What's good to see is a lot of enthusiasm about the subject that people want to continue to speaking about it everywhere here in the room. Well, anyway, my name is Walter Douglas, and I'll be the moderator for this next hour. And we have a very distinguished panel here and really delighted that we can continue the discussion about a U.S.-Egypt free trade agreement with our panel. And perhaps here's some other views and some other, some depth that could add and complement to what we just heard earlier. Anyway, let me just give you a quick introduction here before we jump in. Phil English was a congressman from Pennsylvania and is now at Arnt Fox and the firm here in Washington. But one thing that's especially noteworthy about him is he was on the Ways and Means Committee and was very involved with trade agreements. And so he brings a lot of expertise about what's been going on in the hill and is very current with that. Hisham Fahme is from, we're lucky to have him here in from Cairo. He's the head of the executive director at the Amcham in Cairo. And really, as you look at his resume, has been devoted, he's at the spear point really of American business interests in Cairo and in Egypt and doing everything you can to increase them and to make sure it's a fantastic relationship. I would also note he's been in Cairo for quite a while. He studied at the American University in Cairo, which is truly one of the most distinguished universities in the Middle East and one of the most beautiful as well. And then we have Meredith Broadbent, who's here with CSIS. You heard her at the last session. But at any rate, she is the one who actually then authored and directed the report, which she'll have a chance to speak to you about. So first, I'd like to start with Phil English. I also would like to also compliment him. He made a very good choice where to go to university. He went to the University of Pennsylvania, as I did, and there was a perfect choice. So perhaps, Mr. English, you'd like to start off giving us a little overview of where we are. Thanks, Walter, and I appreciate the introduction. And I'm sure you made more of a splash at Penn than I did. I want to say it is a privilege to be here. I was grateful when Meredith contacted me because this is a topic of great interest to me over time. Also, right now our firm has very much focused on Egypt as one of the areas where there's going to be a remarkable opportunity. I have to tell you, I was for an Egyptian FTA before it was cool. I remember talking to Charlene Marchewski about this back in the late 1990s. At that point, there was a feeling they were not yet ready to proceed with reforms that would make an FTA work. So the negotiation never really took off. In the middle of the last decade, I was part of a delegation that went over to Egypt at a time when we were talking again about doing an FTA. And at that point, there was a real sense of the reform was in the air and there was real movement. That did not lead anywhere. I feel sometimes as an advocate of close integration with Egypt's economy, kind of like the lost army of King Cambyses. Some of you may remember the story, Cambyses overran Egypt, made it a province of Persia, and sent, well, basically heard there was out in the western desert somewhere, an oasis called Siwa where the Oracle of Amun was. So he was determined to control that oasis and he sent an army out into the western desert and he said, find it. And they marched out and a couple of days later, some folks came back and said, well, we haven't found it yet and it's really hot and we're in armor. And the Cambyses said keep looking and about a few days later, another delegation came back and said, you know, there's no water out here. And Cambyses said keep looking and they marched out and they disappeared. And by the way, modern archeologists are planning to use metal detection to see if they can find where the army went, but it never found Siwa. And I've long felt that maybe it would take a long time to work our way and find an FTA with Egypt. Right now I'm optimistic. Why? Because a number of things have changed. First and foremost, Egypt has gone through in the lead up to the current situation a series of market reforms that I think make us optimistic that we could integrate our economies. Market reforms in banking, market reforms in the tariff arena, market reforms in regulation. Second of all, the Arab Spring has, as people noted in the last panel, created an opportunity. I think it has also created an expectation of growth and change within the public. And a free trade agreement with the United States would be an enormous add on to that. So notwithstanding the fact that the nominal leaders in the first round of Egyptian elections were the Muslim Brotherhood who we don't normally associate as potential allies. They nevertheless have distinguished themselves from the Salafists and they are clearly interested in putting together a coalition in the center, whatever that center may be. We potentially could fill an enormous need for them. And this is coupled with the fact that Egypt is going through a substantial economic crisis, not only a long-term problem with a skills gap and with corruption, but with a large informal economy and very, very high unemployment. They need dramatic economic growth to turn that around. And on this side, the United States, I think, has achieved a major breakthrough and a decisive change in trade policy. The passage of the three FTAs shows that there is a new potential coalition in Congress to pass this kind of agreement. I would add not only is it a sign of support for free trade, but perhaps more importantly it's a sign that the traditional opponents of free trade were decimated in the 2010 election. And into this environment, coupled with the traditional bipartisan support in the Senate for FTAs, there is a great opportunity here. Let's recognize a free trade agreement with Egypt would have an important impact. Its immediate impact would be limited. It would certainly be a strategic asset. It would also be a modest economic asset. But over time, as Egypt changes and as Chairman Dreyer noted, it is at 85 million the largest country in the Arab world and a very important potential platform for us. We think that this is a partnership that would be potentially useful. We need an FTA to reinforce the reforms in Egypt. We need the FTA to anchor Egypt to the west. We need FTA to promote a demonstration effect to bring more partners in the region. And we need an FTA to counter trade diversion as a result of trade interactions with the EU. I think now is a time when this could work. And so it's a very exciting moment. I look forward to your questions. Thank you very much. I'll just run through a little bit of our thinking on the paper. You guys all have it. So there's things you can ask about if you want to drill down too much. But basically this paper is focused on how the United States might choose Egypt as a future free trade agreement partner. And I'm going to apologize to Egyptians in advance in one sense. This is more about how the United States is going to get there. We can kind of look at our situation now. We recognize that we've gotten rid of the pending FTAs. The decks are cleared. It's now really an appropriate time for the United States to start debating what the new trade strategy is. And I think we heard Chairman Brady say that yesterday in his trade agendas to gender speech. And the idea is that we need a new trade strategy that takes account of the new realities and a really fast changing global economy that has been transformed since the United States Congress last authorized negotiating objectives for trade agreements. In the past we've had the, for many years, we've had the Foreign Trade Barriers Report which tends to be USTR's Bible about what we want to get accomplished with each individual country. But I think at this point we've got to admit that we're not getting what we want from the big guys, from the India, Brazil and China's of the world. The plan there was to deal with them in the WTO and that really hasn't been working out. We're basically at an impasse and I think for the time being it's important for the United States to start looking at the next group of countries that are coming over the horizon of which we see Egypt as being one. There's a lot of different configurations of countries that you might look to but Egypt fits the bill in many, many respects and that's why we thought it was important to spend some resources and call it to your attention. The first cut of these arguments I think is interesting. I mean we sort of see what Egyptians are saying to the US. The last sort of official meeting that I see registered in the press at least is Ambassador Taylor who I think was here met with the trade minister from Egypt, Minister Issa in October. The trade minister there was saying that we need a new trade strategy between the United States and Egypt. Minister Issa said that it should focus on achieving joint interest for the two countries and it should be a program that was felt, a policy that was felt by the Egyptian nation. He said the time is right for the US to play a role in supporting the Egyptian economy in this transition phase. So I think the thing to keep in mind here is that as the new government gets organized in Egypt it is helpful to have the goal out there of an FTA. It's easy to say, United States shouldn't say something, we ought to hang back, be hesitant about what's happening until we see what the character of the new government is. They're not ready to do it, but the fact of the matter we're not ready to do it either. I mean if the Egyptians announced yesterday that they wanted to forge stronger trade ties with us and have a closer relationship it would be hard to imagine the US following through on that. So we have a lot of work here to do in the United States before we can speak collectively as the United States to Egyptians in a way that can be understood as a signal of support and sort of unified policy and approach to Egypt. On the commercial side there's a host of reasons why Egypt makes a lot of sense. One of the issues I think that is important to think about is sort of illustrative of the general negative progress the US has been making on trade agreements overall while other countries are moving ahead. The Europeans have enhanced their trade relationship with the Europeans. In fact they have a US-Egypt-EU association agreement that went into effect many years ago but it was enhanced in 2007 with some unilateral trade concessions on the part of Egypt. So most countries like the United States are giving trade preferences to Egypt, reducing barriers to them. Right now Egypt is actually accepting Egyptian products at duty-free tariffs and that is having a demonstrable effect on US market share particularly in the agriculture sector and the report goes into that. Another reason on the US competitiveness position with Europe is that the Europeans are in that market and having a big influence on the standard setting process in Egypt. It's a complex area but it has a