times I have to go out by myself and be alone and I find myself in the woods a lot and I get that good feeling and when I'm in in the woods It's like I know everything and I can feel the ground I feel Feel the bush And it's it's great. I Think that's one reason why I survived in Nam is that being An American Indian being close to nature It's like I could ask the ground when I was on patrols or something Take care of me. I asked the tree show me where's my enemy. I asked the animals watch over me be my guide And a lot of times it worked They warned me why the enemy was around And at night I'd asked the crickets and a little little four-legged creatures and a winged creature insects brothers Be my eyes for me tonight And it worked so a lot of my Indian is period when I was in And most of my relatives have fought in wars most of my uncles have fought in them From the Civil War to the Cherokee Wars There always been warriors in my family. I have a He's the second cousin to my mother's or it makes me a third cousin in World War two His name is Jack Montgomery. He won the Medal of Honor in Italy. I believe that's what was either Italy or Germany He is awarded the Medal of Honor and I always looked at that picture of him in Roosevelt Now that's a pretty you know, that's a really great honor the Medal of Honor I thought that was really something the strong sense of duty and honor of the American Indian soldier is Dramatically demonstrated by the high proportion of service by volunteers Nearly 20% of the Indian population are veterans of the 81,000 Vietnam era Indian veterans 42,000 served in Vietnam The motivation to serve has its roots in generations of family and tribal traditions What motivates them what special experience from their heritage go with them into battle is there a magic that protects them? This program will look at the American Indian veteran what he is and isn't It will also explore resources available to all VA clinicians and counselors who were involved in treatment programs with American Indian veterans As combat veterans they suffer many of the same problems as their non Indian counterparts The difference is in the avenues of support available to the Indian veterans Support that rises out of a culture and a heritage as a warrior members of my family on the Taylor side on my dad's side were a warrior a warrior farmer group the the T was renowned for their fighting ability in the southwest of the Pueblo groups and we were historically some of the first groups to lead the Pueblo rebellion along with the the man who was whip Ope So it's kind of a family type of thing and as a as a baby My grandfather my great-grandfather Had blessed me as one of during the second war when I was born that He came up and I was just a baby yet and he picked me up and Bless me as the old men would do That my life was to be a warrior and he did this by saying prayers and then putting a feather and then Taking what they call his spit and rubbing it on the same this man Is going to be when he grows up will be the warrior in our family So my mom was very upset with that that I was chosen out of my brothers and sisters to become aware I'm a street street Indian and I grew up in An atmosphere where there were gangs when I was younger. I was in gangs and I had encountered death I was a survivor. That's where I grew up. I grew up among many cultures the black culture the Spanish culture Mexican culture Anglo culture and the urban Indian culture street Indian culture. I'm mixed with the traditional India. So I was a Gifted in a number of ways as far as survival in back back in my time when I was a young boy When I went into the service in World War two my grandpa Put a big celebration on for me and he had a big giveaway He told the people that I was going off to war and at that time. He also gave me an Indian name He gave me the name of standing bear Then he also made a song for me That they sang at that celebration and when I come back Well, they had another celebration for me in a big feast and that the people were happy That I came back in one one piece It's automatically assumed. I think in many cases that that Indian people, you know, if they enter the military service and they have throughout the years in great numbers that this implies a loyalty or a meaning or a loyalty to the United States government and Into the United States. I think that in many cases what Indians go into the military service for That well they give military service a different kind of meaning You'll see older Older Indian people say standing in front of the flag what they're not they're not necessarily going into a Kind of allegiance to the United States flag or something, but they're drawing power from it I think that over the years what what has happened is that is that Indian people have Through various tribes have built up a sort of tradition of going into the military service In World War one I've talked to World War one Indian veterans And they saw going into the military as as a kind of a fulfillment of treaty obligations Where you were allied with the United States?  You might as well do it now Why wait till later? Because I hate to be you don't want to be drafted There's never been a draftee in my family And I think it's had to be a slur to the family if it was a draftee. No, there are no draftees in my family members of my family had served in some capacity or another during either the Second World War the First World War second and the Korean conflict Korean war rather not so much a conflict but a war and my brother-in-law who was a paratrooper with the 187th Regimental Combat Team used to talk about different things and a lot of the people on the reservation were veterans and Also, you know talking about different things were happening particularly militarily that that I would sooner as I got older That was part of my obligation to to enter the service Sometimes there's a stereotypic view of how Indians view war I think it's important to realize we're talking about three to four hundred different tribes and cultures But if you had to get into some kind of shorthand you'd say there's two main ways of looking at it one as war as a Way of demonstrating one's courage one's manhood one's attainment of a position of honor another way looks upon war as a total aberration In the law of the universe a complete breakdown of order and as such a thing to be avoided at all costs It's interesting that even with those two Totally divergent views there couldn't be two views that are more different about war Both of the cultures that Subscribe to those views still come to the same conclusion and that is You have to prepare the individual to go out into it And then you have to bring them back in a very special sort of way You don't ask in either of those cultures that the war you forget what they have been through Nobody does that nobody tries to do that You acknowledge what they have been through And you recognize what they've been through and you recognize the individual the warrior has to begin today As he comes home is to begin to purify himself and that's going to take maybe A year or two years three years maybe some will take longer because War is ugly and it leaves a lot of scars And I think some of the boys it's going to take a lot longer and that's what lodge and pray So these things will Will leave them and eventually they'll become They'll become a true warrior to their people to be a good example to the young people Which is something we don't have today is we don't have very many good examples for our young people to look at and say I'd like to be like him We don't have that and that's Where the warrior is going to play a big part The importance of the family the community or the extended family is a key element in tribal culture It provides stability and the full support of the society The warrior's role is an important one and related to the whole community Tribal customs and medicine help prepare the warrior for battle and bring him back into the community after service Later he is called upon for his wisdom as an advisor and teacher Based on his experience as a warrior Well, the definition of tribe is one of kinship based on kinship lines And that may or may not necessarily be blood ties for example How people relate to each other The roles that people have a good example would be a child growing up Being raised not only by the mother and the father but by aunts and uncles and grandparents An example child may have many grandparents may have many aunts and many uncles And they may not necessarily be blood. They may be friends They may be other people in the community But because the child relates to them the way they would to an aunt an uncle a grandmother A mother a father or a cousin they are considered part of the kinship group. So it's Like an extended family only it extends way out beyond blood ties. It's much more A community type feeling than what we think of when we talk about the extended family and contemporary american culture Which usually includes the grandparents maybe aunts and uncles. This goes way beyond that The family occupies a very important position in this whole thing Rather than treat the warrior as an isolated individual He's being supported From both the people who are older than him and the people who are younger than him in both directions if you will And being acknowledged by everybody that he has contributed something of value something of substance something that was necessary and this Is more than just simply acknowledging that this isn't just a pat on the head And saying well you went off and you did a nice job and let's now go on to business The family itself is taking on the burden and the experience that the warrior had. Well, there's a continuity of From one generation to another there's there's not the So-called generation gap But a passing of knowledge from one generation to the next and an understanding of where people come from way back In the tribal history way way back in the kinship history And extending forward to future generations to come that people will pass on their knowledge And pass on the value Of that kinship group there's a teaching forward and an understanding from past generations of the values and the practices What we're trying to do is through the tribal school is try to try to pass some of these things on But in the past Everything was done within the tioshpa. That's where all the the children the grandchildren The adopted children everybody was educated within that tioshpa but now we're in we're in different times and You don't You don't have these tioshpas anymore. So we're going to have to go to a different system to do it probably like films The tribal school will be able to Teach him many things there, but we won't be able to teach him everything But we'll be able to teach him enough so That they'll have a have a good identity of themselves. At least they're going to know where their roots are, you know, they're not going to have the Emotional problems that they have today not knowing, you know, where they where they came from who they are, you know That's very important to any child is to know who he is and where he's from He's got to have a past that he can relate to The warrior returns Whether the indian combat veteran saw the war as honorable or as a great aberration in the law The effect of combat was the same War was for all of them a shock that reached to the roots of who and what they were I uh, I still have a hard time kind of kind of trying to just let things ride, but I think the hardest time I had over there is Not being able to come home to one time particular My grandfather died My grandfather blessed me before I went over And I found out that he died and I was honoring him by being in a war too, but I couldn't come home then I had a man who Like very much. He was a good friend named Emmanuel Barreras He was married to an Indian woman His wife and he had children He got killed The sad thing about it was that he had a baby.  