Well, good afternoon. Thanks everyone for coming today. My name is Michael Lane. I am a technical program manager in the networking division of Amazon. I'm actually in the physical stores division. So physical stores, they're the ones who are developing all of the low-end switches, not the high-end data center switches. So one of the things we focus on are really the enterprise use cases and the edge use cases. So that's why we're going to be focusing a little bit on the enterprise edge open source operating system. For a little bit of background on myself, I've been at Amazon for about now going on 11 years. I was in AWS for eight of those years. And for the last three years, I've been part of the physical stores division, which recently merged back into AWS. So I'm back kind of a bit of a boomerang into AWS. So one of the things we wanted to talk about today was DENT. So let's just first kind of set the ground here with what DENT is. So DENT is not just an operating system, but it's a whole ecosystem that includes software, it includes hardware. We have a number of manufacturers. We also have some silicon providers. So it's not just hardware, and it's not just software. It is everything that is included from even testing. The testing methodology that we're leveraging is also part of the DENT ecosystem. This started out as a Linux foundation project. So we started about three and a half, four years ago in the Linux foundation. And then we've continued to work not only in Linux foundation, but we've also done some work in the Open Compute project as well. So you'll see later in the slides where we've kind of started to do that crossover between the two and a lot of collaborative work between the two organizations. We are very much technically focused on the networking solutions. So you'll find that a lot of the talk that I'm going to be speaking on is really around networking solutions. But it's not to say that the DENT operating system couldn't be applied in other use cases. Some of those use cases might be edge gateways or perhaps RF gateways, some places that we're also using those as well, or in IoT devices. The other thing is part of our mission is to promote participation. So you will see a call to action at the end to participate in the DENT Linux foundation working group or the whole project. And you can do it in a number of different ways. One is you can become a member of course, but also just attending the TSC. And also we just started, we just formed about a month ago an end user group as well. So this is something where you can voice your features, your use cases to help us build a better ecosystem. And then finally providing a neutral home. This is one of the things around developing a community organization, open source organization is having a neutral place. So especially when you're talking about multiple suppliers, whether they be ODMs or they could be Silicon providers. So we want to make sure we have a neutral place for each of them to develop and co-work. So let's just kind of go into some of the things that we are working on today. Some of the key elements, starting at the top Linux, the DENT operating system is a Linux based operating system. It uses switch dev and now most recently we've introduced SI, so the SI is the switch abstraction interface and that's an OCP driven project. And then it also involves the Silicon manufacturers. So we have multiple Silicon manufacturers here, a couple listed, we have Marvell. We started with NVIDIA, I guess it was Melanox at the time who's now NVIDIA and they're more also working with Broadcom today as well to pull into this ecosystem. From a hardware perspective, not only are we doing, you know, just, we're not just doing routers and switches, but we're also looking at expanding the ecosystem into cameras and sensors. So in our use case in the physical stores, we also have DENT running in some of our pedestals in our entry exit gates. We're also looking at expanding that into some of our gateways in terms of, these are RF gateways for sub gigahertz. These are like electronic shelf labels and for some of our shelving units that are running at sub gigahertz. All of these run on a DENT operating system. And then software, of course, our networking OS, our telemetry, our configuration and provisioning. As you can imagine for us at Amazon, a lot of these are very much cloud based, but it's not to say that it couldn't be portable to another type of cloud, whether it be Azure or Google or a cloud of your choice. We just happen to use it at Amazon. We just ride on AWS as one might expect. And then of course support. You know, this is the developers, end users, testers. We have a really strong partnership with Keysight. You'll see that they're listed here too. Keysight has been very pivotal in developing a lot of our use cases and housing a lot of our test beds so that individuals can actually go there virtually and test a DENT operating system. They can test a DENT topology or a network based upon a DENT topology. So these are types of things that we're working with within the community. So a couple of things, let me dive directly into the operating system itself. So first of all, the operating system is built on Linux. So it is your flavor of Linux. Some choose different types of Linux, but it is very much so a Linux based operating system. So from a user's perspective, it looks and feels like a Linux device. Okay, so it's not gonna have that shell that one might be accustomed to with some of your big iron like Orista or Cisco or Juniper. It's gonna have a much more server-linux-like user interface. It is free to access the source code. So that's one of the things that we leverage is the source code is free to download. There are no barriers in terms of pulling things down or installing the binaries directly from the DENT website. So we have a lot of users who want to trial the DENT hardware. So we're able to connect them with some of our ODMs that we're partnering with and they're able to just download straight off of the GitHub the DENT operating system and build it themselves. And then some of the benefits, I think these are pretty common across the open source space quality. We have automated test beds that are developed in-house and they're run by Keysight. So we actually have a third party who runs all of our test beds. They run all of our regression testing. We also do the same internally within Amazon. And we provide, we actually upstream all of our test cases into the community. So we're developing more and more cases as we go. And then cost, oftentimes when you're working with big iron you have to worry about costs. So here the cost for pulling down the software, leveraging the software is free. Now there are other costs of course and that is managing your own network and managing the resources but we all understand that those costs are your own internal operational costs. And then finally, being community-driven, open source, as an open source program it is community-driven. We get a lot of feedback. There are users that aren't listed on that previous slide that have provided a lot of really valuable feedback in terms of what features that we are, that we should pursue. So some of those features, I'll show you what we have today in terms of features. We started off releasing Dent 1.0 about two years ago. And with Dent 1.0 it was primarily for the Amazon retail business. So being the first customer, Amazon retail needed some of these features developed. So what you'll see over on the left-hand side are the initial features that we released with Dent 1.0. There might have been a couple of features around policing as well. The first few features we also released with Dent 1.0 as well. But as we matured, within one year after releasing Dent 1.0, we released Dent 2.0 which we added more robust features around Apple management, improved firewall. So one of the things that we found was scaling became a little bit of a challenge. So working with our Silicon providers and working with our developers, we were able to scale a lot greater than we did initially. And then also we added a PoE controller. So Power over Ethernet is pivotal in the enterprise space, at least in our space because we need to be able to power cameras. Even our gates, our entry-exit gates are all powered over Ethernet. So we needed to establish an ecosystem around the PoE. And this was a little bit of a challenge because we had to not only do it that was Silicon agnostic, but also we had to make sure that it was hardware agnostic as well. So we could leverage the same controllers whether the hardware was built by Acton, Edgecore, or DNI, or Wistron, or other ODMs that we leveraged. And then we also included some of the port isolation features in version two. This was important. We had one customer, the DoD, had stepped in and said, you know, some of the things that we want to do in our network in leveraging Dent was some port isolation and even port mirroring. So these are new features that we added as part of the Dent operating system in Dent 2.0. And then finally, our last part of Dent 2.0, which was again released last year, we added dynamic routing support via FRR for BGP, OSPF, and ISIS. Now, we continue on a pretty much a annual cadence right now. That's kind of how we've established ourselves in delivering new features for our customers. Now, with Dent 2.0, at least for the Amazon side, we were able to provide sufficient features that we didn't really have to go into a Dent 3.0. However, we were looking after the entire ecosystem and looking after other customers, prospective customers who might want to leverage Dent in the enterprise. So we added a few more features. One of the things here in particular are early access to things like 802.1x for authentication. So this is something that we had not only internally within Amazon, we had our fulfillment centers. They're like, well, we would love to use your operating system. However, we also use 802.1x for authentication within the fulfillment centers. So we've added 802.1x as a new feature in 3.0. And by the way, 3.0 was released only about three weeks ago. So we've actually delayed the release a little bit because we wanted to do some extensive testing both internally within the Dent community as well as at Amazon. Even though some of these features aren't actually implemented in our network, we felt it was prudent for us to go ahead and verify some of these features ourselves. QOS is an interesting one. So in our use case, quality of service is necessary because we have very costly WAN links to each of our stores.  In our use case, we're not necessarily constrained by the bandwidth going down to the store, but the bandwidth going up from the store. And why is that? Well, we have all this AI inference, all these cameras that are doing all this work that is actually being done in the cloud. So a lot of these workloads are being pushed to the cloud so that the cloud can do a lot of the inference. So we implemented quality of service and right now we're in the process of rolling out quality of service internally within our network. And by the end of this quarter, by the end of June, we will have quality of service rolled out across all of our fleet within the physical stores. IGMP snooping and then egress policies, we enhanced a number of the egress policies. This is something that we felt was necessary, especially from a firewall and security perspective. Now in terms of the current state of dent, now up until now, dent has been very much kernel driven. And what does that mean? It is basically uses switch dev and the TCP IP stack and the networking drivers inside the kernel. So this adds for a lot of stability because the kernel itself is well maintained. However, it can get rather tricky because onboarding a new vendors SDK presents its own challenges, sometimes around IP, sometimes around limited developers because then you actually have to work with Marvell, you have to work with Melanox, you have to work with Broadcom directly to write those drivers into the kernel. So it just didn't scale, as we're looking at more and more silicon providers, it just didn't scale. So the community also had to respect, in some cases, they're the silicon providers SDK. You can't just upstream the SDK. You obviously have to do it in binary format and then there's a lot of things that you need to consider around uploading things in a binary format. So what we did is back in October last year, we started reassessing what is the right model for us to develop software in a more modular fashion, allowing more silicon players or silicon providers to play within the ecosystem. So this is where we moved to PSI. So for those of you who don't know what PSI is, PSI is the switch abstraction interface. This is a project that's actually under OCP, but you have other organizations such as Sonic who highly leverage PSI for all of their communications to the silicon directly. So what we're doing is we're leveraging a similar architecture for DENT, though it's not quite as heavy as the Sonic architecture. So in another slide, I'll show you a little bit more about what I'm talking about there. But one of the things we wanted to leverage is we meet regularly with the Microsoft team and with the Sonic team. It's kind of advantageous being that they're only a few miles away, that we can just go over across the lake and we can go visit with them and we can actually have sit-downs and one-on-ones with them to talk about how do we build an ecosystem together around PSI? Allowing the Sonic community to really focus on the enterprise from a perspective of the data center. So they start at the data center and they work their way out. Whereas DENT is kind of looking at it from the edge and working their way in to the enterprise. So we will come together at the enterprise and I think this is where we give the opportunity for customers a choice. Do they want to run a Sonic operating system or a DENT operating system? I don't necessarily see them as competing. I think that this is an opportunity for the two organizations to collaborate and now that we're both in the Linux Foundation, we actually have the means to collaborate in a neutral space, that being the Linux