Well, good afternoon, everybody. And I like to start by thanking Isawa-san, who I know for many years, for making it possible that I come here and address that honorable group, group of my little people, group of colleagues, group of friends. And what I would like to do is to give you my assessment that will come up in a moment after six years having been in Japan. So not everything will be pleasant, but it will be honest. And what I like to do is give you my view after now almost 20 years in science management as to what I believe would help Japan to prosper. And the first thing, the basis of all is, of course, science. You can see science brings tangible benefits to society. It brings it through rational thoughts and reliable evidence. There is nothing as an alternative fact. We have facts, period. So the science is using a systematic analysis to build and organize knowledge. In other words, you cannot fake science. It will be uncovered. Maybe not immediately, but it will be uncovered because it has to be reproducible. And science, initially, in generating knowledge is also the basis for innovation. That is, if you wish, the practical implementation of knowledge into something that is good for society. Now, having said that, we have experienced in the last 10 to 20 years quite a shift of science and technology and innovation. And you can see here, Xi Jinping, what he has said in one of his speeches, scientific and technological innovation is the most important fighting ground of the international strategic game. So if you translate this sentence into simpler words, science and technologies are now a political tool to assure power. Let me turn it around. Unless you are a leader in science and technology, your political influence will cease. So how is Japan doing in this analysis? How is Japan doing at the global scale of innovation? Well, let's first look at the number of different general analyses. This is the Global Innovation Index of 2022. And you can see that Japan hasn't made it into the top 10 of global innovation countries despite the fact that it's the third largest economy in the world. What has happened? And we've heard a little bit of that previously. What has happened is that three other players in Asia have superseded Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and in particular China. Japan is ranked number 13. So where is Japan good? What is its strength? What are the weaknesses? Well, you can see that Japan is very good in some areas. Knowledge and technology output is strong. Business sophistication, market sophistication, institutions. What is lacking is human capital and research. We've heard the number from Lothar who has said that the number of PhD students is much higher in Germany. So the number of young, highly trained students supersedes what Japan produces. And what is also particularly weak is creative outputs. Now, this is even more worrisome because from the cabinet office, you can get probably even later numbers. You can see that the real GDP growth rate goes down ever since the mid-50s. So Japan had a wonderful group of entrepreneurs in the 50s and 60s. But what you see is the GDP has been going down ever since, and it's still going down. Sometimes it's actually the growth rate is negative. And what is the interpretation thereof? This is coming from a recent study of McKinsey. Japan's industrial R&D departments are no longer achieving world-beating performance. At the macro level, the country has slipped in global rankings for productivity growth and intellectual property generation, even as the total, I emphasize that, the total R&D investment is high. And at the micro level, this is a bad sign because it reflects the current opinion of your R&D leaders at the micro level, our research reveals that R&D leaders in Japan have lost confidence in the ability of their organizations to meet the challenges they face. So how can Japan strengthen its innovative power? Because that's the question we should all address, all of us that work here in order to strengthen at the end of the day the productivity to strengthen the well-being of the Japanese people. Now, this is a bit of a complex slide. But what this slide should show is in schematic drawings what an innovation network looks like. And you can see there are several players, universities, research organizations, government as funders, large firms, small firms, venture capital. So what I decided to do for this talk, I wanted to analyze each player in order to find out which of these players is performing properly and which of these players is not. I can, as an analogy, we can look at this whole system like a gearbox. A gearbox consists of many gears. Here I have three. But if one of the gears drops out, the whole gearbox doesn't work anymore. And this is a little bit what Japan currently is facing. Now, my friend and colleague, unfortunately, who passed away has said something very simple but yet very powerful. Everything which is new has to come out of fundamental research or else it is not new. So basic research is the source of new information. As lengthened the life expectancies, fed the world, taught humanity about our planet and the universe, basic research in general prepares humankind for the challenges of the future. So if what we need to reverse the climate change and curing diseases are all possible, it is the researchers that are going to open and show solutions for these problems. So what our problem is, bringing together these researchers, give them adequate space and means in order to let them work. So what is the situation with universities and research organizations in Japan? Well, first of all, like we heard about Germany, there are many players. And also, unfortunately, a few different analyses, every country is a little bit different. Germany is specifically different than I come to this in a moment. So we have universities as educational centers. Some of them, of course, are top universities. As regional centers, so some not so well-known universities, yet they may have an important role in a smaller prefecture in order to educate and study specific issues that are important for the prefecture. We have, of course, the nonprofit research organizations, national labs, corporate industry, and R&D lab. So this is a little follow-up of what Lothar has just showed. It compares three of the issues between Germany, China, Germany red, China yellow, United States in blue. And you can see immediately that some of the countries are similar, some are very dissimilar. On top, if you look at the sector share, so the percentage of funding, you can see that the China and the United States invest more in universities than Germany does. If you take the next step and look at the nonprofit research organizations, however, you can see Germany has a huge amount that is spent on the big four in Germany. That's the reason for it. And what you can see here, Helmholtz, German research, Max Blankleibniz, Fraunhofer in brackets, because Fraunhofer is an applied type of organization. So the top three contribute to one-third of Germany's scientific research output. So this is very important to note, because many universities in Germany and in Japan have two functions. They have an educational function, and the educational function in most universities is a huge effort. Because you have to train undergraduates. Take, for example, Caltech, one of our examples that OIST is looking for as a benchmark. Caltech has about 1,000 undergrad and 1,000 graduate students. So this is a different type of teaching. So bottom line is in universities, and I think this is true in most Japanese universities and German universities, you have to bridge the task of educating large numbers and doing high level research. This not always is going well together. The national labs, you can also see China has a huge investment comparatively in national labs. We all know, for example, that the Chinese Academy of Sciences runs labs that are fully paid for by the government. So universities, as I said, education and research, non-profit organizations, we have here some examples. On the left, there is one research organization in the United States, completely privately funded by Howard Hughes. In the center is a Max Planck Institute, in which our latest Nobel Prize laureates, Wanda Pebo, is working. On the right, you see the recon center for quantum computing. So individual institutes have a very specific kind of task. But we all need the national labs. Of course, there are some that are huge projects. The XFEL laser in Hamburg accelerators. We have here the Nanotech in Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, or the antenna and IC design in Hong Kong, or ocean drilling vessels. These are research support systems where each country can maybe have one. Sometimes the countries cannot afford it. Take CERN. CERN has to be financed multinationally, and there's only one CERN in the world. So some of the activities you need to have an international consortium. Now, I'm coming to this in order to document to you what basic research will be doing, or what basic research has contributed to humanity. You see here, beginning in 1961, with Sidney Brenner, who discovered the mRNA, and by chance also was the founding scientific father of OIST. And then you can see, I'm not going through this, that all these people have contributed over the course of 60 years to discover components that allowed us to not only understand what mRNA is good for, but also how you can utilize mRNA. And it is this woman here on the right, that's unfortunately not very highly resolved. And this woman was the one that, working in the laboratory of Beyond Tech, has actually made a breakthrough because that resulted in a stable RNA that was not degraded within the cell. So what am I saying? Beyond Tech and Moderna are startups. When I go around, I talk to people. People tell me, why was not any vaccine uncovered in Japan? Well, I think this is the key reason. None of the biggies, Pfizer included, has come up with a concept of this sort. It had to come out of startup technology. And Pfizer has had nothing to do with this. But they are, of course, very well-drained to distribute and increase the production. That's why you need them. So in any case, for us, we need to remember that if you want breakthrough technology, don't go looking for established companies. This is another example where I show the impact of a technology that no one was able to actually assess what it will do. And you can see here, this is done for the Americas. You can see that the federal research was supported by three give and take $3 billion. It generated 152,000 jobs, 850,000 associated jobs, 265 billion economic impact, direct federal tax revenues, 5.2 billion, so that the federal return of investment is almost one to five. This is what we should tell the Minister of Finance. Because at the end of the day, the money invested yielded five-fold more money from the society. There are other kinds of discoveries that were relying on a whole plethora of things. So no one, for example, could predict the winner, unless you are Stephen Jobs, of course, because Stephen Jobs was a genius who put together the large number of technologies to run an iPhone. And you can see there were Nobel prizes given in some fields. There was CERN involved, Stanford involved. There was the DOE Department of Energy. There was Department of Defense, DARPA. So what it took was a genius who realized what he needed and found this at various places and put it all together. This is one of my most liked slides. Because what that shows is an analysis where in the United States, a research group has looked at every patent written for 10 years. So 10 years, the analysis of the patents and what you can see here, 73% of the scientific references in these patents come from publicly funded research. So let me turn this around. Without publicly funded research, these patents would never have been written. This is very hard to translate into expenses for the finance minister, but for the world. This is, I think, an extremely important statement. And at the bottom of this slide, what you see is a most highly cited paper, top 1%. These are normally the ones that a group where you want to be in has a much larger impact than a lower paper that is not cited often. So these are the messages of two of the studies. And you can see governments hoping that the research they fund will foster innovation should, therefore, emphasize research excellence. When mediocre research is supported, neither science nor innovation is likely to gain direct benefit. The same statement in 2019 from another group. So what does that mean? If you invest in research, the only research that matters is research that is giving you new information that is recognized by the scientists and industry alike. So now let's look at the next chapter. How is Japan doing in terms of science excellence? Well, this is the top 1% of all of the highest group of papers cited worldwide. By the way, the top 10% looks very similar. And not surprisingly, you can see the top group, which I call here Major World Leading Research Universities, almost all US universities or research institutions. Then is a group which is called International Competitive Research