Welcome to the original gangsters podcast. I'm your host Scott Bernstein. We're going to do another producer episode would bring in Benny to go kind of volley back and forth. We're going to keep, you know, I've always really enjoyed trying to mix the old with the new and taking things that are happening now and giving some historical context. So we're going to kind of stick with our recent theme of the Great White North and mob activity. Organized crime activity up in Canada, Quebec, Montreal, and again shout out to the guys over at Dirty News who do a great job covering the Quebec underworld. And those guys made me aware of a cold case murder from about 40 years ago. And I was unaware of and gave me a little bit of direction and where to find some info they did a little piece on it. And this is a mob murder from the fall of 1985. And a criminal defense attorney, a mob attorney mob mouthpiece by the name of Frank Shufi, who was a Lebanese criminal defense attorney high profile guy in Montreal, and his murder, even though unsolved. We can pretty much nail down the, the, the reasons and the circumstances, and those reasons and circumstances tied into professional boxing, the role that the mafia played in professional boxing. And in the mid 1980s, the face of professional or the two faces of professional boxing at that time, Don King and Mike Tyson, all kind of play a role in this story Tyson more tangentially. But so we're going to talk about that a little bit and then maybe talk a little bit more in general about Tyson and Don King's connections to the, to the mafia mob and just maybe just in general the way old school boxing was was ran. Benny thanks for joining me man. For sure. Outside of the glass. Yeah. The wife. The children from the glass. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Benny, were you ever, I mean, there's, there's some, you know, age gap between Benny and I a generation gap in one sense that I grew up in the 80s and 90s Benny grew up in the late 90s throughout most of the 2000s. 2000s born in 94. So, right. Don't remember too much of the 90s. But I remember when boxing was a big deal. I'm sure Benny doesn't, Benny probably his first memory of the fight game I'm guessing was MMA related. Yeah, pretty much. Floyd Mayweather in his earlier years, they were hype around that. MMA was what really, I guess, took off in the. It's had a different stratosphere. Yeah, yeah. Boxing boxing is a is, I hate to say it is just it's a dead sport. And I don't know if it's ever going to come back. I hope it does. I loved it. Again, getting you know, not having to go down a personal rabbit hole here, but boxing was one of my first loves in terms of me falling in love with professional sports. I'm not into boxing now I haven't been into boxing in a while but when I was growing up in like again in the 80s and 90s. I was a big fight fan and my first two loves. In terms of sports were baseball and boxing, two things that I don't really care about as an adult, but those are really the two things that got me really into sports, then basketball, and then eventually football was kind of the last pro sport that I fell in love with and now for me, it's all football. I mean, I still love basketball, but to me that's the only thing that really gets me excited. So, but but boxing was a was a really big deal on a big level when I was, you know, until it's just my let's just say my first 15 years of life.  Yeah, so 97 you were 20. Okay, you're in your in your these were things that you saw on your television every day these were athletes that were being promoted by sneaker companies and soda companies, car companies. On every Saturday and Sunday, I remember turning on the television with my grandpa's both grandpa's and watching boxing on NBC CBS ABC. HBO, when we got when we first got HBO, I got it, you know, say in the mid 80s. That's an important point right there. It was on national television. Yeah. And then if you got HBO. It was a big deal when at first, you know, when you could watch tell you watch movies on your on your TV. They were their entire sports division was, they have like the NFL today show that they would run once a week with like highlights, and then the rest of their sports department was all boxing. Let me ask you this. How often was there a big fight on back in the late 80s, early 90s. So that's another thing that I remember the fights, those big fights were never you could never catch them live.  And then and then at a point in the 90s you could order it on your through your cable box, but you were still paying you weren't just paying the regular fee for the HBO or your regular you know hook up to have a television so you could have ABC NBC CBS. But no big fights were free. They all caught my memory. I mean that you could get some really good fights that you would see on those Friday or sorry those Saturday and Sundays, where they would have the big big networks would have their boxing coverage. You could always be like the lead ups. So you would see like number two contender fight number three contender to then have a have a shot to go fight Tyson or fight whoever for a championship and then that would be pay per view. Got you. So you can follow it all you can follow the fighters kind of all the way up to the point where they became championships and champions and we're fighting for belts then you would have the, you know, kind of, you know, not kind of you have to pay for the right to watch it at that point. And back in the 90s how much was the average pay per view back then. I don't I just I always lived with like I lived in like fraternity house and I always live with a bunch of guys I was never the one handling the just always chipping in but I remember you'd always buy the flights. In the 90s but in the 80s. Sometimes I think you could watch it live on HBO. If you had HBO you could watch those fights live. Other times I think HBO would have the right to put it out like a week after it had been on pay per view. Okay. So I remember watching the sugar a marvelous Marvin fight in 87 or 88, but it was like a couple of days after it had been live but I was watching it for the first time, like it was live on HBO. Got you. And these pay per view fights, was everybody watching them like the Super Bowl? Yes. Like a, okay. Yes, a Tyson fight in the 90s, the world's stop in the 80s and 90s, the world's stop for Tyson fights. I mean, that's those are my memories as a kid like you're like it's a great analogy that it was like a Super Bowl. Tyson was a phenomena, like no other sports figure that I can imagine other than Michael Jordan Tiger Woods. You know, maybe like a Tom Brady step Curry type. Now, but he was just must see action at all times when he lost it. It was just jaw dropping. In 90, I think it was 91 90 or 91 when he lost to Buster Douglas. But let's just say from 85 to 91. That was the biggest ticket in professional sports outside of a Super Bowl Lakers Celtics and NBA finals or so. And let's just again put it in a context. The mafia weren't just influential in the pro fight game. Organized crime corruption, back deal wheeling and dealing. That's, that's, that was just the sport, you know, you couldn't have one without the other. If you were a if you were a fighter and you wanted to fight and you had a group of people around you that could get you to a championship, you had to deal with the mafia in one one shape, former or not. Was it mainly the five families? No, it was every family. Every family. Almost every family. So, you know, just for Benny and I are both at people probably know this are Detroiters. So Benny says it is, you know, his first memories of boxing come from Floyd Mayweather who's a, not a fighter, but a guy from Michigan who's really proud to be from the state of Michigan's from Grand Rapids or some of the west side of the state. And his dad was actually a big part of the Detroit fight game, even though his dad was from Grand Rapids but his dad was a fighter and trained down in Detroit, but just in Detroit. We had a couple guys that controlled all the boxing here. Little Sammy Fennazo ran the Motor City Boxing Gym. I believe it was on Woodward. I think you can still find on YouTube some old NBC Saturday afternoon fights I think this is from before I was painted tension to it I think they're from like the 60s or 70s, and they're at the Motor City Boxing Gym that's where the pro fights are happening they're being broadcast on national television. Little Sammy Fennazo ran the fight game here in, in Detroit he was a mob coppo in Philadelphia you had guys like Frankie Carbo, Blinky Palermo, Tony meets Ferranti. I know in St. Louis, Sonny Liston. The guys behind Sonny Liston were the St. Louis mafia, Johnny Bytes out. In fact, then the five families all had had their hooks and almost every fighter on the East Coast. And then they control the rankings they control the 15 different sanctioning bodies and then they could control who was getting what fights which is how they would leverage their power if you didn't want to play play ball with them you weren't going to get a shot at the title, let alone win the title. There were a lot of throwing fights. Yes. But like even in like the 80s and 90s. Probably not as much. But also in the 50s and 60s. I mean just watch Raging Bull. He you know he had to throw a fight to get his shot at the championship.  