In this lecture, we're going to discuss the diagnosis of acute appendicitis. Now clinical evaluation remains the mainstay of the diagnosis. Once the decision has been made that a patient has acute appendicitis, there's very little use for continuing the investigation to prove your clinical diagnosis. Clinical diagnosis is extremely accurate and there are very few tests that can really compete with it. It's only for cases that you are unsure that you can continue the investigations to help you make the diagnosis. So once the clinical diagnosis has been made, the only role really for further investigations are investigating your patient for anesthetic risks, looking at comorbid disease investigation. Patient might be a diabetic, patient might have lung or heart conditions and you need to evaluate these before you decide on treatment. And lastly, just the extent of the disease. A patient can present with early appendicitis, but the patient may also present with late appendicitis with complicated appendicitis, the formation of abscesses, and these might be treated differently. In these cases, you want to continue your investigation. So here's a non-exhaustive list of all these special investigations that you can consider. If we just look at the laboratory side, we have our full blood count, we have a CRPC reactive protein, we have pro-calcitonin, urea creatinine and electrolytes and glucose, we have liver function tests, lipase, urinalysis, MCNS, that's microscopy, culture and sensitivity of urine and blood, and pregnancy tests, either urine or blood based. On the imaging side, we have chestache and abdominal x-ray, we have ultrasound, computer tomography, magnetic resonance imaging and even a contrast enema. Let's discuss some of these. Now if we look at the laboratory investigations, remember that these are all markers of infection, but that's not specific to the appendix. You can have infection in the colon, in any parts of the abdominal cavity or even elsewhere, and they will all have these markers that we're going to discuss now, abnormal or raised. Let's look at the white cell count. So a patient with appendicitis and a patient with diverticulitis will both have a raised white cell count. You must remember that these are not specific just to the appendix. They cannot make the diagnosis of acute appendicitis. Of course, remember, I said it's a clinical diagnosis and you're going to use these tests to support the work up as far as the comorbid disease and the extent, etc., is concerned. So yes, you will have a white cell count. In the majority of cases, very early appendicitis or patients that might be immunocompromised might not always have a raised white cell count, but definitely this would be the norm. A raised white cell count, most specifically neutrophils because this is a bacterial infection. Or if you have access to these kind of reports, they might mention a left shift in the white cell count. The seriative protein might be raised. Again, there are cases in which it's normal. A normal white cell count and normal CRP does not exclude the diagnosis of acute appendicitis. Also to mention in the CRP is it's best to have serial CRP values. A rise, a trend of rising of the CRP might be more important just than an absolute count. If we look at pro-calcitonins, also a marker of infection. But really, the reports do not suggest that it should be used in acute early appendicitis even as much as it only starts rising when we have complicated appendicitis. Once there is a rupture in a bit of peritoneal soiling and advanced cases of acute appendicitis that the PCT starts to rise. So not really useful in early settings. You have to look for raised glucose counts, specifically in diabetics. Glucose levels that become difficult to control is usually a sign of sepsis in the diabetics. Right Aliexpressin, with the symptoms and signs that we've discussed and problems for the patient to manage their glucose levels is an indication of infection. Once again, I want to reiterate, none of these are specific for appendicitis but they do aid you in that diagnosis of a bacterial infection being present. Now in very severe cases, now we're talking septicemia, septic shock. Other laboratory investigations that would help you is the lowering of HP. If you have a vert sepsis, your HP will drop and your platelet count will drop but now we're really talking advanced cases of sepsis. So not of real use in early appendicitis. Now it's important just to look at your renal function if there's one of the areas for an aesthetic help for the anesthetist and for investigation of comorbid disease, usually the kidneys. You want to know where your patient is dehydrated and has electrolyte abnormalities. Remember these patients present with a bit vomiting and they will lose electrolytes. Your ears up might be an indication just of dehydration. Once the creatinine starts going up, of course we're talking acute kidney injury and this is usually in more advanced cases. Now we have to consider alternate diagnosis. So if your clinical investigations were not specific your clinical impression was not specific for acute appendicitis. You did not confirm the diagnosis. You might want to look for an alternate diagnosis. So you're an MCNS and just your analysis with the dipsticks is very important. Females with cystitis or more severe kidney infections, pylonephritis might present exactly the same way as an acute appendicitis scan. So what do you want to see on the dipsticks? Well, you at least want to see nitrates. Remember that white cells, proteins in the urine are indications of other diseases. Urinary tract infections, simple and complicated urinary tract infections should have nitrates. Make sure that your dipsticks actually test for that. Many a time have I seen a report that says, dipsticks normal. But when you go pick up the dipstick you see well, it's one of the cheap variety and it doesn't actually have nitrates on it. So remember to have a look at what dipsticks was used before you just interpret a normal urine dipsticks report in the nursing notes for instance. MCNS, microscopy culture and sensitivity, if you're really concerned it can be spun down, various investigations are possible that can give you very reference on these if you really do suspect urinary tract infections. Pregnancy tests, either urine-based or much better serum-based patients with ectopic pregnancies, right-hand side can really look like an acute appendicitis and you want to rule this out. You might also want to know this, even in a case of acute appendicitis if a patient is pregnant because it might alter your management. Pancreatitis, every now and again can be misdiagnosed. We like a lipase levels, it's much more specific to pancreatitis as opposed to the amylase levels and it also rises a bit sooner and stays positive a bit longer. That would be as opposed to the amylase levels. Pancreatitis is also important, we do want to know whether the colis is right or not, acute appendicitis are going to have raised or abnormal liver function tests, but any abnormality they might be due towards looking towards the biliary tree and the liver for an alternate diagnosis. Imaging, let's start with plain forms and chest x-ray. You really should consider chest x-ray if a patient has overt symptoms and signs of peritoneal irritation. An erect chest x-ray looking for air under the diaphragm. Now appendices do rupture, but it usually does not go with massive amount of free air. Now with entertaining alternate diagnosis, is there a perforated ulcer? Is there a perforated or a particular disease? If we look at the abdominal x-ray, usually not sensitive or specific for acute appendicitis in very rare instances, perhaps less than 5% of cases you might see a fecalith, but what you will often see though is just a bit of localised alias. A bit of air fluid levels in the right alia fossa as you have a paralytic alias in that area of inflammation. That might help you a bit. Ultrasound, of course it's very safe to do, but we have a problem in it as much as we're dealing with an area where there's a lot of gas, which might make it very difficult for the sonographer. And also it only has a sensitivity of about 80%, which really is not any better than clinical evaluation. Now remember what sensitivity is? That is your true positive rate in all cases with appendicitis. So if you took 100 patients who really do have acute appendicitis, it will only pick up 80% of them. So that's just as good as clinical evaluation and it doesn't add much. What does help you with really is female patients, one on the pregnancy side, but two just on the tubovarion side, can really have a good look at the tubovarion area. CT scan has become very prevalent. It really has very good sensitivity. It's going to show you any complicated disease which really might change your mind in management. If it shows an inflammatory mass, we're going to continue just with antibiotics. If it shows abscess formation, it might be drainable percutaneously, which saves the patient, the general anesthetic, and surgery. Very sensitive to pick up. It's going to pick up most cases of acute appendicitis. Also very good for alternative noses. Really investigates the whole abdomen and can give a lot of information. The problem is it is a form of radiation. And it is something that we really want to curtail. Obviously, cost and availability is also a problem. So what are they going to see on ultrasound and on the CT scan? Well, you see a thick walled structure which you really shouldn't see on the ultrasound and on the CT scan. It should be really less than a millimetres without any surrounding signs of inflammation.  On the ultrasound, this is a non-compressible little worm of more than six millimetres in diameter. And with compression over that area, with the probe of the ultrasound, they can elicit the pain very specific to acute appendicitis. MRI, very expensive, not universally available. And really probably only has a role in the investigation of a pregnant patient. Inasmuch as sensitive, you can probably approach that of CT scan, but there is no ionising radiation. Contrast enema really has gone on the back burner, full the colon with contrast, and if the appendix doesn't fall, that used to be seen as the diagnosis of acute appendicitis due to the blockage by fecalith. But really in a modern setting, should not have to be entertained. Now a variety of scoring systems, I just want to finish off with, the Alvarado score, modified Alvarado score, perhaps the two most important, I do not want to go into specifics of these because what they really do, is just summarise all your findings. Because it scores certain points for what you found during history and examination, and some basic blood investigations. Now there is a variety out on these, there is a lot of reports in the literature, some that show benefit, some that don't show benefit, and these can be looked up, and they can be pasted on the wall in an acute care setting, and you can read off of those. It really has not become a universally accepted way of diagnosing a patient. It really is just a summary of what you found, and you can make a logical clinic decision on what does, what the...


