Hi, everyone, and welcome back to JSA TV and JSA podcasts where we are talking to leaders from across our industry on the latest trends, news, and innovation. And joining me right now is John Brunner, CEO of Aegis Mobile. Thank you for joining us. This is our first time chatting on JSA TV. This is. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. We are excited to chat with you and want to start, I think, if we could, by telling our viewers, because it's our first time with this, with our JSA TV audience talking to you directly, would love to hear a little bit of the story of Aegis Mobile. I know it was founded in 2006. You came to take the helm in 2012. Can you talk a little bit about what's happened since? Sure. Thank you very much, and thank you again for having me. So Aegis was founded in 2006, working in an industry called Premium SMS, which was the ability to buy ringtones and wallpaper with your cell phone and bill it to your cell phone bill. During those early years, fraud emerged in many different ways. False advertising, false opt-in processes where you would actually make the purchases. And so Aegis came along to create innovative ways to identify and shut down those bad actors and developed a number of products in that space over the period of years. And it was a great industry that ultimately grew to about $3 billion in the U.S. market total revenue. It's a lot of wallpaper ringtones to be buying, and to think about it. So I understand that one of the areas that you have a special focus on is the business to consumer market, specifically messaging and creating a trusted source for that messaging. Can you talk about that? Sure. It's very interesting because Premium SMS was actually stopped in 2014 in the U.S. market and eventually fell in most markets other than the Africa and South America. And anyway, so what wound up emerging are things like direct care billing, location services, identity platforms, which are value-added services that carriers offered, and Aegis jumped into those spaces and began providing compliance services. But one of the things that emerged was knowing who the software companies are that are actually engaging the carriers' customers. And so Aegis early on developed vetting and verification services to look at the history and legitimacy of companies and their backgrounds to determine would they potentially harm consumers before allowing them to enter the network. Now about two years ago, the United States was looking to launch something called 10DLC, which is text-enabling your 10-digit log code. So companies that have a phone number that everybody knows can now register and get this phone number text-enabled because consumers love texting far more than they love voice conversations or even emails. And so this has emerged to a historic level in that nowhere else in the world have we actually completed the largest registry process that exists. So what is this? This is about a known sender so that consumers can know that they're safe engaging a text message from a business. And what Aegis did two years ago was took our vetting capabilities, which we've been doing for a dozen plus years, and transform those into an automated API-based verification and vetting platform. So today we receive anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 companies every day that are coming through a group called the Campaign Registry to register and get their phone number enabled. And Aegis in three seconds is verifying the identity of the company. And in 10 to 15 seconds can do a complete behavioral background check on that company to determine is there anything in their history that would indicate that they're going to harm a consumer. And so this has created, we've now passed over 2 million transactions within the platform over the last 14 months. And to our knowledge, there is no larger implementation in the world. And the ultimate objective is that if we can get to a place where it's low friction, low cost, high volume capability, there's no reason that any company in America or actually there's 180 countries participating in this platform. But every company can register and become a known sender no matter their size or the industry that they're in because it's low friction, low cost and fast. Oh, wow. Yeah, huge volumes you're talking about and such a secure source for that. And so that makes me think you and I understand that you, I mean, obviously you're experts in the management of this data, the protection of it. But also that leads to the ability for you to gather large amounts of intelligence, right? And so how do you use that? What value does that bring to your ecosystem? So it's actually interesting. One of the things that we learned from a data perspective is that obviously this is data about companies, but it's not necessarily PII data. It's not necessarily data that has problems with GDPR. These are businesses that are registering. So they're essentially doing a contract to be on a channel to do messaging. And supply chains are always doing verifications, just not at this scale and this speed and this accuracy, if you will. A couple of different things though, we have to employ a lot of artificial intelligence and machine learning to ensure that all the data we're gathering on a company is in fact on that company, right? And we have processes that identify data quality coming back and does it truly belong to the company that we're looking at? And if not, then you have people that can intercept and look at it and verify or change the data to be sure that we're accurate. But on the flip side as well, retaining this data as long as you're on the network, when we find bad actors and they get shut down by their carriers that they're operating on, they often can create another company and come back very quickly. Or they've created hundreds of companies to stable low thresholds and do a lot of behavior against consumers that's not good. But they stable the thresholds because it's spread across many, many different companies. So with our verification vetting capabilities, we can actually relate companies to each other. And so not only can we identify that there's 300 companies associated to this bad actor and we then discover they're all doing bad things, we can also, when they come back as a new entity, we're able to match on dozens of data fields and something is going to match that's going to trigger it to be looked at to say, have we seen this company?  And then we can notify the carriers so that they can make decisions. So it's not only about knowing who's sending, but it's also about people will come in. They will do bad things. But once we identify them and we know who they are, it's very hard for them to come back or spread across other companies within the existing portfolio. Well, that's powerful and fantastic. And one of the things that you mentioned was around AI and machine learning. I think that that's interesting as we think about where we're sitting right now at Capacity in Europe, halfway through the show, I think, I don't know about you, but a lot of the things that we hear about, that I've been hearing about anyway, this week, different from years past, years past, we've been hearing about how AI has been driving demand and the supply to support it. But people now are talking about, like you are, about how to really use those tools for the benefit of businesses and ultimately our customers and the end user that it may impact. So that's really interesting to hear how you're able to. The big beauty about AI, too, is that it's in machine learning because it's both about learning, algorithms and technology that's learning. And the reality is, is that having been in fraud protection services for telecommunications for 16 years, 17 years now, we have seen continuous evolution. I mean, when we started, it was flip phones. Today, it's, you know, small handheld computers, but the methodologies by which bad actors go after consumers continues to evolve because they're very smart. They're very well funded. And so these types of technologies actually are agile and they learn. And so it's perfect. It's perfect fit. Yeah. Fantastic. It's been great chatting with you. Well, thank you. I hope you have a great rest of the show, the rest of the week that you're here. And so for folks that want to connect with you and your company, how can they do so? Well, I guess they can contact me via the email. I don't know if we can post it or. Yeah, we'll put up on screen your website for sure. People can go go there and learn more about you. Okay. Well, thank you very much. And thank you to JSA for hosting me. This is a wonderful experience. We look forward to many, many more conversations. Shows like this and otherwise. And so thank you again. Thank you. And thank you viewers for tuning in here again to JSA TV and JSA podcasts. Happy networking.


Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering Boomi World 19, brought to you by Boomi. Welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin at Boomi World 2019 in Washington D.C. Been here all day, had some great conversations. One of my favorite things about Boomi is how impactful they are making their customers. And I'm very pleased to welcome the CIO of American Cancer Society, Kenny Oxler. Kenny, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Happy to be here. Really enjoyed your keynote this morning on stage with Chris McNabb. The American Cancer Society is one of those organizations, I think that that impacts every single person on this planet in some way or another. We've all been touched by cancer. And it's so interesting to look at it as, how is technology fueling the American Cancer Society? Your CIO, talk to us a little bit about what you guys are doing with Boomi, how Boomi is really helping you guys to integrate all these different systems so that an agency as old and historic as ACS is, is really transforming to be a modern, kind of cloud-driven organization. Yeah, I think all organizations now are becoming IT organizations, it's their heart. And it's important for us at the American Cancer Society to interact with our constituents, our volunteers, our patients, our staff, right in a digital way. So it's critically important that we are right there with everybody else interacting with them. And so whether they're on the go and doing it on their mobile phone, or at the doctor's office, talking with their doctor about treatment options that we're there to help them, get them what they need in information for their best chance to beat the disease. So talk to me first about the business transformation that the American Cancer Society went through before your time there. But first it was we have all these different organizations, different leadership, different IT infrastructure, different financial operations model. Talk to us about first how did it transform from a business-like process perspective and then start looking at digital transformation? So some of it happened at the same time. The organization made the decision back in about 2012 to consolidate their organizations. We were, we kind of ran regionally at the time. And each independent different region, there were 13 different regions, kind of ran independently with their own IT systems. There were some shared technologies that we had. But the organization starting in about 2012 decided that no, we wanted to centralize our model and come together. We thought it was a more efficient manner and allowed us in essence to do more for our mission, which is the ultimate goal. So there was a lot of consolidation around people and organization. Some of the processes I will say got consolidated. Some are still going through some of that transformation. So after we kind of brought the organizations together and some of the people together, we kind of looked at, well, where are we with our technology and how do we move forward into the 21st century and do that effectively? And so at the time we did kind of an analysis of our current state. As I mentioned in the keynote, we had a lot of technologies that were just older, had kind of run their course or end of life or just become that over a decade of changes, it just become monstrous behemoth systems that we were really struggling to keep up, right? Both in terms of change and enhancement and delivering those capabilities back to our constituents. So we decided that no, it's time for us to move to a new and technology modernization effort. And we really wanted to be on the cloud-first strategy. So we were looking at our cloud vendors and everything else. And one of the big selections was as we chose Salesforce as our CRM platform, we chose NetSuite as our financially RP platform, that way we could consolidate all those. And then as a part of that, we were looking at all of the leftover processes that weren't standardized, that we were still doing differently, that we could simplify. So taking stuff from 21 steps down to six steps, if we could, et cetera, and bringing that along with the transformation just to create more efficiencies for us.  So a tremendous amount of data just in a CRM like Salesforce and Oracle NetSuite. What was the thought and the opportunity to actually put an integration platform to enable that data to be shared between the applications and enable whether it's providers or, as you said, volunteers, and we'll talk about them in a second, to be able to have an experience that allows them to get whatever they're looking for. Talk to us about integration and sort of that driving kind of hub, centralized hub aspect. Yeah, I mean, with any business, data is key. And historically we had, our data was spread out across multiple systems, but then didn't always sync up. So you'd pull a report out of one system and say something different than when you looked at another system. So one of the key foundational tenants with the transformation was, is we wanted our data to be in sync. We wanted to be able to see the same things no matter where you were looking at. That way we were all looking at the same information. Basically a single source of truth. And Boomi was a critical component of that, right? With their integration platform, they were going to be our integration hub that is going to keep everything in sync. So we knew we had over, well we had 120 applications that ultimately were a part of it. There were probably 20 major ones that had most of our data in there. And then Boomi is integrating all of those. So when information's coming across, whether it's coming in from a donation made or an event participant or a patient referral form, all of that data comes in, comes in through Boomi, and it's propagated and orchestrated across the systems as it needs to be to make sure that it has all of the right information in it, that the data is as clean as we can make it, and it's all in sync at the end of the day. That's critical. Having the data is great, but if you actually can't utilize and extract values from it, it's, I don't want to say worthless, but it's clearly the value in there, you know. It's there. It makes it a lot harder to make good business decisions without good data. Right, and when we're talking about something like patients dealing with very, very scary situations, being able to, whether it's matching a volunteer with a mentor with a patient who's going through something similar, that can be game-changing in lives and really kind of propagate. Talk to me about this service match that you guys have built with Boomi. I think it's such a great service that you guys are delivering. Tell us about that, what it's enabling. So, service match is an application that is part of our road to recovery program where we provide rides for cancer patients to and from cancer treatment. So, often when you're getting chemotherapy, driving after chemotherapy is not an option and a lot of the patients have trouble with caregivers and family always helping them. So, the American Cancer Society provides this program to provide those rides free of charge for cancer patients and the service match application is about connecting those patients to volunteers for the rides. So, if a patient calls in, they say, hey, I need a ride, this is what time I'm going, et cetera, they can do that now online as well and we can connect them with a volunteer. So, then that goes out to our volunteer community and somebody can say, I can do that, I can help this person out, connect them up so that they can get to their treatments on time. So fantastic and such an impact that you guys can make. Is it something where you guys are integrating on the back end with like a rideshare service or are these just folks like, hey, I've got a car that seats five, I want to help. Is it available to anybody? It is available to anybody, anybody can volunteer and most of the rides are handled via volunteers. If we cannot find a volunteer, we have a lot of great partners that work with the American Cancer Society that can provide those rideshare opportunities. So, we'll make it happen and get the patient to their treatment. So, talk to me about the ability to do that. That's one great application of what you guys are doing with Boomi. What was the actual build of that application? How long did it take to be able to say, hey, we have this idea, we can connect these systems, we can facilitate something that's critical in the care of a patient. What was that kind of build and implementation like? Because Boomi talks a lot about time to value and we've talked about that a lot today. So, talk to me about it through that lens. Yeah, so for us, we started on, we were all on spreadsheets, right? And paper and news. Yeah, so it wasn't that long ago, right? So, it was about a 12 month process to actually build some of the service match application itself. The Boomi implementation came in as part of our transformation to make sure that all of the systems were integrated with that. So, as people are requesting rides or whether that's through the call center or going through the website, that that information is there, that they can help patients with it. So, if they need to change the schedule or do something different, that those all take place and that everybody has the latest information. It also enables us as changes are happening or even the rides are taking place, notifications are going back out and back and forth so that everybody's up to date on all of the activity that's taking place. And to date, you guys have helped with service match alone, nearly 30,000 patients. Yeah, we service, I think it's 30,000 patients a year on the platform. We, over 500,000 rides have been delivered since its inception. And when was that inception? I'd have to look at the date. I don't remember. Just a couple of years ago or in the last few. No, it's been, it's probably been over a decade now. Okay. That's awesome. So, another thing I'm curious for volunteers who want to do, to raise funds to support the American Cancer Society. Is integration kind of a central component at your smiling side? I think the answer is yes, I think I know the answer. Talk to us about how Boomi is helping ACS to deliver a more seamless, a better fundraising experience for anybody that wants to actually go out and do that. Yeah, so we have a lot of donation processing systems that we leverage as part of the American Cancer Society because part of what we want to do is make it easy for people to raise money and raise it in their way, right? So we have multiple systems, both from all the events that we do, whether it's the Relay for Lives or the Making Strides Against Breast Cancer, which are two of our major event platforms. But we also have Raise Your Way platforms. So if you want to do it yourself and you want to host a wine fundraiser with your friends and raise some money, we can absolutely help you do that as well. And what we do is we take all that information from all of that, from those events and then bring that into the system so that we know what happened when, who you were, so we can properly thank you. You can also get your tax credits and all of the other things that go along with it, so. That's awesome. So I want to ask you from a CIO's perspective, Boomi being a single instance, multi-tenant cloud application delivered as a service. To you and your previous role before you came to the American Cancer Study was insurance, talk to me about that as a differentiator. What is that as ACS continues to scale and offer more programs and have more data to integrate? Boomi's architecture and your perspective, is that something that gives the ACS really a leg up to be able to do more and more? Absolutely. I think Boomi's low-code development strategy is a differentiator for anybody that's using the platform. We have been able to deliver more integrations in a shorter amount of time with our transformation than I've done in the past with other integration platforms or just developing it, I'll say the old fashioned way with Java or C-Sharp. So I think as an integration platform, it's a real game changer in terms of what enterprises can do in terms of delivering faster and with more stability and performance than in the past. Which is critical for many businesses, but obviously yours included. To also take a look back at your previous role in a different industry, how is the role of the CIO changing in your perspective as things are moving to the cloud but there's the explosion of edge and this consumerized implementation or influence because as consumers we have access to everything and we want to be able to transact anything, whether it's signing up to be a volunteer or an actual patient needing to have access to records or a ride, how is that consumerization effect changing the role of the CIO and opening up more opportunities? Yeah, that's a big question. Sorry. It's okay. Yeah, I think the role of CIO is changing significantly in terms of they are required to be more of a business leader or as much as a business leader as any of the other C-suite executives and it is just as critical for them to understand the business, where it's going to be a part of the strategy with it and help drive from that perspective. The consumerization component is actually in some ways I think making the CIO and the IT job a little bit harder. There's a lot that goes into making sure that what we're doing is secure and performs well and sometimes just the overall consumerization of technology it looks so easy sometimes and sometimes it's easy to underestimate some of the complex nature of what we're doing and the level of security that needs to be applied to make sure that we're protecting our constituents and making sure that their data is safe and secure. How does Bumi help facilitate that? Because you're right, we talk about security all the time in any industry. How is what you're doing with Bumi giving you maybe that peace of mind or the confidence that what's being moved around as data and applications migrate that you've got a secure safe environment of that data? Yeah, I think Bumi does several things. First off, they've got a lot of security certifications as a part of their program. They make it relatively easy to leverage that. They allow us to deploy the atoms where we need to so whether that's on-prem or in our own tenants behind our firewalls, all of those things will allow us to deploy it in whatever method we feel is most secure based on the data that we're trying to move. Excellent, well Kenny, it's been a pleasure having you on theCUBE. Just really quickly, where can we go if we want to become a volunteer to help patients? Cancer.org. Cancer.org, awesome. Kenny, it's been a pleasure, thank you so much. Thank you. Congratulations on the massive impact that ACS is making, not just with Bumi but in the lives of many, many people. We appreciate your time. We're very excited and happy we can help. All right, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from BumiWorld 2019. Thanks for watching.


