From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a CUBE Conversation. Always love when we can dig into practitioner discussions in one of the editorial themes I've been really looking into in 2020 has been discussion of serverless. So really excited to welcome to the program, Dave Anderson, he is director of technology at Liberty Mutual, coming to me from Ireland. Dave, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Stu, delighted to be here. All right, so I think most of our audience is probably familiar with Liberty Mutual. You work in the software group, Liberty IT is part of Liberty Mutual. If you could just start us off, give us a little bit about your background and your group's role inside the organization. Sure, Liberty IT, or something 20 years ago, is really as a sort of internal software house, part of Liberty Mutual Group, or part of Liberty Mutual Technology. So you kind of work across all the markets in Liberty Mutual and all the kind of global locations. My role as kind of director technology is really think about what's the technical direction of Liberty IT. I can lead the architects with my group. I'm really thinking about a global architecture of Liberty Mutual and how can we provide business value in the Liberty Mutual going forward. Excellent, so Dave, I guess, what is the overall business and IT relationship? When I think of companies like yours, usually their M&A comes in, there are growth expansions and digital transformation's been one of those buzzword discussions, but absolutely you need to be close to your customer. There's lots of services that you need to provide online. How are some of those overall dynamics impacting how IT is supporting the business? That's a great question. I mean, technology has always been the key differentiator for Liberty Mutual, even as my group was set up, like I said, 20 years ago, it was always seen as a differentiator. It's something that we need to kind of be very good at. We've always been quite close to be in the cutting edge of technology. Any companies would say, you know, we're not an insurance company, we're a technology company that sells insurance. We are an insurance company, and kind of very, you know, that's very important, but we also need to understand how using the latest technology, i.e. the cloud providers, really helps us deliver value to our business partners and customers. So it's critical that we have a very tight partnership with our business partner. Excellent, so yeah, 20 years, you know, a lot has changed in that time. Give us a little bit if you can, you know, share a snapshot of where you are, kind of in the cloud discussion, and you know, what are the relationships between kind of the infrastructure side of the team and the development side of the team, and I'm expecting that to lead us towards the serverless discussion. Sure, I mean, I joined Liberty about 12 years ago, 13 years ago, and I actually started in a lot of the digital channels, designing systems with digital channels, and probably almost 10 years ago, our CIO, James McLennan, quite visionary, started kind of pressing the public cloud agenda, and sort of discussing public cloud as a potential future. It was a really exciting time, because I think the infrastructure development, we all started to kind of discuss what's the possibilities of public cloud, and as you know, the cloud itself, it probably changes every year, it's redefined, there's new capabilities. I'm not sure we could have envisaged where we are today back when we started that conversation. Like every large enterprise, the initial conversations around, you know, how do we enable this, how do we make this safe, how do we protect our data, all the usual kind of questions you would have, but you know, we kind of really joined together at the various different departments, we thought, well, how do we move kind of the enterprise forward? And as well, I mean, we're all like a global capability for cloud, it was very important, and it's bringing up kind of velocity, that we can deliver value quickly to our business partners. So we kind of, we didn't do it for technology's sake, we did it to find real value for the business. And one of the really interesting things that we talked about is we shied away from counting how many virtual machines do we have in the cloud. That wasn't really a good metric for us, which they will, how are we delivering values to our business partners? That was kind of the metric that we chase and continue to chase. Well, that's excellent, how you kind of laid that out. I'm wondering if you could help extend that and bring us into, you know, where serverless fit into that discussion.   Sure, well, one of the things that I've always found critical working in technology is that curiosity, that kind of search for what's next. So within my group, I always charge my people to say, like, you know, where do we need to get to? What is three to five years out? And we've a lot of really fantastic years right across Liberty Mutual, quite open-minded. They, you know, dig into the thing ahead. So one of my team was, I think, was re-invent in 2013 where they launched Lambda in 2014 and he came back really, really excited. They can build their first small application. It was actually a document generation. I think they were using some proprietary system. So they built a document generation solution and couldn't believe the amount of, you know, run cost that was saved. It probably knocked something like 97% off the cost. Couldn't believe it. And so we started to think, wow, this is potential. But back then, you know, again, five to six years ago, the stack was very immature. There was a lot of things you needed to figure out, like your observability, the developer environment, you know, there's a whole bunch of stuff that wasn't quite right. So it's something that we share through our peers across the organization. And we talked about it. We, you know, we really started to kind of think, well, this is interesting. This idea of serverless or a managed service, it started to really change how we thought. And it really started to make the concept of a cloud native application, very real. Because we started to think about cloud native architecture, cloud native application architecture and that started to really flip how we thought. So it's just been a real journey those past couple of years. And the big thing for me is we started with engineers thinking of cloud as a mindset that necessarily is a platform. That opened the door to a lot of possibilities. Yeah, it's really interesting that you said that, you know, often time we say, you know, cloud is an operational model, you know, not a physical location. Are you using multiple clouds today? Yes, we probably, we're trying to have a multi-cloud strategy. And really, I mean, the very clear is serverless for us, it's not just function as a service. It's not like we're just using kind of something like Lambda. It's really about that idea of using managed service and thinking about evolution or architecture. But how can we kind of, you know, try and cut out anything that is effectively not differentiating? There's a great term which I always like is the stack policy. It's sometimes as technology companies, we get obsessed by the stack and we think that the piece near the customer is quite easy. I think from a technology perspective, we need to think about, we can deliver the most value by making the customer experience kind of best. On the end, can it be even rent a stack from whoever meets that need? Yeah, no, it's really, it's a fascinating discussion. I've seen even today, it's, you know, well what is, you know, you say serverless functions as a service, a lot of it is I don't want the developer to have to think about those underlying layers. Which reminds me of the discussion we've been having about platform as a service for more than a decade, but has was supposed to be, you know, platform independent so I could have my code wherever it goes, serverless today, you know, right now, I mean, you talked about Lambda, Amazon, there's certain things that I can only do on Amazon. There are discussions and working groups and the cloud native computing foundation working at how we can do, you know, serverless functions as a service that could span between multiple clouds or use the same sort of code. So how do you look at that space?  