So please, the same question, how do you consider your role in the government? My official role is that of a digital minister. In Taiwan, there is no digital ministry. So because of that, I work with all the different ministries, what we call digital transformation. Digital transformation, in a sense, is doing exactly what the public service is doing, but doing it with the people instead of for the people. Because in the previous era, before the internet, before the social media, it is very difficult to listen to millions of people. It's much easier to speak to millions of people using radio and television. But now, for the first time using the internet, we can co-create and listen to millions of people. And actually, if we don't do that in the public service, people in the civil society do that anyway. And so the people will feel much closer to each other and much more distance with the public sector, right? So the public and the public servants, they used to be of this distance, but now with the digital tools, the people are much closer to each other, and so they feel much more farther away from the public service. But the public service can also use the same digital tools to engage not just with the public, but also among the different ministries so that we form a much better working relationship that responds faster, that listens to more people, and that discuss things in a much wider scale and sharing through transparent things what exactly is the public service doing to engender a better understanding. And so this is the digital transformation that I'm working with all the ministries together. In the government side, it's called Open Government. In the civil society side, it's called Social Innovation. That's the same thing. It's just two sides of the same coin. So you are a fierce supporter of the transparency of information. Yes. How did you impose this culture on the government? So in my original culture, the open-source culture or the open-culture movement, the free-culture movement, transparency is the norm. All the different ideas in the open-source society or in Wikipedia, for example, they are all transparent for everybody to see. And because of this, it gains trust, accountability, and legitimacy. When you look at the government, actually, the parliaments are also working in the same regard. All the parliamentary hearings, parliamentary debates, and all the different commissions, they're not just kept in transcript by Harner and also now being live-strength. And even in the judicial branch, we're now gradually introducing a jury system. And all the courts, all the different proceedings, unless it's on some very confidential or sensitive issues, it's open by default. It's just an administration itself that is not using the same radically transparent ideas, and therefore people feel more distant and people don't actually know how different ministries think about things, which I think is a lost opportunity. If people can know how exactly does the public executive look at each policy issues, they can contribute much more meaningfully. So I basically tell people in the administration, look at the judicial branch, look at the parliamentary end, they have been doing the same things to engender people's trust so we can adopt much of this idea in the administration. To promote exchange with civil society and citizens, you have designed a platform for debates. That's right. Can you explain how it works? Yes. So this platform called the JOIN platform has three functions. First, there is an e-petition function where anyone who amassed about 5,000 signatures and those are done through SMS, it is not tied to the real identity. So anyone who has a mobile phone account can join this petition and they can petition a wide range of things. People petition for redesigning the text file and software or people petition for changing the time zone of Taiwan. So from very practical to very political, anything can be petitioned on this platform. And there is a pro and con conversation happening in real time on this debate platform and we look at the best ideas that are flagged as pro ideas and the best idea that are contra ideas and bring them as well as people who sign the petition into face-to-face conversations twice and once. And so this is the petition part. The second is the regulation part. For all the laws and bills proposed by the administration to the legislation, we announced for 60 days on the same platform for the public to have a debate. So in a sense, this is like people's assembly before the parliament to look at it. People can just propose their ideas and for the parliament to consider it. But we extended not just to the laws and regulations but also for internal policies for things that are not decided by the parliament but actually just by single ministry. Those internal regulations and policies were also announced for 60 days on the same platform. So people who don't have a parliamentarian to speak to them for this kind of regulation issues can nevertheless speak for themselves on the regulation platform. And then finally, as of last month, we announced that thousands, 1,200 of projects maintained by each ministry, they have their own KPIs, they have procurements, they maybe have some spending budgets and so on. They are all tracked within the ministry itself before but now we open this kind of auditing to everybody so they can renew it every three months or every month and everybody sees exactly is this like nine year or eight year project where it's going, how much spending it's done, how much KPIs it achieved and so previously it is only the purview of the auditing agencies to look at but now it's for everybody to look at and anyway can look at one part in the budget and comment on the part that they feel that relevant to them and the public servant will respond immediately without going through the parliament or the ministry immediately. So you took a... What did you do? You have taken a transversal position, transversal action, it means you have maybe shaken the administrative bureaucracy. Government, it's different ministries plays a game on this digital revolution. So I think one of the main things that we brought is the so-called participation officer network or PO network. Every ministry may to assign a team usually maybe two or five or six people and they're engaging the public in general whereas before every ministry only have offices for media like this traditional journalism or with the offices that talk about the MPs, the parliamentary offices but now they also have offices that talks to the general public or the civil society. So the kind of new designs such as the open spending the KPI that I just talked about this gets cleared by all the different participation offices. It is actually a collective decision by a PO network. So we did not impose it to the ministry as much as we proposed it as a good idea a year ago and the POs tell us maybe the administration itself should try the administration managed projects first. So we tried a small pilot projects and for a year they see that it really increased the quality of discussion and also reduces the time burden of the public servants because they don't have to answer for the one by one inquiries anymore they can just answer once public and it could be found by search engines. And so after a year of pilot they finally feel comfortable enough to introduce this to the ministry itself so actually we have the champions that is the participation offices within each ministry so that this kind of new design can be cleared and approved by all the ministries. How does civil society welcome your action? Well, initially they think that it is of course an extra way for people to petition, for people to have a meaningful conversation. At the beginning only the ministries issues that pertains to one single ministry get a meaningful response. And the civil society does this and see that all the cross ministry issues they only get an explanation they don't get a response that's because no ministry would want to cross the line to talk about other ministries per view and so any ministry who stick their necks out so to speak have to absorb all the risk if it's outside of their per view so for the first two years or so of the e-petition platform we see single ministry issue resolved with no explanation, no solutions. So that is also the dual purpose of participation officer. It's not just talking to the state of the civil society but also making it clear what is being stuck in a cross ministry communication and to make sure because we have a regulation that if ministry A think this is ministry B's business they're just supporting B think it's C's business B is just supporting and C think it's A's business that's just supporting it's everybody's business. In the south of Taiwan they petition for a helicopter to be stationed there as ambulance because their distance to a large hospital is too long so the ambulance helicopter is ministry of interior but they think it's maybe ministry of health and welfare business and the welfare people think maybe it's transportation business because all they need is a faster road and they think maybe it's ministry of defense business and so on but all the different ministries go to Hengchun and we have succeeded in having a cross ministry team about 30 people to talk about this from all the different angles and with local stakeholders and finally we converge on setting a larger hospital there as the final solution so basically the PO network also steps as an internal liaison with the different cross ministries and after a few cases like that the civil society learns that it is now possible to talk about cross ministry issues. Now I would admit that again we are not as efficient to deal with cross ministry issues as single ministries once necessarily but we are improving on that. The question about democracy the democratic model is already an example for Asia do you think it could be improved on power? Yes, so I think one of the great thing about talent democracy is that we are the first generation that can actually use it people who are older than me still remember the martial law where there is no democracy to speak of there is no freedom of speech freedom of assembly, freedom of the press but now people younger than me they don't remember the martial law anymore so we are kind of the first generation that have access to personal computer internet and democracy that also means that we don't have some legacy to respect, to honour people can always invent new democratic ideas so it's not like 200 years of representative democracy it's 20 years of everything so people can experiment with participatory budgets they can experiment with referendums they can experiment with all those different participative ideas without having the package of 200 years of representative democracy and so every year we see new democratic inventions being introduced and rapidly adopted by especially local governments and us in the central government take the part of the experiment that worked really well and amplified to a national scale a question about your background yes so you left school at 12 well 14 but yes to devote yourself to programming it's a very non-typical course in the society that puts a lot of pressure on educational children so can you just comment about your course well I'm of course an autodidact you said the question as if it's not very typical but in Taiwan now up to 10% of students can be self-educated Taiwan has Asia's leading law for not just homeschooling but experimental schools of all the different clients so up to 10% of all the student population can enter up to college level a way that is alternative school to the typical school system and next year we're rolling out a new curriculum for K-12 education that takes the best part of the experiment schools and merge it into the actual curriculum of all the different basic education so things like curiosity or autonomous initiative and communication instead of doctrine based education achieving common good instead of for one particular skill all these things sprung out of alternative education but now we're merging it back into the K-12 curriculum I was part of the curriculum committee and so I think the experiment for alternative education in Taiwan is a very inspiring example to show that not all the experiments succeed