Ang karunungan ay kapangyarihan. Let's put that power to the test today here on KCHECK. Hello everyone ako po si Gabby Concepcion, the attorney not-the-artista with another season of teaching and learning here on KCHECK. Patuloy pa re na paghanap natin ng magustong sanayin at palawakin ng brain power nila through competition. Alumin natin kung kaya nila ang brain workout na inihanda natin for them this season. Samahan niyo kami until the final week of competition which will reveal our newest KCHECK champion. Ang apat natin daily winners ang dadaan sa ating karunungan check sa araw na ito. Denny, this week's top scorer with 275 points is a sports science student from U.K. Dileman and an avid runner with a fascination for history, music and the human body. Sanot naman Patrick, Patrick with 120 points is a student of Kolehiyo de Montalban taking up computer engineering. His hobbies are listening to OPM and underground rap. Next, bringing 200 points to today's challenge is John Vincent. JV is a business administration undergraduate at U.P. Dileman. Mix-handed but not ambidextrous, his OPM favorite is Cup of Joe. And finally, a third-year bachelor of sports science student, Sam is part of the U.P. Track and Heel team. This horror film buff comes to the KCHECK Studio with a score of 65 points. These four will be competing under the watchful eyes of today's KCHECK panel of experts. First off, Professor Glesia Tienza of the College of Arts and Letters, U.P. Dileman. We also have Professor Neil Santillian, former chairperson of the U.P. Dileman Department of History. And last but not least, Assistant Professor Marla Andriga from the Department of Biology of U.P. Manila. At na yung contestants, na rito na ang first round, which is also your first opportunity to earn points. Buzz in, but wait till you acknowledge before you answer para di sayang ang effort. Each correct answer is worth 10 points. Let's begin. Let's begin. Question number one. Who held continuous positions as president or prime minister of Russia since 1999? Benny. Vladimir Putin. Vladimir Putin is correct. KCHECK. Question number two. What word that starts with the letter Z means to move alternately between left and right? Maybe. Zigzag. Zigzag is correct. KCHECK. Question number three. If you rearrange the letters in the phrase legal noses, you will spell out the name of what American city. JV. Los Angeles. Los Angeles is correct. KCHECK. Question number four. The island of Borneo contains the states Sabah and Sarawak, which belong to which Southeast Asian country? Sam. Indonesia. Indonesia is wrong. JV. Brunei. Brunei is wrong. Malaysia. Malaysia is correct. KCHECK. Question number five. In what Olympic combat sport do competitors grapple each other? Sam. Judo. Judo is wrong. Let me proceed with the question. Grapple each other in events called freestyle and Greco-Roman. Benny. Wrestling. Wrestling is correct. KCHECK. Question number six. Which martial arts using the hands and feet to deliver and block blows has a name that is Japanese for empty hand? JV. Karate. Karate is correct. KCHECK. Question number seven. Which country in Britain is called the birthplace of golf because it is where the first golf club is located? England. England is wrong. Benny. Ireland. Ireland is wrong. Sam. United Kingdom. United Kingdom is wrong. Only Patrick can answer if you want to. Okay, the correct answer is Scotland. Question number eight. What zoological class of animals do frogs and toads belong to? JV. Amphibians. Amphibians is correct. KCHECK. Question number nine. In mental math, what is the median of the five values five, six, seven, ten, and 99? JV. Seven is correct. KCHECK. Question number ten. In Philippine history and geography, Nueva Vergara became what present-day city, which is the largest in Mindanao, JV? Davao. Davao or Davao City is correct. KCHECK. Question number eleven. What name, literally meaning fortress inside the city is given to the group of buildings in the center of Moscow that serves as the official seat of the government of Russia? JV. White House. White House is wrong. Anyone can steal? Hindi po umakot, okay. So the correct answer is Kremlin. Last question for this round. Number twelve. Who was the Spanish naval commander of King Charles, the first to compete with the first circumnavigation of the world? Benny. Madjalan. Madjalan is wrong. Anyone can steal? Miguel Lopez de Licazpi. Miguel Lopez de Licazpi is wrong. Patrick and Sam can steal? Sam. Roy Lopez de Villalobos. Villalobos is wrong. Patrick. Okay, the correct answer is Sebastian Elcano. And that ends round number one. And after that first round, we have JV in the lead with 50 points, followed closely by Benny with 40. And Patrick and Sam with a lot of catching up to do. Medyo intense. Ang round na yun. Ang lalakas at ang nabilis nilang mag-press ng father. So, of course, we're in the midway in the competition. At susodod na, ang round two sa pagbabalik ng K-check. Welcome back to K-check. Points rika po na tayo. JV is leading with 50 points, followed by Benny with 40 points. And Patrick and Sam tayo panghumabol sa ating susodod na mga rounds. And so it's now time for round two contestants. Remember, there is a twist in this round. As always, wait to be acknowledged before answering. Otherwise, your answer will not be given any credit. Each correct answer is worth 20 points. But you lose 10 points if you answer incorrectly. Let's begin. This is round two. Question one. The gemstones Ruby and Sapphire are types of which natural mineral which is the hardest next only to the diamond? The correct answer is corondom. Question number two. Which tiny principality on the Mediterranean coast bordering France is famous for car racing, casinos and its majestic Larvoto Beach? Benny. Monaco. Monaco is the correct answer. Kcheck. Question number three. The French sculptor Frederick Bartaldi's greatest work is a 300 foot tall statue located in New York. JV. The Statue of Liberty. The Statue of Liberty is the colossal work located in New York created by the French sculptor Bartaldi. The answer is correct. Kcheck. Question number four. What burrowing nocturnal mammal from Africa eats ants and termites and has a name that might be JV. Anteater. The answer is incorrect. That might be the first entry in an English dictionary. Artvark. Artvark is the correct answer. Kcheck. Question number five. In sports, before being disqualified for drug use, which American cyclist won the Tour de France? A record seven consecutive times from 1999 to 2005. The correct answer is Lance Armstrong. Question number six. What new term refers to the activity of spending a lot of time looking at a phone or a computer and reading negative news stories? This is so new even I have never heard of it. The correct answer is Doom Scrolling. Question number seven. What is the name of the anonymous British graffiti artist known for his anti-authoritarian art often done in public places? The correct answer is Banksy. I alam do ni Ben Lee. Question number eight. What is the name of the second longest river in the Philippines, which is about 370 kilometers long, and passes through Potabato City? It is the appropriately named Rio Grande de Mindana. Question number nine. What English word for a machine comes that from the Czech word for forced labor and was introduced in Karel Kappex Play R-U-R. The correct answer is robot. Question number ten. In science, what do you call the organic compounds composed of molecules containing both amin and carboxyl functioning groups that make up proteins? These organic compounds are called amino acids. Question number eleven. Which 17th century English doctor became the first person to comprehensively describe the circulation of the blood in the human body? The correct answer is William Harvey. Last question for this round. Question number twelve. In the Pacific Ocean, lies an island known for monumental statues called Moal. What is this famous island is named after a Christian festival? Benny. Easter Island. Easter Island is the correct answer. K-check. And that's it for round two. All right, point three, ka po na tayo. Benny is leading with 80 points followed by JV with 60 points. Sam has 20 points and Patrick has a chance in our next round. Our ultimate pagalingan round is next, here on K-check. Come back everyone. Benny is leading with 80 points followed by JV with 60 points. We have Sam with 20 points and Patrick, kedi ka pang humabol. The race to finish on top continues with our ultimate pagalingan round. Remember, sa ating panel of experts magagaling ang mga katanungan, the end of this round will reveal our weekly winner. Here, correct answers are worth 30 points each at my 15-point deduction for wrong answers. Let's begin. So exciting tung round na to kaya umpisahan na natin. Prof. Glesy. This portion of the theater is used by performers before they enter a scene. They do this for scene work or for storing equipment. What do you call this unseen portion of the theater? Letter A, the backstage. Letter B, the off stage. Letter C, the front of stage. Letter D, the wings. And letter E, the storage room. Ben E, a backstage. Wrong. Answer is letter D, the wings. Okay, check. Pero na tayong bagong contender for the lead. Okay. Prof. Neil, next. Question number two, who was the historian that successfully disputed the authenticity of the code of kalanchaw? A, yudoro agon silo. B, Otley Bayer. C, William Henry Scott. B, CEO sa Lazar. E, Samuel Tan. Tamang sagot, I letter C, William Henry Scott. Prof. Mario. Which of these materials is the best conductor of electricity? A, rubber. B, glass. C, wood. D, copper. E, plastic. D, copper. D, copper is correct. K, check. What do you call the range of tones in the human voice created by a certain vibratory pattern in the vocal tone? Phones. Letter A. GV, vibrato. Wrong answer. I will continue with a question. Letter A, letter B, the sound register. Letter C, the sense register. Letter D, the vocal register. And letter E, movement register. Danny, the vocal register. The answer is letter D, the vocal register. K, check. Prof. Neal. Question number five. Sinong unang obispo maximo? Ta iglesya filipina independiente. Ang inilual na simbahan matapos ang himagsikang filipino. A, galikano, apasible. B, rigorio aglipay. C, Isabelo de los Reyes. D, Felix Manalo. I, candido Tirona. Bigger gorio aglipay. Ang tamang sagot ay letter B, rigorio aglipay. K, check. When you front-center? Oonga. Napaka exciting. Prof. Marla. What is the term for the event where a moon moves into the shadow of its planet? A, lunar eclipse. B, solar eclipse. C, apogee. D, perigee. E, hybrid solar eclipse. A, lunar eclipse. Eclipse is correct. K, check. Next question. The monument or the monument in Caloocan depicts the fight for freedom during the Revolution against Spain. Who created this sculptural masterpiece? Letter A, Guillermo de Vega. Letter B, Guillermo Manalo. Letter C, Guillermo Solis. Letter D, Guillermo Tolentino. And letter E, Francisco. Sam. D, Guillermo Tolentino. The answer is letter D, Guillermo Tolentino. K, check. Prof. Mio. Question number eight. Saanong kasunduan ang nagtakda sa pagtigil ng paglalaban na mga Pilitino at Español ng 1887? A, alapan. B, biak na ba to? C, kawit. B, biak na ba to? Ang damang sagot ay letter B, kasunduan sa biak na ba to. K, check. New frontrunner, Prof. Marla. Which of the following is the best role of mangroves in coastal ecosystems? A, providing habitat for land-based animals. B, reducing coastal erosion. C, promoting algal blooms. D, increasing salinity levels. E, decreasing carbon storage. Saan. B, reducing coastal erosion. B, reducing coastal erosion is correct. K, check. So we now enter our last series of questions. So let's have it, Prof. Mio. Okay. He may well be