Welcome, I welcome you all to this lecture in the course Sandhi in Paninian Grammar. In this lecture we continue our study of Atch Sandhi that is Avavel Sandhi. And we are studying Dvisthanika Ikadesh from this lecture onwards. We said that the Atch Sandhi can be classified under two heads, Ekasthanika Ekadesh and Dvisthanika Ekadesh. Ekasthanika Ekadesh means one substituent and in its place comes one substitute. And we studied two instances of this classification namely Yan Sandhi and Aya Vayao Sandhi. We have studied these two instances in detail. The next classification is Dvisthanika Ekadesh where you have two substituents and one substitute. Dvisthanika Ekadesh, two substituents and one substitute. This is being stated by the Adhikara Sutra Ekakh Purva Parayoho which contains two words Ekaha and Purva Parayoho. Ekaha is one slash one of Ekha which means one and so Ekaha means one substitute. Purva Parayoho is six slash two of Purva Par, Purva means previous, Parva means latter. So Purva Parayoho means in place of previous and latter and obviously sound. So in place of previous and latter sound. To put these two meanings together the meaning of the Sutra Ekakh Purva Parayoho would be one substitute takes place in place of two sounds previous and latter. To show this diagrammatically we can say that A plus B is the input where A and B they both are in close proximity in the Samhita mode and then the rule in this particular section applies and in place of both A and B, C is the substitute. So A plus B is the input, C is the output, C is the adesha, A and B both are Stanis. This is the difference between Dvisthanika Ekadesha and Ekasthanika Ekadesha. In Ekasthanika Ekadesha we have A plus B in Samhita mode and A was getting substituted by C. So A plus B was the input and C plus B is the output in Ekasthanika Ekadesha. Now in Dvisthanika Ekadesha we observe that there are two Stanis, two substitute events. A plus B is the input but the output is only C. This classification is stated in the section in the Ashtadhyayi beginning with 6184 Ekapurva Parayoho up to 6112 and then the Adhikara prakritya begins which states that the vowels remain in their original initial form and they are not altered, they are not substituted. So the tradition continues Ekapurva Parayoho up to 6114, there is also a remark passed within the tradition saying that Ekapurva Parayoho continues up to 6112 khyatyat parasya, a rule which has the word parasya mentioned directly in the sutra which logically cancels Ekapurva Parayoho. Anyway we will not go into the details of these remarks in this course, I just noted it down and now after having studied what is Ekapurva Parayoho and how it is diagrammatically represented we shall proceed further. It is to be noted that this diagrammatical representation is taken from a review article published by me in the analysis of the Bandarkar Oriental Research Institute which was referred to in the one of the earlier lectures in this course. Now here are the instances of this second classification. The first one is Gunasandhi, stated by the sutra Aadgunaha 6187. The second instance is Pradhisandhi, Pradhirechi is the sutra, this is 6188. The third instance of Dvisthanika Ekadesha is Pararupasandhi, starting with Engi Pararupam 6194. The fourth instance of Dvisthanika Ekadesha is Savarna-Dirgha-Sandhi, stated by the sutra Akassavarna-Dirgaha 61101. And the fifth instance of Dvisthanika Ekadesha is Purvarupa-Sandhi, stated by the sutra Amipurvaha. These are the five instances of Dvisthanika Ekadesha and we shall study each one of them in detail. First, we take up the Gunasandhi, stated by the sutra Aadgunaha and study it in detail. Gunasandhi now, Gunasandhi is stated by the sutra Aadgunaha 6187. And here we have two words in this particular sutra, Aad and Gunasandhi. Aad is 5 slash 1 of a, either short or long. Of course, Pulutha or Prolated is omitted because there are some other sutras prescribing that Pulutha remains in its own form. So we are not considering it over here, we shall take a look at it when we study the Prakriti Bhava-Sandhi or Prakriti Bhava, chapter of the Sandhi section. So Aad is 5 slash 1 of a, short or long, rasva or dirgha and so Aad means immediately after a, either short or long, rasva or dirgha. Gunaha is one, one of guna. What it means is, guna substitute takes place. The words continued from the previous sutra are these, achi, from Ekoyanachik 6177. Achi is 7 slash 1 of ach, ach means a vowel, so achi means immediately before any vowel, thereby mentioning the right-hand side environment. So Aad mentions the left-hand side environment and achi, the right-hand side environment. And of course, both of them, they have to be in close proximity because there is Adhikara Samhitayam, which means in the close proximity, when in the close proximity. So Aad and achi, when they are in close proximity, then Ekaha, which we just studied, that is one substitute takes place, Purva Parayoh, in place of previous and later sounds. To put all this together, the meaning of the sutra would be, when in close proximity, Samhitayam, immediately after a short or long Aad, when comes any vowel achi, in place of both of them Purva Parayoh, guna substitute, one guna substitute, Ekaha, gunaha takes place. So to put it in the form of an equation and an input-output format, we would say that if you have a short or long followed immediately by achi, this can be stated by saying that immediately before achi, there is an immediately after achi, they are in close proximity, Samhitam and so therefore, 6187 would apply and in place of both of them, 6187 will state this guna substitute. Now to put it in the context, if we have, let us say, a coming at the end of a padha, an ach coming at the beginning of the subsequent padha, then in place of both of them, 6187 will substitute guna. The other left hand side environments and the right hand side environments which are not actually environments, they remain same, they remain unchanged. Only a and ach, they are substituted by guna and that is the guna sandhi. So what is guna? Guna is defined by the sutra adengunahan 112 and guna means a, a and o, these 3 sounds. So a, a and o will be the substitutes in place of a followed by ach. This is the overall meaning of the sutra adgunahan. Now let us look at the examples and these will be the prototypical examples of adgunahan. A stands for short and long. So we have examples having both a and a. So first we have a followed by the achi. So why are we not including a over here? Because of the interrelation of adgunahan with akas sabarane dirgaha which we shall discuss later on. So we start with a followed by e even though this particular slot right hand side slot should contain an element of ach. We do not include a here. We start with e. So a followed by e and the resultant substitute would be a in place of both a and e. So a and e they both get substituted by a. Similarly a plus short e and they both get substituted by a. Similarly a plus long e and they both get substituted by a. Then we have long a plus long e and they both get substituted by a. Then we have a plus o both short and you have the sutra 6187 applying and the resultant substitute is o. Similarly a plus o and the output generated is o. Then we have a plus long o as input in place of both of them after the application of 6187 we get the output o. Then we have a plus long o both long bubbles and 6187 applies and we get the output in the form of o. Then we have a plus ru as input and the output is a. Then we have a plus ru as the input and we have the output r in place of both of them. Then we have a plus long ru as input and 6187 applies and the output generated is r in place of both o and long ru. Then we have long a plus long ru both long bubbles and once again 6187 applies and the output generated is then we have followed by lu and we have the output generated as al in place of both of them. Then we have a plus lu and 6187 applies and the output generated is al. Now in this lecture we shall study the examples of these prototypes these templates a plus e a is the output r plus e is the input a is the output and so on and so forth up to long a plus long ru being the input and o being the output. We must note here that both a and achi they are being the udeshias and that is the reason why a stands for both short as well as long and achi achi stands for both short as well as long bubbles. Let us look at the individual examples. First we have a plus e in close proximity in some Hita mode 6187 applies and substitutes both of them with one substitute namely a. So here we have tau a as one paddha followed by another paddha ishtam tau ishtam beneficial to you at this juncture we have a coming at the end of this paddha followed by e coming at the beginning of this second subsequent paddha and these two both these two paddhas are in close proximity and so 6187 applies and in place of this a and this e now the output generated by 6187 is a. So we have tau a in place of a and e and then shtam this is the second paddha this is the first paddha this is the output generated after applying 6187 when we join these together we get tau ashtam tau ashtam. Now let us look at the example within a compound so if you have chhatra plus isht something beneficial for a student. So this word chhatra ends in short a followed by e this is a compound so samhita is obligatory over here so they both are in samhita mode and so 6187 applies and substitutes a and e by a so we have the output in the form of chhatra a and shtam this is the previous part of the compound this is the later part of the compound and a is the substitute of a and e so we have chhatreshtha as the final compounded form. Now if we go once again within a paddha we are deriving the locative singular of rama so we have rama plus e so a followed by e within a paddha and so 6187 applies and we have ram and a a is the substitute in place of a and e after the application of 6187 and so we have ramae as the output ramae. Then we have the next template r plus e and they both are substituted by a so here we have asha plus iha two separate paddhas asha and iha we have followed the same practice needless to say it is visible we have marked the substituents with red ink and the substitute is marked with the blue ink so we have asha plus iha so a coming at the end of the first word e coming at the beginning of the subsequent word and both these words are in samhita mode so in place of this r and e we have the substitute a so we have asha a and her and when we join together we get asheha now if we go to the compound we have yatha followed by ishtha yatha followed by ishtha and now because this is a compound these two components are in a obligatory samhita mode so this r is immediately followed by e and so in place of both of them 6187 applies and places a as the substitute so we have yatha a and shta and we have finally yatha shta yatha shta a compounded form now if we go to one paddha within a paddha we have the word ha ha and we have to derive the locative singular of the word ha ha so we have ha ha plus e so we have r followed immediately by e so in place of both of them we have a as the substitute so we have ha plus a and so we have ha hey as the finally finished form of locative singular of ha ha then we have a plus long e as the input and a as the output the examples of this template are the following we have first of all the compounded forms over here because they are plenty