So there was an announcement made before that there will be a group photo, but we decided against that it's too much of a hassle So don't Don't appear there at 8 for the group photo There is no group here and and I will of course continue with my Comedy show satire Whatever you might want to call it. I should also mention Because I briefly said something about at the beginning of this conference There is there is also now on Has made made available on my website and I think also on the PFS website a longer essay on Part of which I presented as the introductory lecture to the Mises University this year The full essay Is a more philosophical piece With the title of the proper study of man Reflections on methods so you can see this article It's a lengthy article also on my website and I think it's also on the PFS side I'm not quite sure where Stefan Kitzler put it up in any case So my topic is now on centralization decentralization and self-defense Some of the questions that were Raised during the first lecture I gave I think I might give a more detailed answer also in this Presentation that is now to follow States Regardless of their constitution are not economic enterprises in contrast to economic enterprises States do not finance themselves By selling products and services to customers who voluntarily pay But by compulsory levies by taxes collected through the threat and the use of Violence and of course also through the production of paper money, which they can literally create out of thin air Significantly Economists have therefore referred to governments. That is the holders of state power as stationery bandits Governments and everyone on their payroll live off the loot stolen from other people They lead a parasitic existence at the expense of a subdued host population Now a number of further insights emerge from this fundamental insight immediately naturally stationery bandits Prefer larger loot to smaller loot This means that states will always try to increase their tax revenue and Further increase their spending by issuing more paper money The larger the loot the more favors they can do for themselves their employees and their supporters But there are natural limits to this activity On the one hand their bandits have to be careful not to burden the hosts With whose work and performance make their parasitic extensive existence possible so much that the letters simply stop working and On the other hand, they have to fear that their hosts That is the one that they exploit and especially the most productive among their hosts might migrate from their dominion from their territory and settle elsewhere and Against this background a number of historical tendencies and processes becomes understandable First of all it becomes understandable why there is a tendency toward territorial expansion and political centralization With this states succeed in bringing more and more hosts under their control and Making it at the same time more difficult for them to emigrate to foreign territories This is expected to result in a larger amount of loot and It becomes clear why the end point of this process The establishment of a world state While certainly desirable from the standpoint of the ruling gang Would by no means be a blessing for all of mankind As it is often claimed many people think that that's the ideal thing the world state Because one simply cannot emigrate from a world state and hence There exists no possibility of escaping state looting by emigration It is therefore to be expected that with the establishment of a world state the scope at extent of state exploitation Indicated among other things of course by the level of state income and state expenditure by monetary inflation by the number and volume of so-called public goods and The number of persons people employed in the public sector for public service That that will continue to increase beyond any previously known level And that is certainly not a blessing for the host population that has to fund this state super structure second a central reason for the rise of the west to become the world's leading economic scientific and cultural region becomes understandable in Contrast to China in particular Europe was characterized by a high degree of political decentralization With hundreds or even thousands of independent Dominions from the early Middle Ages up until the present past recent past some historians have described this state of affairs as ordered anarchy and It is now common among economic historians to see in this quasi anarchy state a key reason For the so-called European miracle Because in an environment with a large variety of independent small-scale Territories in the immediate vicinity of each other. It is comparatively easy For subjects to vote with their feet and escape the robberies of state rulers by immigration To avert this danger and to keep local Producers in line these rulers under are under constant pressure to moderate their exploitation and this moderation in turn promotes economic entrepreneurship scientific curiosity and cultural creativity third in Combining these two insights the grand course of modern history becomes intelligible Territorial expansion requires wars Wars between rival gangs and of stationary bandits But the conduct of war requires means requires economic resources and bandits Do not produce anything They parasitically draw on the means produced and provided by others They can themselves of course Influence the overall volume of production and the size of their own loot indirectly however Through the treatment of their host population Other things being equal the more liberal the more the less Exploitative the ruling gang the more productive will be the host population and Parasitically drawing on a more productive host population then it is Internally liberal gangs that tend to win out in war and drive the centralization process I have called this in some of my works as the paradox of Imperialism that is to say internally liberal regimes tend to conduct a more aggressive foreign policy and are the central promoters of Imperialism This helps to understand not only the rise and long-lasting economic and financial supremacy of the collective west over the rest It helps in particular also to understand the sequence and the progressive stages of Western imperialism from a sizable Spain and Portugal as leading imperialist powers But eventually of course broke powers The center of economic gravity Moves would move to the small liberal low countries that is the Netherlands And it is from there that the next major imperialist ventures are launched The low countries then were cut to size set back and surpassed as a leading imperial power by a liberal Britain With some worldwide Empire and finally after more wars Britain's former colony the breakaway United States Takes over and expands on Britain's erstwhile role Owing to its ultra liberal in comparison at least to other countries internal policies US America grows to become the world's greatest economic power and sitting and drawing on such cushy economic foundation The US government then has risen to become the world's foremost Imperial power with a worldwide network of military bases and of foreign vessels and A US paper dollar that functions as the international reserve currency Which allows the US gang to have a free lunch to spend and consume at foreigners expense force These imperialist ventures may initially have some liberating effects a Relatively more liberal that is less Exploitative or more capitalist regime may be Exported to a comparatively less liberal society however, the furs are the process of imperial expansion of and of political Centralization advances that is the closer one gets to the ultimate goal of a one-world Government with a global central bank Issuing a single universal fiat currency the less pressure is there on the ruling gang to Continue in its former internal liberalism Internal