Hello, everyone, and thank you for coming to my talk today at Open Source Summit North America. My name is Brian Bellendorf. I'm Executive Director of Hyperledger, which is an initiative hosted within the Linux Foundation. Some of you may know more about Hyperledger. I'll do a little bit of kind of about our background, but I really wanted to spend today talking about the application of blockchain technology, really, what we're doing at Hyperledger, to the field of digital identity, and using it as a way to reinvent how digital identity works today on the internet and really the progress that this community has made in moving forward with it. I'll speak for about 30 minutes and then open it up for about 20 minutes of Q&A at the end. I feel free to start asking questions and dropping them into the Q&A box, and I will work through those when I get to the end. Also, we have an Ask the Expert session with Dave Huseby, who is the security maven at Hyperledger, starting immediately after the end of this talk, so at 1.15 p.m. central time, and that's in the Ask the Expert B channel over on Slack. Between this talk and your conversation with Dave, hopefully a lot of your questions will be answered, but this is a really rich space, and I'm really excited to be talking with you about this today. Just a bit of a brief background on Hyperledger. We are an open-source project, again, hosted at the Linux Foundation. We're a global consortium that's been running for about four years now, building underlying technologies for distributed ledgers to support use cases in finance, in supply chains, in all sorts of interesting applications, and in particular in digital technology. Every Hyperledger project actually works the same way as the Linux Foundation projects do, where we bring together some tooling around a common license, a common IP framework, collaboration tools, Jira, chat, GitHub, those sorts of things, but also add to it some process around marketing and getting the word out there about how we're building what we're building, as well as security audits and other best practices for managing open-source communities at scale. There's obviously the real meat of what gets created, comes from the developer community. We're not paying for development directly, it all comes from the people who show up to the project and decide what to build, and it's incredibly rich as an ecosystem because of that. And then at the Linux Foundation, we have a staff assigned to help and grow both the technical side of the community and the commercial side as well. So there's quite a few companies now offering hosted services and shrink wrap product and other types of commercial activities around Hyperledger projects. So it's really an exciting place to be. We are an umbrella project, like many at the Linux Foundation. We are home to a number of different what we call ledgers. These are really like databases, right, but fanned out, distributed over multiple nodes and lots of different models for how to do this. You could think of those ledgers as being as different from each other as say MySQL is from MongoDB. There are a few of these actually very focused on digital identity. And those are where I'll be focusing the time today. Those are Hyperledger, Indy, Aries and Ursa. But if you have an interest in decentralized technologies in trying to bring trust really to this world, and because of the tooling used, not just trust in an individual or an organization or an institution, but actually trust in technology and processes, these are technologies you really want to get to understand and learn about. So feel free to check them out at hyperledger.org. But let me start a bit with backing up and trying to talk just abstractly about what is identity?  And I don't mean to define this in a rigorously philosophical way. I'd really like to try to define it in a matter that is applicable to the digital world that we're in today. But first, let's just try to understand how identity works in most cases in the physical world. Identity, I'm thinking of things that you do as the holder of identity documents to prove things about yourself. You're not defined by your driver's license or social security number, but those documents, your driver's license and the social security card and your diploma and other credentials, they form an essential part of who you are and what you can do in this world. And we have, I think, an interest in making sure that the digital world kind of brings along some of the advantages of identity as it works in the physical world, but also trying to do better than that and deal with perhaps some complications that arise from that in the real world. But let's look at this in the real world today. You have issuers of credentials, the state DMV, for example, for your driver's license. You have holders of those credentials, you. You have this driver's license. And then there's a verifier. Like, let's say you go to a bar and you need to prove that you're 21 years of age, you're presenting that credential to a verifier, right? And what's interesting here is the verifier has to have some trust relationship with the issuer. The bar has to have a trust relationship that the Department of Motor Vehicles is not going to issue a credential to me unless I'm actually of the appropriate age, unless it has the date of birth on it and the verifier trusts that the issuer has done that due diligence. But in the real world, the issuer doesn't know where I present those credentials, right? The issuer can't automatically cause that driver's license to disappear out of my wallet and pretend that it never existed, right? Now, I might lose my driver's license by, say, getting too many drunk driving arrests or something like that. But that's not a document that just can be disappeared or forgotten about. And that's really important to how I think digital identity works in the real world. In the digital world, we kind of want it to work the same way. But sadly, right now, your equivalent of your identity documents typically sit on the other end of a name and password at a portal somewhere, right? It's your Google account. It's your Facebook account. It's login with Twitter and share your social graphs from all of these different networks. But those credentials could disappear at any time. They could be edited at any time. And they aren't really portable outside of the ecosystems defined by those companies, right? It's not really possible for me to present my good standing as a member of Twitter for over 10 years in a context outside of that in a way that it doesn't notify Twitter and can't be taken away by Twitter, right? And that knowingness that issuers today have in the digital identity world is actually a big problem from a privacy and surveillance point of view. The fact that Twitter knows everywhere that I log in with Twitter, Facebook knows everywhere, not just that I log in with Facebook, but if I'm logged into Facebook, if I go to a site that has the login with Facebook button, that sends a ping over to Facebook that I've gone and visited CNN or whatever. And this is a big issue for a lot of people out there and one that we should be able to do better on. So in the digital world, how do we get closer to that? Well, let's break this down a little bit further as well into a little bit more detail. There are three different aspects or even dimensions really to identity to consider. There are the relationships, the people you know. You have a relationship with family, with your employer, with friends, with the government, right? That's one dimension of this. There are attributes that are inherent to you or inherent to your experiences, things like where and when you were born, your credit history, your history of having paid things in time or not, your healthcare records, your education. These are certainly not things you want to be public record, right? These are things, in fact, you want to really know who you've shared that data with and things like GDPR and CCPA give us the chance to retract some of that when we feel we have to. But those are attributes of who you are.  If you're buying a house, you trust your realtor to share information about you to a prospective seller of the house that you want to buy. Your lawyer acts as an agent for you. And then technologically speaking, even your cloud services, your iPhone app act as an agent for you in many of these engagements around identity in the digital world, for sure. And increasingly in the physical world. Think about when, I don't know if any of you have stored your flight boarding pass in your Apple wallet, but you're starting to cross over between the digital and the real when you do that. And then finally, not to overstate the case that you are your data, you're much more than your data, I promise. But there are things inherent to you that are intrinsic, right? Things like the knowledge you have about who knows what about me. About representation, who represents me. And also finally, this sense of data leakage, who can share what about me. All these are ways of understanding these three dimensions. Apologize for the noise in the background. So as things have evolved digitally, we've really seen three stages of digital identity. The first two of which are very much centralized. One where you have an account, as I mentioned, with a central organization. And there are standards that have been built off of federating that or trying to federate that. And have worked reasonably well for the scalability at least of institutional trust. So things like the TLS standards in HTTP, which have really done a lot to help us build a secure internet, really. Going forward from that, there are architectures for federating that even further and using third parties. And you've seen standards like SAML and OpenID Connect and OAuth2. Which is how we got to the login with Facebook, login with Twitter through an IDP, some sort of identity provider. To a third-party organization. And again, architecturally, the challenge with that solution is just how much that puts power in the hands of the IDPs. To not only issue or revoke those credentials, but also I know everywhere that you've been using those credentials. So the third concept is one where really there is a direct connection between you and the party that you're trying to prove things to. Or perhaps get issued credentials from. And where underneath that is a common distributed ledger, a blockchain, a shared database of any sort. That is neutral, that is independent of the two of you. And that can serve as a backbone much the same way that the internet serves as a backbone for communications. That at this point we simply can take for granted. And again, kind of the actors in this soap opera are issuers, credential holders and verifiers. And you could really take anybody who's active out there in this ecosystem to find them as these parties. They might even be simultaneously somebody could be a credential holder and a verifier. I might hold a house party and only want to allow people in who have been vaccinated for a serious disease, for example. I should be able to verify directly with you rather than being an institution that you have indeed received a vaccine for a certain disease. And so in this identity ecosystem that we're trying to build, we take that very simplified model and extend it one step further to talk about basically these actions and standards in between these different parties. Issuers both issue a credential to the credential holder, but then they also register a proof of that claim and their own integrity and provenance to