Kauai Studios. This is another episode of Security Matters. I'm your host, Andrew Lanning. Today I've got Cameron Javdani with us. We're going to talk about audio insecurity. Cameron, thanks for joining me today, sir. Hi, Andrew. It's good to be with you. Hey, thanks, man. You built me out. I had a cancellation, so I'm glad you were available. We're going to talk about, this is something a lot of people don't think about, is audio insecurity. You know, the world's used to seeing video and we've heard about all those stories. I think a lot of people don't even know that audios attach to alarm systems and they don't know about remote video or audio verification. Which is something I think I was playing with over cellular, as a matter of fact, back in the early 90s. You know, I remember these old, I think it was Eagle boards and you could attach like an electric microphone and you know, you could have your central station listen in.   So that was always a gimmick. But anyway, you've got a long history with audio. Why don't you take our audience for those who may not know you through your, as much as you care to share your history and bring us up to how you got in the role you've got today. Sure, be happy to. I'm coming up on roughly a decade in the security industry entirely with sound and security systems, audio in integration with camera systems or recording systems. It's funny you mentioned that you were using sound back in the day because frankly, it's not a new technology to the industry. It's a very straightforward technology for the industry. But we see it used quite sparingly for a few different reasons. My background in the industry came when I joined liberal electronics in 2011. I think they got going in 1979. So perhaps well before you were, you were working with the equal boards and attaching mics onto them. I think today we might take raspberry pi boards and attach an electric condenser microphone onto there as well. So I worked there for quite a few years and last summer found it sound secure with the intention of doing something a little bit different for the industry to bring audio more mainstream to make it more accessible for a lot of customers that were choosing between something at the high end or something at the low end with garbled quality or distorted sound. So we see it used from time to time in retail applications and law enforcement applications. Like you mentioned for that evidentiary equality or to just find out what happened when video doesn't give you that clear explanation. When I was playing with it, the most dissatisfying thing was like when somebody would turn away from the mic and their voice would fail.  You could have multiple mics and you could, I think it was, I want to say eight by eight. Was that a product that was involved with, I did some, it was a video and audio. I think I tied LaRue to eight little eight by eight boxes. There was so many, so much that stuff going on back then, it was interesting. But for your purposes, when you were with LaRue, what was the sort of push? Where was the market strong? Like when you started. So we see a big shift in the industry and when I started with LaRue in 2011 the main users of audio for their security systems were police and they used it primarily in interview rooms. So does that count as a security system against intrusion or burglary or robbery or fraud? Potentially, I mean it's tied to cameras, right? But the risk in that interview room is certainly different if you're a retailer looking to protect your shop and your inventory. Over time though, what we saw was a broadening of demand across a number of different verticals. And I think the big driver on that was not our own industry. It was the fact that consumer electronic devices have integrated sound for years. And now everyone is accustomed to whatever piece of electronics they have. It's got to have sound on it. If you think of Alexa or Google Home or Siri on your iPhone, they're all using sound. And if you open up your camera on your phone and record video, your camera records audio automatically. And so practitioners of security among end users are saying, why do I have this feature in function on my cell phone but not in my security system? I'm not going to go hang iPhones around my building, right? So I think more and more regardless of the market sector, consumer electronics are driving demand for our types of technology for security applications. That makes total sense. I really didn't consider how just common it is, right? When you turn on a recording device for video today, the audio of course gets picked up. Have there been major improvements in quality? I mentioned how the electric microphones you turn away and all of a sudden you couldn't hear. I don't know if people in our audience, if folks have had to review video of an event where there is no audio. And it's amazing the content that's contained in that audio when you can put it together with video. So it's super valuable. What's driven improvements, I guess, in there for tying it into video? Because even on your iPhone sometimes, the audio is not the best, but it's usually pretty good. Of course, that's a phone. It's usually really good and functions like speech to text are getting pretty accurate now. But I think more and more we see a number of signal processing features like background noise cancellation echo cancellation and a focus on voice for a lot of different applications. Certainly our focus of sound secure is to pick up voices. So when we talk to a convenience store who wants to have a mic over the point of sale. So in case of a robbery, they can pick up additional evidence of the robber. They don't want to hear the home of the ventilation system didn't want to hear the home of the cooler with the ice cream right in front of the cash register. They want to pick up on those vocal frequencies. So having circuitry that's designed for voice and a frequency response that's designed for voice is very advantageous for a large number of mainstream users of security equipment who want to add an audio. Now when you look at products with a large frequency response for for the sounds that they hear from say 300 Hertz all the way up to 16,000 20,000 Hertz. Those are advantageous for technologies like gunshot detection. So depending on what the customer is looking to pick up or the nature of their security system will help inform what Mike type to pick. So just like you have different camera types with different features and functions, you're going to have audio devices and mics and speakers that all have those that variation in their features and functions as well. For our purposes, where we look to convenience stores or quick service restaurants or broadly speaking the retail industry. Typically the point of sale is the area of focus because if there's a robbery at a convenience store going to happen at the cash register. There's a robbery at a quick service restaurant or if someone's complaining that they ordered cheese burgers but they got chicken nuggets instead. That's going to happen at the point of sale. So customers are primarily concerned with voices in those areas, which is why we put together technology that focuses specifically for voice and cancels out those other higher frequencies that are needed. So is that like a tunable feature? Can you dial it in for voice and then also expand it or is it a different type of a chipset that's required? It's possible to do it through software programming, but most of the time when systems are put in, you set it and forget it. I'm sounding like that infomercial from back in the 90s, right? You don't want to have to constantly be tuning your security system for anticipated situations, right? So if you are an owner of a convenience store and you want to have a mic over the register in case of a robbery or in case of employee fraud or internal theft, you're not going to want to have to change the settings on your devices all the time to then pick up gunshot detection frequencies or glass break frequencies. You would probably want either independent systems or an all-in-one system, which is possible, but there are trade-offs to do that. So more and more we see, especially for our customer base, we see customers that want to pick up voice at point of sale who probably don't need the same caliber of systems that the federal government uses with the FBI or in military CID interview rooms, but they want to have audio that's clear, that's not garbled, that's not distorted. And so our solution is geared towards that segment of the market. And was that some engineering? Was there a gap in the market when you said, you know, we really could do this better? So you went into manufacturing mode and decided to branch out? Yeah, the impetus behind it was if I stood back and I took a look at the offerings in the industry today, and you have high-end technology out there that works for FBI interview rooms, that works for law enforcement across the board, federal, state, and local, that works for military police. Super high quality, you can hear a whisper from 20 or 30 feet away. On the other side of the spectrum, you had cheap consumer electronic type devices that you can pick up at a retailer like Best Buy, but the quality maybe wasn't there, the pickup range wasn't there, maybe it broke down after a few months, maybe it was garbled or distorted. And you had those two offerings at polar opposite ends of the market and absolutely nothing being offered in the middle. So the idea behind starting up SoundSecure was to offer a product that would fit that segment in the middle of the market where customers need audio, they want to pick up sound for the reasons that you mentioned, but they don't need to break the bank necessarily and they don't need that super high level of technology that the feds are using or that law enforcement are using. Yeah, and I know I think everyone's been on the, you know, at the drive, driving in a gate trying to talk to the guard and he's going rah, rah, rah, rah, rah, rah.  You know, it's like really, is it that hard?  And when it doesn't happen at a, like a security gate, for example, that's a really bad experience. I mean, you know, it makes our industry look bad. It's, it's interesting. It's always interesting to me. It happens all the time. Absolutely it does. And if you think about other instances, other events where sound is used, if you ever go to a conference and there's a speaker at the conference who's practically eating the microphone and the sound is distorted and garbled, everyone says, stop, hold on, we got to fix the sound quality, right? Or if you start a presentation and your lapel mic isn't working, and everyone in the back says, stop, we can't hear you. Yeah. But when it comes time to play back the footage of a robbery at a convenience store or the cash register, it's silent. And so offering that we have is one that solves that problem where you can hear what's going on. And you get that additional evidence. The other benefit that we're seeing more and more of today are central stations wanting to verify alarms before dispatching police to respond to them. In a number of municipalities that are escalating fines for false alarm dispatches. So if you have a typical security system of cameras and access control and audio included, the central station can then pull up the live feed of the mic and listen for people yelling for help or glass breaking or gunshots or some other type of sound that would indicate a crime in progress or an emergency in progress that they would need to dispatch for. So it's a very cost effective way to mitigate false alarms. And then on top of that, after the fact you get the evidentiary quality sound and evidence for the investigators to refer back to. It's awesome. Doesn't it? It makes you wonder, you know, how do we do this without audio? You know, as an industry, it just, it got put in. It didn't get built in, which is kind of interesting. So you're definitely filling the niche that we need. It's interesting Andrew too. If our audio cut out on this webcast, I have a feeling the producers would panic, right?   