Universities. And you can see there is Recon. I added, I'm saying there is Recon and OIST. I added Recon not because it's a university, but because of its also high standard of research delivered from Recon institutes. And then you have the top Japanese research universities that is further below. So the average quality of a Japanese university is much lower than the average quality of many universities around the globe. And it has gotten worse. If you look at this, and I found that interestingly, it's of course from the Japanese S&T indicators, but it was published by the Asahi Shimbun. And you can see that Japan's scientific competitiveness has even decreased over time. You see, in 19, around 2000, Japan was number four at the high-ranked papers. Number six, around 210. And now it's number 12. Now look at the blue marks. China, 13, second, first. Look at Germany, constant throughout because of additional investment. So that's what you said. Unless you can maintain your competitiveness, you will go down the drain. Maintaining competitiveness means, as one part, of course, also more funding. And this is what happened to the Japanese science output. You can see here that the bar is going down in areas that all matter for technology transfer. Physics, material science, engineering, biochemistry, computer science, and others. You can see in all these fields, Japan has lost competitiveness. So what can we do? How can we change the situation around? Now I'll give you now a little introduction into what constitutes excellency. And you will forgive me, but I spend almost 30 years in the Max Planck Society in various positions that I use the Max Planck Society as an example. The Max Planck promotes outstanding researchers from all over the world and grants them full autonomy. Full autonomy means no one tells you what to do, what experiments to do, what area to do research in. The Max Planck Society has very many, 86, or maybe by now 90, flexible research units. And we can react very quickly on new challenges. I, for example, founded an institute in Cologne on aging. The recent one that is founded is one on cybersecurity. So what you can do is, since they are packaged nicely, let's say four departments, you can have several institutes in various locations in a particular field that is necessary to meet the challenges of the time. Very important, independency of young research leaders. This is an issue that I feel needs to be addressed in Japan, that young people have to be independent. Quality control, very important. Every five years, a group of experts is assessing the quality of the research being done. And that is something that I like to call high trust funding, because it allows a scientist to have creative experiments following the curiosity in five years' terms. If the subsequent evaluation comes to the conclusion that wasn't any good, you can take away the research money. You can keep it stable, or you can move it up. And this is very critical, because this is the only way where you can drive creativity without the need of being in mainstream, internationally oriented. I believe when my time, Max Planck had about 40% of our directors, non-Germans. All right, so technology transfer, yes. And this is the result of a proper constellation in funding research. So you can see that the Max Planck Society has generated these were people working at Max Planck at the time of the Nobel Prize. We have talked about Schwanter-Piebel, 22, 21, there were two, 22, there were two, and so forth, and so on. So there are 23 Nobel Prize laureates, plus 15 Nobel Prize laureates from before the war when we were called Kaiser Wilhelm Society. So that's a total of 38 Nobel Prize laureates in an institution that now, at its height, has only 20,000 people. This is Japan's number. So I believe Japanese are not less intelligent that the Germans or the other ones working in the Max Planck Institutes. So the conclusion you have to draw is very simple. Unless you have the appropriate framework conditions, you cannot deliver this at a level that is highly competitive. So now, what are the design principles to maximize creativity? Research, excellent, very clear. You need a long-term strategy. You have to assure the scientists, this is nothing that is over next year when you change the program into something else. Small group size, large scientific context is also very important. Every group that is larger than eight goes down in efficiency because you have to delegate your authority to, let's call them, lieutenants or other scientists. You cannot drive yourself anymore. Multidisciplinary context, crucial because a lot of Nobel Prizes have been worked out on the interface between different fields. Early independence, I cannot emphasize that enough. Research-driven education and innovation, so your education is going along with the top research. I trust funding. As I said, core institutional and flexible external funding, Max Planck has been over the years 85% to 15%. 85% comes from both Federal Republic and the States. 15% is third-party income. By the way, Isawa-san, we are now by between 10% and 15% at OISO beyond the way. And excellence in leadership and management that also is a cornerstone of good scientific governance. You need to have a structure the scientists can believe in. So I have written here up a few examples of institutions that have high trust funding and are rated internationally very highly. Basic research examples, Max Planck and Rieken, but we have the other four are all privately funded structures. Whether it's welcome, Allen Institute, Broad or Howard Hughes, they use private money and distribute this money in fragments of five years. And I come back to this. There are goal-oriented research institutions, which are very important. Take NIH, largest goal-oriented medical research institution in the world. Look at the Department of Energy. Look at Helmholtz. These are goal-oriented research organizations that get stable funding. And we have something in between. I have two examples here, CNIS in France and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. They are sort of in between. There are institutes that are free in their research. There are institutes that are goal-oriented. So now let's look at the Japanese funding structure overall.  So the low-trust funding is JSPS, JST, and anything else where you have to write a grant. What you can see here, countries with a larger share of competitive project funding also tend to be less efficient at converting funds into publication. So this is not the most efficient way to get to publications. Because Japan lacks in research funding efficiency. If you look at the United Kingdom on the top, Japan is here, I don't know. I would say probably number 15 or 16. So not only is the amount of money that is spent by the public to R&D in Japan low. On top of this, it's spent in an inefficient way. This is just one example of OIST. And as I said, OIST has a similar kind of funding principle that Max Planck has with high-trust funding, which has, and Isawa Sen kindly has mentioned that, which has led to ranking the total output normalized by the number of professors leading that in Japan, OIST is number one and within the world in the top 10. And it is not a surprise to me, because if this is the case that we can hire the best people, of course, statistically speaking, we also will get, once in a while, someone who gets the highest awards. And this is one to people. And as Isawa-san said, since May of 2020, he has led the Human Evolutionary Genomics Unit at OIST. We can talk about the work he wants to do, which I find extremely exciting, actually. So now let's look at the money. Because in my job, I have to, of course, explain to politicians and colleagues likewise what the money is that we spend and if this is competitive money. And what you can see here are competitors. By the way, I should say this table was taken off the Isawa Review Committee about OIST. So it's updated, it's a newer version thereof. But what you can see that OIST's excellence per PI costs less than that of its international competitors. So this is an issue that you have to decide at some point. Do you want excellence or do you want metriocracy? If you want excellency, excellency you cannot get for a cheap price. Excellency is costing money and OIST is actually very efficient compared to the leading institutes worldwide. This just shows you the overall funding that you get per year. We have about 8.6 per faculty. Look at Rockefeller, 37. I'll take MIT, Stanford much higher. So bottom line is the excellence research is costing money. And if you want to have excellent research, you need to be prepared to give to those that can do this the money they need. This is a very, let's say, it's a full slide, which I also took from the external review panel. And the most important sentence is on the top. Because at this point of time, OIST has only 90 professors. And we follow very much the recommendation of the review panel that OIST needs to grow. So here we are now at a very crucial juncture. What is the funding situation, the R&D funding situation in Japan? Well, first of all, I want you to introduce this lady. Because this lady is an economist at the University College London. And she has done studies that showed literally what she says that it is the state or a country that is crucial to steer innovation in areas that are not covered by industry. So key point is, take home message. The country has to invest in R&D if you want to be innovative. Now, I show you what many people like. Because if you look at the sum total of R&D, in R&D spending from corporates and government, you can see Japan is on number four. And this is what you always read. But what you don't read is this. What you don't read is that the portion, the fraction, that is coming from the public. So the portion that is driving real innovations, this portion is exceedingly small. I have here no Germany spends about 1%. I think Switzerland, my Swiss colleague was here. 1.3 and other countries are very high. And this is what everyone needs to understand. The plot shows the GDP per capita. And the function of HIRT means the investment from the public. And all you need to know is the red. More public R&D spending leads to a higher GDP. So if you invest more from the public, from the taxpayers' money, your people will be better off. That's the message. So major index unfortunately shows a different picture. While Japan spending on research and development as a share of the GDP is among the world's highest, I just showed you number four. The government's budget for science and technology has essentially remained flat since 2001. Meanwhile, other countries, Germany, South Korea, China have significantly increased their spending. So now we know there is a new type of funding model that will come out probably next year, 2023, the 10 trillion Yen University Endowment Fund. Now, we calculated whether or not the 10 trillion Yen University Endowment Fund can help Japanese universities to produce world-class research. I'm obviously not excluding that it will be better to have a little than have none. But this is also the sad truth. Japan currently is in higher education ranking. Japan is here a number of whatever from this group is towards the end. Japan with the fund is a little higher, but still below the OECD average. And you guys are number three of the world's highest productive countries. This is not sustainable. So what the message is of this is also very clear. It is a good start if you come up with a 10 trillion fund, but it is not sufficient. Large firms, for time reasons, I think I will go over this. That is something which I want to show you because it shows the principle between large companies, R&D and public R&D. The large companies make incremental innovations. Incremental innovations are responding to market pull. They are responding to the market. That's why very rarely is a product that we could call a breakthrough innovation product coming out of the larger companies. We can talk about this because I was for four years the chairman of the Seaman Science and Technology Council. So I can tell you what the issues are in large companies, R&D. Breakthrough innovations, however, you get through technology push. And the technology push in turn comes from new ideas, new concepts that open up the market completely. There are dozens of examples. Look at the TV, let's screen versus the old type of TV. Germans TV production literally crumbled because they didn't follow it. So but this is just one example out of many. Venture capital, very, very, very critical for your country. So what you can see here is that this plot shows that Japan is about in the middle if you talk about venture capital and in entrepreneurs. And you can see that the entrepreneurs in your United States and Germany are more active. This is the amount of venture capital available in Japan. And you can see that Japan as the third largest economy, its proportion of venture capital is very small. Israel we didn't put in because it was out of scale. Israel, it's off the chart. So you can see every other country has a higher volume of venture capital compared to Japan looking at what they, looking at high and wealthy rich countries. So here on the right side, there are some numbers. 