Do you want to get the ladies like John Thundercock? Then you need his number one secret, tactical soap, pheromone infused soap from men, proud channel sponsor of 21 Studios. I'm Anthony Dream Johnson and I've proved this soap. Order now to link below. Use coupon code 21C for 10% off now. Thank you for joining us on the 21 Report. My name is George Bruno and I will be your host for about the next 20 minutes or so. We're talking with Socrates today. He was the opening speaker and with a very profound message and we're going to talk to him about his message to what I just found out was not just to men because you said half your audience is women as well. To my mutual astonishment, it actually tends to be women seek out understanding of men. They naturally have an interest in relationships but what they find is that a lot of the mainstream advice women are receiving is faulty, doesn't work and there's an effect to taking some of that information on and so they go looking to other sources and they tend to look for men that at least have a different perspective on kind of relationships and I found myself kind of in the middle ground on some of this like I've been accused of being kind of purple pill or Captain Save a Ho and I think I brought that up earlier and there's some credence to that because I believe the sexes are actually meant for each other and if you're a hardcore red pill guy, you'll sit down and say you're blue pill and blue pill guys think oh my god, you're still red pill so I'm kind of somewhere in between but the reality is is I think biologically we're meant for each other. Actually I don't think I know and because of that I think whatever we do we should be bringing ourselves together and not turning ourselves apart and I think a lot of not necessarily the advice that they give but the effects thereof pull us apart relationship wise and so I think the advice that I give is relevant to both men and women and so you know we kind of talked a little bit about that but yeah I was too was truly amazed that half my leadership were women. That's fantastic and your website is manningupsmart.com what is the name of your book? The book is called The Map, a personal guide to the sexual marketplace and it's based on a previous 21 convention speech in which I laid it out and I said you've got to put this to a book there are too many ideas here and the other element to it is that I just didn't want to have a narration of the speech itself because I wanted to provide more content more in depth and knowledge and kind of fed a lot of that out. The problem though is that having a full life a career plus continuously doing new speeches for the 21 convention and trying to run a blog trying to do a book on top of it you had to kind of pick and choose so the blog itself while it's at manningupsmart.com it's I haven't been able to be real attentive and I need to go back and kind of resurrect some of the ideas and some of the themes there but I've been spending a lot of my focus in on writing the book which will be completed essentially today it'll be for release this Saturday for the house party that we're gonna be having so we'll have a big house party and book lunch tour and be able to have the book out there and hand people the book. How was the book different than other books that talk about sexual marketplace inter-gender relationships? What would be the unique selling proposition if I can put it that way or what makes it different than the entire bookshelf that you see in the Manisphere type of books? Why is this book different and why do people need it in their library? Fundamentally it's graphic in nature so where there's most books are all nothing but text that may have a graphic. The map literally that I create is graphic in nature so you physically can see what we're talking about and analyzing graphically and as an architect I communicate through a large number of medias one of the most important is graphic and we talk about blueprints and designs but we also do specifications which is nothing but text and but we also know for example that a graphic can convey thought, content, tone, visual all sorts of communication cues in a way in which text one so a picture's worth a thousand words so if I can sit down and say you're in the friend zone and you want to be a sexual viable option trying to be more of a friend by going down the wrong axis which is what most people do is just gonna make you a better friend you can't get from where you're at to where you wanna go by doing this unless that's where you wanna go but if you really wanna go over here you need to go this way and if we know that axis and we can define what that is and I clearly articulate that so for example the two most biggest drivers of the sexual marketplace are natural selections, are biological impulses and those factors are known and I break that down into the three major components of anthropology of being survival, seduction and then provision so the physical elements of being survival all the physical traits of being what would make a human survive you know, stature, strength, fitness, health seduction, you have to be able to be a successful sexual being how do you do that? well it's through seduction are you able to give IOWs are you able to receive that are you able to respond socially and appropriately to do that and for men, women's hypergamous nature women's natural sexual biological negative is gonna require men that will pull the trigger that will get sexual that won't be a nice guy and stay a nice guy that they will actually act on their sexual interest the same way men have a similar need okay within the seduction category of we want women who are accessible it's great to be a flirt but at a certain point we want to be sexual with a woman with you and if you're not a woman who wants to be sexual all of a sudden you're dismissed and that lowers the category so you've got that the last one's gonna be provision that's where women, where we're similar the characteristics are very similar so in survival traits for men and women the traits are gonna be very, very the same but for provision it's gonna be very different women want men who are wealthy, powerful, famous and have cultural influence okay now if men we really don't care about those things we actually want young fit and hot okay you know or beauty and so that changes and so it's understanding what makes that up and why you can kinda score yourself and that's consistent with what I call like the swipe left or right correct yes that's right and by the way that's natural selection and at no point are you going on the social selection which are the relationship centrics and so then I evaluate that and say okay what are your relationship skills do you know how to maintain relationships and part of that is what do relationship skills actually do and I actually kinda teach some of that and that's to reduce tension and stabilize things that's essentially what oh you know when we talk about communication being key what does communication do it reduces tension when there is conflict or there's a misunderstanding open communication reduces that conflict and tension reduces violence okay so that's a relationship skills so you know how do you rate yourself on that on a scale to one in ten and then the second one would be what are your relationship management ability do you know how to manage a relationship and so you're taking men out of the emotional zone and making it practical correct intellectual you're giving them words to use they're able to look at the graphic and say I am here but I wanna be here right it's not a guessing game it's not a guessing game and not only that because you can break it out whether it's in scale one to ten or whatever you can then start saying zones is this a fundamental skill is it a basic skill is it an intermediate skill is it an advanced skill somebody at a fundamental level should not be doing advanced skill set the nuances are gonna be lost on them not only that the reality is if you wanna really improve yourself remove the negatives first what are the things keeping you from being normal you know that reminds me Socrates you know the phrase that we that we've been hearing I'd say about the past five years when someone asks another person so how are you and so and so doing and the response is it's complicated it sounds like this book helps people eliminate that response it does and you're able to kind of in what you're saying it's really geared towards guys so you have this very analytical kind of by the numbers kind of and I'm not gonna say it's a formula but at least you have a basis of understanding and by the way you know where I have this sex threshold you know that you have to be above the sexual threshold before women will have sex with you same thing with the relationship threshold you have to be above the relationship threshold those aren't static lines they actually move they fluctuate not only by individual but also on timing context and everything else but if you have a kind of visual concept that you have this map in your head that you can understand that by being here and I wanna be here and this line shifting or if I'm here in the line you know if I'm above the sexual and it shifts now all of a sudden I find myself behind but I haven't done anything and the line shifting up I need to move with it to stay above that I can modulate how to and very much like driving a car where you modulate or you kind of gear that appropriately and so you can do it not only in a macro level but on a micro level and that's actually a separate chapter in the book or section and that reminds me of in business we talk about you can't manage what you can't measure so you have to identify where you are where you wanna be and what direction you're going in correct there's people who operate in relationships for years in the it's complicated zone right so this could take somebody out of that gray cloudy area and help them either move forward or cut it I literally have the key line say never be lost in the sexual marketplace again wow you may make mistakes but you won't be lost you know if you adhere to it the other part I'll also sit down and say is there's more than one route to get to a destination how much you know and the route you take can be complicated and have nuances and a straight line may not be the best solution one of the most common is if a guy's in the friend zone and I locate you in the fuck buddy zone and there's kind of a defined area free sexual without relationship you can go there and most pickup artists will say sell you the opportunity to go from zero to hero kind of the slogan but the problem is that you transcend a certain area of that sexual marketplace and certain people live there and I actually analyze some of that you know if you're going across that in a straight line you're going to be dealing with the dregs of humanity you know people that are low social tolerances low physical appearances and you're going to be spending a tremendous amount of energy doing some very uncomfortable things and getting poor results with low quality people and a lot of guys get very upset with this because they have standards for themselves or they come from a background where they have expectations and a lot of this drives a lot of school