For the first time in months, movie theaters, at least where I live, are finally open again. I could not be happier about this. I've already been to see a handful of movies, like Tenet, which we recently talked about on the new Out of Frame Behind the Scenes podcast, which you should totally check out. But the movie I'm actually most looking forward to seeing right now is Wonder Woman 1984. Over the years, I've been really critical of the DCEU. Between their complete lack of coherent long-term direction, they're rushed to tell some of their biggest stories without properly setting them up or adequately introducing major characters, and with what had always seemed like a lack of creative conviction, they've just missed so many opportunities with some of my favorite characters. But the first movie that really stood out and made me feel like Warner Brothers and DCEU might get their extended universe on track was, you guessed it, Wonder Woman. It's not a perfect film, but it is a pretty good one. Gal Gadot is a lovely blend of innocence, charm, and powerful heroism. The tone is much lighter and more fun than any of DCEU's other films, with a lot of the humor also being carried by Chris Pine. It's a relatively simple story, but it's a great vehicle for introducing Wonder Woman's values and character while expanding the DCEU beyond Metropolis and Gotham. But I do have one major issue with the film that I've wanted to talk about on this series for a long time. Wonder Woman features one of the most important and interesting themes I've seen in any recent DCEU movie. This theme is set up beautifully at the beginning and culminates with a critical plot twist that shakes Diana's faith in herself and her beliefs. The whole thing represents an incredibly worthwhile lesson that people all over the world should understand. And then the third act kind of ruins it. But even though its release has been pushed back, again, with Wonder Woman 1984 still coming out pretty soon, I figured the time is finally right to get into this. So hit the subscribe button, ring that bell icon, and stick around as I explain what I mean on this episode of Out of Frame. For those who haven't seen the film, Wonder Woman is the story of, well, Wonder Woman. She's a character created by the psychologist William Moulton Marston and H.G. Peter in 1941. Marston and his wife Elizabeth Holloway were also notable for inventing a form of lie detector. But without getting into the more bizarre history of the character's literary origins, Wonder Woman is an Amazon warrior and, at least in the movie incarnation, a demigod created by Zeus to protect humanity through superior violence. The gods created us, the Amazons, to influence men's hearts with love and restore peace to the earth. The DCEU hasn't really dealt with the implications of all this yet, but Greek gods are real in this universe, I guess. Anyway, in the movie, we're introduced to Diana as a little girl and get to see her life growing up with her mother Hippolyta, her aunt Entiope, and the other Amazons living on the magically isolated island of Themyscara. Unlike some characters we've seen in a lot of recent films, Wonder Woman actually takes time to show us the progression of her skills and experiences. And while she's always a bit fearless, we see that getting trained by competent mentors is what makes her a good fighter. The Amazons are basically immortal, but, again, they're completely isolated, so for hundreds of years their society stagnates, looking like ancient Greece frozen in time. And not only does their lack of interaction with the outside world leave them living without advancements in technology, including weapons, which you'd think would be pretty important to their culture, it also leaves them without any information about what's going on beyond the barrier that keeps them hidden. And what's happening is the First World War. We don't need to dive too deep into this history, but from July of 1914 to November of 1918, the Great War was one of the bloodiest and most horrific conflicts in human history. Just looking at the numbers alone is shocking. The war involved 70 million soldiers from every inhabited continent. 9 million combatants were killed, along with 13 million civilians. Another 23 million people were wounded over the course of the war. Two-thirds of military deaths were a direct consequence of fighting in trenches and facing vicious new weapons, like mustard gas, flamethrowers, mortars, and mass-produced machine guns. And yet still a third of military deaths were caused by disease, particularly Spanish flu, which ravaged prisoner of war camps and became a global pandemic by 1918. It was industrialized brutality on a completely unprecedented scale, and it had a powerful impact on every aspect of human society. Apart from the loss of life itself, the economic impacts were devastating. We've talked a lot on this series, both about the consequences of reducing trade and about what actually happens when your population disappears. Beyond the emotional toll their deaths had on their friends and families, the millions of people who lost their lives all had uniquely creative ideas, irreplaceable knowledge, specialized skills, and could have benefited the world through their productive efforts if they'd lived through the war. And during World War I, not only was the productive capacity of Europe and tons of countries in other parts of the world either redirected by the state towards their respective war efforts or destroyed by the war itself, the entire global trading system was shut down through a combination of new regulations, high taxes and tariffs, and restrictions on the movement of goods and people across national boundaries. This all reinforces a common paraphrase of Friedrich Bastiat. When goods don't cross borders, armies will. This economic devastation had severe ripple effects that lasted for decades. It set the stage for Nazi fascism by forcing the Weimar Republic to rapidly repay war debts, which they tried to do through hyperinflation. And it contributed to the Bolshevik Revolution and indirectly led to Stalinist Communism. Even in the US and Britain, the concentrated political power a master in war time was never fully relinquished, and that in turn played a huge role in the monetary policies that led to the Great Depression and the heavy-handed regulations, tariffs, and government spending programs that kept it going for years beyond what was remotely necessary. But that's a story for another time. Back to Wonder Woman. The main plot of the film takes place towards the end of the war. After we're introduced to Diana, we meet Steve Trevor, a British pilot and spy who manages to steal some important information about Germany's weapons technology from a lab in Turkey. Under the command of General Ludendorff, the Germans plan to use a new kind of poison gas against the Allied forces fighting in the trenches. From what I could tell if Dr. Maru was able to complete her work, millions more would die. The war would never end. Trevor steals a plane and makes a daring escape, even blowing up a bomb factory in the process. As he flies away with Dr. Maru's notebook, he's chased by the German planes and warships positioned somewhere in the Aegean Sea. And that pursuit ends at the magic barrier that hides Themyscira from the rest of the world. Steve Trevor's plane breaks through first, crashing into the water, while Diana watches the whole thing from a cliff. Realizing that the person flying the plane is probably drowning, she dives into the ocean to rescue him. Ah.  