Good afternoon everybody My name is Darren Hansen. I'm the vice president in general manager for open-stack private cloud at rack space I'm going to be joined on stage before the end of this 40-minute session by Jim Tricorico who is one of our customers and Justin Shepard who is our CTO for our open-stack business and one of our distinguished architects at rack space so what we typically like to do at these times as quickly as possible turn it over to a customer and very credible technical resource to talk about open-stack open-stack as a service and when we talk about open-stack as a service it is really the customer experience and access to technologists the best technical talent in the world for Operating open-stack that really brings home the reason why you would work with a company like rack space But before I get to them, I want to spend a little bit of time on a topic that's near and dear to my heart And that is the movies So how many cinephiles do we have in the room anybody that are movie lovers? Okay, good. Does anybody know what movie this is?  You had your taxi driver. You had your marathon man So marathon man is about an everyman played by Dustin Hoffman Who gets pulled out of his apartment and into a room with a chair? where he is subsequently kind of tortured and and molested by a former Nazi fascist played by the great Sir Lawrence Olivier So I'm gonna play a quick clip and then we'll we'll talk maybe a little bit about bringing this home relative to to open-stack audio All right, we're gonna go back audio we're gonna really have to crank it right turn this one goes to 11 another reference all right Is it safe? Yes, it's safe. It's very safe. So safe. You wouldn't believe it Is it safe? No, it's not safe. It's Very dangerous careful So I don't want to Compare anyone's boss or superior to a former Nazi fascist. That's entirely for you to decide if That comparison has anything to do with your specific situation But in this case you have this fascist dude who is leaning over Dustin Hoffman and all he will ask is is it safe? Now this could be any number of questions. Is it secure? Does it scale? You know, does it perform well will it meet our needs will it remain up? but it's a very very uncomfortable position for our hero Dustin Hoffman to be in and so Many of the people that have to make the decision to deploy open stack have to get through this the sort of round of scary scary Questions from their superiors about deploying open stack. The good news is that open stack has come a long way home so Rackspace as a founder and the first and creator of open stack We were among the 75 people that were at that first open stack conference right here in Austin six years ago, and it's now this thriving community of 30,000 38,000 plus individuals almost 600 companies. They're talking now about, you know, the 50% of the fortune 100 are deploying or have deployed open stack and so there's a lot to Be really really energized about from the standpoint of those of us that are thinking about deploying open stack But all of that doesn't necessarily Answer the boss's question about is it safe or? Does it scale? Yes, yes, it scales incredibly well. It's gonna meet all our performance needs. You wouldn't believe it Will it scale? We're not sure this is the first time we play with this technology. It's never really been tested at this scale so Getting through those questions is where you know, hopefully Rackspace is in a very specific position to help Now the reason that you still have him asking questions asking questions about whether or not it's safe is there also some things out there about the number of Initial open stack deployments on the part of enterprises or large mid-market companies that fail the first time out There's a lot of fear and uncertainty about stability and scalability and complexity and the pace and a new release every six months So there's plenty of fear factor out there that is creating a lot of this kind of angst 70s level angst on the part of our customers and These are the two biggest reasons why there is such angst and when you look at the open stack survey That was just released. These are the themes that really resonate and come home One is complexity the fact that open stack in and of itself is not a product It's a series of awesome features projects code bases Really really really powerful set of tools that can transform your business and really allow you to move at a speed That was not possible before and so that's a very very exciting, but it's not in and of itself a product So what you're looking for is someone who can tell you which pieces are ready for prime time Which ones can be deployed ha which ones sort of meet their primary use case and are ready for broad consumption Which ones have been tested to actually scale in production? Which ones are running in production and for whom these are the kind of questions that a open stack as a service partner can answer for you And the other thing that you need is the talent that can help you put those pieces Into a Millennium Falcon that can do the Kessel run in 14 parsecs 12 thank you. I was just a test Also a force awakens reference, but okay so you also need that team of talent that has configured it deployed it tested it and done so at scales that Probably hopefully exceed what you're going to do for your own business But maybe not and we're happy to talk to you about our capabilities in this space So it occurred to me that when I was hearing all this 70s level angst I'm hearing all of this fear uncertainty in doubt because I hear it a lot when I talk to customers about You know, is it safe? Does it scale? Will it meet my performance requirements? Is it ready for production workloads? Is it can you really deliver this with an SLA? And it occurred to me that a lot of these questions are coming from the perspective of the do-it-yourself model So that leads me to the eye this idea that there are two deployment options that you have with open stack There's do-it-yourself which in the extreme is literally you alone in a room You know, hopefully you have a team around you that is that is going to Rally around you help you learn help you deploy But there's really do-it-yourself by taking the upstream open stack bits and figuring out your own Difference architecture and your own deployment and then there's do-it-yourself with professionals Who will come in and help you build something so you you have companies that will come in and Give you a distribution which is an effort to sort of bring the old school software in a box perspective on trying to product eyes open stack and the software subscription model But that still has a level of do-it-yourself in the sense that those companies will come in and provide professional services Build and design to help you get off the ground with your open stack private cloud But you're still doing it yourself relative to what does it look like to operate it on an ongoing basis? What is it like to patch this environment? What is it like to upgrade this environment? What is it like to optimize this environment? What is my capacity planning toolset look like? How am I monitoring where I am on compute and storage and that I have the resources available to my neutron network as my network traffic continues to grow and grow so Really the message from from rack space is that we feel like we have figured out the superior model for consuming open stack And it's not DIY. It is open stack as a service and when you consume open stack as a service You get a few things one the superior model itself, which gives you a reference architecture a reference deployment a Very specific way of deploying the open stack services the control plane the compute the storage in a way that we've tested that we have rolled out for more than a hundred customers that we know Scales that we can talk to you about how far we've been able to push these technologies and scale these technologies for our customers They can all be delivered in high availability fashion and because we have the experience We've productized it. We've picked the right projects. We've deployed it in a very prescribed way we can deliver a 99.99 Industry-leading uptime SLA, which was the first and still the best uptime SLA for making sure that the APIs are available to your applications when you need them Third reason that it's a superior model open stack as a service is again proven operational expertise We talked about complexity and access to talent first couple nail complexity this middle one is about access to the team that has deployed and Operated open stack at a scale in the industry that is really a factor of many When you consider our public cloud and the the operation and ongoing deployment and optimization of our public cloud Which is running open stack as well as running open stack from everywhere from fortune 5 fortune 100 upper mid-market We for companies large and small and a very diverse set of use cases We have the done match portfolio where we can start with training and professional services But then we move you through into what is really different about us Which is the 7 by 24 by 365 support and the public and private deployments that you can take advantage of and then? Two weeks ago we took open stack everywhere to another level where in the past We've always been able to manage your open stack private cloud anywhere in the