shootings to be really honest so you look at it and when men face rejection particularly at a sexual level and not just sexual rejection but sexual identity level there's a tremendous amount of anger and resentment and I've said before that if you can't resolve something appropriately you'll do it inappropriately and we've seen some of that and so when I was giving the talk in Tampa that year there was a recent killing in California at that time and I utilize that as an example as opposed to teaching the same individual to become normal to remove the things that are making and pushing them down into the friend zone to remove that and by the way there's an 8 to 1 ratio on that so if you can remove the negatives it's vastly better than that than adding a positive so you remove the negatives first and all of a sudden you'll find yourself in the normal zone and that's what happened that's what a lot of guys going through the pickup community but then they find a girl and they disappear and so the coaches lose that opportunity they don't ever get them down to the fuck buddy zone which is what both were selling so I have this question for you years ago in the good old days men used to just self-destruct now they destruct others in their grief in their despair hence school shooter incel this type of thing what has made that happen it is a in the light of history it is a recent phenomenon in the past men would just commit suicide either with a bullet or over a period of 20 years you know one whiskey at a time yeah right alcoholism or gambling or any devices devices now they're destroying others' lives why did why have we made that jump what has happened in society and to men profile those men yeah I'll say it but it's not just men and we'll take us take one step further back explain social justice for us what are they doing yes they're assaulting they're damaging yes they're attacking yes they're not just self-destructive correct destructing in society in a whole so I think in part we take a bigger step even back from both men and women and as part of the talk is that in many ways isolation is being promoted as a virtue whether it's MGTOW men going their own way or you know social justice wars with being a strong independent woman they're both advocating isolation and loneliness but we've sat down and enabled it society to say this behavior is okay and where it goes unfettered you start seeing more so if you don't weed the garden you're going to get more weeds and weeds are prolific and when you have a culture that's leaning to sexual identity politics any of that sort of kind of the theoretical philosophical stuff and they promote that and they promote victimhood and by the way it's terribly empowering to be a victim you all of a sudden accorded rights and respect you've never earned yeah okay and when we give license to that there's no difference and I haven't seen anybody who's killed other people you know I'm in particular school shootings that hasn't felt entitled and felt they weren't a victim every one of these shooters were angry they're evening the score somehow and man do they want you to pay and they want you to feel it and look at the choice of targets children like themselves they want you to feel it and there's a reason for that and so in many ways I think that the community should respond to some of this and I think events like this in many ways we know that is preventing a lot of it and we know it not so much that we have school shooters in our midst because you know everybody has that capacity but we do know there's been a number of people who have said look I was suicidal or my life was heading this particular way or you know I can't believe that after coming to an event like this that I went better part of a year and it only occurred to me that I only thought about killing myself once yeah and you're kind of struck and that was never our intent but that's kind of a ramification of men helping and developing themselves and fulfilling these personal voids but the other part is we demand that you have self agency and as a society we're not we're not unfortunately that we're not promoting that we're not saying when you don't that's wrong knock the shit off we actually enable and we showcase these individuals and so I think we're going to see a lot worse you know which is not a positive thing you mentioned a phrase strong independent woman which is should be trademarked yeah as if that's a badge but you never hear men say I'm a strong independent man why is there a disparity between the genders with that why do women say that and why do men not say that I believe it goes back to the battle of the sexes it's positioning perspective and as soon as you say it's about all the sexes there's gonna be winners and losers and it's them and us and it's teaming and it's tribal and I think there's something terribly natural in human species the animal part that's inclined to that and it's not necessarily a societal better thing but we don't sit down and look for the ways in which we're similar and we're compatible and complimentary and when you do that the sexes are brought together but to go back to the strong independent woman we used to demand that and so it was very much me too movement the original me too was I'm strong and independent me too not the sexual assault front so I think there was this element of that I think that they're also following behind the trail of patriarchy rather than truly developing a macriarchy okay if you were that had its own identity and so we are mammals so we learned through behavior by example and it's patterning so it's natural to fall into thinking processes that are already been pre-established and patterned for you and so if you have this element that you're falling behind the patriarchy you're kind of even though you're gonna tear it down but we're gonna replace it with something almost identical or even worse that you have that sort of behavior and so women are trying to become more like men because they valued those traits for so long they identify with some of them are they being rewarded for that? I'm a behavior modification guy and behavior modification rule number one is behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated how is this behavior being rewarded this SJW this some of the newer female thought how is that being rewarded in society because it seems like it's gaining steam if it wasn't being rewarded you wouldn't see it correct wither and die how is it being perpetuated? there's immediate validation you identify with a tribe and you're one not only that you get tremendous respect notoriety me too me too correct so me too isn't just about I've been sexually assaulted it's bigger than that and it's almost a dead giveaway they're telling you like read the card placard that people present they tell you everything you want to know is me too, me too, me too and it's not even just me too it's see me see me, me too I want you know don't ignore me you know and so there's that element to it but it's short-term thinking process you know and it's negative and in today's speech I actually talked about the ramifications of being a strong independent woman when you have a biological clock tick nature doesn't care whether you biologically are infertile and can't help it it's a biological fact or if it's self-induced or society will induce nature doesn't care tell me some things about nature nature doesn't care nature doesn't lie tell me some other things about nature nature will win that and it's gonna sound horrible I was in when I was going through architecture school or it was kind of an ethics course but they were basically teaching us how to be responsible architects and how to mitigate loss and risk associated with how we get sued for building failures and everything else and it became almost religion that the beginning of the lecture at the very end the professor would sit down and say and water will win so he would walk into the room and everybody has a joke and it became kind of this mantra because he was known for doing it that it became a thing is that and water will win and I've just taken the same thing is that nature is persistent and nature doesn't care about you me as human species it's gonna be survival of the fittest and we relay that to a physical propensity okay you have a survival of fittest but if you have a moral and ethical and fitness for society and you end up eradicating self extinguishing your genetic line because you're a strong independent woman you failed to have children in your biological clock won't nature doesn't care mm brilliant yeah and the fittest will survive and that doesn't mean necessarily it's a societal or civilizational best but what's best for the species and what's best for the species is that it propagates do you think we've lowered the net in the basketball game of life have we made it easier to easier for weaker people to win and to do a layup I don't think we've lowered the net I think the threshold for that has been pretty low to begin with I think the people that get scared by it like a lot of the women I know that are strong and independent and a lot of them are close friends their expectation for motherhood and parenthood have been raised so high that I think they have fears in that challenge I know I personally felt that is that my awareness of what it meant to be a good father or a parent I didn't think I had the skills or abilities to do it and the reality is I didn't okay so I kind of knew which path I was on and where that path with head end up and but it was my obligation to do something about that otherwise I was gonna be unfit and so it was my personal challenge to sit down and say where am I weak what do I really want and to come up with my own answers and solutions and create the world that I wanted for myself and part of that was I wanted to be a good parent I wanted to be a good partner and I wanted to be the world's best father for my daughter and there is no doubt that I am and so you look at and go what are the challenges and so I think in many ways that that bar has actually been raised for people who are aware and it's like many things like when you become aware of a subject the more you get into it the more you realize you don't know and more intimidating it becomes so the barrier to entry becomes stiffer and harder and it does not help us that society and culture doesn't advocate for relationships or marriage and families the way it used to and we've lost those supporting institutions and many ways you have to then go back and reconstruct that and if you don't have that that's a tremendous amount of energy to overcome and so I think there's that a lot to that. I've heard some people say I was I knew everything about marriage and family until I had marriage and a family I knew everything about kids until I had kids and then all of a sudden it doesn't matter how educated you are how mature you are how together you are children will always throw you a curve ball. Daily. It's stunning but it's like a lot of things in life you can't sit in isolation and think you know something in an academic sense and I think that's kind of some of the arguments I have with a lot of academics particularly the people that I read the white papers they're not publishing or putting stuff out because their