this common registry. To a blockchain registry, distributed ledger, shared database, that sort of thing. The credential holder then when they present that claim to the verifier, the verifier, it's basically a cryptographically signed document. And they can verify that that ownership came from the credential holder using standard public key cryptography. But then they can also verify the integrity of that claim by validating the signatures and the integrity of that doc if it's actually been registered into this common registry. And it's wildly simplified. There's a lot more cryptographically that lies underneath these concepts. This is really what started to emerge as self sovereign identity or user centric identity. That's where the term SSI really comes from. But underneath what pulls it all together is a standard called the decentralized identifier, which is as fundamental to this new approach to building things as say the URL is to the way that the web took off and grew. And then really also fundamentally common is having a common place where these DIDs exist and are expressed, which is a public blockchain or other decentralized network. And I should add here that in between the issuer and credential holder, you can use your knowledge proofs to help support the idea of selective disclosure between the parties. So that, for example, a driver's license, think about all the biographic data that you have on that driver's license. It's got your birthday, it's got your weight, your eye color, it's got your photo. It has your home address, right? If you're going to a bar and you need to prove that you're over the age of 21, you don't necessarily want all of that information to follow with that and be available to the bar, right? Like the bar owner, if they had a full copy of all that data, you know, that would be a surveillance and privacy kind of disaster, right? So instead, there are ways to use their knowledge proofs and this technology called verifiable credentials that is also emerged out of this ecosystem to present a subset of that data just enough to be able to prove to the bouncer at the door to the bar owner. Yes, I actually am who I am. Here's my face, my eye color, that sort of thing, but without having to share my birth date. In fact, it might even state I'm over the age of 21 without stating the year that I was born. So some really exciting stuff happening in that space. I think it's important to help clarify what self-sovereign identity is not. It's not a replacement for civil registries like birth registries, driver's license authorities, passport offices. This is not about eliminating the need for those kinds of organizations, institutions or functions. This isn't a rip and replace for all existing identity schemes. There are lots of systems today that start centralized that this technology will be able to support those centralized parties becoming issuers of credentials on a decentralized network. So it could be possible that at some future point I'll prove I'm a Twitter user for 10 years in good standing or with this many followers in the form of a verifiable credential that I could use to log into another site without Twitter ever knowing. But with that new site being able to trust that that data is accurate and complete. So that's really cool. It doesn't work for blocking folks either. It's not meant for no fly lists or sanctions lists. This is really about just proving positive things. Although in a distributed ledger that's assumed to be complete, the absence of say, you know, if I show that, hey, I've got a valid driver's license, right? And that's checked in the ledger. By checking in the ledger one also can check to see if there's ever been a recording of a revocation of that license. Say I have been arrested for DUI and lost my driver's license. The DMV can issue a retraction or a, you know, kind of a pull back that license. And that can be seen by the bar owners. They know, OK, I've lost my driver's license. So that system, you know, if you build upon the sense that the blockchain ledger is complete for those purposes, then they can see there has been no revocation. And that that provides an extra layer of trust in the system. It also doesn't mean everybody self attests all the information. This is not just about me claiming who I am and claiming I'm over 21 and I'm actually 19. All of this is about about verifiable data, right? And most importantly, it's not about removing the need for governments, nor is it about expanding the role of governments. I want to be very clear. Right now we tend to overload social security numbers and driver's licenses and other things for the purposes of identity or the purposes of credit checks and those sorts of things. And that's a dangerous trend, right? That's one where we see privacy breaches all the time. We see people's credit history ruined through credit fraud. We can do this better. We sincerely can. And that's not by casting government as the enemy, but by saying, are there ways to reduce the burden on government of the digital systems that we implement? And I think this is this is a big key to that. So, so sovereign ID inside Hyperledger has evolved quite a bit. I originally, so back at the very beginning of Hyperledger, we had one technology framework called fabric. But it was pretty clear that fabric had a certain point of view on how smart contracts should work, how consensus should work. And that was designed for, you know, not so much the set of use cases, but a deployment paradigm that was not necessarily the one answered everything in blockchain and distributed ledger. So we opened the door as an umbrella to other projects. And very quickly, a group stepped in from Evernim, a startup company based out in Utah, that actually some folks who I've known for 15 years in the digital identity space played a role in starting. And Evernim said, do we think there's something really here in this self sovereign identity space? We're going to jump in. They wrote a technology that became Hyperledger Indie. And that is software to run on a node of a distributed digital identity network. That common layer for a blockchain is what's implemented by Indie and actually go into that in a little bit. And that project took off. It became the basis for a network hosted by sovereign, the sovereign foundation. Sovereign is think of them a little bit like ICANN in that they are a governance organization for a decentralized blockchain network. And they, there's a whole kind of story around sovereign and where they are now, but they are still very much alive and serving as a volunteer run platform for verifying digital credentials. And it's a really, it'll be interesting to see where they go. And they've contributed quite a bit as has Evernim to the development of Indie, as have a number of other organizations, including government organizations, which is pretty cool. And then splitting out from Indie are two projects called URSA and ARIES that I'll talk about more in a bit, but URSA is kind of a shared crypto library and ARIES is a collection of software for building peer to peer connections and wallet messaging and key management that is essential to getting this vision to work. So here's more of a structural or architectural kind of diagram for these things. URSA is intended to be kind of like our version of open SSL, right, to be something that other Hyperledger applications plug into and beyond to perform these kind of underlying functions. Hyperledger Indie kind of at the bottom is the the software to run on each node to serve up this network. And then ARIES are those layers that I mentioned built on top. And there's more that we can go into, but I just want to keep things moving a bit briskly. In fact, Indie is really best thought of as the toolkit to build these networks. Sovereign is one kind of those networks. There could be other networks. I know of several that are in development now. And we'll talk about some of the examples at the very end. But Indie is that fundamental software that you need to run to be able to make this whole thing work and be worth doing. Indie is hosted at Hyperledger, of course. It uses Byzantine consensus between those nodes instead of proof of work. There is no token in this network. There's no need for a token, at least fundamentally to make it operate. It is based on the premise of radically trying to reduce the costs of both reads and of writes. Costs should be free. I'm sorry, reads should be absolutely free. It should cost nothing to verify the integrity of a credential I'm presenting. In the same way that reading a domain name into an IP address should be so cheap as to be not even worth metering, not even worth charging for. And writes, arguably, should also be free. Blockchains of all sorts have upper bounds on the number of writes per second that you can support to actually get to global consensus. There's a lot of work going on now to figure out how to continue to reduce the amount of writes that are necessary to support a large number of credentials. Some really exciting stuff happening in that field actually. So the goal as well is to try to bring the cost of writes to zero or as low as possible. But still there's usually some fundamental constraints involved there. So it's all a question of seeing what we can do and how quickly that can be converged. And then finally, Indie is just about the software. It's not about the governance model. It's not about specifying who gets on or not or what the rules are. Again, that's kind of the thing you want to leave to an organization like an ICANN to decide independently for their cohort, for their network of identity providers. In fact, there is a one of the follow ups in the in the as the experts conversation, I'll post a link there to something called the trust over IP foundation, which is really working to build those kinds of governance organizations that will use Hyperledger Indie and areas and other platforms to go and build the complete kind of identity ecosystem out there. So the things you can do with Indie are use it as a way to establish channels between wallets, use it to send and receive messages with high security and privacy. Use it to prove things about yourself to receive and validate proofs and and then create agents that proxy in that into the cloud or to edge devices. It really is about managing your own identity as well, although the presumption is that many people, especially consumers will have custodial agents for their identity information. Likely people like Apple and Google, but hopefully a competitive marketplace of people who can provide those kinds of custodial services for your identity credentials. And so Indie has also a client SDK that makes building these kinds of applications easier. There are several instances out there. I'll go into a bit more depth on the Kiva one, but just in the interest of time, I want to move through the others. I mentioned sovereign has both a live network and a test network up. And then there's one that was put together by the government of British Columbia focused on an application called the org book, which is kind of the organizational equivalent of Facebook. But it's for digital identity for small and mid-sized businesses actually, which is which is pretty interesting to see. Hyperledger areas is much more of a client toolkit designed for building wallets and web interfaces that use and deal with identity information. It is really infrastructure for blockchain rooted peer to peer interactions. And we see lots of wallets today, they're building and using this technology. And then it