Live from the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Splunk.com 2016, brought to you by Splunk. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and John Walls. And welcome back to Orlando here. We continue on theCUBE, our coverage of Splunk.com 2016. Again, live from Orlando, show floor. A lot of activity going on here as we continue our streaming coverage. And along with John Furrier, I'm John Walls. And we're joined by a couple of gentlemen who are intimately involved with Splunk Trust as we've been talking about. Great community. Users and customers and partners helping each other is what it boils down to. Rich Mullerwein and David Spritz gentlemen, thanks for joining us. Good to have you both with us here on theCUBE.  You've got some hardware that you're taking home for your work here at the conference. I do. Part of the community and everything that's going on with it is also includes documentation feedback. So as we go through the documentation for the Splunk product itself, at the bottom of every one of those pages is a feedback form. And apparently I give really great documentation. So Chris Gales, who runs the documentation team gave me a trophy as the feedback team. What was it for the feedback? Yeah, what was it? What brutal feedback? No, most people would just say it. No, they like the brutal feedback too. They do. It's amazing. I don't know why. But what did you say? What was it about? They're not afraid of feedback. They want feedback. They do. They love feedback, both positive and negative. But yeah, this worked great for me, but this one step, the syntax was wrong or whatever. You just point that out, tell them what I was trying to do, what they got right, what maybe could be improved slightly. Every now and then I just send them back like I went through a whole piece of documentation on building a cluster and it was perfect. So I sent them feedback and said, thank you, this was perfect. Did everything I needed. Oh, that's sweet and simple. So what's Splunk Trust all about? If you explain kind of the DNA or the fabric of it to someone on the outside looking in, how would you describe the kind of work you do, the community you've built and that dialogue that goes on amongst its members? Sure, so I think that the best way that I've heard it put, which is by our fearless leader, Rachel, was that the Splunk Trust members may not always be the smartest person in the room, but they're going to be the most helpful person in the room. So these are the people who are part of the community, who have been part of the community for a while, in some cases, in some cases, they're newer to the community. They either have, they might have a lot of knowledge on Splunk, they may have a little knowledge on Splunk, but at the same time, they're always willing to help other people to help them get their questions answered, to get the data in that they need to get in, et cetera. You know, we've been covering the dot-com from the beginning since the Cube is on a seventh year. So we've had the luxury of kind of watching the coolness of Splunk at all the levels. I mean, it's been a great success around the business side of course, but the community is really awesome and you mentioned helpful, smartest person in the room. These are potentially important to understand. I want to get your thoughts on it. The ethos of Splunk is not to be the smartest person in the room, because everyone's smart, because that breeds arrogance and some communities fall down with, I'm the smartest person in the room, someone sucks all the oxygen out of the room, troll whatever people want to call it, versus having a swagger but helpful. Discuss the decision because I think it's important to highlight that. So I think the important part there is that when people first come into any type of a chat room, let's say, especially if you're used to old-school IRC or if you're in newer Slack channel that we have now as well, people are used to traditionally when you come into a situation like that and you ask a question that might be really elementary.  We don't want to be bothered with that. The Splunk community is completely different. Unlike any other community that I've ever seen where everyone wants to help. Everyone is excited and loves this product and they want everyone else to be excited and love this product as well. And so they help. And so they'll help with the simple questions, with the hard questions, with the bugs, everything that everyone needs help with. And sometimes it's as simple as, I'm usually in IRC very early in the mornings, even according to the East Coast people. So sometimes folks will hop on there and ask a question, and especially a year or two ago, I didn't know most of the answers and I'd just say, well, I don't know the answers, but you know what, if you hang on, we can chat off and on for a little bit. And at some point, the West Coasters will come in or these people will come in and they'll be able to help you.  Somebody will be with you. We are community supported, but somebody will help. How important is the community to Splunk? Can you share your thoughts? What does Splunk do as a company that's different? Because everyone wants to win the community. Like it's winnable. You don't really win people, right? I mean, you win them over of a period of time, but I kind of hate that phrase anyway. We're going to win the developers. We're going to win the community. It's just not that easy. What does Splunk do that makes their community so robust? Is it a mutual trust thing? They provide tools? What are some of the things that they do? So I think it's actually a combination. So I think it's a matter of the people that kind of help run the community, like Rachel, for example. She's fantastic. And it's also the fact that Splunk understands that this community is important for the product. It's a place they can get feedback, where they can test things out, where they can say, hey, we're thinking about this new feature. Is this something? Okay, it is something good. Let's talk about that then. I think Splunk's willingness to put trust in its community, especially with things like answers. Answers is a huge success as far as I'm concerned. In terms of how quickly different questions when they're answered get answers. The quality of those answers is usually pretty outstanding. I think answers is probably one of the key aspects. It's not a boring community for sure. I mean, obviously the product's been successful. There's new people coming in at all levels of the product mix, but they're also doing new cool stuff. I mean, like Cyber, we were talking before we came on about that growth here. So there's always this learning environment going on. Can you share the things that you think are hot right now that people are most focused on in terms of the conversations and the learnings? Right now, I think that most folks who are getting into Splunk seem to always have their eyes somewhere along the line on either the security end of things or on the IT services part. So there's a lot of new products they've come out with in the last year or two that are just really exciting. They're really nice looking. And then they find out, oh, and it's easy to use. And there's a great community helping to support it. And the company appreciates its users and customers and gives them trophies. So there's a variety of kind of different use cases that people are coming to, but that is the common themes I'm seeing. Quite a bit of. Would you defer? I know, I think that's completely true. Yeah, I agree with everything you said. I think security and services right now are those are the big focuses for a lot of our users who are coming in and talking in the community. Looking at things like different security use cases, yes, there are, yes, as well as ITSI. True or false statement. Splunkers in the community like to have a good time. Oh, that's definitely true. I think that's true. 100% true. We're up here wearing fesses, I think that kind of speaks to it. Kate. Yeah, it's definitely a trick question. I mean, I'm a blown away by, but they're not slackers either. You're smart people there. They work hard, play hard kind of mindset and like to have a good time and let loose, but also very active in the sessions. I mean, I look at the sessions here. Two things jump out at me at the show here for the folks watching who aren't here. After the keynotes, the hallway is packed like salmon swimming, you know, down the river and you're kind of trying to go through it. It's packed. The hallways are wall to wall people and the sessions are well attended. One, that's an indicator of interest. Oh yeah. The party also is good too. So normally, you don't see that. I mean, it's kind of a culture, right? No, that's completely true. The small community loves to participate. And you're right, no slackers amongst us. We like to participate. We're on there all day. We're doing it while we're doing other things. Making dinner, sitting in chat rooms at the same time. That kind of stuff. So how about the old school, new school dynamic? Because I was talking with John earlier and we had Rahm on from one of the investments I just did on the threat detection. He's an old school guy in multiple ventures, multiple exits, but you're starting to see a real mix of systems guys and guys who have been around IT and systems. You know, when you talk about IRC old days, when I was back then, it was just through us, right? But now you have the old school mindset and a ton of new in migration of new young people. What's it like? And what's the dynamic of that? I mean, you mentioned, obviously, you guys are really well accepting, but what are the new kids in the block doing, right? I mean, they must bring some energy and some new techniques to the table. Can you share any cutting edge things that you've observed? Anecdotes? Are they wise asses? Are they punks? I mean, it's not all get off my mind.  