Okay, well, thank you for the kind introduction and I'd like to kind of highlight a few of the studies and experiments that we're doing downstairs some of the projects that we're working on. It's quite active downstairs, but I've decided that we're going to focus on three technologies that I personally think are the most promising and the highest impact. And again, this talk is basically just to kind of show the story that we have as we go from translation to development of medical devices, preclinical testing and ultimately even the clinical use. So I am a stakeholder equity owner of Seronis, Maxwell Biomedical, Nanolinia and XN Health. Every technology that's discussed is in a preclinical testing phase at this point. So the way we're going to organize this talk, we're going to first start talking about the wireless pacing for low energy and perceptible defibrillation. We'll then switch over and discuss some of our recent findings with conductive hydrogels for patient specific therapy and then finally we'll finish up with a little blurb about Excalibur or cath lab on a bench, and we'll discuss that. And it's a really cool opportunity I think for a lot of folks to become involved in medical device innovation. So let's start with the low energy pacing termination of fibrillation specifically. In this case, we'll talk about atrial fibrillation. We all know ICD use delivers typically 10 to 40 joules of energy to defibrillate the heart and multiple shocks may be given we also know that ICD shocks can be profoundly traumatic to patients. And it's just not a matter of ICD is it's often you'll have patients who come in, who have atrial fibrillation, and they need to get defibrillated and obviously that is an outpatient, often an outpatient process that involves you know being hospitalized and even as a same day procedure, a brief period of anesthesia. But what if you could actually terminate the AFib without delivering a high energy shock without it actually even being perceptible to the patient, we know that the pacing outputs the pacing energies are about one 80th that even the lowest intensity shock energies that are at the threshold for detection in terms of pain typically it's about one joules, and the powers that we're working with with with the pacing is about one 80th intensity and essentially completely imperceptible as anyone with a pacemaker can can tell you. When we talk about our work, you know, Igor Afimov and his and his group and his group initially at in St. Louis and now in George Washington University in DC, have shown that the concept of low energy termination of fibrillation is not is not a is not a crazy one for lack of a better term, but actually you can really do this, provided that you can deliver energy outputs from multiple sites and you can see that if you if you do that the energy requirement for termination of atrial fibrillation gradually decreases and and you can actually have termination of cardiac arrhythmia, delivering just by pacing from different sites, but these are shocks that are delivered. These are shocks that are typically around one jewel and therefore they are actually perceptible to the patient. So our concept was, we use absolutely no shocking outputs we use purely pacing outputs, and this is for atrial fibrillation so we decided, let's try test this concept and let's see if this actually does work if we can potentially terminate fibrillation purely by pacing. So we induced atrial fibrillation by giving a systemic new stigma injection and then we gave a citricoline close to the sinus node and rapid pacing. Often you didn't even need the rapid pacing once you give the citricoline and the new stigma, the, the animals go into fibrillation on their atrial fibrillation. So we then delivered pacing therapy using a custom built pacemaker to pace from multiple locations at varying delays. So we have this topera firm map catheter that was initially used by Abbott it's mostly for sensing purposes well but we decided to use it. It's a large basket catheter so it works really perfectly in terms of putting it in the left atrium and having good contact so that was our initial experiment and what the way we actually are driving the pacing is this cartoon will will note it's not just burst pacing we're actually going sequential we're going around the heart and I'm going to let this play. One more time. So we go around the heart and as we go. You can see different poles are getting stimulated.  Why do this well we know that by phasic shocks with defibrillation are more effective. And this is a way and actually computer modeling has suggested for pace termination of fibrillation the same fact holds that by phasic will be better than monophasic and this is our way of mimicking a bi phasic pacing train. So it's it's not simple overdrive facing and obviously to do this you need multiple electrodes around the heart around the atrial. Atrial fibrillation again, as I said, with the new stigma and acetylcholine, we observed the duration of the each episode for the therapy episode after one minute, we would provide the therapy with pacing. And in the control cases after one minute of sustained atrial fibrillation we would wait until the fibrillation spontaneously terminated. And this could take up to 10 minutes. If there was no termination after 10 minutes, we would then cardiovert the animal and then we would also use the time to sinus rhythm for each episode as a marker of efficacy of the treatment. Here's an example. On the left, you can see that so here we have the splines, making contact with the with the left atrium. And here is atrial fibrillation that we induced using the new stigma and acetylcholine. Here is the burst pacing that you can see, and you can even appreciate here it's not a regular cadence you see this. There's a there, the cadence to this and the locations and the activation you see is is different but if you were to drop a line right in the middle, you're pacing from these electrodes, moving along and then from here you switch around and you start pacing in the same electrodes but in the reverse order. And essentially it becomes a mirror reflection image. And then after we're done here you can see that the animal is back in sinus rhythm. And, and so this was, you know, this was a very, very helpful observation. We only delivered five to eight microjoules per pulse, far, far less than the pain threshold of one 0.1 to one jewel. And you can see here that in terms of the time, maintain time to termination of AFib, there was a clear improvement clear difference in series of actually three experiments and three different animals on three different days. But here's the problem. The problem is, you know, not necessarily that anyone doubts the efficacy of such an approach. The problem is people haven't been able to do it. And why is that the reason is, as you can appreciate there, you requires a large number of pacing electrodes. And until now, that really has prevented anyone from from looking into the concept or the possibility of terminating fibrillation by But now, and working with ID and Baba Connie at who's initially at rice and now is at UCLA as a collaborator. We have developed these wireless powered pacemakers miniaturized essentially one by one centimeter and down the road significantly even smaller than that. These are powered using electromagnetic induction, much like you charge your iPhone wirelessly. And we use these electrodes can be then delivered to terminate the fibrillation. So these electrodes are about one centimeter, and they can be placed across they can be decorated across the posterior wall or whichever location that you decide in the left atrium. They're then magnetic, they're wirelessly communicating using em induction with a power generator that sits, you know, subcutaneous as an implantable just like you would any other implantable but it is wireless so you have wireless induction, you have wireless charging of the power generator, and you know, you're you're circumventing some of the major issues that we typically have with device therapy which is battery changes and the need for complications from lead failure or device malfunction or lead fracture. Here is another example this is more recent. Again, give the neostigmine and acetylcholine and I do want to bring this point up. Look how rapid this atrial fibrillation is. This is much faster than what we typically see in the cath lab because these animals don't have scar and also the neostigmine and acetylcholine can work basically by decreasing the refractory period. So you can activate more and more rapidly, given tissue. And so you get this really really rapid atrial fibrillation and if anything, this atrial fibrillation at this rate would be more challenging to terminate with with with the pacing protocol one would expect, but you can see that even with these and all of these studies that I show you that's the mechanism that we induce the effort, but you can see you have atrial fibrillation here. So the pacing burst starts right around here, and you deliver the pacing therapy. And then, after this, you notice that, while it was completely chaotic here, you, sorry. While it was completely chaotic here now you have organization on the right side. And this organization is actually something we call atrial flutter. Then the atrial flutter spontaneously terminates. Now in this, I have marked up this region here, where we actually feel that the termination actually occurred of the AFIP. And you can see, I've magnified it here and if you keep a close eye here, you can see that the local activation with every pacing spike that we're delivering for therapy is now driving that pacing spike is driving the local activation. In other words, you captured the tissue, you are now pacing the atrium.   