So today I'll be talking about starting X edge deployment of Kubernetes clusters And I'll introduce starting X a little bit first But to make sure people understand what it is and I'll give a short demo of us actually deploying remotely What we call a sub cloud on a distributed cloud so starting edge is an edge cloud technology, so it's basically a Kubernetes built around Kubernetes built around CentOS operating system we can run open stack optionally, but it's a cloud deployment We can deploy it in number of configurations. You can see here We can apply it all the way down for an edge and typically an edge configuration down to one or two nodes One if you don't need high availability in a hyperconverged configuration We can deploy it in a duplex if you need higher or need a redundancy or if you need even higher capacity One of the other configurations we have is what we call distributed cloud and distributed cloud is where we take a central cloud run as a control plane controlling Monitoring controlling deploying updating running functionality like that also acting as a registry For all these sub clouds the sub clouds themselves or the these individual clouds are all autonomous. They're all their own Kubernetes cluster. They're all Typically targeted at high availability and low latency applications So the And we can deploy up to up to a couple hundred and we can deploy horizontally We can deploy with with our distributed cloud configuration. We can deploy deploy out to a thousand sites today So we can have a thousand sites all controlled all monitored all installed by a central site Optionally, I think I might have mentioned it too. Optionally, they're all they're basically Kubernetes, but also we can run open stack on them if you need virtual machines and container support Container support is what we get out of the box and then you can run virtual machines. We're not running Although you can we're not running Kubernetes on virtual machines. We're running Kubernetes next to virtual machines So this is just a little bit about what I'll show you and that kind of steps So we're gonna we have a system controller Installed and we want to just deploy a single sub cloud. We want to do it remotely This the assumption is that the server is out of the box installed has not had anything installed no operating system and it has a Baseband a baseboard management controller BMC in it So with the really the phasing is that you we would initially do the remote install Using redfish from the system controller install the operating system and Kubernetes We could do that in two ways one is we could pre we can pre-stage the files or put the files Locally on there and this helps if you have a scenario where you want to just put the machines out there And you don't want to download over the network for instance downloading an entire image and also downloading a lot of containers So remote registry can take a lot of bandwidth on what might be a spotty network to to That can take you know hours or you know just to transfer all these files So you can pre-stage them and that's kind of the pride when we show us the primary path here And then I was also if that path's not there or if you've pre-staged the files and they've changed there's been an update since you've deployed Then it can transfer the package as well and that would happen automatically you don't need to Make any any Compensation for that it'll deal do that automatically in the next phase once we've rebooted and installed the software on it Then we'll pull the images because there are part of there are containers that are part of our our platform And then configure it in the end will manage it and what I'll do is I'll just run through a but I think it's about an eight Or nine minute demo of us doing a remote deploy In this case from a command line So the first thing we'll do is we'll just like the current number There's no subplots. We have currently a system controller with no subplots underneath it And then basically one command and all we need to pass in it is some yaml files that give it information about how to what to bootstrap How to bootstrap? Where the registries are the credentials for the registries things like that Also, what the IP address is once it boots up it needs to come up with an IP address so they can manage it from there In this case, we're prompting for the passwords so now the system controller is kicking off in the background now it's creating a In ISO and it's going to download that ISO and to a virtual media device on the board a sport management controller at the remote site And that's what's happening during the pre-deploy phase. So it's creating that ISO downloading at ISO and then it will boot This is to our boot the remote device office in this case. We're just going to do one node We could we could end up installing an entire cloud When we do that it'll install it from the first node The only time we have to do all of this on is on the first node to download from then on everything will download locally Then here's on the UI. You can see the details right now It's an offline disabled state everything's unknown because that's we're currently in the process of rebooting and we'll show in a second Doing the pre install process. So now it's going through doing things like installing the disk partitioning the discs to get ready for our route And our other partitions that we need running and now it's going through and it's a certain install all of our packages So there you can see things like Kubernetes being installed Kubernetes packages being installed And then we kind of cut some out of the middle and there's about 1200 packages total being installed there This is actually what it's when the ISO boots it's booting and the ISO is actually doing auto install So we're watching the auto install with that They are in the ISO the files are in the ISO, so it's pulling them out and installing them And then now it's it's setting some of the apps so you can see it's we're tailing the anthem ansible file So we're basically running an ansible playbook here to do the install from Then you come back. It's now finding the points doing the post install scripts now. It's rebooting. So this is the reboot steps We'll see the HP Flash screens in a second so this is booting up with With the the operating system. We've just installed the Kubernetes all of our services and Starling X are being installed were installed And then the next thing we'll start to do is run. There'll be an ansible playbook that we're running to do the actual The next phase of the update to do a lot of the configuration now So we've installed all of the operating system and then tools, but we need to configure them So here we're going to boot into Linux and we'll see the login prompt in a second And you can see back on the system control and we're just waiting for the waiting for it to come up now Once we've given you these commands to boot then configurates are to boot and install now. We're waiting for it to come back up and Respond over the network. We should go back to the Then all that all of this was initiated by that first Command with the DC manager sometimes stall command. So we haven't had to do anything manually. We're just waiting for things to happen Now we're still offline disabled And you can see like up on the top We're still in a disabled state with one of them because of the single subplot that dashboard is by the way showing system controller If we had a thousand subplots, you'd see all of those So now we're running the The ansible playbook to really to do all the configuration and it's doing a lot of things. It's configuring a Keystone in case we're using keystone for identity We're using some of the open stack services without running open stack in the in the Kubernetes like like the Barbican and Keystone and now it's restarting some of the services after it's configured and waiting for that to happen It's part of the platform. Yes, that's what we use for it while we use that and horizons while we use those for as parts of our of our distribution Now it's doing things with the registry. So it's actually creating there's a Central registry and now it's creating also a local registry on the subplot So every time now for instance when our platform reboots it can get it can get the containers images from local registry Not from a remote registry And now it's waiting for the controller zero which the controller zero is always our first node in a subplot Waiting for that to come up And now it's waiting for the the Kubernetes pods that were started that are part of our platform So at this point, we're still getting the platform up and running and the animal to get it to the point Where we're ready to run workload. This is like that. There's also some armada and helm stuff that's going on That's what's happening here. We're running all that and the configuration and Rebooting and then now we can see we'll see when we run a DC manager subplot list command. We'll see that Now we're unmanaged but in the bootstrapping state. So it's still not quite done and now it's it is kind of getting to the end of the actual bootstrapping A few more seconds here And it actually does another reboot so that This is the shutting down Again, we'll see the splash screen come back up So when it comes back up, it's going to be basically everything's installed everything's configured The only thing it's not going to be is we haven't actually closed the loop to say now we want to actually have the system managed So it'll be out of sync and unmanaged initially it should be In a complete state So it's ready to be that and we'll we'll do one manual one more manual action to actually say I want to manage this So now it's unmanaged but complete and it's out of sync and it won't be in sync until we actually manage it If we go back up here, that's telling us basically the same thing The only thing it's in sync is the certificates And this is the step. This is the one thing. So now I'm going to say I want it's ready. It's up It's it's an unmanaged state. Now I want to manage it So I'm going to go back to the sub cloud list It is now managed to complete and out of sync. So now what's happening right now is now it's it's going to go synchronize everything Because there's inventory of alarms That's all going to get synchronized. You can see there's one major alarm that will actually go away in a second You can see now the services are getting in sync We do one more time here So now everything is everything is green in terms of managed online complete install complete sync We can ssa now we can ssa. So this is ssh ssh into the sub cloud itself We're just going to check one thing there just to See if it's happy and we're going to run An alarm command just to see if there's any open alarms from the sub cloud perspective not from the The system controller's perspective and there are none If you go back to here, it's everything's green So we've gone basically remotely zero zero touch provisioning We've we've deployed this entire sub cloud with with our uh with the starling x And now we could do things if we wanted to add more nodes, we could do that as well All right, because without done installing a you know any interest we're uh, we're upstairs if you want to talk to us in detail up there But if you're interested, uh, there's some links to do the starting x site It is a open infrastructure project. So we're Up there and there's a lot of details up there about that And I guess any questions Yes, yes, it's typically what we're doing is we're installing like a duplex system We actually have a floating ips and we have to be able to settle all of those ips statically that happens when we create We actually create the iso And the system controller one of those the amplifiers says what ips is Said what we call the oam address The national ips addresses They will automatically install those ips So you burn the iso And then push that you push that down And is that cash if you have so you have a bunch of nodes that you're going to Install it in x?  