Now, where would you be? And I do have my answer for this one, since I got to pick the question before. I would probably say that I would be on some island in the middle of nowhere, because that sounds pretty good right now. What about you, Audrey? Well, I have this, I've seen this mug on the internet that says, and I quote, I don't need therapy, I just need to go to Taiwan. So I guess I prefer to remain right where I am. You cheated that answer, you just say where you're at. Zoe, what about you? I'd probably have to say Charleston, South Carolina. I have a lot of family there, so when it's all safe to go and hang out with them, also the beach is great, so can't beat that. St. Helalayas, Canada, California, Hawaii, yes, New York. You know, it's really painful, I'm here in New York, and all of my family and friends back home in Australia, there is no pandemic there. They solved it a little bit like Taiwan, and here we are. Is that where you'd like to be, Jim? It's also summer, they've got a tennis tournament called the Australian Open happening. Wow, they're just doing the most. Yes, I see Georgia, do you mean the state in the US or the country? Greece, yes. Oh, cool. Cancun, yes. I'm seeing like sharp contrast, like people either want to be at beaches or they want to be somewhere super cold, so. Forest, I'm seeing a lot of forest answers. Yeah, Japan, Alaska, Thailand. Awesome, all great answers. Well, since RISE is a global program, Josh Mars, we made people joining from these places that you guys wish you were at, which is pretty cool, honestly. But anyway, we can go ahead and get started. Zoe's gonna frame up the night, but I guess for Audrey, going to frame up the morning, whatever your time zone is. So take it away. That's right, it's 8 and 30 in the morning. Oh, sorry about my dog, there he goes. But yeah, thank you all so much for joining us this evening or I guess morning for you, Audrey. On behalf of Civic Sunplugging RISE, just wanna thank you all so much for hopping on. We're gonna be having two segments. So first, we'll be having an Ask Me Anything with the incredible Audrey Ting. And secondly, we're gonna be having an info session about RISE, which is this incredible scholarship program. Gary has pinned the link in the comments over there, so please go and check that out and make sure to stay to the end because we'll be helping you walk through your application. But first, let's introduce our incredible guest, Audrey. Audrey Ting is the digital minister of Taiwan where they have led numerous initiatives under the mantra of fast, fair, fun, including the G0V project, making democracy accessible and participatory. Recently, thanks to Audrey's work and the resilience of Taiwan's democracy, Taiwan has had a drastic boost in the global rankings for democracy from 31st to 11th. Audrey, anything we should add there for your intro? Yeah, sure. The GovZero initiative, our G0V, is of course important for the civic tech, but for the government side, we also have this very cute spoke stock, a Shiba Inu, the name Song Chai, who explains everything from physical distancing when you're indoor, keep three of them away from one another, wear a mask, or if you're outdoor, keep two of them away and wear a mask, but why wear a mask?  So this is my public service announcement. I'm sad that we didn't think of that. Yes, that is the cutest public service announcement for COVID I have ever seen. Yes, that makes social distancing seem easy, but I guess we can go ahead and dive right into the questions here. So obviously, Audrey, you work a lot with democracy, work a lot with technology, and there have been a lot of kind of questions about where we see the future of democracy and technology going. So I'd love to just ask you, where do you see the intersection of democracy and technology going around the world? What you mean democracy is a type of technology. When we talk about technology, we tend to think about industrial use of natural sciences, but democracy is also a set of technologies that's the application of social scientists, meaning that, for example, in Taiwan, we're not content with only uploading three bits per person every four years, which is called voting, by the way. But also, day-to-day democracy, for example, initiatives like petitioning on the internet. In Taiwan, we have a national participation portal joined the GOV, the TW, that engages more than 10 million people that's roughly half of our population. And so more than one quarter of the petitions there were from people who are not even 18 years old. So the young adults and the young people have a gender setting power way before they have the right to vote and they have successfully petitioned for. For example, banning the plastic straws in our national identity drink the bubble tea, among many other things. And so because of this, people see democracy as something that they can participate, not just through petitions, but also through presidential hackathon, which is bringing a good idea that you have and work across sectors. For example, using an app to encourage people to drink more from refillable bottles instead of from plastic bottles. And that was a hit. It's like Pokemon Go. You can complete missions just by checking in to those water refilling spots and so on. And once you get a trophy, five of those from our president each year, then the trophy is a micro projector when turned on. It shows our president, Dr. Tsai Ing-Wen, handing your trophy, promising that whatever you did in the past three months will become national policy with all the budget and personnel required within the next 12 months. So that's presidential power as a form of hackathon award. And there's many other ways to participate through participatory budgeting, referenda, sandboxes and so on. So what I'm trying to get at is that it's not just about voting and it's about a co-creation of new mechanisms to get people's common values out of various positions and that you can engage on a day-to-day fashion. Yeah, I love what you said about democracy being a, it's a type of technology in and of itself and it definitely looks like the US has quite a ways to go before we can get to that point of really integrating traditional technology and democracy. A big thing I know a lot of us were in the midst of this pandemic. A lot of countries have handled it very differently but Taiwan has had a really incredible response with the use of technology. And so we had somebody who registered wondering if you think that this idea of a digital-based pandemic response would work in other countries, from third-world countries to first-world countries and also where you got the idea from. Well, as I mentioned the Shiba Inu, the cute spoke stock really doesn't need a lot of broadband access or something. It works perfectly well in low bandwidth situations. And the other two digital interventions that play the most part actually also requires very basic infrastructure. For example, there is this daily press conference from our medical officers led by Minister Chen Shizhong, the Minister of Health and Welfare. And again, this could be broadcasted by radio, by television, by any sort of, of course we use live stream, but it doesn't really depend on the internet. And the other important part, the toll free number 1922, where anyone who see anything new about the COVID situation can call and receive the explanation and answers from the scientist and if they bring something that the call center people and the scientist doesn't have a answer to. For example, last April, there was a young boy who called saying, you're rationing out mask, but all I get is pink medical mask. All my, the boys in my class, all of them have blue mask and I don't want to wear pink to school. What to do? And the scientist doesn't know how to answer that. So he got escalated immediately to the Central Epidemic Command Center and the very next day, the next 2 p.m. in the daily press conference, the press officers suggested that all the medical officers were pink medical mask and they continue to do that for a number of weeks and trending bronze and things like that, all colored their brand pink. So pink became the most hip color and the boy become the most hip boy in the class where only he has the color that the heroes wear. And the minister said pink panther was this childhood hero or something. So also heroes hero wear. So all this requires innovation, co-creation, but it doesn't require any sort of like broadband as human right as we have here. You can as easily put it together with regular television, radio and also trophy number through landlines. Yeah, that is so adorable that he didn't want to wear pink and then he made it cool across all of Taiwan. That is super, super cool. And so I know a lot of our, we have CFLs here and rise applicants and a lot of kids here who are super interested to just hear more about your Go Zero project and also the fact that you share every single conversation you have that has a crazy level of transparency of a government official. And so I think a lot of us are just wondering what inspired you to start both of these initiatives and where do you see government transparency going? And what do you wanna see? Yeah, I learned about this idea of rough consensus and radical transparency when I was 15 years old. I was 1996. Taiwan just had its first presidential election and I told my, the middle school's principal, Principal Du Heiping, saying that I don't want to go to school anymore because I discovered this new thing called the Wario Web and the knowledge is being created there and it's at least 10 years ahead from my textbooks in the middle school which are all out of date anyway. And then the head of the school read my email correspondence with some researchers and thought about one minute and said, okay, from tomorrow you don't have to go to school anymore and she covers for me meaning that she fixed the record but in any case, so that I don't get fined by compulsory education. So, and after that I joined this fabulous internet community is still around, it's called internet society and makes the protocols, the kind of the core, the constitution laws of the internet and the idea of the internet society is that of radical transparency because we don't in internet governance have a navy or a army or anything. We can't force any telecom operator or any jurisdiction to connect to the internet. So we have to work with everyone, take all the sides, making sure that there is common value out of the various different positions so that the internet remains a common public good or public infrastructure in the digital era and so that's how I got into the internet style, politics and it will not be another five years until I actually get to vote