From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. Heading into the second half of last year, some investors felt that the semiconductor run-up last summer was a harbinger for a broader tech rally. And that thesis proved prescient and rewarded managers who took on risk at that time with leading firms and semiconductor security and enterprise software. The question is, of course, where do we go from? From here, hello and welcome to this week's theCUBE Research Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we welcome back Ivana Dilevskaya, the founder and chief investment officer at Speer Invest NASDAQ SPRX. Ivana, great to see you again. Thanks for taking some time. Thanks for having me, Dave. Yeah, you bet. Last time we had you on was August of 2023 and, you know, my bad, I apologize that it took so long to have you back. But at that time, I asked you about NVIDIA and you were very strong in your conviction that we're heading into what I'll call data center spending supercycle. And rather than read this, let's listen to what you said at the time. Please, Alex, play the clip. Well, David, we still love NVIDIA going into the next cycle. We believe we're in the early innings of data center spending. So you're just starting to see companies like Microsoft, Meta, Google, expand their CAPEX budgets going into next year. So we believe NVIDIA is going to benefit from that. They're unique. Now, Ivana, that was pretty forward thinking. And well, it's certainly not dollar for dollar. Last quarter NVIDIA's revenue equated to about half of the CAPEX spend from the big three hyperscalers. So there's some kind of correlation there. And that premise, combined with what we said at the top really paid off for your fund. You made the previous statement back in August. And you can see here your fund performance relative to the S&P 500, the NASDAQ. You told us at the time you were fully invested and were pretty risk on setting up for a good run in the second half and obviously into 2024. You were right on. And the NVIDIA trade, of course, has powered a number of high flying companies beyond the MAG7. So the question is now what? How are you thinking about the market going forward? The cloud and the hyperscale is loading up on GPUs as is Meta to train Lama 2 and Lama 3 at the wood trimmed her NVIDIA holdings in 2023 and missed the recent move. And other investors are starting to show some concerns about the inflated nature NVIDIA stock and maybe over buying of GPUs. Although I saw Piper today upped its target price on NVIDIA. You've done very well with the stock. What are your thoughts going forward? Are you taking some profits? The profits are you holding firm? Looking to buy pullbacks. What's your thinking? Well, Dave, we believe we're still in the early innings of this tech cycle and we're just crushed the surface of the GPU opportunity. So we still see a lot more upside than several years actually of upside here. If you look at the earnings estimates for NVIDIA, while they've increased for the current year, if you look out to 2025, 607, the street is assuming less than 20% Kager in the earnings for the data center segment versus the prior cycle we saw over 40% Kager for data center. So we still think that the street is underestimating the earnings potential. If you look at the valuation, it actually screens quite reasonable. NVIDIA is trading close to the middle to the bottom of the EV to EBDA range on a one year forward basis. So this is really what we follow closely to assess whether we are at the peak of the cycle or we're in the middle of the cycle. And right now, it seems more like we're closer to the middle or the beginning rather than the peak. And I tend to agree with that. I mean, if you think about the hyperscalers and they're flush with cash and they're investing all this money in to get these GPUs, we have a new set of GPUs coming out, the H200s, and correct me if I'm wrong, but that investment, that CAPEX really doesn't hit the income statement. I mean, maybe partial for the depreciation of those assets, but what else are these hyperscalers gonna do with their cash?  I mean, yeah, maybe a little bit of AMD, maybe Intel will have something, but NVIDIA's got by far the strongest play. Do you agree with that? That's right, I think you're spot on. And if you even listen to how they're talking about building out these GPU clusters, it's not necessarily a one time investment. This is an ongoing investment that will be needed by the hyperscalers and enterprises. So the large ones have really already gotten a head start, like Meta is one of the ones that's the most heavily invested in GPUs, but they were just a block force the other day about the new cluster that they're building. And you can just by reading that, you can see that this is not a one time investment. It's something that will be ongoing as new models come to market and as inference and applications come to market. So I think back to my prior point, you really are seeing how this is just the beginning. Yeah, these clustering architectures are back. And the other thing Jensen said in the call last quarter was that 40%, and he said that might be even conservative, 40% of their deployments were for inference. And then one of the Wall Street analysts, I thought asked a really good question, he said, is it right to assume that today's training GPUs will become tomorrow's inference GPUs, the importance of that being there'll be a depreciated asset and essentially be a free for these data center managers to just deploy at inference. So how do you think about that? What were your thoughts on those comments? Well, so that's one very interesting thing that I think the market misunderstand. People think that model training is a one time thing. And then it's like, okay, you're done, you've trained the model moving on to inference. Model training is actually an ongoing process. So the new information you are getting from the inferencing, you need to feed it back to the model and train the model. And you need to constantly upgrade the models, right? So I think that goes back to the core of the misunderstanding of how this is not a one time investment that needs to be made, but an ongoing thing where like, you're running the applications which gives you even more data to feed the models with. Okay, let's take a look at your portfolio if we can pull this data off your website. NVIDIA's run up has obviously made it your number one holding. AMD has bumped up as well in the leaderboard, Marvell and Semis. You've also taken on more exposure to cybersecurity with Zscaler, Sentinel-1, and of course, CrowdStrike and some other enterprise software names that we've talked about before, like Snowflake. Confluent, I think is relatively new for you as our Shopify and HubSpots. That was interesting to see them on there. We already talked about NVIDIA and we have some survey data later that we plotted many of these names. So let's keep this at a high level for now if we can. The right hand side of this graphic is a bit dated, but it still shows your general approach in terms of sectors that you like. So how are you thinking about your portfolio mix and then we can get into some of the specific names and more details. Yeah, absolutely. So we still see upside in hardware. So we still have a large position in the names that you, in the companies that you mentioned. We do as well have a very large exposure to cybersecurity. What's been happening this year as we went in towards the end of last year, people decided to take a lot more risk and they gravitated towards this higher valuation software stocks that ran up significantly into ERN. However, what we've seen this year is a pretty significant pullback. So when we're looking for new opportunities, it's really the software side where we're finding a lot going on, especially post this earnings season when you had like many stocks just get completely destroyed on earnings. So even though from high level perspective, it seems like the Nasdaq is near its highs, the indices are near highs. If you look under the foot, actually a lot of stocks have really sold off. On the peak, it all goes back to interest rates. People are nervous now about the Fed when they're exactly gonna cut. And usually these sort of run-ups in interest rates create very good entry points for technology. So while we still like hardware, I think that's a still great place to have a location to going into 2025. There are a lot of video and syncretic opportunities here post some of these earnings shifts that we've seen. Great, thank you. I want to also ask you about the AI effect and how you think about that. Here's a graphic from our partners at ETR that shows net score, which is a measure of spending momentum within a sector on the vertical axis and the presence in the survey, pervasion if you will, on the horizontal axis. This is 1700 enterprise IT decision makers. And so again, you've got that spending momentum. That's the net percent of customers in the survey spending more in a sector. So a couple of points and then I want to get your thoughts. The first point is that the AI momentum is showing signs of deceleration right after we exited COVID, but then it's taken over as the number one position on the vertical axis since the announcement of chat GPT. And now our data shows that 44% of customers say their Gen AI initiatives are being funded by stealing from other budget buckets. So in watching this data over time, many if not most of the other sectors have been contracting on that Y axis and that red line of 40% by the way indicates extremely elevated momentum. There's one more data point that we can discuss and I want to get your thoughts on this. This next graphic shows the LLM innovators which are private companies, only private companies we've superimposed where our data suggests Metis Lama would fall on the spectrum the end of the open source effect. And this shows intent to engage on the vertical axis, we call it net sentiment and then mind share on the horizontal axis. And what you see in the upper right, it's so far off the charts we had to highlight it as open AI. It's literally off the charts and it's created a very wide gap between itself and the rest of the LLM pack. So Vana, you have this situation where enterprises are spending on AI experiments. They're stealing from other budgets to do so. Microsoft and Open AI have taken the mind share mantle and they have incredible momentum and the rest of the world is catching up. So how do you play this? You're famous for doing deep research into the value chain. So help us understand how the AI momentum fits into your investment thesis and how the companies you track and like are leveraging AI, how do you play this? Well, I think your data is spot on with what we're seeing in earnings that they're getting reported right now. There is a lot of excitement in AI but not a lot of it is showing up just yet in the numbers. And the reason why it's showing up is that as you said, basically there is spending on AI but it's getting offset by cuts in other spaces. So the overall spending that will come to a vendor may not look significantly higher than what it would have been without AI and a stable or accelerating macro environment. But the important thing to keep in mind for investors is that we are still in a very tough macro, right? So if you're seeing companies still being able to grow 30 plus percent even though that may be a little lower than what you would have expected those are still very solid numbers in light of the current macro. So AI is showing up a little bit. It's basically adding few hundred basis points that are maybe now getting offset by what's been taken out by by macro. But if you're a long-term investor and can step back you are gonna see as AI accelerates you're gonna see it show up in the numbers we've seen investors kind of like going all in on the hype but then once the numbers come through and not many patient investors are there to stick around and see the benefits. You're right about the