It doesn't make sense. This is all a big part of the eventual goal which is control. Belief in conspiracy theories are actually more popular than you might think. Polls over the years have shown that over half of Americans endorse at least one sort of conspiratorial narrative. Why not believe it? You know, whatever. In a world... Okay, sorry, with this new setup I had to try something dramatic. In an online world where misinformation and disinformation spreads like wildfire and people become empowered through misinformation, horrific consequences can happen. But how did it get to this point? And why have bizarre theories and fake news become so prevalent in our society today? The patented nano-silver we have, the Pentagon has come out and documented and homeland security and said this stuff kills the whole SARS corona family at point blank range. Scientists agree silver has no effect against the coronavirus. In fact, exposure to collodial silver can be toxic. Who or what is to blame for this? In this four-part series, we're examining the rise of conspiracy theories. The influencers who have pushed out these theories and that aftermath when the internet clashes with reality. How did we seemingly go from having questions about society to denying science and even at times reality? In this first episode today, I'm examining how conspiracy theories began and why they seem to grow. But before we dive into that, don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell so that you don't miss an episode in this series. Because we're diving into all the various details of conspiracy theories, this topic might be sensitive or triggering for some. Viewer discretion is advised. Misinformation is extremely prevalent on the internet, now more than ever. Scroll through TikTok for any length of time and you're likely to find a psychology hack. A real psychology fact by popular request. Psychology is a science. It is not a list of facts, tricks, hacks, or anything like that. Browse YouTube and you're likely to encounter a fantastical story time that most definitely certainly happened.  And a lot of this is seen as a harmless byproduct of the internet. But when does it become dangerous? And when does this misinformation turn to conspiracy theory? Let's define it. Conspiracy is a plot between multiple people to secretly control or manipulate a situation or create crimes in secret. These do happen, though oftentimes they aren't always successful, since many secrets seem to always get out somehow and some way. Conspiracies do exist and there are real examples of conspiracies that have happened throughout time. But most of these are not successful and the secret is not kept for long, hence why we know about them. A conspiracy theory is a belief or argument that a conspiracy exists. Like if you were to believe that Avril Lavigne, iconic punk pop star, was replaced by another person. That is a conspiracy theory out there. A conspirator is a person who plans or carries out a conspiracy. Avril Lavigne and the team surrounding her would be the conspirators in the previous example. A conspiracy theorist is a person who believes a conspiracy plot exists or is taking place, like if you were to believe that Avril Lavigne was replaced. Other relevant terms related to conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists is apophynia, the condition of seeing or imagining patterns in random occurrences. For example, for a while I always saw 11-11 on the clock every day and became convinced that it was some sort of sign or had some sort of greater meaning. When in reality my body may have just been on a schedule where naturally I would have the urge to look at the clock at around the same time. I saw meaning in the potentially meaningless or maybe meaningful, but I didn't properly evaluate the other options and possibilities at the time. Conspiratorial thinking is a mindset that makes someone susceptible to believing in conspiracy theories. All of a sudden everything around you becomes a conspiracy theory or a potential conspiracy theory.  All of a sudden Avril Lavigne taking a break from her singing career turns into Avril Lavigne being replaced, which turns into Hollywood constructing a massive plot to be rid of pop stars and singers. Which all of a sudden means even this video here where I'm talking about this conspiracy is part of the conspiracy. The reality is conspiracy theories and the conspiracy mindset has a lot to do with mental health. And while I'm no mental health expert I'm going to try my best to analyze this aspect because it is such an important component of this whole conversation. But I will be doing so through expert opinions and research and all of that research will be linked down below so that you can check it out and find out more about this topic. Things I will not be doing in this video is demonizing people who believe in conspiracy theories as well as making fun of them or seeing conspiracy theories themselves as a joke. While there are some funny aspects to conspiracy theories and I definitely will be covering that, overall conspiracy theories aren't just a joke. There are some serious implications to conspiracy theories and the spread of conspiracy theories. And people who believe conspiracy theories aren't necessarily crazy or weird and they're not just fringe groups of people. Likely everyone watching this video believes in at least one conspiracy theory on some level and in some shape or form. Or we know of our own friends and family members who believe in conspiracy theories. So if I were to just look at everyone who believes conspiracy theories as a joke that would be inaccurate on my part. Conspiracy theories are much more complex than a simple dictionary definition because there are so many varieties of conspiracy theories. Some theories are based on age-old folklore, some scientific misinformation. Some conspiracy theories would require thousands of people to participate and others just a handful. And of course there are really silly or logically flawed conspiracy theories that exist that make it hard for people to take other conspiracy theories seriously. There's also a distinct difference between conspiracy theories of the past and conspiracy theories of the present time. Classic conspiracism involved developments of alternative explanations to phenomena that were hard to explain. There was at least partially a rational way of thinking and when you asked conspiracy theorists of the past to explain their theories, usually they had at least some logical reasoning and thought out possibilities of execution. He got to know Jim pretty good, liked him, and he was convinced that there was a plot, that Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy, was set up. He may have been part of it, but there was a lot involved. Could have gone back to Cuba. He traced a lot of things and he thought he was onto something big. Who killed John F. Kennedy? The commission answers unequivocally Lee Harvey Oswald. Was Oswald acting alone or was he a member of a conspiracy? The commission answers he acted alone. But modern conspiracism is completely different. Instead, modern conspiracism has vague ideas and assumptions without a clear idea of how these conspiracy theories could have possibly been executed. Why do you have that? It's a movement, man. It's the shift that can feel it coming. Some call it the Great Awakening. What do you think Q is, by the way? It's an entity of ten or less people that have... I'm Bob of the government. Hi, clearance. Security clearance. And how do you know that? Well, I'm just telling you, this is what it appears to be. What it appears to be. So you don't have any proof of that, that's what you're guessing it is. And you don't have any proof there, is it? Maybe it's not true because there's no evidence of it. It's just stuff being talked about on the internet, right? There hasn't been any non-evidence yet. New conspiracism also seems to take aim at political destabilization and de-legitimization. You believe there's a deep state? Yes. And what do you think that deep state's doing? Do you think they're running this country? I think they were, and they're petrified now. Because they're losing their control. But Donald Trump's the president. He's running the country, right? Yeah, but he's having to fight against it. I mean, he said he could do it all himself. Everything would be so easy when he came into office, and you think he's fighting with the deep state a year and a half into his term? I think he's been fighting since before he was elected. And who was in this deep state? Who are the people in it? Oh, I definitely believe that, like, the Clintons, the Bushes, the Obamas. So you think the Clintons, the Bushes, and the Obamas are running this country as we stand here in the rain? No, they're trying. So conspiracy theories themselves and the general practice and idea changes along with society and times. A simplistic view of conspiracy theories would be that much of it all boils down to one simple emotion. Fear. When the world is complex and scary and such dark things are happening that it almost becomes beyond human comprehension, it may be easier to look to a theory that rejects that reality. But of course, that's only a simplistic way of viewing conspiracy theories and those that believe them. Though it's also important to mention the world view of conspiracy theorists is often simplistic as well. A battle between good and evil. Us versus them. Red pill, blue pill. Instead of viewing the world as a chaotic mess or humans as complex, conspiracy theories seem to view the world in black and white. Every in-group or group of nice people needs an out-group of nasty people. Otherwise, they wouldn't know who they were. There have also been numerous philosophers who have weighed in on the topic of conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories have truly perplexed a lot of philosophers because in part they are simply theories. People questioning reality is something that philosophers have done for centuries. But on another hand, they can elicit a very specific emotional reaction and can lead to a cognitive dissonance between reality and one's own perception. Philosophical thinking about conspiracy theories can be traced all the way back to Machiavelli and his work The Prince and later and more extensively in his discourses. To be loved or to be feared. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me. Do we love the idea of the conspiracy theories that we believe? Or do we greatly fear them? In his books, Machiavelli warned conspirators who would potentially be against him. It seems his greatest fear was the potential conspirators themselves. So I suppose you could say that we fear the potential conspirators of the world but we love the conspiracy theories because they protect us from our potential worst fears. They prepare us for worse or possibilities. Machiavelli warns his subjects not to engage in conspiracies partly because he believes these rarely achieve what they desire. The philosopher Carl Raymond Popper also made similar sentiments regarding conspiracy theories. He noted that while conspiracies do occur, he thinks few conspiracies are successful since few things turn out exactly how they're intended. Like, have you ever listened to a conspiracy theorist talk about a conspiracy that involves mass coordination on a wide scale between hundreds if not thousands of people and wonder, my workplace is barely ever able to coordinate on basic tasks. How are people coordinating and acting out these mass scale conspiracies without anyone knowing or getting caught? Many conspiracy theories seem to give humans a bit too much credit since no one is perfect and we all f up a lot including those who are in power in our society. Throughout his career, Carl Popper mostly talked about pseudoscience and what pseudoscience was. Carl Popper looked at scientists of his time and noticed two different distinctions. There were scientists who were actively looking to disprove their theories. They were looking for any information that could show that their theory could be false and then there were scientists who only looked to prove that they were right and never actively sought out any information that could prove their theory wrong. Or the entire theory itself was one that you couldn't necessarily disprove. Carl Popper believed the scientists that only looked to prove that their theories were right were actually practicing pseudoscience. That's a very interesting connection between conspiracy theories and pseudoscience because one could also argue that most conspiracy theorists only actively search for proof that their conspiracy theories are right. QAnon only looks to prove that their theories are correct through secret messages that Donald Trump relates to them supposedly. When I started to see some of the games that they were playing with Trump's Twitter, for example, that's when I really started to pay attention to it. One famous example, he had a 0000 second difference on post that Q and Trump posted at the same time three times in one day. So there's like a no time at all difference. And they asked President Trump to say to pop to be top and he did so in Easter. That's very specific phrase. And we keep it in tip top shape. We call it sometimes tippy top shape. Instead of actively looking for alternative possibilities or ways in which their theory may be wrong. Suddenly the most ordinary things like pizza, hot dogs and pandas become confirmation of the worst possible assumptions that you can make about someone. No, I can't prove it. I can only support it with evidence. But to say, do I need to prove it? I would say no, because the starting point is flat. That's what you observe. That's what I observe. And that's what everyone deals with in their day to day lives. It's important to keep in mind when examining a conspiracy theory or when talking to conspiracy theorists, whether or not this theory and its believers are actively searching to disprove the theory or if they're only looking to prove themselves right. These earlier philosophical works sparked a larger philosophical debate on the importance and merits of conspiracy theories. Are conspiracy theories even valid? Should conspiracy theories even be taken seriously? Those like Popper fall into a generalist way of thinking, believing that all conspiracy theories have some inherent logical or structural problem in their argument and reasoning. Therefore, most conspiracy theories shouldn't be taken seriously and should be seen as just a conspiracy theory. Then there are those like Charles Pigeon who fall under a particular list's way of thinking who argue that there's nothing necessarily problematic about a conspiracy theory and that each conspiracy theory should be evaluated on an individual basis based on its own individual merits. Within the last century, conspiracy theories have been very prevalent. Watergate, MK Ultra, 9-11, but are conspiracy theories merely a product of our modern digital age or have conspiracy theories always been present throughout human history? What does the empirical evidence say about the prevalence of conspiracy thinking over time? Conspiracy theories in their modern form have been around for at least 200 years. The United States was less than 10 years old when New England religious leaders sounded the alarm about the supposed Illuminati's plans to destroy the Republic. In a research project conducted by Usinski and Perrin, 104,803 randomly selected letters sent by U.S. citizens to the New York Times and Chicago Tribune were analyzed. These letters were sent between the years 1890 and 2010 and analyzed by a team of researchers for conspiratorial content. What was found was that conspiracy theories have been consistently prevalent throughout history and if there were any spikes in data, these spikes were not in this last century. The first spike occurred shortly before the year 1900 at the height of the Second Industrial Revolution. There was such a major societal change during that time that many citizens, especially those who felt powerless and voiceless, became insecure amidst the change. You know, changes in jobs, a failing and unsustainable industry, an uncertain future in society, definitely not things that we're dealing with right now. Certainly not problems of today. The second spike occurred in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the beginning of the Cold War. A lot of conspiracy theories at this time had to do with communism and assuming association between groups of people and communism. It wasn't like there was heavy propaganda instilling a great fear in communism at the time. Studies have also shown that conspiracy theories are not specific to Western culture. Conspiracy theories have existed among citizens around the world. I know, surprising. Western culture didn't invent everything. So it seems believing in conspiracy theories isn't a cultural or even societal phenomenon, but instead may be intrinsically a part of human nature. So what is the main cause of conspiracy theories? Studies have shown that throughout history, whenever conspiracy theories tend to pop up, they're usually in connection with major societal crisis situations. Like I said earlier, conspiracy theories tend to see the world in black and white, good versus bad, us versus them. And usually conspiracy theories tend to place blame of a societal crisis situation on a specific group. While today's conspiracy theories implicate large government organizations and political leaders, throughout history, there have also been other societal groups consistently implicated in conspiracy theories. One of these groups is the Jewish population who have been systematically accused of conspiracy involvement. In the 1930s and 1940s, Jewish conspiracy theories were a major driver in one of the most horrific events in history. Even in medieval times, the European Jewish population was a target for conspiracy theorizing, including being blamed for setbacks during the Crusades. And interestingly enough, the Jewish population was also blamed for causing disease epidemics such as the plague. An entire population being blamed for a pandemic? That certainly hasn't happened recently. What is it they say about history and repetition? During the Wilsonian progressivism, FDR's New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, there was a growing number of conspiracy theories. Federal support of civil rights was said to be a part of a conspiracy against the white race. And at a similar time, the Kennedy and King assassinations had their share of conspiracy theories. In other words, yes, America has always been like this. Even back in the Roman era, there are prominent examples of conspiracy theories, and these are typically all connected to major crisis situations. In AD 64, the Great Fire of Rome erupted. Emperor Nero was out of town when the fire started, and he returned to Rome to organize help for the victims. But conspiracy theories started to spread throughout Rome, stating that Nero and his associates had deliberately set fire to Rome to rebuild Rome in Nero's vision. Nero, start in the fire! Nero did not like these conspiracy theories, and in response came up with his own conspiracy theories, blaming the Christian community for starting the fire and for spreading the rumors. So I guess you could say Nero chose to fight fire with fire. The connection of conspiracy theories and crisis situations throughout time have led researchers to believe that the two are inextricably linked. Evidence suggests that the feelings people experience when in crisis, fear, uncertainty, and being out of control, stimulate a motivation to make sense of the situation, increasing the likelihood of perceiving conspiracies in social situations. And much of these perceptions can influence the recording of history itself and how people recollect history and major crisis events. But here's where things get complicated. It would be incorrect for me to sit here and say all conspiracies are fake, false, wrong, and blatantly inaccurate. Because like I said earlier, there have been real conspiracies that have existed, and there have been conspiracy theories that have been proven to be true. These are all purportedly, allegedly disclaimer. In my opinion, whatever else I need to put here before talking about these. During prohibition, the US Department of Treasury poisoned alcohol. The US Public Health Service lied about treating black men with syphilis for more than 40 years. More than 100 million Americans received a polio vaccine contaminated with a potentially cancer-causing virus. The government tested the effects of LSD on unwitting US and Canadian citizens, otherwise known as MKUltra. So, I mean, I kind of completely understand why people might not trust the US government. I mean, their track record for conspiratorial involvement is not the greatest. The problem is for those with conspiratorial thinking, these examples of conspiracies that have happened in their minds can be proof that the conspiracy theories they believe of today are happening right now. When there may be no empirical evidence for them to think that, or their logical reasoning for these conspiracy theories may be inherently flawed. So how can we determine if a conspiracy theory is false? Well, some are very clearly from an outside perspective, just not true, but others are a bit harder to disprove. So here is what experts recommend for determining whether or not a conspiracy theory is false. And it's not always based on how crazy a conspiracy theory sounds. Conspiracy theories that have been proven to be true can be just as outlandish and strange as the questionable or false ones. I mean, if MKUltra wasn't proven to be true, I would be questioning it or thinking that it's just another bizarre conspiracy theory. One way to examine the validity of a conspiracy theory is to evaluate the believers themselves. Most people are often adaptable in their beliefs when confronted with new information. Most people follow the Bayes Theorem model, a gold standard for how one should update beliefs in light of new evidence. But those who may have apophenia or a conspiratorial way of thinking may not be thinking rationally and may not be open to changing their mind. In addition, people that believe in conspiracy theories often exhibit an almost nihilistic way of thinking that leads to distrust in all experts or belief that all experts, institutions and trustworthy sources are in on the conspiracy theory. Those who believe that climate change isn't real and the concept of climate change is just a massive government conspiracy theory all of a sudden start distrusting the random scientist doing their own independent work as being somehow in on this conspiracy. This way of thinking can lead to refusal to recognize trivial or accidental events.  