So that's, that's, that's one of the projects that we're working on. Another project that we find very, very interesting and intriguing is using injectable electrodes for improving pacing therapy and also to mitigate the risk of re-entrance arrhythmia. So how does, you know, how does this work? So first of all, we all know we just discussed the limitations of pacemakers as they are right now. Epicardial leads can obviously are placed transvenously and all these leads, you know, with regards to especially cardiac resynchronization therapy, their epicardial leads can have malfunctions. They can have dislodgement, the devices can get infected, things of that nature. And so our thought was not only that, but what if we could make something that does not use these leads necessarily, but as an extension of these. So in other words, you could consider using if there was a portal to be able to paste tissues that up to now no one could paste. And what we're talking about mostly is the mid-myocardial tissues, where most of, you know, you can often get a site for re-entry where you get delayed conduction and delayed conduction is the hallmark of re-entry and ventricular events, especially post-infarct. So a couple of things, if we can paste in the mid-myocardium, first of all, you're improving cardiac resynchronization to a level that is dramatically greater than even any of the devices we have right now, which have, you know, just four electrodes. If you inject into the venous branches, a conductive hydrogel, and if those venous branches, as you, as they feel retrogradually, then come in contact with the tissue very, very intimately, if you will, with the tissue that is now, say, scarred or delayed in terms of its conduction. If you could capture this entire region as it's going deeper and deeper into the mid-myocardium, you're effectively turning the mid-myocardium into a pacing electrode, what we call a planar wavefront activation, planar pacing, so that the entire myocardium is now simultaneously activated. We just did a study on this actually on Monday and we don't, we have some nice images, but we still have to clean them up a bit. But what we found in that situation, and you'll see a little bit more detail here, is that when you paste, you can actually create even in areas in the mid-myocardium, deliver that energy and you get an entire wavefront that even in the depths of scar is now activating simultaneously in the heart. And that eliminates the delayed activation. That eliminates these delayed potentials that we often see, which is the hallmark in the necessary condition for reentry, which is by far the most common cause of sudden death has been tricular arrhythmia is caused by reentry. So how does this work? Here's a little, so we inject the two components of this hydro gel into the venous epicardial venous branch. They, soon as they are mixed here, soon as they're combined, then you can tune how long it takes for the material to gel. And you can actually also tune the conductivity of this material. Right now, the material that we have is about three times more conductive than normal myocardium. You then take a standard pacemaker, you attach it to the base of the hydro gel, and then you deliver the pacing out. And you are checking at that point to see, are you going to be activating as a point that's spreading out? Or are you going to be able to simultaneously, since all of this is essentially one electrode, are you going to be able to actually activate the entire myocardium, including those little regions in the scar tissue that cause the delayed potentials and the reentry. If you can activate everything at the same time, you have been resynchronized or you have brought back the same homogeneous conduction pattern that is typical of native conduction and not disease conduction so you don't have the wave breaks that are caused by scar that caused reentry. So the concept of pacing this entire tissue, this planar wave front, eliminates or potentially could eliminate any delayed conduction or normalize that delayed conduction so that you eliminate that substrates for reentry. So here's, you know, a little bit more of a materials discussion of what is going into the cross linking to create these conductive hydrogels. What we decided to do is we injected these hydrogels into the AIB, which may look familiar to many of us as the Venus partner of the LAD. And the reason we did this is straightforward. If you are having in for this technology to work, you have to be able to localize where the scars. Okay. And at least in the case of ischemic cardiomyopathy or ischemic scars brought on by coronary blockage. This is typically a well defined vascular territory that is scar because the occlusion is that some well defined location in the in the coronary arterial vasculature. Every arterial bed is then drained by a specific Venus bed. So now if you say you have an anterior infarct and that anterior infarct was involving I don't know the mid LAD. The Venus drainage of that tissue that was involved by that infarct is being drained by the anterior and turventricular vein, which is the Venus component or the Venus partner of the LAD. And therefore, if you inject in the Venus branch that corresponds to that arterial branch of that same territory, you are by definition injecting and introducing these hydrogels, and this pacing ability into those exact same tissues that are scarred that are the focus for reentry and have the substrate for the delay conduction. This allows you to tailor perfectly your therapy to the infarct. Now this is probably not going to work as well when you have conditions such as sarcoid or non ischemic cardiomyopathy where you have patchy diffuse scar. But for the vast majority of patients with ischemic cardiomyopathy with scars that are due to a vascular bed being occluded. This technique will allow you to once you know that the region of the scar you go into the Venus branch, and you inject the hydrogels, and you start pacing, and we've, we saw that you know you can actually pace areas that have in the mid myocardium, even over dense scar. Again this experiment you have to take my word for it we did it on Monday and just was a little too short for us to be able to get all the data out. So, let's talk a little bit about these ionic hydrogels. You know, they are conductive, they must be bio stable, they must be cytocompatible, and they must be mechanically robust and the data that we have to date suggests that all of these criteria are are are valid. Right at this point, you can see that the myocardial conductivity is about one third of the conductivity of the hydrogels. Now, there is a concern that if you are now conducting more rapid than native conduction, well then that can potentially be a cause for reentry to and that, yes, that is definitely something that needs to be looked at, and needs to be studied. But keep in mind when we have planar wavefront activation, a very large amount of the myocardium is being simultaneously activated. And so there is that you are essentially creating a homogeneous activation time. And even if this is three times fatter faster than normal myocardium conductivity, if you are activating a whole block simultaneously you have homogeneity in that region. And so the chances of reentry are probably going to be less, but again, this clearly has to be studied a bit more in future studies. So the hydrogen, as I said, we mix them, you can tune the curing period. And then we directly inject the hydrogel into the AIV. This is our experimental setup. This is with sinus rhythm. This is us pacing actually with and through the hydrogel. So it works and afterwards, when you take the hydrogel out, it's quite resilient, it takes the shape of the blood vessels, the venous blood vessels that it was injected into. And so here's I think my favorite slide of all here, other than determination with with pacing of a fit. Here you see a baseline.  You also do what we call point pacing. So these are both point pacing with the hydrogel and the metal and we would expect these to be the same activation they have the same relatively same conductive properties. Then we also did a hydrogel line, which was not injected just a long line that we placed on the outer surface of the heart. And then finally, we injected the hydrogel that was another arm so yet a B and C and this was the arm that we injected the hydrogels. And that's where it goes. Our hypothesis and what we found in necropsy afterward is indeed that the hydrogels go into and take the shape of these tiny branches of the veins that are draining the infarcted region that is the source of the delayed potentials. Also, we know that the mid myocardium, at least at the septal level is where the conduction a good part of the conduction system rest. And for us, a first step to say, Okay, are we actually pacing in the mid myocardium or is this just surface pacing was exactly the way we did that was to compare the morphology of pacing when you have epicardial hydrogels, not in the vein, not percolating into the mid myocardium, and you pace from there and you compare it to what happens when you pace with the hydrogel that's percolated in the mid myocardium. You would expect if our hypothesis is that this is approaching the mid myocardial conduction conduction system this is pertingy system that the cures morphology would probably be a bit more similar than native. And so here you go you see on the top panel here. This is the native cures so p wave cures p wave cures. These are not synced in time, I just want to be clear so you're not necessarily going to see an electrode or signal here for this but focus should be on what this qrs looks like. This is the native qrs baseline. When we pace from the hydrogel point. And I can tell you that these