Welcome to the Metal Voice for the first time. Ronnie Romero, having a man of many hats. Yes, yes. Many tricks. Many tricks, many tricks. So the new album, Alan, before I butcher it, it's Too Many Lies, Too Many Masters that was released on September the 15th, your first solo album. Look at that. Look at that after. So who is your masters and who's lying to you? What's the problem? What's going on? Well, that's actually the perfect resume of my professional career. I was afraid you were going to say that. Yeah, I mean, that came to my mind like a year ago. I was going through kind of a difficult time in my personal life. But it also was affecting my professional life. Even now, it's like after more than two years since I saw my kid for the last time. And I don't have the chance to meet very often. So yeah, it was complicated.  So I was thinking how disappointed you get in the music business very often. And that's why for me, I got this Too Many Lies around. So from that point, I started to think also of how much people you have around telling you what to do. So I thought of this, there is too many masters around. There's too much people telling you what to do. And they know about your career and about your life more than you. They think so. They tell us what to do all the time on their show. Yeah. So that was the. Everybody is a professional, right? Everybody is a professional.  And everybody thinks they know better than everybody else. I like the title. It's very therapeutic, I guess, for you, right? To release this. Yeah. Actually, I will say there is a statement. But it's not that important anymore for me. So it's just something like, OK, I say it. And now I can move on. It's like saying it is what it is. Too many lies, too many masters. It is what it is. Yeah, exactly. That's sad. It's sad, but funny. OK, well, I mean, the whole thing is this. OK, go ahead, Alan. So I just want to know, like, OK, too many masters. Does this mean Ronnie Romero is doing his thing now? You've been in. Oh, my gosh, it'll take 15 minutes to name all the bands.  And this is what you're going to be concentrating on. Ronnie Romero and his solo career. Well, I always been. That's the main thing. It's a mistake that the people think I was not doing my or having control of my career through the years. I mean, I was lucky enough to have Richie Blackmore, Michael Sheehan, Karate, and Vandenberg and all those great guys working with Richie Faulkner. Richie Faulkner and Tony Hernando and Leo Leone from Walthard have many, many more, you know? And but at the same time, it's something like the people they never realized. I was always writing music. On the first two or so black albums, I did like four songs. I did a couple of songs with Michael Schenker on the last two albums, you know? So I think I was not recognized as a songwriter until now that I came with all my own material. So it's funny.  I was doing that since many years ago. But, you know, it's funny at the same time. Well, tell everybody, you know, that have not heard the music yet. Describe it. Is this a Dio rainbow-ish era type music? Is this Judas Priest power metal or what is it? I was made in two ways. The first one, if you heard, if you listened already the first two covers albums I did, you will find all those influences on this album. I mean, it's pretty obvious. Like the covers I did on those two records are totally related with all my influences. So the diddly influences. But also it is true that when I talked to the guys with Andy the drummer and Jose the Giddle player about the songwriting, I told them I really want to go in the direction of kind of a Dio solo career, especially look up the Wolves of Last in Line kind of album. Even Dio with Black Sabbath, that kind of riff and kind of melodies, you know, that you have like a heavy metal, great riffs and the great drumming and all that stuff. But also very melodic and something like the people can remember and sing together on the shows. Because it's also very, very focused on the life side. I always thought that when you're writing a song, first of all, it's really like a mistake to overproduce the vocals and the instruments because you need to bring the song live and you need to play it without backing tracks as possible. But also the vocals, you know, we need to bring something like the people can remember and sing with us on the shows. So yeah, I will say that it's like melodic heavy metal and a little bit of our rubble. Yeah, I've been listening to it, it's quite enjoyable.  That's funny. Crossroad, crossroad for me is the standout track. It's funny you mentioned that song because, you know, it's not, it's the first person who said that it's similar to Sunstorm, but the funny thing is that's a song I wrote for Michael Schenker actually. Oh, okay. Yeah, when he told me on the last album, the Universal album, he told me to write a couple of songs and I thought, okay, so you can write a song for Michael Schenker that it's not gonna sound like Michael Schenker, so it's kind of a thin line you can move in between on the songwriting. But I thought at the same time that there's a long time and a lot of people were asking about this Robbie Macaulay and Michael Schenker album, like a more melodic and more talking about love, you know, that kind of emotions and relationships. Not only like the last album there, you know, it's typical like a heavy metal and a little bit different. So I wrote the song and sadly they didn't take it for the album, it was probably, it was too melodic for him. And but I really wanted to give a chance to the song because I thought it was a good song. So I adapted a little bit because now it's faster than the original, but it turns out in a really good, like a hard rock melodic song, even more similar than Sunstorm, I would say it's more similar to Pretty Maze probably. A Distant Shore? It's a little more of a techno thing for me. Yeah, yeah, I would say it's even more oriented to the pop side. That's probably the most- It's like a Eurovision kind of song. If again, you know, that sort of feel, right? Yeah, that's probably the most special song for me in the record because it's a song I wrote for my son. We were talking before. We didn't met in more than two years already. Oh boy. Yeah, we have a difficult relation with his mother.  I thought, okay, I will write a song thinking on him that he will like the song. So that's why it's a little bit different. But at the end, I think it really fit on the full story on the concept of the record. Yeah, and I really enjoyed the song Crossroad too. I mean, I don't think that would be out of place on a Vandenberg album. It's kind of got that bluesy feel to it. And it's a standout track for me as well. Yeah, and that's another funny thing because we didn't have that song at the end of the production. Yeah, we were thinking about if you have an extra song, a little bit different. And so the guitar player came to me and said, I have this bluesy song. And I was like, not sure about it. I was like, okay, I don't think it's gonna fit, but let's give it a try.  I was going to the studio that morning like nine in the morning. So five in the morning I woke up and I wrote a lyric. And then I went to the studio and I did a try. And actually all the double chorus after the solo in that song is the very first take I improvised for the song. So yeah, so I recorded and then we were working on the production and it was like, okay, I think this is gonna work. And actually the record label, they were like, okay, this must be one of the singles. You know what's amazing? I hear so much of like you mentioned the Ronnie James Diora rainbow-ish type of songs and the album. And you think like you're one of the very few people that hung out with Richie Blackmore. I mean, that sort of, I mean, not many people do this, right? And even the band he was in didn't hang out with, Richie Blackmore back in the mark, two, three or whatever it was. I mean, what's it like being in the inner circle of, do you feel like there must be this coolness, a factor, right? Like you're in this inner circle and the whole world is outside. I mean, what's the difference between in being in the circle and not being in the circle? What did you find? It is a huge difference. And that's for me was probably the most enjoyable thing of working with Richie. Because at the end, yeah, you're on the stage and you play songs and you are in the rainbow band and all that stuff and that's great. And there were another seven, eight singers who did the same thing before counting the rainbow sing and the purple and all the stuff. There was a lot of singers working with them. But as you mentioned, it's like to be with them having a beer after dinner and talking about UFOs or whatever. There was the topic that night until three in the morning. And sometimes he's taking the guitar and we're just singing whatever from the Beatles, Queen and Deep Purple Rainbow, whatever, it comes to that moment. And that was probably the most enjoyable thing. It is great. Obviously, all of this character that people know from Richie, like he's a tough guy and this difficult person and all that stuff is how you see him outside the circle. And that's, in my opinion, there's a character and he behaved that way to keep the people away, which is very understandable in the way that there is a lot of people trying to get in the circle. So it's totally understandable. But when you are in, is a very nice guy, is very loyal, is very cool, he treats you really well. I don't have, like if I think about it, nothing to do, nothing to say bad about Richie Blackmore during the five, six years we work it together. Even with my family, they were all nice, all the people that were great. They would treat me like a very good, very good. So yeah, it's very interesting. So he's a notorious practical joker. Did he play any jokes on you? Yeah, all the time is, all the time he is proving, is putting you in a proof. Like, what do you think about certain things? Well, how are you gonna react to certain things? So it's always tempting you, like, you know. Are you allowed to disagree with them? I mean, you can have disagreement with them. But you remember the next day.  So it's very challenging to have a chat with him because, you know, you are all the time, you need to be in the same level. And I like that because I'm probably the same kind of people. So, but yeah, he's joking all the time. And sometimes he's telling jokes, very clever jokes that because of my English, especially at that time, because when I met Richie for the first time, I didn't talk English at all. I was like, I see you. So he was telling jokes and I was just like, you know, question mark and he was doing it on purpose. I don't understand, you know. So, but yeah, I remember one day it was on the first tour and it was like the welcome joke. So I was going for running every morning.  It was because I let the window open and it was throwing garbage inside the room.  So I looked through the window and it was outside like saying, hello, welcome to the band. That's funny. How did you connect with Richie? Like how does one go about singing for Richie Blackmore? Like it was a through his wife. Like how did you get that call or that email or that text? Yeah, I get the, I get the first communication was with Candice because everything related to technology, Richie is totally out. You know, it doesn't want to, it doesn't have a phone. You know, it doesn't have a computer. So, so it was still, still, is that the same? I think that the last time we met on 2019, it was starting to use like an iPod, but just to listen to music. It's got a phone. Probably only like, yeah, like, Rotary. House line, not even a phone, a cell phone, you know. Like a landline, something like that. But yeah. So yeah, I got the first communication with the wife, but then I met the in-person and in Munich. And yeah, it was very nice. I think that we had a kind of a very good, and I wouldn't say special, but like a good relationship. You know, he was very nice with me and very protective in the way he was telling me, you know, be careful with this, don't do that, you know, do this or, you know, that kind of stuff. He was very nice with me all the time. That's good too. With this album, what's the goal moving forward? Is this gonna concentrate more on a solo career, or you're still gonna have all the bands that you've, you know, like Elegant with Richie Faulkner, is that Elegant Weapons? What's the plan in the future here? Well, obviously to be focused on less.  