We stand here today with a plant that's closing, but I'm extremely proud of the people that work in this plant here. For a year and a half, I didn't have anything. We lost our home. We lost a vehicle. I have struggled to get back to middle class again. This is a historic project that is going to help grow this community, give people jobs and give a future to your kids and my kids. Where you sit today used to be a General Motors plant and now there are over 1,000 employees working here. Is this a union job? It is our desire to not be. We hope someday to get this good. There have been 11 complaints filed. Some workers claim unsafe working conditions and unfair treatment. Doing the same thing over and over again that wears on your body and your soul.  I made it their house. They made it my home. We've just bombed it. Now the whole world is watching. What changed in America was rich people deciding they wanted to rewrite the rules to take advantage of people. You never give up on American dreams. To me that would be un-American. Good morning. You are in the right place for the social impact entertainment revolution. If that is not what you were expecting to attend, now would be the time. Just kidding. I'm Rachel Myrow. Thank you so much for joining us today. We're going to have a fabulous discussion as you can see focused around the recent documentary American factory available on Netflix. We have with us today, going across the stage, Steve, Julia and Monique. I encourage you, if you haven't already, to check out all of the information in the app, the SoCAP 19 app because there's no need to recap that. Just dive right in. But first, before we start talking, I do want to ask for a show of hands. How many people here have actually seen American factory? All right. Well, I guess that tells us where we need to start the conversation. Julia, do you want to give us a sense of what this documentary is actually about? Wow. That's a big question. The elevator pitch. Yeah, the elevator. I never actually had to do that. So we live in Dayton, Ohio, Steve and I, who made the film. And the plant that this takes place in, which makes automotive glass, is about 20-minute drive from our house. That plant closed as a General Motors plant, General Motors left, and left this empty shell of a huge plant during the economic crash of 08. This forward about seven or eight years, and we heard, wow, the plant's going to reopen. Somebody bought it. Turns out it's a Chinese billionaire entrepreneur, Chairman Chao. And we had a chance to go in and actually follow what happened once the plant opened over a three-year period. And that's what the film is. We had access to, like, everything. Well, Steve, do you want to pick that up and tell us a little bit about how you guys got to the Obamas, how you got to Netflix, how you got the money to get going? Well, we believe that story is an agent for change. And that's the one reason why I think we're all here. You know, a lot of decisions in this world are made on data, with buy and on and about data. And we want to try to upend that paradigm a little bit and talk about the individual stories or the community stories. We believe stories are and sparks for empathy, and empathy leads to action. Empathy, you know, if we think back to the social causes that have moved people over the recent years, it's like something touches us, and we take action. And we feel like that's the power of documentary. We were making this film on our own in Ohio, and we reached a point about halfway through the filming. We started filming in 2015, and in mid-2016, we really needed to start to find a partner to raise money, but also to help bring the film into the world. And we got very lucky that we lined up and teamed up with Participant Media. We're Harris-Elda. You got lucky, too. And Participant is a company we've known about for years. We've all seen their films, whether it's Spotlight, the Best Picture Winner, or Roma from last year, or their great documentaries like Inconvenient Truth or RBG from last year. Participant's mission is to make movies that matter, that are entertaining, but have social impact. And when they said, we love your idea, we love what you're doing, we just felt a lot of alignment in terms of mission. And let me just say, Participant, they really mean that, the word participant. They want audiences to take the films, whatever it is, and make social change in the world. And they're serious about it, and they know how to do it. Another great name, Hire Ground, is the Obama's production company that they started as their legacy, being young people in their 50s still. They had to think, well, gee, what are we gonna do? And they decided to focus on storytelling. And they have started a production company, and we, meaning Steve and I's film, a participant's film, is their first release, which is amazing. And they have lots of other things coming out. So look them up, Hire Ground Productions. I think we're gonna expect a lot from the Obama's. The President and First Lady came on board with Netflix this past January when the film debuted at Sundance. And since then, participant media, Hire Ground Productions and Netflix have all been working together with us to bring the film out into the world. Now, you can see on Netflix there is a short conversation that's filmed between you guys and Barack and Michelle Obama. But I'm curious, what was your interaction with them like? Were they giving you the creative freedom to make the film you felt you needed to make? They came on board when the film was all done. Okay, yeah. They saw it at Sundance Film Festival when it was all done. And they told us sort of why they bonded with the film. But I think it really is encapsled in the name Hire Ground. One of the things, for those of you who saw the film, we take the Hire Ground, right? I mean, we try to be fair to everyone, whether it's the owner, the billionaire owner, the management, the HR people, the blue collar Americans, the blue collar Chinese. We try to listen to everybody. Because we felt like that was the best way for this film to make a difference in the world. And we live in a world where people are very divided right now. We all know that. So we felt like if we can create empathy for the owner, as well as the managers, as well as the workers, that would be a real step in the right direction and create conversations around that. When we started making the film, because we live in that town, our hearts were really with the blue collar Americans. But pretty quickly we realized that the 200 or 300 Chinese engineers and managers who had left their hometown in Fujian province in China, flown to Ohio in a small kind of modest gray little town, Dayton, Ohio, post-industrial scrappy little town. They were starting a whole new life there. And we realized that it would be very important to tell their story as well. Now we are not Chinese and we don't speak Mandarin Chinese. We're not culturally competent in terms of China. But we turn to Chinese filmmakers who we teamed up with, about six of them, but especially Yichen Zhang and Mijie Li who are both documentary filmmakers from China. They started coming to Ohio every week and that's how we could try to tell the Chinese perspective as well as the American perspective. I find it interesting that both of you have used some form of the word empathy in your comments and I highly encourage those of you who haven't seen the film to go home and watch it tonight. It really is a very empathetic look at the challenges of trying to run a profitable manufacturing enterprise in America today. Haricela, can you tell us a little bit about your role in promoting the film once they finished? Yeah, absolutely. And if anyone is around tonight, we are also hosting a screening at 7 PM at the in the Southwest building. So you'll have a chance to watch. Better than seeing it on Netflix. Right. See it with a group. Yeah. Don't tell Netflix. No, no, it's okay. So participant was originally set up to be a double bottom line company. We exist to tell the best stories, but we also understand that oftentimes those stories speak to massive issues out in the world. And these are, if we look at future of work, it's complicated. You hear all of the statistics, but what does it mean? So when we have a piece of content that puts a human lens on something so important yet frightening, we find that that type of content helps bring different people to the table, helps elevate the work that organizations and individuals all across the country are doing. So the way that we look at how can we take the content and create change is from a place of humility of trying to listen to what is it that this issue space needs. And we found that the labor space was very fractured. So a lot of the work that we started to do was, okay, how can we, if content can build a bridge, how do we do that? It starts from a place of creating the shared experience of watching the film together, of experiencing that empathy. Those human stories, the 350 million jobs that will be automated suddenly become the workers that you'd see on the factory floor, and that microcosm is actually speaking to the nuances of globalization and cultural differences and automation. And then how do we get people who are not talking to each other to at least see each other and understand the other perspective? And we started by having separate conversations with different sectors, understand where they were individually coming from. And then we designed a national tour and a digital experience where we're creating events that are screenings but also dinner conversations where we're nominating people from the community, deliberately chosen from different sectors and saying, come to this event tomorrow. We're actually doing one in Indianapolis tomorrow night. Watch the film and then just share a meal and a conversation with someone else. And at that table is going to be someone who you might not have thought to talk to before about this issue, but it's building a bridge. And then we're finding that through the digital site that we set up at AmericanFactoryFilm.com, we've had interest from 32 states already hosting their own screening in other countries. Because these are conversations people want to have, and film can be an entry point into doing that. So you're actually getting, which I think is so cool, owners and employees to talk to each other. Like even people from the labor movement and owners to sit down and talk, which doesn't really happen very much. And not just that, is if you look at these issues of inequality and future work from a community lens, our thinking is we also want academics in there, we want policymakers, we want people from the faith community, and we also want students. That's one of the most interesting things that we found. There is so much excitement. We've heard a number of schools are already using the film in their classrooms. So we're just trying to get it out because the appetite is there. Monique, do you want to tell us how this film resonated for you from the perspective of the work you do for J.P. Morgan? Yes. So the work that we do within global philanthropy is really focused on the global context of jobs and skills. And the future of work frame is ubiquitous in every market that we're invested in. That's really the loudest theme that comes out. And given the scale of it, it's very easy to lose the face of the challenge. It's very easy to get caught up in the scale and the quant of it. It's very easy to get caught up in just the automation end of the future of work narrative and really lose sight of the human element. We invest very heavily in our philanthropic strategy in building training and education models that really prepare labor markets and prepare workers for the next phase of work in their communities. And it's very easy to do that without the worker voice present. It's very just based on the scale and the speed of the problem. And so what I think struck us about this particular film, because we've actually