me présenter. Je m'appelle Francesca and I'm going to speak English. Je voulais faire ça en français, mais mon français c'est horrible. Maintenant je n'ai pas parlé français pour un, peut-être l'année prochaine on va faire ça en français. This year we're gonna do this in English. So my name is Francesca. I'm the WordPress community manager at SiteGround, international web hosting company, but for the purposes of this talk I'm the founder of Chippew Bee, who's a blog and this whole talk is based on this experience. So it's the year 2013. I'm leaving abroad and I'm miserable. I am juggling a day job that I don't particularly enjoy and I'm trying to start my own business. And what do I do? I go online and read blogs from American entrepreneurs that tell me that I can start a six-figure business, basically out of nothing, that I can get 100,000 followers on Twitter in a few months, that I can build a business that will make me money while I sleep. I would really love that, but you know this kind of advice, but it doesn't really work for me. So I'm miserable, but one good thing comes out of following all these blogs and chats and forums is that I meet other Italians, other women from Italy who are also starting this online businesses, which was kind of a new thing for Italians at the time. And so we start wondering, can we do something in Italian that will be helpful and that will fit the Italian market? Can we help other female creative entrepreneurs? That's how we saw each other. To all get better at this new adventure of making money while we sleep. Something that I don't think I ever did, by the way. So if that was the advice you were looking for, I'm sorry I'm not the right person, but I know about blogs. So since at the time I was making a living of building websites, I was like, I can do a blog. We can do this pretty easily. So let's put together some people, a blog, and let's start it. And of course we will do this for free. We will share our knowledge and skills for free because we are on a mission. We wanted to make it easier for female creative entrepreneurs in Italy to make a life that they like. Five years later, which is kind of a long time in the internet terms, Chipubi is going strong. Chipubi is a terrible SEO name that will never, never got us discovered. It's Casa Piubottega, home plus studio. No one makes the association, no matter how many times we write this. But this is what the name is based on because most of the people that read and write for Chipubi are home workers and this is why we call it with this incredibly unuseful name. And this is the website and as you can see it's super simple. There's nothing innovative about the design. It's a blog and we like it to be a blog because we concentrate on content above everything else. So this is Chipubi basically yesterday. And we did pretty good. When I say that in five years we're still going strong. These people, these numbers might seem very small to other companies and you know company business blogs and stuff like that. But for us always remember that we're talking about this niche of female creative entrepreneur and we basically cover it all in Italy. That's more or less the capacity that that market has and we cover it all. So we have 80 authors. We're very, very popular on Facebook where we have over 12,000 people. We have a really good engagement rate with our posts. We have a really good number of readers, monthly visitors to the blog. And I think one of the stats that really say a lot about the quality of the content is that 56% of male readers. The whole thing is declined at feminine, I don't know how you say it in English actually. So all the articles are, hey sister, new girl, you should do this. And the fact that 56% of our readers are men that can overcome the fear of being called hey girl, it means that the content is valid and people read us because the content is good and not because we're a blog for female creative entrepreneurs. So on September 5th, 24th, we celebrated our fifth anniversary. And I have to say I learned a lot about running this blog and not just about blogging, but in general about business, of course, and supervising distributed teams. 80 people is not a small team. And so this is more or less what it goes behind the scenes and a bit of tips if you want to start a blog for your business or community. So let's start with the basics. So if you have multiple authors, the first thing you need to do is actually manage all the roles and not just in terms of hierarchy, you know, a company hierarchy who does that, but actually in WordPress how you manage all these different people. So we assign different roles to each user and to have a more granular control over what everyone can do. We use this plugin. I don't know if any one of you knows it. Members by Justin Tadlock. It's a free plugin. You can find it in the WordPress.org repo. So we kept the same names that WordPress assigns to user, admins, editors, authors and subscribers. But for each role we went a bit more into details of what kind of permissions we want everyone to have by using this plugin. So for example, you see we only have three admins. It's me, the founder, the actual editor in chief and the developer that helps us with the code when we need it. Then we have editors. They can do whatever they want except for installing, plugging and things. But in terms of what they can do in the posts themselves before and after publishing, they can do everything. Authors are the people that are active in the blog in this particular season. They can post, they can upload their posts, edit it up until publication. When the post is published, they cannot edit anything anymore. And then we have the subscribers who are the people that wrote for us in the past and they're right now temporarily or permanently out of the picture. So they cannot do anything besides editing their own user profile. And this is how the plugin looks. You can honestly go into each part of the website and decide what capability is going to be granted and which one is going to be denied. So it's in Italian. You have articles, pages, media, comments, Yoast SEO, taxonomies, appearance. Some are in Italian, some are in English, doesn't matter. You get the idea. Some polyglots didn't do their job. But you can go and actually change at a very granular level what everyone can do. There are two reasons why we have this kind of management of roles. The first one is that tight editorial ship. We, as I said, content above all. So it's very important for the newsroom, what I will call the newsroom, so the editor-in-chief and the editors to supervise the content that we put out there. So if an author wants to change their content even years after publication, it's not a problem. We actually really encourage that. We actively edit the first post we had because five things are a long time in the Internet. But we always want to have the supervision of an editor that has the general editorial overview for the whole blog in mind before we go and do something. And security. Reducing the capabilities that people have to do stuff on the website reduces the surface of attack in case of hacking. So we try to keep a higher level of access to very few people that at least we trust that you have good passwords at a minimum. So now we have the people. We need to keep them busy, right? So the first thing we do, decide how many times we want to publish in a week to create, to put these people at work and to create a calendar. What I would say, the experience here is don't post every day if that's not working for you. And if it doesn't work with your schedule and stuff like that, we started out posting five to six times a week. Then about two years in, we did a survey, we had almost 1000 replies. And the vast majority said, you're posting too much, we cannot keep up with you. So we went down to three times a week. And we started doing longer articles. So they really feel like a mini essay. So I'm not, if someone is writing about Facebook, they're not just going to write what's the difference between a profile and a page, which is a content that you can find anywhere and written in basically 400 words, you'll find a 2000 words article that will really deep dive and go deep into the issue itself. So we moved to three articles a week. And basically, in about two months, the readership doubled. So we were, I mean, the people that replied were right in asking us this. It all starts with paper and pencil. I print out or the editor in chief, it depends who's doing the calendar. In this period, we print out a Google calendar empty sheet for every month we want to fill up. We say, what are the days where we're going to publish? I write down when I do it, I do it manually. I write down the list of all the authors and start going, you know, one by one, putting them in the calendar, and put a number next to their name. So I make sure that everyone gets exposure. If someone asks, no, I want to write just twice a year, no problem. If