in food production last this year, the world for the policy makers, and of course we are also experiencing, as it was already the case last year, deep changes in the way industrialized countries are producing and consuming. There is this trend towards more natural, more local, more vegetable food in the West. At the same time, developing countries are also continuing increasing their consumption, their demand, and their wish to move towards, I mean, developed countries food consumption standards. And on top of those areas, we have this continued renewal in technologies in the way food is produced, but also delivered, marketed, consumed, etc., which changes the global landscape. We have also, and that would be the last point that I'm going to highlight as an introduction, this threat around climate, and this big question whether food is an ally, and agriculture is going to be an ally of climate, or is it going to be, is there going to be a lasting contradiction between producing food and being, and fighting against climate change? So we have a great group here tonight to address those issues. I'm very happy that Mr. Colin could reach us, join us again as it is, at least as far as I'm concerned, the second year I have the pleasure to interact with him to discuss those issues. Mr. Colin is the chief economist of the Food and Agriculture Organization. He has a very broad and long lasting experience in economics, in development, in agriculture. Mr. Maximot O'Colin has been, also has worked at the World Bank Group. He has been the, where he has been the executive director for several Latin American countries, but he has also led the division of markets, trade, and institutions at IFRI, a well-known institute here. So Mr. O'Colin, you will start this panel by introducing us into the broad picture, and you will be followed by two people who will focus more specifically on areas that are of major importance for our discussion tonight. Mr. Kabel Abdullah, who is a manager, managing director, and CEO of Canal Sugar, and emirates an Egyptian multi-billion dollar agricultural industrial group, which is operating among others in Egypt, and which aims to ensure Egypt's health efficiency in sugar. So we, Mr. Kabel, for over 20 years you have led large regional companies in the Middle East, we've done around Mondays, and you will talk more particularly about the Middle East. Then we'll have the pleasure to turn to Mr. O'Colin, who is the chairman and chief executive officer of LATC Group, which is a property investment firm in Nigeria, which invests in a variety of areas, sectors, including of course agriculture, which you are particularly familiar with, and you will provide us with a private sector vision of what is happening also in sub-Saharan Africa, as with your grounding in Nigeria, which, as everybody knows, is a critical country for agriculture production, and the largest African country, of course. And finally, you will turn to Mr. Park Yongju, who is coming from Korea, who is an executive vice president of Plant Farm, a leading indoor vertical farm company. You have Mr. Park 30 years of experiences in brand strategies, global marketing management, and product innovation, and with strong sector-specific experience in agricultural production and food industries, which is going to be the issue you will address. You had served previously as the chief marketing officer of Koway, and as the vice president of global marketing at Samsung Electronics. The specifics of the issues that you will try to address will be also to focus on technology, and some dimensions at least of technology, as our round table tries this year to take this angle to give a complementary vision compared to what we had discussed last year on those major challenges. So having said that, I'm going to turn right away to Mr. Cullen. I hope we can hear you correctly. Please go ahead. Hi. I hope you can hear me well. Yes, we're hearing you very well. Perfect. Thank you so much for your kind invitation this second year. Let me try to present where we are, and what are the major challenges that we will have in the future, and where we need to focus enormously. Let me start by saying that relative to last year, the news are not what we will have like to be, meaning that the level of chronic undernourishment in the world remain very high to levels of 735 million people chronic undernourished. And if we project that to 2030, we will be around 590 million people chronic undernourished. Now, if we take out the effect of COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine, we are talking of levels of around 490 million people less chronic undernourished. If you can pass this light to the third one, please. Next. Okay. So basically what this graph is showing, what I was referring, is 735 million people chronic undernourished, projected to around 600 million by 2030. And there you see the effect of the COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine. Next, please. Now, also, if we look at the latest report that we just launched today, when we look at the new hotspots, we see that the situation is not improving at all. And basically what we are observing is that there is 1800 new hotspots comparing to 22 countries, comprising 22 countries and 22 countries and territories. So this puts on a situation where we have countries which are in a very severe situation, a situation which is worse than what we had before and especially now with the latest events, we have increased those. Now, if we go to the next slide, what is important to mention here is that this agri-food system is going into significant problems of risk and uncertainties. And that's where we'll drive the future of what we are observing. These risk and uncertainties are not only on the humanitarian side, but are also on the macroeconomic side, more than 61 countries in debt stress, problems of exchange rate because of the interest rate increase, and significant linkages of the energy sector with biofuels, but also with fertilizers. And of course, the problem of contamination of land and destruction of land. All that affects directly the agricultural sector through inputs, through trade, logistics, which affects overall production, and that will affect, of course, the prices. And in addition, we have debt stress. But the challenge is that all this is under a lot of the stress of water and climate change. And climate change will affect in four dimensions, will affect on extreme temperatures, excess of water, lack of water, variability of the climate indicators which make more difficult for farmers to make decisions, but also pest and diseases evolution because of climate change. Next, please. Now, in this context of risk and uncertainties, we know that we have passed by now six of the nine planetary boundaries. And what that means if we move to the next slide, it means that we are moving into something that we don't know. It means that we are moving into biophysical dynamics that are nonlinear and could be exponential. So the frequency of these events could significantly increase over time. And that's something that we need to carefully look at because what will happen is what we are doing today in Spain, for example, that the payments to the insurance has double or triple because of the frequency of the weather events. So that is the environment we will be facing. Now, if we go to the next slide, there are four key drivers or transformation drivers that I want to raise pretty briefly. First, urbanization, which will continue and will continue in space. Second, industrialization. Third, the importance of carbon neutralization, as you were mentioning. Our belief is that we need good food for today and for tomorrow. And that means it's not only to produce more, more efficiently today with less, but also to be able to make it more sustainable. And that is what brings climate investment towards the agri-food system rather than the reverse because the agri-food system has enough space to improve substantially and have the major marginal returns in terms of reduction of emissions. And the fourth is digitalization. But let me touch on the first three of those. We go to the next slide. In this figure, what we see is how urbanization and how is the relationship between urbanization and the share of urban population in total population and the share of agriculture, including fisheries and fishing, in total gross domestic product. At the global level, the share of urban population grew from 37% in the 1970s to 56% in 2019, while the share of agriculture GDP decreased from 5.3% to 4.2%. And this is substantial, the change that we are observing at the global level. You can see the same in the high-income countries and then you see in China the big difference of what we are observing today. Now, if we go to the next slide, we also see that the projection of the population is projected to evolve in the world and high-income countries and China. And in high-income countries, a clear stabilization of the population is shown and even a reduction in the case of China. But this is not where we are observing in Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, for example, where we are observing a significant increase of the rural population still and yet not converging like where we are observing in the case of China. So, this means that urbanization will be a significant challenge and that's something that we need to look carefully because the demand of the commodities that we could be eating will be varying according. If we go to the next slide, here I approximate the industrialization by using the share of agricultural value added in GDP and the share of agricultural employment. As we can see, depending on the region, we can observe different dynamics. And while in the last 30 years, proportionally labor has left the agricultural sector for manufacturing and services, almost everywhere in low-income countries, labor productivity in these sectors has remained almost constant. What it expanded during the structural transformation in high-income countries. Indeed, labor productivity in the rest of the economy has almost stagnated in South Saharan Africa, but in America and the Caribbean is Asia and the Pacific, while it has barely increased in South Asia and near East and North Africa. So, this shows something extremely important, which is also linked to the informality of these regions and how industrialization will evolve. Now, if we go to the next slide, we will see that the agri-food systems also creates pressures on our environment. And that's something that we need to look carefully, create effects because of emissions, 31 percent, biodiversity loss, water scarcity, and pollution. And those are the externalities. But again, what I am saying is that we need to find a solution to these problems because we need to have good food for today and tomorrow. And if we just focus on the greenhouse gas emissions and climate change in the next slide, we will see that 31 percent of the global emissions nearly 50 percent were from non-CO2 gases and generated within the front by crop and livestock production activities, 20 percent by land use, change processes, and mainly the forestation, peatland degradation, and 30 percent by supply chain. So that's the distribution. So there is enormous potential for carbon neutralization. If we go to the next slide, we will see here that our agri-food systems need to be transformed to achieve this carbon neutralization. And for this, we need to improve governance of natural resources, improve productivity. This means produce more with less, improve production practices, improve consumption patterns and behavior, and use a cleaner energy. So our work here and in the figure, what you show in the red bubbles is the size of the problem and in green bubbles the size of potential sequestration. So there is