Don't I look like one? But there's not a lot of time to dwell on our two main characters' introduction, because Steve is still being followed by Austro-Hungarian soldiers who also make it through the barrier. Honestly, for something made by the king of Mount Olympus, Themyscira does not have a very good defense system. The Amazons take some heavy losses from the invaders' guns, but after they defeat the men who storm their beach, they turn their attention to Steve Trevor and what he was doing there in the first place. As a trained spy, he initially resists their questions, but the Amazons have the lasso of truth, which compels him to tell them everything. But if I can get these notes back to British intelligence in time, it could stop millions more from dying. It could stop the war. War? What war? The war to end all wars. Innocent people, women and children slaughtered. Their homes and their villages looted and burned. Weapons far deadlier than you can ever imagine. It's like the world's gonna end. When Diana hears this, she immediately decides that she knows the true cause of the war. Only Aries could do such a thing. And this is the inciting incident for her story. The whole reason Diana gets involved in World War I in the first place, and her driving motivation for most of the film, is because she believes that Aries, the literal god of war, is the cause of all this conflict and suffering. There's much you do not understand. Men are easily corrupted. Yes, but Aries is behind that corruption. It is Aries who has these Germans fighting. And although her mother forbids her to go, Diana's desire to protect the world leads her to break into the armory and collect her iconic sword, shield, lasso, and armor. Then she returns to the cave where Steve is being held and obsconds with him on the condition that he take her to the front lines. So after a brief stop in London where they deliver some exposition, she actually helped me bring this notebook back here. That's from Dr. Maru's lab. I think the information contained inside will change the course of the war, sir. My god. Dr. Poison has out. Yes. And assembled the team. These are the reinforcements. Are these even good men? Relatively.  Lots of cool stuff happens in this part of the film and we get to see what Wonder Woman is really capable of. But as they get closer and closer to their goal, Diana has an epiphany. Of course, it makes complete sense. What is that? Ludendorff is Aries. She concludes that if she can just get to Ludendorff and kill him, the god of war's magical corruption of the German people will stop and the whole war will just end on its own. And this belief is what I think is such an interesting and worthwhile concept to talk about. Even though very few people today believe that an actual god of war exists, we do see this line of thinking all the time. Diana is not the only one who believes that there's some kind of an evil mastermind behind all the suffering in the world. And I get it. It's really tempting to think that every horrible thing that happens from terrorism and warfare to pandemics and forest fires must have some nefarious singular cause. It's not even a big mystery why so many people believe this. We've taught kids to think this way through the stories we've told for centuries. If only we got rid of the evil king and replaced him with a nicer one, we'd all live happily ever after, right? Sadly, no. The idea that big global problems are a product of one malicious person's evil plan is just the dark mirror version of the equally false idea that we can create a perfect world by giving a ton of power to well-meaning, smart people who can plan out a flawless utopia for us. The hard truth is that big problems usually have a ton of interconnected causes, many of which have nothing to do with anyone's specific plans, no matter how good or bad they might have been. And people who think like Wonder Woman does at this part of the story are often guilty of significantly overvaluing the importance of other people's intentions. Some of society's biggest problems are actually created by people who genuinely believe they're doing good, but who are also willing to do anything to reshape the world according to their righteous ideology. And that's not hard to understand either. If you believe that your political opponents are going to destroy the planet, if you've convinced yourself that silence is violence, but smashing windows and setting cars on fire is not, if you think that someone else's words or thoughts constitute a threat to your very existence, then almost anything you do to the people you think belong to the wrong group is okay. Throughout history, people have justified innumerable violations of human rights by claiming they were just trying to make the world a better place. Over the centuries, a lot of people who have claimed to have positive goals have done horrifying things to accomplish them. We often ignore this because it's easy to pretend that history's greatest monsters must have all had evil in their hearts to do what they did. But when you actually go back and look at some of the ways that people like Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Idi Amin, and others sold their ideas to their people, you'll see that they almost always appeal to completely understandable, often even positive desires. In the stories these revolutionaries told through their campaigns and propaganda, they were the good noble leaders who came to replace the old evil oppressive tyrants. And they promised that if the people supported their bids for power, their societies would see less poverty and higher standards of living, more safety and stronger communities. Their countries would become prosperous and everyone would live in harmony forever and ever. Well, maybe not everyone, but everyone they were actually talking to. Maybe these guys were all just telling people what they thought they wanted to hear. But I'm inclined to think that most of these dictators really did believe that their ideas were creating a better world. And we see this on a smaller scale as well. To quote Isabelle Patterson, most of the harm in the world is done by good people and not by accident lapse or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends. This is demonstrably true, nor could it occur otherwise. The percentage of positively malignant, vicious or depraved persons is necessarily small. For no species could survive if its members were habitually and consciously bent upon injuring one another. To make things even more complicated, a lot of people's well-meaning ideas actually would make the world a better place if they weren't imposed by force. Diana doesn't really get that distinction. She can only conceptualize a world where bad things happen because bad people with bad intentions make them happen, and good people with good intentions will fix it. But eventually, Wonder Woman catches up to Ludendorff and comes face-to-face with the man she believes is the cause of the war to end all wars. And when he's defeated, nothing happens. In what is my favorite scene in the whole film, she has to confront the possibility that everything she believes is wrong. I killed him. I killed him, but nothing stopped.  