used this as a team, what struck us about it is that it shows all the different nuances within this conversation. It's not just about kind of the monolithic idea of the American factory worker. It's about all of the different elements, all of the different human elements that are kind of in this work that we have to be very mindful of the conditions that people have to kind of traverse through to get ready for whatever's happening on the horizon. And so I think that this is a perfect example of how the power of storytelling, the putting a face on the issue brings to light a different way of thinking about it. Because every major company that's really grappling with re-skilling and future of work issues, there's an element of it. Like what does this mean for diversity and inclusion? What does this mean for, you know, creating opportunities for individuals who have historically been kind of kept out of these industries? And this actually really paints a really crisp picture of that piece. And Monique, if I could just add we're talking about the future of work. One of the key, you know, from the worker point of view, one of the big beefs is we're not respected. It's not necessarily about money, although they'd like more money. It's more about do I have a voice? Does anyone pay any attention? Is there any teeth? If I make a complaint, you've seen the film, some of you, will it matter? Or will I get fired because I made the complaint? So one thing I feel strongly about, and I've come to feel this, is if you're going to talk about the future of work, you have to have the worker voice at the table. It can't just be the companies or the government. It has to be the worker voice. And if you think about it, from what I've heard, see if you agree, the largest trainer of people to upskill people is the army. After that, it's unions. Let's not forget that, as far as actually doing training to give people more of a path to the middle class. So I just wanted to make that point, because sometimes unions are seen as opposed to people who own things. But I think this is a place where they could come together. Well, I'm going to challenge you on that, because after watching this documentary, I had the disheartening feeling that no matter how dignified and professional those American workers were, that you still face this problem where capital chases cheap. And the very problem these American workers face beyond being more expensive is that they have expectations about limits on their work hours, expectations about safety in the workplace, expectations about environmental stewardship, things that the American labor movement helped to cultivate in them, but which very much seemed to be on the downswing these days. Well, I was very proud, I don't know what you think, of the American workers in the film who speak up about that, about EPA things, about safety things, but sometimes they get, there's retribution against them for speaking up. And this is not fair. So I don't know if you have anything. Well, capitalism is like a shark that will always go, go, go, and it needs a saddle, it needs a harness. Otherwise we'd all still be working, we'd have children working 12 hours a day in factories here. So I mean, obviously you need a balance. The labor movement was a corrective to 80 hour weeks and deeply unsafe conditions. There's a way to make it work. Right now in China, there's a nascent labor movement. There are wildcat strikes happening. People are fed up with working 12 hours a day, six days a week, or not getting paid.  We don't hear about it a lot, but if you go to China Labor Bulletin, they track insurgent labor unrest there. But then you see factory owners moving the work to countries where those labor movements are even weaker. Even weaker. Yeah, China is outsourcing factories to Vietnam. Yeah, it's true. So something we came to realize, because the film takes you to China and we go into the equivalent factories in China, the workers' salaries are rising in China and they're stagnant here, at least in this part of this sector. I can't speak about all the sectors, tactile and everything else, but in auto. Salaries are rising in China. Everything is very stagnant here. And America is becoming a low wage country. And how do we feel about that? How do we feel about, are we gonna have a middle class? Are we gonna have a blue collar middle class? I grew up as a working class person, but I was able to go to college. We had vacations. My dad knew he worked a 40-hour a week and he wouldn't have to work more just because his supervisor said, no, you gotta come back tomorrow on Saturday. There wasn't that kind of thing. He was a union guy. Do we wanna have a middle class? Do we wanna be a low wage country? So that's where you might think about, well again, what kind of country do we wanna live in? What kind of world do we wanna live in? The billionaire class way up here and the average worker way down here is stagnating. That's what's happening. We all know it. You can read that in USA Today or whatever. Yeah. Monique? Yeah, I just wanted to chime in here. I think one of the kind of undercurrents that's in the movie is kind of this idea of kind of passion and purpose. And I feel like, yes, we obviously see and have heard and read about this hollowing of the middle in the American labor market. That there is kind of a growth in high wage jobs and a growth in low wage jobs, but it's a relatively stagnation or a much slower growth of middle income jobs. It's still growing, but it's slower. And so I think here's the opportunity for kind of creative capital to play a role because the challenge that America faces, I mean, it's interesting how you hear like this conflicting narrative, right? Where you have seven million jobs that have gone unfilled that are kind of middle-skilled gap jobs and manufacturers, advanced manufacturers, industries across the country that are saying, we have this skilled demand that we can't fill. Simultaneously, you have workers who are saying, we can't find jobs that will cover our cost of living. And so there's a gap here. And the reason why that gap exists is that we've got really antiquated infrastructure when it comes to education and training. We've got very antiquated policies, systems that are really tailored for an economy that really doesn't exist in major metropolises across the country. And so given the speed of automation, given the speed of our economy, we've got to figure out creative solutions to get that infrastructure to catch up, to evolve and really do more innovative work to prepare people in these spaces and for these roles. I mean, the reality is that that missing middle is actually not a missing middle. That middle is where man meets machine. And so how are we preparing workers? How are we preparing students? How are we preparing labor to meet machine in really creative ways? I mean, the reality is is that America is still a creative economy. And so how are we preparing folks to adapt to what's on the horizon? Haricela, what kind of responses or answers along the lines of what Monique is talking about have you heard in these various screenings? Yeah, so it really, there are a range of responses. What the film does beautifully is it asks a lot of questions, but it's not prescriptive in what the solution should be. And what we've tried to be adamant in bringing the film all across the country is we're not trying to vilify anyone. We're recognizing that these are tough issues to grapple with, but how can we get creative about solutions? What we also recently found out, which a partner mentioned is 2018, saw the greatest number of worker-led strikes since the 1980s. So there's this question bubbling up about what does power look like in different spaces, including at work? And what we are hearing partners grapple with as they watch the film is who am I when it comes to these issues and what is my role? So there are some people who are thinking about labor from an organizing perspective. There are some people who are thinking about it from a training and workforce development perspective. The narrative that we wanna try to paint is given where you are now in your respective role, what does that incremental next step look like? Is, does it start with just having a conversation with your own workforce and acknowledging where you are or where you're not? Or do you have more resources that you can mobilize against trainings or technology? If so, how do you get to that next step? And how can we help forge connections to do that so that there's not these eco-chambers of everyone's talking about the future of work, but they're talking about it in very separate spaces. So part of our role with storytelling and with trying to build these bridges is to connect all of the various opportunities that people are trying to explore and link resources to those who might need them, putting workers back into that conversation too, so that we think about products from a user-generated design perspective, but we don't think about systems and practices from a worker perspective. So how can we get a little bit better at doing that? Well, we were lucky to walk around that factory floor for three years, pretty much almost three years. And we got to know so many people who show up and punch a clock and go to their station and do their job all day long. And we were also very lucky that we had access to the management, to the offices, the office suites and to meetings, management meetings, where they talked about policy and they made changes to all kinds of things. And we were, frankly, regularly shocked and disappointed how rarely management would get on the factory floor and go talk to the employees and listen or go out for a beer or do something social with someone so that they could really hear the experience of this job and the challenges of this job directly from a worker. And that's the kind of siloing that you're talking about, I think. And it's not hard to do, to walk out there and say, how's it going? What are you doing after work? Can I take you out for a burger? Or even, there were so often a huge gap between how management saw issues and saw solving them and how the workers on the floor in great numbers would say like, no, that's not working. That policy has no teeth. Okay, there's a safety committee made up of workers, but who do they report to? They report to HR and HR has no power or very little power. Sometimes on these various, there's a scene in our film where they have worker round tables. Workers are, you can tell there's unrest on the floor, so the company decides, let's have some worker round tables. And we filmed one. And it's all American workers and they talk about all the American supervisors have been demoted. We only have Chinese supervisors now. And they order us around and they don't listen to us because it's a cultural difference in how work life is seen. They talk about folks pouring paint into the water supply. So the worker round table like tries to raise things and I was proud of that. But in the end, this one worker says, I don't wanna waste your time. I don't wanna waste my time. Will any of this matter what we say here today? And that's what you kept hearing. There were like these kind of, I would have to say kind of phony attempts to create structures that would hear the worker voice. But they had no teeth, they had no power, they just were swept right under the rug. They were kind of fig leaves. And the workers became very cynical about that then. So I just wanted to, I think if there's any transformation, again I say it in terms of the future of work or listening to workers, it has to include real voice of working people and their representatives. We see in Silicon Valley today, middle class engineers who seem to be in a similar vein challenging their company saying, what is the social, political, economic impact of the products we're creating, of the contracts we're signing? And we also see that management responds to that with, well your choice is either to not work on that project or to leave the company. Right, exactly. I also wanted to just say something. We live in Dayton, Ohio and we all know you guys are mostly from the West Coast, I think, I don't know. But we all know that there's a struggle going on for the heart and soul of America. You know what I'm talking about. And I believe, and the 2020 election is just one aspect of that, I believe that struggle is gonna be fought out in the Midwest, in places like Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin. So we can't sit here on the West Coast and think like we'll deal with things in Silicon Valley. Okay, it's important. But look, our community, like Dayton, Ohio, I'm just gonna give you one example. Because all the various companies left, GM left, NCR left, DHL left, everybody left, our school system is falling apart. 