enormous potential on the bigger problems in the use of energy, in the livestock use, in manure management, in fertilizers, and rice to create reduction. And there is enormous potential in land use and forest peatland, but also in soil management to reduce these greenhouse gas emissions. That's why I was saying that the agri-food system could be an opportunity to accelerate this process while at the same time assuring that we produce what we need for today and for tomorrow. And finally, my last slide is just to focus about what we can do and where we can make a difference in this process. And here is where we need to tackle at the same time the emergency situations with an integrated humanitarian peace-building policies, but also we need to protect our houses, our households, increasing resilience and is cleaning up climate resilience across agri-food systems. That's the only way we will be able to address the challenges of water and climate and the only way we can contribute to the bigger access of healthy diets because today 3.1 billion people don't have access to healthy diets. But on the financing part, there are several boxes that we need to look. One is support agriculture and how we can repurpose that, how we can accelerate and promote better incentives of the use of that support to agriculture and that's the repurposing agenda. The second one is of course out of the public sector, but it's the private sector, the international financial organizations and the other traditional borders. That's the way we need to allocate resources in the proper incentives. Next week on the 6th, we are launching the first issue of the true cost accounting of food, which will bring a lot of insights and information of where this incentive should be aligned to minimize externalities from agriculture towards this idea of good food for today and for tomorrow. Thank you so much. Thank you very much Mr. Cullen for providing this broad vision and concluding especially on the policy directions that we have to take. One point that I also take from your last slide is that you are using several times the word healthy diets, which means also something that I did not say in my own introduction that agriculture is also part of our health agenda and which includes also changes in the way we produce our food, but also in what type of food we eat and how we consume it. So thanks so much for providing this big picture. Now we are going to dive more specifically on two key regions. Mr. Okulehi, Sam, let's start with you please and thank you for sharing your vision of what Africa is of the African situation but also your own experience as an investor and providing us with this experience of private stakeholder. Absolutely. Thank you everybody and of course it's great to be here again for the second time in a row and I'm just going to take from where Mr. Cullen stopped and which is the impact of geopolitics on food production, food consumption, nutrition on emerging markets especially the vulnerable emerging markets like Africa for example and the essence of this is why governments in Africa and especially other vulnerable emerging markets should care, should care about what is happening in the rest of the world. From Russia, Ukraine crisis or to lately the Israeli Gaza conflict or as the case may be what is happening between the United States and China, between India and China or as the case may be and I think the most vivid example of why this is important is last year when we started to see the crisis that started in Sri Lanka as a result of you know the crisis in Russia, Ukraine what started to happen in Africa in many parts of Africa with the impact of what is happening in those parts of the world on food production in some of these vulnerable markets and we say vulnerable because it's interesting to learn that for many countries in Africa the staple foods, the staple diets in these countries are still imported whether it is bread which is consumed in many parts of Africa and main ingredient being wheat and wheat you know coming from Ukraine and Russia for example whether it's in maize corn which is a very staple in Africa and it is net imported into Africa today or whether it's even cassava for example in West Africa which is not just a staple but a base ingredient for a lot of the products that are consumed in Africa beyond food and beyond nutrition so the interesting thing to note here is for example why these countries should start to care and why protectionism happening in many parts of the world starts to impact on countries like Africa for example and there are very interesting themes that start to happen and it's interesting that Mr. Colling has pointed out a lot of them in his presentation and you know some of these very interesting themes that start to happen is for example protectionism we've seen for example the ban by India on rice exports and how that starts to have a very important impact in countries like Nigeria for example Kenya all over Africa where rice has become a big staple and the interesting thing that protectionism starts to do is that it starts to make food a weapon because there is social unrest in these countries as a result of these situations there is a lot of problems that start to come out of it like migration and we start to see a lot of people migrating from Africa into into Europe and the Mediterranean sea now becoming almost a cemetery if you like and 12 out of the 54 countries in Africa have declared a food emergency this year as a result of the protectionist or the inflationary or the geopolitical impact of what is happening in other parts of the world other than than Africa itself so it's important to point out things like you know health challenges food as a weapon protectionism inflation and so on and so forth you know being the consequential effects of geopolitics in these parts of the world now following this then is what should African countries or what should these vulnerable emerging markets start to look out for or start to do in order then to make sure that food security becomes a focal point of their policy agendas in order to make sure that there's not only a secure and peaceful environment in these countries but that there is a very healthy population in this in these parts of the world I think the first thing that starts to become very important is first of all building resilience in the supply chains or building resilience in in the infrastructure that allows you know for these countries to make sure that they get food back home and this can can go all the way from neonization or localization of these supply chains to make sure that urbanization is good of course but urbanization of course does not have to come at the cost of depleting agricultural lands or depleting investment in agricultural practices to boost production of food in in these parts of the world next to that is technology research digitization if you like and it was very interesting in some of the presentations that we saw earlier today if you go around supermarket here in the Middle East you find tomatoes you find cherries you find berries and the kinds of things that you would never expect to to grow in this part of the world now being grown here in the United Arab Emirates for example and that has gone a long way in securing the food system in these parts of the world and this is something that African countries then have to start to put a big focus on to ensure that you know there is localization and there is near near realization if you like of production basis and this has to be held by technology it has to be held by research conservation of water and and so on and so forth of course there is diplomacy and multilateral engagement and for countries in Africa to start to understand that there is every reason to care about what is happening in other parts of the world that a war in Ukraine is not just a Ukrainian and Russian problem that the the face-off between India for example and China is not just an India China problem or the the global trade dispute between the United States and China is not just a United States and China problem that of course it's a global village today and it's very important that diplomatic relationships or multilateral efforts at solving these problems either from a regional perspective a coas or an African Union perspective is key and important in making sure that we keep a big focus on all of these of course there is targeted fiscal and monetary policy inflation is a big issue today and inflation is a big issue in these parts of the country in these parts of the world that I'm talking about not just from a local perspective but also from a global perspective there is the impact of the fact that like I said earlier almost all of the staples in African cuisine and diets today is imported you have the double whammy of the deterioration of the currencies in the in these parts of the world vis-a-vis the the the US dollar that is the currency that you require all euro or as the case may be to make sure that these imports are brought in and of course the inflationary effects of it the energy costs and and so on and so forth and last but not least there is of course the key importance that has to be paid to sustainability and sustainability finance or climate finance because of course we have to preserve the production systems in these parts of the world is very important that governments start to make sure that climate related finance or sustainability related finance is paid a very important attention because for example the kinds of resources that we need to make sure that food production is is kept at its premium is extremely important whether it is water whether it is forestation or as the case may be is it's paid a very keen attention to now in summary that the essence of this is to start to understand of course the impact of geopolitics on on you know food systems and these are some of the very important things that that need to be done in order to make sure that these countries have a very very keen focus on why it is important to start to care about what's happening in the rest of the world thank you thank you mr. ukuley and also for helping us making one step further after mr. Collins presentation and highlighting how intertwined are the issues and how geopolitics and food security have tight relations and it's not only about producing and consuming in africa but also managing the relationships and caring about what happens in the rest of the of the world and i suspect that we're going to face now a different situation mr. camel in the middle east which has strong specificities including environmental specific geographic specificities in this major channel and here we are at the right place to discuss those issues thank you i'm not sure if the presentation is up and running even without it first thank you all for still being with us i know we stand between you and your breaks for the evening that's indeed a very important topic especially in the middle east the good news for the middle east is that national food security has been an item for at least the last 30 years in the middle east while it's becoming a hot topic around the world we've been dealing with it for a long time but there has been major changes over the years especially over the last almost eight years in terms of how we look at national food security let me highlight my contribution here is that i come from the private sector however the role or the projects we do is are in public private partnerships with the government for example in Qatar a couple years back we flew in cows by plane first airlift of cows we worked within one to two years to ensure hundred percent self-sufficiency of dairy products in Qatar today as was mentioned we are working in Egypt to again ensure self-sufficiency in sugar by doing land reclamation for a land as