of course but the part that actually results in better education are being considered and merged back into the curriculum so that if in Taiwan now someone says every time homeschool since when I was 14 it will not raise the eyebrow because it's pretty typical that's your love how many lives just a question can you tell us about your entrepreneurial career on your healthcare background okay of course so I started a so I co-founded an internet company called the Inforion Company it was a one of the highlights of Taiwan's dot com bubble and it starts as just a printing press I was not involved back then it was reformed into a software company I was entered as one of the three main co-founders and we did Taiwan's first ebay like auction website it's called Hupit and we did one of Taiwan's first social media website and I wrote one of the first meta search that is to say search across all the search engines but also your files on your disk and so on and so it was pretty successful we won some awards but then I got interested in this open source movement so I sold my shares in the company but later on they got invested by Intel and become very high profile and so I guess it is part of the dot com cycle that everybody put a lot of help in such kind of internet e-commerce and things like that of course the dot com also went bust and the company has voted but I think people still remember it with some fondness because it was one of the first purely companies for Taiwan's dot com era the other being the yam company and so on open find and so on can you tell us about the gov the movement on the rolling place in the Taiwanese society yes the gov zero movement started by a few hackers they call themselves the hacker 15 that was in late 2012 and they started in a hackathon because at that time there was an advertisement by the administration that talks about the economic boosting plan that is the 4 or 80 year plan that is very complicated and the advertisement is literally people who are actors acting as citizens look at all the budget and items and so on and feeling very confused and their voice over says the economic boosting plan is very complicated it's very difficult to explain so we're not explaining let's just trust the government and start doing it of course it's taken as an insult for people's intelligence and so it's one of the first youtube advertisement the administration posted back in 2012 and so it got flagged as spam very quickly and taken out of youtube but instead of just protesting I think the hacker 15 people the original 4 hackers they thought that maybe the problem of people not understanding the budget or the plan is not the people's problem but actually the budget not being visualized in a way that could very easily exist by people maybe it's not inclusive enough so they wrote the visualization platform the budget.g0b.tw website to visualize the national budget so people can track individual items managed by different ministries which by the way is the system we installed last month allies so the GOV0 one of the first project now become a central government project right but the GOV0 idea is always like this is what we call forking the government taking the existing data and the plans by the government but re-presenting it in a way that people can understand, can relate to and can interact with and all the different websites in Taiwan that ends in GOV.twr government websites so the same website that changes the O to a 0 gets you into the shadow government you don't have to search for it you just change one letter in the URL and so once the shadow government has proven as really working better as an alternative because we relinquish most of our copyright so on the next procurement cycle the government can just merge back the civil society contributions and they become official government websites it's happening for the Taipei participation budget and the budget visualization has been adopted by seven different cities and as well as many other projects such as the environmental air quality visualization or the visualization of the labor law calculator and things like that there's many individual subjects that are tackled by the civil society and then merge back to the government you still play a key role in the government in the GOV 0 yes so every Wednesday we have a mini one of the GOV 0 projects called vTaiwan and it's happening in the social innovation lab and I take care of the place where it happens what happens in this social innovation lab and you are meeting some founders of Starter yeah I meet with anyone who has any idea about social innovation defined as innovation that has a positive impact to the whole society not just the founder right so anyone who I have something idea for the public good I have an office hour from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. so anyone can talk to me and there's a booking system as well and it's not just in Taipei in the social innovation lab every other Tuesday I also tour around Taiwan to talk with the local social innovators but using video conferencing connect to 12 different ministries in the social innovation lab Taipei so that people can feel they're in the same room even though they're in different corners in Taiwan so through this way we let the central government be mobile in the sense that they could see actually how their policies being implemented in the real role in the indigenous areas and for the people there to really meet the central government people as people instead of like abstract like emails and whatever right so in this way we increase the empathy of people and also amplify any local idea that could work on a national or regional level we amplify it very quickly to the central government people the question about your background during the sunflower movement you have created some tools to promote the release of speech my question is has this moment played a crucial role in your sunflower movement well I wouldn't say I created it because it is just a tool that the GovZero movement has been always using for two years then right but it's just GovZero was a relatively low-profile bunch of people but now with the sunflower movement everybody half a million people on the street get to have access to the same collaborative tools that GovZero movement is using the hack folder which is a share bookmark hackpad which is the share typing of what's going on the live streaming platform logistics and everything so these were already the tools that we've been using for two years by that time it's just a sunflower movement to amplify it so that people become generally aware of it and how these tools can make people converge on common values instead of like many other occupies where they just diverge or whatever hmm what message did prime minister reach for a gift to the society by working with you well the premier asked me to recruit a digital minister they didn't really recruit me I was kind of the liaison to talk to the community it's just people who I talked to all have other things to do and finally I have to try this so I think one of the key messages the premier is sending out by recruiting someone from the civil society is by saying the government is working with the people now it's not working for the people only right so the down authoritarian government which is very popular the last century kind of poses the government as a like all knowing role where the civil society needs the government to settle disputes to organize whatever but now with the social media internet tools everybody knows that anyone who has a hashtag can organize them on people and settle on common values they don't need government anymore so the government role I think today is that providing an accountable a transparent way for people to participate and so to let people find common values and find solution that work for everybody without the government coming up with all those ideas and so this values of creation was always the core idea of the open source and the open government movement and so the premier by setting one minister dedicated for open government and social innovation I think is sending a message that the cabinet is willing to work with the public service to learn the art of co-creating and working with people rather than just for the people how were you welcomed into the government how? like with applause with fireworks so I had a public one month of Q&A which is in September 2016 before I actually got into office which is the first of October and during this period it's very interesting because I don't give exclusive interviews all the media and in fact everybody need to ask me on this platform where I only answer publicly and so this very interestingly provides a kind of crowdsourcing of people's idea about my mandate so I can take this consensus and talk to the premier saying okay so I have three conditions going in first I don't look at any top secret or national secret confidential information but in exchange all the information that I look I say it's worthy to be publicized and to be released to the public so it's radical transparency the second thing is that I work in an anarchistic way or a Dallas way which is I guess less controversial but in any case it's the same thing in that I don't pick command nor will I command my fellow ministers or anyone in the public service so people don't see me as superior in the facilitative role they come to me if they want to engage the public but if they don't come to me I don't force them to and so this is I think the voluntary basis is also very important and the third thing is that I get to work anywhere I don't have to work in this office so that means that I get to practice this mobile office and also helps digitizing the whole government apparatus so that they find it's easier to connect with me online than actually handing me a piece of paper and it would become very difficult to introduce digital work spaces but because I say I can work anywhere and also my colleagues can also work anywhere but we're able to engage with like 35 interns over Taiwan, crowdsourced efforts that works to the benefit of everyone instead of just people who happen to live around Taipei so through this innovative way of working with people I think I was welcomed not by the merit of me being an issue in good commands or you know being a good superior or things like that but in a purely facilitative role that doesn't hurt anyone's business but comes to me if they think that I can help resolve some issues so in a very dousy way I think I was welcomed in a very kind of calm and peaceful fashion What do you think about Zhong Tu? Zhong Tu You said when there are obstacles that there are opportunities in addition can you elaborate Yes of course so for example last May we have a designer who using the e-petition platform that says our income tax filing software is explosively difficult to use now that is a conflict it's not even an actionable idea it is just a sentiment basically tax filing max sucks and it's a thought of what we call negative energy in the e-petition forum but all of this changed after 48 hours when our participation office and network huddled among ourselves in a Minister of Finance P.L. Yang Xinhe replied publicly saying all the people who complain about the tax filing software are cordially invited to attend our co-creation workshop this week in May this Friday and then anyone who has any ally we promise to incorporate your online opinion in our redesign of the tax filing software and just by saying that overnight the sentiment change 80% of people become very positive and constructive and only less than 20% of people are still trolling or still venting their negative emotions and so by basically inviting people who complain into the kitchen to cook together we were able to flip the social expectation of the government have to know everything but instead of bringing in the expertise from the civil society and the private sector into the co-creation process so now this year we actually have a very good experience for Mike and Linux and tablet users to file taxes so I think all the opportunities arise because we recognize people who complain people who raise the conflict there is a potential that they complain because they know more than the government and just by inviting people publicly from the civil society instead of have the government have to