As the coronavirus pandemic caused panic shoppers to clear out whole supermarkets of toilet paper, rice and canned vegetables, two brothers set out on a 1,300-mile road trip through the back roads of Kentucky and Tennessee. Matt and Noah Colvin loaded up a U-Haul with all the hand sanitizer and antibacterial wipes they could find, and they attempted to resell the goods on Amazon at a massive markup. Then the online retailing giant banned the practice, state attorneys general started cracking down, and the Colvins were shamed in the media. They ended up donating the items. But is so-called price gouging always a bad thing? Michael Munger, who teaches economics, political science and public policy at Duke University, argues that prices contain vital information about supply and demand. When governments attempt to mandate cheap goods, he says, they end up causing more shortages than they solve. And this is especially true during a crisis. I spoke with Munger via Zoom about how the 21st century is testing libertarian ideas about limited government and individual freedom. Michael Munger, thanks for talking to me. It's a pleasure to be on the show, Nick. Okay, and it's nice that it's a show now, you know, because the one great thing that the coronavirus has done is destroy all standards of what is, you know, I don't know where we go after this, but you know, I'm happy to get in the car and drive and pay for gas to get there. Michael Munger, you are trained as an economist. You talk, you teach public policy and political science as well.  Can you explain what you, why in a circumstance such as we're in now, where there is a lockdown, the government says you're not allowed to do certain things, you can only do other things here and there, why should we not suspend market mechanisms on the cost of things ranging from N95 masks to toilet paper at the grocery store? It's not clear that I would defend price gouging in all instances. Let me, let me take a step back. Most of us are not defenders of cutting open someone's abdomen with a razor blade. By and large, you shouldn't do that. But if they will otherwise die and the surgeon can give them an appendectomy, you would say, we're going to make an exception. This is a really bad circumstance. Under these limited circumstances, we would be better off cutting open this person's abdomen with a razor blade than not doing it. So I think price gouging is terrible. And much of what we call price gouging is like a guy coming in telling an elderly person, this tree in your yard is going to fall down. We'll cut it for you for $300 and they give them a bill for $2,000. So much of what is enforced as price gouging is in fact fraud. So let's take out fraud and recognize that we're in a circumstance of really great scarcity. And let's think about what the price mechanism does. So if the price of something goes up and there's a shortage, three great things happen. The first is that consumers buy less. They look at that price and they say, you know, somebody else must need this more than I do. And so they leave some from the person behind them. The second thing is that producers try to find ways to make more. And the third thing is that entrepreneurs try to find ways to make substitutes. And the thing is that if you use the price mechanism, you don't have to announce any of that. All of it happens automatically and in a decentralized way. So the price mechanism is a signal of scarcity. It's not the cause of scarcity. It is a consequence of scarcity. And so there's people that would say that if you live near a fire station, I hear sirens all the time, it's really upsetting. We ought to outlaw sirens. Well, no, the problem is the fire. It's not the sirens. So focusing on the price means that if you want to keep prices low, I walk up, I see low prices. I say, you know, I can take all I want. And so the reason why people take all this stuff is the prices low. Wait, wait, wait. But that, you know, to push back on this, you know, that isn't what happened a couple of weeks ago at grocery stores. When people were like, there is a good chance that we are going to be told not to leave our houses again. There is a good chance that trucks are not going to be replenishing grocery store shelves. We went to buy toilet paper because we were like, we don't know the next time we're going to get it. We did that with meat. We did that with rice and grain.  I'm going to start making toilet paper. How many months does that take to gear up? So can we talk about things in a moment where, you know, a storm is coming down and you have a great story about the long forgotten hurricane Fran from the ages ago, 20th century, and about how shortages and whatnot played out there. But, you know, when a hurricane is coming and we know we've got 24 hours to get stuff, and then it's all going to be gone. Is it wrong to say to people, you cannot charge $10 for a $1 bottle of water, or is it wrong, or is it a totally different thing to say, you know what, we're not going to mess with the prices, but you can't take the entire aisle of toilet paper out of the grocery store right now. We're going to limit you to two or three. You asked a couple of different questions. So first let me accept the premise of one of your questions and then quarrel with the premise of one of your questions. So the premise of your question, and it's a very good one, is suppose that you're in a situation where the things that I've talked about are unlikely to be able to happen. Because economists call this the supply elasticity. It's the responsiveness of the amount of stuff. So if this is really all that we're going to have, it means that all of the second and third things that I said were good about prices, those can't happen. And all we've got is up front, we're trying to allocate a scarce resource among a bunch of people who want it. And then there seems like a pretty good objection that only rich people can buy it. So we really want a system that says only rich people. Again, I'm a rich college professor. I have tenure. I still have income. Of course, I'm going to advocate a system that benefits me. I want stuff to still be at the store and have a really high price. So if there's a circumstance when this really is all there is, I can see an argument for some other mechanism for rationing. And one way of rationing would be, and some stores have done this, no more than one or two containers of toilet paper. On the other hand, the premise of your question is we don't know when we're going to get out again.  And you can still go to the grocery store. And if you've been to the grocery store lately, at least in Raleigh, where I live, there's plenty of toilet paper. There's plenty of meat. Also the case in New York City. I have friends who live in various parts of the country. I know of virtually no one who is saying, you know what, the shells ran out three weeks ago and they haven't been restocked. Yeah. So there's an old North Carolina joke about this. And it actually had to do with the hurricane you mentioned, Hurricane Fran. But after the hurricane, apparently some guy goes into a 7-Eleven and sees that they have cases of water for $30 and says, $30, that's too much for water. And the guy says, well, yeah, you know, there's not much. We're running out. And the customer says, but the guy across the street, water is $7. Okay, go across the street and buy it there. Well, he's out. And so the store owner says, tell you what, as soon as I run out, I'll charge $7. The point is the only reason he had any was that he was charging $30. The question is, are you better off $30 or a price of infinity, which is what you have when all the prices are empty? Now, that's still the premise. And you asked the right question. What if it's true that the supply elasticity, meaning what if it's true that this really is all we're gonna get? If we're not going to get more with a higher price, there's a good argument for rationing. I agree with that. It's just that it's hard to think of a circumstance, although there are some. And that is masks and hand sanitizers for frontline healthcare workers. I think there's an excellent argument for declaring that those things are, there's a national or state reason to control those. We're not going to allow them to be sold. We're not going to allow rich people to buy them because they're the only ones who can afford them. And we can't make enough more of those. The stockpiles are gone. So for masks in New York City, yes, those should not have high prices. Those should go to frontline healthcare workers and first responders. That's absolutely right. What is the, how do we know what the elasticity of supply or, you know, I guess at the same, by the same token demand is in a given situation. And this is where in the current situation, things seem a little bit more unclear than in a classic kind of hurricane situation where we know there's a storm coming and it's going to cut off all the roads, all the supplies. How do we deal with something like this? And what were your first thoughts when you heard, you know, mayors, governors, you know, federal officials saying, okay, you know what we have to put in price controls immediately because of, you know, we know there are going to be shortages. I think from a political perspective, it was a genius move because they can't do anything that actually helps on the virus or access to healthcare. They don't have enough testing kits.  So what they can do is say, you know what, we're going to protect people against price gouging. My own senator, Senator Tom Tillis, who I've had lunch with and has told me to my face, you know, I'm a libertarian. Yeah.  One way or the other, right? I'm sure he is introduced a piece of federal legislation to outlaw federal price gouging. So not only is ignore the 10th amendment on local police being able to control price. So this is a federal price gouging law. It also ignores the fact that high prices in one state are likely to bring because not all states are equally affected by this. Right. States need more toilet paper. Some states really are desperate for some of these items. High prices say, bring it here. We need it more than you do. And people will use the implied profit to say, all right, we will incur extra expense. We'll get it there faster and we'll get more of it. So prices nationally are an important signal. Now, if this were true that everywhere we were all out, everyone was dying, then we probably should have a national rationing scheme. But the way that it is where different states are different prices the fastest signal to increase the amount of this stuff. So I think particularly at the federal level of price gouging law is a mistake. Locally, if I were in New York, I would fully support a price gouging law and the claim that we should use rationing that doesn't involve prices. That makes sense. Can you talk a little bit about in New York City right now? They're trying to get nurses and other medical professionals to come here. They've done what was unthinkable even a month and a half ago, which is they're suspending or waiving various kinds of certification rules saying, you know, like you're certified to help people in New Jersey. It's a totally different world in New York. So you have to go through a bunch of regulatory hoops and all of that. They're saying, okay, screw that. And we're going to pay you something like $100 an hour as opposed to maybe $30 or $40 an hour. Why do we not in general think of labor as a source of gouging as well? Because when contractors, you know, in hurricane situations, things like that, we kind of immediately reach for the idea that if we pay more money, we'll get more of a supply. It's really an interesting distinction and I cannot claim to understand it. In the case of the healthcare workers, they're also being subjected to additional danger and you're trying to get them to commute from far away. So it makes perfect sense, but people never say it the way you said it, which is we're using price increases to attract more of the needed thing. In this case, it happens the needed thing is labor. So we seem to have a blind spot for the use of price for commodities, even though a higher price does the three things that I said, but it's okay for labor. So I wouldn't say it's not okay for labor. That part we have right and those people are taking great risks. I hope they get paid more. They probably are still underpaid, but we should use the price mechanism for other things where it's possible provided it is, we're now seeing an increase in the production of toilet paper. There's a lot of these commodities. We're going to come online with the production of hand sanitizer and masks pretty soon. So there is a market response to this. Can you talk about the ways in which government in a way that it's not always credited often creates these bottlenecks in production and consumption? So with something like hand sanitizer, I've read distilleries are switching over to do hand sanitizer, but there are rules about denaturing alcohol so that people don't use rubbing alcohol to drink or something like that. What are some of the hidden ways in which the government kind of steps in to say, okay, we're going to help with this, but they actually are also part of the problem at the same time? It's probably unavoidable because we were asking a system that is set up to operate with things arriving just in time because storing things are expensive. So we don't have big stockpiles and then to blame the government for not having stockpiled things seems excessive, but the government is also intentionally, unintentionally providing a bunch of roadblocks in the form of just enforcing the existing rules. The hard thing is we probably don't want bureaucrats able to suspend these rules at a whim because they'll reward their friends. And so the Food and Drug Administration for nearly a month, the entire month of February, enforced the rules assiduously about testing kits. So no new testing kits were approved for a full month and there were a number that probably would have been okay, but they had to do field testing. And so the Food and Drug Administration was doing the job and had been assigned to do and that's a disaster. But the reason is bureaucracy is actually designed to move slowly and methodically to avoid things like, and we always use the same example, phyletomite. United States because it had the FDA didn't have the phyletomite because it was slow and methodical. So this is actually just a feature of bureaucracy. I wouldn't say that it's a bug or something that's good. It's the way bureaucracy works. Sometimes it saves us from precipitate decisions that would have been bad. And in this case, it's frustratingly preventing us from being able to have access to the stuff that we need. One thing that economists try to do is look at the costs and benefits of particular policies and the way they play out. It seems to me that in the current discussion about the coronavirus, and this may make sense at this stage, but virtually the only thing we're talking about is the potential cost in terms of human life and the benefits of saving as many people as possible or flattening the curve, whatever phrase you want to use. When is it proper to start factoring other economic issues? In such as we're looking at something, I was reading headlines that over 6 million people have applied for unemployment benefits, which is almost double what the initial estimate was going to be. And we're looking at, we might be looking at 25% or 30% unemployment. This is depth of the Great Depression level. How do you from a kind of public policy perspective factor in economics, the larger economy versus the immediate public health claims on attention and things like that? It's one of the most difficult problems. And when I talk to students about this, it's shocking to them, but I tell them that a public policy analyst, particularly one who teaches from the PPE perspective, I'm the director of philosophy, politics and economics. From that perspective, you have to realize that you are not in favor of zero deaths. And then it gets real quiet. I'm in favor of a number of deaths that exceed zero. If you add up the total of the deaths from COVID and the deaths from starvation or not having access to economic resources or just the stress of not knowing where you're going to work, those are always going to be a lot more than zero. I don't know where the minimum is, but it does seem like we have been biased in favor. At first, we were biased in favor of the economy. A lot of things did not shut down. We didn't get any kind of distancing. If you look at the curves about rate of growth, we blew right through China and we're about to catch Italy. So the rate of increase of deaths in the United States, it's going really badly. And it seems that now we're likely to react in the other direction of overemphasizing social distancing in a way that really wrecks the economy that may leave a legacy of years. So the consequence of that is that we have mismanaged this. I think it's not like I expected anything like this to happen. The effects on the economy are going to be very hard to gauge. And I do worry that there's going to be a centralization of economic power and planning. And the idea of transfer and bailing out based on political power. Some industries are going to get very substantial bailouts. Some industries may get almost nothing. Having that kind of discretion in the hands of government means that not only are we not going to take care of the economy as much as we might have, but there's going to be disparate treatment within different industries. And that's just a giant rent seeking contest. So it really is about as bad as you can imagine. What, you know, a week ago, basically, Congress passed and the president signed what is generally considered or acknowledged to be the single biggest spending bill in American history, probably in human history. You know, $2 trillion plus in direct money being shoveled at various things. What is your sense of that? And what is the role? And this is a separate thing. From a libertarian perspective, from an explicitly libertarian perspective, what is the role of the federal government in a situation like this? We're going to be able to talk about this now for the rest of my life in class, because this is the best example I've ever seen. I don't know the answer to your question. What's interesting is that I think that bill is way... What is the libertarian response, or from a libertarian perspective, what would you be comfortable with the federal government doing? Well, suppose that there is an emergency of such great extent that you're going to see dominoes, where a bunch of restaurants who own money to people who sell meat are unable to pay their bills, and then all of those are unable to pay their debts, and the banks go down. So there's this cascade, maybe because we've overreacted, but for whatever reason, the libertarian response... My libertarian response is I'm a utilitarian and I would like to try to minimize the total number of debts. And I don't know where the minimum of that is. We're trying to make a guess. I would say that the bill, the legislation, is actually far better than I expected. It's more decentralized. Well, you've got a condition that on my expenses, on my expectations. My expectations were really bad. This is mostly going to go to large corporations. A lot of it is going to go directly and immediately to small businesses without having to go through an application process through the Small Business Administration. So they may be able to keep some people on their payrolls. The big expense is if people get laid off, and then we have to go through this really difficult process of rehiring people. So given that we were going to do it, I don't know the answer to how much should a libertarian think the federal government should do. Given what they've done, this is actually pretty decentralized and pretty non-bureaucratic. Is there going to be fraud? Absolutely. But a lot of this money is actually going to get out pretty quickly. And this is a way better bill than I expected. What was your feeling about the bailout after the financial crisis? Is this relative to that? This seems to be better because it's going to smaller businesses and individuals? Or is the function the same? There, that was an idea. And I think that was over-hyped beyond belief. But the idea was that the economic system was about to collapse. We don't really have that sense here. Right. I think that's a good analogy. The problem that I would say is it depends if you ask me when. So if you ask me in the fall of 2008 and the early spring of 2009, did we have to do the bailout that we did? Probably yes. Toxic asset release program, relief program, we probably did have to do because the expectations that they would be bailed out were built into the way that all these assets were capitalized. If we could have made a credible commitment in 2004 not to do a bailout, then none of that might have happened in the first place and no bailout would have been required. But when we did not, when we failed to bail out Lehman Brothers, there was a catastrophe. There really was a very substantial decline. So I guess I kind of think of if you have an alcoholic relative, the question is how much do you enable them?  Well, you probably go bail them out. But the question is, was there something before that, some kind of intervention that could have prevented it? So you've enabled them all this time and then you say, well, we have to help them now. That's the wrong thing to think. But what you need to think is, how can we prevent that from having happened in the first place? We did not make a credible commitment. In fact, if you look at Dodd Frank, it specifies, like a list, it specifies what is a systemically important financial institution or CEPI and says, we will not bail these out. If I were Solomon Brothers, I would say that's my to-do list. What I want to do is accomplish. I want to make sure I'm systemically important. Whereas the restaurant on the corner is not systemically important, but it's locally important. There's five people who work there and bailing them out means that there's a pretty good chance that those five people will continue to have jobs that scales up in a way that paying off a few people at the top doesn't. So that explains why you are more comfortable with the current, the CARES Act that went into effect last week.  