3% of the capital raised in the United States is available in Japan, 15% in Europe. Average deal size, 3 million, 15 million in the US. Limited funding for early startups, but it is the early startups that can bring the largest success. 50% corporate venture capital. The corporate venture capital, if it comes from big companies, is dedicated to increase or improve their own product line. You will not see concern completely new. It will not come out of it. So 50% of the venture capital, I can tell you, will be incremental innovation, not breakthrough innovation. This is just a glimpse at OIST. We have been very successful recently by attracting a 5 billion OIST venture fund. And this 5 billion OIST venture fund will provide us with probably enough funding for 50 to 100 startups. So startups. What's the situation in startups? This is important for you to know, because if you look at the impact, the economic impact of startups, you can see here that new businesses younger than five years account for nearly all net new jobs and almost 20% of the job creation. And this here shows there are 535 unicorns in the world. Unicorn is a company that is worth more than $1 billion US. Four are out of Japan. This tells you the deficit that within Japan, there is not enough entrepreneur spirit, not enough venture capital to come up with new companies that could make it to become a unicorn. I think I skip this and just show you towards the end that this is what OIST is planning now. OIST is here in the forefront. You'll see our compass as the compass will be in about 20 years, or maybe 30 years, or if the government would invest more, maybe in 15 years. And there is a new township here. And this new township shows the land we have that with private investment should be built up to be an innovation park in Okinawa. We can again discuss this. So let me conclude and come up with some, unfortunately, not very pleasant news to people in Japan. Science and innovation will shape the future. No doubt about it. Science and innovation will have an impact on a nation's prosperity and on its geopolitical role. Japan's innovation power must be improved. Japan needs to meet the challenges along the entire innovation value chain. These are models, which I very much like and I would very much recommend that decision makers should take a look, for example, in particularly on ERC programs, because the ERC European Research Council has two programs, one in starting grants and one in advanced grants. And these two programs support young excellencey and the excellencey of mature scientists in a way that you have the high trust funding for five years. It's perfect for Japan. A program of this sort with a higher number of fellowships in the starting grants for the young people could revolutionize Japanese universities from within. So my recommendations then are reform structures and functions of national universities. You need to take a look at governance. You have to establish early independence of principal investigators. Every job, every professorial job, not just the full one that I've propagated here, is and should be advertised internationally and should be decided by a council that has international standards. Differentiation in the research system is recommended in terms of mission and model of value creation for society. So you may actually take a good look at Helmholtz and put an umbrella of the many smaller independent institutes in order to give it a common governance, give it common principles, and give it a common funding structure. Review the triple helix model that has been successful in funding research between government, universities, and industry. I think it's high time to take a good look at the triple helix funding in order to see if this money, some of the money, is not better used by establishing venture capital and startups. Increase funding and incentives for venture capital. Very important because if you want to get a company or young entrepreneurs coming from the United States here, you have to make it attractive. So there are ways to do this, like tax cuts, special economic zones, and the likes to bring these people here to have the companies. And I would very much encourage the decision makers to bring in a high level international committee. You should have a mixed committee between the international and the Japanese in order to have a systemic analysis of the Japanese R&D system. I think this is high time, and it would be very beneficial to the entirety of the system. So as I said, this was my talk today. I have addressed individual elements that I believe can be addressed properly if you have the right tools, if you have the right decision makers. And it is with this conviction that I believe if enough effort and money is put into the system, Japan can come back to where it was in around the 50s or 60s. So Japan needs to meet the challenges along the entire innovation value chain. With this, I thank you very much for your patience and I'm open for questions if you have some. Thank you very much. This is Shintaro speaking. I'm a director of the interspecial bill of the Liberal Party. Thank you for such meaningful lecture or speech you just made. I just want to make one specific question regarding the last paragraph you said. Of course, to make innovation, we need to reframe the new structure needed to use destinations. So I'm just wondering if somebody can show the last page at the center you mentioned R&D funding border. I think this is a key. I'm just wondering what is the criteria to choose the board members. The criteria is not feasible or not adequate or inadequate. Maybe this board will choose the wrong choice on research. And also, this member should not be too permanent because as time goes by, the criteria might change. I would like to hear your opinions. Thank you very much for the question, which is a very relevant one. First of all, the board, the governance structure, the board has to be completely independent. No mix between supervision and management. This will, mixing leads to body-body business. It will not work. And none of the major players in the world has it mixed. They have a supervisory board in Max Planck. It's called Senate. Otherwise, we call it Board of Governors. The world has other names, but the principle is all the same. So your governance board has the supervisory board has to be neutral. So your question as to what is the composition of the board? This is a good question. We have, for example, in the Max Planck and also at OIST, we have people from a variety of fields. Scientists, top people with Nobel prizes. We have people from industry banks, people from the public domain like people from the press. So what this board should reflect is an opinion of the people. So it should be a mix of people. Now, we also were worried about the time of service. And my, what we have now introduced at OIST is two terms, three years each. Unless you elected the chair or so. If you are the chair, of course, one person needs to run the chair, by the way, has to be one of the board members, not the president. So that's that's very important that you separate these two issues. And I don't know, was that. Did you ask a second question or so? It's not as a couple questions, but. So I would, I would definitely considering, see the issue that I find in Japan. Most of the decisions are made at a national level. Science, there's no other field globally that is more international than science. It doesn't matter where you discover some things. And in different than in sports, there is no number one, two or three. It's only the number one. So bottom line is you need to have a stronger influx of international talent. We've heard that Germany made it. And you know, Germany, like Japan, we also don't speak native English, but you can adjust it. You can, for example, the courses for the graduate students. You can teach in English. But for me, more important is the evaluation of the end of an international at the international level to assure the Japanese tax. I mean, you are responsible for how the taxes spent, whether it's spent well or not. You need to internationalize at that level as well. Thank you very much for a very, very impressive talk. I mean, I completely agree with what you said, actually. And I have a question about the German system is a present. I think as you mentioned, you have this academic freedom, that autonomy for the science. And you now have a reasonable international talent that's exactly merged within your community. And I'm very much impressed with this. And I think this is not all tradition. If I recall about the year of 2000, a little bit before, if you visit the German Institute, they were speaking German. And I was not very pleased to see that I cannot understand anything. So I think you had a tremendous effort to change this culture. And within this 20 or 30 years, completely changed. So I think Japan can also do it. And as a matter of fact, you're still continuing to change. And especially for your support for the young people. I think that started only 10 years ago or something. It's not very old. German system had a very huge hierarchy. The professor was very, very strong in all days, but gradually changing. And I think we, Japan, also started to think about making the young people independent situation. But what difference is that money they put to the individual ones? So if you divide the money that is paid for the youngsters, it's something one order smaller. So if we seriously have to think about making the dependency of the youngsters, I think we have to probably triple or 10 times support. Otherwise, the people will have to be stuck to the faculty and do a little bit of independent work. But do you think that this difference between complete independence of the youngsters needs some startups, which is quite a money? But I personally believe that this is very essential for Japan. And another one is these hiring international talents that we probably have to change the language. The business language of English should be more broadened to. And do you think this will help our university system? Absolutely. And you made three points. The first is the students. And when did the German system change, I think? This was for the students, I would say probably 10 years or less, that the universities decided to teach after the bachelor, after bachelor, also in English. Not all of them, but some of them. The top universities teach in English. So that's one. The second is that the influx of international talent has been ongoing. I would say this is probably also 10, 20 years. But we have a lot of foreign talent coming to Germany. And this is what you want in areas where you need highly educated people. So as I said, I'm in Max Planck in my time, that was about 40% of the people I hired were non-Germans. Now, the reform was actually based in a fairly long ago, 1968. 1968 was the student revolution. And the student revolution has led to a dismantling of the hierarchy. So this has then been, of course, it took a couple of years. But by now, every professor, whether it's a full professor associate or we call them junior professor, they are all independent. The hierarchy is very dangerous. I give you one very simple example. If you talk to Nobel Prize laureates when they did the experiment that led to the Nobel Prize, most people were younger than 42. So this gives you my answer. If Japan does not increase the spending for the young talent, you will not get more Nobel Prize laureates. Very simple equation. So from what I showed you, Japan has a deficit. You have only 0.4% of the GDP that comes from the public. Germany has 1%. United States has 0.9%, 0.89%, something like this. But how can that be? A country like Japan, you are relying.  That's your dedication. How can it be that you have 0.4%? And what I showed you is the consequence thereof. Neither enough people educated, no enough know-how in order to come up with new companies. That's the issue. It's a very simple equation. So my pledge for Japan is a gradual increase. So how could you do this in terms of young people? Look at ERC starter grants. You give every year, I don't know, say 30, 40 starter grants for young people. The advantage is it could be run by JSPS or JST or whatever. But it should be, of course, the quality control should be at the highest level.  So let's just say a person A gets a grant, decides to go to Kyoto. Perfect. Bukouka, no problem. Ois, also welcome. So the people vote with the money they bring. Very simple. This revolutionized in Europe the entire, sorry, it revolutionized the standing, the elite. If you are part of it, you are elite. And that's what it takes here. So in our country, we started the so-called Sohatsu program for the young ones. But the amount that paid is one order magnitude smaller. So I just want to emphasize my government. Because then this doesn't work the principle. You should give a person a five years worth of funding complete. This is ERC. And we are talking about probably two parrots, two to three postdocs, secretary, and full funding. So that's what it is. If you do this, I can assure you, not only do you get the best Japanese, you also get the best people from abroad.


