And here we have our first Julia project, a proper project, and it's going to be on medical statistics. Really a good, nice little project about introductory medical research. We're going to set up a medical research project from start to finish, a real basic project, and then eventually we'll analyze the data in Julia using JuliaBox.org And as always you'll have the files available on GitHub if you do not want to create them all yourself. So what are we going to be up to? We're going to discuss all these basic steps in conducting medical research. We're going to come up with a research question. Once we have that question, we're going to do a literature search. We're going to see what has been published about our research question. We're going to start to then decide what type of study we want to do, and then what variables would be required for this type of study so that we can answer our research question. We'll use those variables and we'll set our null and alternate hypotheses. We'll talk a little bit about doing a protocol and getting ethics approval for our study. We're going to develop a data collection tool ensuring patient anonymity. We do not want our patient details to become publicly available. Then we're going to import our data set into Julia and we're going to do our data analysis. So first up in the next section we'll start off with the research question.


What does a prime contractor have to gain hiring a subcontractor with no certification and no federal experience? They're a good company and they can perform the work. Okay. You know, people, and I'm sure Maria would love to tell you about having good versus bad subcontractors right now. She's having a great old experience this week with subs. Maurice, having someone that performs is more important than having someone a certification. Okay. And that's just the bottom line. I tell you all the time, like, I don't care about your certification if you're not going to show up and you're going to come when you feel like it and not do a good job. So how would they know that I'm going to show up? Like, how would they know? Well, you said, what's the benefit? That's what I'm telling you, right? If some people, okay, some people actually already have negative connotations about working with people that are league with certifications. So if in the past, and that's why I always tell people, do not lead with your certifications. Like, that is my advice all the time. Like, listen, I was on Instagram. Someone asked me, Eric, I'm a woman on business. How can you help me? I go, what business are you in? Like, they're so certification driven, they forgot to tell you their business. Think about how silly that sounds. If you would do that anywhere else, you would be like, people would like laugh you off. Like, what are you talking about? I'm a woman on business. How can you help me? I don't know. I'm like, what do you do for a living? Like, what business are you in? So it means people just automatically lead with certifications. And that is the turnoff for a lot of folks out there. And on one of my podcasts with Emily Harmon, who was the director of Navy Office of Small Business, she says a lot of people already have preconceived notions because, first of all, they assume that these programs are for minorities. So right, you go back to the minority program, like giving a handout, like food stamp, like welfare type stuff. So if people have preconceived notions about this handout program already, and that we're just doing this to, for subsidies and to make numbers, they're already apprehensive about it. So that's how they know, right? They don't know for sure because they never tried you. But again, it's just like all of us out here, right? People have preconceived notions about us without, just by looking at us. So I always tell folks, lead with value. What do you offer? What can you do for me? Right? What is your skill set? What is your expertise? Hey, I've, like my man, Chieftain said, hey, I just did 15 banks jobs. I just performed for 15 banks for Bank of America. And you know how stringent they are. If I could do 15 banks cleaning within a week, I could do your federal building.  When I talk, this is exactly what I say. I say, we're a good company first. That happens to be a small business. I'd never lead with, I'm a 8A, I'm a this and that. I never lead with that stuff. I always lead with, oh, your project is over here. We did a similar project to that right over here down the street at this particular, at the Barclays Center. We did something exactly like that same size, same scope. We work with this company. In fact, we've got two referrals. They were so happy with us. They said that we exceeded their expectations. We kicked, but we brought in the windows early. We delivered on time and we didn't charge any extra money. Oh, by the way, and we happen to be a small business. All right, I got it. That's the difference. Okay. That's the difference.  Somebody might be like, I'm going to hear a story. They're waiting for you to come. Now, here come a story again. Right? It's like, here come the story. I'm an 8A business. All right, I got it. They might just tune you off, Maurice. And may not hear anything else you say. All right. Just get me just because of the way that you approach them. Like you're basically saying you're supposed to give me, because a lot of people think you're supposed to give them something because they're 8A or women-owned, right? So they're in their brains. They're like, oh, this guy's coming here asking for a handout because he's 8A. I see that. And you don't want them to think that above you. Like, no, no, no. Hey, I've done my market research. I've studied your particular agency. I know what you buy. I know some of the challenges you have. And I think we can help you with some of those challenges.  All right. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. And then, by the way, that's an excellent question because so many people think or they're under the impression that you have to have. We've even had people call Maria that thought that they could not do government contracts unless they had 8A. As crazy as that seems. So I don't know who's teaching folks, but they thought that they could not get a government contract unless they were 8A certified. And by the way, Maurice, I remind everyone out here listening, 23% goes to small businesses. That's not the big piece of the pie. I don't know why people are so infatuated with such a small, like that's not the big piece of the pie. No one ever talks about what about the other 77%? We are so infatuated with the small piece of the pie. That is just crazy. All right. I'll hear you. But that's what it is. By the way, kind of FYI, so I'll tell you something just kind of piggyback off of that. I'll do me just say those p-tax be pushing 8A. Yeah. Just something really that kind of piggyback enough what you just said. I literally, so Saturday, I'll tell you guys the story. And then I'll let Jeffrey ask you a question next. So the 8A company that we're working with up in Boston, we're already been loading them up with work. So they're already getting like high in numbers. And we're wanting to, we're trying to find some other 8As up there. And so Saturday, I was looking, one of my podcast guests, I was reading his profile, and they are a tribal company. And I saw that their tribal company literally connected with small business to do IT Stars 2 contract. So the IT Stars 2 is like 22 billion. And I saw that they did a joint venture with a small firm to do the IT Stars 2. So I, you know, me crazy old Eric just sitting back thinking, I wonder if this guy would do a joint venture with me. So I sent him an email and I said, hey, I work really closely with a company up in Rhode Island that does construction. We're looking to do a joint venture with the 8A. I saw that you did another joint venture with another 8A for IT. Would you do something like that for construction? And I said, by the way, here's my cell phone, you know, call me and anything. So the guy calls me in 10 minutes. And I'm like, hey, you know, it's Saturday, right? He goes, no, I just got your email.  I got it 10 minutes ago. And he was like, absolutely, yes, we would love to do a joint venture. I love joint ventures. He goes, when can we set up a call to talk about it? And he's a tribal 8A. They have $25 million single limit bonding. They have no limit sole source. So they can sole source up to any amount. They could do $100 million in 8A program. They're in their also hub zone. And so when you ask about why do people want to partner with small businesses because they're looking for good companies to work with. He's not coming to me for certifications. He has certifications. He's coming to us because we're a good company. And we can leverage his certifications to grow. And he's got the money, past performance, and something that none of us could even buy. And so that's why I always tell people that you don't need certifications because look, I have no certifications and I can do a joint venture with a tribal LA and have the highest small business certification that even exists on the planet, which is tribal or Alaska native. Nothing trumps that. That's like DUSA Diamond, DUSA Spade, right? That's, hey, you got a stacked deck. So anyone could do it. Anyone of us could do it. Honestly, anyone else could do it. So there you go. Click the join button now to find out about all of the different membership options. You can start off as a fan supporter and move your way all the way up to a GovCon Insider.


Company, halted! Halt! We're in to be commissioned. Center, halt! The President of the United States of America, 23. This officer will therefore carefully and diligently discharge the duties of the office to which afforded by doing- Raise your right hand and repeat after me. Aye, state your name. Aye, Kondimana Cloud. Do you solemnly swear? Do solemnly swear. That I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States. That I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States. Against all enemies foreign and domestic. Against all enemies foreign and domestic. I take this obligation freely. I protect this obligation freely. Without any mental reserve. Without any mental reserve. Or purpose of evasion. Or purpose of evasion. Once again, I'm gonna enjoy my time with you guys as much as I can. And it's been fun and I'll hope to receive the command. Fall out and congratulate the new Second Lieutenant. Halt! Hey, good job, man. I'm proud of you. Congratulations, sir.