Foundation. So one of the things we wanna do is by leveraging PSI, we're working more closely with the PSI community to enable enterprise features. Some of those things such as 802.1x that I mentioned before or even quality of service may not have been in the PSI that is used for Sonic. So what we're doing is we're enabling those features in the enterprise space. So one of the challenges we're also having is in the PSI community is really getting the right players on the enterprise space to be represented. So a lot of times PSI and Sonic, people kind of think those are synonymous, but there are actually other operating systems that are running on PSI. FBOSS, for example, from Meta, they're also running on PSI. So we chose this more neutral approach and still an open source, open community approach allowing us to actually intercept more silicon. This opens up the door to beyond just Marvell or Melanox or Broadcom, but not even Cisco Silicon One. And some of the other silicon could be very interesting in the enterprise space. So a little bit about the architecture. So the architecture itself starts, kind of the PSI is the HAL. It's the hardware abstraction layer. And we're working very closely with a couple of partners in Romania to do the software development. Amazon's really focused on doing a lot of the integration work with our hardware, but then we also have a supplier in Romania who's doing a lot of the software work, a lot of the heavy lifting. And we've also worked with some of the other software developers also in the Eastern European area, specifically on PSI. The advantage here is that you have a lot of developers who are already familiar with PSI. So this opens up the community even more. We're just opening up specific features that are enterprise ready. And then we have to go back and we have to do the validation. So one of the changes here, as you can see in this diagram is at the ASIC level, you have all of the hardware. And then that right now, it goes up to the available kernel, vendor kernel module, whatever that might be. And then we've added this other area called the Netlink switch dev driver. So since we're still running in switch dev, we're still running in Linux. We need to have this shim that we've developed so that we can talk not only to the switch manager via a PSI API, but also we're able to continue to work in kernel space. And then as we go up into user space, then we have, of course, we still have FRR, TCPIP and the TC applications, those things remain. But what we've done is we've enhanced both the Linux switch dev driver, as well as the switch manager. We've created this new interface or new shim so that it can talk directly to the ASIC. So some of you might be familiar with like a LibSci and this is very similar to what we've done here. We wanna create this so that it is agnostic to each of the vendors. However, to be honest, we're having a few problems there. So the SI interface was intended to be vendor agnostic. However, we do understand that there are nuances with each vendor, each supplier. So we have to take those into account. Okay, and I think in the Sonic community, they're realizing very much the same thing. You have a question? So we have both dotted interfaces. We have the one down here with the netlink switch dev driver, okay? So that one is pretty much what we've always had in the past, you know, in switch dev. But what we added was this switch manager up at the top, which is in user space. Yes, that's exactly right. Yes, yeah, the intention here is to abstract everything away. We're kind of in this interesting phase right now, because all of our up to version 2.0 and even version 3.0 was all written natively in switch dev. Right? Switch dev is at the kernel layer, right? Yes, it does. Yep, yep. And then what we've done is we've created this in the user space, the switch manager, which basically talks to PSI, right? And then also talks to our switch dev layer as well. Yes, yes, yep. So it is a little bit complicated too, because just for a little bit of context, the native dint actually requires two CPUs. One is a firmware CPU, and one is a, which we consider kind of a control plane CPU. And the other one is the primary CPU. And that's basically due to the architecture of dint. And the thing is, is when we start talking to some of our suppliers, it actually is much more expensive, obviously, to have two CPUs running in a switch. So what we're able to do now is we're using the term trampoline is basically use a single CPU using PSI, okay? So that we're able to use a single CPU and run the switch in just a single CPU mode. The advantage here is that when you take a Marvell CPU, or a Marvell ASIC that has an embedded SOC, I don't have to install another CPU on the main board. Actually, yeah, so we will no longer be developing any new features in native switch dev. Yep, all new features will be going, will be developed using the PSI model. That is one option, yes, that we could use that. Yeah, so the CPU, and that's one of the things, in the architecture, and I don't think I have a diagram of a typical switch architecture for dint, a block diagram, the old versus the new, and I think that's probably something I can add in future slides. But the architecture up until release 3.0 required two CPUs, and with the new architecture running dint, we're moving to one CPU, primarily for cost, but the other reason is we just don't, we realize that we don't need two CPUs after all. We do use that CPU for some of the user space applications, but what we've found is even some of the CPUs for Broadcom, for example, may not be powerful enough. So the Marvell CPUs, for example, is a dual-arm core, and the dual-arm is actually sufficient to be able to run dint operating system as well as local agents. However, the Broadcom, at least in the Trident 3x2, Trident 3x3, they have a single-arm core, and it just isn't enough power to actually run a switch. So you might have, we're looking at how we change the architecture. Yeah, so that's an interesting thing, how can you run containers on dint? Yep, yep. So let me, I'm going to actually jump beyond my call-to-action slide, and I'm going to show you something that we announced a couple of days ago from a hardware architecture, how exactly we're addressing that space. So, let me just jump a couple of slides. So a couple of weeks ago at OCP, we announced the Enterprise Edge Gateway. Well, the Enterprise Edge Gateway is exactly intended to do what Amir was asking, is the Enterprise Edge Gateway actually has a slot for a second CPU. And this is a Kami-based CPU, so you could use that for containers, you could use it for firewalling, you can use it for any user application. It doesn't have to be part of the actual switch NOS itself. You can still run the switch NOS on the embedded CPU, and then you would have this type of device, and I'll show you real quick the hardware specifications. So some of the hardware specifications include, and this is just a mock-up, so this was again submitted only about three weeks ago at OCP at the Regional Summit. And the intention here is to have a PoE switch, it could be 24 ports, it could be 48 ports that runs not just PoE, but it could also run Wi-Fi, it could run LTE modem. So it's a modular type device, but it also has that Kami module, and you'll see here on the second bullet down, it says PoE support, and then Kami CPU module, that could be an Intel-based, it could be ARM-based. We're starting to play now with some of the Intel Denvertons and some of the ARM, the NXP arms to develop new Kami cards specifically for this box. The workloads that we're specifically looking at are things like containerized, we call it EC2 Anywhere, right? So for AWS, we would leverage it for EC2 Anywhere, but it could be any Kubernetes, it could be any containerized workload that you want to run on it. The other thing is you could actually run this as a Sonic box as well. Currently, Sonic requires a second CPU based upon their architecture, so this could be a Sonic-compatible box as well. So this is again why we're moving towards a more open hardware and open software approach so that both communities, the Sonic community and the Dent community can leverage similar platforms. This provides customers a great opportunity for choice. Also, this isn't necessarily just a retail box. This could be used in telcos. I've already had conversations with a lot of the telco community. They may not like the form factor. Some of them might say, hey, we'd like to have a desktop form factor that they could actually deliver to a customer. So these are types of things that we're going to start taking a look at. And I'll be working with a lot of the ODM partners. I know that there's some ODMs here in the audience today who I'll have some conversations with around how to create this box that might be more user-friendly or home-friendly. Price targets. I would love to see these price targets for a box like this fully loaded, probably about under $2,200. That would include a Wi-Fi module, include an LTE module and a Commi board. Base model probably would run around $1,500 just for the base. And then when you start adding the Commi, that's another $300. Wi-Fi is going to be another $2,250. LTE is going to be about the same, maybe about $200. And we're working with Wi-Fi partners. Specifically, we're working with Qualcomm on some of their chipsets, both for the Wi-Fi side as well as for the LTE side. This could also be used in your home office for something like you can add storage to it as well. So there are enough slots, enough lanes coming off the CPU. You could actually use this for some local storage, caching storage as well. But I wasn't planning to show these two slides, only if time permits, but I think we had the right audience, the right questions around where we're going. And as I said here, it is going to be multi-sourced from multiple providers, but also the intention is for it to be able to leverage multiple operating systems. Dent, if you want to use this in an environment where it's strong for retail. Sonic, so there might be some Sonic users. I know that I have colleagues over in Alibaba who have deployed obviously a very large Sonic deployment all the way down to their retail sites. So this is a really great opportunity to leverage a common box in their retail stores. So these are types of opportunities that we're going after, and it's just a matter of putting things to paper and really getting those out there. Yeah, another question. It could. I mean, depending upon the Sonic architecture, the hardware itself can support multiple architectures. So given that this is running Oni, much like what Sonic runs Oni as well. So from a base layer, from a boot up layer, it can choose whether it runs Dent or it could run Sonic. So it really doesn't. It is all a matter of how you leverage the hardware to be able to run the different software applications. Yes. That's right. It's one or the other. So I think Amir should probably come up and probably give the rest of the talk. But Amir actually saw my talk at OCP as well. And we presented this as a keynote, this particular device. And it's one of those where Amazon coming to the table and showing, hey, we're really innovating in this space and we're really thinking about it. But only that, we want to also open it up to the community to help develop, co-develop these. Like I said, we're working with Microsoft on the side side and they're going down the Sonic path. We're going to go down the Dent path. But we do have other retailers. There are big retailers in the Pacific Northwest. There's a big coffee retailer that we're working with. We'll just leave it at that. So these are great opportunities. And I will go back to the call to action slide because we're right at the top of the 40 minutes. And this is something for you to take away with. On the Dent side, I absolutely encourage you to go to the Dent.dev. You can learn much more about Dent. Learn all about what we're doing, how to get involved. A couple of things there is we do have regular TSC. This is the technical steering committee meetings on Wednesday mornings at 8 a.m. Pacific time. And then we just started the end user group. So the board met two weeks ago and we voted to have an end user group and that coffee, that green coffee company that I referred to was our first end user.  But we encourage others to also join the end user group because we really want to hear your feedback. We also have a demo pool so that if you want to try things out, you can either do it virtually that's hosted by Keysight or you can actually get some hardware from us. Amazon is holding some hardware that you can use for demo. And then I need to also cross market, you know, OCP because PSI is part of the OCP organization. So I do encourage you to take a look at what we're doing in the PSI. I'm also the co-chair of the Enterprise Connectivity Solutions or ECS Working Group over in OCP. So we focus on enterprise solutions and the box that I just showed you, the Enterprise Edge Gateway is the second submission from the ECS Working Group team. The first one was from Target, from Jeff Strandy, from Target who provided just a one gig switch, just a basic one gig switch and a basic 10 gig switch. But this one provides a little bit more functionality with the Enterprise Edge Gateway. And then finally, you know, I have that last bullet and this is really a call to action, also kind of a side to some of the ODMs. We do have at least four ODMs who are planning to have that box that I just showed you available for evaluation, probably about the end of Q4 this year or Q1 next year. And I'm more than happy to help coordinate that. You can also do that through the DENT organization. But I'm really super excited about, you know, where we're going with DENT, kind of the transformation that we're going through right now in adopting PSI. It's not easy, I'll be honest with you, but we feel it's the right direction to pull in the right level of developers and also have a common platform that we can leverage with the Sonic community as well. So I think I am out of time, but I do appreciate the questions and I'm available afterwards for additional questions. So I want to thank you very much.