One is the fifth level and one is the seventh level of hell. But yes, that legislation is better than I thought and the two reasons are it's more decentralized and it's less bureaucratic. What do you expect to happen to the economy? And part of this depends on how long we're in lockdown for. But over the next two or three months, what is likely to happen and then say, come around Christmas time, where do you think we'll be as an economy? I have such a history of bad predictions. I do have to say that in November of this past year, I took all of my 401K and my wife's 401K and converted it to money market.  And now for two months, I felt pretty smart. But it's not because I knew anything. It was because it just looked like the system was unsettled. And so I think now everyone agrees that the system is unsettled. It's going to be hard to find money to invest. The hospitality industry, restaurants, hotels is just wiped out and they may not be back anytime soon. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of people in every state who work in the hospitality industry and they're not going to be able to spend money at Christmas time. This past Christmas in some ways was not that great. Next Christmas may be a catastrophe. So I don't know, we're going to test a lot of the theories that Keynesians have about ways to try to spur the economy. So we may see a big increase in the rate of growth of the money supply. We may see an attempt to start a bunch of fiscal policy and we're probably going to get one or more of those things wrong.  What is, you know, are there historical episodes that we can look to not for, you know, predictive value but for at least some kind of analytic orientation? World War II, you know, and I'm thinking back to, you know, our mutual friend and your regular podcast partner and whatnot, Russ Roberts, talking about the way he described World War II. As an undergrad who took economics classes in the 1980s, I was taught that, you know, the New Deal was a good attempt to use Keynesianism to restart the economy, but it wasn't big enough. But then, you know, World War II and all of the money and, you know, the entire shifting of the American economy to war footing is what finally got us out of the Great Depression. Russ Roberts and other people say, you know, it didn't do that at all. When you look at economic growth and also economic freedom, you know, nobody had anything. Everything was rationed and you couldn't do anything. And then in fact it was after World War II and an absolute steep decline, you know, by, I don't know, like two thirds or something of federal spending in the 40s, that's when the economy took off. You know, can we look at World War II and the effect both under lockdown and then post war as some marker for what's going to happen or had, you know, how do we even come up with scenarios that are not just wish, you know, fantasies here? I cannot think of an analogy. The closest analogy I can think of to, for people living almost under lockdown was the polio epidemic of the early and mid fifties. So in many parts of the Midwest, people just stayed home. In fact, they had to stay in their own bedrooms. If you, you know, polio was only for young people, but it was catastrophic. So before the Salkvast vaccine became widely available. And the, if you look at the economic effect on states where there was, where the polio vaccine was running wild, it was terrible, but it was relatively brief. It was a couple of years. And by then it moved on to somewhere else. The World War II question is it is true that an awful lot of resources were employed. In fact, in the rap video, if you, if you spend all your money on the army and fleet, you have full employment, but nothing to eat. Right. So you're not actually producing anything, but there still was income. So people did have income. There was full employment here. We're not going to be producing anything and people will not be employed. So they won't have any source of income. Even if it's fake income, like it was in World War II, because there was nothing I could buy, things were rationed. We may move to rationing some things if people don't have enough money to buy essentials. So I guess that my, my big worry is in big cities like New York, if the unemployment rate is 30 or 40%, we're probably going to move to soup lines and ration coupons where you can get things like wick coupons, except now it won't be women and infant children. It'll be anyone who's unemployed. So the, the, we will, we will move towards rationing of a more socialist kind because the alternative is revolution and the cities will be on fire. Do you think it's likely? I mean, and, you know, God, we're only a few weeks into any of this, but the productive capacity doesn't seem to have slowed down. As we were talking about, you know, the grocery store shelves are full again. Do you think if this continues that actually we won't be able to grow food or bring it to market or things like that? Or is, are we talking about something different here where it's, the food will be there and it's just that a large number of people, an unfathomable, unfathomable percentage of people won't have any money to buy stuff with. Yes, that it is the, the, the production part of the economy is behaving pretty well. And we are restocking the shelves that we're going to have a, we're going to have a problem in the fall because there's not enough workers to be able to harvest crops. But, but, but for now, we're still in last year, we have plenty of food to be able to distribute. But if you're not able to pay your rent, then you can have a law for a little while that there'll be no evictions. But that's a really short run problem because the landlord is going to get evicted. The landlord has to make the nut on the note that the landlord is paying every month. And in the big cities that in New York, that in Washington DC, San Francisco, that's a lot of money. So, and that is just, we could decree that no one can be evicted. So they still have housing for a little while. They have absolutely no way of buying food. They have no hope of getting a job to buy food. And in fact, they can't leave their apartment. So I, I do think that in terms of what's going to break the binding constraint is not we're going to run out of things to buy. But people are going to get tired of not being able to buy them. Not having any income 30 or 40% unemployment with no income coming in. You get $1,000 from the government. That doesn't help very much. Do you how likely do you think that scenario is? I would guess that in the large cities, we will have rationing. We will have rationing of the sort to ensure that people with no money can get basics, rice, beans. When vaccines come online for this, is there a strong argument, you know, you were talking, we started out talking about how price signals help, you know, create more of a supply, which ultimately lowers the prices. So a spike in prices now can actually guarantee or help, you know, people have ubiquitous access to a good later. When a vaccine comes online, should that be free or should or should it be free to the person getting it? Should that be something that the government actually makes sure gets to everybody? One solution might be to pay people to get the vaccine. So we can have a because the developing herd immunity as fast as possible is our goal. And the having a vaccine in combination with a test to be able to tell whether you've had it. So if we have a test that could detect the presence of antibodies, because some people are going to have it and not know it, they don't need the vaccine. So if we can develop two things, an effective vaccine and a test to find out whether people have antibodies present, and we can make sure that 97% of the population has met one of those two conditions, the disease is over. We're done. Although it may be that it comes back in a year or two, it's not clear how long the antibodies last for coronavirus. So it's it's not like chickenpox where basically you have immunity for years and years afterwards. But if we can have those two things in tandem, I would say that the vaccine, probably we should pay people to take the vaccine and have as many people as possible. You know, one of the one of the hopes I think of the current moment is, you know, just as the FDA and the CDC and various local and state authorities are giving up kind of stupid regulations that don't seem to be working at all, that we're going to experiment a lot and do that. I mean, realistically, I mean, you're you're talking about a major shift from in the past that was you cannot come in here unless you can certify that you have been inoculated against something. We have kids, you can't go to schools unless you show a vaccination list and all of that. Now suddenly you're talking about paying people to get vaccinated or to, you know, take a test to show that they're in. Realistically, are we really going to change, you know, 200 years of public policy in America over this kind of stuff? And if so, how do we how do we grease the skids for that kind of activity? I think that economic misery is going to make people a lot more susceptible to it, because again, just as we said, there's going to be deaths no matter what, there's going to be economic costs no matter what. So is there a way we can choose that will minimize the total economic misery? And I think this will be less expensive than letting the thing run its course. And not the longer this goes on, the longer we extend the period in which we're economically inert. And there'll be a there's no fundamental problems. Dynamically, we should start to respond on the other end. There's be a lot of pent up demand for all sorts of home repairs, construction, people will want to go on vacations. So the sooner we can get through that, the better. Now I realized that that sort of argument is always made by the left. And I feel a little odd making it that no, it's going to pay for itself. That if we do this, we're actually going to make money by spending this. But it's actually true that herd immunity is a different kind of public good. If we can get to 97%, we're in a fundamentally different world than if we're at 80%. Talk a bit about whether or not, you know, this moment, which, you know, we're about the same age we're in our late 30s, right? With 30 years experience. Yes. And but, you know, this is certainly the most, I was going to say the most unique. It is a completely novel and unique experience. It's not like the financial crisis. It is not like 9-11. It's not like the Cold War and at various hot points there. This is a weird black swan. You know, one hopes it's a black swan and it doesn't become just the new normal. All of this, you know, how does this affect your libertarian predispositions? Does it fundamentally challenge things or does it, you know, magically as often as the case for any ideological persuasion, you know, have all of your, you know, political commitments suddenly been validated by what's going on here? Talk, I mean, and I guess I'm starting to go on it so long as a prologue to this, you know, immediately upon this first becoming recognized as a problem, you know, you started seeing headlines saying there are no libertarians in pandemics. And then, you know, I know reason at other places, published stories almost immediately the first, you know, time a rule was suspended and people were like, I'll just go out your business. It was like, no, there are only libertarians in pandemics. Where are you on any of this, Michael? Almost everyone has seen their predispositions validated by what has happened. And so we use, we use the evidence selectively to support what we believed already. But I have to admit, I came to realize that I had a view on this. January 1, my good friend Tyler Cowan wrote a piece on state capacity libertarianism. And I recently wrote a coming out story of my own how state capacity libertarianism makes a lot of sense. It seems to me we need to have a healthy skepticism about the scope of the functions of the state. And the state has metastasized into so many areas where it has no business. So as a result, it does a pretty bad job in almost all of them. So it's trying to do everything and as a result can't do anything. Can you Right. And we need it to do something now. Right.  