This episode of Hub Dialogues features Sean Speer in conversation with Kevin Chan, the global policy campaign strategy director at Meta Platforms, about the Metaverse, its economic and social possibilities, and the implications for public policy.
You can listen to this episode of Hub Dialogues on Acast, Amazon, Apple, Google, Spotify, or YouTube. The episodes are generously supported by The Ira Gluskin And Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation.
SEAN SPEER: Welcome to Hub Dialogues. I’m your host, Sean Speer, editor-at-large at The Hub. I’m honoured to be joined today by Kevin Chan, the global policy campaign strategies director at Meta Platforms, formerly Facebook, where he’s focused on the future of the internet, including the Metaverse, AR, VR, MR, and what is sometimes called the “creator economy.” He comes to this relatively new role after serving as Facebook’s head and the director of policy in Canada, as well as roles in the Canadian government in federal politics. I’m grateful to speak with him about the future of the internet, its economic and social possibilities, and the implications for public policy. Kevin, thank you for joining us at Hub Dialogues.
KEVIN CHAN: Thank you very much, Sean, for having me.
SEAN SPEER: As I mentioned, you previously spent time in public policy and politics and then doing policy for Facebook in Canada. You’ve since moved to a global position in which amongst other things, you’re focused on the policy implications of the Metaverse and how to design a policy framework that enables us to iterate and innovate and protects against some of the downsides, which we’ll get into. Let’s just start on how you came into these issues and roles. How does Meta interact with public policy? Kevin, how does someone like you spend your days?
KEVIN CHAN: Sure. Look, in terms of how Meta thinks about policy, we really have three types of policy. I think it’s not always clear to people from the outside. We have these things called content policies, which really are rules about what should be on the platforms, what should be removed from the platform. Basically, a set of rules that govern content on the platform. We also have these things called product policies, which is really advising our product teams about how to make sure that what we are building is done responsibly, and that is well-received in the marketplace.
Then we have, I think, the more traditional view of things, which is the public policy piece, which is how do we interact with governments around the world? When you are out working in a region as I was in Canada, you really have to do a bit of all three. I used to tell my team in Canada, the perfect solution on all these fronts is that sweet spot between what’s good for Canada and what’s good for Meta and trying your hardest to enlarge that area of overlap. If you think about some of the things we’ve done recently, by translating the platform into Inuktitut so that Nunavummiut can see the reality better reflected on the platform, I think that’s a good example of that.
If you think about the work we did with the National Art Centre during COVID with Canada Performs, which was a live streaming program, emergency relief program, to provide support for artists while also giving them an outlet to perform live on digital platforms, I think that’s another example. Trying to figure out what that Venn diagram overlap space is, I think that’s the rule of thumb. I think you asked the other question, in terms of a typical day, there’s never really a dull moment. I’m managing a global team now.
Making calls at all hours of the day, at night, early in the morning, to make sure we get folks who are in Asia and in India working to try to help articulate a vision for the Metaverse that is understandable to a broad policy of audience. I think that’s not always a simple task because a lot of what is going to happen is still ahead of us. I think with a global or central role, you can spend almost all of your time internally in meetings. I am trying to make sure that I still get out to engage this thoroughly. I’m really glad that you’re inviting me in and I’m really happy to be here.
SEAN SPEER: That’s a great segue, Kevin, into my next question. You mentioned that you’re spending a lot of time working and thinking on the Metaverse. Help me understand what the Metaverse is. Is it like a virtual reality world or a new kind of internet? Is it one thing or multiple things? Can you elaborate?
KEVIN CHAN: Sure. This is one of those terms that I think was actually coined some years ago in a book but has only recently become more commonly known. From our perspective, the Metaverse is really the next stage of computing after the mobile internet. We’re all very familiar today with how the mobile internet works, you largely access it through your mobile phone, or perhaps other portable devices, and that’s enabled a lot of economic growth and a lot of social possibilities. What we’re talking about is the stage or the computing platform that comes after that.
If you think about it over the course of the last 10 years, the way we have communicated on the internet has become richer, if you will. You moved from text-based communications to images, then to video, and more recently we’ve had things like 360 videos that try to give you a more immersive experience. The Metaverse is the next conceptual leap in that, so we’re moving towards an even more immersive, and a more embodied, virtual environment where your communications and interactions feel physically real, or at least they’re going to much more approximate the real world.