someone says, I want to write every month, no problem. But it's really, really handmade, a simple approach that has worked very well for us. So we always also have a couple of backup articles. So if someone suddenly cannot deliver, we can have someone something to post. But also if we don't post because we miss one date, it's not a problem. Again, it's a volunteer run blog. We all do this for free. So our readers are very understanding if we miss something because they know the story behind the blog itself. Once we have the calendar on paper, and it works, every author basically covers one topic. So I might use the two terms interchangeably because one author, one topic. So we make sure the calendar, all the topics are spread out during the year. So we know that we cover all the things we want to cover for that period. So after this, we move the calendar to Trello, which is a free project management tool. And we keep it really simple there. We don't actually manage the workflow there. We use it to store stuff, basically. And this is how it looks. Very simple. This column, it's ideas for articles. So if someone read something in a blog, or in the newspaper, or they come up with an idea, and they think the topic is good for QQB, they'll put it here. And we might assign it to someone. Then we have the calendar, the dates, the blog, or the other things we're doing. We have a bit of archive with the workflow and a few documents. So if someone doesn't remember what are all the steps, and it will become clear in a moment why someone will not remember all the steps, I can go there and see all the steps. And finally, we have that column where you see Kedya Lesperta has asked me anything. It's something that we used to do on Facebook that worked very well for us. But then at some point, we were all tired of doing it. But we're keeping it there, because maybe one day we will have the energy again to do it. So we'll keep it there for better times. And this is what the calendar at the end of the day really looks like. So we have the date, we have the topic, the person, and every time something gets done, we just check it. So we have the authors, we have the calendar. How does a post get published at the end of the day? It's a very long process. And it's the pride and joy of QQB. And five years later, every time I meet readers, one of the things that they always highlight is the quality of the content and the fact that you can tell that behind each post there's a research.  And this is why. So behind the scenes, we have a number of people. I added their Twitter handle if you want to follow them, some of them post in English and they're very interesting people. So we have an editor in chief right now. It's Daniela Scapoli. And this person is in charge really of picking the best possible content for the blog. She reads the proposals we get from authors. She communicates with existing authors to come up, for example, with a series of posts on a certain topic that will fit that period. She might reach out to two authors who want to feature in the blog. She puts together the editorial calendar or I put together the editorial calendar. This is a bit depends on how busy we are. But in general, she has the grand vision of what it will look like in QQB for the next few months. I don't know. Email marketing. So she'll decide that for the next three months, we will concentrate on writing about the strategy behind email marketing. And then for three months, who will write about MailChimp to talk about the tools of the email marketing. But there's need to be a vision. Otherwise, everything is going to be a bit disconnected. And then we have the editors. This is the name they have on WordPress. But I like to think of them as the newsroom because they have different roles. So we have copy editing in addition to Daniela, which is also a web writer in her daily life. We have another lady called Anna Maria. She's a business writer and she read every post and see that everything is okay. Tie posts, syntax. Sometimes she has to rewrite quite a lot. But it's okay because sometimes we really want to talk about a certain topic. We cannot find any strong writer for that. So we will go to the best possible person to talk about that even if they're not strong writer. And we will help them out with the writing because we believe they really have something to say. And maybe they don't know how to say it in the best possible way. So we will help them out. We have photo editing, media, every poster comes with a picture and with a sentence over it. So she reads the whole article and she decides what kind of image will go better with that content to describe the content. We have Barbara that takes care of Instagram, Christiana Facebook and then we have Tatiana. So every every article is also checked for SEO. And she can give some suggestion how to make it more readable. We're not super interested in getting tons of readers just because we have something to sell them because we're not selling anything. So we're not optimizing for search engine with a business objective in mind. But basically because we think that the content is good and we want to reach out as many possible people. And in fact, we're very, very well ranked for a number of articles. So if you look for that in Italy, you will find us in the first position, including some articles on SEO. So we're doing well. What it means is that basically every article gets read by four to six people before it gets published. And this is how we maintain the quality and it's a lot of work, as you can imagine. And this is why a lot of people are doing this because we really believe what comes out of there needs to be the highest quality possible. And the whole process is very long and it takes a lot of steps. We're going to go briefly over everything. So the first step is talking to the author. The editor in chief will communicate with the author and come up together with topics they can talk about. And sometimes we're not really sure that the topic will fit. So we might ask them to rearrange stuff. So the editor in chief will work closely with the author. Then finally, this can happen also months before the article is published. The author uploads the post in WordPress in the website. And then the editor in chief has the first read. She goes through it, suggests some changes if there are changes that need to be done. And then the editor work on it. It can be the editor in chief because again she's a webwriter or it can be Anna Maria which is a business writer and she go and check that everything is all right. Then media comes in. She reads all the article to see what's the best possible image for that. And she will upload the image. Then Tatiana does her SEO magic, whatever that is. Find a round of changes. Something needs to be done. Let's check this one more time. Sometimes we ask people to read it that have no idea what this topic is about especially if it's a... We have a chartered accountant. I don't know what it's called in in French. And we have a lawyer. So sometimes they write articles that we want to make sure people understand what they're saying. So we ask someone to read it. And then finally the post gets scheduled and it goes out into the word. After the publishing we still publish on Facebook and on Twitter. So as you can see a lot of steps and a lot of people checking what's going on. So yes there's a lot of communication going on and we do it mostly mainly in two ways. The first one we use this free plugin. Have you heard of it? Edit flow. Has anyone heard of it? It's a really good plugin. It's developed by Automatic. You can also find it in WordPress.org and it's a plugin that provides with lots of editorial functionality. I would say that it can be very useful for team that collaborate on a blog. There's tons of features. We mostly use it for editorial comments. So it will add some boxes at the end of your post where you can comment the article and reply to communication. This is exactly what it looks like. It's like Facebook comments basically. So you have the first say, hey I'm sorry I haven't replied to you before. I should put the image for your article. Can you please give me the the sentence to publish? Oh sorry. Okay use this and then the editor comes in and say, ah thank you for the proposal. I vote for this one. And then all right that's good. Image ready, ready to go. And these are the comments that you find it basically in each article we publish. And then despite my hate for Facebook groups and my love for Slack, I try to move everyone to Slack. It didn't go well. Most of the people that write for for gpb are on Facebook so it doesn't matter how much I want to move them somewhere else. It makes complete sense to be on Facebook and this is where we brainstorm our idea. We have two groups actually the editors newsroom but this is more of a technical group where we just say oh I cannot see the image or we had a poster scheduled for 8am and something went wrong you know