I'm honoured to join all of you to celebrate the 30 outstanding years of this institution. I will most honour the selflessness and the enterprise and experience of the founders who not only dared to envision this great institution, but committed their lives and resources to give birth to it. Five and then ten extraordinary women who, after making a success of their lives and careers, cared to look back and give back. But it is to the staff of the school also that we owe a special debt of gratitude for running with a vision and executing the mandate of moulding and developing the many young talents for which there were custodians and doing so masterfully in the past 30 years. But a school is ultimately about its students, what they become in character, in violence and learning and especially what difference they make in their societies. Almost invariably we are products of our environment, especially our schools. There our world view is formed, our ethics are shaped, our sense of fairness right and wrong is born, our fidelity to principles, loyalty to family, friends and the nature is defined. Indeed all that ultimately makes us who we are is likely to develop in school. So not surprisingly, as a part of this event, you are unveiling the school's ten ambassadors of education made up of some particularly exemplary former students whose remarkable achievements in their various fields of endeavour are the pride of the school and indifference. From Kemi Aditibar, the award-winning filmmaker, music video director, filmmaker and television director who has become a leading light in Nigeria's movie industry and who wrote and directed two top-grossing Nigerian movies, The Wedding Party, One and Two, King of Boys, The First and The Second, these outstanding achievements in a few short years to down another movie who at 28 builds and manages the five Lingos independent power plants. She went on to become the presidential advisor of power she worked with me for a few years before going on to have a major federal agency. She was responsible for building the largest power, the largest solar power plant in Nigeria, the seven kilowatt solar plant that is in the Bairu University camp. She was recently appointed as special representative of the United Nations Secretary General and CEO of Solar Energy for All, which again is a UN agency. And then on to Mark Okoye. Mark Okoye is a commissioner for economic planning and project and I'm going to state today and he is said to be the youngest commissioner in the country. I've also had the privilege of meeting him at sub-committees of the National Economic Council and then you should have a great deal from his clarity of thought and his very keen mind. And also in the public service and this time in the diaspora is Matthew Ohtubu who we've already heard about, the Youth Councilor for the New Castle City Council in Scotland, a British Empire member is, and named just recently as the member of the most excellent order of the British Empire. In her majesty the Queen's, just this year in her majesty the Queen's Honour's List 2020. Then there is Omi Lola Okoye, the award-winning life and finance coach and the author of The Richer Woman. That book, The Richer Woman, is now translated into several languages and published in several different countries of the world. She is also the founder of the highly successful Do It Afraid entrepreneurial conference. And then to my learned colleague Donna O'Maraeke, a partner and a reputed law firm of a different from Cacheter Mountains, Apple and Shibu, she is an energy expert of international renown and a poet of oral and performed poetry. In many ways these young men and women demonstrate to us that the future is here and that the past is said to be gone. There is much more to career these days than the traditional areas of medicine, engineering, law and the like. And we live in a world that has come to reward a much broader range of skills and talents. So we have Amaka Osakwe, otherwise known as Maki O, excelling in high fashion, clothing the likes of the young singer and the handler. And I first heard of her a couple of years ago, when she was celebrated in the home magazine and also in the New York, as was Africa's most daring design. Her use of a direct in many collections was described in that publication as an intentional ploy to deploy the elements of culture and to redefine culture in fashion. She's showing us that you can also secure the back in fashion. And Damala Ladejobi is taking over the continent's nutrition and fitness space. She's the CEO of one of Africa's leading healthy lifestyle companies, Ask Dabes. And she's back and she is. And she's also, by the way, alive. While Ijeoma Balubu is redefining the PR market by sharing innovative energy, she's the founder and CEO of Redwick PR. She's an award-winning journalist and forms under 30 2019 honorary. We also have Shea Oplewe, Nigeria's one-time fastest man, whose athletics prowess and endeavours continue to make us all extremely proud. Each of these outstanding individuals is a product of the natural skills and solid foundations of years in a school environment that value their talents, celebrated their skills and shared them all. Atlantic Hall has every reason to be extremely proud of their outstanding achievements. You have done us proud to produce this best-in-class world-class results. Congratulations. Before I take my seat, permit me to throw a challenge to the board of trustees and all of us here. In August 2015, I paid my first official visit to my Nuguri Mono State to inspect some of our facilities there, the IDP camps, and some of the facilities for victims of the conflict in the Northeast. On that occasion, we counted over 49,245 young children who had lost their parents. Almost half of them were girls and some of them were just simply wandering around. That was only in parts of my Nuguri metropolis. There were thousands more. The tragedy of conflict and its outcomes in poverty and displacement is stark. Governments alone cannot handle it. There are international NGOs here and there, but the local private response is still very little. I mentioned a group of friends, and we agreed to establish the Northeast Children's Farm, chaired by Mr. G. Movie. The objective is to build learning centers, schools, and equip and handle traumatized children and give them world-class education and care. We built the Northeast Children's Farm, and built the first accommodation, the first of this school, accommodating over 1,500 children. And they've taken over yet another school, about 700, and are looking at the prospects of a bigger facility. The board invited Grange School to help in passing on some experience and knowledge about teacher and school experience, and they've done a very wonderful job. But that's quite their best efforts. And the best efforts of the Borno State Government, the former and present government, by the way, are outstanding public servants, and the state is certainly fortunate to have them. But so much more is left undone. So much more still needs to be done. There are still thousands, especially girls, in the past, and some women in the streets waiting for the second chance. There are only committed persons and organizations of conscience and offer. And so I urge them to join in that effort as soon as possible. I believe that the Atlantic Correlation of Trust is one that can also render help, especially to so many thousand young men and women in the Northeast and in several other parts of the country, but in particular in the Northeast. So Your Excellency and Ladies and Gentlemen, join me in congratulating all of your honorees, the Atlantic Corp, and also the Board of Trustees, the staff, the students and alumni of the Atlantic Corp. My prayer for this school of this university is that, as your days, so shall your career, so shall your wisdom, and so shall your favor with God in Jesus' name. Happy University!


Ludwig von Mises was born on this day in 1881. This Austrian school economist is best known for his work on socialism's economic calculation problem and for his work on praxeology, the study of purposeful human action. Mises wrote, if history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization. Happy birthday, Ludwig von Mises.


