Hey guys, I thought I'd show you something working on this 96 90s 90 civic as you can see Honda civic And I'm doing a bunch of other stuff along with an engine oil change, and I thought you may Get a kick out of this one. So we are currently underneath the engine and The filter the oil filter specifically the location of it. It's well, it's between the engine and the firewall and You might not be able to see that on the video, but It is slightly out the position of it is slightly Pointing up so you can see the level of the you know the engine So it's something like this say maybe five degrees maybe eight degrees something like that right it sits like that And this is the actual filter that I just took off now. I did just drain some some oil If I were to measure it, I'm guessing half a quart came out. Okay just now and You know you undo the filter and it should some oil should spill out right well not in this case as you can see It is kind of dry inside it spun out right and I carefully Without spilling any oil. I carefully Took it down, but now if I point it down Nothing is coming out. I mean literally not this thing is bone dry inside Okay Yeah, I've never seen that before let's see yep, I Mean they're obviously didn't even there is a little bit, you know a few drops in there. There we go But nothing is coming out coming out. I actually never seen that before you know, I I don't know how many oil changes I've done over the years, but you know plenty times Little bit oil came out. I remember I did a an oldsmobile with the 3.0 I think engine Or is it 3.3? I can't remember whatever it was like from the 90s also a while ago and literally no oil came out I mean I could put it, you know half a cup of oil came out and the engine The engine was fine.  Check her oil guys check your oil


So let me turn now to Haimini and I mean you had long long experience in international economic relations But also particularly in trade and then it'd be good to get your take on this In order to talk about the new international economy order, I think we need to identify the challenges we are currently facing In this sense, I'd like to highlight two most significant challenges, focus on trade First is the breakdown of international cooperation system at the same time the collapse of the rule-based trading system Edward Luce, Financial Times columnist, recently said that the rule of world trade is the rule of jungle I think he's quite right because the existing W-2 rules are no longer respected and new rules cannot be produced With the declaration of Janet Allen, U.S. Treasury Secretary in April last year that U.S. would pursue secure trade with friend showing The WTO's fundamental principle of MFN is that And as you know, the WTO's dispute settlement mechanism continued to remain paralyzed with the non-functioning of its appellate body More seriously, new international rules cannot be agreed upon even though we need new rules on digital and climate change Because the global cooperation system is broken down due to the intensifying U.S.-China conflict and Russia's invasion of Ukraine G-20 summit of last year and this year clearly demonstrated that the G-20 has lost its role as a world crisis management committee With the breakdown of global cooperation mechanism The G-20, in addition to stabilizing the world economy after the 2008 financial crisis, was very instrumental I noticed that I witnessed it as G-20 chef of Korea in concluding the Paris Climate Change Agreement in 2015 at COP21 And its early entry into force in 2016 However, in view of the current international political situation, it would be very unlikely that G-20 can do anything meaningful Regarding global issues such as climate, digital, health, energy or food crisis Because of the impossibility of producing a consensus on global issues, we can see the listen trend of fragmentation Of the international rules on climate change and digital economy in particular In fact, it would be more appropriate to say that European Union is monopolizing the legislation on those issues Through GDPR, EU taxonomy, carbon border adjustment mechanism, digital service act, digital market act Those EU rules are to be applied beyond the European Union The good example is X, the former Twitter, can be subject to EU sanctions because of its misinformation and harmful content Based on EU digital service act and EU's listen decision to ban misleading carbon neutral claims will be applied to Apple Watches as well With the launch of Indo-Pacific economic framework, the United States is also trying to make new international rules But it is not so certain because there are too many different economies participation in these discussions And the issues are so difficult to be resolved Moreover, the recently published draft text of PILA II supply chain, I think is the most important PILA of the IPF Is very disappointing and far from establishing binding rules And we can see the proliferation of national security exception invocation by major economies and increasing export control based on these national security exceptions Since the government cannot produce the rules, we can see more active rules played by the private sectors and NGOs Lineable 100 is initiated by NGO, an international sustainable standard boat, not the government is producing a global standard for ESG disclosure of the companies Second challenge is the strengthened government intervention in the economy De-globalization since the financial crisis of 2008 and COVID-19 have significantly strengthened government regulations And climate change and digitalization of global economy requires stronger government intervention as we need new rules on these issues The direct impact of the strengthened government intervention is increased subsidies by the major economies to the detriment of the middle power countries The US, European Union, Japan are currently trying to offer subsidies to their own industries, most notably in semiconductors and electric battery in order to combat China state capitalism I think the problem of the subsidy is distilled trade and industry because government decisions not market forces determine competitive outcomes Thereby substantially reducing efficiency. We can see the invisible hand of the market is giving way to the visible hand of the state I stop here and come back later about how to properly address these challenges. Thank you Thank you very much, Hymen. We'll come back to that because you could have a parallel conversation where people would say, look, we have to achieve a set of goals Whether they're security, whether they're climate change or global public goods and we have to use a set of instruments that we have, policy instruments Some of them are subsidies, we talk a bit with Pierre Koms next and if you think the European version is a bit less subsidies and a bit more regulation And if this has a consequence in terms of influencing the pattern of trade flows, that's a price once you just have to pay And I think the question that we'll have to pose is how does one address that trade-off because we're no longer going to be in a world in my view where we can only sit on one end or the other of the spectrum And the danger in some ways is that there are two parallel conversations going on What about what we frame as a liberal economic order and what about a whole set of new issues that are on the table that people want to address at the national and international level But I'm not sure that those conversations are coming together enough and it would be interesting to get your view on the role of middle powers in advancing that