stuff like that. But then we have the authors groups that it's a lot more interesting because that's where the discussion happens. You know someone comes on and say oh next month I'm going to start writing about podcasts. Do you have any requests? What would you like to know about that? 25 comments about what the other authors want to hear about podcasts. So and we also have a lot of laughs and fun on that so that's also good to create company culture what we'll talk about. The other thing that I think really separates us from other blogs is how we find all these authors and how we onboard them. This is something that I'm very obsessed about onboarding people in the right way so they can be effective for the long run. When we want to add someone new when we want to maybe want to explore a new topic or someone say hey I cannot write anymore I cannot commit anymore to writing so we need to find someone else for that topic. We usually either do a call for articles so we post something in our social media or blog post and say hey we're looking for someone that will write about this thing or we invite people. If we know that there is one person that we really want to see on chpb then we will invite them. We try to do a mix of these two things because I really think it's important to have this front point of views also from people that are at different stages in their career. We don't always need the super top expert on a certain topic sometimes we need that fresh eye on that very same topic that might bring something completely new than the things we have read about for 20 years already. So this is how we do it if someone say yes I'm up for it we go through a very very thorough vetting process so we will go to these people's social media we'll go to these people blogs to see what's their style and it's not just to see how they write because again we can always trust our editors to make them sound better. I'm heavily edited every time I write I'm like just make me sound good so change whatever you want but we want to make sure that they will fit with us. It's something very hard to describe because you know what the vibe is like yeah if you have been reading the blog long enough you know what's the vibe we want to create so we don't only look for the good writers we look for people that we feel are partners that they believe the same things that we believe and we've been advocating for for five years so this is why we check whatever they're producing and finally we have some legal paperwork I know it might sound a bit overkill for a free blog that goes out whenever people can make it go out but I think it's important to create a professional relationship even if there is no money involved so we have in Italian it's called scrittura privata private document it's between people you don't need a lawyer for this and it states what rights the public publisher has and what rights the author has so for example in our case the copyright and intellectual property stays completely with the author we ask them to release the content with the creative commons license and we also ask them not to repost to the same exact article anywhere else because we want our content to be fresh and then we create a user on our blog we ask them to open graviter.com because we want everyone to have a face we're not in a nameless corporation a nameless business blog where the marketing team writes no these are real people each one of them with the story their face so that's all important the other reason why I think it's important as I said there's no money involved so the minimum we can do to thank people for doing this is give them visibility so I know visibility doesn't pay bills but this is not how people make their money although everyone that has written for a long time in chpb and has wrote written interesting content usually has seen more business coming in so this is why we do it and we tweaked a little bit we use the genesis framework as a basis so we tweaked a little bit the code for the author bio that it comes in with the with the platform to add as many social media link as possible so and at least twice a year we invite all the readers to go look through all the authors and go click on those links and if they want to hire someone please go check what they do because you know these people are really good people and really great professionals and the other thing I feel strongly about is teaching everyone how to use WordPress I know it sounds dumb maybe because they're like oh everyone knows if you're a writer if you're a blogger you know how to use WordPress wrong I see so many articles just coming you know copy pasted from Word with all the CSS so that's when we realize we have to teach people how to leverage WordPress for what it is a publishing platform first and foremost so we provide every new author with a welcome pack where they have you know screenshots of how to and now I'm producing one because we're switching to Gutenberg so I'm producing one this weekend about Gutenberg I'm going to do it tomorrow on the bus I have four hours good wi-fi so it's a perfect occasion so you know we teach them exactly how to format text and how to use all the WordPress options what to do what not to do because the editors or the SEO expert will do better than them and we also set expectations and guidelines how many words do you need to write basic of SEO and we provide a list of common grammar mistakes that I know it sounds very condescending but it's great because we all have those words that well I don't know in Italian at least there are a few words that were like do I put an accent don't I put an accent do I do this so we give it to you so you don't have to worry about that and that also people were really like you know I felt like oh my god I'm telling 40 years old women how to write this word and they were actually no that's great also when I have to write something for myself now I go back to that list because I know I will find the answer and finally the thing that I really I'm really passionate about hence my job and I'm the community manager is the community and in this case it's something that I would like to call company culture even if this is not a company I think over the years we created the culture the first thing I think it's very very important in any kind of community blog business family doesn't matter it's ban trolling and pettiness now I wish I could tell you that it's all unicorns and star and everyone is wonderful and we never had problems we did have problems both with authors that were a bit petty like oh she got published twice and I got published just one I saw you if you reposted that on social media five times and I didn't get reposted why did she get that slaughter no that's not gonna happen not on my watch I usually ask these people you know after they're done with three articles I'm like hey thank you for your contribution now we're gonna bring someone else on board for this because we really want to give more voices unless someone gets really vicious then I'm like just get out I'm very very strict about this same thing about petty comments it happened in the past that some authors were attacked I stepped in and doesn't matter what I'm always defending the author because if I pick that person to be in my team I'm not just the editor-in-chief I'm the mama bear for all these people and that's how I feel and that's how Daniela feels now and we all feel a little bit like that so trolls are no go offensive comments they get deleted I don't care if it sounds like a dictatorship it's my house my rules all right so it's never pleasant to deal with these things but you have to deal with with them as soon as possible otherwise they get big and you don't have time to deal with that the other thing that I learned is delegate so for the first three years I did everything and I felt I was indispensable without me chpb would collapse untrue I actually was now I know that I was the bottleneck for some of the things that chpb could have become because I didn't have time to deal with that so last September I was hired full time by sideground and I was like well let's close the blog of course because we have 80 people but I'm obviously the only one that can do stuff here and I was like well let's hear what these people these 80 people have to say about this and everyone's like no and Daniela raised their hand and she said I'm good to go I want to keep doing this and I'm happy to do this so that's when I learned that sometimes delegating is really good and it's really helpful and I realize it's very helpful to motivate people if you're in an environment that you know will appreciate your efforts and promote you which is again not the case of promoting no one gets paid but you know you can be more effective in a certain group then you will step up and then if you're the person there you need to step down and let other people shine and they'll take ownership and they will go with it and chpb has been going great even without