The Brainerd Girls soccer team started their season with a hiccup, losing their first game of the year. Since then, they've won 10 of their last 11 games, 7 of those being clean sheets, putting their season-long goal differential at plus 36. But a tough test today, Brainerd taking on Moorhead, and it was also the Warriors senior night. First half scoreless game, Moorhead's Olivia Watson plays one in to the box, but Molly Rudolph there to make the diving snag for the Warriors. Keep it scoreless.  Moving ahead to the second half, Moorhead up 2-0, and Elise McNabb delivers a beautiful ball off the set piece, but Rudolph just able to get a hand on it, keeping that one in striking distance, but later in the second, Moorhead puts it out to reach Watson with the perfect picture strike, gets her second goal of the game, and the Spuds would ruin senior night for the Warriors as they win 3-0. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


I've lost many friends, people who are important to me, to substance use. It's a widespread problem. A lot of people, they're going through their addiction in silence instead of getting help. I think people in the past have seen it as a stigma, something they're ashamed of. So for me, it's about getting the story out. It's about helping as many people as possible. If you're struggling with substance use and addiction, it's important to reach out. There's plenty of people out here that are willing to help. You can reach out to a friend. You can reach out to a healthcare professional. You can reach out to a co-worker. You don't want to go through it alone. Don't suffer in silence. Don't try to take it on by yourself. There's help out there, and many people willing and ready to help you. I've heard people say things like addiction is a choice, or people should just stop using drugs. It isn't that simple. Addiction is not a choice. It's more complicated than that. Substance use disorder is a health condition, not a moral failing. The stigma surrounding addiction makes it hard for people to reach out for help. We need to stop the stigma so more people can get the help they deserve. BC is still in an overdose crisis. It's taking lives every day. Let's make it okay to ask for help. We all have a common goal, to be healthy and happy and productive, and to be connected with those who care about us. It's okay to not be okay. We are all in this together. Hashtag and stigma. Learn more at stopoverdosebc.ca.


It's the end of the day, almost time for the bell How many options will you sell? Fire up your platform, get ready to enter But first, let's get the mindset centered Ay, ay, we follow the plan, that's how we get paid Test and trade it, have success Find what works for you and forget the rest Stats and probabilities is what we're about Time to dismiss greed and doubt Focus on the process, not the money And the profits will flow like honey Power our lives, let's start the show Come on trade hackers, get ready to go Zero-day options, time to make bank Get locked and loaded, then be ready to plank Ay What's up everybody, welcome to Power Hour Live Thursday, November 2nd Everybody's doing well Took two zero DTE trades today One was Rick, which just hit Before we jumped on The other was a short squeeze PM iron condor Which is, uh, doing okay at the moment For Power Hour, oh Power Hour Where did our premiums go? We are inverted my friends So we'll be doing a straddle And because we are up over 1% From the open, we'll be doing a short squeeze version In fact, I need to set up my template Right quick, pH squeeze straddle With my new November size Let's go ahead and save that one So I'm ready to roll Got a couple minutes before entry Where, uh, where did our strangles go? Yeah, such a, such a short time ago Like four days ago We were seeing 10 wide Now we're inverted Volatility obviously getting crushed again today VIX under 16 It's above 22 Just a short four days ago You need to buy some longs Longs are locked in So it's right in between strikes so Right now it looks like it would be the 15s See where it moves here in the next minute If it moves up, stick with the 15s If it moves down, it might be the 10s Got my chicken bone broth today I gotta say, I'm a bigger fan of the beef bone broth All right, looking like the 15s Trying to get filled at 10 bucks 990 Filled at 990 on the 15 straddle 2 to 1, yep Just the same strike I used for my PM iron condor as well So a nice, slow drift higher would be ideal See on my PM I got filled at 13 So at 780, I need to reduce my stop on my PM So PM 780 Tronch 1, I got filled at 990 So 595 Is my target to reduce my stop on Tronch 1 So I entered a new TGIF today It's up a little bit since I entered Yeah, our time fly is Yeah, it's pushing towards the upper break even I mean, the TZer line still stays fairly flat Even a little bit higher, but Too much higher tomorrow or or today I will most likely just need to close that just to kind of manage risk Get a little pullback tomorrow, that would be ideal Also entered a new time fly this morning In the NOV 24 cycle That one's already pushing up to the upper end of the range Not quite to uh I'll give it up to 43.25 before I would adjust that one But certainly been pushing since I entered Yeah, I've done them as low as like three days PT But you know you're just I One of the things I like about them is they're You know that TZer line is so flat for such a nice range That you don't have to you don't have to manage them super actively So I prefer kind of seven seven plus days Lipside that is on a three day if it stays in a nice tight range for Short period of time the profits can come quick So it's checking out cl we're not to our profit target yet, but let me see where this is trading 248 So it's profitable I think I'm I'm just gonna close the The oil strangle book the profits we have we're down to 42 DTE We get another spike in oil volatility. I'll just Put on a new one Little bit 248 All right, just posted that in the option selling channel S&P up 75 One and three-quarter percent Nasdaq up 250 Russell up 37 Russell's up two and a quarter percent today Dow at 500 one and a half percent I did uh, I did trade some long S&P futures, but pretty small just micros Still in a few of those hovering near our highs high today 43 15 currently at 43 14 Have that initial push within the first 10 minutes. We hit our upside expected move Pulled back chopped around and then made a big push up again We've pretty much been kind of sleepy sleepy grinding higher since Up over a percent from the open One point eight percent from yesterday's close, but a little over one percent from today's open my PM It's below 780 So I need to reduce that stop to four dollar Any bit of down movement it's gonna stop that out after stop reduction, but Lock it in. Hopefully we go up here a little bounce What else did you guys do today anything besides rick and anybody else in a PM iron condor?  Just rick ryan rick and p.m Speaking of ryan p Don't forget 30 minutes after the bell ryan p will be presenting his trade plan Let me um grab that link to repost while i'm thinking about it Popeye's chicken. I like I like some Popeye's chicken wuga It's good for the heart can't remember I can't remember the last time I was at a Popeye's chicken, but It is good. I guess no more interest rate hikes That's what the market's telling us until Jerome says so anyway Uh datalus. Why do I lock the price slices? Uh, sometimes I play with price slices. Sometimes I don't So yeah, no no reason Sometimes I like to stick it right in the middle of my graph Sometimes I like to stick it on price No reason though it happened to be locked because I was uh, I was looking at down 15 percent on a different different thing but Uh pt had my first one this week And so that'll that'll come out on the podcast uh as a podcast episode on monday Spread trading down to 805 I need 575 on tranche one to reduce my stop. Yeah, I've been a little uh Inconsistent on my episodes I want to get back to getting one out every week, but A lot going on these days But this will help Oh, you're right crish 595 I couldn't read my own handwriting nine look like seven I did believe you you're starting to build trust with me again crish Looking down to 730 Trunch two coming up in a few minutes I'm gonna be at a low premium straddle for trunch two Maro, did you ever do anything whenever the strikes are inverted? But the perform the performance of taking a straddle if the strikes are inverted That's been set on my list It's like the 15s if we hold here Again, I want to be locked and loaded on the 15s Yeah, so I don't yeah, because I don't actually trade the inverted strikes. I actually trade a straddle if they're inverted. So I was just I was curious what that would look like All right, 15s it is for trunch two Try to get filled at 450 Filled at 455 Yeah, like trunch one meach was kind of a tweener So I just I chose the one that I think the one I got in 15s were Just slightly closer To the price than