(upbeat electronic music) >> Narrator: Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering .conf2017. Brought to you by Splunk. >> Welcome back to the nation's capital, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and we're here at .conf2017. Splunk's customer event. This is the seventh year that we're covering .conf with theCUBE here in the nation's capital, in the district. I'm Dave Vellante with George Gilbert. For the wrap of day one, we'll be here for two days. George, good day overall. At Splunk, the Splunk ecosystem continues to grow. Splunk evolves as a company. We're talking about a company. We didn't really have time this morning to run this down, but it's about a 1.2 billion dollar company, growing at about 30% a year. It's got a 10 billion dollar market cap, thanks in some part to the Symantec CEO, who'd found that, hey, Splunk might be a good acquisition target. And the stock shot up there for a little bit. Fifteen thousand customers. They've got a billion dollars in cash. Zero debt. So, nice balance sheet. Good growth. Small, but meaningful positive free-cash flow. So, from a financial perspective, this Splunk's looking pretty good right now. New CEO. They had some bumps in the road in the past. Some kind of, you know, guidance issues. But all seems to be pretty good right now. From your financial analyst, put your financial analyst hat on for a second. How's the company look to you? >> I actually think the numbers look better than the, sort of, high level optics, because it's mostly subscription revenue. And, so, you're rather than get, say, one hundred dollars up front from a perpetual license, they're getting, say, 20 to 25 dollars over a period of, you know, x-many years. So that actually depresses your operating margins. >> Dave: Sure >> And so their revenue impact, and their profitability, is better than it looks. >> Dave: Am I mistaken, I thought the vast majority of their revenue was still perpetual license, right? >> George: I think they've been converting to where you pay on the throughput. How much data you ingest per day. And I think that that's, you don't pay for it all up front. >> So they're migrating to a rateable model. >> George: Yeah. >> Which is, often times, crushes companies, but they seem to be managing through that. So, anyway, that's one thing that I wanted to talk about a little bit. Some of the themes that you and I talked about this morning. There were six that you and I kind of laid out. The expansion of the total available market. Really, from a monitoring, log data, into more of an application platform. Part of that is the shift from sim, from a security standpoint, into more analytic oriented >> George: Yeah. >> activities. >> The second one was the whole cloud and hybrid cloud play. Another theme we looked at was admin and dev complexity, and Splunk's recipe for simplifying that. Machine learning. Where does that fit in? Obviously, with some of their ITOM stuff they're trying to be more proactive and anticipatory. Breadth or depth. Meaning, do they go deep within sort of an application silo. Or use case. Or do they sort of more broadly based platform. And then, the last one, number six, is sort of IoT at edge processing. George, that's not something that we were able to spend much time on this morning, or any time. So, I'd like to start there. Everyone talks about IoT. We all know that, at least in concept, all this data is going to be generated. A lot of it is stateless. We talked about that on the wikibon research meeting a couple weeks ago. With serverless. Question. Where does Splunk fit in IoT. If the strategy is to, sort of, send it all back to the cloud, is that a viable approach? And is that their strategy? >> It's not their strategy, it's what their architecture allows today. But they know that doesn't work because in a world of sort of, industrial assets, and, sort of, consumer devices, you're producing so many more devices per year and so many more data elements per device, per time period, that the amount of data is exploding, exponentially. You cannot, for latency and bandwidth reasons, send that all to the cloud, to get an answer and then send it back. So, part of what's happening, and part of what Splunk is building, is the ability to capture that data. Perform low latency analytics, drive an answer to a local device, and then, what they do is, what other IoT platforms do, send up the interesting data. The stuff that doesn't fit. The stuff that you want to make sense out of, where you have to rethink your model. Your predictive model. And then that sort of research and refinement happens in the cloud. And when you think you have a good new model, you push it back out to the edge. This is, again, all theoretical. They haven't talked about it yet other than directionally. But, it's worth saying, as our distinguished CTO reminds us, that something David Floyer, 95% perhaps of the data and analytics, will happen, really the data processing will happen at the edge. More interesting, though, is the division of labor up in the cloud. It's not just