We have about a half an hour for questions and we'll go straight to those. I think what I'll do is I'll try to take four or five questions and then let the panel respond and then we'll do that again until either we run out of time or the process exhausts itself. So breaking with tradition we'll start with the right hand side of the room and does anybody want to pose a question to the group here? Hi, James Thullo from UNU Wider. I was just thinking about your indicators that you're using, Joshua. The indicators you were using and of course some of your governance indicators are about a willingness to respond and so on and you do have some indicators about distance to nearest clinic or something like that but I was thinking about remoteness and whether or not the higher resolution road data might be one way of showing a potential speed of response. To a particular crisis. Tony Allison from UNU Wider. Very interesting presentation. On the first part on the relationship between climate and environment and conflict there's sort of two questions here really. I think we're moving to sort of policy prescription whereby if you can overlay where the projects are and the investments across the maps and then you can overlay the information about conflict and climate change, vulnerability and so forth. You've got quite a powerful tool to guide policy makers. I can see the value in that. There is of course the substantive issue about well if the rate of return on any projects in those areas is going to be pretty low and actually may decline with climate change itself whether as a sort of national strategy it's worth doing it as against alternative uses of those funds. So it would be useful to have your comment on that. The other thing that I think is a little bit, it's not problematic but something to think about is really what's the sort of theory of conflict in this because and this affects your degree to get predictions from this which is obviously extremely useful particularly from a UN perspective. If we look at the Horn of Africa we know that conflicts over land and water and other environmental resources goes pretty deep back into history. But then the conflicts that we saw over 50, 60 years in the Horn of Africa which is a particularly conflict prone area down to the failed or imperfect transition from colonialism. The Cold War where the United States and the Soviet Union went back and forth in their support for their different countries. Somalia is a sort of disaster in that way. The regional dynamics of conflict between the countries Eritrea versus Ethiopia. All of this could of course feed into, there's a terrible path dependence with this stuff. Feed into conflicts in the future including any climate related conflict or one that's initiated by climate change. But I'll be interested in your observations about how we bring in these other historical, political, socio-economic dimensions into this is a kind of predictable or planning tool. Thank you. I think the issue of governance is the major problem especially in sub-Saharan Africa in particular in the Horn. For instance if you take the case of land grabbing problem which is the emerging threat in this area especially in Ethiopia and other parts of Africa which is affecting heavily the woodland and the forest resources and in the meantime contributing for the emission of huge amount of carbon because of this land use conversion for monocrop and other type of non-perennial crops. So what is your reflection on this land grabbing problem? Because I haven't heard about that because it's critical in African context. That is one problem and the other is concerning to regional instability management of the watershed areas for instance in the case of Nile basin area where more than nine countries are stakeholder in that area and now for instance Ethiopia is planning to construct huge dam for hydro power and other purpose but some of the Nile basin countries are objecting this idea because they think that the water volume may decline and that will affect the overall economy and other activities of this country then how you will see the management of natural resource in the view of maintaining stability in this area. Thank you. One more from any side? Here we go. My name is Gahiso. I'm from the University of Botswana in Southern Africa. My question is for Josh. Please could you define what you mean by politically discriminated groups because there were some countries that came up that I was not even aware that this was a problem in and could you tell us where the data came from? Let's do Adam and then we'll... Adam is right. There we go. And then we'll move on. Then we'll let them respond otherwise we'll all forget what the questions were. Adam Schlosser from MIT. First thank you all for really interesting thought provoking presentations. My question is probably an extension of the question from the gentleman over there from wider which is you showed a lot of compelling maps on the spatial variability and in the climate community when we think about prediction we also have to think about temporal variability, time scales of variability and particular persistence. And I'm just wondering do you have a sense from these metrics? What are the fundamental or representative time scales of these? I mean I know we're thinking about this as an abstraction and you have one indices so it's really hard to get traction on it but in terms of trying to think of something as a prediction and as a result of some of one of your controlling factors there's something coming out of the noise when we think about climate change impacts. We really do have to think about things like time scales and the extent of