hello and welcome to this special cube conversation i'm dave nicholson and this is part of our continuing coverage of google cloud next 2021 i have two very special guests with me and we are going to talk about the topic of security uh i have sunil potti who is vice president and general manager of google cloud security uh who in a previous life had senior leadership roles at nutanix and citrix along with lior div who is the ceo and co-founder of cyber reason lior was formerly a commander in the much famed unit 8200 uh part of the israeli defense forces uh where he was actually a medal of honor recipient uh very uh honored to have him here this morning sunil and lior welcome to the cube sunil welcome back to the cube yeah great to be here david and and to be in the presence of a medal of honor recipient by the way a good friend of mine leor so be here well good to have both of you here so uh i'm the kind of person who likes my dessert before my uh before my entree so why don't we just get right to it you're the two of you are here to announce something very very significant uh in the field of security uh sunil do you want to start us out what are we here to talk about yeah i mean i think maybe uh you know just to set this context um as as many of you know about a decade ago a nation's sponsored attack you know actually got into google plus a whole bunch of tech companies you know the project aurora was quite uh you know infamous for a certain period of time and actually google realized almost a decade ago that look you know security can't just be a side thing it has to be the primary thing including one of the co-founders becoming for lack of a better word the chief security officer for a while but one of the key takeaways from that whole incident was that look you have to be able to detect everything and trust nothing and and the underpinning for at least one of them led to this whole zero trust architectures that everybody now knows about but the other part which is not as popular at least in industry vernacular but in many ways equally important and some ways more important is the fact that you need to be able to detect everything so that you can actually respond and that led to the formation of you know a project internal to google to actually say that look let's democratize uh storage and make sure that nobody has to pay for capturing security events and that led to the formation of this uh new industry concept called a security data lake in chronicle was born and then as we started evolving that over into the enterprise segment partnering with you know cyber reason on one hand created a one plus one equals three synergy between say the presence around what do you detect from the end point but also generally just so happens that as lior will tell you the cyber reason technology happens to start with endpoint but it's actually the core tech is around detecting events but doing it in a smart way to actually respond to them in much more of a contextual manner but beyond just that you know synergy between uh you know a world-class planet scale you know security data like forming the foundation and integrating you know in a much more cohesive way with uh cyber reasons detection response offering the spirit was actually that this is the first step of a long journey to really hit the reset button in terms of going from reactive mode of security to a proactive mode of security especially in a nation-state-sponsored attack vector so maybe leo you can speak a few minutes on that as well absolutely so um as you said i'm coming from a background of uh nation state hacking so for us at cyberism it's uh not is foreign uh what the chinese are doing uh on a daily basis and the growing uh ransomware cartel that's happening right now in russia um when we looked at it we said then uh cyberism is very famous by our endpoint detection and response capability but when we establish cyber reason we establish the cyberism on a core or almost fundamental idea of finding malicious operation we call it the male idea so basically instead of looking for alerts or instead of looking for just pieces of data we want to find the hackers we want to find the attack we want to be able to tell basically the full story of what's going on uh in order to do that we build the inside cyberism basically from day one the ability to analyze any data in real time in order to stitch it into the story of the male the malicious operation but what we realize very quickly that while our solution can process more than 27 trillion events a week we cannot feed it fast enough just from end point and we are kind of blind when it comes to the rest of the attack surface so we were looking uh to be honest quite a while for the best technology that can feed this engine and to as sunil said the one plus one equal three or four or five to be able to fight against those hackers so in this journey uh we we found basically chronicle and the combination of the scale that chronicle bringing the ability to feed the engine and together basically to be able to find those hackers in real time and real time is very very important and then to response to those type of attack so basically what is uh exciting here we created a solution that is five times faster than any solution that exists right now in the market and most importantly it enables us to reverse the atmospheric advantage and basically to find them and to push them out so we're moving from hey just to tell you a story to actually prevent hackers to being in your environment so leor can you i want to double click on that just just a little bit um can you give give us a kind of a concrete example of this difference between simply receiving alerts and uh and actually um you know taking taking uh uh correlating creating correlations and uh and actually creating actionable proactive intelligence can you give us an example of that working in in the real world yeah absolutely we can start from a simple example of ransomware by the time that i will tell you that there is a ransomware your environment and i will send an alert uh it will be five computers that are encrypted and by the time that you gonna look at the alert it's gonna be five thousand uh basically machines that are encrypted and by the time that you will do something it's going to be already too little too late and this is just a simple example so preventing that thing from happening this is critical and very timely manner in order to prevent the damage of ransomware but if you go aside from ransomware and you look for example of the attack like solarwind basically the purpose of this attack was not to create damage it was espionage the russian wanted to collect data on our government and this is kind of uh the main purpose that they did this attack so the ability to be able to say hey right now there is a penetration this is the step that they are doing and there is five ways to push them out of the environment and actually doing it this is something that today it's done manually and with the power of chronicle and cyberism we can do it automatically and that's the massive difference sunil are there specific industries that should be really interested in this or is this a is this a broad set of folks that should be impacted no you know in some ways uh you know the the the saying these days to learn's point on ransomware is that you know if if a customer or an enterprise has a reasonable top-line revenue you're a target you know you're a target to some extent so in that sense especially given that this has moved from pure espionage or you know whether it be you know government oriented or industrial espionage to a financial fraud then at that point in time it applies to pretty much a wide gamut of industries not just financial services or you know critical infrastructure companies like oil and gas pipeline or whatever it could be like any company that has any sort of ip that they feel drives their top line business is now a target for such attacks so when you talk about the idea of partnership and creating something out of a collaboration what's the meat behind this what what what do you what are you guys doing beyond saying you know hey sunil lior these guys really like each other and they respect what the other is doing what's going on behind the scenes what are you actually implementing here moving forward so every partnership is starting with love so it's good [Laughter] but then it need to translate to to really kind of pure value to our customers and pure value coming from a deep integration when it's come to the product so basically uh what will happen is every piece of data that we can collect at cyber is in uh from endpoint any piece of data that the chronicle can collect from any log that exists in the world so basically this is kind of covering the whole attack surface so first we have access to every piece of information across the full attack surface then the main question is okay once you collect all this data what you're gonna do with it and most of companies or all the companies today they don't have an answer they're saying oh we're gonna issue an alert and we hope that there is a smart person behind the keyboard that can understand what just happened and make a decision and with this partnership and with this integration basically we're not asking and outsourcing the question what to do to the user we're giving them the answer we're telling them hey this is the story of the attack this is all the pieces that's going on right now and in most cases we're gonna say hey and by the way we just stopped it so you can prevent it from the future when will people be able to leverage this capability in an integrated way and and and by the way restate how this is going to market as an integrated solution what is what is the what is what are we going to call this moving forward so basically this is the cyber reason xdr uh powered by chronicle and we are very very um uh happy about it yeah and i think just to add to that i would say look the the meta strategy here and the way it'll manifest is in this offering that comes out in early 2022 um is that if you think about it today you know a classical quote-unquote security pipeline is to detect you know analyze and then respond obviously you know just just doing those three in a good way is hard doing it in real time at scale is even harder so just that itself was where cyber reason and chronicle would add real value where we are able to collect a lot of events react in real time but a couple of things that i think that you know to your original point of why this is probably going to be a little for game changer in the years to come is we're trying to change that from detect analyze respond to detect understand and anticipate so because ultimately that's really how we can change you know the profile from being reactive in a world of ransomware or anything else to being proactive against a nation sponsored or nation's influenced attacks because they're not going to stop right so the only way to do this is to rather than just go back up the hatches is just really you know change change the profile of how you'll actually anticipate what they were probably going to do in 6 months or 12 months and so the the graph technology that powers the heart of you know cyber reason is going to be intricately woven in with the contextual information that chronicle can get so that the intermediate step is not just about analysis but it's about truly understanding the overall strategy that has been employed in the past to predict what could happen in the future so therefore then actions could be taken downstream that you can now say hey most likely this these five buckets have this kind of personal information data there's a reasonable chance that you know if they're exposed to the internet then as you create more such buckets in that project you're going to be susceptible to more ransomware attacks or some other attacks right and that's the the the kind of thinking or the transformation that we're trying to bring out with this joint office so lior uh this this concept of uh of mallops and uh cyber reason itself you weren't just born yesterday you've been you've been uh you have thousands of customers around the globe he does look like he was born i i know i know i know well you you know it used to be that the ideal candidate for ceo of a startup company was someone who dropped out of stanford i think it's getting to the point where it's people who refused admission to stanford so uh the the dawn of the 14 year old ceo it's just it's just around the corner but uh but lior do you get frustrated when you see um you know when you become aware of circumstances that would not have happened had they implemented your technology as it exists today yeah we have a for this year it was a really frustrating year that starting with solarwind if you analyze the code of solarwind and we did it but other did it as well basically the russians were checking if cyberism is installed on the machine and if we were installed on the machine they decided to stop the attack this is something that first it was a great compliment for us from you know our not friend from the other side that decided to stop the attack but on a serious note it's like we were pissed because if people were using this technology we know that they are not going to be attacked when we analyze it we realize that we have three different ways to find the solar wind hackers in a three different way so this is just one example and then the next example in the colonial pipeline hack we were the one that found darkseid as a group that we were hacking we were the first one that released a research on them and we showed how we can prevent the basically what they are doing with our technology so when you see kind of those type of just two examples and we have many of them on a daily basis we just know that we have the technology in order to do that now when we're combining uh the chronicle technology into the the technology that we already have we basically can reverse the adversary advantage this is something that you're not doing in a single day but this is something that really give power to the defenders to the communities of siso that exist kind of across the us um and i believe that if we're going to join forces and lean into this community and and basically push the solution out the ability for us to fight against those cartels specifically the ransomware cartels is going to be massive sunil this time next year when we are in uh google cloud next 2022 um are you guys going to come back on and offer up the we told you so awards because once this is actually out there and readily available the combination of chronicle and cyber reasons technology um it's going to be hard for some csos to have an excuse uh it may be it may be a uncomfortable to know that uh they could have kept the door secure uh but didn't yeah where's that bad business is that bad business to uh hand out awards for doing dumb things i don't know about uh you know a version of darwin awards probably don't make sense but but but generally speaking so i do think uh you know we're all like as citizens in this right because you know we talk about customers i mean you know alphabet and google is a customer in some ways cyber reason is a customer the cube is a customer right so i think i think the robot hitting the road a year from now will be we should we should do this where i don't know if the cube does more than two folks at the same time david but we should i mean i'm sure we'll have enough to have at least a half a dozen in in the room to kind of talk about the solution because i think the the you know as you can imagine this thing didn't materialize i mean it's been being cooked for a while between your team and our team and in fact it was inspired by feedback from some joint customers out in the market and all that good stuff so so a year from now i think the best thing would be not just having customers to talk about the solution but to really talk about that transformation from respond to anticipate and do they feel better on their security posture in a world that they know like and leo should probably spend a few minutes on this is i think we're on the tip of the sphere of this nation-state era and what we've just seen in the last few years is what maybe the nation-states have seen over two decades ago and they're going to run those playbooks on the enterprise for the next decade or so yeah leor talk about that for a minute yeah it's it's really you know just to continue the sunil thought it's it's really about finding the unknown because what's happening on the other side it's like specifically china and russia and lately we saw iran starting to gain uh power um basically their job is to become better and better and to basically innovate and create a new type of attack on a daily basis as technology has evolved so basically there is a very simple equation as we're using more technology and relying more on technology the other side is going to exploit it in order to gain more power espionage and create financial damage but it's important to say that this evolution it's not going to stop this is just the beginning and a lot of the data that was belong just to government against government fight basically linked in the past few years now criminals starting to use it as well so in a sense if you think about it what's happening right now there is basically a cold war that nobody is talking about it between kind of the giant that everybody is hacking everybody and in the crossfire we see all of those enterprises across the world it was not a surprise that um you know after the biden and putin uh meeting suddenly it was a quiet it was no ransomware for six weeks and after something changing the politics suddenly we can see a a groin kind of attack when it's come to ransomware that we know that was directed from russia in order to create pressure on the u.s economy sunil wrap us up what are your f what are what are your final thoughts and uh what's what's the what's the big takeaway here no i think you know i i think the key thing for everyone to know is look i think we are going into an era of state-sponsored uh not espionage as much as threat vectors that affect every business and so in many ways the chiefs the chief information security officer the chief risk officer in many ways the ceo and the board now have to pay attention to this topic much like they paid attention to mobile 15 years ago as a transformation thing or maybe cloud 10 years ago i think cyber has been one of those it's sort of like the wireless error david like it existed in the 90s but didn't really break around until iphone hit or the world of consumerization really took off right and i think we're at the tip of the spear of that cyber really becoming like the era of mobile for 15 years ago and so i think that's the if there's like a big takeaway i think yes there's lots of solutions the good news is great innovations are coming through companies like cyber reason working with you know proven providers like google and so forth and so there's a lot of like support in the ecosystem but i think if there was one takeaway that was that everybody should just be ready internalized we don't have to be paranoid about it but we anticipate that this is going to be a long game that we'll have to play together well with that uh taking off my journalist hat for a moment and putting on my citizen hat uh it's reassuring to know that we have really smart people working on this uh because when we talk about critical infrastructure control systems and things like that being under threat um that's more significant than simply having your social security number stolen in a in a data breach so um with that uh i'd like to thank you sunil leor thank you so much for joining us on this special cube conversation this is dave nicholson signing off from our continuing coverage of google cloud next 2021 [Music] you

