All right thanks so what is this all about in contrast to the previous talk it's gonna be a bit more attack-oriented so that can also be fun let's have a look so the title actually is based on a movie a tale of two walls and you see I adopted the movie poster a bit and it's gonna be about assessing the ability of anglia shielding runtimes so this is based on an academic paper that we did last year actually it dates back to 2015 even for the first class of books so it's been a bit of a long-running project together with the people from Birmingham and I am Jo from K.O. Leuven University you make a decent research group so maybe very briefly a little bit on the research context back in Leuven we are doing actually what I would call a very broad first approach to trusset computing so we are looking I would say at all levels of the system stack involving trusset computing as sort of a red thread throughout the research we have people looking into low-level processor design building new open source to computing architectures like Sancus it's one of the flagship projects it's a little 16-bit architecture 16-bit processor with enclave support it's also completely open source so if you want to know more you can talk about this with me later you also have people looking into compilers specific operating system extensions to use it with trusset computing and then I think the more interesting line of work that I want to talk about today is more the attack line of work right we look at integrated well trusset computing integrated biotechs and defenses right sort of a tech defender a zebra's chasing lions lions chasing zebras right so there is a number of let's say more visible high-impact results you might recognize this logo on the left that's the foreshadow vulnerability that we disclose in 2018 it's basically a meltdown variant that completely dismantles the jigs right and that's the reason for instance you have to flush the cash when you enter as jigs there's also more recent results like the zombie load attack last year and this weird thing here on the right it's called plunder vault it's really cool attack we use software-based interfaces to undervolt the CPU inject faults into computations so a lot of what is here called CPU vulnerability research is new class of processor level micro architectural vulnerabilities there's also a tool that I developed while I go it's called sgxtep it's also completely open source I will talk a bit about it later and in a way it's it's really a convenient library to make all of these attacks easy sort of a little offensive operating system development project so let's see how that connects but first I want to talk a bit higher level what are enclaves right and enclaves are often compared to fortresses so I took a nice little picture here of a fortress you can see it's very decent fortress tick walls impossible to get inside that's the promise of two stick execution well this is old right centuries ago people figured out if you cannot go through the walls go through the gates right and yet Roy in his talk said already this morning the interface that's really where security is interesting that's the weakest point typically in your enclave application so very simple idea we're gonna ram some enclave gates simple idea high impact right so this is from the paper we did a systematic evaluation we found over 35 different instances of interface vulnerabilities in enclaves we systematically systemized them across two tiers we looked at eight major open source projects you might recognize some of them here have been talked about earlier yet was framework for us this Microsoft open enclave the Intel sxs okay so we really have a number of highly visible industry projects here also more research oriented post frameworks like the Sanctus framework that we developed ourselves it's also fair to say that we had quite some impact we we we got over five well we got five CVEs and a very associated long embargo period so we're happy to now finally talk about this line of work but again the bigger picture why doesn't matter right all these and by roles and CVEs no one is using enclaves you might be thinking well usually when I want to convey the importance of trust execution I start from this picture right and shouldn't be too new for you so hard to base just computing death room but actually it's quite ridiculous if we look in higher level here how we have been building secure systems over the last decades basically what we have been doing when you think nowadays of for instance a piece of JavaScript code it executes inside a web browser which itself is a huge application which executes on top of an operating system which might execute inside a virtual machine executing on top of a CPU which itself is decomposed of multiple layers of microcodes micro architecture silicon connects with different peripherals and all of that is trusted all of that is green that means a single bug in any of those lower layers and your security is worthless completely collapses in this respect what is it computing tries to give you promises to give you is this picture right we go from this picture to this picture and it's great a lot of it is now white is basically entrusted and our security is basically rooted inside the CPU that's so systems like Intel sjx in a nutshell give you isolation and attestation with a cryptography key that never leaves the CPU that means that you only trust your link level application here and your CPU great picture but of course your security researchers it's not as easy as it seems and indeed since the launch of sjx we have seen a lot of attacks a whole line of work basically attacking this little green box here the CPU which is not as trustworthy as it seems right I mentioned foreshadow you have riddle some below specter all of these bugs that are here to stay out say which show that this green box can still be attacked successfully and even so because you control the operating system you can typically do that more efficient and in a more creative ways than when you're a normal application level attacker looking at this picture what we wanted to do in this research is to take a step back and to basically observe that this is not the only green box right this is all very cool research but maybe that's not the easiest way to attack an enclave what if we just consider that the CPU is trustworthy let's say that vendors will get this right at some point what is the attack surface left well obviously these other green books right what about software vulnerabilities inside the enclave and I'm not talking about let's say well-known buffer overflows not the common sort of software vulnerabilities are there new classes of software vulnerabilities that are let's say particular two enclaves and we look your own when entering exiting this game box again we have seen it today already a number of times right there is sort of an explosion at the moment in the open-source ecosystem around projects like Intel sjx but not only is it Intel sjx many different SDKs many different trusted software layers and we want to look what are the common sort of goals of these frameworks and what does that mean for an attacker so if you look at a very high level all of these frameworks basically allow you to execute a piece of code is of application code in the secure world also called an enclave right which is rooted inside the processor and executes basically in a containing untrusted environment right so you can compare it to sort of a hostile desert and a small little secure oasis right that is basically as jakes and just as we don't always is you can imagine that the trickiness is how do you transfer from this desert hostile environment into the oasis and back right and particularly what we want ultimately is to give a convenient programming model to our application developers or enclave developers just compile their code as if it executes on a normal CPU compiler to a standard compiler and you link it to what we call a trusted runtime which basically will make a bridge from the hostile environment the desert to the enclave and back right so we want to make a piece of software which is trusted sits here in the middle and will mediate between the interset world and the twoset world the tail of two worlds analogy beautiful picture again our problem is solved we make a little bridge we go from the desert to the oasis and back but of course what happens when your bridge is flow is flawed right then things become really really bad and that's what we did so the key sort of lessons we want to draw from that is what are the responsibilities of these opaque yellow box right we have some sanitization layer some software which is maybe comparable to an operating system and some people call this also library operating systems a bit more about that later that sort of sits in between and what are these well what does it have to do at what point can we call it a sort of other responsibilities to answer that question we start by sort of building a more systematic way of looking at that we split that into three tiers where tier three is basically the application developed by the actual application developer the end user and tier one and tier two are respectively what we call the ABI application binary interface people who have some compiler expertise will recognize that an API right application programming interface which basically sanitizes the way you plug in your end user application so very high level what we want to do is to run this application in a higher level programming language could be C but could also be rust or any other language and then we want to basically transfer from a moment where the machine is entirely controlled by the attacker CPU registers all of it right you will have to execute a little piece of assembly which sort of builds up the first abstraction layer being typically see it could also be a rust for instance right and then you will do a number of sanitizations which are already visible at the programming level and things like pointed and the like and then you switch to the application all right so we have a framework now to reason about this what I'm going to do in the rest of the presentation is to present a subset of those 35 vulnerabilities right the ones that I feel are more interesting first on this ABI level and then on the API level and the application is basically out of scope but obviously things can go wrong there as well this would be the before overflows I was talking about if you have an unsafe language like see so what is this ABI about as I said before right the key sort of thing you need to keep in mind is that when you enter an enclave you are sharing the same CPU with a hostile environment so when you enter the CPU is entirely controlled by the attacker and all of the registers for instance could be poisoned it could contain poisonous values and this is in sharp contrast to sort of an implicit assumption by the compiler our nowadays our current compilers