I'm the transition dean for the New School focused on climate and sustainability and I was asking to give you a super quick overview. I know we're all eager to get to the main event here. The two organizations, the Precourt Institute for Energy and the Stanford Natural Gas Initiative that are really key in launching the hydrogen initiative will both be key founding components of the New School focused on climate and sustainability. This is Stanford's first new school in over 70 years and it's resulted from an inclusive long-range planning process. At every stage of the long-range planning process, students especially, also faculty, staff, and our external friends and stakeholders have called for Stanford to have an entity of scale focused on climate, energy, and sustainability. We have therefore designed a school that's designed to have both the powers of institutes which are the powers to foster interdisciplinary communities like the one that's gathered here today for the hydrogen initiative and work closely with external stakeholders and the traditional powers of schools which are to hire faculty, admit students, set curricula, and grant degrees. So we hope that this entity of scale will be able to have a major impact on the urgent issues of climate and sustainability that are facing our world today. Let me turn to the Precourt Institute's vision statement, sustainable, affordable, secure energy for all people. I think everyone who's here today in the hall and online knows that of the eight billion people in the world, a billion of us live without access to electricity. And another three billion cook their food using dirty carbon sources that contribute to four million early deaths per year. This is an urgent effort and Stanford has many efforts already underway to do research that's relevant to it in partnership with stakeholders. We need to not just double but quadruple and octuple those efforts. Let me give you a few examples. Professor Frank Woolick's program on energy and sustainable development analyzes economics and policy with a focus on developing economies. He has helped many countries design energy markets to meet their climate commitments. Professor Rishi Jain uses data analytics to assess energy efficiency and renewable energy opportunities to help retrofit existing urban housing and also new construction and he has a special focus on the large rural to urban settlements where more than 800 million people live. Places that people can live that are sustainable are incredibly important. And I just want to, it's not only faculty, it's also students, a project that's actually led by a postdoctoral scholar Michael McCalla is developing a solar power drying system that will help millions of farmers to dry produce like raisins, beans, figs and chilies to boost income that's now at a subsistence level. Doctors Jain and McCalla work very closely with local researchers and individual stakeholders to help put these inventions and technologies into practice as quickly as possible. The sustainability and affordability are key drivers of the energy transition but so is security and security will be a significant topic I think in today's fireside chat. Let's see, where is Arun? The speaker will be interviewed on the interplay between the energy and climate challenges the world faces in global geopolitics. So we will shortly be joined on the Zoom screen. It will be my pleasure to introduce that speaker, Dr. Condoleesa Rice. Dr. Rice is the Denning Professor in Global Business and the Economy at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. The Thomas and Barbara Stevenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution as well as that institution's director and a professor of political science. From 2005 to 2009, Dr. Rice was the 66th U.S. Secretary of State, the first African-American woman to hold the post. She also was President George W. Bush's National Security Advisor from 2001 to 2005, the first woman to ever hold that position. Prior to that, Dr. Rice was Stanford's Provost from 1993 to 1999 and actually hired me as an assistant professor during that period. Thank you for that, Dr. Rice. She's the first female, first African-American and was the youngest Provost in Stanford's history. It's also my great pleasure to introduce Dr. Irwin Majamdar, who will interview Dr. Rice. Dr. Majamdar is the J. Precourt Provostial Chair, Professor at Stanford, a faculty member of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and former director of the Precourt Institute for Energy. From 2009 to 2012, Dr. Majamdar was the founding director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy. Today, he chairs the advisory board to the U.S. Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Grenholm. In addition, bringing things back to the beginning of my introductory remarks, Dr. Majamdar was the co-chair of the President's Committee on the Structure of the Sustainability Initiative that led to the decision for Stanford to form its first new school in 70 years focused on climate and sustainability. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to Dr. Rice and Majamdar. Let me just start by congratulating each way and the Precourt staff for putting this event. We have been waiting for two years for this, and we are all here. And Kandy, thank you so much for joining us. Let's just get right to it. Energy is always best discussed in the context of economy, security, and the environment. You started the Hoover meeting about two weeks back highlighting security, and you said we are living, and I'm going to maybe butcher it a little bit, but we are living in disturbing and difficult times. Given the art of history of global conflict, explain to us the importance and the implications of the current conflict in Europe and what it means to the United States and to the rest of the world. Well, thank you very much. And first of all, thanks to Cam. I'm glad I signed those assistant professor papers, Cam. It's been great for the university ever since. And Arul, thank you for inviting me. I'm sorry I can't be with you. I'm a little under the weather, so I didn't want to expose anyone, but I'm glad to join you virtually. Well, I think that when we look at our screens every day, our news screens every day, we see something that we really never expected, which is a breakdown of the law-based international order. We see a great power, literally, trying to absorb a smaller power, its neighbor, with military forces that look like they were charted in 1939. As a matter of fact, a friend of mine said, if you put those pictures in black and white, you would be looking at 1939. And I think, Arun, this is a kind of shock to the system, because we've had war, obviously. But nothing that looks of this scale, and certainly not with the avowed purpose on the part of the Russians of eradicating Ukraine. Vladimir Putin has told me, he's told many, that Ukraine is a made-up country, and that Ukraine is really a part of Russia. So this is something that we haven't seen since World War II, and it's sending shockwaves through the international system as countries try to find their footing in understanding how we could have gotten to this place. Thank you, Ghani. So a few weeks back, when I was talking to you actually, you talked me about this balance between the economy, security, and environment. Sorry, I'm looking this way because you're in my screen out here. One of the things that you explained to me was, when you think about the balance, one has to also frame it in timescales. We have a now, we have a mid-term issues, and we have long-term issues. So let's start by talking about now. Europe cannot turn off Russian oil and gas right away because the economies will be severely affected. People's homes will not have heating. And Russia is weaponizing energy to hold new hostage. What can and should the European Union and your broadly do now? What should the United States be doing on this issue? And what should the U.S. be worried about in terms of, if any, Russia-China partnership? Or do you think that this is more to it than what the news media actually tells us? Well, let me start with the balance that you talked about. It's almost like an equation where it all has to add up to a positive sum for any society. When we talk about economic growth, we talk about energy mix and environmental sustainability. And now, in large part, because of what has happened to us over these last few months, security has been more on the agenda. But I would say, Arun, that we should have been thinking about energy security quite a long time ago. You mentioned the European Union. It's been a period of almost 40 years since going all the way back to the Reagan administration. And every administration since tried to convince the Germans that pipelines that would make them dependent on Russian natural gas were ultimately going to be a bad idea. And instead, the dependency of Germany and to a certain extent Eastern Europe continue to grow and grow and grow. And so now we're living with the consequences of that as the shock has come quite suddenly. And we now have a near-term issue that really should have been a medium-term issue. If we had looked at this ahead, we would have said, do you really want to be dependent on Iran, Saudi Arabia and Russia for your energy supply? And I think the answer to that had we known of what we know now would have been no. But we are where we are. And so let me take the short term first. Obviously, if the Europeans particularly, and Germany is the core of this, because Germany is the most dependent. If Germany and Europe is going to lessen its dependence on Russian gas and indeed Russian oil, it really got to do three things. The first is in the short term, find diversified sources of supply. And this