Good morning everyone. Today I am happy to be back at the Ludwigan Mises Institute for the 30th Mises University. I couldn't have asked for a better year to be speaking as a faculty member for the first time at Mises University. I feel compelled to provide a semi-autobiographical digression, but I'm afraid it could seem a bit unmotivated. So I'd like to begin by properly delimiting the main topic of our discussion today. The primary problem considered by this talk is the following. The state has no political legitimacy, and in particular has no legitimacy to enforce tax laws by coercion. The citizens make obedience to tax law primarily a matter of prudence and pragmatism. But do citizens, or at least libertarians, have the right to actively seek and receive financial or in-kind subsidy from the state, or at the very least have an obligation to not actively seek and receive such subsidy? I claim that we are obligated to not actively seek and receive such subsidy despite the competitive disadvantages that may result from this. The only possible exceptions I could think of are those where state monopolization or crowding out has made it virtually impossible to conduct these activities without the subsidy as often occurs in basic science, which I usually work in. In discussing the business challenges that me and my family have in putting ourselves at a competitive disadvantage by not accepting, in our case, farm subsidies, I claim that one can and should seek entrepreneurial opportunities to overcome these competitive disadvantages and that I believe that those of you here today can and should seek entrepreneurial opportunities in your own lives to overcome competitive disadvantages of not receiving such subsidies and of course to not receive such subsidies in the first place. I'd like to clarify some other things first. Though on the schedule, I think this talk was titled Practical Career Advice for Young Austrians. Its topic is more appropriately described by the working title that I had, Moral Principles in Practice for Interdisciplinary Austrolibertarians. I want to challenge the audience somewhat on what I mean by Austrians or the Austro part of Austrolibertarian. I would go so far as to say if this is your first time attending Mises U, then if I knew nothing else about you, I would assume you are not an Austrian or at least not yet. This week could teach you enough to be a fellow traveler or sympathizer of the Austrian school by teaching you the core ideas. But unless you have read the historical masters of the school, many of their names are displayed about me here, and if you have not read from the other schools to understand their various ideas, then I don't think you could reasonably consider to be an Austrian. And in that respect, I'm challenging you to learn more beyond this week to find out if you really are, at least to learn the good economics that the Austrians have to offer. Then there's the matter of interdisciplinary. Of course, I'm familiar with trying to use this term in grant applications to say, oh, I'm going to combine results from this field and that field to come up with some novel result. I don't mean it in that sense or what one uses in an academic department. I have in mind rather a case like mine where one has a significant background in the economics of the Austrian school or in philosophy of liberty, but nevertheless goes into some field or endeavor that is not traditionally associated with these fields, not going into the academic economics or political science. I mean for those who go into some field like business or science, medicine, literature, engineering, or really any other manner of professional concentration. And then there's a matter of what do I mean by moral principles. The Austrian School of Economics, although it is often associated with certain policy and political philosophy views, is a positive body of thought, not a normative one. So what am I doing talking about moral principles and for something that is at least the Austrian part, is about positive thought, not normative thought. While some of the normative principles that I have in mind are those of a scholar proper, not simply for adherence to the Austrian school or libertarianism, but some normative principles are related specifically to Austro-libertarian views that state intervention is destructive and immoral, and our questions primarily concern whether and to what extent Austro-libertarians should accept benefits from that destructive intervention, especially in the sciences and business. So I'll tell you a little bit about myself and it touches on some of these interdisciplinary and other themes that we'll discuss. The story begins with my own father, Hal Walter, who is a rugged individualist through and through and has always been an entrepreneur. And on my side, I was a precocious child and my father encouraged me in my intellectual development, which led to me ultimately graduating high school at age 14. I went on to pursue a Bachelor of Science degree in Math, Physics, and Economics at the University of Arkansas, graduated age 18. In that time, I completed significant graduate coursework in economics, actually, in macroeconomic theory, statistics, and econometrics. But I had better developed research programs in Math and Physics and I ultimately decided to pursue those subjects for research in graduate school. I'm now a PhD candidate in those two areas and hold some competitive university and national fellowships, which is, say, I have benefited from the state as well, so I come across some of these moral challenges of accepting subsidy from the state. Now, it makes me mention that I went into Math and Physics. Why was I interested in economics in the first place? Well, in the first place, my family when we moved to Arkansas about 11 years ago, originally from New Jersey, we purchased the farm and I joined the Future Farmers of America, which is a very large youth organization in the United States. And my Math skills allowed me to excel in their competitions in farm business management and agricultural economics. And I use this experience today, the manager of my family's growing farm operation now. But also in my development, of course, I had a voracious appetite for reading. My father fed me with a few books, including John Flynn's As We Go Marching about the Rise of Fascism. And, of course, Ayn Rand, the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged in particular. I actually went through an Objectivist stage that, of course, is quite common. And while doing that, I was looking around the Ayn Rand Institute's online bookstore. I saw this book, Human Action, and had this description. It was like Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and Physics, but for economics. And incidentally, that's an excellent comparison. So anyway, I thought, well, that sounds really interesting, but it's really expensive. So I go to Google, look up Human Action. And the Mises Institute comes up. Here's the book for you online. Oh, here, let me start this. And I read it all the way through to the chapter on Monopoly Theory. It's not the most readable chapter of that book. But when I did that, well, I started looking around. I started looking at economy and state, and gradually with that, and eventually attending Mises Institute events, I became a well-read Austrian. So, so much for my background. Now, for many of you, this is your first time at Mises U. I had that experience in 2009, where my young age was 15. My disability and my wide reading drew some attention. Ralph Raco in particular, I remember. But there was another student that year in a wheelchair who quite stood out to others. Some of you probably have never heard of him, and some of you have forgotten him, and some of you remember him, John David Fernandez. At the time John David attended Mises U, he had completed his first year at Columbia University, the same institution where Walter Block and Murray Rothbard took their doctoral degrees. David was a strong network for libertarian outreach. He made a strong impression on many Mises U attendees and the faculty. And in 2010, a scholarship was awarded in his name. Sadly, David died on Saturday night, January 16, 2010. He was 20 years old and was less than a year after he attended Mises U for the first time. If time permitted, I would dedicate more time to discussing state intervention, the realm of health and disability, which has significant consequences for me and my quality of life than certainly did for David. But those topics are for another time. The reason I mentioned John David Fernandez in this talk, at the time many people felt that he, and we heard a lot about this yesterday, that he channeled the spirit of Murray Rothbard. Not that John David was necessarily a polymath, but like Murray, John David was the quintessential joyous libertarian in a world that cannot appreciate the full scope of liberty. The enthusiasm of the joyous libertarian can draw many others to liberty, just as Murray Rothbard did, just as John David did, before his good character could bring about all those good acts of which he was capable. So in the time after your first year at Mises U, I implore you to be a scholar, be a networker, to be a defender of liberty, as of course Murray Rothbard was, as John David was in the time that he had. But we need more than joy in the fight for liberty. We need principles. And for those of us entering spheres of life other than academic economics or political science, there are some distinctive moral challenges that really require what Ludwig von Mises took as his motto, tunne che dei mali, sed contra al dentio reto. And that brings us to the main topic of my talk today. The challenge is a primary interest to us, those that give rise to choices between one's Austro-libertarian principles and abandoning those principles. Are those challenges that arise from particular forms of social competition in various modes of social organization or institutions where the state significantly intervenes? These challenges come to center in large part on whether we should seek and accept subsidy or similar such benefits from the state to seek a more favorable position in the system of social cooperation. I'd like to quote from one of my favorite passages in human action on competition. And here's Mises. The term competition is applied to the conditions of animal life, signifies the rivalry between animals, which manifests itself in their search for food. We may call this phenomenon biological competition. Biological competition must not be confused with social competition, i.e. the striving of individuals to attain the most favorable position in the system of social cooperation. As there will always be positions which meant value more highly than others, people will strive for them and try to outdo rivals. Social competition is consequently present in every conceivable mode of social organization. I would like to pause for a moment on the meaning of every conceivable mode of social organization. Now I think Mises may have meant specifically those mechanisms of social cooperation through the division of labor like capitalism or socialism, interventionism, some big system like that. But I think it just as well can be applied to other social organizations or institutions such as the smaller ones that comprise modern science, universities and particular industries. Mises goes on to say that individuals in a free society without ambition or social competition behave like the stud horses which do not try to put themselves in a favorable light when the owner picks out the stallion to impregnate his best brood mare. But such people would no longer be acting men. I should mention that modern economists don't write like this. But Mises then goes on to make a step toward comparative political economy. In the totalitarian system, social competition manifests itself in the endeavors to court the favor of people to court the favor of those in power. In the market economy competition manifests itself in the fact that the sellers must outdo one another by offering better or cheaper goods and services and that buyers must outdo one another by offering higher prices. Now, my main example concerns interventionist society which combines elements of courting the favor of those in power as well as profit and loss. If time permitted, I would discuss social competition in the realm of modern science and universities. On that subject, Jeff Deist hinted at this in some detail and ultimately I chose to focus on different things in this talk but there are notable parallel challenges in the lives of Ludwig von Mises and his famous brother, the applied mathematician Richard von Mises both of which relate to perversion instances of social competition. Of course these take place under the Nazi regime or in connection with the Nazi regime, so they are admittedly extreme examples but very instructive ones. So I refer you to my talk from AERC 2014 on the ideas of Ludwig von Mises in the context of mathematics under the Nazis and of course you're welcome to ask me any questions you like about that. Now the intrusion of ideology through the state in contemporary science is much less overt with notable exceptions of course. The state influence on science comes primarily in the form of financial support of various funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and of course many military contractors in the case of the US National Institutes