Say that again, good morning, everyone. It's wonderful to see you all here this morning, and thank you to everyone who's streaming in with us live stream. We're really excited to be here. My name is Hari Han, and for those of you I don't know, I am the inaugural director of the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. I want to thank the Stavros-Nearkos Foundation for creating the opportunity for us to be here today, for helping us organize and host today's event, and for opening this gorgeous space up for us to use, and providing all the on the ground support that the entire team has provided over the past few days. So thank you. I also want to thank all the speakers who have come to join us here today. You're going to hear more about them and from them shortly. For those of you who don't know much about the SNF Agora Institute, we were founded in 2017 with a transformative gift from the Stavros-Nearkos Foundation. We are an academic center and a public forum that is dedicated to improving and expanding civic engagement and informed inclusive dialogue as a cornerstone of global democracy. Since our founding, we have participated each year in events around the Nostos Festival, but for the past two years, many of our events were online, and so this year you can imagine how excited we are to be able to be back here in person in Athens. The SNF Agora Institute has expanded significantly since the last time that we were here on the ground, including bringing an important and a very impressive group of faculty to Johns Hopkins University, who are all endowed by the Stavros-Nearkos Foundation. So I just want to take a few minutes to show you a video that will introduce these faculty and a bit of the work that we're doing at the SNF Agora Institute. When we think about democracy and its original formulation, it was about sort of the capacity of people to act together. For me, the big question is, how can democracy survive and thrive in the United States at a local level, national level, and globally? What we're finding now is democracy feels fragile. I'm trying to answer a lot of questions that have to do with the long-term historical and economic transformations that have made it more or less possible for women to participate fully in public life. Power concedes nothing easily, and it certainly concedes nothing when it comes to questions of inequality and race and racial difference. First, we need to think about what type of democracy we want. So I look at partisanship and polarization and thinking about sort of solving this increasingly radical partisanship that we see in our politics. We find ourselves in a world where there is disinformation, there is misinformation. There are all of these flows that we have to begin to think about how they affect democracy and the information associated with elections, so I think it's being crucially important. I am trying to answer how people in civil society, how organizers can be more successful, especially in authoritarian contexts when it's very difficult to do collective action. We think about all of the kinds of problems that we face, things like climate change, low education, immigrant health. All of them involve lots of people who are working to solve them all over the place right now. And so the core question for me is sort of how can we bring these folks together to work together to come up with better ideas and better solutions to these kinds of problems? So the SNF Agora Institute is designed to engage people in the contestation, struggle, and deliberation that make democracy work all over the world. The investment that Agora represents to bring together people who are brilliant in across their fields, to ask not just how do we fix it, but how do we first understand the problem better, to me that's exactly what a university ought to be doing. Agora is central to exploring questions around democracy, but it is also central, I think, to the public conversation in ways that are transformative. The democracy is not just a set of rules, it's not just a set of practices, but it's actually a set of commitments and beliefs and connections to one another. So the Agora Institute is a really exciting place to be. And hopefully this synthesis of these particular people will be able to provide this really sort of rich, creative ground from which we can build something completely new. So of course, the SNF Agora Institute takes both its name and its inspiration from the ancient Athenian Agora, the birthplace of democracy where citizens came together to learn the rights and responsibilities of citizenship and develop the capacities they need to be fully engaged citizens in democratic life. We'd like to say that taking collectively our work or our mission at the Institute is to try to realize the promise of the ancient Agora in modern times. But over the past few years, the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated in stark terms the idea that human health depends deeply on how well governments and in many cases democracies are actually able to function. And conversely at the same time, the health of a democracy, its ability to safeguard the health of its citizens depends on how we all take part as owners and curators of our own democracy. So today's symposium is really looking at the relationship between the often unexpected ways that human health and democracy are connected to each other. And we'll be talking about ways that active citizenship can lead to real change in the health of our communities. To kick us off, it is my pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker, Audrey Tang. Good morning, Minister Tang. Audrey Tang. Audrey Tang, as many of you probably know, is Taiwan's digital minister in charge of social innovation. She's a tech entrepreneur and activist who has done trail-brazing work using technology and data to empower citizen participation in governing. She's known for many things, including revitalizing the computer languages, Pearl and Haskell. I probably pronounced that wrong, I'm sorry. And for co-building the online spreadsheet, EtherCalc. In the public sector, she has served on the Taiwan National Development Council's Open Data Committee and the 12-year Basic Education Curriculum Committee and led the country's first e-rulemaking project. In the private sector, she has worked as a consultant with Apple on computational linguistics, with Oxford University Press on crowd lexicography, and with social text on social interaction design. In the social sector, Tang contributes actively to Gov Zero, a vibrant community focused on creating tools for civil society with a call to, quote-unquote, fork the government. That's their phrase, not mine. And so important to today's conversation, Minister Chang's leadership was integral to Taiwan's leadership to COVID-19 and for using technology and citizen participation to manage the pandemic. To improve contact tracing, she developed what she calls a people-public-private partnership among civic tech leaders, the country's major telecoms and the government to develop 1922 SMS, a system that gets needed data to contact tracers without the need for an app. And she did it all in a week. It's innovation at its very best. To help Taiwanese citizens better find available masks, she made pharmacies mask inventory data open and available to the public in real time. These are just two small examples of many ways Minister Tang has worked with citizens to innovate and better deliver services, strengthening the health of her country and strengthening civic fabric in the process. So Minister Tang, it's an honor to have you with us today. Thank you. Good luck with time. Really happy to be here. It's the first time I heard the entire bio-pronounced 100% correctly, so it really, really good to be here. Now, I have just slides for less than 10 minutes. I look forward to more of a Q&A, but just to give you an outline of how we countered in Taiwan the pandemic with no lockdown, without a single day of lockdown, and we countered the infodamic, which is like pandemic, refer mental health without any administrative takedown. And that relies on the health of our civic technology sector, the civic sector, and also the three pillars of social innovation and that's fast, fair, and fun. The fast pillar pertains to this civic technology called PTT, is often said to be Taiwan's Reddit, except it's open-sourced and not funded by advertisers or shareholders. It's a national Taiwan university student pet project for more than 20 years. So at the last day of 2019, people on PTT already reposted Dr. Liu's last message from Wuhan, triage the message, instead of getting derailed into polarizational conspiracy theories, it resulted in decisive action so that we started health inspection the first day of 2020. Now, it's not just for people who can't connect to the internet and forums, although in Taiwan, broadband is a human right, even the very young or the very old can just pick up their phone and call this toll-free number 1922 to speak their mind and contribute to the digital democracy. For example, in 2020 April, there was a young boy who called saying, you're reaching our mask, which is great, but all I got was pink ones, which is not great. All the boys in my class have got a blue mask. I don't want to wear pink to school. Well, the very next day on the 2 p.m. press conference, all the medical offices were pink, and the Ministry of Health and Welfare even said pink pants, there was this child who here or something. So the boy became the most hit boy in the class, and that's by the suggestion of the participation offices or POS dedicated people in each and every ministry is in charge to take on the civic technologies and communicates with the public to meet people where they are in the here and now. Now, you already heard about the mask rationing part, but I would like to say it's not my invention. I didn't do it in three days. It's the GovZero collective, a community of people who fork, which means take what the government offers, but present in a different way without writing the original implementation off. And the domain name G0VDTW means that for each and every government website, something that GOVDTW people don't like, instead of just demonstrating against it, they can demonstrate with the government by building open source alternatives that ends in something that G0VDTW. So just by changing O2 is here in your browser bar, you get into this shadow government that offers better services and it's free of copyright restrictions. So when they, for example, made this real-time visualization, we