is not easy because the Saudi Arabia is not stepping up to have more production. Iran brings its own problems, of course, because of the nuclear weapons issues with Iran. And the United States is an expensive source, particularly of gas, because we are so far away and we haven't invested really in LNG terminals and in pipeline structure. So finding diversified sources of oil is going to be number one. And oil and gas, diversified sources of energy, that's the near term problem. I think you will see considerable pressure on the Biden administration to roll back some of the decisions that had been made that make it harder for there to be actual oil and gas production. It's not so much that if you had those leases, it would help today. But you know, too, a room that signals are important to the oil and gas industry. And the signals have been that hydrocarbons were going to be looked upon with disfavor. Now, my view is, in the short term, since we're going to be dependent on hydrocarbons, since we want to lessen the dependence on Russian oil and natural gas, I would rather those sources come from the North American platform than from less secure places. And so I think we need to rethink that. But when you get to the medium term, we do want to begin the transition. We don't want to sacrifice the transition to a lower carbon, ultimately, zero carbon industry, support for industry. And so we should be asking ourselves, what can we do in the medium term that would actually help us to make that transition? And I think you know a room that I am, like many people, the late George Schultz, Jim Baker, and some other prominent people from the other side of the aisle, favor a price on carbon because a price on carbon in the medium term would help us with the problem that we've had that when the price of oil is a certain level, you don't get the investment in renewables, you don't get the investment in alternative sources of energy. So I would suggest in the medium term, we're going to have to do something to give greater research and development funding to give better signals to the oil and gas industry. And I think the best way to do that from a government point of view is a price on carbon. And then the final point is that then hopefully you've made a transition to an energy efficient but environmentally sensitive energy mix. And there I hope we will have looked at all sources, including, by the way, nuclear, which I think gets undervalued in this whole picture, but nuclear is also a medium and long term. You can't really do much on the nuclear front in the short term. In the short term, it's got to be about where do you get your hydrocarbons? And I would say North America is best. So, Connie, let's turn around this way. So, Connie, let's talk about the price on carbon. As you know, things are not easy to get done in Washington. What would you be advising both the Biden administration and members of Congress on getting things done, especially on the price on carbon, to send that signal that you want to decarbonize and actually, and many of the industries being part of the solution now? The problem is that this isn't a great time to talk about a price on carbon because of what Americans are seeing at the pump, what you're seeing in terms of inflation, the fact that we are essentially isolating a major producer of oil and gas in Russia at this particular point in time. So it's not the most propitious time to talk about a price on carbon. But as you know, Arun, some of the economists who talked about this, people like the late George Schultz, people like former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. These are people who believe in a market-based economy. They don't believe in heavy regulation from the government. But the idea is that if you could put it in a larger context, perhaps talking about it as a medium-term solution. All right, we aren't going to do it today, but could we start putting things in place so that when we get through this immediate security crisis, we could talk about a greater balance in how we are going to look to the energy future. I think that's probably the way to do it. Now, one danger in Washington is whenever you say something is medium to long term, it sometimes doesn't get done. You know that because you've been in Washington. It's all too easy to say, oh yeah, we'll do that in the long term. But I do think that it isn't going to fly right now for a host of reasons. But if we could again begin the conversation, if we could again begin to structure what it would look like, people who are free market folks really would rather see it be a revenue neutral carbon price so that if you collect it, gains from it, it wouldn't sort of just flow back into the budget and again increase spending. So there's a lot of planning and work and I think forums like this and forums that you and I are part of should be looking to the medium term to see how we could structure one when the time is right. This is to the audience. We'll open it up for questions in a few minutes. Let me ask you a little bit about the COP agreements, the COP meetings, etc. You had, you know, in publicly talked about the COP 21, the Paris Agreement as one of the highlights of international diplomacy amongst all the other bad news that we get. We had COP 26 where major nations made commitments for net zero emissions economy in 2050, 2060, 2070. We have now more than 60% of the Fortune 500 companies that have climate commitments. So, you know, this kind of alignment of major nations, major corporations, academia, I mean, this is unique in history. I don't think this is unprecedented. So, should we be celebrating, which I think a lot of people want to, but do you see clear pathways and outlines and should we be concerned about lack of real action and should we be raising the bar? What is your opinion on that? Well, let me contrast three international efforts. There was Kyoto, which set unrealistic targets and essentially no one lived up to them. I think the only countries to actually meet their targets were some small countries and Germany, which bet it, by the way, because they were shutting down industry in East Germany. And so it made it easier to meet it. So I think setting unrealistic targets is not the way to go. What I liked about Paris was that it really did allow on a national basis countries to deal with the energy mix issues that we've just been talking about. So that it's economic growth, energy mix and environmental sustainability. And we know that that's going to look different for every country. So for instance, the French get almost 80 percent of their generating power from nuclear. Germany has shut down its nuclear power. When you look at countries like India, for instance, now huge developing country, there are just certain things that you cannot expect the Indians to carry through on, if it starts to constrain economic growth. So what I liked about Paris is that these plans were sort of built from the ground up, so to speak. And countries made national commitments that I actually think would have been easier to keep. I'm worried about COP26 is perhaps being as aspiration fine, but is it too ambitious for reality, for the goals that were stated, for the obligations that were undertaken, can we really get to those kinds of numbers from where we are now? And so I'm concerned that we'll again get frustration if we're not careful by sending unrealistic numbers. I think it's very easy sometimes for countries to sign on to things and then not to carry them out. So I'm a little worried about COP26. Let me ask you. I mean, what you're saying is we have been on a carbon diet for about 150 years or so. Carbon, carbon, yes. And now everyone's telling us to go on a diet without the carbon. And as I can assure you, diets often don't work. That's what you're... Is that a different way to phrase it? So we should not put targets? That's a fair way to say it. We may have an aspiration for a certain diet. The question is when push comes to shovel, we carry it through. And I'm concerned that there hasn't been enough attention given to what the transition has to look like, how we're going to make the transition. Again, I was talking with some folks in Washington just recently, Arun. And they're very worried because with the first subject that we had, with what's going on in Russia, it's almost as if people have lost sight now of these medium and long-term goals. Because, oh my goodness, we're about to take one of the major oil and gas producers out of the equation. We're going to have to substitute it. What does that mean then for our goals? So I like very much this idea of thinking of it in phases and not getting too ambitious that we simply frustrate ourselves. Let me ask a little bit about the carbon price. And this is obviously a price of carbon. It's very important to help the fossil fuel industry turn itself and in a profitable way, become part of the solution. We are also seeing other aspects, and I'd like to get your opinion on this, as our own Adam Brandt has found through airborne measurements and also there are satellite measurements now on the fugitive emissions. Adam found 9% of emissions, fugitive emissions, coming out of the natural gas supply chain in the Permian Basin, in the New Mexico part of the Permian Basin. And as we know, anything more than 3% or 4% is natural gas is worse than coal. So if you were to get a gathering of CEOs and board members of the oil and gas industry, what would you be asking of them? How can they be part of the solution? And what are the solutions that they can create that others cannot? Well, I do think that they are putting a good deal, at least the best of them, a lot into renewables and they're not just hydrocarbon industries any longer. I think they do want to contribute