I was doing before that probably not gonna take any step forward anymore, especially the Ferryman and probably Sunstorm also, and all the collaborations I was doing before also, because they wanna be focused on the future. And that's why I quit Michael Schenker at the same time, you know, because I thought it was my time playing covers with all those legions is over. I had a great time with Richie and with Michael, probably to Richie, you know, is the reason that I can be a professional right now. He put me on the spot and gave me the chance to do something on the music, but I think that time is over. I did that, you know, and that's it. I need to move on. And so yeah, I will be more focused on the things that I can think and move forward through the years, especially Lorsal Black, which is my band, and Elegant Weapons, because, you know, the album was great, we received, we did a great tour. We're playing to the second album, and especially my solo career. That's gonna be the main thing. Actually, the main thing for the next year is just making tours with this album. So yeah. So you're gonna continue, like, is Elegant Weapons more of a project, or is it becoming a band, a permanent band that you're, at least you're hoping it to become? That was the idea from the beginning. So obviously there is a moment where you need to figure it out and you need to try if it works or not. But actually with Elegant Weapons, what we found when we did this tour in June, July, is, I mean, the album works really well. The people they really like and they love the band, we were playing a tour just one week after the release of the album, so the people they didn't have really like a time to listen to the album. But anyway, the people they were enjoying very much, the shows and the songs, they were like enjoying the song. So we were very surprised about that. So we think that this is something like we can build on in a more solid way. And we have the support of a nice record label, like Nuclear, so yeah, and we're actually thinking on the second record already. Scott Travis, he was in and he was out, he was in, like, what happened there, like? It was, you need to think that this album, it was recorded independently. Actually, I recorded 2021, the vocals, and the album was already recorded by Scott and Rex, especially Rex, it didn't know that he will tour with Pantera after. Right. Oh, you know, and then Scott, it was the same. He was in the pandemic, he was doing this, but nobody knew that, you know, that Judas Priest will come with another new album and then a tour and all this stuff. So when all the plans were clear, Scott and Rex, they say, listen, we cannot do this because we need to come in with the main project. So, but that was it, you know, nothing, no hard feelings, I mean, nothing to do with that.  I never thought in that way, actually. I was just enjoying. You know, it's really hard to say no to all those musicians that I was working with last years, you know, especially after Blackmore, when Vandenberg came and then Michael Schenker at the same time, who was hard to see. What else do you need? Like, geez, it's like, who are you missing? You're missing Evie Malmsteen, that's who you're missing. I was never interested because of the stories I heard. But, yeah, probably Tony Ayumi will be the only one. That's right, that's right. He'll have on my to-do list. You never know, he might call. You never know? He was very happy with the cover I did.  And he posted on his Twitter and he said, like, that was, that's a great cover. Thank you very much and all that stuff. So, yeah, you never know. Have you ever gotten any calls from anyone else that you were surprised that you just said, you know, not now, it's not because you didn't like them, but you just said, this is just too much. You know, like an Angi Malmsteen type. There was a couple. There was a couple of things that I needed to say no because it was, I thought it would be too much.  But I think, you know, because I move, I move, I move for, you know, the feelings. And for me, it's very important to have a good feeling. But with something is like, only about business.  Like the first word is, the first question is, like, how much are you gonna charge?  Yeah, yeah, they want your fee up. You didn't have a chat by phone to see if we can hang together, you know? So, that kind of things, I don't like it. And I say no to a couple of guys. No hard feelings also, but I was pretty clear that for me, it's very important to be comfortable working with the people. And so I say no. I mean, your voice, no matter what you do, your voice is fantastic. What's your secret? How do you preserve that powerful voice of yours? Well, the secret is there is no secrets. It's very simple. Besides, I never took vocal lessons in my life. I learned, you know, just practicing. And so there's a lot of practice behind. There's a lot of hard work in that way. You need to spend a lot of time. And then obviously to have a healthy way of life. That's very important because the most of the singers, they prepare for a recording or they prepare for a tour. But if you are taking care of your body through all the year, you don't need to be especially prepared for anything. So because you are prepared all the time. So that's will be something like I will say to all the singers, you know? I have a healthy way of life. You know, I do a lot of sports and with my wife we eat very healthy. We are not that kind of a vegan or vegetarian kind of stuff. We eat everything, but you know, in a healthy way. And that's it.  And you need to love what you're doing and you need to be happy with. And that's why probably the people say, oh, you're doing too much or you're working with too much people because I'm happy doing it. It just like, you know, I was reading the article about when you're talking about it, you went through your down, your darkness, let's say.  And I mean, again, you just talk about what you want to talk about, but you don't come across that way.  Was it the fan negativity, the comments? It was just the pressure of too much work. What brings you to that low point? Because I just don't see you like that. And I just, I mean, if you want to talk about it, if you want to talk about it, I'm not gonna push you.  I'm glad you asked. Well, there was a mix of a lot of things. There was a bad period of my life in terms of, I mean, all the aspects.  Or if you have a problem in your work, you can deal with that if you are okay in your family. But when you have everything coming at the same time, and not only that, I was really disappointed about people, how people behave. And that's actually part of also the title of the album because I felt, especially in 2021, 22, I felt like the people, they don't care of each other anymore. They don't care, they don't care about anybody. They can, I mean, they say whatever they think they can say about you.  Actually, two weeks ago, they disclaimed this complaint. So it's totally, everything's totally solved, but because it was not true, but it was not only doing that. He was putting the news, she was going to the television to say that, talking about me. So obviously the people who was listening and watching this, they was calling me whatever they wanted to call. They were telling me, criminal, they were telling me that I would be in jail.  I feel that I'm not a bad person. So if you take that and at the same time, we're coming from the COVID, which was a very hard time for musicians.  So obviously there is obviously also I was missing my kid because I couldn't talk to him, I couldn't see him. I was not allowed to even send him a message to see how is it going, you know? So during a couple of months, your wife is working every day and you have a lot of time alone at home overthinking all of that. And you lost hope on people, you lost hope on yourself and you start to think that you are the problem. So if you think that you are the problem, the solution is, okay, if I am the problem, I'm gonna release everybody from the problem. And that was the way of thinking. Gladly and luckily I have my wife with me and she was taking me out of that darkness. I was going through, but it was really hard. It was really hard to manage, especially because, as I told you before, I think that I'm not probably the best person in the world. I'm not the Dalai Lama, but you know, I have my things.  And I just felt that I didn't deserve that treatment. Even today, you know, the people is talking about that. And it happened, especially when I went to- It's like once it's out there, people, no matter if it's true or not, people still push you and push you and it's just- They don't care. Now the people, they don't care. Russell Brand's going through that right now where I just to see how that turns out, right? It just takes a few people to bring stuff up and then you'll see if it gathers momentum or not. Sorry, I cut you off there, Ronnie, yeah. But yeah, now I'm okay. You know, I have my wife, she's a very strong person and she was supporting me. And now all the legal things are getting solved because, you know, we proved that it was not true. So hopefully in a couple of months, I will have the chance to talk to my kid again and that will be okay, yeah. What I've learned, Ronnie, is you know yourself, you know the type of person you are inside, nobody can take that away from you and there's stuff that you can't control, you just got to let that go and focus on the stuff that you can't control. That's what I've learned in my life, so. I find that public figures are sometimes the loneliest and the saddest, even though they're loved by so many fans. It's crazy. Well, because I think it's because of, it's a mistake of think that the most of the people they think that because you're a public person, they can say whatever they want and that's not true. I mean, I'm pretty much okay with criticism where they're talking about my career and my voice or my band or my music, whatever it is, obviously it's part of the job, the people they can say, I don't like you or I don't like your band or you are in too many projects or whatever it is and I'm pretty much okay with that. You know, it's part of the game.  You know, that's not correct. That shouldn't be. So yeah, hopefully in the future, all these anonymous accounts gonna end it up, you know and at least the social, to open a profile, you're gonna need your ID and all those problems gonna end it up in that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, I actually had a last question on Michael Shanker. Did he ever talk about his brother? Did he ever talk? Cause every time we talk up to Michael Shanker, he just give, we asked him about his brother, he just goes on for hours. He goes on for hours. He doesn't stop, he's so mad at him. Do you know if he's gotten over it?   There's just a joke, it's just a joke, it's just a joke. But yeah, yeah, he obviously has, he must be something, but you know, the funny thing is I met a Rudolph like two years ago and we were playing the same festival and then the manager came, Scorpion's manager came to my room, to my dressing room and he say, you're running, you play with Michael, right, and say, yeah, nice to meet you on the Scorpion's manager. I want to introduce you to Rudolph. So we went to his dressing room and he was such a nice guy and he was talking really good about Michael. He was saying this such an amazing and talented guitar player is great. He's doing great now. I wanna say hi when you see him and blah, blah, whatever.  Okay, never mind. I love them both, I love them both. On the record, I love them both. Michael's amazing. We got to see him on the last time and I mean, he played for three hours straight. It's unbelievable. Yeah. I mean, he's probably the most amazing musician I play with. Considering he is celebrating 50 years of career, we did a tour in the U.S. for, we did like a 28 shows in a month. Wow. Wow. It didn't miss any single note, any of the shows. It's just amazing. I don't know how we do that, but I was amazed every night, just watching while he was playing the solos on the songs.  It's amazing. And he doesn't play for 45 minutes, right? I mean. No, it's two hours, two hours show. This guy is a workhorse, man. In rock bottom, he does like a 10 minute solo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he keeps cranking out albums. He's writing and writing and writing and touring. He never stops, man. He's amazing. Yeah, he's just amazing. I guess on that note, Arani, it's been a pleasure. Look forward to seeing you on tour, hopefully with Elegant Weapons or your solo album. We're in Canada, just so you know. Hopefully you guys will come around here one day. And the album. I'm glad things are getting better for you. I'm glad you're feeling good. Stay positive. And it's been a pleasure really speaking to you for the first time, Arani. If you're ever feeling down, just call us up.  Thank you, man. Too many lies, too many masters. It's already out. It was released on Frontiers. It was released on September the 15th. Pick it up. Check out Arani Romero on tour. Thank you for everything, Arani. Thank you.


