Hi everybody, welcome back to Cisco Live 2023. We're here at the Mandalay Bay Conference Center. It's pretty big, probably about 20,000 people here. I'm Dave Vellante. This is the analyst panel. Myself, John Furrier, Zia's Caravalla is back principal at ZK Research. Zia's and I dropped a breaking analysis last week entitled Cisco Needs to Simplify. Here's how we're going to unpack what Cisco announced today. Zia, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, it's great to be here. By the way, this might be the largest expo hall I've seen at a Cisco Live. I've been coming to these since 1998. And I think this is the biggest one. 20,000? I mean, that's a good number. Every seat was packed in the keynote. Definitely. All right, so how'd they do? I mean, we challenged Cisco, dropped it. You and I met Friday, dropped it Saturday. Got some interesting feedback from both sides. And I think it was very fair, but how would you grade them? How'd they do? I thought very well.  Sure. Probably a B, there's a lot of it. Well, I think their vision, you know, is great. That's an A coming from you, man. Yes. All right, the tough professor. But no, explain, defend that. Well, because I think their vision's outstanding, right? They want to create these clouds for security, networking. They have one for WebEx already, full stack observability. I believe they'll probably build one for sustainability sometime down the road. But those are visions, right? And they have to take steps towards them. So I can't give them an A unless they're there, right? And so while it's an aspirational goal of where to get to, it's a multi-year journey to get there. Just like last year at this time, they announced a security cloud, right? They announced it last year. Proof point one was XDR at RSA. Proof point two is SSE this year. And you know, let's see as they continue to get there. They're, you know, the vision statement of it's protected, it's connected, right? There's a lot that has to go into getting there, but it's a step on the way there. One follow-up and then, John, I want to get your take. So to me, they announced, okay, they got a security cloud. I call it the security super cloud. They've got the networking cloud. They kind of got the full stack observability cloud. Do those things have to come together for them to get an A from you? I don't think they have to come together, but there certainly has to be interoperability between them, right? And it has to look like, well, I suppose your term of super cloud actually is the right one. So those are separate clouds and then that would look like one launch of the super cloud to the customer. So if I want to be able to add a new branch, I need networking, I need security, I need observability, those would all get delivered via one cloud delivery platform, even though they're separate clouds. What grade would you give, Cisco? So far, day two here.  He knows all little bit more of the details on what's shipping and what's not. From my standpoint, I give them an A minus. I'll tell you why. Because for them even to do this is Herclian to come together as a team. So, and I've seen them for 13 years up close and it's always been kind of like a, there's like spiked them some people in the company like, they think I run this. Then when Gettler was here, he's like, oh, service providers and get all these sacred cows. That's just, they grew the business, one of the most valuable company for a long time. So Cisco had that legacy. It was like, it was an aircraft carrier. It was hard to move real quick. And so the fact- And there's a lot of technical debt here. A lot of technical debt. So the fact that they are aligned, okay, is huge. Okay, and plus the presentations were spot on. The strategy was genius. It hung together. I thought the idea of a security cloud and notice how they had network plus security. They didn't say data. No, there was no data conversation. Just security, which is data driven obviously. But network security, those are smart pillars to build on. You embed that into everything else. That might rise up those other divisions. And I think Tom Gillis's group has huge upside right now. You think that's a gap? A blind spot? Or is it just- I don't think they know yet what that means for them, other than data's involved. For example, a lot of their AI successes, I thought was not AI washed at all. In fact, this is probably the only event I've been to, besides an Amazon event where AI wasn't washed. It was actually legit development. They showed use cases where AI could be used for obvious network configuration stuff. That's obvious, we know. And then they had a product that they built. A SOC assistant, whatever they called it. That was something that came out of AI. AI SOC, whatever it was called. And then they had the Defend Multi-Cloud Defender. So you can see them already producing fruit from that AI tree.  So I was looking for that, checked it past that test. So we're going to give him a B plus, because I'll take ZS plus John, divide by two, take that. So solid B plus. But the management team is solid. Jonathan Davidson did an amazing job on his keynote. I thought he hit a homerun, because he has the networking piece. And he connected a lot of dots. They didn't talk about silicon, which I hope they would have. I thought Liz laid out a great thing. I was not a big fan of the quantum. I would have liked to see cloud native up there instead, instead of that and outtake as the lead there. I think that's more important than quantum, relative to the thing, but. I like quantum because it's an implication of security. I think that's a big impetus. So I want to come back to that, but a couple of standouts that you've talked about. Maraki and ThousandEyes and APTI. APTI, you've always said it's sort of an underperforming asset that could be doing much more with that. Maraki obviously is a key to the networking cloud. And then ThousandEyes is threaded throughout. What's your take on those three assets? Well, I mean Maraki. That may be the, other than Catalyst, the best acquisition this company's ever made. They gave him the cloud platform. I think Maraki's core fundamental belief is easy use. Everything should be easy. In fact, I remember when they rolled out network assurance, they didn't charge for it because their philosophy is, why should we charge our customers to troubleshoot problems that we're having, right? And so Maraki is. My set is awesome. Yeah, I love Maraki that way. ThousandEyes is a great product. And in fact, it was a very well timed acquisition because they bought it right before the SD-WAN wave hit. And so it does internet troubleshooting, but that didn't really matter a decade ago because you didn't use the internet for corporate networks. But today you do because of SD-WAN. So they hit that afflection point nicely. I'd like to see them take ThousandEyes and take those agents and deploy them everywhere. Put them on Juniper routers, put them on Arista switches, right? Make ThousandEyes the de facto troubleshooting tool for the internet. I don't know if they'll do that, but at least. Yeah, give it away. Yeah, yeah. Well, I wouldn't give it away. I'd license it, but I'd certainly make it available. That's interesting. We've talked about sort of Cisco on Cisco and using the Oracle analogy, right? What would Oracle do, right? They probably wouldn't. But Oracle's a lock-in, and I don't think Cisco wants to be a lock-in. Right, right, right. So to your point, they're more likely to do something like that than say in Oracle. Yeah, so. It's harder to do a network traffic as hard. Databases, I mean it's hard too, but it's like, do you optimize? Database is definitely hard. You can engineer that with compute. Well, that's what Oracle was. They were an engineered systems company. If you want everything Oracle have worked well together. Cisco, because they are the network, the reality is people are going to run Zoom on it, teams on it, people are going to run different applications on it, so they have to almost by default be a lot more open to allow other things to run on top of it. And that's really more the true definition of a platform where you can argue Oracle's not really a platform. They're just an engineered systems company. The line by J2 was multi-cloud economics with no cloud lock-in. Yeah, I thought, by the way, I thought shifting gears a little bit. I thought the security announcements were really strong. You said Tom Gillison, super articulate, really understands sort of that business. And, okay, to me, you and I talked about this, the leading security vendor has, I don't know, maybe low single-digit share. Notwithstanding Microsoft, it's just so big, but I mean, it's wide open, and there's no reason Cisco can't be very, very strong in that business. You've made this point, John, about bringing networking and security together, coming at it from a networking posture. That should really give Cisco, you would think, a leg up. Yeah, and I told them, and I think they have a path to a trillion-dollar valuation, if they can lock in their install base with networking security and bring their install base, like Microsoft did with 365, which is basically office they threw in the cloud and called it cloud, and then everyone stayed with Microsoft. And why would you switch? So I think the switching costs of a customer with Cisco is really high, even though they might experience some stuff. So they have a good kind of lock-in, not technical lock-in, but they got a customer switching cost lock-in. The cost to switch is more than the cost of the alternative. It's the operational disconnect, the tearing down the networks. So I would definitely take that over, bulk up security, they collaborate to follow security in terms of like the pecking order, because it can get faster revenue and security than collaborating.  