in a representation of democracy system. So to me, I mean, this high bandwidth radical transparency-based legitimacy is my native mode of operation. So when we occupied the parliament in 2014, instead of demonstrating as protesters, we demonstrated as demoers, meaning that we showed the half a million people in Australia and many more online how to deliberate, listen at scale so that we can come to shared values across the very controversial trade agreement at the time with Beijing and we succeeded and occupied with the success. The head of parliament took our consensus and then all the public servants are suddenly very much willing to learn how to work with the internet community not just for the people, with the people. And so that's how I become first a reverse mentor to a minister and now the digital minister. So that's the kind of short story of how GovZero gets involved in everyday politics. Yes, I know we had some questions earlier kind of referencing kind of like the US pandemic response which I think is, you could easily describe as kind of the opposite of what Taiwan has done over the last 10 months here. And so we have a couple of people kind of asking like, how do you think the US can adapt into this new space? How can we get more people willing to wear masks? It seems like that was a very easy thing to do in Taiwan but something that we've definitely had a lot more controversy around. So what do you think made Taiwan ready or more ready, I guess I should say, for the pandemic and how do other countries catch up with that? Yeah, well, I mean, we were inoculated as a society. Everyone in some above 30 years old remember 2003 when SARS or SARS 1.0 as I call it now when SARS 1.0 hit Taiwan, we had to lock down an entire hospital and announced the municipal government was saying different things from the central government. There was a mask shortage and all the chaotic things that happened around the world, this like happens in Taiwan on a smaller scale in 2003. I think one of the things that we did write though is that in 2004, the constitutional court, the total legislature saying that's the chaotic response, the sudden barricading of the hospital would be unconstitutional if not for the fact none of us have any experience with SARS, right? So we need, while the memory is still fresh, institutionalized, for example, the PPEs, how to communicate correctly about masks and how to make the central epidemic command center at the daily press conference, the 1.022, all of these are authorized by the legislature in 2004 in preparation of the next version of SARS as we saw in COVID-19. So, and one of the insight we learned in 2003 was that if you say you wear a mask to protect the elderly, then people who don't live with the elderly don't wear a mask. If you say wear a mask to show respect to the medical workers, well, people who don't know any medical workers don't wear a mask. But if you say like the cute dog says, and I show it on the very beginning, if you say wear a mask to protect your own face against your own unwashed hands, then this is a message that appeals entirely to rational self-interest. Even if there's no one around, you will still wear a mask because where it protects you against your own unwashed hands and it connects it with hand sanitation because without hand sanitation, wearing a mask doesn't do much anyway, right? So this sort of idea was spreading which appeals to rational self-interest makes this message viral, meaning that people will voluntarily share with their friends and families. And if you build it as something as altruistic is much harder to spread. Yeah, that is awesome. I'll say we have a really good question from Caleb here asking, I'll just read it. How would you suggest young people on a smaller level apply some of the open source, you know, democratic practices you've helped pilot on a larger level in Taiwan? Yeah, this is an excellent question. So in Taiwan, many children are now working with their schools to design their school curricula because in the past couple of years we've switched to a curriculum that has a lot of freedom in it instead of emphasizing memorization or like the so-called the correct answer or any top-down sort of learning we've switched to a more like Finland like a way of curriculum where we don't teach for example, media literacy anymore or data literacy anymore because literacy assume you are a reader or a viewer. We teach instead media competence, data competence mean that you are a producer because in Taiwan broadband is a human right. So no matter how remote the child is they are guaranteed to have access to 10 megabits per second of bandwidth both ways at just $16 per month for unlimited data. If they don't it's my fault personally. And so because we've achieved more than 99% of coverage in terms of residents there is a very strong will to fact-check the presidential debates for example which is a great way to learn about media competence in the newsroom, how the newsroom works and so on. And it's fun, right? When you are fact-checking all the three presidential candidates in their platforms and their debates and so on and it's imbues in you a network to the amateur and finally to a professional journalist and everyone learns a little bit more journalism as part of this fact-checking and there's many other things to do as well. There's many primary schoolers that work with the environment sensing that's climate science with the very inexpensive tool called the air box and it's less than $100 each and there's literally thousands of them each measuring the PM 2.5 that's air quality and sharing it to a distributed ledger mentioned by academia Seneca, the Taiwan National Academy. And what this does as visualized by the Gulf Zero map is that it showed people exactly how the mobile sources the immobile sources, the various sources of pollution and also from overseas can affect the everyday feeling of air and quality and so together the primary schoolers identify the kind of gaps where there's no citizen-sized scientists for example in industrial parks it's impossible for them to break and enter industrial parks to get the air sensors there. So they petition then work with the environmental protection agency here and the EPA agreed and work with the municipality because it turns out we own the lamp. The government owns the lamp in those industrial parks. So we took their design installed on the lamps and all together contribute to climate science. And so that's something that any primary schooler can do in a day or two work just to set up an air box. And so it's all about identifying the sustainable goal there's 17 sustainable goals that you care about and then link to communities that care about those goals and then just make something happen. And before long the government will take notice of it. Wow, that is incredible. We have this a really good question about incorporating internet into government. I know that there have been a lot of pushes in the US that we should start voting on our phones and all this stuff to make those government systems more accessible but there's been a lot of pushback. Is I think this person is just wondering how have you encountered any difficulties incorporating the internet and technology so intrinsically like so woven throughout government? And then what I guess recommendations would you have for other countries that inevitably will have to follow the same path? Yeah, I would definitely start with broadband as a human right because if there's no broadband as human rights then any advance that we make on digital democracy will be almost by definition excluding the people who do not have broadband access who can only download video but couldn't share through video conferences as we are doing so now, right? So broadband as human right definitely the first step. And the next step is to make sure that people understand what's actually happening in the government and we in the national participation portal is not just that we the people like petition portal the same portal also shows all the upcoming regulatory drafts like regulation.gov in the US and also shows all the national budgets neatly visualized so you can have a real conversation with the public servants in response to any particular budget item that you want more information from. There's no equivalent of that in the US. And so once there's a whole life cycle of a policy from ideation to the drafts to the budget to the execution implementation and of course it will of course always have something to improve so you can go back to the petition to the ideation. Once this life cycle is experienced by the local people for a couple of times then people understand democracy is something that they can participate in their spare time. But if this is just about to voting in one of those points in the life cycle with no prior consultation nor post accountability then it feels very much empty because you don't know how those votes will be used. So a full life cycle visualization that is also very important. Yes. And I think we have a really great question that kind of follows along with that that broadband should be a human right. People should have access to the internet and that it's a great tool to help advance democracy but at the same time can really tear it down. And I think in the U.S. especially we've seen the effects of internet and social media on affecting our democratic system. So I think what the students asking is should information be regulated? Yeah, but by social media I think we have very different ideas of social media in mind because in the U.S. I understand a lot of public discussion takes place in infrastructure maintained by the private sector for the purpose of selling addictive advertisements and entertainment. And this is very much akin to have a public debate or deliberation not in a public park, not in a museum or library or a town hall but rather in a I don't know nightclub that sells addictive drinks, right. So basically the social media becomes anti-social because it wasn't designed for public deliberation. It's designed for addictiveness for selling advertisements and so on. When in Taiwan we as say social media we think of the social sector run media platforms and by social sector I mean something like people's co-ops the collaborative project out of the academia for example the National Taiwan University a bunch of students have been running a site pet project that's entirely not for profit that has no advertisers nor shareholders really. And it's called the PTT is the Taiwanese equivalent of Reddit that has no obligation to shareholders or advertisers but rather just governed by the people who participate and it's open source by the way you can find the source code on