Conspiracists usually believe that nothing occurs by accident, which may be a sign that their theories just aren't based in reality because really accidents are sometimes the only thing humans can do. Reality is the world is absolute chaos with very little meaning or reasoning behind what's happening. But amidst the chaos and randomness that's constantly occurring, sometimes things align perfectly and it can be hard to see that as a result of randomness and chaos. It's like those viral ping pong videos where someone's able to make a ping pong ball fall perfectly into a cup through a seemingly random pattern of movements. But sometimes all it is is just luck and a random sequence of events that ends up having a perfect conclusion. We want so badly to make sense of the world around us but sometimes we give too much credit to seemingly random events. Lately it seems that more and more people adopt this conspiratorial way of thinking where all of a sudden everything becomes a conspiracy theory. This way of thinking has transformed the conspiracy theory landscape and has now been defined by the term conspiracism. Conspiracism is the belief system that leads to conspiratorial thinking or a conspiratorial world view. Conspiracism is distinctive as a belief system for two reasons. First, it is inherently a very negative belief system. There aren't really any modern conspiracy theories that have a super positive predicted outcome. Usually it's like the world is going to be destroyed not people are plotting for peace and to end world hunger, which is interesting. Conspiracists greatly fear and oppose the conspiracy theories they envision because much of those conspiracies are aimed at destroying their way of life. The Illuminati, mind controllers, forces of evil, the Cabal, the globalists, all of these entities are really similar when you actually look at them. Conspiracists believe them all to be evil and plotting against citizens and running a complete secret society of sorts. Conspiracism also seems to be a belief system that lends itself to obsessiveness. This obsessiveness can be seen in conspiracies activity on social media.  Conspiracy theorists may also become so ingrained in their beliefs that even when specific hypotheses of the theory become proven false, they will still remain ingrained in the overall belief, which can also be explained as a confirmation bias or a willful ignorance to any opposing information. If you examine a conspiracy theory and the people who believe it and you find these patterns to exist, chances are the conspiracy theory may be actually just a conspiracy theory based on only conspiracist discourse and not any actual scientific reasoning. And if you believe in a conspiracy theory, I encourage you to evaluate your own logic and reasoning with this same model. Why do you believe what you believe in our other events more or less likely? As Carl Popper said, every false belief we discover is actually good because that gets us that much closer to believing only true things. You can't be afraid of being proven wrong or proving yourself wrong or changing your beliefs when presented with new information. It's a part of learning that we all do as we grow and gain more knowledge in the world. Learning itself could be described as being continually proven wrong. Another way experts evaluate a conspiracy theory is through scale, the size and duration of a conspiracy theory. The general idea for this logical evaluation of a conspiracy theory is that the more people that would need to be involved in a conspiracy theory, its size, and the longer a conspiracy theory would need to be in existence, its duration, the less likely a conspiracy theory is real or true. Think of like in high school, when a secret is passed around between classmates, the more the secret is spread and the more people know about the secret, the more likely someone is going to spill the beans. Similarly, the longer the secret is kept, the more likely the secret is going to get out some way somehow. So those are some ways that we can determine the validity of a conspiracy theory. And whether or not you should take it seriously. But this still doesn't answer the core question. Why? Why are conspiracy theories seemingly everywhere on the internet? And why do we all subconsciously believe at least some of them? A good example of this is the Wayfair conspiracy theory that happened last year. All over TikTok, Instagram, and social media, people were talking about these mysterious Wayfair products that were priced in a reasonably high amount and that had names of children who had been missing. The general idea was that Wayfair was trafficking children. Much of the details surrounding this conspiracy theory were proven to be false, but that didn't stop people from believing them initially when this information came out. In fact, I was even someone who partially believed it. According to Dr. Baraza, PhD, and professor at USC, it's much easier for people to trust the information that's being presented to them on social media. We oftentimes trust who we know. We rely on social cues to attribute validity to a message, which means that we're likely to trust information that's being shared by those we already trust and already know. Yeah, look at the fluffy belly. So the belief in conspiracism, combined with the social media growth mechanism, lends itself as the perfect opportunity for conspiracy theories to grow. Hopefully I don't have cat hair all over me now. But why is it that people latch onto conspiracy theory, concepts, and ideas? People's motivation to make sense of their environment increases when they're feeling out of control and are experiencing feelings of anxiousness and uncertainty. In a psychological experiment, one group of research participants read a scenario where a president was shot and killed. Another group of participants read the same scenario, but with one difference. The assassin missed and the president survived. The participants were then asked whether or not they believe the assassin was a lone wolf or part of a conspiracy. Results showed that when the president was killed, people were more likely to believe that a conspiracy theory was behind it than when the president survived. When things fall into place too seamlessly, like the ping pong ball falling into the cup, it can be hard to believe that it was all just a random occurrence. It can be hard to wrap our minds around the fact that mere accidents or an odd sequence of events can have such a large impact on our society, especially to the extent of a president being killed. It's also believed that conspiracy theories could be evolutionary byproducts. The byproduct hypothesis suggests conspiracy theories emerge from a large brain capable of thinking, reasoning, and gossiping. Yes, gossiping can be an evolutionary byproduct. So all those drama channels that you enjoy and love to watch, the tea that we love to be spilled, could actually be explained through evolution. Conspiracy theories contain a few key components, pattern recognition, agency detection, and threat management. When assessed separately, each of these mechanisms has an important function for survival. Another theory is that conspiracy theories aren't a byproduct of evolution, but in fact necessary and have actually helped humans of the past. Conspiracy theories could have possibly helped ancestral humans in navigating their social world and anticipating imminent dangers in their society. Whatever the reason for conspiracy theories existing may be, the reality is they are prevalent and being interwoven into our society. More than 50% of Americans believe in a conspiracy theory. Polls over the years have shown that over half of Americans consistently endorse at least one sort of conspiratorial narrative. The reality is you probably believe in at least one conspiracy theory, just like I do. Conspiracy theorists are not fringe outcasts or weirdos. There are family members, our friends, our family, and even ourselves. So it's important to understand conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists so that we can better understand the effects of conspiracy theories on our society and what we can do to help. Next time on Conspiranation, when conspiracy theories turn dangerous, we're diving into the different types of conspiracy theories, how they grow, and the original conspiracy theory that may have started the most dangerous conspiracy theories that we see today. And later on, we're examining conspiracy theory influencers and the effects of conspiracism on society. Stay tuned.


The study examined public discourse on Twitter referencing both puff bar and JUUL e-cigarettes, finding common themes such as flavors, health risks, and potential substitution for one another. The results aim to inform the tobacco control community about popular e-cigarette products with different features that can be potentially substituted for one another, and suggest future health communication campaigns should target the health consequences of using multiple e-cigarettes or dual use to reduce exposure to high levels of nicotine among younger populations. This article was authored by John Patrick Allam, Allison Dorminesh, Anu Jamaj Mandar, and others.


Hi guys, this is Aastha Singhal and here are 4 reasons why finding the right co-founder determines a startup success. Choosing a co-founder is one of the most important decisions that one makes in his business. It's like a marriage, which won't last in case of conflict of interest. And ensure that both of you are on the same page for everything. Starting a business together entails collaboration, with no space for competition. Be the co-founders who think alike, dream alike and have similar core values can take the startup ahead. You might not be good at tech and hence your co-founder should be. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, but the key to success is finding someone who compliments you in a way that benefits your business. Every partnership goes through tough times, from fundraising to poor cash flows and contract terminations. All sorts of situations will come up. Make sure that you and your co-founder are competent enough for dealing with such situations together.