You stopped the war. All of this should have stopped. The fighting should have stopped. Why are they doing this? I don't know. Maybe people aren't always good. Aries or no Aries. Maybe it's just, it's who they are. This is the moment that Diana finally comes to grips with reality. They were killing each other. Killing people they cannot see children. No, it had to be him. It cannot be them. Diana, people... She was right. My mother was right. She said the world of men do not deserve you. Maybe, maybe we don't. But it's not about that. It's about what you believe. You don't think I get it after what I've seen out there? You don't think I wish I could tell you that it was one bad guy to blame? It's not. I love this scene because it's not only the heart of Wonder Woman's internal conflict playing out in a big way. It's also an incredibly good lesson for the way we should all understand the world. Unfortunately, the movie undercuts this point a few minutes later when it reveals that, in fact, Aries is real. And for me, it's ultimately a disappointment that the rest of the third act is just one big battle at a random airfield. Although Aries does at least tell Wonder Woman that he's not directly causing the war. Even so, the fact that he's behind any of it diminishes the importance of the lesson Diana just learned. Steve Trevor was right. It wasn't a Greek god or any singular cause that created World War I. It was millions of people all contributing their own small part to the destruction. And I think we can see some of the same ideas playing out today. It's pretty easy to find conspiracy theories for just about anything that people don't like. The pandemic we've all been living through couldn't just be a product of dozens of layers of incompetence in China. And the crippling policy responses in countries around the world couldn't just be a consequence of bad ideas and poor political incentives. It had to be a pandemic. People couldn't just be rioting because they've been locked down for months, unemployed, and feel like lashing out and smashing windows. It can't just be because some are opportunistic criminals who use the cover of protests to loot and steal stuff. No, somebody like George Soros must be behind it all. Even doing what I do, I've been told in the comments that the only reason I could advocate the kinds of ideas I talk about on this show is because some billionaire pays me to. I wish, but no. People are individuals and their actions are the product of their own choices, which in turn are usually driven by their values and beliefs. And yes, of course, there are sometimes conspiracies and there are almost always situations where one person has more influence over a major event than other people have. For example, most people get taught that World War I started because a Serbian nationalist named Gavrilo Princep assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand. And Princep himself was part of a criminal conspiracy involving five other assassins who carefully planned out their attack. But even that is an incredible oversimplification. Their actual plans completely failed and Princep was only able to shoot Franz Ferdinand and his wife because their driver accidentally turned down the wrong street and wound up right where Princep happened to be. And all that skips over the Austro-Hungarian Empire's colonization of Serbia, complex mutual defense alliances, the Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913, and a ton of other important contributing causes for the war. The worldview that Wonder Woman holds at the beginning of the film and the one I see a lot in society at large is massively oversimplified. If no one else will defend the world for Marys, then I must. One thing that makes the movie really good, from my perspective, is that it actually forces Wonder Woman to confront her own naivete and grow in the process. What happens in the world isn't defined by good and bad intentions and people aren't just corrupted by malicious gods. As Daniel Webster said almost 200 years ago, good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters. Just as some people believe that if their favorite well-meaning politician had the power to make the right decisions for everybody, everything would always be good, some people believe that there must be an evil plan lurking behind everything they hate. The influential people they agree with are deified as saints and angels. The ones they don't like are villainous demons. This is all wrong, and it leads people to see politicians as either saviors or destroyers when they're usually just ordinary people grasping for power. And while that makes the idea of solving big, global problems a lot more complicated than most people want to believe, the good news is that it also means every single one of us has a lot more local influence than we realize. The things we do to improve our communities actually matter. The time we spend with our kids, friends, and neighbors, helping them see the value in good ideas and leading by example can help reduce the amount of violence and animosity we're seeing play out on the streets. Connecting with people, finding common ground, and engaging with them in a constructive way is how we build a better world together. But if we don't do this ourselves, no gods or masters are going to do it for us. My father told me once he said if you see something wrong happening in the world, you can either do nothing or you can do something and I already tried nothing. But if the other guy wins, demonic hellspawn will rise from the ground and destroy the world. This is all a sign of a society where politics has way too much power. So instead of yelling at each other in the comments, tell me something that you did lately to make your neighborhood a better place that doesn't fit on an I voted sticker. Also, I'd like to send some love to all of our patrons with an extra special thank you to our associate producers. To Connor McGowan, Dallin Case, Jermaine, Himantana, Matt Tabor, and Victoria Manschart. Thank you. And to everyone, please check out our new podcasts. I think you'll like it. If you love the show and want to help us keep making more episodes, check out the Patreon link in the description below. As always, don't forget to like this video, subscribe to this channel, ring that bell icon, and follow us on all our social media at YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Thanks for watching.


