Today I'd like to report with our speaker, who is part of the greater art community. Professor Dr. Anastasia Sapka-Larriade. Anyway, she is Dr. PhD at University College London in Public Archaeology and Heritage, which is near and dear to pretty much everybody in this community. And so we have a lot of interesting things in common and things to learn. And she worked on that in Greece and has continued to work on with communities, current communities in Greece, on their heritage situation. And she's also had various affiliations with Princeton and continue to be on the PCL. So she's part of a newer member of our community, so it's really nice to get to know her. And today, her title, I'm sure it's the same one, reading, What is the Future of Archaeology in Greece? How the Nation Building Project E-Values Archaeology, that's her article, and the Quests for Relevance. So this, I think, will be particularly engaging for us, regardless of whether we're going to get this or not. So I'd like you to vote for her very much. Thank you for coming. Good afternoon from you too, and thank you all very much for joining us today. A special thanks to Professor Haskell for the time welcome, and Sarah Kansa and the rest of the facilities staff for the University of Greece. I'm going to talk about values of archaeology in Greece, and more specifically, I'll try to demonstrate how the national views of the past, antiquities and archaeology has compromised other broader political, social, and even economic values of archaeology in Greece. This environment I'm currently developing draws from my doctoral thesis at UCL, and any feedback would be greatly welcome. So I'm first going to give you a brief overview of archaeology in Greece, the politics of the past, and the establishment of the discipline, and the practice in legislation and administration. I wasn't at all sure how familiar each one of you might be with the case of Greece. I will then explain a brief line of archaeology, the type of data I collected, and use some important information about the case studies I used. I will then discuss how people directly prioritize the national value over any other type of values, demonstrate to what extent people assign any other type of value, and argue as a result that other values are greatly compromised by the national views of the past. Finally, I will set out my thoughts about how another archaeology is possible in Greece. I believe that a more self-reflective, newest, and less self-referential archaeology may lead us to tell more relevant and subtle stories about the past and to more efficiently address serious issues that were faced today, such as racism, social fragmentation, and injustice. I will make suggestions about specific steps that we need to take in hope that in the end maybe another archaeology may render another national identity possible. So, as Professor Haslop mentioned, my work is founded on questions that public archaeology seeks to answer, as it is defined in the UK, any area of archaeological activity that interacts or has the potential to interact with the public and to the investigation of this interaction. The basic premise is that sustainable protection and conservation of material culture of the past require people's understanding and appreciation. I would now like to join the voices of those who argue that our work should also extend beyond the narrow realms of our disability. So, we now understand much better the role and contribution of culture to communities and are in a better than ever position to continue to the passing issues of our times through our understanding of the past, rendering this archaeology relevant to people's lives today. I believe that here these kind of workflows were within cultural anthropology. I also draw from more mainstream cultural and psychological work work as sociology, museum studies, fantasy studies, social theory and post-processional archaeological theory as well. Now, let's turn to our topic. I will not discuss very much. I will not spend a lot of time on the historical context, but I need to bring up a few big ideas about it to give you some basic understanding in case you're not familiar. So, the relationship people in Greece have developed with the past and with archaeology was mainly formulated in the 18th century in the context of Hellenism. Maurice has defined this as the idealization of Asia and Greece as the birthplace of a European spirit. The balance between the great powers of the time, Britain, France and Russia played a major role in that as well, and also the development of what is known as the Neolemic Enlightenment, which is the reappropriation of classical heritage and the internalization of the discourse of Hellenism for the development of a great national identity. So here, with the images, I want to bring up examples and remind you of the movements of Hellenism, the competition and European museums to gain antiquities from Italy and Greece. And the general context is obviously the struggle of Greece to gain its independence from the Ottoman Empire, but also the developments in the history of art, with the aftermath of the history of ancient art, played their role in this. So the problem of classical antiquity satire in the national narrative resulted in the dominance of art historical approaches in Greek archaeology and the as-latch in approaches to protection and conservation as in the public presentation interpretation of antiquities and the past. For example, in New Zealand's development and exhibition, as scholar Andromachi Gazi and modeler Muig discussed, and also has affected not only the development of the discipline as Kostos Kocakis has demonstrated, but as I hope to show today the socio-political and economic role of archaeology. Within this very broad national context we also have the case of Greek Macedonia, which I need to make special mention to because two of my case studies are located there. So Greek Macedonia has been called the archaeological auger of southern Greece because of its near-exposure from the European notion of Hellenism. It's first mentioned by classical writers and archaeologists consequent in difference to its history. The area remained part of the Ottoman Empire until 1912 when it was surrendered to the Greek army and an efferent of antiquities was established at its capital, Thessaloniki, 15 days later. Within the next six months, two more archaeological surfaces were established in the area. So this otherness continued until 1977 when Manuel Sontlán Kosteks excavated the great Tumulus in Verhina. The group of Thones found was associated with the royal Macedonian family and Philip II, the father of Alexander the Great, and the discovery was met with hater through unprecedented national and international attention and brought financial support and research interest. There was an obvious impact on the public perception of the discipline as well due both to the political implications of the discovery of the dispute with the then Islamic Republic of Macedonia and to the generation for the artistic and material quality of the finds. To give you an idea of the impression the finds in Verhina left on people and on archaeologists, the term the Verhina syndrome was coined by Antoni Zoiz, professor of archaeology in Madrid, to describe a particular pathology in the process of archaeological work production. The trends are hunting excitement where the archaeological value that is the historical importance or significance are oversided by the technology of the valuable material or the form. To say a few words about the establishment of archaeology in legislation and administration, the first legal and administrative measures for the protection of antiquities were taken in the new country's effort to prove it's belonging to Europe, during even as early as the world's independence was still going. The counter-gluting promoted the collection of scattered antiquities in schools and assigned curatorial duties to teachers, encouraged people to surrender their finds and founded the National Museum. The first archaeological law was drafted by the Barbarocresti, the great power established in Greece, when August Sonofloubith, the first king of Bavaria, was informed king of Greece in 1834. That was stated that all antiquities aside Greece, because they are works of the ancestors of the Greek people, are regarded as the national possession of all the Greeks in general. The spirit of the law has remained unchanged ever since. The current law was enacted in 2002 with notable adaptations in the role of archaeology in contemporary society, primarily a more inclusive definition of protection that mentions facilitation of access and communication, enhancement and inclusion in contemporary social life and citizen sensitization regarding cultural heritage. For August Sonofloubith's 11 founding principles refer to the social dimension of protection, the enrichment of protective strategies and the complementarity between state and citizen's duties and the facilitation of citizen's access to features of cultural heritage. More importantly, the Greek constitution recognized in 2001 protection of the cultural environment as an individual right. And this has provided fundamental support for citizens who want to challenge the archaeological services decisions. And we have seen since then many quite public cases of struggles between local community groups. The most current happening right now is the Philoponic Group in Athens, where they're trying to stop the local effort of fences around the Philoponic Hill, which has been always used as an open park, but is also an archaeological site. And against the decisions of the administrative court of Greece, the effort is these days setting up fences to close off the park and turn it into a controllable site that will bring a new avenue. In a critical reading, the current loss is the social role of antiquities and archaeologists. Archaeology fulfilled primarily through business to museums and archaeological sites. Both highly controlled and regulated spaces were formal approaches in joyful and uncontested authority over the visitor. Permit for the use of monuments can be granted under conditions such as the compatibility of the event with the character of the monument, that the event concurs with the original use of the monument and is of an appropriate quality. These terms are not defined anywhere. It's up to the councils and the efforts to make these decisions. They control the archaeological service over the use of antiquities unjustifiably extends to ensuring their ethical use and safeguarding their sacredness from publications ranging from the use of an image of the fountain on Bikoka Colony to covers of a German magazine focused more recently. Admittedly, in the last decade, many museums have been renovated and new ones have been founded. Educational programs and initiatives to attract visitors to archaeological museums and sites were proliferated. It remains no doubtful whether these developments reach beyond aesthetical, technological and communicative advances constituting fundamental ruptures with deep rooted mentalities of controlling authority over the meanings, values and legitimate interpretations of the task of antiquities and of archaeology in Greece. Thus, archaeology in Greece remains an ideologically-laden state-run activity and a quote here from an archaeologist who is a member of the Academy of Athens who describes, quote, those who discuss art and monuments as part of the social becoming and changes in times and in the mentality of people, basically those who discuss art through values as heritage values, he describes them as and are continually called sirens of pseudo-social theories. So, out the window goes 120 years of debate on values, heritage and best practices in sustainable conservation according to this particular archaeologist member of the Academy of Athens. The Archaeological Service is one of the oldest state services in Greece. It was founded in 1833. Its structure reflected that very recently the Trigapite schema, the history of Greece was fitted to in the 19th century in order to serve the argument of uninterrupted continuity of the Greek culture. So, ancient services