macro. Our data suggests that last year IT spending grew about 3.4 percent. IT decision makers came into this year expecting a 4.3 percent increase for 2024 but it's all back loaded. It's all second half. Q1 and Q2 were below that mean and we're just getting in the April data now so we'll be reporting on that but there's no question it's still a tough macro. All right let's look at some of the companies that you own and or used to own and see what the survey data says about them. This chart from ETR like the one we showed earlier plots net score which again is spending momentum on the vertical axis and penetration into the data set on the on the X axis. And we plotted a lot of the names that you own and some you've trimmed like Koopa and Cloudflare and we've also put in some other names like Metaslama, Intel and SAP just to balance out the chart and give a context and we purposely left off the hyperscalers even though they're buying a lot of NVIDIA GPUs because they're so dominant and they tend to skew the data. So a couple of things. First, many of the companies that you own are above that or near that 40 percent mark so that's you own some firms with a lot of momentum from a customer perspective but let's start with the enterprise software players. You know Snowflake, I want to talk about Snowflake you know Frank Slutman stepped down he's now just the chairman. We saw this with ServiceNow I don't know how closely you were tracking them several years ago. I thought at the time I thought Jim Cramer was going to cry when Frank Slutman stepped down from ServiceNow I think the same thing is happening here but Mike Scarpelli the CFO is still there he committed to three more years he has really run the operations. Shridhar Ramaswamy obviously has AI chops from Google. Have you talked to the company how do you feel about Snowflake? Well the original announcement when Frank stepped down was a pretty big surprise to the market and that's why you saw the stock being hit so hard however if you step back and you look at Snowflake's execution they have been very slow in coming up with new products to the market so if you look at the numbers we would have expected the numbers to positively inflake last quarter but for short this quarter and you really didn't see that you really didn't see that show up in numbers now they're guiding to a little over 20% growth which is not really all that great for a company with this type of positioning in the market especially with what's going on with AI and all the products that they've been talking about so I just attended a customer event yesterday for Snowflake which was very interesting the products that they have been introducing to the market like Cortex they talked about it yesterday and they did a demo of how easy it is to use they're actually super interesting we're just in this period of time where there is not enough demand because of this cloud optimizations to offset what's new coming from this new products that they're announcing which haven't reached critical scale but we're still very positive on the company because as you look into second half you will start seeing contribution from this new product announcement so after walking out of that customer event yesterday I came out pretty positive it will take some time for it to work itself through and get use of these use cases but I still really like Snowflake Okay, great and of course the street has to get comfortable with the new CEO and see some track record there how about console? Absolutely, there is a lot more risk I would say there is a lot more risk to the story but then what it was last year where it was like okay it's just a cyclical downturn you are going to see some sort of a bounce now we're here we haven't seen the cyclical bounce so they are going to need to do something that it's kind of beyond what the market will deliver and deliver on their own product introductions You know, this is nuanced but I'll share this with you in terms of the conversations we've had with Snowflake customers is you know everybody's always chirping about Snowflake price and when a company, you know you hear that about some of the great company service now Oracle but what we have heard is that some customers are doing a lot of the engineering and the data pipelining work outside of Snowflake because it's maybe more cost effective remember Snowflake as you well know essentially resells Amazon infrastructure and so that's a big part of their revenue and so you know they got to keep that up they have to sort of mark that up if you will to maintain their margins now they negotiate really strong deals with Amazon and they pass those savings on to customers but that's a tricky balancing act that Scarpelli has to play he can't cut prices too aggressively because he's relying on that margin and so that's something that we're watching closely has that come up in any of the conversations? I mean if you look at their products they will actually save money compared to what you can build in house so I'm not as worried about that part of the story I mean just going to this demo yesterday it almost seems that like I can make and build some of these products that they were demoing right? So it would be like using LLNs to do sentiment analysis that would pull from either your data or PDFs and they can even like you can use the machine learning tools to forecast whole volume or whatever you wanna forecast so I think the products themselves add a ton of value and I don't think it's something that you can as a customer replicate as a significantly cheaper cost I think it's more a matter of proving these use cases showing them to people and just kind of hand holding them through the process to do it on the platform rather than in house but I don't think cost is the problem I think it's literally just learning about these new tools and products and how they can be helpful Yeah so it's adoption I mean there's a lot of data in Snowflake that the phrase bring the AI to the data so they're in a good position from that standpoint Okay I want to talk about Confluent I mean here you're betting on real time streaming it's built on top of open source Kafka the stock has been kind of up and down but what's your angle there Ivana why do you like Confluent? Well the stock really fell out of favor two quarters ago when they reported basically two customers left the platform and then people started getting all worried about that and then they said oh well one of the customers is actually moving from the cloud back to on premise which was like oh my god like maybe this is happening across the board so digging into the details we did not find the customer loss that's significant I think the stock was down over 40% that day so it ended up being a very attractive entry point entry point for us and as we've learned more about the company data streaming could be as big market as data at rest so this is something that it's a little bit more under the radar than data at rest and a little bit less understood but basically this could be a pretty significant market and what they've done recently with this flink acquisition is basically able to do real time data processing so I think a lot of the investors even like on the analysts call on the earnings call they didn't quite understand what this company does and how this flink will benefit it so I think digging one layer deeper and understanding the size of the opportunity can really make a pretty big differentiation here in the stock price so I think it's gonna be a pretty significant data streaming will be pretty significant opportunity I think what they do is basically able to lower your cost or lower the cost to the customers to do this makes a ton of sense especially the time where people are looking at ROIs and cutting down costs so I think this company will do pretty well again similar to Snowflake they have had some execution hiccups so they will need to prove out their business model and step up their growth from currently the 20s to 30% so as these companies and it basically it's interesting how Snowflake came out it was a one-off Confluent came out it was a one-off where like growth is slowing but then if you look you kind of see a pattern across the board where I think a lot of it is under the hood driven by tougher macro, right? So when you see the macro stabilize I think a lot of these companies will be able to reaccelerate growth which is not really common for this part like in their life cycle Right and you know they're kind of a they're not a direct AI play per se but they're going to benefit them in a way they're more vitamins than they are sort of painkiller and so that maybe takes some time Okay now just moving on you trimmed Koopa and you know picked up Shopify and HubSpot that was kind of interesting What do you see there and why do you like those guys? No we've owned Shopify and HubSpot for a while yeah we've owned those two and Koopa basically we exited a long time ago even prior to the deal as part of a risk management like when things were selling off so I think for HubSpot and Shopify they're going to be pretty significant beneficiaries of AI is they own just a ton of customer data right so we're still at the early innings where we don't exactly know how they're going to be able to use this data and what they're going to be doing but they will basically benefit they will be able to introduce tools that they can sell to their customers where the customers can use the data and be able to come up with predictive things so like HubSpot I'm currently a user of it as well and basically what it can do like in the future is if AI can somehow help predict who are the customers that you should be calling on that would be a pretty significant time saving for the users and similarly Shopify just deals like sees a ton of commerce data so they're kind of at the forefront of innovation so they're going to be able to use this to develop tools that will leverage this data All right, let's talk about cybersecurity maybe we could start with CrowdStrike I feel like you can't own enough of that platform play ZScale, ZScale was a bit of a head scratcher to me and they beat and raised and then the stock got hit pretty hard I guess it's because it's going to back loaded but look at your thoughts on that Sentinel-1 very strong earnings but maybe weaker than Hope Guide so it's something that one's like a much cheaper version of CrowdStrike so interested in why you like those and it looks like you trimmed Cloudflare so interested in your thoughts on cybersecurity Yeah, so honestly going into this year I think cybersecurity is going to be a pretty significant team and the fact that these stocks have sold off so aggressively post this earnings season is creating some very attractive entry points basically what's been going on is the companies that are coming out in terms of earnings pretty close to what they guided but they're not really beating by significant amounts and the street I don't know if it's because expectations got a little bit ahead of themselves in December or is it the fact that interest rates are creeping up and that's pretty a pretty big headwind but basically when they report there is zero valuation support so any small miss or comment really gets sold off so I think CrowdStrike obviously was probably the strongest report out of the three but the stock is a lot more expensive than Sentinel-1 I thought the Sentinel-1 report was very strong as well the company could have guided a little bit higher than what they did but again it's a tough macro and some of their new products are still kind of at a point where they haven't reached like scale yet they did say that today cloud and data is about 30% of their booking so that's pretty significant and that's growing at 60, 70, 80% growth rate so I think all three look very attractive and yet the scaler to your point people didn't like that the guide was really implying a very strong fourth quarter but the company was pretty confident on the call saying that they are