Professional development is important because we all need tools in our tool box that can help us develop ourselves in our career but also develop others. We come better leaders in the future and also for our subordinates. FTAC is important because these individuals are just graduating from basic and tech school. They're learning a little bit more about the mission here at Team Shaw as well as those helping agencies when they get to a new installation so they know where to go in the event that they find themselves needing, you know, assistance. ALS, the same thing. You know, when you're going from a senior airman to now supervising troops, that's an important step. And they give you tools to put in your tool box to, you know, develop yourself but also, you know, develop so now that you're leading folks under you that you lead them the right way. You know, when you're in shape outside of working, you're working out, you're feeling good, that's helping your, you know, your mental well-being, your spiritual well-being, and now whenever I'm at work, I'm in better airmen because of that. You know, it's just a matter of you kind of looking out. You guys can call the career advisors and we'll be happy to let you guys know the different events that we are at least hosting here on Shaw.


Hello, my name is Alexandre Mahmoud from the Galaxy team at Johns Hopkins University and today I will be talking about the new Kubernetes powered chat ops development environment for Galaxy. What is this? At its core, beyond all the layers through which we expose the functionality, all we're doing behind the scenes is deploying transient instances of Galaxy in transient namespaces on Kubernetes. Paired with a trick I came up with about a year ago of injecting code as configuration to avoid rebuilding the Docker image, this allows developers to quickly deploy local changes on a shareable Galaxy instance running on the web. This started as a pet project at last year's post-conference hackathon between me and Mohammad Safadiyeh at the time arising undergrad senior interning at Hopkins. The system is for the most part through using existing parts of our stack, just adding layers of abstraction at a few levels to ease the use of Kubernetes regardless of one's experience in cluster or infrastructure management. Notably, I repurposed the genomics virtual lab stack, particularly Cloudman Boot and Cloudman, to deploy a scalable Kubernetes cluster, and I'm using the Galaxy home chart for the deployment of Galaxy within that cluster. With the stack as a whole already purposed for namespace isolation, the GVL was the perfect fit for acquiring the underlying infrastructure. There are currently two layers at which this development environment can be used. The first is by using the underlying bash scripts, through which one can hook up local clones of Galaxy in Galaxy home repositories to deploy and preview on a Kubernetes cluster. The second allows developers to interact with a bot in GitHub pull requests, and this chat ops feature will be the main focus of this presentation. Without further ado, I will start by demonstrating an example of such an interaction in a GitHub PR. In this example, I have a pull request in which I'm modifying back-end code for the Kubernetes runner. In order to showcase the change, I will be logging a string with a lot of new lines in the code to then see the printing after running a job on the live preview instance. I will first start by directing the bot to deploy this PR. The bot will respond back at different points. First, it will reply with reacts to your comment, signaling that it has seen and recognized the command, and at this point it has dispatched the corresponding workflow. Then, it will print a boilerplate starting comment when the deployment workflow itself has started running. Finally, after Galaxy has been deployed with the modified code, and all the handlers have passed their health checks, the bot will post a comment with the output of the Hellman store command, particularly including the link to the live instance. We can now go to Galaxy and test our change. In order to do so, I will upload a quick pasted text file and run a small text manipulation job on that data set. Given that I triggered jobs on Kubernetes, I expect to see the debugging statement introduced in the code printed in the job handler log. I now want to look at the job handler logs, which I can do in two ways. The first command, comment log, will make the bot reply with the tail of the requested log, while just log will add the entirety of the log in a just file and post a comment linking to it. As you can see, the handler did in fact print the new debugging code when running jobs. Furthermore, changes can be added to the pull request as desired, and a new invocation of the deploy command will update the running instance with the latest code on the branch. In order to demonstrate that, while also showcasing editing multiple files in the same PR, I will add a similar debugging statement to the util code. After committing the change, I will then deploy the instance and wait for the comment signaling the upgrade. Similarly, by running the two jobs in the new Galaxy instance, I can test that the new debug statements appear in the log as expected. To do so, we similarly use the log retrieving commands, which, as you can see, show the new print statement as expected, both in the commented log tail and the full justed log. Finally, when I am done previewing my changes, I can dispatch the teardown command, which will uninstall this Galaxy instance and delete the namespace, completing the lifecycle of this transient development instance of Galaxy. Dissecting the commands in a bit more detail, I will start with the deploy command, which currently supports any arbitrary parameters for the underlying Helm install command. The dash dash set is a common Helm parameter, and can be used in this case to modify many aspects of the Galaxy HelmTrad deployment, including but not limited to Galaxy configuration. Additionally, while not yet available, work is being done to accept a set of preset deployments, mimicking chunks of configurations particularly useful for testing certain integrations. Next are the just log and comment log commands. These commands accept similar parameters and defer mostly in their method of reporting the logs. Both of them need at least one argument, which should specify the type of logs that should be retrieved. Soon, the comment log will also feature a grep argument, with some key grep features allowing developers to extract particular portions of logs. Finally, the teardown command does not currently have any parameters, as it simply tears down the Galaxy instance associated with this particular pull request. In the near future, an automatic teardown dispatch will be added when a pull request is closed or merged. While not very mature, the current chat-off system has gotten to the point where it has started to be useful in facilitating some development. As such, given the support for the basic lifecycle, the plan is to release an alpha version of the system, at first for committers only, that can be used from either Galaxy or Galaxy Helm repositories in pull requests for the Galaxy app or the Galaxy Helm chart. This system will use a public Kubernetes cluster hosted on JetStream and using the GBL infrastructure as previously mentioned. A public cluster for non-committers is also in the works, but will require some strict limitations to avoid computer resource abuse. In the meantime, anyone can take advantage of the system by setting it up on their own individual folks, and I'll be more than happy to assist anyone interested with either the Kubernetes deployment or chat-off setup. And with that, thank you for listening and please find me on Remo, Gitter or email for any questions or follow-ups.


I'm going to tell you a story about how really one man founded an intellectual movement that is today thriving. And that man, as we'll see, was Carl Menger. Carl Menger initially started off as a journalist. And he would cover the financial markets and the commodities markets. And up to that point, as we'll see in a moment, the prevailing theory of price was that costs of production, the amount of money it costs, or in some parts of Great Britain, the amount of labor it took to produce a good, determined the price. Well, Menger is sitting there looking at the markets because he has to report on them. And he sees that prices are changing not only every day for coal and cloth and so on. They're fluctuating every second. So Menger thinks, well, this can't be due to costs of production. They're not changing with such volatility and with such rapidity. There has to be another explanation. Menger goes on to get his PhD and writes a book, or actually writes a thesis, which then became a book. And it's a small book. It's called The Principles of Economics. Now, it's not actually this small. The Mises Institute has an interesting way of making very readable pocketbooks. So it's actually a little bit bigger than this. The print tends to be small on this. So it's about 300 pages, a little bit more. And it was really only supposed to be an introduction to a full treatise on economics that was going to be three volumes. But Menger got sidetracked. So, but this book itself, Principles of Economics, was the book that then went on to revolutionize economics. Now, this revolution occurred during what was called the Marginalist Revolution, and sometimes it's confused what Menger's contribution was, is confused with the contributions of two other great economists who were not as great as Menger and who had a number of fallacies in their version of this revolution. It was called the Marginalist Revolution. And the Marginalist Revolution really refers to the simultaneous and independent discovery of the principle of marginal utility, which I will explain in a little while, by three different economists. Okay, as I point out here, they were working independently of one another. The books were published in 1871. Two of them were published in 1871, and one was published in 1874. They were published by widely disparate individuals, individuals in different locations. We had Carl Menger in Austria, the Principles of Economics. William Stanley Jevins was in Great Britain. His book was called The Theory of Political Economy. And finally, Leon Valras, who was a French economist who went to Switzerland, published Elements of Pure Economics. The latter two were mathematical to a greater or lesser extent. The third one was the most mathematical. Just to give you a sort of graphic representation of these guys, that's while Ross on the left, the guy looks like a serial killer, is William Stanley Jevins. Okay. And this was the founder of the Austrian school. Oh, I'm sorry. You'll meet him later. Very interesting gentleman. The founder of the Austrian school was Carl Menger, as I said. And here was Menger. This is why many Austrians have beards, taking after the great founder. But they had three different names for what was called, what came to be known as marginal utility. Now, Menger never gave a term to what came to be known as marginal utility. But his student, Friedrich von Wieser, called it Grenz nutsen in German, which is marginal utility. Jevins called it final utility. And Valras called it rarité. Okay. And again, I'll explain what this really was in Menger's view. But let me just say for now that for Valras and Jevins, utility was simply a quantity of satisfaction that individuals passively received from goods. So in drinking this bottle of water, I am piling up a certain amount of utility, which can be added up according to them and can be compared between people. People have water in the front row. They may only be getting 10 noodles from their bottle. I'm getting 20. He may be only getting three noodles, of course.  