An old man says, you know. I love seeing new people show up into the channels or on answers and stuff, and sometimes they come up with the most amazing solutions, too, because they approach things from a totally different angle. So I really like the new blood. And the other thing I really like about the Splunk community is that in general, I think it's like the smartest group of people I know. It's like there aren't any slackers in there. Even the new people may not know much about Splunk yet, but gosh, they can come up with some good things because they know all kinds of other stuff. We're a fairly mature, well, in some ways, anyway, a fairly mature group of people, but it's certainly a very smart group of people. We meant to have a group of people. I hear him out there a lot.  You guys are rock stars. So, you know, it's the old, there's no such thing as a dumb question, right? Right. But for some people, it's hard to raise your hand and say, I've got a problem here. That's very true. So, number one, if I'm watching this and I'd like to become involved or I might, how do I do that? How do I try, how do I engage? And then secondly, can you give us an example of maybe welcoming in somebody new to the community and solving a direct problem because of that group thought or that group speak, if you will? Sure, so in terms of getting into the community, it's pretty easy. We have a few different chat methods that you can use. So, for the old school folks, there's IRC, for the new school folks, there's Slack. There's also answers. It's a terrific place to go and ask questions. It's actively patrolled and monitored in terms of making sure it's moderated and everyone's being friendly. And I think it's one of the great things about the community as well is that it's kind of self-policed. So I mean, what's the URL? What's the... So that's answers.splunk.com. Okay, good, all right. And then for the Slack chat, if you'd like access to that, you can go to squunkforward2.com slash chat. Yep, there's a little form to fill out with your email address and... And what have you done for solving? How does it work? How does that exchange happen? How's the dialogue transpire?  Depends on the medium. So if you're on IRC or on Slack, usually you pop in and you'll ask a quick question. And it can take a few minutes for somebody who's paying attention to actually notice that or whatnot. And they'll start, it's a back and forth there because it's a very interactive thing. So they'll say, oh, what were you expecting to see? Because that would do this, right? And it's like, oh, I know what I wanted was this. And so they'd start explaining it and we'd start digging deeper and then we'd end up, we'd find out how to fix it most of the time. We can usually fix it or at least get them pointed the right direction. Sometimes we'll dig out answers actually from the actual forums where there's a more long, lengthier involved answer to that particular problem. Sometimes we'll start answering questions and then an answer will come in for the answer and then we'll start giving to a separate chat about inside the answers actually, about like the various solutions. We'll always try to at least circle that back and make sure there's an easy, as easy as possible solution to that problem. I got to ask the question. So maybe two sides that you can pick your side you want to go to. Coolest thing you've worked on or seen or the weirdest use case of Splunk that you've seen? Man, what's the favorite thing that I've worked with smart meters? Actually, because it's really interesting data in terms of pulling in data from across an entire power grid and looking at information and seeing what you can do with it. I think the most interesting thing I've seen is some of the ways people will bend stream stats. There's one command that is useful in so many weird cases that you'd never think it'd apply there. And just seeing that there were ways that that gets put into play sometimes. Were the stream stats command? Yes, the stream stats command. It's just, it's an interesting one. Sorry, I'm a little... And okay, VI versus Emacs. Where do we stand on that? Oh, VI. VI. Okay, and the new kids, what are they doing? I don't know. VI probably. They're probably using supply and pass. Are they? Okay. No pad plus plus for Windows. No plus plus for Windows. No users for Windows. Yep. VI just got an update in the 25 years or 35 years or so. I think controversy. Of course I'm a VI guy myself. Did Emacs hate it? But that's me. There is Splunk syntax highlighting available. Yes. Well, before we let you go, I do want to point out that you both avoided answering, what's the weirdest? You both avoided that. I'd like to at least give it a shot if you can. Depends what weird is.  Oh, okay. Kind of. We'll keep the glasses away. Let's see. PG-13 is okay. Yeah. Maybe R. Let's see. Number one. I don't. I actually have a comment about that though. Oh, sure. There is, it's such a flexible product. It's put to so many different kinds of uses that to pick out one or two or even three really weird things is really hard because some, there's a whole, there's a whole tier of the weird uses of Splunk. Doing random things and Splunking games and Minecraft. It's really the beauties in the eye of the beholder with Splunk. It is. What they do with it is what they want. It's not about a general purpose tool. It's not a hammer looking for a nail. Or you know what I'm saying? It's different. Any same answer you're going to take a tap out on these two? So I think the thing is, just about anyone can do anything with Splunk. The community can be a great help in making that happen and helping the machines. Someone's going to Splunk the stats of the cube and do a little metadata grab on the end of the hour. Oh, I'm sure they are. I'm sure they are. We need a weird trophy for next year. There we go. Because then we'll have a competition. Well, I would have said, put this on up. Then we'll go. We'll get to work on that. Depends what weird is. Right. All right. Gentlemen, thanks for being here. Weirdness is weird, though. And again, and I'm sure on behalf of the community, thank you for the work. Fez, well-deserved and good luck down the road. Thank you for having me. Great community, guys. Really, if you'd be proud to be a part of this. Thanks for being here. Once in a lifetime, these communities develop like this. Cool, good. All right, back with more here from .conf 2016. Live on theCUBE in Orlando, right after this.


Well, after a lot of research done with the OECD expert panel on what is teacher's new pedagogical knowledge, which all teachers really know, one of the things just bubbled to the top and that was that number one, number one, before you can tell teachers what they should do, they should really know what not to do. So looking at a lot of the information that exists in teacher.


This is Coach Mack. Welcome to Beneath the Surface, powered by Microsoft Surface. Let's take a look at AJ Brown's 57-yard touchdown here, first and 10th of Tennessee 43. Titans come out in 13 personnel, which causes Indianapolis to reduce their defensive formation. We're going to get the tight end for the Titans right going in motion. Tight end goes in motion. You can see now that it's man-to-man. And so what we've got now with 13 personnel, they know they're in man-to-man. This play action is solid protection. This is Mack's protection. And Ryan Tannehill knows that he has AJ Brown with a corner man-to-man on the outside with a deep safety in the middle. Perfect protection. This Mack's protection. Look at the great pocket that he has to throw in. Beautiful throwing lane for him to launch this ball. AJ Brown, look at the location of the football. And then AJ Brown, what amazing athletic dexterity to stay on the sideline. Tiptoe, tight rope, down the sideline. Big 57-yard touchdown. Now the score is knotted at 14-14. And we've got a barn burner in Lucas Oil Stadium. Next play we're going to look at is 126 left in the fourth quarter. This is on Indianapolis eight-yard line. We've got 11 personnel down here. You can see that the Titans now are deployed in a nickel defense because of the 11 personnel. Frank Wright, who is a plate caller for the Indianapolis Colts, dials up a screen trying to get out of the shadow of his own end zone. Very well played by the Titans defense. Tremendous pressure up front. Beautifully diagnosed by Elijah Molden that's over here on the closed side. Look at the pressure. Watch this pressure up front. Watch the pressure that we are going to get. Watch Danico Autry. Watch Big Jeff. And then look at the tremendous effort from Buttoe Pre.  The quarterback has to change the ball. Wintz changes the ball from his right hand to his left hand to avoid his safety. Elijah Molden very alertly. Diagnosis to play is right there on the spot. Interception, touchdown. Now the Titans are up 31-24 late in the fourth quarter. Now we're looking at 6-26. We're in overtime. It's first intense scores now 31-31. Very tight ball game. We've got 12 personnel, two tight ends, both off the line of scrimmage. Titans now. This is a zone defense. And watch Kevin Byrd who has been playing tremendous middle of the field free safety for Titans all season long. Watch him diagnose this play. Look at him get the directional delivery key off of Carson Wintz. Carson Wintz starts to aim his shoulder over towards Byrd's right. Byrd breaks perfectly on the football. Goes right to the exact interception point. Cuts in front of the ball. Interception up the sideline to set up Randy Bullock for another game winning field goal. Titans win a thriller in overtime.