me being involved beside being an author when they need a post about WordPress basically and welcome change so the first year when someone in chpb told me I cannot write anymore because I'm too busy I was like what you don't want to be with us for the rest of your life are you leaving me that's how I felt and it's terrible because then people were scared to tell me that they wanted to leave and then their articles were not as good as they were and like well their heart is not really into this they're not leaving so again that's a sign that something is wrong so now I actually welcome this as an opportunity if someone says I'm too busy or you know I'm not I'm not feeling very creative lately so I honestly don't know what to write about child good no problem so you're another in another life it's not a problem so I think I think having changed and having new people is always good and that's like the core of the blog right without the readers a blog is nothing it doesn't matter if you have the best possible content and if you have a wonderful design and incredible writers if you don't have readers you don't exist so you have to find a way to communicate with your readers not talk at them teach them always be the know it all I know this you listen that's not how it works you have to find a way to engage people so we had a lot of things we did over the years for example on Facebook every Friday afternoon we post graphic that says follow Friday now is the time to promote your business and we had weeks where we had more than 80 people going into the comments and say hi I'm Joe and I have a crochet business and you know this is my page come visit me and it's beautiful because you I think one of the best thing that came out of that is that people started collaborating because they found themselves in the comment of that post which is beautiful in the past we had monthly tweet chats we had a book club which was amazing but it was so time consuming that after about one year and a half no one really could keep up with that but it had like a thousand people already in the same book and enjoying that and I actually have two ladies that are they pinged us a couple of weeks ago and said what's going on with the book club I'm like ah we cannot I can do it so maybe it will start again and I think again nurturing the community nurturing real relationship with the readers it also makes it easier again to onboard the new people because they've been reading you they're passionate about this and then it might encourage someone when it's time to bring someone new on board and say hey I've been reading you for a while and I think I would be really good fit for this and I can talk about this topic so this is really important so I think now it's your turn so despite the fact that basically two months after blog appeared also articles that says blogging is dead have appeared blogging is not dead at all blogging is alive and kicking and it's still one of the most important tools you have in your content marketing arsenal so use it wisely it doesn't matter if you're growing your you use it to grow your business to grow your community it's always great to communicate in a way that it's a bit more permanent than just you know a post on Twitter that disappear after 15 seconds I saw a graphic a few months ago that basically the shelf life of a tweet is 30 seconds while the shelf life of a good blog post is two years so imagine that in terms of you know investment in your business so even if you're thinking about a blog for your business think about making it into a multi-author blog because more voices and shared responsibility will definitely help you grow so that's all for me thank you for listening and if you have any question here I am thanks it really varies because we ask everyone to submit their post at least 10 days before publishing day so we have enough time to work on that we have some authors that upload six posts in advance because they have a very clear idea and you know it's timeless content so they have a very clear idea on what they're going to talk so they post everything in advance and then it's great we have some authors that upload the night before publishing but in general in general we it takes about 10 days from the moment the author uploads the post on the website to the moment we publish probably if you know if we were a real newsroom and people were paid to do so then it would take us probably a day to go through all the all the things but since we're all volunteers we honestly do this when we can for example the person that does the images she usually tries to do them two or three like the whole week at the same time she does that usually on Sunday night because it works for her so she takes all the posts that are ready and she does that in once the SEO expert also she tries to do everything at once the editors they're okay doing it when it happens so but let's say the rule should be 10 days yeah in terms of writing or in terms of people that write that's impossible because again we don't have an editor that can work eight hour a week on this eight hour a day on this I've got to say that it does feel very coherent because people have all the authors before becoming authors have been readers so they know the style we use the editors try to you know edit not really in terms of tone of voice for example but more in terms of readability we want to make things as clear as possible so for example this is why I say that I use editing I love it when they edit me because I tend to go on a spiral and you know I start thinking of something and then I open a parenthesis it's like oh that thing and the and then they're like no this needs to be more linear yeah I mean the tone I think somehow created the chip you be tone naturally by writing you know the first group of writers were kind of a group of friends and we knew each other and some of us had similar life stories and similar businesses so we tended to create a bit of a style and when I say all this thing like hey girl say hey sister it's true we really write about this and we this is why for example it's very the work with the lawyer and the accountant are very these are the people that we have a hard time finding someone that fits chip you be because they especially the lawyer tends to talk legalese and so we need to make that a bit more readable and approachable for everyone but we we cannot really go so much into you know editing really the tone of voice of everyone and I also wonder if it's the right thing for this kind of blog or probably if it was a company blog I would say that's a lot more important to achieve some style coherence but for us we have a bit we have a little bit you know in terms of for example don't use to use you which you cannot say in english obviously it's always you don't use profanity unless it's me I use profanity all the time but as I say to my son I created you I'm allowed to swear so that's more or less how it works any other question that's all right but how many is approaching no one is approaching us that's awful I wish they did so this is one of the biggest regrets I have I see people with content that is far less interesting and numbers that are really smaller making quite I wouldn't say a lot of money but making some money out of it but we were so pure at the beginning we were like no we really felt like open source right we're like no we're giving this away for free all this knowledge because we believe in this I wonder if five years in what will happen if we try to monetize the other thing is to monetize you need someone that it's dedicated to do that and we have no one that it's really dedicated to do that so every year in September we say okay is this year we start selling something I'm like oh we should try and then we start saying yeah but who has the time to do this and you know the accounting is not simple because we need a company or we need one of us to issue invoices and my accountant told me you want to issue invoices for nine years ebooks find another accountant I'm not going to deal with that so yeah there is there's definitely the numbers and and the content to monetize but we're not being actively searching for this no one is actively saying hey I really wanted to do something so that we're not doing it for now we still believe that this is our way to nirvana merci à vous


