Thank you. I'm Tim. I work at Google. I do spend most of my time working on Kubernetes, GKE, Anthos, and related projects there. Recently, I've been spending a lot of my time thinking about multi-cluster, multi-cloud, multi-environment sort of use cases, hybrid, multiple clouds, those sorts of things. I don't think I need to sell anybody on why cloud matters, I hope. There's a lot of reasons why people end up in a multi-cloud or a hybrid situation. Just to touch on a few, availability is a real thing. It's 2020, your application shouldn't go down. It's sort of not cool anymore. Scheduled maintenance isn't really a thing. So you really do want availability for your applications. And availability really means replication, geographic distribution, multiple regions, multiple zones. And one of the ways people get that is by moving to multiple clouds. Another related topic there is locality. We're in a worldwide internet era. If your application is serving traffic in Asia, there's no excuse for you to be hitting a back end in the US. Likewise, risk. Cloud is a risk. A lot of you here are enterprise users who are moving into cloud or have moved into cloud. And if you're in charge of that decision, this is a real risk to your business. What happens if the cloud goes down? Or what happens if the cloud decides to change their pricing model or end of life, a product that you depend on? Having multiple clouds is a really strong way of mitigating risk for yourself. Likewise, isolation. Many people end up with multiple clusters or multiple environments so that they can prevent cross-conhemination. They have a blast radius.  You only take down some portion of your applications. Also, people have this legacy stuff, these things they built before the cloud native era. And last one that comes up a lot is acquisitions. You pick up a smaller company. They're already using Amazon and you're in Google or they're using on-prem and you're in cloud or vice versa. Bridging these environments together is becoming increasingly important. Gartner estimates by 2021, that's next year, 75% of mid-large-sized organizations will have adopted multi-cloud or hybrid as a strategy. If you do that without a solid plan, you are going to increase your operational costs. You're going to stall your development. You are not going to shorten your cycles. You're going to lengthen your cycles to borrow from SID. What do I mean by that really? Look, moving to cloud is hard. And it can be really, really hard, depending on what your applications are about. Moving to multiple clouds just amplifies that. And yet, this is what is happening, right? 75% by next year. The reasons to move to multiple clouds or to multiple environments are so compelling that people have decided to do it regardless of the risk. Using those multiple clouds now, like let's dig into the risk, what does it mean? Every cloud is different. There's this noise that you have to experience when you load two clouds up. Anybody here who's ever loaded up multiple cloud consoles and tried to do the same thing in the UIs, right? Or use the APIs, find the same concepts, and map them together between clouds? Holy cow, it's a nightmare. From the infrastructure as a service, to functions as a service, to platforms as a service, to now containers as a service, there are no standards. Every cloud is different, and all these differences, they manifest in really many ways. There's the UIs and the CLIs, there's the tooling, there's APIs, and just API style, right? Some are declarative, some are imperative, some are REST, some are GRPC. Some of these things are very deeply rooted, right? In the terminology, the way you use the clouds, the concepts that the clouds offer, the capabilities, the product portfolio, how you do identity between clouds.  These things, it's a huge deal. And it's actually worse than that, because all of those differences manifest in all of the product portfolio. So you wanna use VMs, compute, right? Well, what's capable in Amazon is different than what's possible in Google. It's different from what's available in Azure or your on-prem. Networking, holy cow, I spend most of my time staring at networking problems. Networking between the different clouds is tedious. Storage, load balancing, autoscaling, life cycle management, all of the different capabilities of the clouds are completely different. Now, of course, this impacts how you build your applications and what you can build. Logically, the logical conclusion to these problems is abstraction, right? So you start building up abstractions for your company. You wanna hide all of these details. Often, this means now you have a lowest common denominator API, right? Whatever capabilities are common across all the platforms, well, that's what you're gonna expose to your staff, right? Now, you have this tower of bespoke abstraction.  They're always more costly. They require more staff, more time. There are more sneaky, hidden little bugs than you can possibly think about. And truthfully, as a software engineer, good abstractions are really hard. So, oh, don't forget your on-prem environment, which doesn't have any of these API controls, right? So you're forced to trade off, right?  You lose fungibility. You can't move things between clouds the way you want to. You end up with high maintenance costs, high development, long cycle times as you move between clouds and try to bring new things online. And just to make that even worse, you've now worked with these individual clouds. You've now got locked in accidentally. You didn't do it on purpose. You didn't really sign up for this, but you just accidentally get locked in. You used some facet of your cloud provider that doesn't work on some other cloud provider, and now you're stuck, because you can either go back and spend engineer years retooling your abstractions and all the things that built up on top of those abstractions, or you just live with it. Some features just don't exist in other clouds. Lowest common denominator APIs kind of stink. As someone who wrote one, I'll tell you, nobody's really happy with them. And sometimes the differences between the providers are so subtle you don't see them until way after it's too late. So now, to be fair, sometimes lock-in is okay. Sometimes you strategically say, like, I'm gonna use this thing that only one cloud provider provides because it's really important to me. But I want that to be your choice. It can be a calculated move, and you should leverage it when it makes sense, but you should do it consciously. Accidental lock-in is really the devil. So now you're building abstractions, and you're building up, and you've got a staff of people, and you're teaching them these abstractions. You've got to train your dev and your ops staff. Every cloud has their own certification programs. There's a reason they have those certification programs.  So now you have to build your own training, your own documentation, your own certification program for your own abstractions so that your staff can become experts on that. And heaven forbid, there's a leaky abstraction, all abstractions are leaky. If you leak a detail from a cloud provider up into your API, now those users are forced to debug down through your API and into the cloud provider. This is really not a great story I'm selling here.  And now you get to train your entire staff, right? And maybe you have 10 people on your staff, and it's not such a big deal, or maybe you have 10,000 people on your staff, and oh my goodness, you gotta get to work on this. I call this craziness, right? This is nuts, and you're doing it by yourself, because these are bespoke abstractions. What we're really lacking here, the reason I'm here to talk today, something that's very dear to me, is consistency. You don't wanna train your teams on all those different clouds, and you don't wanna customize your applications, you wanna build these abstractions. Now, I heard you say, didn't I just tell you how abstractions are this terrible thing, and you really ought not do that? No, what I actually said was, they're really hard. They're hard to get right, and they're expensive, and especially when you're doing them on your own. That doesn't mean you don't want them, and that doesn't mean you don't need them, but you probably don't wanna be doing it all by yourself. So what you really want, what you're looking for is standard abstractions, things that other people are using that work across the industry. We heard to talk this morning on how open standards are being developed using GitLab. Super interesting, you want to know that you're not in this alone, right? You want abstractions that have broad support from multiple environments, multiple clouds, with deep integration that works really well with those clouds. Ideally, where the clouds themselves are participating in those abstractions and in the development of that, you want abstractions which extend easily, which give you the right hooks to customize it for your own environment to tap into the events that are happening so you can pop the seal and do those cloud-writer-specific things without going in and changing all the abstractions. You want examples and documentation. You need to be able to hit Stack Overflow, who has a nice table out there. You need to be able to hit Stack Overflow and find the answers to the most common questions. You want layers that make sense, that don't succumb to the lowest common denominator syndrome, and you want to be able to hire people who know them. Maybe this is the most important point here, Chris made a joke about seven years of Kubernetes experience, but Kubernetes has only been around since 2013. I just lost my notes. Oh, there we go. Kubernetes has only been around since 2013, right? So literally, you can't have seven years of experience. In 2013, there's four people who have experience with it in 2013. So it's difficult to hire people who have sort of these industry-leading experience. What I'm really talking about here is the opposite of bespoke, right? It's really standard. Enter Kubernetes. So this is more or less Kubernetes, and am I sure I was pretty transparent already, if not maybe my jacket or my shirt or my introduction? Does anybody not know what Kubernetes is? It's okay. Wow, one person, excellent. Kubernetes is a platform for building and running workloads. For managing containerized applications, it is a highly portable system that runs across different clouds that has abstractions for the most common sorts of patterns in work loads. I'd be happy to go into hours and hours and hours about what Kubernetes is, show off the demos. If anybody wants to talk afterwards, I'll be around all day. Kubernetes is that abstraction. Kubernetes has most of the properties that I talked about before, kind of on purpose. It's built by and for the clouds. Google works on it, Amazon works on it, Azure works on it, the Chinese clouds, Alibaba and Tencent, they're all working on Kubernetes. It is supported by all the major clouds, even with managed offerings, so you can go to any of the major North American clouds, Amazon, Azure, Google, IBM, they all have managed Kubernetes offerings, so they can take away some of the pain for you. It is used in every major industry sector. At KubeCon this year in San Diego, there was a demonstration of how they got Kubernetes clusters running on an F-16, on an in-flight fighter jet, a cluster of Kubernetes nodes. Let that sink in for just a second. That was cool. I thought that was pretty exciting. It is literally running the accelerator at CERN, right? It is, they're talking about putting it on the space station now. It is, it's being proven in pretty much every industry sector. It's not just for video games anymore. It is also proven to scale. So we're already supporting more than 5,000 nodes. There's been a few blog posts by people who are talking about pushing it up into 10 and