leverages Ursa, which I'll talk about in just a bit. So there's actually I'll go into more depth on this at the along with Dave at the ask the expert. I just want to kind of keep the pace of this kind of brisk, but you have in areas as well an encrypted messaging system for point to point communication between wallets. Again, just to help with the privacy and the integrity of these of these transactions. A way to try to avoid having to go through a central party for for for any step of verification and even even issuance. And frankly, it's areas is about making digital identity systems more like human identity systems, more like back to that very first set of slides I created. Within Hyperledger, we treat these as three distinct projects and I'll talk about Ursa in a bit. And there's a lot of overlap between the developers on each. They work very tightly together around common standards and the touch points that they all have to each other. There are also working groups that that come into play here. In fact, there's an identity working group at Hyperledger, which covers the field pretty broadly and as it applies to all of our projects. But then looking outside of Hyperledger, what are the standards emerging? What are the big deployments? What are the, you know, position papers people are writing about how identity should work. And then within Hyperledger, we have quite a few special interest groups focused on domains like health care and trade finance and supply chain, social impact, public sector uses. And we see identities seep in to pretty much every one of these use cases. And so there's been a lot of kind of communication between those groups and the technical communities on on what we're building and why they might be a value. Sorry for the repeat. Let me let me just skip ahead finally to talk about Hyperledger. Ursa is a shared cryptographic library that makes it easier to avoid duplicating other cryptographic work and hopefully along the way increasing security in the process. We've put this together to be something accessible to all the different projects at Hyperledger and a place to collect together. The more challenging cryptographic work around especially zero knowledge proofs and other systems. Let me show you how we would do it wrong if we were to do it this way, which is, you know, it's always recommended against to build your own crypto library. There are a lot of people who've gotten in very, very wrong out there. I don't have to cite the examples. It's hard work and it's something that is very hard to do if each project decides to do it on their own. And we're really eager to see communities beyond Hyperledger look at adopting this technology. So it's really to try to fight this kind of monoculture kind of concept and create something in a very developer friendly kind of way, one that makes it hard to use it wrong. That's a tall order, but we're going to do our best just to give you a snapshot of some of the actual interfaces and standards supported. There is a big focus on elliptic curve cryptography on it does cover digital signatures, encryption schemes, key exchange. It is intended to be multi-platform. It is also intended to cover multiple languages, although where new stuff is needing to be written. I think the preference of that community has been to write it in Rust. That does seem to be where the security conscious and performance sensitive interests of our community tend to come together. But we also know that there's a lot of usage of go in the Hyperledger community and publicly and obviously languages like Python and others continue to be important. So definitely would love to see folks join that if they want to learn more. We did also put together some training materials on the Linux foundations segment on edX round Hyperledger in the areas in Ursa just trying to understand that broadly. Enrollment is open and I believe the course has launched. I want to end with some use cases and then I'll dive into questions. I did mention this before, but the government of British Columbia established a network for verifiable credentials for small and mid-sized businesses in the province of British Columbia to be able to use to manage their engagements with government agencies. If any of you have ever started a business, you know that you have dealings with both like local governments like city government, etc. You might have a dealing with a state government and you might have a province government and you might have a dealing with a national government. And if you do business across borders, which increasingly everybody is, you're probably doing that with multiple jurisdictions, right? So, you know, weaving together the official documents you get and the permits you get across all of these organizations is really hard if you're going to wait for all of them to tie their back end systems together to give you one pane of glass, right? That's never going to happen. And so instead, the use of self sovereign identity allows you to say, okay, I will get a business registration from the state of California. I will open my restaurant in San Francisco and so engage with the city of San Francisco. I will pay my federal taxes to the U.S. government. I will get a right to serve alcohol from the county of San Francisco. I will get, you know, like, allows me to serve as the pivot point for all of these engagements and use my business credential issued by the state when I'm applying for, you know, the ability to open a restaurant. You know, the city authorities need to verify the integrity of those state issued credentials, right? So, in the far off future, all of this becomes me serving as that pivot point for proof of identity and everybody verifying the integrity of these documents very cheaply and quickly, right? That's the vision that this group inside the government of British Columbia have been pursuing. And to make things easier, they introduced a degree of centralization, which the long term goal is to kind of tease that apart as well. But it's something called the org book, which is this network of verifiable data around these different organizations using these underlying technologies, indie and verifiable credentials and DIDs to be able to make that the exchange of that information easier to cut down on fraud from counterfeit IDs to make bureaucratic processes much, much quicker, right? To get away from using the fax machine or notaries or other services that today we overly depend upon because we don't know how to trust digital data, right? So, this is a big deal and this is growing quickly and getting a lot of accolades and recognition from other governments who are starting to go, well, maybe we should reform how we deal with digital identity in a similar way. Another example of this is a group called Kiva. Kiva is a for-profit company that was one of the first to really pioneer this concept of microloans, especially international and consumer driven microloans. Find a woman's owned textile factory in Indonesia who is trying to raise $500 and so I can put $50 in and convince nine friends to put $50 more in and we can help them buy the new machine that they need for their factory, right? So, Kiva now operates in many, many countries and they found as they've expanded that they needed to help those countries improve their own ability to manage risk and manage credit bureaus and credit histories so that people who actually do pay their loans back on time are able to get better terms for the next loan that they take out and the next loan they take out. Otherwise, lending rates to account for people who don't pay back because there's no penalty for defaulting, loan rates are like 30% which is just like too high to pay for most startup companies, most businesses to have access to capital. So, they're doing a project with the government of Sierra Leone to implement a digital identity system for Sierra Leone that is based on self-sovereign ID, that is based on these technologies we've talked about, a mix of hyperledger indie and actually a bit of fabric as well. To go and implement for not just credentials for all citizens that could be used for any purpose, financial or health care related, education related, those sorts of things. But specifically to use it to implement a privacy first credit bureau system, one that doesn't work the way it does in the states where three agencies know everything about the payments you make on time but instead where your history is something you own and you can decide to share with a lender or somebody you're applying to for a loan on a very selective basis, but in a way that allows them to make sure that the that record is truthful and that it's complete. I haven't decided to just remove the items that were embarrassing to me that times I didn't pay my bills on time, right? So that's a really interesting development and Kiva is really stepping forward here, but they're working with several agencies in the United Nations, along with obviously the Sierra Leone government to implement this and that approach actually also received certification from ID 2020, which is an organization certifying digital identity projects as being respectful of civil rights and liberties. So some really exciting stuff. There's some other projects out there, something called ID chain coming out of BYU that is getting some traction in the academic world around using these systems to track academic credentials, not just your diploma, but your progress against all sorts of different academic targets. I think of it as your record, but within your control in terms of who that gets shared with in terms of being able to verify the integrity of credentials presented to you if you are hiring, for example, and try to move to just a more privacy first kind of point of view with that. And then finally, I'll mention CU ledger, which is an attempt to somewhat provide the same kind of credit bureau reform in the United States that has been seen by that that the Kiva project is attempting in Sierra Leone and CU ledger is a project of a credit bureau collaborative credit bureaus credit union sorry credit union collaborative credit unions are kind of the the more beneficent and community minded alternatives to many of the standard banks that you see out there. And so it makes sense that they're very focused on working together but also working on behalf and the interest of their customers and giving them some special powers they might not have had before. So that's all super exciting and one hour or 40 minutes or however much you have is way too short to go into the kind of depth that this requires to answer everyone's questions but I'm going to take an attempt to and answer some for the next 10 minutes, and then I'll jump over to slack and join Dave Huesby, who might already even be there on on the ask the experts be channel to answer questions. But I see one question here from Ivan Perez, who asks, does governments do our governments willing to move to this technology as issuers, especially with zero knowledge enabled. It's a really good question governments are used to having a role where they are omniscient about what happens right in the digital systems that they deploy. Some governments are better about this than others. You know, I want to be sensitive and diplomatic here so you know there's some governments who are some countries let me put it this way because it's also about the citizens in those countries. Some citizens and governments who are happy with their governments knowing a lot about about them out of a sense of safety that provides or a sense that sharing that