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of PegaWorld iNspire, brought to you by Pegasystems. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PegaWorld iNspire 2020. And now that the dust has settled on the event, we wanted to have a little postmortem power panel, and I'm really excited to have three great guests here today. Adrian Swinscoe is a customer service and experience advisor and the best-selling author of a couple of books: "How to Wow" and "Punk CX." Adrian great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Hey Dave. >> And Shelly Kramer's a principal, analyst, and a founding partner at Futurum Research, CUBE alum. Shelly, good to see you. >> Hi, great to see you too. >> And finally, Don Schuerman who is the CTO of Pegasystems and one of the people that was really highlighting the keynotes. Don, thanks for your time, appreciate you coming on. >> Great to be here. >> Guys, let's start with some of the takeaways from the event, and if you don't mind I'm going to set it up. I had some, I had many many notes. But I'll take a cue from Alan's keynote, where he talked about three things: rethinking the customer engagement, that whole experience, that as a service, I'm going to say that certainly the second part of last decade came to the front and center and we think is going to continue in spades. And then new tech, we heard about that. Don we're going to ask you to chime in on that. Modern software, microservices, we've got machine intelligence now. And then I thought there were some really good customer examples. We heard from Siemens, we heard from the CIO and head of digital at Aflac, the Bank of Australia. So, some really good customer examples. But Shelly, let me start with you. What were your big takeaways of PegaWorld iNspire 2020, the virtual edition? >> You know, what I love is a focus, and we have talked a lot about that here at Futurum Research, but what I love is the thinking that what really is important now is to think about rethinking and kind of tearing things apart. Especially when we're in a time, we're in difficult economic times, and so instead of focusing on rebuilding and relaunching as quickly as possible, I think that now's the time to really focus on reexamining what is it that our customers want? How is it that we can best serve them? And really sort of start from ground zero and examine our thinking. And I think that's really at the heart of digital transformation, and I think that both in this virtual event and in some interviews I was lucky enough to do in advance with some of the Pega senior team, that was really a key focus, is really thinking about how we can re-architect things, how we can do things in ways that are more efficient, that impact people more effectively, that impact the bottom line more effectively. And to me that's really exciting. >> So Adrian, CX is obviously your wheelhouse. A lot of the conversation at PegaWorld iNspire was of course about customer experience, customer service. How do you think the content went? What were some of the highlights for you? And maybe, what would you have liked to hear more of? >> Well I think, thanks Dave, I actually really enjoyed it. I actually kind of thought was, first of all I should say that I've been to a bunch of virtual summits and I thought this was one of the best ones I've done in terms of its pace and its interactivity. I love the fact that Don was bouncing around the screen, kind of showing us around the menu and things. I thought that was great. But the things that I thought really stood out for me was this idea of the context around accelerating digital transformation. And that's very contextual, it's almost being forced upon us. But then this idea of also the center-out thinking and the Process Fabric. Because it really reminded me of, and Don you can maybe correct me if I'm wrong here, is taking a systems-thinking approach to delivering the right outcomes for customers. Because it's always struck me that there's a contradiction at the heart of the rhetoric around customer-centricity where people say they want to do the right things by customers but then they force them down this channel-centric or process-centric way of thinking. And so actually I thought it was really refreshing to hear about this center-out and Process Fabric platform that Pega's building. And I thought it's really exciting because it felt like actually we're going to start to take a more systemic look and take to delivering great service and great experience. So I thought that was really great. Those were my big headlines out of the summit. >> So Don, one of the-- >> Adrian I think-- >> Go ahead, please. >> Yeah, I think the whole idea, you know, and Alan referred to center-out as a business architecture, and I think that's really an important concept because this is really about the intersection of that business goal. How do I truly become customer-centric? And then how do I actually make my technology do it? And it's really important for that to work where you put your business logic in the technology. If you continue to do it in the sort of channel-centric way or really data-centric, system-centric way that historically has been the approach, I don't think you can build a sustainable platform for great customer engagement. So I think that idea of a business architecture that you clued in on a little bit is really central to how we've been thinking about this. >> Let's stay on that for a second. But first of all, I just want to mention, you guys did a good job of not just trying to take a physical event and plug in into virtual. So congratulations on that. The virtual clicker toss, and you know, you were having some fun eating your eggs. I mean that was, that's great. And the Dropkick Murphys couldn't be live, but you guys still leveraged that, so well done. One of the better ones that I've seen. But I want to stay on your point there. Alan talked about some of the mistakes that are made, and one of the questions I have for you guys is, what is the state of customer experience today, and why the divergence between great, and good, and pretty crappy? And Alan talked about, well, people try to impose business process top-down, or they try to infuse logic in the database bottom-up. You really got to do that middle-out. So, Don I want to come back to you. Let's explore that a little bit. What do you really mean by middle-out? Where am I putting the actual business logic? >> Yeah, I think this is important, right. And I think that a lot of time we have experiences as customers. And I had one of these recently with a cable provider, where I spent a bunch of time on their website chatting with a chatbot of some kind, that then flipped me over to a human. When the chatbot flipped me to the human, the human didn't know what I was doing with the chatbot. And that human eventually told me I had to call somebody. So I picked up the phone, I made the phone call. And that person didn't know what I was doing on chat with the human or with the chatbot. So every time there's a customer, I'm restarting. I'm reexplaining where I am. And that to me is a direct result of that kind of channel-centric thinking, where all of my business logic ends up embedded in, "Well hey, we're going to build a cool chatbot. "And now we're going to build a cool chat system. "And by the way, "we're going to keep our contact centers running." But I'm not thinking holistically about the customer experience. And that's why we think this center-out approach is so important, because I want to go below the channel. And I want to think about that customer journey. What's the outcome I'm trying to get to? In the case of my interaction, I was just trying to increase my bandwidth so that I could do events like this, right? What's that outcome that I'm trying to get to and how do I get the customer to that outcome in a way that's as efficient for the business and as easy for the customer as possible regardless of what channel they're on. And I think that's a little bit of a new way of thinking. And again, it means thinking not just about the customer goal, but having an opinion, whether you are a business leader or an IT person, about where that logic belongs in your architecture. >> So, Adrian. Don just described the sort of bot and human experience, which mimics a lot of the human experience that we've all touched in the past. So, but the customer journey that Don talked about isn't necessarily one journey. There's multiple journeys. So what's your take on how organizations can do better with that kind of service. >> Well I think you're absolutely right, Dave. I mean, actually during the summer I was talking, I was listening to Paul Greenberg talk about the future of customer service. And Paul said something that I think was really straightforward but really insightful. He said, "Look, organizations think about customer journeys "but customers don't think about journeys "in the way that organizations do. "They think discontinuously." So it's like, "I'm going to go to channel one, "and then channel three, and then channel four, "and then channel five, and then back to channel two. "And then back to channel five again." And they expect those conversations to be picked up across those different channels. And so I think what we've got to do is develop, as Don said, build an architecture that is, that works around trying to support the different journeys but allows that flexibility and that adaptability for customers to jump around and to have one of those continuous but disconnected conversations. But it's up to us to try and connect them all, to deliver the service and experience that the customers actually want. >> Now Shelly, a lot of the customer experience actually starts with the employees, and employees don't like when the customer is yelling at them saying, "I just answered all those questions. "Why do I have to answer them again?" So you've, at your firm, you guys have written a lot about this, you've thought a lot about it, you have some data I know you shared on theCUBE one time that 80% of employees are disengaged. And so, that affects the customer experience, doesn't it? >> Yeah it does, you know. And I think that when I'm listening to Don's explanation about his cable company, I'm having flashbacks to what feels like hundreds of my own experiences. And you're just thinking, "This does not have to be this complicated!" You know, ten years ago that same thing that Don just described happened with phone calls. You know, you called one person and they passed you off to somebody else, and they passed you off to somebody else, and you were equally as frustrated as a customer. Now what's happening a lot of times is that we're plugging technology in, like a chat bot, that's supposed to make things better but we're not developing a system and processes throughout our organization, and also change management, what do I want to say, programs within the organization and so we're kind of forgetting all of those things. So what's happening is that we're still having customers having those same experiences that are a decade old, and technology is part of the mix. And it really shouldn't be that way. And so, one thing that I really enjoyed, speaking about employees, was listening to Rich Gilbert from Aflac. And he was talking about when you're moving from legacy processes to new ones, you have to plan for and invest in change management. And we talk about this all the time here at Futurum, you know technology alone is never the answer. It's technology plus people. And so you have to invest in people, you have to invest in their training in order to be able to support and manage change and to drive change. And I think one really important part of that equation is also listening to your employees and getting their feedback, and making them part of the process. Because when they are truly on your front lines, dealing with customers, many times dealing with stressed, upset, frustrated customers, you know, they have a lot of insights. And sometimes we don't bring them into those conversations, certainly early enough in the process to help, to let them help guide us in terms of the solutions and the processes that we put in place. I think that's really important. >> Yeah, a lot of-- >> Shelly, I think-- >> If I may, a lot of the frustration with some employees sometimes is those processes change, and they're unknown going into it. We saw that with COVID, Don. And so, your thoughts on this? >> Yeah, I mean, I think the environment employees are working in is changing rapidly. We've got a customer, a large telecommunications company in the UK where their customer service requests are now being handled by about 4,000 employees pulled from their marketing department working distributed because that's the world that we're in. And the thing I was going to say in response to Shelly is, Alan mentioned in his keynote this idea of design thinking. And one of the reasons why I think that's so important is that it's actually about giving the people on the front lines a voice. It's a format for engaging the employees who actually know the day-to-day experiences of the customers, the day-to-day experiences of a customer service agent, and pulling them into the solution. How do we develop the systems, how do we rethink our processing, how does that need to plug into the various channels that we have? And that's why a lot of our focus is not just on the customer service technology, but the underlying low code platform that allows us to build those processes and those chunks of the customer journey. We often refer to them as "microjourneys" that lead to a specific outcome. And if you're using a low code based platform, something that allows anybody to come in and define that process, you can actually pull employees from the front lines and put them directly on your project teams. And all of a sudden you get better engagement but you also get this incredible insight flowing into what you're doing because you're talking to the people who live this day in and day out. >> Well and when you have-- >> So let's stay on this for a second, if we can. Shelly, go ahead please. >> Sure. When you have a chance to talk with those people, to talk with those front line employees who are having an opportunity to work with low code, no code, they get so excited about it and their jobs are completely, the way they think about their jobs and their contribution to the company, and their contribution to the customer, and the customer experience, is just so wonderful to see. And it's such an easy thing to do, so I think that that's really a critical part of the equation as it relates to success with these programs. >> Yeah, staying close to the customer-- >> Can I jump in? >> Yeah, please Adrian. >> Can I jump in on that a little, a second. I think Shelly, you're absolutely right. I think that it's a really simple