And so if they can, I'm not saying they're ever going to be able to have security match their market share in networking, but if they can even get a part of the way there. And I think the security multi-cloud opportunity is massive. The thing with the hyperscalers is they do security well, but they only do it within the world. AWS security tools don't work on Azure, and their security tools don't work in GCP. And so somebody's got to act as that abstraction layer that can help you secure a multi-cloud world, and there's no reason to secure it. VMWare's going for it? Yeah, but they're not really, everything's tied to the VMWare, all those different VMWare clouds, right? They're not going to take their VMWare security tools and have them work if you're not using VMWare cloud foundation. No, but they got a half a million customers, and that's what their advantage is. But I want to go back to something you said, so the trillion dollar baby question, John, I've been sort of, it's kind of pie, it's kind of- You're a stock analyst now? Well, it's kind of pie in this guy, but you think about the two companies that are poster children for complete turnarounds is Apple and Microsoft, right? And so Cisco's a $200 billion market cap company, so we're talking about a 5X. What are the levers? You're talking about security. I think there's something under the covers with AI that somebody's going to invent something. Why not Cisco? Why, they got the resources, they've got the, but it's going to take a visionary to say, here's where we're going. I'll let you- Or a Steve Jobs like, and maybe Chuck's ready, I don't know. Here's the problem, then I'll let you answer. I think that the abstraction layer, I'll say this very carefully. It's going to be difficult for an incumbent who owns a lot of the gear underneath it to own the abstraction layer, unless they move very quickly and take it fast and protect it. Why, networking super cloud? Why couldn't Cisco create the next gen cloud out to the edge? Well, then that's just their thing. That's not an independent abstraction layer for data who does the data version. I'll point out before, you've got to have that on top of it. Are there special layers, just one for data, one for network, one for security? Or is it one third-party new company that emerges as, whoa, Cisco, you can't have it, VMware, you can't have it, whoever else, incumbent, it's got to be something new and de facto. That's the one scenario. Well, I do think it's going to fall into, security's going to be a big part of them growing their valuation. And I think there's a legitimacy to what Cisco's trying to do. The whole tagline, if it's connected, it's secured. Isn't just a tagline. I mean, it's a real thing. We're connecting everything in this world.  To enable anything. Yeah, and Cisco owns connectivity and security is becoming a game of analytics now. Security is no longer, can I spin signatures out as soon as malware hits? It's, can I, as soon as I find a threat, can I do I have the network data and the network telemetry to understand where the breach came from, how it emanated and how do I fight against it and who's got more network data than Cisco? Yeah, and fast by the way too. Yeah, and so I think their AI game actually is in automated remediation, both in network troubleshooting and more importantly in security because that's going to give customers the confidence that I can deploy Cisco technology faster and not worry about the security breaches because even if I am breached, I'm going to have the right tools in place to fight it and I'm going to have the zero trust architecture in place to make sure that a customer who's breached a user that's breached isn't going to create a larger blast radius than it should and if you use, and their goal is if it's all Cisco, that it's got to create that one plus one equals five effect, right? And so everything's there for them, they just got to put it together. My take on this is the vision of connected everything to enable anything. I mean, that's a trillion dollar vision. And that says to me, okay, no lack of TAM, right? There's certainly no lack of resources.  Okay, when was S3 announced? Oh, six, I think, but whatever. But you look at IBM, they had, they spent more on R&D and had more resources than Amazon. Than a book company. Microsoft, right, exactly. So a company like Cisco, if it puts its mind to it, could create the next big thing. And that vision is a massive, total available market that could support a trillion dollar business. But I mean, I don't know what that thing is. What could be, this outtake is an interesting proposition. We're going to see if it's real or not. We had them on earlier. We had VJoy on it. You mean outshift? Out, what's it called? Outshift, outshift, outshift, outtake, redshift. Whatever, you know. Outshift. Blue pill. I think I took the blue pill. Open shift, everything's shifting, the cube shift. So, but they're putting all the, I won't say misfit toys in the island. Well, but that's what we thought early on, was really misfit toys. But I think it is kind of a good job of actually making sense of it. It is kind of the island of misfit toys because they have pure play focus. I mean, look at the management team. It's focused. Jonathan, J2, Liz, all the people in their team, they're focused like a laser for these clouds. And I think it's a great idea to put everything, but it's funded properly and can they develop anything? That's the question I want to see because they're at CubeCon, they're at these events, they're doing quantum. Can that thing get new businesses going? If they can use that vehicle as a test kitchen. Are you under NDA for tomorrow's announcement? Yeah, probably. It's LLM, all right, so we shouldn't talk about that. I don't know what's coming. But there's something in LLM that's coming tomorrow. But I do think though that we are closer than you think to a world where literally everything's connected. And I think if you look at all the works, this goes under the car manufacturers. People joke, why are you putting WebEx in a car? No one's going to use that. Oh, that's an awesome idea. Yeah, it is. In fact, if you go down over there, they got the Ford pickup truck with WebEx in it. And there's a lot of use cases from military to field service, you know, things like that. But more importantly, it's the connectedness that's important, right? And so if you remember last year, Ford CEO was here. And he said, for the first time ever in the history of Ford, they can drive new features and innovation into a finished product. They've never been able to do that before. It's the connectedness that's allowing that. And so literally everything's being connected. And that creates all these different entry points. So that's why I think the security opportunity for Cisco, in a lot of ways, if they had had the strategy five years ago, 10 years ago, I don't know if it works because it was a Game of Point products, but the markets moved to where businesses are now network-centric. And so, you know, their only challenge, I think, is legacy mine, mine, mine, mine. Mine's, and some problems. Yeah, but simplicity solves some of that. It's a mandate. Well, there's some technical issues. Like, we put up last night, Wi-Fi versus 5G, you asked a question in the analyst Q&A the day before about Wi-Fi and 5G, okay? Last night at the hockey game, we were at the Vegas Nights game, Wi-Fi was worse than the 5G. So now that's a technical issue of, if I'm in a car, or I'm in a moving device, I should be able to, that's the case though, you're turning it off Wi-Fi to get to... But I shouldn't have to. Yes, right? That's the case where the device should do it automatically. And I was thinking more like, if we go talk to a lot of large enterprise, security teams and network teams are still separate, right? And so can Cisco serve both sides of that and then bring everything in when they can? And that's why there's a lot of legacy mindset in the customer base that, I think it'll eventually fall. I mean, it happens with every industry, but I do think Cisco can serve the needs of now but also pivot when they need to. Well, especially in the networking business, right?  Nobody's provisioning loans anymore, but network's different. Yeah.  Yeah, yeah. If there's a blind spot in Cisco, besides the legacy of the customers and the dogma or mindset internally dogma, is that they got to be more thinking about the applications that are coming. And I think what the AI is showing us is that there's going to be new developers coming on board, writing apps faster to your point earlier, that they're going to sit on top of the network and that the connectedness is going to be, they're going to have a huge value to provide an app developer. So I think one thing that I think their blind spot might be is the impact of the developer surge in cloud native open source right now. And the stuff that we're looking at right now, it's faster than I've ever seen. And they're moving to market. They're moving trends. So they could have a product coming out of the going to market that could be completely stunted at birth if they're not lined up with the developer community because at the top of the stack, if they're not enabling the right features, that's what I think I'm sensing that I don't think they're aware of that feature enough. Well, I'm starting to really buy into this notion of real-time data apps. In other words, where you've got data-centric apps where the business logic is embedded in the data, not the reverse. So the analogy we like to use is a digital twin of your business like an Uber for your enterprise. People, places, things, ETAs, destinations, those are all data elements from which you're going to build apps. Uber built an app in real-time. Everything's coherent. That's the future. And that's going to be over a distributed network which is going to, you presumably drive a ton of demand for the plumbing. Everything in this world is going to be more dynamic and more distributed and that favors Cisco disproportionately, right? Yeah, but so it's a John's point. Will they, and do they even have to move up the stack to get to that trillion dollar baby? They're not talking about a trillion dollar baby, but that's sort of my pie in the sky. But a company like Cisco, you should see them return to the sort of prominence of, remember, they used to be the most valuable company on the planet. Because of the network, the dot-com boom, and there's no reason they can't get back there just like Apple got back there and just like Microsoft got back there. I think Jesus' argument about the connectivity is that I think the most glaring, obvious thing that Cisco should be like. I mean, what's more important than network today? Nothing, right? If you don't have connectivity, I don't care how good your iPhone is, it's a brick, right? So, you know, and they're the connectivity company.   Yeah, yeah. And pretty soon you won't give, your car's going to be connected all the time, right? Yeah, it's Metcalf's law. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, anything else you want to lay on us for impressions of this week? No, I just think it's, just probably the management team at your point is outstanding here. And I think it's the first time in a long time, maybe back to the early 2000s, where the management team's actually all in sync and they all understand, you know, because back in the day when Cisco was a young company, everyone has focused on building the internet, right? Yeah, yeah. And I think now, this whole management team understands it's just moving to these super clouds, if you want to call it that. Well, we do. Yeah, we do. You know, and the ability to leverage those, to create more value from the overall Cisco platform. I think everyone is on board with that, where that hasn't really been the case in the past. I think they had a lot of political phyphthomes here for revenue and things like that, but yeah. I mean, we joke about super cloud a lot, but there's meaning to it. Yeah, this show validates super cloud. Yes, absolutely, yeah. This show validates that it's mainstream because Cisco is a canary in the coal mine. They're not the leaders, they're great on messaging. But they're a bellwether, you're right. When they launch, when they launch stuff on stage, it's not because of hype, because their customers are not the most early adopters because they run networks. No networking guy goes first. They're locked in, they're operational. They're not going to take a flyer on some. And one of the themes here too around multi-cloud was, the reality is customers aren't ditching on-prem holistically for cloud. People have asked me, do I see a day where everything's in the public cloud? Maybe, I'll be dead. By the time that happens, it's a long way away. We were a Dell tech world, right? They sell a ton of servers. Cisco sells a ton of servers still. And it's because people need workloads. You put the workloads where it makes the most sense, right? And as long as the world remains that kind of complicated nature where I'm running some things at the edge, some things in the cloud, some things on-prem, right? That favors the more and more connectivity to tie those things together. And then you need to secure it. I think that's their insertion point. I think the multi-cloud security piece could be, it will be massive for them. I think that's really their big opportunity. I mean, they're not alone going after that, obviously. Well, they can build on top of their network. It's hard if you don't own the network, though. That's the thing, right? You nailed it, Z. There's not another network vendor. It's easier if you do own the network, I guess. And there's not another network vendor that's got the security chops. And arguably, there's not a security vendor that's got the network chops, right? Interesting, I mean, Chuck said it's a complicated world to your point. Supply chains, war, data sovereignty, and AI just can make it more complicated and so does edge. Last word, John. Okay, I want to ask you, you wrote the post. We got a lot of flak. On one hand, it was our audience thought we could be more critical. You guys could be more critical of Cisco. On Cisco, it felt it was a little bit critical, although they proved you wrong or right or whatever you want to look at it. I heard an analyst say, I've been covering the cloud for 10 years. I mean, how long have we been covering private cloud? We've been doing private cloud since two, what year? Private cloud, hybrid cloud. Well, ever since they started calling him on private cloud. True private cloud. Hybrid cloud.  I mean, we've been there, done that.  You guys got it right? I do. I think we let the data inform.  First of all, Zia says deep expertise in historical knowledge in this business. I've been around a long time. We had ETR data to lean on and we didn't just make this stuff up. I mean, we talked to customers and we got a lot of experience here. So I think, yes, I think that we did get it right. And I think Cisco got it right in what they announced today. It was a very good set of announcements. And the thing I liked about it, it wasn't a lot of shiny new toys. Here's 85 new switches. In fact, there was very little new product. It's a firewall. Yeah, but the other, the announcements were largely around that concept of simplicity and Chuck stood on stage and talked, we need to make things simple for our customers. And that's what a platform company is. I talked to a few people in the hallway and they were talking about your posts and the comments were eight out of 10 were very, very positive. They read it and helped them understand the keynote better, which by the way, that was a great service there. And the other 20% felt neutral. I thought it was just solid, you know? So no negative sentiment at all from people reading the post. That's the kind of content we want. Exactly, I mean, I think that's why I love collaborating with you, C.S., especially when you come to the studio. I hope we can do more. Yeah, well, your two studios are close to where both my places are. All right, guys, thanks. First real problem. Thanks for helping us unpack the day two, I guess, but day one of keynotes. We're back tomorrow. Chief Patel's coming on. Jonathan Davidson got a full lineup. So thank you and thank you for watching. This is theCUBE. We're out day once. Let's go live 2023 from the Mandalay Bay.


Team, 25th Infantry Division, defend against a barrage of attacks, at South Range on Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. I bet those high-tags dude see dispense on the jumps. Watch that, that's what we're shooting at. To the left of that is already being covered. 200 meters.


We're going to go in, it's a hammock. We're going to put the corner against the sternum and the inferior aspect and laterally and the implant is going to go right behind it. It's a hammock that's going to hold up the implant. You guys understand what's going on. We sewed in the hammock in the inframamory fold. We sewed the hammock to the muscle. This is just a implant. We're trying to see what size. It's a sizer. This is going to be the size. You could see when all is done, all the tension on the implant will be on the hammock and none of it will be on the skin. It'll give her two things. One, it'll give her a higher look to the implant and number two, longevity. The skin is not going to have as much tension so it's not going to stretch as quickly over time. Thank you. This is what I mean when I say that the tension of the implant is now on the mesh, the ADM that we used and it's like a hammock. Sewing here and here, it's holding everything up. The patient is sitting up on them, sitting up and the implant is not falling out because the skin is not closed. Nothing is holding the implant in place except the ADM. Now we're going to close the skin.


Welcome to everybody to CSIS. I'm going to quickly turn over to Tony Carroll, who's a senior associate of the Africa program here at CSIS, but we're really delighted to be hosting Tom Burgess for what we hope will be an informal and interactive chat about his new book, The Looting Machine. Tom, thanks so much. And Tony, thank you for directing Tom our way and for moderating tonight's event. I'll just collect the people from outside, but I think we'll go ahead and get started. Thanks, Jennifer. And welcome to CSIS and to Washington. You've arrived in that brief aperture that we have between winter and summer. So we've certainly watched and it doesn't get much more splendid than this from a standpoint of physical beauty. And here we are in the eve of Earth Day, too. So we're sort of talking about a topic that actually pertains a great deal to the issue of the global environment. Africa's space therein. I want to thank Tom and welcome him for making such a terrific contribution to providing thought leadership on an important topic that we're all mulling over these days and the extent in which Africa's future is tied to the extractive sector and how governance is impacted by extractive industries and the international financial institutions and new actors on the scene. Before I pose a few questions to Tom and we'll leave plenty of room for Q&A because as Tom has suggested, that tends to be the best way in which we can really cover the waterfront on this important topic. But I'd like to start with just a very brief read from the last, the concluding chapter of the book. And if you don't mind, it's a very brief passage and I'll read it. The empires of colonial Europe and the Cold War superpowers have given way to a new form of dominion over the continent that serves as the mind of the world. New empires controlled not by nations but by alliances of unaccountable African rulers governing through shadow states, middlemen who connect them with the global resources economy and multinational companies from east, west and the east that cloak their corruption in corporate secrecy. We prefer not to think of the mothers of eastern Congo, the slum dwellers of Laulanda and the miners of Marengue as we talk on our phones, fill our cars and propose to our lovers. As long as we go on choosing to avert our gaze, the looting machine will endure. The powerful words, powerful conclusion to a powerful book. I'd like to maybe start on, to discuss what you and I, what drew you and I together five or six years ago as you were reporting from Lagos and that is the issue of the collapse of the Nigerian textile industry. For those of you who don't know or follow the history of the Nigerian textile industry, at its peak the Nigerian textile industry in the late 70s employed about 300,000 people. The product that was most distinctive in Nigerian's production was this wonderful wax cloth that the African women adorn themselves throughout West Africa and was not only an industrial complex and vertical and linkages to the agro sector and cotton production and ginning and processing and dying. But it was also emblematic of the wonderful culture that Africa had because many of these designs were drawn from the rich traditions of Nigeria. They were often worn in symbolic ways to attend weddings and funerals and other family events and that industry of course is a shadow of what it once was. But it is an interesting lesson for how this industry has collapsed both from sort of external structural problems in the Nigerian economy but also from internal political problems which I think Tom documents really in maybe the first or second chapter of your book.  You were reporting at that time from Lagos and give us a little bit of indication, a little bit of the color of that story. But thanks, Tanya, thanks very much everyone for coming along. That story of Nigerian textile started for me when I'd only been in Nigeria for about a week and my editor sent me up to Kaduna, we were trying to do a special on the country and I had literally no idea what I was doing. But I turned up in Kaduna, was introduced through a couple of friends to various people, met one Muhammadi Bahari who was made his views known and started to go around some of the churches it was actually and the sort of dilapidated old schools where a lot of these redundant textile workers were hanging out. It was a Sunday and they showed me the old, the big factories in the middle of Kaduna by the river which were completely shuttered. There was one security guard on the inside and just lizards going in and out of the gates. And as you say, about 300,000 people not just in Kaduna but across northern Nigeria would have been employed at the peak of the industry and then many more indirectly in cotton farming and the rest of it. And pretty quickly I started to realize that the collapse of the textile industry is emblematic of the collapse of northern Nigeria's economy and the creation of one of this enormous zone of poverty from what was a couple of decades ago a zone of relative prosperity. And actually the first thread I followed, pardon the pun, is wasn't to oil and the distortions. It was that these redundant workers who were standing around in an old school explaining to me how they'd lost their jobs. I said to them, so why has this happened? What's the root of this? And they, people shuffled and looked around and they just said, mangal. And I didn't know who this man was at