Okay. I mean, there is no unit of measurement for satisfaction. Menger understood that, and therefore for Menger utility was something active. It was the result of a judgment of the importance of different goods to a human being's well-being. Okay. Or in satisfying a human being's wants. Okay. So Menger put the individual's judgment about his well-being and his wants at the center of economic activity. Menger was a creative genius. Okay. He had many influences, both from the British economists and from the German tradition that he came out of. And some of them talked about subjective value, though they didn't develop this concept of marginal utility, which is the key to explaining prices. What Menger really wanted to do, as we'll see in a moment, was that prices using one principle, which the classical school, which we'll talk about, was unable to do. His unique way of looking at the economy as a result of individuals striving to satisfy their wants gave us a unifying principle for the entire economy. That is a principle that explained all economic phenomena from the pricing of a simple bottle of water to a very complicated input into, let's say, a tablet computer. His system explained everything. He himself didn't draw out all the implications. His students later did, and of course von Mises and Rothbard really, in a sense, completed the entire system. But the seeds were there. Let me just show you some quotes from very famous historians of economic thought about Menger. Joseph Schumpeter, who was born in Austrian, but was not a follower of the Austrian school, was not a follower of Menger, yet he said, Menger is nobody's pupil, and what he created stands. Menger's theory of value, price, and distribution is the best we have up to now. That was in the mid-1920s, after Alfred Marshall had written, after many other economists had written. Ludwig von Mises says, or said, what is known as the Austrian School of Economics started in 1871 when Karl Menger published the slender book that we talked about. Until the end of the 70s, there was no Austrian school. There was only Karl Menger. And finally, Hayek, who was Mises's student, said, the Austrian school's fundamental ideas belong fully and wholly to Karl Menger. What is common to the members of the Austrian school, what counts, what constitutes their peculiarity, in a good sense, of course, and the foundations for their later contributions is their acceptance of the teaching of Karl Menger, and I think that's still true today. Now, who were the classical economists? It was the classical school of economics to which Menger was reacting. Some people think that he wanted to completely overthrow the classical school. That's not true. They had some interesting important insights that he wanted to encompass in a greater unifying principle that explained everything. They did not, as we'll see. So the classical school was composed of basically three economists. David Hume, famous Scottish philosopher and historian and writer on economics. Adam Smith and his famous Wealth of Nations. Smith is wrongly characterized very frequently as a founder of economics. Well, certainly, he wasn't really a big figure in the founding of Austrian economics by any means. There were people that lived hundreds of years before Smith that contributed more to Austrian economics. And then David Ricardo, who lived in 1811, who wrote his great short treatise in 1811, was the third. The main problem with the classical school was their theory of value. And their theory of value presented a paradox. They were the ones that said that it's really cost of production that determines prices, at least in the long run. And they came up against something called the paradox of value. Sometimes called the diamond-water paradox. The paradox is simply, why is it the case that something like diamonds, which have a very high objective exchange value that is a price on the market, have such a low use value. They're used for bodily ornamentation to show off one's wealth, as conspicuous consumption and so on.  On the other hand, water has a relatively low exchange value, relatively low price on the market, but yet it has an extremely high use value. If water were to disappear from the world, we would all disappear about three or four days later. So water has a very high use value, and yet, paradoxically, it has a low market value. So what solution did the classical economists come up with? They basically said, well, economics is not concerned with explaining use value. Okay, yes, yes, for good to have any value, it has to be useful to human beings, but we're not interested in explaining different degrees of use value. What's really important is that economists explain what determines price. That is exchange value. Therefore, their solution was, diamonds are much more expensive than water because it costs more money to produce, let's say, a given weight of diamonds when compared to the same weight of water. So a gallon of water, which weighs about eight pounds, is much less to produce, or costs much less to produce in either money or labor, than do diamonds of the same weight, let's say, eight pounds of gem quality diamonds. And of course, that was wrong. And Menger saw that that was wrong after he had this insight by looking at markets in the real world. So let's just talk a little bit more about the classical school. By the way, I have an interesting picture here just to show you that. That diamond is called a graph pink. It sold for $46 million at auction a few years ago. It certainly didn't cost $46 million to produce. There's an even better picture of it. Okay, how big it is. I think Kobe Bryant gave a purple diamond to his wife that was worth $10 million after she caught him in an act of infidelity. We'll talk more about exchanges in a little while, Menger's attitude toward exchange. In any case, classical school said some good things. First of all, they did say that, look, prices aren't random. They are determinate. They're caused by other things. In the short run, they did say that they were caused by supplying the man in the long run by cost of production. So in other words, they're not arbitrarily set by businesses. They're not accidents of history. They are determinate. The other thing that the classical school pointed out was that they regulate production. They allow businesses to calculate prices. The factors of production of resources compare them to prices that they can get on the market for the product, and that allows them to calculate profits and losses. So they did have a theory of calculation which was pretty sophisticated. Here's a sort of slide showing that. How prices regulate production according to the classical school. So if the demand for oil shoots up, price of oil shoots up above the average cost, and that causes high profits, which are in classical school above the normal profits. There was always some normal profit they talked about. The Austrians later on cleared that up, too, what was a normal profit. And as a result, you got a huge increase in supply.  That is, producing a substitute for the high-priced oil so that the supply of fuels is shifting to the right. And once that happens, then you'll find the price will return towards the natural or long-run price. So the classical school always thought that price were tending towards the long-run price, which was the price that equaled the cost of production. But at least they showed the dynamics of how changes in supply resulted from changes in demand. Or, for example, when the iPad was released in 2010, and there were tremendous profits, within a few years we've had the various different kinds of tablet computers with Android systems and so on, Google, Microsoft. So the supply has increased of tablet computers. And price have begun to come down of tablet computers. The classical school was right about how prices regulated production. They just had an incorrect theory of how prices themselves were determined. So classical theory did involve a theory of calculation. Businessmen, for the most part they were all men then, were considered to be calculators. And this is where the idea of the economic man, or the homo-economicus, came into play. The classical school focused on the business decision maker and basically said that he buys in markets, he buys in markets that are cheap, sells in markets that are dear, where the prices are high. And that was correct as far as it went. But it just didn't go far enough for Menger. Also, the classical school was right in saying that the law of supply and demand and this dynamics of how prices determined production was abstract and universal. It applied to everyone. Menger liked all of those things about the classical school. What he didn't like were some of the implications of their doctrine. First of all, they attempted to explain prices in terms of classes of goods. So they talked about bread, diamonds, water, coal, iron, cotton, and so on. They talked about it in broad classes. And as we'll see, that's part of the reason for their paradox of value that they were unable to solve. The classical economists could not resolve the seeming paradox. For example, what they did notice, they were very insightful and brilliant men, what they did notice was land didn't have any cost of production. In many cases, it had a very high price. Paintings by long-dead artists, they didn't have any cost of production. They had very high prices that had no relation to what their cost of production were in the past. They couldn't explain that. There were many things that they couldn't explain. Antiques, the price of antiques could not be explained. So what they did was, they made the cardinal error of splitting the theory of value and price into two parts. And they said, well, as a theory of producible goods, most goods are producible, cotton, coal, diamonds, and so on. And in that case, the cost of production theory of value explained prices. But in the case of non-producible goods, supply and demand or monopoly, in the case of land, they believe really all landowners were monopolists pretty much. That explained prices of those types of goods. So this whole idea of being unable to resolve the paradox of value, being unable to show how the use value brought about or played a part in bringing about exchange value, made them focus on the businessman. They just forgot about use value, as I said before. The businessman became the central actor in the economic drama. And so we got something called Homo economicus. That is an economist simply focused on people who were selfish, who bought at a cheap price and sold at a high price. And that was completely incorrect from Menger's point of view, as we'll see. They also came up with an even more ridiculous cost of production theory called the labor theory of value. Ricardo did that. According to the labor theory of value, the price of a good or comparing two prices or the price of two goods, that price ratio reflected the amount of hours that were contained in each good. So for example, if a BMW costs $50,000 and a Toyota Corolla costs $20,000, well then the BMW contained two and a half times the amount of labor as a Corolla, which just looking around in the real world is not true. And so their theory of value was sort of a sweat theory of value. In other words, value was infused into the good by the laborer sweating over it. But let's say the laborer sweat over digging ditches or building a structure that no one wanted to buy. It didn't matter how many hours he labored or how much money, if you want to go to the cost of production theory, how much money was spent on building this structure, building a pyramid in the middle of London or something like that, that no one wanted. It still would not have value. So all of these things were brewing in Menger's mind when he was writing his book. Another thing that was wrong with the theory of value as presented by the classical school was that exchange indicated to them an equality of value. That is that if a bottle of water exchanged for $1.50, well then it was equal in value to $1.50. And if an automobile exchanged for $30,000, then it was equal in value to the $30,000. Because basically the price was equal to the cost of production, the cost of producing that particular item. Okay, now let's look at what Menger had to say about all of this. What Menger wanted to do, as I said before, was to come up with a theory of value and price that encompassed all economic phenomena. And he says this in a preface to his book. He says, I have devoted special attention to the investigation of the causal connections. This is very big on cause and effect, as we'll see, between economic phenomena involving products and the corresponding agents of production, meaning the resources. Not only for the purpose of establishing a price theory based upon reality, he wanted to base it on real things. And placing all price phenomena, interest, wages, ground rent, together under one unified point of view, meaning he wanted a principle that explained all prices and all things, not just consumer goods, but of capital goods and of land and labor. He says, but also because of the important insights we thereby gained into many other economic processes here to fore up to this point completely misunderstood. So his point was that all economic phenomena could be elucidated by a correct theory of price. And when he wrote notes to himself in writing his book, he pointed out the basic themes of his work. He said, look, man himself is the beginning and the end of every economy. The beginning because it's his wants that activate economic activities that bring them about and the satisfaction of those wants, which is the end of the economy. He also said, our science is the theory of a human being's ability to deal with his wants. So here you see he's putting wants at the center. He's not putting costs of production at the center. He's not putting a business decision maker at the center and he says all things are subject to the law of cause and effect. Basically goods had value because they caused the satisfaction of human wants when they were consumed and those things that caused the production of goods. So if a diamond mine and diamond workers and the gem dealer, all of these people caused the production of the final gem quality diamond, then all of those things have to have value. He also put up, it is notes, what we might call trinities of causation. So you start with ends. People have ends, that is to satisfy their wants. They need means in their external environment with which to produce and satisfy these wants and then when the means have been transformed into the things necessary to satisfy the ends, you have realization of the ends. That is also man. You start with man. You have the external world. He works on the external world and he produces his subsistence. So the beginning is always a subjective notice. The ends, the human being, the subject and the wants. There's wants, goods, satisfaction. The beginning and the end are subjective. The objective comes in the middle. It's involved in transforming the elements of our environment, the resources into the ends. So his theory of economics was subjective through and through, though he always focused on an external reality. Some Austrians, contemporary Austrians, almost lose sight of the middle. The middle is the key because we're not ghosts just floating above the earth. We have physical bodies. We have needs that arise from those physical bodies and so on. So you do need a cause and effect relationship between the subjective and the objective. And Menger saw that. He was the first to clearly see that and that's when he came up with the theory of goods. So he brought the objective into it but within the context of subjectivity. What I want to do is to show you a slide. I guess I just misplaced that slide but I'll have something to show you here. You can see it in the middle here. What was a good to Menger? What characteristics went into making up a good? There had to be a human need. There had to be such properties as rendered the thing capable of being brought into causal connection with the satisfaction of this need. There had to be something out there.  Those things can be brought into causal connection with satisfying the need once you make the ham sandwich. And then he said, number three, there has to be human knowledge of this causal connection. People have to know about the fact that these things can be transformed into a final consumer's good. And finally, there has to be command of the thing sufficient to direct it to the satisfaction of the need. You can clone it and control it. Now, Mises pointed out, let me keep this up there, that number two and three were actually, there was an error there. In fact, Mises said you could combine two and three into one. That is, there has to be a belief that a thing can be brought into causal connection with the end and that. You and me could be wrong about that. So if you buy diet pills on QVC, okay, they don't bring about the end of getting rid of your belly fat, for example. If you seek the services of a psychic, she doesn't really put you in touch with dead relatives or friends. If you read The New York Times, you don't get the truth about the world. You watch the Rachel Maddow show.  So, Manger actually, Manger was so smart that he couldn't let that stand. A few pages later, he said, well, there are imaginary needs. He used women's makeup as an example. They actually do have a price and a value. So he's admitting what Mises insisted on 50 years later. So Manger was brilliant. About the last point, about the control of the thing. A sunny day serves our needs when we want to go to a baseball game or we want to go on a picnic. And yet, the sun is not a good. It's not a good because we can't control it. Or let's put it this way, the weather itself is not a good. Because at least up to now, we really can't control the weather. We can't produce a sunny day. So not all things that aid in the satisfaction of our needs are goods. Only those things that we can control. And now let me just talk a little bit about economic goods. So the first chapter is on goods. Manger's trying to show that goods themselves have subjective components. And those are the characteristics that I just specified. But he said now, he went on, all goods exist in sufficient quantities to satisfy everyone's wants. That's in the second chapter. Those goods are economic goods. And therefore, they have to be economized. So Manger came up with economizing man, an active individual looking to satisfy his wants as opposed to economic man, a businessman that's mechanically reacting to buying cheaply and selling at high prices. So he displaced economic man with economizing man. Someone who's active and creative. So for Manger, here's how you economize. There aren't enough goods to go around. No one has enough resources individually to satisfy all their ends. Therefore, they have to choose which ends to satisfy. So if you can do that, you have to rank which ends are more important, which ends are less important to you. In other words, unlike Valras and Jeb, which I spoke of in the beginning, you don't just sit back and receive these utils from the goods. You have to actively compare these different things and make a judgment about how important they are to your well-being. So you're active in that sense also of the human being. As Mom Woods pointed out, the Austrian school accords human beings the dignity of being human beings, of being active. It doesn't drain them of creativity, make them mechanical reactors to prices that are out there. As we'll see, human beings are the ones who determine prices. That is, consumers determine prices that the entrepreneurs and the businessmen are reacting to. Actually, the entrepreneurs themselves have to be creative because they have to purchase goods with the anticipation that these inputs or resources they're purchasing are going to be less expensive than the goods that they produce and sell one month from now, four years from now, five years from now. Manger inserted time and uncertainty into his system. And it's been in Austrian economics ever since. So now let's give an example of how we go about economizing. And this is a famous example. Manger gave something like it in his Principles of Economics. Bumbavirk also gave something like it. This is more, I think, Bumbavirk's, Eugen von Bumbavirk was Manger's student and follower and the one who really completed his price theory. So the example I want to give here is the fictional cast away, Robinson Crusoe or Tom Hanks or wherever he was, has a certain amount of wheat on an island. It's just really his labor and he finds that he can plant maybe some seeds for growing wheat are left on the island along with him when the boat sinks. So what he wants to do is to decide how he can use the wheat so that they satisfy his most important wants. So let's say he ranks the wands as follows and each one will absorb a full, let's say, sack of wheat because he used sack. So let's say the highest valued end is the bread for sustaining life. One sack of bread will just keep him alive. It won't be too healthy, but it'll just be, it'll be enough to keep him alive for a year. A second sack of bread, if he had it, would be enough to maintain his vitality and his health so that he can move around and accomplish other ends. The third would be the seed grain for the following year's harvest. So he thinks ahead. If he had a fourth sack, he would, well, they use whiskey, I like vodka, so he would produce a year's supply of vodka. A fifth sack would satisfy his fifth most important want. These are ranked in terms of their importance. Notice there's no numbers assigned to this. Menger assigned indexes. He signed 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, but he didn't add and subtract them. But it's better just to assign cardinal numbers, because that's what he had in mind, first, second, third, fourth, so on. If he had a sixth sack, he would devote it to food for a company. Let's say he's lonely, and there are some parrots, and he can teach them to talk, so he would have a parrot. And maybe once he got to 20 sacks, they would be super abundant. They wouldn't be goods anymore. They wouldn't be economic goods in his terminology anymore. There would be more than enough to satisfy all his wants. But let's assume that he has five sacks, so he fulfills or satisfies the first five wants. Menger's question was, and he was very adept at asking questions that led to the solution of very important and troublesome problems that the classical school had. So he said, well, what's the value of a sack of wheat, given that we have these five? Is it the value of the highest ranked end? Is it some average? Is it the value of the average of ends? Well, here's where he asked the question. He said, and he put it in terms of a hypothetical example, what if all these sacks were being stored and were going to begin to be used the next day? They were just harvested. They're stored in a structure he has, and you have, let's say, vermin breaking in and devouring one of the sacks. Let's say they devour sack number two, okay? What will be the reaction of this creative individual? Will this individual simply say, okay, well, I'm devoting these sacks to my first, third, fourth, and fifth ends? No. What he would do is he would give up the expected satisfaction from the lowest ranked end, the fifth end. What he would give up then is the dairy products and meat and so on that could be had from feeding farm animals, because that's his lowest rank of the five ends that he could accomplish. So in that case then, this led to the law of marginal utility and then to the solution of the paradox of value. Utility is simply another word for satisfaction. Marginal simply means last or next. In this case, it means the last. So according to Menger, the value of each sack of wheat, no matter which one it is, if you have five sacks, is the marginal utility. The value of the lowest ranked