of Health and so on. Now Dr. William Butos was here earlier this week and I don't know if he's still here is an expert on the topic of government funded versus privately funded science and the nature of crowding out of basic science by the government and I defer in large part to his knowledge of the subject. Of course it's always been difficult for me to reconcile my Austro-libertarian ideals with the government funding I've received even if the awarding of those scientific grants is largely meritocratic. It's not really a problem of the abilities of science so much as it's a problem of whether those abilities are directed toward the most important end without the profit and loss in many instances of science it's hard to determine. But I won't dwell on those distinctive moral challenges for libertarian scientists and accepting the support of these agencies. The funding of basic science is an instance in which crowding out often occurs to such a significant extent libertarians are often left to support to accept that support if they are going to engage in those activities. As it turns out at least two-thirds of research, you know, R&D research is done in private business but in the case of basic science it flips about two-thirds come from the government at least in universities. Perhaps the best models on this question are Oigan, Bon Bon Bavere and Ludwig von Mises who in their capacities as government advisors try to bring rationality to the conduct of the policy of their agencies. But now I'd like to consider my main example of perverse social competition under interventionism based on my own experience from agricultural business. So my family owns and operates Brier Creek Ranch which consists of about 500 acres in Clark Ridge, Arkansas a known incorporated township in northern Baxter County, Arkansas. It's about a 550-mile drive from here to there. We're primarily a cow-calf pair, commercial cattle operation but we also produce hay and forage for our own use and occasionally sale to others. This began with our initial purchase of 165 acres at, like, 11 years ago when we moved and we have expanded significantly since. In the last two years the farm has entered its own as a viable business venture. I should mention here that historically farming has received a preferred status as a tax shelter. Its greater exposure to weather relates to other risks has often been used to justify deductions for investment in farming. The idea being to compensate for that increased risk and increase the willingness of lenders to put up capital for farming operations. But in contrast to general accounting rules that generally require deferral of capitalization of expenses incurring connection with products which only yield income in future years farmers may accelerate deductions such that this may be taken out of current income. Among other things this encourages cash basis accounting despite that accrual basis accounting may in fact be more accurate reflection of capital because it includes inventory which can be quite significant in farming operations. Farmers also receive preferential options on deducting now or capitalizing later for certain things which can even give the appearance of an operating loss despite making an economic gain and this is particularly helpful for reducing tax liability on income earned outside of farming. And in some cases deferred tax liability may often be converted into capital gains in the case that capital gains are taxed at a lower rate. Incidentally if Hillary Clinton is elected president of the US that probably would be more difficult which is a bit strange because farmers are a major supporter of hers. But anyway, some of the point of this is a lot of what happens in what we call farms are actually not business ventures in the normal sense that are directed toward maximizing profit. They are actually based in loss aversion to the paying of taxes and not being based on profit and loss. It has more bureaucratic nature than business nature. Now, Lutagomises and sociologist Max Weber incidentally if you want to be an Austrian you should also read Max Weber that's very least of what the idea is in context. But as they pointed out farmers have always been poor to adopt rational economic calculation and those traditions of sound accounting that emerge spontaneously with the rise of capitalism. I am suggesting that inconsistent tax interventions have further bastardized problematic economic calculation among farmers and I think it has proliferated various farm operations in our area that again are not businesses in the normal profit maximizing sense. You have various weekend warrior farmers who raise a few cattle here and there and of course old land by various inputs. What they end up doing is bidding up land prices in the area. They flood local markets with generally lower grade livestock and more on that in a little bit. And they tend to involve themselves in land disputes in the familiar case of disputes due to inconsistent land title. Also there are people that are more affluent people that are not farmers in the professional sense they're interested in tax implications and put further pressure on these various inputs. But then there are also more professional farmers and they're really our main concern in this talk. We'll visit this in a little bit. These professional farmers realize the same preferential tax treatment and morally I have no issue with accepting these tax breaks or if I'm out of their existence despite what pernicious effects some of this intervention may have because the state has no legitimacy and in particular has no right to enforce tax laws by coercion. Taxation is theft and I think we're right to accept Rothbard's view that we should favor preserving existing tax breaks and use them to the fullest extent. It's defensive to try to keep our earnings of course as I said it's a matter of prudence. It would be unwise to be a fool to bring the tax authorities to bring them after you. But the more professional farmers in our area do substantially greater extent in other areas not only avoid taxes, not so much of paid them they accept state subsidies well and before discussing the morality of accepting subsidy let's consider the magnitude. So our county, Baxter County, Arkansas now these data here are based on U.S. Department of Agriculture numbers that were obtained freedom of information at request by an organization called the Environmental Working Group now as it turns out they're more of a left-leaning organization believing some pseudo-scientific things with organic farming and anti-GMO stuff but their anti-corporate elements make them very good at gathering data and they have a very nice database that I encourage you to look up if you live within the U.S. it would certainly be worth looking at to see what farmers are taking in your area you may even know people in the database. So in our county, 7.08 million in subsidies over a 20-year period from 1995 to 2014 I don't have 2015 numbers and now if you look through the list of various federal agriculture programs it's like a devil's resume and I couldn't possibly go through the details of all those various programs so I'm just going to show you so so-called disaster programs are the majority in our area and there's conservation programs you can see something about our area that things traditionally associated with producing major ag commodities other than livestock are received very little so you'll actually see that this county doesn't take that much in resources I'll show you a little bit of things in our area now these numbers are broken down a little bit these things don't all add up to the 7.08 million because you'll see already this exceeds it but they fall under a few different things it's really these first three in our area and really disaster payments and livestock subsidies as it turns out most of these things called disaster payments or associated livestock I suppose before lost forages or something like that that's things that you can of course self-insure for by accumulating forages, accumulating hay and that's just for our case people will take on riskier behavior of the existence of these programs also the considerable overlap accounts for why it's a similar number of recipients in these various programs these things are tied to various political processes and of course these aren't inflation and just the numbers but that doesn't account for all of the changes here so this is within our own area with disaster payments these tend to correspond to various farm bill appropriations and in fact some of the disaster relief was cut off for after 2011 and with the signing of the 2014 farm bill there is a very significant increase in the allotment of these programs you can see the livestock disaster emergency as I was telling you these miscellaneous disaster payments correspond to things like fence damage which in a lot of these cases again is part of the proper fence maintenance program this is something that is not many of these things are not actually insurable events and I can tell you from these particular cases this is not a case of systemic weather-related damage throughout once property it's smaller things that could have been handled at one time and were allowed to develop and become worse these things of course these livestock subsidies are very tied to the other ones so I won't really focus on them so much as I was saying there is considerable overlap in what these programs are these are very disaster things livestock forage disaster emergency livestock feed, livestock emergency assistance these other ones I think are a different type of losses but there is at least one bad year's weather goes but again if you're accumulating enough forage to handle a bad year then you should need these things but this money is there you can even get information on particular recipients now I'm not going to be a muck raker I'm not going to go through and show you how much all of these various individuals took I can give you the example of the top recipient this is just for livestock this is livestock subsidies here and let's say we take the top recipient 160,000 livestock subsidies over a 20 year period okay now you can take the last year and this is for totals so this number doesn't correspond to this one but you see the sudden increase roughly one third of this individual's total subsidy payments is all from 2014 and again I don't have 2015 numbers so you can't see how this behavior continues and I won't focus on this one these are environmental programs you can see that not so much of this comes from recently then actually I should put this in perspective so a few months ago I attended some event a young farmer and ranchers conference so they're farmers from all around the state of Arkansas and went down there and it was notable we were the only people from Baxter County at this event there were you're going through the line for food and if you don't get any rice on your plate one of these rice farmers looks at you funny and why are you not getting any rice and I think we even said something about the subsidies that you take look at this in the case of the you know these people are buying various other inputs that we're buying in the area too so this is interesting when you look at how congressional districts are broken up in Arkansas I don't have a map here of Arkansas but some of these other ones that take substantially less these are all weird things this is in Northwest Ark I think that one there's a lot of weird shapesate but this district took 8 billion in USDA subsidies over a 20 year period we are actually in this district and I showed you were only 7.08 million over a 20 year period so this is obviously dwarfed what happens is you go across the top we're in the district let's say state of Arkansas square with the middle on the top this is Baxter County you go over here the district goes all the way here and then all the way down the Mississippi River including the whole Delta region there's a lot of rice farming so obviously we're dwarfed by this so when you look at Arkansas over a 20 year period this is not in proportion to the total land area and population this is 11.5 billion in subsidies over a 20 year period for farmers you see in this case commodity programs crop insurance subsidies in particular these are indicators of production of other very prominent commodities like rice, Arkansas itself produces a very large amount of rice disaster programs and conservation programs are much smaller 9 of 50 states now interesting, 77% of farms in Arkansas do not collect subsidy payments of course some of these aren't serious professional farms but there are people not taking them but these people have a very obvious competitive advantage and this just shows you rice, cotton, soybeans, wheat are a big recipient of these and then some other things we can often see if you look at state on a statewide basis in the US everything's bigger in Texas they take it at the top and then of course the entire well takes up and then Arkansas comes in here you don't see California on this list it's sort of an interesting thing and then Missouri which is a bordering state so on just in the top 10 recipient states 58% over that 20 year period goes to these so 322 billion overall over that 20 year period now this is smaller than what some other industries receive but this is substantial given everything you hear about farms and I believe that's the last little