regarding ancient antiquities Byzantine, that is medieval and modern services. It was only a couple of years ago that the services were brought in under the same roof after 35 years of conversation about this change. The Central Archaeological Council, another historic institution dating back to 1836 is the highest advisory board to the Minister of Culture. The Ministry of Culture which consists primarily of the Archaeological Service was itself founded during the colonel's order in 1971. I consider the operation of the Archaeological Service in the context of the modern state as a disembedding mechanism as discussed by Indians from the pre-existing relationships that people had developed with their local antiquities as expressed in myths, legends, rituals, their indigenous archaeologies as Hamilakis was behind them. To investigate the value of archaeology I looked into three local communities that were all adjacent to archaeological sites through a combined methods approach. The site of Crenides, the local community of Crenides is adjacent to Philly in Kavalei, northern Lys. I will show you a map with all the sites that are adopted. It is a settlement of approximately 3,000 residents. It has been named after the ancient colony that Philip II, King of Macedon took under his protection and remained after him in the 4th century BC. The Archaeological site consists of late Roman and early Byzantine antiquities of monumental character including the Forum, Femblad, Ancient and Ancient Theater, Basilicas, an octagon complex with the Baptistery and the Acropolis. There is an Archaeological Museum of site. It reopened in 2010 after 15 years of renovation. Crenides is a rural town in transition to a northern economy. At the time of film work it was the capital of the municipality of Philly but it has been currently merged with the municipality of Kavalei. The site also holds the Philly Festival which was initiated by the intellectual elite of Kavalei in the 1950s. It is the second of the Ancient Theater festival in Greece after the one in Apilabrus. Archaeological research by this service, the French form in Athens and the restructuring University of Thessaloniki has been taking place there for the last century. The site was finally inscribed to be open to tourists in 2016. The second case study is the community of Dyspion. Dyspion is a junction to the archaeological site with the same name in Castellan, again in open Greece. It is a settlement of approximately 1,000 people and lies next to the only Neolithic lake settlement systematically excavated and presented in Greece. The Aristotle was conducting research for the last 20 years there. The research stopped after the passing of the professor who had been here years ago. But the university just got a very big grant from the research council for the study of all the material that had come out of 20 years of excavations. Until then the area had attracted little archaeological attention. The excavation of the wood homes, the houses of the lake settlement were built on has allowed the development for reconstruction in the form of an eco-museum. And these are the images at the far right are from the museum. This is a small exhibition that is co-hosted with the ecological workshop. This one includes original material and it's under the ecological service attention and care. One of the reconstruction because it is a reconstruction of the original is being managed by the university. For manufacturing the area's main economic activity has been in decline since the early 90s and the neighbouring church of the Ascension and the uses of the site before it was excavated among other things for a week-long country fair possibly the most important event of the year in this video has caused animosity between the local police, Kislog and the archaeologists. And the final site obviously next to the archaeological site of Delphi is Central Greece. The modern site of the settlement consists of about 1500 residents in a developing close association with the development of archaeological research in the area. The site consists of the classical monumental remains of the Sanctuary of Apollom and of Ascinata Nea and is presented in the recent renovated archaeological museum. Delphi is also an operative site and thus is managed under stricter regulations and its inclusion in the list was made possible after the local community successfully campaigned for the cancellation of plants to build an aluminum plant in the proximity of the site. The local economy has been defended on tourism for a long time now. The population is diminishing as a result of the limitation of work opportunities in the tourism industry and the prohibition of new constructions in the town. So on the map you can see Grimides is here and Philippi this video is close to the border with Albania and Delphi is Central Greece part of the Greek state for much longer than the other two cases. So the data I collected I conducted both qualitative and qualitative research I did 284 structure interviews among the communities and 29 in-depth interviews with local stakeholders and officials of the Ministry of Culture I also collected data from the Ministry of Quality Archives the National Statistics Service the state budget comments made by the survey participants the national press and countries by the association of Greek archaeologists the trade union of state informed archaeologists I use a 30 minute questions long questionnaire that included both open-ended and closed questions on demographics participants' perceptions on archaeology and its recognition of contemporary life investigating participants' relationship with local archaeology and their level of engagement with it and finally with questions on their engagement with other local cultural stimuli. I use stratified random sampling on the basis of gender and age according to the population profile drawn for the most recent national census and I did fieldwork in 2007, 2008 and 2009 so this is right before the full extent of what has been called as the economic crisis was revealed and thus this data set constitutes a valuable benchmark for any future research on the topic I believe I have submitted the entire data set in all formats with metadata files to the data verse of the general of open archaeology data and published a meta paper alongside in order to discuss the methodology in case someone here is interested in more details now I will turn to see some of these questions and participants' responses there were first of all questions that directly address the relationship between the national narrative and archaeology so participants were asked to agree or disagree on a scale from 1 to 10 then being strongly agreed with three statements the vast majority in all three case studies agreed with a statement that the monuments of the past constitute the most important sources if not the most important one of the Greek national identity leaving us with no doubt about how we valorize antiquities in Greece again a great majority in all three case studies strongly agreed with a statement that Greek archaeologist national mission is to do Greece's glorious past the perception of Greek archaeology as enlisted because of nation building representative of the initial aim of the discipline in the 19th century persist in the public understanding of the discipline until today there has yet to be an official effort to deconstruct the national character of archaeology in Greece and to present the discipline and its practices as a social science politically entangled in the past and the present and with its limitations fewer although still significant of participants agreed with a statement that ancient Greek civilization is the oldest in the world and as surpassable by any other ancient civilization demonstrated thus the lack of contextualization of the past of Greece in the global setting and thus the devalorization of any other past culture the highlight of the agreement in these three statements could be attributed to the extreme way these were couched these are conclusions from a doctoral research by professor Thomas Vikkis on the presentation of the past antiquated archaeology in primary school textbooks although one might have expected that the exaggerated manner would make the detailed participants from agreeing with them to the degree that they did factors universal with universal effects such as the rise of national feelings in public education could also account for them Greek public education has been repeatedly demonstrated to be ethnocentric in rather than research and similar feelings also appear in public opinion surveys regarding the role of culturally society in Greece as the university archaeologist in this video noted in his interview with me in the absence of a constructive relationship between archaeology and the public there is space for the development of an ideologized understanding of the past and of archaeology that nurtures nationalism the question do you believe that archaeology has value in it yes, what do you believe is the most important value we have consensus among science was striking and demonstrated a strongly embedded and geographically widespread belief in the historical the scientific value of archaeology the one that supports the national narrative this was followed by the educational slash intellectual that refers more to the individuals education and own culture and the social one plus in preferences namely the economic value and the political value the attribution of such importance to the historical scientific value of archaeology confirms the dominant role that archaeology has as a handmade of history in public perceptions in Greece and of the perceived scientific profile of the discipline itself it also follows closely the findings of research in archaeological narratives in school texts, books and among students this is combined with a greater reluctance to attribute social, cultural economic and even more so political values in archaeology now participants offer the variety of answers to the question of what did your associate archaeology most closely with the categories national history primarily in Trinitas which is the site next to Trinity ancient art in Delphi and life in the past in this period prevailed world tourism and contemporary politics back behind now this is highly surprising as majority responses among the case studies vary according to the nature of the archaeological sites themselves and of the archaeology practice in each one of them Philip is a site closely related to the history of Christianity in Greece because of its inclusion in St. Paul's itinerary towards Europe and his epistles to the phoenix phoenix patients at Delphi the emphasis on the achievements of ancient Greek art is exhibited in the museum and the site itself with any further context regarding religion or life in the city of Delphi there must have been a city around Delphi it can only be a sanctuary right this view is a quick historic site that does not fit in the historical national narrative and where a more anthropological archaeology has been practiced and hence the difference in their responses in the question do you feel that people who lived in the area from Neolithic times and let this be their answers to treat the relation to them the majority in all the case studies agreed gave a positive reply with considerably less in this Pio just over half the results of this Pio may be due to the fact that the settlement is rather recent the fact that the archaeological remains of the area are dated to the Neolithic without the introduction of any other classical Roman or even decent time material there are remains of a Hellenistic fortification wall but they are very poorly preserved and this may also have contributed to the fact that they feel unrelated to it another factor may have been the extended sermon by the local priest when the excavation started on how Jesus was the founder of all civilization of Earth actually participant echoed this view and said to me Christ brought religion to Earth we do not come from animals furthermore the generic and generally restricted way in which the history has been portrayed in popular culture and in public