I have a mobility impairment. I'm dyslexic, which means I have difficulty reading and pretty bad handwriting. And I became legally blind at 25. And I'm a graduate from the University of Washington's Master of Human-Computer Interaction and Design program. My major in that is human-centered computing. I'm an undergraduate at Auburn University, majoring in computer science and focusing in accessibility. Leading the way, computing students and professionals with disabilities. I'm Richard Ladnder, professor in computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. We rely on computers, tablets, and smartphones to do work and stay connected more than ever. Not only can technology provide access to people with disabilities, but people with disabilities can be part of the computing workforce as software and web engineers, systems administrators, usability engineers, and researchers. I am a software development engineer at Amazon. So I started programming when I was around 15. I've always been really into computers. I used to play a lot of audio games. Those are basically like video games, but they use sound instead of graphics. So I was really into those. I really wanted to create games, and that's what really got me into programming. My name is Jessie Shulman, and I'm an operations program manager in the web services field and a graduate of the University of Washington. And I have a learning disability, so I struggle with language to begin with, so learning computer syntax like Java. All the problems that I had, the struggles that I had with English came up again with Java. So the early coursework was really difficult for me, but when I stuck with it I really enjoyed the data structure classes that came later on. I don't just have a passion for it, I live it. I breathe and think what I can do with a computer or with computing systems, and that's why I have six of them, and I do everything imaginable for my goal is to see what can be done instead of what can't be done. There's nowhere you can look in computing and not find a challenge. I'm the kind of person who when I come across one of those little challenges, I keep digging and digging and digging until I can find the answer and figure out how to fix the problem. I'm Sam Seppa. I'm an HR professional and I've worked for a variety of tech companies over the last ten years of my career, and now I'm focusing on recruitment for software engineers. Students are attracted to computing for a variety of reasons. My name is Cindy Bennett and I'm a first year PhD student in the Human-Centered Design and Engineering Department at the University of Washington. My name is Patience. I am an undergrad at UDAP.com, so I'm finishing my MBAs in Information Technology at UDAP.com. My name is Jesse and I'm a first years student at the Human-Centered Design and Engineering Department at UDAP, and I get to find my son as a kid. My disability is complex. There is one that started from birth, which is my right arm. So I just do everything with my left arm. Computing is interesting to me because I can combine my two passions to create an impact. So I have a passion for psychology and creating a user experience that people really enjoy. And I have a passion for using technology to improve people's lives. It is important for people with disabilities to pursue careers in science because we have really unique life experiences and skills that we can offer. And it's important that for us to be stakeholders in projects and for us to be represented on the market. What I would like to do is to go into security, which is becoming a hot subject today. So I think that's really important for people with disabilities like me, my son, to be included in a competitive field because technology has played a huge role. It has played a better access to lots of work. So for example, the cookie press has to hear, but also the tech system has to be used for phones, computer, messages, etc. People with disabilities can receive accommodations and use technology to help them in school and in the workplace. My main accommodations would be extended time on tests, having my books available as e-text format, which means I can use a screen reader to read out the books to me. So even though when I'm reading it myself and I may not be able to understand it, the computer is telling me exactly what those words are. Many devices come equipped with accessible features, including larger text, text to speech, and spell checking. I use a typical computer like everyone else, but it has an additional piece of software called a screen reader loaded onto it. The screen reader tells me what is on this screen, and I use the keyboard to navigate. Basically, the information that comes up on the screen gets converted to information I can hear, or it can be then converted into something that I can use a braille display to read with as well. I do not accommodate and use almost every day is called C-A-R-T, which stands for communication access real-time. And so what it is, is capturing it, giving that real-time capturing it, that I can read the transcript on the screen while your professor is talking in real-time. The accommodations that I used in school included books on tape. I used a note taker for certain classes, and I used dictation software for my writing tasks. At work, I use a text to speech for some of my written tasks, writing emails, large papers. It helps me proofread and write more quickly. People with disabilities can be valuable team members who bring fresh perspectives to classrooms, labs, and workplaces. Regardless of your ability, you can create. You can be an innovator in a space. Being a problem solver is definitely really important when you're a software developer, and if you're someone with a disability, that's something that you have to do pretty regularly, since we're faced with challenges all the time, we have to find solutions to them. It probably makes us better problem solvers, and it's definitely a good trait to have when you're working in this field. I work in an environment where it's not who you are, it's what solutions do you bring to the table, are you willing to work with other people, are you thinking about all of these different teams, all of these different options. Candidates with disabilities have a unique thought process to bring to a company. Our country is diverse, so the marketplace needs to attract a lot of diverse people who will use products that we're selling or the services we're providing. If a country is diverse, your team needs to be diverse as well, to parallel what our country's demographics are. For more information about access computing and resources related to increasing the participation of people with disabilities in computing fields, consult uw.edu forward slash access computing. Access computing is supported by the National Science Foundation grant number CNS-153-9179. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this video are those of the authors that do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Copyright 2016. Permission is granted to copy these materials for educational non-commercial purposes provided the source is acknowledged.


Hello, everyone, and thanks for watching. Today, we're going to talk about Helm, the package manager for Kubernetes and the security considerations you need to have when using and incorporating Helm charts into your system. As we all know, as engineers, we all strive to use the best technology to solve the problems we're facing. And cloud-native infrastructure and containerized workloads are fueling that innovation nowadays. I was reading a CNCF survey that said that 92% of the organization surveyed are using containers in production, and 83% of those are using Kubernetes in production. So there is wide adoption of Kubernetes, and the use of Kubernetes is increasing. At the same time, we're seeing an increase in cloud adoption. Throughout research, we're also seeing that there's been over 30 billion records exposed to the cloud misconfigurations across 200 different breaches in the last two years. And these breaches have happened in all types of organizations, from small to large. And the problem is that, well, it's easy to get started with cloud-native technologies. It's also easy to make security mistakes that can put systems at risk. So having security in mind while using cloud-native technologies is important. So let's start discussing one of these technologies called Helm. And I think the best way to do that is to take a look at similar technologies. For example, if I'm trying to install a package on my Mac, I usually use Homebrew to install that package whenever I have an option. And here, you see how I would install my SQL on my laptop. And Homebrew takes care of figuring out all of the dependencies necessary and any updates I need to perform to properly install my SQL, which makes it very easy to get on a local database. Another way to get my SQL is to use Docker. The MySQL Docker image comes prepackaged with everything you need to get a MySQL database running as a Docker container. And here's an example of how you would run that. If you already have Docker installed on your laptop, this is an easy way to get MySQL without having to blow your local system. And it's a good option if you need an affirmable database for local testing, where once you're done, you can just destroy your container. Similarly, Helm helps us install packages in our Kubernetes cluster. By executing Helm install, Helm will download something called a Helm chart, which is basically templated to Kubernetes configuration files that have been prepackaged with all of the settings and dependencies necessary to run the target state system in your Kubernetes cluster. You have the option to customize this with variables for the template if needed. And the benefit is that you can get up and running easily without having to write all the configuration files yourself. So at a first glance, using Helm sounds awesome because now if you want to install any software that has been packaged into a Helm chart, you can just do a Helm install and install it without breaking your head to figure out how to get the software up and running. And that's really great for experimenting, but you do have to be careful when installing packages that have been written by third parties with the goal of getting the software up and running as the chart may not have necessarily all of the security considerations for your production environment embedded in by default. And that's what we'll discuss today. How to safely use Helm in your projects, making sure that your security and operational requirements are met while maintaining the benefits of the ease of use of a package manager. Before we get started, let me talk a little bit about myself. My name is Cesar Rodriguez and I'm a developer advocate at Acurex. I've been working as a cloud security architect for most of my career in the military and financial industry and I enjoy contributing to open source projects. So I like to break down the steps we need to follow to use Helm securely into three. The first step is to identify the security requirements and the best practices applicable to the system you're trying to secure. This is going to be specific to your project and the business objectives of that project. The next step is to use something called policy as code. And this is where we take the policies and requirement that we've identified and convert them into a declarative language that can be used to evaluate our infrastructure configuration code and the Helm charts we're using. Step number three is taking that policy as code, one more step and implementing guardrails to make sure that the most important policies are always being followed and to give engineers early feedback on any code or Helm charts that may be