Brutality within Russian Army in Ukraine now worse than in hell. Although the Russian authorities work overtime to hide it, brutality by officers and soldiers in the Russian invasion force in Ukraine is now so bad that some veterans say things are worse than in hell. The product they believe of the entrance of so many former criminals into the ranks and their propensity to follow the moors of Russian streets. US expert Paul Goebel said this. According to him, this is the conclusion of Olesya Gerasimenko of Vertska Media draws on the basis of conversations with veterans, their relatives and their defenders after the last three months of the fighting and the picture she paints is truly disturbing and a sign that unit cohesion is weakening. The closer Russian forces are to the front lines and the rarer leave has become, the more officers and even some soldiers feel they can get away with anything she says. Confident that no military prosecutor will appear and that they therefore have the power to act as they like up to and including torture, rape and murder. According to the investigative journalist, the problem of extrajudicial punishments, bullying and non-regulation relations has intensified and the longer the forces are on the front lines, the more serious things are becoming. Those with a criminal past are leading the way in applying the rules of the streets but regular officers aren't far behind, soldiers say. Both groups view those who are weaker than they as somehow less than human and therefore appropriate targets for their anger. Some Russian soldiers are shooting themselves to escape and others, Gerasimenko says, are surrendering on occasions when there was no need for that only to escape the hell of service in the Russian military. Putin to interfere in presidential elections in U.S. Russian President Vladimir Putin will interfere in the 2024 U.S. presidential election states Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine Oleksii Danilov. According to him, artificial intelligence has allowed Russia to significantly intensify its disinformation campaigns which is a huge step forward for Moscow. The Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council is convinced that the scale of information interference will be much larger than before. Russia now has special units dedicated to every country where elections are taking place. The network of informants and agents of Moscow around the world is so large that removing Russian interference is impossible. The FSB continues to contract with European criminal groups, Danilov noted. The Times states that Russian agents spread 166 million pieces of disinformation about Ukraine weekly on various platforms. The presidential election in the U.S. is scheduled for November 5th, 2024. According to forecasts, the main candidate for the Democrats will be the incumbent American leader Joe Biden. The Republicans will nominate either Donald Trump or former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley. White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan recently stated that the White House is concerned about possible Russian interference in the 2024 presidential election. NBC News reported that Russia is already spreading disinformation ahead of this year's U.S. elections. Fake accounts and bots are being used to harm President Joe Biden and his Democratic colleagues. Russians sent 70-year-old T-55 tanks to attack Robertine. It ended badly. After a brutal four-month defense against a Russian force ten times its size, the Ukrainian Army's 110th Mechanized Brigade last Friday finally quit the ruins of Avdeevka in eastern Ukraine just northwest of Russian-occupied Donetsk, according to Forbes. The 110th Brigade fought until it ran out of ammunition. It is noted that sensing weakness as the 110th Brigade retreated, the Russian Army attacked in several sectors along the 600-mile front of Russia's two-year wider war on Ukraine. But not every Ukrainian brigade is as tired, outnumbered and ammo-starved as the 110th is. Ukrainian forces not only held the line last weekend, they inflicted heavy casualties on the overconfident Russian brigades and regiments, including at least one unit that tried to assault Ukrainian positions in the south in unupgraded 70-year-old T-55 tanks. That unit, apparently from the 42nd Motor Rifle Division, got wrecked as it crossed from west to east, a mile of flat terrain separating Russian lines from positions held by the Ukrainian Army's 65th Mechanized Brigade in Robertine, one of the larger settlements the Ukrainians liberated last summer. The 65th Brigade threw everything it had at the Russian assault group, which numbered dozens of 41-ton four-person T-55s, 13-ton MT-LB armored tractors with room for 13 people, and 13-ton BMP fighting vehicles with space for 11. Firing cluster shells and anti-tank missiles and flinging explosive first-person view drones, the 65th Brigade defeated the attack and exacted some revenge for the men and women of the 110th Brigade, who died defending Avdiivka, according to Forbes. As the dust settled, open-source analyst Andrew Perpetua counted all along the front line 28 damaged, destroyed and abandoned Russian tanks and fighting vehicles. He counted just six damaged, destroyed and abandoned Ukrainian tanks and fighting vehicles.


So the Ravens are interested in Bobby Wagner, but so are the Dolphins, Chargers, Broncos, Rams, Cardinals, Niners, Cowboys, Jets, Lions, Patriots, and the Steelers. So it's quite a long list. And then when you think about the situation, you know that most of these teams, they're going to be able to offer more bread than the Ravens will be willing to pay for one Bobby Wagner. So Ravens, going up against all these teams, if they are going to land a Bobby Wagner, and when I look at this long list, I don't think it's going to happen. But if it ain't over till it's over, but if they are going to land a Bobby Wagner, they would have to convince Bobby Wagner that they are in a better situation for him right here right now than all these other teams are. You look at teams like the Jets and the Lions, even the Cardinals, you could be like, OK, we're in a better situation than those guys. Like, we ready. Like, yeah, look at last season. Don't look at last season. Everybody got hurt. And even though so many people were hurt, that was one point where we were still number one in the AFC. But then our quarterback got hurt and you know the rest of the story. But that real competition comes in with teams like the Rams.  We'll see what their quarterback situation is. The Cowboys who wouldn't want to play for the Cowboys, the Chargers. They looking tough like usual. The Dolphins, they. Dolphins, they beat up on the Ravens last year, but that was last year. But still, Dolphins and then even the Steelers. The Steelers, if they get a quarterback, when they get a quarterback, whoever that quarterback may be, that could either persuade or dissuade somebody to go to Pittsburgh. So that's what the Ravens are against. So again, it's looking like based off of that long list of people. It's looking unlikely, but it is not over. And of course with interest, interest is cool. Being interested in somebody is nice. But interest is where it starts, deals are where it finishes. Deals are where it finishes, deals are where it ends. And hey, all these teams, they could all be interested in Bobby Wagner. But that doesn't mean that they're going to actually pursue him. This is where it starts to pursue. Bobby Wagner has a leg up on free agency because he's a free agent right here right now. He doesn't have to wait until Monday to come to terms with an agreement with it. He ain't got to wait for all that. He can do that right here right now. So, and this is his first time, I believe, testing in the free agent market. So I'm sure he's going to have some fun with it. He ain't going to rush to make any decisions. He been with Seattle for his whole career. So this is his, this is a fresh start for him. So usually players, they don't rush into these things. Usually players, they take their time. They pace themselves and they make their decision when they make their decision. But Ravens, they do have some stiff competition. They got some stiff competition for sure. So it would be nice to have a Bobby Wagner. It would be lovely to have a Bobby Wagner. But based off of this list, I don't think the Ravens will be having a Bobby Wagner. It is a move that fits everything that the Ravens stand for. Number one, defense. Number two, he's a short tackler. We know tackling was a huge issue for the Ravens last year. And I would think that with the Ravens, everything that was wrong last year, this year you want to try to make it right. Obviously started with injuries, but as far as defense, the tackling, the miscommunication, all of that stuff was so bad. He was so bad. So I would definitely not be surprised that the Ravens are interested in Bobby Wagner, but another thing too. Bobby Wagner, he gives you consistency. He gives you high level play on defense. But more importantly, if you know who you talk to, he wouldn't cost against the Compic formula. And there you go. That's probably what really got the Ravens sold right there. We ain't got to use a Compic. He ain't going to count against a Compic. What if somebody else signed one of our players? We ain't going to get a Compic. Sold. But we'll see what happens with Bobby Wagner. And Bobby the Baltimore, I don't think that hashtag is going to be around too much longer. We can keep trying, but I just, yeah, based off of that list, I don't think it's happening. But you never know. So we'll see.