98% of the kids, my grandkids go to the school system. They don't go to a private school outside of town. They go to the city schools. 98% of the kids are on under the poverty level. All the schools are failing. The housing stock is falling apart. What hope is there in some ways? If the best you can do is a 12 or 14 hour job, hard factory work or a distribution center where you have one of those guns or a call center, $10 an hour, 12, what hope is there? And that's why people turn to somebody who they think will give them hope. Which, believe it or not, we knew that Donald Trump was gonna win the election in Dayton, Ohio. We could see that. So I just have to say, it's something we need to think about if we think about the future of our country. We have to think about the Midwest because that is where the battleground is. Monique, not to pressure you or anything. But how do we give hope to that Midwestern blue collar worker? I mean, it's one of the things, for those who have seen the film, one of the things that I think is striking about the film is kind of the different types of narratives that show up, right? I mean, it's obviously, you see the overwhelming narrative of kind of the typical kind of Midwestern factory worker. But then watching it again, you see other voices that are in there, right? And so one of the kind of paradigms in there is, yes, you have the older factory worker who's been in the industry for the last 30 years, but then when there's the issue around the union vote, you have an amplification of the younger factory worker who is like, okay, I'm here. I'm not gonna vote for this union because I can't afford to lose this job, right? I need this job. And it's striking. It was striking to me because I think what that then says is, okay, why is this young person, why does this young person feel like they don't have any other options, right? We're seeing kind of industry evolving in every major city across the country. And the way cities are tackling it is different, right? I mean, you've got the date in Ohio's, and you also have the Pittsburgh's, right? Which are finding new ways to kind of carve out a niche for industry and economy to provide more options and more opportunities. Obviously, education, training, that pipeline of preparation needs to go in tandem with that. And so it's disheartening to hear that you see a public school system that's falling apart. That's a critical piece of this puzzle. And so the work that we've been doing has really been investing on the full scale, right? So yes, we have our heavy investment in kind of re-skilling and preparing workers for kind of the evolving labor market, but we also actually have a considerable investment in career readiness as well, right? How are we looking at youth? How are we preparing systems to provide a broader set of opportunities and purpose for young people as they're trying to figure out where they're gonna go? So it's not an easy answer, right? Like how do you infuse and inject hope into these communities that feel very hopeless? But there are, I think nodes, there are bright spots across the country to draw from to see what are all the stakeholders that were involved in kind of turning this around, right? And this is what's great about the tour that that participant media is doing. It's bringing all of those critical stakeholders to the conversation to say, okay, we all have to solve this, we all have a stake in this, and we have to think about this very differently in order to solve this. That gives the plants the seed for the solutions that will kind of allow that hope to regenerate. And it's the movie that brings people together. Exactly. It's the idea of watching the movie together, not alone in your apartment or whatever, but together with other people and saying, okay, this raises a lot of questions, what are we gonna do in our community? And each community is different on the tour. Each community is different. So we started off at Louisville. We're going to Indianapolis. Louisville, Kentucky. Kentucky, yeah, they have a big governor's race where labor issues are figuring quite prominently. Then we're going to Detroit and Pittsburgh, all are intended somehow to speak to the issuer highlight bright spots. And one thing that we've been hearing is there needs to be a realignment of priorities. So the shareholder based approach leads you down one particular road. Shareholder, honey. Like feeling like you're accountable to shareholders and being driven primarily by profits instead of what the needs of the workers are. By companies, yeah. So if we start to think from a more holistic perspective, our partners point out the fact that, you know, there are so many intersecting issues from education to healthcare to various other things that if you think about that in the context of, well, how does this relate to work and the ability that wages or a certain lifestyle gives to an individual, to a family, to a community, there are costs and repercussions associated with that. So if we can bring different actors to the table for that more holistic conversation, then hopefully it can lead to a path of realigning what the way that companies are thinking about their practices as well. Now I do want the audience to have an opportunity to ask questions, but first I'm going to ask what is perhaps the scariest question of the morning, which is how do you see things like robotics and artificial intelligence impacting this conversation going forward? Hey, look, robotics, it's great. You don't have to break your back doing your job, right? You don't have to have stress injuries on your arms. When we made a film about the General Motors plant that closed and we talked to lots of workers, I don't believe there was a worker who'd been there like say 10, 15, 20 years, who didn't have serious injuries because of that job. Even with the better ergonomics that they over the years brought in, that's a real, you know, we're like ground zero for the heroin epidemic, date in Ohio, right? Well, I can understand it. People were in pain and then they lost their job and then they lost their hope. And you know, these things happen. I'm not really answering your question, but we should view automation from a worker point of view as a good thing if there were other jobs, right? If people could be trained to operate the computers or other, I'm sure you're the expert on this though. I'm just telling you from my little point of view in this one factory. No, I mean, it's true. I mean, the reality is that this is not a new phenomenon for us, right? I mean, it's technology that changed the, you know, agricultural sector significantly and did it affect obviously agricultural jobs, farming jobs, absolutely. Did it create other types of jobs? Absolutely. And so this is really just the next wave of that evolution. And so automation, robotics, all of that plays a really critical role. The reality is that just like there's not an office job that doesn't touch a computer, right? More occupations are going to be computer-enabled, digitally-enabled, technology-enabled jobs. And so we just have to prepare folks better for what those roles entail. And I just wanted to just make one really quick comment about kind of the middle income Silicon Valley engineer, right? So the worker voice is broadening really significantly. And as hard as it is to kind of see, given kind of the polarization of our labor market and kind of the income and wealth disparities that are existing in our economy, it is impacting how American companies do business, right? So one of the big recent kind of announcements was with the business round table, a number of major Fortune 500 companies who signed off on this pledge that it's not just gonna be shareholder earnings that's gonna drive practice, right? That's not gonna be where value is gonna be rested. Now what that means for each of these companies we still have to see. But the reality is that people signed that pledge, yeah, great, it's great to say that that was just altruistic and we just wanna be great people. But the reality is that we've now got a tone and tenor in our labor market, particularly when we're thinking about the younger end of the spectrum. Well people wanna work for good people. People wanna work for companies that are doing more, that are contributing more, that's not just about earnings and profits and shareholder returns, that they're actually making social impact in communities and that includes with workers, that includes with the communities in which they sit and are invested in and that includes shareholders. So it's changing and it was really the worker voice that brought that pledge into fruition. Yeah, the worker voice and you know people wanna be proud of where they work. That is actually something that might surprise you. People on the floor, they might only have a high school education, but they would be proud that they made those GM trucks and cars. They would be proud of the advances they made in terms of ergonomics. They would be proud of the Worker Safety Committee.  They don't feel proud of the company, unfortunately, that they work for now. You'd have to see the film to see why. Some people do, but there's a lot of frustration that people are still dealing with. I'm getting the high sign. Do we have room for one or two questions? Oh yeah. Oh 15 minutes, all right, awesome. All right, why don't we start with you in the pink. Yeah. There we go, yeah, wait for the mic to come around so that folks who are watching online can hear your question. Hi there, I'm Naja Lockwood, and I saw the film with Sundance. I was really touched, and especially because my in-laws are from Dayton. My father-in-law ran NCR, and my aunt founded the opera, Dayton Opera. Wow, thank you, thank her. My question is, what were some significant insights that you didn't have when you started making the film? And you did have after finishing the film. And what are you both doing next? We did not know much about the trajectory of China before we started making the film. We had a typical Midwestern myopic view, and really making this film opened us up to this sort of amazing achievement that's happened over the last 30, 40 years since Deng Xiaoping opened up. And we realized there's a lot of looking at that with a sense from a US point of view, there can be an anxiety about looking at China's growth. But when we were hanging out with Wang or Leon or these engineers who came over from China who are like 29, 33 years old, their parents lived in poverty, their parents lived an agrarian life, and now they have a home, or Wang is saving up enough money to build a home for his family. We looked, it really changed our perspective on looking at the miracle of what's happened in China, which is hundreds of millions of people are no longer in poverty. Now that has come at great environmental costs, great labor-like issues, all kinds of problems. That's all true, we can talk about those, but it's also something to be looked at as a real human achievement in the history of the world, this transformation. That was very eye-opening. But then in crafting the film, we really wanted to not watch it with a lens of Midwestern anxiety about that. And just a real quick answer, the other part of that. We didn't know about the US-based, basically consultancy industry, that is union avoidance industry. We didn't know about that. I don't think most people know about that unless they're sort of in it. And the power of the union avoidance folks that they hired at over a million dollars, over a million dollars they spent on avoiding, like I would say workers to have a fair election, because I don't think it was a fair election and you saw the film, you can decide for yourself. That was kind of shocking to us, because we're big believers in democracy, the democratic voice, and when you start firing people because they're pro-union or you start bombarding people with mandatory meetings again and again and again, that give out borderline illegal messages. And that was a big surprise for us. But that's not just the Chinese company, right? Not at all.  