I want to solve AI, I want to unlock the mysteries of intelligence in the universe. We're going to build a superhuman driving agent for the sake of building a superhuman driving agent, but if we build something that can generically learn problems by watching humans solve them, we can solve a whole lot more than driving. George Haatz, the hacker slash entrepreneur who as a teenager became famous as the first person to jailbreak the iPhone, and then the PlayStation 3, is in a race to build the world's first fully self-driving car system. Haatz's company, Kama AI, which has raised 8.1 million dollars, is competing against giants like Google Offshoot Waymo, Amazon Own Zooks, and GM's Crudes, which rely on custom vehicles with expensive sensor arrays including LiDAR to identify surrounding objects and people and navigate a predetermined path. Kama takes a radically different approach. This is all you need to drive a car. Yeah, clap! I don't want to be the only company building this hardware. OpenPilot's open source. Come play in this beautiful ecosystem. We're paving the way for you. Maybe one of you out there. It's latest product, the Kama 3, runs on a smartphone processor and plugs into most new cars, taking over the built-in steering, gas, and brake systems. Kama's open source software, OpenPilot, uses artificial intelligence to predict where a human would drive in real time. Now we can chill! Make driving chill! Self-driving cars are just the beginning of what all of this technology can allow, I want robots that clean my house and cook me food, right? It's the same tech. Hott says his better-financed competitors have misled the public with hype about what their products can do and on what timetable. I think that this self-driving space is incredibly sad. Like, it went from companies aren't profitable to companies don't have revenue to companies don't have users. So George, the last time that we talked was January 2020. It was about two months before the pandemic hit or before the lockdowns. And I asked you to predict what was going to happen in the next two years and you said we could expect to see a wave of consolidations. These, you know, self-driving startups get absorbed back into the parent company or closures and we've seen some of that happen. Zooks laid off over a hundred people. We saw Uber and their self-driving efforts lift also ended theirs. You think we'll see more things like that start to happen? Undoubtedly. I'm not sure when we talked of Zooks had been bought by Amazon yet. The Nicola founder was indicted. Like, I'm not going to make a prediction that like Waymo and Cruz are going to fold in the next two years. I don't really know but yeah the smaller ones are going to fold. The smaller ones where it's more of a scam. You saw the Uber ATG fold into Aurora. This one seems like a hot scam right now. Aurora also just got permission to operate self-driving cars with a driver monitor in California. Cruz does have a permit to operate fully autonomous vehicles whatever that means at this point in California. So do you think that any of that matters? Investors can't even properly evaluate this space. Why could governments possibly? The hard part's not the permit. The hard part's not the hardware. The hard part is completely the software. You and Tesla and I believe Mobileye have a different approach. Can you just explain what the difference is in your approach? Us, Tesla and Mobileye are all building cars that operate in a similar way to a human. Where the intelligence is on the car. The intelligence is not in the cloud. What separates you or Tesla from a Waymo? When a Waymo decides where to go, that Waymo doesn't individually decide where to go. It's been programmed on maps to basically follow a line. With us and Tesla, we look at the road and we decide where to drive the car. This is also what humans do. If we can't solve it with vision, we are not solving AI. The goal of comma is to solve AI. A lot of the criticism that you've gotten is that you can't possibly perform as well as these systems that have all these sensors like LiDAR. Let's say that there's a world in which the costs of LiDAR come down dramatically so that it would actually be an affordable thing that you could integrate into your product. Is that something that you would do or is that fundamentally misaligned with your vision system? There is an existence proof in the case of humans that you can drive a car with vision. We will drive a car with vision. It's just a question of time. Doesn't that make it a much harder problem to solve though? Because let's say you're driving the snow or whatever. If you have LiDAR, maybe the car can see, there's new technologies out that say they can see hundreds of yards ahead, whereas a human wouldn't be able to. So does that limit your short run development, do you think at all? No. Most human accidents are not caused by failures of the human perception system. Distraction, reaction time, just like kind of like cognitive overload, right? I remember when I started driving, even relatively simple driving scenarios would kind of put me in a cognitive overload state. I think everyone remembers that when they were 17. It's like, I guys make it a turn. I'll make it a turn. Is it me? Is it him? So it's that that causes accidents a lot of times for humans. Can you just talk about how your vision system works in contrast to a system that like is lane tracking or that uses radar or other sensors integrated into it? We talked about using lane lines as kind of the original sin of Comet AI. We shouldn't have to use lanes. We want to drive end to end. We want to look at where a human drove and then we want to mimic that. We want to do the same thing as a human without any reference to anything like lane lines or cars. The only thing we want to say is imagine giving a human a picture of a road and say, where do you drive? So end to end, it's about intentionality and planning and where a human would go, not just mapping different things in the visual field. Yes. It never asks the question, what is this object? It asks the question, given this scene, where would a human drive the car? You can imagine scenarios. Have you ever been in a scenario where it's like a construction zone and like there's like a line in the middle of the road and it's painted and it's kind of a little bit confusing which to follow, especially if you're using any kind of hand coded detect the lanes policy. Our car without the use of lane lines does much better in scenarios like that. Also in scenarios of say suburban streets which don't have any lane markers at all, it will now stay to the right and it will move a little around for parked cars. So for example lane changes, there's nothing in the car that where we coded anything about how to do a lane change. All we did was labeled again automatically in the ground truth where humans made lane changes and said, this is a lane change, right? Nothing special but the word lane change. We could have called it, this was a black. So can you just explain specifically how is that different than what Tesla's doing? Tesla has a hand coded layer between perception and planning. Tesla has a layer where they're outputting an abstracted human understandable feature space from the cameras. We're not. So when we train, we train straight from pictures to plan. When Tesla trains, they train from pictures to labels and then have this quasi hand coded thing which goes from labels to plan. So you have no hand coding at this point? There's still a little hand coded but not really. We can now detect where you're supposed to stop for a red light or a stop sign and we don't do this by ever coding in a red light or a stop sign. We do this by asking where did humans stop and stay stopped for a while. And so when the machine looks at that scene, is there any way to see what it's seeing or like know how it's arriving at that decision? We can ask it that question but why do we care? The question is not like who cares if it stopped because it saw the stop sign or it stopped because it saw the word stop on the road. The only question we care about answering is how many stop signs did you successfully stop at? I don't care how you came up with the answer. I care that you got the right answer. And so does this make it more difficult if you want to let's say go back in and understand how your system made a decision, right? So Tesla has that layer I imagine so that they can go and be like well we didn't detect this fire hydrant or whatever it is. What I find funny about this is after a car accident you can ask the driver what happened. And the driver is not accessing their perception states at that time to figure out what happened. They're actually usually making up a story. A lot of times they're usually making up a story to make them look better. He came out of nowhere man, right? Listen to drivers talk about this. If you really want to figure out what happened in a car accident dash cam footage is incredible. If you have dash cam footage from both cars you can figure out what happened much better than asking the humans. So why should deep learning systems be any different? If you want to figure out why the car made a decision there is no why. Just look at what the car did and then you can say okay well we can figure out why it did that by reasoning about the system holistically not explicitly saying well there was a lane there and it's not a good way to do it. You consider Tesla like the iOS you know it's the it's the iPhone of the self-driving world you want to be the Android you want to be the other half of that market and work with all these different hardware manufacturers. How does open pilot compare to autopilot Tesla's offering at this point? We're trying to make driving chill. Maybe Tesla's slogan is look at this crazy feature. And one of the things that is like that is like right turns at an intersection right. But you would sort of look forward to this point being where we would start to see whole commutes and you know sort of longer trips that you know your system could take over. Isn't that a big part of commuting and like why is that a problem that you haven't solved yet? You may be able to get to an arbitrary level faster using hand coded stuff. We aren't targeting doing right turns or doing whole commutes. Say okay maybe we'll talk about the lowest abstraction level. If you're talking about something that hand detects a car right like I'm looking for taillights and I'm looking for wheels right you're working at like a really low level. Nobody would advocate that anymore. But by the way back in 2008 this was how people advocated for computer vision. It's like if you want to detect a car well we'll detect the wheel we'll detect the light we'll detect the hood nobody does that anymore right so nobody works at this level. They work at this level which is like a little bit higher up where it's like we're going to put a box around the car. And it's almost like they didn't learn that lesson. We take that lesson and go even a level up where like we're just going to build something that drives and then we're going to solve it in a holistic way not in a piece by piece sort of way. So you're saying that you're not going to specifically code for let's say making a right turn. Yeah. You're going to iterate the system so like let's say now it's like a teenager or maybe it's like a five-year-old and then once it gets to the to be a teenager then it'll make a right turn when that evolution happens the overall evolution. Yes. Is that any different like writing that type of code for this end-to-end holistic system versus an iterative you know or sort of a step function type system? Yes and I'll phrase this a little differently. If you asked me to code a chess engine and I had two hours I'm not going to build an end-to-end chess engine I'm going to build some you know hand-coded crap with some very basic you know board evaluation function and some very basic search and I could write you a chess engine and I could write a chess engine in two hours that can beat me a chess but I couldn't write a chess engine in two hours that's superhuman and in fact there's no path from the chess engine that I wrote in two hours to one that's superhuman the one that superhuman