Okay, very good morning to everyone. Hope you're doing well. It's Friday 25th of September Back by popular demand after last week's guest appearance. I have Sam North Hi guys. Thank you for having me Yeah, it was a pleasure Sam. I think people really appreciated your Look through of the charts and last Friday. So what we'll do is stick to the same kind of game plan as normal I'll go through some of the the closing Wall Street what's happened overnight in Asia and then generally Some of the new stories in play what we're looking out for to the dead head and then I'll hand it over to you But please do interject at any point if you want to add your view or anything like that I'm gonna spread a little bit of Trump holding a campaign rally lots of social distancing being adhered to last night, so Getting thoughts on that, but let's have a look at the charts as usual I guess that gives you a good sense of general sentiment at the open and as you can see The dick seems flat and that's largely reflected in the major currency pairs in the top left in your own sterling Gold down a touch but fairly sideways overnight down five bucks at 1871 Equity index futures us pretty flat Dax up but has been drifting lower just as we go through the European open and crude also just Drifting a little bit back towards 40 bucks down here in the bottom But earlier losses 13 cents and teen oats really are not doing anything and hadn't done to the last couple of days at all Super tight ranges there and to give you a bit of a flavor We also had a positive close on Wall Street sort of really decent bounce actually Yesterday, we were looking at those levels. This is that daily Continuation chart where we had marked up on that rectangle a decent area of support around the thirty two hundred thirty one ninety two actually marking And the area of support was seen in mid and late July and the market really responding to that quite nicely yesterday as we were talking about in the briefing and In terms of the US close the S&P and the cash finished up point three percent the NASDAQ as well seeing a pretty decent bounce This is the the chart again that we were looking at it didn't get as far down as really coming to the more interesting or solid levels of a hundred DMA Respectively in this index and the late July lows because we were just respected and bounced off that Low that we saw on Monday on that initial volatility at the beginning of the week So that's still holding and remains a key line of support on the downside as to does the rectangles still On the intraday session if things start to sour in sentiment But overall we had a higher close on Wall Street across the three indices As I said the spools up point three NASDAQ up the usual kind of minor outperformance up point six down up about two Tens of one percent now, you know why the bounce well a couple things And the House Democrats, so let me just switch over to some slides Just transition So the House Democrats now have started drafting a stimulus proposal roughly 2.4 Trillion dollars that could take into possible negotiations with the White House and Senate Republicans according to House Democratic officials and remember one of the main talking points of course of what had been seen as a contributing factor to some of the downside inequities of late has been the lack of Willingness and forthcoming of stimulus coming out the US particularly with the sidetracking of now the Supreme Court nomination with the death of Ginsburg being such a key point of contention now for the ultimate outcome and post-us election environment That's kind of detracted then from getting a deal done, which is more fiscal stimulus obviously one person who's been banging the drum for more Certainly aside from politicians has been Jerome Powell. He's kind of had a busy week speaking to various different political groups And he continues to call on the need and necessary necessity for fiscal stimulus So this is quite a positive development overall certainly probably helps Stabilize things yesterday and contributed to some of the rise House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reiterated She is ready to negotiate it with the White House on that proposal. However The bill could get passed in the House next week But Trump has indicated he's willing to go only as high as one and a half trillion at this point But I guess what the people are taking some Positive out of is the fact that they've gone from basically around five to six hundred billion To three and a half trillion now we're arriving at a number that's a little bit closer into the territory of potential deal making I guess is what the the general perception is Also separately another thing that contributed to a little bit of risk off In the last 48 hours or so had been the fact that Trump basically said he wouldn't go quietly And hand over a smooth transition of power if he lost the election But republican lawmakers Yesterday also vowed that the president's transition after the november election will occur without disruption basically Uh rebuking what trump said yesterday about his refusal to commit to that peaceful Transfer of power so a couple things there um Just to be aware of but otherwise the other kind of stories that i'm looking at this morning are From a dollar perspective in the fx markets. I know um, Sam will probably talk about this a lot more but Really nice chart that was shared by alex and the team this morning He's been talking to the guys already very early about the the dollar index And technically the dollar index is at a really quite interesting level And the dollar has actually put in its best week this week since april And do you remember what was happening in eight march april? That was obviously when the world was in full fear Global pandemic kind of meltdown and obviously everyone was flocking to the dollar at that initial phase And we've seen the best game in the last couple of sessions since that point now Where we're at at the moment though is interesting starting to look a little bit overbought and technically you've got that initial Low that was seen here going all the way back to when the pandemic volatility was really kicking in And then that goes all the way back to really 2018 price action So it'd be interesting to see how it responds here Definitely will be quite key of course for the major currency pairs But also I think it's going to be quite key for the prospects of precious metals You know one of the main reasons why I think precious metals have come under such aggressive selling pressure of late and I'm going to switch it over to to gold here gold's gone from basically an area of Quite extreme range, but ultimately I'd say consolidation after the big shakeout we had in the beginning of august But it's quietly just continue to move lower amid certainly some of this dollar strength And this week is no different at the beginning of the week. We were trading around 1920 And now we're trading down at around 1872 having printed as low as sub 1850 this week And so a turnabout in the dollar will be quite important for supporting These precious metals which have been under pressure now technically These are charts I was sharing yesterday. You've got this area Going back to really july of consolidation that would be a key area of support here on the downside But if we're looking at silver Also from a technical perspective the hundred dma Has provided quite a nice area alongside this trend line I've been keeping an eye on from the march activity when precious metals started to really get fired up and post initially the pandemic selloff that we were seeing and after the initial flurry that was seen on Thursday session We're respecting back onto that trend line. So we're interested to see where things close out the week And the reason why as well to talk about the precious metals is that commerce bank the german bank They came out They've had a research note released overnight and they said silver and gold have been oversold And the positive environment for the metals has not changed It'll be hard for the dollar to sustain its gains given the fact that the federal reserve has pledged to stick to its expansionary monetary policy And again, you know, I do agree. I mean timing of course is important when these banks Put out these notes. They're not talking so much about the intraday session They're talking about just generally over the kind of medium term But I kind of agree. I mean and interestingly Technically the Dixie here is at quite a key level of resistance now having shot broke out of this error of consolidation Over the last couple of weeks and months. So It will be interesting to see if this provides then a bit of a footing if that does hold for these precious metals Which have been ultimately under quite a bit of pressure in recent sessions Other things I wanted to talk about sticking with the u.s. Theme There was a note out of Goldman Sachs There's a lot of people talking about the fact that And this has been reflected somewhat in market positioning particularly in in options for example about the type of volatility that we could see Not so much on the election night itself, but the period thereafter given the mailing ballot system is likely to Result in a lot of uncertainties around getting the actual formality of who's won the election But goldman's have come out in a latest note and it's kind of a little bit against The general consensus. They're saying that traders need to reduce their expectation That a delayed u.s. Election result would upend markets. They said that delayed outcome is a tail risk But a combination of early results vote to turn out county level data and high correlation of polling errors across states Suggest investors will have enough information on election night to determine the likely victor So that's quite different from what others have said. I mean, I hope it's like that. I love a little 24 hour all night session Doing these big events because it was looking a little bit likely that a lot of that general overnight activity might have been diminished by the fact that it's going to be a quite protracted event that will Unfold over several weeks that gs saying for those aforementioned reasons that we might have enough information on hand though To draw some conclusions. I guess it depends how tightly actual Votes and information we have at hand at that point suggest So, yeah, just like to to note On the brexit side of things Brexit I guess has been It's so interesting, isn't it two weeks ago? Everyone was talking about brexit coronavirus spikes and it's like what there's brexit. What's that thing? So it's amazing how blinkered and uh, the market becomes You know, you have uh, obviously the chancellor unveils more formally all of the things that we were already kind of aware of yesterday in terms of his plan for jobs and so on and the economy going forward. Um, but The brexit headlines probably likely to come back to the forefront next week Um, Michelle Barnier and David Frost are scheduled to resume negotiations on Tuesday Just as a heads up Barnier told EU diplomats this week that Johnson's move this rewriting of the withdrawal agreement Have left some bad feeling but the atmosphere between negotiators remain constructive So They're continuing to push on irrespective of some of the initial threats about what Johnson was doing By breaking international law and so on Seeming me there's enough will on both sides to continue these talks to try and broker a deal Which obviously it's not just about penalizing Britain. This is in the best interest of both Countries or areas to strike a deal here. Um, the one thing though We've only got around two weeks now until the self-imposed UK PM's own October 15th deadline to reach a deal Now I would say That's not going to happen So that doesn't mean though that that's instantly going to start seeing the pound Coming under immediate pressure Several officials have already warned the negotiation could now stretch into november or even december Now that does put an incredibly Tight turnaround on trying to what had been a mid-october Commitment to then get it ratified across europe and elsewhere in time for the end of transition at year end but You know, I'm pretty confident that I think that these talks will go into november For sure and it could even go even later Does that mean that there's a cliff edge type end of end of year scenario? Well, look the goalposts have moved with this multiple times and they will move again So at the end of the day And I'm not expecting any amazing movement at the last moment here To actually get an actual deal confirmed in october I do think it is going to drag on a little bit longer, but I don't think that necessarily