even 15,000 nodes. And it is highly extensible by design. We've built a lot of extensibility mechanisms and hooks and dynamic registration and plug-ins into the system so that you can tweak it and bend it to your needs. Kubernetes was built on foundational ideas that came from Google. So before I worked on Kubernetes, I worked on Google's internal system called Borg and its successor called Omega. I took, when Kubernetes came around and Docker landed, we took some of those ideas and we went public with them. We started talking about what we're doing and why and it really resonated. So those ideas have come forth now in the form of Kubernetes. Some people joke that it's Borg for everybody else. Actually, I had a crisis a few years back when I thought, what am I gonna do when I leave Google and I don't have Borg anymore? Like, I don't think I can cope with this. Now I don't have to worry about it. Kubernetes is driven by a community. It is not a Google project anymore and the theme this week or today is community. So Kubernetes is a community project. It is driven by thousands and thousands of developers from every time zone, from every continent, except Antarctica, if you're out there, let me know. We cut a release every quarter. We're not quite as good as every month, but we've cut 18 straight releases for 18 straight quarters. We're cutting another one in a couple of weeks. It is constantly growing, new functionality, handling new use cases. It is handling new customers, new scenarios, new installations. Cloud support is growing, strengthening, deepening. This is how you can bridge that multi-cloud problem. Now, you don't need to train your staff on all the different clouds. You don't need to build your bespoke abstraction. You can elevate the conversation, talk about this platform that already exists, right? You can protect your teams from the turmoil below them, hopefully with close to the right abstractions that don't leak too much, but at least if they leak, you're not alone. Your staff can get down to work, right? They need to do their thing without getting stuck in all the details of each environment. Somebody asked on Twitter this morning, what does infrastructure mean? I was looking at it and my response was, infrastructure is all the crap you don't wanna care about, but you need to in order to get your job done, right? It's everything below you. So, hard-earned wisdom, all abstractions eventually break down, right? Kubernetes, we're trying to make a mechanism, a system that can extend, can grow and develop and adapt with people. Some of those abstractions will break down and be replaced over time. Already at sort of five years in, we're starting to see generation two APIs come in to get more sophisticated and start to age out the older, less sophisticated APIs, and that's fine. The system's gonna continue to grow and be supported and have this community behind it. Now, Kubernetes does not magically make all your clouds be the same, right? Product feature differences and limitations, they do exist. If you wanna use BigQuery, you have to use Google Cloud, right? If you wanna use Redshift, you have to use Amazon. That's just the way of things, right? But Kubernetes has a lot of places where you can pop the hatch, right? And you can break portability and trade off functionality for the lack of portability. But you don't have to most of the time. Kubernetes, one of the things we like to pitch about Kubernetes is it's low-level enough that you can run just about anything, stateful apps, databases, Kafka, but it's high-level enough that your employees don't get stuck in the quagmire of learning each cloud and debugging through each cloud. One of the things we've also talked about through Kubernetes, through our industry, in fact, is this dev ops model, right? Where we make two separate personas and then sometimes we glue them together and sometimes we don't, right? Your developers can focus on the developer tasks and your ops can focus on the ops task. And if you're a true dev slash ops shop, you can wear two different hats, so you can think about two different sets of problems at different times. You don't have to conflate the two things together. So you can get this consistent experience across platforms. Now, if you're careful, just a little careful, you can take your application and you can say, you know what, I'm not happy with cloud A anymore. I wanna go run it on cloud B. And you can take the YAML, everybody loves YAML, take your YAML and you can move it over to the other cluster. It's not gonna be completely free, it's not gonna just work the minute you do it, but with a reasonable amount of effort, you can actually take that thing and move it over. This is the benefit of systems like containerization, Docker, Kubernetes, excuse me, is you have a plausible story to that, right? And these abstractions offer you most of what you need when you cross those cloud boundaries. So if that's not enough, let's talk about Kubernetes as a platform for building other platforms. It's a platform platform. Kubernetes has this extensibility API called Custom Resources. People all over the world are using this to define their own APIs that are their own bespoke abstractions. Wait a second, didn't I say you don't want bespoke abstractions? No, actually bespoke abstractions are great as long as they are focused on what you want to do and they're not baloney.  So we find many customers now who are using Kubernetes Custom Resources to build higher level concepts, right? One of the customers that I work with, I won't name them because I'm not sure how public it is, but they're just down the street and they're building a giant abstraction that changes the way deployments are done because they don't like the way that Kubernetes built in deployments work. They have their own needs for it and they have the staff that they can justify building their own abstraction so they've built their own abstractions, right? People are building these things called we call operators, right? You want to launch a SQL instance, well that's cool, you just say create SQL and it creates you a new SQL instance. You don't have to worry about how many pods does that need? How many replicas? What's the replication story? How do I expose those services? What's my DR? All of that is bundled into an operator that builds these custom abstractions and builds on top of Kubernetes. So we let you do this by defining types on top of the existing API machinery. All the ugly, not so fun part of serving a REST API with consistency, with some well-defined API semantics are taken care of for you, right? You get all that for free. We didn't intend with Kubernetes to build an API serving platform but it just sort of shook out of what we were doing and it turns out to be really interesting. So now you and your teams, you can build your own APIs on top of and alongside of Kubernetes APIs so you can have the best of both worlds. You can have your standard abstractions and you can have your bespoke abstractions built on top of them. This lets you focus in your business, in your business logic and get things done. Now, I'm a Kubernetes fanboy. You might be able to tell by how many times I've said it today. Kubernetes is not an island. Kubernetes is the beginning, the seed of an ecosystem and what an ecosystem it is. We are just one piece of a Cambrian-esque explosion of things. If you look at the Cloud Native Compute Foundations roadmap, their trail map, all the icons are about this big now because they have to fit hundreds of icons into one page. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of products and projects across GitHub, across startups. Many of them are represented here that are aiming to go with Kubernetes, both open source and proprietary, licensable and usable right away today that solve problems for you, that fill gaps, that work with Kubernetes, that either build on custom resources or build applications on top of Kubernetes. To give you these higher level controls, security, policy, networking, storage, it's an incredibly packed landscape. It's very difficult to navigate right now. What a wonderful problem to have. I'm so confused by all of the cool things that are happening right now. It's going to, over time, settle down. That's just the way it works. Inevitably 90% of these things will die off or consolidate and that's okay, but open source is exploding and in a really good way, just to list off some of the projects, Istio for networking, Knative for serverless, Silium for EBPF security and networking, Calico for networking and connectivity, Tecton for CI CD, Cube Builder for helping you build custom resources, the cluster API, which gets you managing clusters and even a higher level. These are just a few of the exciting projects that are happening right now within our ecosystem. Interestingly, there's a whole sector of this ecosystem that is made up of users who are publishing their own tools that they've built on top of Kubernetes. It's not just companies trying to make money off their things or sell you something. It's actually companies who are making this digital native transformation and coming out with their stuff and saying, look what we did. Would you like to help us? Would you like to participate? Would you like to get what we've got? It's pretty cool. This is a really exciting, interesting time to be in open source space. So whether you want to go with pure open source or whether you want to look at startups or other companies to fill these gaps, you have a lot of options. You have a lot of flexibility. The power is really all yours right now. And in my opinion, we are closer to the beginning of this process than we are to the end. This is going to heat up before it cools down. I guess every project curator feels this way, right? But I hope I'm right. This is an exciting time to be part of this. So I sound like a commercial for Kubernetes, so maybe a reality check is worthwhile. Kubernetes has some issues. I will admit it. Some of them are being worked on. Some of them are yet to be staffed. Some of them have yet to be discovered. This is the reality of software. We know this. Not every abstraction that we have is leak proof. We are aware of some of those and not aware of some of them. Sometimes we are our own harshest critics. Kubernetes is very cluster centric. We are working on building these abstractions that span the clusters, that span the environments that make it easier for you to use multiple environments. This is where I'm spending all of my time lately is on those topics. I think we've got the cluster pretty well nailed. Now we're spreading out beyond the cluster. A lot of our cluster policies are sort of poorly defined when you start to go into cross cluster space. So I think this is a very exciting, interesting time to be looking at those things. For example, networking, network policy across clusters, networking is hard. Networking is one of the hardest problems that infrastructure people have to face. Networking across clusters, across clouds is extra super duper challenging. And multi-cluster life cycle management. Cluster life cycle management in general is actually pretty nascent. So this is a place where things are growing up. It is still early for multi-cloud and hybrid in Kubernetes space, but it is growing, right? And I think Kubernetes is pretty well positioned to be that thing that helps you bridge the different environments when you need to. For whatever reasons you need to, there are a million legitimate reasons. Kubernetes hopefully will be there to help you with it. So looking to the future, there's a lot of work to be done. What I need from you is your call to action. Bring me your use cases. Come and talk to me about what it is that you're really trying to do concretely. You want two clouds, why? What do you need to happen between them? How do they communicate to each other? What does your network look like? What do you want to happen? Because that's the way that I, as a representative of Kubernetes, can start to bring those ideas into the fray, right? If you've got the time and the bandwidth, come join one of our SIGs. Come talk to us about your use cases. Come to KubeCon or come to SIG multi-cluster and represent. You know, we have some things that we understood that we think we understand pretty well, as they think, you know, mesh-like, app-to-app communications. I think I understand that case. Ingress, I think I sort of understand that case. But there's a lot of things that I don't understand yet. And that's why I'm asking for you guys to help me. So after this today, I'll be around all day if anybody wants to talk to me. Also, I'm pretty easy to find on GitHub or Twitter or email. It's always the same name. We've got a million topics to talk about. So again, at the risk of being the cheerleader, I think Kubernetes is a good spot for this. At least there's nothing better. Running apps is hard, and that's your business. I don't want to make your business harder. I want to make your business easier. Running multiple clouds is going to complicate your life.  