requires a radically new architecture. I wouldn't build anything about pawns and rooks because I'm not a chess expert I don't know how to code that board evaluation function but I do know how to code the win and the lose state in chess I can code that and I can code that perfectly so I would build something that learns how to play chess by playing millions of games against itself and I'm confident if you gave me a month I could build a chess engine that beats Magnus Carlson so it's the same thing with driving if you want to see amazing results tomorrow don't build any end-to-end stuff but if you want to solve the problem over a 10-year time horizon build this. And from a business perspective you know Elon Musk is sort of famous for over-promising or you know his timelines like I think the first time he said that they were going to have full self-driving within the year was maybe three years ago do you think that that feeds back into the way that they are approaching this problem where they have to you know sort of meet these individual intermediate deadlines and you don't. Yes I do I think that from what I heard from the autopilot team one of their main goals was to get Elon's commute to happen without a disengagement. Hence the right turns. Yes I don't think this is a good approach. I don't care if we solve self-driving cars in one year or 10 years or 20 years we want to do it in the correct way and in the correct way that's going to scale to way more than self-driving cars if we build something that references cars and lane lines things only probably useful for driving but if we build something that can generically learn problems by watching humans solve them we can solve a whole lot more than driving with the same code in the same way alpha zero didn't just solve chess but it also solved go and show you with the exact same code base. So the way that you sort of put together most of your model is through big data right so you have a lot of people that are out driving with commas they give you data and then you use that to train the vision system and you have far fewer users than Tesla's right there's hundreds of thousands of Tesla's out there so how are you competing with them in terms of having that amount of data to to train your models on. So we have 10 million miles of driving data sitting right over there and 10 million as 10 million minutes a 10 million minutes is about 20 years of solid driving this has to be enough and the reason I know this is enough is 20 year olds can drive cars right so remember that it's not just learning the driving problem it's also learning vision entirely humans take a lot of time to learn vision you're like well humans actually learn to drive in like two years and they do but humans have to learn all of vision and all of color and all of shape and physics and we have 20 years that should be enough and the data has empirically shown that we're actually only training on a million of those 10 million so we could 10x if we start to see improvement but it's been diminishing returns ever since like 400,000. And then for the edge cases I guess my main question is if you're taking this route don't you need sort of a pretty much a general AI like an AI that's capable of reasoning like a human because let's say that you know a ball comes across the road right and a human would know okay there may be a little kid coming after that ball right but a machine would not know that unless it sort of has a general knowledge base. Of course it would how many times in its data set has it seen kids run after balls and if it hasn't seen enough we need more data so okay so it's ultimately a data problem of course it's a data problem for humans right humans only know that kids run after balls because they've seen it at some point in their life it's all a data problem to believe that humans have any sort of general reasoning I'm not sure how true that is so you don't think that there's a distinction in terms of higher level cognitive reasoning in humans that you'd have to reproduce for this type of system no especially not for driving humans largely drive on autopilot right when you think about the kid in the ball it's instinctive it's not like it's not like using the long human reasoning pathway I mean even the long human reasoning pathway like you might use for chess or go yes that looks a little bit different from largely feed forward neural networks it looks more like search but we're pretty good at this too again like we're here to solve AI we're not here to write hacks in general the long-term vision that you have it like is this the right vehicle for what you want to do with solving AI still seems pretty right it's interesting to think about now what happens also after we solve self-driving cars I think that homo robotics is harder cleaning and cooking are harder than driving because there's a million correct ways to chop an onion there's only kind of one correct way to drive down a highway there's always there's always a joke about things being AI complete and it's like if you can solve this task it is AI complete meaning you can't solve this task without solving AGI I do not believe driving is AI complete AGI being artificial general intelligence so basically like you can recreate a human yes AGI is a program that can do everything a human is capable of doing we define humans as having general intelligence whether that's true or not it's a definition so I do not believe that driving is AI complete I believe that we can solve driving in such a way that we still can't solve cooking and cleaning now from this perspective it seems like if we solve cooking and cleaning it might be AGI but history has told you to bet against that over and over again and as that goal post starts to get closer you realize oh no there's actually a whole lot more to it wow we built robots that cook and clean really well but there's still a whole lot more to what it means to be a human and what historically are you talking about in terms of people thinking it needs to have general intelligence but it doesn't chess 1995 chess AI complete the only way you're ever going to be human grandmaster to chess is by solving AI this turned out to not be true five years later there's no way you're ever going to be able to like detect chairs and images until you've solved AI this was wrong 10 years later there's no way you're ever going to be able to solve go without solving AI that was wrong five years later people say this about driving watch we'll do without solving AI and so ultimately the reason that you're taking the approach that you're taking more than even for the self-driving application is that it will be useful moving towards AGI and now all these other applications like cooking and cleaning yes and I also do believe that it is the fastest way to get to superhuman self-driving cars though that's an empirical claim that I may be wrong about and what other applications can you foresee for for this like what's what's you're talking about cooking and cleaning robots after cars is there anything else that you know you would you would see as like one of the the first applications beyond self-driving cars building robots autonomous tractors true autonomous farming everything you can imagine being done by kind of um maybe the word is day laborers do you have an idea where you think the line is where an AGI is actually necessary there are some fundamental things to talk about where you can say that like for example humans have about 20 petaflops of compute if you want 20 petaflops now you need an entire rack of google tpu v3s you can get a human's worth of compute but it costs millions of dollars and it costs thousands and thousands of dollars per hour for the power to run it maybe we can say in like 2038 you'll be able to buy a human's worth of compute for a thousand bucks so you don't think that there's a fundamental difference between let's say a human and a bird in terms of like you know we talk about in raw compute right but cognition is generally thought of as you know sort of a higher level like we don't it doesn't flow directly from the structure that creates it right so do you disagree with that the only difference between humans and birds is humans think they're special that's the flip and answer but no i don't i think intelligence is continuous on a spectrum for you to posit a step function like like major step to get from like the animals to humans that seems like the thing that requires a justification and i've never seen a good justification for that maybe there are paradigms of learning that you can make kind of a qualitative distinction on the first paradigm of learning is genetic the only way bacteria learn is by evolution the second paradigm of learning is like a nematode worm learns and then you get into the mammals which all share this kind of third paradigm of learning you learn from your parents you learn from society you learn from culture maybe i'll posit a three and a half with writing like because we can learn from humans 2 000 years ago without them actually being here and then fourth paradigm is like i know kung fu so uh computers are fourth paradigm learners maybe that is a real distinction and i think a lot of this is what makes people uncomfortable with artificial intelligence or you know black box algorithms in general right is that we can't see into it to know how it's making a decision necessarily right um do you find that uncomfortable i heard a good quote people complaining about billionaires wasting money going to space are going to be shocked when they find out how much money governments waste people who are concerned about machines being black boxes are going to be shocked when they find out about humans maybe i ask those people whether the old people telling people what to think really had their best interests in mind or not this also is is sort of a fundamental discomfort that people have with distributed systems right because you can't necessarily control them i think this is almost a philosophical distinction between you know google's way of viewing the world it's like you know we're the cloud we own everything and like oh gotta decentralize it has this inherent advantage of trust everybody can look at the distributed decentralized system and trust it's also true with open pilot if you want to decide how much to trust your open pilot open pilot is open source code you can read it you can modify it if you want to decide how much to trust your waymo or do you trust google do you trust their organizational uh structure that you have no insight into and so how do you think that distributed systems uh you know bitcoin included or crypto but other things as well how are they able to offer more value to individuals than the existing structures the decentralized software is only so good at bitcoin network and only process a small number of transactions per second visa can process a lot more visa is technically better than bitcoin but in the long run this flips bitcoin gets better every year and visa gets worse every year whatever visa blocks payments to at first it's just you know julien assange and then it's sex workers and then it's right wing people and then it's whoever you know the new the new people visa you know decides to go after so visa gets worse more censored and like more scummy kind of every year they're like how can we extract more value from these people how can we raise the ap r in this weird clause that nobody's ever going to read in the contract another beautiful thing that i love about crypto is forks you can't deploy a decentralized exchange to ethereum and take 30% fees apple takes 30% fees in the app store because if you took 30% fees that's enough to fork now if you take 3% fees maybe not but it forces a much more sane dynamic this is free exit in countries too it's the same basic idea if you have you know you can't sustain tax rates that are insanely high because people will leave right and if you could fork the country people would leave even sooner this is a great thing about it's very easy to make more digital land i'm hoping that we're going to see a decade of decentralization and do you see the risk of that you know being slower or not happening as mostly political given that you know i think