in violation of our requirements. So let's start with step number one and this is where we're identifying the policies that are applicable to our system and capturing our requirements. And like I said, different systems are going to have different requirements. So for example, a banking system is going to have a different requirement that a music streaming service or any commercial application. And the important thing here is to identify what are those requirements going to be early in the project so you can start evaluating your infrastructure and configuration against the requirements as early as possible. Trying to retroactively apply security controls to your system once it's in production is always very painful and costly. So the first thing I always try to do when identifying policies is to capture what are our business objectives and what are we trying to accomplish with the system. And this triangle always comes to mind where we are trying to achieve a balance of security of the system while making sure that usability and functionality are not affected. What we're trying to visualize with the triangle is that if we make the most secure system that system is probably not gonna be usable or functional. For example, if we're trying to secure a network the most secure network will be the one where I kill all the network traffic to it and no one can access the network. At the same time, if we made the most user friendly system for example, by removing the requirement to have passwords in the system it's not going to be the most secure. So we always want to strike a balance where our business objectives are accomplished without compromising on security. The next place to look for in terms of security controls that will be applicable to your systems are frameworks or any compliance requirements that you may have or industry standards. Depending on the data you're collecting or the type of system you may be subject to the payment card industry requirements in PCI DSS or HIPAA for health systems or if you're collecting personal information in Europe you may need to be GDPR compliance. There's also industry benchmarks that you can use like those put out by the center of internet security and assist benchmarks. And cloud providers also give guidance on the best practices for systems using their technology like the well-architected framework from AWS. So once you have those requirements it's helpful to think about the security risk categories and how to categorize the requirements in these. Data protection deals with how do we protect any sensitive data that our system could be handling. So things like using encryption at rest or encryption in transit will be examples of security controls in the data protection category. Access management is how do we make sure that any system, people or process accessing our system are only authorized to access the functionality that you need. With network security and platform security controls we make sure that only the necessary open ports are exposed for the processes that need to be exposed. And to other systems or people. And we also need to make sure that we have the visibility and observability necessary. Not only to debug and any issues in the system but also to reconstruct any scenarios where we may have been compromised. One category that's not in the slide where we need to keep in mind all set of security is operational efficiency. These are things like making sure that you're only using the resources that you need for your system so you don't incur unnecessary expenses. So now let's look at an example architecture. And here I'm looking to install WordPress which is an open source, constant management system that you can use to host websites and blogs. And WordPress uses MariaDB for storage database and we'll be using memcached in front of the DB to cache database queries and speed up the site. So all of these are third party open source technologies and this is a really good use case where we can use the Helm chart that's already published. So let's take a look at how we find that. So we open artifact hub.io in our browser which is the site where we can find Kubernetes packages and we're gonna search for WordPress. The first link here is a Helm chart published by a company called Bitnami and looking at the TLDR. We can see how straightforward it is to install this chart with a quick glance at the introduction. We can see that the chart includes MariaDB chart as a dependency and that the memcached chart is also one of the dependencies. So by using this chart we get all of the resources we need in our architecture. So now let's go back to our slides. So now that we have our architecture defined and have an idea of the Helm chart we're using, let's take a look at some of the security requirements that we need to make sure we comply with when we provision the system. And I've identified three requirements that we're gonna look at that I found from the SIS benchmark for Kubernetes. The first one is to ensure that there's no secrets in environment variables. The reason this is important when you're dealing with a third party software is that sometimes there's applications that dump the state of the environment as part of error logs. If the environment contains secrets, that means that anyone with access to the error logs would also get all the secrets in the environment variables. So we wanna make sure that we avoid these whenever possible. The second security requirement is to avoid containers running as route. Although there are runtime security features in Kubernetes that protect us, we will still have the increased likelihood of processes within the root containers breaking out and escaping, which affects the risk of your host and other containers running within that host. Since we're using third party containers for Republic Helm charts, this is something to be mindful of. So there's an option within Kubernetes to allow paths that have privileges that the parent process did not have such as set user ID and set group ID file mode. And you can control that with the allow privilege escalation parameter. We want to make sure that this is set to false on Helm charts we're using to avoid privilege escalations in those containers. Okay, so we've identified our architecture and determined what are the security requirements needed for our system using industry standards and best practices. Now it's time to codify these requirements into policy as code. But what is policy as code? Policy as code means that you're writing the security requirements that are important for your system to be compliant with as code in a declarative language that can be used to evaluate your infrastructure as code against. So your Helm charts, your Kubernetes configuration YAML files or any other declarative language can be evaluated using policy as code. And this makes sure that you are consistently enforcing your requirements as part of your systems deployment and development lifecycle and allows you to move your security posture from reactive to proactive as you want to detect and remediate issues as soon as these are introduced in your code and not at runtime when they're made in the actual environment. For policy as code to work you'll need to be using infrastructure as code to control your system. So your manual changes to your Kubernetes cluster and everything should be defined declarative not manually. And this works well for Helm as your Helm charts are already written for you. The more traditional approach to security is just handing over security requirements to engineers and then practically checking through scripts, tools or manually that these have been implemented at runtime. There are multiple benefits of using as policy as code instead of or in combination to traditional approaches. And I wanna highlight a few of these benefits The first benefit is that you can implement your security requirements with low friction when we're delivering security requirements as code and asset declarative language. There's no ambiguity into what needs to be accomplished in order to meet the requirements. You can reduce the number of gates and interactions between engineers and security and the system can be tested throughout the SDLC to ensure that the requirements are met. The next benefit is that your system will be secure from the get go. Having implemented security upfront would reduce the number of issues that need to be addressed once you're in a runtime production environment. Since we've identified the requirements we need to implement from the beginning and have tested our system against these with automation. Last benefit I wanted to highlight is the increased security visibility. Since now we can store the applicable security requirements with our system code and can easily identify what we are compliant with and any gaps that need to be addressed. So let's look at how we can implement policy as code using an open source tool called Open Policy Agent or OPA. OPA is a CNCF graduated project and the tool allow us to have a unified language and framework to do policy evaluations in our systems. So we're going to take the three security requirements that we identify in step number one of our example architecture and convert them into a policy as code language using the regal language from OPA. So our first regal implements our security requirements where we're trying to avoid secrets in environment variables. So just to refresh, this is important because we're trying to protect our secrets from being exposed in error logs if the containers we're running capture the environment as part of errors. And if we're using a third party health charts this could be an issue. So let me walk you through this line by line what we're trying to detect in this regal rule. So if you look at line number one we're trying to extract the API definition from our deployment. Then on line number two, three and four we're getting the environment variables in our container specification. All these lines so far contain variables that we're using to walk through the Kubernetes YAML file that we're evaluating and that will be a little bit more clear on the next slide. On line number six is the expression where we're testing if there's a value named secret key ref which would mean that there's a secret being used in an environment variable which is the issue we're trying to detect with this regal rule. So here's the regal next to the YAML file that violates the rule. So looking at line number six at the YAML on the right we see where the container are specified and then on line number nine we have our environment variable and if we look at line number 12 and number 17 we see where there are a couple of variables for username and password being used which would be in violation of our regal rule and would trigger in the statement we wrote on line number six of the regal. So this was a simple example where we can see how regal variables can be used to walk through the Kubernetes YAML file and how statements are used to trigger whenever issues are found. Let's look at a more complex example. So in this second regal we're going to identify when the allow privilege escalation parameter is set to true or when it's not defined as we don't want the pods from our help try to be able to escalate privilege. Our regal rule is specified in lines one through five and we have a couple of helper functions in the bottom. So the first couple of lines of the regal rule we're getting the contents of the security context in our deployment specification then on line number four we trigger our functions to do the evaluation. On the first function we check if the value of the allow privilege escalation parameter in the security context is set to true which is the violation. And then on the second function we check if the allow privilege