means that right That's it. There's no there's going to be no deal. I think I'll just make a deal later on I still think base case they do Secure a deal in the end um Just wanted a quick word on the covid situation as far as covid is concerned Um, the uk reported its highest number of new cases in a single day since the start of the pandemic. However As I was kind of suggesting yesterday I think you've got to look a little bit beyond that because the first wave case numbers of kind of peaking at 6000 in in april time Are not really reflective of probably the underlying situation was ultimately way higher than that So I think it's a bit of a A media spin to start talking about it. I wouldn't over stress that the more important thing is though uk rates are accelerating very quickly and are likely to continue to do so going forward France new infections have jumped to a record One of the questions I had I did um What we call like a masterclass on our platform Last night yesterday evening with a group of traders And they part of the conversation was about covid and they were asking me like, you know, things are obviously getting worse You know at what point what would you look for as a trigger then for markets to start becoming a bit apprehensive again about covid And for me, even though mainland european uk is deteriorating at the moment And this definitely is having an impact on expectations about to kind of shape and speed of the recovery It's the us which ultimately is the most important at the moment The us generally has not been following the trend that's been materializing this side of the pond Now one thing though to be aware of is that us new cases Did actually rise last week after falling for two months straight So in america the reason why the markets generally have been Okay, yes, we've seen some downside people getting a little bit worried about a lack of force coming stimulus Generally covid numbers have been going down and this is a net positive for for general markets However last week and more recently there's been a few signs that us numbers are starting to pick up ever so slightly Not enough yet. I think to spook people. But what i'm saying is Will covid become a new dominant theme to really weigh on market sentiment for me only if us numbers start to rise Meaningfully and consistently and we're not seeing that yet, but it definitely now is starting to come up on my radar a little bit more health experts believe that the recent spike was coinciding with the reopening of schools and universities as well as The parties that were happening over labor day, of course if you think about the incubation period Um, that was a big worry for some people about people adhering obviously to social distancing and various restrictions was probably unlikely to happen on what Otherwise is a a public holiday in america the one particular region if we look at the u.s Is the mid states so all midwest states? Except ohio have reported more cases in the past four weeks than the prior four weeks Now a lot of this Again is to do with social distancing The reason for that is because there's an annual motorcycle rally in south dakota Of which attracts annually hundreds of thousands of visitors And that is said to have caused some of that latest movement. Um, so yeah, I just wanted to explain What's going on on that side of things The uscdc director has said that covid 19 vaccine will likely not be widely available until summer All the fall of 2021 so i'm not putting a great deal of weight just in this one person Obviously, we have to layer in what authorities and bodies are saying with what pharmaceuticals trialing and how that's Progressing at this point in time But it's quite interesting because a summer of fall of 2021 for a vaccine according to the director of the cdc in the us is way later than generally where market consensus lays which is more like q1 q2 of 21 So that's the other you know, quite important thing to be aware of um I just wanted to show as well when it comes to us and social distancing. I have to just Interact is needed to share the screen. Yeah, I just want to show this Thank you florida make america great again These are all genuine photos from last night And uh, this was an airport hangar in florida Um, I can see everyone's got their face masks on quite obviously But it's just Uh, I mean it is quite quite unbelievable When you think about we are in the middle of a global pandemic at the moment to see this type of activity however You know, I think you've got to cut between the kind of the noise I mean, this isn't like propaganda. This is shared by donald trump himself So it's not like it's uh, the left liberal left trying to catch him out The the important thing here is the area. This is florida, right? and florida is Ultimately one of the most important battlegrounds in terms of the college um The the college votes to the accounts for which is where really the balance of power is not the popular vote florida Obviously given its large population is one of the highest in terms of its College votes, so it's intrinsic This always ends up being a definitive key battleground and at the moment it is pretty close And so trump is really going out there and doing everything he can to try and To try and Get this back in his favor because at the moment biden is just leading it ever so slightly in recent polling So for me, this is all you know, he he does this on purpose, of course This is to really kind of galvanize the base Also, as well, he's he's increased the frequency of tweeting about law and order You've probably seen there's been lots of social unrest across america with more The same repeat of white police killing I guess inappropriate use of power against black individuals has happened multiple times again um, so the law and order Mantra is becoming ever more prevalent just given what's happening and so yeah I wouldn't as much as I think that this is probably not particularly useful for controlling a pandemic which is showing some fairly Suspect signs of increasing in certain areas in the u.s. And florida was one of the sunbelt states that was hit quite bad I would definitely be interested to keep an eye on the numbers that start coming out in the coming weeks But you've got to understand the amount of political importance this area takes and obviously he wants to make a real statement piece out of this But yeah, quick look at the calendar just to wrap things up and I'll I'll hand you over to sam. Um today is actually from a schedule super quiet um, uk public finance data Europe m3 annual growth None of that's going to move markets courtly bulletin out of the uk as well as a non-market mover So the only real thing you've got is drill goods coming out in the states for the month of august Make a huge rig count for any oil traders a couple of feds speakers feds williams is a voter speaking twice Um in the afternoon and then in the evening if you're uk based And so maybe worth just keeping an eye on but a lot of feds speak this week I wouldn't say anyone's particularly changed the needle or moved the needle too much. So With that That's my piece done. I'll hand you over to sam Let's go over the chance Thank you very much and and um, I think it's it's interesting one the the quiet calendar which i'll come on to but also the uh If you I can just have posts Like they're sharing but also the just the the equity markets recently I've had a lot of mates which is always the case whenever the markets come under pressure Always get my mates and what's going on in the markets? What's the reason we're coming down? Is it is it due to you know numbers spiking up in europe and you know, it's it might have a tiny bit uh In the way of Of a reason behind it, but for me, it's all about the the u.s. Dollar and absolutely if the u.s. Numbers You know really do start to pick up that is going to weigh on things whether the u.s. Do anything about it or not Is that is another question but for me?  You know the The reluctance to do anything more just yet and I think there's still a bit more to go to be honest I'm not sure markets are low enough for geron power to come out and and deliver another bazooka. So How do we we look at that from a technical point of view? Well, look, it's the it's the last day of the week So therefore we're going to be looking at weekly closes and and as long as the euro for you know looking here at Dollar balls as long as the euro finishes below, you know, this highlighted area this trend line I think the the bears are going to be really happy, you know To finish What day was that the 22nd below there was key. We then have some continued selling the next day Okay, a little bit of pause a bit of profit taking for those that are You know happy enough with this push through and as long as it stays back below sort of 117 and a half I think that the You know this this market can continue to go lower. It just might be that you know We have a quiet calendar with you know a bit of profit taking into the end of the week We do have a bit of recovery which is going to aid All the other dollar related pairs which just so happens to be a lot of the markets at the moment as they're sort of moving off that So, yeah, euro dollar looks good. I mean look 115 is sort of talks about as the The next area that we come to and we might well look back and and say well look when the market was at the high Is one person that's moved everything and that's ecb's lane with one comment and we're now all the way back down here We'll have to see how that pans out of course over the coming weeks the euro then on that 60 minute And this is just bringing in the pivot points now. You can see it's got a fair bit of room to go to the upside To retest that whole area that level resistance We'll have a look at the pound in the mark in a moment But that did exactly the same broke a massively key level of support Ground higher for about four possibly even five days before then really pushing lower again So, yeah for the euro it wouldn't surprise me to see you know today and monday a grind higher Like alex have been talking about in our in our amplifier live trading room the dora index is um, you know, it's over overbought for each uh, for example, so it has uh, You know on the short term so it can have a little bit of a pullback potentially But yeah, just have a look at the pound then on that longer time frame going into the end of the week Obviously it's going to be key and and this is what I was talking about in that that support level breaks and then one two three Four, you know, you could argue the fifth morning there as well. It did push higher Oh, it's then come back lower break the lower the month and now we're just trying to find a bit of bit of support On this market and you can see it's a significant level here for for the pound decision time for sure It's got to take place and I was posting this on on twitter yesterday just the significance of this whole area you can see why it is Uh, but we found support there you can see The resistance triple top from 9th of july to the two days that follow turns into support Then we hit it again for a close of the week perspective, you know, the if there are any Pound bulls they won't price above that but that may well see other You know pairs against the pound Other crosses actually push higher as we see a bit of pound strength on this support and a bit of dollar weakness potentially today That's how I see things Falling out for for the remainder of the pound here you can see That sort of comes to fruition if we do break above today's our one yesterday's high Thursday's high The low that we had on the 21st you want a great level great line in the sand that is it there There's nothing to say that we don't find resistance here start drifting lower The euro does the same and then we see dollar strength into the close of the week and it gets ugly elsewhere But if we start to see a push above here, I think we can get a quicker move towards that That up to no means that means that the dollar is now going to weaken for a period of time It just means I think that we can have a little bit of a break gold You can see yesterday found support and as well at the moment slightly up But this looks okay for those people that potentially wanted to go long I don't necessarily think waiting for 18 28 the highest that we had back from april is a bad bad move I think we could still get there You can also see silver like you mentioned Just pushing lower and you know, this was it was something that I was looking at When I did the masterclass two weeks ago in the false break of 26 and the false break for gold on 1900 both never really took place And you know dollar weakness would obviously help that come through. But