This research suggests that women who have lost weight are at greater metabolic risk for weight regain than those with a similar body mass index, BMI, who have never lost weight. Additionally, women who have previously lost weight show signs of metabolic adaptation, such as decreased fat oxidation and increased thermogenesis, which can make it harder to maintain a healthy weight. This study also found that women who have maintained a healthy weight have better control over their eating habits and physical activity levels than those who have lost weight. This article was authored by Louise D. Clamp, David J. Hume, Estelle V. Lambert and others.


Libertarianism is the view that all people have the right to live their own lives as they choose so long as they respect the equal rights of others. As long as I've known what the word libertarian meant, I've considered myself a libertarian. People like Adam Smith, John Locke, all the way back to the Enlightenment, they tend to believe in a very simple set of things. I've been involved in promotion of the ideas of liberty or libertarianism for a long, long time since I was in high school. I wrote a libertarian column for my high school newspaper, for example, and most of that was based on what I would just call general skepticism. What really captivated me was one, opposition to dictatorship, and there were more dictatorships around the world then. There still are some. And then second, when I was introduced to economics, the best system I thought for organizing people was to let them organize their own lives within a common framework of the rule of law, rather than having a master plan for society. Basically the idea that people should be pretty much free to do what they want as long as it doesn't impinge too much upon other people. It seems like skepticism and libertarianism go very hand in hand together, being skeptical of claims to power, being skeptical of claims of truth made by powerful people, being skeptical that there's only one way of doing things, being skeptical that someone can tell you, we're all going to have to do it this way and this is the only way it can work, and then realizing that that person has a vested interest. Libertarianism is the notion that individuals are best suited to run their own lives without interference or coercion from outside forces. Libertarians defend the rights to life, liberty, and property of each person, rights that we have naturally before governments are instituted. Libertarian thought emphasizes the dignity of each individual, which entails both rights and responsibilities. When people say the government decided this or the people decided that, that the government or the people are not persons, they're not like you and me. They're made up of lots of people. When people casually say we decided, the people decided, the government decided to do this or that, Libertarians ask, what does that mean? It means some people were deciding for other people. It turns out government isn't some powerful big person making decisions. There's nothing special about people in government. There's nothing particularly worse about them. There's nothing particularly better about them. When you go from the private side of the public center, you don't grow wings. You don't ditch devil horns and suddenly get a halo. You don't become more intelligent. You don't suddenly become an expert on economics. None of those things happen. You just move from an area where you're in private life to an area where you suddenly have control over people. The progressive extension of dignity to more people, to women, to people of different races, religions and sexual orientations is one of the great triumphs for liberty in the Western world and increasingly the entire world.  These rights are not granted by any government or society. They're inherent in our nature as human beings. One of the central pillars of the whole Libertarian approach to the world is the idea that individual human beings have the right to manage their own affairs. They have rights to govern their own lives. Respecting individual rights means respecting people's autonomy. It means respecting their dignity. In particular, it means treating them in the same way that you would like to be treated. A great Libertarian abolitionist, someone who worked to abolish slavery in Brazil, Joaquim Nebuco, put it very neatly. He said, we should love the freedom of other people and only if we love the freedom of other people will we truly appreciate and treasure our own. It is intuitively right, we might even say it's self-evident, that individuals should enjoy the security of these rights. The burden of proof should lie with people who would take those rights away. A great degree of order in society is necessary for individuals to survive and flourish. And it's pretty understandable that we think order has to be imposed the way we would impose order on a stamp collection or on a business that we might create or a project. What we have trouble understanding is that the greatest degree of order in society actually arises spontaneously. It turns out that you don't need a commanding power or a dictator to create order. Most of us are hardwired to think that when there's order, someone must have created the order. Think of the most important institutions in society. Language wasn't designed and written down by anybody. It evolves spontaneously. Same thing with law. And perhaps most importantly for our purposes, the free market. The market is not planned. The market is not designed by anyone. The market is the product of thousands or millions, even billions of people making choices every day based on what will make them and their families better off. That's the order of a free society. It's unpredictable. You can't predict the details of it. But it's nonetheless orderly and harmonious. That's what libertarianism is about. The rule of law means that individuals are governed by generally applicable and spontaneously developed legal rules, not by arbitrary commands from some authority. A good legal system should solve more problems than it creates, for example. You can't have a justice ID with laws that are capriciously enforced, unpredictable, and impossible to plan your life around. Those rules should protect the freedom of individuals to live their lives as they choose, so long as they respect everybody else's equal rights. To protect our rights, individuals form