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Hi friends really happy to be with you today I'm going to be talking about lies that cosmetic companies throw at us that we should be Aware of and this is a very light-hearted video you guys Please keep in mind that this isn't something that is meant to make you upset or get you going or anything like that You guys honestly, this was just something I was thinking about the other day I was thinking why in the world do we accept that as consumers and a lot of this video will be about Just keeping in mind these things because I as a consumer I can get sucked in to that thinking of these term and this terminology that I'm gonna put forward to you So I just wanted to kind of give you guys a heads up because I know that I have been Guilty of doing this so many times. They'll say these things and I'll go. Oh, I gotta have that I gotta have it right now And so I wanted to make sure that I said that beforehand Please know this is just kind of a light-hearted video and it's just meant as you know Let's just think about these things. So I hope that you do enjoy it Please give it a thumbs up everyone if you wouldn't mind. Thank you all for being here with me If you are new to the channel, thank you for stopping by and I hope that you do decide to please subscribe Okay, let's get into this Terminology or these lies that the cosmetics industry tells us. All right, the first one is this one This one kills me because it's poreless.  Okay, this product can make you look poreless I know as I am aging my pores are tending to look bigger And that's because my skin is not as taut as it used to be and it's you know, kind of fallen a little bit so it's not got as nice of spring back to it as I used to and Seeing something that says poreless intrigues me immediately because I feel like my pores are big Especially on my chin my nose right there on my cheeks But here's the thing you guys Poreless is not something that we can achieve. First of all, we all have pores on our face, right? And the pores that we have right now are the pores that we're gonna have forever We can't do anything about the actual size of our pores Now I will tell you that there is a way to diminish the look of your pores And there is a way to kind of soften that if you're somebody that does have large pores It's a lot of times because you've had oily skin throughout your life when you produce oils the oils tend to mix with dead skin cells and dirt And they end up kind of depositing into those pores now for me Like I said, it's about aging as I get older My you know, my face has gone done a little bit of falling here And I noticed that my pores are bigger and that is because not because I have oily skin I actually have the opposite. I have very dry skin But it's because those pores tend to be accentuated now that my skin isn't so tight But what you can do if you do have oily skin and if you do have bigger pores Sometimes they can appear bigger because they are Congested or they're clogged with sebum and sebum is are the dirt or the oil and mixed with skin cells or Anything like that that gets in there and it really can't come out now There are several products that you can use you can use an AHA BHA whichever when you like lactic acid glycolic acid There's several other acids that you can use to actually do a peel on your skin And it's really going to help to get rid of all that excess skin cells and you know Sluff all those off, but it's gonna help refine those pores because it's going to clean them out Nice cinnamite is a fantastic one for doing that as well. It's really good So my suggestion is if you want to use one of those peels, I love the ordinaries Glycolic acid toner. I use that on a daily basis. I also love good molecules They have a nice cinnamite toner that I think is Primo and I actually noticed Really quickly that my pores looked diminished when I started to use the good molecules one So keep that in mind and then the ordinary has a really good AHA BHA chemical peel.  Okay. The other thing is there's another one about creaseless, okay? I have really bad really really bad creases because I smile a lot And so I have crow's feet. I have really deep crevices I know when I hear the word creaseless that the product itself is not going to do that that is going to be about application When I think of creaseless, it doesn't mean that my wrinkles are going to look diminished that I'm going to have You know, no more wrinkles down here Because what's going to happen is anytime I put a concealer on there if I don't do it a certain way It's going to get creasing through throughout the day, especially if it's a very hydrating product It's going to crease on me. If I don't set it down a little bit. It's going to crease on me So what I find is in order to not have any creasing in there or you know, keep it from creasing Down into my creases because I'm gonna have those I'm gonna have those wrinkles. I'm gonna have those fine lines I have to do it a specific way That's why I don't believe in anything being creaseless because I know that I'm gonna have creases under there Even after I do that whole routine. So it's gonna be like No way Okay, next one is just a personal pet peeve of mine because this is not necessarily Something that they're not working on as far as actually attacking the problem, but I'll tell you what it is it's anti-fatigue and I feel like anti-fatigue is a little bit of a misnomer because people that have under eye under eye bags and I do get under eye bags But people that have bags not dark circles under eye bags Actually, or they haven't gotten enough sleep their eyes are gonna look darker They're gonna have more puffy a more puffy face that kind of thing now a caffeine product will help with that but the reason that that kind of irritates me a little bit is because a caffeine product is also going to take the water out of my mature dry face and So I can't do that I can't use a cream or a primer or anything underneath my eyes that has caffeine in it because it's actually going to make me Look older. That's completely defeating the purpose So I just kind of stay away from those anti-fatigue products And I just try to get my sleep and honestly you guys if you're not getting your sleep and you're not being able to rejuvenate You're gonna look tired throughout the day. Anyway, it might do a quick fix But later on in the day, you're gonna have a problem with it anyway So I feel like that's kind of a one of those ones that you kind of have to walk a fine line with The other thing if you do have eye bags I'm gonna refer you to one of my videos that I found not long ago. That is about eye massage That is fantastic to help your eyes drain that water that can get clogged around them So if you do have eye bags or you feel like that's because you're not getting enough sleep you're fatigued You might try this massage It works great when you're are tired because it does bring the blood up to your eyes But it will help to uncongest this area right here around your eyes. It's so good It really truly is a really good one you guys. So that is one to look out for okay The next one is one that really gets me This one is really hard one for me and it's better than Botox you guys better than Botox How can they even say that? Let me tell you what Botox does Botox is Actually a product that will go into any of these creases around your Elevens around your eyes around your forehead. It's going to actually stop you from creasing Paralyzes these muscles so that you can't do that creasing anymore. You can't frown You can't lift your eyes like this. You can't really get that squinty right here on your eyes There is no other product that will do that honestly even the one that is called argyroline Now I've been doing some studies about argyroline. It does help to relax those muscles It does do that and if you get the right kind of argyroline It can penetrate but it can't go clear down into the muscles So honestly you guys it's gonna help relax. It's gonna help show it a little bit But it's not going to completely take that away So when you see something that says better than Botox it can't be because Botox is the actual Botulinum toxin it is toxin that goes in and it paralyzes all of that So there's no way that it can be and along with that one is my last one And this one was recently brought to my attention And it's actually the reason that I decided to do this video and it is called anti-aging now Okay, I know that anti-aging is something that we all think about and we want Oh, I want that because I'm getting older and I want to look as young as I possibly can for as long as I possibly can and I definitely want to do that and see if it works or not Okay, there are so many products on the market that are going to make your skin look better You're going to have a more radiant glow. That's youthful. You're going to refine your pores. That's youthful You're going to help slow the fine lines and the wrinkles. That's useful as well but you guys This lady that was is one of my subscribers now, and I hope you're listening because this is about you She brought forward the point that why do we continue to talk about anti-aging like it's a bad thing? Aging is not a bad thing. I am glad to be where I'm at number one I'm happy to be alive. That is a huge blessing that many people don't get today to be alive at 52 And I am looking forward to a much longer life from here on in the other thing is Aging is not a bad thing. The whole world has gone crazy especially the United States and gotten obsessed with keeping ourselves and making ourselves look as youthful as possible Don't get me wrong. I am one that wants to look younger as well But there is a point where you need to go I am who I am and just because I'm a certain age doesn't mean that I'm not beautiful and that I'm not worthwhile I did a video on this a little while ago that says I'm over 50 I'm not invisible and I feel like that we kind of get lost in the shuffle there But we can be our own worst enemy too as far as I don't look like her I can't do my eyes like she does. I can't you know, my skin doesn't look as good as hers does That's probably true, but we need to find ways to build ourselves up. We don't need to worry about aging We don't need anti-aging. We need to okay. This helps with signs of aging possibly Um, I think that aging needs to be celebrated a celebration of life. Look where I am at We have knowledge and wisdom that so many young people just don't have And we we know where we want our life to go at this point If you don't then maybe we need to do some introspection or something like that But we pretty much know who we are what we like about ourselves or and we have changed those things if we don't like them So definitely anti-aging is something that I didn't think about until I made this video until I was talking to this gal But we're not going to get away from it. I feel like just because somebody says anti-aging I'm not going to not watch their channel or not look at their product Maybe we can find a different terminology Let me know in the comment section you guys what we can think of for a different terminology besides anti-aging Maybe we could slow the process. I don't know what it could be But let's kind of bounce that around a little bit and see what happens. Thank you guys so much for being with me today I hope that you did enjoy this lighthearted video Like I said, it is not a video that is meant to attack anybody It's just one of those things that I was going, huh, I don't think that I like that term very much anymore So you guys have a great day week or weekend wherever you're at I hope that it's going well for you. Please stay safe. Stay sanitized. Stay hydrated. Stay well And I will catch you all in my very next video. Love you guys. Bye. Bye


