 Live from Cube headquarters in Palo Alto, California. It's the Silicon Valley Friday Show with John Furrier. Welcome to the Silicon Valley Friday Show with John Furrier. That's me, I'm Jeff Frick, co-guesting with me today, talking about a lot of great stuff, what's going on in Silicon Valley. We've been on the road with theCUBE, but a lot of stuff happening in Silicon Valley, a lot of stuff happening around the world. Obviously Trump continues to be the, some now call him the fake president, a riff on fake news, but London's been a London, a terrorist attack, people are dead, a lot of injured, Obamacare potentially being repealed, we'll talk about that. The wiretapping, we're going to talk about the Trump wiretapping revelations, but what it means from a tech perspective, we don't want to get the whole politics thing, but there is tech angles, I have an opinion on that, Jeff does do, we want to weigh in on that, a lot of meek time news. We just came back from IBM, Interconnect, their cloud show, we had South by Southwest before that, just a lot of good stuff. And of course, we had Don Tapscott on just two days ago, he's the new author of the book, Blockchain Revolution. And then we're going to have Mark Suster, a venture capital upfront ventures come on, he's going to call in, he's at limited partner meetings in San Francisco, couldn't make it down to Palo Alto, we're going to talk about his new SnapStorms, his short little video clips that he's doing, which I love, I think they're game changing, he's a great guy, prolific, very transparent, venture capitalist, we're going to talk to him, he's going to call in. Great lineup, Jeff, big news going on, a lot of stuff happening. And you just been a road warrior, John, so welcome back to Palo Alto, you haven't been here for a while. Well, I'm getting ready for the next show, Dr. Kahn is one of our shows. It's all about containers. The container madness, the whole world's changing, we're going to have a segment later with Don Tapscott, talking about blockchain, and I think, you know, I'm wearing the container shirt, but there's a revolution happening in tech and it's called blockchain. And this is now hitting a stride where it's going to start to see massive acceleration, in my opinion, and this has nothing to do with Bitcoin, it's everything to do with a technology shift that could potentially change how businesses are organized, run, and how they do business. So blockchain is potentially one of those, you know, once in a century, once in a lifetime, like situations where the world could literally change and accelerate a whole other dimension. So we're going to go deep into that, but the news out there today is pretty bad. The London attack that was pretty bad, you have Obamacare potentially being repealed by a really fast and loose vote that's going down, and then of course you're at the wiretapping accusation that Trump made up to Obama, a representative from California came out yesterday and said, actually, he's confirmed that actually there was some surveillance and some unmasking of Trump post-election with his team, pretty serious revelations. Well, and what, a couple of weeks ago, they said the CIA basically has a backdoor to everything, your phone, your television, everything else, your microwave oven. So, you know, all the things that we've read about, I guess Big Brother, you can't even buy it anymore, it's sold out, they're going back to the presses, but you know, all these things are real and they're here, and I don't know, I don't know if I'm more surprised than when we hear the revelations or if people are surprised that it's actually happening. I mean, we're just talking this morning, we had a CIO come into our office, we talked about the cloud, Peter Burris was talking about some of the research he's doing, but all these attacks, the London situation, the Obamacare, the wiretapping, kind of points to the fact that we are so living in the old stone age of government, why can't we use the data properly? For instance, the guy who was mowed down, the people on the bridge and then an entry can killed, they had him on a watch list, he was a known ISIS terrorist, peripheral as they say, and they lost track of him. How does that happen? The wiretapping thing, how does that happen? But it's security versus privacy, right? And that's just where these things really come to a head. And at what point do you trade privacy for security? And in fact, a lot of the privacy advocates will say, that's really big brother's best play is to use security and scare tactics to say, no, we can't give you privacy anymore, we're going to take that away because we actually have the access to know where you are and what you're doing and who you're hanging out with. So, I think there will always be this conflict and so they know he's a bad guy, but can you arrest somebody before they do something bad, right? It's an age old, age old question. Yeah, I think my fundamental theory though is different. It's going in a different direction in which is, yeah, there's always going to be those issues and that's a political nightmare, but right now fundamentally the tech business in the data business is changed. Data is the new currency, it's the new oils, the new scarce resource. Why can't we use the data to impact our analog world like government? So, Obamacare, okay, yeah, they're going to jam it through really fast and loose. Is it going to be perfect? No, but can they then use the data to figure out how to make it better? That's what I worry about. The government seems to be so out in the left field on actually using any iterative approach and concept we call agile, they don't have that. So, what concerns me is it's just another, putting the toothpaste back into the tube and putting it out there in some Republican version of Obamacare, which will be just a train wreck. So, well, I mean, the good news is, right, and again, we don't want to get too political, but if you look at history, Obamacare was put through 100% partisan vote, right? There was no Republican support at all. Now, at least