Good afternoon. Welcome to all who have joined us today for our third Thursdays. I'm Janine Bertie Johnson. I serve as director of alumni as well as director of campus ministries and admissions counselor. I'm very glad to have you all here today. Just a couple of housekeeping details before we get started. I'd love to have you introduce yourself in the chat. You can say your name and maybe what years you were at AMBS, maybe where you're from. But remember to send that to everyone, not just to the host and panelists. And if you have a technical concern at any time, you can send a note to the AMBS host webinar host. And if you have a comment or question for Dan, you can use the Q&A feature at the bottom of your screen. Just hover over the bottom. You'll see Q&A and you can type that in there. I'll be watching for those questions and comments and choose which ones that I asked Dan. Please note that the webinar is being recorded, including that time of conversation at the end. So turning now to our conversation, Daniel Schrock is a core adjunct faculty member at AMBS teaching spiritual direction courses. He is also the curriculum specialist for the Doctor of Ministry program at AMBS. Dan is an alum of AMBS and received his MA in theology from Chicago Theological Seminary and his Doctor of Ministry in 2007 from Columbia Theological Seminary in Georgia. He also completed a certificate in spiritual direction, and that was many years ago, and a supervisor training for spiritual directors. Dan started teaching spiritual direction courses at AMBS in 2013, and in 2022 was named as one of the leaders of the D-Men program. He served as a pastor for 30 years, beginning with one year at Lombard Mennonite Church in Illinois, then 11 years at Columbus Mennonite in Ohio, and 18 years at Berkey Avenue Mennonite Church in Goshen, Indiana. Dan will start by answering several questions that I have prepared for him, and then we'll have time for your questions and comments as well. So Dan, thanks for joining us again today. I know you and Joel joined us last year to talk about the D-Men program when it was brand new, but this is a time to learn more about you personally and not just the program. So what would you like to tell us about yourself as an introduction? Well, thank you for having me, Janine. It's good to be here. Some people might think I am a bit quirky, and they would be right about that for all sorts of reasons. For example, I love silence, solitude, and simplicity. I love contemporary Christian music, as long as it was written before 1750. I make my own granola. I am not a big fan of desserts, and amazingly, my best friend still seems to want to be married to me. I'm not really asking about other things. So I'll just say that I'm a spiritual director and supervisor of other spiritual directors. I teach the craft of spiritual direction. I also teach a course at Fordham University in New York City, and I help out here at AMBS with the Doctor of Ministry program. I used to be a pastor, but I'm retired from that. Actually, the things you shared earlier were exactly the kind of introduction we like to hear. We like to know a little bit about your life beyond AMBS, so that's great. Dan and I also happen to be neighbors, so we sometimes see each other out in the neighborhood. You like to walk a lot. I know that. We can testify there is indeed life beyond AMBS. Yes, yes. So we always start with this question. Can you tell us a story about a time or a couple of times when you experienced God in a powerful way? Well, the other day in class, this would be the introductory spiritual direction class, we were talking about spiritual direction in the life of congregations. And one of the things I said was that I experienced God more often in one with one spiritual direction or individual spiritual direction than I did in any other expression of pastoral ministry. In fact, I'm aware of God almost all the time while I am offering spiritual direction while I'm meeting with someone. In the spiritual direction, I get a front row seat to watch the drama of God doing great and wonderful things in the lives of other people. There's almost no other place in congregational life where that happens in the same way. There's Jeanine, those are confidential conversations so I can't give you a, or it would be very difficult to give you a specific illustration, but just to say that that's kind of an ongoing theme in my experience of being a director. So for me, God is most often a gentle ongoing reality. To use a musical term, the reality of God is like an ostinato that keeps playing under the surface of things. I love that. And what attracted you to be part of the AMBS community? And I know you did some of your studies here before you transferred so you can speak to that, what attracted you to be a student, but also what attracted you to work at AMBS? Or I mentioned that I'm quirky. Another example of that is when I was in high school. Somehow I don't recall how I procured a copy of the AMBS catalog, which back in those days was always in print form. In those days it's mostly online. I spent hours drooling over the professors I could learn from and the courses I could take and we just paged through that lovingly. I wish that I could just skip college all together and go straight to seminary. Well, as life turned out, I never did get a degree from AMBS, although I did take courses here and I am considered an alumnus. About 15 years ago when Arthur Bowers, who was then a professor at AMBS, suggested that maybe I could teach a little bit at the seminary. Perhaps he saw an interest in me or some gifts, I don't know, you'd have to ask him. But when he mentioned that, I hardly dared to dream of such a thing, even though in fact I had been dreaming about it for decades. Nevertheless, it all came to pass and here I am was much gratitude for the opportunity to have been teaching at AMBS. Teaching, for those of you who have done it, teaching takes enormous work. But it is essential for Anabaptist Mennonites to have a biblical theological center that nurtures our identity and mission. And I don't think we can do that without a denominational seminary. Okay, well, I definitely have to ask you some more questions later about what made you drool over the catalog, because I would love to have some young people now who do that, but maybe we need to get that hard copy out in people's hands. So, tell us more about the spiritual direction practicum and the courses you teach that are part of that. Sure. At AMBS we have three courses on spiritual direction, I teach all of them. The spiritual direction practicum, and depending on how you take the course that might be called spiritual direction foundations. This is our introductory course for people who are interested in becoming spiritual directors. You can take that as part of a master's degree or a graduate certificate, or if you already have a seminary degree you can take it as a continuing education course. It's the same class, by the way. The best introductory literature on spiritual direction, you begin meeting with directees, you receive supervision for your work, and we explore important topics in class related to spiritual direction, like spiritual discernment, prayer, and so on. In this week's class, which happened on Tuesday, we talked about the dark night. We also offer two advanced courses, they are called spiritual direction wisdom and spiritual direction mystery, the wisdom course will be taught this coming year. And in these courses, you continue meeting with directees, receive supervision for your work, and we explore more advanced specialized topics in spiritual direction. For example, in the advanced course, one topic we will explore is creation spirituality, which many people are interested in these days. And in fact, in my own practice over the last, as a spiritual director over the past almost three decades, I see more and more directees who are, what sort I want, they are, they are getting life, spiritual life, because of their connections with creation. Now, you can take any of these three courses, wherever you live, as long as you are fluent in English and have a good computer with a strong internet access, it actually doesn't matter where in the world you are. We blend students together in the classroom on campus with students from other places. And so these days, most people in my courses are not in the classroom at all. They're at home. So just to clarify, you mentioned that next year you'll be teaching one of the advanced classes. Do these courses alternate or do you always teach the introductory course each year? The introductory course is offered every year, if something we have enough students. And then we offer the advanced courses in alternating years. So you could be teaching two courses at the same time, if you have enough students. Okay, I wasn't sure how that worked, so that's great. And we've already gotten a question ahead of time from Sally Shreiner-Youngquist. Thank you, Sally, for sending that in, but this seems like a good time to ask that question. And she's wondering, how has the world of spiritual direction changed since you... Well, no, this is a question you wanted to ask. We'll come back to Sally's question later. I'm sorry. You had suggested that you might speak to how the world of spiritual direction has changed since you became a spiritual director. I received my initial training in spiritual direction in 1996 and immediately started offering direction in my congregation, so I was a solo pastor in those days. Back then, the standards for becoming a spiritual director were comparatively low. You could complete a short training program, and if you wanted to, you could market yourself almost immediately as a spiritual director. Some training programs back then were just a week or so long, while others happened over the course of a year. This is a program that I took lasted for three years, but a lot has changed in the last 28 years. For example, in 1996, we knew more or less how to do individual spiritual direction. But frankly, we didn't know very much yet about how to do group spiritual direction. Some people were doing it, yes, but it had a kind of experimental