honest, right? Truthful. When you're pulling out all these excuses, it's just lies. I don't want to. True? Is it better to be honest or to make up bulls*** excuses? It depends on the excuses to be honest, but... What I mean by excuse is a reason not to do something, even though you know it's right. My theory is the people that make excuses think this is wrong and don't want to change, they make excuses. The people who tend not to make excuses and don't want to change, just walk straight past. They don't care. Other people take the information on and they change their behaviour and they don't have to make excuses.


Could you just describe what the emotions were coming out of the bullpen tonight?  That was special for me. And just, you know, getting on the mound again, you know, in a real game. That was really, you know, we spine was special. How much have you visualized or tried to picture that night? What this would feel like? Oh, like a hundred times.  But it was fun. It was really fun. Bruce Beck, please unmute. Louise, welcome back. How did you feel out there? What was your command like? You know, what was the experience like? Man, I feel pretty good, you know, I was not worried about my command because I know that I can throw a strike, but it was good.  The second inning was a little, you know, it was raining a little bit. It was a little slippery, but everything was good. Louise, it was 707 days. Did you like that long? Oh, yes, it did. You know, and I had to thank a lot of guys from, you know, from the people down in Tampa.  They want to say thank you to all those guys. But it was, you know, it was really frustrating for a little bit, but those guys, you know, keep me going and because of them out here right now. Tom Merriam, please unmute. Louise, what's it like to come back and have your first game be part of an important game and a playoff race? I mean, I think only coming back, you know, any game will be special for me. But I think, you know, for the team right now, I know the bullpen has been, you know, a lot of, it's a lot of innings in the bullpen right now. So I think somebody like me or her mind can be, you know, huge in that bullpen right now. Robert Aitken, please unmute. Louise, second at bat, you had the first base on a ground ball. How important was it for you to get over there to kind of show that you're not just yourself or something that you were all the way back?  And then the day after that, I did a couple, you know, coming first. So I think doing that, you know, practicing that helped me a little bit. But no, I feel pretty good, you know, everything growing, you know, it was it was really fun to be out there and do all that stuff. Matthew Robertson, you have the next question. Louise, as you were warming up, then as you eventually came into the game, what were you thinking as you realized afterwards this other day? I mean, I was just, you know, I was not thinking about the rain.  He was freaking thunder there. I was going to go back there and try to pitch, you know, no matter what happened, I was going to go back there and, you know, and try to win this game. Brian Clark, you have the next question. Louise, did the fact that the offense scored those three runs right before you came on, change your mindset at all?   If you do a mistake and get one run, you can come back again, you know, in a close game, you know, by one run, you can do that. It was it was really good to see those guys scored that run. So I can, you know, this was my first start in a long time. So it was it was good to have a big lead. Go next to Lindsey Adler. Louise, what was it? Just what was it like to celebrate this moment? And you put most of your teammates after that? It was really fun, you know, I think, I think, when I came here, God, he was the only guy to stay here in 2015. So, you know, I've been through a lot with Georgie. It's been to a lot of injuries and a lot of guy here.