world by providing some monitoring and some remote management hooks back to rack space to be able to manage Your cloud for you, but now we've also are delivering this cabinet level solution Where if you know that you have a certain level of scale and you've gone through the proof of concept You've gone through the testing we can now deploy the entire fanatical experience including an OPEX model the capital ownership of all of the Gear and the networking equipment that makes your data center look exactly like a rack space data center so if you have data sovereignty issues if you have security issues if you have compliance issues and you're looking for a managed service provider that can provide Really a hosted open stack solution But in your data center asset that you've already made investments in or in a country where you have data sovereignty issues now We can really provide that anywhere in the world So a few customers this is OSG who is our consulting partner that works with us on Barkley card us and I'm not going to read the quotes to you But in in three key areas that will help you overcome the objections or the 70s era Fear factor that exists around open stack critical performance improved speed of innovation and open stack expertise Again, this is an example of a customer where we are executing this this mission and vision on a daily basis Encompasses a digital media company that encodes digital video and makes it available for its consumers in a very fast and agile way same thing How we perform for them from a critical performance standpoint and improve speed to market standpoint and an open stack expertise standpoint and what we get told over and over again by companies that are Evaluating different ways of deploying open stack distributions Service providers managed service. This is one of our major retail Customers for whom their entire black Friday shopping experience and and all of their e-commerce for all of their brands Multiple brands runs in production on rack space private cloud powered by open stack Saying that we're two to three years ahead of every other open stack provider and distribution But especially when it comes again, this is about operating and being with you throughout your entire journey As a customer as you consume open stack so that you can have the last laugh and Again, this is entirely up to you if you actually do this to your boss Who may or may not have fascist level qualities? but this is what we want you to be able to do is win at the end of the day and have a successful open stack deployment and That is the end of my commercial part of the presentation and let me take a quick pause to get a quick round of applause for Jim trick-or-reco from open exchange come on up Jim Yeah, either way cool, which is your good side both. Okay. Oh, yeah, you're better than me. I don't have one So tell us Jim a little bit about open exchange and your business the business that you're in introduction to your company sure open exchange is Well, we do a lot, but we've been around for a while and we're focused on enterprise collaboration tools So we do large-scale email deployments. We do word processing cloud-based word processing Spreadsheeting we have secure disc storage things like that for our customers to use so we run the gamut we've been around for a while and We were primarily in the year in the EU and recently a couple years ago. We decided to Make that giant leap into the US. Awesome. So when we did that We had a whole new set of challenges because our US customers were much larger than anything. We'd ever done in the EU So that's sort of how we started getting into open stack and and rack space excellent So tell us a little bit about your evaluation of open stack and why your company eventually came around to choosing and Deploying open stack and some of those experiences so far. Sure. So open exchanges is the word open and open exchange actually Matters here because from the top to the bottom of our company. We are extremely open extremely transparent with our customer base And really internally with our employees were we're software agnostic All of our employees use whatever they want to use as long as it gets the job done But we're also very customer-focused. So if a customer says that they have these 35,000 requirements, then we fit those We have we're very focused on retention and things like that. So so A couple years ago when we were mostly a software company We tried to do open stack internally and I'm sure you all probably know how that worked out It didn't work out so hot but we did learn a little bit about it and we learned enough to know that it was a very solid platform and We just needed some help with it So we as we became more of a software as a service company We started looking for more of an infrastructure as a service partner And and that's sort of where we went to rack space because we needed those experts We needed the guys that that knew what they were talking about from from everything from compute to storage to you name it networking and While we could do that internally Our focus was not on that we didn't we don't we don't care to do that That's not our business our business is to adapt our product and our software to our customers So that's why we enter rack space enter open stack open stack gave us the the flexibility to scale expand contract However, we wanted to the networking components were super cool. And now we've got this really World-class data center world-class partner And we're really growing fast because of it. So tell us about the first couple of interactions I mean, there's clear clearly a reason you went for a managed service or open stack as a service Tell us about the the couple of interactions with the type of credible technical talent that has been so powerful so far Yeah, so I'm sure you all can imagine there are there are a lot of challenges that come with Large enterprise scale, you know, big big customers and in terms of email And things like that. So as we ran into those challenges Internally we were like, well, who's gonna handle this who's gonna handle that and it was just super nice to be able to go to Rackspace and say look, we're facing this problem internally, you know, do you any advice for us? And they're like, whoa We don't need to give you advice. We can just do it for you We can we can we can show up and you know, we've been to the castle in in San Antonio, which is really cool We've met with a lot of good people. They've come to us It's really just been a very a lot of synergy for lack of a better word Between Rackspace and us and really with OpenStack as well We've we've really been able to leverage it the way we wanted to because of Rackspace. So awesome. Perfect. Thank you, Jim Another round of applause please for Jim So I want to pivot now quickly. We're gonna talk specifically now about neutron and Scaling neutron and what it means again to be able to partner with a company who has seen just about every challenge in the book And I'm gonna invite on stage Justin Shepard who is a distinguished architect one of four distinguished architects at Rackspace and Really one of the credible voices that? You know customers really really value access to to be able to have conversations like this one So Shep talked to everybody about neutron and what we're doing to scale this particular technology. Thanks, Darren Good afternoon. All right real quick before we get started How many people run neutron based OpenStack clouds in the room quick hand? That's a good amount. All right good. So You haven't you're gonna find out some of the fun things so neutron Software project contains 60 drivers across four different projects and sub projects. You've got your base network drivers You've got firewall drivers load balancers and VPN drivers, but do the math on that I think that comes up to about 30,000 plus combinations So I have to make all of those choices before I even start running anything Lots of fun Now if I throw in scale, I now have to manage and operate those and tune those at scale This becomes all sorts of fun. I want to go back into the marathon man image of you sitting in a room Try typing that into Google and getting help on your permutation of the combination at scale at a hundred thousand nodes So neutron is probably one of the most complex services One of the things that we do see with customers is They run into a lot of pain when they're scaling and so One talk a bit about the pain how to avoid it All right, so the first piece networking is a service.  