considered as one of the earliest Pilitino playwrights with a place punto al pasig and el consejo de los dioses as his well-known plays. What is the name of this famous writer? Letter A, Francisco Baltazar. Letter B, Epifanio de los Santos. Letter C, Andres Bonifacio. Letter D, José Rizal. And letter E, Apolinario Mabini. Sir is letter D, José Rizal. Prof. Mio. Question number 11, sa anong imperio na namayani mula 1501 hanggang 1736, ang nagbigaydaan na napasailalim ang Iran sa ganap na control ng Shia Islam. A, Abbasid. B, Akimini. C, Safavid. B, Sasanid. E, Ottoman. Beni. E, Ottoman. Malay. Safavid. Question. What is the significance of Avogadros number in chemistry? A, it defines the number of molecules in one mole of a substance. B, it defines the number of elements in a compound. C, number of electrons in an atom. D, it describes the number of protons in an element. Or E, it establishes the number of isotopes of an element. Beni. A, it defines the number of molecules in one mole of a substance. A is correct. K-check. And that's it for our K-check, ultimate pagalingan round na hindi natin malaman until the very end. Kung sino between Benny and JV, ang mananalo, but there has to be a winner. So congratulations to Benny, our K-check weekly winner. With a final score of 140 points, we'll see Benny again in the semifinals when he competes with our other weekly winners. But of course, we need to mention that JV, almost by a hairline, should also be happy in our weekly win. So thank you also to the other contestants, Patrick, JV and Sam. Palakpakan natin ang ating mga contestants. And of course, to our panel of experts, we have Professor Glesy, Professor Neil and Professor Marla. Once again, I'm Jules Gia. And I'm attorney Gaby Concepcion. We'll see you again next week here on K-check.


I'm a little worried about these guys when I kill David here there. Are they gonna be able to get me in the air?  I'm on the phone for a minute because I think the phone's kind of important Are we going into winter?  I want to hear that in your voice when you're speaking David Here's what we're gonna do. I'm on the phone with you. I'm like, hey David Thank you so much for giving me all the information on the 2018 f-150. I saw it online for 20 9 9 by the way What's your best price? We're gonna take so much for calling in about and asking for that I'm very excited to what we do here is actually market-based pricing So we actually use very expensive software that prices all our vehicles for us and in Ken Garf We actually have the process that we so what we actually do we actually prices all our cars for us So that we were price number one number two and number three in the market to offer our best price for a high-volume store That honestly we offer our best price for our customer. Did I fend it anyway by offering our best price? Good job. All right. All right Nathan said he was gonna take his soul, right? All right, Nathan. Hey, thank you so much for giving me the information on the 2018 f-150 I sold online for 29 9 by the way, what's gonna be your best price? Hey Andy? Thank you so much for calling in today and asking about that for it. It's been a great vehicle Absolutely love these you chose an awesome truck here What I want to tell you here is I'm so sorry as I've been talking on the phone that I have not explained how our pricing works So we have a very nice system very expensive system that compares all of our market prices for our vehicles So I start with my best foot forward and give you the best price right out the gate So that way I don't have to waste your time when you come in here and you can get home You can get doing some things with your life. Nobody wants to spend all day at the car dealership But that way I get you my best price and if I'm offended you in any way by getting that price for you out front Let me know and I'll see what I can do to help you out better. Okay. Good job. Listen guys number one give a round of applause Okay. All right. All right. Now listen. I want everybody to do me a favor. By the way, these guys both did a good job Okay, they both did a good job everybody just write this down on a piece of paper real quick And then I'll go over this write down good great and unstoppable. Okay, okay? I need this to always stay with you until the end of time. Okay, good great and unstoppable These three words are the words that I've preached my entire life that there's three levels of people Okay, and the goal is is that that they did a good job. That was a good job. Okay, they didn't say well We you know, that is our best price The worst thing you could ever say on a phone pop is when someone says hey What's your best price and you say that is my best price when you say that is my best price Let me explain what it is that you're saying. You're saying that you're unwilling to work with them. Do you hear me? Okay, I know that you may have a store that doesn't they put online like one-stop shop, whatever, right?  They got a little bit of a dealing Maybe right do you think when they're picking up the phone that they may really love your vehicle? And that's why they're asking the question. What's your best price because it's a freaking buying question. I think so The way you handle that buying question will be whether they get in their car and they come down. Well, I'm asking you right now What's your best price?  It's really the first time that the customer is getting a taste of what a Negotiation is going to even be like with you You're gonna give them a bad taste or a good one and by the way you say you're gonna give them a good one But it can only be a good one if your words are on point Okay, does that make sense? So let's do this Good great and unstoppable. I only want unstoppable I give a word track on this one that is unstoppable The goal is is that there's a couple things that you have to have you have to have massive certainty You have to have massive believability, right? And you have to have a little bit of like Belief in yourself that the customer can feel does everybody know what the term definition Persuasion means it means transfer of emotion, right? And can I say something real quick before we handle the word track? Do you guys know that if the customer doesn't like you they'll ask objections like this? Hmm, I think about that real quick. Okay guy calls on the 2018 F-150. I'm like, oh my god, man I'm gonna tell you this right now one to ten this trucks in 11. Look, we get tons of pre-owned inventory guys It's a 2018 it's got 36,000 miles if I walk down here and cover the odometer You literally think it had zero miles on it. You're gonna be mind blown Look when the guy traded it in there was literally three sets of formats Let me ask you a question. You know a lot of people in life You know anybody driving around with three sets of formats in the truck. I don't think so. That's called massive OCD right massive the guy that owned this truck. I think he had it Okay, and guess what when I walked outside? I thought it was a brand new truck Nobody's ever drove but I turned it on it's got 36,000 miles on it when I drove it I took it 85 down the highway.   So nice. I actually call my wife I don't need a truck and I asked her could we buy one? So the truck you're calling on sir the one that I have if I had a hundred of these I could sell a hundred in a day That truck is still available, but let me answer your price question.  I want to see this truck. Does that make sense? Am I right? How do you sound on the phone?  Hey is this vehicle still available? By the way, we're gonna do phone training after lunch You guys will be ready.  The good deal is you can sound that way I just told you how to sound. You see here's the test. Here's the answers to the test It's that easy. You just got to be consciously paying attention But there has to be a word track that you can say after treating somebody great. Does that make sense? Okay, let's hear what that word track would be and you've heard me say it a million times But I'm gonna say this if I've said it a million times. Are you consciously listening where you can say it, right? You should right? Okay, one of my coaches I don't care who does it anybody who wants to handle it Danny you got it Hey, I'm so glad you asked that our company uses what's called market-based pricing and research shows that 90% of our customers Don't want to negotiate and haggle and want to get the best price up front. It's 2021. It's the age of transparency That's why I use very expensive and accurate tools that find vehicles like ours in the marketplace right now Then those tools actually price our vehicles for us to ensure we're always price below market and according to the stats on this Particular vehicle we're actually price below market, but not only great at price But we're actually high in all their critical areas important to you and your family like price payments and trade-ins by the way Would you be trading in a vehicle with us today? That's it. He diverted Okay


OK, first question. How do developers ensure that users of the decentralized applications, dApps, have access to Ethereum and IPFS clients? If you create an awesome dApp, how can you be certain that everyone who uses it has a reliable connection to Ethereum or IPFS? This is one of the things that makes programming on Ethereum tricky. Your app will not work without a running Ethereum client. After all the hard work you make and all the effort you did, can you afford to let a problem like that get in the way? Does a user's Ethereum know how to be local? Many of us sort of assume that you need to run an Ethereum client in your laptop or in a digital machine. Is that really the case? Does every dApp user also needs to be a sysadmin? Should users need to read documentation to use a dApp? Today we understand the importance of user experience. Enforcing users, especially non-technical users, to read documents can be a dead sentence to your project. Is it possible for dApps to be installed with just one click? It's 2016. Everyone expects apps to be installed that way. How can we make this possible for dApps? And finally, how will the community develop dApps over the next few years? What are the needs of the ecosystem and what kind of solutions will be created to meet those needs? To answer those questions, we created Infura. Infura provides the word we secure, stable, fault-tolerant, and scalable Ethereum nodes. No more worrying that your users won't have an Ethereum client to work with your dApp. No more worrying that the chain needs to sink for a while because they closed their laptop for a few hours. You close your laptop, you want to do a quick transaction. You open your laptop, you need to wait 10 minutes, 20 minutes to synchronize. No more worrying that the Ethereum client got stuck and needs to restart. No more worrying that they are running an old version of the client. All those issues just go away. Infura has been designed from the ground up with security in mind. It's robust, unstable, and it scales. Infura is here to make your dApps succeed. Infura provides the same type of dependable infrastructure for IPFS, which is a project to build a distributed web. As many developers have already discovered, IPFS is a perfect complement to Ethereum when creating dApps. And just as it does with Ethereum clients, Infura provides reliable IPFS nodes on your dApp. So you have access to a centralized storage. Infura lets your users focus on the dApp, not on the things the dApp needs to run. Last, Infura provides a service called Furryman. This is the special source and the secret source of Infura. This is where Infura really shines. Furryman does stuff you couldn't do if you were just running your own node. It provides advanced routing of requests, load