careers very much would be at risk but along those lines is that you have to field test and so when we were talking about kind of a pickup organization is that you just couldn't read the material in keyboard jockey there was actually you had to go out and post and be filled you know go out into the field then post field reports and by the way our layer required you actually be witness doing such so you just couldn't go out and kind of I did this you actually had to go out because what it did is while you think you know how something's going to go in your mind it doesn't play out the same right you know Muhammad Ali says everybody had a you know a plan until they get punched you know in the military we had a plan until first contact and then shit goes to hell and Hampton are you flexible enough and are you skilled enough to handle that situation in context and by the way that there are things that are going to come up that you would never anticipate I mean never anticipate and that develops experience now your your ability then is to combine knowledge and experience and squeeze that into a juice we call wisdom and that that is a whole different challenge you know some of the books that are written for men are only recept are only read by men who are receptive during grief or despair right I certain books by authors that we both know would be meaningless to some people whose lives seem to be going okay only when crap hits the fan then you want to hand someone a certain book it sounds like your book is appropriate for anybody at any stage male or female and it sounds like somebody is going to everybody's going to get something out of this book it will be fair I completely agree we learn through trauma and trauma drives behavior I have no expectation that somebody who has a great relationship is going to find interest in the material they're just not because they're getting it right but there are distinct pain points and knowing that there are three major categories of people that I was looking towards so the people that are in the friend zone those people that are that are sexually viable in the fuck buddy zone but below the relationship threshold that they have a unique pain point the other is and it's going to be strange when people who are average they have a distinct pain point and they suffer from being average there's nothing remarkable about them they're transferable they're swappable and nobody's going to invest in that nobody really wants that they want more for themselves but they haven't put their work in and that is a pain point too and so I think that it's a broad enough book it probably could have been three different chapters or three different books under itself and had been viable but I kind of joke that I should have had a breakup recovery book as my first one because that would have been a best seller and then you go from there I kind of did that with my blog structure I start with the demise of a relationship and what do you do it's a relationship autopsy and then you kind of do assessments and everything else before you do all the relationship stuff and so there was a progression in my writing on that but this particular book it does cover a large spectrum of multiple people but I think people who are in healthy relationships that want to improve them or fine tune them sharpening the acts as it were or sharpening the saw is you're gonna make better headway by having a sharp tool and the way you do that is pick up something that you're interested in that's relevant to your life and I think relationships are very relevant to people. One last thing the people that are watching this right now have needs there's someone out there who's watching this right now and their life need they need something that's gonna flip a switch tell that one person who's watching this that one nugget that could possibly change his life he's watching this he's hoping that he can just grab onto one thing he has no hope he's been out there he's failed what would you tell that man right there? I would tell you right now you know exactly where you're at you know the path you're on and you know the path and where it's gonna end up and there is a remarkable difference between where you are gonna end up and where in the back of your mind where the hero that you are your inner hero that not the Marvel comic book character hero but the hero that you could be what path that individual will do what things that individual will do I would sit down and say drop on and lean towards being that individual the greater separation between who you are and your inner hero that behavior difference the greater separation the greater failure and lost potential of your life if you're not achieving you're not knowing you know happy with where you're at if you lean into your inner hero you will make a dramatic change in your life in a direction that you want that you can control that is completely available right now and that's a change of perspective I just I got goosebumps when you said the phrase inner hero that's talking to somebody right now right now someone is their hands are getting sweaty and they're writing that down that's a powerful phrase yeah and let's talk about that sweat you know that anxiety and that fear that is a immense human natural reaction but it's a reaction courage is what you do in despite of that fear and courage requires courage demands rational thinking that's the cerebral cortex responding not the mammalian or the limbic brain you know the animal brain of fight or flight you know and so to be able to have command of that and realize lean into that fear and anxiety and say my hero can get through this okay and that that'll change your world Socrates from manningupsmart.com his book is coming out real soon I look forward to it I think you'll benefit from it this is George Bruno from the 21 report


I changed my phone after five years and do I regret it. What's up internet? I had no intention of replacing my old phone, a OnePlus 5T, but my kids had other plans and they broke it. Now, I was really happy with the OnePlus 5T but it was a forced upgrade so I decided to upgrade to the Google Pixel 7. Legit, safe and pinakamura, madadila o mortar. Hanapin ang widows version na gusto mo piliin ang preferred paper and pencil. Wala pang 5 minutes na si Zika na para sa windows mo. Maraming na kaming na tulungan. Date? Second departure ko? But now, I'm from the love of my life. Date? Ing-less ang walang purpose ang life ko. But now, I'm a world-class Zumba instructor. So web developer ako and content creator for a YouTube channel and ngayon ganun pa rin ako pero activated na yung windows ko. Kayakon naghanap ka ng Legit, mura at original software. Check out CDKoffer.com Check out CDKoffer.com Check out CDKoffer.com The OnePlus 5T was pretty good back in the day but it was a mid-range phone, not considered a flagship phone. Unlike the Pixel 7, which is basically flagship as it is very similar to the Pixel 7 Pro which was the top of the line. With impending release of the Pixel 8 this year, the Pixel 7 has been seeing some very juicy price cuts. So is this a phone that you should consider especially if you're thinking of considering upgrading from an older, less modern phone? First, the screen is gorgeous. The screen of my old phone was no slouch but the screen of the Pixel 7 blows it out of the water. Colors are vivid, even intricate scenes like this nature shot. Now, cellphone screens are small that is easy for colors to look smudged and smear together and cheaper quality displays have problems with this, not the Pixel 7. Some power screens also struggle with displaying outdoors in very bright light. Their brightness can't compensate high enough. Not a problem with the Pixel 7 which I've used in direct sunlight many times and it doesn't miss a beat. Fluidity of animations is also very good so everything feels smooth. This is a 90Hz screen which is good that's comfortably above mid-range although top-tier phones usually have 120Hz now. I do have to admit though that the Apple transitions and animations still feel smoother on their phones and it pains me to say this because I don't even like Apple. Now, one of the supposed highlights of the Pixel 7 is its superior camera quality and I did get this phone with that in mind. I figured it would be super helpful to have a very competent video and picture recorder with me wherever I go and the hype for the camera of the Pixel 7 is real. Detail and look of the photos and videos are stellar a lot better than my old phone. Most of the pics we see on the Hardware Sugar Facebook were taken with the Pixel 7. Most of the images we use for thumbnails for YouTube if I'm the one submitting the photos also come from the Pixel 7. So the images are high quality enough that we can even edit them. There's enough info. It looks sharp enough in the raw image that we have enough there to edit with. 99% of the time when I need a photograph even for work, I just use my Pixel 7 instead of pulling out my Sony ZV-E10. It also comes with some neat software tricks like this easy-to-use photobomber removal tool. Although software can also be its undoing. For most modern phones, the trick to getting better photos is in the software. AI tweaks the image automatically color corrects it if you will to match what it thinks we expect to see from a photograph or a video. This AI on the fly though can get confused sometimes as with this video of my son swinging in the park. As he swings closer to me, the phone thinks that it wants to focus on brown, the skin tones. So everything else in the photograph even including the grass becomes noticeably more brown. And as he swings away, the phone again is calculating on the fly and thinks that okay, maybe I don't want to focus on skin tones, maybe it should be more about nature. So the green seeps back into the photo and you can see this again in the grass. On one hand, it's impressive that the AI is trying to figure out what is going on in a live scene adjusts accordingly without any performance hit. At the same time though, the changes on the fly don't necessarily translate to a better video. In this case, the transition between colors, the shifting is quite jarring. Outside of these occasional weird situations though, the photos and videos have been stellar. One of the main reasons I got the Pixel 7 was because of this opposite camera quality. Again, it would be easier for me for the work that I do for hardware sugar and it has not disappointed. Small side note, it does take video in HEVC file format and that's no problem. Windows will play it natively without having to do anything else. But if you try to edit that in DaVinci Resolve, you won't be able to. It won't read the video properly and you'll need to convert it first into another codec. Not really Google's fault but it's kind of annoying on the part of Microsoft where you can get the codec needed for DaVinci Resolve but you have to pay. Very niche complaint and more directed really at Microsoft rather than Google. For the guts of the phone, the Google Pixel 7 does use a G2 Tensor chip. So that's a second-gen Tensor chip of Google and that's a big deal because Google started following the lead of Apple and has started to natively design the hardware running in its phones. The Google chips currently are based