I'm delighted to welcome Michael Hauden to the skipped stage. He's the CEO of the Sahana Software Foundation. He has nine years of humanitarian tech-related experience, has lived in Thailand and Indonesia doing humanitarian-related work and worked in Asia and Africa extensively. Welcome, Michael. To be here today, I'm actually an Auckland native My journey started just across the road studying at the engineering school here doing computer systems engineering. Like many of the other presenters, after working in the industry for a couple of years I really wanted to do something more. Maybe my underpants were on the outside and had a bit of a superhero complex. I wanted to save the world. So after the Indian Ocean tsunami, I headed over to Indonesia and basically started knocking on doors of NGOs until someone took me on as a volunteer. Now, I originally thought, like, computer programming, and that field, sort of when you're looking at disasters like this. But when I started sort of seeing these organizations, seeing how they operate, I realized these are huge operations and they need IT skills just as much as any other operation. I also identified the enemy. The enemy is Excel. The entire humanitarian industry is run on Excel. There are 100 million dollar projects like accounting systems on Excel. So it had almost the past 10 years to make a better solution than just Excel. And through this, I've also realized that this is really hard. And one of the reasons, and I think this is one of the things you have to accept, Excel is actually really good at a lot of things. And one of the things it's really good at is giving people a lot of flexibility. Want to add another column? Pretty much any user can do that. And the thing I've realized is when you're coming with solutions, you're taking away some of that flexibility from people. You're disempowering them. Do you want to add another column? Well, we've got the data model. This is the data model. We'd have to recode it to add another column. It gives them a lot of flexibility on how to analyze data and how to make their own charts. So I think this is one of my learnings, is when you're looking at your bright new Sushani solution, what is it disrupting? What are you taking away from people? Another example is when you're looking at database solutions, you may be looking at sharing information more widely. Are you disrupting a monopoly where one person held all the records and that gave them authority and power? So these are some of the things we need to be mindful of when we're working in the humanitarian domain. After building a better Excel, creating a very simple logistics database for International Rescue Committee was the first organization that I was working for, one of the logos that Chris came up with. They had a simple, it was actually an access database, which I sort of extended and deployed in a number of offices in Indonesia. Now I even did a really good job or a really bad job because next they sent me to Pakistan, which was a really interesting working environment, for both the disaster of the earthquake, which happened in 2006, I think it was, but also the ongoing refugees from Afghanistan had been there since the late 70s. So these are two very different contexts, and this is one of the remote warehouses in the tribal areas of Pakistan on the border of Afghanistan. They had a computer, no internet though, so having to build solutions that worked in that sort of environment. I was also sent to Uganda, no this is one of them, where I was working, and one of the things you see a lot of, Excel is really, I came to realise if you've got a really good Excel spreadsheet that's a really good starting point, because most of the time you had files like this or just information wasn't organised. And one of the challenges is you've got this idea of a solution, but what do they have in place at the moment? How are you collecting information at the moment? So I now work with Sahana. Sahana also has its origin in the tsunami, but on the other side of the Indian Ocean in Sri Lanka. There after the tsunami, a group of tech enthusiasts, open source enthusiasts, got together and had a problem. And people talk about the second tsunami and Chris sort of referred to it. It's what some of us call the organizations, and there's a lot of people who coordinate these resources, so you're going to overlap and avoiding gaps. So the first deployment of Sahana, which we're just showing a screenshot here of, unfortunately not the entire screenshot because they used a copyrighted image, which we've had a few legal issues with recently, so I've had to blank that out. But basically an organisation registry, who's doing what where is one of the basic things, is what organisations are responding, where are they responding, what resources do they have? Having a request management, where are the needs, where are they coming from? Looking at a person registry, so being able to identify and help reunify missing people. A camp registry, so helping to manage camps like this, where are they who's supporting these camps, what resources do they need? So Sahana was one of the first humanitarian open source projects, and this was 10 years ago. So a lot of this has evolved since then, and I'm just going to talk a bit briefly about some of the projects that I've worked on with Sahana in the past five years. First I just wanted to quickly talk about the disaster management cycle. Now Chris touched on the response component of this and some of the preparation. But really disaster management, I think a lot of people when they think disaster management, it's a response, it's what you see on the news. But disaster management is something that happens all of the time. And I think Noel, the work he's talking about is a great example of some of the sort of preparation you can do which might not be directly involved. I mean, when you've got councils putting together plans, when you've got things like planting mangroves to mitigate storm surges, these are all sort of part of disaster management activities. And I think it's important to think of it holistically, not necessarily in a linear sort of one comes after another as this sort of diagram indicates. Because more and more we're pushing towards these things happening in parallel. And I think technology and better access to information is one of the things that allows this really work. On the work that Noel's doing is when you know, when you've got good data on who owns what land, then when you're starting to do your response you can also integrate and start your recovery at the same time so you're not building temporary shelters on temporary land but you can actually start building shelters on people's own land because you know that information and you don't have to go into another survey process after you've started your response effort. So this is I think one of the things that we can really help with is integrating all of this and that means the response is quicker and the recovery is quicker which is a really important thing. I mean, I was in Indonesia for two and a half years over various segments of time but last time I was there was almost five years after the tsunami and you still had people living in temporary shelters then so you really have to appreciate that response and recovery can be a long process and I think we're seeing that in Christchurch as well. So some of the deployments of Sahana I've worked on, this is the resource management system and these are all different themes and different configurations of Sahana. This is a deployment that we did for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent. We gave them a range of different functionality. The key functionality that they're using here is the volunteer management. The Red Cross has 93 million volunteers around the world. Now I'm not quite sure how they came up with that number because the majority of these volunteer records will be in a handwritten register under somewhere. Now that information will be collected and aggregated but the majority of those records won't be digitized. Now I think at the moment we have just over 100,000 volunteer records in this so we're getting there but still a long way to go. There are a number of other modules that we gave to them. We actually did some work on an assessment module, some of the challenges that Chris was talking about. That was a really interesting project to work on because you can design an assessment piece of software but you've got to look at how it fits into the organization and we had throughout the Red Cross you have different national societies and each national society has its own assessment templates and some of these templates, the information they were trying to collect didn't make a lot of sense. Some of it could have been baseline information that you collect in advance. Some of it was really not specific are you looking at just a village or are you looking at a district? How would that information be aggregated and how would you actually act on that information? When we dug further we found out that a lot of these times the actual template, the actual systematic process of collecting information and the disaster assessment wasn't really used that much. It was more about people driving off on the back of motorbikes, inter-villages, assessing with their eyes, maybe filling out a form. Those forms would come back to the office, sort of be put under a desk. People would talk locally about what they thought needed to be done and then we're looking, and this is in Indonesia, they hit off part of the process, the conditions you have involved in that. So this is just a show of the resource management system being used in the Philippines and the operations system centre there. Another project was working with the Government Department of Social Welfare and Development in the Philippines. Now this is a great example where I think is one of the strengths of open source, it's about building local capacity. We often think when we think about humanitarian response we think about the United Nations, the international organisations, but really the most important actors in humanitarian response are the local agencies and especially the local governments and this is often really challenging when you have highly resourced international organisations coming into a country with poor governance, poor local government, and there's often a tension there where really the responsibility should be with the governments but the resources are with these international, often western organisations. So there's a tension here and I think one of the things that open source software can do is we can help to build that local capacity. So here in 2012 we spent a week in the Philippines working with a government software team. We went through a code sprint where it was a combination of training, we'd done some virtual training in advance, trying to make the most of our in-person time and during that time we went through a number of tasks that they needed to deploy. Sorry, some slides around the wrong