seeing larger deals and they are seeing improved momentum so if I had to say like out of the enterprise space especially post this sell off here after Q1 a lot of these companies look very attractive and then Cloudflare is just more of a we still really love it I just spoke to them this morning I think they have some really nice momentum on the zero trust side and also on their workers and R2 platforms it was more a matter of valuation and the stock is a little bit more expensive than the rest but we would look to enter basically any of these pullbacks I think are very attractive entry points for this space because as soon as you see interest rates stabilize or the narrative change back to cutting I think to cutting rates I think you're gonna see these names hit new highs You know it was interesting Of course Nikesh Arora from Palo Alto Network set off sort of this chain reaction when he said when he used the term spending fatigue so of course all the cyber stocks got hit but we heard from Jay Chaudhry at Zscaler they're not having that problem and certainly CrowdStrike's not having that problem so there's CrowdStrike for sure is playing out that platform scenario so obviously executing very very well and of course you own AMD which we show on this chart we don't really have spending data on NVIDIA we talked about how you're thinking about that but just broadly on the semi-trade let me make sure I understand this you feel like this still has a ways to go I think you feel like NVIDIA really has a moat with CUDA and the lead that they have in GPUs and their packaging, et cetera do you have any concerns there? So basically for NVIDIA the concern would be as we reach further into the cycle you are gonna see the numbers closer reflect reality which I think we're still few years away from it now what I would say though for NVIDIA specifically is that you can even own this stock through the next cycle because the data center side is gonna be significantly less volatile than the traditional gaming side because data center is not sold through the channel a lot of these GPUs are sold directly to customers when you see pullbacks or if there is a digestion period you're gonna see a one-for-one impact what's been historically very cyclical for semis is when you see impact on demand you almost see a double whammy from the channel because people are then going through a period of this talking so I think what you're gonna see with NVIDIA specifically it's a lot more durable and less cyclical cycles going forward so I think we're comfortable owning it in the next two or three years because of the cycle but then forward even through a cycle maybe not at the current size that we currently have it but I think you can comfortably hold something like this through a cycle and AMD is actually interestingly if you look at their numbers they're closer to the bottom than the top so client is really going through a down cycle and is just stabilizing and embedded is another segment that they have these are chips that are embedded into industrial products that actually went through an up cycle and now it's kind of bottoming out so that's why if you look at valuation AMD will screen a little more expensive and the idea is that that's because the numbers are actually at a bottom so I think even though it may not be obvious just by looking at the stock prices I think we're really closer to the bottom here than the peak in the semis great thank you all right let's wrap with maybe some final thoughts and we'll get your Ivana your take on the market going forward you know Fed watching obviously as you mentioned still very important for tech stocks because if I get 5% parking my money you know that sucks investments away from high-risk stocks but as I pointed out in my post comparing the AI wave to the dot-com boom interest rates back then there were 78% and tech stocks did just fine for a while anyway look the markets seems to be trying to go higher it's just sort of shrugged off sort of hotter than expected inflation data and earnings continue to be a major driver seems like company CFOs are being conservative with guidance so there may be some upside to earnings although visibility still remains a bit a bit murky and the AI bet is that it's going to lift all boats and drive economic growth and productivity you know we'll see if that kicks in this year but Ivana the market has been very hot it's run up nicely since your premise you know last summer so you know how do you play it from here maybe you could could summarize and we can wrap yeah absolutely so on the software side as we talked about it's a pretty significant pullback so I think for investors that can take a slightly longer term I'm not talking about a 10 year view right I'm talking about six to 12 months view just to see this down cycle play out I think software we're finding a ton of opportunities as you said people are just overly focused on interest rates but interest rates on their own don't really have a negative effect on the technology sector so what you're seeing is a lot of times when there is volatility in rates it creates this volatility in the stock prices and not the fundamentals right so they do end up being very attractive entry points so I do think right now even though the cycle even though like the indices seem like they're at their highs it is actually a pretty attractive entry point for investors that can take a little bit longer view and to your point I think second half comps are going to get very easy just because of how tough fourth quarter was last year so fourth quarter as a reminder now it seems like it was in a distant past but rates hit 5% things came almost to a full stop from the economy perspective and a lot of the earnings that you're seeing reported today or over the past few months really restrict that reality that is now a little dated so I think comps will get significantly easier the guides don't seem very aggressive at all so I think it's actually like if you step back I think it's a very good time to look back at the tech sector Yvonne I love having you on because you're a fund manager with real conviction and you do a lot of your own research you go deep and we really appreciate that so thanks so much for your time thank you all right that's it for now I want to thank Alex Meyerson and Ken Schiffman on production Alex also does our podcast Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and Rob Hoth is our editor-in-chief over at SiliconANGLE remember all these episodes are available as podcasts all you got to do is search breaking analysis podcasts wherever you listen I publish each week on thecuberesearch.com at siliconangle.com you can DM me at dvalante on twitter or comment on our LinkedIn posts and do check out etr.ai they've got great survey data they continue to expand their their data set this is Dave Vellante for the cube research insights powered by ETR thanks for watching we'll see you next time on breaking analysis


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We're moving into our first major conversation for today and that is youth involvement in politics. The Saturday elections that took place here in Lagos and Ogun state showed a lot with regards to the involvement of young people and involvement of Nigerians generally in the electoral process. How can we get more young Nigerians to get involved in politics? How can we get more Nigerians to be interested in the whole electoral process and the political space? This morning we are speaking with Okwe Ami or Renoir who's joining us via Zoom. Good morning. Thanks for joining us. Good morning. Good morning. Thank you for having me. Great to have you here. I'm going to start with of course referring to the Saturday elections in Lagos and Ogun state. You know, one of the things that was noticed is that it was marred with voter apathy. The numbers were embarrassing with regards to local government election. The Lagos state governor even mentioned that voter apathy was one of the things that he noticed. Not very many people showed up. And if you look at Nigeria's young population, there's millions and millions and millions of people who should show up when you hear of elections, when you hear of getting registered, when you even hear of participating in Nigeria's political space. But we don't see that. What would you say might be the major reason why? Right. So from where I'm sitting, I think one of the concerns around youth apathy as well as this last election is concerned is people first realizing how much of a disconnect or how much of a no difference you're making their lives at that level. You know, it shows how much, you know, how the power to the local government has been with you about over time, how the state government has been showed by government has been independent over a long period of time. And it just has to be able to connect to see how there will be any much difference in terms of, you know, now having to look at government elections. Why thank you for a lot of time. The reason why the local government election is even done by those state governors that the case may be, it's like a mobilization too and to, you know, kick back to people supported them at, you know, at the time, they were doing that by entire elections. If you see, I mean, look at what happened in, in, in the open space, even like social space, because we have elections coming up for humanitarian, to the essence of all that local government appoints either KTK or elective as the case may be, quote and unquote. It's just as a way of, you know, moving the base together. So it's been a huge disconnect. Without a doubt, you know, there's been an awakening. You know, young people, if we see what has happened, they're not young to run deal with the entire movement. There is definitely a awakening. But people are not, we really don't want tokenistic change. They want real change. You know, so the, the, the turnout right now for local government elections, people already cannot see how much of a difference it's to make in their life. So it has affected that participation at that level. The reality of it is that if you look at legal space and, and open space, actually young people are the ones, the majority of them are actually young people. You know, the very much establishing people who are not much, you know, there's not like, it's not an issue-based, it's not something they're spending for an agenda or there's a new manifesto they're presenting to the table to totally transform Nigeria. It's not the consolidation or evalidation of the executive to say, oh, yes, Governor Spongulou or Governor Dacoab, they're doing his job. So we just want to endorse it. There's nobody articulating a trade course to rally people around. So that, that's perhaps what I believe is responsible for the way we play. Well, there's also, you know, the perspective that a lot of young Nigerians don't really feel the effect of governance. And so they may not be able to see the relevance of going to, you know, participate or to vote. Do you agree with that? Because it's one of the things that I mentioned to the PDP spokesperson here in Lagos in an interview on Saturday, that one of the reasons, you know, why a lot of people may not be bothered about local government elections because they don't even see what the local government does for them. So, is that disconnect also one of the problems? Absolutely. So I try to add this to that. There is a general broad disconnect around governance. Well, I think it is better over time. I think one of the things we struggle with and within the youth development youth advocate, youth participation or inclusion in inclusion space is the ability to see how every decision of government affects your day-to-day living. You know, so the more you see how, okay, if you have a good government in place to directly affect your access to hospitals, the access to jobs and the apartment for a very long time. So that is disconnect. But that has changed over time. We've spent events right now that have played