exploitation taxation inflation and regulation will increase an economic crisis stagnation or even impoverishment and decline will result and with economic and with the economic failure of political Centralization becoming increasingly obvious and increasingly dramatic then the opposite tendency toward Decentralization key decentralization gains in strengths the lesson of the European miracle are remembered and the vision of a radically Decentralized world brought about by means of territorial this session the very antithesis of the world state gains in popularity the vision of a world made up of thousands upon thousands of lichtensteins and I was the one who coined this Mame That we want a world of thousands and thousands of lichtensteins many people have now adopted the same name But I was the inventor of it I should mention that because we have some lichtensteins here or the Americans who cannot say lichtenstein They would have lichtensteinians so I Was thinking the vision of a world made up of thousands upon thousands of lichtensteins Swiss cantons and independent free holds or dominions all linked by free trade and an International gold standard and all seeking in competition with other places to retain and attract productive people with favorable local conditions Now one central regularly present the challenge to this Sessionist project the challenge that I will take up now in the following is this The session implies that a larger territory is split up into two or more smaller parts Yet how are small and increasingly smaller units to protect and defend themselves Against the imperialist desire on the part of some larger state neighbors Are not small states run by small gangs in constant danger of being conquered and taken over by larger states and larger gangs and Isn't the only lasting safety and security To be found then as part and parcel of a large state and ultimately a world state and Similarly and directed especially against anarchists in particular it is asked How can a stateless Territory possibly defend itself against an invasion by some neighboring state Isn't a state necessary in order to defend against another state and does this not show then the inevitability of states and statism Now first off Not withstanding all political centralization going on in the contemporary world There are still many small or smaller states side by side with larger or Or large or really huge states and they live in peaceful coexistence Why hasn't France taken over Monaco or Germany Luxembourg or Switzerland Liechtenstein Or the US Cuba or Costa Rica or Brazil, Uruguay and the reason is certainly not That the leaders of the larger gangs have any scruples regarding conquest Confiscation imprisonment or even killing of innocent victims They owe their very own position as gang leaders to such acts and they continue to perform them on a daily basis Rather what constrains the conduct of the gang leadership and Prevents it from giving in to its imperialist desires and going to war is public opinion These this is an insight that was first made by a Tian De La Boite then repeated by David Dume also as Explicated further than by Ludwig von Mises and by on my own teacher Murray Rothbard Unlike the good old days When rival gang leaders went mano a mano To fight it out in public with their own weapons in modern wars The gang leadership stays protected behind outside the battlefield and The actual fighting is done by other people with other people's means with other people's money and property I should mention that we have examples in history Where the decision who one and who lost in a war was fought out by one king against another and then whoever one The war was over. They sent their armies home and that was it I wish that would be again take place Selensky against Putin. I think that might be an interesting fight to watch So it is not but it is not sufficient that the leadership calls for war then Other many others From the military high command up high all the way down to the soldier pulling the trigger And the worker producing tanks and ammunition They must be willing to execute the orders of the supremo and For such obedience to become possible a reason a Justification must be given by the gang leadership There must be some sort of provocation on the part of the takeover target Some outrageous conduct allegedly or truly outrageous conduct Misconduct that can be presented at home as a justification for an invasion Moreover in addition to domestic and international public opinion the gang leaders are constrained of course in their Imperialist desires and their willingness to go to war by the defensive capabilities of The to be conquered and subjected rival gang The stronger and better armed the rival gang the higher are the costs of war and The better must appear the reasons to go to war nonetheless In light of this Two guiding principles must be followed by small states and even more so by secessionist movements Whether leading to another smaller state or a stateless territory that is an anarchic order first do not provoke and second be armed and I will take up and elaborate on both requirements From the viewpoint of the larger gang The session is in and of itself a provocation and the sessionist deserve to be crushed But it can crush the secessionist and go to war against it its own people only if it has public opinion on its side in order to prevent this and To help bring about instead a public opinion that is favorable sympathetic or at least neutral to their cause There's a sessionist should declare their independence in the least provocative way To that purpose There's a session should be presented as a separation only and solely from the larger Government gang and as motivated by some particular grievance against this gang But it should not be presented And by no means also as meaning to be a separation from the people Residing in the territory controlled by the larger gang With the people you want to have normal steady Peaceful economic and social relationships To further help their causes and to justify and emphasize their declaration of independence as a Universal human right The sessionist are advised to explicitly allow also for the session from the session is territory Most of the sessionist movements that are currently underway Don't consider this idea at all what it is of utmost importance That is people within the session is territory should be permitted also for instance to stay with the old larger gang and Continue to subscribe and submit to its legal framework if they so desire As for the sessionists to declare their independence is to declare that the rules and regulations of the ruling gang Do no longer automatically apply also to the session is territory Many old Traditional rules may be kept by the sessionist such as much or even most of Existing private law including criminal law But other rules or commands mostly public law provisions may be rejected Changed or nullified in any case to minimize the risk of a violent reaction from the ruling gang The separation should occur in a decidedly peaceful manner in in a cooperative spirit That is for instance The session is should not touch the properties within its territory that are claimed as their own By the central government gang such as offices administrative buildings and so forth Independence only implies that central government agents Working within the session is territory are no longer permitted to perform any Executive function at the places where they are This may lead to a relocation of some such agents They simply leave the country and go someplace else Or else it may lead to a change in their employer or their occupation all of it peacefully Moreover to further help avoid any possible provocation There's a sessionist should declare their commitment to a policy of non intervention Regarding the internal affairs of the rest territory which they had been leaving and Declare