slide so that was just to give you a feel for some of the data now so there is competition already for receiving these subsidies in the agricultural bureaucracy and legislatures there's the usual public choice consideration by which these subsidies are distributed according to effective lobbying then there's competition within the disbursement of the funds themselves so on the local level you get this sign up now sign up now mentality and the idea is at least with respect to some of these programs the late joiners are the last in line to receive these funds and in particular if funds run out then those people late that join late will not receive funding I don't know how often that actually happens that's not so much the point it's a sort of tragedy of the commons in some respects to what it is but there's also competition on the markets on which these subsidy recipients buy inputs and sell outputs and then there are very significant cases of regulatory capture and agriculture we're not going to go through that now in the case of major agricultural commodities and we saw some of this already rice, cotton, soybeans, wheat, sorghum, corn and sugar commodity payments and crop insurance are tied to volume of production and average yield which is tied to various economies of scale of course larger operations have advantages there these when through competition we'll tend to increase land prices and cost of credit and cause of very nonspecific inputs that are needed to engage in agriculture and could be purchasing of agricultural equipment or even getting repairs done by local vendors and this tends to make it harder for smaller entrants in particular younger farmers is why in agriculture there's this amazing emphasis to recruit younger farmers a lot of it derives from these interventions and where my family lives, these subsidy recipients also gain advantage with respect to not only the buying of land and doing business with local vendors it also increases their sales in local livestock auctions and private sales and my family is yet to directly benefit from receiving this subsidy but it's extremely tempting and of course if you talk to our friend Walter Block why not take the money it's been argued by others that we should try to starve the beast by accepting financial support of the state the idea being by accepting the state's support we accelerate its demise this strikes me as a remarkably convenient I believe it underestimates the stability of interventionism if at least into socialism it takes a very long time at best I think the starving argument perhaps would apply to trying to accelerate the collapse of social security or socialized medicine and it's not clear to me that forwards libertarian goals because what would the response be when those programs collapse it could be worse than what we have another argument is that accepting state subsidy is actually reclaiming stolen goods which in the modern case would happen in fungible monetary terms first I don't know if anyone really points this out at least in this fashion there's an economic calculation problem figuring out how much one has benefited financially from the state I really have in mind those cases where the state has either crowded out private alternatives or has utterly monopolized something as in the case with security or for roads and then the matter of many governments are indeed insolvent and this gives reduces the problem how do you say who's stolen goods are you reclaiming it's you can't assign it even if one takes out no more than one has paid in taxes or state monopolized services you don't know who's goods there are now there are more sophisticated arguments we're not going to present a sophisticated moral theory here this is to open up conversation and in my view accepting subsidy ends up reducing for at least for private business reduces to receiving stolen goods so how does one overcome the competitive disadvantages of not directly receiving state subsidy the most moral choice would be to judge entrepreneurial profit opportunities to overcome those disadvantages I'll give a very particular example of such an opportunity that applies to my family's farm business the point is to identify such entrepreneurial profit opportunities in your particular cases now our entrepreneurial opportunity for increased profit to overcome these competitive disadvantages of not accepting subsidies consists in an institutional organizational innovation remember of course that in the dynamical market process one must always seek new profit opportunities in fact by even telling you this I probably forced us to have to see even more profit opportunities now in our case this is this organizational innovation comes from marketing our cattle through something called the integrity beef alliance based out of Oklahoma now to understand that this I'll tell you very briefly about something with the market structure with commercial beef cattle unlike some other livestock production the breeding and early stages of cattle production are very decentralized a lot of smaller producers bearing the substantial risk of the actual breeding that happens and one tends to sell these into a larger market often these animals will go to at least in the case of where the animals except for animals that go directly to slaughter many cases these animals are going to backgrounding facilities that prepare these animals before they go to feed lots and then they go to the centralized feeding operations and centralized processing facilities but in the local markets you have what people market failure call information asymmetry in the case of most auctions the only thing you have to go by some external characteristic of the animal most cases it reduces to going by the color of the animal the animal is black there's often assumption that it's Angus which has a which is more likely to have a higher grade meat so it tends to command higher prices white animals tend to be associated with Charley breeds which put on a lot of meat which increases the output but tends to not be as high as a grade and then there are traits that are perhaps make animals very efficient for our area that have Brahmin, Indian sort of traits but don't have as good of a meat and if there are any sign of those traits one tends to get docked for it but many cases these animals aren't that in you could have some things registered but that doesn't command much in our area so in the case of this organization that comes through a trade organization called the Noble Foundation as far as I know this doesn't seem like cartelization device, it's a non-profit entity and it's not a lobbying organization at least not yet for now it seems to me analogous to those stock exchanges that spontaneously arose in the Netherlands in the 1600s in order for that matter of various stock exchanges in the US it ends up providing certification like a underwriters laboratory, you'll hear if you talk to Mark Thornton about this he could have a lot to tell you about underwriters laboratory you'll see their certification on various products that let you know they've tested it to see if it's a good product and on that basis one can realize a price premium for your product so what they're doing in this case is they're taking only registered Angus or registered Charley and to be part of the program to receive the certification you have to go through their own process of their own people check the animals to make sure that they're free of disease and so on and also they have an extensive network that one can use to realize a market premium this is one mechanism of course said eventually even those people of benefit from subsidies in our area if they find out about this where this becomes more widespread then they'll realize the same benefit which leaves us needing to find another profit opportunity I'm already a little over time so it's good time to conclude in my call for libertarians to be joys and to uphold libertarian principles informed by economics and the tradition of the Austrian school I have presented a rather tough challenge except in those instances where state crowding out or monopolization has made it utterly impossible to go without subsidy to continue conducting some activity that would likely still happen absent that government intervention except in those cases a libertarian is obligated to not accept state subsidy and to seek entrepreneurial opportunities to overcome the competitive disadvantages of that moral stance and my father and family and I struggled with this challenges this challenge for several years now and it's matter if you are going to accept those subsidies in the case of business you have to be honest with yourself as a friend put it to my dad a few years ago it's a matter of integrity and thank you very much


The Rings of Power begins with this assurance, set during the Second Age, thousands of years before the events of Peter Jackson's Hobbit and Lord of the Rings trilogies. In this first episode, we are welcomed back to Middle-earth and introduced to a sprawling collection of characters, locations, and beasties both new and familiar. Child Elves bathed in golden light play along a riverbed in Valinor while young Galadriel, builds a boat from folded parchment. But when another elf child sinks it, Galadriel turns to her big brother, Finrod, for comfort. He tells her that a stone sinks because it looks down into the dark water, a boat floats because it looks up to the light. Galadriel asks Finrod how she can know whether to follow the lights in the sky or those reflected in the water, Finrod's answer is a whisper only she can hear. We had no word for death, for we thought our joys would be unending. But the great foe Morgoth put an end to such idealism. As the two trees of Valinor are destroyed, the elves sail east across the Sundering Seas to Middle-earth to battle Morgoth's orcs and to restore peace. Morgoth and his orcs are defeated, but the elves learned many words for death, and one of the fallen elves was Galadriel's beloved brother. The orcs are on the run but still commanded by Morgoth's most fervent disciple, Sauron, who Galadriel vows to hunt down.  A sweeping pan over Middle-earth's landscapes and across centuries of searching finds Galadriel leading a band of elves up a snow-covered mountain face in Foroedwaith, the northernmost waist. Over the objections of Tondar, she pushes the party through a blizzard and into a massive ruin of jagged stone. While surrounded by orc corpses embedded in the walls, Galadriel finds the three-pronged sigil carved into the stone, a sign that Sauron survived. But before she and Tondar can resolve their dispute over whether to go home as the king commanded or press on, a giant bearded snow-troll with curved horns growing out of his nose-less face begins tossing elves into walls. Galadriel is in charge for a reason.  That's commander Galadriel to you, thank you very much. According not to Tondar, as Galadriel sheaths her blade, he lays his down, leading an extremely elvish mutiny as they all ceremoniously put down their swords and tell her that she moves on. She does so alone. And all that is before the main titles even appear. In Rovanian, the Wilderlands east of the Anduin, a pair of hunters with enormous part wing, part moose antler appendages on their back trek the green and hilly landscape. As they move on, the Harfoots, a type of hobbit, creep out of hiding, popping up from tall grasses and out from tree trunks.  