GitHub. So it is on PTT instead of on Facebook or Instagram that's the Dr. Lee Wenliang's message around the end of 2019 that says and I quote there are seven new SARS cases that gets first reposted on the PTT by a young doctor with the name No More Pipe and people just start uploading her message and triaging the message to say that it actually looks legit that it looks like a real SARS case is happening again and this in turn makes it possible for us to start health inspection for all flight passengers coming in from Wuhan to Taiwan the very next day the first day of 2020 but imagine if this is strong amidst those divisive anti-social polarized views in a more anti-social corner of the private sector run social media then chances are that it will not be discovered or triaged that efficiently and that quickly. And so I think the main point I want to get across is that anti-social media and pro-social media are both social media but the true social media that can serve as a digital public infrastructure like your local parks and libraries need to be run by the social sector with a deliberate empowerment by the public sector saying that we are going to run our town hall there instead of on the nearby nightclub. Wow, that's awesome. I'm going to pass it off to Madison because I know she has a couple of questions too. Yeah, so we all know that Audrey is very experienced in technology but now we're going to talk about a topic that was touched on a little bit earlier which is education. Something that Audrey also knows a lot about. So it's kind of clear to people that there's a stigma against students taking an untraditional education path whatever that means for different students. Many see it as a sign of low intelligence or even a lack of ability but in your case, as we touched on a little bit already it was the exact opposite. So maybe it would be cool if you could talk a little bit more about what led you to leave the education system of Taiwan and to follow that up, how would you design the education system to be more adaptable to those alternative paths? Yeah, I think in Taiwan we've had more than 10 years, a decade of what we call the experimental education system and system allows up to 10% of students in Taiwan nowadays also covers the higher education as well but previously only on the basic education level up to 18 years old to basically write up their own curriculum and say that I want to study it with my family, with my friends, with this institution that's definitely not a school and things like that. And as long as it looks legit to the municipal review board then they can just go ahead and follow that curriculum. And so enjoy the same rights and the responsibilities of any children of the same age. And so because of this there's less of a stigma when you have literally like 10% of people just adopting their own curricula. So we see them and by them I say also us, I guess because I'm also a schooler. I see experimental education people as more like the research arm to the basic education curricula. And after 10 years of research we figured out something that works really well for the Taiwanese society. For example, the emphasis on autonomy interaction on the common good and these are what motivates people. And there's also alternate education that focus more on road memorization and so on but with assistive intelligence it's less convincing to the Taiwanese society now. And so after 10 years of like a swarm of experimental education methods we picked the ones that did work and write it into the basic education curriculum so that nowadays even in a basic education you still have hours of capital projects of like learning across different generations across different disciplines across different places and so on. And so anyone who wants the curriculum to change a little bit can work with their school-based curriculum committee without writing their encyclical itself. And now the alternative education community after getting merged right there they started as a fork of the basic education after that got gets merged now shifted to an even more radical experimentation for example, using an entire city as a campus instead of having any particular campus of the indigenous nations doesn't learn Mandarin or English from the very beginning but start with their own language and so on. So like even more daring experiments to the curriculum but I think this general research versus development relationship is the relationship that can ease a lot of this stigma. Absolutely and it makes me wonder because I think about the metric system we use in the US especially to measure like how students are learning so that's great standardized tests and I'm sure that the traditional like standardized system in Taiwan is similar. So I'd like to hear more about how those metrics change for a lot of the experimental education that you've heard about and in the future how can we create metrics that both allow people freedom to choose their education path but also ensure that they're actually learning and becoming prepared for the next one. This is a great question. In Taiwan we've abolished all the metrics that's based on individual to individual competition which used to be the thing when I was a child but we did away with that all together. So people would not feel pressured relative to their classmate can actually start to form co-creation teams with their classmates and that's one of the main impetus to the curriculum reform a couple years ago that took effect a couple years ago. And the other thing is that on a higher education we're now focusing on the kind of day-to-day journeys of the people in their basic education so that when you're applying for example for a university now more than half of the consideration will be by the actual project that you have contributed and this is what we call PBL or purpose-based learning that is to say if you can determine your capstone project's purpose usually with the help of the Sustainable Development Goals because there's like a very clear target of 169 target across the 17 global goals which serves as a great framework of how much a common purpose your personal project has been contributing to the world and using that as a common criteria is much more easy for the university to assemble the student who have completed all sorts of different portfolios together so that they can achieve something larger during their undergrad study as part of for example the university social responsibility program or USR in Taiwan which allows people to earn credits or even finish a graduate level diploma solely by solving something that is of common value to the local environment or social developments and so I think the SDGs is a really good example and that's why we always frame every workout that I do even my job description in terms of the 17 global goals. See I love that because it's not just about project-based learning being able to create a project it's purpose-based learning like the project has to have purpose and so I love that and Rohan asked an interesting question here says Taiwan's economy is diversified but how would a plan like this work for developing countries I'm guessing in terms of education? Well I mean Taiwan was a developing country not too long ago certainly when I was a child and we only become the developed country in WTO I think a couple years back and only this year we become a full democracy right so we still remember how it was when Taiwan was a developing country and I think in Taiwan's trajectory of development in our constitution we put in our constitutional amendments three things the state needs to guarantee universal healthcare, universal education especially at basic education level and universal communication that includes of course broadband as a human rights and having these three promises that forms our kind of socialist core everything else is on the capitalist core this dual core constitution really makes sure that when people want to diversify their interests and so on there is a safety net because they could be assured that both their grandparents or their grandchildren will enjoy pretty good health and education and communication rights while they can pursue their different ideas of design of society changing innovations and so on and if they fail loudly and quickly and then people thank them for it because then it drives the society forward so have a good safety net I think this is really important also important to build solidarity across people who like believe in different positions because if you have a good safety net then people can always go back and say hey we nevertheless managed to agree for example like family value is important despite one side saying that the traditional families need to be respected and one side says the marriage equality need to be addressed and so we went together and co-created this social innovation called marrying the bylaws but not the in-laws so in Taiwan went to same sex people wed they wed as individuals but their families don't form kinship relationships and so that makes to both sides happy or at least like happier and that's how we get to the first country in Asia to legalize marriage equality without leaving a large gap a large resentment in the society so I think that's also thanks to the communication broadband as a human rights of people across all generations can feel safe to express their views and contributes to this final like implementation of this social innovation absolutely and what you said about how interconnected everything is really struck me because it's not just like an isolated good education system it's an overall flourishing democracy because like you said people aren't going to want to take risks with their education or their career if they don't feel like they have that safety net and the support and so that kind of goes on to another question in line with education so I mean right now there is an overwhelming number of career choices and many of us struggle knowing what the right path is I know that a lot of the audience members probably resonate with that as well and it seems as though you knew what you wanted to do and go into tech early on so what helped you find that perfect fit yeah I think that's because I was very much into mathematics but I really do not like math that's to say hand-based calculations and so when I discovered that computers can well compute for me it's like what Steve Jobs called a bicycle of the mind right I still control the direction but now I can do much more with my with my mind on the mathematical concepts instead of being bogged down by the calculations and later on I also discovered the internet as I mentioned on the internet I don't have to do everything by myself right I can just find something