thing. You talk about engagement. And one of the key parts of engagement, it seems to me, is that, is giving people a voice and making them feel important and feel heard. And so to go and ask for their opinion and to help them get involved and make a difference to the work that they do, the outcomes that their customers receive, and the overall productivity and efficiency, can only have a positive impact. And it's almost like, it feels self-evident that you'd do that but unfortunately it's not very common. >> Right. It does feel self-evident. But we miss on that front a lot. >> So I want to ask, I'm going to come back to, we talked about people process, we'll come back to that. But I want to talk about the tech. You guys announced, the big announcement was the Pega Process Fabric. You talked about that, Don, as a platform for digital platforms. You've got all these cool microservices and dynamic APIs and being able to compose on the fly, so some pretty cool stuff there. I wonder, with the virtual event, you know, with the physical event you've got the hallway traffic, you talk to people and you get face-to-face reactions. Were you able to get your kind of real-time reactions to the announcement? What was that like? Share with us please. >> Yeah, so, we got well over 1,000 questions in during the event and a lot of them were either about Process Fabric or comments about it. So I think people are definitely excited about this. And when you strip away all of the buzzwords around microservices and cloud, et cetera, I think what we're really getting at here is that work is going to be increasingly more distributed. We are living proof of that right now, the four of us all coming here from different studios. But work is going to be distributed for a bunch of reasons. Because people are more distributed, because organizations increasingly are building customer journeys that aren't just inside their walls, but are connected to the partners and their ecosystem. I'm a bank but I may, as part of my mortgage process, connect somebody up to a home insurer. And all of a sudden the home buying process goes beyond my four walls. And then finally, as you get all of these employees engaged with building their low code apps and being citizen developers, you want to let the 1,000 flowers to bloom but you also need a way to connect that all back together. And Process Fabric is about putting the technology in place to allow us to take these distributed bits of work that we need to do and weave them together into experiences that are coherent for a customer and easy for an employee to navigate. Because I think it's going to be really really important that we do that. And even as we take our systems and break them up into microservices, well customers don't interact with microservices. Customers interact with journeys, with experiences, with the processes you lay out, and making sure we can connect that up together into something that feels easy for the customer and the employee, and gets them to that result they want quickly, that's what the vision of Process Fabric is all about. >> You know, it strikes me, I'm checking my notes here. You guys talked about a couple of examples. One was, I think you talked about the car as sort of a mobility experience, maybe, you know, it makes me wonder with all this AI and autonomous vehicle stuff going on, at what point is owning and driving your own vehicle really going to be not the norm anymore? But you talked about this totally transformed, sorry to use that word, but experience around autos. And certainly financial services is maybe a little bit more near-term. But I wonder Shelly, Futurum, you know, you guys look ahead, how far can we actually go with AI in this realm? >> Well, I think we can go pretty far and I think it'll happen pretty fast. And I think that we're seeing that already in terms of what happened when we had the Coronavirus COVID-19, and of course we're still navigating through that, is that all of a sudden things that we talked about doing, or thought about doing, or planned doing, you know later on in this year or 2021, we had to do all of those things immediately. And so again, it is kind of like ripping the Bandaid off. And we're finding that AI plays a tremendously important role in relieving the workload on the frontline workers, and being able to integrate empathy into decision making. And you know, I go back to, I remember when you all first rolled out the empathy part of your platform, Don, and just watching a demo on that of how you can slide this empathy meter to be warmer, and see in true dollars and cents over time the impact of treating your customers with more empathy, what that delivers to a company. And I think that AI that continues to build and learn and again, what we're having right now, is we're having this gigantic volume of needs, of conversation, of all these transactions that need to happen at once, and great volumes make for better outcomes as it relates to artificial intelligence and how learning can happen more quickly over time. So I think that it's, we're definitely going to see more use of AI more rapidly than we might've seen it before, and I don't think that's going to slow down, at all. Certainly, I mean there's no reason for it to slow down. The benefits are tremendous. The benefits are tremendous, and let me step back and say, following a conversation with Rob Walker on responsible AI, that's a whole different ball of wax. And I think that's something that Pega has really embraced and planted a flag in. So I think that we'll see great things ahead with AI, and I think that we'll see the Pega team really leading as it relates to ethical AI. And I think that's tremendously important as well. >> Well that's the other side of the coin, you know. I asked how far can we go and I guess you're alluding to how far should we go. But Adrian, we also heard about agility and empathy. I mean, I want an empathic service provider. Are agility and empathy related to customer service, and how so? >> Well, David, I think that's a great question. I think that, you talk about agility and talk about empathy, and I think the thing is, what we probably know from our own experience is that being empathetic is sometimes going to be really hard. And it takes time, and it takes practice to actually get better at it. It's almost like a new habit. Some people are naturally better at it than others. But you know, organizationally, I talk about that we need to almost build, almost like an empathetic musculature at an organizational level if we're going to achieve this. And it can be aided by technology, but we, when we develop new muscles it takes time. And sometimes you go through a bit of pain in doing that. So I think that's where the agility comes in, is that we have to test and learn and try new things, be willing to get things wrong and then correct, and then kind of move on. And then learn from these kind of things. And so I think the agility and empathy, it does go hand in hand and it's something that will drive growth and increasing empathetic interactions as we go forward. But I think it's also, just to build on Shelly's point, I think you're absolutely right that Pega has been leading the way in this sort of dimension, in terms of its T-switch and its empathetic advisor. But now the ethical AI testing or the ethical bias testing adds a dimension to that to make sure it's not just about all horsepower, but being able to make sure that you can steer your car. To use your analogy. >> So AI's coming whether we like it or not. Right, Shelly? Go ahead. >> It is. One real quick real world example here is, you know, okay so we have this time when a lot of consumers are furloughed. Out of work. Stressed about finances. And we have a lot of Pega's customers are in the financial services space. Some of the systems that they've established, they've developed over time, the processes they've developed over time is, "Oh, I'm talking with Shelly Kramer and she has a "blah-blah-blah account here. "And this would be a great time to sell her on "this additional service," or whatever. And when you can, so that was our process yesterday. But when you're working with an empathic mindset and you are also needing to be incredibly agile because of current circumstances and situations, your technology, the platform that you're using, can allow you to go, "Okay I'm dealing "with a really stressed customer. "This is not the best time "to offer any additional services." Instead what we need to ask is this series of questions: "How can we help?" Or, "Here are some options." Or whatever. And I think that it's little tweaks like that that can help you in the customer service realm be more agile, be more empathetic, and really deliver an amazing customer experience as a result. And that's the technology. >> If I could just add to that. Alan mentioned in his keynote a specific example, which is Commonwealth Bank of Australia. And they were able, multiple times this year, once during the Australian wildfires and then again in response to the COVID crisis, to completely shift and turn on a dime how they interacted with their customer, and to move from a prioritization of maybe selling things to a prioritization of responding to a customer need. And maybe offering payment deferrals or assistance to a customer. But back to what we were talking about earlier, that agility only happened because they didn't have the logic for that embedded in all their channels. They had it centralized. They had it in a common brain that allowed them to make that change in one place and instantly propagate it to all of the 18 different channels in which they touch their customer. And so, being able to have agility and that empathy, to my mind, is explicitly tied to that concept of a center-out business architecture that Alan was talking about. >> Oh, absolutely. >> And, you know, this leads to discussion about automation, and again, how far can we go, how far should we go? Don, you've been interviewed many many times, like any tech executive, about the impact of AI on jobs. And, you know, the typical response of course is, "No, we want augmentation." But the reality is, machines have always replaced humans it's just, now it's the first time in terms of cognitive function. So it's a little different for us this time around. But it's clear, as I said, AI is coming whether we like it or not. Automation is very clearly on the top of people's minds. So how do you guys see the evolution of automation, the injection of automation into applications, the ubiquity of automations coming in this next decade? Shelly, let's start with you. >> You know, I was thinking you were going to ask Don that question so I'm just listening and listening. (laughing) >> Okay, well we can go with Don, that's-- >> No I'm happy to answer it. It's fine, it just wasn't what I expected. You know, we are really immersed in the automation space. So I very much see the concerns that people on the front line have, that automation is going to replace them. And the reality of it is, if a job that someone does can be automated, it will be automated. It makes sense. It makes good business sense to do that. And I think that what we are looking at from a business agility standpoint, from a business resilience standpoint, from a business survival standpoint, is really how can we deliver most effectively to serve the needs of our customers. Period. And how we can do that quickly and efficiently and without frustration and in a way that is cost effective. All of those things play into what makes a successful business today, as well as what keeps employees, I'm sorry, as well as what keeps customers served, loyal, staying around. I think that we live in a time where customer loyalty is fleeting. And so I think that smart businesses have to look at how do we deepen the relationships that we have with customers? How can we use automation to do that? And the thing about it, you know, I'll go back to the example that Don gave about his cable company that all of us have lived through. It's just like, "Oh my gosh. "There's got to be a better way." So compare that to, and I'm sure all of us can think of an experience where you had to deal with a customer service situation in some way or another, and it was the most awesome thing ever. And you walked away from it and you just went, "Oh my gosh. I know I was talking to a bot here or there." Or, "I know I was doing this, but that solved my problem. "I can't believe it was so easy! "I can't believe it was so easy! "I can't wait to buy something from this company again!" You know what I'm saying? And that's really, I think, the role that automation can play. Is that it can really help deepen existing relationships with our customers, and help us serve them better. And it can also help our employees do things that are more interesting and that are more relevant to the business. And I think that that's important too. So, yes, jobs will go. Yes, automation will slide into places where we've done things manually and repetitive processes before, but I think that's a good thing. >> So, we've got to end it shortly here but I'll give you guys each a last opportunity to chime in. And Adrian, I want to start with you. I invoked the T-word before, transformation, a kind of tongue-in-cheek joking because I know it's not your favorite word. But it is the industry's favorite word. Thinking ahead for the future, we've talked about AI, we've talked about automation, people, process and tech. What do you see as the future state of customer experience, this mix of human and machine? What do we have to look forward to? >> So I think that, first of all, let me tackle the transformation thing. I mean, I remember talking about this with Duncan Macdonald who is the CIO across at UPC, which is one of Pega's customers, on my podcast there the other week. And he talked about, he's the cosponsor of a three year digital transformation program. But then he appended the description of that by saying it's a transformation program that will never end. That's the thing that I think about, because actually, if you think about what we're talking about here, we're not transforming to anything in particular, you know. It's not like going from here to there. And actually, the thing that I think we need to start thinking about is, rather than transformation we actually need to think about an evolution. And adopting an evolutionary state. And we talked about being responsive. We talked about being adaptable. We talked about being agile. We talk about testing and learning and all these different sort of things, that's evolutionary, right? It's not transformational, it's evolutionary. If you think about Charles Darwin and the theory of the species, that's an evolutionary process. And there's a quote, as you've mentioned I authored this book called "Punk CX," there's a quote that I use in the book which is taken from a Bad Religion song called "No Control" and it's called, "There is no vestige of a beginning, "and no prospect of an end." And that quote comes from a 1788 book by James Hutton, which was one of the first treaties on geology, and what he found through all these studies was actually, the formation of the earth and its continuous formation, there is no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end. It's a continuous process. And I think that's what we've got to embrace is that actually change is constant. And as Alan says, you have to build for change and be ready for change. And have the right sort of culture, the right sort of business architecture, the right sort of technology to enable that. Because the world is getting faster and it is getting more competitive. This is probably not the last crisis that we will face. And so, like in most evolutionary things, it wasn't the fittest and the strongest that survived, it was the ones that were most adaptable that survived. And I think that's the kind of thing I want to land on, is actually how, it's the ones that kind of grasp that, grasp that whole concept are the ones that are going to succeed out of this. And, what they will do will be... We can't even imagine what they're going to do right now. >> And, thank you. And Shelly, it's not only responding to, as Adrian was saying, to crisis, but it's also being in a position to very rapidly take advantage of opportunities and that capability is going to be important. You guys are futurists, it's in the name. Your thoughts? >> Well I think that, you know, Adrian's comments were incredibly salient, as always. And I think that-- >> Thank you. >> The thing that this particular crisis that we are navigating through today has in many ways been bad, but in other ways, I think it's been incredibly good. Because it has forced us, in a way that we really haven't had to deal with before, to act quickly, to think quickly, to rethink and to embrace change. Oh, we've got to work from home! Oh, we've got 20 people that need to work from home, we have 20,000 people that need to work from home. What technology do we need? How do we take care of our customers? All of these things we've had to figure out in overdrive. And humans, generally speaking, aren't great at change. But what we are forced to do as a result of this pandemic is change. And rethink everything. And I think that, you know, the point about transformation not being a beginning and an end, we are never, ever, ever done. It is