I think the government is legitimate. And it should do fewer things well rather than everything kind of in a half ass way. Can you put some meat on those bones? What are the things the government should be doing? And what are the things that should say, you know what, we, we got to, we got to just leave this to the markets or to nonprofits or something else. Well, there's a short run and a long run. So let's think about the short run for a second. Suppose that, like many of my libertarian colleagues, one believes that the food and drug administration is unnecessary. Brand names, brand names, trademarks, reputation that could solve all of that problem. We could have something like underwriters laboratories, a private organization that will check to see if drugs work. All right, you can believe that we have the FDA. The question is, does starving the beast help? Should we cut the budget of the FDA? Does that get us closer to Libertopia? No, given that we have the FDA, given that that's the system, the FDA needs to be well funded and to have these other rules eliminated. So that that's actually consistent with the libertarian view. We should liberalize the rules at the FDA, but it should be well funded. It should have a lot of experts. It should be an exciting place to work. People who want to commit to public health. But isn't that what the CDC, you know, that has always given high marks for a government agency and it's explicitly designed to help stave off exactly what we're in. And, you know, Donald Trump may have tried to defund certain aspects of it, but its budget continues to go up and it's, hasn't it been shown to be, you know, not just an effective but cock-blocking other people who were actually trying to get something done? Yep. I'm willing to say that, and that's the second part, in the short run, we should not just be across the board trying to cut. I have many libertarian friends that say anything that's smaller government is better. That's not true. That's just not true. We need to be selective. In the long run, we do need to try to say we need to have a serious conversation, particularly about expansion. I would like to zero out the budget of some agencies in some activities. What is an agency that you would say you're done? Well, in the long run. The TSA should be private. Other countries, the air traffic control should be private. Most other countries, again, don't have Homeland Security. Many parts of ICE should not exist. There's no reason for us to have domestic spying to have interrogations of people that are hundreds of miles inland. If we want to control the border, okay. We could argue about the extent, but they're just enforcing the law. But we have a lot of enforcement and spying activity as a result of the aftermath of 9-11, the expansion of the Patriot Act.  And some of that at the local level is just nannyism, where it might not even be money. It isn't so much spending as the scope of regulation. Attempts to make sure with local zoning that you cannot build houses in San Francisco and then complain about the absence of low-cost housing. Have a requirement where you have to have 1.75 parking spaces per new apartment. So there's a lot of regulations we could get rid of. There's a lot of things that we could zero out. And then what's left should be well funded. Right. Let's talk a little bit about your line of work. And you know, regardless of the coronavirus, you know, in a lot of ways the kind of model of a four-year residential college with tenured faculty.  And it's more like a post-increase in state universities in the 50s. Till now it's dying anyway. The number of tenured faculty positions in many areas dying out. But this is a shock. The coronavirus, you know, pandemic and the lockdown is as much a shock to higher education as it is to any possible part of the economy. You have written, I think the last time that we talked at length, it was about your fantastic book about the future of work. The future of labor in a, you know, in a kind of sharing economy and whatnot. Talk a little bit about how your daily work life has changed because of this. And, you know, in the fall is Duke or other colleges, are they going to be open for business as usual? Or is this a moment where, you know, the butterfly was trying to come out of the caterpillars, chrysalis or whatever for a long time? Is this finally the moment where a lot of what we took for granted as higher ed just kind of disappears? We could do a whole hour-long podcast about this. I think it's an interesting question. I just submitted a piece to a national magazine. They haven't accepted yet, so I won't say what. But I just submitted a piece to a national magazine about the future of higher education. I think this is going to be a Rubicon. We're going to cross over. And this experience for many students is going to give the lie to the idea that you have to show up on campus and be educated at a particular time. So there's the tyranny of the clock tower. You can only be educated between 10 a.m. and 11.15 on Tuesday and Thursday instead of having things that are asynchronous. You can watch this video, you can watch it two or three times. I think that we're going to look back on this as a big change in higher education. However, it is true that not now, but two months ago in New York City, in one day you could see a movie in the morning. You could watch Netflix in your apartment in the afternoon and you could go to a live play on Broadway in the evening. So all of these things, doing it live in a group, doing it individually and then watching a video as a group and having a discussion, all of those things can happen. The tyranny of the top universities probably will continue, tyranny is the wrong word, the dominance of the top university because of the signaling value of going to an elite university. But for many, many other people, there's no reason why universities should have the gatekeeping role that they do. We should make education something that's more democratized. Well, and it's become that certainly since World War II, and I'd argue in a weird way, and I guess this is something that a lot of libertarian thought doesn't dwell on, but simultaneously a school like Duke or whatever you want to call it, a top 25 university may have more cachet now, but people have more ways of totally ignoring that than ever before. The New York Times, the people there are paid more, they have higher status than ever, and it's also like the New York Times can't close down, Broadway plays with a shitty review anymore, so we have these things that are moving in the same, in directions that don't seem to add up. Let me ask you this about higher ed though, and particularly when you're talking about certain social sciences and the humanities, we tend to talk about higher ed as if it's only a place where undergraduates go and learn all the best that has been thought and said, all of that kind of stuff. In fact, I would argue that the main function or the real utility of a university, of a research university is the work that the faculty do. How do you see that changing if suddenly people don't have to be going to colleges as much and department budgets? You don't need as many professors, you cut the budget, the professors are expected to teach more, do less research. What is the large impact of that kind of shift? That could really be a big deal because a lot of the research that's done in humanities departments is just done as a means to an end to getting tenure, which is done as a means to an end to having the rankings of your university improved, and it's more like a computer game than anything real. The modal number of references to a lot of these published articles is zero, no one ever reads them. And so the way that we have research structured is because it's a tied good to education, to participating in what it is we do in the classroom. And so breaking those things apart, I'm not sure that there would be that much demand and I'll just stick to my own discipline. If you had to sell research in political science on its own, I'm not sure anybody would pay for that. But we get paid a lot to do research in political science because we're in a political science department at a top university. Don't you think that you're a better teacher because you're actively doing research, whether or not that research is going to produce a patent that you can sell to a corporation besides the point? I mean, there is, I think, a link between smart people doing research being better in the classroom, which then attracts more people. I think that that is true for many of the, it is true that many of the best teachers are also good researchers. However, what I was saying was that a lot of the research that is actually published, it is hard to say what its value is. Sure. So the doing research and staying current in your field is a good way to be better teachers, and that's working fine. I think that I would say that, but that's working pretty well at the top universities. But there's a lot of universities that are large state universities that are, well, we call them, it's derogatory, we call them directional universities. So they have, they have a direction. East Carolina, North, well, let's say you're at Duke, let's say North Carolina. It's a directional state university. Yeah, that is, I've never thought of that before, but I'm going to use it a lot from now on. Thank you. They're teaching four classes a semester, and they do get to do some research. But if we could break that off and have them use a video from a professor who is really great at doing this, something like the equivalent of movie stars, and then have a discussion about it, that might be better than expecting them to do lectures on their own. So we're trapped in this narrative about the sage on the stage. And with the new technology allows us to break that up and have it be more modular. So creativity in teaching might be more important than having research informed teaching that we can probably only afford at the top places. What about other forms of labor? This year started, really over the past year in California, there was a law that was passed to help supposedly Uber drivers and Lyft drivers and people delivering for Grubhub or Seamless or whatever, a law that basically banned freelancing in the name of saying the grand bargain between employer and employee that was hammered out in the fat years after World War II and the great compression. This mythical period that never really existed, but we're constantly referencing that our parents or grandparents worked for one company forever, and they got a fully loaded health benefit plan. They got a Cadillac retirement, and that's how it should always be. In California was leading