We'll actually create that iso file Uniquely for each of the nodes because they might have other things that are different than ips The iso is about That's why the option of being able to pre-stage those or factory install files even second touch is better, right? So you don't have to you don't have to do that But you lose the ability to put an empty completely uninitialized server out there But you save the network and these networks you're putting these edge clouds on can be very touching Very limited bandwidth low priority for management traffic, so you don't want It helps you there because you don't have to deal with you know four hour transfer time of a two gig file And you have question What we would what we would see first is we part of the provisioning is we'd be told what the The baseboard manage the BMC controller address is and that's all we need So we can go out if that if that ip address is reachable then we can From there do all everything we need to do which is to push down that virtual media image Reboot it through the BMC Right. It's no no actual discovery. Correct. No actual discovery of the BMC. We were told the BMC's address and credentials For that we're using redfish Well, we're we're remote so we can't really pixie boot remotely over over a layer three network back to a system controller We do after we install that first node object called controller zero any future nodes That like a secondary controller or worker nodes They are pixie booted from the system control or sorry from the controller at the site So there's no going back over the network to do those and that's typical of a private net like a private 10 gig network So you don't have to go over the customer's network typically No, you're going to get one ISO pushed down to the site and everything else we pixie booted from the controller at that site Right Yes, yes Yeah, we don't have you know the idea of a seed node or something when we saw that first controller it becomes the source For everything locally after that point and the only the only reason to go back with the system controller is if You know, we're pushing down upgrades or pushing up Alarms or things like that or inventory It is but it's also a full up starling X node hyperconverged so it can be running workloads as well Yeah, so we don't we don't reserve a node for that purpose I'm not sorry. I understand you're you're pushing You could mean through redfish If you want to take this offline too, I could talk we can talk more detail if you want I'd like to understand your use case I think you might be getting close to some other use cases that we're looking at because When you get into industrial use cases and things you start to have A lot more devices that aren't Aren't cloud enabled devices or cloud devices, right? So how do you talk to them? Yes, okay All right, thank you


Don't touch it. We gotta fit into the camera. You'll butt Do not hit that thing behind us. You'll knock it down and it'll be a very bad situation Hey, welcome back to our stupider accident. It's i'm corbin. I'm a laxative man And you follow son instagram and twitter for more juicy content. It's so juicy. You don't care about it And uh, thank you I know you said that last time. Yep We are reacting to a toshaw Toshaw long Yes, we are reacting to a toshaw null uh Song an original yet. Well, I mean all of us are technically original, but it's an adaption Uh, yeah, no, no an original composition versus a cover Get away Oh, they're all technically but it's a star wars one Yes that one, uh, or is it done and who Some guy named johnny williams Some do yeah, I think I think his friends just call him johnny He actually went by johnny when he was a little boy Not anymore Once you're that famous you are definitively john john john williams john and people call you john williams You think this is john williams? His bank account is in a non-stop state of deposits just point point point If he has a good agent he does Here we go So ashley's here I haven't arrived. There was technical difficulties not a lot though. We've been fine. We've been fine But yes to charlotte all star wars. Here we go I know to some indians to every single america That film is the american culture basically there's hardly That music just like when a new film comes out right when the credits roll you just get this feeling when that when the copyright music starts the Yeah, that's you get the feels yep all the feels sure Um, but yeah, that was I love it love to charlotte all He always includes something new and original in all the videos like I love having the dancer and her bangles being included in the percussion Oh, that's so cool. So cool. Yeah, then the way they had the uh her in all black for the Don't March It is when Micah and I went and saw him at the hollywood bowl Now johnny williams that was probably the biggest eruption of excitement. Yeah was the imperial march Obviously john williams has more iconic scores than anyone else. Obviously, but this I mean it has to be his most iconic It is it's the one. I mean he did um He was doing a lot of work, but star wars is what catapulted him into the stratosphere of the composing gods I mean that's that's his That's the all the other ones came after that. I mean jaws was preceded that so jaws is what made it give him a name um, but Star Wars is what sent him through the stratosphere Yeah, and as always a little bit to short does when merging all the different Instruments and having the imperial march on the sitar. Yeah, it's fun. I like that As always to char is one of the most underappreciated composers and arrangers that I've ever heard in my life Absolutely, he should he should be internationally known for what he can do. Yeah, and he should be Composing indian films at the very least At the very least. Yep. So let us know what if his we should watch next and How was it Micah?


Good afternoon. For those who are new, I'm Dr. Theron Sherman. And in today's briefing, we will be discussing SCP-4518. There isn't any objectionable material in this document, so let's begin. Item Number- SCP-4518 Object Class-Safe Special Containment Procedures A fence has been erected for the purpose of preventing entry into SCP-4518. As attempting to enter SCP-4518 are to be detained, amnesticized, and released. Description SCP-4518 is an anomalous structure located at the end of the old Holloway Boardwalk in San Francisco, California. SCP-4518 consists of a narrow tunnel passageway containing 207 posters for missing children, primarily between the ages of 6 to 12, who disappeared from January 1, 1975 to December 31, 1999. Individuals who traverse SCP-4518 have reported inexplicable feelings of dread, somberness, or a sensation likened to, quote, falling off the edge of the world. SCP-4518-1 is a Class-1 spectral entity colloquially known as a ghost, residing at the end of SCP-4518, resembling a young child of indeterminate age, sex, or ethnicity. SCP-4518 displays symptoms of advanced depersonalization, often providing vague, unusual, or mystifying responses to attempts at interview. SCP-4518-1 is otherwise unremarkable. Addendum, Interview Attempt After reviewing this document's supplementary materials during an unrelated research project, Dr. Elizabeth Espinoza, then serving as Deputy Director of the Department of Spectral Affairs, requested to speak with SCP-4518-1. Due to Dr. Espinoza's position within the Department of Spectral Affairs, this request was granted. The following encounter was recorded shortly thereafter, and has been transcribed for Vatom. Begin log! Hello? SCP-4518-1 turns to Dr. Espinoza. You? Huh, well, that was fast. I don't understand. I saw his face on one of the posters, read the fa- Well, I suppose you wouldn't know what that is. At any rate, it didn't take long to put two and two together.  Yes, I see things clearly now. You were playing a game. He ran off into the woods.  When you told your mother what had happened, men with badges and blue uniforms came. You told them. No, that's not right. He never ran off. Did he? What? It was you. SCP-4518-1 approaches Dr. Espinoza. It was always supposed to be you. Uh, I don't... I mean, I think... I think we've gotten off on the wrong foot here. I never... I mean, I just... I wanted to... Liar. Dr. Espinoza is lost. End log! File update. As of April 24th, 2022, SCP-4518 now contains only 206 missing persons posters. No individual by the name of Dr. Elizabeth Espinoza has ever been employed by the foundation. Further investigation is ongoing. Thank you for listening.  Please become a patron or visit our merch store at the link in our bio to support our work. Secure. Contain. Protect.


Radar is an object detection system that uses radio waves to determine the range, angle, or velocity of objects. It can be used to detect aircraft, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor vehicles, weather formations, and terrain. The radar system consists of a transmitter producing electromagnetic waves. In the radio or microwaves domain, a transmitting antenna, the receiving antenna often the same antenna is used for transmitting and receiving and the receiver and processor to determine properties of the object s. Radio waves pulsed or continuous from the transmitter reflect off the object and returned to the receiver, giving information about the object's location and speed. Radar was developed secretly for military use by several nations in the period before and during World War II. A key development was the cavity magnetron in the UK, which allowed the creation of relatively small systems with submeter resolution. The term radar was coined in 1940 by the United States Navy as an acronym for radio detection and ranging the radio direction and ranging. The term radar has since entered English and other languages as a common noun, losing all capitalization. The modern uses of radar are highly diverse, including their interest real traffic control, radar astronomy, air defense systems, antimicile systems, marine radars to locate landmarks and other ships, aircraft anti-collision systems, ocean surveillance systems, outer space surveillance and rendezvous systems, meteorological precipitation monitoring, altimetry and flight control systems, guided missile, target locating systems, ground penetrating radar for geological observations, and range controlled radar for public health surveillance. High-tech radar systems are associated with digital signal processing, machine learning and are capable of extracting useful information from very high noise levels. Other systems similar to radar make use of other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. One example is LiDAR which uses predominantly infrared light from lasers rather than radio waves.