the time, but over the years that followed and in the book, I've tried to piece together the story of this guy, Alhaji Dahuru Mangal, who is a big political donor. He funded Umar Ayyua's governorship campaigns and then presidential campaign. He's a big guy in the PDP, until recently the ruling party. And he was also, he ran the hard pilgrimages, he ran an airline, and he was also behind all of this, one of the preeminent smugglers of northern Nigeria. He would truck in basically anything that anybody wanted. Textile imports are illegal and yet they completely dominate the market. They have, I think, about 90% market share compared to the now withered local industry. So I tried to piece together Mangal's story, but what also became clear was that he doesn't operate, he doesn't exist in a vacuum. He wasn't able to crush the Nigerian textile industry single-handedly. He needed Chinese counterfeiters, he needed a porous border, but what he needed above all was the weakness of the domestic industry to be able to flourish. And that came about through the distortions caused by Nigeria's booming oil production through the 80s and 90s to start to, this process known as Dutch disease, first identified in the Netherlands in the 50s when they struck gas, of it primarily happens through the currency, I'm sure lots of people know this, the currency becomes overvalued, exports become uncompetitive, and at the same time you get this insidious process in politics when government starts to become far more reliant on rent income from oil and other natural resources than they do on taxing the people and winning the consent of the people to rule, that public spending starts to shift away from infrastructure, roads, a functioning electricity system, the education system, and into what North Sarawiva calls a contractocracy, pouring that rent money out to win allegiance through patronage, and spending priorities that benefit the ruling elite, so military spending typically goes up enormously, and this distortion in the exchange rate, the collapse of infrastructure did for, or certainly started to cause enormous problems for, this once flourishing Nigerian textile industry, so that's ultimately what I was able to piece together and the stories that others have told, but the fascinating thing for me, as a final point, is the extent to which, and I think often we miss this, the extent to which this kind of curse of natural resources is felt far from the oil slick creek to the delta or eastern Congo with its mines, it permeates through the entire state of the entire economy, so much so that the northern Nigeria's felt the curse of oil arguably as much as the delta in some ways, indeed. Let's talk a little bit about some of these networks and how they emerge in the shadows of these business dealings, and one remarkable theme or thread that runs through this book is the involvement of the Queensway Group. They seem to be the universal donor to all the deals in which you talk about in your book, and I'd like us to hear a little bit more about Sampa, a lot about the Queensway Group, which of course isn't their actual name, but it's a name that was drawn based on their Hong Kong address, and the fact that many companies sort of resided there in the end you talk about, or not resided there. But I'd like to talk a little bit about how a person like Sampa is able to ingratiate himself in so many different areas and ways. It's really quite astounding. It is, and the person who came up with the name is here. Actually, it should be acknowledged, J.R. Maley, he's done more than anyone to piece together what the Queensway Group is and how it works, and there's more coming from J.R. soon for which we're greatly looking forward. Well, and we'll have back for another session. So what is Sam and how is he able to operate? Just a moment of background. He, as best we understand it, he was born either in Hong Kong or on the Chinese mainland and moved to Hong Kong as a young man. Gradually develops, seemingly, the way I understand it is a formal relationship with the Chinese intelligence services, but there also seems to be informal exchange of information. And then he seems to have been involved in arms dealing in Africa and elsewhere, in intelligence work in Cambodia, and in cultivating links between arms of the Chinese security and intelligence services and some of the African liberation movements as they were preparing to take power or taking power. And then, as like many spooks before him, he switched from espionage into business. There's a long line, obviously, of British special forces people hopping into the mining game in Africa instead. And Sam does this at exactly the time that Jiang Jiumin decides to go forth into the world and sends out Chinese state-owned companies and entrepreneurs in search of natural resources and markets all over the world, but enormously so in Africa. And Sam is able to make himself, largely by sheer caprice, but partly by being in the right place at the right time. He's able to make himself someone who has, borrowed JR's term, always the right Rolodex. He's able to exaggerate his connections, to some extent, both in Africa and China, but he's able to forge some of the parallel deals that go behind or underneath this big state-to-state relationship between Beijing and various African countries. And he starts in Angola where, and this is where the Queensway Group is born. It's a long story, I encourage you to read it in the book. But in a nutshell, Sam, with Manuel Vicente, Angola's Mr. Oil, is able to enter near a deal whereby a company is created called China Sonongol, which is Sam and his little group of allies registered at 88 Queensway in Hong Kong. And Sonongol, the kind of the engine of the shadow state, the controls, Angola controls its oil wealth. That company ends up with various stakes in some enormous oil fields. And Sam goes on to Zimbabwe, to cut similar deals involving Mugabe's secret police and the diamond trade. He turns up when Daddus sees his power in Guinea. I believe we have a daughter of the Republic of Guinea here who will be chipping in, I hope. I know she will, she's already queued. And he's popped up in all manner of places. And there are two, I think there's two points to make. One is he operates in, he deals with, and this is a term I kept hearing on my travels and postings, he deals with shadow states or parallel governments. He deals with the power that resides behind the formal institutions of state and which develops again and again when you have a country run on rent, on resource rent. Angola is in Zimbabwe, Guinea under the junta. They've even got a foot into Nigeria and various other places beyond Africa now, increasingly. That's one point. The other is that these are not the old, they're not the old networks. They're very much creatures of, Sam I think is very much a creature of globalization. These are business interests and private interests that harness state institutions but don't necessarily represent them. So if you were to look at it in a sort of cartoonish way, you could see Sam as, China and China is a monolithic thing coming in doing business with Africa and seeing Africa as a monolithic thing. But these are enormous syndicates that stretch crucially through some of the pockets of the globalized economy where it's easiest to engage in corporate subterfuge, the BVIs, Cayman Islands, places like that. It also involves, it equally involves business partners from east and west. So Sam will bring in some of the biggest Chinese companies and help them win contracts and advance his own private interest in that way. But the Queensway Group's biggest asset, this stake in one of the big offshore oil fields. And that girl is run by BP. In Guinea they have an off-take agreement with Glencore and they own assets ranging from real estate in Singapore to the J.P. Morgan building opposite the New York Stock Exchange. And that's one of, and it just gets more and more bizarre.  So a Queensway asset was doubled as the Gotham City Stock Exchange in the last Batman film. I mean, it does start to get fairly bizarre some of this stuff. Well, I urge you to read the book because it's the thread that runs through it all. Is Sam, yeah. Is Sam. Of course, taking a page from Tiny Rowland and perhaps Mark Rich and others who wore those or used those same strategies to enrich themselves in two generations before. For sure. And oddly enough, Mark Rich, as I mentioned, but Glencore is and of course Tiny Rowland still is I guess the founder of Laundman going back many years. That's a great comparison, yeah. So I think they knew how to play this game well before. Let's talk a little bit about lost potential. And I'd like to draw you a little bit on the Simandu project, which is a project Tiki and I were talking about earlier. I first went to Guinea in the 1980s and they were talking about the promise of Simandu back then. And we're still talking about the promise of Simandu and it's still a very complicated history. Talk a little bit about why the country of Guinea has not been able to benefit from what is perhaps the largest undeveloped iron ore project in the world. Well, yeah, I mean, the chapter on the book about this is called, is borrows that old Swahili saying of when the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled. I think that is the, that's what has happened. There's, I'll just make two quick points on that really. Seating the floor. One would be that, again, Simandu's been just tied up in layers of, in some cases seemingly corruption and in some cases of the enormous mismatch between multinationals and results rich but relatively poor African country and the extent to which the strategy of the former can so easily trump the strategy of the latter. Rio Tinto sat on that for a long time. They're still sitting on it. They are ostensibly moving towards bringing Simandu into production but we've seen deadlines before Zoom passed. The latest one has just slipped again. Rio Tinto control, used to control the whole thing. Now control half of it, the southern half, the northern half was taken off them and given to Steinmetz's company. Thanks to Steinmetz. BSG Resources, to which Steinmetz is formally only an advisor but he's also, it says in court papers ultimately that the main financial beneficiary again through layers of complex corporate ownership. And the, it's another long story but basically it was taken a few months ago that Steinmetz's rights, BSGR's rights were canceled on the grounds that the inquiry concluded that bribes were paid and offered to the former dictator's wife to secure those rights. And it's now tied up in I think a seven or eight way legal battle involving a criminal case in Switzerland, a criminal case in the US, civil cases on three, possibly four continents. And the prospect of something like that emerging into production is remote and I'll just make two points about that. One is the mismatch between, and it was Mahmood Thiam who put this to me I think, who was the, he was a minister about whom people have asked questions but he was the minister under the junta of 2009 former UVS banker. He has his critics and he has people accusing of all sorts of things but he put it fairly reasonably when he said within when the stock price of Rio Tinto or whoever else, Simando is reflected. It sits nicely in their equity as a future project regardless of how sincere they are about developing it. But obviously there's no such benefit for Guinea but this is also one of the situations where you have this kind of catch-22 economics. The IMF and others have examined the possibility of if Simando went up to full production the amount of money that would flow into the treasury would be massively destabilizing. And this is the problem. The prize that people look for is an enormous rush of rent money and yet you look around all of Guinea's neighbors and an enormous rush of rent money has been catastrophically damaging. So just to finish, I mean that the analogy sometimes found useful and I thought I thought I'd made this up myself but it turns out that it was in Steve Cole's book about Exxon first. But I'm gonna claim it myself anyway.  