end that could be satisfied by the existing stock of the good, by the existing supply, by the five sacks. So no matter which sack he lost, he would lose the value he attaches to having meat and dairy products during the year. And that's the law of marginal utility. And so now then we can specify it. As the supply of a good decreases, the marginal utility rises and therefore the value of the good rises. So in other words, now if he's left with four sacks, the value of each sack is higher because now if he lost one, he'd have to give up his vodka, which is higher rank than the dairy and meat products. On the other hand, if he fortuitously came across another sack of wheat, he could now satisfy his sixth end. The value of that end now is lower. So the marginal utility is falling. Each sack of wheat is valued less because he loses less utility. The marginal utility is lower. So the law is, as the supply of a good increases, the marginal utility and the value falls. An example I like to give is if there's a family that has three automobiles, and let's say they're pretty much interchangeable. One is for the primary breadwinner. That's the highest value used. The second is for, let's say, the spouse has a part-time job and uses it to get from the part-time job and run errands. And then there's junior who has a car to get around. Well, what if the old man cracks up his car? Well, I mean, he doesn't go without the car. Junior loses the car because that's the marginal utility of that supply. That's the lowest ranked end, keeping Junior off your back from continually asking for the keys and so on. Now, let me give you a little more sophisticated example to see if you understand this law. So let's say I have a farmer and he has three horses and two cows. Now, these are not interchangeable goods. They serve different ends. But still, you're still comparing them. You're always comparing goods as to how important they are, whether they're the same or different, just to your well-being. So let's say there's three horses. So the most important end is horse number one, plowing the field. Second most important end is to have a team of horses plowing the field. It makes farming much easier, more productive. The third is the milk that you could get from the first cow. The fourth end is the milk that you could get, the cheese and butter that you can get to various diet. The fifth is the pleasure riding the third horse. Which animal has a higher value? It's the cow. We don't look at the first two highest valued ends. We don't look at them at all. It's the cow that has a higher value. And the way to think about this is to ask Manga's question. If the barn's on fire and you can only say four to five animals, which animal do you leave in there? You leave a horse in there because the margin utility of horses is lower than the margin utility of cows. But once that happens, which animal is more valuable? Now you only have four. Now the horse is more valuable because the margin utility of the horse is the satisfaction that you attach to achieving the second end and for the cow is the satisfaction that you attach for the fourth end. That's how value is determined. Now we can solve the paradox of value as Manga did. So Manga pointed out that diamonds, in fact, are more valuable than water in a normal situation because diamonds have a higher margin utility. They're scarcer in relation to the ends that they can serve. If someone is in the desert and has not had access to water for three days and comes across another person that has a jug of water and has in his pocket, let's say he even has that graph pink diamond that sold for $46 million, would he exchange a diamond for the water? Yes, because the water achieves a much higher end. That is staying alive for another three days. You can go about three days without water, three or four days, whatever it is. He would trade the diamond for the water. But water is so abundant, vis-a-vis diamonds, in any normal situation that we're aware of that water has much lower value. And that is the solution to the paradox of value. That is the classical school went wrong because it focused on all the water in the world. It talked about water versus diamonds. Manger focused on the marginal units, the units that the individual was choosing between. Was he choosing a diamond in a situation where there was a lot of water or between a diamond and water in a situation, in a lifeboat situation or in a desert situation? So the Austrians always focus on concrete units because those are the units, those actual goods that we're dealing with at the moment that are the objects of choice, and therefore of human valuation. We're valuing them in relation to our welfare. Now, Manger went on and developed something called a theory of imputation. And this comes from his very idea of how value and production are interrelated. You remember those trinities of value? The value starts with the end or the want and then is imputed to the good. So if you look here, let's say bread has a value. Now notice the upward arrow.  Bread, at the wholesale level, is valuable because it's integral in the production. It causes the production of bread at the retail level when you combine it with transportation and labor. Flour is only valuable. It's not valuable directly to consumers. Consumers don't want flour. Let's assume they don't bake their own bread. Consumers don't want flour. They want the output that flour delivers to them eventually. The point is though flour helps cause the production of wholesale bread which in turn helps cause the production of retail bread. Finally, wheat is valuable because it's integral in the production of flour. So notice production comes from the top down. It comes from the inputs down. The classical school made the mistake of thinking that value and production both came from the top down. That flour was valuable because it costs a lot to buy the wheat or because it costs something to buy the wheat. And that bread was valuable because it was a cost of production of baking the bread by hiring laborers and buying or renting ovens and so on. But menger said no, no, no, they go in different directions. So the ends cause the value to begin with and the value is imputed upwards or backwards to the factors of production all the way up to land and labor. Whereas on the other hand, that's what causes the production. The fact that this perspective value in the output causes people to undertake the efforts at the higher stages of production to produce the good. So you can think of it in terms of let's say diamonds. I used to give my undergraduates the following example. Back in the old days, if you recall the movie Witness with Harrison Ford takes place in the Amish country and the Amish are known as a simple people and the simple people, they don't even have buttons on their clothing, they're just like sort of hooks and hoops that they fast their clothing with because they're against any kind of ostentation. So if all Americans or everyone adopted the values of the Amish what would be the value of diamonds? Would diamonds have a value? Diamonds wouldn't have a value because they wouldn't play any part in improving human well-being because no one would see them as satisfying a want. The wants for those things would disappear if they adopted those values. But which also means by the way that because diamonds don't have a value the things that cause the production of diamonds do not have a value. So suddenly the high salaries paid to jewelers and those who can identify high quality gems and so on the values of those skills would plummet to zero and of course the value of diamond mines assuming there's no industrial uses for diamonds would fall to zero. So a diamond isn't expensive because diamond mines are very costly and also it's very costly to mine diamonds it's rather the other way around, right? So a diamond mine is valuable only because people play such a high value on diamonds and because of the scarcity of diamonds in relation to human wants for them. So prices determine costs not the other way around and Mender used the idea of people not smoking anymore and he went through it in detail and showed that this dislike for tobacco or this abandonment of the habit of consuming tobacco in any way would bring about a zero price for rolling machines a zero price for tobacco and a zero price for tobacco land if it couldn't be used for any other good or any other type of production. So that's Mender's law of imputation. He actually took it a little further. All it tells us here is that the total amount of money spent on bread and we're forgetting about interest would be equal in value to the breaded wholesale and the total amount that you would spend on wholesale would be equal in value to the flour and so on. So in other words, you take the value of all of the things in that stage producing that good and that would attach itself to the higher stage. So the value would be attached for all what Mender called the complementary goods. All the goods in wheat would be equal in value to all the goods in flour forgetting about the interest differential and a profit there. But Mender wanted to go further. He said, wait a minute, he says that doesn't explain how each individual unit remember the unit of the goods is what is important each individual unit of a factor of production is valued and priced. We have to go a little bit further and here again he asked a very important question a very insightful question that unraveled the puzzle. Let me just give you this example. Let's say you could produce a thousand bushels of wheat this is called a production function. W is wheat, L is labor, H is horses, P is plow, A is acre, acres of land, F is pound of fertilizer. So this is a production function that is a technological recipe for producing wheat. If you had 90 hours of labor and 90 days of labor and you had two horses and you had one plow and 40 acres and 500 pounds of fertilizer then you could actually produce a thousand bushels of wheat. So Mender asked the question what is the value of a hundred sacks a hundred pounds of fertilizer? Let's say they come in a hundred pound sacks of all of those things all of those things cooperate in producing a thousand bushels of wheat how could we attach a value to one unit of all of those different things? Well, Mender simply asked the question how much would the total product decrease how much would that thousand bushels of wheat decrease if a unit of the factory production was subtracted from the process of production? If we took 100 pounds of fertilizer away from all of those other things what would be the amount of wheat produced? And this is the theory of factor pricing he never followed it completely through to money prices but here's his solution so let's assume we change delta F we change fertilizer we reduce it by 100 pounds that will cause a change in wheat let's say by 40 bushels so now you only produce 960 bushels so we call that the marginal product of 100 pounds of fertilizer it's 40 bushels of wheat therefore the value of the marginal product the value of the 100 pounds of wheat is simply the marginal utility that the farmer attaches to the 40 bushels of wheat that would not be produced if you didn't have that extra 100 pounds of fertilizer now he didn't go as far as to go into money but I will do that very quickly the monetary value of 100 pounds of fertilizer to the farmer in a money economy is called this marginal revenue product you don't have to worry about that the additional revenue earned by using an additional sack of fertilizer with a 100 pound sack so we assume that the price of a bushel of wheat is $2 well then the value of that sack is $2 times the extra 40 bushels of wheat that you could get and sell on the market for $2 a piece which is $80 he'd be willing to pay up to $80 for that bushel of wheat so up to $80 for that sack of 100 pounds of fertilizer so Manger completely solved this now this marginal productivity