OK. I will move right along to my next speaker. Alexander Bardell, who is the chair of the BCS Green Specialist Group. He is also the founder of SDA Advocate, an independent sustainable technology consultancy. His passion for sustainability started in 2006 when he joined the IBM House of Carbon initiative, which defined a simple methodology to map and address carbon usage across an organisation. Ac ychydig ddechreu Alex i gweithio ar y cyfnodd cyfnodau ffyrddol. A'n ddweud y byddwn i gwaith ymddangos i'r oedd ymddangos arall y dyfodol. Felly, rhai gael i'r rhaid i gweithio ar Ynys Gweithfodd Alexander Bardell. Rhaid hwn i, Alex? Rhaid hwn ni'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio? Rhaid hwn ni'n gweithio'r gweithio? Rhaid hwn ni'n gweithio'r gweithio? Rhaid hwn ni'n gweithio'r gweithio? Rwy'n creu chi'n wneud yn gwneud? Ond iddo'r wnaeth. Cymru yng Nghwyl yma i chynig i ddim yn gweithio. Pwy fydden nhw, am rhaid i'n gwyl fel hynod. Fel hyn wnaeth i gweithio? Mae'r cyfreidd sy'n ddim yn gweithio. Fel hyn noir, mae'n ffrwng ddweud yw cyfnod a gw הסer fyddwch'da'n gwybod a gydag i'r cyllid am rhaid. Ymhynghorodd, rydyn ni wedi'n adnod briwyr Cymri, yw cyfnod yma. y British Computer Society is a charity, it represents the IT industry and its members. So we don't have a big marketing department and my marketing department is my 13-year-old son who is learning lots and lots and is probably more proficient than I am. So when he gets back today I'll be sitting down with my marketing department after his football training and seeing whether we can use a bit of AI to actually improve how we can do some of our presentations and slide decks. So, well I'd like to come and talk a little bit today now and it kind of works quite well from the previous presentations a bit more detail and granularity around some of the levers and triggers which are there today which we need to use and need to understand which are kind of driving sustainability and part of this is if we go when I started off and my role then was as an enterprise architect, the conversations I were having with firms was predominantly with the marketing department and it's all about the brand and the brand image and how we can make marketing sustainable and this was because we didn't have many other triggers and the reality was it was a bit challenging because the companies would all say yes we absolutely want to be sustainable we want net zero but there's no real legislation there's no drivers no kind of business case justification and back in those days it was really hard to actually get your foot in the door but now it's great that I'm here today and and that sustainability has become more relevant and more prevalent that's a positive on a negative the reason why is not so good so it's climate change and combating climate change but today I just like to go through some of the key elements which as an enterprise architect you probably would like to consider when thinking about your architectural framework your guiding principles building out your enterprise architecture so climate change has become an issue and if anyone was part of COP 27 last year it was quite prevalent that we're having some of the issues like the flooding in Pakistan, the adverse weather conditions in America and we're looking more than just net zero we've got to think a bit about mitigation about how some of these more at-risk areas can adapt and possibly how the richer world is able to compensate some of the the poorer areas which are most at risk and so really it's it's kind of driving this message home and because of it it's becoming more important so employees particularly employees who are coming out of university now want to work for companies who have real genuine sustainability credentials not companies which maybe just greenwash will pretend to be sustainable so this is driving employees and maybe some of the employees that you want to actually come into your companies to say that we are genuinely sustainable and this is what we are actually doing. Investors are under pressure now so institutional investment pension funds to actually ensure that they're making investment decisions with companies who are environmental and have the right credentials so I'm going to talk a little bit around the the ESG's environmental social and governance framework which is growing it's becoming maybe legally binding in some places but it's definitely an important aspect for investors to make investment decisions and consumers are driving change the consumers are getting worried about climate change and they want to make sure that the companies that they're buying products and services for are sustainable and so this will be driving some of the governance and so at the top of the companies the CIOs are beginning to understand that this is maybe an important thing to think about and then this should then start filtering down the organisation and therefore the IT the technology and the enterprise architectural element within the organisation need to consider sustainability as well. I want to talk a little more about the SDGs I've made a mistake the SDGs are in a slightly different aspect but you have an 18 instead of 17 but you know this is important because the UN are using this to kind of push their view of how we should look after the planet my children are learning about the SDGs in school today so this is now something that the the kids of people university are literate with they understand what they are they understand the aspects about it and so we now just need to think about how we place technology within this new arena that we're beginning to see and these new information sources that are coming along so it's interesting so if we're listening to the COPs there's really two aspects to technology there's technology itself from getting its own house in order so we need to think about our carbon emissions we need to think about our resource usages but there's also the other part which I'll probably not have time to talk about today which is how is technology going to be an enabler to support us on this journey and COP26 in Glasgow was an example of the of the what what is it we need to do what are we going to have to change and COP27 was the how what are the things that we need to put into place and interesting I had an invite to COP26 but because it was in Glasgow and there was so many people there I couldn't go COP27 was the first COP where anyone could join anywhere in the world online and this is how technology has really helped us to do that but one of the key messages that came out of COP27 is that technology is the glue it's the binder there's all of these gaps that exist in terms of how we mitigate and deliver against climate change how we deliver all of these projects and then there is a gap which they can't fill and they say well okay you know technology needs to fulfill this role so if you're sitting in an organization and you're thinking about what is it we want to do where do we want to go certainly it's worth listening to the cops and trying to understand how can we use the skills and sets we have in our toolbox our technologies how can we place these into these gaps to actually help us get to net zero and achieve our 2050 goal and so if you want to look at the areas where technology is a direct effect obviously climate action so currently it's believed to be around about between two and ten percent of all global emissions are coming directly from IT the area which is really doing very well is communities and cities so smart cities if you look at London look how London's changed in the last 10 15 years how much technology has become a key part of how we live our lives in London and how these technologies are trying to make life more sustainable um so in these these areas the 11 12 13 7 89 is where we believe there's a direct influence in terms of technology but also you have already said things like big data analytics um technology actually is affects all 17 of the the SDGs and so it's a you know a wide encompassing role but then the direct effect probably sits within these ones so there's an interesting lot of conversation discussion particularly now within IT and this is around scope reporting um so up to now it's been relatively straightforward we've had this concept of scope one and so what scope reporting is part of the greenhouse gas protocol corporate value chain um was that wanted firms and organisations to be able to report their carbon usage uh and one of the real reasons why this is very important is that we need to get to that baseline and the baseline of where we are today and so if you think about your standard enterprise architect technology project you have your this is what we want to do our 2b state we have our aziz state and then we can do our road mapping to get us to where we want to get to but if your aziz state isn't understood well then it's going to be quite difficult to get to your 2b state and do your road mapping so one of the the the sort of drivers for the scope reporting was to try and get organisations at that point in time where they understood what their emissions were and where they were coming from so we started off with scope one and that's quite simple it's the direct usage you have so the fuel used company vehicles the really direct emissions and then the scope two indirect again was relatively straightforward so you could understand your purchase electricity heating steam like that so these are things to measure but now we're moving to the stage where we we need to focus on our scope three emissions and scope three is a bit more complicated because that includes the supply tone so everything that you're consuming um the waste disposal so removing and disposing of your ICT