evolutionary and I think that as we look to the future and to one of your comments, we are going faster with more exciting technology solutions out there, with people who are incredibly smart, and so I think that it's exciting and I think that all we are going to see is more and more and more change, and I think it will be a time of great resilience, and we'll see some businesses survive and thrive, and we'll see other businesses not survive. But that's been our norm as well, so I think it's really, I think we have some things to thank this pandemic for. Which is kind of weird, but I also try to be fairly optimistic. But I do, I think we've learned a lot and I think we've seen some really amazing exciting things from businesses who have done this. >> Well thanks for sharing that silver lining, Shelly. And then, Don, I'm going to ask you to bring us to the finish line. And I'm going to close my final question to you, or pose it. You guys had the wrecking ball, and I've certainly observed, when it comes to things like digital transformations, or whatever you want to call it, that there was real complacency, and you showed that cartoon with the wrecking ball saying, "Ehh not in my life, not on my watch. "We're doing fine." Well, this pandemic has clearly changed people's thinking, automation is really top of mind now at executive. So you guys are in a good spot from that standpoint. But your final thoughts, please? >> Yeah, I mean, I want to concur with what Adrian and Shelly said and if I can drop another rock quote in there. This one is from Bob Dylan. And Dylan famously said, "The times they are a changing." But the quote that I keep on my wall is one that he tossed off during an interview where he said, "I accept chaos. "I'm not sure if it accepts me." But I think digital transformation looks a lot less like that butterfly emerging from a cocoon to go off happy to smell the flowers, and looks much more like accepting that we are in a world of constant and unpredictable change. And I think one of the things that the COVID crisis has done is sort of snapped us awake to that world. I was talking to the CIO of a large media company who is one of our customers, and he brought up the fact, you know, like Croom said, "We're all agile now. "I've been talking about five years, "trying to get this company to operate in an agile way, "and all of a sudden we had to do it. "We had no choice, we had to respond, "we had to try new things, we had to fail fast." And my hope is, as we think about what customer engagement and automation and business efficiency looks like in the future, we keep that mindset of trying new things and continuously adapting. Evolving. At the end of the day, our company's brand promise is, "Build for change." And we chose that because we think that that's what organizations, the one thing they can design for. They can design for a future that will continue to change. And if you put the right architecture in place, if you take that center-out mindset, you can support those immediate needs, but set yourself up for a future of continuous change and continuous evolution and adaptation. >> Well guys, I'll quote somebody less famous. Jeff Frick, who said, "The answer to every question "lives somewhere in a CUBE interview." and you guys have given us a lot of answers. I really appreciate your time. I hope that next year at PegaWorld iNspire we can see each other face-to-face and do some live interviews. But really appreciate the insights and all your good work. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Absolutely. >> And thank you for watching everybody, this is Dave Vellante and our coverage of PegaWorld iNspire 2020. Be right back, right after this short break. (lighthearted music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next 2018. Brought to you by Google Cloud and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Google Cloud here at Moscone South, in San Francisco. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, covering all the stop stories here, and day one of three days of coverage with siliconeangle.com, thecube.net for all the great content. Our next guest is Suzanne Frey, director of security, trust, and compliance and privacy at Google Cloud, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming in today. >> Thank you so much, it's a pleasure to be here today. >> Don't you love the cube that Google built out here, fits the theme, it's beautiful. >> It is mighty fly, it is awesome. It's so exciting. >> That's great. Great to see Google kind of go the next level. The energy, the people in the company I've talked to, we've been following Diane's career since VMware. I knew she was an investor in Cloud, theCUBE actually started at the Cloud Air office when they got their first round of funding, so really a savvy industry executive. Now two years in the gestation period you can kind of see it. The best of Google being exposed to the world is really kind of a great strategy, we've been commenting on that, but one of things Google has, and has had for a long time is, they've had that really open culture of openness, open source, but trust; "Do no evil's" the slogan and they have all this expertise. >> Yep. >> Is your job to harness that. Take a minute, what is your job? Are you brokering all this greatness? Are you shepherding it? Are you influencing product? What's your role? >> My role, specifically, is to ensure that we make Google Cloud the most trusted place for user data. Now, trust is a multi-faceted thing. I often say that trust starts with making sure that what you expect is what you experience. That's the foundation of it and so my job is first to start there and make sure that everything that we do is in line with the customer's expectations and it's in line with what they experience once they're in the Cloud and that's everything from making sure that we're compliant, that we handle their data responsibly in line with all the rules and regulations around the world which vary greatly. You know all the way through to making sure that we're building exceptional, simple, smart, and secure products every single day across our stack. So that's my job and it's to galvanize that, not just in product and not just in expectations, but also in the people we hire and the culture we engender. >> You know it's interesting, we live in an interesting time right now, and as they say, if you look at the global landscape; from politics, play, to technology, a transformation is happening where security trust, the data, you got GDPR happening in Europe, you got fake news on Facebook, you got users not trusting where's my data, so you have this cultural dynamic, kind of independent of the mission of the big companies where there's an opportunity to use AI for good. There's an opportunity to have a compliance model that's going to maintain that. How does that affect you guys? I'm sure it does in some way, but this is on the minds of people. Surely no one want to be hacked, they want their data to be secure. I want to control my data. I want my data to be leverageable. I want to get utility out of the system, Because it's something bigger with Google Cloud, it's not part of a system. How are you guys talk about that internally? What are some of the conversations that you guys have around this cultural shift? >> It's day one of any new product of feature we develop, those conversations occur. It's part of our process in developing any new product or feature. We have a team, in fact a large portion of my organization is entirely dedicated to reviewing and scrutinizing every single feature, every single new product we bring to bear. Even if a customer wants to build, or I should say, even if an internal developer wants to build a new model, our team is responsible for reviewing that and making sure it's in line with the commitments we have to both legal commitments as well as our customers. So it's part of, and it continues all the way through to the point where I hit the launch button and say, "This is okay to go." >> (laughs) Nice. >> So the way you measure trust is that the expectations match the experience. Now when I look at your scope, we run our business on your scope. G-mail, Inbox, I personally love Inbox, I'm like an Inbox ambassador. >> Fantastic. >> And so thank you for developing that product. Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, you count it, I mean we run our business on your products. And so I wonder sometimes are we doing it right? Some of the challenges we have I think are onboarding and off-boarding folks. When somebody leaves the company or comes on the company you want to give them access to certain sheets or certain documents and then you sort of forget to take them off. How do you handle that? What's best practice there? Are you develop tooling around that? Maybe you could take about that a little bit. >> So we do it in many, many ways. And there certainly are best practices, they are documented out there through a number of tools and papers that we produce. We also have partners that work with our customers that engender those practices, but also then we bake the technology in so that you don't have to think about these things. And a good example would be; we released Team Drives last year. Team Drives is a great example of how you manage documentation for the inbound and outbound employees. It used to be that somebody'd actually have to think, "oh wait, Joe's no longer on this, We need to move him off," And all of that. But with the Team Drive that's handled automatically. Groups is another way. Google Groups is a great way to manage access to information and the like. And then we have tools like IRM, that allow you to sort of manage copying and forwarding information. And there's some more announcements that are coming tomorrow that'll let you also handle some of these things, but I can't talk about them quite yet. So stay tuned. >> You didn't want to release it too early. >> Can you talk about how you go to market with those cause every now and then I'll get a phone call or an e-mail from somebody at Google trying to either introduce me to something, maybe sell something, but it's kind of intermittent. What's the go-to market to inform people? We're obviously a small company. We heard today, "we want to help small, large, start-ups, big companies, governments." How do you guys go to market? >> We do it in lots of different ways. We certainly leverage our communication channels online heavily and we've been ramping up, I mean our investment in marketing and Cloud and getting all of these things, I mean you can see I right here at Next. This is a huge example of how we're trying to get the word out. We're at large across all of our verticals, across all of our customer sets, because I think that is information management and so that you understand, "hey I have these great tools to bear." That's super important for us to get right and we're continuing to evolve it. >> One of the things I always admire about Google from day one, the mission has always been speed. Load the pages faster, find what you're looking for, organize the information. With security and trust now, we were talking before we came on camera, I see Cloud as an opportunity, AI's an opportunity, as Diane Green said, security is the number one worry. Dave's asked this question every year, going back to since 2012, is security a do-over with the Cloud? You guys have such great experience with Sass and Cloud; is it an opportunity for customers going Cloud-native to do security over. Your thoughts? >> Well I think about this, so ill answer this in two ways, for us at Google it's not a do-over, it's been part of our DNA from day one because we were born in the Cloud. From the moment we started to think about how we design a data center to how we design a server to how we retire discs, this was mentioned in the keynote, that's been part of our DNA from day one. So for us we don't believe it's a do-over, we actually believe we're ahead of Darwin in terms of security, well ahead of it. And we'll put our words behind it, that we do believe, bar none, that we are the most secure cloud out there. Certainly customers using G-Suite, Chromebooks, Security Keys, we mentioned that at the keynote this morning as well- zero account hijackings. No one else can make that claim and we're proud to do it. For customers, however, I think many customers are realizing Patch Tuesdays and heterogeneous operating systems and tons of different platforms with customers that are storing information on their hard drives or their thumb drives- its a nightmare for many customers who have been operating on premise for many years and I think they're waking up to realize, "wait a minute, you're going to take care of all of that. You're going to take care of it. One operating system. All managed from the Cloud. One place. My documents are going to sit there. Oh my gosh, I can sleep again if I move to the Cloud." and that's really part of the overall narrative here. >> Just to follow up on that, so that was Chromebook, G Suite, and Two-factor authentication right? >> Yes. >> You called it Titan Security, is that right? >> Yes, Titan Security Keys, correct. >> And the Two-factor authentication comes from what, is it a dongle or- >> It's actually hardware based so if you think about- two-factor's not a new term, two-factor's been around for a long time. A lot of people would have these tokens that would generate a numeric key and you'd look at that and you'd plug it in. Well that's phishable actually, that key gets transmitted when you actually authenticate and that can be picked up. >> Exposed, yeah. >> Exposed. With hardware, its all base of the hardware, there's no key that's exchanged. It's all authenticated to your device and that makes it un-phishable. >> You don't think about it. >> Yeah, exactly. >> So lets talk about compliance for a second. That's part of your job. Honestly we see this year was kind of a- the earthquake, the tectonic plates of GDPR. >> Yes. (laughs) >> Certainly Google's experience, a little fine in the EU of some other areas of your business. Obviously data is a regional thing, obviously in Germany we know what's going on there, so as a customer goes global, you could be in the US, there's now policies that need to be implemented. Is that where softwares going to help? How are you guys talking to your customers and what's the solution that you guys see for compliance and making it seamless because it's a real hassle. >> Yep. >> Some sites and some companies aren't deploying their solution. Their website has been stripped down because they couldn't comply with the GDPR regulation which gives the users the ability to essentially tell you to forget me and all kinds of other things, I don't want to get into it, but the point is, that it puts the pressure on companies, like literally overnight, where it was policy. People in the database world know that data sprawls is a huge problem- people don't even know where the data is. What data base is that on. This is a huge issue. How do you guys talk about that? >> Well first I'll say that compliance is always a shared responsibility between ourselves and our customers. However, those customers who have worked with us, and have been going Cloud-native with us have found that the journey to be much much less friction-full, I will say, or I'd say its more friction-less. Because we are the team that's had to really implement the technical controls around the GDPR. And I want to emphasize, GDPR is incredibly important legislation. We believe it's very important. Two years ago we launched an initiative to be sure we were compliant on time. We're proud to say that we were among the first to announce that compliance in the Cloud. And we're really happy. Our customers have been happy. And our relationships- we take on a large responsibility for maintaining relationships with the legislators and the regulators around the world Many companies can't scale to do that and by going with Google you know you've got a tight and good relationship, a company that is focused on maintaining good relationships world-wide on that front and it's been important. >> So two years before GDPR went into effect, that's much better, most companies were two months before the fines went into effect. (laughs) >> It was roughly about two years, it wasn't quite exactly two years between the time it was announced, but it was close to that. >> But it's not just the technology problem too, which makes it so hard, it's a lot of people and a lot of process. >> Absolutely, yes. >> Shared responsibility as you said just now. >> Yes, and the fact that the data's all in one place of the Cloud, again, makes a huge huge difference with your posture, and your compliance posture for GDPR. >> Susanne, you've been at Google for over a decade, what's motivating you these days, obviously the Cloud market's pretty hot, so that's kind of a nice wave to be on. What's the culture like at Google now? What's the DNA? What's the in- cause Google Cloud's got to spring to their step, we can obviously feel it. We can see the results. But it's just the beginning of this new wave. >> Yep, yep. >> What's exciting you and what's the DNA of Google culture? Google Cloud culture? >> Well Sundar echoed this this morning and I was so happy to hear it. I'm at Google because of the mission. I'm here to manage the world's information, make it universally