Thank you very much. Well, thank you for coming today. It's always a pleasure to meet with the individuals responsible for making this administration the force for change that it is. So I'm delighted to see you all here. I thought I might start today with a story about that out-of-town fellow who was riding in a New York City taxi cab. Cab driver was heading straight for a pedestrian that was crossing against the light. And at the very last moment, he swerved, sparing the poor pedestrian. And the driver, seeing the passenger startled expression, explained, he said, you see, if you hit him, you got to make out a report. Well, I'd like to make out a report today on the progress that we've made during our time here in Washington.   You're fulfilling our hopes to change the direction of this government. I'm sure you remember in 1980 when we asked the American people if they were better off than they were four years earlier, well, today we can say that America is better off than she was four years ago, even three years ago. Inflation, which had been taking most Americans through the ringer at double-digit rates, is running at a remarkable 2.6% for the last 12 months. That's the lowest 12-month period in 17 years.  The prime interest rate was 21.5%. It's hard to realize now that it actually got that high. It's like a bad experience you try to put out of your mind. But it was a staggering 21.5%. And we reduced that by almost half to 11%. And it's going to go down even further. Just think if the previous administration had cut in half the prime rate that it inherited, as we have done, they would have left us a rate of 3.5%. In the five years before we came to Washington, the tax take of the federal government doubled. And again, just think if we hadn't arrived on the scene, the American people's taxes would again nearly have doubled by inauguration day of 1985. Instead, we have cut personal tax rates 25% across the board. And beginning in 1985, taxes will be indexed so that never again will inflation push Americans into higher and higher tax brackets. Unemployment is, of course, a special concern, although it too is headed in the right direction downward. In July, we had a drop that was the biggest one-month drop in unemployment in 24 years. And in September, it dropped again, while the number of people working increased to an all-time high of, if we count the military, 103.6 million people. Now, in spite of the fact that Democrats and the press love to wallow in the negative news, good things are happening out there in the economy. And if good things weren't happening, you wouldn't have a stock market that was setting new records. There wouldn't be the increases in productivity, and housing, and construction, retail, and auto sales, all those things that show that a free economy with sound government policies can bring us prosperity once again. Overseas, we have direction as well. When we first came into office, we began speaking up for the principles that our nation believes in. Papering over our differences with the Soviet Union serves only the Soviet Union's propaganda purposes. We began speaking out against chemical warfare, against broken treaties, against the denial of human liberties. We began speaking up for freedom and democracy. And you know, it's amazing. In my meetings with foreign leaders, invariably, at some point or other in the conversation, they tell me how good it is to know once again what the United States stands for. And of course, the strengthening of our military defenses, along with our ardent search for arms reduction, also tells both friends and enemies alike that our mission is peace through strength. Our policies have direction at home and abroad. And it's thanks to you. And I just wanted to stop by to tell you that, because I realize it's not cabinet members or White House staff who do most of the work in planning, it's you. And you have my deepest appreciation and respect. And I've just received a memo this morning that kind of sums up a lot of what I've been saying. That from 1980 through the budget we're planning for 1984, in real dollars, domestic spending, excluding Social Security, will have dropped 10%. And after 20 years of continued climb in the percentage of gross national product that is spent by government, that has now begun to drop and will be a four-year drop for the first time, as I say, after 20 years of the previous increase. And the tax rate on people or the average tax taken from people, again, was above 18% when we came here. And it's now less than 14%. So God bless you all. And now I imagine that sometime or other, one or two of you might have said to yourselves, I know I only have a few minutes left, but might have said to yourselves, if I had a chance, I'd sure like to ask him. Well, go ahead and ask. Mr. President, there are a few of us here that work at the Department of Interior, and we are delighted by your choice. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about our new boss. Well, I've known Bill Clark for quite a long time. And as you know, he served on the California State Supreme Court for a number of years. And in that, surprisingly enough, to those in the press who are intimating that he must not have any knowledge of what the Department of Interior will be doing, you would be surprised how many cases and how many judgments were made that he participated in that involved the very things that we're talking about. And of course, he's a Western rancher. I told him when I appointed him that he could now wear his Western hat all the time, not just on weekends. But I think you'll find him a very reasonable man. I think you'll find him a very fair man. And I think you'll find him dedicated to the principles that have marked the Department of Interior under the previous Secretary, who I think was a fine Secretary of Interior. Mr. President, you first amazes and pleases for the announcement of Judge Clark. Any hints on who will be the next national security advisor? No, I'll try to surprise everybody again. Mr. President, there was a significant announcement rather than Judge Clark yesterday, which was along the way to the announcement that on Monday, you will be signing papers authorizing an election committee. And I think I speak for the people in this room, but we want you to know that we've worked for a long time. We're looking forward to you being our boss for another four years. Thank you very much. We're doing any of you jump ship. So many. Mr. President, it's so wonderful to know that you're going to be so much younger than any of your opponents. It's really true. I'm not really that old. They mixed up the babies at the hospital. Well, there is another one. Mr. President, I felt that when you came into office, you gave this country great leadership and great direction. I'm interested in your administration, as I said to Mr. Meese earlier, developing a 10-year forward plan so that we can have a vision from your insights into the future that lasts much longer than your 10-year in office. Well, may I say that if there is more time, yes, we very definitely want to leave in place some permanent changes so there can't be just a drifting back into the ways that for the last 50 years have so drastically changed the balance between the various levels of government. I think that there is a need for us to once again recall and make plain that we are a federation of sovereign states, that they are not just administrative districts of the federal government. And you know, the first vote I ever cast in 1932 for the Democratic candidate was for a platform on which that candidate ran that pledged then to restore to states and local government the autonomy, the authority, the rights that he claimed the federal government had unjustly seized. So I haven't changed at all. Something's changed at the party. Well now, one more and then I know I have to say something. Mr. President, how would you rate the prospects for passage of federal enterprise zone legislation? Well, I continue to be optimistic. It's been buried over there in the House for a long time. As you know, the Senate thought very well of it. And I am hopeful now with some of the progress that we've made that we are going to get that. You know what we're talking about here. The enterprise zones across the country where we can actually use tax incentives, not government spending programs, to induce private enterprise, to come in, employ people who presently are dependent on the government for their living. And it makes a great deal of common sense because the tax incentives are such that we're not getting the tax anyway. If local governments involved can give some breaks on property tax for industries that will come in there, well, they're not getting any tax on that property now because most of that property in those zones has already been taken over by the governments, the local governments, for delinquent taxes. So we're going to continue to push hard. We believe in it. So I'm reaching out to twist arms. Well now, I have one other nice little item. I'd like to call on Bill Borkland, the publisher of Government Executive Magazine, who has a little surprise for an important member of our management team. Bill? Thank you, Mr. President. I was told by the people who scheduled the president's time that if I run on an 80 length, they're going to throw a net over me and drag me out of here. So I would like to present to Ed Meese, Councilor of the President, the first annual government executive award for management excellence in government for his demonstrated performance for the last two years. Congratulations. And I guarantee you, he's surprised. Now, I do have to run. Would you like to say a word? They lured me over under false pretenses, but thank you.


You really understand how the technological world works.  And I don't mean hacker or spyware secure, I mean the next time you need that device, will it work? In this video I'm going to expose two popular myths and why they are not truly valid for the average person in the world today. What inspired this video was a recent comment in response to a blog post. To paraphrase I'm not going to read that because other articles on that site are anti-technology. Their point was that as some of my work questions resource availability or the net effect of green technologies when embodied carbon or energy are considered then nothing I say can be considered valid because it questions technological progress. What I say in response is that I'm not anti-technology but pro-science. Good science requires that we are always critical of technology because often irrational political or economic objectives define technology rather than just rational thinking. The first of these global myths whatever the product or development under discussion is that the modern lifestyle is sold on the basis that technology makes life better. It's a proposition treated as a rule when in fact it's a function. A certain level of technology definitely improves human lifestyle but beyond a certain point technological dependence creates a trap where growing complexity creates a high risk to our well-being should those systems suddenly fail. The best technologies are invisible. People do not perceive the system owning the miraculous ease freedom or service that the technology grants. The whole point about modern technology from cheap fast-fashing clothes to electronic payments to food delivery is that you do not question the sheer scale of the systems and economic relationships they rely upon. You simply agree with the proposition that it's good and carry on using it. I mean if you question that principle then your whole modern lifestyle would end wouldn't it. That's why you need to keep watching this video because I have a heavy reality to lay upon you. The more reliant we are upon technology for our daily life and the more seamless and invisible those technological systems become the greater problem it poses for your well-being should that system suddenly unravel. It needn't be a classic disaster movie event which causes this. Machines break, companies fail, countries fall out but more importantly as the world economy operates at more extreme levels of physical and economic activity so that whole system becomes more brittle and less resilient to shocks. Technology must be tested in terms of how it is made, how it performs and how performance varies in the probable yet uncommon conditions. For example as it is topical right now the extreme heating of urban areas resulting from climate change. Those who follow my work will know that the experience of being outdoors has a great influence on my work and that I really enjoy walking and if possible camping out in extreme weather, storms floods and winter cold but there is one type of weather I do not mess with, extreme heat. As I write this Britain has just smashed historic temperature records and has started to catch fire. What is missing from the media debate though is the role that technological dependency driven by the economic imperative of greater specialisation productivity and control has accentuated the risks of the urban lifestyle under the situation of extreme heat. Today technology is not an evaluation of how to enhance our lives it is variously an exploitative business model, a consumer fashion or a brand-led cult and combining all of these a religion of affluence and consumption. What we're talking about here are so-called black swan or low probability high impact events. Events that are likely and even more so in the conditions of a warming climate to trigger the disruption of our intertwined technological systems but which are so relatively infrequent that when they occur it pushes people and especially the technology that enables their lives outside of their everyday experience amplifying the impact of those failures. There are many systemic flaws in modern society interlocking processes which because of the way