up to see how, for example, the end-class movement will declare case of eventually bringing the government to a point of negotation. We've seen potential powers of that. What level of local government? It's obvious. Now, people can differentiate that, okay, what exactly is going on? The selection process itself is all of the news that came out around somebody emerging as a candidate and afterwards the party will sit down and say, no, it's not your time yet. I give tickets to another person. So people just see it as a, you know, as a charade of the incubate power to just, you know, constantly need power and not watch delivering on any new change. Is anybody going to come up and say, I'm going to do something different from what the state government is doing? Is anybody going to come up and say that? So it's not, and you look at what has happened again in terms of the results. They will not take fall. You see, especially nobody willing parties, the one that, you know, takes all the, it shows the level of conversation and the variety of the context. It's not the context as it is maybe. So people have just given up to take away. It's time to realize that perhaps at the junction of, you know, gubernatorial presidential, and it's unfortunate, it also speaks to how much local governments have been killed. You know, the state government, there's a good conversation at the federal level even around people who are advocating for restructuring, around recognizing local government as a full-time government. In fact, the proponents of that right now are really recognizing two-time governments, which is the federal state, and that they see local governments as not as independent as they should be. So these are ongoing conversations, and I'm not surprised that it has cascaded down because the federal government election is protracted. We still don't have privacy on what exactly we expect. Are they independent and government? That's not being the case. Okay, so where do you think the change should come from? Because like you mentioned, there's a lot of young faces that you see now contesting, but, you know, there's still a level of, you know, distrust with these people because, you know, like you mentioned, it is possible that they're only just being thrown in there to fill in, you know, spaces where the federal state has young people in governance, not necessarily because they, you know, believed in the process or believed in, you know, in governance and they're going there to effect any change. So where do you think, you know, the change should come from? Should there be more interest?  So, personally, as a rule of thumb, I believe that we need more professionals in politics, not more professional politicians, right? We believe that we must both have we must have created values some way that you want to bring into politics on like what we have, I mean, rampant right now nowadays. So in terms of also young people, we're not saying young people should get into office just for the sake of the fact that they are young. No, that's not what we're saying. What we're saying right now is this is that we are the generation right now we are the product of the status quo. We understand the challenges better and are better wired to the nuances of today's governance and nobody should pinch us, they are more globally connected and the kind of ideas required to move the situation forward is more representative, not depository, you know, in a younger demographic than in the older ones. And we also want young people right now who understand the nuances of governance, telling it around constitutional, the constitutional will presently run. It has to be based on an agenda, not just on the fact that okay, you are younger and you belong to a certain demographic of 35 and under or 30 as number of the kids may be and that's why you want to run for office. So it's not official context, you know, we just don't want people that look young to be in office. So we just believe that for me, it has to be what is the agenda, what are we putting forward. It has to ultimately be issued if not to render just having a replacement so we have young people going into the police but recruitment coaches that brought them in is the same that was put in place by these same people who are trying to replace. So they are not going to change anything or have new ideas that present it whether they are going in the right direction to reinforce the status quo. It will be difficult to change something when you rule on that same course to get to power. Isn't that a challenge and isn't that one of the things that scares people from getting involved and believes that the system wouldn't accept you if you're not the chosen one, if you're not the one that the godfather or the governor or the traditional ruler has chosen to fill that position then you're not going to get in there. So how can we change that? How can a kundle who has been a doctor for the last couple of years and believes in his local government wants to effect change how can he believe in his political party and understand that he's generating enough popularity among his peers and among the society he will win instead of waiting to be anointed by a godfather? Right. So it's not that easy. The popular saying now it has become very rampant that power is not sub-dollar cards, right? So there's a need right now to get your numbers right. So I said create value. It's anything that we've seen over time politics is a game of numbers, right? You don't have to numbers. You don't have a clear-cut agenda that brings people together. Secondly, we cannot underplay the value that money plays in politics. The idea of how the godfather by just a part is a no-consecret. It is through resources. Some sort of people right now maybe through world, maybe through corruption, they need to amass wealth, spend the political party so that idea has been ignited and it is actually possible for us to do this thing. What we don't need to do is that how do we now make sure that we strategically pull those resources together to advance an agenda? It's a relay. Not an hundred meter rate, you know? And what we need to presently begin to do now is we don't have to pull into the old bad political party. We can decide to do that. At the end of it, we go down to numbers and we're picking up resources in there. We're doing action. We're doing ourselves together across the board. So some of the challenges we've also had over time is this decoupling around North and South and we also see soil play out during the NSAS movement where we in the South seem to be very bosterous, we are more progressive in ideal. Why is it not the big conservation? And it's easier to have I would say, I'm not trying to de-politically correct that it's easier right now to easily put them in line with the same player over time. So how do we ensure that our brothers in the North carry them along and make these things about issues? It's not about where you're from. It's not about being in North or South. It's fundamentally about unemployment and it's also terrible there. Having that avenue for continual dialogue and also seeing amongst ourselves as at the time some of the things some of us who have been criticism for at the time how quickly can we get some of our powers? How quickly right now do we want to have because we need resources. The money has to come. So we need to share we can mobilize our own resources to bring ourselves together if we're not in retreating the existing political structures how are we building our own? We've had about two years now to be 223 some years away. So a lot of work still has to be done and we have to be very realistic about when it's to be done. It's not a true party and it's not going to be sad to us. So that's my take on that really. What would you advise a young male-female Nigerian who wants to get into that office and doesn't have to be a governorship office it could be councilorship, it could be local government chairman it could be the State House of Assembly but wants to get into that position to do what he can to ensure that things are better for his people. He doesn't have any godfathers but he has a plan. What would you advise that person? What steps would you say that he or she should take? So first thing I would say is that I think it's important for us to understand the issues. I believe that whatever wants to move forward to change you cannot stop the problem you don't understand. So a lot of times when I engage young people when we talk it's really about what exactly do you want to do differently? You really have to be good at the challenges that Nigeria has. Secondly, you need to find like-mind you need to invest in networking while the other people are thinking like you say right now that in a room of 10 people you are the smartest. When this comes to show, you are the one who will go outside. So how well do you recruit people to begin to think the way you are thinking? Those are starting points. Secondly, you want to look at the political space. You need to do an audit of the political space. What are the existing, you know, do a sort analysis, do a personal analysis. See how well you realistically fit in and how you want to bring people together. Because at the end of the day it falls down to influence. You cannot influence every difficulty. So what do you do? Since you lost power over there we would... I want to also quickly mention something that I shared over the weekend and that was on a different platform. I was saying that a lot of Nigerians don't seem to care. You know, and the the end science protest, yes, it did show that young Nigerians are energetic and they know what they want here and there. But, you know, when it comes to actually being a part of the process, a lot of them don't care. And if you walk around, you know, your environment now, speak to the next 30 people and ask them who their local government chairman is. Or ask them who their representatives in the National Assembly are. They... I'm sure a good, you know, 20 out of 30 wouldn't know these people. They don't know, they don't bother to know. And it's the same thing that plays out when it comes to registering for your voter's card and getting involved with the elections and voting. So what do you feel must change? What do you think will be big enough to encourage young Nigerians to know these things, to want to be a part of the process? So I feel like sometimes we have a very short memory and, you know, understanding of the theory of change about, you know, how... We kind of represent some actions that need to take place for change to happen. I think that generally has been lost on us. We've not been able, as a collective, to see that input and output process, you know. So, as that happened, everybody went back to status quo. Yes, the struggle of dealing even comes into play and speaks to the apathy. So there's a need right now for some of us, you know. At the end of the day, the majority of people, have been intentional about explaining, mobilizing and informing people to see how, oh, election is in 2023. But the real players, if you look at the voting pattern as a case, maybe the e-profile that was removed by INAG. Look at the numbers of registration. You see some interesting numbers. You look at ocean, you have 163, over 200,000 registered voters. That's the highest. The only reason why that is happening is that I already suspect that some engineering is going on there. This group has got their election disclosed. You know. So you can already see that, see, the politicians right now, or as the case in the status quo, they are one step ahead. They know this game. But that's the only thing they know. So only if we understand how they are playing it, that is the only way right now we can beat them at that game. So we cannot afford right now to play the old streets and not be rooted in the understanding of exactly what is going on, what needs to be done. And I believe it's that information process. We need to continuously educate ourselves not on the