on that side. So through R&D to help fund and put forward those, I think a room what the oil and gas companies are looking for is certainty. I think that one of the problems that we've had is there's been a lot of whiplash. On the one hand, you're going to drill everything you possibly can with permits as fast as you possibly can, and then the next day you're not going to do any. And of course, I'm overstating the case, but I think that's how it feels if you're sitting in a boardroom for oil and gas companies. And so that's one of the reasons that I think if you have mechanisms that can produce some certainty, that's why I like the idea of a carbon price, because it can produce some certainty in a market-based way. I think we have to look for ways that they can have some certainty about where this is going. You might also say that some of the certainty could come from some of the phasing that we've been talking about. What are we talking about 20 years in which we really are going to have to be very dependent on the North American platform? Well, in the life of an oil and gas company, that's not very long, because many of these are 30 or 40-year investments. And so I would say we need to have a conversation, almost a track too, with oil and gas companies to begin to look at their time horizon, the time horizon that we want to meet or aspire to meet on the climate side, and start to see how they adjust. Rather than just having either yelling matches around it or even worse to my mind, everybody just sort of virtue signaling without a plan to get anything done, because I do think this issue of timelines, of who's timeline are we on and can we harmonize these timelines is really part of the issue. Terrific. Thank you, Kondi. And we'll open it up for questions. I don't know if anyone has any hands up. There's one out here. So, Kondi, the question is, okay, how do we, in terms of timeline, there is energy security needs right now, but you want to harmonize it with climate goals in Germany, for example, and how does Germany do that? Is that what your question is? What is the time frame? Is it two years? Is it three years? Is it 10 years or 15? Well, the Germans really believe that they can do this in a relatively short period of time. I'm actually not so sure. It depends. There are conversations, Francis, going on with Algeria. Algeria has significant gas fields that are lying fallow at this point. Mozambique has gas fields, but there's been lack of investment. And so I think there's a sense that they're probably going to have to do this in a really short time frame, 18 months, two years, as much as they possibly can. But the Germans also talk about conservation as part of it, that they will simply not be able to use as much energy as they have. And of course, they'd like to accelerate renewables, but that's probably not on the timeframe to help them with Russian oil and natural gas. And by the way, I think the one thing to recognize is that the Russian oil and gas industry now pretty isolated. I mean, people are buying discounted oil on the market and never underestimate the degree to which you will get a black market in Russian oil. We did, for Saddam Hussein's oil, it was a significant black market. So you will see some of that. But the core of the Russian oil and gas industry is going to be isolated for some time. One of the problems that the Russians have now is that since the majors, the VPs and the exons of the world have left, they don't have the technology to develop some of their very old oil fields up around Sakhalin, which need very sophisticated technology to develop them. So I think you're going to see the Russian oil and gas knocked out for quite some time. And that means that countries like Germany, kind of an interesting, just a country of Poland, you would have seen the stories over the weekend that the Russians have cut off oil, cut off gas to Poland and Bulgaria. And interestingly, the polls sort of just yawned about it because they had significant storage, their storage facilities about 80% for full. They'd already begun with the invasion in 2014 of Crimea to shift their sources. And so there is a model out there for how this could be done if you do it smartly. And I think you do want to do it as much as you can with climate goals in mind as well. I was in Poland and the Baltics in 2015 on behalf of the State Department, and I can assure you they were all planning for this invasion at some point. Yes, they knew it was coming. And yet I would say, I mean, one of the, the IEA report that just came out suggested that if people in Germany reduce the thermostat by one degree Celsius, they would reduce the gas consumption by 9%. Yes, yes. So this is very important from the energy efficiency point of view. Yes, and I think the Germans do want to look hard at the energy efficiency element. Sunita from the Department of Energy. Thank you. My question relates to manufacturing. And as we know with batteries and solar and, you know, the offshore manufacturing. So, and we're starting to see the same thing with hydrogen. So for electrolyzers, we have one gigawatt factory announced, but we're seeing announcements in other countries where deployments is increasing. So Europe, China, you know, two gigawatt factory was announced in Australia. So I guess my question is, and obviously if we have deployment and demand locally, that will help incentivize the domestic manufacturing and off takers making sure there are no stranded assets when it comes to hydrogen production and so forth. But my question is, if you have any perspectives on mechanisms, such as the Defense Production Act and, you know, other mechanisms where we could, you know, provide that, that guarantee Germany has the global hydrogen foundation contracts for difference auctions, but specifically mechanisms like the Defense Production Act or others that you have thoughts on would be great. Can you hear that? Okay, go ahead. No, I was just going to say the Defense Production Act, we put it in play a couple of times recently, as you know, around some of the COVID issues as well. And I think you have to be a little bit careful that we don't start to get essentially a kind of industrial planning function, because the Defense Production Act is actually quite, can be quite heavy handed. But certainly we should be looking at mechanisms that make sure that we make the most efficient use in manufacturing as we possibly can of these new alternatives. Of course, the manufacturing is only a part of the issue, and transportation is really the largest problem that we and others will have. But sure, I think to look at all the mechanisms, I would just be careful, the Defense Production Act can be quite heavy handed. And I think people will start to wonder if we're sliding toward industrial policy. That's another question, and if you could announce your name and your affiliation, that would be great. Yeah, this is Chris Redlich. I'm on the Hoover ward. Yeah, hi, Chris. Hello, Connie, how are you? Sorry, we can't have lunch. My question is a little bit longer term thing, is you eliminate hydrocarbons as a producer of energy. What does that do to the geopolitical stability, given Russian's concentration in the Middle East concentration, and to some degree Africa's concentration in oil production? I would look forward, Chris, to the day that I don't think you'll eliminate hydrocarbons, but to the day that you were less dependent on them, because I will just give you an experience from being Secretary. Oil went to $147 a barrel when I was Secretary. And nothing warps diplomacy like oil $147 a barrel. It allowed Hugo Chavez to buy elections in Latin America. It allowed the Iranians to prove their economy against sanctions, so that we had a much harder time on the nuclear front, and of course the Middle East, which is always up and down. And so the smarter countries of the Middle East, by the way, are beginning to think about diversification, because they can sort of read the handwriting on the wall. For all of its problems, and the regime in Saudi Arabia has many, many problems, one of the things that that regime has tried to do is to begin to diversify the economy, similarly with the UAE. So there are some Middle Eastern countries that are reading the handwriting on the wall. The Russians, frankly, didn't read the handwriting on the wall. That is still an oil and gas cartel. Some 65% of Russia's exports are in oil, gas, and minerals. And so they are, they're going to be trapped. But if I could get to the place that I could take the oil card, so to speak, out of the hands of some of these regimes that are not afraid to use it for purposes that are very much against our national interest, I would do it in a second, because the United States will address, will adjust. Yes, we will have to make internal adjustments for places like the coal-producing parts of the country. But the U.S. has an economy that will adjust. The smarter countries of the Middle East are trying to make that adjustment ahead of time. But there are going to be some who are going to be trapped in that world. And I would be very happy not to have to deal with the oil card. Ever again. Maybe I could just follow up on the question with not the geopolitics of oil and gas, but the geopolitics of nuclear. As we are now seeing, I mean, we have the former Secretary of Energy out here, Steve Chu, when Fukushima happened and Germany completely got off nuclear and or decided to get off nuclear. And now we've seen some rethinking, even in California, government use them. Isn't rethinking not shutting down Diablo Canyon? I don't know whether that'll happen or not. So if you are to be in the nuclear... I mean, clearly, nuclear has to be part of the solution for decarbonization. It's not just nuclear