that variability in time so I'm just wondering if you have a sense on that. Let me just summarize so we had a question on roads and road data. Tony speaking about projects investments, those overlays and the issues associated with that. I'll summarize by saying a theory of conflict in a two-part question there. Issues of governance was brought up in the back and then one that I find particularly fascinating that the Nile River Basin Initiative and the hydropower issues in that region. Something just on politically discriminated groups and then Adam on persistence. So I'll just let the panel work this out. Let me take first crack and I might say something about all of them and then see if my colleagues want to weigh in as well. Since the road data our initial effort tried to incorporate that data and this was something that came up in one of the panels yesterday that's used some of the road data from other sources. We had a data set on roads that we thought might give us some traction except that category one road in the DRC might be a dirt path whereas same category road in South Africa would be a 10-lane highway and then a cat two road was actually like a multi-lane paved road in South Africa but if we wanted to just look at comparable categories it was sort of apples and oranges so our map would make it look like if we just mapped all the cat one roads it made it look like the DRC had much better access to do service delivery in times of emergency than it actually possessed. And so we kind of thought we can't use this and so we were kind of waiting until someone came along with better data but we're sort of aware of that we just haven't found traction and there's some other things to get at local capacity maybe lights at night is another you know but then obviously in the midst of an emergency you might imagine a lot of things shut down so we're trying to figure out you know we tried to map airports and again some similar problems so that sort of dropped out but we can imagine that those are important. On rates of return this issue you know I'm a little agnostic I kind of basically said you know you can't you have trouble imagining service delivery and like the absorptive capacity of countries that are unable to receive these resources is a kind of a similar phenomenon so you might imagine that there's a kind of triaging that would take place like well let's invest in the places that we know will spend it well but these are the actually we know that the problem areas are over here but we know we can actually spend the money over there so we're going to spend the money in Kenya and Tanzania because even if they don't have the bulk of the problems we can imagine that the resources are going to be mobilized more effectively and I think that's going to be a perennial dilemma you know in some places and maybe these aren't those ones but you can imagine in low lying countries in Asia there are going to be some fundamental choices about do we need to move populations that some of the island countries are facing at the moment and so that's a similar trade-off like do we invest in this physical space or do we think about investing in these people wherever they live and I don't have a good answer for that but I think those are fundamental challenges now this related question about the theory of conflict you know some of our colleagues work on that quite actively and this field has you know these notions that have been popularized that there are going to be water wars and you know that any changes in precipitation are inexorably going to lead to war we have some anecdotal evidence but most of the econometric work in this space actually suggests that there have been few to no water wars that these are problems that are often resolved peacefully and there's more evidence of you know times in which there's more precipitation or actually ones that are more conflict prone because there's more to fight over and then in drought times people are kind of hunkering down in survival mode so you know we have a slightly different emphasis in our maps because we're interested in places where a large number of people could be exposed to mass death and so that gets at large scale humanitarian tragedies that may divert militaries from doing other things to focus on humanitarian assistance whether they're domestic or international militaries and so it's a slightly different theory about where the security consequences come from but we're sort of agnostic about you know that may or may not develop and turn into conflict I think it suggests a different way security communities ought to conceptualize this problem and not over dramatize the extent to which physical scarcity is inexorably going to lead to violent conflict we haven't really done much on this land grabbing governance issue we're aware of it and I just don't know how it intersects with what's going on here I just know that in you know we have to be aware that in particular circumstances there'll be the kinds of problems that we've illustrated and then that may take some of the adaptive capacity off the table if governments have somehow seeded their land to some foreign investor to grow some product for export and so I think it could feed into some tensions particularly at the political level as governments respond to domestic political pressure to oust maybe some of these foreign investors that we've seen in a number of countries but I don't know exactly how to come to terms with that in a spatial geographic sense other than maybe if someone had maps of where the land grabs are happening be happy to overlay them and that could provide another area where we think of contiguous areas of land grabbing nearby in which there's a concentration of vulnerability we might imagine that those populations are going to respond if the good areas that are being grabbed for expropriation for investors are off limits for adaptation purposes let me quickly on the managing water resources I think some of the class that I led a couple of years ago did a kind of basin specific analysis of vulnerability because you know if we just look at a country context or do a wider geographic lens it might not bring into relief the kinds of river basin specific ways of looking at these optics and I think the deeper dives that we can do with our work or people can do with our work to look at how river basins can be managed for adaptation purposes because one of the strongest findings of this literature on conflict and security is that river basin cooperative initiatives are one of the best ways to avoid the scarcity related episodes turning into conflict so I think that's really