the way and saying, we're forcing companies to do that again. Your book from a couple years ago, and I'm blanking on the title, it's got 3.0. I knew it had 3.0 and it tomorrow 3.0 was actually extolling the virtues of the gig economy or of more modular kind of individually tailored work arrangements. What's going to happen? Do you think when we're on the other side of this regarding your vision of the future? Well, Andy, it connects with the coronavirus and social distancing because it means that we need more flexibility in labor markets. So last week, I wrote a letter. So again, nothing better for your book than the coronavirus. Yeah, I in demonstrating. You're so selfish, Michael Munger. So precious. I wrote a letter, I'm working with the Independent Institute in Oakland, California to have a letter for California economists and policy analysts to ask the governor of California to suspend Assembly Bill 5. So Assembly Bill 5 was the legislation that basically set a set of requirements, and it really affected writers. The tough thing about AB 5 was that if you published, at first it was more than 20, and then it became more than 32 pieces per year for the same magazine. Well, if you have a weekly column, you're going to publish 30 or 40. You have to be a full-time staffer, etc. Which means that they wouldn't let you write. The reaction was not to hire them as a full-time staffer with benefits. The reaction perfectly understandably was to say, all right, you can't write more than this limit. And so we're going to try to get Governor Newsom to suspend AB 5 for as long as the coronavirus is keeping social distancing because we need people to be able to work in part-time jobs so they can get by until full-time jobs start to come back. They may or may not ever come back. I think AB 5 should be rescinded. But it should clearly be suspended in the short run because ability to use apps and gig jobs to get through are going to be the key to reducing the damage economically. What do you think about the argument that a fairly massive federal unemployment benefits in the CARES Act and the $2 trillion spending bill that was passed plus the monthly stipend essentially going to people, individuals and children in households making under $75,000 a year is actually going to push companies to fire people or to at least furlough them? Do you think are we paying people to not work effectively? And that means that's a pretty good bargain for everybody. I think that companies recognize how expensive it is to hire new people and so they'll probably try to keep them on if they can. But restrictions like AB 5 that mean that there's a high minimum wage you have to continue to pay benefits. If you could keep them on in a furloughed capacity for a longer time, it's more likely you would continue to have a predictable relationship with that company. It is true that some companies may say, you know, you're getting enough from outside.  I think that's a hard calculus and there are so many different businesses and different size businesses. I have talked to some people recently that are now, they stayed home for a bit. They took unpaid leave and the company is saying maybe because they had symptoms. The company is saying you have to come back or you're going to be we're going to treat you as if you resigned because you refuse to come to work. They're in a very difficult spot. The companies can't continue to offer benefits for free, but the people don't feel like they can go back to work. Do you know one of the most kind of annoying and frustrating conversations we've had as a nation for 20 years at minimum, it's longer than that, but especially in the past 10 or 15 years revolving around Obamacare and health care, a lot of us wanted to delink health care and health insurance from employment because just from the employer point of view, they don't know how to run a health care insurance plan and it's difficult. It's a drain on them and they're going to get a crappy deal for their employees. Employees want to be able to move from job to job with that saying, I hate my, I'm working in a coal mine, but the benefits are good, so I'm not going to become a supermodel or something like that. Where are we in terms of delinking that now? Because we have on a certain level, we've been told or the Trump administration has said they're not going to reopen the Obamacare exchanges. Obamacare didn't really get us very far along the line. We can argue about why or why not. The idea that the government should be more involved in a system that had already spent half of the dollars that are spent on and does a kind of bad job in the areas that it directly oversees. How does health care and the relationship to work for government come out of the coronavirus lockdown? This is going to break it. So regardless of which side you're on, I think empirically it's going to break our ability to link them because people like me that have a secure job, I will also have secure health care. A lot of people that really need health care when they lose their job won't have it. And their access to it was not improved that much by Obamacare. Obamacare was basically written by a few elites. We didn't really even then achieve 100% coverage. There's at least one former editor of Reason Magazine who has actually expressed admiration for the French system with a single payer health care system. And I wonder if something like the German system might be a compromise. It would be a big and wrenching change to have individual health care accounts that are tax-free that we then top up. The German system is basically a voucher system. So there's five companies that provide insurance and if you can't pay enough into it, it'll be topped up. But then there's competitive private provision. So I'm worried that we'll move to something like a national health system that we see in England. Whereas the German system, perhaps it's not utopian but it harnesses some good elements like universal coverage but also market forces. Libertarians, I shouldn't speak for everyone, I myself find that a compromise in education is government financing and private provision. So a voucher system. So the German system is universal public financing but competitive private provision. And that may be the best that we can hope for because having a lot of people without health care and having that sense of precariousness also being locked into jobs that happen to have benefits, it is not worked out very well. And the fact that employment is going to be so high means that the question that you just asked, I would guess that that's going to be a national conversation within two months. So just as a kind of final topic of conversation, you know, can you take a long view of, you know, and I know from previous conversations, you grew up under, you know, not exactly plush circumstances and, you know, in the American century, in the meat of the American century, you, like myself, I think, looked forward to the 21st century, you know, this, if it wasn't going to be jet packs, it was going to be, you know, at least this, right? I mean, this is, this is kind of cool. This is Dick Tracy, you know, TV, watches and stuff like that. But it seems like the 21st century, you know, first starting with the kind of nightmare of an election, really, that was basically came down to a coin flip.   Now this, what is your sense of the future of optimism?  Or is it one of those weird, ossified artifacts of, you know, mid-century prosperity that just, you know, is, is irrelevant to, to what, to the world that our kids and grandkids are going to be paying for it? In 2008, when I was the keynote speaker for the Libertarian National Convention in Denver, the, the theme of my speech was, what are we for? You know, I wanted to ask, what optimistic, positive view of the future are we able to offer? Because libertarians are usually against things. If you were to ask, there's always some laundry list of things that we're against. And I guess I think the optimistic part of the libertarian vision is that we think that there's a lot of human creativity and resilience in the face of catastrophe. And that, left to their own devices, people are pretty cooperative. On the other hand, libertarians tend not to be utopian. We don't think we can accomplish all sorts of things that socialism promises or that other isms promise. We're going to just try to muddle through. So I guess that's a, that's a very limited kind of optimism, but I do think that there's a lot of people that I have talked to have started to think, all right, what happens at the other end? How can we start to plan for this? And we, we're not going to come out of it better than we were. This is going to be a scar and a limitation on what we can accomplish for a decade or more. But the things are rarely so bad that aggressive intervention by the state can't make them worse. All right.  I used to think that it would happen fairly quickly once quite a few people who have the virus are starting to come out the other end. So once the number of people who are starting to recover approximates the number of new people that are catching it each week, then that's the turning point. But if you look at the, the New York Times has a page that I look at every morning on a log scale and the rate of increase of, of deaths in the United States, it's still linear and linear on a log scale means it's doubling. So it's still doubling every three days. We're a long way from getting to the point, even where we can say we're at the beginning of the end. So we're a month or more even from starting a downturn in the rate of increase. And I, I did not expect that. This is far worse than I had anticipated. Maybe it was anticipatable. Maybe I wasn't paying enough attention. You know, I'm teaching my classes and I'm reading things, but we're a month or more even from the beginning of the end. All right, well, we're going to leave it there. Mike Munger of Duke University. Thank you so much for talking to reason and sharing your thoughts about public health, economics, and the future of work in higher education. It was great to talk to you, Nick.