the tens So yeah, that'd be I guess you'd have to Use the option omega data Just find you basically have to find all the dates that they were inverted and then Go back and do a separate test with straddles. I think I feel like I've done that before I may even have it but all right, so trunch two got in at 455 So 275 What I'm looking forward to reduce stop on trunch two Uh pt. I don't change the number of contracts now I I uh, I have my the number of contracts that I'm doing for the full month of november and I'll stick to that no matter what bumblebee Inverted strikes means that the puts are trading So if we're if we're trying to target Um Let's say we were trying to target six dollars of premium So you can see the puts Our excuse me the calls are the closest to six dollars or the 43 10 The closest to six dollars on the uh put side Are the 43 20 So the the puts are higher a higher strike than the calls You know, we want to be Essentially selling out of the money. So you'd be selling to in the money. You'd be going inverted so if if the if the strikes that we're trying to or if the price of the um If the price that we're trying to target Is inverted the the most narrow that I'll go as a straddle Trunch one is at 6 30 Need a little bit more It's been 6 20. It's the lowest I've seen 6 15 6 0 5 Looking for 5 95 Creeping into new highs of day 43 16 six dollars soft six flash And back up to 6 25 so five Needed to creep back up a little bit A few minutes till trunch three Ah very nice trading naked and back up to 6 70 Didn't quite get there Do you did you supply all that for elliott or did he he bring some screens from across the pond? LA you may just have to move to the us Just moved to florida back down to 6 0 5 6 5 95 there it is All right reducing my stop on trunch one Just in time to get ready for trunch three Look how close these look how close these five cent Longs are But my lungs for trunch three Looks like it might be the 15s again This could be really good or really bad Yep six to three agui Agui I gotta reset my templates up for my november all right, so 43 15 For trunch three Going in at 380 385 380 Some filled at 380 You guys stealing my orders again? Summit 375 All right summit 380 summit 375 Reinhardt welcome Uh, you can check my so I update my trading plan for power hour every month So you can check the trade plans channel right below this one Uh and see my uh trade plan for november So trunch one today. I did two to one, but all the the others are one to one That's what you'll find when you're in a uh Market that pushes up like this basically anything over half percent up from the open Doing two two to one Does does a decent amount better um in the uh zero let's see. I think it's yeah in the zero dte course channel you'll see the video and um And the examples of Order templates, but Order templates are based on your position size. So those are just What you want to do is is you can use those order templates and then just set them up Based on you know the size and the way that you're you're going to be trading it In fact, because I just changed my position sizes for november. So I if you noticed I was kind of Toggling through the position size because I don't even have my position uh my new order template set up yet Which maybe I'll just do that right now So for trunch one Well, there's some I need to delete here first I need to delete all these Yep all in on 43 15. Like I said, this could be really good or really bad I gotta keep an eye on trunch two It's at 365. I'm looking for 275 So while we're waiting, I'm gonna go through here and uh Fix up my order templates and toss Starting by deleting some old ones I wish they made it easier to do than this but If you guys know a better way And going through one-to-one deleting these let me know Yeah, that's what I've been doing too. I'd save an over them On some of these but some of these are just old. I need to Just get out of I have no idea what this one is first I need to clean these up a little bit. Yeah, some of these are just old ones. I'm trying to delete get out of here Problem is that when I set up the new ones, I just I copy it and then I save it as something new and then I got both of them in there Rice actions being real nice so far ladies and gentlemen 29 minutes to go though So don't spend your money yet trunch two trading at 330 Just doing a little house cleaning here Is that a hotel dick? When dick's internet's out he just goes to the wall dwarf Astoria Is that in tampa trunch two still trading at 330 looking for 275 Oh nice morrow all right, so I mean it's Wind percentage is right up there. Yeah only 17 only 17 occurrences, huh? Wait, it seemed like a more than that in uh Well, I guess it was just basically july and august so yeah, that's All right, good stuff I haven't I haven't run my first I've set up a couple. I just I haven't run anything yet Nice. Thanks morrow. I'm gonna I'm gonna save that I think I did that at one point, but I don't remember what I called it so Watch two down to three bucks I call this Watch two still hanging around three bucks. I need 275 down to 295 285 up to 16 We get vix just crushing down seven percent today again pushing new highs Yeah, dick K with all your love of automation I was thinking about you when I started going through trade steward wondering why you hadn't uh Done any of that yet? Yeah, I kind of I was kind of keeping tabs just kind of checking in every now and then on um tat trade automation toolbox with ib and then trade steward um Just kind of waiting for things to waiting for them to kind of wrinkle out and you know get get the wrinkles out of some of those issues But uh, I think we're I think we're getting close All right, so trance one trading at 550 Trance two trading at four Oh wait now Yeah, trance two and three trading at 450 Yeah tat is ibk r trade steward is uh TD All right hit a high of 43 18 early indication market on close imbalance 208 million buy side Trade steward can do stops as well. I just I don't think they can do trailing stops if I'm Remembering right? Yeah, they can do stop losses on spreads just not trailing Need tronche two to hover come back down and hover around 43 15 for a minute Which two back down to 350 Me likey vicks better in the in the 20s Still a lot of a lot of moves outside the expected daily range Waitly settle down for power hour in october Yeah, I heard you say that we'll get you've been using that That 10 wide Yeah, that's a nice feature that they would just close the shorts if there's no bids on the longs. That's That's pretty cool 15 minutes to go Yeah, it always it always feels like there's a good amount of premium left when you're doing straddles Daedalus, I saw uh, I think I remember seeing somebody ask that question in the trade steward channel and And the owner came in and said something to the effect of I think it does it pop up a warning? Maybe I don't know if anybody else here has experience with that yet, but I think it does something To help you avoid strike overlap all three early indications was 208 million buy side Final one coming out in three minutes So discount if it avoids the strike collision across different strategies. Is that only if the other strategies are in? trade steward If it was a manual traded Treats it the same way I got you decay Still haven't reduced trunch to stop yet still hanging around 350 It's going to need to come down towards 15s for that to trigger Come back down a little bit Oh, it flipped to 1.7 billion sell side Yeah, kris keep in mind with the expected move when you get down to this There's always a couple a couple points left at the end of the day. It doesn't go to zero Trying to create new highs on the day 19s The case fib's gonna repel it right here Repel it back down to the 15 Make it extra extra thick wuga All right, we can touch 43 20 if we just touch it and then come back down So i'm gonna start working some of my orders i'm gonna start with my p.m iron condor put that at for 30 yeah let's go four four even 425 Got 30 seconds till I start bailing some of these Build at 455 on my p.m iron condor 450 on trunch one 395 on trunch three And 370 on trunch two All out all winners All right, so let's see we got trunch One was in at 990 out at 450 Nice win there Trunch two in at 455 Out at 370 Trunch three in at 380 Out at 395 so 15 cent loser on trunch two actually But winner winner chicken dinner all together. All right my friends good stuff Even with the inverted Power hour still paid Can't beat that All right, so tomorrow is friday the third so chat will be streaming live in the morning And then we will be back for power hour All right, all take care. Have a good night. Talk to you soon