But I need to understand the use cases. So come in and talk to us if you're looking at multi-cloud and you haven't started looking at Kubernetes, I urge you to take a look at it. It's hard to say that it will be here forever. Who knows? But there's not a whole lot of these C changes that we see through our careers. This is a pretty big one, and I'm pretty excited to be along for the ride on this. And if you think that we're missing something with Kubernetes, let's talk. Thank you. And we've got just a couple of minutes left. So if anybody wants questions, I'm happy to do questions. Or we can just talk afterwards. There's a hand in the back, too. There's one over here. Well, who shouldn't use Kubernetes? Who should not use Kubernetes? If you don't have a problem, don't try to fix it, right? If you're not feeling the pain that I talked about here, don't worry about it yet. You might eventually, but I am a big proponent of if it ain't fixed, don't mess with it. If it ain't broken, don't mess with it. You need to understand Kubernetes before you jump in. It's a deep well of water. It's pretty nice and warm. There are some living things down here. They will occasionally brush past your foot. What's the biggest risk to Kubernetes being the de facto orchestration layer in the next 10 years? The biggest risk, do you mean what might unseat it? Or the biggest competitor to Kubernetes right now is still homegrown stuff, things that people have done on their own, right? It's not, some of what Kubernetes does is not that complicated to just script and do yourself. To the previous question, if what you have is working, by all means run with it, right? I don't see any other projects that are really well positioned right now to sort of replace Kubernetes in the Kubernetes space, but they say you never hear the one that kills you. So if something's gonna come along and eat our lunch, I don't know where it is yet. I'm madly scanning the landscape, trying to figure out what that is and why. Some people think it'll be serverless. Maybe it'll be serverless. I think I'm excited about some of the stuff that's happening in Kubernetes serverless space, whether that's Knative or OpenFaz or the other things that are happening. That might be the guy who comes along and changes everything next. Thank you very much. One more? Oh, I'm sorry, did I not have that on the slide? T-H-O-C-K-I-N at GitHub, at Twitter, or at Google, or LinkedIn, or speaker deck, or whatever all the other sites are. Any other questions? Thank you. Oh, one more? Yeah. What are some best practices to monitor Kubernetes resources like bars, ingresses? Best practices to monitor Kubernetes. Monitoring is one of those spaces where everybody has an opinion, and it's hard to come in and say what we think is the best practice because we have to fit into existing situations. That said, customers who I talk with who are coming in sort of semi-green field are looking to Prometheus. Prometheus is another CNCF project. It's a really excellent project. Also built by former Googlers to model internal Google systems, ironically. It's a great system. We work really well with Prometheus. If you're running in a cloud, though, you might have a better managed experience by using the different cloud provider monitoring stacks. So it is pluggable in that way. Thank you very much.


We're going to start out by proving to ourselves that the chromosomes cause chromosomal sex and that the inheritance pattern for those chromosomes is actually the same. So let's start with, let's run through our little Punnett square rules. Like what were the things? I'm just going to say we're going to make babies between an anatomical male and an anatomical female. Make babies. Okay. Do I have to write all that down? I don't, right? We just know that I told you in words that we're dealing with anatomical male and female humans and they're going to make some babies. Maybe we should ask a question like what are the anatomical sexes? How much, what are the possible sexes of the babies that they're going to make? All right. That sounds like a good plan. So let's do our four steps to do a Punnett square. What are all the possibilities? First of all, we have to do phenotype for the parents. We have an anatomically male and an anatomically female. Do you agree with that? What's our phenotype if we're just looking at sex?  What was the next thing we had to look at? We had to look at genotyp, what? Genotype, parental genotype. So around anatomical sex, chromosomal sex, that works. What is the male's genotype? Well, we got to keep track of Xs and Ys. And look at what we're doing now. That doesn't represent alleles. That doesn't represent a gene. That represents an entire chromosome. This is going to be important for our bookkeeping. A female is going to have what's her genotype going to be, or their genotype. That's gendering it. XX. An anatomically female human has XX chromosomes in our example. Now what was the next step in this process? We want to know what the possible gametes are. Are we keeping track of any genes yet? No. We're keeping track of entire chromosomes, but the process is the same because, look, anatomically male humans and their sperm, half the sperm are going to get next chromosome and the other half are going to get a Y chromosome. Do you follow? Like, yes, right? What about anatomically females? And I'm just going to show you right now that's how huge eggs are. They're gigantic compared to the sperm. Like probably 10 times bigger than that compared to the sperm, but I can't draw them that big because I don't have enough room. But all the babies are going to get an X chromosome from their egg parent. They might get an X chromosome and they might get a Y chromosome from their sperm parent. Okay. So far so good. Shall we do a Punnett square? Possible offspring? Now, wasn't our question like what percentage of boys and girls, XXs and XYs, can we get in from these two parents? Was that our question that we asked? Are you seeing the answer here? We only have an X option from the egg. We have two, an X and a Y option from the sperm. And if this sperm, I can't help it, I have to draw the sperm tail just so we keep track that those are sperms, yo. That baby's going to have two X chromosomes, which means it's going to be anatomically female. That tells us nothing about that baby's gender. This baby is going to be XY, right? It got the Y sperm and that means that it's going to be anatomically male. Also tells us nothing about, doesn't tell us anything about anything except what chromosomes it has. Now, do you agree? 50%, there's a 50% chance of having an XY baby and a 50% chance of having an XX baby. Not a 55% chance. Who knows? Done. That's it. That's all there is to it. And it's that simple now. What if there's a condition on the chromosome? What if there's something that we want to keep track of on that chromosome? For example, color blindness. Color blindness is a recessive trait carried on the X chromosome. So I'm going to give you a problem. I don't have any more paper. What? Maybe I'll just do that. What happens? We'll just see what happens here. Let's do a problem just for the fun of it. Let's say we have a colorblind male making babies with a, let's say, carrier. Female. Okay. And this is awesome because we're just rolling to do our example here. What I've just given you is the phenotype. Do you agree with that? Yeah.  I told you before that color blindness is recessive and it's carried on the X chromosome. You can tell me. What is the genotype of the colorblind male? Well, take a look, my friends. We know he has an X and a Y chromosome. We know that the colorblindness allele is carried on that X chromosome and he's colorblind. So I'm going to say, I'm going to use a little B for my colorblind allele. Again, this is so random, like who knows whatever. You can use whatever letters you want. That's his genotype. He's colorblind, so he has to have the allele. The Y chromosome doesn't have anything to do with colorblindness. So he has one copy of the colorblind allele and he has it.  First of all, we know that she has two X chromosomes, so she's going to have automatically two alleles for colorblindness. She's a carrier. That right there, those words, those are fatten words, folks. That means they're heterozygous, which means they have one dominant allele and one recessive allele.  Do you see why it matters? If this were not sex-linked or linked onto the X chromosome, then we would, all we would do is put, I mean, our colorblind person would have to have two copies of the colorblind allele. That's not the case here. Now, also, this messes with our gametes that we're about to form. Let's make some gametes, y'all. We have X little B gametes and we have y gametes. If you get a y, no information from the sperm parent about colorblindness. I'm not going to make my eggs gigantic. But look, it's so easy to figure out what my possible gametes are, especially if you put the circle around them to remind yourself that, oh, they're haploid. I can only have one copy of each chromosome, each gene, in the gamete. And then our last step is just to throw these guys. Now we have four options, right? So let's throw these in there. We've got X little B, y on one side. Those are my gametes possible. And then X big B, X little B, that's my possible gametes on the other side. Oh, what? You can't see that. Oh, geez. Oh, geez. I have to take this to another page, y'all. We're doing it anyway, though. Look at me go. Paste. Okay, we have one little sperm tail in there, so just ignore my sperm tail. Okay. Now, what are the possible babies? Well, this here, baby, tell me about the phenotype of that baby. Anatomically female, chromosomally female, heterozygous for color blindness, a carrier. This is a carrier female. Tell me about this little baby. So anatomically female, colorblind. Two recessive alleles, that is a colorblind female. That is a not colorblind male, and we have a colorblind male. Half of our females are colorblind, half of our males are colorblind. When we do problems like this and I say, look, there's half of the females are this and half the males are that. Does that mean that if these parents had like 20 kids, 10 would be colorblind and 10 wouldn't be? No, this is the probability.  You could end up with 10 colorblind boy babies. It's not very likely, but it is possible. These are just probabilities. They do not, they're not predictions or like, they're just probabilities, like what you would expect. Okay, whatever I just said. How do you feel about that? Okay, we're going to do another problem that is related to a sex-linked pattern in fruit flies. So I have some fruit flies coming at you in a second.