We're embarking on a project with partners about disclosing the medieval manuscripts that we have in our collections. People who've been to Gend through the Triple F event have noticed the big tower. It's on this historic map, it's on the top left-hand side. We built a book tower on the top of the hill, overlooking the city's churches and abbeys. There's a specific reason for that, because we hold most of their collections now. Napoleon did that, not we personally. But I'm not the only thing from the same area and from the same epoch. There's some remarkable medieval library still existing in Bruges. In the city of Bruges they hold the abbeys of the Gondane and Tardust and these books are still kept there, but not yet scanned. So from these four medieval monasteries, who were very important in the book production in that time, they had very productive scriptorian and big libraries containing the bookkeeping and all the economic activity of the abbeys, lots of religious material, of course, and also lots of texts and documents about just the way of the world and what they knew about the world. Of these very big libraries, we still are aware of, we know, where almost 740 manuscripts are available. Most of them are in Gendt or in Bruges, but some of them are in the strangest places in the world. So we set up a project and you're starting to recognise the scheme. We have been looking very carefully at some of the projects that have been done in Trip Life community. Amazing projects in ecodesies and Biblicima and I'm missing many of them. The Durham Library construction. And we set up this project with the religious authorities and the two big libraries holding most of these books to digitally reunite these libraries. And for us as a university, the big goal is, of course, to inspire people to do more research with that material. Throughout the community for Trip Life, we really want this project to be a catalyst for more optic and more Trip Life usage in museums and libraries in Belgium. We have a first stage grant now that's running and the first things first. So we're digitising most of the Bruges manuscripts. And we set up in Gendt, we set up a service called Chat Canvas, like a triple IF hosting service, reusing our existing infrastructure to be able to make it more accessible, more easy to use for our colleagues. Of course, the first milestone will be have all these manuscripts online and start building some contexts, some explanations, give people an idea or first glimpse of the richness of these libraries. Next of course, we'll be working more on metadata. But in our project, we really want to express everything in Trip Life, not start to build a big knowledge base like the Beatsomers building, but really limit ourselves to expressing things in Trip Life and using them in Trip Life presentations. And that way we'll really be advocating more the use of Trip Life for research, for education, for all kinds of projects. Building up user community really. And then back to you. We've been looking over your shoulders, looking at some of the projects. You may have some of these manuscripts in your library actually. So would you be able to scan them and share them via Trip Life? That would be very useful for us. But it's not only just about the books that have at one time physically been in one of these abysses. It's also about the history of these texts and the tradition that is encoded. There might be related text materials, there might be similar illuminations or decorations or book bindings or ways that these elements relate and make sense. But that's also very interesting. We're looking actively for any kind of link that could work and that we could express as a Trip Life collection. And that's the last part. We already saw a few lightning talks about discovery tools and discovery mechanisms. So we're really looking forward to knowing more how we can use Trip Life collections for that. So that's our lightning talk. Thank you.


Hello everybody, Andrew and my asking here with dental l so you might be wondering, is that teeth polishing or to polishing at the dentist really necessary. And what is it for. Is it for cosmetic purposes or does it actually help to clean the teeth. And is it any different than brushing at home. So these are some common questions that I do get asked. If I'm cleaning somebody's teeth, especially if somebody doesn't have insurance and they come to me and say, I just want my teeth cleaned do the bare minimum basically, but I want my teeth cleaned. And they sometimes say, do I get just a polish will that clean my teeth or do you have to use the instruments on me. So I'm going to talk a little bit about both So teeth polishing helps to take away any stain. Now the instruments that we use in the office. We use those primarily to take away stain because if stain is stuck on there really, really well the polish won't get it off just by using only the polish. We have to use our instruments first. But sometimes if there's a lot of plaque on the teeth. If you ever have the dental hygienist polish first before she actually cleans the teeth with her instruments. It's because there's so much plaque on there that we need to actually polish the teeth first to be to be able to get the tartar off. The tartar and the calculus. So plaque is that light white stuff. So that like soft white off yellow stuff that pretty much forms on your teeth right away. So polish can take that off. Which is why if we're seeing children, the polish may be all we need to clean their teeth because if they don't have any tartar. If they don't have any calculus, which is the same things as tartar, then we don't need to take our instruments and kind of scrape away because kids never like it. When we pick up anything additional right so if I can only pick up the polish and show them my cool toothbrush, then that's awesome right But our instruments for adult patients take away most of the stain. So is polishing necessary. Sometimes I say yes and sometimes I say no depends on the patient. If you have a lot of stain polishing is still probably necessary because even with our little instruments. We can't get everything with our instruments or it is just easier sometimes to take away most of the stain, but then we do still have to polish afterwards. And that polish will help to give you that smooth clean, I guess, minty fresh Feeling after the dentist without the polish your teeth won't feel as smooth because we haven't polished them if that if that makes any sense. So for those patients who tell me that they want to save money and that they don't want the polish. I tell them, you know what that's okay. We don't have to do it because it does save about 17 to $26 depending on how much of a polish we have to do and what type of polishing pace we need to use if it's heavy heavy stain, then we use a different type right So 17 to $26 a patient can save by not having their teeth polished. And if that's the case, then I don't have to. But sometimes I have said After I cleaned their teeth. I might say there is still some stain left. I would be able to get it off with the polish because it just kind of covers a wider surface area. I could be spending the next half an hour cleaning the same tooth with my instrument. I prefer to polish And get that off for you. But if you don't want me to polish. I don't have to.  So sometimes I do say that. But then for other patients, I might say you have really nice teeth. There's no plaque. There's hardly any Tartar, you don't drink coffee wine. So there's no stain on there. I actually don't have to polish. So if you want to save 17 to $26 I don't have to. But after I clean the teeth. If you're saying, you know what my teeth don't feel quite as smooth. Can you polish I can so keep polishing. Yes, is cosmetic. We don't have to do it.  So I hope this helps. If you guys have any questions, please let me know. And I'll see you in the next one.