off of Samsung Exynos chips and that's an advantage for Google and also as proven by Apple because basically native software runs better on native hardware. You can make programs run better if you are able to tailor the hardware that is actually running those programs. What this means for real-world use is that the Pixel 7 has very fast and snappy response time whether it's transferring files using an app, watching videos, swiping right to delete an email in the Gmail app, everything happens without any discernable lag. The response between the user doing something and its outcome on the phone is pretty much instantaneous. Now the phone does get a bit hot so a lot of this processing does generate a lot of heat even just reading text but with the internet on for a prolonged period even when the screen set in dark mode the phone does get noticeably hot in your hand. You can feel it working through the heat but response time remains the same no lag at all. Now I started using the Pixel 7 well after the launch date and I have not encountered any problems. I guess the platform is already mature it is regularly updated by Google so assuming at those problems stem from software they all seem to have been ironed out now. There were earlier reports also of some of the glass cracking especially around the visor which is the signature look of the Pixel line. I have actually had the opposite observation. As mentioned, my kid destroyed my old phone and she has started to experiment on my new phone. So this phone has been dropped a lot not throw it against the wall kind of drop but accidental kind of bumps and sometimes the one or two occasional falls. But the phone is quite sturdy everything still works no discernible scratches and actually my experience with the build quality has been pretty good. I don't put a case on my phone because I figure any case kind of ruins the look for me so my phone is always naked every time it falls it has fallen just on the body itself and it has weathered everything admirably. Now, I'm not saying you go out of your way to drop it or to be careless with it but it can't take a knock or two without looking the worst for wear. My primary concern with the Pixel 7 in terms of build quality was the visor because it juts out of the back of the phone every time you rest your phone on something whether you're charging or you're just putting it down for a moment it will be resting on that visor and that is where the lens for the camera is. So I was really afraid of the lens surrounding that protruded part on the visor would get all danged up and my camera quality the videos, the photos would suffer because of that. Now my fears were unfounded I have set the phone down many times on its visor resting on that kind of back plate and there has been no discernible decrease in the quality of photos or videos and no discernible scratches on the visor itself. So happy to report that that was an unfounded personal fear of mine and it turns out the visor is actually pretty good as a grip if you want to hold the phone for video watching purposes you can use your hand you can shape your hand into a sort of claw and grip it using the visor there's just enough space with the visor protruding from the body of the phone to serve as a surface to latch onto. The overall quality extends to the battery life now I'm not a heavy cell phone user the most that I usually demand from a phone is several hours straight of turning on the internet and turning on the hotspot because I need it as my primary internet connection while I'm out on the go. For situations like that I probably would have enough charge for 24 hours maybe a little bit more if I stretch the battery if I'm just doing basic things with it taking calls, sending texts for sure the phone would last 2 days or maybe even longer so hindi ka mabibitin sa battery life it will store enough juice to satisfy most needs for a reasonable amount of time so far it's been all good but I do have to confess I don't like the modern design aesthetic of the candy bar approach so that's kind of like the thicker fatter phone this is actually the same size as my old phone but I thought it was actually smaller because my old phone was flatter and thinner than the Pixel 7 it just feels a bit bulkier than my old phone less sleek, less unobtrusive definitely there will be a noticeable bulge if you carry this in your front pocket or back pocket not as bad as some of the Apple phones which are chunkier but the Pixel 7 definitely is thicker than my old phone and I'm not liking that extra chunkiness now I understand if that's an unfair critique because we keep demanding more things from our phones and so manufacturers have to keep putting in more and more hardware to keep up with all of the demand from the user but perhaps they should consider a design aesthetic where you flatten the phone a little bit you make the screen a bit bigger so yes, while you have an overall larger phone the thickness is thinner and while I'm dissing conventional wisdom here's another thing I don't like constant updates now one of the key features of getting a Google phone is that you get the updated software before everybody else if there's an update it's released first on the Google phones and that sounds great who doesn't want to be in line for an update you know who doesn't like getting updated all the time Windows users were so used to getting these unnecessary updates from Microsoft kadalingo na lang may update kadalingo na lang you need to take time out to update your system and it's kind of like how I feel about Google's constant updates yes, there are some important ones particularly security but a lot of them just deal with new features or apps that I don't really use Google Home, Google Wi-Fi, whatever there are updates perhaps improvements but these are updates and improvements that I will never need and never use so while it is nice to have that you're first in line I don't think it should be a big consideration and that a lot of reviewers hype it up just so that they have something to say but in terms of actual usefulness being first in line even with something like there's a zero-day exploit and you need to update right away malware spreading again through Android a lot of users don't need that super quick update and again I'm not saying you should eliminate it but I'm saying it's not something that you need to take critically into your decision if you're deciding to buy a Google phone one thing that hasn't been improved on for my old phone is that the Android software just can't figure out when I want to unlock the phone many many times with my old phone and many many times with the Pixel 7 I just have it in my pants and the next thing I know when I open it nabuksan na pala siya dati while it was in my pants and kung anon na nangyayari it went to my email it started surfing some random thing I don't know it got activated in my pants this is a long running problem and I just can't quite figure out why Android can't just stay locked yun lang naman hiniyiko sa kanya stay locked until I knock on you you know I press on you and I let you know that hey we gotta do some work so miscellaneous stuff which I actually did find useful is the wireless charging this wasn't present on my 1 plus 5P before and it seems like a simple thing but when you've tried it like you just have to put the phone on a pad instead of hunting around for another wire and then hunting around for the port on your phone to plug it in just putting your phone down to charge is a noticeably better user experience and this is a small thing which not a lot of people comment on but I found it to be genuinely useful so bottom line this is a good phone which I enjoyed using but I didn't fall in love with it it's kind of like having an old friend which you can hang out with for forever like the entire day several hours you're having a good time there's nothing annoying about the experience and you genuinely want to spend time with them but you don't go to sleep at night thinking about a good friend you don't wake up at the start of the day thinking that yes I am going to have another day with my Pixel 7 it doesn't excite you at the start of your day so it is a very good upgrade especially if you're coming from considerably older Android phone if you don't want to think too much anymore about your next cell phone purchase you're comfortable with Android the Pixel 7 is a good phone at a good price right now Google doesn't disappoint but it doesn't really excite either thanks for watching actually meron kami full service PC store ang hardware sugar nagbabenta kami ng PC components nagbabenta rin kami ng fully assembled rigs we clean computers nasama na rin ang excellent cable management namin and CPU cooler repasting sa cleaning we also clean and repaste GPUs na sa makati ang physical store namin and you can also buy from our site www.hwsugar.ph na 100% palaging up to date yung inventory dun kung instock yung item sa amin available yung sa site we also ship nationwide thanks for watching and maybe one of these days makita tayo sa shop


Hello, my name is Mark Zandri and today I will be talking about white box trader tracing. Let us first recall the goal of trader tracing. Here we have a content distributor who is broadcasting encrypted messages to a large set of recipients, whom each have their own personalized secret key. We are concerned that an unscrupulous user called a trader may leak their key to an unauthorized user, thereby allowing the unauthorized user to read the encrypted messages. There is no way to really prevent a user from becoming a trader. However, if the content distributor comes across the leaked key, we want the content distributor to be able to identify the user it came from. Then the content distributor can take remedial actions, such as prosecuting the trader or at least revoking the trader's credentials. In this way, trader tracing serves to deter piracy. I will now discuss some of the main features one may want out of a trader tracing system. First and foremost, the trader may not simply output their key. Instead, they may embed the key in a tamper resistant hardware device or potentially an obfuscated decoder program in an attempt to hide their identity from the tracer. Another important feature is collusion of resistance, which means that we can identify a trader even if multiple traders collude in producing the pirate key or decoder. We would naturally want to use minimal computational assumptions in achieving our goal. For example, we would hope to rely just on public key encryption as opposed to hard algebraic tools. Next, we would ideally be able to trace decoders that don't work all the time or which don't perfectly recover the message. For example, to have a tracing in a movie streaming scenario, you could imagine a decoder outputting a low-quality version of the movie instead of the original high-quality version. Finally, we would ideally have public tracing, which allows anyone, not just the content distributor, to trace. This provides for maximal deterrence since not anyone, including the unauthorized user, will immediately learn the trader's identity from any decoder program or device. There are also advantages of public tracing for prosecuting traders, but we will not discuss them. When we refer to