they underpin systemic complexity create a correlating risk of catastrophic failure when those systems are disrupted. From supply chains to critical minerals any one factor may create a global crisis such as the current cost of living crisis as a result of the war in Ukraine. It is possible to anticipate and plan to adapt to these crises. Practically though it is far better to develop a less technological, simpler alternative that you can enact when such crises arise. One based on developing your skills to manipulate the resources around you rather than creating yet another consumer market that extracts resources from your life such as the popular cult of prepping. Sorry to butt in with a quick advert but if you'd like to see more content like this then you really should consider liking this video, subscribing to my youtube channel, perhaps leaving a comment below and following me on social media. In today's digital analytics popularity contest all that button pressing means something in this messed up world and if we're going to challenge that then we have to do our bit to whack the algorithms supporting the kind of content we want to see by clicking on it. The ever common global myth I explain here is far older than the one about technology. It's a popular idea from industrialists to bright green environmentalists that cities offer the best life to their citizens. For a globally affluent minority live in the western middle class lifestyle it may be possible to argue that but only if you ignore the relative poverty or servitude that lifestyle enforces upon many others. In reality from the archaeological evidence on the very first cities that emerged 5000 years ago to the gruesome conditions of the first industrial cities of England to the typical lifestyle of the poorest 50% of the global population live in relative poverty in mega cities today. Highly engineered urban areas are not the driver of incontestable human well-being that they are claimed to be. Alongside increase in technological complexity there is a retrograde trend developing out of sight in the space where all those invisible technological systems interact. The reliance upon high availability grid power creates a systemic weakness as people do not know how to react to a protracted power loss. In the most affluent industrial states power cuts are a rare event. In poorer states they are a fact of life and in fact the emergent economic effects of accessible and reliable public services like power, water, temperature control, waste disposal and communications are the basis for the high consuming lifestyle of the most affluent states. Take that reliability away and those emergent benefits of urban living almost immediately collapse. The point is with the majority of humans now concentrated in urban areas we are engineering a situation where a catastrophic urban collapse could take place very quickly for any one of a number of seemingly unrelated trigger events. Again just think of the global crisis that has emerged as a result of the war in Ukraine all the ships stuck in the Suez canal before that and it's possible to see how seemingly restricted events in one location can propagate across the world. To see the complex interaction of electrical power with the average urban community I'm going to walk you through a diagram that illustrates how power pervades all facets of our modern lifestyle in Britain. The diagram starts with the house you live in but it could just as easily be your place of work. The root cause of any power crisis will be an imbalance in the national power grid this can be caused by insufficient power from power stations to keep the grid balanced against demand which creates brownouts or power surges that can lead to blackouts or excessive cold, heat, flooding or storm damage affecting transmission lines or the power stations all of which is certain under current committed climate change scenarios. The critical factor here is called black start this is the capacity of a power station to start itself up using its own backup generators. The two types of plant which had this in Britain coal and nuclear have largely been closed over the past three decades. Many gas-fired plants do not have black start capability and next to no renewable plants have it. What this means is that after a general grid failure plants with black start will have to power on to start the other power generating capacity first only then can the grid start to supply regional power networks. National grid estimate that after a grid failure there's a 50-50 charts 60% of capacity might be restored after a day but under extreme conditions where infrastructure has been damaged it will take longer. Regional grids bridged the national grid to consumers. Under extreme circumstances regional grids can institute load shedding whereby large energy consumers can agree to have cheaper electricity in return for being cut off in emergencies but as manufacturing and heavy industry has closed Britain's shrinking power supply has less large-scale interuptable capacity to shed before rolling blackouts are used to ration what power remains. Apart from national grid issues regional networks are more susceptible to flooding and storm damage. A significant problem is extreme heat large parts on the network are passively cooled lines and transformers heat up during the day when demand is high and cool overnight when demand falls. When night time temperatures remain high equipment can't shed as much heat which progressively leads to a higher operating temperature over successive days increasing the chances of grid failure. You may have solar panels on your home what few realise though is that they do not work in a power cut. Just like large renewable power generators home PV or wind installations require an external power supply to synchronize to the grid frequency unless you have your own independent battery backup system and inverter domestic renewable power sources do not supply power during a power cut. The latest model of highly efficient houses are airtight this reduces air leaks significantly reducing heat loss as a result they must have powered forced air exchange systems to extract and refresh the indoor air. Without a grid supply these heat and all cooling systems do not work then because the building is so well sealed indoor air quality declines rapidly creating health stress as carbon dioxide levels rise. If a heating or cooking stove is used indoors air quality would decline much faster. For 30 years the UK water supply system has centralized around large plants designed to meet higher quality standards. As a result we now pump large quantities of water long distances to supply urban areas using power from the regional grid. In the early years of water supply when areas were supplied with water for a few hours at a time every building had a cold water tank this would fill and continue providing water during the hours when the supply was cut off. Since the 1970s Britain has ripped out many of its cold water tanks this means should the supply fail people run out of water immediately and unless they have their own stored water they will have nothing to drink this creates a clear danger during periods for extreme heat. Like water supply sewage treatment systems have concentrated on larger plants with many small local treatment works haven't been closed over the last three decades. Large volumes of sewage are now pumped especially in areas with high levels of new house building where new developments cannot always drain by gravity. In a prolonged power failure the lack of water supply will limit sewage generation but with the pumps down what volumes are produced will back up and in many cases will overflow untreated into local water courses. This of course creates a conflict of people are also trying to extract water from those water courses during an emergency. There has been a major shift in food consumption over the last three decades towards frozen or chilled ready meals. Most people's food supply is now kept in the fridge which without power will warm up all the frost within 12 to 24 hours. This diagram doesn't include the gas network but that too is dependent upon power for pumping and good control. More importantly most modern gas cookers as well as solid fuel or oil fired boilers will not work without an external power supply. In general then there will be no heat sources for heating or cooking. In a situation where without refrigeration people keep most of their food in a readily perishable condition and without heat to cook it thoroughly that food has a higher probability of causing food poisoning. When the local loop of the phone network operated with copper wires power was supplied from the exchange and most telephone exchanges had priority power supplies and even backup power generation. The switch to fibre optic cables and BT's plan to eliminate all copper cables in the next few years creates a problem in emergencies. Lanline phones now require their own power supply to function. As a result in a power cut communication with the emergency services will become difficult. Smart devices must be charged their batteries are not designed to be replaced.  In addition without power home hubs and wi-fi networks will not work isolating the device from the network and without that link especially as many people keep information on cloud services rather than stored on the device or an external backup information that people may urgently need could be unavailable. More simply as many now keep important phone numbers stored on their device and so do not routinely remember phone numbers without the data on the device they may find it difficult to contact people. Many people do not have a lanline and they are totally reliant on mobile networks. These networks are fragile. Many mobile towers have no or very limited power backup on site. More importantly they routinely produce a lot of heat so during extreme heat events they may shut down. Again with the demise of copper wire lanlines many outland communities are vulnerable to disconnection. In remote areas especially where the plan is to roll out extensive wireless networks the complex problem of maintaining communications in extreme weather has stalled BT's efforts to eliminate the wired trunk network. The media has gone digital. Problem is most of those digital devices consume more power and are in many cases combined with other gadgets like smart devices. Certainly compared to the transistor radios 50 years ago which might work for many hours on a standard replaceable cell battery rechargeable gadgets with built-in batteries and nowhere near as resilient. Recently the BBC announced the end of the longwave service. FM radio services are also slated for closure in the near future too meaning all those old transistor radios will be obsolete. What this means is that in future emergencies people may experience information blackouts where the failure of communication networks and the lack of resilient devices to receive radio transmissions limit their ability to access information about the emergency. Not only as to what is the situation locally but more generally advice on how to deal with the emergency for those who have never experienced such conditions. Technology is making advanced societies less safe power supply failures but one of a number of similar flaws that pervade modern society. The engineering frailties in Britain's urban life support system are well known. Various experts have been talking about these problems for many years. In order to understand and consciously decide how to live in a sustainable way you must first be able to see these invisible technological systems and how they affect your life. Only then can you decide how to live or what the priorities are for your own lifestyle. The person who's comment inspired this video simply didn't want to engage in that pursuit. The moment they opened that Pandora's box it attacked the very identity this lifestyle had forged for them. The problem was their maintenance of a willing ignorance in order to maintain their blissful existence in the consumer technological utopia but as with all utopias it is the limitations of these technologies which render that lifestyle practically unattainable. Is using science, engineering and statistics to model the risk of failure anti-technology? No it's rational to evaluate the risks of the gadgets in our lives. If people are afraid of that then I suggest it is the result of their own failure to accept their dependency upon those fragile systems. The solution to this is simpler technology developing practical skills not buying gadgets. This is why I enjoy foraging, camping and cooking food outdoors. These are the skills which can sustain us when technology fails. If I spend time outdoors practicing and extending my primitive skills it is not because I reject technology. It is precisely because I understand the complex nature of modern technology and its limitations and I do not develop these skills to reject society but instead to create a more simple stable fallback option to help others when the high technology model eventually fails. The response to climate change is all too often accompanied by a call for more or improved technology. I disagree. I believe what we need is less complex technologies. Primitive skills are valuable not only because they make us resilient but because they can be easily and freely shared person to person in response to any emergency. In the final analysis though and especially in terms of how we react to the wider ecological crisis what we have to do is question the entire human project of urbanism. Not simply how cities are designed and operated but more fundamentally whether we need to significantly decrease the density of human settlement alongside a more general simplification of how we meet our needs in order to create some semblance of a sustainable enjoyable future for everyone.


