Well, KDE is all about the apps. It's been our goal for the last year. It's worth checking out what's happened in the last year, how we can improve it for the next year, how we can control the site. First, we're reminding ourselves why we picked this goal last year. Perhaps we're always part of the KDE story. It was always part of the plan from day one when Mateus and the other one started it. It was to create, not just the desktop but a suite of applications that went with it. A suite of applications that worked well together, looked good together, had the same usability, looked and feel. And that was a great goal. And we achieved that along with the desktop. We achieved that within a few years and we've improved it ever since. But the tech world moved on. It turns out, somebody rejected patch from somebody else and then another desktop got started and a whole bunch of other desktops got started. And that's freedom for you. And well, we never did monoplyze the world in the way that Microsoft did. And that's probably not a bad thing. So other desktops came along, other application suites came along, other form factors came along. Of course, there were networks and web apps and smartphones. And other platforms came along. People either used to be people who stood on Swarchforge or KDE or a similar project. But now you just start a project and get that or GitHub or something. So there's no shortage of competition for people who want to make a pre-software open source app. No shortage of places they can do it. No shortage of communities that they can work with. And that's been fabulous for the open source resource as well. But it's meant that we've been stuck a little bit in our niche a little bit. A little bit too focused on our apps being for KDE. And even when KDE became the community and even when KDE became the people and the plasma brand that separated out, there was still this mindset, both within our community and in the broader computing world, that these apps were for KDE and if you weren't using plasma, then they probably weren't that interesting too. And that means we missed out. And of course, then the other change in the computing ecosystem is the coming along of AppStores. So we've now got AppStores for Linux. And there's also AppStores for Windows and Mac and Android and maybe iPhone. And because of changes in the licenses, cute, we can take advantage of this. But we've had a bit of an attitude problem with our AppStore. As I say, we're too stuck in this mindset. Not just us, but people out there and people within KDE and everybody within KDE are not playing in particular, but that mindset exists that we think are for KDE because that was the original vision 20-odd years ago. Even though that restricts us to a niche of a niche, it doesn't allow us to promote our applications on their own terms. And it means that we get a bit too much weather to the idea that we must be separate from the distributions and we can't ship our own software because we've depended upon them as distributions for a long time and they've done a big service to us and continue and always will. But it means we haven't taken control of our own applications too much.  And I've had long and passionate arguments with people within the KDE community where we did a release of KDE applications and I was told not to promote the AppStores that our apps are on. I was told not to promote the channels that we have to ship our apps directly because they weren't quite complete at the reveal. There's some bugs in it or maybe we're a bit too scared of doing the security updates or a bit too scared of those new responsibilities that come along with shipping our stuff directly or we don't want to offend the distributions or so forth. And again, that means we've missed those opportunities. We're a bit too nervous. And also the attitude exists that packaging shouldn't be part of the application project. It can be a KDE project but it should be a separate project and that limits how it is for those applications to be able to take control of their own destiny. So we picked the goal. All about the apps. We're going to focus the market on KDE's applications and the way that we have done for Plasma and Plasma now stands low in its own brand and it's got a lot of recognition amongst Linux users that it's a great product and it brings us back to being a leading desktop, lightweight, feature-ful, simple, indeed powerful, so mighty powerful when needed. But the apps in our marketing got a bit left behind and in our effort to push them out to users and get those communities. So what have we done last year with KDE is all about the app school. We had KDE applications as a name for the three-month, four-month release. But then that duplicates that name, that branding is just a bit duplicated with the general concept of applications in KDE. If you want to talk about KDE applications, which one are you talking about? So we de-branded that because it shouldn't matter how it gets released for the end user, even for distributions, people don't care who makes those release tarbles. People care when there's a new version out and what those features are. So we de-branded that. It's now just a release service and it dumps tarbles every four months. And it means that changes can be made like here on the KDE.org front page. Carl and others redesigned that to highlight some of our top applications and some of those are part of that bundle, some of them are not. It doesn't matter. What matters is that we're promoting those now directly on our front page of KDE.org. And you can see some of our flagship apps here across pre-sale. Everybody talks about KDE. Live is wonderful. Contact is classic and beautiful and full of potential and KDevelop is for the never side there and works great. And you can see from the screenshot that we have these great apps and users don't care how those go out. And also on KDE.org we tied up the applications pages. We now list all the applications that the pages made automatically. It's got a few bugs you can see in there so that needs a bit of quality assurance. But we download those from the metadata files and AppStream means that we can control our metadata. This is pretty basic stuff but it was a long time coming where we say here's a description, here's an icon that goes along with it, here's a screenshot and here's when the release is up. So within these application pages we've now changed that website or improved that website. So it now has an install on limits button. You go there on Linux, it says install on Linux.  That's using the AppStream URL. We were the first people to use that I think and it's not even a URL right so the specification is buggy so we had a few pictures to make there. But then you can just click on that and it'll open up Discover or Knome Software Center or whatever, open your application. And that application will pick the best method to install. And we as coders don't just have a strong opinion about what that method to install is. That's where the user can decide what sort of packages or container age formats are best for them. So you can see here on Krita underneath it, it has options to install on Linux and that uses the AppStream URL but also on the Microsoft Store and Google Play Store. But you can also see further down, it has release text.  It also shows how you download, do a direct download of AppStream files for Mac OS or Windows or get the source. So for the first time now, if someone goes, oh, there's a new release of Krita out, how do I get that? They can go to our website and they can get it. And while I'm using this as an example, they don't want to put a user's Krita as an example because it's a thankshift app and it does everything right but it nicely gives a smooth experience to the user. Along with the de-branding of the KDE applications, we did the monthly app updates. So we are actually doing some promotion of our apps. What's happened in the last month? One of these 200 new titles are being released today. Those are synced with the release service releases.  They come from anywhere within KDE, self-released. Again, with de-branded, the idea of extra gear is just self-release application. It shouldn't matter how the release happens, but it matters what the shiny new features are. So we're promoting DigiCam, picking your release 7, Dolphin, and not only does it promote the application, but it promotes how you get those applications. So it says you can download this app image, you can install it from stats, you can install it on Windows and so forth. And I've also included the occasional review of app stores or interview with somebody who's worked on the app store just to promote the idea that these channels are out there and they're a great way to get our apps. So to review all the channels out there and a great way to get our apps, and we've kind of spent my time doing about 10 minutes and 15 minutes. Q&A will sound before we go on. One minute to Q&A. What? I thought I had nothing out here. Well, so we've got the snap store here that's made by KDE Neon mostly, our stuff. But also other people have accounts there, and they've got a nice feature, coming up on Monday, and that has most of the applications in KDE. You can see where those packages come from, and you can see metrics on them. So that's one of the nice changes that you get from this stuff. So Krita has 42,000-dollar installs, Ocula has also 42,000-dollar. Color Paint, 15,000 installs.  They've got a talk later today, so go and see that. And in FlatHub, app images by nature doesn't really have the store, but a lot of applications use that as a way to say, here's a trivial way to get our application, and they can take full control of that, so that's been quite popular with the number of them. Not just Linux app stores, but also package managers on Windows.  They use that as a good way to get their software. We've got three or four applications for you to sit here on that store, and that's a good way to do some work. Do I need to stop now? Is there some Q&A now? If you'd like to start Q&A, I can start reading you the questions. Go for it. One question to go. All right, so first question says, in the beginning, you mentioned iOS as a possible target for apps. There is some interest in that target in the Maui project, IARC, and also in Cayden. Do we already have a system that could be reused for iOS, for example, Kraft, or is something new? iOS is difficult. I don't know. Homebrew on macOS has worked quite well. That's a desktop application, so you're asking about mobile stuff. We brought Homebrew into KDE, so there's another package manager for Mac, mostly, and that's now been successfully integrated into KDE. Mac, we've got a number of stuff made for macOS, so if you look on Binary Factory, there's quite a few made there, and those are listed on the download pages. I've got a slide in here, a bag, Apple's App Store, no results. Possibly because it just smells bad, maybe you can't put GPL stuff there. I don't know, maybe nobody's had a strong interest. I did notice that Lever Office is there twice, so it must be possible to put free software stuff there, and I'm pretty sure it's the same on the iOS iPhone App Store. We've got nothing there, but there must be ways to do it. I'm afraid I don't know if Crafts can build successfully on those. I defer to Hannah and the others who do Crafts for that. Is there another question? Yes, so next question. Is it possible to have links to Android Play Store slash Freud on the website, for example, for itinerary or KDE Connect? So Android Play Store is another store that we should take advantage of, and we have a little bit. We've got a dozen apps on there, and it's interesting because it also allows commercialization. It allows for apps to have money next to them if they need it, and it's stupidly popular, of course, but it does need your app to be reconfigured for mobile. Is it possible to have links in the store? Yeah, I think it is. I think that's why I showed up pre-tact. Did that happen? Yeah, so on KDE Door applications, that's got a link to the Google Play Store, and I encourage anybody who has an app to put it into Google Play and get that in their AppStream