Welcome, everyone. Good morning. This is Washington Circle, our international exchange alumni show, where we are trying to connect alumni with fabulous experts in various fields across different industries. We're joined this morning at the Foreign Press Center by Nancy Gibbs, who's the editor-in-chief of Time. Time has 50 million readers around the world. She's the first woman to hold this prestigious position. She joined Time as a fact-checker in 1985, and she is one of the most published writers in the history of the magazine. She's covered virtually every major news event over the past two decades, including presidential campaigns and the September 11th attacks. She is also co-authored to best-selling presidential history books, and she often appears as a guest on radio and television. Thank you so much for joining us this morning. Thanks for having me. We're honored to have you. In addition to this live viewing audience we have here in New York, we have viewing parties around the world at embassies, consulates, and American spaces. So we just want to give a quick shout-out to our guests in Cuba, Ethiopia, Mauritius, Seychelles, Nigeria, Israel, Canada, Nicaragua, and Guatemala.  Please remember you can always join in the chat space to ask your questions, and you can also tweet us at exchange alumni. You can also use the hashtag Ask Nancy Gibbs. Don't know if you saw that hashtag floating around this week. I hope that doesn't get loose. It might. It might continue on. Our guests in Cuba were the first to ask questions, and so we thought we'd start with them, if that's all right. So the first question from Cuba says, time has featured Fidel Castro a number of times since 1959. Which other Cuban person or subject could become a time front cover page anytime soon? What was interesting was last year or the year before, as the sort of new opening to Cuba was really becoming a reality, we did a cover that was not about a Cuban personality, leader, athlete, artist, but just about what it would mean for Cuba to open up again to the U.S. and for people who have not been able to easily visit for generations to be able to go. And what fascinated me was it was one of the favorite stories when we do research with our readers of what cover stories did you like the most over the course of the year, and our newsstand sales are a teeny tiny fraction, so they don't tell you much, but it was both one of the best selling on the newsstand and one of the ones that our readers liked the most, which just clued me in on the fact that interest in the U.S. at least in Cuba is really significant. So I'm not sure that we would, we always like to tell stories through individuals, but I think people are interested in the country and in what the experience will be like for these two countries to reinvent their relationship. And of course, assuming that that reinvention continues under the next administration and that's going to be the asterisk to probably every single thing we talk about this morning. Very true. Our next question is about women in journalism. So Time Magazine, you have next generation leaders that you feature and we're very proud. Two of them are actually exchange alumni. Ikram Ben-Sahid and Negat Dodd both work in different aspects of women's empowerment and in women's issues. As a woman in journalism, do you feel any special responsibility or pressure to discuss women's issues in the magazine? That's a great question because, and it's one that we, there's a new group at my company, Women at Timing, where we were having a conversation about this very subject. In fact, I'm in a dinner tonight that Harvard Shorenstein Center is running that's about women in journalism. This is very much an active conversation. And I think one of the reasons it's challenging is I always get anxious at anything that sort of treats women as a minority group or as any kind of a monolithic group that at some point, like back in 1974 maybe, Times Man of the Year, it was still called Man of the Year then, was women. It's just like, really? And so where I find myself always getting a little uneasy is thinking about women as an interest group or as a special category because the, I mean we all know this in our own lives, the differences in attitude and interest and priority among individual men and women differs much more than, you know, it's not, so many things are not defined by gender, they're defined by, you know, your job, your family, your community where you grew up, your faith, you know, so many other factors. Having said that, I think that, you know, certainly time for a long time, like many news organizations, especially sort of traditional news organizations, was heavily dominated by men. And, you know, many of you know it took lawsuits for many of these newsrooms to actually start integrating women into their upper editorial ranks. And I can't help thinking that the conversation around the table changed simply by having twice as big a pool of people to draw on when you're hiring writers and editors and when you're promoting writers and editors, that just by definition the range of topics that we would be aware of and thinking about. And so in my newsroom, especially this year, we've been having a lot of conversations about gender, about gender politics, about identity politics, and how to cover this. And there isn't anything like a consensus either among the women or the men or the newsroom as a whole. I'm glad it's a conversation that's going on, but I don't feel as though there is a, there is one specific mission or set of goals and priorities that any woman in a leadership role in media needs to adhere to or work against. I think it's more complex than that because our audience is, especially at time, you know, there are fewer and fewer media organizations, news organizations that are speaking to as broad an audience as we do. It's, as this indicates, it's a global audience. And it's almost equally male and female. And sort of ideologically and politically, we speak to a very wide range of people. That's, as we all know, it's as the president talked about last night. That is less and less the case as we all, you know, find our information bubbles and decorate and inhabit them. And so one of the things I'm most conscious of is thinking it's a huge part of our mission at time to maintain that audience that welcomes everyone into the conversation. And so if I feel like we are skewing one way or another in our approach, that starts to make me anxious. And so again, having the most diverse possible group of people around the table. And I define diversity in very broad terms. I was very, I was angry at Rick Stengel, my predecessor at time, and who went to the State Department, that he took with him at one point the only person in my newsroom who had served active duty in the military. And I felt like we lost a crucial piece of diversity and of insight by losing Nate, who is also just a wonderful colleague and a wonderful journalist. So, you know, it'll be as high a priority to me of like, okay, how do I address that as any other kind of recruiting challenge? And in follow-up to that, some people are wondering what obstacles are women and others when you talked about diversity more broadly facing in the field of journalism nowadays. You mentioned the lawsuits and other changes that have helped shape current newsrooms, but what are the big obstacles now? Yeah, I think we've seen over the years, you know, we've seen so many women rise to the top positions at, you know, everywhere from the New York Times to anchoring the evening news to, you know, very important magazines and newspapers, that this is no longer, I was actually surprised when I was named the editor at time that it was treated as being as big a deal it was that, oh, you know, after 16 men there's now a woman in this position. Because I sort of assumed at this point that these barriers have been coming down. I think that the obstacles to women in many cases are the same as the obstacles to men, which is as a almost a matter of lifestyle journalism has become very challenging. If you're doing it in many parts of the world, it's become very dangerous for men and women alike. If you are, at one point we realized that most of the reporters and photographers we had in combat zones and in the most hazardous postings were all women in their 20s. And we were like, well, this is, that's interesting. That wasn't intentional on anyone's part, but the most sort of frontline reporters during that period was a bunch of really talented, fearless, enterprising women covering really challenging stories. You know, those stories are challenging for men and women. And in the age of 24-7 news, the job really never, you never feel like you're off duty. And so for anyone who's trying to figure out how do you have a balanced life, which I think is important to everyone, I think is particularly important for journalists, I think you have to make time to live in the world that your audience lives in and not just in the world of hyperactive media consumption and creation.  This is not a challenge unique to journalists. It's certainly not distinct to men and women. But I think it's a real one. I mean, I think that the fact that we can be working all the time and feeling like we never can be completely on top of the stories that we're covering because these stories, I mean, think of the last 24 hours. These are just extraordinary amounts of important, interesting, fateful stuff that can happen in one 24-hour period. And so if your job is to make sense of any of this, you feel like your job is constantly impossible. And so it becomes really hard to say, you know what, it's actually more important for me to go take a walk or talk to my kids or meditate or, you know, make a smoothie than it is to just stay continuously revving within the new cycle. I think that's a challenge for certainly all journalists and for a lot of people who are in all of the related fields that we're in. Definitely. I think we all feel that anyone who works in digital media as well. I just want to remind our audience here if you all have any questions, just signal and we'll make sure we get the microphone to you as well. We're going to open the floor here. Does anyone have any questions? Yes? Yes? Okay. We've won in the front row. Good morning, Ms. Gates. Hi, Kristi. I'm a teacher and an educational consultant. I'm concerned about my students' future. So could we talk about climate change and the press? For so many years, the press gave equal voice to climate deniers who had no background in climatology or were hired by oil companies. And climatologists like our own Dr. Wallace Broker, a professor at Columbia University here. As a result, it's now 2017 and many people in America are still confused about the science of climate and climate change. So how does the press help us get out of that quagmire? Yes, I would challenge the idea that the press gave equal coverage or treated climate deniers as being every bit as authoritative and sources as the scientists who were... The standard thing that most stories about having to do with climate policy say is that there is a consensus in the scientific community that climate change is driven by man-made actions. And climate deniers are typically called out as being a minority that is very much at odds with the consensus