Welcome to another Depadaptation Q&A with me, your host, Jim Bendell, and our guest this month is Zori Tomova, who's known to many of you. I would have thought because she was a coordinator of the Depadaptation Forum for quite some time in the early days as we were setting it up. And Zori, I met in Bali and Zori became a good friend. Zori became a coach for me as well through a very difficult time as I was making sense of who I am or wanted to be with the new knowledge which was real and true for me about the state of the planet and the future. And then also Zori created something back then called the Connection Playgrounds which was her response to the information that she was hearing about the state of the world. And so that was also really important in my own reconstitution of self really. So yeah, so Zori's been a companion on my journey over the last four years now and Zori is joining us from Guatemala, I believe, is that right? Good. So I'm sorry, I'm going to ask you to unmute and say hello. It's in the evening where you are, isn't it? But are you? Yeah, unmute, unless you've got, yeah, please unmute to join us. So just say hello so we know that your mic's working. Okay, hello everyone. It's an honour for me to be here. Just like Gem was sharing, it's been a while that we've known one another and actually he's been, and meeting Gem has been a big turning point for me and a big inspiration for everything that I've been doing in IEM today. And so it's really a big honour for me to be here with all of you and to return to the Deep Adaptation Forum as this work is very close to my heart. Yeah, thank you Zori. And when we scheduled this, maybe a month or so ago, we knew how stressful the world is because of environmental change, because of polarisation, because of pandemic and pandemic policies and polarisation of that, because of ongoing conflict in the world, seems to be war happening everywhere. But obviously, what's alive for a lot of us right now, and so I thought I'd mention it in America, the 26th of February 2022. Yeah, an invasion within Europe is big news and there's such a history around that and such a traumatic history that and any conflict with nuclear powers is also really scary for everyone, not just those currently involved on the ground, which is also really awful. So I wanted to mention it and in a way, it's almost like I feel like we should go straight into that, because I do want to ask you about how you came to where you've got to with the work you do, particularly how that was not by blocking out your sense of the way the world is, but in response to it. But yeah, go straight into the deep end. We've titled this session, the wisdom of play in times like these. So times like these when a new war is on involving a nuclear power and talking to our friends and family and looking on social media, this, yeah, it's affecting people a lot. People are all debating what to do, how to respond. Various ideas being shared on that. Lots of upset as well being shared about lack of responses. The obvious question is, isn't focusing on play, frivolous, self-involved, distracting and irrelevant to the cause of reducing harm, bringing peace and justice into the world. Thank you, Jen, for asking this question. I've been wondering about the same and what's been coming up for me is basically I see this word that has just erupted as a very important invitation to come back in ourselves and in our communities and ask ourselves, how are we contributing to the peace in this world? How can we restore peace within ourselves, within our closed circles and then from there also in the collective, it might not happen. Not all of us might have the opportunity to influence global politics in the way that some others have, but we do have that which is within our control, which is how do we be at peace inside of ourselves and with one another. And what is the role that play has to do with that? What role does play in it? It also comes down to the way that we define play. So for me, play is not just the frivolous jumping around enjoying life. Play is a way of exploration, a way of exploring what are some different ways of being with one another. Play is also a way of coming back to a beginner's mind, a mind that acknowledges, hey, I don't know what's going on. And I might as well come together with others and sort of a playground as we like to call the gathering spaces that we assemble in online right now in the connection playground as a way to really make our way through what's going on. And play is not necessarily something that, at least in my definition of the world, the word is associated with the frivolousness. It can be that, it can be a lightness. But it can go much deeper than that. It can go into exploring how do we explore the unknown that is ahead of us? How do we make sense of it? How do we find a different way of being with it? So that's the significance I see right now in this moment. And in what you've just said, you've reminded me of my experience of your initiative, the connection playground, when it was happening in person. I came along to events, which was, I didn't see it as just how am I going to go and have fun right now. Because what does my body need? What does my soul need? What does my mind need? What is going to help nourish and heal me so I can be more fully engaged in whatever's happening? I definitely felt that and I definitely got that from it. But before we dive more into that, I want to also invite Katie, the leading tech support for us today, just to make an announcement about how you can all engage and ask questions at some point later on in our session today. Thank you, Gem. So for about the next 20 minutes or so, half of this gathering, Gem and Zori will be in conversation. But if you would like to ask Zori a question yourself, then you can do that by sending it to me as a direct message in the chat and be prepared. So I'm going to drop you a line to let you know if Gem's going to call on you to ask your question. And there is an assumption, we will be assuming that by submitting a question that you agree to be recorded as part of this event and the recording is going to be listed on Gem's YouTube channel. So if you would rather not have your voice and image on that, you can let me know in the chat and I can ask the question on your behalf. And yeah, so be prepared to turn your video on when we call on you. And I will invite you to unmute yourself. And this is an intimate group, so there's an opportunity to hear from lots of you. So yeah, please do send your questions directly to me in the private message in the chat. That's all, thank you. Thank you, Katie. Now, Zori, when I first met you, you were talking about your background in IT, in logistics, in performance optimization.  And you were talking about looking at maybe creating some kind of plastics recycling business or other environmental businesses. And then after a conversation we had, within a few weeks, you'd completely changed direction. Could you just go back to that time and tell us what happened? Because I think it's many people on this call and many people who watch this conversation will be either in the process of reassessment and perhaps becoming someone new because of the kind of stuff that we talk about in the deep adaptation world. So I remember first meeting you, Jim, I was already in this process of letting go of that kind of life that you just described. I was an entrepreneur. I was working in the field of startups and IT for quite a few years. And actually a big part of my journey was realizing that the work I was doing was not close to my heart. And this was the reason I found myself in Bali in order to explore and find what else might it be that I could offer to the world and I could shape my life around. And I remember at first when I arrived, I started playing with this idea of, okay, I saw a lot of plastic that was washed up on the shore in Bali and I was thinking, okay, so maybe I could do something to solve that. Although I have absolutely no background or experience in that field, it just was hurtful for me to watch that happen. And then I started exploring what might be some solutions there. And I remember coming to this dead end where this whole idea of problem solution, just a mindset of, oh, there is a problem and let me solve it, started disintegrating because I thought, well, how can I guarantee that whatever solution I come up with to this problem does not end up creating even more problems that afterwards need to be solved or even bigger pollution or bigger issues. And so actually when I met you, I was in that state of just this whole idea, this whole mindset of I need to find problems to solve was disintegrated and I had no idea of how I orient myself in this, if there is no problem solution, then what am I doing here?  It might mean death, actually. And I remember asking myself, well, what if this is true? What if I'm one of those people that will just die in this process of civilization collapsing? And I said to myself, well, then I better make sure I live until that happens. And then I asked myself, but what does it mean to live? How do I know I have lived a full life? And my answer was, well, I feel alive when I feel connected, when I feel fully present and engaged with other people, with nature, with myself. And then does it really matter if I die tomorrow or in 10 years or in 50 years? If connection is what makes me feel alive, then that's what I should commit to and live according to and I should follow this thread of experience that connection is pointing me to. And in a way, if we do bring back that mindset of problem and solution, it does strike me as something that our world needs very much right now, reconnecting with ourselves, one another and nature. As all of our progress has created a lot of disconnect, a lot of isolation and a lot of mental and physical suffering for many of us. So for this, I'm forever grateful to Jim for bringing this awareness because it really helped me to align to the gifts that are mine to give and who I am today. And it became a, it wasn't just about you having, you living differently and you having fun in a different way. You created an organization, you created a framework, you invited people in to join you in that initially physical offline and then online when the pandemic hit. Could you say a little bit more about what Connection Playground is and where it's got to now a few years later? So this awareness of connection being something that I would like to focus on in the face of mortality also came with an awareness that I don't necessarily know what connection is, what are the forms it can take. And I don't feel like it's a kind of something I could ever hope to find the answer to. It felt like a kind of an inquiry. And so I realized that I need to find out more. I need to learn more. And how do I do that? And then I said, well, let's bring people together. We were in Bali, people coming from all over the world. Everyone bringing so much experience, so many different experiences of what connection might look like. And so I had this idea of just having us come together in a shared space once a week where we would