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Hi, I'm Jesse Kremse and today we'll be taking a look inside security at the New York Times. This talk is also unofficially titled, A Media Security Primer for Hackers, but it's really for both journalists and hackers. Most talks start off or end with a thank you at the end, where I rushes off stage thanking all their friends. But really, I'd like to start this talk off by saying thank you to a bunch of people.  I'd also like to thank everyone at the New York Times who's reviewed this talk with me and helped me make improvements and helped me dot all the I's and cross all the T's and make sure everything looks really nice and sharp. We really do try to get this story right every time. It's been a crazy couple of years and in that time we've all gotten to watch a lot of movies and get to watch the Fred Rogers movie. It was really great. And there's a scene in that movie where they take a couple of moments just to think about all the people in their lives who help them get to the stage in life where they are right now. And we don't do that enough. So let's just take a few moments right now to just sit quietly and think about all the people that helped us get to where we are in our lives today. All right, all right, all right. Let's get this show on the road. So I'm really going to quickly start off with my journey. I think this will help reveal some of my biases and some of the stuff in my life that kind of formed how I got here and why I think certain things are neat and some aren't. I've been a long time Defcon Goon. My first Defcon was Defcon Six and that was a really pivotal moment in my life. Working at Defcon really has given me a lot of confidence, but it's also given me a lot of life lessons in A, working with really type timelines, really chaotic environments, really challenging people, and really learning about how to deal with just time-based pressures in a technical and logistical way. From my experience at Defcon, I ended up starting a nonprofit called the Hacker Foundation where I had my first interactions with the media as a subject, but also doing a little media support, which is also very interesting. And that was great. And then for years, I had regular jobs. I was a bike messenger, a caterer, I was a webmaster for Brewery, and then I was a wireless engineer and then I was doing the offensive security for the phone company. Those were all great jobs. People I worked with were wonderful, but I really felt like I needed to just look a little bit more at stuff. And I heard about this thing called the Internet Freedom Festival in Valencia, Spain, and I decided I'd go do it and see what it was like. It was a really different conference from Defcon in a lot of ways, very different from a lot of Hackercons, but similar in the way that all festivals are.  They're one euro, it's really great. It's a little small beer, it's about just as much beer as you want. So I'm having a beer with this journalist and we're talking about stuff and he's like, oh, I have this source I want to talk to, and I want to talk to him kind of. I don't want to be overwatched by the government. And so I'm like, OK, well, you should call him on signal. That's a really good method. And he says, oh, no, no, he doesn't have a cell phone.  Here's some stuff you can do to minimize the risk. You can't negate it, but you can minimize it. And he goes, oh, no, no, he doesn't have that type of phone. He has this type of phone. And I'm like, oh, interesting. So this is the importance of getting more details. So basically the source that he was trying to talk to was a villager who had a party line. So if you called that number, you called everyone in the village. And he, so, and I was like, this is a really hard problem. I don't have a solution for you now. And I still actually don't have a solution for this problem. But it stuck with me. It sticks with me today. I think about this problem. I think it's a really good and interesting problem. And these are some of the technical security challenges that journalists are dealing with. And so I left Valencia, Spain, went back to my regular life, as it were, but I kept thinking about what was this stuff. And I started spending more time in New York City. And there's just something very special there. And then I saw a job opening at the New York Times. I said, you know what? You won't get the chance to do this again. You should apply. So I applied. I contacted someone I knew with the New York Times and said, hey, can you reach into the pile and pull mine out? Because I have a non-traditional background. My resume may not even get seen by anyone. So my resume got passed around to some folks. They looked at it. I did a phone screen. I did an interview. I did another interview. I did a days worth in-person team interviews. And they liked me. They really liked me. So I got a job offer. And I took it. And that's how I ended up with the New York Times. You know, applied for the job, get the job. Not the complicated, right? And since day one, it's been a very exciting, fulfilling, and rewarding job. And that's the quick version of how I ended up with the New York Times working full time in media journalism.  Getting the job is not the end of the journey. It's the beginning of the journey, or it's between another phase of the journey. So one of the things I really like about my job is that I think it's a civic good. I think newsmaking organizations, the Fourth Estate, is a key part of a country. And it's really important to be an engaged citizen in that country. So I basically do that all the time now, which is really nice. The job isn't just about protecting shareholder value. We are a publicly traded company, but it's not just about making money. It really is a very mission-oriented job and company. It's great, I really enjoy that. The problems are hard. They're hard in both technical ways, but also in logistical and very human ways. The, you know, if you have a really whizbang, super awesome technical solution, which can't explain to somebody over the phone or they don't have the equipment, or they don't even know how to use the technology, it doesn't matter, right? It won't solve the problem. So coming up with solutions that are really, you know, work in a variety of environments under a variety of stressors is really, really a delight. So that's great. The people at the New York Times are characters. There's tons of great characters. They make movies about these people, but then you end up meeting them in the hall and having coffee with them and being like, huh, interesting. They're a fun bunch, and they're driven, and they're passionate, and they're persistent, which is, you know, I think a lot of qualities that hackers enjoy. And the work is evergreen, right? The work we do is, I always feel like every day I go in, we're always getting new challenges and new things are always popping up. The news happens all the time. I also think that there's a kind of cousin relationship between journalists and hackers. We're both very interested in having information free to the public so that the public can make well-informed decisions. Hackers really tend to be very interested in acquiring info and showing it off to their friends because look what I can get. Journalists tend to be a little bit more downstream. They tend to be more like, look at this information I got from some hacker. This is great. Let me show it off to the world. They also tend to be very rigorous in their analysis of that information, which I think is much needed. So let's just really quickly talk about New York Times, about the numbers. There are no typical news organizations. The New York Times is an atypical news organization. In many ways, it's 169 years old. It's gonna be 170 as a birthday next year, yay. As you can imagine, a company that old has a lot of technical debt, but it also has a lot of history. And that history is good. One of the great things about working at the Times in the before times was that we went in the office and many floors below the one that I work on is the archive. So went down to the archive and got to paw through the paper card catalog index for Felix Crenns, who is, I believe, a great, great cousin of mine or an uncle maybe. Anyway, he was a big time Broadway actor at one point. And so got to find his name in the card catalog, then go into the actual like archive stacks and pull out vintage photos of him that were provided by his agent to the Times, which is, and hold them and show them off to my family, which was great. Really a wonderful experience. We have a lot of great people who work at the Times. We have 4,500 employees. This includes reporters. This includes people that print the paper. This includes admins and tech staff. This includes developers. We have 1,700 reporters worldwide, which is a huge amount of people to help. 200 of them are overseas. Those 200 are really some of the best reporters we have because they're the only person you can sometimes send to a place is the only person logistically available to do the work. So they have to be well-prepared and on top of the situation and really understand what's going on there. They're really the tip of the pen. It's very exciting to work with our foreign journalists or our overseas journalists. We have 500 developers. No other company makes the New York Times app and website like the New York Times. We, it's new territory for everybody all the time. So we're constantly learning and being challenged and developing new things with our developers. We have 31 foreign bureaus and 16 national bureaus. So we have offices globally and nationally, the end of a variety of other facilities. We have a factory, Prince newspapers, which is pretty cool. And then now we also have a very diversified workforce who lives and works all over the world and the country. So that's a whole new challenge. It's just that geographical spread, right? We don't just have to keep everybody safe in HQ, as it were. We have 7.8 million subscribers. That's a lot of subscriber data. That includes all kinds of PII. We have 100 million plus registered users, which represents a huge amount of data, which we also have to keep safe, of course. And then if you actually think about that classic infosec training, CIA training, confidentiality, integrity and availability, not the other CIA. We have to get the paper out all the time. We have to get the news out on the newspaper and on the website. So, and that's average weekly audience of 7.6 million people. That's a lot of people to reach. We move a lot of data just in general, right? We produce 150 plus pieces of journalism every day. And it's not just print, it's not just photos, it's podcasts and TV shows and live streams of events and stuff like that. And finally, there's a plus sign after all the stuff on this slide, right? That's because we're growing and growth brings its own challenges. I used to work in a dying industry and that has its own challenges too. But growth has a lot of challenges and it feels fun, but it's also very scary. And so I think that's a whole other interesting kind of, it's a pseudo number. So that's the New York Times by the numbers in a nutshell. This isn't just me. I'm not the only person at the working infosec at the Times or even working security. The infosec team at the New York Times is composed of the security operations team. I work on that team. We are the front lines we answer and advise on all kinds of questions and issues every day, every hour. I'm on call at this very instant recording this talk. We have an intelligence team who does both forward and backward looking intelligence gathering to help us figure out what threats we need to align to and where to best use our resources. We have an education team. Education is a huge part of what we do because of the independence of so much of our staff. Having well educated, well-prepared staff is really very, very key. Like I said, we have our own apps. We have our own apps. So then we have our own app sec team which is really another key thing.  