important quickly on this politically discriminated it's the GOEPR data set it's the ethnic political relations data set it's available on a Harvard website anybody emails me and I can send you the details and they basically look at whether or not a particular ethnic group in a particular location is represented in government and whether or not the government has actually targeted them to kind of withhold services from them but since it's not something that we collected ourselves I might be mangling how they classify it but they also have other categories like politically irrelevant groups or politically there's another category where they're not actively discriminated against they're just ignored and we map those two dimensions as well to get at groups that might not be actively targeted by the government but they just might not have representation in the government and might not actually get services in the time of need and I won't say anything about temporal time scales because I've gone on a long time as it is so I'm going to turn it over to my colleagues to answer any or all of these comments I just wanted to pick up a little bit on the theory of conflict and to jump ahead a little bit there was a great paper in the Journal of Peace Research special edition in January that did a similar vulnerability analysis but at the river basin scale and the authors, the names of the authors escaped me at the moment but if you're particularly interested in river basins then you might check that out that same special issue of JPR did a lot of work on this theory of conflict on how do we link climate changes to conflict and as Josh pointed out there's not a lot of evidence of water wars and pastoralist conflicts get a lot of attention and I've done a little bit of work on that along with some of our other colleagues and idiosyncratically we know that it happens we know that there are instances of these type of pastoral conflicts are happening or pastoralist versus agriculturalist conflicts happening it's very difficult to find statistical evidence that changes in rainfall or climatic changes are a driver of that so I think that there are other causal mechanisms behind it and one that I believe that I've done a little bit work on is food prices and this is where I focus more on strikes and riots on SCAD the social conflict in Africa data set that was developed by Idean Salan and Cullen Hendricks our colleagues versus the armed conflict people shooting each other but we know that these types of strikes and riots can explode into larger scale political conflicts which may be sometimes good in fact but that aside I've recently found evidence that dry times lead to increases in food prices which lead to social conflict I don't find although and periods of abundance, rainfall abundance lead to a decrease in food prices but they still lead to social conflict so that's not the causal mechanism there that's worked there now like I said scarcity, high prices, conflict somehow somehow rainfall abundance is leading to social conflict through a different mechanism that we're still struggling to figure out now I don't know if it's floods a competition of a resource available resources like perhaps what we saw in Pakistan a couple of years ago I don't know but we're still struggling with that the names of the authors on that paper are, where are they DeStefano, Duncan DeStefano at all I'm just going to comment briefly on the land grabbing question because I think this is an issue that becomes really important when we're thinking about mainstreaming climate change policies or mainstreaming disaster risk management policies so if we just take the example of Mozambique this is a place where I heard, I had people telling me yes the government is very focused on disaster risk management we have this organization, this is what they do they organize everything, they deal with all the NGOs very organized at least centrally if not in remote parts of the country at the same time I have people telling me about all kinds of new natural resources that are being discovered contracts over those, the role of the government actors in their interests in these contracts and there are obvious risks associated with investment in exploration of natural resources and risks for new natural hazards and effects of climate change down the line so I think these are issues that absolutely have to be taken into consideration when we think about whether or not a country is really comprehensively dealing with climate change or dealing with disaster risk management and it's not simply enough to say that yes there is a policy in place to deal with this particular issue it really is about incorporating that into policies across the board within a country and that's the kind of attitude that I think is being promoted but it's not necessarily being adopted explicitly on the ground to deal with these issues I wanted to say something about time scale since you asked that question so we have our sort of chronic maps that we anticipate in the future might be the places that are vulnerable based on historic vulnerability now we have these 2050 projections of future physical exposure how do we make those kinds of different stories sync up with each other one of the things that we're trying to do with our climate modeling colleagues is they have simulations of present day we have 2050 predictive scenarios can we see about the pathways of what are the intermediate steps of physical exposure that we're likely to see by 2030 or 2020 one of the problems is that climate scientists have until recently been low to do these kinds of 2050 scenarios let alone 2020 ones it took a lot of work for us to convince them that the policy community needs shorter term scenarios and trajectories than 2080 and 2100 which is typical among climate scientists so we got them to 2050 but it's harder to move closer in so our expectations for particular places are in the future between now and the lifetime of concern for the policy making community that has pretty short term time in the horizon but being able to say with any precision about how soon those consequences are likely to manifest themselves is not really something that we're able to say other than you should focus your attention there and the problems are likely to manifest sometime in the horizon that you care about which is you know 10 to 20 years let's take three pointed questions from the left hand side Felix thank you very much that was a good presentation my major challenge is the generalization of what is happening in Africa it was good that you picked data by the sub regions and my question is if you had