All right, morning everybody. Welcome. My name is Steve Calender. I am a professor over in the business school. As I understand it, you are all new arrivals for grad school at Stanford. Is that right? All right, excellent. Well, this is an exciting time in your life. All right, you're probably a little nervous and tentative. All right, but it's a tremendous time in your life. I can remember back to when I started grad school. I'll give my age away. 22 years ago, almost exactly to the day I was sitting in a similar chair to what you're sitting in, and I was very excited. All right, I did my PhD at Caltech down in Southern California. I didn't get into Stanford, so I had to move downstate a little bit. And when I think back to that time, it was really a sort of life-changing experience for me. Coming to grad school was the first time I'd ever been in a place where it was cool to be into learning, where it was cool to be a bit of a nerd. I mean, some of you may have had that experience before, but I'm sure many of you share my experience that sort of learning was something people weren't into. And then you get to grad school, you get to a place like Caltech or Stanford, and it's a whole different world. And it's a very exciting time. It was really a life-changing experience for me. The other thing that I remember when I think back to the start of my grad school experience, which came back to me this weekend, was you look around and the people around you are very likely to be your friends for a long time. All right, I just got back from a camping weekend in Santa Barbara with a bunch of my friends from graduate school who I met, and I'm thinking about it, who I met pretty much in the first week of graduate school. All right, so the people around you, you don't know them yet, you may not be too familiar with them, but they're going to be your friends for your life. Maybe you want to switch seats after a while and pick some different friends if you look around and you don't like what you see, but it's that sort of formative experience, and it's really a great time. So I hope you're excited about starting at Stanford, and I expect you'll have a great time. All right, you're sitting in this room, you're interested in energy. Stanford is a great place to do energy. All right, the set of people who are interested in it and the variety of things that are going on is just mind-blowing. It encompasses everything, and so wherever you are interested in it, wherever they head to, you'll be able to find somebody who is working on it. You'll be surprised to find someone who's working on that aspect of the industry. All right, you take me for example, suddenly I'm sitting here in the engineering building talking about energy. I did my PhD at Caltech, but I am not an engineer, and I'm not even a real scientist according to the definition of probably most of you over here. I am a social scientist. I'm a political economist. I work at the intersection of political science and economics. I use economic tools to understand the questions at this intersection. So what do I have to say about energy? Well, let me tell you about a little bit about the kind of things I do and what I'm interested in. I'll start outside the energy industry and we'll come back to energy industry. All right, so over in the business school, we study a lot of business strategy, business cases, and so one case I wrote a few years ago, and we teach in the business school, is about a startup here in the Bay Area that works in the transportation industry, and they're looking in a few years to pivot and to get into autonomous cars. They're based up in the city. They get by the name of Uber. Have you guys heard of this company? All right, absolutely. So this is what Uber does. So Uber had the idea to create an app to match drivers and passengers and do it a lot more efficiently and expand this network and start a company this way. This was a great idea, but then suddenly when they started to develop this idea, they went and talked to the lawyers, told the lawyers draw up the contract for this company, the documents for this company, and the lawyers said to them, this sounds awesome, but there's just one little problem. And the one little problem is that your business idea is illegal. So fancy that, you got this great new startup idea, you're out to change the world and these nerdy lawyers are telling you, this is illegal. All right, what a bummer that is. So Uber and the founders of Uber at this point had suddenly discovered regulation. They'd suddenly discovered policy and they'd suddenly discovered politics. So what is interesting about Uber is they're great innovators that created this app. They're moving into food delivery, maybe autonomous vehicles in the future and all this sort of stuff. What is also of interest in what they've been up to and where they've been very innovative, particularly from my perspective is they didn't let this fact that their business idea was illegal stop them. All right, so they entered the market. All right, they said, well, thanks lawyers, but we'll enter anyway. But then what happened? What did they do? All right, you can't just enter an illegal market and then say, you know, they're all with the laws. You can't get away with that for very long. And so what did they do? They changed the law. Did they go up to the legislature and say, excuse me, Mr. Legislatures, legislators, can you please change the law? We would like to make lots of money and your law is getting in the way of us making money. That was the goal to change the law and in many jurisdictions they have succeeded in changing the law. But how did they go about changing the law? They couldn't just go and ask to change the law. What did they do? Say that again. They made people like Uber. Yep, we all want people to like them. All right, so what did that get them? Leverage. All right, leverage to do what? They hired some lobbyists. All right, lobbyists are very good at taking your money.  All right, then they've got to do something for you, but they may not do it. All right, so it's good to hire qualified people in this area, but the lobbyists just can't turn up to the legislature and say, excuse me, Mr. Legislature, please change the law for my clients. All right, they need some leverage. So how do you go about getting leverage? Say that again. You work with the drivers. You create public demand and you work with the drivers. What do you mean by working with the drivers? You've got to work with them. They're not your employees technically. Maybe next week they'll be your employees, but they're your contractors at the moment. What does it mean to work with the drivers? Absolutely, yeah, and so you recruit them to drive for you. All right, this is what a business does. You've got to generate. You've got to find employees. You've got to find users. You've got to add some value somehow, but you've still got this problem that what you're doing is illegal. All right, you've got to pay them. But how does this relate to changing the law? You're still doing something that's illegal. All right, why are the Uber guys also rich now when they had their business idea was illegal? All right, I've got an idea. I'm going to sell heroin. How's that business idea going to work? Switch to another country. They could challenge the laws in court. These laws are pretty airtight. However, that's one thing. You've got to see whether the law is constitutional or there's something wrong with it. Well, you're trying to create a business, users to make money. You've also got this other problem of what you're doing is illegal. All right, so what are you going to do? You've got to get your drivers to not only drive for you, but you're going to get them to help you politically. You're going to make your product popular so that they use your product and then you're going to get those users to help you politically. All right, this is where your leverage is going to come from. All right, so the point is if Travis Kalanick and turns up at the city council and says, please change the law, they're going to laugh him out of the building. If he turns up with 10,000 drivers and 100,000 users and they all say, please change the law, politicians are going to start listening. That's the leverage that Uber had over the legislature. All right, and in many jurisdictions they were able to use that leverage to change the law. All right, so what's very interesting about Uber is they had a business strategy that was clearly going to win in the market. They were first in with this sort of ride-hailing app that was going to sort of have an expansive network and then benefit from network effects to leverage to win in the market. Their problem was whether this market was legal. All right, so what they did was they used their business strategy to build up users and drivers in a way that will also gave them not just market power, but political power. Then they use that political power to change the law. All right, so that's what Uber had to do. All right, they've got a great business idea. They're going to innovate, they're going to disrupt, but those who are getting disrupted don't want to be disrupted. And so you need to have a strategy to win against them. And what's really interesting and where I come at from studying markets, studying society, studying businesses, that this competition is not just in the marketplace. It's in what we call beyond the marketplace, in the media, in the government, in the courts, within public opinion. And so Uber needed to use their strategy to not only just win in the market, but win beyond the market. All right, worked out really well for them in San Francisco and a bunch of US cities. There's still some cities that they haven't been able to compete in. If you're from Austin, Texas, they got driven out of there. And if many of you guys are from around the world, they've had more checkered success in other countries around the world. And so part of their ability to succeed, to disrupt, to change the world has been to participate in politics, to participate beyond the market. All right, this is great for Uber, that's one example. But what is important is what important for your perspective is that this example and these sorts of ideas happen in every industry all across the country and all across the world. And I'll give you just one other example of another Silicon Valley darling that I talk about in my class, which is Tesla. Tesla is a transportation company, they're going to reduce energy usage and do all of this sort of stuff. They're great innovators. They just sort of dived in with a fully electric car. Another aspect where they've been great innovators is how they sell their cars. You may not know it, it may be a surprise to you, but in most of the United States, it's actually illegal for Tesla to sell their cars to customers. What kind of business is that? You make a product and you're not allowed to actually sell it to your customers. You've got to sell it to a dealer who then sells it to the customer. And this has been a big constraint on Tesla's ability to roll out their product, roll out their new cars all around the country. So even in that industry, even in that disruptive innovative industry, the constraints of politics, the constraints of government are pinning them down. I could give you a hundred other examples of other industries where this is relevant, the one you're most interested in is energy. The news for you is energy is not immune from these forces. You all know energy is a regulated industry, but a lot of the times you'll think about how can we build a business that conforms with those regulations. What I'm interested in and what's going to be important for you guys is those regulations, those laws themselves are in play. They don't just come out of the sky from sort of some designer who says here are the laws for the electricity industry. Those laws are the result of competitors, Ubers, Tesla's car companies, the taxi