theories of politics and on governance, but be rooted in our realities. I mean, my own reality is even that the disconnect amongst all the young people were not the same thing. The level of enlightenment is not the same. So how are we able to carry our folks around, our folks are long? Are we able to break down this communication in simple languages to say, okay, this is exactly what the problem is. This is what we need to do. This is the games we've been playing and all. So those are the issues. And I do not totally believe also that amongst the older generation also there are people right now who are rooted in the issues. So I believe that we also should seek partnership across, I mean intergenerational partnership because at the end of the day it is Nigeria we're trying to play. So this is my third purpose. We need to be strategic about organizing. The organization, we've done a lot of organization over the last couple of years. Now it's time to come together and build networks that will ultimately transform to the kind of change you want to see. I'm going to use the ocean state example that you just put out. You mentioned that there's some catalyst. There's some engineering that happens or that has happened in ocean state that has led to that number of registered voters. Would you say that we also need some catalyst across the country? There has to be some specific persons who are able to engineer more young people to understand the need to get involved in the process and get registered. There's also a trust deficit because I remember from 2014 there's persons who were part of that process that today would not be bold enough to speak in politics or in political spaces among young Nigerians because they've lost some level of trust with the Nigerian populace. So what kind of engineering would you recommend that needs to start to happen? Do you think that there needs to be leaders in different spheres here and there that should be able to pull together and get young people to get involved? Absolutely, absolutely. So interestingly there's a project right now that we're working on at our aim to see how we want to create a network of civil society organizations. Now already we have some of them doing in different pockets. In Abuja here you have some organizations actually taking a little laps of their offices and going to rural communities to actually run a help you register. You know so you get your form and things like that. So using the same similar model we're actually building a curation across the information to even address the disparity. If you look at the north and the south in terms of voter registration they are more involved over there. You know that participation is higher on the north and south. So we want to say how well to also bring the south to the same level of awareness and participation we should do less of the talking and talking about things being bad. Now it's time for actually to even get registered. Do I agree with you? We need influencers we need people right now who take the especially existing CSOs and concerned citizens and the model we're trying to run is to open it out to say you know we saw how people were involved in the NSAC movement and the resources of both small and old and people coming together and chipping in to make this happen. So we want to run a similar model if we're able to do it transparently and people can see directly the value that you're able to put on the table people will connect and through that we want to see how well can we increase can we directly you know increase registration to up to two million. Okay because of this our efforts right now we've had up to two to three million right now people register that would be a major success story and the beginning of that building block to all that change we want to see because they will not just surprisingly output in 2023. We need to begin to build it you know from now. So I agree that that's definitely a way to go to ensure that you know we see that desired outcome. The NIN process got you know millions of Nigerians you know to get registered and of course to connect their and I enter their SIM cards but that was you know see it seemed like it had to be done you know a specific way by the you know federal government to get that done because of course you know the normal Nigerian attitude to some of these things you know they'll leave it to next week or maybe next month and you know probably never get to do it. You know major telecommunication brands you know TV brands whatever you know and the likes also runs certain types of campaigns every now and then to get people to register on their platforms how possible can we you know do that you know with regards registering for voting is there campaigns that can be thought of that should be able to get young Nigerians to get registered the same way they will register on a platform because someone is going to give 10,000 or 5,000 an hour you know on you know social media platform can we do you know engineer something like that to get more Nigerians you said 2 million we should be able to get a you know good 15 million Nigerians registered 20 million Nigerians registered you know on these platforms but we're registered to vote rather. Absolutely. So I said that from the silo of our own organization the OK group of friends let's come together now the ideal or what would be the super story is a situation where such an idea right now catches fire and we have pockets across the country of people doing similar models right now in 1,500,000 that so at the end of the day is also important right now for the movement especially let me call it voter registration movement to not be seen as apolitical it's not to further a particular political agenda of PDP or APC as the case may be to also make it issue based we're not telling to come and register because we want to tell you who to vote for but hopefully what we want to do is build a data base be a channel for which we now enlighten people about what the issues are so I agree with you that it has to be that and it's unfortunate, INEC has demanded to actually sensitize the public but the reality right now this is that INEC as far as that is concerned do not have the required resources to do it in a kind of way in which you know would be significantly impactful so it's important right now for well-meaning citizens you know we just believe that okay this actually is a collective rescue mission we have to collectively give direction to pick up that initiative to say how do we want to support the drive that INEC is doing you know how do we want to break down the communication at the end of the day we're not a homogeneous entity where you know where you can use one English language right now to communicate to everybody you need to find out people you know in their localities pick out the languages that exist across the country and show that all plug into a grid about a new Nigeria which starts with first understanding what the issues are in fact it should be a case of less even if anyone is not talking about the faultiness of the constitution and how our constitution perhaps is the greatest problem that we have we don't even want to listen to it you shouldn't even be on the platform running for precedent so we want to make an issue base move away from all of that sectionality oh the north is down to the north and the south to not focus on the issues you know so what are you standing for exactly what are you going to do what are we going to do with your accountable for the 400 days you know we want to move beyond show off those rhetorics and I believe the media also has a significant role to play still so much the media has to play you know because the media is actually that platform you know where people are educated where people get to know exactly what the issues are so I think that kind of partnership will also go a long way in sensitizing people there's ideas and so many ideas that can work and I appreciate the work that you're also doing we have these money or do I describe them the platforms or you know get you know bring in five people and then you move up the ladder you know and if those five people bring another five people bring so it's something that we can work with regards voters registration you know get every person to register 10 people you know get 10 of your friends to register 10 to ensure that 10 of their friends are registered and if 10 people reach out to 10 people and those 10 people have their own 10 people it increases the numbers you know it's really just the interest and you know having these number of people and wanting to ensure that it is done and that's just an idea I thought about sitting down here now an idea came to mind we're doing a consultation brainstorming session last week and I was involved in the World Bank HIV fund in 2012 to 2014 some of the strategies that we explored you know to increase people going into do the HIV test was you know we started we created fund sensors where they were you could win things right so we put up gift items like a raffle draw you know created music sensors where there was music so people can come and dance just to drag people in and when you drag people in right now if you do this test you get the raffle draw and the opportunity you could win you know we got these items that people donated from clothes to maybe you know small earphones to use clothes to stand out things like that and it's okay if you do your test so absolutely and the other came into my eyes one of our partners brought that up similar model across when we began this voter registration drive so I do agree with you a lot of ideas and I think the more we have these ideas come to the table and people begin to implement them the better for all truly enjoy speaking with you or where me or you know or you're an international development specialist thank you for joining us this morning and I hope that we can put these ideas to work, God bless you thank you, thank you for having me all right stay with us we'll go on a short break when we come back to the state where of course the four more students of the Bethel Baptist School have been set free we'll be having a conversation on what more needs to be done and what is the current situation with regards to those still in captivity stay with us here on the breakfast