keep explaining but not solving problems Pakistan just passed law to guarantee transgender rights I think it was two days ago do you see yourself to inspire Taiwanese society in this direction this year? Taiwan I think is one of the places where the LGBTQ right is the highest in Asia at least and it's not just the Supreme Court recognized marriage equality but actually we have a very progressive guideline called the gender equality guidelines that informs all the different aspects so that when every regulation and every law instead of being separately evaluated all the ministries in charge of those regulation laws to file a gender impact assessment and so I think this is very enlightened and actually made it possible for a lot of different ideas about gender or transgender and so on to be mainstream in a way to be just one of the factors to consider and not something that to make a fuss of this is the idea of what we call intersectionality in the sense that everybody have some part of them that are in minority but other parts are in the majority and it's a part that our own experience when we are in the minority to feel that it is necessary to consider people of different predictions and that's when we're back to the place where we are in the majority we can still consider with much more empathy and social responsibility in mind and so this intersectional way of going forward I think is one of the strengths in Taiwan because we have a plurality of ethnicities, languages, cultures and things like that and we have to work out a way to get it forward and just I think last week there's also another lobbying past the National Languages Act so now instead of one official language Taiwan now has 16 or 20 or more than 2 dozen national languages in any in any counties where there's more than majority speaking the Taiwanese Hakka or one of the indigenous languages like Banzai and so on that become official language where the official documents can be written in that language of course we will need a lot of artificial intelligence help to do automatic translation but it shows that we're really going where the intersectional plural world view is defining the democracy values in Taiwan military you have an interest in the field of LGBT rights law so what will this vote for us what can we say about this law well we can't say much about the legislation there's many people who want to add on extra clauses to the Supreme Court ruling the Supreme Court ruling basically says the gender equality especially around marriage need to be rectified by the legislation within two years so it's one year and a few months in the future if we don't rectify it in the legislation then automatically people with all the genders automatically enjoy the same right as the heterogeneous couples in a marriage at the moment there are many people who propose many versions of that things but because it is charged by the Supreme Court through the legislation so at the end it will be for the legislators to debate and personally I think there's a lot more in common for people who are valuing marriage the sacredness of marriage they don't want divorce and things like that and people who are for marriage equality than them to me because I don't really care for marriage I don't really want to be married I think there's much more room for those very conservative and very progressive people those cherished marriage to achieve some consensus than me achieving any consensus with them but I'm committed to maintain of course this public dialogue space and the ephetician space so that people who have any part that they want to amend or change or part of the referendum and so on they can do it in a fair and accountable fashion but personally I don't have a stake in the marriage equality law last question we are not trans gender but post gender post gender can I tell you what does it mean so to be post gender is basically said that I'm not really being defined by any gender role or any performance and I think I value people based on their values non-managed monetary value their core values that they live by and so I wrote a tweet about it many years ago I said that I would like to know you by your values and not by your types your roles or your classes and that means basically that I cherish relationships built by people valuing important things and other people valuing different important things but we find common values that can unite these things together but I think gender or class or type or role it's not part of this it may inform people's different perception about the world and that is very important but when we talk about the values themselves it really shouldn't be about particular categories of people but about how those values can be applied universally if there is a value that cannot be applied universally and can only apply to one gender or one race then I think it's not universal enough and that's my basic idea sorry what do you think are the roles that are most effective in terms of gender or gender? I don't think it's interesting I think that if you think your world is more efficient in the government or outside the government oh okay yes I think my role is best if I am seen as being equally in distance with the public service, with the private sector and with the civil society because most structural problems that we see in today's world be from climate change to all the different ecological issues and things like that there are so called wicked problems meaning that they are structural and they cannot be solved by one actor acting alone it must be solved by all the different stakeholders doing their commitments and then finally doing the action together so that we can solve the coordination problem with just one single actor absorbing all the risk that's never going to work it only works if people commit just like crowdfunding, they commit to some and some amount but only if everybody commits does this project enter fruition so if I am seen as being biased toward one party or one sector then I cannot be of this facilitative role to get the society to commit on change it is only if I am equally distant to all the different sectors on different parties and different stakeholders can I find this neutral ground for people to commit on action and once they get a commitment publicly they have to act and once they act we solve the coordination problem together in the last week exactly it's good because in the last week you said something, I will just go to your side since you are interested you said internet web is closed in China but you told me that you are able to get to recover some data from China through the dark web there is the dark web and there is also things like github and also things like the blockchain that is currently blocked by China because if PRC blocks them it hampers their scientific progress so it means you have some very precise and very good information about what is going on in China about constraints about everything but you have comments from people there so you have very good information from I would say that most of the people who work in the GovZero movement they have basic ideas about cyber security and about how to use these kind of cryptographic tools and there are people who work in Hong Kong who work in the various different cities in the PRC they are very willing to engage the GovZero network and to get their messages across and they don't always use the dark net that is kind of the last resort sometimes they just use the public github sometimes using the public blockchain In fact, to Hong Kong myself we would like to do a story about what is going on that is happening I think there is a society that is already shrinking if I send an email maybe a couple of weeks or months can you hand me to maybe to meet some hackers if you go to the GovZero network there is a website called join.g0v join.g0v join.g0v if you enter your email you will get an invitation to the Slack channel of all the GovZero people and there you can see plenty of Hong Kong people announcing their ideas join.g0v GovZero yeah but you are free to send me emails because I want to do something in favor of democracy I am not sure about what is happening there but because in the Samplower days our technologies they are all public so during the umbrella movement they also use many of our technologies so there is a close relationship between the Hong Kong activists and the Taiwan civil civic activists so I am going to walk outside do you have some pictures? do you have to talk about it? you have to talk about it how long do you like to talk about it? maybe one hour maybe one hour keep rolling so do you know what do you do when you grow up? do you read books? no, most of the time I just accept interviews I feel like there is another interview I am going to talk about something else I don't believe you are the last one if you want to try the front one there are four interviews there are four interviews this morning it was Bloomberg it was Ursula that's right this is the best interview so I can have a short walk yes, I can have a short walk


Torment of the mind is not the will of God for your life. You may be battling anxiety, intrusive thoughts, or other forms of mental torment. So let's believe together right now as you focus on Jesus, that your mind will be calm to a peaceful still. May you sense his presence as we pray, Father in the name of Jesus. I lift that one to you now who desires peace of mind. And I pray that as they focus on you, precious Lord, that they would experience the comfort of your presence. Calm their mind now. We thank you for it. In Jesus' name we pray, and I want you to say it because you believe it, say, Amen.


Financial stability is a term that has been popping up a lot in recent months. Bank failures in the US and Switzerland have people asking how stable our financial system is, while high inflation and interest rate hikes continue to affect people, banks and companies. We've just released our latest financial stability review, which twice a year looks at just that. Today, we'll talk about whether our financial system is stable, and we'll take a closer look at the risks we see for two big areas, banks and property markets. You're listening to the ECB Podcast, bringing you insights into the world of economics and central banking. My name is Katie Ranger. I'm joined today by John Fell, who works in our financial stability department here at the ECB, and is actually a regular guest here on the podcast. Nice to see you again, John. Thanks, Katie. It's great to be back. Now, I say it almost every time, John, but it's only been six months since we last spoke, and once again, quite a bit has happened. Some good, some not so good. On the one hand, energy prices have come down, and the supply chain disruptions that we saw across the world are easing. The economy is continuing to recover from the pandemic, and companies are making good profit, so that's all very positive. But on the other hand, inflation is still high, and rising interest rates are weighing on people's debt burdens. Now, more recently, huge shocks in the US and the Swiss banking sectors caught everybody off guard, I think it's fair to say, and this has shifted more focus onto the resilience of banks in this new environment. Now, John, there is really a lot to unpack in this edition of the report, but I want to talk specifics with you. Can you tell us one positive thing that you've seen over the past six months, and perhaps two things that you're worried about going forward? Sure. I'm glad you asked for a positive, as we do aim for balance in our assessments, and this edition is by no means all doom and gloom. At a moment when sentiment towards the banking sector, as you mentioned, basically across all advanced economies turned decisively negative, I think the silver lining has to be the resilience of euro area banks. If you just look at bank stock prices, markets have clearly discriminated in favor of euro area banks, and that's something we haven't seen in the past. And it's in large part thanks to all the effort that went into strengthening banks' capital and also their liquidity offers. But it's not only that. Banks' asset quality has improved to a point where non-performing loans, but here I mean non-performing non-racials, really couldn't get much lower. And many banks have reported strong profits for the first quarter