quality to it. That's changed, and now we understand much better how to do both group direction and individual direction. So the quality of what we're able to offer is much better than it used to be. A second change that's happened is that the standards for being a credible spiritual director have increased significantly. In contrast to three decades ago, we now have a code of ethics to guide our conduct, which is a good thing. When I did my initial training, there were no codes of ethics. We barely talked about ethics at all, but now this is an important part of our work as spiritual directors. If we directors want to advertise our services these days, and yes, advertising is not, some people might cringe without word, but you can choose another one, but that's essentially what it is. We want to advertise ourselves. It's now almost mandatory that we have a website. Because when people are looking for a spiritual director, that's one of the places they look first on the internet. Another thing that's changed is that spiritual directors are setting up business structures that didn't used to happen. Probably the most common business structure now is an LLC or limited liability company that would be in the United States, and then buying insurance to protect themselves in the event of a lawsuit. Well, these things cost money and to pay for them we need to have more than just a handful of directees. The third switch or change is that the best practices for supervision have also gone up. Longer ago it was common for Mennonites in particular, but for many other spiritual directors as well, to meet in peer supervision groups with other spiritual directors. The advantage was that it was cheap. All you had to pay for was the mileage to travel to a meeting. The disadvantage was that probably no one in the group had any training in how to supervise, so the quality of supervision was low to average. That older model of peer group supervision is still being practiced. It's still better than nothing. It still is blessing people and helping us to be good spiritual directors, better spiritual directors. But now, but it is no longer the gold standard. The current gold standard is to join what we call a facilitated supervision group where one person is formally trained in supervision and then leads or facilitates every group meeting. The other gold standard alternatively is to meet with an experienced individual supervisor who also has formal training. And then the fourth thing, and this is the last thing I'll say in response to this question, the fourth major change is Zoom. 30 years ago we met direct ease in person while we were sitting together in the same room. The only exceptions to that, and they were rare, was to meet someone on the phone or to correspond with them by letter, or if you were an early email adopter, maybe by email. And we still do those things, of course, but then the Internet Zoom and COVID came to town. And now it is perfectly ordinary for spiritual directors and directees to meet each other, regardless of where they live. My own spiritual director and my own supervisor both live in California, and obviously we don't meet in the same building. That's pretty amazing to think about all those changes. Now tell us a little bit about your role with the Doctor of Ministry program. Well, I began in 2022, as Jeanine said earlier, as the co-director of the this degree program, along with Jules Gehrich-Lominecker. Last fall I asked the seminary to change my role. I recognize that Jules, unlike me, surly knows competency based education, which is the pedagogical model that we are using for this degree. Jules knows competency based education really well because the PhD which she completed at Andrews University in Michigan used that same approach. So she kind of knows this from the inside out. So we agreed that AMBS would make me more of an assistant to Jules. And then the academic dean gave me the title of curriculum specialist, and then Jules became the director of the degree. So in this modified role as curriculum specialist, I do a variety of things. Last summer, for example, I did some conceptual writing on being, which along with knowing and doing are crucial for every leader to grow in. So at AMBS we talk about leadership having the necessary components of knowing, doing and being. And I worked a little bit more to think about the being part of that. Last fall I revised the demon student manual in light of things we've been learning over the first year of the program. And right now I'm reaching out to selected persons across the United States and Canada to see if they might want to apply to the program. So you do a little recruiting too. I do. All right. Say more about the work you did to develop the being aspect of that. What, what all did you draw on to, to expand that beyond just knowing about being. Does that make sense. Oh yes, sure. So one of the things we notice, Joe and I is that in the master's degree programs. Probably we are emphasizing more the knowing and doing and this is for really good teaching reasons because this these are for these courses are for people at the front end of their ministry careers and they need to know some things, right. There's just no way to get around that you need to know how to do good exegesis. You have to know something about the history of Christian theology and so forth. And we are in the business of training pastors and other leaders. So they also need to know how to do some things like how do you preach. The knowing and the doing get a lot of air time in the master's degrees for really good reasons. Not so much the being part. And it's just a hunch genie is that the being, most of us in most of us in ministry are become more interested in the being parts at about mid life. It is about ethics. It is about character, but more fundamentally it is about an ongoing relationship with the Trinity. And so one of the things we started working on last summer was to say, hmm, we are a biblical seminary. How about we go to the Bible. Yeah, I know. Let's go to the Bible to find out more about being. And so we landed on the fruits of the Spirit that Paul names and Galatians and the Beatitudes in Matthew five. And we're using those as kind of foundational guidelines, if you will, for what being is all about. Of course, I'm using my own work as a spiritual director to work on these notions of being because, frankly, that's one of the big things we talk about in spiritual direction. Your life was God. And this year, for both the second year cohort and the first year cohort, you did an introductory teaching session that kind of grew out of that, I believe, and it was focused on desire. Can you share a bit about, I don't know, why you landed on desire as the theme that you would address and what kinds of, what kinds of things did you learn as you prepared that session for the demon students and maybe as you led them through it. So the Western Christian tradition and the tradition of Western Christian spirituality, I should say, so this is a European Western European spirituality since the fall of the Roman Empire will say a number of key Christian leaders, including Augustine and many others whom we could name, have tagged desire as the engine of the spiritual life, the engine that takes us into a deeper relationship with God. So this desire, of course, starts from God, it originates in God, is given to us as a gift, and then we respond to God's desire with our own desires. So in spirituality, one of the, and again, this is Western spirituality, one of the things we have often said is that when we can identify our deepest desires. So let's think about the layers of a casserole. We've got the superficial layers on top, you know, the things we want some food we want, we might want a nice yard we want a car that works decently and that we can rely on. Superficial things. But as we dig down, we get into more substantive desires. And somewhere there at the bottom is the heart of God's desire for us. So when we can identify that, then we can start to engage God in mission, in relationship and in mission, more freely in the ways that God wants us to engage more often. Now the caveat here is that this is a Western, a Western notion. I was recently speaking with James Cravel, who's a Missiologist, works at AMBS, lived many years in various places in Africa, mostly in East Africa, or is that West Africa, or Iber Coast. At any rate, James said, man, you know, the Africans that I know wouldn't talk about the deepest desires. They would say your deepest desires are the more evil, sinful ones. So, you know, we have some, some language issues here, but we might rephrase this to say the desires which are the most authentic, the most Godlike, we can find other language for that. Thanks. So what are some of your current research interests? Yes. This is again going to sound quirky, probably, but my current research is learning to read and pronounce Middle English, which was the variety of English spoken in England from about 1150 to 1500. In the 1300s and 1400s, England experienced a flowering of great spiritual writers, including Richard Rohl, Walter Hilton, Marjorie Kemp, the anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing, and Julian Norwich. My immediate goal is to read Julian of Norwich carefully in her original Middle English. And then to prepare an article about her as a spiritual director. So far, I have not been able to find an article that anyone has done like that, at least in the English language. And I want to see what I can come up with maybe for publication. And after that, we shall see where this foray into Middle English literature takes me. That sounds really interesting. What is a dream you have for AMBS? When I began teaching at AMBS in 2013, people who wanted to take a spiritual direction course had to come to Elkhart and meet together in a classroom. Back then, teaching was actually easier. I gave students paper handouts, and we used chalkboards. The only technology I had to worry about was making sure I had enough chalk. Those days are long past. Now we use the technology of computers and internet to connect with people like we are today. So I might have class