that they are committed to free and unhempathed Interregional trade and they should make it clear That they are prepared to pay for the use of any goods or services Provided by the larger gang on and off its territory such as water supply electricity and so forth Streets also and they should be willing to pay the same price for the use of these types of services Based on the same itemized bill that are also that also domestic residents must pay As far as the capital endowment is concerned the session is supposedly had already Contributed their part to it before the preceded After the session then only the current usage of such goods and services can be built Further in order to minimize the risk of violent crackdown by the central gang it is advisable also to abstain from any internal policies that could be construed as provocations a Prohibition of the session from the sessionists for instance may be easily construed as such as such a provocation By the smitten central gang However more generally and more interestingly it is a very institution of a state Even a small state, but nonetheless even small states have Territorial monopolists of law and order so it should be taken care of that the session entails Reasons or gives reasons and grounds for complaints that can always be used against it Whether by a well-intentioned party such as some anarchist or by an Intentioned one such as a ruling central gang Even the most liberal small states has a monopoly of Jurisdiction and taxation and thus cannot but create some victims who Properly stylized as victims of human of human rights May provide the excuse for an invasion and As for the actual world there are countless of victims and of the oppressed To be found everywhere and they may even be paid to cry out loud for outside help and intervention Far more difficult for a central gang then to find fault and to discover a reason for a violent reaction against the Sessionists if these do not institute another state however small But a free territory a stateless private law society Under the session is territory all sorts of social relations of Hierarchies and rank orders can exist there exist a multitude of private households Enterprises and associations each with its own internal rules and there are also services and institutions such as police insurance and arbitration in place, but importantly There exists no territorial monopolist of ultimate decision-making That could issue Commands that were binding on all of the territories resist residents and private properties any fault any Provocation or aggression to be discovered in a private law society by a ruling central gang then is someone's private fault Private provocation and private aggression and as such cannot be used to justify and an attack on the Collective the sessionists instead if and to the extent that there are Provocative and aggressive acts committed in the session is territory These are most likely the acts of criminals of con artists seas burglars rapists murderers or plain frauds and Criminals will of course be treated as criminals in a private law society To especially in the private law society and they will be swiftly and effectively punished there and This result then the treatment of criminals as criminals and the effective Containment or reduction of crime then is almost impossible for a central government gang to portray To its home public as a provocation and a good enough reason for Invasion of the session is territory Now what however if the larger gang still decides to attack All accommodating efforts and peace offerings on the part of the session is not withstanding Now in that case Especially when there's a sessionist are small in number and they are confronted with a huge and mighty gang It might be best to simply give up and to surrender and hope for a better times That way at least no deaths and destruction occurs the motto rather dead than red Or more generally rather dead than being conquered and the fighting spirit that it implies May be appropriate sometimes and for some people But at other times in particular Whenever not only the fighters own life But also that of his family and friends is at stake It may be plain stupid and irresponsible Simply an empty heroism Even if sometimes advisable however Surrender is by no means the only option Available to the sessionist vis-a-vis a big neighboring gang intent upon retaking its lost territory They can of course also arm themselves and thus increase the cost of war for an attacker What then make what then makes for deterrence For one there is certainly strengths in numbers The larger the number of the sessionists the more difficult to beat them into submission But more important than sheer members Where sheer numbers is a cohesion of the sessionists. It is not diversity that gives strengths to the sessionists Or the independence of the inhabitants of independent small states, but homogeneity linguistic and cultural commonality a culture of reciprocity mutual trust and community spirit Still more deterrence can be built up by the sessionist if they allow and promote the institution of an armed citizenry and the establishment of a people militia organized and led by military professionals trained and providing training especially in the conduct of partisan and guerrilla warfare To further strengthen their defensive capabilities and make for still more deterrence There's a sessionist may also join or form alliances with various external providers of logistic and military intelligence assistance services and equipment in This endeavor however great care must be taken not to lose control over one's own destiny to some other foreign entity or Institution that is there's a sessionist should stay strictly away from what Thomas Jefferson warned long ago as entangling alliances Any permanent alliance that may involve or implicate them in foreign quarrels Conflicts or wars that are not and are not regarded by them as their own quarrels outlines Our conflicts or wages Should the wars should be avoided NATO for instance is for instance the perfect example of an entangling of an entangling Alliance there's drawing other people into the war precisely because you are a member of NATO Just look at the aggressive talks that you find done by polls for instance and by members of the pop Baltic states because they have the big bully Standing behind them the United States that they hope will come to their rescue and if you know that if you are in an Entangling alliances you tend to be aggressive you provoke these people are provoking and they are provoking because They have not normal alliances They are in an entangling alliance Coupled coupled with a big big guy in the background that might come to their help if something goes Something goes wrong things like that must be avoided under all circumstances moreover Almost totally ignored and forgotten today In an atmosphere of heightened militancy and belligerence Manufactured in connection with the war in the Ukraine the small Can also defend themselves against the big by means of civil disobedience Provided there's a session is and more generally the small Have the will to be free of the conquerors The effectiveness of civil disobedience as a defense strategy can hardly be overestimated The disobedience can take many forms and some and come in countless degrees It can range from ostentatious acts of defiance to some completely unobtrusive conduct such as allowing almost everyone to participate in the defense in the defensive effort The courageous and the timid the young and the old the leaders and the followers One may publicly Refuse to obey certain laws or evade and ignore them One may engage in sabotage obstruction negligence or simply display a lack of diligence One may openly scoff at orders were comply only incompletely Tax payments may be refused or evaded There may be demonstrations sit-ins boycotts work stoppages or plain slacking