In today's video is going to be a homeschool show and tell. The homeschool show and tell is an open collaboration hosted by Abby from Rooted and Rested Myself. The goal when we started this was really just to showcase the fact that there's not one right way to homeschool, that there's tons of ways to do it and still do it in a way that works for your family. So each month we bring homeschool YouTubers together from around the world and we pick a topic and we all share our version or our take on that topic. This month's topic is homeschool spaces and I am beyond excited because that was probably, is probably my favorite video to watch, like homeschool room tours, organization, singing inside, I absolutely love House Hunters and all of the HGTV. So I love the homeschool version of it. I am super excited to see everybody's this month. So before I show you our homeschool rooms or spaces, I want to say you don't have to have a dedicated homeschool room. You can have your dining room table and a homeschool cart. I know that that's really popular and I could totally see how that would work. You can have a homeschool closet. You can homeschool in the car. There are tons of different ways to homeschool and have very little to no dedicated space for that. And I want to say that mainly because what you're going to see when I show you our homeschool room and our homeschool spaces is that we do have a lot of space. And that is mainly just because we were able to use like sunroom that was built onto our house and make it a dedicated area. So that is the designated homeschool space. It's where we store a lot of things but it's not typically where me and Emily sit to do our homeschool time. In fact, we typically sit right here which is our dining room table area. So I'm going to kind of let you get a deeper, better peek at that and then show you our homeschool room. And again, if you want to check out all of the homeschool rooms or spaces that are going to be featured in this month's homeschool show and tell, make sure you check out the link in the description box. It's going to have the playlist for all of them. You're not going to want to miss it. This is the dining room where we do the majority of our schoolwork to the right is our homeschool room, directly behind me is the kitchen and to the left is the living room. So that's the table where we sit at most often. And then over here, we have an antique dresser that houses a lot of our supplies in the drawers. We have two bins, the bin on the left is our currently our picture books for our book in a game of day challenge but it's typically unit study picture books to the right as any kind of books or curriculum or resources that I'm currently using with Emily. And then we have some cube shelves. On the left one, we have our reference books. And then in that basket down below are all of Emily's math manipulatives that she enjoys. Across the top, we have two containers that house all of our pens and markers and color pencils. And then two art drawers that house our talk pastels that we love. The container right there has our planners. It has our journals. It has some of our mail time, a timer for Emily. And like I said, this one has some curriculum stuff in it. Our resources that we use. On that top cubby shelf over here is our mail time, Monday box, file folder games. And then in the basket down below are all of my kind of odds and ends. And then I have an extension cord that hides under the dresser for our laptops. Here is another angle of our dining room homeschool area. And then through those double doors right there are the homeschool room. And this is what the homeschool room looks like when you come down here. You will start over here. This wall houses the majority of our games. In the upper left is where I keep all the games that don't fit on the cube shelves. On top of the shelves are photo boxes that house all of our dice and card games. The trophast system, the gray drawers over to the left are all of Emily's random toys. And then the game shelves are sorted with math at the top shelf, language arts at the second shelf, science and art at the third shelf, geography and history at the fourth, and then just find family games at the bottom. This corner is our reading nook. Kevin built those bookcases or boxes for me because I wanted something that was easy and different. And this house is the majority of our books. The bookshelf to the left is all of Emily's books. The one to the right is majority of our read-alouds. And then we move in to Kevin and Emily's work station. So they have a mirror image of each other. They both have their drawing boards and their own drawers to keep their stuff. Kevin has a cart to the left for some of his work. Next, we have our geography and science center. We have our continent boxes and our globes, all of our history and geography books. Then over here, we have all of our microscopes and most of our science reference books and some of our nature finds on the window sill. That door goes out to our screen porch. That's why our nature finds are right there. This is Emily's maker space. That's where she keeps most of her Legos and building blocks and any other kind of block building type of thing. And then that window opens up into our kitchen. So it's really nice to be able to look down here. And then the last thing in the room over here is their science kit. So this is where Kevin keeps all of their science and stem boxes. And then we added a little folding table that is plastic and easy to clean up for some of those harder messes. And then that way they can sit across from each other when they're doing it. So here is a look at this end of the room from a distance, here we go. The majority of our homeschool things. I hope you enjoyed getting to see them. And if there is a specific area that you would like to see in more detail, let me know in the comments and I will add it to my to-do list.


What if I told you opposites don't actually attract? I know. So why do we say it if it's not true? Let's find out on debunked with Sai in one minute. In 1955, Robert Wench did a study on the theory of complementary needs when choosing a mate. He asked married couples a list of questions to determine their individual personalities and the nature of the marriage. He found that couples who had more in common were actually happier in their marriages. Some areas where commonalities were found were religion, intelligence, socioeconomic status, etc. So maybe ask about these on that next first date of yours. Have you ever heard of somatic mirroring? This is a therapy technique where you and your partner move as if they're each other's mirror reflection. Through movement, you learn to identify feelings and understand why you or your partner feel something. In a 2019 study, couples did exactly that and found it creates that strong foundational bond between partners and a greater ability to walk in the other's shoes. Maybe there's truth in monkey see monkey do, but not always opposites attract. Lai should Sai debunk next. Like and let us know.


Hi everyone, Joe from jaskiescasebreaks.com coming at you with a one-box break of 2022 Panini clearly Donneress football Brock Purdy hunting this is random division break number seven also if you're one of the first five spots picked up in this break You got a chance at an extra spot. So here the first five right here. Thank you Got a chance at an extra spot after seven four or three seven times one two three four five six and Seventh and final time congrats to Matt got an extra spot after seven. Thanks for being an early bird Now let's gather all of your names and let's randomize you an NFL division Let's roll and randomize names and divisions four to four eight the hard way Two three four five six seven eight four and a four eight times for the divisions one two three And eighth and final time NFC East down to the AFC West All right Jerome. You got the NFC East Simon with the NFC North Matt with the AFC North with that extra spot You won Patrick NFC South Jerome AFC East last spot mojo Jason AFC South Matt NFC West Jalen AFC West Sort by division And I've got the one box break right here 2022 clearly Donner's Downtowns could be in here as well. That's pretty cool. So that's the one box break We're in a positive video just for a little bit. We're gonna see if there's any trades So stick around we'll be right back. All right. Welcome back everybody. No deals were done in this one box divisional There's another one in the store right now, too. If you want to run this back Jasper's case breaks calm Now, let's see what we got here. There's a redemption in there Is that a good sign? That sign We'll find out. We got a Rashad white to 75 Got an Aidan Hutchinson Christian McCaffrey Rashad white goes to NFC South Patrick with NFC South He's having a nice little season This year There's the redemption He's down to cook Vikings edition James William hits cup Kittle Gold jahan Dotson is a mirror white and a George Pickens All right the redemption Good luck everybody. We've got a clearly rated rookie autograph of D a ME Damien Pierce Damien Pierce Texans AFC South that's going to be Jason Rivers Well, no Brock Purdy's here, but we got another one box break loaded up Let's keep hunting. Thanks everybody. I'm Joe. I'll see you next time for the next one. Bye. Bye


Okay, well welcome everyone. We're going to go ahead and get started on time. Hopefully everyone has got something to eat and a beverage in front of them. We've got a great conference today on a very interesting, fascinating and important topic. My name is Rick Ozzie Nelson, Director of the Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Program here at CSIS. We're a non-profit at CSIS, so we're really independent upon outside supporters to make terrific events like this happen. So the first thing I need to do is to thank our sponsor for today's event is Raytheon. With that, I'd like to introduce one of our, the senior, the Vice President for Homeland Security, Brian Segraves. He's going to come up here and introduce our special guest, Mr. Howard Schmidt, Special Assistant to the President for Cyber. He's on a very tight timeline. We're absolutely thrilled that he made time and is scheduled to come over here and give us some remarks. He's going to do about 20 minutes of remarks followed by about 10 minutes of questions and answers, moderated by me. And those of you that know me means it's questions only, no statements. So without further ado, I'm going to go ahead and introduce Brian Segraves and we'll introduce Howard. Thank you. But I get to make a statement first. So first, thank you CSIS for hosting this event and we're very pleased to work with CSIS. As an industry partner in giving visibility to a topic of identity management today. Raytheon works with civil security agencies around the world to address their mission challenges and management of identity. The credentials and access is a core enabler that spans across all the security missions that we help customers with. Border security, immigration control, critical infrastructure protection, you name it. And while we're out there around the world, we're amazed at the functionality that other countries are offering their citizens. For example, single national identity credentials that authenticate for financial services, health services, voting, electronic voting, driver's licenses, and even the physical and logical access within government agencies all on the same credential. And yet across our base, we also see customers confronting a number of overlapping challenges. Challenges in how agencies move to interoperability and a person-centric view from their legacy systems. Challenges taking advantage of advances in biometrics technology and addressing the overload of biometric systems. And doing all these things while protecting privacy and confidentiality. These challenges are compounded in the cyber arena and the WikiLeaks incident actually really underscores the importance of strong identity management and insider monitoring as a precondition to information sharing. And then there is our need to foster trusted identity in cyberspace. As a core member of the Defense Industrial Base, Raytheon believes that the way the DIB address federated identity authentication provides a model that can address many of the broader challenges that we have today. We believe all these challenges can best be addressed through a partnership between government and industry where both critical systems and critical know-how reside. And that's why the United States is fortunate to have someone who has had such a long and distinguished career in both government and industry now coordinating cyber policy, cybersecurity efforts for the White House. Howard Schmidt has had a distinguished career spanning more than 40 years in defense, law enforcement, and corporate security. Since 2009, he has served as the president's coordinator for cybersecurity. And he's a longstanding expert in the areas of computer security, cyber crime, critical infrastructure protection, and business risks related to cybersecurity. Mr. Schmidt was formerly the president and CEO of Information Security Forum, a nonprofit consortium that conducts research and develops best practices in information security, risk management, and critical infrastructure protection. He has held executive roles in the private sector, including Vice President and CISO at eBay and Chief Security Officer for Microsoft. Mr. Schmidt's government service has included previous assignments at the White House, the FBI, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, including tours as Supervisory Special Agent, Supervisory Special Agent and Director of the Computer Forensics Lab, and Computer Crime and Information Warfare Division. His military career includes active duties with the U.S. Air Force, with the Arizona Air National Guard as a computer and communications specialist, and in the U.S. Army Reserve as a Special Agent, Criminal Investigative Division, where until his retirement he served with the Computer Crime Investigations Unit. Mr. Schmidt is a professor of research at Idaho State University, adjunct professor at Georgia Tech Information Security Center, adjunct distinguished fellow with Carnegie Mellon Sylab, and a distinguished fellow of the Parliament Privacy Institute. He's also received numerous awards and recognitions from government and private industry, including the CISO Magazine Compass Award and baseline magazine's 50 most influential people in business IT, to just name a few. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Howard Schmidt. Ryan, thank you very much for that kind introduction, and Rick, I'd like to thank you and CSIS for putting this group together. I think you're opening comment about, you know, these things are made possible because of support that people bring together, but we need more of these, and we very much appreciate you hosting this, and my dear friend, John Hamry, runs a great shop here, and we're very proud to be over here today. I don't want to spend a whole lot of time telling you stuff you've heard before, so I'm going to try to focus my comments specifically around the topic. A couple little highlights, because there's a lot of, I used to comment yesterday, noise going on right now about cybersecurity, everything from legislative issues to some of the threats we see out there in the real world. So I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the things that are going on just to sort of update you as some of the things we're doing. But clearly, the crux of a lot of things we're doing come into the area of identity management or what we call trusted identities in cyberspace. And I think a lot of this, as we've seen technology grow, as we've seen the advances in interconnectivity issues move forward, we've seen a need for identity management like we've never seen before. But on the same token, the exact same things we're using for stronger authentication also create their own set of challenges that we've got to overcome. Part of it is designing the systems that can accept the things that we're working with. So it's been a busy year for all of us, at least in the little group that I work with at the White House and across the U.S. government. I know you all have been very busy, and as I made in a comment during a VTC yesterday, was notwithstanding all the things that we've been talking about that are out there in the risk because of the work that all of you do on a day-to-day basis and Brian and all the folks that are part of companies that keep this thing going, everything still works. And we may have hiccups in it, you know, in some cases I like them then to the disruption that we have during snowstorms, which those of us that live here locally, remember when we used to have snowstorms in January? 65 degrees outside the day. But when we look at the disruptions, we recognize that we were able to recover from them quicker than we've ever been in the past, but we cannot lose the fact that things could get worse. And so we have to make sure that we continue to work to reduce that likelihood. So a little bit about the office. When the President created this office, it's part of the National Security staff. At the time there was the Split National Security Council, Homeland Security Council. We've all merged. We're also dual headed with the National Economic Council. And I think that is one of the things that really sets us apart from some of the previous efforts that have taken place, is we have the focus not only National Security Public Safety, but also the economic components of cybersecurity. The staff, and we are very, very fortunate to have some of the best across government from the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, the intelligence agencies, Department of Commerce, FTC, that help us work on individual problems as we move forward, develop the good policy, work with the departments and agencies to take very discreet views that departments and agencies have. As we were talking before we came in here, there's a lot of hurting of cats involved, and some would say, geez, isn't there a tension between this particular department and this one over here? And the answer is, yes, I hope so. We do want to hear what their expertise is. We want to hear how they deal with a specific issue, but we want to normalize it so we can come up with a good policy that takes into account all the components that we work with. And we've got a good team to pull that together. For those of you that listened to or watched the State of the Union speech last week, the President stated very clearly that the Executive Branch and the White House is focused on achieving these strategic initiatives, particularly with the proposed legislation that we put forth that Congress will be putting a lot of attention here in the next week or two back. We've also done a pretty good job, I think, of actually prioritizing things. I see John Gilligan here and a few other folks that have run enterprises, and nothing is more troublesome than when you say, you know, here's 50 security issues you've got to deal with. Prioritize them, and they're all priority one. That's life in the real world. So we've actually set about and said, okay, what are some of the things, how do we prioritize these? How do we expedite the traditional low-hanging fruit while making sure we're reducing vulnerabilities that we know exist while still building for the future? So it's very important as we do these things that we actually have some milestones and specific priorities that we're looking at. And in this venue today, of course, the thing that we'll be talking about is the effective identity management and all the things we can benefit from that. You know, I could spend some time talking about the threats out there. People talk about hacktivists, nation-states, criminal organizations and everything else. The bottom line is if we had less vulnerabilities, they would be less successful. When I look at the law enforcement community, when I look at the men and women that on a day-to-day basis have to manage these systems from a security perspective, provide the services, whether it's government or businesses, and the things that they have to deal with, clearly we'd like to take a whole lot of that off their shoulders by saying we can stop the threats out there. But I think anybody who's been in this business for any length of time know we're not going to be able to stop the threats. We'll be able to get some small chunks of successes, as we've seen with the law enforcement going after some of the criminal activities that control some of the bot networks, working very closely with private sector, using civil actions, using criminal actions. But clearly, oftentimes we see another group will pop up to replace them. But once again, things that we can control is the vulnerabilities that exist in our systems, who's on our systems and how we wind up better hardening our systems so wherever the threat comes from, the likelihood of success is reduced. So, zeroing in a little bit, I want to just take a few minutes to talk about the NSTIC, the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. Jeremy, I saw you walking, there you are. Jeremy came in a few minutes ago. We were very fortunate to lure him away to run our program office at the Department of Commerce on that. When we rolled this out at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce last year, it was a true testament to the amount of support we had on this. We had the President's National Economic Advisor, we had one of the most informed and vocal senators, Senator Mikulski, as part of it. We had the Chamber hosting us for, so clearly a recognition there's a lot of moving parts to this Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. The basic vision is to build an identity ecosystem that provides individual with an option of using a federated, user-centric, digital, credential to conduct transactions with more security. Simply stated is we have a choice. If I want to just do a small transaction, I can choose to use one identity over here. If I have something more robust, I have the ability and also the institution I'm working with has the capability providing me the ability to have a higher level of assurance. To move away, what I think all of us recognize, the static user ID and passwords should have been declared dead years ago. A matter of fact, I remember another CSIS event probably in about 2001 that we had that same discussion. Here we are almost 11 years later, and I think we're finally making progress on this. We're finally having a mechanism to move this forward. But the other thing it wants to do is we want the private sector to give us the capabilities. To be able to draw on a marketplace of identity providers, both public and private, to say, here's the choices you have. I was trying to explain to someone what a OTP, one-time password, was on a mobile device. They understood what we call a smart card because it resembles an ATM card. So they said, well, why would I use something that I don't know about when I have this card here thing that I can use? And that's the thing we're trying to do is provide options for people. But on the same token in these options, we want to make sure we're not sort of reliving the problems we had in the past. Pen and chip technology, great technology. But people have since figured out how to break some of the encryption on there. They've looked for the man in the middle attacks. So we know that now. So we should not say, OK, the answer is here's new pen and chip cards, and everybody go out and use these because they're different than what we've been doing. We have to build these things with the ability to say, here's what we've done to make these better than what they are now. To understand there's likely to be a man in the middle attacks. To understand you're likely to be operating from a computer system, at least for now, that's likely to be compromised. And how can we still operate in that environment? And that's not something you're going to get five people in the government say, yeah, here's the answers, go forth and do this. It's going to take the intellectual capital that we have in the private sector in the security community, in the VC community, entrepreneurs coming and say, here's a better way to do this. That's easy to use, cost effective, and gives us options. The next thing is looking at that interoperable framework. That's why it's very important that we've got commerce and NIST working with private sector saying, what are the standards that we're looking at? Meeting this morning with one of our international, my international counterpart. And we were talking about trusted identities and what they're wrestling with at their government. Everything from taxing to services they provide for health services. It makes the same thing we're doing. And when you look at some of the great advances we've made and we still have a long way to go, it's what VA does now with the big blue button. The ability to consolidate this stuff. One of the things that I probably shouldn't say but I do is, just before the lighting ceremony in the ellipse last year, there was an email that went out that says, any of us, we can put in for this lottery to actually be there on the grounds when the lights get turned on. And I thought, wow, that was really neat. Click the link and it took me to a website that I had to create an account to be put in for a lottery in my cynical manner said to be turned down and had to create an account with a user ID and password. And the good news is, next year I can use that same account if I remember the user ID and password. Because as a security professional, we tell people, do not reuse these things over and over again. So I try to stick to that as much as I can. Not perfect, but as much as I can. So I'll never remember that next year. So we need to have a mechanism with a framework that's interoperable. As a matter of fact, we just released a memo from the OMB in my office telling government agencies, stop creating these accounts, stop trying to manage this, stop being the help desk for every citizen in the world. Use outside credentials. They exist. And we have the General Service Administration or GSA working with NIST and working with Homeland Security to make sure that these are ones that we can use. So you shouldn't have to have, in the case of some of us, a half a dozen or so government logs-ons to find out what your VA benefits are or to find out what your tax liability is or what your social security benefits are. And we have other options to do that. And varying degrees of assurances we move through that. So from the government's perspective on this, we will be a facilitator. We'll bring the people together. We can help convene a lot of these things. But the government will also be a customer of these. And I think there's nothing better than having some identity that I use in an e-commerce environment. I can use that same environment in the government. So as a consumer, the government is very important as saying you build it and we'll use it as well.  