I have a lottery ticket for you which is worth a million dollars. I can pretty much guarantee you based on what we know happens to lottery winners that you'll end up in rehab, you'll buy a fast car and you'll crash it, you'll get divorced, everything will go wrong. And then you'll be broke. But you want it anyway, don't you? And everyone of course takes a lottery ticket and that is the equivalent of bringing something, unless you're lucky, the lesson of the history of African resource states is by almost exclusively I would say that when you have that rush of rent money it causes far more harm than good. Well it's a good segue to my next question or sort of maybe a series of questions is on the issue of okay, we've learned a lot of bad lessons but there are some lessons that have been examples of where it's worked well. I think Chile has done well with its natural resources Botswana certainly has done well, Namibia has done well. And so there are examples of countries that have done better and perhaps because of the peculiar institutional, ethnic or historical context of each of these countries. And I think the major actors have changed. I think the Shell of 75 years ago is a different organization than it is now. I think new actors such as Cosmos and maybe Tullo are perhaps taking a different look at how they're integrating their activities into a more holistic or helpful way in to avoid some of these pitfalls and resource curse manifestations that we've seen. You know the question is what does this pertain in the future? Do you think any of these initiatives like EITI, the Kimberly process which you discuss in your book make a difference? Do you think that the industry is changing? Do you think these relationships with the resource rich countries are evolving to a new chapter? Lots of pressures on localization, value addition, building global value chains, integrating infrastructure to benefit larger communities or groups of people. What is changing? I mean the fact is that Africa has resources. The world now, East and West need those resources. How can we avoid some of the lessons or pain from the past and are there any institutional actors such as EITI and the Kimberly process that might make this process better? So just nine questions. Sorry, yep. I just make a couple of points. One is I'm so slightly wary of Chile, Botswana and Namibia. These are also the countries at the top of the genetic coefficient. They're some of the most unequal countries in the world but yes much more peaceful for one thing than elsewhere. On the things like EITI and the Kimberly process, I think they have some value. I think there's a danger with something like the EITI that its backers become so keen for it to be all encompassing that the bar to entry sinks a lot. I mean there was that big test when they threw out Equatorial Guinea. I mean the very idea that Equatorial Guinea at the moment could have a stamp of legitimacy from an international organization seems bizarre to me. The Kimberly process similarly has achieved a lot but I think took a big blow when they accredited Zimbabwean diamonds. I mean Zimbabwean diamonds flow onto the market. You can buy a Zimbabwean diamond in Antwerp. You can probably buy one in New York and at the same time you can go to Marenga as I did and you can sit and you can hear people tell you how their brothers are being beaten to death in effectively a torture chamber run by the military. Diamond base. The diamond base, yeah, a terrifying place. So I think possibly what's required is the one thing I should always say is that I've never think I'm in any position to tell 48 companies what to do or even to begin to do a thing like that but I have tried to listen out to some of what I think are some of the most persuasive ideas and I think one was repeatedly raised by Lamedo Sanusi when he was the central bank governor in Nigeria. Widely held to be a very impressive man, now the Amir of Karno of course and the man who exposed the missing billions in Nigeria. He often talks about something that's kind of gone out of fashion and has lots of critics but he basically looks at the Asian Tigers and he sees that they used as European countries did 200, 300 years ago, they protected their nascent industries and they used, as South Africa I think is trying to do, they used a beneficiation strategy.  With the value addition and the cutting and sorting and polishing that they have now in countries. I think that's way because I think for all these voluntary initiatives fundamentally what needs to happen is that to quote a guy who I mentioned in the book he used to work with Tiny Rowland, an extraordinarily affable Nigerian called Richard Accarelli. I mean one late night I asked him what is the future of Africa and he said, face fell and he said Africa will be a mine and Africans will be the drones of the world. And this is not some sort of post-colonial casual racist, this is a Nigerian and that's a terrifying prospect for him and for a great many other people. So the way to break that surely is to move, broaden out these economies away from these enclaves of concentrated political and economic power into things like textile manufacturing, into things like cutting and polishing in Botswana or making catalytic converters out of platinum in Dan and Fort Elizabeth. And the other thing is to enforce the law. I mean there are very strong anti-corruption laws in the US, they're enforced pretty vigorously. There are new ones in the UK. There are very strong anti-corruption laws in Nigeria. There are new, there are in places like Tanzania which is obviously going to be crucial to watch a place that has built some strong institutions and now has the test of oil and gas come. There are initiatives there such as ones where you have to demonstrate rather than a prosecutor necessarily having to make the case that they can follow a money trail and can demonstrate that you've looted your ministry or taken a kickback, you would have to account for your lifestyle effectively. So if there was an enormous and obvious difference between your lifestyle and your income, you would have to demonstrate where that extra we call the means test. Yeah, means test, but effectively, but kind of in reverse, right? So a means test on wealth rather than poverty. So initiatives like that I think are interesting. And the one, the last one I'd mentioned is Gathering Steam is this campaign. It's made it into the Obama Administration has mentioned it, a kind of soft version. It's been mentioned to the G7. Global Witness and some other activist groups are getting behind it and it's in the Labour manifesto in the UK, the stronger version of it. Is this idea of having a global registry of beneficial ownership, of true ownership of companies, of offshore companies effectively because there are already these registries of onshore companies. That for me would be an enormous change and would block off an awful lot of the plumbing of the Lutti machines through these secretive vehicles that again and again and again you see these corrupt schemes function. Well, we have a great audience here. So I'd like to take the remaining 25 minutes of our time to open it up for questions from the floor. I'd like you to please identify yourselves and make your comments and statements reasonably short. So let's open it up. Tiggy, are you ready or you want to wait? I'm still reading. All right, she's still reading. So questions? Okay, Philip, we'll start with Philip. Thank you. I can't read the whole thing. Philip, we got a microphone. We're being touched. I was, I read. And welcome back. Thank you. Michaela Rong's review in the New York Times said that this is a challenge to the sort of notion of Africa rising. They've got these two sort of like versions of the African economy. You've got this, which is basically bad guys making deals with the kleptocrats and then a huge mass of poor people. And then my kind of question is really where are the Africans in your book? And the reason why I ask that question is because if we were to say what's a political structure, let's understand the political structure of Africa, that we went to Somalia and people would think, my God, this is awful. And I mean, I know Steinmetz, I know Goethe, I know all of these guys. You've strung together some really awful characters who are very destructive overall in Africa. But I want to know, would you agree with Michaela's observation that this book challenges the notion that there's a new development phase underway in Africa? And there's two reasons why I say that just very quickly if you just give me the time. I think first of all, because Africa is not just a resource economy, or the Africa rising, where you put it aside, call it something else. That notion is really moving beyond resources, that we are seeing a great diversification in African economies, even in Nigeria, where oil is down to 14% of GDP. So the real kind of notion is one where you actually move beyond the resource curve. And the second to the other thing is there's a huge demographic change in Africa where people are moving out of absolute poverty, large numbers of people, and they're becoming active players, they're consumers, they're people that are of interest. So Africa is not just this kind of wasteland of poverty. There are people who are politically making a change. There are people who are of interest to investors, not only because the investors want to come and dig stuff out of the ground and drill for oil. So it comes back to that original question. Do you see this as an alternative narrative, or can you incorporate that alternative view into what you're writing? And you thought my questions were complicated. I was Philip Van Nieker, former editor of the Mellon Guardian in South Africa, and one of the more experienced and esteemed commentators on Africa for many, many years. For sure, for sure. Yes, I think it is not so much intended