just have this 45 minutes dedicated to exploring connection with nature, 45 dedicated to exploring connection with ourselves and 45 connection with others. And in each of those slots, I was just going around my week and looking for what are some gifts that others might have to bring into this exploration, whether they had any kind of background or certification in that, it was just something that they were personally exploring. They felt passionate about and was authentically present for them to be able to share in the form of an experience rather than a lecture or something like that. So it was more of this workshop kind of style exploration of different practices and things, which was just my way of creating a sort of a university really for what is connection. I stayed with that for a while while I was in Bali and it enriched my life in such incredible ways, just this way of community and coming together with this inquiry. And afterwards, for a few years, I was traveling back and forth between my home country of Bulgaria and Romania where my partner was based and bringing this with me, but also going back to Bali, going to Peru, then going to Guatemala. So it was kind of like difficult to keep it anchored in an offline environment because of all of this movement. And so eventually COVID came. And as COVID arrived, I remember actually, Jem, you posted this invitation for us to gather together in online spaces and really kind of come back to community through technology. And I said, oh, actually, that's a good idea. Why don't I just reach out to all these people I had connected along the way with. And I thought it was going to be a few weeks and maybe we'd just come together and explore and support one another, gather together in this way in an online medium. And it turned out that this was something that stuck even now after COVID is kind of fading in many parts of the world. It still is here and we still keep on gathering and doing that work in an online environment which continues to be an incredible and reaching experience of community and exploration and connection. Thank you. And yeah, I do remember that. In the early days of the pandemic, it was the February or March 2020 when we realized that the ability to meet physically might be suspended for quite some time. And within the context of the Deep Adaptation Forum where we were working together at the time, we also then tried to see if people could do more stuff for each other online and you as well with the connection playground. I was wondering, there are some theories around how we are losing our ability in some parts of the world to have dialogue about difficult issues without getting angry and defensive. There are theories about how we, through social isolation, can start instinctively demonizing others There are theories then that this leads us to be more open to manipulation through mass media for whatever ends, for whatever side of any polarized issue might be talking about. Do you think that what you're doing with connection playground is relevant to that story of effectively the disruption, degradation or breakdown of normal society because of the atomization of each of us? I believe that coming together in communities is definitely a way to go about this in the sense that it supports us in self-regulating and co-regulating and having important conversations with one another. For me, one of the key ways in which I've been looking to support this way of perhaps releasing that defensiveness has been just to create an environment of safety and show up in a spirit of I don't know actually the answer to the questions that we might explore together myself or whoever is hosting that space is not coming from this position I'm going to tell you how things are but are coming from this position of well, this is a question that's important for me right now and I have my own position on it but let's have a conversation where there is no teacher there is no central figure that knows what the answer is and just really coming into that spirit of authenticity through doing that so I'm not sure if I'm answering your question Yeah, absolutely because I had thought about the importance of effectively feeling loved and having some sense of general trust in being alive in the universe and other people that can come from just playing because you're not if it's creative, it's emergent you're not trying to win in the game kind of context then that's the kind of thing it invites but yeah, what you've also said there resonates indeed and it would be great wouldn't it if all of us could have more play in our lives I'm just realising that something else though that you said there it would mean that we we're more okay with not knowing we're more okay with we label it failure, don't we like or and yet I mean we've done improv theatre together and I know you did improv theatre in the connection playground I mean there is no failure the funniest bits and the most exciting emergent bits are the things where it's just all completely spontaneous so yeah, that I think that also relates to the whole deep adaptation concept which is wow, the old answers the old truths are crumbling, the old expectations are crumbling old identities are crumbling and can we keep some space for us to play about what what might emerge from that and it will be different for different people because so many people want to rush into having a no this is what we need to do this is how to stop more harm this is the way, follow me and yeah, that can come from a place of panic it can come from a place of just rehearsing our own script about how to be a decent human being so yeah pausing and playing as perhaps is a a methodology in in collapse of where people which I certainly knew and valued and I don't know how much I have that in my life anymore so it's good to know connection playground is happening how many events happen what can we all go and join how do we do it you can we have around maybe three to four gatherings happening each week and they're all based on donation and they're co-created with a bunch of other beautiful humans from all over the world we also have spaces in which we come together to actually being that spirit of co-creation being that spirit of okay what is present for us right now in our connection with self-other in nature and then joining forces around common threads in order to create spaces that we can explore together so there's a lot of collaboration happening there's a lot of yeah just just play really just allowing for us to come together in this way and one thing that also I wanted to mention as I was listening to you is there's something about perfectionism something about just releasing this need for everything to be perfect for everything to be told out before it happens for everything to be controlled and structured and clear and somehow allowing a bit more space for emergence to actually take place for creativity really allowing our life force to kind of guide us to places where we might not be able to go if it would just be so like trying to get everything right and not fail so that's something that's been a big medicine for me coming from a heady perfectionistic kind of place in the kind of work I was doing before yeah I remember you once told me that so if old ways of being and doing are crumbling then we know we want something new but how are we going to discover what's new unless we play around with that like how can we think that we can work it all out from our current way of being and doing exactly which one we're going to transition to like how silly is that idea that we need to know before we then move into the new way of being and why not just realize we've got to play an experiment and trust that we're going to be more urgent and therefore that it means also welcoming diversity of experiment rather than just having this judgemental attitude about people doing different things and saying no no no that's not the way to go it's this way not that way so yeah and that for me also is very much alive when anyone's talking about then things which are very important to me like maintaining social justice human rights that flavour of judgementalism about well hmm like where's the activism and what you're doing sorry is this inactivist is this giving up on the climate fight so you must have heard that or maybe you don't hear it but I certainly do and I've often responded to say well so many people have transformed through their collapse anticipation and are active in so many different ways but I realise perhaps there's another way of responding to that which is well who are you to decide what activism is or isn't and what has an impact or not so any thoughts on this because it's quite a live debate about people wanting to label people doomers apathetic and giving up I guess that brings up the question of what this activism mean you know it's kind of like because activism is taken to mean okay we go out in the street we protest we create projects that perhaps support another way of being and this for me is also a project that supports another way of being because it has this element of bringing us together to reconnect with nature and with ourselves and one another which is a kind of a soil for other kinds of activism to emerge from so when we are ourselves in a state of well-being and self-regulation and creativity and we are open to actually connecting with nature in different ways then nature plays a bigger role in our awareness and then we can bring more action also that is aligned with bringing more awareness to nature and our connection with it so you're touching on something there that I want to explore a bit more but before I ask you about it just to say for all of you who've joined us today please if you have a question for Zari do send it to Katie Carr through private message and then we'll be coming to you in about five minutes to hear your questions and also Katie if you have a question for Zari maybe we go to you first as well so Zari you just mentioned about being open to nature to be so what I think I'm beginning to hear then is and you've said it earlier before about the idea of the fear of failure the desire for control the expectation that perfection is possible and good and to be a responsible human you must always achieve perfection or try to all of that is within a particular idea of how to know the world and how to interact with the world and you called it heady as well earlier so my sense is you have been very alive to a different way of sensing a different way of welcoming insight a different way of sense making and being guided by nature, universe, energies whatever could you tell us anything about about that because it really doesn't get much space in the kind of conversations I have in my boring academic or activist life yeah that's a beautiful question thank you Jim for asking this reconnection with nature actually it opened up for me through the early stages of the connection playground because each week there was a slot that was oh we we have 45 minutes to do something related to nature and actually it was very hard to find people that can offer a kind of an experience of connecting with nature although we