What's the word, y'all? Since the start of the NBA season, I've been to San Francisco, I've been in LA, I've been to New York City, but I haven't been here to talk all things hoops. Now, I apologize for that, but we finally home, and from what I understand, I ain't got no more travel for the next month or so, so we're back on our grind to talk things hoops. Leave a like. When I was just in New York, we did a pop-up shop for Enjoy Basketball. It was great. Shout out to the team, and shout out to everybody that pulled up. It was amazing to talk to all of the people that've been supporting for years, and telling me their stories and all of this, man, and I got back to my hotel, and I legitimately cried tears of joy or admiration. I don't really know exactly what it was, but I was filled with emotion to look at how much we've grown over the last 10 years of me making content, and I know this is not about basketball technically, but I just want to say I appreciate you for your continued support every single season, whether it be on this channel, any of my other ones. Seriously, love all of y'all, but okay, let's get into this stuff. After I promote the newsletter, we got the Enjoy Basketball newsletter. We drop Monday, Wednesday, Friday, all things hoop. If you want to keep up with hoops, this is the way to do it. I know you all see these videos to hear my takes, but I really recommend the newsletter because today we had a crazy slate, and I won't be able to talk about every single game, but the newsletter fills in those gaps, and we got some amazing writers and content creators, so we're trying to get to 40,000. We're extremely close, so if you're not subscribed to the newsletter, hit the link in the description. It'll mean a ton to me. All right, we're gonna start off this one, talking about the Brooklyn Nets because boy, yo, boy, our things, they've been embarrassing, but it's getting even worse. Today they lost to the Indiana Pace, a young, talented team. Shout out to the Pacers.  Enjoy basketball. Let's give them their flowers because the young court that they are building right now is so good. So yesterday they played a game on national TV against the Washington, which they pulled out, and then they got that win, and they flew to Brooklyn, and you wouldn't have known that they were on the second end of a back-to-back, but they took out the Brooklyn Nets. Benedict Mathering is a stud and fearless. Tyrese Halliburton is one of the most fun players to watch as well because you cannot speed him up.  They both went to Iowa State, so I'm assuming they have some type of connection, but I don't know for sure. He gonna talk his trash, and they got some dogs over there in India, and this is a team that I thought, and this might still be true because we're only two weeks to the season, a team that I thought was gonna bottom out because they want to continue to build that court, but through the first two weeks, they have been competitive in a lot of their games.  I think they set records for the most amount of threes they've hit in a long time, so shout out to them. Let's talk Brooklyn Nets though because it is getting really, really bad. So there are a couple of different pillars. I want to start off by saying I am not talking about any of the off-court stuff because the Brooklyn Nets, it's always something, bro. It is always something off the court, and I'm extremely disappointed in the situation, but that's not what this channel is about. We're gonna strictly talk about the hoops because that's what this is, this is what we do. When I was in New York, I went to Brooklyn versus Dallas, and it was the best experience I've ever had as far as an NBA fan being in the arena. Went to overtime, and then Luca had a 40 point triple double. If you have the opportunity to see Luca play live, please do it. Go out there, go watch Luca because you're already amazed when you're watching him on TV, but to actually see it and get in the atmosphere of the arena, it's nothing like it. Luca is just an absolute dog. And you know what? The Brooklyn Nets don't have dogs. They just don't. And man, that feels like, I don't know, there's like this sub-genre of NBA fans that have that, oh man, if he ain't got the dog, and I'm on his bag, it's deep. That's not even who I am, but I look at that Brooklyn Nets lineup, and I'm watching him, and they know how to do his, that's super fiery. You know what I'm saying? And I think that plays a part. I think the number one thing that's wrong with the Brooklyn Nets as of right now is Steve Nash. Listen, KD wanted him fired like three weeks ago, and they washed over it. We go, Josiah said, we stick with our dudes, which is cool. I committed him for that because if he believed that Steve Nash shot marks for the two guys for his organization, I'm happy he didn't fold into KD. But now we six games to the season and the team looks like it has been one of the worst teams on court, offensively and defensively.  