retraining a model but we'll have very rich simulations. So, rather than just saying, training a self driving car to, you know, in the snow, to avoid sunlight that obscures it's view of the hazards in the road, you actually might have a simulation where you go through a whole bunch of different essentially, edge conditions >> Dave: Mmm-hmm. >> So the models get very, very rich. And then, those get pushed down to the edge for local processing. >> David: End-end learning is iterative >> George: Yes, yes. >> And that continues >> George: Yes. >> And, OK, so that's cool. That sort of leads to the discussion of cloud and hybrid cloud. We heard even from AWS that much of the processing and analysis can occur on-prem and their model. It's not something that just has to get done in the AWS cloud. Interesting to hear AWS acknowledge that. Whereas, five, six years ago, their dogma was everything goes into the cloud. So they're learning and evolving along with their partners. But what about Splunk's cloud play. Years ago, they announced, you know, cloud offering. We talked earlier much more of their revenue coming from routable models. I think 50% of their new business is cloud only. >> Mmm-hmm. >> Which makes sense. A lot of data analysis is going on in the cloud. What's your sense of their cloud strategy? Is it working? Are you sanguine toward their approach? >> So, we've had, since the dawn of the Pleistocene era in computing we've had multiple platforms. And there has always been a desire to have a common development and runtime environment across different platforms. So that developers are not locked in, or so that they can have a common platform for building apps across platforms >> David: Mmm-hmm. >> And for running them. The same, so like that you had, part of Cisco's success and Oracle's success was that you had the same admin experience no matter what you were running on. >> Dave: So, Linux, obviously. >> Yes >> Dave: Addressed what UNIX never could. >> Yes, yes >> Was the promise of UNIX. Obviously some of Microsoft's ascendancy was given that, you know, binary compatibility with Windows. >> George: Yes. >> OK, so, will we achieve that with cloud. It looks like we're further away from that than ever. >> George: There's choices here. Where, with Splunk, they will have this self contained environment that can run on many platforms. They're run on-prem. They'll have some subset that runs on the edge. They'll have something that runs compatably on Azure and Amazon and Google. But, once they're on the cloud they're these really powerful centrifugal forces that are pulling apart the compatibility of that singular platform. Because you'll have very specialized services. For instance, if you're doing IoT with Amazon, you have the kinesis firehose service, that's pumping data into Splunk or into S3 where other services might be operating on it. Whereas, with Azure you might have different edge services pumping data into could be Splunk, could be Splunk plus other services. For instance, Splunk doesn't have really strong scale-out SQL database. Where you might want to do some advanced analytics as part of your predictions. >> Dave: OK, so I could leverage DynamoDB as an example, or something like that. >> Yes. Yeah. >> Dave: OK. >> Or Redshift on Amazon. Or snowflake as cross platform. That sort of thing. >> Dave: OK, good. Are you here? You're here tomorrow? Yes? >> Yeah. >> At least in the morning? >> Yeah >> OK, homework assignment tonight. Were you participating in the analyst event today? >> Yeah >> OK, so you've got some other inside >> Yeah >> So bring all the NDA stuff. Tonight, like I say, homework assignment, try to distill that down. Would love to have you back if you have the time at the open tomorrow. >> If I have the time. Dave, I flew across the country to sit next to you. >> That's awesome. >> Ha ha ha. >> Great. Alright. Good. So boil it down for us. Tomorrow, why don't you come on and take us through what you learned yesterday Maybe some of the product announcements. And give us your the George Gilbert, kind of, wikibon view of the future for Splunk and this industry, OK? >> OK >> Alright, great. Thank you George for helping me wrap. That is a wrap of day one today. This is theCUBE. We're live all day tomorrow. Watch the replays at siliconangle.tv. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. Check out wikibon.com for all the research. And go to Twitter. The hashtag of this event is #splunkconf17 and also checkout hashtag #cubegems and you'll see the snippits of today's show. This is theCUBE. The leader in live tech coverage. We're out day one. From the District. See you tomorrow. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live at Dell EMC World 2017. This is our eighth year of coverage of formerly known as EMC World but is now Dell World. First year of the combined companies. Some say Dell bought EMC, some say EMC bought Dell. Either way, the merger and the acquisition, or combination, however you want to call it, certainly working out. This is Cube coverage of the first year. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Keith Townsend, CTO advisor. Our next guest is Tarun Thakur, co-Founder and CEO of Datos IO, big news and as well, Peter Smails, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, a former EMCer, been in the industry. Guys, congratulations, welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you, John. Thank you Keith. >> Thank you very much. >> It's a pleasure to be here. >> Big bang news at the Dell-E, so tons of stories here. Obviously the big story is the combination, but you guys have some really amazing news. Funding, traction, give us the update on the hard news. >> Excellent, thank you, John. First, thank you guys. Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here. The last couple of weeks have been just amazing for us. Last week was all about product, which Peter is going to talk about. Our journey from our one portal to our two portals. That journey is all driven by customers and where the market is headed. But this week was all about enterprise adoption. It's a&bout enterprise activity. You have these two industry stallworths, 200 billion dollars of market cap, recognizing the value of what we have been-- >> John: And so the hard news is, what, Cisco and NetApp have invested? >> Cisco and Neuron Motor invested in Datos today. >> So this is a round of funding from corporate investors. Any VC's coming in as well, or-- >> Both, you know, the investors were already in the company, they claimed their ownership-- >> John: Okay, so they did their pro-rata. They re-upped. Okay so, new corporate investors, that's validation. >> Yes, yes, yes. >> Why are they investing? My masses wants to know, why the hell are they investing? Why don't they just do it themselves? >> Yeah, so you know, look, I think this looks very, very clear that this industry of the data management, or this industry of enterprise with option to the cloud is just massive-paced right now, right? The acceleration is at it's highest gear, so to speak, and we've been working with both those companies for the last few months. They recognize at fundamental level what we've built, like, the application-centric nature of the product, build it fundamentally for cloud ready applications, helping existing customers mobilize their applications to the cloud. You know, you have to-- we have, now, three year lead, into the space, right, and it's best to join forces. >> Well, we had our Cube conversation in our studio in Palo Alto too, and you kind of smiling then, certainly smiling now. The big funding, big fat financing, as they say, but you really kind of coy about not sharing the news to me, which I thought was cool, kept the secret, but you guys have shell-- >> Tarun: I had valid reasons. >> But, the cloud is certainly accelerating. You guys have the tiger by the tail. But, if you look at the VC funding landscape, we were saying yesterday on our opening that, it's a canary in a coal mine. It's a really leading indicator of what's going on in the marketplace. If you're a storage start-up, you're DOA. No one is funding that. They're re-pivoting always. You see, "I got scale out, scale up storage," pivot, pivot, pivot but all of these companies, data management, data backup, and protection are all booming. Massive up, Rubrik, Cohesity, billion dollar valuations. Why are these companies getting such big funding? Why are you guys being so-- Is cloud just creating massive scale for what was normally a white space? >> No, sir. The answer-- I'll go first. >> Go for it. I'll jump in. >> Because you come from this all most recently. (laughter) >> Look, John, there has been no innovation in the space of backup and recovery for the last three years. We've been still living in the world of four-wall data center media-server based architectures, and backup and recovery products that were truly return for tape architectures. That world ain't exist in this cloud world. There has been no innovation, and now you see complete replacing of good companies. Great follow up companies to be p6art of. All of us recognize the disruption of opportunity, and recognize what we all do for the next 10, 20 years. >> And I'll jump on that. So, if you net it out, there's really two things happening. You know, 70% of CIO's have a cloud-first strategy. So, enterprise, one of the reason we're here. Enterprises have a cloud-first strategy. They're moving to the cloud. They're doing two things. One, they're either building net, new applications in the cloud. Geo-distributed, highly scaled applications. You need a fundamentally different approach for protecting those applications. That's number one. Number two is those same customers are saying, "I want to move as many of my non-recovery workloads from my traditional four wall data center off prim. I want to leverage the cloud. I want to put my data where I want to put it when I want to put it there." There has not been any good solution to do that. So, for us, that's cloud data management. We're about protect. If you have stuff in the cloud, we'll protect it. If you want to move stuff to the