companies competing to get laws written that favor them. So if you have a great idea or you want to enter a space and it disrupts, those you're going to disrupt don't like it, they're going to get laws in place to pin you down and to limit your opportunities. I can tell you endless stories of young sort of idealistic aspirational people like yourself who start companies that get squashed by politics. So whether you like it or not, you have to participate in the political world. You might be sitting here thinking I'm a scientist, I'm an engineer, I'm going to build great product and that's all that matters. I can tell you now that's not all that matters. And your company will have a difficult time succeeding or your efforts, even if you don't want to start a company, your efforts to improve social outcomes, induce usage of renewable energy around the world or what have you, are going to be very limited by the fact that if you're not participating in politics, participating in what we call beyond the market environment. A good test of this is you're all young and just beginning your careers in energy. This week and over the next few years you'll meet a lot of seasoned professionals in the energy industry. A good test of what I'm saying is you ask any of them about politics and you will be amazed at how knowledgeable and how fluent they are about policy and politics. They'll often get frustrated when they talk to you, so be prepared for them to get annoyed while they're answering your question. If you want to keep them in a happy mood, don't ask them about this, but they do know about it because they've been forced to deal with it. So what you want to do is start figuring about this stuff early. You don't have to become a politician, a lobbyist yourself, but if you're going to work in this space, do research in this space, do whatever, knowing about these issues is going to be important. So I mentioned earlier, I do teach a class on energy, a two-week elective class. I'll say a little bit more about it in a few minutes, but I'll give you two examples from that class that we talk about. We have the founders and the CEOs of these companies come into the class. One of them is Sunrun, which is one of the largest solar panel companies here in the western United States. So they put solar panels on the roofs of houses.  So what you need to do is ideally store that energy and use it at different times. We're starting to see more penetration of batteries, but the traditional way of doing this and still the overwhelming way of doing this is you pull in that solar energy, you ship it to the grid and then when you need it later, you just get it back from the grid and you use the grid as a battery basically. So the defining issue in that industry is at what price do you sell it to the grid when you produce it and what price do you pay when you get it back? And the predominant way of doing this has been what's called net metering, that basically it's the same price you sell it and you get back.  What do you think the utilities think about net metering?  So the utilities want to, this is usually in a law saying that the rate of electricity pricing is by net metering, the utilities don't like this. So they are now going to legislatures all around the country and all this is happening in many countries around the world, changing the laws or trying to change the law about what rate is, what the net metering rate is. If you remove net metering and you make it the retail rate, so you send it to the electricity company at the wholesale rate and you buy back at the retail rate, solar panels are not economical anymore. That whole industry goes away. So Sun Run is a company that started out of the GSB and tried to energize this industry, so to speak, about 10 years ago to create this industry about solar panels and it was based on the calculation of net metering. This was all going well but then once they started to get a lot of penetration, of course the utility companies are not very happy about this, so the utility companies respond, they're losing money in the market to these guys, they respond by going to the political legislatures and trying to get the law changed. One day a few years ago, Sun Run woke up to discover that Nevada, the legislature in Nevada had passed a new law that wiped out net metering.  So Sun Run had to figure out what to do about it and so what they had to do was educate themselves and participate in this political process to try to get an outcome that made their business viable. They're trying to do this to have a successful business, make some money but they also think this is what part of their goal of having, of increasing the penetration of renewable energy and turns on this political outcome. So they had to get expert at this. Another example is ChargePoint, this company that makes charging stations for electric cars all around the US. They were created because the government and the utilities didn't want to do these charging stations because the utilities are sort of, I don't want to disparage them too much but they're a little staid in their thinking and their planning. So ChargePoint started and raised a hundred, something million dollars and have been a leader in this space. A couple of years ago, they discovered that in the big bill in the California legislature, the law was going to get changed where it was mandated only the utilities could build these charging stations. Suddenly their business was going to get wiped out and this is a common pattern.  So it's essential if you want to succeed to be thinking about these issues. You may not want to think about them, it may not be what you came to Stanford to think about and you don't have to think about them a hundred percent of the time. But the point is these issues are important. All right, so that's what I do. I'm a political economist. I do political science and economics, so I use economic tools to study this intersection. Technically, I'm a game theorist. I do applied mathematic models of these sort of strategic interactions. In the business school, this translates to business and government, the intersection of these two things. So as Peter mentioned, I teach a first-year class called strategy beyond the market, how businesses can strategize beyond the market. And I now teach, we've taught it two years so far, we're going to teach it again this coming spring, a two-week class that's an elective class in the second year that applies some of these ideas to the energy industry. So we do a deep dive into the energy industry to look at the industry itself, the structure of the industry, and the players in the industries, the stakeholders, and these political forces that are at play. We look at Sun Run, we look at Charge Point, we look at a bunch of other companies and we try to understand more deeply why do the regulations look the way they look? How can we make them look differently? And what are the opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship and new business models within this space? It's open to everyone in the university, it doesn't presuppose any knowledge. The more knowledge you have, the better of course, but it's open to anyone and I think if you come for a two-week stint during your time at Stanford, you'll learn something about this perspective that is going to be important. I'm not going to try to turn you all into political economists, but what I'm going to try to convince you of is that this is something you need to know about and the sooner you know about it, the better off you'll be. I also think it's interesting, but that can be up to you after you hang out for a few weeks. So that's all I want to say about me, so I'm in the business school. My email address, if you want to email me, is SJC at Stanford. It's the San Jose airport code at stanford.edu. It may be a bit late for you already, but pick an easy email address. That's a good wise choice. It makes it easy for the rest of your life. All right, very good. I am also the faculty director of what's called the Policy and Innovation Initiative over at the GSB where we try to do more work and build up a capacity around this intersection more generally between policy, politics and innovation. If you're interested in this sort of stuff, shoot me an email, look at our website. We're doing all sorts of different projects from writing cases about companies to try to write white papers, do research in various things. So if you're interested in this stuff, shoot me an email and we can find something to talk about, perhaps work on if you have the time for that sort of thing. Let me stop there. Does anyone have any questions? Up the back, I can see a hand. All right, thank you for the talk. I have a question about the Uber, the Uber's business model and the strategy and how they essentially got into market. So you said they were essentially illegal for a while and they got a lot of customers and drivers to be on their side to push their political cause. But how were they able to ramp up so fast to avoid being shot down if they were illegal? Excellent question. You need to come to my class and we'll talk about it at length. So that's where it gets really interesting and that's the tension. You hit upon it nicely, which is it's a sort of a race. You come in, you're illegal.  But they're going to try to shut you down. And so what you need to do is you need to build up this user base who's going to provide political power, but you need to delay the amount of time before they shut you down. So Uber had three product lines that they've entered, Uber Black, Uber X and Uber Taxi. They were very deliberate at the start about only entering Uber Black because it was less illegal, so to speak, than the other products, but also because enforcement was a lot slower. And that's what provided them the time to get the users to lobby on their behalf. But that's the business strategy. Can you stay in business long enough to build up that business, that supporter base to change the law? And so their business strategy was all built around that. It was about making money, it's pretty clear Travis wants to make money, that's what his motivation is. It was about making money, but it was making money in the long term. And so in the short term, it wasn't about maximizing profit. The short term was about solving this political problem. And once they can solve that, then they can make money in the long term. So that's sort of, I'm not advocating you break into illegal industries. And there are reasons why this work for Uber and it won't work for others. But the point is, more generally, every industry has these regulations and constraints in place that you're going to need to navigate. What is the point of laws if people can stand up one day and go change them? I'm not from here and I'm also far from politics. Yeah, that's a good question. There are also laws that just don't get enforced as well. So marijuana, which might be an issue you personally encounter sometime in the next couple of years, it's legal in California. At the same time, it's illegal in the United States. California hasn't yet seceded from the United States, so there's a little bit of a tension there. So even the issues we have, things like we have that sort of tension. What's the purpose of having laws? Well, we could talk for hours about this, but basically laws are about serving the public and serving the community, making it a better place to live. So we have laws, things are illegal. Uber showed, their hope is to show that this law is a bad law. And the challenge was, the way they can show it's a bad law is by starting a business and showing people it can work better.  