assets um but also where it starts getting a little more challenging is well hold on our our um IT strategy has been cloud only so now we need to understand what proportion of our emissions are being consumed from our cloud service provider um so our cloud service provider then needs to give us our emissions data which we could then use to include in our own reporting now a few years ago this was impossible they wouldn't provide that data but I think that that the cloud the big cloud service provider so people like Amazon and Google have sort of understood that this is a this is a need and they're beginning to provide that data and that information but it does mean that the the process is is is a lot more complicated and I guess the reason why is if you look at this other chart here we can see where we are today in terms of the emissions that we're getting from um carbon based fuels and as we see so transportation um buildings these probably make up about half of all of our emissions they're going to have to transition to zero carbon which means we're going to need to be using renewable energy sources so not only are we going to have to um transition from carbon to non-carbon energy sources which predominantly here means electric um we're going to have to then seriously increase the amount of energy that we're um receiving from these sources so it means that unless we include energy efficiency and again the less with less the more with less it's going to be very difficult for us to then transition everything to renewable energy sources while still being able to provide the energy we need so one of the really important things about scope three reporting is to understand where you are today and then we want to start moving to that point where we have an idea of how we get to net zero and net zero is part of it is renewables definitely part of it is um zero carbon energy but another big proportion is to be we're going to have to be a lot more efficient in terms of the energy we do use because there's just not going to be as much energy to go around maybe I mean maybe this might change we might be able to reach that point but where we stand today I think that's probably one of the big challenges um so we've got the rise of the the ESG um reporting and this is quite interesting so last month I attended a a legal IT legal event where the legal frameworks and the legal practices associated with um ESG reporting are becoming much more prevalent so I don't know whether the people here is this a common thing with people beginning to hear and see and speak about ESGs as part of the company view yes yep so we're getting more so it's interesting to see that as time goes by it's definitely you know when I had this conversation a year ago there was no response at all as time goes on they're becoming more prevalent and interesting there's some some stats so as we can see there are 2.7 trillion dollars um as of december 2021 81% in Europe and in some European countries there's an actual movement to say that actually it's going to be legally binding to be to provide your ESG reporting um so it's fundamentally there and and it's making a change but right now it's a little bit pragmatic so if you look at a company like Tesla Tesla you should think great you know they make electric cars absolutely brilliant should have the best ESG reporting stats but they don't because it's environment social and governance and therefore they may do very well in environment but social there's been some questions around how Tesla employees are treated governance Elon and his tweeting and affecting the markets and so it's maybe a challenge as whether you're looking at in terms of an environmental sustainability perspective or whether you're looking at in terms of social and governance structure as well so yes it's a good point but it maybe needs a little more focus in terms of trying to get it to balance out a bit and and if you want to find out a bit more about ESG reporting I suggest you don't go and look on YouTube um or social media because I wasn't aware of this but it's quite a contentious issue so you're going to get lots of very sort of right wing people talking about woke and neoconservativeness and there seems to be a lot of contention I wasn't aware of where people really don't like this because they feel that it's trying to sort of implement the thing adversely but you know there's a lot of good information so it'd be useful to understand what it is and why it actually means uh why it's important and why it's actually making a difference and um it's predicted that in in the next five or ten years that number of 2.7 will go to 30 trillion so that's then becomes a significant proportion of global economy is under the under the um framework of ESG reporting now the reason why I do sustainability marketing is because when I first started off the part of the company was the who was really focused on sustainability and technology was this concept of the corporate social responsibility the sort of Ben and Jerry's of this world where their brand and their product is about being sustainable and therefore it's a product and a marketing question rather than a business and a technology problem so when I first started and I came knocking the door my predominantly the people I was working with were the marketing and the brand people were within a firm so one of the really important things to do is if if a company is sustainable and if a company does do some really good things um it's to be able to talk about it to actually say look you know we're doing these great things and this is why we're doing them um and then when the business case side of things come along if there's a brand benefit from being sustainable and you've done all these great projects to become a a better company and reduce your emissions then it's really beneficial to actually be able to use that tools and use the things to do to actually promote it so a lot of the work that I've been doing um has been working with companies to actually say right we've done these projects we're doing our reporting we're reducing our emissions and this is how we're going to market it and the other thing I've been doing is saying well actually that's not necessarily sustainable and where if you start marketing this as being a a sustainable thing you're going to be accused of greenwashing and greenwashing is a big problem where companies maybe think they're doing the right thing and are motivated and they then start marketing themselves as being this very sustainable company and then when people start poking and prodding around and looking at it they realise well actually that's not necessarily true and it can cause quite a lot of brand damage to your company if you haven't thought through exactly what it is that sustainability is and that you are genuinely doing the right thing so interesting the UK last year the HM government reduced the thing called the digital data and technology playbook and within there there is a sustainability element so if you're a company or an organisation who wants to do business with the government you will be expected to provide some sustainability credentials and it's unfortunate that the speaker who has come today Adam Turner from DEFRA actually has a whole presentation about government policy in terms of procurement of services but it's quite useful because if you use the same principles here for your own organisation it will mean it will allow you to better understand sustainability in terms of what it is you want to do so you know one of the key things that they're asking for is this PPN 0621 which is a carbon reduction plan which says if you're going to do business with the government you need to show that you have a carbon reduction plan in place that you can actually go some way to achieving your sort of net zero policies in 2050 so you know as an organisation if you say right well when I'm dealing with a cloud provider or a third party if I can start asking them to provide me some of these stats some of these metrics some of these data so I can better understand their supply chain but I know that they have a plan to get to net zero and it's genuine and that maybe even I sign a code of conduct with them to ensure that they meet some of these expectations then some of the work that the UK government is doing is actually probably useful as a basis for you in terms of your own procurement plan in terms of how you can ensure that you can procure sustainable third party suppliers and I guess again this is really relevant when if you look at how IT is consumed today you know previously you had your own data centre you had your own computers but now your colos there's third party data centres there's cloud there's as a service so more and more the way we consume IT is through third parties and therefore it's really important to get it right at the procurement contractual phase because it's there when you can understand whether your supplier is going to be sustainable or not sustainable and that's then important when you have to do your scope three reporting because obviously if your supplier can't provide the data or they're not sustainable then that's going to have an adverse effect on your sort of carbon usage reporting that you're going to have to provide as part of your journey to net zero 2050 deliverables so one of the ways to try and avoid greenwashing and there are lots of different allegedly sustainable standards out there is to see whether your third parties actually have some valid certifications which you can use so one of the ones here EU code of conduct for data centres so are the data centres energy efficient are the data centres constructed using materials which are low in carbon are the data centres