I found 10 of the top companies that are almost always hiring remote jobs. So if you're someone who is in the market for getting a remote or a work-from-home job, this video is gonna be perfect for you. So the first one is going to be BKA content and you're likely gonna get hired as a content writer. And some of the content writing positions that they hire for are going to be basic blog writer, standard blog writer, pro blog writer, web content writer, product description writer and legal content writer. They pay you over PayPal and you're gonna make about $9 to $14 an hour when you first start. And then following training, you'll make around $15 to $30 per hour. Now this position is only for people in the US, but some of the other ones on the list are going to be hiring worldwide. And you must have a PayPal account because that's how they pay you. Now one thing that's great is you can work from virtually any location as they say on their website. And overall they do seem to have pretty good ratings from former employees online. So that's something we always look for when we're thinking about putting one of these companies and featuring them on the channel is they do want to have a good worker experience. That kind of goes without saying. So yeah, content writing is incredibly valuable. I think it's only gonna get more valuable in the future. A lot of people are freaking out about chat GPT and all these different copywriting AI programs and stuff like that. And the truth is I've looked into all of them and they can help good writers, but they're never going to be able to replace good writers in my opinion. So this can be a really good place to start if you're interested in getting into content writing. I personally think there's a ton of opportunity in many different types of content writing. Some of my personal favorites are going to be copywriting of course and also YouTube script writing. But yeah, definitely look into this one if you want to get started with a full or part-time job. Next on the list is going to be NetApp. And this is a company that hires for a range of different positions. Some of which are going to be quality assurance and software engineers as well as product managers. Now NetApp does a lot of stuff that they basically focus on data storage solutions. And they work in many different industries such as automotive, electronic design automation, financial services, game development, healthcare, life sciences, manufacturing, media and entertainment, oil and gas, NetApp, US public sector and also government. And basically they're all about enhancing customer experience while simultaneously collecting and storing the proper data. And they do that by storing information in the cloud and then integrating the companies that they work with in the cloud as well. And currently they have 162 full-time positions that they're hiring for, including software engineers from Bengaluru, a technical support engineer from Kansas, et cetera, et cetera. And they also hire for flexible work as well. They also have an entry-level work program that they call the NetApp Emerging Talent Program. And it's designed to help you grow your career, sharpen your skills and foster meaningful relationships. They also have the sales support and services academy which helps you fast track your career to become the next generation of NetApp leaders. And they also have an internship program too. So just as an example of what they typically pay, of course they're gonna be paying more for people from the US. But what they typically pay is gonna be 86,000 to 126,000 a year for a quality assurance engineer. And they have really good reviews from employees on Glassdoor with a 4.0 total star rating. 80% would recommend the company to a friend and 82% of the people support the CEO. So yeah, this is another really good one, mostly tech related and kind of like data related jobs but those are some of the best jobs that you can get. They're also hiring in the US as well as from a bunch of different countries around the world. So this can be a really good one for you to look into. They have entry level positions as well as higher level positions too. The next one on the list is going to be humanatic and what they tend to hire for is people who review recorded customer service calls. So basically, you're gonna be listening to recorded calls and then you're gonna be answering questions for the company. And very simply on the website, it says review calls get paid. And if you've ever called a company's customer service line and you've heard the recording where it says, this call may be recorded, there's a good chance that was actually humanatic. And basically they're gonna help their clients review the calls, then they provide them with data analytics reports and then they help the clients visualize data so they can improve their customer support as well as sales experience for their customers. And right on the website, it basically says you can work as little or as much as you want. And when you first start, you're gonna be given access to two of the easiest types of calls to listen to and record data for. And then as you work for them more, you'll unlock more opportunities.  So to get started with them, all you need is a verified PayPal account. Then you have to go through a brief verification process and then you can get started once you're approved. Now to be honest with you, this one is more of a side hustle type of thing and this is probably gonna be much better for an international audience that's outside of the US and first world English speaking countries. Because typically you're gonna make anywhere between one and $4.50 per hour. Now this is great if you live in certain countries but in the US it's more of a side hustle or just something to do if you have some free time because that's not gonna be able to give you a full-time income. Next one on the list is gonna be a great company that I actually weirdly enough have promoted before on this channel that's completely has nothing to do with this video because I promoted them for a completely different product and that is going to be study.com. And study.com is all about alternative education and they help students to learn faster, stay motivated and study smarter. And just as an example of one of the services they provide that I promoted on this channel and this is not sponsored or affiliated or anything like that but I'm just giving you an example is they actually help people get college credit much faster. So there's a lot of college classes depending on the university that you go to that you can actually test out of. And that's one of the services that study.com provides. So I think this is an awesome company and they absolutely exploded like they expanded like crazy during the pandemic which makes a lot of sense because a lot of education basically went online anyways. Now some of the benefits of working online as a study.com contractor are going to be flexible hours, reliable payments as well as supportive staff. And one of the positions they hire for is online teachers. So you can basically teach from home in your free time and you're basically helping to build the library of resources and lessons that help students learn globally. Another thing they hire for is online tutoring. This is basically where you help students who are struggling with different subjects. Another thing they hire for is research and copywriting and they put out all kinds of different articles about different schools or different subjects or different types of degrees. And another thing they hire for is reviewing and editing. So they hire editors. So just to give an example of a few positions they're hiring for, they have article writers, they're hiring for in multiple different countries. They have content assistants they're hiring for in the Philippines. They have content editors they're hiring for in the United States. They have content marketing associates that they're hiring remote so you can work anywhere. And they have HR practice test writers that are hiring remote so you can work anywhere as well. And then of course they're hiring inside sales representatives that work remote. So they are basically hiring for a ton of different roles and also in a ton of different places but most of the jobs are remote. And just to give an example of what they're paying for inside sales reps they're paying about $18 an hour. That would be the base pay that doesn't count how much you would get from commissions and for content marketing associate which is an entry level job they're paying about $15 an hour. And by the way, content marketing associate is a digital marketing job and I do have some free training from my friend Seth who's helped thousands of people get digital marketing jobs. I've interviewed a bunch of them on this channel and I'll put that free training down in the description as well as the pinned comment below so that you can check it out. The next one on the list is going to be gamingattack.com and this is a really interesting one in a very interesting industry. Now basically what they provide is complete eye gaming solutions and this is basically online gambling software solutions and full suite product portfolio for B2B, eye gaming incumbents combined with best in class management services. So basically they provide a multitude of different services for anything involved in the online gaming or online gambling industry and they hire from all over the world and some of the advantages of working at this company are, according to them, zero bureaucracy, unlimited holidays, medical insurance, only top talent and top salaries, challenging projects and tasks and the smartest colleagues in the industry and they do have really good ratings on Glassdoor as well. Now some of the jobs they are currently hiring for are business analyst and it looks like they're hiring in Kiev, London, Limisol and Tbilisi. They're also hiring a junior sales manager and it's just a remote job so you can hire them from anywhere. They're hiring a content writer from Limisol and some of the salaries are going to be about $19 an hour for support specialists, $47,000 a year for financial specialists, $119,000 a year for senior product managers, $63,000 a year for data analysts, $20 an hour for fraud analysts, $57,000 a year for affiliate marketing managers, $68,000 a year for integration managers and $78,000 a year for front end engineers. Now on top of that, their interview process is pretty straightforward. There's a 30 minute interview with a member of the HR team and then there's a final two hour interview with four different team members to gauge your fit with our culture and working style according to them on the website. So yeah, this is another good company, lot of opportunities with them, they're hiring like crazy, definitely look into it. The next one on the list is going to be coalitionincorporated.com and their mission is to protect organizations from digital risks. And they were actually named one of the best places to work for in 2021 and 2023 by fastcompany.com And they're hiring for a lot of different roles from business development representative to software engineers. Now they were also listed on the Forbes FinTech 50 as one of the top 50 FinTech companies in the world. And they are rapidly expanding and hiring in many different countries. So just as an example, they're hiring business development people from Australia. It is a remote job. They're hiring IT help desk technicians from Utah and the United States. They're hiring IT engineers from people in the United States.  