Hello, everyone. So today, I'll be presenting the self-analysing and auto remediating cloud platform certification. My name's Ronnie Fields, and I'm with PayPal. Originally, we had planned for Lax Sharma to also be presenting with me, but unfortunately, due to certain circumstances, he cannot come today. So first, I'd like to start with a little bit about our company, PayPal. As everyone knows, it's a massive fintech company, and there is no shortage of companies underneath the PayPal umbrella, such as Braintree, Venmo, and Zoom. And naturally, with such a large company, there are so many developers. We have, in fact, 3,000 engineers. We have 10 million lines of code, 1,000 releases a year. The statistics go on and on and on. And naturally, with any kind of large development system, you have no shortage. In fact, you actually have a very large open-stat cloud. And you can kind of compare it to Alice holding up the world. You have the open-stat cloud holding up the PayPal ecosystem. And in fact, we span three regions and span 12 availability zones as well. Naturally, with such a large infrastructure, we need our infrastructure to be robust as well. So the number one thing here is that the health of our infrastructure is critical to both our business and financial models. Not only that, we have a global presence as well. In fact, we are in most markets. And we also have a hugely distributed customer base as well. In fact, we are also one of the largest fintech companies around. So next, I'd like to present a number. 70%. 70% of all issues in our environment are actually reoccurring issues. So the question is, what's stopping us from creating any kind of system which will simply look into any kind of problem in our environment and then figure out if it's a part of that 70%. And then with high accuracy, we can go in and fix the issue. This is actually what health checks are and auto remediation is. And it's split up into four fundamental basic components. First, we have the health check execution, which is actually a data gathering organ, you can call it. Then based on the information we collect from the health checks, we then can perform monitoring and learning. Nothing new with that. Where we deviate from the standard is that we go one step further and we do test analytics and auto debugging. This is simply where we take a look at all the information that we have, as well as historical trends. And we will go in and say, hey, have we seen this before? Have we? If we have, then we can actually go on to step four and say, hey, since we've seen this before, what can we do to actually fix this? Is this a situation where a simple restart of a service is required? Can we remove this component from our environment to fix the issue? What can we do? So that's the fundamentals of health checks and auto remediation. Next, the pillar of automated health checks and remediation, which is the automated health checks. These are essentially tests, but these are hyper-fine, fine-tuned tests which are designed to operate in a production environment. Furthermore, they are designed to gather tons and tons and tons of data. In fact, we run these tests 24-7 on all availability zones. And in order to manage such a massive system, we use a combination of GitHub, Jenkins, and then we take the data, we database it, and then we display it with graphs. And in essence, through these automated health checks, we create what can best be described as a snapshot of the health of our entire ecosystem. And using this data, obviously, because we're dashboarding, we can also provide supplementary monitoring, which can actually handle certain niches which traditional monitoring cannot handle. And at any issues that we find in the environment, we will then always be sure to analyze it, debug it, and track it. So let's go on to the actual architecture. Number one, the health checks as mentioned. When we do the health checks, we not only collect certain kinds of test data, but we also collect and store log data for everything that can be collected. We store this information, specifically the log data in a log database. And for the health check specific data, we actually will go ahead and store that in a secondary set of databases, and we do various more human-oriented stuff, such as alerting and monitoring, and then we will go ahead and we will merge our data with the logs alerts analyzer. Now let's move on to the actual interesting part of it, the brain. Actually, we have two brains. The first brain is the pattern search engine. This is pretty simple. All we do is we take a look at what's going on in environment. Is there something anomalous going on? Is there anything we can really capitalize on? If there is, we will try to identify it via our pattern-based search engine. And if we cannot identify it, if this is new to our environment, we make a note of it via the issue logger and storage system. Depending on the results of our rule-based pattern engine, if we do find an issue, we then continue to the next step. We will take a look at our historical trends. We will see, can we actually fix this? Have we seen this before? If we have, fantastic. And if we haven't, well, again, that's an issue that we have to bring up with the issue logger and storage system. But assuming that it is there, we can just have a system go in and remediate whatever is going on. Now I'd like to go into a few examples here. First would be hot hypervisors. Basically, imagine if you would, theoretical situation, you have a multitude of VMs which are failing, but they all have some commonality. Specifically, there is one hypervisor, which is a common link between all of those. Now for a human, they can go in and see, okay, we do have an issue with that hypervisor. And even though the raw metrics, which are showing traditional monitoring data about that hypervisor, might show that hypervisor as being healthy, we don't actually know if that's the truth. But using the system, we can see, oh wow, look at that. All of these VMs, which are failing to properly boot up, they're all on a single hypervisor. So using the log data, as well as hypervisor distribution, and as well as any secondary data that might be available, the system can go in, take a look, and see, oh, okay, so this is a problem specific to one hypervisor. Let's go in and as per my historical trends, I can see that I should either restart the hypervisor or simply take it out of traffic. And depending on whatever it sees is more appropriate for that specific situation, it goes ahead and does that. And if required, it'll also alert for RCA. In fact, you'll find that a trend to be, for these examples, alert for RCA, because I mean you can never have enough human interaction despite a fully automated system. The next one would be port binding errors. Imagine if you would a situation where OVS is down. Oh, that's bad. So due to the miscellaneous failure patterns as well as any kind of log data available, we can actually have our system say, oh, looking at historic trends, OVS is down. Let's go ahead and fix it. So in this situation, due to the details of that specific occurrence, it might decide that simply restarting OVS could be what's required. And of course we alert for further RCA. The final example would be stuck volumes.  You look at the logs, you look at the failure patterns, and depending on the results, you then can find that the storage backend might actually be offline for whatever reason. So you go in, you restart the backend and you basically alert for further RCA if that's required. So what's next? We plan to actually take the system that we have and expand it to include predictive analysis. So basically, can we figure out what's gonna happen before it actually happens? We also plan to open source the two major brains of our system, which would be the pattern search engine, as well as the remediation suggestion engine. And next, we also plan to expand our system to include more low level components of a cloud, such as networking, as well as the more incredibly nuanced components of a cloud, which would be configuration management. Now ideally, I would like to take some questions, but I don't believe I actually have the time for that because I've been given the two minute signal. But I just wanna say thank you everyone and I hope you have a nice afternoon.


Andy Mendoza here alongside Nazareth head coach Rob Randall and coach a tough one this afternoon. Your guys got down 4-0 early in the first period but fought their way back. What can you say about their resilience to not really give up? Yeah, I mean, I just love the battle that they had today. We just can't dig ourselves a 4-0 hole against the quality team and expect to come out of it. I liked a lot of the things that we did. I think that we've got to do a little bit better job in the mental piece and staying composed in certain situations. But as far as our effort, I thought it was really good. And we just didn't do a good job early on. We gave them a couple goals and to their credit there, they're a really good team. We've got to get better. We've got to get better. And I think we are getting better. But we have to just start to put it all together. What adjustments did you make at halftime, especially in the face-off circle? Notice that you brought Gavin in to start taking the face-offs. All 12 face-offs were won by Lynchburg in the first half. In the second half, it was much more even. What adjustments besides bringing Gavin in and what did you see from him that helped you guys in the face-off? Yeah, well, I mean, facing off for us so far this year has really been our Achilles heel amongst many other things. So we're just trying to give some other guys a look to battle because we didn't think our face-off guys were doing a good job in some of our previous games battling. And so we decided to come out with Gavin. And he gave us a little spark there where the first couple of face-offs and did a good job. And so he's responded, I think, to some adversity. And we just told him to battle. There was no secret formula to it. It was just battling. And I thought he did a pretty good job. As good a job as he's done all year. But again, it comes down to the little things. And a couple of clears here and a little bit different ride here and there and a few more ground balls in certain situations. Five extra man opportunities you guys had. We weren't able to capitalize on any of them. But you also had less turnovers than Lynchburg. Are there any positives you take away from that? And how do you kind of get your guys to capitalize on those extra man opportunities moving forward? Yeah, I mean, we've got to do a better job on extra man. We really have to work on manufacturing goals. And certainly, extra man is no different. And we didn't do a good job there today. And you get one or two of those extra man goals. And maybe it's a different game. So that was a tough pill to swallow. But we just have to continue to improve, go back to the drawing board with the extra man, and get back after it. Thanks so much for the time, coach. Appreciate it and collect the rest of the season. Thank you, Andy.