balancing, caching, failover, and analytics. This is the Ethereum and IPFS and asteroids. From an architect perspective, Infura consists of several layers of software. As you can see, at the top, we have dApp users and their devices, also servers. Next is Infura frontend, which is the entry point for all the requests from those devices. From there, Furryman takes over to make the service ultra-fast, ultra-flexible, and ultra-intelligent. Finally, we have the Ethereum and IPFS nodes, which are the workhorses of this decentralized world. They are the ones talking directly to the Ethereum and IPFS networks. We are planning to add many features to make Infura even more valuable for developers and users. Among other things, we plan to support various flavors of Ethereum clients so that developers and users have the option to select the preferred client. We are working also on a fork-early warning system, a fork-early warning system, which will sound the alarm when the Ethereum network is experiencing problems. With IPFS, we're working on a content-pinning service. You will be able to access Infura to pin certain files, and you won't have to worry about them disappearing from the network. We will also provide a hash verification API, so you can quickly check that a file IPFS hash is what you expect it to be. Infura will also be supporting the IPTV network. We have been designated as an IPTV caretaker. Finally, but no less important, we have some really cool plans-related state-channel networks and state-channel networks monitoring. To try out Infura and stay up to date with our progress, go to our website, infura.io, and our Twitter, infura underscore IO. Many projects already trust Infura to provide them with a rock-solid decision and IPFS infrastructure. Every day, Infura is serving millions upon millions of requests. I really want to repeat that. Every day, Infura is serving millions upon millions of requests. It is my hope that Infura helps you make your debt a success, so that the world, the whole world can participate in a decentralization revolution. I will leave you with some closing thoughts about Infura and our mission. Thank you very much.


Hello again, folks. Now let's talk about media. And I think maybe two episodes ago I explained about Dash and MSC and HLS. Right, so I've been making another prototype. In fact, to be honest with you, I'm quite away on with the build. But I was away at BlinkCon in the States last week. And so the diaries are lagging behind reality a little bit. But we'll come on to that in a while. What I want to do is I want to talk, as I say, about media. I talked about Dash and MSC and HLS. And I've been making a prototype using the Shaka player. So let's talk about that first of all. Why would I use Shaka player? Because if you've got MSC and you're swapping between different quality versions of your video, you have to do things like tracking the bandwidth. You have to figure out where you can switch and get the next segment of your video and all these kinds of things. And it's actually a tremendous amount of work that I don't think is worth doing when you can get the Shaka player for 43 kilobytes g-zipped. Now, it feels to me like that's really small for what it's actually doing on your behalf. You should actually have a look through all the docs and everything. In fact, we'll link to it in the show notes about the Shaka player and where you can get it and have a look at the demo and all these kinds of things. It does loads. It's really quite small for what it is. And I felt like, you know what? Actually, it's got loads of unit tests and it's just properly done. So that's what I've been using. Right. So with that in place, how do we actually would we use the Shaka player? That's what has been on my mind and that's what I've been working on. So let's have a look at what's on my screen. So I've got a bunch of FFM peg commands. I should explain what I'm going to try and do. I'm going to start with a video. I've been starting with one video that's running at HD. And then what I wanted to do was make different quality versions of this. So I'm using FFM peg. You can see on screen, I've got these FFM peg commands, which is just, I mean, they're sort of reverse engineered from looking around at documentation and other ways of doing things. I just chose a 720 and a 540 and a 360. But let me just show you this. There is a page on the YouTube Help that covers live encoder settings, but nonetheless encoder settings, bit rates and resolutions. So for example, they're saying, if you're going to do a 1080p video, you probably want it 1920 by 1080. Big surprise. But bit rate would be 3,000 to 6,000 kilobits per second. So what I'm doing this for real and not just in placeholder mode, sort of like, oh, let's just do a few versions. Just see how this works. I would probably be following something like this to kind of go, right, that's what a 1080p looks like. That's what a 720p should have, 480 and so on, all the way down to the ones that I care about the most. So I'm just running ffmpeg, just making a bunch of these three different variants of my video. The next thing I'm using is a thing called the Shaka Packager. And what the Shaka Packager does, and that is quite a mouthful to say, Shaka Packager. It feels like it just has a nice little takatakata. I really like it. We can say it one more time for you, Shaka Packager. There you are. What it does is it takes the videos that you've got, all the different variations, like the 720p, the 540, the 360, and you give it a profile. So whether it's live streaming or video on demand, I'm doing on demand, not even thought about live streaming. You tell it where you want it to output the dash manifest, because that's what it's going to do for. It's going to take in all the video and so on. And it's going to split things out into video tracks, audio tracks, different qualities, blah, blah, blah. And you tell it how much, for example, you want it to buffer, which, in my case, I'm saying, three seconds would be good. Just get me three seconds up front. Further down the line, there'll probably be some dancing that I need to do there around pre-buffering video content so that, for example, we can give you a flying start with video. But I haven't really got my head around that space yet. Like, how do we get the first five seconds of a video primed by a service worker so that we can just play instantly? I haven't really thought about that.  That's one thing. And then the segment duration that you can see here is, as I understand it, it's how often you can switch qualities. So I'm saying every three seconds, if you need to, you can switch qualities to the Shaka player through the dash manifest. You can switch every three seconds. What's important about that is when you reverse back up and look at the video calls, you see here that there's this key int, min key int, no scene cut. What we need to do when we take our original video and we turn it into the different quality versions, we actually have to put these things called iFrames, not iFrames like we would, they're different iFrames. They're iFrames, but they're not iFrames. You know what I mean? They're just, they're video iFrames. They're key frames. That's what they are. They're key frames. So we need a key frame. Say, in my case, I'm doing it every 24 frames, which means, because it's a 24 frames a second video, I'm getting a key frame every second, right? So every time we hit one of these key frames is a safe point at which we could switch to another quality. So the segment duration should, if I understand this correctly, be a multiple of the key frame. So if I've got a key frame every second, I could switch every two seconds, four seconds, five seconds, as long as it's a multiple of what my key frame value is. Does that make sense? I hope so. But I have a segment duration of three seconds. That's what I'm saying. Right. What I also do, as you'll see here, is I actually do three more packages. One for the 721 for the 541 for the 360 because I was just interested in whether I might need a separate manifest for the offline stuff, which I'm gonna come on to shortly. Right. So, taking a video, turned it into three different quality versions, as I say, in production you do, you go through that YouTube help and just kind of be like, okay, I need like five or 10 different versions and so on. And you probably just set up a pipeline for processing your videos. And then we're gonna package them up into a dash manifest or have a dash manifest, which points to all these things. Let me show you what one of those looks like. Sample manifest full, that's the one. So this is what the Shaka Packager outputs for us.  But here's the minimum buffer time, which is that three seconds that I set, how long the video is. So the media presentation duration is 71 seconds in this case. And then inside here, you'll see that these things, these adaptation sets and these representations, but you'll see what's crucially important here is that you've got a representation for the 640 by 360 and 60 by 540 and 1280 by 720. So you can start to see that it's listing out all the different qualities of video that you can actually use for playback, which tallies entirely with what I passed to the Packager in the first instance. And it has really interesting things like the amount of bandwidth that that particular video quality is gonna need, the codecs it's using, bunch of other stuff as well.  Not quite sure what that is. It's quite exciting. I'm sure you'll agree. Maybe not, I don't know. And then further down, we also have audio configurations as well. So again, we've got 360, 540 and 720 audio. I have a feeling that in reality, you probably only just want like one audio track, something that's like an MP3 or an AAC or, you know, you probably, the video quality I reckon is gonna change a lot more and be the one that's the more bandwidth sensitive than the audio is my guess. So you might just be like, oh, I'm just gonna take one audio track and I'll have different, loads of different qualities of video, but I don't know. I'm still figuring a lot of this stuff out for myself. Right, so let's take a look at some of the code to actually take that dash manifest and put it into use with the Shaka player. So this is the code, which is not particularly neat. I'll give you the heads up. It is very much prototype code, but hopefully we can just kind of pick out the bits that make sense for this particular context. Here we go. So we have this initPlayer function that I've got here and all we do is we wrap a video element in this Shaka.play, kind of makes a wrap around and starts kind of giving us additional things that we can do, but we can also talk to the video element directly if we need to until it's a .play and you know, seek and all those kind of like .currentTime and all those things that you normally do, with a video. So it's kind of nice actually. It's a really nice way of working that you just kind of still predominantly can just listen to events from the video player, but when you're actually setting it up and doing playback, the Shaka player stuff kicks in and switches all the different qualities for you. It's pretty cool. I actually really like it. So the thing we do is we give it the manifest. So the manifest that we created with the Shaka Packager, we can hand to the player, the Shaka player and that's, a lot of the API is promise based. So we call it with the URL for the manifest and then when it's loaded and it loads the manifest and the first little bit of video across all the qualities listed. So it kind of gets, the first few seconds of the 720 and the 540 and the 360, whatever versions you've got, does that and then it fires the callback for the .then of the promise that