can simply say, okay, it's a reverse procurement that people already let us know what they want. So people queuing in line can refresh their map every 30 seconds and see the real-time inventory. All we need to do is to make sure that an open API, the real-time data is we trust the citizens with such data. This not only resulted in more than 100 different tools that distributes the mask and later on rapid testing kits, but also allows the parliamentary interpolation to take on very different nature. When the opposition parties, MP, asked the minister, well, according to the OpenStreamMap community, you say you're fair, like each citizen on average, is of a very similar distance to next available mask. But what we have analyzed is that because not everybody own a helicopter, what's the same distance on the map does not translate to the same time cost or opportunity cost for people to travel. But the minister simply say, yeah, MP, Gao Hong-An, you're correct. Now teach us how to do it, lecture us, because the citizen now has exactly the same data as the government do. We do not hold the data. So MP Gao, because she was the VP of Data Analytics, says, Fox, she immediately said, okay, let's work on this together. And we wrote our pre-registration and more fair distribution method that takes care of real areas within 24 hours. So that turns what used to be opposition between two parties or many parties into co-creation dynamic. Now, finally, to counter the infodemic, we rely on this idea of humor over rumor. The idea is to make sure that the scientific clarification has an even higher basic transmission rate on social media compared to the conspiracy theories. So for example, the Ministry of Health and Welfare has this very cute spokes dog who literally is the animal companion of the participation officer, so a real dog. So whenever there is a new policy, like physical distancing, they just go back home, take a new photo saying, when you're indoor, keep three shibas away, when you're outdoor, keep two shibas away, and that spreads faster than the conspiracy theories. When it comes to mask use, for example, we have this very cute picture where the dog put a food in their mouth and said, wear a mask to protect your own face against your own dirty and washed hands. Again, this went absolutely viral and it does not talk about any other disputed scientific characteristics early in the infection, the pandemic, but rather it's very intuitive and it links mask use to hand washing and so on. And whenever there is anything that goes viral on social media that may be misleading, that's misinformation or disinformation, we again rely on the GovZero community who have this chat box called Covax where you can invite to your end-to-end encrypted chat channels and you just simply forward to the bot and in misinformation you hear anywhere, just like flagging an email as a spam and it posts to a Wikipedia-like community where people meet every week to triage the most trendy rumors and find funny countermeasures to it. Of course, the most viral ones ends up getting the vets from the international fact-checking network like the Taiwan Fact-checking Center or Micropane and so on and ends up, we take a notice and public notice approach where the clarifications are displayed prominently in social media and that's how we do not take anything down. This example is very funny and it's before the pandemic. Basically, there was a rumor that was detected as trendy this way that says, the state is going to find you $1 million for prepping your hair many times a week and then within just two hours, the preservation officer rose at this countermeaning that I'm saying, it's not true and you see our premier head of cabinet in his youth saying, I may be bald now, but I used to have hair so I would not punish people with hair and what we've actually introduced is a labeling of like requirement for hair products but then on the bottom, premier CLIX now says with a hair blower, if you perm your hair multiple times so it will not damage your bank account but it will damage your hair. Your hairstyle will resemble mine. Again, this went absolutely viral and we do not need to take anything down because it's like a vaccination of the mind. People who have contact is kind of viral vaccine turn their outrage into something that's humorous and therefore become immune from the conspiracy theories and the polarization. So I want to skip a few slides and finally simply say that the contact tracing system is yet another co-creation for health that's created in the GovZero community. Basically, without downloading any app, you can just look at the venues QR code using your built-in camera. Again, it sends a toll-free SMS to the 1922 toll-free number and what it does is that it's like posted note in your local telecom instead of sending anything to the venue or to the state. It just stayed there for 28 days and it gets deleted. And then when the contact tracer wants to send exposure notification and so on, there's an automated system that provides reverse accountability so anyone can go to this website and see in the past four weeks which contact tracer have access to their data for what, for reciprocal transparency. And by not downloading an app, even people with feature phones can simply manually text those 15-digit random code so it obviates the need to buy into any specific technology. Of course, you can still write your naming or stamp your way in. This is all plural innovation but this is privacy-preserving because it was created in a community that cares about the privacy and democracy-affirming technologies. So to conclude, and I only have one minute left, I will simply read you my job description which is a poem that I wrote in 2016, almost six years ago when it became the digital minister. I initially said as digital minister for civic technology, what's important is the SDG goals, 1718 reliable data, 1717 effective partnership and 176 open innovation. But the HR department said minister, nobody memorized those SDG goals. You have to speak in plain language as I translated that into a prayer, really a poem which I will very quickly read for you and then I look forward to the Q and A and my job description goes like this. When we see the internet of things, let's make it an internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let's make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let's make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let's make it about human experience. And whenever we hear that a singularity is near, let us always remember the plurality is here. Thank you for listening and look forward to the Q and A. Thank you minister Tang. I love that you ended with that poem. It's such a beautiful way that encapsulates, I think a lot of the things that we want to talk about today. So the first question I actually want to start with, I want to talk more about the work that you did in Taiwan but I'd love to hear just how you as a technologist got interested in questions of democracy. And I wonder if you could tell our audience here about what the sunflower movement is and how that called you into getting involved in these kind of public sector initiatives. Certainly. So in Taiwan democracy and the internet, there are not two things. They are literally in the same breath became possible in Taiwan. The first presidential direct election in 1996 when I was 15 years old was also the year that the wire web got really popular. So we've got the same set of people who are dot com entrepreneurs and also democracy social entrepreneurs. That's something that's very different. So from the very beginning, when we're designing our democracy like semiconductor design, right? We iterated on that with a lot of participatory, the deliberative community organization, non-violent communication, open space. For us, this is all in the same generation of people. So this is the answer to the first question. The second one is that in 2014, indeed I was part of the team who occupied the parliament very peacefully for three weeks in demonstration first against the sudden signing of the cross-strait service and trade agreement with Beijing. But later on within just a night because we live streamed everything is thoroughly non-violence. We turned this demonstration against something into a demonstration, a demo for something. And that is with half a million people on the street and many more online. How can we actually do what the MPs refuse to do at a time, which is to deliberate about the CSSTA in a kind of focused conversation method facilitated by professional facilitators held by civic technology so that people can, unlike many other occupies, can actually converge on a shared common ground, a shared understanding. And we finally distilled down to like four demands, not quite less, which was then ratified by the head of parliament after three weeks, so it was a successful occupy. And right after occupying in the end of 2014, all the mayor or candidate that supported the open government get elected sometimes surprisingly and the ones that didn't, well, didn't. And so the civic technologies, including me, were then hired as reverse mentors, young consultants really, to the cabinet to push the open government agenda. So pivoting from your own story then to the experience that Taiwan had during the pandemic, I'd love to hear what you think it was, like what were the ingredients in Taiwan that made possible the kind of co-created response that you're describing? Do you think it's something that was unique to certain features about Taiwanese politics or Taiwanese culture, or are some of the principles that you're talking about portable to other places around the world? I think it's quite portable. For example, the mask rationing map was adopted in South Korea within just a few weeks. The dashboard in Japan, in the Tokyo metropolitan area, at least in just a couple of months, so of course we have some horizontal peer-to-peer GitHub oriented civic tech alliances. But beyond that, I think this co-creation fund civic tech community relies on this idea of, as I mentioned, people-public-private partnership. That is to say, the people sets the norm, like what's acceptable in contact tracing, what's not acceptable, and the state just amplifies that norm. And the private sector, including as you have seen telecommunication companies or convenience store chains and so on, just implement the norm that is set by the civic tech people. Whereas in many jurisdictions, the state first already adopted maybe a Google-Apple private sector protocol or a