education may also explain why people find it difficult to associate with these times as another participant said the Neolithic peoples were nomads overall the more prominent and fitting to the national narrative local and the more people are likely to claim decent at least in cultural terms from it it might be worth mentioning I have not included in this presentation cross tabulations with demographics because then the story becomes too big to include in a brief talk but here age and education correlated significantly to participants answers in any descending dispute and in both sides more participants between the ages of 18 and 39 did not feel that people who were originally associated with the sites where their ancestors it may be that one's feeling of ancestry increases with age or that we are seeing a generation that is more detached from the ancient past this result also confirmed younger participants as more critical towards archaeology than other age groups regarding education two thirds of participants in Green Nides and almost three quarters in this video who did not feel that people who live in the area of the past whether ancestors had more than compulsory education of course some social value beyond the national identity building is still as far to archaeology and this became evidently more indirect questions where archaeology was found to constitute a part of these communities to improve their race of life and to raise the ratings of the community's responsibilities for the protection of the archaeological sites so in the question did you feel that these sites belong to you and constitute part of their community and if not to whom would you say that they belong that the past majority in both in all three sides stated that the site belonged to them and it was a part of their community three quarters almost three quarters in Delphi participants who replied negatively said that the site belonged to Greece in general to the whole world particularly in Delphi 20% of them expressing awareness of the site's international acclaim as experienced for many years in their everyday life and formally recognized through the World Heritage status and also to those who have the political interest and get the money so one handful of participants in Delphi who linked political and economic interests with the archaeological site demonstrate that political and economic values are described as means to antagonize current heritage management so they were expressed when participants made explicit claims to their revenues from adverse tickets and in respect to proposed countermeasures to balance the regulations over building restrictions over the use of property and the negative impact of tourism in the community participants' positive answers to whether the archaeological sites belong to the community were reinforced by considerable level of agreement with the question do you believe that these archaeological sites improve the quality of life in your area a result that demonstrated that there is positive value in archaeology and it is identifiable even if it is stated in such vague terms as quality of life if the question do you feel that you have a kind of responsibility for and slash all rights to these archaeological science museums again the majority of participants in all three case studies replied yes and they stated that they had both responsibility and rights explicitly demonstrating willingness to support the conservation and their positive generalization further expressions of social value became evident in answers to the question of what advantages from the local community's proximity to the archaeological site and there people mentioned value, pride and advancement publicity for the village researching local history and culture cultural events mobility of people intellectual development civic beauty and spiritual health but these values were assigned by from a quarter of participants in each case starting to about 3% the least of them however by far the most widely mentioned advantage of archaeology was tourism admittedly 80% of participants in Delphi that makes sense 76% in this video and 60% beneath us considering the above I think that one would expect that archaeology is highly relevant to people's lives today however when participants were asked to grade how relevant they are regarding archaeology to be in contemporary life on a scale from 1 to 10, 10 being extremely relevant over half of participants in Delphi half of the beneath us and one fifth in this video regarded it as relevant only 15% in the beneath us 18% in Delphi and a significant 37% in this video felt archaeology was actually relevant to our lives today the percentages at Delphi beneath us were quite similar however there is a clear difference in the answers from this video a possible explanation for this could be the fact that this video the only prehistoric lake settlement open to visitors in Greece attracts more domestic than international tourism this means that the visitors this video coming to contact with our priests they form a more positive impression about the relevance of archaeological heritage to people in Greece as opposed to the other two sites in Delphi in philippi representative sites of glorious moments in ancient history participants kept contrasting the eagerness of international tourists to visit them praising especially people coming from Asia to Greeks lack of apparel and will to visit archaeological sites food and cafeterias were mentioned prevalent interest for people in Greece and lack of education or of being cultured as the causes for this difference to give you an idea of the importance of these responses the contrast with surveys that are conducted in other parts of the world is striking so one of these conducted by Pocotillo and Gaffi found that four times more participants than in the San Indelphi considered archaeology relevant and only 11% consider being relevant to contemporary life results in this video were actually closer to the ones from service in international service conducted we included this question and things become even more complicated when one considers that percentage is very slightly from case to case in the question on a scale from 1 to 10 how much would you say you are interested in archaeology overall more than half of participants stated that they were interested the highest percentage of interested participants was found in Delphi in Grimidis slightly lower and finally in this Pio 56% stated their interest the percentage of participants interested in archaeology decreases from Delphi to Grimidis and finally with this Pio while the amount of uninterested ones increases this may be a result of the longer presence of archaeology in these areas and nationally important and profitable presence in the case of Delphi at least and the monumentality of their resources now this point I would like to argue that there are three types of personas demonstrated in this data the first one is between values attributed to archaeology and its most important advantage so historical scientific values come first and economic value comes second to last but tourism is mentioned as by far the most important advantage of archaeology for local communities political value comes last although the political views of antiquity for example in the conflict in the Macedonian conflict and during the so called economic crisis have monopolized public discourse in and about Greece and here I wanted to bring the case of Hanfipoli which developed in the last three years but there is a lot of space I think it is a subject that merits its own presentation this goal persists even when the association of archaeology with tourism and contemporary politics is specifically addressed the second is a disconnect between the social values that we found archaeology to generate as opposed to the low relevance attributed to archaeology this demonstrates that little of the social value is actually materialized and identified in terms that make them specific and tangibly appreciated therefore social values compromise and goes unrecognized while the national values widely accepted as the high agreement with the statements I showed you in the beginning about the mission of archaeology and the role of monuments in ancient nation building and the place of ancient re-culture in the world demonstrated and the third business is between the low relevance of archaeology versus participants high interest in it this could be good news even if for the wrong reasons archaeologists have people's attention in Greece the following findings I believe help us explain what becomes evident as a gulf between values advantages, relevance and interests the perception of Greek archaeology is enlisted through the cause of nation building has been almost fully internalized by people a new existence focuses on the practice of archaeology and heritage management rather than on the actual valorization system that guide them the value of this course is almost absent anyway instead the values of the past antiquities in archaeology are being taken for granted archaeologists believe and stated that in their interviews that people know and understand why we need to conserve antiquities they are after all the roots of our national being right but preparedness to agree with statements such as the one of the place of ancient Greek civilization as the oldest one in the world and as repossible as highly demonstrated in this survey is problematic indeed the dominance of the national narrative is such that all participants were entirely oblivious of any contradiction in their statements the role of universal public education cannot be understated but also more recently of the mass media too and this is an argument that the Amphipolis case demonstrates really well finally the myth with prehistory that the national narrative has enforced leads to yet another disconnect with human prehistory beyond national cultures now I would like to close with a few suggestions on how to move on from this 19th century perception of the past antiquities in archaeology and better prepare ourselves for issues that we are currently faced with this is a particularly urgent need as what what initially seemed to be financial crisis in Greece in concurrence with many other events such as the war in Syria has since been revealed to be a larger crisis of values people in Greece are being challenged in many respects and some of their reactions are truly fundamentally shaking our assumptions about who we are who we thought we are and who we need to be in order to face the future I got goosebumps when I read a brief review of professor Jason Spanley's book How Fascism Works and how he identified in his book the invocation of a mythical past showing the vision and attacking truth as essential elements of fascism through heritage we have the privilege and the responsibility to address all these in order to construct a different national identity one that is resilient, tolerant and confident we need a more self-reflective, nuanced and less self-referential archaeology it is time that archaeology in Greece embraces multi-disciplinary approaches opening up to fields such as public archaeology as defined in the beginning public history, cultural anthropology sociology, heritage studies education, museum studies and conservation which more recently acquired a much broader definition internationally would benefit the field a critical history of archaeology in Greece would also contribute towards this direction we also need transparency in heritage management and the decision-making processes in order to reveal which values archaeology has been choosing to preserve through material conservation and render the process open to debate and dialogue it is time to open and admit our year-centrism and how it has compromised the humanity of our past value debates surrounding archaeology that often in public in Greece other than their people's case the finding of whole parts of the Byzantine city of Thessaloniki during the construction of the metro works sparked a huge public debate back in 2013 about what we choose to preserve and what not but no one openly admits or even realizes that their opinions derive from values that