It's theCUBE, covering the Virtual Vertica Big Data Conference 2020 brought to you by Vertica. Hi everybody and welcome to this CUBE special presentation of the Vertica Virtual Big Data Conference. theCUBE is running in parallel with day one and day two of the Vertica Big Data Event. By the way theCUBE has been at every single big data event and it's our pleasure to be here in the virtual slash digital event as well. Gabriel Chapman is here, the director of FlashBlade Product Solutions Marketing at Pure Storage. Gabe, great to see you, thanks for coming on. Great to see you too, how's it going? It's going very well. I mean, I wish we were meeting in Boston at the Encore Hotel but, you know, and hopefully we'll be able to meet and accelerate at some point in the future or one of the subshows that you guys are doing the regional shows but because we've been covering that show as well but I really want to get into it and at the last accelerate, September 2019, Pure and Vertica announced a partnership, I remember Joy King ran up to me and said, hey, you got to check this out. The separation of compute and storage via EON mode now available on FlashBlade. So, and I believe still the only company that can support that separation and independent scaling both on-prem and in the cloud. So Gabe, I want to ask you, what were the trends in analytical database and cloud that led to this partnership? You know, realistically, I think what we're seeing is that there's been kind of a larger shift when it comes to modern analytics platforms towards moving away from the traditional, you know, Hadoop type architecture where we were doing and leveraging a lot of direct-to-cache storage, primarily because of the limitations of how that solution was architected. When we start to look at the larger trends towards, you know, how organizations want to do this type of work on-premises, they're looking at solutions that allow them to scale the compute and storage pieces independently and therefore, you know, the FlashBlade platform ended up being a great solution to support Vertica in their transition to EON mode, leveraging it essentially as an S3 object store. Okay, so let's circle back on that. You guys in your announcement of FlashBlade, you make the claim that FlashBlade is the industry's most advanced file and object storage platform ever. That's a bold statement. To defend that, what makes it- It's a bold statement. I mean, I like to go beyond that and just say, you know, so we've really kind of looked at this from a standpoint of, you know, as we've developed FlashBlade as a platform, and keep in mind, it's been a product that's been around for over three years now, and has been very successful for pure storage. The reality is that FastFile and FastObject as a combined storage platform is a direction that many organizations are looking to go. And we believe that we're a leader in that FastObject and FastFile storage place. And realistically, when we start to see more organizations start to look at building solutions that leverage cloud storage characteristics, but doing so on-prem for a multitude of different reasons, we've built a platform that really addresses a lot of those needs around simplicity, around, you know, making things that are, you know, fast matters for us. Simple is smart. We can provide, you know, cloud integrations across the spectrum. And, you know, there's a subscription model that fits into that as well. We fall, that falls into our umbrella of what we consider the modern data experience. And it's something that we've built into the entire pure portfolio. Okay, so I want to get into the architecture, a little bit of FlashBlade, and then try to understand the fit for analytic databases generally, but specifically for Vertica. So it is a blade. So you got compute and network included. It's a key value store based system.  And so I want to, and as a fabric based system, I want to understand what that all means. So take us through the architecture, you know, some of the quote unquote firsts that you guys talk about. So let's start with sort of the blade aspect. Yeah, the blade aspect. I mean, we call it a FlashBlade because if you look at the actual platform, you have a primarily a chassis with built-in networking components, right? So there's a fabric interconnect with inside the platform that connects to each one of the individual blades. Have their own compute that drives basically a pure storage Flash components inside. It's not like we're just taking SSDs and plugging them into a system and like you would with the traditional commodity off the shelf, a hardware design. This is a very much an engineered solution that is built towards the characteristics that we believe were important with fast file and fast object. Scalability, you know, massive parallelization when it comes to performance and the ability to really kind of grow in scale from essentially seven blades right now to 150.  Yeah, so I interviewed Kaws last September at Accelerate and of course, Pure has been, you know, attacked by some of the competitors is not having a scale out. I asked them his thoughts on that. He said, well, first of all, our FlashBlade is scale out. And he said, look, anything that adds to your complexity, you know, we avoid, but for the workloads that are associated with FlashBlade, scale out is the right sort of approach. Maybe you could talk about why that is. Well, you know, realistically, I think, you know, that that approach is better when we're starting to work with large unstructured data sets. I mean, FlashBlade is uniquely architected to allow customers to achieve, you know, a superior resource utilization for compute and storage while at the same time, you know, reducing significantly the complexity that has arisen around these kind of bespoke or siloed nature of big data and analytics solutions. I mean, we really kind of look at this from a standpoint of you have built and delivered or created applications in the public cloud space that address, you know, object storage and unstructured data. And for some organizations, the importance is bringing that on-prem. I mean, we do see cloud repatriation that coming on, for a lot of organizations as these data egress charges continue to expand and grow. And then organizations that want even higher performance than they were able to get into the public cloud space, they are bringing that data back on-prem. They are looking at from a standpoint we still want to be able to scale the way we scale in the cloud. We still want to operate the same way we operate in the cloud, but we want to do it within control of our own, you know, our own borders. And so that's, you know, that's one of the bigger pieces of that is we start to look at how do we address cloud characteristics and dynamics and consumption metrics or models, as well as the benefits and efficiencies of scale that they're able to afford but allowing customers to do that with inside their own data center. Yeah, so you were talking about the trends earlier. You had these cloud native databases that allowed the scaling of compute and storage independently. Vertica comes in with Eon.  Or they're just straight, you know, go to market.  Could you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, it's more than just, you know, that what we consider a channel meet in the middle or, you know, that Barney type of deal. It's, realistically, you know, we've done some firsts with Vertica that I think are really important. And if they think you look at the architecture and how we've brought this to market together, we have solutions teams in the back end who are, you know, subject matter experts in this space. If you talk to Joy and the people from Vertica, they're very high on, are very excited about the partnership because it opens up a new set of opportunities for their customers to leverage EON mode and, you know, get into some of the nuanced aspects of how they leverage the depot with inside each individual compute node and adjustments with inside there, reach additional performance gains for customers on-prem. And it's the same time for them that's still the ability to go into that cloud model if they wish to. And so I think a lot of it is around how do we partner as two companies? How do we do a joint selling motions? You know, how do we show up and, you know, do white papers and all of the traditional marketing aspects that we bring to the market? And then, you know, joint selling opportunities that exist where they are. And so, yeah, it's realistically, I think like any other organization that's going to market with a partner or an ISV that they have a strong partnership with, you'll continue to see us, you know, talking about our chose mutually beneficial relationships and the solutions that we're bringing to the market. Well, Dave, you know, of course, you used to be a Gartner analyst and you will go over to the vendor side now.  There are strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, et cetera, for every vendor. So you have Vertica who's got a very mature stack and talking to a number of the customers out there who are using Eon mode, you know, there's certain workloads where these cloud native databases make sense. It's not just the economics of scaling compute and storage independently. I want to talk more about that. There's flexibility aspects as well. But Vertica really has to play its trump card, which is look, we've got a big on-prem estate and we're going to bring that Eon capability both on-prem and we're embracing the cloud. Now they're obviously you have to, they had to play catch up in the cloud, but at the same time, they've got a much more mature stack than a lot of these other, you know, cloud native databases that might have just started a couple of years ago. So, you know, so there's trade-offs that customers have to make. How do you sort through that? Where do you see the interest in this? And what's the sweet spot for this partnership? You know, we've been really excited to build the partnership with Vertica and we're really proud to provide pretty much the only on-prem storage platform that's validated with the Vertica Eon mode to deliver a modern data experience for our customers together.  