It's an honor to be amongst you discussing the holy verses of the Qur'an and the blessing narrations of Ahl al Bayt. We have reached, if you have followed us, the last verse of Surat Al-Hamd, Surat Al-Ladhina An'amta Alayhim Ghayri Al-Maghdoubi Alayhim Waladaddeen.  We discussed about Ladhina, where Allah brought examples, where Allah didn't say sarat. And then also we discussed about An'amta, and who are those people who Allah swt has blessed.  Who are those people? They are including the prophets, the truthful, the witnesses, and the righteous. And excellent companions are they. So we discussed about the prophets, and then we are talking about the truth. But before continuing with the truthful, what is this na'amah that we are talking about? When was, is there a place that we talk about, Allah has mentioned na'amah? Yes. Chapter 5 verse 3. Where Allah swt says, Today I have perfected your religion for you, and I have completed my blessing upon you. What is this complete blessing? Nothing but the religion of Islam taking to be completed by the willaya and guardianship of the commander of the faithful, Ameer al-Mu'mineen, Ali ibn Abi Talab, alaihi salam, where Allah swt, on the Day of Ghadir, both Shi'a and non-Shi'a agree that this verse revealed to the holy prophet on the Day of Ghadir after he appointed the commander of the faithful, Ameer al-Mu'mineen, Ali ibn Abi Talab, alaihi salam, as his vice-chairman, as his successor, as his Khalifa, when this was done, Allah says that today I have perfected your religion. And today I have completed my blessing upon you. So what is this blessing that Allah has blessed us with? And those four people is the guardianship of willaya and the willaya of Ameer al-Mu'mineen, Ali ibn Abi Talab, alaihi salam. There's a lot of discussion into this. We want to go back to our Nabiyeena, Sadiqeen, al-Shuhada, al-Sala'i. So we say Sadiqeen are those people who are truthful, internally and out. Their action matches and syncs completely and 100% with their belief and their belief completely syncs and matches their action. We believe, we see, unfortunately, some people say, O Sheikh, I don't have to wear hijab. O Sheikh, I don't have to pray. O Sheikh, I don't have to practice all of our furu'a-deen and all of our wajabat. It's not about the action. That much is about your internal belief, internal intention. You should love Allah, Subhanahu wa Ta'ala. You should be pure internally. The physical body doesn't have that much value. We read it in the Holy Quran. Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Raheem wal-as by dawn. Inna al-insana lafi khos that indeed man is at last, except illa alladina amanu. So believe is the first part. Wa amelu s'alihad. It both has to come together. Believe and action. They both have to sync. They both have to match one another for us to be amongst sadiqeen. Not that I do something outward in front of people, but internally, I'm completely the opposite. How do, how will I know this when I go home at the end of the night, when I calculate my own deeds that we are really recommended on a daily basis, hourly basis, for us to calculate our own deeds. Let me see how much good deeds I gained and how much sin I gained and I lost from my good deeds, which let me put these two actions, two action of minds on a scale, to see which one is more heavier, my good deeds or my bad deeds. So at the end, I will be able to judge myself. And Amir al-Mummini, the commander of the Faithful, Ali ibn Abi Talib, has said, Haasibu an fosakum qabli an tuhaasibu. Judge yourself, calculate your own deeds, challenge yourself to see before you are judged on the Day of Qiyamah. Wa zinuha, put it on the scale, see which one is heavier, the good deeds or the bad deeds.  That's sadiqeen. Again, we can discuss more about it, but we try to be brief and giving you hints and clues and ideas for you to keep researching and reading and analyzing and diagnosing your personality to see where do we fit. What's shuhada? Who are these witnesses? Shuhada, some people have translated as the martyrs. Shuhada, Shahid, the one who fights defending the religion of Islam, defending the properties and the land of Muslims. But shuhada in here doesn't mean, doesn't translate to martyrs. Rather, it translates into the witnesses. They are not the martyrs, they are the witnesses. Shahid, witness, where we get this translation? Chapter 16, verse 89. وَيَوْمَنَا بَعَثُوا فِيْكُلْ أُمَّةٍ شَهِيدًا عَلَيْهِمْ مِنْ أَنْفُسِهِمْ وَجِئْنَا بِكَ شَهِيدًا عَلَا هَأُولًا Allah is addressing the Holy Prophet, where he says, the day we raise in every nation a witness against them from amongst themselves.  So for example, the nation of Prophet Musa A.A., the witness is Prophet Musa. The nation of Prophet Isa A.A., the witness is Prophet Isa A.A. Every amount of our time, the time of Imam Hassan al-Mushtaba, A.A., he's the witness. The time of Imam Hussein A.A., every Imam is witness of his people, of his time of the Imam. Rasulullah becomes the witness above all of these witnesses. Those who are killed for the sake of Allah, subhanahu wa ta'ala, they're not called Shaheed within the text of Qur'an and the words of Qur'an. Rather, they are who've been killed by the sake of Allah. So that's a witness. So we believe that every action of ours, everything that we do, as present, Allah sees it, Rasulullah sees it, and the Imam of our time, Imam Mehdi Mahdi, he's the reappearance, he sees it, and these two angels also, they are witnessing. Again, we can discuss a lot about this, about the witness and what we need to do, how careful we have to be. A lot of action plans can be driven. One thing that's actually one good action plan mentioned in the time goes very fast, it's that everything we do, let me think, one second, before everything I do, this act of mine is presented to Allah, Rasulullah, Imam Mehdi, he's the reappearance, am I not going to be embarrassed if I did this task? If I did it, I shouldn't do it. That gives us good tools, good equipments to fight our ego, to fight our internal shaitan that deviates us to the right path, to the wrong path. So we have to be very careful. If this act of mine is presented to Rasulullah, am I happy with this act of mine, or am I going to be embarrassed and my head is going to be loaded and I don't know what to say? Everything that we do, it's presented to them. So let us remind ourselves on a daily basis. Allah sees, Rasulullah sees, the Imam of our time sees, and the angels see what we do. So who are these righteous people? Who are those who have inner and outer righteousness that we have sadiqeen? Who are these sadiqeen? None, but Ahl al-Bayt, a.s. Where Allah has purified them, where we read chapter 33, verse 33, Indeed, Allah desires to repel all impurity from you, O people of the household, and purify you with a thorough purification. These are sadiqeen. Ahl al-Bayt, a.s. That are the path. So they are the right path. Do we see anyone within the history that was able to attain that highest level and to be very close to Ahl al-Bayt, a.s. Or we have also people say, Imam said that he is from us. Yes, we do have examples. We have Salmanun minna ahl al-Bayt. Salman al-Muhammadi. Some people say Salman al-Farsi. Imam Sada al-Salam has said, say Salman al-Muhammadi. And the Imam of Ahl al-Bayt, a.s. And Rasulullah said, he is from us. He's not infallible, but he wanted, if we want, if we place the goal that we want to become like Salman to get closer to Ahl al-Bayt, a.s. And we fight our inner shaitan and our shaitan. We can achieve it, insha'Allah. And it's possible. Other people have done it. We can do it also. So, sarata al-Ladina an'amta a.s. We discussed.  Who are those people? Prophets, Sadiqeen, Shuhadaa, and we have Salaheen, and the righteous. So, we talked about the prophets. Sadiqeen, the truthful, and the witnesses, and the Salaheen, the righteous, which we say they are Ahl al-Bayt, a.s. We continue.  So, there are three groups of people. Number one, those who are on the right path. Number two, those who have, so, they saw the right path, and they followed it. Sarata al-Ladina an'amta a.s. One sarata, they found it, they saw it, Allah showed them, and they followed it. The second group are those people who see the path, who have been educated and informed with the right path, but unfortunately, they go 180 degrees opposite, stubbornly, they go the opposite of the right path. They have been introduced, they are aware of the right path, they know what is right and what is wrong. They have been shown the clear signs, but they deny, they stubbornly deny. Read about them within the holy verses of the Quran, where Allah says, فَلَمَّا جَاءَتُمْ آيَاتُنَا مُبْصِرَةٌ مُبْصِرَةً قَالُواْ هَذَا سِحْرٌ مُبِينَ But when our signs came to them as eye-openers, they said, this is plain magic. Are we amongst those people? Or not? Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is not only showing signs to some group of people, and not showing signs to other group of people. Allah will show His signs, the signs of the truth, the signs of the right path to everybody. It's up to us to follow it or not. This is the free will that we have. Are we going to walk on this right path, or are we stubbornly going to reject it, even though after we have seen clear signs and eye-opener signs of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, we reject. What do I mean? I mean, a little bit elaborate. Some people attend many Majalices. They listen to many lectures. They read books. Clearly, for example, I come to the sisters and I come to the brothers also. They have been given clear ideas, such as, I mean, proofs from the holy verses of Quran, from the narrations of Ahl al-Bayt, alaykumussalam, about the importance of hijab. Hijab, hijab, hijab, hijab. They have been given. The signs have been given. The proofs have been given. The concept is very vivid, clear, is nothing confusing about it. Nothing confuse about it, but they reject because of their personal preferences or they have their own excuses why I prefer not to wear hijab. Allah has shown. Brothers, don't do this haram. For example, music is haram, looking at the opposite gender with lost and desires haram, and anything that is haram that we have, many reasons have been given. Salah on time, brothers and sisters, khoms, zakat, hajj, everything that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala wants from us. The reasons and the explanation is all out there. If we want to, if we want to find the truth within them, we can find it. Brother, why do