big as Singapore desert land while using disruptive or new technologies in this but let me look at food security historically in the region it was easy it was about availability affordability accessibility and essentially governments would import it because only three percent of our land overall are fit for agriculture almost 97 percent depending on the country that you are in is not does not have the soil or the water needed for you to do agriculture uh government had lots of money so they can import and subsidize food programs around the region for example in Egypt 70 million people receive some kind of food subsidy for for bread 70 million out of about 110 120 million people so but this model is not sustainable you know oil prices will not always go up we heard earlier today they will start maybe going down governments cannot continue to run budget deficit and we had another complication really which is the health crisis in the region we have the highest we're the second highest diabetes rates around the world so what happened over the years is that diabetes heart problems start coming early we have them at ages of in the early 40s versus 50s in other parts of the world again government responded by spending money on healthcare putting the hospitals sending people first abroad and putting hospitals in and now they are aligned also it's not sustainable it's neither sustainable to subsidize imported food nor is it sustainable to continue spending money on treating sick people from chronic disease and that's now where food security has graduated into it's about wellness nutrition it's not about now making let's say poor people or rich people just having food and their tummies it's about making sure they have the right food and their tummies so that they do not get sick so that I don't have spent too money on them buying insulin for their sugar sugar problems so when you have this change in food security approach in the region which said we need now to have good food we cannot continue to import it expensive for many reasons and we cannot continue to have people eating unhealthy food so now we are working to ensure we have some kind of self-sufficiencies or at least a reasonable a domestic component production of agriculture and that's what we are seeing things happening what made this happen technology pure and simple without disruptive technologies we would not have been able to reclaim the desert we have disruptive without disruptive technologies we wouldn't be able to optimize the production and the use and minimizing the use of water and without these technologies we wouldn't be able to develop higher yields for cows higher yields for for sugar higher yields in every area of the agriculture so do we face challenges indeed many the public sector has different expectations from the private sector major mismatch between the public sector and the region and the private sector goals expectations timelines return on investments add to it another component we really need always R&D research and development and our regional companies and I've run two of the larger ones in agriculture do not have the funding to do significant R&D investment so we need the third component in the public private partnerships which are universities the universities in the region are well funded I was an ex-academic but regretfully a lot of the academia is focused are focused on having a higher research index than maybe having a relevant research we know in the industry whenever we mention academia they say watch out these people do research that prove that blind people do not drive you know and we say of course not they have a relevant impact for research we just need to tie them with the food security the government the policymaking and the and the private sector so where we stand today it's the best of days because now food security is the end topic no longer are investors chasing more buildings and more real estate and people are looking at investing in agriculture but also it's the toughest times indeed as was mentioned when you are looking at one healthy earth you know one healthy water one healthy soil one healthy food all of this will contribute to one healthy human and we have several bottlenecks nowadays especially when we add the regional geopolitical situation the tensions that used to be here are coming back very fast and they are driven and will be driven increasingly by agri issues or water issues for example the water issues will impact the Turkey Syria Iraq food supply and agriculture as well as the Ethiopia Sudan Egypt water water supply add to it all these countries use common underground water and increasingly as we do land reclamation we are using or maybe overusing the underground water so we're ending up with a lot of issues there hopefully technology will come to the rescue instead of having lots of cows to get meat we get our energy from alternative proteins so that we'll have less cows less gas emissions and we'll be able to have also healthier food in the process so let me stop here and we'll wait for the Q&A except to repeat that technology has been a saver for the region on food security and that the region has been among the pioneers in promoting nutrition and healthy nutrition now as a direction instead of just more food for people I know thanks very much Mr. Camel for all those messages and two of them which I think we'll all remember message about health and the situation of diabetes and heart diseases by the way something which is also taking place in sub-Saharan Africa which is also experiencing this major change in health challenges and also this call for technology and science as a driver for sustainable food production and I suspect that we're going to continue digging into this issue with Mr. Park which I hope will have his presentation on the on the screen no I don't think I will have presentation so you know my background is marketing and I used prefer like show and tell but some technical difficulty I am not able to show some you know good images so I will focus on the telling the story so the the question is you know the controlled environment agricultural CEA whether this technology can be the solution to you know food crisis or food shortage right I was really glad to hear the UAE minister of climate change actually mentioned about she's strong support of you know CEA technology because you know Middle East is the area many CEA companies actually focusing on to really deploy their technology but when you really think about food shortage there are many different dimensions you know the first one would be whether you can have enough food for the human races on earth or you know some countries they really worry about you know food sufficiency and then self sustainability this self sufficiency issue came out a lot after pandemic when there is disruption in trade and then also like the regional conflict like Ukraine war those are actually causing you know the issue with self sufficiency and then if you really think about you know different countries and different regions you know each country or different regions has different needs for you know controlled environment agriculture one example would be like think about Antarctica right the most cold climate on earth there is no you know plant but currently the Korean researchers in Sejong Research Center in Antarctica they are growing you know the watermelons you know cucumber pepper and tomato all different kind of fruits and vegetables in container farms and those researchers are not really farmers they don't know how to grow those vegetables and fruits but all the system is actually monitored from central location in Korea and then the expert in that monitoring room is providing instruction to the researcher so the the results is you know they can really enjoy fresh fruits and vegetables so that improving their well-being but also you know by cultivating those greens in you know cold place like Antarctica is also good for their mental health as well and another example cold example is like Mongolia I know many controlled environment agriculture company they are really focusing on hot weather but you know the Mongolia has Mongolia has been importing 40 percent of their vegetables and then almost 95 percent of fruits from other countries when I visited the Mongolia the quality of the leafy greens are really really bad you know I visited there you know very premium supermarkets but the leafy green quality is you know as poor as I almost cannot I almost don't want to buy it right and then if I when I ask Mongolian consumers whether they consume vegetables and they say yes and then I ask what kind of vegetable they consume they say it's like potatoes you know sweet potatoes and like you know it's all root greens you know for them they never you know enjoyed eating the leafy greens so one of the project being conducted in Mongolia with support from local Mongolian company and then the Ulaanbaatar city is building a indoor vertical farm near outside of Ulaanbaatar and then producing 70 tons of leafy greens every month so we strongly believe this will improve the health of Mongolian consumers right and another example is the northern Canada the one city in northern Canada they have a very high obesity and then diabetes rates among you know young kids the reason is the again is that they don't have chance to eat leafy greens and fresh vegetables so the local city actually called help for support to Korean Institute the KIST Korean Institute of Science and Technology so what they have done is they actually developed the vegetable called bakchoy in indoor vertical farm and we call that bakchoy as super bakchoy that's because bakchoy has some special ingredients which help you know reducing fat from the body and then also reducing the obesity and the KIST was able to develop bakchoy with 2.4 times higher ingredient which the ingredient in the bakchoy and then they also able to produce bakchoy two times as fast as you know traditional farming so those are the some you know examples in the cold country right and in a hot country like in Dubai as the minister of UAE said they are already using controlled environment agriculture in here right for producing tomatoes you know blackberries you know and leafy greens but another project currently being undertaken in UAE is actually producing the animal feed in indoor vertical farm I found a statistic saying the Abu Dhabi is second large second country in terms of importing alfalfa and they are importing alfalfa from like US and also in China and their import of alfalfa has grown I think 35 times and 35% for the past 10 years but think about you know producing alfalfa in the US and then you have to dry the alfalfa so that you can actually transport to UAE and then once you get alfalfa in UAE now you have to add water into the alfalfa and then mixing animal feed and then feed to the cow right so I hope I can produce alfalfa from indoor vertical farm but we cannot but we can actually produce barley sprout very easily in the indoor vertical farm and barley sprout has very good nutrient for the cattle and then also is much cheaper than alfalfa and then also there are many research done on mixing barley sprout to TMR the animal feed can improve the productivity one research says the the meat the weight growth of the the beef can be quicker more than two times and then the quality of meat can improve for the cow milk cow the milk cows the milk production can improve by 20% and then the protein content in the milk can also improve so we are actually working with one of the local company in Abdabi to you know develop the barley sprout indoor vertical farm and then we want to conduct research with the cattle company as well and then you know today the UAE minister actually mentioned about the agriculture consumes the most resources I think that's