electricity, nuclear heat. It's very important. And if that's the case, what should the United States do, not only to be in the international game of nuclear, but also to get people in countries like Germany and others to rethink along those lines? Well, the first thing we have to do, Arun, is to get our house in order domestically on nuclear. A house is not really in order domestically on nuclear. Going back to the kind of even folklore around Three Mile Island, questions of storage and so forth, we haven't been particularly good at stability in our own nuclear industry. And so I think it is something that we ought to be looking at and then helping others. By the way, I don't think it was Fukushima that pulled the Germans off. The Germans had been talking for a long time about getting out of nuclear. We'd had many conversations with the Germans about this. And I think Fukushima was a little bit of an excuse, frankly. But now everybody recognizes that you're going to have to have other sources. And nuclear could come... If you make the investment and you get the infrastructure, nuclear is proven. You're not dealing with sources of energy that may not be proven and that we have to wait for this and that to take place. And so I think it is a very big part, but I think it's going to start with the United States showing that we ourselves are prepared to use nuclear. And how would you change the sentiments on nuclear? Because there's a lot of public sentiment. That's a major issue. And there's a lot of misinformation about nuclear as well. And so maybe part of it is educational, just getting people to understand better. We get these things in our mind like Three Mile Island. And I'm sure you've heard it. The old joke is sometimes when you get a piece of fruit that looks too big, well, it must have come from Three Mile Island. So it's still sort of there in our national folklore. But there's no reason that nuclear can't be safe. One of the problems is getting somebody other than Nevada to store it. Every time we talk to any other state, it's kind of not in my neighborhood. So that's a hard problem, but I think it's one we've got to resolve. Questions from the audience? If you could just announce who you are in your affiliation. Yeah, Nico, welcome to the California Fuel Support Partnership. This is more of a general question and maybe a high level, the same level as that Mr. Rice is thinking on. How or what would you recommend to industry partners that interact with federal government as well as state government to provide certainty of signals? You mentioned signals earlier and get the right message across. Because I suspect that there is some confusion there as well. Thank you. Yes, I think the confusion has been there for a long time. And as I said, the worst thing about it is that it seems to be never in a steady state. And as you know, particularly when you're talking about investment, these are long tail investments. I'm told by some people in the oil company world that some of the really large scale investments have not been made for seven or eight years because of uncertainty about the signals about what we intend to do about hydrocarbons. So I do think that the government needs to send stronger signals. I do think also we have another factor, which is not just the government, but it's the question of ESG in companies, in investment houses. Is there going to be a sense that hydrocarbons are disadvantaged in investment houses and the like? And so if in fact we're going to get this next 15, 20 years right, it's going to require some very deep conversations with not just the government, but also with the private sector about what it is we're trying to do. I think I've been thinking in time frames if we could lay out something that looks like a longer term plan where we know what we're going to do in the short term and what's required there, where we know what we're going to do in the medium term and what's required there, and then can look to a longer term where we try to start to meet some of the targets of the cops and the like. I think everybody would have a better basis on which to invest, but right now it's just whiplash with every administration. Condi, if you don't mind, let me take it international, let's go back to the whole word. As you know, most of the population growth is going to be in emerging economies in Asia and mostly in Africa. They have a chance to leapfrog into a energy system that is cleaner and more modern. What would you be, if you were the Secretary of State now, what would you be going out and talking to them about in terms of how do you convince them that that's the right way to go and what should they be looking for? There's a lot of demand for finance. How should we be thinking about that? Well, we certainly ought to be thinking about it as a part of our large foreign assistance packages. There are some governments in places like Africa that actually have come to the United States and said, we want to make an energy leap. We have something called the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which does these compacts with countries where they get large amounts of money for specific kinds of proposals that have been worked together with labor unions and with farmers and the like. So one can imagine using some of our foreign assistance to really solicit from countries ideas of how we can help them make the leap. Secondly, I think that you can never make it any kind of energy, reconstitution of energy supply. You can never make it an enemy of economic growth. Economic growth is always going to be first in the minds of these countries. And so it's why I've always thought there are three E's, economic growth, energy mix, and environmental sustainability. And if you can get countries to think of them together. One idea that I tried to put forward, but it never got anywhere, was to have all energy, all climate, anything that might help any technologies that might help on the climate actually be tariff-free. I think if you could do something like that, it would send a very strong signal that this is something that we care about in our foreign assistance packages as well. And that is something, I don't have much hope anymore for the World Trade Organization, which I think is going to die a very slow death as everybody talks more about reliable and trusted supply chains and so forth. I don't see any big World Trade Organization agreements coming out. But I can imagine something like an agreement that these technologies would be tariff-free. And I think that would help quite a lot. And it'd be an important signal. Is that some kind of a revisiting of the Marshall Plan again for clean energy transition? Yes, something like that. But again, we've made a few other things tariff-free for health reasons. I think this would be something, like I said, it didn't get to first base when I was secretary. But maybe it would be time to try it again. Any other questions? If not, I've got one final question for you, Condi. This goes back to what Cam mentioned at the end of her introduction about the new school. And we have a new school in over 70 years. You have been a provost out here. You've lived most of your academic life. In fact, all your academic life here at Stanford. Tell us, give us your advice on how one should think about the new school. And when you talk to students and post-docs and undergraduate graduate students, what do you see and what would your advice be to them? Well, the first and most important thing for any school, in fact for any academic institution, academic unit within the institution, is to be absolutely dedicated to research that is transparent in its assumptions, that uses data, and that let the data take you where they take you. So you've got to establish a reputation for not being a school of advocacy, but for being a school that is really looking for the best answers. I don't mean that students and faculty can't advocate. Of course they can. But it has to be the first principle in the school that you're going to look at a broad range of possibilities. People are going to be led to do the research that they wish to do. And that we're going to be prepared to ask difficult and uneasy questions about issues of sustainability. We've been going through some of them today. How do you think about energy security? How do you think about nuclear? How do you think about the developing world? So asking hard questions has got to be built into the fabric of the school. The other point that I would make is focus on people. Get the very best students and the very best faculty. Give them resources and see what happens. I don't believe that top down planning of what a research agenda is going to look like will ever work in a university. And what is more, we know that you don't get the very best ideas that way. Those ideas have to come up from the faculty, from the students. And I'm not worried about it because I know Cam and I know Steve and I know others. And they're not central planners. But to the degree that anybody ever suggests central planning for the mission of the sustainability school, I would say run, run fast. Well, on that high note, thank you so much, Condi, for joining us. And let's give Condi Rice a big round of applause.


Do you think Trump obstructed justice and did Comey break the law by leaking a memo about his conversation with President Trump? I think it's a no on both of those. I mean, if you could name the statute or the law that was broken, believe me, over the last six months, the Democrats would be naming that statute. The fact that they can't do that tells you all you need to know. And on Comey, I don't think violated the law either from what I've heard from the lawyers that are reputable. He'd leak, but I don't think that's a criminal charge.