private tracing throughout this talk, as opposed to public tracing, will mean that only the content distributor can trace, public tracing means anyone can trace. One feature that has largely been taken for granted in the works is the tracing model. You can imagine the decoder to be an actual hardware device, which may be difficult to break open or inspect. Even with a software decoder, it may be difficult to analyze the program because program code is notoriously difficult to analyze. As such, the vast majority of the trader tracing literature works in a black box tracing model, where the tracer only makes queries to the decoder and sees the responses without having to know how the tracer actually works. This black box tracing model is so ingrained in the literature that it is written explicitly in the syntax essentially all prior trader tracing definitions. There's basically one exception to the black box model, and that is that some early schemes did in fact look inside the decoder itself. But all such schemes required that the trader actually output a valid key for the system as opposed to a general decoder program. And importantly, in all prior schemes that did not use black box tracing, you could easily defeat tracing by outputting a general decoder program rather than a key. So all of the prior tracing that works for general decoder programs all works in the black box model. Now there is a trivial trader tracing solution, which gives each user their own ciphertext component and decryption key. This scheme does really well according to all the features we've discussed so far. It's collusion resistant, requires minimal assumptions, allows for tracing arbitrary imperfect decoders, gets public tracing as well as black box tracing. The main problem is that the ciphertext as well as the public keys are quite large and grow linearly with a number of users and this can become very impractical even for a modest number of users. The bulk of the trader tracing literature therefore has focused on producing schemes with shorter parameters in particular shorter ciphertext. There have been a number of improvements over this trivial scheme, often using algebraic tools to compress terms to the point where we now have asymptotically optimal schemes under certain assumptions such as learning of errors. This talk will instead focus on a limitation of prior work, which has nothing to do with parameter sizes. To start, I will crawl a previous work from 2016 with my co-authors Rio Nishimaki and Daniel Wicks. Here we proposed using public tracing plus setting each user's identity to contain super sensitive information, say a bank account number or something like that. This way, the moment a trader hands a decoder to an unauthorized user, that user can trace using the public tracing algorithm and then learn the sensitive information of the trader. The result is that the only way a trader can distribute their key is to also distribute their sensitive information. Therefore such a mechanism would be a very good deterrence, even in a situation where the content distributor may never come across the prior decoder. The problem is that if the identity embedded in the secret key is very sensitive, the honest user would clearly want to keep it secret if they are being honest. In this prior work, we've proposed keeping the identity hidden from the content distributor by using a multi-party computation protocol to generate the user's secret key. This indeed based on the guarantees of multi-party computation will keep the identity hidden during the setup phase. In this work, we take things a step further and consider keeping the identity hidden even after setup and moreover keeping the identity hidden from potentially other users of the system besides the content distributor. Consider for example an encrypted group chat application where the users are encrypting their message using a trader tracing scheme with embedded sensitive identities. Now consider a malicious user who can send a message to the chat and see how an honest user responds. In essence, they can mount a chosen ciphertext or CCA attack against the honest user and can potentially try to use such an attack to learn the sensitive information of that user. Ensuring privacy of the honest users in this attack scenario will therefore be the main focus of this talk. Our first result is an impossibility showing that with CCA attacks and black box tracing, anyone who is capable of tracing can break privacy of the honest users. In the case of private tracing, we're only the content distributor can trace. This means that the content distributor can use CCA queries against an honest user to learn their identity. In the case of public tracing, which is really what you'd want for maximal deterrence, this means that anyone can trace and therefore anyone can use CCA queries to learn the identity of honest users. The proof of this impossibility is simple.  The tracing guarantee means that the adversary learns the user's identity from the user's answers to the CCA queries. We note that tracing usually only needs to know whether or not a user decrypts, so we don't even need the full power of CCA attacks. We just need to know whether a user decrypts a given psychotext or not, in order to mount the attack. In the public tracing setting, what this means is even an outside user who doesn't have any secret keys at all can potentially mount the attack and all they have to do is see whether a user responds to their messages, but they don't actually need to see the response itself and they can nevertheless mount the attack. For our first positive result, we give a feasibility showing how to obtain public tracing and simultaneously preserve user privacy even under these chosen psychotext attacks. In light of our impossibility result, this necessarily requires the use of white box tracing, meaning that the tracing algorithm actually has to inspect the actual program code of a decoder program. It cannot just trace by making queries to the program. In terms of building blocks, our scheme requires functional encryption and non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs or visits. Different assumptions can be used to instantiate the functional encryption scheme, resulting in different parameter size trade-offs. In particular, if we don't care about parameter sizes, we can use generic public key encryption together with NISIX to achieve our scheme. If we want optimal parameters, we can use distinguishability obfuscation. I will now discuss the high-level idea behind our proof of this theorem. The proof idea is to use something called an unobfuscatable program. These were defined by Barakadal, and they were originally used in the context of proving an impossibility for strong forms of obfuscation, and they can be constructed from minimal computational assumptions. What is an obfuscatable program? An unobfuscatable program are programs with two properties. The first is that they are non-learnable. This means that there is no efficient way to recover the program just given black box access to its functionality. So if you have an adversary that can only make queries to the program, it will not be able to produce any code for the program. The second property is reverse engineerability, which says that given any code that has the same functionality as the original program, even if it's been obfuscated or adversarily manipulated in some way, given any code that can produce the same function as the original program, there is an automated process to actually recover the original program code in its entirety. So superficially, unobfuscatable functions seem to be very analogous to what we need, which is the ability to do something with code, namely trace, that you can't do given black box access. But perhaps it's not immediately clear how to actually turn these programs into a trader tracing scheme with decryption, functionality, collusion resistance, et cetera. So here's a fail attempt to try to build a private trader tracing scheme from an unobfuscatable function. So we'll assume any trader tracing scheme, say from prior literature, which may have black box tracing. The idea is to set the identity of a user to be the code of some unobfuscatable program. This unobfuscatable program may have the desired sensitive information of that user embedded, for example, into the comments of the program code. This way, if you can recover the unobfuscatable program code, including comments, you would learn the sensitive information. And so the hope is that by setting the identity to be this program code, you can then trace and recover the sensitive information. The problem, of course, is that prior works use black box tracing. So what an adversary can do is a remote adversary can do is that they can simply trace over the network to recover the unobfuscatable program. But they actually recover the program code by the guarantees of the trader tracing scheme. And once they have the program code, they themselves can also see the comments. Even if you somehow obfuscated the code, you could still reverse engineer it to learn the original program code with the comments embedded and therefore learn the sensitive information. OK, so what our solution is to do is to embed the program more carefully in a trader tracing system. And we do this using a new object we call function embedded trader tracing. Here, we embed a function into a program as opposed to an identity and augment the tracing procedure to additionally take as an input an input to the function. The tracing algorithm won't learn the function and instead will just allow for evaluating the function on the given input. Importantly, the trader tracing algorithm never learns any code for the function. And this is actually a security requirement that the tracer cannot learn the code for the function just given black box access. All they can do is evaluate it. We show how to construct such an object from functional encryption in Nizzix. Basically, the prior work already uses functional encryption to build trader tracing. And we augment these works with an evaluation functionality. Nizzix come in to guarantee that the tracer can't learn the function F itself. And I'll elaborate on this a little more in a couple slides. All right, so once we have a function embedded trader tracing scheme, we then set the function to be an unoffice scalable program. And the result is a white box traceable scheme with public tracing and user privacy. The idea for tracing is that any code for decryption can be turned into code for evaluating the embedded function F using the tracing algorithm. And then once you have code for evaluating the function F, you can use the reverse engineer ability of the unoffice scalable program to recover the original code, which then contains the sense of information as a comment. Note that for our construction, it is totally fine if the function embedded trader tracing system uses black box tracing. And in fact, our construction leverages the existing work, which uses black box tracing. And you can view our conversion as nevertheless upgrading a black box tracing scheme into a white box tracing scheme that ensures user privacy. OK, so let's now take a quick detour to discuss the limitation of functional encryption that arose when trying to use it to