you delay your Salah? Why don't you pray? Sheikh, Salah, this day and age, I'm at work, at school, excuses. I cannot pray on time. I come home at the end of the night. I pray all my prayers together. Well, Allah says, after we have shown them our signs, Allah says, وَجَحَدُوا بِحَا وَاستَيْقَنَتْحَا أنفُسَهُمْ أنفُسُهُمْ ضُلْمَنْ وَعُلُوبَنْ فَنْضُرُوا كَيْفَكَانَ عَقِبَةُ الْمُفسِدِيمِ And they denied them. What did they deny? They denied the signs of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, which was an eye-opener signs. And they denied them and just leave. And proudly, while their souls had been convinced of them, consider, then how was the end of this mischief-makers? They see the signs. Allah shows us the sign. We cannot just sit and discuss about other people. Oh, those people were deviated after the time of the Prophet, after Rasulullah, the part of this world. People were deviated. They didn't follow the path of Ahlul Bayt, a.s. They didn't hold on to the path of Ahlul Bayt, a.s. Well, are we holding on to the path of Ahlul Bayt, a.s. Are we truthful to them? Are we applying their teachings after we have been educated and we have been lectured, we have attended seminars, we have attended conferences, we have read books? Do we have any excuse? Am I on the path of those people who Allah has bestowed His mercy? Or am I on the path of those people who Allah has wrath? So, action plan before we conclude. Action plan will be everything that I get to, I get, I hear from the wajibat and muharramat, things that are obligatory acts and those these acts that I need to not participate and I need to abstain myself away, abstain myself. Let me find, as soon as I read the reasons and why it's wajib that I need to do it and why it's haram I should not do it, I see the signs. My shaitan says no, I will. If I see the signs which Allah will show everybody the signs, everybody, not one sign, not five signs, not 10 signs, not 100 signs, hundreds and hundreds and thousands of signs Allah will show us for us to be on the right path, for us to be holding to the path of Ahlul Bayt, a.s. Allah will educate us, Allah will inform us. But if I decide my ego and my internal shaitan is stronger and the shaitan outside, I have listened to him so much that they are stronger, they deviate me and I make decision to go 180 degrees away from their religion, well I will have Allah's wrath upon me. There's a little more left to this discussion, insha'Allah, we will leave it to the next episode. We'll conclude our episode by reciting Dua'il Faraj, asking Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala to hasten the reappearance of our beloved Imam Mahdi, adhul Allah, adhul shaleem. Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim. Allahumma kulli wadi'ika al-Hujjat ibn al-Hasan. Salawat uqa alayhi wa ala aba'eh fi hazeh al-sa'at wa fi kulli sa'ah. Waliyan wa hafidah wa qa'idah wa nasirah wa dalilah wa aina hatta tuskinahu wa ardaka taw'a wa tumatta'a wa fiha taweela. Bi rahmatika ya arham ar-Rahmeen.


You're welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at our Palo Alto studios having a CUBE conversation about digital transformation, industrial internet of things, AI, ML, all things great, and we're really excited to have representative of GE, one of our favorite companies to work with because they're at the cutting edge of old industrial stuff and new digital transformation and building a big software organization on a standard mode. So we're happy to have our first time, Jeff Earhart. He is the VP Intelligence Systems from GE Digital. Jeff, great to see you. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. So how did you get into GE? You've actually a creature of the valley. You've been here for a little while. How did you end up at GE? I have, I'm a new guy. So I've been here about a year and a half. I came in via the acquisition of a company called Wise.io where I was the CEO. So I've spent the last 10 years of my life building two different analytics startups. One was based around a very popular and powerful open source language called R and spent a lot of time working with much of the Fortune 500. I think the really data-driven companies now that you would think of the Facebooks, the Goldman Sachs, the Mercs, the Pfizer's helping them go through this data-driven journey. Anyway, that company was acquired by Microsoft and is embedded into their products now. But the biggest thing I learned out about that was that even if you have really good data science teams it's incredibly hard to go from whiteboard into production. How do you take concepts and make them work reliably, repeatedly, scalably over time? And so Wise.io was a machine learning company that was a spin-up from Berkeley and we spent time building what I now refer to as intelligent systems for the purposes of customer support automation within things like the Salesforce and Zendesk ecosystem. And it was really that capability that drew us to GE or drew GE to approach us to think about how do we build that gap not just from algorithms but into building true intelligent applications. Right, so GE is such a great company. They've been around for a hundred years, original DAO component. Jeff ML is not there now, but he was CEO, I think for 16 years, a long period of time. Beth Comstock, fantastic leader, Bill Rood building this great organization. But it's all built around these industrial assets.  We helped cover it in 2013. They had the Pritx Cloud, their own kind of industrial internet cloud, had a big developer conference. But I'm curious, it's coming from kind of a small Silicon Valley startup situation. When you went into GE, what's kind of the state of their adoption, you know, kind of how had Bill's group penetrated the rest of GE and were they making progress? Are people kind of getting it or are we still doing some evangelical work out in the field? Absolutely, both, meaning people understand it or implementing. Yet I think there was maybe misunderstandings about how to think about software data in particular analytics and AI and machine learning. And so a big part of my first year at the company was to spend the time coming in really from the top down from sort of the CEO and CDO levels across the different business, understanding what was the state of data and data-driven processes within their businesses. And what I learned really quickly was that the core of this business and this all, you know, public information and well-publicized is in things like GE Aviation. It's not necessarily the sale of the engine that is incredibly profitable, but rather it's maintaining and servicing that over time. And what organizations like them, like our oil and gas division with things like their inspection capabilities, like our power division, had really done is they had created as a service businesses where they were taking data across the customer base, running it through a data-driven process and then driving outcomes for our customers. And all of a sudden the aha moment was, wow, wait a minute, this is the business model that every startup in the Valley is getting funded to take down the traditional software players for. It's just not yet modern, scalable, repeatable with AI and machine learning built in. But that's the purpose and the value of building these common platforms with these applications on top that you can then make intelligent. So once we figure that out, it was very easy to know where to focus and start building from that. So it's just, it's kind of weird, I'm sure for people from the outside looking in to say data-driven company, we all want to drive data-driven companies. But then you say, well, wait a minute, now GE builds jet engines, there's no greater example that's used at conferences as to the number of terabytes of data an engine throws off on a transcontinental flight. Or you think of a power plant or locomotion and you think of the control room with all this information. So it probably seems counterintuitive to most that didn't they have data? Weren't they a data-driven organization? How has the onset of machine learning and some of the modern architectures actually turned them into a data-driven company where before, I think they were, but really not to the level that we're specifying here. Yeah. Your objective where you're trying to take them. Absolutely. So machine learning, AI, whatever buzzwords you want to use is a fascinating topic. It's certainly come into vogue. It's like many things that are hyped, gets confused, gets misused and gets overplayed. But it has the potential to be both an incredibly simple technology as well as an incredibly powerful technology. So one of the things I've most often seen cause people to go awry in this space is to try to think about what is the new things that I can do with machine learning? What is the green field opportunity? And whatever I'm talking to somebody at whatever level, but particularly at the higher levels of the company is I like to take a step back and I like to say, what are the value producing data driven workflows within your business? And I say define for me the data that you have, how decisions are made upon it and what outcome that you are driving for. And if you can do that, then what we can do is we can overlay machine learning as a technology to intelligently automate or augment those processes. And in turn, what that's going to do is it's going to force you to standardize your infrastructure, standardize those workflows, quantify what you're trying to optimize for your customers. And if you do that and standardize it in an incremental way, you can look backwards having accomplished some very big things. Right, and those are such big foundational pieces that most people, I think discount again, just the simple question of where is your data? That's right. What form is it in? So another interesting concept that we cover all the time and all the shows we go to is democratization, right? So it seems to me pretty simple actually, how do you drive innovation, democratize the data, democratize the tool to manipulate the data and democratize the ability to actually do something about it. That said, it's not that easy. And this kind of concept that we see evolving from citizen developer to citizen integrator to citizen data scientist is kind of where we all want to go to. But as you've experienced firsthand, it's not quite as easy as maybe it appears. Yeah, I think that's a very fair statement. And one of the things, again, spent a lot of time talking about it. I like to think about