He's Real real life Never made it And I had to pick him up Was at that time he walked point for me And we got ambushed I'd rather not November the 20th of 1968 We went out on an ambush We killed that we had to kill The only mistake we made was in his battalion area We were 50 feet from his bunker We killed all the executive all the all this higher echelon soldiers We took all this information I lost I said my best friend Terry Clifton And I lost 11 other men And I was left for 12 hours By the government and they're trying to make up their mind whether to come get me or not For 12 hours. I didn't think I could kill anymore And I kill I was so tired of killing I was sick of it I was sick because they would come they kept coming Well, I think there's A myth that floats around that number one all Indians Have warrior societies and their tribes and they're all the Indian warrior on his painted pony with his Eagle feather warp on it rotting off to war and the stoic Indian And there's an idea that people from Tribal cultures are immune to post traumatic stress disorder But the very definition of post traumatic stress disorder is going through a psychic trauma that will cause That type of response and symptoms in almost anyone and Indians are human and when they go through a psychic trauma such as combat It's going to affect them just the way it would any other person And one of my nephews came up from behind me one day and Stuck this toy m14 at me And All I all I remember seeing you he was creeping up on me and I was sitting there and he came up And all I remember seeing was a shadow in that that barrel and I reached down and I grabbed him and I I almost killed my nephew. I was going to smash him. I missed him With the right with the rifle, but and it's just a natural reaction just like that And my sister if my sister hadn't come in and yelled at me, I think I might have heard him, you know And she told me she said Damn, you're crazy. She said you that war made you crazy And I thought I must be crazy So for a long time there I felt real bad It's very important to understand that the giving of the Medicine bag or the ceremony or whatever before the veteran leaves and the welcoming back ceremony May help facilitate readjustment They do not stop The person from getting post-traumatic stress disorder from getting PTSD the person goes through psychic trauma It doesn't really matter what culture they're from In fact, the whole reason for things like the enemy way is because it was understood That a person who goes through that kind of trauma will have these types of problems And this is how we can help this person readjust back from these types of problems If you if you could be sitting here talking and also on the tv like a tv comes on in your head And you can really envision it.   My family's calling me crazy Damn people don't respect me. I have nothing to come home to what the hell am I doing here?  I didn't throw it away, but I got rid of it I said if I'm gonna attack this problem, I'm gonna have to attack it right See what I can do as far as my relatives and my home communities are concerned They they accepted me I didn't volunteer to go over to v now I was drafted. I was forced to go I went in I served it came back and my relatives My immediate family they accepted me and They noticed that I started experiencing a lot of Social problem. I wasn't the same. I didn't really realize I have changed it that much That's when they started talking about the enemy way ceremony An enemy way ceremony is a seven-day ceremony. It's a ceremony Which allows you to readjust back into society I didn't believe completely believe in the ceremony But I went through it. It did purify me It's real. It's not something that That is just symbolic. I found that it's it's real The main thrust is to bring them back into the Into the tribe to let them know that it's over and to let them know too that everybody else shares that burden So for example, if we were watching Hopi who have a general view of the universe that would require viewing War as a major disruption of the law capital letters We would see them bringing their warriors back in with an idea towards cleansing them of the Taint of the contamination that they picked up just in the same way that we might have people Do an unwelcome job like cleaning out a broken nuclear reactor They come out We'll give them a monetary bonus and praise and all that and then we're going to decontaminate them before they can come back in They're not lesser people. They've done a necessary job But a job that might have hurt them if we don't go about the business of cleansing For an enemy way ceremony to happen, it takes the whole community The immediate family there's a lot of money involved gift-given It's a seven-day ceremony. There's a lot of preparation. The last three days of the ceremony is When it's most busy, there's Several medicine men involved It takes a lot of work. There's a lot of fasting Uh Certain type of food that you have to eat. There's a lot of earth gathering It's a a TD ceremony. It's very tiresome. Uh, there's a lot of songs involved prayers Uh, I personally feel it's it's a really good outlet It's something that the Navajo people still Have they have retained it Many of their uh culture their religion, you know through that ceremony I felt that you know that It's a good thing that we still have it Every summer we still have it There's a number of veterans still going through it. There's a number of veterans that has gone through that ceremony twice There's a number of uh veterans that has really gained it from that ceremony it's Recognized by many of the doctors and in our home communities White Indian doctors and I just hope we Perpetrate the ceremony in some way The ceremonies are kept alive at powwows held around the country The dances the songs the drums all to honor the returning warrior I I came to this year's powwows mainly because I felt A personal interest I felt that I was honoring honoring myself The Indian tribes around the country My tribe the Navajo nation And those that have gave their lives I lost two cousins in Vietnam I lost a brother while he was on active duty I lost some real close relatives. I thought about them when I was out there I was very serious. I didn't joke around I Just felt that I should honor them and those songs You know really that had some special meaning for me I felt tears in my eyes several times thinking of my cousin And I just wish you know, they were here to participate So these powwows really do mean a lot to me. I I feel that I'm here representing my tribe The Indian around the country and also veterans in general the blacks the whites Mexican-Americans all those veterans that has served. I think that we're also honoring them So it gives me special pride, you know to go step out there hold it further It really does give me pride, you know, I show that honor to myself and also to the veterans and in our country in general I had no idea what a powwow was before I went As much as I had read about Indians and spoken in my family and this sort of thing and I went down to this conference and it was a three-day conference and a powwow I believe was the night of the second day and the first day there were a series of lectures and we talked about post-traumatic stress and all these different things and There was not a lot of patience among the participants for that sort of of dialogue. It was it wasn't that it was Irrelevant it was just that that that wasn't the way that that they were going to relate emotionally to this gathering And they kept telling me wait till the dancing starts and It really was one of the most profound things I've ever experienced the first one that they had when 48 tribes were represented from around the country to come in and for the first time in the intertribal association context honor Those who had served in vietnam When they went out For the special dance for the veterans and the first powwow it really was one of the most powerful experiences I've ever seen They started one at a time they came in with the The fancy dancers the people who were dressed up and they had in 16s and then the people who were vietnam veterans were Allowed to to fall behind them and then others fell behind The vietnam veterans I was allowed to to go out and dance because I was a vietnam veteran Sort of snaked until they ran a circle then they turned to the drum And they started screaming And there were guys were crying. There was one guy who was standing next to me who'd been with the first air cavalry Imagine the paradox Someone from a white culture Looking at an individual who's got a blanket on Half of it honors The mexicans that they fought who they fear very strongly about half of it honors the cavalry that they fought in history With the first air cab custer zone patch on it in the back The the combination of that is is is paradoxical and yet this guy was a big man was was standing there and The room was so filled with emotion and his wife Walked up behind him and put her hands on his back and as soon as she touched him like that He cried What we're seeing Is the integration of people back into their culture We're also seeing if you've been watching the pow wow and seeing the children We're seeing the beginning of a contract if you will between some people And each other that says from a very early age If you go if you have to go off and do things like become a warrior, we'll be here to support you The young children that we saw dancing We're being in effect taught That look around you you see these warriors You have to be one. We will be here to not only support you but bring you back in That's an important message for people to get at the very beginning I think we I Decided to go back to my roots The powwows they give me peace of mind They make me feel not as Is it white people look at me? I said, I'm a killer.  