analyzed this what you did by the sub regions I don't think you might get that conclusions that are coming out because I mean a similar example of the generalization is the example you just gave your last response that when the dry season food prices goes up and leads to conflict the countries in Africa has different ecological zones and different resources and arrangements for off season activities so when such a generalization comes it becomes there are some hotspots you might you can conclude that but there are very few places that you can make that conclusion but my question is if you had done this analysis especially for the last presentation on a regional basis would some of these conclusions be the same next Tony has one over here if there's not one more on the left okay do you have one more go ahead Tony just coming back to this point about the causes of conflict because the conflict schools have thought about conflict falling to two explanations one is that it's really complex you've got to be deeply historical etc etc the other is that we can just cut out all that and we can look for economic growth or lack of it as a source of conflict inequality as a source of conflict we now have climate change as a source of conflict food prices as a source of conflict so you just pick the kind of one that's kind of deeply attractive because you know then we don't have to kind of explore the whole complexity of the societies but we also know it's actually quite dangerous in a prescriptive sense because not only can foreign policy departments but also militaries international organizations read the wrong conclusions from all of that so you know I just sort of I'm attracted to your to your approach because as an economist I'm looking for the simplest explanations possible but on the other hand the my understanding of some of these conflicts particularly in the countries that you're pursuing is that they are deeply historical and very context specific if I was going to make a question but I'd actually talked to you over coffee about this it would be whether your model would actually explain what happened in New Orleans and whenever it was when that big flood disaster occurred because you know there is a rich society which didn't cope at all well and you know can we actually predict these kinds of things for African societies in the way that you conceptualize it but maybe over coffee Thank you very much. Finta from you and your wider. Mine is a little bit more of a comment or a couple of suggestions and a very pointed question but somebody who was basically the person who started the disaster risk management system in Mozambique this is obviously extremely interesting in the late 70s and I would also say that as somebody who sort of tried to grapple with predicting some of the crisis in Burundi and Rwanda based on FAO land scarcity data and so on this is of course incredibly interesting because this adds a whole slew of dimensions to these things which are absolutely fascinating my sort of maybe suggestion is that implicit in quite a bit of what you were talking about both when it came to the sort of aid allocation but also when you were talking about the model there are some links to the literature on foreign aid which I'm not sure maybe you are maybe you're not aware of it but there are some very strong links to part of the core discussions about foreign aid effectiveness and so on which I would suggest that we might want to just discuss a little bit more in depth one example is that you have very influential literature on aid effectiveness suggesting where returns might be high but which are then emerging out of the World Bank and so on but which are then subsequently shown not to stand up and it touches on exactly this issue of rate of return are you having the highest rates of return in bad conditions or in good conditions potentially you can have them high rate of returns in pretty bad conditions because if capital is scarce and you put capital into there is actually literature on these things which I think it could be quite fascinating we're trying to link up with what you were doing and on the moral hazard question let me just say that this is a I mean it's an absolutely first class example of trying to dig into something that the aid literature is suffering terribly from we are suffering terribly from the fact that theoretical hypothesis become accepted as empirically validated before they have actually been empirically validated and I would just really strongly encourage you to push this as much as you can because this can help change that literature in a strong direction I was a little bit sort of pondering and I'll finish now on the one hand Joshua spoke about all the data and taught as well and then Jennifer was kind of talking about a question of quantitative data and I was sort of wondering whether I might want to elaborate just a little bit but that was... and then finally and this is just to make a point which I hope you won't take as defensive UNU wider is not subject to political pressures in our research just absolutely not we get zero dollars from the UN thanks so please go ahead and a lot of discussion in the questions but some quick answers here so first I thank you very much for the question about the rainfall season and I need to clarify a couple of points one I did not mean to suggest that UN University was in any way had was political beholding to anybody especially since we were funded by the defense department people would make the same assumption who wants to talk but a few weeks ago we Professor Robert Wilson and I were in Nairobi visiting with UN Habitat and they are funded directly by countries and they do have political constraints on what they can and can't say so I think that let me be clear that that didn't mean UNU I meant other UN organizations on the the also I need to clarify that this is a danger about trying to summarize a completely different paper that I was working on in about 30 seconds I didn't mean to suggest that prices go up during dry seasons because they don't the rainfall measure that I was using in that paper was a difference from long-term mean so in individual countries so when a country whether it's the dry season or the wet season gets less rainfall than they expect based on long-term long-term patterns that's when prices go up prices go down it's a you're absolutely right that countries are adapted to various conditions and I tried to deal with that in the paper but that is something that we definitely need to be more nuanced about and I think that these maps are just one tool and maps are a very powerful tool and they can get people to sit down around coffee or around a conference table and talk about these things but they're also a static picture and it is important to bring in historical perspectives cultural perspectives and other tools that other people have talked about here so we also don't mean to suggest that these maps are that end all be all and just point to the place on the map where it is read and put a project there that's not good either I'm going to take chairs prerogative and call an end to this session thank you very much speakers