cloud, from the cloud, within the cloud, that's mobility to us. That's what we do. Ultimately, this is why there's so much attention being paid to cloud data management, because everybody's moving to the cloud. The one thing we have heard consistently-- >> John: It never existed before, really. >> They're not taking traditional tools to the cloud, simply put. >> You know what, go to the website, I don't see anything about backup. I don't see anything about, you know, there's data protection, but in an enterprise, when we go to the cloud for the first time, a couple of things we figure out first. Backup is hard, because, you know, I can't point my data domain to S3, and backup S3 or some type of &object storage. I also find out that these traditional architectures within the data center just don't translate to the cloud. So, where are you guys at in the education cycle of the enterprise, and helping them understand the value of the application-centric model, and where do you need to go? >> Yeah, so... Keith, that's a good question. You actually hit the nail on the head. You have these proprietary backup appliances. We used to call data domain, really a PPB appliance. You have these media-server based architectures with the likes of Vericlass and Condor. Perfect for four walls, right, in the cloud geo-distributor applications, right? You look at those, sort, that scale, the application centricity, and we started, what we did in our strategy, we started with absolutely green field. What does that mean? That means the cloud-native applications, the non-relatable databases, right? The analytics, the IO key applications. So you go towards the use-case where the world and the customers are already thinking cloud-native. Coaching and training customers, as you rightly called, is a very hard journey. It is a crossing the chasm. It takes time. You need to start with earlier doctors, the innovators, who will then latch onto you and take you forward. So, our strategy of picking the space, which was completely green field ablution, couldn't have served us better. >> So, what's that next step after we've figured out backup, because we have to back the data up. Data management is way more than backup. Now, as I've blown away the limits of my data center, and I can access data from anywhere in the world, what have you helped customers understand that they can do with their applications and data, now that I can access it anywhere in the world? >> Tarun: Excellent question. >> Yeah, so, I can take that. So, to your point, if you look at protect-- our three pillars: protect, mobilize, monetize. You'll hear us say that over and over and over again. We started with protection. It's a business-critical use case. You cannot have a cloud-first strategy if you don't protect your data. Got it. Second piece around the mobility piece is, like you said, giving. What have we done by being application-centric data management? What do we do that nobody else does,6 is we enable you to, very intelligently and very efficiently, move data sets, in native format, where ever you want. To any cloud that you want. We don't normalize data. We don't change formats. So, for example, I'll give you one great example of application centricity. I have an on-prim workload. I want to run a query against that. Star, not Peter star. That resulting data said, "That's all I want to move to the cloud, "because I want to run BIA against it. "I want to do something that helps me "monetize my data in the cloud. "That data set, I want to move." One, you can run a query against that database. Two, we'll intelligently and efficiently only move that data, in native format. Spin it up in the cloud as metadata set. All your metadata's there. Do whatever you want to that data. When you're done, move it back if you want. Do whatever you want. So, essentially, we've eliminated any silos from a cloud standpoint. So what we've done is, we've given people complete cloud freedom to move what they want when they want, where they need to. That's the essence of what we've done. >> Let's talk about the monetize portion of-- cause, you guys have me curious. If I can move the data to the cloud natively, that's great. That's really value add, but on top of that, I need to figure out really tough problem, which is metadata. I have global data, worldwide. I have data scientists wanting to pound against that in a completely new way. Do you guys provide a new way to access this data other than my legacy tools? >> Absolutely, Keith. So I really hit on those two points in the statement you made. Moving data efficiently, Keith, is a very hard problem. What we have done by being, only protecting what you need to protect, why back up an entire database when you only care about a couple of tables? Remember, we're going from traditional monalithic architectures to micro-services in the cloud, right? DBAs and augments, they only care about couple of tables. I want to run a BI query against certain part of the data. What we have fundamentally done, to the first part of your question, move data very highly