In line with our strong commitment to our price stability mandate, the governing council took further key steps to make sure that inflation returns to our 2% target over the medium term. We decided to raise the three key ECB interest rates by 50 basis points. You just heard ECB President Christine Lagarde at our Monetary Policy Press Conference on the 21st of July 2022. She announced our decision to raise interest rates by 0.5 percentage points. It's the first time our rates have gone up in 11 years. There's a lot behind our decision. Inflation is high and it's putting a strain on people. This is still mainly due to the very high energy prices, but supply bottlenecks, high demand and a lower exchange rate are pushing up prices too. The economy is also growing more slowly and borrowing is getting more expensive for people and businesses. Many are worried that too high inflation is here to stay. That's why we've raised interest rates, to send the message that we will not allow inflation to stay above 2%. This decision is important for everyone in the euro area, which is why today we're going to explain what interest rates are and what higher rates mean for you, for the economy and for inflation. A couple of weeks ago, before we decided to raise rates, I spoke to Gabriel Gluckler, advisor here at the ECB, about all this and more. You're listening to the ECB podcast, bringing you insights into the world of economics and central banking. My name is Katie Ranger. Gabriel, great to see you again and to have you on the podcast to break down this really important topic for us. Great to be back, Katie. Now, before we get into the whole mechanics of it all, how interest rates work, the real complicated stuff, I really want to just go back to basics. What are interest rates? Well, interest rates are often just loosely talked about as the cost of money, but more correctly will be the cost of credit. And interest rate tells you how high the cost of borrowing is and how high the rewards are for saving. Why do we need them at all? Why can't money just be free? Well, yeah, it's a good point. What economists have are saying is there's no such thing as a free lunch. And I think the same is true also for money. Money is not free and there's an interest to be paid because you could look at it like a compensation for risks about the future and the future is by definition uncertain. So just take an example of you, Katie, who are kind enough to lend me, say, 100 euros so I can buy a flashy pair of new trainers. And then I promise to give their money back to you, say, in three months' time. Now, if we do that, you run a risk. Because in three months' time or over those three months, I could be running off, leave town, never to be seen again. You could run away with said trainers, at the speed of light. I might go broke and I actually have the money to give back to you. I go for a bit.  So there are a lot of reasons why you might not actually see your money back after those three months. And therefore you want to be compensated for that risk because you take that risk. And that compensation is the interest I need to pay to you over and above the 100 euros which I need to get back to you. Another way of looking at this is in terms of what economists call the opportunity cost. If you lend me today those 100 euros for three months, you don't have the money available for things that you would like to buy. I'm the one who's losing out. Not necessarily, but there's in a sense a sacrifice now for some reward later, which is when I pay back the money and the interest. True, yes. But for me, it's the other way around. With your money, I can buy those fleshy trainers today that I wouldn't be able to afford otherwise. So I have that benefit of enjoying something today and only pay later and that costs a fee and that's the interest rate. Okay, so it's depending on what side you look at it from. It's an opportunity or it's also a risk. So there's a lot of this compensating for risks taken and that's the interest rate there. Correct. And there's not just those risks. There's also other risks in fact that are all kind of incorporated in interest rates. One thing is we have inflation risk. So go back to the 100 euros that I borrow from you and today they buy me this flashy pair of new trainers.  That's quite a big change in purchasing power but I get the point, yes. Exactly, that's a risk and again you want to be compensated for the risk because after all if you lend me that money you want it back you want the real value of that money back and also that risk that purchasing power goes down also feeds into the interest rate. Okay. And there's another one which we call liquidity risk which is all about the money being available for the use at the right moment in time. So having liquidity available. Correct. So if I promised to put my money in the bank and I basically then lend it to the bank for them to use for other things hand out mortgages and so on but I say okay you can have it and it will sit there for two years say. So you won't touch it for two years. I won't touch it for two years. Then the interest I get from the bank is higher compared to if I always wanted to have it available at any moment in time. That's because I would run a risk that I might unexpectedly need the money so I park that money for two years and if in between I suddenly need that money I short notice then I won't have access to it. So in a sense I have a risk of not being liquid and I want to be compensated for that and that's the higher interest rate. Okay so we've covered what interest rates are and why we need them to cover this this risk these various different types of risk. Let's get to the complicated part how they work. Now interest rates have been low and haven't gone up for a long time especially here in the euro area and some of our younger listeners might not even remember when they last went up. Now Gabriel what happens when rates do go up? Can you explain that to us? Absolutely I will but maybe it's good to go a little bit back in history because it wasn't always like this that rates would go up and down. If we go back in time long enough say around 5000 years that is when the first time the whole concept of interest showed up. So we have records from ancient Babylon back in 3000 before Christ about interest being charged for borrowing grains. It wasn't just that money was also on grain on livestock and the interest that was being charged was a whopping 33 in a third percent. 33 in a third. For grain and for silver it was 25 percent. My goodness. What I find most fascinating is that that rate remained pretty much unchanged for two and a half thousand years until about 500 BC. So Katie you talked about rates not moving for a while. I think that was a very long while there. Well yeah 11 years compared to 2500 quite a big difference. We also then had a long period of time when the very idea of charging interest was considered sinful and therefore in fact outlawed. Christianity for many centuries made no distinction between interest and usury and usury that is kind of an indecently high charge on credit that would be basically unbearable for people who borrowed and ultimately condemn them and sometimes even following generations that children to serve them. And until the modern era the church therefore declared it immoral to charge interest to your brother your sister and to the present day much of the Muslim world disapproves of the notion of interest and we have a field called Islamic finance which works to make modern finance conform with the teachings of the Quran fascinating. Now to the modern times these days in our modern market economies changing interest rates play a powerful steering role. If interest rates go up it means that borrowers have to pay more for a loan and savers enjoy a higher return on their deposits. It's a powerful market signal that determines the zillions of spending saving borrowing and investment decisions that all of us take every day. And that's the key isn't it it's it's all about these decisions that are taken on a daily basis. But what I really want to know is what is our role the ECB's role in all of this. Now when I was preparing for the podcast I did a little experiment and I googled interest rates to see what came up. Now of course the ECB's rates were in there but it was buried amongst millions of results on different types of interest rates all with different names, mortgages, loans even student loans I saw that as well. So obviously the ECB's interest rates are just one of many but where exactly do we fit into all of this? Well maybe the first thing to say is that we as ECB we don't actually set the interest rate that you pay for your loan for your mortgage or that you receive on your savings. But what we do is we influence them. So what you found on your Google search is what we call market rates. And we as a central bank as ECB we can influence those market rates via what we call the key or policy interest rates. So how does that work? Our policy rates are those rates that we set for banks that want to borrow money from us the central bank and for the money they keep with us overnight. Then the interest rates offered by those banks to people and businesses outside move more or less in tandem with our key rates. Okay so basically banks can borrow money from us or put it with us overnight and the rates that they are charged or the rate that they get for that is then passed on through their operations. Okay correct so higher key interest rates so we put up rates higher rates for example mean that money is more expensive so to speak for banks and they pass the cost of money so to speak on to the borrowers and they raise interest rates for people like you and me who come and want to have a mortgage for example. Now this is an impact we spoke about how it affects decisions on how much people businesses, consumers can afford to borrow and by extension this influences how much money they've got left to spend on and invest on the things they would like to do. So if you want to think of an image it's it's a bit like a gas paddle or a break in the car just applied to the economy when accelerating the central bank's lowest rates making the cost of borrowing cheaper and we're putting the foot on the brake the central bank raises rates and this increases them the cost of credit so the overall speed of economic growth to stay with the same image in turn then affects how fast prices in the economy are rising and therefore inflation. Okay you use a car which is not very ecologically friendly so here's my question do our rates determine how much my bank will charge me for a loan to buy an e-bike for example then? That's a lovely example and it's much much better than my car absolutely. They do influence the cost of your loan but there's also lots of other factors of play like the demand and supply of money in a free market economy in other words how much businesses and people want to spend and invest how much money there is available and also how much competition there is for your custom to offer you Katie a loan. Okay so ECB interest rates influence the rates that we get on loans from from our banks but there are also other factors of play okay got it I'm with you. Now obviously the ECB influences the rates for all countries in the eurozone I mean the euro is the official currency in 19 countries soon to be 20 with Croatia but does that mean that the rates on loans and savings are the same across the eurozone so if I go and ask for the same loan in two different countries will I get the same conditions? I think you're pointing to a very important aspect that is very special to the eurozone there Katie as you're saying the eurozone is made up of 19 soon 20 countries and each country is of course different so we here in Frankfurt at the central bank have to make sure that what we decide here actually reaches people and businesses out there in a reasonably even manner across all the countries of the eurozone now that process we call the transmission of monetary policy quite technical now how that works there's various channels there at work they involve banks and financial markets and people's expectations and so on that's how this transmission works basically from here all the way into the economy and it's absolutely essential that those channels work smoothly and without distortions so that our decision here ultimately reaches people and businesses on the ground across the eurozone going back to images which is very important think of it like dropping a stone and a lake if you do that usually it produces pretty