situated in a country where the energy mix is from renewables and zero carbon so a good example is somebody was building a data centre in poland but poland predominantly is getting its energy from burning ligite which is brown coal so therefore the carbon footprint of the energy source in poland is really bad and as a consequence that then means that when you're actually looking at your end to end emissions you have to include a proportion of your energy coming from brown coal which is not a very good source whereas alternatively if you were to do something in Norway most of Norway's energy sources is from renewables and therefore the actual total carbon footprint associated with the data centre and the IT equipment in there is better because it's coming from renewable sources rather than coal based sources again bream was another good certification which looks at the manufacturing process of the building to understand if the build environment is sustainable we've got some of our US standards so if you're on a global project you want to be looking at what's happening in the US obviously uptime institute to look at energy efficiency of the data centres CEDA which is our very own BCS derived standards where we look at energy efficiency of data centres and award a data centre based on their energy efficiency standards and obviously I say with their 14,000 standards and similarly recently the the BSI but your standards institute have brought out a whole set of standards associated with with sustainability so you know one of your questions when you're asking your suppliers about their sustainability standards is try and understand if they have achieved a certain level of sustainability based on the certifications that they've managed to achieve against so I've talked a lot about data centres and computing but one of the interest areas and areas that people don't really discuss very much is sustainability and software so it's not the data centre that's using the energy it's not even the compute that's using the energy it's a software that sits on top of it and up till now there's been very little focus on how you can actually make your software more sustainable so you know it should be seen as part of a project to try and consolidate software products unfortunately the way that computers have grown over time is it's not linear it doesn't stay like that more's law means that the compute processing power has been going up the relative cost has been going down and it's really only been going on one trajectory and because of that there's been no real incentive to say how can we actually write software which is more energy efficient so there's some guiding principles in terms of how you want to think about generating green software and obviously it all starts with the code and certainly to certainly the the carbon measurements are looking in the wrong place we're looking at the data centre but it's not the data centre that's driving it it's a software it's a software that that that powers the computers that then consume the energy and if you're thinking of a cloud only architecture well then that actually gets even more complicated because maybe you've got a a data source here you've maybe got a compute source here you've probably got some apis and some extra elements connected so then you suddenly got quite a kind of distributed software state using multiple vendors to provide a common set of services so cloud is is definitely a source for good because it's a more efficient way of delivering compute but it's more challenging to try and understand where the carbon is so there are some things out there to help you so obviously microsoft has its principle green but I would you know look a bit careful because you know microsoft products tend to have a lot of bulk in there they're not necessarily the most energy efficient to have extra software modules you don't necessarily need another place look is the the green software foundation but as we already discussed there's some big challenges coming along so AI is definitely a product for or a thing for good so we could use AI in a good way but I find this this the stat from MIT which is that to train an AI module uses as many carbon missions it takes to build drive and dispose of five cars over their lifetime so that's actually quite a lot of carbon so we got to really think about AI in terms of its cost and its benefit there are benefits but there are costs and I don't think right now people are looking at the cost associated with AI they're all interested in the wonderful features and functions that it has and we've got to be careful because we've kind of going this past so when we got cloud suddenly the cost of IT dropped significantly and what happened is lots more people were able to use compute and so cloud improved the access to compute but it also increased the emissions we then had big data analytics which is a similar kind of thing where you're then looking at huge unstructured data sources and there's benefits if you want to map deforestation in the Amazon big data is perfect you couldn't do it any other way so there's a benefit but again you're interrogating more data and more data means more carbon usage and then the final bit was that the you know the point is that we need to get a balance and we can't just keep going on the trajectory we're going now because whereas other industries are reducing their energy usage they're looking at how they get to net zero right now technology is still going up we're not reducing we keep coming up with new ways to use compute and do these these extra things for us we're moving to a digital by default world but that runs the risk of cooking the the planet to a certain degree as well so we have to try and get that balance right in terms of green software energy efficiency and compute it's quite interesting these guys here the the Rosetta code did a ranking of all the programming languages to try and understand which ones were the more efficient and unsurprisingly the older ones the seas to Pascal's the C++ these languages which were written from the time when there wasn't much compute very efficient in terms of the amount of energy they use relative to the amount of compute they do and then as we get to the more digital ones at the bottom the pythons the javas the rubies these software languages are very good for doing simple little digital things but you really need to think about if you're going to write your whole application it's not going to be probably the most efficient way of doing it so some of the key things is to think about your data I mean we've got one way we're saying data is great but obviously when you're interrogating data you're using compute power so how can you minimize the amount of data you need to interrogate selective programming languages that is sustainable try and remove some of those unused features the libraries the software loops all the things you don't need that come all bundled up within your software package aren't necessarily what you need monitor and manage your energy use so think about your energy think about getting some monitoring and some analytics on your software when you're coding it so that it actually you can have a look at it and say we're improving it we're making more energy efficient we can actually see that in our data center or our usage we're using less cloud instances and therefore we must be doing some improvement and as the audience here has predominantly enterprise architects this question probably needs to be asked as our suppliers the people who are delivering our software can they do something similar and so what are we looking for for mass suppliers so if I check how many for time I can't see the clock almost up right so I'll zoom on quickly so we're talking a bit about e-waste so e-waste is a big problem 50 million 54 million and one of the challenges that we we're not using our assets properly and we're sending a lot of assets straight to recycling rather than reuse so in Europe there's a big second-use market so part of the strategy is first thing can we repurpose something so we don't need to necessarily get rid of our own assets can we just reuse our assets in a slightly different way when they come to the end of their effective first life so they effectively have a second life and if we can then great if we can't then let's sell them on to someone else but if we really have reached the end of the life where we have to be very careful is how do we actually recycle those assets and if you look at e-waste it's got some good stuff in there so there is ceramics metal silicon plastics and currently the the best place to mine gold is a big pile of e-waste it has the highest concentration of gold it has what the the the rare earth metals which aren't particularly rare but are quite hard to mine and come from single single locations which is geographically and politically quite challenging so can we not think a little bit about how can we actually use e-waste in a way that we take these assets out and this is going to get really important because we're going to renewables so obviously wind turbines have huge magnets use expensive difficult to find rare earth metals um but within the UK there are a number of people who are actually focusing on this so there is Birmingham University is looking at recycling magnets in Cambridge they have a project where bacteria are eating e-waste and taking out the the rare earth metals and similarly Coventry University are focusing on a project to recycle the magnets and and some of the rare earth metals in there but what we have to get away from is the challenge which has happened in the past which if we go back to this one um only 12 and a half percent of e-waste is recycled the rest