of the year. So we still think the main sources of risk reside outside the banking system. Okay. So what are the things that are worrying you then? Okay. So on the negative side, and you asked for two. So first, I mean, after the exceptionally strong rebound in financial markets at the start of the year, I think we can say that some of the old concerns have returned. So asset valuations are stretched again, and as central banks have been pulling back from asset purchases, that's basically meant the two-way risk has returned while market liquidity is eroding. And that's making markets, especially bond markets, vulnerable to adverse dynamics or episodes of intense volatility. And second, even though there are signs of vulnerabilities in the non-bank sector are easing, we see investment funds adopting more cautious strategies, for example. We still have concerns that some of them may not be holding sufficient amount of liquid securities to cope with stress. By liquid securities, I mean assets that could be easily sold, if necessary, and quickly without moving prices. We know that investors are often spooked by unusually large asset price declines. And in situations like that, some can even panic and look for their money back. Holding liquid assets allows funds to absorb shocks like that are, if they're using derivatives, to meet margin calls. But if they don't have sufficient amount of liquid assets available, they might find themselves in a situation where they're forced into selling less liquid assets in a hurry, and of course at low prices. And that could amplify market stresses even further. So these two negatives have the potential to reinforce one another. Okay, so we're going to be keeping an eye on markets and non-banks. And I'm hearing that liquidity is really the word of the moment there. Let's zoom in now on one area that you've already mentioned and where we've seen a lot happening since we last spoke, and that's banks. Now we had three US banks failing in the space of just a few weeks. And during that time, Global Bank Credit Suisse was also taken over by UBS in Switzerland. For some, it no doubt brought back memories of the fear and the turmoil of 2008. John, can you talk us through how this episode has affected banks here in the Euro area? You won't find anything in the last issue of our episode. So that's a November issue, suggesting that the epicentre of financial stability was lurking in the banks. And if you were to leave through the pages of the financial stability report that the Fed published last November, there are a few hints there either. So it's really been a complete surprise. It has been a total surprise. But the effects on Euro area banks were very limited. We did see large drops in bank stock and bond prices, especially on so-called AT1 instruments, and also credit defaults spreads widened. But there were no serious stresses of the kind that we saw in 2008. And tensions eased very quickly. So why was that? Well, I mean, banking crisis can spread through at least three channels. And so let me just mention those channels, interconnection between banks, common exposures to the same risks, are simply swings in confidence or sentiment. So if we think about the first channel, all of the banks that failed in the U.S. were regional banks. So they were not international banks, but regional banks. And also by definition, interconnection with Euro area banks was, there was somebody who was very, very limited. As for common exposures, the idiosyncratic business model of Silicon Valley Bank is often pointed out as setting it apart. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal where there was a quote, for startups, all roads lead to Silicon Valley Bank. And that was true. It took deposits from startups, it extended loans to them, and it even invested in them. And that business model was working fine as long as the tech sector was booming, as it did during the pandemic. Deposits were coming in, and the funds were sent back out to work in the tech sector. The music stopped, though, when the loan demand of tech firms weakened, and the deposits were continuing to flow in. So the bank needed to earn an income to pay those deposit depositors, many of whom had large accounts, well in excess of the $250,000 deposit insurance threshold. So that's basically how much the government, 250K is how much the government would pay back immediately in the case of a bank, bank failure. And so to pay the depositors, it chose to do that by investing in U.S. treasuries. Now, essentially what the bank was doing was taking two massive bets. The first was betting that interest rates wouldn't rise, and the second was that their clients wouldn't withdraw their deposits. Of course, as we saw, neither of those bets paid off. In fact, deposits left because interest rates rose, but depositors fleeing on a scale and at a speed never seen before. Now, there are no systemically important banks in the Euro area with business models like that. And so up to a point, the common exposure channel has not really been relevant in the Euro area either. Now, I say up to a point because it's not uncommon for banks to invest in government securities, but not on the scale that Silicon Valley bank did. So, I mean, it's positive for Euro area banks, but it's not that we didn't feel it at all in the Euro area, right? Right. There was substantial repricing of Euro area bank stocks, bond prices also. Arguably, the confidence channel was relevant here with the investors in bank securities asking what I would say, describe as what if question. So, the pricing of complex securities like 81s is based on assumptions and probabilities. Now, if those assumptions are questioned or if those probabilities change, that can be a recipe for repricing and also volatility. Now, after Silicon Valley bank was closed by the FDIC, investors in Euro area banks were asking how would the value of senior bonds be affected if all depositors, so that's both insured and uninsured, were made whole in a resolution. Now, as that is not foreseen in the European resolution framework, it would actually make them worse off. Likewise, after Credit Suisse was taken over by UBS, markets were surprised by the full write down of 81 bonds. Now, this time we, and here I mean the ECB together with the EBA and the single resolution board came out rapidly with the communication which clarified that this is not foreseen in the EU framework. And from the feedback that we've heard from market participants, that helped to ease the tensions. Okay, so that's good news. But is there anything in the turmoil that could be seen as a warning flag for us here in the Euro area or even a lesson to learn? So, the turmoil, I mean it's really raised many issues across the effectiveness of market discipline, regulation, supervision, resolution frameworks. The list is too long to go through everything. But on the positive side and with all the shocks that banks have had to contend with since the outbreak of COVID-19 and since we've been doing these podcasts, followed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And now this, I think we have evidence that Basel III has genuinely helped in safeguarding financial stability. Okay, so Basel III, they're the rules that govern things like capital for banks, capital requirements. Exactly. And then we've also learned that bank resolution choices made in one jurisdiction can have spillovers to other jurisdictions. So the what-if questions that I mentioned, that's new. But if I was to pick out one lesson, the speed and scale of bank runs witnessed in the US really stands out as a warning flag. Now there was a study published very recently by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis that compared the three recent runs on US regional banks with earlier episodes. So for example, in the case of Washington Mutual Bank, that was the largest US bank failure in September 2008, 10% of deposits were lost over 16 days before it failed. Now fast forward 15 years and Silicon Valley Bank lost 25% of its deposits in a single day. And had it not been closed, it could have lost a further 62% the next business day. It was incredible. We haven't seen anything like that before. But the case was special as many of the depositors knew one another personally, and that appears to have speeded up the run. But if you look at also at first Republic, I mean that's the latest recent failure in the US, 57% of its deposits were lost in about 10 days. So in comparison with Washington Mutual, you could say that the intensity was about five times greater. So I mean you say that the speed and the scale of these bank runs really stood out, but what exactly contributed to it? What was behind it? Well the factors that are often cited as drivers of the speed and scale of bank runs include the share of insured deposits in the total, insured depositors won't run, electronic banking and the influence of social media in spreading information. That was something quite new I'd say here compared to 2008. It was and I think care is going to be needed in the final diagnosis of the role of each of those factors and the role that they played in what we saw. Now it certainly looks like social media in combination with electronic banking speeded up the runs. But then look at the funding of Silicon Valley Bank, 6% of the depositors were insured. So 94% were not and their incentives to run were huge. If you look at Washington Mutual, more than 74% of deposits were insured and that might explain why we saw lower intensity in that run. Now if it does turn out to be the case the flip side of all of the benefits that we've been enjoying of electronic banking is the potential for faster runs then that could well have implications for the amounts of liquid assets that banks will need to hold to avoid situations where liquidity stresses are transformed into solvency crisis and so quickly the crisis managers don't even have a chance to respond. Okay so this kind of leads on to another important topic in the financial stability review and it's something we've talked about before John and that's bank profitability. Now a lot of factors go into how profitable a bank is and if we just think about where we stand right now after years of cheap money it's got more expensive for banks to get funding because we're raising interest rates here at the ECB to fight inflation. Now previously on the podcast on we've talked about how banks profitability has been low and that's something that we've been concerned about. How do things look now for banks in this new environment? So I mean as interest rates have been rising banks are having to pay more for their funding as you said and that's particularly true for market funding and just to give an idea the average rate that banks were paying on senior unsecured bonds at the end of 2021 so 18 months ago or so it wasn't much more than 0%. Now they're paying closer to 4% that's a big change but the contribution of bond funding to the total is only about 15% so banks only get about 15% of their funding on average from the bond markets far more important are deposits and they account for about they account for about 70% of banking sector funding. That's a big amount much more than I expected. It ensures stable funding for the banks and I mean also as interest rates have risen banks were able to pass through higher interest rate costs actually far more rapidly to their loans than to their deposits. Now we've seen it in the in the first quarter financial results of the banks this has given a boost to their profitability so that's yeah the higher interest rates so far have boosted the profitability but we don't expect that to last for too long as we again the ECB that is retreat from asset purchases and as TLGRO funding is repaid that's going to induce more competition among the banks for funds so we can expect further pass through the deposits over time and that's going to erode that boost that we've seen profitability. Okay I want to revisit a different topic now that we spoke about in our last episode back in November John and that's real estate markets. Now back then we discussed that although house prices were still rising there was a possibility of things being at shall we say a turning point after a very long boom cycle. What exactly have we seen in the last six months how things developed since then? So well first of all if I look at housing markets first they've continued to show signs of cooling down now that was to be expected as affordability obviously worsens as interest rates increase. So by cooling down you mean that prices aren't rising as fast as they were? Or even that in some cases declining but the downturn has been orderly so I mean nominal prices are below their peaks in some countries but so far if you compare year on year house prices so comparing how they are today relative to a year ago they're still actually positive during the final quarter last year. Now that said disorderly adjustment can't be ruled out now because we haven't seen the full pass through. Higher interest rates are going to raise mortgage borrowing costs and that's a process that is obviously taking place more rapidly in countries where people have variable rate mortgages but that's the prevalent way of borrowing to buy a house. Now some indications of this I think were apparent in the sharp reduction of mortgage demand that was revealed in our latest bank lending survey and we also saw in that survey the simultaneous tightening of credit standards by banks for mortgage lending and that suggests uneasiness let's say among banks to increase their housing market exposures.  