file and then appear. But I had in my not quite success slide, FDroid, which is another app store for Android, free software, so it goes on for ideals, but so far we've only got two things there that I can find, and it would be great to have more things on FDroid. Is there another question? Next question is KDE Apps and the whole Linux itself. I'm not so sure about that, in quotes. Still are not friendly with some graphic drivers, like NVIDIA, sorry, not pronounced NVIDIA, or something, which makes users have to install lots of things. So what do developers do to fix and improve this? Well, the developers do fix NVIDIA, it must have run away in my experience. That's difficult, of course, because it's a long stack that graphics is on top of, and if something doesn't work, it'll go down, especially if NVIDIA is a limited matter that we can do. On the NVIDIA laptop that I have, I tend to just use the Intel chip on it, unfortunately. One of the failures of just the whole Linux ecosystem is that we're not always so integrated all the way down the stack, and it would be great if we were mostly talk to the Quinn developers, because they're the ones who know about graphics. That's all. No question? We've got a few more questions. Go for it. All right, so next one. As a developer, how do I reproduce the magic of packaging if I need to debug packaging slash builds or platform-specific bugs slash issues with my app? Example, KD Android SDK helps for Android. What else is there? Building stuff, you can build a lot of stuff with the craft tool which is exactly built on different platforms. Whenever I've built on a different platform, you have to have that platform with you or a virtual machine. I know for Windows, you can download virtual machines from Microsoft, which run on VirtualBox, and those are free to anybody to try. So if you're developing your app on Windows, then anybody can try that. I don't know enough Android to know the equivalent systems from Android, but they should be out there. All right, next question. Does promoting to make changes in their approach to de-emphasize the bundle or is the rebranding successful in meeting that goal? Is the rebranding successful of KD apps stuff? I don't know, because that's up to the people who have seen it. It doesn't make sense. It's still not quite perfect, but it's the only set-up that we could agree on. I like to think that in creating those monthly app updates that we've mostly successfully moved away from the idea that here's a bundle that's released today and gone into the idea that it's everything that's been released on this week, the other problem I have with those is stuff that gets put into distros and various forms in private repositories, maybe. And so people think they're available, even if they haven't been fully released to the stable one. It's tempting to say, oh, this is out now because we know there are a few people out there using that. And we're very keen in all about the apps, but also with my neon hat on to make the point that stuff needs to be released from KDE properly. And, yeah, occasionally, you get the odd maintainer who works for them, but so they don't want to make it atarable or they don't want to make a release and a tag. And that's the nice thing about the KDE community course is if you don't want to do some particular part of it, there's probably a team out there that will pick up the slack and help out. So we can certainly do that on more of the apps. I've done a number of releases. And the other side of that is incubators bring stuff into KDE, which is also part of the goal because the whole point is to make KDE an attractive ecosystem for an attractive place to develop your app. So it's an important part of the goal also is to bring stuff from outside KDE into KDE as part of that incubator process. And we've reviewed a number of ones this year. I think Raleigh Stream is particularly interesting and fun. It's a virtual role-playing, virtual tabletop software dedicated to pin-in paper role-playing games. And that's bringing in a whole new community that was there, new discussion channels even with Discord and whatnot who want to be part of our community. And that's just great to see. All right. Well, we have a minute to go and there are four more questions, but I will ask you the most important question of the hour. Who is the KDE baby? Who is the KDE baby? You want to introduce yourself? Just before we're locked down, I was feeling like we should have a bit more. We should have some om-gums here and some fine friends come along to see our talk. So what are you going to do with this one? Yeah, just letting you live up to it. Yeah, you will be a developer coming in soon. So we do like to help some projects through the incubator. Very cute. Jonathan, I will send you the remaining questions and you can do the questions in the Academy question or however you'd like. I'm sorry, I missed that. I will send you the remaining questions and answer those in the attendance chat or however else you'd like. Yep, attend these chat rooms. Okay, well, thank you so much, Jonathan.


From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Radio 2018, brought to you by VMware. Hey, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Radio 2018. We are in San Francisco for their VMware's Radio 2018. It's their R&D fiesta party. As Steve Herrod said, former CTO, it's like a sales kickoff for engineers. It's a great time, but it's also serious, a lot of real serious discussion. And of course, people are flexing their technical muscles, stretching their minds. And I'm here with one of the chief operator, one of the main principals and legend in VMware, Ragu Ragu Ram, chief operating officer, new title, chief operating officer, products and cloud services. Great to see you. Great to see you, John. What year did you join VMware? 2003. So you've seen many of these radios. Yes, it's one of the highlights of the year for me. Yeah, super important architect of VMware, great part of the community leader, architect of the AWS relationship. Sure. Part of that, moving with Andy Jassy, Sanjay Poonan. This is the 14th year of radio. And VMware has changed a lot since you joined. Now, a world-class organization, getting check marks for one of the best places to work, certainly for engineers. It's like a great party of ours. Take a minute to explain the radio culture. It's 14th year. There's t-shirts behind us that commemorate the key milestones. Where it's come from, where it's gone. Your thoughts on the program and the community. Yeah, I mean, this is in fact, one of the unique characteristics of VMware. I've checked around with my peers in the industry, and I don't think any other tech company of our size does this. Radio stands for R&D Innovation Offsite.  Fundamentally, that's groundbreaking. So I would say it's a cross between us, wild science fair and a research conference. And in fact, both of these go hand in hand at this place. People publish papers, and there is a selection committee just like in serious conferences. And in fact, Ray had some amazing stats for this year's submissions, and the selection is very, very rigorous. At the same time, you'll go upstairs, and you'll see the exhibition hall, where there are all kinds of things that are displayed, things that could be very well incremental, things in the next release, and things that are wild and wacky off the wall that we might never, ever do. So it's really the full gamut. The other interesting thing is if you've gone bigger, we are getting people from pretty much all parts of VMware. And I think there is a representation from 25 to 30 companies. How many engineering centers are there, roughly?  How many engineers? I would say, in terms of medium to big size centers, there are probably over a dozen across the globe, and literally every continent. Clearly in the US, we have four big centers. In Europe, we have three, at least. And in Asia-Pac, we have another three or four. So we definitely have over 10. I mean, everyone who knows VMware and also knows theCUBE for nine years, but this is our ninth year covering VMworld. All you got to do is look at VMworld and you can tell one thing right out of the gate, very community-oriented. All the decisions are made in the community. Also, people who know VMware know you're highly an engineering organization. This is not like a lot of marketing fluff, although you do have some good marketing here and there, but the point is it's an engineering culture with community. This is unique. I've seen companies that don't walk the talk on, quote, community engineering. They have silos, there's a lot of infighting. How has VMware preserved a culture of innovation amongst their peers when it's competitive as hell inside VMware One to be smart, achieve the success, but also VMware's always been in always a moving market. How do you guys do? What's the secret sauce? I mean, there's not a single thing. Like you said, I think culture is something that happens over time and is preserved over time and is preserved through people. It's not like anything you can write down, right? Of course you can write it down, but it won't be worth the paper to turn it down unless it's practiced every day by the people. And so I think that is the key thing here. Right from the get-go, customer-centric innovation has ruled the rules here. So the question to ask always is, okay, great innovation. Look at it from a customer end point of view. I think that matters a lot here. Secondly, there is a lot of emphasis on breaking the rules in terms of doing something disruptive. And the engineers that come here are tend to be the kind that respond to that, right? And then lots of venues, like this is not the only thing that we do, right? We do these things called Boratons, which is our internal versions of hackathons. We do regional versions of these things.  It's a lot of things. They can go outside the scope of their job. Exactly. Get an idea of passion, an idea, and go after it and not have to worry about anything. Yep, yep, exactly. And we have a pretty... With a path to commercialization, if the... Yeah, that's what I was going to say. We have a fairly high success rate, I would say, of taking things that we see here and turning them into product and eventually into monetizable businesses, all things that go into the product features, right? Give some examples of historically successes, notables, and then also talk about some ones that aren't notable, that have come out.  Numbers are clear. What are some of the highlights that have come out of the radio event that have been blockbuster successes? I mean, a lot of the things that you see in the networking today came out of radio, right? A lot of the things about doing security and networking from the hypervisor up came from here. What you see today as V-SAN, add its roots here, right? What you see today with the app defense and the security stuff, add its roots here. A lot of the features that are in V-Sphere today, right? Especially the storage, V-Motion, and so on and so forth was first showcased here. And this goes on and on and on, right? We also have a lot of things that I've shown up here that we have not pursued. There was, for example, almost like an eBay for V-M capacity, and we didn't pursue it. God knows that could have been a huge idea, right? So- There's some misses, too. Yeah, there's some misses, too. But that's the whole point of this, so. Yeah, that sparks the creativity. How much is creativity goes on at this event? I mean, certainly a lot of barnstorming, brainstorming. I don't want to call it a lot of interaction, physical face-to-face. How much creativity is happening, do you think, here? Yeah, so a few years back, they introduced a couple of things. One is instant birds of a feather, where you can literally go to a whiteboard and say, hey, let's discuss this topic and set up a time and then people show up.  I would say those are two examples where there's a lot of on-the-spot creativity, right? And also, as the companies and the R&D teams have gotten more dispersed, this is an opportunity for people to get together, even within the same business unit or across business units, and say, let's go solve this problem. You and I have been talking about this on email, let's talk about it face-to-face, and say, hey, let's bring somebody else in that's relevant to this conversation as well.  