One of the ways you can think about this is that you’re getting close to how you would communicate in the real world. To give you an example, when you think about the mobile internet, a lot of the communications have been what we call asynchronous. So you send a text, let’s say, and then you get a response back sometime later, or you post on social media and that post is then later found by other people, not necessarily in real-time. In the Metaverse, communications will largely be synchronous, and you’re going to feel present and in the room with everyone you’re interacting with.
There’s some element of this that will for sure be virtual, so it will be VR, virtual reality. There will be some elements of this that will be augmented reality, so layering a virtual layer, if you will, into our physical space. I think, the real holy grail, and what I think everybody is hoping to crack and we’re still perhaps some ways away, is this notion of mixed reality, where you’re actually going to be able to seamlessly integrate a virtual environment into your real-world environment so that you have an ability to enhance the way you’re working, to enhance the way you’re interacting with people, to enhance the way you’re learning, for example.
SEAN SPEER: Let me follow up, Kevin. In a long-form essay about the Metaverse in May 2022, your colleague Nick Clegg wrote that there are three factors that will make the Metaverse experience feel more like what we have in our daily lives: ephemerality, embodiment, and immersion. Can you elaborate on these factors and how they will combine to create a unique experience?
KEVIN CHAN: Sure. When we talk about ephemerality, what we’re really saying is, there’s going to be a difference, like what I said earlier, there’s a difference between the way we’ve been communicating in the mobile world or in Web 2.0—where you are writing an email, you are largely posting things, or you’re texting—where there is a large degree of permanence to what you’re doing. You’re putting things out there and things can be saved. Things are actually there for others to discover.
As the computing power of the Metaverse reaches the potential that it needs to be at, we’re going to really be talking about having real-life, real-time conversations with people. That takes away this notion of putting something out there for people to see. It’s really going to be more about communicating as we have done traditionally in a non-digital way. That’s what we mean by we’re looking at a more synchronous type of communication.
Embodied really is about feeling like you yourself are present in the moment. You’re going to be able to have a sense of being somewhere, whether it be in some say natural environment that you’re going to visit for school, or if you’re in a meeting and you just feel like you’re actually in a room versus I guess what we’ve been doing for the last two or three years which is just staring at a screen with a bunch of squares. You’re actually going to feel you’re in the room of others.
Then the sense of immersiveness is really a sense that others are there with you, this sense that you are sharing an experience. I can tell you, I meet actually with my team once a week in a Metaverse environment, and just the dynamic is so different when instead looking at a bunch of squares or rectangles on a screen, you’re actually sitting around a conference table, you know very well that somebody is to your right, someone’s to your left, you can make eye contact.
We were talking about something a bit sensitive a few weeks ago, and I could tell that somebody just by their body language, even though it was an avatar, that someone’s body language suggested they had something to say or were uncomfortable with where we were leaving things at, and I was able to call on them to further articulate what their concerns were. Those kinds of cues you’re able to pick up in a Metaverse environment because there is this immersive quality to it.
SEAN SPEER: If the Metaverse is going to be distributed and decentralized, like the current version of the internet, what are Meta’s goals or expectations? Will it basically be like Facebook but different, or are you aspiring to do something completely different? What’s Meta’s business vision?
KEVIN CHAN: This is a big question, Sean, but maybe if I would just back up a little bit to say at a high level, before we get to I think what it means for social media, I think at a high level we do think that the Metaverse will be different from what’s come before. From what Web 2.0 was or what the mobile internet is. I think we hope that the governance model for the Metaverse will be different than what we have seen on mobile internet. In the mobile web, what we have experienced is really two big companies serving as the gateway to everything. You think about Apple with its iOS ecosystem and then Google with its Android ecosystem.
If you want to, if you’re a developer and you want to build a mobile app or participate in Web 2.0, or if you’re a creator and you want to sell something in these two environments, you really have no choice but to go through these two environments. And I think we are beginning to understand some of the challenges with that in terms of rent-seeking, in terms of control, in terms of power. The other thing is, economists will say to you the value of the entire ecosystem is reduced if you pursue a closed approach to managing these ecosystems.