Season one was plagued with a lot of rage quits. Come on. Ah! But when it came down to it, it was time to secure our first Super Bowl ring. We started with a large deficit, but with nine seconds left on the clock and my opponent with no timeouts, we sent a zero blitz. I'm done for you! Yes, mom! Boom! When we shot the gap, I risked giving up a touchdown, but we sacked Lamar Jackson. No huddle could save him. Locke expired. And we secured the first Wheel of Mutt ring of Madden 24. Season two was a slugout. We made it to the wild card playoffs and sadly lost the game 32 to 35, extinguishing our chances of a Super Bowl in season two. Season three was a defensive masterclass. Lurk artist Luke Keekley propelled us to an early lead. Plutch catch from Seedy Lamb in the fourth quarter sealed our opponent's fate. All right, Seedy, we haven't used you yet! We'll use you now! And the game! The Bengals beat the Ravens in the Super Bowl. Logos out in the field and all to lock up our second Wheel of Mutt ring of the season. And that leads us to Wheel of Mutt season four where we stand today. Our third Super Bowl ring is on the line. Our wild card and NFC championship this season have been absurdly close games. And for the Super Bowl, I had to bring out the Kelly Greens. It's Eagle season, so we had to do it. We are one game away from our third Super Bowl ring. We have to be locked in. Let's take a look at our Super Bowl lineup before we take our two spins for the Super Bowl. Offensive line is honestly very good. The lowest overall is in 88. We got 89s at most positions and 91 Alex Mack as the anchor. I have two of the best tight ends in the game in Rob Gronkowski and Greg Olson. I have the best wide receiver in the game in limited tie re-kill. My backfield is bizarre, but they've led us this far and I love it. We've got Budget Beast, Belitz, Devon HN, 90 overall, AKA Johnny Football and Alec Ingold at fullback. We of course have Prestige, Jamar Chase at wide receiver one and we just recently picked up team of the week, Debo Samuel. What's crazy about Debo Samuel is he's actually an 89 overall, but if you guys didn't know, there's this Matthew Barry team of the week chemistry boost where this dude Matthew Barry picks a player every week. This week it is Debo Samuel. So if you take a look at my Debo Samuel, he has insane boosts to all of his stats. He's technically a 92 overall right now, which makes him significantly better. That is pure luck, by the way. I didn't pick up that Debo knowing that. Defensively, we are equally star studded. Every single position has an excellent player at it. Terry Canard, free safety, Giants team Diamond has been an awesome corner, very physical. Sherman's obviously been a stud. Joey Porter Jr. has been great. The D-line is stacked. Big Vince Wilfort got a big man Rumble touchdown this season, Prestige Derwin James, looking to get him an upgrade pretty soon here, but he's been great. Justin Simmons with Kair Elam, Paul Kraus is the backup. So we got three Lurk artists out there and I could even run four if I wanted to. Josh Allen, Ray Lewis, Derek Brooks, CJ Mosley, and we even have our Prestige kicker Harrison Bucker. So this team is almost maxed. Obviously I want to still upgrade with the wheel spin, but honestly there's not too much to do. The next amazing thing is when we make the Super Bowl, we get one new Prestige player. So one player on this lineup will make it to next season. And lastly, do not forget about the presents. I have collected a few presents on this account already. The first episode of Wheel of Mud, after Christmas, when these presents open, I'll get to open them and add them to my team. That'll actually be on season five. So right now we've got these two lavish presents. We got one that looks like Seahawks and one that's all gold. We've got a gray simple present, probably a legends present. This nice present is. This is a team of the week nice present. This one all red, I really don't know. I don't think they do core elite. So that one's puzzling to me, maybe most feared. And then one blue simple present, be able to open all these. All right, boys, we're finally ready for the wheel spins. In the playoffs, I'm only supposed to get two wheel spins. I actually forgot for the last two episodes. No wonder my team is stacked. I'm only going two wheel spins today, but the wheel is juiced. The Christmas Super Bowl, boys.  This is too big of an episode. The lights are bright, I'm ready to shine. Three times newest promo packs. Newest promo is obviously zero chill. Kyle Hamilton limited, Saquon Barkley limited are impacts. Either of those would be a gigantic upgrade on this team. I'm not going to lie. The odds are not that great. When Tyree Kill and Fred Warner were in packs, odds were real good, but I think they nerfed them since. We'll take anything we can get here. Probably won't help in the Super Bowl, but we're going to find out. First one's got Kevin Dotts and Josh Oliver, but a quick sell those for training. I am going to re-roll the training too. I don't normally do that, but it's the Super Bowl episode. So that was 2,240 training right there. Next zero chill pack, Keith Kirkwood. Got a legends player, Bruce Smith 79. Every time we see that animation, we know it can't be good enough to make the squad. 3,469 training, okay. I haven't pulled either of these limits yet. Kyle Hamilton nor Saquon Barkley. If they want to decide that the time for me to pull it's out of wheel of mud, I would not be mad. Madison Stevenson, that's our third and final pack and three players we can't use. Luckily we do make out with enough for 382 plus re-rules. Just looking for the limits are a big 93. Honestly, our first one, Jamie Gillan. That's not going to take us anywhere. Tanner Hudson, you're not going to. Actually, Tanner Hudson is a slight upgrade at fullback. Although I won't even be putting him in. I'm not going to mess with my fullback. Tanner Hudson really wants to be on this team, but I'm not putting him in. Damn unlucky boys. Dang the first wheel spin of the Super Bowl does not help us out much. Limited would have been sick. I think the second wheel spin is going to come in dummy clutch though. Oh my God. I got this idea from those packs that EA put in the store the other day. It's simple, 88 or 93. Come on, baby. Give me that juicy gambling degeneracy. My house is on 93. Dude, that thing kept going though. That thing just kind of scared me. 93 overall, so I can't get Christmas limited. I can get any of the Christmas set players which are all 93s and of course any other 93 overall player that I want. Let's take a look. Boys, let's be real. Let's be real here, okay? Johnny Football took us all the way here. He took us all the way to the bowl and I love him for that. But this is Eagle season. I have on. A Kelly Green Jalen Hertz jersey and in the Super Bowl, I'm giving the opportunity to add 93 overall, zero chill Jalen Hertz to the squad. This Jalen Hertz, by the way, earlier in the season I passed on Patrick Mahomes. I said I don't want Mahomes because Mahomes is slow. Guess what? This Jalen Hertz is the white Johnny Football. You heard me correctly. 89 speed for both of them but Jalen Hertz beats him in every throw category. Jalen Hertz is Hot Rod Master, the only difference. Johnny Football has a scape artist. Jalen Hertz will not get that a scape artist. That is a unique ability for AKA Johnny Football. I honestly, I don't see any other position I take. I'll take a Jalen Hertz. Oh dude, I have never done this. This is a first in Wheel of Mutte where I make a significant quarterback change in the Super Bowl but I think it's gonna pay off. I think we're gonna have a sweat fest here and I'm gonna be very happy to have Hot Rod Master on this team. Johnny Football. I wanna thank you for your dedication, your service to the squad and bringing us to the bowl. He gets gift wrapped for free. Hot Rod Master is three AP. Gunslinger is two AP. That is the exact same AP we ran on Johnny Football. So it's like nothing changed. I'm gonna give him a run and gun. He basically just made Johnny Football better at throwing and we gave him Hot Rod Master. That's another way to think about it. So I don't think we did any damage. I think we only could have helped the squad with what we just did and I'm so happy about it. HN still got freight train, five AP and run and gun on Jalen Hertz. Tyree Kill with DoubleMe, mid and elite. And we no longer need tight end apprentice on Gronk since we have Hot Rod Master. Which means if I want to, I can put a different ability on Gronk here. Tight end apprentice is one AP but mid and elite is also one AP. Instead we're gonna give Gronk mid and elite. Hopefully he comes down with some tough catches. So this helps in two ways. I got a better ability on Gronk and we got Jalen Hertz. And I'm wearing the Kelly Green and it's Eagle season. I think we're gonna be just fine here boys. All right gentlemen, that's two wheel spins. The only addition we make to the team today is 93 overall Jalen Hertz at quarterback. Can't say I'm mad about that at all. I'm really excited. Last thing up is the Christmas challenge wheel. Completing the Christmas challenge wheel lets me add one more mystery present to our unopened packs. And of course those presents will help build our future wheel of mud team. We're laying the ground floor. We're building roots. And that's it. Dude, this is one of my favorite challenges. This is a dope challenge. One player on my team needs a touchdown, 10 receptions and a hundred yards. That's a lot of receptions. I don't think a hundred yards is too hard and I don't think a touchdown is too hard. But getting on the ball 10 times could be an issue. Can't worry about that now boys.  Win the Super Bowl to become a seasons champion.  Best part of the Super Bowl baby. You get the Super Bowl presentation. In Las Vegas taking on the Raiders. That is quite the home field advantage. We came all the way from Philly. We're starting with the kick, which makes me so happy. He's got out of position Gilmore as his return man. So he's definitely got a good team. How do we start this Super Bowl? That's the question. Did we start with an excellent defensive stop? Did we start with a turnover? Did we start getting bombed on? No kick returns. That's how I start. Perry Canard. The free safety playing defensive back. Massive hit. I'm gonna go three, two mug to start this game. Tampa two. He's in strong close. Very easily could be a run play here. And it is. He starts the Super Bowl the hell. He starts the Super Bowl the same way I would with a run. But big man, Will Forks having none of it.  Gotta be a pass now after that pitiful attempt right there.  I was going for that strip with Justin Simmons.   Woo. Gun tight doubles. Do we have time? No. Great find. He makes a great find right there. Makes a great move too. That Shannon Sharp. Yeah. Hey, we've already got him sweating a little bit. Some good defensive stops. Just gonna go cover three sky here. This definitely could be a run play. Okay. He's got the corner out. Doesn't take it. Checks low and scary. That's a scary throw. I'm on nine. Oh, oh my God. He's still through it. Dude, sometimes people make such a bold throw that you don't get on it. I thought I had that bag. So I didn't think he was gonna throw it. Heaves one deep. That's a bad ball. His Jalen hurts just. Oh, it's a Jalen Hurts mirror match. But wow, he sailed that. I think he's giving up on the run. Which I hope is the case so that I can start guessing pass.  