And then, of course, the exhibits, when people start talking, thinking about these exhibits and talking to people that are showing there, other ideas get spawned off as well. Greg, we talk about, just from your experience, so you had a lot of great track record, and certainly within VM, where it goes back to the early 2000s, what is your observation on the innovation formula? What's been the consistent constant of innovation, as the waves have changed, and certainly, I mean, I've been in Palo Alto for 19 years now, in my 20th year, even Palo Alto's changed. So the world's changed, modern, and we'll get to the Amazon deal in a second, certainly clouds here. What have you seen as the constant innovation variable? I mean, what I would say is this, fundamentally the people that we tend to recruit into VM are by and large what we call, what I at least I call, platform thinkers. So they think of building a fundamental piece of technology that can be used, possibly used in 10 different ways, right? And they build it for one particular use case, and then the question goes back to, okay, now we have done this, what else can we do with this foundational technology? And if you look at vSphere with the same thing, if you look at networking the same thing, storage is the same thing. So I would say that is the constant, that's one constant here, right? Which is how do you build fundamentally a platform that can be used in fundamental, very different ways? I mean, some will also say systems thinking. I mean, the cloud is a system. I mean, cloud has been offering me, I think Paul Maritz's 2010 picture, although some of the calls didn't come out, but he kind of generally had the architecture. Yeah, yeah. He nailed it. Yeah, yeah. And there are only a few people like Paul in the world and absolutely he nailed it. Yeah, Dave and I would give him a lot of credit for that. Okay, let's talk about Amazon Web Services. Certainly, radio is now 14th year. At what point did the clouds start clicking in? You said there's some misses to eBay for VMs. Certainly, cloud is on the radar. And vCloud, we know what happened there. Pat talked about how you guys really took that opportunity, which is you made lemonade out of some lemons there with that project. That's my words, not his. When did cloud first appear on the horizon in radio? Yeah. And when, now, how do you see that happening now as we talk multi-cloud? Yeah, so you missed the alumni session today and one of the early engineers said when he was interviewed by Mendel, which was in 1999, right? Mendel is, of course, the founder and chief scientist the first chief scientist here. He said he foresaw Dave and when the engineer asked him how are we going to make money on this, right? He thought there'll be a day when people just rent compute capacity from a data center instead of going out and buying gear, right? And so, in some ways- He predicted cloud operations. But it's back in the company starting days, right? But really, I think we saw this in 2005, 2006, 2007 at the same time actually as Amazon saw this, right? But the big difference was we were growing 100% a year in our core business and we had our hands full that way, right? And we felt like as a software company the way to play it is by delivering technology to other people to build it. So that's when it really made its way here, right? In radio and in the products. And by the way, it wasn't obvious to many people in the industry at that time to Amazon. I have had many conversations with Andy Jatsy and he always, now he uses the term being misunderstood. I mean, they were completely misunderstood unless you were an entrepreneur who was using EC2s to avoid seed money because it was a dream for entrepreneurs at that time. I remember that clearly. That was not obvious. It really wasn't obvious until about 2010, 9, 10 there. So you guys were growing, okay, missed that. But I mean, radio is not about missing, it's about identifying. So how does it translate today for Amazon? So the Amazon relationship, if you think about the technical underpinnings of it, right? Clearly we did a vCloud error. We learned a lot of that. Then within our, some of our engineers, the question that was asked was, what if we could run a cloud on top of other people's clouds, right? And we did experiments with nested virtualization, we did experiments with bare metal and then we chose this sort of a model. So that's, I would say, one of the technical early indicators of what we could do on other people's clouds. So that's, I would say, a big thing. And the rest of the things that we're doing with respect to elastically growing capacity and all those things, came from the experiments that were shown up here. So that was the roots connection back to radio. In terms of the Amazon partnership itself, that was, a lot of it was driven from the customer end. As we were thinking about VCA not working the way we wanted it to work, we went back to the customers and said, look, what is wrong with this picture? And the answer that came back was very clear. They said, we like the hybrid idea, but we want the hybrid to be VMware on-prem and Amazon in the cloud, because 70% of our customers turned out to be AWS customers. And at the same time, AWS is hearing the same thing. Why don't you guys team up instead of being an either or, right? That's what led to the partnership actually. And your team at VMware, can you notice the cloud native piece aspect of it? So obviously Kubernetes is on the horizon, but not on the horizon, in your face, and you've got service mesh over the top. It's up the stack, it's networking. Still needs to do networking. It's like, you guys must be like, hey, we love what's going on up there. Come down to the store. So the boundary between what is the application platform and infrastructure platform is constantly changing, right? And Kubernetes, when it started out, people said, oh, it's an application platform. Now it turns out it's actually infrastructure. And similarly, same thing in networking. So what we see is things that were at the lower level of the infrastructure constructs, the same idea is applying at the next level up. That's why we love Kubernetes. We love service mesh. We love similar concepts that are coming about in storage and security and so on and so forth. A unified stack is coming. Yep, exactly. It's just someone fixed networking and the Holy Grail programmable networks. When are they coming? At the application level. Let's go. Holy Grail is finally here. It's not where you thought it was going to be. It is at both places, right? I mean, it's tying back to the conventional layer, two layer, three stuff because that's also important still. Rego, I love having a chat with you. It's great to chat. Good to see you again, John. Super impressive with the work you've been doing. I love the cloud deal with Amazon. You know that. Love was going on in Kubernetes and containerization. Love was going on service mesh, unified stack. Love cryptocurrency, which I didn't get to ask you. Yep. Thumbs up. You've got crazy things going on there too. Thumbs up, okay. Thumbs up. More blockchain than cryptocurrency, but yeah. Blockchain, token economics coming right behind it. It's theCUBE bringing you all the action here at Radio, we're the signal. 2018, Radio 2018, I'm theCUBE. With Raghu, I'm going to be right back with more coverage after this short break.


Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering Mobile World Congress 2017, brought to you by Intel. Hey, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Palo Alto at the SiliconANGLE MediaCube studio. It's our new 4,500 square foot office. We merged in with our two offices here to have our own studio. And we're covering Mobile World Congress for two days, 8 a.m. to six every day, breaking down all the analysis from the news, commentary, and really breaking down the meaning of the impact of what's happening and the trends. And we're doing it here in California, bringing folks in and also calling people up in Barcelona, getting their reaction on the ground. We got a report, we have analysts there, but all the action's happening here in Palo Alto for our analysis. Our next guest is Christina Koo, Director of NTT DoCoMo Ventures. Welcome to theCUBE, appreciate it. Coming in. Hi, well it's good to see you again. Great to see you. So you obviously we've known each other for over a decade now and you've been in the investment community for a while. I got the first question is why aren't you there at Mobile World Congress? Because it's changed so much, it's a telco show and some apps are now thrown in there. But there's so much more going on right now, around 5G, AI, software, end-to-end fabrics. So it's not just give me more software, get more provision, more subscribers, it's a whole other ball game. I mean that's a great question. And so our CEO of NTT DoCoMo is there and his C-level team, but we are the innovation team. We have been here since 2005 doing research and then added business development about three years ago and then a Ventures team that's been around and now we're part of NTT DoCoMo Ventures. What we're looking for is more services and software and this year I guess the focus is AI and AI is, I would call it the new infrastructure. And since wireless networks are all data now, the new infrastructure is AI rules. Rules for everything, vertical and new maps. So I can talk a little bit more about what we've been seeing in the software and services area and how we're looking at the Bay Area as the new innovation to bring back to Japan with NTT DoCoMo. That's awesome. Well, let's take a minute, Christine, if you can, just before we get started. Take a minute to explain what your role is and the group that you're in at NTT DoCoMo here in the Bay Area. What you guys are doing, the focus and some of the things that you're involved in. Great, yeah, no thanks. So I'm a director and I invest on behalf of two funds. One is NTT DoCoMo Ventures for NTT DoCoMo, the wireless carrier, 60 million subscribers, all in Japan, our competitor SoftBank, but we're bigger in Japan and have more market share. And also the NTT Group has a $250 million fund and they're off the 101 freeway. There's NTT Security, IQube, a division of companies as well. And the idea is to bring these technologies through startups through BD to help them enter Japan and also to invest, a minority investment. That's awesome. And so you have to pound the pavement, go out there and see all the action. Obviously, still can buy a lot of stuff happening here and you have experience here. Your thoughts on the business model and how the AI as a service you mentioned that, which is we totally see the same thing. We see a confluence of old network models transforming into personal networks. We're seeing a trend where the relationship to the network, if you will, from a personal standpoint could be the device initially, but now it's wearables, it's the watch, it's the tablet. So now people have this connection, digital connection to the network. Might not be just one network, it could be two. So now AI has to come in. But people are speculating that AI could be that nice brokering automation between all the digital services, whether I'm jumping into an autonomous vehicle or not. If you refer to services for consumers, then the approach that we have is to offer a B2B to see business model. So in each lifestyle category, we purchased a cooking school or percentage of a cooking school ABC cooking, and then we're looking for kitchen devices. So offer that service, an oven, a Bluetooth connected pan. I think some of these devices will be showing up at Mobile World Congress, and then people want a service wrapped around that. Same thing that happened last year with fitness, with Fitbit, but also there's so many other devices to monitor your heartbeat and your health at the consumer level, but consumers want a service provider or someone to put that together for them, and I think AI would be in that