Recently I feel like I've just been feeling very like energetically stuck. I don't know how to describe it but for some reason like something is restricting me from like accessing a higher version of myself like I almost feel like Unchanging my life needs to happen because right now like I'm just kind of like this like I had so much change happen to me and right now I'm just kind of going like this and honestly I think I know what that change has to do with and I think I know what I should be doing It's gonna be very emotional. I'm really gonna try not to cry. So at the beginning of last year in January 2021 That's when I really had my you can call it a spiritual awakening. You can call it a life awakening You I don't know what you can call it anything you want to call it But that's what I just really realized that like I want to really follow my passions and my dreams and make it my Career so that I can enjoy the rest of my life and literally just follow my dreams So my boyfriend Joel also have this kind of spiritual awakening At the time and we kind of went through it together where we're like, you know what like what's the purpose to our lives? What are we doing and we were really just like looking deeper into ourselves and looking deep into the meaning of life And just like navigating that at that point last year I was not in school if I'd already quit school, but Joel was still in school and he decided to Take time off of school to see what can happen and where this can lead him and our plan was that he's going to Start off by helping me make my YouTube videos so I can be consistent. We can work together and build my channel because At that time he didn't really know what he was passionate about necessarily and he just knew that it wasn't school at the time And I knew that I wanted to do YouTube. So that's where we started off At that point we were going to be working together every single day So he moved in with my family And he's been living here for this whole year the year has Not gone exactly the way that We thought it would but It brought us everything that we manifested at the beginning of the year. We were literally making no money I barely made it. I was maybe making like a couple thousand dollars barely even that like I was still doing my video editing job on the side and making very small amounts of money from YouTube and We just wanted to make these dreams that we have of living our dream life Living being able to live remotely. We just wanted to make that Happen and we just knew that school wasn't for both of us at the moment And we just felt a pull to do this together Because we had no idea where it was going to take us and so Joel took a leap of faith He quit school. I don't want to say quit because you can always go back Like it's not something you can't go back to but he did I guess you could say take time off of school Our plan originally was like, okay, we're gonna stay here at my parents house And they allowed us to live here rent free, which I'm forever obviously going to be grateful for You know, you have that gut feeling that you're supposed to do something That was what we were feeling and we were like we have to pursue this because This is just like what we feel like is going to lead us to bigger opportunities So we were kind of low-key about it We only told a couple of close friends and obviously our families knew but Everybody kind of outside of that like didn't really know like I didn't announce it anywhere I just wanted to kind of work in silence but our plan was to live here for a year and After be financially stable enough to be on their own and move out Obviously if it doesn't happen within a year We would do it for as long as it takes But our plan was like we were just kind of like hopefully like we can do it by the end of the year Like that would be that would be like amazing and so now we're so lucky to be at the financial Place and situation for the financial spot that we could move out on our own Joel He is working for a startup company right now and he is literally obsessed with it He loves it so much like he is he found his passion He really did and I see a smile on his face every single day that he's like truly happy now and what he's doing He's so passionate about it and obviously I'm doing what I'm passionate about which is such a blessing We just took a chance kind of blindly and we were just like you know what we're gonna do this and we did do it like We did it and it didn't happen in the way like I said it didn't happen the way we expected it to But it all unfolded perfectly so it is february 15th today and we went to go view first apartment on the 12th And we were just kind of expecting to dip our toes in the water Just to kind of see like what rental prices are prior to seeing this place We were looking kind of online every single day and then if we ever liked something we tried to book a viewing for it We tried to book a viewing for a couple of the places, but it didn't end up working out Because the market is selling so fast right now not selling but like like things are just getting taken up a lot And it's also selling fast like the real estate market is just crazy right now So we went to go view the place and we literally fell in love with it It was the first apartment that we viewed although we did see a lot of other ones online But it was the first part apartment that we viewed and we fell in love with it We were like this is the dream apartment. So when we went to go see it the latin lord said that he wanted Us to be like if we wanted it we had to move in a couple of days Like he wanted it to be rented mid february onwards because he had other tenants who were willing to do that and move in right away But when we went home Um, I ended up texting him and I was like, you know what like I'm sorry but I'm going to have to say no because I'm not ready to move in that soon like the earliest I can do is march first And then I told Joel before that before we texted him that and I was like Joel Like if it's meant to be then we'll move in march first like he'll let us move in march first That's what's