Hello, my name is Naila Canaver, and I am going to present to you today women of color in democracy on the carnival spaces at all times. I currently serve as the first African-American leader for a municipality that is in the county of St. Louis, Missouri. The municipality is made for, it consists of 800 people, excuse me, and then within the county of St. Louis, there are 88 municipalities. So we are invited similar to Memphis, Tennessee. And so we started off this talk to know that first time a very great place you are here. Second, at some point in this conversation is not meant to harm. This conversation is not meant to blame. This conversation is meant to lift women of color up in times. So, with all of that being said, I am going to let you all know that shortly, there will be a video. And this video is a mini documentary from a transformational summit that took place in New York in March of this year. And this took place because of my partner who is not here with us today due to a family crisis. My partner in this presentation, her name is Melida Bres, and she is with Democracy Rising, and she's a badass. I was talking with my partner who is going to sit here today because she was like, that person can talk to me today. So, this women of color transformational summit is for each one of us. And she thought to herself, you know what, I want to make sure that democracy is more inclusive. Democracy is accessible to all. And I believe that women can be the lead in that. And so she brought a very diverse group of women of color together that in New York. And this video that you're about to see is just a snippet of what came out of that lead. So Grace, would you like to join me? In the United States, we've never truly had democracy where every citizen had all of their rights and is still in power. Particularly women of color are facing a lot of threats of violence and abuse. Full time of their work, their movements. We've seen a lot of backlash and a lot of pushback. I am giving my life to people that don't know. When we get back here, it's horrible. It's horrible. And if you do? Decisions where we're never going to support the United Kingdom. And you know it's something that the community really wants to leave. We just can't get up. We can always really help for so long until we can go through those spaces and leave people. That's all we're going to have to do. We cannot continue to exact change in the city without a single change. No one should die. We started at low, low, and now we're going against the state government. We're not just trying to go on the road for transition. We all have a responsibility to make sure that women and children are actually safe. We shouldn't have to stop and work. Everyone has equal access to this. Especially the government. It's always a limit. We need to fight to get the community. That's all I have to say. This is something that we will continue to fight. And we will move this community. I believe we are going to be out of this space. We're going to help our petitioners to engage, enjoy, and care. And we're going to support that. We need to work. I think first of all we're trying to make sure that we're working. We're not going to ask all of this around here and get to protect everything that can pass to people. We're building on the future that the community deserves people who will come out and support that. And try to protect and counterpart those who you have to deal with to fully bridge back the green in the future. We're going to let the best of the rest come to action. It is so cheap to be that way. And so for me to feel like that after 113 years to serve as the mayor is huge, and I had persistence and backing, honestly, it felt like I caught the Obama effect, where a lot of people get really excited about change and being history. They want to be part of that. But then once that person gets into that space of leadership, all the excitement dissipates. Everybody seems to go away. And so I had to figure out a way to have an ally specifically for me. And so when I was elected, I thought, or council, I thought that my colleagues were going to support the agenda that I have. I was wrong. And so when I thought I could count to seven, I learned I could only count to one. It's very, very safe. And so I needed to be able to understand, okay, who was my opposition on council? Who can rise to a communal side? And then who is just going to roll off so I can make sure that whoever comes next is going to support my agenda? I am an attorney. I am a district judge for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And the only experience that I had from politics was maybe watching House of Hards. I couldn't get the rules right. You know what I mean? Watching a few episodes of that history from school, I did not want to be a politician. My only goal was to make sure that low income families could stay in our school district so they could go to our grade school. That's it. So when I came there, I was just focused on how we were going to help everybody on council. Was this focused on that? No. Maybe people were focused on power. And what I learned was that I thought it would be the white women on council and my opposition would be the white men. And it was the reverse. And so that was shocking. I continued to occur where there was a power grab and I had one of my white women colleagues on council reading me, if you will, because I was trying to make appointments pursuant to our charter. And they didn't like that. That was the only one that didn't talk to me after I died because it was so nasty the way that it was done.  Other people can, but I cannot. I cannot be seen at the end of my life. And so I am taking all of this time, fullery, in a public meeting and then we move on. Thank you. Someone was just like, you did an excellent job. I couldn't tell it. You were angry at all. You just kept going. I got out of bed and I was like, no, no, no. Because this is building a bond where our conversation is going to be in a few minutes. I got with Holly and council white men and I'm telling them that the councilman who spoke this way never came to me, they never spoke to me. This wasn't fair. And he agreed. Now he counts it. Because he saw that I was in training and he's not. He is a person that hears about fairness. So now he has some people that are rolling along with council for whatever reason. And I see openings coming in. Now I'm going into the community to find people that are going tomorrow because I need to have us. I need to count to four. I'm able to pull it or convince rather two people to run the council. They come on board. Now I'm accountable. I get another person on. Now I can count to five. At that point, we don't want you to give them money. I don't care. Whoever else is going to come on board, that's fine. As long as I have my numbers, I'll need to go. Now, let me tell you, I have people that support me. Having people that that keep this world out of the way for me in the St. Louis region. There I say, the state that has an affordable housing and has a tear filling price deals with county assessors with real property taxes for leading democracy have the opportunity to make a change. We will make a change. And so what I'd like to do now is ask Chris any questions and answers that may cause you to feel vulnerable and in your vulnerability you may be asking these questions to be getting on. I am asking these questions to have an exchange of information because what we hear today my goal is to what can I do to move a hurdle out of the way of a woman of color so she can lead and make change. What can I do to support a woman of color that wants to be in a space that she that no person of color has ever been in to support and to do for all. That is the intent. So I'm Chris I'm very honored to be here and to talk to you all. I was just explaining the format of these conversations that we're trying to set up so we're going to split up into two chairs we're going to have a group of people in the room together to discuss some little talk there and talk about your experience and what it means to be in a democracy space in an American apartment working to change it and to share stories and build a community. And then we're going to have a whole white policy that goes together in a conversation with me and the other white folks just talking about exactly what I was saying talking about how we as white folks who want to build a democracy that looks like the people in this room that wants to build a democracy movement that reflects American the whole American populace how can we build people of color with power how can we get like the same those and obstacles out of the way so that's what that's the goal that's the goal is to have these two groups having these terrible conversations and then we can bring it home and make something out of it all. Thank you Chris Thank you Chris so what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask questions give your groups time to discuss and provide answers you know and then we're going to share out before I go to the next end of questions alright sounds good okay so let's bring that Andrew you want to say what's your opinion or said question people of color work in your organization how many people of color work in your organization next how many of them are women of color how many of them are women of color in the final part of this set how many women of color work in leadership roles as opposed to assisted roles so I'll go again how many people work in your how many people of color work in your organization how many women of color and how many of those women of color work in useful roles as opposed to assisted roles so if you go ahead and you all can have that conversation and you know these groups are big so you must with them like a half yeah I guess we're going to talk about two groups over there I'm going to call it that it's pretty much 81 that is 9 it's in between 8 9 9 8 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 10 9 19 10 11 11 9 9 10 19 20 21 22 23 23 23 23 23 24 24 24 issue. I don't see like, I mean, she's a bad guy. She's awesome. And, you know, she listened to me. I had a hard conversation over weeks and weeks, but, you know, they didn't give me the same little word because sometimes we just don't understand each other. And I say, it's less than a white woman in a weird place because that's our offering.  I try to assess her. And so, I think for us in this group, especially this lady right here, you know, it's scary to not have any people around you. Where people like to just do this. So, yes, that is a good example. We have some cleaners. So, they started the organization. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Steve Bonho. We did have a plan before. We identified that there were very degrees of organizations. So, we also, I want to say, I had this one person that was a woman of color organization, but it was a very different place. Unfortunately, we didn't get to get into more conversation like this kind of increase in ourselves at that point, but I didn't know a lot. Okay, this is what all of them looked like. Oh, we can move forward until I could not hop. Thank you. Okay, so organizations, there were some people of color and others that weren't. There was a discussion about my example. We were talking about an organization led by a woman of color. Pretty much almost all the employees in the entire organization are all women of color. Almost. Very few white people, very few. Yeah, I think the general just knows that there's maybe not enough women of color in leadership. I mean, let me ask, forgive me for putting y'all on the spot. Okay, so after hearing what Tyra, yes, after hearing what Tyra said about being in a space and wanting to essentially get the proper pay and the same pay, you be an advocate and support, especially when you and we have one black person, right?  Can you tell us why? Yes, thank you. So that's it. And if you can get in a relationship with the person you know you got, they know you're not going to be bad first of all, right? Then that could be pretty awesome, but we can't really capture this. Thank you. I'm going to come here to help. So you can come policy by recommendations. All right, who would like to volunteer or who shall be volunteered to share? Okay, Chris. I didn't get volunteered somehow. So I think our conversation was similar to, it was a big variety. There were some who swear, everybody has some women of color on staff, but some, you know, it's a really small share of 5% of fewer of those folks. And then you've got the organization and staff. Tyra would say led by women of color, created by women of color, or led by people of color because they were created with the express purpose of the individual justice organization. So it seems like the attention of the app is when people are coming this sort of generic like do good things lens. They're not being quite as intentional as they could be especially in the start-up stages of these organizations are bringing in people of color at any level, especially at leadership levels. So that was my sort of takeaway of this conversation. Chris, do you feel comfortable in being vulnerable in answering the question, have you facilitated or have not why? Yeah. Yeah, so mine, I, sorry about that question again. Jim was saying like at that eye to just sort of keep saying like at that eye to just sort of keep me out of all times for women, you know, like conversations are happening when I feel like my colleagues who are primarily women, but also women of color, if they are experiencing micro approaches, if they're experiencing micro approaches, I try to watch that and see if they'll be able to know what's happening so that I can reach out and check in and see how they're feeling and see like I don't want to take action. I want to take action. I don't want to do it. I want to see them. I want to check in with people of color when they're experiencing car non-workplace and strategize with them about what what is my most effective sphere, where can I get in, where can I sort of like disrupt this hard so that's how I try to reach I just wanted to type I was like, I think my affair that I run into like definitely want to echo like I might have to do anything outside of relationship. Everything needs to be done with that relationship, but I know that if I am here with going into a conversation with somebody who I try to communicate to like superior, I am able to put with apps and experiences and data, I'm more likely to fail and I think I can tell me that and I think it's important to really know the whole story going in. I know it's going to be like a fraction of the guess, I think that goes on. It's like 100%, but does one have to mean that we also can't see when we're trying to speak? We, I'm sorry, like we like white co-workers who are trying to stand up for our co-workers of color with their bits and pieces. I want to speak on what Jim and Chris were talking about.  I can tell, I say my improvement, I can tell black and brown people, hey, y'all, we're going to, we're going to separate into this group because as Tara said, there is comfort in that, there is a feeling of safety in that because we are all going through the same thing. And so when I want to communicate, I'm with me and I'm going to communicate that to white people more often than not. I'm going to be the representative. This is the truth. It's the truth. It's the truth. And am I like, oh, you know, this is, this is so unfair. It's the truth. It's the truth. And am I like, oh, you know, this is, this is so unfair. It shouldn't be this way. I ain't got time for that. I'm going to be wrong with you all. I do not have time to be like, oh, it's so unfair. It shouldn't be this way. What I'm trying to do is, which is my agenda form and my agenda supports my community. And so if I'm interested in the representative to get something done, that's what I want to do. And I appreciate the representatives that go into the room and talk to the white people and then say, hey, because I wonder because what this woman is doing helps everyone. So thank you, Jim, for speaking out to that. Thank you all. Thank you. What's your name, Carrie? Thank you, Carrie, for saying I'm trying and it's difficult.  So thank you for being in that discomfort and moving us and helping us to lose what we're trying to do forward. It's about comfort. For you to feel comfortable in talking to a white person in leadership to assist you or if you are running your own business, if you're running your own business, what would help you to feel comfortable to talk with someone else that could assist your business first, push your agenda forward? So that's the question. But what it takes for you to feel comfortable and then for this to feel comfortable and assist me in moving forward, either in the space that you're in, whether it's space that you're in, moving forward and ensuring that their voices are heard. All right, so we will help you in those two minutes. So, okay, here we go. Let's say we have three things. Yes, yes, okay. But this will be a five-way conversation, so then we can go around. This will be the last question. I mean, you can start with. This is so awesome. Thank you for participating. That was an interesting decision of yours. Should I say, for people to assist a woman of color with the information that she may have or getting rid of pearls, cleaning them up so they can have voice, what was going to help you feel comfortable with that. And then on this side, I was asking you all to talk about what you do need to feel comfortable so you can have that. And I'll just tell you the space that I have in my household is two minutes off the life you need to know. So, it's fine. Independence is not here to work for me in this space. I need you to ask for help, right? And so, I have a sense of representative and now I have a change for the better in my community. And so, we're going to start here. I would love for that to not be the case. I don't want anyone to have to be like, oh my, really, reach the depths of hell. And now I need to ask for help, right? You know, so trauma, what can make you feel comfortable? And then I'm going to spot like the system right here, which I'll be able to sell.  And I'm asking you to be normal until the end, because that's the space that we're in. And I'm here as the more AES thing, you know, maybe one of the, one of the two books that I need to be proud of. So anyway, in the green room, yesterday, I was standing up at the media. We said, ooh, I'm going to be proud of her. I was already nervous in the green room. Welcome to the media. She's so tired of her and I'm too into interviews. Perfect to schedule those. Do you also want to, so I brought it to the group early. So I don't know how to have a conversation and the team is right and communication. I think it was that one Asian woman, one Asian man that has spoken on any of the communication trends. And I would like to say, and I'll quote it like, this kind of strength is black people running internet, like people color. With their communication, sometimes interacting with others, especially in an era of conversation, isn't clear. Some of the things that have been very intentional of their words and thoughts before coming into this conversation. And a couple people are mentioning is conversation. They all want to bring things up because they don't want to lose their job. That's also something to do online. And then it's going to make me feel comfortable in four positions where I'm the one person and all of the others in the order. But one of the things that I try to do is just listen and give people space to say what they need. I often, when I can't bring something to someone, I'm going to say, oh, we'll do all this instead of giving me the space to explain what I need, what I'm going to be the space to, for them to understand where I'm going to be conversation is let them to understand. For being vulnerable and strong and saying that in this space, I wanted for you to share that because I want you to hear it. I think that I'm sure that our society was in your environment, but it was in your community. I'm sorry that you were dead. And yeah, I'm thinking about what Jean just said about listening. When someone or other tells you this may be a little comfortable or what you said was offensive, we not change that personally. I think a personal attack on you, what I've experienced is I tell someone, we're not true, okay, David's not okay. They're like, oh, you think I'm a bad person? No, that's not it. We're just talking about that one thing. So we're on a one thing and not center, not center, but this person is not going to be in school at first. We are not products when you're guilty because you don't have time for that. You don't have time, right? You're just really trying to think of time. And so, please don't take it as, hey, we have different cultures. You may think that this is okay, but in my culture, it's not. So can you work on that? Get a bridge there and then get over that bridge so you can get whatever the task is we're trying to get done. All right, so thank you for listening to that scale. Who would like to report out for this? A little bit of a different transcendental organizations, but what we're talking about is being a safe zone for those people of color who are in those positions and making sure that's known. It's okay to get out of your voice shakes. It's okay to be that person that's a little bit scared of speaking off of being that person because that's how you put yourself into that atmosphere where those people of color feel like they can talk to you. And we talked about knowing your power as a white person, as a white man, knowing your privilege that you have to stand behind somebody to color and listen to that. But you shouldn't have to do that from the ground, ground zero, so she can ask, what do you mean? If you need that understanding, let me be that one side of it. Right, I think that's what our role is, is be behind the people that want to make that change. If they do make that equal change, you don't have to go years. And that is, I think that's really important to talk about. We're going around. Thank you. All right, I need to get out of the