in Sanskrit so we have gana plus isha gana plus isha the compound so samhita is obligatory so r is followed by e immediately and so in place of both of them after applying 6187 we get gana a and shta and when we join these together we get ganesha similarly we have rashik plus isha remember rashik plus isha this is another compound so there is a at the end of this paddha and e at the beginning of this paddha which is part of the compound so samhita is obligatory so in the samhita mode 6187 applies and this and in place of both of these a is the substitute so we have rashik a and sure and so we have rashikesha the epithet of krishna rashikesha this is how these words are derived and remember there are plenty of words in Sanskrit of this kind so we have for example suresha sura plus isha nuresha nara plus isha dinesha dina plus isha gana plus isha and so on and so forth all these words will be derived in this particular fashion finally we take the example of gunasandhi taking place between two paddhas so we have atra and iha atra is a separate paddha iha is another separate paddha a coming at the end of this first paddha and e coming at the beginning of this subsequent paddha and both these paddhas are in samhita mode so 6187 applies and substitute a and e by a so we have atra a and ha so we have atreha now let us go to the next template which is a plus e as the input and a is the output so we have compound first once again because these are very popular and they are also prevalent in modern indian languages names of so many people are explained using this particular sandhi so we have rama plus isha where you have a followed by e in the samhita mode because this is a compound and 6187 applies and in place of both of them the substitute a comes in so we have ram a and she and so we have ram e she similarly we have gudakha plus isha gudakha plus isha where you have long a followed by e in the compound so samhita is obligatory 6187 applies and substitutes a in place of both a and e so we have gudakha a and she and we have gudakesha this is the epithet of arjuna both rishikesha and gudakesha they do appear in the celebrated text shreemad bhagavadgita several times now let us also remember that there are so many words of this kind umeshya uma plus isha rajeshya raja plus isha rakesha raka plus isha mokesha muka plus isha and so on and so forth plenty of words are there in samskrit and they are also part of the modern indian languages they will be explained using guna sandhi in this particular fashion now let us go to the other example where guna sandhi happens between two padas which are part of a sentence so we have vacha plus iritham vacha plus iritham a followed by e in the samhita mode and so the sutra 6187 applies and the resultant output is watch aritham a substituting both a and e and so we get watch aritham next we have a plus o as input and o as output so we have attra plus uktam attra is a separate padha uktam is the separate padha appears at the end of this first padha who appears at the beginning of this second padha and so 6187 applies and in place of both of them o one substitute takes place so we have attra oktam attra oktam if we take the example of a compounded form here we have purana plus uktam once again o coming at the end of this padha o coming at the beginning of this padha and so in place of both of them we have one substitute namely o so we have purana o and and so we have purana uktam shruti smriti purana uktam similarly another compounded form sarva plus upari and once again we have a followed by o in the samhita mode 6187 applies and substitutes this a and o by o so we have sarva o pari so we have sarva o pari as the resultant output then we have a plus o as input and o as the output so we have harina and uktam harina has a at the end of it uktam has o at the beginning of it these are two separate padhas part of sentence and so now in place of both of them we have o as the substitute after applying 6187 so the output generated is harina oktam when we join them together we get harina oktam within a compound we have vidya and utpanna where a is followed by u immediately this being a compound so there is samhita obligatory and so in place of a and o we get o so we have vidya o and tpanna when we join them together we get vidyothpanna generated by knowledge then we have another example of the compounded word a plus utta utta is derived from the verbal root v so we have a plus utta and a is followed by short u and in place of both of them we get o as the substitute one substitute so we get the form otta so otta is derived in this particular manner then we have a followed by long u as input and o as the output so we have upper plus uh and a is followed by u this is a compound and so we have up plus o plus her that is apoher o substituting a and u similarly pada plus una pada is a quarter una is less so we have a followed by u in a compound in place of both of them we have o as the substitute so we have pada o and na that is pada una one quarter less to the hour then we have examples example of words in the sentence atra plus uche and a is immediately followed by long u and so in place of both of them we get o as the substitute and so we have atroche atroche then we have a plus u as input and o as the output so we have harina plus uche and in place of a and u are coming at the end of the first pada and uche u coming at the beginning of the second pada we have harin oche that is harino che then we have the compounded form vishala plus urja where a is followed by long u and so in place of both of them 6187 applies and substitutes o and so we have vishal o rjja vishal o rjja these are the examples that we discussed in this particular lecture now let us look at the interrelation of rules the interrelation between 6188 and 6187 is interesting which we shall study in this particular lecture so 6188 is vridhirachi which has got two words vridhir and eche and we shall study this sutra and vridhisandhi soon so vridhi is one slash one of vridhi vridhi means a i and au as stated by ashtadhyay 111 vridhiradayche eche is seven slash one of h h means a o i and au the words continued are aad samhitayam and ekapurva parayoho aad meaning immediately after a short and long samhitayam means when in close proximity ekapurva parayoho means one substitute in place of two the previous and latter substituent so vridhirachi means in the close proximity when immediately before h that is a o i and au a short and long appears in place of both comes the substitute term vridhi that is a i and au so we have a plus h as input and this sutra applies and vridhi is the output what is important here is that h is part of ach which is the condition for 6187 to apply now we see that there is some overlap of scope of application of rules over here 6187 says when ach is at this place so when ach follows a the resultant output should be guna and ach includes h now with respect to this h which is overlap domain 6188 says that vridhi substitute takes place in place of both of them now in this smaller domain vridhi is the substitute that over rules the guna substitute and so 6187 does not apply in the condition of age coming immediately after a and 6188 applies over here to summarize in this lecture we studied in detail the guna sandhi the sutra which states this guna sandhi ad guna ha we also studied its meaning we also studied the words continued in it from the previous sutras we also studied part of the examples in details and these examples are taken from different levels within a pattern or in between two patterns we also studied the interrelation of 6187 and 888 now we study remaining examples and interrelation of some other rules this we do in the next lecture thank you for your patience


Hello and welcome to today's discussion on antitrust law and how it can be a tool for helping workers. My name is Mary Alice McCarthy and I direct the Center on Education and Labor at New America. Over the last decade there has been a resurgence of interest in antitrust law and in the role that market concentration that is the domination of a particular product of service market by just a few firms. The role that that market concentration is playing in the growth of economic inequality over the last several decades. This phenomenon of growing market concentration and declining competitiveness is occurring across many different industries and markets, most notably in technology but also in industries like healthcare, retail and hospitality, transportation and warehousing and more. Most of the scholarship and writing on antitrust has focused on the negative impacts of these oligopolistic markets on consumers, particularly on prices and on the quality of specific products and services. Not as much has been written about the impact of market concentration on workers and labor markets. That is until recently. And today I have the tremendous privilege to welcome two of the foremost thinkers and writers on antitrust policy broadly speaking, and on its potential for helping workers, specifically. So please welcome Eric A. Posner, Kirkland and Ellis Distinguished Service Professor of Law from the University of Chicago, and Tim Wu, Special Assistant to the President for Technology and Competition Policy at the White House National Economic Council, and formerly a professor at Columbia University and a former New America fellow. Welcome to you both and thank you very much for joining us today. My pleasure to be here. Thanks for having us. Great. So Eric, go ahead and get started with you. You've done a lot of writing on antitrust and workers specifically probably more than anyone and just last year you published a book titled how antitrust failed workers. So I think an obvious place to start would be with just that. How has antitrust policy failed workers. And can you please give us some concrete examples of that failure. Sure. And as you mentioned, Mary Alice, most of the focus of antitrust law has been on product markets. And so when people think of antitrust law they think of the law that's used to counter technology companies, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and other companies from raising prices through concentration and various types of inclusive behavior. Now antitrust law though applies to all markets, not just the product markets that applies to labor markets as well. And yet there's been relatively little discussion about the application of antitrust law to labor markets. And until recently there was hardly any at all. And this is quite surprising when you think about it because just as firms can engage in for example price fixing agreements in order to raise prices and product markets they can also engage in wage fixing agreements in order to reduce wages in labor markets. And that has exactly the same type of harm people as consumers have to pay higher prices, people as workers have to pay receive lower wages. So there's been a number of examples. There've been a number of examples of well documented, well documented inclusive behavior and labor markets over the last few years. Now most of these examples do involve legal action of some sort, because they were so blatant and outrageous. But the problem is, is that there's so little of it and there's a lot of this behavior going on which has been, you know, it's suggested very strongly by academic literature. There's a lot of examples to to get people's intuitions going. So a few years ago, a pair of economists at