Welcome to the RSA and to forethought. Tonight's speaker, Ben Dyson, specializes in money and banking. He spent the last five years researching the current monetary system and trying to understand the impact it has on the economy and on society as a whole. He founded and is the director of Positive Money, a not-for-profit organisation which aims to raise awareness of problems with our monetary system among policymakers, academics, unions, charities and the public at large. He's also the co-author of a forthcoming book, Modernizing Money, which sets out to explain how, in his opinion, our failing monetary and banking system can be fundamentally reformed. Ladies and gentlemen, Ben Dyson. Ten years ago, I made the decision to study economics. Now, psychologists have found that studying economics can make you less charitable, less willing to cooperate and generally more selfish. But despite all that, I thought that economics would help me understand the world. And if I could understand the world, then I could figure out how to change it. But what I learned about economics left me feeling uneasy. There was something decidedly odd and unrealistic about the subject. Whenever a textbook or a lecture explained how humans are supposed to behave according to economics, my first reaction was, well, I don't think like that and I don't behave like that. But I wondered if I was the exception and that actually everybody else did behave like homo-economicists. But the more I read, the more I realised that the textbooks were describing this world full of rational, calculating people that I had never met in real life.  The mainstream school of economics assumes that humans rationally weigh up all the options available to them before making a decision about what to buy. Now, at first that might sound realistic, especially if you're the kind of person that does your research before buying a new car or mobile phone. But economics assumes that you do this whenever you buy anything. So, when you walk into a supermarket, your mind supposedly weighs up the benefit you'll get from eating or drinking each product in there before coming to a calculated decision about what is the best combination of products to give you the most happiness or satisfaction or utility, as economists call it. But we all know from personal experience that that isn't really what happens. You know, we fall prey to the impulse purchases by the checkout or we go for the special offers. We buy the donuts and the discounted beers and then we get home and realize we've forgotten the pasta that we really needed to cook dinner this evening. There are countless examples like this where economics ignores reality. Now, the deeper I got into the subject, the more frustrated I became. But studying economics wasn't a complete waste of time. There was one day when I did learn something useful. I was searching through the library for a textbook when I was distracted by the words, the grip of death on the spine of a book. Now, I used to work in a bookshop. So when I see something that's been mis-filed, it really annoys me. So I took the book out to try and see where it should go. And I was trying to think where the crime thriller fiction would be filed in this academic library when I spotted the subtitle, which was a study of modern money, debt and destructive economics. And I thought, well, this might actually be slightly more interesting than the textbook I was supposed to read. So I sat on the floor on the aisle with annoyed students stepping over me, reading through the first two chapters and discovered that, amongst other things, the title, Grip of Death, was a literal translation of the French roots of the word mortgage, to be engaged in the contract until death, which is ironic given today's house prices. But what was so interesting to me was that this book actually gave me the missing piece of the puzzle that made economics seem so abstract and so irrelevant to the real world. That missing piece of the puzzle was money. Now, you may find this hard to believe, but money is the one part of the real world that economists ignore more than anything else. And I know how absurd that sounds. I mean, how can economics ignore money? Isn't the entire subject about money? Well, economists concern themselves with how people spend their money, how businesses make their money, and how traders in financial markets make their millions. But there are some very basic questions that are almost completely ignored. One of these key questions is simply, where does money come from? Who actually creates it? Now, for most of us, where does money come from is a question that we never think to ask, even though in one way or another, money affects almost every aspect of our lives. If you give the question a few seconds' thought, the answer should seem obvious. If you take any 10 or 20-pound note out of your wallet, you'll see the words the Bank of England printed on the side. But the twist in the story is that the Bank of England only creates a small percentage of all the money that exists. In fact, they just create the cash that's in your wallet. And that cash makes up just 3% of all money. So where does the other 97% come from? Now, the surprising fact is that the vast majority of money these days is just numbers in computer systems. Money now is electronic. And these numbers are created through an accounting process whenever a bank makes a loan. In fact, the number that you see at the bottom of your statement or on the screen of an ATM doesn't represent some pile of money that's in the bank. That number is the money. So when we borrow from a bank, new numbers are entered into our account. We're not borrowing from somebody else's life savings. That's actually new money. In fact, brand new money is created by banks every time somebody agrees to take out a loan, mortgage or credit card.  So the first time I read this, I found it very difficult to believe. I mean, after all, we all know that if you start printing money at home, you can expect to visit from the police at 2 AM early one morning. If creating money was so harmful that the police would spend their time trying to stop people doing it, it seemed unlikely that there would be a loophole that would allow new money to be created. Almost as an accident of accounting every time somebody agreed to take out a loan. But the more I read, the clearer it became that this really was how money is created. Looking through the Financial Times one day, I found an article that explained it in black and white, saying that the essence of the contemporary monetary system is the creation of money out of nothing by private banks often foolish lending. The author was the paper's own economics commentator, Martin Wolff. But still, the skeptic in me wanted to hear it from the horse's mouth, the horse in this case being the Bank of England, who wrote in 2007 that, by far, the largest role in creating broad money is played by the banking sector. When banks make loans, they create additional deposits for those that have borrowed the money. Now, for me, the discovery that every new loan by a bank creates brand new money was a revelation. It made sense of one of the things that had been puzzling me for ages. Why were house prices going up so quickly? I'd always assumed that banks were taking money from savers and just lending them to borrowers. But if that was the case, where was all the money coming from to fund these ever-larger mortgages that banks were providing at the time? Now, I soon found the answer to this question. In the 10 years running up to 2007, the banks had collectively created over 417 billion pounds of new money in the form of ever-larger mortgages. With every new mortgage creating an equivalent amount of new money and new debt. And this is what was behind the huge rise in house prices over the last decade. Now, understanding why house prices were rising so quickly wasn't just an academic question for me. I am one of the millions of people that weren't on the housing ladder before the house price bubble started. And as a result of this huge credit bubble, people in my generation will see our income swallowed up by enormous mortgages and ever higher rents. So by this point, I'd accepted that undergraduate economics was not going to explain how the world worked after all. So in 2007, I finished my second year and then left to join some friends who were starting a business. I spent my free time trying to understand the monetary system by reading papers and reports from the Bank of England. I probably should have got out more. I watched the first two years of the financial crisis playing out and it seemed obvious to me that the crisis had been fueled by the creation of huge sums of money through this process of bank lending. In just eight years, bank lending had doubled the amount of money in the economy. Something seemed very wrong about the system and yet the questions in the media and in policy circles were all about the symptoms, the risky lending, the speculation and the huge increase in personal debt. Nobody seemed to be asking the question that I thought would lead to the root of the problem. Where had all the money itself actually come from? So out of frustration, I started