No, no, no, this is an American thing. In fact, it's not even a year- And American regulators need to be asleep at the wheel. I know, exactly. When we showed this film in Europe, they were shocked, they don't have that kind of thing over there, like we showed it in England and in France. And they don't have union avoidance, at least that's what people told us. And it's definitely not, the Chinese learned it from the American consultants, learned how to avoid the union. Oh, we're making another film about women workers, White Collar, you know the movie, Nine to Five, Jane Fonda? We're making a movie about the movement that gave rise to that movie. Hi, thank you very much. Congratulations, first of all. The reviews have been tremendous over the last few months. My name is Josh Kearns. I'm a reformed journalist, now consulting with Goal 17, a new startup out of Seattle. Media, a creation company, as well as accelerator for impact startups is the goal of the founders. I got into journalism 25 years ago to change the world, but was always taught to sort of keep my hands off, tell the stories and have become much more activist and am overtly activist now. Question, I guess, from the participant media side, how do we leverage great content? What is your thinking? Obviously activating local meetings are one thing, but at the end of the day, as you said, we need to change policy. I covered Boeing for 20 years. All of the fight, all of the issues you're describing are happening at Boeing right now. And as a result, there is no reeducation funding. In terms of those things that would actually provide other opportunities for future workers. Get to the middle class. And as a result, we have tremendous income inequality in Seattle. You need to earn over $150,000 to have a living wage now and afford a home within the city of Seattle. And it's not gonna change anytime soon. How do we leverage great content in order to affect actual policy? Is it specific call? Voter registration drives out the meetings. Is it going to Congress? There's a hearing today in Congress on worker issues. Not a single worker's rights I was just seeing on Twitter. Not a single worker rights or worker involved in any of the panels. Oh, that's terrible. So if you think about what is it that storytelling can do that few other mediums can do? Ultimately, the way that we think about it as a participant is it can help create the cultural conditions for change. Our storytellers at participant were not the issue experts. So we need to very humbly approach the perspectives that we're bringing to the table. It shouldn't be us saying what the solutions are. It should be how can we help individuals and organizations leading this change? The ones who have been fighting for these issues for decades who are gonna keep fighting after our release is done. And what we saw with a film like Roma last year is if you get people to talk about it, the right people, enough people shining the spotlight that you have with the content on others in a deliberate way helps to empower movements that are already happening before we even make the film. So acknowledging that we're coming into spaces that are existing, the labor movement has been around and grappling with these issues for decades, but when you have the Obama's tweeting about a film, people are suddenly paying attention. So can we help bring the worker voice? Who is it that we're putting this film in the hands of? How do we get to scale? It's, on some films, it's easy to say, okay, there's a very clear call to action, and let's just give that to audiences and hope that we get to a turning point. With something like this, it's much harder. This is a harder issue because it's very intersectional. It's much more complex. So for us, the goal is how do we put the film and the materials that we can create around it in the hands of as many people who are having these conversations? So it becomes an emotional entry point into the issue to bring new people in, to highlight the bright spots, and to accelerate movements that are happening so that it's not just about us, we're just, can we add a little bit of fuel? And I think that's what storytelling can do beautifully. And we're going to Seattle, so we gotta get your card. Oh yeah. We'd love to host a screening. Oh great, and everyone can sign up at the end. We'll have a sign up table if you want to host a screening. Yeah, Seattle, can't wait. My name's Greg Mollner with Goal 17. We have such alignment. We're storytellers for the new economy and we're going to launch in about three months. Amazing. I want to say thank you. I ran a film, independent film company 20 years ago that won Sundance, and one of my responsibilities was financing our films. If anyone wants to talk about creative financing, talk about financing the film. So two questions. What was the budget for your film? It was over a million dollars. It was under two million dollars somewhere in there. Way under two million dollars. We're not supposed to give exact numbers, but that's okay. North of a million. North of a million, south of two million. Yeah, for people who haven't made a film, for you to make that film for under a million and a half dollars is extraordinary. What you're doing a participant is you're the good guys in Hollywood. Yeah, they're the good guys, right, they are. Which, if you're involved, there aren't a lot of those guys. How do you guys keep funding? How do we keep funding content? Yeah, it wasn't on our film that they earned money. No, it wasn't. I mean, how does participant stay finance? Because a lot of great studios have started and fallen apart. How do you guys stay finance so you can continue to support these kinds of films? Yeah, we at participant have been very fortunate to work with some of the filmmakers and the content creators that we've worked with. You know, you have a film like Wonder a couple of years ago, which doesn't feel like it's a big social change film, but it grows something like $300 million at the box office and empowers us to be able to make other types of film too. Something like Roma, right? Not a natural investment, but we are looking at the potential of stories from a different lens. And when you have Netflix coming on board with Roma or with American Factory, who also believe in see that potential and they're willing to bring additional financing to the table, it's because there's a response from the audience for these types of stories. And that is bringing in more financing and it's helping craft better deals. As we craft deals too with distributors, we're trying to put impact into those deals. So there's an audience response and there's a shift within the industry towards what is the worth of these types of stories? And it's growing, which helps our business and from our perspective, yes, we were first to the table when Jeff Skull started this company with the belief that stories can change the world. Everyone thought that was a crazy idea, now everyone's doing it, but we need to continue to innovate. How do we do that better? How do we bring others into the fold? And the fact that you're launching something that's in that vein, it's inspirational because there's power and the fact that we're in a growing ecosystem is meaningful. Well, if I may, one specific thing that happens is participant tries to sell their movies and at least recoup. And so with the American Factory participant and we took the film to Sundance and sold it to Netflix and higher ground and participant made a little bit of money, not a lot, but enough to recoup all what they had put in. And that's true for Roma and that's true for a lot of their other films. That's right. Hi, thank you for speaking. I think taking it broadly, like some of you have asked some questions, we see represented on the stage here obviously, production, filmmaking and philanthropy. And I'm curious if any of you have thoughts as the social impact entertainment space grows and we're seeing this sort of revolution, what some of the opportunities you're seeing around growth and also possibly gaps in this space and sort of where you might suggest energy is most needed to continue accelerating the growth we're seeing. You mean in terms of philanthropy? In terms of philanthropy, in terms of production, we're hearing here other companies that are being started in this space, just taking it a step bigger where you're seeing just sort of the industry move. Well, I think that's really oriented around like the production side, right? Yeah, well, okay, I can start a little bit with that. I think the way that we're thinking about how does impact happen? Impact does long term. So the life cycle of a piece of content, if you think about the release, can be finite. Even though having the film on Netflix will make sure that it exists in perpetuity and the scale is very large, the way that we approach the work, it oftentimes has a limited timeframe, but how is it that we can empower communities and movements over a longer period? And sometimes that requires additional investment. It requires additional collaboration with organizations that intersects with different issues. So we're thinking about that. How is it that we can collaborate beyond just one piece of content or support communities more holistically empowering them with content generally as a mechanism and as inspiration for change? And I guess from the J.P. Morgan perspective, it might be helpful to hear about how the content has been helpful in the conversations you're having. I mean, I think philanthropy shows up on both ends of this potentially. Obviously from where I sit, philanthropy we're positioned to do something about it. We're positioned to tag on to these community conversations and figure out what's the solutions oriented investment. I think where there's probably less understanding is how particularly when I think about arts and cultural philanthropy, how they leverage that grant-making capacity as equity to invest into these type of ventures, right? I think we know how to do that with like kind of traditional real estate for instance, right? We know how to, and small business development, we know how to throw equity into that deal to kind of get you over the hump till you get into the black and move forward. We don't necessarily know how to do that in the kind of arts culture and film space. And so I think there's probably some kind of emerging knowledge development that needs to happen in that space to help arts and cultural philanthropic organizations to think differently about how they invest in this space. I would just, you know, I'm not a philanthropist. I've never had that ability, let's say. But I feel like if someone's thinking about investing in the future of work, let's say, which let's say, face it, if we want to have a middle class in America, people who can actually spend money and keep the economy going, you have to have workers at the table. You have to have community people at the table in a real way, making them feel respected and listened to and make sure they have a base that they're speaking from. I just feel like I also would always emphasize, I think the