strong impact on US companies and when the Europeans are there and able to offer a lot of assistance they have this agreement that says we ought to harmonize standards and get closer to what the European standards are that's negative for the United States. Egypt in fact may be for example not accepting US automobile standards in the future. Historically they've accepted both the European and the US automobile standards. As time goes on it sounds like and I think the statements they've been making are that they'll be switching to the European standards. So that's a practical negative competitive impact on the United States that European involvement in the Egyptian economy is promoting in their interest which is their prerogative but we ought to be there and be engaged at the same time. The third element related to the European competition is that the trade agreement that Europe has with Egypt gives them a lot of lines of communication into the Egyptian economy. When you've got a trade agreement in place you have an office that deals with those trade relations even through the very difficult political transition taking place in Egypt during July, August they were able to have high level meetings, they were able to have day-to-day trade meetings they were able to conduct business under their trade agreement which supports their traders. The United States I think has been hampered, we don't have a mechanism in place it's politically difficult to have a new type of meeting with the United States so we don't talk as often and as deeply as the Europeans and Egypt are able to do. We're a bit on the outside because we don't have the structure in place where the bureaucrats know what their job is, facilitate trade, take care of day-to-day barriers. So I think there are almost intangible benefits there to a trade agreement being in place. If we had had one that went in place earlier the democratic transition comes and I would argue we would be in a better place than we are commercially in Egypt right now. And I think the thing that others have really pointed out is the value of their forms that the Egyptians have undertaken leading up to this point before January 25th. I think the Egyptians deserve a lot of credit for their reform of their bureaucracy. They've done a lot of privatization and their economies was before January 25th and to some extent going forward with a lot of foreign investment and it's led to very strong growth rates, 7% annual growth rate between 2005 and 2008 and even during the global downturn in 2008 it fell to only 5%. So three or four times the growth rate that the United States has and something that the Egyptians need to think about preserving. What are the policies that they need to put in place that will attract investment, make investors secure and set the structure for a good business environment? And finally on the strategic side of negotiating with Egypt at a loss the director of our Middle East program is in Egypt right now, John Alterman and he would be able to give a good description here but just strategically overall Egypt is a very powerful state essentially the center of gravity for the Arab world. If Egypt descends in instability maybe other countries in the Arab region will do so. We need to be worried about this and we need to support sort of the good example from Egypt that comes from their professionals that really do play a leadership role in the overall MENA economy and have a lot of influence on sort of the future development in that region. So at some we need to really come up with a policy that has defined objectives if there are folks in the Egyptian government that want to grow and modernize and integrate into the global economy it is good to have the goal of a free trade agreement out there. We think that Egypt will be a key partner in the future. The performance of the economy will drive a lot of how the Egyptians approach the future and so we think that the time is right to start thinking about how we build these new avenues of interchange and cooperation that take place under a free trade agreement. It's an early time but Egyptians are looking to make choices and a free trade agreement really has by the nature of its effect on an economy moves an economy towards market oriented reforms and if the United States can see its way clear to have a forwardly deployed economic strategy in the region with just even saying the aspirational goal of a free trade agreement it would be I think a clearly understood gesture of goodwill and encouragement for Egyptians at a pretty uncertain time. So that's sort of the thrust of where we were going on the study. It's there for you to read and we really appreciate these two other speakers coming to talk about both how the United States is going to start looking at the question of U.S. relations with Egypt as well as I'd like to yield now to my colleague Hisham about how Egyptians are hearing what's going on in the United States and how we can have a positive impact. Good morning everybody. I'm so happy to hear that we're talking about free trade agreement with Egypt again. We've been talking about it. I've been talking about it when I had hair. And I really am absolutely happy that we are talking about it. Do we want an FDA U.S. Egypt? This is sort of not a role. We, there are several parts whom we are talking about and I think we're talking about U.S. government. We're talking U.S. companies. We're talking Egyptian companies and we're talking Egyptian government. Everything I had here has been said but let me look at it in a different way. I'm going to try to be a bit more argumentative just for the lively note of the place. I think for U.S. companies it's obvious. It's a win-win. As Meredith is saying the Europeans are eating our lunch in Egypt and expanding in other places in the Middle East and Mediterranean and we have to do something about it. And an FDA is one but it's a very good avenue to pursue that U.S. companies very shortly will be locked out of Egypt and other places. For Egyptian companies that are working with the United States or with U.S. companies it's a must.  Who wouldn't want an FDA with the largest economy in the world? It is a given and I think anybody who thinks about it or talks about it or knows about trade issues it's something that is needed. I think Congressman English put his finger on what he said about a catalyst for reform. I think this is one of the most important parts of what an FDA, not just an FDA that is concluded but an FDA that's negotiated as Thelma was saying, this will cement a lot of the reforms that we as business people, those who represent business people want to make sure are cemented into law in Egypt. And this is the time to really with the new constitution, with the new parliament, with the new government, this is the time to put the seed of what we really want Egypt to look like on the economic side, the free market side and so on. The revolution had a lot of extremely good effects but it also had parts that included people thinking of more populism, more socialism, more equality and so on. And we need to be aware of that. An FDA with the United States will send a signal to the whole world, particularly to the U.S. companies who are not in Egypt, not the Coca-Cola's or the big companies but the small and medium United States companies. It will give them a signal that Egypt is part of the global economy. There's a rule of law and I think that an FDA will do that. Investment rating for Egypt will definitely go up with an FDA with the United States and Egypt needs the FDI, needs all the help it can get. Increased competition for quality goods and I think Congressman Dreyer mentioned that. It opens up a huge market, the United States market, to Egyptian exports and that is not an impediment to anybody or argument anybody in Congress or the labor unions or anything. If the whole products GDP of Egypt is exported to the United States, it's not going to affect the United States one little bit. And if we're talking about the most sensitive part, it's the textiles that's already done through the QIZ. So there is no more products that really can have a big impact. And if the U.S. can have a free trade agreement with Mexico, Canada and Korea, I mean, I don't think you should be worried about Egyptian exports. So the pros for Egypt to have an FDA are never ending and they're just not debatable. FDA with the United States for Egypt is something that is positive and so on. But how anxious is Egypt to have an FDA agreement with the United States? Congressman Dreyer said everybody he spoke to welcomed it. Of course, they're welcomed it.  Egypt had a long laundry list of reforms that were presented by the U.S. government many years ago before the United States entertained talking about a free trade agreement. And we're very grateful. Private sector, actually the Egyptian government did go through those reforms as Congressman Engler said, the banking sector, the trade non-tariff barriers and so on, and tariffs went down. And that was something that we were so close to signing, so starting the negotiations.  And we don't want that to happen again. We want to put politics out of the way to look at it commercially for Egypt and the United States. Of course, for the United States it's such a strategic area or country on the politics side, on the security side, on the DOD side. I think it's something that also is a given. But what has Egypt done since these negotiations were stopped or not started maybe five, six years ago? The EU partnership expanded tremendously as Meredith has said and so on. The Pan-Arab free trade agreement is now working better and it's the Comessa, the East Africa free trade agreement with Egypt. Turkey in 207 free trade agreement with Egypt. Efta, Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Liechtenstein. Mercosur, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay free trade agreement with Egypt. Russia, India, they're talking about it now. And now the big boy, China. The Chinese are coming and the Chinese are coming quickly, quietly and strongly. The Chinese are working so hard. They have the money and they have the expertise. Negotiating an FTA with Egypt will be very painful for the Egyptian bureaucracy. And I don't know if they have the capacity. The Egyptian bureaucracy looks at what has to be done with the US FTA with trepidation. China is huge. There's a lot of negotiations. A lot of technical expertise is needed. There's a lot of legal expertise that's needed. And in their mind there's less problematic alternatives. Again, China. China doesn't have any conditions on labor. They don't have any conditions on the environment. They don't have any conditions on human rights. It's easier. But let me also look at something. Again, to go back, free trade agreement with the United States is a given. It's something that is good for Egypt. And we think it's good for the United States on a broader sense. But let's look at Egypt's economy now, today. It's hurting, ladies and gentlemen. Meredith just said it. The first quarter of this year, minus 4% GDP. Second quarter, 