So the topology comes together based off of all sorts of stuff it your application design patterns Influence it your security posture influences it a lot of your operational practices influence it a lot of your personal process stuff influences as well Everyone's probably fairly familiar with a normal three-tier application, right? So I've got the land separation between all my three tiers I've got firewalls in place of all three of these tiers controlling access between each one of the tiers I've got load balancers distributing traffic With these whenever you add in new webs or a new app Let's say everyone's kind of familiar with having to go into your ITIL ticketing system and say that you added a new box and submit a ticket to get a change request so that you can open up a port from Web 4 off to this new database server or one of the new app servers And it goes into some queue somewhere where someone has to go and manually click a button and look at an approval and say Yes, I agree that this change should happen and ultimately a lot of times it boils down to Some person has to log into one of these devices and actually start making a change Whenever I start talking about software to find networking it transforms into this So I just have a networking fabric where all of my VMs that are running all of the roles are just tapped into and I still have all the functions. So I've got load balancers. I got firewalls. I've got VPN. I've got routers But the tools change each one of these now are virtual network functions, right? So these are usually stripped down versions of their components If you're familiar with the Cisco router as an example if you start playing around with a neutron router Those two are gonna be wildly different worlds. You don't have an iOS console. You're not able to do V&I's set down on to the infrastructure the same way that you're used to so interacting with these is really a big thing So having said that the the next part of it I would say is everything's really a trade-off here So you have all of these topologies that have built out over years You have these security requirements and trying to do this inside of a software to find networking function can be tasking On the left-hand side or yeah on the right-hand side. You have these big purpose-built devices, right? So you've got huge Cisco Nexus routers or you've got checkpoint firewalls You've got these things that have been designed over years and years and years in tune to run and perform at optimized speeds On the other side of the equation now you have software. So I've got cheap Software versus expensive hardware The point to note here is that the software is still maturing. So it may not actually do all the things that you want it to do a Great example of this trade-off. It's something like a VPN concentrator So a lot of enterprises have got VPN concentrators in the environment So it's a purpose-filled device. It's able of handling and terminating thousands of VPN sessions from concurrent users Tunneling into your environment the hardware is optimized It's got silica that has got hardware acceleration for all the off the offloading of the encryption You're able to centrally manage it Generally, there's a single sign-on aside with this you're able to log in once and get into different parts of your environment We all know that single sign-ons a bit of a lie in most places On the left-hand side if I were to do the software I've got VPN as a service So today the reference implementations for the unists service. I can't say that VPN as a service Are things like open swan open VPN? The important thing is this is just software that's running in the cloud that is terminated at the tenant level It is on-demand for the tenant to be able to spin these up configure them however. They want peer with whatever they want And so now you have lots of interesting challenges. How are you going to do your single sign-on management here? How do you start to manage all of the logging credentials? How do you enforce a lot of your security postures that you have? I mean everyone's got auditors that come in and regularly check their environments if they're fisma or HIPAA or PCI compliant and those auditors kind of know with the hardware piece what questions to ask right if you're running a Checkpoint or a Cisco VPN concentrator or firewall. They know okay. Here's the standard operating procedure that you're using for managing this I can get to the log for auditing data I know how to check and see if you're actually doing all the things that you say you do how you're managing all your change control Whenever I start introducing the software stack all that kind of goes out of the window The auditor is not familiar with any of those tools and now you're talking about things like well I've got open VPN configured a hundred different times inside of my cloud connecting to Lord knows what peers It's not centrally managed. It's completely on demand all of the onus is now on the tenants and that makes auditors cry The second thing that we tend to see is a lot of enterprises will Use new tools in an old-school way All right, so going back to the three tier application, so I've got some SDN now I want to apply it everywhere and there's this interesting thing called floating IPs Floating IPs are really meant to allow you to have a well-known IP for any kind of a role And then it provides you the ability to detach and reattach to any instances across the system So that you're not having to deal with the ephemeralness of the IPs in the infrastructure, right? So it's an abstraction that separates those Today we see this all the time where customers will come in and they will go. Okay. I'm gonna put floating IPs everywhere Obviously, this is better. It's SDN all the things. It must be better well turns out you just added a whole bunch of latency into the system and a whole bunch of Choke points that can cause problems. You have troubleshoot for zero value. You haven't done anything here today Administrators are still logging into every single one of those boxes. They're pushing new code to that box They're upgrading it. They're running a whole bunch of hand scripts. They're patching the operating system You're not moving it anywhere. So I have a detachable resource that's connected to this that does me no good I'm not attaching it. Detaching it. It's there forever So I've introduced a bunch of latency for zero reason Where what you might want to do is take that same stack put a floating IP in front of your web server Or maybe a load bouncer and be a better representation here And then whenever I get ready to deploy new code I deploy new web and app assuming that all your state is kept in the database to hand wave over that piece a little bit And then you can reattach the floating IP over to the right-hand side, right? So now I'm actually using one of these features that is useful to me. I have reattached it. It gave me something I'm okay with any kind of Performance hit that I'm taking because I gained something back The last thing is that staying current matters I Cannot tell you how many times I talked to enterprises where they really are asking for agility Speed transformational service, but they also immediately go into the enterprise software life cycle where they expect to live on the same code For three to five years, right? They're companies out there whose entire value proposition is pay me so I can protect you from all this innovation And I will you know long life software for you. I'll do all this back port By doing that you miss out on a lot of the innovation you miss out on all the bug fixes You miss out on all the vulnerabilities or you're having to pay a hefty tax just to receive that but you still Probably don't get a bunch of the new features and if we're going with all the software We want to be on the newer versions because that's where all of the innovations happening That's where the new features happen. Most the time everyone that has a long life policy will not Backport any kind of features And so all the innovations happening on the new version So upgrading I get to cut all those out. I Can't tell you how many vulnerabilities come through in each release We've seen about two to five but for any given product inside of the open stack big tent Each one of these can have two to five of its own vulnerabilities and half the time you might not even know about it You also might be getting bug fixes that you didn't hit yet So the best thing about running on the newest code is that you have the newest code The best the worst part about running on the newest code is that you have the newest code So it does not come without its own challenges staying current is not easy either There was an example that we ran into Where we had a kilo environment stood up We had hundreds of VMs or thousands of VMs across to hundreds of hosts all up and running We upgraded it to Liberty and because we were checking it scale and we were monitoring it This was a test environment. We were watching the ping times on all these VMs Whenever we did this upgrade all of a sudden the ping times jumped By an order of magnitude So I went from a couple milliseconds to maybe a second or sub just just short of a second turns out that it actually had to do with a feature that was released that does IP tables state management And so we your security groups it does a diff between where you're coming from where you're going to and attempts to just Load just a smallest portion of security groups that get you in compliance There was a bug at scale whenever you're running this a race condition where it actually Wiped out your entire IP table set for your security groups and then re laid them down But it also Commingled with some of the existing rules so got into a really squirrely state now This was because it was running at scale if you were running this on dev stack it worked in dev stack You wouldn't have ever seen this matter of fact it gated without any problem But because we were running this at large scale. We were able to see it so that's one of the last things here is Being able to check all of these things at scale Being able to see them running in large scale and find those race conditions and those bugs where it's