efficient, which is 10x dedup of what data domain could do. We have significantly modified to be protected around that decon. The second piece around metadata question. What we've really done, Keith, in our, sort of, scale-out elastic data protection, to the tune of elastic compute and elastic storage, you need to extend that to elastic data management, is your metadata catalog can't back up, at the end of the day hasn't catalog. The golden nugget. >> Right. >> That catalog used to be siloed. If I had 10 media servers, I had that catalog siloed around that. >> Keith: No value met. >> No value met. >> Correct. >> Our catalog log is now distributed, stretched across cloud boundaries. If I have a Datos running on prim, and a Datos running on Amazon, those are two instances of the same software, two nodes, the metadata catalog can see each other. You back up here. John can see that backup in the cloud. He can spin up his sequence already in the cloud. You couldn't do that past. You couldn't do that back in the old world. The golden nugget. You need to stretch your metadata catalog and you need to make it distribute it across cloud boundaries, which is fundamentally what-- >> What's the impact to the application developers, because now, are you freeing up-- What is the ultimate value to the customers? I mean you're basically freeing up the hassles for the app developer to say, "whatever?" Give us the bottom line. >> So, you know, absolutely John. Look, I'll give you a customer's real scenario, okay? A world's leading e-commerce platform where we go, and wife's go spend a lot of money buying clothes, so I'm just going to leave it at that, right? They are moving from a monolithic architecture, the Oracle DB2, to the cloud-native architecture. Application developers want to take their CICD. I'm writing new code, I want to bring new catalog items on the website. I want to test my code changes, and I want to go from the data, not two days ago, which was the old backup world, every day you bring a backup. Now they want what we call, to your question of we don't call it backup, what we call it versioning. I want a version one hour ago, because I want to test my code changes. I want to deploy those code changes on the e-commerce platform driving a billion dollars in revenue, so-- >> So you're enabling more and more coolness with the developer from a data, stale verses fresh data. I mean to certain levels, I mean not-- >> But I want to jump on that as well, because the thing that sometimes goes over looked is that, one of the things that the cloud has done that people sort of don't always acknowledge, is it's created, we've pushed the silo problem from on-prim to the cloud. Clouds don't talk to each other. You know, the notion of that. So the notion of the universal file system, such as the cloud, which some of the competitive landscape tries to-- >> John: Wait a minute. We're supposed to have multi-clouds. >> Yeah we're supposed to, but no. To your point, we do have multi-cloud. But its amazing how difficult it is to deal with that. So to your point-- >> In the future they might be talking to each other, but today they're not. >> But, but, and my point is that we enable you to do that. So, the ultimate value to the customer? I'm the marketing guy, yes, but the notion of cloud freedom is a direct business value to the customer-- >> John: So that's legit from your standpoint. Cloud freedom... >> Put it where you need to put it, when you want to put it there. Bring it back when you want to bring it back. So, from an app standpoint, a lot more flexibility. A lot more agility in terms of app development. From a cost standpoint, from an IT standpoint, I can dramatically reduce my cost, cause I can leverage the cloud versus having everything on prim. From an operational standpoint, I ensure everything's protected, so-- >> And we know cloud-native developers are very, like, they won't tolerate a lot of the old baggage and dogma of IT. >> Peter: Right, right. Are ya freakin' kidding me? >> Tarun: Well, well all-- >> Peter: That's actually, can I take that one? >> Tarun: Please, please. >> That's actually a good-- >> You see how fired up he is? >> I don't know how many hours we have to talk on The Cube because that's a fascinating topic. >> Just pause. Can I pause you for a second? >> Yes. >> That's only 30 days since he left EMC. (laughter) >> Alright, alright. Anyway, the point is, but the problem is new, but there is a persona, what I refer to as basically like a persona innovator's dilemma, that we're also helping address, because there's a convergence of personalities of people involved in the protection and management of data. So, to your point, we've been dealing with a lot of the new personas going after cloud-native data protection, but you're watching the organizations. The enterprises, they're going through it and they are rapidly transforming these personas. So, part of our jobs, to your education point earlier, is making sure that the left hand knows what the right hand is doing,% and marrying those two different pieces. That's