The seven, is that right, call outreach and communications subcommittee to order, and Evan is absent. Yeah, Alyssa has gone away because she's not part of our committee, so it's just George and Darcy and myself, and then Lynn, are you saying as a guess, Lynn will be here as an other president? I did that. So report, ever report on action items. We could discuss that, unless we're too tired. We're never too tired. Yeah, so I put together a Google form for counselors in general regarding outreach efforts. We might as well keep it in the reference materials that we have for OCA only because later on. Oh, it's in the wrong, I'm in the wrong, you have to be in the subcommittee, obviously. Yeah, there's an outreach subcommittee under this. Not minutes, no. Yeah. Oh, yes it is. Oh, I'm sorry, yes. That's okay, that's okay. No, it's not minutes, it's if you go back. Yeah, so yeah, it's, and I think else we have is a, so is this it right here, Darcy, the outreach form? Yeah. So if you go through the OCA and then just look for minutes in the minutes folder for this subcommittee. Oh, right, okay, talk to more groups than anyone else to this form and then when you hit responses, they would get a spreadsheet that would tell what everybody said about each question. And then we'd have all the data. What about events, like events that you attend? I mean, we have like a lot of events on our calendar. Yes, that's a good one. And then like maybe what, because I'm just thinking, because I think that we're all trying to figure out how to do outreach the best way, and we should kind of archive this. And we also want to try to help counselors, like after we're gone, counselors can come in. So what are events that people have found? You know, are they helpful? I think one of the things that we talked about with CPOs is do you somehow want to be able to when you go to an event, like have a way to, if people are interested in certain ways of serving or volunteering, like are we bringing information like that with us? And then also, you know, the gathering names, but then we'll have to further talk about how, like how those are used. Like when we get names, they're not for our personal use, but would they automatically be center forwarded to any participation officers, town manager, resident advisory committee? Because we're trying to make that loop. We're trying to keep, you know. So I think that if we ask the question, what types of events have you attended, or what events have you attended, you know, Lynn would have to like write 2,000 entries on that one. And how could we do it in a way, maybe we could categorize them or something? I don't know. Because I think we're looking at events in different ways. Like I think one of the things that the CPOs brought up to us as townhouses being on the front line was that, you know, when they go out to certain events, they're one of their goals is to let people know different ways, at that event, you know, different ways to participate in town government and also to make sure that they're also bringing in some names. So I don't know how we would do that. I'm just putting out that that was something that was brought up for me.  You know, I think classifying or categorizing events would be useful. I mean, there's events, for instance, that we are officially representing the town, okay? For example, when we stand on the town steps on a snowy morning for the Tibetan event. And it's, you know, sometimes it's me, but sometimes it's me and three or four other counselors. And then there's other times where, you know, recently a couple of us were invited to attend a student event at the university. And we weren't there in any, quote, official capacity. But we certainly were identified, if you will, as town counselors. We didn't speak, but, well, that's, you know, just, you know, attendants, attendants at events, representing the council versus, well, that's a good question. It's a very, in addition to having fun talking to people about this and that. And then if names are gathered or someone says, oh, I heard about that's so amazing. I would love to do that, then saying, like, you would have this name and then you would be protocol where that name would go. I guess I'm thinking. And I suppose one of the options could be that I could go through my calendar and say here's the various events that I've done since December 3rd and see whether there's a way to categorize them. But, you know, and then there's times, for instance, where I could not be here for the Jones Library 100th anniversary kickoff or the kind of gisaki visit. And then in that case, Mandy Jo represented the council. And Andy happened to be at least one or two of them. And some of other people may have been there as well. So there's official ones. And along with some of those, we're actually asked to read various proclamations that we've passed as well. I've got a couple of them coming up just in the next month or two. You know, and then there's other events where we just happen to be invited as counselors. For example, the recent Business Innovation Center at Eisenberg. We were just invited as counselors. I think we actually were recognized, as I recall. And there were about six or seven of us there. So, and whether or not we're actually promoting participation, I'm not clear that I'm always doing that, but I'm certainly representing the town.  In Pat's, in my case, we have a district two meeting coming up. George has, no, you've had at least one. Darcy, you've had more than I can keep count of. And district one is the same way. We're actually taking the information that the participation officers have provided us on how to use, how to sign up for CAFs, and we're actually taking also the information for how to sign up for alerts from the town and that kind of thing. So, and then, and I have mentioned this to a couple of you at different times and maybe even to this group, we do have the hope that in the fall we have some set of coordinated district meetings, maybe in a period of like two weeks where we have as our focus the major capital plan, major capital projects and what a proposed plan might look like. And in that case, we're going to have, want to have very common material that each of us takes out and I, this is where I think we take a lesson from the school committee and the schools, a way for people to get that information if they weren't able to attend, a way to provide feedback on that information if they weren't able to attend or even if they did and they want to say something later. So, using that as an example, I would dearly embrace this committee looking at what should that look like, what kind of handouts should we have helping, working with the community participation officers and how we're going to do that. For example, are each of us at each of our district meetings going to try to have the model that Sean McGonough has been perfecting available? Will we break into small groups? What are some of the options? Okay. The counselors might want to try. And I know for example, Darcy, at your district five, you had Andy do a dry run with your group and there's, you know, some positives and some not so good, I'm not going to say negative things, but complications in how, and sometimes, and in fact, the model's not quite finished yet, so we know that. Pat and I are going back and forth as to whether we're going to do that on Wednesday night when we also have Andy coming to ours, because he also happens to live in district two. And I also, I do want to encourage that whenever possible, that district, that townwide counselors be invited to district meetings, particularly if they're from the district or because they have a specialty like Andy and the case of district five was able to help use that model. So there's all kinds of ways to look at it, but I mean, even if you took the focus of let's start planning now for that September, October, two week district meeting on capital projects, that would be fabulous. Does that help you? This is part of the vision of what I had hoped this committee would also deal with as well as the incredible burden of the appointments that you all had to take on. Actually, thank you. In fact, including how do we increase attendance at our townwide forums? How do we increase attendance at our hearings so that we're not sitting there like we were back in March where there's only 16 people in the room and half of them were related to the counselors? So I think that we vote, I see George being completely overwhelmed. I think that if we look at what the, because I think the school committee, I agree with Lynn that they did an amazing job and there was the forum that you could send back. I mean, I think we have a skeleton already of things that were very effective. We could even very kindly ask someone who helped to do that for the school committee to come and talk to us about how they accomplished it. So we would have a better idea like ITWISE and, but we have a skeleton. We have people that we can ask about how they did it. We also have already staff support and guidelines in place for public forums. So I think it would just be a matter of using the information that we have and then, and building it up for our particular use. So I don't, I think it will be a decent amount of work, but I don't think it's daunting because I don't think we have to reinvent the wheel. So much. I think we do have some really good vehicles already for outreach. We just now need to pull them together. Let me clarify on the, on the forums and the hearings. They, they pretty much are dictated by topic. And for example, as we got ready for the budget one, the town manager came to the finance