Yes. And how about the commercial real estate front? So I mean on commercial real estate the downturn is it's more firmly entrenched the first quarter data that we've seen it's reported in our review which shows valuations and transactions are both contracting and they're contracting at double digit rates. Now it looks like what's happening is demand has declined but we think that supply has reduced as well so that liquidity in the commercial property market has been eroded too so you might ask why might that be? Well the way I think about it is that just like the denial stage of the five stages of grief it can take time for valuations to reflect the true market reality and so unwillingness to sell at low prices might explain why we see low transactions now but ultimately the future market dynamics are going to depend on the cash flows the rents basically that are generated by those properties and they are vulnerable to things like for example adverse economic surprises or interest rate surprises. Well I don't think I've ever heard the five stages of grief being used for real estate markets but that's super interesting thank you so much John as always this has been a really insightful conversation and I hope that the next few months will bring some calm on the financial stability front. Now before we wrap up we ask all our guests on the podcast for a hot tip linked to the topic that we've been discussing today so broadly speaking financial stability. John your hot tips are always very interesting and useful very practical so what have you got for us today? So since we spent a bit of time today discussing bank runs I have two movie recommendations for those listeners who would like to learn more about bank runs how they can happen how damaging they can be so the recommendations are Mary Poppins it was a 1960 movie starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke and the other is it's a wonderful life that was a 1946 movie starring James Stewart and Donna Reed. Now in Mary Poppins the trouble starts when a boy is overheard shouting give me my money back and he's shouting at the bank manager and misunderstanding what is going on one woman says to another there's something wrong the bank won't give someone their money and so you can imagine what happens next and it's a wonderful life there is a great scene after the run where James Stewart's character is in a discussion with his uncle the uncle is asking how does something like this ever start now I've I've often wondered whether these movies had provided inspiration for Diamond and Didvick to write their Nobel Prize winning paper in 1983 and that paper showed that runs can happen even when a bank is sound once depositors become nervous that other depositors will run and that they will run before they do a solvent bank can soon become an insolvent one and that was the big insight of that paper. So two really interesting hot tips again there John and they really highlight the the psychology behind it all I think as well which is is the key factor the human factor here this brings us to the end of this episode I want to thank John fell from our financial stability department for joining the conversation today thank you so much John thank you very much now listeners be sure to check out the show notes for more on this topic you've been listening to the ECB podcast with Katie Ranger if you like what you've heard please subscribe and leave us a review until next time thanks for listening


Yn gymhwynt ymlaenwyr, ac mae'r bwysig i'r hyn yn y bwysig yng Nghymru? Felly mae'n gweld hynny'n gweithio. Ac mae'n rhan o'r gweithio'r cyffredinol, felly mae'n gweithio'n gwahanol yn y gweithio'r ysguad. Ac mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n 15,000 ffordd a'r ffordd, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. So rheswm yn gweinio i'r gwaith oed Caerdan – a'n bywm'n detall. Rwy'n gweithio i fawr o'r blaenau. Rae5, o bob ystod y barogaf rhaid, yn fawr yn cyffredinol, gofan y gael amser ac fel cyntaf o'r bach, rhaid i ddweud i ddim yn gŵr ac oed yn gŵr, a'r byw sydd wedi'i gwybod o'r hoffa o dim, felly rhaid i ddim yn cyfodol. Fel wybod i gyd, a'r morhau na wedi meddwl ystyr, I want to keep contributing with goals, assists and positive performances because ultimately that will help the team get where we want to be. With fans there it also gives the chance to just give you a rule. It gives you an extra 10% when fans are there. The fan base here is bigger than anything that I've played with so I just want to show the fans what I can do. Obviously help the team get some more wins and go from there. The fans turn out and then numbers every single time we're there away as well but especially at home you get that real atmosphere and you get that real feeling of it being a big occasion. The pressure is then of course on us to perform and to make sure that we send the fans home happy so we're all excited. Home games are always an occasion and we're looking forward to it. Last week again as you mentioned a lot of great determination to come away with a point encouragement from that and emerging through adversity really. Exactly and I think there's going to be times like that in the season where a point is what we need to take from games to keep on moving forwards. I think that was a big step for us sitting in, getting a point and doing it a hard way. It gives us a lot of confidence as a team to then build on that and hopefully at the weekend go one step further and get a goal or more to win the game. To be fair I hate watching games. I just want to be out there and playing. Obviously I've come with the mindset to do that here to score goals and get assists to help the team so it's good that now I'm back in the squad and I could help do that. Still beating at home in the league this season, what's the confidence like heading into that game? The confidence is good. The place is buzzing. We don't get too down when the results are not going so well. I think the dressing room is good. We've got good characters in there and we take every game as it comes and we'll do the same with this one. We come off the back of two good results. I know it's a goal to score at Newport but I think it's a really tough place to go. The previous week beating Rochdale 2-0 gives us confidence going into the weekend and if we can apply the things that we did at Rochdale and put in the grit that we showed at Newport then I think we'll put ourselves in a good position to get a positive result. The positions that we play you have to have an impact as well. We're there to kind of contribute. We have to be on form and we have to do well for the team.


I know it's not popular to say it, I know people will get mad at me for saying so, but I have to warn you, your sin is destroying you and it's separating you from God. You need to turn from it. Today, the Scripture declares that today is the day of salvation. Repent of your sins. Turn to God and be cleansed. Repent of your sin and wrongdoing. Turn to Jesus and be saved.


Welcome, thank you very much. Excellent, so thank you very much for having me today and being the last session. I would like to make it easy to digest and to move forward because the topic is a really interesting topic, at least for me, I think that for everyone around. But before jumping into the actual content of the session, I would like to present myself and also the company that I'm working on. As you said before, Mario Neto2Code is a relatively small solutions company focused 100% around providing network automation solutions. And within this company, there is the architecture team that I'm part of. And here you also see the screen mark and my kale that they are working together, creating and helping the different teams that are providing new solutions. A holistic view about how the different components can work together. What makes the company different is that we make everything as open source projects. So we try to create the solutions, build the solutions, composing the different pieces that are available. Obviously, we can work with multiple vendor solutions. But if there is a gap, there is always an option to put an open source piece. And everything that we do, we contribute back to the community. And also we create and we sponsor projects by ourselves. Then to try to narrow down the topic because we actually had a network related session before myself, one before. What we are going to talk today here, when I talk about network automation, this is a really open question. You can think about networking in a not really concrete way. Because actually in networking, there are different planes. So if we look at the bottom of the stack, we see the data plane that is where the actual packets are forwarded. So one packet is coming in one port and it's going in another port. This has been pretty static for a long time, but since the ratio of SDN with open flow and other protocols like before, or just directly programming the A6, you can change the behavior of that. We are not focusing on that. On top of that, we also have the control plane. The control plane is where traditionally the network routing protocols work. So they work together, they bring a distributed understanding of the network. And then this representation of this state is pushed into the A6 just to change via tables the behavior of the packets. So it's where the packets are defined is the definition. But the topic for today is in the upper plane, in the management plane, where we as engineers, as an architect, we can define how the control plane, how the data plane is going to look like. So simply set is the way that you connect to the devices traditionally via a command line interface and you change the behavior. And being this set, I think that is good for me to give context about one of the main reasons that I'm here today. As I said at the beginning with the introduction, Marie already mentioned that I have been working in networking for more than 15 years. And for the first seven, eight years, my main focus was about network architecture, network operations. And I had been working mostly as a CLI focus engineer. So I had knowledge of multiple vendors, multiple syntax, and I was able to translate my knowledge into the network behavior. But there was a moment that I understood with the DevOps ideas to change the way that we operate the infrastructure, not only the network, the infrastructure as a whole. And I changed my career. I went to a company where I started as a DevOps network engineer. And I remember perfectly the moment that my mind blow up and I discovered the beautiful open source. It was where I was dividing a problem with an SNP client for a monitoring solution that was open source. So we were trying to understand what was going on. We understood that there was not behaving as expected. And my third reaction, as I was used to, was, okay, we detected the problem, we just called the vendor or the solution, and at some point the solution will be solved. This was my default behavior. But luckily for me, side by side, I had a more smarter guy than me with more experience. And he took the