of the scientific community. And so I don't feel like there's a sort of equal time, all points of view are equally valid in the way that climate change is covered. But, and I think this may be partly what you're getting at, it is exactly because of the siloing of information streams that it is certainly possible for someone to have a media diet that only includes people who are disputing the science of climate change because it is very possible to tailor your sources of information to the ones that support a world view and where you will not encounter any kind of disagreement. And so the larger question is how do you... And again, this is one of the things that the president raised last night as a challenge I think that certainly policymakers feel, politicians feel, journalists feel of who has authority to be orbiters of fact. And I doubt there has been a political season in which Moynihan's injunction about your entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts has been cited more often as having been now challenged, that now people feel entitled to their own facts. And the 2016 was a year in which the notion that there is a set of agreed upon authoritative expert factual knowledge that can be taken as a baseline for debate was routinely undermined by the way the political conversation unfolded. And I think that that's very much where we are now in everything from the age of fake news to the what is reported as proven, what is reported as rumor, what is reported as... Because nothing stays unreported anymore as we are reminded again that the ability... And this goes back, I mean you can sort of put a date on when that started which was when the Drudge Report was first born and published the news about Monica Lewinsky where there were reporters who had been following that story and trying to figure out what was going on in that story but didn't feel that they had proof that met their standards for publishing. And every news organization has how many sources do you need and what kind of evidence will make you confident enough of the truth of a story that you're willing to publish it. And that has been true in newsrooms forever. Now where if a story doesn't meet the standards of these news organizations it will meet the standards of these outlets or this blogger or this individual with a Twitter following and so nothing is ever likely to go unpublished. If by published it means put out into the information ecosystem through one channel or another. The days in which editors like me controlled the channels are obviously long past. And so anyone with an agenda, whether it's an agenda about climate or an agenda about foreign policy or an agenda about health and health care reform or vaccines and whether they're safe. Anyone who has a point of view has a way of sharing it, promoting it, publishing it, whether or not it ever appears in any kind of a traditional news organization. I think that that is the challenge to authority, the challenge to expertise. It has been so much the narrative of this past year and it makes the stakes all the higher for those of us who are operating on principles that what our readers and viewers need most from us is that we be disciplined about our fact checking and our sourcing and how confident are we about something that we're willing to publish it, that there have to be sources that people trust when you are operating at a time when there's so many sources that are not adhering to those standards. So when you mentioned people who have blogs and Twitter accounts with large followings, how they're now able to publish their opinions often as facts, we did get a question as the editor in chief of time, how do you see social media changing the landscape of traditional media and the way the press functions and gets information out and what do you think the future relationship will be between say those people with those large Twitter followings and blogs with traditional press? I'm suspecting most editors keep wondering if this is sort of a devil's bargain where on the one hand if all of us who are in journalism aspire to reach as many people as possible and engage in a conversation with as many people as possible and to just raise the quality of debate about issues that matter. The power of social media to amplify really great reporting and profound insight is extraordinary. Henry Luce was the greatest publisher of the 20th century and in his wildest dreams he would not have been able to reach an audience that we can reach now. Even at a time when I would be the first to admit that time as an institution is less powerful than it was in 1950 or 1960 and yet our audience and our ability to engage with people and not just one way but in a two way conversation has never been greater. That's an extraordinary gift. But on the other hand the challenge that it represents to the business model that supports journalism has been profound. It is just much, much easier to have access to information without having to pay for it which makes it much more difficult for us to fund the creation of important... I mean some of the work that I think is most important that we've been doing as a business proposition is counterintuitive. I feel like we've talked about how a lot of news organizations are going to be hiring people who can write grant proposals that some portion of journalism is going to become a philanthropic, nonprofit driven because the business model to support... We have a project that I'm very invested in that we launched at the beginning of the year with a fantastic photographer, Lindsay Adario and Aaron Baker, our bureau chief in Africa called Finding Home where we're following the newborn babies of four Syrian women in refugee camps in Greece about what is the experience like of being born stateless and you come home from the hospital with your newborn to attend. What is this year going to be like? And the investment in resources and trying to take this enormous epic story of mass migration and the challenge of refugees in Europe and making it human, making it one that we can all identify with and follow and imagine ourselves walking in these shoes. That's at the heart of what we need to be doing but there isn't any business model for supporting that. There isn't an easy way to have that make sense as a business proposition. And yet to go back to the social media part of this when we do a project like that if I want to put that in front of an audience that would not normally encounter it who might not be subscribers to time, who might not find us and Christy Turlington tweets out what we're doing or Ben Stiller does or any of any number of celebrities or for that matter David Miliband and any of the NGOs who are profoundly invested in this topic where their entire news and social ecosystem is now tapped into this project. We have the ability to reach people that we never would be able to reach otherwise. So it's an enormous tool of amplification even as it's, of course, you know, it's in some ways an economic challenge and it's a challenge in the sense that, you know, who is the arbiter of what counts as true or not true? What deserves attention as opposed to what gets attention? Not always the same thing. Definitely. I'm glad you mentioned finding home. That was actually one of our next questions for you from the chat space. It's something that Brittany and I looked into. We're both really looking forward to following that project. And when we've polled alumni on social media, Facebook and Twitter, refugee and migration issues always rank at the very top of the things they're concerned about. And last year we hosted one of our very first ties, the Matic International Exchange Seminars in Croatia on refugee and migration issues. And we gathered European alumni who work in the field together to find solutions. And one we're really proud of, Zuzana a month later was actually awarded the International Woman of Courage Award by Secretary Kerry. And so we were all fascinated by the finding home project and we wanted to know what led your photographers and the time team to take that on and how did they pick the location and the families that they wanted to follow. Lindsay and Aaron had been covering the refugee crisis from any number of different angles all through as our other correspondents in Europe and the Middle East had been. But I think in a way the tipping point came when they were looking at, after the land routes were either closed or became much more difficult and a lot of the traffic shifted to Libya. And the idea of hundreds of people including pregnant women and children, hundreds of people boarding these rubber-wrapped that it was absolutely certain they could not physically make it to Italy. It wasn't even like it's risky, it's dangerous. No, the number of people on that kind of a vessel traveling that distance was not going to happen. So what they were gambling is that they will be rescued at sea either by the Italian Navy or by any of the Doctors Without Borders and the humanitarian rescue efforts. That they will be spotted by the many spotters in the air and rescued before they all drowned and that they were willing to take that risk. So Lindsay and Erin embedded on an MSF ship that was on these missions. It was the most harrowing tale of really just bringing home the desperation of these men and women who would have set out on a journey like that. So they did that project last year and then started looking to see if they could get access to the camps in Greece where a lot of the Syrian refugees were ending up. And getting Syrian women particularly to open up in this way, getting access to those camps in the first place, which we have not as journalists typically been able to get into. And then to find these women who were willing to let us be in the delivery room with them as they are giving birth and trying to imagine giving birth in a hospital where none of the doctors and nurses around you speak your language when trying to explain, in a couple of cases these ended up being pretty high risk deliveries of what is happening to you and what are the risks and decisions that you're facing. And then imagining leaving the hospital with your newborn to go back to a place that has no running hot water, there are no toys there, and what that is like. We thought it was really important as a way to make this story that is so typically told in terms of enormous incomprehensible numbers or of huge geopolitical conflicts and players on the National Security Front and the Economic Front and what is this going to mean for Angela Merkel's electoral prospects. Lenses through which the refugee story is told, which are also important, it's very easy to miss just the very human experience of this. And so our priority was to say, okay, how do we really make this story and the experience of these people real to the largest audience we can? Very nice. We're all looking forward to reading it and looking at those photos. Your photographers are amazing. Looking at the opening piece, I was all in seeing that opening photo, really captivating. In your 30 years of experience of journalism, these questions from Ethiopia, what are the ups and downs you have seen? In Ethiopia, for example, the media is more restrictive. How could we move to having more independent media? You know, in any country, the ability of journalists