So just as an example of the salary, they list incident response lead is making about $140,000 a year all the way up to $215,000 a year depending on where you live. They have the base salary of SDRs which is sales development representative as being anywhere from 40 to $55,000 a year. And again, that's just the base salary that does not count the bonuses. So typically most of the positions they hire for are going to be in the US, Canada, Australia and the UK but this can be a really good one to look into so definitely check them out. The next one on the list is going to be a Fortune 100 company. They ranked actually exactly 100 on last year's Fortune 500 list and that is going to be Mass Mutual. So this is one of the 100 biggest companies in the world. And on the website, they emphasize that they have really good compensation, work-life balance, health and welfare benefits as well as helping you to plan your financial future which makes sense because they are a finance company and they have many different roles. Some of them are 100% on site. Some of them are 100% remote but one of the roles they're hiring for for instance would be an external wholesaler for life insurance and that is a remote role that they're hiring in the US and some of the examples of roles they hire for and how much they pay are going to be 118 to 156,000 a year for solutions architects, 80,000 to 105,000 a year for life underwriting consultants and 92 to $121,000 a year for system administrators. So they do pay very well but typically they're only hiring in the US but a lot of the jobs are remote. Still definitely worth looking into if you're from the US. The question on the list is going to be magic ears and this is basically an online English learning platform and it's for students that are aged four to 12 years old and their mission is to bring a global classroom experience to every child in the world and they want to provide the best online opportunities for teachers and that's typically what they're gonna be hiring for is teachers and educators and when it comes to salary, you earn up to $26 per hour but you're probably gonna start a bit lower than that and of course the work is going to be remote. So one of the most common jobs I've seen when I've met people traveling around the world that are working remote while they travel full time is basically teaching English. So this can be a really good one to get into especially if you wanna travel because this tends to be a fully remote job and in fact it's even better if you're kind of awake during the time period that people in other parts of the world are awake as well. The next one on the list is going to be Maximus and this one is really interesting because they actually help governments out and they do that by providing essential services to the most vulnerable citizens in the communities that they serve. So they hire for technology, clinical, customer service representative roles as well as veteran and early career roles. Now they, like almost everyone else on this list are hiring like crazy right now, that's why I included them in the video and all the roles they're hiring for are from the US and almost all of them are remote. So for instance, they're hiring a senior manager for accounting and finance, they're hiring a principal analyst, they're hiring a senior coordinator, a remote clinical coordinator, an HR service center admin and a licensed practical nurse or LPN. So yeah, lots of jobs available, almost all of them are remote. There's a bunch of different types of jobs in different industries that are available. Definitely a good one to look into. And just to give a few different examples of salaries they're paying for data analysts, they're hiring entry level role and they're paying nine to $21 per hour, which is on the lower side, but it can be a good first job for you to kind of get your foot in the door. They're also hiring operation support coordinators at about $17 per hour. So not one of the higher paying ones, but it is a good one to get your foot in the door and get some work experience. Now if you haven't seen it already, I did make another video where I went over a bunch of different companies that are not on today's list and that is 17 work from home job companies that are always hiring and you can check that out by clicking right here.


I wanna make an ocean in a bag. Look at my sparkly ocean. We're gonna show you how to make one so you can play too. First, you need to squeeze some hair gel into a bowl. It's really gooey. Yup, very gooey. Then you wanna drop some blue food coloring into the gel. Just put in a few drops. You can always add more if you want to. Then you mix the food coloring and the hair gel together. Once your water is mixed, you're ready to make the rest of your ocean. First, you'll need a plastic bag. I'm adding some rice to make it look like sand. Now I'm gonna add some sea animals. Me too. I'm gonna add a little pink crab. I'm adding a turtle. And a cute little kitty. These are just little plastic toys.  I'm gonna use some cray paper for seaweed. Me too. If you want to, you can scrunch some of your paper off to make it look more like seaweed. I'm gonna add a little bit of glitter. I like sparkly water. Important tip. Do not put anything sharp in the bag. If you do, it will pop the bag. Once you have everything inside, then it's time to put your water in. Can you hold the bag for me? Sure. Can you hold my bag open? Sure. Yeah, there we go. That's what I need. And then you have to seal the bag. Here you go. Then you mush stuff around. Oh, it feels like cool water on a hot day. It feels so mushy and fun. You just keep squishing and mix everything together. I put in a manta ray, some seaweed, and a dolphin. It really looks like the ocean just much more sparkly and glittery. Swim, Mr. Turtle, swim. And that's how you make an ocean in a bag. How to make an eye-spy bottle. We're playing spies. We're making eye-spy bottles. What's an eye-spy bottle? It's a bottle where you spy things. We're gonna show you how to make one so you can play too. First, we're gonna make colorful rice. You're going to first need a plastic bag. And put in four to five pumps of hand sanitizer. I want to make my rice red. I'm making mine blue. Then put in four to five drops of food coloring. Then you're gonna put a cup of rice. And just put one cup. You need to zip your bag. And then you're going to put that rice and just swish it. It feels so mushy. Machine, machine, machine, machine, machine. Mine is all red now. Mine is blue. You need to dry your rice. Which will probably take an hour. You could just pour it into a bowl. This is the rice that we made earlier. And now it's dry. And now we're ready to make our eye-spy bottle. This bottle was old and recycled from Sweet Tea. So we're gonna have a clear bottle, a funnel. And here are some objects. So we're gonna get a scoop in the red. Mix the rice go through it. So then the rice will go into the bottle. Time to mind us to put it inside the bottle. Here's some that we found. A paper clip, some candlesticks, some flowers. Blue ball. Okay, and now we're gonna write down what we just put on. We're gonna write things down so we can find them later. So now we're gonna get another scoop. Blue. This is gonna be nice and colorful. So I'm gonna put in the dice. And he's just gonna put it in the skateboard. I'm going to put in like the red rice and then an object. And then the blue rice and then an object. And then a green rice and an object. And I just repeat it and repeat it until it's full enough. Okay, so now we're gonna put in an object. So I'm going to put in the guitar. And Daniel's going to put in a whistle. The whistle. The whistle. Okay, so now to finish our rainbow. Now I'm going to put the cap on. I'm gonna shake it up so I can find the objects. I found the guitar. And that's how you make an I spy bottle. First you need some recycled bottles. You can use glass or plastic to make sure to clean out the bottle and it's all dry. Then you could fill your bottle with whatever you want. Different stuff will make different sounds. We have some beans, beads, rice and pasta. And I'm not going to put too much because I don't want such a heavy sound. Let's try this out. Ooh, that's nice. I like that a lot. Add some little beads so it doesn't make a boom, a boom, a boom. What I'm going to do is I'm going to put some of this nice pretty tinsel in the inside of my bottle. The tinsel will change the sound. Maybe. I'm going to add some blue and silver ribbon. Big tip. Don't fill it up all the way to the top because you want room for the things inside to shake. And then you put your cap on and seal it tight. And then you can decorate the outside too. I'm going to use some stars and smiley faces just to make it bling. I'm going to use some of these star stickers. Now these stickers are pretty. You can decorate it really any way you want. You can use ribbon, you could use duct tape. And we're going to show you how to make space sand so you can play too. The first thing you need to make space sand is a big bowl. The first ingredient you need is three cups of flour. I'm going to dump the flour in the bowl. The next thing you need is gelatin, one cup of gelatin. I'm dumping the gelatin in. The gelatin color is red and that will make your sand red too. And now we're going to mix it together. The red and the white are coming together. It's starting to look sandy. It's starting to turn into a light red, almost like a light pink. There are little pieces of red and white in it. Next I'm going to add some glitter. You can put as much glitter as you want. Now we're going to make a hole in the middle to put baby oil in. It feels very soft. Now we're going to add a half a cup of baby oil. This is just regular baby oil. Now I'm going to put the baby oil into the hole. And then you mix. It feels so mushy. It feels very hard but it feels also a little bit wet. You can just squeeze it. You can squeeze it like actual sand. Just squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. It's really cool because you can mold it into any shape you want. Or just play with it. Over coming through the red sand. Look astronaut one, I found a volcano. Astronaut one, we have discovered red sand. Space sand. Woodster grandma's house legal. We're going to show you how to make it so you can play too. To make your own baking soda. You need two cups and then you just pour it into a pan or a bowl. You can add some glitter to make sparkly snow. Just sprinkle the glitter all over. Now conditioner. You're going to want to squirt it in. It's so gloopy. Next you're going to want to mix it. It feels very good because we added the conditioner. The conditioner makes the baking soda stick together. It's also sticking to the spoon. It might be better to just use our hands. Time to get messy. It's so snowy. It's so squishy. It's snowy. Stickier and clumpier, add more hair conditioner. Or you can use it nice and fine like a flurry snow. I'm going to add more hair conditioner to make it clumpier. And I'm going to try to make a snowman. That's a good idea. You might want to save some of the snow as flurry snow. It's so squishy. And it's cold too. The snow feels cold because the conditioner is kind of wet. I have the bottom of our snowman. Let's make more. There's the middle. There's the top. You can also add some toys to play in your snow. This car is having a hard time driving because streets are covered in snow. I made a snowy mountain. Let's make the tallest one yet. It's snowing on the snowy mountain. And that's it. That's how you make homemade snow.