And I know, Jeremy, we made sure that the funding is there to actually do some of these things that we need to do. The other piece is when we are looking to streamline the customer experience. I mean that's tremendously frustrating. Private sector is spent a lot of time and a lot of effort trying to make sure the user experience is as positive as possible. It's a business thing. They want you to come back as a customer. And quite honestly, if they give me a good experience, I'll be back. Whether it's an airline, hotel, whatever it will be. But the bottom line is we have to have a mechanism to do the same thing in the government. And that's what the government is looking to do. The other thing we need to do is set up a governance framework. Once again, the comment we had this morning, we were still in some cases running around with 18th century laws and 21st century technology. So when it looks to identity management, we look to the private sector to build this. But how do we wind up dealing with some of the things that just are a normal part of business? A company may be our service provider for whatever reason. They go out of business, they take a wrong turn somewhere. And how do we protect people against that? What is the governance mechanism in place that says, okay, companies out of business and their value in their company is the data that they've got about us? How do we deal with that? We've seen that a couple years ago with one of the Trusted Traveler programs. We saw it even a few years back with a child's website that had tremendous amount of information and went up in receivership and the bankruptcy court says, yeah, the only value you have is this information to all these children that we as parents, as grandparents say, we don't want that being sold off to the eye as bitter. So these are some of the things that we have to build in this identity ecosystem to better protect us because we don't want to have someone go out there with 99.9% legitimate businesses out there. And at point one it says, it's a good way to commit identity theft and credit card fraud. Open up a company, collect all this stuff, take advantage of all these people, then shutter my doors and move away. We have to have a mechanism in place to be able to deal with that. We also want to make sure we have a system that does not have sort of this one-size-fits-all identity. One of the criticisms many of us have had for a long time is I have a single logon that gives me access to everything in the world. That means if and when it gets compromised, everything I own and everything I have access to is then compromised. And that's a choice that we get to make. And that's a choice that we have to have the system designed and built to to have to deal with. So when we look at some of the things we're looking to solve, first and foremost, deal with some of the issues of cybercrime or online identity theft, financial fraud, online theft of intellectual property, all these things that we deal with, we're looking to solve some of those things. We've seen, while a lot of people may recall these things, advanced persistent threats, some of us don't think they're that advanced. We think they're very determined. But when you look at the sort of the analysis of how these things really happen, oftentimes starting with a spear phishing email or a phishing email with a piece of malware attached that then gives you a backdoor to find vulnerabilities and escalate privilege, that's pretty determined. But some of the things that we can do identity management would actually be able to resolve some of that, including the ability when I get an email or any of us get an email, the owner should not be on the end user to figure out is that real or is a piece of malware. But that's what we do today. Most things get through unless there's a signature out there that says this is known bad. It goes through and somebody says, yeah, this is my 2012 benefits, pay raise, holiday schedule, and you can bet most people will click on it. We've seen some states that have tried some pilots where they send emails out as part of an education system. And 86% of the people click on it because it appears to be legitimate, even though they send it from an outside email address. Good identity management should resolve that problem for us so the end user is never confronted with this. And whether you call it certified email or whatever term you want to associate with it, that's some of the things that we're looking to solve. But let's take it up to a more critical issue and that's critical infrastructure, whether it's the energy sector, transportation sector, financial sector. The bottom line is we basically have seen the same thing happening in that environment. So having better trusted identities, having strong authentications into these systems and more specifically in industrial control systems that many generations have been built, never designed to work in a networked environment, let alone a network environment that's connected to the internet. So as we look to do trusted identities while we think about individual interacting with a machine, we also have to understand the machine-to-machine interaction and build identity management into that as well. That gives us the ability to do authentication, gives us the ability to do encryption, some of the things that we really need to do on a regular basis. The other piece of this when we start looking at some of the things about NSTIC and the things it can do for us is it has to be interoperable worldwide. I mentioned that before and I think that's vitally important. If we're going to continue to be successful in a digital world from an economic perspective, there shouldn't be 110 different systems. We should not say, yeah, when I go to the UK, I get to do this. When I go to Australia, I get to do this. And that's going to be just as confusing and less likely people will adopt it if they need to do all these different things. Because when you look at the basis of it, we're looking for something easy to do what we want to do. And these are the things we need to do as we move forward. So on that, just in closing, a couple things that relate to that, the international strategy on cyberspace, openness, prosperity in cyberspace. When we released that strategy last year, it wasn't a strategy on cybersecurity. It was international strategy for cyberspace. Part of that also talks about digital identities and identity management on an international platform while we pull into that. And the last thing that I want to touch on before I open for questions and that's inside the government. I think many of us, both when we've been in government or outside of government, have said many times is it's really difficult for the government to ask people to do, private sector to do stuff that the government's not willing to do. And that's truly the thing we need to do. We released a memo on use of multi-factor authentication. It was really an interesting thing to find out that 76% of the people that should be having a PIV card were issued a PIV card. And very, very few of them were using it because there was no requirement. We flipped that around. So not only do you get it, but you actually have to use it. And some of the first things are for logical access. We're going to be bumping that up to a digitally signing email. Eventually it'll be used for SMIME and an encryption of email. And the bottom line is the technology exists. We've just not implemented the policies and enforced those to move this thing forward. So when we look at HHS Homeland Security, President's Directive Number 12 and how it's languished for years, that's been accelerated in something we need to continue to do with. And we will make sure that the expertise is there to help departments and agencies move this thing forward. So in conclusion, I just want to few comments. The things that we're looking at is knowing what is on our network, all the devices, how the devices interact, a mechanism for those to interact securely. Know what is coming in and out of that network. If it's not signed, if it's not digitally certified, I don't want to see it hitting my network. Or I want to have some mechanism to sandbox. I want to have some mechanism to make sure that we're not introducing risk into the network that we shouldn't be. And of course, knowing who's on the network to the level required for the business that we're going to transact. And that goes for a total anonymous access, just somebody defining out what government services are available, all the way up to and including something that's more robust. Because this is really me, I've done in-proof proofing somewhere and I can actually go out and say this is me and I need my VA records. So with that, I thank all of you for coming together. I think this is really good form to discuss the things. And I know Jeremy's here and I'm sure Jeremy would love as the rest of us would to hear your ideas on things that we can move to accelerate this. Because we've got a window to make this happen and we don't want to be discussing this again in 11 years from now. So thank you very much for the opportunity to discuss this with you. Thank you. Well, thank you for those very candid and open remarks, Howard. It's actually quite refreshing and open forum like this to get that kind of discussion. So we thank you for that. We have time for about five to seven minutes of questions. We're going to head into standard CSIS format. We have microphones. Please state your name and your affiliation. And due to time, please limit to a question. So go ahead. We'll start right here in the middle. Sorry, Jim McCartney with the Latin tush. Now, what do you see as the fundamental stumbling block for why this hasn't gone further faster and what do you see as the White House role in trying to leave you that stumbling block? Yeah, I think the biggest thing is we've not articulated a good business case for doing it. As I mentioned in my opening comments, things continue to work. You know, everything from a liability issue from a credit card fraud, identity theft, excuse me, financial fraud. The liability cap is at $50. So it's been sort of viewed as, yeah, I'm willing to absorb the losses and not do anything with it. But I think there's a bigger picture now, people that have recognized through the efforts that the White House and many of you in this room have said, it's not just about the money. It's the trust in the system. It's the ability to build the system. And I think that's what's really got people thinking about this more than just, oh gee, there was a little loss that I can write off. Venues like this is things that the White House is doing. We've got, we meet with Congress regularly. We meet with CEOs, the VCs, Jeremy's office over there. I don't know where you've had what, four or five workshops to date, continuously saying, here's what we need and asking the private sector to build it. So I think there's a whole different discussion today than when we had 11 years ago, even three years ago. Thank you for that. Gentleman in the orange. Good morning. David McWhorter, Catalyst Partners. What is