to operate safely and independently is, I think, something of a grand bargain where in the United States, what has been vitally important to the success of the vibrancy of journalism in America is a tradition that's practically embedded in the Constitution that, or is it Jefferson, if I had to choose between a free press, that you pick a free press, that a basic premise that having a free press, having freedom of assembly, having freedom of speech is an important enough core value that the people in positions of power, whether positions of political power or economic power, who have the ability to block or undermine or diminish that, are deterred from trying to block or undermine or diminish it. And creating that sense of shared value that as a society, as an economy, as a political system, as communities, we will all be served by allowing the free exchange of information. That seems to me to be the baseline that is necessary in order for journalism to be able to work. And if you have powerful interests, whose interest is opposed to that, as we have seen in many countries around the world through history, then it becomes very difficult and very dangerous for journalism to happen. And what's fascinating to me now and what we're seeing in so many parts of the world is because of access to mobile technology, particularly, it is just harder to censor information. It's harder to keep people from being able to find stuff out if they want to. And I was amazed on my wonderful, full-bright excursion last summer in New Zealand that I think someone had told me that there were more time readers per capita in New Zealand than anywhere in the world. And I certainly came to believe that because this was the summer of 2015. So the American presidential campaign was just starting to kind of come to life. And I was having conversations with people there that you would have thought it was face-to-nation. I mean, it was the level of interest and knowledge, I mean, detailed granular, like down to the which way will a given congressional district swing a year and a half from now was unbelievable. And I'm just thinking, how is it that, because I feel like I have flown all the way around the world because I had flown all the way around the world to be in this magical place that feels as far, far away from the green rooms of Washington, New York, as you can possibly get. And yet here we were having the same conversation about the same issues, whether it was the future of Uber in Auckland or whether it was about, is Donald Trump really a viable candidate for president? And so it was just such a reminder of how there is the ability for people in the United States who's preferred source of news as the Guardian or people in China who figure out ways to work around firewalls in order to have access to information that they're not going to find in local media. I think that that's a fascinating challenge to authoritarians everywhere, that it just technology is making it harder and harder and harder to limit the ability of people who want to know what is happening in the world and find out. Definitely. I just want to remind our audience here, we've got about 15 minutes left, so if you have a question, don't forget to signal. Okay, we've got one. Thank you. Hi. I'm a teacher, a middle school teacher, and we use time for kids in our school, and I'm just curious what time's mission for young people, particularly adolescents, is moving forward and how you intend to reach them in coming years. We have just undertaken a partnership with something called News Literacy Project, which is a reflection of an awareness that teaching news literacy, teaching kids how to distinguish reliable sources from unreliable sources, good information from bad information, which you can have taught your students that Wikipedia is not the source for their term paper, but how do you go multiple layers deeper in educating students at all ages of how do you know if a source is trustworthy or not? In a sense, that's always been part of a teacher's mission, but it's become so much harder because bad information is so much more readily available, and I could say good information is more readily available too, but that means that the ability to tell one from the other becomes an essential academic, intellectual, social skill. I think our obligation is to foster that process of learning any way we can. I think Time for Kids is a fantastic institution that I'm looking, which I would like to be a much bigger presence in classrooms, particularly digitally, as more and more classrooms turn into essentially digital classrooms. I think Time for Kids should be a portal into an information environment that helps kids both stay on top of current events but also be able to tell why is this piece of information more reliable than this piece of information? It isn't just obviously part of common core standards about informational nonfiction and providing content that kids want to read and engage with to turn them into readers. One of the things I'm heartened by is I actually think as much as we may decry what has occurred to all of our attention spans, I would bet if there were ever a way to measure how much my children have read and written compared to how much my generation growing up read and wrote. So much of their time is spent reading and writing. You can say it's all reading and writing, snaps and texts and Instagram posts, but it is still true that communicating, I mean we joke that they don't know how to use their phones as phones, that they are consuming so much information, they are consuming so much media that the appetite for news broadly defined is vastly greater than it has been in the past and surely that's an opportunity for us to include not only news about whether One Direction is going to get back together but news about, I mean I was fascinated by how engaged young people were in this election, I was very heartened by that, how passionately they felt about it and so I think that that is an opportunity that can start at a younger and younger age that part of being a citizen, part of growing into adulthood and into citizenship is learning to be a good consumer of information and a good analyst of information of what is reliable. I think the mission of time and time for kids is to promote that as much as we can. I'm going to take another question from Kenya and then we'll come back to you. What would you like to accomplish in your time as time editor in chief? How do you hope the stories you oversee will be different or stand out and that's from Olive in Kenya? I think that the, I'm very proud of what, I have a very young team, I have some very grown up experienced people but I have a lot of people in my newsroom who are very young and tireless and enterprising and excited about journalism which is hugely inspiring to me and where I push them, and again the events of the last year have reminded me how important this is, is to be extremely ecumenical in how we define news and how we define what counts as news and it's very easy, given the pace of the news cycle now to never take your eyes off institutions and individuals in positions of power and institutions that are regulating, ruling, legislating and that just keeping up with the news generated out of institutional life could keep all of us occupied all the time but if you do that then you're going to miss the opioid epidemic. You know, we did opioids on the cover three years ago when it was not being written about but where if you went into any rural community and you talked to any EMT any police officer any teacher they could tell you just what a scourge this was in these communities and now three years later we are seeing how the whole way that we are thinking about a topic like drug addiction is changing from how much is it a criminal matter how much of it is a moral failing versus how much of it is a health emergency and how do we think about our resources and our treatment and our approach and our thinking and our conversation about a topic like that so that kind of story is, you know, it begins on the ground it begins at people's kitchen table it begins in a coffee shop or a rotary club or the Walmart in a town that is never going to be on the radar of big institutional makers of news and so I think we aren't serving our audiences or taking advantage of our opportunity or serving our mission if we aren't really disciplined our resources are finite I don't have nearly as many reporters as I would like how we deploy them and how we define news and what we go out looking to find out what kind of prospecting we do has to go beyond just covering this week's Supreme Court ruling this week's Senate Foreign Affairs Committee hearing or this week's you know, Goldman Sachs earnings report it's just, we have to go deeper and broader and look beyond the sort of traditional makers of news and to that end, alumni in Guatemala are wondering what you pay the most attention to in terms of Latin American news and Latin American happenings that you'd like to report in time one of the things I regret is, you know, in the contraction that all news organizations have gone through at time as many other places there just are not as many reporters covering Latin America and other regions when you start to have to make choices okay, if you're going to go from this many foreign correspondents to this many foreign correspondents what do you give up where do you no longer have permanent people where do you rely on stringers and contributors and so one of my regrets is even though we've gotten really interesting important reporting out of Central America and South America I don't feel like I have the same kind of eyes and ears that I have in Europe the Middle East or Asia and I think that I would bet if you pressed a lot of news organizations that they would say the same and I don't know what it takes to change that this goes back to at some point as a society we're going to have to figure out what is it that's important to us to know and how are we going to support that, how are we going to make it possible for this news gathering this coverage to be supported because if it's at some point this is every day is bringing us another headline about how many jobs are being eliminated at the Wall Street Journal or at the New York Times or the Daily News this or that network and those jobs are often going to be the people who are covering far-flung parts of the world and stories that editors have decided okay, if you force me to choose this is what I'm going to choose which is not the answer that you want to hear but I think it is unfortunately the reality of where we are at least what I'm seeing across the industry it's good to know and before we close I'd like to give one more question back to our audience here hi, my name is Wawa Guthero I'm a recent alumni at the University of Thailand it seems like we've been talking about the phenomenon of fake news and inaccurate news it's a topic that's been circulating in the news community in the recent years especially after its role in the most recent presidential election so we were talking about the emergence of news literacy programs in American education programs so what advice do you give to the youth that have not yet been educated about news literacy and how do you think we should be able to navigate this world where