members who are sitting in any number of states or Canadian provinces all at the same time. And this means that before every class meeting, I have to set up the technology to make sure it's working correctly. And usually that means two computers, mine and the one that's in the classroom. And getting those computers to talk to each other can be interesting sometimes. We're distributed electronically. And in these days, this is a recent phenomenon, but these days I even have students who live in this area in Elkhart or Goshen, but choose to join class by Zoom. They never come to campus. Well, this is just one of the new phases of seminary education. Another new phase for AMBS is our high number of students in other countries around the world who never come to the United States. And again, this has happened since I started teaching 11 years ago. It's technology. So the downside of this one downside is that for teachers, that means we are always dealing with technological glitches, which takes extra time, can cause some aggravation. But I celebrate these things because now we can offer training to people who cannot come to Elkhart or to the US. And I hope this continues. That's I guess my dream is let's just keep doing this because I think it's blessing us. And frankly, we need to do it. Well, speaking of dreams. Now we'll get to Sally's question. Sally remembers you telling of a significant dream you had about caring for cows. Sally helped point you toward the ministry as a vocation. And she's wondering if you could say something about how spiritual directors work with dreams and helping their directives interpret them. Thank you, Sally. Sally Schreiner-Youngquist for that question. Yeah, and it's good to be in touch with you today, Sally. So, yes, I used to, I did not only have one cow dream. I had probably a hundred of them. I am not exaggerating. And yes, they did help point me to becoming a pastor about 40 years ago when I was still struggling with that question. In spiritual direction, the person's dreams can be one way that God communicates with us. This of course is something that the Bible itself testifies to. But one guideline about dreams is that they always point us to more life. God is always using them to invite us to take another step forward into more of the life that God wants for us. Even what we experience as a nightmare does this. So in dreams, there is always good news somewhere. It's like a good sermon. If you're going to preach a good sermon, you should tell good news somewhere. Well, dreams do something similar to that. However, a good director will not tell the person what the dream means because only the dreamer can really do that. A director can be a compassionate, contemplative companion and the director can ask evocative questions about the dream so that the dreamer is able to come to the meaning for themselves. And we almost always, when the dreamer gets to the core gift of the dream, there will be an aha moment, like a light bulb going off and they'll say, ah, yes. And dreams actually love to pun. They make puns frequently. So one place to kind of walk into a dream is to inquire, hmm, might there be an unhear somewhere that it's, that is trying to open up something for me. And I'm sure you can teach a whole course just on that, right? There'd be so many different ways people have worked with dreams and spiritual direction. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the advanced courses we do have a session on dreams. Okay. Here's another question from now on Serato. You mentioned that you experienced God in one to one meetings often.  And he notes some of the spiritual encounters, like Peter and Cornelius meeting one another or Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman and declaring God is spirit or Job, saying my, my ears had heard about you but now my own eyes have seen you. Thank you now and for that question. Yeah, it's a good question now. What I would say is that yes, when God shows up in a spiritual direction session that I'm doing with someone else. Often, not always, but often, there will also be a word or a message or an invitation for me. It affects me, perhaps, over the long term. Now, I don't talk about that in while I'm meeting with this person. No, I just bracket that or if you will, I take that and put it on a shelf somewhere. Jeanine's got a shelf behind her. It's a great image. I put it up there on the shelf knowing that I can come back to it later. And I might talk about it with my wife. Not that I would talk about the direct D or the direct these issues with my wife but if it's my own material I can talk with her about it. Or I might talk with my supervisor, or my own spiritual director. So I don't do that in the session of the person but sure. I do talk about who taught the spiritual direction courses before I did used to say is something like the fact that one of the things you learn is a spiritual director is that the direct these issues will often touch your own issues. Thank you. And we're glad to have Marlene joining us today. Doug obstates is noting as a graduate of the CAC living school. I find we as Anabaptists have so much in common with the CAC slash Franciscan mystic contemplative practice and action. We're aware a way that ambias can collaborate with the CAC in spiritual teachings or collab cooperation. We're all part of the quote minority report in Christianity and I feel we need all the connection and collaboration we can get. Thank you Doug for that question. I don't know what the answer is I've never thought about that before, and I don't recall anyone else ever mentioning that possibility. So, yeah, maybe, but I have, I don't have much to say about that right now. How much have you engaged with the materials that they put out and do you feel like that like Doug does that they are. There's some things that we can learn from one another. So that part sure. Absolutely. I have read Richard war some, not all these books. And of course he's coming to. He's getting quite elderly at this point. And I do sense, yes that there is a great deal of overlap or affinity that we would have with an organ with a group like the Center for action and contemplation. I think it's not just the Center for action and contemplation. It would also there are also other groups in the US and Canada that we would have some affinities with. I, for example, have decided to join. Tom, I should say a come all the leaves Benedictine oblate. I'm attached to the monastery of the risen Christ and Christ in San Luis Obispo, California. And in the Maldives tradition we talk about three values three core values. And solitude and service. Well the first and the third ones of course sound very very comfortable for a good and a Baptist Mennonite. We believe in community, we believe in service, but it's the solitude part that is not, it doesn't quite get so much attention in our tradition, but it certainly is in the come all the leaves tradition, and I'm learning from them. That's why I joined. That's why I became an oblate. So I am looking to see if there's any final questions from the group that's here. One more has come in so theology seems to be a subject with unlimited expansion in terms of the different practical applications that communities find in the biblical text. This reflect on the practice of spiritual direction and does this expansion anyway increase the need for direction. Thank you Friedbert August for that question. Ah, Friedbert. Okay. Yes, yes. All right, well, um, when I went to seminary the first time so this was a Chicago theological seminary which is loosely in the reform tradition. One of the things we were taught how to do is constructive theology. Meaning that we construct a theology that we know some things about the history of theology and the themes of theology like creation and salvation and redemption and all that sort of thing. But the constructive approach is to take what we know about theology and apply it to this current situation. You could also call it incarnational theology if you want to, but you, you construct a theology that is meaningful for the situation with the context that you are in. And absolutely, that is sort of what we do in spiritual direction. The caveat of course is that spiritual direction is not about not about we don't talk. The purpose of spiritual direction is not to talk extensively about theology, but I and the director can use what we know about the Bible and theology to inform and enhance our conversation and make it. Incarnational for this person. Well, thank you so much Dan for answering these questions for giving us some windows of insight into what you're doing at ambias and we're so grateful for both of your roles here. Thanks to all of our alumni who joined us today for your ongoing support of ambias. I say this all the time, but it really is true that you are most important influencers, both in terms of identifying others who might come to ambias. And if you think of someone you'd like to suggest that to please let us know so we can be in touch with them. And also in your financial and prayer support of ambias. These, these things are so critical and to remember to stay in touch with us via the church leadership center and its offerings. If you haven't checked out yet the practical leadership trainings, those are just really wonderful opportunities as well as the short courses and next week is pastors and leaders and I know many alumni are coming for that. So we're grateful for your ongoing participation. Remember that as a graduate of ambias if you're graduate you get the option of having a discount on audits. So if you're interested in taking a class this summer or next fall, you can talk to me about that as well. Next month on March 21 our third Thursday conversation will be with Deanna Risser, who's our chief financial officer. So hope you can join us again to hear some of the things that you might not be aware of in terms of what goes on in the behind the scenes roles at ambias. Thanks again for joining us today and thanks to our student Janet McGarry for being our AV technician. And I hope that you have a wonderful day. This concludes our third Thursday program for this month. Thank you.