0.4. Maybe we'll end the year at one. And this is, as Meredith said, something that was 5.6 during the financial crisis. Seven and eight before that. So it's a big, big drop. Look at the macros, and it's still depressing. The reserves are down from $36 billion to 20. And we're losing them at about 1.5 or 2 a month, depending. Our budget deficit is 9.6 and growing. Interest rates up. Inflation up. Unemployment, as Congressman Drain said, 2 million have been lost up. The pound is down. Egypt needs short-term support. It's good to talk about the free trade agreement. It's really important to talk about the free trade agreement. It's even more important to have a free trade agreement. But Egypt really needs support today. And the US needs to put its weight behind this. The US doesn't have to fork out huge sums of money itself. But the United States has the weight around the world to make sure that people, other countries, support Egypt. It is important. The economy is tanking. Whatever government we have, they're going to have to deal with a very, very serious situation. The US has to support Egypt. We don't need a war to kick-start US support, do we? The future of Egypt will be good. It must be good. If you take everybody out of Egypt, just look at the location. It's fantastic. If you wanted to choose a location for a country, you probably, I know everybody's going to say, well, the United States, but no. Apart from the United States. Everywhere in the world, you know, on the Mediterranean, on the Red Sea, with the Suez Canal, with the Nile, in Asia, in Africa, Mediterranean, Islamic, Coptic, African, it's just, it's the genius of Egypt. And of course, the fantastic potential that is there with the 80 million people, half of them youth. And FTA is crucial for Egypt. US support now, now is critical for Egypt. And I think the youth that have startled the world for a quest for a better Egypt, for a better life, please, let's not let them down. Thank you. Well, thank you very much. Our time is romping on pretty fast. So why don't we just jump right into questions here? And if someone has one they'd like to ask, the microphone be given to you, and please state your name and affiliation. Any questions there? We've got right over here. Hi, I'm Michael Jubin. I work in the Middle East program here at CSIS. Thanks to all of you for your insights. This is a question for Mr. Fahmi in particular. You mentioned the bureaucratic needs in Egypt and some challenges there in the short term to building the capacity for a long term solution to this. What are the things that the bilateral relationship can be focusing on in the short term to work on those sorts of challenges in support of something like an FTA or other initiatives that require that kind of sort of permanent capacity? I'm sorry, I missed the question. Sure. Regarding the bureaucratic needs, what are the things that the United States and Egypt and Egypt can be doing together to fill those gaps, to solve the challenges of technical expertise, or other training initiatives that can be done, that kind of thing, in support of a longer term FTA? Well, obviously there's a huge learning process for an FTA, and the learning process doesn't just include government, but it includes the private sector. The private sector in Egypt needs to know what it means to have an FTA with the United States. What are the opportunities? What are the challenges? Not everybody wins with an FTA. There are losers and winners, but the total is a win. The technical expertise will have to come from the United States, but also it will have to come from Egypt. I think the private sector has a lot of experts that the Egyptian government will need to reach out to to help it negotiate an FTA, or other countries that have negotiated an FTA, and I think if I was Egyptian government, I would go and find somebody from Mexico or Korea who's negotiated with the United States and let them help in the process and have a learning process there. Another question? We've got a clump over here. Why don't we do the fellow on the turtleneck? Quick question. Hisham, I remember you and you had hair. I was Secretary General for the Egypt U.S. President Council. At that time we were pushing for trade, not instead of aid. My question, considering the complications of having an FTA, why don't we focus on revising the investment treatment? Wouldn't this be a more practical thing to work on right now and get the train moving and then at a later time we'll talk about FTA? I think he did ask you. You were still always asking questions when I had hair. I think the investment opportunities in Egypt, as Congressman Dryar said, with examples like Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble and General Motors and Apache and so on, there's no real impediment for investments in Egypt. And I know Meredith has put in the updating of the bilateral investment treaty. I'm not so sure that's an extreme priority. I think it's something that is important for the United States. I think if the Egyptian government is looking at it, they're going to say, well, why am I giving all these guarantees without getting something in return? And that's where the BIT and the FTA negotiations sort of mesh together. I think there are a lot of modules in the FTA negotiations that can be done either consecutively or parallel-wise that can improve the investment and the reforms and so on without going through double negotiations like the bilateral and the FTA. I guess I'm more positive about it because I think it's a good signal. I mean, for us, if the U.S. was able to get our domestic political consensus in a spot where we could announce we would like to update the FTA, update the BIT with Egypt, that would be good and I think it would be good news for people, investors looking at Egypt who has a signal of goodwill and wanting to make sure that investment was safe. BITs have a lot of just kind of institutional benefits to them due process requirements and so forth. I get the point that maybe it's more one way, but I'm sure the Egyptians can come up with something on their side that could go along as a companion negotiation with a BIT. And as a practical matter, there is a stepping stone to an FTA because every FTA has an investment chapter which looks very much like a BIT. So if you want to start what we've been talking here today as the process of the beneficial process of getting to a free trade agreement ultimately, it really is a stepping stone there and there's others that we could talk about and hopefully we'll have some programs in the future where we can talk about maybe it's a customs facilitation agreement and just interim steps of goodwill and good news for Egypt that help the bureaucracy get organized and have some good goals of transparency and just openness that we think is beneficial. I mean, the Egyptians will have their views on these things, but these are goals that would be important for the United States, which we believe would help Egypt. There's another gentleman over there, yes? I'm Chuck Dietrich with the National Foreign Trade Council and the U.S. Middle East Free Trade Coalition. First of all, Hesham, I think your hair is great. But you've been here.  Phil, you targeted the houseways and means focus probably more than any other time on commercial opportunities in the Middle East and how to use the commercial agenda to build our strategic agenda. What do you think is the mood in houseways and means specifically and in the speaker's office and what steps do you think can be done to get them in a better place if they're not there already to think seriously about an Egypt FTA? I think that they are interested. They are there. Full disclosure. I've not had an extended conversation with them, but as you know, I know the trade council very well on Mr. Boehner's shop used to be my LD. They, I think, are looking for next steps on the trade front. And the administration, I think it's fair to say, has other preoccupations at the moment with the exception of TPP and Russia's entry into the WTO and what we would do to accommodate that. There really does, to be fair, does not appear to be a lot immediately on the agenda. I think there is a pent-up demand among House Republicans to move forward on some ambitious agreements that maybe go beyond traditional trade promotion authority and go beyond traditional FTAs. I think that, particularly, Egypt would be challenging. There will be a natural constituency for it in the House. You'll remember... I'm sorry, it was co-chairing with me a Middle East economic opportunity caucus. I think there is still the center of gravity between Ryan, Mr. Brady, and a few others to back something that would move quickly and be very, very aggressive. But I do think it's going to take a role and a sign-off by the executive branch to move something forward. Answer your question. They're hungry, and I think this would directly address what they're craving for. So can I just actually follow up on that? When we had the last free trade agreements go through, I think a lot of people were surprised that they moved through. What was the key selling point? I'm not sure it was a selling point as much as it was a sea change in the House of Representatives. Understand historically, the Senate has been comparatively bipartisan in its support for trade agreements. However, in the House over time, there had been building resistance to doing additional FTAs. And I think this was as much political and tactical as it was anything else. What you had was fewer and fewer House Democrats who were in the space that Mr. Meeks now occupies of being someone willing to embrace a new trade initiative. I realized some of my former colleagues on ways and means on the Democratic side would probably disagree with me on this. Certainly there's some like Joe Crowley who I think are very aggressive on trade. I just think it has gotten over time more and more difficult for House Democrats to find a space where they are comfortable and where they can work with their coalition with the AFL-CIO being put into the minority and having a Republican majority with very, very few AFL-CIO allies in it, I think simply cleared the boards to move everything forward. I mean, it's really as simple as that. Thank you. Question? Yes, back there. The lady in red. My name is Jillian Moroney. I'm with Nathan Associates. We have a contract with USAID and I'm the Deputy Chief of Party Trade Facilitation in Egypt. And I was in Egypt in the 2000s when there was a lot of talk about a free trade agreement that Hisham has alluded to. And it was dropped for political reasons. So this is a question to the Americans. I mean, if I was the Egyptians I would be very concerned. I mean, maybe I have an election for president or my constitution and it doesn't go quite the way the Americans would like. But how would that affect the free trade agreement negotiations? My own view is I don't think it particularly would. I think this is a time when both countries have an enormous interest in moving forward. Four variety of reasons. From the Egyptians standpoint, not only would a free