way. You're like, not today, sister. All right, who is volunteering to be on the phone? Come on, come on. So some of the things you talked about were white people are afraid of bucking it up when they want to have a conversation about something that they think they see, and they think you might need to be addressed. Making sure that they are exactly what you said. What she said, she said a way about making sure we're giving you the space appropriately, so that if we're going to say, whoa, I see something that is not okay needs to be addressed, it's actually fine. And we're not stepping where we shouldn't be stepping. And so I think we were talking about tools and tactics to making sure like having that courage to not just speak up, but to speak to the person that we think needs to be given the space to explain what they experienced and have that elevated and changed, but to talk to that person first. And so that was one thing we talked about a lot, which is making sure that, you know, we want to be an ally, let's be an ally in the right way, in an invited, welcomed way. And I think the other side was, you know, we talked about this kind of one of, have you ever felt retaliated or potentially retaliated against if you started to raise an issue that you're seeing with your colleagues in color? And is that going to be backlash to you? And we're just going to put some conversation around, you know, I'm not going to repeat what you said, but what he said, you know, you got to do it. You got to do it, you got to take the risk, now that you're privileged and see how we need to raise people up. And like, you got to take the risk, even if there is retaliation, which is an unfortunate start. Thank you. If you would like to leave or if you have a question and you would like to follow up on, you're welcome to do so at this time. Thank you. I'm also in love to official at the second platform in Portland, New York. I never was going to say that I was a grassroots activist and somehow, you know, I'm experiencing that in also a very white city, very white state in Portland, New York. So a lot of things we talked about with things that I personally deal with. I guess my question for this is the challenging and scary part about being a black woman in a leadership position and a lot to the official is I speak out on a lot of the differences that have been passed since I was a little bit of a threat to myself and to the people that I love. And it's so, it's a little bulky because I know that we need people like us in these positions to keep fighting and fighting. So I guess if you're wondering personally, why don't you move forward because I'm getting close to trying to figure out how to run for election. And part of me, you know, if I could, again, the second platform we've ever had in front of the end is remember that survey of a very non-politician politician. So I know a lot of ways of a lot of people who come back. But then there's also this level of my own personal health and mental health. And I think it's welcome to do so often to just like keep going, keep it buried and fighting. And I'm wondering how do you balance the two personally and how do you feel like I can be in this space and I can keep moving forward.  So I guess I'm wondering if I can continue to fight for our community. And when do you feel like you can also step out and say I need to take care of my mental and emotional health and feel like you're not giving up for other communities and letting balance the people that are in question. Okay, so I am going to be extremely vulnerable with you all. After the incident that occurred that I shared with you where I had colleagues on council inappropriate at an other meeting, it was down over there. And I became extremely anxious. I didn't know. He knows that I'm going to seek for those council members. I didn't want to, I didn't want to go to council. And we were on the zone, you know, and it just a little side over it. But when you get up on the side, extremely depressed, I became extremely anxious to the point that I have to get on anti-depressant medication. And I am anti-anxiety medication just to continue to do this work. But for me, I'm still in that space. That's what it meant. And I didn't want to leave the space. And so I'm like, okay, if I'm not going to leave the space, but I need to help myself, what do I need to do? I need to start putting the seats. And so I had to do that work to get more allies on the council. Well, before that, I didn't have to get allies on the council. I went to the community. Let the community know that you will be involved. Let the community know that you will be harassed. I promise you, the people that had the intention, purpose to get out of their house to go to the voting board, right? They had to be the commentator of their home to do that for you. They will be there for you. And they see that you are not treated the way that you should be treated. So they didn't have a little gas left in the tank. Go to your community. Because that's how I was able to survive that time until I can start to count to three, four, and five. They'll do the other one. This is just a small amount. It's very funny. I think I'm sure everyone's voting has experience where you will hear all of this negative communication. And it's so loud. But the group that is coming from is so small. So we give them a back. City Council, we really did a lot of housing. We were going to ask, we were going to housing every grantee. And so we're with him and his vision is to be able to serve people, to follow us, to keep it for him. We need support. So it's really hard to talk about it at our organizations. It's the intersection, the race, the gender, and the health. So it's much like surfing in the schools. You know, I'm kind of curious, I'm really good with that. What kind of pitch did I give it to? Was it hard to say what she's dancing? Oh, no, no, no. What are you saying again? I'm going to say to them.  Seeing that, because I, that's not a note that I haven't had to give a pitch to someone, you know what I mean? I rest in this house and I understand, take toes on that because you have white women in my community that will have reading circles and they're reading white storytelling. So I think we see this woman in what she's trying to do for children. And if we want that to be more, so we're going to do whatever we need to support that. I am very blessed to be in the community that I'm in. And that's not to say, for instance, right? I will tell you that, and if I'm not getting T, I'm not. Oh, make a woman so progressive. We're just going to be this couple. And then I'm ready to make this vote. You're hearty with mine. I am about changing policy. As much as I can change a policy or ordinance that is going to be enforced, let's make that policy so it's important. A lot of the things I have to do about the state politics is I go on for a little more research work position, isn't it? And so I've heard, and these are sacrifices that for our conferences, I've always heard black men and I'm sure that on the other side of the hands are people. And that there is an ability to host some, some sacrifices. So, we all have that feature, too. And I know there has to be some love set up on this street, but they believe the full moon to the moon is right in the street. She was like, okay, you got to be careful about that. You got to be careful about your low. You're not going to do that.


Right, here's outdoors in the streets and I'll tell you what I'm doing as I'm walking down here. I've been sent a photo of a chicken of the woods in town so I'm vlogging myself walking down the street but I'm gonna go and try and get it if it's still there. We'll have to run because you know there's gonna be a lot of hippies if they see it they'll have it and I want it first because I've been sticking around these parts. Chicken of the city. We're gonna go and see if it's still there. Right it's one of these, one of these but it's one of these but I'm gonna look like an absolute nutty if that there it is.  It looks a bit past its best let's have a look. Right she's gonna look mad but I'm gonna get of it. I'm gonna go into it. Right I'm a gardener I'm qualified. Hello. Hi. Do you mind if I just go and have a look at that mushroom on the tree please just to see if it and it's chicken of the woods which is its common name but I just want to have a quick look at it so I'm just gonna get in the border and have a quick look. All right cheers. There you go. Just ask, secondly shall find look. Now it doesn't seem too bad I can that'll clean up quite well actually. This is mad isn't it look? This is it look. Look everyone the one's just sitting out having the dinner and that and I'm gonna get me SE3 out. That's what I'm gonna bag it up for me today. Got me knife of choice. This is madness. This is pretty mad. Oh what? Excuse me love can I just have a look at your bush at that tree? Yeah there you can. That smells nice though. It needs a lot of cleaning. Not all of it I'm just gonna get a little bit for me tea I'm not gonna take it all. Are you wanting some? No no no it's just that everyone comes and looks at it so I don't. I'm just gonna take only the under bit this bit's all a bit I'll save this bit to read you know to keep going. Only a tiny bit though yeah. I've just enough for me tea tonight mate is that okay? Just a tiny bit because everyone honestly everyone comes and looks at it. Alright sorry man yeah I'll just take a little chunk. She just said you was photographing it not taking it. Alright no I'm just gonna take a little chunk at the bottom. Alright man I'll only take a little bit. Just a little bit. Not allowed to take too much. Just taking a little chunk there Seal. That'll do for me tea. Fella came out and said I don't take it. They said people come and look at it like it's an attraction. There's plenty of stuff to see around here mate. I don't think also it'll be it will die off and then it might come back next year but anyway didn't want to argue with him so I just said sound mate and just took a little bit enough to do a couple of just a few chicken of the wood muck nuggets tonight so let's get it back home and get it cooked up. Some people can have an allergic reaction so only a small amount should be tried at first when tasting the mushroom. If the mushroom is growing on the side of a yew tree I would take special care. The tree itself is poisonous so any bark or needles that get in and around the mushroom can give you a dicky tummy. Once it's clean and if there's no debris on the mushroom then it's fine but tread with caution and at your own risk. Now let's tussle up some chicken of the city nuggets. Got my ton in here so have a little look at them. Chicken of the city. Chicken of the city nuggets and that doesn't look like chicken. Then served it with just some garlic sweet potatoes and a bit of a dress salad and then I made just mayo and sriracha for a sriracha mayo. Really well worth trying and getting right. I'll cut tea on it. Quick and simple chicken of the wood chicken of the city nuggets Right, see you later. Thanks for watching. Take care. Bye for now.