uniform ripples across the surface of the water but there could be places for example where the lake is frozen or whether there's driftwood or where there's debris in the water and then suddenly these ripples don't propagate as smoothly because the water has a different properties or different conditions in different places that's a really that's a really good image actually to imagine what it looks like now and that's something that we absolutely have to pay attention to so we don't just have to decide on the what's the right level of interest rates for the eurozone as a whole so what's the right policy right now but we also have to make sure that all corners of the eurozone effectively feel so to speak what we are deciding so let's recap we've learned what interest rates are and now we've also learned how they work and we've even learned about this idea of their effects being transmitted evenly let's turn to the practical side now ECB interest rates are expected to go up it's high time some people say because rates have been very low for very long why exactly has that been the case can you just explain how we got to where we are yes i think it's very important to also frame what's happening so for a long period of time interest rates in the euro area have been very low even negative so below zero particularly after the financial crisis and the european debt crisis so during the past decade or so inflation was very low for a whole range of reasons but it was in fact too low for too long and lower interest rates have helped credit to get cheaper and this in turn then boosts investment and consumption many jobs were created and with many more people in jobs meaning they got income and they go out and spend and the economy recovers and as the economy recovers also prices were slowly increasing again because there's more demand in the economy for things going around absolutely we then came covid and the lockdowns and with with this massive shock to our economies again our low interest rates and making sure that there's enough credit available at favorable rates made sure that the economic hardship that was inevitable with such a huge shock was not more severe and didn't last longer than absolutely necessary you mentioned inflation there gabriel and we are in a very different situation at the moment on that front inflation is too high and that's the context in which we're working at the moment let's look at the practical side of things what exactly does a rate height mean for people for you and me sitting here in our daily lives how will we see that let's make it very concrete a written example say you want to buy a house I need to borrow 100 000 euros at an annual rate that say now is three percent but it used to be one percent this means you will now have to pay your bank 3000 euros in interest per year and not just a thousand in addition of course to paying back the loan mm-hmm that may mean that you maybe other people who are in a similar situation may rethink their decision to buy a house and the same also is true for firms who are wanting credit to expand their business so if if that costs for borrowing goes up they may reconsider but also works the other way around if you say you have more money available that you need right now and you decide to save it and you stick it in the bank the interest is the money that the bank pays you to speak because they borrow in a sense money from you yeah like what we talked about in the beginning exactly and for example if you put 1000 euros in the bank account for your savings and the annual rate of interest is two percent then at the end of the year you will receive 20 euros in interest so instead of spending you see that extra interest coming in and you say maybe it's better to save and not to spend so if we zoom out from you and me and the effect it has on us and look at the broader economy it means fewer purchases by people fewer investments more people will be saving because there's they can get more by leaving their money in the bank that would mean that the economy would cool down right correct that's the mechanism and as a result and that is for us as a central bank the most important thing also the pressure for prices to rise will diminish and hence inflation will come down so for us taking that macro perspective Katie that you mentioned on the economy as a whole the mechanism goes like this in normal times if inflation is too high because there's too much demand and not enough supply we can raise rates to make money more expensive this way we slow down demand and investment and this will gently cool the economy and eventually inflation down you say in normal times Gabriel but I do want to be frank here we're not really in normal times at the moment I mean we've just gone through a pandemic hopefully we're coming out on the other side but who knows whether there will be a new wave and how that would affect the economy we're experiencing war on our borders in Europe for the first time in in over 75 years so it's difficult to speak of normal times you're absolutely right these are not normal times and currently we're facing a very unusual situation which inflation is high but economic growth is actually slowing at least for the short term so Russia's war in Ukraine has pushed up energy prices and food prices and worsen what we call supply bottlenecks just at the moment when they were starting to ease after the pandemic so what does it mean it means that many companies still find it difficult to get the materials the spare part and enough qualified workers that they would need for their production and if they do get it they often find that these inputs have become more expensive now what will firms do then they will eventually pass on those additional costs to their clients and their consumers through higher prices for their products and services so what we're seeing right now is that prices are going up for more and more groups of products and services across more and more sectors of the economy okay so what can higher rates do then in this situation given that it's not we're not in normal times so what higher rates will do is two things first they work why something we call inflation expectations if people and businesses start to think that high inflation is here to stay they want to be compensated so workers will demand higher wages and employers may in turn put up prices now that then turns into some sort of self-fulfilling spiral which we call the wage price spiral workers ask for higher wages companies have to put up prices to be able to pay those higher wages and it just keeps going round correct but we can put if you want to stop sign up there and say we signal we will tackle higher inflation and not just saying it we follow through with our action and that is actually raising rates and we show this way that we will not let expectations of higher inflation become entrenched we will make sure that businesses and workers and investors can be confident that inflation will come down to our two percent target over the medium term so that's one channel via the the inflation expectation second and as mentioned before higher rates also have that cooling effect and they take the pressure off as I mentioned because they can help to bring demand in our economy in line with supply as people and businesses rethink their decisions to spend or invest because rates are going up that counteracts the price rises that we see spreading and ultimately reduces inflation okay so higher rates will help to bring people's inflation expectations down and it will also help to cool down the economy by by reducing demand a bit okay there is one last aspect that I want to ask you about and that's kind of I would say the word that has characterized at least the last few months and that's uncertainty we don't know when the war will end for example I also said we don't know what will come for the pandemic what's next what can you do about that well we at central bank we cannot take away the uncertainty about the future states of the world this we cannot do what we can do is take away any uncertainty about our commitment to do what is necessary and ECB President Christine Lagarde has explained several times that we're now on what she calls a journey to normalize monetary policy so to move away from some of the unconventional measures that we have used over the over the last few years and in terms of interest rates the topic of our of our podcast today we now talk about a sustained path of interest rate hikes so this is this journey that Christine Lagarde referred to which of course starts with the first step the one we're expecting but there are more to come and how fast those further steps will be taken and how big those steps will be depends on how the economy develops and how we see in our assessment how inflation is evolving thank you Gabriel this has really been a very insightful and important conversation so i'm really grateful for you taking the time to to break down this topic for us now before we wrap up as you know as a regular to the podcast we always have a question that we ask our guests and that's for a hot tip linked to the topic we're discussing today Gabriel what do you have for our listeners right for our topic today i would recommend a fascinating book by the late David Grabo and it's called that the first 5000 years i found a very very stimulating he's an anthropologist and in his book he takes us on a fascinating tour covering millennia and many different civilizations and cultures to show how concepts like debt credit or money which are pretty abstract relate to people's social relationships what happens between people to the institutions they create for their societies and to the power that's exercise there in fact some of the nuggets about the the ancient history that i mentioned earlier are also treated in his book i wanted to say actually anyone who liked your anecdotes at the beginning would certainly be into this book i reckon absolutely the best bit it's not dry it's written very well in a very engaging style and of course you may not agree with his premises or where he ultimately takes his argument but i could not help but admire his efforts to fundamentally challenge and he won't unhinge a whole conceptual edifice of how money finance and markets work okay i've been working at the ecb and in central banking for over 20 years you weren't really at the heart of today's money system and i found it refreshing to think in new ways about this system and follow him and how he questions many of to speak the truth that we hold to be self-evident in this field so a very fascinating and stimulating read okay david grober debt the first 5000 years a another brilliant hot tip thank you so much gabriel thank you katie it's been a pleasure so what's next well our decision to raise interest rates is a further step in normalising our monetary policy more rate hikes will come and they'll depend on how we see the economy and inflation developing these rate increases will help bring inflation back to our two percent target if you want to learn more about this topic we've lots of resources on our website you can find all the links to those in the show notes that brings us to the end of this episode i want to thank gabriel gluckler for discussing with me what interest rates are and what higher rates mean for people the economy and inflation you've been listening to the ecb podcast with katie ranger if you like what you've heard please subscribe and leave us a review until next time thanks for listening