polarization and this group wants to ban these people and this group wants to ban these people and they all rely on a sort of central authority that is capable of doing that right you hear people like elizabeth warren and other politicians now saying that we need to ban or regulate crypto really heavily for this reason right uh because they don't know where the payments are going right it could be buying guns it could be buying drugs you never know um so do you see that as a significant risk this is why i don't do politics it all happens on the wrong timescale it happens on this small timescale they all act like the world is falling and then some new administration takes power some new country gains prominence uh and this has happened throughout history so no in the long march of technology technology wins seems like governments have been equally shitty throughout all of history but when you look at technology it's very rare that technology declines whereas governments and corporations fail all the time so what do i fundamentally trust more not organizations of people but technology the bitcoin software the ethereum software the blockchain software will improve year over year slowly these organizations some will rise some will decline but someday the software will beat them all and do you think that these systems that are distributed like you know bitcoin one of the promises of it is that it can't be regulated to a certain level right i mean we're finding out that there you know it's not quite as anonymous as people think it is but fundamentally do you think that it's possible to build systems that are not touchable by existing power structures no i think power structures will always find ways i think that how power structures come to prominence is usually by offering something the things that they will be able to offer will diminish with time as technology gets better you can imagine one of the things that power structures fundamentally offer you is protection from violence i wouldn't need that if i had a arm-based force field that could fend off bullets and knives and everything right the need for the power structure would decrease so no i don't think it's that power structures can't fundamentally regulate these things i think it's at the way power structures gain power and the way not just governments but also corporations gain power is by offering people value and as the value they can offer decreases their ability to rise in the first place decreases why do you think that this the 2020s are going to be fundamentally different and we're going to finally get to this decentralized ideal i can see comfortably by the end of the decade crypto money technology which is actually technically capable of replacing visa this is not true in 2020 it certainly was not true in 2010 and crypto didn't even exist in 2000 but by 2030 i could see it getting to the point where even extrapolating growth of payment networks crypto can actually exceed the technical capacity required i've also seen a general decline in a lot of organizational structures so one goes up one goes down lines cross at some point i'm open for this decade how do you see this playing out on the ground right has is comma gonna change do you think that the tech industry will change in a fundamental way i think one of the biggest changes is startups with this thing mark zuckerberg dropping out of college coming out to silicon valley was this narrative and he was kind of one of the first people to do it today if you drop out of harvard move to silicon valley and raise money from institutional investors you are not a maverick you are a copycat and it is fundamentally a different type of person who does the former and does the latter it needs to be a new type of thing it needs to be who actually is breaking the mold it isn't moving to silicon valley valley and taking money from institutional investors that is the power structure that is not disruption what does actual disruption look like uber and lyft are massively more expensive than they ever have been do you think that's a function of what we're just talking about where you know the bills come do and they've been floating on all this VC money for so long um is it the pandemic is it a combination of both something like uber is interesting people 10 years ago would talk about how uber shouldn't be this middle man they're just a middle man extracting profits actually 10 years ago the opposite was true uber was paying out the drivers more than the riders were paying there was no way to possibly compete with them but as that starts to shift and the more that starts to shift the better the peer to peer decentralized uber looks what do you think about you know the experiments that we've done on like a universal basic income or uh you know basically giving people free money right uh how do you think that that is going to play into how things evolve from here where's this free money coming from who has the authority to give free money that's the interesting question right if you have two shitcoins and in one shitcoin the owners have access to the mint function and just arbitrarily mint more whenever they feel like it and you have another shitcoin where the owners uh transferred ownership to the zero address so nobody can call mint well the value of these coins is probably going to go like this but there certainly are tokens like that and they don't gain adoption people don't like that what are those guys have access to the mint function and not me i don't feel that good about this tell me the mint function in bitcoin is like a hash rate competition and everybody can participate and hear the rules i feel better about that yeah that's that's a currency that i believe in more for the long term than the currency where it's arbitrary and guys are like ah but he really needs it mint him some coin all right so the fact that like in a decentralized network where people aren't operating at the behest of some centralized authority they choose not to buy coins that have unlimited printing do you think that that's analogous to the dollar i love competition i love seeing competition i love seeing competition for everything competition for money competition for televisions competition for self-driving systems and competition for uh governments all the competitions great


The interesting twist in the story came when an organisation outside federal avionics or military sensors, in this case Exxon Mobile, heard about what was going on with the Face Consultium. They understood the business problem that was trying to be solved and very quickly identified it as a very similar problem to the one that they have. In the oil and gas world a very similar thing happens in that typically a system is developed by one of a small number of major suppliers with maintenance obligations going on for 25, 30 years in some cases, with the consequence that customers are tied into that vendor and that system for a very long period of time. One of the key drivers in the oil and gas world was that their systems are currently reaching an end of life situation in the next 5 to 10 years and they don't want the next generation of systems to be done exactly the same way as they had before. So they want essentially for oil and gas what the US government wanted for federal avionics and that is an open architecture, open systems based approach to the new systems. They came to us and asked if we could help them create an industry grouping around this to tackle it, not just for Exxon Mobile, but to tackle it for the oil and gas industry as a whole. So we checked with other oil and gas operators that they had a similar problem and of course they did. What we found in the open group over the years is there's very rarely a unique problem that somebody has there more often than not shared. So given that we then had a critical mass of oil and gas operators we started having some open days to industry days to describe what it was that we were planning on doing and gauging the level of interest. That's when it got really interesting because at that point we realised this wasn't actually just an oil and gas situation, this was a multi-industry problem. Basically any industry that uses large scale process automation systems has the same problem. So utilities industry, pharmaceutical, petrochemical as well as oil and gas and pulp and paper, for example, food and beverage, another example, they all have the same problem. And very quickly we found that organisations from those industries were joining to create a common approach to process automation systems in the first place. The benefits are considerable for the customers and also for the vendors because you get situations, for example, where the vendors find it difficult to fulfil 25 to 30 year maintenance obligations. The technology gets old, they even struggle with parts sometimes. What the open process automation forum, which is what this group turned into inside the open group, what they are working on is, like the previous examples, both technical standard and business guidance and business case documents for helping the uptake and accelerating the uptake of the standard in practice. They have published an initial standard down through certain levels, they're working to evolve that standard and now they're working on the certification programme.


Economic Development Committee. I think this is probably the last time that we'll be meeting as jointly the Economic and Community Development. The mayor put out a notice yesterday, which I think is very appropriate that we're going to take economic development and separate it and have a separate Community Development Committee that'll be chaired by Ms. Herbert. And he's created another committee called Help Me Out Here. It was something in public health. Health, Social and Environmental Affairs. Health, Social and Environmental Affairs that will be chaired by Dr. Bussell with Mr. Duvall and Mr. McDowell, and that will be responsible for homeless programs and public health programs in this city, so. General quality of life. Yeah, we've, I think, very appropriately elevated homelessness and the services that were provided into a place where it's gonna be, have a committee that really, really works with it on its governance. And I think that's, again, a very appropriate thing to do in light of the investment that the city's made this year at addressing the chronic homelessness on the street issues more than anything else. Any comments before we get started, Ms. Herbert? Mr. Blackson, I'll let you go first. How about that? Good afternoon. Thank y'all very much for having us today on behalf of Susan and Henry and myself in the chamber. We appreciate very much all support of our military program that we've been having at the chamber for a long time and the city's been a huge partner for that. So I wanted to just give you a quick update of where we are and how things are going as it relates to our military affairs. And Council Member Taylor, I know you were out there recently for a night infiltration course. Hope you learned a little bit. Took young John Taylor with me where he could learn if he didn't behave. Good. Better grades where he might end up. It is, it's a great place for show and tell and to learn what maybe not to do, but things are great out. In fact, I don't know of a better time that we are, that we've had at least in my time at the chamber in eight years of our relationship with Fort Jackson. And really the military as a whole. I mean, if you look at it, just in your packets there, you've got some fact sheets, but also we've included the military-based task force which is under the Department of Veterans Affairs did a fiscal impact study of the military throughout the state and we're fortunate here that we have over $6 billion impact from our military just in the Midlands of South Carolina. That includes not only Jackson which has about a $4.2 billion impact, but our National Guard, our VA hospital. So all told, $6.6 billion impact which is a significant amount of revenue that flows through the city and the county and the region for that matter. But most importantly, we got a lot of people. We were fortunate over the last couple of years we've seen a spike in new hires out at Fort