have been built with the assumption that machine the running one can be trusted right so typically a program is bound by for instance an operating system and it's considered that this operating system is not trying to attack your application obviously right so that means that we will have to do that manually we will have to write a piece of assembly which will sort of transfer the CPU from an insecure state was a state which we call secure which is basically the assumptions by the compiler which luckily have been documented in application binary interface right this also happens when you link to files together from different developers so compiles need to be very explicit about the assumptions they make so we can just read a document and make sure we meet all of those assumptions right for instance a stack pointer is something you might be familiar with as well so the high-level message here is that this is relatively well understood that makes sense right in order to make your program just function you already need to think about this this goes back a long way to early compiler so we found that this requirement is not completely overlooked however as an often with security the edge cases that's where it goes wrong right so here you have a bit of an overview there is a number of vulnerabilities related to stack pointers also to basically just forgetting to clear the registers on the way out the way out you have the inverse problem right you want to transfer from a trusted machine state to an interested desert hostile world and you need to make sure of course to cleanse all remaining secrets from registers but more interestingly is this status flies and that relates actually to a more high-level observation we made and that's what I want to talk about namely the attack surface at the ABI level seems to be like very noticeably bigger on on this line of highlighted SDKs which are basically Intel SGX SDKs that run on a very complex Intel x86 CPU right and these two ones are research frameworks that are basically built on more risk-like CPUs and the main message here is the more complex you're underlying architecture the more attack surface you will have associated it's not the first time this has been noticed but this is again a big big downside of x86 and what do I mean let's have a look at one of those very complex behaviors of Intel x86 for instance so the typical for those that are not entirely familiar with Cisk which is complex instruction set programming and risk-reduced instruction set programming right the philosophy of a complex instruction set is to add new instructions for features you think might be useful so that's why the Intel SDM is so many pages right to have hundreds and hundreds of instructions and one of those for instance is related to this sort of programming paradigm which is indeed very common I call it here a MAM set you go with a for loop over an array and you sequentially access the elements in this case to store the value zero in there you could write that in x86 very efficiently as follows basically have first a number of initializers and then you have this highlighted instruction which is a repeat string instruction and this repeat here basically acts as a hardware level for loop so this entire for loop can be encoded in a one instruction which basically will go through your array and repeatedly move a pointer from left to right from low to high addresses every iteration of this for loop and then and store the value zero so that's quite neat you might think but then also for whatever reason they thought let's make it a little bit more complex maybe in some cases you don't want to traverse this array from left to right but from right to left from high to low addresses again for whatever reason that supported and that's actually supported with this r-flags e-flags register so if you put if you write a one to the direction flag bit in the r-flags register it's the f-bit then this instruction will entirely will behave entirely differently right so one bit in a configuration register and this thing goes from right to left what could go wrong right okay so we start reading the API this is a relevant section here it very clearly says because of course compilers want to optimize a bit and compilers don't want to explicitly set these bits every time they do a repeat stream instruction that would be opposed to the purpose of beat of this instruction being very fast so they say let's assume no one really uses this from right to left we always use this from left to right anyway so let's assume it's set to left to right if you want to use it from right to left you have to set it first but on function entry we assume it's set in the normal direction left to right okay so let's put this piece of code in an enclave very common programming paradigm this is verbatim from one of the functions in the Intel SDK you have allocate a buffer on the enclave heap trusted memory here and then you go through this buffer from left to right to initialize it all fine if this user here puts on a black hat becomes malicious what can go wrong first thing you want to try of course is to flip this bit so just you control the processor just before you enter it's like a one-line patch in the Intel SDK in the into certain time you put this to one you enter it allocates the buffer on the heap so far so good but then of course it goes wrong and it will write heap corruption from right to left right and imagine that this this piece of heap you just created is neighboring a crypto key now you just overwritten the crypto key with zeros which basically is a dummy encryption right this is a really severe thing Intel assigned the CVE for this they assigned it criticality high which is actually interesting I think meltdown had been assigned to medium this is high so all right and and then they're right and this is interesting and this potential vulnerability is present in all SGX enclaves built with the affected versions of the SDK and this shows the importance of looking for vulnerabilities in the truth that run time you find one vulnerability in the truth that run time all software is affected right it's like a bug in the operating system okay there is actually more maybe just go on the high level so this DF this direction flag is the really the most severe one but there is also this AC flag for instance which is really interesting at least from an academic perspective so AC stands for alignment check and again Intel x86 processors do not have any restrictions on alignment you can do unaligned accesses they might be a bit slower but they're supported but then again for whatever reason they say you can also optionally force the processor into checking alignment so let's let's force the process into checking alignment and we're gonna try to use it as a side channel so we're not gonna make memory corruption this time we're just gonna try to learn something about what the enclave is doing so I made a very simple enclave here which just accesses a b c or d so it will access two bytes a or b b or c or c or d depending on the index you're going in let's say this could be an s box and this index could be related to the secret key right so first we enter it without alignment checks it just accesses a b we're all good and then we enter it with alignment checks and it's gonna access bc which is an unaligned 16 bit word so 16 bit word with the lower two bits are no zero in the address so it will generate an alignment check exception which exits the enclave and basically notifies the operating system hey there is an unaligned access going on and that gives us at least one bit of information right we know the enclave performed an unaligned access it's completely yeah it's completely unnecessary because the software could have cleared these bits on entry and didn't so now current versions also do that to at least reduce side channel attack surface cool thing is that you can do this really on a very very fine-grained similarity so it's better than all the other known side channels in this respect but let's look a bit more at this second tier so and so the first tier was basically all this cool tricks you do with CPU registers and this is more high level let's do some some tricks at the API level using things like pointers that if you program a bit with CEO of a million so this is less magic hopefully but more intuition first very very simple enclave program it's called echo and it will just run echo so you you basically call the main function the equal entry points and you say here's a string hello world and it resides in the interest that address space so enclaves in sgx but in many enclave programming models can just access you input unprotected memory right so you put a string here ready hello world and it will access that it will read that and and dump it on the output right just a very simple dummy example again what could go wrong well let's say that our enclave actually is a useful enclave and it contains a secret the secret is top secret and we just flip this pointer right so we give a pointer to the string hello hello is and unprotected and known is a public piece of data and it will print the public piece of data if we just flip the pointer and we give a pointer to the secret piece of data this stupid dummy enclave will just print top secret so you can just print whatever you want you have a sort of arbitrary primitive in the enclave because the software will print whatever you give it a pointer to you give a pointer to a secret it will print a secret you might think this is artificial this doesn't happen right this is really stupid well here's a little video of the graphene sgx system where we found exactly this book so we're gonna run a normal linux application and then we're gonna link it to this graphene library operating system now we started up and this is the interest at runtime I just entered the address of the secret I wanted to print and now you see here super secret enclave string so this actually works right and we were like whoa that's cool how do you protect against that this graphene granted this is a research project and I think it's really cool that they made their course the source code open source available it's understandable there are a few of those that say hiccups bugging bugs in there so we turn our attention to production software right Intel sgx decay one analogy here why a picture of this guy well this is called insecurity such confused deputy attacks right this guy is a deputy that's the enclave he holds the gun he has the permissions on enclave memory and you just give him a bullet and he will shoot himself in the foot that's that's the idea you abuse that the software has access rights to enclave memory and exposes you with an oracle to let it do what you want so we turn our attention to sgx Intel software so this is really production code they of course do check that and you have the hello world and it will check that the hello world buffer lies outside the enclave