committee meeting. He talked with us about what would be the content of that. And we have a similar meeting with him when we do the capital one in June. So the, it's not really the content, but I do want to mention that we have clarified. And in fact, on the draft agenda for the forum in June, we will now have, where the chart is very clear, public comment is to be 50% of the time. What we learned out of that first forum is it would be nice to have an opportunity in this instance for the town manager, the council president or other members of the council or other members of the staff to be able to respond to questions that people ask during the public comment. We are now counting that toward the 50% of public comment so that the public comment period can be more like a dialogue. There may also, it's also going to be a trial because to be honest, we have to be careful that we're not saying, well, and I think, or in other words, we need to be factual and clear about whatever information we're providing and are just saying, you know, we don't have that information. We'll get back to you. I agree with George that it's, you know, going out and handing out posters ourselves or doing things like that, that's not our job. I think that we do, like I said, you know, the CPOs have also already given us things like how to plan a district meeting and I had looked at that and I will bring it again. I don't know if I showed this to you guys last time. I had tweaked it just a little bit and even just tweaking it a little bit as far as asking for things like a projector or something to use PowerPoint on as far as, I'm trying to think, so if you were trying to do something that was a forum or bigger than you would in addition to asking for a setup, like setup would be different. You would have to say, you know, to the CPOs, I think that we're going to be expecting 250 people and we're going to have a panel of people talking so we would need a table or a podium and microphones. So I mean, you're still, as far as I can understand from the CPOs, these are things that they still want, they have a structure for, they want us to go through them and we have all of those forms which I will definitely distribute. But I think that we could follow that form and then have, you know, relevant staff, you know, it's known that this is, we're relevant staff can do this or that. And then if we bring in the school committee as far as, like, thinking of different ways of getting things out, I think that we can set up a way that there's, we'll have a structure for how to distribute things on the internet or send to somebody. We could have a draft of a typical informational letter that could, you know, you could do a little bit of fill in the blank for things, if you're, you know, for different meetings of information that you want back for people, like saying here's what happened, fill in at this, or it's going to happen at this finance committee hearing, are there certain things you weren't able to attend but there are things that you have concerns or want to make comments? Like I think that we can put templates and process, we could nail those down so that it would be easier for us to do and then it'd be something that other people could follow after we're gone, is my feeling. Right. The council has been done. Right. Right, a person did. Yeah. So, but it's not like, you know. Right, no, so this one that we came up with I think is incredibly helpful and will be to all of us and to future councilors. I think I don't, I would send, yeah, I would send that also to Lynn if she can't. So we have, once we're done with it, and once we feel confident, it should be something that we, you know, send to Lynn that we write a report on and then, you know, it's possible that Lynn could put it in an agenda so that people understand what it's about and then we could then start collecting that information. No, no, it's more, we want to make it as simple as possible but I think it would also help us as far as outreach goes, know what's working for other people, what hasn't worked for other people, what are, you know, it will also, I think, in the long run at the end of these three years, we will have some information and process for future councilors for outreach that they can follow, which, if we had had that, wow. Amazing, right? So I think that's what we're, that's what we're shooting for, for that. So we're, you know, talking about our individual outreach, how that's working, how we could help each other. So I sort of hear that from Lynn, is there a way that we can contact each other if we want to have a certain councilor there at our meeting, for district meetings? Also, I know a lot of people have been, I know some neighborhood associations have been feeling like they wish they had access at some point at district meetings of certain staff. So I think we, I think that we have a process for that but I want to make sure that we, that we have also the public knows some information on that. So those are things that we can nail down, yep. Let me mention specifically because I did have a round of emails with one councilor, it's needless to say we all know Paul has to be protective of staff time after hours and even during hours for that. I mean they have other jobs, but at the same time, and this is not necessarily as I speak to the particular of the community participation officers, but you know, to other people. So I think it, first of all, we need to be cautious and careful of how we request for staff time and when we're requesting for it. But I think that request needs to be for district meetings. Yes, I agree. To start having it be for neighborhood associations or even district associations. I mean we have one district that I think there's probably five neighborhood associations in it and you just can't do that. No, and then I think that's what I'm saying is that we would establish a process in which we clarify, you know, when is appropriate for staff to be there and how we as a council deal with that. So I'm just saying I agree with you. I think we just need to make that process actually written down and clear. Yep, I know we're way over. We need to adjourn. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you so much, Phyllis, for all your, sorry, but all the excitement today. Oh, you need to go yet. And actually I'm getting picked up at 12.15. So your chair also has to adjourn. Yes, can we come Phyllis right behind you? All right, so yeah, so let's, let's make it a priority to finish or to just, we can send you individual emails. Obviously we can't deliberate, but if we have any other suggestions for the form just so that we can be ready because we won't meet next week, but we will meet the week after. And I, and I guess we'll also put on our agenda. We're not meeting next week? Well, no, we talked about that because we have to extend because we have to make sure that we, OCA decides on its process and that tree and that won't be easy for us and the ECAC. So, so OCA's meeting, but we're not. The subcommittee won't. So the subcommittee will meet the week after. And so I will make sure that I put these action items on the agenda and also Lynn, if you could, if you know, if they just in October, if you could just send me some information because it won't stick in my head. Just general things about those forums that are coming up or that you wanted to have, or is that pretty much it? Basically I pretty much said to you everything I can say. Okay, so then I think something that I'm gonna think about is maybe trying to see about contacting and I'll to go through Paul and Lynn, someone from school committee who, or they can tell me who helped them to put together some forum. I think Sean can help us with that. Okay, great. So then we'll get that rolling as well. And that being said, if there's not any other discussion? Great, yeah, yeah, fabulous. Yes, yes, as long as we don't deliberate but we can take a look, see. Yep, wonderful. Thank you, George. It's fabulous, fabulous. Okay, send it to me and I'll put discussion of that at our next meeting. And if some of this stuff picks up then we can talk about, well, we'll time. We'll make it, we're good. My husband's gonna be here at 12.50 and two. Yeah, and we'll, yeah, yep. So everybody making, we can't deliberate, but everybody can make individual points or if you wanna send something simply to the person who sent it, if only it's not deliberation, but you know, that's okay. Just to sharpen things to make our discussion quicker, easier, more effective next meeting. Yes, we are, right here. So I make the motion to adjourn at 12.17, all those in favor? We're awesome, way to go.


October is here and falling temperatures are bringing big savings get the phone you want with free activation all month long on postpaid service that's up to a $30 savings per life better service bigger savings that's today's Appalachian wireless paint pipe will pink registration will start at 7 a.m. tomorrow morning Saturday we will actually have a survivor's walk at 8 a.m. our 10k will start at 8 30 a.m. and then we will have our 5k start at 9 and our one-mile fun walk run will start at 9 15 and everyone needs to meet at the Garve field for registration at 7 if you haven't already pre-registered we're gonna have a lot of prizes so we encourage everybody to come down and participate even if you don't want to walk or run if you would just like to come and donate and get a ticket we are going to be giving away Botox we're going to be giving away jewelry we're gonna have gift cards from local restaurants of the community has been very supportive in giving us a lot of great prizes for this event.