really true I heard 70% of freshwater are wasted or used in agriculture it's very simple if you give water to the plants 95% of water just disappear it's only less than 5% of water is actually consumed by a plant but controlled environment agriculture we use less than 5% of water used by traditional agriculture and then you know we can also recycle the water so the water consumption is very low and another statistic says 30% of the agricultural land disappeared in the past I think 30 years but in controlled environment agriculture we don't make land you know bad and then we can actually increase the productivity of you know agriculture by you know six times eight times ten times basically we can actually stack up the layers then we can produce much more product and another good side of controlled environment agriculture is no pesticides used typically I believe six billion tons of pesticides are used in agriculture but we don't use any pesticides and in terms of the waste of food only 67% of you know the crops harvested in traditional agriculture can be edible so almost like one third you know you cannot eat but the crops from indoor vertical farm the rate goes up to 97% so we don't waste anything and 45% of fresh vegetables are wasted during the transportation and then 40 about 50% of also the fresh vegetables are wasted because you know it doesn't supply chain issue as well but by producing you know the the crops locally and then reducing food miles you don't you're not going to have this kind of waste and in addition to saving the waste you know we can produce the vegetables throughout the year 365 days a year and then the productivity rate is at least two times faster than traditional agriculture and then you know if you look at countries like you know Singapore they also want to do you know the food self-sufficient food supply within Singapore but they have very limited land one of the benefit of you know indoor vertical farm is we can actually do agriculture anywhere any place in the city so one example is the metro farm in Seoul so we actually converted unused space in Korean Seoul metro station into a smart farm so I actually wanted to show the picture but when we think about changing that place that place was completely empty is dead space but we revive that space into you know indoor vertical farm with a salad cafe and then also we develop you know the agricultural academy for kindergarten kids and with the Singapore food agency we have been discussing about you know using the land below the the underpass because below the underpass there is no sunlight so that land is completely wasted but we are actually utilizing that land for indoor vertical farm and another project currently being discussed is you know developing indoor vertical farm in Manhattan right the the vegetable price in New Jersey versus Manhattan the Manhattan is typically a 2.5 to three times higher than the price of vegetables in New Jersey that's because the transportation costs from New Jersey to New York there is only one route you can transport vegetable to Manhattan which is the the Georgia Washington Bridge and then you know after the pandemic there are lots of empty spaces in the buildings of Manhattan so excuse me Mr. Park could I kindly ask you to conclude this series of very exciting projects yeah thank you please go ahead yeah last few words the Manhattan is another one so we want to make self-sustainable you know farm with the the restaurant connecting to the the farm as well but you know the the CEA also has many you know issues because we are being criticized with using lots of energy but I believe we can solve that problem because the one of the things we are currently focusing on is the consumption of energy in our LED lights and for example we were able to reduce the power consumption by 10% every year Park could I kindly ask you to that we thank you thank you very much I think the list of examples that you have been giving is incredibly is incredibly stunning and highlights how much productivity can be increased and also all the extreme conditions or frontier conditions in which food can be produced efficiently with economic models that that are viable so and all the examples that you have given are also leading me to go back to one word that you Mr. Camel mentioned was that was alternative proteins so alternative proteins is meat without cows you know including up to a 3d printing etc so I know there's a lot of curiosity about this issue and I would like to ask all of you in two minutes each whether you think this is a possible solution for the future of food not only as a tiny niche area but something that could really be a full-scale solution I don't know Mr. Cullen if you have correctly heard me and if you'd like to start you know really two to three minutes each just giving a feeling about what is you know something that for everybody is absolutely beyond understanding to up to a certain extent please if you can tell me again what is the solution you're referring to I cannot hear you correctly I'm asking whether you think that alternative proteins can be a full-scale solution for nutrition and not only some kind of niche scientific experiment sure okay so look I don't think is the only solution that we have to look at okay because the importance here is that it's not just proteins but it's other elements that are required in the nutritious diet and healthy diet and when we look at all the vegetable animals for example there is a diversity of micronutrients that are provided which are important I think the challenge on the other side is how we are able to balance things because we have countries that over consume proteins and countries which are completely undercontaining protein if we are able to achieve that balance I think we can bring that solution which is more efficient and could report significant problems of other consumption of protein if you have and at the same time cope with greenhouse gas and metals especially related to livestock production. So it's one element which could contribute but I don't think it has an overall solution to the challenge. So there are alternative solutions to alternative proteins okay Mr Kamal would like to continue. Yeah first this is relatively in you area I mean it's only on the last five six years I think everybody tried down possible burger and another similar product it's here to stay we are still at the pre paradigm era we don't have a clear way of how to do it and more important we don't have assurance of the health and safety long-term benefits associated with it but if you think of life on Mars for example and here we always say in the desert in Egypt we are reclaiming Mars because we don't have water we don't have soil we don't have electricity what have you if you think of life on Mars let's say of course you will be using what you call food in the lab so I believe it's here to stay it will grow it's important definitely continuing to have more and more cows and more and more gas emissions as a source of us getting meat is not going to be sustainable and we have to wait to see what will happen but it will go mainstream in another couple of couple years I believe already major major investments are done there and we'll have to see yet the economic return still there is no positive economic return on this but I think it will continue to to happen it's okay yeah I think so as well I think that alternative proteins would at the moment it is niche and perhaps it will continue to be niche until it is no longer a niche and perhaps what would help it to not become not continue to be niche is technology it's it's research this evokes for example the question that many years ago was at the point of debate with regards to technology and is genetically more genetically modified foods for example before now there was a lot of debate about the health benefits or the health implications of genetically modified foods but today food technology has shown us that it is not only possible but possible to do it safely to 45 foods with the nutrients that are required whether they are proteins or vitamins or as the case may be so with regards to whether alternative proteins will be able to provide at scale the kinds of benefits that we need in order to to to make it economically viable is still questionable but I think what is encouraging is that it's becoming more and more possible with technology with science to fortify with more nutrients what we we consume already but it's definitely a very interesting topic that should be on the on the table of both public and private sector very well thanks mr park would you concur I agree like theoretically you know almost everything is possible right like you know the fortifying vegetables you know is possible and then we can also you know modify the taste of the vegetables right if in certain region they produce best carrot then we can study you know the the land and then the climate of the region and we can mimic the same condition in the indoor vertical farm and we can produce same type of food but you know we still need you know long way to go but as you know all the technology develops it starts with the niche and then it becomes the main technology so I think it's not going to solve all the problem but it could be a big part of the solving problem of food in the future okay so I understand that you're cautious but rather positive better if I could summarize this kind of feeling now maybe let's turn to the room to the audience would there be questions comments Philippe you would like mrs guan yeah may I say I'm a bit surprised because in listening to you I had the impression that the food problem was just a technological one and with some money invested in the private sector there wouldn't be any more food problem you didn't speak about one individual called the farmer neither perhaps a bit our friend from Nigeria did you speak about public policies may I remind you that in the 30s Europe was a net food importer that in the 50s the pl 480 was created in the United States to send food aid especially grains to India that very India which is now threatening the food markets with their embargo because they are exporter of rice of sugar of wheat where are the successes of Europe ever India perhaps technology yes but at first it was public policies the common agricultural policy in Europe and what is not enough studied the Indian agricultural policy with a guarantee of renovative prices for farmers don't you think this is this thing which is important that's true that Africa is dependent is importing Nigeria you're the world's biggest with Egypt in fact Nigeria in Egypt you're the world's biggest wheat importer in the 50s Nigeria was the net food exporter you were the biggest exporter of palm oil if I remember so don't you think that's the first problem is a problem of public policy of agricultural policies and unfortunately in some of your countries farmers don't vote or their political power is fairly limited well understood the rebellion of public policy Philippe before maybe I'm going to ask mr. spawn also to intervene because we don't have much time left and then all of you will get a chance to conclude this is cool certainly I feel thank you very much first of all first thank you very much for sharing with us your very extraordinary activities and after Mr. Shalman's question I feel certainly you know my question is not very very important but I personally convinced I'm convinced that the technology is really one of the very important solution to the problem of our food insecurity issue and especially just for that I have a small question to mr. Park and I'm personally very very fascinated by this smart farm technology but you know as one of the person who like very much to eat very good food my concern is you know all products from a smart farm do you think