yeah silver finding a bit of support If it can finish above 23 77, you know, that would be you know, a minor win for For silver and then we could potentially start to see a push higher But at the moment If if I was a dollar ball, I'm happy regardless of a move higher It's other than a flick over to to look at the s&p like you mentioned 100 day moving averages across the board weren't too far away And we found some good support Yesterday decent pop higher. It's not out the woods. Of course, let's just get the Moving averages on as well the 50 21 and 200 the 50 day moving averages has been key for For this market. So I would keep a watch on that more importantly, and I'll come back to the s&p The dow Jones you can see the 50 day a couple of days ago was the top and there's been incredibly well respected So you're trading the dow on your longer time frame keeper a watch on that and obviously the and as that you can see exactly the same So yeah, they're looking at the 50 days. So we're going to look at it So keep a watch on that keep it marked up on your longer time frames going into then the the close of the week And I think, you know, there there is a bit more downside in this market And you know, it's not panic stations I think it's healthy. I think we still finish the year On the highest a bit of that, you know does depend on on trump winning the election for me But is it panic stations if we're only 9.4 of a high, I don't think so. I think the dollar, you know was you know Under pressure for quite some time strengthened. This is obviously going to bring all markets lower and it's healthy enough. I think You know from a support point of view And I think it's a long yes say on 100 day moving average on the s&p But I have got this area marked up here 31 75 you can see a nice area of support Around here turns out to be you know another area where prices reacted quite strongly to so that's something I'd be looking at To the flip side if we do get above the 50 day moving average, you know Then you're going to come to the 21, you know, do you remember when we did the the live FOMC on Was it the 16th of September? It must be 16 basically when all markets turn I was saying if we finish about 34 Well, this these these recent highs we're going to all-time highs that didn't happen and you can see we push lower So that's another one, you know just area to be aware of as we go into the shorter time frame now on the The s&p and start marking up some of these levels that we just bring in the pivot points You can see There is another key point today that from a bullish point of view that might support Yes, they being a short-term low We would need to get above today's r1 the support point from wednesday almost turned to the high yesterday And really for me is is a key line in the sand where if we can get above there The balls feel a bit more confident, but as mentioned elsewhere I think the test is going to come if the dollar weakens over the next couple of days When it comes into very key resistance or say you're a dollar What that is then going to lead to for the rest of the market and it's going to be really really interesting Another market just to wrap up for you and I've got obviously oil here and you can see this on Let's just put let me remove some of these studies. We'll have a look at this on on the the On the daily chart Bring that in and see about you said just flirting around that sort of 40 bucks This is how we finished last week, you know on these previous highs that we had Turns into being you know really nice resistance I think anyone sort of bearish oil at the moment can still be happy enough and and stops will be above there for sure So, you know, this is almost how I potentially see you're a dollar panning out I know it's completely different market, but the dollar has got some sort of weight on commodity pricing here So the breakthrough comes back to find resistance and we can then start to maybe push lower as we go into the close of the week To put this onto this the 60 minute Bring in the pivots just for a bit more context You can see like the s&p like euro like pound just above where we're trading There is a massive resistance where any bulls are going to want price to get above So we've got the s&p the r1 oil the r1 obviously similar for nasdaq and dow and also the pound where we're just trading Almost now as well. You can see just above This point here This would be a minor victory for anyone that wants to go along these markets on the flip side for continued downside today I think those levels have to hold. Thank you and for inviting me on always a pleasure never a chore Good stuff. Good stuff. Well, um, yeah, if anyone's got any comments for us at all if you're watching this on on youtube Don't forget to subscribe to the channel I know sam always puts out a video on the sunday as well where he'll go over similar to what he's just done there for the Week ahead You know that in combination and I guess with the briefing I do on a monday It's kind of a great way to to start the week We hope for you guys But any comments on this video just drop a comment and we'll reply throughout the day But otherwise, thank you sam and have a great weekend. Okay guys


Today I'm going to be explaining Backrooms Level 72, a level full of… crabs?  What else could you want in a Backrooms Level? Without further ado, or any other explanation, let's get into it, shall we? Also welcome back to Day 3 of Brutemus, hope you're having a great day! Leave a like if you want to. Level 72 of the Backrooms is the 73rd level in the catalog, and it's classified as a Class 2 difficulty with an environmental difficulty of 2 out of 5, an entity difficulty of 2 out of 5, and an exit difficulty of 3 out of 5. Although you'll see why later, why that really doesn't matter because it's actually really dangerous here. Definitely more so than a Class 2. The level consists of a large island smack dab in the middle of a shallow ocean. The island seems to take the rough shape of a crab, so its design is kinda like in a crab shape. And the level gets its name from that shape, and that's where the level gets its name call of the crabs from. The ocean surrounding the island is virtually empty, with little to no life in it. It's just water. And it goes out in all directions, for as far as your eyes can see, specifically around 3.7 miles or 6 kilometers. At the edge of that 3.7 miles, the distance of the ocean instantly just drops off into a waterfall that drops into a void. So think of this as like a floating ocean with an island in the middle, and on the edges it just drops off into a void. The actual island itself is a sandy island, and it's comprised of several sand dunes and palm trees and bushes and pieces of coral and seashells and all those kind of things. There are also some other things here that I'll talk about later, just know that it's not that safe. The level itself is also very hot constantly, and very humid. It stays at literally a solid 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or 38 Celsius at all times, and it kinda feels like you're in an oven. The water here is also salt water, which means that the constant breeze that's blowing the air on the island will make your skin dry out, and you'll get very dehydrated since there's gonna be salty air. You pretty much look like Patrick and SpongeBob underneath the heat lamp. Now randomly, around every two-ish weeks, the level seems to produce rain clouds, through an unknown means, and it'll rain for a few minutes at a time. This is all of the fresh water that can be attained on this level, so if you're trapped here and you can't store that fresh water or grab it somehow, I don't know what you're gonna do. You're screwed. Now ironically, underneath the island, there are hundreds of freshwater aquifers of different sizes. And the bigger ones are deeper underground. These aquifers are pretty much impossible to get to for every wanderer who comes here, because no one brings shovels or equipment. Like, why would you bring that stuff while you're exploring the back rooms? But anyways, if you don't have that kind of stuff, they're just down there. But these aquifers are where the plankton and other organisms like crabs come out of on this level. And the crabs that live here go down to those aquifers for the food source, which are the plankton and creel. Now speaking of crabs, there are thought to be eight species of crabs that live on this small island. Now there's only eight species, but there are supposedly millions of crabs crawling around. There are dungeonous crabs, flat top crabs, ghost crabs, gold crabs, hermit crabs, Pacific mole crabs, red king crabs. All of these are real life species that are found here. And those are just the recognizable species. There are other ones too. Each one of those crabs tends to only eat the creel and the plankton that's below the island, but they're also seemingly genetically coded to eat themselves and their friends. Like they'll eat each other. They will literally cannibalize one another. That's right. Got a little crab on crab crime going here. Now these crabs that I just mentioned are typically pretty safe. They're not that dangerous. The only reason you'd have to fear them is if you have a fear of crabs because there are literally hundreds of thousands of them crawling around the small island constantly, but there is a level exclusive crab that isn't safe at all. Like it's completely not. And you should be afraid of this one. The Aurora crab behaves pretty similarly to a poison dart frog from real life because this crab is very colorful, it's very bright, and it's very unsafe to be near. Its shell and body are this wonderful array of shiny colors and pigments, but it's the colors themselves that are the danger because they seem to be some kind of toxin. Because if you touch that toxic color, you will get a severe reaction or rash to whatever part of your body touched it, but it doesn't stop at a simple rash. Of course it doesn't. You see the rash is just the beginning. After it starts, your blood from the inside of your body will start to seep out of you in different orifices. Like literally right out of your skin pores, it'll just start dripping out. Like of somebody wringing out a wet washcloth, except this is your body being wrung out and it's not water coming out of you, it's the red stuff inside of you, if that makes sense. Now ironically, the Aurora crab is actually pretty safe and docile, as in it doesn't attack people outright. Its shell is the only dangerous part about it, and it only is dangerous if you touch it. If you see something bright, don't touch it unless you want to literally get drained of all your juices. Now even beyond that, there are whispers from people who have been to this level that say beyond the ocean, where it waterfalls off into that void below, there is a gigantic crab-like creature that's been seen stepping out of it. All that's been seen is the giant black silhouette at night time of huge crab legs slowly walking around the ocean. We're not sure if these reports are real or if it's just a tale to get people not to come here, but as you can see, that would be a terrifying sight to see when you're just kind of like sleeping on an island. You see giant stick-shaped legs walking around, that's terrifying. So to summarize, this level is an island shaped like a crab in the middle of a shallow ocean which itself is floating in the middle of a void. And the only things on this island are millions of crabs sprawling around constantly.  We have no idea. So yeah, that makes perfect sense to me. Love it. Now there's supposedly a community here on this level called New Crabland that just has around 20 people. Apparently, they're pretty friendly and they just chill on the island most of the time. To enter the level, you can be on level 75 and find a roasted crab and consume it and then you'll wake up here. And if you want to exit, that's where it gets pretty tricky because you really and truly can't.  So if you find the exit, tell everybody because that'd be a nice thing to do, right? Get to this point and they can't get past it. So be warned. All right, that was level 72. Hope you enjoyed it. I love me a good island level and who doesn't like crabs? You know, I love crabs. Not the disease, just the actual animal. Anyways, thank you for watching till the end.  And while you're doing that, check out the merch below if you want to. It'd be a good family, a little gift for your friends, your family. If you want to support the old Brewster. The second and third channel are also down there if you want more of me. And with all that said, I hope you had a great day. Thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next video.