governments. But governments are dangerous institutions. Libertarians have a deep skepticism about concentrated power because they understand what Lord Acton said that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. So we want to divide and limit power, and that means especially to limit government, generally through a written constitution that spells out the powers of government and limits it to those powers. Limited government is the basic political implication of libertarianism. The constitution grants powers only explicitly. It assumes no powers are going to be in government. It says there are 18 things the government is allowed to do. And insofar as those 18 things are followed, you'd get a pretty good constitutionally limited government. To survive and to flourish, individuals need to engage in economic activity. The right to property entails the right to exchange property by mutual agreement. Free markets are the economic system of free individuals and they're necessary to create wealth. There's more opportunity in the United States simply because we have a freer political system and freer markets here. People are allowed to engage in more mutually beneficial and voluntary economic exchanges. As a result, people are able to take more risks, reap those rewards, bear the cost themselves. And over time, this means that we accumulate capital, skills, and that culture which produces consistently an increasing economy and more job opportunities. Not just for Americans, but for people from other places as well. And people who come here recognize that, recognize the opportunities, and they want to be part of that. So one of the most effective ways that we can promote peaceful coexistence with other nations is actually to trade with them. Free trade is a great leveling force. When countries trade with one another, research shows they are far less likely to fight one another. Libertarians believe that people will be freer and more prosperous if government intervention in their economic choices is minimized. Much of the impetus for libertarianism in the 17th century was a reaction against monarchs and aristocrats who lived off the productive labor of other people. Libertarians defended the right of all people to the fruits of their labor. This effort developed into a respect for the dignity of work and production, and especially for the growing middle class who were looked down upon by aristocrats. Libertarians developed a pre-Marxist class analysis that divided society into two basic classes, those who worked by their own labor and those who took wealth by force from others. Thomas Paine, for instance, wrote, There are two distinct classes of men in the nation, those who pay taxes and those who receive and live upon the taxes. Similarly, Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1824, We have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. Modern libertarians defend the right of people to keep what they produce against a new class of politicians and bureaucrats who would seize it to transfer to their clients and cronies. Libertarians have always battled the age-old scourge of war. They understood that war brings death and destruction on a massive scale, destroys family and economic life, and puts more power in the hands of the ruling class, which just might explain why the rulers haven't always shared the people's sentiment for peace. Henry Kissinger once said that no foreign policy, no matter how ingenious, can be successful if it is thought of in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none. And what he really meant by that is the idea that foreign policy has to be a decision made by the people, not just by a few elites. So foreign policy will never be successful unless it's supported by the population at large. People around the world have come to see each other as other individual human beings, to think abstractly that that person may look different, speak differently, worship differently, have a different language, that nonetheless they're people like me. And if we have a common nature, as the great Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero put it, then certainly we are obliged by the law of nature not to act violently against each other. Personally, and I think many people would agree with me, just don't think that we will ever reach a state where war is impossible. But the good news is that political science research tells us that war should be rare, very uncommon. Free men and women, of course, have often had to defend their societies against foreign threats. But throughout history, war has usually been the common enemy of peaceful, productive people on both sides of the conflict. For societies to remain free has to be at least a critical match to the population of some understanding of what it means to be a free person. But some people in every social order take it as a personal mission, a calling. I think of William Wilberforce who spent over 50 years of his life in Britain and the parliament and agitating in public and the media all over for a simple goal, the elimination of slavery in Britain. We might still have that monstrous institution if there were not people like Frederick Douglass and William Wilberforce and Liza Andrew Spooner working to eliminate it. Those struggles for freedom are with us today. I've dedicated a large portion of my life to advancing liberty because it is a rare and precious institution that has existed in few places for short periods of human history. And if I can just push the cord in a way to preserving those individual liberties in a very real sense, if I can just do that once, I will have purchased my life. I will have made my life more worth living because I have fought for someone else's liberty and of course in fighting for their liberty, I'm fighting for my liberty. To be a libertarian means that in some sense it hurts you to see that happen when people suffer violence, they're murdered because of their political opinions, because of their religion, because of their sexuality, because they engaged in some behavior that wasn't harmful to anyone else. And yet, violence is visited upon them. For me personally, I hate it when I see that and every time I see someone suffering, some form of oppression, I want to do something about it. That's what moves my life and I think it's what moves the lives of those who have dedicated themselves to loving the freedom of other people.


Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Enterprise Connect 2019, brought to you by 5ix9ine. Hello from Orlando, Florida, Lisa Martin with theCUBE, Stu Miniman joining me. We are at Enterprise Connect 2019, day three, graciously hosted by 5ix9ine. We've had great conversations with 5ix9ine folks, customers, partners, and we're very pleased to welcome back to theCUBE with the first time live. This is CEO of 5ix9ine, Rowan Trollett Rowan. Thank you so much for joining Stu and me today. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Stu. Great to be here. And for hosting us, I was telling you before we went live, we've had a great three days of talking to your customers, your partners. This contact center is hot. It's electric. It's electric. I think they should rename Enterprise Connect to Contact Center Connect or Central or something. It's really all the innovation. I've heard this from people in the financial community and the customers that, wow, there's so much innovation happening in the contact center and they're 100% right. And not just us, but the whole industry is just absolutely on a tear right now. The rise of the empowered consumer is incredible how this consumer behavior- That's the driver. Absolutely and every company has to react because we have as consumers so much choice. Yeah, we call it the experience economy. It's like, you know, we're all, and we all can relate to this because we're all consumers. And when we deal with brands, we want to have a great experience all around. Like not just when we're buying or when we're using or, but you know, from the very first moment we discover that brand all the way through to the renewal of that product and the use and the install and the support that we get. And we're really, really focused on that. So that's the driver. And you know, enterprises have realized and businesses in general have realized that if they can deliver an outstanding experience from an engagement perspective to their customer that can drive fierce loyalty amongst customers unlike any other thing they can do. So it's emerging as this extraordinarily important part of every business. Yeah, Rowan, one of the things Lisa and I talking about what we learned this week is I wish as a consumer I had visibility into some of the technologies that we're using it behind them because it would give me an indicator of how much they value me as a customer. And if I do need to call them what that experience would be like. That's right. So we think a lot about customer love. What does it take to get a customer to love your business? And it doesn't only take having a great product. It takes having a great experience with your brand and nothing is closer to your customer than the contact center. It's where all the action happens, right? It's right at that frontline. It's for the moment you hear the ring when you call that company or what the website looks like and how you get answers to your questions and how do they engage with you? How do they greet you? What is it like? Does the person know who you are? Do they give you that delightful experience? And you know the thing is we all know what great looks like and therefore we see when it's not great and it's just greats on us. Great, great. And 5.9 is fundamentally solving that problem for our businesses. One of the things we heard too in terms of Omni channel and you know as these empowered consumers we want a company to communicate with us as you were saying before and know us on whatever channel that we want. But one of the things that did surprise me is that social isn't as high yet as a communications tool but that really companies of any industry thing. I will go to Twitter if I'm not getting what I want from an agent on the phone. So I just was surprised to learn that social wasn't as high on the radar yet but then other things that were surprising too Ro and it's voices sexy, voices back. It's we have to have the humans and the empathy. So there's some sort of old school things that are coming back and researching is critical. Yeah well you know on the Omni channel things that sort of very fancy word for just saying communicate with me as a customer in the way that I want in the best way possible and if we think about, I keep this really simple for people. Think about how you and I would communicate if we were just chatting. Sometimes I would call you, sometimes I would text you, sometimes I might send you an email. They're all different. Not one or the other is better or worse. They're just different.   The call center or the contact center needs to deliver that same seamless experience across whatever channel you want whether it's messaging or whether it's in the product itself or an email or phone and voice when it's needed. So that's really the, that's where we're driving towards and that's what our product offers. The fancy word for that is Omni channel. You know you'd be surprised that not as many customers do it as you know you would like and we're able to deliver that out of the box, right? And we can also do that with our partners like Salesforce and Oracle and you know whoever the backend is that you're using so we can, we partner with that and do that very effectively. Yeah, Rowan, one of the other things we heard this week is just how important cloud is to a lot of the changes that are happening. One of the panels though I was actually a little surprised to hear they're like oh how do we call kind of the hybrid environment? I have my on premises, I have my cloud deployments and you know hybrids in the middle. You know, we're at certain parts along the journey of maturation in the industry and sometimes they're like oh well there's certain things that will never go to the cloud because of you know it's very large and part of me looks at it's like well I look at the largest technology companies in the world they're the cloud companies and they're scaling, you know and they're enabling companies to scale even more. I know cloud's one of the main reasons you know for five nine success in one of the regions that came over. We're a market leader in cloud. You know that's how we started. We're born in the cloud so we don't have any on premises technology. You know think about a call center today that has phones on the desks and wires and this. You know we're all about the agents log into our website at five nine dot com. They get an incredible experience and they plug in their headset to the computer and so it's super lightweight. There's nothing to deploy. There's no closets of equipment anywhere. It's all very seamless and lightweight and that's what customers really love about the solution. The idea back to your point that you know there's some things that are too big for the cloud. That's total BS, I just have to say it. That's not true. What I would agree with though is that we're on a journey. You know we're not at a point where every company should hit a button right now and lift and shift everything to the cloud, right? And so there are sort of steps along the way that we think some companies need to make. And you know that frankly if all you have is a legacy on premises set of technology then that's the story you're going to tell. And it's not a lie. It's true that for some companies but what's true for most companies almost all the time is that the cloud is the best answer. And we're essentially, we're through the evangelism phase here. There's not really any question anymore whether that's a viable solution for most large businesses. It is, you know we've got over 40 customers now paying us over a million dollars a year. Then that's doubled in the last two years. So it's the fastest growing segment of our business is large scale contact centers running 100% on the cloud and they are loving it. And another thing we talk about is cloud as an enabler of AI. We've, that's been a theme. I know that AI came up sort of a little bit controversially on that panel that you were on this morning but talk to us about AI as an accelerant of the customer experience and the agent experience. Yeah, well I'll tell you a little story. I was call center agent my first job. We were talking about that earlier.  