others obviously do not share the authoritarian hegemony of Hellenism still lives on, it indicates after the European powers lost their colonies built on the paradigm of European superiority we need to move beyond narratives that build divisions between peoples of the past and allow us to extend such divisions to today we need more nuanced and elaborate narratives that address the sophistication matters that are relevant until today and migration has become an issue that is more widely discussed among anthropologists the triple A's a couple of weeks ago we need narratives that benefit from archaeological science and its advances but also put this to the critical test of their limitations and we also need a critical evaluation of the content and messages that we have been communicating through hundreds of permanent and temporary exhibition educational programs and other such outreach activities and finally we should keep trying to renew our history textbooks in spite of the failures of several previous attempts we need to de-sacralize, de-nationalize and decolonize every instance of the archaeological discourse but coming back to the trap of a politically neutral display which is a favorite argument amongst archaeologists in Greece in practice but by fully engaging with the political nature of heritage from the opposite direction the one that openly addresses the constructs that led us here only then will we be able to free ourselves from the constraint of the national narrative and pursue other benefits from our work as archaeologists and allow other heritage values to materialize we need to make our communities relevant to our work first before our work becomes relevant to them and there are and there are so many different communities to work with out there so for recent examples not to leave you with a very simplistic note are collaborations with initiatives for the appreciation of urban architectures such as the Open House that have recently helped attract urban communities to archaeological sites and urban areas and there is also a great interest among younger generations which are entirely underdeveloped in Greece again to finalize you to close with a positive note there have been initiatives towards these directions recently we have founded the Association of Heritage Managers and Policemen in the annual meeting Archaeological Biologists in order to try to introduce all these debates in Greece there are enlightened state archaeologists who are retracing archaeologists' role in contemporary opening up archaeology to new collaboration but there is still a lot of work ahead and the issues we are faced with are only increasing they are not going away on their own so thank you very much for your attention Thank you Thank you very much It is something that you come up against very often especially with older generation archaeologists who my own professors often would say things like oh I don't care what happens to the antiquities after I study them it's not part of what archaeology is or when I was doing this research and I was applying for funding I turned down because what would be sociology if it's not excavated material or material from some really old storming it's not archaeology but this this can't be another recent example is the current exhibition at the National Museum of History and it's an artist among all the things that are happening in the last decade and the world is the various aspects of beauty so it kind of leaves you there's nothing to say you feel that you're hit against the wall and you have to wait for generations to clear out before anything can happen but we can't wait because we need now I have a question about your question that might help me understand the disparity between whether they find it relevant and they're interested in it but I have to actually be free so when you ask those two questions how are you free to be free to be free to say are you good, how long are you free to say are you good yet in terms of the lack of relevance I've done a quite close translation actually actually over here in both instances so both whether they find it interesting and whether they find it relevant you use the same terminology yes, actually over here and I had obviously 38 questions, it was a huge questionnaire that we never presented in one event but the most interesting question was what do you think of when you hear the word archaeology and that was an open question and it was so difficult to codify the answers and come up with a way that makes sense so it's very difficult for me to include it into any such presentation but there as well it shows that the longer people have been in touch with archaeology who live next to these sites the more they appropriate this relationship with archaeology so if you need as an endelpe you would see sites where people would instantly say oh, you think of a pier we think of our museum we think of this one even I think of my father who works at the excavations while in this video which is archaeology it is indeed an anthropological archaeology that is taking place there by a communist Marxist archaeologist to remember himself people have much more objective distance detached relationship and come up with answers that make sense like history, culture such generic terms I was just thinking of my energy study in my city for instance and if I ask when thinking about those same topics I think there would be that difference as well that they don't actually think it's very relevant to what's going on they see it as an economic advantage that they have in their archaeological site but they are actually all kind of interested they do want to know what you're finding I don't necessarily know why they don't know what I'm finding different generations will tell you different things but I noticed when there was a difference you mentioned that I think it was for cruelly best was initially its own municipality and then it was incorporated when they made the changes so I definitely noticed in my city that when we were our own municipality it was a very different relationship with the archaeological site where they were both resizable for it and also immediately receiving benefit from having it once they were then combined with Argos which they are now and they don't get the jobs anymore it's coming from over there in the city that are getting the jobs they have a very different feeling in the relationship you see how this scale affects their relationship with the site and that mistake itself it didn't get combined Delphi is also so close to the site and so associated to the site it's always curious about the site originally absolutely people would show me on the site where they used to be so that's a really good thing actually initially I had only designed a project to only clean this and this video and I talked about it for a minute this is not here how are you going to compare this and I included Delphi for that reason and the differences came up so spectacularly between the mentalities of people who have been affected by archaeology working with archaeologists for a century and the sites that people have seen and have had an entirely different relationship with it but we will see changes because now we have the third generation of these pillars that have always met with the archaeologists in their community comes to age so these changes will start showing that as well this was a fantastic talk I think I know how long you are here in the military and I know a working group on tourism studies that I love to get this I would love to I would love to I would love to and there is also one of the sites of the archaeology studies which is one of these called Cure and I am curious on the dissidents slide the photo of the old white horse train where is that this is in Belgium these old trains are famous all over the world for turning people off for turning academics academic skills but I am not so sure about the people especially in Delphi because it is kind of steep they want with this train to connect the old house of Sicilianos with the archaeological sites so to encourage people to stay for longer in the area and to disperse them in the site they use this train for free obviously I understand you are talking about your reaction and our reaction to it but sometimes it can be practical during the talk they are going to type in tourism studies but for all the new middle class these Asian tourists you can't get them to send them unless you promote them with a train or a show or something they don't get them that might be true in the case of Delphi too thank you very much for your suggestions and I will try to look after the people and get in touch thank you so much


And I'm going to talk about five major themes for today. The first one is how this all became. Now for those of you that have been blogging for some time, you might find this topic very basic. But let's just level set it for those who are watching here and those watching on the live stream, can just understand a little bit of the historical perspective. Two, I'm going to show you how some of this power is shifting to those who participate and about trust data. And the third one is adoption around the globe. And we'll spend a little bit of time looking at the Arabic blogosphere as well. Then we'll take some examples of look at who is doing it right, a global perspective. And I'll give you a framework on how you can prepare your blog as a strategy framework. And then what I see happening in the future of the space. So in 1997, the term web blog was coined. Then Peter Merholtz out of San Francisco, he used the term we blog, which eventually got shortened to just blog. By the way, that's a horrible name for a movement, blog.  I used to work at Forrester Research as an analyst for the last two years. And I was researching how social technologies are used around the globe in context of business. And this isn't my research. This is from Edelman, but it looks very much the same. And in fact, I've seen three pieces of research on trust. And basically they asked consumers, who do you trust? And over and over, this is the third one down, it's a little hard to see, conversations with your friends and peers tend to be higher up the trust ladder. The different colors is the purple is 2008, the darker blue is 2009. So there was an actual big decrease in trust around the globe. This was a global study primarily due to the recession. People started to clam up. And so people have always trusted each other. And now they can use these technologies to talk directly to each other, that more of that trusted conversation. What's interesting, and this is important to note, I'm not here to evangelize the technologies, but to tell you what is happening. So towards the bottom here, a corporate website is trusted a lot less down here, 24%. But even beneath that, business blogs are trusted 19%. How many of you have a business blog for a company or an organization? Anybody? So it's important to note that many business blogs do not do it right. They're simply using the same rhetoric or the same, we are the greatest type of discussion and not having that true human discussion that the people already having out there. So if you're going to use blogging for business, it's important you do it in the right way and part of the real conversation that people are doing. Or you may be wasting your time and be one of those untrusted blogs. Here's some other data. This is from Universal McCann. And it actually shows that the adoption of social tools around the world are increasing. So at the highest one here, the pink one, which is Watch Videos Clips Online, and then blue, listening to radio. And then you start to see the red one. That's the fourth bullet down under 2009 that people are reading blogs at around 70%. So readership is definitely happening. But a little bit lower, you can see people are in the pink one, which is about 30%, 35%. I actually start my own blog. So what does this data mean? It means that people are certainly reading blogs, but not everybody is going to be creating them. Full adoption. Technorati looked at this data. And you'll notice that it tends to be focused on US, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. And this is Other Bucket, Other. Here's another business opportunity. We don't see a lot of stats on the Middle East when it comes to these social technologies. So if you're in the analytics business, or if you're into the measurement business, this is an opportunity to tap into a new market, the Arabic blogosphere and the Arabic social technology space. So I would love to come back in a year and see if this other can be broken out into your community. Let's take a look at some examples of who's doing it right.  