have this beautiful garden in Bali where we could do that people had lots of things in relating with self and other but very few things in relating with nature so usually that was my challenge to go through my week and to actually be watching what's happening in my own connection with nature that I could offer as a shared experience with others and through time also through my own spiritual path that is related to shamanism which has brought me to places like Peru and Guatemala and Bali before that I've also been exploring yeah just this different way of being with nature where I guess it's just about going out not just with the intention of I'm just going to spend some time in nature but really meeting nature and meeting the beings of nature as a sacred other or as a part of myself and and there's been a lot that I've done in this direction like for example last year when I was here in Guatemala I lived right next to Lake Katitlan and I had this agreement with the lake that every day I used to go and actually open up to receive a message from the lake through a certain quality maybe today I would see like the algae in the water or maybe I would see you know the way that the sky was reflected in the water or something else and every day I would get that specific message or quality of transparency or pinkness or whatever it was or sometimes dead fish you know just whatever really arrives at that place where I'm about to go and have my swim I would take that quality with me and I would take it with me in my day see how it expresses and then come back the next day and report the lake. So I had this like many different ways of just really starting to acknowledge that lake not just as a you know an object but like as a being in its own right that I can have a conversation with and I can really open up to receive it wisdom and learn from so this has been something that I've thought to embody as I walk through my life looking at okay so really this larger organism that I'm part of and all the beings that I can meet whether it's a human being or it's an ant and how can I open up to the wisdom that that ant carries as well and converse with it so that's something that's very typical of animistic and shamanic traditions and it's something I'm very much aligned with and it's also the reason why I'm sitting here in front of my chair you know some people have laughed because usually they see a chair and then I'm like coming in it's like why don't you sit on the chair and for me also there's something about the connection with the earth actually here in Guatemala the land of the Mayans the women used to actually not sit on the chair even if a chair was there because it was actually seen as very nurturing to be more closely connected to the earth for a woman specifically and I didn't know that before coming here it was it was something I was doing anyway and I continue doing it and so there's all of these little ways that we might not be so conscious of but are energetically very important to our well-being as is the connection with the earth itself and so shamanism for me has this way of like bringing us back down so shamanism and what you've just described for my understanding there's a niche in the so-called modern or western world where that is embraced and there's also maybe another field where it's observed and thought of as a curiosity but the majority of the people I know would quietly laugh at you or aggressively dismiss you if you ever want to take any of these ideas anywhere near normal life and you have this lightness you don't seem to ever get angry about that being the way of the modernist world or the patriarchal world do you experience patronizing negativity and dismissal and or not but if you do just how do you deal with it how do you not get angry given that there's not only an dismissal of what you've just described and the lack of embrace but also that comes upon a history of the violent repression of the ways of being that you've just expressed yeah so I've had my own share of processing anger and it's not been so much around my beliefs and my spiritual understandings it's been more around really the impact that religion has had in the western world on disconnecting us from the earth from the body, from the feminine and in specific circumstances I've experienced very deep rage for that and I guess in the rest of the time I just see it as a part of reality we don't need to all agree on the same things and if you don't agree with me that's alright like you don't have to and actually in a way those that disagree are also part of spirit they're part of what challenges me to carry whatever I'm carrying in an even deeper way so that's the way I see it and so there's this yeah just this way in which for me this spiritual understanding is inviting me to look at even conversations like that as an expression of spirit like this bridging of spirit and earth and everything we experience and each and every person that come into my field if they're coming into my field there's something for me to look at and something for me to figure out how to respond to that is also a part of me because this inner critic has been there especially in the early parts of my journey of like oh but what is this this doesn't make any sense all of these things so it's just a way of okay that's a part of me that is now appearing externalized as this other person and I get to explore how I relate to it so you're really taking a playful, curious non-controlling emergent vibe to the whole of life including people who otherwise might just be really annoying so thank you for me so many annoying people actually yeah I don't know why just my world whoops okay so thanks we're going to open up to questions now first Katie I know you had a question so if you feel like asking it go for it otherwise then we're going to be going to Rene after Katie I do feel like asking it thanks Gem Zori will you talk a little bit about your experience of play in the broadest sense that you might understand that and altered states of awareness what people might call flow states or beyond self consciousness hmm that's a beautiful question it's yeah there's been so much there so I think it was about six years ago that I first bumped into this what we might call this altered state of consciousness in a very conscious way where I first had shamanic drum journey experience I read about it there was nothing spiritual going on around me and I just said okay 20 minutes drum track you know you too let's see what happens and it just blasted me off of like everything I thought I knew it was like what the hell is going on like this this incredible rich you know diverse wilderness that is within me that I've actually never gotten to meet before and in an incredible support to my journey that I encountered to just saying oh let's play with this let's see what happens you know and further down the road I've encountered many different yeah practices that support that so for example for me even authentic relating is an altered state of consciousness what we call is deep relating in deep adaptation or inner dance or you know ways in which this can be practiced you know that does not involve plant medicine which is a big part of shamanic culture as well in some parts of the world that I've visited and I've also worked with plant medicine quite a lot so with ayahuasca phylocybin mushrooms just going into that exploration of consciousness and connection in this way and play has come forth there in big ways especially with mushrooms they tend to bring oftentimes this playful wise quality somehow the way that yeah really play connects to wisdom when you're in that state of consciousness has been quite striking for me because usually we would look at play is something that pertains to the child and wisdom is something that pertains to the old age and actually in these altered states of consciousness I've seen them come together and I've seen how much wisdom there is actually in being willing to engage with something in a playful way and yeah so I don't know if that answers your question yeah this is part of is there anything you want to add Katie or any reflection or otherwise yeah thank you maybe just part of my impulse to ask is coming from a deep adaptation perspective and that I don't think it's really appreciated or acknowledged very much the connection between altered states of consciousness which I'm putting in inverted commas because there aren't any words for it really and the relinquishment is part of deep adaptation direct experience of the fact that this individual that I think I am is not as much of the picture as I thought it was thank you so Renee hello you can unmute yourself and ask question for Zori thanks Jim hi Zori everyone else I'm going at the moment but yeah my question was about your experience of running the workshops and the sessions that you do in person versus online and I guess when I think of play I think of a real physical kind of component to it a lot of movement and sometimes this sort of forum I think it would bring a little bit more difficulty and just wondering if you'd speak about how those sessions are being for you yeah that's a wonderful question thank you Renee I see I see them as complementing one another the offline and the online gatherings and the kind of play that we can do in one case and in the other so the offline offers the opportunity to to get our bodies moving more and to get connecting through body more which is amazing and is irreplaceable at the same time the online space allows for you know if we look at play in that wider context of exploration and cross pollination as well the online allows for it's almost like different environments take to one another through us so we each have our own bubble you know that we are immersed in and so somehow as we come together in this online space there is a play in just kind of allowing for this like movement of ideas and practices and ways of being between different parts of the world that can then be brought into offline environments or even just for that playfulness that technology allows by just allowing us to connect from so many different parts of the world and share our context share our ways of being share our bubbles and get out of our bubbles too which for me is very much what play does it encourages us to get out of our bubble and try something else yeah I've been amazed at the possibilities of online interaction and once you have the confidence that actually in some ways anything that you do in the physical realm can be experimented with online then you just try it don't you so a course I teach with Katie we asked a mutual friend of ours Helen to have a go at doing improv theatre online and it worked so well you know you can even sort of just do silly things like using the fact that there's a screen like this in the box and like hello and obviously people much better than me in doing these things but anyway it's just like whatever context you're in you can play with we're going to have a question from Aidan please please unmute yourself and have your video on if possible hey Zori, hey Jim thanks it's been a really wonderful chat tying together a few things