Are you kidding me? That is so embarrassing. As I say it, he definitely could run this ball again. Let's get Vince Wilfork in position to just blow it up. He's gonna check down half back. Go for the punch out. Ooh, I'm getting that. Dude, I'm gonna get a straight fumble today. I can feel it. He's throwing a lot of low check downs. That's just gonna leave these boys open to fumble.  What a ball. Yeah, Sherman's sitting there waiting for it. Something similar.  Damn it. That was bad. Third and sixth great defense. I really wanted him to throw something sketchy there. Third and sixth, what's he gonna come out in? He's his best play. Gun doubles, hat back weak. I'm gonna stay in it. Honestly, we've played this so well so far. I don't think there's any reason to switch it up. I'm not gonna guess pass. He's gonna dig there. Slee, that could have gone either way. He could have caught that. I could have caught that. Wow. Hey, that's a huge W, boys. Hold them to three. Hold them to three. We just can't do the same thing ourselves. Let's make sure he doesn't onsite kick. He doesn't hurt base kick off. Short kick to Debo Samuel. Oh, I had a window. We get out to the 32. I'm starting this game with my favorite Eagles play, stretch alert bubble. Jamar Chase is wide open. And I wanna make that throw rather than the run because I need receptions, yards, and a touchdown for my challenge. All right, now we're gonna keep them honest with pin pull sweep. Got lots of pull blockers. Where are you going, 66?  Whatever. Honestly, got the first down. Doesn't matter. I'm a little confused on that, though. Is this man coverage? He's on Joey Porter Jr.  But I think I can hit Gronk if I get a little bit of time at this point. That or honestly, I can just throw Devon Hian right there. Make this third and two. That's a really nice pickup.  Doesn't have inside stuff. Great blocks. Juke to the right. Hian. Huge play, huge play, huge play. Oh, I'm dicing him up with four verticals right now. I'm gonna stay in it. I wonder where he uses here. Is he on Tyrese? He's not, oh, he's getting there. Oh. I thought that was open and he saw what I saw. No, he was gonna hand that off. He's gonna try and milk the clock here. I do get ball at half. Somebody get home. Jalen hurts his sack. Third and seven. Unbunch tight end. And I can't believe I didn't pick that. Doesn't matter. Fourth and seven. We got the stuff we needed. I made a huge mistake, but defense made up for it. That's kind of how my Madden games go. Great lurk by him. First and 10 from the 44. A minute 47 ball at half. Superior clock management. I get seven points here with no time left on the clock if I play this perfect. I'm handing off Hian. I'm hoping we can get to second level. If my left guard gets a hand on Palomalu, this is an excellent run.  Hey, it's a six yard run.  I'm gonna go back to stretch alert bubble. This has Tyree kill as the bubble man. Okay, you know what's funny? He's usuring that but he's not gonna be fast enough to get to wreak. Ooh, they're going for the punch out right there. First and 10, very nice play.  Sorry, she popped up on my spot. Second and seven, there's Gronk right in the middle of floater. What is the clock at? Was the clock not stopped when I was saying all that nonsense? Oh my God, I am not locked in.  I'm pulling out a, I am tossing a nuke on this man right now. Third and one touchdowns is two receptions. He might be our challenge build guy but most importantly, we are leading seven to three in the Super Bowl. There's 13 seconds on the clock and he's got three timeouts. That was some titanium nuts clock management. I wasn't even trying to do that. 13 seconds on the clock. Let's get a great kick. Let's burn four seconds here. That was nine seconds, three timeouts. It would be very difficult to get in field goal range without making a big mistake. And I would love to see him make a big mistake. Oh, smart man. Smart man, he lets it bounce through. We have to cover the boundaries. We're going to guest pass here. We're going to play outside. Let's see what he does. I think he wants Shannon Sharp corner route. Now he blocked Shannon Sharp. He's got a deep. Wait, I was going to say he has nothing. Seven seconds go by. He only, only thing he could have done there is throw a pick. Terry Canard with that lockup coverage. Second attempt. Dude, after Tyreek makes a play like that, it makes me want to prestige the man so bad. Play action. He has the left side. He's got nothing. No! Sack through Smith. And we get extra momentum from that. That's huge. Momentum is so big in games like this. I think momentum might be one of the most slept on things in Madden 24. Like right now my team has reduced stamina drain during plays. That's crazy. I'm going to let Debo take this out. Oh, I'm boxed. Just the stack receptions on Tyreek. I want to throw this bubble. But if his user's over there, I can't do it. Yeah, I can't do it. This is still crazy good yards. So it doesn't really matter. I need him to respect the run and send his user at it so that I can throw the bubble. That's what I need to happen here.  That play is messed up how good it is. I'm going to come out of it.  That ball literally just bounced off alignment and into Tyreek's hands. I don't want to talk about how lucky that was because I don't want to think about that play.  Tyreek kill has another reception now though. That's what's important. Oh, oh, got past this user.  Oh, his user saw me go out.  Let's go. Needed that. We can still run option plays. We have Jalen hurts. Risky business. I'm going read option. This might be a keeper. Depends what the user does. Definitely could have kept that, but it's safer to go H&N if I'm getting five yards anyway. Jalen hurts a fumble and H&N won't jinx it, Matt, but I don't think H&N will. I think we're in man here looking for Tyreek kill on the win. He just shaded outside on Tyreek, but he did not shade outside on Grog, baby. Oh, you've got to love that, dude. Watching someone make the adjustment. Actually don't like this. So I'm going to run inside zone. It's the edge H&N, great defense. I need to be in like a, I need a two stack. I need two on the right and two on the left. This way I can go to Gronk if he's there. I can go to Debo if he's there. I can go to Reek if he's there. I can go to H&N. Lots of options here. Sit in the block. Sit in the pocket.  But that's third inches. This is a nasty play actually because it's going to look like it's going right side with the motion. Oh, I didn't mean to keep that, but Jalen hurts.  Why lead to read option in the bowl? I'm letting that go to the quarter. Actually, no, I'm going to run this. Pinball sweep looks really good here. I'm running it. He sees it, I got to cut this back. It looked good, it wasn't good. Second and 12. I have not reached in my bag of pass plays really at all today. The one dot we threw was to Reek and that was it. He's up in man coverage blitzes. I think it's time to show him what Tyree Kill can do. So we think this is zone, right? I wanted to take H&N.  That is the textbook example.   That should have been picked when I threw to Reek. He literally didn't hold why because in his head he goes, okay, I bagged this. 12 plays 83 yards, four minutes, 30 seconds. I didn't even have two clock on. That was just a tough, difficult, arduous drive to take a two possession lead with three minutes, 26 seconds left for the bowl.   First and 10, big hit. Gosh, y'all, Ray Lewis. He has some rare cards on this team. He's got the Irvin and the Hertz. He's gonna go 84, right? No, and I'll check down half back. Yep. Oh, keep that clock ticking. This defense is great. I don't think I can really give up any one-play bombs on this defense. So this is exactly what we need here. Oh, get off that block. I like the effort, Elan. I like the effort. Dude, that's smart that we get out of bounds there. That's the first time he's been able to do that. Over the top, he wants a corner out. Oh, what a good play. I thought for sure that was a corner out trying to get to the boundary. Play action, he's got 80. Oh, he's got nothing. Cause he's bagged by Bruce Smith. Second and 10. Do we surprise him? We surprise him with the Blitz now? I'm gonna try it. This is so risky, but I'm sending it. I'm gonna use her Sherman. Oh, no way he made that throw. You dog. And he's gonna let himself get, oh, two minute warning.  You get out of bounds there, and then your next play, you get the two minute warning. That was a big mistake he just made. He's not fully reliant on the onside kick yet, but it just depends how quickly he can score now. That was a big mistake. Does he go corner out now? No, but he has this and I'm behind it. Gotta get there, Joey Porter. You don't know how big that tackle is. You know how many seconds go off because of that? That's huge. Oh, he called the timeout. He's forced to use the timeout. Does he run it? Does he run it? No, pass, low, cut, tackled, clocks taken. We're blitzing. He's nervous. I'm on 88. Jalen, talk to him. Third and goal.  Fourth and goal. JPJ Tackle kept him from the one in the ball. How many things to talk about now?  Hey, Jalen Hurts, excellent game. You made it work.  Let up zero touchdowns in the Super Bowl. Defensive master class. Can I also just say, we let up zero touchdowns in the Super Bowl on an off meta defense? I do wanna talk about that, okay?  Let's go, baby. Okay, a few huge things to talk about. Number one, we will get a rage cool wheel spin at the start of next season. Number two, I don't think I earned the challenge wheel. I don't think Tyree Kill is close enough. So the presents that we will have after Christmas, which that video probably posted on the 27th or 29th will be these ones right here. The blue simple, red, silver, blue, silver, Seahawks looking one and the all gold one. Those will be the presents we get. Also, we get this. When you win the Super Bowl, you get a three times trophy pack bundle and you get a red zone pack. I'm gonna open those too. So we're gonna have a really nice kickstart at the next wheel of money for really all the amazing stuff that we did this season, which is so incredible. And the final thing and probably the most important thing is our prestige player. I mean, we'll have to see, right? Like, you know, technically there could be like a 95 Jordan Milana drops and then that changes everything. So right now to me, it's either Tyree Kill or it's Ray Lewis. Both are excellent options. I think Tyree Kill probably gets better cards down the line sooner, but then I'm prestigeing two wide receivers. It's kind of weird to prestige two wide receivers. It's a little, it's a little top heavy. Boys, that was an incredible, incredible Super Bowl. I hope you guys enjoyed. I had an absolute blast recording this and I don't think that could have gone better. I can't wait to see you guys in the season five opener. Season five opener will be on the 20th, I believe. So you'll have an episode on the 20th. You'll have another one on the 23rd and then on Christmas day, you'll get the Christmas special. And then after Christmas, I'll open those presents. We also have all three of those episodes to collect more presents. Like I'm not done collecting presents yet. That's just what we have right now. You'll see a new team next episode. I love you guys. I hope you guys have an amazing rest of your day.  I'm coming for you, Tom. All right, boys. Love y'all. Peace.