that has worked 80% to my imagined purpose and I just fulfill the other 20% and then share it again to the community so that they can pick it up and develop it again and so basically a internet-based community is what I would suggest because that makes sure that you don't feel alone even if you are the only person in your neighborhood caring about I don't democracy as a technology then by joining civics unplugged you can find like-minded people who care about things in pretty much the same angle and with that in mind you can then feel free to explore whichever implication that this idea brings you and always knowing that whatever you learned successful or not will be of broad use and benefits to your community and so internet-based community I think is the main answer because I engage the community as early as when I was 12 so I've never felt alone and I always feel supported no matter how many turns that I make in my so-called career because I'm really a slash so at the moment at Digital Minister the TW slash board member Radical Exchange I was co-founding something with the Vitalik buttering and trying out on the Ethereum community and slash for example board member in the Digital Future Society which thinks how to apply time communication to the future of assistive intelligence collective intelligence and so on so anything that I feel interested in I just add another slash too much of description and that's also something that's only possible because of the internet community that's I engage with Yes, Audrey you're preaching to the choir in terms of digital first communities rise and see you or both first of its kind digital communities for young people I know that for me it completely changed my life plan in terms of my education and what I want to do in the future so totally resonate with that and I think that's so key as well and so another question a participant wanted to know obviously you are the Digital Minister of Taiwan you've had a lot of success in technology so people want to know is there a secret to being successful in technology what helped you become so successful at a young age Yeah, the secret is you're always successful if you bring technology to the people and you're rarely successful when you ask people to adapt to technology and so this is what I mean by assistive intelligence assistive technologies because if you are a technologist you have two different ways to think about things like AI you can think assistively meaning that you design something like my eyeglass good example the person who designed the eyeglass really doesn't have any control how I use my eyeglass and it's lying to me meaning that I want to see better it helps me see better and it's accountable meaning that if it fails in some way I can repair it myself or I can bring it to another person who can repair it without asking permission or even knowledge from the original designer of this particular class but imagine if instead of assistive technology they chose the authoritarian technology way then the eyeglass will probably see what I see and pop up an advertisement for 10 seconds when they deem that I see something interesting and if it fails I'll probably have to pay like 10 000 dollars in the license fee before even attempting to reverse engineering the source code and things like that so they may have control but actually it goes against most of the time with the personal rationality of interest of the person using the eyeglass and so before long the eyeglass will not be used I'm not saying anything about any particular brand but what I'm trying to say is that if it's aligned to the people if you design in a way with humility empowering your fellow citizens instead of treating them merely as users as some other industry that treats its customers users then you will work always successfully because the things that doesn't work in the actual field people will be able to then fix it to reappropriate your technology and on an appropriate way that's what we call appropriate technology and you will learn from the people who remix your technology and it's all in all a good community but if you keep to the authoritarian path then you have to make all the decisions and human are human beings you can't really anticipate all the use cases and therefore it's much harder to succeed absolutely and to relate back to what you were talking about earlier with democracy as a technology that seems me part of the secret why Taiwan's democracy has been just so flourishing it's because it follows kind of like what you said like the secret makes it about the people and I just think that that's super cool I had never thought about it like that so yeah and then another question the audience is composed of 15 to 17 year olds from around the world as we've mentioned so we want to know what advice would you give to 15 year old Audrey? yeah well 15 year old I'm already dropped out of the middle school and already started my first company co-founded it and so I think my main recommendation to the 15 year old Audrey is that even though your English is pretty bad at the time it's not a problem just start traveling around the world because people don't care about pronunciations about the accents people don't care about the grammatical errors right if you just say what's on your mind people figure it out anyway that's how the world works because my English wasn't that good to begin with I waited until when I was 25 years old to start touring the globe to basically couch serve like 20 CDs in a very short time of two years and I was like very self-conscious about my English ability but then I discovered it's not a problem at all this is not something that you need to score a perfect score in order to to communicate with your fellow homo-sabians or fellow human beings a little bit of grasp of vocabulary can can be quite sufficient and so that would be my main suggestion absolutely and I think that is all the questions we have Audrey I know that you are very busy so seriously thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us and thank you all for submitting your questions before the event and now now we are going to transition to talking more about rise so Audrey if you stick around I don't know you're busy thank you for the great questions and have a good local time everyone live long and prosper bye bye


It's July and it's getting hot, just like the deals at Appalachian Wireless. All months get the Samsung Galaxy S8 for just a penny with a two-year agreement, but don't wait because the deal ends soon. Better service, bigger savings. That's today's Appalachian Wireless. The Floyd County Health Department, Floyd County Fiscal Court, City of Prestonsburg, and local food service providers are coming together in an effort to prevent an outbreak of hepatitis A in the county. Although hepatitis A has not become an issue in Floyd County, plans are being made to reduce the chance of an outbreak. In an effort to be proactive, officials are encouraging local food service providers to get the hepatitis vaccine for all employees who are handling food. The hepatitis A is not coming from a food source. The source is an individual. It's coming from people. But when you look at where this vulnerable population of people work, they are working primarily in restaurants and other places. Any food service provider who follows this protocol will receive a sticker to display on their entrance. It is not an issue in Floyd County yet. In working in this partnership with the restaurants and the food hammers, we're trying to get ahead of this situation. Officials are increasing surveillance and vaccinations in an effort to limit the opportunity for exposure to customers. They're looking at what's happening around us and they're concerned because this is their business. For more information, contact the Floyd County Health Department. In Prestonsburg, Shelby Porter, EKB News.


So, the anti-corruption movement, I think when I was younger, I had so many issues that I cared about, I still do, but the environment, health care, there are a number of things, but it always felt like there was a roadblock to what do I do in these movements because corruption came up. How do we get bills or legislation passed in these areas if my will as a person is not being represented fairly? So for a long time, there's just this feeling of like, I felt very disempowered, and then I found represent us, and I loved what their message was. It was an apolitical message, so it wasn't Republican or Democrat, it was about how do we address corruption in this country? And essentially, to boil it down is if there's something you care about, corruption's in the way. Let's address that first so we can address a number of whatever else you care about. Once we address corruption, we can deal with everything else. So, Max, what can we do? Like what can we all do to help and take action? Yeah, so it's not that hard, actually. I think that's when we hear these big political words like gerrymandering and and voting rights, how as a single person, what can I do to help? This seems too big. And the truth is, no, collective action is really important, but collective action starts with you. And what you can do is you can have a conversation with a family member and a friend about this. But the reason why we're here is because I love represent us and they they already made up a game plan. They have the actions for you. It's at represent dot us backslash Max. That sounds pretty simple. And what it is is it's coming together.  And as a voter in your blah, blah, blah, and you have a conversation, there's scripts online for you. It's not hard. And it makes all the difference in the world. If you can get two friends, five friends, maybe where you just agree, hey, I'm going to hold you accountable, pick up the phone, call your local person, deliver the message and you keep doing that. Again, I'm going to throw I love numbers. Yeah, the number, I believe it's 3.5 percent is the magic number. If 3.5 percent of a population comes together, they can pass anything. That's that's look back across history. The civil rights movement, gay marriage equality, all of that starts. Once you hit the 3.5 percent threshold, it becomes federal. So if we can get a small group of people who are really passionate, apply pressure, take very simple actions like go to represent us backslash. Max, follow the instructions. We can change this 3.5 percent. That's such a small number. It's like still single digits. So it sounds like something we can definitely do. Even just us young people or millennials and Gen Z. If we get enough mass momentum going. So yeah, good numbers to be encouraged by. And like Max said, guys, go to represent dot us slash Max and get involved. Let's do this.