way. Just the solution here and it was basically a relief, good and inventory monitoring system. So this meant when Typhoon Haiyan struck the next year they had the system set up and we were able to use it to help track the majority of the relief goods that were distributed through the government. So I think this is a really great example of how humanitarian open source technology can build local capacity. These slides here actually later on in 2012 when Hurricane Sandy hit New York we were also able to deploy Sahana there working with the Occupy Sandy movement to help give them a solution to manage and you can see all of the donated goods and help, this is me working with a couple of their team there, help coordinate requests for those goods to distribution centres. And this is a great example and another one of the strengths is I see open source technology can allow really good transfer of knowledge between sort of, as Kate said, whether it's whether you call it developing and developed countries, the North and the South. But one of the things I'm seeing is there's similarities between these two contexts and open source technology allows us to take learnings from Philippines and apply them in New York and vice versa. The next example is a solution that we did working funded by the UN but working with the government in East Timor, Timor-Leste and this was to design a disaster management information system and this is just a really a simple solution to help them organise a variety of information both before disasters to support sort of coordination and collaboration and building relationships between the different stakeholders there and in response to disasters. You can vaguely see it here but we did a lot of work to make a really intuitive interface sort of a news feeds type style. We thought what's a way of sharing information that people are familiar with and when they said, hey, this is just like using Facebook we knew we kind of actually succeeded because it was something they could really use quite easily. Not the best example but I just dropped it in but one of the things we use heavily in Sahana is we really rely on a lot of the open-street map baseline data and a lot of the contexts we work they have the best maps and what we try and do is sort of a value add. The next project I'd like to share with you is a community resilience mapping project we did in Los Angeles and this is working with a number of different community coalitions and going around and combining sort of baseline data with information from local government, US census data, US geographical sort of hazard map data to allow communities to get a better understanding of their own resilience and sort of map what resources and what all communities. One of the things working in this environment that was really apparent is who really adopts adopts these sort of technology solutions and we worked with eight different community coalitions and we found that the most engaged users were typically white, male, highly educated and I think it's really when you're talking about technology and early adopters there are going to be some people who can engage really easily this is really familiar to them and there's going to be people who this isn't so accessible to them. One of the things that Kate talked about about printing out maps is absolutely critical. I mean we went in there initially with like here's your web map because this is what we're really comfortable with but for a lot of people a map is still a book and so it's about working out what they're comfortable with and making that focus on accessibility. So just talking a bit about where Sahana is now there's been a number of versions and different revisions and a couple of rewrites of the project of the software over the past 10 years as it's been going. The current version is Sahana Eden there was a long debate about that name some use it as an acronym for emergencies, development, environment I actually proposed it because I come from Mount Eden which is a suburb just sort of five kilometers that way. It's a web application it's built on the Web2Py framework which some of you might be familiar with using Python. We've really focused on a RAD rapid application development framework so it's really easy to deploy instances and to create new modules. Now there's a bit of a double-edged sword there it's really easy to write modules it's really easy to write that code but to get people to use it to get people to get value out of that is something which is much more challenging and I think that's something to be really mindful of when you're engaging in humanitarian open source technology is the technology I say technology is easy people are hard so you can have the best solution but you've still got to get people to use it and I mean one of the one blog posts I read is the technology is actually only 10% of the solution and the rest is sort of working with people making sure that there's user guides on how people can use the software making sure it's really I think one of the key things it's adding value to them and in that value equation you've got to keep in mind of the cost adopting any new technology there's a cost to that so we've got to make sure the value outweighs that cost and that people are prepared to make that initial investment we've got a full restful API and we support data integration through XML, JSON, Excel it's the enemy but we're still trying to subvert it and CSV and I think this is one of the other things there's a lot of different technologies around at the moment I was talking to someone the other day and they're like how do you choose the best technology do we have to have one platform and I said no that's never going to happen one of the key critical things though is to make sure that different platforms can talk to each other we do a lot of work on open data standards and making sure that different solutions can inter-operate so that you don't have to have everyone using the same solution one of the things we put a lot of work into and you've seen a number of different screenshots that all look quite different is different themes and different templates to allow Sahana to be configured and used in lots of different contexts so this is what we've been doing over the past years I've actually only recently come on as the CEO of Sahana six months ago and one of our focuses now is to really we've done all these deployments we've worked on a lot of different contexts and a lot of people say every context is different every country is different and every disaster is different and there's some truth to that but there's also a lot of similarities and I think that's where we can actually and one of our aims at the moment strategic goals for the next year is to look at really putting a lot more investment into the core default generic Sahana so that some people have something that they can easily use out of the box and that's not just the technology but that's the training material and sort of guides on how they can deploy it how they can integrate it implemented in the organizations as well so if any of you are interested in contributing and engaging with this here's a link on how to get started or just come and have a chat to me this is sort of a more technical if you're interested in contributing code but as I said coders not there's only a sort of 10% of the solution there's a lot more we're trying to get better communication material better engagement we're trying to engage stakeholders to set up local branches throughout the world as well so there's a lot of work to be done so if any if you are interested in getting involved especially if you're based in Auckland I'm based here too and I'm hoping to do some events later on in the year here just talking more generally about humanitarian open source one of the key differences between humanitarian open source and open source projects this is maybe a bit of a generalization but in most open source projects you've got users and then contributors to that project are sort of a subgroup of those users it's people who've dived in who found out that they've got an itch to scratch and they scratch that itch contributing maybe they found a bug and they fixed that bug now humanitarian open source projects are different in that respect the majority of users are people who have no interest in contributing to an open source project in terms of code and there's a lot of debate around this in terms of just being a user and giving good feedback also not going to be users of that code and I think that means that we have to put additional thought into how do we make these solutions accessible for people who aren't us for people who aren't like us for people who don't have the same skills as us to telling people to say to making accessible for people to learn how to install it how to use it telling people to go and fork a repository on github for the majority of users we deal with and I think we even need just to watch our language because I mean it's not just over your head it's like that's not something for me and I think it's something we really need to be I mean in terms of accessibility an open source license is really I think there's a lot of I totally agree with that but for most people and most users that doesn't make it accessible that they may might not even understand most of the organizations we've worked with many of them don't even care about the fact that it's open source they just want a solution I think it's really valuable that we've been able to sort of cross-pollinate development that we've done between things that have been funded by the Red Cross the UN, the government and the US as well but I think that accessibility thing it means that we have to have more focus on design better user experience and user interfaces so that people don't have to sort of read long manuals or explore for themselves to really reducing that investment that people need to make to start using the humanitarian tech so that's all I think it's lunchtime now and we're coming back 120 so thank you very much for listening and look forward to the panel discussion afterwards


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The way it was presented was founders had dropout. They started in their driveway, just taking like a family recipe. It's the most insane hummus I've ever had and they really want to be in Ralph's. And that worked? Yeah, and he was like, this sounds a little bit like the Apple story. And I was like, yeah, he kind of wants a lead of Crusade. Crusade like, you know, into the market. The same way Apple wanted to, you know, the mid-70s. This is your grandmother's recipe? Grandma used to make it with a big wood thing and just mash up those beans because they were so soft. Then dump in the tahini and then whisk it up.  Times have changed. Yeah, absolutely. Food safety and anytime somebody hears a 20 year old start of the company out of the garage, everybody's like, that sounds awesome. Do they have everything in line with food safety? And after I heard that, okay, this now sounds awesome.


Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem aren't just two of the hottest actors to ever hit the silver screen, they're two of the most attractive people to ever shack up together in real life as well. This notoriously private couple first met back in the early 90s while both of them were part of the Spanish film industry. Over the years, their relationship would develop and the two would eventually marry in a secret low-key ceremony at a friend's house in the Bahamas back in 2010. These days Javier and Penelope live in a beautiful mansion Beverly Hills as you might expect, so we're gonna take a look. In these videos, we don't reveal any addresses and even though I've done a house tour of my own place, please do not show up at any private residences because it's not safe for anyone. As you know, Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem are both A-listers and today this world-famous couple is still together, having been married for over a decade. Pretty rare for a Hollywood relationship. They have two children, their son Leo and their daughter Luna, and as Penelope herself told Marie Claire in 2019, My life is a very different life, but it's the life that I always wanted since I was a little girl. My family is my priority. We like the family to be together. Well, since they enjoy spending so much time with one another, I thought today we'd take a look at their home life. At the time of this recording, the couple's estimated net worth is around a combined $95 million, so you already know they're living in luxury.  We'll look at their spectacular mansion in Beverly Hills, California and give you a taste of where this happy family spends their downtime vacationing as well. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe and ring that bell for notifications because we post brand new videos daily. As always, you can follow me over on Instagram to chat, and now let's get into this video. May 10 was a massive year for these two superstars. Not only did they get married, but they also bought their first family home, a $3.3 million prime piece of real estate located in Beverly Hills, California. Before I tell you about the home itself, let's take a look at one of its most spectacular features, its star-studded neighborhood known as Hidden Valley. Man, even the name of this place sounds cool. Penelope and Javier chose to live here in one of the world's most glamorous communities where a large percentage of the Hollywood elite also reside. For instance, want to know who their next-door neighbor is? Well, most mornings, Penelope or Javier are saying hello to Adele. And just a little bit further down the street are the homes of actress Zoe Saldana, superstar Jennifer Lawrence, as well as the family home shared by Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis. Oh, and did I mention that Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom live right around the corner as well? It's true. With that said of the way, let's take a look at the home itself. This 2,538-square-foot house includes four bedrooms and three full bathrooms. Considering that both Penelope and Javier are extremely private individuals, practically no images of the interior of their home have ever leaked out. But thanks to some real estate listings for the homes of their equally famous neighbors, we can get a taste of what the inside of their place is actually like.  Meanwhile, the interiors are more unassuming than you might think, with the highlights being tasteful staircases, formal living rooms, expansive marble-top kitchen counters, studies with sun-drenched windows, and some truly spectacular ensuite bathrooms. And while it's unlikely that the inside of Penelope and Javier's home looks just like Adele's, especially when it comes to the decor, the form and function is more than likely similar, just with their own unique flair and taste added throughout. For example, according to Javier, these two of trends form their Oscar statues into bedside table lights, which they then use to catch up on their script reading every night.  You put light bulbs on your Oscars? Yeah, we switch them on and we read with them and we read a lot of books because that's the only way for us to remind us how good we are. He's joking, right? He's probably joking. Anyways, just because you live in one of the nicest neighborhoods in the world doesn't mean that sometimes you don't need to get away from it all. And when Javier and Penelope feel like jetting off to some exotic destination, they loved vacation at one particular rental home known as Bougainville, located in the Bahamas. This spectacular seven-bedroom villa sleeps more than 18 people and features nine bathrooms alongside oceanfront views that can lull you to sleep at night, causing that sound machine you brought along to help you sleep completely useless. Oh, and did I mention that there's a private beach located right at your doorstep? Because there is. When you've got accommodations like that as a selling point, you attract some of celebrities' biggest and brightest. Beyond Penelope and Javier, this spot has also been rented out by the likes of Glenn Close, as well as Connie Chung and her husband, Mr. Are You the Father himself, Maury Povich. Outside of being a designated vacation spot for some of Hollywood's A-list talent, Bougainville House also has been featured in photo shoots for publications like Sports Illustrated. In fact, it was the very spot where Ron DeRausi photographed her cover photos for the 2016 swimsuit edition. Now, I know what you're thinking. That's all well and good, but can I afford the place? Well, yes and no. The nightly rate starts at around $4,000 a night. So, if you happen to have around 17 other friends that you want to share the spot with you, then 222 bucks a night per person doesn't sound too unreasonable, does it? Hold that thought. I know it's still expensive, but you might change your mind when you find out that this spot also comes complete with its very own 10-passenger speedboat and a captain willing to pilot it. That kind of pushes things over the edge, doesn't it? If that's not enough, you can even sign up for their swimming pigs tour, which takes you on a boat trip around a series of islands and features a pirate of the Caribbean sandbar, shark feeding, storkling at a grotto made famous by the James Bond film Thunderball, and, of course, the titular swimming pigs of Stanyoke. Honestly, I never knew that was a thing, but now that I do, I need to find a dozen of my closest friends' pronto, because I need to head there for a much-needed vacation. Now that we've checked out what we know about where Penelope, Cruz, and Javier Barzam are living, including their main mansion in Beverly Hills, what did you guys think? While we don't know too much about their home interior, we did get to see just how they're living when they take some time off, and that was pretty impressive, too. Be sure to let me know your thoughts on Penelope and Javier's luxury lifestyle in the comments down below. If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe to our channel. Want to see someone else's home profile in this series? Then leave some ideas down below. Thanks for watching. Feel free to follow me on Instagram, and I will catch you all in the next video. Bye!


Now we present Herbert Marshall as the man called X. The Saturday Night Feature on NBC's five-show festival of comedy, music, mystery and drama. Brought to you by... RCA Victor, world leader in radio, first in recorded music, first in television. By the makers of Anderson for fast relief from pain of headache, neuritis, neuralgia. And by your local Ford dealer, who is now displaying the new 1951 Ford, the car that's built for the years ahead. Herbert Marshall as the man called X. Wherever there is mystery, intrigue, romance, in all the strange and dangerous places of the world, there you will find the man called X. Here's a word from RCA Victor. Are you still a television outsider, still just reading about it, talking about it, thinking about it? Well, we'd like you to hear what some of the television insiders say. Here's what Robert J. Patterson of Bronxville, New York writes for example. Television brings the family closer together, makes new friends of neighbors who come in to enjoy it with us. Adds much to the joy of living. The Patterson's are just one of the more than a million American families who own and enjoy RCA Victor television. Why not find out the facts about television for yourself? Look at the list of big new shows going on the air every week. Look at the new sets, 18 beautiful new RCA Victor receivers now at your dealers. Look into the matter of price, too. It may surprise you to find out how little it costs today to join the insiders who own America's favorite television, RCA Victor. It happened on a quiet fall evening just across the river from Washington, D.C. in a small frame house in the outskirts of Alexandria, Virginia. Look, operator, I got a call Mr. Ken Thurston in New York, fast. What is the number, please? I don't know the number, but I want to talk to Ken Thurston and hurry. And the address, please? Oh, for Pete, I don't know the address. Get New York. Tell him he's the man called X. They'll find him. Now step on it. General Staff? Sure, Chief. How are you, Colonel? Glad to see you again, Thurston. The Colonel says he's got some business for us here at the Bureau, Ken. Oh? Yes. Thurston, do you know a man named Bill Pringle? Bill Pringle is an old friend of mine. You know him, Chief. Sure. Cryptography expert. The one who helped us crack the Japanese code during the war. Well, he's in trouble. Oh? What kind? Maybe treason. Treason? Well, that doesn't sound like Bill Pringle. That's what we thought when we put him to work as a civilian expert, helping us develop the greatest defensive weapon in the history of warfare. Maybe one that could prevent future wars. An electronic deciphering machine. Electronic deciphering? If it works as we think it will, any enemy cypher or code will be as clear as ABC to us. We'd never be caught flatfooted again by a march into Poland, Korea, or Pearl Harbor. Hmm. You said something about treason, Colonel. We'd suspected for some time that foreign agents were contacting Pringle. We'd had him under surveillance. Last night, there was a shooting scrape at his home in Alexandria, Virginia. The man who'd been