off The conquerors may be maltreated molested cheated ridiculed laughed at or simply Ostracized and never assisted in anything In any case all of this contributes to the same result namely to render the conquerors increasingly powerless The conquerors will have to leave or they will be absorbed and assimilated by the conquered Last but not least there's a sessionist the small May defend themselves against some bigger invader and raise the level of deterrence for him also in being ready for retaliation and counter-attack Any such retaliation should never be directed against the people That is their citizenry Residing in the territory controlled by the invading gang While the gang leadership itself is considered of limits however as is the current practice and leading Opinion these people are considered to be holy. We cannot attack them We can just kill normal people but not those people who are responsible for the whole thing That is a standard legal practice that is in practice in nowadays Rather to the contrary in order to be effective as a deterrent any retaliation should be explicitly Exclusively directed against against the gang leadership The leadership from the king president and prime minister up high on Successively downward should come to fear wherever they are that they may be personally Targeted as aggressors and be brought down by long or short-range precision precision weapons assassination commando's or secretive poisoning at the same time all Collateral damage to the property of innocent civilians should be avoided under all circumstances Or should be at least minimized to the extent it possible so as to raise Sympathy for the sessionist the small and to sow doubt and skepticism Regarding the war policy of once big home gang potentially engender in dangering the gang leadership's legitimacy in the public mind and thus bringing about a Situation to be averted at all costs for them Now contrary to popular popular opinion, then the unitary top-down command structure of a state is not necessarily a strength in war But it leaves an Achilles heel open to any adversary Once the top are toppled the war is essentially over or can be brought to a quick end So whenever under attack and unwilling to surrender Again keep in mind. I didn't say that if you have to defend yourself under all circumstances Sometimes it is advisable that you simply say I give up There was once a Danish politician I forgot the name Said when he was asked What do we do if the Russians attack us that we have a telephone and they say attack us I take the telephone at what does we give up? Yet So whenever under attack and unwilling to surrender go for the tap top of the attacking gang Yet this does not just hold for the small attack But also for the big attacker He too will go for the top of the sessionist that is the small to accomplish his conquest or reconquest And the institution of a state is also the Achilles heel in the defense of the sessionists That is the small gang small people against the takeover by the big ones And it is once again the anarchic So-called no state private law society that turns out as offering the best protection and Defense against such a contingency if there's a session is Institute another smaller state on a smaller territory rather than a private law society The decision of how to defend against an invasion by some bigger neighboring gang Will fall to the leadership of the sessionist state As a monopolist of ultimate decision-making the leadership of the new smaller gang decides Bindingly for everyone on the session is territory Whether to resist or not and if to resist whether in the form of civil disobedience of armed resistance Or some combination thereof and if of armed resistance of what form If it decides to put up no resistance There may be that that may be a well-meaning decision Or it may be the result of bribes or threats by the invading state But in any case it will be contrary to the will of many who would have liked to resist and Who are thus put in double jeopardy? Because as resistors they now disobey their own state as well as a state of the invaders And on the other hand if the state decides to resist This again may be a well-meaning decision or it may be the result of pride or fear But in any case it too will be Contrary to the preferences of many who would have liked not to resist or to resist by different means and Who are now entangled as accomplices to the state's schemes and Subjected to the same collateral fallout of and victor's Justice as everyone else Now weakened by various internal divisions and opposing forces Infections then the central gang may be able to crush the secessionists and retake its lost territory With just one surgical strike or one decisive victory over the sessionist government gang Once this gang is defeated The entire secessionist movement is finished at least for the time being and Matters are distinctly different. However, if the secessionist establish instead a private law society on the seceded territories There is no government No central gang in place that makes one all binding decisions on matters of war and peace Instead, there are numerous Interconnected individuals and institutions who choose their own defense strategy Each in accordance with their own risk assessment Consequently the attacking gang has far more difficulties conquering the territory It is no longer sufficient for the attacker to know the secessionist government and to win one decisive Victory over it to end the war because in a private law society There exists no one central decision maker and hence there exists from the perspective of the attacker No one clearly identifiable enemy But there exists instead a multitude of mostly unknown private parties Some big some small some hostile some friendly or neutral Some armed and insured and others not and in this situation There is simply no reason to be found to sell to once invading Soldiers or to the public at home that have to finance the whole endeavor As to why a collective war must be waged against the secessionist if after all These are just a bunch of independent private parties associations and institutions Then as noted already before a case can possibly be made for the punishment of some particular party But nothing constituting a casus belly could ever arise out of such a constellation Instead were indeed faced with some neighboring free country Free territory the abandoned central ruling gang may well be happy to keep control of the territory That it still has and not to lose too many productive people to the secessionist due to immigration Rather than engage in the violent Reconquest of some lost territory and thereby running the risk of losing all of its Legitimacy in the eyes of the general public at home as well as abroad Now to sum up From the nature of the state as a parasitic gang Attendancy toward political centralization can be deduced as well Based on a few elementary economic considerations the paradox of Imperialism and the dialectic of Centralization or it can be good and turns bad can be explained That is the fact that political centralization reduces Interregional competition and hence tends to lower economic welfare and yet that Centralization in so far as it is driven by the most liberal gang leadership can have a liberating effect at first and Only eventually the closer a ruling gang comes to the position of a global shows its true colors of increasing oppression social strife economic crises in civilizational decline Having reached about this point or being close to it in the meantime The opposite tendency toward political decentralization has increasingly gained in popularity in recent times Consequently the prospects of the sessionist movements were analyzed There are difficulties what mistakes to avoid and how best to defend against the foreign takeover in conclusion as Confirmed also empirically by the long-lasting peaceful coexistence