accessible and useful and secure. (laughs) I will add the "and secure" to my mission. I came because that was so exciting to me. As a kid I never got Encyclopedia's because my father was like, "there going to be out of date." (laughs) He know instantly. >> Data quality number one, he was smart. Data scientist- >> Yes he was, he was. And when Google started to evolve, I was so excited. I'm like, "oh my gosh, look at what's happening to information management in the world." And that's why I'm here and I'm surrounded by other fellow citizens who are so excited about that but also excited about the challenge of keeping information secure. So that's what excites me and to work around so many great data scientists and software engineers and site reliability engineers and customer engineers. Google is about engineering at it's core but we take such a human approach to working with our customers. Understanding how important their information, their productivity in the Cloud is, their security in the Cloud is, and that's what excites me every single day. >> Final question for you; talk about what you're working on. What's your guiding principles for your organization. Where are you guys hiring- obviously you mentioned earlier, which I loved, the expectation is the experience should match; that's a great quote, I think that's important but I would argue that, to add to that complexity, is that expectations that are coming are not yet known. You saying things like "block chain" for instance, that kind of hit a lot of exciting areas around security, decentralization, decentralized applications, token economics. So you're seeing the world starting to get a little bit different where those expectations are not yet seen. So you got to get out in front of that. How are you guys managing that? How are you hiring? What's the vision? >> Sure. So there's sort of three pillars that Prabhakar Raghavan talked about this morning; simple, smart, and secure. Those are kind of our guiding principles for everything we do and, for example, G Suite. How we're thinking about the future, well we're very very lucky that we are always getting low latency signals about what's happening in the world right now. We talk about spam and phishing protection and things like that and we get billions of signals every single day about malicious information or malware, ransomware, those sorts of things. So we have a very low latency view into what's happening at the next minute around the world in that respect. And that gives us a competitive edge in terms of really thinking about what's the next thing that's going to happen. We certainly know that machine learning, whether it's smart compose and smart reply, or it's actually based in security, an anomaly detection. What's an anomaly to one company, is not necessarily an anomaly to another, depends on what business you're in and the like. So investing in machine learning and understanding how to be that security guardian for our customers in an automated fashion, so the people don't have to worry about security, but we've taken care of it for them. That's the holy grail and that's what we're investing in right now. >> Suzanne thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. We were just talking before we came on, Dave and I, before we went live that if security and some of these complexities can be just services under the wire, like electricity. All cue-ade before we even turn the lights on of computing. That's kind of the goal. (laughs) So we're super early. >> Yes, absolutely. >> That's great. Director of security, trust, compliance, and privacy at Google Cloud's theCUBE. Live coverage, stay with us. This is day one of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, we'll be right back. >> Thank you. (techno music)

(energetic music) >> Narrator: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's theCUBE, covering CoinAgenda. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE. >> Hello and welcome to our exclusive Puerto Rico coverage of CoinAgenda, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We're here covering all the action at Restart, we've got a ton of events, all the thoughts leaders, influencers, decision makers, you name it, in the industry, pioneers making it happen. My next guest is Toni Lane, who's the founder of CoinGraph. She's a true influencer with a lot of impact in this market. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> We're so glad to have you on. Like the little joke at the beginning about being an influencer, you actually are an influencer. You've done such great work in the industry, well regarded in the community. You have publication and you do a lot of great content. Thanks for coming on. >> Oh, for sure, yeah, thanks for having me. >> So being the influencer, what does that mean these days? Because we were just talking before the camera on, we came on camera, influence changes. You can't be an influencer all the time. You can be super or expert at something, but your expertise could change, you move to a new topic, learn something. And there's a lot of people in the digital marketing world saying I'm an influencer. It's kind of half baked, and really, I mean, it's not about the followers, your thoughts? >> Well, I mean, most of those followers are purchased. So there's a big difference between being an influencer and having actual influence. Because if you're, you know, if you have a million followers on Twitter, that's nice. How much engagement do you have? And that's actually what you look for, it's like when you look at someone's, whether it's, you know, social media, their digital presence, it's not about followers, it's all about engagement. You know, I don't even have that many, like I don't spend a lot of time doing that, at least I haven't so far, it's something I'm getting more into. But I have people that are really engaged, and so I look at people that have 15 million followers and I'm like, you have just as many likes on your things as I do, right. Because these people aren't real people. And it's less about, having influence in general is in many ways about having authenticity. And so influence is your ability to get something done. Being an influencer is your ability to hold someone's attention for a fragment of time. But being an influencer is not the same as having influence. >> And this community here, certainly, with decentralization here, you get the decentralized applications coming up blockchain, you got ICOs booming. It's all about the network effect, if you look at network effect, that is a new concept that ad technology does not know because you can't cookie a network connection. The only way to measure someone's true network is through malware today, and that's not good, no one does that. Well, they do, they're-- >> Toni: Unfortunately, yeah. >> But you can't you do it at business price, not sustainable. So the point is, it's not about how many followers you have. It could be that one follower, maybe 200 or 2,000, that opens up more. This is the network effect. This is what this community is all about, so I want to get your thoughts on this community's vibe. A lot of mission-driven, impact-oriented, merged with tech. So you have a fusion of technology, artistry, craftsmanship and mission-driven societal change in one melting pot. This is your wheelhouse. Share your thoughts on this. >> Well, so all of the different digital currencies have different value systems and they attract a different breed. And there are different incentives for each of these based on how the technology is designed, each protocol, right? So if you look at Bitcoin, in Bitcoin, the incentives are, you know, mining is done by computers, so your only incentive is like having social influence? And this is, I think, why we've seen a lot of kind of I would call it a scarcity mentality in terms of the way, why we see even more trolls in Bitcoin is because social influence is a huge way that success is measured, because as a developer, you can't have, you can't achieve a level of status any other way as a developer or as an influencer in Bitcoin, because the Bitcoin network is so far removed from that. And that's actually a perverse incentive in and of itself, and not only that, but early days in Bitcoin, there were major organizations who would hire people to man 100 Reddit and Twitter accounts and go into the Bitcoin community and actually fragment the public opinion using a technique grassroots psychological insurgency. So buying Reddit accounts that had been active for the last 10 years and going through and, you know, essentially just stabbing at people and creating, even having conversations with themselves to empower the voice of trolls. And what happens is you start bringing out what we call, actually, what the former Assad called, after Henry Kissinger, there was a big move that happened in the Middle East, where Kissinger realized the Middle East was becoming too powerful, and he saw it as a threat to American democracy. And so Kissinger organized a deal that fragmented the Middle East. And Assad said to Kissinger that his actions would be, he played Assad, basically. And Assad said to Kissinger, "Your actions "will bring up demons hidden underneath "the surface of the Arab world." And that strategy is actually something used in the Bitcoin community to leverage the incentives that are created, which is why we have seen previously so much, even from our industry leaders, so much fragmentation and so much tension. But the network is the most secure and the least corruptible, hands down, fundamentally. It's real cryptography. >> But let's talk about that, I love this conversation, because with networks, you have the concept of self-heal, and this gets nerdy on the packets, how packets move, at that level, self-healing networks has been a paradigm that's been proven. So that's out there, that's got to go to a societal level. The other one is the incentive system, if you have an immune system, if you will, in a network, this is a cultural thing. So actions, the Reddit's obvious, right. Weaponizing content has been well-documented, it's coming now mainstream, people are getting it that this outcome was actually manufactured by bad behavior. Now, I argue that there's an exact opposite effect. You can actually weaponize for good, 'cause everything has a polar opposite. So what is your view on that, because this is something that we've been teasing out for the first time. How do you weaponize content for good, (mumbles) not the right word, but look for the opposite value? >> Right, yeah, I mean, it is in so many ways, right. So I think it's about, there's a professor at Stanford whose name is BJ Fogg, and he's a behavioral researcher and he talks about essentially, you know, he writes a lot about habits. But something that's even more interesting about his understanding of propaganda is I studied a lot of Edward Bernays, he's responsible, he created the theory of propaganda, right. And he's the nephew of Sigmund Freud, he's responsible for essentially every consumptive theory in like leading up to the last century, he's actually, I would say he's responsible for the state of advertising and the economy today, almost really single handedly. And what's fascinating about this theory is that you can use propaganda to get women to smoke by unearthing what it is unconsciously in men that makes them not want to smoke. You can also use propaganda to get people to invest in health and wellness. You can also use propaganda to get people to stop their bad habits. So it's understanding that a technique works in a cognitive capacity in a way that affects a large amount of people. And it's really about the intention behind why a person who has influence, as we were saying, is leveraging that relationship. So I would say it's more about-- >> So we have to reimagine influence. Because the signalings that are igniting the cognitive brain can be tweaked. So that's what you're getting at here, right, so that's what we have to do. >> And it's an illusion from almost every angle. It's even the idea that, in the United States, the level of influence the president has and who's running, you know, and who, yeah, and who's at the wheel, right. So it's, we live in a world that is built on manufactured consent, and manufactured consent is enabled through thinkers like Bernays and through what I call the illusion of things like our former construct of even American democracy. That these things we've imagined to be so, the foundation and the structure for the way that we live. All of those things have become so far removed from their theory that they're no longer serving the principles under which they were founded, and that disconnect is actually a huge, it's a gap, it's an inertia gap for exploitation or it's an inertia gap for growth, and usually what happens is you have the exploitation first. Someone says oh, here's a big gap of information asymmetry, so I'm going to exploit the information asymmetry. And then once people start realizing that that information asymmetry is being exploited, you experience a huge inversion of that and you have enough kind of, you have enough inertia behind that slingshot to launch it into something totally different. >> Yeah, this is a great concept, I interviewed the founder of the Halcyon HAL in Washington, DC, and she's an amazing woman. And she had a great conscious about this, and what she postulated was, bubbles that burst, exploitation's always, we've seen it in all trends. The underbelly, 'cause it's motivated, no dogma. They don't care about structural incentives, they just want to make cash. But she had an interesting theory, she was talking about you can let the air out of the bubble with community and data. So all the societal entrepreneurship activities now that are mission-driven, now getting back to mission-driven is interesting. There might be a way to actually avoid the pop. Because, depending upon what the backlash might be on the exploitation side, as we saw in the dotcom bubble, you can actually let the air out a little bit through things like data. I mean, how do you see, in your mind, just thinking out loud, how do you see that playing out, because we have community now. We have access to open data. Blockchain is all about immutability. It's all about power to the user's data. This is a mega trend. Your thoughts? >> So interdependence is huge in the blockchain community, and that's actually to touch back on the incentives in Bitcoin, I think that that's actually one of Bitcoin's, it's not that it's a wrong or a right, it just is, right, like sidechains will be launched eventually, but the idea that Ethereum created something that was adaptable and empowered people to be creative, and yet they're creating incentives for her people to launch products that are, I believe, 'causing, in some ways, could cause some serious harm to the ecosystem once the air is let out of that bubble. >> John: The data. >> The data, so data, yes yes yes. >> How do you let the air out of the bubble, because the pop will be massively implosion, it'll leave a crater. >> So data is a non-scarce resource. This is actually how I describe blockchain to people. And this is actually, I think, one of the, the challenge, if you want to look at it from the perspective of challenge, and then I'll talk about for the benefit, just between Bitcoin and Ethereum, there are obviously other blockchains, EOS is like coming out super soon, Holochain. There are tons, Steem has actually its own infrastructure, tons of other blockchains to speak about. But just to take these two main blockchains, which are not competitors. In Bitcoin, you have, it's really cryptography. Cryptography is not about, you know, like let's do some rapid prototyping, cryptography is about let's like put a lot of thought into this thing and have mathematical certainty that this is not exploitatable. And Ethereum is just kind of like, well, let's build a framework and then let people play as much as they can. And so there are challenges and benefits to both of those models, the challenge of Ethereum being that you've let all of this capital into the industry which is not actually, 46% of ICOs have already failed. Already failed. And then if you look at Bitcoin-- >> And a person with your industry (mumbles) at 1,200, so it's a 50% discount. >> Oh yeah, oh yeah. And then if you do the same thing and you're looking at the Bitcoin blockchain, we've seen that the capacity for innovation, Bitcoin could have done what, they could've been the first to market for what Ethereum is doing. And they chose a different route, and I think there are some pros and cons to both of those things, but I think there is an intentionality behind why the world played out in the way that it did. And I think it's the right strategy for both products. So the way I describe applications using blockchain technology to people and what I call the future of an infinite economy is that, if you think about why are Facebook and Google these multi billion dollars companies, it's really simple. It's because what do they own, right? The data, the data. And they're some of the last companies that are still stewarding these things in a way that is taking vast amount of aggregated ownership over an asset that people are generating every day that's extremely valuable to companies in the private sector. So the way that I describe blockchain is that, if we