as a challenge to the Africa rising argument, but it's turned out like that. I was personally always quite suspicious of that Africa rising argument, partly because it does something that I'm probably guilty of, although I tried to avoid it of speaking as Africa as if it was one big thing. And secondly, because I thought some of the excitement was overdone. Yes, there does seem to be a growing middle class, but it's extremely fragile, I always thought. And I think that a big test comes now with a big fall in the commodity prices, the extent to which that African rising narrative was driven by the commodity boom. I don't think I'm in a better position to call how that will play out, but it'd be interesting to see what happens. On Africa rising being a sort of alternative, on the diversification of economies that we've seen being an alternative to the resource curse, I agree to some extent that certainly in places like Nigeria, places like Lagos that are sort of managing to disconnect themselves in some ways from that rentier economy. And in other pockets of largely coastal Africa, there is that development. But I think, however much we would like those of us who wish Africa as well as we possibly can, would like to see this as a uniform development, much of the interior Africa where I spent a lot of time is not rising. It's still driven with warfare and extremely hard living conditions. And on the diversification point, the crucial thing for me, the most insidious part, was not too much the share of resources in GDP, but the share of resources in government income. And that doesn't seem to be shifting that much. So in Nigeria, it's still kind of 70% government income from oil and gas, and about 4% from direct taxation. And in Sudan, the figures like South Sudan, it's 98% similarly high rate in Angola. That, for me, was more troubling, really, because it breaks that basic contract between rulers and rule. It means that in many ways, the ruling elite of whatever form it takes doesn't need to appeal for popular consent to rule because it's not funded by the people. I mean, I don't know if you wanted to come back again. I mean, I think it's a strong point. Other questions, please. Later, OK. He's going to corner you on the way out. No, please, please. Yeah, I don't present have answers. Good afternoon. My name is Rosemary Segero. I'm a president of an unprofit organization called Hope for Tomorrow. We focus on conflicts and violence prevention. You talk about looting machines. Looting machines have cost a lot of havoc, not only looting, but violence and conflict in Africa. Women have died, children have died, looking for those minerals, oil, and everything. Now that you have written this book, what do you think you can make a difference of your book and part of what you are selling this book should go back to those countries and help those women and children to make a difference so that the looters can know that this man really wrote a book of truth. Now that you've written the book, so how do you make that change? Or you will be part of the looter again. So, thank you. First of all, I'd like to say there's a slightly mistaken premise at the start of the center of your point up there, which is the idea that the book's going to make any money. But, yeah, personally, I do try and do some charitable stuff. I'm not going to get into it here, but we can talk about it after this. We have a question down here, and let's take a couple. Let's do here, here, there, and then we'll come back for one quick last round. Deidre, I got you, and I'm going to give Tiggy at least one more chance to ask a question. Thank you. I'm Jack Balkins. I benefited from a first-run discussion of this book at the Columbia University Conference in Africa last Saturday, where I met Tom. Being South African, of course, but I have worked with the World Bank for 40 years, so I've lived recently in Cape Town and grew up in Johannesburg, and I have some knowledge of the South African economy. And the question that has struck my mind is South African mining companies have been through the same world, down shocks, and the collapse of commodity prices. Yet some of the companies don't seem to have been subject to state capture, either by, say, the military wing of the ANC when it came to power or by Chinese investment. It just doesn't seem that way. They've got many other problems in South Africa, but not the same as what you describe in your book. Am I deluding myself on that? And if I'm right, or partly right, it could be attributed that there's better corporate law and transparency there, and internationally-owned companies that are quoted on the international stock exchanges, such as Angler Gold, Ashanti, and these big companies that they've got social problems, but they don't seem to have the state capture rental issue that you describe so eloquently in the book. Yeah. Take that and bring it back to the next one. But go ahead. Do you want to take it? No, go ahead.  I mean, just quickly, there isn't a nor great deal of South Africa in the book, but I would say, obviously, there was subject to state capture under apartheid. Right, right, right. And I mean, which is obviously the biggest sweep of the bigger period I'm trying to cover in modern South African history in the book, and the going back through the numbers, the extent to which the international gold market was the bankroller of apartheid, it's just astounding if you go back through the numbers. I think it was the late, late 70s, early 80s, when South Africa was producing two-thirds of world gold production, and that's what kept apartheid afloat. And there were obviously there were tensions between the kind of African's political side and the more English-speaking mining execs generally, but they made their tacit arrangement that one would support the other. So the question is, are South African companies, big South African mining companies today, subject to less state capture? Broadly so, yeah, I think the JSEs are pretty strong institution. South Africa is a broader economy. My one point would be this, the sort of inequality indicators haven't really changed, have they, since 1994? For me, part of that is a model that's obviously next to impossible to, in such a short period of time, to make redress on the scale that's required. But part of the problem, I think, especially in the early stage of black economic empowerment, was just basically transferring sources of rent. So keeping a pyramid that was shaped by as a resource economy, even though it is now broader, and just changing the color of some of the bricks at the top, rather than trying to widen out the pyramid. It's a good book to read on that topic is Steve Lewis's The Economics of Apartheid. And the reason that Botswana left the RAND monetary union in 1976 was in part because they felt that the diamond sales were in effect accruing to the benefit of the Reserve Bank of South Africa. And so Steve Lewis's recommendation to Quet-Missiri at that time, who was the Minister of Finance, was let's exit the RAND monetary union. And that way we won't be subsidizing Apartheid. And in a way, Botswana did that and did that successfully. We got a question back there and then we'll come over to Jennifer and then Tiggy. Hi, Winslow Robertson, Cowries and Rice, China, Africa, consulting stuff. I'm really curious about the prospects of dismantling the looting machine. And I track Chinese finance in Africa and I don't particularly blame Chinese money in Africa doing what any other foreign country does in Africa. But I want to know what the prospects are for the looting machine to stop the incentive structures that might change and whether you have a brilliant 10-point plan to stop it in the concluding chapter of your book. My brilliant 10-point plan, I'll read it to you now. No, I have no such thing. I think we touched on some of it earlier. I think there are things that the, I think it was more in the UK actually when I was doing events like this, the number of people who would steer the conversation back to aid and the extent to which in the British central and right-wing press aid dominates the discussion of Africa. I wonder whether an interesting thing would be to switch more to the scale of wealth that is filched from Africa and bleeds out either through straight up corruptions or through trans-firmist pricing or you could argue just through raw exports as opposed to more value addition manufacturing within the continent, the big resource producers. I think a shift in the debate like that would be helpful. I think sometimes the debate, especially I think you find it in Europe, is obsessed with aid, which is a fraction of the sums we're talking about and often terribly paternalistic and neocolonial. It seems to me often that the debate is, it's the equivalent of headbutting someone, standing on their neck and then saying, I'll call you an ambulance. I mean, the structures of the looting machine are overwhelmingly, the plumbing is overwhelmingly outside Africa and it falls under the regulatory rate, falls beyond the regulatory power of African institutions. And the other thing, yeah, the beneficial ownership thing, I think would be one concrete step, but no, I don't have some big solution. But surely that's for people like you to work out. Jennifer? Crook with CSIS and thanks for the talk. It was actually following on that. The question of the G7 initiative on tax transparency and beneficial ownership and Kofi Annan had his, the Africa Progress Panel, very good report a couple of years ago, equity and extractives. Equity and extractives, wasn't it, yeah. But I just wonder what kind of traction is that initiative getting and what is the venue in which to push into, to push that and what kind of traction is it getting in Africa? Kind of global or regional or standards for beneficial ownership. What will get that done kind of thing? Where is the place to push on that? One answer to that is to say, read JL's report when it comes out soon. Two, I'm not sure about traction in Africa about that. I mean, it's not really an African problem, right? Well, you do, yes. I think Thabo and Becky's report on trade mispricing is linked into that because it's the same vehicles that are used for tax dodges. I think, though, that also people, and this is all just anecdotal really from me on this stuff for now, but a lot of people in the various talks along the road have pointed to that recent New York Times piece called The Towers of Secrecy, all about real estate development in Manhattan and how I think there's something like 90% of new construction in Manhattan is owned by offshore companies. And I suspect that people will start to twig to this kind of stuff much more if they can combine a sense of empathy with far-off countries that are being looted with the fact that their children can't afford to buy a house because a lot of looted Russian money or a junior money or whatever it may be is massively inflating the real estate market. They might own Rockefeller Center, but they can't get a