with the latest yoga mats and blocks in store and online at michaelmerfysports.ie and you're welcome back to the score program 20 minutes past seven o'clock we're turning our attention to motorsport and joining me in studios the man that won the two-wheel drive modified section of the Galway International Rally last weekend that's Mark Alcornmark you're welcome to the studios of Highland Radio thanks Aushen we have to mention John as well he was sitting on board with you he's more important things he's meeting to attend to tonight's week he couldn't join us but he was doing a great experience in the car at the weekend yeah it was a great experience I it was a nice one to one and we were with none at a long time so it was we were talking there the Corolla I thought it was black but you told me it was red 2005 so it's been a wild mark that's been a long time since we started on the red one I myself and Kevin but yeah then the black one come and the bigger engine and now the the new red one the new red one and the red one performed very well for you over the weekend Mark you were telling me there was only one wee mark on her yeah small mark on the wing yeah so another wee bit of fixing but none serious no no major damage I think you laid down a marker did you on the Saturday which was stage two when you took seven seconds out of Kevin Eves well everybody within Rally knows that Mark Alcorn's quick but you blew Kevin away by seven which was a bit of a statement a lot of the guys perked up so they did but it didn't take a fuzzle out of you no I didn't I wasn't when he said seven or eight seconds I wasn't really panicking about it like we had that kind of pace and done it all against Kevin so it's always nice when you take seven seconds off Kevin because Kevin is outstanding like on the stages and he's never far away like he never drops a stage unless something happens him so I was I was happy inside myself but I wasn't going to let it get to me and I was just there to do a job and thankfully thankfully everything went a wee bit smoother this weekend than any other weekend and in saying that is it difficult to keep just to what you're doing yourself within the car and try and blank out what everybody else is doing Mark yeah because you're not racing at the end of the day it's all about times now oh it's all about times but when you're in the car there I don't really think about any other times like I wouldn't I'd be worried more about my side of the car and worried not to have put in a bad time or something like that there so no I do my own thing and I don't worry really what's happening outside the car I kind of figured that out along a couple of years ago like you can't do nothing about anybody else you just have to worry about yourselves you're a very relaxed partnership you enjoy and that was that was evident with the videos and the films and the social media stuff we were seeing at the end of the stages yeah we were very calm we only fell out once on the whole weekend when we were starting to warm up tyres but now we're calm on the car everybody thinks we're two nutters but when it comes to that kind of sport like you have to have a very serious side to it like you know and take it very you know have a great approach to it and don't approach it in the wrong way it's not a funny sport it's very dangerous times so everything has to click on the car like with you so what was clicking with you in the car in John when you were able to pull the legs of seven and then against other competitors maybe 10, 12, 14 seconds out of some guys because that car was really on its limits so it was our recce was very important like we if you've seen our notes like we pulled out all our notes and redone them we used all the distances and all your markers but we really redone the notes and speeded it up just the way we wanted it and that's normally what the two of us do normally like we kind of we put it down to what we like on the stages and that we had a really good set of notes for that rally what was it like on the Sunday trying to get the car home just be sure that you get it as far as the finish line because you had a healthy enough advantage getting into the day and listen Galway's a really, really tricky rally because conditions at times are horrendous we've seen that on Saturday and on Sunday and when the heavens opened they come down really, really heavy so it's a difficult one to navigate so it is listen Sunday was a very, very tricky day listen we had much of a lead in Sunday morning we had a slip up on Saturday evening which dropped us back into the claws of them like we were running about 31 or 32 seconds in the lead which is not a lot when you're on the slippy stages and maybe a spin Sunday that was our plan and I had actually planned earlier in the morning I said we'll push a little bit and try and see where the rest of the markers when you Kevin was out and we might have been able to drag a couple of seconds here and there off them even though they knew the stage is a lot better on Sunday we didn't know them at all so that worked then and we stretched out a real good lead then up to around 50 or a minute before the last loop and you get into the last loop and you go through it safely what was it like at the end of the stage and that sort of roads the road miles in between coming off the stage and heading back to the Connacht Hotel because all of a sudden having tried for so long you've got it now Mark you've won an international event and modified and an escort yeah listen when I crossed the finish line and John says yeah we've done it I was a wee bit emotional but just for about three seconds and then it was like back to normal when I met everybody and Brian McDade was there then to take a few videos and a few pictures and we had a good gang there at the end so no it was a wee bit emotional but at the same time when that passed it was like yeah we've been here before we didn't get it but we knew it had to come sometime so it was brilliant time super stuff but the what comes now off the back of this Mark so it is that people are going right Mark all the coins now in the man debate in 2023 yeah well that's what I'm hoping like I want to put a bit of pressure on myself and I want to be able to go out in the midlands now and I know there's people texting me already from up the country saying we want to see more faster times from you and that's what I want to do I want to try and set down a marker now when the thing is hot so there's more in the tank then? I hope so definitely I know there's more inside me I know I was quicker when a few years ago and on the scroller so I don't know why I can't take it all out of me and to the escort now well listen you're doing the national championship from here on and is that correct? John's going to call the notes John's focusing elsewhere is it? John's on the tarmac championship so he's going to West Cork and that's a few weeks after two weeks after midlands so he's going to have a wee bit hectic there but we're going to thread now into the midlands myself and John now and we're going to sit down tomorrow and he was just ringing me before now or before we landed on here just to say we're going to sort stuff out now for that what happens come done it all I'm sure if I was to say to you now Mark you would love to be national champion would you take being a national champion or would you take one in the national rally the modified section in Donegal I'm sure you'd be going towards the Donegal one I'm definitely I'm not saying nothing about the national championship but now I would give the eight rounds I would give the eight rounds to to cleanse the Donegal national so that's going to be the big target for the year definitely we did take it we had a plan in place at the start of the year it didn't just happen overnight it was a six month period and that was my plan get seven or eight rounds into me and focus then on Donegal come on really hot and try and put it up to the rest of them but John's going to do Donegal as well and the R5 so where does that leave you who's going to call the nuts I don't know maybe John can do both because he's pretty good but no James McNulty's going to come on me and they ask her again and he done a great job and we set some great times last year and Donegal and we were only getting heated up so I think there's more James is well capable of reading the notes when John's away having fun as R5 when you were a young cub Mark when you were a bit younger and you started under Allian who was the guys that you used to watch who did you look up to who did you want to aspire to be I don't know why there was a lot of guys like there was a lot of guys about my house like Paul Geller himself there and I really did look up to Paul and Robbie Peoples the two guys I was very very impressed with them guys there was also Damien Geller there was a great great winner and a great champion too they won the national but it's just like ourselves like God rest man it's like the two of us come up at the same time through the sport so we all had them guys on our radars and we were like whenever we get into cars that's who we want to be beaten there you know so you better mention the rest of the team there at the weekend for the finisher well big big big thanks to Jared, Jared McGrinner and Sean O'Donnell and Ryan Gormley and JP JP Boyd and we had Enda McCormick and we had Liam Doherty down just giving us a hand out to making tea and stuff so they were helpful and the two girders, Michaela and the whale they were brilliant but big shout out to Ronan that's why we're kind of on here this evening nothing would have happened here only Ronan coming board with Ron Hill and Ron Hill is one of the biggest distributors biggest bakery distributors and Donegal with over 25 local and national bakeries so with him being on board he brought it all kind of to life now and there's a real good buzz about it. Exciting year ahead Mark it's going to be a real good year good stuff I wish you all the best for 2023 you and Jon on the rest of the team thanks there you go that's Mark Alcorman thanks for coming in Mark and best wishes for the rest of the year okay we're going to go for another quick break when we come back we will be hearing from Niall O'Regan who is the head of coach education with the FAI this weekend the FAI's women's football conference comes to letter Kenny the sport on Highland is brought to you by Michael Murphy sports and leisure you'll find everything you need to stay motivated