not Necessarily a small-scale implementation or specifically you wouldn't find it in a single instance of the code But whenever you're running at scale they do pop up This is part of the reason why we actually founded the open stack innovation center with Intel is to be able to start Finding these problems and be able to run these things at scale be able to test networking environments at scale be able to Gate at scale and be able to find all these issues that only crop up under scale As part of those open stack initiative We have two thousand node clusters that are available for the community to develop on Not to turn it into a pitch, but it is important It is there it is a resource that the community is capable of using you find people You now don't have to necessarily check it on your laptop. You can't actually check it at scale You can put in a reservation request and get access to a large number of machines to be able to run these patches through And there's some work that we're actually doing with the open stack foundation and the open stack Infra teams as well to start putting this in so you should start seeing some of this benefit But I would invite you to join in with the initiative and start bringing test cases to the open stack Innovation center so that we can start finding these things because the best place to find these bugs is the people That are running them and running into it Um lastly for going to Q&A So rack space he's got the rack space cantina I am not the smartest neutron guy in the world. This man may be he literally wrote the book Come on by the open stack cantina. He's doing a book signing tomorrow. I think actually he's doing another session as well So the rack space cantina Please come by Now I will open up for questions and answers. Do you want a question? Yes, sir and and So yeah, I mean for a long time right we ran Nova networking Before neutron we ran Nova networking But since neutron is there it is the thing that has all the integration points and so running something that is not neutron means that you're Gonna have to rewrite a whole bunch of compatible APIs and manage an entire system and furthermore really backport all those changes right now You've wedged yourself in between two projects and you have to proxy either side So neutron starts implementing some new API calls to neutron you have to proxy that neutron starts implementing new APIs You have to kind of do a bunch of work where working on the neutron code base is probably a simpler problem There was another hand Yes, sir. Thank you Evan Lord of the Rings reference marathon man, sir. Yes, sir So one of the things that we actually see with a lot of customers is yeah, thank you Is we tend to actually advise them to take a mixed approach, right? So you actually can run overlay and non overlay and you can do provider networks or VLAN networks and actually propagate those up to The cloud they're not cloudy right so you don't necessarily have programmatic access But there's a lot of use case that can be met by that and it still allows you to tie in a lot of your physical devices That you're used to managing Go ahead So that is an ongoing challenge. Yeah. Yeah, it's not a solve problem by any means We do we see that a lot where actually the developer community is the one that does most of the pure SDN It's a good use case. It makes a lot of sense Auditing for that is depending on your environment. Sometimes dev environments aren't as audited as strictly as production environments Sometimes they are there are some tools out there that start to help this and there is a lot of work going on inside of Some of the logging projects to be able to give the audit ability tracks back to auditors there is without a doubt some sort of Education is going to happen with the auditor community where they have to get used to being able to get an output of IP tables or OBS flows or all these things that are the security mechanisms and be able to understand them and translate them back into the checkboxes That they're used to Yeah, it's very much a hole in the space. It's emerging technologies part of the space and there are Technology providers out there that are looking at providing Virtual network functions for those things that will tap in line for that And then you're able to actually manage it through policy management and set the policy at create time so that you don't have users that can Get themselves into a violated state There are a couple of them out there right now I think you're starting to see them like cloud passage is one that I can just think of off top of my head not to pimp them That is starting to do this and they're starting to put in those functions that have tie-backs to the auditing systems That you're used to of record and being able to integrate towards those And so I think you'll actually see those guys come up a lot in the next couple years, right? Because I mean suffer to find networking has been around for a little while But in the grand scheme of things not very long it is now It's been in cloud mostly and you're starting to see it go back into the data center depends on where you've seen it Sometimes you may have seen it the day sooner first But a lot of those tools have yet to catch up and so now as you get into environments that are security conscious You're gonna have to ask and beat on your vendors of you need to give me these tools I can manage policy management.  He's the do that wrote that code. You're welcome Evan Yeah, right there the little white shirt right there holding his hand up So the VX and so on the private cloud open-stack side We actually use straight-up VX land and we implement Linux bridge instead of OBS today That has more to do with history OBS on the one dot series was a little rough operationally There've been giant strides in it and we probably need to reevaluate that but today We actually do it with Linux bridge because it's the same set of tools Everyone understands from a Linux engineer perspective. I mean, it's not re-implementation of all of them So we do that and then it's straight up the excellent Not on our core product today. Yeah But I mean you think look things like open daylight, right? They're actually starting to recognize links bridges a viable option you go to their front page the install instructions aren't for OBS They're for links bridge any other questions time check You want four minutes back. Thank you


Hi everyone Joe for jazby's case breaks calm coming at you with 2021 tops five-star baseball eight box picker team at number 17 Very big thanks to everybody here. There was no fillers for this. We just knocked this out straight up Thanks for thanks for putting in the work Martin put in a lot of work on this break. Thanks to him Thanks everybody for making this happen. We didn't sell the Rockies. They don't have any hits on the checklist Mark s ended up with last Bob Mojo with my Dodgers There's everybody else right there. Thank you very much everyone for Getting into the action There's the five-star pretty quick break 21 five-star baseball Looking for two autograph cards per box on average Logan shots fire. They don't have hits and games either rock You're gonna hit some games either. All right. Here's a blank card right here. That's what we're gonna use to Slow play the Hicks a little bit first one out of the gate is a white sock Tim Anderson Really hope we get baseball back Soon I think that was the card. I was thinking about Jack and Tom Blavin aces card where he has a King's Jersey and a Braves cap White Sox Nicholas Nick L with that one and Golden graphs JT Real Muto one out of 15 Nice That's Zach and the Phillies Lucas Gio Lido another white sock For Nick patch auto nice Christian Yelich 14 out of 25 three-color patch autograph that really pops Jeremy Haynes with the brew crew Nice one Jeremy Good pick So Cal kid from the LA area. All right, rookie Otto Casey Mice 30 out of 50 Tigers it'll be for Steve Herrick and we got a Joey Vado vado matting. It's Ethan and the red legs Weasel would have worked better Rex pop goes the weasel Walker Bueller nice Walker Bueller for Mark and the Dodgers last spot mojo strikes again Last spot mojo 70% of the time 100% of the time hits 100% And then we've got Alex Rodriguez Hey rod nice 33 out of 50 That'll be for its Mariners edition going to Charles Four boxes to go. I actually don't know Gina. I'm gonna have to double check to see what our What our case status is on that? How many we have we got Anderson Tejada? rookie autograph for the Rangers Texas that's gonna be for Oliver. There's the Hawk Andre Dawson Even hits you with the Hawk inscription right here. That's awesome. That is a 19 out of 20 It's Charles with the Chicago Cubs excellent penmanship From the Hawk. I wonder if he inscribed all of those the Hawk. We got Brendan McKay That's for Martin and the Tampa Bay Rays Could be a could be a future I don't know if they're gonna deploy him as a two-way player, but he can he's able to pitch and hit Let's see how often they deploy him in that situation And the next one is nice Brooks Robinson 9 out of 25 for the Orioles That's also for Martin personal box. All right next one. They got William Contreras Rookie Otto for the Braves that's gonna go to Charles and the ATL the world champs and we've got another silver signature That's Andrew McCutcheon 12 out of 25. I guess the Hawk was not a silver signature So the Hawk was the five-star signatures card and the Andrew McCutcheon is a silver sick That's for Zach and the Phillies That's right wrecked. Yeah Brooks Robinson was is indeed boss man's favorite baseball player. All right final two boxes Good luck final two autos first one is Randy Arzirania 9 out of 15 for Martin and the Tampa Bay Rays Nice one and the last one is Steve Carlton Zach Loomis with the fight and fills Nice Steve Carlton going your way and that is that my friends It's a quick break eight box pick your team number 17 of 2021 tops five-star baseball in the books Thanks for watching. Thanks for breaking with us. I'm Joe. I'll see you next time for the next one. Bye. Bye