ultimately, and that's value to the customer, and we help drive that process. >> Well, Tarun and Peter, congratulations, and good to see the journey continuing to accelerate. >> Thank you. Thank you. >> Entrepreneurial journey, and we'll keep in touch. Love the name, Datos OS. We believe, and Wikibon believes, and they're firm on this, that the business value of data is ultimately going to be a major, major disruptor for business. Not necessarily technology, but having that data operating system, that Datos, as you call it, is going to be fundamental. Congratulations. >> Thank you, John. >> Just keep it live here at Dell EMC World 2017. More live coverage, stay with us. More after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE, covering Knowledge15. Brought to you by ServiceNow. (electronic music) >> We're on, welcome to theCUBE special presentation, here live at the ServiceNow Know15, it's theCUBE. It's our flagship program, we go out to the events and as you can see from the noise, I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE co-host Dave Vellante of WikiBon.org And our special guest, John Cleese, distinguished Professor at Cornell, we just learned, no-one knows that. But apparently that's true. Writer, comedian, thought-leader, I got told that. >> And a Doctor. I'm a Doctor, Doctor of Laws. >> Doctor. >> And, what else am I? I was offered a Peerage but I turned it down because I had to be in England during the winter and go and vote in the House of Lords, so I said no to that. And I also turned down a CBE, but I would love to have an OBE. But not an Order of the British Empire, I'd like to have an Out of Body Experience. (laughs) >> But you're not a thought leader anymore, you're a futurist, that's the new trend. The futurist is the buzzword. >> No, I'm not. I'm very much living in the past. I don't like the future. And I don't think much of the present. (laughs) >> Well you're here speaking at the CIO Decisions. What do you think of all the CIOs and all the geeks here at ServiceNow? What's your? >> Well I like geeks because they all like Monty Python. (laughs) You know? I'm about, three-quarters of the speeches I do are to software people, and I usually tease them. You know, I ask em how many Star Trek episodes they can name, whether they've got a tee-shirt with Moore's Equation on it, and all this kind of, whether they wear a black backpack to formal occasions. So I got a whole lot of geek jokes. But they all like Python, cos they're extremely smart, and as you know, people who like Python are astonishingly smart. (laughs) >> So how to you tell smart people from people who aren't smart? How about people who are not smart? >> Well as you've said, you like Monty Python. >> I love Monty Python. (imitates extreme gibberish) >> You think, he doesn't like it. Doesn't get the jokes. >> So you've talked to a lot of software people. In Vegas? Do you like Vegas? Enjoy Vegas? >> Vegas? >> Las Vegas. (laughs) You see a show while you're out here? >> I can't get over this place. (laughs) Why people spend a lot of money to come here, so that they can lose what money they still have left. I really don't get it. Do they come here, because they think that the casino owners are so rich because they won a lot of money gambling at other people's casinos? (laughs) The only good thing about it is the food. >> Did you bring your wife with you? >> Which one? (laughs) No I didn't. She wasn't feeling well, said she's going to join me in New York, cos I'm going onto New York. And this weekend we are at the Tribeca Film Festival, Robert De Niro's, and we are having a Monty Python retrospective, for really smart people. >> What's been the weirdest thing that has happened to you, in the tech community here in ServiceNow. Any highlights? >> Not this visit, but the last visit when I arrived at the hotel, I can't think which one it was, Venetian I think, and the guy at the counter recognized me and said, are you listening? >> John F: Yes, I'm Tweeting away. >> No you're not. I tweet. >> I'm Tweeting away. >> He's kind of rude that way. >> What are you on your fucking keyboard for? I'm telling you a joke. (laughs) >> Tweeting away. >> Welcome to the future. >> Do you have a Twitter handle? >> Now, shall I start it again? (laughs) I was coming here to Las Vegas, right, I was staying at the Venetian hotel. Got any phone calls you need to answer or anything? >> Hold on, let me check. (laughs) >> I arrived there at reception and the guy said to me, "Mr Cleese, I really like your shows Monty Python, Fawlty Towers and all of that. Could I have your autograph?" So I said, sure, I write him an autograph. Then he says, could I have your credit card for extra expenses, and I gave it to him, and he said, "I'm sorry to ask you this, but do you have any identification?" (laughs) It's true. >> So are you Tweeting, and live-streaming? >> John C: Am I what? >> Tweeting, using your Twitter account? >> Am I, Am I? Can we get a handkerchief. >> Do you have a Facebook page? >> Facebook? I've heard of Facebook. That's for people who aren't important