the mechanism for a company, maybe a client of mine or a company that I know that has something that we'd like to get in front of the entire group? I've been to the workshops. They're great. But what's the mechanism for demonstrating to you the ideas of the company? Jeremy, stand up and you can demonstrate to Jeremy. But seriously, and that's one of the challenges we have. And I think at the one meeting I was at, there were probably 34 different, I use the term startups, they were in various stages. They had great technology, they put some effort into it, weren't quite sure where they'd get the footing. And that's one of the things we're working with Jeremy, is how does that become more public? Without endorsing any particular technology or endorsing any particular company, how do we get those that want to build the stuff sort of a portal, if you would, that says, here's the 50 options that are out there. Here's the status of fundings, whether they're just a founder and some angel investment or even a single investment, or this is something that's done around B and we have some customers out there so people can see and make decisions on their own. That's the part we're lacking, and I think that's the next part we need somebody to help us build. Whether it's done through universities, whether it's done through Jeremy's office or NIST, a mechanism to sort of shift through these and figure out what's going to work best. The downside, of course, like any of these things, we may miss something that is the most rocking greatest technology we've ever seen, because somebody's just a small voice out there, and we want to put an equalizing platform in there through some sort of a portal. Right, in the back. By the way, I think it's a brown shirt, not an argument. Andrew Howell, Monion Policy Group. Hey, how you doing? How are you? Good to see you. Howard, I want to pick up on a couple of things that you mentioned on HSPD-12 implementation and the fact that you just talked about the business case. HSPD-12 is a good example of a program that departments and agencies have struggled to make the business case for an investment. And in the tight budget environment where we are now, if you've turned the corner, can you talk a little bit about how you've turned the corner in a tight budget environment on convincing departments and agencies to spend that money to increase assurance and identity? Yeah, very simply stated is it's not an option. It's not as, gee, you can do this if you want to. I think that was the biggest thing we did last year when Vivek and I put out the memo, said, no, this is not an option. This is a presidential directive. We've got a lot of plans. We've had tremendous success with senior leadership and for those of you that have been in this environment for a while, it used to be this was a technology problem. It wasn't a business problem. And now we have the deputies, secretaries across all the departments and agencies, basically they now have ownership of this. We have the President's Management Council, we bring them together, we go through their metrics, and they're held accountable for it. In instances where there may be an issue of funding, where we look to do some reallocation of budget in this all-steer time, said, yeah, this needs to be done. We may pull something from over here that can wait and make sure they've got it. Okay, great, last question. We'll go right there. Hi, Howard, Brian Benson with CA Technologies.  And in the commercial space, a lot of those companies have made their decision and their investments on that ROI. But I haven't seen a whole lot of that within the government, within the agencies. Do you have plans to use, whether it be an ROI calculator or showing the agencies that they can actually save money by going to whether it be Instic or Agents P-12 or FICAM or OMB-1111? Yeah, and I think that we're probably way past that because now that we've mandated it, it's kind of tough to go in and say, you have to do this and here's the value you get. In the early days, they did some rough metrics just in password help desk costs and those sort of things, but we've just got beyond that. Now, there's a true value in as Instic expands for a private sector to say, gee, if we sell 100,000 credentials at a dollar a piece, but it costs us 200,000, it's not a good return on that. How's that scale? How do we wind up getting the costs down? That is what we're looking for in the private sector because the government's going to be the consumer of that, not building our own. We want to get out of that business. Awesome questions and great remarks. I look forward to the rest of the day. Again, I'd like to thank Brian Seagraves and Adam Isles from Raytheon for their sponsorship for this. Obviously, Howard, thank you for taking time out of your day and for your candid remarks. We'll reconvene at 10.45.


Now let's jump over to the Q&A, which is my favorite part of the whole show and let's get to it. Jerry, let's do this Let's see I start a couple Now Nick says that Solana is going to the five to seven dollar region Jerry, what do you think about Solana? You got a Solana? I own one Hey, you won't be left out. That's good. I staked it and it's it's an a private where they call a Browser extension wallet. Yeah, okay You probably got it on what is it phantom? No, believe it or not. It's on Soulflare No, okay. I never heard that one works out pretty well. Well, you got it. You got a whopping one One not Solana which according Nick could go to five bucks. So well, here's the thing there are the likes and dislikes of specific projects are all individual and I could never Fault anybody for liking something even if I don't like it. You know what? I mean, it's yeah, that's okay I think like people hate some people hate Solana some people love it because they say it's fast It I gotta tell you my friend Stephen here who owns the San Juan smokehouse in Puerto Rico He loves he loves it. He goes if you're trying to use DeFi with it He goes it's super fast and super cheap people like that. I said, what about that? You know downtime he's like, yeah can't be up all the time and I was like, well, that's true But I mean, I mean we'd like to see it up as much as possible Jarky says he's waiting for Solana to die and then crypto golf says, thank you Robert timing the stream swing and watch USA Wales in an hour from now. I'd be good On in Qatar, I believe Yes Jarky also says He trusts me but people can always go in a corrupt corrupt corrupt mode. So I trust him 51% I gotta tell you that's that's that's pretty high numbers. It's high praise and then I Trust myself one of us, which is a good actually. That's probably the best advice you can have right there Let's see Tom crown is here legend. It's guys showing up everywhere Let's see. Hey great interview yesterday Tom. Thank you for critiquing my strategy We talked about the dogecoin millionaire yesterday and So so so speaking of profits Jerry, you know, how much he so he had a hundred some run a hundred K or so Dumped in a dogecoin. I think he was up to three million somewhere on there and then with the recent crash He was right back to where he started. He took zero profits. What do you think? I think it'll take profits I think a lot of us. I think of a lot of us in 2021 did exactly the same thing and I don't think I will make that mistake again. I Gotta agree this one though. I heard people say they the people that lived through the 2017 I Heard them say in 2018 and especially in 2019. They were saying. Oh, yeah, man I won't I won't let that happen again and I happened to have a friend who's one of those guys who in 2021 let it happen again He missed the he missed the top of both Here I so I so I have a question for everybody in the audience It happens. It happens. I have a question by the audience Do you still believe in the diamond hands theory or are you gonna take some profits because everybody's different, right?  I'm curious if people are gonna do that or not And let's see Bickey From the show Rob's bat token was getting up there. I hope so bat Basic attention token. What a power for the next big thing Steven says the Chinese and Binance want to hack your crypto and steal it I think everybody wants to steal crypto. Let's that's not let's not put it to one specific country Everybody does that's why it's all a scam, right? Oh Jerry have you been following this story? Cardinals stablecoin will not know no a Right us us da something to beef us da bat by us dollars interesting the stablecoin thing Isn't final like though they're gonna be stablecoin wars Coming up here battles But whoever gets it right and whoever wins is going to have So much velocity because everything is collapsing into a digital state Value is no different right value is no different So we're watching the proliferation of all these incredible new payment structures and systems They're all gonna use a digital medium To transact it's gonna be interesting to see who wins to win There's there was that one and also they talk about a privacy coin coming up on Cardano. That was another big thing. Yes But I don't know if it's a coin or a chain. I couldn't I couldn't get the that's a layer one I love I love Cardano and I have a I have a nice size bag of it and I just stake it Stake it and compound stake it and compound compound Yeah, I agree. Let's see Oh, this is a good one Tom's got a good point What would like to be able to take out the original investment and then some more along the way That's a that's a pretty safe strategy as far as like taking problems great strategy. It's this matter of fact It's my number one yield strategy So any asset that I invest in to get a yield from the minute it's given me my full ROI Yeah, half or 30% Immediately and take that profit right off the table Oh, okay It covers its ROI then that I'm taking profit and then I let the rest of the profit pay me every day until the project dies So, okay, so to tie it again select. Let's say you put a thousand bucks into Tomato coin, right? It's made of coin gives me let's say three commado coins a day And the price carries depending on the market, but at some point that yield that it generates is going to pay off the thousand dollars of tomato coin that I invested in the first place Right. Okay. Yeah For these that have already reached that point they paid for themselves I've got a wallet full of them that are still producing more yield every day And then I go into the wallet and I'll unbond a certain piece of it Hmm, right. So let's say I bought a thousand coins Yeah, thousand dollars and I've received a thousand dollars in yield I still have the thousand coins. Maybe the thousand coins is only worth five hundred dollars But it's still spitting out coins every day I'll go into the wallet and I'll unbond and I'll take two hundred and fifty dollars of the coins out And that's pure profit see that's it still in the wallet is still producing yield every day Obviously it varies depending upon the price of the coin at that particular juncture, but that's the strategy and it's this is the concept Crypto companies are offering us incentives to join or be a part of their networks This is all part of their funding packets. They know if they're going to have to have a project They're going to need to incentivize users to come So I'm just taking advantage of highly incentivized Blockchains no different and every one of us that likes to go to a retail outlet on black Friday and Take advantage of an incentivized sale of a television or toaster. I do actually like that Right, so okay, so that's that that's a pretty good bear scenario check out this one Here's the are a bull scenario. This is Jay and Charles always got good questions and comments Here's a bear catalyst bear catalyst for probably the worst-case-near Genesis declares bankruptcy, which is today Monday today's Monday, right? Yeah, today is Monday. Yeah, so I believe they need like a billion dollars to fill that hole So Genesis declares bankruptcy then of course there goes your Gemini earn grayscale The Bitcoin trust and ether forced to dissolve. I don't know.  