Hello everyone, welcome to the first episode of Hello. That's a podcast. I'm an easy I'm all over and we're thrilled to be your host for today's episode We have a very special guest with us here today. She's not just a talented person, but a very very pretty girl with us Can you please give us a brief introduction about yourself? Hi, everyone. Thank you for having me today First of all, let's let me start with my name My name is Kenny Ritze and I am a student here at Tetsuo College I'm pursuing my bachelor's degree in psychology and I'm in my sixth semester right now And let me just say if I'm not mistaken Your your members are all like under 20 years 20s early 20s early 20 years and They promote mental health and then it's awareness and so like I Don't have enough words to describe the team after so like can you please tell us a little bit about your workshop that you have done and the team so our team after We are a group of young individuals who are trying to promote mental health and it's um You know importance to the young minds of our society today Right now we have completed a very big project out say it was a three days mental health campaign it was done in the district of Peck that's our town and So this three days mental health campaign was done with a few resource person so We also had the Department of Psychology of Tetsuo College involved in this campaign So that was pretty much it I think we had a very fruitful session all together and we were able to help and promote mental health in Many ways. Yeah, and also have the young individuals That's incredibly inspiring Kenny. Can you tell us a bit more about the goals and objectives of Team Afti? So our main goal is to promote a You know mental health well-being in every person of our horizon and to you know to start with that we need to build awareness on it So our main goal right now is to create workshops to conduct workshops and to you know conduct awareness camps and all for the awareness of it Um, are you planning to like set up any workshops in the college itself here? We do have some few plans, but Let's see right now. We are planning on webinars and all I think that would be able To help many people as well, you know Some people are not able to attend the workshops or campaigns due to transportation problems or anything So I think online webinars and all it would be a good initiative I believe So like as a student from the Tatso College, like do you get any like? You say you talked about the research persons from the Tatso College So like was it beneficial being a student of that so and being a young manager of the team? I think that's a college If you talk about the benefits I've gained from this college It would be almost everything I have right now or I have become I think that's a college What's my starting point and of course the resource persons when you talk about it our department teachers? I am from the Department of Psychology as well. So our department teachers were so willing to help me in this course and Yeah, I would say it was very beneficial for me to be a part of that so family So Like a lot of people Interviews you they come to you like asking all about your the peasant the pageant the pageantry so like Aside from that today as a student of the Tatso College, like how do you manage being in this? Having a social life and as a student like how do you manage the ongoing activities ago? Right. Um, I think when people ask me that I have only one question is to live in the moment Like when I am in college, I would be a student nothing else and but of course it's it's Harder than you know, it looks But I think with proper time management I everything is possible Of course, I do have I do get helped from my teachers as well in you know catching up with the ongoing lessons Yeah, so So Do the college like I'll give you any consideration or leave like when you're supposed to like say for example your team up T There's a requirement for you to have a workshop in another district or another place. So like do you get a special consideration of attendance or like? Specially I think that's always very considerate towards their students who are involved in other Extracurricular activities and I think that's the One very good quality about the college and yeah, surely I do get some You know a help from the college as well whenever I have to travel or anything Yeah Okay, was there any specific reason for taking up psychology as your core paper? Psychology the subject psychology has always intrigued me in so many ways And I was especially interested in Psychopathology and criminal psychology. So yeah, when I heard that that so was offering a course in psychology I expected nothing less and so It's my you know Curiosity to know learn more about the subject and also yeah, I feel like psychology As a subject also helps you in so many ways and that way you are able to help people around you so As a student from the psychology department, there is this one of this very well-known meme like Student of psychology like if you're depressed go study your notes. Oh Like one of the most common the train do you have any like objection like How do you how do you want to justify the rest of the psychology department students? Me what I feel about the meme is quite funny. That's all nothing personal We don't take it personal, but yeah, it's quite funny and I see where it's coming from Do you try to practice those coping mechanism that you learn in your subject into your daily life? I think psychology as a subject is so applicable in like day-to-day life You just don't learn it you apply it in whatever you are doing especially, you know learning about different attachment styles or learning about different Coping mechanism defense mechanism styles. Those are the things which are very I think very beneficial to us as a person So I do sometimes try to apply it. Yeah Can you mention one like any specific practice which we have like carried out in your daily life? Which you have learned from subject so From psychology itself if you can I think Our the power of our subconscious mind is very strong. So whatever you think Will always you know and up happening in real life. So I Just want to tell you all to think positive things so that positive things can happen to you in no way I'm telling you to be an foolish optimist, but it's always nice to you know, look at the greener side of the When you talk about positive things we can talk about the motor of our college striving for excellence. Dear viewers You're in your final year if I'm gonna say and so Do you have