Princeton published a paper, which looked at franchise agreements. So the big franchise companies like McDonald's, Wendy's Burger King's they enter into what are called franchise agreements with their franchisees these are the restaurants that people actually enter and these restaurants are not owned by these companies they actually have a franchise contract with them. And these economists discovered that in most of these franchise agreements, and these are agreements among involving among the most famous companies in the country like McDonald's, there were what was called a no coach agreement. And no coach agreement says that a particular franchise restaurant, for example is not allowed to hire a way of worker from another franchise restaurant. So for example, and there's a case involving a woman who worked for a McDonald's restaurant in Chicago. She was solicited by another restaurant she was being paid, you know, 10 or 11 or $12 an hour by the first restaurant. And the owner of the other restaurant said why don't you come and work for me I'll pay you more. I value your skills more. And they learned that the, the, the owner of the second franchise learned that the no poaching agreement prohibited that type of behavior so he said never mind. And she was unable to obtain this job so that's a collusive agreement between competitors, these restaurants compete for for workers. And these agreements cover millions of people. And so these no poach agreements that these economists discovered applied to millions of people. There has been litigation against them. And most of the I understand that most of these franchises have dropped the no poach clauses from these franchise agreements. But the follow on litigation on behalf of the workers like the woman I was referring to at the McDonald's that is encountered headwinds in the courts because courts are unfamiliar with this type of antitrust violation and seem to be a little bit confused about how best to address them. A related example. This is also a kind of a famous scandal from a few years back, Jimmy johns the sandwich chain had inserted non compete causes into the employment agreements with its workers these are the people who made sandwiches at Jimmy johns. And a non compete agreement is a bit like a no poach agreement. It's a bit different. The employee who's banned by non compete agreement is not allowed to work for any company that competes with Jimmy johns within a few miles of a Jimmy johns. And because there are thousands of Jimmy johns around the country that these non compete causes effectively prevented a worker who was fired from a Jimmy johns from you know working for a competitor like subway. And, and, and, and, apparently, when some workers did try their bosses would tell them you can't do that because of this time compete. Now compete is the name suggests is an anti competitive agreement. They're traditionally regulated under the common law, which puts some restrictions on them, but the type of non compete that Jimmy johns use which is applied to all employees, regardless of how skillful they are with truly anti competitive, not only hurting their workers directly, but hurting their competitors other employers wouldn't be able to hire workers that they need it. And that could result not only in lower wages for the workers but higher prices for the people who go to these restaurants. And I'll give you one more example irrelevant to the pandemic. So markets labor markets involving registered nurses have been studied quite a bit. And recently to hospitals in Texas merged. And they had to obtain the approval of the Texas agency which ultimately gave approval, but the Federal Trade Commission submitted a comment in which they oppose this merger and they pointed out that the two hospital systems that plan to merge. They employed 50% and 45% respectively of the of all the registered nurses in the area. So when they joined together they would as a merchant entity they would employ 95% of the of the registered nurses in the area. Now if they employ you know 95% of registered nurses, these nurses really have no other options they work for this company no matter how little it pays them, and how bad the conditions are or they quit, you know, some people can move away. To another market but most people because of family commitments and other connections, you know can't don't have that option. This merger I found particularly striking in light of some academic research that was published recently, which looked at mergers of hospitals around the country. So a large number of hospitals, and found that when hospitals and concentrated labor markets merged. The wage growth for medical professionals declined compared to hospitals that did not merge for hospitals that merged in more competitive markets. So at least for this Texas merger you know it only happened recently but one would expect that the registered nurses are going to be harmed. Over time. So these are all cases that you know should at least be subject to antitrust litigation. There are been attempts by some private lawyers to bring cases but they're very difficult. And, and I think it's very likely that there are you know many more examples of this type of inclusive behavior around the country. And the reason for thinking that is that you have another set of papers of academic papers have shown that is an extremely high level of labor market concentration around the country meaning that. In most areas in the country for particular types of jobs they're only a handful of employers one or two, or three maybe and when one or two or three employers exist in a market it's very easy for them to collude to hold down wages. And even if they don't explicitly collude, they can, you know basically ensure that wages are not as high as they should be. So this is probably a very big problem, and, and, and I think that you know, there should be more. And antitrust law it's the type of problem that entry antitrust law is appropriate for. So thank you for that those were, those are such interesting examples and I just want to note that two out of three of your examples to were of totally low wage workers right workers and fast food restaurants you know the hospital workers the registered nurses not so much but they think to when people think of things like anti poaching and non competes they're probably thinking of very highly skilled workers with you know, you know and super competitive markets. And this is a very low wage workers who have very, who are very vulnerable already and quite precarious so that's that's very striking. And that brings me to the next question which is, you know, in your writing you do explain how this market concentration to storage labor markets and makes them less competitive. But you also write about why those impacts on those particularly those vulnerable workers have not gotten as much attention from lawyers from unions, and from policymakers and can you share with us a little bit about why this is a problem that has been sort of not not taken up by lawyers policymakers and unions. Sure, I think there are two basic reasons I interrupt that and say, has historically not been taken up. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you very much. Times are changing. But there are two basic reasons. The first is political and the second is intellectual. So, back when anti trust law was first created in the late 19th, early 20th century. It was initially used against unions, rather than against sellers this is kind of well known and there's this long history of union suspicion toward anti trust law because, because of that. And probably, what's more important is that when workers were trying to, you know, aggregate their bargaining power to oppose employers that underpaid them union organization was the natural way to do that. And so not only did workers organize unions but they also tried to persuade Congress and state legislatures to support unions in various ways and that's where all the energy was union density in this country increased fairly steadily until the 1950s. And I think until that time it probably never occurred to people that they needed anti trust law, the workers that they needed anti trust law was the union that would negotiate with the employer in order to ensure that wages were not suppressed below the competitive level. But union density, as everyone knows has declined quite rapidly, especially in the private sector. Since the 1950s and Union, most people, you know, very few people compared to the entire working population are unionized and so there's this gap, I think left over by the decline of unions. And, and I think that this is a gap that anti trust law could at least partly fill. The second is intellectual and it's related to this point, but strikingly, you know, I think there's a story here where economists were drawn to anti trust law, because there's a lot of anti trust litigation but it was on the product markets. And so there's a field in economics called industrial organization or IO which studies product markets and so the economists in that field were hired and paid to serve as expert witnesses. And this stimulated more work in the field with the result that the field advanced, you know, very far anti trust litigation became increasingly complex. Now the IO people were not focused on labor because they don't do labor. There's another field of economics level labor economics and the labor economists were focused on unions because of their historical importance and other elements of the employment relationship and they weren't so concerned about market structure. The, the, you know, over time the government hired these IO economists to help bring cases they didn't hire the labor economists, the labor economists weren't really focused on anti trust issues because they weren't being hired and it wasn't that litigation. And so this kind of bifurcation has acted as a real drag on anti trust litigation and labor markets. And this is all changing just over the last few years, labor labor economists have discovered anti trust they've discovered this problem of labor market concentration so I think this too will change in the near future. Thank you for that and let's use that as our segue to you Tim. And thank you so much for joining us and to your point yes this is a we're in a very different place in the policy conversation today, you've been writing about anti trust for a long time. Yeah, let's get this a little bit. First of all, what you think about this trend, you know this move towards more focus on labor markets. Give us a little bit of perspective of what you have how that field is thinking has developed as one of the first sort of people thinking about anti trust and anything about Eric's work or writing that has surprised you or that you want to react to. Yeah, sure thanks and it's pleasure to be here. As I mentioned I was a new America fellow and I really appreciated those years and they helped me write my own first book which is always a challenge for for anyone. I wanted to say a few things so yeah there has been I think intellectual and somewhat political and policy movement surrounding anti trust revitalization. Someone said the anti trust winter is over a few years ago, and I think that's true. I like any kind of movement or thing they're different segments to it, and I think that that in some ways we look back at this five years later from now that that labor anti trust may really turn out to be one of the areas with with some of the most legs and depth and potential. I think that once you start to, in some ways, look at the other side of the market or look at labor markets you can undo it. And it makes sure it's like putting on a different pair of glasses or maybe the scales from your eyes or something. And it really changes the way you think about a lot of problems. Yeah, I mean, reader of most things that Eric has rights or has written over the years. This one I really think he said the jackpot. I think he's come out with the right book at the right time. I think it's having enormous influence in the administration and and how people are thinking about all these problems.  