I'm a self-taught developer and Ruby is the first language that I've used professionally. It's the first language where I've had the more obligation to produce code my teammates could understand. And it's the first language where I've had to understand code that somebody else wrote. But I also consider Ruby the first language I've learned. When I was younger, I toyed around with basic, and it was part of one of our classes at school. I played with JavaScript since I was in high school, and I wrote websites in the side throughout the 2000s in PHP. But I never truly learned these languages. I just kind of cargo-colded code I found elsewhere until the thing I was trying worked. So Ruby is really what I consider the first language that I've learned by committing myself to it. And because of that, I have, I think, a good understanding of how Ruby works and how object-oriented design works in general. I decided I want to learn other languages because I kept hearing and reading people talk about them. What they said seems a different form I was used to. Why is everybody talking about this thing called functional programming? How could Erlang possibly be more robust by letting things fail? How could Haskell be pure with no side effects and do anything useful? Why would anyone ever use Go or Rust or even C? Ruby and Python seem fine for that sort of stuff. People keep saying Ruby is slow. Is that really true? It doesn't feel slow. Every day on Reddit, Twitter, and Lopsers, there are hundreds of posts about languages and frameworks I've never used, and that's what got me interested to know what else was out there. So I installed some languages. I think the first one I played with was Closure. It had a lot of hype around at the time. I made a dice-rolling API that returned JSON arrays of random numbers. But toying with the language randomly didn't seem effective for me. It was very reminiscent of when I was installing Linux or BSD when I was younger. I would download an installation ISO, install it, and then that was about it. I never had a use for Linux at the time. I never actually tried to do anything useful with it. I never had a great, never had a goal of what I wanted to learn. I just compulsively installed it on a whim and then forgot about it. So I think you need a project. I think I need a project. This may seem obvious to some people, but it was a big deal for me. I needed a project or more abstractly, I needed a goal of what I was trying to learn while trying to accomplish. So I thought about what came to mind when I was thinking of programming. Most projects I work on are on the internet. They're either a website or an API for some client. And behind those websites and APIs that are other services being used over HTTP. So I think HTTP support is pretty important to me when I'm evaluating a language. But if I just have an HTTP endpoint that responds to data and I can't write to it, it's basically just a static website. So it would be nice if I could write some data to it. And if I'm writing data in the server, it has to work somewhere. One thing I don't want to do is use an external database because I'm going to try this in dozens of different languages. And I could use Postgres or Redis in a real app, but that seems like a lot of work when I'm exploring these languages. So let's try to keep the state of the world in memory somewhere. And that also forces me to think about concurrency. And last but not least, testing is very important to me. And that means TDD for me. I'm most comfortable writing code when I have tests that cover it, mostly because I'm lazy. And if I have to start an application and manually make a request to it to make sure it functions correctly, that sounds like a lot of work. So these are the things I wanted out of a project. So I wrote down different things that came to mind when I would satisfy these goals and I tried to pick one of them. And the project I came up with was a URL shortener. It's an HTTP API that will return a token for a URL. And then if you request that path, it will redirect you to that URL. And for simplicity, the token started at one, but if I was regarding a really little URL shortener, I might try to make the random or compress them with some kind of like base 62 encoding or something. So a client makes a post request with a URL in the form data to the shortener and it responds to one created with a slash one and that one is the token and also the path that the client can then use to get that URL later. When you expand and you get that slash one, that path from the shortener, it will redirect you to the website that the URL that was stored at that token. And if you make a request that doesn't exist yet, it should return 404 not found. So that was like my basic API that I wanted to implement in all these languages. So I wanna touch on a few code samples from this and a few languages starting with Ruby and the things I learned from them. To implement this on Ruby, here's a sample of code I came up with. Using Snotcher at a shortener URL, we grab the URL from the params and ask a shortener object to shorten it. This method returns a token and we tell the user what the token or path is with the 201 created. And then to use the token, the user makes a request for the token. We look up the token with the expand method which returns the full URL or nil. If we couldn't find that token be 404, otherwise we redirect the user to the full URL. Inside of the shortener object, we have two methods to shorten and expand. They kind of look like the Snotcher versions a little bit more in-depth. The shortener we generate a new token and store it in our hash of URLs and to expand we look up the token in the hash. And then there's a thing called an ID generator which is a numerator that yield sequential numbers and the URL's method is just a memoized hash. And to use the shortener class from Snotcher and actually have the test pass, we use a singleton pattern with a class method called instance that memoizes an instance of the shortener so that every time we ask for the instance we get the same one back. Is that code thread safe? If I run this on JRuby or Rubinius, will I get missing URLs or token collisions because two things are trying to update these objects at the same time? If I use Puma or Unicorn, should I have wrapped that code in a mutex? I have no idea. Let's talk about closure. Closure has these things called atoms. You create an atom and give it an initial state. So for this we start creating tokens at zero. Then you can use the swap function to send a function into the atom to update its value. So here we're using the ink function which increments the number. You can think of an atom as wrapping a value and it has a queue of operations to perform on that value and it guarantees that they happen one at a time. It's a little bit similar to the actor model. So if we call the next token function, it tells token to increment by one and return itself and we get one back and then two and so on. And I love how little code there is to guarantee safe and current access to the token. It's one function to wrap the value and the swap function is in place of whatever code you would normally write there to change the value. So it's really just about four to six characters and you count parentheses to guarantee safe concurrency to that object. Next thing I want to talk about is Haskell. Haskell is really intimidating when I first looked at the syntax. Here's our shortened method in Ruby again. The input to our function is a URL. We do some stuff in the background including incrementing the token and storing the URL and then we return the token. So Haskell is a statically ticked language and this is what a type signature looks like. These are optional. The compiler will infer most types for you but it's idiomatic to add them. Anywhere you see double colon you can say is a and anywhere you see a right arrow it's a function between two types. So you can read this as shortened is a function from a URL to a token. A URL and token are aliases for string but I find it helpful to be explicit about the meaning of these types. And this is what an implication of the shortened function or at least the input and output looks like. But if we try to copy the inputs and outputs of the Ruby implementation we kind of run to a wall. Haskell is a pure language which means it doesn't have side effects such as changing a variable in some other part of the code. And there are no objects to hold instance variables and no ID of self. So in order to shorten a URL in a pure manner we have to also pass in the state of the world and then the output, this could also be called state or shortener state or whatever. Then the output of our function if it updates the world will also have to include the new state of the world and then we can use another function to get the last token from that. So, and then the world is that ID, the int and then a map or a hash of URLs, of tokens to URLs. And then we can write our function that operates only in the data that was passed into it and only returns a new world and it doesn't affect anything outside of itself. So to get rid of that implementation and then add the type signature for the expand function where I learned about Haskell is without even seeing the code for the functions you can tell what they do. Not only can you tell but that the Haskell compiler guarantees it will do exactly what these types say. Let's talk about NIM, which usually called Nimrod. NIM is a language that compiles to C code and is also statically typed like Haskell. Here's some similar code in NIM but it uses global variables. But there's a difference between the return types of Haskell and NIM. Haskell returns a maybe URL which could be just a URL or nothing. But in NIM it just says it returns URL but what happens if that thing isn't there? So if you try this out, it turns out it says it returns URL but it could also be nil, which nil kind of sucks. By the way, every time I get a new method error in Ruby it's a type error. Let's look at go.  When you're using a function that could fail the function typically returns two values, the result in this case the number and an error. And then you check to see if the error is nil or present. Most people find this pretty ugly at first. But it's there for a reason. If we didn't check for the error and explicitly handle error cases we don't know for sure what the result would be. I love this tweet because it shows how much progress you can make when learning something new. In this case an experienced programmer, Brian Lyles, was but still new to go and now he's a keynote speaker, you have to learning it. But I also love that even Brian Lyles was fighting the conventions of go because I felt like the only one that was confused by these environment variables and how my directory should be structured. In Ruby we typically use nil to signify a failure state or quite literally the absence of the useful value but nil doesn't really carry any useful information other than it's not the thing you wanted. Sometimes we raise errors and rescue them but it's not really easy to tell if a method will return an error and which errors it might return. Let's talk about Elixir and Erlang. Elixir uses pattern matching to ensure that the return result matches what we expect. Here we expect to get an okay symbol back along with token. If things didn't go as planned maybe the shortener would return an error and message. The pattern match would fail learning to the problem. Instead we can use pattern matching to handle the happy path and four or four if anything else happens. The underscore just means anything else. Typically I don't do this in Ruby but it would work. It's not very idiomatic to see code like this. We also typically don't wrap things in a maybe or option or result class sometimes. Maybe that's because we don't have pattern matching in Ruby. But Matt has said that Ruby three could have type inference. It's not a stretch to think Ruby could someday be smart enough to know that this code doesn't work. I think people assume adding type checking to Ruby would be limiting but I wonder if adding type inference to Ruby would actually allow us to evolve and create new conventions and borrow more from other languages. This code I've written in all these languages is probably not idiomatic for each language but I've really tried hard to embrace the conventions of the language when I learned them. It's very easy to have a knee-jerk reaction when we see something we're not used to. Like why doesn't Go have version dependencies? Embracing the conventions of the language you're working in. Lots of smart people are probably doing that