escalation parameter has not been defined as our requirement is to have this parameter set to false. So to make this more clear we can see a snippet of a YAML deployment file on the right side of the slide and looking at line number five we see where allow privilege escalation has been set to true which would violate our function in line number nine and trigger our regal rule. So now let's look at the regal rule for the third security requirement we have and this one is about avoiding our containers running as route. We want to protect our environment from the possibility of container escapes and it's the best practice to avoid running containers as route. So I cut the regal rule from this snippet as it was similar to the last one I wanted to focus on the functions that we're using here in the first and the second function highlighted here we're trying to identify if run as non-root parameter in the security context is set to false meaning that we're going to be running as route or if it's undefined it's by default Kubernetes will run the container as route. The next couple of functions we're trying to identify if the run as user parameter in the security context of the pod is set to zero which is route or if it's undefined. So I have a couple of YAML snippets here that are in violations so we can visualize these issues. On the first one, if we look at line number two run as non-root is set to false so this is in violation of our policy and on the second YAML snippet in line number two we see that run as user is set to zero which is the root user and that will be in violation of our regal rule as well. So now that we have our policies to find as code it's time to implement our guard rails to make sure that any helm charts we use are in compliance with our policies. So there's two main types of security guard rails proactive and reactive. Reactive are more of the traditional security controls where we update the runtime environment after we notice a violation has occurred. So for example, when doing a vulnerability scan of a server and we detect that there's a critical vulnerability that needs to be patched we could have a reactive guard rail to automatically patch the system. Proactive guard rails help us identify issues early in the development process where it's easier to fix and less risky and this is where policy as code fits. So there's an open source tool that allows you to implement your policy as code guard rails that we had accurate maintained called terrace can and what I like about terrace can is that it's packaged as an executable so you can easily integrate it into your workflow by running it locally on your desktop or as part of your CI CD pipeline. It can also be executed in server mode which allows you to centrally govern your infrastructure as code scanning by having a central hop with rules to help meet your standards. And we recently added the ability to use terrace can as an admission controller where you can use it in server mode to listen to the admission webhook in your Kubernetes cluster to prevent any actions that will deviate from the standards and policies that you define in terrace can. The tool leveraged the regal language from the OPA projects as part of its policy engine so you have a standard way to implement policy as code and it includes a lot of policies by default that you can use as a baseline to evaluate your system or enhance your current policy set with the ability to scan Terraform, Kubernetes, YAML files, Helm and customize. So I'm going to walk you through the three example ways to implement proactive guardrails and then we'll see a quick demo of how terrace scan works. So the first and most straightforward guardrail is to use a policy as code scanning tool on your engineer's local environment. So here's an example where we're using terrace scan to scan the example WordPress architecture we've been using through the presentation and finding the three issues that we've discussed on the deployment of the channel file. This is the best way to get early feedback in through the Helm charts you're trying to use. And in this example, I had the Helm chart code on my local environment where you can also scan remote repositories. And here's the terrace scan command you would use to do that with the dash R to scan the git repository that has the WordPress Helm chart directly. You can further enhance your workflow by creating an alias to check if there are any high findings in terrace scans output and failing your Helm chart install if there are any. The next place to apply guardrails is on your CI CD pipeline. And this is where you can prevent any code that deviates from your standards to be introduced by having a CI job fail if there are any issues that you would like to walk on. And we have to keep in mind that it's always easier to fix issues on your code rather than at runtime. So you want to make sure that changes to your runtime Kubernetes clusters are only known through code. And this will help you use CI CD as part of your security guardrails. The last guardrail I want to discuss is using an admission controller. Admission controllers hook into your Kubernetes admissions web hook to make a policy evaluation on the API call that's being made and can be used to block any requests that deviate from your standards. If you have policies, this must be enforced no matter what, this will be a good place to make sure that they're being followed. Also, we know that there might be break the glass situations where we might not be able to use declarative code to make changes to our clusters and need to make a quick change at runtime because of an emergency. So using this approach, we would have an additional control to prevent issues from being introduced through those break the glass changes. So now let's take a look at how Taurus can works locally by evaluating the WordPress Helm chart. So now for this example, I'm using the deprecated and obsolete github.com slash helm slash charts which is an old repository which is no longer maintained, but it's good for our purposes of illustrating policy as code. And the first thing I did was to get cloned this. So I have this stored locally. But one of the things I wanted to show you was if you don't wanna have a repository you wanna scan, which is not local, you can use terracecan slash i helm slash our gith and put the github repository in there and under the hood terracecan will download that repository and run terracecan on it without you having to necessarily clone that repository and give you the results which is an easy way if you have remote repositories that you wanna scan. So I'm just gonna scan it real quick to show you what are the things out of the box that we get from terracecan when scanning this repository. And this might take a little bit because it's downloading the repository from the internet and then running terracecan. So if you see here are some of the results that we got from running terracecan on the repository and this is what the default policies that terracecan has. So you'll get a lot of results which may or may not be relevant for what you're trying to do. So one thing I did with this repository on my local copy of the repository was I added, let me zoom this a little bit. So I added a policies directory and this policies directory has the three policies that we're trying to evaluate today for our examples. So just to show you the first one that we're gonna take a look at is using containers in environment variables. And as I said, for this one, we're just looking for this particular value of secret key ref and you can just looking at it locally on our deployment.jaml file. And I had this open previously so it's redirected me right there. But looking at this file, if you search for this value, that's all of what we're doing if we were gonna do this manually, that's all what we're doing. But this time we're using a tool to look for that secret key ref. And here you see that they're using a, they're storing that secret for the WordPress database password and also the username. So that's what they're doing here. And we'll go on to TeraScan shortly so we can see how these three policies evaluate the code. So the next policy here, so let's take a look at this one where we're looking at the security context and seeing if allow privilege escalation is set to true or if it's undefined. So I'm just gonna look real quick to see if they set this on the deployment.jaml. I don't see it set at all here. So it's gonna be undefined. It's probably got a trigger based on this rule. And the last one is running as a non-root, which it's expecting for you to set the run as non-root on the security context as false. The one thing here is that the way that TeraScan works is that it will automatically use the variables in the helm chart and populate the values for it before doing a policy evaluation. So although I'm doing a quick find in this deployment.jaml file, although I'm not seeing the values that would trigger these policies, it doesn't mean that they're not there. It might mean that they're using variables for these. So this is an example where it's saying, so run as user, it's using a variable here. So what we're looking for is run as non-root or having it undefined or the run as user being set to zero. So right here, we have run as user, but it's using the variable to set this up. So TeraScan will look for this value on the variables. So let's look at the values.jaml file and what was the name of run as user? So run as user is set as a non-zero user, which means the rule is not gonna trigger for this one. So now let's run TeraScan to see if which ones of these policies are gonna be triggered by our local helm chart. So we can do TeraScan-p and the dash-p flag is where you can specify a directory containing your rego policies. So this will override so that you don't use the default policies included in TeraScan. So we're only gonna be using the three policies that we've created here. And then that's I is our IAC provider, which in this case is helm. And once I hit enter, this is gonna run pretty fast because we're just running TeraScan against a local repository as opposed to the previous example where we downloaded the remote repository from GitHub. So as we see here, our scan showed two of the policies being violated. So the first one is where the container is using secretion environment variables. So this is where on our deployment, the JMO file I showed that the database credentials were there. And then the second one being triggered here is that the container should not run with allow privilege escalation. And this one is triggering because if you remember our policy, we said that if you don't have the allow privilege escalation set to false, we will trigger this policy. And our final policy, which is running as non-grid, is not triggering. And that's because we have run as user set as a non-zero value. So let's recap on what we did today and how we implement Helm securely in our system. The first step was to identify and define the requirements that were applicable to our system. In the example, we captured three different requirements that came from the SIS benchmark for Kubernetes that were important to us. And step number two, we took those requirements and rolled declarative regal policies to help evaluate our infrastructure as code against them. And finally in step number three, we discussed the different ways that we can implement guardrails to make sure that our policies are being met and to get feedback on policy violations as early as possible. So thanks for watching today. If you wanna learn more about Terescan or cloud vulnerabilities policies and best practices, you can visit our blog where we're constantly publishing the latest findings from our research team at acrase.com slash blog. Thank you.