So of course we have a secure architecture team. Incidents happen. If they didn't happen, none of us would have jobs. So having an incident response team who can guide both, who can help the InfoSec team do their job better when we're responding to incidents but also guide the other people involved in that incident through the process. It's wonderful. I live in New York City. New York City has been hit with all kinds of business continuity events within my lifetime and not just like in the last 20 years. So that's a, so we have a, so that's another thing that is also within the InfoSec sphere. And then finally, of course, we're a business. So we have to manage our risk and our compliance needs just like every other business out there. We're not the only security operations at times. We also have a physical security team nationally and internationally. And both of, and all three of these teams, InfoSec, national, international all meet together on the threat response team where we trade intelligence and we work on ways that we overlap because increasingly there is a great deal of overlap in what we all do together. And that's just the security apparatus, right? That's the people that have security somewhere in the title. But we also have really wonderful CIS admins out there who really hold the standard and do a really, really good job of making sure that our systems are secure so we don't have to bug them. That's so nice when you have really top motivated CIS admins making it happen. So we don't have to be like, hey, it's patch Tuesday, you gotta patch that. They're already like, you patch that. I'm like, even better. We have a great end user supports team out there who just listens to our users. So when the user says this thing and they're like, oh, that's a security event. You need to talk to these people right now. And then we have folks in the newsroom, editor supports deaf and journalists who help us coordinate and form us of events and form us of threats that they've gotten both in the physical, but also in the technological sphere tell us about all kinds of stuff they're hearing on the street, which is also really wonderful. And then also the past has helped us. We've learned a lot from the past and from the people that've been at the times before us who've helped build the organization and the team. So it's just not just now that got us to where we are. The present is made by the past and the past is contributed mightily. So here's a quick guide for journalist security for hackers, but also conversely, if you're a journalist, this is also for you. This is a really great graph that kind of shows the threat continuum for journalists out there. And on one side we have murder and on one side we have litigation. Death is a very real concern for a lot of journalists. This is a very high-risk job in a lot of ways. It shouldn't be, but it is. And it's not typically one would consider a high-risk job, but in 2020, 66 journalists lost their lives in the course of reporting. Just today, I was reading in the paper about a reporter who lost their job in a conflict area or lost their life in a conflict area. And the week before, a journalist also lost their life covering a parade. And targeted killings by repressive governments that are too often willing to kill journalists to keep citizens in the dark about their actions does happen. So we always have to factor that in when we're thinking about the physical security aspects of journalism. This also kind of plays into the infosec, which is not traditionally something we would do, but increasingly repressive governments and non-state-accuracy use technology to assist them in precursor activities to murder. Going down the matrix really quick, we have harassment. I have a slide for this, we'll talk about this in a bit. We don't, so the security team at the New York Times doesn't protect journalism. We protect journalists. And journalists' job is to protect journalism. And that means producing high quality journalistic works and not so censoring. It means that our job is to keep them safe enough so that they don't feel that they can't cover a story because it's too hot, it's too sensitive. And this ties in the next thing, right? If they think that people are after them from hacking, that's an issue. So we help protect against that as well. Political pressure, it's basically a way above my pay grade, but it's definitely something that does stop or does concern some journalists at some times. Denying access is another way that journalists' work is threatened, right? Either in the withholding or manipulation of press credentials or to deportation. You know, P&G and persona non-grotting someone out of a country so they can't come back is something that does happen and has happened in the two years that I have worked at the New York Times, two journalists. Add pressure is a factor. Boycotting the New York Times or another news organization to add to people that would advertise with the Times is definitely an influence that has affected media organizations worldwide. Censorship, right now there's some government censoring the New York Times somewhere in the world, either overtly or covertly. With the Times, try to provide news to everyone as much as possible all the time. We, for example, I was talking with a colleague today about the New York Times' version of the onion service. We do have an onion service online and that's specifically as part of our censorship busting operations. Reputational attacks, there are attacks against the practice of journalism, against the organization, and of course, against the reporter themselves trying to de-digitimize them. And that's a more long-term kind of high-brow argument, but I think it's also a definite concern of journalists. And then finally, at the very end of the spectrum is litigation and lawfare, where we like to think that very civil people use very civil words in a very civil environment to try to win civil arguments. This doesn't always occur, but we like to think that that happens. So there are kind of three bins that are in here. And one of them, the last one, kind of doesn't fall on the matrix because it kind of pervades all of them, actually. There's the physical security stuff, which is an increasing concern year after year in journalism. Increasingly year after year is also the need for increased information and cybersecurity as technology plays a bigger and bigger role in reporting both, and our lives, both as a day-to-day activity, but also in the nature of how reporting is done. Understanding how technology works, how big data can be understood and analyzed is really key. Finally, there's a psychosocial security concern here. It's taken, I don't know how long has journalism existed for, right, for ages. It's taken a long time for people to realize that the day-to-day stresses of being a journalist takes a serious and possibly negative toll on the practitioners. And so, when we're working with journalists and we're talking about security practices, we're really trying to train them for an ultramarathon, not a sprint. The best, most fun journalists to hang out with are the ones who've been around the block a lot. They have great stories, they're really well-seasoned, and they have some really good security practices based on some part one lessons. So, any media information security organization would definitely take a look at all of these things that are highlighted here in bold as something that they would pay attention to on a regular basis. So, I mentioned harassment at the beginning, I can't go lost over it, but let's look at harassment.  According to, so Lucy at the CPJ helped put these numbers together for me because this is not something that I look at the numbers of every day, but in 2019, 90% of respondents to one of their studies, two journalists, experienced safety issues or threats in the USA, which is, we like to consider one of the more safe countries to be a journalist. And then, large numbers of journalists have been harassed in various ways. 63% of all journalists have been harassed online. I think we in the infosec community familiar with the fact that people get harassed online. Journalists get it all the time and they get it in various ways. Following up that number very shortly, very shortly behind it, 58% have been harassed in person. I have, you know, I've had my run-ins in life, but I haven't been systematically harassed in person, right? I can think of one or two incidents, right? But in this case, you know, it happens to a lot of people who work in journalism. Finally, this bottom number, 26% have been physically attacked, right, so one in four, a little bit more than one in four have been, you know, attacked in the course of doing their work. That's a pretty big percentage for a job that isn't really about getting in, you know, physical altercations. They're not wrestlers here. And the other thing to think about is that this is, there's some disparity here, right? Women get this way more than, way worse than men. Two thirds of women respond and say that they've been threatened or harassed online at least once according to the International Women's Media Foundation. And one in 10 respond, one in 10 of their people that they've surveyed has said that they've experienced a death threat in the last year. Not just harassment, but straight up death threat. And I see these threats and they're real. They're not, people aren't joking. So harassment's a real issue and it's something we deal with on the regular basis. And it goes hand in hand with social media presence. Having a strong social media presence for a journalist is a huge career asset. If you look at big names at any media organization, they usually have big followings on social media, on Twitter or Instagram or whatnot. Some media organizations don't realize this, but curing and maintaining your presence on social media is work. So one of the reasons I don't do it is because I don't want to do the work. I don't want to have a big social media presence because I don't do other things. And with that presence will come harassment. Most platforms are woefully unprepared to provide any real support regarding online harassment, both to journalists and to just regular people. I think there's plenty of evidence of that if you look through the mind sphere of the InfoSec community online. So one of the places that I always see a lot of people get kind of spur of the moment harassment is from hot takes or spur of the moment comments. So I always advise journalists to be thoughtful and consider about everything they post online and that they separate their personal and their private and their public persona so that they get some separation because they deserve it, Franco. But yeah, hot takes tend to get people in some trouble. But they should have the right to have hot takes. People just need to start being nicer to each other. So really quickly, people often ask me where does the responsibility for security journalists lie? And it really lies with the journalists themselves. The buck stops with them because there's a ton of competing interests and my interests are not necessarily the same as a journalist, the same as an editor. The editor isn't the same as the journalist and the journalist isn't the same as all those other events, everybody has different needs and wants and desires here. So finally, at the end of the day, it's really the journalist's decision and if they're gonna cover a story and how they're gonna cover that story. The job of the Infosec team or any security team working with media is to prepare them with the best tools and knowledge available and give them the freedom and respect to take care of themselves and also do the best they can covering that story. That's it. But it's often the journalist's job to make sure it goes down correctly. So let's really quickly talk about training and advisement. That's something that we spend a lot of time doing. A lot of time we do at the times. Training is lessons and pre-prepared lessons where we really get people to start to speed on proper techniques and tools. And advisement is when they come to us and say, hey, Jesse, I got this question and we think about it and we give them the best advice we can about what they can do. This is often what will happen if you as a security professional end up working with any news organization or media person. They will ask for advice about something. So make your advice actionable. Journalists have a lot of competing interests and their time is very valuable. And they basically have to deal with a ton of stuff. So making practices that are doable and not theoretical is really the best thing I can suggest. But they are curious and persistent folks. So expect them to ask you challenging questions about the practice or advisement you give them. So here are five basic practices for journalists. As a journalist, you should be doing these as a information security professional and hacker and journalists are asking you for advice. This is the five pieces of advice. Maybe you should give them. It's a great starting point. Use strong diverse passwords on all your accounts. Please, please, please. You're gonna have a lot of accounts as a journalist. And so you're gonna need to use strong diverse passwords. This will of course mean you need to use a password manager. Any password manager out there is probably better than no password manager. And a real online password manager that's backed up that's securely operated and securely run is really the best solution. Notebooks, things you remember, iterations of things you remember are really, really not gonna work. Use second factor authentication on everything you can. As much as you can. Skip over doing it with SMS though. Use authenticator apps and use hardware tokens. Use authenticator apps that back up to your password manager, so that if your phone is lost, stolen or confiscated, you can get back in the game real quick and you don't have to re-enroll everything. Use hardware tokens whenever possible. Have two and have the codes of course. One of the key things to do is to take that second token and keep it in a safe place and not carry two with you at all times, just have the one on you at all times.  