there are so many different news outlets and when the definition of news is so inclusive right now I think that you've put your finger on a fundamental challenge because the trick about fake news is that it looks very much like real news these sites have been named and designed and created that you could very easily mistake it for a reliable local newspaper or a national news organization it's obviously self-interested for me to say that established news organizations, whether it's time or the New York Times or CBS or NBC or Reuters are it's incumbent on us and you're hearing a lot of this messaging of saying there is a difference between what we do and how we do it we do not publish fake news doesn't mean that we are always right doesn't mean that we're perfect but the standards that we live by are different and to make that very much a part of the messaging that we all make I've looked at some of these sites and I think if I were especially if I were a young person that doesn't know all the visual cues doesn't know the established organizations and my Facebook feed is full of these these stories I think it would be very challenging to be able to tell I think it's fascinating challenge to Facebook that's a really interesting conversation about you know Mark Zuckerberg talks about we're not a publisher, we're a platform I think the obligations that platforms are going to have to acknowledge in the role that they are playing in creating this ecosystem they will say the last thing people want is for us to be the arbiters of what can and can't be posted what is and is not true they are hoping that there will be a technological fix to this problem but this is a you know if the press barons of the 20th century had a set of ethical challenges that they faced about libel and slander and when you publish a rumor and free speech versus national security and what those competing values are their legacies in the 21st century include Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook and Evan Spiegel and the creators of I ask people like Tim Cook about this, what is your ethical obligation when you're having the debate about unlocking iPhones as part of criminal investigations I would put it to any of the leaders of social media platforms isn't that you have to have an answer right now but what is the mechanism whereby your organization is going to explore and address and weigh the competing values and challenges that we are now seeing you know we've seen Facebook Live can be an extremely powerful force for good or for ill and so how is Facebook going to have the conversation about what their obligation is about how that tool can be used and I think that's going to be one of the most important media conversations one of the most important media conversations occurring right now is going to be occurring in organizations that we don't traditionally think of as media organizations thank you and in closing we have a request from two viewing parties in Cuba in Ethiopia if you wouldn't mind giving some advice to aspiring women in journalism women who hope to become journalists, do you have any special tips for them any encouragement you would give looking back over your career anything you wish you knew this may sound counterintuitive but I think this is a golden age of journalism for a couple of reasons it isn't that we don't face very real challenges as a profession but this goes back to what I had been saying the fact that you have a combination of appetite and audience and opportunity that if you find and tell a good story that matters the ability to you don't have to be employed by a huge news organization or have 30 years experience in the field the ability for quality to find its audience is now just as enormously powerful corporations can now be started in garages the power of a single individual or a single idea married to the technology that now makes everyone a filmmaker everyone a music composer everyone a novelist everyone a journalist these technologies are are almost limitless in the opportunity that they give people who want to tell stories who want to have an impact that I just think it's the great challenge to us is is how do we make the best use of the incredible advantages that we now have to do the kind of work that we want to do I think that is a perfect note to end on thank you so much for joining us today on behalf of the Office of Alumni Affairs at the State Department and our colleagues at the Foreign Press Center we're so thankful that you all hosted us this morning and to all of our viewing parties particularly those that stayed up really late to join us thank you so much for being part of this conversation and we hope you all will continue it online with hashtag we'd love to keep talking to you about this we'd love to keep chatting with you so thank you again for joining us


Hi, I'm Zor. Welcome to Unizor Education. This is the third lecture in the mini-series, which defines different inverse trigonometric functions. In this case, we're talking about arc tangent. This is the function which is inverse to tangent, obviously. So before talking about arc tangent, let's talk about tangent. And what's very important about it's graph, the main range, these type of things. So tangent is the function which you can define as sine over cosine of a national. Now, let's build the graph. Well, if you remember, it's great. If not, I'll just try to kind of derive the graph from the graphs of sine and cosine. So if this is pi over 2, this is pi, this is 3pi over 2, this is minus pi over 2, this is minus pi, et cetera. So sine goes from 0 to 1 and then to 0 and then to minus 1, et cetera. Minus 1, 1, et cetera. That's how sine goes. Now cosine is symmetrical. It goes like this. So when we divide one by another, sine by cosine, obviously it points pi over 2 and minus pi over 2, and 3pi over 2 and minus 3pi over 2, where the cosine is equal to 0. We will have asymptotes. Now here, if you divide this graph by this graph, you will have 0 here because numerator sine is equal to 0 and the cosine denominator equals to 1. And then the graph grows and finally it grows to plus infinity because the denominator goes to 0 and sine is 1. So it goes something like this. Now similar in this case, the situation is very much alike except it's negative because the sine is negative and the cosine is positive. So when you divide one by another, you will have negative results. But also in this point, you have an asymptototent that goes to minus infinity. So this is our tangent. Now after that, it goes by a period of time. All right, so knowing what the tangent is, now let's talk about what can we say about inverse function, arc tangent. Well, obviously this function, as I have represented it in red, does not have an inverse function because for any value, there are multiple arguments. In each of those arguments, function takes the same value. So you cannot determine by the value of the function tangent by having y defined. You cannot define x. And we will do the same thing with the tangent as we did with sine and cosine in exactly the same situation, which means we will reduce the domain to the area where the function is monotonic, which in this case, traditionally, is from minus pi over 2 to pi over 2. The function is monotonically increasing. And it takes all the values from the range, from minus infinity to the plus infinity. So we wipe out everything around this as if it does not exist. And we are left with the function, which will be called new tangent or whatever, which is defined only for an interval from minus pi over 2 to pi over 2. I don't remember if I mentioned it before, but whenever I'm using parentheses, it means the boundaries are not included. Whenever I'm using square brackets, that means the boundaries minus pi over 2 and pi over 2 are included. In this case, we cannot include boundaries because that's where we have asymptotes. So the function is not defined at minus pi over 2 and pi over 2. It's defined in between. That's why I have round parentheses. So this is my domain. My range and my co-domain are all real numbers. So this is the domain, and this is the range. Now we can define an inverse function or a tangent of x. Well, the sense of this function, the meaning of that function is, well, inverse. If you have some kind of a value of the tangent, we can find the angle in radians tangent of which is equal to x. So that's what the meaning of the inverse function. Now, obviously, the x can be any value which this function takes from the range, which is minus infinity plus infinity. And the range of the function, so this is the domain, and the range of the function would be the domain of the tangent function, which is minus pi over 2 pi over 2. Now let's do the graph. Now, we know that there is a symmetry between the graphs of the function and its inverse function. Symmetry means relative to the angle bicep. I think I need a new picture. This doesn't look good. The picture would look like this. Minus pi over 2, pi over 2, this is x, this is y, and the graph looks like this. That's my tangent. Now, if I will reflect this relative to the angle bicep, that's how it would be. My range would be from minus infinity to plus infinity, sorry, my domain for this function. My range would be from minus pi over 2 to pi over 2, which is pi over 2, and this is minus pi over 2. So whatever asymptotes used to be, they will be turning into my, basically, maximum and minimum. And the function would look like something like this, symmetrical relative to the angle bicep. So the range is from minus pi over 2 to pi over 2. The main is all real numbers, and that's the graph of the function arc tangent of x. It's quite an interesting function. What's interesting about it, it can be basically modified. And right now, it's from minus pi over 2 to pi over 2. But we can actually adjust it with proper multipliers and shifting, et cetera, to any range. And I was actually thinking that function like that, and this is a practical implementation of something, function like that can actually be used in some practical situation, namely, we know that we have something which is called progressive text, which means that the percentage of the taxation is greater with base amount greater. Now, what it means is that you might have some minimum taxation, and you can have a maximum taxation, and the percentage grows from the minimum to the maximum well in something like this type of a fashion. So we can actually establish this instead of minus pi over 2 to pi over 2, we can establish this graph from a to b basically by aging something and multiplying something by this graph. And also, we can regulate the stickness of this curve by multiplying x by certain factor. So it can be used for the purpose of defining a very simple formula. OK, this is the formula for taxation. Whatever you earn, just multiply by this percentage expressed as arc tangent with certain multiplier here and multiply here and maybe horizontal shift, and you'll be fine. So that's one of the practical implementation of taxation using function like this. So it gradually moves towards certain asymptote on both sides. All right, that's it for arc tangent. I do recommend you to go to unisor.com to this lecture, to notes to this lecture. Just read it again. I think it would be very helpful. Other than that, good luck.