they can contain the same nutritional quality or taste okay so again yeah you know I think there's third question unfortunately very quickly please madam it's very short yes I was just surprised to hear that genetically modified GMOs what it's all the GMOs are sort of normalized now because they appear to be safe what is that is there something official about that now and they are normally the world organization Mr. is here maybe he would confirm has not really approved that so can you give clarity on that issue thank you okay fine thank you very much so GMOs maybe two minutes each so that we stick into our time frame Mr. Park if you wish to start I think the what the method we use in indoor vertical farm or controlled you know environment agriculture is different from like GMO so we don't do any you know the fabrication to the the crops the only thing we do is we basically use water and nutrients and we don't use soil soil is actually something it can hold the crops but we use some other methodology to hold the the crops and then basically feeding nutrient so when I say you know the theoretically modifying the taste or the ingredients it's mainly done by controlling climate so for example the the Korean strawberry is very sweet if you try Korean strawberry the the sweetness is more twice more than the strawberry in us they are typically grown in you know the traditional the the greenhouse the reason Korean strawberry is sweet is not because it's modified it's because of the the temperature difference between the during the daytime and during the nighttime so that's the techniques we are using it when I say controlling the climate so if you want to make strawberry sweeter then you know you you can control the the difference in the temperature some of the thank you Mr. Park fortunately everybody has to get a chance so very quickly 30 seconds two seconds like some of the the crops with the high the the functional ingredients is old also done by you know changing the the light and then changing the temperature you know we don't do any modification and normally the the crops we produce has the same nutrient as the crops produced in the the traditional farming thank you very much Mr. Park the question from madame billo I think that again science has has helped to demystify a lot of things and there is genetically modified food and there is today the improvement for example in seedling or in the the makeup of of of food that that creates better yield for example I'll give you an instance I own an agriculture business and we supply the supermarket chains in Nigeria and today with science with you know better seedling you're able to produce in a 200 thousand meters greenhouse controlled environment agriculture situation more food to supply the supermarket chains than we were able to do in 200 hectares of you know open-air farmland today there what is important in all of this is the safety and health and how to prove the safety of the the seedlings that we use to produce food today and I think that the issue of GMO is still one of these issues that are out there I don't know what the official policy on them is but certainly science has helped to prove that some of the practices that were yesterday seen as taboo are actually safe today which regards to the question over there yes it starts with policy and this is very ironical especially for us coming from from Africa many many years ago Nigeria gave the first palm seedling or palm trees to Malaysia and today the reverse is the case where palm oil is imported from Malaysia into Nigeria very sad situation but yes it starts from public policy from governments realizing that there is a big impact in not doing anything and there is a big impact in doing something and coupled to that is that private sector starts to see the economic benefit of making sure that there is resilience around supply chains today you have a lot of the meals the flour meals for example in Africa starting to see that you have all of these machinery and production lines but you need supply chain contribution from places like Ukraine for example to to get wheat you know to make sure that the the factories are running the more these people start the more private sector starts to realize the impact of this then maybe the hands of governments are forced with regards to public policy but spot on it it's the truth this is a very important area you raised at Cannes should be work with 6,000 farmers will reach about 20,000 farmers within three more years you are right the farmers do all the work and they get maybe 10 cents on the dollar from anything that's done if there is food waste due to supply chain the farmer is the he or she and mostly it's she the farmers people think of farmers are only men mostly they're women they're the ones who suffer when it comes to public policy people in agriculture people forget the Treaty of Rome before the EU was probably in the beginning purely an agriculture project the farmers are suffering all over the world one of the issues is the lack of development in the public policy format in the legislation format they don't have access to legal papers for their land so they cannot get financing for for the land because generally it's the land is given or inherited or is owned by several people so they have to go to the industry the other part of private sector who will charge them so much for ensuring funding and then the same thing on access to technology and access to to seeds and what have you you are right that this is this is a shame that agriculture remains as part of the GDPs of most countries relatively much smaller than other parts the other sectors and you are you are spot on the farmer is now an educated person and sooner or later if he or she will not vote with their with their electrical votes they will vote with in different ways and it could become a ticking ticking ticking bomb so I appreciated the the question we didn't address it in our presentation because that wasn't part of our brief on discussion but we would need a quick update of public policy of environmental legislator changes that will cater to the the traditional farmer what we do is mechanized farming which is different but will not be successful without working with the traditional farmers thank you very much mr. Camel and yes yes yes I'm not forgetting you because I'm sure that as a FAO official and senior official you would be very happy to address the issue of public policy oh sure thank you so much and and look at I I refer to many but also when we talk about innovation and science which is central new a good policy of innovation and time to require policies behind to set them up requires institutions in place if not it would be very company so for sure everything that we have been talking about is linked to to the design and policies but we need to be careful not to bring distorted policies that will have worked in the past but not necessarily will work today we are in a different environment and we need to be very careful not to create new distortion second I think it's important to correct some issues and biofortification cannot happen does not increase nutrition capacity the only way you can increase nutrition capacity of a crop is through biotechnology which is not biofortification and the other element which was wrong GMOs are not accepted and generalized of course not GMOs are managed and decided by each country and there is a lot of scientific evidence behind them especially more than GMOs on gene editing today but this is country by country decision and the institutions and regulations have to be in place in each of of their countries so so we need to be careful with that and even in Europe of course GMOs are not there and there is still discussions on gene editing so again there is a lot of evidence already in place that we need to bring to inform people but we need to assess already different elements and finally on the on the control environments horizontal and vertical so you can have control environments horizontally and vertically horizontal have been cost effective UAE is an extreme example because it's very costly to produce food in UAE but they are profitable in China, Vietnam, Singapore it's very profitable vertical farming is also starting to be profitable in terms of control environments there are very good examples in China and Singapore and other regions of the world so again it's a way to satisfy food for the urban areas because you get closer to them in terms of production of vegetables and other high value commodities and that is not GMOs that is not biotechnology it's basically it's a high level precision agriculture to manage properly micronutrients to the to the plants and and water provision and of course the heat that is needed so again it's a technological innovation when you are in the high end of high value commodities which is starting to be evolving rapidly and to make give access to urban especially for the households thank you oh thank you mr colonn we are we are now for these very interesting comments we are now at the end of the session I just would like to add as personally that I've spent now at least three decades of my professional life supporting governments or establishing public agricultural policies in developing countries in Asia in Africa etc and it's building on Philippe's comment it's of course a sobering situation to see that in many developing countries not all of course but in many developing countries agriculture has a much lower share of budget investment and policy attention than it should if we wanted to address all the issues that we have here so that's a reason for which I'm particularly grateful to the WPC Thierry mrs. Kwan for insisting on having this discussion on agriculture because it's not all it's not only about discussing the substance but also just per se because there's discussion around it and whatever we say that it shows the importance that it has in the global agenda and importance which is really underestimated by many policy players so thank you very much for allowing us to have this type of discussion continuing maybe if there is another discussion next year trying to deepen even more some of these policy dimensions at the global level but also at the national level and trying to dig into this this agenda now I think that all of you will have recognized that we had a fantastic group to address those issues on the screen and in the room and that they have enlightened us with their vision on policies private investments and initiatives science that opening new doors into our vision so please upload them and thank them