says, okay, you're good to go. So when you get that, now you can see I actually have a bit more code going on here which we'll talk about in a minute because I've been trying to get it to work offline as well. Been successful in that, at least partially successful. So we'll talk about that as well. But you can then start calling .play and that will work. So let me just show you what that looks like. So don't talk, Paul. So as you can see on my screen, there is the video and actually if I go to the network tab, you can see it's requesting, there's a moment in time it's requesting the 360 video, 540, 720. It's decided that my bandwidth, because it's coming from local host, my bandwidth can support this 720 and off it goes. And it makes, let me show you this as well. This is quite interesting. It makes what we call range requests. So the request itself only has a request in there for, only has a request. The request has a range in there, which is rather than saying give me all the video at once, it's saying I want this byte range to that byte range. And the Shaka player figures out that range request itself based on, I guess the bandwidth and how big the segments are. And it goes, well, I guess I need that number of bytes next to make that next chunk of the video. So it makes this range request. There are other ways to do it. You can, as I understand it, instead of having one big MP4 file or whatever video file you've got, WebM or whatever, you can also do it in chunks and actually have individual files. And that's also our way to do it. I've gone for one big file because I think I'm gonna have to pass one big video file across for Chromecasting later on. So it just made sense for me. I was just like, I'm just gonna have one big video and make little chunked range requests off that. And as I say, that's working. So we make one of these range requests and the response from the server is, it's over here and it looks pretty tiny, but it's basically just those, you can see the size of it. I mean, the original file is much bigger than that, but you can see that you just get, say, 477K of the video or however much of the video it thinks it needs. So that all works and you can see as well that the bar here in the controls only fills up with the amount that's buffered. It's all good. That's working just fine. Now let me show you what actually happens if we try it again, but this time I'm gonna throttle the network connection back down to like regular 3G. So probably as a guess, it will start asking for the 720. Yeah, you see it started asking for the 720 video, but soon enough I reckon it's gonna drop down and ask for the 360 when it figures out that actually the bandwidth isn't so good. And again, this is what ShakaPlay is gonna do for you so I don't have to do that, which is brilliant, because it's code I wouldn't want to write. There we are, you see. Now you can see the requests are for the 360 video and the 360 audio. That's what it's decided I actually want. Cool. So that's kind of like the dash side completely sorted. Let's have a quick chat about the HLS as well. In my script further down, I take those 720, 540 and 360 videos and I call this media file segmenter, which is something you can get downloaded from the Apple developer portal. And what that does is it will slice and dice the different videos into particular formats for you. This M3U8, you can see this, it's like a playlist file. If we actually go and have a look, I think, let's have a look. 720, M3U8. I don't really know what I'm looking at other than I can see that there's like, this is like three seconds and it tells you which sequence of files. You can see it makes all these files in the process of running media file segmenter. So that does that bit. And then after that, I move some stuff around, but then you call variant playlist creator, which is another one of these tools that comes with the Apple downloads that you can get. And you pass it to the three playlists in my case, but all the playlists that you've made and it makes one master playlist, which looks like this. And that is essentially, I guess, roughly equivalent to the dash manifest. I mean, on the technical side, it won't be, but for Android and desktop Chrome and desktop Safari and whatever, you can just use MSC and that will just work. So you've got the dash manifest for those. But for iOS Safari today, you do need to create one of these M3U8. So it's kind of, it's the equivalent, I guess, of the M3U8. Good. On the code side, if for whatever reason we get an error from loading the manifest, which should happen, I believe, on iOS, because it will go, oh, I've tried to load the dash manifest and I tried to do all that stuff and it's just not working. I have a fallback that just says, okay, switch across to HLS, which is where you get that M3U8 file and you just say video.source equals M3U8. So it's actually very, very straightforward to use, very convenient to use. And iOS Safari will just kind of go, oh, sure, and it'll start adapting and getting the right things for you. So you don't actually have to do an awful lot with HLS other than point your video element at the M3U8 playlist file. I think the upside of dash is that the Shaka player can manage the bandwidth and you get to have a little bit more of a say on what bandwidth you think it should have and which track you think it should lock into and all those kinds of things if you want to. With HLS, it's much more like the user agent just kind of goes, I've got this. And if it decides to download the entire video, there isn't much as the developer that you can say other than, sure. So it is worth knowing that that's what's gonna happen. I mean, there's nothing you can do about it particularly. The only way I've found actually to at least tweak it a little bit is to say on the video element that you do preload equals metadata. If you don't set the preload attribute, it will go off and download all of the content which may or may not be what you want. So there you go. Right, I'm aware that I've taken up quite a little bit of your time but I still wanna show you the offline stuff. So I hope you're sticking around, I hope you're enjoying this. Let's have a quick look at what it does, what we require for the offline stuff to work. So at the moment everything's just going off to the network and the idea was what if we could pre-fetch everything into the cache, into a cache so that when the request goes out for that part of the MP4 file, saying the dash version, that the service worker can be like, oh yeah, I got this, this is already in the cache. I'll just create that, I'll handle that range request. I'll get the item out of the cache, get that bit of the file and then just send it back. So it's kind of transparent as far as Shaq is concerned. We just kind of go, just get that video and it will go off and do it. Enough chatter, let's look at a little bit of, hang on, let me get my words right. Let's look at some code. There we are. You wouldn't have thought it was so difficult to say but apparently for me, yes. There we are. Service worker, this is my service worker as it is today and this is really the interesting bit. So imagine that this fetch is called on every time a request is made from the page, okay? Cool. What we do is we do a match against the caches and if there's a match, we'll handle it. If not, we'll just do like a pass through. So what we need to do is figure out, well at what situation would we call the caches.match and get something back and the answer is when there is something in the caches. So if we went off and got the video and audio and everything else that we'd made and put those into the cache, then we'd get a cache hit. One thing I discovered and I was very grateful to Jake Archibald, if you don't know him, should follow him on Twitter and all that. He was helping me figure out how I should actually handle the range response. You remember I said that when we make the request, it's a ranged request. We only ask for a certain byte range. When we get a cache match, we get a cache match for the whole thing. So if we just say, well, return whatever the cache has, rather than returning just those bytes, you'd actually return the entire video which is not what was actually asked for you. We were only asked for bytes from, say, zero to a thousand, for example. So we actually have to do that ourselves. So what I do is I've taken Jake's code here and what we do is we create a ranged response. So that takes in the request and we find it from the cache but what we do is we call dot array buffer on it and that gets us the entire video. We'll come back to that in a moment. And then what we have is some code that looks through the range header and goes, okay, which bytes did they actually want? And then that gets sliced out from that array buffer. We set the status to 206, which I think is something like partial content or partial response or something along those lines that says you're not getting the whole thing, you're just getting the little bit that you asked for with the range request. And we set a couple of other headers like the content length and the content range and then we return that instead. For me, this is a bit unpleasant. Not only because there's a bunch of code in here that could arrow, I guess, could go wrong, but mostly because calling dot array buffer at the moment on the response would get me the whole video. So if it's like a one gig video, calling dot array buffer will get me a one gig array buffer in memory for every request. And the solution here I think is gonna be to slice and dice the video instead of one big file in the cache, actually have lots of different files like smaller chunks inside the cache and then just pull out the chunks that we need to make the ranged response. We'll see how that goes when we actually wanna get to production and how big the videos are and whether it's actually a thing, but I fully expect to actually have to do that. I should also mention, by the way, that there is an offline implementation already in Shaka, which uses index DB to do its thing. So that all takes care of it, but it doesn't use a service worker today. It's all in the foreground. It populates index DB, but it also does other bits and pieces like if you've got EME and licenses, which again, I don't understand fully, it will store those for you as well. Right. Let me just show you though what it actually looks like when you do this. So when I hit cache video, hopefully, oh, it's set to the regular 3G. Let's do no throttling. Oh, if only life was actually like that where you just go, no throttling. You see now we've got the cached video. So if I just clear that and start running it. Now all the requests are coming from the service worker. Essentially, it's doing its job. The service worker is stepping in, and rather than going out to the network, it's actually creating the response from the cache. So that's a way to transparently provide the video to the Shaka player. So all this code, in fact, the whole site code at the moment, let me show you this, is up on GitHub. You can get it at github.com slash Google Chrome slash sample media PWA. We'll link to that in the notes below. If you want to have a play around with the prototype, I'll add a prototypes folder to this so you can at least see roughly speaking what I've been doing and go from there. In the meanwhile, have fun. I'll be back very, very soon with an explanation of what I've been doing on the server side. Catch you later. Hey, folks, thanks for watching. Don't forget that there is more content that you can find kind of over here-ish. And if you want to subscribe, there's probably a button. Oh, maybe there, maybe somewhere around there. Click that if you've not done that. Brilliant.