g into the universities primarily. And that's kind of where we get started with operating systems and where it started to influence in universities in particular. So at that point the PDPs were given to a bunch of universities and universities were actually starting to work together a bit and you would end up in universities like most of you guys are here you would see these kids who were able to just hack up code and hack up stuff to make the thing work. And that's kind of where the term hacker came from. And so you end up with these college kids who were actually a community of tinkers that were trying to get this stuff to work. And the cool thing was when they were a community like that they were able to share their successes and share their failures with one another, commiserate with one another and start to really share the things that they had and that they came up with and that they were able to solve. So one of the awesome things at this point because of the sharing and the collaboration that was going on it was considered a professional courtesy any time you put out some sort of instruction some sort of operation, some system that would manage operations on a computer that you would offer the source code along with it. But that changed a little bit in 1980 when Richard Stallman decided to fight a printer. So Richard Stallman was working at MIT at the time and the MIT was given a printer by Xerox and this was the very first real printer like the printers that we know. At the time Xerox was making the photocopier you put a piece of paper down and it makes a copy of it. This one you actually took data, sent it over the network and put it onto the printer and the printer decided to print it out. And it was fantastic except it had a few problems. There were some issues with the networking specifically lots of paper jams of course because they always had those but there were some situations where in the data would go from the machine on the network over to the printer and get lost somewhere in the pipes. And the only way to address that was to actually work with the operating systems that was maintaining the computer itself. Here's the problem. Xerox decided to send the code not paying attention to the courtesy of including the actual source code with it. They compiled it into binary so all it was was bits and bytes and Stallman although he was a good programmer and a great engineer he didn't really do too well with bits and bytes and such. So remember I talked about that community of folks and community of hackers. He decided to go to Harvard. Now at Harvard they had two machines also. They had a PDP-10 originally actually the machine that Bill Gates wrote the first version of Basic on and they got themselves a PDP-11 and they weren't able to talk to each other. So what they did was Stallman reach out there after they figured that out and he told them I'm working on this machine that's got a similar network issue that you guys are seeing with the PDPs can I have your source code? And they gave it to them because that's what hackers did at the time. That's what people in community do when they're working with community-based operating systems. We share stuff. And so he shared that with them. He was able to update the code and fix the issues and that's fantastic. He was able to go forth and do also. Now at the time so that was like the first real situation there was an operating system that was being openly sourced where the source codes were available to him ever. That's fantastic. Of course OS's went all crazy from there. Unix was made by Bell Labs, BSD came off which was based in Unix and just turned into this big legal nightmare. DOS eventually came out from Seattle computers. GNU project was started by Stallman and then it kind of fell flat and it really didn't really take off the way that he wanted to. Windows ended up, or rather Microsoft ended up purchasing DOS and then building Windows off of it. And then at that point you had a machine that had an operating system but the operating system belonged to the people that sold it to you. You couldn't touch the operating system. You can change configurations. You could make it do stuff but you don't get the code. And tinkerers, hackers, people like us like to look at the code. We'd like to have our own systems like the gentleman before me that was working on his system. He wanted to take a piece of machinery and make it work for himself. He needed access to the code. And so, 1991, Lannis Torvalds out of Helsinki decides to write an awesome operating system that we know is Linux and just give it to everybody. Anybody who wanted it could have access to the source code that could actually drive a computer that we have right now. And that's fantastic. And Linux just blew up from that point because it was free, it was open, it was available and so now we got Linux on all of the top 500 supercomputers, three of the top five websites of the world right now. Actually, this is evidence of 2023 so this might be a little dated. 96% of the world's top million computers and 90% of all cloud services are running off of Linux right now. And it's a free open-source software that everybody uses and these people are making lots and lots of money off of this stuff and that's fine, that's fine. But the base of it is a free and open-source piece of software that started out with a base in higher learning and at research. So, here's the weird thing when we talk about research specifically. Now, before I went into the research area, before I became an engineer, so right now I work for a linear particle accelerator in Lansing, Michigan, in the US. But before I started working I worked in web hosting and like my bio said, I was a chef before that. This is the first time I've ever worked in a place where we didn't create a product and that blew my mind when I first started, when I first considered it, like how do you pay for stuff? How do you create things? What's the drive behind that? And what the reality happens is that because we don't make a product, it fundamentally changes the way that you look at the work that you're doing. You don't get funding quarterly because of how many things you sell. Most of the time funding comes in the form of grants where you try to get as much free work as you can from folks who are just really interested in things and the crazy thing about grants, the US where I'm based, is grants usually come from the government and the US government can change over every four years. So you can get a grant that's great and it's moving, it gives you all this money, but then four years it's just gone. So what do you do with the money that just changes out of nowhere? You end up employing people that are actually seeking out knowledge and looking to push forward the boundaries of society as we understand it. That's what science does. Technology changes quickly, every what six months you get a new version of something every three years you get some, you're obsolete at that point. After three years, most folks that are working in technology are looking for a new job, but science doesn't change. The numbers doesn't change, only technology moves quickly.  So let's get back to Linux. At CERN, at FRIB, at Fermilab, at NERSC, they're all using Linux to drive so many of their great research. That's, like I said, just changing the world as we see it today. Why? Well, like I said, that first part about the funding is a big thing. Funding is free, so you don't have to worry about having to change the way you're funding or whenever something just changes randomly because we get a new administration. Not just the new administration, but we're college kids. Well, I'm not anymore, I'm an old man at this point. You guys are college kids right now. You're not going to spend money on the stuff that you're studying, gaming, right? Last time you actually spent something on the worksite.  Anyways, I didn't say that. So it's customizable as the other cool thing. Super grandly, all the way down to the hardware itself. You can change the actual way the bits and bytes interact with the specific hardware as it goes. And not to mention, that goes along with that, is built into the way it was actually created way back in the day, is this community that comes with it. All these folks, we're a community of tinkerers that just like to make things work and like to share what we got, share our successes. And so that means that Linux really moves forward, really helps to move that stuff forward. So, we're looking at science specifically. What's the big deal with science? So, I had to learn the hard way, honestly, that science isn't science unless it's recreatable. You can't just make one quick discovery and decide that you've changed the whole world or you've come up with a new paradigm. Science isn't science unless you can come up with, well, you can find those discoveries, you can do those testing, and then you can share it with the rest of the people that have been working on them. And it's not important unless we're actually learning something and you're doing something new. Also, science moves incredibly, incredibly slowly, like I was saying earlier. And we don't create things, we break ground. So, with that in mind, we're going to move. So, with the idea of science where we are right now, we're going to move into what we consider the future. And anytime I talk about the future and talk about time now, somebody wants to tell me how do we use AI with this? The future of research isn't AI and I'm very sorry that I had to say that. I can't tell you when the matrix is going to happen and I can't tell you when the terminators are going to attack. Because that's not with science though. Science moves much more slowly than the technology we had yet. So, when we're looking in the research, the OS's that research is going to favor as you move into the future are going to take those fundamental ideas that I gave about science early on and kind of build off of them. The first thing is that when you're breaking ground in research, you're trying to figure out how things work. And fundamentally, as our technology has grown, the way things work is just getting smaller and smaller. My job specifically is subatomic particles, little neutrons that are kind of shooting into the atom of a nucleus. It's tiny, tiny, tiny. We're talking picoseconds. The picoseconds are a millionth of a millisecond. It's crazy the way that they're measuring this. So, not only smaller, it has to be smaller, it has to be lighter weight and it has to start to move much more quickly. Because you're capturing these things like the Higgs boson was recently discovered in CERN where it was recently proven to be discovered in CERN. It was already proven by a mass. But we actually found it and it exists for something like a millionth of a picosecond. It's a tiny, tiny amount of time. So, the operating system has to be able to keep up with those sorts of discoveries as well. On top of that, our world is getting smaller and that's good. We can share this stuff out with the rest of the world and with the rest of humanity and help kind of push us forward. However, that also means that there's a chance that bad actors can come around. So, operating needs to also maintain some level of security and some leg-mindedness about how we're going to make sure that bad actors don't misinterpret or take the research that we've been doing and use it in a nefarious manner. And the last thing, because science moves so slowly we're no longer looking at three- and five-year terms of support. The longer the amount of support the more. When I was in CERN, I got the great opportunity to go and visit CERN and they were working on a project right now breaking ground and doing planning and finding funding that doesn't actually start until 2045. We're talking 20 years in the future. So, if we're starting to look at the operating systems that are going to be able to manage that product we have to look at longevity of the support that's actually going to come from those guys. So, that's kind of what I had today in a quick 15 minutes introduction into where we are with operating systems and science. We have a whole lot of ground that we can break. We're learning stuff so quickly. We've got a whole bunch of fresh minds that you guys specifically are out there like willing and able and looking forward to do something awesome. You'll find, I think, that using these sorts of open-source software is going to be one of the fundamental backbones of how we actually push ourselves forward. So, hope that was alright. Thank you guys for the lovely time. Thank you very much. Yeah, quite impressed how you get the audience really clapping like so loud and excited like, yes. But like, yeah. Are there any final questions in the room? Okay, I have a question here. Do we use only Linux for this open-source science works? No, so there are lots of different opens, there are lots of different pieces of software that are involved in it. There's lots of windows, there's lots of Linux, there's lots of Mac, there's a whole bunch of different flavors. You find that in some of the pieces of hardware that require more customizability, they do turn to Linux however. And it's mostly because they can change things and cut things off as they need to. Have you applied what all you explained to us for any science project or any of your work? Oh, yes, absolutely. So, most recently at the FRIB, there was a science experiment which discovered the drip line for the sodium molecule.  So, an atom can only hold so many neutrons and you're trying to add more neutrons to it. And in the process we got these two big beams that are moving together, converging right in the middle, and they splash against the back splash and the hardware that captures it is running Debian right now. Is it electrons? Electrons and neutrons? Yes, thank you very much. Thank you. So, thank you very much. That concludes the session and the track. We're back tomorrow here. Yeah. Jerry, people love you. Great, great. Thank you very much for giving back this energy here to the stage the whole day. Been a fantastic audience and we can't wait to see you again tomorrow here at the First Asia Summit 2024. Goodbye.