Welcome everybody to this presentation, so today I'll be giving a talk about a recent chess paper, improving generalization with ensembles in machine learning-based profiled side-chain analysis. So we have three main contributions in this work. First is the analysis of output class probabilities, the predictions, second is how to use proper metrics for profiled SCA with deep learning, and third, how to improve generalization in deep learning-based profiled SCA by using ensembles, which are basically a combination of multiple neural network models into a stronger model. So deep learning-based profiled SCA follows the same principle of classical profiled attacks, such as template attacks, where we assume an attacker has fully control of a device A, where he can learn the leakage from it, and in this case the difference that the learning method is a deep neural network where the attacker uses profiling traces with a non-key and all information to train it, and then to validate with also with traces with a non-key, until he achieves a good generalization that is used against a device B, from where the attacker collects another set of traces, and then if the model trained with device A provides good enough generalization, then the attacker is able to recover the key from device B. That's basically the picture of profiled SCA attacks. So in the title of this presentation, we say that we are going to improve generalization, so one way to do that in deep learning is to use good regularization methods. So the regularization methods can be seen as a method that prevents the model to overfit, and then this can be given by implicitly regularization that is provided by small neural network models, either by different methods such as dropout, data augmentation, etc. that can be used as an extra regularization artifact in large neural network models, because large neural network models are very prone to overfit as they have very high capacity, and so adding regularization is very beneficial to reduce this overfitting effect and to lead to better generalization. Another way to achieve better generalization is by using early stopping method, where in the training phase, we return the model as long as soon as we achieve a very high value in the metric that we are considered as the reference metric for our training. And also another way to do that is that the main contribution of this work is by using ensembles, combining multiple models as an artifact to improve generalization. So we can assume that deep learning for side channel analysis is mostly about hyper parameters. So this is a very difficult task that we have when we use deep learning for SCA. Although we can see many different several, let's say benefits from an advantage from deep learning side channel analysis such as no points of interest selection. We see that CNNs leads to attacks that are less sensitive to trace misalignment. Also that the complex deep neural networks can learn high order leakage. And also visualization techniques that helps a lot the attacks. This all leads to the community, the security community to implement more secure products, because if we know better, if we have better attacks, we can see how we see the need to implement better and better countermeasures. So the advantages of deep learning are beneficial actually for security community. Also, we have a work in progress, let's say, but like this, where we still don't have how to implement an efficient and automated hyper parameters tuning for deep learning side channel analysis, because we need to create a deep neural network and we need to face many different hyper parameters. So selecting good hyper parameters is not a easy task, but there are many works that are going to this direction and I think very soon we're going to have very efficient solutions for that. Also, adding hyper parameters to the side channel scenario can render the attack unpractical if we don't take care of this part because SCA by itself is already very costly. It takes a lot of time to do side channel analysis, so we need to be careful when we add the hyper parameters tuning problem into the context. So also using correct metrics is very important for SCA with deep learning. So we have seen the supervised metrics like accuracy, loss, recall, precision, etc. They are not very consistent for side channel analysis. Their main work is already showing this. And what we have to use basically is are the common side channel metrics such as success rate, guessing entropy, and either as a custom loss function in common libraries or apart from independent of the training process. So this is success rate in guessing entropy. They are computed out of the predictions that we obtained from side channel traces like which are the, so when we have a set of traces, we classify those traces using the training model, and then we obtain predictions with these predictions are the output class probabilities, which are used to compute key rank and then guessing entropy and success rate. So what we ask ourselves is what we can learn from these predictions in a way that we can do better. So just a visual example here what we have. This problem of metrics in the left side, so in this case, we are attacking a basket as implementation, we have results here for one key bite attack with the Hemingway model, and then we can see that with test and validation accuracy, they are very low, they are decreasing. So if you judge the attack by this metrics, we would say the attack is not successful. But if we compute guessing entropy out of the predictions that from this test trace, we can see that it's actually decreasing. So more, it's just a matter of having more test traces to reach a successful attack. So predictions or class output class probabilities actually have a lot of important information for side channel analysis with deep learning and machine learning methods. So here I have a representation in an array of these those output class probabilities. So what we have here, so assuming that we what we have here are the predictions, when we have Hemingway model. So every row in this table corresponds to a test trace, and every column corresponds to a label. So Hemingway to label, for example. So every element in this array represents the probability that that trace I in the row I have label J, so have a certain Hemingway. Now let's say that we have a key guess K from the test traces, and then we label this all the traces according to that key guess. This is a very simple process because we know the key we know the plain text key, of course, and we don't know but we have the guest of the key. So and then by labeling the all the traces according to the key guess, we can extract the corresponding probabilities from this table. And then extracting every probability, we can compute the log summation of it and which leads to the probability that this test traces contains key, the key guess K. So and the recovered key would be, of course, the maximum summation of probabilities among all the 256 candidates because here we are talking about attacking one key byte. Let's assume that we have a test accuracy of 100%. So we have a model that learns pretty much very well from the side channel leakage. And then when we test the traces, we achieve 100% of test accuracy. This is a very ideal scenario. And then what happens then is that the summation probabilities for the correct key candidate will select the highest probability from every row in every from every row from this table. So very likely with one or two traces, the the attack will be already successful. However, if we have a very low test accuracy, meaning that the implementation, the target implementation is protected with countermeasures or it has a lot of noise, for example, then the test accuracy can be very low. And the summation of this probability to compute the key rank will not select the highest probability in every row. It can select the highest sometimes, I would say 27% of the times, but for the 73% of the traces, it will select either the second, the third, and so on. So then the summation of probabilities for all the key candidates will be very similar to each other. However, and I will show in the next slides how still this low accuracy can lead to a successful attack. So if we rank all the key candidates by all the key by accuracy, let's say, oh, we would have something like this, let's say, we would select always the highest. So the accuracy considered only the classified information. So and then if we consider only accuracy to rank the keys, we could have this type of sorting where the correct key candidate is not the highest. So by using accuracy, we might say that the attack failed. If we consider the second highest probabilities in every row, we could say that, I mean, selecting only the second candidate, the second highest probability, not the highest one, because the highest one would be really accuracy that the library gives to you. But the second highest would be, for example, one that gives the correct key candidate as the highest one among all the key candidates. So if we repeat this process for all the nine ranks in the output class probability, we could have something like this. Sometimes we have the correct key as the main one, but most of the time as the least one. And this is what we observed in most of the times when the attack is successful. What we can see is that in the low ranks, these values will have a very large influence on the final key rank, on the summation of the probability summation for the for the key rank calculation. And the probabilities that are not ranked as the first ones will have a very small influence on that. So low ranks, this pushes the summation of for the correct candidate up and high ranks pushes the summation of the summation for the probability down. So that explains why even with a small accuracy the correct the attack can still be successful. Here is a real example on the leaky AS where we have some sort of good enough accuracy to recover the key with very few amount of traces. I believe this with this example 10 to 20 traces we can already get the key. And the test accuracy is 48 percent. And if we make the plot that I explained the previous slides now for this real scenario we will see that most of the for the correct key candidate most of the output class probabilities for every trace they are among the first ones. They are among the first say the first ranking as first, the second or third and very little as the fourth and almost never as the highest ranks. So I would say that output class probability for the correct labels are most partial towards ranks one and two and three. And basically when the for the high rank, ranking probabilities it basically never almost never appears for this for this trace set. The situation is not very the same but similar I would say in nature for a for a mascot AS implementation where the accuracy that we obtain is very low 22 percent. But we can still see that for the correct key candidates the class probabilities are still high for the low ranks. So what ranks one and two it's very high it's not the highest but it's very it's it's among the highest. And for the and for the high ranks after ranks five let's say it appears as the least as let's say the smallest probabilities in every row for the prediction table. So the summation probability will not be affected too much by this probability rank as high but will be affected by those probability ranks as the one and two and three. And that is this is the reason why this attack the key rank as a metric can can lead can indicate a successful attack. But as we've talked before hyperparameters are very