We've already established. They have 635,000 Bitcoin. Yeah, quite a bit If that hit the market for liquidation, I'm sorry, there's not enough Michael sailors in the world to cover See How about this so let's say that does happen and we start to see Bitcoin cascade down to I Don't know 14 13 12 10 K. Would you be buying? Yes? Yeah, me too. I mean come on I mean, I mean Now you and I are lucky because we're in Latin American cultural places where The restrictions for stuff so we can always make jam and jelly or sauerkraut in our garage And sell it at the farmers market. This is true. You know, I mean, yeah We also live in places and climates where we can grow food Easily like you that whole backyard where the swimming pool is it that could be a food producing garden You would save money on food by eating out of your garden and the money you save on the food You don't have to buy at the store that's all shipped in you're buying Bitcoin I might have to because if you see in the price is in Puerto Rico, it's super All right, so how about this so how about this he talked about D5 ban in the US ETH? Here's another thing. How do you ban that? How do you ban so you make a law? But how do you enforce that law? Well, I'll be the same way that they did with the Toronto cash, right? tornado cash Cuz because here's my question to actually do an on ramp or an off ramp for cash Well, you need a some type of centralized exchange unless you can actually hook into I think someone told me that true USD You can do it but true USD is a company that has a centralized point of failure And even if you did that they could say well, we can do it except for Iran North North Korea and America you guys aren't gonna get it and then they're like you guys can do whatever you want to But there's no on no more on and off ramps I think that would be like one way But they can't you can't ban D5 and there's another thing if you ban crypto in any any of the projects or any of the The big projects and also D5 It just creates a vacuum and of course just goes out of the countries and guess what the other countries do well Thank you because this is the new technology will absorb it and you guys will be left out To shut down D5 to shut down by you have to shut down all on ramps and off ramps for all crypto Well for all crypto for United States citizens if you're gonna go that route Which mean yeah, which would be difficult, but I could do it In the United States, right Right very difficult very difficult. How about this one Jerry? We talked about this before Everybody's freaked out about this you get ETH declared a security everything besides Bitcoin becomes a security because all of a sudden Gary Gensler who watches the show he comes out and says you know what I told you guys and we're gonna ram this through in Congress They're gonna they're gonna give me the authorization. We're going to just say that these are all securities Let's say that happens. Is that doomsday? I Don't think it is. Okay. Walk us through that Jerry. All right. Let's say every non proof of work Asset becomes a security right and all proof of work Blockchains are deemed commodities by their nature. Okay well, okay Schwab Fidelity JP Morgan Goldman Sachs Bank of America Wells Fargo Everybody would be Including those security assets in their brokerage because there's an an a massively large already established License brokerage system to deal with Securities so all it would take is if you're deemed a security and you haven't registered yet come up with your $185,000 and register the goddamn thing. That's how much it is or or go away Or yeah, that's the same Right, I don't know what Cardona would issue there.  We're gonna find you Yes So what kind of finds you think they could impose because I know like like with with eos dirty It would be it would be they would set a standard Okay, it would set the standard and then everybody would be expected to pay the standard. It's it's it's Unfortunately the pay-to-play model of I mean it's the pay-to-play model Yeah, and we can rail against it and see how corrupt in an un-American it is we can do all that or We can go about doing business and that's the way business is being done for a long time It's slimy, but it is it is the reality, but you know But us the users it's nothing It's a big nothing burger The only people it affects are the developers and the people that are actually governing the chain Also, you know what else it is Jerry. It's a it's a great way to to generate revenue for the government, right? And why not well Anything hey anything to keep them from raising your taxes Let's let's look at this right this is my biggest thing and why I love your channel and why I love crypto Because it started to teach me about economics and started to teach me about monetary policy I've learned what money is as a direct result of being in this space No, I'm not a working business owner for the last 56 years It's being in this space learning about crypto has taught me financial literacy and Here's the thing. There's only two ways the United States government can fund itself taxation and the issuance of debt Of course, right? Well, that's it. That is it. Yeah So so you have to think that fines and penalties are just going to be another Tax receipt stream for the government and if that keeps them from raising your Income tax rate, right? That's why that's why like people say grip is going to zero It's not going to zero. There's too much money slosh around and of course the big the big names are here That's not a big thing Governors I want you to stick your your cash into savings account. Why would they want to do that? They want to tax you so start spending that's the whole thing spend and tax a velocity of money is Where money gets its value? When money is not sloshing around the system money starts losing its value Yeah, hey, so what do you think about this one rocky rocky Bobby? Says Fidelity is now sending me marketing emails about Bitcoin interesting Patreon group my and beyond here's my shameless plug beyond One of my okay got it members is works for Fidelity the crypto division Really and it kept her mouth shut for months Until this last investor meeting and she was able to Disclose what's going on. Yeah, and she disclosed that Bitcoin and Ethereum and they are looking at others But they're waiting for clarity just like everybody else is Okay, so here's the next question. So this lady that was a fiddle Fidelity, right? She was part of the not the board, but the inner workings So they're going to start to invest and give their clients access to Bitcoin Ethereum so They're reading her regulation. What happens when we get regulation It depends on what kind of regulation if it's if it's Selection like this is what a security is this is a commodity. This is utility. This is a currency blah, blah, blah Yeah, I think you'll start seeing those funnels filled I gotta agree.  You need to be over there in the in the security line This is for commodities like Bitcoin and Litecoin and the 25 different versions of Bitcoin that aren't Bitcoin that were forks of Bitcoin, but now or no, you know, whatever that whole Fire Yeah Okay, here's a question from Paul. What's your biggest FOMO and fail? I'll tell you I mean so far I'll start I'll start I'll say it so I got into Luna Last year and it did well and then of course Thankfully I had to sell a bunch of crypto because I had to pay for this house And I didn't really want to and I did and I'm it wasn't like I was smart enough to figure it out I just timing just kind of worked out and I sold a big chunk of it But then guess what I got as soon as I sold it and I paid off the house I went right back to dollar-cost averaging and not like $10 dollar-cost average It was like I was trying to make up for lost time It seemed like and I went in and not like I didn't put like hundreds of thousands of dollars or six figures something crazed like that But it was enough to where I was like, damn, that's all gone.  What do you got? I? Crushed Luna. I made a lot of money on Luna, but it was all in the in the the turmoil of the event biggest failure from an investment standpoint was a chain called sift chain and it's in the cosmos ecosystem in my the big lure To me was they have this incredible Dex in bridge, so you your sift chain wallet had an aetherium address and had the cosmos address And you could get wrapped Bitcoin wrapped a theory and da da da da da And you could do all this stuff on their decks For like pennies like fractions of a penny and I thought this was great And you could stake their coin in your wallet and earn a hundred twenty three percent so I took like 50 grand and put it into that thing and Yield was monstrous and it was doing great. Yeah, it was a dude in the first month. I'd already got 45 or 25 grand almost half in the first month because I was doing this combination of compounding and yield farming yield farming Yeah, and then it just went into the toilet Months and months and months of sub penny Sub penny performance on an asset that I think my average cost is ten cents Did we get do we get greedy Jerry? Is that what happened? Sometimes I got greedy and I'll tell you what I developed a new rule like you have your four rules that people see on the screen a lot Yeah, I love my new rule in this world of DeFi is I'm never gonna commit a Large chunk to any one thing ever again.   And I think we got greedy. I think we all got greedy in one way Cells use being a big mistake Oh, and then the other thing that I was thinking about this no other big mistake on my part was was I thought That it was a good idea to tell people about crypto that I that I I thought would get into it Like this is just like family and friends But they didn't have the same desire that's a huge area or the people everybody watching, you know Tesla Jarky mean everybody that's that comes your all the time Vicky, I mean all you guys that are here right now You understand that it's not a set it and forget it type of play you have to be in this game you have to understand what's going on you have to make moves and I mean not like big huge moves, but that's it. So my biggest mistake was I don't think I've ever gonna tell anybody about it again because if I tell people like To invest it's a wrong play I think the best way to say it is like why I've invested in the crypto because it's it's gonna change the world And then just leave it at that and then once they want to learn I'm not gonna beat it in their head anymore It's just like you got to learn about it and you got to stay in it because if not There's a lot of problems that can happen. Just look at like if I mean Voyager Celsius FTX how many of us told our friends and family, you know, you could you should use that and now here We are so and of course maybe maybe you told them But maybe you figured out later that hey, this is a dumb idea I should probably put this in cold storage But you didn't follow up with them to say hey, did you put it in here in cold storage? I think that's the bigger thing and before before Nick's head explodes He's asked this 10 times. What's the edX we can try to set limits. I will tell you it's called Jerry says dydx I have no affiliation with it. I don't have a link for it. You're gonna have to find it yourself dydx Okay, and then Crypto Kool-Aid who has nice glasses says Cardano has no future. So just Ouchie that hurts done, you know, it's interesting to me I don't have a like I have a discord thing going on right now. I have this back and forth with this XRP Guy on Twitter. I love XRP, but I just think it's a horrible investment It's great to have Opinions that don't match but do it in a respectful way. So I would ask Cardano has no future. Why? Why does Cardano have no future? They seem to be one of the few projects that is actually building a foundation to have a future true I Mean they're slow, but that's good, right? I mean how many times we have we have we rolled out D5 products They were like whoopsy We'll have the back door open a little problem with the codes my bad It was Dollars worth of value that got you have a point. It's just a couple billion All right, so maybe I'm gonna take we'll take one more question and we'll get out of here Well, he really doesn't want to answer your question He just says Hoskins and should be in jail Cardano's only but I'm money grab.  I I just think to myself You know as far as like Cardano, there's this one project. I just love I was I mean, there's a couple of them, but world mobile token actually has real utility It's actually doing things giving telecommunications to people in Africa 1.1 5 terabytes of of data being sent and zipped around on 24-hour basis Which doesn't seem like a lot here in the States, but in a place like Africa, which had no Internet telecommunications connectivity. That's massive. So just on that one World mobile just building right now. I mean that sounds pretty good for me And then of course there are some taxes that are being done. There's some liquid assets. There's hopefully some new things I'm around. Yes, it's slow, but like we talked about hey I really I rather have it slow and right Then have it fast and wrong and that my prime example would be I don't care line takes to build an airplane Just make it right so I don't crash What do you think Jerry I? Could not agree more No, that's it. That's it. That's it. I've kept Jerry way too long from his That's it DJs, that's it Well, just me and you Jerry and the rest of the people are pretty they have their head screw on tighter than us So that's it everybody. So thanks so much for stopping by again I want to thank Jerry Hall for stopping by it's been too long buddy. Thank you, Rob Thank you. All right, everybody if you liked this video like and subscribe all that good stuff And of course you want to win that shield folio links in the description. That's it. Adios. See you on the next one