Hello, everybody. Andrew Maeski here with Dental L. I will be unboxing the FabFitFunFall 2019 box, which is pretty awesome this time. It's actually huge. It's even kind of hard for me to show you guys the whole thing in the one like webcam angle here. So if you guys haven't seen my unboxing videos before, I've been a FabFitFun member for about three years now. And I actually sign up for the year membership because you get a box basically for free. There's a box every single season. So like spring, summer, fall, the winter, I believe four boxes altogether, maybe even five. And if you sign up for the year, you get access to special deals that they have every season, including like just as an example, like there's tons. But I got this thing here. It's a recipe shaker for cocktails that was only available to those that signed up for the year membership. They have like literally tons of things like I can't even tell you probably a hundred things. But this was only $14. So just as an example. But I'm going to show you guys inside the box here. So I'm actually gonna put it down over here. It's kind of heavy. And I'm going to show you guys inside the box. I just love them because it's something new every single season. If you personally don't want everything inside the box, you can give the stuff away for like birthday, Christmas, whatever. I do my Christmas shopping, birthday shopping all year round. So sometimes if I'm like, Oh, I couldn't really use this, or I have enough shampoo, but there's this like really good shampoo in the box. I'm going to save that for my sister's birthday or for Christmas or whatever, right? So just kind of makes gift shopping even easier because you can kind of keep some of those things too. So inside every box, they have a magazine, which kind of showcases all of the products. And it also tells you how much those products are normally. So a box is about I think $40 a box. Again, I sign up for the year membership. So I pay like a couple hundred for the year. And I get a box for free. I will leave the link for you guys on the bottom if you want to just check it out. If you use the link that I provide, I believe you get your first box for free also, which is awesome. It included a yoga mat. I actually don't have one. And it's such a good idea. I've been seeing a chiropractor now for probably about a year. And there's certain like, not yoga poses, but like, I would say like certain stretches that I like to do in the morning and before bedtime. I just do it on the carpet, but it's kind of uncomfortable. A yoga mat makes perfect sense. And now I don't have to buy one because it just kind of came in. So a yoga mat, a salt and pepper shaker, which is pretty cool because this just looks nice, right? Like it just looks nice. This isn't something that I would normally just buy, but I didn't have to buy it. It looks nice. And I'm actually quite excited to use it. It came with some coupons by the way, like just FYI. It always gives you like a couple coupons there. This wallet you guys, I love. Now if you're a year member, you can customize your box. And this was one of the four things I think you could customize. I can't remember, but I think one of the four things, you could either get a lunchbox or a wallet. And I chose the wallet because I have enough lunch boxes, but isn't that nice? And it actually came in this cute little, like this little fabric type bag, which if you were giving it away as a gift, that's kind of nice, right? Because it just kind of came like that and it just looks nice. So I'm quite excited to use this because, hey, I think it's, I'm that person where I have a new purse for every season, probably even two purses. I haven't gotten a new wallet for a while. So and this is perfect. Perfect for the fall for your cards, cash, whatever. Pretty excited about that one. A body souffle, which again, for like fall, it's always just kind of nice to use something new. I probably change out my body washes every couple months just to have something new. So I'm kind of excited to use that. And it does smell, you guys, like really, really good. So you will love that. Now this I have not seen before. Check this out, you guys. When I was opening this up at the kitchen table, my husband was there because he's like, what are those things? Kind of said, I don't know.  It's kind of hard to see, isn't it? Kind of like a lime sugar, if that makes sense. So they kind of look like sugar cubes. And what they are is you would use them in the shower. So to like clean yourself, probably not the face, but everywhere else. And I'm excited to try that. They are called exfoliating sugar cubes. I'm going to use this. Pretty cool, right? And just things you wouldn't think to buy perhaps. And even if, let's say I didn't want this, you could give this as a gift to somebody and they would think, oh, that's cool. I've never seen that. Like you give the coolest gifts ever, right? I was able to customize this as well. So these are earrings. John, I can't remember what the other option was. Let me just check really quick, you guys. And that's a nice thing about the magazine too, is it kind of shows you what could have come in the box. If you decided, if you don't have the year membership, but you want to kind of customize your box a little bit more, like you can pick either this, pick that. Of course, no, I can't find it. Sorry guys. I swear I just looked through the whole thing, but oh, and look, just kind of talks about the different products too, which I think is really cool. And I don't know. Like I like getting a box. That's a surprise. That's just me. Okay, so I see how it's showing these products too, but I could have sworn you could have picked something else. But anyways, you guys probably don't want to wait for me to find that. But just keep in mind that you actually can customize things. And the earrings is something that I did customize. I want to say you could get earrings or like a necklace or something. And I picked earrings, but I can't remember for sure. Always a good idea. And this is a great company. So this is for your hair. This is really expensive, you guys. I think normally like $60. I can always do something different with my hair, make it a little bit healthier, because I get it colored a lot. This I am so excited to try. It is a daily hair repair. And that isn't something that I would just go to the store and buy for $60. So I got this for, you know, it was included in the box that I paid approximately $40 for. So that's pretty cool, right? And a essential oil roller. So this was something that I could pick because I do remember that and I love my essential oils. So this I plan to keep in my purse. It's a deep relax, which how can you say no to that? Does it say which essential oils are in it? It probably says in the magazine, you guys. It doesn't really say here. Well, it does, but there's like a ton of different essential oils. Probably like lavenders, like the main one. But I love my essential oils. So I'm really excited about that. And I did get a little cream. Oh, here it is. And this skin cream. So I like buying skin cream from like China or sorry, not China, from Korea. I believe this one's from Korea. Because honestly, guys, they have the best skin ever. So I'm going to get my skincare from them because they have really, really good skincare. And this was actually part of that big sale that they had for like yearly members only. So this is normally $75. I was able to get it for $9.99. So I haven't started using it yet. I'm really excited. It doesn't say if it's for day or night. Oh, wow, that does like smell amazing. It kind of looks like a night cream. But I wanted something to wear during the day. So I'm probably going to look up this company to see like what it's best used for like day or night. But usually if it comes in a container like this, it's usually a night cream. But anyways, pretty cool, right, you guys? So tons of stuff. I hope you found this interesting and keep in mind too that you can pick different items to go in your box if you sign up for the year. If you, if you sign up for FabFitFun for like per season, that is still okay, but you can't pick or customize what's inside your box. Like even this actually this came in my box last year, last fall, I think, and you could pick from different colors. So that's always fun.  I kind of wanted to show you guys this cocktail shake or two. So this came as part of that sale that they do offer every single season. And I was just really excited to get this because I don't know if I explained this to people before, but when Tom and I eat out, I like to treat myself to a cocktail. But honestly, they're like $8 a cocktail. So I kind of want to make them myself at home. And when I saw this as part of the sale, I was like, wow, that's perfect timing. And I like it because it does have different cocktails that you can mix up on the actual container. So I have actually never had one of these before, but I'm pretty excited to start using it. Let me just see as I'm taking off the plastic here. So basically, you would put your ice and your stuff in here. And even if you want like a non alcoholic one, because you're trying to study, why not, right? Just put it all in here. You would, I've seen people do this, you would mix it up, and then pour it from this. How awesome is that? And this one looks easy to clean because I was looking at some on Amazon that like aren't as well made and they're pretty much plastic. This is not plastic. Like I don't know if you guys can tell, but it's pretty hard, right? Like it's pretty sturdy. As I'm talking about like a cocktail shaker on my dental L tutoring channel, but hey, we all have some, right? But even if you want it non alcoholic, that's okay. I just noticed they have a recipe for a mojito. I love mojitos, but I find some, some places just make them where it doesn't even taste like one. So I'm kind of excited to make my own, and it just tells you exactly what to do. So when people come over and make your own cocktail, and you'll be the life of the party, right? So guys, I'm so excited. So thank you guys for watching. Again, this is the Fat Fit Fun box. It's now empty. Fat Fit Fun box. I'll leave the link for you guys on the bottom, because if you use my code, you can get a deal. I do suggest signing up for the year just because you can get so much more. Like I said, like this, for example, was normally $75 and they had offered it to Fat Fit Fun members for $9.99. This was part of the sale too. This is normally, I think, said like $30 and I only paid $12. So isn't that awesome? You can't get these things cheaper anywhere else. And if you don't want everything that they send you, because it is supposed to be part of a surprise, just give them away for like Christmas, birthdays, whatever. So I got some new stuff. It came right to my house. So cool. Thank you guys so much for watching. I'll leave the link for you on the bottom. If you have questions, let me know. And if you do sign up, like feel free to comment. I don't think you can attach pictures to your comments. Can you? I don't know why, but I would love to kind of see what your like Fat Fit Fun box looks like. So feel free to send me an email and just kind of show me, because I like to see other people's boxes too. My sister has a membership and she always gets slightly different things. And sometimes I like even say, oh, I kind of really like that. Do you want something from my box? Can I have that?  But anyways, you guys, thank you so much for listening and watching. And I'll see you guys in the next one.