An open approach that maximizes compatibility across the system actually maximizes the economic pie for everyone. For us, an open Metaverse would be a very good thing for everyone. That means at least two things. One is that technical standards are compatible across devices, and we are working in cross-industry groups to try to establish those standards, but also that interoperability needs to be paramount. As an example, if you’re an avatar and you purchase a digital asset, so let’s say it’s a shirt or something, you should be able to port that to other environments, other worlds and be able to use it.
If you build a virtual environment on one platform, you should be able to port that to a completely different platform as well. We think that this notion of interoperability will be very important in the Metaverse so that it’s really one Metaverse and it’s not something that is partitioned or separated and owned by different companies. If I may, Sean, I think the second point on the difference with traditional 2D social media, I think there is going to be a big difference there as well. If you think about it, the interactions in the Metaverse are going to approximate—as we just discussed about synchronous communications—it’s going to approximate real-world experiences.
In other words, we’re really moving away from this notion of asynchronous communications or a certain degree of permanence to your communications. We likely will have a lot less of what is written. So posts on platforms waiting to be discovered by others, which really lend itself to the way speech has been governed on the internet currently, which is really with content policies backed up by potentially some public laws. The governance model, presumably, in the Metaverse will more closely approximate how we think about speech in the real world.
To give you one implication from a privacy point of view, right now, I think people actually have some degree of expectation that companies and platforms are reviewing posts, are reviewing what people are saying. If it’s violative of the content rules or is violative of the law, then those things get removed. I think we’re going to move into a space where it’s going to be a bit different because once you’re talking about synchronous communications, the people’s expectations of privacy change. If I invite you into my home and we’re talking, we don’t think that the builder of the house or the government is listening in on us.
I think similarly in a virtual environment, if it’s just you and me in some space, most people would probably have that same expectation of privacy. There’s this big question of, what does governance look like here? And I think the other big shift is really we’re going to move from content policies where you can say, “This is allowed and that isn’t allowed.” We’re going to shift from that because the communications are ephemeral, as you say, we’re going to move from that to probably a governance model that’s focused not on content, but on conduct. What is your behaviour in this environment and what is acceptable to the community and what isn’t? What are the consequences?
SEAN SPEER: We’re going to come to questions of governance and public policy in a moment, but before we get there, I just want to talk about the possible applications of the Metaverse. I should say, in parentheses, that here at The Hub we’re generally in favour of progress for progress’ sake. It’s broadly healthy for our society to continue to pursue the next frontier, whether it’s medicine, the Metaverse, or whatever. But more often not progress is a means. It begs the question, what are the ends of the Metaverse? What are some of the possible implications for, say, education or commerce or other fields of economic and social life?
KEVIN CHAN: I completely get what you’re saying and I’m going to try to ground these in examples I think that we can already see today so that your audience can actually feel like it’s real. I think in a nutshell, the Metaverses will augment what we already do in real life, but make it easier and richer for everyone. Let’s look at again, maybe three examples. One is in the health space, we can talk about that. Let’s say practicing surgery. We can talk about immersive education. And then we can talk generally about economic opportunity. There is an example, and folks can look this up, but there was actually a recent example that made the headlines.
It was two conjoined twins. They were joined at the head and they were in Brazil, and they needed to be separated, and they were relatively old for separation. I think it was four years old. The surgeon, what they did was, obviously it’s a very delicate procedure and it takes a long time to do the operation and you actually obviously don’t have a lot of margin for error. What they did for months before the surgery was actually practice it in a virtual environment, using Oculus wrist and headsets and really stimulating the environment and what it would be like actually going through that surgery over and over again.
It was ultimately, at least in the immediate months, deemed a success, which was really great to learn. That’s an example of how this technology can help enable real value in society. Another one that’s already coming to pass is this notion of immersive education. So the idea that you can, as a student, be in an immersive environment to learn is really going to be groundbreaking. Some of the early examples, Georgian college here in Ontario, they actually are a world leader in this use, and if you go on the website, you’ll find all these different courses actually that they’re trying to integrate VR into.
One of the examples is using a virtual house to welcome Indigenous students in for language revitalization classes. That again has been a very interesting thing to learn about and to understand. That’s been really great to see. Then the last thing, I guess is just this general notion of economic opportunity. We think that already on these 2D platforms, you’re seeing all these creators emerging that are actually making some amount of revenue, whether it’s part-time or full-time, in a way that just wasn’t possible before, through sponsorship, through direct fundraising, through creating digital assets and selling them.