Why are Africans jealous of Ghana? Ghana is a country in West Africa, formally known as the Republic of Ghana. It shares borders with the Ivory Coast in the West, Burkina Faso in the North, and Togo in the East, and spans the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean to the South. Ghana, located in Western Africa, is a massive country with enormous economic and social potential. While Ghana is classified as one of the world's least developed countries, it has one of Africa's fastest expanding economies. It is a low-income economy. GDP per capita in 1999 was US$1,900, based on purchasing power parity, which accounts for Ghana's low prices of many essential commodities. Because of the economic situation, Ghana has a lot of affection, love and jealousy from Africans because of its economic viability, tremendous potential, and political might. Here are just some of the reasons some Africans are jealous of Ghana. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe as we ride along. Economy Private and governmental enterprise coexist in the economy. The services sector accounts for almost three-fifths of GDP, agriculture for nearly one-fifth, and industry for one-fourth. Prior to independence, the government's involvement was primarily limited to providing essential amenities such as water, electricity, railroads, roads, and postal services. Agriculture, trade, finance, and industry were nearly exclusively controlled by private interests, with foreign interests controlling the majority of them save agriculture. According to our econometric models, Ghana's GDP will trend at US$64.00 billion in 2022, with such a high GDP. She is one of Africa's most developed countries, causing envy among her contemporaries. Technology Over the years, Ghana has gradually been advancing in technology to the point of becoming one of the technological giants in Africa. Accra, Ghana's capital, has been a bustling metropolis. Google just launched its first artificial intelligence, AI. Facility in Africa, and now Twitter has selected Accra once again as its African headquarters. Other African countries, particularly Nigeria, were thrown into a frenzy as a result of these two incidents. Nigeria's GDP is more than seven times that of Ghana's, and it expects to receive the lion's share of international investments, but it has recently been losing ground to Ghana in nations like Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Africa, and others. There were raging debates in television studios and on social media over why Ghana had stolen March on them. The news received much more attention as Twitter advertised employment openings in Ghana for its office. Twitter selected Ghana for a simple reason. As a champion of democracy, Ghana is a proponent of free expression, internet freedom, and the open internet, of which Twitter is also an advocate. It's stated in a statement. The recent nomination of Ghana to host the African Continental Free Trade Area, Secretary-at-Corresponds with our larger goal of establishing a presence in the region to help our efforts to improve and personalize our service across Africa. In November 2019, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey made his first trip to Africa. During his trip, he stopped in Ghana, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and South Africa. Nigeria has great expectations for Twitter's arrival. Manufacturing Since independence, Ghana's government has pursued various industrialization policies, resulting in the establishment of a diverse range of manufacturing industries, including food, beverages, tobacco, textiles, clothing, footwear, timber and wood products, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, and metals, including steel and steel products. These are mostly produced for domestic use. The maintenance of a reasonable balance of external trade was one of the program directions of the five-year plan for 1975 to 1980, and a number of industrial initiatives were geared at the export market in the medium or long term. Auto companies moves to Ghana. Nigeria is not a big market since it has less than 200 million people, according to a wise guy compared to Nigeria. A market is defined by the number of people who can afford a product. With nearly half of Nigerians living in extreme poverty, certain items are out of reach. Furthermore, the other half of the country, which is not in poverty, is separated into numerous groups. A brand new car is out of reach for the vast majority of people. In the long run, Nigeria's market for new vehicles is extremely modest. The situation in Ghana may not be much different, but the firms appear to have faith in the country. Volkswagen, Suzuki, Toyota, and Nissan are among the automakers that have chosen to establish a manufacturing facility in Ghana. Nigeria could need those employment, which it has now lost to its friendly neighbors. Ease of doing business in Ghana. Did you know that registering a property in Nigeria is the most difficult task in sub-Saharan Africa? Nigeria was ranked 48th out of 48 nations in the World Bank's 2020 ease of doing business index for Africa. While Nigeria is ranked 131st in the world for doing business, Ghana is ranked 118th. This means that paying taxes, getting power, registering a house, and doing business in Accra is easier than in Lagos. The World Bank acknowledges that Nigeria has made significant progress in this area, although Ghana has remained ahead of Nigeria. Politics. Not only does Ghana has the one of the best democracies in Africa, she is a role model of peace and stability in the West and the entire Africa. Ghana stands out as an optimistic success story in West Africa, a region characterized by political instability of varied magnitudes, ranging from coups, political turmoil, violent sectarian conflicts, to simmering political tension even in some ostensibly stable countries. Apart from being the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to gain independence from a colonial power, the country has emerged as the epitome of African democracy and decent governance after years of political turmoil. Ghana's President Nana, a Cufo Addo, has once been the chairman of ECOS. These are just a few of some of the reasons that Africans are jealous of Ghana. If you found this video interesting, please make sure to like, share, comment, and subscribe to Africa Reloaded for interesting videos. Do not forget to subscribe to Africa Reloaded.


Today, we are going to talk about that when the situation arises where the access of the patient's records is to be needed by the family, what should be the protocol we have to follow keeping in mind the ethical guidelines. This should be inevitably remain in the mind of the psychotherapist that at any point of the time they may arise a stage when the family would be asking for the evidences for the proofs and for the record of the treatment whatever would have been provided to the patient so far. Occasionally, a concerned family member will see access to exact the client's record. Therapists should recognize the unique problems that arise when working with minors or families and should remain sensitive to each individual's right to privacy and confidentiality in such circumstances. You never know that for what reason the questions is being arise that they have to see the records that whatever you have been giving in the psychotherapy. Specifically, in those situations, when a minor's case is presented to you and in that minor's case, there are such sensitive issues in which they keep on doing their tasks, keep on telling their childhood problems, keep on explaining their child-parent interaction, in which there can be some sensitive information or when it is being asked by the family, it should be carefully needed to see what information they should give or not. In certain cases, this directly comes into the right to the confidentiality and that information cannot be given to family members. But in certain cases, which we will be going to see in the future, where we have to extend that information. From the outset of any such relationship, all parties should receive information about the specific nature of confidential relationship. Now, there could be many stakeholders which may be involved in certain, you know, scenarios. We feel that there is a case where a parent's child's parents have an issue of separation. And that child is learning psychotherapy because he is wasting a lot of stress, he is unable to cope with it. And with that psychotherapist, the issues of his parents and the problems of his family dynamics are shared. And he is unable to openly tell who he wants to stay with from his parents. And since he is going through a psychotherapeutic treatment, the court may ask that the child's psychotherapist should be taken to the records and be asked from there that in the past, the child shared more of his inclinations or problems. In such situations, more than one of the stakeholders may be involved. A discussion about what sort of information might be shared and with whom should be raised early. So keeping in mind all possible scenarios would could be occur later in the psychotherapeutic treatment. It is very advisable that at the beginning, when we set an informed concern or protocol between the parties, we should also jot down the points where information will be given. Let's say that we can only tell symptoms, we can tell major inclination, we will also share the verbatims because this is something very sensitive to be shared and it should be very sensitive to be treated. When the client is a child or deemed legally incompetent, parents or guardians generally have full legal entitlement to record access. But this is also something which should be write down in a very beginning that if a child is very young and can't give any concern or is legally incompetent, then the guardian of the child is a full, complete caretaker. The right to information can be shared with him or not. It is very important to decide these things on an early stage. Ensuring strong previously protection is critical to maintain individual's trust in their therapist and willingness to obtain needed healthcare services which are being provided. So, you know, if we can't maintain this, which stage of your confidentiality can reach, then it will be very difficult for a client and therapist to maintain a healthy relationship. Otherwise, a client will continue ZFTA that in any situation, all my verbatims, all my talks, all my secrets can be exposed to the general public, family, court or law. This should be done in a very sensitive manner. There are a few rules for the healthcare providers to share the protective information of a client. So, they are very simple and easy and I will just quickly go through all of them one by one. Communicate with the patient's family member or friends or others involved in the patient care. So, you know, we have to provide the information about these general rules to all these members. Communicate with family members when the patient is an adult. So, they should know that they may not be able to get any information because the patient himself is an adult person. Communicate with the parent of a patient who is a minor. So, they may have probably better rights than the adult one. Consider the patient's capacity to agree or object the sharing of their information. Like, for any point where they understand that there is no need to tell anything, they can raise that point. Involve a patient's family member, friends or others in dealing with patients' failure to adhere to medication or other therapy. But in those sensitive conditions, where you feel that his medical adherence is not good or his compliance is not good with the therapy, we can take those close ones in the loop so that we can provide better treatment for him. Listen to family members about their loved ones receiving mental health treatment. So, this is also very important and communicate with family members law enforcement or others when the patient presents a serious or imminent threat to harm for himself or to others. But in therapy, if there is a sensitive bar disclosed in which you can see signs of suicide or homicide, it is very important to tell others about it. Moving further, I will be giving you different examples to the cases to elaborate this scenario further.