trade agreement with the largest economy in the world give them a shot in the arm when whoever is in the new government they're going to need to show results and increase economic growth comparatively fast. But also I think it has a solitary effect on their trade relationship with the EU. I've found over the years as a co-chairman of the EU caucus that the EU responds very aggressively when the US goes and poaches on markets that they regard as in their back yard. We saw that with the Moroccan FTA. I think that the best thing that an Egyptian government could do would be to embrace against perhaps the expectation a free trade negotiation with the US that would dramatically, I think, strengthen their hand in negotiating a better agreement and new opportunities with the EU. There's another question over here, right? My name is Omar Mohana. I'm an Egyptian industrialist. I'm in the cement business and car-time manufacturing business. And I'm the past president of the American Chamber of Commerce. I've been coming to Washington for the last years, many, many years. We've talked about free trade and I think everything about the free trade has been said today. The challenges that Egypt is facing, we used to have a very good economic story and a lousy political story. I think now it's the reverse. We have a better political story and a lousy economic story. But one of the big challenges that Egypt is facing now is the brain flight, the outcome of the political outcome of the reforms that are taking place, the elections and all that would lead, and it is already leading to the fact that many of the brightest and the best educated are thinking twice. We have succeeded over the years in attracting the best and the brightest back to Egypt. Now we see a reverse. We see a real brain flight that's starting to take place. And I think that maybe an FDA could reinforce a bit the sense of confidence and would give the young and the brightest another opportunity to rethink their plans and try to live with the political actualities of Egypt and have possibly a more optimistic approach. So maybe this is an additional point that could be added to an FDA. Thank you. Any more questions? There we go. We got one right back there. I actually used to work for GAFI, the investment promotion agency based in Cairo, and somewhat related to the last question. I was curious to hear given the investment climate in Egypt now with the government, whether it's GAFI or another ministry is doing to address investor confidence, whether that's current investors or future investors. That's mainly directed to you, Mr. Sham. Thanks. You have to feel sorry for them. Every time you try to attract investment there's something in Tahrir Square that people think that it's all over Egypt and investors are not very risky. On the other hand, there have been very, very good examples of companies coming in and there are deals in Egypt now that companies have invested whether from the Gulf or from Sweden and they've made substantial investments since January in Egypt and I think those companies are going to make a big bucks in Egypt. They're betting on Egypt's not just geography, but market and the reforms that are coming. If everything goes well and you have all the physical ingredients of Egypt right and then you add to it the democracy rule of law less corruption and so on more human rights and so on there's never going to be a better place around the world. We have time for one last question right there. Hi, my name is Robbins Pancake formerly with Hewlett Packard in Agilent Technologies. My question is mainly for Heisham I think and that is the concern I hear expressed around Washington particularly in the business community is who do we negotiate from public policy people? Who do we negotiate with? There's an election every three months or so a new parliament, new president, whatever so it boils down to is there a trade minister is there an institutional structure is there enough enthusiasm in Egypt so that no matter what happens politically that there will be the foundation for proceeding with discussions because I think the image certainly here is that boy we just need to wait 9 to 12 months before we even start the conversation. I think what congressman Dryer said before is that everybody all the structures there and the political parties realize that investment and attracting investment and making it a business friendlier environment is important. Yes there are challenges now of getting people to sign off on difficult deals and so on or things that require special licenses and so on that is a challenge right now but if you're investment or you're thinking about Egypt and so on this is the time to do due diligence. Look around look at the market, look at the segmentation look at the who's going to be your partner I think if you do all that it's going to take you some time anyway and once we're talking now June for having a president constitution, parliament by end of June in July if that's extended for a couple of months so you're talking seven months and I think any serious investment will take longer than that to put together so you use this time to do your investigations to do your what you need to have an investment going look at the financing look at all that and there is a lot of support especially in financing I mean everybody the EBRD the ECSOM all these institutions are putting their weight behind US companies working in Egypt so this is the time to look at especially in the financing packages and so on. Well thank you very much we're wrapping up our session now and thank you the panel it was really terrific I think everybody learned a lot thank you the guests for coming over to CSAS I think we heard both that there's a good economic reason for free trade agreement there's a good political reason I'm very struck by Congressman Dreyer quoting Assistant Secretary Jeff Feldman saying this is the kind of issue that can bring all Egyptians together and I think that something at this time is really a vital interest so let's hope that the CSAS report here can really reinvigorate the debate and move this forward and get something moving on this because it sounds like the time is here thank you very much for coming


Hey, what's up, YouTube? I'm Zeke and welcome to The Dream Green Show. While Bitcoin is on the boom, I'm going to show you guys how I invest into Bitcoin just from using my phone. I'm going to show you the easiest way to invest into Bitcoin. Also in this video, I'm going to show you another way that I invested to many different cryptocurrencies. And then at the end of this video, if you stick to the end of this video, I'm going to show you guys how I get Bitcoin absolutely free and you guys can start earning Bitcoin free today as well. But this video is brought to you by Webull. Sign up now by clicking the link down in the description, deposit $100 and receive two free shares valued up to $1,600. Now enough talking, let's dive straight into the video. Welcome back, dreamers. Here we are, the app that I use to buy straight from my phone is called Coinbase. I'm going to also leave that link down in the description. I think if you use that link and sign up using my link, I'll receive a free $10. I think you receive a free $10 as well, but I would really appreciate it if you use that link. It'll help me eat more than just rice and noodles every night. But here we are in Coinbase. Right now, my account is around $4,930 just from Coinbase on my phone. I have a lot of cryptocurrency stored offline elsewhere, but this is just the ones that I have on my phone on Coinbase. Right now, Bitcoin is at $11,363 of the last week and went from $10,500 all the way up to $11,363. And we'll take a look at the all-time high. Bitcoin had an all-time high of $19,891. So that is the price point that we're all trying to get back to is the $20,000 price point. So while it's under $20,000, I buy around $100 every month or so of Bitcoin just so because Bitcoin is literally cryptocurrency itself is the future of currency. America right now is just printing out money, printing out money, causing inflation. And Bitcoin literally cut out how much Bitcoin is paid out in half. So if you're mining Bitcoin that used to pay out, let's say two Bitcoin every block that you mine, just a couple of months ago, Bitcoin cut in in half. Now you're only getting paid out one Bitcoin instead of two. So they're literally driving up the price of Bitcoin by limiting the supply of Bitcoin. America right now is just printing out the US dollar and eventually it's going to make the US dollar worthless from inflation. The US dollar goes down every year in value because of inflation, but Bitcoin is doing it right. This is currency working in the ecosystem in a perfect way. So right now in my Coinbase app, I have 0.32870918Bitcoin. So let's go ahead and buy one. I'm going to hit trade, buy with cash, and then I'm going to type in $100. I already have my bank account linked to this. I'm going to show you guys how simple and fast it is. Buy $100 that's worth the Bitcoin. I'm going to hit preview buy. And once I hit buy now, it's going to give me 0.0084 Bitcoin. Hit buy now. And there it goes. It's just that simple now. It should go through within the next couple of seconds. Take a look at my Bitcoin. And there it goes in my history, 0.008 $100 worth of Bitcoin. So it's that simple to buy Bitcoin using the phone. Now let me show you guys how you can get many different cryptocurrencies on a site called Binance that I actually use. And then at the end after that, I'm going to show you guys how you get Bitcoin completely free. All right, guys, here we are. This is Binance.com. I'm going to also leave this link down in the description. This is the site that you can buy and trade, day trade, swing trade. It is much easier to do it on this website Binance and you can buy over a hundred different cryptocurrencies. So let's click on BTC, which is Bitcoin, and it brings up its own chart right here that you can use to trade if you wanted to and zoom out. So not too long ago, it was at $10,136, a hard time high over the last couple of days, it's $11,491. If we look at the one day chart, you can see that it's using this simple moving average line as the resistance line. And this is Bitcoin at its current price. So yes, this is a great site to use if you want to try your attempt at day trading Bitcoin and make some money that way. These are also all the cryptocurrencies that you can buy on these sites. So let's just scroll down the list so I can show you guys all the different cryptocurrencies that goes bad. They go BTG, that's Bitcoin Gold. Let's scroll all the way down. They have TRX. So yes, TRX was just Tron and then they have Litecoin, Ethereum, XVG, XTZ, XRP, which is Ripple, ZRX. So yes, they have all of these different kinds of cryptocurrencies that you can buy on here. All you got to do is just go sign up using the link down in the description, make your account. Now, I'm going to tell you guys when Bitcoin shot all the way up to $20,000 in the past, Coinbase was not allowing new people to sign up. That's how much people were buying into Bitcoin at the time was that it was overcrowding their service.  