Midwest is highly neglected, at least in my view, economically and shouldn't be because it's, again, it's that struggle for the heart and soul of America is going on there. I mean, we feel it around us every day. So those are two things, I don't know if that's helpful but are important to me. Well, one of our partners is an organization called Jobs to Build America and they have done some really ground-breaking work. You know that group? They're very much worth a little research. They've done some really ground-breaking work on working with companies and corporations to create jobs that have living wages and what we call good jobs. And lots of other things, like hiring workers who would normally not be seen as part of the labor force, gender, making sure that people of color and people who are women get hired, retraining, Jobs to Move America, you're shaking your head, is like a kind of a brilliant thing and it's expanding, actually. Jobs to Move America based in Los Angeles and what's the name of the woman who's? Madeleine Janssen? Yeah, Janice. Janice, yeah. I think we have time for one more question. Two, let's do two. Let's see. Yeah, this gentleman and then right behind you. Great, thank you Julia and Steven for the movie. I've seen it twice. Oh, that's so good. That's an amazing movie and one of my big takeaways was really the stark contrasting culture and approach to work between the Chinese and the American workers, that kind of collective approach versus the individualistic approach and that was one of my biggest takeaways and I think the film does a great job with that. My question is, do you think either in the making of the film or the impact the film has had since then has changed Fuyao at all or the chairman himself? He seems like a real introspective guy, like did he absorb any of this or process any of this? Did the company change? What do you guys think? The chairman has supported the film. We were nervous to show it to him of course because there's scenes that we knew he wouldn't like but he's, oh, Jacqueline with the mic right up here. Yeah, with the black jacket. Yeah, but he's been very supportive of it and wants to help get it out in China. The film, yeah, we don't know if it's impacted the culture yet so far. We do know that it sparked a lot of conversations in the factory but it's still kind of early days since the film moves. Yeah, we talk to workers a lot and there doesn't seem to be a lot of change. I will tell you one thing that'll be funny to people who've seen the film. We heard that people went around after the film came out on Netflix with duct tape over their mouth. As a sort of a protest because there's a scene in the film where- But wait, don't tell, don't tell. Sorry, no spoilers. Seven o'clock tonight. You have to watch the movie. Or Netflix. Okay, so, thank you. Hi, my name is Tracy and I want to kind of piggyback on something that Monique said as far as where energy could still be placed in learning and teaching and I want to expand that particularly with social impact stories and that may have a long term impact where you can't see it in the short term. My question is particularly on the philanthropic and investment opportunities, recognizing that these stories will change perception and that perception can influence where money flows and where it doesn't flow. So, is there an openness in the investment community and in the philanthropic community for that long term objective where you're seeking to change perception, recognizing that that's prerequisite to creating the type of major and sustainable change on the economic level as well, domestically and internationally? Yeah, so I think it is a gradual sea change that's happening in philanthropy. It is definitely a culture shift and we see some foundations that are moving on that kind of more center mass than others, right? And in a lot of ways it's also regionalized, right? Like, so you have perfect example like here in the San Francisco area, the San Francisco Foundation is looking at the social impact and worker voice very differently and very progressively in a way that you don't see necessarily across the country. So, but it's a slow and gradual sea change because oftentimes philanthropy in a lot of ways, the way we think about our grant making is how do we reach scale faster and how do we kind of follow the longevity of these investments over time? We know grants kind of there in cycles, right? And so how do you continue that progression over a longer sense of time? And you definitely see that where there's kind of really deep strategic market investment. You see a lot of that in Detroit right now. You see a lot of that in Chicago and other major cities that really have long-term philanthropic investment and that kind of gives more space for the narrative, more investment in the narrative shift to occur. But there's I think still a ton of work that has to be done. I mean, I think about for instance, Ford Foundation is an example where they have an approach to the future of work but their approach is really, in fact, they name it that it's the future of workers. Like their investment is in the future of workers and that the narrative becomes a really critical piece of that effort both to kind of just highlight the experience of the worker but then also to get the worker voice to have some cohesion because there are so many different kind of disparate angles to this issue. And so it's hard to make it sound more like a symphony to actually understand what is the perspective coming from that side of this discourse. And so it's very early days. I think it'll probably kind of accelerate and amplify as the economy continues to move at the pace that it's moving but we still have a lot of work to do in that space. And you know, the future of workers is also the, I see it from Dayton, Ohio, is the future of communities. You know, yeah, like where did our tax base go? People have $12 an hour jobs. They don't have, their taxes are not supporting the schools, are not supporting the renovation of communities. So it's not just about the individual person getting a better deal. It's also about what they then, through their taxes and their ability to give back, what they give to our communities and what that means to, again, America. You know, a lot of the Midwest we're suffering, not everywhere, but anyway, I won't go on anymore about the Midwest. Well, that's a great point to end on. I want you to join me in thanking our panelists today. Thank you.


Mae gennym, wrth gwrs, yn hyffordd y mynd. My name is Katherine Wheel, my chair of the Germany group, so we've a mixture of Germanic fields and a column of fields here. But as a group we're very fortunate to have Dr Woods with us at the moment. He holds an MSc and PhD in Economics from the University of Munster. He's been with the King Institute for the World economy Ieithio yn W Despite, hefyd yn ffawr i nimu Gwyl Gweithio Cynllunioedd Cymru ac Rhaid i'n gweithio'r unolus yn cyfrifio. Yn 2013 hefyd wedi'i gweithio'r Ffastriw i arweinyddion gydechrau'r Syrgrif, ynghylch, ond rydyn ni wedi cael eu rai'n ffordd o'r ysgol, oherwydd mae'r ysgol ddim yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn economiaid. Oherwydd, mae yna ei wneud ei ddweud, ac mae'n rhaid i'n gwmwybod i'r ysgol, a oedd ymwneud ymwybod i'r ysgol. Oherwydd, mae'n rhaid i'r ysgol, a'r ysgol yw'r ysgol, a'i ddweud i'r ysgol i'r ddweud i'ch ei ddweud, Ie, ddweud os yw ddwy'r cwun yw'r ffordd iawn eich cyfle. Mae'n ddweud gennym eich bod i'r unig hefyd. Mae'n ddweud i'ch ffordd iawn. Mae'n ddweud i'ch bobl yn ysgrifennu gwir yw'r sefydlain. Felly, y cael y gweld, mae'n ddweud y dyfodol yn y Ffrancfurt, ond y mae'r sgwyl wedi'i wneud y sylwg bod mae'n bwysig yn ymgylchedd opeth. Felly, mae'n gweithio'r bwysig yn ymgylchedd opethol, ond er mwyn i'n bwysig yn ymgylchedd opeth. Mae'r hyn mae'r cyntaf yma. Mae hyn mae'r cyntaf sydd ar gyfer y cyfrifiadau mewn hwn. A llwyddo anghylch y Tytol yn ni wedi'i ymdyn nhw yw ymddangos i'r grannu ym brwyciennu. Ymddangos i'r Cyfrifiadau fel nhw yw ymddangos i'r llwyddo am fod o'r cyflobol yn ymdyn nhw. Mae'r brwyciennu ymdyn nhw sy'n gweld godfell hynny? I did not dare changing it, but there's only one question mark in it and a year ago there would have been a second question mark already behind is there a boom in Germany at all. Well, this question is over now practically everyone agrees in the forecasting community in the macroeconomic community. Yes, there is a boom going on in Germany. So we only have to tackle with the second question mark. Is this sort of the seeds of crisis? And let me start with a kind of textbook like exposition first. What macroeconomists are concerned of is that actual production could deviate too much from potential output. So that we have overcapacity utilization and you may ask yourself what's so bad about overcapacity utilization. Isn't it great to have a boom to produce even more than you would sustainably be able to? Well, it's not good news to deviate from potential output because it is in the boom. And I will come back to this later in my talk. It's in the boom that we are seeing business models emerging that are non-sustainable. The boom by itself is non-sustainable. It's an over stretching of capacity utilization. And therefore we are allocating scarce resources to uses that at the end of their boom will turn out to be a misallocation. And therefore the boom and the exaggerations during the booms are the true course for the subsequent recession. So the more exaggeration we see in the boom, the deeper the correcting recession has to be. So if you're really interested in stabilizing the business cycle, do something about dampening the boom. This is the best recipe for not getting into a too deep recession. Unfortunately, mainstream macroeconomic policymaking has it rather the other way around. Once the crisis is there, people say, OK, now we have to spend more or we have to lower interest rates or whatever. It is a much better idea of really stabilizing an economy by preventing the boom to develop too strongly. Unfortunately, from the political economics perspective, this is extremely difficult task to do because the boom just feels good. Text revenues are coming in like crazy. Budget deficits are shrinking or even are running in surpluses and lots of money there that waits to be spent. And this is exactly the time when most of the most important political mistakes are made. And we're not only talking about technocratic business cycle stabilization. We are talking about human things. Think of the real estate boom in Spain. The peak of the boom, 25% of the male labor force work for the construction sector. And they were qualified people, qualified workers, skilled workers working there, but skilled for the construction business. And once this boom was over, these people fell back on their next best productivity level. And this very often wasn't really significantly above that of an unskilled person. So we are really talking about human well-being when we are trying to prevent these artificial booms from growing more and more. It's not only a macroeconomic technocratic fetish that we are following here. And where's Johnny? Well, according to our current diagnosis already in boom territory and we are approaching the peak of this boom. And let me very briefly show you why we come to this conclusion while also others follow us now in this conclusion by some forecasting and diagnostic material. And in the second part of the talk I will very briefly say something about what policy makers are supposed to do now and what are they most likely doing. Well, we are drifting towards overheating. What you see here in the bars is the degree of overcapacity utilization. If they are positive territory, then it's overcapacity utilization. If you're below the zero line, this means we are underutilizing our economic capacities. And what we are observing for five years in a row now is a very stretched upstream. Unusiwally stretched, therefore we call into the