everybody, thanks for coming here. 10 a.m. is early. I could barely convince myself to wake up for this talk, so I don't know how you're doing it. I'm Lee Holmes. I'm the lead security architect for Azure management and Microsoft. I'm the author of the Windows PowerShell cookbook. And also I've been a developer of PowerShell since its early versions. So you may know me from such parameters as execution policy bypass or other such things. So let's do some context right here. So you're in an engagement. You fish somebody. You get inside the network. You find some creds and you got some code execution. So you do a little bit of recon. You find out that somebody has been connecting up to a machine. That machine has one part open. Recognize that one 5985. There you go. That's WS man. PowerShell. So you got PowerShell. You got creds. This is going to be a good day, right? You connect up using PowerShell to that machine they're connecting to. I don't know, 15, 20 commands. That seems a little bit off. But you plow on. You plow on. Who am I? You're on that thing. You see that you're the DNS administrator. DNS is almost always co-located with Active Directory. So you're good. You got creds. You got PowerShell. You're on a DC as the DNS admin.  You add in another account here. But you get an error. That's kind of weird. So you move on. You try to run kind of one of those traditional download cradles. It doesn't work either. You get an error that you're in constrained language mode and you're allowed to run that kind of stuff. You're like this is weird. So I'm a DNS admin. Let me see if I can restart the DNS server. That works just fine. But then you try to restart WinRAM and that doesn't work. So what's going on here? You're against obviously a target of a completely different category than you've run into before. You, my friends, have run into just enough administration. Just enough administration is the idea that admins are your attack surface and you cannot treat them as your buddies anymore. So you might say, Lee, are you saying that we get rid of admins? No, no, no. Of course we need admins. But here's the issue. People make mistakes. Sometimes they're just bad actors. But the big thing to realize is that everything they can do, an attacker can do as well. All the stuff you see about PowerShell is just unauthorized administration. So if you're worried about PowerShell attacks, you gotta be worried about your administrators. So wouldn't it be great if people didn't need these huge admin privs to do their jobs? What if you popped a machine and you didn't get all these high value creds that people are leaking everywhere? And what if you didn't need to give them full domain admin to just manage DNS? What if you could just give them the stuff they needed to do their actual jobs? And of course logging. What if everything that happened on a machine got logged and when a bad thing happened you could always go back and take a look? So the answer there is just enough administration. This is based on the security features that have been in PowerShell since 2008. So Exchange Online uses this really, really heavily. They're putting just enough administration based principles to the entire internet. So it's based on three simple concepts. One is role capabilities. So this is making sure and defining what people are allowed to do when they connect. Then there's the endpoint, which is the configuration that happens when they connect to the machine itself. And then you've got the identity. So this is when they connect, what is the identity that runs the commands that this person is running? So these three things together are what lets you lock down a machine like crazy.  It's kind of two things. It's the time that somebody has access to the machine, but it's also the capability of what they can do. So we've done a pretty good job as an industry of starting to lock down the time. We've got all sorts of PAM modules and all that kind of stuff that will say hey, this is just in time admin. You're only allowed to do a certain task. Once you ask for privilege and then you're only allowed to do it, let's say between nine and five, something like that. So we're starting to see some good stuff to do this kind of lockdown. Just enough administration is all about the capability. So yeah, sure somebody's got access for a given amount of time, but why do you need to give them full access to the domain controller once the service ticket is open? So combining the two, this is what your attack surface reduction can look like. So it seems like it's kind of a cool thing being able to reduce your attack surface by this much. I even I was talking with this guy on Twitter about it. It was kind of going very slow and it made me realize that some people are very slow learners. Edward Snowden, you think he might realize a danger of admin running amok, but obviously not. This threat didn't make it much further. Now how does somebody actually go through and do one of these just enough administration lockdowns? The first part is defining role capabilities. So this is what can a person do? And it really is this simple. You can say that when they connect, you import the DNS server module. And here are the five commandlets that they're allowed to run. But what you can also do is declare your own functions. So if a built-in commandlet isn't good enough, you can define a function, let's say who am I, and this is the example that you saw before. So this is a custom written function that you want to expose. Then you've got the endpoint itself. So this is defining what happens when somebody connects. The key point with just enough administration is that you say the session type is restricted remote server. Of course you want to log all the things. So you set up a transcript directory. Everything that you do comes and goes through this transcript directory. So you can audit this at all times. I'll get into the run as virtual account in a second. That's your definition of what identity you want these things to run as. So the run as virtual account is the best one you want to use here. And then you can figure the role definitions. So this is me saying that when the DNS admin connects, this can be either a principal or a group. When they connect, they get the role capabilities of, let's say, DNS maintenance. And that's really just a reference to what you saw in that last slide. Identity is the big one here. So by default when you connect up with PowerShell, the identity that you use is the connecting user. So when Lee connects up to a machine, well, then that process runs as Lee, whatever. You can do a named identity that's being able to configure a very specific domain account. You might need this for some specific reasons. A danger with a named identity, if that endpoint gets popped, then you do have an issue of, well, then somebody can steal the creds of that named identity and do stuff with it. So you want to be very, very careful with that named identity. A virtual account, that's kind of what happens in IIS when you can have a temporary local administrator. Windows handles all the password maintenance. You don't need to worry about rotating these, nothing else. When DNS admin connects up, this now runs as a local administrator, but just without a password that you have to worry about rotating. And then you have group managed service accounts. These are the same thing as a named identity, but this is the kind of identity that Active Directory will automatically rotate and manage passwords for you. So it's a very, very strong option if you don't want to have to deal with that kind of password maintenance. And what makes things super cool is you can even get really, really deep into fine grained proxy control. So you saw there before somebody was able to run and they were able to restart the DNS service, but they weren't able to restart the WinRM service. So here's an example of somebody restricting restart service and using some parameters that says the name parameter, I'm going to lock this down to only the DNS or the DNS cache services. So you can get super, super hard core on this. So you might say here, this is Fort Knox, this is like what am I going to do? This is the impenetrable wall. Somebody's actually got their stuff together. They're not a whale. They're not just deploying a server with no patients. What can they actually do to start getting some, what can you do if you're on an engagement trying to attack one of these things? Turns out there is a couple things.  I could be pulling up Kali. I could show you some shells raining, but we don't have the time for the applause in 20 minutes, so I'm going to skip on that. The first thing is ports, right? I showed you this wonderful world of connecting where a machine all you've done is exposed, power shell remoting, but realistically you're going to run into systems where somebody is still doing things like exposing RDP or Telnet or something like that. So if you've got creds and they're also letting you use those creds for RDP, well then yeah, you just RDP in and whatever. So just enough administration, all it can do is lock down power shell access. So there's the first kind of misconfiguration you're going to see. But here's another example. I showed you locking down a handful of commandlets, but some commandlets they're not immediately obvious what's going on. So here's an example from Matt Week's ScriptJunkie where if you expose something like hey, I'm going to give an endpoint where I can join systems into the domain. Well hey, if you're an attacker and you get access to that commandlet you don't have to pick it, you don't have to add it to the domain that the enterprise wants. You can also add it to your own domain and start pushing out malicious group policies or something like that. So the commands are not always obvious. Language mode is another huge one. I showed you back there trying to run any script and that didn't work. Well here's an example of somebody trying to make it a bit more friendly and using a version of power shell called constrain language mode. So constrain language mode at first blush looks like it's pretty cool. I can't do arbitrary dot net script or anything like that. But the big thing with GIA, this is why constrain language is a bad idea. If you take a look on the right hand side, the way that GIA controls the access is it places a very big distinction between the functions that you expose to the user and then the capability that you're allowed to run as part of one of those