I think in this case it's sort of. And I think that's and I think that this this work that Eric is doing obviously other people as well but the work he's doing is just puts it so clearly and really lays a roadmap for I think what will be some significant changes in this area. In fact, we've already started I probably shouldn't comment on individual matters but I think if you analyze some of the work that justice and FTC is doing you can already start to see the influence of this kind of thinking on their work. So in terms of what's surprising, you know when I read the book, and I think Eric always, I can't remember what page it on but he, he talks about how as recently as the early thousands that industrial economists were happy to just assume perfect competition and labor markets as an input. And I think it's worth dwelling on that for a second. You know economics is somewhat famous for its unrealistic assumptions. That's part of what also it makes it useful. But when you think about it that this one is, and this is kind of the power is just discovering just how unrealistic that that assumption is. And the assumption is that if a job with higher wages sort of emerged anywhere. Nothing stops the work from taking it. And so the employer is compelled by the market to pay a competitive wage that's kind of where it leads. But you know if you think about it, you know for most of us, moving Caesar towns is not exactly costless or leaving behind a nice job you've had for some period. But in fact, for most things, it seems exactly backwards. You know, I think most of us probably find it easier to frequent a different restaurant or maybe even change the brand of cola you drank or, or whatever the case by me on other words change products substitute a product maybe eat corn instead of chips if the prices of chips go too high. We find probably find that easier than than changing jobs so in some ways it's almost exactly backwards. And in fact that was, you know, Eric referred to the, to labor law, or at least to the labor movement. And you know that was sort of the assumption I think of the labor movement that at least originally the workers were too powerless. They didn't change jobs easily and that's why they had to unite and bargain collectively. So, anyway, I just want to say that that really really sort of surprised me that I, well, all of us, you know have blind spots and can go years without really thinking about something but it's amazing to me as an entire endeavor that everyone was like yeah that's fine, you know and didn't really think about looking very often at the labor side of these markets. I appreciate that that very much and I will say I know similarly the thing that I think was most striking to me as I read how anti trust field workers with this sort of realization the obvious realization that everything that we so much of what we do in the workforce development and education space is based on the premise that labor markets are competitive. And that is taken as a given and many of the strategies particularly in workforce development make that assumption and, and what it means to, to not do that so I'd like to come back to that but I want to come back. Tim to, you know, you're at the White House figured, you know, like all of us virtually these days but are right now. Can you share with us a little bit more about how the Biden administration is thinking about anti trust policy in relation to workers, I realize, you know, with with an element of what you can share. And, and in particular, it's, how do you think about this policy area. What does it mean for the Department of Labor what does it you know where do these things sit we're used to having policies and regulations and practices that affect workers come through the Department of Labor, just wondering if you have anything you can share about the administration's thinking in this space and how it's evolving. Yeah, I think that's a question we're very happy to talk about. I'll start by saying, you know, I think there's a democratic imperative in this area, you know anti trust is often, or has been thought of as being something of a, of a technocratic it is sort of necessarily somewhat technical but I, you know, there is a there is a demand I think by this administration that something be done differently than has been done for the last, let's say 20 or 30 years 40 years with respect to who is who are the winners and losers in the economy. You know there is there's an acute popular demand, not really left wing or right wing that that people get a better sort of better shake. You know, and that's, and I think that has a lot to do with the relative power of employers and workers and, you know, some of the statistics on the people have seen about. This is starting to change but you know for a long time there was a real lack of change in real wages. So, I think I want to suggest that the these concerns aren't sort of in the air but have been taken seriously in visceral ways by by this White House. So, the, if you look at the executive order on competition, which came out on July 9, you know, I don't want to read all of it but it said this, you know, could could have been written by by Eric maybe here I'll do a quote the This is from the executive order signed by the President, the American promise abroad of the American promise abroad and sustained prosperity depends on an open competitive economy for workers a competitive marketplace creates more high quality jobs and the economic freedom to switch jobs or negotiate a higher wage.  And I think signals. And, you know, executive orders and, and the President and the White House we don't obviously dictate individual cases but we do dictate enforcement policy. And I think we've made it clear to the enforcement agencies. The Department and the Federal Trade Commission that we, you know, want them to be thinking seriously about these, these ideas. And you know that comes all the way from the top the President is very focused, I think he got sort of his entrance to to becoming an antitrust person. The President didn't come from price theory, but came from really probably from non competes and the sense that you know workers kind of getting a raw deal not being able to switch jobs. Something he's signaled in the back when he was Vice President, but has always had a very great sensitivity to. So, you know he's personally very invested in the stuff. And I will say you know you asked so how does this manifest itself. Well so partially it's through the setting of competition policy by the White House, partially it's through who has been appointed. Partially it's in a call for for whole government cooperation and things like having the Justice Department and the Labor Department work together among other agencies. So that's I think the shift I think that you know there there are traditional labor agencies and then there are antitrust agencies, and I think one of the big shifts is we will think of more labor policy, frankly coming from the antitrust sides. Thank you for that. I do have a couple more questions but before I go on I want to first let our audience know we are taking questions we will we will take questions so encourage you to put your questions in the slido box. And as we're going to continue to talk and then we'll move to a Q&A period. Also they want to give you Eric a chance to respond to anything that Tim said or any thoughts that you wanted to share before we go on to another question. Well, I mean I do think that that executive order from last July was an amazing document. The president is the first president who has made it a priority to address labor market problems from an antitrust or competition perspective. So, there's a lot more in that in that executive order but I was very excited to see that and I think it's very important. And this idea of getting other parts of the government involved is also an extremely important one. The tradition is that Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission they bring antitrust cases and you know they do some administrative work as well to address problems of competition. But, you know, lots of agencies have authority in this area, you know their bank mergers are governed by banking agencies, and you know they're, you know, airline mergers and you know mergers of radio stations and so forth they're often other agencies are involved so it's it's very important that they coordinate and particularly the Department of Labor. So the Department of Labor, there are various components of it, which have a great deal of authority over employers and how they treat workers. And I'm not an expert on the Department of Labor, but I believe that in the past they have not been focused on problems of competition like non competes for example, but they certainly have that power to get to gather information and to coordinate with other agencies to bring other actions as necessary. So I think this could be very important. Thank you for that. And it's great. So, related to that then a question for both of you is, you know, for worker advocates or whether they're unions or just organizations dedicated to supporting workers. What can they do to leverage antitrust policy to help workers, any advice or guidance you can offer to folks who are out there in the field, advocating on behalf of workers. So a quick thought unions should bring antitrust cases. They have in the past. The SEIU has brought, I believe, a few antitrust cases. That was years ago. But there's still a great deal of hesitation but unions are in an excellent position to do this to find out about anti competitive behavior because they often have members who in a particular industry who work in different companies. And so if certain types of parallel behavior occurs that may suggest illegal elusive behavior, non competes, you know, there are other ways that unions can gather information about potentially anti competitive behavior. And, and then actually bring the lawsuit on behalf of their of the union members. So they should, you know, put some effort into thinking about this and investigating. And it'll be interesting to see what they find. Yeah, I, you know, don't want to comment on on on litigation or bring litigation but I do think I will say the White House has met with with a number of unions on on on their interests and I think they're showing a lot of interest and potential in these areas and I think that's very promising. I think that being involved in the policy debates is very important. I'll highlight something that's going on right now. I think it is a an effort to led by the Just Department and the Federal Trade Commission to redo the merger guidelines. And obviously one of the key questions and merger guidelines is what kind of market markets