of it is just disappearing out and supply chain it's ending up in countries who are not really prepared to recycle it and if you search on the internet for some of the the things that are happening in Africa or Indonesia it's pretty unpleasant there's big piles of burning e-waste and it's not really what we should do so we need to try and focus our efforts on how we can actually close that loop um and that means researching um and developing ways of recycling some of these quite challenging materials but the really message here is it needs to remain in the UK and it needs to remain in in the country that has the products because we're the people who have the ability to actually develop the ways of recycling these materials and they're very valuable they're quite scarce and if we go to a zero carbon world where we all drive electric vehicles and we need renewable sources we actually need to get all of this back again so the hard drives and compute we need those magnets we need these materials and we can't just keep throwing them away because we just don't have the the materials available um i'll skip that one skip that one skip that one so this is the summary now so hopefully it's giving you a little idea of some of the triggers and the levers which are there which are going to be happening and are happening at the higher ends of the um at the C-suite within the organisations and so as we start moving down um people within enterprise architecture are going to be asked to start providing some of these data they need to provide information for the SDGs um the ESGs so the UN want to integrate the ESGs with the SDGs so they become one thing um we're going to be needed to do deliver scope one two and three reporting so that's going to be a given and it probably is legally required in some places it will become legally required I think here in in some period of time um but as you're making your decisions there are a number of standards that you can deliver so we are standards out there the seat of the ISO the BSI standards which you can ask of your suppliers and be careful of people with dubious standards which don't mean anything and there's lots of those out there so the the the risk of greenwashing um the government digital data playbook is a good start point um and we've got the carbon trust so carbon trust provides lots of useful data that you can go and look at which help you along your path in terms of carbon reporting they have thought leadership pieces and most of the things they have they provide are without cost so it's a something you can use to make a start so there we go that's my presentation finished hopefully it's useful thank you Alex yes please take a take a seat I'm going to combine a couple of the questions um any interests of time but um great great presentation sense of some real tips and things to think about and takeaways so thank you for that um so uh I'll combine these two um first part well is your opinion on how companies esg data will be independently governed and audited in the future um combined with when can we expect the current scope one to three are kind of passive metrics when can we um expect active prescription and governance to match these goals so based on the the the legal conferences that I've attended over the last 12 months or so there is a kind of movement to create a legal framework and it will have an auditable framework similar to say an audit firm coming to audit your accounts it needs to be independent it needs to meet a certain set of standards um and we're beginning to see that within Europe and I'm interested to see where the UK goes everything's a bit you know because of the way we are right now it's quite hard to see which direction we're going in but I suspect that we'll probably go in a similar way where you know in the way that you are audited for your accounts you're going to be audited for your esg rating and therefore your rating is then delivered by an independent third party um and by doing that it then has the um I guess the the kind of structure and and the governance and and the ability for other people to then read that as they would read any um auditing that's done of a firm third party do you see that being like European and maybe US or whatever or do you think there's any chance of a global approach I would like to see a global approach because as you know if you spend any time looking at and listening to the UN listening to the cops it's about the fact that this is not a country or a region specific problem we need to solve it's a global problem and therefore we would really like to see global standards that are there that everyone can adhere to and I think it's really prevalent again in the technology industry because we have projects which go across regions and it it would simplify the process a lot if we could have one set of global standards that everyone could adhere to but that might just be wishful thinking in my other hand it's a nice nice goal though it will be far more useful um what evidence evidence do you think there is of shareholder demand for green outcomes that that's actually a concern that's overriding corporate investment decisions of over putting that over financial expectations well I guess it's a balancing act isn't it so I mean it's always this has always been a risk in particularly when there were no things like ESG is that when you talked to business leaders they would always say look we absolutely believe in this but what we can't do is put our company out of business because um you know we're meeting these ESG standards now if everyone has to do it well then that means that it's um you know it's something that that it's like a business cost is associated with all businesses but I guess from from that perspective this is again why it has to be a global thing it's no you know if if Europe is doing something and Asia isn't well then it's going to put them at a comparative disadvantage and because of that that's then going to affect the business leaders in Europe we're going to say hold on I'm not doing this um so this is why it needs to be a globally recognised um thing but yeah I you know I guess the other driver though is consumers yeah so consumers are the people who are driving this um and I never believe there would be much consumer driven but there it seems to be particularly um within younger people who are a better understanding of the ESGs now have a better understanding of the sustainable development goals from the UN because you know our kids are learning it in school and you know so they this is part of their curriculum their view of the world is slightly different so there is an expectation that when they come out of school out of university get jobs consumed that the products and services they're consuming will be more sustainable and we're already seeing that with the the 20-somethings who are coming into the the workforce right now okay um again consolidating a couple of questions um data the data source power topic if that's incriminating why would anyone support a supply chain originating somewhere where coal powers the grid um example was given of Arizona for example were the the ideas so to just understand the question so yeah so why would you why would anyone support um if if it's such a clear cut thing that where your where your power is generated and I think you gave the example of Poland is bad source if that's incriminating why would people support that um why would the country support it well why I think why would why would customers support that um is I'm interpreting the question now but why would anyone support a supply chain originating in say Arizona USA where coal powers the grid well I suspect is that that the point is that they won't and then the objective is that um Arizona would then think about transitioning away from coal powered power stations to renewables but I think the the thing is that that's it's not in the mix now so you say you know you say okay I've got energy source I've got a a data center of the PUE of one theoretically you know I've got this super energy efficient data center but in my calculation mix I haven't calculated the mix of where the energy source is coming from so when I include the energy source mix into the overall calculation of sustainability of my data center then I understand well actually it's not that sustainable and if these countries Arizona and Poland want to be in a data center business then they need to start transitioning their energy away from coal a little bit quicker it's going to affect those decisions yeah yeah Alex we'll leave it there let people get to their to their break but hopefully you'll be around if people yes now they're around here questions great thank you very much wonderful thank you very much thank you


The other thing which I think is really one of CMU's secret sauce is what was called a reasonable person principle. Now everybody has a different definition of reason person. I'm going to give you my definition. I always took it as something where I could trust people. If they had to make a decision and I had the same information they had, I would usually probably come up with the same decision. So instead of trying to build a fiefdom or something, we were looking out for the good of the whole unit, good of the whole faculty.  So if you have to go and talk to people, all that takes time and you lose your initiative. And there are a number of times where we've literally written winning proposals in a week that, you know, if we had the regular hierarchy or needing approval or by a department head or something, we wouldn't have had a chance. So CMU is very entrepreneurial and it's a very trusting organization and it allows us to very quickly take advantage of opportunities.