build our trader tracing system. Consider the canonical motivating example for functional encryption, which is a spam filter on a remote email provider. Here, a user wants to outsource email management to a remote provider. But the remote provider needs to figure out how to route spam messages to trash. The obvious solution is to have the provider just own the decryption key, allowing it to decrypt the messages and apply the spam filter on the plain text. But the user would like to keep the messages hidden even from the provider. So what the user will do is employ a functional encryption scheme and give a special secret key corresponding to the spam filter to the email provider. This key will allow the provider to learn the result of applying the spam filter to the contents. But it won't actually reveal anything else about the contents beside the single bit of whether the spam filter decided the contents were spam or not. This will allow the provider to route the messages accordingly, but will maintain the privacy of all other information in the message. But now we ask, what about security against the spammer? Concretely, the spammer may try to learn how the spam filter works in order to design a ciphertext that can circumvent the filter. In particular, you can imagine the spammer sending various ciphertexts and then trying to learn whether or not the spam filter classified them as spam by observing, for example, whether the user clicked on a link in the email. If the user clicked on a link, then the spammer is reasonably confident that the email circumvented the spam filter. And if the user doesn't click on the link, then the spammer may hypothesize that the spam filter caught the message. So basically, the spammer in the setting is mounting a CCA attack against the provider's secret key in an attempt to learn about the spam filter. And the natural question is, what can the adversary learn through such an attack? Certainly, it's unavoidable that the spammer can make black box queries to the spam filter. Given a message, you can just encrypt it, send it to the spam filter, and see if it gets caught by the filter or not. But the usual notions of security for functional encryption actually potentially allow the spammer to learn a lot more than just black box access. They potentially allow the spammer to learn the actual code of the spam filter. As the barracudal, unoffice-gatable function show, knowing the code may reveal more information about the spam files than just having black box access. We therefore propose a new notion of black box function privacy for functional encryption to capture this scenario. Essentially, black box function privacy guarantees that the spammer is limited to just black box queries to the spam filter and can't learn anything beyond what can be learned by black box queries. And we note that this notion is also needed for a trader tracing application to ensure that the CCA attacks don't reveal the code of the embedded programs and only allow the programs to be queried on function inputs. We show a simple transformation from any functional encryption scheme to one with black box privacy, and this is where the mystics come in. All right. So that summarizes our privacy result. And now we briefly discuss another potential limitation of the prior trader tracing literature that we explored in this work. To motivate things, consider a typical modeling assumption in the NPC literature, which assumes a reliable broadcast channel. This means any message sent to the broadcast channel is identically received by all parties. Why is such a model important? Well, if you have an unreliable channel, some users may know the adversary is malicious, but others may think the adversary is honest. And this would break the guarantees of many NPC protocols. We note that some works have developed protocols with point-to-point communication, but typically at the cost of many more routes. We now ask, what if the broadcast channel is encrypted under a trader tracing scheme? We will assume the ciphertexts themselves are sent over a reliable broadcast channel, but the question then becomes, will the virtual plaintext channel remain consistent? And we show that for existing trader tracing schemes, the answer is no. And in particular, we show an impossibility that if you have black box public tracing, this allows anyone to compute ciphertext with inconsistent decryptions. Basically, since the tracer learns the identity of a user just from queries in the black box setting, different users must respond to these queries differently thereby having inconsistent decryptions. On the other hand, we give a partial positive result showing how to use functional fully homomorphic encryption and lockable obfuscation to achieve consistency. The limitation of this work, however, is that we are only able to obtain tracing under a constant number of collusions. And the efficiency of our scheme is exponential in this collusion bound. Note that even in the setting with a constant number of collusions, however, white box tracer tracing is still necessary per hour impossibility. Our protocol and proof for this are pretty complicated. But the basic idea is to start with a scheme where tracing inquires a certain secret. And this prevents users of the system from running the tracer tracing algorithm themselves to learn the inconsistent decryptions because only the person who has the secret can run tracing. But we want to allow public tracing. So what do we do? We encrypt the secrets under the fully homomorphic encryption scheme and have the tracer then perform the tracing algorithm homomorphically using the decoder program. Note that this homomorphic tracing cannot be accomplished with just black box access because you actually need the program code in order to do the homomorphic operations. The problem though, is that the results of tracing remain encrypted in the FHE scheme. So to get the results of tracing in the clear, we need to use lockable lock escation and due to another number of subtle issues that come up in making everything work, this outline appears that stuck at handling a constant collusion bound. We therefore leave improving our results for showing an impossibility for fully collusion resistant consistent tracing as an interesting open question. I'll now conclude with an interesting direction for future work. Note that trader tracing can be seen as a special case of a more general problem of watermarking software where trader tracing is a special case of watermarking decryption programs. All prior watermarking results analogous to trader tracing use black box tracing algorithms to extract the watermark. As a consequence, similar privacy and consistency issues may arrive in the more general watermarking setting. So an interesting direction is to explore white box techniques in this more general setting. Another interesting direction, it is known that some programs cannot be watermarked. For example, unlearnable or even unoffice scalable programs cannot be watermarked. On the other hand, we have a number of positive results for watermarking, but there is a large gap between these positive and negative results. So an interesting question is whether white box tracing can allow for watermarking more general programs than are possible using just black box tracing. All right, this concludes my talk. Thank you for listening.


The president's broadcast may have inspired some people, but most persons on the streets of Abalendi in Lagos did not pay any attention to it. We went to find out what they thought. Nothing is bad about a speech, but what people want is action, not speech. So people need security that is hungry when they learn. Nobody wants to hear about the speech again because nobody is happy. So whatever he is saying, whatever strong people don't mind, nobody cares. He has never said anything good, anything that is beneficial to the masses. Whatever he says is the only thing that will benefit him and his people. I was really trusted in it because what are we celebrating? Are we celebrating the UC St. Killing in Nigeria? Are we celebrating the kidnapping? What Buhari is saying is truth because we Nigerian people, so we need security. So that I know that if Buhari says we get security in Nigeria, so that we get it. Because government is your government. I'm never happy with this regime at all because it's like everything we are supposed to progress, but it's like we are regressing. It's not doing anything there. You just need to step down. That's all. That's all I can say. I don't think he talked to them. I don't think he talked anything for them. I just had to look them in and out.


Item number SCP-834, Object Class, Euclid. Special Containment Procedures. SCP-834 is to remain locked in Containment Locker Alpha-12. When being tested, D-Class upon which SCP-834 is used, are to be kept in a standard containment cell for the duration of testing, and are exempt from monthly terminations until effects can be ascertained. Description. SCP-834 is a set of four markers, black, red, yellow, and blue. Each marker bears only a The Factory logo, and no other distinguishing characteristics. The only effect of these markers is that they write permanently on human skin, resulting in tattoo-like markings. Testing has proven the ink sinks below the surface of the skin, and is only removable via laser dermabrasion, or similar tattoo removal procedures. Note, the previous text has been revised. The Addendum. Addendum 1. On 2, 2000, junior staff researchers L and C appropriated SCP-834 under the pretense of testing it further, but in actuality, to use it on themselves. When discovered, a decision was made by 0513 to have the item removed to a more secure area, as well as to demote the researchers to janitorial staff for three weeks. Dr. L had been given a band of barbed wire around his wrist, while researcher C opted for a depiction of reptilian scales on his chest. Two, in his words, reveal my inner dragon. Both researchers are currently denied access to casual testing of any SCPs. Note, even if they are only anomalous, SCPs are not toys. Site supervisor knocked. Addendum 2. On 8, 2000, screams were heard from Dr. L's office. Security investigating found Dr. L on the floor of his office, bleeding heavily from self-inflicted wounds at the wrist. Dr. L claimed the wounds were inflicted when he tried to remove the tattoo, after it began constricting upon his wrist. Medical investigation showed the only damage was that inflicted by Dr. L digging at his skin with his own fingers. There was no sign of his tattoo. Shortly after, acting on orders of the site director, a security team broke down the door of researcher C's living quarters after he failed to answer his personal phone and site pages. Researcher C's corpse was found in his bathroom. His chest burst open from the inside, as if by a great pressure. Further medical investigation revealed all the major organs of his chest were missing, but no other damage. A trail of bloody claw prints led to the shower drain, which had been ripped away. A full exploration and cleaning of the site's drainage and sewer system turned up nothing unusual. Lesson complete. If you missed the previous orientation, go watch SCP-833, Charity Worms, right now. Or for the complete course, watch this playlist.