I get tranquility I'm within peace within myself notice that that The more dancers that you get more it comes into a circle What what The circle has always kind of symbolic meaning there's power in the circle. It shows continuity It's A And you'll also notice in the gore dance that that all the warriors face the drum And technically no one's supposed to get in between other than warriors you in in the drum Because what you're doing out there is actually drawing power from that from that From the drum and also from the songs those those songs or warrior songs they're They have been preserved and through time and And even in the words to those songs there there is power. There's medicine there Medicine in the words and in the song An avenue perhaps to begin the treatment of indian vietnam veterans But not the only one and certainly not some sort of magic As with any victim of massive traumatic shock There is a lot of hard work to be done There are many resources available to assist in treatment of the indian veterans because the sweat lodge Takes care of Three things that man is born with that's the mental part of him the physical part of him and the spiritual part of him And the biggest part of man is the spiritual part of him So if you don't continue to fill that big void there, uh, you're going to be off balance You have to get yourself back in balance these three things back in balance And that's what the sweat lodge does A lot of these indian veterans go to a VA hospital. So they need a doctor. They need a psychologist They need a doctor a medical doctor for his body And they need a a minister or a priest for his spiritual part But if you come in a sweat lodge, uh, that's all taken care of at once All those three things that we're born with and I think that's why a person Comes in feeling bad and when he comes out, he's in balance there for a while And what he needs to do is keep that balance. Don't let it get on balance again Keep keep that in balance and you're going to be all right. There are a lot of guys a lot of street indians and other Indians alike that are walking around Confused and unable to define or or explain that problem or explain what's wrong with them And it's insight and They're they're really crying and they and the only way they express this Is probably, you know, through alcoholism and anger physical abuse and so forth upon themselves or the others and It's uh It's trying to reach these guys who come in, you know into the vet center and trying to To let these guys know that they're not the lone ranger and they're not alone out there and these guys It's a system that they're so scared of and being Not oriented to their needs and coming back and people not understanding what has happened and What they have been through is very hard on them very hard In some ways if if clinicians will outreach to Indian health agencies It's a way of bringing Indians into say the vet centers are more into the VA system The walls need to be broken down the the clinician needs to understand That An Indian is not an Indian is not an Indian and so you have to have a whole myriad of of resources to plug that person into and to be aware of On reservations BIA social services BIA mental health things Indian health service or maybe the tribal health facilities They've been too isolated and we haven't done the training in the area post-traumatic stress with those mental health people That we really need to be doing those are other resources that the clinician can use Medicine people both in urban settings and in On reservations, um, they have an immense store of knowledge that the clinician can draw on But it's again, it's a seeking out and and needing to know What the resources are and when they're appropriate And the best thing to do is to ask the veteran you How do you feel about your culture? Are you involved in these kinds of things? Would this be useful to you? Are you aware that this is available? I consider myself as a warrior. Yes, that's It's something that gives me pride honor not that because I want to Vietnam and kill other people I felt that you know, this is something that I didn't want to do in the first place I felt that I have served my country because my country has called upon me to serve in in in Vietnam I Felt that I have done my my part And I felt that I You know, I have gained it some honor out of that I would say that from my experience With Vietnam I would say that If there was ever another I wouldn't want him to go through what I what I went through But it would be his choice the experience in in Vietnam was Probably one of the first times that I can say that I was scared I know what fear is I know what death is one of the one of the As you grow older one of the things that You are better able to understand is the decision that you make in your everyday life And to and to broaden your thinking And to take into consideration that warrior status To think for your family your relatives and your people For the better of them if the if that sort of thinking Puts you into a leadership role That you can't deny it The people aren't going to allow you to deny it Because they'll put you there Depending on how strict how strict of a standard you set for yourself With those values that you've gained You know anytime you leave your area and you go to a foreign land You have You have you have where you've been exposed to dead bodies Or you have anything to do with death you step on blood You touch the enemies and all this and you must have a cleansing ceremony done And I haven't had this and In doing so hopefully I can Become whole a whole person again and Both being from the non-union world and the Indian world and making myself One with nature again. I believe I'm out of tune and I get myself back into tune. It's My beliefs are gradually changing towards anyways and hopefully in time I'll I'll learn more about it And one way would be to get this done for myself To go through the traditional healing ceremony, you know to Get all the bad spirits away from me When I stopped drinking and Found that I had to have a purpose in life and then along comes my two children That I had to put My feelings And a lot of Wants aside The old warrior instinct came back and I had to preserve the people had to preserve my family And as a warrior in our people Your family or your people come first You protect them you do all you can for them Your life is to be given for them you live for them And I've been taught that And that comes first in my life as my family my little ones And my immediate my immediate family and the rest of my my Indian people coming But I take care of those that are around me And I work for them and I try to do things. So if I attain this degree this master said I'm able to To go on to really provide for them and at the same time Build up enough that I I'll be able to help others In the meantime, I try to work this war out of my system


Hello and welcome to this podcast episode 33. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante Extracting the signal from the noise very busy interesting week. I'm on the road. I'm in North Carolina. I had some visits here For meeting sas Dave with the sas championship. I played in their program met some of the founders doing a big story on research trainable park Welcome to episode 33 great that great to be connected via zoom Hope the audio comes out. Okay for the folks listening. Apologize, but wanted to get the streak going 33 Podcasts numbers are up day people love the podcast love when we riff But this week is not a lot of riffing with really the top stories being the war in Israel is just Insane the whole thing that went down the terrorist attack the Hamas just basically just invaded Israel and You know besides The dramatic peace Rupture that happened because you know, Israel's trade land for peace basically years ago and It's just been Horrific, you know and not without its consequences to the tech industry as you know Silicon Valley is, you know heavy with Israeli startups Tell it be well known. It's like the Silicon Valley in the area I've talked to at least a few founders already on the phone multiple multiple founders in the middle of rounds of funding With their teams over there. I mean every company that's in tech has a tech team in Israel We know Infinity has teams so, you know, Eric Herzog and others talking about that as well just Dave I mean, this is just unacceptable. I mean just my I'm standing with Israel and this is just incredibly Difficult and just the invasion.  It's really it's crazy. I mean, it's just mind-boggling the whole consequences of what this means. So I think Also, I don't know if you know this John our lead security journalist David Strom His daughter lives in Israel and has for years a couple years anyway Maybe even more and her husband was called in to do service. I know that.   And so I'm really really concerned about escalation I'm concerned about The I mean if look at if you're Israel, we had the same feeling after in line 11.  There's no taxis. I got my family and I got to pick up everything and go and so that's a cluster And then they're gonna roll in and appears. They're just gonna You know really flatten Gaza And and so what is that? Gonna bring and will other nations, you know, get involved is Hezbollah gonna get involved You know, what's Iran gonna do and if that if ran gets involved What's the United States gonna do and then you've got the US and China the two superpowers, which are right now Not in a great place, but it could could go one of two ways John. It could get worse or We could start having some diplomatic discussions and make it get better and the the latter is the better outcome if the two world superpowers can get together and And and and calm things down in Ukraine, I don't know Middle East That's that they're they're different, but they are sort of related in terms of just the the the global and geopolitical Implications, but let me start with Ukraine if the United States and China the two world superpowers could somehow broker peace in Ukraine that would be a good outcome and a good start and again I don't know what the answer is in Israel. It's it's a decades-long Millennial the Hamas problem. I'm a snake. You just got to be eliminated. I mean the Palestinians The friend his friends on that side, too. It's just they get pigeonholed with the with the terrorists, right? So, you know Humanities at risk here. It's a huge issue pivotal moment in history But here's the problem John is you said Hamas has to be eliminated, but first of all, Israel has tried before to Wipe out Hamas not not to the scale that it's going to happen now. You know the concern there is You know people say Hamas it's not I Mean is it an organization? Obviously, but it's also an ideology It's that you know the concern