Hi everybody, my name is Jason Klein. I'm Director of P20 Initiatives at Northern Illinois University, and we're excited to bring more students to you today. We've got a group of students as well as one educator from Ridgewood High School. And so we're going to jump right into learning about what they're learning in school and how it's helping them with their career planning process and their post-secondary planning process. As we do, we're going to have them introduce themselves. So for each of you, I'm going to have you mention your first name, your year in school, and right now at this point in your life, what you're thinking your post-secondary and long-term career plans are. So David, can I have you kick us off please? Yeah, my name is David. I'm a senior at Ridgewood High School, and my post-secondary plans are to major in education and then hopefully become a high school English teacher. Awesome. Eza. Hi, my name is Eza. I'm a senior at Ridgewood High School, and my plans are most likely to finish my education with Triton after high school and then later on go to another college and get more education for autos and eventually open my own shop. Cool. Josh. Hi, my name is Josh. I go to Ridgewood High School. I'm a freshman, and I want to do my four years in high school and do like good college later on. And for college, are you thinking that's a college that you'll go to for four years or to your college like Triton or both? A four-year college. Okay, and do you have any idea what you want to do career-wise when you're done with college? I want to go to like business and start my own business. Cool. Well, we'll talk more about that in one second. So tell us each of you and maybe we'll stick with the same order for a moment at least, but how and when, maybe even why, if there's a story we'd love to hear it. Can you become interested in your specific career areas and becoming an English teacher or in autos or starting your own business? Tell us those backstories, if you will. So I became interested in education because my mom and my cousin were both teachers growing up. And so my mom taught preschool and she was my preschool teacher. And when my cousin was in high school going into college, she did her pre-hours observing my mother. So teaching is always kind of running the family, so I thought might as well join the family plan. Okay, what interests you about teaching, David? What makes you think you want to be a teacher? What interests me is the fact that just even the smallest little bit in education, whether it's teaching a student how to do something correctly or even just being there to talk to them when they're down, really, really makes me think that I can really impact a young person's life with just the smallest amount of care or thought. That's true. You are right about that. So awesome. I'm glad you found that passion for that. Iza, tell us about your path with autos and maybe wanting to open your own shop in the future. And particularly interested to hear about the idea of Triton and then going to another school and what you would want to major in at another school and learn about potentially and then opening your own auto shop. So growing up in Poland, my dad was very much into motorcycles. So I was kind of always around mechanics and around stuff like that. So I was very much raised around it. So my whole life, that's what I was interested in. And then coming here to America and figuring out that I can do this while I'm in high school really, really got me excited. So I ended up doing it.  So then I can do regular mechanics and diesel in my shop. So it's not just a single kind of car. I want to really spread out to do everything I want to do electrical diesel and regular cars. So that's kind of the plan for the future. Easy. Can you talk about how your high school experience was before you took the automotive classes compared to how it is after? Yes. So when I came into high school, I wasn't very good at school. I'm not really good at like sitting down and doing my work and stuff like that. I'm very much hands on and doing things. So when I went into high school, I struggled a lot with my grades. It was very, very bad. And then I got introduced to doing my classes online and doing try and which then really just boosted my grades and now I've been getting really good grades ever since I did search and do to the online classes because it really helps me learn because it kind of, I can focus on school a little bit and then focus mainly on autos, which then kind of gives me the power to really go fully into autos without having to hold back because I have to do school work also. So then it kind of allows me to do it all together without really struggling. And it's been really, really good ever since I started autos. So Eza, I'm going to come right back to you in a minute. We'll hear from Josh and then I want to share with all of you guys about a direct message I got on Twitter from a person that has a job very much like Mr. Lasky's in another school district who sent me a message I think on Sunday. And I want to share that and ask Eza to use specifically some follow up questions that and maybe David and Josh. But Josh, first of all, tell us about your backstory for how and when you became interested in this idea of opening your business. And if you have an idea of what kind of business you want to open, like we know Eza wants to open an auto shop, I want to open a chocolate store but my family tells me that would be a terrible idea because I wouldn't have anything to sell and I'd have a lot of health problems. Josh, go ahead and tell us what you're thinking. Oh, so my mom owns a business right now. So that's like, like the fact that why I want to. She owns like integrated demolition, which is pretty cool and fascinating. Why I want to start a business is because when she started business, it was like, like hard, and I want to put that work into it. So my business can like profit later on. And when I have a business, I want to like be my own boss and have like have no one like tell me what to do because like, I feel like I would work better like that.  That's awesome. That's awesome. Thanks for all that for all that background and we'll come back in a second and talk about how you expect your experiences at Ridgewood and obviously we're all having a little bit of an unusual year this year but how you expect your experiences at Ridgewood you think over the next three years will will help you get there so easy. Let's pop back to you real quickly. And the direct message I got on Twitter from this. This colleague really of Mr. Lasky's in mind. She wrote about as, as we see the end in sight to coven and with the with the vaccine starting to be rolled out and we can think about what what school will look like in the future. And we have students who are having a lot of success with remote learning, and how she and her district that they're multiple high schools they need to figure out which students are help students figure out which of them that will be most successful that they build that in to kind of what they do moving forward. My question for you that it made me kind of connect the dots between what you said is, it sounds like all of the work you're doing in school is going better. As a result of, of how you're doing in automotive is that true would you say you're, you're learning more in classes that are not directly related to this time you're spending in automotives to. That's because I feel more driven to do good in those classes so that I am able to take my trying classes. So very much I'm much more driven to do better in my classes that I have at Ridgewood now that I have something to like, you know, I'm doing those things to work towards being able to do good because if I have bad grades I can't do autos. So I want to bop that will bop to David next, but before I do that, easy. Can you give us a little idea of what your day or week looks like right now I want to make sure that I have an idea because I know things about how things work for different students at Ridgewood but I want to make sure anybody watching this has an idea of kind of what your day and week looks like as a senior at Ridgewood pursuing autos. Well, right now we don't have any autos programs for me, because I'm a lot more further like, I've learned all the things that all of the juniors that are going into the class now learned. So there's not a specific class for me to do autos. So I just do regular online classes that everybody else does at Ridgewood. Okay. Go ahead Mr. Lasky. I was going to say, why don't you tell them what your schedule was last year then that might be good. Okay, so before COVID I would go into school and have first period which was Jim that was a regular class that I did with all my other students. Then I would do math, which I also did, we do math half online and half, like not online. So it's kind of also different than regular math, because we do it all on a computer but we still have a teacher in class that's helping us and everything. So then I did English and history and all those other classes completely online. So I would just sit in the library for like two hours and just be working online and just taking my test answering the questions and doing everything. Then I would actually leave Ridgewood at around 1130 to get to try in at 12. We would have one class from 12 to one, which will study hall. We would just kind of sit and do extra work that we have for either schools. And then at one until around three o'clock we started our actual class from one to three, and we had a lab usually from two to three, and then we had a classroom from one to two. So it was kind of all all over the place. Cool. But that became normal for you and you learned to be successful with all that independent time, didn't you? Yeah, once you really get into a schedule of doing it, it's very, very easy and simple and it's just, you know, everyday school. Cool. So David, tell us about how in your case, Ridgewood is helping you prepare to be a successful teacher. I mean, we certainly have a teacher shortage in general. And so I want to hear more about how that's working for you and what you're doing at school that's helping you along that pathway. Yeah, so I'm, I'm lucky enough to have, last year I had two teachers that taught the Ridgewood that taught the course at Ridgewood. This year I have one, but both of them were amazing teachers and I also have the support and help of Mr. Lasky and all the teachers at Ridgewood. And I did the past two years I've been taking courses at Northeastern University for teaching and this year I just finished our introduction to urban urbanized cities. And so basically just being able to sit and learn not only from teachers at my high school but to be able to sit in a college class and learn from college professors and not be blown away that, oh my God, but seeing you're sitting in with a bunch of with a cup with a bunch of college students that I could actually compete and show them and show my education smart. So I've got a few follow up questions for you there first of all. So what are some of the courses you've taken you talked about the course of courses at Ridgewood, and then the courses at Northeastern what are you remember the names of any of those classes that you've taken. So one of the courses at North at Northeastern was like I said inner city studies this semester. And then last year I took, I forget the technical name of it but basically it was, it was learned learning the backs, the backstory of education education and the history of it. And then at Ridgewood the courses I take are basically just observe observing other teachers at our school so last year during my seventh and eighth period. I would do tutoring so I would help tutor with another team with teacher from Ridgewood, and I would sit and seventh seventh period I would help tutor freshman freshman and sophomores and then my eighth period would be tutoring juniors and seniors. Cool. And did you get feedback on the tutoring you were doing from the Ridgewood teachers. Did they provide you any feedback as well as to how you were doing as a tutor. So I was I wasn't the only one tutoring I had help from two teachers in seventh period and then a period. It was me and another teacher but every day after a period we spent about maybe five to 10 minutes after saying, Okay, this is this is how we did today. This is what these kids have to work on tomorrow. And we got to make sure that these kids are going to their if they