And they also one of the worst defensive teams in basketball. They don't guard the three and they don't guard the paint. That, those are the two most important things, the defensive basketball, and they don't do either of the two. They don't shoot the three ball well. And I'm assuming that's gonna come back up because Joe Harris has missed a bunch of time. He's just coming back. Seth Curry literally had his first game. So these are some of the best shooters in all of basketball that are on their roster and I'm sure they're gonna get the numbers up. Even Kyrie Irvin, known as a great three point shooter, he hasn't been able to put it together. I'm sure those three point numbers will come up, but they can't hit threes. They can't guard threes. And they're about as paper thin down low. One thing I do want to give Steve Nass a little bit of credit for. In the last two games, he basically told Daeron Sharp, you're reserved right now because Daeron Sharp minutes throughout the first three games or so was dreadful especially when they were pairing him. With Ben Simmons, are you kidding me? And then in the games that I went to, they kind of neutralized the Nick Claxton and Ben Simmons minutes. And I was like, okay, Steve Nass trying to figure it out. And then we get back here and they can't put together four competent quarters of basketball. Every single one of these games, they're right there. And you think, hey, I got Katie and Kyrie. Once we're right there, once we get to the last three minutes, we're gonna be fine. No, no, Steve Nass has done a terrible job. We see these, these former players get coaching opportunities and in a lot of cases is really good. Some of the best coaches in basketball right now are former NBA players. But one thing that a lot of those people have is experience on the bench before they got the head coaching job, right?  Steve Nass is one of the guys they threw into the fire and he has not been good, bro. This man, I got some notes.  Steve, do you understand?  You can sit Katie down a couple extra minutes. So Steve Nass has done a terrible job of like getting his players to rally behind him. They did a players only meeting today after the game. So maybe that helps something. But I mean, we can't look past the fact that your star player wanted you gone and now we faggaged to the sixth games of the season and y'all are completely underperforming. Like I would not be surprised if Steve Nass is getting, is getting fire. But I can also see a world where Josiah gets kind of stubborn because he made the decisions off season to keep Steve Nass around. Pillar number two has been Simmons. Now, hey, be honest with you, this has been Simmons's best game as a bricklay net. He scored nine points. Next game he might hit double digits. This was his best game of the season. And I am, I'm not here to bash been Simmons because I do believe in time you would consistently get better. I don't know if we'll ever get back to the 16 point per game been Simmons. I don't know if we'll ever get back to the guy that was all NBA 13 early in his career. But the version we're getting right now is a third is a fourth of even that version of been and that version of him been had his deficiencies. When I was at this game, Luca Doncic was hunting been Simmons defensively. Been Simmons is usually a guy, you don't want guarding your best player. Nah, Luca's a different breed, but like they were going at been Simmons. And every single game they have this idea that we gonna run through Ben for the first couple of possessions and get his confidence up. And he'll score the first bats, the crowd erupts and then he might score another basket in the first quarter and then he never looks at the rim again. I've been seeing people say like, okay, Kenny, his defense missile, I'll give him that. He's still been Simmons. Even though Luca was roasting his ass, he got a big steal at the end of that game that led to overtime freestyle to him. Defense has been okay. People like Kenny, his playmaking looks really good. It looks all right. You know, he had nine points, nine assists, eight rebounds. They near triple double, sounds a bit, but like his assist numbers are definitely inflated. Let me show you what I mean. I'll show you one example, but this set I'm not an X's and no's guy. It's something Steve Nash and his team runs a ton. They ran into a ton this game. And out of been Simmons' nine assists, five of them were through this. And I can see you making an argument, Kenny, this is real life playmaking, but you tell me what you think. So they run this and this time been Simmons is sitting in that corner, give it up to Kyrie, who gives it back up to Ben and it's basically a dribble handoff screen that leads to an assist. And a couple of these times it was like this, same pretty much action, just a different spot. Hand it off to KD. And KD's good enough to hit a heavily contested double team, three pointer. And been Simmons gets an assist. Now he did get a couple really good backdoor cuts that he hit KD for and things like that. But like I'm saying, the numbers are slightly inflated. Either way, they're paper thin down low. And they need a new coach or something. I wouldn't be surprised if we get a month into the season and the team still ain't hitting their expectations and Josai slash Sean Marks decides to blow it up because they probably should have done it this off season considering all the things that happened. So that's enough Brooklyn, let's talk, let's talk about some of the other games of the day. The Sacramento Kings finally got their first win and it happened to be against the Miami Heat two R2 and five on the year. I'm gonna give a lot of love to the Kings because it finally happened. They are no longer one of the winless teams of basketball, even though they did everything in their power to get this game away. We got to the third quarter. They had to have 10 turnovers in that quarter alone and the Brooklyn Nets, oh, not the Brooklyn Nets. The Miami Heat were doing a good job of turning the ball over or getting the turnovers and turning that into buckets for them. But at the end of the day, that man, Red Velvet came to play, man. And the rookie, Keegan Murray, being in that lineup for the last couple of games, he had another 22-piece game and Deere Fox continues to look pretty solid. Not his best efficiency night, but he had a couple buckets down the stretch that are really important and they finally get on the board. I was saying they were the best-looking winless team left in basketball and now they're no longer winless. Shout out to them. Are they heat-cooked? Oh man, it's hard to even say. I've been getting that a lot. They don't look very good.  