Thank you for staying with us. Now we'll over to the hot topics and our first hot topic for today is Tinibu to present 2024 budget on Wednesday, which is tomorrow. We have with us Bwala Khan or Louis J.D. who's a public policy analyst. Good morning Mr. Bwala Khan. Yeah, good morning. Nice to be on the program. Thank you for joining us. Okay, so we have with Tinibu who's going to present the 2024 budget tomorrow. However, what are your impressions? I'm sure you've seen the figure. We're looking at 27, about 27 trillion. What are your impressions on this budget? Okay, on a general basis our budgets are too tiny, but I'm not so sure people have done better because for you to post a bigger budget, you need to have been able to work on the revenue. But within the field one that has been in the saddle, it may be too short to dramatically level the revenue to the kind of levels we would have loved to see. At 27.5 trillion Naira, which is barely about 37 billion dollars, we're just about 20% of South Africa's budget. And considering the fact that we are 200 million people while South Africa is just 60 million, you can see how poetry our budget is. However, if we're dedicated to it and we execute with the right level of discipline, we might be able to begin to stabilize the economy and maybe pull us out eventually out of the economic quagmire over the next few years. Okay, so do you think we'll be making revenues for this to be able to have more in our economy? I didn't hear what you said about the revenue. Do you think we'll be able to make more revenue like with this budget? Because some people are calling it unambitious. And so while revenue generating budgets that we say in quotes, would we be able to make that? It's challenging, but we have to shoot for it. We have to at least aim high and work at it. The beauty of the Nigerian economy is the fact that the potential for doing well, as far as revenue is concerned, is there. So it's a matter of how much work we're willing to put in to make those assets that we have. You know, we say we have the largest GDP in Africa. How come? I mean, this is a fundamental question which just asks, how come that with the largest GDP in Africa, we are only able to generate 20% of what South Africa, which is a smaller economy is generated for the Pera Gom, a point of Pera Gom outcome. So it means that we're not sweating the asset called Nigeria. We're not sweating that GDP to the level or the right way, the appropriate way to sweat it to make it generate what we want it to generate. So that is a challenge right there. The opportunity is there. The economy has that capacity. We only need to drive it to make it fix all the distortions around there, get a bit more distance, and it is possible. The revenue is possible. And I believe that if we set our mind to it, not only is that revenue possible, but it is possible over the years, say the next 34 years to be able to do like three times what we're looking at on that budget. Okay, let's look at the parameters on which this budget was even prepared. We have a deficit of 9 trillion Naira, and the revenue projected is 18 trillion Naira. But we also have oil production per day at 1.8 million barrels per day, 77 Naira of $77 for oil per barrel, and then exchange rate 750 per dollar. Then we also have inflation, 21.4 percent, and economic growth at 3.6 percent. Let's look at these specifics. How realizable are these parameters that we've set our budget on? Quite, quite challenging, but not on some level. For example, if you take the inflation figure of 21 percent, inflation is currently at 27.3 there, I believe. And bookmakers are saying that the inflation figure may actually climb as high as 30 percent by the end of the year. So the question is, what is the basis for thinking that we can get 21 percent inflation rate in the budget here in 2024? What has started to happen is that the rate of increase of inflation is slowing down. Yes, it is still increasing, but it is now increasing at a slower rate, which means that if we do the right things and sustain it, we can actually at some point flip that increase, first of all, to a plateau and then begin to have declines. What can we do to get to all those things? A very good example of what I call a low-mage input is in the food side of things. See, anytime you break down our inflation figure, you see that the food inflation is a huge component, is a major driver of the composite number. What that says is that if we can deal with food matters, we can moderate the composite inflation figure that we currently have. That is essentially the message that those numbers are passing through. So the next question then is, can we do something about food? And I believe we can. We have the land, we have the water, and we have all it takes to produce more in this country. The government, for example, had mentioned, oh, we're going to cultivate 500,000 more hectares of land. And my question is, when are we going to start? If in July, when government said that we have put corn in the ground, by now the corn has matured and set the market. So it is in the place of beginning to implement that we can begin to see changes that could deliver 2024 the way we are projected. If we don't put in the work, it will just be a bogus set of not, if we don't put in the works and we will not be able to get to where we ought to get. That is the reality. 750 Naira exchange rates, we are not quite there, but is it possible to get there? The answer is yes. So what are those market distortions that we need to deal with? What are the supply issues that we can master at this level? Because some of the supply issues for corn and corn are a bit on the fiscal side and they will take some time to be able to get there. But what are those ones that we can begin to deal with in the immediate? Those are the focus for 2024. So for me, it is challenging, it is quite ambitious, but it is not on some of them. Yeah, well, you know, we also have the production capacity of Nigeria. It was only in September that it rose to 1.3 million barrels per day. And this one is pegged at more than that, 1.8 million barrels per day. And like Romer said, it is ambitious and a lot of people have said it is ambitious. How do we plan to even get to 1.5 million barrels per day, let alone the 1.8 that is being pegged at?  Are there certain wells that have been shot in for certain period that are coming on stream right now? Are there certain difficulties we have faced in the past? For example, issues around oil theft that we are now overcoming. Let's be frank, this country had once produced 2.5 million barrels per day. So what that says to me is that it is not an impossibility. We just must be asking ourselves those particular questions. If you have produced 2.5 million barrels, how did you get to 1.5 million? And what can you begin to do to rev up those production? Those oil that were disappearing in the pipelines, those things that we could have driven with technology that we are not driving, those engagement at the community levels where all these oil are disappearing, the involvement of possible complicity at the level of some security agencies, all those things together are things we can look at and begin to see how we can take this nation back to its 2.5 million barrels per day. But unless we are saying that the projects are people, I have not considered all those things and they are just making predictions. Okay, let's just put one point. If that is what we have done in this project, then we are just joking and we will not even move near people. But as a person, have you seen any signs that it is possible that there are things that have been put in place to realize the exchange rate, the capacity, the production capacity of oil and to curb the inflation rate so that we can realize what about ambition we have in that budget? Have you seen any sign as a person? Okay, for the foreign exchange rates, before listening to issues around scouting around or trying to get supply, so there is the issue of this $1 billion which is part of this particular budget. There are discussions around another $3 billion. There is the issue of secretization of NLNG dividends which is also meant to produce $10. So if you now take that and you situate it beside the recent pronouncement by the CBN governor at the CIBN, about discipline, about transparency, about working with the fiscal side of the economy, it appears as if there are efforts in the works. So we have to open our mind and watch that space and see how that is translated to substance. As it is today, many of those things are still in the policy realm but making them to manifest for us, we involve a lot of work and we are counting