You've heard them all. You're never going to be surprised by an inbound sort of caller or message or whatever.  But the big challenge in the context. So if you got me on the phones I would know the answers to your questions. After you take 8,000 calls you're fast. You're efficient. You can deliver that great experience. The big problem in the contact center mostly a labor driven operation. There's very high turnover. Contact center reps once they've taken out these 8,000 calls the first thing they want to do is get the heck out of the contact center. We think that AI offers a brand new way to solve that problem. To deliver the intelligence and the prediction to your most junior agents. Let them focus on the empathy. We say let the machine bring the mastery and let the human bring the heart. Because it's really important that you have that human touch in that experience. That's what people crave in life. It's like I don't want to talk to a bot whether it's on text or on IVR. As far as I'm concerned this rash of bots that we've seen are sort of the new IVRs. Nobody likes talking to a computer. You want to talk to a human. So our goal right now is to see how we can make those humans more efficient. How we can arm them with real time interactions and that's all about leveraging data. Because the data in this case is voice. So voice is the new data. It's the biggest source of dark data in the enterprise. Customer voice, actual voice like wave files. What's new in the last year or two is that we can now take that in real time, take that customer voice, convert it into text, real time, with high accuracy, better than humans can do. And we can then use that to generate predictions about what that rep should say or do next. That sort of superpower rep who's taken 8,000 calls. How do you make every rep like that? We are sort of heading down a path to enable that. The very first step though is you have to get to the cloud. Because this technology cannot be done on premises. So you can dance around that all you want, but the reality is you cannot get data at scale on premises with the legacy approach. You have to be in the cloud and that's where we are and that's where we started. Well that data driven story is something that definitely resonated with us this week at the show and something we heard a lot from your team. Something that's happening just across industries. Love to hear a little bit about, you know, just future growth where you, you know, 5.9 had a very strong product, great customer experience to begin with, but yourself and Jonathan now on the team starting to move down the AI path, data becomes more and more important part of the story. What should we be looking at for 5.9 kind of the next 12 to 18 months? Yeah, well I think 5.9's got the best experience for our customers. And you know, where we're heading, the big opportunity here is to deliver that next generation of innovation to the contact center to enable an experience unlike anything they've ever delivered before. So that you can take in any company anywhere in the world and deliver that sort of best in class experience, right?  And whether that's inbound or outbound, if it's outbound, it's really important that it is not only predictive, but that it's anticipating what your needs are. Because I like to say, if I have to call support, like that's already a problem. Why am I calling you? You know, with IoT and with instrumentation going on and with the ability to gather data, part of what you should be doing, every business should be doing, is anticipating what their customers are going to need and sharing that information across their company and the contact center is really where that all comes together. To be able to say, look, we know this customer's already having a problem with this. Like let's not have an outbound marketing call to try and upsell them. We should be calling them to figure out how we can make that experience better. So really honing and optimizing and anticipating your user's needs is sort of the other side of this. So it's both the inbound case I talked about, but also that outbound case and that proactive engagement that I think every end user really would like in an effective way. Five nine has about five billion recorded conversations, customer conversations a year. Five billion minutes a year. Five billion minutes, thank you. A year, tremendous amount of opportunity there for your customers to start digging into that dark data and becoming predictive. Talk to us about that as a competitive advantage. Yeah, the very first step is lighting that data up. We're lighting it up now with Machine Learning. We signed a partnership with Google and we're using their speech to text in a secure way in a private way that doesn't expose anyone's data. So very, very secure. Obviously our name is Five Nine. We're known as the trusted brand in this industry. Five Nines of reliability is what we're all about. So this is for our customers is when it comes to the next step, it's really okay, take that voice data which is not very useful. Like you can have agent, spot check or supervisors listening on calls. That doesn't scale as I pointed out earlier. The more important opportunity here is let's convert all of that to text. Let's then take that text and it becomes computable. You can summarize it. We can use modern natural language processing technologies to summarize it, to include a summary of every call in your CRM system so that whenever the person calls, they can quickly scan down and see what's happened. Also to be predictive. Hey, we think that this person's been complaining about this for a long time. We can actually go predict what the challenge might be or and you can do that across your whole data set. So there's incredible business insight and value that can come from the voice of your customer, from really being able to translate that from voice into digital data. So we're turning voice into the next digital channel and we think that that has profound implications on every contact center and every business. Yeah, Ron, one of the interesting things is if you look around this show floor, you've got a lot of partnerships but there's some of the overlaps in blurring the lines between some of the environments. We had Carfax on, good customer of yours started out with the contact center agents but they've got quite a lot of seats just for the sales doing outbound, not our traditional contact center. You're partnering with marketing cloud and unified communications but some of those lines blur quite a bit so. What is it called to a contact center that the lines of that are blurring? The traditional thing you would imagine like what I was working in 20 years or 30 years ago was like rows of cubes, people on headsets, like that's mostly what people think about but increasingly some of our largest customers, it's nurse practitioners, it's doctors, it's other experts that are interacting with their customers, it's education consultants and specialists, these are all customers of ours that are using our platform today. I think about 10 years ago, I'll give you an example of this transition, 10 years ago my wife's step was giving me a hard time about my garage being messy as she likes to do because it was messy and I sort of successfully ignored this for about two years and then eventually had to do something about it, she didn't give up, she's very persistent and so I ran down to Home Depot and I got some like rack things that I could bring home and I organized all my junk. So fast forward to a year ago and we've moved, we now live in San Francisco and Steph's on me again about