I think about it for me, it starts with the empowerment of the engineering team. We talk about a serverless first strategy. That means that you've got the capability to build anything you need to, but you'll rent where you can. We had a fascinating story, one of our test stories is a company called, or a area called WorkGrid, WorkGrid Software is one of the companies that we spun out of Liberty Mutual. That was a project that we had an internal digital assistant that we built with some of our teams be back four or five years ago. And our CEO, Gene as a Glennon decided to fund that as a kind of a startup. So they broke off around three years ago and that initial team had four people and that engineering team. So they kind of decided that they would be serverless first in their approach. So they didn't have time to think about operability or right for portability. They had a realized business value really quickly. So they took an evolutionary architecture approach which meant they kept incrementing and iterating and delivering value where possible. Like what's the next best thing they can build, deliver value for the customer. So when you think in that regard, if you ever come to an Amazon of a great, talk about no one way doors, keep a two way door, don't lock yourself in the anything, make decisions that you can always build upon. So with that kind of constant iterative work of our teams and that serverless first strategy, that means that when you do rent a service, if you need to change to another service, it's just a matter of, if you've got your boundaries set up correctly, it's fairly easy to get rid of that. You dig yourself in deep to something and then that's the difference. So I think there's an engineering mindset and culture that we certainly have brought with in our teams that they kind of go fast, focus on business value and kind of try and be sort of cloud native in their outlook. Excellent, yeah, that I just heard Andy Jassy in the AWS Summit online, you know, talking about those one way or two way doors. So sounds like from your standpoint, serverless is a two way door for architecting in your mindset. Absolutely, I mean, I think it's really, for me, it brings architecture back into the team. It's one of the really nice things is if your team are kind of using managed services, that focuses on business value. If our infrastructure itself support that type of team, then you have minimal handoffs within the team. If you have a single team, it's their job to create value, engineer the solution, make sure the security is good enough through the operations, the visibility. It's all contained within one team. We get a huge responsibility within that one team. As an engineer, that is super powerful and super huge autonomy. So we can talk with the serverless engineer. And for me, it's been absolutely fascinating to see teams come into this environment. And once they understand, you know, that event-driven way of creating their systems. And I use the word systems drawing applications to create the event-driven systems that constantly in the building upon. It's just fascinating to see where they go. It's, you start to see the creativity and innovation from a lot of engineers. So it's truly unbelievable to watch. It's really quite cool. Dave, I'm curious, when you look at the application portfolio that your team manages, how do you decide what goes serverless? Is it, you know, new development? All goes serverless? If they've been a migration, you know, how do you look at the overall application portfolio that you have? Sure, well, it kind of depends, I suppose, on, I mean, I'm not going to sit here and say that we're going to refactor everything the serverless. You know, I think when you do migration, you have your, you know, your six or seven paths that you can go down and you do what's best for the business. But for new development, it's definitely interesting. We haven't found many use cases that are really a bad fit. It's a spectrum. We may decide, you know, what different servers do you use? We built a system last year, which was absolutely fascinating to see. It's like a financial kind of aggregation system where we do a lot of our accounting. So it was kind of called serverless ETL. We're trying to run like a end of month batch system. You take a lot of accounts from different countries and kind of pipe them into a kind of general ledger. Not something I would have thought about for serverless, to be honest, but then when you think about it, and some of our kind of engineering needs, as they put this together, they kind of designed this fantastic system using serverless workflows, because you're taking lots of various different types of data orchestrating them in this single destination. And we've went live with that this year. And I think one of the month ends that they recently ran, I think they ran something like 100 million transactions, costing relatively low cost. And of course, being a month end system, the rest of the months, there's zero cost. You don't pay for idle. We only actually pay while it's running in that month end process, or maybe, you know, a few hours or something. Yeah, Dave, you talked about in the early days, 2014, when Lambda was announced, re-invent, when you first started using in the first year or so. There's the maturity of that ecosystem solution set. Where do you see things now? What's working well? What's on your wish list to kind of mature or increase overall functionality to help? I think the developer environment and developer experience is a big part. One of the key messages in trying to kind of get into the NDR culture is code is a liability. It's not NASA. If you have a bunch of engineers writing lots of code, that effectively is a liability. There's no business asset in that. The asset is in the system that you create. They're trying to get engineers into the mindset to write less code than they actually engineer systems. So one of the things that we've been trying to do is maybe using patterns as building blocks. People, they kind of like a Lego building block way of creating their systems. They're using some things like CDK, for development kit patterns, using the well architected process to make sure that teams are looking after their costs, their security, their performance, their reliability, and their kind of optimizations. So some of those things are really important that aims that whole ownership of an operational view of their systems. And also even things like observability. When you create a system with a lot of advanced plan around, it starts getting complex. But then if you do that correctly, you can start to layer on what data insights can be built on top of the system. So it's really opening up aims a different way of working. And then of course, there's lots of operational challenges when you get in the more complex environment. So as we often say, it's not easier, different, build difficult to build these systems, but it's different. So it's definitely easier, but better. All right. How about anything that you're looking out towards the future? You talked about the early days when you look at these, and while you're not necessarily throwing the light of shiny thing into production, there's that curiosity. So what's exciting you now? Anything else looking forward that you could bear? I think, I mean, one of the fantastic success stories we've had is with a project we've called Virtual Assistant. And really that's your question. It's about how teams can properly work at MVP. So one of the things that we really find fascinating is when you put a good engineering team, and I mean a team who are really solid engineers, we then layer on the cloud and secure the best practices and certification. We then put them in a supported service environment with a real business problem. They then create an MVP. So our Virtual Assistant team created an MVP where they would start to see if you call them to the call center and you've a fairly straightforward request. Like if you have an auto claim, you might say, well, when can I pick up my rental? If you've already done your claim. We have an NLT, a natural language assistant that can help you out with that conversation. So when you start the MVP systems like that, you can start them off with a fairly small traffic until you actually tune that until it's going to perfect. And then you gradually scale up and add on other data-driven potential AI services, you know, integrations to that. So I think when you start to take that MVP approach and have a very, very narrow solution, see what that's like in the wild and then start to scale that up. I mean, we scale that system from taking maybe 30 calls, you may be taking a quarter of a million calls. So it's fantastic how you can start to scale these systems up. So I think what I'm really looking for is more kind of support to see how we can, you know, it's the art of the possible. How can we use this tool set and this service mindset to create really fascinating, you know, business applications? Because when you get into that kind of creative conversation with business partners, I mean, they don't want to hear about Lambda or events or observability. They want to say, well, what can I do with AI? What can I do with voice? What can I do with vision? You know, you start to open up really fantastic, you know, conversations like that. So I think that's, I'd like to see more of that, that kind of creative product development. Excellent. Well, yeah, Dave, so important that you brought back as to how, you know, I've seen the business working together.  All right, Dave, thanks so much. Real pleasure having a chat with you. Thanks, Drew. I really appreciate it. Thank you. All right, be sure to check out thecube.net, lots of backgrounds. If you go hit the search, you can actually type serverless, find out more about what we've been covering as well as what events we will get in the future. I'm Stu Miniman, thank you for watching The Cube.