There's some great scenes in that movie with Frank Vincent who goes on to be Billy Bats and, and other great, you know, other great characters and Scorsese movies and then actually the guy that played coach on Cheers. I think his name was Nick Colosanto. He was the mob boss in Raging Bull. And he's great. And there's some great scenes there about him not wanting to play ball with those guys. I don't. I don't know I should I should have done some more preparation for this. I don't know exactly who Lamada was dealing with anybody in the comments you can chime in. Which New York guys were were, you know, making it so Lamada couldn't get a title title shot unless he, you know, help them out. I know in Detroit, at that point again not to always bring it back to the motor city but that was a, just like with a lot of other things in organized crime at that time this was a real hub. And a lot of professional boxing's biggest fights were happening in Detroit from the days of Joe Lewis forward Joe Lewis again somebody who was, you know, probably outside of what Ali and Tyson and sugar Ray Robinson Rocky Marciano. Jack Johnson I mean I would say those guys are the icons and he got a Joe Lewis is probably at the top of it. Okay, let's get back on track. Joe Lewis was being was controlled by the mob. He was controlled by the black mob at that time who was working for the Italians in Detroit so I didn't know that Wow yeah yeah so so Joe Lewis so just from the days of Joe Lewis Johnny Roxborough was Joe Lewis is a manager Johnny Roxborough is one of the biggest black policy number bosses in Detroit controlled a lot of black bottom Paradise Valley which was an area of Detroit that bred a lot of great athletes and great entertainers and through Joe Lewis spent most of his time in Detroit anyway he yeah so he was and then went and then in Detroit when it kind of moved into the 80s and you had Tommy the hit man herns he he was I don't want to say he was Cronk Jim which is the Detroit kind of the boxing Legendary Jim yeah unfortunately now close but right the many RIP many Stewart who is you know I believe he trained 40 41 champions world champions against the most any any trainer and pro boxing's ever had and Tommy herns was his protege is his first major champion to get other champions his first real superstar and and Tommy the hit man was mob adjacent I don't I don't want to say he was controlled by the mafia per se but his entourage was filled with black gangsters I mean that's a fact there's a lot of pictures and videos out there of of Tommy herns going to the going to the ring on some of his biggest fights in the 80s surrounded by like Demetrius Halloway and Maserati Rick Carter you know some hardcore Detroit gangsters we grew up with and then he comes up in a bunch of FBI investigations for hosting a lot of mob gambling events that is his mansion in the suburbs all right let's go back to the original story that we buried the lead on but let's just talk about we wanted to give give a little bit of a precursor a little precursor a table setter a little appetizer a pallet pleaser so Frank Shufi was very high profile criminal defense attorney in Montreal came to prominence in the media in the mid to late 60s was representing his first you know big client that got him a lot of publicity was independent gangster named Richie the cat Blass and had a I think he had a couple brothers and they opposed the at that time the reigning mafia empire in Montreal was the Cotrone family and the youngest Cotrone brother big Frank Cotrone was you know a formidable force in his own right his older brother's oldest brother that Cotrone AK the egg was you know he was kind of the Al Capone of Canada until the risottos and what's going on over the last you know 40 40 years but the Cotronis were the the name brand mafia there and Frank Cotrone controlled all the boxing in in Canada a lot of great fighters came out of Canada and Frank Shufi made a name for himself as a criminal defense attorney represented these Richie the cat Blass who was at war with the Cotronis and it got a lot of headlines back then he also represented members of the Cotrone family members of the risottos members of the violins I think he represented some West End guys Irish mob just a guy that was involved in politics served as a kind of a business counselor and one of the people he was counseling for business and handling legal affairs for was the Hilton family which was a big boxing family in Montreal the dad David Hilton trained his two sons the Hilton brothers Matthew Hilton and Davey Boy Hilton are both of them were world champions Matthew Hilton who this particular situation a contract between him and Don King that's where the situation arose from was the junior middleweight champion in the IBF I believe his brother Davey Hilton was the super middleweight champion in the WBC I didn't really know about these guys for being for criminal claims to be a boxing aficionado I'd never heard the Hilton brothers and I looked at their records and I think Matthew Hilton finished with a record of like 34 and 3 32 3 and 2 32 right 32 and 3 so what I'm saying is they were commodities in the mid 80s Frank Shufi had the ear of their father who was their manager and their trainer Frank Cotrone was brokering contracts for fights at different major venues throughout throughout Canada taken broker fees finders fees specifically with Don King's fighters Don King you know the gotta be the most infamous famous iconic every one fight promoter of all time the hair alone and the big personality and reputation for being well he was a gangster and then he remade himself as a boxing executive and it was always a lightning rod but a pop culture personality and somebody that was difficult to he was ubiquitous him and Mike Tyson at that time are just everywhere and Frank Cotrone was fighting extradition he had a heroin case he was gonna have to go do some time and in a prison in New York I believe in he was banking on the contract that he was brokering for Don King and the Hilton brothers and then and Frank I think this is either can you Benny look up when Tyson got the bell this is October 85 Tyson is either on the verge of getting the bell or it just got the bell was it WBC champion when he beat Burbeck I think it was for the championship and then he was he was a heavyweight and he was 20 years old November 22, 1986 first title fight against Trevor Burbeck okay so this was like I'll say not 11 months this was a little no this was 13 months 13 months before Tyson takes the crown but Tyson at that time is still a the buzz started with him the real life club or Lang right exactly and Don King was going to sign a contract to promote fights for Matt Hilton two upcoming fights that were pretty relatively big name fights the fight the first fight was like literally like a week after Frank Shufi's murdered in Montreal in his office or right outside his office on October 15th 1985 and the reason the investigators believe nobody's ever been charged was that Shufi had convinced Dave Hilton to not have his son sign that promotion contract with Don King where he was going to promote the October 20th fight against Vito and a fight in February of 1986 against Wilfred Benitez these were you know pretty big name people at the time and then I think he was also had options to promote some of Dave Hilton's fights and Shufi told him not to do business with Don King was probably a good advice but it got him killed according to what investigators believe and what Frank Catroni's form of right hand man bodyguard Real Samard who flipped told investigators that Catroni put the head out on Shufi so it's interesting I didn't know anything about it and when I started to look into it I talked to some of my sources up there talked to some law enforcement you know this is just stepping on the wrong people's toes so do you think it was did Don King have any ties no so let's be well yeah he ties with the Catronis he was doing deals with the Catronis where the Catronis were kind of teeing up fighters like this to do deals with in Canada and then taking a piece of the deals so it wasn't just Canadian fighters it was like any fights that were taking place in Canada I mean I remember when I was a kid there was a big fight I don't remember where it took place but it was against a Canadian fighter and everybody was all they all thought oh this is the there was always like this is how my memory is a kid was like there was always like the next guy this is the one who's going to take on this one's this is the guy that's going to take down Tyson this is the guy and it was Donovan Razor Ruddick who was a Canadian fighter so stuff like that so when Tyson was going to Canada obviously King was going to promote it and then he was trying to take the market in Canada for doing any all promotions and the Catronis controlled the boxing market there so but Don King we don't believe right let's call the hit let's be clear Don King was never implicated in any wrongdoing or violence or anything shady in this particular situation but Don King is a convicted murderer that's not a not a secret he was convicted of second-degree murder in the 1960s stomped the worker of his to death back before he became a boxing promoter he was a have I heard this story yeah yeah this is this is not a secret this is Cleveland he was a Cleveland racketeer in the 50s and 60s he was a black mafia boss or mob associate to the Cleveland Italian mob ran all the numbers in Cleveland with his partner Virgil Ogletree and I think it was 1966 got into a dispute with one of his numbers runners over 600 bucks and killed the guy I think King had to go do five years four or five years he might have been got the sentence commuted or pardoned by the Ohio governor or something and then came out of prison and immediately jumped head first into the promotion game and was promoting Muhammad Ali within like a year or two we in a reinvented himself you can call Don King a murderer because he is a murderer not first-degree murder but he was convicted of