Dan, welcome to the show, brother. How are you doing? Doing well. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Right before this, you and I were talking about the weather and the quarantine. I'm like, you guys, you know, at least in Toronto, it's like cold. And it was a little bit flurries of snow today.  I'm staying inside, no matter what. But like, I would lose my mind if I'm staring outside.  I got to get outside. Yeah. It's, you know, it's a little hard to work from home when you look out and I've got a view of the ocean and it's bright and sunny and you see sailboats in the bay. It's makes it a little tougher to stay inside. Yeah. I can kind of relate. I lived in the West Coast, British Columbia, Kelowna for a couple of years. And they have much more mild, warmer type of climate in Toronto. And you would see the Rockies on the outskirts and like emerald green lakes.  It's certainly a bit easier to work inside if you're snowed in or you get those. Yeah. Well, you heard the theory, right? They have like the whole productivity theory, like the latitudes, depending on where you are in the latitude, they have a different level of productivity. You know, that makes a lot of sense. My family is originally from Minnesota, so Minnesotans, you know, it's pretty close to Canada and it's quite cold up there as well. And Minnesotan people. Well, you know, the major thing I got you on the show is I want to talk about Bitcoin, obviously, and we have a big event coming up. When is it? It's like three weeks from now, something like that. And so the Bitcoin having, what's your thoughts on that? Do you have any predictions or this is just going to be a fly by and business as usual? Well, it was kind of funny. So me and some guys on Twitter were talking about, you know, what constitutes an OG? And a lot of people think like an OG could be represented by the number of boom bus cycles you've gone through. Through early 13, late 13 and 2017. But what's funny is I've only been through one happening. So even though I've been in Bitcoin a really long time, you know, I came in just after the 2012 happening. So, you know, it's kind of crazy that there's only been two before this. And Bitcoin is still very, very young and its journey to become a global money. You know, what's there was a lot of initial anxiety with the 2012 and 2016 happenings where people were worried about Bitcoin security and they're also worried about the mining death spiral. And we've largely seen those narratives debunked through 2012 and 20, primarily through 2016 and also through, you know, 18, 19, where we saw the market dip and 20, you know, we just had that dip to 3,800. We've seen the difficulty adjustment equilibrate. What that means is essentially the difficulty adjustment isn't this, you know, Bitcoin isn't this thing where miners can become overextended. And then all mining ceases to exist because it's unprofitable because the price drops. No, there's a mechanism that equilibrates the system and that's called the difficult error. As more and more miners leave, the difficulty to mine and Bitcoin block becomes less and less. And it also means that the block reward, which is the reward given to miners to mine Bitcoins or mine Bitcoin blocks, that is now distributed to less and less miners, which means that those miners can now be profitable. So Bitcoin are a built in mechanism to stabilize the system. Now, my question for that is this. So I agree with everything Bitcoin. I think that the difficulty score they have is one of the most ingenious things possible. And so to clarify, more miners come in, becomes much more difficult. Yeah, that's a great simple way to put it. All right, less miners left, less difficult. The question, the question I have though is there is a capital cost to run the mining rigs. So to buy the A6, to rent the space, to pay for electricity. So there's a big war and who can get the cheapest kilowatts per hour? Is I don't know the numbers on top of my head, but with the difficulties and with that being said, with the overhead capital cost, is there, is there a scenario where miners, do you think miners will be mining for a long time if they're in the red? Yeah, so what's nice is that we can look at equivalent industries like other commodities like gold and look at gold miners and their financials and how they operate through these, you know, boom bus cycles. And a lot of them operate at a loss for years. You know, you spend a ton of time sourcing the electricity, getting the long term contract for that. So many are willing to operate at a loss for a little while. You know, the duration of that I can't really speak to because I've never operated a Bitcoin mine. You know, there's different levels based on people's different. Is it fair to say, though, since they're doing proof of work for everything and they can just switch their hashing power to some other chain temporarily to get some type of rewards? With Bitcoin miners, they're only useful for Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and any other Shah 256 hash algorithms. So that's what protects Bitcoin, in essence, is the game theory behind these miners. So the miners purchase these these computers called A6 or these processors called ASICs are capable of doing which ASICs that name represents application specific integrated circuit. And what that means is that they can only be useful for mining Bitcoin. Now, some of the Bitcoin forks like Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV, they also use the same mining algorithm. So technically, you could switch that equipment over to mine on those chains, but those chains are very, very tiny in comparison to Bitcoin. So, you know, these machines are really only useful for mining Bitcoin itself. If it's not profitable to do that, they're not really worth a lot. And historically, so you mentioned the two haveings that we had. And like you said, Bitcoin is I'm actually I always tell people this story. I I entered this space long time ago and I remember it was just Bitcoin before Ethereum and you would go to a meetup group and it's like, hey, here's seven weirdos. Yeah, I mean, yeah, we hit it on the head. Yeah. And here we are.  I mean, it's incredible in San Francisco, January 2013, there was only a dozen people at the Bitcoin meetup. That's it in San Francisco is like the tech hub of the world and pretty incredible to see the growth out here. And I went to those meetups in January 2013. So I saw it for firsthand. I mean, it was just a cooler of PBRs and this kind of run down place called 20 Mission, which was an old kind of crack house converted into a hacker house. That's where Bitcoin started in San Francisco. It's a it's a wild it's wild to see the journey this far. And that's why I'm more bullish than ever about Bitcoin is you and I have been there when, you know, Gox collapsed or Silk Road collapsed. And all these sort of these different, like different, you know, each crisis brings about a different attack on your faith in Bitcoin. It's road collapsed is our dark markets. The only demand for Bitcoin.  Yeah. Well, I never understood the the dark markets like people forget like, especially it's a honeypot.  You know, the coins are pretty traceable unless you use coin join or other mechanisms to obfuscate your trail. So yeah, you're right. You know, what's funny is that 80% of dark market transactions are still done in Bitcoin, which I found really surprising. I thought I'd check the numbers. It would have been more of a mixture of Monero and C-Cache. Monero is the second largest, but C-Cache didn't even register as 1%. Why is that liquidity? You think I'm not sure. I think it's maybe a network effect thing. You know, there's certain narratives that circulate around a coin and become kind of the standard. You know, it's a shelling point for transactions, right? Where people go, I want to do a dark market transaction. Well, if I want to go do that, I know Bitcoin is accepted by all the different participants in the ecosystem. Interesting. This is why I read it. But someone in the government in the U.S. they're charging somebody for creating the coin drawing software or like a mixer software? Well, he did an explicit coin, not coin drawing mechanism, but he did an obfuscation mechanism where he would essentially mix the coins manually like on his own servers. To the best of my knowledge, I don't think it was open source code. I might be wrong on that, but I think that was the difference between that and like coin drawing, which is a somewhat open source infrastructure and things like coin, like joint market is definitely a source. So I'm not exactly sure, but I believe that's why he got flagged and taken down. But yeah, definitely there's kind of an attack on privacy across the board. So that's a pretty scary thing to kind of see come to the ecosystem. Do we have any proposals? Because I know they were talking about, fuck, what's it called? Schnorr signatures to be implemented. But that eliminates the amount, correct me if I'm wrong, that eliminates the amount in the transaction, but that doesn't eliminate who you are. I believe Schnorr is more around signature and making the signature smaller or being able to take multiple signatures and it all look identical. You need Schnorr plus an implementation of a couple other mechanisms to really obfuscate coins well. So Schnorr in and of itself isn't a great isn't going to improve privacy that much, but combining that technology with coin, plus one or two other things makes it more private. And they're planning to put this in the actual within the protocol itself. That's right. It would be, I believe, a soft fork upgrade. But I think the main value right now is just more the more capabilities, bringing more capabilities to the Bitcoin blockchain in terms of what it can do, signature types. It adds privacy in terms of the types of signatures. So all the signatures evidently look very similar. And then I believe it makes them much smaller. So you would essentially be able to have more transactions per block. What's your take on the whole narrative of store value digital gold when it comes to Bitcoin? Right. Well, that's where we see, you know, we can look back at Satoshi's intentions. We can look at how the protocol was constructed and we can look at how it's used now. You know, Bitcoin is planted in the in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis weeks after Lehman Brothers collapsed and Satoshi in the first block in the blockchain blockchain wrote a UK Chancellor on the verge of second bailout for banks. I mean, Bitcoin wasn't here to replace visa to like have cheaper credit card payments.  I mean, that's that's incredible. Like this is this is a revolutionary idea that will have monumental change for humankind. So with that, money is one of the most important things in the world. It's a store value, unit of account and medium of exchange.  Each one has a curve of adoption because humans are animals. After all, we don't immediately recognize a new idea as valid and totally open to it. One of my favorite account, the pessimist archive, pessimist archives. Yeah. And so what they do is they scan, they look through old newspapers from like 1850 to like 1920 and they pull out really hilarious takes on bicycles and radios and everything else because people innately are afraid of new technology.  