need help with tutoring and they teachers are open during eighth period and they need to go take a test we need to make sure that they're going to go take their test so basically it was more of after every class period at the end of the day. We would talk and we regroup and say okay we did this really well today. Tomorrow we need to make sure that person a and person B are working because they have a test on Friday. So you were really part of that teacher team doing that debriefing at the end of the day. Yes. That's cool. That's cool well Josh, you are only really one eighth of the way through high school a little bit, a little bit beyond that if you if you go for a full four years we're just going to assume that this example. What are the things you anticipate being able to do or hoping you'll be able to do at Ridgewood to help prepare you to be an entrepreneur to own your own business. At some point and to go to you said you want to go to four year university to be able to do that. What are some of the things you think are going to happen or that you've learned about already at Ridgewood to help you do that in between now and when you graduate from high school. So right now it's like career planning. So I want to have my career set. So like I'm going to take like marketing and like finance. So to help me for a feature on for my business, because I need all that information for my business to grow later on in the future. And may have mentioned this maybe I'm forgetting with all the questions I'm asking but do you have a specific idea for exactly what kind of business you want to own. No, I don't right now, but I think eventually it will. So let's dive into my next question we'll start with Josh on this one. What kinds of extracurricular activities, work might you do or other things do you think you might do at school and for David is that this might be that it will have you already done to help you figure out in your case Josh what kind of business you might want to own. Well, for my eighth period in class with Mr. specific I coding and coding like right now we're coding a video game about cars. But hopefully like that coding can help me with my business and I can put two together to like have coding business and like, I don't know financial and management to make my business grow. Yeah, I mean coding could be your business and it could be writing software that helps other kinds of businesses, for example, and you and if you're owning your own business. No matter what it is whether it's eases auto shop or, or a bicycle store or a clothing store, you have to know finance and there's a lot of laws you're going to have to learn and be able to get support with as a business owner as well Mr. Lasky. I was going to ask you to tell me about what are you guys doing currently in your English class that is helping you with your prayers. So right now for English, it's Zello and for Zello this like my test for us to like help us for our future. And recently, like the ones I'm interested on are like the coding and business ones. But I think right now richwood, I can have a better understanding from that yellow and preparing for a career. I was going to say what what do you have to do for that project what's involved in your project what are the steps and things you have to do. So, first, we had to like have 17 choices of what you would want to do like agriculture or business. And I'm more interested in business instead of agriculture so obviously I chose business and we had to have like one and one like we had to compare it. So we had to put business and we had to get another one that we're interested in so I put business and finance. So we had to compare on like why you like it. And I like business because like I said before I want to own my own business and be my own boss and finance I chose because they can help me with my business and help me later on in the future. Yeah, and so then thinking about activities and work and jobs that you might have later in high school. I think those are going to be the kinds of things where you're going to want to look at how those can also help you, for example, working at a small business versus for like an international company might give you a better idea of what what a business owner has to do and finding participating in extracurricular activities around coding, for example, could be could be great. So with that said, David, what are the activities you've been involved with at Ridgewood or work experiences that you've had while you've been in high school, or any other activities to really help you kind of zero in on your next steps. So for for me, it was it was obviously we did, we would do observation hours so we would observe teachers from our neighboring elementary schools like Giles and Lee. And we even went out to Pinora and then we saw how high schools taught at Main East so basically basically just being able to see not only how from all the way from little kids being taught to how high schoolers are taught and seeing the difference and like hey so you know when you go into college, you can you can choose your grade level what what subject you want to teach and everything, we're going to give you these experiences so you know what know what you're preparing for. That's amazing. Let me just say, I mean, I had those experiences first. My last year on campus in college, and I was sure I was going to be a high school teacher and had to observe at Urbana Middle School and was with in this just incredible teachers classroom. I still thought when I student taught at a high school, I still thought I'm going to be a high school teacher, but having that experience made me, maybe be open to working in a middle school, which is where I ended up teaching and kind of falling in love with that experience as well. So that you have had those experiences, literally three to five years earlier than I had them. What a what an awesome experience and thanks for calling out all those, all those schools you got to have those experiences with. What about you? What were your experiences besides the classes that kind of got you to where you are today? Well, for me it started off I worked at a diesel shop through somewhere a while ago, and that's what really really got me excited about it and then in Ridgewood what really helped me is the support of the teachers, because they really supported me through transitioning so being half the time in Ridgewood and half the time in college. That's what really just helped me is them being there for me being able to like talk to those teachers about the issues I'm having with transitioning and stuff like that. So that's really what they helped me with and being able to like give me a route that I can do still classes at Ridgewood but still mainly focus on trying and that's that's really what Ridgewood helped me with a lot. I'm going to pull out a really challenging question that it almost might be unfair because I'm asking you to think about other people's experiences and not your own. Earlier in this conversation is that you talked about your dad and his love for motorcycles.  You've all had parents who whose their personal occupations or interests have impacted kind of what you want to do and you've been lucky enough to see up close with their experiences have been like. One of the things that's really important for people like Mr Lasky and myself and schools across Illinois is making sure that all students have the opportunity to be exposed to a wide range of careers so in in case they don't have a parent who can show them their career or they're not interested in what their parents doing. When you think about if you didn't have and your parents doing that what are some ways that at schools whether at Ridgewood or at any other middle school or high school what are some ways you think schools can help give students those kind of experiences to get them excited about a potential career that they might not even know exist you guys have any ideas for us about that. He's a go ahead and then David. Okay, so I think Ridgewood what they did a really good job with doing is having presentations and having people from trying to come in and talk about it and openly sit there and say hey we have this and this and this that you can do. And for me, it was a lot different because my dad didn't want me to do autos, because he wanted me to go to something completely different, and he was not very like supportive of it. So, I think Ridgewood did a really really good job really convincing me that I can do this even though I'm being told at home. I shouldn't it's a bad idea I'm not going to be successful but Ridgewood really helped me with being like okay I can do this. If I really put my head to this I can be good at this. Easy before I go on to David that is a very common experience. My parents were both teachers, and they don't want me to become teachers and actually on Friday morning last week I let a workshop, and one of the scenarios we looked at was a was a student who wanted to pursue a career that was one of their careers, and their parents didn't want them to pursue that career so that is also I'm really glad you brought that up it's not something we talk about very often allowed, and that's a pretty common experience that lots of us have had so thank you for bringing it up. David what ideas do you have that either Ridgewood is doing for students or that you think schools at Ridgewood and elsewhere can do to help students be exposed to careers. So I think Ridgewood does a really good job and just and telling kids in general that hey, any career that you that you want to continue in is possible. There are classes, especially at Ridgewood that you can take and clubs you can join to get to the pathway that you want to continue in the future. And I think just talking to my other friends that want to be teachers and listening to them saying man I really wish I once originally just because we really don't have an education program where where hey I want to become a teacher. No one really talks to me about what the steps I have to do. I feel like just being I feel like other schools surrounding us and even around the country just telling kids not being like if you want to become an educator and educator. You don't just have to be a teacher you can you can be a counselor. You can do many other careers in education other than being a teacher that will help that I hope kids. Great.  You, we've already heard about how you're using Zello specifically in English class right now and exploring that. What kinds of things do you either know of or hope that Ridgewood will do for you or they would you want any high school. You are our other ninth graders currently are at to be able to do for them to expose you to careers or like in your future to help you figure out what might be the kind of business that we in our community need, and that you can be most successful then in in launching in your future. So, so like, if I was like, um, if I was like to pick. For business, it would have to be for coding because Ridgewood has those programs and has those classes to teach you more about coding and and more about like, what you want to do and what you stick with because what you like. So, if I would have to pick. I'll pick business but for for like, for the planning, like, if, like Richard's such a good school to do that, but like, they would have, if I would have told another classmate, I would be like, do something that you would like to do, like, stick with it.  