Shaffer Smith, much better known as Neo, somewhat recently sold his family-sized estate in Sherman Oaks, California, which he bought back in 2017, leaving us to wonder where does the singer live now. Some years back, Neo also bought up some properties in Georgia. He formerly owned a mansion in Alpharetta, which he sold, bought not one but two houses for his mom in Georgia, and continues to own a couple lavish condos in an Atlanta high-rise. Today, we'll check out a few places he's called home. In these videos, we don't reveal any addresses, and even though I've done a house tour of my own place, please do not show up at any private residences because it's not safe for anyone. Neo is a singer, songwriter, record producer, dancer, TV judge, actor, and more, who became well-known for his songwriting abilities with the 2004 hit hero for fellow singer Mario titled Let Me Love You. I'm sure you all remember that one. Since the single did so well, it prompted a meeting between Neo and Def Jam Records to get started on some of his own music with a recording contract. His single, So Sick, was a hit all over the globe. Neo would continue pumping out some hit records and singles for the majority of the 2000s, and in addition to his music career, he serves as a judge on the reality competition series, World of Dance. His career has been more versatile than you might think, and it's reported that Neo has amassed a net worth of about $16 million, and with that, he's been able to buy homes for both himself and his loved ones. While he's no longer with his ex-partner, Moderna Shaw, he does have two children with her and apparently set her up comfy in one of the Atlanta condos he bought up a few years ago. Just last month, Neo and his current wife, Crystal, announced that they're expecting their third child as well, so lucky number five for him. While I'm unsure about the property, Neo and Crystal are currently living at, we do know what's still in Georgia by the looks of her Instagram, and it looks like it's a big, beautiful home. Hey guys, it's Keira the Vampire Slayer, and today I'm bringing you another house tour here on Famous Entertainment. Be sure to hit that subscribe button and ring that bell. We post a new video daily. In this video, we're going to be taking a look at a few of singer-songwriter Neo's properties from Georgia to California, and while he owns them all, some weren't even for him. The man seems to be a giver. On this channel, we talk about celebrity houses, but on this channel, we talk about celebrity houses, but have you ever wondered about their fashion or purchases like Bobby Schmurtt's recent shopping spree at Icebox or the nicest celebrity yachts? We recently started a new channel, Famous Fashion, where myself and some other hosts are reporting on all things celebrity fashion and purchases. Join us and subscribe. Most recently, in what seems to be a Valentine's Day we can give to herself, Summer has yet another big car to add to her driveway. While it may seem more practical, her new designer SUV was far from cheap. As always, don't forget to follow me on Instagram to chat, and now let's get into this video. Just before Neo took an executive position at Motown Records, he paid just over $1.5 million for a beautiful mansion in Alpharetta, Georgia, which was back in 2011. Alpharetta is a city in Fulton County, Georgia, and a suburb just north of Atlanta. Since it isn't right in the downtown core, Neo was able to enjoy one acre of sprawling land at this property, and the mansion itself spent over 13,000 square feet of space. Located in the community of Windward the Enclave, Neo's former home boasted nine bedrooms, four full baths, and three half baths throughout. After living here for some time, it was reported that the singer listed it for about $1.59 million, but didn't have much luck with buyers, lowering the price to about $1.16 million, taking a loss of $402K on the sale. I would have assumed this was the mansion Neo was still living in to this day if there weren't reports of him selling it, because by the looks of it, he updated the home quite a bit. Walking in, there are fresh white walls in the foyer and throughout the nearby common spaces, with a bright formal entryway complete with double-height ceilings and a curved staircase. An arched doorway and shiny white marble floors led to some formal living spaces and nearby. There's also a cozy family room with dark wood furnishings, beamed ceilings, a fireplace, and a mounted flat screen TV. The top-of-the-line kitchen also has soaring beamed ceilings, designer stainless appliances, and an additional sunny breakfast area. Other highlights of Neo's mansion include a library home theater with leather recliners, an exercise room with a sauna, massage room, wine cellar, and elevator that services all levels. And that's just the interior of the home. His former backyard was designed to impress or entertain, or both, and the focal point was definitely the swimming pool with grotto-style attached hot tub and even a water slide. The pool area was all stone, which extended to the other backyard add-ons like the outdoor kitchen, barbecue, and bar. Talk about luxury living. While Neo treated himself to that mansion pretty early on in his career, he saved enough money to spoil others as well. Even if he sold that place, he still owns a few properties in Georgia, including not one, but two he bought for his mama. Good sons such as Neo treat every day like it's Mother's Day, and in 2016 he snagged a townhouse for 300k in Mabelton, Georgia for his mother, Harriet Lorraine Byrds. This neighborhood is only 15 miles from downtown Atlanta, and it's a fabulous three-bedroom spacious property. Even more impressive, though, is the other home Neo bought for her in 2012. This one is near Neo's former mansion we just looked at, also an alpharetta, and we actually have pictures of this place. This mansion cost him a bit more at $550,000, but it looks like it was totally worth it, and it's apparently where she still resides. Here Neo's mom has 5,900 square feet of living space with six beds, five baths, and features like a finished terrace all overlooking an upscale golf course. Her home boasts a bright and airy entryway as well as a spacious lofted kitchen area with double ovens and multiple areas to eat. Her sprawling master suite also has its own private walkout terrace to enjoy some sunny views. And Neo's property gifts didn't stop there. Neo has long owned at least two condos in the upscale neighborhood of Buckhead Atlanta, buying one for $285K back in 2007, which appeared to be a pretty basic two-bedroom condo on a lower level of a posh high-rise building. These days, he could be renting that one out. The following year, Neo then dropped about $1.16 million on a penthouse at the top of the gallery residences, a luxe building boasting amenities like a fitness center, swimming pool, tennis courts, clubroom, landscaped courtyard, a first floor library, and even an art gallery. Since 2015, this sprawling 3,000-square-foot penthouse has been co-owned by his ex and mother of his two eldest kids, Moneta Shaw. So we can guess that she's currently occupying this lavish home. It's said Neo made the expensive gesture to make sure his kids were living in absolute comfort, and by the sounds of it, they are. The condo has three beds, 3.5 baths, and loads of other goodies. More recently in 2019, Neo also unloaded his family-sized home in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles. The quiet city, tucked away in the San Fernando Valley, is 30 minutes from downtown LA, and quite popular among famous families with young children. He bought this home in 2017 for about $1.9 million, and when it came time to sell, it seems he wasn't seeking much profit, listing the comfortable and luxurious suburban home at about the same price. I guess Neo was used to Georgia and only spent a couple of years at this crib. The Cape Cod-style home offered five beds, six baths, and decorated with white moldings and cabinets, as well as custom oak flooring. Every room in the house was full of natural light, thanks to large windows all over, and the open floor plan made the place seem bigger than its 4,310 square feet. Outside the home was painted dark blue with white trim, and inside, there's a formal sitting room with marble fireplace, while a few more steps in, a double-height gallery with sparkling chandelier. The formal dining room was linked through a butler's pantry to the open-plan kitchen, featuring expensive appliances, marble counters, and large center island with room for four. A breakfast nook at one end looks out to the backyard, and the family room opens up to the patio via floor-to-ceiling glass doors. Other features on the main floor of Neo's former home included an office den, a glass-in-close wine cellar, and an en suite bedroom for guests or staff. Head upstairs and you'll discover four more en suite bedrooms, including the master, which has soaring beam ceilings, a fireplace, a balcony, and marble master bath. The entertainment areas in this place are extended outside, where the grounds boast a pool and spa with waterfall features, as well as other add-ons, like a barbecue area. The smart home also featured iPad-controlled music, lighting, and more, which even lit up the waterfalls out back. At the time Neo owned this Sherman Oaks home, he reportedly also lived in a six-bed, five-back home in Georgia. These days, Neo's exact home is unknown, but by the looks of his wife Crystal's Instagram, we can say they do in fact still live in Georgia. The locations the couple seems to visit are in this state, and it also appears they live in a sprawling house. If you guys know more about Neo and his family's current living situation in Georgia, be sure to let me know down in the comments. But I think I'll bring this house tour to an end here. Did you know that Neo bought up so many homes over his career for himself and for his loved ones? I think we can all agree he's a great son and baby daddy by the looks of it, setting up his mom with two homes and his ex with a penthouse condo. But what did you guys think about Neo's properties? Which was your faith? Before you guys go, subscribe to my personal channel if you want to get to know me better. I love reading your comments on there and getting to chat. We'll link you to my latest video. Caitlyn's basically gonna get me playing Fortnite, which I've never played. It's probably gonna be super embarrassing.  No, you know what?  But that's not even an actual person. It's like a what is that? Thanks for tuning in. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram, and I will see you all next time. Bye.


