 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's The Cube. Covering Knowledge 15, brought to you by ServiceNow. We are on, welcome to The Cube, special presentation here live, ServiceNow, Know 15. It's The Cube, it's our flagship program. We go out to the events and I start to see from the noise. I'm John Furrier, we're still looking at angles. I'm the coach, 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, and it told about it. 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 in order of the British Empire. I'd like to have an out-of-body experience. Well, 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. 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- I like geeks because they all like Monty Python. You know, about three-quarters of the speeches I do are to software people, and I usually tease them, you know, I ask them how many Star Trek episodes they can name and whether they got a T-shirt with Moore's equation on it or this kind of, whether they wear a black backpack to formal occasions. So I get a whole lot of geek jokes. But they all like Python because they're extremely smart, and as you know, people who like Python are astonishingly smart. So how do you tell smart people from people who aren't smart? How do people that are not smart? What did you say, do you like Monty Python? I love Monty Python. No, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't. I love Monty Python. You think, doesn't like it, doesn't get the joke. You've talked to a lot of software people. In Vegas, do you like Vegas? Enjoy Vegas? Vegas. Plus Vegas. You see a show while you're out here? I can't get over this place. 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, you know, I mean, do they come here because they think that the casino owners are so rich because they want a lot of money gambling at other people's casinos, you know? The only good thing about it is the food. Did you bring your wife with you? Which one? No, I didn't. She wasn't feeling well, so she's gonna join me in New York because I'm going on to 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 the weirdest thing that's happened to you in the tech community here in Service Now? What, any highlights? Not this visit, but the last visit when I arrived at the hotel, and I can't think which one it was. Venetian, I think, and the guy at the counter recognized me and said, are you listening? Yes, I'm tweeting away. I tweet, I'm tweeting away. He has got rude that way, but. Fucking keyboard, that's any joke. Tweeting away. Welcome to the queue. Do you have a Twitter handle? Yes, of course. Now, shall I start it again? I was coming here to Las Vegas, right, I was staying at the Venetian Hotel. You got any phone calls you need to answer? Hold on, let me check. And I arrived at reception and the guy said to me, Mr. Cleese really like his shows, Monty Python, Faulty Towers and all of that. Could I have your autographs? I said, sure, I'll 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? It's true. So are you tweeting and like live streaming? Am I what? You're tweeting? Am I? Let me 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? So we have some fake Facebook questions from the crowd. You might have to ask some of those. Somebody wants to know what the airspeed velocity is of an unlaid and swallow. Oh, I think they mean after. I used to know this. I used to know this, 1971, and I could have answered that. Pass, pass. You're lucky. All right. Are you back with us? I'm back. I'm just going to the questions. So the question on my Facebook page is, what about this Cornell study about the curse, double curse of incompetence? The double what? Curse of incompetence. The double what, she's saying? Curse. Double curse of incompetence. I don't know. Good question. Good question. 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, love is that in order to know how good you are at something 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 I've ever come across is that there's a 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 of stupidity who finish up in power. That's why the planet doesn't work. So, honestly, they don't know about Monty Python. What? They don't know about Monty Python. They're not smart enough to know. What do you mean they don't know about Monty Python? He's a very smart man, David Dunning. He's very smart. He's also shown, oh, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. So, what did you talk about, the CIOs? When you were talking to the CIOs. CIOs. The chief information officers. 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, you know, they 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 got... Texting selfies. What do they do when they get together? Just to continue to talk to each other on their phones? It's a 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, things that are... Well, people are on technological advices all the time. They think now that the kids have less good social skills. And the point about human beings is that 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 that's 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. So 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 10 years ago because 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 animat... Who are you talking to? He's saying we only have one minute. That's Greg. That's Greg. Stuart. Oh, okay. I can't be bothered to go and talk to you for one minute. I have so many fascinating things to say that... Thanks. Thanks for that. Thanks, Greg. You're fired. Greg's fired. The guy's going to lose their job if you walk up to say good. He's fired. He's fired. He's fired. He's fired. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. If you don't see that, it'll be over. Okay. That's a note. It's a wrap. Say goodbye.