Ukraine plans to develop combat drones to counter Russia. The evolution of drones has taken the world by storm. Drones have captured some of the most prevalent parts of society, especially the military sector. Governments have been trying to capitalize on the maximizing advancement of drones to resolve global security turmoil. In the recent Russia and Ukraine war, the former was touted and criticized for turning AI and its related technologies into weapons that can be used against Ukraine. However, recent reports declare that Ukraine is also planning to produce combat drones to counter Russia. Russia continues to invade Ukraine in an attempt to overthrow the existing government. Over the last several months, the local citizens have been fleeing the land, their homes to save themselves. But Ukraine has decided to amp up its defense game by introducing combat drones. A top-ranking political expert has described Russia's war against Ukraine as the first major war in the internet age. These experts have credited the use of drones and satellite internet systems like Elon Musk's Starlink to have transformed the manner of the war. Recently, the Russian government has accused the Ukrainian government to have been carrying out drone attacks on Russian military bases. Even though Ukraine has not formally taken responsibility for these attacks, it has surely made some vague indication of retaliations earlier that are leading experts to believe Ukraine's role behind these combat drone attacks. Besides, Ukraine also has access to Elon Musk's Starlink that is helping the government to maintain communication during conflicts. During the course of the war, cities and towns have been experiencing power cuts lasting up to 10 hours. Elon's Starlink, however, is helping Ukraine curate strategies that will protect the citizens and the country.


So, in my lecture yesterday on competition and monopoly, I mentioned some of the claims that have been made about the technology sector in particular, firms like Amazon, Google, etc., exercising market power, engaging in so-called anti-competitive behavior, mainly because of how large they are, because of their large market shares. There's a lot of criticism of the tech sector in recent years, not only from politicians and regulators and commentators sort of on the political left, concerned mainly with these sort of antitrust concerns, but also those on the political right who have raised a set of additional concerns about how these firms are too large and too influential and too powerful, not only in terms of sort of conduct in the marketplace, but also in ways that they're influencing the larger culture, that they're having an influence on the political process, influence on social norms in ways that are harmful to the good of the greater community. In particular, their concerns that the tech sector is not only affected by the recent trend toward what we can call wokeness, but also that the tech sector is an enabler of or a driver of wokeness. Can we understand a little bit better, can we unpack these concerns and think about ways that the tech sector might be affected by, as well as a driver of social and cultural change? I'm using the term wokeness in what I take to be a fairly conventional meaning. The term woke has been around for a number of years, but recently has come to be used sometimes by its proponents, but mainly by critics, as a sort of ironic reference to a kind of emphasis on social justice that is a little bit different from similar movements that have been around since at least the civil rights era in the US and in Europe. So I'm going to define wokeness or woke as sort of a strong concern with so-called social justice issues, with particular reference to things like race, gender, sexual orientation, sexual identity, a concern with what in the corporate and university sector is now usually called DEI, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, with a particular philosophical foundation. So wokeness differs from previous social justice movements in that it's really built on a particular set of philosophical claims, mostly those associated with the Frankfurt School and its more recent descendants. So what do I mean? In sort of epistemology or the theory of knowing, how do we know what we know, what are the appropriate sources of knowledge, how do we validate truth claims and so forth, the woke movement prioritized sort of subjective personal experience over sort of logical argument, appeal to data and so forth. It would be a woke person would say upon reading Karl Manger's principles and learning about Manger's unique treatment of his understanding of utility and Manger's claim that marginal units of a good are allocated to lower valued uses than previous units and therefore we can speak about diminishing marginal utility, a woke person would say, Karl, speak your truth. Okay, right. But you know, Marxists might have another truth and you know, Keynesians might have a different truth and mathematical economists might have a different truth and they're all equally valid, right? There's no way to adjudicate among those claims because we all, you know, just we sort of go with how we feel about it and if you think that two plus two is five, there's no reason why two plus two can't be five, okay. In terms of sort of ontology or how wokeness sees the world, right? Wokeness doesn't see the world in terms of individuals with personal traits and characteristics that are unique to those individuals but rather places an emphasis on group characteristics, right? What, you know, in what group are you a member of and you know, how does your group exercise power or influence over members of another group? In a sense, you're kind of inevitably, you know, drawn toward or torn by characteristics of a particular group. You know, part of one of the results of this is that, you know, there's a lot of this sort of in-group, out-group dynamic. You're either part of the acceptable group or you're part of the unacceptable group in which you should be shunned and ostracized. You know, people talk about so-called cancel culture, right? A world in which, you know, if you're speaking ideas that are not part of the, that are not acceptable to the dominant group, you know, you should be banned. You should be eliminated. Your voice should be, should not be permitted to be part of the public square. I mean, one of the assailant illustration of this ontological focus of wokeness as it, you know, as it sort of, you know, built on, you know, critical theory, a lot of people noticed in early 2022 that the anti-defamation, anti-defamation league, the ADL changed the definition of racism on its website. But prior to January of 2022, racism was defined by the ADL as, quote, the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another, that a person's social and moral traits are predetermined by his or her inborn biological, biological characteristics. So racism is a personal belief that members of one race or group are inherently superior to members of another group. That definition was rewritten in 2022 as the following, quote, the marginalization and or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people. So that's now the official definition of racism. It's not about the belief in your heart. It's not about how you feel about members of one group or another group. It's about, sort of, you know, structural inequities that privilege one particular group, especially, you know, heterosexual, cisgender, white males, maybe in the U.S. or in the West, right, over members, members of another group. There's also a particular sort of theory of history that is associated with wokeness and its foundation in Frankfurt School, you know, critical theory. And this, this is not only the idea of inevitable conflict among groups, right, which is why, you know, you've heard the term cultural Marxism, right, to describe this way of thinking. The Marxism is, so it's a version of Marx's idea of inevitable class conflict, you know, in Marxist view it's, you know, workers, it's labor and capital. In the cultural Marxist view, well, there's inevitable conflict, but among other groups, you know, people of one race versus people of another race or people with one kind of identity against people with another kind of identity and entities can intersect in complicated ways. According to so-called intersectionality theory. There's also this idea of an, of an inexorable upward march, which is also part of Marx, the Marxist understanding of history, right, that of course, you know, the old world in which we had, you know, something like the old definition of racism has been swept away and we're inevitably moving towards this new world where, you know, sort of the new definitions apply. That's why when you hear one of the popular phrases used by woke people is to say that someone they disagree with, someone who has the wrong opinions, is, you know, quote, on the wrong side of history. You know that term? These ideas are on the wrong side of history. The implication is that there's a right side of history.  Okay, so this is what I have in mind when I use the terminology of woke, wokeness, et cetera. And I think it's pretty standard, both among proponents of this worldview and among critics, although the proponents might, you know, might describe it in more glowing, you know, terms than, than I have. So I'm particularly interested in today's talk about how wokeness affects businesses, companies, right? Can we, does it make sense to talk about companies or corporations being woke? This term was, this phrase was introduced by the New York Times columnist, columnist Ross Douthat in an article in 2018 called The Rise of Woke Capital. I think that's the first time the term woke, terms woke capital, woke capitalism, woke corporations entered the lexicon. And he was describing the phenomenon that on the, on the face of it might seem kind of puzzling and surprising that a lot of, you know, for-profit capitalist companies, large successful profitable companies seem to be embracing woke ideology, right, inside the company, outside the company and so forth. So the amount of investment in companies on DEI training has skyrocketed in recent decades. Chris Rufo did a little count and showed that, you know, all 100 of the Fortune 100, the 100 largest corporations in the world, all have large and substantial DEI training programs, DEI hiring criteria, you know, DEI staffs with hundreds of employees and so forth, all designed to make sure that the company internally is following appropriate practices to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. And you remember, equity is different from equality in the sense that equity refers to outcomes, right? So a company is lagging in DEI indicators if people with the appropriate, appropriately defined identities are not on average achieving the same results, right? So however you define these different identities, you know, however they're distributed in the population, percentage-wise, you should have the same percentage of people from those identities, you know, in the, on the executive team, same number of people, proportions getting promoted, same proportion on the board and so forth, okay? Wokeness also affects marketing and public relations, you know, it's kind of a joke now. I think almost everybody recognizes it's a joke that, you know, in the month of June, every company changes its logo to a version of that logo with a rainbow background or some other kind of colored background. Some critics have introduced, critics sometimes call this woke washing, right? Like you're pretending to be woke but you're not really woke. Companies are, large corporations are, are increasingly active in philanthropy, right? Making huge donations to groups like