term like a chewing gum cycle. It takes much longer than usual for the typical stipulated pattern to develop. And therefore it was really difficult to diagnose in the first time. But now it becomes quite clear when you look at 2017, we are talking about positive awkward gas nearly 2%. And this is a lot. And as you will see this is not even the end of the story. Or this has been possible also due to labor migration which has led to also an increase of our potential growth rate without the immigration of labor. We are not talking about the refugees. It's a different story about the normal way of labor migration into Germany, in particular from Eastern member states of the European Union. They have contributed massively to the growth path here in Germany. But today capacity utilization is above normal levels and it's higher above normal levels. You may say well these potential output estimations are to some extent questionable. They are difficult. Yes that's true but we have other indicators as well. In particular we have surveys, we have asking firms what's about your capacity utilization. And whatever industry you look at you will get more or less the same answer via way of normal capacity utilization level. This is true for manufacturing. Construction sector is already at their capacity limits. They are booming already for a couple of years. And even if you look in the services sectors, statistics are not developed in this sector. But even their information that we have is they are running out of production capacity. The most important factor that they report in surveys that prevents them from reducing more is that they are running out of labor. So all these are clear signs of over capacity utilization. And this is our current GDP forecast of the 2.2% last year, another 2.5%. This year this is way above potential output growth which is around 1.7% in Germany. Also elevated a little bit stronger than normal. I'll come back to this later. And every year that you see GDP expanding stronger than potential output is growing you're ending up to over capacity utilization. And I don't want to go into all these details here but all the short term indicators that we have clearly indicate we will have a very strong first quarter, probably then a kind of weaker one. But the underlying trend is still clearly upwards towards higher capacity utilization. And this is a broad based expansion. Very oftenly you see in the business or the macroeconomic reporting that people are looking at net exports and their growth contribution of net exports. And then they come to the conclusion that oh Germany is only domestically driven. This is nonsense because netting out exports and imports would imply that all imports are only used for producing export goods which is obviously not the case. So what we are doing is we are allocating via input output calculations the imports that we are expecting to different uses to consumption goods, investment goods and exports goods. And if you do this exercise then you see that Germany is currently very much driven again by external business. As you know the external environment has improved a lot. In particular in the euro area, the euro area even without Germany is already also in positive territory in terms of the output gap. I think this has kind of happened without being noticed really by policy makers. So the alarm range should really be on now for everyone who is concerned about business cycle stabilisation. And again if you look at trade expansion in the euro area it looks kind of normal on average. But the two driving factors, or there are the two driving factors, one is France number one and number two is Germany. In these two countries alone today account for credit expansion in the euro area. And again looking at the euro area average can be extremely misleading as it was with respect to inflation rates prior to the European debt prices. But the ECP was on target ten years in a row, very proud. But obviously something can happen below the radar of inflation rates that produce a lot of turmoil in our economies. So very strong impact of the external economy, of the external environment. Consumption is not that strong anymore but still strong for Germany, for what Germans are used to. And now what we typically see or expect in such a boom investment spending is accelerated. I don't want to go too much into the details here. Again the messages exports are back on track, not as dynamic as they were prior to the great recession. But anyway we have to customer ourselves out more normal times. What we have seen prior to 2007 was not the standard way of economic operations. And are we very concerned about the protectionist wave that is rushing through the world economy? Well of course we are concerned. But we do not really believe that we will see something like escalating trade conflict. And this is because the whole debate is too trade centristic. If you look at the transatlantic economics phase what we see is they are much more interwoven by a capital flows than by a trade flows. And what I've shown to you here is other trade shares of trade from the EU to the US and from the US into the EU. It looks like well trade seems to be more important for European exporters than for American exporters. But if you look at the foreign dime investment possessions the picture is quite different. Then you see that the exposure of the United States in Europe in the European single market is much more important than the other way around. And just compare the sales volumes of US owned affiliates in the European single market compared to the exports shown out of the United States. Then you see that the business that the affiliates are making in the European Union are much much more important than their exports. And we believe that once the president tries to trigger such a trade conflict and disturbs the economic functioning of the EU then vital interests in the United States would be affected and they would push for a more rational policy stance in the EU. So just thinking in terms of retaliation measures we think it's a very bad idea. It's much better to focus on where is our mutual benefit out of having an integrated transatlantic space. And I think that very important people in the United States would support this. So therefore we are not that alarmed. We are concerned of course as anyone else is. But we think there are good reasons that you will not see this escalating trade conflict in the transatlantic EU economic space. And I said construction activity is already booming. We have now order books that are coming up coming near to the peeps in the mid 1990s. And this was when you really had very pronounced construction boom after your realification was probably unavoidable. But the reason that Germany became the chief man of the Europe in the second half of the 90s and the first half of the 2000s was because we have to shrink the construction sector again. So far we don't see the construction sector itself expanding that much, which is so far with news that the order books are already piling up three months. Merges, investment in machinery and equipment, merges and acquisitions as well, I did this first. We have quite a cheap ban now to offer for if you are interested. You feel free. Investment in machinery and equipment is also picking up not as pronounced as we would see it any forward. Cycles, there are probably at least two reasons or three reasons. One is the whole upswing is very stretched. Therefore, these accelerator effects are much more done than they usually are when you see a quick switch in capacity utilization rates. It's number one. Number two is maybe, and this is what people from the corporate sector tell us, our equipment has become more of the plasticity of our equipment has increased, which means that with the same hardware it is easier to produce new products just by exchanging the software. This might also explain why overall investment in machinery and equipment is kind of subdued. Plus, this country is running out of skilled labour. It's nice to have the machinery, but if you do not have someone who can work with it, then you would rather invest somewhere else where people are still available. So maybe these three reasons together explain why you're expecting, yes, an upswing of our investment, spending of corporates, but not as pronounced as we would forecast it if we stick to the patterns that we only used to in the past. Labour market is increasingly tight. I've shown you the immigration numbers. They will come down also because in those countries the economic situation is improving tremendously, particularly in the eastern part of the European Union. You see very strong growth numbers there, and this makes less likely that people migrate into Germany. We see it for, we could have a whole bunch of indicators here, but all indicators tell us the situation becomes more and more difficult to find. Labour, you see it in the unemployment rate, we are approaching full employment in this country. I wouldn't take the ILO number at face value because we here have important statistical problems to have the refugee immigrants reflected in this number. This is based on telephone surveys, and well these people aren't registered anyway, and even if someone asked that, we in Germany are currently working on a regular basis. Therefore the ILO number is probably over, it's not very reliable, but even registered unemployment is going down below 5%. The fiscal policy is really not ambitious. You see that although the fiscal budget is about 1%, the structural budget balance is shrinking according to the plans of the new government. There will not be a significant impact this year, just too late in the fiscal year to do anything that would act as a game changer, and the whole package is kind of end loaded. But next year you will see already some impact of what they are planning. Some observers are concerned, well six months without the government wouldn't this depress business sentiments and a negative impact on GDP. Well there's very very little evidence on that. If you look at other countries like Belgium, Spain, Netherlands, where the longer periods of not having a re-elected government, they've had quite well. For the libertarian I would say there are worse things in the world that have not had a re-elected government. So this is clearly nothing that would influence our forecast in any way. The medium term again is alarming. We are seeing the boom, the peak of the boom coming. And if you ask me how do you come up with this projection that we will then see the recession or the downswing, I should say, the downswing coming in 2020? Well this is not written in stone of course, but do we have a model for that? Well not really a model that gives us the exact date. But what we can do is we can look at what were the record high levels of capacity utilization of output gaps that we have observed in the past. And then we come to the conclusion that somewhere around 2020, maybe 21, we will see the end of the story. And then necessarily we will have the beginning of the downside. So those who are relying on their eternal boom will be clearly disappointed. And what we are concerned about is that two effects will show up at the beginning of the new decade. One is the downswing, so the correction of the boom. The second is it is also the beginning when demographics in Germany will no longer be compensated by immigration or higher participation rates of women or elderly people. Then the demographics become the dominating factor for German growth numbers. And on average German growth was 1.5%, over the last, let's say, two, three decades. This will then shrink at least 1%, maybe even below. The Bundesband is even more skeptical about that. This would not be a problem if just the whole country would shrink. But this is not the case. Most of the people will continue and live, which is good news, by the way, but they have to consume out of some income that they are no longer producing. And therefore we see that our social security system can really come under stress. And it's not good news if this beginning of the low growth period is accompanied by a business cycle doctor. This brings me very quickly to some risk and policy assessments very often here, in particular in financial markets. Booms don't die out of old age, they are murdered by policy makers, in particular by central banks. Thank you again. This is logically not possible. If a boom would be sustainable, wouldn't it be a boom, then it would just be on a higher growth trajectory. But which we are not according to all the indicators that we have. So there is some exaggeration going on. And the problematic thing again that may reiterate this of the boom is that business people can no longer distinguish between, Am I doing good in my business because I have a great product? Or am I doing good because I'm just swept away with all the others? And well, the natural human response is my product, it's my success. So people are tempted to build up business models that are not viable in the long term. And they must be corrected. And this is what, at the end of the day, squanders scale resources. To put it another way, you could say this diagram that I've shown in the beginning is somewhat misleading. It could convey the message that well, sometimes we are above normal, sometimes we are below, but on average it's the same then the growth trend. This is not the case. The more we fluctuate around the trend, the more resource misallocation happens in the boom, and the flatter is the overall output trend. Therefore overall well-being, material well-being depends on dampening of these factors. As I said, there are these endogenous distortions that are building up. And we are also seeing an easy-going mentality in policymaking.  