How might language teachers productively blur the line between tasks, games, and testing? In the following essay, I consider something like a continuum from task to the game to assessment, but only in the book and learning moments of input and output. I often think of learners in my classrooms as a gray box, not quite a black box, the inner workings of which are completely mysterious, but a thing into which we only ever have uncertain, provisional insight. We can do all sorts of theorizing about language acquisition and psychometry but will never have anything as exact as a litmus test. However accurate my notion is, it motivates me to focus on things that are much more knowable and observable, the inputs and outputs of a learning situation. My personal experience. During my first year as an English teacher in South Korea, one moment sticks out in my mind as the moment I felt like I really belonged in the country, and it was a moment of language learning. I was in the tiny grocery store in my neighborhood, bagging some green peppers. During peak hours, one of the grocers would get on a microphone and howl about special deals and such. As I was bagging my peppers, I suddenly understood that he was talking about me. Help, somebody. He cried, the foreigner needs someone to weigh his peppers. Smiles and laughter spread through the store. I laughed too, as I handed my bag of peppers to a clerk who had come to stand near me. This moment was a task, I had to buy groceries, it was also a test, did I understand the intercom announcement and react appropriately? And, even if it is stretching a bit, I still think of this as a pleasant distraction, if not a game, the purpose of the whole thing was to laugh together and have a good time. Teacher as a medium of real life communication. The teacher has a high degree of control over the input he offers by way of teaching materials and the feats of learning he demands of his students. The teacher will also be a central point of input for vocabulary, grammar and other rules of language, learning strategies, and feedback. However, the outside world also has its representatives in the classroom, other students. The teacher needs to carefully balance the accessibility, variety, and intensity of all these components toward a single end, that is, providing each learner with a safe challenge. A classroom of safe challenge allows for the confusion, mistakes, miscommunications, and other stressors of living in a foreign language to benefit learning in a way that is palpable to the student. The output is all that comes out of the student that can be tested and evaluated. The key output instructors should anticipate, and encourage, is communing, not just communicating. Measuring the student's comprehension and expression are part of this, but the instructor also needs to imagine, observe, and reflect on how his input encourages, or, when things go wrong, discourages the student to take part in community, whether it be joining a club, enjoying their work, having a romance, or interacting with family. Hence, all output indicates where the student can go with the knowledge or skill appropriated from the present class. Indications that the student is somehow communing in new ways, at work, in the home, at school, are the most positive signs we can hope for. In brief, I will consider my classroom perfect when it feels like a term-long, team-building exercise, the goal of which is to learn to live better without the controlled input of the teacher and to better take on the multifarious input of the real world. The safe challenge gives way to the unpredictable challenges of the real world. Activate Phase of the Lesson In one of the unit reflections for this course, I wrote about how games, considered from the standpoint of evolutionary psychology, can be understood as real practice. Allow me to imagine a hypothetical test, one that would be maximally authentic for ELLs living in an English-speaking country. We won't worry about practicality for the moment. Let's assume that the teacher has all kinds of high-quality camera surveillance of her students, rather than studying a picture of the grocery store and a vocabulary list, or some such material. The teacher assigns the students to make a buy or a casserole and bring it to class. The teacher is available as a resource, to answer questions and offer advice, but since this is a test, students are left to their own devices. The teacher will evaluate the quality of students' choice of recipe, noting whether they consult a cookbook, a website, or got the recipe by word of mouth from a friend. The teacher will evaluate the students' interaction with employees and other shoppers at the grocery store. Finally, the teacher and students can evaluate the dishes together. To add a written component to the test, students could be asked to submit written reviews of their classmates' dishes. To make it even more authentic, it could be a thank-you note, dear Kyoko, thank you for the mulberry buy. The students have thus completed an authentic task, fully immersed in an authentic environment. All of the testing materials exist for real, in the world of the target language, and not just for the artificial purpose of measuring whether the student recalls broccoli and spells it correctly. The student makes real decisions, does real work, and really uses English and situations that don't involve any classroom niceties. Do you want to teach English abroad? In a brave new world of social media technology, there would be feasible ways for the instructor to observe this task game test. Students could upload photos updating their progress to using a class hashtag, sharing recipes in a class Google Docs folder, and so on. I'm not as interested in the practicalities as I am interested in combining as many possible tiny activities into a capstone project that might also feel like a game. How would teams, rules, snakes, and ladders be introduced into this ordeal? That remains to be played tested, but why? Because, I deeply believe that, whatever brings students to the EFL classroom, the experience of language learning can broaden and deepen their connection to the crazy, complex real world. Speak with an ITTT advisor today to put together your personal plan for teaching English abroad. Send us an email or call us toll free at 1-800-490-0531 to speak with an ITTT advisor today.