Any untrusted network is not your home network and not your work network. So pretty much all the weird networks you jump on, all the press pool networks at the Olympics or at a convention or something, especially this convention. Company should have a VPN for gain to its own assets. Journalists should collect third party VPNs as they see fit. There's a bunch of great ones out there. There's plenty of market research about which ones are the best. Just choose one that's a high quality, repeatable VPN provider. Keep track of your assets, where you store your information. Divide your public and private assets. Your work computer shouldn't be your personal computer if at all possible. I know this sounds annoying, but it's a really good thing to do for a number of reasons. If you're a freelancer, I know this is really tricky, but definitely think about keeping as much of your public and private life separate from a data compartmentalization or information compartmentalization standpoint. Update early, update often. I don't know anyone who suffered greatly from updating to the latest version of some OS or patching their systems. I do know people who have suffered greatly from not doing that. Use secure messaging platforms. Use Signal for as much messaging as you can. You can even use it to securely store your notes. You can just message yourself notes, right? Signal's a great tool. We really like it. The other secure messaging platforms out there have a lot of different interests that don't always seem to align with their user interests. But you're gonna have to go where the source is. So whenever possible, try to shift to Signal, but if you have to use one of those other third-party secure messaging platforms, do find the online guides that are out there about running those more securely so that you can minimize your attack surface and your exposure. So it's not just reporters who are part of the newsroom. There's also editors out there. So here's the five basic practices for editors. You really need to communicate known security risks to your journalists. If you know it's a security risk, your journalist who has maybe been around for a long time or maybe hasn't, may not know them for whatever reasons. Let them know. Tell them, you know, these are the things that I am concerned about for your safety or your information security safety regarding this story. When a journalist comes to you with security concerns, you need to listen to them and factor them into the reporting. You also need to connect that reporter with support systems, be them in-house or external, to help them stay safe. It's really very, very, very useful when an editor says, hey, I've got a team, they're gonna cover the story, can you talk to them? Have a regular and clear cadence of communication with your reporters when they're in the field. This is really key. Always start off the conversation with the same basic question set, PSI. What's their position? Where are they in the story, physically in the world and where are they in the story? What's their situation? What's the environment around them looking like? What's the situation looking like? And what are they planning to do next? If you can have those three pieces of information handy when something goes wrong or you think something might be going wrong, then your security team will be able to provide even better support. And finally, you have to do all the things in the previous slide. You need to be the example of how to do secure journalism securely. So the fun never ends, it never gets easier as you move up the old hierarchy in the newsroom tree. So that's the basics for journalists and editors in the newsroom. Let's talk a little bit about some of the stuff that we in the InfoSec team deal with on a regular basis and more of what we do. So here's the more of what we do. You know, we help journalists and editors gather and secure source material all the time. We make sure that we don't cross any legal red lines. We never instruct sources on how to get information. We, that's not our job. We're not doing that. We're really looking for sources to, they have something they wanna give us. They collect it and they deliver it to us. We operate a tips line and we operate our own secure drop servers from the Freedom of the Press Foundation so people can get us that information. Also, we will develop solutions if needed. We are always concerned about the intent and operation of nation-state actors, both on how they are interacting with our journalists and what capabilities they have and whether or not they've exercised those capabilities against us or other news organizations. As a telecommunications guy, I'm super into telecommunications security. So all the types of communications, both in how it can be used for surveillance, how it can be used for interception. So we're constantly looking at that and trying to improve our own telecommunications security as best we can within the operating environment. We operate a factory that makes newspapers. So we have all the industrial control systems you might imagine that exist in any factory out there, which is really great. It's also really challenging because it's very different from a lot of the other stuff we've talked about today. I said it before, I'll say it again. You know, we have our own apps that we build, so having secure applications that are both externally facing, like the one in your phone from the New York Times is the crossword, but also internal apps that we use to build, run and operate the newspaper or the newsroom is really key as well. So we look at the security of those things as another area of concern or focus. Of course, we're concerned about our cloud architecture and infrastructure. We've moved out of data centers everywhere. We're a very cloud-centric company now. I think any news organization that's still running data centers is possibly making a mistake. So having secure cloud architecture that is both redundant, available, but also absolutely secure and admirable is really, really key. And finally, I'm gonna kind of lump into enterprise security here, but this is just the great business of the great lady. We're just like every other company out there. So we have legacy systems we need to keep in track of. We have the not so exciting information security things like your HR systems or your accounts payable systems, which are very exciting because they involve real people's lives and getting paid. But that's a huge area for us to also pay great deal of attention to. And that's really the nutshell of, you look at the newsroom very specifically and then the rest of the company at large. So let's look at some hard problems that we face that we can't really solve. These are not things that, we're like one of many who would desire these outcomes, but these are really kind of interesting hard problems. And if you're looking for a challenge out there, please take a look at my list of hard problems and solve them for me and just produce the golden goose because that would be awesome. One of the things we run into all the time on social media platforms is a lack of clarity and consistency in language and presentation, security controls. Social media platforms really seem to like to change their security controls all the time, change how they're referring to things even at the most basic manner. So that when we say, hey, this is what you do to do this. And one of our people goes, I don't see that button. And we look at it and we go, so it was there yesterday. If there was a system or a scheme where the policy you would like as an individual for your security controls and privacy controls could be read from a file as opposed to like, clicked on a bunch of random click boxes on five different tabs. That would be great. So if you have any influence or control over this, that would be wonderful. I really like someone to produce the holy grail of telecommunications devices. I need something about this big. It does like multiple hundreds of megs of bandwidth reliably, runs on batteries. So that when we send journalists to natural disasters or conflict areas or just out into the hinterlands of the world, they have a way to return us high quality, rich journalism. We're not just a print or a more, it's not just some words we need to stream out. We're not just dictating phone, dictating stories over teletypes now. We're trying to move up the scale of the kind of media we're producing. So that would be great if you could do that. Not asking for much. As we all know, when you get a large gathering of people together, a festival or an event or rally, we often see modern telecommunications, wireless telecommunications kind of grind to a halt or slow way down. And then what happens is journalists basically have to go to the event, cover it as best they can, and then get back to some sort of, usually a landline, but sometimes just outside of that cell area to file their story and provide some context for it. So really, what we're looking for is something like a wireless mesh network, something like Otena or MeshTastic that can send print-ready photos or video as well as long bits of text. That would be an amazing little tool to help us get that working. We'd love some tools that allow for lightweight mobile opt-in mobile device management. So we work with freelancers and their phones are their phones. They're not our phones.   Duh, duh, duh, duh. So that if they get detained for whatever reason, we can A, know that they're detained because we can track them physically and we're allowed to through their device or we can block their phone for them. In that same vein, remote journalist check-in tools, these generally don't work at scale and we have a lot of journalists, so we do a lot of check-ins. So if there's a tool out there that would allow basically a way for journalists to self-enroll for a security check-in and then it would check in and they would be able to report back and if the check-in didn't work or they hit the red button because the meeting is not going well and they really do need some backup, that would be wonderful. Tor network speeds, I love it when a source comes to us and says, hey, I've got six gigs of data, I don't wanna drop on you and we're like, yes, that's wonderful. And then they say over an onion share and I'm like, ah, because I know downloading six gigs of data or the Tor network is really, really, really painful. So anything you can do to help speed up the Tor network speeds would be great. Operating proper relays and exit nodes is wonderful, supporting them financially so they can hire more folks to work on the project. Tor is currently working on increasing their network speeds. I'm really excited about that project at many different levels. Speaking of that six gigs of data we just got, it would be really great if we had a really wonderful set of tools for source media sanitization. We are looking at tools right now but it doesn't seem like anyone makes a really great, robust method for sanitizing masses of data at scale in a newsroom, especially with a lot of the controls and features we would like to see as a news organization and not a financial organization or an insurance organization. Finally, we have all this data, right? Better tools for searching and analyzing large mixed file sets. You just get a lot of random stuff in folders sometimes and you're like, okay, this is photos of PDFs. Interesting. You can't just grep that. Maybe it's mixed set, right? Maybe it's to be a lot of different data. So having a way to handle that would be wonderful. Finally, an external message handling tool for secure messaging platforms. When we start getting 10X messages in our tip line because of a campaign from a group that we really like to be heard, it makes it very difficult for us to weed through all of that information. So something that we could operate that would allow us to manage all those messages in a secure way and do some filtering and binning so we can really go, okay, this is all from this, but here's a unique tip and here's a not unique tip. It would be great, especially for apps like WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram. Again, not an easy thing, but definitely worth doing, especially we want these tools to be tools for civil good. Those are the hard problems. Oh, and finally, Bellingcat has their own list of OSINT projects that they're working on that are just all GitHub stuffs. Definitely check out Bellingcat's work and their need for building tools for open source investigators. So maybe you wanna get involved, maybe hopefully I've inspired you. Please think about attending the Internet Freedom Festival. There possibly will be some similar meetups like that in the States in the next couple months. So definitely stay on the lookout for those. Attend a generalist convention if you feel like that's another great place to kind of get a flavor for what's going on. If you're looking for work, check out the Digital Rights Job Board. A lot of posts are put up there. I post all the New York Times jobs to that board as they come up and there are openings right now at the Times in the security group. We have major, they're tough. I mean, we're not the only, we're not the, you know, there are other newspapers out there. There are other news orgs, surprise. So definitely check out, you know, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, CNN, BBC, Rogers, the AP, Gannett.  