I would just like to mention very briefly that you must not forget that the whole economic development, not only in Germany, but also in the euro area, but in Germany in particular, is accompanied by absolutely extraordinary monetary policy systems that is trying to bring interest rates down below their market levels. But what does this mean? Well, the ECB says we want to bring up inflation rates back to our target of near 2%. But by so intervening, we do not only affect possibly the average rate of inflation, but you are necessarily affecting relative prices. Every product price, each of every product price, has an interest component in it. And the more distant the product is from its final use for production, the more important this interest rate component is. Therefore, if you are manipulating the interest rate, you are necessarily also manipulating relative prices. And you all know relative prices is what is steering our market economies. So we are not talking about peanuts here. We are talking about the machine room of our economic system. And we are also not talking about expansionary monetary policy for a year or two years where it would not cause too much damage. We are talking about an extended period, 7, 8, probably until we see an exit to this, if we see it, of a whole decade. And a lot can happen in terms of new distortions, new production structures emerging that are again not viable due to the relative price distortion caused by monetary policy. And this spills over to financial stability. Financial crisis is nothing else but a mirror image of a massive distortion in the physical capital stock of an economy. When it turns out that the physical capital stock and all the production structures around it cannot longer provide the yields that are once expected to be produced, then you see a financial crisis. Because then you do not have the individual business model that flocks which is normal in the ongoing business world, it is too many due to the too low interest rates in a systematic way investors were guided towards the misallocation of capital. And to correct this is extremely painful. Plus we are currently overestimating, rather than underestimating, potential output. This is due to the mechanics, statistical characteristics of our economic approaches here. So it is more likely that we are underestimating the current output gap than we are overestimating it. Plus people take for granted that there are nearly 2 million people who came as equals refugees into our country will stay here. Well some of them probably will stay, but what happens if there is again peace in Syria in the other countries? Obviously many of them would want to go back. So we cannot take for granted that they stay and consider them as if they were already, naturally, part of the labour force in Germany. So at least we should be cautious about not taking this for granted. What we are deploring is a very negative policy response. I've already talked about prosyclicial fiscal policies and I don't want to overstretch it, I would say. It's not as rigorous as it should be, but it's not really extremely prosycical, but at least going in the wrong direction. But what we are seeing is an expansion of the welfare state and this makes the whole system even less prepared for the democratic change that is coming in the next decade, or it's not coming somewhere in the future, it's coming in a couple of years before the front door. And therefore we are aggravating the intergenerational conflicts that are already quite strong in the next decade. We have a restribution debate that goes along the lines that we want to increase the guaranteed minimum income levels.  There's a huge span, roughly 1,000 euros, from someone who's unskilled who enters the labour market. He has a couple of hundreds of euros that he can keep for himself, but then there's a very long period, a very long gap that he has to overcome until his net income increases if he earns more money. And this is a disincentive for becoming part of the labour force and gaining all the qualifications, et cetera, et cetera. This is really something that should be tackled, we don't see it actually in our current debate. And something that I call the Gulliver syndrome, we are reducing flexibility more and more and this will make it even more difficult to master the upcoming upswing. What do I mean by the Gulliver syndrome? It's well, we are introducing a minimum wage, equal pay regulations, a rent break, gender quota, full-time, part-time guarantees, et cetera, et cetera. Each of these policy measures does not keep the economy on the ground and prevent entrepreneurs from becoming active. But it is the sum of all these strings that keep Gulliver on the ground as they keep economic activity on the ground that makes it more difficult for entrepreneurs really to invest in their business and to take some risks. It's a nonsensical debate just to look at one isolated policy instrument and say this is not doing that much harm. Well, of course it does not do so much harm. But even there, even a minimum wage is below the equilibrium wage of the labour market like in southern Germany. In Munich, a minimum wage of 9.7 Euros is nonsensical because the free labour market would show you a higher wage. Nevertheless, it is a hindrance to production. Why? Because you have to report that or you have to show that you are paying the minimum wage and so easy to circumvent it. You just make a contract 30 hours a week. This is an awkward contract. But at the same time, we have an agreement for four months. So it's very easy to go around it. What's the response of the government? Well, you restrict the regulations that these extra contractual arrangements are provided. This is the same for the other regulations as well. So it's not only that we are interfering with the price mechanism. We are creating a lot of extra bureaucracy which, if it becomes overwhelming, will be a blocking strategy economic activity. So much for our current assessment of the situation in Germany. So we are not having a party in our institute. We are very concerned that people don't take this boom serious and just say, well, nice to have. Now is the time to respond, but so far we have not seen the debate and the policy response that would be accurate. Welcome.


Hi, and welcome to the Zephyr Developer Summit. My name is Yuval Perez, and I'm going to talk to you a little bit about time to market for embedded applications using Zephyr and Pigweed, and I've added a little bit of an extra twist to it, Firebase. If you need to contact me about this talk or any other talks I've done, please feel free to reach out to me via email, discord, or GitHub. So I've worked at a couple of startups in my life, and really I've found out that nowadays, more than ever, every company timeline is everything. And this is true for even personal projects. If I have a pet project that I'm working on, I don't want to be spending a lot of extra time on boilerplate logic. And once you've launched a product, even iterating on it or tweaking it is hard enough as it is. This talk kind of came about because I've used tools such as Firebase. It's not the only one, but it does kind of bring everything together in one place. And it's a really good way to not have to predict exactly what your users are going to do once you've already launched the product. And this is something that is available to most Android iOS, web applications, servers, things that are very far removed from what we do in our day-to-day. But we're going to see how it's not. So some highlights that we're going to focus on is remote configs, being able to use our kind of Firebase account to change how our EC behaves. And that might mean turning on and off a feature or maybe tweaking a threshold for some calculation. We're going to check user engagement in real time as well and kind of track what features are being actively used and how users are using our application. And then we'll take a quick peek into crash analytics through Firebase. This, I will give a disclaimer, does not work yet, but it doesn't mean it can't. So the bridge between those two, between our Zephyr embedded application and the Firebase console is Pigweed. And we want to move quickly. And the question is, can we have both of these, both the embedded application and this quick iteration? And the answer is yes. And we're going to build a product right here in the next probably 15 minutes. So what we're going to need to do is decide what the product is. I've got one in mind. And then we're going to set it up, configure logging, set up the application logic, such as tracking events, setting up remote configs for how we're going to modify our algorithms at runtime, and then give a peek into how crash analytics could work. So the product is something I've been wanting to do for a long time is building an automatic gear shifter for bicycles. One day I'll actually build it.  We can measure cadence, power, speed, gravity vector, and whether or not the user overrode our decision. And the output is the gear selection. We have a rear and a front cassette. So we're going to start off with a much simpler algorithm. And what we're going to do is we're going to take the user's cadence here, which you can see fluctuates just under 100 in this case. And then the amount of power that they're outputting. And then we can effectively divide it, right? We can get energy per rotation of the pedal by taking the power divided by the cadence. And we can see that. And we're going to set a simple threshold that I think was 160 or around 160. And if we cross that threshold, we need to shift down, basically. I mean, the user is not spinning faster and they need a little bit of help. They're pushing a little too hard and they need the lower gear. So the workflow that comes through here is we're going to collect a bunch of data, compute the energy per rotation. And then here I also included this optional step for computing the slope. And then compare against the threshold, which is the green line. So this is to detect if we're going uphill, maybe. And then if we pass the threshold, we're going to shift. If we fail the threshold, we're going to wait. So setting it all up, we're going to need Zephyr and we're going to need Pigweed. So we're going to add these to our manifest. And then we're going to enable C++. I believe now this actually became deprecated. So don't do that one unless you're using an older version of Zephyr. Now we're going to initially start off with a really simple main CC. And we're going to just log. Hello for Zephyr logging because we're going to need to debug things and we might want some logging along the way. When we go to build it, we're going to need the Pigweed environment. So every time you run West Update and you pull the latest version of Pigweed from main, you're going to need to update the bootstrap.sh.  