Same thing with Binance. People was coming in to Binance and then they said, hey, no more new people could sign up if you already have to have account in order to capitalize on Bitcoin just going up $500 every single day. So that is why it's just good to make an account to sign up for Coinbase or sign up for Binance. Just make an account. You don't have to even buy or trade Bitcoin at the moment. Just make sure that you have one. So the next time Bitcoin has a bull run, you don't miss out on the opportunity. But once you sign up, it's just a simple click of the button. You hit buy crypto right here. You enter your credit card or your debit card information and then you could just deposit your money and then just start buying all the different types of cryptocurrencies that they have. So this is the site that I was using during the Bitcoin boom. I was using Coinbase and I was also using Binance. Now to show you guys what you already been waiting for on how to earn free cryptocurrency, I've been using this real browser. It is called CryptoTab browser. That link is also down in the description. Now this CryptoTab browser, it uses your CPU.  This crypto web browser is called CryptoTab and then you just start mining. I'm not going to mine right now because I am currently recording a video. So let's go ahead and turn that back off. But it's going to use the hash rates from your CPU to mine Monero and then it's going to convert that to Bitcoin. So all you got to do is use this web browser. It's just a Google Chrome copy extension. So all your data is safe down here. You use it just like Google Chrome. And then you just turn on the mining, turn it all the way up to max. And then you could also do times two or times four or times 10. But that actually costs. But to do it the completely free way is just to download this browser using the link down in the description, sign up and then just turn it on. And then you guys are mining Bitcoin completely free. So so far I have withdrawn .0019 and .0015. So a total of around $56. So me myself, I mine around $24 plus another $15. So that's around, so that's around $40 that I mine myself. And then from affiliates, from friends mining, that's around $31. So total $56. Now Bitcoin is at $11,300. So let's imagine Bitcoin goes all the way up to $500,000 per coin. That's around 45 times the price of what Bitcoin is right now. So this $54,000, this $56 times, 54 times that price. That's around, that's around $2,500, $2,600 you guys can use. I'm literally use this site for a month just by leaving the computer on in the background when I'm off at work or when I'm web browsing is just up mining in the background. That in the future, if Bitcoin do get to $500,000 this just by having this website up just by having the CryptoTel browser, I am earning mortgage, car note and much, much more just by simply using this browser. Now there's way that you could mine cryptocurrency even faster on this site by having a mining network. Let's say you have more friends that I have that scroll down. If you get someone to sign up, you could get 15% of what they're mining. So it's easy to get your friends to sign up because it's free. You're not asking anyone to pay anything. It's completely free and I've made $54 from it. So when I tell my friends, they pretty much download it and use it as well. So they have a mining network. So let's scroll down. Let's say if you have five friends and each five of your friends using and they tell five of their friends, you could calculate your income. So in your first round of business, you could get like $3. If all of those tell five friends, you'll have $25. You could get like $10 on the year, I mean month. If 25 of those tell five of their friends, you'll have $125 on your third round. That's $25. And then all the way down to the 10th round. So you could literally collect around $24,000 or $40,000. All of this combined every single month around 3.5 to Bitcoin. Is it people out there collecting over $10,000 a month from CryptoTap? I believe so. Me personally, I have not collected that much money. I'm around the $25 mark. But you know, I just got started on it. Who knows? I'm gonna tell a couple more friends because it's completely free. But once they start charging to use this site, I'm going to reevaluate the site itself. But so far, it's free. So why not make free money? But until they start charging, that's the only downside. If they start charging, but right now that is free, you might as well use it. So yeah, guys, that's three ways that I'm collecting cryptocurrency, why the price is under $20,000 to have Coinbase, Binance, and I use CryptoTap browser. The last way is a free way. If you want to try that out, the link is down in the description. The first way is the easiest way. It's just an app on your phone. You just sign up, link your car, and buy crypto. And the second way is the way that you guys can sign up and buy tons of different types of cryptocurrency. Let me know which one is your favorite down in the description. And while you're down there, hit the thumbs up button. It really helps out this channel a lot. But other than that, I'm Zeke bringing you the Dream Green Show, and I'm out. Peace.


Hello and welcome to MIPS TV and with me always is Bob Cook, who is going to share a piece of literature, one of his famous book reviews. And we've got a very interesting book today. It's called A Game Free Life by Stephen Cartman. And that's a name that people will know for sure. Yeah, in T.A. Parlers, he's one of the elders of the T.A. community worldwide. And he was in, well he was right at the front of the Eric Byrne Revolution, Eric Byrne being the creator of Transaction Houses. And he spent five or six years and never missed a week when he went to the Eric Byrne Tuesday seminars. And he was a young man then, but he was Davouti Avogba. That's where he comes from. So for students, it's a really good book, this. Well, what's interesting is that you talk about Game Free Life. Games is part of the architecture of it. It's in the DNA, isn't it, of transactional analysis. Yeah, so Games is the colloquial name, if you like, for the compulsion to repeat. So the definition of Game in T.A. Parlers would be a maladaptive, repetitive series of behaviors that you've sort of repeated from childhood. Yeah. That you keep doing and keep doing in a repetitive manner, but it doesn't actually help you anymore. Like blaming other people. Yeah, you learned it in childhood, sort of got you by, but today it doesn't. No. Cartman talks about if you're free of games, you're able to love them. Yes. Yeah. I guess you'd taken a bit of responsibility for your life, aren't you? It's the most famous book that Eric Byrne ever wrote. I don't think it's the best book ever wrote, but certainly I think it's the book that took him to Stella Starden was about games in 1964. And so this is a bold claim by Cartman saying this is a sequel, really, to the games book in 1964. Yeah. Which is a really bold book. Those are big shoes to fill, really. That was a best-selling book for 20 years in what sales, wasn't it, Games People Play? Oh, yeah. Games People Play in 1964, written by Eric Byrne, where he looked at and analysed the behavioural patterns people played unconsciously, which kept their script going and kept the interaction between the two players going. So he helped really social workers, probation workers at the time, young therapists to look at these behavioural patterns between people, which actually weren't working, but kept an unhealthy script going. Yeah. Yeah. So it's an interesting book from a student's perspective, Bob. How do you think it's helpful as a student? Wow. It sort of reframes the idea of what Byrne came up with of putting these classifications of behavioural transactions, which interact between different players, into what Byrne called persecuted games, victim games and rescue games. And of course, where Cartman went a step further, he created what was called a drama triangle. And he was famous for this drama triangle. And the idea of rescuers, they took, you know, the thoughts even further, victims and game, sorry, persecutors, and he used this drama triangle to actually analyse the games. Eric Byrne never used a drama triangle. He didn't create the drama triangle. And of course, this book is all about triangles, you know, and how rescuers are over helpful, you know, persecuted or over fearful victims often stay young. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. He talked about how people pick at these, these people unconsciously to fit into their life script. So for example, people who are over helpful will look for people they can keep young to get strokes and to come from a one-up position really outside their awareness. So people pick their interlocking people on this diagram and then they move around it to confirm how they see the world. Yeah. So what Cartman does in this book is really outline what I've just said and the many persecuted games, the many victim games and the many rescue games. So he sort of goes over the literature away. It's a useful book to have, but what I found sort of critically evaluating book, this poster, this book if you like, is it goes over many, many of the games that Byrne went over and Cartman himself talked about earlier in 1974, for example. So it's repeating a lot of the earlier literature. What's new about this book is how to get off the game triangle and what he talks about how to get onto a compassion triangle. But he's still going from one triangle to another triangle. It's just a winner's triangle and one is a loser's triangle.  And part of that is, I guess, looking at that, that drama triangle and maybe replaced it with something a little bit more compassionate to self. Yeah. So you're thinking of, if you change victim to vulnerable, think of the rescue to responder. Think of persecutor more in the permission level. Yes. You start changing the words to a winner's triangle or a winner's cycle, if you like. I like that's what he, I like that idea of what he talks about. But he spends a lot of the book repeating, I think, what's been said before, and also really going through or inventing if you like, many, many more games and many, many more triangles. And my daughter is just taking the maths exam, a basic GC exam, because you had to take it again. And it's a bit like that. There's lots of equations and lots of A, B, C. And personally, I don't particularly find that stimulating, but I do like the idea that to have love and intimacy, you need to get off the negative game triangle. Yeah, yeah. Well, I guess that's a lesson for everybody. So the book's called A Game Free Life. It's by Stephen Cartman. We're going to put details downstairs. So you can click a link to the book and you can go and see it and look at it. Of course, Bob isn't this is a sponsored video. Bob does this because of his love of literature and share his knowledge. And we're very thankful of that. And as always, Bob, thank you very much. Thank you very much.