stuff for a reason. Vim helps a lot with this for me. There are so many plugins available for all these languages that Vim becomes the best IDE for all of them. Saving a file checks for syntax errors, does type checking, automatically imports packages you're using and sometimes even suggests better code. Another tool I've really grown to love is Make. Make runs commands and their dependencies. We typically use rake and Ruby to do this but when you're learning what the language is or returning to a language you haven't used in some time or sharing a service you wrote at work with a co-worker it's hard to remember the commands and their syntax and their arguments. Make files are executable documentation for what commands do what and also a rake file couldn't install rake for you or Ruby. So why do this? Why spend our valuable free time and our downtime at work learning these new languages? I think it helps to get a new perspective. I truly believe learning some of these languages has changed the way I think about programming. To progress our knowledge and challenge what we know it helps to move outside of our comfort zone. Language matters. I see a lot of parallels with spoken languages. Learning more languages allows you to communicate with more of the world and programming languages allow you to contribute to more code and projects. But also learning other spoken languages can change the way your brain thinks known as linguistic relativity and linguistic determinism. For me learning new programming languages has also changed the way I think not just in that language but in every other language I'm working in. I believe it made me a better Rubyist. I didn't have an explicit goal when I started to bring knowledge of other languages back to Ruby but it makes sense that learning more about programming makes me a better programmer. But I didn't expect functional languages to teach me anything about object-oriented programming or statically typed languages to teach me anything about dynamically typed language such as Ruby. And why would you want to do this at work? Why would companies care about this and why wouldn't companies want their employees to do this? If you have some variety in your technologies you use in your organization and you give people the power to move between or introduce new technologies you become much more attractive for people to work there and also to stay there. Michael Lopp of Rands and Repose has this popular article called Board People Quit and the gist is the most important factor of keeping employees happy after their basic needs of like money and safety is keeping them interested in work and fighting off boredom. So I have some random ideas for Ruby that I didn't touch on earlier in a new particular order. Testing becomes interesting when you're learning new languages. How do you test when you don't know what you're doing? I love RSpec but it's really complex for newcomers. This is a contrived example but subject let, describe and context and the stub and mock syntaxes, all of them are complex language on their own and over-drying specs can make them harder to read and stubbing and mocking requires a lot of understanding of how Ruby works. So I found that doing assertion style tests in an imperative coding style with local variables and even copy pasting code and not keeping it dry made it easier to write and comprehend when working in unfamiliar language. Another thing with testing, I always test outside in with Ruby and I use stubs and mocks heavily to isolate and object dependencies. When I'm writing Ruby, I'm very comfortable with this. I know I think how Ruby works and I understand what RSpec is doing. I understand what happens at the language level when I stub or mock something and how to set them up and what point mocks are verified. But when I'm writing tests in language, I installed 15 minutes ago. I don't know any of this. If I understand something, I can start building it with tests. There's very little that I understand when learning a new language, but I do know how functions work or objects and methods or whatever the language has, the small parts. So I think inside out is okay if you don't know what you're doing. So just start from whatever point you understand. So Scala has this tool called SBT. So it's kind of like rake. You do rake test or SBT test. But if you prepend a tilde to the command, it watches your files and reruns of the command without having to reload the JVM. So I thought it'd be cool what if rake had a similar syntax and by default it just rerun the command on any file changes. Maybe we could also control the pattern with like a guard-like regex in the task. Another thing I thought was maybe like in many languages, including all the JVM languages that use maven dependencies or install automatically when you run any command if they're missing. So why does Bundle give me this error? The chances that I'm going to type bundle install after I see this are about 100%. Bundle is the thing that installs dependencies so maybe it could bundle exec install the dependencies instead of yelling at me. Interview make objects with the new class method. But a lot of other languages use the class name and parans as a syntax for making objects or more likely records in a functional language. So why not Ruby? So I made this gem called Nuke and EWK to do this and it worked and it only broke like three things that were like really weird metaprogramming in this project that work. And I put it on Reddit, people didn't really like it. It's been said that you should learn new language every year. But a year is way too long to dip your toes in and see if you like something. And a year is way too short to dedicate yourself and really absorb the conventions and ideals of the community around the language. Start with a few hours a day and see if you like it. Then as you spend a week with it you'll produce something substantial and you'll need to address metaprogramms such as like how do I deploy or ship this and how do I upgrade dependencies. After a month you'll have experience interacting with the community and the honeymoon will be over. Pick a project. You could pick a URL shortener and you could do Conway's Game of Life which is a coding exercise that's very common at code retreats. If you've never been to a code retreat I highly recommend it. Or pick any other project that kind of resembles what you do day to day and what you like to do in programming. Maybe like graphics, maybe you like APIs. So which language should you learn first? I could stand here and tell you to decide for yourself which language to learn but I have some opinions. You should learn Haskell. You may never use it for project, I haven't but it's taught me the most about type systems and you should learn Clojure or any Lisp. It's taught me the most about how to think about my data and the syntax is incredibly simple once you get past the parentheses. And you should learn Go. It discuses conventions of modern languages to keep the compiler and language simple and this can seem like a step backwards but it's a great language for getting stuff done and I feel a lot of joy when I use it. Other than those I think two reasons I would pick a language are fun and community. Fun is how much I enjoy working with the language from a technical level. It's easy to create fun with dynamic typing but I find that these type systems help me think about the problem instead of the code and I find that fun and also how easy is it to read? What if somebody else wrote it? Can somebody understand my code and can I understand their code? And the community, is anybody using this and are they using it for what I'm using it for? How hard does it find help? And I think most importantly when I go to find help am I welcome or ridicule for not getting it? Is there like a vocal minority of people that makes you embarrassed to be part of that community? Or is it a very welcoming community, like the Ruby community? Some resources. I'll just hold it. There's two books called Seven Languages in Seven Weeks and Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks. These are great books that you kind of dip your toes in these languages in a way that's reminiscent of learning on your own. He goes into a repel and starts playing around with the language. Learn X and Y Minutes is a website that just has code examples for almost every language you can think of. It's great for learning the basic syntax of a language. Shameless self-promotion. I made this organization on GitHub called Kata Seeds. If you've ever done a code kata, one of the things that I find frustrating is trying to get the development environment set up so that your tests are running, and even in a language that you're familiar with, it might take you like five to minutes to do that. Or maybe you know enough of another language where you could just start doing the kata, but you don't actually understand how to write tests in that language yet. So Kata Seeds is a GitHub organization. It's a collection of repositories that already has a single passing test. So you can clone it, run make, and then you should be able to start playing with a language with TDD. And I really like this for a code retreats. I'm sure you're excited with somebody else. Have fun. Remember that sucking at something is the first step to being sort of good at something. And thank you.


Hey guys, Shaperone 1000 here, we're going to try out this wish product, let's see what's in it Okay guys, monkey got another wish product in the mail, I think this was one of the free ones that she gets every once in a while, she wanted me to do a review on it, it's about 12 24 am I'm not feeling real well, so I can't sleep, so I thought I'd do a little film filming for you, so let's open this up and see what's in here, I think she told me what she thought it was, but we'll see here, let's check this out, this is a personal straw, silicon straws, okay, all right, let's see what it's all about, food grade silicon, all right, it's got of course your little container here, it's got a brush, I guess to clean the straw, there's the straw, so can you see through, let's get something to take a drink with this and see how it works, all right, well we got a soda pop and a soda pop and a glass here, so this, I don't know guys, this looks complete reusable straw kit, I guess he can take it with you wherever you go, I don't know, excuse me, I don't know about, I don't know guys, let's, let's give it a shot, this just seems, it just don't, it don't feel right guys, this just don't seem right to me, oh shit, I woke her up, she was sleeping but I hear her in there laughing now, so monkey, I'm trying to film, he's making me laugh, you know, maybe, maybe for a female, I'm just not going to see myself using this thing, it's just, I guess it's a guy thing, well guys, there it is, personal straw with its own little case, little hangy thing, and it's own little brush, I, I don't know why she's standing over there, I don't know why she wanted me to do this, but shea bear, what color is it babe, it's pink, like you got the cat, you woke up, you got the dog woke up, shea neon, you know why they have it, why, because people are getting rid of the plastic straws, I don't care, I don't care, so now you have the, a bird can't drink out of a straw, okay, but a lot of places are not going to have straws anymore, so now you have your own personal straw, look, I'm all, I thought it was funny for you to do it because, I'm all for going green guys, but it's pink, this is not going green, this is pink and I'm not going to use it, she can suck on it all day long, she can use this straw all day long, I don't have anything to do with it, look at this cute little brush, that's to get the saliva out I guess, they bent it to stick it in the thing and it's got this little shea bear, I'm gone, bye bye, can he sudden moves, don't, I'm filming this thing, I'm not messing with that one, you better because of the bites it's in our nits, leave will be a really big trouble, it can make us sick, what if it gets burned over the cat, I think it's just a, I don't know, I don't know what that is, he's huge, come on Bruno, he's about the size, he's bigger, oh he's a lot bigger than a pop can lid, I'm not going to reach a pop can up there just to show it, but trust me guys, this thing is bigger than a fucking pop can, round, shit, it's big, I gotta, better than the straw, I gotta kill it, I'm gonna be in here with Bruno, alright guys, yeah he's a big one, huge, sicker than how she wants me to kill a goddamn spider, god that thing's freaking huge, I okay, there's nothing funny going on, midnight gets a little crazy around here, bye guys