do you assess. And I think people who are interested in labor and worker interest might want to be active in that. For example obviously invite everybody but that's an example, where I think the, the, the input of people into policy would be very, very valuable over. Sorry about that is that the famous mute button. Yes, and then suddenly not getting able to find it. That's, that's, that's very helpful. Just one more question before we'll sort of open things up to some questions that are coming into the audience I did mention to yes I might background and a lot of the work of the center I run has been in the field of workforce development and and also a lot on career and technical education and things like apprenticeships as well, but underlying undergirding a lot of the sort of funding models and just theories of change around education and workforce development is this assumption of competitive markets and kind of human capital theory that, you know, making people, you know, building equipping people with skills and credentials to be more competitive and in the marketplace. So I'm trying to wrap my head around what what does it mean to think about workforce development and education for workers who may be going into very non competitive labor markets and I realize that's a, you know, question that to me that's like where do I where do I take this and into my work and I realize that's not your background but would love any thoughts, just, you know, open in the thoughts on just what what strikes you is sort of what we should be thinking about those of us working in this in this space. Well, Eric is an educator so I guess I'll defer to him former educator. Yeah. Yeah, for lawyers I could talk about educating lawyers but but I won't. Instead, let me let me give you this, the few thoughts about this. So I do think there's a kind of a revolution taking place in in labor economics and even among labor economists there was this assumption of no more or less competitive markets and that's I think increasingly, labor economists are going to talk about what they call monopsony labor monopsony meaning lack of competition in labor markets, and once you move from a competitive model to a monopsony model a lot of things change and sometimes surprising ways. You know, a famous example, before I get to your question is the minimum wage, you know in a competitive labor market if you raise the minimum wage that can lead to unemployment. If you raise the minimum wage that just results in higher wages and actually more potentially more employment. And one of the reasons why people's views have shifted about markets is that the empirical research complicated but it tends to suggest that minimum raising the minimum wage does not reduce employment which supports this view of labor economy. So, you know, a kind of a popular tool among, you know, people Democrats generally people on the left or the center left actually becomes more powerful under the late labor monopsony model but there are other tools that become more complicated and this brings me to your question about workforce development.  So if the government steps in and offers them training and they get trained, let's just say hypothetically on the weekends or in the evening, they become more productive and that means their wage should go up. They become more productive more revenues come in and the employer becomes afraid of losing that worker to a competitor. So, if the worker says well I'm going to leave unless you raise my wage the employer says fine and so a lot of the gains from the training most of it will actually accrue to the worker. But now let's move to a monopsonized labor market. And to take an extreme case imagine there's just a single employer imagine like a small town somewhere and there's no one accounting firm or one chicken processing plant and that's basically your only choice for a certain set of skills. Well, if the government gives this person training, the person will become more productive and revenues will go up. But now, when the worker says look I'm more productive you should pay me more. The employer is going to think well you know what are you going to do if I don't pay you more right there's no competitor to go to. So the employer will be less inclined to raise the workers wages. Now the employer will probably raise them a bit, but not as much as in a competitive market. So ironically, one effect of training government sponsored training in a monopsonized market is that you're actually increasing the profits of the employers. Depending on how the market is structured, possibly a lot more than you're benefiting the worker. I do want to jump in and say I do want to interrupt myself to say you know, that's the worst case, all these markets are different some markets are very competitive, others are not and so the value of workplace training and so forth will depend a lot on market structure and continue to be valuable in some places and less valuable and other and others but that's something that you have to think about. As you, you know, design and propose workplace workforce development programs. If I can say a word I don't have anything particular to say about training but I do feel that. One reason I'm so excited about the work in this area and so this also the policy development is, you know, it helps us get at this. Which is administration really wants to crack which is how do you create a sustained sort of widespread prosperity. You know which sounds like the kind of thing politician might say but also is really a challenging question. I think we've learned you know through through four years of microeconomics, how to generate wealth but I'm not sure we've learned how you create a sort of broadly prosperous society. And, you know, there's, I think the research being done, and I mean broadly prosperous both among classes, races, you know, regions of the country. So the whole whole country is feels feels that kind of wealth without killing the golden goose. And I think that that you know that is sort of one of the, if you can get that right. In some ways you've really gotten to what a big thing for what we can do for people in this in this country, which is try to sort of, you know have a place where, or have a country that has been the story of this country for a time where people can reliably expect to do better than the generation before them and feel that this is the fabled land of opportunity so maybe I'll just leave it there and turn to our next question or as you like. I'm going to ask one very quick follow up question, which is, again, a lot of to what we do in the workforce development field is labor market gathering labor market information and doing an analyzing local labor markets. How hard is it to determine levels of monopsony or the presence or intensity of monopsonic labor markets is, are there tools available for that sort of thing is this like a common labor market analytic thing I'm not familiar with. Yes, well that these tools have been, you know, developed recently and they really, really what was needed was access to data which is now available their enormous resources. There are different kinds of labor monopsony so that what I'm focused on is concentration, the number of employers that in a certain area that a given type of worker can realistically get a job from. And so their number of papers that just count them up and you know there there are these, there's both government data, which will tell you how many employers are in a particular area. And you know they usually use commuting zone which is a kind of a big it was like a city, and you just count up the number of let's say accounting firms, five, and the number of accountants you know and you have a sense of how much concentration there is. And, and so there's both the government data as I mentioned and there's also data from private companies like Glassdoor Glassdoor operates a platform that people can use to find jobs. There are you know 10s of millions of listings and some of this research has used data from Glassdoor and other kind of platforms intermediaries. There's another type of labor monopsony which is which is a real problem, which is, which is the result of certain workplace frictions that are independent of concentration. So for example if you're working at a job, and you don't like it and you feel like you're not getting paid enough. It's not like just you know switching from Pepsi to Coke, as Tim was mentioning before, you have to do a search you have to do interviews that's all very costly. And that's another source of friction that gives the employer the ability to suppress wages, that too can be measured and has been measured. Basically you can kind of look at how frequently people change jobs, I mean it's complicated but that's basically what you can look at and, and, and you know if wages change, whether people, let's suppose wages, you know go down for some reason because of some kind of recession, do people leave or do they stay where they are that's another way that you can measure the degree of labor monopsony and now there are you know dozens and dozens of studies that look at this and they find actually people don't change their jobs, you know, very much when their wages change and everybody was listening, you know, and, and a new Mary Alice and you Tim as well I mean you can just ask yourself is my, if my employer just said I'm going to cut your wage by 10% you know, would you quit. I think people would, but most people, you know, for me for example, what would I why shouldn't say this in case my Dean here's but if they if you cut my, you know my wage. I've got family here you know my wife is here, you know I can't really just up and leave and find another employer. So this, these types of frictions are very important, but they are well documented and available to the public if you're interested. I'm the rare example of person who took a job to for a pay cut. I don't know how you measure that but anyway. Don't tell your employer just don't tell your employer. Okay, we do have some questions from the audience I'm going to start with the first one here which is, what can be done to hold companies accountable when they pursue promise a merger will create jobs, but then lay off workers once the transaction is approved. That is a very good question and I think a real challenge for for antitrust law which is, you know the typical merger review process and is a projection and involves a enormous number of promises often of efficiencies or jobs are, you know, likewise, and, you know, and if they are not approved by this court or agency though it's true then then the merger I wouldn't say technically is approved but is not acted on. I will say that in the executive order on competition, we mentioned that we said the exact that the, that the agencies should be aware that they can challenge mergers retroactively and not forget that I think they know that. And it is clear under the law that you can challenge a merger retroactively, but somehow there's been sort of a campaign to pretend that's not true. But it is true. And without mentioning to the cases there's a major litigation going on right now which is in fact a retroactive challenge to a merger under section two of the of the Sherman act so the legal authority is there to act. And in fact I can mention a case that was completed within the last couple years there was an example. It was a case around doors or something like that. Carl