So so with Bitcoin becoming a new money wasn't going to happen overnight. And the first stage of it becoming a new money is people recognizing it as somewhere they want to store value. Bitcoin has very good characteristics as a store value asset. Similarly, like gold is very hard to seize, you know, for example, you know, seizing all of our bank accounts can be done at the snap of someone's fingers. But going through and going door to door and knocking down each door and trying to find where someone hit their gold or their Bitcoin is extremely difficult. And so it's got those those feet. It's extremely hard to seize. It's can it's immutable in terms of transacting with it. It has a finite amount or a and then the production curve of it is costly. That's why it's called proof of, you know, essentially the proof of work of the costiness of production. Gold as gold is demanded, more and more of the supply is sourced through an extremely costly method. If gold could just be found in infinite quality, infinite amounts and very easily, then it wouldn't be very valuable. So Bitcoin mimics that same functionality with the proof of work algorithm. And so all these other characteristics essentially make Bitcoin a good store value asset. It is a gold 2.0 and it was planted in the middle of 2008 financial crisis because at that time we lost faith in the institutions that surrounded us like our central banks or governments and our banks. And Bitcoin gives everyone the option to store their value into something that can't be seized very easily. It can be transferred anywhere. And that is a huge monumental change. And it's the first step in becoming a money later down the road. It will eventually be widely held enough that we might then transact with other people for everyday goods and services. And then maybe those items will finally be priced in Bitcoin. But that takes decades. Doesn't happen overnight. Certainly the movement from shells to gold probably took hundreds of years. Gold to fiat took decades and Bitcoin is essentially doing it in the same amount. You know, a few decades, I think we'll see if Bitcoin will have succeeded or failed. I think if anything, what we're seeing right now, we thought we thought that 08 was fucked. Oh, it was it. Oh, it's nothing compared to this. I mean, not in my wild. I wouldn't say dreams because I don't dream for these moments to happen. I just predicted that they would. It's we Bitcoin is built to give us another option. And and we thought that there's something like this might happen, but not at this magnitude. I mean, I never would have believed ever that this sort of magnitude that this occur, just the infinite amount of money, literally infinite amount of money printing, the bailing out of every single industry. It's like we forgot what capitalism was. Yeah. So I couldn't be more excited for Bitcoin, Bitcoin's performance in this environment, because this is exactly what Bitcoin is built for. I have a couple of follow up with two follow up questions. So the two two two mediums of exchange right now for liquidity is OTC and centralized exchanges. They come with their pros and cons. Obviously, it's a weird gray area because they've got to be within the regulated space, but they're dealing with global customers, but they got to figure out on ramps, which is dealing with the banks and off ramps. Yeah, you know it very well. Both of them, like I have cognitive distance at the same time. I think what they're doing is great, but there's a dark side to that, because also that is a center point of failure to control a bunch of Bitcoin. That's where all the flow goes to. So I'm trying to figure out like the vision that Bitcoiners have, where it's like peer to peer, which is great. I can meet up with Den in person and we can transact.  But I still need to take some form of value outside of the crypto ecosystem to onboard within the ecosystem. Do you see in the future, do you see trends that we are going more and more towards maybe a non-custodial decentralized exchange versus centralized exchange? Yeah, that's a good question. And I know that Jesse, you know, the CEO of Kraken, it's funny because we're one of the largest exchanges out there. So we're custodial, you know, we custody people's assets for them. But Jesse pushes our users to be self-custodied. He actually encourages people to take their coins off Kraken and go store them themselves. Kraken is a very like core crypto ethos company where we do believe those fundamental values of not your keys, not your coins. And we were the only exchange effort to do an audit, the proof of keys. We did that a few years back, but we're the only exchange effort to prove that we had the amount of coins that we had on our exchange at a moment in time. So very much myself and Kraken very much feel the same way. When it comes to the actual numbers, I haven't looked at them myself, but I heard that they're pretty decent. I haven't heard like there's an overwhelming trend of coins moving from non-custodial to custodial, so that's good. Again, I haven't looked at the data, but I haven't heard that propagated as a narrative. So to me, that would seem that maybe it's remaining static or it's going the other way very slightly. So that's a good trend, knowing that like more and more people aren't just doing custody. They're eventually learning about self-custody and moving their coins off of these centralized venues because certainly Kraken, Coinbase, you know, we're companies that exist in the real world. We have bank accounts and we're that physicality and that attachment to the real world does make us a point where, you know, a government could come and ask for certain things. So, you know, I think in the future, you touched on a good point where like Bitcoin's weak point right now is that a large amount of volume is in these centralized entities where governments could come try to seize it. Now, what's interesting about Bitcoin is this isn't like the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq or there's one venue where all the trading happens. There's many different venues. There's Kraken, Coinbase, Binance, Bitfinex, and these are all over the world. And so for Bitcoin to be really, you know, taken down or for Bitcoin to be attacked, you would have to go after all of these venues simultaneously, which would require all the governments across the world working together. But what do you say, would you say the OTC, though, is greater volume than the retail on the actual exchange order books? That's a good question. You know, back in 2017 and 2019, I think the narrative of like OTC was like this huge sort of a shadow market or shadow volume was kind of a big narrative. I think as, you know, OTC provides you separate. So OTC is great to use, for example, if you're worried about slippage, like, let's say I want to sell $10 million right now, but I don't want to go out across five different exchanges, open up five different windows and slowly bleed my order into the market. I just want to call up Kraken OTC. It's just easier for me, man. Honestly, it's like email, phone, hey, sell, buy, buy. That's it. Exactly. They bake in a small spread, you know, especially for really gigantic orders as well. Like you could be getting the billions or hundreds of millions of dollar size. And so that's a very attractive option for large sizes. Also, if you don't want to telegraph your position, kind of want to go through an intermediary and disguise it in a way. Let's say you don't want an exchange to know you're moving X amount of volume. So it's a little bit of a privacy thing. I mean, the OTC desk will know who you are, but five different exchanges won't know who you are. And probably see more go to the lit order book side. Just as, you know, working with APIs is easier in the spreads on OTC might still be larger for some of these large volume institutions.  You'd be hard, you'd be hard pressed to find an OTC desk that'll quote you to 10 bits spread. That's pretty tight. Yeah, it is really tight. Yeah. Yeah. Back in, you know, back in 17, 18, I think the spreads, especially with some of the alts were like one or two points, a hundred, 200 bits. And that was pretty amazing because anyone can do, you know, anyone can run an OTC desk then. And so that we saw a lot of the OTC desk consolidate over time to where you only really have like the big ones now are Kraken OTC, Cumberland, you know, Kraken OTC, Bot Circle OTC. Yeah. Um, and let's see, uh, you've got like OSL and a few others left that are really the genesis, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Genesis would be a big one. Um, so there's a handful of big ones. And then one of those bigger ones told me a stat that, you know, there's around 30 total that are still operating. But I think at the peak, there was like over a hundred. So the very, the industry has become very consolidated. Your operations as an OTC desk have to be very, very tight. You have to have X Wall Street types. You have to be really focused on scraping every bit you can and executing that order properly. So I was talking to the OTC desk, those doing stuff with Genesis. Um, it was interesting. I don't know if you heard this as well, but they were miners, some institutions were buying the miners, the institutions were paying a premium on virgin bitcoins from the miners directly. Yeah. So this is a widely popularized story that I still haven't really seen a lot of. I haven't seen the data, but I've heard this firsthand from people in the industry. We've all heard the story, right? So, um, so two things, you know, this kind of goes back to our privacy argument where some people argue that bitcoins fungibility or the ability to, you know, transact one Bitcoin for one Bitcoin. Yeah. Has been broken. Um, which it hasn't because there is no secondary market for tainted bitcoins. Correct. They can't log into Bitfinex and trade tainted bitcoins versus clean bitcoins.  Exactly. Every point. Yeah. I mean, and there's almost every Bitcoin out there. If the Bitcoins tainted, I don't know what about the US dollar? Yeah. I think like, was it some X percentage? Okay. Lot of them. Yeah. There's still, you know, one unit is the one unit. And so Bitcoin, we haven't seen the fungibility broken on that side. Now, some people like to quote this stator on virgin coins selling for like, you know, I've heard 50 to 100 bits over spot. But I believe that this isn't necessarily representative of them being clean or not.  There's no logical reason to do that. It's more of like, if you want to, if for a vanity thing, sure. So it's either vanity or if I want a steady supply of Bitcoins contractually, the best like, I can enter into a contract with a miner to distantly get X amount of Bitcoins every, you know, let's say hour. And so with that, like, I will know I'll get X amount of coins. I don't have to worry about slippage or anything else. I know exactly how many coins I'll get. I don't have to worry about different venue risk. I can just get it directly from the miner. So you're kind of tapping straight into the source. And I think people do pay a small premium to be able to tap right into those fresh coins. Guarantee. Yeah. Yeah. My final question. So we saw the explosion in Ethereum for DeFi.    But let them experiment. I'm actually my my question I'm more curious for is like you have places like more companies like fuck, what are they called? They're New York, the lending company. Block five. Block five. Then in Toronto, you have lead in. And so you put up collateral. But once again, it's Fiat.  One thing I give credit with least in Ethereum is OK, I can put my ETH get died or put my ETH and gets easy as fuck. Like really, really, really easy. Question is like, well, why hasn't someone built something like that on Bitcoin? I do believe that there is someone working on that. I think it came out yesterday. The atomic loans. I know the guys in Toronto. I know them well. Yeah, I actually had a conversation with them a few weeks back where they were they just looking to see how Bitcoiners felt about different DeFi sort of products, if those DeFi products were brought to Bitcoin. So from the best of my understanding, they're kind of a bridge between Bitcoin and Ethereum and using smart contracts with both to enable this. You know, there's a very, I think like the decentralized lending or I think that's a very interesting kind of first you know, for DeFi, like a lot of people see me as a Bitcoin maximalist and they don't really realize like I've mined prime coin, I've day traded litecoin, I know you're making money. Right. I'm getting cryo preserved when I die. I fly drill and trip on not like a conservative individual. You know, it's mainly because I'm very skeptical about new technology. You should be. Right. And the people that I've seen that are really exceptional in Silicon Valley are always inquisitive but skeptical. And so, you know, with like Maker, we saw Maker break during that dip. Now they have a lawsuit against them for that. Yeah, exactly.  