that don't normally talk to each other I run an improvised theatre company in my city and as you know improv historically is much more connected to comedy the industry of comedy it is more about fun making people laugh and I'm in this weird position where I run a company I privately you know a big believer in deep adaptation it informs a lot of my life yet in the company itself it's not really foregrounded so I sometimes am playing with this tension of the fact that through improvisation, through play people are kind of enacting deep adaptation but you know they know not what they are doing so maybe to kind of put a little example like Zori I love your example about the Charmingism of Jim your point about how would be received by some people other people and you say nature has spirit nature speaks to you you need to listen to nature you need to play with that oh that's crazy but if you go to them and you say hey I want you to pretend that the lake has spirit that the lake is saying things to you if the lake was speaking what kind of things might be saying people suddenly go oh yeah they can do that so I guess my it's a roundabout way of asking to what extent do you think we need to foreground collapse and deep adaptation in the way that we think about play or to what extent do you think we just sort of background it and trust the play processes sort of having its own pedagogical value I'll leave it there yeah it's a beautiful question and I don't know what the answer is I think both maybe I think it also depends really on the context we are in a lot of the work that I'm doing is not necessarily targeting to bring people into collapse awareness however I do feel that these questions of collapse can come up for people and also the resource that is built by just having people explore these different ways of being together in this way even if they are not collapse aware and even if they are not even considering looking in that direction for me it's a kind of it's looking at deep adaptation a little bit with how to say less clear boundaries less clear oh these are the people that are collapse aware and these are the people who are not because the people who are not they can still feel oftentimes of some things missing some things like what's going on like I'm disconnected and I want to reconnect and I want to play and do these things and and so the resource that is built through them engaging in that and through creating spaces for them to engage in that I believe it's going to be very supportive and the on setting of collapse and also the learning also of how do I hold space for others which happens in those kinds of spaces and if we have other ways of knowing all of us other than just analytical head then all or many of us at some levels are insuating what's going on the environmental breakdown the societal breakdown so in that sense it doesn't necessarily need to be named there's just you said it once didn't you that a lot of people have a sense of something being quite off in the world and there's that original trauma of separation in all of us if we've all grown up in modernist industrial consumer societies that we're hyper individualists that we consume our environment rather than just live in sacred communion with it and yeah that we carry that is something off in the world so there were we can all be naturally I think drawn to the kind of stuff you're doing sorry if we just let ourselves for some people you have to have a real shock to just let yourself engage with the kind of things that you're doing so for me someone said wow Jim it took you realizing the end of the world for you to let yourself become more human actually might have said it worse than that like oh it's only when you realize you're going to die you can became human but so some people for the shock is actually helpful I want to go for our last question to Neil who's joining us from somewhere else completely different because I think we've had a couple of questions from Australia Neil where in the world are you I'm in Hawaii and I'm really enjoying this thank you for the work that you're doing Jim and Zori this is the first time I've been in a group with you and become familiar with your perspective I was really struck by what you said around about the 10 years if you have 10 years or less what do you want to do with that time and your answer to that was resonated with me a similar answer creating something like connection playground and when I looked more into that I saw that you're coming from you have groups on authentic relating and circling which is what I'm doing as well just being in the moment in relationship if I could do anything if I only have so much time left that's what I'd really like to do and I have groups circling groups and T groups and I'm curious what you were talking about creating safe space I'm wondering if you could say more about that what that means to you and what that looks like in your groups how you do that thank you very much that's a wonderful question and in a way it's amazing that it's coming from someone that's been involved in circling specifically because for me circling is a safe space and at the same time it's a brave space it's a space where we come to be challenged as well and in a way play for me has been this way in which we invite both actually so sometimes it's going to be just the safety of seeing somebody authentically which is a way in which authentic relating and circling has impacted me hugely because the whole spirit of the playground is done in this way of like you're not just facilitating as like somebody sending outside of the group and telling them what to do you come in and you be part of it you participate yourself in it and you show yourself authentically and I guess yeah there's been that and at the same time there is an acknowledgement that we are coming here to experiment many of the people who arrive to these spaces and start holding space don't have experience doing that so there's this sense of like can you come in here and know also that it is up to you how you engage here because it's an experimental space and so you take care of yourself as you do that and how much can we trust one another and I guess that's been something that it's safe but it's also a little bit edgy in that sense that sometimes we're playing around with things that are kind of you don't know where this is going to go and can I trust my capacity to handle it and if I cannot then I just don't enter so that's basically yeah basically the way that we've been approaching this. It reminds me of the way Katie on this call talks about it as well which is looking not at making safe spaces but spaces that are safe enough and other people often talk about it as safe enough for you to go to your tender edge as well which I think is also quite a nice phrase to think about this issue. You're working on this aren't you Zori? You're actually working is it with Maria Perkins on something in this area of facilitation and space holding? Could you just before we end could you tell us about that so people can follow up if they want to? Yeah so this is what we're working with Maria Perkinson she's also a volunteer in the deep adaptation firm and it's how I met her and she's been also an incredible companion in the connection playground in its online form so exploring and co-creating for about two years now together in that context at some point we realized there is something here about the way that we be together that we feel could be a good way of getting together with other space holders from different parts of the world in this period of there is no teacher or maybe nature is the only teacher and let's just gather together and support one another and create a space where we hold this question of how do we create an environment that supports human growth and learning and and just really do that with other people whose profession is such and it's been an incredibly rich experience there's 14 of us there right now 14 people from different parts of the world and a lot of cross-pollinating a lot of support that we receive ourselves as we go about supporting others which is very important in this profession so this is one of the things that also happens in play is that things emerge out of us engaging with one another in this way sometimes we find oh actually I vibe really well with this person and how about we go and make something together and then so this is one of the things that I feel is also a big benefit of allowing more playfulness with this opportunity to get to know one another how do we find that how do we find that is there a simple web link yet for the widening circles I can share it with you I don't know if you can post it somewhere absolutely so yes so if anyone's watching this on the youtube channel then look below or the links will be there for those of you with us now who may not do that sorry maybe you could just type the link in or Katie type the link in before we go so thank you very much sorry for spending an hour with us and sharing from all of who you are and connected and grounded as you are awesome I think you might be the first person I've hosted who sat on the floor in a deep adaptation Q&A in two years okay maybe I should do that next time let's see what happens and thank you Katie for doing the support and thank you everyone for joining from Hawaii to Australia and everywhere in between if you're interested in future Q&As then Stuart will be putting those in the deep adaptation main Facebook group when they come available that's probably the easiest way for you to know about them thank you bye bye thank you so much thank you everyone thank you Jim