Local news is really, really, really important and it's really, really, really on the ropes right now. So definitely think about, you know, checking into your local newspaper, even if it's an alt-weekly and asking if they want any help because they might, they probably do need the help and even if it's just advisement, it could lead to something you could not, but it could definitely help. If you are a researcher, if you like working in NGOs, and you like doing advocacy, definitely check out some of the NGOs working in the space. There's the Committee to Protect Journalists who helped me get some of my stats. This report is sans frontier. They're a wonderful organization. The International Federation of Journalists is out there working on the half of journalists internationally. The International Women's Media Foundation is another great place to look and then, you know, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a lot of folks, I bet you, in this very room are from that organization. So please, please think about working for one of them or working with them.  I didn't even name, also working on these same issues. So hopefully you found this talk enlightening. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me. You can hit me up on Twitter. My DMs are open. And I'm not a great Twitter person, by the way, but I will look. I will give an eye out for you. So feel free to ask me any questions you'd like. Thank you so much and have a good day.


Lie from Palo Alto in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's theCUBE, covering I.O. Brought to you by I.O. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burris. Hello, everyone. Welcome to this special CUBE presentation, live at the Rosewood in Menlo Park and here in California in Silicon, heart of Silicon Valley. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. This is theCUBE, Silicon Angles flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the Silicon Noise. We're part of the I.O. Data Centers. I.O. Conversations, Thought Leadership event here in Silicon Valley. Talking about Data Center as a platform. Our next guest is Suzanne Kass from Base Layer, Peter Groves from Bloom Energy. Welcome to the program. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you. So Data Center is a platform, is all about the cloud. And the cloud is just a data center that no one knows the address of. So we still have to do all the innovations. Suzanne, what's the main innovation happening? Because facilities are still going to be needed. But yet the energy piece of it, the costs are still gonna be there. What are the current innovations that you see? Well, the newest innovation, and I'm actually passionate about John, is actually focusing more on energy savings and growing sustainably. I fundamentally believe the cleanest unit of energy is the one that you actually don't waste while you actually still have to do cloud computing at the growing astounding speed sustainably. Is there any new trends that you see happening that are indicative of the cloud movement where people are actually looking at data centers differently? I mean, it used to be a sprawl kind of mentality. Now you're seeing engineering, specifically going into it. What are you seeing, big trend? One of the key big trends I've asked you to observe is actually the growth of the edge computing. So the mega data center will continue to grow as I actually worked at eBay for a long time ago, citing many of them around the world. But the growth is actually because of the driven of the devices in a smart city. So it's gonna be at the edge. Peter, how about you? You're seeing trends also in the energy side as well. What are you seeing? What are your thoughts? As most of you know, the data center industry is very risk-averse. For the longest time, innovation was coming slowly until about five, six years ago with the advent of hyperscale data centers. Different reliability expectations, different conditions enable these companies, whether it's Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft to bring some very interesting new concepts, new technologies that had an enormous impact, not only in terms of energy efficiency, but also energy utilization and other elements that are part of the whole sustainability picture. Since then, other companies, enterprises and co-location companies have embraced some of these technologies. And now we're seeing some real transformation, not only in terms of power, but also cooling, security, physical logistics associated with data centers. It's a brave new world and the energy components, power components plays a major role here because it's such an important, expensive and the major component of the physical reliability of the data center. Now historically, when we think about a data center, we think about raised floor, we think about large, dedicated space, servers over here, storage over there, a bunch of network stuff, it's all being hyper-converged into a series of racks, but I want to come back to the point that you made just now about the edge, that what we're, because of physics, while we will continue to see these very large data centers, we will increasingly see what we're starting to call edge centers, the ability to put significant amounts of processing power close to where the sensors are, where the controls are, because the speed of light will not allow for round trips of more than a few milliseconds. So that's where energy and the things that you do will really become crucial to the design question. So can we talk about what it means or how you envision folks starting to design these edge centers, especially in the context of energy consumption? Precisely. Actually, I love the way that how you designed it because you speak like a data center designer, as a PhD. Indeed, actually, very well stated and you keep it very simple. The only one thing I would actually build on your idea is actually make it smart. So the smartness of it, to go by some of the technology that Bacelay have done, it's actually the inventing of that is we don't need a building. We provide dual source, so you can actually toggle between the grid power and also additional capacities, such as Peter's company bloom and others such as the energy storage system. And space is absolutely very important. That's underlined about the way that actually how you describe it. So one of the unique things that actually I'm personally involved with is actually welcoming many utilities attending our conference today. They're all attending from the California utility and also some of them come as far as the East Coast and New York ISO. Specifically, it's actually placing a module instead of a building, a building, have dual feet, be able to consume separate feeder and power right on the transmission substation. We have many clients around the world, including some of them actually attending today, like Goldman Sachs, take full advantage of that. And they have never have any downtime. It's actually improved the reliability compared to the race floor and saving hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. And one of the unique innovation actually I'm leading on that part, coming out from the renewable background, is actually have that right on the generation of clean power. Now, Peter, Bloom Energy came out with a significant fanfare about eight, nine years ago, as I recall. Fuel cell-based but very, very large capacity. How is Bloom Energy fitting into this vision of dual capacity, dual connection, as a way of driving energy or energy management needs? The concept of destroy generation, onsite generation, is gaining ground rapidly. And for a, it's a whole slew of reasons of which the reliability of the grid is a significant factor. Just in terms of numbers, the number of utility events, failures have grown at the rate of about 10% a year for the last 10 years or so. Just last year, there were over 3,600 events averaging about 44 minutes of downtime. So there is a significant concern in the entire community about power resiliency. And the focus is on many enterprises to have some control over one's power destiny. So then if you take into account the fact that when it comes to data center and any kind of mission critical facility, there is no real sustainable onsite generation solution. When you talk about sustainable green power, you primarily think of either wind or solar. Geothermal might be a factor. But they don't satisfy the basic requirements of continuous availability, which is essential in the operation of a data center, right? And that's where Bloom comes into the picture, the ability to deliver much cleaner power with a much lower carbon content. But a solution that is uninterruptible, continuous, a solution that could very well replace the traditional components of a data center, UPSs, batteries, generators, transfer switches, a lot of auxiliary components, simplifying the architecture, reducing cost, improving the reliability, and finally having this green sustainability element has dramatically changed the whole green power solution for data centers. Interesting topic. And Peter certainly put us on our agenda for our Cube Friday podcast that we're going to do Friday, because this really is such a cutting-edge trend. But it's got implications and impact to the industry. And I want to get both thoughts on this, Suzanne and Peter, on the cultural impact of two industries colliding. Because you mentioned some of these cutting-edge power, the utilities, the smart grid's been around. I mean, it's been trying for years, decades to get that smart grid going. But now the IT culture, the raised floor, meets these two industries. Can you share some insight into what is the culture clash, if any? What's the good, bad, and ugly around that integration? Because you have two sets coming together. And certainly IoT, Internet of Things, is right around the corner. So that's happening at the meet. So what does the culture clash look like? Is it good? Is it going well? Can you share any insight? Sure. As I mentioned before, data centers operators had a difficult time accepting all this new technology. But things have changed. And probably I would certainly not underestimate the importance of OCP, Open Compute Project, will fundamentally, in my opinion, change this industry. It's all about this whole industry. It got to the point where it's really mature enough to talk about becoming a commodity. And I'm not trying to minimize the significance of these new elements. Since it's all about industrializing, standardizing this whole business, where the drive cost and cloud has a lot to do with it, Internet of Things has a lot to do with that. And the concept of OCP is exactly its focus prime. And the main focus is cost reduction, energy, energy efficiency improvement. And it's going to tremendously transform the way we built and operate the data centers. And it started with Facebook. Now Google joined a lot of the software involved in that. That's a great initiative. Everybody's there. B.O.A. made an announcement about embracing this. So it's happening in your mind. It's happening. And it's going to change this industry. And the power and energy element having to do with that, it's fundamental. That's probably one of the single most critical elements of this new concept. Yeah, energy is data centers are driving a lot of the net energy consumption. It's a big issue. All right. Thanks so much for sharing your insights here on theCUBE. Appreciate it. I know you got to go to your panel. We're here live at the Rosewood and the heart of Silicon Valley right down the street from all the venture capitals here on Sand Hill Road. This is theCUBE. We're having more live coverage from IO Conversations, the IO platform, data centers and platform event here. And the Rose will be right back.