manslaughter second-degree murder and that that says 1967 couldn't even convicted right so what I'm saying is like when he came into the business the general public might not have known that I mean I didn't know about it until Ben didn't know about it until I didn't know about it at all I didn't know about it until I started studying the stuff but that you don't think that helps you in that business yeah people aren't going to fuck with you like they would fuck with a Jewish promoter that evokes fear yeah so let's wrap up by talking about Tyson and not a lot of people know his ties into the mafia or the people that he was connected with um he's he was a I don't want to say he belonged I think that's the wrong way to phrase it but he was trained by custom motto who's a famous fight trainer who died before he got a chance to see Tyson become champion and what was so unique about that situation was that Tyson became the youngest heavyweight champion of all time and the person that he beat out for that achievement was Floyd Patterson which had been custom motto's first champion um and and cuss was a very uh controversial figure was kind of I fought the mafia but also was controlled by the mafia a lot of people thought that he was too strong willed too strong minded too stubborn when he found Tyson he was kind of held to upstate New York and the Catskills he wasn't really even training champions at that point he had kind of been blackballed a little bit and then he discovered Tyson who was at a reform school down the road I think Tyson was like 12 years old yeah Tyson had a rough upbringing and people know that in Brownsville in Brownsville and Catskills some of the guys that trained with cuss were counselors at the reform school and one of them discovered Tyson brought him to custom motto and so custom motto everybody had to have a guy and again that's just the way business was done the guy was Charlie Antonucci went by the nickname Charlie Black whose brother or half brother or step brother was Fat Tony Solerna who was you know at the head of the table at least on the street for the Genovese crime family for quite a while he's kind of like got a big cigar in his mouth and he just looks like like a cartoon character of what a monster would look like there's a famous video of him walking out of court barking at the paper or barking at the cameraman like he's a penguin but Tyson's not shy about this I just heard him on a podcast recently saying that Charlie Black used to bring Tony Solerna up to Tyson's training camps like before Tyson became champion I'm sure Solerna was by the time Tyson became champion I think Solerna was locked up but in the lead up to that as he was being groomed and rising through the ranks he's Tony Solerna sitting there with a few feet away from him sitting there with Customano I bet you he had some stories there I saw a funny interaction or an account of an interaction where there was an old time boxing writer I'm forgetting who he was I don't remember if I saw this on a boxing documentary or if I read it but I remember them saying like Customano used to whenever he would have the media by him he would just start railing about the mafia and how the mafia had its hooks into all the different sanctioning bodies and all the different fighters and how he could never get a fair shake and how he was a one man fighting squad against the big bad mob or this big popular prominent boxing writer was like I would sit with Cuss after he would go on these tirades and the media would all go away and I turned to him and be like Cuss what are you talking about it wasn't for Charlie Black and Fat Tony you wouldn't even be and he's like yeah but you gotta arts and minds man you gotta play the game so I just thought it was interesting to kind of chop up for a little bit I would recommend anybody that's interested in the genre or reliving that stuff there's so much great stuff on YouTube of fights from the not just the fights but just the way they were covered it was just so much pageantry it's like what the UFC is now but times a million because there were only Russian networks and it just was such a it was so grand and we're just an interesting story I wanted to share and I'm glad Benny was here to share it with us and thanks Benny.  It's the money, it's the greed and it's the fame. Well everybody please like, subscribe, share we're going to be doing a little more of these kind of split in the baby episodes not quite a quick hit or not quite a long form episode with a big interview but maybe like these like 30, 25 to 35 minute breakdowns of some things and hope you guys enjoy them Thank you Benny. We will be back very soon here on the OG pod. I'm Scott Bernstein for Benny.


OK. So today's your mystery bonus lecture. What are we going to talk about? So I thought we'd go back and talk about virtualization again today a little bit. And this paper is about smartphones, which I like. But the technique that we're going to describe today is something that's a little bit different. So this is a third form of virtualization. We talked about full hardware virtualization. We talked about where we were going to actually try to faithfully execute an entire OS kernel directly on hardware inside a virtual machine. We talked about pair virtualization. We were going to trade off some small modifications to the kernel in order for much improved performance by modifying the kernel to interact with a hypervisor, which controls the VM state and makes it more efficient to do certain operations that might otherwise pierce the VM. Today we're going to talk about something called container virtualization. So this is kind of hot right now. Does anyone know why? You guys might have used container virtualization recently or heard about a company that's using container virtualization. Yeah? Portability? Yeah, but there's one word where if you say this word, people will get it. What's that? Docker. Nope. Docker. Who's heard of docker? OK, so docker is the Darling in Silicon Valley right now. What docker is doing, essentially, is exploiting an old technique that allows you to do what's called container virtualization. So this is also known as OS virtualization. So this is interesting. Has anyone ever set up a docker instance before? Have anyone ever used docker for anything? Does anyone know what docker is for? Since they're, you guys haven't gone to their web page, checked it out. So you actually use something that's hosted on docker. The discourse forum that we set up for you guys to use this semester runs inside a docker container. So what does that mean? It means that when I want to set that up, I get this docker container, which is kind of one single thing, and I run a command that starts that docker container. And then that container runs happily inside my existing operating system.  Like what are some of the applications that would be required to support a forum like Discourse? And clearly, I need a web server. I need a database. That's where the information is stored. What else? What's that? Yeah, there's something else, though. I mean that Discourse and most other, you need more than a web server. You need something else. So that's why actually we're not using the back and forth. But that could be done by the web server. I mean when you run code in a web server today, you usually just don't run a web server that serves static content. What else do you need? Yeah. What's that? Yeah, yeah. So you need something to interpret the web script in language. So Discourse is written in Ruby, so it uses something called Passenger, which I've never heard about, that I guess runs Ruby on Rails. What else? What else might you want running in there? Discourse, has Discourse ever contacted you? Has it sent you something? How did it do that? Magic. Email. So there might be an email server in there. There might be a, I know, I think Discourse uses Redis, which is like a queue, sort of a caching in a queue management system. So this is sort of the reality of modern day computing, which is if you want to set up something, like before, if you wanted to install Discourse, you'd have to install all of these software packages. So you'd have to find a machine. You'd have to download Nginx. You'd have to download Passenger. You'd have to download these things, set them all up, try to configure them properly so they all run together. And when you were done, you would have this machine. And what container virtualization laws do, now to some degree, what else could Docker have done? What would be another way for Docker to package, sorry, Discourse, to package all of this software together? What would be, based on the things that we've talked about in class, what would be another way that they could have done this? What's that? What's that? How do they distribute it? Well, but they could have distributed how. I mean, it's one of the, there was just a use case for one of the things we've talked about previously in this semester. I have a whole bunch of software that I want to bundle up and package together into one, into one. Multiplication. Well, Son and Ed, this is multiple applications. That's what's so hard about it, right? Yeah.  