Jack Canfield was born in the early 1940s when World War II was in full swing. He was born to an alcoholic father and a mother whose name is unknown. He had a very difficult childhood. Many years later, the young lad was admitted into Harvard where despite his love for the literary arts, he got a C-plus in writing and was told by his professors that he was an average writer. But Jack refused to listen. His journey truly began in 1990 when Jack shared his idea with Mark Victor Hansen to collect stories for a self-help book. The duo later turned this idea into a phenomenal series titled Chicken Soup for the Soul. After significant time labouring, the book was completed within three years and contained 68 stories which were true inspirational stories about ordinary people they had given motivational talks to. The book was rejected by major publishers.  In fact, when Jack told one of the publishers that he was hoping to sell about 1.5 million copies within the first two years of publishing, the publisher laughed in his face and told Jack he would be lucky to sell even 20,000. Jack was committed to his life principles. He persevered and eventually convinced a minor publisher in Florida that his book would certainly sell a few thousand copies. After about 14 months, his book was finally published by the publisher in Florida. To his wildest surprise, his book became the third best-selling book in the United States during the mid-1990s and sold 10 million copies around the world. Today, the Chicken Soup for the Soul brand is an international brand worth about 1 billion dollars with over 500 million books sold. I have said this before and I'll repeat it here. Nobody knows what you're capable of doing, not even your parents, siblings or friends. You don't even know what you are capable of achieving until you try. Because nobody knows what you're capable of achieving, you can be sure that 9 out of 10 people you'll meet in your life will either discourage you or refuse to support your dreams. Because you also don't even know what you're capable of doing, it's super easy to believe that 90% of people are right. That's when courage comes in. You must love your dream enough to want to risk failing.  You must love your dream enough to want to die for it. Because if you don't want to sacrifice you all, then at a point, you might be discouraged. When I started out in the business world, everyone told me that I would not succeed.  J.K. Rowland said, It takes a great deal of great rage to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.  It's part of life's difficulties that we all have negative people around us. They are mountains you need to climb. Even though the mountain is slippery, you must not see it as unsurmountable. Jack Canfield said, If you're going to be successful, you need to give up the phrase, I can't and all of its cousins, such as I wish I were able to. If Jack Canfield had not believed in himself, the world around him would have killed his dreams. If you allow life's difficulties to kill your dreams, they will. But if you think you can, then you can. If you like this video, do subscribe to this channel, so you'll be notified when we publish our next videos. Also, like this video or share it with your friends on social media. Thank you. We love you.


any questions about any of the registration process, please reach out to us and let us know. And we'll definitely get our contact information put in the chat for you guys too.  And that's just basically having you guys let us know what you're specializing in. So make sure that when you're going through there you take the time to really choose the commodity codes that apply to your business. When we're getting ready to put out a bid on the street to have you guys, all of our vendors register or excuse me, all of you vendors have the opportunity to bid on these projects. We're gonna let you guys know about that. We're gonna send you a notification through the email that you've registered with according to the commodity codes that you choose. So therefore, if we have a construction project come up we're gonna go through, we're gonna look at the commodity codes for those particular construction projects. And those are the vendors that we're going to send notifications for.  So please make sure that you choose the correct commodity codes. That is one of the biggest things that you can do to make sure that you're getting the correct notifications for the projects that we have out there. So with that being said, like if you have any questions make sure you let us know. Make sure you reach out to any of us over here at procurement contracts. We're here to help you guys. And I'm gonna turn it over to Gary. And if you have, like I said, any questions make sure you reach out to us. But Gary's gonna let you guys know about some of the projects and some of the certifications. Thank you, Jill. Again, it's a pleasure, my pleasure to be with you all this afternoon, Judy. Thank you for your participation with us today. You've done a wonderful job. It's been some great information that's been shared during the conference. I hope it's been beneficial to you all who are participating. And I just wanna reiterate some of the things that Jill said.  My name is Gary Porte and I am a construction procurement manager for the city of Columbia. I work in the procurement and contracts department. And what that means basically, I tell people in the short version I buy paving, water, sewer, those kinds of things for the city. That's the majority of what I handle. And of course, we've got other departments or other divisions in our procurement contracts department, one for professional services, also goods and services in which we do work in that goods and services department as a junior buyer. But I've got three two-bed coordinators and a contract specialist to work with me. And when we get a project from an end user, somebody primarily, most of our work comes out what we call Columbia water, those paving and water and sewer products. I'm talking about, we do some paving projects for public works as well. We'll put that package together into a procurement and then we'll post it on this website that Jill's been referring to. I can't reiterate enough how important it is that you all register in our website, the slide that's still up on the screen, that's the address again that will take you directly to our, we call it EVID for short, but it's H-T-T-P-S, colon forward slash forward slash Columbia S-C dot iron wave dot net. And then you'll come to that page. And again, when we put bids out, you can see the bid when we do construction bids, you can actually see them without being registered, but I'm hesitant to even tell you that. One of the things you can't do is you can't ask a question on a bid. We do have a question table and put bids out in case something's not clear if you don't understand it. You cannot submit a question if you're not registered and you also can't put a bid in on the product. So we wouldn't want you to get to the end of it and not be able to bid on it because you weren't registered. So it's so important that you register.  What do you provide? And based on your registration, when we then put out a construction bid, let's just say it's for sewer pipeline work. What it does is the system automatically will go through and search those commodity codes of all the vendors that we have registered. And if it's something that we're putting a bid out that has sewer work in pipeline work or manhole work, if you register for that, it's saying that you do that kind of work. The system will automatically send you an email letting you know that there's a solicitation out right now from the city of Columbia that involves the kind of work that you do or services that you provide. And it'll tell you that it's there. It'll give you a link that you can go look at that bid and see if you might be interested in putting a bid in on that. Also, it's a lot of information. And as Jill said, we're here to help. I don't think we've got our contact information on there. My name is Gary.Porth, G-A-R-Y.P-O-R-T-H at columbia-s-c.gov. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to email me and I'll be more than happy to use if I can answer. And trust me, there are a lot of questions I can answer, but I think I can probably send you in the right direction to Jill or someone else in our department who can get those questions answered for you. Jill handles the registration process. When you all register, she will then, Jill will have to verify that the information is correct and then she will okay it and you all of them will be set up as a vendor and you'll be set that information. Two other things I wanted to talk about and I think Aisha or Melissa mentioned these earlier. We've got a lot of what we call Columbia Disadvantaged Business Enterprise Program projects that we put out that have a Columbia Disadvantaged Business Enterprise goal for the project. We've got our 15% DBE goal that the city uses on all of our products, but also that CDBE goal is listed for those products I'm talking about. And you might not be a bit or it would be what we call a prime but you may be a subcontractor and you might be interested in bidding on the work as a subcontractor. Maybe some of those products are huge products that we do. And you can attend a pre-bid meeting and they have when we do a CDBE product and I'm using CDBE for Columbia Disadvantaged Business Enterprise that's our acronym. Usually right after we have the pre-bid meeting our Office of Business Opportunities will conduct an outreach event. And what that does is helps connect any subcontractors that might be interested in working on that project or bidding on that project it connects in with the prime bidders who will likely be placing the bid for the product. So I would highly encourage you all to take a look at getting registered first off and that will notify you of any work that we put out. And then also the programs that we do and we've got a mentor protege program too that OBO spoke about earlier. And those are, I don't want to step on OBO Office of Business Opportunities toes but very good program we have also that pairs up a mentor with a protege and then that's what we put a workout under those programs and mentor protege as a traditional mentor protege where the protege which is an up and coming business a lot of times a DBE will then get at least 20% of the work for that entire project. And then we also do some projects that are protege only. So the protege basically steps in the shoes of the prime and the protege actually gets all of the work. Now they can sub some out if they want to but they can do all of it. It's a very good program too and those are usually smaller products that are designed to help younger and upcoming vendors and contractors kind of get used to doing the work for the city that we do. It kind of shows them and leads them along the path and they've also got the mentor to lean on as they're hitting that bed together and put it in. And then the last thing I want to do I got a couple of about out of time but I want to tell you some of the products that we've got currently out on our bidding website and just to mention a few of we've got a water project, it's a water mine, water main pump station rehabilitation basis better not pump station improvements. It's actually bid number 017-21-22 and it's got an 11% CDBE percentage goal for it. So that means 11% of that work hopefully will be awarded to by the prime bid or two DBE, CDBE subcontractors throughout. And again, we try to look at CDBEs first which are the Columbia Disadvantaged Bidding Center Prizes and they're from the eight county area in and around Richardson County and then we move out to DBEs, Disadvantaged Bidding Center Prizes in that area and