on CBN to make that happen. On oil production, we've seen oil production went as far as 931,000 barrels, as low as that. That was, I believe, September 2022. But today that same oil that was 931,000 barrels has gone up to 1.2 million barrels. So something obviously is going on. I believe that the rate at which we are improving is a bit too slow. I would have loved to see something faster but there is no doubt that we are beginning to grow the product. We need to sustain it and whatever impediment that is still left in that space to deal with, to take it from that 1.2, 1.3 and rev it up to 1.5 and possibly even further, we need to continue to put efforts in it. But for now, like you rightly said, it remains very ambitious that we will get there, we depend on the works that we are willing to put in and ready to put in and the political will to make it happen. Is it cementable? My opinion could be all the challenges are cementable. Okay, so I know you talked about food production earlier. However, some people can argue that we have food production to a certain level. But the reason for the inflation rate is other factors such as transportation power because these farmers, they need certain things, certain machinery as well. And they have to transport these food items from wherever their farm is to the cities where they're being sold. So don't you think there should be some things that are being done for them to enable these farmers to be able to sell at a cheaper rate? And then we, the citizens, can also afford these things and the inflation rates can come down a little bit. Yes, you're right on the money right there. The interesting thing is that it is not a safe government itself. It's not aware by virtue of some things it has said. I remember that in that July speech, government was talking about rural roads as part of the infrastructure reform that we need in the economy. What does rural roads, what do they do? They connect the center of production to the market. So when food are produced, where they are produced, they can be, where they are not produced on a marina or in maybe in very land or in some places that are remote, they need to be moved to the market. But where the connection between these two centers is not smooth, then we have a problem. So that is where the rural infrastructure comes in. It would be nice to be able to dig deep into the budget to see how government to address issues of rural roads in the current budget because a lot of farm produced in the midst of what we are talking about gets rotten. In certain product categories, it is as high as 40% of the entire thing that the farmers produce gets bad because there are no ways to move them to the centers of consumption or there are storage facility problems. All those things are there. So if we look in the budget today, are we going to be able to see spending or initiatives in that direction? Or is the government going to drive the private sector to lead in this initiative? And how? Those are very important. Otherwise, we will not be able to kill because the food matter for security is number one. Then what you have just mentioned now is critical. Without that proper connection to the consumption center, we will still be hungry in this country. Yes. As the president presents the budget tomorrow, the Federal Executive Council, on the other hand, has approved 1 billion Naira loan. And we're wondering, a government that said that they will not borrow at all is now mulling the idea of 1 billion Naira loan. And we're just wondering how we'll fare next year. Well, I don't think the issue of not borrowing at all is a realistic comment considering where we are. We will borrow, but we will have to borrow with decency, with the realization that we are already in a huge hole. And when you're in a hole, at least the first thing you should do is to stop digging. But under the current circumstances, there will still be need for certain borrowings. The discipline that must follow that borrowing, the kind of borrowing it has to be, heavy concessionary loans. And what we will put the loan to, how are we going to use it, is much more important. So I do not foresee an explanation that we do not borrow. We should cut down on our borrowing. We should be disciplined about whatever we borrow. But to say we will not borrow is unrealistic from a finance perspective, considering where we are right now. Okay. I think that's where we'll have to drop it this morning. We'd like to thank you, Bolaahom, for coming on the show and sharing your thoughts with us. We wish you're happy. Thank you. Have a lovely day, sir. All right. We'll go on a quick break. And when we return, we'll be looking at our next hot topic. Please stay with us. Thank you so much, sir. He just logged out. This one that I'm just putting germs in my ear and it's not working. Germs? Oh, did you talk back? What's the point when it's not working? Did I initiate you into the stretching club? I'm stretching because I'm not used to sitting like this. I'm used to being relaxed. You're relaxed? No. When I want to relax and like this, I'm tired of saying that. I'm so happy to be relaxed. I had to relax on myself. Hello. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Can you hear us? He's speaking. We can't hear you. We cannot hear you. So maybe you have some mute if you're muted. Okay. Now we can hear you. Fantastic. All right. Thank you. Say you're looking sweet. Oh, thank you so much. Who said I'm looking sweet? You're looking sweet. Who said I'm looking sweet? He said you're looking sweet. I guess. Oh, thank you. Are you sure that's what he said? Because he's looking like... Oh yeah, you're looking sweet. Thank you so much. Let me not add what I want to add. Okay. Oh, I'm looking at top training instead. Ludaria, international development advice or legacy state. Are they coming to us or not? I don't know. Guys, we are


Hello there and many thanks for tuning in to Y254 Lifestyle Wednesday tonight to be looking at the modeling industry. I'll be speaking to Ryan aka Nezhe. He's the president of the Zuri Africa Global Trust. We want to see how much is into this industry and is it lucrative by the way and so much so we want to see the event that will be upcoming. We are looking forward to keep it Y254. Send in your comments or questions to all our social media platforms at Y254 channel. My name is Dereva Hillary. Welcome to the program and we begin right away. Karibu Sana. Welcome to Kenya and welcome to Y254 Studios. Karibu, welcome. Now I would love to understand or to know more about the global trust just before we get into the event that will be upcoming. Tell us more about the global trust. The global trust was founded in South Africa that's 2014 with an idea of differentiating what African culture means and how best we can penetrate the global market as Africans. So we founded in South Africa 2014 heritage house. And how has the business been? How has the reception been for those years? No, the impact is strong. The brand is bigger than the individuals. And if you always say that we run as a collective, South Africa with a collective mindset, with one mindset then I mean nothing can beat it. And so far how many countries have joined you? We have over 22 countries. 22 I think it's actually over 26 countries now. So for the first year we said let's focus on 22 plus then next year we penetrate even up to 34 plus. So the response is overwhelming. That's quite awesome now. Maybe you could tell us what was the motivation and the inspiration to begin as such? I think we discovered that there was a gap in terms of how us as Africans are recognized outside. Remember Africa is a brand. But how then do we sell Africa as a brand? And we felt as Africans our brand is not really stepping out in terms of the content that goes out through media platform, through individuals that then travel and then they discover new land and then they adopt new cultures which has got nothing to do with being an African. So the motivation was that let's come up together as a collective so that we're able to influence the global space. How we then influence the global space is what Zuri Africa Queen defines. Zuri Africa Queen is a project that runs under Zuri Africa Global Trust. I want to believe you work with young people like I have seen and what is into place or how do you encourage or the strategies you have in mentoring young people and nurturing their talents? The strategy is a global trust. Number one we identify our partners from all different walks of life. First is Africa. We also got global partners from the United States, Canada, UK, etc. But our number one protocol we discover who is our partner in the African market. We can take our brand to launch it in their country, to run it in their country as a platform that then defines who is supposed to take part. So we run auditions at the national level where we work with national directors or the franchise or whatever brand. So they run auditions, they test their selection platform through auditioning, through scouting, through... We also open what you call it participation platforms where we say if you think you got the gift, if you think you're a cultural leader, it was what we promote after or it's cultural leadership.  That begs the question, what does it take to become a model?  