layer. So when you say service, you don't mean like network services or like connections, you mean like lifestyle services, as you mentioned, cooking, by the way, Twitch has one of the most popular shows in Korea. People watch each other eating food. It's one of the hottest, you know, live streaming shows. But this kind of talks about that. You mentioned healthcare. Is this the kind of new software you're seeing? These are the kind of new digital services. Is that what you're looking at? That's exactly what we're looking at. I think people don't associate a carrier and services. In Asia, more so, maybe Korea and Japan, because 5G will happen there first, and Dokomo will be the first carrier to have 5G in Japan. I think Korea, they'll have their version first. So I think with that, we have been, I guess since the days of iMode, offering services in a way, and because PC and phone has been analogous, all data services have been just data in Japan. What's your take on 5G right now? Because obviously that's the big story at Memorial Congress. Is it real? Is this one of the big upgrade areas? You see that being a catalyst? Yeah, I mean, we will have it for the Tokyo Olympics. And what kind of speeds are they talking about? A gigabit? Is that what they're looking at? Yeah, I think it's within 30 seconds, you can download a full HD movie. What's for consumers like that? Come on, I want that now. We're going to ask a sargellonic. What am I going to do with the game? Well, absolutely figure it out. That's one of the beautiful things about software. What's the coolest thing that you've seen? In terms of as you look at some of the things that are around the corner, what are some of the cool highlights that you see? Connecting the dots with some of these new kinds of services. What's the trends? Depends if you say consumer enterprise or kind of core. Like I said, what's in the home is interesting. I think on the infrastructure side, mapping. I think new types of beyond ways mapping. 3D drone mapping. The drone thing is super hot. That is killer. But it requires a new data set, right? And if you look at ways is great, but if you look at it, it's almost outdated now, right? In terms of what you can imagine if there is a tree that comes up because of the storm or it's falling down, you want that map to configure that so that the drone can fly over kind of the building or the tree or whatever's in the way. So you need real-time mapping. And I think that's an interesting area that we've been looking at a lot of places. And connectivity will fuel a lot of these devices, whether they're drones or other sensors on the network is that's, I'd imagine, the good instrumentation out there for that stuff. And also social data. The confluence of easy, cheap social data and the mirroring that and stitching that in there. We found companies that will identify you through video, the computer vision, and a drone will follow you and recognize you through AI. That's cool. That's kind of, you know, there may be their small little increases in innovation, but without the AI and the machine learning, you can't. Yeah, we were, it's interesting, you're on this lifestyle, just these services. I think that's the right strategy in the right direction because we were just having a debate earlier this morning on theCUBE here about autonomous vehicles because one of the four categories of the hot trends in Mobile World Congress is autonomous vehicles, entertainment, and media, smart cities, and at home. Automating all that stuff and that's all an opportunity for services. But we were debating that, you know, transportation's not going away, but I might not buy a car in the future. But the differentiation might come from really cool software that allows me to take my preferences, my Spotify playlist, all my digital services that I'm leveraging into an environment whether it's a car, a theater, a park, a stadium, whatever lifestyle I'm in, I can then move with my digital ecosystem, if you will, my personal digital aura, if you will, and not have to have to reboot and connect with me right now my phone works, I just associate, but it still feels clunky, it's not. So I think that's kind of a cool direction. Is that something that you see that telcos and most folks will pick up? Or is this just you guys doing that right now? I think, you know, what interested me about NT Jocomo when I joined was that they're kind of in the forefront and in kind of leadership of that and I think Korea and Japan and Asia are looking ahead. You know, what do you do with unlimited data and then kind of following you everywhere, right? So I think AI, you know, we had Siri, Shibet Konsey, which was, I guess our version of Siri a long time ago, there's a lot of voice enabled applications. So I guess, you know, will that be the interface? I think another interesting concept is what will be the interface, the phone, the Amazon Echo, and then will be the natural interface for you to connect to these devices. Take us through the day to day of the life of a VC that you're kind of the deals that you do. What happens in your day to day life here in Silicon Valley?  So most days, I guess, just meeting with companies and trying to find, you know, the next one, there's so many great areas and also the next trends. So we also do a lot of enterprise deals. So I've been looking at security, cloud, a lot of the DevOps are kind of, you know, what's around the cloud systems. And so, you know, finding the right companies and then also intersecting with my other business development team and they connect to Tokyo. So they're at night talking to the business group leaders and finding that balance of, you know, what is a technology that would work in Japan? What are they interested in? And then out here, scouting for those companies. Yeah, one of the sub plots of the Umo World Congress this year, which is not, which is consistent with pretty much the trend is that the enterprise IT is evolving very quickly because of the cloud. Amazon has certainly demonstrated the winning in the cloud and security, no perimeter, API economy. These new trends are forcing IT to move from this, you know, proven operational methodology to very agile, data-driven, high compute clouds. And security is one of the huge issues. And now you have multi-clouds where I might have something in Azure, I might have something in Amazon, I might have something on a geographic basis in around the world, trying to operate globally being a multinational is challenging. What's your take on that? Because this is an area that is not sexy as the consumer play, but in the B2B space, it is really front and center RSA conference, just last week we were talking on an email about RSA two weeks ago, that was the number one thing. You got the cybersecurity issues, you got the cyber surveillance and also just the threat detection from ransomware to just consumer phishing. What's your thoughts in this area? So I guess we're looking at kind of what's the next new area, which would be using AI to analyze all this data that's coming in from the perimeter, from the endpoint, on your network, right? And then what can bubble up to the surface? So I think we've invested in two companies in this area, Centrify and CyForg, looking for kind of, other companies as well. Well, Centrify, they're really focused on the breach. They're really focused, yep. Yeah, Tom Kemp, in fact, we went to their party at RSA, Jeff Frick and I had had a great band, had a good time with those guys, but they're doing extremely well. They're very focused on mobile. They're doing really well, yeah.  They're looking for kind of like the white spaces, they're looking for some tea leaves to read. Can you share any color on just advice to the entrepreneurs out there? Because it's certainly a turbulent time in the enterprise and just in general, the cloud market. Like it's very competitive. Advice for entrepreneurs, they focus much of the key metrics they should be building their ventures around. I think it depends on if you have an idea or have a product already, but I think it's very competitive, right? And it's hard to break out of what's your product differentiation. On the enterprise space, I think building a product, solving the problem. And then once you've done that and have built a great team, then sales. And then I think in security space, we're trying to get to a million AR, right? Just getting to a certain scale. So it's a little less centralized. When did you guys invest in those guys? Early, later on, what was around? We invested pretty in the last round. So we were a little late stage investors, but we were happy with investment. Yeah, they're doing very well. Awesome. Any other cool things you're working on you'd like to share? I think we have taken apart AI and started to look at transportation. So I think mapping is a little bit part of that. It's also driving different industries like e-commerce, IoT. We've looked at IoT. You must get a lot. I guess all the time. I got to ask the same question because I always get asked, John, what is AI? I know, now I have two answers. Oh, AI has been around for a long time, but then there's a new AI. How do you answer that question? Because AI as a service essentially is software eating the world paradigm. And it certainly is happening where you're going to start to see some significant software advances, but AI in and of itself is evolving. How do you describe that AI as a service? How would you describe it to the lay person out there? I think maybe it's early stage, it's the team and the technology. How many PhDs? What are you looking at? What type of machine learning? So we have a more technical team. We build services. My boss's boss is the head of services and he reports the CTO of Docomo and so his team and they look at that. And then on the other hand though, I think it's later stage is vertical industries and have people taking it apart, put it together and then are monetizing that. And so I think it's- It's a lot of machine learning, a lot of data driven. So algorithms over data or data over algorithms? Is there a philosophy there? I mean, that's a debate that people love to talk about. Maybe it depends on where you're applying it, who it's for, where do you get the data? How do you train the data? And what is the result, right? And are people happy with the result? I think the core infrastructure, I think once an AI company becomes hot, then it gets bought and at that point, we all know who the players are and people are probably looking for more and more of those. So I think those are harder to find. So then like I said, we've taken that apart and maybe looked at mapping. What are maybe more of the components underneath that that we can start to say this is going to be huge in the future. And I think that's a great philosophy too. If you look at how IBM has branded Watson. You can almost look at how successful that's been because people can get a mental model around that. And they've taken a similar approach, although I would say they've done very good on the vertical packaging. And a lot of work's going on now, I think it would say down in the guts of the tech. I think there's a machine learning and more going on there, which is really cool. Which utilizes the cloud, right? That's where the power, the compute. I mean, Amazon has that at re-invent, last re-invent they announced the machine learning as a service. You're starting to see this now where people can take a iterative approach to leveraging this AI as a service. So that's a real brilliant, I'm really impressed by that. Congratulations on a great strategy. I think that should be a winner. And that's going to be probably a core business model. I think other telcos should take notice of that, but I believe we shouldn't tell them we're alive. Well, we can't put it back. Christina, thanks so much for coming in. Appreciate it. Christina Koo here inside theCUBE, special coverage of Mobile World Congress, doing all the investments, checking out all the new business models and really looking at AI as a service. And that really is cutting edge. That really is consistent with the data. It's theCUBE, we're back with more after this short break.