Sadock burrows as ill at ease, it's uncommon for hunters to come this far this early. Meanwhile, the Harfoot kids are outside the village, picking wild berries in the charge of Nori Brandyfoot. It's idyllic, until a little Harfoot gleefully shows Nori a huge, clawed footprint in the mud. She sends the kids quickly home just as a big furry, and sharp-toothed creature comes into view. To Linden, capital of the high elves. A young Elrond sits writing in a yellow-leaved tree when a messenger seeks him out. Bad news, he's not invited to the next council meeting, since he's not an elf lord. But the good news is that his friend Galadriel has arrived, swathed in a shimmering gold gown and sumptuous green velvet, she cleans up well when not battling snow trolls in an evil blizzard-beaten fortress. She tells Elrond about the sigil she found in the stone and that she wants the king to send her back out, but Elrond warns her not to disobey the king again. Time for a quick Harfoot interlude. Unlike the rest of the happily pastoral Harfoots, Nori can't help but feel there's wonders in this world that they haven't yet seen. But her mother, Marigold urges her daughter to find satisfaction there in their village. The Harfoots are the only creatures of Middle-Earth who are just responsible to their community, and that relationship is how they survive. Back in Linden, Galadriel is feeling the tug of her own responsibilities. She and her company Neil in their armor, somehow both fierce and luxuriously draped, the elven magic gives them both immortality and impeccable fashion, as High King Gil-Galad honors them for their efforts. In the words Elrond wrote for him, the king insists that the days of war are over. Galadriel is unconvinced and even less enthused by the reward. The heroes will be escorted to the Grey Havens. But is it still home for her? While fireworks burst over the lake, Galadriel gazes at a statue carved into a living tree, one among many, each lit by the soft glow of a lamp, a memorial grove honoring her brother and those who died with him in battle. Elrond arrives to ply his friend with wine, but Galadriel is in no mood to celebrate. She can't go home, not until she's rid the world of Morgoth's evil. As Elrond promises that he will take up her task if the evil resurfaces, the memorial lights stretch out in both directions behind them, further than the eye can see, a reminder of how much has already been lost. In the Southlands, the lands of men, no one seems happy to see the two elves making their way through town. Elrond arrives at a tavern for his biweekly check-in and finds the locals discussing a poisoning. When he asks for more details on the poisoning, Rowan shouts at knife ears that one day our true king will return and pry us right out from under your pointy boots. Elrond goes out back to share a charged moment with a lady, Bronwyn, a local healer, who seems way happier to see him than anyone else in town. But Erondor's companion Elf, Medhor, reminds Erondor that the elves are here to monitor the town, not flirt with its inhabitants. Elves and humans have only attempted to pair up twice, and both times were tragic. The odds are against Erondor and Bronwyn sharing anything more than significant glances. The chances don't improve upon their return to their outpost. The High King has declared the war over and disbanded the far outposts. Revion, the Watchwarden, finds Erondor moping atop a watchtower. Revion warns him that they've been assigned to watch these people because of their allegiance to Morgoth. Erondor should be glad never to see them again. But there's one person Erondor absolutely has to see again. He finds Bronwyn at her house and says that he has expressed his feelings for her a hundred times over, in every way but words. But before he can actually use those words, a man brings his cow to be healed, and the inky black goo that Erondor milks from it absolutely kills the romantic mood. He and Bronwyn set out east to check out the area where the cow last grazed. Bronwyn's son Theo, the angry boy from the tavern. Sneak into a barn while while his friend taunts Theo about his missing father. Theo is barely listening though, because he has a task at hand. From under the rickety floorboards, he pulls out a broken sword he's been hiding and that is clearly exerting a mysterious influence over him. The hilt is surrounded by twisted metal, and on the blade is the telltale sigil of Sauron. As Galadriel and her company sail across the Sundering Seas, Elrond and King Gil-Galad discuss what they foresaw and kept from her, that if Galadriel stayed in Middle-Earth, she might keep the evil alive rather than defeating it forever. He tells Elrond he'll be working with Lord Kellabrimber, the greatest of Elven Smiths on a new project. It sounds suspiciously like a quid pro quo, but we'll have to wait along with Elrond to learn more. On the Sundering Seas, the elves are nearing the Grey Havens. They have their weapons and armor ceremoniously removed, although Galadriel cannot at first give up her sword. A flock of white seabirds bursts through the clouds and encircles the boat while the elves break into harmonious song. As the ship sails on and the song crests, the wall of grey clouds before them parts, and breathtaking golden sunshine streams through the cleft. But Galadriel cannot rejoice in this homecoming. She hears her brother's voice again, asking do you know why a ship floats and a stone cannot? At this moment, a fiery meteor rips through the clouds. The elves on the boat see it, in the Southlands, a ronder and brawn when instinctively class pans as it burns its path across the sky. Galadriel backs away from the blinding golden light as sea spray falls like rain, like tears, as her younger self asks the same question, how is she to know which lights to follow? We now hear the answer that was only whispered before. Sometimes we cannot know, until we have touched the darkness. Galadriel dives overboard, into the water, the shimmering light above her, and surfaces just in time to see the wall of clouds closes again, shrouding the sea and her in darkness. King Gal Galad saw the meteor too. He picks up a golden leaf in its wake and sees its veins turn black and corrosive. But nearest of all to the fireball is Nori, who watches it hit the ground near her village and explode. Ever curious, she follows it to the site of impact, where she finds an unexpected sight. An utterly naked man, curled up in the center of the fiery hole. Who is he?  We'll have to wait to find out until the next episode.


Hello, everyone, and welcome to KubeCon. And yeah, my name is Jakub Schultz. I work at Red Hat, and mainly, I'm a maintainer of the project called Strimsy, which is all about running Apache Kafka Kubernetes. And today, I will be talking about the work we have been doing there, which is around removing the zookeeper dependency. But before we get there, a little project announcement, because recently, as a Strimsy, we moved from sandbox to incubation. So we're a that's a big achievement for us. Thanks. Unfortunately, it doesn't really allow us to stop working on the zookeeper removal and just enjoy our rest, so we have to finish that. But if you ever run Apache Kafka, you probably know that for a very long time, it always depended on Apache Zookeeper. You had to first start the Zookeeper cluster. You had to get it running. You had to know how to deploy it, how to run it, how to operate it. And only then, you can actually run Kafka, because it was using Zookeeper for storing metadata, for bootstrapping the cluster, for electing the Kafka controller, and all these things. But that's now changing, and the Zookeeper is going away. And so to say, Kafka is now released from the cage, and it's free to fly. The way it is done is that the Zookeeper is replaced by something that's called Kraft, which stands for Kafka-Raft protocol, which basically is Kafka's own take on the RAFT algorithm, which will replace Zookeeper. Maybe I can start by talking a bit about motivation, why this is happening. So one reason is to get rid of Zookeeper, simple as that. Zookeeper has some nice things, and it does many things very well. But it has also some issues, for example, lately we faced a lot of issues around VNS resolutions on Kubernetes, where a lot of our users face some problems. So yeah, these are kind of the things by, to be honest, I personally would not really cry when Zookeeper is gone. But what's also important is that removing Zookeeper simplifies the deployment. You used to have the Zookeeper cluster and the Kafka cluster. You had to know both of them, had the knowledge for both of them, and now it will be just Kafka. So you don't need to know Zookeeper, you can forget everything, you knew about it, and it will be all Kafka. So that simplifies it a lot for all Kafka users, but obviously also for us in Strumzy, because in Strumzy had to also manage and operate the Zookeeper clusters as well. Finally, there might be also some scalability and performance improvements, but I guess a lot of that might be visible when you are having very big Kafka clusters, when you have hundreds, thousands of partitions, then there might be more improvements than when you have a small cluster with just a few hundred partitions. Maybe some of you get the feeling that this is not really new and why the hell is this guy talking about Zookeeper removal here? And that's not completely wrong because this is something that basically started in 2019, and today if I checked correctly in the morning, we have 2024, so it's a very long time, but that kind of demonstrates how big change and how big effort this is. A lot of that is obviously in the Apache Kafka project itself, not necessarily on the Strumzy side, where I spend most of my time, but even on Strumzy side, that's quite a lot of changes and a lot of work. So how will Kafka look like when Zookeeper is gone? The way it is implemented is that the Kafka nodes will now have two different roles. One of them will be the controller role. That's basically what will replace the Zookeeper clusters. That's what will be used to manage the metadata. That's what will be used to bootstrap the cluster. And then there will be the broker role, which will do exactly the same as the old brokers in the Zookeeper clusters we're doing. It will just be responsible for delivering the messages between clients, storing them, and so on. What's interesting is that you can combine these roles in a single JVM or in a single process, which actually gives us quite a variety of different architectures, where in the past we always had Zookeeper and the brokers. Now you can, for example, start with a single container with a single pot, which has both the controller and the broker, and for some development testing, this might be completely sufficient. If you would want some high availability, you can basically just scale it and run three of these containers, each having both roles. And yeah, you get the high availability. It still runs in this combined mode without any Zookeeper cluster or anything. If you would want to scale it a bit more, then you don't really want to scale the controllers up and up because they will not scale forever. So you can simply decide that the next nodes you will add will be the broker role only. And that way you can have some mixed nodes and then you can have the broker nodes. And then finally, what we kind of expected most production clusters will actually use, it's quite similar to the Zookeeper-based architecture where you have kind of the dedicated controller nodes, which do the metadata management and the bootstrapping, and then you have the dedicated broker nodes for handling the messages. Why do you think that this will be what will be used in most production clusters? It's because this way you can control how many resources will the controllers get, how many will the brokers get, and you get the best performance and scalability out of your cluster. But in general, each of these architectures might fit a bit different environment, depends on your infrastructure, whether you run on the edge, for example, or whether you run on bare metal, where each node is beefy and has the same size or whether you run on VMs, and it's quite easy for you to have smaller nodes for controllers and bigger for brokers. In Strumzy, we really want to support all of these architectures because we have users using Strumzy for all of these different things and in these different environments. And we also want to allow the transitions between them, which is quite important if you wanna start small, but maybe you want to grow your Kafka cluster as your project grows, product grows, or as your company grows. There will be also a migration, so if you are already running Kafka cluster based on ZooKeeper, don't worry, it won't be left behind to rot away over the time. You will be able to migrate it from ZooKeeper to the craft forum. It's kind of a multi-stage process where you first introduce the craft nodes, you let them sync the data from the ZooKeeper, then you kind of shift the traffic from the ZooKeeper nodes to the craft controllers, and then you definitely remove the ZooKeeper. So you can migrate like this. It's not as easy to migrate the other way around, so once you run craft, then you run craft and you don't really get to ZooKeeper. What's important is that in Kafka 4.0, ZooKeeper will be completely removed from Kafka. And you have to do this migration before you upgrade to Kafka 4.0, because you have to first, within the same version, migrate from ZooKeeper to craft, and only then you can within craft, upgrade to Kafka 4.0. So that's something that might be useful if you have the ZooKeeper-based cluster and need to plan the migration. So that was kind of the intro to how the craft stuff works and how the ZooKeeper and Kafka look like. I wanted to talk about some challenges which we faced, which maybe might be useful also to people not just interested in Kafka, but also in other projects and tools. Some of these challenges were related to Apache Kafka itself. So as I said in the beginning, it's something that's going on for several years now. So obviously there have been plenty of bugs, there have been plenty of missing features which were added over time. I think that's kind of expected. One of the other issues we faced was that a lot of the stuff which was done initially was not operationalized. So there were no APIs to manage things, there were no metrics to kind of observe the state of the system. And when you work on something like Strimse which is all about automating things, then you add instructions like, yeah, read the log, find if there's some line in the log, and then do something that's not really reliable and something you can automate on. So that was one of the issues. Another issue was what I call premature production readiness which Kafka announced Kraft's production ready quite early for my taste when it still had a lot of missing features and a lot of bugs, but for a lot of users who didn't really follow the Kafka project, this triggered a huge flow of questions on us like, hey, this is now production ready in Kafka, why isn't it supported in Strimse? And to be honest, we spent awfully a lot of time just answering these questions and explaining that maybe it's not as production ready as it sounds in our opinion and that it will take time to get there. But there's other set of challenges which were quite unique to Strimse and to