theory took many years to be developed and the Austrians were instrumental in developing it but Manger had the seeds of the theory he had this brilliant insight and again it was this idea of asking the appropriate question that led to the solution okay lastly Manger thought that the class of economists were all wet in saying that the value of a good is equal in value to the price of the good because in the long run cost of production equals price Manger says that's ridiculous and he gave a simple example of exchange he says if by the way the item or the animal that's in parentheses is the one that the individual does not have so A ranks a horse just look at A ranks a horse above a cow but he doesn't have a horse what does that mean? that means if he met someone who was willing to give him a horse for a cow he would make the exchange on the other hand there's a B out there who doesn't have a cow but has a horse but would prefer a cow to a horse it has a higher margin of utility to him so what Manger shows is that if they met if they knew of each other's existence they would make the exchange and he goes beyond that and he says look this is mutually beneficial each individual gives up something that he or she values less for something that they value more they receive and return something they value more than what they give up and that's the essence of exchange that's the essence of the whole economy because the whole economy the whole market economy is simply a network of voluntary exchanges whether it be someone buying an iPad or someone hiring an illegal worker doesn't matter Manger's theory covers all instances there is only one theory of price and as we'll see of exchange he doesn't go much further than that but you can see in today more modern example obviously whenever you buy anything let's say someone buys a BMW the buyer prefers the BMW to the $50,000 that he gives up whereas the seller prefers the $50,000 that is received to what the product that he's giving up now it's not to say that they can't be buyers' regret later on the buyer might say you know what this BMW is a crappy car I don't like it would have rather gotten an an Acura or a Lexus or whatever but we're not worried about that as economists at the point of exchange right before the exchange we call ex ante from the standpoint of before the exchange they both have these valuations they're called reverse valuations so not only aren't the goods equal they're not equal to either buyer there's a double to either participant in the exchange there's a double inequality of value the seller values the $50,000 more than the BMW the buyer values the BMW more than the $50,000 there's no equality anywhere to be found there I'll stop here we have I think about five minutes for questions by that clock any questions? in the back stand up I'll talk to you individually about that I think that would be better any general question or comment okay thank you very much


Welcome back. It's still the breakfast on Plus TV Africa and of course moving on with our conversations this morning. Time to look at what the papers have to say. But before we go to the first paper, Mercier Boppo is also here with me. Mercier is a great Wednesday morning. I can't wait to see what the papers have today. Some very interesting stories. So we have those. Yeah, definitely. Very interesting stories. Coffee. It's good to see you this morning on the set as well. We just get head straight to the conversation. Always at this time we get to look at the papers, various papers that we have and of course have an analyst share their thoughts on it. This morning, Tunde Kola will be joining us. Tunde Kola, well if you're... No, we have Andy. So that's a default setting. Andy, if you can hear us, it's good to have you join us. Thank you. All right then. But let's sort of with a daily trust newspaper, broadly written. It says politicians move to bypass cash withdrawal limit. Politicians move to bypass cash withdrawal limit. That's what you have on the daily trust newspaper this morning and underneath there are several writers. It says chief tends collect agent's account details in Nassarowa, a presidential candidate to spend 1.8 billion naira on agents on... Wow, that's a lot. APC-MUM as PDP, Labor Party kicks and then you have it won't affect our campaigns and NPP and the PR, it's called policy will force a change, activists are saying. Two billion dollars per greed maintenance expansion ongoing. The federal government is saying now and that's a way from election spending. So there's a lot of money that's would just be going round. Stakeholders approve dangote cement and share by back. Tunebu and Kaduna vows to eliminate bandits. The question would be how? Because how is the question? Very constant dominant question that every time you know someone is saying something to you. How? How? How? Southeast PVC collection is slow, start amid rising insecurity. PVC collection is in slow, start amid rising insecurity. Women are reigned for assaulting police officer and Malamiz committee working to recover stamp duties. That's what the president is saying. I'll restore peace, improve mining in Plateau. Really, I think it was quoted to say, but is it just in Plateau state? Because this is just also saying nodding to the fact that yes, there's mining going on, especially at a time where you don't have the states in charge of their resources constitutionally. Wow. That's the much we can take this morning on the Daily Trust News People. We have the nation up next, top stories on the nation front page. We have banks getting marching orders to sell off Disco's shares. Quite interesting. A government explains sack of core investors targets 22,000 megawatts. I think we can be not surprised with the performance of some of these Disco's. Under the nameplate of the nation news report, you can see that headline, killers of unilaterally female student to die by hanging court rules. It's a long time I had since I had the last time I had such a ruling with are you in office? No deal with Atticus says wiki. How to end petrol crisis by reps. Oh, wow. They should put that in the book. Agency search to partner. I didn't hire 12,000 workers in our show. 14 persons, 22 cows die in road crush. Teenable promise to end, promises to end, banditry, terrorism in Northwest, CBN abuse, Naira and go to jail will be promises to end stealing in government. I had lines on the front page of the nation. Nothing on a rise TV today. So I think it's cool. Well, we have the punch newspaper this morning, 2023. Inaq vows prosecution of voters, card buyers and sellers. Well, that's a lot. Inaq vows prosecution of votes, voters, card buyers or vote, whatever. I mean, if you talk about those who are buying votes and selling votes, that's what Inaq is quoted to say. Commission and system beavers to combat PVC fraud. Please working with Inaq to track rigors, first headquarters is quoted to say this is, this arrived is underneath the board caption. And just before move away, Nigerian leads in YAM production exports none. Oh, wow. Such an irony. Reps direct NNPC to end petrol scarcity. Even though you have the DSS also saying, hey, the ultimatum was given for the eight hours after it seems like the situation has actually been different, especially after all of that. Now, Senate postpones hearing on cash withdrawal limit and fake soldier in court of for terrorism or terrorizing Lagos community. And Majestic Mercy Secures Argentina World Cops Final Sports. And they say he's the goat, the greatest of all time, just in case you're wondering. Well, I think that that's the much we can take. They're interesting headlines, but for the want of time, we need to move away. All right. The last one is this day, on Wednesday, the big one there, wiki, I would have won PDP primary if it weren't manipulated.  As he would have won the PDP primary if it weren't manipulated, insist he doesn't have any rift with Attiku, ex VP Okoa PDP governor salutes Revers governor at 55. Attiku put out a congratulatory message to wiki in the papers. As he celebrated 35th birthday yesterday. Interesting. This day is still holding on to that fight, the argument and the disagreement with the Teenable Camp whilst the nation didn't have anything on it today. This day, who belong to that rice family, they put out a headline. It's under the nameplate of the paper. Allake or Nanogawa's allegation. So by being a class heir challenges them to present their candidate for debates. Interesting. And the writer so that reiterates journalist, not the opponents in 2023, insists resort to blackmail, fake news, bullying, bullying won't work. Right. Resort to blackmail, fake news, bullying won't work. More from the paper. U.S. Africa Summit. Buhari restates 30 gigawatts electricity target by 2030 and Obi and Kogi pledges to make Nigeria producing nation some of the headlines on the front page. Obviously, let's bring in at this point Andi Akpoti-Veho is our guest analyst on the program this morning. He is a nation builder, thinker and author. Andi, good morning to you. Thank you very much for your time. All right. All right. Let's start with this look at the cash withdrawal limit, the lead story on the front page of daily trust today. We hear politicians are moving to bypass the cash withdrawal limit, you know, shift agents, collect agents, account details in Nassarwa. Some underhand moves and tactics going on with the politicians just to beat the CBN's rule. What are your thoughts on this? We are just in a joke. I'm just in a joke. And let me tell you why I've just said this. If this had been said or this policy had been constructed but about in civil society, you would hear how that there would be a potpourri of ideas from those who are the propellants and those who are the opponents of these. They would be on TV. They would be on radio. They would be bypassing their positions, presenting facts around why it should be or why it should not be. But in 99 years, what we hear is a national assembly called the CBN and says to them, can you just talk this? And I wonder, now we joke. Now we really, you know, created, commit my use of this word, created after the image and the likeness of God. Who always conveys this idea? They wanted to make man and he was consulting the others and saying, come, let us make man in our image. Are we really designed after the likeness of him? That today, if people in the first instance wanted to bring a policy and they just and they were going to adjust the fiscal policies, they did not consult with the monetary angle, which is the Ministry of Finance, who is really responsible for those kinds of adjustments. The CBN is not responsible for those kinds of adjustments. Now they did not make matters worse. The national agenda and politicians are also making the same mistake. And I'm wondering what kind of people are we? I'm just a joke. I'm sorry to say TV stations and politicians and radio stations, you reach out to these politicians and CBN and they've had a debate, a national debate. I have followed so closely from debates, you know, in America on CNN and that they are on both on the floor. They are having, you know, serious conversations around some policy statements on CNN. They are having those conversations and everything. But you know, India is a command and rule kind of thing.  It's such a joke, okay? I'm telling you. It's such a joke. Well, let's also look at, turn our attention to the punch newspaper ahead of the 2023 elections. Inaq vows prosecution of voters card buyers or vote buying and, you know, sellers of this vote. What are your thoughts? Because it's one of the factors that will shape the 2023 elections. We saw that, you know, the pre-elections, the elections that happened before 2023 elections, vote buying quite dominant. Do you think that the empire has what it takes? They've been empowered enough by the law specifically stated, well spelled out, you know, to carry the act of prosecution of those who will be involved in buying and selling a vote.  