keyboard and went into the PDV session in Python because it was a Python application. And he was able to understand what was going on, was able to fix the issue. So we had a working solution at the moment. And finally, he contributed back to the community, to the AppStain project. You can imagine for myself that was used to interact with the devices, with the operations in a predefined in a common line with really narrow options. This completely break my mind. And this was the reason that I jumped into natural automation as a whole. And the same journey that I did, a lot of people is doing these days. There are a lot of companies that we are working with them that are doing this transition from traditional network operations. They are used to understand how the network should work, but the way to communicate it, the way to enforce that has been really manual way up to date. But this has been changing and open source has a big role here. This is something that we are going to see later that help you to do this transition. You can use Ansible framework to change the configuration management like you are doing for the servers, for the network. This is not new. This has been for a while there. But we are seeing, as working with multiple customers, multiple projects, that there is a big dilemma, a big decision that you have to take. One thing is just focus on the tools and specific project and just move forward with the project. Or try to think on your network automation strategy, the way that you provide solutions to manage your network in a more overall understanding. So you understand the whole picture, not only how a tool solves a specific problem, because maybe it's not solving the whole solution. And this decision is the one that we are going to try to solve today. And the approach of the presentation is as simple as try to share the same prime work mindset that we in the architecture team in network to code and network to code as a whole applies to all the project that we are working on. We try to focus not on the tools, we focus on the different functionalities that compose a network automation solution. And then when you have the solutions, sorry, the functionalities, you can then place the different components that can solve the problem. So we have to start first on the network automation framework. This is not rocket science, but really, really helps for everyone to understand what we are talking about. And we define our framework network automation framework in these seven different components. Remember that we are talking about network automation. So in the bottom layer should be network infrastructure for sure. This network infrastructure, we're going to see there could be different types. But then if we go to the top, we have the user, the user is the one that is going to start and control the whole automation. In the middle, there will be different pieces. The source of truth, telemetry, orchestration, we are going to go one by one. And in the left side, we have the CICD process. We have to not forget that this is network automation, but this is a software development project. So any tooling that we are using for developing any kind of application these days can be applied to this. And we try to keep this in mind always as we work with these projects. So let's try to start one by one. The user interactions really important one because everything starts here. You have multiple options here. And you have to select the one that solve the problem for your user. Maybe there is a user that wants a user interface, a graphical user interface. There are options. Maybe there are other users that they want a programmatic interface, an API. Maybe they want a GraphQL API. Maybe another one. Another one wants a dashboard just to visualize the data. So it's the work of the architect when things about the network automation solution to understand which are the user interfaces that has to be implemented because maybe not all of them should be in the project. Once you have the user interfaces, you have to start focusing on defining how your network should look like. Traditionally, the way that network operations have been working is that the state of the network is the state of the network. There is no reference. The reference, if there is, is in your head. So you remember how the network should look like, or maybe in some diagram in some wall, but nothing more sophisticated. The idea is to achieve the goal of automating your network. You have to properly define what is the intended state, what the network should look like. And we call this the source of truth, where your variables are defined about how your data, how your network is going to be modeled to eventually move into the desired state. How we want the network to behave, how we want the routing protocols to be controlled. All this information should be properly defined in the source of truth. When we have the source of truth, because we are automating a process, you can imagine that there should be an orchestrator, a workflow orchestration in some place. The future, the functionality of the orchestration is nothing else than coordinate the multiple steps of the execution. Maybe there are multiple steps that have to be executed in order to fulfill a solution and has to be in the middle of everything. We are going to see in an example how this fits together. Then we move into what actually is more specific of network automation. Why? The automation engine is the place where we put the different tooling that is going to help us to move the intended state that is a data model, a reference into something that the network infrastructure understands. Because on the network infrastructure, what we have are routers, firewalls for multiple vendors, supporting different interfaces. Maybe one only supports CLI, because it's a legacy device, or SNMP maybe. But we have to actually deal with new interfaces like GNMI, NetConf, or even dealing with cloud network services, you have to interact with custom APIs. Whatever it is, the automation engine is going to take the reference, the model, and translate simply a translation to move from one to something that we can actually activate. Then the network infrastructure is really heterogeneous. We have multiple devices that are physical boxes, virtualized, cloud network services, everything. We should be adaptive to whatever we have and just offer the different interfaces just to be able to get an operational state and to set an operational state. So, first, we can take the configuration and then we have to be able to show, to communicate what's the operational state. And this is what the telemetry and analytics block is going to do. It's going to collect information, enrich the information because information without metadata sometimes is useless. When we collect information from a device, because we know which device we are connecting to, maybe we can enrich this data via the source of truth and maybe a part of the device we can get the different sites, more information that then when we visualize this data in a dashboard, we can enrich and we can classify the data in a more educated way. Finally, all this data, because it's a lot of data, has to be stored. As we are going to see when we talk about the related open source projects, the beautiful that we have here is that we are not reinventing the wheel when it's not needed. Obviously, we have to talk within the interfaces that the network devices have, but for the rest, for transferring the different messages, we are going to use open source projects. To store, we are going to use other open source projects. When I say open source projects, I mean general proposed open source projects. Finally, as I said before, CICD is helping us to deploy a network automation logic that takes care of not breaking production. So the same practices that we apply to the software development lifecycle, we are going to apply to the networking automation. Obviously, taking into account the different specificities of the network devices. And now we are going to try to do an overview. It's not exhaustive at all, but we are going to try to do an overview of what the different projects in the different areas belong to. And this is only taking into account open source projects. We are always using this in a brownfield environments where there are some vendor solutions that we integrate. But here today we only mentioned some relevant open source projects. First, an important piece, the source of truth, where we can define this data. Obviously the data has different particularities, different characteristics, depending if the data has to be changed super often or by a user. It can be stored in different places, like in GIT or maybe in relational databases. Here we have an example of two pretty common source of truth that are complete for data centers infrastructure management, IPAM management, multiple of them, like Netbox and Mautode. There are two on multiple available solutions for source of truth that are tackling different parts of the data information that we have to store. When we define this information in the source of truth, what's coming next? Obviously, someone has to change this. And here we can offer multiple solutions in open source projects. We have chat applications like Mattermost. We can build our CLI applications in Python with click, in Go with Cobra, multiple of them. We also have complete IT services management, like GLTI or ITOP. And to visualize, we have Kibana or Grafana that can help us to get data from the telemetry storage. Then to orchestrate everything, just to name two of them, AWX, RANDEC, are orchestrators that help to play with the different components that are part of this architecture. And there are multiple of them because all any kind of tool that can be used to orchestrate processes can be used in the natural automation ecosystem. And as I said before, what makes natural automation a bit special are the different libraries that we have available to automation engine. The automation engine is using first languages that I have not pictured here. That is, for instance, JINJA to render templates of configurations from the data that we have in the source of truth. And then we have multiple projects like Napalm, NetNiko, PNGMI, Nordnir, Scrappy. Multiple applications that work in different languages to connect to the different interfaces for each network device and change the state. The same device applications or libraries that work to change the state can also be used later in the telemetry part. As I said before, you set the state and you actually get the state. But I added here just to be more specific on the place. But here, also, you have to notice that there is AMSIVOL, there is SELSTAC, just as configuration management. The same way that you configure servers, you can configure network devices. And also Terraform because a part of configuration management, there is also the provisioning of network services if you are running in the cloud. This is also part of these features that we have to fulfill. And the definition of the state is going to come from the source of truth. We have in the telemetry part, obviously, what makes this special is the interface. So how we connect to the devices, because usually a lot of devices cannot install an agent. So you have to do an agent list. Telegraph helps a lot here, hosting multiple libraries to connect to the devices, get information and reach from a source of truth and finally consolidate into a 10-city database like Prometheus or others. We also have to use Kafka because in some places we have a lot of data to transfer and to distribute to multiple receivers. But there are also specific tools for network automation, as for instance, SUGQ that helps to get the information from network devices. And when we talk about network monitoring, we are not only talking about metrics and logs. We are also talking about flows, flows of data. Tools like PNGCT or GoFlo can help you in order to get all this information together with the logs and the metrics. And this is really important because network automation here works together with application monitoring. So all the information from network servers and applications could go together to the same place. And you can imagine what can make possible this convergence of information. Last, as relevant open source projects, as I said