Think Tech Hawaii. Civil engagement lives here. Welcome back to another exciting episode of Human Human Architecture, broadcasting live here from our exotic tropical paradise of Honolulu, Hawaii. And today's show is, as promised, a follow-up on the trilogy of the three shows about the architecture of UH Minoa with the solar brown. In the last show that we called the fall and potential re-rise, we're promising to do a follow-up on what we call the exceptions of the rule of, unfortunately, not so good things having been built ever since the 70s. And that great exception to the rule is our today's guest, John Hara. Welcome, John. Thank you. And his daughter and partner, business partner, Mayumi Dao. So hi, Mayumi. How are you? Thank you for being here with us. And let's jump right in and show the slide number one, which is me snapping a picture of you guys in your office here, which we can see that you guys are old school, which I call also new school, which is I encourage my emerging generation to be heavy on physical model making. And here are the models. And we want to jump in. We want to show the three projects that we identified a little bit more in depth. And they're actually from the late 70s and the 80s and of the very early 90s. So let's start in the 70s. Slide number two, please, which is exactly 77. And John, explain a little bit to us what we see. Yeah, what we're looking at now is a diagram of the proposed east-west center at the bottom of Holmes Hall, designed by Skid Rowans and Merrill, and at the upper side of the east-west center building is designed by Ion Pei. The building we designed is right opposite of Holmes Hall and it's on axis of Dole Avenue, which is indicated by that line going into the building. This also shows the relationship of what we're doing Burns Hall to the other buildings on campus. At the top of the drawing is what was then called the biomedical building. By Edward Jarrell Stone. Yeah, by Edward Stone, sure. And we're saying this is something that hardly anyone does these days anymore, this sort of figure of ground, calibrating of axes and of relationships and configurations. So that's very classy. And based upon that, you went a step further. And if you go to the next slide, please, also did physical modeling and studies about spaces and places, right? So here you can see that relationship again between the SOM engineering school to the left and the gateway dorm at the very bottom, which we also did a show about. And then as you indicated, the Hall and Manoa up there as part of the east-west center, which you told me this interesting anecdote about, actually, let's go back one decade early about the mid-60s and you at Penn, please share that part. Oh, yeah. So in some of my classmates from Philadelphia went to work for IMP in New York City. And we had these incredible discussions. They were working on a project in Honolulu, and what they were talking about in the office was, well, let's hurry up and get this project out of the office. It said, Honolulu, nobody is ever going to go there. Well, these were the fresh post-statehood days, right, where it was still exotic and far away. Yeah. And it was the beginning of IMP's development of the precast concrete facades. Amazing. And let's go to the next slide, which shows the model a little bit more from the side, where I find it intriguing that you were actually paying as much attention to the detail of the massing of the neighboring building as much as to your building. So it's way different than sort of the very narcissist sort of me, me, me sort of attitude that we have so often these days. It's more about the others, the others, and how do I basically fit in? Well, it's also very important that what you build is a relationship to other structures. That has to work as well. And let's have one more view of that beautiful model here, next image here. Also want to recognize how you built that topo model, that topography. So you went through the effort in showing the mountains, right, which is... And the mountain was a very important part of the composition, and as we'll see probably a little later, the work of art was generated, I think, by the fact that the mountain comes down, and we'll discuss that a little bit. And if you want to, we can discuss it now, because we bring up the next image in there, it shows. Sure. Work of art was originally conceived of by the state, Hawaii State Foundation on the Culture and the Arts, which is one percent of the construction value. And I spoke to the director of that time, Alfred Price, and then I suggested that instead of a piece, a sculptural piece, it'd be nice to have something which would relate more to the environment, such as the garden.  And that's precisely what Mr. Noguchi did. Well, we built this model for him, actually, but he wanted to recall Hila Ridge in the back coming down to these mountains of rock, and becoming a rock garden, very much in the Japanese kind of tradition. It was really an incredible experience. Unfortunately, because of the discussions between the State Department and the University of Hawaii regarding money, it was never executed.  Let's go to the next slide. Nevertheless, again, one could always add it, right? Yes, yes. Because you set the stage for it, as we can see, the setback of the building is basically giving space, too, for that. It was also upon access with the road, as one of the earlier drawing shows. Exactly, yes. And talking sort of value engineering, let's go to the next page here. Something that Detective DeSoto and Martin were already identifying when we saw the working model in your office, and then comparing it to this is actually a picture, I believe, from the Kobayashi book Building a Rainbow that we took from there. So the comparison you can see is something more rich on the right side of the model and something sort of missing on the left side, which is some of the breeze soles, right? We're very much concerned about the environment, except those days it was not called sustainability, it was called ecology. We should call it like that again, please. And the breeze sole was certainly part of it. Protecting all of the fenestration from direct sunlight, which is now, you know, people do it naturally, I think. And the kind person you are, you were defending the client when I was starting to accuse the client of having been a bad client. You said, no, actually the client was good, the university, but the construction manager who was in charge... Yeah, the construction manager was in charge of bringing the building in for his budgeted costs. And there was an irony to that right at the end. Sure, you could certainly take off the breeze sole and save a lot of money. They saved a lot of money. They saved too much money. The cost of the building came in under the budget. Like a million? Did you save a million? Something like that. So I think we should make a claim to bring the movers back. Yeah, I think we should try to do that. All right, well, let's move on to the next page and also to the next project, because this is getting us into the 80s, which, you know, many of us, if we think about the other arts of music and even like car, and this is probably the low point in American car manufacturing in many ways where cars were not made to last anymore. Everything was about the look and put together cheaply. The Reagan era, never mind as well. So, I mean, and you probably very remarkably, when DeSoto went out there for his field work and in gathering information about the show, this project of yours, without us shame on us knowing who did it and what it is, he immediately said, wow, I like this building and I agree and that we did our research and found out it's your project. So tell us about what project it is and, again, your thoughts behind. Well, again, our concern was how our project relates to other existing buildings around the site. And then the upper corner is a biomedical building and the lower corner are two high-rises that were designed and the decision was not to compete with those two taller buildings. So this is a laboratory building, you know, a wonderful client and the thinking here was to separate the office space, which is quite different from activities in the laboratory spaces. The courtyard serves as a function of being the facade for the offices and all the offices are in the inner ring of the courtyard. The laboratories are on the outer ring which does not require light or air beneath that kind of requirement. Very clever and go to the next page, we can see this and I want to just say this is the emerging generation, this is the old school, this is the ink on vellum and then you did these I remember because we worked like that as well so I'm part of that generation our kids don't know this anymore everything comes out of the machine instantly but these are and then also the shadow lines are beautifully inked on so it really sort of gives us a sense of the plasticity of the building. The V-Logs printing which they don't do anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah.  