important to be let's say to be tuned in a in a deep learning attack for side channel analysis. So in this case I have two examples here where we have two convolutional neural networks and both in both cases we have successful key recovery but we just change it one parameter that is one hidden layer one thanks layer in the between these two CNNs and then what we see is the very big difference in the distribution of class probability ranks for both situations. This explains that is more modifications in the models the hyperparameter leads to big modifications in the how predictions are done. So it's what we saw is that tuning the hyperparameters we can find good models but still we are kept in this situation when we see the the probabilities high for the low ranks but not very really distinctive for from the incorrect key candidates. So a common story in deep learning analysis is that we require a large amount of hyperparameter experiments until we find a good model. So usually in across other domains loss function is used as minimizing the loss functions is the main goal and for as inside channel analysis we we always need to select the correct metric that is guessing entropy or success rate or some other special metric that can be proposed and by minimizing for example guessing entropy we can also define a good model. So we train multiple models until we find the best one and then from this and by electing a best one we can say we can we might achieve a success a good generalization where which leads to a good successful attack in the test phase. But then the main question we had to ourselves by when we went through this expensive process of training multiple new neural networks was why not benefit from these multiple models instead of just selecting a single best model and then we proposed the usage of ensembles. So I will not give too much details about different types of ensembles here in this presentation but I can reinforce that what we used here was bootstrap aggregating so basically the bagging method which combines the predictions of one way to do that is to combine the predictions of multiple neural networks into one. So basically what we do is the in the key rank summation for every key candidate what we do is to put an outer summation for all the models. So we don't need to of course to select to sum up all the models that we train but if we can if we are able to define what are a group of good models then we can choose this group of good models and then to do the summation. Always using this metric of minimizing Gaussian entropy as the metric to select good models. So basically this is a function of different hyper parameters the train traces the validation traces. Here a visual example using the distribution of class probabilities rank of why ensembles provide improvement in the generalization. So here we have we trained 50 models and then from these 50 models we selected 10 best models and then we made the summation of a class probabilities of all these 10 models. And if we compare this now the the line of correct key candidate in this class probability rank density distribution if we compare that to the to the single best model out of this 50 we can see that the ensembles the line for the ensembles is much more distinctive from the incorrect key candidates. The line of ensembles for the correct candidate is higher for ranks one and two for example. Here the attack is successful the model is this is the this plot represents on the right the best model out of 50 training models but is still the ranks for key candidates the sorry there the density for the class probability ranks one and two are the highest but is still not really distinctive from the rest even though this provides the the highest summation probability for the key correct candidate visually we cannot see very well what is the what is the correct key candidate but here with ensembles it's much more clear. We tested in this paper for different data sets two data sets has one has no countermeasures and three of them they have countermeasure even though dp84 is a very weak countermeasure for to be assumed as a protected target but ascad and chest CTF data sets that we use it in this paper they are they can be considered as masking implementation so we yeah so we assume that our method works also for against masking implementation. The hyperparameters that we so the range of hyperparameters that we define for different models that we combine into an ensemble so again maybe I skipped this part but when we do an ensemble you train multiple neural network models by varying the hyperparameters of each model and then what we do here is to randomly select hyperparameters out of these range and then for every model basically we can say that the model is random this is not a really random search because we define some range that are most kind of optimal range based on literate results for sidechain analysis. So here are some results that we obtained on the ascad data set using handy weight model for MLP and CNN. Every plot here so on the right on the left sorry I have plots for gas entropy on the right for success rate and we have three main lines one is the green line that represents the gas entropy for the best single model out of 50 models and the green and the blue and the orange line they represent the ensemble of 50 models and 10 models respectively. So we can clearly see from the analysis that we have done that ensembles either with 10 models or all 50 models they provide superior results. So we never saw a situation when the single best model was superior than the ensembles. It can be similar very close to it like here in the case of CNN but never clearly superior. So ensembles is a good way to go is a safe choice when you want to improve generalization when you are trying multiple models with some reasonable range in your hyper parameters. Also results for identity model on this ascad data set we can see again that ensembles provides better success rate and gas entropy than simply electing a best model. So some conclusions of this work we can assume that output class probabilities they are a valid distinguisher for side channel analysis. This is the information that we use to compute of course gas entropy and success rate but more information we believe can be extracted from the output class probability in order to do to have it as a valid distinguisher and more stronger distribution. So also we can use this information we can see that this information the predictions or class probabilities they are very sensitive to small changes in hyper parameter. This is not really a novelty to say that but what we wanted to reinforce in this work is that when we have these variations in the results Ensembling many modules can remove these small variations that we have by changing a little hyper parameter a little bit the hyper parameters and then it can improve results. But we do not assume that ensembles replace hyper parameter search. What we say in this paper is that they relax the fine tuning of hyper parameter. So from many experiments we have done we always saw that guessing entropy and success rate for ensembles tends to be superior to the ones obtained from single models. Also ensembles they do not improve learnability from the model. It doesn't mean that after using ensembles the mod learns more. What we have is that ensembles will improve what the models already learned. So that's what they do. And also positive thing is that limited amount of models can be enough to build the strong ensembles. If you are using good hyper parameters and then you are tuning them combining those models can lead to you don't need a lot of models hundred or thousands of models you just need 10 to 50 models for example in some cases to achieve a good ensemble. And so this work we saw from this work we saw many opportunities to continue exploring more the benefits of ensembles. So we want to explore in the future work different methods for ensembles like stacking for example and also one thing that we find very interesting would be to see the benefit of ensembles in combination with other regularization methods. So ensembles can be considered a regularization method in the end but then combined with other an efficient regularization method we believe that could lead to interesting results. Also to formalize the density distribution of class probabilities that we we have seen in this in these slides in this paper so it could be a nice interesting future work. So this could lead to a very nice metric for deep learning side channel analysis. Okay so I would like to thank you to watch this presentation and I also would like to say that our code to reproduce the results from this paper is available in our github page from our lab and feel free to download and try it. So thank you very much and


Yeah, I'm gonna take yeah chairman chairman prerogative and say that we're we're now two minutes over But we have there's lots of push-and-pull in the in the program before You talk one of the things that I forgot to do right at the beginning was to go around the room and Get people to introduce themselves. I please don't tell me your life story Just who you are and what institution if I'm we're gonna start at that corner right there Pressure's on Mike Mike Mike Mike Scott, whatever your name is Scott ways partners healthcare Scott Waldman Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia David Ledbetter guising their health system Chris Bradburn Johns Hopkins University applied physics lab. I'm Steve Blile from Intermountain Health Care I'm Jonas. I'll make it from UAV Lora Nelson chief medical officer in Marshfield Clinic Beth Cobb Cincinnati Children's Julie Johnson University of Florida Patrick Bender National Institute of Mental Health David Emok Medical College of Wisconsin Medical College of Wisconsin Children's Hospital of Wisconsin Debbie Nickerson University of Washington John John Harley Cincinnati Children's Hospital Mary Relling St. Jude Children's Research Hospital Howard McLeod University, North Carolina Chapel Hill Paul Riker Brigham women's Hospital in Boston Murray Brilliant Marshfield Clinic Ron Miller. I am as health supporting the Air Force SG 9z project Joe Anne Armstrong at now Naomi Aronson Technology Evaluation Center Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association Oh, sorry, Perla work partners healthcare Boston Jeff Ginsburg Duke University Jean Passamani NHGRI Rex Chisholm Northwestern University Chicago welcome to Chicago Thank You Rex Terry Monoglio from Gino Dan Roden Vanderbilt Eric Green Brad Ozemer NHGRI Mark Williams guising our health system Heidi Rehm partners health care David Valley Johns Hopkins Howard Jacob Medical College of Wisconsin who has been through key lab core Toby Citrin at the Center for Public Health and Community Genomics University machine school of public health Sean Tunis Center for Medical Technology Policy Good morning Ned Colange. I'm with the head of the EGAP working group and with the Colorado Trust and University Colorado Mike Murray Brigham women's hospital and partners health care Martin Schumer VA Greater Los Angeles and UCLA Melissa Bathford Vanderbilt Mark Geyer NHGRI Kelly Frazier University of California at San Diego Urban Bodin Jamount Sinai New York We're a good man come Ohio State University Rognini NHGRI Peter O'Donnell University of Chicago Andy Friedman NCI Lucia Hendorf NHGRI Dina Paltu NHLBI use Kenna Kamura University Chicago Andy Fawcett Geisinger Health System Jeff screwing NHGRI Simone of all being NHGRI Kerasen Cleveland Clinic Kate Nathan sin problem in school of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Josh Denny Vanderbilt Olivia Harris Mandy UC San Diego Federico in the shant University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Scott Devine University of Maryland Laura Melosson Vanderbilt and Robin who organized this meeting is circulating somewhere so That that is the end of our our introductory session sort of where we have come from and And I thought the little exchange just now across the table was like a taste of what we want to hear over the next day and a half So that's very exciting and and we'll start with with Heidi rim from we'll start with two talks First of which will be Heidi rim and the second of which will be Deborah Leonard and the idea here is to hear from people who are implementing Genomic medicine in academic laboratories So Heidi you're on great. Thank you for coming