Hi I'm Brian May with Cal OES and we are in Ventura Harbor today and while the setting is beautiful it's time to talk tsunamis. Do you know the one thing you should never do if a tsunami was headed toward the coast of California? We'll answer that in a moment but first the last week in March is designated as tsunami awareness week. With more on that and how you can prepare yourself here's Rob Mayberry. You know Brian California enjoys over 1200 miles of pristine beaches just like the one behind me here in Ventura and while most Californians understand the potential damage that can be caused by wildfires, earthquakes and flooding far fewer know the potential risk from tsunamis. For instance did you know California's two worst tsunamis of the past century happened in the month of March? The tsunami of 1964 killed 11 people and destroyed most of the town of Crescent City in Northern California. Although not nearly as destructive the Japan tsunami in 2011 caused significant damage to California's harbors. The last big one that impacted California was the Tehoku earthquake and tsunami which came from Japan to California and caused about a hundred million dollars in damage just to coastal infrastructure boats harbors and piers that kind of thing. We caught up with Cal OES earthquake and tsunami program manager Kevin Miller to find out just what areas along California's coastline are prone to this natural disaster and what we should know to be better prepared. It might be coming from Alaska toward California and you're south facing facing beach and you think you're protected from something coming from the north and you're not and then you might have a wave that's coming from Chile and that'll impact different harbors or coastlines than something coming from Japan. So it just depends on how much water is coming and what direction is coming from and what your local topography is really what's controlling how much inundation does or doesn't occur. So what are the warning signs in the event of an impending tsunami? If you feel strong or long shaking of earthquake type shaking and you're at the beach that would be one indicator. Another would be is if you hear a large abnormal ocean roar that you don't expect from the ocean and a third indicator is a drawdown abnormally of the water drying far out. Something to remember that those are natural warnings. Don't look for all three of them to happen just one of them might be an indicator of a tsunami. If it's a distant event that's when you'll have potentially hours of warning and you can get information potentially on your phone or on the radio. If there are tsunamis I mean if there are sirens in your area those could be triggered as well. And if you encounter one or more of these warnings what should you do next? Pretty easy to protect yourself from by knowing where your hazard zone is what you can find online. There are tsunami warning signs along the coast that show how far inland these things are expected to go. Most cases in California should be okay above 20 to 50 feet and far northern California it may be a little bit higher north of Cape Mendocino. Thankfully we do not see tsunamis often on the west coast but as you can see when they do happen they have the capability of being destructive and in some cases deadly. If you have a subduction zone right off coast you may only have 10 or 15 minutes to get to that high ground. So practicing your route to safety with your community with your family by yourself and knowing what that route would be on a sunny day like today is a good thing to have in place. In the event you have to evacuate due to a tsunami make sure you follow the evacuation routes away from the ocean. You don't have to go that far to get to a safe place. In fact if you look behind me you can see the ocean right down the way. Back to you Brian. Alright thanks Rob now back to our initial question what is the one thing you really shouldn't do if a tsunami were headed toward the coast of California. Born and raised in Ventura County John Higgins knows these waters like the back of his hand. Hi guys I just wanted to remind you there's larger than average surf so when you come out when you come in the harbor really try to stay in the middle. In his 23 years with the Ventura Harbor District the last five as Harbor Master Higgins has pretty much seen it all. The first time that we experienced the tsunami I would say we did not see the drastic drop of the sea level like you've heard of in some of the Pacific Islands or in Asia when they've had those tsunamis where the water retreats back and it's nothing but barren bottom of the ocean. In our harbor there was very little warning if anything it was coming but fortunately it wasn't a big wave that came it was just an influx of water a consistent surge of water akin to a river coming in the harbor continuously for a period of time and then leaving the harbor continuously for a period of time. Back to back tsunamis in 2010 and 2011 turned out to be teachable moments for Higgins and Ventura Harbor. The tsunami didn't happen in five minutes and it was done. The tsunami happened over a period of time we had several different events and in the Japan case it lasted for for over 12 hours these individual events so patience was key. Which leads us to the one thing John Higgins recommends you not do if a tsunami were heading towards California. I would highly recommend if you're not at the harbor don't come to the harbor. I had people and in each of those instances saying I'm in Los Angeles or I'm in Bakersfield should I come to the harbor and take my boat and go out in the ocean I said no no no. When the next tsunami warning comes in and it will Higgins knows from experience the protocol he is to follow. I typically will get the call from our Ventura County Office of Emergency Services who is tied in with Cal OES and the tsunami warning center. He also knows from experience the simple measures those in the tsunami zone should follow. It is as simple as five minutes into town everybody knows that there's Starbucks there's grocery stores there's hospitals there's movie theaters there's parks there's a number of different things that can stimulate you and keep you entertained for a period of time and that's on top of being assured your safety when they go into the ocean there is none of that they're they're going into what is akin to the old Wild West there is no resources out there there's no gas station there's no Starbucks there's no movie theater there isn't a hospital offshore there isn't an ambulance. If you'd like more information on what to do in the event of a tsunami you can go to tsunamizone.org and while you're there there's a list of events that are taking place all across California for tsunami awareness week again that's the last week of March. For all of us at the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services I'm Brian May thanks for watching. Go to tsunamizone.org to learn more find out if your home school or workplace are in a tsunami hazard or evacuation zone understand the difference between a tsunami watch advisory or warning and what you should do before during and after a tsunami strikes


Next to me is Gustav Björgston and he will be telling us about open source biofuel. Please Gustav. Thank you and I apologise for the delay. So this talk is about looking at the possibility of very small scale open source biofuel production. So it's just a matter of housekeeping. Life is too short for fancy slides. I hope you like black text on white background because that's mostly what you're going to get. So what this talk will cover? Where fuck? The global context? Why we the people are the only solution? What it means to obtain personal security in all things? A ridiculously brief history of motor car fuels. Some case studies. Bougainville and Brazil. Why biofuels? What those fuels are? What needs to be done to get your car running on them? And a plan to make this part of the revolution. So we're fucked. We are well past peak oil that happened a long time ago. Companies using ever more destructive means to extract fossil fuels. And this is having an effect on the immediate environment as well as a further reaching effect in terms of things like transportation and whatever of those fossil fuels. We're also way past 350 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. That was the level that was set as being the safe point. We're a long way past that now and we're in very much uncharted territory. Climate change is here. I believe it's here. Back in my home country, I see evidence of it. In one state, the state of New South Wales, the disaster recovery expenditure has tripled in the last six years. The 214 expenditure, they had allocated 95 million Australian dollars and they spent $375 million. And just this year, as of April, they had spent the entire year's allocated budget for disaster recovery and that occurred in a single storm in Sydney. In Victoria, the state I'm from, there's been a drought for 15 years. There's a whole generation of kids who have never seen the many fountains of Melbourne bubbling with water. And after this 15 year drought, there was the first major deluge of water and it caused a massive flood and it was billed as a once in 200 years flood. And then just a few months later, in exactly the same area of the state of Victoria, there was another once in 200 years flood. And I think this is the kind of thing that we're going to see everywhere. I think climate change is real. I'm now living in Costa Rica. There's the first ever recorded drought in Guanacaste, the western province of Costa Rica. So I think we're in a lot of trouble. Why are we the only solution? Because governments and industry around the world have failed us. Climate change is a global phenomenon. It doesn't respect national borders.  And from what I've seen so far, there's not a lot of ability or desire to do that. So we may be looking at the sixth extinction level event. In Earth's history, there have been five previously. About a month ago, a scientist who was talking about climate change broke down on camera because she believes that it is probably too late and that we are heading for the sixth extinction level event. I don't know if we are or not. I do believe that the situation is critical and that we must do something. I want to do something. And that's why I've looked at where my interests lie and what my capabilities are and have come up with this proposal to try and do something about it. So we, the people, we must take matters into our own hands because we may be humanity's last hope. I'll just take a tangent for a second. I'm a believer in personal security in all things. I have an interest in a lot of these. I would like to see the people of the world rely less on governments and big corporations for all of the basic things that we rely on to live.  Instead of, you know, monoculture farms, let's get into permaculture and so on. Water independence, collect, filter, store, reuse yourself. Shelters, you know, build simple local material shelters. Obviously there's alternative energy, transport and fuel, which is what this talk is going to be about. Economic independence, doing, cutting out the middleman of the big financial organizations.  Let's go peer to peer. Let's use cryptocurrencies. Let's create local currencies. And the last one there, healing, wellbeing and evolutionary independence. Let's talk about transport and fuel. A ridiculously brief history of motor fuels. We have this idea that cars run on gasoline or petrol diesel. When the whole, you know, idea of cars started and in the early days of cars, there were experiments with a whole range of different fuels. Steam was the first one. It's difficult to carry enough fuel to get around with steam.  