Shapiro was the was the expert economist, and it was a retroactive challenge to a merger of door manufacturers when they had just lied to the agencies about what was going to happen it was private challenge actually. And so that that is one avenue I would suggest that's possibility. Yeah, I mean and private litigation also in principle, the workers, if they're fired or their wages go down. And other conditions are met they should be able to bring an antitrust class action against the merged entity. And you know they should at least be able to obtain damages for lost wages. And there may not be able to get the merger unwound, but you know this, this has never happened. So I mean, in law, often the law, you know kind of supports you but the practicalities logistics, the complexities may defeat any such may defeat any such effort. I wouldn't say it's never happened. We're workers, we're workers have done we're workers sorry. Retroactive merger challenges standard oil, for example, sorry. Right. Standard oil famous interest case in fact was a retroactive challenge to a series of mergers. I was just talking about workers. Right. Our next question is again about about litigation that the Sherman, the Sherman Act and antitrust laws are notoriously broad. Given the Lochnerian bent of the Supreme Court. How will this worker center view of antitrust survive the courts. Well, it's hard to say, you know, and the question is a good one. I mean what I've been trying to argue in my work is that, you know, there's nothing radical about thinking that antitrust law should apply to labor markets in fact. The real Lochnerian court in the 1920s recognized a case by semen against their employers in California. So, you know, the idea that the antitrust apply antitrust law applies to labor markets, it shouldn't be controversial. And so there are probably a lot of well hanging fruit that even, you know, a court that tends to be skeptical of challenges to businesses should be willing to recognize. And the court did, you know, just in the recent Austin case which involved, you know, the, the NCAA, the sports leagues, you know it said yeah, sure antitrust law applies to workers in this case the workers were student athletes. You know the courts should be open to this I think the real problem is more practical. They're not used to these cases, you know, lawyers aren't used to these cases, they're very complicated. So if they're brought in the right way by the right people with good facts. I'm optimistic that that at least some progress will be made. I think the real problem with with the current Supreme Court and judges is they're just kind of hostile to antitrust law of all types, not not just you know worker related antitrust law and that that's going to require probably legislation to overcome. Tim, any thoughts or. Yeah. Okay. Here's another question with large companies able to depress wages in an obscenistic markets presumably, how does that fit in with the popular story of wages as the primary driver of inflation to certainly something we're hearing a lot about right now. Any thoughts on that. Well, wages as the primary driver inflation I mean there's there's some, let's see, there's some complicated points going around I think, you know, there's inflation right now, which is driven by all kinds of factors supply chain disruption, maybe government debt, you know there's a lot of debate going on. I don't think people think that inflation is being driven by. Well, it couldn't be driven by wage suppression, right. So if wage suppression is occurring you wouldn't, you wouldn't see a lot of inflation. You know I wouldn't say as a general matter that the concentration of labor markets is related to any kind of trend, like rising inflation today, or even the declining. The decline in the labor share of output because the evidence such as it is suggests that this problem has been around for a long time, just the people haven't recognized it. So, I don't, you know, I'm not sure what I'm not a macro economist I'm not sure what the relationship might be at the moment between labor markets and inflation but you know I don't think it's really an antitrust issue. Next question, unless you had something on that. So, here's a question that says, you know, oligopoly enabled the big three automakers in the 1950s to pay high wages and to pass on the class is the difference with the hospitals that Eric Posner cited that those nurses in those hospitals in Texas that you're talking about were not unionized is that the big difference between so if you're operating in an oligopolistic labor markets is unionization the thing that will make the difference in terms of who pays the cost. Yeah, so, so if. So if you have, let's say auto manufacturers. Well, it's complicated so if they're not the opportunity they can charge prices above the competitive price so cars in the old days were expensive, because there wasn't much competition between. Between the car manufacturers, there are only three of them. Meanwhile, in the labor markets, you know, they're only, they're only three employers who hire people to construct cars, right. So there's also a lot of al gobson is the technical term in the labor market. With market power we would expect the car companies to suppress wages in the labor market. But but the labor market is unionized as you mentioned and so the unions are able to aggregate the power of workers and negotiate a wage which is higher than you know the monopsony or the oligopsony wage. So unions are probably a very important factor now missing factor and in many of these papers, economists do look at unions like the hospital merger paper I told you about. They compared mergers where the workers were unionized and mergers where they're not unionized, and where the workers were unionized there wasn't the, the, the decline and wage growth that there was where the workers were were were not unionized.  I think people don't understand you know the economists don't understand unions as well as they understand ununionized markets because it's kind of hard to compare a market that's unionized and a market that's not unionized because they're they're different and lots of different ways. There is a lot of evidence that there's a wage premium when for unionized people. And, and you know and that's true, that's more likely to be true probably you know I'm not in an oligopsinized I'm an optionized market and in a competitive way. I just one thing you know I'm not close to the data on that but the way Eric is. I wonder also if there's a possibility. This may violate the rules of an economic conversation but if culture, you know if culture and corporate culture has changed in ways that matter since 1950s in other words, you know management. I think today is is rewarded for generally for maximization of shareholder welfare and value most most straightforwardly. You know, another contributing explanation maybe that there was a sort of different commitment to the sense that having well paid workers was a representation of success, but that's just another maybe factor in there. I mean I think that's very important you know former student of mine named Samuel Milner recently wrote a book about this era after World War two up until about the 70s. And you know other historians have studied it as well but there was a kind of an agreement. And among the, the, the, you know, the big firms and the oligopsinized industries steel, cut autos and so forth to keep wages going up, and the government actually kind of got involved and would encourage this. And, you know, at the same time, they had some oligopoly power as well. So they could, you know, raise prices raise wages, and then you know there's controversy over ultimately whether this is a good or a bad thing in the long run some people think it led to inflation. And it was clearly a very different era from ours where I do think there's a kind of a cultural or intellectual change, which has encouraged the management of large firms to just you know, suppress wages the best they can you know ideally, you know ideally, I don't know I don't know if that's a good idea or something like that. But, but, or I say at least automation is less bad and suppressing people's wages. But, but, you know, that was less true for the big industries, half a century ago. Well thank you both this has been just an excellent conversation very appreciative and if you, if either of you have any final comments or thoughts you wanted to share, please do. You know, I just, first I really appreciate people have taken a list of this. And I do think we're, you know, we're in, we're in a moment here and it's a good time to rethink much of what has been the conventional wisdom for for a long period I think are thinking a huge contribution in that respect. The administration is also, you know, I think this administration is committed to, you know, rethinking some of the questions of what it really means to have an economy that works for everybody. And, you know, along all kinds of lines so I think these kind of conversations are part of part of that. And again thanks for the opportunity to be here. Let me say something going back to a point to me, and I think this is something that a lot of people don't understand so this idea that antitrust law should be used in labor markets, okay so it's not, as I tried to say before a radical idea it's not a left wing idea or a communist idea or anything like that, it's just an idea based on the view, the very conventional view in the United States that pre markets competitive markets are good. And what's striking about this in particular is that unlike you know other types of schemes to try to help the worst off like taxing and and transferring resources. You know people object to that, in part because they don't want to pay higher taxes but they're worried that it will reduce incentives to work and be a drag on the economy. And this is that you know anti competitive behavior and labor markets and product markets already is a bad is a drag on the economy, and it's bad for lower income people. Okay, so if it's so strong or antitrust enforcement in labor markets and product markets as well should should lead not only to higher wages, but lower prices and more output so the, the pie should get bigger, everybody should, you know become better off in a very general level, but also these workers you know their wages will go up. And that's from a standpoint of equity, and you know the kind of the social fabric which is which has been fraying I think that's that's very important. So I think this is an exciting thing to think about. I think that students and academics will put, you know more energy into thinking about this and the policymakers will as well. And thank you very much, Mary Alice for having me on. Yeah, I gotta add that this is you know this is this is not this is not area, this is an area where there's this. I remember actually when I was in the Obama administration that first it's like labor antitrust. So much work to be done this area and you know Eric say a lot of people are doing it but it is a ripe area for you know students academics policy. Think tanks, whatever to sort of to take some time thinking about and we are, as I said very the administration policy councils, you know are interested or Abbott consumers of the materials are being generated. So, thanks again, Mary. And thanks again to both of you and thanks to all of you who joined us today.


Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2018.  Welcome back to Las Vegas, as we continue our coverage here on theCUBE of AWS re-invent, day two of our three days of coverage. Happy Wednesday to you, wherever you might be watching. We're joined by Yaron Javik, who is the founder and CTO of Iguazio. Yaron, thanks for joining us here on theCUBE once again. Thank you, hi. Yeah, just for folks at home who might be watching or at their office and not familiar with Iguazio, tell us a little bit about the history of the company, what you saw as the need as the founder, and what your primary focus is. So our key focus is delivering advanced services, the same one that you see in the cloud, high performance for real-time analytics. Essentially what we've seen is a gap where you have all the cloud services in the cloud, but when you're fanning into an edge or an on-prem environment, you're usually consuming like IT, you know, VAMs, et cetera. So what we are doing, we're matching the same level of services. We provide serverless functions, AI as a service and manage databases that can run either in the cloud or on-prem or in a federated edge environment to have one consistent application development environment throughout wherever you are.  For those who aren't there yet, what do you sell them on, if you will, or what do they want to know? What don't they understand you think generally? Yeah, so, you know, AI and ML, there are a lot of companies solving that problem, okay? Where we master is the notion of real-time AI, okay? What people are looking is into embedding AI into business applications, okay? The traditional notion is you have a data lake, you throw all the data in, then your data scientists go learn stuff, create nice, you know, dashboards in Tableau, great. So what, you know? What people really want is to build recommendation engines, you know, someone is logging into a website, he gets recommendations, so that requires very short latency of response, okay? You're doing front detection in financial applications, so you're feeding a lot of data. You need to make decisions now, okay? You're doing cybersecurity analysis, so you're feeding data from routers and firewalls and switches and you need to act immediately to whatever is happening.  I need to respond very, very quickly. Now this is a much harder problem to deliver AI in real-time than it is in sort of a data science workbench or just a batching notion. And traditionally the way people address that problem is by profiling, creating sort of, you know, every time I'm going to see something very similar to that I'm going to go to database, school, compare, and contrast. But the problem is that you need more and more multivariant analysis on objects that keep on updating. You know, my location keeps on changing. If I'm going to stand in front of this store, I need to get this advertisement or if I've just, I've done some purchase with my card and the bank knows my GPS location, it can cross correlate that and know if it's a fraud or not, okay? So there are more inputs going into the decision. This is where we master the ability to ingest lots of data in real-time. Cross correlate that in real-time to generate what's called feature vectors, all those things that make up a decision. Run the decision based on the traditional AI and deep learning algorithms and they act on it. Whether it's respond to a customer request or block some firewall or whatever. And our focus is time to action and the way we're implementing it is using two major components. One is real-time serverless functions which is an open source we're promoting called Nucleo. A second is a real-time database extremely high performance that attaches to those functions and allow and help stitching the data and calculating and getting the results. So that's the general thing we're doing. Yeah, so that idea of the serverless functions with Nucleo, that's really about bringing what you used to in the cloud and bringing that out into the edge which I think we were talking before and that's our thing of focus for a lot of developers I want to use all of the things I'm used to in the cloud where I can just consume them as services and it's quite easy to deal with but then when I come back into the onsite or on onto the edge in this kind of hybrid cloud model I don't actually have access to all those things anymore and I want to. And it's even beyond that because the lambda came from more of like web hooks, use cases, et cetera. Extremely not concurrence, extremely low performance. You're talking about hundreds of milliseconds of latencies. We were talking about like thousand invocations per second. You know, that's sort of the concurrency, single threaded applications. We're talking about real time applications. You know, hundreds of thousands of events per second. We were talking about latency in the range of milliseconds, response times, you have to respond. So we had to build a different serverless. Something that's real time, something that has right, you know, real time access to data, et cetera. So that's originally where Nucleo came in and then you started seeing pool from customers saying yes, but you're also a multi-cloud serverless. And you can also, I can run your serverless on a laptop for debugging. I can run it on a mini edge appliance because this is my enforcement point. I can run it on-prem because I, you know, I'm stuck with some old gear in my on-prem application and this is what made, started making Nucleo very popular in lots of GitHub stores, et cetera. And the fact that we provide it as a fully managed platform, you know, it's open source, consume it, whatever. But when you're using our managed platform, you get security integration with Active Directory, integration with data, logging, monitoring. So it really provides an alternative to Lambda where you need high concurrency and everywhere. You know, edge, cloud, on-prem, but also high performance, high concurrency for those new workloads of real-time analytics. Yeah. So what are some of the things that customers are using the platform to develop on? Like, could you give us an example of someone who's using some of these serverless functions for real-time application? Yeah, so one of the applications is, we do a lot of work with network operators. You know, Verizon is one of our investors, but also working with different other telcos. So we're doing real-time network monitoring across all their firewalls and network equipment, et cetera, to predict the network behavior. So if there's going to be a failure, is it a cybersecurity attack right now? Things like that. The next level that they went into doing is actually remediation. It's essentially rerouting the networks to bypass falls automatically based on the predicted behaviors or stopping some attacks as they occur. So that's one use case. Another use case in financial services and many other places is predictive network operations, is monitoring again behavior of services, et cetera, like in trading platforms. And knowing that there's going to be a latency spike that's going to impact the trading and essentially going and fixing that in order to not lose millions of dollars of trades or real-time tick analytics, you know? Until now, all the financial applications were very sort of event-driven and complex event-driven, not incorporating deep learning, things like that. Now, think that there are many variants, you know, the president is going to tweet something about some company and then it's going to impact the B over or with stock. So the current high-frequency trading algorithms are not designed for that. Now, if you build all those serverless functions that listens on Twitter and news and all those things and they can start cross-correlating that information to a much smarter decision, they fit in the real-time decision of buying and selling stocks into a lot more intelligent decision, you can make more money, okay? Another application, retailers, okay? We're working with locations where they have 1,000 cameras in a single supermarket because they just inspect the shelves to look into inventory levels and eventually they're going to like an Amazon Go model where they actually want to know to track what you're buying, et cetera. So 1,000 cameras in a store, you cannot ship all that bandwidth through the cloud, right? Okay, and this is where it comes to a federated application model where as a developer, the guys that are cloud-born or cloud-first, you know, they know containers and they know APIs and they know that stuff. They don't know how to build a box that sits in a store, okay? This is the other world of VMs and VNICs, you know, they don't care about that. They want APIs, they want Lambda functions, Dynamo, et cetera. So what we're providing is a mechanism where they can develop in the cloud, test, simulate, run CI-CD pipelines, push artifacts to the store to actually go and do the work. And there we have strong partnerships with at least a couple of the major cloud providers. We have co-sailing agreements with Azure. We're working with Google and I assume Amazon will be next, but those two we have strong relations with already. All right, and before we cut you loose, just give me your idea about the show in general here from what you've seen and kind of how you feel about the conversations that you're apartment. Yeah, I was very busy talking to customers all day, so I haven't had a lot of time, I think interesting announcements, you know, they've made the announcement with VMware, I'm still trying to figure out what have they announced? Because, you know, again, we spoke about the fact that the whole idea of cloud is about service obstructions, not virtual machines, not Kubernetes containers, is about using APIs, using serverless functions, using AI work benches that you can develop this new logic. If I'm going to do this VMware on-prem with Amazon, am I going to get all the SageMaker, Lambda, all that on-prem?  Is that a real cloud service cloud? Okay, I think it aligns with what we're seeing now with the Kubernetes, I think we had some discussion about it, you know, IBM buys Red Hat, you know, Cisco collaborates with Amazon, VMware buys Eptio, Kubernetes is containers, it's infrastructure. We speak to customers, we show them what we do, serverless, you know, AI work benches, database and service. That's the interesting part, that eliminates IT. If you're putting Kubernetes, it perpetuates IT. Now they need to take Kubernetes, tie to their security system, build Spark on top of container, et cetera. Now there's a lot of IT and DevOps work involved, but many customers that need agility, the reason they're going to cloud is not to use VMs, you know? It's to be able to take some lambda functions, some pre-baked services, glue them together and really come fast to market with an application. Yeah, so what we really want to do is just to cloud all the things, I think. Yes. Cloud all the things. Mission accomplished. Yeah, yeah. Well, thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time we're on theCUBE. Good to see you, sir. Thank you. Thank you. All right, back with more here at AWS Reinvent. You're watching it live and we're on theCUBE.


have chosen you. You will serve me. Who should I obey? Master Zed? Or the farm implement with delusions of grandeur? Screams throwning.


Hi everybody, this is the recap, the hit recap video, and there were hits in this one, man. The hit recap video for 2022, Tops Triple Threads Baseball, Nine Box Intercase, Picker Team One. That was from a fresh intercase, from a fresh master case on the 21st. This we did on Fanatics Live, a lot of fun on there, and a lot of monsters in here. Thanks to everyone who joined the break, they've got the White Whale, the O'Neill Crews, a lot of great stuff here, and obviously, Triple Threads looks really awesome. But thanks to everybody who watched and experienced this break with us on Fanatics Live, that was really sick. Jason did this break, it was amazing. There's the Spencer Torkelson Amethyst, a one out of three Strasburg, some nice relics, some nice players, some nice parallels, some nice color, and wait for this, wait for it, wait for it. Julio Rodriguez, Rookie Otto, right? Then we had Julio Rodriguez, Rookie Otto, then we had the A-Rod bat name plate book card, one of one, with another couple relics right here. How ironic. Who did that go to, right? I think it went to a Red Sox fan. I think he said it was for his wife, though, his wife likes to hear it. And you're like, what's Joe waiting for back here? This Deca book that Jason pulled, Deca Relic autographed book card. At first we thought it was 10 different players, but no, it's just 10 different relics, one auto. Derek Jeter, I think it opens. Yeah, open it up again in the middle. Oh, it opens again in the middle, there we go. Feels like the first time pulling it, that's awesome. And it was five out of five, you can see the number right below his name. That was awesome. And that was the break. What a wonderful experience on Fanatics Live for the debut, even though we were kind of beta testing it essentially, but it ended up being a really full and fun night. So thanks to Fanatics Live for getting all that set up, and we'll be on there some more, ladies and gentlemen. This will be a fun platform to break on. We'll see you next time for the next Fanatics Live break. Download the app. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.