It has been a long time since I've done this. I'm glad to be back. Thank you all for your patience. Let's get on with the show Hello, everybody hooded cober commander 788 here. This is the show where we review every vintage GI Joe toy from 1982 to 1994 this week We are looking at a figure that was not a part of the drug elimination force set But it should have been the DEF was not continued after its debut in 1992 if it had been Gristle would have been the lieutenant of the evil drug dealing headman instead Gristle was part of battle core which just doesn't seem right for this guy This was a peculiar time in the history of GI Joe Hasbro introduced characters that promoted the use of illegal drugs to kids It was part of an anti-drug campaign So they were the bad guys, but still the drug elimination force set was about 20% pro-drugs. Let's chew on a new review HCC 788 presents Gristle This is Gristle the urban crime commander from the GI Joe battle core series This figure was introduced in 1993 and was available in 1993 only it was discontinued for 1994 This was the only version of Gristle in the vintage era There was a second version of Gristle released in 2008 as a GI Joe convention exclusive based on his backstory Gristle was clearly supposed to be part of the drug elimination force subset or DEF DEF was introduced in 1992 and was a subset of GI Joe dedicated to opposing drugs The enemy of DEF was the criminal mastermind headman He had his minions called the headhunters Gristle would have been headman's second in command DEF was supposed to continue into the 1993 series But the subset was canceled and the 1993 DEF figures were folded into the battle core set There was a second version of headhunters, but the backstory was changed to have them working for Cobra This is a 90s style file card, which means it has a numbered list of features for the figure I will use this list to describe some of the accessories and details on the figure Let's take a look at the accessories for Gristle He has a lot of accessories, but none of them are original. They were all reissued from other figures Let's start with his rifle. This rifle is in a maroon color It is very large and very well detailed This rifle is a reissue of the rifle that came with 1990 rock viper When difference between Gristle's rifle and Rock Viper's rifle is Gristle's rifle does not have this peg for plugging into Rock Viper's backpack Next let's look at his pistol It is in that same maroon color It is oversized and looks more like a submachine gun This accessory is a reissue of the weapon that came with 1992 Destro Next let's look at his knife This knife is really nice. It's a really well made knife It is the one accessory that is not oversized This knife is a reissue of the knife that came with 1988 shockwave Next let's look at the yellow missile launcher The artwork has this in more of a green tint, but it looks yellow to my eye The main body is yellow, but it has a trigger that is in that maroon red color This missile launcher was issued with major blood in 1994 and headhunters stormtroopers and astro viper version 2 in 1993 The missile launcher included two maroon colored missiles and this is a spring-loaded missile launcher so it would really fire There is a grip for the figure to hold the missile launcher but I'm worried about the thickness of that grip I'm afraid it may break the figure's thumb so I will not put the grip in the figure's hand To operate the missile launcher just press the missile into the launcher barrel with the notch on the same side as the trigger Press it in until it clicks and it is ready to fire We will demonstrate this missile launcher using our old friend Dr. Meinvender Just aim the launcher and press down on this trigger in the back to fire We did hit Meinvender squarely, but that back wall saved him He's leaning against that back wall I'm wondering if I can knock him over if I hit him again I do have two shots after all Let's take aim and fire There we go Gristle included one other accessory, a figure stand This is not the correct color though This is a black figure stand but the correct figure stand should be in that same maroon red color as the other accessories With the accessories out of the way let's look at the articulation on Gristle He had the articulation that was standard for GI Joe figures well before 1993 So he could turn his head from left to right and look up and down He could swing his arm up at the shoulder and swivel at the shoulder all the way around He had a hinge at the elbow that allowed him to bend his arm at the elbow about 90 degrees He had a swivel at the bicep that allowed him to swivel his arm all the way around The figure was held together with a rubber o-ring that looped around the inside That allowed him to move at the torso a bit He could move his legs apart about so far He could bend his leg at the hip about 90 degrees and bend at the knee about 90 degrees Let's look at the sculpt design and color of Gristle starting with the head And on this head he has brown hair He has a curl of hair on his forehead and curls of hair in front of his ears He has a ponytail And this is an interesting way to do a ponytail on an action figure without adding plastic doll hair or an extra plastic piece for the hair It is a high ponytail, so it is just sculpted on He has black sunglasses The file card calls these Bloodshot Eye Shades This is not a reference to Bloodshot by Valiant Comics He has an expressive angry face with white painted teeth On the chest he has a black vest With a yellow collar and a yellow liner that runs down the front He has two maroon colored knives That's very close to the maroon color of the accessories and the plastic on the figure The file card calls these knives two buck knives with sheaths This suit he's wearing is described by the file card as a rip proof all leather street suit I see suits like this on the streets all the time There is also a maroon colored belt and buckle on the lower part of the torso On his arms he has long maroon sleeves On his left arm he has a yellow knife with bands around the forearm On his right arm he has a yellow band with a device that the file card calls a remote phone message beeper Because that's what drug dealers have The color of the plastic does very closely match the color of the accessories His waist piece is in a base black plastic And he has a maroon colored demon bat crotch cover That is an amazing detail But how does he get out of that thing when he needs to take a whiz? There is also a maroon colored patch on his butt On his legs he's wearing what look like black chaps over yellow trousers I guess There is a diamond pattern sculpted in on the left leg And on the right leg there is a maroon colored knife In fact it kind of looks like there's a small knife on a big knife This guy has a lot of knives We finish up with a pair of tall maroon colored boots Now that is a bold fashion statement The file card calls these all leather biker boots Yes all leather from a maroon cow Let's take a look at the file card The artwork on the file card is a bit different from the figure It looks like he has blonde hair That does more closely match his animated appearance His codename is Gristle He is the urban crime commander His file name is Danimal J. Rogers Danimal His birthplace is Montego Bay, Jamaica Montego Bay, Jamaica In the animated series he had an American accent What was the thinking behind his Jamaican origins? This guy doesn't look like a Rastafarian Jamaica man Go to Jamaica Have some rum man Dig it Iri Iriman There is a quote here Presumably from Gristle himself It says I go crazy when those GI Joes come after me They just keep chasing and chasing and chasing Well if that's the best quote we can get out of the guy We probably just don't need a quote at all This paragraph says When you think of grease, slime, and dirt You are basically thinking about Gristle Not me when I think about Gristle I think of the 70s industrial band Throbbing Gristle But that's probably just me That is just me Let's move on Not only is he a corrupt crime boss His personal hygiene is absolutely disgusting During the months he spent training to be in the head hunters He didn't bother to shower once But because he was big and bad He became the right hand man to some major crime lords Does not mention head man by name Who operated illegal warehouses disguised as legitimate comedy clubs So are we taking shots at comedians now? Eventually Gristle started his own criminal activities And then joined up with Cobra But even those snakes admit he is too grungy to deal with Gristle is easily recognized by his bloodshot eyes Or by the sunglasses he uses to shield them from the daylight I wish they had made the figure with bloodshot eyes I have no idea how they would have done that But I would love to have seen them try Looking at how Gristle was used in GI Joe Media He had two appearances in the animated series During the Deke era In the episodes titled The Greatest Evil Parts 1 and 2 The character design was totally different from the figure He had blonde hair A head hunter's uniform And no sunglasses He was head man's lieutenant Which confirms that would have been his role if DEF had continued into 1993 In the comic book series published by Marvel Comics DEF and head man appeared in issues number 124 and 125 But Gristle did not appear Looking at Gristle overall What a weirdo He's supposed to be the right hand man to a drug kingpin But he looks like a bassist for a 90s grunge band Dressed as a fetish biker from Planet Demon Crotch The figure itself is remarkably well made The sculpting is sharp As it is for most 90s figures The colors all work well together If you look at this figure without any reference to the real world It looks pretty good The problem for this figure is This is Earth Imagine seeing somebody dressed like this in real life It would be ridiculous This is not how a tough guy drug dealer looks Obviously Gristle thinks he looks tough This is the taser face of drug dealers The accessories are entirely reissued So this is another low effort 90s affair If you like DEF though This figure is essential Even though he wasn't released in the DEF series He is the right hand man to head man And an indispensable character That was my review of Gristle I hope you enjoyed it If you did please share this video Give it a thumbs up And subscribe to the channel And check out my back catalog I have hundreds of GI Joe reviews I also have a Patreon If you'd like to help me continue to do these videos You see the name scrolling on the screen right now Your name could be there I have a website HCC788.com Thank you very much for watching I will see you soon for another vintage GI Joe toy review And until then remember Only GI Joe is GI Joe


Hello everyone. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. It depends on where you are joining in from. Today I'm going to talk to you about changing landscape of open source databases. And I will look at that from two different angles. One is from their changing the open source, definition of open source, open source business and so on and so forth. And then changes which are taking place in the database technology. Now, in this presentation, I will use free and open source software interchangeably. And I know this is not quite the same thing, right? And there are some people who are very passionate about using one terminology or another. Well, I'm just going to miss a match. So forgive me for that. Now let's start looking at some history. Where is this open source software is coming from? If you look at the early days, hardware and software, they're actually bundled together. And software code was shipped with that early software, right? So the early adopters could modify the code to fix the bug and add functionality as they need. And those changes were also openly shared according to the academic principles of sharing the knowledge, right? That wasn't quite called open source at that time, right? Even free software, those terms came about much later. But in essence, that was something like that. Then if you look at the 70s, there are a number of things happen which created the proprietary software industry as we know it today. First is we have a computer software became a copyrightable item, at least in the United States, right? It wasn't on the list before that because software code wasn't the thing. And also IBM is forced to unbundle their software and hardware as a response to the antitrust. So software was copyrightable item which could be sold separately. And it really became a major class of intellectual property at that time and still remains