state-oriented state surveillance protocol or whatever, and that would decimate the agency of the civic sector. The civic sector thrives because they know that they are the norm setters and they become much harder to operate if the state take on a top-down, lockdown, shutdown approach when it comes to the civic space. So one of the things that's so interesting in what you're describing is that the government was really open to a lot of ideas from the citizens. And so that people, innovators like yourself or people that you were working with could come up with these ideas that government would then adopt. And we don't necessarily see that same pattern all across the United States. And I'm wondering, what did you all do to create that kind of openness from government, and what advice would you have for people that might work in different contexts? Well, in different contexts, for example, the collaborative fact-checking cofact.org, if you take out the plural, cofact.org, you'll find the Thailand version of it. And of course, operating in the Thai political landscape, they focus more on consumer protection like dispelling rumors about food and drugs and things like that, or things about environment, things that are less politically sensitive. But that was the case in Taiwan too. When I was a child, we were still under martial law and we cannot talk publicly about politics. But we can talk about environmental protection, national parks or air pollution, and all these civic technologies first work on those relatively non-politicized issues that is a partisan or a nonpartisan or all partisan, right, pen partisan. So you're seeing the PM 2.5 measurement stations set up by the civics teachers, the environmental science teachers, and so to measure PM 2.5 in an entirely grassroots way. But when it became apparent that the state cannot refuse these facts that those people have gathered, then of course, we work on the civil IoT project to measure the points where the primary school teachers cannot break in to measure industrial areas and parks. But again, this is the civic sector setting the norm and the trust, the fabric resulting from this kind of collaboration eventually would become the infrastructure that powers the mask rationing, the rapid test rationing, all the different maps that you see during the pandemic was because there's already a mutual trust between the open data and API platform on the state side and the civic capacity on the civic tech side. It's such an interesting story about the way in which you took this pan partisan issue to use your terminology and then use that as a way of building up the capacity both within government and in the civic sector and how that lay the foundation for what you all were able to do in the future. That's really interesting. And I wondered, do you think cultural issues, like the culture of Taiwan plays a role at all or do you think the kind of infrastructure that you're describing could be built anywhere? Yeah, I'm pretty sure it could be built anywhere because to me is just a matter of bandwidth, of latency and of connections, right? So just like upgrading from 3G to 4G to 5G technology, democracy used to be very low bandwidth like if you vote one candidate out of eight, that's just three bits, very high latency like every two years or every four years and very few connections like just with adults, with citizenship and so on. But with digital infrastructure, we can basically vote all the time. We just concluded a round of quadratic voting which is a new voting method with much better synergy and promotes much more truthful voting. Under-presidential hackathon and every year we have more than 200 different ideas corresponding to the SDGs that builds data collaboratives that we invite the people to vote. But because this is not a zero sum game, right? People who prefer such SDG to be prioritized not necessarily reject the other SDG target, they just want something to be prioritized before the others. So every time we finish a round of quadratic voting, we get fresh people who initially were working on some other problems, but they understand, oh now we have to focus on these problems, but they still pivot their ideas and open source technologies to work on those common ideas. So every year we give out five of those trophies and those teams that were voted in that's delivered something locally for three months, the social innovators. Once they get a trophy, this is actually micro projector. If you turn it on, it projects our president, Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, giving you the trophies, that's very meta, promising whatever you did locally will become national level with all the fiscal, budgetary and personnel support. So there's yet another way to just exercise those relationship muscles with the civic tech community that has some local champions, but really strive to make it a civic fabric into a public infrastructure. Yeah, one of the things that we say a lot at the SNFR Gore Institute is the idea that democracy is a muscle and so people have to practice it. And if they don't have the chance to practice it, then an atrophy is just like our human muscles might. Yep, yep. So one of the themes that's running through a lot of the examples that you're giving us, I feel like are themes about innovation, about infrastructure and about collaboration that exist in a lot of the examples that you give. And along those lines, I've heard you describe yourself as a conservative anarchist, which I think also has a lot of those themes in it. I wonder if you can describe to us, what do you mean by conservative anarchist? Sure, so basically I could also say I'm a spiritual Taoist or philosophical Taoist, but still people would think that I perform some religious rites or something that I don't do that. So to be conservative is to respect traditions. In Taiwan, we have more than 20 national languages. And when we work on, for example, marriage equality, we have to respect all the 20 different cultures, some of them matriarchies, some of them doesn't really care about gender when it's choosing the successes. And so one, 16 of which indigenous. And so because they are all national languages, they need to be conserved equally instead of pushing an agenda that's a progress by one particular language and then decimates the possibilities of the other languages. And I may anarchist in the old sense, like I don't give orders, I never take orders, so I work with the government, I don't work for the government, but yet I work with the citizens, not for the citizens. Basically I'm just working out the common grounds in which that people can innovate to deliver on those shared concerns, but I never call us anyone to do anything. So I'm not bomb throwing, I'm forking the code anarchist. That's great. So that leads me to another question. So this morning, we're here in Athens, Greece, and I'm sorry that you couldn't join us here in person, but this morning some colleagues and I were at the ancient agrar, the original site, the birthplace of Western democracy. And we were walking around and sort of learning about how the ancient Athenians practiced democracy. And one of the questions that came up is, what is the extent to which the kind of democracy that was practiced in ancient Athens is possible at scale, at the level of a nation state like the United States or much bigger countries. And that same question comes to mind as you're describing what you mean by conservative anarchy, is that kind of spirit of respect for traditions with simultaneous anarchy or co-creation possible at a very large scale? Yeah, very much so. Because the very large scale is actually an intersection of a plurality of existing social communities. So instead of working to disrupt such community, we need to respect, uphold those communities. For example, in 2015 when UberX first entered Taiwan, Taiwan is not the only jurisdiction in which that there is a large debate about whether it is sharing economy or gig economy or anything like that. But we built a digital agrar using Polis, a digital infrastructure in the public sector that's open source in 2015. Now, you can see like a real agrar, I see my friends and families on social media and elsewhere like scattered around based on how they feel differently about the same facts when it comes to right sharing in general. But just like a real open space technology facilitation to space promotes pro-social conversations and understandings. So you can see, for example, I feel passenger liability insurance is important. And if you agree, you move toward me. If you disagree, you move farther away from me, but at no point do you have a reply button. So there is no room for true to grow. The only thing that you can do here is to promote something else. And we only hold ourselves accountable. We pre-commit to say, if you have the 10 best resonated feelings and ideas that can convince everyone across the aisle all the different four groups, then if the four communities all totally agree on some values, then we just deliberate on that and use that as a basis to regulate Uber case in Taiwan. So we respect existing community, including taxi unions, but also the rural areas, self-service, transportation services, and only the idea to convince all of them ends up making the cut when it comes to the rulemaking. So in the V-Taiwan rulemaking method, we actually see that people agree to disagree on just 5% of the things like economic, but actually most people agree with most of their neighbors across communities, most of the time. And this reflection is not the picture that people have in mind if they are on the more anti-social corners of social media or traditional media. And so to get this picture into all the different communities' mind, that the communities actually have this overlapping consensus is the key to scale this kind of deliberative conversation across different communities to a national scale. That's great. So that actually pivots us nicely into another question I want to talk to you about, thinking about more broadly, health of democracies. And in the United States, where the Esnefagora Institute is based, for example, there's a lot of concern about the ways in which social media, in particular, and in some cases, digital media overall, have really emaciated or hollowed out our ability to practice democracy in the ways that we might aspire to do. Yet, Taiwan's experience in the ways that you've been describing is actually quite different from the United States, certainly, and also a lot of other countries around the world. Can you tell us what was different about the way online space is developed in Taiwan and what can other countries learn from that experience? As I mentioned, the online civic space, like the PTT, it's open source by default. It's maintained by young undergrad students in NTU and other universities. It's subsidized by the National Academy Network without any worrying about shareholder value, right? So it started as for purpose, not for profit. So I often liken it to a kind of dedicated zoning, right? The PTT would be like a campus. Polis would be like a town hall and so on. And Facebook would be like, I don't know, a nightclub or something in the entertainment district. So the problem is not that the nightclub sells alcohols and addictive material to underage people, although it is a problem, I guess, but that we do not have other public digital and civic digital infrastructures and spaces in our digital realm. So our mayors were forced in other countries to bring their town halls into the nightclub.  