How empowered are they? Only Inaq would prosecute those who are spending money, you know, more than they should spend for election and they are not banks, they are not the essay, only Inaq. They are just, it's just everything is a joke in Nigeria. And that Nigerians are buying these, these, I want to be very careful, you know, with my church of course, Nigerians are buying this non-science from this politician, you know, shocks me, beats me whole lot. How is Inaq going to be able to prosecute them? Is Inaq police? I can, Inaq take anybody to court. If the police says they're not going to prepare the matter, they're not going to prepare the case and take it to court. What would Inaq do? How can Inaq do with case where journalists, people should ask them, how can you do it? Ignite that position is clear on who should take, you know, criminals or who should take those who have been said to have committed crime to the courts. Who should take them? It's police. The police are loyal, the members of the police are loyal to politicians. You don't know this reality. It's a big joke. Politicians will even go to the police station and go and enter into a non-reprosecute and carry those people out of the police station. Those who are up there, they are going to the generals to go and enter in non-reprosecute or beyond for the state, for those people who would have done, would have used to do those things.  Everything is a joke, my sister. I'm telling you, for the sake of speaking, that's why we are speaking, but they are not serious about addressing the basic issues that are confronting Nigeria. The issues that will address Nigeria is going to be a gain on the pedestal of growth, a gain on the journey towards, you know, becoming one of the greatest nations on earth. Those basic things, they are not willing to address that.  And quickly, before Kofi comes in, before Kofi comes in, I'd like to ask, because it's also another issue, the fact that the commission is insisting on the beavers as a means to combat PVC fraud or rigging of the elections. Do you really trust in this technology and its deployment? It's as a need, I don't need to know that they are insisting on beavers as a means of what? Commission insist on beavers to combat PVC fraud.  Politicians are head of, you know, INEC already. I don't want to speak to these things on national TV. Politicians are head of INEC already. As long as, you know, you have the fact that you have the right to speak to it. Are you seeing what they are doing with the frequent and regular burning of INEC offices across the nation? Politicians are head of INEC already. And INEC is not the security, you know, institution in this country. They must sit with other stakeholders to make this work. They would fail to do these basic things. They would fail to contact the security people to do what should be done. Beavers will just be one thing that would not even address the nonsense that will happen in this election. I have said, if you go to my Facebook page, you see I have posted a lot of things around these beavers, you know, but not to overflow the dead horse. I would just say that I wish them were around the optimism with the years of the beavers. All right. Quite interesting. Let's look at the situation in the People's Democratic Party. Yes, so we get Governor Rivers that is still talking and still blowing hot. And this day, it gives us space to data in its lead story. Ricky says he would have won the PDB primary if it weren't manipulated. That's where the back and forth is at right now. This comes as he's insisting. The paper says he doesn't have any rift with a Tikua worker. And a Tikua himself yesterday took out, I think, a page in a national daily to wish Wike well, happy birthday. Okowa and some PDP governors also saluted Wike on his birthday. So what are your thoughts on where we are right now in this entire drama? We are trying to get Nigerians to be emotional. I'm not interested in this Wike's quarrel with the Tikua and the Tiku's quarrel with Wike. I'm interested in what we need to talk about to improve Nigeria. I'm interested in APC telling us the Potacot refinery will start working by December. Taking our monies millions of dollars to go and do what they call revamping of the Potacot refinery. Today it is not working and there is scarcity of petroleum. They are interested in those matters. Wike and PDP are not speaking to do this. They climb the post of the restaurant at the podium and they talk fucking, spewing all kinds of gibberish, you know, on the podium. Wike will speak today and I'm not fighting. Who is interested in your Oswana wife matter? Who is interested in it?  How we can stop this brain drain? How can we stop this jackpot syndrome? Nigerians are living this country in droves and in numbers because leadership is feeling on all levels and the leaders that we like, we call them leaders and the dealers that we have there who are currently in position of authority are really giving us sensationalism. They are discussing about what kind of boxers they are wearing, what is the color of it, what kind of hair their wives made, what kind of nails their wives made. We're interested in all those jokes because the real issues that we make Nigerians move forward. This course is about the potter country for the night that you will spend money on. This course is about the monies you took to go out and buy machines to use to combat these who with our last years you are not doing it. This course, these basic things, this course it out, the amount of money you see you have invested in your life, production, years you have been buying carbon flies for 45,000, 50,000. This course is about these people. I'm not interested in your Oswana wife matters, you know, the matters that concern you and this course are going to affect, you know, how the price of fish and how the price of snow is going to change in the market. We can continue discussing those things and be having the ears and the interest of Nigerians while interested in them. But I'm sure that a lot of Nigerians who are rather interested in address, wearing them, address the real issues, which is to be spending your life on TV and the frame that the OPC has failed. OPC said the protocol refinery was going to go back and produce it. The trade of these things, when we take you on this course, there are a lot of people around them saying that today nothing is working and it's talking about articles, rifts, I mean, I'm just so disappointed, you know, about these people we call leaders who rather should address as leaders. Okay, let's just also quickly look at the fact that, you know, with all of that, some persons have taught that this policy is actually rather hasty and some people are very critical of it. So I hear a lot of noise in the background, right? So it's difficult to actually pick what you are saying. If you can please repeat it, I would be really very glad. Okay, so it's about the withdrawal, cash withdrawal limits and the argument surrounding it. And some people have said that's on the daily trust, we're back at it. And, you know, there's been several arguments that it's a hasty policy. Others are saying, yes, it's good, but it's hasty. I mean, where do you stand in all of this? So if that's what you are saying, the fact that it's hasty looking back, I thought you should converse, you should say what is wrong with the policy. It's not one of them because his hasty is bad. So because somebody quickly finished addressing certain problems that was given in school, they said it's supposed to take like three hours to write it and the person wrote it in 25 days, they make that solution provided bad solution around us and Nigerian. That's why I say it's a joke. I needed to say them come on TV, come on radio, those people were against it to come and tell us why this policy should not be. Little kind people converse ideas. If you are really worth yourself, if you are really a politician and a leader, who knows? If you are not just, I don't want to say who is put there in position of authority, but now I'm telling us what you think is wrong with this policy. Come and tell us, come and converse, come and tell us the reasons you believe that if it should do something different from what you are doing, you should come and tell us why they think that is what Nigeria should be asking for. I don't know, I don't want to develop to that level yet. I have a few friends who said to me a couple of days back that, you know, the developmental stage of Africa and Nigeria is at the lowest end. If you heard people, if you heard older society talk about issues, you would understand that. I do not argue with you when you said it. You will hear how that they are converting issues. They are thinking about it. You will make sure you stand still and you are converting ideas. Yeah, God almighty, because it's a good thing you should not do it. But the love reason for you to suspend it, because it's hasty, okay, it's being hasty what destruction is we going to bring about? What level of noise will be introduced into the system or noise will be introduced into the system if we implemented this now? I'm sure that you are conversant. So it's a conversation that we're going to have in the course of, you know, the breakfast on the show at 8 o'clock. So maybe we don't need to dwell so much on it. But if you talk about the arguments that have been put against it, there's been a lot, especially for those who are in the business of rendering services. I mean, I'm sure you know the POS service or agents across different parts of the country. That is a major concern. And the fact that this person probably might just be out of business, you know, is another issue that has been put at the front, but quickly to that other one, I'd like to show you a thought on the punch newspaper. Nigeria leads in YAM production, exports none. That's what the federal government is saying. Do you think this is an irony? It is as pathetic. It is as ludicrous. It is as ridiculous as preposterous. I think we pay that we're living in rice production. Go to the market, man. We are just defining all the loan economic principle. You know, the simple mode demands things. When demand is higher than supply, prior we go up, we won't supply terms demand. When there's so much supply and demand is pursuing, price will crack. They are telling us that we have to diesel rice in quantum. They lied to us and show that we're in the middle of rice. And I think that you go to the market and tell me why people buy the rice if they're selling at $48,000, $45,000 even though we are living in it. And it's not rice. And it's not rice. It's YAM. YAM production. No, I know. I know. I know it's real. It's the same thing that you are living in YAM production. And I just think they have become, within the reach of the poor in our country, we don't understand the whole life.  The government, the leader of the government, the spokespeople in the government, they all actually never think they can continue to do this because my children just buy this life. We are not concerned. We are not going back to check whether this is going to be, whether this is going to be speak.  That's it. That's what is in YAM. That's what is in rice. Please let them read me this morning. All right. Andy, thank you so much for your time. We will leave it at that. And of course, we appreciate you joining us, you know, and to give us your fantastic analysis. Always look forward to having you again. Thank you very much, Andy Agportive, for your time. Indeed, Andy Agportive is an author, a nation builder, and a thinker. He's been a guest on Off the Press right here on the breakfast. We'll take a break now. When we return, we look at some reactions to the Central Bank of Nigeria's cash withdrawal limits. That's a new comment coming from a legal practitioner. It says it's illegal for the Central Bank of Nigeria. We'll discuss that with analysis up next. Stay with us.