The audio usually persists, but the video... That's the sound of all the viewers clicking off right now. Well, let's go pay some bills. We take about a one minute break here and we'll be right back. Hi, I'm Rusty Kamori, host of Beyond the Lines. I have a TV show based on my book, which is also called Beyond the Lines. It's about leadership, creating a superior culture of excellence and building winning teams. We are having a fun drive for Think Tech Hawaii and please, please, please, please help us keep these shows going. Please go on our website, thinktechawaii.com to donate. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, Aloha and welcome back to the studio. We are live. We're talking about audio today and if you haven't played with a lot of audio and security cameras walking us through why you should be looking at this for your customers. Where were we? Let's see. We were talking about adding this product on. We were talking about bringing value. Let's talk a little bit about some of the things that held it back and I think there were... I think people misunderstood some of the laws, some of the privacy stuff that might be considered. What's the... Well, maybe a little history of that and then what's the status today? What concerns do you come across most about recording audio? I think a lot of folks in the industry are rightfully concerned about people's rights to privacy. That's something that our industry is addressing regardless of the technology, if it's sound, if it's facial recognition today. Back in the day, you remember people saying, you can't put up cameras in the workplace. It's an invasion of privacy. And then when it was communicated how people are properly managing that data, people become a little bit more accepting of it. But the rights to privacy are certainly at the forefront of people's minds. So for audio specifically, post Watergate, a number of state statutes were enacted under wiretapping laws. So you couldn't have your neighbor's phone line, right? No one wants to have that. But the way the laws were written is more broadly than just wiretapping. So across the country today, in all 50 states, except for Vermont, which has no state wiretapping law but is still subject to the federal wiretapping law, you'll find states are either one party consent or all party consent. So in 38 states, if one party consents to a conversation, you can record it. If you and I are meeting at ISC West in Nevada and you want to record our conversation, Nevada is a one party consent state and you can do that. If you come to my office in California, California is an all party consent state. So everybody needs to be informed and acknowledged and consent to audio being recorded. However, all of that said, assumes there's an expectation of privacy to begin with.  This call is recorded for training or for quality or for whatever reason they give you. What they're doing when they tell you that is removing your expectation that you're having a private conversation that isn't being reported. So to say that audio recording is illegal would be an indictment against every call center in the United States, which would be ridiculous, right? If you want to take it to a further degree, think of that cell phone example I gave you earlier. So if you're on vacation and you open up your camera phone to record a vacation memory and it records audio by itself, are you now breaking the law because your phone records audio? Of course not. So the application of the technology is almost more important than the statutes themselves. I'll give you another example. You and I are recording this, right? So there was no notification given to me prior to saying we're going to record your voice on this broadcast, but I have a webcam in my face. It's assumed that I know it's being recorded, right? So there's no expectation of privacy here. So what we always recommend to customers is yes, put up signage, yes, circulate a memo in your office and have people sign off on it. One way or another, remove that expectation of privacy and notify people that audio is being used. I think one of the causes of concern in our industry is that a lot of folks take the idea of security and surveillance to the nth degree and an nth degree too far in that they think they need to be the NSA or the CIA and have super top secret equipment. And the fact of the matter is most of the time you want to make sure business operations continue uninterrupted for security threats. So when we talk to, again, a convenience store, and they put up notification on their door that says 24 hour video and audio monitoring, or you talk to a retailer who plainly has a microphone over a cash register. One, they've given notice. So at that point, it doesn't matter if you're in an all party or one party consent state because you've been informed, same as the call center example. So I think for our industry, we're becoming a little bit more comfortable with audio overall because of consumer electronics again. And because people are more and more realizing hey all these other devices have this capability, something like 90% of IP cameras have audio inputs, probably 100% of analog DVRs have them. If this were an issue I wouldn't see all that opportunity for integration I wouldn't see these inputs on all these devices so I think our in our industry is having a bit of a light bulb moment when it comes to using sound for security systems. So it's something that we want to have a very objective view on. So on our website at sound secure.com, you can link over to various law firms that list out the state statutes you don't have to take my word for it you can look up the state statute. There are a number of journalism organizations that list out state statutes because if you imagine a reporter asking hey, you know Niners versus chiefs who's your team in the Super Bowl and they stick a microphone in your face to find out your answer. Did that reporter just break the law no of course not that's a ridiculous assertion. So I think more and more as people are accustomed to the various applications. They're more comfortable with embracing sound for security systems. That said, one market that we are not pursuing is the residential market, because there is such a heightened expectation of privacy in a residence that's not to say you couldn't use audio in a residence. It's just to say that the levels of privacy expectations are so high in a residence that it's not a market that we we see a lot of demand for with the carve out for residential care for elders and seniors because senior abuse is a concern. And when that happens, there is express consent typically given there's a memorandum that's given out that says we're using audio to prevent cases of abuse or monitor service levels or that sort of thing. And everyone signs off on it so it's it's very expressly consented to in that residential instance. Yeah, it's interesting you bring up the idea of the sign on the door and how how most people just assume these things are happening so they don't. I don't think they often consider like consent so like they do have the option to not enter the store when they see the sign. So they're, but I don't think most people realize they just consented to being recorded both audio and video when they entered, you know, they don't go through the process. Right, there's a difference between implied consent and express consent so press consent is you signing a document that expressly consents to something implied consent is when you stay on the phone line with that 1 800 customer service wrap. And tell them that you you know you have a service issue or you need tech support or whatever it might be. So there is a difference in terms of the two types. But again, that that signage that notification that phone recording, you've removed the expectation of privacy to begin with right this this broadcast, there's no expectation of privacy for me here. If it's going to be something embarrassing, or something else embarrassing, then, you know, it's going to be played back, and that's out there and I don't have any recourse for that, but that's. Eric to edit it. Right. So, where I'm leaving. Let's leave residential alone because the iot guys are getting in enough trouble recording people in their homes when they didn't think they were being recorded all that so we'll leave that be. Yeah, where do you think we're going to go because I, as an evidentiary component we did we've had some recent shootings here we had shooting on Pearl Harbor, and those guys. I know there's not audio there in the public spaces they were the cameras are but do you think we're going to start to see surely for that that evidence here use in public space. More and more, you know, audio recording alongside the video or what do you think what do you think the expansion space is going to be. I think retail is an obvious one, but beyond that one. Well I see quite a bit in in retail and convenience stores and when you talk about these different market segments. Some folks in our industry are a little bit bored with them, right because they are not the highest spending segments of the industry quick service restaurants are in there as well. In some cases they they do put in high end equipment but most of the time if you have a low margin business like a convenience store like a fast food restaurant that needs security, you don't have practitioners breaking the bank open to pay for the equipment. When you talk about gunshot detection, especially when you have municipal gunshot detection in public spaces. That's not a cheap technology, especially if you need it to work well. So I think we're going to see broader segmentation between the high end and the lower end in the middle of the market. But I don't anticipate seeing mics on every street corner I don't anticipate seeing you know every town square, having some kind of sound capability. One of the reasons one is the design of sound systems is just very different than video systems today with high resolution and 4k 8k cameras you can put up one or or just a few cameras and cover a huge area with just that one device. Audio doesn't work that way you need to be as close as you can be to the source of the sound that you want to hear. And when we talk about public spaces. If there's an incident or an emergency that source of the sound is going to be moving around. So it becomes very difficult to have a permanent installation with a public space. But most of the time the threats themselves that our industry exists to protect, especially in the commercial sector are going to be at those businesses that have thinner margins that need security equipment for alarm verification and evidentiary review after an emergency happens. Awesome. Super insightful. So I got one minute left. What, what would you like to share with our audience something that they maybe that we haven't covered that you think they ought to know. Well, I think just the basic of if you're in the industry and you've been doing alarm panels or DVR kits for 10 1520 years. And haven't taken a look at sound because of a preconceived notion about whether or not you can use it or because it's a new different type of technology to you and it works differently than cameras do. Don't be afraid to take to take a bite at it. Give it a try. You can reach out to us will walk you through all the steps that you need. And again, 90 plus percent of cameras have the capability you just plug the mic right into the camera or in an analog system plug it right into the DVR. And frankly, you're set to go. It's a straightforward technology. It's easy to add but the value it gives is is pretty darn high. Awesome Cameron. Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing with us. You know, if you're out there as Cameron said, reach out to sound secure. Try to add some audio because you really don't know what piece of evidence you may capture that you're not capturing today with video alone. So thanks again. I like all of you to remember that we're gone here every Tuesday at 10 am Hawaii time right now that's noon PST that the clock moves around a little bit. Cameron, I look forward to watching what sound secure does and I think I'll see you at IC West pretty soon, sir. I'll see you there, Andrew. Thank you for having me. Take care.