In this presentation we will discuss the concept of lower of cost or market. We will define this concept first and then see it and talk about how it would apply to inventory. The definition of lower of cost or market according to fundamental accounting principles while the 22nd edition is required method to report inventory at market replacement cost when that market cost is lower than recorded cost so what we're saying here is we have we're talking about the inventory of course and we're saying that we have to record it at the replacement cost when that replacement cost that market cost is lower than the recorded cost what we actually purchased it for so this looks like a confusing type of definition however it's pretty straightforward what we're applying here is going to be the conservative principle meaning that if our inventory has declined in value we have to record it at the lower cost we don't want to be overstating our inventory obviously regulations are very concerned about us overstating something when we're talking about an asset and making the financial statements look better than they would rather than under stating it and therefore what we want what we want to default to for this concept would be under recording the inventory rather than overstating the inventory and therefore we want to record it at the lower of the cost or the market value to apply that if you see problems such as this of course they're going to give you basically two numbers that we'll have to be able to compare and it's as easy as basically picking the smaller number so if we bought it at cost this is our inventory this isn't a piece of merchandise this is not a piece of equipment that we're selling if we buy and sell forklifts and they are our inventory then and if we bought that forklift for the 15 000 but the replacement cost is only 12 000 then we're saying that it went down in value and we shouldn't be keeping the inventory on the books at 15 000 which would be the general rule the default rule meaning we keep the inventory on the books at cost if the replacement cost has gone down to 12 000 it's important to note here that we're not talking about the sales price so we're not saying that the cost is what we're selling it for we're not selling our inventory in this case the forklift for 15 we would have marked it up for something of the sales price we're talking about the cost of it what it's on our books for and we're saying that well if it costs 15 and we can buy the same inventory for 12 then we should be putting that inventory on our books for a lower amount and if we were to sell it of course it's probably the case that there would be a relationship to the sales price the sales price probably is something that would have to be lower than the original sales price that we would have had when we had bought the merchandise at 15 000 but this problem once again has to do with how much we're reporting our assets on the books for which is not the same thing as the sales price it has to do typically with what we bought it for that's going to be the default but if we're saying it went down in value given the fact that we bought this inventory specifically for selling it if the purchase price went down then you would think that the inventory has declined in value and therefore we should not be holding it on the books overstating our assets by keeping them at cost at 15 but putting them on the replacement cost what the inventory what the same inventory the same forklift in this case would cost if we purchased it at this time to make that decrease of course would make the financial statements look a bit worse we would have to decrease the inventory lowering the amount of assets that we have on the books and record some kind of loss lowering the net income come at the point in time that it is determined that the replacement cost is less than the cost that we pay for the inventory


Hi there! Today, I'm going to show you how to find scholarly articles in Articles Plus. Articles Plus is the first green tab in the middle of the library's website. It will search almost all of our resources, as well as resources from other libraries. It's kind of like library Google. You can search for topics, specific titles, keywords, you name it. Let's say I'm interested in renewable energy and I need to get some scholarly articles on the topic, so I will simply type in Renewable Energy and see what we get. Of course, you can be more specific, but we'll start with this. You can see I have quite a few results and they vary from books to videos and more. But we know we are looking specifically for scholarly articles, so I need to make some adjustments. On the left, I can narrow my results to scholarly peer-review journals. That way, I can have confidence that my results are coming from legitimate, reviewed academic journals because the library says so. And that's it! If you have any questions, chat with us from your Articles Plus results page or contact your subject librarian. The list of subject librarians can be found on the library's home page under Resources. Until next time!


How to be more productive, curate your media. Hey, have you wanted to be more productive, get more done, make more money, get more accomplished? This is your video. Don't miss it, and we're starting right now. Hey, I'm JR Fisher. Welcome to my channel. Been selling online since 2009. I've sold millions of dollars of both digital and physical products. And on this channel, I share it with you. I tell you the things that work, the things that doesn't work, and I save you some time, money, and hassle. So in this video, I want to help you out with your productivity. And it has to do with curating your media. Now you may think when I say that, that you're saying I should go out and curate by go getting more media and more content and putting it on my site and sharing it. And that's exactly what I'm not talking about at all. Before we get started, don't forget to subscribe, hit that big button down there. Don't forget to like this video and turn on all bell notifications. You gotta turn on bell notifications because if you do, you'll be notified. You want to be notified, right? Every single time I do a new video, you want to be notified. And you'll be at the front of the line. You'll be part of the Fisher family, the VIP group that gets notified before anybody else. So don't forget to do that. So let's jump right into this. And I want to share with you how this has really affected me and what I do because I actually curate my media on a daily basis and didn't realize I was doing it until I saw what other people were doing. I'm like, oh my goodness, you're wasting a lot of time. Check this out, you should do this. So I want to share it with you because this time management really does help you out. You need to free up more time. Time is your number one asset. It's not money, it's not strength, it's not how good looking you are. It is time because with time, you can do things. You can get things accomplished.  You just will never succeed. So I want to show you how to free up a lot of your time here. Now, the number one question I get asked, which I think is really, really funny, is I tell them I have a business and people will say this to me. How many employees do you have? How many employees do you have? How many employees do you have? They think that having a lot of employees means that you're very successful. That doesn't mean that. Having a lot of employees just means that you have a lot of payroll. That's all that means. That means that there's less money going into my pockets than there is to somebody else's.  What you want to do is free up more time for yourself to create, to do things that are going to make you more money.  Matter of fact, I would actually blacklist emails that come from people that you don't want to look at their content. And blacklisting means you're not going to see them anymore, you won't even have to click on it and delete it, because every time I click and delete, that's taking up time. It's not productive. It's not productive at all. So I don't want to even get those emails. And I would take this a step further too. If you've subscribed to some mail list or some email list and you haven't bought or acted on those emails in over six months, I would say that you probably should get off that list. Unsubscribe from these lists. That's the first thing you need to do is start unsubscribing from lists. Look at your email box and look at how much time you waste by deleting emails you don't even read. As a matter of fact, if you want to pause this video and start deleting, you could do that. Or you could keep watching. Let's go ahead and keep going. Number two, get off social media. Get off social media. Now, what I mean by this is I don't mean you can't use social media. I use social media every day, but it is business related. It is very rare for me to post anything personal on social media. And the reason I don't post anything personal on there is because the people that mean a lot to me, I talk to them on a daily basis any hour or I'll text with them, I don't need to post anything on social media. Social media pictures and posts and all those things are basically ego boosters. You want to show people that expensive bottle of wine or that fancy car or your beautiful home to make yourself feel better because they're going to say something complimentary about it. That's what social media is about. You're posting something online, whether it's a news article, whether it's a meme, whether it's a video to tell other people what you're about. You're saying, hey, this is who I am. I like this. I like this kind of politics here. I like this kind of article here. I like this thing that they're doing here. And since I like these things, you should like me because this is a really cool thing. That's what social media generally is. Now, I use social media, but I use it to post educational videos on how to make money online. And that's the part where I think it is valuable, but just to sit there and go through your news feed and look at what people's lives are every single day and find out what they had for dinner and what movie they're going to. And it's just a waste of time, guys. You've got to get off social media. And that means Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and all, unless it's your business. If it's business related, I get it. If you're teaching exercise programs and you want to do a short video on a particular exercise, that makes sense. But just to sit there and scroll through and read all this stuff, it's a waste of time. Number three, get rid of chat apps. I pretty much don't use chat apps. I occasionally will use Messenger when somebody sends me a message on it and I have Skype and that's it. And if you want to talk to me, that's how you're going to do it. Otherwise, you're going to text to me and very few people have my cell phone number. So not that many people are even going to text me. If you have all these things, you got Messenger and WhatsApp and all these different things going on all the time and all these messages come from other places. People are controlling your time. They really are, you've got to get off it. That's number three, get off these chat apps. Number four, cut down on phone use. Now you may be saying, well, JR, I don't ever talk on the phone that much. It's very rare for me to talk on the phone. It's not what I said. I said, cut down on phone use. There's a difference in talking on a phone and using your phone because here's the truth, guys. We use our phone for everything, right? We use it for payments. We use it for posting social media. We use it for telephone calls. We use it for chat.  