So, welcome to the 27th session on signals and systems. In the previous session, I had left a couple of exercises for you to do. I hope you have done them and now we are going to understand the implication of those exercises. What does commutativity mean? What does associativity mean? Maybe we have hinted a little bit when we talked about continuous systems, but now we are going to look at both continuous systems and discrete systems together. So, we have said several things about discrete systems now and you can notice that a lot of things are very similar to continuous systems. Now, let us dissolve these differences. Let us take continuous and discrete linear shift invariant systems together. So, let me put that context down very clearly. We are treating LSI systems in the continuous and discrete context together, that is important. And what does commutativity mean? But before we ask what commutativity means, let us ask what associativity means. So, let us consider a sequence xn being given to two systems one after the other, xn or xt. Remember we are treating continuous and discrete systems together. So, this is s. This could be either a discrete system or a continuous variable system. Now, s we will number it, we will call this s1 and we will call the second system s2. And both these systems are linear and shift invariant. The impulse response of s1 is h1 and s2 is h2. So, what do you expect the output to be? y of n or y of t. And in fact, now we would not distinguish continuous and discrete. So, we will simply put down y is equal to x convolved with h1 first and then convolved with h2. Now, here it could be continuous y, continuous x, h1, h2 or discrete y, discrete x, h1 and h2. The relationship is the same and associativity tells us x convolved with h1 convolved with h2 is equal to x convolved with h1 convolved with h2. What is the physical implication of this? We are saying consider a third system s3 whose impulse response is h1 convolved with h2 and give the same input x to it and you will get the same output y. So, what does associativity tell you? Associativity is essentially a statement of equivalence of systems put in series or in cascade. When I put two systems in cascade, you can replace them by one system whose impulse response is equal to the convolution of the first impulse response with the second. And now I can bring in commutativity. What does commutativity tell you? Commutativity says the order of the system is irrelevant. That means if you were to cascade s1 followed by s2, it will be the same as s1 following s2. These are the same. So, associativity tells you that there is an equivalent system and commutativity tells you the equivalent system is unaffected if you reverse the order of the two systems in the cascade or the series connection. In fact, I now have an exercise for you, a slightly tricky one, but I am sure with a little reflection you should be able to do it. I will put down the exercise. Commutativity and associativity together say if I have capital N systems in series connection or in cascade, any permutation of these N systems in cascade gives you the same equivalent system. In other words, together commutativity and associativity tell you that when I connect more than two systems in cascade, it does not matter in which order I connect them provided they are all linear and shift invariant. Now, I must exercise a word of caution. This is true if the systems are linear and shift invariant and in fact let me write that down clearly, not just any systems. These systems are all linear and shift invariant if they are not there is a problem. In fact, let us take an example, suppose you have system 1 where you give x could be a continuous independent variable, I mean a continuous independent variable sigma or a discrete one and essentially the relationship is y is x squared and s2 is essentially the relationship you have x and you have y and y is x plus 1. So, you know if it is continuous time what this would mean is that yt is xt the whole squared and if it is discrete time it would mean let me show discrete time in red y of n is x of n the whole squared similarly here this is discrete then it would be y of n is x of n minus x of n plus 1 and if it is continuous and you are saying y of t is x of t plus 1. Now, in the case essentially you have taken two system both of which do not have memory what do you mean by saying we do not have memory there is a point wise mapping the output at a particular point depends on the input only at that point. Now, let us cascade these two systems you have s1 followed by s2 and the second instance you have s2 followed by s1. Let me show by taking the continuous example as in point. So, suppose I have xt being given here s1 would essentially give me xt the whole squared here and s2 would essentially give me x of t the whole squared plus 1. On the other hand if I have xt here s2 would first give me xt plus 1 and s1 would then give me xt plus 1 the whole squared which is xt the whole squared plus 2 times xt plus 1 and therefore, these are not equal. So, it is very simple to see that when you have systems which are not linear or not shift invariant there is a problem look back at this example here s1 is non-linear in fact so is s2. So, both of these systems are non-linear and as a consequence cascading them does not allow you to change the order of the systems in the cascade. Now, the exercise for you is to come out with other such examples I would like some of you to come out with other such examples and tell us what these examples are examples where one of these properties is violated either linearity or shift invariance and as a consequence when you cascade you do not get the same output in general if you were to change the order or permute the systems in the cascade. So, to emphasize once again when you have a cascade of capital N systems if all of them are linear and shift invariant any permutation of them is acceptable for the overall input output relationship it remains unchanged with any permutation of the N systems in a cascade. But even if one of those systems is not linear or not shift invariant or neither linear nor shift invariant then you have trouble you are not guaranteed that when you change the order of the systems in the cascade the input output relationship remains the same. Now I am going to confuse you even further or maybe in fact remove some of your confusion see remember what we have said here is that when I have systems in cascade and if one of them violates the property of linearity and shift or shift invariance then the overall system cannot be the same always if you change the order. But other instances see we cannot on the other hand we cannot make a blanket statement that the moment you notice systems are either not linear or not shift invariant then changing the order changes the overall behavior that is also not true for example let me take a very simple instance again let us take this instance of y is equal to x plus 1 being the first system s 1 and y equal to x minus 1 being the second system s 2 both these systems are non-linear however these systems are commutative that is interesting. So you could have exceptions what are we saying to be precise we are saying at the moment either linearity or shift invariance is violated you cannot guarantee that changing the order or permuting the order will leave the overall system unaffected you cannot guarantee there could be instances like this where the overall system remains unaffected there may be instances like the previous one where the overall input output behavior is affected. This is the consequence of linearity and shift invariance provided you look at cascades of only LSI systems the moment one of them is not LSI you have to doubt permutation. Now what I am leaving to you as an exercise is to prove formally that if I have a cascade of linear shift invariant systems then a permutation of them leaves the overall system behavior unaffected and I encourage you to do this by using the principle of mathematical induction. This is a slightly of course I have you know it is a little challenging as an exercise I am giving this to you as a slightly difficult problem. Well even if you do not solve the problem entirely you may now accept by taking examples you know if you take 3 systems for example in a cascade you can easily verify that any permutation of them will give you the same overall equivalent system by using commutativity and associative but if you want to prove this in general you would have to use some kind of mathematical induction and that is a slightly difficult exercise. The easier exercise is do it for 3 systems first. Use commutativity and associativity to prove that if I have 3 systems in cascade any permutation of them gives you the same overall equivalent system. If you want to generalize to n systems you have to use a little more of your mathematical induction knowledge and that is the challenging part anyway in the next session we are going to ask the question if I know a system is linear and shift invariant then I know everything about the system given its impulse response. How do I use the impulse response to come to conclusions about the other properties of the system may or may not have namely causality and stability. Thank you.