like any of Thing you want to say about the college like the advantages the benefit of being a that's a student As I've already said That's a student of being a that's a student. It has not only helped me academically, of course I have also learned so much academically, but it have helped me in so many ways, you know to Apply all those knowledge which I have Gathered in my recent years into practice into the real world Right. It has given me opportunities after opportunities in so many different fields So that would be one advantage That I have gained and I think it's almost applicable for all the students here the There's ample amount of you know Opportunities that that's all provides and I think we should only be smart enough to take out those chances As a student of that so there are like two cafeterias, so which one would you pick? Go to two cafeterias are you talking about the hotspot in the back section high cafeteria and hotspot? Yes, high cafeteria. Oh, it's called. Yeah, right. I would always pick the Coffee cafe I totally forgot about that Yeah, not in coffee. I think their iced Americano is amazing Yeah, are you a coffee person? I cannot I am not, you know, like I can my body cannot stand a stand caffeine But I love drinking coffee. How many shots of Americano as personal as personal I in my Americano I like two shots of espresso with no sugar. That's heavy Do you have like any Secret spot your favorite spot? It will always be the library Yeah fun fact when I first joined that's a college I Kind of missed some of my classes because I got confused with the routine. So I would always be in the library And the library has become my comfort place. Yes. Yeah, it's amazing and then the collection of books is really nice It's really good. They have like all the genres Name the books is there in that's a library. Yeah, I think of visitors are allowed. Yes You can always come visit. Yes, and it opens from 9 to 4 p.m. And it's not just the library, but the card the gym The new renovated gym is quite good. I've seen some pictures of it. Oh, yes, and I'm sure and I'm There are benefits for that. So students. Yeah. Yeah membership. Get your membership Join that so college talk about the library spot Which which section do you prefer the most? It'll always be the psychology section just like Self-help books are amazing. But yes, yeah, you need you should not only read it But try to apply it since we're talking about books like would you recommend any books for our viewers to read? You can be psychology. I am a big fan of Paolo Colho. So any of red one? I any of yeah, 11 minutes and the classic deal chemist, of course, and then fear door His books Dostoyevsky I have so many like things I like Oh, yeah, but those would be like my favorite and of course Jane Austen books are amazing It's an escape for real of you know from reality for me You know like if you're into your self from the psychology department, so like I have a really good suggestion It's a philosophical book the courage to be disliked the courage. I think I've read that book Because it talks about how like no matter whatever happens in your life. It's always up to you how you wish to live your life Exactly, even if you have those dramas those negative comments those negativity around you It's always up to you take it in or like filter everything out, which is not needed, right? The book really It's a really good book you guys should read if you guys are really into books And it's all available it's a library all and even if I'm not mistaken The end of us It's also available at the end of us. There are so many good It ends with I was like what book is that sounds familiar you get confused with that. That's just how I'm not a rom-com person Is it but yeah, that is the trend like there are so many Very good food so many good books and if you're like a wondering what kind of books are available You can get an access there are certain pages for that's a college if I'm not mistaken I think those are accessible only for that two students Not a college library the Instagram page. Oh, yeah, don't check out the that's all library Instagram page Yes, it's at It's the library You can just type in the library and if you find it so that's a college is also very well known for its club Hmm the college variety of and I am if I'm not mistaken They want a trophy for the one like cash price the drama drama. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah So are you any member or like involved involved in any of the club? I Our newest club creators club, which is focusing on social media content creating and you know advertisement and all I am one of the members dear and We are going to start our content creation soon So we would be taking over Instagram's and YouTube's and all and then we would be uploading different kind of contents You know So, yeah The viewers can also suggest what kind of contents they want to see from the text of students that way like we can make it more Interactive mm-hmm. Oh the particle of club would like create a wider outreach for More more like the students would immediately be involved with content creation So I think that way it could be more interactive and more fun for the viewers also Moscom students should sign up Students are should it's necessary for them to be involved with it or terms are going to be out soon That that way you know what's gonna happen. Yeah, I do suggest like really like instead of just leaving some helpful comments You can like review and then leave some comments on what content you want this The YouTube channel the podcast to be about so that we can give you the you know We can serve you and I want to serve you. Yeah, tell us what you mean. Yeah, it'll be on your table Thank you content creators club would like Help your team itself team of tea. I think we could do something with that. Yeah, right, right? That's a nice idea Yeah, and then people can also be a part of team of tea we're like more than happy to have you're creating Not recruiting exactly because it's a team right like we could it's just a group of friends coming together Working towards something we are all passionate about and I think our young generation should be, you know concerned about the ongoing mental health crisis in our state so any Individuals who are concerned or who are interested to help can join us in all ways We will be having our webinar soon and then we can all be a part of it Yeah, that's really good. That's not really good because like I feel like mental health. It has no age or like You can just happen and then the