all the hydrogel point, the metal electrode, and the lines were somewhat similar to each other. You can see that here you had an initial upward deflection, and now it's going down. So again keep in mind for all these tracings this is your normal, this is the best way to summarize it for metal electrodes for point hydrogel and line hydrogels. The morphology that you get is if you can appreciate it here is quite different than the morphology that you have at base. However, with the hydrogel pacing, what you see is with the pacing artifact there's a slight delay note that slight delay isn't here this in our hypothesis and this is something that's in the community is relatively well expect accepted is if you pace, and there's a slight delay that actually you're probably going into the conduction system and this is one of the things that these days we see with left bundle pacing when when you have a pacemaker and you're trying to actually capture the left. You see the slight delay as the his purkinje system is activated and therefore there's no surface activation, and then when you have that morphology of the trs. It is substantially more similar to what we have in in the case of the metal electrodes, or the point hydrogels or the linear hydrogel, non injected into the AIB. And all this but is it safe I mean you're you're including Venus branches you're doing all kinds of stuff well, you know, from a practical perspective, every time you put an epicardial LV lead in into the, you know, to do a by V your you're putting a lead that is essentially close to occlusive, because we typically go all the way distally until we can't push that lead out anymore so we we're doing this right now in the Venus system, and this is the Venus system that the experiments are being done it. And so that clinical picture kind of does give us a little bit of confidence but we decided to look into it, even in more detail and, as it turns out, you, if you look at the level of inflammation and necrosis. We did an injection we survived them for two weeks, and then we did the autopsy you see that there's a lot more inflammation that the vast majority of this inflammation is occurring where the injection was being delivered where all the instrumentation was being done. In this, in this region, right, this is the region that you know you're instrumenting and things, but the more distal areas as you're going farther and farther into the AIV farther more distally into the AIV. You see that there is essentially no changes no necrosis essentially very little damage. And so this was an initial indicator that we probably are going to be okay that the Venus, you know we're not going into the major Venus branches we're going into the side branches. We're not necessarily, at least based on this locally even there was no effect on myocardial necrosis. So here's the catheter delivery system. It's a dual plunger system. It allows even injections of the precursor to solutions. And it becomes the two lumens go into a single lumen catheter and then the mixing occurs here. And then you curing is pre programmed and as I said, tuned, you prevent the backflow you wait for the curing to occur.  And then the final thing I'd like to talk about today is catheter lab on a bench. This is an idea that I would like to shout out to Matthews john and Allison post in our, in our lab who came up with this idea, and I'll be introducing you to everyone here at the end of the I think every one of us at some point as physicians has had a period where they said, Well, you know, I have an idea. What if we did something like this, or what if we did something like that to help of a specific pain point in the course of our care of our patients. Well, you know, drawing something on the back of a napkin and then actually prototyping it are two very different things and, and this is where we hope to provide a service essentially to the community to the medical community, where if there's a clinical and there's well defined requirements and there's an idea that you have. We certainly can try to help with the prototyping the testing and the validation of that. And the ideas, everything remains yours, but we provide we can provide this service for you. And we have actually done it already and we have published. So, again, a step back. We had a paper that we were in which we were looking at different ablation characteristics for for ablation catheters. No need to really get into the details of that but suffice to say you can change the settings on the catheter the power the duration the force with which you are ablating you can have irrigated or non irrigated ablation energy deliveries you can have internal irrigation and external irrigation but for our purposes. The thing to keep in mind is that an ablation catheter resistively heats tissue, and it does so with an AC current output at about three to 500 kilohertz. The depth and the width of the lesion is dependent on these on multiple features that I was talking about. There is however one other variable to we talked about I just discussed the power, the force, the duration, but typically RF energy is delivered in a monophasic unipolar. I should say not a monophasic but in unipolar fashion, and what I mean by that is that the energy comes from the tip of the ablation catheter.  So as the energy from the tip of the ablation catheter is going away it's dissipating the concentration of that energy is dissipating as it goes towards that back patch. That is in the mid myocardium and you're trying to ablate it you're trying to ablate tissue in the middle of the myocardial tissue. In that case what if you want to be able to create a deeper lesion. Well, one of the things you could potentially do is instead of putting a back patch for your indifferent electrode, you bring a second ablation catheter and that becomes your indifferent electrode that becomes the ground electrode. And when you do that now you are not dissipating that energy you are concentrating it, and you're enabling deeper lesions to form and you can see how that essentially works here with with bipolar the lesions are deeper it traverses the entire mid myocardium. So we decided that we were going to look and study different catheter properties and different ablation properties with bipolar versus a unipolar ablation. And so this is exemplar at this is just an example that I'm offering for what we do at Excalibur but you, we have a simple setup for bipolar ablation. In our second generation we actually circulating we had a circulating temperature water bath, and this this work was actually published by Matthews, and the rest of the team at on and heart rhythm, and you can then see that in our most recent gen three the unipolar ablation capability and the ability to monitor temperature to monitor collateral tissue damage during ablation was there and you can see. The whole setup for you, and it's in a bath, and we can actually control the amount of force that's being delivered to the catheters to the ablation catheters we have direct visualization, we can control the power that's being delivered, we can switch from bi phasic, I'm sorry from bipolar to unipolar pacing or ablation also just by removing catheter. So we have very good control over what we're doing, and you can see in real time a very detailed granular analysis of different results on the tissues when you alter some of these pacing, some of these ablation variables. Now, for the more most recent. There's a, we want to have and we do have precise catheter control of precise bath temperature and flow control, and we have a stationary and different electrode, and right now we basically can look at different properties, different ablation variables, again, as I was discussing earlier, and analyze in real time, what is happening and it's it's really remarkable to see the tissue changes. In front of you in real time, I think that anyone who ever touches an ablation catheter should at some point early on, preferably see what the ablation what what this does to the tissue. And so this is a perfect opportunity for that and to have future studies to have better understanding for example one of the other things that we are looking at right now is the concept of insurance lesions where an EP very frequently we will have we will do an ablation we'll see a good result and we'll say okay let's just stay there and give another burn as an insurance lesion. Do these insurance lesions work or not well we looked into this and stay tuned it should be out in press here hopefully in the next few weeks but the bottom line is that I would advise you not to do an insurance lesion. And these are the publications we've had recently, and, and, you know, it's it's it's been ramping up, and we look forward to having a 2022 that is even more productive than our 2021. And of course, this couldn't happen without help grants. The McDonald grant has been extremely helpful at the earliest stages to give you that initial money that you need to start those first few experiments to build on that. We've been collaborating with electrical engineers at at Rice University, and we have a patient specific multi sites in order to create kind of a patient specific type programmable multi site pacing to terminate the atrial fibrillation. And of course we look at the sensed events and correlate atrial sensing with the substrate of fibrillation so that we can give the appropriate pacing therapy. We have an R01 NIH R01 looking into this this this concept, and we have been blessed with philanthropy from a number of foundations are collaborators across the country but mostly obviously focused in in Texas. And here's the team. Alison post, Matthews john scholar buckin drew Bernard and pi arms of the 90. And that is it. Happy to take any questions and thank you.