Jackson. Pre-pandemic, they were somewhere around 7,000 employees. Now they're 8,200 employees with the success of their soldier prep program that they started back in July of this year which is for layman's terms, just like a junior college for soldiers that are thinking about coming who may need some help to get to where they need so the Army has not met their numbers for a number of years as it relates to bringing in new soldiers. So their recruitment numbers have been down and so they had to get creative and they were able to start a program where folks can come on post and up to 90 days and get the training they need to qualify to meet the Army's standards. Significant program. We're the only place in the country that's doing that. We're the only branch of the military that's actually doing it. And so DOD has sent a bunch of big wigs down from the Pentagon to look at this program to see the success. They don't wanna release all the numbers yet but if you ask the general they're very pleased with the outcomes and so that's gonna help further our calls and make Columbia a better place and more soldiers coming through here which is a great opportunity for us. But with that comes new numbers and hopefully they're gonna bring in another 85 people to this market to help that soldier prep program. They're all told 8,200 current employees right now that's a combination of both active duty as well as civilian folks that live off post. And so we're still about 70% of the folks that live or work on Fort Jackson live off post which is again, our neighbors, our friends, folks we go to church with and so the economic impact is significant. And through our work we do hire a consultant up in DC and we were able to this year get about $55 million worth of construction dollars that flows back to Fort Jackson. We've seen in the last 20 years almost $900 million worth of direct congressional spend for Jackson and there's a lot of other dollars that flow through other pots of money but that's just through the milcon. The military construction is about 898 million over the last 15, 20 years. So we've been very pleased. They added a new reception barracks but as you know costs over the last few years have gone up and so they've had some costs overruns but we've been able to secure some dollars through Senator Graham, Congressman Clyburn to help offset those deficits but all in all we had a really good year at Jackson last year with 55 million coming for those new training barracks but we're thrilled with General Jason Kelly. He's been a great addition to Fort Jackson since August 31st when he took over but we've been pleased with him. He loves it here and is so excited. If y'all have met him and had a chance to, he's got more energy than I've ever seen in somebody but through his leadership and General McHales. One of the things where I was up in DC back in October one of the things that General McHales really pressed upon us before he departed was looking at Jackson and figuring out ways we can use that for different missions and it does not have to be an Army mission. It needs to be another branch of defense work. It could be another branch of government quite frankly but there is a lot of land that's in the city of Columbia that is out there. We have 50,000 acres but all around I call it the downtown the old Fort Jackson proper where there's some barracks but offices there's a lot of space for future economic development activity and the key is to find the right mission, find the right partner that needs to be behind protected lines. I mean you basically have to go through a checkpoint to get in so it's a secure facility but I think we've got our congressional folks looking out for us. We've got our consultants looking out as well to try to find a partner. It could be Justice Department, it could be Homeland Security. There are a lot of folks that are looking to grow and there's plenty of space out there that could be used for future uses and so one of the big missions that we've been talking with Jackson about what can we see. We're also looking for additional missions as it relates to the Army. Now our livelihood has been about training and I think that's what we need to stick with. I don't think anybody wants a bunch of helicopters and bombs blowing up things but I do think that there's a right civilian need and a back office support mechanism that we can put out there that could benefit all of us and bring in more employees which is what we want. So we're trying to use your dollars that y'all give to our group as wisely as possible but I think our numbers are pretty good. The growth that we've seen out there is significant and I think with this Army Prep program and if we can continue to grow and look at other missions I think we'll be in good shape. I don't want to belabor it because y'all've got other business to do but feel free to if you see anything that you have questions about. Susan myself will be happy to answer any questions but we're delighted with our partnership with Fort Jackson and our military at McIntyre. I think that McIntyre has done extremely well this year. I thought their movement to have the F-16s fly out of CAE's been great for the public to see what they do. Now that'll come to an end first part of the next year but they'll go back to McIntyre once the pavement is done, the repaving work at McIntyre but we're looking to partner with them trying to keep as many of their active duty folks here in the Midlands. So current job fairs and opportunities for, right now there about 32 folks that retire every month out of Fort Jackson and our hope is that we can keep some of them here. We did pass this year the General Assembly a bill that allows 100% of the retiree pay from our military friends to be tax exempt from state taxes which is a huge incentive because there are 34 other states that have already passed that so we were the 35th. So it was more of a competitive issue but I think we're gonna have a good opportunity to have a future workforce retire here in Columbia which is good for all of us. So with that, thank y'all for your support. I'm happy to answer any questions. Carl, thank you for y'all's work that you do with our fantastic military and all the workforce initiatives you have in place. You know we had all great intentions of having a city council delegation committee that interacted with Fort Jackson and our military presence here to expand the quality of life. And exactly as you pointed out, how do we keep those wonderful residents that come through the fort? How do we get them to retire here, enjoy a quality of life here, grow a family here? What suggestions, what can we do? How can we team up to be more effective in the role that the city plays in promoting the quality of life, the attractions, the reason to stick around and be a part of Columbia in its future as a city? Well, two things. It starts when they first come to Columbia and Susan, I'll give props to Susan. They started an orientation program for all new officers that come through and they began in the summer. So in August of July, August of every year, we host all the new officers and their spouses. And we have a half day program for them to talk about all the things in Columbia, in the Midlands, and they're probably 75 people that are there. But the point is there is orient them on not just Jackson, but the region as a whole. We're going to do the same type of program this spring. About a meeting with the Deputy Commanding Officer on Friday, what we want to do is those that are thinking about retiring or are in the pipeline to retire, catch them early, which is three or four months before they are actually departure and let them meet with businesses here in the Midlands to say, here's mainly in the HR. Some of the problem that we've seen is people that have worked in the Army for 25, 30 years, they don't know anything else but the Army. They don't really know how to transition their skills to the private sector. And so we're going to have workshops set up with businesses and HR folks to go and meet with them to say, these are your skill sets. These are what we can help with. Not in Army terms, but in the private sector terms, which is the biggest disconnect, quite frankly. But for us to sit with them and bring our employers out and say, your skill sets match up here, here and here. And this is what opportunities within our industry. But we want multiple industries represented. So I'd love to partner with y'all to put this on. But that came as a request of the DCO that we look at an opportunity and so this is, we're gonna flash it out. Is that something OBO, or it's a department that the city could look into? Possibly. We'll connect with the program. And do we have a liaison that works with you in general, with your various boards and your monthly meetings? Is the city represented? Well, Ryan is actively engaged with us in his part of economic development. We keep him apprised of everything that we're doing. Oh, good, good. Well, if there's any more of a formal role that the city of Columbia can do to play, to tell that story of the city of Columbia and the great things about it. Well, we'd love to have you, if you've not been out on posts lately, and if you've not been to a graduation, if you've not been to a night infiltration, you hear about things and you know it for Jackson there, but seeing is believing and recognizing, just having that experience is pretty awesome. So we'd love to coordinate something with you if you have an interest going out. Thank you. And I would just add as you're looking at the different industries to include the city of Columbia as a place, I would love to have some retired military folks at the city, I think that that would be good. I think that would be good. Well, there are so many folks that are leaving that actually now we have a competitive footing. They come to Columbia, they love what they offer. And you talk to General Johnson, you talk to General Beegs, and you talk to Michaelis and Kelly. And the consistency is we offer something different than most posts and throughout their travels, it's pretty consistent where we have done a really good job of welcoming them and making them feel like this is a place where they can retire, which is important. And because the more retired officers that we have, that means we're doing something right and they wanna be here, they wanna be included. So hopefully we'll keep on doing this work. Thank you, Carl. I just would mention just a couple of things going back to General Clotier. The Army is really bringing a different kind of general here today than they did when I was a kid. Used to come here to retire, now the Army's put a whole new level of importance on recruiting. I remember Roger used to say was, this is the most important thing we do in the Army. If we don't get it right here, we're wanting General Kelly has been just an absolute gem for us. I was tickled to see him be there. I think he was the grand marshal in the Christmas party. He was. And then I would just add, I don't know if anybody saw it, but Boyer Construction Company during Thanksgiving did a series of all the veterans that they have working in their company. And I think that will be a nice thing to feature going forward. And their latest General Maz is a great addition, I can't pronounce his last name, I just call him Maz, but if Brian and his team recruited a bunch of veterans that served in high levels. We appreciate everything you and Susan are doing at the Chamber of Commerce. Thank you, let's keep, I think that membership role is growing, isn't it? It is growing. I think, didn't I hear something about how many days in a row, how many years in a row, months in a row it's going up? We're about 25, 26 months in a row we're on. That's pretty strong, congratulations. Thanks for the city. Well, you had asked about this and I just wanted to elaborate on what Coral was saying. On a monthly basis, I go out to the fort and I welcome in all of our new senior officers and they might be drill sergeants, first lieutenants, the ones that are actually doing the training of the work. And in the last eight years, we have welcomed personally over 10,000 new officers to here. The first thing I do is I tell them, welcome on behalf of the city and Coral. And then I say, our goal is for you to serve here, serve your country, come back and retire here. So that message we share loud and clear. We also work with job fairs, with out at Fort Jackson, with the city of the county, all of our local employers and law enforcement is a big one that they're working on right now. And then we do work with contracts so that if people here in the city, small businesses have an idea and wanna pitch it out at Fort Jackson, we help them make those connections so that they can go be successful. And I am gonna brag just a minute, we recently had the Midlands Minority Business Accelerator Program, we had our first class graduate.  