thing is You know mental health problems affect one out of every four individuals of the population So it's quite relevant, you know in our society. It's just the ignorance that's hiding it away pushing it under the rock Yes, and I I'm really against this generalization of mental health that like men should not be emotional men can't be emotional Like as a human now like everyone has emotions and they have their own right to just express how they feel regardless of any gender race or You know color Ethnicity we are all human beings at our core level. So I think Just like physical health issue just like we face physical health issues We face mental health issues every one of us and we are all to you know We are we all should be able to ask for help and seek help But then the thing with it is that's you as you have mentioned about gender You know discrimination on mental health Sometimes instead of I'm talking it on an overall perspective. It's just a message. I want to get You know true so instead of you know provide it telling them to take care of themselves or providing them You know ways to build a better life It's the community care people need the most sometimes Really Everyone I just have a tough day just kids So like sometimes a shoulder and or a hug is what we need like a companion. Yeah, obviously, obviously and air would do Actually the thing is a team of tea of tea is derived from the Greek word. It's called air Yeah, it means to give a listen to people's, you know stories and all Blending your ear It's really nice So I heard about the that's a community will come in you at the airport tea So like, you know, can you tell us like how you felt when you won the Miss North East? title of 2003 and seeing your like Colleges your friends your family. Hmm. I think Success is sweeter when you celebrate it with the people you love and of course that woman was so emotional and Overwhelming for me as well to see my family's my friends my You know supporters the community I have I think it was quite I was quite happy to see all of them and yeah That's so always have been supporting me and having hopes on me in so many, you know In so many things I have done and this time too they Supported me a lot and I'm just very thankful to everyone For me, I feel like that's not just a college.   They're like So giving like any time they're like ready to help us I really like that about that. So I think the faculty members the teaching staffs they are so, you know Selfless at times for your students and that's what makes our you know Our time more memorable here So that was all for today's episode. Thank you Kenny for joining us Stay tuned for the next episode where we'll be bringing in a gold medalist from Magalan Olympics And please do leave a comment and press the like button at least like share subscribe


Dr. Lapuma is clinical director of Chef Clinic, co-founder of ChefMD and the New York Times bestselling author. He has led clinical trials of nutritional interventions designed to improve obesity, hypertension, osteoarthritis, insomnia and diabetes. Dr. Lapuma hosts PBS's new national series, ChefMD Shorts, and his most recent book is Men Don't Diet, Men Refuel. Please welcome Dr. Lapuma. Thank you, Dr. Ross. And thank you all. Let me thank Mark especially for the invitation, the mentorship, the kindnesses, and real friendship you've shown over the years. And I'm so grateful for that and for so much else. And for all of you staying here through lunch or not through lunch, as the case may be, it turns out, and this is a modified title, I know that most of you are actually expecting a demo. And many of you know I've been to cooking school and taught cooking school and so I was really hoping to do a cooking demo. But sadly, there is no cooking in the law school. And I just really worry about the health of future attorneys. But I guess we can negotiate that in the next election. Instead, I am standing in a dangerous place between you and lunch on the south side of Chicago, just about to talk about food, not just any food, but comfort food. And so I want to ask your indulgence and then I'll dive right in and try to make it worth your while to stay. I want to ask first, with a show of hands, who here has suggested a food or a meal to a patient for a medical condition? Maybe 30, 40 percent. Okay. Who here has used a food or a meal for her own or your own medical condition? Also about 40 percent and it looks like a different 40 percent. So I want to try to talk with you today about how comfort food can cure. This is also not my title, but I'm happy to rise to the challenge. Here are three parts. What is comfort food? Went to prescribe it and comfort food is culinary medicine. This is Jamie Oliver's, the cover of Jamie Oliver's new book. Who here knows about Jamie Oliver? Only about 25 percent of us. Jamie Oliver is the naked chef, not for his lack of clothes and deadly go-blat kind of emulation, but instead for his food, which is unadorned, at least it used to be. Now, actually, and has for eight or ten years dramatically improved the quality of the food served to school children in Britain and has made a similar effort in the United States, not quite as successfully. Here he talks with Stephen Colbert. I'm going to play this clip. It's very short, so I may have to play it twice, which is fine, about what comfort food means. He's been talking about food and cooking food that is especially healthy. So short clip. This is the Colbert Report in 60 Seconds. Beautiful stew or curry or pot roast or meatballs that just kind of makes you feel like you want to hug or you're getting a hug. Yeah, yeah. Eventually your body hugs you all the time. You got that. Okay. I won't play it again. So this clip in 12 seconds summarizes our conflicting feelings about comfort food. On the one hand, it's incredibly soothing and on the other hand, it's incredibly unhealthy. Right? Well, maybe not. So this really begs the question, what is comfort food? I think comfort food is memory, history, culture, and identity rich, all those four things. Tasty food eaten to maintain or regain mood. Comfort food comes in four categories. Nostalgic, indulgent, convenient, and physical comfort. Those actually are not my categories, although the definition is mine. Those are categories derived from the psychology literature and reiterated there. Comfort food is not, despite what you might think, primarily macronutrient driven. It's not primarily carbs or primarily fat. Certainly not primarily alcohol and not primarily protein. It is, it does tend to be more indulgent