It's done. Holding. Nice job, though. I think we've cleaned that up. Nice! Oh, nice! Oh, they're gonna get him!


Welcome everyone to this event with the Cambridge Union. Thank you so much for tuning in. This is our 11th event of this online only term.  Yanis served as Greek finance minister in 2015 as the author of several books, including to talking to my daughter about the economy. And he's the co-founder of DM25 and the Progressive International. He now serves as a Greek MP. Yanis, the floor is yours. I think you're muted. Oh, okay. You better. Okay. I'm not. You've unmuted me, have you? I can hear you now. Okay, fantastic. So yeah, that's the beauty, the wild beauty of Zoom. Thank you so much for the invitation. Good evening all. Good evening Cambridge. Cambridge at large, I suspect. I'm coming to you tonight from Aguina, a small island, a stone's throw away from the coast of Attica. While the physical splendor of the union is always said to be missed, I'm very glad to be connecting with you from our home, which is sitting on a hill overlooking the Aegean Sea in these very interesting times. It was suggested to me tonight that I address what else are post-pandemic predicament. I decided to do so by alluding to a chronicle of the 20s, of the 2020s, a chronicle which I fear I may have to write or to speak to sometime, let's say in December, 2030. So be warned, a rather bleak account of the next decade is about to hit you. But don't think of it as a prediction, as the chronicle of a waste decade foretold. Think of it as a glimpse into a future that we can avoid as long as we take this bleak possible future quite seriously. So without further ado, here it is. The title of my assessment of this decade, I'm very much fear, is going to be something like our bleak 20s and it would go something like this. Before lockdown, politics seemed like a game between parties resembling football teams, having good days or bad days on the pitch, scoring or conceding points that propel them up and down some football league table. And at the season's end, they get the ultimate prize, or at least one of them does, the opportunity to form government without, of course, big in power. That was a standard view of politics. Was it not as it was coming to us from the mass media? But then all of a sudden, the general feeling that politicians are not really in control gave its place to the realization that governments possess great powers. And upon hitting this realization, many have started salivating at this show of raw state power. Have you noticed how all notions, you know, liberal or let's say neoliberal notions of a minimal state that is mindful of its limits and eager to seek power to individuals? You know, those notions have gone out of the window with the 24 hour curfew, the closure of the local pub, the ban on walking in the park, the suspension of football, the emptying of theaters, the silencing of music venues, you know, all those things that have really changed life over the last few months. At the level of political economy, free marketeers that until a few weeks ago were hell bent on shouting down any suggestion for the most modest of boosts in public spending, the very same people, the very same people a few short weeks later are demanding or demanded a state takeover of the economy. Nothing like that had happened since Leonid Bresnev was ruling the Soviet Union from the Kremlin. Very, very quickly, the state began funding private firms wage bills or in nationalizing their ways and taking shares in airlines, car makers, banks, whatever. What really happened was, and I think that is a good thing. This is a silver lining. From the first week of lockdown, the pandemic stripped away the veneer of politics to reveal its boorish reality underneath. And what is the reality of politics that some people have the power to tell the rest what to do? You know, this thought vindicates Hobbesians who live in fear that others have control over them. And it evokes, remember Lenin's forgotten phrase but very accurate phrase that in essence politics is about who does what to whom. The only thing he did not do this pandemic of ours was that which some naive commerce of mine on the left, some naive leftists had hoped it might do, revive state power as a power for the many. That did not happen. By the end of May, beginning of June, 2020, the lockdown was beginning to ease but the teleconferences that had become essential to surviving physical isolation carried on and leftists in particular, centered left, hard left, doesn't matter. They annoyed me so much with their unfounded optimism that this pandemic was enabling the state to do good things. I would try to remind them that Margaret Thatcher was never really against state power. You know, she left the British state larger, more powerful and more concentrated than she had found it. It was never about the village baker, butcher or brewer. Thatcher is grasped the importance of an authoritarian state to support markets controlled by corporations and large banks. Markets that after Thatcher was out of the picture, eventually the markets themselves were owned by the large companies, think of Amazon or Facebook. They are not competing in somebody else's market or in some market, they own their own markets. So why should those who claims to wish the state wither hesitate for a moment, either in 2020 or before that, in 2008, when we had another implosion of financialized capitalism? Why should they hesitate for a moment to unleash massive government intervention to preserve oligarchic market power? So while in the early 2020s leftist fantasized about the renaissance of the commons of public goods, of the new consensus on the common interest on tackling climate change, I spooked them with the specter of the impending depression, economic depression and psychological depression. Because as far as I was concerned, anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear should be able to see that a great depression was approaching. How could my lefty friends back into 2020 ever imagine that a depression was going to further their socialist dreams, especially after the experience of the 1930s? I recall telling them back in May 2020, you are determined to confuse state power for people power, forgetting that we're entering deflationary times and deflationary times invariably breed monsters, a lesson from the 1930s that you ignore at your peril. Now, while I was saying all this to my lefty friends in 2020, I was hoping deep down that I was wrong, that I was profoundly wrong. Nothing would have made me happier, but it didn't take long before my glam procrastinations were vindicated. Big business always needed the state to impose the property monopoly from which big business draws its energy. By strengthening the state, there was never a serious prospect that the coronavirus would empower the chronically disempowered. Airlines took a while to return to disguise, but money very quickly began to fly across the planet as before at the speed of light. They were never into the pockets of those who actually really needed it. Little gases that had largely subsided for a couple of months filled up the atmosphere again, as soon as production lines were restored, sending truckloads of stuff across the seas and through our fortified land borders. In 2020, the Green Ripper almost claimed the British Prime Minister, the Prince of Wales, from what I hear, even Hollywood's nicest star. However, true to his vile ways, it was the poorer and the browner that the Green Ripper actually did claim. You see, they were easy pickings. Disempowerment rears poverty that ages people faster, makes them biologically older than they should be, and ultimately, readies them for the cult. Amazon, Google, Netflix, Microsoft were not the only beneficiaries of the lockdown days. Thanks to the central bank money pumped into them, through the usual financiers, share markers flourished as economies collapsed. That was a great paradox of 2020. Economies were collapsing, financial markers were doing quite nicely, thank you. Even the guilt of some city and Wall Street bankers, a guilt that was lingering since 2008, diminished as they handed out to middle-class customers a small share of the freshly minted government money. The disconnect between the world of money and the real world, a disconnect that caused millions to struggle and to suffer, that disconnect grew inevitably. With it grew the discontent that fed the monsters I was warning my lefty friends about. The hellish mutual reinforcement cycle between inequality and stagnation, first observed after 2008, was given another spin. The ultra-rich thanked their lucky stars that socialism was alive and well, exclusively for them, of course. But they were not blind to see that the little people condemned to the savage arena of unfettered markets were shedding incomes fast, fearing that the masses would not be able to afford to buy their products, big business invested less and in fewer good quality jobs, spending their money instead on shares, boosting share prices, on yachts, on mansions, on the usual fare. Plans for the green transition that young climate activists had put on the agenda before 2020 were paid lip service afterwards, as governments buckled under tall debt mountains. Mass depression ensued, yielding industrial-scale discontent on a browning planet. Well, ladies and gentlemen, that was the story of our 20s, a decade too close for comfort to the last centuries 1930s. As then, a growing wrath prevailed in the minds of the discontented. In their souls, the grapes of wrath were once again growing heavy for a new bitter vintage. In place of the soapboxes, from which the 1930s demagogues addressed the disgruntled masses, promising to make them proud again, big tech, this time, provided killer apps and social networks perfectly suited for the task. With state power already reached with state power already delegitimized and reconfirmed by the pandemic, cynical agitators took advantage of the dismal performance of Western governments. Instead of strengthening voices calling for international cooperation, we had the spectacular situation where videos of Chinese planes airlifting basic health equipment to Europe and the United States bolstered nationalism. Nationalist leaders harnessed xenophobia to offer demoralized citizens a simple trade. We will give you personal pride and national greatness in exchange for what you give us to the stonkmen in authority, authoritarian powers to protect the people from lethal viruses, from cunning foreigners, and from scheming dissidents. If cathedrals were the middle ages architectural legacy, our 20s contributed tall walls featuring electrified fences and flocks of drones buzzing in their shadow. Finance and nationalism already on the rise before 2020 were the clear winners. For those for whom it was always hard to travel, to make ends meet, to speak their minds, the nation states revival made the world less open, less prosperous, less free. For the functionaries of big tech, big pharma, big business in general, who got on famously with a stonkmen in authority, globalization proceeded at pace. But nevertheless, the myth of the global village gave its place to that of an equilibrium between great power blocks. Each sporting burgeoning militaries, separate supply chains, idiosyncratic autocracies, and class divisions reinforced by new forms of nativism. The new divisions through the prevailing features of each country's politics into sharply relief, like some of us who respond to crisis by becoming caricatures of ourselves, whole countries focused on their collective illusions, therefore exaggerating and cementing preexisting prejudices. Once communities surrendered to the fear of infection, human rights seemed an unaffordable luxury. Big techs, apps developed biometric bracelets to monitor our vital data around the clock. In cooperation with governments, they combined the biological data with geolocation data of where we all were, whom we met, and fed all this information into