how does it do that it's a string buffer so you first need a length right so you just compute the length of the string s here this argument you store it in a local variable and then you check whether the entire string from start to end lies outside okay so there is a number of things that can go wrong here but this is actually sound logic you compute the length of the string you check that the entire string start to end lies outside what could go wrong let's swap the pointer and just try what goes on right if I give a pointer to for instance the secret here which is inside the enclave step one is it will the reference whatever point I give it lies inside the enclave it will do a computation a string length computation so it will in my case if I pass secret one it will advance one byte right and then it sees a zero null term this string and see and then it will say the length is one if I would have given it secret to it would just have such string length is zero okay so we already see that there is some dependency that's maybe interesting to keep in mind but then secondly are the attack didn't succeed right because it will see oh s plus one lies inside the enclave and it will say illegal arguments so what can we still do this is for a side channels kick in right side channels are really cool so it says you cannot access it but actually if we are really attentive it will say when you enter it with secret one it will tell you I have to go one byte ahead and then say oh no you cannot access it if I enter it with secret two it will say immediately I know that the same interesting and you cannot access it so the timing the time it needs here to determine whether you can access it or not will depend on your secret and that's a side channel right so we just need to measure execution time of this thing here and we learn whether or not a certain byte in the enclave is zero or not right that's the idea let's see if that works right we just measure the execution time then quite some noise people already said today entering and exiting of enclaves is really involved there is a lot of things going on including microcode so this is not very useful this is already the median or the over 100,000 runs well the distribution of 100,000 runs and you don't really see anything happening here so that doesn't work but maybe some of you know that you can also do things with page folds because we control page tables so let's try to do that Intel says you can see accesses of the page level granularity so we set out and we said okay let's think a bit if we can do something with page tables you have this follow-up here string length you have your data here but it turns out that you're a bit in a catch-22 in order to make progress you need to have both pages mapped in if you revoke access rights here then you will see that string length is being called but it will also and then you want it to continue so you're mapping the page again you also have to map in this page and by the time that you see the access it has already been completed right so that doesn't work so we're going to use interrupts and the basic idea is this sgxtap framework I talked about so we're going to execute our enclave exactly one instruction at a time and then we execute our attacker code we do some measurements in the page tables or other other means and then we're going to resume the enclave we're going to do this in a loop now the problem this sounds like a debugger right you just debug your enclave of course this is not going to work because the debug exception is being blocked for production enclave so we need another debugging primitive and we're going to use that we're going to make that using timer interrupts so we can just configure the timer very precisely to interrupt right after this instruction do our attacker code and then configure it again to interrupt right after the next instruction sounds quite crazy but actually this works and it's really involved if you want to talk about this I would be very happy come talk after me it's an open source framework on hithub and people are actually using this some some very excited and it's actually quite neat so we use the dev mapping of Linux on an unmodified kernel and then with root access of course we mob that into user space we can manipulate epic timers memory page tables all of it and and we basically build our own little offensive kernel as a library in user space so now we have a primitive to execute this very precisely one instruction of that time and then we just look and every time we can also look in the page tables whether the enclave has accessed a certain location or not and with that basically we can reconstruct all the zero bytes so that's great right we have a primitive to distinguish all the zero bytes in enclave memory sounds cool and it was a lot of work but then what do you do with that right and also just to give you some idea you can completely break as with that and that's what we did together with the people in Birmingham so we interrupt our victim we made a proof of concept victim enclave we interrupted right between the last bit one round so the before the last round of AS we interrupted as a result it will write the secret key in enclave memory and I'm just gonna do that many times until my secret key contains a zero byte right chosen plain text attack and then basically what I'm gonna do is to enter on a new thread probe whether this byte is zero or not I just built a deterministic oracle to do that right as you accept and then what you have I'm gonna spare you all the crypto details but it's actually very simple you know that this was zero you let the enclave compute again and the final round now you know that what is the output of the cypher text and then you can just back there is a cypher text because you know this is zero we can do an inverse S-box lookup this gives us one byte of the round key we do that many times until we have all the bytes of the round key if you just give them a random plain text it will randomly have zero bytes in allocations we have all the bytes of the final round key and we get the full long-term AS key right so that's cool complicated attack you might think but this is a real time so it's now compiling it's running and it has a AS key with ASJ step and everything in between so this is actually really practical just took us 30 seconds to get an AS key so a bit of a bigger picture I will not go in detail for all of the vulnerabilities I can refer you to the paper to read more about it of course so maybe one let's say high-level observation is that we found these books both in production code and research code also we found them in production level SDKs as well as in research but also with with unsafe languages like C and also safe languages especially than the API like just there's also a number of things related to system calls here that you have to watch out for and basically opening systems now interested and the conclusion should be wash your hands before you enter the enclave right always do proper sanitization of your ABI and API sounds simple but really goes wrong very easily also let's say a bit more long-term lessons for the community I think is many of those things have we have seen them before in operating system development right and I think of a twist execution community we should really try to draw lessons from that and to attempt to not make the same mistakes again as a final notes you can also find all of the source code here as always we made the attacks code open source okay think that concludes the talk so far yeah yet you mean a twist execution platform or a software SDK or both so for software SDKs as we also say in the paper having a safe language really really helps so for instance the risk platform right it's really a big step forward there and then you basically can reduce your attack service at least to the ABI which is more manageable is also something that and developers don't really have to worry about if we just vet that thoroughly regarding TE platforms I think it's even fair to say that that I think we need more research on that and I think maybe these things are not as production ready as they are being sold by certain processor companies so I think we are really making progress there and for instance one of the things I also usually say is that SGX as an architecture has never been broken the design is really solid the only all these books are micro architectural books which means that maybe the biggest intricacy is that they built SGX on top of x86 and that is I think a lesson right a sysk versus risk we need to build open source risk based just execution environments and I'm very glad that people like for instance people from Berkeley with keystone are starting to do that so yeah yes yes yes yes yes so the question is how does this generalize the truth so so very short answer maybe with a graphic you are completely right that's what we call in the paper single outer space TE designs where the enclave lifts in the shared other space are more vulnerable to many of those attacks especially the API level attacks however even trust so into a certain degree is affected by this and there is CVEs from prior researchers that actually showed it and you see for instance this what we call dual world view where they don't share the other space explicitly is the design of truth so and also other TEs but you typically still have a region of shared memory which you explicitly map in both worlds in order to do efficient IO and this is again a trade-off between efficiency and security maybe but you can still do many of those attacks even on truth so yes as an application developer maybe your biggest concern should be choosing a right framework right and for instance realizing that some of these frameworks are research code like yeah I really hope that some of those are not being used in production and including the ones on yeah we are self in love and develop this thank you framework and it's really cool I really like it but I hope no one uses it because it's really not meant to be production quality yeah and yeah it's often like that in software software research vulnerability research I think it will move more mature