Cyber Conflict, Module 15, Social Media and Information Operations. Once you have completed the readings, lecture, activity and assessment, you will be able to articulate how nation states can use social media for information operations. Describe why novelty is considered important for the spread of fake news. Welcome to Cyber Conflict, Module 15. This course has introduced you to the United States four major adversaries in cyberspace, China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. It has also offered some background on how these countries use their cyber capabilities. We have seen that Russia manipulates its enemies through propaganda and other activities associated with reflexive control theory. China typically uses cyber tools for espionage related to the development of its economy and military forces. Iran spies on its own population with cyber technology to disrupt anti-regime sentiment or subsequent protests. And North Korea develops asymmetric cyber weapons to disrupt the ability of U.S. and South Korean forces to respond to crises on a Korean peninsula, as well as a means of gaining respect in international diplomatic circles. Based on Russia's success in using social media to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, we are likely to see other adversaries use similar methods of social media for similar reasons in the future. Certainly, influencing the outcome of democratic elections is not the only way for adversaries to use social media. For instance, as your readings point out, both Israel and Hamas used social media during the Gaza conflict to inform or influence target audiences about ongoing military operations in the so-called First Twitter War. However, to understand how our adversaries may go about targeting future U.S. elections, let's review a recent report filed by special counsel Robert Mueller, which outlines the degree of Russia's interference. In February 2018, Mueller filed an indictment that detailed how the Russian government used social media to meddle in the 2016 presidential election. The indictment charged 16 individuals for their roles in working with a Russian troll farm, the Internet Research Agency. According to the indictment charges, the Internet Research Agency engaged in information warfare by, quote, impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful governmental functions of the United States, end quote. The indictment outlined how Russian operatives impersonated U.S. citizens to create fake social media accounts of political activists. Russia then attempted to influence Americans through both false and biased information on those accounts. To succeed, Russia's front organization, the Internet Research Agency, oversaw a sophisticated operation employing hundreds and with an operating budget of several million U.S. dollars. The agency was headed by a fully staffed management group and organized into several departments, including graphic design, data analysis, search engine optimization, and information technology. One member of the agency's management group, Alexandra Khrilova, actually traveled to the United States under false pretenses to collect intelligence to better inform the organization's operations. Khrilova's information combined with other employees' research findings allowed the agency to create social media pages on a range of polarizing issues, such as immigration, religion, and culture. By 2016, some of these social media pages had gained hundreds of thousands of followers and were being shared and referred to by more mainstream news sites. Mueller's indictment does an excellent job of highlighting the logistics of an information warfare effort, but it does not broach the question of how or why people are influenced by fake news. In early 2018, the journal Science published the results of a study that looks at this question. The study examined more than 126,000 contested stories disseminated through Twitter and found that the number of times that the fake news story was shared was significantly higher than real news stories, especially if the topic involved business, terrorism, war, entertainment, and politics. For example, the study found that fake stories on Twitter were shared at a 70% higher rate than true stories. Why is this? Although we have no absolute answers yet, the study pointed out that information theory predicts that stories with novel content are more likely to attract human attention and be subsequently shared than stories lacking such novelty. The study noted that novel stories are perceived as being attractive because they update our understanding of the world, and from a social perspective, increase one's status by being in the know. Although it may seem that we are far from preventing adversaries from intervening in future elections or otherwise attempting to influence our nation's policies, we have at least been enlightened to the problem, which is the first step in combating it. According to the Science Journal article that you read, which of the following is not a reason that fake news is able to rapidly proliferate? A. The novelty of false news stories better engages the human attentional system. B. People feel that sharing novel news stories may increase their social status. C. When information is novel, people intuitively feel that it is worth more and are more likely to share it. D. People knowingly share fake news stories out of boredom. The answer is D. People knowingly share fake news stories out of boredom. True or false? Nation states have been known to use fake news to shape perceptions regarding the efficacy and legality of military operations. The answer is true. The activity for this module asks that you consider how much do you think you were influenced by fake news generated by Russian troll farms during the 2016 U.S. presidential election? To try and find out, perform an Internet search for the names of fake news sites produced by the Internet Research Agency. Then, review your Facebook and Twitter posts during the election season. Did you comment or share articles that are now known to be fake? If so, what about these articles attracted your attention? Did you find them somehow novel? What steps can you take to mitigate the effect of future fake news stories?


Hi, my name is Niyate Chakrapani, also known as Ziet Mahamaya. I'm a former product manager at Microsoft now working at Consumer Direct. I'm the product manager for Hogo, a new app launching on October 20th, 2022 for consumer privacy and financial technology. You can learn more about us at hogo.com. The world is full of uncertainty, which leads to stress and real negative health effects. Everything you do is grounded in assumptions. Your brain evolved to take meaningless data and apply or create meaning. Product management is one of the most creative, rewarding, and self-developing roles in technology and uses creativity to deal with this uncertainty and provide positive outcomes for users. So what is creativity? It begins with not knowing. With a question. It relates to a number of ancient concepts. Huwe, simplistically translated to effortless action, the art of getting out of one's own way. Sahaja, spontaneous and natural enlightenment more literally translated to to be born together. And a number of others. We know now that creativity looks a certain way in the brain. And no, not just your right brain. Creativity involves a co-activation of three networks. The executive attention network, which is recruited during concentration that puts substantial demands on working memory. The default network also referred to as the imagination network, which is majorly involved in constructing dynamic mental simulations based on personal past experiences and used in remembering and collecting, thinking about the future, and generally when imagining alternative perspectives and scenarios to the present. It's also involved in engaged in social cognition, like when we're imagining what someone else is thinking. And the salience network, which selects which stimuli are worthy of our attention and has a robust prediction of individual creative ability from brain functional connectivity. An interesting feature of these three networks is that they're not typically activated at the same time, but research suggests that creative people are better able to co-activate brain networks that usually work separately, especially in the flow or trance state.  So while some people might have genetic and environmental factors which predispose them to creativity, it is something that anyone can learn and wire themselves for. Creativity is central to product management, whether it be identifying and questioning assumptions, empathizing and communicating, or brainstorming and problem solving with divergent thinking demonstrated by a presence of solutions and knowledge of differences. The job is almost impossible without creative thinking and system integration. The product manager sits at the intersection of the user, the technical team, and the business. We have to think like our users, but we aren't the target user. We have to understand the technology, but we're not the technical team or the ones building it. We have to understand the business, but we're not the business. No one person is. What we are doing is connecting the dots between disciplines and becoming a force multiplier. We have to be able to make associations, which is really what product creativity is. Once we have more connections between different pathways, it becomes easier and easier, basically exponentially, to be creative and innovative, words that are so overloaded, but can actually be broken down into simple concepts. As I said earlier, we often make assumptions in order to survive a very uncertain world, but those assumptions can be a detriment as well. While they are helpful to simplify things, we don't have all the information that we need, and we never will. So we need to be able to step back and figure out what assumptions we've made in the first place, something that's hard for nearly everyone. We also need to be able to communicate with others in a way that not just we can understand, but them. In fact, information by itself that hasn't been communicated, while not useless, is not useful in a group setting. We need to be able to understand the context of someone else's communication style and the knowledge that they already have. Now, we can't actually do that, but we can make assumptions that we then identify and investigate. Brainstorming and problem solving are maybe more obvious publications of creativity, but they're not easy. Even if you have an aptitude for problem solving or ideating, you need to be able to put constraints in order to use your time effectively, as well as think through a number of different types of solutions and understand the differences of them to optimize for the best solution. Anyone that's led a brainstorm knows that constraints make the process more efficient. It's like a writing prompt.  Giving your brain something to latch onto, to start and to know where boundaries are, helps the creative process. We have to be able to empathize with and know as best we can our user and come up with innovative solutions in order to meet their needs, possibly solutions and probably solutions that they haven't even thought of themselves. And this cannot be done in a vacuum. This can't be done alone. A product manager is a team player, so part of the creative work is actually in teamwork. In order to identify strengths, differences of opinion, and associations between opinions in order to come up with a solution. Moreover, a product manager needs to be aware of all aspects of the business, and especially in more lean teams, may even take on a role of marketing, sales, and more. And if you come from a creative background or want to develop more of a creative background, this can be directly applicable in ways that you might not have thought of.  