Denmark plans to invest 143 billion Danish crowns in defense over the next 10 years, the government said on May 30. When combined with increased military aid to Ukraine, the rise will help it achieve NATO's spending target this year. A founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Denmark scaled back its military capabilities after the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s and has acknowledged major shortcomings in the ability to defend its territory and meet NATO commitments. But in response to the Ukraine crisis, it pledged last year to permanently increase spending on defense and security to 2% of gross domestic product by the end of 2030, a key goal for NATO member states. Speaking at a news conference in Copenhagen, Denmark's acting defense minister, Trolls Lund Poulsen, said his country must live up to NATO expectations. It is crucial that Denmark can handle the development of security policy, he said. The plans were announced as the country's prime minister Metafredriksen has emerged as a serious contender to take over as NATO Secretary General with incumbent Jens Stoltenberg due to step down in September.


We're very pleased to have this evening, Dr. Yanis Farifakis, former Greek finance minister and currently professor of economic theory at the University of Athens. My name is Mary Hanley and I'm a program officer here at World Affairs. World Affairs seeks to explore problems and expand opportunities at the intersection of international policy, philanthropy, and commerce. Where solutions to hard problems lie, learn more at worldaffairs.org. Please take a moment now to silence your cell phones and any other noise making devices. We are recording for radio and I'd like to thank KQED's audio engineer David Ogledy. Please also make use of the blue comment cards you'll find on your chairs. Staff will collect them throughout the program and share your questions with the moderator. I'd also like to remind everyone that tonight's program will feature an extended discussion. At the end of the event, we'll open up the floor for your questions and comments. I'd now like to introduce our moderator for this evening, John Wilson is partner of Shearman and Sterling and served as the managing partner for Shearman and Sterling Bay Area offices from 2001 to 2010. In addition, he has worked in their London, Paris, and New York offices. He is also a trustee of World Affairs. Please join me in welcoming John Wilson, who will introduce our speaker. Mary, thank you. We're going to have fun this evening. Thank you for joining us. It is my great pleasure to introduce tonight's guest. Dr. Yanis Varoufakis is a professor of economic theory at the University of Athens. From January to July 2015, a relatively important time in the history of Greece and Europe. He served as Greece's finance minister and he represented the Greek government in numerous high-level talks with other European Union member state representatives during the Eurozone crisis. He has recently launched DM-25, and by that I mean within the last few months, an ambitious pan-European grassroots movement intended to democratize Europe and increase public representation in the European Union by the year 2025. His most recent book is entitled, And The Week Suffer What They Must. For those of you here tonight, please see tonight's program flyer for his full biography. Please join me in welcoming Yanis Varoufakis for a conversation about the complex Greek economic landscape and the controversial and, we hope, hopeful future of the Eurozone in the global economy. So for those of you who haven't read the book, I highly recommend it. It is a good read in 250 pages. He takes you from Bretton Woods through the various twists and turns of international sort of financial theory and the various agreements and rubrics that have been devised to try to deal with surpluses and deficits, trade imbalances, and the political realities in Europe and the United States and elsewhere. If you enjoy Michael Lewis, if you enjoy The Big Short, if you enjoyed Stress Test, books like that about financial theory, about economics, you will thoroughly enjoy this book. It's extremely well written, very entertaining, very concise, and very informative. So with that introduction, I'd like to start with a very fundamental distinction that you make in the book at the outset about the difference between the tools that are available in the United States when we have an economic crisis similar to 2008 and the system and the tools that are available for the European model and essentially the hurdles that you faced and that the Europeans faced when trying to deal with the very significant economic crisis of 2009, 2010. Well, let me just begin by thanking you, John, and thanking everyone for being here. It's heartwarming. Let's go back to 2008 in response to your question. Imagine if the dollar zone, also known as the United States of America, were structured according to the rules and institutional framework of Europe. Let's go not too far away from here to Nevada, the great state of Nevada. Then approximately the same as Ireland. The climate is very different to Ireland, but the economy is not far off. Both economies concentrate a great deal on real estate and the financial services sector, and they both experience the major boom in these two sectors prior to 2008. Imagine what would have happened if in 2008, once the bubble in real estate collapsed and the banking sector imploded, if the state government of Nevada had to go cap in hand to the international money markets, trying to borrow the money that was necessary in order to salvage, to bail out the bank's domiciled in Nevada, while at the same time unemployment burgeoned as a result of the collapse of the developers, construction work is becoming unemployed, and the state government having also to find the money to pay for the increased unemployment benefits in an environment of collapsing revenues as a result of the downturn. It is very simple. The state of Nevada would not be able to borrow the necessary money. Now let's take it a bit further. So imagine the governor of Nevada flying to Washington, DC, cap in hand, saying, please help. And imagine if the response by the Fed, by the Treasury was, you are not allowed to default on any of the loans, you have to save the banks, you must pay the unemployment benefits, and we are going to give you a loan which is one of the largest in history because it would have to be in order to cover for all those losses on condition that you slash all pensions, you slash Social Security, you slash salaries, and you consolidate your budget by 30%. Now what would have happened if that were the case? Nevada would have been emptied of people. The recession would be so stinging that you would have a massive migration of people from Nevada, and the state of Nevada would be, as well as the banks of Nevada, would be perpetually broke. This is precisely what happened in Europe. And of course, if that was what happened in the United States, the markets would immediately look at what's happening in Nevada, and they would start fearing about Missouri, about Mississippi, eventually a domino effect would happen, and California would be hit, and, and, and, and. I think that answers John's question, just, I drew this parallel in order to make the, the, the simple point, that the Eurozone is a remarkable design, remarkable and remarkably idiotic, in the sense that we've created a central bank for all of us, which is not allowed to come to the rescue, no FDIC, no capacity to purchase bonds, quantitative easing, and we have states without central banks, and states with, without central banks, which are supposed to salvage the banks, which finance them. John, let me just give you one little snippet of the, the, the, the incredible, um, subterfuge wrapped up in irrationality of the Eurozone. Every time a government in Europe, whether this is Greece, Ireland, Spain, is clashing with the creditors, the creditors what they do in order to gain leverage over you, over the government, is they switch off liquidity to the government, and because you don't have a central bank, this is a serious problem, right? There were times, even when I was in the ministry, but when some of my predecessors were in the ministry, too, over the last seven years, when the following happened, the state would owe money to the central bank because the loan in the end came, but it was a loan from the central bank, unlike, unlike quantitative easing, it was a loan, can you imagine? Can you imagine Jack Lew borrowing from Janet Yellen? Just imagine for a second. We had these loans, and of course we couldn't repay them because the whole point was that we were bankrupt, so if you're bankrupt and you get a huge loan, um, that doesn't get you out of your insolvency, does it now? So we had to repay loans to the ECB, to the European Central Bank, which we couldn't. The only way we could was if we got more loans from, from Europe, so we would get more loans from Europe to pay Europe, take money out of one of the pockets of Europe and give it to another, yeah? But they were, remember, they're trying to asphyxiate us to accept more austerity cuts, lower pensions and so on, so what they do is they, they stop these, these loans. But then how can you repay them? So this is what they, what they did. This is, this is what I'm going to describe to you has been happening. It is unimaginable, but it's true. The Greek state would issue t-bills, treasury bills, that no sane investor would ever buy because the Greek state was bankrupt, right? The banks that were, the Greek banks, which were bankrupt, would take a piece of paper and write an IOU on, yeah, I, the president of such and such bank, of Alpha Bank or National Bank of Greece, solemnly declared that the holder of this piece of rubbish paper has a claim of 40 billion from me. Yeah, right.  Who would ever buy that? No one. But they would bring it to me to the finance minister, the finance minister of the bankrupt government to guarantee, to give the guarantee of the bankrupt Greek state to the bankrupt bank. The bankrupt bank would take this IOU with a phony guarantee from the bankrupt Greek state and would give it to the ECB, to the European Central Bank, as collateral, for money that the bank would get, loans. And then the bank would buy my treasury bills that no sane investor would buy so that I could take this money and give it to the ECB. You can't make this up, can you? These are the tools and instruments we had to play. But it's, you know, it's an interesting workaround because you actually in your, in your chapter that covers this mechanism and maybe it's because I'm a finance lawyer and I sort of followed the different steps. I understand what they were doing. They were really getting around the legal gaps in the existing structure, right? Because going back to the Maastricht Treaty, the European Central Bank doesn't have the powers that, you know, the Fed has in this country, right? And you also have a very different relationship with the Bundesbank, with the German authorities, in that they seem to be in this veto power or position with respect to so many of these initiatives. And so when it actually comes to putting together a package, you know, it's not a function of a few policy makers at the Fed working with treasury and so forth as we had in the United States. By the way, a system that has come under some criticism in this country, right? But it's much worse and certainly much more complex and much more difficult. And I think in the case of Greece because you were first, I believe, right? You were also being made an example of it. And one of the points that I find so interesting is this notion that the austerity package had to be part of the, or the austerity measures had to be part of the, you know, the overall package for even this very complicated indirect financing mechanism, right, which is, you know, a little bit like, you know, one of these collateralized bond structures, you know, that prevailed in these markets because they were transferring the credit risk, right? And I find it interesting, my question really is, were the austerity measures, you know, were those imposed simply to deal with the political fallout in the European states that the regulators in Germany and elsewhere, the political fallout that they would face if they