than not, but I'll show you some comfort food shortly that actually might verge into healthy and we'll talk about what that difference is. Men and women choose very different comfort foods. You've heard Jamie Oliver describe the pot roast or the curry. Men generally choose meals as comfort food. It makes them feel cared for. It often reminds them of home and sometimes of their mom. They have positive triggers for comfort food. Men generally eat comfort food as a reward. Women, completely different. Women eat comfort food that is sugary, fatty, crunchy. They use it to console themselves. It's not a reward. And they feel guilty after eating it. That's a really big difference. Now there are good, that data comes from, by the way, from Cornell and Brian Wantsink who has studied behavior and food a lot. And yet there are good reasons for this both physiologically and psychologically. And comfort food is actually both. It's both physiologic and psychologic. In physiology and here are some of the abstracts that I found important and papers that I think are useful about using comfort food as self-medication. No one really knows the mechanism for this. Although a lot has been actually found in animals. Very different kinds of theories. Whether it's endogenous endorphin release or cholecysticindin release in the intestine because many much of comfort food is fatty and so that fills you up right away. Whether it's cortisol release and a modification of the cortisol response as you respond to stress or exorceratonin synthesis from all those carbs because actually there are often a lot of carbs. Or if it's just the body's way of telling the brain, you can relax, you refuel, you've got lots of high energy food. No one really knows. Similarly the psychology of it is puzzling as well. The popularity of mac and cheese and chicken pot pies is way up after September 11th. But it wasn't the fat or the carbs or the calories. It's because people knew what to expect when getting those dishes and we often, as you remember, didn't know what to expect after September 11th. So this is really quite complex and interesting. However too much comfort food, as Stephen Colbert was pointing out, can make David go from this to that. We don't want that but in fact it happens to too many of us and there's a reason for that. It's because when you have too much comfort food, really too much any food, you gain visceral fat and men that changes testosterone to estrogen and men and women it increases inflammation and cytokines and you blunt your insulin response, you just feel awful and that's what happens. But it doesn't have to happen. This is Paula Wolfert. Who knows who Paula Wolfert is, anybody? One, two. Paula is a colleague and friend who probably knows more about Mediterranean cooking than anyone in this country. Her books are The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen and Coos Coos, Another Good Food from Morocco. She's the doyen of Mediterranean cooking and interestingly she has Benson's disease which as you know is an atypical variant of Alzheimer's disease, sort of a visual analogue of it and so her memory is going and so she's trying to use culinary medicine, her food is medicine, to forestall the neurologic loss and it's actually being successful. She's blending avocados and blueberries and three kinds of coconut into a blender every morning and giving herself a shake and in fact her deterioration is stabilizing, although of course she's doing other things as well. Paula wrote for PBS what we did a series on comfort food about her recipe chicken smothered in cracked green olives which by the way has two small chickens and four quarts of cracked green olives. That's a lot of cracked green olives. This recipe, my chicken smothered in cracked green olives, is the dish I was going to make for my son. She wrote, who is coming home for Christmas. I thought it would bring back family memories of living in Morocco when he was growing up. The smothered was very important here because it's over the top. It's pushing the point. It's making memories in Technicolor. I'm comforted by making this memory for my children. So another aspect of comfort food, we see someone who prepares it with love and remembers with love how it was prepared and here actually are some of the foods that we ourselves either save for a sick day for soothingness or used to celebrate. This is actually Paula's chicken with cracked green olives and some preserved lemon on top and lots of parsley. But more familiarly, macaroni and cheese, cheeseburgers and french fries, you notice the little beef on top, mashed potatoes and gravy, deep to Chicago pizza because we're here. Why else? Spaghetti and meatballs because we're anywhere. Chilaquiles which is a dish of tortilla chips with a chili sauce, cotea or another Mexican cheese on top and a fried egg which we used to make at Topal Bombo at 11.30 at night after serving. Although that egg looks like it's not quite runny enough and of course that's an interesting kind of preference because I really haven't said and want to now that comfort food among all other things is intensely personal. It's not just culturally memory identity rich, it's personal. What your comfort food is is for you and it says individual as people are. This is matzabal chicken soup which of course is one of the more, which looks like a more traditional healthy food. I mean it's broth and carrots and a little bit of parsley and whatever matzabals are made of. And then we move to ice cream pecan pie. This is a pecan pie ice cream chocolate chip cookies and you should pay attention by the way to the chocolate chip cookies outside on the side table I'll tell you why at the end of the talk. A glazed cinnamon roll and a frosted cupcake. Some people believe that the frosting on the cupcake is a separate comfort food from the cupcake itself. That probably deserves really like a federal grant, I don't know. And you can in fact buy a meatloaf cupcake here in Chicago, combining the snackiness of cupcakes and the meal of meatloaf. I don't really know who would buy it but I'm sure they're all really popular. And then donuts. You might be interested to know that the glaze on a donut is trans fat combined with powdered sugar. They take a little bit of Crisco, they put powdered sugar on it and they put it under donut. Fried chicken and waffles because we're very close really to the mecca of fried chicken and waffles and then a tool called Wandy who himself is not a comfort food but instead has written a really great book called Being Mortal which I recommend