I don't want to equate Travis Kalanik with social activists, but basically sort of, this is what Martin Luther King did. All right, civil disobedience. I mean, they're very different motivations, but they try, his challenge was to show that these Jim Crow laws, these racist laws were bad laws. And sometimes you need to do things that are illegal. So it's a more fluid conception of what a law is. But at the same time, I'm not advocating you go break lots of laws this weekend. All right, I'm going to add a message to the bottom of this tape. Up the back. Who's got the microphone? Hi, Steve. My name is DJ. I'm at GSB. So you're probably seeing me in your class. I wanted to say, with the rise of renewables, right, especially in the energy industry, you mentioned that, you know, basically people that have state industries try to change the laws. So I was trying to see the big oil majors try to influence, you know, decision making in the Congress to kind of decelerate the rate at which renewables is, you know, I was trying to see that. I'm sure you probably talk about that. Yeah, absolutely. The big oil companies are very active. The constraint on them is nobody likes the big oil companies. And so they, they're not going to mobilize public opinion on their behalf. And so they keep a very low profile. But they've been absolutely, they've been in play in trying to limit the rollout of renewables. What the oil companies have come to realize is even 10 years ago, they were like, yeah, let's keep renewables out. They've come to realize renewables are coming. That's going to happen whether they like it or not. We've had peak fossil fuels at least. There's going to be a long ramp out of it, but they know renewables are coming. So what their strategy is about now is delaying renewables. And they're delaying it in a way until they can basically capture all of the value around renewables.  They want to capture them. And so they're going to have a, they're pushing for laws within states and all across the U.S. that basically make it difficult for innovators to come in and make it in a way that the big companies, because they're trying to catch up technologically such that at some point they'll say, all right, we're now ready for renewables. They'll have the technology and the capability to take advantage of that. All right. So they absolutely act people on that front. And so if you're going to get into that space, you need to know what's happened. Any more marker puns? Up the back. All right. Thank you so much for that talk. It was really interesting. So I'm still pretty curious about the Uber situation. And I think it was a similar situation with the electric scooters that penetrated New York City, DC, where at first they just put in these scooters on the road and they weren't legal, but then eventually some cities legalized them. So my question is, aren't there any retrospective punishments that are assessed to these companies like, or it's once you're, you're good in the eyes of the Lord, everything's forgiven?  And so we're going to assess these fines, these punishments or it's all forgiven. Travis's punishment is that he's a billionaire. It's a good question. It's got to come back to this question. What is a law? They broke the law. In some places the law changed and some it didn't. And so, I mean, it's a good question about how to design a legal system, a legal system and laws to appropriately allow the opportunity for this sort of civil disobedience but punish appropriately. But in this case, there has been no retrospective punishment in other countries there has been. So in South Korea, Travis Kalanig was charged with a crime and he actually appeared in court there, I think it was last year, this track of time a little bit last year, he flew over and appeared in court to sort of come to some settlement agreement. Because the Korean said, you broke our law.  And so he couldn't go there for a long time and then they finally broke it in agreement and he went. And this comes back to this enforcement. So the enforcement violation that Uber was often faced with was about $5,000 per instance and 90 days in jail for the executive. And so the $5,000 isn't much of a threat because if you lose, you lose your company. But if you go to jail, that's more of a threat. I think the judicial system is not fair in the punishments it meets out, I think is the short answer. But it's a good question about how to design these punishments to induce the right amount of business experimentation. And what we learned around the world is the taxi companies realized that this was the strategy they needed to play on. And so they would get the enforcement punishment changed to try to deter Uber by using jail rather than money. One more question. This guy in the corner, he's got his hand up. Thank you. Jordan at the GSB also looking forward to taking your class. My previous background was in state politics interested in pivoting into energy. And so my question for you is for those who have a passion or interest in politics and want to work in the energy sector, what is the demand in the industry for that kind of skill set, or is it just something helpful to know? Quite a man. So I didn't mention, I co-teach the energy class with an alum who has a background in congressional politics, who now works for Bloom Energy, the fuel cell company here in Palo Alto. So there's a lot of opportunity in this space. And part of this policy and innovation initiative is to try to create more of a career track for people like you, like Josh Richmond, who I teach the class with, to combine this interest in policy, interest in society, so you want to do good in the world with business. I think for a long time these roles were kept separate in companies, but increasingly we're seeing an awareness in Silicon Valley that these skills are valuable and to try to build, it's still a little bit sort of ad hoc how you forge your career, but there's certainly a lot of demand for these skills now, there's an appreciation. And Josh is the person to talk to about how to forge a career with these interests in the energy space. All right, fantastic. Good to meet you all. Have a great time. It's David.


I don't know how hard it is. Right. Are we live? OK, some last minute technical fixes. And we should be good to go. I think we're there. Right. Live giving the people what they want. OK, looks like you're good to go. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the 15th episode of give the people what they want. Your weekly show. I'm Prashant from People's Dispatch. And we have with us Zoe from People's Dispatch. Like all of you know, this is a weekly show. It's also a podcast which is going to come out tomorrow. And usually we have, of course, three of us, but today we are missing our friend, our comrade, Vijay Prashan, who's unfortunately stuck in the airport due to some pretty bad weather conditions from what I hear in the large parts of the United States. So we're going to miss him. And unfortunately, this is an episode he would have really wanted to be here because we are just a couple of days away from a very major event, which that is the 21st of February. It's an event. It's a week. It's a celebration. It's a commemoration that began last year and marks a very special moment in the hearts and minds of all those who believe in the left. Zoe, you want to take us to what's special about this day? Yeah. Well, February 21st is Red Book Day. It marks the anniversary of the publication of a text which has inspired millions really across the world is the Communist Manifesto. And you know, Red Book Day is a really important day because it's a time in a context where a tax against the left across all fronts, even left editorials and publishing houses are facing a tax. And so Red Book Day is a time to say, we're proud of these Red Books. We think they inspire us. They're central to the conversations we're all having about, you know, the world today. And we honor our, you know, for our ancestors in the struggle who, you know, gave us this incredible text which inspires so much of our work today. So everyone should join the amazing activities that will be organized across the world to collectively read the Communist Manifesto and to engage in necessary debates about its importance today. Absolutely. Do mark the date. That's February 21st. Events taking place both online and offline across the world. It's always a really refreshing experience to read the Manifesto and we're all looking forward to that day. Now, speaking of weather conditions in which I'm being trapped, another place in the United States where the impact of these weather conditions has been really extreme is the state of Texas. And of course, over the past few days, the news has really been diverted by Senator Ted Cruz flying off to Mexico and then it's coming back and there's been a lot of gossip and drama about that. But actually the issues involved a far more deeper far more structural and these are some of the issues like we like to talk about on this show because it's really not so much about what one politician's that what one politician does, but rather about decades of policies. Zoe, have you been following what really are some of the more underlying issues with what's happening in Texas right now? Yeah, it's a real tragedy. This past week has seen extreme weather fronts in many areas of the United States. And of course, you know, I'm up in New York. We've had snow for the past couple of weeks, but you know, this is a city that also is in some respects has infrastructure to withhold such, you know, extreme weather in Texas over the past week. We've seen a lot of snowfall and freezing temperatures and it has caused mass chaos. It's caused mass suffering. I mean, there's cities, cities across the state have been without power for days in freezing temperatures. They've been without water. I mean, some reports say that they're at almost 40 people have died due to these extreme weather conditions. There's been a number of things going on.  Of course, we know that the weather itself, the cold temperatures have immediate impacts. Of course, on the the livelihood of people, their ability to survive because of, you know, being out in the actually freezing temperatures. Of course, thinking about, you know, the people who are in a state of homelessness, people who are living, you know, precarious conditions, which of course, this number has massively increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. That's one level. But then we also have the level of just kind of the abandonment with regards to the power grid. And a number of things have happened. I mean, the state tried to make allegations that this was due to renewable energy. Numorous, numerous reports have actually debunked the failure of the power grid, which has left, again, millions without electricity, without running water. This is not due to, of course, the renewable energy, which makes up a very small amount of the energy that's generated in Texas. But of course, this is due to, you know, systematic and structural failures within the system. Of course, this is a private company that administers energy within the state. And it's really cause havoc. And I think I would definitely check out the reports by liberationnews, liberationnews.org. They've really done important work in uncovering that the systematic impact of this, but also the structures behind it, which is, of course, larger state abandonment, larger, you know, lack of investment in social programs and in public infrastructure. And of course, corporate capture of key, you know, areas which control this. And it's a really tragic situation. Again, almost 40 people have died, millions are without power and experiencing, you know, extreme conditions within their homes. Really hope that, I mean, the state has said that they don't know when they'll be able to restore normal conditions with access, you know, to power. So it's really concerning.  But of course, the people who suffer are the people. And there have been numerous mutual aid efforts. People have been organizing, trying to get funds to families that are, you know, having their houses collapsing because of bursting pipes, because of, you know, water freezing within their apartments. But of course, that's not enough. We need a strong responsible state that's going to take account for these people and ensure their wellbeing.  