special algorithms that texted messages to the population with very helpful instructions on what to do and where to go so as to stop new outbreaks in their tracks. But, ladies and gentlemen, a system that can monitor our coughs can also monitor our laughs. It can know how our blood pressure responds to the great leader's speech, to our boss's pep talk, to the police's announcement that some demonstration has been bound, making the KGB and Cambridge Analytica look positively neolithic. The great strength of the new fascists in the 2020s was that unlike their forerunners a century earlier, to gain power they did not have to wear brown shirts and heavy boots, or even to enter government by electoral or other means. You see what happened was panicking establishment parties that had a liberal or social democratic pedigree, or even a conservative old one nation pedigree. Those panicking establishment parties began to fall over each other to steal the fascist thunder by adopting, at first, xenophobia light, then authoritarianism light, then totalitarianism light, until light gave its place to outright darkness. Now, that was my summary of 2020s that I do not want to live to write. In a sense, what I did tonight was to share with you a dystopic prognosis so as to exercise it, to prevent it from coming true, to have you tell me and promise me that we were not going to let this happen. But before we see that promise, one final piece, if you want of advice, a softer warning. Let us please refrain from thinking of this pandemic as more significant than it is. Let us overcome our urge to seek moments of truth, watersheds, milestones. You see, I have a certain tendency to be incensed with all the commentators repeating ad nauseam that 2020 was our moment of truth. I believe that moments of truth are a fiction. Truth grows organically. Epiphanies are an illusion. An illusion that our mind conjures up to explain our failure to realize the obvious a little bit earlier than it did. Now, 2008, I lived through 2008 as an economist as well, as a moment of truth. It was just as much a moment of truth as 2020s. And I could go on as to why I believe that 2008 was a more poignant crisis than this one. But I have to follow my own advice and resist the temptation to elevate 2008 onto a pedestal of significance above that of 2020. You see, like epiphanies, the fork in the road theory of history is a convenient lie. 2008 was a crisis whose wasting paved the ground for nationalists and financiers to prevail after 2020. But the truth is, and this is how I conclude, the truth is we face a fork in the road every day of our lives. Every single day we fail to take advantage of opportunities to change the course of history. And then do you know what we do? To console ourselves? We look into the past, pick out one pivotal moment, and try to lessen our guilt by saying, ah, that was the moment we missed. No, folks.  So let's not miss today's moment of truth, tomorrow's the day's after. Only by not missing those moments of truth, every instance, can we together make my little account of the 2020s sound morose and inaccurate. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much for that wonderful speech. Just to pick up on something that you said, in your kind of dark vision of the 2020s, you talked about a kind of a new rise, populous, kind of promising national greatness in exchange for loyalty to the nation. One of the interesting features of kind of the pandemic so far is that the country led by populous tend not to be doing as well. So whether it's Trump in America, it's telling kind of encouraging people to inject bleach or Bolsonaro in Brazil, there seems to be a gap in kind of the competence in dealing with the virus and populous leaders. Doing that will affect the success of populism going forward. I think my answer to your pertinent question was already embedded. It's something, as I said, connected to it. I said that, you know, this time, these strongmen don't even need to be in government, unlike in the 1920s and the 1930s. Because, you know, let me give you an example. Take France before Macron, when Francois Hollande was the president, in a bid to stem the rise of the neo-fascist National Front Party of Marine Le Pen, it was the socialist government of Francois Hollande that introduced into the Constitution and the National Assembly a provision for withdrawing from dual nationality citizens of Arab descent. Nationality, nationality rights. So, you know, Le Pen didn't even need to be in government. Now, there's no doubt that the incumbents during a pandemic will always suffer to some extent. But are we sure that Trump is going to lose in November? Are we sure that Bolsonaro is on the roads? Maybe they are not. I hope they lose. Let me be very clear about that. But the problem, the point I'm trying to make is that even if they lose, their poisonous politics has infected the center ground. And the center ground is bending over backwards, you know, to go, okay, not full Trumpian racism, but racist light, xenophobia light, authoritarianism light. So they are already penetrating government, even when they're still in the opposition. And I have no doubt that Trump has changed American politics independently of whether he's going to be reelected or not. So, interestingly though, Michael Gove a few years ago said that kind of public has had enough of experts. One of the interesting features of this crisis, this was the first time I can remember in my lifetime, certainly, every night you have experts, you have epidemiologists, you have medical experts on the television talking about their science. So do you think that we're kind of seeing a revival of experts or is this just a temporary fad for this corona crisis? Well, look, I happen to agree with Michael Gove when it comes to the economy, when it comes to policy, when it comes to education, when it comes to, you know, should we privatize the national health service or not. There are no experts in this. There are experts in medical science and in natural science. There are experts in engineering. There are no experts in the science of society and of politics. So the tragedy with somebody like Trump is that he denies science, the right and the opportunity to tell us what we need to know about climate change, about, you know, the epidemic. But then this is one threat. The other threat is that you have somebody like, you know, the good people in the Treasury, the UK Treasury, prior to the Brexit referendum coming up with predictions down to decimal points of what the loss of GDP will be if the people of Britain dare vote for Brexit.   So I'm all for experts where expertise can be proven scientifically, right, when epidemiology, for instance, building bridges, you know, climate change. But I will agree with my goal that those who come to us as technocrats on matters that are pure political decisions, yeah, those are not experts. They are pretend experts and you should get rid of them. Yeah, that's very interesting. So one of the paradoxes of the coronavirus crisis has been that countries are quite rich and powerful, like Britain, like the United States, are leading the world in deaths, while countries are much poorer, much less organized, much less kind of successful in generalist countries like Vietnam, actually doing much better. So there's kind of more deaths per day in America than Vietnam has had over the entire crisis. So what do you think that tells us about how the world is run? Do you think that there's an illusion here that Britain and America are really leading the world in other areas or is something special about coronavirus that makes it different from other kinds of problems? Look, I have to be very, very careful how I thread here because I'm in unfamiliar territory. I'm not an epidemiologist. I don't have the expertise that somebody else would have in my place. The only thing I can tell you is that the United Kingdom and the United States have one thing in common. They have governments that disputed the importance of acting quickly, decisively, locking the country down in order not to go towards the lunacy of the herd immunity story. It seems to me that that is one dimension and the other dimension is interconnections. Countries that are very interconnected with the global economy. Take for instance Belgium, compare Belgium with the Netherlands. Belgium has suffered a massive blow from coronavirus. And what is the fundamental difference between Belgium and the Netherlands? It was not so much policy. Policy was very similar in the two countries. The difference is that Belgium, Brussels because it's the center of the European Union, is the center of NATO. It's effectively the capital of Europe, has a lot more interconnections, flights and so on. So there's a lot more movement and mobility going through that country. You have the city of London, you have the world state. That I think is the second dimension. But the fact that Boris Johnson and Donald Trump were dead against the idea of a lockdown to begin with and took so long to do it may have something to do with it. But again, I'm not the expert to talk about this. Yeah, and I'm definitely not the expert either. So going back to Britain, what do you think kind of in this dark future of the 2020s, what role do you think the Labour Party and Kirsten Sturma will play? In an interview recently, you said he's a very nice guy, but was absolutely in a threat to the establishment. Do you think he'll last in the role? Do you think he'll do well? Oh, goodness gracious me. I have no idea whether he will do well. I'm not very good at predicting how well politicians will do. Look, Kirsten Sturma seems to be like someone who is a bit of a paradox in the sense that he is wonderfully efficient and lethal in the House of Commons, but not so much outside. So the question therefore boils down to the extent to which the systemic media are going to adopt him as a palatable replacement for Boris Johnson. He's not going to have the kind of support that Jeremy Corbyn had from the grassroots. He doesn't have that. It's not in his disposition or in his politics. So is he going to be embraced by Rupert Murdoch or the equivalent Rupert Murdoch of the next couple of years? That is the question, you know, harking back to what Tony Blair managed to do, that is to be the Labour leader that in the end was considered reasonable and not particularly worrisome alternative to the Tory Prime Minister. So what do you think he needs to do to get that? Does he need to pivot to kind of harder forms of nationalism? Does he need to kind of pivot to centre economically? What do you think allowed Tony Blair to get that kind of dominant hold of a centre ground? Well, Tony Blair has sold out completely to Rupert Murdoch. He went cap in hand on his knees and begged for Rupert to anoint him, and that's exactly what happened. Maybe the situation is a bit more complicated now because the Liberal Party is the largest party in Europe in terms of membership as a result of having inducted the momentum crowd, you know, my good friends and comrades from the left of the spectrum. And if he antagonises them too early and too much by doing it only Blair, then it's very unlikely that he will be able to make up the numbers simply by ingratiating himself with the establishment. So he has to, it's clear that he is trying to take a middle road. He accepts most of the manifesto under Jeremy Corbyn, but rejects all those aspects that the establishment would find threatening to its, to the establishment's core. Very interesting. And one thing that kind of stands out from your speech in the beginning is how consistent it largely has been with what you've been saying for a while. You've been warning about kind of rising, kind of rising nationalist populism, kind of transnational capital and so on. Are there any things that the coronavirus crisis has changed your mind about? Is there anything that you used to think is important but no longer do or vice versa? Not really because, you know, look, my thinking is not very