Hey guys, what is up? Welcome to my channel. For today's video we are going to be a shopper drop where I go through all the new makeup on try mood and I tell you whether or not I am interested in picking them up. So if you would like to hear my thoughts on some new makeup releases then just keep watching. Hi guys if you're new here my name is Morgan. I'm a product knowledge enthusiast. I just love knowing anything and everything about all the new makeup on the market and sharing my thoughts with you guys but I will say okay I'm apologizing in advance. I have two more months left of the school year until summer and I am trying not to overbuy so that I do not overwork myself. I find that when I buy all this new makeup I'm like gotta film, gotta film, gotta film, gotta film. So I'm trying to slow down. I'm buying all the new makeup because being a teacher is stressful right now and I just am trying to keep some mental sanity here. So I don't know if I'll actually be successful in this but I'm trying to set myself up to be mentally stable and not overwork myself because guess what in two months I can do a YouTube a full time. It is summer break and I will catch up for these two months so just be prepared for that. I won't be answering. I won't be as present probably in the comment section and all of that but I'm gonna do my best and I'm definitely gonna miss some of these launches but I will be back come mid-June. Okay let's get into it. So it's been a few weeks since we've last done this so I'm gonna pick up on trend mood April 5th. So these are currently available now. Hood of Beauty launched some new lipsticks and lip liners. They became available during the Sephora of the IB event and I picked up one lip liner. It's a very nice formula. I don't know how I missed this but I didn't realize that she also came out with the cream lipstick so you guys I seriously my head has not been in the new makeup release game because of all that's going on right now within education but I'm sure the lipsticks are just as beautiful but the lip liners are gorgeous as well since these are already gone past released I probably won't pick anything else up from this line but I'm sure the lipsticks are beautiful the color range here uh these are my kind of colors these nudes and these mobs I'm loving it and the lip liners I can speak on those those are very good. Rare Beauty also launched their spring or summer whatever it is eyeshadow palette along with an eyeshadow primer. I decided to pass the palette she is cute and I was pleasantly surprised with their holiday releases of their eyeshadow palettes the quality was really nice again like this normal morgan normal not stressed morgan would have picked this up and reviewed it on my channel it decided not to stress myself out with squeezing a review of this but it does look cute she's cute simple every day I definitely think this is a great palette for her consumer base and then also of course an eyeshadow primer uh but yeah I passed drop when wild came out with their spongebob collection I'm sure this is very trendy among the tiktokers because it is an adorable collection and I haven't gone to walmart but I want to go to walmart because I can definitely see myself passing through this and picking up one of those spongebob sponges and the palette is really cute too so this isn't something that I am going to go out of my way to do a review for but I definitely think I will be shopping it if I pass by because it is just too cute who didn't love spongebob but growing up obviously it's not like my viewership you guys aren't as into this also I'm sure so I didn't I didn't need it but I'm I'm getting it if I walk by it so shop kind of BH cosmetics I love me some BH cosmetics they have come out with a remix dance collection each palette is for a different decade so there's an eighties palette and nineties palettes two thousands palettes these are available now I love BH cosmetics the reason why I constantly feature their products where I talk about them on these videos is because I think they have some of the best formulas for the greatest price I dropping these I don't need them the two thousands one is kind of right at my alley with the cool tones and the purples and the neutrals the other two I'm not as into but I'm dropping these I don't need them it's been pretty slow with really good palette launches and I've kind of liked that break because I've been breaking into some of the older palettes that I have that I haven't used yet so these aren't really worth adding to my collection right now but they're cute but typically I like their square ones so I'm curious if the quality is as good as the square ones I've heard some thoughts about the KKW launching eye contour duos I mean these are the most unnecessary product if you ask me the idea is they're like the marketing so good the way that they kind of presented the product really great it's 24 at dollars and that's $12 a single pan so I know I would not recommend you get that definitely dropping from my list not interested in that all you can get that in any palette you can get it in your face contour duos but kind of cool marketing just unnecessary and I feel like I have no idea but I feel like Kim is probably bored of her beauty brands because skims is just like killing the game she's got to put all her attention in skims and it's been quite boring sigma beauty launched a cordu rosa palette and I am stoked about this palette because cordu rosa is one of my favorite blushes it's $49 it is currently available and I am holding myself back from buying this I have a thing for blush palettes I love blush palettes they're they're so fun they're so pretty and I really want this especially since it's based around my favorite blush I think I'm going to wait to see if I can get it on a good sale because I do want it but I don't need it like I don't need it but I want it I want it so bad okay I'm dropping it from my list but I'll fall weak and pick it up eventually I'm sure of it oh okay yes I got a lot of questions about the visi art La Plague Itang Zhu and she is so cute for summer if you like neutral tones I'm gonna love this you guys know I love visi art I'm waiting to see if I get it in PR if I don't no biggie I will pick it up the packaging is so cute the color story is so cute it's so neutral but you have the fun pops you guys have been asking me if I was gonna review it just waiting to see waiting to see if I can save myself $44 but if not it's okay I will pick it up if I don't get it in the next week it's too cute I'm gonna get it it's adorable I feel the need to talk about this because Benefit came out with these forest scope palettes and they are face palettes now some of my most successful videos on my channel are the big cheek palettes that they come out with every year I always get a lot of views I always review them every year I love them they didn't come out with that this year they did come out with these this year I don't know if these are replacing the big palettes I mean regardless they've been doing those big palettes for so long I wouldn't be surprised if they're done with those even though I'm pretty sure those sell pretty well every year but anyways I don't know I have no clue these are so cheap to me I'm not going to review these I'm not going to pick these up if they come out with one of the regular like six-pan or I guess it's five-pan palettes of the full size product I will definitely pick that up but it doesn't look like they're coming out with those and it looks like they came out with these instead and I'm pretty sure I own almost every product in here they have some new formulas it looks like in here but I don't know these just look kind of cheap to me if I'm being honest let's talk about the shantikai spring 2021 collection so many of you guys told me that you did not like the packaging you thought it looked very childish and I love it okay I like the kitschy kid like kind of packaging here I think it's super cute they do have the blur powder now which I know so many of you guys already ordered the blush is really cute I'm not picking them up because I don't need them and you guys know how I feel about shantikai love their products great quality but overpriced so you know I gotta pick and choose with shantikai color pop launched six new quads I was lucky enough to receive three of them I got them in pr I haven't tried them that yet they look cute being completely honest what I purchased these without getting them in pr no so dropping them from my list but they look really cute and I can't wait to play with the ones that I got but kind of unnecessary but they're really tiny and pretty affordable nine dollars but I don't know kind of unnecessary I did speak a little bit about the Hermes blushes on my Instagram so if you don't follow me on Instagram make sure you do because I do some makeup commentary as they come out on there and I wanted to pick up one of these because 70 dollars for a blush listen I'm crazy I have a YouTube channel I'm a shopaholic I'm a makeup reviewer I'm a makeup enthusiast so normally I take one for the team but I could not bring myself to do this excuse me 77 dollars what on earth that price is just ridiculous and so I was contemplating this weekend I wanted one just one just to say I did it and so many of you guys messaged me some of you were like do it do it do it but some others of you were like girl it's not even worth it no no no and so I was like I'm gonna save myself 77 dollars so drop these for my list I don't need them I feel like this is something where I will buy it on a whim like if I'm walking in Nordstrom I'm on vacation because I have a vacation planned in July like I can see myself being like trading myself but from what I've heard these are nice but they ain't worth it 77 dollars I don't want to do that right now so we'll keep it moving dropping it no no no okay nothing color pop because they come out with so many so these have launched as well the came out with some new five pen eyeshadow palettes and I've seen some of them in people's instagram stories and they look really cute dropping them from my list because too many and these are honestly not colors that I really would wear anyways they're very cute really great if you want a little mini color story it just to have it won't break the bank if you say to yourself like oh I need something green just for days that I want to wear green these are great to pick up but um don't need them won't use them I forgot that house laboratories existed they came out with these lip oil set stains 24 dollars each available April 27th well dropping those lip oils are very very popular nowadays aren't they jacklyn cosmetics is launching the prep and set bake brighten and set your way for a flawless complexion so it's like a under eye set so here's the thing miss jacklyn I want to order these I want to pick it up I want to do a review but your launch time is always on Thursday when I am on hallway duty at work and I cannot order I missed out on the lip order last time couldn't get the colors that I wanted for the blush order like you why am I on duty when you anyways I plan on buying this no guarantees though because I am on duty so hopefully they don't sell out I'm getting irritated jacklyn needs to change your schedule for me because I want it looks interesting I'm always interested in an under eye product because they are such a finicky area on our face we all feel like our under eyes are creepy and creasy so I got a good feeling about this hopefully hopefully okay ABH has launched or they're coming out with on May 3rd these face palettes oof I'm sorry I'm not interested in these at all um these look like I've seen them before from many other brands for many years now like back in the day when contouring and stuff was coming into style so many of these kind of palettes came out it just seems a little bit outdated for me for a launch remember when ABH used to set the trends and now they're like behind on the trends this is I think listen I'm not a marketing major I know nothing about ABH I know nothing about their situation but they need to come out with an eyeshadow palette and I know that's crazy to say because myself included we were like they gotta stop with the eyeshadow palettes but that's because they launched like three four five you know like a three months time span it was ridiculous we couldn't keep up now it's been well over a year and let's be honest ABH palettes with where it all came from I mean not true you know eyebrows highlighters whatever liquid lipstick but we they used to have a cult following of for their eyeshadow palettes and now they don't I just think they need to come out with a really innovative palette just to like freshen up the brand you know because this is not fresh at all they need something fresh even if it's not an eyeshadow palette I just like eyeshadow palette some buys but they need something fresh maybe like a blush palette like all blush because I don't think they've ever come out with a all blush palette something like that something new Kaleidos my beloved Kaleidos has revealed their flower punk collection I should be getting this in PR looks very melt like to me but I think Kaleidos does it better than melt you guys know me and melt got beef right now okay we got beef and I'm sure the Kaleidos formula is great these colors I believe I've seen from melt before I'm really excited about this this is such a unique not really I suppose but it's it's a fun collection and Kaleidos always has the best packaging the best themes and very good quality so the pre-order will be April 28th at 8 p.m pst dang that's like 11 o'clock in Maryland but um yeah I'm excited about this I wouldn't say looking at it