running Kafka on Kubernetes. And one of them comes back to the different architectures which I described. On the beginning, I said that the advantage of the removing ZooKeeper is that you will have now only Kafka nodes, right? And that's great on paper, but then you run on Kubernetes, it can be quite challenging because you have only Kafka nodes but each of them has a little bit different configuration. And that's not always something that fits well because it leads to what I call asymmetric node configuration or pod configuration where each of them is kind of slightly differently configured. And to try to demonstrate how this fits Kubernetes this is how what your old school ZooKeeper cluster look like. You would have, for example, free ZooKeeper nodes and free Kafka brokers. Each of them has its own kind of ID which has to be unique but it needs to have a unique ID for the ZooKeeper nodes and unique IDs for the Kafka nodes. It doesn't matter that there's Kafka broker with the ID one and a ZooKeeper node with the ID one. Also, each of them has a different configuration but they are simply different applications. So if you want to deploy that on Kubernetes, the kind of obvious thing is you create two different stateful sets. Each of them has its own configuration for the application, each own configuration for storage, resources, scheduling and all these things. So that fits quite nicely into the Kubernetes workload APIs. But when we move to the ZooKeeper less Kafka cluster, yeah, you have only the Kafka nodes but each of the Kafka nodes has a little bit different role. Maybe here you started with free brokers and some mixed nodes with both controller and broker role. Then you scaled up, added some more brokers. Then you decided that maybe it's better to run the dedicated controller nodes instead of the mixed nodes. So you started adding the dedicated controllers and then you will remove later the mixed controller nodes. So it can easily have the Kafka cluster in a state like this. Now, all of these nodes, they share the same sequence for the node IDs. So they start somewhere and end somewhere but you can't have their two Kafka nodes with the ID one. It has to be unique. So that's kind of another limitation. And each of them has a different configuration for the application itself but also for the resources for storage and so on. So the brokers, they will have the broker configuration. They will have the CPU and quite a lot of memory. They will have definitely a lot of storage. The mixed nodes, they might have the same hardware configuration or resources configuration but will have a different configuration for the application. Then you have again some brokers which have the broker stuff and then you have the controller only nodes which will have only the controller configuration and will possibly have less resources because they don't need as much resources as brokers. So you have kind of only Kafka nodes but you can't easily go and represent them with a state full set. So this is something what we had to deal with and it's funny because something similar was discussed in one of the previous talks about the Mongo operator. We actually took the decision to leave the state full sets behind and we moved to managing the bots ourselves directly. Internally we are actually using our own resource for it which is called Strumzy Podset but it's kind of just to better separate the code and better kind of design internally the code base. It's not something the users will be using but what we did is we introduced another custom resource which is called Kafka node pools which is used by users and it's used to define the configurations for different groups of the Kafka node. So you can create a node pool for the brokers, you can create a node pool for the controllers and so on and you can of course change it as well. And to make this a bit more challenging we had to roll this out with while maintaining some backwards compatibility making sure that the existing Strumzy users can easily move and upgrade into these new things and so on.  So hopefully it will be worth it. And how does it look afterwards is that, yeah we have now only Kafka nodes but each of the group of the Kafka nodes it's kind of treated separately and it's kind of using the Kafka node pool to be configured but because we don't use stateful sets we can then easily play with the different IDs how they will be shared between the nodes and so on which stateful set would not really allow us. Okay, let me see if my demo works. So I wanted to show how you would deploy the Zookeeperless Kafka cluster with Strumzy. The way you would do it is basically you would as before use the kind Kafka resource which will be used to define kind of the Kafka cluster entity. That's what contains the different shared configurations which apply to the whole Kafka cluster. So for example, the version of Kafka use is currently here and it's always shared between all the nodes. The listeners are kind of shared, the Kafka configuration is shared as well. So these are in the Kafka resource as they were before but then the user basically adds the Kafka node pool resource which defines the different groups of nodes for the Kafka cluster. So in this case, I specify that I want to have these nodes with both the controller and the broker role so that they have both of them. I say that these nodes should have three replicas. I define how many resources should these nodes have and I also in this case define what the storage should be used by these nodes. And when would I do kubectl apply? Then if I write it correctly, I get something like this where you can see that I have the Kafka cluster named my cluster and it has three different nodes. And if I would dig into the pot and check the configuration, you would see that it has both of the roles for broker and controller and they can manage the cluster but also send the messages. But what I can do is I can simply take another resource, so another Kafka node pool and in this case, I specify only that the role should be broker and I again specify how many replicas do I want, what should be the resources, what should be the storage. In this case, it's just a simple demo cluster so the resources are actually the same but you could of course have them different. And then if you notice here, I have here some special annotation to make it a bit easier to manage the different IDs so I say here that I want these nodes to be numbered 100 to 199 and not continue 345. And now when I do kubectl apply and watch the pots then what we can see is that we have these three new pots starting here. They are named my cluster broker 100, 100, 102. And these are the new brokers I'm just adding to my cluster. And if you would already have the node pool, you can add third, fourth node pool but you can of course also do just kubectl scale to add additional brokers to the pool as well. And maybe once these brokers are ready, I decide to migrate to this other architecture where I have the dedicated controller node and the dedicated broker node. So what I can simply do now is I can do kubectl edit Kafka node pool Kafka which is the Kafka node pool resource where the mixed roles are created before and I can simply go and remove the broker all from the cluster. I can apply this and when I watch the pots again, I can see that the old pots are now being rolled by the operator and they are being reconfigured from having both of the roles to having only the controller role. So if you remember the slide with the different architectures, I basically just now moved from the architecture with the mixed nodes to the architecture which I called as a most production ready with the dedicated controller nodes and with dedicated brokers. So that's the demo. So actually I cheated a bit because of the time. I didn't have any clients there so there were no data. If there would be some data, then the operator would automatically block the change and you would have to reassign the data to the brokers. For example, we have a cruise control integration. So you could use cruise control to kind of move them to the new brokers which I created and then the operator would remove the broker role. But that would take several minutes to kind of execute so that's a bit tricky for a 25 minute talk. You need to bring the cruise control. Do all the needed and only after that you can remove the role. And maybe it could be implemented with the operator just you're removing the brokers. The data should be evacuated from there. So I hope that one day we get to these things such as triggering the cruise controller balances automatically when these changes happen. To be honest, we don't have that yet. It's only something we are planning or talking about. And one of the reasons is that we spend the last few years working on craft. But yeah, it's a good point that it's something that we are thinking about. But already today you don't have to use the APIs of cruise control yourself with KURL or something like that. We have custom resources which you can use to kind of trigger the removal of the node. So it's not completely automated but if you would want you can for example write some simple shell script to do the automation yourself. Thank you. So the question was if the brokers are being run on the same nodes, in this case they are probably not because in the background is OpenShift cluster with multiple worker nodes. But yeah, I just simplified the YAML because if I had all the affinity rules, topology spread constraints and so on then the YAML would be super long. If you want in the autumn in Chicago in the data on Kubernetes day I did a talk about making your Kafka cluster production ready where I cover kind of all of these things you should consider for production like affinity, configuring the record awareness and so on. There's YouTube recording so that might be a good thing to check for all the things which I kind of omitted from the demo to make it a bit easier. I asked this because the 100 brokers they were running quite fast. So that means, I mean, the nodes they were already there or this is what. Yeah, the worker nodes already existed there. Ah, okay. Okay, I wanted to touch a bit on the different risks which I might see behind this implementation. One of them is around managing the pods ourselves because that means that you take over a lot of responsibility which otherwise Kubernetes does for you. When you create a stateful set then the pods are actually managed by Kubernetes not by you. And that means if there is some disaster in your Kubernetes cluster and if for example an availability zone goes down or some nodes crash, then it will be Kubernetes who will be kind of responsible for re-spinning the pods. When you manage it yourself without the stateful set then now it's Trimsy who's responsible for it. And if something fails then yeah, you might have a problem and let's be honest, the stateful set control in Kubernetes is way more used and way more proven than Trimsy or do I think we have our share of users. So that's kind of one risk. Another risk, I'm a bit curious to see how much do people get used to the combination of the Kafka and Kafka and Opel resources. I don't think we are the only operator using multiple custom resources like this but it's a big change from what we did before. So I'm a bit curious how quickly do people get used to it. I also wanted to touch on where we are today. Just last week released Trimsy 040 which is a big release for us in terms of craft support because it enables it by default so you can now just choose on your own whether you want to use craft or zookeeper based clusters. And it's also the first version which adds support for migrating to existing Trimsy based zookeeper based Kafka clusters to craft. So yeah, if you have some existing clusters you can try that as well. There are also some limitations which I don't think are necessarily production critical but yeah, let's be open about them and let everyone decide if they want to run crafting production or not. For example, there are some limitations around scaling the controllers. There are some limitations around unclean leader election. These are actually in Kafka itself. On the Trimsy side, we for example have some limitations around the J-Bot support for using multiple disks in the craft nodes. Hopefully this will be all addressed later this year but yeah, I think in many cases you can use it in production even without it. And finally going back to the timeline which I shared on the beginning and let's talk a bit more about what's next. Later this year probably October or something like that Kafka will release the version 4.0 or that's current plan, of course plans change sometimes. So in the autumn Kafka will release Kafka 4.0 which should remove the Zookeeper for good and then probably early 2025 we will kind of follow that in Trimsy and remove support for Zookeeper from Trimsy as well. I guess we will try to provide some bug fixing and CV fixing for the last version with support for Zookeeper for some time but yeah, this is for someone maybe going a bit too quick but you can't stop the progress so sooner or later every Kafka user will have to move to craft. And that's it, thanks for your attention and I will be around for the rest of KubeCon so if you would have anything else around Trimsy or Apache Kafka Kubernetes or even about this talk then feel free to stop me whenever you see me or ping me on the CNCF Slack and so on. Thanks.