It still does, I think it worked out very well. Absolutely. The next page is just the top floor and we see on the very top right we see this sort of interesting in the very rectangularity of the whole configuration we see this one sort of breaking out of that rule sort of more organic kind of curvy line and if we go to the next page we can see what that is then in reality right. And the reason for that was to somehow try to acknowledge the fact that this is next to biomedical building or opening up that vista as well. Mm-hmm. And I would say you know while it is truly a very sort of a zeitgeist gesture I'm thinking of New York 5 and Richard Meyer and Guathemey and Siegel in their you know, good heydays I'm seeing that by at the same time some of their buildings are still dated that you know you clearly think about the 80s like okay but here both sort of zeitgeisty and being timeless move to the next image here and again vegetation plays a big role and as you were saying Mayumi that your father is often using and allowing in fact inviting vegetation right. Yes, he loves trees. But on the other hand the idea of maintenance and that's equally as important with landscaping, you know, landscaping must be maintained and the university is always to go on that. It's notorious and not wanting to do maintenance. Next slide to that regard here this is a picture you provided from when the vegetation was small and you can see that the building is doing a job because the glass facade of the fenestration is pushed back so you can see the structure doing a job in shading, right. Then on the next page is a picture I took which I love at Jungli because I come from Germany where you studied and worked and we were just talking in Switzerland and France and you said we're going to talk English or maybe Swiss German or all the languages that you picked up on your way and sort of obviously here now the typologies on campus here identified courtyards as a very good theme that in fact at that time in the 80s the university has given up on because most of these horrible hermetic buildings don't do this anymore so you were keeping up that sort of genetic code of the courtyard. Well what has also happened during the time is that the landscape grew which is very natural and it still works as a courtyard but it absolutely does. Still sitting. Exactly. What universities then do over time maybe not so good anymore the next picture here this is a picture I did of what they did to your building after the fact and maybe trying with best intentions but again not of the originality that that you handwriting sort of brought and to expand on that we have the third project which is the closest to me because it's my workplace or at least it's supposed to be in fact I basically boycott to be in that building that I'm already saying you didn't design but we get to that because we bring in the next picture here and this is what I would have loved could have worked in a very tropical easy breezy single loaded corridor aerated through multiplicity of courtyard building that you designed for me and my colleagues This was the original scheme for the school of architecture and it was designed to be part of the quadrangle rather than to dominate the quadrangle to allow the quadrangle to be important as it should be as you say there are spaces in between the buildings which relate to whatever the functions are so again that was the intent it was and how that was played out on a larger scale we see at the next page here which is the side plan and you rebelled you, you were resisting the classicist order of the of the quarter and the quadrant here and basically moving the building out of it and making it in line with George Hall here and that way opening up the quad to the public, to university that's right and to try to repeat what was done prior to well for example the neoclassic kind of language it was somewhat archaic but well that's why we did what we did well initially in the first and as we talked it's interesting because he said and this is almost ironic because he said you know I went to Berlin I studied shingle right and so but I think I allowed myself to say you were working in the notion of shingle because if shingle would have come to Hawaii in the early 90s to the tropics he would have done what you did but what in fact then you were forced to do was the shingle who didn't move on right that's right the shingle who got stuck in a time that is outdated right because the campus architect at that time was shooting three bullets at your design and the three bullets were if you don't remember the my no no no the three bullets were the language to be neoclassic the building should be two stories in height with parking below and then class assist in style and then central into the quad right so these were the three bullets and when you were initially sort of talking to us about this on a side note when you gave a talk story at dokomomo and after that I insisted and thanks to your daughter who was then basically not giving up on making you dig out the proof of evidence not only of what the building originally was intended to be but then also how hard you fought to keep as many of these original ideas and from these many drawings we just going to share one of the iterations as we call that so if you can get the next image here which was where you basically had to give in and move it down but you were keeping sort of its democratic gesture of being open versus prison watch it what it happened to be we tried to keep a courtyard for all kinds of reasons it was another face of the university to the public and you know it allowed the school of architecture to have its own exterior kind of orientation absolutely which I thought was very important at the time it would have been I can tell you on a daily basis because so trapped and so hermetic and so introverted we don't have a face people say where is your building and we say well it's where the parking is that's the face of the building and that was by programming of a client who at that time had turned into sort of being stuck in some formalism and wasn't as progressive innovating and trusting an architect who had proven himself you know twice to be capable of doing these things so the next picture here is again showing in this sort of beautiful hand drawing style how again you know you would have I mean often it's a compromise right between different interests so the client here wanting the quadrant to be completed in the original way and you did that but at the same time you insisted to be open to give the school a face that is an open face for the offices and the classrooms speaking to the public and the sort of empty theater sort of stepping down so I commend you for that and again just for the records there are many more iterations where you were not giving up you were staying a rebel and saying okay I'm not gonna you know and at the end you had to but again I'm saying this is this is not I mean obviously there is some stamp on the drawings that unfortunately has your name but I'm saying and with a show we tell everyone it's not your building we have now shown what your building would have been and it would have been just another beautiful building that's exotic and tropic and totally appropriate so whoever designed this here the campus architect who is also now the one of the largest firms here on the island and designed by committee as well because it was just one person and whenever you design something by committee I have that experience too it just goes wrong so that we have a tradition here if you go to the next page to conclude on a positive note and while we were sort of critical about the existing building we have and then sort of being very sentimental about what it would have been go to the final page here please is that our tropical tutor Bill Chapman who has been a friend for a while and now is our interim dean pretty much has thrown out something that's also within the tradition of campus because this is the old engineering building and the old engineering building was overgrown with vines so he basically suggested to do the same with a current school of architecture basically dematerialize it with foliage and that way sort of bringing back your idea to just you know you have to go over a bump but the sort of the lawn or the meadow you know the quad is sort of continuing and you just dissolve that sort of tragic sort of neoclassical mock-off so there's always some hope and another hope is that we cannot not talk about your recent engagement in academic architecture which is the university of Hawaii again but at West Oahu so we would love to have you come back talk about that and that has to be when I will be half around the world because this is going to be my last show for eight months that I'm able to be here but I will not be gone physically I will be but every other week I will continue to see if this is going to be my last show and I don't know if this is already here I see him Rob can you signalize him that he's supposed to walk into the show please and so we are going to continue human human architecture every other week and human human architecture is if you haven't recognized yet it's about mainly the post contact so here come and join us there he is hello everyone hello to have you so I'm just announcing what we're going into we keep running strong every other week human human architecture about the post contact culture construction evolution but at the same time about that history that's about documenting and conserving that and we need to do that too and you're also going to be here with us in another capacity because every other week you will coordinate and synchronize our doko momo board who is going to do the one unique in the united states of all chapters we're going to have an own doko momo chapter Hawaii show and you're orchestrating them so I will be a co-host probably for many of those shows and then you and I will be doing shows you'll be remote from Germany I will be here in Honolulu and we'll have various guests on the show we just agreed that we will have them back you with them and we're going to talk about Harris Hawaii and this time at West Oahu so we look forward to that and until then stay all happy and healthy and as joyful as John and Mayumi and along that side also happy holidays because next week it's already going to be the Soto and that's going to be a reckless show because I will be in trans and cannot and I think it's going to be your brutalist topics there we go there you go alright see you all then bye bye happy holidays