getting the right people in the right roles using the right tools. And the term data scientist has evolved over the past five plus years going from to give Drew Conway some credit of his Venn diagram of a programmer or a math guy in a domain expert into meaning anybody that's looking at data. And there's nothing wrong with that, but the concept of taking anybody that has the ability to look at data within something like a BI or a Tableau tool, that is something that should absolutely be democratized and you can think about creating citizens for those people. On the flip side though, how do you structure a true intelligence system that is running reliably, robustly and in particular in our field in mission critical, high risk, high stakes applications? There are bigger challenges than simply are the tools easy enough to use. It's very much more a software engineering problem than it is a data access or algorithmic problem. And so we need to build those bridges and think about where do we apply the citizens to for that understanding and then how do we build robust, reliable software over time? Right, so many places we can go and we're going to go with a lot of them. But one of the things you touched on which also is now coming in vogue is kind of ML that you can, somebody else's ML, right? As you would buy an application at an app store, now there's all kinds of algorithmic equations out there that you can purchase and participate in. It really begs an interesting question of kind of the classic buy versus build or as you said before we turn on the cameras, buy versus consume because with API economy with all these connected applications, it really opens up an opportunity that you can use a lot more than was produced inside your own four walls for those applications. And you see in that, how's that kind of playing out? So we can parse that in a couple of different ways. So the first thing that I would say is there's a Google paper from a few years back that we love and it's required reading for every new employee that we bring on board and the title of it was machine learning is the high interest credit card of technical debt. And the point and one of the key points within that paper is that the algorithm piece is something like 5% of an overall production machine learning implementation. And so it gets back to the citizen piece about it's not just making algorithms easier to use but it's also about where do you consume things from an API economy. So that's the first thing I would think about. The second thing I would think about is there's different ways to use algorithms or APIs or pieces of information within an overall intelligent system. So you might think of speech to text or translation as capabilities. That's something where it probably absolutely makes sense to call an API from an Amazon or a Microsoft or a Google to do that but then knowing how to integrate that reliably, robustly into the particular application or business problem that you have is an important next step. The third thing that I would think about is it very much matters what your space is.  Is it a dog versus a cat? Is it hot dog versus not? Versus some of the things that we face within an industrial context which aren't really publicly available. So we deal with things like within our oil and gas business we have a very large pipeline inspection integrity business where the purpose of that is to send the equivalent of an MRI machine through the pipes and collect spectral images that collect across 14 different sensors. The ability to think that you're going to take a pre-trained algorithm based on deep learning and publicly available images to something that is noisy, dirty, has 14 different types of sensors on it and good and good answer is ridiculous. And there's not that many, right? That's the other thing I think people underestimate that the advantage that Google has is we're all taking pictures of dogs and blueberries so that it's got so much more data to work with as opposed to these industrial applications which are much smaller. That's right. So we'll shift gears again in terms of the digital transformation. One of the other often said examples is when will the day come that GE doesn't sell just engines but actually sells propulsion miles to really convert to a service. And that's ultimately where it needs to go but it's kind of the next step beyond maintenance. How are you seeing that digital transformation play out? Do people kind of get it to the old line guys that run the jet engine, see that this is really a better opportunity because you guys have, and this is the broader theme, very unique data and very unique expertise that you've aggregated across in the jet engine space, all of your customers and all of the flying conditions and all of the types of airplanes where one individual mechanic or one individual airline just doesn't have an expertise. Huge opportunity. That's exactly right. And you can say the same thing in a power space, a power generation space. You can say the same thing and the one we were just talking about. You know, things like air inspection technology spaces. That's what makes the opportunity so powerful at GE and it's exactly the reason why I'm there because we can't get that any place else. It's both that history, it's that knowledge tied to the data. And very importantly, it's what you hinted at but as Bear is repeating is the customer relationships and the customer base upon which you can work together to aggregate all that data together. And if you look at what things are being done, they're already doing it. They are selling effectively efficiency within a power plant. They are selling safety within certain systems. And again, coming back to why create a platform, why create standardized applications, why put these on top, is if you standardize that, it gives you the ability to create derivative and adjacent products very easily, very efficiently in ways that nobody else can reach. And I love the whole, for people who aren't familiar with the digital twin concept and really leveraging this concept of a digital twin not to mimic kind of the macro level but to mimic the micro level of a particular part unit engine in a particular ecosystem where you can now run simulations, you can run tests, you can do all kinds of stuff without actually having that second big piece of capital gear out there. That's right. And it's really hard to mimic those if you didn't start from the first phase of how did you design, build and put it into the field. Right, right. So I want to shift gears a little bit just on some philosophical things that you've talked about and doing some research. One of them is that tech is the means to an end. And I know people talk about that all the time but we're in the tech business. We're here in Silicon Valley. People get so enamored with the technology that they forget that it is a means to an end. It is not the end and to stay focused. How are you seeing that kind of play out in G-Digital? Obviously Bill built this humongous organization. I'm super impressed that he's able to hire that many people over the last like four years in San Ramon. Originally I think just to build the internal software working within the G business units but now really to go much further in terms of industrial internet connectivity, et cetera. So how do you see that really kind of playing out? Yeah, I think one of my favorite quotes that I forget who it came from but I'll borrow is, customers don't want to buy a one inch drill bit, they want to buy a one inch hole. And I think there's both an art and a science and a degree of understanding that needs to go into what is the real customer problem that they are trying to solve for and how do you peel the onion to understanding that versus just giving what they asked for? And I think there's an organizational design to how do you get that right? So we had a visitor from Europe, the chairman of one of our large customers who's going through this data-driven journey and they were at the stage of simply just collecting data off of their equipment. In this case it was elevators and escalators. And then understanding how is it being used? What does it mean for field maintenance, et cetera? And but his guys wanted to move right to the end stage and they wanted to come in and say, hey, we want to build AI and machine learning systems. And we spent some time talking through them about how this is a journey, how you step through it. And you could see the light bulb go off that yes, I shouldn't try to jump right to that edge state. There is a process of going through it, number one. And then the second thing we spent some time talking about was how we can think about structuring this company to create that bridge between the new technology people who are building and doing things in a certain way and the people who have the legacy knowledge of how things are built, run and operated. And it's many times those organizational aspects that are as challenging or as big of barriers to getting it right as a specific technology. For sure, I mean, people process in tech, it's always the people at a hard part. It's funny, you bring up the elevator escalator. So we did a show at Splunk Mini Moons ago and we had a person on from an elevator company and the amazing insight, they connected Splunk to it. They could actually tell the health of a building by the elevator traffic. Not the health of its industrial systems and its HVAC, but whether some of the tenants were in trouble by watching the patterns that were coming off the elevator. I mean, just a whole different kind of data driven value proposition than they had before. So again, if you could share some best practices really from your experience with R and then now kind of what you're doing at GE about how people should start those first couple of steps in being data driven beyond kind of the simple in terms of just getting your house in order, getting your data in order, you know, where is it? I think if you connect to it, is it clean? How should they kind of think about prioritizing? How do they look for those easy wins? Because at the end of the day, it's always about kind of the easiest wins to get to support to move to the next level. So I've sort of got a very simple, high little playbook and the first step is you have to know your business and you have to really understand and prioritize. Again, sometimes I think about the, not the build by decision per se, but maybe the build consume decision. And again, where does it take the effort to go through hiring the people, understanding, building those solutions versus where is it just best to say, I'm best to consume this product or service for somebody else. So that's number one and you have to understand your business to do that really well. The second one is, and we touched on this before, which is getting the right people on the right seats of the bus.  