We're back, one o'clock show on Friday with Peter Hoffenberg and he's in the history department at UH. Hi Peter. Hello again, as always, nice shirt, as always. Okay, disclaimer as always. Disclaimer as always, I'm here to represent one of my personalities, but that's it. No institution, no family member, so I'm quite happy to be employed by UH Minoa, but I do not want to in any way ruin my colleague's reputation, so I can do that privately. We've had so many wonderful discussions, but before we start our discussion today, which is about history in the 21st century, I just want to do a book review, or rather a movie review with you about the boys. Can we talk about that for just a minute? Our boys or the good boys? Our boys. Our boys. Of course, yes. We've only seen the first episode. Okay. And you've seen both, right. And the idea there is that three Israeli kids are kidnapped and killed in, what, in the West Bank. Mm-hmm. Hebron starts. Right. They're kidnapped on the road. The city of Hebron. Right. And the Jewish settlers there, call them settlers, I'm not sure which term they would pick.  And it's really, it's in Hebrew, but there are subtitles. You know, sound on my television, I'd rather have the subtitles if you'd like to know. And it is a very interesting, introspective view of the West Bank, of the way the Arabs work, the way the Jews work, their relationship together, and how they operate in a crisis. It's a very interesting examination of how the police work in the West Bank, in Israel. It is really a study of modern-day Israel. What did you think of the first episode? The first episode, again, I've only watched the first one, Sobring. Your viewers probably know, but just to remind you that, even though they're dramatizations, the events are true, the three kids were kidnapped. There was a very long time in which some police knew that they had been murdered, but they kept alive the hope, which is part of the story, right, that all of this hope and God will return them, of course, as one policeman reminds us, and true everywhere, not just in Israel, if you pop the bubble of hope, the consequences are actually much greater. And that's when things he fears, right? You hope he's alive, you pray to God, you have large rallies, you get people all worked up, and then, of course, when they're not alive. You're really angry. You're in big trouble, as the policeman knows. The depiction of the Islamic family was, I thought, not just nuanced, but really very honest, because sometimes in the media, Jews and Palestinians and Arabs take on almost these cartoon images, the good Jew, the bad Jew, the good Arab, the bad Arab. And, of course, it showed a domestic scene, which could be seen around the world, but made more difficult, of course, by curfews and employment and how, like many young Palestinians need to do, they need to go into Jewish areas to work. I don't want to spoil for anybody, but the subplot is, of course, that the kid who is kidnapped. I may or may not be kidnapped because he works in Israel. Right, he may or may not be kidnapped. I don't want to destroy everything for your viewers, but here's clearly a kid who is able to, when things are fine, go to this other area, but is vulnerable as a young boy. And I think it shows that, like in places such as Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, parts of the United States, the zealots and extremists are on both sides. And sometimes the police in the state are caught unprepared in the story. On the Jewish side is about a unit in the police department, which is supposed to be watching for Jewish extremists, that's what they do. They don't watch for Palestinian extremists, they watch for Jewish extremists. Just think of all the pressure on a policeman like that, right, who is responsible for targeting, surveilling, arresting fellow Jews, not Muslims, Palestinians. And remember, of course, a lot of Palestinians are Christians, so Palestinians are Arabs as well. And also just as television is superb. There's good dialogue. There's time where nothing is said, which is perfect.  You see he's lost in searching. It's a very well done show. I wouldn't say for the emotionally squeamish, because there are definitely ups and downs and yanks here and there. But the violence is not visible, except in the crowd setting. Right. But that's one of the powerful things about that film. It's a lot of the violence we never see. We as individuals very rarely ever see the violence, yeah. And what makes it interesting too is that this is a CIS kind of thing. The Israelis are using technology, all kinds of advanced technology to solve the crime they don't know. And they're using psychology too to solve the crime. So it's good police work. And ultimately, I don't know the end of the story yet, but ultimately I'm sure they did solve the crime. They did. And the culprits, again, not to spoil it for everybody, were who you thought they would be. It was a revenge murder. And revenge is almost on people's lips the minute the kids are reported missing, not just killed, but the idea of revenge. One of the characters makes a comment is they were not kidnapped to be returned. They were kidnapped to be killed, which is sad. It is sad that the Israelis are equally accustomed to the opposite. It is Hamas kidnapping an Israeli soldier and using the soldier as an exchange or something like that. This was outright murder. Worth seeing. It's on HBO, as I recall. Right. We're not allowed to advertise, so it's on a cable network. OK, if you wish. Well, it's a good segue to our discussion today. Our discussion today is looking at it from the point of view of a history professor. We are in a time that's different and that you can disagree. You may very well disagree. Partially different, sure. A time that's different in my observation than any time in the past, at least in modern civilization anyway. Here we are in the 21st century and there are things that are happening that were really unpredicted and unpredictable. And they are moving so quickly. And you wonder whether this can be a straight line. Maybe history is never a straight line. Where do you think we are on the continuum? Moving rapidly towards extinction, I would say. Extinction. Extinction. No, not at all. I'm not a pessimist. I'm a realist. So I would agree with you and disagree with you. As we're old friends, we can do both. I think that it is fully rational and fully acceptable to think that things are very different. They certainly seem to be very different and to think that they could not have been predicted. And I think that is a truth. The other truth is, and they really co-exist, that most people cannot predict. Remember, economic companies that do well predict successfully 25% or 30% of the time. So to look back and say, well, the election of Barack Obama should have prepared us for this or Iranian Revolution or whatever should have, at least historians and most political scientists are not really in the business of predicting one answer. So I would agree with you. It seems to be very different. And part of that's for good reasons of technology, et cetera. And two, it is difficult to predict. Now, on the other hand, and they can class. They're not fighting. Their hands are clasped. Much of what we are experiencing has been part of modern history, at least. And modern is a very problematic term. But certainly, it's much of history in the last two, 250 years. And of course, there were people who predicted these kinds of cataclysms. But often, when you predict something like that, you're often predicting it based on speculation or based on a single hard theory. So if one wanted to say Marx predicted it. And he ended up predicting a lot of things correctly, but not everything correctly, right? But the criticism of Marx would have been in part that he had one simple theory. That simple theory could predict everything. Or George Orwell. I mean, we all are quoting Orwell these days. These days we care more about him than we did before. Right. But he would also remind us that if we simplistically care about him and simplistically swallow what he said, we're actually guilty of what he was worried about. We need to be as critical of Orwell while appreciating Orwell as critical of the things that we use Orwell to criticize. So as usual, and I apologize again to your audience, I can't say everything is new. It's not. Some things are new, most certainly. And some people remind, for example, Verne predicted spaceship and Verne predicted helicopters and airplanes, but they didn't turn out to be the way he thought. And he didn't know all the science, right? So you could go back well to, if I had read Jules Verne, would there never have been aerial bombing in the same way they had in Vietnam, we might have not had. That's kind of an absurd little exercise. Now, I think what you're asking me in part is what's new, right? And what's not new. I'm asking you about vectors and factors and influences that we could identify now, which never existed before. I'll give you two of them that come to mind for me. And maybe these are two of the most important. One is we have technology now that was unpredictable 20 years ago, not necessarily in the technology or in the function of the technology, but in the effect of the technology. If I told you 20 years ago that everybody would be strapped together, not only to be able to talk to each other, but that would have an effect on mass thinking, on group thinking, on global thinking, on global action, you might not have seen that coming. So what we have is speed and we have influence of the technology. The second one, we could go one by one here. The second one is the decline of the planet environmentally in terms of climate change, which a lot of people resist that and reject it and all. But that is little by little, if not every day and soon enough every hour. We're all going to figure out, this is going to change our lives on the planet. Yeah, we're doing this show with Storkle about 15 years. And that means a lot of people are going to die maybe in the billions. That will change things. And this could be coming relatively soon. The way is sort of logarithmically increasing. So those two things come to mind. So let me ask you, were those things predictable? Were those things happening before and influencing the way humanity worked? OK, again, let me give you the first answers of philosophical one. Because when one asks, did it happen before, was it predictable, et cetera, you're asking a certain degree, is there an equivalency? No. We saw this in the recent debate over what to call the migrant center. They're not equivalent. So were there catastrophic environmental events or similar events? Yes. Were there technologies, which as you say, had unprecedented speed and influence? Yes. Now, they were not equivalent, but we could say they were similar to analogies. What a historian would say is everything's unique. Some things are precedented, some things are unprecedented. But how they play out depends upon the two things. And this is one third thing I would add to your list. One is the context, which we always have known, the time and place. And your viewers will be familiar with that. I think the third thing I might add to your list is the use of the past or the significance of memory. And Orwell did worry about this. So when I say how we think about the past, well, we often think about the past in light of the present or what we think we've thought happened in the past, fake history, like fake news. OK, I would add that. So of your three, let's go to the first one. I think this computer age, so we go back even 25, 30 years, is unprecedented. But the way in which you phrase those very important problems are not unprecedented. The middle of the 19th century, in which there was a telegraph, an explosion in the west of literacy, daily newspapers. The response would be actually very similar. Look at the speed. 