gonna happen if it's meant to be so after I texted him saying no Because we couldn't move in middle of february. He texted me and saying sorry, but I can't do march first as I have tenants available to rent mid february, which totally makes sense understandable. So We texted back and I was like, okay totally understandable Thank you anyways that place is absolutely beautiful after I sent that text like I just had like a feeling that he was gonna Still give it to us even after he said no and I just knew it like I Knew it. I don't know how but like, you know when your intuition is telling you something I just knew it and that's exactly what happened the landlord texted me back A couple like maybe like 20 minutes later and he was like, okay, you know what? I really like you guys and I'm willing to wait to have you Um for march first you can start the lease on march first I literally knew that was gonna happen and that just goes to show that like it's meant to be as well And we were not planning on moving this soon like we were honestly planning on waiting a bit You know to get more slowly But when it's meant to be it's meant to be in like literally the perfect apartment fell into our laps Like it fell into our laps as our dream place when the universe gives you an opportunity like that you can't You have to go with it like it's meant to be whatever's meant to be in your life It's going to come into it naturally and that's exactly what happened Gonna tell you this next thing just because I I want to keep it honest and this story is so perfect and Like I'm literally about to start like my adulthood and we're about to move out together and really start our dream lives Um, but I'm just gonna tell you this next portion because I just want to keep it real and honestly like I'm not trying to be fake and hide how I feel from you guys because you're the reason why I'm in this position And I want to be so like open and honest with you guys always So I come from really I guess you can say religious background where my parents are super religious and Basically, it's like against the religion to move out before you get married. They're very disappointed and upset with me for moving out before I get married, but um, you know me and Joel have been together for five years now and We know like it's meant to be and we need to take this next step in our lives like marriage isn't the next step in our lives like this is the next step for us and we know that and I'm not gonna get married just to please my parents like I'm gonna do what I want With my life and I'm not gonna live it to please anybody else Even though I know that I'm disappointing them like I realize that like in order to live your own life You have to disappoint people in order to follow like my dreams Like I have to disappoint people but at the end at the end of the day Like that's what's gonna be best for me and it's my life If you live your life based on other people's opinions, you're not gonna be living your own life It's like really hard when your parents aren't proud of you and they're not excited for you And when they don't want anything to do with you Big step My inner child is like yearning for their support because this is like a really big deal to me and Like I'm really proud of us really proud of me and Joel They can't really say one positive thing about us doing this It really sucks. It really hurts me in a day Like if I did what they told me to do then I would just be lying to myself It's my life. I'm gonna do what's best for me. I know what is best for them We're not what is best for anybody else.  This is not going to stop me from doing it But it's like obviously you want the support of your parents and what you do and you want them To be with you for every step of the way And it just sucks when that can't happen, but I just wanted to Share that with you guys because a lot of things on social media nowadays It's like really filtered and it's like nothing is that easy like people go through struggles in order to come up stronger and That's what I wanted to Tell you guys this is because Sometimes you have to go through these moments in your life in order to be stronger In order to grow as a person to spread your wings in order to be true to yourself And moments like this in life are normal. It's just a part of life and you will get through it Like I will get through it and it's tough when it's happening in the moment because it's really emotionally tough to deal with But at the end of the day, like it's only going to make you stronger And it's only going to do good for you like you or you're going to learn from your experiences that you're going to grow But I just know at the end of the day that this is best for me And for me and Joel together to do this and it's a necessary step in my life right now Because I feel like I was just energetically like this whole year. I was going up I was going up and then all of a sudden I hit this point where at the beginning of the year I just felt like I almost was Like I needed a change I needed a change like something needed to happen The universe was like, you know what like you're down to space of your life Like you need to move on to keep accelerating and to keep growing And this is exactly what needed to happen like this place literally fell into our labs And I am so beyond excited like we are so excited and I know like I'm crying right now But I'm so excited. Yes, it is tough for me right now, but like I will get through it And this is still such an exciting time and like I am so happy and I know that this is going to be so good for me And I'm just so so grateful that I have this channel that is growing Sometimes things don't unfold the way that you think that they're going to But they will unfold perfectly at the end. It's like sometimes you don't realize how much you're Manifesting and how much you're growing until you really take a step back and realize It's like me getting this part like us getting this apartment.   I promise. These are happy tears Um, they're just so excited. It's official We're moving in two weeks. We're moving literally in less than two weeks. I think it is now We're moving in exactly two weeks exactly to the date. It's two weeks. Um, yeah, so I'm gonna bring obviously I'm gonna bring you guys along this journey and I want I just want us to grow together in every aspect and I can't wait to Document everything what I learned down to like my spirituality down to my finances like down to everything I want to document everything with you guys.  