Underneath Skoll, I work at Labrador Friendship Center as the shield project coordinator. So the shield project, it stands for Sexual Health Information Exchange Labrador District and we operated it out of the Labrador Friendship Center but it's meant to go throughout the whole Labrador region. And the idea is that we're using art culture and technology as mediums to bring young people together to build relationships, to create safe, supportive spaces, and then to bring in different health and holistic well-being themes, things around sexual health, but also many indirect health themes, whether it's self-esteem or relationship building or just connecting because I look at health in a circular way as opposed to an institutionalized way, I guess. We've identified Indigenous youth age 14 to 18 within our, because we're funded through the Public Health Agency of Canada, but what we've done is we've opened it up to all youth within that age range but now because of interest we have opened it up even to 12-year-olds and 13-year-olds, recognizing that if young people are feeling drawn to this project then we need to be flexible and adaptable to include them in that way. And we also look at that all youth being able to have access to what we're doing is about inclusiveness and encouraging that diversity, but also when all youth are having these positive life experiences, Indigenous youth who are within our communities, which these are predominantly Indigenous communities, it helps everybody so if we're trying to create this idea that everybody is included, excluding any youth is just not how we want to go. What we're doing is trying to be really creative and create natural, intergenerational learning and sharing opportunities by recognizing local role models who are Labradorian, who are Indigenous, who are artists of different forms. So we're really open to what our culture and technology looks like. So everything kind of includes in that from cell phone tricks and being able to use them for photography and filmmaking to, and when we do that, we're able to see that youth are also the skill-shares. So they many times can teach the older generation and so when you bring them together in these learning environments, we're not sort of creating this who's above and who's below. It's still in this kind of circular feeling and that's part of the culture that we bring into it. There's times where I've had academics kind of ask. So what's the cultural component to this event? And I said, well, the fact that we're doing it within a circle, that everybody is equal here, we bring Indigenous values in, we honor the cultures of all of our participants. We have a lot of new Canadians who are within our communities and so they come and the interaction and the sharing is whatever culture you bring to this. So it's really diverse and that's what makes it really exciting and the art we've done everything from theater arts to visual art to virtual art to music to dance. I mean, it's again like we're using mediums that have a lot of flexibility and so usually when we're connecting to different artists, it really is the sky's the limit, you know, and then how young people sort of plug into that to create these safe spaces and we incorporate this health theme allows all of a sudden it's not so here's when you talk to your nurse or your doctor, your public health person or here's when you talk to your guidance counselor or here's a fun art activity, we're actually meshing all of these people together as humans as opposed to their titles and positions. So that's where relationship building can happen. I mean, we can have a resident doctor helping out at an art slam and the kids don't even realize this individual is a doctor, but in having conversation and sharing with each other, then they figure that out and they go, huh, a doctor's here helping out with this. And it changes how they when they walk into these more formalized settings. Now a doctor can be someone that they're not intimidated by doctors, someone who was coloring pictures with them a few nights ago. So it's really looking at things to break down barriers as opposed to creating really the stories. I think in many ways it's the stories from the youth, the feedback, the energy. I mean, it's very tangible when you're in these sessions, when youth are engaged and you know, I've been involved in a lot of different sort of formalized learning, you know, presentations, working in non-profit. I've gone into schools for, you know, anti-bullying days. And so you have this session about bullying and about relationships. And when you do that, a lot of times I find youth kind of turn off and they whether this is happening to them or not, they can't show that same kind of level of emotion because they don't want to be targeted or they won't, they don't want to be traumatized or triggered or it could be that this is something they're really just not comfortable with. But when we bring in a form of art and while we're doing this art, we're talking about relationships and you see people relax and get comfortable and they just start speaking. So it takes, again, this fear, this audience factor out of it. And so for me, that's the measures of success. When a young person opens up and shares with us or is not afraid to ask questions, when I see, you know, the professionals really relaxing, allowing themselves to be more human. And they don't mind doing a craft activity.  They don't feel this sense of needing to perform. Then that to me is success. And of course, we do a lot of evaluation. We do have an external evaluator for our project. And so she does all of the technical work around the evaluations and making sure that our funder is getting all of the indicators that they need. So there's all those layers and things that we do through the, you know, through the federal funded through the government systems.  And I get parents who are reaching out to me and just wanted to say thank you, like my young person hasn't gotten involved in things in such a long time.  But because I'm combining this art form, they're there and they're engaged and they want to learn, they want to share that success. I think it's when we, when we get back into the circle and this idea that sharing goes both ways, that everyone in the community, regardless of what their status is or their background is or their age is, all have something to bring to the circle. And so sharing and the skill building is not reflected on position as much as on wanting to, you know, so I think what we're doing that that is unique is we're really giving young people a voice and we're allowing them to lead this project and we come in and we support them in doing that. And so I think indigenous education is also about the value systems of indigenous communities. And this again, this circular way of the whole community works together. And the whole community decides and we all have a responsibility and a role within that. And it's not just this institutionalized structure of education of who's the authority, who's the teacher and how the students, you know, behave. So it really, you know, we did, we've had different events where we take it can be outside or it can be inside. There could be desks involved, we could be sitting around the circle, we could be moving tables, right? Like, so it's really for me when I think of some of the formalized education, their structures, there's these standards, there's this criteria that allows young people to sort of feel like, so I'm in the top of the class, the middle of the class or the bottom of the class. Indigenous education for me takes away these social structures, these classes, these where do I fit into this? And it becomes really about this holistic circle, where everyone walks away feeling like they've genuinely contributed, but that they're also very purposeful. And we talk a lot about land based learning as a part of an Indigenous education. I think that's really important. But we don't always have to think the only way we can do Indigenous education is to bring people out onto the land. I think we need to figure out more creative ways to bring the land into wherever people are learning, so that we don't get sort of caught up into these structures where it's only if we can, you know, take them out in the boat. There's many ways to bring water into your classroom, or into wherever that environment is, and where we incorporate a lot of technology into our project, going out into the woods or going out on the land, we start getting a little bit of restrictions if we're looking for Wi-Fi, if we're looking for the ability to do things online, or figuring out how to bring that technology into those land based places. So we're a lot of our stuff, like we run a summit that will be mostly within a building. But that doesn't mean we can't bring this Indigenous sense of values, and how we construct things, and how we build this agenda, and still do it in a very inclusive and holistic way. I'd like to see it to continue to build in these creative ways that, because where I find we're losing more and more of sort of our elders, and who are going to be the next wave of elders. So what I think of in 10 years, I think of the elders I work with now, where will they still be with us 10 years from now, and who will be the next knowledge holders? And how do we look at knowledge holders? And how do we look at people who are bearing witness? And so I think, you know, looking at things like the Truth or Reconciliation caused action around education and really making those real could be a good direction to head in. But I think also, I mean, from the work that I do, which is predominantly youth based, it's being able to see the youth as our knowledge holders and really giving them opportunity and that safe space to share that knowledge in a really impactful way. So it's again, it's kind of getting away from this sort of triangular model of who the teachers are and who the students are. I hope that we keep growing more and more that we're part of a circle, or almost, you know, I think of the way that water flows that some places are really calm and some places are really busy. And I think if we can look at education, the way we look at water systems, the way we look at how the land operates, how the circle of life flows, you know, that could be a really interesting place to be where young people start to not always have to feel this pressure that many of them feel right now about the expectations of society, of their families, of this institutionalized version of success. So if we can help to sort of change that model into something about where you feel a sense of purpose, where you feel like you are part of this greater picture, where you're really connected to the land, you're connected to your culture. And that's the things that make you feel really good. So we start to look at success, not in this form of whether, you know, all the letters after my name or what have I achieved or accomplished within a colonized, westernized world, but that we actually feel this deep sense of connection and purpose to our life path. That to me would be a really exciting place to go. And I hope that that's what the SHIELD project allows opportunity for youth to feel a sense of purpose. Because I think a lot of times when we get in trouble, you know, as young people as adults, is because we've lost that sense of purpose. And so the Western world has told us, here's the things to fill that void. And a lot of those are around education, career, family, home, you know, but how we define those when we start to embrace that as indigenous people were very nomadic. We have these deeper connections to land and water and lives and animals. How does this start to change, you know, this version of knowledge? No, it seems like sometimes knowledge and wisdom is so far apart from each other because we think one is institutionalized and one is life based. You know, how do we make sure that they're all intertwined into this, this one path that that's okay if you slip up and make mistakes. And then when I look at how colonization has been, I think that's led many times to indigenous purpose being taken away and then replaced with, you know, addictions and with very unhealthy sort of coping mechanisms that would have been introduced generations ago. And we're still trying to reconcile and heal from that that if we can, if we can develop systems that allow that healing to happen in a much more gentle or fluid way and that we're able to look at each other as healers and how we all offer into this energy. I mean, I have a lot of big visions on where we could be, you know, if we get into the triangle and start to really embrace the circle.