So, let's, let's finish up with these last two questions. First of all, for each of you, what's, what's the most important thing to you in selecting and preparing for the career that you think you're going to do what is what is driving that decision for you. So, what's what's driving the decision for me to go into education is, is once again the fact that like, with teachers are the job is we need teachers and not everyone wants to become a teacher so the fact that it's a demanding job and it's even if it's not thankful, thanked all the time and it's overlooked. I think just being able to help kids even in the smallest bit whether it's teaching them how to do a subject correctly so they can go on and have a great career, or even just being being there when they're in the dumps to say hey, Mr. Mr. Barry I need someone to talk to or hey I need to teach you to talk to about this situation real quick. Is that what about for you. Um, for me. The main thing is like we need female mechanics, because there's not a lot of us and females don't feel comfortable going into a male mechanic, a lot of the times because they feel like they're going to take their money they're going to get scanned all this stuff so I feel like a female on shop is definitely needed here, because there isn't one so I feel like it would really help females around this area to, you know, kind of learn to feel comfortable in that kind of environment just because we're always, it's such a manly thing to do, be around cars and work around cars that having a female would kind of be refreshing and I feel like female seeing other female do that they might pursue welding or they might pursue doing something that they also wanted to try but they never had that like they never saw anyone actually be successful in that as a female so so what for me it is just empowering other women to do what they want to do even if it is manly or it is dirty. Well, and the other thing you brought up that's important to point out is, at one point, a few decades ago cars really under the hood we're all pretty similar they all, they all operated the same way and you know you brought up being able to work on gas powered diesel powered and electric cars, and cars, and given the computer backbone of most cars it become incredibly complex, so our need for mechanics generally. Even if we start limiting our need for cars because of other forms of transportation and remote work. We're going to need mechanics for the cars and trucks we do have as they get ever more complex so you seem to have a very good plan there and. I want to start to bring my car, whatever it is at that time into your shop so thanks for sharing that Josh, what about you what's most important to you as you think about selecting and preparing for a career.  My business is successful. I want to teach people like what I did to get to that business standpoint and teach people how to become more successful by starting their own business. Well, last question. What advice do you guys have for for teachers like Mr laski and myself and all of your teachers to help us best prepare other middle school and high school students for college and career success. So, if, if, even if you if you sense that a kid or a student wants to go into something and you see that they're, they're really interested in this one subject if they don't want to talk to you about it maybe try going up to them and say hey look. I can, I can tell in your grades and just in your passion that you're really interested in this. You know there are ways that you can make this into your job and into your future and be successful in that plan. David, either for me I think it's being consistent because for me it took a lot of convincing for me to actually do autos my teacher had to really, you know, tell me you should do this you really should it's a good idea keep doing it just try it just try and being open to kids trying and like trying out classes and then you know they might not be successful in it so we can try something else. And I think that's the most important thing is don't give up on them, just because no matter how bad they're doing, there's only you can only go up from there. So just really try everything and just be open minded to what kids want to do and what they want to be in. Great advice, Josh. Basically what Isa said but have like more opportunities to learn like if you want to do something else, and another key wants to do something else have that show for you to like be stuck with it like what you want to do and be stuck with it and just want to change it or not be stuck with it. So allow students to kind of pursue their own interests in in class assignments and things like that. Yes. Yeah. That's, that's great advice. Mr. Lasky before we wrap up do you have anything you want to share. I think it was great that these guys shared I know Josh being a freshman we've got a lot to offer him as he moves forward a lot to do all credit, a lot of experiences that will help them discern which direction he wants to go a little bit more with his business. So it's just good to hear, you know, sometimes we don't always get to hear as much but from here from ease and David about some of their past as well and see where how they got there so this was great hearing for them as well so thank you so much Jason for taking the time to talk to the students. Absolutely well thank you Mr. Lasky for your help setting this up and ease that David Josh thank you guys so much for participating to all the educators watching. Thank you for watching. Now, we would love to engage with your students we know that after watching something like this you'll want to ask your students question, but don't hesitate to reach out to me into the Illinois P 20 network for us to feature your students. You can follow us on Twitter at P 20 that's at P to zero network, and you can connect with us at our website P 20 network that niu.edu. So thanks again to our students and Mr. Lasky great work to all of you and to Ridgewood High School. We're looking forward to bringing everybody watching future episodes from students perspectives.


And aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I'm the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea program. Today we're going across the sea to the Middle East. My guest is Nicole Grove. Nicole Grove is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her interests include international relations and transnational Middle East politics. She is a recipient of the 2016-2017 Fulbright Scholar Award in the Middle East and North Africa Regional Research Program and was a visiting scholar at Abu Dhabi University from January to May 2017. Nicole is the author of a recent article, interestingly titled Weapons of Mass Participation. Social media, violence, entrepreneurs and the politics of crowd funding for war. This article appeared in the European Journal of International Relations and discusses the appearance of non-state combatants fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq. She refers to them as violence entrepreneurs and suggests that they may be a new generation of violence and a new way of warfare in many respects, especially in the use of crowd funding and social media to raise funds for their activities. Nicole, welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you for being here. I want to ask you first, how did you get this interest in the Middle East and politics there in these different areas? What brought you to that? I would say I think I came into my, began coming into my political life as a young adult in New York City in the kind of mid to late 1990s around the time of many anti-police brutality protests in New York and later after 9-11, I was a part of the anti-war movement there. I think one of the things that I felt very conflicted about and wanted to try to understand was at that time how quickly the people around me really felt like they were ready to go to war and also a lot of the violence that was being committed against particular communities, where I lived based on the way that people dressed or where they lived and so the way that I tried to make sense of that is I started studying Arabic at NYU and then I eventually traveled to Egypt to do that and did some more traveling around the region. I think I found that the way that we hear about or read about this particular part of the world on the news is very different from what it actually is like. If you go there to travel there, visit there, interact with the people who live there and so that's something that I try to communicate in my own research and to my students when I teach. So your personal involvement with people in those areas kind of has shaped your feelings and you had a desire to find out what was really happening. Is that an accurate statement? Yeah, I think yes. I think that's accurate enough. Yeah. Okay, and now, violence entrepreneurs. I mean, I never heard that term before. Yeah. What does it mean? What are violence entrepreneurs and take us into your study and your article? So violence entrepreneurs is a concept that I developed to try to describe what I was seeing as a different kind of irregular combatant from the way that they are often described in international relations literature. So irregular combatants are not soldiers that are participating in a kind of formal armed forces for a country. So usually when we think of non-state combatants, we think of them as, for instance, private military contractors which are entering into some type of agreement. Like mercenaries or something, is that correct? Like private military contractors, they're just private enterprises that enter into contracts with governments and participate in these conflict spaces in different ways. They could be providing food for troops. They could also be interrogating people for the army. But they're formal companies of some sort, I see. They could also be mercenaries, right? So people who are hired to assassinate someone or occupy a village, they can be what Danny Hoffman calls labors of the battlefield. So these could be people who are being forced to fight or are fighting in a conflict because this is really kind of the only option for them or is one option in a kind of limited range of options that they have available for their own survival. So other people might fight, other non-state combatants might fight to regain a territory that they've lost. There are other reasons. These particular fighters don't really fit that category at all. They're not entering into contracts with the government. They're not being forced to fight. They're volunteering. They have no clear kind of ideological motivation or territorial aspirations. They really seem to be doing it for the fight, right? For the kind of enjoyment. A personal type of a feeling. Is this a gratification of violence? Is that what you're telling me? Yeah, a lot of different reasons. A lot of different reasons, yes. But they don't fit in these other categories, which I think Wyatt necessitated a new kind of concept to try to understand. So they're not employees of a company that has been hired and they don't live in the territory per se. No. They are private people who for some personal reason are undertaking this. They'll be compelled to engage in conflict on their own terms. Okay.  So I looked primarily at people who identified as anti-ISIS combatants. So these were people who were traveling to Northern Iraq and Syria to engage in combat operations against the Islamic State. Why was that focused? Why did that come to your attention? It came to my attention in part because so much of I think media coverage of this particular issue was really focused on people who were leaving their home countries to go and fight with ISIS. And I can't speak to the numbers specifically in other countries, but I know that in the U.S., while there were a number of people who were being profiled in the media for going to fight ISIS, there weren't many at all, if any, that actually were actively fighting with ISIS in those particular areas. And so I wanted to try to understand why that was, but also how we could think about these particular individuals in a kind of more global context and an international context. So what did you find out? Who are these people and what's their backgrounds? Can you generalize it all? I mean, is there something about, is this generational, is this gender-based, is this age-based? What did you find out and who are these people and what are they doing? So I think it's very hard to generalize them. They are really quite different in terms of, again, motivation, but also age. Many of them are younger, but some are older. They come from different countries. A lot of them are coming from the United States, Canada, but also places like Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., the Netherlands, Denmark, a number of other countries. And so I think it is difficult to say that they are coming from one place over another. I did find that many of them, specifically anti-ISIS fighters, a lot of them were former veterans, a lot of them were white men, but not all of them, certainly not across the scope. It seems like most of them are coming from western countries, is what I've heard. You say, is that accurate? Yeah, based on the research I've done so far, yes, I would say that. That's accurate. Okay, so as opposed to those joining ISIS from various countries, these violence entrepreneurs are fighting ISIS. And that's what your study is focused on. What are some examples? Who are some of these folks and what