The modeling parties will define with the national directors because when I sit here I'm looking at a program. I'm not really keen about the models themselves. The platform that is really keen about the models is then the national directors who run the modeling agencies. Because through the modeling agencies you are taking the cultural leadership skill to fuse it with beauty and brains. Where do you get the beauty? The beauty then you get it through working with the national directors who run modeling agencies. But for the women in the modeling sector when we work with them we are just molding them to become leaders. We are molding them to become influencers. We are molding them to believe and stand up for what they believe is right. What is right? Being an African is right. There is nothing wrong with being an African. There is everything right being an African. But there is everything wrong when an African decides to be something else, which then doesn't have a definition. I'll give an example. When you look at the way Zurefika Queen is designed, it's designed in such a way that the women that participate are promoted to being their organic form. We say organic form, we are talking about the organic true identity of an African woman. What is it? It's from head to toe. The language you speak without anybody asking you are you an African or not. If you look at an example, you take a queen who is promoting a certain initiative, you take the mouse out of the country. But from head to toe, nothing defines only the sash that is defining what, what, what means, what, what African. It's not enough. Let everything speak from head to toe that I am African and I'm proud. But then if you are compromised, what do I mean by being compromised? You're an African but you've got Brazilian hair. You've got long nails from Spain. You've got Italian dress and everything. And you stand, people tend to doubt. But when a true queen comes in its organic form, it then also lures stories to say, okay, wow, you know, I really need to go to Africa and check out what's happening down there. You made a statement that I kind of feel, okay, I don't want to go there because it may bring some issues with our ladies because they love to look good in these days. But then you just mentioned about partnership and you've spoken about European countries. But for a long time Africa has been accused of relying more on the West. Now when you partner with them, what do you look for from them? From the partners, we have a guide who got a franchise guide that defines how that program is supposed to operate. So we are looking at capabilities who is capable of delivering what needs to be delivered with this brand called Zuri Africa Queen. So that's what we are looking at to say, okay fine, if you're going to take up this franchise, you need to be informed. Okay, for the past five years or so, what has been the greatest achievement that you have made as a Zuri? Okay, we have been very influential because number one, we invested six years in building a brand and how we invested it from South Africa. We have been running and partnering with other programs just to help them cushion whatever they are doing. We have operated also in Zambia. We have operated Malawi, Ubinin, Zimbabwe just to build the brand in terms of launching of agencies, we launched agencies in different countries to then use that as a hub to discover the organic culture and mentor women into ethno-cultural leaders. So in terms of achievement, yes we have achieved in a lot of countries and today we are in Kenya because of that the brand has become too strong and today we are in Kenya and Kenya is Austin and I believe this is the first ever to happen in Kenya to have international models over 40-something participants who are coming into the countries because Zuri recognized the queen's role, it recognized the princess' role. So we got the queens and the princesses that are coming into the country for the very first time as an international program. So to us that's a major success. I'm interested to know how the reception is here in Kenya and how people have contributed but as you respond to that as well we have seen such initiatives come maybe to dry fans or to have an agenda or having something that will be pronounced out here but then as you work in Kenya and the event that is upcoming are you looking into maybe raising funds to a certain project or you just want to showcase Africa? For now we are not looking at raising funds we thank God for our host partner which is Afrik Models they have partnered with us to say okay let's give Kenya a chance so such programs when they come in a country the country has got a lot more to benefit number one the minister of tourism they benefit because these are tourists coming into the country number two you find they are benefiting also in forex because these tourists are coming to leave their manizia they have forex in the country and at the same time we are a program that says we do not work against the government we work with the government we have a wing that is in government this is what we are running with so we partner, our biggest stakeholder should be the government and is the government the minister of tourism, the minister of education was why are we in the country also to educate people about the Kenyan culture so when the countries come they want to see what Kenya is all about I've been in the country for four days now and what I see is amazing I've got an amazing story to go out there and tell because I'm an African ambassador so Kenya has got a lot to benefit because when I come here and I step in I'm an ambassador for Africa then when I go I'm then influencing people to say you know what Kenya is an amazing country Kenya is like this because I focus on the positives of a country and from the time that I landed here I'm just seeing amazing stories so that is what Zuri wants to dub then as a collective we are saying now as different as we are we are not different what do I mean we are different because of borders we'll put the borders in place it's not us the Africans it's in the foreign element we're just saying okay we can still break those borders but not the physical but the way we trade like right now we are together we are talking we have broken the borders we are saying now we can communicate as Africans we can come out solutions and say how best then can we do that how we do that when you combine these countries that are coming to showcase organic culture the true roots of who we are will succeed because it's a collective of voices Africans are saying you know what we love who we are we package ourselves we take that to the global community and the next thing the global community will be knocking at Zuri Africa doors to say you know what you want to invest in Africa how do you go about it and because we got a relationship with the government and the ministries we have a discussion you know what there are people who want to invest in Kenya how can you assist them because we are the voice so there is so much that Kenya is going to benefit from this program one of the things I have noticed and in a moment to be seeing some of the models you are working with the designers these kind of people who make these dresses and the attires that you have the African what really is into this because we have seen other models they have this kind of designs the kind of clothes they wear the kind of attires they showcase this one is purely African it's purely African and the creative the creative sector we strongly work with them you mentioned the designers it's good that you noticed that designers are our friends they are our partners it's a collective of different elements because when you want to put in the components of culture you got different players the designers the African the African what you call it artists that are going to perform there the musicians they play vital role also in the program the musicians the designers so we have a collection of designers that we said you know come through not just from Kenya because remember you got queens that have been prepared for the past one year in their countries and they have been working very closely with their designers all of them they are into so much passionate about who we are as Africans and the correction is between us as Africans they say okay fine how do we package ourselves for a global market for these designers for every country that you are working with right now you said about 22 now for every country like for example Kenya you are in Kenya you are working with Kenyan designers or you have come with your own the Kenyan queens the Kenyan princes they are working with their own awesome that's what we promote there is no need to say okay we need to take another designer from somewhere to dress a Kenyan queen it's not going to tell a true story if you are coming from Tanzania your Tanzania designer are going to dress you because they understand the dynamics of the dress codes and everything so for Kenya has been dressed with Kenyan designers the Nigerians have been dressed with the Nigerian designers that's how we work and these designers they have to work with what you have in mind or what they will have alright we have categories we just give categories number one we are saying on Zuri Africa global platform you are coming to tell a story how to tell a story we got six categories number one is the traditional we are saying okay fine