Welcome to episode 17 of Eat NATO for Breakfast. Today we have a very special programme. We're broadcasting in two languages, with translation into English and Spanish. If you're watching us through People's Dispatch English, you'll be hearing me in the voice of somebody else, our interpreter, Sarah, because today I'm going to be speaking Spanish. And if you're watching the programme through the YouTube of the party of the European left, you'll be surprised to hear Francesca speak Spanish. Many thanks to People's Dispatch and PIE for making this possible. In the previous 16 programmes we've spoken about history, the new Cold War, the ecological and feminist struggle for peace, and the specific impacts of war and NATO on the environment and health. But we felt that we needed to go deeper into one of the fundamental players of NATO and of this international crisis, which is the European Union. To that end, today we again have a programme full of women who'll speak to us about Europe's role in this war and in today's geopolitics. We have two prominent leaders of the European left party, Maite Moller, who's vice president and responsible for international relations and Claudia Haidt, coordinator of the EL Peace and Security Working Group. Today we have two Spaniards and two Germans. Welcome, Maite and Claudia. How are you today? And where are you speaking to us from? Are you looking forward to eat NATO for breakfast with us? Firstly, thank you so much for the invitation. It really is a pleasure to be with you. It's always a pleasure to see how women are empowered. And speaking of such inadvertent, almost masculine subjects, I'm in Pamplona, which is where I normally live between Pamplona and Brussels. And I am, yes, looking forward to eat NATO for breakfast, but I know I'm going to have to have some liver salts afterwards to be able to digest it properly. How about you, Claudia? Good morning. And yes, I would like to eat NATO for breakfast, too. And it could be hard to digest, so Maite is absolutely right. I'm talking to you from Stuttgart in the south of Germany. And by the way, Stuttgart is host to two major command structures of the US military. On the one hand side, it's the European command. And the European command, maybe you know it, maybe you don't, is the US military's supreme command for the European Union countries, but also for Russia. And Stuttgart is also host to Africa. This is the African supreme command structure of the US military. So those are the two only supreme command structures of the US military outside of the US. And this might give you an indication on how good allies the Germans are if they are host to those command structures. And me as part of the peace movement and of the left party, I'm always paying regular visits to those command structures in order to tell them that they are not as welcome as they think they might be. Yes, but the people that are welcome are ourselves to together have the NATO for breakfast, Franziska.  How are you today? Good morning, everyone. And thank you very much for organizing all the complicated arrangements around translation. And no, I'm not drinking coffee anymore. I've switched to herbal tea. It's been, to say the least, it's been exciting enough. I really need to calm down and calm my nerves. So no more coffee for me for a while. Thank you, Claudia. And thank you, MITRE for joining us today. I think Claudia already jumped right into the subject. We need to look at, we need to look at the role of the European Union, but also even more specifically the role of the different countries. We have tried to do so a little bit in the past already looking at speaking with people from Norway. We will be speaking with people from Italy. So we are looking into the countries as well to find out where they're standing today. It'll be the European Union session. So the war in the Ukraine has sort of brought into the sharp focus, the global situation in many ways. We clearly see that there's a division in the world again in the 20th century, like in the two blocks, a new Cold War. We have NATO on the one side playing a central role. And somehow the agendas between the United States and Russia are sort of playing out. And in the middle is Europe, not only geographically, but also politically, because the European Union is related in political terms and social and commercial, well, in political and social terms a lot with the US, but also in commercial terms a lot with Russia. So how do we see this role of the European Union in this global situation? What is the weight of the European Union in all this? And how has or why, to some extent, it doesn't seem that NATO is really determining the conversation or is strengthened in Europe, is really playing a much more, suddenly a much more prominent role after it seemed for a while like it, you know, it was superfluous military alliance. Maybe we can start with that question. Thank you very much. For this question, I could speak about until the cows come home, because there are several questions and they're all key, the ones that you've raised. And as this is breakfast, let's be as quick as possible. European construction, this is the issue that we need to talk about.  It's everything, including Russia. Europe geographically is so. That was a big blunder doing that. Well, economically, I hardly need to comment on that. But right from the outset, it should have been a construction of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals. So we started with a blunder. If we'd built a European Union, including the biggest country in Europe then today, we wouldn't be in the situation where in that's point number one. So it's key that we show our shame. So our shame for not having done this in Europe. How can it be that in Finland such an important decision which is to join NATO, a country, Finland, which has been an example together with Sweden and others of balance, just in five minutes overnight decides to join NATO without even consulting its population. This is a complete lack of democracy. Even in Spain, a referendum was held to decide whether to join NATO or not. I know it was a complicated thing to do. But what is happening now? The EU is strengthening, was encouraging people to join other countries to join NATO. They're not saying that openly, but in a veiled way they are encouraging countries that are not in NATO to join NATO. And I don't want to say that I'd like to eat NATO for breakfast, but actually don't think that I haven't realized that this mineralized version of European Union is completely useless and also completely dependent on the United States. Claudia, in your opinion? Claudia, your opinion? Well, as Maite already has pointed out, we are talking about the militarized European Union. And if we talk about European Union, we have to consider the foundations on which it is built. And you might know that the legal foundation of the European Union at the moment is the so-called Treaty of Lisbon. And this Treaty of Lisbon came into force in 2009. And it's the basis for developments in security and foreign policies and so on. And you might have noticed that there are some significant changes we have to see in European Union just now. And for example, this treaty includes something totally strange, at least for me, namely the obligation of member states to, and now I quote, progressively improve their military capabilities. So for my point of view, it's the only, it's not a country, but the only state building or community of states which is actually founded on a legal obligation, on a constitutional obligation, even to improve its military spending, to spend more and more money to become stronger and stronger. This is totally crazy. And now, actually, Germany is copying this framework of constitutional obligation to improve military spending. And we've already talked about this in other issues of Eatnato for breakfast. But Germany now is proposing to spending 100 billion euros just to improve its armament. And this 100 billion euros are to be put into the German constitution so that they really have to be used even by future governments for buying tanks and ammunition and war planes and fighter jets and whatever. So what we are seeing now has started by European Union, but is actually being implemented by more and more countries, for example, at the moment in Germany. And if we are talking about the European Union, actually, we have to talk about Germany. You know, for a long time, Germany has been the dominant economic power within the European Union. And it had catastrophic implications during the austerity crisis, the euro crisis, this dominant role of Germany. And now we've also seen an increasing political dominance of German policies within the European Union. And now this is actually complemented by a stronger military role. And if Germany is actually spending 2% of its GDP for military reasons, and this has a global implication. With this 2% of the GDP, Germany becomes the third largest spender globally after the U.S., after China. In future, we will see Germany. And this is not something I'm proud of. Coming from Germany, it's something I'm really actually ashamed of. And Germany that is going to be that strong militarily is normally not good news for neighbors and seeing it on a global scale. So I will do everything to stop this and I hope we find lots of allies for this. But we are talking now about the European Union. And Germany will be also militarily the strongest part within this European Union. So we just are not talking only about an alliance of states with the European Union. But we are talking about an alliance of states with a dominant power or two dominant powers, Germany and France side by side. We know that both countries don't have a past which is dominated by let's say peaceful foreign policies. Germany and I don't have to talk about World Wars and with France, you know, it's colonial past and even colonial presence, and this is forming the foreign policy of the European Union. So what we are seeing now is a very militaristic European Union. Some of this militarism is still ambition and not reality. But this ambition is really founded on a lot of money. So it can become reality. And thus this make the European Union into an independent player. This is what some of our politicians tell us, hey, it's going to be an independent European Union, independent from NATO, independent from NATO. But in order to be independent, you have to be our aims. You have to be our goals. You have to use our means. None of this is true. So what we are seeing with the European Union that it is working side by side with NATO, it has the same aims. And it's not an alternative. We are going to talk about this, but it's just a very bad copy of what NATO is. And it's not a European Union I want. I think Claudia has set the scene of what we want to talk about now. She spoke about ambition. She spoke about European Union ambition, but I'd like to actually carry on talking about what Maite said at the end of her intervention. Rather, this ambition also follows what the US is aiming for. So could you say a few words about whether the European Union is something in its own right, does it have its own independent foreign affairs? And if not, why not? And also because many of us would like a different kind of European project such as Claudia, what can we do to chart our own destiny? So first of all, Maite and then Claudia, let's see what you have to say. I think that Claudia has, yes, started to set the scene. I'm just going to talk about two specific issues. Firstly, from what I've seen as an older lady who's seen how the European Union has developed and I've followed it closely because I'm in charge of international relations for the European left and have been for the last 20 years, I don't know what you think about this and it's almost a question to you, but as I see it, there are increasingly worse overseas affairs representatives of the EU. A few years ago, we were complaining about our representative. What could we say now about Mr. Burrell? I don't know what's happening in the European Union today, but what started out being a very interesting project because it was a very interesting project, we were creating something rational in the European Union and I supported that idea, but this rational construction of a European Union should have its own policies, its own independent policies, economic, overseas, and where it has less of its own independent projects and I think Claudia said that quite clearly is everything that's related to militarisation and foreign affairs because here in this field, we are being completely controlled and led by the United States, so the foreign affairs policy of the European Union for me is something that makes me once again question and ask myself what's the European Union for and the second issue. There's also a problem of the states that make up the EU or rather the governments of the EU because otherwise it's just a kind of a circus, it's a kind of theatre where a lot of other countries are being harmed for example, Cuba criticising Cuba and criticising other people and other countries, so the European Union has a problem, it's a really serious problem which is who's ruling Germany, who's leading France, who's in the government of all the different European Union countries when for example, Pedro Sánchez goes to Ukraine to visit Zelensky. These images of our governments, of the European Union governments, for me are very concerning. It would seem that the only thing, only people that are saying things with common sense are Pope Francis and sometimes China and Cuba as well. So whilst our states, the states