To Looking to the East, I'm your host, Dr. Steven Zercher. I'm broadcasting this morning from Kobe, Japan. And we're going to be talking about a very interesting subject for this particular show. I've noticed in looking at the news in the United States over the last few weeks that the popularity of the former president of the United States continues to be quite strong within a relatively broad segment of the U.S. voting population, the U.S. population overall. And it got me thinking about the United States and the evolution of our democracy. And I began to question in my mind whether or not the United States could potentially follow in the footsteps of many other countries around the world, and that has moved more towards authoritarianism. Trump has often indicated that he would like to become a dictator, that he is the person that his follower should follow and listen to. So there's signal signs that the United States has the potential to move in that direction. Obviously, Trump lost the election, although his followers don't believe that. And I was just reading that there's going to be a second inauguration next month, which is remarkable. But again, that segment of the population eventually believes Trump will become president and move into that dominant role. So as I began to think about this, I said, well, how can I get as a guest who could help me answer these questions that I have in my mind, whether or not this is really possible or am I just fearing the shadows? And the United States would not move in that direction because we're a democratic country. So I contacted Professor Mark Kogan. So Mark is with us this morning from his home. Thank you so much, Mark, for being with us, getting up early on a Tuesday morning here in Japan and participating. Mark is an associate professor at Kansai Gaida University. He's been teaching there for five years now. He focuses on peace and conflict studies. And what really triggered my decision to contact him and ask him about this is he teaches a class on authoritarianism. It's called tyrants, dictators, and strongmen. Yeah, so he's been teaching that class for a number of years. So he focuses on authoritarianism in Asia, where I read in his description of his class, 50% of the countries in Asia have never been a democracy. They followed this authoritarian role. So Mark, welcome to the show. Again, thank you very much for having me. Yeah, let's start with defining what authoritarianism is. And then maybe you could give some examples of countries in Asia that follow this model, like China comes to mind and Singapore comes to mind. There's many examples. Sure. So there's a number of definitions of what an authoritarian typology would look like, but a classic definition by Samuel Huntington, one of the famous authors who wrote The Third Wave, talking about the Third Wave of democratization around the world. We're now, of course, in a democratic recession. But his idea of an authoritarian regime was ruled not by popular elected leaders, but by a single leader or a third party. And that there would be limited political pluralism, meaning the free flow of ideas, cultures, ideologies within a society. And there would be a limited mobilization or the ability for people to mass mobilize on issues of their concern or special interests. And there would be some use, a minor use of propaganda or even small acts of state terrorism to repress a population. But authoritarian regimes are not all the same. Sometimes an ideology is stronger, but generally ideologies are weak. Political pluralism, like the use of political parties, have a role in society. There are opposition political parties that are permitted to exist. Civil society still has a role to play. And the regime itself does not seek to exact total control over society in general. So if you look at it that way, you have a kind of authoritarian topology. But I think a better question is what's a democracy, right? So anything that falls short of a kind of minimum standard or a topology of democracy could be classified as someone or a state that is sliding slowly into authoritarianism. You put it on a kind of continuum. So these things are quite simple and there are lots of different definitions out there. So the presence of free and fair elections, people who are of adult age 18 to 21 or whatever have the right to vote, anyone has the right to vote and can vote if they want to without interference. And then the right of people who are popularly elected to take power once that election is over, meaning the election has some sort of consequence. So we can start there in our analysis whether or not the United States is sliding slowly into authoritarianism. Yeah, those are some interesting characteristics that you point out there. And I will get into this, I think, in a few more minutes. But it seems like the United States may be failing on some of those markers for what a democracy is, which would then potentially predict that the United States is moving more towards that model. But let's go back to Asia. Can you give an example for the viewers of an authoritarian regime, which doesn't meet the metrics that you had just mentioned, for example, elections and so forth? What country would you say was the best example of that type, that particular type of government format? Well, I think that there are a couple of examples and they are representative of how different authoritarian regimes really are. OK, there are authoritarian regimes, there are hybrid regimes, there are totalitarian states. We're talking about a classic authoritarian type state. Two examples of those are Singapore and Thailand. So the Singaporean model of governance has been kind of highly touted in the East. There was a conversation in the mid-90s about Asian values and whether or not a Singaporean model was more applicable to East Asia than Western-style democracy was. Singapore is an example of a country that has high economic growth. One of the more wealthy countries in the region, it has political parties, it has largely free and fair elections. People who want to vote can vote and then the ruling party, once it's elected, takes power. The problem with Singapore, what makes it an authoritarian regime, is that there are a number of areas in terms of elections, in terms of the media, in terms of the legislature, not so much the judiciary, that make it fall back so much. For example, for many, many years, the long-time prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, his PAP, People's Action Party, won every single election. So every single... As I recall, because I've been in and out of Singapore, it wasn't even close, right? No, it's never close. 80% or 90% in the... There would be opposition parties who competed in election, but because, one, the philosophy of governance was quite popular. People were, to a certain extent, happy with the exchange, but... Mark, let me stop you there, because I think that's an interesting point. The exchange being economic success and loss of political freedom. Yes, so to speak, yes. Okay, I just want to make that clear, because that's my observation, that Singaporeans are more interested in wealth than they are in democracy. Maybe that's too simplistic, but anyway, it was a trade-off that they made, and many countries make that trade-off, too. So the thing about Singapore is that the opposition political parties, even though they contested the election, so to speak, the opposition leaders were often jailed or under great coercion. They didn't have access to media during the election periods, and the way the campaigns are funded, they were under greater scrutiny than the PAP. And journalists in the country, not from elections, but in the realm of the Fourth Estate, were treated quite poorly, threatened with legal action, heavily censored. There was, for a great long time, a kind of media control going on in the country. And then, of course, the second example, to try to be more concise here, is Thailand. I have to stop you there, because I think the perception in the West, I don't know where this comes from, is that Thailand's a democracy.  Thailand holds free and fair elections, so to speak. It holds elections, but they're certainly not free and they're certainly not fair. For example, recently, Thailand held its March 1920 election, but the March 2019 elections, the election was stacked by the new constitution, which gives a favorable percentage to the military, to the police. So the legislative sort of math is stacked in favor of a coalition party or a group of parties that are backing the military junta, or the military government. Routinely in Thailand, and I'm not even talking about the worst kinds of abuses in Thailand, I'm talking about the guard and variety of abuses, right? When the government feels that an issue is of injury to national security, or threatens the monarchy, media organizations will be shut down, closed or threatened. Journalists in the past have been imprisoned, or simply disappeared. The referendum itself on Thailand's constitution, which was largely written by the monarchy and military drafters, so to speak. There was kind of silencing of dissent. People were not allowed to campaign against it. Anyone who was voicing criticism of the referendum were threatened, and sometimes jailed for that kind of simple kind of dissent. So Thailand has free and fair elections, but it fails every other test. So the question now, I suppose, is does the United States fit into any of these kinds of categories? Well, I have to say that some of the things that you've mentioned as hallmarks of Singapore and Thailand are applicable. Certainly, the persecution of journalists under the Trump administration, that was a daily barrage. They didn't end up in jail, but they were called traitors and enemies of the state. So that particular aspect of Singapore, and also Thailand, is evident in the United States. That's always been a struggle in the U.S. I kind of disagree with you. Oh, you do? Okay. Go ahead. Because there isn't... Yes, journalists are criticized in the United States. And the rankings, press freedom rankings in the United States under the Trump administration, fell quite dramatically. But the press still has the ability to report the news, right? Journalists are not imprisoned. Right. There's full exercise, full control. Well, yeah, I wasn't saying it was the same. However, the only difference is that there was increased media criticism. So people, you know, the demonization or the dehumanization of journalists in America was on the rise, which, you know, if left untreated, right, could have led to violence, right? Not just extreme rhetoric by the president and extreme rhetoric and sentiment by his supporters. I mean, Donald Trump, of course, but it could have led to violence. Right. Yeah, I think there were some instances of journalists being attacked by the Trump supporters and crowds. But it was nothing like, I agree with you, it was nothing like going to jail and disappearing. Right. Or having your entire... Well, forced disappearance. Being sued into bankruptcy, which I know Singapore used to do as well. They would just sue these journalists or opposition politicians to the point where they had no money left whatsoever. This was something that Trump had been in favor of for a very long time, which was changing the liable laws. Right, exactly. Which had made it easier to target journalists. But that never, of course, had happened. So let's pivot to this... And survive the First Amendment challenge. Sure. So let's pivot then to the United States. So we have a definition of what authoritarianism is, even though it's quite broad and there's different representations of it, as you point out. But we have the example of Singapore, which is based