Okay, perfect. So the previous paper was about the climate cross-country climate policy coordination. And now the next paper is about supervisory cooperation, incomplete coverage in supervisory cooperation and cooperation externalities by Wolf Wagner from the Rotterdam School of Management. Wolf, please. Thank you. Thank you for staying for the last paper of today. So the paper is on incomplete supervisory cooperation. It's together with Torsten, who has conveniently disappeared at the moment, and Conselo Silva-Bostong from Universite Cartolica in Chile. So the paper, as Andrea said, actually is quite closely linked on the conceptual level to the one from Emanuela, so it's about cross-border regulatory arbitrage. But here the source is different. So we're looking at cooperation of banking supervisors, and this cooperation is effective in the sense of the countries involved in the cooperation, so their risks go down. But precisely because of this, actually there's pressure for the risk to go to unaffected or to third countries that are not in the cooperation agreement, and this has some kind of undesirable consequences for the global effectiveness of cooperation. So we think about the big banks in the world, right? So these are cross-border banks that operate among different countries, different jurisdictions, there are a lot of different regulators and policy makers involved, and this creates a lot of issues. So we know this. And to contain risks at these banks, domestic supervisors, national supervisors, they're frequently a corporate, okay? And this cooperation can take many different forms. So it can, for example, be some kind of joint supervision. So think about the banking union would be an extreme example where you replace national supervisors with one common supervisor, in this case for the large banks. But there can be also many other types of agreements, and actually in all data the most common is information agreements or information cooperation. So you're making an agreement to exchange information on your banks. So, for example, this is very prevalent in Latin America, so there are a lot of small agreements between different countries and they're agreeing on exchanging information. So in a sense that the banking union within our data set is not the most representative, okay? It's a very powerful cooperation, but in most cases, actually we're talking about these information exchanges across a smaller set of countries. So what's the potential issue with that? The issue is that these agreements are often made on the country level and so they don't necessarily cover the involved banks. So there's a mismatch between the cooperation area and the geographic footprint of the banks. So there's this incomplete coverage and this creates regulatory arbitrage, the potential for regulatory arbitrage. So cooperation between A and B presumably makes it more difficult for banks to take a risk in these countries, so they have an incentive to shift to C. And this may explain why cooperation is not effective for the very largest banks. So in our private paper in the JFQA, we find that actually if you look at the consolidated bank level, cooperation is effective, okay? But not if you look at the very, very large banks and these are the banks that also have subsidiaries in many countries so they can shift risks pretty easily. So the idea is that cooperation between A and B kind of makes it difficult for banks to take risk in this country and this creates this pressure to shift risk into third countries and there's quite some literature, mostly theoretical, unless people in the audience have contributed on this. So for example, there's this idea of negative externalities across countries. So if a bank from A is failing, it has negative spilloes on B. So once A and B cooperate, these negative externalities are internalized and this makes more stringent supervision optimal. There are also arguments based on heterogeneity, right? So if you have countries that differ initially in the stringency of regulation, so the theory suggests that there will be a tendency to only cooperate if basically you move to a stricter standard. But there's also a sense in which supervision is becoming more effective and it's simply because you have more information, right? So you can exchange information about cross-border movements and this makes it easier for you to take risks. So all of these channels basically suggest that it's going to be harder for banks to take risk. So basically in this paper we show two things. One is this incomplete coverage creates a third country risk shifting and second, this risk shifting in turn has kind of effects for the distribution of gains and costs of cooperation. So basically the costs are shifted kind of outside the cooperation area where the gains are mostly within the countries that are cooperating. So we have collected a large set of data, so hand-connected data. It's on formal cooperation agreements. So we have quite a large number of countries. So in terms of home countries we have about 100. In terms of subsidiary countries we have more. What's also interesting is that these agreements, they are bilateral or multilateral, so actually we have quite a big number of pairs or sets of countries or more than 10,000 potential country pairs that can cooperate. So we have now data since 1995. So for this second pair we updated the data to 2019. Now we look at simply here the existence of cooperation agreements. So we look at the data. So now in this map kind of dark is good. In the previous paper, dark was bad. So here dark is having higher cooperation intensities. So what you see is that there's a lot of variation across countries. So basically here we measure basically for each country with how many other countries in our data set you're cooperating. But you see it's in Europe it's relatively dark, reflecting for example the banking union. But you see that the cooperation agreements, many other places of the world, so there's a lot of cooperation in Africa and Latin America. But you can say that cooperation, I mean this should be conditioned on kind of having some banking links. So there's no sense of cooperating if you don't have any banks in common. So what we're doing is we're combining this with kind of a banking sample. So we have a large set of banks. So they have 600 subsidiaries. They spend 47 home countries and 100 host countries. And now we can compare, we can calculate a different metric. So here, so darker is again higher coverage in this case. So basically what we're doing is we are calculating metrics at the country level. So we're looking for country at all the banks incorporated like headquartered in that country. And then we look to what extent the parent subsidiary, the home host relationships are covered by cooperation agreements. And you see that we get a bit different pictures. For example Europe kind of gets a bit lighter and the reason is that yes we have the banking union but we also have kind of relationships, European banks in Latin America and other places in the world. So this kind of reduces the coverage. Another interesting example is Latin America. So actually they don't cooperate much but they cooperate exactly where, so they have a few banks that are really locally overlapping and they're cooperating exactly in these areas. That's why they're very dark. They have low intensities but they have high coverage. Okay, so this is from our kind of first paper. So basically it's kind of the direct effect. So we're looking here at lending in a subsidiary. So let's say we think about lending as a measure of risk taking. And here basically the home and host countries start cooperating and we see that lending slows. So that's kind of motivating this idea of making it more difficult to take risk in A and B. Now here we are looking at the third country effect, right? So let's look at Royal Bank of Scotland in 2008 and 2009 and let's look at risk shifting into the Argentinian subsidiary. So arguably in 2008 there was not much risk shifting pressure because there were eight other subsidiaries and only one, so dark is indicating a cooperation agreement with the UK. So only one is covered by a cooperation agreement. Now in 2009, so basically UK signs cooperation agreements with many other countries. So basically then how many subsidiaries are covered by cooperation agreements. So you can argue that in 2009 the pressure to shift risk into Argentine has increased. So that's basically what we're going to study. Regression. So the setup is, so basically we're interested in how a risk allocation into a specific subsidiary, how this depends on cooperation coverage in the rest of the group. So we are regressing lending as a measure of risk taking on a group cooperation. What is group cooperation? It's the share of subsidiary countries of the banking group for cooperation agreement with the home country excluding the subsidiary itself. It's like the cooperation coverage in the rest of the... And for identification what is interesting is here that we are basically relying on third country. So when third countries sign cooperation agreements with the UK we look at how this is influencing Argentina. But think about what we can do is we can, in our setting really control for parent subsidiary country time-fixed effects. So we can have a lot of time-fixed effects. So basically we are comparing two subsidiaries in the same country so they have the parent bank is also in identical countries. But these banking groups they have different geographic food points. And our third countries are signing agreements with the UK that this creates differential risk shifting. Okay so we find that lending indeed shifts out. So it shifts into the subsidiary if group cooperation increases. Now this seems to be also indicating a general change in risk so it's also that it's not just substitution away from other activities. It's really an increase in the size of the subsidiary. Leverage increases so the liability side becomes more... risky. And if you look at the Z score as an overall measure of default risk it also indicates higher riskiness. So we do an alternative exercise at the loan level. So the first exercise is really looking at the overall subsidiary. And now we look at individual loans. And basically what we do is we look for a given loan. So we take a loan as given through which subsidiary a banking group is originating the loan. Okay. And we look at how this is relating to residual group cooperation of this subsidiary. And basically we find that the same kind of type of result. So basically there's this risk shifting pressure. And here the loan level what we can also look at we can look at explicit measures of lending risk or loan risk. We find that if the loan is ex under risk here you know this risk shifting pressure is more pronounced. So then we look at several kind of determinants of this risk shifting. We look at what kind of country characteristics