if you haven't read it you should because I think it has the potential to make public a debate about end of life care that we really have not made public in a really constructive way. Wandy as you know is a surgeon at Harvard who also writes for the New Yorker, writes brilliantly and he writes about food near the end of life and about our goals in medicine. He writes we've been wrong about what our job is in medicine he says. We think it's to ensure health and survival but really it's to enable well-being and well-being is about the reasons that one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life or when debility comes but all along the way. Food is the hundred years war in retirement facilities. A woman with severe Parkinson's disease keeps violating your period diet restrictions. A man with Alzheimer's disease hordes snacks in his room violating house rules. A diabetic is found eating clandestine sugar cookies and pudding knocking his blood sugar way off target. Medicine has forgotten how vital such matters are to people. We want autonomy for ourselves and safety for those we love. People want the right to lock their doors, dress how they like, eat what they want. So this is the second part of the talk. When do you prescribe comfort food? I think there are three indications at least. One is to do what Gawande suggests when you want to enable well-being and quality of life. I think a comfort food should a patient want it is a really good thing. You want to trigger feelings of caring and healing certainly if you want to improve anorexia and most of all when health and survival are not the primary goals when they're secondary. Second, when you want to with a patient honor autonomy more than safety when someone really needs that feeling of independence and kind of a demonstration of it I think you want to say what would you like to eat? What's your favorite food? Let me get it for you or let their family get it for them. And then third, when you want to explore fears, goals and trade-offs instead of simply deciding for patients or just giving them information but when you want to have an actual relational discussion I think these three ideas form the basis of my suggested indications for prescribing comfort food and I suggest you use an actual prescription slip. Third, comfort food is culinary medicine. The art of food and cooking blended with the science of medicine is the definition of culinary medicine that has as a mission restaurant quality meals that aim to prevent and treat disease with its vision being that of an accessible effective safe toolkit in a clinician's pocket. And actually culinary medicine is becoming a thing. The first course, cooking nutrition course was taught at State University of New York Upstate in 2004. Harvard has a CME conference that's over subscribed every year since 2007. Tulane has a curriculum that is now licensed to nine different medical schools in culinary medicine. I taught the first clinical student elective with Des Moines University and Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital last year. It's becoming a thing and this is part of culinary medicine. So use your prescription pad, write a prescription for comfort food especially for patients near the end of life and perhaps at other times. Don't worry about healthy or nutrition in comfort food. It's not the primary goal. The primary goal is to enable well-being. And then write prescriptions for condition-specific healthy recipes for patients who are not near the end of life because there are such prescriptions and they're available. I want to give you a taste of a comfort food that is important to me. These are beehives on my property in Santa Barbara. I have a little organic farm and take care of bees and harvested this raw, hand extracted unfiltered honey and with friends centrifuged it down and brought you all samples and a little straw that you can find on the chocolate chip cookie table. The reason this is important other than it's really incredible and you'll like it is because as a clinician who is really interested in food and thinks that it can be a therapeutic tool, it's safety, it's flavor and depth of flavor and the ability to savor this comfort food is something that I treasure and it's a way to avoid going from David in 1504 to David in 2014. Savoring comfort food is the secret to its cure. Thanks very much. We go way back, Dr. Lupuma. I met you when I was a clinical dietitian so if you want to learn how to make Matt's ball soup I'll be happy to do that. Thank you very much. And to anyone else, what I've done over the past 10 years is take physicians one on one and teach them as Dr. Lupuma has presented culinary medicine. And now it's exploded and as he mentioned it's in all of the major medical centers but also around the world. So what I want to turn to is coming from California, raising your honey having all of these wonderful access would you comment on what about having in every community clinic a garden and having our patients invested in really nurturing what it is they're then going to consume and nourish and sustain. I also want to add I spoke with a tool Gawande when he was here and I suggested that we take his lab and meet with patients, families and ask them what those foods are because I think larger than the nutrients that's in food you touched on what the memories were and Dr. John Morley who I'm sure you know at WashU has always for 20 years said at some point we need to give patients over the age of say 75 what foods they really enjoy. We need to count less and care more. So I welcome your conversation on these points. Thank you Maria, thank you especially and for your own work. There is actually great data about community gardens and community health one that's actually emblematic and illustrative of that movement in the Bronx where the sociodemographics are terrible but the kinds of contribution in creating and employing members living around what was a terrible block filled with drug dealers and rusted cars before but now as a community garden that sells its extra produce at the farmers market distributes it to people in need and actually lowers blood pressure for the people who participate in it in a standardized, careful way is in fact a really powerful tool and so Alice Waters started this in the late 80s with the edible schoolyard in Berkeley and so there are many such interventions that we can offer and I think they all ought to be tried and integrated into education once they are helpful and effective. I don't want to stand between us and lunch any longer.