Well, of course, because it was designed for such for-profit motives. So I think the Taiwan case succeeds precisely because people in Taiwan understand that Facebook may be the place for cute cats or something, but to get something that will get into our collective decision-making process, you have to go to one of those civic or public spaces. That's so interesting. So what I hear you arguing for is a kind of plurality of different kinds of spaces. So we need the nightclubs online, but then we also need these publicly designed civic spaces. And so in places like the US where we haven't had that four-purpose digital infrastructure that's built yet, what do you think the possibilities are for constructing it now that so many people have been and building an audience for it. Now that so many people have already been drawn into an infrastructure that was really built for-profit not for-purpose, as you would say. Right. So I think Polis have been used successfully in I think Bolling Green Kentucky in many places. So on the community level, I'm quite optimistic. There are quite a few community organizers in the township level or a municipality level that have successfully deployed such things. So what I think is important is not to suddenly scale to the national level because the Taiwan example relies on everyone looking at the UberX story and have the same picture in their mind. But if you do not have such a PEM political, PEM partisan case that works for everybody in the US, maybe do not start that top-down approach, but rather from a grassroots, from a bottom-up approach and keep the local social entrepreneurs and civic technologies well-connected and also well-funded. A lot of the work that we do in Taiwan is just to make sure like the German prototype fund and so on, that public infrastructures can recover. Their research costs very easily either via grants or via new like plural funding, quadratic funding, retroactive funding, pay for success. There are a lot of ways to ensure that it doesn't cost them anything really if they launch something that works for just a few specific cases for a community and if they will document it and publish it to public codes, then the state or the municipal government just allows them to recover the cost and then move on to the next experiment. That would be my suggestion. And can you say a little bit more about what the relationship is between platforms like Polis or those other digital ways in which people can be involved and the kind of infrastructure or ways of involvement that people might need offline? Like how does the online offline interactions occur or need to occur? Yeah, certainly. Yes, so in design, we make sure that like the design thinking double diamond, right? So the initial exploration, like making sure that all the difference, especially people who didn't used to have a voice like residents but not citizens or people who young to vote and so on, they nevertheless have a valid SMS number so they can participate in the Polis platform, in the joint platform very easily and explore together to discover together what they have in mind when it comes to possible norms. And then when we define things, then this is self-selection. In Taiwan, we only use sortation to the largest project because sortation is quite expensive to run in a face-to-face setting. But in the cases like Uber where we do not have the budget to do this for sortation, we would, for example, if it's the National Universal Healthcare, which we did do this sortation based for scale participation. So for this like micro scale definition, like finding out how might we questions together, then we just self-select the people who as I mentioned, resonated with the most of the people across the different groups, across the plurality. We measure the diversity and invite the people who propose those very nuanced, eclectic ideas to serve as not representative, just re-presenting the ideas that also resonate with them in a multi-stayholder discussion, face-to-face. But we also just spread those conversations via live stream. So people can still join in real time over Slido and so on. So we have this whole system of participation officers, POs, that you can just search for a participation officer at Taiwan and we've held more than 100 of those low-budget collaborative meetings on the issues that either have this post-conversation or a joining platform, e-petition that have more than 5,000 signatures and they can just summon our team to their locality to have this face-to-face conversation. Yet we broadcast that live stream as though people in other time zones can also join online. So one of the things interesting about what you're describing is there's a lot of ways in which the platforms that you're describing and the venues that you'll have created allow for people to self-select and engage in a very decentralized way, which enables a lot of participation. When I imagine how that might operate in the United States though, I immediately worry about bad actors that would self-select into these very open spaces and then try to denigrate the quality of the conversation that's going on. And so I wonder if you can talk a little bit about what is the role that referees, if any, or monitors might play in a decentralized network or decentralized platform like that? Certainly. So in participation, I think one of the golden rule that Wikipedia discovered very early on is that when you play this game of attrition, make sure that the moderator have to just spend this minuscule amount of time and effort to moderate away a lot of effort by the people who detract from the process, right? So, and the way that we automate away those moderation is by crowds moderation. In the Polish example, in the Uber example, it's not always people who have a bad intentions, but they do want to influence the outcome. Right after the Uber X case, I think Airbnb Taiwan sent an email to everyone who have subscribed to Airbnb before in Taiwan as they go to this platform and vote exactly this way to support our party line, I guess. But it kind of backfired because only less than one third actually voted it away. The Airbnb wanted them to vote. And the reason why is that this is not a survey. This is a weak key survey where the survey questions are written by the people who do the survey themselves. So because it's crowdsourced, it has a higher dimension for people to express their actual preferences. So instead of just voting the way Airbnb want them to vote, they see each other's ideas and start to resonate with them. So a lot of this astroturfing or trolling behavior can be corrected if the trolls find it more fun and more mentally rewarding, more intrinsically rewarding if they act in a pro-social way and if they get 5,000 bots voting exactly the same way. Well, there may be an extra zero on the A group, but it doesn't count for anything because we measure the plurality of the groups. It doesn't really improve their agenda's chances to get liberated because the agenda is only held accountable. If it convinces everybody across all the different groups. So just the way your pre-commitment shapes the discussion that of course works towards mitigating those attacks a lot. Of course, we apply standards, cybersecurity defenses, work with penetration testers, why has and require SMS-based authentication. Great. So we need to start wrapping up our conversation, but before we go, I wanted to ask you if you could talk a little bit about as we think about this relationship between technology and democracy, not only in Taiwan, but really all over the world. What do you see as the biggest challenges or the biggest threats that keep you up at night? And then conversely, where are your sources of hope? Yeah, I think if we think democracy as itself, a civic technology, then that keeps me hopeful. As I mentioned, just like semiconductor design, democracy is something that everyone can simply fork and to do it in a different way, not necessarily better way, but at least different. As I mentioned, quadratic voting, quadratic funding, retroactive funding, pay for success, all these are ways to do participatory budget and agenda setting in a way that's not disrupting the election process of mayors and presidents, yet allows the mayors and presidents to say, yeah, I commit, pre-commit to the will of my people. So this is an augmentative view toward working with representative democracy instead of a disruptive view. So going back to my conservative roots. Now, if people continue to think of democracy as such a augmentative assistive technology, then I think there's a lot of possibility in each of us and in all of us to create the technology that are appropriate, meaning that we take whatever the Silicon Valley people have made, but adopt it so that it fits the norm of our local community. So it's technology in the service of local democracies, not the other way around. But if we stop thinking democracy as a technology that people can meld to remix and fork as they like, if the democracy people ends up being the very difference from the technology people and they don't talk to each other, then that would be a quite hopeless scenario. Well, thank you very much, Minister Tang. You've left me with two aspirations, which is one, I aspire to become a conservative anarchist like you. And now I'm reconsidering when we should make our motto at the Esnefagora Institute of Fork Democracy. So we'll take that under advisement and let you know how it goes. But thank you very much for joining us. Please give Minister Tang a round of applause. Thank you. Liftoff and Pasta.