I could bundle this all up and you could run it inside, like you create a virtual machine for it and you could load it into a virtual box virtual machine or something else. So that's another way of doing this. Container virtualization has some advantages. It's a little bit easier to set up. It exploits features that are already built into Linux. And so that's what we're gonna talk about today. So this is virtualization of a very different kind. It's pretty interesting. This particular paper that we're gonna discuss in the context of applies it to a very specific problem. Okay, so just a few brief announcements. I don't know what's wrong this year. Is it the lack of piazza? Is that what's killing you guys? Like, I don't understand. Just do the course evaluations. Do you want questions from the final exam or not? Okay, I guess not because you're at 54%. So I want you to do the evaluation. You want to do the evaluation. Why can't we get together on this? Yeah. That's okay. I mean, everyone should be reading the discourse forum. I can send a mass email, but I don't know. Is that gonna work? Every time I do that, people are like, stop sending me so much email. I get like one email a week from the department. I can't figure out what to do. Read it, delete it, whatever you want. Okay. As opposed to the emails, which you read carefully. End to end. All right, I'll make sure Donna sends it out as a really ugly forward. Because I know that's what you guys like. Okay, please, yeah. I mean, find someone who's not here in class and make friends with them quickly in the next few days and then convince them to do the evaluation. I mean, that's another strategy. On Wednesday, we're not gonna have class. Please go to see the talk by Bob Horowitz, Eric Horowitz. Shit, I think I got his name wrong. Anyway, whatever, someone Horowitz, famous person that overlaps with class. So please go see that. How many of you will have tickets for that? Okay, good, a couple of you. The rest of you, maybe there's still tickets off. I don't know, I'm going, I think it'll be cool. And then we're not gonna do a Friday 8am recitation because Ali was there last week and no one else was. And Friday morning at 8am is a very lonely place to be if there's no one to talk operating systems with. So we're just not doing it this week. On Friday in class, we'll do exam review. Okay. So, you guys didn't read the papers. I'll just tell you what kind of paper this is. So this is, people applying an old idea to a new problem. And there's some hard work they have to do and we'll talk about what that is. But the old idea here is OS virtualization. So OS virtualization in some form or another has been around for a long time.  Yeah, that sounds bad. Say goodbye, that's it. We can order you a new laptop right live in class. All right, so OS virtualization, right? Then this is, and again, this is different. And it's kind of cool, it's a different take on virtualization for what we talked about already. The new application here are smartphones. And to some degree, some of the complications they had to go through are unique to the smartphone environment have to do with smartphone use of devices. So we'll come back and talk about that. But a lot of these ideas are sort of have been swirling around. And they put them all together and got this to work on smartphone platform. All right, so OS or container virtualization on Linux, which is the operating system that runs underneath the Android platform, allows them to do the following. It allows them to create what are called multiple virtual phones. And I'll have a YouTube video, which if I'm desperate for time, I'll show at the end. But essentially the interface to this becomes you have your single phone and by swiping in some weird way, you can now switch between multiple virtual phones. So you can have like four virtual phones running on top of this one single physical phone. Why would you want to do this?  Each virtual phone runs Android. So they're all Android phones. They can make phone calls. They can run unmodified Android applications. They can use data collections. They can do pretty much anything that a normal phone would do. They interact with the touchscreen, except each virtual phone is completely and totally isolated from other virtual phones on the device. Essentially, it's like it's, this is kind of the equivalent of a virtual machine. It's like those other virtual phones don't even exist. I can't see what's running. I can't tamper with them. I can't access any of the private state that they might have, okay? So here's a sort of a picture of this architecture. They, so here's one virtual phone and that virtual phone describes this entire name space. And again, if there's an app running inside that virtual phone, it has no contact whatsoever with apps running on the virtual phones. They also have this special root name space, user space that they set up that handles certain interaction with hardware devices. We'll come back to that in a sec, okay? Yeah? Nope, nope. You can't do that, right? I mean, that would leak information between the virtual phones, right? So the idea here is that apps on one virtual phone are totally isolated from the other apps. Now, to some degree, for example, if you were using a message-oriented app and you had both phones registered under the same name and they were synchronized in that way, sure. But the two phones, the two message-oriented apps would be, they would think that they were different.  So that's what it would look like. It would look like two separate devices. Does that make sense? I'll look at you, we're using two separate phones. So, and this is, now the interesting thing about this is they don't do this using the virtualization techniques that we've already talked about. But first of all, what are use cases for this? Why would I do this? This seems sort of weird. How many people carry around two devices, two phones? Why? They use one for debugging. Okay, so that's a use case, right? This is a very much like I'm a CS developer and so not representative of the general population use case. But yeah, like sometimes people will use a phone for debugging. If my app crashes on that phone, it's okay. Developers are using this phone to beta test or alpha test, various things. Okay, so that's an interesting use case. What else? Yeah. Yeah, so the math, I hope. Now I'm sure there's some people out here that just like to have lots of phones because it's fun or interesting or something. Maybe you can use one with each hand, I don't know. But I suspect a lot of people, at least a little while ago, who had multiple phones had two because they had one that was for work. Why would work want you to have a whole separate phone? I wouldn't make sense for certain companies to give you a whole device. Why would they want that? Yeah. It's secure, okay, why is it secure? The answer is correct, but what's secure about it? What is it secure from? Okay, that's true, right? That's true, right?  Yeah, so it might cut down on the number of mistakes, but from the perspective of an employer, like what would they be worried about? Yeah, Matt. So that's a good point. I might want to mentally separate out things. So when I get a call on my work phone, it's a work call. When I was growing up, my mom worked from home and she had a dedicated work phone. And when that phone rang, she screamed at everybody to shut up, you know, because I've got a work call. So that was like the protocol was everyone had to be silent when that phone rang because she was working from home and she wanted it to feel like a professional setting. So okay, you might want that, what else though? Why would employers want this? Yeah. Okay, yeah, you might want to, so I might not feel like it's appropriate to, you know, for my employer to be paying for my personal calls or for my personal, my employer not to be paying for my, like what if I don't want all the extra usage that I accrue on my personal device? I want that to be built to my employer because it's work related, okay? What other security things, right? So these are all good reasons. What about security issues? What are security concerns? What do people tend to do with their personal phone? Yeah, okay, so the work phone might have constraints about how it's used. I mean, in general, the work phone allows the employer to really control that environment. So for example, I might not be allowed to install software on the work phone. It's totally locked down. That prevents me from installing some sort of malicious app that might steal information from the apps that run on the work phone, right? Like this is, you know, Android's a new platform. iOS is new platform. I'm sure there's cases where there's been information leaked between apps. And if I want to attack a company, I might try to get onto somebody's phone. So, okay, so fast forward to now, what do, so I think there was a period of time where companies seemed very enthusiastic about buying phones and buying service for their employees. Now they don't do that anymore. What do they do instead? There's this phrase in the business world now. B-Y-O-D, what does that mean? Yeah. Bring your own device. So now they want to use your phone. You know, they've had enough of this, you know, I'm penned paid for someone else's phone service. So now they want to run this directly on your phone. So this technique might be a cool way of doing it. You know, imagine I have two virtual phones on my phone. I have a personal one and a work one. And you know, I can have, you know, it provides a lot of isolation between the two and to some degree it provides some of the mental isolation that I want to where when I'm on the work phone I have a certain background set up. The employer might completely control that software environment to make sure that nothing bad happens, okay? So there's some, you know, use cases for this, right? Security, and then to some degree encapsulation. The work and, you know, my work, my employer might want to completely control that environment. So they control all the software running and they think it's secure, who knows. So why not use the existing virtualization solution? So here is their argument, right? This is back in 2011. You know, we can debate whether or not