from the subsidiary perspective affect the extent of risk shifting. And one thing we look at is supervisory stringency. So the idea is if it's motivated by risk shifting then if supervisory stringency in a subsidiary country is high then this should mitigate the risk shifting. And that's also what we find. So we have different measures of relative stringency. So subsidiary country versus subsidiaries in the rest of the banking group. Okay. So we construct relative stringency measures. And so we have different proxies for those and in each case they indicate that you know if the subsidiary country you know basically they can protect themselves against the inflows by having you know a stringent supervisory framework. So in the last part we are looking at basically the distribution of benefits and costs from cooperation. And basically if you think about this through basically there's an interesting implication here. So if you look at the effectiveness of cooperation purely from the perspective of country A and B actually it's increasing if banking groups can shift risk into C. So we also have a model underpinning this but basically the idea is that yeah so if basically there's no risk shifting opportunity into country C for banking groups so if they face more stringent supervision in A and B they will reduce risk a bit but you know they want to still keep up their risk so they're doing some risk shifting within the countries. But if there's opportunity to shift into C they will shift risk at least partially into C and this lowers risk. So if we just look naively at A and B it looks like supervision has become more effective in terms of reducing risk in these countries. Of course the risk on the world level is just shifted around. So the prediction based on our model is that if A and B do not internalize this effect so then they don't kind of consider also this negative effect on country C then actually their gains on cooperation they're higher if there's risk shifting opportunities for their banks. So the prediction is basically if risk shifting opportunities for banks exist they can shift risk into third countries so the gains from cooperation they're higher for A and B. And basically what we do is so we look at existing kind of frameworks existing models of the benefits and costs to cooperation and we kind of amend them by including this new risk shifting term. So specifically what we're doing we're now explaining cooperation so we are regressing the propensity of two countries to cooperate on kind of controls general controls for cooperation costs and benefit and then this new risk shifting term and how do we measure this? We have kind of several ways to do this in the bearer but the most intuitive one is so you look at kind of the number of third countries in which banking groups that are active and A and B operate. So this kind of measures the opportunity in terms of the country set the exploit for shifting risk. And what we find is that so this risk shifting measure this risk shifting opportunity measure is positively related to cooperation across countries and so basically what does it mean? So when a situation appears to be more effective from the perspective of country A and B because a risk can be shifted into C A and B are also more likely to cooperate. And this indicates like a negative kind of a cost so this is a potential source of inefficiency because these are kind of gains accruing to A and B but actually come at a cost of C. So here we have a graph, a map where basically we look at this risk shifting potential so this is now from the subsidiary country the perspective of a subsidiary country and basically we look at for country we take all the subsidiaries from global banking groups and then we look at how these groups are cooperating again in their residual subsidiary structure. So this measures basically the potential of the risk shifting pressure you get from outside the country. And on the map again it changes so the darker is indicating higher risk shifting exposure and now it looks like a bit like kind of developed developing country divide. So like let's say Europe and North America they do quite well also because they're mostly they have the parent group in their countries but then for example South America they host a lot of subsidiaries of for example European banking groups so they're exposed to this risk shifting pressure. Okay so let me wrap up and come to conclude so basically the main thing we want to point out here is that there's this mismatch of cooperation area and footprint, geographic footprint of banks so this is what we call incomplete coverage and this creates risk shifting into third countries and this undermines on one hand it undermines the global effectiveness of cooperation agreements but it also potentially creates this incentive program so if the set of countries that are thinking about cooperation differs from the affected countries then basically you know the incentives might be distorted because the cost of cooperation they're partly shifted to the country's upside. Now the policy I'm mentioning is very clear so it's really about this mismatch so what it means is that when you think about cooperating I mean you should think kind of big in terms of the countries so you should involve all countries as much as possible the countries where the banks have a meaningful footprint and what we also argue that this also speaks in favor of multilateral agreements where basically on one shot you know you're trying to set up a big agreement on many countries at the same time so this kind of reduces the negative potential side effects of cooperation. Thank you. Thank you Wolf. Perfect timing. I'll discuss in this David Marcus from ECB's research department please. In a nutshell what this paper is doing is to show that an increasing cooperation and cooperation is a proxy for supervisory scrutiny. Banks expand and where would a bank expand so they would go to greener posture so what we call greener posture is places in which there would be less scrutiny because scrutiny is expensive for banks and the mechanism as Wolf explained better than me is that countries do not internalize effects in third country so that's in turn this will lead to an increase in the propensity to coordinate, right? So very graphically we've got a cat which is the supervisor chasing the bank because he doesn't want the bank to take excessive risks on other people's money and what the mouse does is to hide and obviously the cat will find another cat to cooperate with and reduce the cost for the supervisor so this is in a nutshell what this paper is doing. Now my first job at the ECB around 20 years ago when I was in policy is to attend the banking supervisory committee in which all the EU countries coordinate and have informal coordination agreements so I'm very sympathetic to this type of work and also very skeptical to some extent on how this could be nailed down with the current setting so is the question large enough? I think so, I think the power of supervision has been hardly studied in the literature I think it's super important can they answer it? I think the authors do a great job I think it's a very important paper but to my mind you are trying to answer too many questions and again I love this paper because you are actually looking at a major question and normally as you know there tends to be like a trade-off I will talk about it but I'm very sympathetic about this type of work and I think it's very important Now, why am I convinced about the power of supervision? So let me give you an example very close to home as you know in 2012 the SSM was actually unexpectedly announced and there were talks for the need of a banking union in Europe and a size threshold for banks to be inside the SSM was announced it was 30 billion, 30 billion, sorry so banks have a whole year until the ECB assumed the supervision of the largest banks so I think this is going to be helpful to bring the point of the authors home in the following sense if you look at the distribution of banks' assets in the year prior to the announcement which is this is basically the distribution of banks according to size and as you can see in 2002 it's a kernel distribution so you see how the tails are going down at the end this is purely by construction but effectively in 2012 the red line banks were very smoothly distributed around the threshold of 30 billion in the year after you see that many banks shifted because of anticipation of stronger supervisors so I think Amber is sympathetic to this in Europe at least to the issue of the supervision and even on expectations of supervision this anticipation effect I think is also interesting so on the data in most papers there is a big trade-off between a big question in terms of scope and the identification of a very little component which is very well specified this paper tries to do both it focuses on the identification but to my mind still very little on the data for instance before 2014 the data has been hand collected from annual reports, regulatory websites and newspaper articles this is the core of the paper I would like to know more about this maybe it's my background but I wanted to understand how they coordinated more with with the countries around that I would like to know more about that now I fully understand that in a central bank we have the luxury of data but I have a very big quirk with the use of syndicated loan data because in the end this is just one way of expanding direct lending they also do cross-section a cross-selling of other products and they occurred very very rarely in theory to nail supply effects which is what we are talking about you will need to have two different syndicates before and after and in Europe this happens very very rarely it's around two firms a year that happens syndicated loans happening from two different syndicates before and after my last point is about cooperation the authors pulled together all types of corporations from NUMOU which for the people in the jargon is memorandum of understanding to an actual supranational supervisor so you are bringing together legally legally binding agreements with an informal paper which has been signed at one point in time now people in the business who have been doing policy for a long time they know that cooperation is very often toxic for the lack of action and you have been living in the Netherlands we know what happened with NB and AMRO I can tell you there were a lot of cooperation agreements down there there are also implementation problems time consistency it's very easy to sign a piece of paper with another supervisor now in a different country it's a very different thing to put fiscal money when the financial authorities need to intervene so how about also considering for failing banks which cooperation agreement had prior to failing I'm convinced that the majority of banks who failed had a cooperation agreement in place