You often have to present your ideas in a creative way, even if you've already thought of a creative idea. Like we said, communicating is maybe more than half the battle. A great product manager is a force multiplier. Someone who uses the impact of others to create more impact and whose presence increases the impact that others are able to have. A great product manager also has a combination of divergent, convergent, inspective, and imaginative thinking, which you can imagine on a sort of graph. The Inspect Imagine Access refers to how a PM will approach the problem, product, or project from a more pragmatic or realistic point of view to a more creative and imaginative point of view. Meanwhile, the Divergent Convergent Access, which both are used, by the way, in brainstorming, refers to where to focus the attention, being the divergent and more open think, where a lot of ideas are explored to a convergent or deep think focusing on a single aspect or idea. We didn't touch on how inspecting and imagining are part of the brainstorming process specifically, but you can think about it in terms of creativity more generally. By crossing these axes, we can see a vast ocean of possibilities for a product manager to position themselves toward the product. In his lecture, Ken Sandy presents four clusters that he calls the four mindsets of a product manager. The first one is the Explorer mindset, which combines an imaginative point of view with a divergent way to see the world. The Explorer defines a vision, seeks opportunities and solutions by looking away from the product itself, and often borrows these solutions from other products similar or not from their own. It is ideal that an Explorer product manager pursues multiple solutions concurrently, validating and testing these different ideas to fail fast and cheap. The second mindset is the Analyst, who focuses on the aspects of the product and inspection, but sustains an open think standpoint or divergence. An Analyst product manager is concerned about metrics, how to set them and how to measure them. They're a data explorer and observer. A usual aspect of this kind of mindset is to interview customers. Being analytic is a good way to understand the customer and their unmet needs, and it's important to know that being analytic is not the antithesis or antonym of being creative. These things are not left brain, right brain, separated. Those are all simplifications. The third mindset is the Challenger. The Challenger, a combination of inspection and convergence, identifies and mitigates risks. It's a mindset for the PM who approaches ideas as hypothesis and requires continuous validation. The Challenger listens to problem finders and is always searching for ways to focus, prioritize, and cut. And last, but certainly not least, is the Evangelist mindset, focusing on motivating the team and building support with a combination of convergent and imaginative thinking. Also don't hear that imagination and convergence are not opposites either. The Evangelist communicates with all the stakeholders, understands different kinds of communication and sets context. More importantly, they lose ownership over the product to the team, giving them all a sense of unit and engagement. You're likely more skilled in and prone to one mindset of being a product manager, but it's important as a well-rounded great PM to be involved in them all, within one product or multiple, within one day, one week, one month, one career, I don't know. But you will have to use these different types of thinking as a well-rounded individual to make a great product. Creatives are also associated with higher levels of emotional intelligence, which makes it easier to empathize with customers, stakeholders, and team members by engaging, listening, and learning from them, which is the secret to building awesome products. Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify and manage your own emotions and the emotion of others. Emotional intelligence is generally said to include four core skills, emotional self-awareness, what I see plus my personal confidence, social awareness, or empathy, what I see plus my social competence. Self-management or motivation, what I do plus my personal competence, and relationship management or social skills, what I do plus my social competence. Creativity is also associated with resilience. Creatives feed off of adversity. They don't run from it. They embrace it. Adversity is where the creative process starts. Our problem is nothing more than an opportunity to create something better, to see things differently, and to discover new paths forward. Creatives thrive on collaborating within diverse teams to hear a variety of perspectives because they know that these can lead to bigger and better ideas. So how do you build your creativity? Creativity appears when we allow for unconscious, unfiltered, or random sensations to arise in the flow state. Integrate your knowledge. Create synaptic connections by finding associations between concepts. The more you have different sets of neurons firing to one another across pathways, the easier it is for those new pathways to fire next time, and the more pathways you now have to think through things. Also, schedule time for imagination, daydreaming, visualization, with constraints. In order to achieve flow, psychologist Mahay Chiksemay lays out the following three conditions. The goals are clear, the feedback is immediate, and a balance exists between opportunity and capacity. Other great techniques include journaling, taking visual notes in mind maps, painting, drawing, coloring, dancing and using your body, and exercising. Do things in moderation that give you joy and minimize harm to yourself and others, and remember that love and joy are exponential when collected. Practice positive psychology and gratitude, including nightly gratitude journaling. This will all improve your mood and activate the anterior cingulate cortex which is associated with insight. Address addictions and avoid other hijackings of neural pathways. Use psychoactive substances like caffeine as a tool if you want help. Eat healthy foods and practice raja yoga including pranayama and meditation. Perform samyama, the combined simultaneous practice of dharana, concentration, dhyana, meditation, and samadhi, union. Yogi B.K. Iyengar says, fixing the consciousness on one point or region is concentration, dharana. A steady continuous flow of attention directed towards the same point or region is meditation, dhyana. When the object of meditation engulfs the meditator, appearing as the subject, self-awareness is lost. This is samadhi. These three together constitute integration or samyama. For mastery of samyama comes the light and awareness of awareness and insight. Samyama may be applied in various spheres to drive its usefulness. And seek diverse community perspectives. Use the wisdom of Nguni Bangtu philosophies of Ubuntu. I am because we are. Being self through others and humanity most literally. Be present in the moment and breathe. Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese monk and associate of the Dalai Lama recommends you say in your head while inhaling, as I breathe in, I know I am alive and while exhaling, as I breathe out, I smile. Or simply in, out, to bring awareness to your breathing and presence. And rest and sleep. These are some of the greatest things that you can do to improve your creativity. Gratitude trades the brain to focus on the positive, altering its normally negatively biased information filtering tendencies. This impacts mood, but it also increases novelty since we're used to the negative, the positive is often refreshingly different. Gratitude feeds the salience network with more raw material and the good mood that results gives the default mode network a better shot at using the material to make something startlingly new. Mindfulness teaches the brain to be calm, focused and non-reactive, amplifying executive attention. It also put the little space between thought and feeling and gives the ACC more time to consider alternative, far-flowing possibilities. Exercise lowers stress levels, fleshing cortisol from our system while increasing feel-good neurochemicals, including serotonin, norepinephrine, endorphins, and dopamine. This lowers anxiety, augments our good mood, and amps up the ACC's ability to detect remote possibilities. Plus, the timeout that exercise provides works as an incubation period. A good night's rest also provides additional benefits. In fact, one might say the most important ones of all. It increases our energy levels, providing resources to meet challenges. It improves memory consolidation and mood. The resulting feeling of safety also lifts our mood and increases our willingness to take risks and amplify creativity. Moreover, sleep is the most critical incubation period of them all. When we sleep, the brain has time to find all sorts of hitting connections between ideas. Gratitude, mindfulness, and exercise and sleep are non-negotiables for sustained peak performance. The non-negotiable part is key. When life gets complicated, these four practices are often what we remove from our schedule. But when life gets complicated, lean into these practices instead to get the creativity needed to untangle the complicated. If you already consider yourself creative and want to enter into product management, ramp up on system design and technical concepts that you are interested in and that people are hiring for. Look into industry professional transition programs, especially in companies that will pay you for this, and roles looking for non-traditional backgrounds, possibly in startups. And most importantly, build projects. What problems can you solve today? What goals can you achieve? What does the market need that you are uniquely positioned to provide? You will have a harder time convincing people that you can do what you say you can do than you will actually doing it. If you're already a product manager, how do you know your team needs a boost of creativity? Signs include converging answers and perpetual alignment. Encourage creativity on your team by expanding the individual techniques to a group setting and hire for creativity with the following principles. Remember that there are many types of intelligence and abilities and not all of them are rewarded by society with obvious merits. Consider people with non-traditional career backgrounds, fewer qualifications on paper, and diverse marginalizations. Ask candidates to make visual, verbal, kinetic, and other associations. Scout candidates on non-traditional platforms like social media, lower tier colleges, and related less skilled work. All of these terms are not things I agree on, but are used today. Test teamwork and collaboration by working on a problem together as insight is rarely developed alone. Value passion. Make a creative job posting may be a riddle. Value diversity, including disability and different ability. Give candidates questions beforehand where they can showcase their ideas, but do not overwhelm them with too much work during their job search or ask them to solve business problems for you without pay. Ask the same questions of all candidates and provide the same set of information for fairness. Always accommodate online interviews and proactively ask for candidates, accommodations, pronouns, and preferred names. Remove your ego and value differences. This might be the most important thing of them all. I'll conclude with a quote by Picasso. Everything you can imagine is real. Thank you for joining today.