I think there's aspects and solutions that work very well there, but for the vast majority, I still think that there's, you know, your data center is not going away and you do want to have control over some of the, many of the different facets with inside the operational confines. So therefore we start to look at how do we can do the best of what cloud offers, but on-prem. And that's realistically where we start to see the stronger push for those customers who still want to manage their data locally, as well as maybe even work around some of the restrictions that they might have around cost and complexity, hiring, you know, the different types of skill sets that are required to bring applications purely cloud native. It's still that larger part of that digital transformation that many organizations are going forward with. And realistically, I think they're taking a look at the pros and cons. And we've been doing cloud long enough for people to recognize that, you know, it's not perfect for everything and that there's certain things that we still want to keep inside our own data center. So I mean, in realistic as we move forward, that's that better option when it comes to a modern architecture that can, you know, we can deliver and address a diverse set of performance requirements and allow the organization to continue to grow the model to the data, you know, based on the data that they're actually trying to leverage. And that's really what FlashWid was built for. It was built for a platform that can address small files or large files or high throughput, low latency, scale to petabytes in a single name space and a single rack as we like to put it in there. I mean, we see customers that have put, you know, 150 flash blades into production as a single name space. It's significant for organizations that are making that drive towards modern data experience with modern analytics platforms. Pure and Vertica have delivered an experience that can address that to a wide range of customers that are implementing, you know, the Vertica EON technology. I'm interested in exploring the use case a little bit further. You just sort of gave some parameters and some examples and some of the flexibility that you have. And, but take us through kind of what the discuss, the customer discussions are like. Obviously you've got in a big customer base, you and Vertica that's on-prem. That's the unique advantage of this, but there are others. It's not just the economics of the granular scaling of compute and storage independently. There are other aspects. So take us through that sort of a primary use case or use cases. Yeah, I mean, I can give you a couple of customer examples. And we have a large SaaS analyst company which uses Vertica on flash blade to authenticate the quality of digital media in real time. And for them, it makes a big difference is they're doing their streaming and whatnot that they can fine tune and granularly control that. So that's one aspect that we get to address. We have a multinational car company which uses Vertica on flash blade to make thousands of decisions per second for autonomous vehicle decision-making trees. That's what really these new modern analytics platforms were built for. There's another healthcare organization that uses Vertica on flash blade to enable healthcare providers to make decisions in real time that impact lives, especially when we start to look at the current state of affairs with COVID and the coronavirus. Those types of technologies are really going to help us kind of get above and help lower and bend that curve downward. So there's all these different areas where we can address the goals and the achievements that we're trying to look forward with real-time analytic decision-making tools like Vertica. And realistically as we have these conversations with customers, they're looking to get beyond the ability of just a data scientist or a data architect looking to just kind of derive an information. We were talking about Hadoop earlier. We're kind of going well beyond that now. And I guess what I'm saying is that in the first phase of cloud, it was all about infrastructure. It was about spinning up compute and storage, a little bit of networking in there. Seems like a new workload that's clearly emerging is you've got, and it started with the cloud native databases but then bringing in AI and machine learning tooling on top of that and then being able to really drive these new types of insights. And it's really about taking data, these bogs, this bog of data that we've collected over the last 10 years. A lot of that, driven by Hadoop, bringing machine intelligence into the equation, scaling it with either cloud, public cloud or bringing that cloud experience on-prem scale across your organizations and across your partner network. That really is a new emerging workload. Do you see that and maybe talk a little bit about what you're seeing with customers? Yeah, I mean, really as we see several trends, one of those is the ability to take this approach to move it out of the lab but into production. Especially when it comes to data science projects, machine learning projects that traditionally start out as kind of small proofs of concept, easy to spin up in the cloud. But when a customer wants to scale and move towards a real, derived significant value from that, they do want to be able to control more characteristics like that. We know machine learning needs to learn from a massive amounts of data to provide accuracy. There's just too much data retrieve in the cloud for every training job at the same time, predictive analytics without accuracy is not going to deliver the business advantage of what everyone is seeking. We see this, the visualization of data analytics is traditionally deployed as being on a continuum with the things that we've been doing in the past, with data warehousing, data lakes, AI on the other end, but this way we're starting to manifest it in organizations that are looking towards getting more utility and better elasticity out of the data that they are working for. So they're not looking to just build up silos of bespoke AI environments, they're looking to leverage a platform that can allow them to do AI for one thing, machine learning for another, leverage multiple protocols to access that data because the tools are so much different. It is a growing diversity of use cases that you can put on a single platform. I think organizations are looking for as they try to scale these environments. I think there's going to be a big growth area in the coming years. Gabe, I wish we were in Boston together, you would have painted your little corner of Boston orange, I know that, but you guys operate, but really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. Wall-to-wall coverage, two days of the vertical, vertical, virtual big data conference. Keep it right there, but right back, right after this short break.


The statistical red flags around Jacob Eason are concerning to say the least. His efficiency in Washington wasn't great, with his 8.0 AYA sitting 6th among the top 7 quarterbacks in this year's class. And if a quarterback isn't efficient, you at least want them to be younger and experienced. But Eason is coming off his age 22 season, with just 26 games and at least 10 pass attempts under his belt. Outside of his major bowls, there's not a ton to get you The best statistical comp for Eason is JP Losman. Losman never had a top 15 season in total net expected points, so Eason will have to hope he's able to perform his resume coming out.


Good morning everybody, welcome back to Las Vegas. This is day four of theCUBE's wall-to-wall coverage of our Super Bowl, aka AWS re-invent 2022. I'm here with my co-host, Paul Gillan. My name is Dave Vellante. Sanjay Poonan is in the house, CEO and president of Cohesity, sitting in as our guest market watcher, market analyst, you know, deep expertise new to the job at Cohesity and it was kind enough to sit in and help us break down what's happening at re-invent. But Paul, first thing, this morning we heard from Werner Vogels. He was basically given a masterclass on system design. It reminded me of mainframes years ago when we used to, you know, bury through those IBM blue books and red books. You remember those Sanjay? That's how we learned back then, right? But it made me think, wow, now, you know, IBM's from a systems design, nobody talks about IBM anymore, nobody talks about Amazon. So you wonder 20 years from now, you know, what it's going to be, but what Werner's amazing. He pulled out a 24 year old document that he had written early in Amazon's evolution about synchronous design or about essentially distributed architectures that turned out to be prophetic. His big thing was nature is asynchronous. So systems are asynchronous. Synchronous is an illusion. It's an abstraction. It's kind of interesting, but you know. Yeah, I mean, I've had syndromes for things, timeless architecture. Werner's an absolute legend. I mean, when you think about folks who've had, you know, impact on technology, you think of people like Johnny Ive in design. You got to think about people like Werner in architecture. And that's the fact that Andy and the team have been able to keep them engaged that long. I pay attention to his keynote. Peter DeSantis has obviously been very, very influential. And then of course, you know, Adam did a good job, you know, watching from, you know, having watched as I was at the first AWS re-invent conference as a time was present at SAP. And there was only 1000 people at this event, okay. Andy had me on stage. I think I was one of the first guests of any tech company in 2011. And to see now this become like, it's a mecca. It's a mother of all IT events. And watch sort of even the transition from Andy to Adam is very special. I got to catch some of Rubo's keynote. So while there's some new people in the mix here, this has become a force of nature. And the last time I was here was 2019 before COVID, watch the last two ones online. But it feels like, I don't know what you guys think. It feels like it's back to 2019 levels. I was here in 2019. I feel like this was bigger than 2019, but some people have said that's about the same. 60,000 versus 50,000. It was a little bigger than 2019. But it feels like it's more active. And then last year, Sanjay, you weren't here, but it was 25,000, which was amazing because it was right in that little space between Omicron before Omicron hit. But you know, let me ask you a question. And this is really more of a question about Amazon's maturity. I know you've been following it since early days. But the way I get the question, number one question I get from people is, how is Amazon AWS going to be different under Adam than it was under Andy? I mean, Adam's not new because he was here before. Some sense he knows the Amazon culture from prior when he was running sales and marketing prior, but then he took a time off and came back. I mean, this will always be, I think, somewhat Andy's baby, right? Because he was the thing, and I sent him a text, he should be really proud of what he accomplished. But I think he also asked him, when I saw him a few weeks ago, are you going to come to me? And I said, no, I want to leave this to be Adam's show. And Adam's going to have a slightly different view of him. And his keynotes are probably half the time. It's a little bit more vision. There was a lot more customer stories at the beginning of it, taking you back to the inspirational pieces of it. I think you're going to see them probably pulling up the stack and not just focus on infrastructure. Many of their platform services are involved. Many of their even application services, I'm surprised when I talk to customers, like Amazon Connect, their sort of call center type technologies, an app layer, it's getting a lot. I mean, I've talked to a couple of Fortune 500 companies that are moving off Avaya to connect. I mean, it's happening and I did not know that. So it's, you know, I think as they move up the stack, the platform's gotten more, the data-centric stack has got, and you know, in the area we're working with Cohesity Security Data Protection, they're an investor in our company. So this is an important, you know, both, I think tech player and a partner for many companies like us.  Do you see that disrupting the way software, enterprise software is sold? Oh, for sure. I mean, you have to be a ostrich ahead in the sand to not see this wave happening. I mean, what's it, $150 billion worth of revenue, even though the growth rates dipped a little bit the last quarter or so, it's still, aggregatively, between Amazon and Azure and Google, you know, 30% growth. And I think we're still in the second or third inning off a grand one trillion or two trillion of IT, shifting not all of it to the cloud, but significantly faster. So if you add up all of the big kings of the on-premise world, they're, you know, they got to a certain size that growth is stable but stalling. These guys are growing significantly faster. And then if you add on top of them, platform companies, the data companies, Snowflake, MongoDB, Databricks, you know, Datadog, and then apps companies on top of that, I think the move to the cloud is inevitable. In SaaS companies, I don't know why you would ever implement a CRM solution on-prem. It's all gone to the cloud. That happened 15 years ago. I mean, within three, five years of the advent of Salesforce. And the same thing in HR. Why would you deploy a HR solution now? Got Workday and got, you know, others that are, so some of those apps markets are just never coming back to an on-prem capability.  