functions. So if you do constrain language and constrain language you're allowed to create new functions and so all you got to do is create a new function and that function now can run anything you want. That is no longer restricted and so you create a new one and then you've completely bypassed anything somebody's put in when it comes to GIA restriction on commands. So no language mode. If you ever see anything but that, they have a complete RCE and that's your way in. But by far, by far your biggest danger is vulnerable functions. Code, you know, if you saw the session before on all the ethereum vulnerabilities, it's all about the code, right? When you're letting people expose any sort of functions to untrusted input, they're going to make mistakes. Command injection, there's nothing new about command injection in our industry. It turns out if somebody is writing a PowerShell function, they can just as easily write a command injection vulnerability when it comes to their functions. So here's an example of somebody taking user input and then for some reason deciding to call PowerShell directly and injecting that user input. Like anything you're used to in the past, you can put a semicolon in there and run arbitrary commands. And it's not just PowerShell of course, if they're calling CMD for some reason, you can also input that user input there and get arbitrary CMD injection. By far the biggest thing that you're going to see though are vulnerable functions. So this is somebody doing invoke expression and invoke expression is almost never needed in PowerShell itself. Here's an example of somebody thinking they want to take some user input and then for example a process name and call get process with that name and which you'll normally see that they're used to doing things from Python or whatever where you do an exec call or a system call. So this is somebody trying to do that with get process. That's a bad idea.  User input can contain semicolons or any sort of download cradle and you're done there. There's a bunch of obscure forms of script injection coming here from invoke script, create nested pipeline, add script. So make sure to keep your eyes on those. But here's an example of it being done correctly. It turns out you almost never need invoke expression in PowerShell. Of course in PowerShell I can do arbitrary user input and just provide that as a variable to a parameter name. If I don't know the parameter name beforehand I can also dump things into a hash table, the parameters and their values and do something called splatting that on a command let. That's the at sign parameters there. So this is a way to invoke a command let with no parameters that you don't know beforehand still without any sort of injection vulnerabilities. And even if you don't know the command let beforehand you can use the invocation operator and still get the same thing. So this is the best approach. This is what people should be moving forward to. But sometimes you'll see somebody who thinks that they're aware of the invoke expression vulnerability and what they decide to do here is well I'm going to do get process dash name. I'm going to escape the user input with single quotes because single quotes are kind of the safest kind of thing in PowerShell. And the line before that I'm going to escape out single quotes with other single quotes. You see there's people trying to prevent SQL injection a lot of times. But here's the issue. PowerShell was raised in a world of outlook and exchange and word press where there's all kinds of quotes. There's curly quotes, there's back quotes, there's hanging quotes. There's like six kinds of quotes in PowerShell. The version you see here only escapes one of them. Use any other form of quote and you're right through this. Sometimes you'll see script block injection. So script block injection is when somebody wants to take user input and then take that input and run it via PowerShell remoting on another system. So here is somebody who takes that script block based on user input but they need to create a script block. They do this with a string. That can be injected as well. There's an obscure form of this as well. You see the new script block with a string that can be injected.  And that's the approach you want to take. String expansion is another thing that you'll sometimes see where somebody wants to take a variable and figure out the value of that variable. So they use the expand string API. There's a couple versions of that exposed through execution context as well. That can go through some string expansion vulnerabilities itself. And so you don't want to be using expand string on user input. The best thing you want to do is use the get variable commandlet to figure out the current value of a variable. There's some obscure things here. Method injection if you're taking user input and using it in the for each commandlet. You can start to run arbitrary methods, arbitrary functions there. Don't want to make that happen. You've got vulnerable functions too. Here's an example that can really burn a lot of people. If you want to take user input and send it into the add type commandlet, well the add type commandlet can run arbitrary C sharp code. So if you ever see anybody taking user input and sending it into the add type commandlet, well now you have arbitrary C sharp, arbitrary access to win 32 APIs and Bob's your uncle is over. Now that's a lot to keep in mind. What can you do if you're actually trying to audit this or defend against any of these things? It turns out that PowerShell is powerful and it's not just powerful when it comes to all the stuff it lets you do, but every scripting language pretty much goes through two phases when it understands a script. The first thing is tokenizing. So this is an example of tokenizing here where you give it a command and PowerShell actually has an API that lets you see, okay there's a generic token, there's a parameter, some left parens, there's an operator. You can start to do some really smart analysis against the token level of PowerShell itself, but on top of every token stream there's the parse stream which generates an AST. So this is what PowerShell has as an AST which is kind of a tree like structure of what it interprets the command to be. So you can even do crazy things here like the value of a parameter, was that a constant expression or is that the result of doing some binary operators on some things? Here's an example of the PowerShell AST, there's a great module on the PowerShell gallery that you can just run install module on and start browsing through the AST for a different command. So the AST is cool, but how is this actually going to help you either find issues or prevent issues? And the answer here is there's a lot of wicked hunting things you can do with the AST. So you see at the bottom here kind of read this one from the bottom to the top. That last line there's a method on the AST that lets you find all things that match a given predicate. So this is doing a tree, a navigation of the tree, looking for anything that matches the predicate that you ask. So hunting with the AST is a really big thing, so that bottom line just keep it in your mind's eye. So the bottom eye was going through and the bottom line you can do an AST searcher based on anything that any predicate that you give. And so the top line, and so the top line was an example of a predicate that you can do and start to run against all the AST. So this is an example of finding an invoked member AST where the thing being invoked was not a constant expression, kind of one of those examples. But doing this at scale is a really, really hard problem. So that's why PowerShell has the script analyzer. This already is used in things like visual studio code and stuff. Every time you, for example, do an alias or whatever, it can find things like aliases that you could remap to something else. So I can start to take those predicates and write AST rules against arbitrary PowerShell scripts, but this time based on known script injection vulnerabilities. So obviously that's a great thing to do, so we did it. What we're releasing now is the PowerShell injection hunter that takes every single thing I talked about today and does it for you automatically. So you run PowerShell script analyzer against these injection rules and then you're done. This will flag everything that you might be worried about, but even better, you've got integration with visual studio code. You enable this in visual studio code and you can see these things while you're developing your PowerShell scripts, anything that might cause an issue when exposed to untrusted user input. So here's the thing, if you're on an engagement, make sure you're testing for administrative complexity, testing for script injection vulnerabilities, but if you've got things to defend, man up, use woman up, use GIA, use things like that and use script injection hunter to find vulnerabilities. Thanks for your time. Glad you could make us early.


There's two LaChavage Principles problems up already, but this is the third one. Okay, and this one's good because it really isolates the effect of pressure, what pressure does to a system at equilibrium. Okay, so will an increase in pressure decrease, or sorry, will an increase in pressure decrease or have no effect on the hydrogen concentration in the reaction? So, huh? Yeah, I think this is a homework problem. Huh? It's 89, I think. 89. But anyways, so if you look here, on this side of the reaction, we have one mole of gas, right? So in phase two O's and gaseous forms, we have one mole. On this side we have two moles of gas combined. So when this system gets at equilibrium, it's at whatever concentrations that these are, okay? But then, if you increase the pressure, so say you have some sort of a piston, and this is in, this reaction is in this system here, and you push the piston down to increase the pressure like that, what's going to happen, okay? Well, you've got two moles of gas here and one mole of gas here. So what's going to happen is that the reaction is going to try to get to less moles of gas because it's compressed, okay? So after equilibrium will have happened is that if you increase the pressure, the reaction would go to the left towards the reactant side, okay? And of course, if we're looking at what happens to the concentration of H2, it's actually going to go down because of that increase in pressure, okay? So the concentration of H2 decreases due to the increase in pressure.