Can you change the mode? OK, so our next paper is on multi-input functional encryption with unbounded message security. The authors are Vipul from MSR. I use from UCLA and Adam from Georgetown. And I usually give the talk. Hi, I'm going to talk about multi-input functional encryption with unbounded message security. This is joint work with Vipul and Adam sitting in the audience. So let's first start discussing with what's public key encryption in a public key encryption scheme. Any decryptor can either learn everything about the underlying message or can know nothing about it, depending on if he gets the secret key or not. But in a functional encryption, you get a fine-grained access to the private data. So in particular, if suppose there is a malicious, there's an adversarial cloud or an adversary, he gets an encryption of x. And let's say he wants to learn f of x. He can ask a key for a function f from the trusted authority who does the setup for the encryption scheme. And he can learn f of x. What security guarantee we want is that the adversary should not learn anything more about the message than just knowing the value f of x. But we are not going to talk about functional encryption. Rather, we are going to discuss an extension of functional encryption, which was studied by Goldwasser et al. And here, we are going to talk about functional encryption where, given the function key, you can basically compute joint functions from the independently generated ciphertext. And so here, for example, the cloud has this secret key for f. And he gets encryptions from four independent sources. Then what he can learn is f of a, b, c, d, where he gets the encryptions of a, b, and c, and d. There's an interesting application of this function encryption, which was given in Goldwasser et al. It was computing on medical data. Here, a researcher wants to perform some computations on patient records from various hospitals. But at the same time, the hospitals don't want to reveal the entire medical data to the researchers. So the solution that was proposed is that the hospitals can participate in a trusted setup. And then they can encrypt their data. And then a researcher can request for a key from the trusted authority about the function. And then he can learn f of a, b, c. Security, what we require from this multi-input functional encryption is that he should not be, he should already learn f of a, b, c, given the ciphertext and the function key. So there has been a lot of work in this area. And the first work was done by Goldwasser et al, where they define this primitive and also construct it for bounded arity and bounded number of ciphertext. By arity, I mean how many sources can the function key operate on. And this scheme only allowed to release bounded number of ciphertext in the system. So that was the bottleneck. But this scheme was based on IO and one-way functions. They also had another construction which removed these bottlenecks. But it was based on more stronger assumption of what's called as differing input obfuscation. Then there is this work by Brekarski Komodoski-Sagev and Anantin Jain. It was concurrent to work. And they construct an MIFE for only secret key setting. By secret key, I mean the encryption keys are not known to the adversary in the security model. But they removed the bottleneck of having bounded number of ciphertext. So this was based upon secret key FE and one-way functions. And finally, there was this work by Badrin Narayan et al. And they construct MIFE for functions with a priori unbounded arity. And it also allowed releasing unbounded number of ciphertext. And this was based on slightly stronger assumptions of PC-DIO and one-way functions. So what are the drawbacks of this work? So one drawback is all the known constructions either give us constant arity for unbounded number of ciphertext. Or they are based upon strong assumptions of DIO and PC-DIO. So in particular, in the examples, imagine a scenario where there are these hospitals and they encrypt their patient data. Now the researcher learns F of A, B, C. Suppose now that the hospital wants to update its patient data and there are some changes in the data and he releases the encryption of A prime. And now the researcher wants to learn F of A prime B and C. These schemes with bounded number of ciphertext do not provide any security guarantee at all in this regard. So what's the bottleneck? We can't issue many ciphertexts. So in this work, we construct MIFE for unbounded number of ciphertext. But we rely on sub-exponentially secure IO instead of polynomial IO. And we also rely on existence of sub-exponentially secure injective one-way functions. So the existence is in bold because we don't require to know explicit instantiation of such one-way function. Any existence is enough for the security proof to go through. So I will just recall quickly the syntax of what's multi-input functional encryption. And so in the original construction, there was a setup algorithm which takes as input the security parameter to bound on the arity. Again, by arity, I mean the number of sources of data the function key can operate on. And it also takes as input the bound on the number of ciphertexts that can be released. But since we are dealing with unbounded number of ciphertext in this work, the syntax that we propose doesn't use this bound. So the setup algorithm outputs some master secret key and n encryption keys. There's an encrypt algorithm which takes the encryption key for any index out of those n. And it also takes the message, and it outputs an encryption. Then there is a key generation algorithm which takes the master secret key and the function for which you want to issue the key. And it outputs a function key for that function. Then there's a decrypt algorithm which takes the secret key for f and all the ciphertexts. And it outputs the joint computation f of x1 through xn. So what's the security definition of such an encryption scheme? We will look at a simplified setting of the secret keys where adversity does not know any encryption keys. So consider two worlds, left and right. On the left world, the adversity gets encryption from two sources where he gets the encryptions of xi, j. And on the right, he gets encryptions of yi, j. And from two sources, and he gets additionally a key for some function f. On the left world, we can see that it learns these values, fx1, x2, j. And on the right, he learns fy1i and y2j. So we want to put some restriction on the security model that these values should be the same. If we have these values, if these values are the same, then we want that the left world should be indistinguishable to the right world. But this is insufficient for the public key setting because in the public key setting, he can encrypt by himself and learn more than what's released by the given ciphertext. So he can basically substitute any value on the star. So we must require additional constraint that basically these two functions should be the same. Anyways, we are not going to deal with public key setting here just to give things simple. So let me recall some of the primitives that we are going to use in this work. So in IO, there are two circuits A and B, and they are equivalent. By equivalent, I mean that they output the same value at all the inputs. Then if you obfuscate A or you obfuscate B, then adversary cannot tell apart these two obfuscations. So this is an indistinguishability obfuscator. There's a stronger variant which we are not going to use in this work. It's called DIO, but our construction does derive some motivation from DIO. So I'm just going to quickly tell. So in DIO, if there are two circuits A and B, such that they differ at some point, but that point is hard to recover, then the guarantee is that if you obfuscate circuit A from obfuscate, if you're given obfuscation of A or an obfuscation of B, the adversary cannot decide unless he himself computes the point at which the circuits differs. So we are also going to use what's a special kind of injective unbi function. It's a sub exponential injective unbi function. This function is injective and it's hard to invert. But other than that, we also require that if there's any algorithm that breaks it, successfully inverts the unbi function, then it should definitely run in time, which is sub exponential in the length of the input. But we don't want an explicit instantiation of this function, as I will describe later. And this is finally the last tool that we are going to use. It's puncturable PRF. A puncturable PRF is just like a normal PRF with some special properties. And the property is that there exists a puncturing algorithm, which takes a PRF key and some point x, and it punctures the key at that point x. This punctured key allows to evaluate the actual PRF on all values except that point x at which it was punctured. Also, security-wise, given this punctured key, it's hard to tell what evaluation of the PRF at the point x. So given the punctured key, it's the PRF evaluation of k at x is indistinguishable from a random value. So now I will describe the approach of our work. How do we construct MIFE for unbounded number of ciphertext? Let's recall what is general recipe for MIFE or FE that has been studied in various works. So in general, the ciphertext generally consists of two two public encryption ciphertext. And there is a IO-friendly proof like a statistically binding NISIC. And any function key is generally an obfuscated program which takes as input these ciphertext and then it verifies the proof. And once if the proof verifies, then it uses one of the hardware PK secret key. And then using these decrypted value, it computes the function and outputs that evaluation. So here thing to observe is that since we are dealing with IO-friendly proofs, these statistically sound NISICs, typically for the proof to work, we'll have to commit all the challenge ciphertext in the setup. And therefore the size of the setup parameters, the size of the encryption keys, it grows with the number of ciphertexts. So that gives us only bounded number, bounded security. Also it restricts us to just selective security since we have to commit all the ciphertext in the public parameter. So I'll describe our solution like step by step. So first we look at how to remove this bottleneck. So one way is to use simulation sound NISICs instead of using SSS NISICs. But we cannot use this with IO. So we'll have to use it with like DIO because DIO is using DIO, what we can do is you can, these kind of NISICs are more friendly with DIO so they can help us to argue security. But since we are not allowed to use DIO, we have to do something else. First thing is that for every valid statement, there are multiple proofs in BCP 14 where it says that IO is some sort of one point differing input of the specification.  