Pretty soon, and without that perspective we lose track. I would also say that this notion that these great world religions are constantly at war with each other depends upon an understanding of religion that sees it as a series of empirical absolute reveal truths that we can either prove or disprove. That is not, in my view, what religion truly is. What religion truly is, is a way of living, a way of life. And when you examine all the great religions, there's so much in common. The question of mutual love and forgiveness, the question of service, the question of humility, the question indeed of how the more you give to others the more you might receive, the paradoxes that make human beings' lives worth living. And the ability to construct however brilliant a technological achievement does not make a single person happier, a single person more spiritually satisfied. And I would also argue the last 250 years has indeed seen human reason completely explode and create an extraordinary civilization of technological and physical extraordinary lengths. Let me also point out that in those 250 years we have probably set in motion the destruction of our entire planet. The machinery of the individual desire to do well and to prosper has been so unleashed that it has wrought unbelievable havoc on the natural climate and the natural operation of the Earth. And to that extent, Western civilization has to answer for that. It is no good creating a civilization if it destroys the very habitat in which it exists, especially at the rate it's going. And so again, I would say reason alone would tell you, why not? More and more money, more and more wealth. Look at China how fantastic it is. Or it would say in America, look, the average standard of living is actually higher now than before. And yet countless people are suffering from unprecedented levels of depression. The suicide levels are up. The large swaths of this country are numbing themselves on opioids. So many people are restless and angry because the jobs they do don't really add meaning to their lives. That these are huge questions, paradoxical questions, that the promise of reason progress never really fully realized until the last minute. And the other part of it is that we constructed a machine of wealth creation, product creation, production of things and things and things to sell and buy and sell and buy. That it can't be stopped. None of us can stop this machine from China, through India, through the use of the world's resources. And it is an unbelievably ecological destructive force. And it will, if it continues, it is not stopped. It will be the greatest crime humanity has committed on this planet because it will be destroying the very planet that gave us life. So let me take two of those issues first. Let's start with the depression and the fact that people are so miserable today. And indeed, there is a problem. I'm not going to deny the problem exists. And it's a problem of meaning. It's a problem of purpose. And I think to that extent, I think that Western civilization still has work to do. That the idea of applying reason to human purpose, to human morality, to philosophy is a work in progress. And that the enlightenment was immediately attacked. And the anti-enlightenment movement, which dominates the world today, the anti-Western civilization movement, which I think dominates today, has not provided and not allowed for the advancement of ideas that I think that would provide spiritual sustenance to individuals. Spiritual sustenance. And indeed, I would add, the welfare state, I think, is to a large extent responsible for this depression. If you look at where it happens, you know, it's stunning to me. Today, in places like Ohio, you know, people have lost their jobs over the last 30, 40 years because of industries have closed. And they sit at home waiting for those jobs to come back because politicians promised them that one day the jobs will come back. They sit at home waiting for the welfare check because they become dependent on the state to support them.  There are plenty of jobs in America today. Northwest Arkansas is booming, has been booming for decades. And people don't go there. They stay at home in Ohio using their opioids, waiting for the miracle to come because our politicians and our intellectuals and the welfare state implicitly have told them, don't worry, we'll take care of you in their message. If you see statistics about the willingness of Americans to cross state lines for work, they move as we all used to. It's way down. Americans don't move from state to state anymore, partially because they lose their benefits, partially because they're just waiting around for the Messiah to come or Donald Trump to come and save them. So I don't think it's capitalism, I don't think it's reason that has brought us to where it is. Indeed, it's the rejection of capitalism and they're not taking reason far enough for finding meaning, purpose, and applying ethics and developing an ethic of living as an individual in the world in which we live that has brought us to where we are in terms of this depression. And it's a lot of it has to do with the lack of real personal responsibility. You're not the superficial kind of politicians to talk about. But a real personal responsibility and the real personal responsibility means taking responsibility on your own life and find purpose, meaning, and live it, live your life, make your life the best that it can be.  Now, again, I think the welfare state and I think the regulatory state and I think the mixed economy suppresses those opportunities dramatically, particularly if you're poor. But there's still enough of them going home, taking opioids and dying slowly. Do you know when the greatest opioid epidemic in this country was? No. In the late 19th century, when there was no welfare state, and it happened partly because of the Civil War and afterwards because puppies were grown for the wounded. It was the only actual painkiller anybody had. And in that same period, it spread massively. What was going on in that period? It wasn't a welfare state. It was massive technological and social change caused by the engine of capitalism, by the desire for profit, which had more concern with the profit than with the stability and security of the lives of the people involved in it. Now, look, I am not attacking capitalism. I think it is the least worst option that we have of generating wealth and taking care of each other. But that is where it should be put in its place. The goal is human flourishing, and there are many ways to it. And no, it is not a failure of an individual who's lived in a community that had a meaning and a role and an industry and a community and a life. It's not that person's fault when that industry has moved on and those people are left. And there really isn't much to do. The truth is that also capitalism has created now automation and globalization in such a way that so many more people are actually not going to be needed anymore in our society. And the one thing that people need to be happy is to be needed. And I think those things are qualifying. I think we are learning now, as we've learned before in periods of massive disruption, that the people are hurt. And not everybody is capable of doing what you think they're capable of doing. Not everybody is capable of pioneering their own life. Most people don't want that. They want security. They want their family. They want a simple community. They want to live a life in happiness. You can go back, one small point and I'll shut up, hunter-gatherer societies had higher lifespans in general, more leisure, better diets, and although they had occasional rather bloody fights, nonetheless could be seen to be flourishing human beings in a way which the early 21st century has not provided. So I disagree with all of that. Not surprising. No, I think if you expect little from people, you'll get little. That is, if you tell people that yes, it's not their fault and they shouldn't strive and they shouldn't be self-starters and they shouldn't go out and pursue their own happiness, then they won't if you say it often enough and reinforce it with the things like the welfare state. And capitalism is an unmitigated, amazing success to call it the least of all evils, is to denigrate it in a way that it doesn't deserve. If you look at human life 250 years ago, 300 years ago, 400 years ago, when the cathedral was bought, think about what that cathedral required in order to build all these peasants who were barely surviving, where life expectancy was in the 30s, nothing, nothing. And then whatever they had, a little bit is taken from them or they put into endangered servitude to build this, in a sense, monstrosity pyramid in honor of what? In honor of the elites of the time in order to serve the elites of the time. No. In order to worship God. To worship God who has done what for them? They're barely surviving. Half the kids are dying before the age of 10. They live short and horrific lives. It's not pleasant. So yes, today, life expectancy in the United States the last three years has declined a little bit. We're living into our 80s. Technology doesn't provide happiness. Of course it does. It provides the happiness that our children don't die at childbirth. It provides the happiness that we see them grow up. It provides the happiness of providing leisure and a million other things, little things that we enjoy. The fact that I can turn on the light and read a book in the evening instead of going to sleep because that's all I could do 400 years ago before we had electricity. The fact that I can... Every aspect of this technology enhances my life in dramatic, significant ways and in ways that make it possible for me to enjoy all these spiritual benefits. I can now listen to every piece of music. Ever written. Ever written. On my iPhone any time of day, anywhere in the world at a marginal cost of zero. If that doesn't provide a little bit more happiness I don't know what does. It surely does provide happiness to me. I love music and I get incredible spiritual joy from the fact that I can listen to it. So let's not detach technology from happiness. It's crucial. And let's not forget that because of technology there are 8 billion people living in the world today who wouldn't live. About 7 billion, 7.5 billion wouldn't be around if not for that industrial revolution. If not for the fact that we have developed all these technologies that make it possible for them to live and to thrive and to succeed. And yes, I do place the responsibility and the whole idea that technology displaces jobs sorry, but as an economist. Really? I mean this is the argument we've heard for 250 years as economists. The Luddites have always argued that at every point I remember my Marxist uncle in 1987 telling me that PC's were going to take over the world and there will be no jobs any day now. And there are more jobs now than ever. You've got millions of people in China working now. You can denigrate China with all this trade stuff, but people who used to be starving starving are today in the middle class and are living good lives. And if you go to China you see the dynamism and excitement of people who used to be poor and now are middle class and now have some material wealth and the spiritual value that that provides the spiritual value that they now benefit from because they can now live a decent life and don't have to live in squalor in the villages. And you can still go to the villages in China where they still live in squalor. It ain't fun and it isn't spiritually good and it's materially good for any of those people living in that squalor. So there are more people on the planet today than ever before. They're producing more than ever before. There are more jobs than there ever were before. The idea that in 10 years there will be fewer jobs or 50 years there will be fewer jobs I think there's no empirical evidence for that there's no reason to believe that indeed every historical fact suggests the exact opposite. There will be more jobs, more opportunities more ways to do stuff in 50 years that are unimaginable to us today. What we need today what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life was guided by reason by the intellect. Not by feelings wishes, whims or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist brought. Using the super chat and I noticed yesterday when I was enrolled for support for the show, many of you stepped forward and actually supported the show for the first time so I'll do it again. Maybe we'll get some more today. If you like what you're hearing if you appreciate what I'm doing then I appreciate your support those of you who don't yet support the show please take this opportunity go to uranbrookshow.com slash support or go to subscribestar.com uranbrookshow and make a kind of to keep this going. I'm not sure when the next...