The search for missing people resumed on Tuesday morning in water under a collapsed bridge in India which killed at least 134. The colonial Arab bridge over the Machu River was packed with side seers and joined holiday festivities when it ruptured on Sunday evening sending people plunging about 100 meters into the water. A local resident said the tragedy was painful and shameful due to mismanagement. On Monday, Indian police arrested nine people including managerial staff, ticketing clerks and three security guards fulfilling to regulate crowds before the bridge crumbled.


For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. After being ruled by a non-elected government for almost a year, Bolivia is set to have elections on October 18th. These are the first elections that will be held since former President Evo Morales was ousted in a coup on November 10th last year. A U.S.-backed government with Ginny Nanes as interim president was installed in place of Morales' administration. In the upcoming elections, Luis Arce is contending for the post of president from movement towards socialism, or MAS, which is the party of Morales. His main opponent is Carlos Misa from the center-right civic community, followed by Luis Fernando Camacho from the We Believe Party. She and Chan from Front for Victory and Filaciano Mamani from Bolivian National Action Party are also contending for the presidency. Most opinion polls, however, have declared Arce as the favorite and likely to win in the first round of polling. Because of his popularity, many of his opponents have dropped from the race so that votes can consolidate behind the more popular right-wing candidates. This includes Ginny Nanes, who pulled out of the race in September. Despite what opinion polls suggest about Arce's popularity, the Bolivian right will not let MAS get elected again so easily. Nanes and the oligarchy, whose interest her administration represents, is unwilling to relinquish power and allow for the return of democracy. Elections have been postponed multiple times, and there has even been an attempt to annul the legal status of MAS in order to ban it from participating in the upcoming elections. This appeal made by far-right senator Carmen Eva Gonzalez was rejected by a Bolivian court. However, fears of interference in the election process are still strong. In the past few weeks, far-right paramilitary groups have carried out violent attacks against MAS supporters in different parts of the country. Luis Arce wrote in a statement, Recent statements by de facto government authorities show that they won't give up on their attempts to obstruct the electoral process to try to generate fear and are now threatening the use of military force. I repeat, what other provocations are they willing to generate to derail the elections? Arce has issued a call to the international community to observe the electoral process and the days following the elections in order to monitor the activities of the Bolivian right. The people of Bolivia appear that the ruling party will make use of all kinds of dirty tricks in order to steal the elections from them, including blackouts during the count of her courts. Moreover, the ballots will be guarded by the same armed forces that supported the coup. Five of the largest international admissions that have been approved for election observation by Bolivian authorities include the European Union, the Carter Center, the Inter-American Union of Electoral Organizations, the Association of Electoral Organizations of South America, and the Organization of American States or the OAS. It was the OAS and the EU which contributed significantly in the unleashing of the coup in Bolivia last year. Political scientists from the US closely studied the allegations of fraud in the elections made by OAS last year. They concluded that there was no fraud. Despite various flaws in the report from last year, the OAS has been given accreditation for observing the elections. Meanwhile, progressive observers including elected lawmakers such as Jeremy Corbyn faced many difficulties before getting accredited. Solidarity activists who have applied for observer status are also facing many hurdles. The people of Bolivia are prepared to take to the streets in case of any interference in the election process. Social movements and trade unions associated with the OAS have announced that they will mobilize if there is an electoral fraud.


Item No. SCP-437 Object Class Euclid Special Containment Procedures A fenced perimeter has been established around SCP-437. Foundation horticulturalists are to be kept on site to monitor and care for SCP-437-A instances. Testing is prohibited pending review by the Ethics Committee.  Description SCP-437 is a large grove of trees located in Camp Lakewood, Illinois. It contains 64 instances of SCP-437-A. SCP-437-A are numerous trees common in North America. Each instance has several cankers, a typical interior structure, see below, and rather than sap, contains significant quantities of human blood. SCP-437 was discovered by the Foundation in 2011, twenty years after the summer camp's closure. Employment records for Camp Lakewood have not been found. All persons who attend Camp Lakewood during the summer of 1991 are persons of interest and are still currently at large. Addendum 437.1, Interview POI-437-15 was brought in after genetic analysis of blood samples from an instance of SCP-437-A led to a match in Foundation hospital records. Date September 19, 2014 Interview Agent Bennett Subject POI-437-15 Samantha Blanchett Begin log Did you attend Camp Lakewood in 1991? Is that what this is about? Uh, yeah, that was… wow, two decades ago? Wow, I was fifteen, I think. That really takes me back. What do you remember from your time there? Best summer ever. It was an amazing place. I was so sad to go, especially when we found out it was closing. I made so many friends there, so many great memories. I think… yeah, it's even where I had my first kiss. Did you ever see any strange trees to the south of the camp? Huh? Two kilometers to the south. They're the Grove of Trees. Are you familiar with it? I mean, sure, we all were. In what sense?  Stories the counselors would tell around the campfire. Spooky trees down the southern trail, something trapped inside of them. Go there at night, press your ear against the bark, and you can hear it singing. Yeah, like I said, goofy kid stuff. Did you ever go there yourself? Mrs. Blanchett? Huh? Oh, sorry. No, I never went there. Too scared, I guess. That was a pretty crazy summer, you know? Sometimes I really miss that place. And log. Note, shortly after the interview, POI 437-15 escaped custody via unknown, presumably anomalous means. Subsequent investigations found all POIs associated with SCP-437 have been recently reported as missing. Addendum 437.2 Email Update Date ██, 20, 2016, from Dr. Weiss, to Site Director August, Subject, Recent Findings. Video graphic and ultrasound imaging determined the presence of humanoid skeletal structures and soft tissue in each instance of SCP-437-A. Organs are woven into the trees themselves, and appear to be semi-functional. Although severely deformed, most of the bones are consistent with adolescent humans between the ages of 13 and 16. In several cases, deformation of the jaw has been minimal. This has allowed us to identify certain instances via dental records taken before 1991. I don't think your POIs are the campers, Jeremiah. I suggest we subdesignate them as part of SCP-437. As for the SCP-437-A instances themselves, I want to look into the possibility of euthanizing them. They've been in there for 20 years. When you press your ear against a bark, you can hear them. It's low and muffled, but you can hear them just fine.


Hello there, everyone, and welcome. This is Melissa Armo with the Stock Swortion. I called the QQQs today. This was the play of the day in the training room, and I also called Puts in This. This was a short, was a great call, a huge move. And just going to go over it with you here. We're bouncing a little bit here tonight. So we're up slightly, and again, hopes of a stimulus deal, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No idea where it'll be tomorrow, but everyone should be out of the shorts I called today because it was such a beautiful move. So we did this very early, right in here, snug as a bug. Some people got out in the quick drop, which you could have. It was a great, great move, but I said this looks like it's gonna fall all day. I even said it on the Maritrade as well, so we're probably gonna sell off into the close. I was right. And again, this bar here is tonight, after hours, just so you know. So it was a nice big red sell-off bar today. And I got, again, I called Puts in This that you would have done and been out today. And then I also called the short in the day training room. One to trade, you can learn how from me. I'm very good at predicting market direction. I'm very good at predicting stock direction. This was an incredible call. To be able to see that we were gonna fall today in the pre-market, to be able to see that we're gonna reverse in the pre-market on Friday, again, phenomenal read on the market Friday by me and today as well. So many people in here thought the market was gonna just go right back up to the highs. They were buying the support. They were buying the support. And again, even on a Maritrade today, she was asking about buying the dips. It's not a strategy. I know people do it, thinking it is a strategy. It does not consistently work. While sometimes it may work. It does not consistently work, okay? So the idea of making money and actually trading, trading is when you're pulling money out of the market on a regular basis, okay? And if you're not consistent with what you do in the market, you're not gonna be able to pull money out of the market consistently, okay? So this isn't buy and hold, buy and hold. That's not what you should be doing if you are a trader. A trader is someone that can go long, but someone that can short, someone that can be nimble, someone that can read directional bias, someone that knows how to look at momentum, spot it, play it, do it. You are pulling money and chunking it out. That's what I call it. And that is what we did today. This was great calls today. Great read of this market by me. I'm continuing to stay very focused every morning. Some days it's tricky, but we are getting it. If you're interested in the Golden Gap course, it's this weekend. Only three more classes this year. October 24th and 25th. Email me at melissathestoxswish.com if you wanna sign up. Have a good night.