So what we do is now make the proofs unique. Since here we have many proofs which satisfy the same statement, we want to make them unique so that we can use this result and it will become later here in the talk. So I'll just describe the construction in quickly. So the setup algorithm is just doing setups for the public encryption two times and it samples a PRF key. This PRF key will give you some sort of proof that we are going to use in the algorithm. The master secret key consists of these PRF keys, the public keys, the secret key of the PK system and the public encryption key is just the set of public keys and the PRF key. Okay, so how do you encrypt? First you take the message and encrypt it twice using the public key of the PK and then you compute the PRF value on these ciphertext that you get from PK encryption and just output these encryptions along with the PRF evaluation. This PRF evaluation behaves like some sort of proof and the function key, it looks like first it verifies the PRF evaluation for the ciphertext as you can see here and the decryption first and then it decrypts one of the ciphertext using the hardwired key and it finally computes the value value value. So what's the proof idea? So the main idea is again that IO implies the IO for bounded number of inputs. So this is the main theorem that if two circuits A and B differ at one input say X, then any adversary which distinguishes obfuscation of A from obfuscation of B with some advantage E, then there exists an extractor that recovers X and it runs in time polynomial in the security parameter and inverse of the advantage. We consider, so the proof works in the following manner consider the challenge vectors in the first step. Then we start with an encryption of say vector X, then we switch from encryptions of since the circuit only uses one of the secret key, we can switch the other remaining pk encryption to yi's and then we switch the function keys to use the first secret key to the other secret key and this is done step by step which I am going to describe. So we consider a hybrid circuit G sub Z which is the hybrid function key and in this function key the first step is the same except that there is another step at which we check that if the ciphertext is less than some value Z, then we decrypt using the first key otherwise we use the second secret key and we output the and using this decryption the obfuscation just outputs the value. So now we iterate the Z from zero to all the space of all the inputs. So if now how do we argue security between the two if suppose G sub Z and G sub Z plus one are equivalent then in this case we are good because of the IO security. If suppose they are not then what we can actually do is invert the one way function use this to invert the one way function p. This is done by using IO implies the IO result. So since the main idea is again we use the hard coding and the puncture programming technique to embed a one way function challenge and then using IO implies the IO we can invert the one way function. So note that p which is a one way function is used only in the proof. We can actually as well use it as any one one function in the construction. Now this construction works only for the security setting for the public key setting we need to do something else because once you when since in the public key setting encryption keys are revealed to the to the adversary since the encryption key contains the PRF key you are losing the security there. So what we do is instead of giving the PRF key in the clear we give a program that contains the PRF key and that program is obfuscated and given as the encryption. Yeah the obfuscated program takes the two ciphertexts and its randomness and gives out the proof the PRF value only if both the ciphertexts encrypt the same message. So now I will conclude we get an MAFE for unbounded number of ciphertexts and we rely on sub exponential IO injective one way functions with sub exponential security and we get adaptive security for free because we are dealing with sub exponential assumptions here so we get it for free. But there are some open problems. First is that since we are going input by input are the secure we can only achieve security for bounded message lens which like the message lens that has to be bounded in advance. So how to remove that bottleneck? Then second open question is the ultimate goal of coming with an MAFE scheme with unbounded RAT. What about polynomial time assumptions? Okay any questions? I'll ask a quick one. So with respect to the first open problem you had up what is the current bound on the message length? You can fix any polynomial bound like in the security parameter. So in practice it's probably not a huge deal. Anyways we are not implementing MAFE in practice. Yeah. Okay any other questions? Okay then let's thank Ayush again.


This is an abstract video for the paper Maliciously Secure Massively Parallel Computation for All But One Corruptions. My name is Rex Fernando, and my collaborators are Yuval Geles, Ilan Komorgotsky, and Elaine Shi. In our work, we're interested in studying the types of massively parallel algorithms that run inside data centers. So probably the most famous example of this is the Google search algorithm. And what we're interested in is whether it's possible to achieve meaningful notions of security for these massively parallel algorithms. The model that we're going to be working in is called the massively parallel computation model, and this model has been adopted by the algorithms community for studying the types of computation that I was just talking about. And at a very high level, it works as follows. So we assume that there's some very large input string, and we assume that this input string is divided among a large set of machines, each of which has very limited local space, much less than the size of the input string. And then these machines run a protocol together, and then the output of this protocol is defined to be the concatenation of the local outputs of each machine. So I'll go into more detail about this model in the full version of the talk, but two details I wanted to mention here are that first, the local space of each machine is limited to be n to the epsilon, where n is the size of the input and epsilon is a small constant. And second, in general, when studying distributed algorithms in this setting, we limit ourselves to algorithms that are very round-efficient. So in particular, they take logarithmic rounds or less. The particular type of question we're interested in this work is whether or not it's possible to build protocols in this model, which satisfy security guarantees that are similar to those found in classical secure computation protocols. So in these classical secure protocols, we in general assume that some subset of the parties are malicious. We can say that they're controlled by some polynomial time adversary. And in this setting, we want to protect the inputs and outputs of the honest parties. So we want to prevent the adversary from learning these inputs and outputs, and we want also the adversary to be prevented from tampering with these outputs. So going back to the massively parallel computation model, where I recall the two main constraints are first, that the local space of each machine is limited. And second, that the number of rounds is very limited. The question is, can we achieve security akin to classical secure computation while still respecting the constraints of this model as much as possible? So a natural question is, there's a ton of work on classical secure computation. Does any of that apply to this setting? And the answer is unfortunately no, because at a very high level, almost all work on classical secure computation involves simultaneous broadcasts. And this is very problematic for our model. So I'll close by quickly stating our results. And just for context, the bottom of the slide contains a table that describes the state of the art prior to our work. So with that in mind, our first result is an impossibility. We show that it's impossible to achieve anything stronger than semi-attest security in the setting of all but one corruptions.  Our second result is a fully malicious secure compiler which works exactly in the setting of all but one corruptions. And the way that we make this work is we first observe that our impossibility result does not apply in the programmable random oracle model. So more specifically, we give a compiler which takes any insecure, massively parallel protocol and turns it into a secure one with minimal efficiency blow up. So I hope this piqued your interest in our work. And if so, hopefully I'll see you on Monday.