As you can see, we've got a poll for you. So please go ahead and weigh in on this. You have the bios. We have an absolutely fantastic panel to help us with this question of, will the cyber defenders prevail? And what will it look like in terms of securing the information age? Our arc is, as the date shows there, 2026. So what I'd actually like to begin is we're going to do something you're going to try and influence the audience. So very quickly, from each of you, what is your answer to this poll, the letter, and a one-sentence explanation for why you take that position? So I'm going to start with you, Peter. So I would say none of them. And so my answer is going to be no, no, no. This is not a presidential debate. I'm just going to try and crack it away with that. All right, I'll take B or C. I'll take B. And I think what it is, it's going to be more risk-based. So I think in terms of valuation of assets, I think there'll be better security for higher value assets. Let's see. Oh, very good. I take B as well, both from an evolution of our technology, but also a more informed public in terms of how to engage with the systems that are dependent on the technology. I'll make it three for three and say B as well. I think the move toward the cloud is probably the most important thing that we're doing in terms of providing real security. I guess I'd go for B prime, which would be more secure from a technical perspective, but I would say from a safety perspective, we won't be better off yet, that there will be more of the bad things that happen. We'll have bigger human impacts in 2026 than they do now. Okay, I'm going to take C because all those things may be in play, but also there will be a larger sort of landscape for people to go after. And of course the adversaries will evolve as well. So we're going to close off the poll right now and hopefully we will pop up the results to see what you thought and if you were persuaded by this overwhelming emphasis on B. And while we're waiting for that to go up, I'm going to, oh, here we go. All right, so B it seems, but not by a majority. Okay, so- That's called a rubia win for C. Right? Sorry. You have to make a DC joke when you're here. Yes. Actually, yeah, we're going to move on, move on. Okay, so let's actually begin actually with you, Matthew. How do you see the internet's infrastructure evolving over the next decade and how do you think that's going to affect the security environment? Sure, so at Cloud Flare, our mission is to help build a better internet. What I mean by that is, had we all known what the internet was going to be 25 years ago when the web was really coming into being, we would have put in place a lot of security, performance availability that it just doesn't have from the beginning. And I think that a lot of the move that you're seeing to cloud providers is really the move in the right direction, where if you are taking a security posture and instead of saying, every single organization needs to figure out how to run their own security systems at the highest possible level of, with people who really know what they're doing, it's a lot easier if we can bring those people into one organization or a handful of organizations like a Facebook or a Cloud Flare, as opposed to saying every single person out there has to go find CISO, which really has the skills to do that. So I think that the move towards cloud services, the move towards more of the infrastructure actually being provided in a multi-tenant basis, well that seems like a very scary thing on the surface to some organizations. It's actually probably the best thing that we can do in terms of really securing what it is in terms of data that's being stored. I actually wanna get the Raytheon perspective on this. So the move to cloud, does it mean that we can basically just outsource our security to experts and large companies that arguably could do this better and we don't have to name specific companies? Do you see that as the evolution in this case? I do think that's a key part of the evolution is Matthew just indicated you cannot out-hire the cyber threat, right? As we talk about IoT and that's stretching further. The ability to move to the cloud and then have a centralization of capability allows you to extend its scale to have the niche capabilities there. But then also that next leap forward is the automation, moving from a signature-based threat environment to looking at behavioral anomalies and being able to do that in a centralized way. I do think it strengthens it, strengthens that position to outsourcing but recognizing that moving to the cloud also means we're looking at from the home to the enterprise. So whether it's a public environment or critical infrastructure, we're gonna need to fortify the entire landscape. So it does certainly help. Alex, Peter. So I see sort of a dichotomy and the dichotomy is the following is that I think you're gonna see the cloud, moving to the cloud. So you're gonna have a lot of centralized processing and a lot of centralized data storage but then you're also gonna have many, many, many more endpoints. And what I mean by that is you go to the internet everything in your home is going to be an endpoint and you're gonna be able to address those endpoints through an IP address or a MAC address. And so I think it's sort of a dichotomy. I think it's gonna be potentially the cloud will be more secure but I think there's a challenge in terms of making the endpoints more secure because there's really no one in charge of endpoints. Alex, go in the way. Yeah, I think Peter has it right. From an enterprise perspective when I speak to other CISOs, my suggestion is always to outsource as much as possible. Pretty much nobody in the world is qualified to run their own email service against the top tier adversaries except people who are providing that commercially such as like the Googles and the Microsofts and then have dedicated teams that are working on that and then are amortizing the incredible investment security engineering across many customers. But Peter's right too that we're gonna end up with more endpoints. It's interesting when we talk about IoT, we're already there in the enterprise world because we are living with the density of IP-enabled devices that I think will be common in homes in five, six years. We've got our IP-enabled security cameras everywhere. We've got our badge readers. Those badge readers, a lot of them boot up with each one has its own Linux kernel, right there. Each one's like a little unpatchable computer.  And so I think there is learning to take out of the enterprise side. The flip side is obviously any normal household is not gonna be able to hire a CISO on the security team. And so we're gonna have to figure this out now before we get to that point where we regretted not building security into these devices before we ship them out to normal users. Now I wanna ask about the global nature of this. So we have representatives from US government. We have representatives from companies that provide literally global services. We have representatives from companies that don't sell to every nation in the world because they're aligned. They sell to US government and US government allies. And yet we heard this morning about a realm where essentially everyone will be using, cloud exemplifies this, doesn't respect borders, but it will have state-related threats to it. So when we're talking about this defending the cloud, how is that gonna be navigated over say the next 10 years? Where you may have, to put it bluntly, threats coming at it from the same locations where you have users or you don't? I'll start, I think part of it, especially when we talk about IoT is cyber hygiene. Think about it, I grew up in a time where we didn't have to put on a seatbelt from a safety perspective. And we've evolved as a culture not only where it's required, but it's automated. Where the car's telling you if you haven't put your seatbelt on. And so when we start talking about that internet of things and things going into the home in a public domain where there's not the CISO at home that understands the implications and the risks with all these things connected, there's that public-private partnership and also at the state and local level where you build a citizenship that understands what those risks are and what that risk profile is. And then again, companies like ours and those represented here bring the technologies together to lift it up forward. So, okay, I think some of the trends that I see first of all is insurance industry is coming up in terms of cybersecurity. And I think that's going to be a big driver towards security. And the companies have to assess a certain risk and now the CEOs are actually becoming liable. And so I think there's going to be from a corporate point of view much greater emphasis on security. However, we got the legacy systems we in the government have many, many legacy systems that are not very secure and we try to put bandages over them. And I think the salvation of that is as we try to move to the cloud, we're gonna, I think is that the cloud services tied together with the security company should be able to provide a more secure environment as we move those applications. But it all turns into cost and trying to finding the money to pay for that. Because I think eventually we're gonna have to move to the cloud and to get that greater security. But then also the challenge is again, the internet of things. And the fact that now it's a wild wild west out there because nobody's controlling my refrigerators as far as I know. I'm not, you know, my home CISO and I'm not sitting there making sure my refrigerator's behaving itself with a toaster and not trying to attack it or something like that. So I think we got a, again, and going back to that dichotomy, I think in terms of the enterprise, in terms of corporate, I think you're gonna see the insurance industry driving the companies towards greater security. I think the technology is there. If you take advantage of the cloud and actually thoughtfully design architectures, the cloud has