Republicans are coming back with an alternative. So, without arguing about the benefits of one versus the other, the good news is, at least they're talking about it. And I don't know what the data is. I mean, it's- That's the whole point. I mean, I just- Open it up. It's a great book. Open up the data. I'm talking about SpaceX versus NASA and the way private companies do things, as you said, with data versus kind of the old government way. And they just have a real hard time changing. You know, it's just kind of not in the DNA. Well, that's my whole point. They've got to change. I think one of the things that we should do is amplify as a tech culture and saying, get your shit together and open up the data. Right, right. And, you know, open up the data, then no one can hide. So, if you bring that open source ethos to Obamacare, I think that would be, to me, I could swallow this change. And with the wiretapping, same thing. Make the data transparent. Let's see who's hiding behind the covers there. I mean, who unmasked, who approved, who made that call? Right, right. That's illegal. But that's, well, you know, our boy Snowden brought things up long ago and had to run to Russia. So now, everyone looking back in hindsight, was he the good guy or the bad guy? It's not so clear. Jeff, you always have the favorite quote I love. You turn the lights on and you see all the cockroaches running for the corners. So that's what's going on in government right now. Turn, open up the data and just watch all the cockroaches. I mean, to me, that's really what's going on. Everyone's going to be running for the hills. And I don't think that Trump is any more corrupt than some of the other presidents. Certainly he's more bombastic and kind of a loose cannon. But it just seems that if Obama truly, people truly surveilled him, then that's politics is dirty. Politics is dirty. But should they be surveilling him so that they see the guy that just ran the truck down the people in London because you know he's on the list? Again, that's where you get in these huge conflicts and it's kind of the spies dilemma. When do you tell the information that you have without disclosing the fact that you have the information? You know, you get out of your apparent. It's the same thing when you're a parent. You know what's going on, but you can't really tell them because you want to still have that access, that information in case something more important comes along. Well, I just think the wire tower, I think we're never going to crack the code on the intelligence stuff because the throw is going to keep that black art stuff hidden. But Obamacare and some of the stuff out in the open, I do believe that, you know, that and some of the terrorist things, you got to open up the data because that's the only way to do it, checks and balances is that I think just the government's business model, how they operate is in the stone age. And I think getting digital will help them and not just a website, we're truly getting them and transferring, but other than that, it's just another train wreck of Obamacare come in my opinion. Yeah, it's kind of what are you performing to, right? What attributes are your priority in the SpaceX versus NASA thing is pretty interesting. They're talking about, can you use commercial electronics for some of the space stuff? And the data says you can, but if you're optimizing 100% for safety versus economics, you may put a different weight on how much you're willing to spend on a particular chip or not. And so I think it's about incentives and what are people working towards and the government has a different set of incentives in the private sector. And that's why now SpaceX is shooting satellites up for like a 10th of the cost of a traditional- This is my point. Why not open up the market a little bit, open up the data, let's see what happens. Hell, this is the whole premise of healthcare. And I think the whole Obamacare was opening it up, but the government slows it back down again. Right, right. Well, I mean, again, the good news, the problem with it is as long as it's a political football right, it's gonna be difficult because why would you sign up for something that the other side can take charge of and turn it off? That's really what scared me about Obamacare because you knew it was a football. It had nothing to do with it. People just want healthcare and bottom line is the government ends up screwing it up anyway. So that's what I worry about. So if you open up the data to your cockroach example, turn the lights on, shine the light on the problem, and then ultimately that is the way to do it. That's what open source has done. I think that paradigm going to government would be something compelling. Okay, enough of that, let's get that off our chest. And of course the terrorist thing is gonna give Trump a ton of power because now it's gonna be like we can't have that happen in our country. So how much privacy are we gonna give up in letting people survey us in the interest of security, right? That's the classic, that's the classic deal. This is the blockchain, this is why I like the blockchain concept. I mean, I think personally, go search my email. I have nothing to hide. Go poke around if you want to look for patterns and terrorists, take my email, but ultimately. So we covered a couple of blockchain events before and you know, Bitcoin's been around for a while. What do you think happened to kind of, at least feels like for in IBM's instances last week, get blockchain to a tipping point? I think the momentum in open sourcing, IBM did a good thing there. I think there's momentum in the developer community. I think most people who understand computer science and are techies get totally intoxicated with blockchain because what blockchain can do is completely change the game on how things run or a transaction standpoint. It takes on all the costs of doing things. So one of the things I learned at IBM was the double entry accounting is basically built for reporting an audit. That goes away with blockchain. It's one big distributed audit system and it