information is better for for harmony or social cohesion and others who don't trust their governments at all and and for good reason right and you know this approach doesn't dictate, you know, one thing or another. It allows people to share information with whoever they'd like to. It allows obviously governments when they issue credentials or, you know, annotate that with additional information. They always can keep that information. What was important though was to come up with an architecture that we believe that started from the premise that the issue of my credentials shouldn't have control over where and how I use those credentials afterward and control, meaning they shouldn't be able to take that away and pretend it never existed. They may be able to issue an update that says that credential that we issued is no longer valid because that diploma that I earned turned out was fraudulent. Turns out I paid off my last couple professors and didn't really earn it right so so that's that's a you have to be able to support that. But then you know if I'm presenting my diploma to somebody they can see both the diploma and the retraction and that's more data. That's better data than if the diploma just disappeared because the academic institution went away or the website went down or they forgot about me right. So governments are starting to warm up to this and governments for the last 10 years have been deploying identity systems that are starting out as centralized perhaps the most successful example of this is in India. Something called the Aadhar, which is a centralized digital identity system for the Indian subcontinent. And it's something that now 1 billion out of the 1.2 billion Indian citizens have an Aadhar ID, I believe it is, but might even be more complete than that. And there's a whole India stack now being built on top of that number. You have to respect the fact that that platform does seem to have brought some social benefits when it comes to making sure people get access to health care and get access to rations when they need it and other other benefits. But but there have also been some clear concerns about civil liberties and privacy even by courts inside of India. So governments are still figuring this out and governments, especially in Europe, especially Canada, especially in other places where there's a strong tradition of privacy as a right baked into their constitutions or laws like GDPR are really eager to understand technology architectures that make that possible because all they've heard so far have been just let leave it up to us will build a big central server out of this. So it's been really great to see experiments like the one I mentioned in Canada and Sierra Leone. There are quite a few developments in Europe, in Finland, in the Netherlands, in Spain that are happening at both national and kind of city levels. But I think in order for this to be interesting, we have to see adoption by the private sector, by nonprofits, by others and make sure government isn't the platform. Government should be a peer, they should be a participant in this just as any government can set up a website now. But fundamentally this network doesn't really need government to operate and it can hopefully take the burden off of government institutions from having to do things they don't really need to do. And still meanwhile leave all of the appropriate kind of functions like issuing driver's licenses and social security cards and that sort of thing and proper regulatory functions to government as well. But this is, and I've seen eyes light up, I haven't seen anybody in government firmly opposed to this kind of approach. It's just sometimes you have to help governments understand that when they've taken a very centralized path, why that might be limiting to their potential future. Sorry, I went off for about 15 minutes on one question, but it's obviously one of my favorite questions in this and it does motivate a lot of why we're involved. And it's really super want to emphasize government has it can be a partner in this and it gives them some real advantages over a centralized approach. I'm looking for other questions that might emerge. I'm looking on the chat here and not sing then. Let's see. I think if we're wrapped up. This is probably a good place to wrap up. So, as I mentioned, Dave Huseby and I will be on Slack on the ask the experts channel be, and I'll jump over there to look at it. Other than that, thank you for coming to the talk and I look forward to engaging all of you on this as time allows. Thank you.


What's up everyone, Takedown here. Welcome back to another video. Recently I've seen Do You Nerd, Tom and Lacy issue an open challenge for video game franchise to keep going and one to bring back and I decided to get in on this open challenge because it sounds like it's going to be a very fun video. Let's get into it and I'll share with you my picks. So at first for the video game franchise that I want to see continue going on is something that a lot of people probably are not going to agree with and for me personally I'm going to say Battlefield games. I absolutely love Battlefield. I love the whole war aspects and I used to play them a lot more previous years. This past year I've been playing a lot more different games but I absolutely love the Battlefield game especially with the new technology, graphics and everything like that. I absolutely love the Battlefield games. The stories are amazing. I love the whole World War One and World War Two aspects of the last two games which is really my niche and what I absolutely love playing. Now I used to play Call of Duty a lot whenever I was younger but Battlefield is definitely more strategic for me. Not only do I love the campaigns from the last two games or even earlier than that but online I love to snipe. In Call of Duty you cannot snipe the right way in my opinion. I love to do the right kind of sniping and with the open maps of Battlefield 1 and Battlefield 5 you can definitely snipe online and just keep moving and it's awesome to have somebody to play with so you can actually strategize whenever you're playing online rather than Call of Duty where even though there's teams it's kind of like every man for himself. Now I know a lot of people hate Battlefield games and especially for the last two have been dissing them because there's a lot more I guess cryptocurrency and different microtransactions you can get for them but I absolutely love the games. They are a lot of fun to me and I would love to see them continuing and I know there's rumored to be right now it's not titled as it's supposed to be Battlefield 6. I don't know what era of war that's going to be related to. Some people say it's going to be the Cold War kind of like Call of Duty's last game. Other people say it might be something else. It hasn't officially been announced but I'm really excited and even past that I would love to see them continue because the graphics have definitely increased and I love the whole war aspect and how online it's more strategic than it is every man for himself. I love those aspects and for the video game franchise that I would love to see be brought back. I'm going to have to go old school with PS2. I'm going to have to go with True Crime. I absolutely loved True Crime. I think there was only two games made for the PS2 and then it never was one ever since but it was more like a Grand Theft Auto style game where you could go and be a cop but you could be a good cop or a bad cop so you can plant evidence on somebody and arrest them or you can arrest the actual criminals throughout the city. You can go through all the districts and basically clean up districts so that lowers the crime rate for each district and it was a lot of fun. I remember the first two games there was True Crime LA and True Crime New York. I honestly can't remember which one I liked better. I think it was New York I liked better but both games were a lot of fun so definitely I would like to see them bring back this franchise and have a new game at a new location. I think that'd be very, very interesting and a lot of fun. We see that Grand Theft Auto for the past years hasn't put out a new game. I think this is something that a lot of people would absolutely love where it's kind of like a Grand Theft Auto style game except you are the cop and you get to decide whether or not you're going to be a good cop or a bad cop and of course you can play through the story the way you're supposed to but going through free roam basically you can be a good cop or a bad cop. I absolutely love that where you can basically harass shop owners. You can go and just arrest people on the streets. You can go to domestic disputes and different real life scenarios that cops have to go through. That was incredible playing it back on the PlayStation 2 so definitely I would love to see true crime brought back some way shape or form. Even if it's a remaster I think that would be a lot of fun to be able to play those games once again. So thank you Tom and Lacey from Do You Nerd for issuing this open challenge. I did comment on that video saying I was going to make my own video of the video game franchises. I wanted to see brought back in the one that I wanted to see continue and now you guys know exactly my picks. Hope you guys enjoyed this video. See you guys in the next one. Please take care. Peace.


What's up everybody, JZ here for jazzybiscasebrakes.com, we just sold out our last filler to unlock Contenders Optic Picker Team Number 3 with this last filler here to give away two spots in the team right now. So again guys, this is 2021 Panini Prism NBA Cellopak Break Number 401, 30 total spots, everybody gets a round on Team NBA, Novak Commons, ship. So first we'll do the break, round of my tests, renames, teams, distribute the hits out. And at the end we're going to get the original list, let me actually duplicate this, and let me paste in the names again. And then basically guys, like I said, we'll randomize the names, top two names get spots in the team random, which will be coming up next. So let's do the pack filler first guys, roll, two and a one and a two three times, good luck. One, two, three. So that was three, Kev and a Michael, and we're using psychic science, the round of my work on this computer has just been a little weird, I don't know if we have to like clear cookies and stuff, but I feel like maybe because it's a big day on Friday, everybody's on round of my work, so it's a little slow. So I'm just using the dash rule there and then we're using psychic science for the robust randomizer. Now we go three times on the teams, one, two, three. Wizards, down to the Grizzlies, so again stick to what you got, just a quick little filler pack. Jay Crowder, Annie Cassius Winston, green, Halliburne, under gun. Alright, switch scenes, and here we go guys, so again, dash rule there, customer names, remember everybody gets a chance, only top two get into the next team round of break, which is right here. Here we go guys, top two, roll, three to three, six times, one, two, three, four, five, six. And boom, that was six times, and let me show you guys of course, remember it does do a time stamp at the bottom so you guys can know it's legit, it just doesn't tell you how many times I randomize it, but that was six times. And Brian and Steve Herrick, congratulations, you guys have won the two spots in the team random after six times. So there you go guys, we're going to paste your names in there, and coming up next is the team random, so unlock Pikachu number three of Optic, thanks guys.