before, all the things that you can use on software development lifecycle can be used here. But you also have a specific tooling for networking. There is like the simulation tool called Batfish that help you to get a configuration and create an analytic model to represent how this network device is going to behave. Or you can even simply run the network operating system like a container or a virtual machine with different projects like container lab or Kubernetes network emulator. Multiple of them that can help you in the way of deploying a new change on the network automation infrastructure. We are talking about management. You can first speed up network device, push the configuration, see that the configuration is good, and then you can heavily deploy it to the network. As I said before, this is a really, really quick summary of all the different relevant open source projects. But the best way to understand this is to see an example, a really quick example. Imagine that you want to implement a firewall rule automation. Using this architecture, this framework, we can understand that the first thing that we have is a user that we present an interface that is a chat application, matter most. So he can set what's the state that he wants to change on the network. What happens next is that this change in the intended state has to be pushed to the source of truth. In this case, we receive this change from the chat ops integration in an autobot. An autobot changes the state of the intended state and automatically triggers a workflow, a workflow that eventually will deploy this change to the network. So AWS takes care of connecting to Ansible. I'm saying, okay, with this information that we want to change, get some templates from another source of truth from Jeep and render the configuration. What's the configuration that we have to push to the network? Then thinking on making a reliable automation, we can spin up a bad fish container just to test if this configuration is syntactically correct. If the outcome of the configuration is what we expect to be. And when we are comfortable that we are not going to break anything, it's Friday afternoon, so we should not break anything. It's time to deploy. It's time to connect to the different network in the devices, could be physical devices or could be in the cloud and change the state. But this is not over. When we change the state, what's next? We have to close the loop. We have to, in the telemetry and analytics part, we are going to collect the flows from these devices and see the feedback to the AWS. Are these flows that I am seeing consistent with the change on the source of truth? I mean, if we have created a rule that enables the flows, the flows that I should be seeing should be accepted. So this is the point. We are changing the state, observing the state and validating that. If not, the loop can be continuously doing until we get into a state that we are comfortable with. The same that I mentioned for firewall automation, here there is a quick summary of multiple real use cases that we have been solving in multiple places, from managing OS upgrades, firewall compliance and remediation, implementing device lifecycle, how an upgrade has to be done, or just managing circuit maintenance when an operator changes something via mail, your source of truth can be updated in order to reflect these changes. There are multiple of them and all of them at the end has to be approached the same way. In a framework that you understand what has to be solved because every network is different, you have to adapt everything, but the idea is exactly the same. And just to wrap up this session, I just want to give you a quick hint about how to approach this kind of projects. First, you have to prioritize what you have to automate, and this means that you have to take something small, but with high value and low risk. And usually, this is getting data, getting information, giving you some educated comprehension that you can use. This is a good starting point. When you understand the problem that you want to solve is have to go deep onto what are the different details that this operation looks like. So maybe what is like one sentence, if you drill down, you will understand that there are three, four different steps. So all of them have to be clearly understood because you as a human, you can infer this and automatically do these things, but a computer has to go one by one and understand how this works. When you understand the different steps, simply try to simplify them and normalize. Because, as you know, a computer only understands data that is well normalized. And when you have everything clear, just try it. You cannot keep thinking, planning for the future. Try it with something that has low risk. Maybe just getting data from your network is good enough. This is a starting point that will help you then to step by step trying to move and not changes that really change the global orchestration of your network. And as a take away three takeaways. First understand, try to understand what you are doing. What are the workflows actually doing to try to simplify them understand what are the functionalities that you have to implement. Don't start with the solution of the tool. Don't think that, yeah, Ansible is the solution or Python, whatever, or no, the solution is never a tool. Maybe you are going to end up using that tool, but before you have to understand what are the different things that you have to cover, because not always you have to cover all of them. Then understand that you are not going to find a project that solves everything for you. This is not even true in a vendor solution. Usually you have to combine multiple of them. And open source here has the extra benefit that you can customize this you can adapt your the different pieces just to suit well together. And as a conclusion, natural automation that few years ago was like the last resort on network on infrastructure operations today in 2022 is no longer the exception. So, every day, every project we are working automation is there, we are just extending it improving, but there are always some starting points on natural automation. Because without natural automation, you cannot achieve the scalability and the reliability that your network operations deserve. And probably your network users are used to have because everyone today is used to work to the cloud, click into places and get a service up and running. The same user experience maybe is going to be expected also from your network. And that's all. Thank you very much for your time.


What's hanging, Madden Sikes? So, um, a deal of steel has a Batman vs. Thor Dawn of Justice. That piqued my interest. I was like, Batman vs. Thor, huh?  Um, by the way, I have a surprise for y'all. And, uh, I want to see who notices it first. You can start looking on Monday for this surprise. It may be here, it may not be here by then, but you will notice. So I'll be looking at the comments section. All right, so let's get this going. I'm really surprising that the most powerful man in the world should be a figure of controversy. We, as a population on this planet, have been looking for a savior. We're talking about the Batman who's very existence. It's cool. It challenges our own sense of priority in the universe. Human beings have a global track record of following people with freedom. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts. They're gonna make me watch this on them. Maybe he's just a guy trying to do the right thing better now, don't we?  No, they come from the sky. The world has been so caught up with what he can do that no one has asked what he should do. Pretty damn good there, a deal of steel. You know, I think Thor is not shown with the true power that he has.    Anyway, that was pretty good, y'all. Post a comment down below, let me know what you thought. If you enjoyed my reaction, hit the like button, subscribe, and share. If you didn't, hit the like button, subscribe, and share. What million subscribers? Woo!


Hey guys, how you doing? This is your boy Rich from Rich TV Live and you too can join the club at richpicksdaily.com where you can learn how to win and trade. How you doing? This is your boy Rich from Rich TV Live and richpicksdaily.com where you can go and join the club and we got another club to talk to you about today, the billionaire zombies club. That's right, the BZC coin and token, the BZC DAO, they're all about NFTs, they're all about the metaverse, they're all about gaming, a one-stop shop DAO metaverse and gaming and NFTs and guys, these guys started with just the dream of creating a club for NFTs, which are now worth over $20 million and they were giving it away to charity because they wanna do the right thing. So we love the fact that they've got a great cause where they're participating in one of the fastest growing sectors in the world in the NFT space, they've got a really cool product, billionaire zombies, everybody loves zombies and guys, we're gonna look at all the celebrities that are a part of this club that are minting NFTs and you should too, let's take a look, shall we? Have I told you lately how much I love Bitcoin? Well, I've heard the NFTs could be as big as Bitcoin itself, that is just mind-boggling. Let's take a look at the billionaire zombies club, BZC, right here, right now, exclusively with your more rich, the richest of you live. And this is the billionairezombies.com website. As you can see, billionaire zombies, welcome to the BZC army, billionaire zombies club army. And this is the new thing, guys. Everybody wants to get their hands on NFTs. Everybody wants a piece of the metaverse. Everybody wants to get into the Dow and everybody wants to get into gaming and this is one of those projects that's doing it all. The hottest PFP project on Polygon, entering the metaverse as a Dow. There it is. The project, and guys, I'm telling you, this is a project that you need to be aware of. The billionaire zombies club or BZC army community has aggregated cutting edge marketers, entrepreneurs, game developers who have come together to create one of the metaverses most unique communities, launched as a 10K PFP mint on Polygon. The project quickly gained popularity and hit number two in the ranks, making raking in nearly 700 Ethereum in sales across collections and with a highly anticipated game drop coming, that's right, a zombies game. How cool is that? The project is set to transform the utility of PFP projects and set the bar for other projects. Now, I'm gonna go through some of the details here, but if I was you, I would sign up, then sign in, get involved in the community and learn about NFTs through billionaire zombie club where you can mint, rarity tools, billionaire zombies club, 2D skeleton keys, 3D skeleton keys, meta crystals, metaverse, skeleton kings and charity swap. Want to learn more about the project?  This is the website, billionairezombies.com and now available on OpenSea, right here. You can see all of their social feeds. So you can literally follow them everywhere. Click on LinkedIn. It'll take you to their LinkedIn feed. I'm gonna follow them on LinkedIn. There we go. I'm now following them on LinkedIn and let's go back and let's try to follow them on Facebook. And this is how you can learn about different projects. This is their Facebook page. As you can see here, billionairezombiesclubdowl. We went to their LinkedIn. We showed you guys their LinkedIn page and all of this is on the website, on the bottom right. They've got a Medium page. This is them on Medium. I will follow them on Medium. I'm now following them on Medium. We know that they have a Twitter page. Here's their Twitter page. This is their Twitter, 11,700 followers on Twitter. I am following them on Twitter and I've got all the notifications turned on on Twitter. And this is them on Instagram, 19,500 followers on Instagram. I am one of them. So you can see some of their art on Instagram. And I'll be honest with you, it looks pretty good compared to a lot of the NFTs I've seen. I'm gonna be honest with you, these NFTs look good. These are really, really popular NFTs. And I'm gonna show you guys how much these guys have actually blown up in a short period of time. It's mind-boggling. This is another one of their websites, billionairezombies.club. So you can see here, billionairezombiesclub. Welcome to the most luxurious club in the NFT space. 