Welcome to the Knuckleheads of Liberty. It's funny, you know, it just seems like this is such an interesting time. I guess maybe a lot of the times have been kind of interesting in the last, you know, 50 or so years, but it just seems like it's been pretty extraordinary these last 5 or 10 years with the comfortableness that squelching free speech in the name of, you know, being concerned over certain words or other things like that.  Yeah, at the national level, the media has always been pretty much in for all to whoever is controlling the government at the time. During the 50s, 40s, 50s, 60s, media was pretty much owned by Republicans. And Republicans, for the most part, controlled most of the major media outlets one way or another. That's gradually changed over time as the Republicans lost their majorities in Congress back in the 50s, and the Democrats took over and also took over in the administrative, at the presidential level. The media kind of followed along, you know, in order to get access to the newsmakers. And if you have to do and say and ask the right questions in order to get access to the newsmakers, and if you have wrong questions or promulgate the wrong editorial beliefs, then, you know, you don't get the juicy interviews anymore. And so the media, knowing that they have to be able to cover the story, kind of plays along and gradually changes. So we've seen over my lifetime, I've seen a very gradual shift from a Republican-inspired media to a Democratic media in terms of where most of the reporters and most of the ownership is coming from. It's not a gradual shift, but it's always been the case that whoever controls the government, de facto controls what the media says. They don't do it through outright censorship, but they do it through limiting access to people that they don't think will give them the kind of coverage that they want to hear. I mean, I noticed at first in the 1990s, the 90s during the Clinton era, it was kind of a transition period. We had the advent of the drug report, the internet, the alternative media, which were not controlled by the government at the time. You had ABC, NBC, CBS that controlled pretty much everything that you heard on television. You had the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Associated Press that pretty much controlled anything that got any national coverage as far as print is concerned. And the radio stations were, for the most part, simply following whatever the networks, ABC, NBC, CBS said or what AP said. They didn't do a whole lot of original reporting themselves. So in effect, the government controlled, de facto controlled what the media said. And I heard Hillary Clinton complain about Drudge during the Monica Gaye episodes. She complained, we don't have any intermediaries anymore. We don't have anybody that can essentially squelch what is going on over the internet. That was a complaint to Ferds. We don't have the control over the media that we used to have. And she thought that was absolutely terrible and that kind of opened up my eyes to what was going on as far as the government having de facto control of what the media says. It's not like Tass or Pravda in the Soviet Union, but it tends in that direction. Well, perhaps that's who's pulling Biden's strings on this disinformation board, right? To try to get that media. Over the last, I don't know, 10 years or so, certainly since the Trump era, the media, the social media, which for the most part were pretty much free for all. Anybody could voice their opinion. Anybody could put whatever heterodox opinion out there that they want to do on Facebook, on YouTube, on Twitter, etc. Very, very, very clearly and kind of softly at first, but then very much, very much, obviously, government said, hey, you can't be saying all of these things. You can't be doing all of these things that we don't agree with. And the way they were able to make their influence felt was to call Zuckerberg into the congressional hearings, the heads of the other primary internet social media corporations, bringing them all in front of congressional hearings, giving them the third degree, and implicitly threatening regulation of the internet. And very effectively, they brought them into line. They said, the internet company said, we're going to have to censor ourselves or we're going to be censored. And that's what you saw happen. And of course, with the removal of Trump from Twitter and the leftward tilt of the social media companies over the last 5, 10 years, it's become more and more obvious that the conservative voices can't be heard except on non-mainstream media for sure, and internet more and more so. You know, there are places like Parler and others that are fighting back. But the largest thing to remember is it's really not that much difference between what you're hearing when the Republicans were in control and when the Democrats are in control. You just hear a little bit of a different nuance. The main message is the same. Trust us. Do as we say. Don't rock the boat. We are in charge. We will do the right thing. Don't question us. That's what Republicans said back in the 50s and 60s. And that's what Democrats have been saying ever since. And they're both buying. So where do you place your typical podcast that would be media that you would access through Apple iTunes or Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts or any of those other methods to organize your podcast? Well, you know, podcast are one area where anything goes still. The problem is getting the podcast heard or watched. And for many years, Libertarian Counterpoint went on YouTube and there was a Libertarian Counterpoint channel. And if you went to the search bar on YouTube and a Libertarian Counterpoint and you'd be able to see every show that had ever been done, ranked by viewers, ranked by whatever, you know, most recent posting and so forth. It was really easy to find Libertarian Counterpoint. In the last couple of years, I've noticed when I want to go look at the most recent show or whatever, I have to actually put Libertarian Counterpoints in quotes in order to get it to come up at all on YouTube.  So YouTube has changed their algorithms to make it more and more difficult for the uninformed audience to find us. And that's true with all kinds of podcasts. If your audience knows to find you, it's still out there. But if your audience doesn't know where to find you, the internet giants are making it more and more difficult for anything other than mainstream kind of stuff. And by mainstream, I mean really kind of liberal-slanted, left-of-center, if you want to call it that way. That's the only thing that's getting promoted at this point. So it seems that as far as those podcasts go, it's more difficult now to find them because you don't really know where they are. You're not a subscriber, let's say. But what about for somebody that's a subscriber to a particular podcast? And let's pick Google, as is your example, since you used it before, about finding something you didn't really, you know, maybe you'd heard about it or something you're just kind of searching for it, but you're not a subscriber. So let's say now you go one step further and you found this libertarian-based podcast and you subscribed to it. Wow, I really like this. I want to see this all the time. Is the algorithms at Google even hiding those from people that are subscribers today? I'm not an internet guru enough to answer that question. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness always and forever.


Statistics and Excel. Probability, distribution, models, and families. Got data? Let's get stuck into it with statistics and Excel. Introduction. In prior sections, we've been thinking about how we can describe different data sets using both mathematical calculations such as the mean or average, the median, the quartiles, and with pictorial representation like the box and whiskers and the histograms. The histogram being the pictorial representation most used when we're thinking about the spread of the data, how the data is dispersed. We can then use different kind of language to describe the histogram and what the histogram looks like, such as it's skewed to the left or it's skewed to the right. Now we want to spend more time using mathematical models to describe...


Consider an M by N matrix A. We define the null space of the matrix A, which we'll denote MUL of A, the null space. This is gonna be the solution set to the homogeneous system AX equals zero. Now, sometimes this null space is called the kernel by some people, which if you can follow along the series, then kernel's like, oh, that has something to do with linear transformations, right? Well, there is a connection between linear transformations and matrices. In fact, if we define the matrix transformation associated to A, then the kernel of set transformation would be none other than the null space of this matrix as we're defining it right here. So the null space is the solution set to the homogeneous system AX equals zero. We define the nullity of the matrix A, which we'll just call it nullity of A, is gonna be the number of non-pivot columns in A. This is significant because the non-pivot columns will correspond to free variables. And we've seen before that a homogeneous system has non-trivial solutions for the free variables it has. So if we count the free variables in a system, then that essentially is telling us how big the null space, AKA the solution set of the homogeneous system is going to be. Now, in particular, the null space is going to be a subset of FN because it's a collection of vectors in FN. And that's where N here is the number of columns in the matrix A right here. But we can even do better. It's gonna, the null space is a subspace of FN. That's actually why we call it the null space as opposed to like the null set. We know that it's gonna be a subspace of FN here. And we can try to make an argument that the null space is just a span of vectors, which we saw in the previous example. And we'll see an example in this video as well. But it turns out we can argue that the null space is a subspace directly using the definition without any recitation of spans whatsoever. We don't need the geometric argument here. Because to be a subspace, we have to first show that the zero vector belongs to the null space of A. And that's pretty easy to do because if you take zero times A, that's equal to zero. And therefore zero is a solution to the homogeneous system, AX equals zero. So that gives us the null space that contains zero, right? The second condition was, if the vectors X and Y belong to the null space, then