My name is Seth Francis, and I am the co-founder and director of Titus Learning, one of the Moodle Certified Premium Partners. The company is a Moodle partner, so we offer a whole range of Moodle services. I always like to describe it if you can put Moodle before it, and then any word there after, whether that's training, support, boasting maintenance, development, content and everything else. For us at the corporate market, we work a lot in the UK, but in about 30 countries globally as well. So, whether that be Germany, France, Spain and other areas in Europe. Really, I'd say at the moment, I think there's a massive improvement in terms of the level of people acquiring tours and looking for further professional development, both formal regulatory training and also more informal training in professional development. I think the trends are a lot around personalisation of learning and gamification of learning as well. So, as I mentioned with the informal piece of learning, people want to learn when it works for them, how it works for them, whether that be on different devices or in different places. So, the personalisation side is massive. Also, a lot around analytics I think, so understanding is the training actually working as opposed to just doing it for the sake of doing it. The game changer, I think the game changer is a lot around the client and the company working well together. So, not to take away from anything cool or dust, but we often say that about 80% of the features of LMSs is going to be similar. So, working with a company that understands you and configures the platform and, more importantly, support you in the long run is a big game changer. Also, content and having readily available content to save the user's time and gets about there to their staff and employees.


Biden and Schultz worried that allies weakened support for Ukraine at critical moment of war. US President Joe Biden has expressed concern that allies are weakening their support for Ukraine at a critical time in the war with Russia. Biden said that Russian President Vladimir Putin was on the balls of his heels. And what are we doing? Stepping back, he said. Biden warned that Ukraine is at a critical point in the war as the country's ammunition and weapons stockpiles are dwindling and fighting is expected to intensify this spring. The United States is viewed as we are the essential nation. If the United States steps out of events, what happens? What happens then in the Middle East? The Taiwan Straits. What happens in Asia? What happens with Ukraine? The American leader said. Despite Western support, Ukraine is likely to face a serious shortage of weapons and ammunition soon, states German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. The European Union and its member states have been Ukraine's largest financial supporter, having contributed more than $91 billion since the beginning of the war, followed by the US and Germany. Germany's military support is second only to the Americas, he said. According to the chancellor, since the beginning of the war, the German government has allocated purchased and supplied Ukraine with military equipment, including tanks, artillery and expensive air defense systems worth more than $30 billion. Our message is clear. We have to do our utmost to prevent Russia from winning. If we don't, we might soon wake up in a world even more unstable, threatening and unpredictable than it was during the Cold War, Scholz stated. He noted that some financial obligations have already been exhausted while others need to be extended. Despite our support, Ukraine could soon face serious shortages in arms and ammunition. Some financial commitments have already run out and others need to be extended. The long-term consequences and costs of failing to stop Putin's aggression would dwarf any of the investments that we are making now, he emphasized.


Tuesday at 2 o'clock central standard time. I'm excited to be with you live or cooler. Look at what we're doing We live cold call every single Tuesday at 2 Greg is Greg sits in the back and gives me advice and says hey Cody say this and I fixed it I say it and dude it works man. That's how we roll in here. We're hanging out in the studio here at Scourage a mentor a scratch better headquarters. This is our entire I don't know. I don't know what all you can you guys can see here, but we've got our entire Marketing team in here rocking and rolling doing videos setting up for the show and Hanging out with you guys to Continue to make you better at what you do as an insurance agent. Who else do you know? Who else do you know? Apparently, I just sent some Some laughings in there. I'm gonna delete that just touch something. Hey That's what we do. I even watch myself. That's how important this is. I'm sitting here I'm doing it and I'm literally watching myself. So today as we do every single Tuesday at 2 you guys are even getting a little back A little back cam today. How about that today? What we are going to as always What's up Lawrence? What's up mark? Hope you guys are doing well. Are you guys excited for this show? Are you guys excited to see someone actually? Put their time where their mouth is. That's a little different than money where their mouth is, huh? But I'm not really spending much money right now. I'm just spending time I'm spending time with you. I'm hanging out with Dave on YouTube. What's up, man? I love the emoji. What's up, Lawrence? Hi to you as well, brother. Dude, we are talking today about making you better as an insurance agent Making you better today Than you were yesterday as my good buddy Dave Kobo likes to say the sales director. You're gonna jump in and literally call seniors Especially since you got plenty of people to call it in at any facet and today We're gonna be using a script And if you hear something used to hey Cody, dude use this script say this try this you guys know I'll try it That's how much I believe in you guys I'm sold on what we're doing and why we're doing it as as you should be as well I hope you are sold on your business on blowing up your business if you're joining on Facebook Please share this thing out if you're joining on YouTube Please give a thumbs up and make sure to keep the comments and questions rolling because today like every single Tuesday Almost every day around here. We're doing something nuts To help you guys become a better insurance agent. That's why we came out with 8% nation insurance conference randomly I did that on a I think I think I first go have the idea on a Sunday Came out with it on a like a literally like that next What Friday Saturday Sunday Monday? So that's why we use it. Hello. I'm looking for Larry I'm looking for Larry. Oh my goodness. Is this is this a little I apologize. You've been so nice Let me update me information. Who am I speaking to? No, no, absolutely not yet. I just want to make sure that we Always heard that's a good age I don't know that I would know yet, but I've always heard that's a good age. You're welcome Hey, and what would you as far as what you would like to receive information on would you like to receive your free Information on five thousand ten thousand or fifteen thousand of coverage Yeah, that's a that's a common answer. Okay, and then all right So, okay, perfect perfect. And do you have a home? No home number. Oh me neither. I'm right there with you. You know what Diana? Okay, perfect And we've got you there in Baxter Springs I will have one of our local field underwriters give you a call back next couple days and Provide you the free for me. I hope you haven't You got to enjoy yourself, right?  What's up, Mike dude? Mike is a telecells Cold calling Hey, hello. I'm looking for Linda. Hello. Hello. All right I'm gonna I'm gonna pause this real quick because I want to diagnose that call that you guys literally just heard Number one. I want what I want to hear what you guys thought of that call in comments because what I saw is at first The the the husband Literally made me think I had the wrong number. I said I'm looking for Diana. I'm looking for Diana and He said who as if as if I'm calling the wrong number, right as if I'm calling the wrong number But then I stick to my guns. I stay patient then he goes and gets her she comes on the phone and She's like, yeah, why are you calling? And then I literally walk through the script word for word. You guys can probably see it from the back camera And I literally walk through it word for word. Hey Diana This is Cody we're calling because you may qualify for a new state-approved final expense plan That's available in your area. Did we get this sometimes I'll take that out once you get through that Then information to you yet. That's the reason we asked that because oh, I don't know I'm not really sure. Well, then you don't do. Hey, so our state licensed filled underwriter Would like to give you a call back in the next few days. I think it was afternoon Perfect and and and and okay, great. Also, how old are you or I've got you at 62 is that correct? Especially since you've already got it You might as well verify it because it's easier to you to yes in response than hey how old then ask and and open in a direct question It's better to just I've got you. I've got I show you're 62 is that right? And so then hey, who's normally your beneficiary for stuff like