But yeah, they've lost against some really good teams so far, so it's still too early for me to tell. I just know once the half-quarter offense comes around, it's a bit rough on the edges. You know what I'm saying? So give me a couple more games to watch the Miami Heat before I have a full opinion on whether or not it's wraps. I said before this season that I didn't see them as a contender though, but right now they're not even in the playoffs. You know what I'm saying? So I don't think it's gonna go that far, but man. The Charlotte Hornets beat the Golden State Warriors. Whoa! Another team that I was super low on going into the season, the Charlotte Hornets, and they continued to impress. Dennis McJr is one of the best stories in basketball. He said that he was basically out of the league and he didn't wanna go play overseas no matter what. He was training to join the NFL. He was putting on muscle and right now they're a 500 team, which is Charlotte Hornets to a T, a 500 team. That's what they usually are, which is, again, I don't really love it, but so far I thought the season. Gordon Hayward has looked really good. He's been an all-star caliber player throughout the course of this. Like if the all-star game was today, he'd probably make the Eastern Conference team, but the real MVP of all lists was PJ Ross.  Three of them that led to possesses that led to points to close out this game. So he beat Wiggins. I think he beat Dremono one and I forget what the last one was. He won all of his jump balls. I'm still a huge fan. Didn't know I was gonna become a Nick Richards guy. He has really played himself into the rotation after two years of not really being in that and like getting quality, quality minutes. Now they start, they close the game out being small because they're going to get to go to stay Warriors, but the Warriors defense so far this season has been really weird, man. Both of the top two teams defensively last year with the Brooklyn net, nope. I keep doing that. Bosses Celtics and the Golden State Warriors are struggling out the gate defensively. I kind of see the Bosses Celtics one because you're missing Robert Williams, who was such a critical, critical part of your defense, but the Warriors aren't missing one of their pillar defensive guys. Now they are running more people than they probably want to with like Ty Jerome getting minutes, or to Michael Green getting 15, 16 minutes per game, but the defense hasn't been good. And I don't, I'm not hitting the panic button because they're the Warriors and I feel like they can snap it all like that. But we have to remember that in the second half for the regular season last year this is basically what they were looking like. We got to the playoffs and everything was different, but this is the version that we got like the last couple of months of the season. We need them to hit that switch. I will say once we got to overtime, Draymond Green was everywhere, which is a good sign. But we made a tick talk about this on our podcast platform, Stoodlewire podcast. And I got a lot of flak for it, but they asked me what NBA player do I think will disappoint this season? And my answer was Clay Thompson. And it wasn't like, aw, Kenny H. Clay. I've been a fan of Clay since he been in the league where I'm a big fan of Clay. But I do believe that people saw them win a championship, which was dope. He had a couple of really big moments in that. And then gave him one off season. It was like, okay, now Clay should be back to Clay. And I think it's going to take way more time than that. And he might not ever get back to the Clay Thompson that was making all star teams and things like that. But I didn't expect Clay to come into the season and look like the old version of him. And so far I've been kind of right on that. But luckily Jordan Poole has looked really good. Wiggins has been really good this season. But man, you know, I just want to give Clay Thompson more time. That's all. The Bulls nearly beat the 76ers, man. This man, Joe Alamide, absolutely hates the city of Chicago or he loves it. It's one of the other. We have not beat this man in his entire NBA career. I think it's nine and no now might be the record. If he is soon enough for the 76ers going to get Chicago Bulls, we basically stand no chance. And he hit the biggest shot of the game. But we were so in this one. We were missing Lonzo, we were missing Aiya D'Souma, we were missing Drummond. Maybe it's better that we were missing Drummond because Jordan Beden Drummond, I mean, Drummond loses that match up 100% of the time. Boy, I really wanted this win. Both teams are coming off the back