can't be hacked. So it's a really good system of record for doing transactions and that's why people built corporations to create a structure to do commerce and do business. So the nature of the firm concept that we learned in business school is shattered. Yeah, well the part I love is trust as a service. Trust and privacy protection. So for instance, you can have blockchain be an identity network and distributed network maintaining full privacy and multiple records. So to me, I think that's the leveling it impacts. Banking, supply chain, media. And you know, Don Tapscott had a great quote. We're going to play this clip and we'll discuss it but he talks about to me fundamentally why the blockchain is a cultural shift because if it does play out the way it does it will give younger generations or entrepreneurs an opportunity to decimate existing billions of dollars of business. And I think that people will work together in an ecosystem way. If the stakes are that high, you'll see blockchain go from the momentum now to ecosystem formation and take down incumbent industries. And I think that's going to be to me the deciding factor. So let's play the clip from Don Tapscott where I asked him specifically how he sees blockchain. And he really kind of sums it up nicely. First of all, I see this change in culture profoundly. So artists can get fairly compensated for the work they create. Imogen Heap puts her song on a blockchain platform and the song's inside a smart contract that specifies the IP rights. And you want to listen to it, maybe it's free. You want to put it in your movie and cost more. The way she describes it is the song acts as a business and it has a bank account. So we can profoundly change many aspects of culture bringing more justice to our culture. But I'm not sure there'll be a counterculture in the traditional sense because you've got people embracing blockchain that want to fix a bunch of problems, but also people who want to make large organizations more competitive and more effective. The smart banks are embracing this because they know they can cut their transaction costs in half, probably. Okay, that was Don Tapscott, who's the author of The Blockchain Revolution. He wrote Wikinomics Paradigm Shift decades ago about digital business, a real futurist, not a phony futurist. He actually has a track record of looking at the future and super impressive, Jeff Don is phenomenal. His son, Alex, is a father son team working together, what should I find super awesome. But that's, he nailed it. Blockchain is fundamentally can change the nature of business. And I think he covered so many different areas in which it can have an impact beyond the simple transactions. But it's funny, you talk about young people, right? They already swap money with their phones with Venmo and some of these other systems. So they're not tied into the old way. They don't even have ATMs. They don't even know what cash is. I mean, think about blockchain. He brought up in the interview, I didn't play the clip, but he called Facebook data frackers. And meaning that they frack data like oil frackers and actually you're screwing things up. And what he means is we're giving information to Facebook for the use of their free application, which some people now are getting off because they're so pissed off with all the political coverage. But they're using the data that we provide and making money, billions of dollars. Right, right. Mark Zuckerberg is a billionaire because we give him our assets. As does Google or everybody else. And his point in blockchain is, you can now seriously create a model to take down Facebook. So Facebook is at risk as a business of going out of business because of blockchain. To me, that is fundamentally what blockchain is all about. So as an entrepreneur, some kid who's 15 years old on YouTube could say, you know what? I'm going to build an anti-Facebook and could potentially compete with blockchain and take out Facebook. That is the level of disruption potentially that could happen. John, I'm a huge fan of Don Tapcott. Introduced to him, I guess it's been 20 years ago now since business school, but you know, the guy's always out on the leading edge, a really great thought leader. And he's working with the sun, I love that. And like I said earlier, when anyone who goes to business school knows that how business works, blockchain can blow that all up. That's what I love about that. On our next segment, we're going to talk more about what's going on in Silicon Valley and some of the disruption in the culture there and kind of what's blowing in the wind, what's happening, where is the action coming from? People obviously know you from Shark Tank, but the Hercovac group has been really laser focused on cybersecurity. So I actually helped to bring a product called Checkpoint to Canada, firewalls, URL filtering, that kind of stuff. But you're also an entrepreneur, right? And you know the business, you've been in software, you do tech business, and on Shark Tank, you get a lot of pitches as entertainment beats business. On our show, we're a bubble. We don't do a lot of tech deals that we're talking because it's boring TV. Tech people love tech. Consumers love the benefit of tech. You know, no consumer opens up their iPhone and says, oh my gosh, I love the technology behind my iPhone. What's it been like being on the Shark Tank? You know, filming is fun and hanging out is fun, and it's fun to be a celebrity at first. Your head gets really big and you get a look at tables, at restaurants. Who says tech has got a little pizzazz? More skin than anyone. Today for us. In charge of his destiny. It's great. You guys are exciting. Robert Rochebeck. No. Dancing with stars, of course. He's alumni. You're listening to Cube Fridays. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Now, here's John Furrier. Okay, back at Silicon Valley Friday show with John Furrier. Jeff Frick here, my guest here. Thanks for enjoying that beautiful Don Taps God thing, Jeff, amazing, amazing piece about blockchain. Tons of stuff happening in the Valley. This is one of them. You start to see, with blockchain, a cultural shift obviously is disruption, but the other disruption is a cultural shift, and I've talked to this on theCUBE, where social good is now part of the DNA of the younger generation. You're seeing, I mean, the stuff that we did, we have a purpose. Purpose-led organizations seem to resonate and attract millennials. Obviously, our purpose is free content, extracting the signal from the noise. We were doing women in tech interviews in 2010 before it was so-called fashionable now. It's the rage, of course. We were for equal pay, equal rights, et cetera. That's our purpose, free content, creating a community approach, like open-source software, open-source content. But there's a shift of social good. Kastanova Ventures is doing a fellowship. We did the tech truth. At South by Southwest, Intel had this AIF of social good. The content was awesome, and the results of the traffic was amazing. Mark Vanier was on stage with the CEO of IBM at their previous event, Ginni Rometti, talking about the societal changes. So this is a huge shift. Maybe it's post-911 generation coming into the workforce. Don't know. What's your thoughts? Or maybe it's just because it's easier. There's so many ways that you can do things. Casey Neistat, a guy I follow on YouTube, I'm a big fan. He just put together a friend of a friend, put together some money to Somalia. They raised $2 million in two days and got Turkish Airlines to donate space on a plane to the only airplane that flies in there and deliver tons and tons and like 200 metrics tons of food. So I don't know, because it's easier that you can actually do stuff. I think there's a little bit of the software ethos. I think a big part of software ethos is you can actually write a little piece of code and see it and change the world with it. And I think maybe that's part of the driver, but it is certainly a very important piece. The ability to connect the people on the internet has been number one. And this is a game changer and this is a social collaboration. So combine connected networks, internet of people and celebrities like Casey or folks on theCUBE that we talked to can mobilize millions and millions of dollars. People recognize that. So that again, that's disrupting the old way, the United way, the old nonprofits. That we're taking a lot of profit and probably putting it in their pockets. But I mean, that's what they would do. I think that everything is a service too is an interesting kind of twist on the story because people are not as much into stuff, right? The young kids there are not looking for their first car. They're much more experiential. And so that opens up. If you don't have that desire to save that money to get that first car, that maybe changes the way you think about it. But giving back. I think the millennial generation and the generation that's coming after them will be social conscious. And I think that now that you start to see the breakdown of traditional how business models are working. So even some of the venture back companies are hemorrhaging and groping for relevance. Like Medium's got a new business model for $5 a month. It's like they're groping and guessing. And that shows a side of the marketplace. Younger generations wanna come in and work for a company that's gonna have a purpose. And they wanna feel it's not so much about the company perks of old. Right, well even like Atlassian has one of my favorite ones. They used to date, and I'm sure they still have it. It was 10 seats for $10 and the $10 went to build schools in Africa. Who can't not take advantage of that deal, right? Everybody feels good. They get a new customer. The customer feels good. It's a real thing. They invite the people over. They go over and film the spot. So it does seem to be, and maybe it's just a different twist. Cause like you said, before it was kind of top down, you were kind of forced as big code to put aside some percentage of your money into United Way. But now it's a little bit- The cultural shifts, the cultural shifts happening. And again, in Silicon Valley, I can smell it. I can feel it in the air. Maybe it's like when you have a bad knee, you can feel the weather patterns changing. For me, I can feel it coming. And what's happening is there is a massive revolution that no one's seeing is gonna create so much wealth. And I think a lot of people, maybe 90% of people, even some of the big names like Mark Andreessen, aren't getting it. I think that's the key is that you look at blockchain. The dots are connecting. It's not just points in time that they're investing. If you look at the arc of what's changing, there is going to be a generational replacement of people here in Silicon Valley, including the people like Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, the gatekeepers, the so-called guys who are making the market, they're going to get decimated. I see that coming and it's going to be out of the blue. It's going to come from left field. It's going to come from right field. It's the blockchain. It's the big data. Something different is happening and that is totally is in the air. And you can see it. Company goes out of business here. Company groping for a business model over here. Come on, guessing here. Investors throwing good money after bed. Where's the success? That's the question. Look at it. You can't see it. Yeah, well, as you said, it's in the data and it's combining data in new and innovative ways. It's using the algorithms. It's using your proprietary data and open data and finding the new patterns, putting things together in a slightly different way. Preparing for a perfect storm of innovation. Who's going to take advantage? That's what we're looking for. I'll tell you, I can feel it. It's happening. Of course, we'll cover it on Silicon Valley Friday show and theCUBE. We're going to be horizontally scalable at all the shows. Huge lineup coming out. We're going to be in Germany all over the place. Getting the data, bringing it out. Thanks for watching Silicon Valley Friday Show. See you next week.