this is still true. So while VMs are useful for desktop and server computers applying these hardware virtual techniques to smartphones has two drawbacks. Smartphones are more resource constrained and running an entire additional operating system, OS and user space environment in a VM imposes high overhead and limits the number of instances that can run. Slow, so some responsiveness is less acceptable on a smartphone than on a desktop computer since smartphones are often used for just a few minutes or even seconds at a time. Does this make sense? When I run two virtual machines, let's say I run two Ubuntu virtual machines on the same server, I've got two complete copies of the operating system loaded. And there is an enormous amount of duplicated code and other things in those two virtual machines. So bringing the virtualization level all the way down to hardware means that it includes a lot of other crap, like the operating system, all the device drivers. And if I can build a virtualization solution on top of the operating system interface, which is what I'm gonna do here, I can have one OS and that can potentially use fewer resources. I don't know about the lots of VMs thing. I don't think people are gonna have like 30 virtual phones. That seems weird, right? But whatever, okay. The second reason is that there are these devices that applications want to use. And these, so these existing approaches don't provide good ways of sharing these devices effectively between multiple virtual machines. And this is something that they spend a lot of time on in the paper. Because if I want to run two instances of a pedometer app, maybe my employer makes me run one because they want me to be fit and then I want to run another because I want to make sure my employer is not lying about how fit I am. I want to make sure those both have access to the accelerometer independently from each other. Okay. Does this make sense? Any questions about this? So this is the goal. The goal is to be able to create these virtual phones without doing full hardware virtualization or pair virtualization. No, so what's required for this to work? So when we talked about virtualization, we already noted that for hardware virtualization, I have to have identical, the identical ABI. I need to be using the same binary interface. So I can't do hardware virtualization for an ARM target on top of X86. For container virtualization, what's required? And go back to this slide. What do the two virtual phones have to agree on? What do they share? They're both running on top of what? I know it's like turn, right? Yeah, they're running on top of Linux and the identical Linux kernel version. So here I brought the interface level up, but now what happens is the two containers or two virtual phones have to be sort of built and ready to use the identical version of Linux. The shared API here is not the hardware API. It's actually the operating system, system call interface. Now here's what's interesting. So at this level, what do we have to virtualize? So for hardware virtualization, the goal was that we would virtualize the hardware interface. And what that meant was certain operations that were performed inside the VM were invisible outside of the VM. Operations that would normally modify hardware state, part of the virtual machine, the requirements of being a virtual machine was making sure those didn't actually change the hardware state for applications running outside of the VM or in other VMs. So in this case, so in this case, the OS interface is shared. So what is virtualized? It's kind of interesting. So again, all you can think of these as the virtual phones here as separate applications almost. Everything, all the apps that run inside these virtual phones are making calls through the same OS interface. That's the standard system call interface that you guys are familiar with. What do I have to virtualize in order to isolate apps in multiple virtual phones? Yeah, not quite. Okay, I mean I need to virtualize aspects of the user program interaction. So let me put it this way. Give me an example of an operation at the system call interface that could potentially pierce the virtual phone. Give me an example of something that one app and one virtual phone could do using the system call interface that would normally be visible to other apps but cannot be visible to other apps in the other virtual phone. What's one example of that? Normally in an operating system there's lots of things that apps can do that are visible by other applications. In this case, we need to start cutting down on those things. So what's one example, right? You can do it with the phone call. Okay, so we definitely need to make sure that incoming phone calls to the device end up in the right place. This turns out to be uglier than some of the other aspects of this. We'll come back to this later. This has to do with limitations of the underlying hardware that even these guys can't work around. Give me an example of something I can do with the OS interface that should not be visible. Yeah. Yeah, how about open with the create file? Like create a file. If I create a file in one virtual phone, that file and its contents cannot be visible in the other virtual phone. So that's kind of interesting. Where, who should be able to see those files contents? Yeah, other apps potentially inside that same virtual phone assuming they have the right permissions, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so that's interesting. So there's something interesting going on at the file system namespace. What else? There are some other things. What other aspects of the overall system behavior might I normally be able to observe that I cannot now observe? And if you've ever used Docker, you've observed this. Because when you outside of the Docker container, there's certain things that you don't see. What's another example of something like this? Another example of something I can do with the system call layer that I need to make sure that it's not visible in the other virtual phone. Well, you guys know about a dozen system calls. You just guess at random, yeah. Well, okay, but that's normal, right? So remember, that's a normal feature for isolating memory between apps. Normally, app memory is private, so that's okay. Now, you're right if two apps want to share memory through something like, you know, by setting up a shared memory region, I have to make sure that they're isolated from each other, which points to another interesting place where I need to make sure that there's some division here. What's that? Fork. If a process in one of the virtual phones forks, that process and its child cannot be visible in the other virtual phone. So there's another namespace here, which is the process namespace. If I do like PS in virtual phone one, I should not see any of the processes running in virtual phone two. Same thing the other way, okay? So we got a couple of these. And what we're really doing here, which is really interesting, is we're virtualizing the OS namespace. So all these names and meaningful numbers that applications use to access system resources, we need to make sure that those are tagged with the virtual phone that they originate from and don't mix with the other virtual phone. Does that make sense? We'll talk about some examples here, right? So the file system namespace. This is super important because this normally leaks a lot of information between apps. Now, I sort of protect this information locally inside each virtual phone using the standard permission mechanism and things like this, but across virtual phones, there's just nothing. If a process in one virtual phone creates a file or modifies a file, the namespace has to be completely distinct. So I can have two files with the same name in the different virtual phones that have completely different contents. That's required to make sure that these are totally distinct. The process namespace, same thing here. So really here we're talking about the stuff that I would be able to get through PS, the PROC file system, all those numbers. The process communication between processes and the ability of processes to contact each other to establish IPC has to be stopped at the boundary between the virtual phones. Same thing with the network namespace. The two virtual phones have to be able to have different IP addresses, different services running on the same port. So I should be able to have two web servers, for some reason, if I was running a web server on my phone, but certainly you would do this inside Docker, a web server running inside the container and a web server running outside the container. And those web servers have to kind of, I need to be able to have a way to set up different IP addresses and port mappings for those two virtual phones, as if they were separate devices or separate machines. And then the device namespace. So this is where things get pretty tricky on phones in particular. So Linux does something interesting with devices, which is that it exposes devices like files. Has anyone ever poked around in dev and your system? So there's this directory called dev. Inside dev are devices that Linux is exposing as files. Those devices have file-like interfaces and things like file systems use those devices to actually communicate with real hardware devices that are exposed in that particular way. So like disks are a great example. When you mount a drive or a part of a drive in Linux, you have to give the path to the device that represents that. And so this is another place that I, we need to be very careful with OS virtualization because if there is unintentional sharing at the device level, I can do things that can get around some of the other