Black Lives Matter or other kinds of DEI oriented groups, as well as engaged in political action, lobbying other forms of rent seeking and so forth to try to influence policy. There was this, there was an ad in the Washington Post with over, I think it was about 120 large, you know, Fortune 500 companies based in the U.S., signed this open letter objecting to a change in voting laws in Georgia, which you might remember from a few years ago. In particular, it was the requirement that voters have a photo ID and so there were some complaints, well, this discriminates against voters, certain types of voters and, you know, you'd think why do all these, why is company, company based in California, you know, care how the Georgia, you know, electoral commission establishes the criteria for sending in an absentee ballot or whatever. But that became a woke, you know, celebrity cause, right? This is taking away people's voting rights. It's a threat to our democracy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's, you know, it's like electing Trump. It's like the end of democracy and all these companies were taking a stand to condemn the state of Georgia for its voting rights. You know, Disney is a good, you know, sort of a poster child of a company that has been extremely woke lately according to its critics. Disney participated in a a objected to a recent Florida bill that was about what's appropriate to talk, what's appropriate to share in the preschool, I think it was preschool classroom like grades up to second or third grade, the legislature passed some law that said public school teachers are not supposed to discuss issues of sexual orientation and sexual identity to students in, you know, K through two or the third grade. And that was subject to criticism from the woke crowd and Disney strongly objected and threatened to move business out of the state and so forth. And apparently the governor of Florida slapped them down a little bit by taking away some of their privileges that some exemptions to zoning rules and giving them, taking away some of their tax breaks and so forth. Okay. So what we're interested in here, you know, why is all this happening, right? Why are companies that on the face of it, you would think, look, they just want to make money, right? So why would they care about all this stuff? Why are they getting involved in politics? Why are they trying to influence the culture? How does that square with their mission of earning, you know, generating profits for shareholders? Well, it's useful. And you see in this literature an important distinction between what we might call normative versus instrumental motives for going woke and doing and engage in similar behaviors. By normative, I mean, so a company that is going woke for normative reasons is doing so because the key decision makers, board, top executives, employees, customers think that going woke is the right thing to do. We're doing it because it's correct. It's true. It's right. It's just and we care about doing the right thing as opposed to doing it for cynical reasons, because you think you can make more money. Okay. You know, when you go to Starbucks and you see all this stuff on the wall about how, you know, we source our beans from small farms in developing countries using sustainable practices because we care about the environment and we care about protecting the small farmer in Nicaragua or Colombia.  It's just people who buy coffee at Starbucks. Some of them are willing to pay a higher price for the warm fuzzy feeling you get inside knowing that you did a good deed as you're sipping your $8, you know, Frappuccino or whatever. So, you know, if customers are willing to pay more, are willing to buy more, pay higher prices from a company that proclaims fealty to woke values, then it is profitable for a company to do so. Or maybe you want to hire a particular type of employee. You want to hire a woke, you know, only want to hire recent graduates of Ivy League colleges and universities who are super, super woke and they won't take a job anywhere that isn't, you know, where the workforce isn't also woke and so, okay, you go woke to try to attract them. Again, that's this idea of woke washing. We're not really committed to these ideas normatively, but, you know, we can make more money by acting like we are, okay. Now, it could also be that, you know, owners of firms, investors, maybe top executives and other leaders are, again, deeply committed to these ideas. You know, slightly related, you can take a company like Whole Foods, right, which is not a woke corporation exactly, but the CEO and major shareholder of Whole Foods, John Mackie, has a deep personal commitment to environmentally sustainable practices. And so a lot of things that Whole Foods does, and Whole Foods is a very profitable company, really do reflect the preference of key decision makers. And of course, we would expect to see that in a market economy, right, especially with smaller firms, right, smaller owner operated firms, you know, there's no reason why they shouldn't engage in ways that reflect the preferences of the owners, even if it comes at the expense of profit. You know, Chick-fil-A isn't open on Sundays because the founders think that people should take Sunday as a day of rest for religious reasons, even though Chick-fil-A could probably make more money selling chicken sandwiches on Sunday. We would expect to see that in a market economy. So some of that could be, you know, the woke corporation, the drive toward the woke corporation could be explained to some degree by that. As I said before, maybe you want to recruit and retain employees with certain values, so you make the company embrace those values as well. But one, a factor that I think is under explored, I'm writing a paper on this myself at the moment, has to do with sort of the role of what we might call middle management, that it turns out empirically that most of these woke initiatives are really not coming from rank and file employees, they're not being primarily pushed by CEOs or by boards of directors. It's really a kind of middle manager position, you know, HR directors, people who are in, people who run DEI programs in companies, right, are the ones who essentially have been given a huge amount of latitude by the board and by top executives to sort of run these programs in whatever way they want.  We don't really know what it is and we're not sure we're early on board, but the one thing we don't want is to be written up in the newspaper as being a company that has a hostile work environment because it's not woke, okay. You see this especially at universities, right, who runs all of the diversity programs and all the woke programs at universities. It's the assistant vice provost for student affairs, you know, it's not the president of the university who's pushing it, it's not the board of directors or curators or whatever, it's some kind of mid-level university bureaucrat and of course the ranks of mid-level university bureaucrats have greatly swollen in the last many decades which partly explains the increasing costs of college tuition. Okay, a little bit of broader context, you know, if you look at some earlier movements like the drive for companies to embrace so-called corporate social responsibility or to embrace an all-stakeholder model of governance and with just not just shareholders whose opinions matter but the opinions of various stakeholders, workers and customers and suppliers and so forth, you know, that movement has also been analyzed similarly to the way I'm describing woke capitalism and the woke corporation, namely that some of that is done for purely instrumental reasons. If we say that we care about the environment and we care about all our, you know, our workers and we're not just greedy profiteers, then we'll actually make more profit than we otherwise would. You know, it's different from wokeism in my interpretation in that, you know, CSR and stakeholder models, they don't have any particular philosophical grounding. They're not committed to critical theory or the Frankfurt School philosophy and really they're more about making marginal changes, right? We want to put representatives of organized labor on the board of directors so that we show that we have a commitment to a broader set of stakeholders. They don't want to tear capitalism down to its foundations and rebuild it, you know, in a different kind of model as many woke advocates surely do. I think it was Ibrahim Kendi who said, I don't have the quote in front of me, it was something like, you know, to be anti-racist is to be anti-capitalist. You know, we can't solve racism unless we destroy capitalism and replace it with socialism. You also get that from Robin D'Angelo and other sort of leading spokespersons for woke. Now, you might ask, why does woke seem to be concentrated in certain industries like entertainment, retail sales, technology, and so forth? You know, Nike's Colin Kaepernick ad, which you might remember from a few years ago, was one of the first examples of an explicitly, you know, sort of woke PR campaign. Gillette also did have this infamous ad at the Super Bowl a couple years ago, denouncing toxic masculinity.  Gillette got slammed both in the press and also their razor sales went way down. I just read last week of something at Disney where, so apparently I've forgotten this, but there's a section of Disney world with some, like a shopping area where it's like the Fairy Godmother's area, I can't remember, Fairy Godmother's land or whatever, and they used to have, all the employees would be female and they were called future Fairy Godmothers, the store employees. Now they've changed it to Fairy Godmother's helpers and any gender, people of any gender can be, you know, can work in these shops and the claim was, well, this is more, you know, this is more woke than having a gender specific designation for a particular type of employee and people have been sort of picking on that as well. Okay, so what about big tech, right? Why is big tech in particular, you know, playing such a strong role in the woke movement? Well, again, there are two ways to look at this, right? You might say, well, let's just look at the tech sector as another industry, as another type of firm like lots of other firms, you know, that is responding to the change in our culture, right?  Yeah, I mean, it's certainly true that tech companies are like any companies in that they do have to respond to external pressure, cultural change, social change, and so forth. You know, tech companies tend to employ, how should I say, employees of tech companies are probably more woke on average than employees of oil and gas companies, right, or employees of, you know, other kinds of companies. There was an infamous incident at Google where right after the 2016 election, when Donald Trump was elected president, Google called an all hands meeting. And here's the top Google team up on the stage, you know, helping employees to work through their grief and, you know, giving them how to set up safe spaces because of this obviously traumatic event that the wrong person got elected president. And the top executives were literally shedding tears on stage.  