went ahead and offered even this indirect type of relief to Greece without some price to pay or some, you know, pain being exacted? How do you, or was it truly a question of a policy view that these austerity measures, you know, would help solve the problem? Oh, I think it's a combination. The ideological part is there. Remember in Europe during the Black Death, the church was convinced that the Black Death was due to the sinfulness of Europeans and it was prescribing bloodletting as a solution. And if the bloodletting didn't work, it must have been because there wasn't enough of it. So there had to be even more bloodletting. There is this element, the Old Testament kind of harshness, ideological background. There is also, let me say that when you have a bubble that bursts like we did, like we all did here in the United States everywhere, there's going to be some pain. There's no doubt about that. And my view, my feeling, my sensation is that the Greeks overall were ready to take pain in 2010. But they were ready to take it as an investment into turning things around. So there's a difference between drinking bitter medicine and drinking poison. We drank poison and the result is that still, since 2008, every single quarter sees a shrinkage of our nominal income when our debts are rising. So we are in the class of a major depression. But let me try to answer your question in terms of what is the basic essence of the motivation behind what happened in Greece from the perspective of the Chancellor of Germany, of the Central Bank, of the Commission and so on and so forth. Just like here in the United States, in 2008, the authorities could not believe their eyes and their ears when the financial system imploded. They didn't see it coming. It was no conspiracy. They just did not see it coming. They had believed their own narrative about risk and risk and about all that. Similarly in Europe, the people in authority had believed that the eurozone was constructed soundly when it was not. In, after 2008, when Lemons collapsed, the Europeans were almost triumphant. They felt that, ah, those Anglo-Saxons, they have been lecturing us now for years about competitiveness, about the new paradigm, about financialization and about that. Now they're getting their comeuppance until they looked inside their own banks and they realized that they were in a far, far worse state than Lehman Brothers was. So Lemons had what, a leverage ratio of 1 to 37, and Deutsche Bank 1 to 78. I mean, unbelievable, unbelievable. So here we have Angela Merkel. Angela Merkel is a very interesting politician. I have a lot of time for her personally, even though I disagree with almost everything. No, but she's impressive, her work ethic, her attention to detail, and the way she maneuvers politically, and out maneuvers her own folks, her own people, like Saubel and the others. But she had, she was projecting the image of the Schwabian housewife, make sure that not one euro is misspent or misallocated, that everything is done by the book, the rules and the regulations are respected, that there is parsimony and all that. Suddenly she receives, so in the context of this, she was very harsh with her own ministers, with her own party not to overspend, to keep their lives on government expenditure and borrowing and all that. She gets a phone call in every 2009 saying Deutsche Bank, Finanzbank and another 20 banks are going under. We need 500 billion by two o'clock this afternoon, 500 billion, that's 600 billion, sorry, dollars. So more or less the same package that Hank Paulson went to Congress and sought. And why? I mean these banks have been making loads of money every quarter. Why Chancellor, let's not talk about it now, we'll do the anatomy later, but now we have to give them 500 billion. So she goes to the Buddha stack and drinks the poison, the political poison of looking into the eyes of her own conservative, said the Christian Democrat MPs, and saying to them, don't ask questions, we need to give 500 billion to those people who until yesterday were making loads of money. So she does that. She goes home, she doesn't even know what happened, what hit her. Four months later she gets another phone call, Chancellor will probably need another trillion. What? And the story is told that to her is explained that the Greek state is going bankrupt and that's around 250 billion owed to French and German banks. The Greeks can't pay and the reason why they can't pay is because their growth rate from being plus eight became minus 10% in nominal terms, from plus eight to minus 10. And nobody wants to lend them because all the financiers are panicking, credit crunch, remember Dubai at the time and all that. So the country financed their loans, so they'll have the default. And if they default, then Deutsche Bank is finished yet again and there will be a domino. Societe General is going to go under, Portugal is going to go under, Ireland is going to go under, Spain. We estimate we need about a trillion in order to contain this capacity. And wasn't a similar conversation taking place in Paris as well with the French banks? True, true. But in the end the French banks were bailed out by the rest of Europe and they didn't get the same kind of bailout. So the French state was fiscally stressed in the way that the German state was not. So they got far less directly from the French national budget. In Germany they got 500 billion, I'd say a very large amount. And then, so, could she have gone back to the Buddha stag, the federal parliament and say, remember what I said to you a few months ago that 500 billion would be enough to save those financiers? Well, I was lying. We needed more. She couldn't do that. She just could not do that. Politically it would have been suicide. So what she did was to go to the Buddha stag and to use ISOP, the ants and grasshoppers story. Europe is populated by ants who work very hard and by grasshoppers who sit under the tree in the Mediterranean playing their guitar, singing along merrily. And demanding a bailout during the winter from the ants. All the ants live in the north and all the grasshoppers live in the south. So these Greek grasshoppers, having spent their summer, some baking and singing and dancing, now need to be bailed out. So I need 110 billion to begin with, to begin with, for starters, for those Greek grasshoppers. They are terrible. We hate them. They are undeserving. They are unworthy. But in the name of European solidarity, we can't let them die. So Greece got 110 billion. Of course, to convince them, and this is going to the point of your question about austerity, to convince the Buddha stag that we are going to save the grasshoppers, we have to be harsh on the grasshoppers as well, so they don't do it again. So what we do is we introduce exceedingly harsh austerity measures, which, however, can do something really quite tragic. They put Greece into a nosedive, Greek national income. We lost 28 percent of national income, 28 percent. When Thatcher caused a furor in Britain with a recession in the early 80s that saw unemployment rise from 750,000 to 4.5 million, the consolidation, the loss of income was 1.5 percent. We lost 28 percent. So we have a humanitarian crisis in Greece. And what happened to the money that the Greek state got from the Buddha stag? It went to Deutsche Bank, to Société Générale. But what was also quite sinister, John, as many people don't understand that, is because the eurozone operates on the basis of shareholdings. So for instance, the ECB is owned, 27 percent of the ECB is owned by Germany. Why? Because the German GDP is 27 percent of the GDP of the eurozone. Similarly, whenever the eurozone borrows to give a bailout loan to someone, 27 percent comes from Germany that has to spread out. So poor Portugal, poor Ireland was made to borrow on behalf of Greece so that Deutsche Bank could be saved. So they spread out the burden of the bailout of the French and the German banks. That's why the French didn't have to pay that much. They had the Slovaks paying for it, the Greeks of course. Okay, you can say that the Greeks are the loans, but the Portuguese, the Irish. So to cut the long story short, austerity was a political justification that was necessary in order to convince the Buddha stag a few short months after they had already given 500 billion to give more because it was portrayed as solidarity to Greece. Now how much, let me just finish up this story. In the reason why I'm not finance minister anymore was because last July I refused to sign another of these agreements. Had I signed and my good friend and successor, Euclid, it's like a lot was signed. That's why he's still there. What exactly did he sign? Another 85 billion loans. Now how much of that will go to Greece? It's a radical number, zero. Of all the loans that have been given to Greece, 91% went to the banks, 91%. The rest went to the Greek state, but it wouldn't have been needed if the Greek state had not shrunk as a result of the recession, the depression that was caused by austerity. So when they say, oh, we bailed Greece out. What? Greece was never bailed out. You know, when you say, I had Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission say to me, we are going to give more solidarity to your country. Just go along with us and say, Jean-Claude, enough solidarity. We don't need any more of the solidarity. Please, no more solidarity. One of the interesting notes that you make in your description of your own experience is that, in fact, while you were meeting with the representatives of Shroika and they were outlining this program, you say that in private, they were quite open with you that these measures would not work. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I believe that's the way you describe it. And yet they were not prepared to alter their positions. What was going on there? Was it really just politics within Europe, as you've just described, or was there more to it than that? The beginning was the scene that I described, and a political imperative to bail out the French and German banks without seeming to be bailing them out, to present it as solidarity with Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and so on, when in reality they were bailing out the banks. Now, the thing is, why did the banks need to be bailed out? Because the states had become insolvent. But as I was saying before, you cannot overcome an insolvency by means of loans. So they knew that they wouldn't get their money back. They were giving this money to Greece to give it to Deutsche Bank, knowing that they wouldn't get it back from Greece. So they lied to their people. They lied to the Greek people and they lied to the German people and to the Dutch people. Okay. So let's step back a minute, because just in order to answer your question. So that's the original scene. Lying to parliaments, disguising a bailout for banks, that the money was irretrievably lost once you did that bailout, disguising it as a loan that would be repaid with interest. Okay? And once Merkel accepted that and the rest went along with it, it was very difficult and remains very difficult to go back to these parliaments and say, you know what? We lied to you. We're not going to get the money back. This money went to the banks. We won't get it back. You can't really expect the insolvent, who's be given an extended pretend loan to repay the old loans and the new loans, especially when the loan has been extended to them under conditions of shrinking their income. So this is the conundrum that they face. The people that I was negotiating with, the Troika, Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the IMF, Mrs. Merkel, Dr. Schoibler, the finance minister of Germany, the commission, the Eurogroup, this Troika of Lenders, as we call them, they admitted to me in private, as John said, that I'm right, that these policies cannot possibly work. This is an expression that was used. And I really freaked out when I heard it, because it's one thing for me to say that these policies of yours will not work. It's quite another for them to say, you're right, they can't work. Can't work is a very big statement. It's not the same. It's difficult for them to work. Can't work. It's like squaring the circle. It's not a question of willpower, expertise, how good a mathematician you are. It cannot be done. So they said to you, it can't