The Metaverse, we think, is going to be even more impactful in that regard. We do have already creators, even in Canada, who are building these things. There’s an Indigenous person by the name of Joshua Conrad based out in B.C., and he’s really a 3D artist that’s using augmented reality technology to build filters on behalf of different causes and on behalf of different organizations. Those are, again, just net new ways to make a living to build out a new business that is servicing a new sector of the economy. I think all of those things are pretty important.
I have this here. I should probably just share, at a conceptual level, there was an analysis done last year on the potential economic value of the Metaverse. This was done by an analysis group, and they estimated globally that if the Metaverse proceeds along the same trajectory as the mobile internet, we’re looking at a $3 trillion value by 2031. That was 10 years from a year and a half ago. In Canada alone, it would be about $20 billion in 2031. I think that’s a pretty sizable economic gain, but there’s still a lot of work to be done ahead of us. We’re just very much still working with partners across the industry to help build the foundation blocks from that.
SEAN SPEER: A big part of those foundational blocks, of course, is the role for public policy and regulation in particular. I want to put a few questions to you along those lines, if that’s okay. In the same essay that I referred to earlier, Nick Clegg writes of the need for government regulation: “We must create thoughtful rules and put guardrails into place as the Metaverse develops to maximize its potential for good and minimize the potential harms.”
Let me ask you, Kevin, when it comes to regulating the Metaverse, how much scope do you envision between say national regulation versus some kind of global framework? I suppose, depending on your answer, where should the locus of thinking be for what a policy framework for the Metaverse ought to ultimately look like?
KEVIN CHAN: That one’s tricky. As someone who works at the company, I’m probably going to say something that perhaps is not surprising. I think I want to find a way to say this that is going to be a bit more authentic because I think substantively there’s a right answer, so let me just try to do this here. First of all, it is early days for this technology. I think that’s fair, and we’ve talked about that. I think some critics even say that, “Look, this is not the direction that the future is headed.” There are a lot of people who are asking good questions and are critical about it.
I don’t think this is something that is fully formed yet. We’re still in the early stages. Therefore, typically, what we say as a society, I think, is that it’s probably too early to think about the architecture of regulation because it is very nascent. Overall, I think, directionally, governance of the Metaverse should tie back to the principles I talked about earlier in our conversation, which is really about openness and interoperability. It should favour those things. If there are blanks to be filled, then they should be filled by regulation. I think the reality is a lot of things are already regulated.
Really, the trick will be not to regulate for regulation’s sake but to really understand, what are the truly novel areas here? If there are any, then we should be building rules around that. For that, and again, I think it’s too early to be specific about it, but Canada does have a pretty good track record historically about what does good regulation look like. If you look at even our private sector privacy law, PIPEDA, it has been about principles, and it’s been about being technology-neutral. Principles, so that we’re clear about what it is we want to support.
Perhaps it’s this notion of openness and this notion of interoperability. Then we want it to be technology neutral in the sense that it should stand the test of time because it’s anchored in principles that aren’t going to change. The technologies change and novel cases arise or unique cases arise but the principles don’t change. Therefore the framework is still relevant. I think that’s probably important to have instead of something that keeps trying to chase after the latest thing, which can obviously change on a dime. I’m just trying to think if there’s anything else that we should be talking about here.
I think maybe just a bit beyond regulation. I think the precursor to that, which we are actually trying to do, is starting to have conversations about what kind of Metaverse we want. It’s not just going to be us that’s going to build it. It’s not one player. It’s a very very big ecosystem. We won’t be able to do it alone and we need actually to come together as different industry players, as civil society, as governments, as academics, and experts to think through how we should do this. That starts with having conversations. My team actually has been building out what we’re calling the Metaverse Community Collective which is bringing together experts from around the world to actually engage in these conversations.
We just did a pilot in a virtual environment earlier this year. We’re going to do one next week actually. Assuming that these things work well, we’re going to want to do a few more in the coming months, but I think that’s perhaps the stage we are at right now, which is developing a common understanding of what it means to help build for the Metaverse. Then from there try to enunciate a set of principles or a set of policy positions and see if we can find common ground.