Hello everyone and welcome to the talk titled bringing speed to linker d for mesh expansion and in this talk we are going to take a look at how linker d the service mesh augmented its identity system in order to allow for meshing external workloads or actually making workloads that are not part of kubernetes part of the mesh. My name is Zahary Ditchiff and I'm a software engineer at Boyant the creators of linker d and if you ever want to connect or chat you can always reach me on any of these channels I'm always happy to chat so in this talk we are going to first of all take a look at make the case for mesh expansion so what is it and why might organizations actually need that functionality and then we are going to look at why workload identity matters both within and outside of the cluster and what are the guarantees that you get with the encryption and identity that's implemented in modern service meshes we're going to take a look at how that specifically works in linker d so with mtls and we are going to discuss some of the challenges that appear once you once you cross the boundary and you end up on a bare metal machine that's not part of kubernetes and then we are going to look at how we use spire and spiffy and leverage this technology in order to solve these problems and hopefully at the end we can have some time for a q and a if you want to ask questions about any of that so first of all let's actually take a look at what is mesh expansion and why organizations might need that so really if i have to put it succinctly mesh expansion is the process of actually making non-kubernetes workloads part of the service mesh and the main motivation for doing that is to enable hybrid cloud infrastructure scenarios where you have part of your infrastructure on let's say bare metal machines or on-prem boxes but you want to be able to connect this infrastructure to kubernetes and have the workloads in kubernetes communicate with it as if this infrastructure was native kubernetes workloads and this is really for the reason to kind of gain this to be able to be generic over the specifics of your infrastructure so whether this is whether this workload is hosted on a local data center or on the cloud like that shouldn't really matter you should still be able to get all the nice things that you get when you're using a service mesh namely security guarantees reliability features such as circuit breaking load balancing traffic policy and all of that so what are some of the specific scenarios that kind of motivates the you know using a hybrid cloud infrastructure and thereby mesh expansion well there are a few distinct cases and i'm sure there are more but this is what we're going to look at so first of all there is the case for the integration of edge devices so nowadays there are a lot of organizations that manage fleets of devices that just cannot run on kubernetes so you know they're like out in the field sensors that run on specialized hardware that you know you just can't run in kubernetes another reason is cost optimization and the use of specialized hardware so you know again there are organizations that need to use hardware that's either not available from cloud vendors or it is kind of prohibitively expensive to obtain and then there is the case for incremental infrastructure modernization where organizations are trying to shift to the cloud gradually and they want to migrate just part of their stack to kubernetes so let's actually look at like how each one of these might look like from an architecture perspective so let's say you're working for an organization that has a kns cluster and there is a bunch of services there that their purpose is to communicate with edge devices and you have your team working with like a dashboard that uses some of these services in order to observe these devices so you know look at health health data that's been sent by the devices and all sorts of monitoring data around these and then on the other end you have devices such as like watches that might be using some services in your cluster you have mobile phones that are also need secure and reliable connection to the cluster and you might even have software that actually runs on cars that also needs to talk to the cluster so naturally like these things cannot live on the cluster but you still want to expose the cluster to them and vice versa then you also might be in a position where you are in need of specialized hardware and there are organizations that namely financial institutional organizations that use data from providers such as Bloomberg and Reuters and the likes and they are in the business of gathering large volumes of financial data so say prices that for example might land in your kubernetes cluster where they are persistent in a database and you have some analytic services that is supposed to actually work with that data and you have a bunch of clients in your organization that are using the service to compute some statistical models on that data and we're talking about stuff like Monte Carlo simulations or heavy AI workloads and a lot of these workloads are fitted particularly well for running on specialized hardware so either specialized GPU chips or as they call them AI chips and you could be in a position where you want to host some of that hardware in your local on-prem infrastructure and not in a public cloud because it's either very expensive in the cloud or they just don't have this these pieces of hardware there or you want to tweak something specifically and be able to to kind of manage it yourself and you know but you still want this analytic service for example like in this case to be able to talk to this box this hardware box and be able to get the advantage of the fact that you're using a service machine kubernetes also there is the case for cloud migration so you know there's a number of organizations that still are running quite legacy software on-prem so things like cobalt services mainframe apis and and i know we most of us here probably live in this world where we are all running stuff on someone else's computer in the cloud and and and it's all virtualized but but this other world exists where there is organizations that are legacy nature and in their tech stack and they really want to move to the cloud using kubernetes cluster and oftentimes what what they do is they they can't just run this migration from day zero to one because it's just a big bank it's very risky so they would kind of try and shift some of these services onto the cluster roots their traffic through an api gateway or something and just set up the grounds for this more modern infrastructure and then gradually uh migrate their infrastructure to kubernetes but uh while they are doing that they need a connection to their legacy infrastructure in order to support operations and this way they could be very strategic about uh when they are doing this migration how they are doing it at what pace and this gives them optionality which is important so with all of these things being said there is one theme that is kind of recurlingly appears and this is the need for workload identity and security and encryption on this traffic that is flying outside of your kubernetes cluster and the way modern service meshes implements this is through uh mostly through tls right so um and this is nice because it gives you a certain number of properties that you know if you don't have them you can get yourself into quite hairy situations so the first thing that you get because of workload identity and encryption with a service mesh is authenticity and this really is the idea that uh the parties on each side of uh the connection can prove that they are who they say they are and this is important because if you actually don't have that what could end up happening is that you could have an attacker so imagine like this service in a kubernetes cluster tries to talk to some smartwatch well if you don't have a principled way of identifying this particular piece of hardware then you're exposed to attacks where another another actor could pretend to be that that piece of hardware you also get confidentiality which really is um the guarantee that no one could actually just read the data that you are sending and of course if you don't have that you end up again in the situation where somebody could listen in on your data and for some particular industries this is absolutely prohibitive so industries like healthcare and defense that are heavily regulated like they can't allow themselves to be in this situation you also get integrity which means that because you get the cryptographic integrity that helps you verify the fact that the same data that is received is the data that was sent and of course if you actually don't have that you could end up with men in the middle attacks that allow a third party to kind of intercept and tamper with your data which as you probably might imagine can lead to quite a lot of bad outcomes so on top of that when you have MTLAS you also get authorization which means that you can attribute granular access policies to certain clients so for example you can if you know and can identify this particular instance of a piece of hardware you can configure the system to only allow traffic to one service originating from this from this up here and ban traffic to another service so really let's actually talk about how this is currently implemented in linkardy so how do we actually achieve identity in linkardy and how does it work with kubernetes specifically so identity in linkardy is effectively MTLAS so mutual TLS for both client and server identities linkardy uses a short-lived x509 TLS certificates that each proxies issued and that are rotated periodically I think like every 24 hours or so and this document essentially the certificate is used obviously for both like proving the identity of the workload to its peer and also encryption of the data so the identity at the station framework that linkardy uses is based on service account tokens so when I say identity at the station I mean that it is as the service account token is the principal way of a workload proving its identity and kind of ensuring that it deserves to be given a certificate and because both client and servers are you know authenticated because this is a MTLAS connection then you can apply traffic policies obviously on both ends so how does that work in practice at the moment in kubernetes well whenever a pot starts up you actually end up with a service account for this pot that is either the default one or a specified one that you've configured now the service account a service account token is issued based on the service account and it's mounted onto the file system of the pot so when the pot when the proxy fires up initially one of the first thing it does is that well obviously it needs a TLS certificate in order to talk to other peers so what it's going to do is that it's going to generate a