work. And then immediately add the following, but Janis, you must understand that politically it is impossible for us to confess this. We have invested a lot of political capital in this program, and your credibility, my credibility, depends on you accepting it. So let's step back. One of the things you do extremely well in the book is that you articulate some fundamental principles of macroeconomics in ways that even I found understandable. You discuss in some detail this notion that in a worldwide, a global system of modern economies, you are always going to have significant imbalances, trade surpluses and trade deficits and so forth. There will be long periods of surpluses in one area, but these things shift, and it's a complex system. But that without some sort of mechanism or a series of shock absorbers, I think is the term you use, that provide for the recycling of the surpluses in the surplus nations effectively to the deficit nations, you really have an unsustainable system that will ultimately build to a certain point and then crash and burn. And you point out that in the United States we do have certain shock absorbers that are helpful, but that in Europe you don't have those same mechanisms in place. Can you just elaborate on that and in particular give some examples or some of the reasons why this set of issues was so acute in Europe? Well, since we're here, Arizona will always be in the deficit in relation to California. Always was, always will be. Similarly Vermont will be deficit in relation to the state of New York. London is in surplus in relation to Yorkshire. Eastern Germany is in deficit in relation to Western Germany. Always was, always will be. Greece is a chronically deficit country vis-a-vis Germany. Even within a city, if you look at different suburbs, they are not balanced. Some are in deficit and some are in surplus. But what keeps a union together is exactly what John said, a surplus recycling mechanism. Let me give you a very simple example, one that has been working increasingly well in the United States since the 1930s, the military industrial complex, which is a magnificent surplus recycling mechanism. So when Boeing gets a contract for the next generation fighter jet, it comes with strings attached. You're going to have a new greenfield development factory, building the wings, and it will be in a deficit area. And the engines will be made there. And you will invest this, that, and that in Missouri, in Mississippi, in Arizona, somewhere. You're not going to put everything in Washington state or in California. And the purpose of this is not philanthropy towards the deficit state, towards Arizona. The only way that the surplus regions can maintain their capacity to have surpluses is if there is investment in the deficit regions so that there are jobs, not handouts. So when a Boeing factory is built in a deficit state, people get jobs there. They actually develop skills. They have an income, and they use that income to keep purchasing stuff from California so that California can maintain surplus.  You can have apolitical or bank-driven ones, where the banks, the private sector banks, on banking principles alone, recycle. But what the new dealers understood with Roosevelt onwards is that bank-based surplus recycling is a bit like fair weather sailing. So when everything is going well, the weather is good, there's a lot of it, the first clouds appear on the horizon, the whole thing breaks down because bankers abandon the recycling process, especially if there are insolvencies. So the first 20 years after the war, the so-called Bretton Wood system, was designed by new dealers as a global financial system that recycled surpluses worldwide in order to ensure that the emerging superpower, the United States of America, would not sleep into another great depression. And the only way to ensure that that would be the case was if there was sufficient demand in Europe and in Japan for American products. And the only way that this would be possible is if some of the surpluses of the United States of America were recycled in Europe and in Japan. That's the Marshall Plan as one of many different examples. Europe never learned that lesson. The lessons that the United States learned from Roosevelt onwards were completely and utterly ignored by European policymakers. You see, and this is something that doesn't endear me to my fellow Europeans. We in Europe think that the European Union is a magnificent European design implemented by heroic Europeans. Not true. It was an American design which was implemented by Americans, taking Europeans by the scruff of the neck, clashing their heads against one another and saying, you do this. This is how the European Union was created. So for the first 20 years, the Bretton Wood system that was designed by new dealers was creating the global environment in which the European Union could grow, could become established. But that finished in 1971 with the collapse of Bretton Woods. And why did the Bretton Woods system collapse? Because America lost its surplus. It became a deficit country. So it could no longer recycle a surplus that they didn't have. From that moment onwards, Europe was jettisoned from the dollar zone and it had to fend for itself. And they tried in Europe from 1971 onwards, they tried to recreate fixed exchange rates, the Bretton Woods system in Europe, except they missed out the surplus recycling. So instead of creating a European Bretton Woods, they created a gold standard, what had collapsed in the 1920s, and what the new dealers tried to prevent from happening again by introducing the surplus recycling. So as you trace the history of the development of the euro, starting with the early attempts by, I guess, the French when they approached the Germans in what, 1964, I think it was, and then ultimately the Maastricht Treaty and so forth, one of the things you do very well is you talk about the different smaller steps that the European regulators took to try to, for example, have the individual currencies trade in relation to one another and so forth. And the idea was that as long as their fiscal policies were structured in a certain way and so forth, these bans would stay in tandem and everything would work, right? But then of course, things from time to time would fall out of bed. Because you though, when you articulate, or at least as I read your thesis, when you talk about the European equivalent to our Fed, you seem very focused on having greater control by a European political entity than at least in this country most people believe should be the case with respect to the Fed. There's always been this tension between having a Fed that's independent of Congress and in a position to set its own policies based on what it believes is best for the economy and having a Fed that's responsive to the needs of the public and so forth. As you, now that you're thinking about essentially devising a new system and you have your own plans, right, this modest proposal which is set forth in the back of the book toward really a totally new rubric for these kinds of regulations in Europe, how do you envision that entity interacting with the different nation states and the individual populations of Europe? What is actually workable as a practical matter in that context? Well, for a start we should stop doing what we're doing at the moment because, come to think of it, the reason why our government was crashed was because our central bank closed down our banks. Why? Because they were insolvent? No. Just because it was their way of convincing us to reduce fiscal policy that was even more austerity. So where is the, the central bank independence cut both ways, you know. That's what I kept saying when I was in the ministry that I dream of a situation where I do not interfere with the central bank but the central bank does not asphyxiate me to reduce functions. But the central bank did interfere in this way. So it's, we have a myth of central bank independence in Europe, a complete myth. And it, I don't blame the central bank for this. When you have a giant with one leg, the giant is the Eurozone, it's a very large economy, probably the largest in the world, and there is only one leg, the central bank. There's no, no treasury, nothing, nothing else. This is a very unstable configuration. And the central bank is trying within its remit to do its best. So I have great deal of respect for the current president of the European central bank, even though he closed down my banks and throttled me. He's a very smart man. He's trying to do his best to keep this Eurozone beast going. It is important to know the profound difference between the Fed and the ECB. The Fed, firstly, it makes its own rules, the ECB does not. It's politicians that make the rules of the ECB, and I'll give you an example in a minute. But secondly, it's also very important, you have the double mandate, the twin mandate here. The Fed has a duty to preserve price stability, to prevent inflation, but at the same time full employment. The ECB doesn't. So as long as all prices are stable in Europe, everybody may die in Europe, but the ECB has done its job.  Now let me give you an example now of what I was saying about the rules that are created by politicians in a way that the central bank is asphyxiating itself. Rule number one, no state financing, which means the central bank cannot print money to buy government debt. In other words, Euro-loud QE. What Ben Bernanke started doing here is simply not allowed in Europe. It's happening now, because Mario Draghi is bending the rules. He's portraying it differently. That causes a lot of clash, a clash between himself and the German government, or parts of the German government, not all of it, it's very complicated. Let me give you an example of the distortion introduced by this political interference in the central bank. The way he's doing it is to say, okay, CISA cannot buy government debt because I'm not allowed to finance governments. I'm going to say that I'm going to buy government debt in order to fulfill my mandate for price stability, because prices are falling in Europe, we have deflation. But to keep prices stable, I need to buy government debt. But so that the Germans or the French or the Greeks do not accuse me of bias, I'm going to purchase, for every thousand euros that I purchase, 270 will be German debt, because remember, 27% of Euro area GDP is German. So I will buy government debt in proportion to the size of the economies. This is a trick he conjured up in order to be able to do it. But this is terrible. It's very silly, because it destroys the pension funds in Germany, because he buys mostly German, because Germany is the largest economy, he buys the bonds of the country that doesn't need its bonds to be bought, because it creates a shortage of government bonds in Germany, and the government bonds in Germany are the ones that the pension funds are obliged to hold by law, but when there is excess demand, because the central bank is buying so many of them, interest rates are pushed below zero, and the pension funds are destroyed. And doesn't it also blunt the policy impact of the very purchases that he's tried at? Of course. Because it's all proportional. That's why we still have deflation in Europe. So the modest proposal that you mentioned is just three or four very simple proposals on what we can do within the existing rules. All it needs is some interpretation, creative interpretation of the rules, but that doesn't sound, it's not as sinister as it sounds, because they are interpreting the rules all the time. I just gave you an example of Draghi's reinterpretation of the rules. Purchasing bonds is not purchasing bonds. That's a pretty liberal interpretation of the rules. In order to stabilize the situation before we can move on. And yet, through all of this, if I understand your position historically, you have not advocated Greece leaving the Euro. Is that right? That's exactly right. My usual answer to this is, yes, we should not have created it. It was a terrible idea. It's an awful, frightful architectural design. But it's one thing to say you should not have created it. It's another to say you should get out. Because the path that took us in no longer exists once we've traveled it. If we try to reverse, we will fall off a cliff. And I can explain this in more practical terms, but if you want it at the discursive level, since I'm in California, it's what I call the Hotel California Dictum. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. So tell me a little bit about DM-25. Now you're no longer sitting in these long and I would assume somewhat stressful meetings in Germany and Paris and elsewhere dealing with the day-to-day crises. You've had some time to think and you've developed this new movement just within the last few months. How do you envision DM-25 developing and what are your hopes and objectives? After my resignation, I'll just tell you my personal story on this. After my resignation I had a lot of pressure. I received a lot of pressure from colleagues, friends, voters. For some reason, I got a lot of votes when I stood in the parliament. Search me, why? But anyway, I got a lot of pressure to start a new political party, in opposition to the government, in opposition to the opposition, and so on and so forth. And I just could not be motivated to do that. And then I started asking myself a question, why am I not motivated to do this? I want to be in politics. I think that I was really shocked by why I saw in politics. The reason why I could not be motivated to do anything was to do anything, to start a party in Greece. Because it occurred to me that our government had a tiny window of opportunity to change things, to reboot Europe. Because if we had successfully known to this perpetuation and recapitulation of misanthropic idiocy, Europe would have changed. Exactly the same way that the euro crisis began in Greece, the end of the euro crisis, or a new approach to it would have started in Greece. We failed. We were crushed, we were divided, we lost. Okay, say I was to create a new political party in Greece. What would I say to my voters? Vote me in to do what? If that question was put to me, I would have to say exactly the same things I said a year before, when it did vote me in. And then, of course, my voters would have said, but we did vote you in last time and you didn't do it or you failed. Why do it now? And by the way, by that time, we had already signed a new loan agreement. We were prisoners of a new silly agreement. So that was thought number one. Then a French politician, a former economy minister of France, or no more more, good friend, invited me to go to France in August, just to recover a little bit after the turmoil.  And there were 10,000 people in the rain who came to hear what I had to say. And I realized that they didn't come out of solidarity with me, with Greece. They came because they were worried about themselves. They were worried about their town, their hospital, their pension, their jobs, their children, their children's education, their country, Europe. And after two or three such trips around Europe, especially in Germany, when I had similar responses in Germany, I thought, you know, what we started in Greece is spreading. There is a realization throughout Europe that we are facing common problems in Europe that no one is looking at from a joint perspective. Everybody is in it for themselves. So the French government is thinking, oh, what can we get from Germany or from Brussels? The German government, how are we going to extend our control of the French national budget? And nobody is asking this simple question. What are the main threats for Europe? And how can we deal with them together? That discussion, I can tell you in the months, and there were not years, but I can tell you I went to many, many meetings. Not once was there such a conversation in Brussels, in Frankfurt, in Paris, in Berlin. And that's scary because the crisis is common. It takes different forms and manifests itself differently in Germany. The pension funds get crushed, and Greece will have great depression. But it's different symptoms. It's like an organism that has different pains and aches, but it's the same malaise. It's the same disease. And so from this, if you put all these experiences together, together with another two or three people, we came to the conclusion that it's utopian, but it's worthwhile trying to create a movement that is cross-border and across political party affiliations for the purpose of coming up with a European agenda. What should the European New Deal be? And how do we design it and how do we create a movement that pushes for it? Now, you may say that, and you would be right to say that, that this is really pie the sky, that this is highly utopian. It is. But then again, what's the alternative? Europe is disintegrating under the democratic vacuum, because we have democratic states. But those states have no power. The decisions are made now in the European Union institutions, which are democracy-free zones. There is no democratic deficit in the European Union.  There is no oxygen deficit, because there is no oxygen. There is no democracy, no democratic process, no checks and balances in Brussels. Now, zero. There is deep contempt for the demos, for the people, and for public opinion. Public opinion is there to be manipulated. It's not there as a source of insight as to what we should be doing. So this disintegration, you can see now, we have the economic crisis taking a turn for the worse. We have new borders being erected between countries that had no borders between them. We have the Austrian government sending soldiers to the Greek Macedonian border to seal off Greece from a country which is not in the European Union.  You know, Mahatma Gandhi once was asked what he thinks about British civilization, and he said it would be a good idea. The European Union, it would be a good idea. So the way we are moving, I can see a replay of the 1930s, with the rise of the most toxic, misanthropic, xenophobic, racist, horrible political forces everywhere. Fascists, neo-Nazis, people who hate themselves, gaining power, or not government power. You don't need to be in government to be in power. The political spectrum is all shifting in an awful direction. With the same people being elected, you don't even need to have the sinister forces being elected. So the alternative to our European projects is an awful dystopia. So that's what keeps us motivated and happy to wake up in the morning and do things. Can you talk a little bit about, within Greece, the rise of the new dawn party and essentially how you see all of this playing out domestically in terms of the domestic politics of Greece?  It's been around for a while. Most countries have some Nazis, somewhere forgotten. But when you have a combination of deep national humiliation, the whole world pointing their fingers at the Greeks and the grasshoppers who are lazy, who are corrupt, who are this, that, and the other. And at the same time, the same people are caught up in a vortex of debt deflation, debt bondage, and depression. Those seeds of Nazism start growing. This is what happened in Germany in the 1930s. This is what's happening in Greece today. In parliament, my seat would be here as a minister in front of me. There would be the thugs of Golden Dawn. They were elected. With roughly a 25%? No, no, 7%. 7%? Oh, really? 10%. 10%. Oh, I'm sorry. MS Redmond. OK. But 10% is a lot. Yes. Especially given that they are a criminal organization. And there are court cases against them. They've killed people. So the fact that they get so many seats in parliament is astonishing. But I was in a taxi going to the airport a few weeks ago. And I was talking to the taxi driver. And the taxi driver was actually very pleasant with me. He knew who I was. And halfway to the airport, however, he said, but I vote for Golden Dawn. I thought, oh my god, I better jump out. And it became clear to me that he was not a Nazi. But he was choosing whom to vote for on the basis of answering a very simple question.  Whom do I vote for to annoy the establishment the most? And his answer was Golden Dawn. A bit like Trump in this country. So what has happened to your party, your colleagues, after your resignation within Greece? We split up in three parts. One part of us voted against the surrender document, as I call it, the new loan agreement, and left the party and did not stand again in the parliamentary elections that followed. Another part stayed in the government. And they are the government. And the third part imploded emotionally and stayed at home. That's the largest part. The largest part of our party's activists have gone home. And it's just a very sad occasion when I meet them. When I see them, we go out and eat and talk. And the depression is not economic. It's purely psychological. Even within those who stay in the government, there are different varieties. There are those who stay because, to somebody who said to me, 68 have been through three different splits of the left. I just can't afford to split again emotionally. But again, the depression. It's a party that's fading. History is going to confine it very quickly to the dustbin. Simply because, you know, for how long can you say to your people, this piece of legislation is toxic. It's terrible. It is antisocial. Vote for it. So it's once, twice, three times, 10 times. After a while, it becomes just does not compute. So this may be an unfair question. But at this point, do you know what your next step will be in terms of reentering politics or running again for a seat in parliament or some other position? Or are you going to step away from getting elected and focus instead on building this new movement? On the 20th of September, when the last election took place and I announced I was not running, I said, I am not running for parliament because I want to concentrate on politics. So it's not a question of stepping back into politics. It's true.  Being in Congress, being in parliament, it's just not politics. There's so much. It's just a chore. You go from one meeting to another. There is very little politics involved in it. I do a lot more politics now than I did when I was even in the ministry. The period of negotiation was politics. But if I were to stay in the ministry now, my colleagues who remain in the ministry now, they don't do politics. It's all administration of a program they don't believe in. This is not politics. As far as running for elected office, that is a question. It's an abeyance. When I was all my life, I was an academic. As a professor, I always find it difficult to understand why people wanted to be dean or head of department. If you're a professor, you shouldn't want to do this. And if you wanted to do it, you shouldn't be a professor. You should be disqualified immediately, because it means you don't enjoy teaching, writing, researching, publishing. Why do you want to be an administrator? Administrator for Google. You make more money, too. But of course, somebody has to be dean. So this is something I always consider to be a chore that one does as public service. But you should always be a reluctant administrator, but not an enthusiastic administrator. I believe the same thing about government. You should be a reluctant minister, a minister who is doing it for a short period of time, only if you think you can make a difference. And you don't like doing it, but you do it because you have a moral duty to do it. So I'm not in any rush to go back into government. I will go into government only when the circumstances are such that I think, firstly, I can make a difference, and secondly, that somebody else can do it. But you, if I understand what you've said previously anyway, you do plan on turning out a book, another book, on the experiences of the last 24 months. Indeed. Firstly, it's therapy for me because this was a very tumultuous period. And also, I think that I have a duty to let people know out there what went down. Not just Greeks, but you should know as well the role that the American government played, the German government, how these things hung together. I'll do it in the summer at some point. I need some space, some distance from those events so that everything percolates in my head, and that will be my next book. Well, having just. But writing books is part of politics, isn't it? Absolutely. Absolutely. Having just finished your current book, I do look forward to the next one. I'm sure it'll be a great read. Before we open the floor for discussion, with those of you in the room, I'd like to say good night to our radio listeners, and thank Yanis Verifakis for his excellent discussion. Thank you. Thank you.