150 years ago, when there was a rebellion in East India colonies, it took six to eight months for British troops to get there. See point mutiny of 1857, the British knew what was happening in two days. But that's because of the technology. Now it's not, I can pick up my phone and know what happened a nanosecond ago, that's true. But there are societies which have had to deal with quantum leaps in the speed of information. And then very much in how the information is used, should somebody in the 19th century read the information privately and reflect upon it? And or should the information be expressed publicly at a meeting, read out loud? Today is the anniversary of the Peter Lou Massacre, where a newspaper was read out loud. And that is similar, if we can see, in a way to social media. Different effect, different effect. And the effect, the feared effect was, using the language of the time, irrationality and hysteria. In between is a very significant moment in history. And that's the 1920s and 1930s, where radio was used. Every significant leader, every significant political movement used radio. And radio is kind of the middle ground between the iPhone and the newspaper. It was radio for a fireside chat of reflection. The political leader is entering into your home, telling you there are only four fears. And or, right, is the radio to be used to rally people, to act? There was those in Germany who did that. Of course, in India. Gandhi, a father coughed in here. If you ever, I'm sure you've seen it, but if you see it again, please see The Great Dictator. And the penultimate scene of The Great Dictator is Charlie Chaplin, who has been mistaken for the dictator. He's the Jewish barber. That was the most time. Right, using the technologies of radio and mass assemblies, not to get people to kill, but to get people to stop killing. And so there's a brief moment where he realizes that he's using the same technology that the fascists and authoritarians are using for a democratic purpose. But how are you going to turn that off? How are you going to turn off FDR's cry for war from stealing your Japanese-American neighbor's property? And Chaplin, excuse me, is a brief moment where he looks at you with his eyes. And he says, basically, boy, boy, I'm doing what my enemy is doing, or world peace. But how am I going to be able to make sure? It's like Lincoln in a second inaugural dress. We're at war. How am I going to make sure the end of war will mean an absence of malice? I've turned on the spigots. And what we know is the spigots are very difficult to turn off. But that's true of any technology, the power of it all affects. The second one you asked me about, an environmental cataclysm. We could look back and look at, for example, the Great Leg, the Bubonic Leg, which was not strictly environmental, but it was demographic. Now, we can begin to understand that great massive fires in the Middle Ages and the early modern era, which turned the skies of London, for example. We wouldn't want to exclude, however, mass disease in the 21st century. It's not just environmental. Humans have experienced mass disease before. Right. Absolutely. Lincoln in 1918, was it? A huge flu epidemic killed hundreds of thousands of people. More people died from the influenza after the First World War, probably than died during the war, at least it's very close. And we could have, you know, that was worldwide. That was global. Some other kind of highly infectious disease. I think probably, though, I certainly would not. I mean, and I fundamentally agree with you. I'm just tweaking at the edges as historians try to do to say that not everything is quite new. Probably, though, considering the knowledge we have of the animal and plant world, I don't think humans have ever stood at the precipice of such natural extinction. I'm not necessarily talking about water and glaciers per se, but the United Nations declaring that 25% of birds will die or what have happened to the bees. I would have to talk to my friends in the environmental history and animal history, but that seems to be, first of all, we have much more knowledge now of the natural world than we ever did before. And that seems to me to be one of those moments where, no, we don't really have precedent that I know of for the extinction, the significant extinction. They've always been extinctions, but I mean, a massive extinction. It's almost as if you were at Croma and Neanderthal and you're looking at the last Wally Mammoth. What would be your reaction? And we are eating on that edge in some cases, most certainly. I'm thinking that one of the elements that goes into that, you say we have knowledge, we have knowledge of the environment, of water, of food, what have you.  Which is not to disparage other societies, but we just. There's not a problem in acting together. There are more of us. And the political will seems elusive. Not only here, but elsewhere. Governments come apart so easily, make the wrong decisions to affect everyone so easily. And so the question I'm left with after that is, okay, so we have the technology to provide water, to provide food. This goes back to Flint, Michigan, and it goes back to Detroit in the news this week about clean water. And newer. And thank you. And newer. It's a shonda. Yeah, I don't know if you're in the audience. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We see it is. Let's just get it. Yeah, they're all Swedish speaking. Nothing technical, they're just speaking show. You know, it's a shonda. It's a kind. So with a lack of political will, you know, you cannot apply the technology and you get lead in the water. You know, this is really tragic that we have it, but we can't use it. It's biblical even, you know. So I think that's a factor we have to consider. Absolutely. Response is, and again, in complete agreement with you, that has always been the case. That people, no, but I mean, I want to twist a little bit so that's, because that's, but no. I always watch out when you say you agree with me. Right, I know. Everybody back home will remind me not to. I'll wear a T-shirt next time. Unfortunately, historically, that these kinds of shondas happen to minority groups and low-income groups. Now, but that's a banal claim. The non-banal claim is that the modern world is one in which there's supposed to be a social contrast.  Free of want, so regardless of your race, your freedom, your ethnicity, your income level. So I agree with you. I agree with you in Saturday evening posts. Right. Norman Rockwell. Okay, but it is a shonda when people in this world, this country, world even can go without water, but certainly, so I think the difference is, and the difference has fueled what we might want to talk about some other time, you know, populism and authoritarianism. It's been fueled by a social promise and a social pact, which has been ignored or broken. Gellner, a very famous sociologist, in his usual bold, non-apologic terms, all this social bribery, right? I'm going to participate in this society, and I'm going to participate in this polity, not as equal, right? I mean, it's not as equal, we know that, but as having at least, right, at least a floor of human decency, right? So I know that I'm never going to become Bill Gates. I know that I am of a privileged race. I know all that. So the responsibility is to recognize that there are minimum standards, and we have seemed to be having a difficult time. Housing should be a minimum standard. Healthy food, clean water, not just a job. We seem to be obsessed with the job, and it doesn't have to be a decent job always, but a job that pays, you know, health insurance. These are basic, and if we go back in history of the Cold War, these were all the things that Khrushchev and Kennedy and Nixon and British would fight over because the Soviet Union would say, of course, we do all that, which they didn't, of course, but they could say they would. So interesting, and one factor that's in play here is that we had a pretty high moral standard during the Depression, you know, freedom from want and Norman Rockwell and FDR, and those guys raised up the country in their own way to a higher moral level of decency. Now we reject a lot of that. I mean, or the government does anyway. I don't know how. Well, that's part of the difficulty. There's always been a populist anti-elite, anti-expert tone. Hofstetter wrote a lot about it as kind of a politics or culture, resent, right? Resent New York, resent Hollywood, et cetera. Resent the guy who seems to be successful. But people inside of government generally were not like that. I mean, unfortunately, in a lot of our governments around the world now, we have people who resent all of that science and that management in government itself. You can understand the gap between the best and brightest as David Halbersturm would say and the rest of common people. You can understand that. But what happens when the best and brightest wield power and wield money and deny violence, deny rationality, deny the enlightenment of equality. And that's not reserved. Again, probably most listeners and naturally so would think of the United States. That's not reserved, the United States. That's part of an authoritarian populism that's India, Hungary, fuels Brexit. I mean, really what? You can dislike being part of the European Union, but the idea that you can go it alone. That's a great segue. Yeah, because what we have now, and by the way, this all reminds me of Herman Wolk's book, The Winds of War. In the movie, it was actually a TV serial with lots of episodes, Robert Mitchum and Ali McGraw and how they traveled around Europe in their respective roles. Like, she was a student and he was a naval officer, US naval officer and they brought it into each other once in a while. But mostly, you followed the decline of Europe, the decline of decency and the imminence of war. It was different than World War I, the way it came about. At the end of the day, nobody liked each other, and at least the Germans didn't like anybody. Nobody liked the Germans either. Nobody liked the Germans, okay. Still probably the case. Sorry about that. So, but the bottom line is you can tell it was coming. And right now we have countries like Russia, we have Trump who like to divide people, like to make them angry at each other in this thought. I mean, there's a method about the madness in the thought that they will be stronger if the people they're dividing are weaker. So if I go to Sweden, for example, an article about Sweden with various groups of liberals and not so liberals in Sweden arguing with each other about migrants, and clearly, and they found evidence to suggest that Russia was