private key that never leaves the spot that is going to use for the certificate and it's going to generate a certificate signing request essentially saying okay I to the upstream authority that it needs a particular certificate with a particular identity and this identity is based on the service account so it's the name of the service account dot namespace dot service dot cluster domain so now what it's going to do is that it's going to package both the CSR so the certificate signing request and the token and it's going to send them to the control plane to the identity service that's the upstream CA now this identity service needs to ensure that this workload actually is the workload that it says it is because anyone can send the certificate signing request to it with some demands in order to do that it checks the service account token that's part of the request with the Kubernetes API and essentially it's looking for the answer well does this service account token belong to this service account that I'm being asked to issue an identity for and if that is the case and that's greenlit it replies back with a x509 certificate that contains the identity in a DNS like form in the subject alternative name the DNS subject alternative name metadata of the certificate this certificate is used as follows when a proxy initiates connection to another proxy first of all the server presents its certificate the client verifies that certificate in order to ensure that indeed the peer that it's talking to is the peer that it intended to talk to right so when that's when that's done it's the opposite way around the client presents the tls certificate so that's like normal mtls handshake the client presents its certificate and the server verifies it with the trust routes cryptographic cryptographically and it parses it and when it parses it it extracts the identity of the client so now it knows which particular client is talking to it and it can console the control plane for traffic policies and essentially determine whether this particular traffic should be allowed so you know there could be a policy that allows traffic only on port 8080 from this set of tls identities on this particular htp path so it's like this kind of this kind of policies are also a kind of layer seven aware so they're protocol aware policies so this is all great in terms of security right we get we get identity we can attribute policies to it we get encryption and it has been working for a while quite nicely in kubernetes now what happens about workloads that are living outside of kubernetes though now the moment you cross that bridge you end up with a couple of problems so first of all there is no real way for an external bare metal vm to attest its identity to the control plane because you know it doesn't possess a service account token which is the main mechanism for attesting an identity and getting a certificate and you know that makes it kind of hard to obtain a certificate which makes everything else hard because you kind of need tls to actually be part of the mesh and get all the benefits so what are some of the potential solutions to that problem well for starters you could use some mechanism for manually provisioning tls certificates to these boxes which is not ideal because you know the whole like part of the reason part of the appeal for using a service mesh is that you get certificate management for free like you don't really need to care about rotating these certificates how long they're gonna last what's the chain where is the ca kind of get it for free now you and you want to keep that because this is error prone stuff especially at scale you can manually distribute service account tokens so you know you could actually use the kubernetes api in order to get yourself a service account token for a particular service account then just put it on the box that you want want to mesh but then you end up in a situation where how do you actually do that securely like what you need to come up with a process that in order to do that securely and that's hard an error prone especially again at scale because it's just one machine yeah you can use a flash drive right but you know if it's thousands or hundreds of machines that's getting harder and harder and and it's also associated with a lot of management costs around like keeping track of rotating and the expiration of these tokens you can use as other mechanisms such as clan grants access tokens and JWT's and whatnot but this is just like a different piece of technology with different attributes or you could use something that we've leveraged which is piffy which is a framework for securely authenticating software systems across heterogeneous environments and that's kind of a mouthful but really what this gives you is defines a standard way to prove and obtain workload identities which really is in an essence a replacement for this attestation bit that we have in Kubernetes but we are missing a side of Kubernetes and Spire is the reference implementation of this standard that we are we are using in Linkardee now and it has integration with major cloud providers in upstream CA so it's very extensible it's very customizable and it can serve identities both in JWT form or X509 certificate which is what we actually care about so some of the core concepts of this is the spiffy ID which is a string to uniquely identify a workload or a group of workloads and this spiffy ID is similar to what in purpose to what we use in Kubernetes with the DNS like identities you've got an Svit which is essentially the document that you use in order to prove your identity that's either an X509 certificate or a JWT token and the Svit in this case contains the spiffy ID and you also have like the workload API which runs locally on a note that your workloads can use in order to obtain identity so some of the core components are a spire server which is responsible for managing and issuing identities based on registration entries so you know it it uses note attestation to identify agents that connect to it essentially trying to determine the identity of the particular note that the agent is running on and the workload is running on and based on registration entities it could give the correct identity to the note so to the agent that connects and this could be extended with upstream plugins so you could get it to talk to your upstream CA such as vault and the likes the spire agent is what actually runs on the note and exposes the spiffy ID workload API to workloads that that run on this particular note and it serves identity to them and it performs workload attestation and this is really kind of proving ensuring that the workload that's asking for an identity is indeed the workload that it says it is so if or rather it gives it the identity that's prescribed to the workload so how does that actually how does this attestation work in practice if you don't have a service account to prove your identity or if you're not in the possession of a service account token well so on the note level essentially you could use selectors that kind of tie very well with your infrastructure that you are running so for example if you are running on aws the agent itself can actually introspect the note that that's it's running on and determine whether this is a note that has a particular instance id pattern or contains a particular set of aws instant stocks and based on that you can have a policy to issue a particular identity to this agent and same for the workload but at a more granular fashion when a workload connects the agent that's running on the note when the workload connects with grpc api that the agent exposes on a unix domain socket what happens is that the agent could introspect this this workload and it can actually consult the kernel to determine a lot of things about this workload such as what is the unix user id that this workload is running under or what container id it is running under or what is the image that this container id is using so in that sense you can define very rich and granular policies for distributing these identities and this side these identities really come in the form of x509 esvitz and these are the actual tls certificates so these are non-ca and leaf certificates and they must contain exactly one uri subject alternative name which is essentially the uh which is essentially the the spiffy identity and the spiffy identity if you read the standard there's a bunch of detail around how these identities need to be structured and how they actually differ from your eyes so you can't really have query parameters or port numbers and all that because these things don't make sense in this particular scenario but it really is in the form of a the spiffy prefix and then the trust domain and then the actual location of the workload so it could be data center one slash databases slash instance a for example so this is good right now you have a framework that can allow you to actually obtain an identity in a secure fashion on devices that are not part of the mesh and you don't need service account tokens so how is all of that at the moment integrated with linkardy in order to have this feature that's called mesh expansion well first of all you have your kubernetes cluster and you want to mesh an external workload you want to make it part of the mesh now oftentimes if you're running in production you would have an upstream ca such as uh vault or the likes or aws secrets that contains and stores your trust routes so the root certificate with its key so this will probably be integrated with if you're running clinkardy with something like a cert manager that would be responsible for periodically issuing um periodically issuing certificates intermediate certificates that the control plane uses in order to sign and certificates for the proxy so then you will have your pots running in the cluster and the proxies and they will get these certificates periodically but now you also want to mention an external workload well say you have a vm with a bunch of applications that are running there now there's the proxy that is on the vm and traffic is going to get rooted through this proxy but it needs an identity so essentially what needs to happen is that you need to have a spire server hosted somewhere that is also integrated with your upstream ca so it can issue certificates that are essentially rooted in the same trust route as the certificates that the proxies get and then the spire agent will be running on this particular note that that's these applications and the proxy are running and the proxy will contact the spire agent over the unix domain socket using the grpc api the spire agent will know that this proxy runs under either on a particular aws instance or an azure instance or as a particular user account id and it will give it the corresponding identity so because now this is the proxy gets an identity that's rooted in the same trust domain like it can