But I call it the slingshot economy.  Maybe me. You and I both. I've never seen anything like this, where visibility is so unpredictable, the economy is slingshotting. It's like, oh, hurry up, go, COVID, go, go, go, build, build, build. Then pull back. And now, going forward, now pulling back. Slutman said, you know, on the call, hey, the guide is the guide. He said, we put it out there, do our best to hit it. But you had CrowdStrike at issues, you know, mid-market, service now. I saw McDermott on the other day on the TV. I just want to pay, you know, buy from the guy. He's so wonderful, right? But mixed, mixed results, Salesforce, you know, octa now, pre-announcing, hey, they're going to be, or announcing, you know, better visibility forward guide. Elastic kind of got hit really hard. HPE and Dell actually doing really well in the enterprise. Of course, Dell getting killed in the client. But so, what are you seeing out there? How, as an executive, do you deal with such poor visibility? I think, listen, what the last two or three years have taught us is, you know, with the supply chain crisis, with the surge that people thought you may need of, you know, spending potentially in the pandemic, you have to start off with your tech platform being 10X better than everybody else and differentiate, differentiate, because in a crowded market, but even in a market that's getting tougher, if you're not differentiating constantly through technology innovation, you're going to get left behind. So, you named a few places, they're all technology innovators, but even if some of them are having challenges. And then I think you're constantly asking yourselves, how do you move from being a point product to a platform with more and more services where you're getting, you know, many of them moving really fast? Nikesh Arora, I like him a lot. He's probably one of the most savvy operators also that I respect. He calls these speedboats. And, you know, his core platform started off with the firewall network security, but he's built now a very credible cloud security, cloud AI security business. And I think that's how you need to be thinking as a tech executive. I mean, if you've got core, here's your core beachhead 10X better than everybody else. And as you move to adjacencies in these new platforms, have you got now speedboats that are getting to a point where they are competitive advantage? Then as you think of the go-to-market perspective, it really depends on where you are as a company. For a company like our size, we need partners a lot more. Because if we're going to stand on the shoulders of giants, like Isaac Newton said, I see clearly because I stand the shoulders of giants, I need to really go and cultivate Amazon so they become our lead partner in cloud. And then appropriately, Microsoft and Google, where I need to. And security, part of what we announced last week was, last month, yeah, last couple of weeks ago was the data security alliance with the biggest security players. What was I trying to do that? First time I've ever done it in my industry was get Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, Wallace, Tenable, CyberArk, Splunk, all to build an alliance with me so I could stand on their shoulders and them helping me. If you're a bigger company, you're constantly asking yourself, how do you make sure you're getting your gammas on? They're top 100 customers spending more with that. So I think the playbook evolves and I'm watching some of these best companies through this time navigate through this. And I think leadership is going to be tested in enormously interesting ways. I mean, Snowflake is really interesting because they, 67% growth, which is, I mean, that's best in class for a company that's $2 billion. But their guide was still pretty aggressive. So it's like, when it's good times, you go, hey, we can guide conservatively and no, we can beat it. But when you're not certain, you can't dial down too far because your investors start to bail on you. It's a really tricky algorithm. But Dave, I think, listen, at the end of the day, I mean, every CEO should not be worried about the short-term up and down the stock price. You're building a long-term multi-billion dollar company. In the case of Frank, he has, I think I shot to a $10 billion, you know, analytics data warehousing, data management company on the back of that platform because he's eyeing the market that not just terror data occupies today, but now Oracle occupies us or other databases, right? So his time as it grows bigger, you're going to have some of these things, but that market's big. I think same with Palo Alto. I mean, Datadog's another company, 75% growth at 20% margins, like almost rule of 95. When they're going after not just the observability market, they're eating up the SIM market, security analytics, the APM market. So I think, you know, you look at these case studies of companies who are going from point product to platforms and are steadily able to grow into new tabs. You know, to me, that's very inspiring. That's what I seek to do at Arkon. I get that it's a marathon, but, you know, when you were at VMware, weren't you looking at the stock price every day just out of curiosity? I mean, listen. You weren't micromanaging it. You do, but at the end of the day, and you certainly look at the days of earnings and so on and so forth because you want to create shareholder value. I'm not saying that you should not, but I think an obsession with that, you know, in a short term, makes you, you know, sort of myopically focused on what may not be the right thing the long term. Now, in the long arc of time, if you're not creating shareholder value, look at what happened to Steve Bomber. You needed a Satya to come in to change things and he's created a lot of value. Yeah, big time. But I think in the short term, my comments were really on the quarter to quarter, but over a four, eight, 12 quarter, if companies are growing and creating profitable growth, they're going to get the valuation they deserve. Do you think the, I want to ask you about something that Arvin Krishna said in the previous IBM earnings call, that IT is deflationary and therefore it is resistant to the macroeconomic headwinds. So IT spending should actually thrive in an adverse economic climate. Do you think that's true? Not all firms of IT. I pay very close attention to surveys from whether it's the industry analysts or the Morgan Stanley's or Goldman Sachs, the financial analysts. And I think there's a glut in certain sectors that will get pulled back. Traditional view is when the economies are growing, people spend on the top line, front office stuff, sales, marketing. If you go and look at just the Cloud 100 companies, which are the hardest private companies and maybe with the public market companies, there's way too many companies focused on sales and marketing. Way too many. I think during a downsizing and recession, that's going to probably shrink some because they were all built for the 2009 to 2021 era where it was all about the top line. Okay, maybe there's now a proposition for companies who are focused on cost optimization, supply chain visibility. Security's been intangible that I think is going to continue to have an investment.  And right now in our business at Cohesity, part of the reason we've embraced things like ransomware protection, there is a big focus on security. And by intelligently being a management and a security company around data, I do believe we'll continue to be extremely relevant to CIO budgets. There's a 20 ransomware attempts every second.   And I think what's happening now is actually IT spending is pretty good. I mean, I track this stuff pretty closely. It's just that expectations were so high and now you're seeing earnings estimates come down and so okay, and then yeah, you've got the inflationary factors and your discounted cash flows, but the market's actually pretty good, you know, relative to other downturns that if this is not it, we're not actually not in a downturn, not yet anyway, it may be. All right. Oh, there's a valuation down there. You have to prepare, not on sales. When I was on CNBC, I said, listen, it's a little bit like that story of Joseph, seven years of fees, seven years of famine. You have to prepare for potentially the worst and if it's not the worst, you're in good shape. So will it be a recession 2023? Maybe, you know, high interest rates, inflation, war in Russia, Ukraine, maybe things do get bad, but if you're belt tightening, if you're focused on operational excellence, if it's not a recession, you're pleasantly surprised. If it is one, you're prepared for it. All right, I'm going to put you in the spot and ask you for predictions, expert analysis on the World Cup. What do you think? Give us the breakdown. I wish India was the World Cup, but you can't get enough Indians and all to play soccer well enough, but we're not, I'm a US fan for us. I would love to see one of Brazil or Argentina and as a messy person, I don't know if you'll get that, but it would be really special for Messi to lead, to end his career like Maradona winning a World Cup. I don't know if that'll happen. I'm probably going to go one of the Latin American countries if the US doesn't make it far enough, but first loyalty to the US team and then after one of the Latin American countries. Can you take one of the Latin American countries as your best bet to win? I don't know. It's hard to tell. What happens now at this stage, anybody can win. You just have lots of shots in gold. I'm a big soccer fan. I mean, I don't know if the US is favorite to win, but if they get far enough, you get to the finals, anybody could win. I think they get Netherlands next, right? That's tough, right? That'd be really tough. But the European teams are good too, but I would like to see US go far enough, and then I'd like to see Latin America win a team, one of Argentina or Brazil. That's my prediction.  Are you able to follow cricket the way you like it over here? I've gone on North League times the night because they're in Australia right now, yeah. I watch the T20 World Cup, select games of it. Yeah, I'm not rapidly following every single game, but the World Cup games, I'll catch and do it. It's good. I mean, I love every sport. American football, soccer. You're getting David basketball now. I mean, I hope the Warriors come back strong. Hey, how about the Warriors Celtics? What do we think? We do it again? Well, this year? I'll tell you what. As a Boston San Francisco, I would love that. I actually still, I have to pay off some folks from my Palo Alto office with some bets still. We are seeing unprecedented NBA performance this year. It's amazing. You look at the stats, it's like nothing. I know it's early, like nothing we've ever seen before. So it's exciting here. Well, always a pleasure talking to you guys. Hey, great to have you on. Thanks for having me on. Love the expert analysis. Sanjay Pune de Vellante. Keep it right there. Reinvent 2022, day four. We're winding up in Las Vegas. We'll be right back. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.