Man must seize attributes and his problems to his environment and learn again to exercise his will, his personal responsibility. Albert Einstein couldn't have said this better. Recently, I decided to step out of the house to take a long walk. The entire country had been unlocked down for more than two weeks and I was beginning to feel like I needed to stretch. As I walked through the streets, I saw a group of young people huddled in a corner. One of them walked up to me, keeping his distance and was begging money for food. Truthfully, I didn't have any cash on me or I would have given him. On second thoughts, I imagined that giving him money wouldn't do him any good. First, he was a young person. Second, he didn't seem like he was serious because he was dressed like a thug. Third, because he was young, he had the wits about him to learn a skill that could be put to good use for himself so he can start to make money and not have to depend on anyone or even beg for money. I did not judge him for his condition because I did not quite understand it but I have learned that if we don't take responsibility for our lives, no one will ever take it for us. You may find yourself in a terrible situation which you didn't bring upon yourself but pete in yourself is not going to make the situation go away. Taking responsibility will The niece weightly said, a sign of wisdom and maturity is when you come to terms with a realization that your decisions cause your rewards and consequences. You are responsible for your life and your ultimate success depends on the choices you make. Taking responsibility for your life may not be a much discussed topic amongst young people but doing so in your youth will allow you to build a life of success early. This is all about choosing to take responsibility for your life. No man becomes anything which he doesn't decide to become. You are responsible for your life. You are what you allow. As much as it is easy to blame anyone or circumstances for your predicament, the fact that we have life in us is a proof that we have been handed the charge we need to either move our lives forward or stall it. Most young people do not take responsibility for their lives.  If it's not the way you want it to be, here are three tips to help you take responsibility for your life which if followed will change your life. 1. There is a price to pay. When you blame others, you give up your power to change. Gary Player, one of the most successful international golfers of all time, lost count of how many times someone said to him, I'd give anything if I could hit a golf ball like you. After one particularly grueling day on the links, player couldn't resist correcting the person, said no you wouldn't, you'd give anything to hit golf balls like me if it were easy. Player then listed the things one would have to do to achieve this level of play. You got to get up at 5 o'clock in the morning, go out and hit a thousand golf balls, walk up to the clubhouse to put a bandage on your hand where it started bleeding, then go and hit another thousand golf balls. That's what it takes to hit a golf ball like me. The person nodded and went his way, I'm sure he never did any of those things. Don't blame him, he wasn't just motivated to, he had no determination and no self-discipline to travel the path. His excuse, I can presume, would be, after all, it's player's field, not mine. Yes, a good reason indeed. Not taking responsibility for your life may be the easy way out, but when it comes down to later in the future, there is a price to pay. You can play now and pay later, or you can take charge of your life, pay now and play later, whichever way you'll pay the price. 2. Develop your self-esteem Disciplining yourself to do what you know is right and important although difficult is the high road to pride, self-esteem and personal satisfaction. Brian Tracy If you don't have what others have, it's not because you can't have it, it's likely because you're not willing to invest in yourself the needful attitudes to have the same thing. Having a victim mentality is thinking that everyone but you should be blamed for your bad lots. No, you should be blamed for your bad lots. Your freedom comes when you admit this and you start to work on yourself to grow. Take those classes, pursue those dreams, live intentionally and make deliberate decisions that you will become the person you hoped you'd be. With every step you take, successfully, your self-esteem grows. 3. Accept the permission to live the life you want. When we have begun to take charge of our lives to own ourselves, there is no longer any need to ask permission of someone, George O'Neill. For a long time, I waited for people to tell me I was a great writer. If I wrote anything, I didn't consider it great until someone said it was great. As a result, I didn't publish most of my works because I didn't believe I deserved to be heard. All that changed as soon as I stopped waiting for people to permit me to be great. I realized I had to admit to myself that I was good and that only by believing in myself could I get others to believe in me. No one is going to stop you from living the kind of life you want.  You are the one permitting them. You can have back your permission by choosing to rise to do what you must. But people won't make you do what you don't want to do. Stop permitting them. Grab the permission you already have to move your life forward. 4. Take responsibility every day Helen Keller said I long to accomplish a greater noble task but it is my chit duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble Abraham Lincoln said on my quote you cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today. Taking responsibility for your life wouldn't be an easy feat at first. So it's safe to start small to do a little daily. Start now. Do a little bit of what you wouldn't ordinarily do. Fix the project you've long procrastinated on doing. Call the loved one you have to. Do a little bit every day that helps you take charge of your life. The more you succeed in doing those little things the greater your self-esteem builds. With better self-esteem you are almost always ready to achieve the success you most desire. You don't become in one day what you want to be. It's the same with forming a habit or taking responsibility for your life. So start now to take those baby steps and remember no one can decide to change your life except you no matter who or where you are now you can change. If this video inspired you subscribe to our channel. We love you.


I believe that when depression hits you your file is corrupted.  Sky Williams just came back with his series Slayin Mayware he answers a bunch of people's questions and a lot of them were about depression and he gave some very good advice about depression as well as a little bit of bad advice so let's break this thing down. What is up everybody this is Chris from the Rewired Soul where we talk about the problem but focus on the solution and if you're new to my channel my channel is all about mental health and what I like to do is pull different topics from the youtube community to try to teach you how to improve your mental and emotional well-being so if you're into that kind of stuff make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell so before I get started like I gotta keep myself in check and I love all of you for keeping me in check like I know kind of my thing on here is talking about different things going on in the youtube community and pointing out different things to try to teach you how to improve but something I'm a big advocate of is humility and staying humble right and this is why I always tell you that you need to keep people around who tell you what you need to hear and not what you want to hear so I've mentioned that we have a discord server it's gonna be linked down in the description comments come join but there is a specific channel in there for video suggestions right and I somebody recommended this Sky Williams video she was like yo Sky Williams did a new video and it's about depression and it's really good and my ego came out to play I'm like you know what I don't even want to make that video I actually tweeted out I'm like I don't think I'm gonna make a video about this but here go watch it because it was a really good video and my reason why here's my reason why right and this is why we need to keep people around to call us out on our bf I was like you know what I'm like I love Sky Williams I love Sky Williams so much and I'm so proud of him but this fool acts like I don't exist so I don't want to make a video about him right and here is what she says to me so in the discord Queen Unlikable says I say go for it he makes some great points and if you think it would make a good video then absolutely plus like you always say it's not really for them although hopefully yes they see it and it helps but the message is for whoever watches the video subscribers and anyone else who comes across the video who may find what you have to say helpful that's how I found your channel honestly so as much as it would be better if he were to acknowledge and see your video if you think the video will be overall helpful then I say do whatever you want and make the video whether he sees it himself or not even though obviously it would be ideal for him to watch it but that's just my humble opinion and I'm like damn it Queen Unlikable calling me out on my own stuff I love it and absolutely absolutely like you guys part of the issue with growing and one of my biggest fears is changing right because I'm always trying to teach you to watch other people and see what happens to them and learn from their mistakes and you see how people begin to grow and change so I need people like all of you like Queen Unlikable in discord to call me out because she's absolutely right I tell you guys all the time this video isn't for the youtubers it's for all of you so in that moment in that moment I got very selfish and self-centered and I was about to deny you guys some mental health advice some really good mental health advice because I'm upset that Sky Williams doesn't acknowledge my existence like how selfish and self-centered is that like real quick y'all get some people get really upset when I call people selfish and self-centered but it's the truth it's the truth and most of the time we don't even realize it and this intro is way too long some of you are gonna complain about it but sorry you just got a little bit of a story time so anyways about a week or two ago I made a video about Sky Williams he came back and I talked about how he overcame depression I'll link it up in the info card very good video I love this dude he's hilarious very unique and I just think he's like a genius with the way that he does his videos he's amazing at editing but anyways I guess he had a series I never saw it before it's called slay and a and he lets people ask him questions on twitter so he's back and he finally and he came back with a series and a lot of people ask him questions about depression and there's some very good tips in there and I want to break it down and explain why these are good tips and give you kind of like the therapeutic as well scientific backing for some of them it wasn't just one thing that happened in my personal life that was bad what depression kind of does is it takes your mind and just and then puts it back in your head it's a vicious cycle and it's gross but not everything that went bad was because of depression right I mean it certainly wasn't depression that made youtube strike me for no reason that is an excellent point that is an excellent point and this is why it's important to understand what depression is and why I make so many videos that aren't just about like mental illness as a disorder like so much of our mental health is based on just life circumstances so it's awesome that sky pointed out like a lot of what he was going through was depression but some things were just like yo that sucked like you guys sometimes we just get unlucky you know what I mean like right now I don't know if you're gonna hear it but they're like trimming trees right outside that's unlucky that's not my depression you see what I mean it's important to distinguish the two because something I talked to you guys about is this psychological thing called the the locus of control right an internal locus of control helps you with your depression and anxiety because when you have an internal locus of control you believe that you're in control of most of your outcomes so when sky williams acknowledges that not everything was because of his clinical depression now you can start moving and shifting things in your own lifestyle to try to make things better what has been your biggest weapon to fight depression could others use it to alcohol don't do don't use that you shouldn't drink when you're depressed but damn it's fun especially with you with people alcohol psas piss me off so much it's like in my head