of small and large states and by multiple examples of peaceful succession think of the Breakup of the Soviet Union think of Czechia and Slovakia would Joseph was talking about before the separation of Malaysia in Singapore The separation of England from the European Community the Brexit There are examples there is all Central gang objections not withstanding no principal argument to be made against a process of Successively progressing the session to the contrary The furthest is process advances and the larger the number of independent territories The better for the all-around economic well-being of mankind Nor is there any principal argument against the complete Dissolution of the state and the establishment and the successful defense of a private law society as The logical end point of the process of the session and of political decentralization after all a private law society Exemplified by hierarchically ordered families and by every small family centered face-to-face community logically and temporarily preceded any state and all political centralization and Notwithstanding all distortions and perversions of private law brought about in the meantime by state legislation and so-called public law the common private and criminal law notions of right and wrong have not been wiped out entirely and forgotten hence the establishment of a private law society Via the lengthy detour of a history of statism is like a return to normal To something old and familiar from a long period of aberrations or Byte a return on a different level of social and economic development now That is of course. We are no longer in the Middle Ages. Lots of things have changed but in any case While we find ourselves in a completely different situation now The process of state formation and political centralization when it took off way back in history We can return to a normal normality because people still know What is right and wrong? Most people do know what is right and wrong and they can distinguish between peaceful relationships and Relationships based on coercion and violence in every small village you can still see that our Natural natural law as it would call it our Consciousness of natural law is still alive and can be Reenlivened if we only want to do it. Thank you very much


Time for another crypto minute! UNISPOT passed 500 billion in total trading volume. Opening up crypto Twitter for the day.  And the Great Dog Coin Wars of 2021 continue to heat up. Over 2 billion ETH has been earned since the implementation of EIP 1559. Crypto adoption is doing so good it's almost scary. We have Jason Bourn now. Cream Finance was hacked for $130 million. This weekend is the 13-year anniversary of the Bitcoin White Paper. FTX is purchasing a SuperBall ad. US regulators are looking into allowing banks to custody crypto assets. Janna Yellen wants to tax unrealized capital gains. Tesla hit a trillion dollar market cap. Good morning to everyone who knows that it doesn't cost $100 of electricity to buy a cup of coffee with Bitcoin. Well, Facebook is officially rebranding to Meta. It's been a while since I met a person that even uses Facebook. Mastercard is now going to allow any of their merchants to offer crypto services. Keep stacking and I'll see you next week.


Hello everyone, and welcome to this exclusive CUBE conversation. We have the pleasure today to welcome Wim Kokert, Senior Vice President of Software Development at Oracle. Wim, it's good to see you. How you been, sir? Good, it's been a while since we last talked, but I'm excited to be here as always. It was during COVID though, and so I'm hoping to see you face to face soon. But so, Wim, since the Barron's article declared Oracle a cloud giant, we've really been sort of paying attention and amping up our coverage of Oracle and asking a lot of questions. Like, is Oracle really a cloud giant? And I'll say this, we've always stressed that Oracle invests in R&D, and of course there's a lot of D in that equation. And over the past year, we've seen, of course, an autonomous database is ramping up, especially notable on exadata cloud of customer. We've covered that extensively. We covered the autonomous data warehouse announcement, the blockchain piece, which of course got me excited because I get to talk about crypto with Juan, roving edge, which for everybody, you might not be familiar with that. It's an edge cloud service, dedicated regions that you guys announced, which is a managed cloud region. And so it's clear you guys are serious about cloud. These are all cloud first services using second gen OCI. So, Oracle's making some moves, but the question is, what are customers doing? Are they buying this stuff? Are they leaning into these new deployment models for the databases? What can you tell us? You know, definitely. And I think, you know, the reason that we have so many different services that not every customer is the same, right? One of the things that people don't necessarily realize, I guess, is in the early days of cloud, lots of startups went there because they had no local infrastructure. It was easy for them to get started in something completely new. Our customers are mostly enterprise customers that have huge data centers. In many cases, they have lots of real estate local. And when they think about cloud, they're wondering how can we create an environment that doesn't cause us to have two upstreams and two ways of managing things. And so they're trying to figure out exactly what it means to take their real estate and either move it whole sale to the cloud over a period of years, or they say, hey, some of these things need to be local for maybe even for regulatory purposes, or just because they want to keep some data locally within their own data centers, but then they have to move other things remotely. And so there's many different ways of solving the problem. And you can just say, here's one cloud, this is where you go and that's it. So we basically say, if you're on-prem, we provide you with cloud services, on-premises like dedicated regions or Oracle Exadata Cloud at customer and so forth so that you get the benefits of what we build for cloud and spend a lot of time on. But you can run them in your own data center or people say, no, no, no, I want to get rid of my data centers, I want to do it remotely. Okay, then you do it in Oracle Cloud directly. So, or you have a hybrid model where you say some states local, some is remote. The nice thing is you get the exact same API, the exact same way of managing things, no matter how you deploy it. And that's a big differentiator. So is it fair to say that you guys have, I think of it as a purpose built cloud because I talk to a lot of customers, I mean, I take an insurance app like claims. And customers tell me, I'll put that into the public cloud. But you're making a case that it actually might make sense in your cloud because you can support those mission critical applications with the exact same experience. Same API, same, I can get, take RAC for instance, I can't get real application clusters in an Amazon cloud, but presumably I can get them in your cloud. Is it fair to say you have a purpose built cloud specifically for the most demanding applications? Is that a right way to look at it or not necessarily? Well, it's interesting. I think the thing to be careful of is I guess purpose built cloud might, for some people mean, oh, you can only do things if it's Oracle Centric, right? And so I think that fundamentally, Oracle cloud provides a generic cloud. You can run anything you want, any application, any deployment model that you have. Whether you're an Oracle customer or not, we provide you with a full cloud service, right? However, given that we know and have known obviously for a long time how our products run best, when we designed OCI Gen2, when we designed the networking standard storage layer and all that stuff, we made sure that it would be capable