Really important thing. When you're blogging, choose an objective. Figure out what is your goal. Don't just blog just because you want to. What are you trying to accomplish? That's very important. So let's first look at bivertical.   This was the UK Trade and Investment Group. And it's a springboard for global growth. So they write.  And they also integrate YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and other social networking tools like LinkedIn. So they're using a variety of voices but to focus on trade and investment. So that's one particular area to focus on. Next, let's think about it by audience. Maybe there's a particular type of person that you're trying to reach. Me, I'm trying to reach CMOs and VPs of marketing in large corporations. I know who I'm trying to talk to. In this particular case, New Zealand's libraries, they have blogs written for kids or for kids' parents. And they want to teach them literacy and how to use the school resources and the library resources and talking about new books to read and covering the new types of things that are happening in their particular community. So the takeaways from this particular section. Start your blog with a clear objective in mind. So Her Majesty, Queen Ranaia, was listening. She wants to hear from what people are saying. She's made that very clear that I want to understand. That was her objective. The second objective was the dialogue to talk back and forth with people, to allow and encourage people to leave comments or put videos up. Another objective is supporting, encouraging the readers to talk to each other. And I'm gonna talk about that from my blog a little bit later. I have a surprise for you. And then the fourth one is that co-innovation, actually engaging with people, saying how can we improve? I want to hear your voice, but you gotta be ready. Another strategy is make sure that you keep your content focused on one topic. Don't deviate.  If you find you're covering two topics, split off and create another blog. That's my personal take. Not everybody will agree with that, but I think it's important to remain focused. Measure. If you're gonna be putting resources, time, or energy into this, you should measure your efforts. And we're gonna talk about that in the workshops. So you should measure based upon what was your objectives. So if your objective was to dialogue, then you measure that. If your objective was to do innovation, then you measure based on that. Any questions? Let's talk about what I see as happening as an industry analyst in the future. The future of online voices. So I'm very pleased that there's a lot of focus on blogs today, but it's also important to note that there's a whole suite of technologies that are appearing. In fact, at Loweb in Paris, the topic was the real-time web. And this also has to do a lot with Twitter and mobile micro-blogging technologies and using mobile devices, wherever you are to communicate with each other. So this is definitely a trend that we're seeing in 2010. So one thing that we see is blogs are integrating social technologies from other social networks. Take, for example, the very popular blog, TechCrunch. They allow readers and commenters to sign up using Facebook Connect. Here's how you can see it down here. And this allows people, they don't have to leave their name and their email and their URL. They can just click Facebook Connect and it knows who they are and it increases the adoption. So these tools allow people to make it easier to comment and then also when they comment, it spreads back to other places as well. So when you are blogging and you use these connective tools, I call them, and then it encourages your blog content to spread to social networks. So you can see in these blogs right here that they're encouraging people to connect with Facebook or even their mobile devices or my blog log and other communities to spread it wherever they go. So on my blog, we have, I think we have Facebook, Twitter and a bunch of other things that are connected in so it'll encourage people to spread. Next, another trend that we're seeing, this is certainly an advanced example, is the Huffington Post has used Facebook Connect. But what they've done, which is very interesting is, they encourage people to, you log in at the top left with your Facebook ID, but then it makes recommendations on what stories you should read in that blog based upon your social network. Think about that. That's turning the editorial of a newspaper over to your friends. So now your friends are recommending what to read to you and that changes how you see information. Expect this trend to continue. I'm sure that Google will, it was already looking at this with a lot of their tools. So takeaways from this particular area. You should integrate your blog with other social networks and other tools. This will encourage WOM, word of mouth, the spreading of it. Allow logins from other social networks to help content to spread. So encourage people to share it on their social network. I recently put tweet meme on my blog posts. It encourages people to retweet it and that sends a lot of traffic. In fact, most of my traffic is coming from Twitter. It's pretty amazing. Social networks and these technologies we're gonna allow for personalized news pages or editorial pages. In the future, it's possible I might change my blog. So once you log in, the stories will be just recommended to you by your friends, maybe not the just most recent story at the top, but I might turn over the complete control to my readers to decide what should be on my front page. I'm willing to experiment. I'm willing to experiment and see how that can happen. Okay, interactive ME from Cafe Viennese. Number one, how does J.A. gonna see the future of blogging? Two, and what price does blogging activity take? And what price does the blogging activity take place? Okay. Well, the future of blogging, as I went over, it's certainly being integrated on all of these social technologies. So the content is being spread into many locations. Now, what is the cost? Well, it's time. Now, if I spend two hours every day, usually the business days, that's 10 hours. That's very expensive. But I think it comes back to me later with the opportunity to come here. I mean, this is priceless. So it's really a lot of investment in time and you have to be prepared to do that. Now, two hours a day is probably a little excessive. I made this my career, but for other people, think about how much time you wanna put into this. Anybody have questions live as well? Ah, yes, sir. Oh, there's the mic. Hi, my name is Ammar, I am blogger. Do you think- Can you speak up a little bit? Do you think the social website like Facebook, Twitter is telling the real bloggers? Is it going what to bloggers? Sorry? I'm sorry, I couldn't hear the last part. Is Facebook and Twitter- Stealing the real bloggers, like you said, as you said- Stealing? Bloggering is human nature. Is Facebook and Twitter taking power from blogs? Is that what you're asking? Stealing from blogs? Okay. The trick is to use all of the tools in a integrated way. So I use Twitter in a way that's very different than blogging, but it's integrated in my blog. So think about your job is to build a house and you have a variety of tools, hammers, saws, nails, measuring tools. You wanna use all of these tools together to build that end product. Don't focus on just one tool. So Twitter is great for connecting with people, asking questions and pointing them to your blog or pointing to things that are interesting. But it's a very different behavior because Twitter is designed to just link out and find things that are happening. It's a very short attention span. Now Facebook is different. It's more of a social connection so people can talk to each other and learn about each other. And sometimes they'll talk about your blog things, your comments and your blog posts. So my goal is each technology is very different and I approach them very differently. I use different content on each particular one. So what I write in Twitter, I tend to, I have a certain style. If I want people to click on my links, then I usually ask a very short question and say, here's the answer that I linked to my blog. So if I was gonna blog about this one, I'll say, what are you missing to know about the Arabic blogosphere? Ah, I interviewed them, here's a link. And then people go, that's really interesting. And this is a technique called link baiting and I got kind of good at it. And so this is how you get people to do that. But that content would be very different in the way I would put it in Facebook. So their approach and the strategy is very different for each particular tool. And then on the blog posts, I have a more informative title, not with that question in it, because I wanna attract search engine optimization. So I'm very careful about the words I use in my title because I wanna think about, what would people search for 12 months from now? So I give it a lot of thought to how each of these channels stands. So I answer your question, they're not taking away from each other, they're all becoming one, but your strategy and approach needs to be different from each particular one. Does that answer your question? Okay, thank you, that's excellent. Yes, sir. Here's the mic, sir. Good morning first. Good morning. If I want to make a blog with a sexual blog, let's say with aim, with goals and these things, I think from your talking, I need the team to do this job, not by myself. Yeah, I have the idea. I wrote the idea, I wrote the comments, but who will improve the blog? I need technical side to improve it. One person know the technology very well to put the new things, so I cannot work myself. In the end, it's not my blog, it's our blog. So there's only one writer of my blog and that's me, and I didn't hire anybody until I started being successful with it. And to be clear, I'm only hiring this designer for one project a year, for maybe like two weeks. So it's not really a team approach. This is my blog. And I actually have a theory about team blogs versus personal blogs. I actually think personal blogs are more effective, a blog written by one person, because you build that ongoing relationship with your community, where I think that team blogs, sometimes you don't know actually what to expect from different people can be confusing. So I prefer that one personal blog because you know that one person over time and treat it like that. So when you hear me saying, treat your blog like your own company and your own platform, I'm just talking about Jeremiah's company. It's just really myself. But when I hit, when you hit a certain point, you wanna invest resources so it can grow even bigger. The great thing about blogs is, anybody can get started at a blogger or WordPress or type pad right away and most of the basic tools you need are already set up. Does that answer your question? Thank you. Yes. Thank you. Given that people tend to blog from work and even from home, sitting late at night in front of the computers, have you conducted any studies as to how blogging affects productivity at work and quality time with family? Yes. So blogging is, and we looked at the stats. So the question was, how do blogs actually work well when it comes to research and communities, is that what you're saying, and collective intelligence? Yeah. Blogs score very high in search engine results, pages. So meaning that when people search for topics because blog content tends to be very specialized, that it can score very high on very specific topics. So as a result, when people are researching and they frequently are using Google search, these blog posts come up high and they absolutely influence