Okay, so hi everyone. So you can probably judge from the title, but what we're gonna do today is we're gonna show how you can use Windows executables, service accounts, and cloud services to basically power your own model operation. Shortly about me, I've been around cyber security for a long time now, I've spent some time at, sorry, thank you for that.  I've been doing local, no-code security for like three years now which is weird because not many people are into it, but you will soon be, so that's cool. I started a company around 18 months ago called Zanity. I would folks that are sitting right here, we're focused on local, no-code security. And again, first time they've gone, very excited to be here as you can probably hear. So thank you for coming. By the way, this talk is gonna feature research from Aria Zilberg who's sitting right here, one of our researcher, so give him some love. This one is important, local, no-code is a cool thing. We are very much pro at the movement. And this talk, I will try to give you an attacker's perspective on that. The reason, of course, is to make sure that this is done in a responsible way. So what you're gonna learn today, use it to educate people around you, and let's see what it takes us. Okay, so I'm gonna start right now. When I say creating or running your own model operation, there are a bunch of things that could mean, so let's figure out what exactly I'm meaning that we're gonna do today. So you have initial access to some victim machine. There's a lot of other things that you need to do around it in order to really call it a model operation. You need to be able to, okay. So you need to be able to go through a firewall. You need to be able to actually run malware on that machine and be able to bypass DDR. You need to be able to create command and control across that firewall and to exfilter the data back to your, backwards outside of the org.  And you need to remain persistent on the actual victim machine when they're obviously trying to kick you out.  So what we're gonna do today is we're gonna show how instead of having to do all of that yourself, you can just focus on the initial access and on the last part which is kind of having fun. And we're gonna try and figure out whether we can, how we can use existing services to take care of all of that ops for us. So what, so here's this service that we're going to use. I'm not sure if you've heard about RPA. This is basically a technology that is out there in every major enterprise today. It's really every word. And the idea behind RPA is basically to take mundane processes that business users are doing. So copying and pasting through different software that they have on their machine and basically automating it. And the way that it gets automated is that the users are actually emulated. So the user gets impersonated. They are copying the keyboard and the mouse clicks and then reiterating them. And that's the way that they're using the user's own identity. And it's used to basically facilitate integration with old software that has no APIs which makes it easier. So RPA is built of three main components. The first one is an agent. It sits on somebody's laptop and it emulates the user as I've just mentioned. The second part is the controller which is able to go reach out to the machine, send some payload, the payload gets executed and then the output gets routed back. And there's a management portal which allows you to basically say, okay, here are all my agents. Here's the payload I'm gonna send to each one of them. The key thing about this technology is that every part here is trusted. And what do I mean by trusted? I mean trusted by the EDR, trusted by network security, trusted by the SOC team. So on the agent side, there are executables that are signed by the vendors themselves. We'll see that in a moment. The communication, so all of the endpoints, all of the protocols and the cloud services themselves.  Today, as you've kind of realized from the talk, Stider, we're gonna focus on Microsoft and you'll find out why in a moment. But actually everything that I'm gonna show you today is not specific to Microsoft. It's actually a problem. It's actually inherent in the way that RPA works. So RPA can take care of all of the malware ops that I've just talked about for us. So command and control, exfiltrating data outside of the org, avoiding defense, persistency, cleanup. But it also will be able to give us much more. So handling error, everything that's related to kind of engineering, updating those agents, being able to support any type of platform, those are all things that the RPA vendors will do for us. So this is the leaving of the land attack and we're gonna leave off the land of RPA and specifically Microsoft RPA to do what we wanna do. Here's our agenda for today. So we covered the motivation. Next up, we're gonna drill down a bit more into what RPA is all about. We'll focus on, we'll do a deep dive and understand how it works. Then I will shift gears and show you specifically how do you take RPA and leverage it to your own malware operation and really introduce a tool that will allow you to do that quickly. And don't worry, you will also send you home with kind of a few things you can do to remain protected or protect your organization. Okay, so in order to understand what RPA is, let's start off with a story. When I was a young, when I was a teenager, my friends and I used to play in a game called tibia. Who knows what tibia is? Raise your hand. Okay. That's a weird game, weird MMORPG from a long time ago where basically you level up your character, you play with other players and you collaborate. But a lot of the actual time that you spend on that game is actually doing things like fishing. So you need to improve your fishing skills. In order to do that, you basically go to a pond and then you need to click. So you click and you get some fish and you click and you get more fish and more fish. And this is basically transforming clicks and virtual worms into virtual fish. This is important for the game, but it is extremely boring. So of course, as a teenager, I wanted to take advantage of this. I wanted to basically be better than my friends and impress them. So I tried to find a creative solution for this to work better. I started off with physical automation. I actually looked for a picture of this. I couldn't find any picture. I'm not sure why somebody in my family didn't take the picture. As you can imagine, this didn't work. So the book would fall over. I would wake up in the morning and things were not as I expected. So I had to find a better solution. And I actually went with automation, which was basically, there was software that allowed me to basically record my keyboard and my mouse and then replay them.  And when I wake up in the morning, I'm leveled up. So this is what it looks like. I think you're seeing it. So, and basically this made me the hero of my friend. So this was my first kind of, the first moment I got some love kind of became a bit popular. And this is funny because this is actually the basis of RPA. So the same technology that I used as a kid like 20 years ago is being used in the enterprise today to do very serious things. So RPA as a quick recap, it's about replacing copy and paste integration. It's a drag and drop builder. You'll see it in a moment. And the people, and it's used, the people that are building these RPA bots, they can be in IT, but they can also be business users. It emulates the user's own actions. So it operates as the user with their own identity. There's no way to distinguish those clearly. And it runs on the user's machines. And on the use cases side, enterprises are really using it for serious things. So customer services, financial services, on-boarding and off-boarding HR. So this is touching business sensitive data. Now, we understand what, now that we understand what RPA is, let's drill down technically into how it works and how, and that would also kind of lead us in the way that we're looking for with our model. So we want to use RPA for the model operation. And this is where we're gonna actually focus on Microsoft. And this is why. So Microsoft has released an RPA agent called Power Automate Desktop. And it is now baked into every Windows 11 machine. And by baked in, I mean, that if you take a fresh Windows machine, you'll search for Power Automate, it'll be there. It's also trusted by the EDR and trusted by other EDRs as well. So that's why we're going to focus on that on Microsoft today. Let's start from the user's perspective. So this is a fresh Windows machine, Windows 11 machine. Searching for Power Automate, I immediately find this executable. Let's see if this works. Okay, it works. So what I'm showing you here is a quick video that is me setting up my connection with that RPA service. The third thing that I'm doing is actually plugging in my office account. And the crucial thing here is that I could plug in any office account. So in this example, I created a new organization. You'll see that in a moment. And I'm plugging in my credentials with that organization. Once I plug in those credentials, I get to this drag and draw builder with a bunch of operations that are available for me. And then I'm gonna click, I'm going to create a lower world application that basically writes a lower world to a file on desk. The crucial thing here is that this thing is synced to Office Cloud. And it's not, it's synced to my cloud because I just logged in with my account. And so you'll see in a moment when I kind of finish off with the demonstration here that there's a bunch, so we're seeing it now.  Those are all things that I set up previously in my office account. So this is what you just saw. When you plug in your credentials, your office credentials to this Windows executable, you get all of the different payloads or processes that you have created in an office. This is how it looks like, this is how it looks like from an architecture perspective. So on one side you have Power Automate, the RPA agent and the other side you have Office. One sits in on-prem and another in cloud and the reason that I'm focusing on that is that Microsoft, of course, has to be deployed everywhere in large organizations so they need to figure out how, I mean how is this working? They haven't asked for permission from anybody, right? It's already there. So what we're going to figure out right now technically is how is this communicating? So we'll focus first on the left side which is actually the local side.  