And then every other time this is a much faster one, it just activates the virtual environment. If you're setting up a virtual environment for Zephyr, I would suggest just leverage the one that's already set up in Pigweed. So once you've run Bootstrap, that's when you do the pip install Zephyr scripts requirements.txt. And they will basically just merge the two virtual environments into one. When we go to build it, it's yeah, that's it. We just build our application, just like any other. So the new kconfig we're going to add here is we're going to add this tokenized RPCs. And what this does, it does quite a lot. It effectively starts up a server on our EC that is going to be the host to one or more services, RPC services. The first one is going to be this tokenized RPC service, which will automatically get added for you. And any log commands that you have will be tokenized, meaning the string is going to be reduced to a four byte hash. And it will automatically get passed through to the RPC service that logs it. So this is not 100% required, but it is the most optimal way to get started, really. You can feel free to look through the kconfig for Pigweed logging. We have plain Zephyr logs, which means everything just gets passed through to the Zephyr backends. And we have plain tokenized logging, which means that the logs are going to come through as a base 64 encoded tokens. So Pigweed is going to actually intercept all the Zephyr logs and it's going to create those hash based tokens. And then it's going to put everything into a log entry message and pass it into a service stream, meaning effectively the EC is going to just push this out through the UART. And if nobody's listening, it's just going to go into DevNol. If you want to grab it, what you need to do is basically just run this Python 3. There's a console involved with Pigweed already. You have to be inside the Pigweed environment to do this. You pass in the device. In this case, I was connected to USB 1 and then you need to give it the token database so it can decode the tokens that were come through. The other alternative is a web console. If you want to use the web console, you're going to jump right in here and you're going to have this really nice web UI. You can connect directly to your device. You can upload different token databases. There's a couple of settings in here to allow you to change how you want to connect to it, whether it's plain logging, base 64 log encoding or RPC tokens. There are extensions coming soon where you can even send RPC commands through this web console so you can actually pretend, kind of mock the host of your embedded controller. If you want to decode anywhere else other than these consoles and the Python and the web consoles, you can very easily do this through all of the Pigweed RPC-supported targets which are in Python C++, TypeScript and Java if you're maybe using your phone to control this gear shifter. The actual core application logic is we're going to dive into a little bit of math. It won't be too bad. We're going to put things into a buffer of these Q31 values. Now, if you're not familiar with the Q31 values, I highly suggest checking out the Zephyr DSP Digital Signal Processing Library. It will make your life much easier when doing some of these fixed point arithmetic. The key thing we need to know about it is really it just has a range of negative one to one and a bit shift value for scaling. So if the shift is one, the range is just multiplied by two, right? If the shift is two, the range is now negative four to four. If the shift is negative one, then the range is minus half to half, so on and so forth. And now we're going to get the current threshold and we're going to use Remote Config RPC through that, which is the new thing that we've added for this talk. This is not an official pigweed thing, but it is built on top of pigweed. And then we're going to iterate through the buffer and compare it against the threshold. And then whenever we get a gear shift, we're going to register an event with Firebase. So how do we track these events? That's the most important. We want to know when the system is doing things in general, while abstracting away the personal identifying information, PII. So the way this works, we've created a simple service, right? This is going to be a Firebase event service. We're going to create a service stream here, return to the client. And this works very similar to how the logging does, except for in logging, we don't mind losing events in the event service. We probably don't want to, we want to avoid missing them. So what we've done is added one little bit of caching here. If there is no host, right? If the user isn't using their phone actively to connect to this device while they're cycling, we're going to save things to an event cache. And the event cache can have different rules, right? This just depends on how the application, how complicated you want your application to be. Maybe it can be first in, first out, right? You can evict the oldest, evict the newest events. You can even have different signals to kind of turn on maybe the Bluetooth if the event cache passes a certain watermark so that we can connect and dump it and then shut down the Bluetooth connection to save power. But the general idea here is we're going to pass one or more of these events over to the host. And then the host is the one that's actually responsible for passing these over to Firebase. So the idea is the EC does not need a live internet connection. But the application can pretend like the connection exists. And in the actual Firebase console, you can see here, I actually got this fully piped and we have connections, first visits basically every time, new devices that came online, right? It attracts these page views, but those are kind of different areas of the application that I called pages, different sessions. And then you can see two unique users for this because they're two devices. We don't get any PII obviously, but Firebase also comes with a debug live view, which is really, really nice for debugging these events. So you can see here when I basically first came online, I went into the original, the kind of entry point for the application. The application configured itself to transport mode, provided RPC as the mode here. So this is a parameter to the transport mode event and then synchronize this database, the token database, and then got the full connection. And so these events were all kind of cached and then it was all dumped right here. So once we have events, we probably want to see how different users are going through things. And having remote config is the way to do that. And this is just the kind of inverse service. It pipes data from the server to the host. And then when the EC gets a connection to the host, we're going to pull the latest and then cache those configurations. And Firebase supports technically four. I've only implemented three because I couldn't think of a good reason to have a blob type of thing here. We have these ints, booleans, and strings, and then we get client stream. So we might get one or more of these values when the host connects to the EC. And when we look at the remote config console, we can see we can add them here. We can add new parameters. We can tweak them. We can then select also what percentage of the users. And this is where it gets really interesting. So in our example of setting a threshold, I'll go back to our graph here. So we set a threshold and maybe 160 joules per rotation in this example. And we maybe are seeing that we are getting a lot of events where the user manually overrode. So we shifted maybe up or down a gear. And then the user shifted back up immediately afterwards, right? Those are events that we can track when the user shifted in the opposite direction within maybe five seconds of when we shifted. So our goal is to reduce the numbers of those events. And what we can do is set this threshold as a remote config, right? It's a simple int remote config. And we can then use a B testing to set maybe 50% of our users to have 160 as the threshold and then 50% of the users to have 165 as the threshold. And then we can compare the events from those two groups and see which one worked better. Once we decide, we can push the same value to all of our users as the new baseline. The other thing that we can do with the Boolean one is maybe add a flag that guards it, right? So one of the earlier flow diagram that I provided showed that we want to maybe take into account the gradient. So we use an accelerometer to measure the down vector relative to the bicycles forward rolling. And we can say, OK, well, maybe we want to tweak the threshold by percentage depending on the gradient. And we can then maybe just enable or disable that entire code path using remote config. So crash reporting, like I said, is the experimental point. And this works with kind of the cache being the assumed path, right? The previous ones are if there is no connection, then go to cache and then flush it on connection. Now what we have is when we crash, we're going to hit our trap. We're going to log all the crash report information. And then when the EC boots back up and it gets a connection, the Crashlytics server is going to stream basically down. If we're connected, we're going to get pull the cache data and we're going to flush it into the host. Like I said, this doesn't quite work yet because Firebase specifically did not have a free form crash reporting. It's possible I've started looking into maybe using their Android NDK, the native development kit to kind of piggyback and have a almost a backdoor into Firebase. But that I couldn't get that to work quite yet. There are other crash analytic platforms that will allow you to do this. I just wanted to keep everything under the same umbrella for this talk, which is why this wasn't quite working yet. So finally, getting this all together, what this looks like, we've launched a product that makes a lot of assumptions on the threshold, has maybe a couple of different configurations on the code path for making the decision. And the beautiful thing about it is we can make informed decisions not based on a small study inside of our own company, which is not actually a company in my house, a pet project, and spend a lot of time where we can ship this to users and then use AB testing to configure these things and use analytics based on events and to drive our product into a better and more fine tuned location, which means that we've actually hit the market before having to spend a lot of money on research, a lot of time on research, and so on and so forth. The addition of crash analytics will allow us to make sure that users are getting the reliable service that they're hoping for. So in our example, right, we've added an event for manual gear overrides. We talked about that when we shifted and then the user shifted to correct us, or maybe the user shifted without any of our shifts. Meaning we missed an opportunity to do this correctly. We used Remote Config to set the threshold and we can improve our algorithm in order by AB testing and making sure we're getting the user behavior that we wanted. So if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me. My contact info is on the second slide of this and I'll be happy to answer any questions that you might have. Thanks for everything. Bye.