complicated or sophisticated. I have a very simple approach to the global political economy. I see what happened in 2008 to be very worryingly similar to what happened in 1929 with big differences. The big difference was that in 2008 central banks created rivers of money in order to reflow banks, something that did not happen in 1929. But the only difference that that really made was that the period between 1929 and 1931, in our case, after 2008, was extended to a dozen years. Effectively, we have stagnation now for a dozen years. The fact that you have so many people in Britain that it only took one week of not working and to go into penury. If you think that 60% of Britons did not have enough money in the bank, savings to last them for more than a week. And why is that? GDP is greater, employment is higher. The reason is because you had the bank of England pumping money into the financial system, creating an immense rise in asset prices because that money was mainly lent to companies to buy back their own shares, not to invest. And to employ people at the lowest level of the service sector, you know, sort of zero hour contract jobs and so on and so forth. So that creates a great increase boost in inequality. But it also means that a very large percentage of the population are going to be discontented, whether they are working or not. Most of them are working poor, were working poor, became unemployed poor as a result of COVID-19. And then what happens? You have the bank of England again pumping huge coins of money. Now, the key regarding the UK and the UK may be slightly different from the Eurozone. It already is quite different. And I'll explain that in a moment. But already, at this stage, all we see is a repetition of 2008. Again, you have the banks getting gigantic quantities of money from the Bank of England. The banks have difficulty passing this money on to the real economy. You already hear all these complaints by small businesses across England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland that they simply do not see where that money is ending up. They're requesting a loan of 80,000 quid and they get a loan of 15,000 three weeks later than they were promised. So there is this bottleneck that effectively what it does, it takes our predicament between 2008 and 2020 and turbocharges it. But I did say, and I need to explain that, that there is a difference between the United Kingdom and the European Union in the sense that the Johnson government, and I'm no great friend of the Tories as you may have gathered, but nevertheless, they have been very good at dismissing austerity as an option. And even before the coronavirus hit, I'm realizing that having stolen all those red belt seats from the Labour Party in the north of England, that they need to put real money into public goods and investment in the north of England. If they do that, then Britain may end up in a much better place than the continent. And that may also tip the balance regarding the costs of Brexit and their relative hit that the Eurozone takes from a hard Brexit vis-à-vis in relation to what the United Kingdom gets. Interesting. I think that's probably enough for questions from me. I have some questions from the audience that were pre-submitted before and I'll go to the chat box in a bit. So Marino from the University of Montreal asks, how could China take advantage of the current Eurozone turmoil? What could the effects be, especially for southern Europe? Oh, the answer already exists because they've done it years ago. The Eurozone crisis began in 2010. And since then, China has been building up its presence in the south and east of Europe. There's nothing sinister in this. There's nothing sinister in this. They're doing what is in their interest. The question is, what allows them to do it? And the answer is the complete and utter lack of investment of European investment in southern and eastern Europe, complete zero investment. All you have, some privatizations in Greece, in Italy and so on, effectively existing wealth has been taken over by northern Europeans without actually putting any real money into creating new productive activities. The Chinese come in and do it. And that money doesn't come with strings attached, with the steady strings attached. So China has been quite brilliant at doing this. When I was from the Finance Minister of Greece, I remember how open they were to anything that I would suggest to them and how generous they seemed. Now, some may say, well, this is the thin edge of the wedge, and this is part of their geopolitical attempt. Well, sure. But if you really want to blame someone for the fact that China is finding it, it's the path of least resistance, the east and the south of Europe, the answer to that, to the cause of that, of course, is the failure of the European Union to shift money from excess liquidity in the financial sector to investment. And as a follow up to that, there's someone named Cameron in chat who asks, what are your thoughts on the Chinese Communist Party imposing national security legislation in the Hong Kong special ministry of region? I am appalled, absolutely appalled. I think the Hong Kong youth have been in paragons of democratic morals and ethos that I salute, the manner in which they remain steadfast in the face of brutality in the Hong Kong polytechnic some months ago, is an example for students all over the world of how we need or you need folks, because I'm an old enough, but you youngsters must be prepared to put your lives on the line to defend democratic freedoms. And this latest, in the last 24 hours, I heard that Beijing is trying to effectively impose one country, one system on Hong Kong. I have to say it called me by surprise, I was expecting to be a bit more wiser than that, unless they think that the coronavirus crisis is blunted opposition and now they can steamroll over the youth of Hong Kong. I hope that the youth of Hong Kong pulled them wrong. So do you think there's still a chance that the Hong Kong activists can fight back against the Communist Party and defend Hong Kong democracy or do you think it's too late? No, I don't think it's too late. I think that they've always, they never cease to amaze me with their bravery and innovative forms of resistance. I hope and trust that they will try it again. We who are outside Hong Kong and China, I'm not a China basher, you heard me before saying good things about China. But when it comes to authoritarianism, especially in Hong Kong, but also other parts of China, we need to stand up China, while at the same time, not buying the Atlanticist NATO-Trumpian attempt to create an environment, an atmosphere of military conflict, confrontation or even economic conflict and trade sanctions between the West and China. So we need on the one hand to be nuanced and on the one hand to understand the great success story that China is and not to look at them ex ante as an enemy of our countries and our peoples, but at the same time defend Democrats everywhere in China, including in Hong Kong. Definitely. Some Christus has asked this twice, but it's a good question. The humanitarian aspect of the pandemic with regards to refugees has been ignored. What is the best way to incorporate the issues in such narratives? This is a fantastic question. I don't have an answer to it. I wish I did.  For instance, I'll give you an example of Greece, because Greece is such a good case study. As you know, we are at a front-line state. We have a common border with Turkey. Turkey has three and a half million refugees or migrants. The president of Turkey is instrumentalizing them, sometimes letting them come to the border, to come into Greece, other times not doing so, depending on his relationship with the German chancellor, what he wants to get out of the geopolitics of the Eastern Mediterranean. So you've got these poor people who are being instrumentalized by the Turkish government, but they are also being instrumentalized by the European Union and the Greek government. They're caught in the middle. And you have a population in Greece, which after 10 years of depression, they say, it's not our problem. Let the Germans, let the Swedes deal with that. They don't want to deal with that. Are we the poorest of Europeans going to deal with it? So it's so difficult. We do it. My political party stands up in parliament and we go around Greece and we do say that we have a duty as humans and as citizens of the world that abide by international conventions and the rights according to international law of the refugees to seek asylum. It's very difficult in a climate of economic collapse, especially in a country that has had a great depression for 10 years, to evoke the sense of solidarity which is necessary towards people who are being instrumentalized both by the Greek government and the Turkish government. Definitely. Yeah. So one question about Brexit. I know it's something you've talked a lot about in last few years, but I think this is a good question. Brian Heath asks, will this pandemic strengthen the EU's position on Brexit trade negotiations, seeing UK crash out without a deal December? No, the opposite. This is a great gift to Boris Johnson. I'm not saying this cynically because I was one of those economists who were, I was not putting figures on it and certainly not decimal points, but I always argued that a no deal Brexit would be detrimental to the interests of the majority of the Brits because of the supply chains, the damage it would do to trade between Britain and its greatest trading partner, which is the European Union. But the coronavirus has really appended all that and he has designed it in two ways that are helping Boris Johnson immensely. The first thing is the supply chains change are broken. They broke. They can't break more than they already have. I mean, there could be no greater disruption of trade than what we've had and we are still having. Even Sweden that didn't have a lockdown, their Volvo factories had to shut down because they ran out of parts and raw materials. So if Boris Johnson was going to use as a credible threat towards Brussels the no deal by the end of the year were out and no extension to to this interregnum, this is the time to do it because the whole thing is already a pair shaped in terms of supply chains, but there's a second dimension that strengthens Boris Johnson. And it does so if he's smart and uses it immensely even at the discursive level. You will recall that the argument of Michel Barnier, which actually made some sense before coronavirus was that look folks speaking to the bridge to you folks, we have a single market. We have a level playing field and there are certain rules to gain access to that single market. You have to play by the rules. And if you don't want to be part of making those rules because you are out of the you have to accept our rules. So if you want to have access then you have to go along with whatever the European Court of Justice says. But that doesn't no longer applies because the single market has already fragmented because of coronavirus. You see that now governments have been given the green light by Brussels. Governments in the European Union have been given the green light by Brussels to bend the rules of competition to help their own industries. And in other words to move beyond the level playing field. So if there's not a level playing field within the single market of the European Union how can Michel Barnier demand of Britain to stick to the rules that no longer apply between let's say Italy and France. And if Boris Johnson is smart enough he should use this argument. I hope he's not listening because I don't want to strengthen him. Well let's hope so real relevance there. So Michael Tierney asks how does the new progressive international contribute to making sure that the dystopia you describe does not come into being? Well it's the key because the dystopia that I'm describing is the result of two international organizations or international networks. One is the finances because you see