covering him for us was killed and Pringle has disappeared. I see. Then you think Pringle sold us out to foreign agents? It doesn't matter what we think, we've got to know. Hmm. Well, Ken, Chief, I think I'd better visit Alexandria, Virginia. Yes? Here's Bill Pringle at home. Who are you? My name is Ken Fursten. Come in, please. Thanks. You're another government man, aren't you? Well, all right. Why do you keep on wasting time here? Can't you understand that Bill's life is in danger? They may be torturing him, killing him. They... I'm sorry. You seem pretty upset about things, Mrs. Sir. I'm Philly's Pringle, Bill's wife. Mrs. Pringle. But why are you afraid that someone might be torturing him and maybe killing him? Foreign agents were after him, trying to get him to sell out his country. What do you think happened last night? I don't know. Bill was supposed to be working late, so I went to a movie. When I came back, the house was filled with government men. And Bill was gone. I've been half crazy ever since. You're sure you don't remember anything that might give us a lead, something Bill might have said or let slip? No, nothing. I'm going through some of his things now, those notes and letters on that table. So far, there's nothing. What's this map here, Mrs. Pringle? Map? California. With a town near Monterey circled in red pencil San Merido. Oh, I've been trying to get Bill to take a vacation. Anything to get him away from his worries here. He just decided to go to San Merido next week on a fishing trip. And then last night happened. Well, thanks for your trouble, Mrs. Pringle. If there was only some way that I could help. You've been a lot of help. Thank you. Yes. I happened to know that Bill hated fishing and he wasn't married. Good night, Mrs. Pringle. But if she isn't Bill Pringle's wife, who is she? I'll leave that up to you to find out, Chief. To me? But you're right there, Ken. Look, Chief, if Colonel Blake's right, Bill Pringle or some other country's agents may have the plans for the deciphering machine. Sure, Ken, and those plans are probably on their way out of the country right now. That's why I'm going fishing. Fishing? Yep. At San Merido, California. Song, Chief. You want a private play, Mr. Thurston? Apply to San Merido. That's right. Can you fix me up? Sure, easy. Can't get you all the way into town, but there's a farmer named a Bronson who'll drive you in for a couple of dollars. How come you're so familiar with a little place called San Merido? I wasn't until night before last. Flew two men up there in the charter job. Oh? One of them named Pringle? No, Smith and Jones. Then this morning he got another inquiry about a flight up there. Funny name, I got it right. Yeah, yeah, here it is. Zell Schmidt. Zell Schmidt. Sure, who else? Hello, Mr. Thurston. Hey, Don.  Oh, it's very simple. I'm here because I was a Los Angeles and wanted to go to Rio de Janeiro. So I put in a long distance call to New York. What? Sure, I had to say goodbye to my dearest, my most favorite friend, Mr. Thurston. Hey, Mr. Thurston. You mean you called collector, chiseled some money. And Miss Brooks likes your accent. So you learned what I was going and came up here to wait for me? Well, the answer is no. But I didn't even ask you yet, Mr. Thurston. I'm not giving you any money. But, Mr. Thurston. And you're not coming with me to San Merido. But, Mr. Rex. So long, Pego. But, but... How do you like that? Such ungratitude. Well, it's lucky there is more than one way to skin a purse from McKessie. Hello? This is Pagan Zell Schmidt. I got news for you. He's here. That's right. And I can spilt you plenty. For a slight consideration, of course. Mr. San Merido. Nobody lives here but them Tony fishermen. Portuguese, most of them. That's why I can't figure out why all you fellas wanted to come here all of a sudden. You're talking about the two men you drove last night? Yeah, Smith and Jones, it was. Where did they go, Mr. Brunson? I don't think, but one place to go in San Merido, Mr. Madam called us. Madam called us. Yeah, this here spot right here. Eatin' place, drinkin' place, gamblin' place. And, uh, so much as a fellow with money can buy almost anything he wants in there. Wouldn't know myself, never been in the market with them kind of things. Well, thanks for the ride, Mr. Brunson. Into the tip. Oh, forget it, Mr. Bled, do it. That's your on your own. Okay, mister? I'll go you one better. I'll buy you the first drink. Now, that's a switch. You bein' a sucker or is there a string at hand? There's a string. Okay, shoot. What is it? We have that drink alone in private. Is it a deal? Hey, that's the best offer I've had in ten years. I got a good bottle in my office. Come on. All right, mister, what's on your mind? I've had a tip that a man with enough dope can buy almost anything here, Madam called us. Like what? Like safe transportation out of the country. You don't have to pay for that. Drive down to Tijuana or over to Nagales. You can get across easy. For free. Sometimes it's not that easy. It is if you're not hot. The feds ain't after you. And if they are? That makes it tougher on you than on me. I don't mess around with stuff like that. So let's have that drink, mister, and forget it. Okay, have it your way. I guess Bill Pringle gave me a bum steer. Who'd you say, mister? Bill Pringle, a friend of mine. You wouldn't know him. No, I wouldn't know him. Did you say you were buying this drink, mister? That's fine. Some drinks come kind of high around here. Oh, how high? Maybe $500. Phew. Okay, who do I pay? Name's Captain Braga. Skipper the tuner boat's Santa Isabella. Captain Braga, where do I find him? He's aboard ship now, out in the harbor. I'll have Joe row you out there. Well, here's mud in your eye, mister, and a bond voyage. You keep the Santa Isabella pretty ship-shaped, Captain Braga. No, she's all right. I don't see much of a crew aboard, though. I thought these tuner boats carried quite a few hands. Your interest is nothing fishing, no? You stay in your cabin. Well, I handle these ship. Fair enough. As long as you get me what I want to go. See, here is your cabin. You will go in, please. Sure. I didn't know I was going to have company on this trip. I hope you don't have any objections, Ken. After all, I've come all the way from Alexandria, Virginia, to be with you. Yeah, does your husband know, please? Bill Pringle? I don't think he's in any position to care at the moment. Why not? Did you use that gun on him, too? How can you be so suspicious, darling? I'm only pointing at it you to welcome you aboard properly. Isn't that so, Captain Braga? See, welcome aboard, Mr. X. We'll return to Herbert Marshall as the man called X in just a moment. If you would like to know a quick, easy way to ease the pain of a headache, neuritis, or neuralgia, then by all means try anisin. Your own dentist or physician may, at one time or another, have handed you an envelope containing anisin tablets. Then you already know how incredibly fast and effectively anisin brings relief. Anisin is like a doctor's prescription. That is, anisin contains not just one, but a combination of medically proven active ingredients. For your own sake, try anisin. Anisin is sold to you on this guarantee. If the first few tablets do not give you all the relief you want, as fast as you want it, you may return the unused portion and your money will be refunded. You can get anisin tablets at any drug counter. Anisin comes in handy boxes of 12 and 30 tablets and economical family size bottles of 50 and 100. And now we return to Herbert Marshall as the man called X with Leon Bolasco as Pagan's elchement. Wake up, Mr. Thurston, please wake up. Why do you have to keep on acting dead this way? Wake up, Mr. X.  Oh, you're not subconscious after all. Not that subconscious, Pagan. Ah, I see Captain Bradwell and the beautiful Felice are gone. We locked in this cabin. Titled in the bum. Yeah, yeah. Looks like we're on our way, Pagan. Hey, how come you don't even act surprised to see me here, Mr. X? Because I saw you make that phone call back in the San Francisco airport. Call? What call was that, Mr. Thurston? The one you made of Felice. By the father of my father, Mr. X, I only told her that... Yeah, where'd you meet with the airport? That's right. Naturally, she went for me. So when she invited me to go on a fishing trip, well, you understand how all these things are. Oh, yes, yes. But there's just one little thing, one tiny thing I don't understand. What's this all about anyways? Pagan, we're on our way out of the country. And we're all after the plans for an electronic recycling machine. You mean we're not going fishing then? I think Felice is going fishing after those plans. And she figures on using us for bait. Huh? And Pagan, you better pray that she likes to fish with live bait. Sure, but what difference does it make? She doesn't like to use live bait. She'll use... Oh, Mr. X! Nice of you to invite me on deck for some air, Felice.  So you'll know just where you stand. That'll be refreshing. We've dropped anchor off the coast of Lower California, Mexican waters. So? Captain Braga and I are going ashore at nightfall. Nice. If I don't see any town over there, someone expecting you? Smith and Jones, maybe? Or your erstwhile husband, Bill Pringle? I'm going ashore to get the plans for the deciphering machine. If I get them, Captain Braga will return alone. His orders will be to get rid of you and Zell Schmidt. What if we don't get the plans? We'll come back together. And persuade you to tell us just how we can get them. What makes you think I'll cooperate? You might be interested to know that Captain Braga served a long apprenticeship with the Gestapo, questioning prisoners at Buchenwald. I think you'll cooperate, Ken. How can you tell them something you don't know, Mr. X? I can't, Pagon. But as long as they think I can, we're in pretty good shape. Pretty good shape. He says, pretty good. If they get the plans they bump us off. And if they don't get them, they're going to... they're going to... they got us right between the frying pan. Not if we get the plans first. You're doing me that luck, Pagon. Give me a little time, Mr. X. After all, with practiconing and toothpick to be working with, I... Hey, no better, eh? What do we do? Follow Felice and Captain Braga ashore. But who wants to go swimming this time of the night?  