is something else will rise up and it's it we've seen over history just more and more escalation So but I understand what you're saying and I think Netanyahu has basically said we're going to wipe them out This time so they're going to go house to house and then what happens to the hostages Can you imagine if you had, you know, one of your loved ones taking hostage? And you see the tanks rolling in and they're threatening to execute these people these barbaric executions and they put them out live on Social media and it's just heartbreaking Well, it's also going to be a lot of action on cyber security So there's also we know we wrote a story this week on silicon angle the Hamas Israeli war is going to be fought in cyberspace check that out So I'll say that's there. Just you know, a lot of you know tech news continues to go along We actually think featured in Israeli start-up Kubey up. They just launched the new suite of AI services So it was really cool to see them get some headlines Could be you know have a chat GPT for DevOps basically as platform engineering Another company tabby ML raised 3.2 million for open source coding assistant We'll be at Kubecon this year in a couple weeks next month. What's going to be there? So Linux foundation that cloud native World will have a lot to discuss. I'm guaranteeing it's going to be a lot of AI being discussed Elation a company we've been tracking since the Foundings debuting AI co-pilot analytics Adobe Adobe's really getting in there. So some great posts and they have the whole of the photo stuff and I Was even at an event last night here in North Carolina and it was a bourbon tasting contest Of course, I'd do a flyby Dave And of course the guy well, Jay Jay's the CIO for sass who's just a cool guy and and he's got their customers in there We were kind of late to this event, but We so we stopped him for the guy who runs the the the country club place where they had it He's just just a guy's facility's guy does like diverging you know stuff Overseas all that stuff.  We put the glass on he goes. I did this all with AI Okay, that It's awesome. That means, you know, here is a non-techie. This is the utility, right? I think Adobe's gonna crush this kind of kind of you knowledge worker You know, here's a beverage manager who's got a bourbon tasting Event which they created a placemat with mid-journey and eyeball the circle and put the glass on You put the glass on with the name. So when the glasses when you lift up the glass the name of the bourbons there My point is you start to see the real world application of Where AI is gonna just make things better kind of like, you know When we were riffing about the old days of the web, right or the PC revolution I mean when you use Lotus one two three and then ultimately Microsoft's office on a PC You're like, wow, this is awesome word processor Excel PowerPoint Wizzy wig what you see is what you get interface That made it real. So I think AI you're gonna see an adoption, right? We're gonna see the same progression like the PC revolution Worldwide web. You're gonna see Basically the online population grow. So PC is PC users the more users the more software gets sold with the web The more web users online the more browsers were installed right more websites or bills So I think this that stat is gonna be something we're gonna track with AI is how much AI usage Is there in an application and users? So, you know users using things like mid-journey for this this this beverage manager You know, I've been here since you're at sass. Let's talk about that a little bit I have three events in my life where sass I was, you know, was part of my life if you will I was in college and you know, one of our computer science classes. We had to use sass You remember we all sort of did use that it's sass stands for statistical analysis system And it was the way that sass and SPSS were kind of the two systems that we use so we sort of had to learn it It was like it was like, okay. Hey, that's cool R is you know now one of the emerging languages and it has been for a decade plus The second was years later When I had my CIO practice with it centrics, there was a scotch-tasting Event for CIOs in Boston. It was scotch not bourbon and it was awesome went in drag a lot of scotch And that was that was fun and then of course sass explore John Well, we had sort of got a good Kool-Aid injection Although I think they understated sort of the position that they have and the opportunity that they have and now you're down there You know meeting with the execs and the customers and at the at the sass open You know this company I would I hope they do an IPO. That'll be fun to watch this sort of American Legend of a company after, you know, five decades going public would be amazing Yeah, I mean he's the founder and he's he has answers to nobody. What's interesting about sass You know, I'm down here. They have an event.  And then before that was Patrick Harrington both amazing had Patrick Harrington was my favorite And you know all the legends and you know Justin Is only he's only 51 so He's young and Patrick Harrington is I think 52 So, you know, these are pros they get but they still they can still rip it Do you get any tips from these guys? Did they oh, yeah, Patrick Patrick Harrington was the was all chatty very cool gave us Tips we were here this would with the CEO singles to a Raj, you know Raj, right? So Raj Yeah, Raj, but yeah, he sponsors Patrick Harrington is you'll see him on TV if you watch on golf channel. He's got single store on his jersey So actually he's playing with sponsor CEO of the sponsor who's very cool You know Raj and Raj and his wingman Aaron. We were all playing together with the CTO of sass was fun and What I found interesting is that I had a conversation with with Patrick Harrington yesterday breakfast with him him and David Duvall another legend and You know, they just you know, it's all small talk. What do you do bubba blah? I really don't I'm not fit into the mold here I've done you know, I started silicon angle Dave Alante the Cube you got journalism digital TV software AI and And you know, we kind of kind of rub against the grain relative to the journalism They're like give me an old narrative on journalism because you know David Duvall is it was a golf channel Commentator and now with ESPN so These guys Duvall almost has no social media Patrick Harrington's got only got 115,000 followers So I kind of gave I planted the seed in their head.  And then you'll be bigger than the golf channel. So like, yeah, that's a great idea. Let's do it So we might do a podcast doesn't have fun. Great. I might I might show them how to do a podcast but um There's there's you know, these guys think they're they're getting the value of their brand So these the senior tour they call the champions tour is is very lucrative. I was very surprised at how big it is Um, and apparently the sash tournament here has a big purse So it attracted all the big names and so I had a chance to meet the founder and the team And their campus he owns everything. He actually owns the country club. It's gorgeous, isn't it? I mean, it's beautiful. I actually went there one time when I was at IDC I mean, it's just it's you know, the the iron man part of iron man two. I think was filmed there The iron man three they said not the two was a three. Sorry Yeah, but he owns all the land. They have daycare. It's very bus employee-centric Kind of mindset and he you know, he has no outside interest. It's private company days. It's not public So, you know, he can do it every once and he built a culture Around academia and the little fun fact is that the google culture the google plex was modeled after sass I didn't know that really. Yeah, that was a little trivia. They came down and said, how do you guys do it? It's like a huge campus very uh academic feel they got a hot they got a medical facility on sites and so no no one has to leave campus to go to doctor appointment Um, they got daycare health care All on campus beautiful beautiful philosophy and so you don't see that anymore in corporate america day You don't see that kind of culture You know reminds me when I graduated in the 80s. Um, eulah packet was like that. IBM was kind of like that then Not so much anymore in terms of having like the campuses So I think it's pretty special Company, I mean, I'm very impressed with the culture, but also you that they got tech shops And I think AI is going to be a secret weapon for them because they've been around for so long They have all these relationships with customers of every single industry vertical And you know, we've been saying for years that The data in these vertical markets is where the IP is and so with AI coming down the the pike fast They're going to be an opportunity to go to their install base and just Modernize them in in in a quick minute So, I mean, it's going to be very interesting to see how they do that And but they're all on it and you can see there was got spring in their step here They get it and they and they got they're going to probably drive More value and and that can change the landscape of the industry because the old model if you remember Dave They just have to you know rip and replace old bring in the new with AI you can actually abstract away up that Old technology and build bots co-pilots for you know Code assistance to management software and then bring in new data functionality. So it'll be very interesting.  