the same thing, consistent and I ignore her for a while and I go all right, all right, I'll get it done. So what do I do? I think about, well last time I did this, I got a rack, how am I gonna get a rack? I went on my phone and I searched garage organizing systems and I find a few companies and I go onto their websites and I do a little bit of self-service like discovery and learning about their products. I'm an empowered consumer at this point, right? I find three different companies, I call one of them because like this is a big purchase, I don't want this huge thing to show up, steal, blah, blah, blah at my house if it's the wrong thing, I get ahold of someone, I talk to them, I have a good experience. I hang up, I called one other one just to kind of compare it, I compared the two, then I ordered it and it showed up at my doorstep. So 10 years ago, let me give you the punchline here, 10 years ago, one trip to brick and mortar, zero calls to the call center, 10 years later now, zero trips to brick and mortar, two calls to a call center and those calls to call center were the differences between a sale and no sale. That's the experience economy in action and that tells me that there may even be more contact center agents in the future and they'll look very different than how they look today. That's a really interesting view that you give us of how different a contact center agent is, I wouldn't have thought of it as, you're right, these are nurse practitioners, it's so diverse. Speaking of diversity, I know that 5ix9ine has several thousand customers globally. One of the ones that you mentioned during the panel this morning was Estee Lauder which I thought was so interesting because- Woman Founded Company? Woman Founded Company, not a tech company, talk to us about how 5ix9ine helped this business transform and actually did George Clooney a solid? Yes, we did George Clooney a solid. So in the case of Estee Lauder, they were a, they're a huge company, 11 billion dollars in sales. They're an amalgamation of 40 different brands, very high-end skin care products and so they had a big challenge which was they bought 40 companies, they did not integrate any of them. So you call any one of these places, it was all different contact centers. They didn't even know when we began how many call center agents they had. We had to sort of make that a part of the discovery process and global. They're in all over the world. They're in Asia Pacific, they're in France and Europe, they're here. They had telecom contracts in almost every single one of those cases. They had independent technology contracts in almost every single one of those cases and I don't even know how many systems that were coming together but it was a lot. So we engaged with them and basically provided, we helped them write the RFP, we helped work through that process, we got them on board with our software, nothing to deploy, nothing to install, right? Just have your agents log in, we did a training and we were able to onboard well over 1,000 agents onto the platform and those were folks who were engaged across many, many different businesses. And some of the things that they wanted in this upgrade was not just to sort of like have fewer contracts or a better system but it was also to tie that system back into the business. So they have some products that they give away at like the Oscars and the Emmys or whatever. Gift bags and they want brand representatives and influencers to use their products so they encourage them to call in to order more or to find out more about their products and so on. They don't want them coming into the same contact center that you or I would use, maybe you would go to the VIPs but I'll call the regular contact center. They want those to go right into their VIPs and make sure they get the right specialist at the right time to that customer. And that, well I think actually while we were in helping them out with one of the deployments and one of the onboardings, George Clooney's people had called in and the team was actually dealing with that and so we were able to get that to the right agent at the right time and that's about knowing the skills, being able to route things in a complex way, understanding oh this is a contact coming from an event. That event has some VIPs at the event. We've got a specialist here who's got this skill and that skill, this is the right person for it to go to. They're really good at dealing with VIPs and you can get it to the right person at the right time. So we saw it in action, it was obviously great and what made us feel good that we could help them deliver on what they wanted. Wow, all that contacts, Rowan thank you so much for joining Stu and me this afternoon. And also for 5.9, for graciously hosting theCUBE the last three days, we've had a great time, great conversations and can't wait to see what happens next year. Me too, stay tuned. Stay tuned for Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE.


Thank you. My name is Virgil Stevens. I'm from the Stone in Dakota, Morning Reserve. Part of my job is to work with the younger children. Teach about our culture. Culture, our culture, it's an education. That's where we teach our children. That's how I learned myself. When an elder is present, you feel more comfortable at work sites and at home. Always seek guidance. As we go older, that's one of our teachings that we need to put out to our younger children. And in our culture, one of our protocols is to present tobacco to an elder. You will ask for guidance or ask questions. And most of the time, the elders will give you advice. You follow it. You will get good results. And I'm here today, part of a group that are presenting our First Nations culture, Métis and Inuit, and all the community schools. Some First Nations, Métis and Inuit, they go to schools of the reserve and they need to know about their culture. I'm here at a workshop about that and I like it very much. People get to know each other. They need to work together, stand together, sharing, giving, helping. Part of our First Nations culture is about sharing, giving and helping. My late father once told me, if you're in a workplace, if you're doing something, make sure a lot of people benefit from what you do. That's part of our First Nations Métis and Inuit culture. And I'm glad that I'm here with other First Nations. They know what they're doing. That is their job to preserve our culture. Also, I want other nationalities to understand about our culture, what it's all about. It's not just about sweating, sun dances or powwows. Our culture is a religious teaching too. We learn from our elders. We get older. We pass that on, what we learn from our elders. And I'm looking forward to present more of our First Nations Métis and Inuit cultures in urban areas of the country. And today, I thank the staff and organizers to come up here in this Chutina Reserve. I've met people that I've never met before. We need to understand who we are and work together. Yes, teachings are young people. If we are to teach them, we have to work with them. Young and old are working together. Teamwork, teach them about teamwork and helping each other. Sharing, giving, use our talents. It can be done if they work on it. Elders always say, go work on it. Always have a positive idea to better yourself. Don't always feel down. Feel about giving a head. Another teaching in our culture is use the day. You will be strong mentally, physically. And respect elders and other First Nations culture and religious ceremony. Thank you.


The mechanism of the charge density wave in Kagome metals is under intense debate. Here, by using a combination of diffuse scattering and inelastic X-ray scattering, the authors show that the charge density wave transition in CS, RB, V3, SP5 is of the order disorder type. This article was authored by D. Sue Byers, A. Koshunov, A. H. Z. and others.