10,000 unique zombies are stored as ERC721 tokens on the Ethereum compatible polygon network. All zombies are hosted on IPFS. Now, you can get access to all of their social on their link tree right here, the billionairezombieclub link tree, which is right on their website.  You can see here, you've got the option for affiliates. You got terms and condition policies, everything is here. And when you go and click on all the different options on the bottom right, you can also see they are part of Clubhouse. They are part of clubhouse.com, billionairezombiesclub.dow. The BZC army is on fire, join the community for newbie training, learning to buy NFTs and discuss upcoming milestones in the roadmap. So you can see they're also on Clubhouse. So all of this is available to you on their link tree and you can just literally follow all of their social, their Discord, that you can follow them on OpenC and we'll look at their OpenC. You can see that they've got a metaverse collection on OpenC, so be aware of that. And we've shown you their Instagram, their Twitter and their websites. They're also on YouTube. This is what their YouTube looks like right here. I am following them also on YouTube. And you can see there is some content that is starting to grow on YouTube. This is what their products look like on OpenC. You can see here they are listed on OpenC. They're quite popular on OpenC. And you can see 595 Ethereum traded, 3.4,000 owners and 10,000 items. On OpenC, the floor price of 045 Ethereum is actually about 120 plus dollars. And it's actually peaked. The floor has peaked at a high of $800. You can also see the items that are sold and when 30 minutes ago, 38 minutes ago, two hours ago. So you can see all the different items for sale with an item number, if you click on it, you can see exactly what the item looks like and how much the high offer is.  And literally you're buying and selling art like you're buying and selling stocks and crypto. And it's an entirely new exchange. It breaks down everything here. The price, the floor price, the difference and an expiration date. So everyone keeps saying they wanna learn about NFTs. So this is what NFTs is all about. These are the billionaire zombies club collections. So you can see here, there's a collection of billionaire zombies club. And I wanna show you guys the total volume, very impressive billionaire zombies club, Metacrystals official. You can see a floor price of 0.04 Ethereum and 24.8 volume traded in Ethereum. And you can scroll down and take a look at the 90 day activity and you can see 24.8 Ethereum over the last 90 days. You can see the 90 day average price of 0.0385 Ethereum. Move over to the next collection, the billionaire zombies club skeleton keys 3D, a floor price of 0.055 Ethereum with 8.3 Ethereum traded in volume. And there it is over the last 90 days, 8.267 Ethereum traded with a 90 day average price of 0.0795 Ethereum. This is the billionaire zombies club skeleton keys collection with an average floor price of 0.32 Ethereum and 101 Ethereum in volume traded. You can see here over the last 90 days, an average floor price of 0.495 Ethereum with a 90 day volume of 100.986 Ethereum. Lastly, the skeleton kings collection and you can see the floor price of 0.15 Ethereum with a volume traded of 34 Ethereum and scroll down. And you can see an average 90 day average price of 0.267 Ethereum with a 90 day volume of 33.96 Ethereum. We'll go right into this.  This is one of Bow Wow's pieces. So they got Bow Wow involved.   Oh, no, sorry. I apologize. This is Bow Wow's. Yep, that's it. That's Bow Wow's Instagram. Shade Moss, that's correct. So that's Bow Wow's Instagram. Oh, I guess he just changed his photo here. So pretty cool here. Maybe that's another NFT. So you can see that there are a lot of celebrities that are involved with billionaire zombies. Let's continue on with another one, Brittany Renner. This is Brittany Renner's piece of art. This is her NFT. You can see the photo right there. That is her NFT. This is Bow Wow's and this is right here. Bundle of Brittany. So 4.6 million followers and she's got a billionaire zombie NFT, right? So I mean, there's major star power getting into this project. So the question is, are you interested in this project? Are you getting into this project? And if you're looking for NFTs, this looks like a really cool project that I think you should consider because I think it's cool. I mean, look at Mario Chalmers, ex-MBA champion with the man Heat. You can see here, he's involved with billionaire zombies. He's got his NFT. So pretty cool. They got some serious star power here. There's Mario Chalmers on Twitter. So just under 900,000 followers on Twitter. So some serious star power and real celebrities taking an interest on billionaire zombies club. And this is a project that has really grown in popularity. Here's Michael Beasley, former NBA player. And you can see here that he's also got his zombie.  You know, I'm interested in this project. Here's Michael Beasley and his Twitter page right here. So let's just 74,000 followers on Twitter. And once again, he is a fan of the billionaire zombies club and a member. This is Brandon Thomas profile image is one of his skeleton keys and one of billionaire zombies NFT metaverse assets. So pretty cool that he would put a red on his profile page. Look at that, eh? His profile image, pretty cool. And it's a pretty awesome image. What do you guys think? So big star power behind this project. Now let's get into why. Billionaire zombies club launches metaverse experiences, white paper and Times Square campaign. So they're really pushing hard. The billionaire zombies club has released its official white paper, a preview of their upcoming metaverse experience. They're all over metaverse and has empowered their community to mint skeleton King NFTs, which will eventually have Dow governance and significant in game utility. As of this writing, the BZC collections across open sea have aggregated more than 600 Ethereum in volume or 2.45 million as of this writing. So we're talking about a project that is making millions and it's literally brand new just coming out and it's the billionaire zombies club. And I think it's really cool and I think everyone needs to be aware of this and understand how they are really focusing now on the metaverse, on the Dow, on NFTs. And I've been listening to a lot of experts who believe that NFTs could be as big, if not bigger than Bitcoin and the entire cryptocurrency sector because it's digital art. It's a whole nother exchange where you can buy and sell. Here was the news on December 17th, but a month ago, billionaire zombies club BZC, a fast growing decentralized NFT art community has released its development roadmap via its official white paper. In addition, BZC has launched a proprietary online portal that will be a hub for the club's actively activity going forward. This portal will empower billionaire zombies club members to register their official billionaire zombies club collections to trade assets in the official billionaire zombies club marketplace. Wow. And to mint new assets for the upcoming metaverse and gaming experiences at billionairezombies.com. Wow. Huge. And billionaire zombies club ran advertisements in Times Square. Huge. You know, I gotta take a look at this. Let's see if this will take us to their roadmap. They're referring to their white paper which has a link to their roadmap. Let's see here if we can see that. All right. So this is the billionaire zombies white paper. And this is the roadmap. So billionaire zombies club development roadmap, mint created successfully mint zombie art collection which they've done token launch, distribute Genesis utility tokens for holders for use in the upcoming metaverse game. Done. Future NFTs reward NFT holders through game mechanics and airdrops with future generations of art. So this is all coming up skeleton keys, meta crystals and metaverse. BZC battle royale released zombie gangs into the metaverse in a web three battle royal game. Wow. That sounds super cool. I wanna play that game. DAO governance model transition to a DAO based governance model to create value, support charitable causes and organize community events and rewards. So very exciting to see this coin and this token and this project evolve. And now they're even doing advertisements at Times Square. So that is just huge. So take a look at some of their advertisements at Times Square. Wow. I mean, look at that dropping today. They were advertising in Times Square. So this is pretty wild. Put billionaire zombies club on your radar, on your watch list. I think it has incredible upside, incredible potential. Now I must remind you that Rich TV Live is strictly for information and education purposes. Please do your due diligence, do your research before you invest in anything we talk about or discuss here on Rich TV Live. In saying that, we believe this is a project that has incredible upside. We love gaming. We love the DAO. We love NFTs. And this is a project that encompasses all of it. In addition to that, they're giving back to charities and to zombie owners. Billionaire Zombies Club has dropped two billion tokens and two drops, one billion on zombie holders and one billion on 10 charities, 100 million tokens each, including, this is one of them, Could You, One Mama, Presence Worldwide, Hope Refuge Inc, Leilene Wendell Scott Foundation, the First Parents Splash International Human Trust Foundation and the Digital Legacy Foundation. Great Cause is a company doing great work. Great Cause and we love what they're doing. Now, I think everyone needs to be aware of Billionaire Zombies Club. You can see here once again, the press release and this is on markets.businessinsider. Once again, the press release going out everywhere that they're donating a billion tokens to charities. So Great Cause, news is circulating everywhere. Once again, Billionaire Zombies Club collection was estimated to be worth more than $20 million in November. So huge growth for relatively small, obscure token and coin and project that is just now becoming mainstream with all the different work that they're doing. Love to know what you guys think about this video. Remember Rich TV Live is strictly for information and education purposes. Please do your due diligence, do your research before you invest anything we talk about or discuss here on Rich TV Live. In saying that, we think this is a great project. We think everyone needs to put them on your radar, put them on your watch list and we love NFTs and we love what this project is all about, BillionaireZombies.com, a project that I think everyone needs to put on their radar, put on their watch list with huge upside, huge potential. Thank you guys for watching. If you're not winning, probably not watching, we bring you the winners and we bring them to you first. What do you think? Are you gonna join the Billionaire Zombies Army? Are you already a member? A lot of celebrities are. Are you next? Listen, I like what these guys are doing. If I get some art, I might start here. That's just me. Now it's risky, it's a whole new exchange. I'm not saying there isn't risk associated to it, there is. Like anything that you invest in, there's always a risk associated to it. But I like the community. I like the fact that they're giving the charity. I like the art. And I think that they're doing the right things. They're building community. They're really getting on social like everywhere. Like look, they got everything, right? They're everywhere. They're on OpenSea. They're on all the right places.  OpenSea is pretty much one of the top places in the world for NFTs and they're there. And like I said, their art has been already valued at over $20 million. And the reality is when you speak to them, they're just getting started. They're literally just getting started despite the fact that these NFTs in the Billionaire Zombies Club in the metaverse are now being valued this collection over $20 million. And it's just getting started. Now they're gonna focus on gaming. They're gonna focus on the Dow. They're gonna focus on their NFTs and their community and building a vibrant community to trade, buy and sell NFTs, mint and create NFTs. Love it. Love to know what you guys think. Billionaire Zombies Club, your boy RetroMarchTVLive. And I'm out. Peace.