I want to take a moment and share with you my vision of a 21st century Amherst, a vision I hope you will join with me in making a reality. Part of that vision involves broadening and diversifying our tax base. Amherst property taxes, our revenues basically, 90% of them come from property owners, 10% come from commercial property. We need to take steps to ease the burden on the Amherst taxpayer. I think the best way to do that is to encourage responsible growth. That growth, however, needs to be concentrated in the right places, in the downtown and in the village centers. I think a good example of appropriate growth is what's happening in the Mill District in North Amherst. There we have 130 units of badly needed housing being built. 36 of those units will be made available to people earning 50% or less of the median income. In addition, over 20,000 square feet of retail space is being created. Space enough for 8 to 10 businesses that will bring economic activity and increased revenue to the town. In addition, I think this approach will help protect our neighborhoods. When we draw a clear line between where we want development to occur and where we want the neighborhoods to be protected, this, I think, is the right strategy for protecting neighborhoods. And also, we should look into zoning changes, things that have done in other college towns, that might be able to protect our neighborhoods from the change from single family or multi-family homes to student rentals. I think there are steps we can take to prevent that or at least to discourage it. A third part of my vision involves the elementary schools. We really can't afford to wait, both for the good of our students and also, I think, as a matter of social justice and just fairness. These schools need to be replaced and it needs to be done in a timely fashion. We can't afford to wait 10, 15, 20 years. Another piece of this vision involves preserving and protecting open space and the essential character of our town. What makes Amherst Amherst, that must be preserved and protected. Another piece involves affordable housing. My years serving on the board of Pioneer Valley Habitat for Humanity made me very conscious of the need at the lower end of the economic ladder. But for me, the issue also involves those in the middle range and middle incomes. People who work for the town, firefighters, teachers, university employees, they work here at Amherst but they can't afford to live here. I think this is something the council must address. We must make Amherst a place that is affordable for everyone, not just those at the top or those at the bottom. And a final piece involves maintaining the constructive and positive dialogue we have right now with the university and the two colleges. The University of Massachusetts is the economic engine that drives this town. When the university does well, the town does well. We have our differences but I think in the end we must come to see that we are in this together and a constructive positive dialogue is the best way to move forward. Now when I look into the future of Amherst I see other things. I see that we will have replaced the aging and inadequate DPW building so that our workers can have an adequate structure to do the work they need to do. We need to see that we have moved the fire station from the center of Amherst to South Amherst where it belongs. So our firefighters and EMTs can better serve the needs of the community and have better facilities for training and for work. And thirdly I see a community that has brought the Jones Library into the 21st century to meet the changing needs of a changing community. But these kinds of things must be done in a transparent and fiscally responsible way. I hope that you will join me in making this vision of Amherst, 21st century Amherst a reality. What I pledge to you is that I will be accessible to you always. I will represent everyone, not just one neighborhood or one particular point of view. And I will keep you informed of what is happening on the council and why it is happening. Please on November 6th I hope you will give me your vote. Thank you.


It absolutely would not be CES for me if I didn't get a chance to interview Jen Wei from Belkin. We're like old friends, we've been doing this for so many years. I've missed you Jen and the pandemic and I'm glad to be back with you. Same, it's like a family reunion. There you go. All right, we're going to do a speed walk through some things and then see some new products. But the first thing here I see is the Belkin charger that I have at home, but you say it's not the charger I have at home. Describe what we're looking at here. That's right. So it is a familiar form factor. It's the beautiful Belkin design. As you know it, premium materials, stainless steel, chrome stand. However... This is the 3-in-1, right? So this is the iPhone and the Apple Watch and then a charger. Wireless earbuds. Okay, there we go. But what's new? The difference is this is a G2 module and it also rotates. So you can adjust it for optimal viewing. Now a lot of people might not know what G2 brings to us. G2 allows us to have 15 watt charging and has nothing to do with Apple blessing you as MagSafe anymore because it's a standard finally. So that's got fast charging. That's going to be a lot better for us, right? That's right. So we're hosting the party. We just need, we need people to come. Yeah. So come on Android devices, you know. If everyone starts adopting the G2 module then it's a party. It's going to be great. All right, what's up next here? So lots of more G2 products. We are in the G2 section of our table. This is a convertible pad to stand. Okay, so I'm going to describe it. So it's a, it's a an iPhone MagSafe, MagSafe kind of mount and then it folds down into kind of a flattened puck sort of thing, right? So you can take it with you on the go. Oh nice. It's meant for travel. Nice. I like that. Very nice. Yep. Then we have a two and one. You have here a G2 module on one side of the device and then a wireless charging surface that's good for wireless earbuds. All right, great. That's more flat. Okay. And then we have our family of G2 power banks. We have a 10K and 8K and a 5K. And are these MagSafe? And these are G2. G2, so does G2 include magnetic mount? So G2 is essentially wireless charging surrounded by magnets. Oh, okay. I thought it was just a charging technology but it's a magnets as well. It includes the