Boom. What's up everyone? Welcome to simulation. I'm your host Alan Sakyan. We are at the transformative technology conference We our mind has been blown over and over and over again. We are now with dr. Bashar Bajran Thank you for joining us. Thank you really appreciate it likewise. Thank you and Bashar is a neuroscientist at the medical University of South Carolina That's correct and You were telling me that you were working on vagus nerve Vegas nerve There's just a lot of stuff that you're doing. I'm excited to learn more about this. Yeah, that's unpack Oh, the transcranial make direct make try transcranial direct current stimulation and TMS magnetic stimulation It's all all of the above. Yeah, so okay, but even before we talk about Exactly what you've been up to most recently. Let's talk about how you even got excited about neuroscience It's like who are you? How did you yeah get? Yeah, so I'm trained neuroscientist from the medical University of South Carolina That's where I did my graduate training. I did it under the direction of mark george Who is known for inventing TMS to treat depression? Whoa, so kind of the pedigree in history of my lab goes back to the 80s And in the 80s was kind of this evolution of using brain stimulation as a non pharmacological intervention to treat neuro psychiatric disorders So really there was two kind of big findings in the 80s One was by tony barker who is from the uk. He's awesome dude He invented a machine that can deliver magnetic stimuli to the nervous system and My mentor mark at the time was training in the uk Saw one of these machines and said hey, we can put this on on the head and stimulate the brain neurons in the brain to treat depression And that's when it all started in the late 80s. It went on to the 90s where At musc they ran all the early clinical trials and developed tms is now an fda approved treatment for major depressive disorder um, and it took about 10 or 15 years of development to get to the point where a company in neuronetics ended up Taking the technology running with it and getting an fda indication for depression. So that Is really a game changer in psychiatry. It's really one of the only non pharmacological interventions for depression There's also one other really cool finding in the 80s was wait. Can we talk about what part of the How we're how exactly of course happening. So tms. It's really essentially a big stack of capacitors Electricity comes in from the wall is stored in these capacitors and then rapidly discharge that a specific frequency Uh through an electromagnetic coil, which is essentially a bunch of copper windings, right? So an electricity goes through these copper windings. It creates an induced magnetic field Magnetic fields a few centimeters And if you put that on the brain on the skull essentially and fire these magnetic pulses at a specific pulse pattern You induce electrical currents in the brain those stimulate neurons and cause kind of a long-term Plasticity that helps treat a variety of disorders for depression. We stimulate the left dorsal outer prefrontal cortex EEG position f3, which is like right here And if you deliver about 10 hertz that's like executive functioning correct cognitive functioning executive control And also mood and so what we do is we deliver tms to that position five days a week for four to six weeks and people that have failed a series of Antidepressants several series of antidepressants. They're really refractory. They come in They see the doc they get treated at the clinic and after four to six weeks They can go back to their jobs and it's and they're fully better. They remit So they come in with really high depression rating score. It's the hamilton rating depression rating score In the 20s high 20s still used hamilton the hamilton depression rating score Yeah, so it's called the hamd hamd and that's used clinically. It's a kind of a clinical questionnaire That's administered. It's not subjective So I would ask you a series of questions and then the rater would rate your depression symptoms interesting Oh instead of self-diagnosing that's that's it's interesting. Yeah, so it's uh, we do this weekly and we track the progress Oh cool. That's how you know that tms is working because yep Oh, because you're at your you have like a psychiatrist that's asking correct questions So the psychiatrist is there weekly evaluating usually it's on like a friday to get the lay of the land and we can track Usually people respond to tms in two to three weeks and they're all the way better by week six Now we're making a lot of advancements on Kind of shortening the total treatment length by doing multiple sessions in a day So we can try to shorten that treatment course from four to six weeks to about two weeks With these kind of rapid Paradigms that we're developing right now and and what are you so now tell us kind of like the exact Uh The exact process for somebody They they come in their hamd score is would it be high or low high they would be high Okay, so hamd scores high and then you say okay We can do tms right here on the left dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex And then we can do that once a day for four to six weeks And then we'll evaluate you midway through and at the end or like we evaluate Weekly and it's really daily, you know The physician's always interacting with the patient and the nursing staff and personnel We're seeing these patients every day and then and then what is what is what is going on? Especially in that left dl pfc area of the brain Like what where are you by stimulating that area magnetically and causing that area to Fire what is Why why is that specifically? Causing them to be less depressed like is it taking attention away from another depressive area or like yeah, how it's a good question You know, there's a lot of different hypotheses on how a depression works. It's still kind of unknown But one of the major ones is there is this uh under activation in Uh, just resting activation in the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex So a lot of early studies in the 90s were showing that there was decreased metabolism. So less active neurons in the dl pfc that really uh elicited this kind of target But there's also this idea that uh, the dl pfc is part of this larger network With substructures that are deep in the brain like the enterosingulate that are involved in mood and salience, right? So, uh, it's kind of doing a twofold a twofold when we do tms in the fmri scanner So we can actually do tms in the scanner. Oh interesting. It's really complicated and awesome Yeah, we can look at what's happening in the brain in response to a single session of tms And we're creating increased blood oxygenation level dependent signal bold signal Which means that part of the brain in response to the magnetic stimulation is becoming more active for that period of time Slowly goes away the more you do it the longer that effect stays eventually it sticks Now does this potentially have something to do with how When I feel Like I don't have something to like that my executive functioning saying go and build this Aspect of whatever may brings meaning to your life And if I don't have that clicking I kind of tend to go to netflix or facebook or whatever it might be And I might not find as much meaning or fulfillment in life by doing that Perhaps although maybe you're just procrastinating from a task that you really don't want to do So tms doesn't help with that, but People that are depressed really Wouldn't even be able to watch netflix. Some of the patients we see are Staying at home. They've generally quit their jobs They really can't function. Some of them are bedridden and stay in bed. Oh, yeah, that's right So there's this idea or this term called it was a movie on that. Um, I believe it was a I don't think it was a motor. I don't think it was a motor Reason. I think it was a depressive reason. Oh what movie I should remember the name, but it's okay. Yeah, okay So here's the deal.  You end up getting something called ect One of our friends and mentors herald sat time Electroconvulsive therapy. I think that might have been so there's an old movie that kind of stigmatized ect called one One flew over the cuckoo's nest. Yes, right And that actually did I think a disservice to ect because it's really one of the most effective treatments for depression that we have When people come in with catatonia or they're admitted into the unit Ect brings them right back to to step one and you only need about You know 10 or 12 treatments There's about three treatments a week for a couple weeks and they're way better than they started So now be sure where are you amongst everything that you've been describing? Are you Analyzing things and making sure that everything's going well out of the whole So that's a great question. Usually I I'm the one that develops the new paradigms So a couple of the kind of new paradigms we thought is rather than just focusing on the dorsal outer prefrontal cortex Perhaps you can use different cortical Um targets to stimulate networks, right? So the most recent Two developments in tms that I did in my lab was One targeting the pre supplementary motor area, which is right here. That's connected to deep Motor control networks and we did that to treat essential tremor. We also Use that site to kind of detune the obsessional thoughts in ocd So we did that in 2013 and 14 and now that's actually gone to fda approval Now people can get tms for ocd based on that early findings. We do tms paired with an exposure Therapy and it gets people who are refractory In their ocd treatment to pretty much remit. So they get all the way better In ocd. It's amazing. So that's kind of some of the stuff we do in the lab. We have an active Brain stimulation clinic that treats folks from the community That are usually depressed by polar anxious And then we develop the new paradigms, but that's only kind of one third of what we do We also do something called vagus nerve stimulation, which was developed in the 80s by jake zabara who's a friend and mentor In the early 80s, this is a beautiful nerve that goes the vagus nerves awesome It's really this large central bundle of nerves It runs from your brain all the way down and targets every smooth muscle organ in your body Stomach, heart, lungs, spleen, kidneys, intestines, bladder All of it. Wow.  