to back. You can really feel that energy, bro. It was not a pretty, pretty game. But I love the games that we're getting from Nicola Vucovic. She hit five threes. He had 19 rebounds. And I would argue his defense was really solid tonight. I think they had a good defensive plan to go against Jordan B, but Jordan B is still decent. You know, no, wait, that's disrespectful. He's still elite. And at all the people that played tonight, he was the only one with fresh legs because he didn't play last night. You saw that and they got a much needed win, in my opinion, and the Bulls didn't. But I'm starting to think that the Bulls are going to be pretty solid once we finally get healthy. It's just a matter of when that's going to happen. I think Yanis is on the road to winning his third MVP. Tonight he had 34, 17 and four assists. Now, I tweeted that. I tweeted that Yanis is going on to his third MVP, you know, based on the first two weeks of the season. And I got a ton of Atlanta Hawks fans like, it's Kenny, he gets all the crazy whispers. Now, he did attempt 19 free throws in this game. And I went back. I went back because I was like, okay, let me see what that referee whisper was really looking like. And I watched all of the fouls in the second half because first half, I don't care. I think he had four points in the second half for something like that. It was the second half, oh, in the first half, in the second half he really came out to play. There's always, when you have a guy as physically dominating as Yanis, he is going to be extremely hard to officiate for. We saw the same thing with LeBron. We saw the same thing with Shaquille O'Neal. When we have these bulldozer freight train level players, there's gonna be times where he's bulldozed into the paint and the referees have to figure out on the fly if the contact was enough to warn a foul. When in reality, every single time Yanis goes to the basket, he's getting fouled. It's just a nature. It's just the nature of the way he plays the game. But it's a matter of, do we call it now? Do we not? And sometimes, sometimes he's not getting fouled, but they're anticipating the foul and they blow the whistle. You know what I'm saying? In this game, like I said, we watched all these fouls. There were a couple that were maybe a little bit iffy, but I don't think that's the reason y'all lost this game. This is a really good game for the Atlanta Hawks, man. For the first X amount of games of the season, the Atlanta Hawks look really good, but they've also played against really okay talent and not one of the elite teams. They held their own against a very, very elite, one of the last, I don't know, the last undefeated team in basketball. They should be proud of that. Obviously, you can't say we happy that we lost, but like for a team that made a big time move this offseason to go against the team that a lot of people picked to win the championship, including me and hold your own as a good sign. And I wouldn't be mad if there's a seven game series. Joe Holiday was amazing. Yanis was amazing. Trey Young was elite. And one of my favorite things that I saw that makes me feel really good about this Atlanta Hawks team is Trey Young was taking over. Did I think he missed two shots in the fourth? And then Dejante hit one. I'm like, man, Trey Young didn't have that. Trey Young didn't have that extra guy to take off a little bit of pressure once he was a little bit gassed and you got that today. So I feel good about the Atlanta Hawks even though they didn't win this one. The Milwaukee Bucks are undefeated. Their offense still ain't completely put together yet. The defense is elite. Brooke Lopez. I haven't mentioned Brooke Lopez's name on any of the videos so far in this series, but his defense has been really good. I always give a lot of love to Drew as a one-on-one defender and a lot of love to Yanis as the best help defender in basketball. But I do need to give love to just a straight up paint protecting big in Brooke Lopez. The defense has been really good. The offense ain't even been put together and eventually Chris Middleton's gonna be back. I mean, come on, man. Like the team is ridiculous. Now these last two games of the night, I wasn't able to watch. Unfortunately, me as one of the captains of the non-thunder fan, OKC fan club, I feel like I haven't done my due diligence in watching Shea this season. I'm tuning in because with five minutes left in this game, they were down by 15 and they came back to win this game somehow. And I see Shea jump shot. Isaiah Joe, I see a lot of Isaiah Joe in this box. I got to go back and watch at least a five minutes plus over time because it looked like they did their thing. And I think was Luca in the dorsal chamber? 35% from the field? Might have been in the dorsal chamber. I'm gonna watch them with Thunderfans, I promise. And then lastly, the Utah Jazz won a game. And I was excited about this one and I found out Ja was in playing. And now I feel bad because it might have been the best game of the night according to the stats. I got to rewatch that one too. All right, man, that's all we got for today, man. I got to figure out how not to have these videos be a thousand minutes long. But I just have a lot to say. When I spent a full day watching Hoops, there's a lot to be said. And my notes, yeah, I didn't even hit everything. But at this point, it is what it is. Leave a like, subscribe, and I appreciate you.