He said Dave A big rationale behind these acquisition acquisitions is getting talent, which is kind of I guess obvious But he's you know people talk about paying overpaying for that talent will not really, you know You need to have that or overpaying for these companies because it's worth it to get the talent So will that create separation? Or is AI going to be so ubiquitous and widely available and you know relatively easy to implement I don't want to say easy But it's you know, it does simplify, you know software development in in a lot of ways I don't know. What do you think? I think it's going to completely change the game I think AI will actually, you know, I think if you train AI and treat a code base as data and then Import your code It will learn and you can essentially you'll code on its own. You just tell it what to do So and I think that's going to help in areas where the short resources So, you know, you know, let's talk to a guy who used to run City group, which is a huge It shop billions of overhead that he runs Budget-wise he says, you know, they can't hire cobalt programmers. So what they do They basically train AI to be a cobalt language that ingest the language know every syntax Guess what then you in court incorporate the code base With the language merge and you now have a smart co-pilot or bot chat bot code bot That can code The area is that you would just instruct someone to code. You don't need a cobalt programmer So that's a gap obviously older technology. So new technology. I think you're going to see Um a democratization where you don't have to be that person To be that expert I think machine learning was that craft right if you were a machine learning developer Go back say seven years ago or 10 years ago, Dave You were pretty much a small percentage of the population of coders, you know, and then even more, you know, google google Was always talked privately about how when they do acquisitions They would count the number of engineers and that new machine learning and and and value them at two or three million each And so what companies would do is stockpile ml engineers just to get the m&a going. I got 10 That's hilarious. Oh my god, they would gain the algorithm to get high evaluation So, I mean smart, so I think that is true today if you have talent Okay, and you have AI then you have a scale there there So I think everyone is really figuring this out now and I think it's really well understood We've been talking about this, you know for the past year It's not new to us in this conversation, but I'll tell you in mainstream kind of tech and mainstream society It's becoming well understood that talent plus AI is better than just talent on its own Clearly, right? So that's going to mean that's going to apply to every single field I mean, there's no exceptions with this kind of like again like the pc like the web. The reality is this shift Impacts everybody. Okay. I mean, so let me ask you a question because I'm always pimping up Cube ai go to the cube ai.com and and sign up for private beta John will let you in When I look at that, I mean our engineers are good, but it's not like they are AI experts, right? They're just good coders and they're full stack developers. So they you know, they pay attention So they were able to correct me if I'm wrong tap open source tooling Leverage MongoDB leverage open source tools like milvis And actually build the cube ai and I mean I use it all the time It's awesome Now so we were able to do that, you know without, you know deep AI exposures now is that going to Well, I could actually change our our industry. So that's my point earlier is like It's somewhat this llm's have have and chat gbt and bard and these other tools open source tools There's dozens and dozens of them have somewhat democratized AI and made it much more available To a much wider audience. So to me it comes down to okay That what's the what's the model who's creative? What can you create that doesn't didn't necessarily exist before to transform your industry? So if that's true, then it's execution and the clarity Of the value that you're going to deliver for your customers for your community, whatever it is That is ultimately going to be the determinant of winners. And yeah Big some big companies like open ai or, you know, the big cloud guys will come out of the woodworks I personally think Something that we haven't thought of is going to come out and surprise everybody and I can't obviously predict that what that is But for mainstream, you know companies, you know small guys like us We can now tap the power of those tools to transform Industries or at least our business Yeah, I mean there's no doubt about it. Well, I mean, I think we do have some experience with some AI around some of the language stuff we were doing in the extraction That's true. NLP. It's mostly NLP, right? No, that's true. That's AI. You're right. So you're right Have had chops there With our team, Narendra and Vokes. Yep. Definitely have that I think you got to be careful when you might be oversimplifying it because think about like a basic coder right in a corporation enterprise Yep, you know, they're coding away and they're just writing code on their application We we are kind of on the cutting edge. Remember, we had the twitter fire hose with the deal with apis We go to cloud native. So, you know, you got it Not everyone's dev sec ops Native anymore, right? So there's still people are doing dev ops and just writing applications So application developers and you see that in the Verticals where there's well known applications in these industry verticals. That's why you know sass has got my attention because You know, they have developer In their markets, right? So they sell to people who are users Right dev ops users have a whole different breed to them. So a whole nother animal my To me, if you're doing dev ops cloud native, you're well advanced because you have to learn a lot more up and down the stack It used to be called full stack developer Um in the nomenclature but with cloud you have to deal with microservices. So, you know with services Cloud services versus on premise monolith kind of concepts That's just different right and then coding application coder. You're just coding away. It's like, okay. I'm writing code as the application You're relying on someone else to do the platform engineering So that's the transition that we're in and again, we talk about this all the time on the cube But so it's not that easy, but it's going to get easier to your point What you're really trying to say and like I guess what I'm sensing is is that you're just saying Hey, if we can do it, we're not really heavily vc backed We're agile when we have good people The argument is the same along when when in dresen you mark and dresen said the 10x developer, right? Remember that concept software is eating the world You know with cloud you have 10x now you can get you can have one developer going to have the functionality of 10 in the past that step function value Is now moving to ai where it's not 10x anymore. It's probably like 1000x. It's not completely step function So the the talent plus ai if you know that to me, that's the game, right? That's the whole conversation Like if you have ai right That's key now the conversation we talked about last pot. I think we're getting into us the really cool area is What's the role of data? Right? So, you know, everyone's clamoring about vector databases You know, and you know, it's going to be more and more vector databases coming out And I was talking to the single store and they later they already have vector database They're in their pro and their platform.  The vector database is not a company And the embeddings don't work with each other. So what they're the the frothing around vector database in my opinion Is the fact that the role of data Is changing radically with ai Because of the use cases are now possible The public we published that power law Of llm's large language models yet the top proprietary ones big ones and then smaller ones are coming in the long tail Every company will have their own foundation and data models foundation or large language models. So so that ip Is the companies so every if every company has a large language model and a proprietary foundation models The role of data is changing That's the real story here is How you handle data how data is used and applied Will be based upon the ai systems that are going to emerge And I think that's going to be coming fast. So, you know, no one has that yet in my opinion. There's no real ai company Do you go to there's no Linux of like like moment for ai. Isn't that what open ai is trying to be?  It's large but to compare to the world of the power law. We have an sll SLL SLL small language model slm Small language models and that's not bad. And by the way the horsepower we're seeing some of the stats The cost issues go down completely if you decompose these language models The smaller ones into smaller pieces because they're highly contained and cohesive in the language So you can get more if it's valuable you want to want to pollute it with other other syntax or other data Again, so this is brings up the whole data architecture I mean, it's almost a mind blowing conversation day because it's like well, it'll if this continues It'll upend everything that we know about storage And how it's how databases function Right. I mean mongo putting a vector database with their data store makes total sense. It's a feature Of a platform This is this is one of the things that You know, we've been doing with the future of data apps data platforms using that notion of uber for all uber for the enterprise Where you're basically building a digital representation of your business you're in you're ingesting data That data is all different forms. It's structured. It's unstructured. It's different formats and it's different tables You query it differently, but then you create You know a consistent, you know, people say semantics. I don't know if that's the right term But you're able to join that data in real time to make decisions and take actions for your business That is a productivity driver that's unprecedented. Eric Brynjolfsson was at ui path this week as One of the keynotes hit awesome keynote speakers. They had Walter Isaacson, they had Eric Brynjolfsson tremendous. Anyway, Brynjolfsson, who's an economist at mit and very well known He said that he believes That ai will have A will double productivity. He said it will be at least three percent productivity boost in the relatively near term He said he'd be disappointed if it didn't beat that he would expect four percent You know or higher, which would be Amazing if you can get four percent productivity on the on the economy on the global economy That could potentially help solve all these problems of debt If the government it would have some kind of fiscal discipline And that is the wild card right now. But by the way without that, I think we are in deep shit You know notwithstanding all these wars and who knows how to predict that but to the extent that Productivity gains can be seen That is going to open up new opportunities. It's going to create a flood of money You know it could create greater wealth disparity, which is obviously a concern But right now the big problem that I see is us debt, you know One of the number one problem that we have to deal with Just in terms of be able to fix some of the challenges we have You know around healthcare for example or infrastructure or innovation, etc. And so That would be huge if Brynjolfsson is is right and so Um, I don't know. What do you what do you think? I mean, this is you're saying it's the biggest way of ever The that to me, how do you measure that you measure it with productivity? Yeah, and then a number of people using it So like from a TAM total addressable market perspective I think the thing that I would look at as an investor and someone looking at Kind of a progress bar is adoption How many applications will have AI enabled or AI in them true AI? I'm not talking about just washing AI over and saying it's it's AI But like legit AI right legit Productivity and so you'll see that I was actually commenting with brian harris is the cto at sass here. We were playing golf together Great technical group.  