Aaron Fox, you gave me some of the best advice, life advice I think I've ever gotten and so I want to talk with you about it now.  What do I need to talk about? And it was impossible for me to do this comprehensively without having a conversation with you. So thank you for your time today. You did an episode of Single Threaded, you gave us this advice. I think I can't remember, had you just gone through a layoff or like were you in a job search at the time? What was the context? Both feel the same, like getting laid off and searching for a job. They're kind of intertwined. Yeah. Yeah. Unless you're like independently wealthy for some reason. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I have been laid off before and I have been on a job search for longer than I expected. So during that podcast, it was probably just when I got laid off. The thing that stuck with me is that you said something to the effect of, you know, when you're doing a hard thing, a new thing, you know, whatever it is, like, you know, searching for a job and you're facing a lot of rejection, facing a lot of challenge, something that you do to offset that is to do something that you're good at, like unambiguously good at.  And then I'm going to come back and cook ribs. And that was like, you were like the angel in my shoulder was like, just do something you love doing. And so I'd love to hear more about your experience. What led you to kind of finding that and living it? Yeah. I think, well, first off, thank you that I feel I'm like speechless, obviously. It's just great that you made ribs and coded for fun and thought of that advice. I love it so much. I think where it came from really is it took me a while to get there. And I was just so sad and so sad of either getting laid off and not being able to find a job and feeling because when you have a job, you have projects and you feel successful and like you spend whatever six, eight hours of your day at your job. And it's what kind of gives you like purpose.  And when you don't have a job and you're applying or you just got laid off, you don't have that like bucket to like fill the satisfaction.  And so like I had like so much baked goods by like every day, I would have something but I felt so like accomplished because it's like a quick, easy thing for me. At least baking comes very easily to just bake something and it's delicious. I can share it with my family and friends. And so that's kind of where it happened of like, oh, like I'll totally bomb a technical interview, but I'm going to go make some cookies because I'm good at that and it makes me feel good. And so it kind of just came from that wanting to just be happy and figuring out what makes me happy and I'm just going to do it. Yeah, I love that. I'm curious because I think both of us had this like food was a big part of it. And I know that food's not universal, but there is this thing that resonated with me was when you said the idea of doing something and having it be shareable, like having a shareable success. How much of that was a part of it for you to kind of be able to reset with the people that are important to you? Yeah, because that's where the satisfaction comes from.  One, I'd like, oh, it's just like a technical interview all over again. Or they like, oh, this is really great cookie.  For me, it was very important, but it's also important to do stuff just for yourself, too. Like, I don't know. I'm a big dog walker. I like to walk my dog a lot and listen to a podcast. And so that's like another thing I would do at the time to, I don't know, just be like, oh, I did a walk today, gold star, you know? So it's not always satisfaction from other people. I feel like that's more of a bonus.  So yeah, we were talking about this even just just before we hit record how even now you're taking some parental leave, but you're kind of excited to get those first like green blocks kind of on the board again. That there's there's something kind of in us that just wants to, like you said, like those little gold stars, the checkboxes are ending the day feeling accomplished. Now, this is really funny. I'm just I'll be honest, I make some pretty good ribs, but they're not always great, right? Like there's that chance that they're like not going to be good. And my my children, they're 10 and 13 now, have very distinguished pallets and care less about how I feel than giving their commentary on on food. And so I wonder, did you have any experiences in those moments where you tried to share something and it kind of bombed? And then how did that that feel? Or were you able to navigate around that? Yeah, I think I would be like for my husband, like I'm very sensitive right now. So you should try this cookie. And like, I think everyone was very aware. I was just like, overall, just, you know, going through a thing. And so I think if you just set it up for that, be like, you know, dad's going through something right now, try this grip, you know, like. Just. Oh my gosh, I love that.  I'm good at feedback when I'm ready for it. And so if I usually say, like, oh, if I ask, like, what do you think would be better about this cookie? Like more chocolate chips, less chocolate chips? Like, I think I've trained my husband and like my parents well enough to know, like wait for me to ask for some feedback. Or sometimes they'll ask like, you want some feedback? I'm like, no, but thank you. Maybe tomorrow positive feedback only in this moment is what I'm looking for. Exactly. That alone is a very important piece of advice. I think sometimes like for the people in our lives, when you're going through a thing to be explicit about what you're going through and what, why you're doing a thing. And I think sometimes that feels a little bit raw, but then also it's setting you and your friends up for success to be like, I'm very clearly doing this because I'm going through a thing.  And at the end of the day, it's cookies and ribs, and it's like it could still eat it. Yeah. You still accomplish something. I'm curious what the extension, I guess, of that advice is. So you've gone through it now. And if I'm not mistaken, you're really enjoying, you know, where you landed and enjoying the work. As you look back at that time, do you feel like there were other things that you did that were a success or kind of led you through it and led you to what you eventually found?   I'm ready. I'm ready to get ready to hate me. It's everything works out in the end. Like people would tell me that and be like, stop it. You know, like that's not what I need to hear right now. But in reality, it is. And I think I never enjoy my time when I'm in between jobs or getting laid off because I don't know. I feel like at the time in the past when that happened, it's such a huge like who I am and my personality is my job. And like that shifts throughout your life. And I'm really into going on about that. But I think the best thing that I did, though, was just do stuff that made me happy during that time. And that was baking and going on walks and doing little react components or things like that because I don't know. I think a huge part of me to be to feel successful is being happy. And so that really just like tick the box is funny. Yeah, I I always think it's so funny. The the challenge of communicating with the people in your life about the hard things that they're going through, right? Because you want to motivate them, but at the same time, you want to instill confidence in them and do your best not to like kind of like just fall into the hole trying to like pull them out, right? But so many times it does kind of come across as a little unknowing, I guess. And I think that's something that stood out to me so much about like your practical wisdom in saying, hey, just do something you like. Like that that will help. And like I can't say that it's going to make things better, but it will help. And I do love things like that because it's like, hey, like I've been in the hole and like here's something that you can do while you're down there. Yeah, absolutely, too. And when that when I got laid off or when I was in between jobs, someone I can't remember who it was. I don't remember who I was talking to. So if you're out there, thank you. I don't give the full credit for this, but at a brewery or at somewhere and there was like a can of beer or soda on the table.  Like if this whole can of beer is your happiness, like how much of your job is your happiness? And I was like, oh, seventy five percent. And they're like, so seventy five percent of your life, you have to be so happy at work. And if you get laid off, you're only you're not happy. Like that's seventy five percent. And I was like, so that was like such like a slap in the face of, yeah, like I am too obsessed with finding satisfaction and finding happiness from my work. And so I've really worked on that in the past few years of figuring out like where I live is that like 10 percent happiness is like my partner in my family, like how much happiness is that? Now I have like a baby, like, man, that's like my whole can right now. My whole can of beer is my baby. Whole can of beer is my baby. It's the greatest thing I've ever heard. But yeah, but when you chat with people and you say, OK, here's your can, like what percentage, how much happiness and how much joy do you find from your job? And if you love your job and that and it's seventy five percent and you're thriving and that's what makes you happy. That's great. If you love New York City and you have to live in New York City and you won't be happy, that's yours like 50 percent or something like that. So like I learned that a lot when I was wasn't working and looking and just to figure out how how much I care about things in my life. And that kind of put it more into perspective of of everything for me at least. Yeah, yeah, I love that. How is that kind of changing now? And does that impact kind of how you think about work? You know, I think you said that you're happy where you landed. But, you know, as you change that, do you feel a sense of like insecurity about how you approach your work?  Definitely, because when I was like, oh, yeah, seventy five percent. That's where I find all my joy is work. I was just like burnt out, not realizing like how hard I was working and how much I was like, I need to finish this project on time or I cry. I don't know. It's just it really put in perspective.  Like, if they notice that I'm dialing back because I'm trying to find more happiness, like walking my dog, spending time with other people. Like, how does that work? And so I think just having an open conversation with your manager or whoever you report to, whoever you're going through work with is a big one to be to say either I'm burnt out or like I'm kind of adjusting my workflow that my happiness like I'm still going to get everything done on time and blah, blah, blah, but I'm a huge open communicator. I probably communicate too much. So I think just having those conversations of like, I need to spread my happiness a little bit more across my life than where it's at right now. Yeah. And that is an important conversation that I think a lot of us don't have early enough is that that concept of motivation and kind of like being committed, but to a degree, right? And in that being OK and that being how commitment looks like for you at this phase in your life, we could talk about that all day, I think. Yeah. Well, this is awesome. I wanted an opportunity mostly just to cheer the wisdom that you've shared with me with others and just say thank you. Because I think, yeah, in a very real way, I couldn't have navigated this kind of emotionally without the support that you gave me in that conversation that you have with Jen. So thank you for being someone who is, as you said, just very open with their feelings and, yeah, blabbering now. But thank you. No, no, I'm so I'm so glad because I've I've been there. I know how hard it is and I'm just so glad it helps. Well, awesome. Erin, thank you so much for your time. I'm glad that you made time to join me for this like conversation. And I really do hope that it helps other people where can people find you and kind of, you know, so they can follow along with what's going on in your life and and the way you see it. Yeah, I'm on the X, the Twitter. I'm mostly there still hanging out. I think it's it's it's kind of like going to come back, right? A little bit. I think so. Yeah.  So yeah, I think I think there's some there's some gold to find there right now. It's Twitter at Aaron. Oops, so it's Aaron Fox with two O's. Love it. Love it. Thank you so much for your time, Erin. And yeah, I will see you again soon. Yeah, anytime.