fomenting that divisiveness. So what you have is that some people like to create divisiveness on the part of other people and get a leg up on them and undo the functionality, the effectiveness of their longstanding society. I don't know if that's happened before. That seems like a new one for me. And it seems also that the hate, the racism, all that stuff, it seems like that is a introduction to the winds of war. That means that people aren't getting along. They're not looking to collaborate. They're not looking to make friends and do things in collaborative groups. They just all mad at each other. Populism, nationalism, what do you call it? So the problem I get with that is I think that's as much a relevant phenomenon right now as immigration, by the way, is involved in that as climate change or technology going to muck or some of the other things we've talked about. That is a factor that can change the world pretty quickly, where I think we're on the brink of war in various places, not to say that each place will go to war, but one of them, all we need is one of them. And the situation is such that a mistake can cause war now, I think it's so intense. I think the unprecedented nature of that is that we have dismantled an imperfect, admittedly imperfect international order after 1945. And I'm not here to extol the virtues of the World Bank or the IMF, the United Nations, they can do that themselves. But there was a structure, there was a structure, a Keynesian structure, and a recognition that that really revolved around the United States and the Soviet Union. Again, imperfect, not equal by any means at all. That has been dismantled. It's been dismantled in part because again, it didn't fulfill all of its promises. It's been in part dismantled because of the rise of other wannabe great powers. Again, I'm not picking on anybody, but China plays a major role in this. In 1945, remember, there was a week in China, there was really no China in the sense of being a political entity. After 49, there became China's at least. So the participation in China, and again, not to blame China, but that's clearly influenced things. The failure of larger, multi-ethnic states, also part of that, 1945. I think we'll look back, my grandchildren will look back, and they'll see really the end of Yugoslavia as one of the warning signs. And we don't talk about it too much anymore. It was a multi-ethnic state. It was not held together by a Democrat, by any means at all. A populist, authoritarian figure who did practice social bribery, though. The Croatians and the Serbs, and he was able to play off the U.S. and the United States, he had a mixed economy, which is not to say I have a Tito T-shirt, by any means at all. But I think we'll look back and see the failure, the failure of Yugoslavia, which also had Russian and American intervention in it. Russians came to help their Slavs, their fellow Slavs, which they had done for centuries and centuries. That was kind of prescient about what was happening. The question would be, and that's happening all over the world. The question would be, though, whether that happening all over the world will, like in 1941, become a world event. A world or two is not a world war until 1941. 10 years of vicious violence and all the different theaters. So that's, as a historian of the 20th century, that's what I look at. Do you see this as a phenomenon, a course of events that's repeating itself? After all, you know, we have North Korea shooting missiles and Trump's discussions with them are meaningless. We have rioting in Hong Kong at a level we've never seen before, such a threat to China. And China, you know, organizing its armed forces on the border in Shenzhen. We have 65, 70 million people now in homeless camps, you know, migrant camps around the world behind barbed wire. We have a general decline, I would say, of law and order, if you want to call it. We look at this country, we have a shooting every few days, most recently at the police themselves. So, you know, what I get is we're in a process. And as you say, it may not result in a war or a debacle, a global debacle tomorrow, but it shows you a trend, doesn't it? The trend is there. I don't see right now the equivalent, say for example, of Pearl Harbor or the Soviet invasion of, sorry, excuse me, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Boy, that was a... I forgot to mention, you know, we have we're tearing up nuclear treaties. Right, now I was going to say, apropos your previous comment, that does endanger the world. And of course, one of the things that held the world together between 1945 and we hope forever will be the only two tragic uses of nuclear weapons. Now, I would be worried about that. I would be worried about India and Pakistan, et cetera. But as I say, which is not to be an optimist, by any means at all, I don't see the trigger mechanism. You don't see quite the competition between China and the US as exactly equivalent. Remember, we're talking about equivalencies, not analogies to the tensions between Japan and the US in the 30. And that helped trigger, of course, World War II. And I don't see the tension between a significant expansionary central or western European power and the Soviet Union. And that's, of course, what triggered the invasion in 1941. Just as a historian trying to find what's the same, what's different. I'm as depressed as you are with your description, you've made me even more depressed. I'm going to go home and finish my bottle of slivvits. But my depression might be. I'm going to get a bottle of slivvits. Yeah, my depression might be even deeper. And I also don't see a pollution. In other words, Syria, if we look at Yugoslavia, we're also going to look at Syria. All those years, really, nobody did anything. And in the end, what's happened? In the end, the dictator has won. Well, I know we didn't like all the opponents of the dictator. I understand that. It's kind of off the end that way. He's won. He's won with the sort of the assistance of Russia and Iran. And his victory and stability now in some ways has made it at least more recognizable or Netanyahu to deal with Syria. But think of the dead. That Syria used to be, you know, in the 19th, yeah, late 19th, 20th century, just like Beirut. These are great, these are great cosmopolitan. Beirut was the Paris of the Levant. And so I worry, but I don't, I neither see a global conflagration. I don't see that. And I hope that I'm right on this one. But I also, even though I'm generally a hopeful person, I don't see a resolution to a lot of these issues because I think that the political world and the institutional world have failed. It was gonna take something that I used to never talk about or even think of that important, but I'm changing my mind about it. It's going to take society, not government. In the Middle East, it's going to take NGOs and families who cross the border and have their kids go to school with each other. Here in the United States, it's going to take, I don't wanna discourage people from voting by any means at all, but it's going to take, like I'll show you a video a friend of mine sent me, this wonderful black musician who didn't even understand racism until he returned from Germany and he has spent his entire life, his non-professional life, meeting Klans members, talking to them. Guys, Brave, he's big, helps being big. Brave and bright, and that's not a government program, right? That's not an institution. It's a brave person who has decided I'm going to make this effort, and let's be honest, equally brave Klansmen.  Maybe I don't need this, maybe I'd like to get along with this guy. It's going to take both sides, right? I mean, it's going to take Israelis and Jews, making some concessions, but I think what the bottom line is, is people have to be able to, as Adam Smith wrote a lot about this. You have to have the right. So if the African-American musician goes into the guy's house and he knows there are weapons in the house, he has to trust that the person will not use them, right? The Palestinians are going to have to trust if I go to the Jewish section of Jerusalem, I'm not going to be kidnapped. Or to the police station. Right, and that gets back to some of your earlier points that social media would have it differently, right? Social media would say, oh, the kid's there, let's go get him, right? Or the authoritarian populist would say, he or she is different. So it's going to have to take trust. There used to be more trust in government. There was always reason to be, you know. Would you agree with me for a solution? If you were king, I mean, in the full capacity of that, you would want in this country to reform government, major reformation. Because government right now doesn't work. Government doesn't regulate, government doesn't, you know, doesn't support decency. Government doesn't do anything right now. And furthermore, if you were king, and I made you king soon, you would have a certain number of things to do. You would get back on climate change. You would ease up on this immigration. You wouldn't do anything to create hatred in the country. You would support relations with other countries and you would support other countries in the same sense of decency.  And I think we have learned in the 21st century, or in the 20th, that a leader, a negative leader can have huge effect on people. That the stories of decency, the stories of courage that you described, they're anecdotal. If you want to have them happen on a large scale, involving hundreds of millions of people, billions of people, people look naturally to a leader. However he got there. And so we need leaders, you know. So if you were a leader, don't you think you could find a solution to our current predicament? I would hope so. First of all, I'd get rid of the designated hitter rule and all of AstroTurf. No, I think I don't disagree with you. Although I think that being the son of two people of government, there are a lot of good people in government. A lot of people. There are institutional questions, but certainly everything you said is a floor, right? A decent leader. A leader who unites rather than divides. But I think you've seen with the current, authoritarian figures, be they kings or want to be kings, we got to take a step back. Because either one looks up to them, the wrong reasons, right? For example, should we look up to a leader because of his or her race? So we kind of have to step back, right? If we're going to have a democracy and you're going to vote for people. And that means trust. It means seeing that everybody's identity is very complex. It can't be reduced to religion or race or gender. It's very complex. Every society is complex. And that's a step before voting, or a step before politics. Does this mean, Peter, that we can come back and have this conversation again? And I'll have many different identities for you. Yeah, absolutely. And maybe you'll agree with at least some of the things. And we'll talk about it. I've agreed with a surprise. I know you haven't. I didn't have sleep last night. I know. I make a little glow with it. He agreed on this. I know. The contanker's chew is gone. Yeah. Anyhow, thank you. Always a pleasure. Yeah, I can get my voice back next time. Peter Hoffner. Thank you. Historian extraordinaire. Thank you.