on economics, perhaps a trade off people giving up political freedom. It's kind of with their consent. Although I think it's slowly changing in Singapore. I've read that there's maybe a greater interest in democracy. But anyway, then you talked about Thailand, where things are pretty much dictated by the monarchy and also the military. So let's apply that then to the United States. These characteristics, where do you see the United States signaling or moving in the direction of these other states in Thailand and Singapore? And maybe where, for example, is the United States clearly not at risk for moving in that direction? Because those characteristics are still freely dependent and are democratic in nature. How would you... I mean, it's a tough question, Mark. I understand. But how would you do it at a broad level? Well, I would say that there was a scholar about 20 years ago, 2002, 2003, Steven Levitsky wrote a book about something called competitive authoritarianism. And he used four areas of what they call democratic contestation. And we'll talk about a few of them. The media is one of them. So in the United States, in any kind of liberal democracy, you need a free and fair press and people need access to information and also access to alternative information. Meaning if the government is in control of the media, you need a secondary source. You can't just buy what the government is telling you, so to speak. In that area of contestation, have there been any kind of movements away from a free and fair press? And you could make the case that the free press in the United States is slowly sliding back as evidenced by its deterioration of its free to the press rankings by reporters without borders. But there is greater media monopoly. So you have the presence of television networks like Fox News or Newsmax, these sort of injurious rightling platforms. Or you have greater political polarization, even among media networks in the United States. And you could also argue that when it comes to information, social media companies like Facebook aren't doing enough to combat the spread of partisan fake news or disinformation online. So has there been violations or sort of incursions into that free and fair press in the United States? I'd say very little. But the vulnerabilities are still there, right? Greater media concentration, right? Partisanship in television networks, harassment, threatening of journalists. But as long as the free press is able to do its job without interference, I don't see any kind of change. The American Steel meets all the categories of having a free and fair press. Other areas of contestation, like elections. I say you have some real evidence. Because you have an election in 2020, millions of people vote. Joe Biden got 81 million votes and Trump got about 74 million. There was a result in all 50 American states, right? Some of those states were close, Arizona, Pennsylvania, right? And some of the results were challenged, right? Particularly in Arizona, particularly in Pennsylvania and Georgia, of course, right? Trump went through 60 or more legal challenges to those election results. All but I think one of those legal challenges, right? He lost, right? He was entitled to recounts under law, right? He paid for recounts as under law. And the machine count and the hand counts were virtually identical. They're never probably ever going to be the same. But within a very, very, very sort of razor margin, the same. Not enough to upset the outcome or the result. So the problem with it is he was not willing to accept the result. And he was able to persuade people that the election was stolen from him. And on January 6th, there was a kind of insurrection or a kind of authoritarian fantasy played out on the steps of the Capitol where for the first time people thought, well, maybe people aren't going to accept the actual results of the election. That there would be something else. I don't know what they were fantasizing about, of course. Some kind of military regime, some kind of authoritarian regime run by Trump. I think so. Yeah, if you look at the posters and the signs, it was clear that there was a personal allegiance to him above and beyond the Democratic election. So journalism, you're saying the signs are not there, that we still have a free and fair press, and what happens in Singapore and Thailand? You still have free and fair elections. But sometimes for the first time in a very, very long time, since the 1870s, you have people who are not happy with the result. Hey, Mark, we were running out of time, and we actually got some questions coming in here. Oh, that's great. Yeah. So this question here, I'll go ahead and read it to you. In a recent article titled First as a Farce, Then as a Tragedy, the nine U.S. division perpetuates Trumpism's delusions. Philosopher Solvall Zizek, you ever heard of that verse? Oh, you have. Okay, argued that there are at least 30 million Americans that are ready for a dictator partly because of the cognitive decline in the United States. That's a huge issue. Anti-science, anti-region, and I would, this is not in the question, but I would also put in fundamentalism because evangelical religious types are ones who tend to make up a large segment of the Trump supporters. So actually, this question is what caused me to do the show. Is it a used question? It said that there is, he's saying that there's a segment of the American population that would want to move in this direction. And he's estimating this 30 million people. It's not just a ragtag group that we saw invading the capital since the first time since 1812, but there's a huge population out there that would reject democracy if Trump was to become the leader. Yeah. Okay, my response is that I think there's some validity there. And I think it has to do with personality characteristics. There was an author or a political scientist by the name of Karen Stenner who wrote a book primarily about something called latent authoritarianism. And the idea was that people don't really identify readily as authoritarians. They wouldn't readily admit that. But when faced with circumstances like changes, like sea changes in social and political norms, in 2016, people galvanized quite quickly around Donald Trump and early Republicans in the South Carolina primary at that particular point in time had largely decided in favor of Trump and they never wavered from then on. So it's a question of those characteristics. So, you know, people are fear, they fear wholesale changes in society. They are worried about external threats, whether that be from Muslims or threats to their economic livelihoods that foreigners, immigrants, are so called stealing their jobs, you know, kind of economic fragility or anxiety. It makes them make extreme choices. Trump tapped into that those kind of personality characteristics and he also sort of tapped into a kind of populist moment where he could paint individuals that threaten American norms and American traditions and American way of life as something dangerous to society. So he kind of created these, you know, the sort of favorite in group and a very, very sort of deviant out group. That's the classic sort of populist formula. But there are also personality characteristics that kind of make up this, you know, a rejection of reason, simplistic thinking on the part of people. You know, as the commenter said, a disbelief in science and reason, right? The highest percentage of people who voted for Trump were people without a college degree. Hey, Mark, yeah, Melissa, I know we're running a little bit over time, but I want to go over because I want to get to this next question just one minute on this, Mark. It's kind of interesting. So he talks about the management of government and democracies are challenging. Yeah. To actually manage well that if you look at Singapore, despite the trade off, the lack of democracy there, it's run more efficiently. That is certainly true. For example, their government officials get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, you know, when they invest in their government and they get the brightest people to make the decisions and so forth. So the question is, should we change our tumultuous democracy to a more improved management for the United States? Can our democracy get better, maybe technically or so forth? And is democracy sustainable if we don't make that change? That's the question. One minute only, Mark. I'm sorry. That's another tough question. Yeah, but it's not that all that difficult to answer. But I think my response is I would answer with a question. What kind of management changes are needed to equal the kind of discipline that Singapore has had maintained? Wow, that's tough to answer. Yeah, so people say that Singapore is much better managed than the United States. And that, you know, well, it's a lot more simple of a place to manage. It is a city state, right? It's complexity or it's complexities are a little bit different. What kind of management changes are we talking about? What kind of democracy changes would be necessary? Let me frame it in a completely different way, right? I think there probably are. I just think that, for example, a Singaporean model would not work in the United States. It simply wouldn't work, right? And some systems simply don't work elsewhere because of a variety of factors. For example, a lot of African democracies, if you want to call them even flawed democracies, inherited their systems from the West, right? And those systems which work very well in the United Kingdom, right? When they were protectorates or part of the Commonwealth, they led to catastrophic disasters when those African states declared independence. This is evidence in Lesotho where I used to work before I came to Kanzai Gaidai. Obviously there are economic, social and cultural factors which complicate the situation, right? But the systems itself, the management of democracy, right? What works for Singapore or what works for Brunei or these sort of wealthy authoritarian states won't work for the United States, just not. Yeah, I agree with you. I'm a management professor. So I think there could be some things that we can do, but I agree. The wholesale changes you're talking about, Americans won't even wear masks. As we know. Okay, Mark, we could easily go on for another half hour hour on this. Thank you so much. This has been so interesting and you're so well informed on this topic. Really appreciate it. Thank you to the viewers. And my next show is a couple of weeks. I'm thinking of addressing the issue of women in Japan. There's been some controversy over the last week or so with a high-level government official disparaging women as business people. So that'll be the next topic in a couple of weeks. So you guys can tune in for that show. Mark, again, thank you so much for taking time. Appreciate it. Thank you for the questions from our viewers. And that's a wrap. Thank you. See you all next time. Bye, everyone.