They want to keep you on that platform. They want to keep you on that platform because the way they make money is ads are run on Facebook. And if you're not on the platform, you're not going to see the ads. You got to get off all of this phone time that you spend. Most phones will show you what your screen time is and it will show at the end of the week, I don't mind us, and it will show you how much time you spent on websites. It'll show you how much time you spend on Facebook, on social media sites. It'll show you how much time you spend on YouTube. But I do like YouTube because this is a YouTube channel that you're learning right now.   The longer you stay there, the more money they make because there's more people on the platform, more people to watch these ads that constantly you put in front of you.  Most of the stuff you buy, you probably don't need. Most of the things that you're probably working for are not going to make you happy. You know, you think of the big house and I've had big houses before and I have a smaller one now, but the big houses just cost you more money. Anytime you acquire anything in life, it's going to cost you more money. So when I had my bigger house, it had three heaters and air conditioners in it, okay? Because it had different zones, which meant I had filters for all these heaters and air conditioners, which meant I had electricity for all these heaters and air conditioners, which meant I had repairs for all these heaters and air conditioners, okay? So my point being is when you add something and then we had a huge yard, it was three acres of grass, which meant I had to have a special zero-turn mower so I could mow that fast, which meant I had to cut more of the grass, which meant I had to buy more gas, you know? So all these things that you think are great that you're working towards, you may want to readjust. What's great is having money in the bank and not having to worry. Not having to worry, you know, if you're going to be able to pay all these bills or take care of all these things. Every time you buy something, it can cause you to buy something else. You get your in-ground swimming pool. Now you got to buy chemicals. Now you got to fill it with water. Now you got to clean it. So that item is going to own you more than you're going to own it. Keep that in mind. Unless you pay people to do all these things and now you're working to pay people. So if you think about that, you're kind of their employee at this point. So please look at this stuff and the usage you have. Now, number five, this is a really big one, really big one. A lot of you guys haven't done this yet. I've done this with most everything I have and that is turn off all notifications. Turn them off. Restaurants send you stuff. Social news, weather, all these things take away from your attention. And if they take your attention away from something else, it could be your business. It could be something that makes you money. It could be something that makes you happy. But these notifications are built in to steal your time. They're taking your time away from you.  Open the section that says notifications. Look at all the notifications you're getting in there. And you know, sometimes it's not that you get a lot of notifications from one restaurant or from one thing in there. It's that you have so many notifications turned on with weather and news and all these different things in Facebook and Twitter and all this that just the combination of all of them could use up your entire day.  Is that what you wanna do? Do you want this little pocket thing, this little phone to actually control what you do all day long? I know I don't. I know I don't. And you say, well, some of these things are really important. I have to know what the weather is or what it's gonna be. You know, years ago, we didn't know. You know, what they did is they went on TV and they told us what they thought it could be. They were usually inaccurate. And then they told us what, I love this one. They told us what the weather was yesterday. Yeah, what the weather was yesterday. Does it really matter what the weather was yesterday? If you're gonna be more productive, you've gotta change the way you think. You know, I read an article one time about Richard Branson and Richard Branson being a billionaire, one of the richest guys in the world. He says, I don't have an office and I don't have a briefcase. All of that is just distracting. Wow.  Not just physically, but mentally on a daily basis. How much more freeing would it be if you didn't have to go to an office, if you didn't have to carry around a briefcase? Now, I had this studio here and I gotta tell ya, it's a nice office. But I don't use it for an office. I use it just for filming videos. I don't come in here to sit down at the desk and work. I can work anywhere. I can work on my couch. I can work at a coffee shop after the pandemic's over with. Okay, I gotta give a caveat to that. We can't go anywhere now, but that's what I normally did. I have an office down the street too. I could go there, but I don't because that's not where I feel comfortable working. And where we've come to nowadays, we think that we're only gonna be productive if we're working in an office somewhere. And you know, it's so silly. I think that started in the 40s and 50s where offices seemed so important to us that actually TV shows picked up on it. If you think about it, and it still goes on a little bit, but a lot of the late night talk shows, the guy will be sitting behind a desk with a shirt and tie on, talking to somebody, as if it's a business meeting. And a lot of them have gotten rid of those desks now. Those desks made no sense for them to be sitting behind a desk interviewing somebody. What was the desk for? There was no paperwork there. There was no typewriter. There was no computer. It was just a desk, and it didn't make sense. It didn't make sense in that setting, but we all kind of fell into that and we thought that's what a talk show should be as a guy sitting behind a desk interviewing somebody else. And now we've come to see a lot of times like on YouTube, I watch a lot of interviews now and they're no longer sitting at desks. They're sitting in two chairs side by side, just the way normal people would talk, okay?  It's silliness, okay? So keep in mind, all these things matter to your productivity. If you don't spend your time properly, you won't be productive. I hope this video helped you out. I also have a free course that's below. It's a $97 course, but you can get it absolutely free. All you have to do is click and learn. Link below, link below. And don't forget, put your comments below too. If you've got questions about this subject or anything about learning how to make money online, put that below. 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Welcome to the 21 report. I'm Frank Pesci, and I'm here with Alexander Cortez aka Ajak Alexander is a personal trainer content creator and fitness entrepreneur Ajak. How are you? I don't Frank doing great Thanks for being here. Good to be here. Absolutely. So you spoke at the event this year. Yes. What's going on? What do you think? So this is my I think my fifth time speaking so I did three speeches talks You know my convention 22 convention then also the patriarch convention. So I became a dad Last year about three and a half months ago. Awesome. Awesome. Well, I've seen you at other conventions Just as we were talking in the pre-interview. I have taken things from you from your speeches I've applied them in my life, and it has become part of my regiment of Personal growth and development and just being a better version of myself.  Yeah, as a Being a dad actually it didn't change a lot bit clarified a lot where It's very easy to tell them in like you have to be disciplined get to follow schedule Yeah, your life has to have structure to you don't have any structure You don't need discipline and any kind of recommendations are pretty much mute I could give you the best plan in the world. You know for fitness for anything else you know, but if waking up at the same time isn't something you do and if You know prioritizing your time and something you do that doesn't really mean anything but when you have kids I Wouldn't say that you have less time, but you have less time to be indecisive and You know when my son was born, I remember I was pretty tired. You know my wife Went to labor during the night sort of gave birth in the morning. It's very pretty much fast delivery But neither was it slept, but I still went to the gym the next day and I got the treadmill. I ran four miles It was as imagine like what my son think, you know if I sort of skipped the gym Right, you sort of have this question you become a dad of like what am I so where my son think he's watching me right now like in my actions And I became much more impatient in fact now that he's been born or just I do everything faster You know like the the rate of time the order of time slow time is accelerated that way And I've been telling can't my my following that now I've gotten much more I Pays place much more of an emphasis on your usage of time and being ultra decisive in the moment When you're younger when it's just when you're younger it's just yourself like you can kind of you can waste your moments You can spend time thinking about things you can waffle back and forth But then once you have kids you realize like Jesus like I wasted You know moments days, you know weeks, you know, we think about this don't think so much just act Action is clarifying So it's how in the message down I think that way Yeah, but is the habit of excellence? Consistency doing the same things but consistency is itself as a decision What I need to do to be consistent.  Nobody starts out in a state of greatness. We all start out shit If you're gonna the beginning of any process like you're an amateur, you don't know anything How do you get better you show up every day regardless of feeling regardless of emotionality regardless of motivation What role do archetypes play in You're the way that you think the way that you prosecute life I say that because I had spent time in one of your talks 2019 maybe where you did an amazing job of just tying together what it means to be a man to archetypes throughout the time of history Do you still think along those lines? I do I do it's a useful Framework for just understandings or what I call like depth and breadth of masculinity we've We've put up with about 20 30 years of what my friend Mike Cermich always calls it like boobs and butt and bacon kind of masculinity What are men into men like bacon men like tits?  