of running our more complex environments because our advantage is Oracle customers have a place where they can run Oracle the best, right? And so obviously the context of purpose built fits that model where we've made some design choices that allow us to run rack inside OCI and allow us to deploy exadata inside OCI, which you cannot do in other clouds. So yes, it's purpose built in that sense, but I would caution on the side of that it sometimes might imply that it's unique to Oracle products. And I guess one way to look at it is if you can run Oracle, you can run everything else, right? Because it's such a complex suite of products that if you can run that then it'll support any other deployment. Right, right, it's like New York City. You make it there, you can make it anywhere. If I could run the most demanding mission critical applications, well, then I could run a web app, for instance. Okay, I got a question on tooling. There's a lot of tooling. I sometimes makes my eyes bleed when I look at all this stuff. And doesn't square their circle for me. Doesn't autonomous and autonomous database like autonomous Linux, for instance, doesn't it eliminate the need for all these management tools? You know, it does, it eliminates the need for the management at the lower level, right? So with autonomous Linux, what we offer and what we do is we automatically patch the operating system for you and make sure it's secure from a security patching point. If you eliminate the downtime, so when we do it, then you don't have to restart applications. However, we don't know necessarily what the app is that is installed on top of it. People can deploy their own applications. They can run third party applications. They can use it for development environments and so forth. So there's sort of the core operating system layer. And on the database side, we take care of database patching and upgrades and storage management and all that stuff. So the same thing. If you run your own application inside the database, we can manage the database portion. We don't manage the application portion, just like on the operating system. And so there's still a management level that's required no matter what, a level above that. And there's the other thing, and I think this is what, you know, what a lot of the stuff we're doing is based on is you still have tons of stuff on premises that needs full management. You have applications that you migrate that are not running autonomous Linux could be a Windows application that's running, or it could be something on a different distribution, or you could still have some databases installed that you manage yourself. You don't want to use autonomous or you run a third party. And so we want to make sure that we can address all of them with a single set of tools, right? Okay, so I wonder, can you give us just an overview just briefly of the products that comprise and the cloud services, your management solution? What's in that portfolio? How should we think about it? Yeah, so it kind of, it basically starts with enterprise manager on premises, right? Which has been the tool that our Oracle database customers in particular have been using for many years and is widely used by our customer base. And so you have those customers, most of their real estate is on premises and they can use enterprise management to do local. They have it running and they don't want to change. They can keep doing that and we keep enhancing as you know with newer versions of enterprise management better. So then there's the transition to cloud. And so what we've been doing over the last several years is basically looking at the things, well, one aspect is looking at things people like of enterprise manager and make sure that we provide similar functionality in Oracle cloud. So we have performance hub for looking at how the database performance is working. We have APM for application performance monitoring. We have logging analytics that looks at all the different log files and helps make sense of it for you. We have database management. So a lot of the functionality that people like in enterprise management mention the database that we've built into Oracle cloud and a number of other things that are coming up for agents insights to look at how databases are performing and how we can potentially do consolidation and stuff. So we've basically looked at what people have been using on premises, how we can replicate that in Oracle cloud. And then also when you're in a cloud, how you can make use of all the base services that a cloud provider provides, telemetry, logging and so forth. And so it's a broad portfolio. And what it allows us to do with our customers is say, look, if you're predominantly on-prem, you want to stay there, keep using enterprise manager. If you're starting to boost Oracle cloud, you can first use EM, look at what's happening in the cloud and then switch over, start using all the management products we have in the cloud and let go of the enterprise manager instance on premises. So you can gradually shift. You can start using more and more. Maybe you start with analytics first and then you start with insights and then you switch to database management. So there's a whole suite of possibilities. I've been, you know, you mentioned APM. I've been watching that space. It's really evolved.  Now you're seeing some open source stuff come out. You're seeing a lot of startups come out. Cisco made an acquisition with APD and that whole space is transforming. It seems that the future is all about that end-to-end visibility, simplifying the ability to remediate problems. And I think, I'm thinking, okay, you just mentioned, you guys have a lot of these capabilities. You got autonomous.  It definitely is. And in fact, one of the, so, you know, APM allows you to say, hey, here's my web browser and it's making a connection to the database through a middle tier. And it's hard to, it's hard for operations people in companies to say, hey, the end user calls and says, you know, my order entry system is slow. Is it the browser? Is it the middle tier that they connect to? Is it the database that's overloaded in the backend? And so APM helps you with tracing, you know, what happens from where to where, where the delays are. Now, once you know where the delay is, you need to drill down on it. And then you need to go look at log files. And that's where the logging piece comes in. And what happens very often is that these log files are very, very difficult to read. Like you have networking log files and you have database log files and you have the web log files. You almost have to be an expert in all of these things. And so then with logging analytics, we basically provide sort of an expert dashboard system on top of that that allows us to say, hey, when you look at logging for the network stack, here are the most important errors that we could find. So you don't have to go in and learn all the details of these things. And so the real advantage is of saying, hey, we have APM, we have logging analytics, we can tie the two together. Right? And so we can provide a solution that actually helps solve the problem rather than you need to use APM for one vendor, you need to use logging analytics from another vendor and that doesn't necessarily work very well. Yeah. And that's what you're seeing with like the elk stack. It's cool. You're an open source guy. It's cool as an open source, but it's complicated to set up all that that brings. So that's kind of a cool approach that you guys are taking. You mentioned enterprise manager. You just made a recent announcement, a new release. What's new in that new release? So enterprise manager 13.5 just got released. And so EM keeps improving, right? We've made a lot of changes over the years and one of the things we've done in recent years is do more frequent updates, sort of the cloud model frequent updates that are not just bug fixes, but also