My grandmother was a devout Christian. At the very least, that was the mask she wore. In reality, I believe she liked to tell people they were going to hell, berating them for any small mishap. I never saw her preach the good word or talk about God's works.   Jacob. She would snap. Don't touch the pie before it's done. It's a sin to interfere with someone's unfinished work. After smacking me away with her old wooden spoon, she would make me pay penance by doing chores while all the other children played outside. Her obsession with sin consumed every aspect of her life as a saint walking among mortals. It was her express duty to tell the world the horrors of hell. In gruesome detail, she would describe how exactly a person's face would be peeled off in the pit. Sometimes it was ear to ear. Other times, from chin to forehead, she could never keep the detail straight. Her children didn't care about these inconsistencies, however. They were more concerned with a five-year-old grandson who was just told how he was going to burn for knocking over her vase. There was one story she told the same every time. I think it was her favorite one. Oddly enough, it was the only one that never mentioned hell. The talk of sin stayed, though. She could never get away from that. The bird stares, she would say, will appear to you when they're most needed. God will show you all your mortal failings, and you will be saved. Your wickedness will be revealed to the world, and your soul will be purified. I never understood how learning of all your wickedness would suddenly save your soul, but grandma was convinced. Maybe that's why she felt the need to point out every transgression. Maybe she thought she was saving our souls. I don't know if she ever gave herself the same treatment. The story goes that at some point in your life, when your sins have become too much to bear, a door will appear before you. It will be old with chipped white paint and decorated with a light feather pattern around the edge. From inside, you will hear a call, a beautiful song beckoning you inside. Grandma never went into detail about this song, but she assured us it would be the most beautiful thing we would ever hear. It would be impossible to resist. Upon opening the door, you would see a long straight way down. The steps would be old and wooden, yet sturdy. She would describe the sound that first step would make, mime out a comical creak that would make all the younger kids laugh. I never did, though. It seemed foolish and childish. On either side of the staircase would be a wall that stopped at waist height, wall-papered with a dainty floral pattern. From where the wall stopped to the ceiling, extended chicken wire, behind which you could see hundreds of birds, behind the birds, another wall with the same floral print. She would go into great detail about the birds. Grandma would meticulously describe each species there in the walls. Macaws, ravens, eagles, her hands would strike up and down as she brought the birds to life before us. I never got tired of hearing about those birds, the way their feathers moved, the bobbing of their heads, how the grace of God allowed all their independent chirps and whistles to be joined together in one glorious song. God didn't seem so bad when viewed through the lens of those birds. Hell didn't seem so bad either. You would go down that staircase, basking in God's glory to the tune of every bird imaginable. They would flap and flitter by, their wings creating a mass of feathers and song. I always imagined that those birds created some sort of angel, a collective that throbbed and shifted and swarmed. That staircase must have been heaven in my mind, an endless journey downwards, surrounded by angels and music. At the time, I didn't know that a staircase to heaven was supposed to go in the opposite direction. At the bottom of those steps was a room. It was small, square, and contained only a table and two chairs. The empty chair is for you, in the other sits God. He would talk with you in that room. He would lay bare all your sins. This part of the story was the worst because grandma would go and point out all the little misdeeds of those listening. She would talk for God and we would squirm with guilt before her. You would thank God for saving your soul and then go back up the stairs. That's where the story ended. Grandma never said what you were supposed to do with the knowledge of your sins. She never answered me when I asked if God would let me stay there with the birds. The bird stares was everyone's favorite story. Not that there was much competition, considering all the others involved rotting in hell. So nobody could understand why Uncle Glenn would take the tail and twist it. Why he would take something so beautiful and turn it into something so horrifying. Grandma thought what Uncle Glenn did was a sin and was therefore banned from most family gatherings. Nobody complained about this. Uncle Glenn wasn't liked by anybody in the family. I only got to hear his version of the bird stares once. Uncle Glenn claimed to have encountered the door. He said he found it after a night on the town after he had one or two beers. Uncle Glenn said his girlfriend had broken up with him that night. Apparently she'd been seeing his best friend behind his back. She didn't want to drag on the affair and decided to stick with a friend, saying he was better in bed. Glenn didn't take the news too well and decided to make some bad decisions.  That's when he came across it. The same old white door from grandma's story. He didn't hear any song behind it, though. There was only the door placed perfectly in the center of the alleyway, a single light illuminating it. It looks so out of place there. He said that white against the brick. That door was something you'd find in an old lady's house, not something that'd be in a dark alleyway in the corner of the city. Those feathers etched into it sure as hell didn't. They were too. He'd stopped there, lost and thought. I don't think he was able to describe how out of place it felt that door. I found later the word he'd been looking for was delicate. Those feathers were too delicate to have been in such a place. Some abandoned street at four in the morning. It deserved to be in a place where it could be loved, viewed, appreciated. Some place where its craftsmanship could be admired. Uncle Glenn wasn't disturbed by the lack of music. He was too concerned with how unnatural the door was. I don't know if his alcohol-addled brain had been thinking of the story at that point. Maybe he hadn't been thinking of anything at all. On an impulse, he'd opened the door. He described the stairway as pitch black. The electric glow from the pitiful light above the door barely went five steps down before being consumed by the inky darkness. It could not penetrate into its depths. Through that dying orange glow, he could tell the narrow steps were wooden, rotting and impossibly steep. There was no floral wallpaper, only splintering wooden walls. He could not see past the chicken wire. The dark concealed that area from wandering eyes to perfectly. He didn't know when he'd stepped inside that place or when he'd closed the door, only that now he was trapped in a suffocating darkness. The door locked behind him. I tried to open it, you see. It didn't work. The knob wouldn't turn at all. So I tried to bust that thing down, but it wouldn't even budge. He looked like he was going to cry when he said this. I didn't really believe any of this, though. Uncle Glenn was six foot four, with arms as large as my thighs. Given how mean he looked, a door could come off its hinges just by him glaring at it. Maybe he only looked mean, all bark and no bite. He'd included him losing a fight as a part of the story after all. A door wouldn't know that though. But maybe this one did. He was left with only one option. Descend. I didn't like the way he said that. The way the blood drained from his face and the hopelessness took its place. Descend. That part almost gave me nightmares alone. As he went into that deep, stumbling over the sheer steps, he began to notice something. It was subtle at first, but it soon was everywhere. It was a sort of flapping sound. She said it was birds, right? Well, yeah, that's what I thought too. But the sounds those things made. I've never heard a bird sound like that. Can birds even scream? I became very angry, as he said this. But you have to understand, I loved those birds my grandma described. I wanted to see them someday. My childhood fantasy never released its grip on the idea of those flying angels. For this disgusting man to brutally dismantle the dreams of my childhood to tear it apart bit by bit through the image of walls that wouldn't stop screaming. Well, I finally got grandma. It truly was a sin. It must have been hours, or even days he was trapped there, stuck with the company of that ever present darkness and those guttural sounds he called screams. They threw themselves at the chicken wire, he said. He could hear every time those birds smashed against it, their wings beating frantically against the metal cage. It created a strange, horrid symphony, the reverb of the wire mixed with the flapping and the screams. He can still hear it when the time of night is just right, and the darkness has taken its hold. He never met God. There were no chairs at the bottom of the staircase. There was only a table with a candle next to which sat a small, feathered body. The candle's companion was a long, dead finch, curled up and shriveled in the flickering light. He didn't take the candle or the finch. Instead, he opened the door on the other side of the room and came back out into the cold alleyway. At this point, his words were wracked with sobs. It was hard to decipher what he was trying to say. So that's where his story ended. He was shaking too much to continue any further. I thought he was a great actor. He told this tale with much more force than anything grandma ever did. We all said he could make a career out of it if he ever managed to pull himself together. He never did, though. It was a shame he drank himself to death. When I got the news about his death, it was distressing. I hadn't thought of the bird stairs or Uncle Glen in years. I had tried very hard to forget about him. His version of the story left a bad taste in my mouth and, unfortunately, ruined the original tale for me. My beautiful birds had been turned into a screaming hallway and a dead finch decaying in the dark. I didn't want to think about the bird stairs after that. It just made me sick. So I abandoned the tale, along with the rest of my childhood innocence. Uncle Glen's funeral was a simple affair. No one wanted to spend the time or money to give him the proper family send-off, so they just stuck him in a coffin and put it all in the dirt. The bird stairs he described would die with him. That's really all I cared about, that little bit of closure. I didn't want to think about white doors or stairs or birds, but I did dream of them. I thought that if I was there when they finally put him in the ground, it would all go away.  I was only there for closure. So I ignored the birds. It was admittedly difficult, considering they were everywhere.  