Colleagues, thank you. Welcome to the Policy Trade Value Chains team, PTVC, and all objective of our program is to really understand how do public policies on the one hand and institutions, organizations created by market stakeholders on the other affect performance of domestic agri-food value chains and international agri-food value chains. Overall, we conduct research on value chain performance, upgrading innovations and competitiveness issues, focusing on livestock and livestock product value chains, and in particular, focusing on small-holder production systems, and really looking at creating analytical and methodological tools to achieve deeper understanding of value chains and stakeholders of agri-food systems. Through RESEX, our other PTVC implements regional trade and integration policy analysis and engages directly with policymakers and contributes to the implementation of the CAREP agenda. So the link to the EURI strategy is really at the heart of EURI strategy is the objective to improve food security and reduce poverty, and really increasing profitability and enhance market access is a necessary ingredient to achieve this. So improving value chain performance and efficiency is a very important aspect of achieving this game and improving access, especially in terms of affordable livestock or animal food products. So why improving productivity at farm level is necessary to increase food availability? It is not sufficient to improve livelihoods and incomes alone. So understanding policies and institutions, markets and trade do matter in this objective. So our strength and weaknesses, I think strength, PTVC has done well on research. Also, in terms of more recently, our publications in 2014, we've increased a lot and have been focusing on this project implementation on the ground in various countries, including Botswana, Swaziland, Somaliland, and also capacity development, not only engaging through with students, but also our partners on the ground, and especially also through RESEX in terms of capacity development. Weakness, as I would say, includes communication, especially internal communication to increase our visibility and also to show our work in terms of what we're doing. We have a limited budget, I think, due to some of the financial issues we've gone through as an organization. So this is a challenge for us. Overall, we can work more on strengthening value chain analysis and frameworks and share that more with others. So our proud moments, I would say, have been our publications, especially in 2014, 11-page review journal articles. We held successful conferences and led them, especially the one in Accra that led to special policy publications in food policy, finalizing the value chain tools in collaboration with other ill-reinvolved fish researchers, and also really the development of value chain tools community of practice, as well as conferences related to that, both physical and webinars, those led by Joe Cadillon, those were great moments, and also more recently we held a policy conference in Botswana with great participation by researchers, policymakers, and farmers from all over the continent and other parts in other countries. So those are just a few to note. Dial moments overall, I think the financial meltdown of, you know, in terms of what we went through as an organization, and of course, PTVC was particularly affected by the CRP, PIM money reduction. This was a very dull moment, certainly. And overall, what we need from other parts of Erie, I would say overall is greater and more meaningful collaboration with other programs. With BioScience, certainly PTVC can provide market analytical work and value chain assessment work. For example, on vaccine, assessing vaccine delivery services, et cetera. With LSE, we can work more together on policy and market-based approaches to deal with climate change challenges, whether it be land degradation, range land management, tenure, land tenure policy issues, and also resilience. Those are some key areas that, where there are opportunities. LGI, obviously, gender is their strength. This is an area that is more being called on to show evidence. We do not do a lot of work on gender, but we do have a lot of data. So collaborating on LGI on gender analytical work would be good. For food safety, certainly looking at economics of food safety issues, cost of zoonotic diseases, and valuation of, you know, food safety and quality attributes of livestock products. So overall collaboration in with other programs and more meaningful, not just backstopping, those would be good. And to be able to have good influential publications together would be an area to focus on and really implement. A dream alliance, I would say, is one that enables us to scale out some of the evidence and, I think, research activities that we are leading and implementing, whether it be an alliance with some of the regional bodies such as SADEC, or SACU, or even African Union, or some of the development banks, to scale out some of the work we're working on. For example, whether it's innovative finance schemes in Swaziland or the competitiveness project in Botswana to say, we've done the work then, let's scale it out to three other countries in the region or so. That will be a dream alliance, whether it be with regional bodies, other local organizations or some of the big development agencies and, of course, they can provide some of their resources to do that. So I end here in answering those questions and thank you for listening. Thanks.


Well, the All Veterans Memorial for Crow and County was dedicated on Veterans Day. And for this week's community spotlight, Sarah Winkelman shows us the new addition to the memorial. 11-11-11 is very significant because that was the signing of the Armistice of World War I, which was the war to end all wars. So on November 11th at 11 o'clock, it only seemed fitting to dedicate the updated All Veterans Memorial. To all veterans who have served or are serving, men and women who have been all over this world defending our freedom. The current memorial only went up to the Vietnam War. In organizers felt it was time to update for veterans a more recent war and conflict. I've had an ad hoc group of veterans that have worked for two and a half years to make this just right. When designing the memorial, extra thought went into what words should be used, including remembering those often forgotten that served in times of peace. Very moving and emotional experience for those people who will see this. A veteran came up here to the front of the memorial and saluted the memorial. That's what it's all about. It's about the Gold Star Mothers and it's about the families that have supported veterans throughout the years and the ages. Nearly 20 years ago, the first part of the memorial was put into place and some of the members of that crew have continued to be involved. Person was an immense pleasure for us to be able to put this up here to honor all the men and women who served in this area. Having this one put up now and how it's turned out and having it built so there's a meditation center in the middle of both of these monuments I think is fantastic. Even though it is not yet quite complete, it already carries a very important message. To honor all veterans every day, not just one day of the year. Nancy hopes this will soon be a destination for veterans and their families.  Reporting in Brainerd, Sarah Winckelman, Lakeland News. The all veterans memorials located in Laurel Street in Brainerd next to the Crowing County Courthouse. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


This is like just completely backwards to how I was taught my entire life and how most people were taught This is what so many people had problems with welcome back to the channel everybody for those of you who are new around here My name is Michael a.k.a. Dr. Chalina and I'm a board certified Diagnostic and interventional radiologist in New Jersey things are a little different on today's video one I'm talking about the American Heart Association, which I never have in the past number two I'm also recording on this fancy new microphone to try to give some better audio to this video So today we're going to be talking about the latest update to the American Heart Association CPR guidelines in COVID patients more specifically that is the new paper They came out with entitled the 2021 interim guidance to healthcare providers for basic and advanced Cardiac life support in adults children and neonates was suspected or confirmed COVID-19 now This has gotten a lot of uproar on Twitter and a few reddit posts here and there but for some reason nobody's really talking about it in the mainstream media and Who better than myself to take on this burden and talk about it? It is very interesting that they would post something like this given the current environment where healthcare workers are feeling very Underappreciated to say the least so let's go ahead and get into this paper and the new guidelines and we'll talk about it Let's go So for this video we are going to break it down in a couple different categories here So for one we're gonna talk about what is the American Heart Association or the AHA? Why should we listen to them? What exactly are the new guidelines that the AHA put out? Should you follow these new guidelines and finally my thoughts on the new guidelines? So let's go ahead and get into it with what is the American Heart Association? So I know what the American Heart Association is But I don't actually know how to describe it So for those reasons I had to doodle it and this is what doodle came up with the American Heart Association is a Non-profit organization in the United States that funds cardiovascular medical research Educates consumers on healthy living and fosters appropriate cardiac care in an effort to reduce Disability and deaths caused by cardiovascular disease and stroke That's why I had to look that up because I couldn't come up with that off the top of my head So the AHA is very important in the medical world because they do put out these guidelines for basic life support and advanced cardiac life Support and they provide these algorithms with us and everybody in the hospital throughout the United States Uses these algorithms when someone is in cardiac arrest now I'm not too involved in the American Heart Association or know too much about them as probably most physicians and healthcare workers don't But what I know the AHA most for is the basic life support classes and the advanced cardiac life support classes that we as Providers have to be certified in in order to be credentialed in the hospital The BLS and ACLS certifications are required every two years I believe and they are very important because they keep you up to date with how to manage critically ill patients in Cardiac arrest so that's the AHA now. Why should we listen to them? Well, like I mentioned prior they do a lot of research and come up with the preferred guidelines for treatment for cardiac arrest And they have come up with a very useful algorithmic approach to treating cardiac arrest and like I mentioned prior Almost every hospital in the United States uses these guidelines and algorithm And it's essentially the standard of care and if you've never heard of this I'll actually pull up one of the images right here of the actual algorithm It is what we use on a daily basis in the hospital I fortunately do not have to use it very often But most critical