What's going on, everyone? Sam here with late sports cards for the 22-23 Panini Revolution basketball hobby box case break number 27. Pick your team style. Read off the list of our names and our names. We've got L&M with the Jazz, Alex P. Nix, Andrew D. Warriors, Chen L. Ox, Chen Y.W. Mavericks, Connor M. Raptors, David H. Wizards, David V. Blazers, Francis P. Magic, Gary H. with the Lakers, Hunter R. Thunder, Kevin L. Timberwolves, Claes W. Pelicans, Mark S. Netsixers, and Rockets. Matthew T. with the Bolts, Matthew K. Pacers, Michelle K. Celtic's Heat, and Kings. M. Kang with the Hornets, Nick A. Clippers, Po-Yen-L. Sons, Robert B. with the Pistons, Scott T. Grizzly's Caps, Tim T. with the Spurs, Tony K. Nuggets, and Tyler B. with the Bucks. Good luck here, guys. Let's get into it. I'm still not showing me who that person who bought it was. All I want to do is say thank you personally to who it was. Nope. I guess so, dude. I guess Gmail's like, ah, gotcha. Curry, Shockwave, Blake Wesley, Groove, Rookie. Again, it's just going to always be base on the back. The last three cards will always be that base. Palo Rookie on top, very nice. Groove, Brandon Ingram, base, base, base. Jalen Green, Vortex. There is KD on the Cosmic to 99. Nice one there, Nets. Again, you're still going to have KD and Kyrie as Nets and the rest of the 22-23 run. Nicolay Jovic, that is Christian Coloco for the Raptors to 149 on the Impact. Rookie. Here's some barns. Base, base, base. First Auto. Dyson Daniels, Rookie Auto for the Pelicans. There you go, New Orleans. Nicholas B. Thank you, Nicholas B. That's who it was. Nicholas, I appreciate you, and we're down to one now. I have to wait for Google so I can thank the next person. So again, whoever took that second spot, maybe it's down to one. Thank you, Bradley Beale, Vortex, for acting. I will thank you personally when Google finally decides to show me who it is. Astral Desmond Bain, that was a Tatum Shockwave on top, and last pack of Boxing One is Jay Will, Jake LaRavia, Astral. Did you see his Optic card? The whole thing about his Optic gold, yeah, isn't that sweet, dude? That is pretty cool. That's so cool, bro. That's so cool. He's cool. He does a lot of inscriptions, too. He did, and I pulled his Pentals to 10 on card, and it just said, shout out you, exclamation point. I was like, that's cool, dude. All right, Box, dude. Got Ex-Bended Cumberbash Matheran, Shockwave, EJ Liddell, Groove Rookie for the Pelts, Perry Base, Wendell Moore on top, Fractal Devon Booker, Vortex, Base, Base, and Base. Again, just one spot left on the day, guys. One contender's tier spot. That is it. Again, if you buy it, gets you one in the top, one in the bottom. Dallontary, Revolution Rookie, Zion Astral, Astro. So, you guaranteed yourself a top 15 team value-wise. Wendell Moore Jr. Astral, come on. Guaranteed yourself a team in the top 15 value-wise. Haliburton, Fractal, Dyson Daniels, Patrick Baldwin Jr., Russell Westbrook on the groove. Liftoff, Zach Levine, Dicut, Calden Johnson, Astro, Base, Base, Base. Vince Williams Jr., that's Terry Eason. Nice one there for the Rockets. Impact to 149. Grats, Houston. The other guy you're looking for next to Jabari Smith. Jabari Smith Jr., drop you guys that link again. Like I said, just one to go. Last spot of the day. EJ Liddell, Groove, Kauai. Ex-Bended Cumberbash Matheran. Two Fractals in there. That's Marcus Smart and Laurie Markman. Jabari Walker. Andrew Nemhardt, that is Lava, 10 of 10. Rookie for the Pacers. Nice one there, Indiana. Pacers. Jeremy Sohan, Vortex. Harrison Barnes. Auto, Desmond Bain. Nice one there for the Grids. Third-year audit. Desmond Bain. He's actually in the thumbnail today. Desmond Bain is in fact in the thumbnail today, as well as the Mellowball Shockwave. Desmond Bain, some like good baseball player, and then Cortland Finningen. Put Cortland Finningen in there today. Jamerant. Tomorrow we've got Nivante Adams, Jose Ramirez, and Beno Udre. Jalen Howeadurin for the Pistons. Ashrow Rookie, sorry. You're gonna see that a lot with Top Floor. We're gonna be hitting each other's hands all the time. Here's Keegan Murray. Jake Moravia, Groove Rookie. The Grids. Beats. Again, dude. Let's see who bought that spot. It could be Eddie. I'm trying to see who it is. Maybe it's already in the trash. No, I don't think so. Well, to whoever that was, thank you very much for taking a spot. I apologize. I can't. Google is just not our side right now. Bari Walker. Groove, Devon Bissell. Revolution. LaRavia. Then Lee Frackel. Hitton Watson. It's gonna be Sadiq the Freak Bay. Cosmic to 99 for the Pistons. Still Piston in this, of course. Retrayed to the Atlanta Hawks. Shade-on-Sharp Shockwave. Anfrey Simons. That is, ooh, is that what I think it is? Shade-on-Sharp Galactic. There you go, Blazers. That's David, right? David V. Took the Blazers in both breaks. There you go, man. Case hit Galactic. God, that's fire. Pretty much any Galactic at this point.  I want your take on this. Shockwave. So say, we'll do it for each sport, too. So say we'll start with, what do you know the most? Like, what's your fourth, I would say? If you could pick one. What's up? Alright, so baseball. If you're putting together Maokai Branham, Astro Rookie, if you're putting together the ultimate PC of a player, what are like 10 cards, money's not an issue, what are 10 cards you need for baseball? Dot-A-Mitchell, Dyson Daniels. Because I'll start with basketball, like N.T. True RPI to 99, Prism Gold, Cracked Ice Auto, Galactic, I would say True Galactic Rookie. Graded, preferably. So on and so forth. So with Bowman, I'd say like a Gold Auto for Gold First Auto to 50, I think it's a big one. I honestly feel like Blue, True Blue. True Blue, yep. Palo Bancro, that's a good call. True Green. True Green, yep, yep. And, Daling Green. True Red. There's, yeah, also True. Anthony Edwards, that is Cosmic to 99. Revolution. Yeah, True Red, yeah, any of the True colors, basically. Yeah, True Gold, I would say too, True Orange. Yeah, Purple. Nicolay Yovitch, that is Daling Green to 99, I'm gonna Cosmic. I'm trying to think, like, what other big baseball tops things do you need? Topped Chrome. Yeah, I need like a Topped Chrome, like any of the True colors, too. Dyson Daniels, Luca, Astro, Auto, Maokai Branham for the Spurs, Rookie Auto. Nice one there. Got Spurs. Spurs is another one of the last teams taken. Real one, Rookie Auto, pretty nice for the PC. Yeah, yeah, from Heritage, the Red Inks, yeah, that's a good call. That's a great poll, Jenkins. That is a great call for like an ultimate PC, one of the Red Ink, Real One's autos are definitely necessary. Because it's first of all, it's rare to find, and they're just so gorgeous. Jay Will, Jake Laravia, because like football is my main one that I always go with, so I would say you need like, you need a cracked ice auto, probably both true and variation, I would say. You need a gold prism, true gold prism on auto. You need a shanty True RPA. I would say you need an IMAX True RPA. I would say you need a flawless gem of some sort. You need an impeccable bar, like an impeccable silver bar, I would say the 25 is a big one. Pretty much any case hit you could think of. Like, I'm not the biggest Kaboom fan in the world, but I'd say you probably need a Kaboom. Or a downtown. Or a downtown of some sort like that. Basketball, I would say, you need a downtown. Or is there a one-in-one? That's Caleb Houston, there's also Maiden Zhang on the Fractal. Like Timeless Moments, if you're going for like a that guy's the one that you could probably go after, like a Timeless Moments to 10 or 25. Jaylen Green, Tyler Hero, Astro. We may be sold out. Will may have just sold us out. We're sold out. Thank you, Will M, taking the last tiered contender spot. Sold out on the daytime, everybody, guys. Jayden Hardy, Oseman Zhang, Astro. There's Jaylen Green, Liftoff, Malachi Branham. I like downtown baseball. I think they look good, too. Keegan Murray, Andrew Nemhard, Groove. For not having licensing, they look very good. I will say that for sure. I'll give credit where credit's due in that sense. Trevor Keehls. There's a Cubic Kevin Porter Jr. It's a 50 for the Rockets. Laurie Markinon. You can just do autos and galactic for this, yeah. Every now and then we might get another super short. Probably won't get another galactic. We might get one of the other super short prints in the next half case. So this usually just autos. Unless there's like a big, I would put the Nemhard in there, too. The Nemhard to 10. Oh, I have all this like all number stuff here. Okay, gotcha. So Han Rookie, you don't have to do all numbered, I would say. Any numbered Rookie you could throw into. Shockwave, Johnny Davis. There's Jason Tatum, Vortex. That is Cosmic to 99. It's one of 99. First one stamped for the Cs. Sextan, base, base, base. Hey, Cliff becoming a member again. Let's go Cliff. What's up, Cliff? Ochaic Vaji. Got a Jalen Suggs on the Impact to 149. To the Magic. I'm already behind, Shane. We're already behind for 10 bucks these days. Malakai Branham. Luca. Auto, Shane. Unsharp. Blazers destroyed it this break, dude. David, congrats, buddy. That's awesome.  