It's the dawn of the final day. Nintendo has insisted for months that several of its Super Mario anniversary games, Super Mario 3D All-Stars, Super Mario Bros. 35, and the Super Mario Bros. Game & Watch will no longer be available after 31 March. Fans have expressed frustration at this decision, with some complaining that Nintendo is deliberately limiting the sale of these games to drive up demand. So why limit the sale of these games? What's Nintendo's logic here? When asked about this strange business decision last year, Nintendo of America president Doug Bowser said, I use a simple word, celebration. It just, this is a celebration of Mario's 35th anniversary. There are various ways that we're celebrating Mario's 35th, and with some of these titles, we felt it was an opportunity to release them for a limited period of time. Yeah, at this point the decision was really made around that celebration feature and aspect. We can't speak to plans beyond the end of March. Chances are, if you're not watching this video on the day of release, you'll already know more about Nintendo's plans beyond March, so we won't speculate too wildly. Nintendo's strategy here is certainly confusing, with some games such as Super Mario 3D All-Stars getting a limited release, while other games such as Super Mario 3D World plus Bowser's Fury remaining available indefinitely. If the plan was to artificially drive up demand for 3D All-Stars, it seems to have worked. Bowser said, They've done very, very well. Super Mario 3D All-Stars has sold over 2.6 million units in the US alone, as of December 2020, and so clearly consumers have been able to jump in and enjoy that, and it's not strategy that we're going to be using widely, but it's one we thought was very unique for the actual anniversary. It's difficult to say whether 3D All-Stars sold more in six months than it would have over the Switch's lifetime if it were available long term. There is, though, another factor to consider. It is also worth noting that Nintendo's 2020 schedule was somewhat disrupted by, well, 2020. Rumours and leaks suggested that 3D All-Stars was intended to be made available much earlier in the year, although we don't know how much weight to give these claims. Either way, though, it's no secret that Nintendo's release schedule had to be reworked on the fly throughout the year. Bowser said, Something unique about Nintendo is, our content is released year round. But then, we also look at the content coming from our third party publishing partners, whether those be AAA houses or indie developers, and figure out how to slot those in. And then, one thing we feel is unique about Nintendo is the strength of our evergreen catalogue, and the Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild, or Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and how would we fit those into our messages? So we have news, and we have conversations that we can have year round. We had to be flexible, and we had to be nimble, and move those around. The decision to limit the Super Mario Bros. Game and Watch in particular feels reminiscent of the NES Classic console. Reggie Fieser may once stated that this nostalgic hardware offering was only ever intended to carry Nintendo through an otherwise quiet holiday period. He said, We had originally planned for this to be a product for last holiday. We just didn't anticipate how incredible the response would be. Once we saw that response, we added shipments and extended the product for as long as we could to meet more of that consumer demand. The Mario Anniversary games and hardware have had a longer release window and been more widely available, so it makes sense that Nintendo isn't looking to extend their availability in the same way. So why is Nintendo taking away all of this wonderful Mario goodness? Because… Nintendo. It seems that the company decided, for whatever reason, that a flurry of excitement over a limited release was more useful than turning these games into evergreen titles. All of this makes us excited to see what might be coming next.


So how do we grow YouTube channel? So I'm gonna give you a couple of ideas here. So first of all, I think, you know, I think it is probably worth for you to go onto YouTube and search how to grow YouTube channel because the people whose videos come up at the top are probably doing a good job of that. Do you see what I mean? Like they know what they're talking about. That's why their videos are at the top when you search how to grow YouTube. So I do recommend all of you do that because whenever you search is gonna be whatever strategy is working at the moment. But I'll tell you what I have noticed having been on YouTube now for, you know, something like 10 years and granted, I've grown my channel very slowly. So please take my advice with a grain of salt. But I have, of course, had some success with YouTube.  So I have a video like that and I have some videos that are tens of thousands. I have some videos that are hundreds of thousands and some videos have tens of thousands of views. So I do know a little bit about how to make certain videos go viral. But just to kind of the short answer to this is to grow YouTube channel, you need viral videos. So really the answer is the best question is how do you make a video viral? Because they are viral videos growing YouTube channel. Okay, so how do you make a YouTube viral? How do you make videos that get watched more? So a couple of tools for tips for you here. One is if you can interview famous people, okay, you will have a viral video. If you can interview Brene Brown. Now, of course, Brene Brown is not gonna say yes to any of us who are watching this probably because she's too busy. She's interviewing the top, you know, elites of the world. So, but still, if you can interview the most famous person you can get a hold of, okay? So it could just be someone like me, right? Maybe I'm famous in your mind or I'm famous in your field. But I think it's better to interview people who are famous in your niche, in your field. So in other words, people who are being searched on YouTube. So if you look, really, I mean, I think all of us have at least one person that we can reach that's like that. So look at your LinkedIn contacts list. Look at your Facebook friends.  Who's following, not who you're following because they might not care. They might not care to respond but who's following you, right? So look at the people whose attention you have and who is the most famous among all those people, especially that's related to your audience, related to your niche, then, you know, and make more videos with cute animals. No, then interview that person because that, so, you know, interesting example and recently, a recent example for me is I interviewed Danny Gardner, Danny Da and I Gardner and she has been getting increasingly great SEO reach in the past couple of years. People are searching something and then they're finding her and then now people are searching her name. And because I interviewed her a couple years ago, almost every month at least one or two email subscribers, which by the way, like someone who watches YouTube video and then bothers to go to my website and subscribe to my email, that's like several steps, right? So like that's like if for every one email subscriber that came from YouTube, there's probably 10 or 20 or 30 others who discovered me in that way, do you see what I mean? So like at least one or two a month will tell me they discovered from my email newsletter will tell me they discovered me because I interviewed Danny Gardner. Do you see what I mean? Like Danny is now more famous than me in terms of the YouTube search. So not only should, you know, you might say, George, I don't know any famous people even in my niche. No, no, no, we all know people who have a bigger audience than us in our niche. So if you just interview people with a bigger audience than you in your related area, they are probably rising stars. And in the next few years, people will be searching their name and find your video. And that's really, and that's not just with Danny Gardner. I've also interviewed several other well-known people in my field and also in related fields and people find me through those videos very, very often. So that's one. The second one is kind of related, I would say, is basically trending topics. If you could make videos about topics that are hot topics within your industry, is there a particular issue or question or problem that people are talking about recently in your industry or among your clients? You notice people asking you this kind of question. Okay, the simplest question is, okay, I'm gonna ask you two questions right now. One question again is what is a hot trend in your industry? Go ahead and comment below, chat below if you'd like. I'm actually talking to some of you who are live here. So I will call out a couple of ideas and they just pause this recording and see what ideas you all have. And thanks for those who are live here and chatting ideas here. Angie says, how to deal with pain and birth? That's been hot for 5,000 years, 10,000 years. Not just hot now, but yes, it is going to be a trending topic always, right? Let's see here, Catherine's is inclusivity and anti-racism, absolutely. I would say past five, seven years, especially, right? Let's see here. Shretta says liver and colon cleansing, which can be harmful in her opinion. Wonderful. It's like if you can make a trending topic and give your controversial opinion, that's even better than just making a trending topic that says what everyone else is saying. Do you see what I mean? Very, very good point. Let's see what else is standing up to me. Daniel says human design and gene keys. Absolutely. Gosh, my wife's been getting into that for the past couple of years and it's just getting