Of course, we already have the COVID-19 condition. So it's just, it's just a disaster and really unfortunate to see. And hopefully, this will be, you know, sorted sooner or later so that people can get back to some sort of, you know, normal and safe conditions. So yeah, important story. And again, as we do and give the people what they want, gonna just jump over from the south of the United States and Texas to a region that's been quite neglected. I think we can say we've spoken about this in the show before. We've spoken about Ethiopia, the impact that the conflict, which has, you know, been restarted in recent times has caused on the population. But Prashant, can you tell us a little bit more about what's happening over there? Absolutely, right. So this is something like you said that we talked about a few months ago when the conflict had started. And the key point of this conflict is the Tigray region. That's the northern end of Ethiopia. Now, it's important to remember, of course, that Ethiopia is currently governed by a government led by Prime Minister Abhi Ahmad, who's a Nobel Peace Prize winner. And at that point when the conflict had started, it had started against the regional government of this Tigray region, which is the northern end of Ethiopia. And at that point, Abhi Ahmad, his government had promised that this would be a short conflict because there was an attack at a military installation in the capital of the Tigray region. The Ethiopian government went all out against the Tigray people's liberation front, which was ruling that region. And before Abhi Ahmad came to power was actually the dominant force in the whole of Ethiopia. So in some senses, this was kind of an attempt to sort of cut that force down to size. And from the very beginning, the claim was that, you know, this is going to be a short conflict. You're going to end this as soon as possible. But even at that time, observers, experts, analysts had warned of two things. One would be that this would not be a conflict that would end quickly. And point number two, that this would also be an attack on democratic institutions or democracy. In Ethiopia itself, and Abhi Ahmad at that point of time had claimed a lot of credit, had won a lot of credit for the fact that he'd actually restored many of these freedoms. So there was a lot of concern over the fact that, you know, this conflict could lead to an erosion of both democratic values and also causing humanitarian crisis. And guess what months down the line, many of these worries, many of these concerns have proved to be completely right. UN agencies, for instance, reporting appalling, horrifying conditions right now in the Tigray region. From what we know right now, of course, both sides are indulging in some of these atrocities. But what has happened at the end of it? What has happened at the end of this conflict is over 222,000 people are believed to have been internally displaced. And this is from a conflict we just started in November. That's just three and a half months from now. So we have about 222,000 people displaced, huge amounts of starvation looming, people not having access to clean water, people not having access to sanitation, health facilities, you know, there's very little fuel. The whole area has been cut off, not just to journalists, but also to relief workers, which means that it is impossible to even get a proper estimate of what exactly is happening in this region.  Because this is already a very, this is also already a region which is on the borders. There's been a conflict with Eritrea in the past. Again, I remember what a lot of credit for ending that conflict, but there are reports that Eritrean soldiers are involved in these atrocities. The Ethiopian armies informed that sections of the TPLF are involved. But right now, what we're seeing is that there is this is a huge looming crisis that is definitely kind of say it's developing. There's no sign of it being sorted anytime soon. And more worryingly, the fact that, like I said, there is no clear reportage or for that matter, ability by human rights organizations, by aid organizations to actually go to the ground and provide that kind of inputs on what has to be done. So this is actually, I think a story that sort of we need to be that needs to be tracked very carefully that, you know, requires that amount of international attention because more often than not what we see is that these kind of stories completely disappear from the news. You know, you find your odd, one odd report once in a while when there's a major report by a human rights organization. But other than that, the systematic violence or the systemic violence actually goes completely unnoticed. And I think another very key example of this is Columbia, which you also often talked about on this show. And again, you've seen multiple instances of such violence continuously happening, becoming almost a daily occurrence. Zoe, I believe a new report has come out, which again exposes some of these details. Could you take us through it? Yeah. And last week, you know, we had talked about what's been happening in Columbia with the process of justice. Of course, there are numerous bodies where these investigations are being taken up. And recently, just yesterday, actually the special peace jurisdiction, which is a body that was created through the 2016 peace agreements between the national government and the revolutionary armed forces, which of course demobilized in 2016, following the peace agreement switch in Havana, Cuba. And the special peace jurisdiction was created in order to investigate the crimes that took place during the nearly 60 years with armed comforts in Columbia, specifically regarding the two actors being the FARC and the national government. And so one of the, well, I mean, it's hard to say because there have been so many human rights violations committed by the Colombian state throughout these 60 years. But one of the most egregious cases, which I think has been pointed to time and time again internationally as just kind of a horrific atrocity, which unfortunately occurs in a lot of situations of these kind of armed conflicts is the false positive scandals. This is what has been called in Columbia. The false positive scandal is essentially, during the 2000s, important context, of course, this is when Plan Colombia was signed to the United States of huge military aid agreement. The false positive scandal essentially is when the Colombian army on a systematic basis would assassinate civilians and dress them up as guerrilla fighters and then count them as guerrilla fighters that were killed in combat. So why would they do this? It's called false positives because it's giving, it's showing results where they don't exist and saying that we're winning, winning, you know, winning, of course, this war against the people by giving these results by saying that we've killed this many members of the guerrilla and we're successful. But of course, for years there have been, you know, incredibly brave efforts by victims of the false positive scandal. We can point to, for example, the organization and mothers of Soacha who just to give one case of the false positives, a group of young men who lived in Soacha, which is a neighborhood, a city right next to Bogota, a very working class, poor, a group of young men who were, you know, from this community, poor working class, not many opportunities, not many employment opportunities, were approached by members, you know, later we found out members of the army who essentially told them, get on a bus, we have a job opportunity for you. They're brought to from the capital city to, you know, hundreds of kilometers away to Norte Santander, where they are preceded, they're assassinated and then they're dressed up as guerrilla fighters, broadcast on the news as combatants who are killed. And these crimes have been denounced for years. You know, victims have been saying, this is, you know, the army is saying that my son was a guerrilla fighter. That's not true. Trying to get justice in some way, some recognition. And yesterday, the special jurisdiction for peace announced that the number of false positive victims were around 6402, which is an absurd number. And it's important to point out that the attorney general of Columbia had in a report had only presented 2248 victims of this case. So again, the systematic denial of justice in Columbia is evident. And something else to point out is that 78% of these 6402 false positives took place during the eight-year rule of Algardo Rodígue, which is often considered one of the most, you know, bloodiest, brutal times in Colombian history where there's just systematic denial of human rights, violation of human rights, of human rights offender.  And that, unfortunately, that's continuing today. And so I think it's really inspiring to see that finally some presses of justice are taking off. But it's hard to see that at the same time, you know, we have 1,000 human rights offenders and social leaders that have been murdered since 2016. So how does this take place where you're finally getting justice or at least some recognition of something that happened in the 2000s, but right now there's another genocide or a continuation of that genocide continuing. So again, we really have to, you know, look to hold these, these states accountable, continue to fight for justice because at every turn they will deny that these things happen.  So I think something that we saw this week, a really tragic accident is something that happened in a mine in South Africa. Three workers died. Can you tell us about this, Prashant? Yes, this actually happened in a plant of Arcelor, Mithal, which is a global corporation. And it's a very tragic accident. The number of workers who died at three, but what it also shows is some of these issues that we've been talking continuously about in this show, which is how, what happens when, for instance, say costs are cut, what happens when, you know, safety protocol is neglected. What happens when the lives of workers are basically considered dispensable and this has been a constant thread, I think, to many of the labor issues that we talked about. And unfortunately, the case in South Africa shows that many of these were probably, there was an instance of many of these as well. So here it was an example of a building collapse. There are reports that it stemmed from an explosion. The company is denied it, of course. But what happened was that three workers were trapped and it was rubbled. And the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa, NUMSA, one of the most militant unions in the country and two of these workers were members of that union, NUMSA. NUMSA says that actually for the first 12 hours that these workers were trapped, they were trapped on 2 a.m. on February 17th and what do you call the news of the information, the news of the deaths finally came on February 18th. And according to the union for the first 12 hours, there was no professional help for rescue. So it was basically the workers who were trying to rescue their own comrades, their fellow workers, a group of 10 employees were trying to conduct search and rescue operations. And this is despite the fact that this is one of the big massive corporations across the world, employees thousands of workers all over the world, including in South Africa. And here we have a situation where in a plant, there was no emergency team which could actually provide that kind of rescue operation and ordinary workers had to take up this work and it was only after hours and the workers pressed for a more specialized response many, many hours, probably around 12 hours later according to the union at least that actually professional teams were brought in. And the whole process what we've seen is a complete sort of disregard for both not only the workers' lives but