Andrew just with the home run what was going through your mind when you were rounding the bases. Get home as quick as we can quick as I could so I could celebrate with the boys in the dugout. But we saw the celebrations on TV we saw some family members that looked like they were emotional crying do you feel that emotion on the field or is this just hey you're doing your job. It would be crying. No just probably a different emotion but like exhilaration I think felt like all the other homers I've ever hit in my life didn't count. Brendan Cuddy go ahead. You hit the ball. Yeah yeah yeah Eddie tracked it down for me. Was it like a clean clean give up or did you have to sign a couple more. He said it was a clean give up said it was a military man so whoever it was thank you. Eric Bowlin go ahead. Andrew at any point have you had a couple of big hits against the Red Sykes talked about it being a dream come true doing what you did against them. I hit the first career home run in front of your family friends at Yankee Stadium. If you caused to ask yourself what could possibly be next. No I'm just trying to take it one day at a time I mean right now we're rolling so we just you know one pitch at a time even just trying to stay in the moment and where my feet are that way you know I don't get lost and everything else that's happening. Plus we're rolling right now which is awesome. Has it been difficult not to get lost in what's happening with you personally. I've been doing a good job of separating kind of like when I get here it's about you know work and the guys are so good at just prepping for the game and being loose in the clubhouse and in the dugout but like about business that I can't help but fall in line. And who's going to get the ball. I'm keeping that one. Yeah I'm gonna keep that. Thanks Andrew. Thanks. Next to Dave Lennon. Andrew this is a third different team that you played for and you've played a number of major league games before is it kind of I don't know what you call it. You know it's kind of a storybook thing that you managed to get the first home run here at home. Yeah some guy on that kept screaming at me that I should hit my first one like every about I got on deck he was screaming at me hit your first one down the line. So I went over three before that and then the final one I said let me you know let me take his approach because mine ain't working. Who was here from my family and friends with Andrew tonight. I saw a couple on the video that even though we're here in the in New York so that was pretty good. I think I had some aunts and mom and dad obviously my brother so my grandmother was here. And they've been at every game you've been home here. Yeah give or take but definitely had some family at every game. Thank you. Yeah. Take another from Brian Hope. Andrew do you remember anything about the last one run you hit. It's probably in 3 A. So that's boring. This one was better. Yeah this is the best one by far. Yeah. And we won. And we won. Yes.


Now, Dale, this next question is for you. It's from the U.S. Embassy in Lomay, Togo. And they want to know if an entrepreneur can use fintech without a background knowledge of computers. So I'm going to answer this question in two different ways. First of all, if you're an entrepreneur who wants to found a fintech company and you don't have a background in technology, I personally don't have a background in technology. It is all about the team. I am very good at marketing, PR, communications, and some of those kind of those softer skills. Actually, one of my best friends since I was at high school is the chief technology officer at my company. So really, as a team, you cannot build a company by yourself. No matter how much you'd like to think you might. Well, maybe some people can, I mean, I certainly couldn't. But it is really about the team. So it's about a part of your job as a founder of a company is to bring together the right team to build the right technology at the right time. So yes, I do think you can. And also, I think that there are opportunities if you don't really know how to use computers. There's a group of people who are, of course, kind of being left behind a little bit by this whole digital revolution in Fintech, which is older people, and a lot of them or people who are technologically not literate. And I think that there is a way to kind of work with those people in terms of I'm sure there's still some innovation that can go along, cash payments and things like that, or even helping those people kind of become part of the digital economy.


Ah, red wine. A man's best friend. I just got rid of one. Not wine. A fake friend. Fake former best friend. Okay, today's topic has nothing to do with him. Of course. I'm going to discuss somatic narcissists. In 1995 I coined the phrases somatic narcissists and cerebral narcissists to describe two types of narcissists. The somatic narcissists derives narcissistic supply from his looks and the way he uses his body. For example, sexual conquests. The cerebral narcissists derives narcissistic supply from intellectual pyrotechnics, from his intelligence, from the way he uses $10 words, rings a bell. Okay, Shoshanim. My name is Samvaknin and the author of Malignan Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. I am also, yes, a professor of psychology at several universities. Most notably, CIAPS, Center for International Advanced Professional Studies, the Outreach Program of the CIAPS Consortium of Universities. And today we are going to discuss somatic narcissists who pretend to be cerebral narcissists. The worst conceivable kind snakes in the grass. Clinically, a narcissist who pretends to be the wrong of the wrong type is a covert narcissist. So a somatic narcissist who pretends to be cerebral is clinically a covert narcissist. Covert, because his true nature is hidden. He is lying about who he is. Sometimes he is lying even to himself about who he is, a form of self-deception. But in most cases, he knows very well that he is deceiving people. Somatic narcissists who pretend to be cerebral are a serious threat, because they claim intelligence, wisdom, sagacity, knowledge that they don't have, that they don't have. They appear to have it, but they actually don't have it. In other words, they are called artists. Okay, let's delve right in. They are grotesque caricatures of masculinity, buff, deformed, veined, musculature, you know the type. They are like tightly packed meat packages. They have slicked gel oozing hair, ostentatious tattoos, and pants too tight so as to emphasize the crotch. This is a typical, not stereotypical, but typical picture of the kind of somatic narcissists that I'm talking about. The internet gave rise to a new breed of gurus, coaches, self-help advisors, and self-styled experts. These mostly men spend more time in the gym and in nightclubs than they ever spend in libraries and museums. Actually, I doubt that they ever frequent libraries and museums. Their natural habitats are gyms, where they spend hours a day honing their bodies into perfect weapons. They weaponize the bodies and they spend hours in the evening snorting coke or doing worse in nightclubs. These are covert somatic narcissists who often pose as empathic. They pretend to be co-dependent victims, saviors, healers. All this is intended bottom line to lure women to engage in sex and then cruelly dispatch them on their way sometimes in the middle of the night. But you could ask, all somatic narcissists needs is sexual conquest. Yes, but this particular type of somatic narcissists is envious of the intelligence and intellect of the cerebral narcissists. He wants to have it all. He wants to have a perfect body, sexual conquest, and to be considered a public intellectual. Sexual conquest are not enough for these delusional and venglorious megalomaniacs. These somatic narcissists also posture and pose as sages and visionaries.  Con artists, didn't I say? These people, these somatic covert narcissists wannabes cerebrals, they guess they get most of the information disastrously wrong because they don't have the tools to get it right. And if they don't have information, they just make it up as they go along as they self-importantly aspire to pretend that brain and brain are interchangeable, which they are not. These somatic covert narcissists have a dream. Their dream is to be cerebral. What they do, they often team up with intellectually superior cerebral narcissists and then they appropriate, they plagiarize, they steal the work of these intellectuals, of these intellects, of these intelligent cerebral narcissists. They simply steal it and they bask in the perloined glory or they attribute to themselves this work. That's what they do. They are like cuckoo, cuckoo birds. They stumble only when they are on their own, when they are not in the presence or together with the cerebral narcissists because when they are on their own, they are incapable of generating a single original idea. It's all about stealing other people's work. They are never creative. They are never original. They don't truly comprehend even the material that they have stolen. They just parrot. They just mimic. They just imitate. It's all mimicry. Some of these somatic cerebral narcissists are smooth talkers. Some of them disguise their essential vacuity and endless stream of nonsense effectively because they know how to put together resounding sound bites, verbiage, pronouncing words like dissociation wrongly and awash in malapropisms but still palatable to the layman's ear. Other somatic overt narcissists engage in displays of aggression or nosiating eroticism. They are creepy to the last. Most of them are psychopaths cloaking themselves in the mantle of saviors and healers. They are a serious danger to society and to everyone who crosses their path. It's about time we should expose them, point fingers at them. You've all seen them on YouTube. You've all seen that they're puffed up chests as they brainwash gullible and malleable people into submission as they form cults around themselves.