The difference between the average person and a member of an elite family is they are given the rulebook You know imagine you're pitted up against a chess grandmaster, but you don't know how to play chess That's essentially how the masses are pitted against the elite the 1% The rulers of this world You know we grow up with a set of behaviors morals overall intelligence that was molded by those people To keep us down What I like to call the natural laws is referred to as the seven hermetic principles and to my understanding These laws have been passed down through secret societies for thousands of years and this is a good base of information to get started Obviously, there's you know thousands of hours of nuances that the average elite family member is taught throughout the first years of their lives The principle of mentalism the all is mind the universe is mental the principle of vibration Nothing rests everything moves everything vibrates The principle of correspondence as above so below as below so above as within so without as Without so within the principle of polarity Everything is dual and has poles or opposites opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree the principle of rhythm everything flows out and in Everything has its tides all things rise and fall the pendulum swing The principle of cause and effect Every cause has its effect every effect has its cause Everything happens according to law the principle of gender gender is an everything Everything has its masculine and feminine principles now you can Google the hermetic principles get explanations for these laws But I'll try to give my interpretation and how to apply them to your everyday life The principle of mentalism the all is mind the universe itself all matter and energy of our material universe Are literal thoughts thoughts are things, you know, they're actually energy matter vibration The idea being that everything is essentially thought into existence the law of attraction might sound familiar here But simply thinking about something does not make it happen. You have to have the correct vibration You have to plan carefully think about what your goals and desires are and maintain a mental state Consistent with them law to the principle of vibration Explains this a bit further what I mean by vibration is the signal the thought is giving out of your brain Everything is active. Everything is in motion matter Energy spirit are all simply different levels of vibration Obviously the vibration level of an ant is drastically different than a human being But the point is that everything is emitting certain amounts of energy You know, this relates to EMF electric and magnetic fields I've spoken about recently the mental state you're in emits a certain vibration So when you have outside factors such as radio frequency radiation a poor diet making you sick Your potential to emit the vibration you want is inhibited the principle of correspondence as Above so below by looking at something lesser or greater You can figure out the opposite an example of this is something as rudimentary as your gut feeling That basic gut feeling can help you figure out something far more complex than your brain could have ever solved It's impossible to know everything about everything that has existed So by using patterns observing what we do have our intuition allows us to deduce the impossible The principle of polarity everything has opposites This allows us to appreciate or strive for certain things in life when some people experience negativity They might seek out positivity if they feel sadness they might seek out joy you know recognizing these Contrasts and molding them to fit your thoughts and vibration is something that becomes ingrained in your mind with practice The principle of rhythm means that everything is constant motion the constant cycle of birth to death to rebirth Understanding that there is inevitability allows you to realize that nothing is permanent Once you comprehend that nothing is permanent you're able to remove the many stresses and anxieties of modern life The principle of cause and effect one of the simpler ones every action Instigates a reaction. There is no such thing as pure luck or chance Everything happens to you. You are the cause for the effects in your life This ties into your mental state and vibrations Dictating what events you're led into imagine you're on vacation in an unknown country and you walk down a sketchy alleyway and if you're emitting fear and panic and That type of vibration of uncertainty Then it's more likely those things are going to happen to you as opposed to emitting confidence It's okay I'm gonna get home and and there's two ways to categorize that The causes are your thoughts and your vibrations and what you're emitting currently The effects are the past what already happened what was already thought into existence Finally, we have the principle of gender that masculine and feminine traits can be found in everything It should be our goal to draw each of these energies when we deem fit masculine generally being assertive Exploratory and transformative while feminine is reflective protective and nourishing as you can imagine too much Feminine or too much masculine under certain circumstances can be the wrong thing You know incorrect amounts of either energy typically has undesirable outcomes So I mean hopefully most of you guys already know about this But if not, let me know and maybe we can talk about each of these things further So thank you guys for joining me today If you can please drop a like on the video leave a comment down below Subscribe so that YouTube can unsubscribe you next week and if you do want to support me further definitely check out Frank dash to final comm Thanks again for joining me today guys. I'll see you for tomorrow's video


Tom here from Orange Systems, and I'm joined again by Matt and a shady guy over here Jason. How you doing guys? I'm good We did this video just the other day, which will be linked down below You literally yesterday. I think I published it about how I would hack you and Cisco, you know prompting us with an example here, but a good example but this is a fun little breakdown we want to go through for what happened at Cisco and How they did which well too long didn't watch it did a good job but we're gonna break down the attack vectors here and Still some lessons learned and I in one of the first ones is really I got to jump to this right here MFA fatigue This is just clever Where you annoy someone where it's come up and said would you like to 2FA prompts so many times They're like the only way I can make this stop is to say yes Or the action we the user should have been trained to do is probably call someone and say like this thing's broken It's going crazy It's annoying me of course I can picture my wife being a more general end user if I did that with her MFA system. She may just press yes, but I hope that's not true because she works If you press deny too many times right like there's room for improvement there if I hit no 10 times Why is the 11th one coming through? Well, I would probably say that the threat actors offset capabilities of changing IPs rapidly is not happening So if they're hammering on the edge, it'd be really cool to see technology where you could actually Auto-ban that from even hitting the surface for x period of time, right? So this IP you'd have to change you'd force some tradecraft, but yeah, they are coming through its tour I mean like in all honesty, okay So maybe I force a denial of service attack But I can only force a denial of service attack if I have your password and I can successfully prompt you for MFA And in that case is it really should service be denied? I would argue yes Yeah, that's security before convenience for sure. I love it And and this is one of the things that the initial tech factors technically low tech And there's two things that allow them to gain access one This is a BO IOD system where people were logged into the browser to their Personal Gmail with password synchronization. So it's synchronizing passwords in there And so they were somehow able to leverage control over this personal computer Which then gave them the information needed to then swing over to? Logging into their business accounts that were synchronized with those passwords Yeah, but they didn't have 2FA is 2FA will save us until you're annoyed by the 2FA depressing it So it's actually not the most sophisticated levels of attack It's still pretty low hanging fruit here We were joking about this earlier when we started this little chat to lead to this video of people think it's a really Complicated attack all the time like this is really amazing cyber war of things and bits flying by nope They just hammered the 2FA button a lot and called them Yeah, and at this phase right so we have this initial vector We understand where it's coming from the only thing I'd say to Cisco's point is there clearly is a gap in their user Awareness training and the understanding of how they should have reacted what they should do around sensitive passwords and whether or not They should store them in their system, and I think a lot of executives We check off the box because we've given the training But I don't think that necessarily proves the training has been tested in its functional Right, and I think some of those things you might add to this is personal computing reviews Things around password usage testing of those things around this vishing attempts And so I'd say the only piece I will go negative on for Cisco is just that piece I think they may be have a gap in the training and maybe this is something to be added to the training program who pick a person and Annoy them with 2FA request and see what happens. It's actually a good idea. I'm gonna pick Matt Lee Oh, that's very nice of you. I really appreciate it shady guy namelessness Yeah, now from there We're gonna just jump down they did a lot of living off the land here and they did this to kind of evade detection We talk a lot about we're gonna lock it down so they can't run approved apps and things like that But this is something that's running on the system. Let's talk about living off the land for a minute Yeah, I mean it's the concept my dad always taught me of like don't jump me in a rock pile Because I'll probably pick up a rock. Yeah The situation and so I think living off the land is you know much to everything we have very Open and trust first type centrism and most things and once you're on that machine There's a lot of tools and things I can abuse that you know, you pointed to it yesterday Microsoft will not fix list. Well, you know walk the dog or dog walk that was just patched yesterday was known about for almost two Years and was originally on their operating as behaved list And now that it's been exploited and listed So I think the point is living off the land lets a threat actor or an adversary understand that I don't have to Bring tools that'll get me caught I can use the things that are around me that I already have here, right? So I have a media question to ask was this user in question like a local administrator on wherever he was logging into in Citrix Because a lot of these commands would just fail if they weren't right. Yeah, I'm following best practices there and that's why I think that's They had obviously because this person's just using a net local group Administrators so they're adding themselves to an admin username Z So this is a really interesting so they're able to control a lot of high-level privileges This is why we we talked about this and how I would hack you You don't want the users to have too much privilege on a local workstation because the threat actor if it assumes them It assumes the same level of privilege Yep, and then they use Mimikats, which I think one of the things that will speak towards as we go You know Cisco very much touts at how quickly they stopped it Jason You said as we started today, you know, and I saw the same stat 2.8 gigs was all that was ex-filter And so