then we moved to DBEs throughout the whole state to try to award those projects to that portion of the work to DBEs and CDBEs. There's also we've got bid 19 which is a broad river, it's a sewer project sanitary sewer project and rehabilitation and it's got a 17% CDBE goal on it. So you might want to take a look at those if that's any of the work that you might be interested in doing. We've also got another sewer project of Somalia Drive Sewer Main Improvement Replacement Project and it's bid number 022-21-22 and it doesn't have any office admittance opportunities programs with this one because it is a FEMA project which is the Federal Emergency Management Associate Administration, excuse me and it's being funded federally. So again, we won't let us put any local geographic preference programs on it but we still try to achieve that 15% DBE goal for that project and that's one that's currently out of bid as well. It bids on March the 24th of this year and then we've got several other large projects coming up bid 18 which is another filter rehabilitation project with two of our water plants, the Canal Plant and the Lake Murray Water Plant. It's got, this is 11% CDBE project and then we've got another sewer project of Gravity Sewer from Green Lone Drive to Burnside number one pump station. It has a 17% CDBE goal for it and then we've got another combined sewer repair project with three different locations on that one and it has a very good CDBE and I don't know what the goal is on that one but I'm thinking it's somewhere between 10 and 15% I believe but if you look at the bid when it gets started it'll show you what the CDBE percentage is and again, if anybody's got any questions as Jewel said, if you all will contact us and I don't know if any questions have come in if they are and if you all have time, Jewel and myself will be happy to try to answer those questions today. So thank you very much and please contact us and let us help you any kind of way we can, we'll be more than happy to do that. All right, I'm sorry, Judy. I just wanted to add one thing. The projects that Gary just mentioned we posted in the chat for everyone to take you directly to that link. I know some people weren't writing things down. You wanna go to it right away. Information's in the link. Apologize for interrupting. Thank you so much, Gary and Jewel. Thanks, Judy. Yes, great information and we wanna make sure everybody gets the information that they came here for today. So check that chat and of course the OBO staff will be happy to follow up with you as well. We have just a few minutes left. Two last quick presentations for you. The first, Mr. Roderick Stevenson, SCDOT's Lead DBE Certification Analyst with information regarding the SCDOT certification process. All right, well, good afternoon everyone. My name is Roderick Stevenson, Lead DBE Certification Analyst with SCDOT and I wanna thank you all for allowing the SCDOT the opportunity to present on today along with such an exceptional panel of speakers, just kinda overwhelmed with the wealth of information as well as inspiration that's been offered. So I wanna thank you all for sharing but I won't be before you long. The topic that I'll be covering on today is the process of becoming DBE certified. And before I do that, you'll need to know what some of the qualifiers are for this program. Now briefly, I'll find the four main eligibility criteria. The list is as follows. The first criteria is social disadvantage. The second is economic disadvantage. The third is ownership and the fourth is control. And I'll provide a brief description of each. So there are six classes of individuals presumed to be socially disadvantaged and these individuals are women, black Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Pacific Americans, subcontinent Asian Americans and Native Americans. And to be considered economically disadvantaged, the owner's personal net worth must not exceed $1.32 million and in addition to the business owner's grocery seats, the grocery seats must not exceed $26.29 million and that's for DBE applicants and 56.42 for AC DBE applicants. And in regards to ownership, the firm must be at least 51% owned by socially and economically disadvantaged owners or co-owners in order to qualify for this program. And that disadvantaged owner or excuse me, or owners must possess the power to direct and control the management and policies of their firm. Now let's talk a little bit about the certification process. There are just five steps to becoming DBE certified and just three steps to the DBE application itself. Now one, not two, but actually three steps to the DBE application. And in order to gain access to the DBE application, you can do so by visiting our website listed on the slide. And so let's talk about those five steps. Step one, you'll mail in your DBE application along with all of the required supporting documentation. And I refer your attention to the supporting documents checklist found in part three of the DBE application as your guide. And you have step two upon receiving your DBE packet, the assigned analyst will conduct an initial review. Step three, and after the initial review has been completed, the analyst may provide a request for additional information known as an RFI. And that RFI is due within 14 calendar days. Then we move on to step four. Once we've received all the requested information and timeframe allotted, the analysts will schedule to conduct an onsite review, which is typically done in person or just depending on the situation, we may elect to do it virtually. So a last step is step five. The analysts will prepare a recommendation for approval or denial. Now we based upon all the information that you've provided us with thus far. And that will be in accordance with whether or not you've met the criteria referenced in the federal rules and regulations. And last but not least, we'll just quickly go over some of the benefits of being certified. And so upon being certified, you'll have the access to government contracting opportunities. You'll be added to our directory, which serves as a tool to network with state agencies, prime contractors and subcontractors. And you will have potential to participate in a variety of supportive services, marketing, training and technical assistance. So for more information on doing business with SCDOT, again, you can visit our website at scdot.org. Or if you have any questions regarding our DDE program or you need some guidance in regards to filling out your application, feel free to reach out to me using the information on the slide there and I'll be more than happy to assist. So that's my time on the thank you guys for listening and I hope to hear from you soon. Rajik, thank you so much for sharing that great information. We appreciate your time and being here today. Before we have our closing comments, we wanna invite Mr. Johnny Birch, the program coordinator for the Office of Small and Minority Business Contracting and Certification to share some final nuggets of wisdom about their certification process. Judy, Johnny was unable to join us but we will provide his contact information to everyone who attended so they can follow up with him and then how to receive that certification. Fantastic. Well, I think we have plenty of information to start making some connections today and start building a wealth of resources and to follow up with our wonderful OBO staff. With that, let me just say it has been a wonderful event. It has been my honor to help moderate today's event. I hope you have a lot of takeaways to follow up on. Be strategic, be intentional in how you use this information and how you share this information with those who are not able to be with us today and know that our city OBO staff is available to assist and serve you in any way necessary. I hope you leave this conference feeling empowered, uplifted and supported knowing that you have resources available to help build your success. With that, I would like to turn it over now to Ayesha Driggers, our deputy director for the OBO to offer any final Q&A and our closing remarks. Ayesha, again, thank you for the invitation to participate today. Thank you so much, Judy. You did a wonderful job as we knew you would. We appreciate your partnership and your eagerness to share this information with our business community. Thank you so much. I also wanted to share our Minority Business Opportunities Directories on the screen right now. That's just the front page of it, but we will send it out to everyone via email this afternoon along with a survey and the recording of the event where we'll have a YouTube link for everyone to view. But in this directory, we have a lot of great information regarding contacts, direct contacts with the Columbia Department. Typically, we hold this event in person and we would have booths set up with a different department, but since we're in a virtual setting this year, we have provided specific contact information and the services that the different departments would need. So you might not think that the service you provided is something the city may purchase, but you may be surprised that there are a lot of different goods and services that all the different departments may need. We've also included some of our community partners on Richland County, the Department of Commerce, Richland School District 1, DOT, Savannah River site. All of their contact information is in here, as well as the certifying agencies that for anyone, I know we had several questions on certification, so that is on here as well. And then our different compliance programs that were mentioned is in this directory as well as information that Jewel and Gary provided regarding eBid. So again, we will provide this to you via email and it's also available on our website. This event was a joint effort with all of our OBO staff in our different departments. We really appreciate everyone coming together to provide this service to you. Also, I think as well noted, there were a lot of connections and network being taken place in the chat, which is wonderful. We love to see that. So we have saved the chat and we will also provide that to everyone. It's so wonderful when we see those connections being made even in this virtual environment. I hope you had a greater understanding of the procurement process and our commitment to our small business community. If there's anything the Office of Business opportunity can provide to you, you can give us a call at<PHONE_NUMBER> or email us at OBO at columbiasd.gov. As you see on your screen, I think this is a previous slide, we do wanna make note, if you are following us on social media, we are streamlining all of the social medias at the city of Columbia, so we will deactivate our OBO account on March 1st. And so anyone that wants to stay tuned to anything that's going on at OBO, you can follow our city of Columbia handle on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, as well as you can send us a text message to 228, so that you can be added to our mailing list. We send out a weekly newsletter with a lot of great information regarding upcoming events, resources, funding opportunities, as well as information from our different community partners. So one thing I wanna see if Melissa Lingler wanted to offer any final words before we close. Thank you everyone for joining us. This has been a wonderful event. Again, thank you, Judy. Thank you to all of our presenters, our public and private sector presenters. We really appreciate everything that you've done for us today. And to our small business community, we are here for you as Mayor Rickman said, we're open if you have any questions or any ideas that you wanna share, please let us know. Everyone have a great rest of your day and take care of yourself and each other. Bye.