I always think about the metaphor of the heart, right? The heart beats 24 hours a day, but the only reason that it's able to do that is because it rests between beats. And so for ambitious, hard-driving people like a lot of your clients, it's really important to get very deliberate about that rest. Otherwise, you run the risk of burning out. And so, you know, I wrote a book for working parents who are like, you know, the most busy people of all, right, because they're either doing one hugely demanding task or another. And so you think, oh, well, those kinds of people don't have a chance to rest at all. Actually, those are the people that are most in need of rest and they're gonna have to be pretty creative and deliberate about doing it. So there's lots of ways to do that. And one way is exactly what you're saying, Michael, which is like detach and give yourself permission to do that. And when guilty thoughts crop up, remind yourself that part of what you're doing is allowing yourself to do the hard-driving tasks more effectively because you're taking a break and recharging your battery. If you don't do that, you're not gonna be able to do the work that is important to you. And so what can often happen for people who are really ambitious is that every time they take a step back to take a rest, they feel so guilty and that guilt really interferes with the rest being productive rest. So what we want is to have productive rest so that when we return to the roles that we care about, we have a lot to give to them in a more enduring, sustainable way. What I also found is that in my own life is that when I do take those rests, that's when my default mode network kind of kicks in and gives me the solutions to all the problems that I've been trying to figure out for the past two weeks. But the moment I take that paintbrush and I start painting, it's like 10 minutes later, oh, here's an idea. Oh, this is how I could do it. This is how I could do it. It's like, yeah, those two hours of painting were like well invested because I got a couple of solutions to my problems that I've been pondering for an entire week and here we go. Totally, that's another great way and science-backed way that we can actually use our multiple roles and downtime to be productive for our work. So what you're pointing to is, some people call it the Eureka effect and Archimedes had this realization about the buoyancy principle, but he wasn't working. He was in the bathtub and he had this insight and it was probably actually, I think that story is known to be more myth than fact, but it refers to something that most people can have had that experience, like you have a fight with your partner and then you're in the shower two hours later and you're like, ah, now I have the perfect response, right? Your default mode network was sort of working in the outside of your conscious awareness and that's where creative thinking comes. So if we're always focused in a very conscious way on the problem, we don't have a chance to get access to that really creative thinking that doesn't filter out what can sometimes be crazy thoughts that can sometimes be really powerful, creative solutions to our most hard-pressed problems. And so again, thinking about that downtime as really beneficial can help us alleviate the guilt and really very deliberately and fully step into turning off work. And that is really helpful for burnout. And it is, Michael, as you're noting, really helpful for creative problem solving. It's a really strategic way to do it. And this actually has a name. It's called the incubation effect. And it's when we consciously stop thinking about a problem and allow our default mode network. This is sort of the part of the brain that's outside of conscious awareness to get to work. And that only then, this isn't the only way to be creative, but it's a very powerful way to be creative. But in that incubation process is when really creative solutions can come out almost as if they're coming out of nowhere. But it's from your own brain processes that you activate.


All right, I believe we are live. So welcome, Rebecca, or Rebecca holds you. I know, I think this is my first time on YouTube. I'm scared. No, you've been on YouTube. I've seen your YouTube videos. You've seen me on YouTube? Where? I know, right? I'm like, what? I'm on YouTube? I'm sure that some things have been like, are you perfect? We don't have a YouTube channel.  I don't think I've been live on YouTube. Live on YouTube is definitely, yeah, that's just the same as being on YouTube, except we're not editing this thing, so it's going to be really authentic. So all right, we have kind of known about each other for years, I think mainly because of Tad Hargrave, marketing for hippies, you guys don't know, it's a great, great guy, great teachings and things.  Yeah. Yeah, and yeah, so that's kind of the point of like kind of like colleagues from that place. And I've always thought, wow, you look like you have a pretty great business and you have a Facebook group of 15,000 people and your team is very active and kind of caring for the members and you have a coaching program, a year long coaching program that's very active as well and a couple of hundred people in there and I was just part of your series. And by the way, folks, we're going to talk about in this video, in this interview, I'm going to be, we're going to be talking about how do we grow a business, particularly in the beginning, because there are a lot of people who are watching this who are either in the beginning, like as a life coach or a nutritionist or a holistic healer, but haven't gotten traction yet or maybe it's been a year or two or even longer and you're still looking for the best ways to get traction in a way that feels authentic or feels good to you. So we are going to be touching on the topic of how do we do that without relying on social media? And because Rebecca just hosted a whole series of, it was like a dozen, no, like 15 or something people, right? Experts who all contributed to this topic of how might we do this without social media? I have to say I was the lone rebel saying, well, I'm going to talk about social media anyway. Actually, a few others did. A few others did. I actually listened to, I think all of them actually. Oh, cool. Did you learn anything new? I did. I mean, it was amazing how there were a couple of common strategies that people were talking about, like going to live events, meeting people and reaching out to your existing people and how people heard about you and having a good offer and things like that. But everybody talked about it in such interesting ways. And so again, right now as of this recording, the series is not available at this time, but Rebecca, you're going to relaunch it in the summer of 24. Yeah, it was such great content. We did it kind of as a time limited thing. And now we're like, well, shoot, we hope all this amazing content that we should reuse. So we are going to do an encore presentation of it, not till August. So it's very far away. Everyone who's watching this will forget about it by then. But maybe they'll be pleasantly surprised when they see us promoting it. Yeah. And, Becca, you already have an evergreen free training on how to do business without, so how to grow your business without social media. Yes, it definitely did not have as many strategies as was in the series. Yeah, but still, it's what worked for you and what you recommend to your people. So I will be linking that below. So those of you watching this on YouTube live, sorry, you got to wait until after I finish this, but you can actually, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to pull this up because I have your website up here and I just want to make sure that it's already, people can already go there if they want to. There it is. Yay. There it is. This is fun. Yeah. You need to do a website review for me? Oh, well, maybe, no. I'll roast it right now. No, well, let's go to the free. Can you imagine? You start tearing it apart. It's like, you weren't expecting that. So, and then here it is, how to build your business without social media for your training and there it is. So folks, check it out, theuncagedlife.com slash no dash social. And I'm sure it's good. So I haven't watched yet, but. You don't need to watch it. You know the strategies already. Well, hearing how you interviewed the others in the series, I know you know your stuff and the series itself, let me just take a minute to talk about this. Like, it was the most interesting collab, collaboration I've been part of, as far as long as I remember. And I've been here since 2009. Yeah. Because usually when you do a summit, right? And for those of you watching this, if you're thinking of doing collaborations with colleagues and like the traditional way is either to start a podcast and interview, do interviews like this, maybe YouTube live or whatever, Facebook live, Instagram live, the difference and or like create a whole summit where it's like really intense and you have to like so much organizing and the difference with how Becca did it was, we did it over voice messaging back and forth. Right. And you didn't use the Voxer app before this, correct? I never used the app. Okay, most other people had, I think it was you and someone else who were like, I've never used this before, but... Yeah, because if I were to do it, I'd probably do it on either Facebook messaging or like WhatsApp or something like that. But it doesn't matter because it worked out well. And what was special about this is when you're in the live interview like this, you have to respond in real time, kind of just off the cuff, right? Like just shoot from the hip. What other analogies can I use? No.  Whereas with the messages we were passing back and forth, you know, you were willing to wait an hour or a day before you... Yeah, it was a few days in between some of them. I had to go back and listen. I was like, shit, what did they say again? Exactly. Yeah, so it was great because we worried, but I was like, these are the smartest people I've ever met. Like how come these interviews are so smart? I'm like, oh, that's right. They had time to think. Right. And most of them, you don't have time to think. And this is, I mean, were you planning on this being one of the major factors of why this is different? Or it's just kind of happened that way. It was more that I really like the Voxer. So the app that we use is called Voxer. It's a voice message app. It's similar to WhatsApp, but you don't need somebody's phone number to add them. And you can listen in real time. So like if you were leaving me a message now, I could be listening to it as you're doing it. So it's kind of like an easy way to have conversations when you don't want to get on like a call like this. And so I use it all the time in my business with other business colleagues and friends. And it's just kind of the way that we catch up and keep in touch with each other. And I like it because it's something you can do. Like I'll often be walking my dog and I'll be messaging someone being like, hey, about that strategy we were talking about, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, wow, I do this all the time. And it is where like so many good ideas come from. And it's so different than if I was, I don't, I would never get on a Zoom call with any of the people that I talk to normally on Voxer. Like we would do an interview, but we wouldn't have these kind of like casual conversations like we do in the app. And I was like, that's interesting. And there's something about it. And I liked that you don't have to get on video. And I liked that we're not setting, what actually what I liked about it was that when we were inviting our collaborators like you and everybody else, we didn't have to be like, okay, so we're going to schedule an interview. We're going to do the whole thing. It was like, it's going to happen over the course of these like one or two weeks. And that's pretty flexible.  