mesh with proxies on the cluster so and and it can just like tls can be terminated so you get the identity you get encryption you get all of the security features and you can apply traffic policies and you know exactly the identity of this proxy that that's uh is living over there on this vm so this is uh pretty cool but there is still quite a bit of work that needs to happen and we have some future plans for extending all of that and namely we're thinking some of the things that we have considered are unifying the identity models between linkardy and spiffy spire so really kind of maybe use or have a mode where spiffy id's are used only not only for external workloads but for proxies that are outside that are in kubernetes as well or allow kubernetes proxies to actually obtain their certificates from spire and not rely on the control plane at all and these things are perfectly possible like you know it's just a matter of changes that we need to get through but they are not particularly challenging we also need to work on private network supports so when there is no connectivity between two networks so that's on the networking rather than the identity site and also we're thinking about also dns proxies which will open quite a lot of doors for optimizations that we can that we can do so in summary i would say that mesh expansion has multiple applications across wide variety of industries and it's something that we are going to see more and more neat of especially with like auto migration to the clouds the integration of existing workloads and the likes however securing workloads is actually quite challenging especially when you when you have completely different constructs compared to what you have in kubernetes and that's why we use spire and spiffy in order to leverage all of that and and actually achieve this the same things that we achieve in the cluster work outside of the cluster as well and now there is some time for q and a i think yeah thank you so i think there is microphones that you can use if you want to ask questions or i can just repeat the question so um what i'm a bit unsure about is this request is by us or receive they say hey give me a certificate that is signed how does it know that this is not a random request from an untrusted source i don't i think i got a bit lost there are you talking about in the world as spire and spiffy or in kubernetes in in the picture you had before where the external workload an agent according to the spire server yeah i didn't really get why the the spire server trust this agent and give it a certificate because the spire server supposedly has a mechanism to actually introspect that like that's kind of the implementation details of spire and spiffy so essentially it it it has its own attestation implementation details that integrate with the particular cloud provider so it would use like the apis of the specific vendors to verify that oh so it's an external mechanism that is like a trusted party that provide the info yeah okay thank you so they yeah essentially they use the underlying infrastructure as a trusted as a source of trust okay thank you yep hi yeah hi so most of the talk or when you usually talk about a mesh expansion you're talking about expanding the mesh to between the cluster and say a vm yeah but if we have say vm a that talks a bit to the cluster and also to vm b so will the mesh expansion work also between the two vms uh completely outside of the cluster um yeah absolutely so that's a matter on of discovery rather than identity but it should there is no reason for it to work so for example you could have two vms represented as services in kubernetes because that's what ends up happening right like each vm is a service in kubernetes that could be addressed from services outside of kubernetes and it can also address services in kubernetes so if you have two vms that have corresponding services vm a can just target the service that corresponds to vm b that's on the cluster and essentially use that as a discovery mechanism and the traffic will flow through these two vms without even actually going through the cluster so yeah that's that's actually now in the center what you're asking and that is possible we verify that this works yeah nice thanks hey thanks for the talk um so the last example used like an aws vm and it used the the aws vm id to allow it to issue a certificate so how would that look for i think you used an example of a smartwatch before like how would how would that work there would you have to like preload the smartwatch with a certain certificate or how would you allow to issue a spire certificates uh now i think you need to preload it again like i am uh i'm a developer i'm not an operator like i don't really provision you know smartwatches with software but uh i i they are as i said this was just an example of a certain way to use the metadata attributed with the workload to attest your identity but if you look at the spire implementation there are a number of plugins that you could use so i would not be surprised if there are plugins that tie specifically to things like um and again i'm don't quote me on that but i could imagine plugins being written where you have um your identity being dependent on say a serial number of a particular device and the agent being able to actually read that data via plugins so then you end up with a different different kind of metadata so each device somewhere will have some metadata and if that's obtained securely by a trusted party like spire then that's fine to use right and this metadata could range from instance IDs all the way through serial numbers on on on you know um on just physical devices makes sense thanks a lot all right well thank you a lot uh for listening in on this talk and have a good couple of days


How's it going guys? Welcome back to another JHR review and today we're gonna be looking at some cat gotchas. We don't have just one but we actually have two different cat gotchas right here and basically on here if we zoom in it's kind of like a gamble between all of these different little sticker booklets down here. I also think that it might also have a poster of a kitten on here but I'm not too sure. I'm also not sure if it comes with any like candy or anything. I feel like there might be actually a stick of gum right here so it might be similar to the Dragon Ball Super ones that I actually undid or unboxed or technically unwrapped. So right here on the back it shows a good example of what you can use these guys for. You could put it on a pencil case and you could put them on the back of like a little notebook or if you have one of those thermal kind of flask things, the big ones, you can get it Costco you could even put that on there too and then I'm not sure it looks like a snickering about something and then it does look like it has something on the inside which I believe is the gum which also has 2.7 carbohydrates and sugar, glucose, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, gum base and citric acid so yeah it is. It has the same stuff down here on Japanese or in Japanese and let's go ahead and zoom back out on that. So we have this one and then we have the other one so let's go ahead and undo this one first and they're actually glittery I had no idea whoa look at that that is an insane amount of glitter that is so cool let's move these out of the way look at it between like my LEDs and stuff it's gonna zoom in see if we can get a good focus so this is like normal right no glitter and then there's just so much glitter on that zoom in look at this it's like a it's like a disco scene or something that is so cool I like that guy he's doing a loaf there's a little kitten playing this guy's just kind of standing cute little cat kind of face cut out and then we got this beautiful kind of looking girl over here I'm assuming that's a girl we have this jumping kitten right here I'm kind of like a little like birdie designs and stuff oh we can't forget this one right here kind of looks like he's like has little teary eyes or something and then we also have the brand as well zoom out a little bit that glitter is just so so intense though I wasn't expecting it to be so like intense it's it's really interesting too because like he do like small movements it kind of looks like they're like little LEDs that's really cool wonder what I should put this on what do you guys think I should put this on I should put a sticker on something that I frequently use but what should I put it on let me know in the comments below what do you think I should put this on all right so that is the first one and now let's hope that we get some other cats in the next gotcha right here push those out of a little bit I'm gonna leave this there for comparison and then we also have the gum as well let's not forget about that and now let's unload it and we have different cats zoom in on it so here's the first one right here we have any duplicates not that I immediately see yeah no it's a brand new one let's go and zoom in so we have the look I'm gonna call them the laser dot looking cat we have a kind of scared or skittish looking cat a loaf cat a pounce cat like give me food cat we have a watching eye cat same one you have a cute cat face then we also have this kind of roaming cat look this cat's tails huge and then two really cute black kitties but yeah no these are actually really nice and I wasn't expecting them to kind of glitter so much I think this will look really cool on my fiance's kind of thermal kind of drink bottle that she brings that she got at Costco lots of space for stickers but yeah what do you guys think something that you'd pick up for yourself something you think would drag people's attention and let me know in the comments below a huge shout out to my patreon's thank you guys so much for your support you guys are awesome if you enjoyed this video don't forget to comment rate and subscribe and as always I'll see you in the next video


Monday in Google's changelog, the AI-powered chatbot formerly known as Bard, plus its sister model, Duet, will both be called Gemini. The company also released Gemini as a dedicated app on Android, which users can use to set Gemini as their default assistant. For $20 a month, you can use Gemini Ultra 1.0, which also is bundled in as part of the Google One AI premium plan. What do you think of Google's attempt to play catch up with open AI? They have to get there. They will change their entire leadership before they fail at AI. It is that big of an issue for them. It is an existential threat. I think this shows that Google, as we mentioned with YouTube previously on the show, is valuing subscriptions as its hedge against moribund advertising dollars. So them saying, hey, in your search app, you can use Search, which we fund with advertising, or you can use Gemini, which we fund with subscriptions. Either way, I think that points to the future of Google's strategy here.