house, right? Yeah, right, yeah. I think that's where maybe some of it will come from. A woman I spoke to earlier at Global Winners, they're doing some work to try to raise the profile of it. The UK lecture, if it goes labors where, would be interesting to see how that plays out. I think the main division is between those who say we must have a registry, it must be global, and it must be public. And those who say, yeah, well, we'll try and have a registry country by country, but it'll be private, which rather defeats. The point of it would be available to kind of law enforcement agencies and maybe one or two others. But it has to be the first option, surely, to stand on each hand. We're gonna have two more questions. Okay, JR, you wanna make a comment on that? Yeah, go ahead. And then I'm gonna do Deirdre and I'm gonna leave the last word to my good friend, Tiggy. Sure, yeah, first, just a compliment to the book, Tom. I just finished it. And you know, in addition to- Can you tell us who you are, JR? JR Maley, Africa Center for Strategic Studies. You know, in addition to kind of mapping out the elite-level networks and the John Le Carré-type storylines, you know, what I was struck by was the ability for me to convey the sort of on the ground level storyline. The particular passage I'm thinking of is the It's Forbidden to Piss in the Park chapter where you discuss stopping to relieve yourself on the side of the road and turn that into an eloquent discussion of how patriotic network work. You know, and what struck me was, you know, getting down to the ground level. If you were a reformer, if you were someone in civil society, if you were, you know, someone who really wanted to make a difference in a resource-rich African country like Engel or like Eastern Congo. You know, we talk about how the plumbing is outside of the continent. What would you do if you were in one of those countries and you wanted to make a difference? I mean, the trial of Raphael Marx de Marais is this week. I mean, he's one of the most renowned anti-corruption campaigners on the continent. And he's facing something like 16 libel charges. You know, so what pathways are there for folks in Africa, in resource-rich states, to sort of make a difference? And where, you know, where can people start if they want to get, move the needle a little bit? Thanks. Thanks, man. Do you have anything to take? Why don't we take a couple? Deirdre, you go next, and then I'll leave the last one for Tiggy. Tom, my name is Deirdre Lupin, and I've been a correspondent of Tom's for quite a long time on Nigeria and Africa in general. And it's such a pleasure to see him today. Absolutely, yeah, I'm a wise social council. Yeah, lovely. I must confess I haven't read the book yet, but I very proudly own now an autographed copy, so I'm delighted. My question is a very hard and naive question all at the same time. In your investigations of Nigeria, have you come to any conclusions about why no one will tackle or is willing and able to tackle the massive oral theft in the Niger Delta? Oh, okay. Can we take one more watch? I'm looking out for that if I'm gonna take that. Tiggy, I'm afraid we're gonna have to see him later. Go ahead, Tiggy. Yeah, okay. Did it take you two hours to get here? Well, I hope it doesn't take you two hours to go home. All right, I'll give you a last word, but it's gonna have to be short, okay? For me, it would be above a comment and a question. So I will say. Tiggy, when you tell us who you are. My name is Tiggy Kamara. I am the founder and CEO of Tiggy Mining Group. So this book actually hits right back home regarding the mining sector in Guinea. So the cement case has had good and bad impact on the mining sector in Guinea. Good one that the government has finally taken steps about trying to face people that they think are not doing things the right way. People that are looting, like you said, Africa or our economy in a certain way. The review of past contracts. Exactly, but the other part is it's not just putting it out there. It's not just attacking one particular company because I'm sure there are many other companies in Africa, specifically in Guinea that have acquired licenses, major companies or major licenses, but not doing nothing. Just sitting on there and then making money. But the impact that it has, the negative impact for someone like me in the junior mining company, it has made it very, very difficult for us, for example, to find the right type of partners because all of a sudden they think, oh, the government now is not really, they're not protecting interest. They have big companies like Valais and BHP and so forth, all of a sudden now they could take their licenses so what will they do to us little investors? So the most important thing was to find the way to sending out the message. And I think it was the way the message was sent that's now right because if we go a little bit deeper somewhere they will say, this was not only about looting Guinea's economy. Somewhere they were saying that it was something that was between Benny Steinmeister and Mr. Soros or whoever his name is. So it was something, it was like a personal vendetta and then poor Guinea is caught in the middle of it. And with that, all the different companies that really want to develop the economy. So having done so many research, what type of advice will you give African government in about how now to remedy to this kind of a looting problem? What can it be done? Nick, we'll let you go ahead with those. Maybe in reverse order. Yeah, so obviously the BSGR's approach from the beginning when it realized it was under review has been to try to push a completely alternative narrative which is a conspiracy between Alphacondae, George Soros, assorted to other people. For which from what I've seen, I don't believe it's the case. There doesn't seem to have been a significant body of evidence to show that that is what really happened. What appears to have happened, I think is what you're arguing is that they, Condae, to a greater or lesser extent, made a genuine attempt to have an independent or at least an arms length review of past mining contracts, exactly the kind of thing that any sort of policy advisor I think would advise in that situation when you've had half a century dictatorship. There were flaws in how it was done, it seems, and lots of critics, but they seem to have made a pretty good effort of it, especially when you compare it to something like the Congolese mining review, which did seem to be an exercise in asset snatching. So I think it's a tricky one for me to comment on because we've done so much reporting on it, but we try to keep that balance all the way through. But I think a lot of people would say that Condae deserves some credit for that process, whatever other criticisms there may be of the way he's ruled. But it just shows that, I completely agree, it just shows the terrible bind that if you hadn't done anything like that, it would have been encouraging impunity and da-da-da-da-da, and if you go ahead with something like that, you're an asset snatcher and what have you. It's, yeah, I'm not sure they're, that's just an injustice. I'm not entirely sure, I don't know if you have an idea, but I'm not entirely sure how that would be, how better to address that. They had their PR people, they tried to get their message across, they had some pretty heavy-weight advisers trying to help them. I think, by and large, the message has got across that certainly compared to the junta that went immediately before, things are better in Guinea, but it has been ensnared in this big legal battle. Yeah, yeah. Well, in an environment of declining commodity prices too, so it's like... Annibola. Yeah, Annibola. Some pretty unlucky cards as well without that, which are beyond anyone's control. Well, I think the two of you can continue this discussion. Shall I just jump on the other two? Duda and JR's pieces, and I think, unfortunately, we're gonna have to clear the room. This, I think this comes back to... Something was mentioned earlier about where are the Africans in this book. There are quite a lot of them, but I think the question was more to do with where are the kind of the Africans who aren't the finance minister, right? Or that the people you might bump into are the roadblock in Eastern Congo. And that's something I did try to grapple with of what it's like to live under this kind of... A sort of political economy that's distorted by rent. And it's... Again and again, you could see this tension almost physically in people, especially when I was living in Lagos or Dan and the Niger Delta of people who would like that guy on that roadblock with his AK-47, who would clearly be aware that their actions, their imposition, in that case of a kind of basically bogus roadblock to tax a little piece of the road, were part of a broader malaise in someone like Congo or the Delta that is perpetuating the curse for their children ultimately. But you're faced with this terrible dilemma of do you make your peace with the system or stay locked outside and stay locked outside the one kind of... Take your point, not across Africa, but in many of these resource areas, with the one real pocket of wealth. For on what to do, hip-hop, I would say. So, Raphael, you mentioned in Angola, he's written about ex-prosupal mental and other rappers in Angola, this kind of vanguard of resistance. There are some LD and other very interesting Nigerian rappers and musicians who are starting to articulate in a fascinating way at least the anger with the kind of oil trap that they found themselves stuck in. There's links between the uprising in the coup basically in Burkina Faso and hip-hop and Sierra Leone and the anti-corruption movement in Senegal and the protection of the democratic process. So I would say, if you want to make a difference, learn to rap. And I think the Nigerians invented that approach a few years ago, didn't they?  And why is oil still stolen in the Niger Delta? Because you keep running the racket, actually. Because in a sentence, I think the worrying thing is that there's weirdly an alignment of interests. It suits the, I'm not sure it's necessarily always conscious, but it suits the interests of the multinationals operate and increasingly the local Nigerian companies operating on Chor and the Delta for some chunk of our oil to be stolen. It's an informal version for me of like a formal local content policy. Everybody says that they're losing, but actually there's key interests, formal, informal, violent, nonviolent art. Their interests are aligned. Look, there's a lot of things in this book that we haven't reached, including the personal toll that this took on your own life and how you had to recover from an extraordinarily intense period of time. But I'd like to welcome you back another time. Wish you much success, continued success with this book. I know that you're a young man onto great things and hope that we'll cross pass again. So will you join me in giving Tom a round of applause? Thank you. Thank you very much.