All right, Pharrell Billionaire Boys Club and the Yankees are teaming up for a special addition, some apparel. Just how did this collaboration come about? To be honest, it was like a long time coming. I think we've been talking about this thing for like two and a half years already. You know, dealing with the Steinbrenners and it's just been great. But we're finally here. I mean, it's a dream to be able to do something with, you know, the world's biggest sports franchise, let alone baseball. What's it like for you? I know you were necessarily a huge baseball fan growing up but being here at Yankee Stadium on the field. So yeah, I mean like, yeah, as a kid, you know, baseball is something like a lot of my friends were into. But I just kind of like the logos, you know, obviously just being a fan in Virginia of like that iconic Yankee logo and just that NY. It's like, it's a lot of things. I mean, I gave the commencement speech here a couple years back for NYU when they have it here at Yankee Stadium. So there's like all these like connections, kind of kismet, cosmic. The interlocking NY definitely known globally. So when you're thinking of that, how do you come up with the creations? How do you come up with what apparel works? I think our biggest job there was to like let both, you know, marks breathe together on the same product, you know, and, you know, show the appreciation for both just in the way that we, you know, all the reverence that we have for the brands, you know. So I mean, again, it's like a dream for me. Now you're wearing one of the t-shirts right now. I saw a pretty cool jacket. I'm going to put you on the spot. What's your what's your favorite item? Oh man, it's like there's an assortment. I mean, mugs like I think this is the first of many. I'm already on to the next one. On to the next one. You got to give us a little insight. What's the next one? Well, I mean, now I'm saying too much, but we're excited. This is cool. I mean, I love this team. My son is wearing a hoodie right now. He's up in the box. He'll come down with me when it's time to pitch. I was going to ask you about that. Since you brought it up, are you nervous? I mean, you've performed in front of thousands and thousands of people, but are you nervous for that? Here's what I can say. It's a pitch, right? I'm a musician. I hope I'm in key. Do you get any tips from anybody in the clubhouse? No, but I probably should. There's still a little bit of time. Yeah. Well, we're going to see. Well, the stuff is available starting today on the website in the stores and also here at Yankee Stadium. Anything else people should know at home? I don't know, but this is fun. They should know it's pretty cool, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, about the collection, the collab, yes. It's like, it's super cool. And we want to do more. And this is great. And this is like an overwhelming thing. Well, enjoy it. Enjoy the first pitch. I think you're going to do great. Thank you so much. Appreciate the time. We'll send it back to you guys.


All right, you will see what happens So she gives a rock to us. That's the task and We give her a piece of cucumber and she eats it.  She tests the rock now against the wall she needs to give it to us and And she gets cucumber again What can we learn from monkeys about human beings and is What is the fundamental difference if there is any between monkeys and human beings? Monkeys are not human beings We evolved from monkeys, but monkeys are not human beings. We have a different species We function by laws. Some may argue about this. No, nobody could argue with it We have the capacity some may choose to live like monkeys, but this is the big difference Monkeys cannot choose to live like human beings, but we can choose to live like monkeys We have free will monkeys do not we have a conceptual ability We can invent rockets to take us to the moon.  I mean we talk we have complicated conversations. We do experiments on monkeys. They don't do experiments on us So what about jealousy Does not exist Jealousy, I mean it depends what you mean by jealousy the two terms see I know that you are right but I'm jealous It's painful in my stomach when you have jealousy is something we learn It's not something you're you're that's ingrained in you. You're not born jealous It's something you learn and some of us are not jealous, you know, am I jealous of Bill Gates's billions? No Not at all. I live a good life. I have what I have I Wouldn't swap my life for anybody's life.   They're unhappy if you live your life based on I want to be like that person I want to you're always looking at other people You're gonna be miserable, but not everybody's like that and that suggests that it's not wired into us It's not how we are as human beings. It's learned and it can be unlearned And to unlearn a lot of that bad stuff I recommend reading Iron Man Look, it's not that I support jealousy as a virtue, but I think it's human Maybe I don't I think it's I think it's bad. I think it's bad ideas. I think it's bad ideas That make us focus on the other instead of focusing on our own on ourself. I'm not jealous of of LeBron James's ability in basketball You know Delacy is not competition I'm competitive if I got on a basketball court with LeBron James I would play against him knowing I would lose but I wouldn't be upset by losing to him But we're competitive competition is different than jealous Young children are competitive and their parents teach them to be jealous often Because the parents are jealous and we teach our children to be jealous We also teach our children to share we teach our children to be good socialists Right, but we don't share as adults, right? You're young kid is playing in the sandbox with his little cars and some strange kids comes up and says I want to play with the cars and what are the parents says you say go you got to share you got to share Why Why should the kids share? I mean you could trade I'll give you my truck if you have a I don't know a sports car something and You won't share as an adult if some stranger came up to you and says I want to borrow your car right now Would you give him the keys? Of course not and you think your kid doesn't know that and doesn't know you're a hypocrite That you want him to share but you won't share so we teach our kids little subtle things about About the big world and about what we expect from them that we don't even know we're teaching them What we need today what I called a new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think Meaning any man or woman who knows that men's life must be guided by reason By the intellect not by feelings wishes women's or mystic revelations Any man or woman who values his life and who does not get want to give in to today's of the spare cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist All right before we go on reminder, please like the show we've got a hundred and sixty three live listeners right now 30 likes That should be at least a hundred I figure at least a hundred of you actually like the show Maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it But but at least the people who like it, you know, I want to see I want to see a thumbs up there you go Start liking it. I want to see that go to a hundred All it takes is a click of a click of a thing whether you're looking at this Uh, and and you know the likes matter. It's not an issue of my ego It's an issue of the algorithm the more you like something the more the algorithm likes it So, you know, and if you don't like the show, give it a thumbs down Let's see your actual views being reflected in the likes But uh, if you like it, don't just sit there Help get the show promoted. Of course, you should also share And uh, you can support the show at your own book show dot com slash support on patreon or subscribe star or locals Uh and uh and show you support for all for for the work for the value. Hopefully you're receiving from this And uh, and of course, don't forget if you're not a subscriber Even if you even if you just come here to troll or even if you're here like Matthew to defend marks Uh, then uh, you should subscribe because that way you'll know when to show up You'll know what shows are on when they're on you're good notified, right? So, uh, yes, like share subscribe support like share subscribe support. There you go. Easy Do one or all of those Please


Andrew asks, in the Bitcoin ecosystem, how were the initial Bitcoins created in the Genesis Block, dispersed in transactions, and the proof of work accomplished? Well, the first version of the software was launched by Satoshi Nakamoto in January 3rd, 2009. Presumably, Satoshi Nakamoto fired up the Bitcoin software and ran it on their own computer. It started calculating a candidate block. That block was empty. In fact, I believe the first transaction didn't happen until block 75 or so. The first 70 or so blocks only had a coin-based transaction in them. Of course, it only had a coin-based transaction. There was no Bitcoin to spend. Every transaction refers to the previous output, and at that point there were no previous outputs. The first block could necessarily only have a coin-based transaction. Soon after, in the first year or so, I believe a limitation was placed so that you couldn't spend the coin-based transaction until at least several blocks had elapsed. The current standard is 100 blocks. I'm not quite sure when that rule was added, but even the coin-based from the first block was not immediately spendable. The second block was also empty, and it only had a coin-based transaction. The third block was also empty. It only had a coin-based transaction, etc. All of these coin-based transactions paid the Bitcoin address, presumably Satoshi Nakamoto.  In fact, it would be quite a historic event and a big news item if any of those coins were spent. That would indicate that Satoshi Nakamoto was spending their initial coins. Of course, we don't know that Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first blocks. Maybe they gave the software to a friend, and a friend was running it. Maybe Satoshi Nakamoto was more than one person. Maybe lots of different people were collaborating in running that early network. None of that is known. We do know that others were invited to participate, and several other individuals did participate in both mining and transactions in the first 100 blocks or so. Michael asks, how does the miner integrate the coin-based transaction within the block? That's a great question. This is often confusing. After all, the coin-based transaction includes a payment to the miner themselves. Essentially, they write a check to themselves in the block that they produce. How do they get that coin-based transaction in there? The trick here is to realize that every miner constructs a candidate block. Every miner's candidate block has a coin-based transaction. They put it in there, and that coin-based transaction pays their Bitcoin address. If it's being produced by a mining pool, then the mining pool has put a coin-based transaction inside the candidate block. That coin-based transaction pays the mining pool address. Then they distribute that candidate block out to all of the miners participating in the mining pool. Who creates the candidate block? The miners create the candidate block. Who puts the coin-based transaction in there? Every miner puts a coin-based transaction in their own candidate block. That coin-based transaction pays them. If everybody puts a coin-based transaction in their own candidate block, how do we choose between them? That's where mining comes in. All of these candidate blocks are useless, worthless, not valid. The reason they are not valid is because they do not contain valid proof of work. They do not have a nonce such that the block header hash produces a fingerprint that is within the difficulty target of the network. They are not valid. In order to become valid blocks, they need to have that nonce. In order to find that nonce, you have to do septillions of calculations and hashes. Once you find that nonce, you publish that block because it is valid. The rest of the network accepts it because it is valid. As a result, the coin-based transaction that you wrote as a miner and put into that candidate block becomes reality. A hundred blocks later becomes expendable, so you can pay for your electricity bill and make some profit. Miners write a check. They put it in a candidate block. That candidate block is not valid until they find the proof of work that makes it valid.