It must have just renewed because it said you became a member, so I'm assuming you just renewed. Chet Holmgren. Jordan Poole. Yeah, that's the big joke is like I'm always behind on 10 bucks these days. It's like the Lod, because a lot of times it'll be like the day before a big release too, so like it's understandable. And so the big joke is like we'll start or anything. Let's go, David. Congrats, dude. Benedict Matherin. Wendell Moore Jr. Astro Rookie. And lift off, Jayne Knight. Like the big joke is like, oh, he's already like right when the stream starts, you're already behind, you're behind already. I'm like, yeah, pretty much at this point. And then we know, and then we'll get like 10 bucks these days, like all bowmen. So it'll just take longer to rip, too. So like there's a number of reasons why that's generally the case, but yeah, pretty much always. Dyson Daniels. Tobias Harris. Astra. David Roddy. Fractal Tyrese Halliburton. Vortex. Terry Eason for the Rockies. Rocky Rockets. Rocky Revolution. Houston Rockies. Subtle heart reference. I love it, dude. Ochaic Bajie. That's funny. It's your best card right now. Kate. That's cool, dude. Problem to Aaron, dude, I got a home. A couple of 250 in rookie year. That is probably Walker. Is it Top's Chrome? Bowman Chrome. Bowman, gotcha. James Harden. That's nasty. Can I have like the Wanderer card or something to Aaron? Oh yeah, that's nice. Palo. It's your top card. Value-wise, probably Hayton Watson. There's Cubic. Joel Embiid to 50. I'll tell you after the break. Nice one there. A space in base. Do a quick recap here, guys. We've got Cubic. Kevin Porter Jr. to 50. Terry Eason to 149. Siddiq Bay to 99. Kevin Durant to 99. Andrew Nemhart to 10 on the Lava. We had Auto. Shadon Sharp. Nice one there for the Blazers. We had a Malachi Branham. Rookie Auto for the Spurs. Desmond Bain. Auto for the Grizzlies. Dyson Daniels. Rookie Auto Pelicans. And Galactic. Super Short Print. Case hit. Shadon Sharp. Rookie Revolution for the Blazers. As you can do it for the break, guys. Thanks again for the fill. Next up, we've got the next half case, number 20.


Psych2Go and Neurus Clinic presents Coffee and Books for Mental Health at the Irvine Spectrum from 3 to 7 p.m. October 14th So whatever you purchase at Barnes & Noble and the Starbucks upstairs part of that proceeds will go towards affordable and accessible mental health services


You've stated that the government is in possession of potentially non-human spacecraft. Based on your experience and extensive conversations with experts, do you believe our government has made contact with intelligent extraterrestrials? Something I can't discuss in public setting. Okay, I can't ask when you think this occurred. If you believe we have crashed craft, stated earlier, do we have the bodies of the pilots who piloted this craft? As I've stated publicly already in my news-nation interview, biologics came with some of these recoveries. Yeah. Were they, I guess, human or non-human biologics? Non-human, and that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the program I talked to that are currently still on the program. And was this documentary evidence, this video, photos, eyewitness, like how would that be determined? This specific documentation I would have to talk to you in a skiff about. You just listened to former U.S. intelligence official David Grush say under oath that the United States government is in possession of not only extraterrestrial spacecraft, but non-human biologics as well. Now it's not the first time that he's made this claim because in a viral news-nation interview uploaded on June 5th, he also alleged that the government has a secret UFO retrieval program and actually has quite a number of spacecraft from non-human species and also says that they've recovered bodies of non-human pilots. But that's not all because as Forbes reports, Grush stated that the vehicles were not necessarily extraterrestrial and speculated that they might come from another dimension stating, as somebody who studied physics where maybe they're coming from a different physical dimension as described in Quantum Mechanics, Grush hinted that some of the alien beings were malevolent and had even killed humans. Grush also implied that there is some kind of secret agreement between the government and aliens and that people have been murdered to protect the secret. And he claims that he received this information from senior intelligence officials who confided in him about the program that he is blowing the whistle on, though he admits that he hasn't seen any photos, but he does have documents that confirm the existence of this program and the existence of the spacecraft of alien nature allegedly. But he can't release this evidence to the public due to the classify nature of these claims, although he does confirm that we can trust him because as he puts it, I am for real. And I'm sitting here at great personal risk and obvious professional risk by talking to you today. Well, I don't know about you, but I'm convinced. And I think that we need to get the crew who stormed Area 51 in 2019 back together to further investigate this because the government is not going to tell us. But what we do know is that if we Naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets. So let's see them aliens. But on a more serious note, listen, I want to believe I desperately want to believe I think that what he's saying is really interesting. And the idea that we've been visited by aliens and the government has formed some sort of alliance with them is very compelling. It's stuff out of sci-fi. And I love sci-fi. I love Star Wars. I love Mass Effect. So I'd love for this to be true. I'd love to think that it's happening. I want to believe. But unfortunately, I don't. One person telling us to trust him because other people told him it's true and that he should trust them is not a sufficient standard of evidence for such extreme claims. And blurry videos of UFOs are also insufficient evidence to confirm the existence of aliens. Sure, you know, our government can't explain all visual phenomena that they see. Neither can all of us. But sometimes, you know, it's a balloon. Sometimes it's other spacecraft. Sometimes it's an airplane. But there are some instances where we can't describe what we're seeing because we just don't know. But not knowing what something is doesn't automatically mean that it's extraterrestrial, right? When I was a kid, you know, sometimes I'd see a shadow in the bedroom in the corner and I think that that's a ghost automatically. That is until I worked up the courage to turn on the lights and then I'd see that it's just some clothes on the floor that I forgot to pick up. Oftentimes, you know, we come to an irrational conclusion automatically before we explore other explanations or even think about what it could possibly be besides what we initially assume it is because that's what we want it to be. And most times, there's a rational, admittedly boring explanation for a lot of the things that were unable to explain and author and conspiracy theory debunker, Mick West, poked a lot of holes and gruscious claims in a lengthy 45 minute long YouTube video that I'll link to down below. But here's what I think is the biggest red flag with gruscious claims according to West. The biggest problem with this other than these claims are outlandish and ridiculous and don't have any evidence behind them. The biggest problem with this is that these claims have been cleared by the government. This is something I mentioned on the program, but I think it's worth mentioning again in the context of what the claims actually are. You know, there's a government body called Dopture, the Department Office of Pre-Publication and Security Review. When you want to publish something like a TV interview or a book and you are covered by classification, you have a security clearance. Even if you've left the government, you have to go through Dopture. And they have to look at this thing before it's published, this pre-publication, and do a security review. So they've