Hi everyone, Joe for Jasper's CaseRakes.com coming at you with 2018 Panini Prestige Football Pack Break number 25 right here, giving away spots in this mixer right over here. So we also took out six spots here and we're going to give them away to the people in this break right there. So let's copy those names, there's some new dice, there's a new list and the top six are going to get extra spots in this filler after 11 times, 1, 2, 9, 10 and 11 then final time. After 11 times, top six, so from 7 on down, sad times, but top six happy times, you got extra spots, PJ, Mark, Michael, PJ, Ryan and PJ. So now you have extra spots, we'll put a little rooftop next to your name so you know those are spots that you won. Now let's grab everybody's names right here and let's do the pack break itself before we re-randomize those names again and see who's going to win those spots. So for names and teams, let's roll it, randomize it again, 11 times, 5 into 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 the final time, 5 into 6, 11 times for the teams, 1, 2, 3 and 11 the final time. After 11, we've got the Patriots down to the Eagles in this quick little pack break. Alright, no trade windows in this stuff, let's first half right there, second half right there and let's just print this out and rip. This is for the mixer a little bit later on, actually after this video. And we've got a Jordan Howard relic in here. Now we'll go to Adam and the Bears. Alright, so we've got that relic, Jordan Howard relic and slip up the list, back to the list over here, we've got Gerald down to Ryan and everyone in between and that's a different dice roll. We'll use a new dice roll and a new list and this time we're going to randomize it 7 times, lucky 7 and it's going to be top 6 after 7 will be in that fair catch mixer. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 and final time after 7 and from 7 on down, sad times, apologize but thanks for trying, I appreciate it. 3 times though for the top 6, PJ, Ryan, Michael, Mark, Chris and Jose, congrats to you. You are in that fair catch mixer, we're just coming up right after this in a different video. I'll see you for that, JasperCaseRakes.com.


The Mutual Broadcasting System in Cooperation with Family Theatre Incorporated presents Herbert Has Ideas, starring Jack Smith as Herbert, with Janet Waldo as Kathy. John Beale is your host.  Here is your host, John Beale. You know what's a funny thing? When we're sick, we long for health. When we're well, we take it for granted. It's that way with everything. When our homes are running smoothly and we're content in our own well-being, then we begin to take God for granted and only remember Him when trouble comes. But prayer is not just asking for aid when we're in need. It's more than that. It's remembering and thanking God at all times. It's keeping Him always in the family circle, in good times and in bad. To bring happiness into your home and keep it there, make daily family prayer a regular practice in your home. Why not begin tonight to learn for yourselves that family prayer spells family happiness for your family and all the families in the world? John Beale speaks again following our Family Theatre play, Herbert Has Ideas, starring Jack Smith and Janet Waldo. Sealy Harris-Martin, one moment, please. SHM, I'm sorry, Mr. Sealy hasn't come in yet. Yes, I'll have him call Mr. Creech immediately. Oh, good morning, Herbert. Hello, Kathy. Gosh, you even look pretty at 9 o'clock in the morning. You're sweet, Herbert, but it's 9.20. You're almost as late as Mr. Sealy. Well, I was thinking and I wrote out to the end of the line before. Herbert, oh, go Thorpe, haven't I warned you about that? I know, but this is a great idea, and I know that- Oh, excuse me. SHM, good morning. Yes, I understand. I'll have him call Mr. Creech the moment he gets in. Now, you listen to me, Herbert. You've been working here less than a week, and you have a comparatively unimportant job. Well, that's just it. I want to make it more important, quickly. I understand, dear, and I'm all for it, but you've got to use a little common sense.  Three days, but that- Marinating green peas and vinegar is a possible substitute for olives. You ruined a whole bushel of peas before they found out. Well, it was the pits that had me baffled, but this is different. SHM is an advertising agency, and I've got a great idea for it. Good morning, Mr. Ceeley. Good morning, Kathy. Good morning, Mr. Ceeley. Yes. Any cause for me, Kathy? Oh, Mr. Creech's office called you several times. Oh, no. It's not going to be one of those days. Well, tell him I'll be right over. Mr. Ceeley, wait. I've got to go- Not now, Herbert. Mr. Ceeley has troubles enough without you today. Well, that's Ceeley. The question is, what are you going to do about the Creech Emulsified Cream Lotion Show? Well, I thought the show was doing pretty well, A.K., and, however, I do- You thought it was doing pretty well. Ceeley, do you know what our Hooper rating was last week? Well, I haven't the figures available at the moment, A.K., but I think that- The Creech Show was exactly two and three-tenths percent higher than the Frost Warning Service for fruit growers. Now, A.K., be reasonable. The president was on at the same time over another network. Excuses, Ceeley. Excuses. But, uh... Hey, you wouldn't like me to transfer my account to Bingham Bailey-Durham and Otis, would you? Oh, Mr. Creech, now, you wouldn't do a thing like that. Well, frankly, Ceeley, if you don't come up with a fast shot in the arm for the Creech Show, I'm leaving SHM, and that's final. Um, A.K., A.K., I've been thinking about your problem, and I believe I know what the show needs. Well, that's more like it. What? Um, a singer. A singer? Well, I know just what you're going to say. You can't see paying some big name in inflated salary. Well, I don't want to know that. And you're so right. And that's why you'll be crazy about the mystery tenor. Well, I'm not going to, uh... Hmm? Mystery tenor? Yes, you'll wear a mask and a cape with a hood. We'll sneak him in and out of the station. Everyone will wonder who he is. We'll start a whispering campaign. Oh, what publicity! But, uh, who is he? Oh, someone known. Look, I'll hold auditions on the QT and pick him up for peanuts. You know, I think you've got something there, Zilly. Oh, just the usual SHM service, A.K. Uh, this mystery tenor must have a good voice. Smooth and romantic like my lotion. Yes, emulsified and creamy. Look, A.K., you can pick him out yourself if you prefer. Good. I want quick action on this. Right. I'll call my office and have him start setting up the auditions. And you can listen to the records tomorrow afternoon. Hmm, fast enough? Fine. Use the phone on my desk. Ah, thanks. Hello? This is Mr. Sealy. Get my office, please. Hmm, that per-dan was a Pullman porter man on the train. Let me in through the Dixie. Oh, that's funny. I could remember what it was I wanted to tell you, Chaffee. Here, have a lifesaver. Was it about Otto Kransmeyer? Well, what about Otto Kransmeyer? He's leaving town, so they're making me first tenor in the choir. But, but that's wonderful, Herbert. Why didn't you? No, I remember. It was something I heard at the executives meeting the other day. What were you doing at an executives meeting? Cleaning the ash trays. But listen, Chaffee. They need a new opening theme for the Slumber On mattress program. What's the matter with the old one? Oh, it's too ordinary. They've been using Slumber On, my little gypsy sweetheart. Besides, according to Mr. Harris, market research shows that gypsies is a class or a very mediocre group of potential mattress customers. Well, hooray for Mr. Harris. What's your idea, honey? Brown's lullaby. Brown's lullaby? Well, as a background. Against that, I'd have the sound of, say, I've been meaning to ask you. That light on your board has been blinking since... Oh, my goodness. Hello? I mean, Sealy Harris Martin. Yes, Mr. Sealy. I'm sorry, Mr. Sealy. The audition room tomorrow morning. Yes, notify Max Tehr. I understand. Yes. Hey, boys. I think Hank Stern's told you all about this job. We'll be recording most of the day. We're accompanying a lot of different singers, so you'll have to be... Oh, hello. Hi. Got your music with you? Music? Well, I didn't bring any. Hang on. I will fake a background. But I don't think... No, don't worry. What are you going to sing? Sing? You mean right now? Oh, sure. And you'll play along with me? We'll do our best. Gosh, this is wonderful. A real orchestra. Sure, sure, kid. Only what are you going to sing? Well, how about I'll take you home again, Kathleen? An E-flat? Why not? Boys, Kathleen, an E-flat. You ready in the control room? Good. Give me an arpeggio and see more fake an obligato, will you? Okay. I'll take you home again, Kathleen. Kathy, guess what just happened? I can't play guessing games with you now, Herbert. Mr. Sealy was very annoyed with me yesterday when I took so long to answer his calls. But can't you even... Not now, Herbert. When I suggest you get to work before Mr. Sealy catches you wandering around. Mr. Sealy? Is he in his office now? No, he went in Mr. Martin's office for a couple of minutes. Great. That makes it even better. What nurses are you talking about? My idea. It all ties up with what Mr. Sealy was saying at the copywriter's meeting. What were you doing at the copywriter's... Never mind. I'd rather not know. Dramatize it. Are they your part? Well, Mr. Sealy said, if you've got a good idea, don't underplay it. Don't minimize the impact. Dramatize it. Yes. Honey, we're going to get married real soon. What? Man and wife. Just as soon as Sealy makes me a partner. See you later, Kathy. A partner? Hey, wait! Let's see now. Here's his phonograph. Here are the records. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms. Brahms! He's got it! What a break! I'll set it up. Now I'll stretch out in the couch. When Mr. Sealy... Uh-oh. All right, Martin. See you, Harris, about the rest of it. Well, now who turned that thing on? What the deuce?  