It's so exciting. Anyways, I love you guys as always and I'll see you guys soon Hey, so it is February 12th And me and Joel are viewing a place today and we are at Ikea right now Just to kind of get a look on furniture and just kind of going for funsies We're not necessarily going to buy anything today But I don't want to buy everything the month that I move out because that's just like too much, you know, so I kind of want to disperse my expenses and Just I'm just like dipping my toes in the water right now and just we're just going to like look for fun And then in the next couple months, I'm actually going to Inquire buying things like buying dishes and stuff because we both don't own anything We don't have a dish to our name like I never went to university and lived on my own So I never had to buy any of that kind of thing Um and Joel when he moved out he basically used most of his parents stuff like in terms of dishes And he kind of lived with people that already had dishes So he didn't need to buy much anyways when he lived on his own at university But I've never done that. So it's like we don't really don't have anything So anyways, I just wanted to start documenting The process of moving out and you know taking a leap of faith I'm going to dive into this more but I just wanted to document this journey because It seems surreal and almost Fake, you know Seems really weird And I just wanted to document it along the way because it would be really cool to look back on And even if I don't end up posting this just like to have these videos is going to be really cool Okay, anyways, we're going to do a place at five and it's 330 right now. So we have like about an hour to look around so Yay I like the way 200 isn't that like normal for a denture? Nice and aesthetic You guys are literally purchasing two little soap defenses because I thought that these were so cute And look at the total when I'm telling you things all with a line. I'm literally telling you like that is literally crazy Okay Okay, so it's currently February 19th, I believe and we move in in exactly a week Well, not like fully move in but like we're just gonna we get the keys. So we're just I guess that's moving in Technically, but it's going to take us a few days to really get our stuff in and everything So we are here at Ikea and today we're going to be getting like Everything essential. We need to get plates. We need to get cups. We need to get You know kitchen things like I made like a whole literal list on my phone of things that I literally searched up on the internet And I was like things you need for a kitchen when you move out because there's so Many things that we use like on a daily basis in the kitchen and stuff that we don't realize that we're using and that we need you know, so there's like I literally made a whole ass list and there's so much shit that we need to get Like cutting boards baking sheets like all that stuff So many things to get but Ikea honestly has so much like they have everything to get you started So we're just like, you know what? Let's get everything we can here Um And then we'll also we're also going to go to other stores But we're going to try to get as much as we can here just because it is like cheaper pricing Yes, the quality is cheaper here, but at the same time it's like our first place So we don't really care that much and we're planning on literally leaving and traveling in a couple years So it doesn't really matter And yeah, we just want to get ourselves started and get furniture. It's so exciting Um, no furniture actually today. We're gonna come back for furniture. Um, I think next weekend But today we're just getting at the essentials. So So excited Adulting adulting ladies Okay, so we just came across this couch and this is like perfect Size that we would want because I could have really like how it's an l-shaped and then you can put like an ottoman in the middle So for sizing this is like perfect and it's also pretty comfy. So I'm gonna see if it comes in different colors online But this is definitely nice, you know, we ought to get the wine glasses It's literally a six pack for nine dollars. So it can't go wrong And you know when you have friends over you want to be using some wine glasses This is the updated cart. I'm sorry. I haven't been updating you guys because it's so busy in here And yeah, I will give you guys a haul obviously later, but this is what we got so far Because I have a lot of shit in here and I've got this box I feel like this is gonna be big enough for hopefully All of my bathroom things because I just have kind of a lot of products like face masks And stuff like that that obviously I'm gonna bring with me. Um But I don't have like too much Like I honestly don't have too much like feelings should be the perfect size box So we'll see what I can take with me um my sister Shared this bathroom in Madison So I'm not really going to take the stuff that like we mutually bought like I'm not going to take it I'm like, we're just going to take the things that belong to me and only I use So Here is all the stuff that I took out of the cabinets Honestly, there's a lot more that I thought that I had Because I still need to do under here Which honestly, there's not like that much. It's basically like under here is the stuff that I pretty much use on a daily basis And also in here as well. I have my hair stuff So this is all stuff that I use on a daily basis whereas this is just more like hair stuff At least the stuff in the cabinets fit in here And then for under here we'll get a new box, but yeah, I thought that it would all fit, but it's okay Okay, here's the state of my room right now Um, not very pretty because I've just been kind of like trying to sort through my things and get rid of Stuff like that's kind of to get rid of that bag there. This is stuff that's I already packed up Um, so it's not looking too pretty right now, but it's okay Yeah, this is this is what you have to do to pack and honestly packing is literally so Hard like it's really hard because like you don't realize how much you have until you start and then you're like, holy shit Anyways, so yeah, it's not looking too good right now But we're gonna work on that right now I think right now what I'm gonna do because yesterday I just went through I didn't film it But I went through my nightstand and I unpacked Pack that into here and then I also did my desk drawers and pack that in To here So this is my nightstand and my desk drawer and then now I think I'm gonna do these two drawers underneath my bed We are taking the drawers and everything so um Yeah, but I I do have like a lot of really useless shit underneath these drawers that I don't want to take with me So we're gonna get rid of a lot of shit right now