today, right? And there have been a lot of innovation happening in the proprietary software. The next era which I would touch on is something I would call it as an era of romantic open source software and free software in 90s, 80s, right? You can see here on the picture that Richard Stolman who was the early leader of free software foundation, right? And he was championed for free software. A lot of the idea at that time is what the open source software or free software is good for you. It's kind of good for the planet. It was the right way of doing things. It was not so much about making money, right? Or even helping the corporations to make money or stuff like that. In 2000 though, the open source really gets a lot more mainstream adoption, right? Which you can here recognize but folks like as Steve Ballmer from Microsoft calling Linux cancer, right? Obviously Microsoft is now moved away a lot from that position, right? And one of the leading companies which works with open source and contributes to open source those days. And also their successful exits with MySQL being acquired by Sun for a billion dollars which really sounds like a lot of money at that time. Before this acquisition, the Red Hat was really their exception kind of one company which was able to IPO and really maintain the value over long term. This is also where the enterprises recognize the value of the open source and it becomes a preferred choice for many. So why and how open source is important for enterprises? Well, it offers direct lower cost in many of cases, of course, and it also for many engineers, especially the good one, it's preferred to commercial software. Because if you're a gifted engineer, you're likely to prefer open source software because you can understand it better if you need. You have a source code available to figure out how it works inside and why whatever you're doing with that software works or doesn't. Better productivity, faster innovation, and also what is important you avoid software vendor lock in which can be problematic over a long time because as software become more complicated than changing some foundational stuff as database or operating system can become very, expensive and creating that sort of unbalanced relationship between the vendor and a customer. What happened in this case, though, is also the new generation of open source companies was born, which really started the focus on the business first. Hey, there is looks like a, you know, great idea we can have an open source solution for X and make a lot of money along the way. The fastest way to do that in many cases is to raise some venture capital right and a lot of open source. Those days is venture funded. And what that means of course is what you need to provide the high returns to their, your financial backers and do it quite fast. And that create I think this very interesting dynamic right there are very companies would use their attractive messaging of open source to obviously attract more attention because that's preferred by so many companies but at the same time focus on a building monopoly to avoid commoditization increasing stickiness, building anti competitive modes, all those things they teach you at the business school right as a ways to build a successful business. But in many cases, it's kind of who comes in the conflict with the classical romantic open source software value. With that, something I will call not quite open source got a lot of traction right and indeed majority office software, which is marketed or casually referred as open source will fall in one of those buckets open core software open source eventually, and so on and so forth. Let's look at my squirrel for example, my squirrel is often spoke about as, you know, the world's most popular open source database. Right, but in fact my squirrel is open core, there is my squirrel community edition, which is open source. It is however missing certain features which are reserved for the enterprise edition, which is commercially, commercially licensed. Right, so that means you cannot get all the features, which you may need in open source solution only in in the proprietary one. The other approaches would be open source eventually that's when you have a software which is released under property license and then after certain number of years goes open source, you have shared service licenses for example, MongoDB uses SSPL license which restricts competition from from cloud vendors and so on and so forth. And there is also an interesting class of software which is open source compatible software. I would like to focus on that a little bit a little bit more right. One thing I like about the open source compatible software what typically this software is doesn't claim to be open source right it's, you know, honest property software, which claims to have some level compatibility with open source software. The important thing though is what you understand what this compatibility typically means, right. And I like to call this comparability as a hotel California comparability which makes it very easy to check in, but kind of not so easy to check out. The open source compatible technologies often very much focused at making sure it's easy migrate from open source technologies to them, but then provide some additional features, right, which you would likely adopt and then make it very hard to move back to open source software. If you ever need to keep this in mind, and if you're using open source compatible software and if really ensuring where you are not locked in is important for you, make sure you test your software with their open source software in question. For example, in a database space, if you're running Amazon Aurora and want to ensure you are software can still run on a plain MySQL, make sure to test that, not just hope for that. Now, if you think about that's not quite open source software, it's kind of has an interesting impact to the open source movement in generally on one extent it really allows much more investment in the high pace of innovation in in the open source space, then just a bunch of romantic folks would be able to provide, right, but at the same time, this software does not provide all the value of a fully open source software, and even worse in some cases may mislead people and erode the value of understanding of the open source software as it is. Now, if you move to the closer times, 2010, so we have a raise of a cloud and cloud obviously brings a lot of unique challenges and opportunities to open source software. I think one very interesting effect of a cloud is what before a cloud many companies would rely on GPL and dual license to prevent folks from building commercial derivative of their work and monetizing that without giving anything back. Right, for example, MySQL had a very successful dual license business where if you GPL doesn't work for you, you want to build commercial entities, the commercial derivative you can do that but you have to buy MySQL under different license to do that. With a cloud, you do not actually do software distribution, so you can use a GPL, a modified version of GPL software without paying anything to anyone, right, so for example, Amazon Aurora, there is a few other cloud vendors run derivatives on MySQL and they don't make a lot of money on that commercial derivative without having to pay anything to the MySQL copyright holder, right, and that really broke a lot of business model and really forced a lot of the companies which are really capital heavy and really need to focus on providing, you know, Harry John, right, to their backers, they had to change the licenses away from the open source to the licenses which are not quite open source but really protect them from being able to destructed by cloud hyperscalers. Right, they are, of course, within their right to do those things and other businesses, they are responsible, right, to their shareholders to do that, but we just have to mindful that those changes means that there is less of open source software available. Another interesting thing, what have been happening with the cloud is what I would call the great rebundling, right, if the cloud services, you now often have your hardware cost and usage costs kind of mixed together, right, for example, if you're buying Amazon Aurora instance, right, it's not really separated, obviously how much I pay for software and this is how much I pay for hardware, and that is problematic for open source because you don't have a zero price effect anymore, right, there is something very much magical about price free which often takes us to, you know, spend more time, right, even or effort working with a free solutions when even if they are paying, you know, just a little bit of money to get them. Additionally, the most convenient and easy way to adopt databases has been becoming the pattern called the database as a service, and it is fantastic and I think that is where the database moving at large at the future, right, and the added benefits or interest and benefit it provides is what that really allows developers to choose more database technologies to meet their needs like an experiment more, because in the past, you know, before database as a service, if I want to deploy this kind of a new database and use it in my software, I would need to make sure that Opsteam is able to provide all kind of services, keeping it at 24x7 security, patching policies, so on and so forth. If database as a service, often that can be outsourced to a vendor, and you are as developer, you know, just get a database instance you can use. And I think that is one of the reasons why we see really so many companies using increased number of purpose built databases, open source and not for their applications. Another thing which I think is quite interesting about the database as a service, well, as many things, it tends to be over marketed, right, it does provide a lot of fantastic benefits, but its promise is much higher than that. We find a number of customers which come and say well, you know what we kind of, we are sold on that kind of fully managed database as a service you don't need, you know, any database on what's not but then we figure out you actually need somebody to understand the databases because the database as a service is not going to design a schema for you, right, or tell you how to rewrite the queries from bad queries to good queries and stuff like that, which is one of the core functions of your DBA team if you have that. And we also have found the database of which do not have a lot of database knowledge and understanding, right, they often would have some additional problems when it comes to database as a service usage. So, where it has been in the last few years, a lot more cases of security incidents because database have not been configured appropriately, increased level of, you know, down times, for example, because of lack of appropriate capacity planning, you know, and so on and so forth. Right, so keep that in mind, if that's something you are thinking about. Now, if you think about the cloud, I think right now there is those two different approaches, how cloud can be used and they are in use at the same time and different teams, think about that differently. Some think about cloud as commodity and, you know, compare that to something like electricity or your internet provider, right, they are