Hi, and thank you for joining me for this month's behind the article in Envision Magazine. As promised, I'm going to walk you through an example of how you can reflect upon your existing sales pitch and how you can adapt it. And of course, we're going to use the three concepts that we discussed in the article, relatability, vanity, and value. Now some of you are thinking, oh, well, that's your mistake right there. I don't have a sales pitch. I educate my patients. Oh, please. You were still using your words to educate or communicate or sell to them. So don't get hung up on silly definitions. The goal here is to adapt what it is that we're saying in the optical to be more relatable. So why do we want to do this? Well, my friend, it is always smart to reflect on existing habits that we have in life with the opportunity of improving upon them. We all get into our routine and our habits and our little groove of doing things, right? But if you never adapt, that groove will turn into a rut. Now here's the thing. Many of you can give me a long laundry list of what you think is great about the lens options that you have in your office for your patients. Not to mention the buzzwords of technical features like abbey value and light transmission and substrate matching the index of the material for better durability. Guess what? Patient doesn't care. And most of you know that and will not even use those big words, but you will still use unintentionally some optical buzzwords just because we're using them amongst our colleagues all the time. We mention AR and they're like, ah, accounts receivable or polycarb? No, not normal, average, everyday word, mm-mm, or high indexes or listing out the numbers of the indexes of the high indexes. No, none of that, yet we use it all the time. So we are going to run through an example of how we can adapt our pitch and reflect on how we are promoting anti-reflective treatment in our offices. Now hopefully you've written down your anti-reflective pitch. If you haven't, guess what? You can pause the video, but I really encourage you to write down your entire pitch, every word that is said, not just bullet points. You can't improve without knowing exactly where you're at.  Okay, yes, we get it. But you typically have the same common thread running through your pitch. So please reflect upon what it is and write it down. What it is that you say to your patients. Go ahead. I'll wait. Okay, now that we have that using our optical terms, what is it that makes AR treatment great? Well, it helps light pass through the lens and reduces the glare and the reflection of that light coming off of the lens, right? Okay, now without optical terms, ask yourself, why would a patient want that?  Listen, guys, everyone wants to look good, okay? People like seeing eyes. I mean, having the opportunity to go from, you know, a lens that's nice and clear and you can see me and we can have a conversation where you're looking at me in the eyes versus something like this that has no AR treatment. You can't see a darn thing. Maybe if I get at the right angle, you might be able to see it just right. That's not clear. That's not okay. That's not, that doesn't feel good. Not to mention I can't even see the darn camera.  And I'm not just referring to the teeny bopper wannabe TikTok star. My 75-year-old grandfather even cares about photos, memories. Think about it, memories are held in photos. When you bet your tishi, my papa is going to want to be able to be seen in his photos for all these memories with my kids, his great-grandkids, for years and years and years to come. Why not make sure that he can be seen and not just the reflection off his glasses? Okay, so that's the vanity part. But as we dig a little deeper, we start to think about, well, when you're not having to look through all that glare, you're not having to strain to see. Perfect. That'll be way more comfortable. And what is something that we know that anti-reflective treatment does for glasses? It makes them way more durable and way easier to clean. Perfect. Now we've covered our three things. So how do we simplify it? Ready? Look better, feel better, and see better. It's that simple. So now your long pitch is now simplified down into it'll help you look better, feel better, and see better. And it helps make them more durable because nobody likes looking at glare and nobody likes scratches. Perfect. How simple is that? Your patient cares about that. No discussion of light transmission, no random data points on how it's going to improve their optics. No discussion of scratch proof. Oh my gosh, it hurts my brain even saying that. And we're certainly not talking about warranties. Don't sell for the sake of a warranty, sell for the sake of optics. Look better, feel better, and see better. It's that simple. We've been teaching this concept to our Spexy members since like 2017, since we started Spexy. And even like a decade before that in my independent opticals, just make it simple. And you know that it's good?  And even the Lens companies now are starting to promote the look better, feel better, and see better because it's simple and it works. So let's review how we can take the look better, feel better, and see better and put it in a pitch to a patient. We'll give you two different variations. You could say something like this will help you look better, feel better, and see better.  It'll help you feel better because you're not having a strain to see through that darn glare. And it'll help you see better because gosh, if there's no glare on your lenses, you can see clearly through them. Another variation would be this allows for you to look better, feel better, and see better. And it has amazing durability because let's be honest, nobody wants to look at reflections on your lenses. They want to see your eyes and nobody likes scratches. It's the best treatment ever. So however you want to give your pitch in your office, keep it nice and simple. If you can simplify it down better, great. If you want to use the look better, feel better, and see better, please do because it's working for opticals everywhere. I encourage you to do this exercise for every treatment and every option that you sell in your office. Think about how you can refine your pitch to be more relatable, to appeal to vanity, and to have an awesome amount of value. Do it for materials, for polarization, for progressives. The art of being able to reflect on what it is that you're doing allows for you to adapt to become better. One last point I want to make before we wrap up here. If you don't believe in the product that you're selling, your job is going to be a lot harder. I understand that you're running a business and you need decent margins. I get it.  And if your patient feels like they can get the same thing online because you've given them meh lenses, are they wrong? I believe that if you set your optical apart and only offer the very best, your patients will see that value. We'll see you next month.


Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel today. I'm going to be showing you a few Neat little commands in the command line that use the command curl now.  They're Nothing spectacular, but they're all kind of neat. So I just thought I'd show them to you. I will link in the video description a GitHub repository that lists a whole bunch of really cool little programs that you can run using curl and other little things like that Because I'm not going to show them all to you, but I'm just going to show you a few So the first one I want to show you is something that will Shorten URLs for you. So you could probably bind this to a key command or put it in Roe fee or something But this one is just really simple. So if we go here Control shift V and this at the end row here We have to put the link that we want to put in so I'll go get a link delete this and Control V and then it will give me a link and I believe in order to do this I'd have to go through and copy everything I'm not sure if that prints percentage sign is supposed to be there or not I'm testing that right now All right. Yeah, you'd have to copy everything except for the percentage sign. I'm not sure why that's there Probably some kind of bug But anyways, it just gives you a short URL for you know Sharing it on social media or something really easy. There's also one for tiny URL if that's something that you'd rather use There's not one for bitly, which is weird, but you probably can create one if you really wanted to okay So this one here will get you the latest URL and title of a particular YouTube channel So I'm just gonna use your NPR because that's the example they give and I know it works So if I just hit enter on this, it'll actually tell you the title The name of the channel and the YouTube URL again, this has the weird percentage sign at the end I don't know why that's there that has something to I'm pretty sure that's gonna have something to do with curl Just to be honest with you. Okay. So this one here is a who is Look up. So if we do this here and do This will actually look up the who is information for Google.com tell you who The name servers which is interesting apparently that's public information.  I bet you it's a pretty penny. Anyway, so let's clear out of this oops and Look at the next one So let's see here an interesting thing if you want, let's say you had a You a web page that had a whole bunch of links on it that you wanted to extract all those links from You could do that by using this one here and This one here uses MSN as an example I'm just gonna go ahead and use that but I don't know how long this will actually take Actually didn't take very long at all. This is these are all the links that are currently on MSN.com It was really quick You could you could obviously then go I mean this is fairly useless in the terminal itself But you could pipe that into a text document or something so that you hey, you know, however you want to use it Let's see here. Well, so this one here is cool So this one here will actually give you the weather. So I'm just gonna copy this and copy this in here And I'm just gonna put in a Tom that's near me I'm actually going to zoom out a little bit. So this actually looks proper But it shows you know the temperature and you know Forecast for the next three days and that which is really cool. And this is actually not It gave me Mason County, Illinois I'm not anywhere near Mason County, Illinois. That's supposed to be Mason, Michigan, but whatever it works Maybe if I put in Lansing Yeah, that one gave me Lansing, Michigan that works better All right, anyways, that one gives you the the the weather and stuff we'll go back to zoom in and clear this out that way you can See what we're doing here All right, so this next one will show you the current rates for various cryptocurrencies This this retube just did a video on this one quite extensively So again, this just shows you Bitcoin, Ethereum and all those things for those people who have money in order to actually you know Invest in things if you're one of those people Congratulations, so let's get rid of that so I can stop being you know jealous All right, this next one will show you current coronavirus stats So this is gonna be another one we're gonna have to zoom out of in order to actually see and You can just scroll up all the way and you can see then that Go USA. We're still number one in the world and even the worst things Go us so it started that and zoom back in so we can actually see again and Yeah, let's see here the next one that I want to cover is because of this one here will give you various Linux commands and cheat sheets and stuff So if we just do this one here is just curl cheat that's H and Again, I'm gonna just zoom out just a little bit Some of these things not sure what it will do so you'll just have to you know Experiment but it'll actually Like programming questions and stuff like that will show you some some cheat sheets Again, not quite sure everything it'll do but it looks cool, so we'll clear out of that. Okay, so here is A dictionary so if we do this and do Linux This will actually It does actually define Linux. It's not well formatted It probably should just clear out of this all this stuff, you know away, but an open source version of the Unix operating system Technically that's true Okay, so we'll clear out of that. We'll go to the next one Okay, so this one here will give you a random American name Rosalie Goldman hello Rosalie Goldman Nice nice to meet you this one here is going to give us a really corny joke. I almost guarantee it It's a dad joke. I've just written a song about a tortilla. Well, it's more of a rap really. Oh, okay. I Told you I did warn you that it was going to be a really cheesy joke because it says I can has dad joke calm fantastic Okay, then that so the next few are going to be in the entertainment and games category so Some of these I won't be able to show you because they're gonna be copyrighted infringement things So I'm just not going to do that, but we'll Do this one here this one here is something to do called with my end cat I don't even know what that is, but I Probably have to zoom out in order to see that properly. No Again, I don't know what use that would be but it's cool. I mean someone had to have gone through and coded that Seems like a interesting use of time. Let's see here next one I don't know what this one will actually do it says search and display GIFs in your terminal, but I don't Okay, so I'll actually tell you How to use it so let's zoom back in here so we can actually see Okay, so your search terms separated by an underscore. So let's just do this So they can move my microphone so you can actually hear me when I type this in go back here and do slash Cat let's just do Napping I'm guessing that this the reason why these last two didn't work is because the terminal I'm in it doesn't support them That's cool. Oh So it did kind of work, but It was really pixelated. So what are you gonna do? Alright, so There's a few more there that will go through and do interesting things like that The rest of these all look like they're pretty much SSH stuff But like I said, I will leave a link in the video description so you can check out the rest of these now You'll probably notice that something's a little bit different today I did not have a video of my face and that's because OBS is not treating me well for whatever reason Everything was out of sync That's just the way it apparently is for the way things are going for me today I don't know it took me like six tries to try to do this video. I tried some with the camera some without the camera It's just one of those days people So if you like this video give it a thumbs up if you didn't give it a thumbs down if you're if you know any other Really cool curl command uses leave them in the comments below You can also support us on patreon.patreon.com slash the Linux cast and on that note I would like to thank our patron our patron Devon see thank you for supporting us the first episode Exclusive episode of the Linux cast is now on patreon if you're interested in it that will actually come become public tomorrow So it's up exclusively right now for patrons. Thank you for watching. I'll see you next time