We are still in the AKT state and the PDP Congress was an event that was filled with illegal dealings. This was stated by an aspirant of the PDP in the coming AKT government election, that's Olusola Eleka, on plus politics earlier this evening. He said this while narrating what allegedly happened in the party's Congress that was rejected by some of the party stakeholders. He added that the leadership of the party is filled with individuals who have integrity and will solve the country's problems. In a day-to-day view, we are taking our position in the liberal world, the liberal political domain. We were fortunate in the technical domain to get the officials to go with us. And even at that, when we finished going around to get the officials to go around the world, they refused to complete the resource even at the local political office in Ekerre. And they insisted on those who are good to do that. Third, I'm going to quote Chauhan to say, which was agreed by me. They decided to shift to NTS in Bento, owned by Governor Faiyoshi. And that is quite unfortunate. And that is the case, it's the case, the guidelines. He said they are part of the election of 300 delegates. Well, I do not know about the political lane, but they were diverted to event of censor. Rather than releasing the resource at the political office, he said, which was agreed by me, he said all of them were going to write reports. He said that they never went home. He said they were not committed on the streets. They were just compared, so we are. They all went to the NTS event center to commit illegal means. The foreign leadership of the Democratic Party is made up of men and women of the United States. And I want to say this, but greatly that it is very much out of the command to rescue the nation from this hand of this and to rescue from this party. That I think of the race, the entire people of this country. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


Tana and welcome to what we are now calling the dream lounge Okay, thank you. I'm funny. Anthony's personal blog is actually called dream lounge. Okay. Yeah, it's not somebody's been He's worked on in a while, and I just had this idea. It should be called the dream lounge Absolutely, so this used to be 21 report bit more formal But now it's a bit more relaxed. I like the lounge idea that makes it Yeah, and we've got more you know, like totally streaming and we can get some good Real good interaction with the audience. Cool. So it's gonna be exciting. Um, first of all, this is your first First-ever 21 convention. It is What do you think man? I think it's been fantastic. You guys are lucky to get to be aware of this and be a part of it I thought the other guys who spoke yesterday were incredible the talks that I've been able to hear today have been really good and there's something about You guys we're in a weird generation I'm on kind of the older end of the generation but still in the same one where it's really easy for us Because the vast majority of our peers have no interest in actually improving themselves They would much rather just have the world say no, you're good enough as you are as opposed to saying I would actually like to be better than I am and I would like to aspire to be something more The reason that's good for us is because that means that in comparison You really don't have to exceed that much to be to get a leg up to get ahead And so it makes it you can be kings in a world that nobody else really has any interest in doing so because they'd rather just be told That they're good enough as they are. Yeah, absolutely. So, um Can you explain a wee bit to the audience, you know, what it is exactly that you do first point and then why do you do it? Why is style and fashion so important to you? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so guys I run a site and a YouTube channel. It's called masculine style I've actually been writing for the site for about five years if you go to masculine dash style calm. That's the main site and Basically what I do is I take Most style guys if you spend any time in that corner of the internet They kind of take for granted that you want to dress better They take for granted that you know why you want to dress better What the actual benefits of it are and so they focus on wear this don't wear that focus on these colors or avoid these patterns And yeah, that stuff matters But if you don't know why if you don't know how it's actually going to benefit your life Then you're just spinning your circles or you may actually be going Way down the wrong direction when you should be heading the other way And so what I do is I take an approach That's the philosophy of style and I help guys figure out the why why it matters that you dress better How it's actually gonna benefit your life because style itself doesn't really do a whole lot But it contributes to other things that are more important and then how to leverage it to actually do that So you can't improve in the other more crucial areas Cool, so we've got a question from a primitive OS He's been he's been on fire on the chat nice on YouTube awesome questions awesome guy. He says hi Tana Basics for beginners, please like where where did you have to step? Yep biggest thing fit is king pay attention to fit Because most guys will either err on the side of everything being way too baggy That was a problem we saw for years and years and years But now we're seeing even seeing guys go the other direction where stuff is way too skinny And the biggest thing is you want to make sure that things fit right? Basically a good kind of rule of thumb is it means I want an idea of what kind of shape you're in But I don't want to see any of the gory details You know what I mean like it should follow your natural lines, but it shouldn't limit any of your movement It shouldn't actually constrict your body But I should be able to see what kind of shape you're in and what your build is like So if you focus on fit then even if you're wearing a really cheap stuff You get from H&M or savers, you know You're thrifting or anything and it can still look significantly better than guys who drop serious amounts of money on something that fits I'm like garbage Another question we got one by one of the attendees is how can How can you make? dressing well more affordable It's one of the more common questions that I get and the biggest answer is you have to figure out what the value in dressing well is because when you're starting to develop your style and for those of you guys who actually saw the speech yesterday I talked about the difference between a developing approach to style and then a deliberate one right now If you're in a stage where you don't know how to dress better Take this developing approach be willing to experiment and at that stage my cheap stuff Go to H&M go to forever 21 go to Target go to the thrift store Don't worry about putting a lot of money into it But then as soon as you actually have developed a sense of style and you know that it works for you You're starting to leverage it for other benefits and stop worrying about whether or not it's cheap and start focusing on whether or not There's value because at that point it's worth it to spend more money on quality pieces because not only do they last longer But then they also look significantly better people who they may not be able to quantify the difference between quality piece and something That's garbage, but even if you can't quantify it You can still see a difference and you can tell a difference so start off with a cheap experiment that way But then don't worry about cheap versus expensive worry about value So something interesting we just had a chat out in the in the hallway there was I was like I was like Yeah, so the way I'm dressed right now I'm dressed mainly because I'm running about the event doing the live stream I'm dressed for comfort and the question is not just come through from Greg So like the reason why I'm wearing this is to be comfortable because of my current situation Usually I honestly would want to dress better and absolutely So it depends on what I'm doing when I'm working. I like to be comfortable so I can focus I guess But the question here from Greg White says What should I wear when it's above 90 degrees Fahrenheit? Like should I wear a jacket because it's hot which relates to the comfort issue? So he says he wants to be more stylish, but it's hard in these conditions Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, especially here because I'm always at hobby with the humidity If you think about it from an historical context people 200 years ago We're living in Florida in the middle of the heat and the humidity They didn't have any air conditioning and these guys were still wearing three-piece suits and ties and everything else And what they did is they focused on materials that breathe really well So things like linen cotton's tropical weight wools and they were cut a little bit more loosely so that you could get airflow and so I mean that's just one example of how you want to dress maybe like what and that's what I'm wearing I'm wearing something that has this jacket has a lot of a lot of texture to it It's a really open weave and so the air cuts through it really well And it's not as uncomfortable as as something that would be a normal suit jacket for me And I can wear it and I specifically brought it for that. So if you understand the value of Construction practices you understand the value of different materials and the seasons for which they're designed Then it makes it easier to dress well even an inverse weather condition same thing goes with really really cold Weather that's why you can get guys are really thick heavy tweeds as opposed to having to wear a parka or something That's down because it's designed to actually work in those conditions. Awesome So another question we've got is actually from Ian. He's one of our volunteers at the event. He's gonna kick-ass job and his question was Forget clothing. How important is hair style? Hairstyle is huge. Yeah, that's a great question because Hairstyle can either completely counter everything that your clothes are saying or it can contribute to that Because if everything else is on point then your hairstyle sucks It basically says you're a guy who just kind of half you just halfway everything You don't actually commit to what you're doing or it says that you're not paying attention to details The hair can also work in really good contrast if you think about someone who's wearing a really dialed three-piece suit It fits him immaculately. He's got this really refined look But then he's got really long hair like in dreadlocks or a man bun or something that effect Then it's got more of a rakish look and so the contrast between those two makes him more visually interesting And it makes you think that he has a different story to tell as opposed to it Just being the uniform of a guy who looks like he belongs on Wall Street or the uniform of a guy who looks Like he belongs on the beach by blending those two worlds together Then it makes it makes you more visually interesting and people will be more inclined to not just be open You're coming up and talking to them but even approaching you and wanting to come up and talk to you So be just as intentional with your hair as you are with everything else because it either works against you or it works for you awesome So I've got a great question and yeah, he's got a great name as well on YouTube the big G He's asked should you wear clothes that? Represent your hobbies and the things you love or just buy trending clothes like what's currently in style So I guess the question he's specifically asking is maybe he likes football. Maybe I like basketball He wants to show his personality fruits clothing, which is a