are they doing to fight ISIS? They're somehow enjoying the violence, or that seems to be somewhat of a motivation. That's what I hear you saying. What are they doing? So I think what they're doing exactly on the ground is a very good question, and that's not always clear. I think we often have to rely on their own statements in interviews or with other media outlets on what they're doing, because there's not a lot of transparency around their activities on the ground. So I think this is also one of the problems that is part of what we're seeing, which is individuals going off to sort of determine and then fight their own wars, this question of transparency, but also accountability. I think that a lot of them seem to be located in terms of their activities in northern Iraq or Iraqi Kurdistan and northern Syria. This may also be in part because they do have some or had some institutional support in working with the YPG, which were the Kurdish People's Protection Unit. So a lot of them were kind of networking with that group in particular. And are they actually fighting on the ground? Are they actually taking part in battles? Are using guns and weapons? Yes, I mean, based on what they've said in interviews, yes, they're taking part in combat. They've admitted to killing members of ISIS. But again, a lot of this information is based on the statements that they've made to the press. And they are not visually in the United States. I mean, how are they known in the United States? How do we hear about them? Well, so how do we hear about them? I think I'm going back a little bit further than this particular time frame that I was looking at in the article that you mentioned. But Christian, who is a UCLA student, decided he was going to fight with Libyan rebels just a couple of years before. I think that this particular phenomenon really started gaining more attention in the media. And he said that he went to do it on his spring break to have an adventure. So he'd previously done some volunteer work abroad, something that we might conventionally think of as more kind of volunteer work. But he wanted to go fight with the rebels in Libya to kind of have a real or authentic experience. And that I think is really, when I heard about that and also saw that he was being interviewed when he came back on Good Morning America, it was kind of astounding to me. I sort of wondered, like, how someone could go and do this and then come back and be interviewed on morning television and then kind of go back to work. It was very different from what we call dark tourism, which is maybe going to, like, former conflict sites or war memorials or things like that. Like, this is actually taking part in battle in a way that's very real and immediate and has consequences. So that was the kind of, I think, the first, my first kind of introduction to this. And then I think the anti-ISIS fighters was really kind of where I picked up in the concept development. All right. So and who are some of them and how are they using the social media? How are they getting their word out? So one group, the Lions of Rojava, was organizing on Facebook. They were using their Facebook page. They were working with the YPG to recruit people, to come and join them. Also, people used Facebook to kind of express their support, even if they couldn't fight. They wanted them to know that they really appreciated what they were doing. They also used crowdfunding campaigns as well. So they're using Kickstarter, GoFundMe to raise money, to buy plane tickets, buy armor, just to get themselves over there. And we have an image on screen. What's this? So this is a crowdfunding page that I found by, I believe he's a former veteran from Clarksville, Tennessee. And so he was trying to raise $4,000 so that he could, as it shows, take the fight to ISIS. And at the time that I had taken that screenshot, that was in 2015 he had raised about $880 from small private donations on the platform. Okay. And the next photo, let's take a look at that one. So this is Jamie Lane, ISIS Hunter. He was also crowdfunding on GoFundMe. He was, this particular crowdfunding page was set up. It doesn't look to me, just from the details of the page, buy Jamie Lane but buy a friend who was trying to organize some funding for him on his return. I think he was in Northern Iraq, so it was a kind of payment, kind of a gesture of appreciation for fighting ISIS and when he returned to the US. All right. And so we have these violence entrepreneurs, folks that for some personal motivation are going to Syria or Iraq and fighting ISIS. A little different than those joining ISIS. And there's some questions that we have. I have about what happens to them. Now, we'll take a little break. Okay. We're going to take a one minute break and then come back. And I want to ask you, what happens to them? This fellow that spent his vacation fighting ISIS admitted it. What happens when he comes back? But let's talk after the break. Okay. And Aloha. My name is Calvin Griffin, the host of Hawaii Uniform. And every Friday at 11 o'clock here on Think Tech Hawaii, we bring you the latest on what's happening within the military community. And we also invite all your response to things that's happening here. For those of you who haven't seen the program before, again, we invite your participation. We're here to give information, not disinformation. And we always enjoy response from the public. But join us here, Hawaii Uniform, Fridays, 11am here on Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha. Hey, Stan Energyman here on Think Tech Hawaii. And they won't let me do political commentary. So I'm stuck doing energy stuff, but I really like energy stuff. So I'm going to keep on doing it. So join me every Friday on Stan Energyman at lunchtime, at noon, on my lunch hour. We're going to talk about everything energy, especially if it begins with the word hydrogen. We're going to definitely be talking about it. We'll talk about how we can make Hawaii cleaner, how we can make the world a better place, just basically save the planet. Even Miss America can't even talk about stuff like that anymore. We got it nailed down here. So we'll see you on Friday at noon with Stan Energyman. Aloha. Welcome back. My name is Mark Shklov. I'm the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. And I am with Nicole Grove. And we are talking about violence entrepreneurs. Young people, old people, all different types of people from different countries who are going to Syria and Iraq for their own purposes. And they're raising money on the internet to do this. And Nicole, take me through this some more. What are they doing? What are these folks doing? How does the internet function for them? You showed us a few photos before about people that have gone on for crowdfunding and that type of thing. What's going on? So I think that the crowdfunding is, I think, a particularly important aspect of this because it really shows there's a kind of shift in both the organizational structure and the funding structure of the way that we think about how wars are fought. Usually states will use tax dollars to fund military operations. And here we see individuals who are declaring their own wars based on their own personal motivations in these spaces, in these conflict zones where it's not clear how and when the law is applied. It's a kind of nebulous space in a lot of ways which allows them to engage in certain kinds of behaviors that might not be permissible elsewhere. Right.  Yes. Right? Now let's take a look at the next slide that we have. What is this? So this is a screenshot that I took from the Sons of Liberty International web page. The Sons of Liberty International was founded by a man named Matthew Van Dyke who is a self-proclaimed freedom fighter and protector of Christian communities in Iraq and Syria. He had also fought with Libyan rebels as well. He's now started, he's back in the United States, and has started what he calls the first non-profit security provider in the U.S. And so this page was from his website. And you can see individuals can go online or they could. This page is no longer on there. But you could go online and, for instance, donate $700 to put a camouflage film on a pickup truck, or you could pay for someone's gear, right, a full approved vest, or even a GoPro camera so that people could video record what they were doing, right, on the ground. And so it was a way for the public to participate. Vicariously. Yes, yeah. But in a way that was very specific to how they wanted to participate. And they knew what was happening. Yes, they knew what was happening. You can now go online and I think you can choose which missions you want to support. But at the time that I took this particular screenshot you could also choose, even down to the types of equipment you could fund for people. Okay, so you have individuals and their motivation is a little unclear to me. And you can, I think it's unclear to you too, even though you've studied it. It's hard to figure out exactly where they're coming from. But they've gone off to do some activities against ISIS. And there's also people who are supporting ISIS that I guess are doing the same thing. We've seen those people prosecuted, the folks that are supporting ISIS. What happens to people in, well let's say an American goes off and crowd funds to support himself or herself fighting ISIS. Admittedly killing people. Yeah. And admittedly doing something that normally a state does. What happens to them? Is there any repercussions from this? So when, it's illegal to go and fight for ISIS. So I think that that's not a question.  So when we think about what a violence entrepreneur describes, it's difficult to try to create a kind of diagnostic where we could just apply it to a particular individual to say this person is a violence entrepreneur or this person isn't. It's more of an activity, a formal versus informal set of activities or practices. So like for instance, when Sons of Liberty formalizes themselves as a nonprofit, I would see this as moving outside of the violence entrepreneur category because they are now sort of implicated within the institutional structures that are already participating in these conflict zones in ways that are kind of more permissible. So like for instance, I think there was, you know, if for instance somebody decides that they were switching sides, right, maybe they worked for the military. Formerly this individual, Ikaika Kang, I think, is someone that you brought up to me in a separate conversation. And I think if someone, I also don't think somebody's switching sides to fight for ISIS because they support ISIS is a violence entrepreneur either. I think the whole point of being a violence entrepreneur is that you're on your own side and you're not necessarily pro or against anything, right? Okay, so how does the government deal with them? I mean, if that person, and you talked about a young man who appeared on TV and I think we have some slides of him, let's show those slides. Oh, sure. Oh, so he was not fighting ISIS, he was fighting with Libyan rebels. But as far as, so this was really kind of an earlier iteration of this, but I think he fits the profile right to the extent that there's a profile. But he just went and kind of had this adventure and maybe or maybe didn't shoot people were not clear on that. And then he was allowed to return to the United States as far as I know, just continued his education at UCLA. And he had a, there's another shot of him being interviewed. Yes. Sorry, it's a bit blurry, but yes, that's him on Good Morning America, I believe. So this is an image of him being interviewed on a morning talk show. And what's the next one? Let's see the next photo. Okay. Yes, a picture of him with the rebels he was fighting with. Okay. And so he came back and as far as I know, no consequences. So I think the consequences are different based on what state the person is a citizen of. So in the US, I'm not aware of anybody who has been prosecuted for participating in these kinds of activities. I'm not aware of it in Canada either. There was a Dutch citizen who had admitted to someone he was giving an interview for that he had killed something like 90 ISIS militants. And when he came back to the Netherlands, he was prosecuted. But there was an enormous public outcry over this. And people had gathered thousands and thousands of signatures to have him released. And he was actually released. But I think that the way that the government dealt with that is that they took away some of his social security benefits. He was no longer entitled to social security benefits from the state. So yeah, I think that it's really, I think it depends really. I think it really depends on the state. So my question is then, are these violence entrepreneurs taking over the role of the government in those countries? And that's why they're not prosecuted. Is that a legitimate question? Taking over the role of the government? Yeah. So I think that I think we could think about it this way. So long as they are beneficial to a government, they're not harming the government in some way or doing something the government doesn't want them to do, I think that there's a certain level of permissibility there in terms of their actions. Now, when they may start sabotaging maybe special operations that are happening there, they become a liability for the government. I think that's when you see the government starting to intervene and maybe stopping people from going on to planes or taking passports. And this did happen to two men who went to Syria. They got there, decided they didn't like what was happening to them and actually went to a special forces unit and asked to be extracted. And the officers there told them that they should leave the way that they came. So I think that we are seeing a kind of shift in how people are talking about them and how easy it is to go over these days and how I think we think about the legal ramifications of what they're doing.  