more and more. So absolutely anything about that. In fact, funny thing, Danny Gardner, the one I mentioned earlier, she got famous in SEO because people were Googling human design and like a particular human design type and marketing. And she had written an article about that or made a video and it's like suddenly she noticed it was blowing up. She hadn't done anything special other than chanced upon the right keywords at the right time. So trending topic does that. And YouTube SEO is much easier than Google SEO. Google SEO takes six to 18 months for Google to really pick it up and have finding first page results. Sometimes it can be faster but most SEO experts say six to 18 months on Google. YouTube, one to two weeks. Yeah, so you see how much faster it is. So that's why YouTube is much easier to test topics and things like that. Gregory says toxic masculinity, which is the opposite of Gregory Vahanian, right? So yes, toxic masculinity is definitely been big these days. Catherine says learning to work with trauma, huge. I would say past five to 10 years. It's gotten more and more and more important. So notice you can see trending topics, hot topics by looking at what your niche makes others in your industry. If you see more than one person, so that's really the simplest way to find trending topics. Look at your niche mates. Now I don't like to say competitors, like to say niche mates because niche mates are your potential partners. Your mirrors, people to learn from. Look at if more than one of your niche mates is making a post or a topic or a video about something, the same thing. If more than one person is doing that, that's called a trending topic. Now three or four or five well definitely it's a trending topic. So take notice of that. Now the second question I have for you is, have you had, excuse me, I had to cough there, have you had more than one client or audience member ask you a question about a particular topic? So think back to the last three clients you worked with, not the last three but the last several clients you worked with. Have they all come to you about a particular issue or question or goal? And if you don't have clients yet, have you noticed people asking who are your potential audience members? The same question that is within your field of expertise. Go ahead and comment below if you'd like particularly those of you who are live here. All right, and thanks to those of you who are chatting below here. You know, let's see, Ginny, her business is Soul Pet Connections says getting dogs to stop barking. Yeah, great. Well, that's if multiple people have asked you that that's definitely, you know, fun things. I would say how to get my cat to stop meowing because the dog is much more easily trainable as you can see, buddy is a very, very good boy. My cat's a little bit less more individualistic there but let's see another one. Carrie says, how do I regain my faith? Yeah, wow. Yeah, if more than one person asked you that that's definitely something you can make videos. I mean, any of these topics, dog, stop barking, regain my faith, these are things you can make videos about from multiple angles. Of course. I mean, how to regain my faith? You could have 25 videos just about that from different angles. Same thing with dog stop barking. Oh, what's the root cause of dogs barking? What is one tip that's often shared but doesn't work in my opinion? Or what's something people say, but I think it's harmful for the relationship with a dog?  Catherine says self-care when you're an activist. Absolutely. You know, a lot more activism is happening these days and people are burning out, right? So these are different ways of finding trending topics and questions that are much more likely to get your video popular. Now, once you have those trending topics or ideas, the next thing to do, and I'll let's go to Google right now for this, the next thing you do is to go to Google, Google, go to Google Trends, so trends.google.com and search that keyword and see what you can come up with. So how to get dog to stop barking. Okay, let's go ahead and press enter there. All right, and basically I would advise you to do past five years and see if it's going up or down. Oh, this is going slightly up. So that's actually a good topic, but if you see something going down, down, down, down, down, it might be okay for you to make a video at this point, but more and more it's gonna be less and less searched. Let's scroll down and see here related queries. How to get my dog to stop barking? If you move your mouth, if it's very long, but if you move your mouse over this and wait, you'll see that it says, explore how do I get the real question? How do I get my dog to stop barking at strangers? Question mark. Literally, if you make a video with that and the title, people are actually searching this and people are more likely to find your video as a result. How to stop dog barking at neighbors. You see, these could be different videos or it could be the same video and you could do strangers slash neighbors. My dog barks at everything that passes by. You see what I mean? These are actual searches that people care about and at the bottom here, let me go ahead and just, sorry. I'm sorry, I'm just in my video. At the bottom here, you can keep going to even more queries. Okay, these are less relevant, right? Anti-bark caller. I mean, you could have a video about your opinion of anti-bark callers. Maybe it's, you think it's helpful, maybe you think it's harmful. It's worth talking about that, right? And then by the way, if you click on any of these, it'll further, it says breakout, which means if you click on them, now you get even more ideas, right? You scroll down. Oh, actually, no, I'm sorry, there's nothing else here. But if you click on various other ones, sometimes there's other ideas. Like for example, something that's a shorter keyword like anti-bark caller, look at this. It's plus 140%, which means it's rising. These are rising topics. It's getting more and more popular. So I click on this and then by scroll down, there's probably, yep, some related, not that many, but some related things there. But instead of rising, you can also look at top, which means top right now that's top, not necessarily going in a good direction, but these are very popular as well. See, and there's many more queries there to look at. So again, Google Trends is good. And if you are looking for something and you're not finding a Google Trend, so for example, if I do, if I start over on Google Trends, I'm gonna go to Google Trends homepage and say human design and gene keys is probably a less searched term. You see, there's not enough here. So it's like, well, it's not helpful. So what I would do then is probably go to Google itself and just search this on Google and see if I can find shorter tail keywords. Maybe I'll just go with human design, right? Human design or gene key on Google Trends and that might be more helpful. So I'm just gonna say human design, okay? And search this. And if I look at past interest over time, a past five years, it's probably going up. I bet it's going up. Oh, it's definitely going up. It's, you know, this is good. And then scroll down. Human design is Joe Genozoe. All right, now this is interesting. Okay. Remember I said, you know, you interview famous people and people are searching for them. It's basically, I'm not saying famous, people who are being searched. So if this Genozoe person is being searched, you should make a video about, I don't, I have no idea who Genozoe is, right? I don't know if this is even relevant. But if it is relevant, because you could talk about someone who's being searched. Now, if it's not someone who is, if it's not someone who's famous, they might find your video. You should probably just say good things about them. Okay.   Again, if it's genuine and authentic and helpful for my audience, this is why you shouldn't trust Tony Robbins. I don't, I'm just using that name as a famous person or this is why you shouldn't trust Oprah, you know, whatever, right? Because they're never gonna watch my video. They don't care. You know, they're never gonna watch my video. And if it helps my audience and they're like, that's a really good point. And people are searching those names. You're gonna find my video. You see what I mean?  If it's someone who might find your video, just talk nice things about them if it's authentic, right, and helpful. So, and the last thing I'll say is that this is mainstream YouTube advice. Title and thumbnail are the most important parts of what the YouTube algorithm cares about because that's what human beings care about. Before they click on your video, they see your video suggested and they'll click on your video based on the thumbnail image, the preview image. Is it interesting enough? Is it on the topic that they care about? Which is of course, the title also is about that. So just be aware of how the titles and thumbnails are being in your industry. What are the popular videos in the title and study them and see how can I borrow that advice? So I hope this helps.


The European Union proposes a ban on Russian oil imports within six months to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. Russia's foreign ministry announces restrictions against 63 Japanese officials, reporters and professors for unacceptable speech against Russia. Officials in South Korea and Japan say North Korea has carried out its 14th known weapons test this year, this time involving a large long-distance missile. And in China, officials close 10% of Beijing's underground train system as a measure against COVID-19. Restaurants and many other businesses have been closed.


identifying people and things this is many rivers this is many rivers that is mr. Lewis that is mr. Lewis many is a writer many is a writer mr.