cool way. I love that story or that question Yeah, okay This is a perfect question and this really comes down to a lot of what I try to teach guys is So much of what you're communicating with your clothing because as much as American culture Especially traditionally we like to believe that we're the rugged individualists We know and a lot of other guys have talked about this this weekend that we are social creatures and that we're Designed to exist in small groups of people are in tribes and tribes have always always always used our clothing or our Markings in our skin or our haircuts or anything else We've used our physical appearance as ways to distinguish between those who are in tribe and those who are X tribe And so if your tribe is derived Primarily by your hobbies if your tribe is guys who are into football or into anything else that your hobby is and you Need to dress to that and sure you can introduce elements of other things that maybe Maybe you're wearing a jersey, but it fits a little bit tighter than it would have 20 years ago because things were a little bit baggier back then you can certainly play with trends and be Pay attention to what current aesthetics are and use those to your advantage But I think you should always dress to your tribe because it signals to the guys were part of it That you were one of them and it signals to the guys who are not that you were not part of who they are Yeah, so like to what degree should you Pay attention to others in terms of their feedback or listen to yourself when it comes to choosing your style or a better way of saying That would be like let's say you think you look really cool with a certain style But maybe a few other people in your friend circle say hey, man You know you maybe should take that hat off or whatever, but you're like man to me I look really good in this so what degree should you listen to other people when it comes to your style? I think you're better off paying attention to the results because you should always be thinking about what? What do I want my clothing to actually do if it's that I want it to signal to my friends that I'm part of them And I want them to like me better, which I don't think should be your primary reason You know your value should be based on other things But let's go with that for example if that's your primary goal And then your friends start to reject you because of what you're wearing Then it's not accomplishing the goal that it's designed to do and so you should try something else If it's something that irrespective of how anybody else treats you you just want to feel like a million bucks in it Then it doesn't matter what anybody else says and you should wear whatever you want If it's something that you only want it to be comfortable Then it doesn't matter how it looks and you can show up wearing a hospital gown You know and so really what you want to do is understand what the reasons or what the goals are that you want your clothing to accomplish And then just objectively assess whether or not it's accomplishing those goals and then evaluate from there Well, let's just say like if you're like your goal is to just you know go out and pick up chicks but also hang out with your buddies and You're wearing an article of clothing that to yourself. It looks cool But maybe one girl said like two girls mentioned that they don't like it Do you think you should modify it? No, especially because if it draws enough attention that they're willing to tell you that they don't like it Yeah, because hatred is closer to acceptance The opposite is indifference what you don't want is to wear something that people are indifferent to Because if you're getting negative attention, especially if your whole purpose is should try to go out and meet new people Negative attention can be better than positive attention. Okay, and it's also a really good way to kind of Jockey within position within your tribe. It's a way to kind of show your buddies that it's like no I'm not just one who's going to fall in line. I'm still an individual within the tribe That you're willing to do things a little bit differently And if they're guys who are gonna resent you to the point where it starts to affect your friendships because they Don't like your hat then they're not interested in your self-improvement They're just interested in the way that you validate them and they're probably not your good buddies anyway So you would say that self acceptance of your style trumps most other people's feedback as long as you have a good idea of what you're trying to indicate and Accepting yourself. I would say that objective accomplishment of your goals trumps self-assessment which Kind of trumps, but it's on a pretty even playing field of what your audience's perception of your clothing is Do you have a personal story Tana, I mean we've only got about five minutes and there is one more question I want to ask however Like say I don't know your background how you first got into all this We don't have the time unfortunately going in depth maybe another time we can get you on the podcast and talk more about that Do you ever like based on max's question? Did you have a point when maybe say you made the decision to start dressing better when someone came up to you and said I don't like x y and z how How did you respond to that and how would you recommend like someone like max would respond to that comment I don't think I had somebody I can't think of any time other than like my mom who said you know like I don't know if I like that and you know your mom should always have at least your best interests are but I know that for me I used to wear a suit when I worked doing loans and everybody else would just wear a shirt and tie and I come to find out a few years later that people resented me for that and in my mind I'm thinking that's fine. I'm not interested in being where you guys are anyway because for you This is the pinnacle of your career This is the pinnacle of your self-improvement and this is just one step in the ladder for me So if you're trying to pull me down, then I don't have to worry about you It's just made it easier for me to separate myself from those who have more of a mediocre mindset As opposed to having to worry about whether or not they like me It's just so what that just makes it easier and you don't have to worry about it because then they know Yeah, that's good advice. All right guys on Periscope and if you want Tana We've got we're running out of time. We've only got two minutes left And I've got to ask one question if you want your question answered hit those hearts right here We got to see those hearts otherwise we got to go next door and we got to go see Ted Keep coming right you got to keep coming Yes, yes keep it coming keep it coming anyway, right so the last question I wanted to ask There we go getting away from you. Yeah. Yeah, you guys keep Coming guys keep it coming then I'll pick a question after this one. I promise So in your talk at the under 21 convention, which is where we are right now If you guys on Periscope, don't know what the under 21 convention is where have you been go to Under 21 convention comm check it out. We're having an event next Next October this October 2016 the 21 convention is going to be our biggest event ever It's all about men's self improvement in terms of style Which what we're talking about now fashion, you know, we don't we can't reveal this right now, but Tana might be there We hope he's there So we'll see However, let's get into the question which is Tana you just talked a lot about this thing called masculinity archetypes And it was correct me for wrong. It was rugged retired rake rugged refined and rake rugged refined and rake Yes, so if you have an idea of kind of generally what style you want to Appropriate then it makes it significantly easier as opposed to this nebulous. I just want to dress better We've heard a lot about fitness today and some guys will say well, I just want to get in better shape Okay, does that mean you want to do powerlifting does that mean you want to run marathons like what direction does that actually take for you? And it's the same thing with style So I helped guys figure that out and so I teach the three primary archetypes Which are rugged refined and rake ish and they're based on what your relationship with the world is So if you're a rugged guy, I mean you primarily exist within a physical relationship with the world That means you like to work with your hands. You're probably a blue collar guy You're someone who's a little bit more rough and tumble Refinder guys who exist within kind of the financial or the social world They're guys who are interested in building or maintaining civilization and they like to work within those bounds And then the rake those guys are the rebels They're the ones who like to break the rules and they're defined by their willingness and their desire to kind of go against the grain They like being they like getting extra attention for doing the wrong things And so if you know where you fall within those you can dress in a way that magnifies that and helps you Facilitate that relationship with the world. You can mix certain. Oh, absolutely Most guys are a mix of all three, but you primarily lean towards one or the other and then have the other two is kind of secondary Interstiary archetypes Okay, time for one more question on periscope. You've got five seconds to ask it Otherwise, we're gonna have to go next door and check out the other talk seen lots of hearts. Let's see a question That's let's say question five four Type type type two one and we're gonna have to go over YouTube. So big planning asks and What to do if you feel we're dressing well Because no, I love this question. I love this question Can you repeat the question? So what do you do if you feel weird when you're dressing? Well, is it just because you're not used to it or how do you feel where the biggest thing that you need to distinguish between When you're starting to dress better is is this actually uncomfortable or is it just unfamiliar? Because if it's uncomfortable, especially when it comes to how it physically feels on your body Or if you're getting objectively negative reactions from people then you need to change But if it's just unfamiliar if you're not used to the way that it feels on your body Or if the people you find yourself surrounded by aren't used to seeing you that way But it actually is better than ride through that unfamiliarity So if it's uncomfortable change it if it's unfamiliar stick with it. Awesome. Well kind of cool. Thank you. Yeah, thanks guys I was blessed. Yeah, appreciate it


In Washington, DC, there are many things to do on a Sunday afternoon. I like to exercise. I like to shop. I like to garden. But today, I feel bored. When I feel bored, I always look for something unusual to do. Music, let's go see, is going on here. This is a big birthday party for the writer, William Shakespeare. This is a party for William Shakespeare? Yes! Awesome! Awesome! Is a drum band. I never listen to a drum band. But today, I am listening to a drum band because it's Shakespeare's birthday. This is a puppet show. I never watch puppet shows. But today, I am watching a puppet show because it's Shakespeare's birthday. Listen. I never watch puppet shows. Listen. But today, I am watching a puppet show. My clothes are usual. His clothes are unusual. Listen. My clothes are usual. Listen. Their clothes are unusual. In Washington, D.C., seeing a politician or even the president is usual. Seeing the Queen of England is very unusual. Your majesty, sword fight. But today, I am sword fighting because it's Shakespeare's birthday. There are many things to do in Washington, D.C. Some unusual. Some unusual. Today, I am not bored because it is William Shakespeare's birthday.