when I hear like don't drink I'm like alcohol is accessible and fun and in moderation could be a great stress reliever and it brings this together and it makes straight men kind of act a little curious I'm just so I'll be honest this is the only the only bad tip and sky williams was joking but it gives me the opportunity to talk about this saying that alcohol helps depression now you know I don't drink I've been sober for a while that's cool if you drink that's totally cool all right but I just want to touch on this because I just talked about it in my tan emoji um enabling video this goes back to the habit loop like for example did you know the leading cause of addiction whether it's alcohol or suck or drugs like it's a mental illness and one of the reasons is because of that habit loop that reason is because of self-medicating so I explained yesterday that the habit loop is a trigger behavior and award reward right and once you go through that loop and lays down a memory in your brain so your brain knows to do that again so what I'm trying to explain is is if every time you get depressed you drink alcohol and you feel better your brain is saying oh okay so the next time I feel depressed drink alcohol and I'll feel better and you keep doing that that's how a dependency is created because your brain is training itself to go for a substance every time you feel a certain way all right this is why a huge part of treatment is cognitive behavioral therapy and what that is is swapping out an old unhealthy behavior with a new healthy one I made it kind of like a mission every month I want to find an rpg or really any game that I like that I normally wouldn't pick up and I want to beat it from start to finish and what really helped me is that when I finished a game when I accomplished it it really helped me put small goals into perspective because it's really easy to look at everything you're doing and be like well oh that's just so much oh there's so many things but when you beat an rpg like that or when you beat a video game like the game will teach you small steps and large steps and you get a bigger sense of accomplishment especially when you're finished oh my god oh my god sky williams I love you like this is what I keep telling you guys this is what I keep telling you guys and I'm so glad you brought up video games okay something I've mentioned in a lot of my videos is if you want to work on your depression set up small achievable goals for yourself like I always say you don't have to do everything just do something so something I always say is like just you know get out of bed just take a shower that day just like clean one room of your house do something because when you set up small achievable goals your brain actually gets little spurts of dopamine and serotonin which helps you get out of depression so sky williams talks about how he's made it a new mission of his to get a video game every month that he hasn't played play it all the way through and beat it and that's an accomplishment like you guys do understand do understand what we're saying like you can literally if your goal is to play a video game then do it like I don't care if you want to read for an hour that day I don't care if you want to beat a video game I don't care if you want to knit crochet meditate set up small achievable goals for yourself they can like this is why you craft them to what you're into and this will help your depression okay youtube started to look like fox news and I was like hmm I just felt this compelling need to try to make youtube fun again in any way that I can and making content is one of those ways so I'm here this right here is great and I can really relate to that so sky williams is kind of back because he found this like call to action okay now I will say real quick you got to find a balance between like trying to save everything or your ego getting in the way thinking like oh I'm going to save youtube because the platforms you know there's so much negative content but we got to look at these things as a call to action so I'll share my personal experience it started when I used to go to meetings back in the day I still go to meetings sometimes but okay when I would go to meetings and I'll go to meetings and they were just such a bummer right like sometimes people were just in there and all they were talking about was the problem and no solution and I mean 12-step meetings by the way these weren't like work meetings but anyways people were just talking about the problem and like I was very self-conscious and had social anxiety and I didn't want to share but it was suggested to me that maybe that feeling I'm getting is a call to action like maybe I should be the one to share and maybe shift the momentum of that meeting maybe shift it from being this like downer negative meeting and shift it into that positive kind of swing of things right so I've taken that philosophy and I've used it in the rest of my life like one of the only reasons I have this channel was because I was so sick and tired of seeing like different websites out there that were just like talking about the problem with mental illness and giving no solutions no suggestions at all I was tired of watching YouTubers out here just talking about depression and giving no solutions at all so I've made this channel and I have my little tagline we talk about the problem but focus on the solution because I saw a problem and I wanted to help with it right this is something I mentioned a long time ago in a different video but my my view on complaining is I do not complain about anything unless I'm willing to do something about it so I'm not going to sit around whining and complaining about other YouTubers or other websites or whatever it is unless I'm actually willing to do something about it so that's why I started this channel so think about that in your own life like what what is something that's causing you turmoil what's something that's making you depressed what's something in this world right like maybe it's your neighborhood maybe it's family maybe it's you know whatever it is just think of something if you don't like it do something about it look at that as a call to action to make this world just a little bit better of a place at josh spiker I ask this as a longtime fan and someone is rooting for you in career and life in general what's different this time uh-oh what separates this combat from the five or six other times you've quit and come back damn okay you're right all the best love from Seattle yeah man he just caught me he's like oh I've seen this before this is one of my favorite questions and it's so interesting like you guys know how my brain works kind of I'm always trying to find these like similarities I try to teach you guys find the similarities rather than the differences this question that sky williams got about like what's different this time what's different about your depression this time like I can relate to it with my addiction right as somebody who had multiple relapses as somebody who constantly let my family down as somebody who constantly let my son's mother down somebody who constantly let my friends down right how many times did I say I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm gonna change I'm gonna change I relapsed multiple times multiple times right and you know but this last time over you know over six years ago this time was gonna be different when I first got sober I kept telling everybody this time is going to be different right and people were asking me the same thing that they would ask God like what's different what's different and I'm like dang you right like what is different and this is so important this is so important from both sides of this okay but something I always try to teach you is actions speak louder than words okay this is what shows change this is what shows um that you're actually sorry like I can say sorry a million times but like the reality is like you're not going to be able to forgive somebody overnight you're not able to going to be able to see change overnight like so with sky williams case the only thing he can do is prove with his actions how it's different maybe he's taking care of his mental health more maybe he's documenting it maybe he starts therapy the biggest indicator is going to be if he consistently makes videos I've been following sky williams for about a year now and this is the most consistent I've seen him in the entire time and it's just been three weeks right so I can see he's moving in that right direction but for me personally my actions spoke louder than words by staying clean staying sober becoming a better person like for example how many of you have anger issues and you're constantly snapping at people who love and care about you you're like sorry I'm so sorry I'm sorry about that right but then you just do it again you just do it again because you're not doing anything to work on your anger issues so remember that remember that your actions speak louder than words and I I'm really emphasizing this point because I have clients who call me all the time and they say why don't they trust me yet why don't they believe me yet why haven't they forgiven me yet and I'm just like because you're not doing anything or you're just being impatient like especially for people like we've done things for years we've done awful things for years like we've done something for years and then we expect somebody to forgive us in like a week like think about that logic real quick especially when you're still holding a grudge against some kid from eighth grade who like stole your lunch or something silly like so remember it's very hard for you to let go of things so why do you expect other people to let go of things that you've done so easily think about that practice a little empathy man I love slamming it's been so long since I've done one and like every every single one of these is like so thoughtful and actually sweet as hell everyone's so nice I'm not saying like oh I don't deserve it or anything but like you know how when you're in trouble with your mom and you're expecting her to like beat you with a fish or just like yell at you but then like she doesn't say anything and you're like well just punish me like please get it over with hit me mom you last but not least um I want to I want to talk about this gratitude that sky williams has not even just gratitude but this kind of shock you know what I mean um that people are being so kind and nice to him when he's you know quote unquote screwing up even though he's dealt with mental health issues like yeah I just made a video about this about um you know how I don't deserve my amazing friends like there's a there's definitely a balance with this because I know a lot of us we struggle with negative self-talk we think we're not good enough and all of that and like we need to realize like like sky williams just has a very caring compassionate audience he has people who are right or died they have people who understand and empathize and we need to accept that from people we need to accept that people love and care about us and forgive us and give us second chances you know what I mean because some people who don't forgive us and don't give us a second chance like sometimes we don't deserve it but sometimes they don't deserve us either and it's just better that they're out out of our lives right sky williams was close to a million subscribers he's lost a ton of subscribers but now he has a chance to rebuild with a very solid fan base who loves what he's doing you see what I mean so be willing to accept the forgiveness that people give you if they do forgive you okay use their love like it's a cliche old saying a man neo made a song about this a while back but let them love you until you learn how to love yourself and another plug for the discord server come join the discord server okay because that is a place where we give you love and we'll love you until you learn how to love yourself all right but anyways let me know down in the comments below are there any of these depression tips that you can use or anything that you can relate to all right or let me know this what is that small achievable goal that you're gonna give yourself on a weekly basis or a daily basis or a monthly basis are you gonna read are you gonna play a video game are you gonna meditate what is your small achievable goal that you're gonna do all right many ways that's all I got for this video if you liked this video please give it a thumbs up if you're new make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell because I make a ton of videos and a huge thank you to all of these beautiful people we're signed up over on patreon we'll use these last few seconds to let you know this if you if you want some goodness go sign up on patreon right now for as the dollar tier I would like if you did more but at least a dollar because I have some very exciting news coming up all right so thanks so much for watching I'll see you soon