Meditating is cleaning your internal environment. And when you face it, breathe with it, you can make peace with it. Hello, citizens, my name is Courtney, and I'm a brain education instructor from Boston. Today, let's talk about cleaning. This time of year, most people will naturally be rummaging through closets, tidying out drawers, and does anyone else have a room or a closet in their house where they store things they don't know what to do with? I hope that's not just me. Anyway, spring cleaning is a well-known activity around this time of year, and many of us are focusing on cleaning out our external environment. But what about our internal environment? I'm talking about cleaning your mind. All the invisible parts of ourselves, like our thoughts, emotions, memories, stresses, just like your closet can keep piling up with all the stuff you don't know what to do with. If you don't clean your mind, your body can end up being just like that closet. What would happen if you didn't clean your kitchen after you cooked? How difficult would it be to cook your next meal with all the dishes in the sink and food still on the counter? And I'm not just talking about pushing it to the side or suppressing it. I'm talking about cleaning it, processing it. That is the power of meditation. But a lot of people tell me they have a hard time meditating. And from my personal experience, here's why. When we look inward, before things get quiet, they may feel louder. This is part of the process of becoming more aware of your inner environment. We can actually live for a long time on the surface of our consciousness, unaware or perhaps even avoiding what may be going on underneath. Let's say your body is a house and your mind is the owner of that house. Your mind is kept very busy focusing on things outside of your house, your job, your family, your community, your responsibilities. After a while, more and more of your time is spent outside than in. And we can live like that for a while, just staying busy and focusing on things outside ourselves. However, we may get to a point where we feel something is missing and we decide to try meditation to come back home. When you meditate, you're asking the owner to come back into the house. When you come back to a house after spending a long time away from it, what is the house going to look like? When you open the door, it might be dark. Some of us might even be afraid of the dark. You may bang into things as you walk into the house. You may think you see a ghost or hear scary noises. Then you turn on the lights and you see that it was a drawer that you banged into. The ghost was a shadow, the noise was a mouse. Once you have your eyes open, it isn't as scary as you imagined, but you can see the mess. You can see the dirt, the cobwebs, maybe some bugs, et cetera. Turning on the light represents your awareness. Once you become more aware, you can move the furniture, turn the heat on, roll up your sleeves and clean. When we're cleaning internally, that may mean feeling emotions we haven't been able to process. The stress we may have compartmentalized because we had to function at work. We may feel discomfort from conflicts we might have within our relationships. Bold wounds, trauma may resurface and that can be scary. But do you want to clean them up or do you want to keep them in your body? The key is to get comfortable with your own internal dirt. This is just old emotions, stress that I need to do something about. But if you open the door to your house and go, this is disgusting, run away, we disconnect from ourselves. A big part of meditation is the practice of being okay with whatever you observe within your internal environment. Try not to judge it, try not to react to it. And when you do, you may find it starts to dissipate on its own. Feeling your emotions with neutrality and acceptance is cleaning, you're processing or digesting them so that they're no longer bottled up and stored in your body, your house. Often it's our fear and our reaction that stops us from being able to process our feelings. We can't accept we have dirt, but we do, we're human. Meditation is cleaning, it's purifying. So when you meditate and heaviness or emotion arises, great, it means you're doing well. It's a good opportunity to practice self-compassion, self-empathy, self-love. And then when you aren't walking around with all this stuff under the surface, naturally you'll feel more clear-headed, more able to prioritize, more able to give and love yourself and others. Actually, all of us want to be around people who are internally clean, not holding onto grudges, protecting themselves or judging others. Here are a few ways to do that. One, I've already mentioned several times, meditation. But it doesn't always have to be still or static. BETV has so many videos for moving or dynamic meditations. And in fact, anything can be a meditation when you're being mindful. My personal favorites are the chakra meditations. Two, get outside. Nature has a way of helping us clear our mind. Trees aren't capable of anger. Neither are rocks or mountains. Nature just is. We can be reminded of our inner nature as we connect to nature outside ourselves. As you spend time outdoors, your thoughts may start to quiet. You'll feel your body more, your emotions will settle. Third is journaling, getting all your thoughts and emotions down on paper. It tends to take their charge down a notch and help you organize and clean your inner environment. But whatever you do, try to make a habit of it. Because we may only do spring cleaning once a year, but how often do we clean our house? How often do we shower or brush our teeth? And how often do you think you accumulate stress and worries daily? Try to make a habit of inner cleaning daily. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to experience a full one hour brain education, find a body and brain center near you. See you next time.


Aloha and welcome to Stand the Energy Man. Stan Osserman coming to you live and direct on think te kauai directly from the mighty megalopolis of Kailua. Another beautiful day. My guest today is my pet rooster who just happens to start growing right before my show right on cue, just like I apologize. He just loves participating on Stand the Energy Man. But today we're gonna talk through a bunch of the things that are going on in the hydrogen world. You know, the world is focused right now on so many things, COVID and the inflation and stuff. And right now over in Europe, they've got COP26 going on where all the worlds rich people get together flying on their jets and build a bunch of the sky full of carbon. To talk about the pressing issues of greenhouse gases and the centigrade of Thunberg, you know, lecture us about how we're not doing enough to take care of our carbon footprint. But anyway, we are taking care of our carbon footprint and a lot's going on, but nobody hears it because we're busy talking about what's not going on and that's kind of counterproductive. So I'm gonna tell you what is going on. And we're gonna talk a little bit about what's going on specifically with hydrogen. And then we're gonna talk a little bit about what's going on in general in the energy world. So to start off with from the Ohio Fuel Cell Coalition which turns out a really great newsletter. Got a couple of stories. This one comes from PR Web. This Plug Power and Heaven Drones announces a joint development alliance between the two companies. Heaven Drones is a leader in the development and commercialization of actionable drone platforms with heavy lift capabilities today. And they announced that they have a bilateral alliance with Plug Power, a leading provider of hydrogen engines and fueling solutions enabling mobility. So Heaven Drones designed its own proprietary operating systems and it's the exclusive company selected. This is important by the Israeli Ministry of Defense to develop and customize lead of hydrogen fuel cell drone. Specifically, Heaven Drones is working with the DDR and D their research and development spokes in Israel on a specialized unit responsible for research and development of advanced technologies. That's a real keeper. That means that hydrogen is being taken seriously by one of the militaries that really has the most at risk in the world is really defense forces. Next story comes from the Ballard Press Release. It says Ballard and 4C Power who entered a long-term strategic partnership to develop and commercialize integrated fuel cell and battery solutions for heavy duty hydrogen mobility. This is important. You know, a lot of people don't realize that hydrogen and fuel cell vehicles are electric vehicles and they also contain batteries. And the real trick when you do a mobility solution with hydrogen is matching the ratio between batteries and hydrogen and which system is gonna provide what kind of power. We have systems called battery primary or battery focus power and fuel cell power and shift between the two. So sometimes you might wanna like the Toyota Mirai is fuel cell dominant. It really has a powerful, powerful fuel cell and only relies on the battery for bursts of power at startup and things like that. Most of the power overall is delivered by the fuel cell. But the battery dominant fuel cells have big batteries and they just have the fuel cell like charging the batteries all the time. Now, Ballard and this 4C power that solution they're coming up with is important because that mix has to be paired with what you're using the technology for. And so it's really important that they've set up this partnership. So Ballard system, a world leader in chem fuel cells and 4C power a leader in smart battery systems for sustainable electromobility, meaning transportation announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding for a strategic partnership to develop fully integrated fuel cell and battery solutions optimized for performance cost and installation for heavy duty hydrogen mobility applications. I'm assuming that means class A trucks, class seven trucks probably even locomotives and other things. So that's a critical development that has a huge impact across all sectors and in the hydrogen world. Out of a location called microgrid knowledge there's an article on fuel cells on the microgrid gap solution that customers seek. And this is important too because a lot of people when they start talking microgrids and they start pricing the need for long-term storage of energy and they start looking at batteries they quickly are overwhelmed by the huge cost and recurring cost of batteries plus end of life disposable and things like that. But people are starting in mass in droves to recognize how hydrogen really complements microgrids in long-term energy storage. So this story again is from microgrid knowledge and says utility businesses and homeowners are tuned to the value of microgrids as reliability solutions. They're being deployed around the United States in all shapes and sizes and combinations from dense urban environments to rural farms. However, the conventional path to new microgrids microgrid doesn't work for everyone who needs one. Increasing the wildfires, hurricanes, severe weather grid infrastructure fails and public safety power shutoffs have made backup generation for critical infrastructure or critical and essential loads necessary for many but they can't afford to wait the 12 to 24 months for a microgrid to be installed. They face a power gap. So what this article is talking about is the real need again, just like in the previous comment about the pairing up the batteries and the fuel cells and pairing up the solutions for microgrids. You know, basically a single family home with a battery backup system in solar, the microgrid especially if you're not connected to the public utility but that can be a small microgrid or a mini, mini microgrid but so can a network of hospitals being, excuse me linked on the same network with other microgrids to provide resiliency in a big system but they all need to be designed and that's the critical piece. So they're saying that the industry in hydrogen has grown enough that we need to have a company or companies that provide solutions in putting together all the pieces all the components of hydrogen and solar distribution, DC-DC converters, DC-AC converters, things like that to really supply an entire solution for institutions and buildings of all kinds because there's all kinds that need. So I think that, and I think that's really a good if you're an electronic electrical engineering system designer, that's really a place for a company to grow. The next story comes from Argus Media and it's about Phillips 66 upbeat on hydrogen fuel. Again, Phillips 66 is a big fossil fuel company. So Phillips 66 is optimistic that hydrogen can help diversify the energy mix as industries around the world step up efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in coming years. After introducing a lower carbon unit called the Emerging Energy in January of this year, the US independent refiner, Phillips 66, fielded a rush of calls from groups looking for project investment as well as a fair amount of commentary from peers skeptical of hydrogen and their hydrogen initiatives. That's according to the vice president of emerging energy, Heath DePriest. So what you've got in this story is an example of the industry is recognizing that we need to have hydrogen and the mix on micro grids and solutions that mitigate our greenhouse gas emissions. But a lot of the fossil fuel industries and power producers that are out there that haven't taken the time to understand hydrogen solutions are looking at hydrogen data from 10 or 15 or 20 years ago. And who poohing it saying that it doesn't work it's too expensive, not ready for technology, blah, blah, blah. So much has happened in the last 20 years with technology that really companies need to look like Phillips at the need to use hydrogen in large-term energy storage. The next story comes from Swift headline. It's a universal hydrogen to start testing fuel cells in passion in a passenger jet. So universal hydrogen, a Los Angeles startup once they convert passenger planes to flying hydrogen then it'll start testing its fuel cells with a 40 seat jet next year after it raised a fresh bunch of funding from investors including 10 cent and GE aviation. The company has attracted 62 million in new investment on top of its 22 million and it raised in April with its valuation climbing from 55 million to 262 million and other investors including the venture arms of Toyota, JetBlue and PortaQ, PortaSq, universal hydrogen has already signed deals with at least five regional airlines to buy conversion kits to replace their current engines with hydrogen fuel cell and electric motors. It said the plane should be operational by 2025, 2025. I mean, for practical purposes, that's three years from now. So hydrogen aviation is not as far off as everybody thinks and even Airbus has already announced that by 2035 they will be marketing and selling three hydrogen fuel cell or hydrogen powered aircraft including commuter size all the way up to 200 passenger long range aircraft. And so some of the companies that are gonna be purchasing these aircraft from universal hydrogen are Ravin from Alaska, Spain's Aaron Ostrom and Ireland's ASL aviation. So aviation is also starting to recognize the energy density of hydrogen makes it one of the lightest fuels on the market energy wise and perfect choice for anything that relates to aviation. Advent Technology announces successful installation of the Advent fuel cell system in the Philippines telecom sector. This is from a company called Business Wire. On the Boston Advent Technologies Holdings, today announced that it was partnered with Smart Communications Inc. The company has successfully completed the first installation of its HD 5000 fuel cell system across the Philippines. The delivery agreement was made earlier this year between Smart and the Philippines and Advent Technologies AS of Denmark, formerly Sir Energy AS. Smart's partnership with Advent follows a commitment United Nations Race to Zero campaign with the GSM Association. GSM A is a member of the trade alliance of Climate Action Task Force. So that technology was put in place primarily I think for telecommunications backup. The Philippines obviously has a bunch of islands that are isolated, a lot of territory to cover including cross-channel territory. And it's great to have telecommunications companies recognize the importance of hydrogen in their systems. Let me see, Enos confirms fuel cell version of Grenadier retro SUV green hydrogen plant. Enos on Monday announced, and this is from Green Car Reports. Enos on Monday announced a 2.3 billion, that's with a B investment in what the chemical company calls green hydrogen production which could pave the way for a fuel cell version of their Enos Grenadier SUV. The investment will fund plants in Norway, Germany, Belgium and the United Kingdom that will produce hydrogen through electrolysis of screen hydrogen. And Enos press release said, the company already has some plans in operation through the subsidiary of Eno in Oven and claims to be the largest operator of such a plant in Europe. Another component of the investment is the 100 megawatt electrolyzer in Cologne, Germany that will produce hydrogen intended for green ammonia production. Transitioning to green ammonia could reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by almost 1% per year, according to Enos. And for those of you that aren't aware, ammonia is NH3. So it's three hydrogen atoms and one nitrogen atom which makes a liquid carrier of hydrogen which is much easier to transport than the liquid hydrogen or gaseous hydrogen. You just have to follow the safety protocols. And ammonia of course is also used in fertilizer. I think this is the last story from these folks. A new catalyst helps combine fuel cell and battery into one device. This is kind of intriguing. We've had bi-directional fuel cells in the past where one can make the hydrogen and then turn around and use it to make electricity. But his org, PHYS org reports that a single device that will generate fuel and oxidant from water and when a switch is flipped converts the fuel and oxygen to electricity and water has a host of benefits for terrestrial space and military applications from low environmental impact to high energy density, developing efficient utilized regenerative fuel cells. And they call that a URFCs. Has been researched, re-tertiary site for years now but only truly to be efficient these URFCs need to have a good bifunctional catalyst. And that means in the electrolyzer mode the catalyst needs to facilitate the breakdown of water into hydrogen and oxygen. And then the fuel cell mode it needs to facilitate the recombination into water. And that's quite a challenge. So anyway, we're gonna take a quick break here and let you in on what's going on with Big Tech for a few minutes. We'll be back with the rest of the stories on Stand Energy. Hi, I'm Rusty Kamori, host of Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. I was the head coach of the Punahou Boys varsity tennis team for 22 years. And we were fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championships. My show is based on my two books, Beyond the Lines and Beyond the Game which is about leadership, success, character and creating a superior culture of excellence. Please tune in and watch my show every Monday at 11 a.m. on Think Tech Hawaii and on YouTube. Aloha. Hey Aloha and welcome back