got to look at it and they've got to see, does this reveal any classified information? And so they looked at everything he said. They looked at things and they said, oh yeah, OK. So he's claiming that the US government is killing people. He's claiming that aliens are killing people. He's claiming that there might be a secret agreement with aliens. He's claiming we have all these alien crafts and we've been reverse engineering it. And we've been illegally giving this technology to industry. This is another thing he said. We've been illegally giving this technology to industry and allowing them to exploit it and then sell it back to the government and make loads of money. And this is going on. This is fine. This is all fine. This is not secret. This is not secret. Dopture has cleared everything that he has said. So none of this stuff is secret. Which kind of begs the question, why has nobody mentioned this before? Why has no one mentioned the fact that aliens are killing people? Why has no one mentioned the fact that the US government has this secret program like selling alien technology to industry? Why isn't this actually being revealed? Why isn't it being discussed? Why hasn't anybody raised it in Congress? It's not secret. It's not classified according to Dave Grush because it's all being cleared by Dobsa.  It doesn't really matter. Yes, the US government kills people and has a secret agreement with murderous aliens. Yeah, that's not a secret. Everybody knows that. The alternative to that ridiculous scenario is that what he's saying isn't actually true. What he's saying is maybe not a lie from his perspective, but something he has been told that is false. Very good point. And it goes on to make a lot of great points about how these claims, they just don't add up. And I'd highly encourage you to watch the entire video if you have time because he goes on to debunk not only what Grush says, but debunk UFO videos as well. And it's really insightful. And that doesn't mean that what Grush is saying is incorrect, right? As West put it, he might actually believe what he's saying. But what we do know is that there isn't enough evidence to confirm that what he's saying is indeed true. Now, to be clear, I get the desire to want to believe in something bigger than yourself. When I was younger, I was really into astronomy and I got into conspiracy theories surrounding UFOs and aliens. But the problem that I always had was that there was a fundamental lack of evidence. See, we have a lot of testimonies and fuzzy photos of unidentified flying objects, but nothing concrete to suggest that all of their explanations have been exhausted, therefore it must be aliens. We just don't have enough evidence to say aliens exist. And not only that, that they visited us, right? Those are very big logical leaps that you need a lot of evidence to make. But that's not to say that I don't believe in aliens at all. I mean, when you think about the sheer size of the universe and the thousands of planets that we've found just within the span of a couple of decades, statistically speaking, it's probably likely that life exists somewhere in the universe. I mean, it might even exist in the galaxy. Whether it's complex or single-celled organisms, we just, we don't know. We can only speculate, right? And therein lies the problem. It's difficult as human beings to just accept that we may never know. There are countless questions that we will never have answered. It's not just about aliens. Like, why are we here? What is the meaning of life? How did the universe get started? Are there other universes? Are there other dimensions? There's so many theories that kind of try to explain the world that we're living in and as bizarre as it is, but the truth is, we'll never know. But we shouldn't feel inclined to diminish our standards for evidence and our request for the truth because if we do that, then it's really not the truth that we're looking for. It's just psychological gratification, right? And if you want the truth, you've got to have a high standard for what you accept as evidence. But we can find comfort in what we don't know. For example, Sir Arthur C. Clarke famously said, two possibilities exist. Either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying. And that quote really resonates with me because on one hand, it's hard to conceptualize this idea that our massive infinitely expanding universe is empty and we're all that exists in terms of life. But on the other hand, if life was out there based on how much we've learned about the universe and how big it is, it does seem plausible that by now we would have found some evidence of aliens, right, anything, but we haven't. And that's what we call the Fermi Paradox. Live Science explains, the Fermi Paradox is a problem that asks where are all the aliens in the universe if life is so abundant? Why haven't we been visited by or heard from anyone else? According to NASA, in just the last two decades, we have found more than 4,000 planets beyond our solar system with trillions of stars thought to exist in our galaxy, most of which host their own planets. Considering life sprang up on Earth, would we not have expected it to start in at least one other location in the last 14 billion years of the universe? Exactly. It's possible that as good as our technology is, we just haven't been able to look far enough into the universe to see the life that does exist. We don't know. Now the photo that you just saw was of Enrico Fermi, who is the physicist that devised the Fermi Paradox. And I really hope that he's wrong, right? I want to live in a universe like Mass Effect where at some point we can use mass relays to visit other alien planets and talk to other alien species. But I mean, for now, that is just science fiction, period. And I'm not gonna latch onto one man's claims simply because it sounds cool and he is supposedly somebody who we can trust because he is a former US intelligence official. In fact, being a US intelligence official leads me to be a little bit more skeptical given the fact that this community has lied us into wars in the past. But I mean, what I'm saying is we need more than that. We need more than this dude saying, trust me, bro, it's totally true. I heard it from a bunch of people who probably heard it from other people. I mean, if Grush claims people have literally been murdered to keep the secret but yet he can't release the documents due to their classified nature, then we have to assume that he's brave enough to risk being murdered by exposing the secret but not brave enough to risk prison time by releasing the documents that he supposedly has. So I mean, my ultimate conclusion is we need pics, bro, or it didn't happen. But let me just end by saying that of all the conspiracy theories, the UFO ones, this is probably one of the least harmful conspiracy theories to believe because unlike anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, you're not gonna die if you believe in something like this. It's fun, it's compelling. You know, it's sci-fi related, which is really interesting. Having said that though, there is a concern in the sense that if you lower your standard for what you accept as evidence for this one particular conspiracy theory and if you believe what Grush says about this, even if it's not harmful, perhaps you're more inclined to lower your standard of evidence for other conspiracy theories, right? And this is kind of how it starts. Accepting one conspiracy theory kind of leads you down the rabbit hole to accepting other conspiracy theories. So what you need to do is make sure that you have a very high standard for what you accept as evidence and be skeptical of everything that you see, right? Ask questions, even of people who are trustworthy. Ask questions of me. Question what I'm saying. Fact check what I'm saying. Because when it comes to the truth, that is important. An objective empirical reality exists and you shouldn't muddy the waters just because you want to believe in aliens. I want to believe that aliens are real and they visited us and they have this secret pact with the government. I think that would be really, really cool. But the fact is there's just not enough evidence to confirm that what Grush is saying is true. So unless he gives us additional evidence, then we have to deduce that it hasn't happened. Like everywhere there's glow, you see them all the time. I mean, it's constant. My children are about mama, glow, glow, glow, glow. I turn on TV, there's glow in the background. Every TV show knows me and why. Why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why.