we need that their sum X plus Y also belongs to the null space. So let's suppose that X and Y belong to the null space. So if X belongs to the null space, it's a solution to AX equals zero. Then Y is also a solution. So we see that AY equals zero. Now consider the sum here. Well, A times X plus Y, well, since this is matrix multiplication, matrix times a vector, we can distribute here and we get AX plus AY. Well, AX equals zero and AY equals zero and zero plus zero equals zero. So this tells us that X plus Y is a solution that is A times X plus Y is equal to zero. So it's part of the null space. And the third condition to be part of the null space is that if X belongs to the null space, then we need that C, which is a scalar, CX also belongs to the null space. So again, using the assumption that AX equals zero, pick your favorite scalar C and consider the product here. A times CX, well, you can actually factor the scalar out. So you get C times AX, but AX is equal to zero and any scalar multiple of zero is again zero. So CX is contained in the null space and thus checking the three conditions. We've now determined that the null space is in fact a subspace of FN. So I wanna look at an example of a calculated null space, right? And so since the null space is the solution set of the homogeneous system, we can construct a spanning set for the null space. So we wanna represent the null space as the span of some set of vectors. This is similar to what we did before, but we're gonna have that perspective in mind right here. So let's take this three by four matrix, over the real numbers and we'll find a spanning set for the null space. This is gonna be basically coming down to solving the system, the linear system of equations. Now, because we're trying to solve a homogeneous linear system, normally there should be like this right hand side, zero, zero, zero, but I've seen many times already as you do row operations to a column of zeros, that column of zeros will never, ever, ever change. And so I'm just gonna omit it from consideration. It turns out that computing the spanning set for the null space is really the same thing as just determining whether the column vectors are linearly independent or not. It's just we go a little bit further. So I have a one in the pivot position, one, one. So I'm gonna use that. We're gonna get rid of the two below it by taking row two minus two times row one and getting rid of the three in the third row, we're gonna take row three minus three times row one. So we're gonna get minus two, minus six, plus six and then minus eight for row two. That's gonna give us a zero, negative five, ten and negative five and then for row three, we're gonna get minus three, minus nine, plus nine and then minus 12. Three minus three is zero, negative two minus nine is negative 11, 13 plus nine is 22 and one minus 12 is negative 11. That takes care of the first column. For the second column, we have a negative five right here. I can't help but notice that everything in the second row is actually divisible by five. So I'm actually gonna divide the second row by five, negative five in fact, but I also noticed that everything in the third row is divisible by negative 11. So since I'm at it, as well as we'll do that as well. And so dividing the second row by negative five and the third row by negative 11, I actually can see now that the second and third rows are now actually identical. Kinda like the Weasley twins there, we're identical. In which case, we're just gonna take row three minus row two and that'll just cancel out that entirely, giving us now a row of zeros. So that then gives us a matrix which is in echelon form. We can actually identify all of the pivots in the matrix now. There's a pivot column in the first and second, which actually tells us that column three and column four have no pivots, these are gonna be free variables. We're gonna have in fact two free variables in this system, two free variables. What that tells us is that our null space is gonna be spanned by a minimum of two independent vectors. All right? And so to help us here, we're gonna finish by putting this thing in row reduced echelon form. Take row one minus three times row two. So we're gonna get minus three, we're gonna get plus six and then minus three right here. Three minus three is zero. Negative three plus six is three and four minus three is one. So this gives us our REF right here. And again, identifying our pivots. We see a pivot in the first column and the second column. So we're gonna think of this matrix now in REF. We're gonna realize this as a, we're gonna realize it as a linear system. So we get the equation x one plus three x three plus x four equals zero, x two minus two x three plus x four equals zero and then zero equals zero. We don't need that. Solving for the dependent variables, we get x one equals negative three x three minus x four and then x two equals two x three minus x four. And so if we write our general solution, notice we have x one, x two, x three, x four using the identifications we saw earlier for the dependent variables, we get the following. And the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna separate this vector we see right here based upon the three variables. Notice that these positions depend on x three. So if we separate those from the x fours, we get a negative three x three. We get a two x three for the second position. We just get an x three for the third position and then there's nothing, there's no x threes in the fourth position. We're gonna do a similar thing for the next vector. Take a negative x four, take a negative x four, get a zero this time because there's no x four in the third position and then x four for the fourth position. So we separated the vector according to the x three, x four, we just separate those entirely. And then looking at the first one, everything's divisible by x three. So we factor out the x three that leaves behind negative three, two, one, and zero. And then looking at the second vector, we factor out the x four and that leaves behind a negative one, negative one, zero, one. And so it turns out these two vectors right here then form the spanners of a plane for which the null space is actually equal to that plane. Set say u to the first vector negative three, two, one, zero and v to be the second vector negative one, negative one, zero, one. And then we've now seen that the null space is the span of these two vectors. And so these two vectors is the form a spanning set for the null space which in this case we see is a plane.


Under any circumstances, we'd be an honor to introduce our keynote speaker today. But given Senator Warren's topic today, America's monopoly problem and what should the next president do about it, it's truly a privilege for all of us who have voiced concern about concentration of economic power these last many years. Many of you are in this room today. As you all know, Elizabeth Warren is a former law professor. But Elizabeth Warren is not any law professor. She's a law professor who knows how to fight. She picks the right fights and she sets out to win the fights that she picks. Senator Warren won on consumer finance. It looks like Senator Warren will win on too big to fail. In many respects, Senator Warren's focus on corporate monopoly is a natural outgrowth of her work on banking and finance. It's a natural next step. Power in the financial realm and power in the corporate realm are inextricably intertwined. On this immensely important issue of combating monopoly, which is so vital to the health of our democracy as well as our economy, Senator Warren, I believe, is gonna find some allies already in place. As we've heard recently, Senator Frank in a market have won pioneering victories in telecommunications. At least some of these allies will likely be in the Republican Party, as we saw last year when Senator McCain joined with Senator Warren in the effort to bring back Glass-Steagall. As those of you who follow our work at the Open Markets program know, we are very close students of the writings of the great Supreme Court Justice Lewis Brandeis. More than any other person, it was Justice Brandeis who extended the principles of traditional American Democratic Republicanism, traditional American anti-monopolism into the industrial age of the 20th century. As we look ahead to updating these same principles for America's 21st century, our digital economy, Senator Elizabeth Warren is one of the very few people alive today who truly merits comparison with Justice Brandeis. So, ladies and gentlemen, the honorable Senator Elizabeth Warren. Thank you. That was a really generous introduction and I very much appreciated it. I'm gonna have a hard time, I think, living up to a standard like that. But I really do appreciate this chance to come in and visit with all of you. As Barry mentioned, before I was a Senator, I was a law professor. But what he didn't explicitly say is that I taught contracts, secured transaction, commercial law, bankruptcy. All of the courses related to functioning competitive markets. So let me say it now, I love markets, I do. Strong, healthy markets are the key to a strong, healthy America. And that is the reason I wanted to be here today because anyone who loves markets knows that for markets to work, there must be competition. But today in America, competition is dying. Consolidation and concentration are on the rise in sector after sector. Concentration threatens our markets, it threatens our economy, and it threatens our democracy. Evidence of the problem is everywhere. You know, just look at banking. That's where I usually start this one. For years, banks have been in a feeding frenzy, swallowing up smaller competitors to become more powerful and eventually to become too big to fail. The combination of their size, their risky practices, and the hands-off policies of their regulators created the perfect storm. We know that excessive size and interconnectedness brought four of the biggest banks, brought the biggest banks to the brink of financial disaster. And yet today, eight years after that financial crisis, three out of four of the biggest banks in this country are larger than they were before the crisis. And we also know that two months ago, five of the biggest banks in the country were designated by both the Fed and the FDIC as too big to fail. But the concentration problem and the idea of too big to fail in the financial sector, it gets a lot of attention. But the problem isn't unique to the financial sector. It is hiding in plain sight all across the American economy. In the last decade, the number of major U.S. airlines has dropped from nine to four. And the four that are left standing, American Delta, United and Southwest, control over 80% of all domestic airline seats in the country. And man, are they hitting the jackpot right now. Last year, those four big airlines raked in a record $22 billion in profits. 