magnets, yes. Great. Okay. So you can charge and watch on your device horizontally or horizontally. Oh, because it's got a little kickstand on the back. Very nice. Very nice. And then it has additional two USB-C ports so you can actually charge up to three devices at the same time. That's fantastic. So obviously for the for the audio only audience this is thick, medium and thin based on how much charge you want to get. International flight, heavy duty CES day, just a regular day running around doing it. There you go. I like it. I like it. Okay, what's next in our lineup? All right, we're moving over to the GAN section. So that's gallium nitride? That's right. GAN stands for gallium nitride. It allows us to create higher-powered product in a smaller form factor. So this first product here, it's about the size of an Apple TV, I would say. Yeah. It's a six-in-one dock. So it's half the size of other six-in-one docks. It has six features. It has HDMI, Ethernet port for internet. It has two USB-C ports and two USB-A ports. Oh wow. And the way that it plugs in, it's just a cable. There's no power brick because of the GAN technology. So if you have a small work station at home like I do, this is perfect. Nice, nice. And I'm gonna stop you on price first. What's the price expected on this particular six-in-one dock? 139.99. That's really inexpensive for, let's go over it again, two USB-A, two USB-C, and it's got HDMI. So you can hook up pretty much most of the stuff you need for that. That is a really good price point. Yeah, I would agree. Most stocks are about $300. That's right. That's good. All right, what do we got next? So the next GAN product is a 200 watt USB-C four-port charger. So we have two ports that give you a combined 140 watts. Another two ports that gives you a combined 60 watts. So we're talking power hungry laptops. We're talking multiple tablets, four phones. It's also like all of our new products made out of 72% post-consumered recycled plastics. Oh, I did not know that. Excellent. This is a new Belkin initiative. I wanted to especially point it out for this product because if you have recycled materials housing a 200 watt charger, that's potentially thousands of dollars of devices plugged into it. Yeah. You want to go with a brand that you can trust that's going to deliver the highest quality. And again, it's a cable that you connect to the back. Oh boy, 200 watts is heavy. Yeah. But when you need all of the power, all right, that's very cool. So this thing is a, that's a hefty brick, but man, that's going to get it done, right? Yeah. Okay, wait a minute. Now she's got an iPhone that's that's rotating. Oh my gosh. This thing is flying around in circles. It's rotating up and down. What are we doing here? All right. So this next product is the Auto Tracking Stand Pro. It uses face tracking technology from Apple called Dock Kit in order to track your every move. So what I want to do is come over to this other unit. Okay. And let's see if we can get it to work. So we're looking at, we've got a tripod with the, what is the name of this device again? Auto Tracking Stand. The Auto Tracking Stand. So she's got an articulated, it's got azimuth and elevation going on here and it's on a tripod. She's going to stick her phone on it. So you need an iPhone 12 or later because it attaches via a MagSafe module. You need iOS 17 on your iPhone because that's what will activate the Dock Kit technology. I haven't even heard of Dock Kit. You're teaching me. Yeah, it's kind of flown under the radar a bit. So let's see if we can get it to work. So she's holding the phone near the, we're in a very challenging networking environment. Okay. So we're trying Steve's phone and this looks much more promising. It's got green bars around tracking your Dock. All right, connect. Belkin Stand Pro. So I've never seen this pop up before. This is great, but I did see her doing this earlier right before we walked up. It was working great. It says it's 820, so it's like I'm done. Yeah, yeah. I was done 20 minutes ago. Done. You promised me a drink now, right? All right. It's coming. Exactly. Okay. So it says configuring accessory for first time use. This may take a few minutes. Done. Okay. So now we put it on the MagSafe module. I want you to keep your eyes trained right here. Okay. And it's going to give us a signal when it's ready to go. Okay. So it's gone up and down in elevation. It gave it a nod. It gave us a nod. It gave us a nod of approval. Okay. Now I'm going to open a native app. I'm going to use the camera app. I'm going to turn it to face me and a yellow box is going to appear on the screen. And now it's tracking me. It has 360 degrees horizontal rotation. It has 90 degrees vertical rotation. As you can see here. She's going up and down. She's doing deep knee bends here as the phone is just tracking her completely. And I can use the rear view camera. It's going to look for me. It just spun around and now I've found her on the other side. So here we go. You got to see this view. Yeah. So lots of use cases here of teaching remotely, telehealth for physical therapy patients who can't get into the doctor's office, face timing with your best friend while you're cooking and kind of move around the kitchen. Immediately I thought cooking. Like I need to talk to my kids or I'm washing dishes. I'm running all over the kitchen. I could have this on the counter. Right. And then obviously for content creation. Yeah. So what is this device called one more time? Auto tracking stand pro. And when will that be available?  And it is coming very, very, very soon. Very, very, very soon. We can quote, quote Jen here. And what's the price point on this? 179.99. All right, perfect. I appreciate you sticking with us. This is very, very cool. And it actually is a better proof that it worked with just Steve's phone right out of the box. You didn't have to do anything special.  Thanks for meeting with us again. We'll see you next year, Jen. Thank you so much, Allison.