it. In fact, I just did a survey to my readers to find out does my blog influence their purchasing behavior or what they do in their own companies and their behaviors in the companies? And most of the data points up, yes, that it actually influences their behavior. But remember when we looked at our trust data, many blogs are not trusted business blogs. It's because it doesn't have that real depth of content. So to answer your question, it scores high in search engine results, but the savvy readers can smell when content is not right versus trustworthy. So your job is to make sure your content is trustworthy. Good. Oh, I recently saw another startup that you might be interested in. It's called Wordly, W-O-R-D-L-Y, I believe. And this is, they just launched at the low web and essentially they offer editorial to improve English writing. So you submit a blog post to them and they can turn it around a few minutes to make sure that it's grammatically correct in English and it costs a few dollars to do. So if you're trying to reach a Western audience, but you're not completely confident in your writing, there's a bunch of services that are now appearing that can do that very quickly. Let's check that out. I saw another question back there. Yes, I can repeat the question. Excellent one, is a question around marketing your blog, are there any new techniques? The best blogs, you just need to have honestly the best content. That's gonna be that continual driver. That's the core, spend 90% of your time there. What's the other things you can do? You should leave comments on other blogs in the focus areas that you talk about and be involved in those conversations and make your name known there. So as much time as you spend on your own blog, you should be leaving comments elsewhere. I actually probably not as good as that as I could be. So that's something I need to continue to work on myself. And then as you see interesting conversations and you add to those conversations in the comments, it's usually okay to link back to your blog but as long as you're doing it in a very collaborative and helpful way. Also I encourage you to make sure that you have search engine optimization set up right for your blog so that you have the right keywords and you're using tags and meta tags. These are topics that we'll discuss more in the workshops, more technical areas. But yet again, content is the number one thing. Anybody who covers this event on their blogs and is live blogging today or blogs later today, that's a really good thing to do because then people will look back at your blog and I'll probably send you traffic as well. I see another, there's a whole bunch of questions so I'm not sure where it is to go. Did you have one? Was it on Twitter or something? Yeah, exactly. So I was trying to figure this out. Yeah. Personal blogs. So the question are these tactics that I'm talking about applied to personal blogs? Yes. Everything I said here applies to government blog, corporate blog, non-profit or personal. The strategies are all the same. They're all the same. Excuse me? Yes. Yes. I don't see. What about Facebook pages? Can it be taken at least as a start point for in blogging world? Yes. Facebook pages? Yes. Yes, okay, good. Is there anybody here from Facebook? Okay, good. I mean, anybody who's working at Facebook here. Okay, who wants to work at Facebook? Okay, that's right. Facebook fan pages are a great way to put your blog so you should also do that so people become fans of that content and that's another way to integrate it into that. I think I've done that as well and I also created a web strategy group that encourages people to have their own discussions and start them so I'm using both of those features. So that's absolutely an ideal thing to do. Good point. And same thing with Twitter. You should obviously create a Twitter account associated with your own brand or with your blog. Can you talk about three or four strategies that work to make your blog into a profitable business? Right here in front of you, this way, left. Raise your hand. Right here. Okay, making your blog profitable. This is a touchy topic. So I make money from my blog by generating business and to be a professional speaker. So I don't make a direct revenue generation right off the front. But there are many bloggers that put advertisements on their blogs and there's a bunch of ways you can do that either through Google using AdSense but I hear the payout is very low. Or you could join a actual blog network that I talked about earlier such as Federated Media and I think there's an opportunity for an Arabic blog network to create that and then you find advertisers and then you split the revenue with the bloggers. Or you could do something that's very controversial which is called sponsored conversations. And this is an area that I've looked into at great depth as a researcher and there's different rules and taboos depending on culture and even governmental things. So the United States government has put restrictions on what bloggers they must disclose any relationships. Be very careful if you're going to be doing that. There's potentially dangerous waters there. One way that I generate direct revenue from my blog is I put job listings on my blog and anybody can post those and they pay, I think they're paying 200 US dollars to put that job post on there and that covers my hosting costs. So those are some ways that you can generate revenue. I just wanna tell you your goal for your blog is to start with passion first and if it turns into a career, great. But if you're going into it just to make money, probably will fail. Next. Hello. Over here. See. I see you. Really? I see her, yes. But I'm here. Wait. Where are you? There's multiple mics. Just raise your hand. Hello. Hi. Hi, how are you? Good morning. Good morning. We hear that Obama win the election because of the blog, is that true? I'm sorry I say that again? We hear that Obama win the election because of the blog, is that true or not? It's not entirely true but it helped. And he used a variety, he had, so he hired one of the founders from Facebook to run his social media strategy. And they used a variety of tools. In fact, they used a lot of these tools to do a lot of fundraising. And it wasn't just one particular tool but that helped. Now when you look back at history, this has happened before. I mean not Obama or Facebook. But you look back in the 1940s, Franklin Roosevelt, President of the United States used the radio to connect with American citizens. And then in the 60s, John F. Kennedy used TV, the next medium to connect with U.S. citizens. And now you fast forward, President Obama used the internet to connect with the world which is greater than just U.S. citizens. And so he simply used the new media that was at hand at the time. So I think this has happened before and someday there will be a new technology and some president and somebody will ask, did the president win it from electronic telepathy? And my answer will be the same. It's part of the strategy. That's a good question. Yeah, excuse me. Two more questions. Excuse me. Yes, hi. Hi. I have read about some incidents in other countries where some people have abused blogs such as threatening others or harassing others, invasion of privacy. So is there a method to ensure that some blogs are used in a civilized manner? One of the challenges that we have on the internet is through most often anonymous people disrupting content from others. But I think over time that could start to decrease because what we're seeing is verification of identity using Google profiles or Facebook or Twitter connects. So people will actually be able to identify, this is a real person that has a history and a reputation. And then I will allow them to comment or I would be allowed to see it. So the ability to filter away the unwanted content is becoming easier and easier. However, one of the beautiful things about the internet but has its dark sides is that anonymous content can certainly have a negative tone to it. And we should continue to expect to see that and as far as privacy concerns as well. Just like every other medium has had its challenges in the past, this one will have just as many as the amount of opportunities. So equal amount of greater opportunities, equal amount of greater challenges as well. It's just a reality that we'll have to continue to face. Thank you for having me today. You can find me online. Here's my email. My blog is web-strategist.com and I encourage you to leave a comment. I wanna connect you with my audience and my community in the western side and you can find, I also write for Forbes so you can find me there and also on Twitter. Thank you very much.


Hey, um, hey, I just had my first coffee in 15 days after my ride and I'm feeling a bit wide So I might keep riding you okay to drop the kids at school for me My house is my first ride in over 15 days because I've been on this massive Juice fast and reintroduction to food program. I've done a few light indoor trainer sessions, but this morning my first ride out on the road No more anime videos No more me talking about I'm gonna stick my dick in a blender to get to a coffee. None of that.  I love it so much I'm gonna have my first coffee that sweet black nectar in over 15 days First coffee it's a marnard. It's very exciting I promise I wouldn't do an anime video again, but now that it's actually not too bad You just once you've done it once you sort of just get used to the experience. It's all about cleansing by then You wouldn't do it I know whose bike that is someone's in here. That's what I'm getting next. This is stolen wasn't it? This one was stolen by hobo in the city He scratched it nicely. He was getting out of the shed where Is that the only thing he stole? He stole the only thing that was stolen was the bike and he put a bike lock on it And he put a bike lock on it. Where did he put the bike lock on it? He didn't want someone stealing his stolen bike. Who found it boys in blue boys in blue. Did a great job 24 hours later Yep Pretty amazing. There's a lesson in there somewhere. It's strategic Lesson the hard way. Anyway, I feel completely jittery after that coffee and I've got a massive turtle head So I need to race I need to race home and go to the toilet So about five minutes post leaving the cafe and I'm super jittery. I Feel high. I really do Probably should have eaten something before I had that coffee. Normally that was strong almond latte It's had a single shot and I actually feel I think I'm gonna have to keep riding Like I'm just absolutely high. I'll be too jittery if I go home I need to go to the toilet has decided though, which is good because I Was close to shooting myself. I think just as I was exiting the cafe there, but Yeah, I'm gonna have to keep riding. Hey Hey, I just had my first coffee in 15 days after my ride. I'm feeling a bit wide So I might keep riding you okay to drop the kids at school for me Yeah, I might ride straight to a revolver as well. But I think that appreciate it I'll be I'll be home 45 Just had to pull over at 7-eleven because I am absolutely flying and Little bit edgy and I'm just to curtail this This immense high that I'm currently having gonna down this banana Actually feel right now Like my watts have increased by about 10 20% but I could snap the crank. I'm really feeling it right now One shot of coffee. I normally have two shots and it doesn't even scrape the sides one shot of coffee after 15 days, and I about Four or five days ago When I was doing this juice fast I was denied a banana and also a very nice feeling because all I was looking to do was get out and go for a ride and I just needed a little bit of energy the soups and The porridge just wasn't doing it just being able to eat a banana now and enjoy life. It's pretty buddy good Alright, so that banana definitely hit the spot. I've just started to come down a little bit, but I'm still pretty wide So I'm heading back down Out on the beach another lap morty and back And I reckon should be good after that. I probably should have mentioned before with the banana I was denied a banana by my natural path Tim Altman during the fasting and reintroduction to food program because you're not allowed to eat sugary Food in fact not out any stimulants caffeine salt peppers, because you're re-educating your digestive system and I'm still very sensitive clearly because this coffee has made me like Absolutely fly and then I had the banana to curtail the coffee But the sugar of the banana has sort of lifted me to a different new level Like not only am I physically flying but mentally I've just pulled over here in Mentone. This is absolutely cracking Melbourne Morning here, and I'm just enjoying everything So that's it. I just got home. I've got about 70 K's on the clock Which is pretty massive when I consider I've done a couple of light indoor trainer sessions since I've started this fasting program over the last few days And I've just had absolutely no energy of it just been completely drained and I've just banged out 70 K's I reckon I could go another 70 but conscious that I lost about two kilos of muscle during the the detox process and I think I'm just overstimulated by caffeine and banana sugar at the moment, so Gonna leave it at that. I'll catch you in the next video