There's a dinghy more to the stern rail. Come on. All right, Pagon. Over the side into that boat. Get it, Mr. Thurston? What are we doing here anyways? There's nothing in this wilderness but wilderness. There's going to be something around here, Pagon. Did you look at that jetty we tied up to? Maybe it was just put up there to fool people like us into thinking somebody used it for something. Maybe it was... Mr. X. You know something, Mr. Thurston? I think we should have stood on that boat. Come on. We're going to find out where those came from. But somebody was shooting at somebody with guns even. That's right. But maybe they wouldn't like us to come crashing this way. After all, it could be just a quiet little shooting party between few friends. Yeah, a few friends named Smith and Jones. Huh? Huh. This is where these shots came from. You mean this old tumbling down shack? No tool shed of some kind. Let's go in. Two woods in the old tools. The flashlight will fix that up. You always have to think of everything. Are you satisfied now? There's nothing in... Mr. X. Yeah. Looks like that quiet little shooting party ended in murder. But... but who is he anyways, Mr. Thurston? A man named Jones. Or Smith. Those guys again. And look there. Against that wall. Huh? This ain't no tool house. It's a radio station. Short wave outfit. And a good one. Hmph. Very interesting, yeah. Let's give this to you in a quick sign over there. No hurry, Pagan. I want to learn what this set's doing so far from home. Huh? Take a look at that manufacturer's print. Made in Moscow. But why do we keep hanging around here, Mr. Thurston? You did what you wanted to. You give it with the radio already? We still haven't found old Pringle, all those plans. They're pringles, plans for crazy machines. Sometimes I think, oh, this is a pigment of your imagination. You got it wrong, senor. Mr. Thurston, it's him. And with that cannon again. You were telling Pagan he was wrong about Bill Pringle and those plans, Braga. See, senor, that is so. For proof, I will take you to them now.  We meet once more, Ken. And as usual, you're at the wrong end of Captain Braga's gun. Looks like it, Felice. Well, don't feel too bad about it. I don't need you anymore. And it really doesn't matter if you get it here in this old ranch house or on the tuna boat. That sounds like you've got the plans. You really didn't provide too much competition, Ken. No. Nor did your power back there on the radio shack. You found Andrea then? Well, that was his name, Andrea. I'm glad to know it wasn't really Jones or Smith. By any name, he was a fool, Ken, thinking he could double-cross me. Then the two of you were working on Bill Pringle together, the old gag, I suppose.  What was the pressure, Felice? The threat to turn you over to the government as a spy unless Bill came across with those plans? Roughly, yes. It wasn't too difficult, either. Bill proved quite amenable. So, what went wrong? Bill and Andrea have disappeared two days before the time we'd planned. I figured it was a double-cross so Andrea could get the cash and glory for himself. Then how come it took you so long to start after them? We'd arranged several exit routes from the country. I didn't know which they'd taken until you found that map for me. Nice of me. Now what? You'll join Pegon and Bill down in the wine cellar where we've got them locked up. Then you'll be disposed of together. Before or after you get aboard that submarine. There are times, Ken, when you show positive flashes of genius. How did you know about the submarine? You didn't figure out that tuna boat escape routine just to hibernate here with the plans. That'll be some way to get into the country you're working for. Add that to the jetty, the mooring lines and the radio. That's not too tough to come up with an answer. You've come up with the right one, Ken. It's due in about 15 minutes. Captain Braga will see me safely aboard.  Sorry, Ken, if I hadn't been so smart and figured I could trap the two of them by myself, you wouldn't be in this fix now. Don't forget I'm in this fix too, Mr. Pringle.  Are you really trying to trap them, Bill? Andrej, yes, police, I don't know. That's why I tried to call you the night Andrej have blackmailed the plans away from me. I thought maybe you could get me straightened out. Only Andrej from that government man got in a gun battle and I caught a slug on the shoulder. And that finished that. Yeah. I don't care about myself now. When I think of the mess I got you into in my country... Now he thinks of that. We're all locked up here in this wine cellar place waiting for the firing squad. We've got to do something, Mr. X. It's a little late, Pagan. Ha-ha. Those than yours. I see you are all here waiting for me. I am so happy I did not disappoint you by failing to return. We wouldn't be disappointed, Captain. Honestly, we wouldn't. Go away and don't come back again. You see, I wouldn't be... at least be disappointed. But, Captain, I'm the man you really want. Let these two go. I am afraid that would be impossible than yours. They know of our communications route between here and your country. I expect my tuner boat to be quite busy in the near future. Nothing can be allowed to interfere with this journey. No. Listen. Javlo, that's him. Help, please. Mr. Rex, help, please. That's right, Pagan. United States Coast Guard planes and probably a squadron of Mexican fliers, too. That is not possible. How could they know about this place? That shortwave radio in the Shackbagger. In case you didn't know, it can be used for other purposes of contacting submarines. So, you call for help and believe they will rescue you? You are mistaken, Senor.  Now, if I can help in Bragger, you will only be first, Senor. Not if I can help in Bragger. I'll kick that gun, Bragger. Quiet, Pagan. Gather yourself together and come up behind those wine barrels. Of course, Mr. Rex. Of course. I was only trying to help you, understand? Oh, sure. Hey, what's the matter with Pringle? He doesn't look very good. He's not, Pagan. He took Bragger's shot so I could get a crack at him. Oh, the poor guy. I guess that makes up for a lot of things. Yeah, a lot of things. Too bad he couldn't have stopped that Feliz cookie from getting away in the submarine with those plans that would have made him happier. But the way they see it... Mr. Rex, what's that? A gift bomb, Pagan. Gift bomb? Oh, then she's not getting away after all. No. No, she's not getting away. They don't get away. Our star Herbert Marshall will return in just a moment to tell you about next week's story. Ladies and gentlemen, America's newest car, the fine new Ford for 1951, is now on display at your neighborhood Ford dealers. And when you see it, you'll find that inside and out, in every detail of design and construction, the 1951 Ford reflects true fine car quality. And in addition, it offers 43 look-ahead features, designed to keep the 1951 Ford young in appearance and young in performance. For example, there's Ford's smart luxury lounge interiors with their exclusive color-harmonized Ford craft fabrics. There's the new automatic ride control that automatically adjusts spring reaction to the type of road to give you a level ride and easy ride. And there's the automatic mileage maker that lets you get the last mile out of every gallon of gasoline for utmost economy. Visit your Ford dealers soon and see the 1951 Ford yourself. You will agree, you can pay more, but you can't buy better. Now here again is our star, Mr. Herbert Marshall. Thanks for being with us. Next week, Mr. X goes to Guatemala to fight against one of the most insidious threats to mankind known in the world today. And I don't mean Leon Balasco will be along as usual as Pagan Zelchman. So join us, won't you, when next I return, as the man called X. It's a Saturday night feature of NBC's five-show festival comedy, music, mystery and drama, brought to you by RCA Victor, world leader in radio, first in recorded music, first in television. And by Whitehall Pharmacal Company, makers of Anison, Cardinos, by Soudal, and other fine drug products. And by your local Ford dealer, who is now displaying the new 1951 Ford, the car that's built for the years ahead. Good night. The man called X, starling Herbert Marshall, by Richard Kennedy Production, with music composed and conducted by Felix Mills. Tonight's story was written by Sidney Marshall. All characters and incidents on the program are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual characters or incidents is purely coincidental. Be sure to listen tomorrow evening for the big show with Tallulah Bankhead, Fred Allen, Ed Winn, Lawrence Melchior, Ed Archie Gardner and Jack Carson. And until next week, same time, same station, this is Jack Latham saying good night for the man called X. Oh, and by the way, winterize your driving habits, will you? Drive slow in rain, sleet, or snow. Remember, Ed Winn and Fred Allen join the big show tomorrow on NBC.


The Institute of Translational Health Sciences, ITHS, has developed a collaborative regional clinical research network called the Northwest Participant and Clinical Interactions Network, Northwest PCI. This network consists of 12 diverse clinical health systems and academic institutions from Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho, WAMI. These sites have been involved in over 1,240 open studies involving over 6,700 patients in 2016. The Northwest PCI is interested in expanding its reach to include more grant-funded research. Additionally, the Northwest PCI has facilitated 34 new grant and contract applications across diverse topics since its inception in 2013. This article was authored by Laura May Baldwin, Lori Hassel, Cindy Lorx, and others.


Cell adhesion is a fundamental process that allows cells to attach to each other or to their surrounding environment. It is critical for many biological processes such as cell division, migration and tissue formation. Researchers have developed techniques to study cell adhesion in vitro using artificial surfaces with varying material properties to mimic the characteristics of natural extracellular matrices. Factors such as surface topography, surface chemistry and surface energy can all influence cell adhesion, which is crucial for understanding how cells interact with their environment. This article was authored by Kai Xu Xi'an, Wu Chuan Xi'an, Yang Wen Guang and others.