Good morning, John. Thank you for your lovely yesterday video. Today I want to talk to you about a really weird reason why it is worse for conservation to have a Republican in the White House than to have somebody from the Democratic Party.  Uh, not really. Uh, it's more complicated than that, it turns out. Let's be honest, both parties like resource extraction, it keeps energy prices low, and it makes us less dependent on other countries. President Obama did a great job of keeping gas and energy prices low by having a whole lot of fracking happen in America. There are a lot of reasons why conservative people in the U.S. are totally into land conservation. Specifically, they like to use that for hunting and fishing and recreation of various kinds. But unless your dad was the Florida State Director of the Nature Conservancy, which our dad was, you probably don't know about this law that's very obscure and really amazing and popular, it's called the Pittman-Robertson Act. Named after the two senators who thought it up, it was signed into law in 1937 by FDR. And the idea was one of the things that makes America really interesting is that we have a lot of open space. In a way that the places where a lot of Americans came from, Europe did not. But America is growing fast, land values are going up, wildlife management is all over the place. So the idea is we're going to take existing revenue from attacks on guns and bullets and put that toward managing wildlife and conserving land. And in 1937, the main reason people bought guns and ammo was to hunt. So basically you're just taxing hunters specifically by taxing guns and saying we're going to use this to do stuff that you want us to do, to protect the land so that there's still places for people to recreate and shoot stuff. And also so that hunting won't become what it mostly was in England, which was a rich person sport, to keep it accessible to more people. Nowadays guns and ammo are bought for a wider variety of reasons, hunting still for sure. But interestingly, one of the biggest reasons people buy guns and ammo is out of fear that they will soon not be able to buy certain types of guns or guns and ammunition at all. And as any good marketing person will tell you, the idea that something is available for a limited time only is really great at motivating people to buy stuff now. Which is why, during Obama's eight years in office, Pittman Robertson revenue went from $310 million to a peak of over $800 million. And suddenly, the states had three times more money for their conservation and wildlife biology programs than they used to have. And they even had a hard time spending all of it. A lot of it went to local and national land trusts to acquire new lands and of course that land has to be like open to hunters, but it's also not open to development. And interestingly, as the Pittman Robertson revenue has increased, the number of licensed hunters is going down. It's just not as popular a hobby as it once was. So Pittman Robertson is protecting wildlife that's getting hunted less and less. And nobody doesn't like that, though. People who buy guns, even if they don't hunt, are proud and happy to support hunters. And people who might be in favor of more gun regulations in America, like me, also are probably more or less happy that more land is getting conserved. To be clear, if you want to support conservation, the best thing to do is to donate to a local land trust rather than buy a bunch of bullets. But I find it fascinating that a surge in the purchase of firearms and ammunition inspired by a fear that those things are going to get taken away from you by the person who was in the White House at that moment actually did amazing things for wildlife conservation over the last eight years. It's just weird. Johnny recently sent me a text that said, I forgot until just now that you are the CEO of a board game company. You are hilarious and amazing. I mean, I don't know that I'm the CEO. I'm just helping make it work. But DFTBA Games has a new fun, weird, silly party game. It's called Rolf. You can watch a video of me playing it or check it out on Kickstarter. We'll be kickstarting for the next 24 days or so. We've already reached our goal, so we are making the game. And John, I know that you can't come to VidCon Australia, but I will be there. If you're near enough to Melbourne or in Melbourne, I have a coupon code for you. Just use the coupon code HANK. Looking forward to seeing all the people who can come to VidCon Australia. John, I will see you on Tuesday. Blood, sweat, and tacos. It's a rannosaurus rex. I'll play tacos. Blood, sweat, and tacos is good. The Backstreet. Banshee. Banjo. What?