And so it felt like there was just more flexibility and easier for people to be like, I can do that. I don't have to get ready. Don't have to look video ready. Don't have to be sitting at my desk at a certain time. Yeah.  No, I'm kidding. I was saying I put on the zoom filter today, but yes. No. Yeah, I mean, it's just a different, it's different. Yeah, it was different. And I loved how one of them, I'm now forgetting the name, like she was just waking up and she was like, oh, you know what, it felt so real. It felt so real. People are like, they're like doing, you can hear things in the background, they're like doing dishes. We tried to keep the audio. Shaking in the ears, you know, where you could hear the dogs, you know, shaking around. Yeah, that was me, my dog shaking in the background. Yeah, and like it did, it turned out really well. And I don't remember if I told you this, I did tell a lot of the people I was participating. We might have actually been finished our conversation, but I, in the middle of all of this, I was going through a pretty bad personal playing, a pregnancy loss, yeah, literally in the middle of the interviews. And so it was like, I was like, oh my God, I have to, so thank God I didn't have a bunch of Zoom calls scheduled because I could give myself, and I let people know we're gonna be delayed and I gave myself a couple of days and I was like, I just need some time before you'll hear a response from this. And it still worked, like the interviews, I don't know, probably didn't sound quite as cheery in the second half of the interviews, but I do think that's another reason why I love things that are not done with these scheduled time slots because it really does allow you to have the flexibility of like all the things that are gonna happen in your life. Yes, yes. And you put it into a private podcast feed and one of the people you interviewed was the founder of the private podcast feed software. Yeah, yeah, Lindsay, hello audio. Yeah, and so it was interesting. Anyway, I just wanted to mention that because anyone who's thinking of collaboration and doesn't want to do a lot of video and lights the flexibility of what we just talked about, again, you're just recording messages back and forth with your colleagues. And the nice thing, like I said, is that it gave me time to think. It gave me time to like, okay, what would be a better response? And sometimes I waited a day before I set something so that it would be a better contribution than if I just off the cuff immediately set something. So that was- I will say that as a strategy, it is, I mean, I didn't do the tech stuff because I have a wonderful team that does that, it is more to implement because you have to download every conversation individually. So we had to like figure out how to get ginger into those conversations and then stitch them all together and then actually get them into the private podcast. So there are a couple of little tech things that we had never done before because we never knew to us. It's not a big deal. And I think a lot of people again, who are just starting out, have more time than money. So it's- They got time to figure it out. It's not a big deal to just download these audios and then just use any kind of basic audio editing tool.  I'm sure you just piece of it. I don't know how to do any of that these days. Yeah, but these days- Yeah, I love Hello Audio. I would definitely put in a plug for Hello Audio because it's been such a cool tool. We use it for our blogs. So basically anytime I write new content on blog or newsletter, I read it on Hello and put it onto a podcast on Hello Audio. So if people are like, I hate reading blogs but I can easily listen to these 10 minute episodes. Kind of another way to get content in front of people. We've used it for freebies. Yeah, there's all kinds of cool ways that you can use it. That's really great. Okay, I wanna, as promised, talk about marketing without social media, particularly for those who don't have a large audience.  But they're starting out, obviously they have some friends, colleagues who might be willing to help them out. But what is your, and I know you have a whole free training on this. So maybe kind of give me just a very brief outline anyway of what the strategy is and we'll have a conversation around that. Yeah, so a lot of the strategy is, it's funny, cause in the free training, we're like, bear with us cause we'll get to the strategies. But there's like this preliminary stuff that we need to talk about first. And that is all, a lot of, like that's what my program focuses on. So obviously we're gonna talk about that. But that is really, I think it's a strategy on its own but all of that is like clarity and specificity and clarity of the niche, ability to talk about what you do, specificity in what you do, ability for other people to just easily understand it, not covering it with kind of language and jargon, right? So a lot of it is that those like foundational bits that I could give you the best marketing strategy in the world. And if you can't articulate who you help, it doesn't, the strategy means nothing, right? So I feel like if you're gonna watch the training, know that we're gonna talk about those things first because those things need to be in place. And I'll sometimes have people come to me and they're like, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, like I have all that. I just wanna know the strategy like YouTube, this or that. And I'm like, okay, well, I look at their website and I'm like, I don't even know what you do. Like the strategy is I'm not going to help you. And so we have to get these things nailed down.  So I feel like it's hard to talk about the like, go post five times on YouTube and go do whatever without having that base. Yeah, it's a good point because it's a very good point because it's true. A lot of times, beginners, people who are not super marketing savvy think that just like you said, oh, if you just use YouTube or if you just use Instagram, like suddenly all the clients are gonna start happening and you just need to post, some people tell me, George, just tell us like Tuesday at 11 a.m. you should post here. And then on Thursday at 4 p.m. Which cash thanks? If you just do that, then you'll be fine. You'll be checking all the boxes and somehow crimes will show up. And you're right. It's like, I always tell people like, money comes from, your income comes from other people deciding to spend money.  And if they don't want what you have or they don't understand what you have, well, then it doesn't matter how much you post. You post five times a day and have a 10,000 person audience. And I've seen that. I've seen social media accounts with tons of thousands and tens of thousands of followers and having conversations with them privately.  So, and then on the other hand, I've also known people who have no social media presence whatsoever, but they're kind of like a best kept secret because what they do is super helpful for people and people know exactly how to refer people. Or referral based. Yeah. So it's not enough, right? Is it not enough to say, I'm a life coach and I can help you with anything because my life coach will allow you to. Yeah, and I think I've just had that too where I've had people come to me and they're like, I am like, took a course in social media. I even hired it out. I hired an agency and they're doing all this work and I look at their social and it looks great. I'm like, oh, this is really pretty and I start poking through, but I'm like, you're not saying anything. Like there's nothing in here. You're not, first of all, you're never selling. There's nothing in here that's telling me that you have a service available. And it's a lot of like quotes and memes and images and like nice ideas, but like it's not, it's not something that's gonna make me click over and be like, holy shit, I need to pay you money right now for this. And so it's too bad because I feel like people who do that, like people are trying hard, right? New business owners, no one is sitting, most new business aren't sitting around being like, well, I hope the clients just come in. Like they're really trying to implement these strategies, at least the people when they get to me and probably when they get to you. And so it's sad to see that it's not working. And so I'm such like, just like I'm constantly beating the drum of this message of like, it just has to be niched in and it has to be clear. And it's not something to be taken personally. If people don't like what you're selling, it doesn't mean that you're not good at what you do and you're never gonna have clients. It just means you're not articulating it well or you haven't identified exactly what the thing is that they wanna pay for. And that's what the work is. There are so many problems in the world that people have so much pain that people are going through, so much healing that they want to do, actually, and things that they want to achieve that there's more than enough clients out there for everyone if we could only just offer them what they want. So one of the points I've been making, I like being a rebel as you know, and I'm curious what you think about this or whether we can agree to disagree. But I tell people, listen, if you're having a really hard time like taking all of your multi-talented, multi-passion stuff into one niche for your entire professional identity, I say, hey, listen, maybe you can let go of niching yourself, but you do need to niche your offers. Yes. Yeah. Okay, so. Yeah, no, I agree with that. I think what I've seen though is then people are like, okay, well, and they create like a bunch of different offers that are totally unrelated, but then try to sell them from kind of one home base. And I'm like, mm, it's fine. I think I agree. I totally think you can have a niche didn't offer that's super narrow. I think everyone should have that. And you spend the time marketing it and you sell it out. And then it would almost be like you're moving on to then switching all of your marketing, all your messaging to like this different offer, which is fine if it's just a lot of work. If some people want to do that though, I totally think it's fine to play around with different offers, but not at the same time. Like you can't be selling five different offers in different niches in an effective way at the same time. Unless you have a lot of time on your hands, but even then I don't think it works. Right, I think that's reasonable. It's the whole thing of, you chase two