Right now we will go over a few instructions for the lab which will begin at 2 o'clock. So the afternoon lab we had asked everyone to bring a headphone and a mic. So if every individual is not having a headphone or a mic, it is okay if you do it in pairs or as a group. The essential idea of this lab is to introduce you to the idea of screencast. So this lab is known as video creation lab and we have uploaded this particular PPT in the resources for week 2. You can download this document from this ABU also. So the focus is on creating video for your own classroom. What you did so far in the previous sessions, features of lip classroom, benefits, how to construct lip classroom, out of class videos, in class activities. So yesterday you did selection of out of class videos. But what you are going to do today is explore technology tools to create videos specifically screencasts for your own classroom. You are also going to write learning objectives expected from the student after watching the video. Note that these learning objectives are usually at lower cognitive levels. So if you have watched the revised Bloom's taxonomy videos, then you will be knowing how to write these learning objectives at lower cognitive levels. And at the end of the lab, you are going to create a video or screencast for your own course using this tool. Please note that this video is completely different from the video that you selected yesterday. So ideally we want you to select a different topic, not the same one. Because the video, good videos are already available for the topics that you selected yesterday. This is consider a scenario that somebody, so your students have watched this video, you have done a session. And suppose there are some concepts which have not yet been clarified or there are some additional concepts that needs to be clarified even apart from the video. So consider a case like that and then start creating this video. It could be either a related topic or a completely different topic from what you did yesterday. So the screencast, what it does, what should this video, so it is essentially a video. So this is one example, so there were, this is a simple example of using recursion. So again, this is something which is related to computer science engineering. But please, so people who are not familiar with the domain, please note what functionalities of the screencast you have used. So it is only to get an idea, there is some audio narration which explains the topic. There is a continuous slide movement and there are writing on slides, so they use the pointers. So for example, if you see, I am using this pointer right now. So if you record it, this pointer movement is also captured. So all these things get captured. So all you have to notice, do not focus too much on the content that is being discussed, but note the various things that this particular video provides you. It is a YouTube video and you can directly watch it from your remote center. So points to take care while creating video, it is same as what you did for selection of video over here but you have control. So keep the length of the video to 5 to 10 minutes. This is because it has been found that shorter videos are more engaging. The previous example, if you look at it, it is bit long but since one of the research scholars over here created it for a lengthier self-learning session, there were specific activities, it was chunked and specific activities were given from that. If the topic is too big for a single video, 10 minute video, then split it into two videos. If you are presenting animation, since you have using a desktop, when you are presenting the animation, it is better to use audio narration along with it rather than text. So if there is text and video together, there will be some cognitive load on the learner. So over there try to use audio as far as possible and it will make the content acquisition. So the information acquisition much more easier. Now tools for creating classroom videos, there are several technology tools that can help you create videos. The tools that you can use vary based on operating system of your computer. Some of the common tools, CAM Studio, CAM Stacia, Jing, Screen Customatic, these tools have different features in terms of operation, usage, look and feel and everything. So over here you will be using Screen Customatic and Record My Desktop. So Screen Customatic is for Windows users and Record My Desktop if you are a Linux user. So for Windows users explore the Screen Customatic tool, it is available for download over here. There is also a video tutorial. So before starting your screencast, do look at the video tutorial that is there. The browser should have the Adobe Flash Player plugin enabled to watch the video. Play with various features in this tool. Create some sample videos, show it to your neighbors. So this is very important. So whatever you create today, just make sure that an internal peer review happens. So even if somebody is from a different domain, you can show it to them and ask opinions about have you used audio narration correctly? Have you used the pointers correctly? Have you used the features of the tool correctly? All these things you can discuss with your peer regardless of the domain because essentially it is the same activity that is going to happen. You are going to record a desktop. For Linux users, the Record My Desktop is available at this particular site. There is a video tutorial which uses Record My Desktop. So after recording, so this file has to be converted from OGB format to FLV. You can use this particular command in your Linux command line. So all these yellow slides are the places where you have to fill. So yesterday we had pale yellow, over here we are using much more, what do you say? Visible yellow, which is your normal yellow. First you have to write the subject and the topic. Subject means the course for which you are creating the screencast. So if you have not done any screencast before, so this is just to asking you whether you have done a screencast or not. If yes, please mention the topic and if you can provide us the links and also the software that you have used, then it would be really helpful. So creating video for your own course, even before you start with video, the first step is that you have to write the learning objectives. The learning objectives should usually at lower cognitive levels. You have to also mention the cognitive, the revised Blooms cognitive level of each of these learning objectives. So creating video for your course at the third step is planning. So you require some amount of planning before you start recording. So list down the main points within the topic that you want to cover. Yesterday we saw something called as key concepts. So similarly over here you note down the key points that you want to cover within your video. If you want, you can also draw a concept map of the topic. So people who are familiar with the concept map, they can also draw a concept map in this place. Please note that the main points are written so that you can plan your video well. To achieve best results, it is recommended to prepare a detailed script mentioning what you are going to say and when you are going to say it. These are known as visual cues. So when you actually go and record a good screencast, it is very important that you create a script first for yourself and then start recording. Creating supporting materials, so sometimes video alone is not sufficient. You may be providing them with slides or some books, reference books, all those things. So if you are using some of these, so if it is a PPT which is being recorded, do mention the supporting materials that you are going to use along with this particular screencast. Then what you have to do is steps 5 to 8. So screencast is typically a screencast of a PowerPoint slide. So open the PowerPoint slide which you want to use while explaining the concept. Then open the screencast tool and select the screen area accordingly. Start recording, explain the topic orally and using the PPT. Once you finish explaining, stop the recording and save the video in your system. Now uploading the video tutorial, once you do this, you can go to YouTube and upload it or some file sharing site, let us say even a Dropbox or a Google Drive. That also would be fine enough. But what you have to do is after you upload and save it, you have to just provide us with the link to not upload the video into assignments. Currently the file sizes that is supported are 2 MB, so most of your videos will not be available. We will be creating this assignment, creating video for your own classroom under week 2. The due dates for this submission is 22 May, that is next Sunday. So you have one full week to create the screencast, but make sure that you practice the first creation in the lab today itself. You can then refine and do a submission of a better screencast by the end of this week. So some of the possible future actions to improve your video, there are lot of video editing softwares like Windows Movie Maker or OpenShot. You can use them to edit your video. Now all these are time consuming and you need to have some amount of understanding about the video editing process. So do this only if you are interested in producing good quality videos. If you just want a normal information transmission, your screen recording along with your narration is good enough. The next steps obviously is to create in-class activity which are at higher cognitive levels, ensure that students get feedback on their work either from peers or from you, you will be given online assessment in the next weeks to do this activity. So in the coming 6 weeks, you will be given more activity. So in fact the week 4, we will be asking you to integrate your out of class and in-class videos and provide the links in the course portfolio week. So linked assignments are coming in the subsequent weeks. But for today's lab, practice screencasting. Practice screencasting and there will be an assignment which is going to be created. You have to upload your screencast only by May 22nd. So you have one full week to create a sample screencast. With this, the morning session is coming to end. In the afternoon from 2 to 3, 30, please go to the lab, practice this screencasting exercise. See you all at 345 for the next interaction.