It's kind of fun We were talking about basically that you can really do great demos with AI and they do that They did that at the event by the way, which by the way work demos of real data and they showed How the data is crossing so it's a legit AI demo Okay, so you can actually see the difference in demo and so that's one hurdle you can start to see That being an indicator of pretenders versus the player. So the pretenders won't have good demos Okay, because you can actually do good demos with AI because that's the benefit of AI This challenge that's new the net new challenge with the AI wave Dave is going from killer demo or app to scale and production And so the all the conversation in silicon valley and in the AI industry and cloud right now is How do you move AI from you know, great application that works with some data or some scale To moving it into a production environment. We have a lot more scale a lot more data is needed So, you know, as we know with chat gpt It's garbage in garbage out meaning You're only as good as the data you're providing. So at scale With AI you're going to have to manage massive amounts of data the right data Volume of data velocity of data. So it's going to be a challenge. I think that's going to be the conversation probably the next two years Who's in production with what and what does that look like and your point about usage and adoption is right on I mean, you know, my rap about Productivity you're you're peeling the onion one layer down. How do you get productivity? You get productivity through usage and adoption Usage of tech and applications is what drives value. It's what makes people more productive And the other thing to think about is if you go back 30 40 50 years the percent Of time that users spend employees spend first of all the percentage employees that have access to technology And the percent of time that they spend Using that technology has gone from, you know, small percentage of back office, you know workers back in the 60 70s And and in the 80s with the pc productivity it went much much higher But still people spend time doing other things today a huge percentage of people's time is spent on using technology and The impact of that usage is much much higher. Just think about what happens The way floyer and I used to measure this when we had, you know, our cio consultancy Was what happens we would ask organizations and employees we would do these time and you know time in motion studies What happens when your your access to this application goes down? If you ask that to a claims processor an insurance company she or he's going to say, uh I don't do anything. I can't do my job. Um, and so You know, think about when you lose email. Um, it doesn't happen that often, but it does happen. Think about it when you're, you know, hacked Uh, that is massive productivity impact. It just underscores How much productivity technology drives so to the extent that you can increase that to bernie alson's forecast double You know that productivity You know Up gain from let's say where it is now two percent to four percent That is massive in terms of the economic impact on the global economy I totally agree. Well, I mean, let's let's go through our rants here. Obviously my rant is one rant It's small rant. It's the whole war an israel israel situation My heart goes out to all the founders who have companies There and in the u.s. And also companies that have employees there Um, and people have relatives there and on both sides. It's really kind of Unimaginable. Um, I stand with israel. That's my personal perspective. I think they get invaded And have to take action. Um, and then my my my segue into the ranter in the industry is, you know, this There's still layoffs happening. Dave is, you know, more layoffs coming from flexport We saw a bunch of other layoffs coming in from companies juniper laying off 440 employees So interesting layoffs there Yeah, I mean, it's going to be a weird time qualcomm said it's going to lay off more than 1200 people in california Just a lot of Issues you know going on in the tech industry. So yeah, I hope we can get around that and I hope we can get some data That will give us an indicator of what's going on with the economy So that's my rant Yeah, I mean I mean on On the war, I would just it's very complicated as we know situation in middle east one of the most impactful books that I've ever read And if you haven't read it, I would encourage people to read it is the lemon tree Many might dismiss that at this point in time because you know the horrific Incident and incidents that have occurred and are incurring in israel, but it's um, It's a very thought-provoking Piece of work the lemon tree for my rant Activision microsoft finally closed today uh, I feel as though that was It's like the exception that proves the rule the exception being the government's actually allowing the governments around the world allowing This to go through the the time it took and the pain it took Um and the concessions that were were made they they could have been made I think Would have been made Upfront had two things takes takes two to tango, you know, how ironic but but upfront if the if the government had a You know stronger relationship and more supportive relationship of big tech and at the same time a big tech Big tech had more of an open mind to the fact that you have a monopoly So you you cannot use that monopoly power to Advance your position at the expense of the industry And that's if those are both, you know opposite sides of the equation bring them together right now the The you know us I guess it's the doj. Maybe it's the fdc. I get so confused with all these lawsuits But but basically the fdc is there but no it's it's it's the fdc their position On on amazon is let's start with breakup Um and then you know amazon's position is to dig their heels in and say No effing way we're going to break up the company.  I can't remember. I think they're both after them I think right now it's the doj. Any rate come to an agreement Meet in the middle and actually keep it out of the courts and the headlines And that is going to foster a better public-private relationship That's going to help us in so many ways and I don't know. Maybe that's just a pipe dream But it's something that I think we should endeavor to support He a great great, uh brand as always, um yeah, I mean Let's talk about um, a couple things you were at the ui event this week in vegas. How'd that go? We got super club coming up ui path ui path Fantastic event always fun You know ui path was a company that their series f I think was a 38 billion dollar valuation They went public didn't go so well. They're probably trading at a 10 billion dollar valuation now But they brought in rob enslin who's the was the co-CEO now. He's essentially the CEO, uh from google Uh, he has he is a go-to-market pro Uh, he's very focused. It's allowed daniel deniz the visionary founder to really focus on Product and he is a visionary. He's been doing a i for a long long time I know everybody says that just as a proof point They bought a company called re-infer natural language processing before chat cpt was was announced And so it wasn't like scrambling because they had an event coming up It was they saw it as a fundamental component of their platform They've shifted from a point tool rpa to a platform of automation now at the same time Uh ai is is eating away at some of their tam. I mean john You know me. I've been talking every time I go to ui path events. I'm like, hey john We could use rpa to do like auto clipping and and and streamline our workflows. Well, guess what? We're not doing that without rpa. We're doing that with ai and large language models You know kind of built it ourselves. So there is that component Where it's eating away ai is eating away at some of their tam at the same time They were smart enough to say look we have to go beyond point tool build a platform so that we can you know drive end to end What they call hyper automation Which is you know very high value many more people accessing automation So that was really what the you know event was all about is what kind of progress they're making there And when you talk to customers, you know, what's happening is is this is still largely a back office function The opportunity is to move that throughout the organization to the front office And that's just a massive total available market opportunity and uh, I really like these this company I sat down one on one with daniel deniz the the founder super humble guy I say humility and I don't mean that as a sign of weakness He's bold takes big makes big bets But he's just a really thoughtful individual and somebody that I've enjoyed getting to know over the years Yeah, that's awesome. And again every app is trying to figure out their gender vi strategy or their gender vi something and Those guys have always been ahead of the curve rpa has always been that category that's kind of doing it But right now again the startups that are out there and the some of the commentary in the elite circles are At least that people are just creating something that sits on top of open ai or chat gbt three or four And you know now we got the vector database search kind of buzz You know, I think but I think there's going to be a real New thing that's going to come out of this which is you know around neural networks, right day I think that's going to be you know, we're because everything's talking about like search and retrieval rag is a term they use um getting data to have memory and and and data to have intelligence Is gonna have to have a new system and that's what we're watching and I'm looking for that big time, right? Like that's them out there like with my goggles on like, you know, binoculars looking out in the field saying, you know Who's moving the needle? Right? And the gap between demo and production Building anything with machine learning is just too big right now. And that's what everyone's talking about So we're going to keep tracking it. We're going to be at super cloud four in two weeks So we're going to be live stage performance in Palo Alto on our Genevieve super cloud Event and Let's let's get pumped for that Yeah, so super cloud four. It's uh, it's going to be awesome. I mean look if you guys are local to I think We're getting pretty full John, but still, you know, if you're local to Palo Alto, let us know You know, we can always what we did with super cloud three is we had so much demand for people coming into the studio We created a second day and we could do that again We we've allocated that time and we would welcome if you've got a really good angle here You know, let us know and then of course reinvents coming up. Of course, we have the The the dp3 We're doing a data protection series with our friends at Dell. This will be the third in the series Out of our Palo Alto studio. It's a super studio sort of format like we did with vast data like we did with it with iBM So headed by Rob Emsley who's the the the marketing lead over there and guy named Michael Wilkie So they're doing some really interesting work. Our guy Greg gots is is participating very extensively We get the support from our friends at Broadcom. So that's that's been an awesome And it's this is going to be a community event. It's not just like pimping We don't we're not pimping, you know Dell per se. We're talking about it's thought leadership and you know We'll let them pimp their products. So we're sort of setting the groundwork for thinking about Data protection as an adjacency to cyber security. So that's that's another thing that people should look out for All right, well Dave, I'm going to call it a day We've got a top of the hour here a little shorter pod than normal being together I got to go and zoom anything's possible. This could crash went that far with only one glitch Thanks, thanks for taking the time and making around my schedule awesome senior. John. Good luck. Good luck in the course today crush it, bro Right. No, I'm not playing golf today Like I'm working you must be sore. You must be sore from all that. Oh god. No, I'm not I got this I got this. All right. We'll see you see you later