the potential to provide greater security because the ability of the companies to make those investments, you standardize architectures and then layer security as a service on top of that. I was hoping that Peter Valencia would give me some free advice on what the question was about how we deal with operating in a multinational environment because I think that we see that on a just daily basis. And I think it's a tricky problem. So in our case, we see state sponsored or at least nationalistic based attacks coming out of countries like China, Iran, Russia on a fairly regular basis. Sometimes against targets that you wouldn't think of as natural targets. We're not political scientists, we're computer scientists and so when a whole bunch of our customers who were adoption agencies started to be attacked with these massive cyber attacks, we thought who can be against adoption agencies? Turns out a very large political issue in Russia about adopting Russian children out and targeting of those institutions and that we're facilitating that. China has been a really interesting learning case for us. We're one of the few technology companies that actually has infrastructure that is running inside of China. Along with Baidu cooperate to have 22 data center facilities across China. One of the advantages that that gives us is that we can actually sink whole attacks and keep them inside China. So a lot of the attacks that we see coming out of China we can actually use our infrastructure inside the country in order to keep the attack actually local. And that's one of the benefits of having one of these large global presences like a company like Codzler does that there's no way for any one enterprise to be ever able to react to that. I think there are a whole bunch of policy questions that become extremely difficult when you try and operate in all of these different environments. And someday we'll write a great book on all the stories that we've learned in trying to navigate that balance. And I think unfortunately that's about to get a lot trickier with what the UK has proposed, what France is moving forward with encryption. Creating a patchwork of regulatory environments across multiple places actually makes it much more difficult to have these global clouds. And if you don't have the global cloud then you don't have the data and security advantages that come from that the more you regionalize it the less the collective benefit and collective knowledge can be. So I think it's an ongoing issue and certainly one we'll still be struggling with in 10 years. We don't have this as a polling question but you've opened up a really interesting question to get each of your opinions on. Will in 2026 will there be a global cloud or will it evolve, continue to evolve on this lines of kind of a patchwork of kind of broken down by national law, region, whatever. Do you think it will be truly global or will it be patchwork? And let's just, we'll hear from you, Matthew. You brought it up. What's your first, but I'd love to hear from the others on the panel as well. I wrote back in 1996, I wrote my college thesis on how there were going to be nationalized search engines. Like how there's not a Fox news search engine blows me away. And yet the power of being able to access data globally across a unified search engine like Google is so compelling that one of the biggest requests that we hear from Chinese engineers that we work with is gosh, we really wish we had Google because we don't think we can find the resources as efficiently because of that. And so I think that there is enormous power from the scale that being global allows you to have. Yeah, but that power is also a threat. Absolutely, absolutely. And so there's a, and that's true with Google as well, but I think that the analogy of showing how far they've been able to take what I would have thought would become a very regionalized nationalistic system. You think about what Google fundamentally is, they're an editor at some level. They're an editor of a publication that's driven by search and that they have been able to translate that and navigate the globe. I think is really in part a testament to their skill in doing that, but really it's a testament into you want to have access to the broadest set of information regardless of where you are around the world, and I think that the hope is that that will overcome some of the regulatory challenges that I think are gonna be inherent. Let's hear real quickly from the other, so just start at the end. So will it be a quick one word answer? Well one word answer is I think is that the economy, economics, and people's socialization is much more global than governments right now, and I think government governance is actually more nationalized than the companies. The companies are actually headed to the political system right now, so I think it really depends on how quickly the world evolves to a more of a worldwide governance. And that's actually where I was about to go. When you talk about Google, that's a search capability. If you think about the solutions that a company like ours at Raytheon provides, there are governance restrictions, and also risk that are factored in when you start talking about a global cloud environment. So 10 years from now, do I think we'll be there? No, from my perspective. I think if we end up with a patchwork, you'll be very sad because a lot of the societal and individual benefits in the internet will no longer exist if that's true. Will you be sad 10 years from now or not? I don't even mind being sad 10 years from now. Okay, I'm gonna try a different question with you, which is you arguably handle security for the world's largest nation when it comes to members of your measuring it that way. One of the other trends besides the cloud and other things is just a sheer mass of people coming online and particularly coming online, mobile. How does that affect the job that you do? Yeah, it's interesting because the mobile revolution has really changed the security relationship between providers like us and individuals, and in a way it's only getting more complicated. So out of our, you know, more than 1.6 billion users, like 1.3 billion of them use us from a mobile device, and we obviously have a big project called internet.org to bring the two thirds of the planet that don't have internet access online. And one of the challenges there is that if you think about when it's like to come online in 2016, let me see, how many people in this room have had internet access for more than 20 years? Right, so the people in this room have grown up for two decades alongside the bad guys, right? And we take a lot of things for granted as the expectations of how we need to behave to keep ourselves safe online. Those are things we think are obvious, but they're actually not obvious. A lot of them make absolutely no sense if you think about it.  The idea that on my device, if I open up a document that somebody sent me, that that might mean they can take over my device. That makes absolutely no sense. And it shouldn't be true, but it is. And so one of the real challenges we have is trying to figure out those things and provide the right information and the right training and walk people through the educational steps necessary when we bring them online to make sure that we're not just letting them loose. And we can do a lot to keep them safe while they're in our platform, but obviously as people get online, there's a lot of things that are out of control of the major providers. And that is a very difficult thing. The other truth is as we expand the scope of people who are online, the overall quality of people's mobile devices is actually going down. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of people who are online right now have Android devices that can never be patched. It will never be patched and are vulnerable to off-the-shelf exploits. And so that's another challenge we have is trying to keep people safe in a situation where we know their mobile devices are likely to be compromised in the lifetime of the device. What are the things we can do to keep them safe even if we're starting with that disadvantage? So yeah, it's not easy. You have to weigh that. Obviously with the incredible benefits a lot of these people get from coming online, but we just can't take it for granted that they're gonna be able to keep themselves safe on day one without us doing the things and providing information that is culturally and language-appropriate to make sure they don't take the missteps that seem obvious to those of us with 20 years of experience doing this. So Peter, we've talked about, in our other things, we've talked about cloud, we've talked about mobile from your perch at thinking through technology issues for Homeland Security. What technology have we missed? What over the next 10 years is gonna be another key one that we ought to be paying attention to that you're putting a deep effort into? So it's sort of a funny answer I'm gonna give you is it's not really a new technology. So from a security, I'm gonna talk from a security perspective, is that I see what's going on right now in the security industry is that for the most part, there's a lot of incremental improvements in cybersecurity but there's really no breakthroughs that's going on. And I think, but you also, the environments talking to the banks and talking to different agencies, the problem that we see is there's, everyone is overwhelmed, the workforce right now is overwhelmed because they have 70 or 80 or 90 tools out there that they're trying to use and they're loosely coupled. Those tools are all loosely coupled, they're not integrated. And I think one of the big breakthroughs that I'm gonna, is that there's something called orchestration tools that I'm not familiar with, everybody's familiar with. So that's a new tech, I would say that's a new technology that's coming out. The orchestration is really something that coordinates the actions and the passage of data so that if something is sensed and makes sense out of it then it goes, it makes a decision and takes an