There's one service that's called Power Automate runs on the user's own account and there's another service account that's being created that you can see here that runs with an executable that's called Machine Runtime and that will be the one that's actually in charge of communicating with Office Cloud, we'll see that in a moment. There's also, Power Automate also allows you to automate the browser. So you can basically, so through an extension on all popular browsers, you can change what users are viewing on the browsers and you can also kind of fetch all of the information that they have there. So we'll add that to our architecture as well. As you can see, there are these extensions across all of the different browsers. This is the, so what you're seeing here is actually that I've only talked about three executables out of about 20 that are built in to Windows 11 again and you're seeing that this is an entrusted, this is kind of an entrusted location. So there's plenty of opportunity to do more research here. So if you're looking for a challenge, I recommend checking this out. So let's switch to another direction and talk about the communication. So of course, network boundaries have been, I mean people have been trying to maintain them for a long time and there's a really serious question we should ask ourselves here which is how is Microsoft able to communicate with office services without having some IT admin open up a port somewhere? The way that this is done is with a neat service called Azure Service Bus. It used to be Azure Relay. Basically, both sides are creating outbound communication and so this is how the channel gets created. So the agent will reach out to Azure Service Bus every couple of minutes and ask for new tasks that it should pick up and use. Okay, so we're connected. We understand how these things operate. We understand that it has components that run as the user and components that run as a service account. The crucial thing to note right here because it's the last time I'm gonna say it is that all of these things are trusted. The executables are trusted, the service accounts are trusted, the cloud accounts are trusted. They are all in the allow list that you get by default. Once you plug in your machine, this is what you're seeing from the office side. So office provides you with kind of a nice way to view all of the machines that are connected to your cloud. You can also run things on the laptop from the cloud. So you trigger, you create some sort of a payload and you can execute it from the cloud on some machine and then you get the status. You can look at history. You can debug things. So all of the kind of convenience layers that you need around it. The last thing that I wanna cover in terms of architecture is how is trust being established? So it's not only about connection to the Azure service bus. Actually there needs to be kind of a trusted communication between the two. So when you register your machine with Power Automate that you saw me do a few minutes ago, there's a private key that's being created on your local machine and a public key on the cloud side and it's being used to basically encrypt a message that sends two things to the machine through Azure service bus. The first thing is local credentials. So you can run those payloads with whichever local credentials you'd like on the machine. And the second thing is an RPA task which is the kind of the process that you would like to run. So again, in a summary, in a nutshell, this runs on the, this executes on the user's own, with the user's own credentials and it constantly goes out to office and asking whether there's something it needs to be running. So what we're gonna do right now is we're gonna switch gears up until now it was kind of theoretical. We're gonna go to specifics of how you can use this setup to run your model operation with Power Automate, Microsoft's RPA. So let's remember our wish list. These were the things that we wanted to accomplish when we started this conversation. So all of the things here that are around ops will go through each one and show how they can be done. First up, we need a bit of setup. So what you need in order to use this is basically, what I'm doing here is creating a new tenant within Microsoft. It's kind of a trial version. You don't need to plug in your credit cards. It won't cost you anything. I'm creating a new organization and you can see that once it is created there's a guide here that which pointed me to how do I create, how do I onboard new machines here? So we need to onboard victim machines into my malicious Microsoft account. You've seen me do this already in the demo but this was done through UI which is kind of not what we're after as hackers. So the question is whether we can do it programmatically with some script. Fortunately Microsoft has provided a script for us. Again, signed already in your Windows machines. So you run this silent registration script and you provide it with your organization ID and again the crucial piece here, if you're thinking of detections as well is that you can plug in any tenant ID here. So of course I'm just sending, I'm just saying okay this is my account and I'm pointing this agent to my malicious office tenant. Once I run this script, I go back to the list of machines and the machine is already there and you can see that I have the status of the machine, the version of the agent that's sitting here. So that's kind of cool that that's how, that's basically our way to onboard victims to our malware operation. One thing that was problematic about what I just showed you is that this requires an admin privilege on the local side to do this onboarding which makes this kind of boring, right? Fortunately that's not really the case. So we didn't do anything special here, we just tried, it worked, so why not? So you can just run this and it will connect the victim's machine to your cloud. Once the victim machine is registered, here's what you need to do in order to run a payload from the cloud to the machine. So you create this automation from the cloud side, you create a connection, you basically you choose which machine you're going to run on, you choose the local credentials, we saw that this is part of the payload earlier and you choose a specific payload that you'd like to run. Of course you can create new payloads and on your own machine and upload them to Windows. One thing that we need to figure out because we need to provide a user account here, we need to figure out what happens if that user is already logged in to the local account. What would it do to the user session? So again, people have already fixed this problem for us. RPA has two versions, attended RPA which basically runs in parallel to a logged in user. This also means I can take charge of everything that the user is doing, I can open the browser and take their cookies, I can do everything that the user is doing. And on the other side is unattended RPA which basically creates a new session, runs the payload and discusses of the session. So we've seen a bunch of things from our list of the malware operation that we wanted to create. We know that we can deploy malware. We saw this with the register, with basically a silent registration. We know that this avoids defense while this was the premise, everything here is trusted. And we know that you can maintain persistency because I didn't install anything on the laptop, right? I only used Microsoft's own executables. What we're gonna show next is how we'll accomplish all of the things that are left over. Now we've already kind of seen command and control but we're only so specific payload so let's drill down into it some more. Okay, this is how we're gonna, now we're just gonna show what you can build with this RPA, what can you actually do on the user's machine. So here's a very quick data X field for you. This is an RPA flow that does the following. It gets as an input, a file, a pass on the hard disk and basically it reads the file and it sends the file content as an output of that flow. Again, this runs with Microsoft's executable from, and the key thing that we need to think about is where is the output actually going? So it's going to Microsoft cloud. I'm triggering it from Office. I'm logging into Office with my malicious account. I'm sending out this payload and I get in response the actual, the content of the file. So recalling the architecture that we saw earlier, let's figure out where does the data move to make sure that we don't get caught along the way. So this is the architecture that we saw and these are the three steps that are actually happening. I'm building those instructions on my side on a malicious machine somewhere and I'm uploading the instructions to Office cloud. Then I'm sending the payload to the machine through the Microsoft Trusted Communication channel and the output goes through that same channel. So again, completely undetected. So here's another example. So this example goes through code execution. So we saw that you can run specific payloads but actually I would like to be able to run everything that I want on that laptop. So again, fortunately, the RPA agent provides you with the operations that allow you to execute actual code. So command lines, PowerShell, Python, JavaScript. So here's a quick automation. I'm basically sending out a script, telling them which kind of script, how will it be executed and then I'm exploiting outside the STD, out an STD error. Actually, the problem is that when I run this, it gets flagged by Microsoft EDR. Now, why does it get flagged?  It doesn't really matter who created that command line. The EDR is very focused on looking on those command lines that are actually running. So you can see that I basically went out of the trusted part. So there's the trusted part, the RPA agent, which is able to run some sort of code. Like, here's a piece of code, run it with this executable or that executable. And there's the untrusted part, which is the command line. So the question becomes, what can we do only with this drag and drop primitive? So what kind of malware we can build only with no code? Actually, we can do a whole bunch of things. So these are all things that are provided by the RPA agent. Let me name some of them. You can use the built-in encryption function to encrypt files. You can trigger HTTP calls. You can communicate with Active Directory in Windows services and processes. You can look at files and folders. You can automate the browser. You can take screenshots. You can automate the mouse and the keyboard. You can copy the clipboard. You get it, right? You can do basically everything. So let's do a couple of things. Here's no code run somewhere for you. This one is, again, very simple. I'm iterating through the drive, through the local drive. I'm reading the file, encrypting that file with the provided encryption function, and then stamping that file with, replacing it with the original. Here's how this gets triggered from the cloud side. So again, very simple. I'm saying, here's the directory I'd like to encrypt. Here's the private key. And it will just go to the machine, send the payload, encrypt the file, and that's it. And I'm getting flashes here that I don't have a lot of time, so I'm gonna skip kind of through it. But as you can see, this is being triggered from the cloud side. And when the task gets finished, and you saw that this already happened, I basically see it. I get the results on the cloud. And from the machine side, of course, the files are encrypted. The EDR didn't catch it. This is all being done by the Microsoft executable. Okay. Here's another one for you. So we know that this agent is actually creating a whole bunch of logs, the agent that we're actually using. Because every time that it gets called, it writes what did it call, what exactly did it do. But again, looking at Microsoft documentation, we can figure out where these logs are being maintained, and we can just go ahead and delete them. So here's the flow to do that. I'll finish off with one more. We talked about the browser. So here's a quick thing that we can do. We can open the browser.  