They stand up by being the first right out the gate, right? That's, there's that. You know, going beyond that and looking at what the solution is, I think that it's the mobile side that the need to, the need for companies to look at a more integrated mobile approach is growing and coming into more into focus for a lot of companies where they need the, sadly, they need the always on, always able to be reached capabilities of with their work profile that they, that are maybe not always as accessible outside of having a mobile solution in place. The need for this mobile component is what has come immediately into focus for a lot of companies and why this need has bubbled to the surface for Microsoft as they developed the solution and brought Verizon to the table to be the first there. So we're talking about Teams, Phone, Mobile and what on the Verizon network with that lets you do is have a single phone number that's now converged between your Teams client and your mobile phone. So before this existed, you had to have two numbers.  So you had, you were carrying around two different phone numbers. Now we're talking about one phone number on the Verizon network. So you take your Verizon number and you make that your Teams number and it's also brings you on your mobile and people say, well, wait, that's just the Teams mobile client. We'll just do that. I'll just single number reach or simmering me on both. But yeah, but you still had two phone numbers to deal with. So this is quite groundbreaking in a way because now you're talking about the savings of a DIV. And then a large enterprise, that could be significant. Well, it also goes back to what we were talking about earlier of customers who were coming and saying, well, can I just use mobile devices? Well, yes, but you also get the benefit of that mobile device is now attached to a corporate phone system. So you can do all the things that a corporate phone system can do. But like Dino just explained, you have a single device, single phone number and for, well, you don't have to have a single device. You have a single phone number. That's really the important part. But that single phone number now stretches across your mobile device, your PC, whatever other devices that you may have that you sign in with. So obviously the first and foremost is like BYOD. Like so organizations struggling today with do I need to supply a corporately owned device or do we handle the BYOD and let people come in? And of course, if we do that, now we're providing a phone number. We have a thousand or 10,000 user org. Now we have 10,000 mobile phones. We need to worry about 10,000 new phone numbers. So we're managing 20,000 numbers. And then if they're user devices, well, that's a whole different thing. They need to worry about how do we onboard these devices and make them work seamlessly with teams. So these are the sorts of questions that you're hearing from business leaders and they're not sure where to go. Yeah, I would jump in on that and just kind of echo a few things. But what's interesting is when I go out and I talk to organizations that are looking to move and they start talking about, hey, we're on system XYZ, it doesn't matter. And we're looking at where do we go from here? One of the things I hear commonly is this, can we just go to cell phones? Can we just go to mobile devices? Do we need a phone system all together? And that's the bigger challenges is that everybody has become so dependent on their mobile phones, good, bad and different. We could, it's a whole another conversation for another set of drinks. Corporations, organizations still need a centralized phone system. Like whenever I talk to these customers, I'm like, well, how's Bob gonna transfer to Sally from mobile? Is it literally going to be I'm going to call and then three-way call in and then drop? And I'm like, it doesn't work that way from a business perspective. Customers will not be okay with that. And so to get them to understand that and then it becomes an even different component of like Dino said of devices. Do we own the devices? Do we own the DIDs? If you're asking for BYOD and then, hey, I'm just gonna let Bob use his mobile number as it. Well, what happens when Bob leaves the company? You have no, you no longer own that number. And so all your customers who are calling Bob, keep calling Bob, but they're no longer calling you. And so there's a lot that goes into that when we think about from a mobile perspective. And there are decisions to be made there that the company, that as you're waiting into it because you got user preferences. And there's a lot of end users that are getting more and more voting power in terms of what they will or won't do, what their technology will or won't look like. I'm not gonna carry two mobile phones around.  I'm just not gonna do it. But no, I don't want you controlling my mobile device and getting into my call log and doing, I don't want that either. And so striking the balance in terms of where that, who owns what, where the controls actually lie, what those policies are gonna be and making end users, employees understand this is what's in place and why it needs to be in place. There's a journey there. And certainly it is, there is no easy button to it. It is going to be a lot of decisions, a lot of talking through and a lot of planning. But when Josh mentioned that of the carrying, not wanting to carry two phones, I know that that's pretty common place outside of the US. It's super common from that perspective, especially over in Europe. The idea though, what happens when, especially here in the US, we don't really, we don't have good boundaries. We all work there all the time. Let's just be honest. But as we start to see more and more people have the, that concept of the right to be off, to not have to work and to not be contacted when you're off work comes more and more about what happens at that point.  And so there's a lot of stuff that comes into play there from a mobile perspective. The fact that if the internet's down, you're not getting calls. So when you're, but if the Verizon network's up and running, then that inbound call is still going to ring your mobile phone. Irrespective of what Microsoft Teams is doing, if there's an outage on Teams, normally that means no one's getting phone calls, but with Teams phone mobile and Verizon, you're going to that inbound call still gonna complete as long as the mobile phone network's up and running. So there's a resiliency aspect to it as well. And that's exactly where I was going with it. You know, it's a, with what I was gonna say there is that I've had a lot of projects in the past where the redundancy was either a stopping point in the discussion or just a glaring uncomfortable point that was going to follow into the life of the use of the solution is that if we're down, if we're totally down from a VoIP perspective, well, that's just gonna be a bummer. A lot of, at that point, you'd bring up the fact that, well, you know, you've got your Teams client on the mobile phone and yeah, if Teams service is down and the Teams part is dead, but you still got the phone that can kind of be your backup. It really wasn't a very lovely part of the conversation that it wasn't looked at as a great answer to redundancy or backup. This brings it a little more into the natural, yes, this is a part of the Teams solution. This can be looked at as our redundancy in those scenarios where everything is just down. Well, there's something to be said, I think to that point you just made, I mean, it is important too, if you lose visuals but still have audio, it can still proceed. You, people are still connected. The conversation happens. It is a, it's a more fundamental part of a collaboration, having the voice be able to communicate. If you have no sound but we can see each other, the meeting ends. Yeah, we can put culture on hold until the power comes back on and just communicate via audio. Following the pandemic, there were a lot of organizations that thought they had a good handle on how things had changed forever. And a few years beyond that, we see that we're still getting a grasp on what that change really means and how those workers are going to be in the office or not in the office. And as they develop a lot of these new patterns, that often translates to a lot of different tools that they prefer to use for managing their time, staying organized, communicating with people. And that extends across meeting applications, telephony, and a lot of that lives mobily as well. So mobile solutions start to come into focus there. I think one thing that's interesting is that part of the change that's happened is that there's not just one way of working. I would agree on that of that more and more companies are truly trying to figure out how do they keep an edge in today's modern work environment? I don't know how else to say that. But I think when you look at it, and everybody's approaching it slightly differently, you have some folks who are saying, hey, we'll go full remote and we're just gonna find the best of the best wherever they may be at. You have other companies that are saying, we're just gonna be flexible and we're gonna have some folks who are gonna be hybrid or whatever, some in office, some not. And then there's the other organizations that have figured out that in order for them to grow and be prosperous, they need to return to the office. There's a lot of great reasons for that. And so finding and meeting those needs today is really what you see as doing is helping bring that.  It's removing barriers for communication and that's the real goal.