Oi, oi, how's it going? If you want to take a look back at the game with another reaction video and today we got a new camera angle Usually I have my camera over here, but today we're going to be trying it over here So please let me know what you think about it. Actually, I'll quickly show you what it's like from over there What one do you like more? Comment down below But for the rest of this video, we are going to stick with this angle here because why the hell not? Actually, I like this one more. So we're going to just stick with it But yeah, today we're going to be finally reacting to Goldchars. Take a leap. Come back Trader. Come back. Come back Gotcha having a comeback. Yes, please. Seriously, please. Gotcha. And we're finally going to get into it So yeah, other than that, let's just get straight into this. I'm sad to see what this is going to be like I hope you guys are too because it's going to be pretty interesting. Okay? Okay? Holy This sounds like it's going to destroy everyone. Um, I'm gonna watch that again because Yes, please. I want to know who this is that comes up Boink. Okay. It's coming down to Jo-chan or Jang Joon. No, not Jang Joon Yes, Jang Joon. Jo-chan. Well, I know it's one of them. I know actually I know it's someone from Goldchars And it's someone not from Goldchars, which would be a bit weird. Yeah, but anyways, let's continue Bro, wait. Nah fam. Okay. I just thought of this Did they use their i2k performance as a spoiler for this because like the violin man the friggin violin It's it's showing off a lot and dude if they did Bro, if they did Yeah, yeah, okay.  I seriously think this is this is just gonna sound so freakin dope It's so freakin dope in it. Oh wait, it's got the time for when it gets released, right? 23rd? Oh, so long. But you know what we'll get over. I think. I hope. But yeah, other than that Thank you all for watching. Hope you enjoyed. If you did, show some support by leaving a like. Comment down below, I don't know what I said I've really done. By comment down below how excited you are for Goldchars comeback and also subscribe because there will be some more Goldchars content coming to you in the future before they come back, okay? Other than that, hopefully you all have a great day. Keep smiling, be happy, be safe, and yeah Peace


One of the most mysterious aspects of medicine is how to actually heal the spirit of a person, or the psyche. You know, all the stuff that has been stored in the unconscious or the subconscious, and then allowing that to come up and see the light of day to be processed. Very very messy process, very tricky, and there have been many traditions throughout history that have attempted to do just that. Now, I've taken some time to begin doing some of these practices in my own life, but for many, many, many people, these practices are an integral part of their healing journey. So I want to share 10 practices that you can use to heal the spirit or the emotions, the psyche, and the subconscious or unconscious. Hey, it's Alex Hine, author of the book Master of the Day. Now I've included down there below the first link is for a free PDF. It's five daily rituals that can possibly help you add 10 years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine. So check it out right there down there below. So the first one, very, very interesting is the induction of healing dreams. So really, really fascinating, Asclepios was the Greek God of medicine and of healing. Now throughout time, people had this practice of going to these Asclepian healing temples, and they would sometimes consume substances or herbs, and then they would sleep there, and they would pray for a healing dream. Absolutely incredible because we don't think about that being necessarily real or true. But going through my own health stuff, I had done a very similar exercise where every night before bed, I would seed my subconscious and say, please give me a healing dream.  The second thing is somatic body work or Hakomi. So even though I have not done Hakomi therapy, I've done tons of kinds of somatic body work, but one of my most interesting experiences has been working on patients and just doing a little bit of light massage work specifically in the neck. And I've probably had half a dozen patients just spontaneously start crying. And it's interesting, there's a whole vasovagal theory and all kinds of stuff coming out specifically about the neck and where trauma and tension and things like that become stored. And the first time it happened to me, I thought it was weird that the patient just started crying, but since then it's happened for many, many, many patients only when I've worked on their neck. Now, there's something interesting about how emotions and trauma and memory, somatic memory as it's called, is stored in the body. So working through the body and not through the mind is often a very effective, sometimes more effective approach to dealing with emotions. The third thing is therapy or hypnotherapy. Now I found that for therapy and hypnotherapy, they work well for certain things. But in general, if there are some deep emotional stuff going on or there's some subconscious, whether it's suppressed or repressed material, obviously talking about it can bring some of that up to the conscious aspects of our being. But also the interesting thing is with hypnotherapy, sometimes you can bypass some of the conscious resistance and really get deep into the emotional stuff for people that maybe are doing therapy, but they're hyper logical and hyper rational and they are experts at avoiding emotions. The fourth way to access the subconscious is psychedelics. So I'm not saying you should or should not do them depends on where you live, what country in the world, what state and what laws there are. Pay attention to those. But there was an interesting episode on, I think it's called Goop Lab with Gwyneth Paltrow, few members of her staff went down to Jamaica to do a psilocybin healing ritual and a therapeutic setting with therapists and advisors and people watching them. And the lead woman said something interesting. She said that in Jamaica, they only use that mushroom for people who have prolonged illness and they're trying to pray for healing and maybe even a healing dream like the Asclepian temples. But then she said, for foreigners coming here, they're often well, but they feel a sense of disconnection and they feel like there's no greater purpose to their being. But maybe that is their illness and illness of the spirit. I thought that was incredibly wise. But for many people, psychedelics are being used in end of life care for terminal patients and for people, for example, anxiety associated with a pork cancer prognosis. The fifth is Chinese formulas and acupuncture. I once had a woman say to me when I was suggesting that maybe therapy or a counselor was a good option. She said, I found that three months of acupuncture have been more effective for my actual trauma and PTSD than years of therapy. Now, that really was not on my radar, but I thought it was very interesting because, again, trying to access the subconscious through the body, it's the reason why for so many people, traumatic memories and in general, trauma is experienced usually through the body through somatic symptoms. So it's deeply ironic that in our culture, we treated it just as something biochemical or just as something psychological. The sixth is affirmations, intentions or prayer. Now, I found that sometimes if there's something you're trying to work through, the very act of writing statements over and over, whether the statement is reflecting how you feel, I feel so betrayed, I feel so betrayed, or the intention is actually, I'm going to do my best where I am right now. I'm going to do my best where I am right now. These kind of things seem trite and a little bit cutesy and new agey, but I found that they can actually give a person a significant amount of peace, especially if done in the morning or done before bed, if the person's having insomnia, but the act of using affirmations, not as a way of lying to oneself, but acknowledging how you feel and then intending or willing to live life a little bit differently, I found can actually have a profound impact. So prayer and all of these practices have a strong effect on the psyche of the person, on the physiology of the person, regardless of whether or not they're real. The