writing about this on my own website in 2009 and then in 2010, I started an organization called Positive Money to get policymakers, academics and the general public talking about these issues. And we soon discovered that some economists have been talking about this problem with the monetary system even since the Great Depression, with Irvin Fisher, Milton Friedman and James Tobin being just some of the more famous examples. Within just a couple of months of launching, we got a call from the producer of a television documentary who was asking for an explanation of how money was created by the banking system. So we explained how we thought the process worked from our research, but like myself, she wanted to hear it from the horse's mouth. So she called up the Bank of England and asked them, do you have a simple document that explains how money is created by the banking system? And the answer was, well, no. Okay, so can you send me the training manual that you provide to your new members of staff? We don't really have one. Right. The problem was that the information was spread throughout hundreds of documents. A paragraph here, a rule change there. We realized it would be difficult for journalists to provide any accurate commentary on the financial crisis when the information was so difficult to find. So we teamed up with the New Economics Foundation to hunt through these documents and find definitive answers to how the monetary system works today. When that painful process was complete, we called the book Simply Where Does Money Come From? And the book has already been used as a cortex in some universities. But does it really matter that we don't understand money? Isn't this just some boring technical issue that we can leave in the hands of economists and financiers? Well, let me tell you, this really does matter because the nature of the monetary system that we have and the money we use determines the nature of the society that we live in. If the vast majority of the money that we use is created only when somebody takes out a loan or a mortgage, then sooner or later we'll end up with a society that is deeply dependent on debt. And we've all seen the very clear consequences of this dependency on debt over the last few years. What we may not have realized is that there is actually no other way as long as we have a system where money is only created when somebody goes into debt. But the good news is that the laws of money are not fixed. Unlike the laws of nature, the laws of money can be changed. If we decide that our monetary system is not working well for us, then we can change it. In fact, we've already done this in the past. In 1844, a law was passed to stop banks printing their own paper money. Yet that law has never been properly updated since 1844 to cover the electronic money that now makes up 97% of all the money we use. And as a consequence of that, while it took all of history for banks to create the first trillion pounds of money in debt, it took just eight years for them to create the second trillion. And we now find ourselves with a monetary system that evidently isn't working. So we all need to be asking these fundamental questions. Where does money come from? Who creates it? Who decides how much will be created and how that money will get used? Is the system of money that we have today working in the best interest of society? And if not, isn't it time that we start to think about how we can change it? Money isn't ruled by laws of nature. It's a product of human design. And with our system of money being as dysfunctional as it is today, now might be the perfect time to go back to the drawing board and redesign money so it works for us all. Thank you. Ben, that was fabulous. Now, you're in Radio 4 with the RSA, the audience, live studio audience here, imbued with the power of Radio 4 to make you Chancellor. Congratulations. What are you going to do now? What's the next step if you were suddenly in charge of the banking system, the monetary system here in the UK? What would be your solution to these problems? Well, I think the problem that we have is if you give the power to create money to people who will profit the more that they create, then you're going to end up with too much. And that's what we had in the last decade is we had the money supply doubling faster than it's ever done in the past. So I think the first thing we need to do is actually remove that ability of the financial sector to create money in the way that we did back in the 1840s. And that's actually remarkably easy to do. I think if we did that, we'd have a lot more stability and we wouldn't have seen the problems that we saw over the last few years. But doesn't the situation we're in at the moment with people in large amounts of debt and with this need for growth to get us out of that situation, doesn't that sort of necessitate banks being able to do that? Or somebody at least to be able to create this wealth somewhere in order to stop everybody in this room from going bust? Isn't it fundamentally necessary right now? I can see if you'd started in 1840, it would have been a good idea, but we're in 2012. How do we get out of today's problem? Well, this is precisely the problem that we have. We had a crisis that was caused because there was too much debt. And the policy response to that was we're lower interest rates to make it cheaper for people to borrow more. Now, the situation we have, we need people to borrow more to get more money into the economy. And yet we also need to reduce how much debt we have. And you can't do both of those things at the same time. So we have a system that has actually driven us into a complete catch-22 situation where there is no way out until we change the whole system. As a dinosaur banker, one in which the things that bankers are allowed to do today were actually criminal in my day back in the 70s, how would you suggest that the bankers can actually be stopped from this money creation, which I don't really understand at all, even though I was trained in credit analysis, where you could only lend the funds that the depositors had put in the bank. You're saying that they're actually lending money out of thin air, not what the depositors have put in. Can you explain that a bit more because I'm lost? Well, the system has changed. And most of us would assume that the bank cannot make a loan without actually having some savings from somewhere. It's kind of morphed into a system where if they can find somebody to lend to, they'll agree to lend. And if they haven't got enough money at the end of the day to settle with all the other banks, then they can borrow it from another bank or the Bank of England. And that was why the interbank market, which was so central to everything in the middle of the crisis, was so important because that was how they stopped running out of money, was because they would always lend from another bank. The market worked for a while, but it was fundamentally unstable. It was going to collapse sooner or later anyway. It was just a matter of time. And behind the pillow that? I think there is a solution. And it actually is quite a fundamental economic solution to actually revisit the quantitative theory of money and actually question Urban Fisher and Milton Freeman because it stands to reason that the velocity of money is actually a key issue that through their theories of actually rate that as just it should be a constant. I think rather than throwing lots of money at the system, it's actually the velocity of money that should be looked at. Without getting too technical, there tends to be a lot of people until you get deep into the subject assume that if you create money, it will immediately cause inflation. But the money causes inflation where it goes. So if it goes all into property, that's when you get inflation in property. If it goes into buying bonds from the financial markets, which is why the financial markets are doing well now, whereas the real economy is struggling. And not all kinds of money creation is a bad thing. If it goes into productive stuff, if it goes into creating jobs, it can actually be quite useful. But less than a tenth of all bank lending actually goes into that job creation and that investment in real businesses. Final question from the audience at the back. Given that we live in this international global financial system, I mean, is it possible for a single country like the UK, big as its financial system is, to sort of do this alone? Or do we have to wait for multinational agreements, in which case that's forever? Yes, yeah. No, we don't have to wait for multinational agreements because you can reform your own currency. You can reform pound sterling without waiting for every other country to do the same. If you have any other sort of reform such as taxing banks and they have an incentive to get up and leave, but if they want to get up and leave when you reform this pound sterling currency, then it's a case of saying, okay, well, you won't be able to do business in the UK anymore because you won't be able to do business in this currency. So it's one of the few reforms that you can do without the banks being able to say they can travel and go abroad. Ladies and gentlemen, Ben Dyson.