all right charlie is seven nine four wow seven nine four seven three one seven six granted I've one of them I've done the thing I am become death in a video game wow that's a new it's actually right there can we go watch it can we go this camp and watch it and then not like not die 145 hurry up wanna yeah we need your help man we need all the help we can get to kill this kill this queen anybody grezz everybody else if you want to come in and help please do we need oh it's automatic mother it's beautiful all right I got me a stick I only got 840 millimeters and I need some granadas I got some plasmas grenades kill the scorch Beach Queen's Beast Queen I see you I'm gonna tag it she comes back I tagged it I better get full credit or I'm suing three damage I'm going here coach well I'm going in here I come here I come oh you better hold that thought I got a baseball bat and I need a fear to use it where you going where you going get over here and fight like a man fight like a man get over here tagged it with life and death one damage two damage and three damage for why are you dropping for reason everybody three damage four damage five damage I was on I dare you to bring I dare you to come come get some of this get some of this I will use my boomstick guess they still for the boomstick though I miss with the boomstick chat don't tell nobody oh so you don't mess up not oh I'm tossing nada's I'm tossing all kinds of stuff oh you in trouble not yeah you see this I need my boomstick I need my boomstick hurry up get the boomstick oh yes doing one damage with the boomstick wait you see healing stay there don't move no he moved I'm about to die don't tell nobody don't tell nobody what just happened messing with Appalachia County really that's all you got it's a death claw kill it with life and death stuff a three-star laser pistol


And I have Matt Pryor here. We are from a company called StackHPC. And today, we're going to talk about what we do with compute platforms, platforms as a service, as opposed to infrastructure, particularly for the scientific computing use cases. I don't think anything we're going to cover is particularly specific to that domain, it's just the domain in which we work in. So we have been working together in our company on an open source project called Asimuth, which has been developed by a lab in the UK. And we have been working to further develop that system and make it into a very nice sort of self-service platform for various types of compute platform systems. We're going to talk about some of the particular use cases. And also a little bit about some of the really cool things in it that I think are quite distinctive and certainly worth a little bit of extra time on. And hopefully we'll have a little bit of time for questions at the end. So you probably won't have heard of our company unless you're in this domain in the niche that we work in. We're actually about 25 people based in the UK, Poland, and France. And the company was formed about six years ago in order to work in this space of public domain scientific cloud infrastructure. And I think we started out to do this and we've been doing it for six years. And I think it's been going very well so far. So everything we do pretty much is open source and in an open community. And Asimov is no different to that. So you might think, well, why would we do this? Why would we need to do this? Why would we want to think about doing this? And I guess part of the reason for that is this concept of dynamic high performance computing. So this is what some people call like sort of the next generation of high performance computing or just research computing in general. And the idea is that we start to use open stack infrastructure, software-defined infrastructure in order to compose compute platforms for the scientists and the end users that we serve, simply to give a little bit more flexibility in terms of the kind of platforms that we can offer. So conventionally, historically, providers of research computing services like universities and institutions generally tended to serve a fairly sort of fixed range of functions, such as batch queued environments or general sort of high performance computing runtime systems. And that's no longer true because of things like machine learning and the sort of explosion of life sciences and other faculties within research institutions who need completely different platforms. We have to or institutions have to provide this kind of flexibility. So you get this idea that upon our software-defined infrastructure, which is where things like OpenStack and Sef come in, we start to provide a rich ecosystem of science platforms and actual sort of software on top of those. And we have to be able to do that usually with the same people. So an HPC services group or a computing services group now gets stretched really far. So it might look something like this. And so we can see straight away that there is a lot of trouble coming in here because we have a huge explosion and sort of the breadth of environments that we might want to provide. We might need to provide a Kubernetes environment and a Slurm environment. And that's standard. People will often, people will always expect this actually within their OpenStack infrastructure when they're looking at cloud computing. So how do we provide all of these different environments on a single common infrastructure substrate without burning out the people in the team? And so this is where we have to bring in things like cloud native automation techniques. And this is the kind of system that Asimov provides for us. So I think in particular, we're going to be focusing on this piece. So Asimov is sort of limited to its jurisdiction is this red box here. And I'm going to hand over to Matt now to talk about some of the other motivations. Cool. Thanks, Stig. So yeah, so what we want to do is basically get researchers doing their science as quickly as we can. But the researchers, they're not, they're asking for different kinds of platforms than they used to now. They want to use the best platform for their workflow. But they don't want to be a CIS admin. They don't want to be a networking expert. They don't want to be waiting. But they also don't want to sacrifice the performance that comes with a specialized system. And as an operator, what we want to do is not incur a heavy support burden of having to manually deploy these systems every time. But we still want to keep our infrastructure up to date or at least help our users keep their own infrastructure up to date by making it easy. So we came to the conclusion that the ideal solution is kind of more opinionated than infrastructure as a service but less opinionated than platform as a service. So we want to be flexible and dynamic and be able to offer these platforms on demand. So I actually used to work for a facility called Jasmine before I worked for StackHPC. And they have an open stack community cloud where they've successfully established this pattern of on-demand platforms. And we've been building on this work. And so what Asimuth provides is a simple self-service portal that you give research. The idea is that you're able to give researchers direct access to this portal for them to manage their own cloud resources. And it has platforms as a first class citizen. But the available platforms are curated by the cloud operator. So the operator retains some control. And these platforms are optimized for HPC and AI use cases in the deployments that we have done so far. But like Stig said, there's nothing particularly HPC specific about the system. And access to these platforms is streamlined using an application proxy that we've developed called Zenith. And this allows us to expose services without consuming a whole load of floating IPs actually, so it is, which is quite often a limited resource in the clouds that we work on. We're currently targeting open stack clouds. We'd like to target other clouds in hybrid scenarios and things like that. And the developments that we've done as StackHPC have been funded by the Iris collaboration so far. And so like we've both said, the overall aim is to reduce the time to science and reduce the operational burden of onboarding and supporting users for the operator as well. And so I'm just going to walk through a few of the use cases that we've got. So the first use case is the one we like to call Big Laptop. So this is a researcher has some code they've developed on their laptop. They need access to a machine with specialist hardware. They just want to get to that machine really easily. So we've really stripped down the machine creation dialogue from Horizon literally just a name, an image, and a size. And then we've also added this option to enable a web console access, which isn't VNC. So what that does is they create some machine, eventually becomes available. You get access to this option in the dropdown. Note that there's no external or floating IP associated with any of this. And then you click on that link, eventually the web console becomes available. You'll notice it has a funky domain. This is a Zenith application proxy endpoint. And then from here, and Zenith will also handle things like TLS termination for us. So that's nice. And then eventually the user gets into their remote desktop. So this is a web desktop. They also can have access to a web console. And this is a machine that has their GPU or whatever it is that they wanted. So how did we do that? So there's nothing special about Asimuth. It's just an open stack client that authenticates with the credentials that the user gives it. We provision machines with some extra metadata.  And one of those is start up a guacamole web console and then register the machine with Zenith. And by the time it's done all that, the user gets to access their machine through the web browser without consuming a floating IP using the application proxy. The next use case we've targeted is the sort of dedicated slurm cluster. So an example of a use case we might see here is maybe the site does have a big HPC, but the queue times are long or they need some specialist packages or their work is real time and they don't want to wait in a queue. But they do want a batch cluster to execute an MPI code or something. But they have a cloud allocation that they want to be able to make use of. So we have this system, which we call cluster as a service. Slurm is the only appliance that we, as StackHPC, maintain at the moment. But it's actually just ansible playbooks in Terraform. So it can support different cluster types. We only have slurm at the moment. And then once they've selected their cluster type, they get to set some options and then click Create Cluster, goes away, makes the cluster, makes a bunch of machines. And then eventually the cluster becomes ready. You get access to the cluster details dialogue. It tells you how to access the cluster via SSH. If that's what you want to do, there's also some services that we have on the slurm clusters that are exposed again using Xenif. So this is open on demand. For people who've seen that before, it's an interactive web interface for managing slurm jobs. And we also present some cluster monitoring so people can see what resources their jobs are using. So yeah, again, how did we do that? So we're using ansible, a bunch of open source technologies plugged together with a little bit of code, basically. So we're using ansible driven by AWX, which is the open source version of Tower. We're using Terraform with the state-stored in console. Our slurm distribution is open HPC. We're using open on demand. And then the metrics are done using Prometheus and Grafana and Elasticsearch as well, actually, which isn't on this slide. So the way it works is Asimov makes inventories and jobs in AWX. That invokes an ansible playbook, which invokes Terraform, which deploys the infrastructure. It's then adopted into the ansible inventory, and then we configure it as a slurm cluster. And like I said, the user can either access this via SSH, or they can use on demand via our open on demand via the Xenif application proxy. And then the third case we've kind of targeted is applications on Kubernetes. So the big one for us so far has been Jupyter Hub. And that's what everyone wants now. And so we wanted to make provisioning Kubernetes clusters easy. So the example use case here is a project wants to use Jupyter Notebooks for their data visualization. They've got a cloud quota. They want to provision a Jupyter Hub. Maybe they want to use Dask. Maybe they want to mount some specialized storage, those kind of things. And so we've really, we've present a simplified dialogue here. There's a concept of a template. And the template is what defines the cluster version, the Kubernetes version, but it also can define other specialist things about the cluster. So for example, if you want SRIOV networking, that would be part of your template. And these templates are defined by the operator. So you can do things like tag. Say you wanted an SRIOV network to be attached. You can tag a network in the project as providing SRIOV. And your template can say, use the network that's tagged for SRIOV for this cluster. And so we can do things, we can do high performance networking in these clusters without the user really having to worry about it, which is nice. So you can have one or more node groups. The node groups can be auto-scaling.  