But you can say, well, look, if that's the way your workers are, if the majority of your workforce really is traumatized by the result of this election, well, it makes sense that the company would want to do something for those employees, you know, so they can continue to write code and be productive and do other stuff. As an aside, most tech companies are actually not very diverse at all in their workforces. I just read something about Amazon. The only sector, the only type of employee classification at Amazon that is at all diverse is like, you know, people who do physical labor at an Amazon fulfillment center, right? But the engineers, the executives are almost all white or Asian, okay? So it doesn't seem to be much of an effort to diversify the workforce, you know, in a more meaningful way. And again, you have this phenomenon I mentioned before of allowing these sort of mid-level HR people to run the Woke programs. That happens at tech firms just like it happens at any firms. You might have, remember the case of this guy, James D'Amour, who a couple years ago, he was an engineer at Google and he wrote a memo on an internal message board criticizing some of the DEI programs at Google, criticizing the Woke culture at Google and claiming that it was holding back innovation and it was not fair to employees who didn't share that same ideology. And then he was fired by Google for, you know, creating a hostile work environment by posting his opinion, by being on the wrong side of history, right? And posting his opinions on the internal message board. And then that generated a lot of publicity as well. So I mean, if he's right, these big tech companies are really not a very hospitable environment for people who don't share the sort of Woke ideology. But this is not what, you know, people like Senator Hawley on the right and other critics on the left, Elizabeth Warren, this is not really what they are complaining about with tech companies. They're claiming that tech firms are driving Woke-ness, not just dealing with Woke-ness like any other company. You know, for example, we have content providers and distributors, you know, Netflix, Amazon, Disney, whatever. I'm sure you've all heard plenty of jokes and seen memes or whatever about, you know, different things that are in movies and TV shows and video games that are trying to promote, you know, certain kinds of Woke-ness. Amazon has gotten criticized for its new Lord of the Rings adaptation that explicitly has a very diverse cast of characters, even though Tolkien described his stories as sort of allegorical, fictional accounts of England, right, with sort of English-looking people.  It's not all about social and cultural things. If you say, you know, don't get the vaccine, the COVID vaccine, you'll get banned from Twitter. But, you know, the claim is that these platforms are not viewpoint neutral, right, you know, the terms of service on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok, whatever. They, you know, they have some language like, you know, you're free to speak your mind unless you're directly threatening someone or, and now they've changed it, you know, unless you're, also if you're spreading misinformation, you can be banned, although, for instance, misinformation is never defined very precisely. And the claim is that companies are arbitrarily enforcing a particular ideology, right? People who are on the wrong side of history will get their accounts banned, or you can be as threatening and ugly and mean and nasty as you want if you have the correct ideology and you will be embraced and, you know, and supported. So it's a little bit like, I think there's an analogy here with universities, colleges and universities. You can say, well, colleges and universities are just like other institutions and organizations in society, right? They're seeing external pressure for wokeness and they're becoming more woke because they have to survive and they have to attract students and donors and so forth. Yeah, but of course, all the underlying philosophical ideas of wokeness came out of the university. So, you know, if universities are feeling hurt by this, it's like the chicken's coming home to roost, right? But again, it's not a perfect analogy, but it's similar in that you could argue, well, big tech has been an enabler, right? Big tech is helping to change the culture, not just responding to the culture. And that's something that people are concerned about. So, you know, so what do we do? Okay, can we understand why tech companies like universities are doing this? Well, first, remember that not all tech companies are the same. This is something I emphasized in my lecture last year on big tech. You know, they don't have the same business model. You know, Google, almost all of Google's revenue comes from advertising on Google search, right? Most of Apple's revenues come from hardware sale of Apple hardware and fees from apps that are in the app store. Facebook or Meta is also mainly an advertising company. You know, Amazon gets most of its revenue from its cloud storage service and then a little bit of revenue from retail sales. Microsoft, I guess most of its revenue from selling software, from Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office licenses, et cetera. So, they don't all have exactly the same business model. That's an important point to keep in mind. So, you know, think about a company like Amazon, okay? So, if Amazon is getting most of its income from Amazon Web Services, from cloud hosting, you know, what determines how much revenue Amazon will receive? Well, the quality of its cloud hosting services, reliability and pricing and convenience and so forth. So, let's say, okay, Amazon also has a side business where it produces and distributes movies and TV shows on Amazon Prime. Okay? I mean, the Lord of the Rings thing, apparently, is super expensive. But on average, you know, Amazon's investment in media creation and media delivery is a small part of Amazon's overall activity. And the revenue that it gets from, you know, Amazon Prime subscriptions is small compared to Amazon Web Services. So, you can say, well, I mean, you know, the top executives at Amazon might say to the people in charge of Amazon Prime, hey, you do whatever you want. We don't really care. You know, this is just sort of a brand building thing. Or we want the customer data, right? Because we can integrate it with other kinds of customer data. Amazon has recently made a bid to acquire a hospital chain. And so, people are trying to figure out where the synergies might lie. What's probably something to do with acquisition and use of customer data, right? So, maybe as long as customer data is coming in in a way that's useful and Amazon Web Services is profitable, top executives at Amazon are willing to let the people in charge of Amazon Prime indulge their preferences for more woke content over less woke content. I'm inspired by an idea that I got from Murray Rothbard. I don't know. I didn't even find it in his writing, but I remember a conversation I had with him where he was talking about the book publishing industry. And the issue was why this, you know, this was 20, 30 years ago. You know, why is book publishing, you know, why is there so much sort of more left-wing, a bunch of left-leaning books get published and very few libertarian or conservative books get published, relatively speaking. Why are the big major commercial publishing houses publishing, you know, stuff by Robin D'Angelo and Kendi and all these people. Or whatever were their equivalents back when we were having this conversation. And he said, well, he said the book publishing industry is one of those industries that can be characterized by what they call the long tail phenomenon. The long tail, meaning that a very small number of titles account for the majority of the revenues. Right. So the typical book publishing company, you know, Random House, Basic Books, Commercial Publishers, you know, they publish hundreds of books in a year. And maybe only a handful will make money.   But then the rest of the books, especially the nonfiction books, most of them won't make any money at all. So Rothbard's belief was the, you know, top executives of these publishers, they delegate a lot of authority to editors, right, sort of middle managers. Editors are the ones who select titles and work with authors to develop the books and coordinate with marketing and publicity and production to get the books published. The book editors are, you know, largely have a left-wing ideology themselves. And so, you know, as long as they're bringing one or two money-makers to the boss, the boss is happy. And then, you know, all these books to the right, you know, so the diagram is like, you know, popularity or usefulness on vertical axis, and then the number of products on the horizontal axis. And so you have a small number of products that are highly important, interesting, popular, and then most of them are not, right? So the editors are allowed to indulge their personal preference for promoting left-wing ideology, according to Rothbard, because most of the books won't sell anyway. And so the CEO doesn't care if it's a non-selling left-wing book or a non-selling right-wing book. Even a publisher who is not ideologically in sympathy with the editors will let the editors kind of choose the titles, even though that introduces some bias. And so the same kind of thing is likely going on in the tech sector, right? Where the tech firms are actually making most of their money is in areas where Woke isn't really all that relevant. Woke isn't playing a very strong role. And as long as those activities are generating revenue for the firm, shareholders, boards of directors, top executives will delegate a lot of discretion to lower-level employees to sort of do what they want, because it doesn't cost you anything, right? The cost of bias towards wokeness, the impact of Woke bias on profitability is low for many activities because of this kind of long-tail phenomenon. And I think that's largely what's going on in the technology sector. Okay. So suppose we believed that that for these reasons or for other reasons, these tech companies really do have a lot of market power or monopoly power. What are we supposed to do about it? What do we say to Elizabeth Warren or Josh Hawley or other critics who want to break up big tech or regulate big tech, because they're too woke or because they're harming consumers or harming workers in other ways? Well, I want to state at the outset, it is true that a lot of tech companies have large market shares. As I mentioned yesterday, not 100%, not even 50% in many cases, but pretty substantial market shares. No one would dispute that Twitter, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon have a large influence in their respective markets. And there are a lot of reasons for this that are not in any way nefarious or suspicious, what they call network effects like for platform companies. A lot of critics of when people criticize Twitter or Facebook, one response is, well, people who get banned from Twitter, why don't they just go to another platform? There's GAB, there's Parler, there's the one that Trump started, I can't remember what it's called. Yeah.  