I'm just trying to understand it. Maybe it's harder for me because of growing up in a different time period, but I'm trying to understand why they chose this path, what their outcome is sought, what they're seeking from it. Is it just experience? Is it just they're bored with their current life? What are your thoughts? Yeah, I think that for some of the veterans that went back, they had fought in Iraq and lost friends and comrades and felt that this was a way for them to go back and try to make things better on their own terms. And what they saw is the failure of the U.S.'s nation building project there. So that's one person. I get that logic, yeah. But there are other people who say that they got bored, right? That maybe there was some conflict that they wanted to participate in, but that had sort of dissolved, and then this opportunity came about. And so they went there for that reason. Other people who, I think if you look historically at some of the, if you're kind of keeping track of how people give these interviews and the motivations that they give in the different interviews that they that participate in over time, you'll actually even see their motivations changing. So, you know, one, Jordan Mattson, for instance, has given interviews where he talks about being really compelled by and wanting to support the creation of a Kurdish state in that particular area of the world. In other interviews that he's given, he talks about his father being in the military and how he was very disappointed that he didn't get to go off to combat. And so this was his combat moment. So it sounds like personal. Everybody has their own personal motivation. Yes. That's what it sounds like I'm hearing. But they, yes, these are their own individual motivations, which are changing, ambiguous, and fluid, but they are still going off to war, willing to kill and be killed. People. Yes. People are people. We have a minute left. Okay. What have you learned from all this? What are your thoughts? What are your conclusions? I think, you know, my thoughts are that I am really interested in kind of what the inverse of this group is and trying to think about, you know, what would the opposite of a violence entrepreneur be? And I'm reminded of this particular protest group, a campaign called Voices in the Wilderness. And so these were individuals that defied Iraqi sanctions to go over to bring people medicine, toys, food, and even under threat of being arrested and find very large fines by the U.S. government. But they persisted in doing this anyway in order to bring attention to the plight of Iraqi people under sanctions. So maybe there is an opportunity for peace entrepreneurs. Maybe. Yes. Is that it? Yep. Okay. Nicole, thank you so much for coming in. Thank you. It was great. And this is a great introduction. There's lots of questions I still have, but we're going to have to close for now, and maybe we'll come back and talk some more at another time. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks. Aloha. Thanks.


I was curious, how do you get to de-growth? Because you kind of mentioned, okay, the first element is to be really curious about the environment and what degrades the environment and how just and unjust some measures are, either when you implement it beforehand and they have environmental implications or afterhand something that is supposed to do good for the environment, but it's just for the rich few. So I started, I mentioned just before, like around the 2011 to read about it. I think it was in French with Serge Latouche. He had some very small books about de-growth, which is a nice introductory to the topic.  Do you feel that anyone who should have more or less done the same path as you would have arrived to de-growth and write this book as you did? Oh, it's a good question. No, I don't think so. I think for me it was a logical arrival, but it's a logical arrival. It always has a biographical element in it, right? So same two people can follow very logical steps and arrive to different conclusions because the assumptions are different. So I think it's important to think that logic is a method of analysis, but you always need premises. So like if your premises are very different, I don't think you arrive to the same conclusion. So for me, it was a logical process. So I arrived to it, let's say I arrived to it through my mind and through my thought I didn't arrive to it by being an activist or by being involved in some environmental conflict, which is the way many other people arrive to it. So yes, I studied environmental, I did environmental engineering because my master's then I said, okay, I wanted to do a PhD because I felt I wanted to go deeper. I worked for a year in the European Parliament and what we were doing there was we were supporting parliamentarians with, that they wanted, it was called the science and technology option assessment unit. So the idea was like someone who wants, parliamentarians who wants an assessment on a particular policy they are preparing, they would ask us to prepare a small study. So we would normally commission it to a consultancy, but in my case, I did the study myself. So it was at the time we were discussing the water framework directive, what later became the water framework directed in the European Union, our main water legislation at the European level. And I was started with a study to assess like certain aspects of changes that they were going to be introduced in European water policies. So that's what I did, but I realized by doing, let's say a consultancy and working with consultants, that you need to really go deeper. You write things on the surface, you don't really get to understand them. So I thought, okay, maybe a PhD is where you do that. So then I did a PhD. And water somehow accidentally, you know, there are these accidental tastes, but also accidental in life. Not so somehow I was really motivated to study water, but I've never been motivated to study food. I don't know why, although I like eating and I like food, but like people tell me, let's do a project on food sovereignty. Somehow it doesn't, I don't know why though, no, it's, you're that kind of a person. Okay, I understand. I don't judge more into construction, but sure, okay. So, yes, I did my PhD, I started working on water. And the thing I did was like a little bit similar to your research and to your podcast in the sense that I was studying water management and water planning issues in Athens. That's how it started. But then over time and through European project and the collaborations I had there, I started looking at these questions much more critically. So we were looking at Athens and Athens at the time had a big drought. So there was a discussion whether Athens should construct and develop a new dam or focus on demand management and water conservation as it was called in the American literature at the time. And me as like, let's say a green person, I was very much in favor of water conservation. I thought there was room for Athens to manage demand and not necessarily build more dams as was the dominant idea at the time. How was that perceived? How was it, sorry? How was it perceived, this type of idea? Because I guess there were two kinds. It was discussed, generally. It was discussed a lot in England. It was discussed all over the place, like demand management and even in Greece, like people understand it. But then I started getting more and more into the logic of how the whole dynamic of the water system was working. And on the one hand, you had engineers very much trained and always thinking, okay, there is a lack of something. People want more, so we have to provide it. We're not gonna question whether people why they want more. And in one sense, these people were also creating the desire for that more, you know? Because it was like, okay, you were building bigger dams so then you had a lot of water, it was very cheap so you could have suburbs exploiting in Athens. You had the city getting bigger. You had half of the water of the country going to Athens. So of course, half of the population also of the country was in Athens. So then I started understanding this link between, let's say supplying water with big dams, creating water demand, growth of a city and growth of the resources going to that city, you know? And there I understood that demand, what was called water demand at the time, but we can think about energy demand. You can think about other stuff. It's not something that it's exogenous only, you know? Because planners, engineers tended at the time to take it into exogenous. But you would see in their work that they were not just analyzing demand. Let's say they were making these projections. Now how much water will Athens need in 10 years? And they were making these graphs. But then you would see that these were ideological graphs because they were assuming a... It's the status quo that would continue and everybody just wants to consume just a bit more, right? Yes, everyone wants more water. And the city must grow. Like, who are we to say that the city of Athens should not grow? Who are we to say that people cannot have? I think Donald Trump said that yesterday, actually. It was in a... He started the ranting and people have put it on the YouTube as a rant, but he was talking about it. Who is to tell me that I can't open the water tap and the water doesn't flow on full... He was talking about removing some water restrictions in Iowa that he was talking. He was very proud of saying no more water restrictions, no more water demand measures. Who is to tell me that my sour is not gonna be on full, full blog? So that was the logic. Now we can't tell people they want more water. The city has to grow. So this is where I realized that that's an ideological thing. So when I started working more and more on that, then I started a little bit water issues in California where these things play out on a much bigger scale and there is a lot more written. And then you realize how, for example, the growth of Los Angeles was predicated on securing water resources from the north of the state at a massive scale. And you see also the organizations of elites, of growth interests to make that happen. So again, it wasn't just a natural process of people wanting more water. So by the time I arrived in Barcelona and then when people introduced me to the idea of the growth, because it wasn't something I read, but it was the conference 2008 in Paris and then people from my group went there and came back. They were very excited. And they started introducing me to the growth. For me, all this made sense now because I realized that the driver of the... It was just a missing word somehow. You already had everything, all the pieces of the puzzle together and someone just put it there for you, I guess. Exactly, because for me it was like, okay, we have to talk about is this growth of Athens necessary? Is this growth of water use necessary? And we have to satisfy it? Or can we change what we do in order to have big girls? So the world felt pretty well there.