And I'm like, well, we saw that it broke like and they'll be like, oh, the code didn't break. I'm like, yeah, but your game theory did, which is even worse than your code because the code just enables the game theory to work because all these this code eventually touches humans make these things work. You know, so with DeFi products with Bitcoin, you know, one, I think Bitcoin by itself, just being a gold 2.0 is hugely successful. It's the largest TAM of any protocol or product ever created in humankind history. Hundreds of trillions of dollars of value exist in this world and they may want to be stored in a place that's hard to seize and immutable, which is Bitcoin. And so that by itself is a success metric. Now there's these other ones where we can add like different DeFi products like decentralized lending. It's a very narrow window of like their total addressable market for those users. For example, I can get an underclutter. I can get a no collateral loan from my bank. Yes. Right. You know, I can lend my Bitcoin out using centralized lenders in a really nice return. If you look at Compound, I believe the yield on six percent, I think. Yeah, it depends on the lender, but typically centralized products give you a higher a higher rate of return than these DeFi products. What's the margin? What's cracking? You guys have you guys have lending on cracking, no? We have a margin pool. You know, I think there's obvious reasons why we might want to explore some products around lending and borrowing because, you know, that's a really popular thing nowadays. So I don't think it'd be a surprise if something that some day down the road, we have something like that. But yeah, we currently have a margin pool. And so those that requires the margin traders to borrow coin, which we currently do ourselves. But with, you know, with these centralized lending solutions, they typically have a higher yield. So for DeFi products, it's tough to convince someone to get a lower yield. Now, some will say, oh, that's my point there, though. Sorry to interject.  Yeah. Well, it's funny, it's like a lot of the DeFi people go, oh, well, there's no counterparty risk for their protocol. And I'm like, there is your code. Yeah. My risk. Yeah. And if you look at like the if you look at compounds yield for Ethereum, that is lent, if you lend Ethereum on compound, it'll take you 3,600 years to double your money. Awesome. You're telling me that there will be no protocol flaw that there won't be a zero day in 3,000 years. Yeah. Doubt it, right? So, you know, DeFi products have a lot of risk. It's just not as explicit because it's a zero day or some unexpected event that occurs, like the MakerDAO event with the price crash. And so, you know, I think there I think some of these DeFi products are a little bit disingenuous with about the with the risk that they're taking. I believe that's part of the lawsuit with Maker, right? Is that they believe that Maker was an upfront with the fail states of the protocol. And then you also look at like Maker has quite a few points of centralization, like their oracles are 12 unknown individuals. I never understood the idea or the terminology of decentralized governance because I'm like it's it's a group of people that have skin in the game. What's like, I don't understand what you mean decentralized. No different to my company. I have people around the world to make decisions. Like what's what's the difference? It's a little bit of complexity theater to make it seem exotic, cool. You know, it's like you and I started business today. We get an LLC and we have we have an owner in Russia and Turkey and one in in Buenos Aires.  Right. Well, yeah, but you can't go raise hundreds of millions of dollars in a token that way. Yeah, now it's, you know, and then you look at like the emergency sort of measures that Maker and those and those types of DeFi products can do. And then you're like, wait a second, if there's like a backdoor or like an emergency thing that they can do, then that sounds pretty pretty not decentralized. That sounds pretty centralized. Yeah. So, you know, I think first and foremost, every product or protocol must must solve a problem for a customer. Right. I mean, that's that's it. And so we have to look at these DeFi products and that while they seem very interesting again, all of these seem really cool and I'm a fan of some of these could work. You get under the hood and you take a look at how it's all working. And you're like, wait a second, they made they made huge compromises in security for to build this product.  Like most loans in the world are not collateralized. And if they're collateralized, they're partially collateralized. Yeah. So, you know, there's a very small while it's impressive and it's interesting. It's a very small customer segment for them to go after over collateralized lending. Also, all of your data is on chain. So some of these DeFi lenders and, you know, you can borrow against your Bitcoin or Ethereum as collateral and borrow a die or some other stable coin. They're like, oh, but you don't have to go through KYC and ML. And I'm like, that's great from a UX perspective in terms of onboarding because it's very fast. Like, yeah, then it's a privacy angle too. And I'm like, but no, all my shit's on chain. So, like, it's not that much more private. But it is it might be fast or it might be easier. But then again, you still have to buy crypto, hold crypto, understand crypto and then use the product which, you know, might take a decade for people to get used to versus their existing solutions.  You know what's going to be an interesting event in the whole world, both finances and crypto is I'm making the assumption that Libra is going to launch regardless in some kind of shape or form it's going to launch. I don't know how it's going to look like it's going to be their stablecoin. That's going to open up a whole Pandora's box of brand new users and very interesting use cases and kind of like antagonist within the crypto space. Yeah, I think stablecoins are great products. A lot of people want to move digital versions of the dollar around. They're sort of permissionless.  Yeah, so stablecoins like USDC, GUSD and Tether are centrally controlled.  Hey, wait a second, we don't like that. We'd like you to freeze that amount. You know, we'll see what happens to the amount of money in that protocol when that happens, which we haven't really seen a lot of that happened so far. Not yet, but I think it will happen actually. Right, right. But I do think stablecoins are really interesting. You know, dye was an interesting product because it's, you know, as decentralized as possible to where you didn't have like a central issue or kind of dictating and being able to freeze funds individually. And Tether, I believe, hasn't done any of that, even though they are centrally controlled. I'm surprised no one has come created a token without any governance. Like here is just a stable token. Yeah, I believe the mechanism required to keep it stable requires governance structure. Gotcha. It's kind of funny because a lot of people, when they look at the volatility of Bitcoin, often question, is this a good store value? And I like to go and look at gold, which gold is the quintessential store value. It's the gold standard. And the gold fluctuates quite a bit. And the reason why a store value asset cannot have a stable purchasing power is because it would require an entity to completely control it to keep it stable. And so with stable coins, it's the same sort of problem. You have to have stability mechanisms built in. And some of that requires external data. So I need to know what the real world price of things are and pipe that into my blockchain. So you have the oracle problem with that. You also have to have some sort of stability instruments on the other side, you know, maker does that in a sophisticated manner where they've got a bunch of stability mechanisms, they have a stability fee. So these can all be somewhat self-adjusting. But since it pipes in real world data onto the Bitcoin blockchain or onto other blockchains, it requires a choir store requires humans in the loop. And when that occurs, it adds all sorts of complexities in different game theoretic attack vectors.  I mean, that's the best way to do it for anything in life.  Same with woodworking or anything else and same with Bitcoin or crypto. Got to go take it.  Yeah, that's a mine for people. Yeah, the phrase is like, what do you mean, my seed phrase? That's where I'm a little controversial with the Bitcoiners where I don't agree that not your keys, not your coins is the first thing we should teach them. I think it's like that's a good ethos to tell them about and go, hey, in a couple months, when you're comfortable playing around with a wallet, we'll move over a little bit of your funds to your non custodial solution. And then over time we'll move more over.  As we wrap this up, and do you have any final thoughts or questions or anything you want to leave our audience with? Well, I mean, you know, the having is coming up in a few weeks here, I think May 11 through 12th, Bitcoin Clark Moody is a really great Bitcoin. Bitcoin.Clark Moody. Yeah. He's a, him and I have worked together at a couple of different companies in the space over eight years. So he's a really brilliant guy. He built a dashboard to monitor this. So he built kind of a Bitcoin dashboard, you can you can look at all Bitcoin dashboard metrics. And one of them is his having calculator. And he has a very, very good calculator in terms. So it looks like May 11th is the date. But, you know, Bitcoin since when you and I have been in, I've waited my entire time in this space to wait for a moment like this. All that is required is that other people believe what we believe in. And that there will be a price spike and that will draw awareness to Bitcoin. Some of those people will tell their friends about it and it increases the price going up, which increases awareness, which increases more people believing in what we believe in. Feedback loop, yeah. Exactly. It's a viral loop. So I think I've never been more excited than in this moment because of the amount of people interested in Bitcoin, liquidity in this space, the infrastructure. It survived this long. It survived a civil war with B-cash. It's incredible. Incredible to see how far it's come.   It's sure people are thinking about the price when you have a thousand bucks here or there. It's, you know, Bitcoin really forces you to have strong, strong hands. Yeah. Tell me about it, man. Fuck. Yeah. You've been in just as long as I have. So you get it. And look, I've been in a long time.  It's going to get a little choppy here. Yeah. No, my biggest, my biggest, funniest thing, though, is like, I remember when I was giving out Bitcoin and Ethereum, like a long time ago for everybody, like, and then I was like, like a year ago, I was calculating roughly how much I'm like, motherfucker. You talking like for burgers or for like personal just giving out, I was giving out people 10 bucks back in the day. And like, here's 10 bucks, here's 10 bucks, here's 10 bucks. And it's like, ETH was like a buck or something. And Bitcoin was at like double digits. Like, wow.  I know. Yeah. I mean, back in January, 10,000 was our moon. Yeah. Like we're like, can you imagine Bitcoin at 10,000? And so we're on the verge of, you know, we're on the verge of Bitcoin finally achieving its purpose, which I bought Bitcoin and the investment thesis that it will be Gold 2.0. Yeah. Gold 2.0, Bitcoin's market cap or Bitcoin's price per coin has to be between, you know, 100,000 and 10 million dollars a coin. Like that is like the applicable range for Bitcoin to be considered a Gold 2.0. And we are on the verge of the next cycle touching upon that, which is incredible. I mean, that's what I've waited for this whole time. So I couldn't be more bullish. You know, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But I don't see it having a better shot than it has now. Well, Dan, thank you so much. If people want to get a hold of you and read or watch or listen to what you do, what's the best resource? If you'd like long form content, you can go to danheld.com and check out my blog. If you'd like more, you know, quick takes on Twitter, I'm twitter.com slash Dan Held. Dan, thank you, brother. Thanks for having me.