And going through life sort of being dismissed because of the way that your brain is the way that you operate and perceive things. You kind of get used to the fact that people are going to treat you negatively. And it's you sort of build up this this wall you you learn from you learn how to interact with people through these negative interactions. And I think a really important sort of step in my life was realizing that, hey, maybe this experience in teenagehood, this isn't representative of the entire human race, which sounds funny me saying this. But if you have been surrounded by these experiences and not really feeling that you fit in, you have this sort of warped view of what people are generally like. And so the first step to me, you know, realizing that I had these quite negative and defensive sort of personality traits was because I had a bias towards negative experiences, negative social experiences. And the point at which I was like, hmm, I don't know about this, but let me gather some more data. That's when I started to talk to more people. I started to actually like, yeah, exactly, they're going to approach it in the logical fashion.  But then also I found people like me. I also find the autistic community. I found people who are just genuinely nice, lovely people who wanted drama free, happy kind of friendship, connection, emotional connection that I really wanted. And if I wasn't able to look inside myself and notice that there was this bias, I wouldn't be able to do it.  Why do you hate neurotypicals? And it's it's usually because of that bias that they have such a bias and they build up these walls and these walls protect them. And they've they they act and they convince us that everyone's out to get us and that we're always a step away from having a hurtful comment or abuse or negative experiences. And really, we just need those. We need to balance out that bias with with reality. I tell you what, two of the biggest challenges I've faced in my life because of my autism. So the two that I would say were the first thing is, is that as neurodiverse people, we have this sort of obsession to justice of fairness and truth in particular, that thing truth. And I think looking back, had I have not held on to my principles as much and probably just let maybe some things go, I probably could have had an easier life. But it's I think it's an experience that's common to a lot of us. If something's not fair, like we will hold on to it forever until death. I think the biggest problem, the biggest challenge I've ever had was that as neurodiverse people, we are driven by truth of facts and evidence, right? Neurotypicals are driven by emotions and perceptions. And those emotions might be totally detached from reality. But however, they're true for them. That would frustrate me no end because I'm like, it's objectively true. Like I can show you, it's right there, it's in black and white. Why can't you see it? You can tell them the sky is blue and they'll still say it's green. And it was that theory of mind and just saying, OK, well, it might not be true in reality, but it's true for them. For example, in the work that I do, people come with all sorts of preconceptions and ideas on what they think is happening or whatever. And I think if you just if you use truth in an injurious way, you just kind of smash people with it. Yeah, you might win an argument, but you're not going to get them on side. You see this a lot in general media. So much like online spaces. Like, why can't they understand that rule? Stupid. I'm not doing it. And I'm like, yeah, well, you've got to get through the next five years of school. Maybe it might be worthwhile just taking the people used to say to me all the time I was a kid, take the path of least resistance. I could never understand what they mean, but now I get it. So pick your battles. So, for example, people, you know, will come and they believe this is happening. And it's kind of it's an art form being able to give them some facts in a way that's digestible for them and doesn't. Yeah. Scar there doesn't hurt their feelings. And they they still be on side. They'll still trust you enough to follow the advice that you give them. And I think that really is if I if I was to say in my profession, that is the know the master skill. I would say it's that being able to communicate and win people's trusts without, yeah, totally demolishing them with facts and truth. I think that there's there's a really important point there because for most people going through life, you know, that their perceptions are that their behaviors can be easily translatable to other people. Like if they if they cry, they're feeling a certain way. If they raise their voice, they're feeling a certain way. If they change their tone, they're feeling a certain way. But when you when you different when you when you have a neurodiversity, your perceptions, your thoughts, your feelings, they're different. And so in some ways, you know, when I was younger, if someone wronged me, you know, perhaps they weren't actually in tending to wrong me. They would they just had a different idea of what was going on. And I think a really constructive thing for me was kind of going past. Because most of the time, if someone, if I felt someone was being disingenuous with me or they're being nasty, you know, and they were sort of stating things that just didn't make any sense.  Whereas, you know, as I'm getting older and understanding the differences between myself and someone who isn't autistic. It kind of kind of allowed me to to view the situation as just a crossed wires, like a situation where both people had good intentions, completely different conclusions were made just because of the differences that we have. And just just realizing the ways that, you know, I perhaps might have been biased and towards a certain feeling or thought in that situation, especially when it's an emotional issue and how they might be. And, you know, realizing the fact that, hey, actually, I didn't know much about their experience and what they were doing and how they were thinking. And likewise, they didn't as well. So it was kind of, it was a really sort of transformative thing for me to kind of go for and go like, actually, hey, look, I'm actually getting this wrong.  But other people, quite a large majority of people, they just got a different interpretation of the situation. They didn't understand how I sort of experienced life in terms of my emotions, my perceptions and my thoughts. And I didn't know how they did either. Good day, viewers and listeners. Apologies for my very rude introduction to our regularly scheduled broadcast. I just want to remind you that if you have enjoyed the podcast this far, please make sure to rate, subscribe, like, comment and share. All of these actions are pretty much the lifeblood of a small independent creator like myself. And it will help me get most of my work, more of my work, to people who really need it. If you want to stay up to date with my life, get behind the scenes content, check out my daily blogs, head over to the Instagram at Thomas Henley UK. You'll find a link to that down in the description alongside my range of neurodiversity clothing, just like this strong, powerful autistic hoodie that I love so much. And my website, of course, where you can find a contact email to book me for one-to-one autism coaching, interviews, workplace training and speaking. So thank you very much for listening to this very annoying self advert. And I hope you enjoy the rest of the show. Understanding and unpicking those strands where things sort of became miscommunicated was really important for me. Developing a sense that actually people aren't really much out to get me. I'm not just inherently pushed to the side and ignored. It's just I didn't really have any way of explaining my point in a way that they understood it. So you have that situation for a lot of people, especially if you don't have any autistic friends, autistic connections to kind of talk things through and really sort of understand those situations. But bridging those gaps and understanding that life isn't the same for me as it is for them and trying to figure out the points at which that is the differences are and trying to find some way to relate to each other about that. That was so important because I went from viewing everyone as hating me and I was lonely and nobody understood me to understanding, hey, there's been some issues here and it probably could have been addressed with a little bit more information from the people around me and also myself and sort of learning about it. And perhaps even them to understanding a bit more about how autistic people are and how they work. One of the best sayings I've ever heard is that the map doesn't match the territory. I know they mean that everybody has their own internal map of the world the way that they think it is and different people's maps don't always match up and it's having the skills to be able to meet halfway and find common ground. And I think you're very introspective and I think that's unusual. A lot of people who I mean they look at their behaviour and they'll make some justification for it or they'll look at it in a way as that they were wrong and I was right. I think you're honest and you look back at yourself and you look at what you could have done better and what you could have done worse. And life's a learning curve. It's important not to beat yourself up. You just did the best you could at that time and now you're in a different point and that's alright. It's just having that acceptance that we do the best we can. And I think also as well I think it's important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater because some people do have malevolent intentions towards you. It's absolutely true and it's naive not to think so. We live in a free market society where individualism and selfishness is rewarded. I think I've worked all over the world and particularly last year I was working and some of the norms and the way people treat each other I wasn't quite prepared for. It was different. And some of the things you come across they are they can be rude and it can be a power game. So I think it's important to be able to decipher between instances where somebody may have done something unintentionally which is 99% of the time. But then there are those instances where people do mean to it's a power game. And I think for autistic people in my experience in those instances it's best to check out because it will have a detrimental effect on your mental health and you know it's not good for us those kind of environments. So if you feel like you're in the presence of you know somebody that means you you know hasn't got the best intentions towards you just check out that. I think that's always better in my opinion. I had a great view. I went the opposite way as well. I thought that everyone was great and everyone had the best intentions. And that led me into some very precarious long-term damaging situations. So it's really you know I kind of had a the switch pull then I was like okay everything's not negative everyone's great. But also that was a really bad sort of mindset to have about it because you know the best results that I've had with people with life is to approach things with the best intentions and make it very clear to people why what intentions I have and how I am and be open with them. But then if they take advantage of something I try and understand it better. And if they're not amenable to also trying to understand it better you know what can you really do about that. And it happens multiple times and it keeps happening multiple times. That's not miscommunication. They understand you've explained yourself. So it's you are only responsible for your 50 percent Thomas. And I think that you're only responsible for what you do and what you don't do. And if you've come to a situation with the best of intentions and you've been honest and you've not concealed anything you've done your bit. I think one thing that I've noticed it's previously in myself but in some of my friends who are neurodiverse. There can be a social naivety inherent with us. And we think that everyone's our friend. And I've seen that play out that dynamic whereby you know I'm trying to explain some listen. So you get bullied. This this this and this is going on. And you kind of can't see it. And they still refuse to see that. And that can be tragic tragic sometimes. So I think it's just you know just approach everything with the best of intentions. But when you're in the presence of someone that might not have reciprocated his feelings towards you. It's just knowing when to check out to say God your own kind of mental health. I think it's all this was a lot of mileage in that. I think one common theme for for our talk is that everything's great. Yeah. We like to think that we can develop this way of being way of living that's going to be applicable to every situation. And really in a lot of cases it's not. And it's very individual. And everyone's very different. And it's it's just about as you said doing your 50%. And giving people giving people chances but also knowing at what point you know the things are not going to change. And it's it's still going to be like that. And they're aware and if you've tried to explain multiple times. And really it's just about you know as you said stepping back.