And we just plug in a JavaScript shell inside of that browser to basically take home the cookie. So there's a quick demo for that here. Not sure I have the time, but basically it's really simple. What this does is it opens up the browser, it goes to that location, and it just runs the JavaScript script that I've mentioned. And fortunately, there's a nice property here where you can open the browser in a minimized version. So the user won't know this. Okay. So a quick recap on anything we did, everything we did up until now. We saw how you can deploy malware, you can avoid detection, you can remain persistent. We saw you can create command and control through the Office Cloud. We saw exfiltration and cleanup.  The one thing that I'm going, the one thing that I have left for you is how do you do all of that as part of your existing arsenal? So you don't want to be playing with UI for Office and those things. So we've introduced this new tool for you. You can go ahead and use it right now. You'll have an address in a moment.  So we are handling errors.  Here's the payload I'd like to run. Here are some parameters and you get back all of the outputs of that process. And all of the things that you saw here in the talk and other payloads as well are available through that tool. So this is available right now. There's a convenience layer around it in Python. Let me quickly describe how it works. You create your Microsoft tenant. There are instructions on how to do that. Again, no credit card free of charge. You run a quick script that I'm setting up that tenant. You register with your machines with Microsoft's executables, not mine. And then you use this nice Python script to do things like run, run somewhere, run specific commands, and please feel free to send out pull requests with new payloads. So we're about done. Let's do a quick recap. We saw what RPA is. We saw that it's available on every major enterprise. Check it out back home. You'll see it's already there. We saw how it works and we saw how it can be used to power a malware operation. We saw that you can use it with local primitives that basically allow you to do whatever you want. We saw Powerporn, which is a new tool that you can use right now to play around with it and to see how it works. The last thing I'm gonna do, and I'll do it very quickly, is leave you off with a few things you can do to protect yourself, to protect your organization. So here's one very, very obvious thing. Monitor these executables. So as you can see, you need to make sure that basically the number one thing you need to make sure is that people are not registering those agents to a tenant that is not your own. You can also review, this entire talk was focused on using the existing tools without talking about whether the organization itself is going to use it. So your users might actually be using this. If they're using this, there are a bunch of issues that can occur. If that's interesting for you, I have another talk here at 4 p.m., same room. So if you're not tired of me yet, see you again.  Microsoft Documentation, there's an OS group that is focused on this area, and a bunch of blogs and content. Thank you very much.


At the beginning of your self-growth journey, you might be chasing the secret of success, wondering what is the one trait that separates all high performers from the average person. And in my opinion, it's not a secret. And it comes down to just one thing that anyone can do right now today. Let's have you guys, Alex Hine here over at Modern Health Monk, author of the book, Master the Day. So before we jump into this video, I put together a free journaling worksheet to help you figure out what your dream life is and design that going forward so you can be more successful. It's the first link right below this video. You'll also get a couple emails on how to use journaling to design your dream life. So check it out. Why do people succeed or fail in life? Obviously, this is a question that has puzzled people for thousands of years. It has spawned a whole industry, a success magazine, and there's all kinds of business publications dedicated to talking about success. But I have a simple story that I think will illustrate a point that you won't forget. When I moved back from living in China about 12 years ago at this point, I was in my early 20s and I'd moved back in with my parents because I didn't know what to do next. I didn't have much money saved. I had no friends. I had no job prospects and I had no job, right?  No friends, I had my family, I had my health, but I had no direction. And around that time, I ended up putting together a little mastermind group of three or four people. And those three or four people were people that I had selectively cultivated because they were driven and they wanted to improve their life. Now, part of this mastermind was that every single week on Thursday mornings, we would have a call and we would talk about our goals and our aspirations. And in that group were three other people, one woman and two other guys. Now, the woman and I were the two most driven, right? We had been driven for a long time. We were actively taking those steps towards our goals. We were really, really working hard on making our dreams a reality. And those are the people I wanted to be around because ultimately, a lot of people will say they're ambitious or say they want to work towards their goals and they never do, but she was. So we were a great match in terms of friends for this mastermind. Now, there was another guy and there were really two other guys in there and one of the guy was really impressing me because he had all these great ideas and he would say, you know, oh, I forgot another million dollar idea today. And I was too much of a rookie and too much of a new entrepreneur to know that really he wasn't doing much on a day-to-day basis, but he certainly had a lot of good ideas. Now, as time went on, after three months or six months or a year, you know, I made maybe $2,000 that entire year in my business, right? Because at the time, the point of us creating this mastermind was that we all wanted to become entrepreneurs. Even if we had full-time jobs or part-time jobs or whatever it was, we wanted to become entrepreneurs. And after a year, I had only earned $2,000.  But the other guy seemed like he was doing quite well and he kept talking about these ideas and the business he was working on as if he was really doing things. Now, flash forward and fast forward about three years. Well, after three years, I just quit my job, my full-time job. And I wasn't making much. It was about $2,500 a month. But you know what? The $2,500 was enough to pay my $800 a month rent and feed myself. I knew I wasn't gonna starve. And then I could work all day on my business and work all day towards my goals and towards my dreams. But the crazy thing was that after those three years, I had quit my job and this guy still hadn't even earned $1 in the three years. And all of this time, I thought he had been building a business. I thought he'd been doing well. I thought he was really changing his life and really doing something. And years later, he's still exactly where he was. Now, this story illuminated one of the most powerful lessons in my life, which is that the most successful people, most of the time, don't possess hidden knowledge. They don't possess necessarily some supreme God-given work ethic. But one thing they cultivate as a habit is that they go from idea to action a hundred times faster than the average person who may wait their whole damn lives to write a book, who will wait 20 years to start a business, who will wait years and years and years to ask that attractive person out. But successful people most often tend to be doers and tend to be action takers. So I wanna issue a 30-day challenge for you because this video does not contain some long prescriptive advice for what to do in your life. But it does contain a simple piece of wisdom that has helped me. The people who succeed in life, whether it's finding love or saving money so they can actually travel or be financially secure or getting that raise, don't necessarily possess something secret or special, but they do something every day and they are gritty over time. So they possess a very specific drive to go from, I've been thinking about asking out that woman at the coffee shop for a year to, you know what, I like that girl, I'm gonna come in tomorrow and ask her out. May not work out, but I'm gonna ask her out. To, you know what, my neck has been killing me for 10 years, instead of waiting to maybe do yoga or higher chiropractor or get acupuncture, you know what? Today I'm gonna start doing yoga 20 minutes every single morning and focus on stretching the upper back. And maybe I've been so overworked and underpaid for 10 years and I've never gotten a raise to, you know what? I'm gonna sit down with my boss today and ask her, what do I need to do to get a raise or get paid an extra $20,000? What skills do I need? Who do I have to work with? What team do I need to be on? Because that person after a year is gonna completely change their life in a way that no one else could ever see. And they don't need to have something special or something different. The only different thing is that they cultivated the habit of taking very quick action. So I'm gonna leave you with this here today.  That is one of the greatest success hacks that is the most overlooked. All right guys, so download the free drill and worksheet. It'll help you figure out what you want and how you define success and how to have an incredible life going forward. And I'll catch you in the next video.