First question is from coach Ken.  Pavel said you should lock out to build joint strength. I always thought you should come I always thought you come just shy of lockout to keep tension on the muscle and off the joint. Yeah, so Yes, both are right. Yeah. Well Pavel is definitely right with what he's how he's explaining it I know how he talks about it here. Okay. How do you keep tension on the muscle and off the joint that comes intrinsically? Now, can you do that with by shortening your range of motion? Yes, I guess But the problem is now you're not strengthening the end range of motion. The problem isn't Locking out the problem is locking out and then not resting on the joint. Yes I also think that this is partly the fault of us and our peers. Oh, well bodybuilders for sure Yeah, I think even trainers and coaches I was guilty of this because when you're teaching somebody You know, it is hard to teach somebody to do something intrinsically like keep tension on a muscle Keep squeezing. Yeah, keep you know keep you know the bicep Tense while you open up in a bicep curl versus just saying hey You know what go almost all the way to the end and then come back up You know that it forces them to keep tension in there because you don't allow them to rest on the joint But the truth is we're robbing them of that full range of motion by not allowing them go all the way To the end range, but the key is that you don't relax on the joint You don't lock out in a bench press and let the weight rest on your on your elbows in that lock position You keep your chest tense your shoulders tense while you're in then your triceps all tense While you're in that fully extended position before you come back. This is just another example of certifications kind of putting in place safety measures, right like so, you know only going to 90 degrees Not locking out fully because they want your your muscles to take on most of the stress and the impact You know, there's a way to teach Through this to be able to still provide that intrinsic tension in that support system But that's a vital part of training. You can't cut it out. So You know for me personally, I would lean more on the Pavel side of it But it requires that education it requires learning how to do that Yeah, so imagine this right imagine you're sitting on a chair and then you have an ottoman that you put your heels up on So you put your legs out in front of you Like an ottoman and so in between you and the chair there's some space, right?  Okay, if I relax my legs, that's not gonna feel good That's that that's my joint supporting them If I tense up my legs and allow my muscles to support them now I can support their weight and it not cause problems with my joints now That's directly opposing my joints my joints ability when I'm straightening my arms out on a bench press or overhead press totally different It's even safer, but you've got to maintain tension You can't press it up and then let the joint what ends up happening is the ligaments End up holding the weight and limits are you know, they don't necessarily build strength that way and if they fail They break if your muscles fail Then you lower the weight so it's safer. So yes You want to go full range of motion, but keep tension the whole time. You're not relaxing at any point of the rep


So Nitesh, since the time you've done the IPO, what has changed in the gaming landscape? And I'm hoping and I know it's changed for the better. What has changed for the gaming landscape since you did the IPO? Sure. Hi. Good morning, everyone. So for us, you know, we did the IPO right in the middle of the COVID, right? We listed in March of 21. And I think just the COVID push was a pretty strong push on generally people spending a lot more time on gaming, a lot more new gamers coming into the ecosystem. So I think COVID played an accelerating role. Of course, gaming in India is in a secular trend, I would say, for a long time to come. I think from two things, right? I think gaming from within the entertainment industry in India is going to be the largest sector by far in the years to come. I would of course be biased to say that as well, but I think that's the truth. And I think India is really on its way to becoming the gaming nation of the world. We can talk more about it, why that's going to happen. So I think it's been a fantastic time last two, three years, but I really think we're just getting started. Now, Nitesh, also, since I know you personally, you're also my Facebook friend, I know your dad well, and I keep reading your posts and you know, a couple of weeks I can't figure out when you posted that you were when you were very young on one of your birthdays, your dad got you a specific keyboard and a PC, right? And that played a big role in your going down this path. While gaming is a hobby for a lot of gamers, and then becomes a profession, but a lot of gamers are now coming into gaming, seeking it as a profession, you know. So tell us some success stories from gaming, because the big growth in gaming will come from content that is developed for India by Indian companies. We're still very, we are less than 5%, between 3 to 5% in terms of content from India on the app store. So give us a sense of some other success stories, especially of gamers, because ultimately you cannot talk of gaming without the gamers, they are at the content and the gamers are at the heart of the gaming ecosystem. So I'd love to hear some success stories that you come across in your role as the founder of Nadara. Sure. So I think two aspects, right? Founders can be looked at as people, let's say like myself, who started coding games at a very young age and then went on to set up a company. And the success of them and their gaming company, right? Which you've started seeing more and more happen in India. A couple of examples, I would say is Kidopia, which is a company we invested in. Young founders couple year based in Mumbai. Today it's the number one app in the US for that segment of young kids. Tim Cook was here in India and actually tweeted about this app called Kidopia. So you've started to see Indian game developers also go out and compete globally. There's another Bangalore company called PlaySimple, which actually did a fantastic work on word games and actually sold the company for $300 million plus in less than five years of setting it up, right? Bangalore based company. So you're starting to see these successful stories emanate of companies which are now attracting more and more talent, more and more entrepreneurs, as well as more and more equity capital. So I think that's been one success story. I think on the other side, you're starting to see gaming influencers become very popular, have millions of streamers, right? And a lot of the audience here would know about that. And I think they're making a lot of money. And seeing a lot of success, a lot of adulation. We recently hosted DreamHack, which is a gaming festival in Hyderabad. And you know, some of these gaming influencers came and the crowd pull was so much, you actually had to bring in security to manage, right? So they're becoming celebrities, just like our Bollywood celebrities, et cetera. I think there you're seeing that also happen from a consumer perspective. You're seeing e-sports tournaments becoming larger and larger. You're seeing e-sports teams come across, win larger prizes. I think there's a lot happening there in this whole ecosystem. So gaming is in some way a sass, you know, gaming companies are moving towards a sass model, you know, people pay to play games and so on and so forth. The other ecosystem is the advertising branding ecosystem with such sizable numbers. Mr. Karnik talked about it. I talked about it. Do you think the advertising marketing media ecosystem is leveraging gaming for its true power that it brings, the numbers it brings? Honest answer I don't think at all. I think there's been experimentation. There's been, you know, a lot of new ideas that people want to try, et cetera. But I think for the level of attention that gaming gets and even a gamer when he's focused on gaming, he's not watching it passively, he's interacting, his attention is very much and in today's world as you know, getting somebody's attention even for a few minutes is very difficult. So I think a lot more can be done and will be done compared to what it is today. So clearly Nadeesh is saying, and that's why we need, you're doing a corporate tournament for clients, is giving them a glimpse, you can talk about it, but they're interacting and you know, getting a first-hand knowledge will hopefully lead them to use the medium more. Nadeesh, you are at a place where while you're looking at what's happening now, you're also being a listed company, you're also looking at the future. You've made some investments over the last 24 months. Give us a sense of where we are going. Give us some trends that may be very small right now, but as we move along, we'll become bigger and bigger and where is Nazara making its bet? I know you are a listed company, so you'll have to be careful about what you say and how you say it, but give us a broad vision of some trends that all of us can benefit from. Look, I think from a gaming perspective, the time study is super exciting because you have so many big technology shifts happening and that's going to transform the gaming experience. So two, three that I can talk about is one is the whole web three world with blockchain and NFTs. While I know that two years back, it was very fashionable to talk about it and the last two years, given the way that world has got hammered, it's not fashionable anymore, but the reality is that there's a lot of disruption that's going to happen in gaming, because true digital ownership of in-game assets is going to be a game changer, right? So I think that's one big technological shift. I think the second is virtual reality, augmented reality, and I'm not saying it because Apple launched Vision Pro a couple of days back. I think we've been looking at VR at the horizon for at least a decade. Others on my board were telling me to set up a VR studio 10 years back or maybe even earlier. Luckily I didn't, I would have led a lot of money because a lot of these technologies are at the horizon, but sometimes it takes much longer than you estimate for it to come. But especially in the last year or so, at least a sense I've been getting is that that inflection point in VR is really coming and VR will transform the gaming experience because you're going to go from playing a game to being inside a game, right? And that really changes the whole experience. So I think VR is coming very fast and of course now with Vision Pro coming, it's going to accelerate. Of course I know it's very expensive right now, but that's fine, you know directionally where you're going. So I think VR, Web 3, and of course now with AI, right? I think having these AI driven characters inside your game that are going to live inside your game and talk to you just like a regular human being, right, is again going to engage players a lot more. So I think you have three, four technologies