I'm already obsessed guys. I'm couples goalsing it, I'm shipping it, I've been loved, I'm inspired. You've got couple goals too. The two of you are just a joy and I've got to start from the beginning because, okay influencer, can you focus? Okay, focus it. Focus, but you're phone away. I am, go away.  That might've been the first time I experienced that. So start from the beginning and don't skip details. Wait, that's the first time? No way. I think that I'm married.   I just thought you were hot and this is how we were like compatible. True. I didn't even think of you as a friend. Oh my God, that's so funny. And we elevated to friends and then. So it's interesting, Nish was a surface level friend I would say like someone in like a college dorm and I thought he was really cute, but I had a boyfriend when we first met and I would see him in the elevator. I still remember like, oh, like he's like a cute guy and I didn't act on it for a long time and then we were introduced just through mutual friends in the cafeteria and there was just a lot of chemistry and then what ended up happening was we started hooking up and I was sadly still with my ex. Yeah, and kind of a shitty thing to do. You were cheating. Like I was young, okay? I say though that like, does it even count as cheating when you're that young? Well, okay, here's it. Okay, yes. But also. At that point I didn't. But also, so we used to live in the same residence and so literally you'd be living together, eating together because there's a cafeteria and stuff like that.  So I actually didn't even know she had a boyfriend even when like many, many weeks into us meeting.  Is that true?  No, it just never came up because we weren't good friends. If it was like a good friend and they knew what was going on in my life and like they really knew me, then of course it would come up, right? But like we were friendly. We were in similar friends groups that would overlap but more so it would like we'd go out together at night, you know?  And I was attracted to him and like of course it was a shitty thing to do, right? Like in retrospect, it was a really shitty thing to do. It wasn't by the way planned or anything. We were out like at a club and that's where we hooked up the first time. Yeah, yeah. And place called Tequila Jocks. Like what do you expect? And what happened is really immediately within a couple of months of us hanging out more and more and just like obviously becoming friends over time, it was really obvious that we also kind of wanted to be in a relationship because it wasn't... It was interesting and I still remember the switch that happened where like I told my best friends that were my best friend that we were hooking up and I was like, nope, but I don't see it going anywhere.  Like he's fun to hook up with and like obviously I liked his company but I didn't necessarily see it as, that's not where my headspace was, you know? And then over time as we were hooking up we're obviously spending more and more time together and then I was like, wait, like I actually really like him and I remember that switch happening because it was nearing like the summer and he was going away to Calgary for the summer. I was, yeah.  Like this is weird. And I'm not saying that you go into something and you're like, I'm going to change a man. I don't believe in that, right? But what I'm saying is there's beauty in the unknown. There was no real expectation from either party. It's just we were getting to know each other as this whole thing happened. And what we discovered along the way was how compatible we were and how much we liked each other. And I don't know, like had we gone into anything with the mentality that like, okay, this is what I want. Like I want to be in a relationship or not. I don't think anything would have happened between us. And I like we're 11 years into our relationship. Do you have any people who resent your story because most of the time what happens in these dynamics is maybe they do agree at the beginning. And then a week later, somebody else wants something more and the other person doesn't. That's exactly what happens usually. And this awkward toxic dynamic now ensues. And that's how we enter into an era of situations.  So these success stories are rare. I know, I know it's so rare and like, were we lucky? I don't know. I think we're lucky for sure, but I also don't think that this is usually what works because I've had sex buddies in the past and that didn't work out. And when I think of that, it was just because it was truly just not compatible. And I think, and when I think about it, it's really clear because it was always, you don't feel equally the same way to move along. And that's what it is. So if you feel that you're the one who's catching feelings and the other person's not, then it most probably is not gonna work out. And when it's clear, it's really, really clear. The thing is that it's usually actually not gonna work out, but when it's clear, the other person wants to spend time with you. Like you're not just going over to have sex. You're going over to do much more than that or you're hanging out outside of just doing that as well. And- It's mutual. It's very, very mutual.   Yeah, I remember being in a situation ship as well. And there was like, I had really good chemistry with this guy. I thought he was like really funny and blah, blah, blah. But I was obviously much more interested than he was. And I think when you're in it, it's like you're blind and then you get out of it and you're like, but now I can see, you know? And it's like, I was obviously trying to force this thing. I would tell myself narratives based on like a couple of texts. You know what I mean? And like make something out. It was like I was creating a story. And so many times people tend to do that, but it's like, I don't know. You almost have to take like a bird's eye view and maybe have friends in there who are like, okay, like are you really seeing what I'm seeing or am I just telling myself lies, you know?  I actually bad advice. I don't think that is the way to go and find relationships. I think that if you're doing that is because you've found someone who you wish to further something with.  Cause if that's set from the beginning is usually that is not going to work out.  And then, oh, nevermind. I actually want, I see something more with you. I think those are very two very distinct different scenarios that you're in. My favorite quote that I say a billion times over is like healthy intimacy is just one step at a time.  Do you want to go back to the other step? Do you want to move forward? Should we go left for a bit? And instead of trying to like aggressively move forward, you're just taking this scenic slow intentional route which allows you to one move forward just naturally or two to end things long before you get frustrated that you're dragging the other person and like they've stopped walking 12 steps back. Yeah. And when it came to the relationship it was really just about is this person a compatible and fun person to be with? And compatibility did not even have a deep meaning to it because at that kind of when you're that young, it's just like, okay, are we having fun? Is this person being able to see me where I am enough because we were traveling a lot of the time? Well, Shan, do you remember when you came on my podcast you shared this tip like, which I think he's putting in different words but like it's the same thing, right? That like, if you know that XYZ is important to you think about the type of people that do XYZ and then go hang out in that place. I think as you were talking, I was thinking of that that the adage is like love comes to those who aren't looking, which is half complete because it comes to those who aren't looking but are fully living.   It means that you're more likely to be in the network of people who your perfect partner would associate with. And have fun along the way. Like it shouldn't feel like this like horrible like teeth pulling process. Like I think that it should be a fun thing. Like dating should be fine. Like being in a relationship should be fun. And I feel like if you go into it with the premise of like such pressure and like anxiety I think that that's the energy you're bringing into it as well, it's just a lot of pressure you're putting on yourself. I feel the energetics around this. I really, really feel that. Do you know where I wanna go with this though? Cause like I'm kind of like, I always try and think about the person who's rolling their eyes right now because I remember when I was in Toronto, I did photography. She's from Toronto by the way as well. Yeah. Oh what? Yeah, from Toronto. So I went to school for journalism and I did wedding photography as a way to like fund myself through school. Didn't get a job afterward so I had to keep doing it. So it was a thing that I did, I didn't love it but I was doing it and like you make good money that way. And I remember just thinking to myself like money is so easy, people stress about money and this big thing like they put so much pressure just like be relaxed about it and money comes to you. And then I moved to LA and obviously I didn't have a network for here for weddings.  Like I was continuously like $3 in my account and I was like what was I talking about? Money is easy when you found a way to make easy money. Money flows when you were in a system or a network of thing where it's flowing. So it's easy for you guys because you're 21. You met at 21. So the stakes weren't high. You were in places where it was plentiful to find partners. You were obviously both good looking people so the way that it was easy for you. By the way I have to say we did not look like this. Oh I looked so bad. We were so bad. I was probably one of the ugliest he was ever. I'm telling you right now. This is pretty bad. For both of us. No you were cute. And I'm gonna pull up an image. It's bad. I was like oh. Really bad. You're saying you're saying that. But I guess the point I'm making is that like this idea that I have that idea too. And I think actually when I turned 30 is when I started to date with that ease and fun and relaxation and curiosity. And I was talking to this in their podcast that I would go on dates with just like what can I gain?  Sometimes it was information on how to distribute products in China. Whatever it was. So I had that mindset and I just enjoyed the experience more. But I also didn't struggle for dates. I didn't struggle to get callbacks. Well why do you think you didn't struggle? I mean there's two stories to this. There is the way that I look and the confidence that I have, the background, it's the privilege element of the things I had no control over. And there's also the things that I did have control over. Well the confidence piece, Shan, is I think that anyone can work on it. It's like a muscle.  Like even when they're just out in the real world. And so yes, like there is such a thing as pretty privilege and I want to recognize that. However, I've also seen guys who are like maybe threes but have the best personality.   So I feel like that piece of it, like what you're saying about not struggling to get callbacks and stuff.    There's also a psychological element that comes into play when we come across somebody who's too available. Like we don't like the nightclub with no lineups because we're like, why does nobody else want to go in here? The restaurant where all chairs are available, we're like, nobody else wants to eat here, even if it's great. So there is that element, I think that comes into play where if you have a, I think LA teaches you that, bar none. Desperation is, our sixth sense is detecting desperate people. And there's something about that ick that you get when you're around somebody who needs something from you, whether that be a title or a future or purpose or love or even sex that it think is very repellent.   And then one guy rolls around and then all of a sudden, it's like you are a magnet to so many people and it's not just men, it's like jobs. You are unemployed forever. Then you get one offer letter and then it's like six offer letters all at the same time and you're like, why are they all coming at once? And the only way to explain that is energy, right? Because it's not an experience that is unique to me. I'm sure you've had it. I'm sure you've had it. I'm sure anyone who's listening has had that experience. So like explain that to me in any way outside of the fact that it's like the energy that you're putting out into the world and like the ease that you're kind of navigating things with. Yeah, and I wanna put energy in like something tangible because it is just your presence. That's another way of saying it. It's really the way you put yourself out there. I think that's what it is. And so when I think about it, for example, when I decide, okay, I remember telling my friend specifically this. I was like, you know what Tim? I think I'm gonna have a girlfriend this time next year. So, and he's like, really? And he's like, why makes you say that? I'm like, I don't know. I don't think I am. And when I remember saying that to him and then literally, it came into my life less than a year from then. And it's just because I was like, yeah, I really wanna put myself out there. I really wanna meet the right person. I really wanted to have more fun in that part of my life.  Like, let me also make your life fun by adding my presence in there. And hopefully you'll reciprocate. And so that's what I was doing, especially like obviously with Yousaf. And it's why we had so much more fun together. It was more so about like truly going out there with the intention of having such a good time and meeting the right person as a result of that. And that's what resulted in this relationship really growing more and more over time. But, you know, it wasn't about, oh my God, I'm really looking for something here. There, yeah. I think when you came on the podcast, you shared.