things that I'm doing above like the file system namespace and access parts of the system and I'm not supposed to. All right. So here, these are basically these four techniques put in the words of the paper. We use four techniques to isolate VPs from one another and the root namespace. So, oh I forgot something, user credentials. Same thing with users. I need to be able to create identical users in each virtual phone and assign them with different permissions, assign them to different groups. The user namespaces have to be totally distinct from each other and that's important so that I can do permissions and lots of other things. So user namespaces is number one, kernel level device namespaces, so that's dev slash and I need to make sure that that information is isolated between virtual phones. Mount namespaces, so this is once I actually get a file system mounted. I need to be able to have the same, I need to be able to have two virtual phones, both have to be able to have a root mount point and those root mount points have to be totally distinct from each other. So they have to not only use different parts of the disk but they have to have namespaces that are completely, completely separate. And then they do something interesting here to help secure the device namespace and I don't know, hopefully you guys have never done this because this is like a level of Linux hackery that means that something is going terribly wrong in your life but you can create device nodes manually inside Linux and configure them by sort of by hand and they prevent, in order to secure the virtual phone, they prevent you from doing this because this is a capability that if the virtual phone had it, it could use this to access parts of the disk, for example, that it's not supposed to be able to see. Parts of the disk that might be serving as the root mount point for a different virtual phone. Questions up to this point, does this make sense? So I'm providing the same file system API. The file system API is identical. Sorry, the kernel API is identical. What I'm doing is I'm making sure the names diverge. So a name in one virtual phone is distinct from a name in the other virtual phone and there's several different namespaces I have to deal with here. So three out of these four problems had already been really solved and rolled out in other previous solutions and that's really all of the other namespace stuff except for the devices. So the device namespace was not handled particularly well and this is what they wanted to get right because, so for example, what would be a simple if not very good way to, so what do I do, how do I provide two different separate root mount points to different virtual phones on top of a single disk? How does that work? You guys know how this works, you might have done this before without even thinking about it, how do I do it? Yeah, it's actually, it's almost like creating two different partitions, okay? Now I might use a namespace mapping to make them look like the same device or something to the virtual phones but that doesn't really matter. The point is that there's some disk blocks that are allocated to virtual phone one and there's some disk blocks that are allocated to virtual phone two and the file system sort of separates out the names to make sure that I can share the file system that way. Why can't I do this with a device? Like for example, take the accelerometer. Why can't I apply the same technique or what would be one bad, sad, not very good way to quote unquote virtualize the accelerometer on a system like this? That's one kind of wrong way to do it that wouldn't meet some of their design goals. But would be a way to do it. Ron, you want to take a guess? That's, well that's not quite gonna do the trick because what's going to happen? So my suggestion is, why don't we just let one virtual phone use the device at a time? For example, when the virtual phone is in the foreground the apps that run in that virtual phone get to use the accelerometer and they can do things like configure the accelerometer. Part of what's tricky about these devices is that usually they're configurable. So for example, I might have a game that wants to use the tilt controller. It sets up the accelerometer to sample at a very high rate so it can monitor how you're tilting the phone. So here's my proposal. When a virtual phone comes into the foreground I just let the apps on the virtual phone use the devices, configure them how they want to and when I switch to another virtual phone I just stop the apps on the first virtual phone from using the device and I let the second virtual phone use the device. Why is this not a great solution? Yeah, it won't be too bad. I mean, you're right, there's a little bit of a configuration overhead but remember, we're assuming people don't switch virtual phones that often from the, into the foreground. You know, I mean, this is not, this is not like a context switch, it doesn't happen that often. It's something that you're doing. So okay, it's like I'm gonna use my work phone for a little while, send a few work emails and I switch back on my personal phone and we use that for a little while, send a few, yeah. Yeah, so like, the famous pedometer application. How do you think, or I don't know if you guys went to Hari's talk last week they're driving an application that uses accelerometer data in the background. So it's reliant, the devices, sorry, I'm really plungtied today, the apps running on that virtual phone even in the background are relying on continued access to those devices. So if you suddenly make the accelerometer go away, they're not gonna be very happy. They're gonna miss steps. If the GPS isn't working, they may not know where you are. Same thing with things and they talk a little bit late about network virtualization but it's also true of network devices. I wanna be able to accept a packet, route it to the right virtual phone even if that phone is running in the background because it might be doing something like delivering a notification or something like that. Or for example, I might have an app on the virtual phone that's running in the background that's doing something like syncing data to a server or something like that. It's doing background traffic that's useful. So I wanna make sure that that's not the case. So that's what's a little tricky here. And they apply, it's interesting here. They apply two techniques to this problem and we'll point out why in a second. So they say, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, integrating novel kernel level and user level device virtualization methods to prevent a complete virtual smartphone loss environment. Kernel level and XS provide transparency performance. User level mechanisms provide portability and transparency when the user space environment provides interfaces that can be leveraged for virtualization. For proprietary devices with completely closed software stacks, user level virtualization is necessary. So what do they mean by this? So the interface that we're virtualizing across is the OS system call interface. By kernel level, they're talking about below it. By user level, they're talking about above it. So they're making changes essentially to both Linux which sits below the system call interface and provides it and to what else? What other component, when they talk about user level virtualization, what are they modifying? On an Android phone, what sits basically right on top of the OS interface? Provides a lot of access to these devices, yeah. It's the Android platform. So Android provides this big library of tools for accessing devices and things like this and so they modify that too. So they're modifying both on top of the virtualized interface and below it. What does this remind you of? Yeah, this is sort of like para virtualization. Now they talk about, in certain cases, the changes they're gonna make to Android are done for convenience. It makes it easier. But there's one case that we'll come back to later. There's a couple of cases where they, when they're working with proprietary devices where those changes are required. There's actually no way to provide the features they want to by just changing the kernel. So we'll come back and talk about why that is in a second. Okay, so yeah, I have to make changes both to OS kernel and to the Android runtime. So here's why they have to do the user level virtualization. So there are, sadly on these devices, there are these big blobs of proprietary code. And a lot of those frequently are bound up with what's called the RIL, the radio interface layer. So when you get an Android smartphone, even when we get them on phone lab and build them ourselves, they come with these binary blobs that are used to drive things like the LTE chip set. We do not have access on phone lab to the source code for the drivers for the Sprint's LTE network. We just get a blob of binary code that we hope does the right thing. This is true for most smartphone platforms. I'm not sure of one that I know where you actually have a non-proprietary radio stack, although that's sad. So it says details of the vendor library invitation, its communication with the baseband, our well-guarded secrets. The baseband is the radio. Baseband is the thing that makes wiggly waves in space so that you can receive your cat pictures. Since the stack is a complete bad box, it would be difficult if not impossible to intercept or replicate or virtualize any aspect of the system in the kernel without direct hardware vendor support. So essentially, I don't understand the communication protocol here between the binary blob that sits in user space and the underlying device that it's communicating with. And so it's very hard