am I like oh my god this palette was made for me it definitely was not made for me not my color story not in love with the colors but just in love with the overall theme if that makes sense oh we're already on the last product well I'm gonna talk about something else after this but Maybelline is coming out with the Maybelline fit me a tinted moisturizer and it's available right now at Walmart and I almost you know what I've been forgetting to say shopper drop that's okay anyways I almost picked this up like while I was scrolling I was in the bathroom not gonna lie to on my phone and I saw this I was like should I get this I love Maybelline fit me I decided to drop it I'm intrigued but I'm dropping it for my list because I don't need another complexion product to add to my pile of complexion products that I'm testing out but I'm interested my skin is currently we're going through a good phase right now we're at a healthy point in our relationship and so I'm looking into lighter coverage options so I'm interested Maybelline does a good job with their complexion products but we're gonna pass on that for now and drop it from our list okay guys I just finished a workout but I stopped so that we could talk about the newest product that was revealed of course I had to put it in this the Pat McGrath blush line was revealed but it's actually like a whole collection so there's nine blushes there's a quad there's some lip colors there's a highlighter yes thank you to each and every one of you who sent them to me I was already stalking it but I know you're all just as excited as me you know me so well so here's my dilemma nine blushes was a little more than I was hoping for like it's great there's nine blushes but I'm like dang pat now we gotta buy everything up so I don't think I'm actually going to end up buying everything I'm gonna see what bundle deals are available but I'm thinking at least probably the first six blushes from the lightest to because those last three looked really deep so and too vibrant for for this so I think I'm gonna get the first six blushes the highlight of chorus and the quad and I'll take a closer look at the lip colors not I'm just not for need of lip colors but I'm gonna pick up as much as I can without it hurting my soul so excited those blushes the embossment look absolutely stunning the eyeshadow quad is nothing to write home about I'll have to take a closer look at the swatches when more is revealed I'm definitely picking it up but it looks nice and wearable the highlight looks absolutely beautiful so I'm hoping it's similar to the formula of the highlight that came out not with holiday but the one after that the one that was better with the quad you know it came out anyways yeah but so excited finally the packaging looks adorable and she finally actually gave us what we wanted so many of you guys message me and you're like watch it be just another quad watch it be a lip duo so I'm so excited she finally came out with blushes I'm gonna pick up as much as my wallet will allow as much that is reasonable so I'm not picking up the entire collection unless there's a good bundle deal but I wish I could I really wish I could so yeah and the last collection that I did want to talk about is the suku spring collection okay I had the blush because that's the only thing that was still available from them in my cart at selfridges but I was like girl get it together now I have never tried anything from suku I want to it looks like Tom Ford it looks beautiful the colors in this collection that purple palette y'all is that purple palette and the blush it like I want to try this so bad I don't want to add another brand to my repertoire right now though I don't I wanted though I have been eyeing suku for so long this is the collection that I might want to dive into the brand like I'm feeling it so I think I'm gonna shop this I think it might be piece by piece I don't think I'm gonna do a big review for it but I think this is going to be my introduction to the brand so that's how I'm feeling about that I think that's it I'm gonna stop there I did see though that Dior was coming out with a new quint let me tell you Tavia over at chic profile I don't know how she gets this stuff yes so okay this really is the last one Dior is coming out with a new quint I'm dropping it for my list I don't need it but it looks really pretty it's a bit warm for what I'm feeling right now I also did just purchase a new Dior quints anyways and they're kind of pricey like they're not a brand that I once buy everything and anything that they come out with and especially if it's a quint and I already have some pretty good experiences with their quints but it's pretty um yeah just wanted you guys to know about that I don't see any details about it though okay there you guys have it there we go those are my thoughts on all the new makeup that is launching very very soon make sure you check out trend mood and chic profile down below I have them linked in the description box if you aren't subscribed to my channel already I would love it if you would consider taking the time to do so and I will see you on the next one bye guys have a good one


The University of Wisconsin system has a high profile direct assessment competency-based program. I think it's pretty small though, I think 1200, 1500 students right now, but they have an online little ad for it and I think it's called FlexPath. It does a great job of explaining this in 30 seconds. I realize I just worked checking out actually. So let's briefly, before we open up to questions, talk about the regulatory side. Believe it or not, we're in Washington. This is an issue that is actually bipartisan. There's a bipartisan bill to create a demonstration project around competency-based debt. It seems that the past administration really liked competency-based debt. It seems like this one is not going to at least stop it on the interest and maybe encourage it once they kind of staff up. But what would you like to see Washington do, and creditors do, to both preserve quality, protect it, but to also encourage the growth in this field? I know this is not a simple question, but I'll start with this one. I think the question has always been, what do we, as taxpayers, want to pay for? And up until now it's been instruction. And I think with competency-based education, it starts a conversation around, should we be paying for instruction, or should we be paying for outcomes? Should we be paying for what a student knows and can do? So when you change the paradigm to focus on that, things like regular and substantive interaction don't seem as important because the reason why that exists is to make sure that students are getting instruction. Can you briefly explain that? Briefly? Yeah, it's not easy. So regular and substantive interaction is a statute that differentiates distance learning from correspondence education and has to do with whether or not the faculty member is regularly interacting with the student. It has to be faculty instigated. And just briefly on that, so that the Office of Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Education has been auditing Western Governors University, which is obviously the big fish here, on the regular and substantive issue. And if they find that they're not operating under the statutes, they might label it as a correspondence course provider, which would be very bad for WGU, and would require them actually to pay back some of the federal aid they've received over the years. So this is a very hot, delicate issue right now. And a lot of folks are wondering where the kind of regulatory side will go on competency-based education. You know, it's hard because I'm torn, honestly. I'm really interested in new models. I think there are serious issues with the current ones. And I'm aware that there's this rush to the bottom whenever there's a loophole. And so I do believe that the amount of money at stake is so huge that you do have to deal with fraud and abuse. You have to try to prevent it. At the same time, whenever I hear somebody say, well, I don't know, direct assessment, that sounds pretty fishy. And I think, oh, an indirect assessment is okay with you? Like, you know, that we never question the status quo. And I think with the level of scrutiny that it deserves to be.


Lagersteg governor Babajidesong Lu has signed the bill prohibiting open cattle grazing in the state in two law. He signed the bill early on Monday, according to the governor's media aid on print media Wali Adjet to Mobi. The bill was passed after unanimous votes by the lawmakers.


Good afternoon everybody. My name is Martin Sivak and I work in the cloud native infrastructure team focused at the telco use cases. Today, I would like to show you how OpenShift can be used as a platform for running low latency and real-time applications. Before I begin, let me go quickly over the content of my presentation. First, I would like to introduce you to the general concept and the use cases that are important for low latency. Then I'll give you an example of latency budget and show the latency sources we are dealing with. The next section will guide you through configuring OpenShift, the application and explaining what happens behind the scene. At the end, I'll show you how the tuning can be validated and the latency measured. I will also describe the known limitations and give you some tips about how to change tuning manually. And how to debug the latency tuning. I am going to move to the low latency concepts now to not waste any more time. First, a note about low latency versus real-time terminology. Those two terms are very close in meaning, but not identical. And I don't want to get into the details during this presentation. So I will be talking about low latency only from now on. Having said that, what is low latency and why is it useful? Low latency systems are about guarantees with regards to response or processing time. This might be needed to keep a communication protocol happy, to make a device secure by reacting fast to an error condition or just to make sure a system is not lagging behind when receiving a lot of data. More specific examples are on my slide. Telecommunications and the radio industry processing needs to be low latency to synchronize radio transmissions and to give guarantees. The new 5G standard defines the ultra-reliable low latency communication class that guarantees one millisecond, one-way latency for the purpose of Internet of Things and Industry 4.0. Industry 4.0 is the move to remotely controlled machines and vehicles that require the same guarantees for safety and reliability. The same applies to the field of autonomous vehicles. The reaction time to sensor inputs must be instant. The two use cases I mentioned are just the tip of the iceberg, and I'm sure there are many more like the stock trading platforms and the banking industry in general. I will focus on the telco example in the rest of my presentation. I described the telco use case and mentioned that low latency is needed for synchronization of the radio transmissions. On this slide I want to show you a more detailed view of the time constraints we are dealing with. On the last slide I said that the ultra-reliable low latency communication guarantees one-way latency of just one millisecond. A half of that is needed for high-level infrastructure. That leaves 500 microseconds for all the radio transmissions, cabling, operating system and the communication protocol processing. That is not much time. A half of this time budget is consumed just by the radio transmission, another 1% by every kilometer of cabling. The total time remaining for processing in the distributed unit is 100 microseconds. And that is shared between the hardware, operating system and the cloud-native network functions that implement the 5G protocols and functionality. When all the requirements are summed up, the remaining time left for the infrastructure and the operating system latency is just 20 microseconds. Now that we know the latency