rabbits, you catch neither one. Right, yeah. So it is sort of like if there's a momentum being built with your audience, your network, remembering you for this, and then you switching gears and offering this other thing, it's just gonna, it's possible, it's just gonna take them, you know, adjusting their minds. Like if they have to build up again for the new thing, which is fine if you want to do that. And every time you do it, you learn how to do it better. Right, so it is like you, if you're really great at marketing, you can actually do that more effectively. The problem is it takes people some time to get really great at marketing enough to be able to do that. Yeah, so then this clarifying of the offer into something that people actually want to buy is one of those, maybe one of the foundations or the main thing that your coaching program helps with. Yeah, like a lot of my students will come in and have kind of a, even if they have a niche, they'll be like my niches, you know, life, like life transitions and grief, you know. Oh my gosh, I hear that a lot. The loss of a job, or getting divorced, or loss of, or moving cultures, or death. And I'm like, right, so they have what they feel is sort of like a theme, or they think it's a niche, it's really more of kind of a broad theme. And we just like work to get it to something so specific. Because I'd much rather somebody niche and offer and sell that out than stress about finding like the perfect niche for their whole entire business forever. Because, yeah. Yes, now, okay. What would you say to somebody who says, oh, I don't like, I don't know how I would say this, like it's almost like they're saying, I don't like being concrete about it, because the work I do is so much deeper. I don't know if you've heard that. Yeah, I mean, I have a lot to say to them. I mean, I will usually, I understand because I have been there, most of the people we've worked with have been there. And I think what, I will usually articulate all the reasons to go more narrow and remind them that like when you get in the door, when you get a client in, even in this narrow niche, they are still a client sitting in front of you with all of their problems. And so like, you still get to do the deep work. I'd argue you get to actually do deeper work when you're niched in because you can really get into it. Whereas if you're working with 10 different people, with 10 different, completely different problems and different niches, then you never really get to develop your skills around like that particular niche. So I do think you get deeper with your coaching and your skills when you niche in. And then I let people kind of choose. I'm like, great, like if you, I definitely have had students who are like, nope, I don't wanna do it. I'm just gonna stay out here and stay kind of broad. I'm like, great, go on to our next module, go on to the next steps, see how it goes. Like, I'm not here to tell you it's not gonna work, like maybe it'll work. And so we go on, they test it out. They almost inevitably come back and are like, okay, it's too hard. We're like, I'm finding everyone kind of wants this one thing. And so then it's like, okay, so maybe we like nudge a little bit more that way. So I think sometimes you do just have to experience it. Like any coach can tell you to niche. And if you're just resisting it, you're not gonna do it. So I do like to allow people to kind of find it on their own through taking the next steps versus trying to force them into something that's just not gonna feel good from the beginning. It usually feels good by the end. When they start to see, they're like, okay, I'm just gonna try this one narrow area and then clients come in and they start getting paid and they start being like, whoa, this work is like, I'm actually getting to do the work. They usually are like, okay, this is good. This is a good decision. But sometimes it just takes time to get there, which I totally respect. Yeah, and clients who come for this one thing, one specific thing, like you said, once they like your energy signature, I call it, I mean, they're much more willing to, it feels natural to talk about other things and you could start presenting other possibilities to them. But I'm actually glad we focused on this because marketing on social media, well, there's a whole free training that you offer, which we will link to. But this thing is so key that if you don't get the offer right, I mean, if you do get the offer right, let's say, it's not like it sells itself because you do have to still tell people about it, but it's like the telling people about it, it's not rocket science. You could literally write a list of 20 supporters in your life, friends, colleagues, class, fellow classmates or whatever, and then get their opinion about it, get their feedback. But it's like, if people light up and go, oh my gosh, I can think of, oh, this is very clear. Oh, I can think of this, oh, it's very, I can definitely imagine thinking of people that to refer to you, that's such good news. And then the marketing part of it becomes much easier and it becomes like a mission, I think. Because once you start helping people and you're like, oh man, I'm really good at this. Like people need my help. And then it's like, of course, I mind what people know. I feel like when you stay broad and you're kind of like still trying to even articulate what you do and you can't even get anyone in the door because no one really quite understands it, it's like you're not even getting to do the work that you set out to do. It's like you're just stuck in this marketing shipstorm where you can't get anything, right? Like you niche in and you get clients in and it's like, oh, okay, I was so resistant to niching, but niching is what's actually allowing me to work with people. And do I wanna focus on marketing being so hard because it doesn't make any sense or do I wanna actually work with people? And I think once people get in and they're actually doing the work, it's almost like they laugh at how hard niching was for them because they start to see it's not that big a deal. It actually allows you to do what you wanna do. And there's still wiggle room within the niche and there's room to go deeper and there's still room to pivot as you go. It's just so much easier to get started. Yeah, that's really good. And it's nice that you have a coaching program focused on that because you've got a couple hundred people in there that there's this kind of momentum that's built and people, members probably feel safer and more supported to actually take these steps, which is great. So I'm really glad you're offering it. I'll be sure to link that below as well. And my goodness, the time is already flying by. So is there anything else you loved saying to those folks who are in the beginning-ish stages of growing your business?  Cause I find a lot of people come and I did this to where I was like, I had this concept or this idea and I was like, I'm gonna start a business around it. And once you get into it, it's like you start to realize like this is my idea but your business is actually about other people. Your business is actually more about other people than it is about you. And so being willing to like take the feedback and do the market research and take what they are telling you and shift your idea. Cause I find it's people who get her so rigid with like, no, it's gonna be this thing and are not willing to change it that just end up spinning in circles. And so I just think you have to have that flexibility where it's like, it's your idea and it's the market. And then like, how do we mesh those things together? I think that's the thing that I see my students coming into my program will often ask me like what's the difference between people who are successful in the program and people who aren't. And one of my first answers is like, you have to be willing to just move with what you're seeing and not get so hung up on the thing that you came in with. I love that. Yeah. This is, I think the danger of, well, ironically people, they might even come in thinking they've niched themselves. Right? Like they might even done the work with other programs or other coaches or whatever. And so they get, I call it like they get so ossified into one identity and it's painful to let that, this is me go. And this is why I soften the message by saying, you don't have to niche yourself, but do niche your offer. And you can have a thousand offers in your lifetime, a hundred offers in your lifetime at the very least. I certainly have. But if you want to make money sooner rather than later, or like you said, business is more about other people, if you want to be about yourself, then it's a hobby, which is fine. You could keep it a hobby and do it for friends. You can do it for yourself. I've said that cold hard fact to people too, where I'm like, do you want to make money? And of course we're not just saying, do you want to make money at any cost and throw out all your ethics and all the things, but like, do you want to make money or do you want to have an idea that you're kind of just going to try to play with because the way to make money is to go in this direction, the way to make money faster. And I think that's really important when you're new because the thing that makes people burn out is going for so long and not seeing any traction. And so I want to prevent people from doing that. And it's like, just get some money coming in from one niche offer. And then you can totally change your mind, I don't care, but like you need to see that positive feedback and that positive return, literally like in your bank account to have the motivation to keep going. So like, let's get that happening. And then we can talk about like the thing over here and all the other ideas. Yeah. And I mean, it's fine to have kind of two tracks in your efforts. One is, all right, this is going to create a livelihood sooner because I'm really solving people's painful problems or their most intriguing goals that they're willing to pay for. And then on this side, parallel, I'm doing my hobby and this might turn into a long-term audience who's going to buy anything I want to sell, that I feel like selling. But that is a long-term pathway. But yeah, so I'm grateful that we are talking about this because that really is like 80% of the way there whereas the marketing, social media part of it is way smaller. Honestly, to me, I'm like, that's so easy. Here's 12 ways you can go market your business. Like any of them are fine, they can all work, play around, see which one you like best. But like when the messaging is solid and the niche is there and there's like a compelling offer, it's any of them, I don't care which one you do. I feel like I'm like marketing model agnostic.  It doesn't actually matter, all of them work. Yeah, yeah, this is great. Thank you so much. And by the way, the Facebook group that you manage, your team manages, 15,000 people is also a good place to go do market research. Yes, yeah, we sort of turned into like a market research hub which I'm okay with because I'm like, people are like, where do I ask people?  Yes, yes. Yeah, so it's definitely great for that. And a great place to potentially find collaborations as well because a lot of people in there are growing and they're learning a lot of this stuff. So I'll be sure to link that below as well but you can also find it on Facebook, it's Uncaged Business. Uncaged Lifers is the free. Uncaged Lifers, L-I-F-E-R-S. So okay, well I'll link those things below. Yeah, great. Thank you so much for showing up. Yeah, thanks, it was nice chatting with you face to face. Yeah, for sure, it was great.