care medicine specialties and specialties taken care of critical patients will have to use this Likely on a daily basis these algorithms are very simple to understand. They're very simple to perform And it's our best response to treating patients and cardiac arrest. Alright, so now let's get into the meat of this topic What is this new policy that the AHA put out and why are healthcare providers so up in arms about it? So let's go ahead and pull this up here. This is from the AHAjournals.org website I'll leave a link in my description and you can check it out yourselves This is the actual summary of the adjustments to CPR algorithms in patients with suspected or confirmed COVID-19 So first and foremost, we say reduce provider risk So before anybody codes in the hospital, we need to reduce provider risk And how do we do that? Well, healthcare providers can significantly reduce their risk of infection by receiving a vaccine And or a booster if applicable against these SARS-CoV-2 virus So we already know this that's not new a lot of hospitals and healthcare systems are requiring providers to be vaccinated before coming to work I'm not even gonna touch that subject because it can get pretty dicey. So moving on So reduce provider exposure and provide timely care. Okay, obviously that's what we want, right? When someone goes into cardiac arrest time is heart We have to get in there start CPR and initiate the ACLS protocol immediately However, you do not risk your own life to help others. So what do they say here? So first and foremost, we need to rapidly provide chest compressions without delay or interruption Basically, that means when somebody codes or someone's heart stops We have to provide chest compressions first and foremost amongst anything else The next line is what makes people a little concerned about these guidelines Do not delay chest compressions for provider PPE or to place face covering on the patient That's kind of a loaded sentence there. So do not delay chest compressions for provider PPE So like we mentioned, chest compressions are the first thing we need to initiate However, they want you to start chest compressions before donning PPE for yourself Think about that for a second They want you to just run in there start chest compressions before you actually protect yourself This goes against every single thing we were taught about any sort of advanced cardiac life support BLS protocol, all that stuff This goes against all of that because the very first thing you do in all of our teachings That I've been taught forever is check to see if the scene is safe And part of that is allowing yourself to be protected before you go into the scene The scene here is the actual patient's room who is coding And before you go in if the patient has COVID, you must don PPE They're basically retracting all that stuff because now we're vaccinated And now we're invincible, which we know not to be true That we should risk our lives and go in there and start chest compressions Before donning PPE Now, this is what so many people had problems with And myself included, it just seems a little ridiculous for them to tell us to risk our lives Especially in the time where healthcare workers, nurses, physicians are stressed out, overworked And we already feel underappreciated as it is Now you're gonna tell us to just run in there and risk our lives To help someone who is coding without protecting ourselves The next part of this same sentence here, the same bullet point is Do not place a face covering on a patient before starting chest compressions Now I don't know if any of you all have been in too many codes But the first thing we do when we are in a code is not to put a mask on a patient At that point we should be dressed in PPE and everything should be done We should be safe But now they're saying don't interrupt chest impressions by putting a mask on a patient But the only mask we'd be putting on a patient would be a bag valve mask before intubation Nobody goes in there and puts on a mask on the patient That just doesn't happen How are they supposed to get oxygen? It's really odd But anyways, the next line here is Relieve initial resuscitation personnel with providers wearing PPE or AGPs as soon as possible So they're basically saying the first person should just run into the fire And then once it's time to switch chest impressions The next person should have time to have PPE on and they can start chest impressions And that person can be relieved to go put on PPE This is like just completely backwards to how I was taught my entire life And how most people were taught Then they'd want to say don appropriate PPE for AGPs In 95 masks with eye protection, positive pressure airway respirators, gloves and gowns Prior to confirmed AGPs including bad mask, blah blah blah You see here these new guidelines are a little concerning to say the least Then we go down here to the specific additional resuscitation strategies Pediatric and adult cardiac arrest Defibrillate as soon as possible when indicated Do not delay defibrillation for application of masks or other PPE Again, this is basically just saying that we should not protect ourselves And put ourselves in harm's way To help others Now a lot of us take these jobs because we want to help people But we don't want to risk our own lives at the expense of helping people We want to help other people safely and in a safe manner When you see stuff like this It basically puts providers in harm's way And that's where they get angry And I completely see where the anger is coming from After this new paper was released All right, so now let's talk about Should you follow these recommendations? Well, I'm not going to tell you you should follow these recommendations Or that you should follow any recommendations Because that is ultimately your choice Now, I personally would not risk my own life To go into a room to help someone I spoke on this topic briefly during one of my live streams And someone put in the comments It's basically like saying for a fireman To run into a burning house Without putting on his protective gear Because someone is in there That's just not the case He shouldn't have to risk his life To go into the fire without protective gear And that's no different than what we're doing here We shouldn't have to risk our own lives Before going into a patient's room with COVID Because they're coding We should don our PPE as fast as possible And, you know, it takes like 10 seconds And that's the other thing too But I guess we'll get into that in a second Much like the paramedics who are on the front line If they were called to, say, a game fight The first thing they do is assess the scene To make sure it's safe for them To go help someone who is injured They do not run out in the middle of gunfire Because that's what they're supposed to do They wait, make sure the scene's safe Wait till the police get there And then they do assess the situation to help people Asking them to just run out on the fire Is a little crazy, to be honest with you So what are my thoughts on this matter? Well, for starters The most people who are running codes in the hospital Are already wearing at least some sort of PPE So people who worked in the ICU setting Are wearing N95 masks Almost all of them are wearing goggles Protective goggles and protective head covering already That's just what they wear on their 12 plus hour shift For them, I think they're already prepared To run into a patient's room if they need to I don't think this paper matters too much for them But for everybody else including myself Who works in interventional radiology Every now and then we'll have a patient code And every now and then we'll be doing procedures On COVID positive patients And we have COVID positive patients Who are getting CT scans all the time Who could code while they're down there And I, the radiologist who would respond To these codes in the MRI or CT scanner Would not be wearing a N95 mask Or any PPE at that time The only time I ever put on an N95 mask In the hospital is if I'm doing a procedure On a COVID positive patient Otherwise I just have a normal surgical mask on So for myself, I do take this kind of personally I don't think I would run into the room And start CPR on someone with COVID Without putting at least an N95 mask or goggles on After all, it takes about 10 seconds And I don't think that 10 seconds Is going to make that bit of a difference Especially when talking about putting my life at risk And actually for this video I tried to find data on the survival rate For patients who code in the hospital The only thing I could really find Was something that was a little outdated But differentiate the average survival to discharge rate For adults who suffer in hospital cardiac arrest Is around 17 to 20 percent So one in five patients essentially Make it out of the hospital after a code So even if everything goes perfectly smoothly And the patient gets return of spontaneous circulation The patient still may not be discharged out of the hospital alive So those survival rates are not in the favor of the patient And we also have to keep in mind That the patients who are coding Are severely sick to begin with And a lot of times are in multi-system organ failure Especially from COVID or other comorbidities So risking our own lives as providers When we know that there's 20 or even less percent chance Of that patient actually maintaining out of the hospital alive Puts us in a very difficult position That is basically it for this video I just wanted to shed some light on the AHA guidelines Because I don't think they have gotten the publicity That they deserve And for some reason the media has not covered it at all Here you are, here are the new guidelines Let me know in the comments what you think I think now you know what I think about these guidelines And I want to know how you will respond to these guidelines Or if you disagree with me Or just your thoughts in general So let me know in the comments below As always, stay safe out there Make sure you gently tap on the subscribe button For this channel If I'll manage spamming tiktok And I guess I'll see you all on the next video Bye