this Is it normally like your daughter your spouse or your son? Because that that that wording it that way and you guys if you don't notice when you word stuff certain ways You can get a better response specific ways and I've only talked to a few people a Couple wrong numbers a couple of voicemails one good lead whatever you guys I mean, I literally was calling for about 10 minutes. You have an incredible rest your day and it's it's simple It's not I mean that that's an FE that's an FE script that someone could use for Cold calling for tele-sales that's an FE script that someone could use for cold calling for Drive Traffic to you and you know okay over there Okay, all right. I got my internet company coming out tomorrow to score these things away if you can hear me Give me a thumbs up and okay a yippie a kai and hooray Okay, so you guys can hear me But the if what I'm saying is true. Let me know you can hear me but the video keeps getting interrupted by Internet, maybe it's our internet. Maybe it's everyone's internet. Maybe it's You know Greg's internet Bailey's Bailey's it taking up all the internet with this code. Who knows man? Who knows? What do you guys think? What questions do you guys have about Using this to generate leads. I mean some people say hey Cody could I get a lot? I mean some of the popular questions I get to say Cody. Could I use this to? Tele-cell he's gonna be out in your area on Friday You don't have a lot of time if you want to use it for appointment setting then do that Because you've got a bait and a hook in the beginning that's gonna get their attention and to keep them on the phone And it's something that is gonna be easy for them to agree to like a callback and then later in the script You can spin it into setting an appointment by using that exact verbiage that I just gave or Say you want to tell a cell You know what actually our field underwriter he's across the hall and he's available right now His name is Dallas. Let me get him over to you He's got a couple seconds he can go and give you the information give me one second. I'll get you right over okay Perfect. You have an extra rest of your day and when we'll get you over to Dallas I mean just there's ways that you can spin anything. The key is it's got to be exclusive you got to take it away You got to get gain some agreement you got to get through the bulk of the intro before you know You don't want to pause you want to get through the bulk of the intro before they can interrupt you And then you want some simple questions to flow the call Are we over there guys? I'm gonna come off the internet and check myself. What do you guys think? Well if you can see me and Hear me, okay Let me know Kind of going in and out, but there's there's times where it's uh, that's weird You guys pedal faster you guys watch in pedal faster So it was so it won't load. Yeah I'm even using LTE and I'm actually still getting some some stuff too. So Yeah, I think it's I think you know what? It's part of it at the internet makes a work around what Do you use this in your business do why would they pay you for that? Well, it's because I've built several up the learning process Absolutely, you guys see when I'm here at the office I use I use water with no logo when I'm outside on my porch on Sunday nights I drink smart water and I show the logo All right, let me go to about 20 20 25 minutes before we got a few more minutes. What's up James? We got a few more minutes on live call Call McCody. We call for about 10 12 minutes there Generated a good lead had a good example of a call. We broke that call down I walked through the entire script at least once or twice already live on camera So you can see how actually word things what I say you can literally apply this in your business when you're calling people You can literally say these same things. What's some of the things that? What's some of the things that as an insurance agent? Those then let us do that dude. You're exactly right 100 more appointments be better on the phone know how to word questions to get answers Like agents can get social security numbers Bank account all of it doesn't matter. They just kind of know how to how to say those things That's right man. Some will some won't so what who's next we're gonna get that on a t-shirt Matt. I Say that uh say that a lot. I think I say that what would I say that it probably almost every Sunday night Don't I James I don't think I say it on as much on the other shows But I know I say it on Sunday nights We have a fun show on on on Sunday nights, too We really really do what we walk through Everything training wise training specifics Constantly so is it was just one solid live video. All right We'd be going about 24 trauma any other questions before we wrap this one up any anything specifically Thank you James. Thank you Tyler. Thank you Dave. Thank you Joe. Thank you Kathleen thank you Albert. Thank you. I know I'm missing a few of you guys as well All the other comments all the interactions. Thank you for the shares on Facebook. We're here to help so so what? appointment setting is it closing is it You need to go it's the mantra and it works dude. You're so right brother if you're just not joining in you have not I Know most of you have already gotten your tickets to a person nation calm this event will sell out We're having a lot of tickets come in I could see premiere and VIP selling out of the next few weeks Make sure that you get in there make sure you call our office a 3 3 40 internet company coming tomorrow at 1 That before our 2 o'clock show to hopefully help some credible week And I hope that I see you tomorrow on dealbreakers at 2 o'clock central standard time Take us out Dylan. Thank you guys


Hey everybody, it's Eric Johnson from Airtate Throwers Nation and in this video, what we're going to talk about is Love the Grind. What is Love the Grind? It's our new podcast and we're really, really fortunate to kick off our first podcast with 2019 world champion Joe Kovacs and his amazing coach wife, Ashley Kovacs. So in this short segment, about 10 minute clip, we go through some different things, a little bit about Ashley's background. We go through some coaching questions, kind of mindset, the qualification process and what was leading up into how the preparation, kind of some of the behind the scenes stuff that many of you probably find very interesting. If you listen carefully, Ashley has some really great coaching nuggets as they talk about how they prep for the world championships and kind of how they planned to execute the competition and it didn't go quite as planned but clearly it worked out well. So check out this video and enjoy Love the Grind.  I probably did something that was crazy, especially if people who know me and know me about warming up and how many warm-ups I've taken. I was like, wow, man, that's gonna be normal with me. I'm not even worried at all. And I actually only took one pull and they cut us off in a three. It was a little unfair to one group, got more than the other. Thanks so much for you guys doing this. Again, we're getting our podcast going, kind of an extension of what we do with our program and we're just trying to get a little bit more into the mindset of what it takes for athletes to kind of obviously get to your level as a very unique mindset. And as we did some research, it seems like you guys are definitely a very good match, you know, learning a little bit more about both your personalities. Joe, you and I actually have a few things in common. One, we work with our wives. My wife's my partner actually in my business and our business. We both obviously worked with Art Venegas. My wife actually helped with some of the research and she was like, I can't believe you're not best friends with this guy.  I mean, there's like John Smith and Connie and there was like Ramona Pagel and Kent Pagel and there's been some husband wives, but I don't, nobody's ever won a world championship together. So I will start out with Ashley and I will try to make this cohesive as possible. So now you've been the coach, I believe for two US national teams now, NACAC and this year you were the throws coach for the worlds or you were helping with preparation. So yeah, I was throws coach for the world team for the men. 2018, I did NACAC in 2017.  