It's an autonomic nervous system nerve It's really associated with the parasympathetic nervous system Or the slowing of bodily functions. So there's really two Autonomic control systems the sympathetic which is really your fight or flight and gets you up and stressed and ready to Evolutionarily escape from a stressor With the parasympathetic, which allows you to slow right go to sleep relax your heart rate Digest and so those are cholinergic So acetylcholine is the neurotransmitter associated with this pathway the vagus nerve Dumped acetylcholine onto these organs and it causes a relaxation and slowing that process starts at the brain Acetylcholine is the neurotransmitter that the vagus nerve dumps into the Onto the organ for the For the parasympathetic nervous system functioning correct, but that is initiated in the brain So before it dumps any type of neurotransmitter. Yeah, there is a complex system that's uh Uh initiated kind of in these deeper brain structures that then send the signal out to the vagus nerve So then there's like there's this from the brain. We go down. There's all the the cerebral spinal Neural system and then there's also the vague vagus nerve system. So it's gonna. Yeah, the vagus is in Your thorax, so it's in your in the cavity in your body's cavity. It doesn't initiate in the spine. It's wandering So vagus. Yeah is lack is Latin for wandering for wandering So it's it used to it was called the wandering nerve and i'll show you in my talk later today that It was there was this italian uh neuroanatomist that dissected the body in the 1500s It's this beautiful image of all the nerves in the body spine and you can see the vagus nerve is literally The the most complicated part of the entire thing and so that's where it got its name as the wandering nerve because it just travels throughout your body And what's interesting is there's not only uh efferent effects or from the brain to the body, but you can actually Go from the body to the brain, right? So it's bi-directional communication And we can take advantage of that by stimulating it to access deep parts of the brain Okay, now teach us about how to stimulate the vagus nerve and what it does. So in the early, um, well, actually it's really late 1980s there was a neurophysiologist jigsawara who had a epileptic dog model so canine dog that had epilepsy he implanted the electrodes onto the nerve directly of the vagus nerve and when he turned on electrical stimulation externally internally internally Okay, so you do the dissection. Um, and you access it really kind of in the Cervical part of your neck. You can't do external stimulation of vagus nerve That's what you can and that's what we've been developing. Okay. Sorry. I jumped the gun. Keep going. Yeah But all of the early studies were implantable.  So that's where vns started Uh, and from then on jacus nerve simulation. Yeah, so the vns Uh, actually jake, uh, interesting fact that not a lot of people know is that he called it a neuro cybernetic prosthesis but the The medical community community didn't really understand that and they changed the name to vagus nerve stimulation So initially it was ncp Which then became vns. I like ncp better, but vns is cool and it's stuck So, um, that ended up becoming a company that jake founded called cyberonics Um, and over 150,000 people across the world have been implanted with a vns stimulator to treat their refractory epilepsy Whoa 30 to 40 of people implanted have reductions of More than 75 of their daily seizures that didn't respond to meds. It's amazing So just a little electricity here Um, actually ends up stopping your your seizures. Yeah, and then from then on there was actually A really astute and this is like a cool history lesson and astute Um, hotel clerk that noticed that these patients that had epilepsy Uh That were coming to stay for follow-up visits their moods were getting better and he reported it to one of the docs That's cool. They they they then explored vns to treat depression and it treats depression Whoa, so it became this, um, epilepsy treatment depression treatment recently It's been FDA approved for chronic morbid obesity So if you plant stimulators at the level on the on the vagus nerve right above the stomach Yeah, uh, it decreases your appetite and reduces obesity symptoms so people lose body fat That sounds a lot better than the bigastro bypass surgery Well, in fact when people get their stomach stapled for those types of procedures sometimes in rare cases Um There's a mistake and they actually staple over the vagus nerve And if you damage the vagus nerve all the downstream communication for the vagus becomes interrupted So it's actually pretty risky.  It's expensive because about $50,000 You have to go into the or and do it any surgeon trained in head and neck dissection can do it but It's not really common for individuals that are exploring you for other things So what my group's been doing I've been doing a lot of research on this in the last five years Is developing non-invasive vagus nerve stimulation So rather than implanting electrodes, you can stimulate a branch of the vagus nerve that innervates your ear That's called the auricular branch of the vagus nerve And you can use electricity to stimulate that nerve and mimic the effects of implantable Which now has opened up this entire field of vns to everybody It reduces heart rate. It increases heart rate variability. It treats depression It doesn't work super well on epilepsy, but that's because it's still early and the dose isn't optimized But where where does the electrode go externally? So the electrode goes Uh in your ear. So you can stimulate the auricular branch of the vagus nerve either in the left or right ear And this small little off branch of the main bundle Can be targeted in your ear right in there's a couple different targets One is the anterior wall of the external ear canal So like your tragus, but on the backside of your little tragus Or you can target the simbaconsha, which is this kind of top part on the inside Circle of your ear or you can target it on the mastoid. Whoa, and you can just You can is that um, is that an electrical stimulation electrical stimulation? So we A long time ago, they tried to do magnetic stimulation there But it's uncomfortable to deliver magnetic pulses there because there's a lot of muscles So what we thought was perhaps we can do electricity to mimic it. We started these studies in 2013 And we explored the entire parameter space so low frequency high frequency big pulse width long or short pulse width Long stimulation short stimulation different electrodes different different targets and over the years We've optimized this technology and now it's rolling out into several clinical trials across the united states So this is all at m u m u s c. Okay, and how long has it been that you've been doing that there six years six years there And then you have a lab there. Correct. And what's the lab called? So it's the brain stimulation lab brain stimulation lab correct How many people are in the lab right now? The lab is pretty big. So we have around 20 staff 20 staff We have the division director mark george who's still around we have Three other faculty there who do a variety of things from a nervous stimulation to treat addictions PTSD working with veterans There's a really interesting individual dr Shing Baoli who does tms for smoking cessation Nice works really well to help people quit smoking which is a really big problem in the united states Well, this list is crazy. Okay. So helping with smoking helping with addiction helping with PTSD helping with With potential stumps the gas hunger It's pressing soft But I think what the most cool part of the entire thing is besides all of these by the way, we're doing parkinsons With vagus nerve stimulation But the most interesting that the project is that i'm doing with dr. Doe jankins who was a pediatric neonatologist using non-invasive vns paired with Bottle suck training. Wow In pre-term neonates to accelerate the learning of how to feed And put down formula To be discharged from the hospital faster when they're born with a hypoxic ischemic event And what's the hypoxic ischemic event that prevents them from being discharged?  So between 10 and 20 days rather than six weeks. Yeah. Yeah So that's really the most promising work at musc Yeah, and so that just got published recently as a brief report now We're doing the larger clinical trial.  Okay, but It's pretty common and these a lot of the babies that are born pre-term Don't have this ability. So even if you don't have the hypoxic ischemic event A lot of babies are candidates for g tubes because they just can't learn how to feed Now you don't hear about a lot of these cases. You really hear about the healthy ones Oh, I had a healthy baby And it's doing great But there's a lot of babies in the unit that have this difficulty feeding and get sent home with a surgery energy tube Wow, um, holy cow. Bashar. Um, I am so Impressed there's so much so much different stimulation that can occur electrically magnetically to solve so many different it Problems that exist in in humans that that I think can help create a healthier happier civilization That's oh, yeah, and you're you're investigating into all of these right now We test all of them and what's really Fascinating is that these technologies end up trickling down to people like me and you so we take these treatments that help people And treat disorders Then we investigate how they can help us in our day to day life One of the prime examples is what I was telling you earlier is using tdcs It's this low electrical current stimulation about two milliamps that runs off a small 9 volt battery. It's pretty cheap and inexpensive We use that to help people feel calm and relaxed And accelerate their meditative practice So that was something that we used to research for pain and cognitive enhancement Has now trickled down into a paradigm called e meditation that came out of MUSC as well And we use that we were actually demoing it here at the conference There is 40 people in vermont that are doing the first ever brain stimulation Retreat where they meditate At a monastic center for five days using brain stimulation to augment their meditation practice It's really cool stuff. So that method's called e meditation I've been thinking about that for a while because whenever I go to the 10 day meditation retreats They just came back from one. I I always love the idea of thinking how to augment it 2,500 years ago when this is you know conceived this isn't really we didn't have the Like tdcs and we didn't have Access to so many like other psychedelics that we could you know So there's so many different ways to kind of add variables to the meditation mixture to just see what happens Yeah, yeah So what you know, we what we know is safe and we know actually works in the sick brain Is now coming to individuals in the healthy brain to optimize human performance and help help us connect to interact with each other And hopefully make a better world one day if we can all Connect with each other and and be kind to one another through these really transformative technologies like e meditation We can really change the world and that's what we've been developing at MUSC It's really exciting. So that's the stuff that gets me out of bed every day Is is doing the whole gamut of brain stimulation and hopefully one of these things will be able to be used in the general public To improve day-to-day life I love it. You are amazing. You're amazing. Thank you So I'm so grateful to have been able to interview you I think there's a lot of cool collaboration explorations we can do with an organization called Brain Mind We'd like to potentially loop you into that as well as You know the neuro scape over here at adam gazelli's Lab over here. Great. There's a lot of cool stuff to explore. So I'm again super grateful for you. Thank you so much Hey, no problem teaching us about everything you're up to. Thanks for having me. It's really cool. Your story's incredible And what you're working on is amazing. So thanks everyone for tuning in. We greatly appreciate it We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below Also, go and build the future go manifest your dreams into the world everyone. Thanks for tuning in much love That was so fun, man.