Yeah, that's all we're supposed to be And that's not the case obviously like men have created the world and being a man has immense depth and breadth to it It's a complex complex experience. There's all different kinds of men in the world There's all different kinds of talents and what you can be good at what you can pursue The end archetypes is just a way of you know orienting yourself around you know certain kinds of roles and characters You know every man's inclined her different towards different things. You have men who are leaders You kind of King archetype, right? You have men who are very physical you know combative competitive, you know warrior archetype You have men who are very intellectual like that They have the mind you can call that sort of like the other wizard archetype an organizer Yeah, then you have men who are in fact like more emotional in the masculine way, you know They like to bond with people they have a softer touch, you know like they use love as sort of their conduit for a relation to the world You know when you you know and analyze yourself you're trying to better understand yourself Like what do you defer to and you're always going to be all all things at once? It's not that you pick something and you pick an identity and that's all that you are But you know organizing it that way especially as a younger guy, we're trying to figure out like who am I like? What am I into it's like, you know, what are my natural talents? What am I interests?  That's it's some guys. That's the only thing, right? It's just women and it's like okay.  So I still reference that from time to time But you know once the past year especially once I got married and became a father I focus much more into the fatherhood. I guess archetype now. That's what's important. Yeah That's what you're encountered with. Yeah, so that's what becomes important to you You know and it's interesting sort of watching the mass beer evolve at the same time where yes I often reference this it started out as it being basically about getting women You know, how can I have successful relationships or just get sex? You know since for a lot of guys that's still their major frustration getting laid. It's okay. It's a real thing There's always gonna be that segment of dudes where they just struggle with girls, but then over time it's evolved into okay It's not just about women. It's you know, how do I be more effective in the world? Yeah, how do I pursue excellence? How to become more successful financially? Yeah, how do I you know? Patriot convention. How do I be better father? How do I be a better leader to people? Same scene the 21 convention evolved at the same time, but just it's cool to see Yeah, and you've evolved with it I mean from my perspective as somebody who sits in the audience and gets to watch these speeches and have Conversations like this. I've seen just everybody has just grown in different direction. He will have been unified seemingly under One spirit we might say in a lot of ways Five-time returning speaker. Yes What do you think of this event that Anthony put together this year as it compares to the others? This it's it's been an evolution since 2018 Yeah, this year was it's gotten older like in the subject matter Definitely like you know, whether this is Anthony's personal decision or that's just the state of the spear You know the subject matter, you know, even five years ago was very female oriented And now it's a sort of very man in the world accomplishment oriented Yet the majority of the I think the speeches that were given Which that's been cool to see and like the audience has gotten more serious Again, like you start out being about women largely and now it's just really about how can I be? Competent, how can I navigate sort of this chaotic world? How can I make sense of it? Hey on the sense-making factor has become a much more of a subject matter We're you know guys come here to serve listen to other men who they consider competent like how do you think about the world? What do you think of what's going on right now the kind of question and how can you help me think about it? And hopefully make better decisions. It becomes like a reality check for you guys For instance, we're content creators you get to meet other people who are also creating content who are influencing people Who are seeing things perhaps from a different perspective? Do you find yourself coming away from these conferences more equipped?  Yeah, I've said this before like this is not my life Goal of like I'm gonna be a known figure, you know on the Internet That was not something I thought about 10 15 years ago when I was younger. You know, that's why I became right But yeah in regards to creating content and why really this one to be useful to your audience That's why I always think of myself like I want to be useful to people. Yeah, I'm not trying to create a cult of personality Just want to be a vessel. Yeah I don't it's not my aim that people are trying to imitate me I'm like I just want to share useful information useful advice useful models heuristics Instructions steps and hopefully you take that you apply to yourself and it allows you to find out who you are As your own man not trying to be me or someone else who are you and here's some tools to help you discover that I know that you have You know forums and and a faithful following of people that you know listens to you When you see those guys, do you see them trying to be like you or do you see them trying to be the best version of themselves? Because in essence you become the archetype that they look at they say I want to be like him How do you navigate that? What is your views on that? Yeah? I think I attract Independent-minded people like I've yeah, I had guys here that I was meeting for the first time They've been following me like five years Which I was like wow it's in like they've you know they start out maybe they're 25 now they're 30 or when they were 20 other 25 It's not an insignificant portion of their life By percentage But they always seem to skew towards being independent-minded. I don't know I've really met anybody where it's like oh this guy's trying to like sort of copy me It's more so like I found you and it's like more like a big brother figure. It's like you look up to your big brother You know he gives you good advice You know he's sort of living his life Yeah, maybe you're trying to sort of imitate what he's doing But he's also encouraging you like you need to go find your own way You know he's gonna push you into those kinds of situations, you know whether literally you're metaphorically figuratively You know, I've never gotten that vibe from people you never got a stand letter like Eminem got no I mean every once in a while you like I've had lots of weird interactions online But that's just the nature of being online once you have a large following I don't was compared to being like a list famous not that I'm being mobbed in public But just when you you're online you have a hundred thousand plus people that follow you You know cumulatively it's like maybe two hundred thousand You're gonna attract weirdos just kind of by default There's gonna be a percentage of not even your audience But it's presented to people where they find someone they fix it on them and because of their own pathologies They send you weird stuff or create weird scenarios. That's funny But I mean that's like a very overall like I say this often too like my my following I can start like a virtue is falling. It's a virtue cycle Yeah, I'm useful to people. I'm positive for them. I get that positivity back You know those negative interactions are not even maybe 1% of the overall breath interactions But you do remember them just because oftentimes is just they're almost comical. It's humorous. Yeah You know it stands out from the other stuff.  You're enjoying it You said it wasn't necessarily what you set out to do, but you're doing it and doing well When I talk to young people generation Z people, they all want to be content creators, dude They all want to be injured Tate. They all want to do something where they make money online Like what would you say to them about the reality of being a content creator the work that goes into it? What's the lifestyle really like behind the scenes? It seems to me that so being a content creator now being a creator being an influencer Another word that was not a thing 10 years ago. Now it is I Think for young people. It's simply looking at what is most popular and wanting to be that popular person yeah, I remember growing up in 1990s and You know is very popular for young women then like they want to be a singer, you know Which I don't know if that's the case now But like at that time this is like pop culture This is sort of the Britney Spears era like being a singer was probably like the highest status thing you could be as Like a girl or at least be out by young moments perspective, you know as a young guy I remember 1990s as is when for whatever reason like I haven't traced it sociologically Like being like an astronaut was supposed to be like a cool thing like I want to be an astronaut Yeah, I don't hear anyone say they want to be an astronaut anymore But at that time being an astronaut was like that was cool. That was that somehow meant something important You know for kids don't have young people don't have you know extremely defined Logical objective reasons for why they think they want to be something. They're just existing in the world Their brains are still forming. They're young they're young the young people, right? So I can imagine which for 15 16 17 and the most popular coolest person You know as an online creator of some kind that you follow like I want to be like him The actual reality of it is I don't want to say that it's an unsustainable career But to have sustainability to last in this It goes back to my emphasis on usefulness on having utility You actually have to have useful knowledge and skills And you know advice you can give people in direction You can be an entertainer like you know sort of being an online based creator Sort of like being the new version of a comedian celebrity You could do an entertainment factor, but not most not everyone's entertaining. Most people are not entertaining Yet your odds of succeeding as a micro celebrity are probably pretty low It goes back to the popularity thing like people just want to be popular I've been doing this for a while and you know why am I successful at it? It's a brutal consistency Which she feels easy for me like I'm good at writing. I like being on camera. It's enjoyable But doing that every single day You know for one year two years three years four years five years You know my rate of production also has to match by consumption Now actually it's overlooked a lot like if you want to be consistently useful to people You have to be reading a lot you have to be watching content You have to you have to actually be studying and learning and improving your own knowledge base You know to stay up to date at least certainly in my field of fitness Yeah, is someone actually willing to do that or do they just want the supposed success of look this person got a lot of likes They look cool They're presenting this image and I want to feel cool. I want people to like me too So I question my own position at times like is this going to burn out eventually not myself But like is the creator sort of market going to eventually sort of have this rise and then sort of fall into a trough Of like okay, like we've seen people do this for a number of years They can't keep it up.  