Yes, sir. You see, I was just... How are you, anyway? Why, I'm Herbert Oglethorpe, sir. The new second assistant to the assistant office manager. I was dramatizing it. Oh, yes, yes. Now I know who you are. You do? Yes. Very well. You're the fellow who keeps turning up in places where he isn't wanted.  You're the fellow who... Mr. Sealy, I don't think you know... Quiet, you numbskull. I could forgive you for that. I am a patient man. I could even forgive you for taking a nap on my office couch. I'm famous for my charitable nature. But when you use my record player to lull you to sleep, that's the last straw. But if you'd only let me... You're fired, get out. But Mr. Sealy... Get out. So I guess you just wouldn't understand, Kathy. It was nice of you to visit me, anyway. Nonsense. Of course I understand. Do you really, Kathy? Well, almost. I know you're ambitious and energetic, and you've got a lot of enthusiasm. I get good ideas, too, mostly. The trouble is you let your ideas and your enthusiasm run away with your judgment.  I think I'll go join the foreign legion. What for? In order to forget. That's silly, Herbert. You're doing just fine right here. For instance, you forgot to give me the ring that I'm supposed to return to you at this dramatic moment. Gosh, you're right. I meant to make a down payment on one this payday. Payday? Gee, I never thought a simple little word like that could carry so much nostalgia. Oh, you'll be all right, honey. Just wait a few days until he cools off, and then go in and explain to Mr. Sealy. Maybe the French consul could tell me how to go about enlisting. Come now, Mr. Sealy isn't so bad. Why don't you just send him a note apologizing and... Apologizing? Look here, Kathy. If anybody's going to apologize, it's going to be Mr. Sealy. Now, don't be unreasonable, Herbert. I am unreasonable, and I have silly ideas, and I can't hold on to a job. In fact, I'm a complete waste of time for any girl in her right mind. That's not true. You're just... It is true, and the sooner you realize it, the better off you'll be. All right. I'll go now. Maybe you'll feel better in the morning. Good night, Herbert. Kathy, wait! I didn't... Well, don't you think number eight or perhaps number 14 had possibilities, A.K.? No. No, they don't send me, Sealy. Go on, pray the next one. I'll take you home again, Kathleen. Across the ocean, wild and wild. Your heart has ever been. Since first you were my bunny bros. Those has all have left your cheek. I've won. This is sad, when air you spears be dim. Your loving are, Kathleen. Those are fresh and... That's it, Sealy. You've got him. Well, nice picking, A.K. Really, really beautiful. That's my mystery tenor. Well, take over, Sealy. The rest of it's up to you. Right, A.K. Sign him up and keep him signed. I'd like you to sign him out on next week's show. Oh, without fail, A.K. That's the spirit. Well, goodbye for now, Sealy. Have lunch with me sometime next week, will you? We'll discuss the details on a long-term contract with SHM. Well, it's a day, A.K. Hello, Kathy, Miss Donovan? Yes, sir. Get me the singer on record number 20. I want to speak to him immediately. Yes, Mr. Sealy, immediately. All right, hold on. And when the grass is fresh and green... Mr. Sealy. Yes? I have no singer listed for record number 20, Mr. Sealy. Well, in that case, you... What? Are you sure? Quite sure. There are only 19. Great suffering snakes. Get Harris. Get Martin. Get Max Tair. Can I go home now, Mr. Sealy? I've called my wife three times. My dinner will be ruined. Your dinner will be ruined. My business is ruined. My life is ruined. Think, man. Think. Can't you give me a clue? Mr. Sealy, if I told you once, I told you 100 times. All tenors look alike. I don't remember. Doesn't the song recall anything to you? No. Wait, wait, wait. I'll play the record again. Oh, well, my dead body. Now, listen, Mr. Sealy, there were 20 tenors, right? Right. Okay. Seven out of the 20 sang, I'll take you home again, Kathleen.  I give up. You give up? Would... Would Betrillo give up? In a case like this, yes. Please, can I go home now? Oh, good night, Max Tair. Send Kathy in. Mr. Sealy wants to see you, Kathy. Oh, yes, Mr. Sealy? Kathy. Kathy, ask Mr. Martin, Mr. Harris, and the rest of the staff to come in again. They've all gone home, Mr. Sealy. Oh, the rats are leaving the sinking ship. All right, Kathy. Close the board. Go home, too. Mr. Sealy. What is it, Kathy? Mr. Sealy, I've got a funny feeling. A hunch. A hunch? About what? Well, never mind. I'd like to hear that record. Will you play it for me? It's on the machine, Kathy. Help yourself. Thanks. I'll take you home again, Kathleen. You, you knew it. You mean, you know who that is? Of course, it's Herbert. Well, it's Herbert. It's Herbert. Herbert who? Herbert Oglethorpe. I recognized his voice immediately. Did you say Herbert Oglethorpe? That's right. You see, I've heard him sing this song a hundred times. Oh, no, no, no. It can't be.  Herbert isn't a singer. Oh, yes, he is. What a lovely voice. Why, Herbert is the first tenor in the choir. Now that Otto Kransmeyer's gone to live with his in-laws. Well, it seems incredible. What would he be doing in the audition room of all places? Mr. Sealy. Herbert? Oh, yes, yes. I guess it's quite possible at that. Kathy, call him up. Tell him I've got to see him at once. Tell him that I don't... I don't think so, Mr. Sealy. Herbert thinks you owe him an apology. He can be very stubborn. An apology, but I've... No. Oh, very well, very well. I'll apologize. Call him up and tell him... It won't take you more than ten minutes to drive over there. No. No, I won't do it. I won't do it. That's the whole story, Herbert. I admit I've come here tonight because I need you. Badly. But my apology is sincere. I shouldn't have lost my temper and I shouldn't have said the things I did. Will you forgive me for calling you a numbskull? What? Oh, gosh, yes, Mr. Sealy. You should have heard the things I called you when I got home. Huh? Oh, yes. Well, I forgive you too, my boy. Now then, this chance to sing on the Crete show is a wonderful opportunity for you, my boy. I'm prepared to sign you up on a long-term contract at a very handsome salary. Gee, that's awfully nice of you, Mr. Sealy. In a way, it's really too bad, isn't it? Too bad? What's too bad? Well, I'm not interested in singing professionally, Mr. Sealy. You're not interested in... No, no, Herbert. Herbert, now you don't understand. Oh, this is not the time for thinking of personal preferences. Oh, this is a time... This is a time of crisis. We must stand shoulder to shoulder. Oh, I'll be glad to help you out for as long as you need me, Mr. Sealy. But I'm an advertising man by profession. Oh, yes, of course. Herbert, will you come back to SHM as first assistant to the general manager? There's a $10 raise that goes with the job. Well, thank you, Mr. Sealy, but that's not the position I had in mind. All right, my boy. Tell me, what do you want to be? A partner. Oh! I could have sworn you said a partner. I did. In the first place, I promised my future wife that I'd become a partner. And in the second place, I have more good ideas in a week than Harris and Martin having a year. And in the third place, at what a creature... I know all about the third place. Temper, Mr. Sealy, temper.  Who can tell you might even like them? No, absolutely not. Say, what's on your mind? Well, the first idea is about an opening theme for the Slumber On Mattress program. And we'll do it my way, see? Oh! Oh, very well, Herbert. Are you suffering from N, N, nocturnal nuisance? Hmm. Are you tired, nervous, irritable, and unpopular because of the insufficient quantity and the inferior quality of your nightly slumbers? Then switch to a superb new Slumber On Mattress, I mean. That's the new opening on another of our shows, A.K. Sealy, the mystery tenor is up my sales 30%, but why can't I have a wonderful opening like that on my show? Well, there's no reason at all, A.K. Glad to oblige. I'll have Oglethorpe report to you and get to work on it immediately. Oglethorpe? Yes. Our idea, man. And my new junior partner, SHM is a thing of the past, A.K. From here on, it's S-H-M-O. At your service 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Yes, sir. S-H-M-O. I've been wondering what you'd think about Herbert and his ideas. I guess you'd call them likeable and laughable, wouldn't you? Well, Herbert's ideas weren't too sensible, but at least they didn't hurt anyone. But you know, ideas are always mighty important. Our ideas about marriage, for instance. Our ideas about a home and a family. For most of us, our chances of happiness in this life are wrapped up almost entirely in our families. That's why we must think clearly and sensibly about our family responsibilities.  Without His constant help and protection, we can't have happy marriages or happy homes. Yes, men and women with right ideas about family life are turning every day to family prayer. They're learning from their own experience that the family that prays together stays together. This is John Beale saying good luck and God bless you. Our thanks to Jack Smith and Janet Waldo for their appearance and to Erwin Lieberman for writing our play. Music was scored and conducted by Max Tehr. This production of Family Theatre Incorporated was directed by David Young. Our cast included John Daener, Si Kendall, Arthur Q. Bryan, and Harry Bartel. Next week, our Family Theatre star will be Linda Johnson in A Daddy for Christmas. Your hostess will be Shirley Temple. This series of the Family Theatre broadcasts is made possible by the thousands of you in need for this kind of program, and by the Mutual Broadcasting System which has responded to this need. Be with us next week at this same time when Shirley Temple and Linda Johnson will star on Family Theatre. Tony LaFranco speaking. It's the Mutual Broadcasting System.