Okay, so this has been basically four world teams at this point. So three, so Pan Am juniors women, NACAC senior women, world men. Looking at that, obviously you've had a very impressive career as a coach and so you've had to go through the list, like I said, what we'll do is kind of dive into some of the information and more questions but you've won all kinds of honors. Like you were Great Lakes region coach, that was the second time you've won that, right? Sade was the female athlete of the year for the Big 10. Obviously she had just this huge indoor with the weight. You were crushing it. You've coached multiple 20 meter guys. Obviously as a coach having a ton of success, you yourself obviously were a very accomplished thrower. So now if I had this right, you threw 50 feet in high school, right? With the shot. 10 and a half, yeah. As a glider. Yeah, yeah. Once it's two in the disc. Right, so you're kind of like a legend in Ohio. So returning to the state and coaching at Ohio State, is there any other place you're gonna rather wanna coach? Yeah, I mean, probably not. I mean, it's kind of like the Mecca for Ohio for sure to end up at Ohio State and an Ohio kid. No, that's awesome. So you were an 11 time all SEC honors athlete. You competed in two Olympic trials, 2008, 2012. Let's see, you were the what the NCAA runner up in the 2010 indoor in the shot, correct? You competed in a few meets post-collegially then after the trials in 2012 and 13. And you were fourth at the US indoors in the women's shot, obviously. And then you went to North Canton, right? That was at Hoover High School. Three time state champion. So you were pretty good thrower. I guess I was good at that time. The other interesting thing though about, and I don't know if you wanna mention this from being from North Canton, I went to Judd Logan's high school. Oh, okay. So yeah, so that's kind of like unique. Like I went to prom with Judd's son. So I was like, I always tell everybody, I knew Judd Logan before I knew what the hammer was. That's pretty funny. Yeah, and then the other thing, so my first master's was in human development leadership, but I just finished my second one at Ohio State and sports coaching. So that might be kind of notable just because I did, I'd say I definitely learned some things in that one that have been helpful. Okay, yeah, that was gonna be, that's one of my questions later on. How's your- Yeah, that's all I'm gonna note. So I was just- He's got the format, stick to it, right? Okay, so any rate introducing Joe, obviously Joe, again, the list of accomplishments are pretty incredible. Two time world champion, Olympic silver medalist. Also, so technically a three time world medalist, two time world champion, two time US champion. So needless to say I could go on about how many pro meets you've gone to and all the US teams you've made and all that kind of stuff. But what I figured we do is dive into some questions and get to that. So not too slight, you know, it seems like you've done a thing or two as a shop putter. And so we will kind of go from there. Let's see, Doha, I figured that's the, we'll get the monkey off her back and we'll talk about obviously that performance. I think there's some very unique things in terms of as a coach, how you would feel about that. And then obviously as the athlete. And so then there's this added element that not only is this the athlete you're coaching, this is your husband. And so there has to be some extra, like I would imagine some extra anxiety or maybe not. Obviously you hit the auto qualifier in the qualifying round, right? And it was just pretty much you were, I think you did it on the first throw, right? Yeah, so if you, I haven't been getting into detail on that too. So I went through a lot of changes. I think when I came out here, I'll tell you to recap Doha. You kind of have to recap the whole process of getting there. I was named the coach in November around this time last year for the Doha team. I was super excited for her, but at the same time, as you know, USA's isn't easy and I had to punch that ticket. So we weren't really able to kind of celebrate that fully until I got that done in Des Moines. So it was definitely exciting just to be there in Doha with her, knowing that she was going to be there. By the time we got to Doha, just to sum it up, like we kind of hit the ground running. She had to be there early because she was the team coach. So I got there at the same time she did. We strung together some of the best training I think I've ever done in my life. Not really crazy distance, though they were pretty good, but it was more like the mindset kind of reading my body. I'll tell you when you just brought up the qualifier for me, I'll be brutally honest.  So once we got through that, it was a definitely breath of fresh air. We'll go into details about it. Like I probably did something that was crazy, especially people who know me and know me about warming up and how many warmups I've taken. Everybody talks to me about how many warmups I took in Rio and they think it was crazy outside the stadium. I didn't take any throws outside the stadium before qualifying, which was, yeah, it's a little bit of a risk and gamble, but you know, the 2090 is the automatic qualifier. I like to think I can pretty much do that within three throws. This was the first time that the A and the B group weren't going at the same time. Normally it's two rings at once and they let them go because there's a long throw going on, they went A and then B. So I actually heard that the A group got five throws in the ring for warmups. So I was like, well, man, that's like a normal me. I'm not even worried at all. So by the time I got out there, I did two stand throws, kind of just to start warming up, assuming I'm going to have three fulls. And I actually only took one full and they cut us off three. So I mean, to be honest, I was a little ticked off because it was a little unfair that one group got more than the other. But I mean, you kind of just have to roll with it at this point, but I know she's sitting in the stands. And you know, ultimately it was something I wanted to do, but it was her decision. And I would not have agreed to do it unless we did it. We jointly made that decision. But yeah, that's a little bit of a gamble to go into that qualifying round without seeing and having the confidence to see where the ball is going. After I took the first throw, I saw it just squeak past that line. And once I saw it 92, I mean, I didn't care how far it was. You know, when you did that big cue, it was the biggest relief. So was there any added stress, the fact that you did take the one warmup throw and then now you're like, well, wait a minute, I don't get a couple more. And so did it add a little bit? Yeah, like unnecessarily, just because you're planning on it. I mean, I'm at the point now I think I roll with things pretty well. If you get shut down, we can deal with it. I would be extra mad if that was the final and it was under different circumstances. But yeah, I mean, I asked the official, I was like, hey, the other group got five and they're like, oh, we're running late on time.  For me, I just kind of rolled with it at that point because you have to at these meets. Like the most important thing is to not have a routine. But as long as you can kind of check your checklist off and you feel confident, kind of feel good to go. So I don't know if it was more pressure, but I know actually in the stands that might've made her been a little bit more on edge just because of the plan we had. You know, most guys coming in there were warmed up outside the stadium and coming in the call room, you obviously have to wait a while, but there was maybe a little bit more advantage because they kind of came into that scenario a little bit different than I did. But ultimately, I think it was definitely worth it. And who were the main throwers in your qualifying group? I forgot at the time I looked, but. Sure, Krauser was in mind. I'll tell you, Bob from Luxembourg, who didn't make it was in mind because I remember seeing him throw outside the sector a few times. The other pull, Heretic was in mind. And those were kind of two casualties not having those two 22-meter guys make it. But luckily, it's probably good I don't remember because I took one throw and got out. It's bad if you remember who's there because that means you're sticking around watching the other two throws. Yeah, exactly.  I always know as the right as the coach. It's always got to be like, oh yeah, everything's fine, even though you might be dying inside.  It's like, yeah, yeah, it's no big deal. So did you have any of that too? Like were you worried at all since he only got the one full throw in qualifying? Yeah, I didn't like it. I knew that they were cutting it close on time. And I knew too that it was gonna be dependent upon like how quickly the guys walked like through the tunnel to get to the stadium. I just knew there were gonna be a lot of variables because they had that hard start time. And so I was getting a little bit worried because the way that the guys came out all at once, it was just kind of like a lot of chaos and they didn't get into the ring right away. And then that made me feel like, okay, they're not gonna have as much time as I thought that they were. So like I timed the warm-ups for like every throwing event just to be sure. I had said to him, I think that you're gonna get around five throws. And that was kind of like what everybody thought. So the fact that they only got three, I was definitely stressing out about that a little bit. His first full throw was pretty good, but I just, I know that in the past he's really judged himself for the day based off how his warm-ups were. So I was a little bit apprehensive about that, but luckily Joe came through in veteran fashion and saved us on that one because I would have been feeling it for sure. I should know too, like we were practicing, you know, you are guaranteed two throws of the major championship. So we were practicing and had the mindset we're gonna get two throws. It was only after her watching everybody because she was a team coach, everybody get multiple throws that we're like, well, you know, we can keep on. Okay. To be honest, Tom Walsh opening up a 75 feet. I wasn't shocked by that because, you know, when that happened, I was ready for that.