They sat on the tombstones and lingered in the trees, watching, waiting. Nobody else said anything about them. Maybe they wanted closure too. There was one bird, smaller than the rest. There was perched to the left of me on a gravestone, carrying the marking of a cross. I don't know whose tomb it was. I stood straight ahead, keeping my eyes fixed on the reverend, giving the final blessings. I don't think the little devil was looking the same way. Its eyes bore into my soul, picking out and dissecting every action I had taken. The weight of whatever sins I had committed was astonishing. I don't even know what those sins were, just that they were there and I could feel them. I wanted to run, to scream, to release the itching that was just beneath my skin by peeling it off just as grandma had described. I could do nothing but stand there in agony, the eyes of every winged thing laughing at me, tormenting me. When I saw the door the next week, well, it was no surprise. I almost laughed when it appeared.  As a child, this moment would have been glorious. The angels would accept me, no longer would I have to worry about my bones becoming diseased in hell. In my teens, I would have been wary, the thought of Uncle Glenn's shaking hands, a recent memory. Now, I could only remember the funeral, the birds, the weight of every invisible transgression I had committed against God. The door emitted a low hum, a quiet tone that never varied. It sounded like something that would play at the end of a TV broadcast, but I don't know whether the static was real or if it was just my brain filling in the gaps. It had a strange musical quality to it. I don't know why I didn't get the song my grandma described or the empty silence of Uncle Glenn. It called to me with that moan. It promised repentance and sanctuary. I entered. For what else was I supposed to do? Leave back the way I came? Abandon my home to the divine being that now claimed it? Be stuck in the vision of those demonic birds that hated me. The stairway was not how Grandma or Uncle Glenn described. It was an odd mixture of both sheer rotten steps contained by floral wallpaper and clean chicken wire. It was not a pitch blackness, but rather a dim shadow that covered the area more of a dusk than a midnight. The light was like that sliver right before the sun sets fully. An eternal twilight captured in the narrow hall. The ceiling was tall, and I could not see where it ended. I could not remember if Grandma and Uncle Glenn ever mentioned the ceiling or if this detail was created specifically for my own personal purgatory. I am certain now that they never mentioned the ceiling. Although it was brighter than Uncle Glenn described, I could not see past the chicken wire to the wall that I knew lay further behind. It was washed in shadow, and the small movement I did make out made me turn away in surprise. Whatever was there did not want me to see it. What struck me most was the suffocating silence. The steps did not creak as I went down. No song or scream came from the sides. The shadow did not speak. This detail was disturbing to me. The stories of the bird stairs always seemed to have a fixation on the sound. Here, there was nothing. No sound, no sight, no music. The birds that haunted my memory did not choose to reveal themselves to me. It didn't feel like a descent. It was more like a slow walk that happened to go downwards. Maybe the lack of a ceiling played a role. The wire stretched up into infinity, so how could I possibly descend? The height gave me a feeling of vertigo, especially when compared to how narrow the staircase was. I could not extend my arms out on either side. In fact, if I were to stand with my shoulder on one side and try to fully extend my other arm, I would be unable to. The space seemed to have been created for the exact width of my shoulders, leaving mere inches on either side. The mixture of claustrophobia and height began to get to me, to the point where I was nauseous once I got to the bottom. The room was almost exactly as grandma described. The shadow was absent, revealing the cheery pattern on the walls. I could see the table, and the chairs, and God. So I sat down across from him. He wore an impeccably tailored and pressed suit with a matching dark tie. He had pale skin and dark hair. The most striking thing about his appearance, though, was the grin. God never stopped grinning. The smile stretched from ear to ear in a horrible imitation of humanity. His teeth were stained, a bright, blinding white. I didn't know God was supposed to look so wrong. He said nothing. I waited. I sat there staring at his grinning face, waiting for him to make the first move. He never budged. His smile never faltered. Are you going to tell me my sins? I finally asked. He didn't respond for a long time. His face started to remind me of those birds. I wondered when he would stop taunting me with that cold, glassy stare and start screaming. He spoke hours later. I have something to show you. My name was missing from the end of that statement. I don't think he even knew it. This observation distracted me from how wrong his voice sounded, how cold and grating it was to my ears. There was no expression to it, no trace that it was human. It was like some alien AI, a voice granted to something that was never supposed to speak. His mouth never moved from that strained grin. He got up from the table, like a puppet controlled by strings, and opened the door behind him. I followed him down a long hallway, staying back from his unnatural, shambling gate. The walk was short, yet felt so much longer due to the absence of sound. Time slows down when you can't hear the echo of your own footsteps. God led me into a circular room with textured brown walls and a raised platform in the center. He gestured at it with a jerking motion, and I approached it without an ounce of dread. On the small stone platform was an angel, a beautiful bird of paradise with feathers made of silver and gold. They spilled over the side in a cascade of sculpted metal. It was more dazzling than my grandma ever could have described. God whispered. Without hesitation, I uttered a quiet hello to the little bird before me. I knew I'd made a mistake as soon as it started shrieking. The sound is hard to describe. It was an otherworldly whale that caused my skin to crawl and my hair to stand on end. It was piercing, metallic, oscillating in tone rapidly. It moved up and down and never settled on one note. I couldn't tell if it was a song or a scream, only that it was hurting me, and I wanted it to end. I turned around to ask God to make it stop, only to find he disappeared and the hallway with him. I desperately ran to try and find a way out, to get away from the wailing echo that came from the center of the room. I clawed at the walls, crying as I peeled away the bits of rot that clung to it. When my fingers were bleeding and the wall unmoving and the sound constantly changing, I snapped. I stormed right up to that damned angel and I grabbed it and smashed it into the ground. I stomped and stomped and stomped on that little bird, not caring as it started to ooze a dark oil, not caring as its feathers were ripped from its body and its hollowed bones were crushed and its shrieking stopped. I stood there trembling at the destruction I'd wrought and then went back down the hallway. God said nothing to me as I went back up the stairs and out the white door back into the street before my house. I didn't turn back. I couldn't bear the thought of seeing that strained grin again. That was the first time I went into the bird stairs. The next time I saw the door was a week later in place of a restroom door and a gas station. I didn't want to go in that time, but that static hymn wouldn't leave my mind. It was impossible to ignore. I went in again, down the stairs, trailing my fingers over the chicken wire as I descended. I could feel them watching me now, those angels in the shadows, their beady eyes not once leaving my face. I sat down before God again, his grinning face still taunting me. Why am I back here? I almost screamed. What do you want from me? He said nothing. I screamed and yelled and hurled every insult I knew at him, yet he said nothing. So I waited and waited until he spoke. I have something to show you. He said, his mouth still unmoving, his tone still without expression. I followed him down the hallway once more, my breathing now taking up the silence. If God heard how uneven and choppy it was, he chose not to acknowledge it. The room was the same. The walls still kept their clinging brown rot. The platform still held a delicate metal bird, no evidence of my violent rampage to be found. The bird didn't even wait for me to say something this time. It started its holy whale almost immediately. I didn't want to kill it again, but I didn't know what else to do. I couldn't stay trapped there while it called out to me, begging me to end the misery God had put us in. I killed it again. I smashed its poor fragile body into the floor. Then I left, feeling the eyes of God and the angels as I went back up those stairs. I keep finding that door everywhere. It plays out the same every time I descend. I yell at God while he grins. He leads me to the little bird. I kill it over and over again. I tried to fight God one of those times. I threw myself over the table and slammed my fist into his face again and again and again. It didn't work.   I tried ignoring that door once. I tried to resist its call and move on with my life. It found me, though. The next time I went down a staircase, I ended up there. Reality not even blinking as it changed. I think God laughed at me that time. He definitely did the next time. When the door I went through changed, just as I passed the threshold, I can hear the birds now as I walk down that hallway. I notice the slight flapping of their wings. It's getting louder with each trip. I wonder when they will start screaming. I wonder if that sound will be the same one that haunts me every waking moment. I wonder if I will still be able to hear it when I stand before God, when he finally decides to tell me all my sins, if I will feel it when he rips my heart out of my ribcage, when he takes my bones and flesh and turns it into something new. How much pain will I be in when he turns me into one of his angels? Will it hurt when he throws me in with the rest of the fleshy, featherless birds? Will my skin bear the scars when I throw myself against the chicken wire as I scream?  Will they remember me? They ignored the birds then, and they will ignore them now.  When he brings some new hapless sinner in there, how soon will I start shrieking? Will they hear it as a song? What will it feel like as my brains are ground into the dirt, as my body is placed under the heel of penance? I wonder when God would get tired of it, when he decides some other bird should take my place. When God consumes me, shoves me down into His gluttonous mouth. Will I finally be saved? Will I be redeemed for every evil I've made, all those small sins I cannot name?  My grandmother then will laugh, another soul saved from endless torment. She will sit and hum with a nightingale in her window, God thanking her for her service.