And then the last thing is to make sure to understand that it is a journey. And we like to think about the journey that we go through in sort of three phases or sort of three swim lanes that can happen both in parallel, but also as a journey. And we think about those as sort of basic BI and exploratory analytics. How do I learn, is there any there, there? And fundamentally you're saying, I want to ask and answer a question one time. Think about traditional business reporting. But once you've done that, your goal is always to put something into production. You say, I've asked and answered once, now I want to ask and answer hundreds, millions, billions of times in a row. And the goal is to codify that knowledge into a statistic and analytic of business rule. And then how do you start running those within a consistent system? And it's going to do and force exactly what you just said. Do I have my data in one place? Is it scalable? Is it robust? Is it queryable? Where is it being consumed? How do I capture what's good or bad? And once I start to then define those, I can then start to standardize that within an application workflow and then move into again, these complex adaptive intelligent systems powered by AI and machine learning. And so that's the way we think about it. Know your business, get the people right, understand that it's a systematic journey. And really bake it into the application. That's the thing that we don't want to make the same mistake that we did with big data. Put it into the application. It's not to stand alone, kind of funny thing. Exactly. Jeff, I'll give you the last word before we wrap for the day. So you've been with G now for about a year and a half, about halfway through 2018. What are your priorities for the next 12 months? If we sit down here, June one next year, what are you working on? What's kind of top of mind for you going forward? Yeah, so top of mind for me. So as I mentioned, sort of our first year here was really serving the landscape, understanding how this company does business, where the opportunities are, again, where those data-driven workflows are. And we have an idea of that with the core industrials. And so what we've been doing is getting that infrastructure right, getting those people right, getting the V1s of some very powerful systems set up. And so what I'm going to be doing over the next year or so is really working with them to scale those out within those core parts of the business, understand how we can create derivative and adjacent products over those, and then how we can take them to market more broadly based upon that exactly as you said earlier, that large-scale data that we have available, that customer insight and that knowledge of how we've been building this stuff. So, well, I look forward to it. I look forward to being back in a year. All right. Jeff Aratt, thanks for watching. G, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from our Palo Alto Studios. See you next time. Excellent.


Ahoy, ahoy, and welcome to the channel. I'm Dr. Sumerian, not a real doctor, and today we're going to go over just a few dank memes from the dank memes from the indeed subreddit. I did say in the last video that when I did this one, I would at least talk a little bit about why there's been a delay. See, for a period of time this month, most of Reddit, or at least most of the important parts of Reddit, went dark as a protest against some API changes that Reddit is instituting. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like that protest went anywhere, and in fact Reddit decided they were going to try and force the subreddits back open by changing the moderators out if they didn't comply, which leaves me very questionable as to whether or not I think Reddit is worth doing videos about going forward, but we're going to do this one at the very least, and then I'm going to give some consideration to the idea that perhaps Reddit is a... perhaps Reddit is a dead platform. I don't know. I'll figure it out. I'm probably going to do more of these. As long as they're still making memes over there, I feel like it's respectful. So the first meme is by Zeal. I find you all disgust. I get it already.   It may only be emotional damage, but it's damage. It worked. It helped. Maybe? Question mark. I do love the idea of SCP-682 being defeated through emotional damage. The only one who's allowed to kill 682 is 682. You heard my feelings. I'm going to jump into the sun now. Let's see what's next. Shoulder. This is a shoulder meme. Try to re-rate this content. It seems you have already rated this content and your current rating is plus one. You cannot re-rate it with the same value. This is literally 1984. No, that's the funny part. It's like, usually when I see try to re-rate this content, it's because it's negative one. I do see that sometimes. It would be interesting.  I've always found it particularly interesting. Any time someone's like, read this article and I want to demonstrate just how much I dislike it, I'll just post. It seems you've already rated this content and your current rating is minus one. I'm sorry. The whole thing. Trying to re-rate this content. You cannot re-rate it with the same value. Just to point out that I would downvote it again if I possibly could. Yeah, no. I like this. This is funny. This is something that happens to me quite a lot actually. I got a master ball from the Pokemon dimension. I figured you might find it useful. Thank you. I have no idea which SCP to use it on. I don't know. I feel like that's it depends on the universe, I guess. Oh, and this is a meme by Dim and Bright. But yeah, it depends on the universe, I guess. The easy answer that most people probably think of is 682. But 682 is not existentially threatening to the world. But a Pokeball is not going to work on like literally anything, even if it is a master ball. What I mean is it's going to work on some sort of a creature that's a problem. So maybe the Scarlet King or the Broken God. Something God-like in power but which can still be captured by a Pokeball? That's a good question. Actually, here, let's do this. In the comments down below, tell me which SCP you think should be captured by a Pokeball. And if you select something that's not world ending, I'm going to judge you, I promise. Every other site, Site-19. I don't know that this is necessarily true. Dude with hat who made this meme. Site-19 does get a lot of attention, but so does Site-17. So does Site-88. So does Site-43. That's the one I'm thinking of. I almost said Site-42, which is Sherm's thing, but that doesn't really show up as much as Site-43 does. I mean, there are plenty of sites that get plenty of attention to the SCP Wiki. It's just that Site-19 does. You're not wrong. Site-19 gets an outsized amount of influence, but that's because a lot of people really, their version of the SU Foundation is one where there's just one site, maybe a couple other tertiary sites like Site-17 or Site-88, and that's literally it. Like there is, and those other sites are much more minor in comparison. I don't know if that's a bad thing. It depends on the person. I swear it's like our entire universe is a work of fan fiction. 05, Black Box. I mean, this meme is by fanboyx27. You know, I picked this out mostly from the fact that I've, I've, no, I've seen this before, but given the complete lack of emotion that the actress portrays here in the actual scene, which I remember from, well, not childhood from my teenage years, it's funny to see this use as a reaction meme because it's literally like sort of a non-reaction reaction, but that's none of my business, sips tea.  This is by FledBeast578. You know, I'm not anti-back rooms. I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I'm not, I'm sure this has meant ingest, I think, because honestly, got the SCP foundation had exactly the same problems when it was young and the back rooms are young, even if they are getting more and more popular as time goes by. So it's like, come on, like, and our respectful youth, yeah, okay, our tasteful jokes, their immature, this has got to be ingest, right? Like, you can't possibly legitimately think that the SCP foundation in the back rooms compare this way, because like, almost everything that's listed here is exactly the same on both sides. I think that's a point, right? Yeah, looking at the image, like how everything is exactly the same on both sides, yeah, yeah, it's got to be. Someone in the comments tell me if I'm taking this seriously when I should, when I should be looking at it as satire. Majah the Oracle. I need, I help anomalous animals. That's Wilson's World Life Solutions. Could you help milk my clowns? Herman Fuller, Circus of the Disquieting. What? Clowns are livestock animals. What? I've seen a lot of versions of this meme using these birds. This is one of the first ones that really legitimately gave me a chuckle, because this is a little weird.  And plus clowns are, clowns are livestock animals, but also in a lot of Herman Fuller stories, they're also not. They're also like people that can be milked. Super weird stuff. Anyway, that's it. Thank you very much for watching. If you enjoy the video, hit the subscribe button, hit the notification bell after that so you're notified when I upload new videos. And there are two options you have for supporting the channel. You can head on over to Patreon, like everybody here on the screen already has, and pledge at any level. I'd like to specifically thank Sinjeriki for pledging at $100. There's also the possibility you can scroll down into the, just below the video and join on YouTube. I have memberships open. I've had memberships open for quite a little while now, but I haven't really advertised them as an extant thing. If you'd like to join as a member on the channel, you can. I don't have a lot of rewards yet, so it's really just a matter of supporting me to get the content out faster, perhaps, but I would very much appreciate it if you did. I'll definitely start looking, depending on the amounts, definitely start looking at giving shout outs. That's it. It's nice to know that I'm not alone out here, and I will see you all again on Tuesday, I hope.