being to own our self-sovereign identity, then when we're owning our data, that's the foundation for universal basic income. If we take a non-scarce resource like data that's being generated every day, not just from us, right, but the data in the health of the ocean, right. The stewardship of the ocean, the health of the fish, actually saying okay, fish are thriving in this area, and so there's a healthy ecosystem, and so this coin is trading higher because we're stewarding this area of the ocean so we don't overfish. The quality of the air so that, when we're actually de-polluting the air collectively, everyone around us is creating and generating data to say we're making the air better. The air, actually, the health of our bodies, of our Earth, of our minds, of our planet, of even the health of our innovation. Right, what are the incentives behind our innovation, those are all forms of data. And that's a non-scarce resource, so if we take all of these different applications and make many different blockchains. Which I fundamentally believe that there's a powerful theory in having blockchains that are economically scarce, because I believe you're going to empower more diverse spectrums and also have a level of difficulty in creating the coin. You're going to have more innovation. And so-- >> Well, this is a key area. I mean, this is super important. Well, I mean, you step back for a second, you zoom out, you say okay, we have data, data's super valuable, if you take it to the individual's levels, which has not been, quite frankly, the individual's been exploited. Facebooks of the world, these siloed platforms, have been using the data for advertising. That's just what everyone knows, but there's other examples. The point is, when you put the data in the hands of the users, combine that with cloud computing and the Internet of Things when you can have an edge of the network high powered computer, the use cases have never been pushed before. The envelope that we're pushing now has never been in this configuration. You could never have a decentralized network, immutable, storing users' data, you've never had the ability to write the kind of software you can today, you've never had cloud computing, you've never had compute at the edge, which is where the users live, they are the edge. You have the ability where the user's role can enable a new kind of collective intelligence. This is like mind blowing. So I mean, just how would you explain that to a common person? I mean, 'cause this is the challenge, 'cause collective intelligence has been well documented in data science. User generated content is kind of the beginning of what we see in user wearables. But if you can control the data streaming into the network, with all the self-healing and all the geek stuff we're talking about, it's going to change structural things. How do you explain that to a normal person? >> You don't, you don't, right. So you show them. Because I can sit here all day and I can talk to you about, you know, I could talk to you about all of these things, but at the end of the day, with normal people, it's not something you want to explain. You want to show them, because with my, actually, my grandma gets Bitcoin. My grandma hit me up in like 2012 and she was like, "Do you know what that Bitcoin thing is?" I'm like, "Mimi," I'm like, "How do you know "what Bitcoin is, Mimi?" And she's just like, "I don't know, I read." You know, I was like, "This is, so what are you reading? "Like, are you hanging out on like libertarian forums, "like what's up?" And so-- >> What's going on in the club there, I mean, are they playing-- >> Yeah, but she is a really unique lady. So I would say that, for most people, they are not going to, when you explain things to people-- >> What would you show them, I mean, what's an example? >> The way that, so when I was, so I got into Bitcoin in 2011, and the way that I would explain Bitcoin to people is I would just send it to them. I would be like, "Here's Bitcoin, like take this Bitcoin, "here's some Bitcoin for you." And that was, people got it, because they were like, I have five dollars now in my hands that was not there. And this person just sent it to me. And for some people even still, you know, to be honest, even then, I remember how much energy it took for me to do that. Everywhere I go, I'd be like, in cabs, I'd be checking out grocery stores and I would try, I would essentially pitch Bitcoin to every person that I met. >> John: You were evangelizing a lot of it. >> It took so much energy though, and even after that, there was a period-- >> It was hard for people to receive it, they would have to do what at that time? Think about what the process was back then. >> Oh yeah. There were very few people who, even after doing that, really got it. But you know what happened. This is so much perspective for me, I remember doing that in 2013 and I remember, in 2018, actually, I think it was the end of 2017. I went to a gas station, it's the only gas station in San Francisco with a Bitcoin ATM. And I was like, I need to get some cash and I'm running on Bitcoin. >> John: You guys want a mountain view now. >> Yeah, yeah. And so I go in and these guys, I'm like frustrated, I'm like oh, the ATM is like the worst user experience ever, I'm like (groans). That's literally, I'm like, it's just, it was like eyes rolling in the back of my head, like just so frustrated because I'm a super privacy freak. And so it was just a super complex process, but the guys that, the guy's (mumbles) he looks at me and he goes, "Yo." And I was like, "What's up, man?" And he goes, "Are you trying to buy some Bitcoin?" I was like, "I'm trying to sell some Bitcoin right now." (John laughs) >> You're dispensing it, they're like yeah. >> Yeah, he's like, "Oh, word." And he's like, "How much are you trying to sell?" And I'm like, "I don't know, like 2K." And so he goes, "Aight." And he's like, "Let me hit up my friends," he literally calls three of his friends who come down and they just like, they're like, "Do you want to sell more?" They're like, all they just peer to peer. It's like we bypass the ATM and it was actually a peer to peer exchange. And I didn't have to explain anything. You know what made people get it? You showed them the money, you showed them the money. And sometimes people don't, you can explain these concepts that are world-changing, super high level or whatever. People are not actually going to get it until it's useful to them. And that's why a user interface is so important. Like, if you even look at the Internet. Who made the money on the Internet, right, it was the people who understood how to own the user interface. >> I had a conversation with Fred Kruger from WorkCoin, he's been around the block for a long time, great guy. We were riffing on the old days. But we talked about the killer app for the mini computer and the mainframe, the mini computer and then the PC, it was email, for 20 years, the killer app was email. We were like, what's the killer app for blockchain? It's money, the killer app is money. And it's going to be 50 year killer app. Now, the marketplace is certainly maybe tier two killer app, but the killer app is money. >> For sure, that's amazing. >> That's the killer app. Okay, so we're talking about money, let's talk about wallets and whatnot. There's a lot of people that I know personally that had been, wallets had been hacked. Double authentication (mumbles) news articles on this, but even early on, you got to protect yourself. It's something that you're an advocate of, I know recently, you've been sharing some stuff on Telegram. Share your thoughts on newbies coming in, be careful. Your wallet can be hacked, and you got to take care of yourself online. Is there a best practice, can you share some color commentary on when you get into the system, when you get Bitcoin or crypto, what are some of the best practices? >> It's not even, I think you need to remember a key principle of cryptography when you're dealing with digital currency, which was like don't really trust anything unless you call someone, you have like first hand verification from a person that you trust. Because these things are, I mean, I've had, literally last week, I had seven friends contact me, actually more than that once I posted about it, and they were like, "Is this you?" And I was like what, like people would literally just go online, they would scrape my Facebook photo, they'd go on Telegram and they would make, my name is @ToniLaneC, T-O-N-I-L-A-N-E-C, and so is my Twitter, and people would scrape my photos from my Twitter or my Telegram or my Facebook and they would create fake accounts. And they would start messaging people and say "Hey, like "what's up, how are you, that's cool, great, awesome. "So like, I need like 20 BTC for a loan. "Can you help me?" And all my friends were like, "I was just talking to you, is this you?" And I'm like no. And so I think that there's, the other thing you have to, it's not just security in terms of, and this is actually a problem Blockchain has to solve, right. It's not just security in terms of protecting your wallet and, you know, getting like a Ledger or a Trezor and making sure that you're keeping things like in cold storage, that you're going, there are so many, keeping your money in a hard wallet, not keeping your private keys on your computer, like keeping everything, storing your passwords in multiple places that you know are safe. Both handwritten, like in lock boxes, putting it in your safe deposit box or, you know, there are so many different ways that we can get into like the complexities of protecting yourself and security. Not using centralized cell networks is one of the big ways that I do this. Because if you are using two factor-- >> John: What's a centralized cell network? >> AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile. Because you are putting yourself in a situation where, if you're using a centralized system, those centralized systems are really easily exploitable. I know because my mom, when I was a kid one time, she put a password on my account so I couldn't buy games. I was not happy about it, it was my money that I was using, it was my money I was using to buy games, she was like, "You should just spend your money on better things." And so I remember going in when I was a kid, and I was like, this is my money, I totally want to buy this upgrade on this game. And so I went in and I essentially figured out how to hack into my own phone to be able to use my own money to buy the games that I wanted to buy-- >> Highly motivated learning opportunity there (laughs). >> But I realized that, in the same way we were talking about things that can be used for good can be used for bad, in the same way that someone can do something like that, you can also say, well, I'm in a call and say that I'm this person and take their phone and then get their two factor auth. So I don't use centralized cell networks, I don't use cell networks at all. >> John: What do you use? >> So, I mean, I have different kinds of like strategies or different things that mostly-- >> You might not want to say it here, okay, all right. >> Yeah yeah yeah, they're different, I'm happy to talk about those privately. The way that I've kind of handled that situation, and then the other thing that I would say is like, we really need hardcore reputation systems in our industry and for the world. And not social reputation systems like what is happening in China right now, where you can have someone leave you, like let's say I get into an Uber and I'm 30 seconds late. I can end up in a situation where I'm like not able to be admitted into a hospital or I'm not able to take a public train. Because someone rates me lower on this reputation system, I think that's a huge human rights issue. >> John: Yeah, that's a huge problem. >> And so not reputation systems like this, but reputations like the one we're working on at CULTU.RE that are really based more on the idea of restoration and humanization, rather than continued social exploitation to create some kind of collective norm, I think that kind of model is, it's not only a-- >> Well, the network should reject that by-- >> Toni: Exactly, exactly. >> All right, so let's talk about digital nations, we have China, so there's some bad behavior going on there. I mean, some will argue that there's really no R&D over there, and now they're trying to export the R&D that they stole into other countries, again, that's my personal rant. But the innovation there is clear, we chat and other things are happening. They finally turned the corner where they're driving a lot of, you know, mainly because of the mobile. But there's other nations out there that are kind of left behind. The UK just signed this week with Coinbase a pretty instrumental landmark licensing deal, which is a signal, 'cause I know Estonia, Armenia, you name every country wants to, Bahrain's got, you know, Dubai envy. So I mean, every country wants to be the crypto country. Every country wants to be the smart cities digital nation. I know this is something that you liked, and you and I were talking about 'cause we both are interested in. Your reaction, your thoughts on where that's going, I see, it's a good sign. What are the thresholds there, what are some of the keys things that they need to do to be a real digital nation? >> Well, I think it's less about digital nations in terms of like a nation is a series of borders, and more about first nations that we are, this is what we work on at CULTU.RE, that we are actually a nation of people and a lot of those nations have overlap and we should be able to participate in many different nations who have many different economies that are all really cooperating interdependently to create the best possible life for all human good, rather than just saying like I care about me and mine, because that strategy, the way government works now, it's a closed network with low trust that is extremely inefficient in management of resources. And the only way you can really-- >> That's the opposite, by the way, of what this movement's about. >> Yeah, exactly. And the only way you can have influence in government is to go in government and to work through government. All right. So it's the idea that, look at how much food we waste in the United States. If we took the food we wasted in the United States and repurposed it, we could literally cure world hunger. That is how bad it has gotten, right. And there are people starving in the US. There are people on food stamps in the US. >> Well, I mean, every institution, education, healthcare, you name it, it's all, you know, FUBAR, big time. >> Yeah, but we're throwing away tons of lettuce and all of this different kinds of produce because it like looks funky. Like this peach looks a little too much like a bottom. So we're like not able to sell it. >> Or lettuce got a little brown on it, throw the whole thing away. >> Yes, exactly, exactly, and that waste is unacceptable. So what we need to move toward is a model of open networks of governance where we have peer to peer distribution of finance and of resources in a way that allows people to aggregate around the marketplaces that are actually benefiting the way that they believe the world should work. So it's about creating a collective strategy of collective non-violence and eliminating harm, so obviously, you know, having a society that has enough proper incentives so that people are well off and that people are provided for, and I think blockchain will-- >> I noticed you're wearing a United Nations pin. >> Woo-hoo, yeah. And blockchain, I think, will also create this. >> John: I have one too. >> Let's up top. (slap) Yeah, I think blockchain will also help create universal basic income, but in addition to that, it's the idea that, if I'm living next door, I'll give two examples. So one is about the legality of the way that we contribute to the society. So let's say I have a next door neighbor. And let's say that this next door neighbor and I feel literally, we totally get along on everything, there's just one issue we feel we're like, I totally disagree with this, I totally disagree. And that issue is the use of, and I hope this isn't controversial to say, but anyway. So the use of medical marijuana, right. And it shouldn't be, because we can have two different opinions and the world can still work and that's the point. >> Well, in California, it's now legal to own marijuana. >> Yeah, for sure, it's legal here as well. So it's the idea that, if I, so let's say I'm a woman who, you know, I have someone in my life who was injured by a driver who was driving under the influence of marijuana. And so that's all I know about marijuana because I don't really do drugs, I've never been around drugs. So when I hear that word, I immediately think about the person in my life who was harmed because of, yes, and so immediately triggered, and I'm like, I don't want to support anything, I don't want to support anything to do with marijuana, I think marijuana is like the Devil's lettuce. And I have no interest in supporting marijuana. She never has to support marijuana, she doesn't have to. But her next door neighbor is a veteran with Parkinson's disease, her, me, whatever, is a veteran with Parkinson's disease, okay. And the only way that this man can move is, he's literally shaking, but when he smokes medical marijuana, he's