Another radiant fire outbreak at LHJ in Dibu axes of Port Harcourt and River State has destroyed property worth millions of nair. Residents who spoke to these men could not exactly tell what triggered the fire. Some attributed it to an electric spark from a pole. Others said illegal bankrupting activities could have been responsible for the inferno. This place near LHJ, we are people who normally live. So maybe there is a light spark from there and I think it has exploded. So what do we see next? We see a fire. This is water site and it's close to where business is being operated. They do a kind of bunkery around this environment so we don't know actually if it is a bunkery or so.  So the ones that went to look for money that will come back seeing their place being burned is very painful. It's other area resulted in self-help to put out a fire when efforts to reach the river state fire service through the stress cause did not yield any results. They even don't call themselves. They say they don't want to finish. So nobody knows how we do it. And those of us that have the fire service number we have been trying to call them, reach out to them. But their number is not connected. How can we have government here and they are not helping us? Fire service is not coming. Even the schools bought there. They have a vehicle inside there. Nobody is there to help us. But when it's affecting my neighbors I have to come and help. That is what I'm here. So most of us are taking our properties out. You see youths are taking buckets to fetch water, omo, everything. But I know the pressure here is more than. Now it's standing from one place to the other. My one debut I've called fire service till now. But there is no fire service here today. So you will blame Wiki. Wiki will come out of this fire. The inferno at the Eleti Coca Cola axis is a fourth fire disaster in Port Harcourt River State capital in one week.


Excellencies, distinguished participants, and friends, thank you for joining us online to mark the beginning of the 14th International Conference on Community-Based Adaptation to Climate Change. Bhutan, in our capacity as Chair of the LDC Group, is proud to host this year's event and we welcome you and your participation from wherever you are connecting. As in normal times, we would have a physical meeting this year in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, CBA 14 has had to innovate to bring its wider community of practice together in a new way. This way of doing things will be an experiment for all of us, but we hope that we will be able to learn from the experience together and perhaps shape new ways for us to collaborate going forward. Despite the pandemic, the impacts of climate change continue to be clear and increasing while fires are burning in California, intense flooding has damaged homes and destroyed livelihoods in Sudan, India, Yemen, Bangladesh, and many more other locations. Climate change adaptation is as important as it has ever been. The urgency and ambition needed to fully prepare for the future must continue to increase if we are to protect ourselves and our communities. To do this, it is crucially important that opportunities for grassroots community-based organizations, non-government organizations of all kinds, local and national governments, researchers and development partners to come together, learn, share innovation and expertise remain available. These moments are central in building the community of practice, networks and know-how that are necessary to develop complex responses to a complex challenge. They ensure that development partners and international organizations can remain grounded, able to learn from those who are most vulnerable by providing opportunities for them to listen to local solutions and wisdom. Adaptation to climate change cannot be successful unless it builds on the knowledge and understanding of the people who are most affected by climate risks. CBA 14 is also an essential resource and learning opportunity for the LDCs. Last year at CBA 13, the Talunaya we held on the Lease Developed Countries Initiative for Effective Adaptation and Resilience, LifeAR, directed to inform the LifeAR Compact that has been signed by over 10 countries. The Compact sets out a vision for a climate-resilient future for all LDCs by 2050 and commits to increasing the flow of climate finance to the local level to 70% of the total. CBA's five themes are of central importance to the future of adaptation and resilience and to informing the next stages of LifeAR and other initiatives. The climate finance theme will explore how we scale up the flow of finance to the local level. The responsive policy theme will explore the role of social movements in driving change and the adaptation technology theme will discuss how new technologies can go beyond innovative projects and become part of national policies. We recognize that addressing poverty, biodiversity loss and climate change are issues that cannot be taken separately but must be addressed together. So I am pleased to see the addition of a theme on nature-based solutions. Finally, the youth inclusion theme led entirely by young people will explore the barriers to the participation of young people in shaping climate policies. We must use these moments to understand the challenges that we can scale up climate finance to the level necessary, scale up technology or nature-based solutions through policy that is inclusive and builds residents, prosperous societies. We must continue to build ambition on top of previous commitments under the Paris Agreement so that COP26 in 2021 we will be able to secure an agreement that safeguards a resilient future for LDCs.


The reality now is that your ability as a parent to supervise your child is being taken away from you by the technology that's being developed. Children don't realise that they are actually committing a criminal offence themselves and they are liable to prosecution. They're committing offences of possessing child exploitation material and distributing child exploitation material. At the end of the day the tool that you provide your child will give them open access to the world and will provide the world with open access to your child. Education is going to be the most critical tool that we have at our disposal to address this problem.


Welcome. My name is Melissa Armand. I am the Stock Swoosh and today I wanted to talk to you a little bit about inflation. This is something that I've literally been talking about every single day on all of the news channels that I appear on and we're going to continue to talk about it. I'm sure we're going to keep talking about it the rest of the month of October and into the end of 2021 and even into 2022. I talked about it yesterday in a webinar and someone said, oh, this is all doom and gloom. Inflation is not doom and gloom.  Talking about inflation and talking about what's happening right now in the world and looking into the future and planning for the future is actually a very intelligent and smart thing to do. It's not about doom and gloom. It's about realizing what's happening right now and how to improve your situation so you can move into the future. So one of the tenets of the webinar that I spoke about, and again, I'm going to talk about a little bit here today, is that when you know that the cost of goods and services are rising, housing to food, gas, all the things we've been talking about again, that I've been speaking about on news for the last several weeks, if the prices are going to continue to rise, will you only have several solutions? What is number one? You can spend less. Now, that doesn't work for me. I don't like to spend less. That's one of the reasons why it works so hard. I like to spend money. So I like to make a lot of money because I like to spend a lot of money. So you can spend less. I don't think it's a good decision. But you could. You could do it. Maybe you're okay with that. I'm not. Or number two, you can ask for a raise at your current employer. So say you work full-time, you may get it. You may get it because employers are desperate for employees right now. You may get a raise. You can ask for it, but you might not. The employer may not be able to afford to give you a raise. Three, third choice is you can get a part-time job to try to earn more income to cover the cost of increased prices of things. That's a third choice. People are getting part-time jobs. There are many jobs available right now. I'm sure if you want a part-time job, you could find one. But again, that's time out of your life from your full-time job and your family and your personal life. And what's the other choice? The other option for you is to do what? It's to trade. To trade and make money from the market. Remember, trading is not investing long-term. Like for your retirement. Trading is active trading. You chunk it out. You go in. You take a trade. You make the money. You get out. You go in. You take a trade. You make the money. You get out. Today we did Boeing. We shorted Boeing today. We were in, out, in, out. Day isn't even over. Everybody, out. Boom. That's it. You're in a trade for a couple of minutes or a couple of hours, but no longer than before 4 o'clock. Because you've got to get out of a day trade between 9.30 and 4. So it doesn't take forever to make money when you're actively trading. Again, this is not long-term investing. And you can pick up a couple hundred dollars a week or a couple thousand dollars a week depending on how much you want to risk trading the market. Yes, you have to learn how to do it. Yes, there's a cost involved with learning. Yes, there's time out of your life to do that, but it pays off. So this idea of planning ahead for the future, and by future, I mean four weeks from now. I mean the holidays. I mean December 1. I mean Thanksgiving. I mean January 1. This isn't about doom and loom. It's about preparing now and doing the things you need to do right now, knowing that continued costs are going to go up and stay this way for a period of time, which we don't know when it ends. Nobody knows when it ends. Some people are predicting now that it's going to go into December of 2022. Sure, it might. It might go into December of 2023. No one knows. But either way, you know that even right now in the last several months, you've been paying more for things. If that's the case, you've got a couple of choices. I laid it out for you. This isn't about doom and gloom. It's about preparing and making intelligent decisions, knowing that you want to be financially secure. You want to have a happy life. You want to be able to spend money on things and you want to also have some free time. And if you're working full time and part time, I mean you don't have a lot of free time outside after that. So think about the things I've said today. If you're interested in learning how to trade the US stock market, I teach a class once a month on my method. You can email me at Melissa at thestockswish.com. The next class is October 23 and 24. It's in a little bit more than a week from now. Have a great day, everyone.