22 billion, now listen to this, 18 billion alone came from fees for baggage, leg room, and paid toilets. Okay, the last one was a joke, you were supposed to laugh on that. But you see, the fact that you went along with me and thought maybe that had happened, you're thinking, oh geez, I wonder how many million they got out of the paid toilets. Okay, but think about it, what have passengers received in return for those higher costs? Fewer flights and worse services. Airline complaints rose 30% just from 2014 to 2015. And the list goes on. A handful of health insurance giants, including Anthem, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, UnitedHealthcare, Etna, Cigna, control over 83% of the country's health insurance market. Three drug stores, CVS Walgreens and Rite Aid, control 99% of all drug stores in America. Four companies control nearly 85% of the US beef market. Three produce almost half of all chickens in America. Some people argue now that concentration can be good because big profits encourage competitors to get into the game.  It says there's no competition today, but that's a good thing because maybe it means there will be competition someday. Look, the truth is pretty basic here. Markets need competition now. So I want to talk about five reasons to be concerned about the decline in competition. First problem is that less competition means less consumer choice. When consumers can purchase similar products from multiple competitors, they force market players to constantly seek out new ways to reduce prices and to increase the quality of goods and services so they can attract more of the business. But when companies consume their rivals instead of competing with them, consumers can get stuck with few or no alternatives. Prices go up, quality suffers. Consider Comcast, the nation's largest cable and internet service provider. Comcast has consolidated its position by buying up rivals. So today, over half of all cable and internet subscribers in America are Comcast customers. And last year was Comcast's best year in a decade. But while big telecom giants have been consuming each other, consumers have just been left out in the cold, facing little or no choice in service providers and paying through the nose for cable and internet services. Over a third of Americans who theoretically have access to high-speed internet don't actually subscribe because the price is just too high. And the data are clear. Americans pay much more for cable and internet than their counterparts in other advanced countries. And in return, we get worse service. The second reason for the decline in competition that it should cause concern is that big guys can lock out smaller guys and newer guys. You know, take a look at the technology sector, specifically the battle between large platforms and small tech companies. Google, Apple, and Amazon provide platforms that lots of companies depend on for survival. But Google, Apple, and Amazon also, in many cases, compete with those small companies so that platform can become a tool to snuff out competition. Look at some examples. In 2012, FTC staff concluded that Google was using its dominant search engine to harm its rivals of its Google Plus user review feature. Now, among other things, the staff produced evidence showing that Google promoted its own Google-branded content over its rivals, even though the rivals would otherwise have had top billing through an organic search algorithm. The FTC commissioners ultimately sided against the conclusion of their staff, but the European Commission has moved forward with formal charges on similar allegations, and Europeans may soon enjoy better protections than U.S. customers. Apple has received attention over similar kinds of issues. The latest example is its treatment of rival music streaming companies. Now, while Apple Music is readily accessible on everyone's iPhone, Apple has placed conditions on its rivals that make it difficult for them to offer competing streaming services. The FTC is investigating those issues and deciding whether to sue Apple for antitrust violations. And Amazon has faced similar charges. Last year, groups representing thousands of authors claim that Amazon uses its position as the dominant bookseller to steer consumers to books published by Amazon to the detriment of other publishers and that it extracts a larger share of book profits from publishers. And you know, this has another effect. It discourages publishing houses from publishing riskier books or books written by lesser known authors. There it is. Google, Apple, Amazon have created disruptive technologies that change the world and every day they deliver enormous value. They deserve to be highly profitable and highly successful, but the opportunity to compete must remain open for new entrants and smaller competitors who want their chance to change the world. Third problem created by less competition is that when competition declines, small businesses can just be wiped out and our whole economy suffers from that. Look at what is often referred to as the Walmart effect. Walmart is big and it is powerful. It delivers anywhere from 30 to 50% of the products that Americans consume and it controls over half of the groceries sold in some major cities. Now Walmart's gigantic size gives it a competitive advantage over smaller businesses and often when Walmart moves into town, small businesses collapse because they can't compete with the price leverage that Walmart has built with its suppliers. Walmart is also notorious for the low wages and poor working conditions it offers and the Walmart effect has a similar impact on suppliers as well, often forcing them to cut their workers' wages and benefits to keep Walmart's businesses. But think about what that means. Workers who cannot survive on those wages turn to public assistance, including housing, healthcare and food stamps, public assistance that is subsidized by other taxpayers. Walmart workers alone are estimated to collect about $6 billion a year in federal taxpayer subsidies just to survive. That means those low, low prices that Walmart advertises are paid for in part by high, high tax subsidies that every other American pays for. And in the meantime, Walmart's investors pocket high, high profits. The fourth problem that concentrated markets create is a political problem. The larger and more economically powerful these companies get, the more resources they can bring to bear on lobbying government and lobbying government to do what? To change the rules to benefit exactly the companies that are doing the lobbying. Over time, this means a closed, self-perpetuating rigged system, a playing field that lavishes favors on the big guys, hammers the small guys and creates even more market concentration. This is a big one. And it should terrify every conservative who hates government intervention. Competitive markets generate so many benefits on their own that the government's only role in those markets should be simple and structural, prevent cheating, protect taxpayers, maintain competition. Concentrated markets that are dominated by a handful of powerful players on the other hand, they don't produce those consumer benefits that flow from robust competition. Instead, the benefits get sucked up by a handful of executives and large investors. And their lobbying remains focused on protecting those giant corporations. Government intervention and concentrated markets inevitably becomes more and more complex and technocratic as it attempts to impose complicated regulations in an effort to recreate the benefits of competitive markets. It is costly, it is inefficient, and it plays right into the hands of the big guys because they can afford to throw armies of lawyers at the regulatory process. Small players end up having to shoulder regulatory compliance costs that make it even harder for them to compete while big players use their resources and their political clout to get carve-outs, loopholes, and rollbacks that favor themselves and make it even harder for new competitors or small competitors to survive. Over time, the result is a trifecta, more intrusive government, more concentration, and less competition. Finally, concentration has contributed to the decline of what was once a strong, robust middle class in this country. As corporations get bigger and bigger and bigger, a handful of managers get richer and richer and richer. And God bless, in America, we celebrate success. But what about everybody else? What about small business owners and community bankers? People who used to be able to hold their own with the big guys, but now find it harder and harder to keep up with the armies of corporate lawyers and lobbyists determined to rig the economy against them. What about the employees at Walmart who scrape by on help from the food pantry and Medicaid, but who never have an opportunity to build any security? What about them? They're just stuck. Concentration is not the only reason for rising economic security, but it sure as heck is one of them. Concentrated industries result in concentrated profits. It is the ultimate price squeeze. When markets are not competitive, big businesses are able to extract monopoly profits by setting prices that are higher and higher. In 2014, the top 500 largest firms pocketed 45% of the global profits of all American businesses. And the vast majority of those profits went to the wealthiest of the wealthy. As of 2013, the wealthiest 1% of Americans held nearly half of all the stock and mutual funds held by all of America. And who gets a shot at their own dream? When big businesses can shut out competition, entrepreneurs and small businesses are denied their shot at building something new and exciting. Left unchecked, concentration will destroy innovation.   And left unchecked, concentration will pervert our democracy into one more rigged game. But the good news, and there is good news here, is that this isn't the first time that America has faced this threat. We have been here before and we know the way out. More than a century ago, America was in the midst of a transformation from a nation of small shopkeepers and craftsmen and farmers to a country of giant corporations. As greater and greater economic and political power concentrated in a smaller and smaller number of firms, America decided we needed some new policies, simple structural rules to level the playing field. Congress created antitrust laws to address the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few. Passing the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act, progressive era reformers like Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson, were trustbusters, people who fought the power that monopolies wield in the economy and in politics. The original purpose of these laws was to fight concentrated economic and political power. 