tell us the story where the dress started from and remember culture is not defined by dress dress is just a symbol of where you come from culture has a lot of components those are what we are dressing that's what we are showcasing we are not just showcasing dress you are not just going to see women coming and working and go that's how different we are they are coming in and they are going to tell us why they are wearing the traditional dress they are coming to tell us why they are wearing the modern dress which is now they are coming to tell the story why they are wearing the heritage dress which is the national symbol dress or some they call it a national costume they are also coming to tell us a story why they are wearing the creative dress because by working with the designers also we are challenging them to be creative then at the same time the final thing is we are also challenging them to think 20 years ahead for Kenya we can say okay as a designer can you show us the futuristic dress 20 years from now how you are going to dress but it is defined also in the way they are going to work with the designers alright at this juncture I would want us to see the model that we have in studio and see how they are dressed and get to understand about the traditions like you have mentioned why such an attire and what message does it send our modelists are coming right now please come in exactly so if you could actually explain to us maybe I will begin from that end so we have a gentleman there what kind of message is being sent with this kind of an attire okay at this juncture I think I am going to leave the platform because I am also learning and enjoying to learn the Kenyan culture so I will be biased if I tell you okay this is from this one I learned from this one can you hear from them then yeah we can actually hear from them alright tell us about your attire my name is Akevi Nancharo and what I am wearing it comes from our culture I am half kikuyu and half kamba and from our own models they usually use this they are called this kalabash in so many things some of them store milk some of them do different things with it they put porridge for the kids and everything alright how about the next okay I am brand Nwendo Sankaw what I am wearing comes from my culture I am half kamba I am half masai the red part comes from the masai part and the green part the kamba I expected the yellow that's okay did not yellow alright my name is Quinville Wanyama I am wearing Ankara or we call it Kitenga this is mainly from Nigeria but we have also adopted as other African countries right okay finally my name is Makulet I am wearing I have used a kikuyu fabric it was used at the coast coastal part of Kenya so I have used the kikuyu to bring out the African alright so as you can see Kenya is beautiful no it's amazing and you see there men as well we have been talking about ladies here and you could ask me why the men are there tell me about it it's just a symbol to say when the queen is going to be found there is going to be a king who is waiting to Asha the queen to the throne so that's a concept that we are using and you find there is a prince waiting to Asha the princess to her throne because the prince plays the people to her all alright I will request our modders not to tire we will be finishing in a bit but for now tell me about the upcoming event well the upcoming event is amazing I have been three days in the country just to see if everything is in order everything is ready we want to see the venue the venue is a western hotel western hotel ya here in Nairobi who is invited everybody is invited and just a couple days we have been inviting all the ambassadors because all the embassies they are also stakeholders they need to receive their queens how about the public the public is number one pronto so they are all invited we are coming with tickets or is it free no it's not free it's not free because the reason why it's not free is to control the crowd if you say it's free then it's going to be disaster so it's not free there is the VVIP there is VIP entry there is the general entry and tickets are already being sold so how many people will be participating many in terms of the countries ok roughly we will sum up because I will tell you even by today we are still having entry for other countries that we thought they are not going to be on board like Egypt but we never thought we were going to have Egypt on board so because of the what you call it the noise that is causing out there and the concept itself so we are still having a lot of countries that are coming in but so far in terms of entry we have more than 26 countries 24 26 countries but remember they are queens they are first princess second princess so you'd be expecting more than 44 participants going up alright now I want to pose a question to you I understand you will be participating what do you have in mind what you will be looking forward to I'll be participating as the princess whatever I'm looking forward to is to win yes and where do you expect your king to come from or whoever comes I will choose the all-african I'll appreciate a prince from any part of the Africa what kind of attire will you be having then the one you have now I'll be representing Kenya so I'll just pick on one trip from Kenya may be lore and showcase alright alright now tell us about the ticketing and where we will find them as we wind up alright before you get to there there are no prince there are no prince for contesting there's only one prince who's just on the stage to Asha waiting for the princess no I'm not I'll be enjoying the event I'll be enjoying the event in terms of the tickets the tickets the adverse that are circulating with numbers that they need to call unfortunately I don't know the number by head but there is a number on social media maybe you can follow yeah on social media Facebook you can follow Zuri Africa Queen you can follow Zuri Africa Kenya so Zuri Africa Queen follow Zuri Africa Kenya follow any Zuri Africa platform Zuri Africa Kenya Nigeria because the circulation is just going everywhere so all our contacts and all our details are there yeah then Instagram Zuri Africa Queen awesome maybe website that's www.zuriafricaqueen.org so the website is the best platform if you get mixed up with mixed up with the high energy which is on social media right now alright I want to get the final words from our modest Malizia from your end because you're into this what can you tell the young people out there and generally the public what do you have a message for them and if you could hold your mic call it your mouth please about Zuri the modeling industry the modeling industry many models pass through a lot of struggles I'll advise them to keep pushing and never give up keep hope alive thank you alright next person I advise young models to follow their dreams and be sure to their hearts alright thank you ok I will advise people the young people if we go the passion in modeling just show it out you may never know where destiny lies thank you ok for me what a lot is that many models go through so much challenge especially in this industry but if you get the right channel if you get the right for me afric model as an afric model it has helped me through a lot since I started modeling way back but for now you'll see that so many doors are opening being his privilege for me and I thank afric models I'd like to tell all the models out there follow your dreams be passionate in what you do before I let you go how do I identify the places to go because we have people with talent out there they have no information where do I go how did you get your breakthrough first of all you always find that outside there are scouts scouting for models but if you happen to join the wrong agency I want to mention names but if you happen to join the wrong agency you'll end up getting disappointed but first of all before joining any agency do your research yes thank you so much finally with you is it profitable to be in this industry how are the models benefiting being here and doing this and your final ones what models need it's a platform you get the right platform you get exposure we have a brand that is giving these models the people in the industry exposure like for instance they got about three amazing tours for next year all the queens that are participating and the princesses participating we got Germany we got Asia in fact you got USA we had the three countries we already got schedules so we got a global tour but Zuri Africa doesn't end on the event it actually starts when the event starts so what models need is to identify the right platform because talent which is not exposed it's nothing talent is exposed that's how you tap into opportunity somebody is going to identify you so what we create is a platform and when you get the right opportunities they tap into those opportunities so they need to position themselves that's all I can say many things for coming many things for the models 14th of December which will be actually few days from now at Weston hotel they will be showcasing Africa and indeed Kenya will be fully represented they have been my guest here and my guest speaker was Ryan Monegami he's from Zimbabwe so other way from Zimbabwe to Kenya many thanks for keeping us company this has been Y254 Lifestyle Wednesday with me Dereva Hillary have yourself a very good night