goal for the platform, 20 microseconds, let's see if it's achievable and how. Imagine a process that is triggered by a timer. Ideally it would do its job immediately once the timer tells it so. However, it's not quite as simple in real life. There are many different sources of delays and noise in the typical operating system. The first step the operating system kernel has to do is to actually wake up the resources. That itself can take a lot of time, even if the sleep is not too deep. The CPU frequency might need to be adjusted to the performance mode. Then the kernel needs to decide who is supposed to run first. Is there maybe a higher priority task in the queue? This decision can take microseconds, eating from our time allocation significantly. Loading the process to memory is not pre-either. What if the memory bus or the CPU caches are being used by someone else? Now finally, the process runs. But a state of happiness usually does not last long. It can suddenly be stopped and replaced by another high priority task. Either an interrupt handler or by another process. Would you say that I surely covered all possible cases? Not at all. The firmware of the computer itself can take over. Stop the operating system and perform some hardware housekeeping via system management interrupts. As you can see, it is impossible to guarantee any processing time under normal circumstances. Luckily, there is a way to mitigate most of these interruptions and I try to add hints about how next to each latency source in blue. We call the procedure low latency tuning. It requires updating and configuring machine firmware. You might know it as BIOS. Configuring the operating system kernel, making sure processes run only on specific processors and so on. Now I am finally getting to the OpenShift role in all of this. I will start by showing you the administrator visible components. There are many places that need to be configured, but my team prepared a single to use operator that is an OpenShift term for supervisor component that takes a high level description of which CPUs to use for the operating system, which tuned for low latency, where the real-time kernel is needed and which group of workers compute servers to apply the tuning to. OpenShift processes this performance profile and applies all the tuning necessary. This usually means couple of automated reboots, but that's it. We also provide a tool that will help with validating the tuning. It can figure out the cluster layout, run a bunch of tests to make sure everything is set correctly and allows running the OSLAT latency benchmarking tool if requested. We use the same tool for our continuous integration test suite to be sure we did not break anything. As a cluster admin, you do not really need to do anything else, but maybe you are interested in how it all works inside. All the magic is done by orchestrating couple of components coming from Kubernetes and OpenShift projects. I will go from the bottom layers closest to the operating system. Kubernetes runs an agent on every node that manages the lifecycle of all containers on that node. It contains two components that are relevant for the low latency tuning, CPU manager and topology manager. CPU manager is responsible for allocating exclusive CPUs for latency-sensitive containers. The topology manager handles NUMA affinity between containers and devices like network cards. NodeTuning operator runs the containerized version of TUNED service and adapts it to the distributed cluster environment. The tuning service is then responsible for applying all the low-level tuning on every worker node. Machine Config operator allows installing the real-time kernel and other changes to the operating system configuration. We use it to start some helper services to configure system D to apply a default CPU affinity mask to every infrastructure process. And the highest-level component I ever mentioned, the performance add-on operator. This is the component that computes the tuning rules based on the high-level description you saw previously and instructs the other components to do their part. Here you can see what I just described to you in a nicer graphical form. The flow is generally left to right. The performance profile is processed by the performance add-on operator that spits out more granular objects which are then processed by the other components I mentioned. That results in tuning the system. On the right side of the diagram you see color-coded processors. And in the middle you can find examples of processes and workloads color-coded in the same way to give you an idea about where everything is running. The example performance profile displayed on the setup slide defines two groups of CPUs, reserved and isolated. Reserved, here marked by the red color, is the group for CPUs that are to be used for noisy operating system processes. Isolated, marked by the green border, is the group of CPUs that is tuned for low latency purposes. There is however one specialty of OpenShift here. The isolated CPUs are not dedicated to latency-sensitive containers until one such container actually claims it. That fact is signified by the green fill in the diagram. You can see that the CPUs 3 and 4 match the green color of DPDK and low latency and real-time worker pods. Only those CPUs are exclusively dedicated to those containers in this example. All the gray ones can still be used by any pod in the system. Here is a summary of where each kind of process can run in the tuned OpenShift cluster. It matches what I just described on the diagram slide, but describes the placements explicitly. Operating system and kernel tasks are typically restricted to the reserved CPU pool only. The reserved pool needs to be large enough to be able to pull the wave of the operating system. The latency-sensitive processes are pinned to their exclusive CPUs to avoid any interference from the OS or neighbor processes. But notice that the infrastructure and general workload pods can actually run even on the reserved CPUs. Their CPU list is not restricted in any way, and OpenShift relies on the Linux kernel CPU scheduler. The important fact to mention, though, is that the pods are still accounted towards the isolated pool capacity quota. That is the current behavior of the stock Kubernetes CPU manager. Now that I covered the system configuration, I still need to describe how to define a workload pod. That's an OpenShift name for a group of containers, and how to mark it as a candidate for the latency-sensitive treatment. The first and most important piece is making sure the sum of resources requested by all containers inside a pod match the sum of resource limits. This way Kubernetes places the pod into resource class called Guaranteed. Only pods that belong to this class are processed by the CPU placement logic in CPU manager. When this is satisfied, the CPU manager allocates exclusive CPUs to all containers defined in the pod that satisfy the same rule. When your application is single-threaded and knows how to handle thread placements by itself, you can also decide to disable the kernel CPU balancing logic for the allocated CPUs. This results in further reduction of the OS latency and is typically used for DPDK-like applications. The performance add-on operator installs a new runtime class to the cluster that allows controlling this functionality per pod. There will also be a feature to enable or disable interrupt processing per pod in the upcoming OpenShift version. Even though interrupts are typically not desirable on the dedicated CPUs, the application might need them if it uses kernel networking stack for communication. I covered all setup and workload slides, and I will briefly describe the latency measurement tools to be used. There are many tools that can be used for measuring the latency of the system. Each has its own specific use, and typically all of them are used as the validation progresses. First, the measurement by hardware lab detect is needed to establish the baseline that is achievable by the bare hardware. There is no point in continuing to the software-based tuning if this number is not good enough. Rather focus on firmware and hardware. After hardware lab detect gives us good results, we usually proceed with the tuning and then use cyclic test. That tool allows us to verify the timer latency. It schedules a repeated timer and measures the difference between when it should have triggered and when it actually did. This can uncover basic issues with the tuning caused by interrupts, process priorities, and so on. The last two tools are useful for the final verification. They behave in the same way a CPU intensive DPDK application would and measure all the interruptions and disruptions to the processing. The hardest part about measuring latency is patience. Some latency sources only disrupt the measurements once per hour or once per day. Proper latency tuning validation takes a long time because of this. Our flow is to first run a short test to detect the easy tuning mistakes, but once those are corrected there is nothing else left than to leave the test running longer and longer. Our flow is to first run a short test to detect the easy tuning mistakes, but once those are corrected there is nothing left than to leave the test running for longer and longer time. Rounds of 12 or 24 hours are not an exception. You can see a shortened example of a typical latency measurement result on the slide. This is an actual result from one of our debugging sessions. There is a spike of 35 microseconds visible on the max latencies line. But the number alone does not give the full picture. In this case there were only three cases of higher than 20 microsecond latency in about 100 million samples cyclic test collected over 15 hours. That might be good enough for your use case. Unfortunately it was not for hours. I am getting close to the end of my presentation and I would like to mention that there are some common issues that you should know about. I already mentioned that the infrastructure pots count towards the isolated pool capacity. This is how our upstream Kubernetes decided to implement the CPU manager. But it can be slightly confusing and so I am mentioning it again. You need to make sure your reserved CPU pool is large enough to pull the wave of the operating system. The kernel can grind to halt if you don't do that. A guaranteed class container will only have the dedicated CPU for itself after about 5 to 10 seconds after it starts. The time is configurable but making it too low puts higher load on the node. All the tuning guides might tell you to use ISO CPUs. Please do not do that anymore. ISO CPUs on OpenShift causes issues as all CPU process balancing is disabled on all the isolated cores. But the non-low latency and the infrastructure pots run there as well and will be affected by that and that includes OpenShift infrastructure itself. And the last remark is about kernel vs. dpdk networking. I already mentioned that one when speaking about workload definition, interrupt processing and the runtime class. There are two tips I would like to give you with regards to the process of tuning. Debugging latency issues is not trivial. There is a procedure you can use when you are truly lost. First disable all power saving modes in kernel and then use the procedure described by Clark Williams from the Red Hat Real-Time Kernel team. This procedure will let you watch what exactly interrupted your process and where it came from. Once you figure out what needs to change in the tuning, our tools give you an option to add your own overrides. The description about how to do that is too detailed for this presentation but you can find a step-by-step how-to in the link I added to this slide. Please do not hesitate to ask any questions you might have about low latency and OpenShift. In case you would like to participate or just follow our work, the code is all public on GitHub. Thank you very much for listening and if you have any immediate questions, please find me in the chat. Thank you.