to virtualize. So instead, here's what they do. So this is the normal Android radio interface layer. So there is this piece of code right here that is supposed to be radio-independent that's provided by Android. Then there's this vendor blob that I don't have access to. And the radio, this R-I-I-D communicates with the vendor R-I-L in order to drive the radio and kind of do the right thing. What we do here is we stick, this is kind of an interesting case of using a level of indirection. So we insert, what they do is they write their own radio interface layer that then communicates over a socket with a component that runs in the root namespace. And that now intercepts communication and communicates with the vendor R-I-L. So the vendor R-I-L has to, so what's important here is that this interface right here, the interface at the top of the vendor radio interface layer, that is known. So when vendors write these, they have to make sure that they conform to a specific interface. What's unknown is this. I have no idea how the vendor's radio interface layer actually implements the commands that I send in. I say like, associate with this network and it goes to the driver and magic happens. So I don't really understand how that works, but I do understand how to talk to it. And by doing this, by sticking in this new radio interface layer that they wrote, they can now do things, they can now handle the communication and the swapping between virtual phones correctly. Does this make sense? It kind of makes sense to me too, not entirely. But this is how I get away with virtualizing the radio interface layer. Yeah, Ron. Okay, hold on, hold on, we'll get back to that. So yeah, so this comes to a limitation of this overall system. Now, this is kind of sad, because you get like about two thirds of the way through the paper. Up until this point, you're like, this is awesome. I can have like four different phones with four different phone numbers. No. So unfortunately, information about the phone's identity on the network is actually, you guys may or may not know this. It's actually encoded in what's called the subscriber identity module, which is a physical card. It's called a SIM.  Okay, so, and I have no idea what that word is, but whatever. So yeah, so essentially subscriber identity model, SIM, subscriber identity modules, encode one phone number on the network. And this is not something that their system can work around. So what do they do instead? They run VoIP. It's kind of hacky. I mean, why not?  This is how things like Google Voice work. I can, the phone number that's used is provided by the VoIP provider, and then they're essentially exchanging just normal data traffic with my phone, and I can do this. So this is how they get around the limitations of these SIM cards. So actually, it's interesting. So three or four years later, has anyone heard of Google Fi? Yeah, so what's Google Fi? Who didn't explain it to me? Yeah, does anyone know what's interesting about it? What's cool about Google Fi? What's interesting about it? What's different about it? Yeah. Nope. No, that's Google Fiber. Yeah. That's true. But there's something, there's something really interesting. You guys don't know. What's so interesting about Google Fi? It uses two providers. So Google Fi phones use both Sprint and T-Mobile.  It is not the two best carriers in the United States, but that one. But so they use both. And the phones will actually roam from one carrier's network to another. So how do they do that? I just told you that the SIM encodes this one identity that cannot be changed. And so when I stick a SIM in the car, in the phone, I'm on a particular carrier's network and it's over. So what do they do? How does this work? Anyone know? It's very interesting. What's an obvious thing to try? What's that? No, no, no, it has nothing to do with WiFi. This has to do with the fact that they are using two overlapping sort of phone and LTE networks. Yeah, Steve, you have a guess? There's a simple solution. You guys might have seen these phones out there, yeah. Yeah, just throw hardware at the problem, right? Get a phone that has dual SIM cards. That is not what they do, okay? You could do that. So they actually created, it's really fascinating, they created this whole programmable SIM card that they use in the Google Fi devices that allows them to reprogram what is supposed to be this sort of like fixed piece of hardware, which is pretty neat. They don't switch networks that often, but they do find that carrier diversity helps because what might be true is when you're on campus, Sprint's network is the best. When you go home, you're closer to a T-Mobile tower and so you get a little bit of a better connection. They said then, I think on average, the phones switch two or three times a day between different networks, but they do use both. Did you have a question, Steve? Did you have to direct a mask between each phone number and the SIM cards, I think? No, because at that point, like you have to remember, when you use VoIP, once the connection gets to your phone, the phone number information's totally lost, right? All the phone sees is like a data stream, right? So for example, using Skype or something like that, by the time that gets to your phone, it's just a data connection, right? I mean, Skype might send some metadata along so you know what number is ringing, but Skype has sort of done the work of interfacing with the phone number system and converted everything to data somewhere else and what you're basically doing is you're just establishing a network connection to their servers. Does that make sense? Yeah, cool. All right, so anyway, unfortunately, at least in 2011, you can't work around the multiple SIM problem, but this is what they do, okay? Any questions about this? We finished a little bit early. I didn't know how fast we'd go, but yeah, Steve. Are you working? No, no. I mean, once Google does something like Project Phi, you know it's kind of a solved problem. I mean, Project Phi is awesome, by the way. If you guys haven't signed up, well, you should sign up for phone lab first, but you can go sign up for Project Phi later. It's a very cool project, yeah. Rising the old landline, it seems like we're still stuck to that modality and that thought set as if these were still all connected to the physical line program. So that's- Is there any move to roll out that modality in a completely different way, instead of identifying us by, you know, another that's attached to this advice, identifying us in a more vertical way so that we can get the phone call without a notice? Yeah, I mean, I think that's happening, right?  I'm sorry, I used to. Verizon does this really funny thing when you sign up. What is it? They make you pay an extra five bucks a month for what? You can't just get Verizon DSL, it's impossible, or it used to be, at least. Make you pay $5 a month so you can have what? A home phone number, right? Does anyone, I have a theory about this, which may or may not be true, I might get hate mail from Verizon, right? Do you know why that is? I'm pretty sure their home phone number is like the primary key in their database. And so I think if you don't have one, they're just all confused, because when you call them, the first thing they ask is, what's your home phone number? And I'm like, I have no idea, I don't know what it is, right? I know that I'm paying $5 a month for it, and that annoys me, but I have no idea what it is, right? But yeah, but these companies, like that's sort of the mindset that came out, right? Now, what's really interesting is that very recently, this is something that, you know, we'll talk more about in my class next semester on the internet. I mean, we've gone through this very long transition from circuit-based networks to packet switch networks. And you guys probably have a hard time realizing how radical packet switching was when it was proposed back in the 50s and 60s. So there were these famous stories. This guy came up with the idea of packet switching, and he went to like AT&T, and he was like, this is gonna revolutionize how you communicate. And they were like, it will never work. And actually, they apparently held a whole day, like special symposium for him where they brought in all these engineers, and all they did was give talk after talk after talk all day long about how packet switching would never work, right? It was never going to work. And then at the end of the day, they asked him, they said, are you convinced? He said, no, and of course he was right. So internally, your voice communications get converted to data very quickly, right? It might be like a connection to the tower, but it doesn't take very long when you're in a subscriber network before your voice calls are chopped up into little data packets and sent across that packet switch network that the phone company said would never work. What's interesting is that's actually reached all the way to the network edge. So new versions of LTE don't actually use packets for voice all the way to the device. So essentially what LTE carriers are doing with LTE is pretty much running Skype over their own proprietary networks. Like that's where we are today, right? It took us 50 years to get there.  I don't know how long it'll be before I can just call an email address. That would be awesome. You could pretty much do that already, right? But it would be nice to be able to just, you know, punch into my phone and not to, you know, completely, let's get rid of numbers. People don't like numbers, right? People like names and addresses and things like that, so. All right, no class on Wednesday. I'll see you guys Friday for exam review. Good luck finishing up assignment three.