seventh thing is cranial sacral or massage. So this is back in the category of somatic practices to heal the spirit. And I had an interesting experience after going through a prolonged breakup that was the worst of my life, the worst time. I got cranial sacral from this woman and she was massaging lightly in my neck. He was like, I don't remember what she said she was doing, but she said whether it was the cricoid or something else, she was massaging here and she said, you know, this has a direct connection to the pericardium. And ironically, she had been doing that for 10 minutes and I had a spontaneous memory come up with the girl that I was heartbroken over. And before this woman told me that there was a link in Chinese medicine, pericardium is kind of related to heartbreak or the heart and connection and things like that. So I hadn't thought about this girl for months. I'd been trying to actively not think about her for months. But as she was massaging this, she said, sometimes working on this can open up the pericardium as an anatomical link or physiological link. I had the spontaneous memory for the first time in months. And then she told me after there was this link. So there's some very, very interesting effects of somatic practices that are still so unknown. I mean, the whole channels of Chinese medicine have a physical component and maybe a non physical component. But the very fact that that what she did was even a real thing is absolutely interesting to me. The eighth is EMDR and tapping. Now EMDR has been used for PTSD, veterans coming back from war, but can be used for many, many other things. And I've had plenty of people I know report that by using EMDR or tapping practices, like you may have seen, they're doing tapping like this, by using these practices, they've been able to find a sense of calm or relief from anxiety. The ninth is Vipassana. So Vipassana meditation, they do these retreats where you go and for at least three days, but up to 10 or more days, you're in complete silence, meditating all day. And it's interesting to think that this could heal your psyche because for so many people, it's probably traumatic. But the very act of when you're in silence all day, it's like the monk's life where you remove every distraction. No TV, you can't even really be eating that much. You're probably not eating what you like. No stimulation, no talking, nothing. That's when, when the water settles, you can see farther. And a lot of the stuff starts coming up from the subconscious and it can be dealt with that way. So it's probably not a popular option for a lot of people. But then again, most of these are probably not very popular because this kind of work is usually not that fun, but it is transformative. So the Pasana is another option. Now, the 10th that I've seen help people is shamanic practices. Now, whether or not you believe in shamans, shamanic practices doesn't really matter to me. The point is that the actual ritual, the set and setting of the shaman doing a healing ritual with all the smudging, the drumming, the music, the chanting, all of these things are designed to have a therapeutic effect and they have for tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of years. So these very acts, regardless of whether or not you consume any substance by itself can be healing for many people. And that ritual by itself can be healing alone, whether it is in a shamanic context or another context. So these are 10 ways that I think are very useful to heal the spirit, the psyche, the emotions in a world where most of us probably only think that therapy is that option. And even that is highly stigmatized and avoided by so many different people. So you can either start doing these practices or begin seeking out professionals that are skilled in these to help you with that aspect of your healing. I hope that helps. Before you go again down below, I've actually updated that the five rituals that can help you add 10 years to your life. And I've included this story of a 256 year old Chinese man. Now, it's interesting. I don't think he really lived that long, but it's four pieces of advice are truly fascinating. You can check it out down there below to free download. And then before you go, come check out this related video here.


Good morning. I am Keith, the center from your content lead for spectrum and founder of the solution center. We are delighted that you have welcomed spectrum virtual over the next three days to talk about one of the most pressing issues facing America the racial wealth gap If things were normal, we would all be together at the gathering spot in Atlanta, Georgia, hugging and working together and shaking hands. But these are not normal time. Nothing is normal about the economic disparities we are facing across racial lines. Nothing is normal about COVID-19 and the impact it has had. Nothing is normal about the killing and hunting of black men and women. But here we are gathered all across the spectrum to do something to have an impact to make a difference and to build an inclusive economy. Thank you for joining us. We are so excited to have you. And I'm excited now to turn the stage, the virtual stage over to Carrie Hansen, VP of SoCAP. One more thing while we're waiting on Carrie to join us, please be engaged in chat and the chat we have here, these people that are coming and joining all over the world. And we are just really thrilled that we have over 500, close to 600 people that are here with us today. So please do take advantage of the entire platform and learn from them and meet them. Carrie? Hi everyone. Welcome. Thank you so much for being here and for joining us today. My name is Carrie Hansen. I am the vice president of SoCAP. And on behalf of SoCAP and Spectrum and our parent company Intentional Media and our sister brands, conscious company media and Total Impact, we are so delighted to have you here today to join these critically important conversations. I want to tell you just a little bit about SoCAP and then we're going to take you right into our event for today. But SoCAP was started 13 years ago and our mission is to unlock the potential of markets to accelerate and inspire investment and positive impact. To do that we convene a global ecosystem and a marketplace and that includes social entrepreneurs, investors, foundations, nonprofit leaders, governments, policy leaders, creators, corporations, academia, everyone that makes up this entire ecosystem of creating an impactful economy. And we do that through events that are digital and throughout our platform. With education we spur conversations ignite action. In 2017, with support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, we started in a racial equity track and dedicated content to racial equity. And from those conversations last year, we started Spectrum to specifically address racial inequities and in particular the racial wealth gap. As we planned this event and the content team checked in daily as events unfolded across our nation, we try to determine and decide what pieces of content needed to pivot or change in order to respond to the current moment. The one piece that has remained constant throughout the entire planning since last year to today is the need for action. The content team has listened to hundreds of conversations nationally with many of you that are joining us today and many others across the country. And with the help of our advisory committee to be able to bring this action oriented conversation to you today. I ask and we ask that you bring real conversations, bring your real hopes and fears and needs into Spectrum over these next few days and then afterwards as we continue the conversation leading out of Spectrum and into SoCAP and beyond. We have asked all of our speakers to do the same and I guarantee you they are ready and prepared to do that for you. It has been my absolute pleasure to work with Kesha Center, our content lead to develop this content with you and with Nadia Brigham and so many others to deny in this event. At this time, I would like to introduce you to Nadia Brigham of Brigham Consulting. She's going to come to the stage. Nadia brings over 20 years of work in racial equity in the philanthropic sectors and she is going to be our facilitator over these next three days, weaving a tapestry to spur us all to action and to healing. It's my pleasure to welcome Nadia Brigham.