This month, Longmont has begun replacing some of its electric meters with smart meters. And smart meters, for some reason, cause a lot of controversy. But they're really necessary given the changes that we're going through on this planet in this climate. And the reason we need smart meters is so that we can make the adjustment without hurting people so we can keep our energy system reliable and so that we can give you a level of service that you've never had before. The first thing that happens is that we transition to renewable energy and stop burning fossil fuels and nothing bad happens in the process. Your electric bills don't skyrocket although they're not going to fall for a while. Your service doesn't become less reliable. All kinds of things affect how much we can generate energy from the sun and wind that it's harder to control and harder to manage than generating energy from coal. But the trouble with generating energy from coal is that it's really expensive. It puts greenhouse gases and other noxious gases into the air as well as nasty particles. And because the planet is warming and we're having forest fires and stuff, there's already too many nasty particles. So we don't need to add to that by burning coal either way. I want everybody to know how important the energy transition is. I worked in this industry in the private sector for many years. I have patents and the techniques that the smart meters use now. I am telling you I've been living and breathing this transition for much longer than I've been on the city council. In the 1940s and 50s, when this was all designed or even earlier, electricity wasn't considered essential. It was considered a modern convenience. But today it's a necessity and that means that everybody is tremendously inconvenienced or even in danger if the electric grid doesn't work and doesn't deliver power to your house. Here in Longmont we are really blessed because our power almost never goes out. Or if it doesn't, you find out about it when you get up in the morning and your clocks are on your stove or something or flashing because it was off for 15 minutes in the middle of the night and you didn't even notice. But the grid was designed to operate until failure. It wasn't instrumented. It didn't have all these controls on it so that you would know when it was getting worn out. When the power goes out we'll fix it and that was the attitude for which it was designed. But now it's going to undergo a period of time when there are a lot more changes coming a lot closer together. Every electric vehicle that you plug in consumes as much energy as about half of a middle-sized house. But they move around so they're going to draw that power from all around town. And on Thanksgiving when everybody comes to your house and half of the people already are driving electric vehicles that could be a little bit of an overload if everybody needs to plug in in order to get home. We need to have a more adaptable grid and the first thing we have to do is to find out why and where the stress points are. Because when your electric grid fails, it fails just like a light bulb burning out. The electric current that flows through the filament in your light bulb, an old incandescent light bulb, you've all seen that happen, they burn out because that filament literally wears out. And the same thing can happen on the bigger components that are underground and we never think about them. But they can get overstressed when they are overloaded or when change happens too much when they have to adapt. And so we need these smart meters which are sensitive instruments on the grid that will tell us where those stress points are and let us upgrade them well before they fail. That's called distribution management. It's not invasive to you. It doesn't make any difference to you and it won't cause you to be charged for more electricity or anything like that. But what it will do is keep our electric grid up to date, reliable and sustainable, and make us able to do a good job, even in the face of rapid change in terms of what the grid has to do. The next big value that we get from those smart meters is demand management. A lot of things have to happen right on demand, like turning on the light. You'd be really inconvenienced if you put on the light switch and the switch and the light in come on because you need to see right down, right now. But there are a lot of other things like heating up the water in your hot water tank that can happen whenever there's plenty of energy because as long as the water in the tank doesn't go below a certain temperature, you're fine. It'll still be warm when you turn on the shower. It's the same with charging your electric car. If you plug it in when you go to bed, you don't care whether it's charging right then or whether it's going to charge between 2 o'clock and 4 o'clock in the morning. All you care about is that it's got at least a 70% charge by the time you wake up and head to work in the morning. And making sure that the demand, that all those devices, your devices on the electric grid are ready for you but also not overstressing the grid, not using too much electricity when there's not enough because the wind's not blowing hard enough or it's night and the sun isn't shining is called demand management. And having the meter be smart is one of the tools that we use to let your electric company do demand management both by predicting what the behavior is going to be based on past experience with your house and everybody else's house by exercising a certain amount of control in terms of playing around Robin with the different devices that are on the grid, for example. That's demand management. It keeps us from having to generate too much electricity. It keeps us from having to back up our renewable generation sources with generators that use natural gas or coal, bad. That in turn keeps our prices low. So that's demand management and it's really important. And by the way, it doesn't invade your privacy. All the detailed data that those smart meters gather is still strongly encrypted. And at a household level, nobody in the electric company or at the power company is ever even going to see that. All they do is see it lumped together by a neighborhood or a block or which transformer you're on, which is seven or eight houses. But they never know when you're running your dryer. They don't have to know that. Nobody is ever going to control the way you use your electricity. Nobody's ever going to say, no, you can't do this right now. But we can give you a discount if you say, yeah, this is my policy. I want you to make sure that at eight o'clock in the morning, if my EV is plugged in, I want to make sure it's at least at 60% charge. But what you do with my EV battery in the middle of the night, I don't care as long as you meet my policy. Then you can have a discount. You know, same thing if you say, I've got an air conditioner and it runs all day off and on because I've got a thermostat in my house, but I'm not going to get there until 5.30 because that's when I get off work. I want my house to be below 74 degrees Fahrenheit when I get home from work, but you can let it get hotter than that. As long as it's at a nice, you know, 72 to 75 when I walk in the door so I'm not miserable. Your air conditioner is spreading our demand for electricity around and saving everybody money because the power company that delivers the energy is charging us a surcharge if they have to burn coal to meet the demand. They'd rather use wind and solar because you know what? There's no fuel cost. There are a lot of other smaller consumer benefits than that. It can help you with your budget. You know, you can get three-quarters of the way through the month and get an alert on your phone that says, you know, you budgeted $75 for your electric bill this month and you're already at 60. Maybe you should, you know, change some of your thermostat settings or something to try to get to the end of the month inside budget. That's not control unless you want it to be. And there's nobody saying you have to subscribe to that service. The city is not going to control what you do. You can use the services from the city as much or as little as you like and you can pay more or less depending on how much you consume, but that's always been true. The meter is not going to make your bill higher. Yes, we are investing in all kinds of infrastructure to use renewable energy instead of using fossil fuels. There have always been capital costs affecting your bill. When the price of coal or natural gas goes up, your bill goes up as a consequence of that. And what's being predicted now from our power company, Platte River Power Authority, is that for the next 10 years, we're going to have about a 5% increase in energy costs each year because we're making an investment in renewable energy and it's a capital investment that has to be anortized. But the real news is that after that nine-year period is over, that rate of increase drops to almost zero because the capital investment is there and the fuel is free, which has never been true before. And so the only thing you're paying for is the maintenance of all of this infrastructure that it takes to use renewable energy. So it's not invading your privacy, it's not stealing money from you, and it's going to make your life better and you don't have to change anything unless you want to. Later, I'll be able to tell you about the new services, but that's another story because for right now, all we need to know is it's not going to change your life, it's not going to invade your privacy, and it's not going to cost you an arm and a leg. They're okay.


Most of it's uncomfortable. There are moments where it's fun. Everything else is just the price you have to pay. Infantry is a backbone of the Marine Corps. That's what defines it.  Charles Crystal from Schenectady, New York. Everything from the last one pretty much carried over. Week one we seized a compound and lived in there for four months. North of Helmand, rained a lot. It's very uncomfortable. It's certainly more miserable than this. It's a matter of what needs to be done and who can get it done the best. Doing whatever is necessary. They made a point to do their job in the best manner possible. And just exceed as opposed to being mediocre because mediocre usually fails. It's serving the Marines. It's just making sure they're ready. But actually leading Marines, it's a good time. It's just common sense. Things, you know, keep the meeting machine guns in the middle. Is that something that squad leaders control? Pretty much you decide what you want to accomplish there and just build your movement around that. And everybody else just integrates so that there's really no weaknesses in the lines. Your authority. I mean, I'm filling a sergeant's bill. You need to distinguish yourself. Is there somebody who knows what's going on? So like leadership, people who obviously distinguish themselves as being competent, they will naturally ground to leaders. So you should obviously delegate responsibility to people who have identified that they can handle it. Through my conduct, it should be pretty evident to everybody that I know what's going on. Roger, just for your essay, we are locating compound seven. Break. We've just made an effort to learn as much as I could so it'd be efficient. Continue to push through Quebec. The remaining 200, 300 meters. Break. If they're doing their job, then you're not yelling at them and you're saying, all right, good job.  That should be enough. Once it gets darker, you'll shoot us a grid and we'll conduct a nighttime link up. I was like, this is the last couple.


FNAF just launched on the Epic Games Store. Stewell Studios announced that the latest game in the FNAF series, Security Breach, would be the first game in the franchise to launch on the Epic Games Store on the 1st of April. And it turned out to be no April Fool's joke as the title is now available for purchase on the Fortnite developers' platform. And earlier this year, several characters from FNAF One and Security Breach appeared on a survey released by Epic Games to garner interest for possible future Fortnite collaborations. And while the creator of FNAF, Scott Cawthon dismissed any planned game collaborations for at least the year of 2021, whether or not he's now open to the idea of game collaborations after targeting his efforts towards solo FNAF projects for that year is currently unknown. So who knows? Maybe we're closer to a Fortnite and FNAF collaboration now since...