Welcome to Digital Asset News to get top stories in cryptocurrency and digital assets and break amount of bite-sized pieces. Let me tell you what's going on in the crypto market in 30 seconds or less. First up, Coinbase is about to launch their IPO on April 14th. I'm going to tell you that this is great news for the cryptocurrency and digital asset market. I'm also going to tell you that things will not happen on that date. Give it a month or so and things should pretty much work out right. On top of that, we're going to talk about Binance is able to list different stocks on their exchanges and the first one is going to be Tesla which will be able to buy on Binance. And finally, we'll take a look at in America, taxes are due on May 15th and you could potentially owe all your taxes on April 15th as reported by a new article. So take a look at those videos or that video. Just click right here below and I'll tell you the full stories.


Hello, my name is Ayesha Kater. Welcome to Story Story with Ayesha Kater. Today we'll be focusing on storytelling. I will be telling a story from Mali that is in West Africa. Are you ready to go to Mali? Great. This story is called The Proud Peacock. Cuckoo was a young peacock. He lived in a beautiful garden. He lived with three pea hens, Babae, Cece and Lou. Cuckoo's feathers were beautiful. They were pink and green with gold and long green feathers. He would walk around the garden bold and arrogant. Look at me. Look at me. I am so beautiful. He would chase the cats away. Look at me. Look at me. Stomp at the lizards. Look at me.  Look at me. Look at you. I am so much more beautiful than you. As he got older, his feathers only became longer and more beautiful. Look at me. Look at me. He would walk around annoying all the animals in the garden. He thought he was the most beautiful animal in the world. And he would hit Lulu with his tail and chase Babae and laugh at Lulu. He was a big bully. One day the three hens got together, Babae, Cece and Lulu. Come. Come. I am tired of being bullied by Cuckoo. We have to do something. What can we do?  Babae had an idea. We should go see the wise old peacock. He lives in the garden down the road. He will have advice for us. Good idea. The next morning before the sun rises, Babae, Cece and Lulu go on an adventure to go see old Sambu, the wise old peacock. That morning Cuckoo comes out of his nest, ruffling his feathers, making sure they are beautiful as they were the day before. He looks around. He only sees chickens in the garden. Where is Babae, Cece and Lulu? Girls. He squeaks. Where are you? I want to play with you. Oh, come on. I will not peck at you anymore. No reply. He goes to see the chickens.  Where is Babae, Cece and Lulu? They look at him. Hmm. Even if we did know, we wouldn't tell you. Hmm. Cuckoo goes to the cat.  Where is Babae, Cece and Lulu? Why don't you just leave me alone and go play with your beautiful feathers? Cuckoo sits and waits. And waits, mumbling to himself. Meanwhile, Babae, Cece and Lulu are on an adventure to go see old Sambu, the wise old Peacock. Old Sambu, old Sambu, they call. Yes. What can I do for you? Old Sambu, we need your help. We live in the garden, right down the street, and we live with a mean, mean Peacock.  Look at me. Look at me. We can't take it anymore. What can we do? Old Sambu looks at them for a while. Hmm. And patience. Patience, said Babae, Cece and Lulu. Time and patience? Lulu says, time and patience won't stop Cuckoo. He has been doing this for a long time. Time and patience, calm down, calm down, says old Sambu. Time and patience. Everything has its time and season. Nothing is permanent. The girls walk away. Time and patience. Old Sambu yells out to them, just go home, wait and listen. You will see. Time and patience, the girls say.  We wanted Cuckoo to be punished. They go back to the garden. Cuckoo sees them.  I have been waiting for you all day. The hands, Babae, Cece and Lulu, turn away from Cuckoo. Fine.  As time goes by, Cuckoo stays the same. He walks around the garden. Look at me. Look at me. I am so beautiful. Look at me. Look at me. Annoying, annoying. All the animals in the garden till one day. He flies down from his mango tree. Cuckoo shakes his feathers and feather falls to the ground. All the animals look at Cuckoo. One of the chickens runs up and grabs the feather on the ground and picks it up and places it near its feathers. Look at me. Look at me. I'm the most beautiful. Look at me. All the animals laugh and laugh. Cuckoo runs to a bush and hides and stays there for the rest of the day. The next day, another feather falls off Cuckoo. The next day, another feather falls off until all his feathers start to fall off except for one. Now he is just brown and gray with one colorful feather on the top. He looks at that feather hoping it won't fall off too. But the next morning, it does. What is happening to me? Am I dying? Says Cuckoo. What is happening? All the animals look sadly at Cuckoo. What is happening to Cuckoo? What if he is dying? Let's forgive him before he dies. All the animals go and go around Cuckoo to play with him. Cuckoo sits there sad. Doesn't want to play. Doesn't want to eat. Just sad that all his feathers being gone. Babesese and Lulu look at Cuckoo confused. What happened to Cuckoo? Did we do this? Oh, we should go to Old Sumbu and see and get some more advice. We wanted Cuckoo to be nice, but we did not want all his feathers to fall off. Cuckoo with all his feathers off had no time to be mean to the other animals. He just walked around the compound of the garden. Being nicer now, sharing his food, he had no time to be mean for he was so sad about his feathers. Babesese and Lulu go on another adventure to go see Old Sumbu. Old Sumbu! Old Sumbu! Yes? What did you do to Cuckoo? All his feathers have fallen off. We wanted him to be nice, but we did not want all his feathers to fall off. Did you do this to Cuckoo? Did you cast a magic spell on him? Old Sumbu laughs. What did I tell you the last time you were here? Time and patience, said Babesese and Lulu. And we walked away upset because you did not tell us how to change him. Time and patience says Old Sumbu. Yes, time and patience. Every year, once a year, all male peacocks shed all of their feathers. That is why I said time and patience. Why didn't you tell us that? Because Old Sumbu says, I wanted you to learn that patience is important. I wanted you to learn to wait and not rush and do something drastic. Sometimes things fix themselves, said Babesese and Lulu. We have learned a lot from you. You are a wise old man. Thank you Old Sumbu. First, we have learned that everything has a time, a season. Two, we learned that patience is important. Three, we learned that no matter how beautiful you are, if you do not have a good character on the inside, you will look ugly to the world. As for Cuckoo, his feathers grew back even more beautiful than before. But this time, he was humble, loving, caring, and kind to all the animals. All the animals forgave Cuckoo and looked at Cuckoo and thought, wow, he really is the most beautiful bird we ever have seen. Not only on the outside, but on the inside as well. And that is the story for today. What was your favorite part? What was your favorite lesson? Do you know anyone like Cuckoo? That is all we have for today. Thank you so much for joining me, Aishesh, at Story Story. Thank you. See you next time.


National Coffee Day just happened recently, and we thought this would be a good time to check in with a company that's always been known for coffee, but has doubled down on that positioning with a rebranding effort that began late in 2018 and in many ways is still unfolding. I'm talking about Duncan, the restaurant chain that has over 13,000 locations and serves 2.2 billion cups of coffee every year. A rebrand on that scale is no mean feat. So I'd like to welcome Drayton Martin, Duncan's vice president of brand stewardship, to tell us how that effort has been going. Drayton, thanks for joining me. Of course, thank you. I'm looking forward to talking about the rebrand. It's been a really exciting adventure. About two years ago, if I'm not mistaken, September of 2018, you folks said about a pretty ambitious rebranding effort. The most noticeable change was dropping the donuts from your name. Another facet of that was becoming what you folks termed beverage lead as a brand. Donuts had been part of your name since 1950, so I have to ask you again, why did you cut it loose? Food is critical to what we do, but if you think about the role of coffee, and I mean coffee big, you see it could be espresso, it could be drip coffee, that is an obsession in our country and frankly the world. We wanted to put all of our emphasis on our beverages sort of as the lead and really surround that with food as the attachment to those beverages. It seems like as a company, you had already started to move in this direction quite some time ago. You added, if I'm correct about this, a steaming coffee cup to your logo in 2002, and then in 2006 came the slogan, America runs on Duncan. My question is, in a sense, this rebrand is kind of an evolution, right? Absolutely. I mean, and that was part of what we talked about is, this answer has been staring us in the face since that tagline appeared. There was a vast exploration. It's the typical less is more thing. It just took a little while to get there. The logo has had a bit of evolution happening. When you went from Dunkin Donuts to just Duncan, you kept the typeface. The Duncan stayed orange.  Was there any reasoning behind that that you can talk about? We have, since our inception, had a variety of logo shifts, not as many as you would expect for a brand that's been around for 70-plus years. But we went in this mid-70s to pink and orange, and we worked with our design agency partner, JKR, and really dissected the brand, and it was about looking at everything that existed and really pairing it down to that which was most essential. And if you think of the iconic aspects of our brand, it's our colors, it's our name, and it's our typeface. And so it was really liberating to your point before, coffee cup was added, all these things were added, and it really was a study in reduction. So just as with the name we did that, we went to the core elements that telegraph our brand. You've also been in the course of the rebranding effort. You've been building next-generation stores. The thing with the next-gen, that is a really important part of our rebrand, of course, because that's your experience. And it really seeks to transform sort of a transaction to more of an experience, but still at the speed of Duncan, which is quite fast. With the next-gen design, there are several critical things that we did. And the first is bringing the bakery case forward. When Duncan was first created, there was actually a window that people could look through and see the donuts being made. It was really a part of the theater of brand experience. And so by bringing it forward, we have been able to entice more of that appetite of feeling we've seen a sales correlation with that. Another thing that we've done is, instead, again, of having things in the back and then you just get your cup, we put in a tap system, almost like inspired by bars, and we're allowing our crew to sort of be baristas and be able to serve you your drink. And that too has inspired a lot more, I would say, exploration and curiosity. So we're really expanding our menu based on where we see that sort of needs and interests are. We value and adore our loyalists, but we need to continue to expand our relevance to more and more people, and particularly younger people. Great, Martin, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for making the time to talk to us. Thank you.