that are members of the European Union don't have progressive governments, governments that are against war, that are against militarisation and that in favour above all of peace, then the European Union is just a complete disaster and it would be better if it didn't have any overseas affairs policy. So we've got these dependent relationships. Thank you. Well, I think I'm just going to follow up on what Maite is saying, if it's okay. And what we are asking ourselves is if the European Union actually is something which is acting on its own with its own values with regard to its foreign policy. And yes, of course European Union is different from the US. But if you look on the foreign policy, actually the US government should write a thank you note to Putin for bringing the alliance closer together than within the last 10 or 20 years. Within the last 10 or 20 years we've seen some small manoeuvres of doing a little bit different things there and so what Putin actually managed is to enforce the structure of NATO again to make it stronger than ever before. So actually if we are talking about rational policies, I don't see them within the US government, within NATO, within the European Union, but I also don't see them in Moscow and with what Putin is now doing with his kind of foreign policies. Actually it looks like two trains running towards one another and all of them pretending it's not my fault, it's the other one who is rising, who is running towards me. And I have to keep on because if I don't keep on, then the other will win and this is moral bankruptcy. So we are talking about morals and not about policies and not about the people who will suffer by this kind of policies. And there actually has been pressure for a very long time by the US on its European allies to increase their military spending and to increase their military ambitions, level of ambitions. And this was okay, something happened, but not as much as the US government actually had wanted. What we've seen in the last years is actually that every crisis was used to increase the military spending and to increase the level of ambition for military activities. And now we see at least for the moment the final step, the war against Ukraine, which cemented the alliance, made it even more into a strong military actor, which is using this moment in time not to find ideas how to overcome the confrontation but actually to implement policies which will deepen the rift, which will make the world into an even more dangerous place. And it's like a militaristic reflex, but it's not a reflex, it's policy. It's policy which has long been provided for, but now has the moment to be implemented. And the reason for the US to put this pressure on its European allies to improve their military spending is actually that the US doesn't want to change its policy in Europe, but it wants to do less for the same policy and be free to implement pressure in the Pacific region towards China. So we see actually a continuation of US policies which are now being implemented by its European allies more and more and leaving the US free to put pressure on China over the Pacific. So we don't see this in recent years. I've seen the idea that the US is being a little less present in the European countries as something positive and I still see it, but what we now see is that it's bringing the European allies to do the dirty work more and more and make the world into an even more dangerous place. And we really have to make a break with this, not reacting on provocations, on war, on suffering as we see in Ukraine now by preparing even more wars and even more suffering, but by starting to be rational and prepare for peace and not for war. Thank you, Claudia. I think you raised a number of very, very interesting points. You say not react to the military, like not react to war with a military reflex of just jumping to the conclusions. One of the things that we have seen and one of the things that is being undertaken by the EU and by other countries around the globe, but not by no means all countries, is a different type of pressure, which is the whole idea of sanctions. So we've seen that in Germany it was Robert Habeck, but I guess also Josep Borrell, they all proposed that the Europeans should just turn down the heat so we could live without Russian gas and oil for a while because this was now for the war effort and this was gonna go and bring the Russians to heal. The idea of sanctions is a very, very tricky one. We see that it will likely harm many countries and the people we have an impact on food and energy security in countries actually from Germany to South Africa, so it is actually global, this crisis. And we also see that, for example, the investment of EU countries in US liquefied gas has increased. So we also, when we look at sanctions, whether they're effective is one question, but I guess another question that we need to ask ourselves is who benefits from these sanctions. And I would like you to comment a little bit on this, on the idea of sanctions as somehow a more peaceful way of solving the two trains racing towards each other. Is that actually, is that boycott against Russia even sustainable? Are these sanctions really harming the people that they should? I mean, again, I actually know the answer to that. That seems like to that moment, almost a silly question. But I would like you, if possible, to comment a little bit on this aspect of, let's call it what it is, of this type of war theater that is also taking place. If you could, Claudia, please. Yes, I'm really convinced that what we are seeing now with the sanctions, which are implemented, for example, by European Union is actually a continuation of warfare and a continuation of building up the blocks just by other means. It's not military in itself, but the implications, the destruction it causes, the death it will cause, actually are on a level with a war. So this is economic warfare, what we are seeing now. And just to be clear, there are some sanctions I don't have a problem with. To not export weapons is actually a kind of sanction. So yes, I'm in favor of sanctioning every country or at least every country which is engaged in warfare, not to send weapons, not to export weapons. It's a sanction I'm fine with. I'm also fine with, let's say, using the luxury yachts of oligarchs to make them into lifeboats. Okay. And if we use the big mentions of oligarchs, not only the Russian ones, we also have some Ukrainian oligarchs to use them to get flats and good living for people. Also no problem for my side. But if we talk about sanctions with widespread effects like the sanctions on oil and gas, we have to be very clear that they are causing actually more harm than they are useful and they won't help the people in Ukraine. You know, the sanctions the EU is implementing just now are not short-term sanctions. You can see it by the question that some of the EU countries only have to implement them in two years or in three years. So it's not about the short-term help for Ukrainian people. It's about the restructuring of economic connections and of economic cooperation. And this economic cooperation is being more or less stopped or it's on the way to being stopped between the Western and Middle European Union countries and Eastern Europe and also with China it's not possible because the links are too strong but at least the links with Russia are really now being destroyed by this phase. And we are talking really about a European Union which is doing everything not to be a bridge to Russia but to building up new walls. And economic cooperation can be part of a bridge-building process. And we actually see a frenzy of sanctions in the moment which don't stop with economic sanctions. But they are continuing with cultural sanctions. They continue with stopping... stopping ways in which people from different countries can cooperate with one another. You know that there is this concept of twin cities. There is a city in Germany cooperating with a city in Russia. And really a big part of those twin cities have now stopped their cooperation.  So what I now see is only foundations for future wars, for future confrontation and no foundation for future cooperation. And actually the ones who are going to bleed for this are especially in the global south. We already see in Egypt, in Tunis, in many countries in Africa and Latin America. In Asia we see a problem with hunger, with people not being able to buy what they need to survive. This is a huge, huge problem. And I don't see any pressure of the European Union to free the ships which are loaded up with grain in Ukrainian harbors. There is no pressure on this. There is pressure on a lot of other things, but no pressure to actually help those who are in need. So my take on the situation is that European Union is actually only acting in those areas of policies in which they are actually making the problems stronger and deepen the problem. And it's not really active on those areas where they could actually make a huge difference on a global scale. To make my final point, you can see the permanent nature of the sanctions of the restructuring of economic cooperation by the fact that the sanctions which are decided on now are not conditioned. They are not conditioned to withdrawal of troops or not conditioned to ceasing hostilities. They are just implemented full stop. So if they would be for people in Ukraine, they would be conditioned to the cessation of war and this isn't happening. All sorts of things are happening as we've seen in many things that aren't happening. But what we are seeing is that this is unsustainable. All these studies on energy and food security say we're heading for disaster. And also the words of Borrel, which Francesca mentioned, it seems to be forcing civilians to just actively boycott Russia from our homes. So we seem to be obliged to take part in this war. But this situation in Europe, I think we all agree, shows all the different ways that it's affecting it. And like all crises, there's also this need to seek strange alliances. We've seen, for example, how in the Middle East with the support of the Mujahideen. And in Europe, if you remember, in this dangerous context, sometimes there seems to be this naturalization of the extreme right in the European Union. And I'm really, really interested in your opinion on this. The extreme right already promotes hatred, racism, the limitation of rights, and representatives of the extreme right are increasing in number in national governments and in the European Union. Recently, you held some very interesting talks about that, talks entitled No Pasaran. We're going to put up a link for everyone who's listening to us if you'd like to have a look at that. But this violent situation is also being mixed in with sending weapons to Ukraine. And also, of course, in Ukraine, there are also organized militarized extreme right forces. So you're sending out weapons. You don't know where they're going to end up. And then there's this naturalization of violent replies. Can you say a little bit about that, Mighty? One of the most serious consequences of this war. You called it the naturalization. And I'd say the whitening of the extreme right in Ukraine, laundering it, as it were. I mean, the leaders there are dressed in military fatigues.  