not so very much differentiated, you can switch one to another relatively easily, right, and this means you leverage a lot of power in negotiation, right, if you would have one. Right, in this case, you are using many of the compatible implementations, you know, maybe using S3, right, for storage compute instances. In many cases, those days, that is where Kubernetes is being used as a, you know, cloud neutral API, right, and that really gives you a lot of flexibility picking and choosing cloud, but it's not maybe as polished or as effective. And that is where the other approach comes in when you say, hey, I am going to use proprietary solutions available from the vendor, right, to build my applications as quickly as possible. I would use database technologies such as Amazon Aurora or even DynamoDB and so on and so forth, right, and a full stack of those highly differentiated proprietary technologies, which will possibly allow me to move faster, but comes off with a risk where if I have to adopt another cloud, it will be very inexpensive and impossible. See, though, from our side, and again, they're quite biased in the open source space, what nobody really wants to be the host, and with the trends with database as I described, you see the pivot happening towards what you can call the multiverse, multiple database technologies are used in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environment, right. For this ecosystem, you can see actually a lot of proprietary solutions are available, right, to run multi-cloud and hybrid cloud, all cloud, big cloud vendors as well as companies like VMware have some solution in this market. Additionally, we have a Kubernetes emerging as this kind of leading open source alternative which works on any cloud, being that's public cloud or private cloud. Think about the open source databases, how do they evolve in this market and what they should do. One thing I think they should adapt for cloud native deployment in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environment, right. This is different compared to on-prem deployments from many dimensions, right. The second is what the Kubernetes API is really an API of choice for many open source database deployment, right, and we see increasingly standardization happening in this place. What I think is still missing right now is focus on simplicity, right. If you really want to have an integrated database service solution which is similar to Amazon, RDS, Aurora, Google Cloud or scale and so on and so forth from terms of simplicity, it is hard to do, right. I don't see, haven't seen the open source solutions which are at that level yet. So, in your case, I think as you're choosing database as a service, you may not be able to get everything from open source yet, but at least ask a question in this case, how do you get from most from open source. From our side at your corner, we are really working hard to push boundaries of what open source can offer with our products per corner monitoring management which is your kind of GUI for monitoring, right, in the future deployment and management and also the operators which really allow you to run the databases in Kubernetes environment efficiently. Okay. In the last 15 minutes or so, I wanted to talk about the database, database technology and the changes are happening in this space. If you think about the brief history in the database technologies, it's kind of interesting in terms of what everything old is now new again. If you look at the very early days of the database technologies, you know, 60s, 70s, there was a lot of different models, implementations, languages, right, and a lot of fragmentation. And there by 80s and 90s, we have a lot of standardization happen, and pretty much complete dominance of relational database and SQL query language. There have been different database, of course, in different vendors, but the big language decision and so on and so forth was very much unified. So if you look at starting from the thousands, we have a new wave of innovation, which both applies in terms of data models, as well as the query languages. So what trends do we see actually right now as we are starting our 2020s? Well, one is what we see developers and architects are empowered to make more choices related to the database technology. And one of that when it comes to one of the drivers that is database as a service, that means developers can actually, you know, choose technology and have that run for them without needing another team of ops people to commit to that, at least in certain environment, right. So cloud makes using those multiple databases easy. And now, which is interesting is that microservice architectures, right, or even if you don't go all the way to microservice architectures, right, kind of decomposing to the monolith to more building blocks that often means that each of those building blocks have its own needs and it shows choices for a data store, right, and that's how multiple technologies may be adopted. And that also brings us the term of multi store where in so many cases you would have the same information which is stored in a different form in multiple systems, right. For example, one may use, let's say MySQL as your database of record, right to record the, you know, orders and so on and so forth and then shift the data from Kafka to elastic search for full text search needs because it's much better. You can use the same Kafka to ship the data to click house or redshift to really have a, you know, very fast analytical workloads right with a column store. One question you may ask is, okay, are we using this should be using relational or non relational databases. And I think it's interesting in this case it's even now, right, while we have a lot of other databases come to fruition, the relational databases are still completely dominating, at least in terms of a general purpose databases, but at the same time. If you look at the growth rate, what you would see you would see things like time series databases right or document database and so on so forth they all grow a lot faster than the relational databases. Those days right so a lot of those special purpose database are growing much faster. So there is two innovation which happens if a data data model one and one approach is to break with relational data model entirely right that's how many companies did, you know, thinking, you know, Cassandra, MongoDB, Redis, and so on and so forth, or extend SQL. Right, and that is also what have been happening in many SQL technologies you know think about my school or postgres or SQLite even all of them have extended their relational SQL model to process the document data such as Jason specifically better. So I think which I see quite interesting. This is another kind of dual trend where two competing approaches exist. One of them is multimodal databases that is when you have one database which can actually be used through a different protocol using different models. So around good to be supports many different models or even my school while it doesn't market itself as multimodal database it has both SQL interface and also dog store crowd protocol as well. Right. And then another one is hybrid transactional analytical databases versus multi store. One approach is to say hey you'll have one database, for example, the, you know, pink up study be and many others which will really be very good at both running analytical queries as well as your transactional queries, where another approach is saying hey you know what we will use one database technology which is transactional optimized another which is optimized for analytical queries right and the data will flow within them. Both approaches are currently used successfully and in that will be very interesting to see if there would be some call they call is somewhere in the future or we'll have them happen at the same time. So most of scaling. There are two scaling approaches which come to the databases. One is traditional land from older days is scaling up right if you think about a couple of decades ago right if you needed to scale your Oracle instance you often would, you know, buy even bigger products right and run it run on it. The scale out approach means instead of that will spread database across many many systems right often it also can be referred as sharding the MongoDB Cassandra, you know, you go by planet scale with us right they're all designed if that scale out in mind.  When you can't really scale up there is no single server, which can run Facebook workloads right in in existence. Right, but the question comes is, well, do we need both. Right, do we need both the database which are optimized for working very efficiently maybe for medium size databases in the constraints of a single server, or should we be only looking at those distributed database which tends to be kind of more complicated and have some different characteristics. A couple of architecture trends to which are driving I think in the in the decisions for databases right now is the locally distributed right that is pretty much your shorter database right there are a lot to allow to scale out. But another interesting trend which many people, many use cases demand right now is geographically distributed when you can say well, I need my database to live in many geographical regions, which can be because of their performance reasons. It can also could be because of illegal reasons, you may have a local government saying hey well the information of my users needs to be stored in my country, right and if you want to have all your users in a single database well you'll have to have your database kind of to be geographically aware. We have a lot of war going on with the cloud native and communities focus databases. And at the same time, also, many databases being built as a cloud only databases which are available only in the constraints of that given property cloud, you know, think about cosmos dv Dynamo dv which I answer mentioned already. Another interesting trend is separation of storage and compute, which a lot of database are thinking about or at least pursuing because they're, you know, very seductive benefit of this approach is what that allows you to scale storage and compute separately. And it allows you kind of to have your compute stateless, right, which, you know, brings many other architecture design benefits, though, that is not something of what traditional databases like my school postgres or even, you know, Mongo has been designed for. Hardware acceleration isn't a very interesting, interesting trend, right, we see many analytical databases, for example, figuring out how to use GPU successfully, there is also new generation of storage coming in which can accelerate some of the database, the operations and so on and so forth. Well, as a summary, I wanted to highlight what there is a lot of going on with in the open source database space. I think that is the great time to be involved with open source databases, there is a lot of fun things to do and as well a lot of career opportunities in which comes with open source databases. Right. One thing on my personal level, which I would encourage you all to do is to what extent it's possible, keep the open source open and for benefits of all of us. And with that, that's all I have for you folks. And feel free to reach out, do you have any comments or questions?