SEAN SPEER: I want to take up some of the issues that you raised there, Kevin. As a nascent technology, it strikes me that there are some similarities between where we currently sit with respect to the Metaverse and where policymakers found themselves with the emerging technology of the internet back in the 1990s. As you know, as many of our listeners know, at the time the government of Canada including the CRTC had to confront basic questions about the possible consequences of the technology. Whether it should be thought of as a corporate entity or a public square, how it might be monetized, and ultimately whether to pursue proactive regulation or take a more hands-off approach and see how things evolved.
In general terms, the government chose the latter approach and is now taking some steps to fill gaps and introduce regulation. I just want to ask about the parallels for you to the Metaverse. Is there an optimal point for policymakers to start to turn their minds to these issues? Is there a case like with the early internet that the government should take a hands-off approach for now? Or is there a case for a need to rather to start developing a regulatory framework at this stage?
KEVIN CHAN: Like I just said I really do think that it is very early stages to think about regulations specifically. I think if we were to think about the past 10 years with Web 2.0 as an example I think one of the things we should be doing and could be doing is just having better conversations and having better understanding. I’ve seen some of the ideas that, not in any particular country, I think generally that’s the case, we see a lot of ideas about regulation emanating from all sorts of quarters that are actually wrong-headed and come from perhaps a lack of understanding of what the internet is.
I think to me anyway as a professional in this space that’s the lesson I’ve taken, which is why it’s so important that in this new next generation that we’re talking about in terms of the Metaverse and in terms of virtual and augmented and mixed reality, we should do things differently. We should have more conversations earlier on so that policymakers, so that people in the policy ecosystem, have a better understanding of these environments so that we can have a better conversation and ultimately more effective regulation. That’s certainly what my team has been charged to do.
SEAN SPEER: Now I understand that Canadian firms are at this stage showing signs that they may be able to “punch above their weight” in the Metaverse. Let me ask you a two-part question. First, what might that mean? Second, can you talk a bit about the parts of the Canadian ecosystem that you and others are excited about?
KEVIN CHAN: For sure. Look, we have an incredibly talented workforce in Canada and I think that bodes well for the future. If you think about Toronto and the corridor that extends down to Kitchener-Waterloo, if you think about Vancouver and Montreal as gaming hubs, and a lot of the germs of ideas and of the Metaverse do originate from the gaming industry, and so again, we have a very good head start there. There’s just a wealth of talent and experience. There is also a lot of AI talent here as you know. Canada is one of the pioneers of machine learning and that dates back many decades and is based on decisions by successive governments over time.
That’s actually led to a renaissance and AI globally. I think, again, there’s a lot here to build on and it would seem that AR and VR is the same. There actually is a very strong ecosystem in Canada already on this. We have, at Meta, given out unrestricted grants to 17 Canadian research labs to researchers who are actually helping invent the future. There’s just a lot of talent already present in Canada and all these different places and these different dimensions that potentially allow Canada to be a real leader here. I think if I may add, the one thing I would guard against I think in Canada is the sense of reflexive protectionism.
We are a middle power. We are largely trade dependent as a country. I really think that our success and prosperity are tied to welcoming trade, welcoming foreign investment, and yes, I think we want to scale up homegrown companies. Here’s the important part, we want to scale them up so they become global giants like Shopify. Being big but staying in Canada or erecting walled gardens against the global digital economy, I think it just doesn’t seem to be smart geopolitically and it’s just not smart economic strategy in the medium or long run.
SEAN SPEER: It raises bigger questions about the state of the global economy. We’re having this conversation at a moment where we’re seeing so-called decoupling between the U.S. and China and the prospects of a new digital curtain. Help us understand, Kevin, the consequences for business and users, and how does Meta as an American-based global company think about the prospect of decoupling?
KEVIN CHAN: Look, that’s a really good question and a very cutting edge one. Actually, thank you, Sean, for asking because I don’t think we think about that enough in Canada, to be honest. I actually think we should all be concerned about that and it doesn’t really matter where you’re from or what company you work at. The global internet is valuable to the billions of people and the millions of businesses that rely on it every day precisely because it is free and it is open. What we mean by that and what I mean by that is anybody can join, anyone can leave, anyone can interact and communicate freely through it.
The splintering of the internet into a free and open internet largely, I think you could say exemplified by “The West”, and authoritarian internet like what we find in China and increasingly places like Russia is a real concern for anyone who cares about freedoms generally. I would just add, incidentally, that is why any domestic policies that we put in place that restrict the free flow of information should also be concerning.