Right to another shooter because Joe is gonna hand that headset off to Patty Mills now in his second season in Brooklyn How are you at this guy to wrap it up? Feel like his last comment was explaining you to a tee. Yeah. Yeah, exactly the indispensable You know winning type of player that you just need to get over the hump You know what it means to be that guy Patty you've been that guy on a championship team with the Spurs Yeah, we've been through a lot and experienced a lot not only with the San Antonio Spurs But you know our national team and Australia being able to go to many World Cups and Olympic games I think it's just understanding what the Meaning and purpose of what you're trying to do and how to do it to be able to accomplish something It is the main thing here and you know It's it's one of the main reasons why I came here my ability to to be a leader From a team aspect and and what it takes to be able to bring a team together Understand that culture build that culture in the hopes of winning an NBA championship, which is what why we're here? Well, Patty we are thrilled We're thrilled you're sitting here next to us because we weren't sure if that might be the case when you're looking at the soft season and to think about Everything that that you that your team endured throughout the course of last season and then the uncertainty of this summer But for you personally what why was it to come back here? Why why was Brooklyn the place that that you decided this is where you wanted to return to yeah good good question And I think that the reason Was what it was when I first came here And that was the opportunity to be a part of creating a Brooklyn Nets culture And and continue to build that but also, you know still putting in the work to be able to achieve in an NBA Championship and I think Having a year under my belt and experiencing all of those things For me it was just unfinished business. So nothing really changed It was just one year under our belt and we got to keep chipping away the thing that I've been saying is Rome wasn't built in a day and You know, it's the same sense here with the Brooklyn Nets So being able to continue chip away about building this thing To not only create a culture that is strong for us in the present to be able to hopefully win an NBA championship But a long-lasting one to that, you know, hopefully, you know Fussy long into the time that we're retired and hung the boots up Patty, what was the process like or what has the process been like of sort of Reunifying the group in the aftermath of an uncertain offseason in the aftermath of a disappointing end to last year where it felt Like everybody was ready to go, you know, there's separate ways and at least for a period of reflection and and Exhalation what what has it been like now? Just trying to get everybody back Unified same page to go on this journey. Yeah, well, well, we're here. We're here at media day For this next season and I think that that's the first step but I think what we do have is The guys in the locker room who have been through what we went through last year and knowing that we're back here for the next year We've had that we've got that under our belt now to You know have a revenge of getting that bad taste out of our mouth out of our mouth I think the adversities that we went through last year You know, it's things about how you learn from those things. How do you grow from those things? You know, what position are you going to put yourself in to make sure that those things don't happen again? So definitely going out the way that we did You know is never a good feeling and definitely wasn't the mutual feeling for everyone here But we haven't had the opportunity to you know, put that in the bank and do everything we can to make sure We don't feel that ever again. So it's all things that start in the locker room off the court On the buses on the planes all the fun stuff that I think that we do to try and bring the team closer and closer together from a Team aspect again, it's bringing that meaning meaning and purpose to what we're trying to do here Well, what do you take away and especially you individually from last season because I know there was so much that you couldn't have Anticipated but for you career high in minutes the usage the roles and just all that was asked of you I know you're the ultimate pros pro and we'll do anything the team needs but just the amount of responsibility Physically What was that like for you and just how you are able to take something from that? Yeah, there was definitely a stage there where I was a bit cooked But look, it's it's one of those things right when you understand What you're playing for who you're playing for what guys you have in the trenches with you that you want to go to battle with I think that it Whatever the team needs you you'll do and and I think that's the mindset that I had going into last year and then the same again But but last year was a good learning lesson from that standpoint of whatever is is Is needed and whatever is arcs of you go out there and do it to the best of your ability It's like what you get told when you're eight years old, you know, just do it to the best of your ability so for me last year to have the start or three quarters of it and then You know my mindset changed to the team and how we can continue to try and bring this Team closer so that definitely took an impact a little bit but one that you know it is for the betterment of the team I think that's the main thing here You know the decisions that you make that is for the betterment of the team What's going to make the team better how it's going to make the team better? Is the values that I've kind of been built on so to bring that here and and you know to try to offload that as As much as I can or or trickle that throughout the the group. I think is important. How about your relationship with Ben? I mean a lot was made of that last season Patty and now we just heard from him He's ready to go. He's ready to step on the floor and impact this team What has been your role of just trying to you know help shepherd his transition here to Brooklyn and his transition back to the floor? Yeah, it's it's a very good relationship from the standpoint of stars being able to line for us to share a locker room together for the first time I supported him from a from afar But now I have the opportunity just to share the court with him. It is important So look, I think my role first and foremost is to be supportive of of him as a person You know his his well-being. I think he's number one before Ben the basketball player comes into the picture to support him that way to know that he has Team mates and people that are close to him that that care about him that that genuine care That's been me from afar for a very long time now, but now I get to do it in the locker room And and now when you talk about now working out together on court or being in the weight room together and lifting the banter That comes along with that. I know he's in a very good place. He's in a hungry place I've been wanting to play one-on-one against him for a long time now So by the time I asked him the other day if he's ready, he's like I'm ready to play one-on-five He's in a great place and you know the most important part that is a healthy mind Which I think plays a big part in his in his approach who wins on a one-on-one game me for sure. I don't even question Well Patty we have Obviously Becky Hammond Winning the WNBA championship But obviously very familiar with your your days at San Antonio just over your thoughts on that and seeing what she accomplished in her first season, yeah, it was so pleasing to see so You know happy for her to you know accomplish something incredible But also not surprising at the same time, you know, she was great In being able to help me and in little parts in San Antonio all that time But you could always see that whenever she got an opportunity to to drive the ship and being charged the ship that she was going to Do it to a full potential with You know a group that obviously You know done the perfect job for us So it was it was really great to see and very happy for awesome stuff. Oh patty. We so appreciate you giving us some time Welcome back to Brooklyn for two more years and good luck as you start this journey. Thanks guys Thanks for having me. All right, that's patty mills plenty more to come here nets media day


That was last night's home over there, the boot barn, I think it said, Indian Trading Post. We are heading west. Today might be a pretty quiet day. It's already like almost 3 p.m. Basically I edited like five videos. So I'm about a week behind schedule, which is great, because it also means I have a week buffer.  So that helps for that, as well as other things. Let's hit the road. We're already on the road. Can you help me scratch my itch? That's not how you say it. Oh wait. You had to scratch. We're at the Billy Sims. Survey says? Pretty dang good. You like it? Yeah. All right. Time for the second survey. Now we got the extra meat brisket. This one goes to the fourth place. Do you agree? Yeah. All right. So we just left that mediocre barbecue place, by the way. And I happened to see a small horse. Well, a baby horse on the side of the road. And I said, oh, look, a pony. And... Ponies are a type of horse. They're not a baby horse. What is a baby horse? But in fact, it's not a baby horse. I don't know.  She's going to ruin my Christmas. Truck, which is right next to a love's and across a freeway from something we're about to go to. But first, we came down and check out these two pistols here. They're actually barbecue smokers. And here's proof of it right there. Not your average barbecue smoker. Very Texan indeed. Well, right across the freeway is Slugbug Ranch, Buggy Ranch, Bug Farm, all different names. Most probably well known as the Slugbug Ranch. It was basically built as a old travel plaza, as you can see. It says route 66, budget fuel, a little gas station. Who knows what this was. But it was intended to draw people away from the other place we're going to later, Cadillac Ranch. And so this was like a parody built in 2002. As you can see, it's a BYO SP. Bring your own spray paint. This guy's selling souvenirs and spray paint. That's a first for me. Since I have been here before, we'll make this a little bit quicker. All right, here we are back at the Cadillac Ranch. I'll give you some quick fun facts. It is right on route 66. It was made by a guy, a billionaire named Stanley Marsh, the third, and brought out some hippies from San Francisco, put ten of these things nose ground into the dirt, and it's been here ever since. Listen, Amarillo, Texas. The third bizarre vehicle burial grounds, whatever you want to call this thing, is Combine City. I guess you could call it the Combine Ranch. It is a bit out of town. Kind of strange. We're just minding our own business heading out of town. We happen to come across this on the Roadside America app, which is pretty cool. But yeah, here is some combines. There really wasn't too much information on the app. It just said kind of, you know, where this place was, what it is. This completes the trifecta of bizarre things. Vehicles buried in the ground, though. What do you think, Claire? Worth a stop? Definitely. If you could go in there, it'd be better. Yeah, there is a fence, barbed wire fence, surrounding this whole thing. So it looks like, you know, it's kind of off limits. Don't spray paint here, people. Go spray paint somewhere else where they kind of allow it, encourage it. But yeah, this is pretty neat, pretty cool. Wish we could get inside, though, and go get a closer look. But this'll do. It's that special time of day where we get to feed ourselves. And thankfully for Claire's sake, we're going to have another very nutrient-rich meal. We were just saying how this has been a very healthy week for her. Apparently, it's the most amount of meat she's had in such a short amount of time. Oh yeah. Oh yeah, this is my kind of place. This place screams Texas. There we go. Great state of Texas right there with lone stars. That's quite a bite, it'd go for it. Looks hot. Okay. Yes? All right, first time trying brisket queso fries. Oh, this place rocks. Fried pickles, fried jalapenos. That goes on top, too. That's good, huh? Oh yeah. Really good. Yes. I gotta agree, I forget the name of the town we're in. Lebeck? South of Lebeck. But this place is incredible. You should definitely come here if you're passing through Lebeck or if you live here. Yeah, great spot. Bush dogs.


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