It's time for the Lawn Jean Chronoscope, a television journal of the important issues of the hour brought to you every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, a presentation of the Lawn Jean Wittner Watch Company, maker of Lawn Jean, the world's most honored watch, and Wittner, distinguished companion to the world-honored Lawn Jean. Good evening. This is Frank Knight. May I introduce our co-editors for this edition of the Lawn Jean Chronoscope? Larry LeServe from the CBS News staff and John B. Oakes from the editorial board of the New York Times. Our distinguished guest for this evening is the Honorable Edmund Mischle, member of the French Senate and former Minister of War. The agreements to rearm an independent West Germany will have far-reaching significance. There can be no doubt of that, but these agreements have yet to be ratified and that involves the people of France and Germany as well as the governments. So we'd like to ask our guest tonight, who has been a member of the French resistance until he spent two years in Dachau as a result. How he feels personally about the re-arming of Germany? Well, I think it's the most important event by far, since the end of the war. And the most encouraging, too. Excuse me if I don't speak very good English. Well, Senator Mischle, nevertheless you are not worried about a renewal of German aggression against France? No. Because I believe in the world of Chancellor Adonore. Chancellor Adonore is not a Bismarck or a Hitler. And I think his word is important, and his important, too, is the control of our American and British friends in that settlement. But what about the possibility of taking you into a war to unite Germany, to unite the Eastern province? Well, I really think their settlement avoids this danger. That's what I think. And I think Americans are there with us, you know. As part of NATO? Yes. That's why I think it's a good thing. Well, Senator Mischle, do you feel any bitterness after all you were in Dachau concentration camp for two years? Do you feel any personal bitterness towards the Germans? Well, I think we have to, this is the past, you know. There is a new danger, a new danger of totalitarianism, of tyranny. And we must settle by the old animosity between our two countries. I really think that in France the majority of people is for reconciliation with Germany. Well, now, will the SAR settlement be a means of reconciliation, or does it... Certainly, SAR settlement is, yes, it's a very good thing in that way because it ends a position between our two countries. Do you think permanently it's settled? Yes, I think so. What is the significance of that settlement of the Tsarland? Well, it's the first stone building in Europa, the first step in the way of Europa. A building, a European unity? Europa? Yes, Europa, yes. That's why it's important. Who do you think came out better in that arrangement, Senator, between France and Germany on the SAR? Did the French get practically everything they wanted? Well, the French get something, but Germany too get something. Possibility of a change with France, possibility of investment of doing many important things with us in Africa, for instance, you know? That's why I think this agreement is a very good thing as well as for France as well as for Germany. Now, the Germans have no colonies whatsoever in Africa, but do you think they will now work with the French in North Africa and West Africa? I think colonies are not their real name, they're their real word now, you know? We don't speak of colonies, we speak of Union français, it's not the same thing, you know? And we think, really, we think, really, that with Germany it's possible to do very great things in Africa. So you don't fear that in Africa there may be a development similar to that in the Far East, in Indochina? I know, it's the same question, you know? There's a very, very great difference between Indochina, near China, and Africa and North Africa, you know? I was thinking of the nationalist movements in Morocco and Tunisia. Well, it's the same thing at all. Senator Michelet, do you think that the French assembly will ratify these agreements on Germany? I think it, and I hope it too. I will vote for him and my friend's goal is too. Well, now the opposition party to Premier Mendez-France is the Catholic party. Now will they go along on this agreement? No, they are not Catholic parties in France. They are Catholics in every party. I am a Roman Catholic. There are many Catholics with the Gaulist and Gaulist will vote for Mendez-France. They are with him, you know, in this important question. But some of the elements of the German government, some of the opposition to Adnau are grumbling about the agreement on the Tsar. Do you think that Germany will go along? But Adnau is strong in Germany. He has a great position. And I think after his true war in America, he is quite able to obtain what he wants from his parliament. Do you feel that Mendez-France has the general support of the French people and what he's been doing? Yes. Behind him, he has the youth. He is the most popular man in France since he generated the Gaul. It's a fact. And it's important. Is that based on the Far Eastern settlement? It was for the Far Eastern settlement and for the new style, you say, still. What about his internal policy? Could you tell us something about that? I think he is a social man, you know. He knows what he wants about this social part of his work.  Our Secretary of State, John Foster Jullis, has said that there is no tension now between Germany and France. Is that true in your estimation? That's really true, yes. How do you account for that? Well, you know, we are tired of making war between us, Germany and France. That's a fact, you know. Last war, both of us gained and lost it, you know, not at the same time.  That's what we think. All wars would be civil wars in Europe now, because the world is gotten smaller? I think so. Well, you feel that the French people will welcome Germany in NATO, then. Yes, I think so. They will welcome Germany and a German army. Yes, I think so, and I hope so, too. What safeguards are there, Senator Michelet, against a renewal of German aggression? Well, say, God, it's the control of American army and American control. And the British entrance? The British entrance, too. Yes. Well, then, Senator Michelet, could I ask you this, do you think that these agreements on re-arming of Germany mean an end to the Cold War? I mean, in Western Europe, an end of the Cold War. And it could be the beginning of the end of the Cold War, yes, I think. Well, then you believe that there is such a thing as coexistence, Senator Michelet? It's a serious matter, you know, coexistence. In the United States, our duty is to try to avoid war, you know, to be ready for it, but to prepare peace. So I think it's coexistence, you know. It's an important question. Well, Miss, Senator Michelet, what does this settlement with Germany mean to France in particular? Why will this do France good? In what? The settlement with Germany. It's good for France because I told you it's the end of the position between our two countries, you know. And it permits France to exchange credits with Germany, you know. That's why it's a good thing. Do you think it... I think it's only at the beginning of Europe. Do you think it would tend to lessen the strength of the Communist Party inside France, Senator? I think so, and I hope so, too. What is this is Premier Mendes France doing about the Communists inside of France? Well, the best thing he has to do is to develop a social program, you know. Is that actually progressing now? Has there been time? The next term of his program, yes. That's why we help it. We help him. What is he doing about trying to curb the growth of communism in France now? The best thing he has to do is, as I told you, to develop social laws, you know. To obtain more wages for workers. Our workers are not so well paid as your workers, you know. That's why in Europe I will put up some more communists than you are. Senator Michel, when you say that the settlement of the Tsar means the possibility of Europa, a grand concept, do you see a similar settlement spreading around Europe? Yes, I think so. It's possible, I think. I told you on a very thing, it's the beginning. It's the beginning of Europa, or the best way. You feel better than EDC? Certainly. EDC was not serious. For my mind. Serious with us? Thank you very much, Senator Michelet. It's a great pleasure to have you here to tell us this. The opinions expressed on the Launcine Chronoscope were those of the speakers. The editorial board for this edition of the Launcine Chronoscope was Larry Le Sur and John B. Oakes. Our distinguished guest was the Honorable Edmond Michelet, a member of the French Senate and former Minister of War. In old words, accuracy and reliability take on a new and a true meaning when applied to a Launcine watch. Because one knows where he stands with time all the time, a Launcine watch brings you priceless peace of mind. Now, for almost a century, Launcine has made watches, which by observatory measurements have consistently been equal to, or superior to, the highest achievements of each decade. Further proof is found in this fact. Among the finest watches of the world, only Launcine watches have been honored with ten World's Fair Grand Prizes and twenty-eight gold medals. Yet though Launcine is one of the finest of all watches, there are many beautiful models for both ladies and gentlemen for as little as seventy-one-fifty. 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