when you look at it, I have to imagine the command about four commands ago was what took triggered their incident response team Yes, my supposition. Yeah, right when you got into that Bringing down many many dump and being able to execute that is probably going to trigger most Effective and I think that's probably what alerted to them and being that they're Cisco They have some really advanced the telos people are no joke. They really good at what they do They probably wanted to go we know we want to watch what they're doing a little bit It's I think there's probably a little bit of that that went on because they wanted to dig deeper. Who's attacking us What's the threat actor group? Yeah, what's the threat actor group because they do attribution and things like that So they dove a lot in this and I think this is where They probably let them go a little further. They did have some redacted things here But they posted like this is just the beginning of more to come, you know them Sending my thing else. Yeah Yeah Wait the more to come like there's literally nothing. Oh, oh, oh, no, they stole they stole any connect mobility client I can't get that from any Look at the juicy bits of name titles we made Yeah, so it's I think they probably In a very controlled way watch them because they actually go down and list of all their commands everything they were doing they also Break it down here. Let's see go down. They have the whole midter attack mapping in here So they really did a nice job of laying this out But this probably took a little more time They have the hashes and the IP address used for talking to the C2 server So I think they probably took some time to let these people they wanted to gather intel And they may have known the fences on the sensitivity of data and how do you Gresh and control at that point? I mean it became a honey pot to some extent Yeah, I was gonna say if they maybe the user did report it and they turned the user's account into a honey pot 100% that would be that'd be next-level awesome Yeah, the one thing I will say, you know when we talk about cyber security for anybody who's still listening to me drone one When we talk about cyber security, we think about it as identify our assets and our systems that are touching them, right? Protect put out the systems, but most marketing focuses on protect. It's all about we're gonna be the best We're gonna stop it all no bad thing will ever happen to you Then why the hell is there three-fifths of it after that because you have detect which is figure out the boom Right of boom being you know Respond, how do I stop it? How do I honey pot this account? You know to shady guys point down there, right? And then how do I then recover and I think I partially more value is gained in Cisco's response Right then the failures in the front end and the weaknesses because they'll always be there So anyways, I'll get off my soapbox, but that's the takeaway. I would say no It is and right here's kind of in Cisco's response, you know, they observe the TTPs They are looking at exploits they created two clam AV signatures of it So Cisco's like, you know, merely putting this information back out there That's what kind of leads me to think the once they seen and it triggered on their side internally They let it kind of like you said turn a user into a honey pot So we understand the full scope of what this threat actors capable of they even commented I like this this proves they have a lot of detail in the logging. They said we noticed typos So we know these were manually done late like we typo'd something here type out something there So this is a threat actor being very careful in the thought of not just running They may have a playbook, but it wasn't a script. They were running on here You know, you typo a few things occasion. I know I do that Well, if I recall the three the three attributions that are being floated around are all somewhat Intelligence affiliated in some form and so stealing intellectual property from a Cisco user is a very targeted human at a keyboard Is not all that unexpected in my mind. So yeah, I think a few takeaways from this are really simple 502 user and user training are two of those low-hanging fruits Simple as that don't let people use the same personal devices They log into their personal Gmail and their work one that is just you know, even my work from home employees They have completely separate workstations for this reason Because I just don't it the risk isn't there you got to treat those separations Oh those yeah, the any the 502 keys and UB key being one of the most popular ones on the market But there are others out there and even the UB key was a relatively affordable They're just so simple to do and if you really dig into I have a video I broke down on how like SSH works with 502 and things like that you look at some of the details You're like, oh, that's just clever and that's yeah, think about how hard is to get in the middle of I wish we had more support for it in like the common tool sets we use especially as MSPs as an MSP like nothing I use supports it other than like github and like yeah But you can but you can bring it in as a method of part of your MFA Structure so that as you do SSO and as you do extensibility of these tokens in different places It works and I'll give it the five second ELI five on these Essentially the difference is with my cell phone. It's on the publicly switched telephone network It can be stolen in many ways. It can be stolen on signaling system seven from a text message perspective Right, there's tons of things that can be done to attack that side. This is literally the eye of the beholder There's only I think one side channel attack against these. I think it's against the google token If I recall the titan token they found a certain token Yeah, but that's the only one and they had to have it and pry it out of my hands and take this plastic piece apart Even if you get my pin number that pin is only to this It has no transportability to anything else public facing. So 502 ELI five is it is a cryptographic way of saying I'm me that's not reachable out of the outside world only by my fingers. Yep. Yep. Yep saves you a lot of 2fa that's a good one and uh Locking down power shell usage making sure people aren't local administrators pretty pretty simple stuff And obviously having a high-level monitoring like Cisco does to be a lord of this Yeah, a huge thing there, right? It's like clearly they had like sysmon running on these boxes because they were able to get everything that people did And a lot of people don't do that, right? So once you have an incident you're playing like schrodinger's like breach Like what did they do once they were in right because you don't have any visibility into into what was actually run Yeah, they knew I mean they didn't just know the commands type. They knew the typos. Yeah Yeah, 100 the inter didn't work go again. Please Yeah, absolutely In the final further reading Ali people with is going to be the dark night diaries episode 36 with tinker sack Which is called Jeremy from marketing Great one because it's a fun listen because it's storytelling It's a red team engagement and it's basically a red team are walking through everything they did with the you know Obviously targeted adversary like Cisco was and what happened next and it's just a fun I won't spoil the ending for you But uh it walks through almost this scenario of living off the land using power shell These are these same type of techniques were used in that particular episode So I always like give people something to listen to something further reading and that one's fun Also, I'll take your sec on twitter. He's uh, he's fun Cool So all right, I'll leave links to where you can find more information about the shady guy and matt and of course our Other video of how I would hack you. Uh, that's been a lot of fun. I'll link you down below and thanks Yeah And thank you for making it all the way to the end of this video If you've enjoyed the content Please give us a thumbs up if you would like to see more content from this channel Hit the subscribe button and the bell icon If you like to hire a short project head over to laurance systems.com And click the hires button right at the top to help this channel out in other ways There's a join button here for youtube and a patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated For deals discounts and offers check out our affiliate links in the description of all of our videos Including a link to our shirt store where we have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and designs come out Well randomly so check back frequently and finally our forums forums.laurancesystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics covered on this channel Thanks again for watching and look forward to hearing from you


And this one is on the reaction between acids and metals. This is not a neutralization reaction. Water is not a product of this particular reaction. In fact, this is better described as a displacement reaction where in most cases what you'll find is the metal, a more active metal, will be displacing hydrogen ions from the solution. And so we have some slightly different products. Now one thing I should say at the beginning is that the concentration of the acid and the type of acid can actually change the products of this reaction. We're going to simplify things in this particular video in looking at the reaction of metals with dilute acid solutions, but where the solutions are concentrated you can actually find some of the less reactive metals will react, but they won't always produce the same product. So we might have a look at a few of those examples as extension examples or as examples of interest in class, but for now we just want to focus on these key general types of reactions. So the first thing we want to do is we have with the last two groups of reactions is to look at the general equation. So here's a general equation, an acid and again as I mentioned we're talking about dilute acids plus metal produces salt and hydrogen gas. We'll use the same sort of examples that we've looked at previously to give us an example. So hydrochloric acid, which as we know is a solution reacting with magnesium solid will form hydrogen gas and a salt. And again the salt we can determine by looking at, well firstly the metal itself, the metal effectively is going to push the cation out of the solution. So magnesium is going to be the first part of this salt and the cation is going to come from the acid as it usually does. So this particular salt would be magnesium chloride and using our NAG SAGs we know that group 7 elements form soluble salts with a couple of exceptions. Magnesium is not on the exception list so therefore this will be a soluble salt in solution. And so that brings us of course to the net ionic equations which we've been looking at previously for some of our other examples. So in the net ionic equation if we split up our acids as we have and of course I've done this without balancing the equation at the top you'll notice that when the equation is not balanced you'll end up with problems later on.  But balancing equations is obviously a very, very important part of writing of your chemistry. So we've also got magnesium and as a solid it is not an ionic form. And they're going to produce magnesium ions and chloride ions too and hydrogen gas. So as we've done previously where we have spectator ions we can always cancel those out. In this case we only have one spectator ion which is the chloride ions. When we cancel those out our net ionic equation is going to be 2H+, plus mg solid goes to mg2+, plus h2 gas. And of course these are in aqueous solution so I'll just throw those in as well there. So there's our net ionic equation. The chloride ions, the anion, has been cancelled out because it's common, it remains in the solution from the beginning to the end. But what we've done is we've basically used our more active metal to push out the hydrogen ions from the solution.