actually able to, you watch and literally 30-45 minutes, he's upright, he looks like a normal healthy man. And so he says, "I believe that every, "after I fought in this, I believe every person "should have access to medical marijuana, "because this is the only way I'm able "to even operate my life." >> The different context. >> And I'm so, yes, exactly. And so what culture is really about is about understanding each other's context, that's even how reputation works. It's contextual awareness that provides greater understanding of who we are as individuals and the way we work together to make society work. So maybe they can mutually agree that he is not going to smoke while he's driving and he can pay to support everyone to have access who needs access to medical marijuana. >> Or he could finance Uber rides for them. You know, or whatever, I mean, these are mechanisms. >> Yes, yes, but it's the, yes, exactly, exactly. It's the idea that we are all, we're coming together to share context is a way that's not aggressive and not accusatory, so two people can believe two totally different things and still develop enough mutual respect to live together peacefully in a society. >> You know, the other too I'm riffing on that is that now KYC is a concept (mumbles) kicked around here, know your customer. I've been riffing on the notion of KYC for know your neighbor. And what we're seeing in these communities, even the analog world, people don't know who their neighbors are. Like, they don't actually even like care about them. >> Toni: For sure. >> You know, maybe I grew up in, you know, a different culture where, you know, everyone played freely, the parents were on the porch having their cocktail or socializing and watching the kids from the porch play on the lawn. Now I call that Snapchat, right. So I can see my kids Snapchat, so I'm not involved, but I have peripheral view. >> Toni: For sure. >> But we took care of each other. That doesn't happen much anymore, and I think one of the things that's interesting in some of these community dynamics that's been successful is this empathy about respect. They kind of get to know people in a non-judgmental way. And I think that is something that you see in some of these fragmented communities, where it's just like, if they just did things a little bit different. Do you agree, I see you're shaking your head, your thoughts on this? This super interesting social science thing that's, now you can measure it with digital or you can measure that kind of-- >> We can incentivize it. We can incentivize it. And that's the difference, measurement is one thing. Incentive is a behavior changer. Incentive is a behavior changer. And that is what we actually have to do in the way we think about the foundation of these systems, is it's not incentivizing competitive marketplaces that are like my way of thinking about this is right and your way of thinking about this thing is wrong, and like ah, it's not about that. At the end of the day like, I think we forget or misquote so much of, so many of the great thinkers of the last generation, like if you think about Darwin. What does everyone know about Darwin, right, it's like survival of the fittest. It's not what Darwin said, okay. It's misquoted and it's used, it's like one of those things where people who want to exploit-- >> It's a meme, basically. >> Yeah, people who want to exploit someone else's knowledge for their own ends will use that to, in some way, uplift the kind of like strategy of, you know, incentives of the time. What Darwin actually said was that human beings with the highest capacity for sympathy, qualities we now identify as altruism, compassion, empathy, reciprocity, will be the most likely to survive during hardship. Fundamentally, I mean, look at the state of the world today. It doesn't look good, it's like, you look at the way people interact with each other, it's like a virus that's attacking itself in an ecosystem that is our planet Earth, and we need to be, you know what is the antibody, our own sense of consideration for our fellow man. That is the antibody to violence. And so we can incentivize this, and we're going to have to because we're going to, AI, automation, these will fundamentally transform the way we think about jobs in a way that will liberate us like we've never known before. And once given the freedom, I think that we'll see the world start to change. >> Toni, I really appreciate you spending the time in this thought leadership conversation, riffing back and forth. Feels great and it's a great productive conversation. I got to ask you, how did you get there? I mean, who are you? I mean, you're amazing. Like, how did you get here, you obviously, Coin Telegraph's one of the projects you're running, great content. You're wearing the UN pin, I'm aligning with that. Got a great perspective. What's your story? Where did you come from originally, I mean... How did you get here? >> I think, you know, I don't know. I'm really connected to Saturn, I don't know where my home planet is. >> Which spaceship did you come in on? No, I mean, seriously, what's your background? How did you weave into this? 'Cause you have a holistic view on things, it's impressive. But you also can get down and dirty on the tech, and you have a good, strong network. Did you kind of back into this by accident on purpose, or was it something that you studied? What's the evolution that you have? >> Yeah, you know. I studied performance art and I was an artist all of my life. And I had a really big existential crisis, because I realized, as I was looking around, that technology was replacing every form. I remember the first time I watched an AI generate, this was maybe in like, I don't remember how, this was a long time ago, but I was essentially watching, before like the deep dream stuff, maybe like 2009 or 10. And I remember watching computers generate art. And I just was like, I was like mic drop, I was like anything that could ever be created can and will be created by computers, because these are, you are looking at this data, you can scan every art piece in the world and create an amalgamation of this in a way that extends so far beyond team and capacity that the form that we have used to express artistic integrity, all forms will, in some way, become obsolete as a form of creative expression. And I had this huge existential crisis as a performer, realizing that the value of my work was essentially, like, how long would the value of my work live on if no one is, I am not alive to continue singing the song. You don't remember the people who played Carmen, you remember Bizet who wrote the opera, you remember Carmen the character, but the life of the performer is like that of a butterfly. It's like you emerge from the cocoon, you fly around the world beautifully for a very short amount of time. And then you just, you know, stardust again. And so I had this huge existential moment, and it was a really big awakening call. It was as though the gravity of the universe came into the entire dimension of my being and said these, what you have learned has given you a skill, but this is not your path. So I went okay, I just need some time to like process that and so, 'cause this is my entire life, it's the only thing I ever imagined I would ever do. And so I ended up spending three months in silence meditating. And people are like whoa, like how did you do that? And I don't think people, I don't know, not that people don't understand, but I'm not certain that a lot of people have the level of this kind of existential moment that I experienced. And I couldn't have done anything else, I really just needed to take that time to process that I was actually reformulating every construct at the foundation of my own reality. And that was going to take, that's not something you just do overnight, right, like some people can do it more fluidly, but this was a real shift, a conscious shift. And so I asked myself three questions in that meditation, it was what is my purpose, what is the paradigm shift and where is my love. And so I just meditated on these three questions and started to, I don't know how deeply you've studied lucid dreaming or out of body experiences, but that's another, a conversation we can get into in another time, that was my area of study during that period. And so I ended up leaving the three months in silence and I just kind of, I started following my intuition. So I would just, essentially, sometimes I'd walk into a library and I would just shut my eyes and I would just walk around and I would touch books. And I would just feel what they felt like to me, like the density of their knowledge. And I would just feel something that I felt called to, and I would just pull it out of the shelf and just read it. And I don't know how to explain it-- >> (mumbles) Energy, basically-- >> I was guided, I was guided to this. This was in 2011. And so what I started getting into was propaganda theory, the dissolution of Aristotelian politics as an idea of citizen and state when we're really all consumers in a Keynesian economy structured by Edward Bernays, the inventor of propaganda, who essentially based our entire attitude of economic health on, you know, a dissolving human well being. Like, the evolution of our economic well being and our human well being were fundamentally at odds, and not only was that system non-sustainable, but it was a complete illusion. At every touch, point and turn, that the systems we lived in were illusions. And so is all of the world, right, like this whole world is an illusion, but these illusions in particular have some serious implications in terms of people who don't have the capacity, or not the capacity, everyone has the capacity, but who have not explored that deeply, right, who haven't gone that deep with themselves. >> And one of those books was like a tech book or was like-- >> It was just multiple, no, it was multiple books. And it's not that I would even read all of the books all of the way through. Sometimes I would just pick up a book and I would just open it to a certain page and I would read like a passage or a couple pages, and I'd just feel like that's all I need to read out of that book. It's, you just tune into it. >> When was your first trade on Bitcoin, first buy, 2011? >> You want to know something nuts? People always, people are like, "When did you first buy Bitcoin?" I was not, I didn't. So after I started, once you know, all this knowledge came to me, I just started talking about it, I was like, I've been given some wisdom, I just have to share it. So I started going out into the world and finding podiums and sharing. And that was when someone put a USB full of Bitcoin into my hands. I very rarely, I don't necessarily buy, I've just been gifted a lot. >> Good gifts. >> Toni: They've been great gifts, yeah. >> And then when did you start Coin Telegraph, when did that come online? >> So that was in 2013. I joined, the property had been operable for I think like three or four months. And some guys called me and they said, "We're just really impressed with you "and we want to work with you." And I said, "Well, that's nice," I was like, "But you don't have a business, right?" And they were like, "What do you mean?" And I was like, "Well, you have a blog, right?" And so I went in and I said, essentially like, here's, to scale the property, I was like, "Here's a plan for the next three years. "If we really want to get this property to where "it needs to be." I'm like, "Here are the programs that we need "to institute, here's like this entire, "countries we can be operable in "and then other acquisitions of other properties." I essentially went in and said like, "Here's the business model and the plan at scale," and they were just like, I think they were a little like, the first call that we had, I think they were just like, "We just called you to," it was a bold move, like, "We just called you to offer you something, "and you countered our offer by saying "we don't have a business?" It was one of those things, but they-- >> Well, it was the labor of love for them, right, I mean-- >> Well, for all of us, yeah, for all of us. >> When all you do is you're blogging, you're just sharing. And then you start thinking about, you know, how to grow, and you got to nurture it, you need cash. >> Yes, and so I essentially came in and then started, I was both editor in chief and CEO and co-founder of the property who helped bring in a lot of the network, build the reputation for the brand, create a scaling strategy. A lot of mergers and acquisitions, a lot of franchises and-- >> How many properties did you buy roughly, handful, six, less than six? >> So I would also say that-- >> Little blogs and kind of (mumbles) them together, bring people together, was that the thinking? >> Yeah, you know, what's interesting is media from all shapes and sizes, 15 to 20 offices in 25 different countries. I always say this when I talk about this, a very important lesson that I learned. How do you manage a team of 40 anarchists? You don't, you don't, that's the answer, you don't, you don't even like, you're like oh. I remember when I was like, "We're a team!" And someone was like, "No, we're not, "I don't believe in teams, I work for myself "and I don't need," I was like oh, wow. I was like oh-- >> John: The power of we, no. >> I was just like, all right, but it was a good learning experience, because I was like well, this is the way, these are your needs. So if that's your, I was like, well, let's embrace that, let's embrace the idea-- >> But that's the culture, you can't change it. >> And let's create the economy around that, let's actually do direct incentive for it, if you think that you're, if you want to be in this on your own, then let's say okay, we're going to make this fully free market economics and we're going to have a matter of consensus on whether or not someone who's exploiting the system, you write an article, you send it out, the number of views and shares that it gets from accounts that are, you know, proven verified, that is how much you get out of the bounty that's created from our ad sales, and if the community comes together in a consensus and says that someone wrote an article that was basically exploiting the system, like beer, guns, tits and weed plus Bitcoin and then they just shared it with everyone, then obviously, they would be weighted differently because the community would reach consensus so-- >> Change the incentive system. >> We just, I started, yeah, I started redesigning, essentially, once I had that moment, I was like okay, I was like, well, we really got to change the incentives here then because the incentives are not going to work like that. If that's the, if there's a consensus that that is the way you guys want to do things, then I got to change things around that. All right, cool, and so yeah, it was a really interesting awesome learning experience from like, you know, a team of like, maybe like 20 to 40 into, probably took it up 40, and then with all of the other, you know, companies and franchises, to about 435 people. And then just took the revenue from, yeah, just took, it was like skating revenue and then rocketing revenue. So that was really my role in the growth of the business and we're all, you know, it's amazing to see how these kind of blockchain holacracies work, you know, at a micro scale and at a macro scale. And what it really takes to build a movement, right. And then, in some ways, I guess it'd either become or create a meme. >> Well, I really appreciate the movement you've been supporting, we're here to bring theCUBE to the movement, our second show, third show we've been doing. And getting a lot more this year, as the ecosystem is coming together, the norms are forming, they're storming, they're forming, it's great stuff. You've been a great thought leader, and thanks for sharing the awesome range of topics here for theCUBE. >> For sure. >> Toni Lane here inside theCUBE, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching our exclusive Puerto Rico coverage of CoinAgenda, we'll be right back. (energetic music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube covering InterConnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Okay welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas the Mandalay Bay for IBM InterConnect 2017. This is the Cube coverage I'm John Furrier my cohost Dave Vellante, our next guest is our famous Cube alumni, Tanmay Bakshi welcome back to the Cube. Now you're a cognitive developer and your new business card as part of the Darwin Ecosystem says Algorithmist. >> Dave: Algorithmist. >> Algorithmist, yes. >> John: Welcome back. >> Thank you, I'm very glad to be back on theCube. And yes, of course, as I said, I'm working on many new projects with artificial intelligence, and, of course, IBM Watson. Including ones that are provided by Darwin Ecosystem. And of course, we're working on this really interesting project called A Cognitive Story, which you will be seeing more about on my talks on Tuesday and Wednesday. The Cognitive Story is basically this collaboration between IBM, Darwin Ecosystem, Not Rocket Science, and me. Basically we're working towards really using the power of cognitive in order to change people's lives in a positive way. That's what I'm doing at the Darwin Ecosystem, generally, with IBM Watson and AI. >> Last year, we had a great chat. I