action. And that's actually a coordinated action. Right now there's way too much manual intervention that we wanna get the human on the loop and we're not in the loop right now. We have to get that human out of the loop. I think that's one of the big technologies. I think the other thing is that we're going to see is, I hate to use the word big data analytics because it's so beaten to death but that really everybody understands it. I think as we get the automation and we actually have the ability to collect a lot more information and actually assimilate it and share it, is that we're gonna be able to do big data analytics and so we're gonna be able to pick up things that we never could see before. And then I think once we've done that is the key, then the key is the information sharing to be able to share out that information in real time so that the people can learn lessons from what happened to you and they can apply those lessons, learn to their environment so that they don't get attacked. So that's where I see us going from a technology point of view and the cloud is always gonna be a big piece but that's been discussed already. The other technologies people would wanna mention? Self healing systems. We're participating in the DARPA Grand Challenge. There are six universities in Raytheon that are participating but that is for the, to give the system the knowledge that a hacker would use and to be able to diagnose those behaviors and then immunize itself against those attacks. So I think that's another evolution that we'll see. Let's open it up to the audience for questions. So again, please wait for, raise your hand. Please wait for the mic to come to you and actually if you could stand so we can see you as well. So any questions from the group out here? There's a, yeah. Please wait for the mic to come to you. Okay, it's blocked behind us. You have the chief, the obstructive chief. Two questions. We can just take one if you'd like. Alex, do you mention things that were out of control? Actually if you could introduce yourself. Sir, Megan Stiefel, I'm a consultant to public knowledge and a couple of other folks. Former White House and Department of Justice. So you mentioned Alex a couple of things that were out of control of major providers. Could you pick your top two that you, if you could weigh your magic wand, you would fix or identify for those of us who might be able to try and help push that conversation along. Second question is, Dr. Fonash, you mentioned the information sharing it. So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about the trickle down effect of how information sharing at the corporate and enterprise level will ultimately help impact our average consumers, particularly those who are outside of our beltway who hear about this, but may not really know what that means to them. So who's gonna do the first question? No, information sharing. Go ahead. I was gonna do the second one. Okay, I'll do the second, so the information sharing.  What we've done is through, you know, through information sharing analysis centers and things like that, we have set up a structure to enable the sharing of information. The next thing what we've done is we've developed some technology to share the information. And what we've done is, is that we've, there's two standards, sticks and taxi. Sticks is the payload and taxi is the actually transport mechanism for sharing of information. That's from an inter-organizational point of view. Now, in other words, one organization wants to share to another set of organizations. That's something that we're talking about with sticks and taxi. The one of the problems that I've been working on with and I've been working with industry on is, is the intro-organizational sharing. And that goes back to the point that I made about integration. One of the problems is, is we need to have, we'll be able to have data so that we can put it into the information and then we can share it. And so one of the problems we have today is the lack of automation and the lack of integration of those tool sets. It's very hard to get information put together to share out today because you can't get it, it's simulated enough in a relevant time, in a cyber-relevant time, so that you can actually take action if it's useful for you. So one of the things that we're trying to do is we're trying to get industry together to agree on some standards in terms of a common messaging fabric, in terms of so that one tool can share information with another tool. We're trying to work on a common data model so that everyone understands what every one other tool means. And we're trying to get those things together and we're also trying to come up with common APIs, which is basically how you plug in a tool, a particular tool plugs into that messaging fabric. And so once we feel that once we can set that up, and it's very much of an analog to the old PCs and the motherboard of the PCs where the processor and the video cards all plug and play, you can buy an vendor's product. What we wanna do is we wanna stimulate innovation and we also wanna make all those tools work together as a tool set. But then once you have those things is that you can actually then take that information, do a quick analysis on it and get some recommended courses of action. And you can provide those courses of action out through information sharing so that not only you take that action, but other people can take the information you put together, assimilate, and take a course of action to protect their networks. So in other words, I see something, in other words, you may hear that there's a burglar around and I see the person walking across street and I lock my door and I close my blinds and I call the police, but you also wanna share that information out. And that's what we're talking about with information sharing so that your knowledge protects someone else. That's what we're talking about in information sharing. So I believe the question was, what are two things that I would love to get fixed that would make people safer? So I think both of the things have been discussed. I mean, the first one from a technological perspective I would love for us to have a better overall quality of mobile device and mobile operating system out there. That would be the most basic thing that would keep more people safe than anything else. The second, from a regulatory perspective, Matt was totally right, the patchwork of regulatory regimes, even when they're supposed to be single markets like the EU is detrimental to security because the interaction between privacy rules and security rules and data control rules are all extremely complicated and building a way to keep people safe and to make sure their accounts don't get taken over or bad things don't happen to them in a situation where if you drive 100 miles, the rules completely change is extremely difficult. And so from getting to some kind of global consensus on how we're able to use certain technologies to keep people safe and what kind of information can be gathered to keep people safe, which has changed. For a while, it was a big deal not to give online companies your cell phone number and they didn't want, a lot of governments didn't want folks like us to collect cell phone numbers. Now governments understand the best way for us to do two-factor authentication to help recover people's accounts is to have an out-of-band communication mechanism. There's a bunch of different scenarios just like that today that hopefully can get fixed and we can have a better global consensus about. Okay, another question from the audience. In the back, yeah. Pete App, Simon Global Affairs columnist at Reuters. Again, we've obviously seen a lot of spike in geopolitical tensions. NATO, Russia, US, China over the last three or four years. I'm wondering how directly that corresponds to knock on a tax. Do you see a rise in bad things happening when tensions rise or is it much less linear than that? We do and see it fall when tensions fall. You know, the most recent example that we've seen is in Turkey where there were a large number of cyber attacks that were launched against Turkish infrastructure and large Turkish providers following the downing of the Russian jet. An older example is the last shooting war in the Middle East. The thing that was interesting about that was we tracked, we had people using Cloudflare on both sides of the dispute and the cyber war was actually quite quiet while people were shooting at each other. Within less than 30 minutes of the declaration of the ceasefire, you saw the entire field of battle shift from the physical world to the digital world instantaneously and attacks going in both directions. Yes, yeah. And so I think that it is, we're seeing, and what I think is hard though and what I don't have an insight into is how much these attacks are the actual government entities directing them or they are nationalistic individuals that are directing those attacks. One of the things, a question that I've gotten recently is has any of the change in policy and the agreements with China changed the types of attacks? And I think anecdotally, we've seen less attacks directed at what seem like obvious targets that would make sense, but what we're still seeing is the same tools and techniques that were used to attack what looked like, again, either nationalistic-based attacks or government-directed attacks are now going after what seem like much-odder targets like online gaming or other systems. And our theory is that internally you have the tools that have essentially been built by individuals. At one point, those individuals were getting instructions to say go attack XYZ corp because it's in the nation's interest. Now those tools are sitting around and it's like the torpedo and hut for Red October where it's out there, it doesn't have a target anymore and it's still potentially causing an enormous amount of damage. So I think it depends on which type of attack you're talking about. So for example, there was some tensions between certain nations in the United States and the banks were being attacked