introduce new functionality so people get more stuff more frequently rather than once a year. And that's certainly been very attractive because it shows that it's a lively evolving product. And one of the main focus areas of course is cloud. And so a lot of work that happens in enterprise manager is hybrid cloud, which basically means I run enterprise manager and I have some stuff in Oracle cloud and might have some other stuff than other cloud vendors environment. And so we can actually see which databases are where and provide you with one consolidated view and one tool, right? And of course it supports autonomous database and exadata in cloud service and so forth. So you can from EM see both your databases on premises and also how it's doing in Oracle cloud as you potentially migrate things over. So that's one aspect. Then the other one is in terms of operations and automation. One of the things that we started doing again with enterprise manager in the last few years is making sure that everything is a REST API. So we try to make the experience of enterprise manager be very similar to have people work with a cloud service. Most folks now writing automation tools are used to call in REST APIs. EM in the early days didn't have REST APIs. Now we're making sure everything works that way. And one of the advantages is that we can do extensibility without having to rewrite problem. That we just add the API calls in the agent and it makes it a lot easier to become part of the modern system. Another thing that we introduced last year but that we're evolving with more dashboard and so forth is the Grafana plugin. So even the enterprise manager provides lots of cool tools. A lot of cloud operations folks use a tool called Grafana. And so we provide a plugin that allows customers to have Grafana dashboards where the data actually comes out of enterprise manager. So that allows us to integrate EM into a more cloudy world in a cloud environment. And then I think the other important part is making sure that again, enterprise manager has sort of a cloud feel to it. So when you do patching and upgrades, it's basically, it's near zero downtime. It basically means that we do all the upgrades for you without having to bring EM down. Because even though it's a management tool, it's used for operations. So if there were downtime for patching enterprise manager for an hour, then for that hour, it's a blackout window for all the monitoring we do. And so we want to avoid that from happening. So now EM is upgrading even though all the events are still happening and being processed. And then we do a very short switch. So that helps our operations people to be more available. Yes, I mean, I've been talking about automated operations since, you know, lights out data center since the 80s back in, I remember toward a data center one time lights out there were storage tech libraries in there. And so, but there were a lot of unintended consequences around, you know, automated ops. And so people were sort of scared to go there at least lean in too much, but now with all this machine intelligence. So you're talking about ops automation. You mentioned the rest API's, the Grafana plugins, the cloud feel, is that what you're bringing to the table that's unique? Is that unique to Oracle? Well, the integration with Oracle in that sense is unique. So one example is, you mentioned the word migration, right? And so database migration tends to be something, you know, customers obviously take very serious. We go from one place, you have to move all your data to another place that runs in a slightly different environment. And so how do you know whether that migration is going to work? And you can't migrate 1000 databases manually, right? So automation, again, it's not just automation. It's not just to say, hey, I can do an upgrade of a system or I can make sure that nothing is done by hand when you patch something. It's more about having a huge fleet of servers and a huge fleet of databases. How can you move something from one place to another and automate that? And so with EM, you know, we start with sort of the prerequisite phase. So we look at the existing environment, how much memory it doesn't need, how much storage does it use, which version of the database does it have, how much data is there to move. Then on the target side, we see whether the target can actually run that environment. Then we go and look at, you know, how do you want to migrate? Do you want to migrate everything from a sort of a physical model? Or do you want to migrate it from a logical model? Do you want to do it while your environment is still running? So that you start backing up the data to the target database while your existing production system is still running. And we do a short switch afterwards, or you say, no, I want to bring my database down.  So there's these different deployment models that we can ladder customers pick. And then when the migration is done, we have a lot of health checks that can validate whether the target database will run through basically the exact same way. And then you can say, I want to migrate 10 databases or 50 databases, and it will work. It's all automated out of the box.  Historically, you'd have to freeze the code and then migrate and take forever. It was a function of the number of lines of code you had. And then a lot of times people would say, well, I'm not going to freeze the code. And then they would almost go out of business trying to merge the two. You're saying you can, in 2021, you can give customers the choice. You can migrate, you could change the, refuel the plane while you're in midair. Is that essentially what you're saying? That's a good way of describing it. Yeah, so your existing database is running and we can do a logical backup and restore. So while transactions are happening, we're still migrating it over. And then you can do a cutoff. So it makes the transition a lot easier. But the other thing is that in the past, migrations would typically be two things. One is one database version to the next. More upgrades than migration. And the second one is have old hardware or a different CPU architecture and moving to newer hardware in the new CPU architecture. Those were sort of the typical migrations that you had prior to cloud. And from a sys-atman point of view or a DBA, it was all something you could touch. You could physically touch the boxes. When you move to cloud, it's this nebulous thing somewhere in a data center that you have no access to. And that by itself creates a barrier to a lot of admins and DBAs from saying, oh, it'll be okay. There's a lot of concern. And so by baking in all these tests and the prerequisites and all the dashboards to say, this is what you use. These are the features you use. We know that they're available on the other side so you can do the migration. It helps solve some of these problems and removes the barriers. Well, that was just kind of same, same vision when you guys came up with it, I don't know, quite a while ago now. And it took a while to get there with, you know, get gen one and then gen two. But that is, I think, unique to Oracle. Maybe some others are trying to do that as well. But you were really the first to do that. And so I want to switch topics, talk about security. It's hot topic. You guys, you know, are like many companies really focused on security. Does enterprise manager bring any of that over?  