econometrically you could use local projection act adding different types of cooperation agreements as a predictor of failing bank and then of course the other issue is how about the incentives to cooperate not to implement the stricter supervision I remember the light touch regulation from Gordon Brown in the UK before the crisis often coordination is an excuse not to increase the supervision of banks so a set cooperation sometimes in this country this is the blue light you are familiar with it's something we are worried about and I would like to see more about that so to summarize and to let you go all of you after thanking Andreas again for a great supervision a great conference you see this is a Freudian slip for a great supervision we used to work together I would like to know more about the data I would like to know more about the type of cooperation this is a relevant question very well executed by excellent co-authors and I think it's an important paper with great potential that I would love to see very well published because I think it's a very important contribution thank you so very much and I don't want you to go now because we still have a speech so thanks David thanks David for your kind words and thanks for your discussion so then we go to the last question and answer around this afternoon and the demand is high Harry, Giovanni so I wonder whether to what extent these cooperation agreements that is whether a country enters into agreements with other countries whether that could reflect say local supervisory employment because in the end you need people to carry out and do this cooperation and then local employment of supervisors could also affect bank risk-taking and therefore the quality of supervision so I wonder whether there's an employment issue here Giovanni Bassani here from the SSN it's quite interesting I was probably the question actually should be on your previous paper because I think you mentioned that you found out that even if there is this consolidated supervision at the end of the day that doesn't catch actually the risk in those countries and for somebody doing supervision this is something a bit surprising in a sense because we are we are we are supposed to think that through consolidating supervision you should be actually able to supervise risks in all the perimeter of consolidation if that doesn't happen because you don't have enough information coming from a country you should actually ask the bank to consolidate the subsidiary which then the potential treatment is going to be much more so it seems to me that maybe it's true I mean I'm not saying that it's not true but that the the findings and again maybe more from your previous paper are against the way consolidated supervision works in a sense so this supposed to work which will be something significantly depressing in a sense and also I wasn't sure how you actually defined this what countries are because I think you have a very extensive definition of what the country are I guess all Eastern Europe from from the from the charts you show will become a country as opposed to the SSM and also all South America is basically a certain country so we basically supervise banks on a consolidated basis if there are countries where we can actually get into we should actually take them out for what consolidated supervision is so we have a country right now you can imagine which one which presents a lot of problem but this is sort of an exception you seem to actually generalize this aspect very much I mean it's amazing that it work and you mentioned that I mean there's a lot of variation on cooperation intensity and I think David also appealed to this I would be very interested to learn if you can somehow explore this further for instance I mean I wonder if there's agreements that are focused on specific banking groups like Santander compared to very general high-level agreements also how does this link to the the actual cross-border banking structure I mean for instance if these are agreements between countries that are mostly hosts of foreign banks I don't know I think there's tons of interesting questions to be asked there I appreciate you're trying to finish up so I'll be brief Mary let's bet the magmon I'm from the Central Bank of Ireland thank you very much for the paper I couldn't I had to stop myself going to the question of effectiveness and I don't know whether through your research you kind of tested for the cooperation effectiveness in crisis times and you know whether the existence ultimately of the cooperation agreement I think you touched on this David really did it show anything and then secondly for me given that you had you said you had I think 93 countries you've over 10,000 of the kind of relationships whether we know that these group structures change and more you know continuously through your data gathering do the cooperation agreements change or do they remain static just a few comments it's really a very interesting paper covering understudied topic it's also brave to present this paper to a room full of supervisors let me tell you there would be no change in legal form of cooperation between SSM supervisors between 2012 to 2014 and now but the scope effectiveness the standardization is two different words so also sometimes we've been even a single group of supervisor following a single legal framework 10 years would make a huge difference if it's a project like creation of SSM and this is just one of the aspects where we would need to look into much more detail in terms of what cooperation really means to have a meaningful benchmark in any case what I would also join Giovanni here look into and perhaps you could comment this how those countries that are those third countries treated a bit as let's say lower standards jurisdictions how they react to this status and whether they were being aware of this status whether they don't increase actually the benchmark I think we would have real life examples of such countries maybe Eastern Europe is one of those where some jurisdictions are perfectly aware that the subsidiaries located there might be treated in the way you describe and then ring fencing is a natural reaction so maybe a comment on this would be welcome many thanks okay please a lot of questions thanks a lot maybe working in reverse order so I would be interested in your real life example so we talked to Latin American supervisors and they are aware of each other so they know something happens in this country it's shifted into my country I react so there's this notion of interdependence it's clearly there and I think there were two questions on I mean related on kind of overlapping cooperation so basically our data set is dynamic we are updating over here so it's a better but basically the banking union would be a one because if you just look at the existence so basically you want same you jump from 0 to 1 so if cooperation agreements evolve and come better, so you wouldn't Yes, there was some comments on the type of agreements. So we have some limited information. I think we can do more work on this. So the previous paper, we split it up. And we found that each individually significant, but we couldn't find significant differences in the effectiveness. But yeah, so maybe we should move on. So basically, Giovanni on the consolidated solution, I think it's probably just a language problem. So I didn't talk about consolidated solution. I meant the consolidated banks in terms of accounting. So I'm not looking at any of the subsidiaries. So I'm just looking at the total group, the risk of the group. And I consolidated parent and subsidiaries. This was the statement. And there we found it is effective. So it does work. Except so the overall sample, except when we split up and we look at the real big cross-border banks. So Harry had a question on kind of the indigeneity of cooperation, right? So kind of employment. So it needs manpower to kind of implement these corporations. So I agree. So one of the concerns is that cooperation is endogenous. That's why we focus on this paper on third country effects, right? So it's driven by third countries. So it's not driven by Argentinians, but by third country signing agreements with the UK. So basically then these endogeneity concerns, I think they're less, you can still find some concerns, but I think they're less first order. Yeah, David, thanks so much for the comments. I think it was a very nice set of comments that we can take on board. So data collection, because the second paper we were kind of a bit brief. And in this paper, I think it's good to know that people want to see more, because it was like a multi-year effort to collect this data. But basically, so we have like a sequence of sources. And we start from the relevant authorities, the national authorities. And we look for information there. And it's all imperfect, but what helps us is that we have several countries, right? So if it's at least about other agreements of one country as kind of patchy information, we can still hope to get it from the other country. So in many cases, this helps us that we actually can get these agreements from different sides. Yes, I agree. And you mentioned a very important point on cooperation and bank failures, right? So that's something we also thought about. So it would be really nice. So we look kind of at ex-ante risk, right? So it's like the Z-square of banks. But it would be really nice also to show that this kind of also leads to less bank failures. But then we thought, yeah, we don't have too many kind of cases where we observe failures. So we thought about, in the end, we're not too confident to run regressions on this. So it was really on our mind. But the only thing we did is that, basically within the context, again, in the first paper, so we said, OK, so this risk effect on the Z-square, does it go down in a crisis? Or is the effect we estimate in normal times in terms of risk reduction, is it still present in a crisis? And the answer is yes. But it's not about failure, it's just about balance sheet. Thanks so much for your comments and to everybody else.


The study shows that donors with a history of both infection and vaccination have more airway mucosal SARS-CoV-2 antibodies and memory B cells than those only vaccinated, and that infection induces populations of airway spike-specific memory CD4 plus and CD8 plus T cells that are not expanded by vaccination alone. Additionally, the study found that airway mucosal T cells induced by infection have a distinct hierarchy of antigen specificity compared to the periphery, and that spike-specific T cells persist in the lung mucosa for 7 months after the last immunizing event. Overall, the study suggests that peripheral vaccination alone does not induce durable lung mucosal immunity against SARS-CoV-2, supporting an argument for the need for vaccines targeting the airways. This article was authored by Elena Mitzi, Mariana O'Dyneis, Asus Rayner, and others.