Well, a lot of people don't want to use those platforms as much because they're small. The whole point of being on a platform is to reach a large audience and connect with a lot of people. So there's a kind of a network externality or network effect more precisely that the value of the platform depends on the size of the platform. And so if one platform is already very large, it can be a challenge for new platforms to enter because when they're small, they're not very attractive, so why would people use them in the first place? You have the phenomenon of large upfront investments to write the code, to develop the hardware, and then small marginal costs to produce additional units or serve additional customers, which combined with first mover advantages or that is a kind of a first mover advantage that can sometimes lead to what they used to call these winter take all markets. And then it was quickly pointed out that 50% is not all of the markets. And now they call them winter take most markets. Path dependence is related to this as well. But of course, these markets are still competitive in the sense that we described yesterday as long as there's no government restriction on entry, as long as other firms are free to try to compete whether they're successful or not, these are still competitive markets. I always show my students this article from 2007 worried that my space because of first mover advantages and network effects would always be the dominant social media platform. A lot of you probably never heard of my space, but maybe when you're like a toddler, you heard people talk about it. So a lot of the criticism has been directed at so-called platform companies, right? A platform means you're not just providing products that you make, you're also creating like a space where other people can exchange products. eBay is a platform. eBay isn't manufacturing the stuff that gets sold. It just provides a venue where buyers and sellers can get together. Google is in many ways a platform company as well. So is Amazon, social media platforms or platforms as well. And so there's some concerns that not everybody can access the platform and that recent, most important recent concern is that if you have a platform that also is a producer of some goods and services that are available on the platform, the platform will privilege its own offerings over those of competitors. And this is a sort of inappropriate unlawful restriction on competition according to the critics. Like if you just Google search, you know, weather Auburn, Alabama, the first thing that comes up, it used to be like the weather channel would be the first thing that comes up, but then Google changed it so where Google just tells you the weather forecast, right? And now not many people are using it, but I mean, maybe some of you use Google flights. If you just type in, you know, flight to Los Angeles, Google now has its own, you know, ticketing, airline ticketing and search function. It doesn't take you first to Travelocity or Expedia or Kayak or some other product. Google tries to answer the question for you first. And so allegedly this is Google privileging its own offerings according to the critics. You know, it's trying to drive Travelocity and Expedia out of business by just doing itself what those companies also provide. I mean, this is actually a very old problem.  Well, there's the Kellogg's cornflakes, but next to it, you'll see the great value cornflakes. That's the Walmart brand of cornflakes. So if we take these arguments about self-preferencing on platforms seriously, which some people do, it should follow that it ought to also be illegal for companies to have a store brand, right? Walmart should not be allowed to have Sam's Cola or great value cornflakes because it's not only the seller of Kellogg's, but it's the seller of its own. And it could put the Kellogg's cornflakes in the back where you can barely see them and put the great value cornflakes in the front where they're right in your face. And that would be unfair to Kellogg's according to these critics. Okay. Part of what's going on here is the idea that, you know, competition is increasingly not just one firm competing against another firm, but a platform or even you hear the term ecosystem, an ecosystem competing with another ecosystem, like in my phone, you know, in mobile telephony, you know, there's the iOS ecosystem and the Android ecosystem, both of which include hardware companies and software companies and service providers and so forth. You know, does that affect how we understand competition? Do the lessons that we learned yesterday in our discussion of competition and monopoly still apply if competition is not among individual firms, but among like clusters of firms that are all part of the same network or the same platform? I would answer the argument that I would argue the answer is yes, the same principles described by Mises Rothbard and others about how competition works would also apply if firms form partnerships, alliances, they coordinate, they sign contracts to work together as a group competing against other groups. There's no, that doesn't violate any of our, you know, the idea that voluntary interaction is mutually beneficial, that in a free market entrepreneurs are free to experiment with different business models and different business arrangements, as long as the state is not privileging one firm or one ecosystem over another, this is just as competitive. A world like this is just as competitive as a world where you have only individual firms competing against individual firms. Another issue that critics have worried about, and I touched on this a little bit yesterday at the end when I mentioned monopsony, is this idea that well, these sort of platform companies are more like intermediaries. So eBay is an intermediary between buyers and sellers. So eBay has a certain contract with the buyers and a certain contract with the sellers. eBay is making money from the sellers and in some cases making money from the buyers. So the relevant places where we should look for so-called market power is not just in the relationship with buyers. Does eBay have a monopoly on the sale of little garden gnomes or sort of obscure thing that you only get on eBay? Part of the reason that critics are saying, well, this is not only the only market that matters, we also need to look at this market. Maybe eBay is not charging high prices to buyers. It's not ripping off buyers. That's not how it's using its market power. It's ripping off sellers by giving them a really low, charging them high fees or for other kinds of intermediaries paying a low wholesale price. You can see why the argument went in this direction. Because if you try to claim that companies like Google and Facebook and Twitter are monopolists abusing their monopoly power, it's like, but to use them, the price you pay is zero. Most of their products are given away to consumers for free, of course, because they're making money off of the advertising. So the standard monopoly arguments don't seem to work because they're clearly not restricting output to increase the price as in that monopoly diagram. So the argument has shifted towards people saying, oh, well, maybe they're ripping off their workers using their monopsony power on the input side or platform companies are somehow taking advantage of their intermediate position to extract more rents from the sellers than from the buyers. And therefore, antitrust should be used to break them up and so forth. Okay, do these characteristics give rise to monopoly power? To market power? I think the answer is no, they don't. Not in the sense of monopoly that we discussed yesterday. Someone asked me in the Q&A yesterday about so-called natural monopoly, which is kind of a technical variant of the standard monopoly argument that is supposed to apply to certain kinds of services like utilities, water, gas, electric. And some people have argued, Elizabeth Warren has argued that social media companies should be treated as public utilities. Right, just like the government regulates the price of electricity and what electricity companies could be in the market, the government should treat Twitter and Facebook and Google the same way and regulate them as public monopolies. I'm sure you won't be surprised to know that I'm not sympathetic to that. On the subject of so-called misinformation, I think if we look closely, I think there's tremendous political pressure on platform companies to, you can call it censorship, if you want, to regulate the flow of information in particular ways. There's infamous case where the laptop belonging to President Biden's son was discovered in New Jersey somewhere right before the election, and it had all kinds of information that was indicated that candidate Biden was politically compromised, had made secret deals with Ukrainians and Chinese and so forth. Gosh, what a shock that now we're deeply embedded in the war in Ukraine. The New York Times, Washington Post, made a deliberate decision that they would not report any information on this story, and Twitter and Facebook would ban any accounts or would delete any posts that mentioned the Hunter Biden laptop story. It was forbidden to be mentioned. And now, of course, we all know this is completely true. It's been verified by even the FBI and so forth. I think that there were high-level conversations in which, you know, the so-called deep state operatives, people in the intelligence community, the same ones who claimed that this was, quote, Russian disinformation, they made it clear to Twitter, Facebook, and other tech companies that you will not allow people to discuss the story, okay, and the tech companies caved.  I mean, we have documentary evidence of meetings between Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx and other members of the COVID response teams in the Trump and Biden administrations working with the tech platforms to decide what people will be allowed to say about COVID and what they will not. I mean, Birx, Dr. Birx just, her book came out a couple weeks ago in which she openly brags about reporting false information to the president and to the public, you know, two weeks to flatten the curve was completely fabricated. And she proudly admits that she just made that up as a way of trying to get people to shelter in place because if she said what she really thought that they should shelter in place for six months, they wouldn't do it. So the government is the source of most of this misinformation and they're putting a lot of pressure on tech companies to go along. Okay, so some libertarians have said, well, because tech firms are so deeply embedded in the state, we should really consider them as part of the state and treat them as state organs. I don't think that's literally true. Clearly, a lot of tech companies have benefited from public subsidies, state subsidies in various forms. You know, they engage in behaviors like de-platforming at the behest of state actors. They get certain kinds of legal privileges from the Communications Decency Act and the Section 230 exemption, which I would argue is a kind of a privilege or a subsidy given to tech firms, but it doesn't follow that they are literally part of the state. I mean, they're privately owned. The state doesn't control all aspects of their operation. If you want to say that companies that partner with the state, companies that benefit from the state, should be considered part of the state, well, I mean, then Goldman Sachs is more part of the state than, you know, Microsoft or Twitter in my opinion. Okay, so what should we do? Sorry. Yeah, I don't think there's any case for government policy to break up or regulate tech companies. Most of the specific regulations that have been proposed, we can talk about these offline, impose costs that are greater than any potential benefits. You know, we should stop subsidizing them, right? The best public policy towards big tech is to take away any special privileges that have been granted and let them compete freely and fairly on the marketplace, just like all firms, even those that are not the recipients of that kind of privilege and protection. So, thank you very much. Time for lunch.