What can you tell us about security? Yeah, so there's really two things. You know, one is we obviously have our own best security practices, how we run a database inside Oracle for our own world. We've learned about that over the years. And so we sort of bake that knowledge into enterprise manager. So we can say, hey, if you install this way, we do the install and the configuration based on our best practices. That's one thing. The other one is there's TIG, there's PCI, and there's HIPAA. Those are the main ones. And so customers can do their own way. They can download the documentation and do it manually. But what we've done is, and we've done this for a long time, is basically bake those policies into enterprise manager. So you can say, here's my database, this needs to be PCI compliant, or it needs to be HIPAA compliant, and you push a button. And then we validate the policies in those documents or in those prescribed files, and we make sure that the database is compliant to that. And so we take that manual work and all that stuff basically out of the picture. We say, push this button and we'll take care of it. Now, Wim, but just a quick sidebar here. Last time we talked, it was under a year ago. It was definitely during COVID, and it's still during COVID. We talked about the state of the penguin. So I'm wondering, what's the latest update for Linux, any Linux developments that we should be aware of? Linux, we're still working very hard on autonomous Linux. And that's something where we can really differentiate and solve a problem. Of course, one of the things to mention is that enterprise manager can do HIPAA compliance on Oracle Linux as well. So the security practices are not just for the database, it can also go down to the operating system. Anyways, so on the autonomous Linux side, management in Oracle Cloud's OS management is evolving. We're spending a lot of time on integrating log capturing and if something worked to go wrong that we can analyze a log file on the fly and send you a notification saying, hey, there was this bug and here's the cause and here's potentially a fix for it to autonomous Linux. So we're putting a lot of effort into that. And then also sort of IT slash operation management where we can look at the different applications that are running. You're running a web server on a Linux environment or you're running some Java processes. We can see what's running. We can say, hey, here's a CPU utilization over the past week or the past year. And then how is this evolving? Say if something suddenly spikes, you can say, well, that's normal because every Monday morning at 10 o'clock, there's a spike or this is abnormal and then you can start drilling this down. And this comes back to over time integration with whether it's APM or logging analytics, we can tie all the dots, right? We can connect them, you can say, push this thing, then click on that link and we give you the information. So it's that integration with the entire cloud platform that's really happening now. Integration, there's that theme again. I want to come back to migration. I mean, I think you did a good job of explaining how you sort of make that non-disruptive and your customers I think are generally, you're pushing that experience which makes people more comfortable. But my question is why do people want to migrate? If it works and it's on-prem, are they doing it just because they want to get out of the data center business or is it a better experience in the cloud? What can you tell us there? You know, it's a little bit of everything. You know, one is of course the idea that data center maintenance costs are very high. The other one is that when you run your own data center, you know, we have, we obviously have this problem when you're a cloud vendor, you have these problems but we're in business. But if you buy a server then in three years that server basically is depreciated. You buy new versions and have to do migration stuff. And so one of the advantages with cloud is you push a button you have a new version of the hardware basically, right? So the refreshes happen on a regular basis. You don't have to go and recycle that yourself. And then the other part is the subscription model. It's a lot easier to pay for what you use rather than you have a data center whether it's used or not, you pay for it. So there's the cost advantages of the unpredictability of what you need to pay for. You can say, oh, next year we need to get X more VMs and it's easier to scale that, right? We take care of dealing with capacity planning. You don't have to deal with capacity planning of hardware. We do that at the cloud vendor. So there's all these practical advantages you get from doing it remotely. And that's really what the appeal is. Right. So as it relates to enterprise manager, did you guys have to like tear down the code and rebuild it? Was it entire like redo? How did you achieve that? No, so enterprise manager keeps evolving and we changed the underlying technologies here and there at piecemeal, not sort of a wholesale replacement. And so in 13.5, there's a lot of new stuff but it's built on the existing EM core. And so we're just improving certain areas. One of the things is stability is important for our customers, obviously. And so by picking things piecemeal, we replace one engine rather than the whole thing. It allows us to introduce change more slowly, right? And it's well tested as a unit. And then we go on to the next thing. And then the other one, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of the automation and extensibility comes from REST APIs. And so instead of basically rewriting everything, just provide a REST endpoint and we make all the new features that we built automatically, we REST enabled. So that makes it a lot easier for us to introduce it. Got it. So if I want to poke around with this new version of enterprise manager, can I do that? Is there a place I can go? Do I have to call a rep? How does that work? Yeah, so for information, you can just go to oracle.com slash enterprise manager. That's the website that has all the data. The other thing is if you're already playing with Oracle Cloud or you use Oracle Cloud, we have enterprise manager images in the marketplace. So if you have never used EM, you can go to Oracle Cloud, push a button in the marketplace and you get a full enterprise manager installation in a matter of minutes. And then you can just start using it. As well. Awesome. Hey, I wanted to ask you about, you know, people forget, you guys are stewards of MySQL and we've been looking at that MySQL database cloud service with Heatwave. Did you name that? And so I wonder if you could talk about what you're doing with regard to managing Heatwave environments. So yeah, so Heatwave was the MySQL option that helps with analytics, right? And it really accelerates MySQL usage by, you know, 100X and in some cases more and it's transparent to the customer. So as a MySQL user, you connect with standard MySQL applications and APIs and SQL and everything. And the Heatwave part is all done within the MySQL server, the engine itself says, oh, this SQL query we can offload to the backend Heatwave cluster which then does in-memory operations and blazingly fast returns it to you. And so the nice thing is that it turns every single MySQL database into also a data warehouse without any change whatsoever on your application. So it's been widely popular and it's quite exciting. I didn't personally name it Heatwave. That was not my decision, but it sounds very cool. That's very good. Yeah, it's a very cool name. Well, we love MySQL. We started our company on the LAMP stack, so like many. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's great. So yeah, and so with Heatwave or MySQL in general, we're basically doing the same thing as we have done for the Oracle database. So we're going to add more functionality in our database management tools to also look at Heatwave. So whether it's doing things like performance hub or generic database management and monitoring tools we'll expand that in the near future in the future. That's great. Well, Wim, it's always a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming back in the cube and letting me ask all my Colombo questions. It was really a pleasure having you. You're welcome. Always good to be here. Thank you so much. You're welcome and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time.