There were electric cars right back in the earliest days of cars. We think of, you know, Tesla as a brand new thing, but not so much. And cars back then even ran on gasoline and diesel. The 1908 Model T Ford was a flex fuel car. It was actually designed for bioethanol, but it could also run on gasoline. But it was optimized for bioethanol. And Henry Ford had a vision. He saw the farmers of America on their, you know, average size farms back in those days of 125 to 250 acres, growing one acre of potatoes and using that one acre to produce bioethanol and run all the farm machinery that they required to farm the remainder of their farm. So this is an old idea. Rudolph Diesel first tried to design engines for straight vegetable oil before moving to Petro Diesel. So again, that's another early inventor that was looking at these alternatives. Couple of stories. The Brazil government has moved, they actually, you know, legislated and made decisions and made the possibility of being a 100% bioethanol country. They use sugarcane as the feedstock. There's arguments for and against that. You have to grow lots of sugarcane. There's debates about whether that land could be better used for other things. But the fact is that they have done it. All cars sold in Brazil must be flex fuel. And at every gas station, the citizens have the choice of which fuel they want to buy. Gasoline is still available, but every citizen has the choice.  Another interesting case study is the island of Bougainville in the Pacific. They had a fight for their independence from New Guinea because there was nothing that really made them think that they should be part of New Guinea. They weren't culturally part of it, they weren't racially part of it. You know, Bougainville was just given to New Guinea after the Second World War like certain situations elsewhere in the world. So they had this fight for independence and as part of that fight, they were blockaded. The island was blockaded by the Papua New Guinea Navy with support from Australia who has mining interests on Bougainville. And so they couldn't get any supplies, including fuel. So they made their own and they made it with coconuts. They took their coconuts and some very, very, very basic equipment and drum, put the meat of the coconuts in the drum, jump up and down on it until it turns to liquid, put a hole in the bottom of the drum, drain it across some corrugated iron into another process and so on. And that's the way they were able to brew their own biodiesel and keep their vehicles going and keep their revolution going and ultimately they got autonomous rule. So old fuels. Old biofuels are a renewable resource. I'm interested not in growing large amounts of biomass to make fuel because in many places we have that biomass already. It's waste product. It can be waste vegetable oil as used by restaurants or whatever. You can turn that into biodiesel. In Costa Rica we have an enormous amount of waste biomass. It comes from things like food production, the waste bits of the food production. And it's a problem of what to do with it, but we could be making that into bioethanol. So it's carbon mutual to produce. It's much cleaner when burnt. It's even much cleaner when burnt when you blend it with gasoline or petrodiesel. Even if you have 10% or 20% of the biofuel mixed with your petrochemicals, the burn result is much cleaner. So there's less environmental impact. There's less of its spills. It's much more biodegradable. So it has advantages there. As I mentioned, many countries have biowaste ready at hand. It's cheaper to produce. And I'm a ref head.  I like the idea.  I want to save the planet. Prius is just not commensurate with my testosterone levels. So I want to fuel like a burn. So the first potential fuel we have is straight vegetable oil or waste vegetable oil. So ideally we would take the waste vegetable oil. The processing is very minimal. You just filter it. But what are the cons of using that in cars? It's only going to work in diesel engines. You have to mechanically modify the cars. The engine life will be questionable in my opinion. I've seen some pretty disastrous results over time. And there's most definitely mileage and performance penalties. So not great. You can do blending. That is possible. But again, I think it's less than ideal. Just because you're putting your engine and everything at some risk. There's two options you can go for with waste vegetable oil or straight vegetable oil. A double tank. So you have your normal diesel tank and you add an extra tank. And you start driving on diesel. And when the engine and everything is warm, you flick a switch and you change over to the vegetable oil. You need to do that because you need to heat the vegetable oil to get it viscous enough to actually go through the car and run the car. The bigger problem with this is that when you want to stop a couple of kilometers before you stop, you need to switch back to diesel to clean out the system. So if you have to stop suddenly and leave it stopped for a while, you might have difficulty restarting. The other option is a single tank. But if you have a single tank, you'll need to also preheat the fuel before you start the vehicle to get it to go around the circuits of the vehicle. So the process is extremely simple.  Biodiesel. Biodiesel, you get better mileage than petrodiesel. It cleans the engine. It has a much higher solvent content. The vehicle modification is minimal. So certainly for older vehicles, there should be no modification. There just may be some issues with very modern diesels. Biodiesel can also be blended, but I like to use it straight. The cons, it's going to clean your engine and it's going to clean a lot of muck out in a short space of time. So when you switch to biodiesel, you have to change the fuel filter several times. It's also a good idea to carry a spare and you can't use rubber hoses because they will deteriorate pretty rapidly. Now, to me, there's no point in producing biodiesel unless it's of the highest standard. And these are the standards that are out there. ASTM D6751 is the US standard. There's different standards here in Europe and Germany, but they are all pretty much equivalent. They differ a little bit here and there, but for our purposes we can take any one of those and if we can meet those standards, that will be fine. So the theory behind these standards is that if you reach that standard, the diesel should run in any diesel engine. That's great theory and, you know, there was a time I believed when that was true. I'm just not sure that it is true today. So older engines, this is a heuristic rule. Older engines are much more tolerant than newer ones. Certainly industrial engines are very tolerant. The industrial generators around this camp that are providing us with all our power, there's absolutely no reason why they couldn't be running on straight biodiesel. My trucks are 91 with a 95 engine. It's just fine. But, you know, the really modern common rail direct injection diesel engines use extremely high pressures at the injectors. You know, 30,000 psi is not uncommon. And I do believe that some people find that they cannot run on straight biodiesel without having some injection problems. But I also believe that, you know, those people can blend with 50-50 and it will work. Unfortunately, I don't have a modern car to test with, otherwise I would, but we need more people to get into this and test it and publish the results. So to make biodiesel, we take a waste vegetable oil or a straight vegetable oil. We put it through the filtration process if it's waste. So we go through a 600 micron, 400 micron, 200 micron, 100 micron filters. And then we heat it and put it through a pressurized five micron filter before putting it into the reactor. So the reactor is where we turn that vegetable oil into biodiesel and we make that reaction occur by using a catalyst, which is methanol and sodium hydroxide. And it splits the vegetable oil into biodiesel and glycerol. So glycerol can be used for all kinds of things. It can be used to make soap. It can actually be used as an input to make another sort of fill. An FLS-based fuel. It can also be used for all kinds of other things that, you know, glycerol can become glycerine. You mix nitrate with that. It becomes nitroglycerine. You add a gel or a clay. You become dynamite or gelic night. But, you know, apart from that, let's hope we don't need that for the revolution. Let's stick to fuel. So after we've had our reaction and we've split the oil into those two parts, we pull off the glycerol and then we take the biodiesel and we put it through an acid pre-wash and then we put it through a wash and then we put it through another wash or some people call it a dry and we should end up with our standard spec biodiesel and then it's a matter of store and pump. You need to test your waste-visible oil before you start. There's visual and filter tests. If it fails those, don't go any further. Throw it away. Find a different source of waste-visible oil. It needs to be reasonable quality. Otherwise, you're just fighting an uphill battle. If it has too much food particulates in it or if it's been heated and used to death, it's not going to work for you as biodiesel. You also do a titration test and that gives you the potential for the reaction in the reactor and so it needs to be within certain specs for you to get a 98% or better reaction into the glycerol and biodiesel. You also do a titration test after the reaction and that shows you what the success of the reaction is and then at the end of the process you want to do some quality testing so that you know how far off the standard you are. To get it properly tested in a lab it's going to cost about $1,000 a throw so there are some very basic tests mentioned there which will give you a good indication of whether you're meeting the standard or not without having to pay that amount of money. So bioethanol, pros. It runs your engine at a cooler temperature. There may be performance gains for high-performance engines. I certainly heard about someone who owns a Koenigsegg supercar and runs it on straight bioethanol and the performance figures were much greater than running that on gasoline. It also has anti-knock characteristics but there are some questions about it. Worst gas mileage is certainly one. The fermentation produces some CO2 so you need to find ways to mitigate that since the exercise really is to reduce CO2. Again, you can't use rubber hoses and you may need to tune or modify your ECU to get it to run on bioethanol or be optimised. So the process, I'm not so familiar with bioethanol. I have a close friend in Costa Rica who is a specialist in bioethanol. I'll show you his plant in a later slide. But it involves milling so you take the biomass, you mulch it up, you then cook it and liquefy it, then you ferment it so it requires yeasts and enzymes. If it's not a very sugary feedstock, you'll have to add sugar. And then you distill it and put it through a sieve. If you're doing this commercially, you would add a denaturant. If you're doing this yourself, you wouldn't have to do that. The only reason they do that is to stop people from drinking it because it is an alcohol and then you store and pump. So bioethanol, I might just really skip through this because there's a lot more unknowns about bioethanol. There seem to be arguments saying that over the full life of creating and burning the bioethanol, you produce less CO2 than gasoline. But there's also other studies that show that it releases a great deal more CO2. So I don't know. I haven't really done the science to work that one out. But it is a possible fuel as well. That's the process. It's a much more involved process. That's why, certainly for myself, I'm going to concentrate on biodiesel. As I mentioned, my friend Peter is concentrating on bioethanol. But I mentioned this just for the sake of completion. So some processes, the idea is to be as self-sufficient as possible. So wherever we can create all of the auxiliary processes ourselves, we should do that. Distilled water is required in both biodiesel and bioethanol. So we want to make sure that we have a source of that. The production of bioethanol also produces distilled water, so that's handy. As I mentioned before, you need enzymes, yeasts, and possibly sugars. My friend currently is importing that from Europe. But I think that given that we're in Costa Rica, it would be much better if we could source local things that did the same job. The same is true for the chemicals. If we can source those or make those locally, then that's better. And heat, this is one that really cracks me up. If you look at YouTube videos of distilling bioethanol, what you will see in almost every video is the use of propane to heat the still. So here we have someone who wants to get away from fossil fuels in their vehicle and produce a biofuel, but they produce the biofuel by burning fossil fuel. To me, that doesn't make a lot of sense. So we need to find a source of heat that makes sense. So using that glycerol to create another fuel for the process, something like that would be ideal. So modern vehicles, 96 and newer. All vehicles have OBD2. They all have the diagnostics port. So the theory is that all modern cars can run on bioethanol, at least as a blend, if not straight. But no cars are optimized for this. Not even flex fuel cars are optimized for biofuels. They're optimized for gasoline. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done in terms of chip tuning to tune the ECU to work optimized for biofuels or reprogram to run on biofuels. It's software-only modification, but it'll be interesting to see how difficult or easy that is. Older EFI cars, again, they should all be able to run on bioethanol, but it's a much, much more difficult problem to reverse engineer the ECUs and reprogram them. Back then there were no common standards for these things. I have myself rewritten the ECU of an old GMC truck that was normally labeled as OBD1, not that that was any real standard. And I can tell you it was a lot of work. And really old carburetor cars. So again, old old cars can be modified to run on bioethanol. That link there shows a story of someone modifying a 1969 Dodge Dart to run on ethanol. You hack into the carburetor and a few other things like that and you can get it to work. So how are we going to do this? I want it to be cheap. I want it to be small. I want it to be simple to construct and simple to understand. I want it to be built with local materials. I want it where it requires some machining or manufacturing. I want that to be locally sourced. And I want the whole thing to be open source. So that's my vision. So cheap. There are brilliant people out there with brilliant solutions. I don't know if any of you are familiar with Earthships. These are houses that heat and cool themselves, that treat their own sewerage, that grow their own food, that power themselves. They're completely off the grid. They're awesome. The inventor of the Earthships claims that he wants it to be a viral thing and he wants everyone to build one. And yet he charges $8,000 for basic plans and $120,000 for customized plans. So I don't know about you, but that puts it out of scope for much of the world. So I call that a guilt appeaser. If you are one of the 1% in the US and you have polluted the planet plenty, you can now appease your guilt by having your own Earthship. So it's going to be really cheap. I also want it to be small. I want it to be as close to personal as possible. That's most definitely the case with biodiesel. You can make it in very small amounts. It's a very simple process. You can do it in the garage. It's not a problem. Bioethanol is more difficult and that's what we're starting to work on now. But if it's small, if it's personal, you present a smaller target to the, you know, petro interests that are out there. We need to be distributed much like the Internet. We need personal commitment and buy-in from the people that are going to be producing the diesel. So, you know, I want to see people building it themselves. And with that model, it'll be very difficult to stop. If we all start making our own fuel, they'll have to start to listen. Simple to construct. Ideally, no specialist skills required. I'd like to see kits offered to help people. I'd like to see people share with other people and support other people. And I would like it to be easy to replicate. So easy to train how to build your own personal processing plant. Local materials, as I mentioned before. So just, you know, instead of shipping things from halfway across the world, let's try and do all this wherever you are. Same for machining and manufacturing. I mean, biodiesel is pretty basic. It's, you know, regular plumbing parts. But for bioethanol, it's a bit more complex. So we're looking at, you know, using the advantage of technology to solve those problems. Fablabs are really popular in Costa Rica. They're really good, really well-kitted out Fablabs. And so we're looking at how we can reduce the cost by, you know, assembling the parts ourselves, the complex parts using those facilities. And open source. We all know why open source is good. It's resilient to legal challenges. No one to sue. No barrier to adoption. No level playing field. And it has true potential for viral growth.  So cheap, small, simple to construct, simple to understand, built with local materials and local machining, but it's not open source. But I do mention it here because I think that it's a good place to start. I'm not associated with these people at all. But it's Utah at dieselsupply.com. So the plans are from a couple of hundred dollars to about eight hundred dollars. And you can build the plant for about a thousand to ten thousand dollars. This is one made with a hot water unit. This is a reactor. So you just keep the heating element in it.  There's one there. Another one. This is the next one up. It's made of a couple of 55 gallon drums. You just weld them together and solve the problem that way. You can find 55 gallon drums just about anywhere in the world and some basic welding skills in your way. This is the one I like. You take these propane tanks. Propane tanks usually are highly regulated and they have a lifespan and when that lifespan is over they usually sit somewhere in rust. But if you can get your hands on them you can turn it into this which will produce about 250 gallons of biodiesel a day. So the bioethanol plant this is the website of my friend in Costa Rica ecoethanol.net His plant cost about $275,000 which is obviously way beyond what I want it to be. I want it to be affordable by just about anyone so we need to get that cost right down. So this is his plant. It sits inside a shipping container. The piece at the front there is the it's actually a food processor that does the molting of the biomass. The biomass that he's using is the cores of pineapples that come out of a cannery plant. They just throw the cores away. So it's high in sugar. It's perfect for making bioethanol. We put it in there and process it, cook it, ferment it and distill it. The stills are at the far end. That's the stills there and you can produce bioethanol. The testing station, make sure the quality is there. So I see our role as hackers to create, facilitate, militate and rehabilitate. For sure. In the creation process we need concepts, the processes, the plans, you know, from the whole plant to the smallest component of the software. We need to package this in a way that we can distribute easily and out-create those that have an invested interest in the problem. Facilitate. So this is about providing materials where we can, assisting with fabrication where that's required, doing ECU programming and giving away the code and the instructions and so on for free. It's about producing kits, sharing and supporting each other, training each other and having fun. Militate. Tell your friends, clump together. I like the idea of the Roman military model. Everyone else in the ancient world, if they wanted to have a war with someone they would have to get all of their troops together in one place and they would train for a few days and then they would go into battle very unprepared. Whereas the Romans worked out, if you had six men in the tiniest village you could put those six men in a line, the first one would be a javelin guy, the next one would be something else and so on, and they would train as a line. And then when they came together they just put all those lines together. A highly trained, very efficient military machine. You want to do the same with this kind of thing, so in small groups get someone who's good at car hacking, get someone who is more interested in the fuel side, get someone who has a real interest in chemistry and so on and clump together and make it happen. Lobby government campaign advocate never hurts to do that, promote what you're doing. I think this is what the revolution might look like. And rehabilitate. So assist those in fossil fuels to repurpose their infrastructure capital and energy and resources into something that will help humanity not harm humanity. I think if we get started they'll have to follow. So let's get started. Give back. That's a permaculture principle. So share. You're experiencing your knowledge. Pay it forward. And this is the plan. The plan from here is to set up a lab for biofuels experimentation. I hope to do this in Costa Rica. We'll be prototyping different plants and so on. We'll be looking at vehicle modification. We've already started gathering data for that. We've worked out what are the most common models and makes in Costa Rica. So we know where to start with that. We need people to contribute all these things. Biofuels expertise, sourcing of waste biomass, engineering of components, fabrication labs, ECU hacking, car mechanical expertise and funding where appropriate. A note on legality. I don't know what the legal status of doing this is in wherever you come from. What I do know is that in the USA and New Zealand it's very straightforward. You just apply to the federal government for a license and pretty much within a couple of weeks you get it sent in the mail and you're away. Your mileage may vary elsewhere. I don't know what the regulatory environment is like here in Germany but it is an eco-friendly country so I would hope that it would allow for this possibility. If you do know the legal situation please let me know. I would like to be able to gather that information and publish it. Okay, questions. Please line up at the microphones if you have any questions. We have a little time.   It was a BMW E35 with a 525 TDS engine because it has a pre-chamber engine and these engines were built until 1999 and this car died because the synchronization chain broke. BMW told me that if I asked about changing the chain because the car had 300,000 km they said no you don't need to change it it lasts an engine life so it lasted another 20,000 km then the engine broke. But there are some drawbacks because you need to completely redo all the ceilings in the injection pump and you need to re-heat the fuel because otherwise you will break the injection pump. So it's not that easy but you can do it with a heat exchanger that heats the fuel from the coolant water and so you can do it. There's a website where there's a forum in Germany called FSMO .de and they did a lot of experiences and the best cars to use are the old Mercedes cars that have inline injection pumps maybe if you have a 6-cylinder car you have 6 actual pumps in the line like a truck and these pumps are extremely rugged so you can simply use these old cars those are the best things to use. That's a solution, rapeseed oil as a straight vegetable oil. Any other questions? I think where I'm from the Netherlands from what I'm told we can't drive on biofuels because the government is afraid they're going to miss their taxes so well thank you Olaf so thank you Gustav, that's the name great talk I would like another round of applause for him