We work on contracts up in Washington, they're doing work bringing the dollars to Fort Jackson. One of our local small businesses, Pat Kahn Masonry, actually won a contract at Fort Jackson and they're doing some of the work on the barracks. So it goes full circle and comes back and benefits us in numerous ways. And so that's just a great small business thing. And then we do a lot of work to try and make sure that we help the general and the city and all everybody meet the common goals of growing together. So just wanted to add that a little bit, thank you. I just wanted to thank Ryan, he's gonna be talking about a Greenville Economic Development Stimulus Program that they have that caught our eyes. And I asked him to do a little bit of research and kind of share that with us so that we can look at whether or not this is something that we may wanna do. And I don't know if I share it with you all the article, the article that I read specifically dealt with grocery stores, but I think we're gonna learn today from Ryan that they use it in various ways. Is that a good introduction? Oh, and what I'll add is this would be another effort with the mobile food market and things that we're trying to do to address food scarcity. Good afternoon, everyone. So what I've put in front of you today is just kind of general overview of Greenville's business license and permit fee rebate program. This is something that they've introduced very recently. I think it came out in October of 2021 based on the information that I've seen. And so what they are doing is in an effort to support some of their existing businesses which are in a desired business classification, i.e., a retailer, an artist. Grocery stores are targeted as a part of this as well. And then identifying certain geographies that are a priority for them. So kind of looking at a case where you might see in Columbia where we've had artists in the downtown Vista area that might get priced out of that. Greenville put together this rebate program where essentially an artist in the West End or their downtown area would apply for this type of incentive. And for a period of five years, it would allow them to get a rebate for 100% of their business license and their permit fee cost as well. The existing businesses are also allowed to take advantage of this. They also have to apply for the rebate program, but they can get a benefit of up to 50%. And so basically what they've done is their council's sat down, they've identified where their target areas are. You can look in the packet that I've put together for you here, you can see where their grocery store incentive area is. They've got online interactive maps, so you can enter in your address and see if you're in a qualifying area. Same for retail and same for artists. And so that's the program that they've got. It's in place, it's for artists, retail, and grocery stores, and these all have to be in specific designated areas. Other businesses that they've included in the program allow for manufacturing, corporate headquarters, childcare was included as well, and commercial annexation, surprisingly. So I think it's something where they wanted to put together a particular benefit for businesses that they were bringing inside of the city limits that may have to bear the cost of some additional property taxes as well. Also included at the back of the packet, and I think Ms. Knox passed out copies of it. Is their ordinance, it's a pretty decent little read at about six or seven pages, but it's pretty thorough. I think they've done a really good job of kind of outlining specifically what type of businesses they're looking at and what their priority target areas are. Now, Ryan, I do have a question where it says incentives for job creation and capital investment. Are there some dollar amounts that they have to spend? Is that what this is about? So that is for a different type of investment. So the businesses that we talked about in the target areas that they've outlined, that right is allowed up front. They've put this additional program in place, essentially understanding that you might not be a business of a particular type that's coming in our target area, but we understand that if you're creating 10 jobs at or above the county median wage and you're investing a certain amount of money in the city, we also wanna provide you some level of benefit as well. And so if you look through those additional tables, you'll see that the benefit period is only for three years and not for five, as it is in the outright program. And additionally, you have to hit certain criteria to get additional permit fees rebated. So businesses only creating 10 new jobs and investing $500,000 would only get 25% of their permit fees rebated.  They're covering a lot of bases here is kind of what they've outlined. Thank you. I will say, Mr. Taylor, the reason that I specifically, I hadn't read the statute, so I didn't know it was as expansive as it is. But I would like the committee to consider kind of drilling in on the opportunity to at the very least use this for grocery stores. But I can see other areas that we may wanna consider looking at. Question. Ryan, Jeff, can you, so I'm looking at new jobs, 50 plus, check the box for a grocery store, capital investment a million, business license rebate a hundred. Can you put into perspective what that number on the business license rebate would be if you calculated that out? Is it enough to really move the needle to put a potential grocery developer or a grocery operator in the position to truly go forward with a project that otherwise they wouldn't in the past bite off? It's tough to say. I don't have that information ready right now. I think at the very least, it's something nice that you can kind of put out there and sell a little bit. But the numbers on a business license. Well, let me add to that. I would tell you from a state perspective, you don't, it's actually not allowed in most of the state statutes, except for recently in the worst tier counties where the state to incentivize retail, because retail comes to the market. And if the market's not there, retail won't last.  So we'll take a look at this. And again, I wanna make sure, I wanna make sure it's something that would benefit everybody. I think too many times when we look at special incentives and things like that, it's no benefit for our existing businesses. And frankly, I think for the city of Columbia to go and grow, unless you're a state of Texas today, I think it's difficult to recruit corporate headquarters to get them, you have to grow your own. And so sprouting, if this is something that helps sprout more small businesses that become medium-sized businesses, that become big businesses, I would be all for it. But we'll take a look and study at it and report out in the next committee. And then I would ask, I don't know if we have any information about the success rate that Greenville has had because it's still pretty new. I don't know if anyone's taken advantage of it. Just a year, I'm gonna reach out to their, I think he's their director of, I was gonna reach out to someone that is knowledgeable and I don't know his actual position is just to see how they've taken, how many of these applications they've taken and if there's been a focus in certain areas and certain groups. And we were thinking through Councilman Brennan's question as well just to, we will take a look to see kind of what that average is just on business license. So I do have a concern that it might not really move the need of the dual program, just focus on business license. But if there's going to be a focus for the need for grocery, it could be part of a program potentially that could be added in with something else. But we will bring, we can bring that type of information back at our next meeting. I've made notes. And I would say too, and I do understand not over incentivizing any particular project too. Well, and I would say, I think one of the things, I've never been a big fan of business licenses. I mean, they're already paying a 6% tax, which is 33% higher than residential's. But I think as part of this, we look at our whole business program. I'd love to see us for small businesses, not even charge of business license for the first year period. So we'll take a look at the whole thing. What are we thinking about? What are we considering small? Federal government says anybody under 500 small, but I think a little bit smaller than that. You do, the federal government class for small businesses, anything less than 500. Yeah, 500 people. That's what I was wondering. But I was thinking, you know. We use 50, I think. And that is something we could take a look at because I was kind of interested in their additional. I think that's on the second or third page where new investment, if it had the number of jobs in capital investment where they are rebating back a certain percentage. I think you asked the question, while I was talking about it on this page. Right, I didn't know that at the time. As a policy going forward, though, here's what I'd ask that we do as a committee. When we got these things, if we can get those when the agenda comes out, kind of like we do at the city council meeting, so I've got a chance to review the stuff and read it before it. I think it will be helpful. Yes, sir. Erica reminded me last week, so. Sorry for not bearing it quicker. And I will take full responsibility too because I mentioned it in the council meeting and I forgot to talk directly to Ryan. And so when we talked last week, I said bring us some information so that we can start having a discussion. So I'll take some of that responsibility as well. Nobody's blaming anybody. I just think it helps me anyway to have a better understanding. And I look forward to reading this to see. Any other questions about this program? I do think one other thing that we didn't mention that's worth kind of bringing up though, is there's certain reporting standards that go along with this too. So these businesses will have to certify at the end of the each year. I know this is done through an application process, so it's not outright granted to businesses. But kind of keeping in mind, if that's something, a mechanism you start to look at, you know, what the staff needs would be on the back end to kind of come through at the beginning of each year and have to recertify, you know, based on the number of businesses that could add some additional strain as well. Do you think the organizations themselves would have capacity issues? I don't know. The business? You know, more paperwork that the city is looking at. Well, I would clarify too that this is, this is would be basically just not charging the fee. You still have to apply for a lit for your license, that's. Yeah, you have to apply, you have to pay, and if you meet the criteria, I think within 30 days of your full payment of your business license or permit fee, then you get rebated on the back end. So it's. And I can tell you, it makes it very difficult to move the needle. So something, as you mentioned, that's kind of maybe an outright upfront would. Well, I just think it's part of what we're doing in the mayor's slogan about us being open. You know, that again, you know, I just think one of the things we may want to look at it. At some point in time, I'm not saying now, but at some point in time would be again, you know, the first year you're in business, there is no business license in the city. You apply for it, there's no charge, and then you get billed the second year. Just things like that. It's a pretty significant