coming together into this melting pot which will completely disrupt what you think of gaming today versus what is going to be as early as I would say three years from now, not even ten years from now. It's very exciting, it's also challenging for companies like ourselves, right? Because you have to be able to adapt and move very fast to those trends while still keeping an eye on your quarterly numbers and revenues and profits. But it's exciting times. Nitish, as I said, we as entrepreneurs have looked at, we have to look at our lunch, but we also have to look at, you know, what we'll eat next week, next year, so to say. Specifically, where is the Indian gaming ecosystem investing? Are we getting enough money for game development? Are we getting enough money for gaming startups? What's right? Are the valuations more palatable just now? And especially in overall, in the last six years, five years, Indian entrepreneurs are dreaming big. They're dreaming global. In one or two cases, it may not have gone right, but, you know, in a lot of categories, it has gone right. And you talked with this Bangalore-based company in which Fred Amine was the first investor, you know, selling within five years. So clearly, Indian gaming companies have global potential. Give a sense of what are we doing right as an ecosystem and what we are still not doing right as an ecosystem. So India is a very peculiar market, right? It's a mobile-first gaming market. So the users over the last decade have been very hyper-casual in nature. So today, if you look, there's a big paradox. You have, in the charts, if you look at Google Play charts or Apple charts, India is now ranking number one in terms of downloads all over the world, right? In terms of... 17, 18% of downloads. Yeah. But it doesn't rank in top 10 in monetization. So I think that's the paradox that you're trying to solve. And which is why you don't see enough super-high-quality or AAA games made specifically for Indian market because economics usually do not support it. Now some companies are attempting that and we'll see how it goes. That said, in India, the landscape is really monetized through skill-based real-money gaming, as we call it. Whether it's fantasy sports through Dream 11 or poker or Rummy, which are games of skill as regulated by courts of India. That's obviously gone through the roof in terms of billions of dollars of monetization. Traditional gaming models like Freemium, IAP subscription is still coming up. Advertising is one thing a lot of companies are making money in, but the ECPMs are very low, the fill rates are very low, and we need to find ways to make it better. So I think that's what's happening in the Indian gaming landscape, per se. Esports is taking off pretty well. There's a lot of excitement around that. And then you have another set of companies building in India for the world, where the monetization of portraits is a larger, but then the competition is also a lot more higher. So you have to choose the battle you're going to fight. Absolutely. And what will make sure that monetization is better, where we are 17%, 18% of the downloads, as you said, what will enable this monetization to be better? I think one is a natural progression of the market, which is in any case happening. What was the monetization three years or five years back to what it is today has significantly improved, and what will it be in the next three, five years will be much better, right? India will monetize gaming. There's no two things about it. Like I was saying earlier, it'll be the largest revenue generator compared to Bollywood or Tollywood or whatever it is. So no doubt about that. Gaming is going to monetize. Perhaps higher quality content designed specifically for Indian market may help accelerate this monetization. So what I learned by interacting with game creators early this year was that there is a three, two, four year, five year gestation for gaming content, right? Now, is there a way to bring down this cycle of producing content? I mean, you see what's happened with Generative AI, right? That in itself is one single way that would have accelerated the pace of deployment or execution of ideas to reality significantly. Because if you use these tools, which are also still developing, but if you use a lot of the tools that are available today for graphic creation, 3D creation, design, I think that in itself will accelerate time to market significantly. Now as happens in all content businesses, the Indian language content is a very important driver of growing the market. How are we doing in terms of the gaming ecosystem having Indian language content or the gaming being in the language? See, I again think Indian language is now an easy thing to do. And AI can do that also for you very easily, right? Replicate across the board. So just putting Indian content is not good enough. Getting the right nuances of what the Indian consumer is going to like. And India is not one country. It's many countries. So you have to build individually for these different worlds. Is what's going to really make the difference? What is with the strange names of gamers? I went to a gaming awards last year, and the names were really, really interesting and crazy and really funny. Look, I'm running this company for 23, 24 years. I come from a different generation, so I'm not in that generation to get those names. But yeah, I think that's what's important. I found that to be a whole new world, so to say. And mostly young people, mostly less than 30, a lot of them between 30, 35 years, but mostly less than 30. My last question, if you had to pick up three trends that are relevant to the ecosystem that is represented in these rooms, we represent brands and businesses and how gaming can be intertwined to be able to message to that large audience that is embracing gaming. What would be two or three things that we should keep in mind? No, I think you need to think of the 10-year-old today or the 12-year-old today. For him, the primary source of entertainment and the primary source of also interactive social experiences with his friends is gaming, actually. His world revolves around gaming, whether it is playing games, whether it is watching games, whether it's chatting with his friends, friends within the game, whether it's buying gaming merchandise, whether it's following these e-sports players or these streamers. I think what I find is that this younger segment is growing up. When I was younger, cricket was the biggest thing. It's still big.  But the younger kids, their primary interest is gaming. And I think that's a big culture shift that is happening. And as these kids grow up, that's going to continue to be their primary source of entertainment and socializing. So I think making sure that you're not going to miss out a mega trend, if I were to call it, is very important. I must also say that the next event you for him should do is to get these gamers in the room because they are a different ball game all together, as you know, and we've experienced. We have Nitish here. If you'd like to ask him a couple of questions, we could direct some questions to him. If you have a question, raise your hand. There seems to be no questions, so I'll ask.  I know that's something that gives you happiness. Is there any similarity between playing a saxophone and running a gaming company? For me, it's always about play, right? So you play a game, you play a saxophone. But I think gaming, when I was younger, now, of course, it's my business. So I don't know whether I can play games to de-stress because it reminds me of my work also. But I can definitely play the saxophone to de-stress. Absolutely. Which are the other gaming companies in India that you admire all across the world? When you look at Nizhara, is there a company? Again, there are different companies and different buckets of the gaming ecosystem, and you're building a unique company because you've invested in some of the players, not when you invested. You invested, of course, Qidopetia. And they applied for an award, and when they presented, I asked them, they told me that revenue, this was two, three years back. And I asked them again, the question, what? How much is the revenue? And they again replied the same. And then they said India was less than 5%, 7%, or less than 10%. It was a sizable number. I don't want to give it to you. Maybe it's public. So which are the other companies that you admire and why do you admire them? Because life is about coexistence. The more this domain grows, the more your company will also prosper. No, of course, I won't name specific Indian companies. They're all my friends, and I don't want to take sides right now. But I think if I were to generalize it a bit, you're seeing a lot of young startups with a lot of enthusiastic entrepreneurs in the gaming space in India. And I was just referring to earlier that India is really, I strongly believe, becoming the gaming nation of the world. When I started this company in 1999, when none of what you have market existed as today, even then my dream was that India will become a very large gaming country, or in terms of the opportunity of gaming in India. I didn't realize that was too early. But today I'm actually seeing that happen. And I think over the next few years we'll be surprised how important this becomes for our country. You're already seeing the government actually take a lot of positive steps towards supporting this industry. They set up the ABGC committee. The Ministry of IT is now very actively involved with Rajiv Chandrasekhar, taking a lot of interest in this space and doing a lot of foundation building, I would say. So I think lots happening. And hopefully you will have names to reckon with emerge globally from India in the next few years. My last question before I let you go. As an entrepreneur, when you start something which is, you're a pioneer, you are a pioneer, you started in a different era when gaming was not being seen as mainstream. Today it is the fastest growing segment in the media and in the entertainment space. You take any report. What are your learnings as an entrepreneur that you may want to? People who run companies, people in the room are also intrapreneurs. I mean, when you run large businesses, what is your advice to professionals in this room to be able to do whatever they do well? I think without sounding like I'm preaching, I think just two points. One is everyone in this room must start up something. I think India is really also the startup nation of the world now getting to be there. And the kind of opportunities and starting up today, you have all the equity capital available, right, from angel investors all the way. There's a lot of money available. So I think if anyone has the entrepreneurial bug, this is the best time to start. Of course, nothing is success is not guaranteed. But you can't get a better time than today to get started on something, whether gaming or anything else, right?  Thank you for saying that sounds very simple. In times of adversity, in times when you're not doing well, to keep your head down and to do that is not easy. Being an entrepreneur, I can say that. But that's the best thing you said. Even in large organizations, when you start new projects, new ideas, you have to be very entrepreneurial. So having the positive intent, believing in the idea and putting your energy in making it happen is really what builds something special. So give Mr. Mithrasen a big round of applause. He's a pioneer in the gaming space and has done a successful IPO and his stock price remains strong. I want to say that, unlike a lot of IPOs where the stock price is really melted if I may use that word, I think that tells you that the fundamentals of the company are strong and they continue to stay by making the right choices in the marketplace of investing in companies that really add to the portfolio they have. So all the best, Nithish. You are a poster boy for us in the gaming domain. I'm sure you and your company will continue to grow and hopefully more and more brands will utilize gaming because of what you do and what all the ecosystem players are doing. Give Nithish a big round of applause. Thank you. Thank you very much.