If we impute value into things like hyperlinks that are actually the lifeblood of information sharing on internet, if we erect walls to protect our economy and cut it off, or try to create friction, that makes it less obvious how we plug into the global digital economy. I just think that those things are just directionally just away from this notion of a free and open internet at a time when we are facing fragmentation and we should be clear about what are the principles that underlie our digital policies and be clear about which side of that we stand.
SEAN SPEER: For my penultimate question I want to move in a slightly different direction if that’s okay. Facebook has emerged in the past half-decade or maybe slightly longer as a powerful tool for different forms of online advocacy including, of course, politics. Let me ask a two-part question, Kevin. First, was that envisioned by the team? Maybe put differently. When did you think it became clear that Facebook had this potential through its networking platform? Secondly, how does Meta balance its goal of creating a positive community experience on Facebook at the same time that it faces demands from advocacy groups including politicians and others to leverage the platform to advance messages or pursue a political goal?
KEVIN CHAN: Sean, again, these are some great questions. I think people don’t ask them enough, so thank you again. It actually is interesting and instructive. If you look back 20 years ago when Facebook was founded, I think it was 19 years ago. Facebook has always been a mission-driven company with the goal of connecting everyone together and building community. If you go back to its founding, again, it’s important to remember Facebook existed before it was a company. This mission is actually deeply baked into our DNA. Now, over time as we establish success, there are now two plus billion people on our services, you’re going to naturally have different groups of people who will want different things from the platform.
I think that speaks to the controversy of being a global platform and working on a global platform. For example, we can just take one just to illustrate the point. On speech issues, I think, no matter where you try to draw the line—so we’ll go back to this notion of content policies that we have—no matter where you try to draw the line, there will be a good number of people on one side that say you took too much down and an equally good number of people that say you left too much up.
That is, I think, the reality of content moderation today. If governments and parliaments want to regulate that instead, I think that will be helpful to us. You’re setting industry-wide baseline standards. But I also think then we should also be clear-eyed about the fact that it will be governments and parliaments that will inherit or share in that responsibility, which, as I noted, is a very challenging space to be. I just don’t think that there are any free lunches here.
Content moderation is a wicked hard problem, which is something that someone from The Economist said to me recently and I think that’s right. So we shouldn’t pretend there are easy answers to it. Probably no matter what you do when you have two, three billion people using these services, no matter where you draw the line, there will be some sizable constituency that’s going to have an opposing view to that.
SEAN SPEER: Final question. Coming back to the Metaverse. Let’s wrap up, Kevin, with you painting a bit of a picture of what success might look like. If you come back on Hub Dialogues in say three or five or 10 years. I asked you what happened in the intervening time, what would you admit and be satisfied with in terms of progress? Can you help us understand what that might ultimately look like?
KEVIN CHAN: Look, first of all, Sean, I hope you’ll have me back earlier than that.
SEAN SPEER: Deal.
KEVIN CHAN: Look, I think for the Metaverse project, I think success will be that people, consumers see value in it. I look at my kids and they’re already in virtual worlds in Roblox, in Minecraft. They actually think nothing of buying virtual assets, like clothes for their avatars. They also build virtual worlds and they do them to play with each other but they also do it to socialize, they actually spend time just hanging out in a virtual world that they built. I don’t think this stuff will go away. It will be interesting to see how it evolves as the next generation comes of age. Of course, I think it’ll be a success if we can help bring these new technologies to light. We have talked a bit today about what is already there.
We’ve talked a bit about the building blocks from a policy point of view, but from a technological point of view and based on the vision that we have, a lot of this has not yet been invented yet. We’re talking about lifelike avatars. We’re talking about holographic projections from smart glasses. We are talking about persistent virtual worlds that millions of people can play and work in and you need the computational power to be able to support that in a synchronous environment. All these things are still—they all still lie ahead. It’s really exciting stuff. I just feel very privileged to be along for the ride.
SEAN SPEER: We’ve been grateful to be able to join you for part of that. Kevin Chan, the global policy campaign strategist director at Meta platforms, thank you so much for joining us at Hub Dialogues.
KEVIN CHAN: Thank you very much, Sean, for the opportunity. I really appreciate it.