come to think of it the golden era of capitalism was the 1950s and 60s when we had very low unemployment, very high investment, minuscule inflation, inequality was shrinking. That was a period during which the finances were in a straight jacket. They were not allowed to do anything what they're doing today. They were capital controls, there was a complete separation of investment banking from retail banking. What they have managed to do ever since and especially after 2008 the financial crisis which they caused was to create a financial internationalism in action on behalf of bankers who always made sure that the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Switzerland, the Bank of Sweden always worked together to refloat banks whether they were Greek banks, French banks, German banks, British banks. So this is internationalism in action and also what you call them, you call them populists, I call them fascists because I'm a bit old and I can't be bothered with euphemisms. The Bolsonaro's, Trump's, Le Pen's, Salvini's of the world. They love each other. They work so well together. They never disagree about anything. Unity's strength, the trade unions movement used to say, well now the trade unions movement has gone sadly and you have the Bolsonaro's, the Modi's, the Le Pen's and the Trump's that are united. So the only way of countering this twin pillar of misanthropy, the international of the bankers and the international of the fascists is for Democrats, for progressives to start cooperating along the lines of the progressive international and the idea is very simple. We should have an answer to the question, so what do you want to do at the planetary level? Okay, you talk about, you talk about green transition. How much will it cost? We need to have the same answer whether we're in living in Brazil, Argentina, in the United States, in Brighton or in Cork in Ireland. We must have the same answer, something around, you know, six, seven percent of global GDP and then we must have an answer to the question, where will the money come from? And how will you spend it? We need to have a global plan, a green new deal for the world. It's not enough to have a green new deal for Britain. It's not enough to have a green new deal for France, for the United States. We need to have one for the planet. If this is a planetary problem, and it's not just that the green transition is a planetary problem. The, you know, looking after the vast majority of people who live under precarious conditions is also a planetary problem. So do you think that demands kind of planetary institutions then? Because at the European level, DM-25 can sit together in the European Parliament, they can be left in different countries and they can serve as kind of one party. But if I'm a progressive Democrat and Bernie Sanders in the US, I'm a socialist in Britain, I'm a socialist Argentina, there's no kind of political mechanism for us to unite. So do you think this demands new institutions, the UN, or what do you think is the solution to that? Well, I know that there are certain members of the audience, I hope very few, who are waiting for me to say, yes, we need a global government to attack me for being a globalist who wants a global, unaccountable dictatorial government to tell people what to do. So I'm not going to fall into that trap. But look, you remember when the financial sector came crashing down in 2008? Very soon after that, there was a meeting in London of the G20 that Gordon Brown actually chaired. So they go together and they coordinated. They didn't create one central bank for the world, but all the central banks, the major central bank which I mentioned before, they go together and coordinate it. Well, why can't we do this? Not to refloat the banks, not to save the banks, but to save the planet. Why can't we get together? The level of the G20, even informally and say, okay, we're all going to combine forces at two levels. Our investment banks, the European investment bank, the World Bank, KFW, the German one, Britain should have one, it doesn't have one. Jeremy Corbyn promised to create one. Well, I think you need one. But anyway, so investment banks that issue bonds that soak up liquidity around the world and throw it into the green transition investments that we need, and central banks standing behind those bonds in the international markets in the same way that the Fed, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank purchase bonds anyway in the secondary markets. Well, that's not even a radical agenda, what I'm saying. And you don't need a central government to do that. You just need the political will. To have the political will, you need to elect governments in America, in Britain, in Europe, in Brazil that actually are interested in this international doing you do. That's why we need the political movement to help progressives get elected. I think I might know the answer to this next question. I'll ask it anyway. Theophile asks, do you think the deal Macron and Merkel struck or positive consequences for the real economy? Well, you see, firstly, it's not a deal. It's a common proposal. There is a gigantic difference. And the reason why I'm saying that is because back in June 2018, the same two politicians, President Macron of France and Chancellor Merkel of Germany, go together in a very picturesque castle in Brandenburg.  It seemed what was the announcement that the Eurozone would acquire its own separate budget. A separate budget means it's a Hamiltonian moment. It is, you know, common debt. It's, you know, common treasury. That's what it means to have a common budget. And what happened to that? Zero, nothing. It was forgotten. It didn't disappear completely. It simply diminished and diminished and diminished until it became an obscure line in the budget of the European Commission. Macroeconomically insignificant, just a few pennies. So before I pass judgment on this latest Merkel and Macron proposal, and this is another game changer, we need to see how it turns out after tortures meeting, after tortures meeting, after tortures meeting, because, you know, this is, it's going to, to wither slowly into something far less significant than what it was made out to be. In any case, look, the very fundamental idea is interesting and wrong. It is interesting because on the one hand, it is the first time that a German chancellor has agreed to the idea of some kind of common debt that, and for those who don't know what it is, the idea is this. Germany, France, Italy, Greece, all the EU member states are going to give Brussels a guarantee so that Brussels can go out there in the money markets and borrow. So the commission is going to be borrowing using some guarantees that the member states give, right? Now, of course, those guarantees will have to be repaid. At some point, in other words, the states will have to fork out the money for the money that the European Commission has borrowed. Now that's some federalism and it is not a fiscal union. A fiscal union is what you have in the United Kingdom. In other words, you have a situation whereby, you know, when some people become in some region, let's say in the north of England or in Cornwall or wherever, unemployment rises faster than it does in Surrey, incomes from Surrey are automatically used in order to pay the higher unemployment benefits in Cornwall or Newcastle, okay, without politicians having to make that decision. This is the automatic stabilizers within a fiscal union, right? If Cornwall, Surrey, Sussex, Yorkshire had to guarantee debts of London that London would then give back to Newcastle, Surrey and so on. Firstly, it would be a very silly and perverse system and secondly, it would not be a fiscal union that actually works in a way of stabilizing the United Kingdom. So I'm not that impressed. It was a long-winded play of saying that I'm not impressed. Hi, I can tell. So there's a question from, sorry, I can't say this name, but Mr. Vera Fakis, we've seen during the pandemic the lockdown has helped the climate in many ways. Do you think there's possible that some measure scheme could be permanent in the post-corona era? No, I don't. I don't. Exactly the opposite. The airlines will do anything they can to put as many planes up in the air as possible. States are already announcing that they are going to help them, give them lots of money. I mean, look at what happened in Germany with Lufthansa, a company that was extremely profitable up until recently now has lost a large chunk of its value. The government's going to put a lot of money in it, and it's not even seeking shares. And why is it significant? And why is it pertinent to the question? It is because if you don't have shares, you don't have votes in the general assembly of the owners, and then you can't say, as a state representative of the people, you know what, folks? I'm sorry, but we are now major shareholders and we want to reduce the emissions. And we need to take into consideration the climate change when it comes to the business plan of our airline. So no, I don't see that. Interesting. I mean, you did mention that in your earlier thing about airlines. Yes, so I just want to sum up with any more good questions to chat, I think. But what do you think that the British right will do with this? So the big concern that kind of certain countries are more nationalistic in reaction to this. So countries like Britain, like people that are disproportionately dying of coronavirus are BME people, people in urban areas. Do you think that within countries you'll see a rise of xenophobia as well as kind of between countries? Look, I don't think it's good to do much with the coronavirus. Coronavirus, as I said in my talk as well, discriminates against the poor, against the blacks, against the disempowered. But the greatest fuel of xenophobia and racism is depression, economic and psychological depression that follows usually from the economic depression. In the United States, for instance, one of the reasons why Trump was elected was because people who were not particularly racist, who were just racist light back under Ronald Reagan, blue collar workers who used to not really loathe blacks, but look at black mamas who were unemployed and minded the kids at home and got some kind of benefit from the state. They looked down upon them. They used to call them, you know, welfare mamas. Now these blue collar workers living in the Rust Belt areas of the United States, they've lost their jobs some time ago, not the coronavirus crisis, but a long time ago because their industries went to pieces and they can't even afford their medical bills anymore. So they have to go to the same office where the black mama went to get her benefit and beg to be classified as disabled in order to be able to get Medicare.  That's what fuels racism. And maybe then they turn against the Mexicans and they call them rapists, you know. But what breeds those monsters is the deflationary forces, the depressive forces of an economy where the world of money has been completely decoupled from the work of labour. Well, on that very optimistic note, I think we'll close this event. Thank you for coming, Janus. Thank you to everyone for tuning in. It's great to have you. Thanks. I enjoyed it. Thank you.


Agora is, let's say, a creative platform for students to share their work. As soon as you kind of leave the circuit of, let's say, graphic design, as a student, you're kind of stuck, you know, doors closed. I think that having a project like this, like Agora, actually might help a few people, you know, just, like, first, like, trying out stuff and having, like, some actual proof of their, like, experience, you know. And then, also in the future, like, networking with professionals, because we want to have in the future, like, either, like, professionals interviews, but also them participating in the project. So, yeah, just, like, having a place where, like, people can just network and more easily than how it is right now, that's in, like, the current graphic design industry.