also the union's attempt to intervene because when NUMSA spokesperson tried to actually intervene apparently the CEO refused to allow her to enter the premises because apparently she had put out a video talking about this accident. And that was the reason why say a union spokesperson, the spokesperson of a national union who was trying to help in this case was apparently not allowed to enter because there was apparently a YouTube video which obviously did not paint the management in good light and this is not an instance where you would expect that to happen. And NUMSA has been taking this matter very aggressively. They call for an investigation of course but again, I think this also has a lot to do with the company itself. Arsalan Mitalis, a company we've covered across the world. You can see protests breaking out on similar issues on safety issues on retrenchment issues in Europe, in Africa and many other parts of the world. And I think this is one common struggle that workers today and this is something we talked about in the first segment as well that workers across the world are the kind of struggles they're doing often to protect not only the livelihoods of course, not only the salaries, not only the jobs but also the basic kind of safety and infrastructural benefits that you would want to save your lives. And another very classic example would be say, your reminder of mine workers in Pakistan as well who similarly made struggles after because it's a working conditions over there. And these production lines are so important because these are the veins of global capitalism so to speak. You talk about all these big mines and production companies especially in Africa and the wealth extraction from there becoming the blood of the empire so to speak of previous empires and the empire we see today. So this is actually, although I mean, this is not an isolated incident is what I think is the kind of lesson we sort of take from here. And so that's that. And speaking of empires, of course, quite a few, there's the empire we can never really stop talking about the empire of course because it's so prevalent everywhere that we see around us. So if any, there have been a few interesting developments of course from the empire watch side so to speak. So you want to take us to that? Yeah, I mean, I think another aspect of, you know, empire meddling is I think the discourse of human rights. And I think this has been very interesting over the past week because we have two kind of cases that just really highlight the true the sheer like contradictions and the sheer kind of like hollowness of this discourse that's used, you know, of course to justify everything from invasions to assassination attempts which is like human rights. So in interest, I mean, this week essentially there's been a lot of attention on the news of the imprisonment and arrest of a Carolonian rapper Pablo Hassel. He is a political rapper. He, you know, wraps against talking against the Spanish crown against kind of imperialism. He's been in a lot of Solidarity Venezuela. He's spoken, he's participated in several, you know, Solidarity events and several different occasions and apparently his lyrics and his poems and kind of his public persona as a political artist were a little too much for Spain. And he has been involved in a legal struggle for the past couple of years. He was basically charged with, I mean, the charge is insane glorifying terrorism, insulting the crown and state institutions. And it's important to remember there is a king in Spain. You know, there's a lot of countries in Europe that still have monarchies just to make sure that we're aware of this that the sheer kind of ridiculousness still exists. And, you know, Pablo Hassel, he was charged with this the past couple of years, it's been kind of this ongoing legal battle. And finally in January, they said they confirmed the charges after several appeals and said that he had 10 days to present himself to court.  If you want to arrest me, you have to come and arrest me. So he barricaded himself in the University of Leda. He was surrounded by supporters and, you know, other activists that joined him in this. And the police forcefully went into the university, arrested him, massive operation, and it's been followed by huge protests across Catalonia and Barcelona and then other cities in Spain as well. And I think it's just really interesting because here you have the case of a rapper who has political lyrics who, of course, I'm sure he insults the crown because why wouldn't you and I'm sure he, you know, criticizes the state because the state has to be criticized. He's an artist. That's what artists do. They, you know, continue to make critical dialogue and he was now he's in prison and I think it's interesting because at the same time, this is the same country that is currently holding Leopoldo López who according to the lens you're looking at it with for Venezuela, he's, you know, charged with terrorism for Spain. He's apparently a human rights activist. Leopoldo López just to remind people was participated. He's a Venezuelan opposition activist. He participated and helped organize some of the violent uprisings that happened in the country in 2014. He also was, you know, participated in, you know, he's part of the party that was behind a lot of the uprisings in 2017. He then once he was released was part of the attempted military coup with Guaidó in April, 2019. He's a fugitive of the law yet he's exiled in Spain. And so I think it's really interesting how they wheeled this human rights discourse. Meanwhile, they have a rapper in prison. So these are really interesting kind of contradictions. Another one which we've seen which has been again, we've talked about for the past couple of weeks as Haiti. So people have been, yeah, as we've been talking about on people's dispatch on this show, people have been on the streets, mobilizing and protesting against the dictatorship of Jovenin Moise, who is, you know, holding onto power despite the constitution saying that he, that mandate ends, despite, you know, massive sections of the opposition. We're not only talking about the left here, we're talking about the entire society is mobilizing against this man, but he's supported by the United States. It doesn't matter that under his mandate, Haiti has been plunged into deeper inequality that, you know, massacres have been continually carried out by the security forces. We have a couple of copies about this and people's dispatch about some of the massacres that have been taking place in the inner city areas. But he has a sporting United States and the OAS. So he is remaining in power. So I think it's just necessary that we're constantly interrogating these, you know, ideas of human rights and these discourses wielded by the empires. So another, I mean, another thing that we've been talking about is also, of course, the vaccines, which is, of course, the issue of our time, no? Absolutely right. It's, it kind of flows from what you're talking about because when you're interrogating states, interrogating establishments on various issues, the key question we need to ask today is what about access to the vaccine? I mean, what, you know, how are countries, how are states, how are governments working towards it? And a couple of days ago, the UN Secretary to Antonio Gutierrez, you know, he made a statement which kind of, I think, demonstrates the situation we're in. And it is a very simple number or a series of numbers. And those numbers basically are as follows. One is that 10 countries have given 75% of all the vaccines administered so far. And then 130 countries have not received even a single dose of vaccine.  This is the level of inequality. This is the level of absurdity that faced with an existential crisis, at least one existential crisis like COVID-19. This is how the world has responded. There's a global alliance, which has something called the Covax Initiative, which is supposed to deliver vaccines to the poorer countries. And the target was that the vaccinations in these countries would start at the same time as the richer countries and they're behind. They're short of at least $5 billion. And the key issue here is basically something very simple that the rich countries are hoarding vaccines. There is nothing more, nothing less. It's as simple as that. And obviously most of the production, most of the research and development has taken place in these richer countries. They have dominated the markets and basically the poorer countries are left with more or less a begging ball in some senses. And if you look at the map, it's shocking because you'll see these high density points where, you know, vaccinations are going at insanely fast rates, which is great. Great for the people of those countries. And then there's blank spaces on the world map where, you know, the vaccines have clearly not reached. And this kind of vaccine nationalism is, it's a very depressing picture. China, of course, in that UN Security Council meeting said that it is donating say millions of doses of vaccines to the initiative as well. It's also donated or exported a lot of vaccines to around 53 countries. Even India, for that matter, has actually done some work on that. And those are really steps worth appreciating. But the key question, I think, is that it's basically in some senses a question of capitalism. It's a question of imperialism as well, how these vaccines are distributed. And the most, I think, obscene example of this is what is happening in Israel and Palestine right now. Basically, Israel blocked the delivery of vaccines to Gaza from the occupied West Bank. And they said that, you know, we need to consider it in our committees. The government has to take a decision. And for two days, these supplies were blocked. And it is only after that that these supplies were able to, these supplies were provided. And this is, again, the supplies that are provided are not enough to vaccinate all the Palestinians or even a significant number of Palestinians in Gaza. This is just a bare minimum of doses that we're talking about here. And even that is so under the stranglehold of Israel right now that there is no other way to describe it but vaccine apartheid. And this term has been used. Of course, you've seen apartheid being used by human rights organizations to describe Israeli behavior in Palestine. But here is just yet another manifestation in the form of vaccines. So I think in the coming months and years especially, this definitely turning out to be a major front for struggle for unions, people's movements, organizations across the world. The right to health is at stake in that sense over here. So again, a major issue in the coming months as well. I mean, Sonata has done such a negative note. I just want to point out that Cuba is still in, you know, is doing vaccine trials for the sovereign too and has announced that it will have with, if, you know, everything goes according to schedule that the entire population of Cuba will be vaccinated by the end of 2021 and all tourists to go to Cuba will be, could be vaccinated should they decide to. So there are some glimmers of health in a very grim situation. Also, Venezuela started vaccinations yesterday. But again, it's, it's not enough. And we of course have to continue to interrogate these, these questions, but. Absolutely. Absolutely. Sounds good. So we've actually crossed our usual time and it's been great talking to all of you. Thank you for everyone who watched the show. Do watch out for our podcast, which comes tomorrow. We are definitely expecting Vijay to join us next week to continue some of these discussions we've had. And thank you for staying with us, watching us over the past 15 episodes. And we totally assure you that we're going to be coming back every week at the same time, both on Facebook and YouTube of People's Dispatch. And as a podcast the next day, we'll be back with give the people what they want. Thanks so much.