remember talking about algorithms, the software, super fun. What's changed in the past year? Give us the update on you. And, two, what's changed in the code? >> Definitely. >> What are some of the things you're working on? >> Yeah, sure. So, since last year, first of all, a lot has changed. A lot of new trends have emerged in the general topic of technology, like Cybersecurity, something that people are starting to take a lot more seriously now. With things like AI and IBM Watson starting to be incorporated in with that. And, of course, though, really from my side, what I've mainly been doing is not, I've actually started to work not only with IBM Watson's cognitive capabilities, and not only the cognitive capabilities provided by these services, but also my own custom services. Crowd by neural networks, and other machine learning algorithms. Like, just for example, A Cognitive Story is powered by my own custom coded neural networks. And that's why, of course, I've been given the designation of Algorithmist. Because I love to work with algorithms, fine tune them, and, of course, design them. So that's actually what's been going on for the past year. But mainly, I guess you could say now my real focus is on how we can use artificial intelligence and cognitive computing in order to first of all, amplify and really augment human capability, and, of course, how we can use it to change people's lives in a positive way. Especially in fields like health care, where we can save people's lives with this technology, where we can make people's lives easier with this technology. Like, just for example, what IBM Watson is doing, for people with Autism, and how it's helping them with the applications that it provides. What IBM Watson's doing for the elderly in India, with the new Gentoo Robot that IBM Watson is creating, and so much that Watson is doing with healthcare. That's really what I'm focused in, with cognitive computing in general. >> What are some of the algorithms that you've been working on? What's the intent? >> Sure, well, I've actually been working on a lot of different algorithms. Mainly in the AI space, and, of course, how we can create neural networks to understand brainwave patterns. And you'll be seeing more of that on Tuesday and Wednesday, with The Cognitive Story. But, I've also been working, of course, on algorithms that I've already created, as I said, AskTanmay, you probably remember that from last year, the NLQA system. I've been working more on AskTanmay, and, in fact, in June, in Developer Connective last year, I actually open-sourced AskTanmay. So, of course, I've been working on that, improving it. I'm about to release Version 3, which is really fun. And, of course, since it's open source, I love to share my knowledge with this code so that other people can learn from it and learn how to use this type of AI technology in their own applications, as well. >> As a young, next generation, mogul, software mogul that you'll soon be, you're already one now, but you're still young, you've got a lot more ways to go, but you're living in a great time because, I wish I could be your age right now, because machine learning is really hot right now. And it's growing because of the cloud. The cloud gives you scale and compute power, and there's also a cultural vibe going on around social good. So, talk about machine learning, what you're excited about there, specifically, and some of the things that you see, from your generation of developers around this desire to provide social good. >> Yeah, definitely. Well, I guess we should start off with, really, my main focus of interest, in fact, as you said, are really cloud computing, cognitive computing, and IOT. Because in their respective fields, they are the next level of computing. And, in fact, we're already starting to adopt them. Cloud computing's already been adopted on a huge scale. Cognitive computing, we're getting there. And IOT's, again, starting to be accepted by a lot of different people. >> And you might not even get a driver's license because by the time you get your driver's license there's going to be autonomous vehicles. >> Exactly, and so, of course, IOT's being used everywhere, and so is cloud computing and cognitive. So, really, what I've been focused on in the past year is, first of all, trying to get developers really interested in cognitive. But as you said, developers are really interested in doing social good with these technologies, and, just imagine this, what we're doing with The Cognitive Story right now is, we're basically, for example, I can't, of course, go into too much detail about this right now, yet, but we are basically taking this cognitive services and we're allowing people who don't have the natural ability to be able to express themselves, or communicate, or move in any way, really, to be able to express themselves, and communicate their decisions, and communicate their emotion, or whether or not they're comfortable, and more, through this cognitive system. And, of course, that's why it's so interesting, because imagine if you can't talk, and imagine if you know that, OK, I want to do this, but you're unable to express that, you're unable to communicate that to the people around you, that means that you're quite literally trapped in your own body. And having cognitive computing able to come in and allow you to communicate, and create your own, I guess you could say, unique language using these brainwave patterns. That's something that I absolutely believe is, I guess you could say, the greatest gift, ever. To be able to give you the ability to communicate through artificial intelligence. That's really why I love working the healthcare field. >> Now, am I right, you've written a book? >> Yes, actually, and it actually started from last InterConnect. Last Interconnect, I started, and now I'm actually done writing my book, called, "Hello Swift!: IOS App Programming "for Kids and Other Beginners" and it's actually currently available for pre-order on the publisher's website, as well as lots of other book stores online. Of course, the final hard copy will be released soon. But basically, this book is really targeted towards getting the youth, and, really, kids, interested in programming, and specifically, IOS programming through Swift. And, of course, as you know, Swift is open-sourced, and I really support open source software. >> What are some of the cool things young kids want in software these days? Because, like I said, there is a tool chest of great stuff coming on, like composable software, Lego blocks, which people called like Lego blocks. What are some of the cool things that kids want these days? >> Well, there are a lot of things. But I'd actually like to highlight the main way that I like to get the youth interested in coding. And it's by showing them something that they find really interesting. For example, something that they see in movies a lot. Like, for example, artificial intelligence is the absolute perfect example of how you can have something, like artificial intelligence, that can get kids interested, and the youth interested, in these technologies like programming, in order to start to get them programming. Because of course, we need them to be prepared for their future. >> Gaming and AI are two, like, Sci-Fy is AI, kind of a cool, futuristic. And then gaming, also, is very interactive, immersion-based. >> Exactly, and, in fact, that's why a lot of companies are starting to merge AI and games. And, of course, virtual reality. Virtual reality is something else that, you know, kids, and really everybody, is really interested in nowadays. If we can, and in fact, we are, taking these AI technologies and incorporating them with these other technologies, like gaming, with the virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, and we're trying to create this really interesting mix, especially for kids. And also, one more thing, here, is that not only are we doing this, AI is so diverse, it's all around us. It's on your phone, it's on your smart TV, it's in your car, and that's really why we should be showing the youth that this is all around us. We need to start adopting these technologies. >> Last year, I asked you the question, take us through a day in the life of Tanmay where you had a discovery. So let's play that back this year. Give us the time this year where you had a discovery. It could be super cool, or maybe just a breakthrough in some small way that was a notable that you'd like to share. >> Yes, and that actually happened recently. And again, I'm going to take this back to just a few weeks ago, actually. When I started working with, I mean, I had actually been working with my own custom machine learning algorithms for quite some time, since just after last InterConnect, actually, I started working with my own custom algorithms for machine learning. But a few weeks ago, I actually started working with those custom algorithms in the healthcare space. And one application that I've created that I find, actually, quite interesting because of the capability it has to help doctors, and I'll tell you this in a moment, is that it's an application that can take 69 attributes about any patient, OK, and it can actually tell you if they have a hearing disorder. And if so, what's their hearing disorder. The reason this is so great is because this can be a great help to audiologists, for example. And, in fact, I am actually in communication with an audiologist from the UK, and we're collaborating with him to try and see what this could hold in store for the future of audiology, and the future of healthcare, in general, with artificial intelligence. Apart from that, though, The Cognitive Story is another great project, where, of course, I'm trying to combine machine learning with these extremely powerful capabilities that Watson provides in order to create a great mix. In order to help people express themselves even though they don't have the natural ability to do so. >> So, Tanmay, obviously you are a big supporter of open source. You said earlier you open-sourced some of your algorithms, AskTanmay. What's been the response? Have you had contributors? >> Yes, actually, and that's the greatest part about open source, because, now, the thing is, let's just say there's some issues with AskTanmay, there's some, as you know, this is general open source stuff. But now, Ask Tanmay is really, I guess you could say, evolving much faster than I could ever have programmed it because there are many people coming to me, collaborating with me, helping out, submitting issues, pull requests, and more. And with AskTanmay, especially, now I'm about to release Version 3.0, as well, because I was able to get that help from the community. And, of course, because of that, not only does the community help me, but I am able to help the community by sharing my source code so they can learn from that and build their own QA systems on top of it. >> Awesome, so give us the report card on Bluemix and Watson. And be fair, now, I know you're IBM Champion. >> Yes, now, IBM Bluemix and Watson, I can tell, especially Watson, it has evolved a lot since last InterConnect. Of course, the new services that they're providing, like the Natural Language Understanding service, and more. And really, what I believe, is that not only are they providing these new services, but they're also improving their existing services. Like the Visual Recognition Service, how they're doing the image similarity, how they're improving their default classifier, how they are merging it with the Alchemy Vision services in order to make it even more powerful. And of course, the new, live training features that they're incorporating into visual recognition. How they're improving speech-to-text, and they're generally taking all of these Watson services that already exist and making them even more powerful so developers can really leverage them in their applications. Apart from that, though, IBM Bluemix has been going great, as well, with the new services it provides, especially from SoftLayer. Of course, Bluemix is going great, Watson has been rapidly evolving, as well. >> I notice you've got your IOT Watch on, the Apple iWatch. I bet you've been doing some stuff with IOT. What are some of the wearables you think that are needed right now? Because we had the founder of IndieGoGo on and we know the success of the crowdsourcing is there's a lot of tinkers and inventors out there who now can be up and running, so we're expecting to have a big maker culture growing exponentially around new stuff. So, what do you see that's needed from your generation? Chip implant in the brain? What's going on? >> Well, of course- >> What would you want? >> Well, in terms of, I guess you could say, wearables, there are a lot of different things that people are doing with wearables, including virtual realities. One of the main things that I believe is, I guess you could say, the most trending topic, in terms of wearables, of course watches, we've got glasses now that they're creating, like the Microsoft Hololens. And all of these different products that are focused around basically being able to, I guess you could say, run have these technologies available on your body. On yourself, quite literally. And to make it so easy to use. And really, what I believe is that one of the main things that's really going to power these wearables is AI, artificial intelligence. For example, even the Apple Watch has AI features in it. I mean, all virtual reality is powered by artificial intelligence, as well. And without that, it becomes extremely hard if not impossible for people to code in things like virtual reality. So what I believe is that we need, I guess you could say more adoption to these cognitive technologies. And we need people to adapt to it in their everyday environment, and really accept that it's all around them. And that's it's going to be extremely hard to live without it. Of course, we need to start getting the youth involved in these technologies, for them to be prepared for that future in which cognitive computing is everything, and, in fact, cognitive computing isn't just the future. It's the present, as well. That's why we need to start getting prepared for it. And that's why it's all around us. >> John was joking earlier about you getting your license. You're 14, now, is that right? >> 13, actually, about to be 14 in October. >> OK, right, so soon to be 14. So you'll probably get your license and still be able to drive. In two years we're not going to have totally autonomous vehicles, but- >> John: Maybe 25 years. >> What are your thoughts on that, though? What's the driving age in Canada, 16? >> Yes, I believe 16. >> Yeah, OK, so, you know, 16 years old, it's a symbol of freedom, you know, you get autonomy, and, you know. What's your feeling about maybe the next generation and them inheriting autonomous vehicles and not having, you know, the stick shift to drive, like when we were kids, and we all learned on the stick shift. What do you sense that? What do your colleagues and your other friends say about that? >> Sure, so, now, self-driving cars is something that is already being worked on, heavily, actually. It's a big research topic. Tesla, huge company that's really working towards self-driving cars, autonomous cars. They've already got, like, half of that done. They just have to work on the last half. Of course we've also got Google working on their self-driving cars, and so many other companies who at least aren't creating self-driving cars right now, or most are, actually, starting to work toward self-driving cars, including Uber. In fact, Uber is creating their own self-driving taxis that can take you around the city without you actually having to have a driver. But the thing is, what I believe, is that this AI technology is powerful enough to be able to work with these autonomous vehicles and more. It's just that there are a few, I guess you could say, rough edges that need to be worked out with these technologies, which I believe can be done. It's just a matter of time before we are able to get completely autonomous cars on the road. It's just that there might be a few issues with the ethics of self-driving cars, and that's an entire topic on its own. That would require an entirely separate interview. But, generally, I think autonomous cars, that's a great, great place to go with artificial intelligence, because that could completely eliminate, or at least significantly reduce, the amount of, for example, human error there is in driving. And, of course, get you around traffic faster. And, generally, maybe not even have traffic jams. There's just so many advantages to having autonomous cars. And, of course, that's why cognitive computing is all around us. >> So, AI is hot, IOT is hot. You're hot, you've got a great fan base. We know that from last year. The reaction from our audience was spectacular. >> Tanmay: Thank you. >> You almost won our Cube Madness competition because you retweeted all your followers, or all your YouTube followers. >> Tanmay: Thank you. >> Congratulations, great to see you. Come back on the Cube. >> Thank you, it's great to be on theCube. >> OK, we'll be back with more from theCube Live here in Las Vegas where IBM InterConnect, AI, cognitive computing, collective intelligence, all the data, here on theCube. We'll be right back with more after this short break. Stay with us.