Hi everybody, this is Michelle Walling from N5D Network. This is episode 17 and the name of this is Do I Have to be Thin to Ascend? And you may say, well, that's just an odd name. But it's really in response to a comment that I got on a video. As you know, Greg and I just returned from the N5D Superpower Activation Conference and we've been putting every one of our videos up for free in service to humanity to share the information. And one of the comments that I received was this. Some of the information was correct, but these two individuals are far from ascension as nobody who lets themselves get that overweight and out of shape could possibly be connecting to anything but Burger King and McDonald's. So I find that actually a little comical, but in a way I find it judgmental and egotistical. Meaning that only the ego would say something like that, definitely not coming from the heart. So how do you deal with comments like that? Well, I take it as a good opportunity to actually share my experience with my life and with my past lives and how I got to be the size I am and why I'm happy with the way I am and why there's other people that may be the size that they are and whether it's extra skinny or extra large, it doesn't matter. It's what's inside that matters. And I think most of you know that, but I thought you might be interested in hearing some of my life story. So there are many different human extraterrestrial mixtures on this planet. Most of the human templates on this planet have at least 12 extraterrestrial DNA additions to them. Some have tweaks, they have families of different, more of this gene or more of that gene or some people on the planet are hybrids. They have their mother and their father conceived and then they were abducted and taken up into a spaceship and added a third extraterrestrial gene into the mix. It's true. And so thus you have hybrid children who are more like extraterrestrials than humans, than the average human, let's say. So we all have our extraterrestrial lineage, as well as any kind of tweaks that may have been made over the lineage as far as inserting extraterrestrial DNA of different families, different races. And then we all have our personal bloodline, heritage here from this body that we incarnated into. Now, we made a contract with the collective that at this time in this lifetime, the majority of us would be meat eaters, meaning that we would succumb to the system that was set up to enslave us, dominate, control us and poison us, which does include meat. And as most people know, a lot of the meat that is killed, the animals aren't treated right and they have consciousness and they have feelings. And a lot of them are slaughtered in unsavory conditions, which causes emotional information to be stored into the meat when they die. But that's not really what this video is about. As we begin to learn, we make choices and we begin to turn away from these kinds of meats that you may find in your supermarket and then we move more towards organic. So if we're going to eat meat at all, we make sure that it's organic. So we know that that's not it, right? That's not the reason why some of us carry a little bit more weight than others. I think it does have to do with how active you are and, of course, your lifestyle and what you eat. A lot of people say you are what you eat. And that's a real, that's a truthful statement in a way, but it's also very cruel because I'm not a cow.  So really what I wanted to cover though is that we've been inundated with fast food in this reality. And fast food was definitely a thing that I grew up with my whole life. It wasn't something that I had much choice over because of the way that I was raised. We'll start with going back a little bit. I woke up at the age of 40, as most of you know, which was only five and a half years ago. And before that, I had absolutely no idea whatsoever what they were doing to our food. Truly didn't. I had, when I was married at my second marriage, I had a lot of money at the time and I didn't cook. So we found ourselves eating out most of the time where I would go to a place called Central Market and buy meals, pre-prepared meals, bring them home, warm them up. And that was good. Before that, my first marriage, I was a mother and I worked. And I came home and did all of the household chores, including cooking, which I don't do. So as you can imagine, it was very convenient for me to stop by McDonald's or order a pizza, Taco Bell at the time before my body began rejecting these things. That was part of my lifestyle. And that started, let's go back to college. When I was in college, I didn't have any money. I lived off very cheap fast food, cheapest I could get. Anything that I could put in my mouth that would fill my stomach up I ate. I also lived on potatoes. Potatoes was a very big staple for me. And weenies, weenies and cheese when I was in college and I didn't have a lot of money. So these are things out of necessity. I was very grateful to have something to eat. But really, I think it all started in this lifetime as far as not eating ideally when I was born and my parents divorced when I was seven and my dad was the caretaker. Now, he made chicken fried steak was his homemade specialty with homemade gravy, mashed potatoes. He was really good at that. So probably once a week, maybe once every two weeks, that's what we would have if we didn't have fast food. There's a devilish place called Water Burger in Texas that has really good hamburgers and fries that we would eat. And we ate some McDonald's. I never did like Burger King just for the record. But things like, you know, we didn't eat well. We didn't eat like right. We ate well, but we didn't eat right. So I learned that that was normal for me. And I didn't really have a weight problem most of my life. So going through when my dad and my parents separated at seven and my dad cooked, he used to make things like spaghetti and meat with Colby cheese and homemade fries, homemade, you know, fried potatoes and Crisco oil and things like that. Yeah, we're talking my dad was a meat and potatoes kind of guy. Then his father, my grandfather, was a very generous man. And when he had extra money, he saved up for every weekend. He tried to bring the family together for community family gathering. And he would invite all of their friends, all of their business associates together with all the family. There could be 40 people, you know, at the house and he would sit outside all day starting early in the morning and fire up his smoker and put half a cow on there with a whole bunch of sausage, make all kinds of mashed potatoes and things like that. And my great grandparents would make pies and all kinds of varieties of pies. We had a smorgasbord. We had more than we could ever eat. And when we didn't do that and we got together, we'd go out to eat Mexican food or something like that. That was a tradition in our family. So that's the way I grew up. And I didn't know anything about how that was affecting me until I woke up to, you know, out of the fog, out of the programming, that that's not very good for you. Now, I didn't really struggle with the weight most of my life until I got pregnant. And that was a twofold thing. The first was I knew that I was only going to be pregnant once. I knew that I was only going to have one child. And somewhere deep down inside, I think I knew that this was going to be my last lifetime here because kind of a selfish type thing, I decided that I was going to eat whatever my body craved. And whatever my body craved out, I ate. I would eat for one and a half, maybe two. I gained, you know, probably 20 pounds over the normal, which isn't too bad. But I did get that weight off. And I always had a metabolism problem. And that probably stems from the thyroid problem and that probably stems from my family lineage. I'm not going to own this because I'm trying to change this. But my grandfather was over six foot four and over 350 pounds. My father was kind of a tall man, but my uncle, especially, he's still alive. My uncle's about six foot two, six foot three. He's probably close to 280, maybe even 300, depending on your fluctuates back and forth. So, you know, you can probably eat just as much as you did one year as the last year.  And you have to exercise just a little bit more. Now, when I was born, I was born with a knee problem. My knees would not, they were floating. And when I was a baby, I couldn't crawl on my knees. I scooted on my butt until I learned how to walk. And my parents just thought it was funny. You know what? What's wrong with you? My baby doesn't crawl. That's okay. But I realized that I hadn't had a problem. And I started having knee injuries and doing sports in high school where my kneecap would slip out of the socket. They call it something like a sub-bloxed patella. Now that is more painful than having a baby. It was horrifying. And it wasn't until I got insurance when I was in my probably 30s that I had surgery.  And the other one was done orthoscopically. Now, it seems that since that time, I went through a divorce and I was a single mom. And I didn't have a lot of time, didn't make a lot of time for myself or to exercise. And then in between my first marriage and my second marriage, when I got married the second time, I had time to exercise. And I did because if I didn't, then I would have gotten probably a lot bigger than I did then because I had the money to buy whatever I wanted anytime to eat. And then we traveled a lot. And like I said, I didn't cook, so we ate out. But after my awakening, I made a really big lifestyle change as far as sodas, alcohol, sugar, inorganic foods, processed foods. So I made some huge changes. So it's not like I don't sit around and eat, process foods or overeat. My issue is the lack of moving around. And it does have to do with my knees, my back, my physical problems that I have now that I believe that I'm working on and healing from probably past lives. I mean, it's really obvious when you're born with a knee thing, it's got to be from past lives. So a contract that I made that I've revocated. But really mainly working 10 to 12 hours a day sitting in front of a computer really doesn't leave a lot of time for yourself. So I'm really working on trying to make more time for myself. But the bottom line is that I love my body. And I love the way I am, just the way I am. And it will be nice to get some more exercise, especially when it warms up and I can get back in the pool because the pool has less stress on my joints. I might have a little bit of a hip issue that comes and goes, but mostly my knees and my back. And so when you carry a little extra weight, it's stressful on everything. So you're kind of in a catch 22. And I do realize that, but I'm perfectly fine with who I am and acknowledging that this is a vehicle. And I'm trying to do the very best I can in the situation that I'm in with my whole life and with my family's DNA. I'm very surprised that it hasn't gotten way worse than it could have if I just simply wouldn't exercise at all or if I would simply just eat whatever I wanted. Or if I was eating GMOs, what happens with GMOs is that your body knows it's toxic and also with the pesticides and chemtrails that fall on the food and are in the soil.  