to Stand Energy man. We're gonna continue here with these stories now are not from the Ohio Fuel Cell Coalition but from one of my regular guests, Dan Gohan from Electron Power and Technology. And he and I talk a lot offline about the bigger energy picture. What's going on in the oil and gas world? So some of these stories and I'm just gonna make little clips from them. This first series of stories actually comes from oilprice.com. So on any of these topics, if you wanna do more go to oilprice.com and look up these separate topics. The first one is that oil prices will remain high for years to come. And that is the opinion of this organization but I'm telling you a lot of people are following the same thing and you'll understand as I go through these stories but the global annual upstream spending needs to increase by as much as 54% to 542 billion with a B. If the oil market is to avert the next supply shortage shock. By the way, we're going to experience a global oil supply supply shock here this winter. It's already started and you can tell by the price of gas. Any new major oil fields that's fields producing 100 million barrels or larger found this year and that's no small feat. There haven't been any that big found for a while. The production will not arrive in the marketplace until after 2026. So as we're talking about COP 26 this year and what they're trying to figure out how to accelerate the clean green movement across the planet, you gotta realize that there are economic forces behind the scenes that are driving whether you can produce oil or sell oil at a reasonable price. And the problem is with all these big fluctuations and huge government predictions that we're gonna go off oil like right now, big investment, big company investments in oil field refurbishing or looking for new wells or driving new wells is starting to actually cause people not to wanna invest in the oil industry and therefore it leaves a shortage of production which drives the price higher while we're trying to also pay for new infrastructure in new technologies like wind and solar and other things to get back to green. So sometimes pushing this stuff is actually making it more expensive to get where we wanna go and not necessarily speeding it up. The next story is what's behind Saudi Arabia's pivot to natural gas? Well, what people don't understand in most cases is that natural gas is a byproduct of oil fields. So when oil fields die, the last thing to come out of the wellhead is natural gas. And if we're not drilling new wells and we're not tapping into natural gas that we have, we're missing out on an opportunity. But here in the US because we've kind of limited ourselves with some of our resources and a lot of our natural gas companies have gone bankrupt because they invested a lot in fracking and stuff and then found out that the price had dropped so low they couldn't pay off their loans. They went bankrupt and now there's actually a shortage of natural gas. So it says US residential natural gas bills will jump 30% this winter. The average cost of drilling and bringing products to shale wells is $7 million each. The shale wells only produce on average seven years until they go dry. So expect the cost average for this winter's natural gas in North America to be greater than $10 per million BTUs which is the standard term that gas companies use or gas markets use for the price of their energy. The next topic is United States is not doing enough to secure critical metals. You go, whoa, what does this have to do with oil and gas? Well, it does not much to do with oil and gas directly for fuel cells and batteries. It actually has quite a bit to do. But also there's another source of energy out there that's clean and renewable but it has pretty nasty reputation. It's called nuclear and nuclear power. And I talked to some friends who are nuclear engineers and I worked nuclear issues, including the 2011 Daiichi Fukushima nuclear power plant issue in Japan when they had the tsunami and the earthquake. And there's newer technology that's actually quite a bit safer and more reliable and has less end-of-life issues with the spent fuels. But that's not what we think of when we think of nuclear power. So we've also kind of given away the farm to China in terms of letting China buy or invest in countries that have rare earth minerals and they're buying up a lot of the raw stock that a lot of companies need for production and nuclear power and things like that. So we really need to be conscious of that as we proceed into our international relations and our international financing to make sure that we don't get stuck behind on the raw materials edge. Grid operator in France needs nuclear power for net zero. So countries like France are recognizing that they actually are gonna need nuclear power and they're probably gonna start looking at the safer version of nuclear power that's out now. The good news is that the US has plenty of nuclear fuel that can last quite a bit of time, several hundred years I'm sure. The next set of stories comes out of worldoil.com.  Exxon to close two Houston office towers following worker exodus. You know, this COVID thing has had a real impact on a lot of economies, but to have the world's most profitable company on the oil side dropped to closing down two high rise buildings in Houston. And they must not be getting that profitable anymore. It must be a pretty tight market in the oil industry. High cost productions and customers looking at higher fuel costs are making the oil market pretty sketchy right now. Next story says crude forward prices price curves suggest a hundred dollar oil is on the way. You know, I've seen that production, that prediction more often than you would imagine from a variety of different sources. And one of the reasons that, and it's in actual, I'll skip one story down is that the St. Louis Federal Reserve has some data that shows that inflation tracks the price of crude oil. So right now the price of crude oil and fluctuating between $40, $50 a barrel, maybe a little higher, maybe a little lower here and there.  And there are some sources that when you start to stretch out more than the next few years, they're talking $150 to $180 a barrel. What that's gonna do to inflation because everything that you buy in a store just about has to be shipped from someplace. Even if it's domestically produced, it's gonna be shipped on a truck or a train or something. And so therefore it uses fuel. And if the price of fuel goes up, the price of jet fuel goes up, the price of bunker fuel goes up for big ships, the price of gasoline goes up and diesel goes up. Therefore it makes sense that inflation tracks the price of crude oil. So get ready. If you don't think inflation's here to stay just keep watching the energy markets go. And if oil keeps going up, then you know that inflation's here to stay. And many Wall Street companies are also predicting quite a bit more inflation in the future. Let me see. Oops, went the wrong way. The Dutch government is gambling billions on green hydrogen. They're saying at the time that they, you know, Europe in general is really big on green hydrogen. And I personally think green hydrogen, that's hydrogen made from electrolysis is the way to go. But not every place has a clean energy production source. Like you can look at solar and wind as clean energy production and hydroelectric dams are clean, you know, production of electricity. But some countries just can't do it. I mean, they just don't have enough capability to use those technologies. But they have other sources like natural gas and methane and things like that. Well, if you, that's when you make hydrogen from those gases, it's called blue hydrogen. It's the green hydrogen. It's not as clean, but it's way cleaner than coal and oil in terms of from the time you get it to the time you use it and what it means to greenhouse gases. It's also better to do something with methane than to release it in the air because it's worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. So, you know, a lot of the folks in Europe are really bullish on hydrogen and specifically green hydrogen. If they have the solar, the wind, the hydroelectric or geothermal to produce hydrogen in a clean way. But this next story talks about gambling billions on green hydrogen. It says, at the same time, blue hydrogen potentially is an important bridge fuel and it's being largely overlooked. So right now, methane is actually flared off in many cases of making heterochemicals and fossil fuels. So why are we not looking at that more as a primary source of energy and making hydrogen and just flaring it off? So let me say, to close it up here, it says billions or potentially trillions of euros will be at risk as this new hydrogen infrastructure turns, starts to get turned out. But if we don't look at all of the production, blue and green for making this transition, we may kill the economic viability of hydrogen. And if we do that, we're gonna really be stuck because by then the demand for fossil fuels and the price will be too low and the price of fossil fuels will be too high and then the cost of renewable energy and renewable energy storage will also be too high. So that's gonna really wrap it up on what's going on in the world today. And I hope that the folks over in COP26 come up with some really brilliant ideas to do better, but you gotta start looking at the economics of things too to make sure that they make good decisions. So next week, we'll see you back here on Tuesday, Stand the Energy Man and we're gonna try and get that going in and finish up on a discussion of compressing hydrogen in a way that most people probably haven't thought of. So until next Tuesday, Aloha, thanks for joining us here on Stand the Energy Man.