There's some add-ons as well. Sorry. This, the point is, okay, there we go. So you click Create Cluster, it goes away, makes the cluster.  They all have funky names. And then eventually the cluster becomes ready. You can easily get hold of the kube config, copy it to the clipboard, download it, whatever you want to do. One thing to note here, actually, is the API endpoint is actually also a Zenf endpoint here. So we're not needing to consume a floating IP, even for the API server, to do this. And then in the cluster details page, you get, obviously, a bunch of information about the state of the cluster.  You can probably see a pattern forming here. And so these services are things like the Kubernetes dashboard, Grafana monitoring. And then that was Grafana in between. This isn't very responsive anymore. So yeah, that's the Grafana monitoring. And then the third thing which we're making available is the kubabs application dashboard. So this comes from the Tanzu project. And what this is, is basically a user interface around Helm charts. So we can present a bunch of Helm charts to our users. We have a repository of Helm charts that we include by default, which have Zenf support integrated into them. And so the user can pick a Helm chart, and they can configure it using a nice little form. Metadata goes with the Helm chart that defines what the form looks like. And then they can click deploy. And it goes away, and it deploys the thing. And then eventually you get, again, another Zenf endpoint.  The nice thing here, actually, is Zenf will also pass the open stack username of the authenticated user in the remote user header. And so we've configured Jupyter Hub to understand the remote user header. And so each open stack user actually gets authenticated as themselves when they get to Jupyter Hub, since they get a separate notebook server, which is nice. So this is just demonstrating that it mounted our luster file system that we had. And then this is like a noddy expensive computation that I was using just to demonstrate autoscaling. There is a video here. I don't know if we've got how much time have we got. Enough. Can you press play on it then? Thank you. So this is just DASC. So it starts off with one worker. And then we should see the autoscaler push the cluster out by spawning new machines. And then eventually those machines become ready. And then the Kubler has to start up on them. And they have to be registered with open stack. But they have to have the initialization done by the open stack cloud provider. But they then become available as additional workers for DASC. And you can see just the computation just speeds up. And then once the computation is over, the autoscaler is smart enough to understand that it can scale those nodes back down again after a configurable timeout. But by default, it's something like 10 minutes. Oh, we've done that. So again, how did we do that? So we're not using Magnum actually to do Kubernetes. We're using a project called Cluster API, which is like Kubernetes clusters inside Kubernetes clusters. And so what you do is you provision, you create Kubernetes resources inside a management cluster which define your workload clusters. And it uses all the standard tooling from the Kubernetes ecosystem, which is not something that Magnum does at the moment. So things like Kube ADM is used to deploy the cluster. And the other thing it does is uses an immutable infrastructure approach for upgrades. So upgrades are done by deleting nodes and replacing them with a new node one by one in a rolling process. And so by default, we have monitoring and logging with Prometheus Grafana. We're using Loki for log collection. And there's a Grafana dashboard that shows the Loki logs for pods. We're using, like I said, the Kube application dashboard, which comes from Tanzu, and all these dashboards are available via Zenif. And like I said, we have support for GPUs, high-performance networking and things like that. These are kind of use cases that this can facilitate transparently to the user as well. So the key to a lot of the ease of use with this is Zenif, which is this application proxy that we've developed. There's only one slide on here. I keep promising this blog post, which I should definitely write. But what Zenif is, is a tunneling HTTPS proxy. And what it does is allow us to expose services that are behind a NAT or a firewall without consuming floating IPs. And the exposed services only need to be bound to local host. In fact, in some cases, we can do better than that and only bind them inside a pod, for example, for the Kubernetes services. And it performs TLS termination for the proxy services. It also provides authentication and project-level authorization for the proxy services as well. And this is all built using industry standard tooling with a small bit of glue code. It's just SSH port forwarding. Basically, we've got a locked-down SSHD server that only allows these tunnels to be established. And it runs inside Kubernetes, makes heavy use of the Ingress, the Nginx Ingress controller, and we use console to do some of the service discovery. But there will be a blog post about this soon. So just summary and future plans, just a few things about where we're going with this. So we hope that this is demonstrating that we're trying to lower the barrier to get for researchers to get their science done. And we've got this deployed in a few places where we're working with the research teams there to make sure that we're supporting their use cases effectively. One of the main plans that we have is to have a first-class representation of the applications directly in Asimuth. So the piece that we're using Kube apps for, we used Kube apps because it got us where we wanted to go quickly, but we're kind of realizing that it doesn't quite fit with all of the use cases that we need. So by having a first-class representation of apps in Asimuth, we can do things like integrate intelligently with data sets and storage systems, which is one thing that our users want. And so they'll be able to do things like say, I want a Jupyter Hub that has these two data sets available as mounts inside my pods, for example. That's the kind of thing that we're looking to target to do. We want to be able to do the same seamless integration of the accelerated hardware that we do in Kubernetes with the Slurm clusters, which we can't quite do at the moment. And so we're talking about GPUs and SRIV and RDMA, those kind of things. There's a bit of operational hardening of the platform itself that needs doing, so disaster recovery, monitoring, all the boring stuff. But the stuff which is critical, if you're running it in production, right? And then we, like I said before, we have an ambition to do some hybrid and public cloud stuff, and there's loads and loads and loads more ideas, but these are the main ones. And then just to say, come join us. It's all open source software. Those are our repositories. We'd love to collaborate if you have access to or are an operator of an OpenStack cloud, and this looks interesting to you, let us know. We're happy to chat.  There's our website. If you come see us, we can give you more details. Just to recap on a couple of things there. The user experience, they log into their platforms through a web portal. They authenticate once to a university's ID provider or an OpenID connect source. And then from that single point of interface, they can access all of their compute resources, which are otherwise not exposed to any public IPs by default. For the operators, they get to avoid having an industry of tickets around creating new compute platforms for user requests. The self-service is defined by a series of Ansible repositories that are used to deploy the clusters that are provided as an application catalog to the users. And perhaps from the security officer's point of view, there is only one point of ingress into the system, which is through the Zenith application proxy via azimuth as well. So we think it brings a lot of useful features to a system and from our experience, this level of self-service and yet with a steady hand over it from the admin's point of view in terms of prompting for maintenance and enabling the users to keep their deployments up to date, but more importantly out of the public internet. These are all quite strong points that we think in favour of the way that this thing is working. Cool. So I think that's all we wanted to say. So I hope we've got a bit of time for some questions if anyone's got any questions. Mr Heikinen. Yeah. Okay, so I think I'm paraphrasing a bit, but the question I think was basically how easy is it to add another cluster type if you've got pre-existing Ansible playbooks for deploying a system? Is that? Yeah. So the way this works is basically the Ansible playbooks live in one or more Git repositories. These get added as projects in AWX and then the individual playbooks get added as project templates and then Asimov is able to query the available cluster templates using the AWX API, but you can add as many of those templates as you like. There are some small constraints on how the playbooks operate because they also have to be able to interact with... There's a layer that has to be able to interact with Terraform to provision the infrastructure, which we've written, but you have to basically expect your Terraform outputs from that stage have to have a particular shape for the code that we've written to be able to adopt them into the Ansible inventory and then from then on it can be any Ansible that you like. Yeah. There's a minimal set of assumptions about inputs and outputs. There's also the metadata for the form. When a user wants to create a cluster, something has to provide the list of questions and parameters for that form, but otherwise, yes, it's intended to be extensible. Yeah, so the bit Stig was talking about there is... It's probably easier to find it on here, actually. Go for it. So this form here... This form is customizable on a per cluster type basis, and the way this form is... The way the content of this form is defined is using a YAML file that lives in the same Git repository as the playbook. So, yep. So the question there was, are we planning to do first class support for bare metal for the batch clusters? And we could equally do it for Kubernetes as well. Yeah, the answer is yes. I mean, really the integrations between the sort of platform services that Asimuth provides and the infrastructure beneath it, whether the nodes of bare metal or not are sort of wrapped up inside the infrastructure anyway. So there isn't any special consideration that I'm aware of other than, you know, it takes a little while longer to make them for bare metal nodes in these systems. So the idea there is that if you selected a bare metal flavor for your workers, you would get bare metal hosts. Yeah, so... Yeah, cool. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you.