I've given out this format from I've given out the formula probably a thousand times to people like you I like I want to do what you do I want to work online. I want to I think I know things. I want to You know be my own personal brand. Okay. Like just pick a platform post every day do that for three years straight Like that's it. Like if you do that, you'll probably be successful if if your stuff isn't good But most people die after 30 days, you know, it's just it's discouraging Uh, you know, don't quit your day job at the same time. It might be a year before we really make money And you know, whatever your idea is So it's fair to say Not every tweet that you sent out you're in a moment of inspiration and glory and excitement Or I can't wait to share this with the world.  Yeah, yeah, like this television's destroying people's minds We're watching too much TV. This is terrible humans just like to consume things. It's just in our nature Yeah, like we can only be productive so much the majority of people They're just gonna want to sit and just watch something unfold and just we we like to be fed this way You know, it's it's romantic You know the internet kind of replaced television You know the same way like youtube kind of youtube and twitter and all these things replaced, you know You could say like newspapers and magazines or So that's a new form of consumption Some people can keep it up Some can't some people get driven crazy by it.  You know, as I say, I always try to keep it useful for people You know, I don't want to be known as someone that's a clown, you know or a jester kind of character You know other people sort of fall into that because they don't know what else to do So it'd be interesting to see where it goes a matter of five six ten years Yeah, yeah, you're a brilliant dude, man I've definitely enjoyed any of the content that I've been able to consume of yours. I've enjoyed it I've always thought it's incredibly insightful I've done appreciate that that's gratifying to hear. Yeah, for sure That's why I like doing these events when I show up because it's like, okay Let's yeah, I get positive feedback a lot obviously written word emails People send stuff, but you meet people in person. It's like you've really helped me. I'm like, okay cool I'm doing good in the world. Yeah, right on. Do you think it's important for men to attend events like these in particular 21 summit? Definitely You have to make the internet real You know like it's it's you know, this is this has changed for the better the last few years, but You know when this serve like self-improvement spear first arose or the man of spear You know even the fitness fields first arose It's very easy to consume content online. We all do it You know, but it's it's you and you're into a relationship with basically your your phone or your laptop Um, you're not connecting with people You know loneliness has become a serious issue for young people A lot of people don't actually have friends. They don't have close connections Everyone they know is just literally just digital relationships. And that's not substitute for real life relationships I've I've met a lot of guys here that have become my friends who are the craters, you know fellow guys Over the last five years. I've also met attendees that become my friends or become people that you know live relationships with And I've seen them build relationships with each other. Yeah, maybe they move in together Maybe they realize live in the same town same state whatever they plant things together And it's just a way for you to probably make you know Using the internet's filtering mechanism where these events is a filtering mechanism It's a way to meet people that you know, you're probably very aligned with value eyes You probably have Similar mindsets of you're on the same mind about many things. So you'll probably have a lot in common Absolutely, absolutely. Well, where can people find you? To the usual places so twitter Because I supposed to look the camera on this whole time. We'll look at the end Or you can you can I think it's a good time. Yeah, so twitter obviously AJA underscore Cortez website Cortez dot site and then instagram as well AJ underscore Cortez and I'd like to think i'm somewhat known for having a really good newsletter So all of my long form of content that I consider the most helpful stuff the good stuff It's all in the newsletter. So go sign up for that Fantastic for the 21 report. I'm frank peshi with ajac. Thank you. Thank you, Frank


Hi, good morning, everyone. Welcome to the 8th US-Iraq Higher Coordinating Committee session. It's my honor to introduce Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Well, good morning, everyone, and so good to see you all here today. Before getting to the HCC, let me just comment briefly on the events of the last few days. Over the weekend, as you know, Iran launched hundreds of missiles and drones against Israel. This was an attack unprecedented in its scope and in its scale, in its scope because it represented the first direct attack by Iran on Israel, and its scale because, as I said, there were more than 300 munitions fired, including ballistic missiles, as well as land-attack cruise missiles, and drones. Thanks to Israeli air defenses, as well as support from other countries, including US military assets, virtually all of the incoming projectiles were destroyed and shot down. As President Biden underscored to Prime Minister Netanyahu, the US is committed to Israel's defense. And I think what this weekend demonstrated is that Israel did not have to and does not have to defend itself alone when it is the victim of an aggression, the victim of an attack. In the 36 hours since, we have been coordinating a diplomatic response to seek to prevent escalation. Strength and wisdom need to be the same sides, the different sides of the same point. I've been in close communication with counterparts in the region, and we will continue to do so in the hours and days ahead. We don't seek escalation, but we'll continue to support the defense of Israel and to protect our personnel in the region. Now for today, let me say how pleased we are to welcome our Iraqi colleagues here to Washington, and I'm particularly glad to have the Deputy Prime Minister here with us this morning to kick off what is the second US-Iraq higher coordination committee with the Sudan government. We just had an excellent meeting with Prime Minister Sudan. I'm grateful to him for receiving us this morning, and of course we look forward to a meeting shortly between the Prime Minister and the President. But I think everything we're seeing today highlights the importance, the value we attach to the relationship between the United States and Iraq, a partnership that's genuinely 360 degrees in everything that it covers in bringing us together. Prime Minister's visit to Houston and to Detroit is another indication of the breadth and depth of the relationship, not only between our countries, but also between our people. Through the HCC and the meetings today, we are working to strengthen and expand that 360-degree partnership. We're focusing on a half a dozen issues, including energy security, democracy, the rule of law, climate and water. The American private sector remains very interested in engaging, in investing, in lending its expertise to Iraq, especially when it comes to energy. Through these efforts, we look forward to helping advance the Prime Minister's affirmative agenda and seeing Iraq succeed. So this HCC carries forward the vision of a long-term relationship of cooperation and friendship that was laid out in the 2008 Strategic Framework Agreement. Our mission today, our goal today, is to make concrete progress on that vision, to continue to transform it into reality, and a reality that benefits people in Iraq, benefits people in the United States, benefits people in the region. And with that, it's a great pleasure to welcome Minister Tameem and to have you here today. Mr. Minister.  Your Excellency, Secretary Tony Blinken, the Secretary of the United States, the Prime States, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to express my gratitude and thanks for the warm reception. And I hope today we'll achieve results that will be in the interest of both nations. The Excellency, the HCC, the Higher Coordinated Committee that is an ensuing meeting on the side sessions that will contribute in transforming, transforming our relationship, strategic relationship to a different phase that will activate the Strategic Framework Agreement that will align with the services government led by our Prime Minister of Sudan, where we are intending to reform financial and political policies and to go towards the energy independence, conduct partnerships with the regional countries and the world. Your Excellency, Secretary, the United Middle East today is living exceptional circumstances that has repercussions on our nations, and we hope escalations and tensions in the area will end. The government of Iraq is warning about escalation and the area to be dragged into a wider world that will threaten international security and safety. And therefore, we call on all parties for self-restraint and to respect the rules of dramatic works and also international laws. And we see that these sessions, it will be the beginning of putting the foundations to work effectively through this higher committee so that we will continue our ongoing bilateral relations and meetings, and we're going to focus on energy, investment, education, climate change, health, desertation and water, and also to strengthen democracy and human rights protections. And this is the new launching of a new phase to implement the articles of the strategic framework agreement. The government of Iraq is working to, for the prosperity of the Iraqi people at the same time, to pay the debts of the Iraqi nation, and especially when it comes to the different phases of the energy sector and use new technologies and modernization of our energy sector to reduce also pollution. The Iraqi government is widening its partnership and conducting agreements so that we'll be able to, for example, use technologies to capture glaring gas, to create and achieve independence in energy, and also to invest in other resources of energy, including renewables and solar energy. The Iraqi government is also seeking to diversify its economy through activating the domestic industry, and the governmental enterprise is to adopt a profitable model to make the Iraqi economy open to the international market by inviting tourism, agriculture, and also creating industrial hubs and zones that will really push Iraq to a prosperous economical horizons with a partnership with the United States and the European Union and other friendly countries to incentivize our economy and to adopt a new economy that is dependent on free market and investing in major industrial projects. To conclude, all I can say is to reaffirm our recognition and appreciation for the joint and mutual efforts to take our relationship to a different phase and a different page of partnership between the two friendly nations. Thank you, Secretary Blinken and everyone here present. Thank you, and peace be upon you all. And thank you, Mr. Secretary and Mr. Minister for your remarks. If I could please ask the delegations to stay seated while they depart and invite our press colleagues also to depart the room. Thank you to our press colleagues. And I have some additional logistical information for our working group delegation.