enough to get in the gossip columns and newspapers, right? (laughs) >> So we have some Facebook questions from the crowd. Do you mind if we ask you some of those? Somebody wants to know, what the air speed velocity is of an unladen swallow? >> Oh, I used to know this. I used to know this, in 1971 I could have answered that. Pass. (laughs) >> Dave: You're lucky. >> Are you back with us again? >> I'm back, I'm just going through the questions. So the question on my Facebook page is, what about this Cornell study about the double curse of incompetence? >> The double what? >> John F: Curse of incompetence. >> The double what you say? >> Dave: Curse. Double curse. >> Of incompetence. I don't know. >> Good question. >> Oh, now I know what you're talking about. There's a great guy there, a Professor called David Dunning, and he's one of the most amusing and entertaining guys I've ever met. And he's spent his career studying how good people are at knowing how good they are at things. What he calls Self Assessment. And what he's discovered, which I absolutely love, is that in order to know how good you are at something, it requires almost exactly the abilities that it does to be good at that thing in the first place. So if you're absolutely no good at something, you lack exactly the abilities that you need to know that you're no fucking good at it. And that explains the planet, better than anything else that I've ever come across. Is that there's a whole lot of people out there, who have no idea what they're doing, but they have absolutely no idea that they have no idea what they're doing. And those are the ones with the confidence and stupidity, who finish up in power. That's why the planet doesn't work. (laughs) >> So, honestly they don't know about Monty Python. >> They're not smart enough. >> What do you mean they don't know about Monty Python? This is a very smart man, David Dunning. (laughs) He's very smart, he's also shown, oh it doesn't matter. >> What did you talk about, the CIOs, when you out talking to the CIOs- >> John C: C-I-Os? >> John F: The Chief Information Officers. >> Geeks, well, what was interesting was that they were quite receptive to what I was saying, which is so counter-cultural. You see, I think we're living in the nadir of our civilization. I think as you wake up in the morning, that sound you can hear is our civilization cracking. And it's because of technology, because nobody talks to anyone anymore. They all go in restaurants and then they do this. I mean, we all know this, I'm not making a clever observation, but it's insanity, you know? When my daughter was 16, she would get together with all her friends but instead of talking to each other they'd be emailing or texting everyone who wasn't there yet. Do you see what I mean? They never actually- >> Texting selfies. What do they do when they get together? Just continue to talk to each other on their phones? >> It's completely vacuous, vacuous civilization. With the celebrity culture at the heart of its rottenness. >> Hollywood. >> So what effect do you think that has on the human brain, creativity, thinks like that? >> Well people are on technological devices all the time. They think now that the kids have less good social skills. And the point about human beings is we've always been good at technology, you know? In the 13th century when we were in the Holy Land, slaughtering Muslims, we were still able to build beautiful cathedrals. You see what I mean? So we can build things, and put men on the Moon. The only thing is we can't get on well together. So, which is more important? The answer is getting on well together, so we're now giving kids all the things that stop them from acquiring social skills. It's beyond mad, but people are after money, and so they will always do things, and always come up with excuses why what they're doing is actually good for the world, when it's all about that. >> What about the Hollywood situation. You mentioned in your speech about, when you were creative, when you were younger, and the process you went through, what's the state in your mind, of the Hollywood culture. I mean, they do a movie about Korea, and then Sony gets hacked. >> It's all a bit crazy, but I wrote two film scripts about ten years ago cos I thought to myself, can I make a living writing film scripts. And I did an adaptation of a children's book by Roald Dahl, called 'The Twits.', and I wrote something for Jeffrey Katzenberg about cavemen as an animation- who are you talking to? >> John F: He's saying we only have one minute. >> That's Greg Stewart. >> Oh okay. I can't be bothered to go on talking for one minute. (laughs) Though I have so many fascinating things to say, that I'm afraid (speaking off mic) >> Thanks, thanks for that. >> Thanks Greg, you're fired. (laughs) Greg's fired. >> The guy's going to lose their job if you walk off the set. >> John C: Good. >> Good, >> you're fired. (mic thumps on the desk) (laughs) >> Thank you very much. (laughs) You don't see that everyday. >> Okay, that's an out. That's a wrap. Say goodbye. (upbeat music)