So, you know, there's so many factors involved in, you know, being part of this matrix that is very uncompassionate to judge someone else for what they're going through. And that would be also, you know, your past lifetimes because everything's happening at the same time. Well, I think that my second husband was probably a king at one time and he had everything he could ever want. And that's how we used to live. And, of course, that didn't make me happy. But I'm sure that I also had, so I was with him when he was a king. I wasn't the queen. No, far from it. But I also had many lifetimes I know where I start to death. And so I always, you know, want to, I always find myself planning my next meal. And, you know, even if it's a really good meal, I just want to make sure that I have my organic food, that I have everything lined up. And that I also have an issue with blood sugar to where if I start getting my blood sugar gets low, if I don't eat, I get a little grumpy. So, of course, these are all things that can be fixed. And I just kind of live with it right now. But what I did really want to talk about is this perfection of your DNA and ascension. And that has nothing to do with your ascension is not going to happen because you're skinny. You're not just going to ascend and float up like a balloon. It could happen to skinny people, but not because of the way your physical body is. And I carry, my soul is a high vibrational soul. And I came into this body as a child with a different vibration than most other kids. And they didn't want to play with me. They didn't choose me to play in different games and things like that. And I just felt like an outsider. And that's because I carried a different vibration. And my body and my soul vibrate at two different levels. And eventually, what you really want to do is you do want to try to vibrate your physical body. It's a holistic view. You want to vibrate your physical body at a rate that can meet your soul's vibration. And also work with, it works with your body to be able to bring in more of your soul essence. So one of the things that I do is I bring in more of my soul's essence when I'm grounding to the planet. And I ground in that cosmic energy to the planet. And that's one of the exercises I do to try to help humanity ascend, wake up and ascend. So sometimes I feel like I need to have a bigger base, so to speak, to hold a lot of that light. And I know that may sound a little weird, but... And it's not really an excuse, it's such a thought, because I have no excuses. All I have is, you know, observations as to why this vehicle is like it is. It's me. It's who I am in a physical manifestation. So I think as we do work more on ourselves and connect and bring in more light, that light is going to keep shining on our DNA and lighting up the codons. And I think one time that I really stopped caring about worrying about dieting and more focusing on my inner self and my soul was in 2012, when I truly thought we had a chance at making a shift. And that would mean that we could have our DNA activated and that we would be able to create whatever physicality that we wanted. Which could mean we could grow our hair long, we could grow it short, we could have it green, we could have it blue. You know, we could change our eye color. We do have to work with the template involved in this DNA body. Or we could even bring in a template from another lifetime happening at the same time. So that's very interesting. But you have to keep in mind, you know, the compassion for other people. They're used to seeing you a certain way. It's really going to freak them out if you're at least not you. Even if you look 25 when you're actually 45, at least it's still you, right? So when that didn't happen, I knew that there was something kind of wrong. I really have always said that I felt like I didn't feel like 2012 was going to be the end or the end of the world or any major thing, but I did think it was going to spark sooner than now this DNA activation because I know that's what I'm here for. So secretly, I have to say that I've never really worried about my body that much, the size of my body and what other people think about me because I know that one day I will either leave this body or I will be free of it and go on back home to where I came from or I will transform this body and create whatever body I'd like. So it's just a body. It's just a vehicle. So it's very silly to look at other people and say, here she is not going to ascend because of the way they look and that includes skin color and race and all kinds of things, male or female, you know, anything. Also, I wanted to say that food actually serves me. And it does that because like sometimes when I'm on my radio show, I get very high vibrational and when I'm done, I literally feel uncomfortable because I am vibrating so high and I need to eat something to ground or I need to ground. And I could go out and hug a tree and that would just make me, you know, even more. I could probably pop out of my body. My job is to be in the body grounded. So I always eat something a little after a show. I've always found that potatoes, starchy things like pasta and bread have grounded me. And so it's like a double-edged sword, you know, because my soul is vibrating high and to stay in the body, I need to ground. And I don't know how or why that works, but it's always made me feel very comfortable. One of the best diets I ever did was that Atkins diet where you only eat meats and vegetables. You don't eat any carbs or sugar or anything like that.  I was eating, when I say best, I mean, that's when I lost the most weight, gained it all back. But I was eating meats and bacon and eggs and cheese and things like that. And that's not the way to live either. So yeah, so emotional eating. I also am very, you know, have used food very many times under a lot of stress to just calm myself down. And it does something with the brain and it sends forth some kind of calming aspect for me. So, you know, when it comes to being a breatharian, not having any food or having a love affair with food and being able to use it to calm myself and to do my job here, I have to say I would choose food over being a breatharian. Now, as far as a vegetarian, yes, eventually if it's going to take a while to get to this point where we ascend, I've already cut down on meat. I very rarely eat organic beef, but I do eat chicken and I only eat organic chicken. And every now and then go out to a restaurant. It's all in moderation for me. You know, the restaurant's not going to have anything organic. I had some lobster the other night, Wednesday night. And it did make me feel pretty heavy, but it did ground me. And it's all part of this experience for me. Secretly, I also have had many thoughts once I woke up that if this is my last lifetime here, I'm not going to sit and worry about not eating this or that except for the obvious things like the poisons. But more of blessing my food, raising its vibration, allowing myself to have a relationship with food and loving the food and allowing it to do what I need to be able to get by to do my job. Because I'm holding a lot of energy. So that's just where I'm at. And that's kind of like, you can see from past lives, you can see from my current life, you can see from emotional, I had a lot of emotional issues. Thank goodness I had food to make me feel better. Because, you know, when you're going through these things before you're awakened, it can be very horrible, you know. And if you don't have anybody to share experiences with or to help you move through those things, you got to use what you got, right? So, but I never really had, you know, a really lifelong issue. I would say that I'm pretty lucky so far that I don't weigh more than I do. But if I did, it wouldn't matter because I know what's coming. And I know it's not going to keep me from ascending because I know who I am. And I know that I've done my inner work. So, let's see what else I wanted to say. So, the person that made this comment surely didn't listen to the video because it did talk about what's most important right now is being in your heart and being compassionate and loving. And many people have said that as long as you're a loving person and you're compassionate and you're more than 51% in service to others rather than being service to self, that those people are going to make it, whether they're spiritually awakened or not, whether they're religious or not, their vibration does not have any boundaries. You know, vibration is what it is. You can't fake vibration. You can't say that you're doing everything by the book perfectly and judging other people. So, that's not doing it by the book in perfectly. No one in their heart would really do that to someone else. So, how do you deal with it? Well, you can do what I did. You can talk it out. You can let it flow through you. You can share your experience with other people. If there's one person out there thinking that I go and eat at McDonald's and Burger King every day and that I'm not going to ascend, well, I certainly need to talk to that person and perhaps other people that might have that judgmental view of things. But it's not that their thinking is wrong. It's just that it's not on the same level of understanding as mine and I don't understand why people who are in their heart, well, I just know that people that are in their heart wouldn't do that. But interestingly enough, this person, their last name, had Arian, A-R-Y-A-N, and that made me think, because it made me think of the Nazi Hitler-Nazi regime where they were trying to kill everyone that didn't have the perfect look. Of course, they weren't fat then because they didn't have any food at all. But we're talking blonde hair, blue-eye, white skin. So, it kind of makes me wonder if that's just a program carried over from when they're past lives. So, you know, I judge not because they don't know what they're saying or doing, but it's time to wake up. It's time to be the God source that we are. And that means being responsible for your own actions and being aware of what you're saying and doing to other people because whatever you put out comes back to you. So, I guess that's really, there's probably more I wanted to say, but I just want to give everyone hope that no matter what you look like, no matter if you can't afford organic food, as long as you love yourself and you do that inner work and you raise your vibration, your physical body is not completely indicative of your vibrational level. That's within yourself and your heart. And yes, while we're working to change within to have an external reality of what we call perfection, the thing is, is we're perfect just like we are because we're doing the best we can. And until we have more tools to work with, this is what we need to love. We need to love our physical body for giving us this vehicle to do this work in. And I do that. And so I'm very comfortable with that. I'm also very lucky to have a partner who does not ever, ever put any pressure on me to lose weight. And I would like to look good in a bathing suit. I would like to do, you know, have more energy to do things and I will, when the pool gets a little warmer, one of my favorite places to exercise and I do encourage everyone to go on this journey with me to exercise a little bit more. I do work on the computer a heck of a lot and it's no different than when I was in the corporate world and sat behind a computer all day long as well or in the car back and forth. So I do want to say that it was, I guess another reason why I felt like I needed to work through this is because I worked very, very hard on the conference. I mostly organized everything myself and I mostly created everything myself to go with the conference and then I had these beautiful volunteers that helped set up many things.  I can do that. That's no big deal. But I gave it everything I had and so I hope that, and that's from my heart and it did have a very physical toll on me as well and being around other people was absolutely fabulous and the energy in the place was just healing and wonderful but it was physically and spiritually exhausting for me to be there for everyone and hold the space. So yeah, people sometimes, they don't realize the work that some of us do requires just a different vehicle, requires a different outlook and requires a different way of looking at things and while this may not work for you, I just want to share my information with you and let you know that if you are struggling or having a problem with your weight or with the way people think about you, my advice is don't give a shit about what other people say because they're clearly not understanding if anyone has the gumption to say anything about the way you look and that's about it. So I want to send my love to all of the large people, extra large people, medium people, small people and extra small people. I love you all and I thank you for listening to my video. Bye.