percentage of businesses that don't apply for the second year that don't make it first. From what I think, I saw a statistic on that. So yeah, any little bit helps, I guess. That's right. Yeah. Is he about to say something? Well, I was gonna say, I think Greenville probably took a look at this as doing this as a rebate. We have had discussions of this in the past about exempting it up in the front end, and there's been legal issues. You may recall, even 10, 12 years ago. Can't treat them differently. You and others that the focus has always been, we're gonna have to rebate it. So it does create a problem because then they still have to pay it upfront. And if they're already struggling in the front end, I won't say struggling, but if it's already, they're pulling everything they can, now they gotta still pay it and wait, whether that's 30 days or any quarter or whatever it is. That can, it seems to diminish a little bit of what the program is. You know, and I just kind of maybe closed with this guy. It was an interesting deal. I watched a webinar the other day on retail recruitment which include grocery stores and things like that. And the number one, this is interesting, the number one incentive for small businesses and retailers is the speed that you get them open. That's the number one deal. And you know what that costs us? And so I think that's part of what we need to work on. How quick can we get your building permit? How quick can we get you inspected? How quick if there's a zoning change? And I would argue that I'm not gonna call the name of the company, but they do make airplanes. That one of the reasons they're in South Carolina today is because we could get them a grading permit in 30 days and the other places they were looking at some said that would take up to three years. So it's just an interesting thing there. Thank you, Ms. Herbert and Ryan. Yes, sir. All right, having that, now we get to talk in the executive session about some folks that are talking about making big investments in Columbia and projects. So is there a motion that we go into executive session? Yeah, Mr. Chairman, I'd like to make a motion that we enter into executive session discussion of matters relating to the proposed location expansion, provision of services, encouraging location or expansions of industries or other businesses in the area served by the public body pursuant 30-4-70-85, Project Astral, Project Subtext, Project Tango, Capital City Stadium. Second. Eric, do you wanna call the roll? Aye. Yes. Aye. We are going to thank you for joining us today. And then, like I say, for the record, we try to do our meeting at one o'clock, the second Tuesday of,


Both countries say they are outraged, both countries believe this is a gross violation of their sovereignty, both countries have protested, recalled ambassadors, why are you doing this? In the name of God, the most beneficent and the most merciful, with Pakistan and Iraq, we enjoy very good relations with both of the countries we have talked and agreed for several times on the necessity of fighting terrorism and providing securities to our very long-shared borders or agreements between us. What happened yesterday? Actually two days back, in a real of the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region had to do with the elements and the agents of Mossad of the Israeli regime, we carried out, they carried out operations inside Iran, terrorist attacks and Israel took responsibility for them, especially there was one against one of our facilities, and it's not a Republic of Iran, if any kind of action that is carried out by the Zionist regime against our people, the Republic of Iran will respond to it vigorously, we hit the Mossad base in one spot in the Kurdistan region of Iraq and we hit it with precision missiles, this does not mean we hit and targeted Iraq, we targeted Israel that remains to be a common enemy of both of us, but on Pakistan. Say they were given no notice of it, none of this squares with the idea of good relations with Iraq, this is a country that you have claimed to have very friendly relations with, it seems a hostile act towards a friendly government, that is how Iraq is reading it. We respect the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Iraq, we had the intelligence from our security forces about the place and the spot that was targeted in Kurdistan of Iraq, that the intelligence is undisputable and the elements of Mossad and the Mossad elements and agents and those that had a hand in making Iran insecure and took responsibility for that, I repeat we retaliated and they were targeted by us and our security people are examining the matter and sharing information with the security advisers of Iraq and our information confirmed that the spot belonged to Mossad and there was no mistake that was made by us and on Pakistan, none of the, about what happened in Iraq, we have a security agreement between us and according to this, the government and the local people in the Kurdistan of Iraq according to this are obligated to provide security to our borders and what we did, what was within the confines of this agreement, security agreement and the legitimate right that we have to defend ourselves and any kind of abuse of the Israeli regime and taking advantage of the Kurdistan region against us and Pakistan, none of the nationals of the friendly and the brotherly country of Pakistan were targeted by the missiles and the drones of Iran, there is this group so-called Jashul Adl which is an Iranian terrorist group and they are somehow, they have taken shelter in some parts of the Sisan and Balochistan province of Pakistan and for several times we have talked to a lot of officials in Pakistan and the security forces there, they carried out some operations in Iran, especially in the Roske police station, they killed our security personnel, we responded accordingly, we only targeted Iranian terrorists on the soil of Pakistan before this, I talked to my colleague the honorable foreign minister of Pakistan and I assured him that we do respect the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of Pakistan, also those of Iraq but we don't allow our national security to be compromised and to be played with and we have no reservation, no hesitations when it comes to our national interest and those terrorist groups inside Pakistan and those that are affiliated to Israeli regime and the Kurdistan region of Iraq, what we did was actually in line with the security of Pakistan, Iraq and the whole region, we believe that the security of Iraq and Pakistan are the security of the Syrian public of Iran. Pakistan and government both disagree with what you said and minister let me ask you, you came on my program and my colleague interviewed you in October 29th and she asked you, do you want the water spread and you said no, we do not want the water spread, we do not want escalation, since then Hezbollah has launched attacks against Israel, the Houthis are attacking ships in the Red Sea, you have attacked Iraq, you have attacked Pakistan, it certainly seems like the actions of Iran and its allies do not suggest that you are trying to keep this war from spreading, it seems as though you are encouraging an escalation. I agree with you that in the west of Asia, right now we are witnessing the enlargement of the crisis and the tensions but these tensions are not rooted on what happened in 7th of October, Hamas is a Palestinian liberation group that has been fighting against occupation to liberate the occupied territories of Palestine, they carried out an operation. Of course, we never agree with or approve of the killing of women and children anywhere in the world but I want to tell you that it is not rooted on what happened on 7th of October, it is rooted in 75 years ago when Palestine was occupied by the Israeli regime. From the very beginning of the start of the Israeli genocide or war in Gaza, which followed the 7th of October operation, we gave warnings that if they attacks the war crimes and genocide against Gaza and the West Bank do not stop, the war will spread out, it will become a larger, it doesn't mean that we wanted to play a role in this enlargement. No, it was because we had a proper understanding of the situation and the conditions in the region and as a result of this some of those groups that you mentioned, they started to defend Gaza and the United States made two strategic mistakes. The first one, they threw the weight behind the Israeli regime's war and genocide and they supported it. It has been unrelenting and it has continued up to now. The second mistake was that they brought the conflict to the Red Sea and Yemenis. They started this by killing some of the people in Yemeni boats. First, they killed Yemeni people in the boats and maritime security is something that is very important to us and Yemen also cares about this but the security in the Red Sea is now very much tied to the developments in Gaza. We will all be at loss if it will be to our detriment if the killings and the attacks and genocide in Gaza do not stop because if it happens then the crisis will persist. Explain to me that you felt Iran had the right to respond to what you described as terror attacks and terrorist groups that were attacking Iran and you retaliated in Iraq and in Pakistan. Why does Israel not have the right to retaliate to the October 7th terrorist attack? What we did against Mossad base in Kurdistan and also against Jais al-Adl, the terrorist group inside Pakistan, they have nothing to do with the situation in Gaza but the Yemeni front terrorism and the Israelis said they are retaliating against a terror attack on them. We don't consider Hamas a terrorist group. Hamas is a Palestinian liberation movement that has been formed against the Israeli occupation. We cannot erase history. For 75 years we have had the occupation of Palestine. This is a reality. What about the rights of Palestine? On innocent women, elderly people, civilians, raped, used rape as an instrument of war.  Doesn't Israel have the right to respond? What about Palestinians? Are they not human beings? What about the rights? Even Israeli regime doesn't even accept the UN resolutions about the restoration of the rights of the Palestinians and the formation of the Palestinian state. They have all been ignored by the Israeli regime. According to the international law, when a war breaks out, there should be two things. One is differentiation and proportionality. The officials of the Israeli regime claimed that on the operation on the 7th of October, 1,200 Israelis were killed. There has been this retaliation. They did not differentiate between the civilians and the military. The word has seen that more than 16,000 children have been killed, infants, women. Up to now, more than 24,000 Palestinians have been killed and proportionality. They have not been observing it. 1,200 Israelis were killed. There has been this retaliatory attack by the Israeli regime. Do you think 24,000? That is 10 times more than the number.  Israel is an upper tide and occupying regime, but Hamas is a liberation movement. I repeat, we don't welcome the killing of women and children anywhere in the world, but the solution is not a military one. They have to respect the rise of the Palestinians. The Red Sea and these ships. Is there a situation in which Iran would get involved and start blocking the ships in the Straits of Hormuz? First off, we do care about the maritime security and the shipping safety. Our exports, our oil exports are done through by the sea. So the security of the Red Sea and Oman Sea and the Persian Gulf are very, very important to us. We benefit from it. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to export our oil. Secondly, we have information that these days the Yemenis and the Saudis are nearing a real substantive peace agreement. We believe that when the U.S. got involved in it and it is not going to be good news for this agreement, we will all benefit from maritime security and the Yemenis also believe that. What happened? It has to do with the genocidal war of the Israeli regime against the people of Gaza and the Yemenis defending the Palestinians. If the genocidal Gaza stops, then it will lead to the end of other crises and attacks in the region. You didn't answer whether you will Iran start involve itself in blocking any ships. I think your answer is no. We have always been on the positive side of the developments in the region. You should not forget that in the past years, and in order to fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria and in the region, some of our best military attachés were killed and martyred. The security of the region is our own security. Do you believe that Hezbollah is going to get more involved in more attacks and counterattacks in Israel? In the last 100 days, I held talks twice with Mr. Secretary General of Hezbollah. 48 hours before the humanitarian ceasefire, the temporary one in Gaza in a meeting with Hezbollah, I asked him, Mr. Secretary General, if Israel's attacks against Gaza stop, do the attacks of Hezbollah stop too? He said yes, because we got involved in this somehow because we wanted to defend the people of Palestine. And if they stop, we will stop too. The whole world witnessed that in about six days when there was this ceasefire, there was not even one bullet that was fired at Israel, and they were committed. They remain committed to the ceasefire. But in the last few days, something new happened. Since 2006, there was this unwritten agreement that the capitals in Beirut or Tel Aviv were not targeted. They were not targeting each other. But Israel and Gaza had no achievement but killing women and children. But Israel brought the war out of Gaza and they assassinated one of the leaders of Hamas, not in Gaza, but in Beirut. So this has created a new situation. But definitely if the genocide, the war of the Israeli regime, comes to a halt, then it can lead to the stop of other crises and attacks in other parts of the region against Israel. But we should not forget that today Lebanon is somehow involved in the war, in the Red Sea also. And today we see that people in Gaza are under attacks and they're starving in Gaza and the West Bank. This means that the war will go on. So at any moment, it is possible that the severity and intensity of the war will rise. Netanyahu should understand that war is not the solution and they are not going to destroy Hamas by continuing the war. And the Israelis, prisoners will not be released if they continue the war. The solution is very clear, stopping the war, opening up the humanitarian corridors, and stopping the forced displacement of Palestinians towards the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt and, of course, the exchange of prisoners. Today the United States is more concerned about how they are going to run Gaza after the war, the post-war Gaza. But in our talks with the different and various Palestinian leaders, there are some ideas there. The most democratic one is that all the Palestinian leaders with all their viewpoints and differences of opinion and having a referendum participated by the Palestinians in both Gaza and West Bank. And naturally, the resistance against occupation, according to what we have heard from the Palestinians, will continue their activities. But about the re-institution of the rights of the Palestinians, it can be done in a democratic way. That is election under supervision of the United Nations. But still, Netanyahu is under the impression that the solution lies in the war and continuing it.  All the leaders in our region believe that if the war stops today, 10 minutes later, Netanyahu will fall. And he won't be able to continue the war without the support of the United States. We believe that the political solution is something that everybody has to pay attention to, and we never believe that the war is a solution. About a year ago, I would say, there was reports that Iran and the United States were maybe getting to a point of some kind of revival of the Iran nuclear deal. That conversation is completely closed. And I wondered whether you had any comment on that. Why was it not possible to revive the Iran nuclear deal from your point of view? You see, in Dr. Raisi's administration, I mean, the current administration of the Republic of Iran, we started talks with the European countries and some indirect talks with the United States. And ultimately, these were met with the initiative that was set forth by the kingdom of Oman. And there were these indirect talks with the United States. And there were efforts made by the king of Oman. And they all wanted to bring together and closer everybody that is a party to the nuclear deal. We still welcome any kind of endeavor, any kind of initiative, any kind of a step that will help bring back all the parties to JCPOA to back to their commitments and obligations. There are still some efforts made, some contacts between Iran and the United States. Therefore, we believe that if the American side has enough will and a required will, then we can achieve the deal. And they're coming up with a lot of excuses. One day, they say that we are involved in the Ukrainian war or some domestic purposes, pressures we are facing inside the United States. So you are involved in the Ukraine war? You are supplying the Russians with weapons? A very important point you made and touched upon on Ukraine. We have never, ever provided any drone, any missile to the Russia to be used against Ukraine. Less than 11 months ago, I had an agreement with my counterpart, the Ukrainian foreign minister. I told him, if you claim that Iranian-made drones or weapons are used against you, please give us pieces of evidence. So we agreed that there would be a team comprised of the high-ranking military people from both sides would meet in Oman, in the city of Moskot, the capital of Oman. They discussed the issue for hours. The Ukrainian team did not show any proof. And they said that we will go back to Kiev, we will gather information, proof, evidence, and we will come back in the next round of the meeting. But they didn't give us, they didn't show any kind of proof that Iranian-made drones and weapons are used against them. To Ukraine, the people on the battlefield on both sides refer to the drones that Russians use as Shahid drones. Shahid is the Persian word for martyr. I don't think Shahid is a Russian word. Those drones are Iranian. You see, we have sold Iranian drones to different countries in the region within the framework of our defense cooperation. You know, it is not difficult for any country to copy our drones. We are not responsible for that. But even for that, the Ukrainians have not given us any piece of evidence. My dear colleague, Mr. Farid Zakaria, just we are sensitive about the killing of people, women and children in Gaza, Afghanistan, Syria, in Yemen. We have always condemned these killings. And we believe that war and the killing of civilians and women and children in Ukraine. We condemn that too. And we believe that the solution is never war and fighting than Russia. We have enjoyed a strong relations and ties with Russia. We have asked them several times that have you ever used Iranian-made weapons against Ukrainians? And they have repeatedly told us that we have not made use of any Iranian-made weapons against Ukraine. And up to now, Ukraine is claiming they are making a lot of noise that Iranian drones are being used against them. But they have not given us even one piece of evidence, not no document. For more than three times, I asked Mr. Josep Borrell, with his connections and contacts to encourage Ukrainians to supply them to us. But they have not. This is just a basis allegation. We believe war is not the war, not in Ukraine or in Gaza. When I look at the data, it seems to me that Iran has been able to export more and more oil. Are the sanctions against Iran in place? Are you able to export as much oil as you want? The sanctions imposed on Iran are unilateral. They are illegal. And within the framework of the international law, we consider it our natural right to export our oil and energy. And the United States is not the master or the chieftain of the world to decide about other countries. Those days are over. We defend our rights. And within the framework of the international law, we will continue to do so. It's the events in Gaza. Many people predicted that the Arab countries that had normalized relations with Israel, the UAE, Morocco, would break relations. That has not happened. In fact, Saudi Arabia has talked about, or at least privately there are reports, has talked about continuing its objective to normalize relations with Israel. This seems to leave Iran more and more isolated in the region. First of all, we have not recognized Israel. We believe it's just then occupying powers, 75 years of occupation. This does not create any right for Israel to exist. Mr. Zakaria, for decades, Algeria was occupied by another country. The long occupation of Algeria came to an end, right? So the countries of the region and their foreign interactions and decisions, whatever decision they come up with, is their own business and their own foreign policy. Isolated. Your more and more countries are recognizing you. But we are witnessing that some countries that during the time of Trump and under the pressure from him, they normalized ties with Israel, they have not really benefited from this, and they are now facing more problems. Today, Israel is the one that is isolated, never been dis-isolated. This Republic of Iran is not isolated. This Republic of Iran is the right part, is the positive part of the developments in the region because it's our region, and it is very important to us, the security of the region and the progress in the region. In our administration, we have put very high on our agenda the policy of interacting and cooperating and collaborating with our neighboring countries with all the countries of the world, dialogue and the progress with all the parties, including the western countries. This is something that has come to the attention of our administration. Do you want to see an end to the hostility and conflict with the United States? You still are part of a government that encourages the chant of death to America, calls America the Great Satan, and yet you say you want better relations, you want to return to the nuclear deal. How can these both be true? There's so much state propaganda designed to maintain the hostility, indeed, the rage against the United States. Firstly, anything that we see that is based on mutual respect by the American administration will be welcomed by us, mutual respect. If you're respected, we will respect them. Secondly, the problem that is there is that in the year 2015, we reached a deal with the United States. Remember, JCPOA, the nuclear deal, it created commitments and obligations for all the parties. That deal was turned into an official and a recognized resolution in the UN Security Council. But it was the United States that broke the deal, broke the promise for us. There is no difference between Biden, Obama, and Trump. The deal happened.  You still had the trampling on American flag. You still had the Great Satan as a slogan that didn't suggest a desire for better relations. You know, when the nuclear agreement was finalized, they kept violating it from administration of Obama. And the worst mistake, the worst decision was made by Trump. But in our government, we said that we will be ready. We waited for them. We were state-committed to it for a long time. But the United States kept violating the deal. We, in our administration, we also came to some agreements. We were seeing some signs of it that they were still breaking their promises. There were some temporary ones. It seems that it has become a part of the DNA of the American foreign policy. It doesn't make the difference what administration is in power. We want the United States. If they're committed to the deal, we will also be committed to the deal. Mutual respect. If they talk to us, treat us respectfully, we will do the same thing. But anything unconstructive, the unfriendly, the behaviors of the United States, we will retaliate to them. It will be in the favor of the peace and security of the world if the United States would become less hostile, would become cooperative instead of confrontational. Thank you very much. You've been frank as always. I appreciate that. Thank you so much.