and there are large denial-service attacks against the banks. But on the other hand, the financial attacks to steal money are continuous, right? That's a steady stream. So the botnet attacks and the denial-service attacks spike and go down based on political situations and other types of attacks against critical structures and things like that. But I think you've got the intellectual property theft is pretty steady, that type of attack trying to steal money. So the criminal elements trying to steal money is pretty constant, not politically directed very much. And then the intellectual property theft I think is also generally pretty steady. But I think the more visible, the ones that make the newspaper type of things are more based on political situations. Yeah, I would say it is rare for there to be a international incident where we don't see a specific corresponding set of attacks against people related to it. We have a full-time conflicts and threats team. There's a lady in the second row here who works on that, whose entire job it is to watch what's going on in the world and try to predict what's gonna happen and how we can proactively protect our users. So last year, we rolled out, we take it very seriously. We wanna make sure that our platform is not used to harm people in any way, including by governments or government-related groups. So last year, we rolled out a specific warning to people where we think their accounts are being hacked by nation-states. We've always been warning people when their accounts are taken over. In this particular case, we're telling people it was a government so that they can take steps in their personal lives to keep themselves safe. I can't speak to this. Why do I not name the government? Why do I not name the government? So attribution is hard. It's not that hard, but it's hard enough that you might not want to. But you're able to know that it's a government. So I... I'm asking the questions they want me to ask. You're asking the questions they want me to ask. So for example, I think one, that information will eventually come out last year. The New York Times reported that we had used this in a situation where a certain Middle Eastern country that we're not friendly with had hacked hundreds of State Department employees and journalists and NGO folks in Syria and Lebanon. And so the people, if we do the notification and their story's written, looking at the pattern of the people and what they're involved with, it is almost always possible to figure out the attribution from that without us having to turn over any technical information. So I would say the more sophisticated the attacker, the harder it is to attribute where it came from. I would disagree. I would say the more that the country cares about being caught, the harder it is to attribute. We have very, very sophisticated attackers that know that there is no downside to being caught versus countries where they're very good and then also perhaps they're U.S. allies and therefore absolutely can't be caught attacking a U.S. company where attribution is much harder but you have some suspicion that it might not be who it looks like it is. So I'm gonna take a question from social media and actually it's about social media. So it's not directly a cybersecurity issue but it has become a cybersecurity issue. And essentially this is from Jade Parker who tweets it at counter jihadr. And I'm gonna essentially phrase it. I'm sorry, talking to you Peter. Yeah, her question is basically about will we see over the next 10 years the use of this space by extremist groups that was advocating violence in the same way that we see now and how will we see companies and governments respond to it over the next 10 years? Another way of putting it is how will the situation when it comes to the use of social media and violence be different 10 years from now? And again, it links to cybersecurity because of course that's been, that's at the essence of Apple, VFBI and the like. And we'll look at our social media expert but we've got three other folks who have, I'm certain have news on this as well. So if the question is, are violent extremists gonna use social media? It's kind of the same question as, are from now on violent extremists gonna use running water, electricity, the phone network, cars, right? Technology is part of our lives and whenever you bring a new set of technologies in it will be used for good and we'll be used for bad forever. Maybe to be more, how will the response from, so that we'll always seek to use, how will the response to the use be different? Right, so I mean the response from the the big social media companies, Western social media companies I think has actually been pretty aggressive. We have no desire for people to use our platform to spread any kind of violent extremism or to call for the injury of anybody and so we proactively, as well as reactively respond to people doing that kind of stuff and keep it off the network. We're also working a lot on capability building. One of the things we've seen is that as the big companies get good at kicking this stuff off you see these groups move to smaller social networks that might be very, very specific audiences and that would never suspect that they could be possibly used and so we also work in capability building by meeting with those folks and providing them with help so that they can build up their teams and understand how to do it. So I mean I think we will continue, we have a complete incentive to keep these kinds of folks off of our network it is against our terms of use and we have the ability and the desire to do so and I think that will continue but as all of these technologies continue to exist and continue to diversify even if kind of the core companies that represent several billion users are able to do a good job, there will always be kind of a rear guard action against the entire constellation of different technologies. Many of which are not gonna be based in the United States, many of which will not be responsive to the concerns of government. So I think from my perspective is that the, for example, terrorist or any other adversaries will always try to use any means they can to do communications, to do recruitment of people, to do command and control. So and obviously they want to keep it secret in terms of what they're doing and they don't want anybody to be visible. So yes, they're going to try to use any mechanisms they can. Social media is one of those mechanisms where they can try to hide. So what are tools that DHS you hope will have to deal with this say five years from now that it doesn't have right now? So actually there's a White House effort right now to work with the industry and I think it has to work with industry to inform industry that there's problems and to help to identify what those problems are and how the social media is being used so that they can mitigate those things. And so I think it's working with industry on mitigation techniques. Oh I was just gonna say the analytics evolution and seeing that mature more so that you can have some more predictive behaviors as you see those trends. I see them giving you that. So I actually think that we face a very different adversary now with ISIL and which has a much more sophisticated marketing arm. And I think that what the government has done in terms of approaching industry and making technologists aware of what the problem is is a great first step. If you think of the there's a theme that's running through the media right now that it's the government versus the technologists. I would encourage anyone writing about this to try and stay away from that theme because I don't think it's actually very helpful and I don't think it's particularly accurate. If you think of the history of Silicon Valley when it works best and what created it was when the government comes to technology companies and says we have a really hard problem whether that's we need to build more ships or build stronger bombs to win World War II or we've got to land a rocket on the moon because some guy just got on stage and told us we were gonna do that. That's what built the research labs of Silicon Valley. That's what built Stanford. That's what built Moffat Field. And those are the things that we I think can do if there is a cooperation. One of the great powers the government has is the power to convene. And I think that that power is extremely powerful and it's a really good thing. And I've seen really very good effort from the White House and the rest of the national security team to do that. I think that that is a very different power than the power to compel. And I think that there is a real power that government can use in enlisting technology companies to help with this issue and talk about how we can do law enforcement in a world where there are these technologies whether that's encryption or social media or the cloud or whatever it is. We're happy to have that conversation and again, really encouraged by the fact that government is coming to us and inviting us to come to them to do that. So I think that's a great ending point for what's been a fantastic conversation. So please join me in a round of applause for this place.


There are so many people out there that are brilliant, talented, hardworking, successful- Yeah, good businesses they've launched. But they just don't have that ability to get their point across. And what happens is, look at it this way, every idea has a certain intrinsic value, right? How someone else perceives that value is either multiplied or divided by the person who's explaining it. So if I explain the idea, they can think it's a great, if someone who's terrible at selling will think it's a shitty idea. Imagine, I said this the minute all the people out there who are these brilliant, hardworking, smart people, they wanna make money, they wanna provide for their families, they wanna help their parents and communities, right? Great intentions and they have great ideas. But they lack this one skill and they struggle. And to me it's the craziest thing because here's the thing, it's learnable.