100 years ago, Congress understood that these two factors were forever intertwined. Arguing for the passage of the Sherman Act in 1889, Senator John Sherman famously declared, if we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessities of life. A generation later, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who we were talking about earlier, worried that the concentration of economic power was so great that corporations are sometimes able to dominate the state. The corporate system was becoming a ken, he said, to the feudal system. That would mean the rule of plutocracy. Brandeis declared that without vigilance, our government would be controlled by the very rich and the very powerful. Under Franklin Roosevelt, antitrust enforcement really took off. With Thurman Arnold at the helm, the Justice Department's antitrust division grew from 18 lawyers to 500 lawyers, and they ramped up their litigation. In Arnold's five years running the division, those lawyers brought almost as many cases as there had been in the previous 35 years. Antitrust law became real. And American corporations knew it. But starting in the 1970s, the story starts to change. In the late 1970s, Robert Bork wrote an influential book rejecting the idea of competition as the driving rationale for antitrust law. Bork argued that the government should weigh the costs of less competition against the claims of greater economic efficiency that consolidation could create. In his view, if a monopoly persisted, it was because the monopolist was quote, more efficient, close quote, than its competitors. If not, the market would correct itself and the former monopolist would be driven out. No need for government in his make-believe world. Bork proudly ignored all of the harms caused by concentrated political power or economic power that had motivated Congress in the first place to pass those strong antitrust laws. Now, Bork's framework limits antitrust thinking even today. When coupled with the deregulatory ideology of the Reagan era, the Bork approached antitrust law, meant that government largely stepped out of the way and just let companies grow larger and larger and larger. Now this country needs more competition and more competitors in order to accelerate growth. We need more competition to promote innovation, more competition to reduce the ability of giant corporations to use their money and power to bend government to benefit themselves. So how do we get more competition? How do we do it without new legislation that would require co-operation from a Congress that is already awash in campaign contributions and influence peddling? Because that's how we've gotta think about this problem. Well, I'll tell you, we can start with the president and an executive branch willing to once again enforce our laws the way Congress originally intended them to be enforced. We have the tools right now to reinvigorate antitrust law. And here are three ways that we can do it. First, hold the line on anti-competitive mergers. The DOJ and the FTC are on the front lines in the battle over mergers. These two agencies already have the authority to stop harmful mergers in their tracks. Too often though, they just don't use that authority. Now look, there is no question that antitrust enforcement has picked up since the Reagan administration. And the largest increases in merger challenges were during the Clinton and Obama years. And the Obama administration has challenged a higher percentage of mergers than any administration since before Reagan's. But mergers are outrunning enforcement. While the DOJ and FTC have opposed some huge mergers recently, many others have slipped through with very little pushback. In fact, 2015 was the biggest year for mergers in US history, both in terms of the number of mergers and in the size of mergers. Now, it has become fashionable in recent decades for the DOJ and FTC to allow mergers with serious antitrust implications to go forward if the merging entity agrees to certain conditions. So for example, one or both of the merging companies might need to sell off part of their business or the new entity might need to agree to change some business practices in ways that supposedly would preserve competition despite the increased market competition. These conditional approvals are sold as win-win. There's just one problem. Too often they just don't work. A recent analysis of mergers challenged by the DOJ or FTC between 1999 and 2003 concluded that stopping mergers is the best way for regulators to prevent high price hikes down the road. The study compared product prices before and after mergers and found that when the DOJ and FTC allowed mergers to proceed with conditions attached, dramatic price increases usually followed. By comparison, when regulators opposed the mergers altogether, prices rose at a fraction of that pace. Now, there's another problem with relying on conditions to offset the impact of bad mergers. And that is that the regulators who didn't have the chops to block the deal in the first place are very unlikely to force the companies to break up after the fact, even if the companies blow off the conditions. In other words, enforcement of merger conditions is weak at best. Even when companies meet the conditions, like selling off some of their assets, they sometimes just turn around and buy back the same assets.  I mean that literally, that part is not a joke. It's not like paid toilets. It actually happens. That's what happened after Hertz was permitted to merge with Dollar Thrifty and after Albertsons was allowed to merge with Safeway. In both cases, the divested parts of the businesses then declared bankruptcy and the bigger companies just bought back part of the companies they had been forced to sell off. The lesson is clear. Where a merger raises fundamental antitrust concerns, regulators need to stand tall and say no. Number two, closely scrutinize vertical mergers. Vertical monopolies exist when one company owns multiple parts of its own supply chain. The manufacturing, distribution, production sales, and again, size creates a tremendous advantage. There's no competition anywhere in the chain and other businesses are locked out and often die. The DOJ and FTC should approach vertical mergers with the same skepticism that they use on horizontal mergers. As an aside, by the way, the guidelines that apply to vertical mergers have not been updated since 1984. I could have you raise your hand if you were born after 1984. And the world has changed a lot since then. Revising those guidelines would at least be a good start here. And number three, we're coming to the end. Require all agencies to promote market competition and appoint agency heads who will do so. Too often, the DOJ and FTC are viewed as the only agencies responsible for promoting competition. Promoting competition should be taken seriously across the executive branch. Let me give you a couple of examples on this. The FDIC, the Federal Reserve and the other agencies have a role to play in making sure that financial institutions don't become so large that their smaller competitors don't have a chance to serve the American families and American small businesses. The FCC and FTC both have a role to play in making sure that small innovative tech companies can develop newer and better ways for us to connect with each other without they're being crushed by the big guys. The Agriculture Department has a role to play in making sure that poultry farmers and produce growers aren't held hostage to the whims of giant firms. In April, the White House issued an executive order requiring all government agencies to identify ways that they can play a role in increasing competition. And that is exactly the right place to start. We need strong regulators who will promote competition across all agencies, not just at the DOJ and FTC. We need strong regulators who draw the line on mega mergers and on concentration across the economy. We need strong regulators who believe in competition because personnel is policy. These are just a handful of the steps that the president and federal agencies can take now and defend competition. But there is much more to do at all levels of government and there are a lot of good ideas out there. Earlier this month, the Roosevelt Institute issued a report laying out a number of ways to check corporate, financial and monopoly power. And today, the Center for American Progress released a paper discussing the harmful effects of market power and proposing an extensive set of reforms designed to reinvigorate competition policy. Proposals, including adopting a public interest standard for enforcement actions, placing the burden on merging companies to prove that mergers will not harm competition and requiring agencies to release more information about their enforcement actions. Those are proposals that would make a real difference. Strong executive leadership could revive anti-trust enforcement in this country and begin once again to fight back against dominant market power and overwhelming political power. But we need something else too. And that is the revival of the movement that created anti-trust laws in the first place. For much of our history, Americans organized and protested against the forms of consolidation. As a people, we understood that concentrated power anywhere was a threat to liberty everywhere. It is one of the basic principles founding our nation and it threatens us now. Competition in America is essential to liberty in America but the markets that have given us so much will become corrupt and die if we do not keep the spirit of competition strong. America is a country where everyone should have a chance to succeed. And that happens only when we demand it. Thank you all for your work. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Well, that was pretty good. As I mentioned before, we study a lot of history here and I would actually say that that was probably the best, most important anti-monopoly speech in the United States in a hundred years, in a hundred years, in a hundred years, in a hundred years, in a hundred years, in a hundred years, in a hundred years, in a hundred years.