You know, here I am. We know who he is. We've been in Kiev. We visited Ukraine, of course, before the war broke out. And we saw that in Ukraine, the government is an extreme right-wing government, as is the Hungarian government. It's an extreme right or right extremes, whatever you want to call it. And look at what's happening in Poland. Poland and Hungary are both in the European Union. And I've not seen any sanction against these countries who forbid homosexuality being spoken about in schools. Or the idea that Poland has to put an end to abortion. Nobody's sanctioning that. So it's almost like we're laundering and naturalizing, as you call it, the extreme right. This gradual naturalization and it's nauseous. I want to return to what I was saying before. The problem is that the European Union is just a sum of heads of states and presidents. These are the ones who are taking decisions. Economic decisions are taken by the ministers of EU countries. Others as well. They're not taken in the European Parliament. Major decisions are taken by governments, individual governments of the European Union. So it's a construction of the European Union that has failed at its roots. And I'd go even further than that. I think Claudia has said this a few minutes back. Who would have imagined that in Spain, after dictatorship until 1975, that today, this morning, seven o'clock in the morning, that there's an extreme right-wing party and it's a powerful party and a great deal of potential. They're completely shame-faced. They don't have any problem insulting people. Valtonik may end up being thrown into jail for having criticised the former king. And this party's already governing in a region of Spain together with the popular party. So it's not just a matter of laundering them. It's just that they've been completely integrated into... They've been normalised. I mean, it's only a few days ago in relative terms that there was a world war. And now we've got Madrid in a situation of more than 40% of people that are voting for the right and very, very high abstention levels in France as well. What are we going to see what's happening in France and what's going to happen in the legislative elections? But at the end of the day, this laundering or naturalisation of extreme right is becoming something completely normal. And this is a fact. It's not something that might happen in the future. No, no, it's already happened and it's here to stay. And I want to finalise by saying sanctions, and please allow me just this, sanctions already always paid by civilians. So you've got on the one hand the extreme right on the up. On the other hand, sanctions, whenever we feel like using them, we use them. What we're doing with that is we're getting into a situation in which there's a lack of democracy because people really don't care anymore. The case of NATO joining Finland is also a lack of democracy. And what does that help? It feeds the extreme right. And I don't want to mention the Eurovision Song Contest here because I think that's just represents such levels of degeneration that Eurovision Song Festival and what you see in the television about that, you just win against Russia. That's it. First, Russia isn't allowed to take part in the competition. This is a lack of democracy and a lack of democracy in my, where I come from is called extreme right. That's what lack of democracy means where I come from. Thank you, Maitre. I think the next, I think as far as all the contradictions and also the deficits that have been listed in the show that we've talked about, the contradictions of increased military spending for within Europe, like the controversial European Army project, PESCO and Frontex and all of these incredible contradictions also some of it very much related to what Maitre is calling a lack of democracy. We can speak a lot about what are these contradictions and deficits. I think I would like for our, I think it's the last question of the day because we're already running out of time again as it always happens when we get into an interesting conversation that we want to continue and continue because only, I don't know, sometimes only halfway through the show do we realize where do we need to go with this and where do we want to go? So we never have enough time, but hopefully we will make time perhaps in Madrid that would be great if we all meet there during the countersummit that is being prepared. But what is my question is listing the deficits and contradictions is one thing but we have the pleasure to be here with people who are actually in the European left and who are in the places where I don't know civilians and citizens might turn to and say, what do we do? How do we go about this? So what can we propose? What can we work on together? How do we bring things back together? Because for example, what Maitre was just saying about Poland and Hungary, I sometimes wonder about choices. What are the choices for these people? So before we say they all vote right because they're illiberal people who, you know, what is a good left alternative for them? Where can we provide? How does the left provide this alternative and be an alternative? And so I hope that this is meant as a positive question. I hope that we can end on a positive note of like how do we work together? How do we challenge our strength? And yeah, so I would like to give the word to Maitre and Claudia for a few more minutes to please help us, you know, make a proposition, help us with the proposals that we can join and work on together. Thank you. What a complicated question that is. I believe that the left and ecological and progressive forces that question current economic models need to unite. We need to unite in some countries that's being achieved. I think Spain is an interesting example as is France. It's a very interesting example after having been through those presidential elections as well. The progressive and left wing and green forces have actually argued much more with each other than with opposing forces, but they've managed to achieve something. And the Cubans, the Cubans say in these things, united in diversity. So that's the project that I purchase. But I want to say something to you, Francesca, which I think is what you're trying to sell us to do. What is our goal? What is the goal here? The key goal at the moment is peace. Peace. It's a key goal. And what's more, it doesn't unite all of us. We're not all united in peace. It only unites those that are anti-militarists and environmentalists. Those that are anti-militarists and feminists, for example. The issue of peace is a key axis that does unite. But some people will be left out. And those that are left out, we know who they are. And I'm not referring here to the extreme right. I'm referring to rights, right-wings. You can put any other objective before right that you want to. This needs to be a debate with social movements, with unions, with everybody so that it's not just an institutional unity because what we need is unity from the bottom upwards, from the grassroots level. So the issue of peace, peace has always been key. But the thing is, we're very divided. If you look at all the different calls that are out there for the rest of May and June, there are all sorts of calls for peace, but they're all different. And we need to talk about that. We need to say, look, okay, great. We have this vision. This is our view of the path to peace, and this is ours. But at a given moment in time, we need to bring together political spaces, people that are in grassroots movements so that we can all together come together and build peace. That's the only way to get the world to change. And if we don't understand that we need to leave outside the 25% or the 20% that separates us, sometimes we just start handing out banners. We have our own slogans and our banners. Well, no, you need to get more people involved. You don't need to say that, oh, I'm the one that's most fighting for peace. We need to unite. We need to work together. Stop looking at what separates us because, as you quite rightly said, Francesca, this summit not against NATO, but in favor of peace, because although, okay, it's against NATO, but it should be a peace summit. And this should be the place where we should all come together and with that carry on being determined to work together, together, because otherwise we're going to still end up being separate trade union forces, political forces that are fringe forces facing up an enormous, great big enemy. Thank you. Yeah, well, let me continue from where my tail left. And for me, it's especially interesting that within the last two years, we have seen that everything is possible. Within the corona pandemic, we've seen that it is possible even in our world of today to stop everything just now if you want it on a political level. And within the last weeks and months since the beginning of the war against Ukraine, we've seen that there is money. The 100 billion we already talked about in Germany, we never seem to have enough money to fight climate change. Although it's much more dangerous than Putin could ever be because it's got the potential to destroy everything on Earth that we see. So if there is the political will, we can actually decide everything politically. This is what we have seen. Even if it wasn't to the best within the last two years, sometimes for people, that we've seen that political decisions can be made. And the Tina principle that there is no alternative actually should never be used as an argument after those years. But we should only ask if there is a political will to change something. And we actually also have seen that it is possible to welcome people, to welcome refugees with people from Ukraine. It obviously wasn't as big as a problem as with people from other regions of the world. So we see that societies are able to change, able to do things if they want to. And if we use this energy to on the one hand side fight climate change to tackle all the essential crisis which are globally on the agenda or should be on the agenda like hunger or illnesses and so on, we actually could achieve a lot. And it's clear that all the global problems can only be solved if people on the globe work together. And if we start our policies with people and not with governments, we have a good first stepping stone. Therefore, it's good that if NATO heads of state are meeting in Spain, but also people from different countries are meeting and showing NATO is not acting in our interest, is not helping to solve the problems which are on the table. But we are part of the solution, NATO is part of the problem. And this might sound idealistic. And I know that people like Putin will not disappear tomorrow. But what NATO is just doing is self-fulfilling prophecy, is helping to get people like Putin stronger. They themselves act as a role model for people like Putin. All the things that we see now with Putin actually have been in some ways already ways he's working on just now have already been worked by NATO states. And I don't want to apologize for him, not at all. What he's doing is a crime, is a war crime, he should be punished for it. But it is really a difference if people are saying this or if governments who are responsible for millions of people within, for example, the War of Gerald are saying this is a crime. So we have to really talk about who is putting what kind of moral standards to what kind of developments. And what we're seeing is really an increase on hypocrisy and we have to go down again and put the same standards and our same ideas to whoever is acting. And we expect of the governments of the NATO state to do everything to prepare for peace and not for war. Someone, I don't know who said that we have to prepare for war with the same and even more intensity than people who are preparing for war. So we not only have to wage war, we have to wage peace and do it with great intensity. We have to prepare it, found our alliances and really put peace first, peace with other nations and peace with the environment. This is a big task, but I'm really optimistic that we can achieve it. Thank you. Thank you, Claudia and Maite, for having spent some time with us today. We've all from our homes and from our towns find it really difficult to understand what is happening in Europe and what European institutions and European policies are all about. I know Maite is always very good at explaining to us how the council works, how the parliament works, because we need to analyse and see, as Maite said, what is this project that we want to create? We all need to think about political will and democracy. Of course, with our alliances, that's impossible. We need to think about immigrants. We need to think about what's happening with women's rights and LGBTI communities, what's happening with racism, what's happening with extreme right, because peace isn't just a lack of war. It's the fact that social justice exists in our lives. We will carry on working. We do work united. We will carry on doing so. We're hoping that we can carry on seeing each other and building upon what we're working in Madrid from the 24th of 26th of June, thanks to the interpreters, thanks to Vishard, our producer from People's Dispatch, and of course all those people that have made it possible to have this first bilingual episode of our programme. I want to mention our next episode, we're really, really happy because in the next episode we're going to have two very important guests, Cosmos Muzumale and Akendi, who are going to talk to us about the situation in Zambia and the advance of military bases in Africa and the role of Africa in the new Cold War and global NATO. And I'm sure things will crop up related, as Claudia said, to French colonialism. So we'll see you next week. Let's carry on building. Weapons will not save us. Let's together build this peace alternative. Thank you very much.