Two men walk into the octagon. Only one will walk out. Well, unless you count the referee, and if there's a big old melee at the end of a brawl, there's more coming out. Hello, welcome to Octagon St. Leveau. I'm your hostess, Betty St. Leveau. On this show, we talk about all things MMA and UFC. Even though there are a lot of fight promotions out there, I'm really entranced by the way the UFC does their thing. The next UFC event is their fifth hundredth event.  Okay, so let's go into a little bit of MMA lore and facts. Now, I think I'm going to start off with the pound for pound weight classes. And instead of going by each division, I'm simply going by fighter, their division, and their statistics. So this is ranking is from Fight Matrix, I believe. Oh, I think the males is typology and the females is... No, the male pound for pound I got from Fight Matrix and the females from typology. Let's go into it. John Jones, light heavyweight. Must be a 21-1-0. That's his statistics for a fight. Henry Sejudo, Bantamweight, 15-2-0. Demetrius Johnson, Bantamweight, 29-3-1. Khabib Namagadov, light heavyweight, 28-0-0. Stipe Mikovic, heavyweight, 19-3-0. Max Holloway, featherweight, 21-4-0. Kamuro Usman, welterweight, 15-1-0. Tony Ferguson, light weight, 25-3-0. Daniel Cormier, heavyweight, 22-2-0. Joseph Benaviniz, flyweight, 28-5-0. Alexander Volkanovsky, 21-0. Francis Gananu, heavyweight, 14-3-0. Kiyoji Huriguchi, Bantamweight, 28-3-0. Tyrone Woodley, welterweight, 19-4-1. Kobe Convicton, welterweight, 15-1-0. So when I say Kaminov Gadov, light heavyweight, 28-0-0. It means he's, like, 21, oh, pardon me, 28 wins. Zero and zero losses. And I can't remember what the other number is. I'm still learning. Okay, so for the women's, pound-for-pound rankings. Here we go. Amanda the Linus Nunes, 18-4-0. Valencia the Bullet-Chevenko, 18-3-0. Chris Cyborg, 21-2-0. Thugrose Nomenunus, 8-4-0. Jessica Basha Estaka Andrade, 27-0. Magnum Wili Zhang, 21-0. Joanna Jusevix, 15-3-0. Jermaine the Iron Lady the Randme, 3-9-3-0. Holly the Preacher's Daughter-Home, 12-5-0. Tatiana Suarez, 8-0-0. And Jewel the Jewel Bud, 13-2-0. All right, so there's our pound-for-pound rankings. The women's as of yesterday. The men's as of September 15th, 2019. Right on. Now, this big fight that's coming up is a very intriguing... It's one of the fights of the century. To me, it's even bigger than Kona and Ney, or Kabebe and Kona. This is Nate Diaz-Hohe-Masville throw-down that's going to happen in Masquin Garden all Saints' Day. Well, I think it's Day of the Dead, November 2nd, this year. Now, my siblings aren't really into MMA, but I cleverly asked my sister, Laura, to identify a James Brown song for me at the beginning of Mick Smolley-Woppery's excellent video, Grand Theft Hype, involving Torre Massival and Ben Askren. But Mick Smolley-Woppery makes some of the finest videos that you'll ever see about MMA. I love his work. I'm an eager student of his. We end up watching the video with volume down, but I could see me, sister, Laura, as eyes keep glancing over. The Hohe Massival and Ben Askren fight was a... It was heartbreak for Ben, and it clinched Hohe's reputation as a bad bleeper-bleeper. Words... I mean, this basic cable, I wish I could say those words, but I don't really feel like cursing on the air. At any rate, Nate came out of retirement, Nate Diaz fought Anthony Pettis in the unanimous decision, and then said to Dana, we need a bad... a BMF title, meaning Bad Mother Bleeper Belt. So this event is actually called the Bad Mother Bleeper Belt because both these guys are incredible scrappers, and I'm using Hohe's term. Now, let's talk about both Nate and Hohe for a hot second. Nathan Donald Diaz was born on April 16, 1985. He has fought for World Extreme Cagefighting, Strike Force, and Pancras. He won the Ultimate Fighter No. 5, and he has tied with Joe Lozon for the most UFC bonus awards. They both ranked second in that. 15 total, and he's also had the highest pay per view until the UFC 229 event, which featured Khabib and Connor. He is... his ranking is No. 6, Welterweight, as Welterweight. He went to Tokei High School, and he started training at 11 with his older brother, Nate Diaz, who are featured on my episode of Achton St. Leveau called Leo Time. He returned to the UFC this past August 17th, UFC 241, where he fought Anthony. He went to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu School in Stockton, and he's been a vegan since he was 16. He has won 30 matches. He's had 30 matches, won 20 of them with 11 losses. Connor, the guy by being one of those losses. He's 6 feet, weighs 170 pounds. He has fought Lightweight and Welterweight. His reach is 76 inches. His stance is soft-paw, and his mode of fighting is boxing and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and he's trained with Cesare Gracie. Now, let's look at Jorge Masvidal. He was born November 12th, 1984. He has fought for the Fight Franchises Bell Tour, Strike Force, Shark Fights, and Victory Road. His nickname is Game Bread. He's a Welterweight out of Miami, Florida. He's Cuban and Peruvian. Went to St. Brendan High. His style is kickboxing. He's been with the UFC since 2003. He has had 47 matches, 34 wins, 13 losses. One of those losses to Stephen Wonderboy Thompson, who we will at some point feature on the show. His style is kickboxing. He's 5'11", and his reach is 74 inches long. All right, so now we know a little bit about these two very interesting fighters. There's no trash talking here. It's all about the scrap. There's a mutual respect between both of them, which, did it bring tears to my eyes? I guess it did a little bit. During the presser, Nate came out first and stood until Jorge came out and they both sat down together. Jorge was dressed fantastic. I mean, he looked great. White suit, red shirt. Nate, in his own way, looked great, too.  However, Jorge's outfit took the cake, okay? So they'll be fighting in Masson Square Garden. The presser's sound was horrible, and I really enjoyed the YouTube comments because everyone was like, as usual, the mics aren't working, and someone else wrote, I need a job. UFC, I'll work for you. I will get your sound right, okay? But that was a huge space that the press conference was in. In the background, I saw the Brooklyn Bridge. It looked like they were actually on a platform outside of the bridge in the back of them, and it was just special effects or something like that. Now, Jorge is up for Fighter of the Year, and in my next episode, I want to talk about great moments of UFC and who is Fighter of the Year. It's funny that he's up for it because I keep thinking about how Chris Cyborg helped develop a couple of villages in Africa. Jorge's flying kick to Ben Asperin's head, Nate coming out of retirement, and the downside too. Connors McGregor's whiskey business, and there are a couple other fighters who are just... Oh, Max Holloway and Tony Ferguson. So for me, right now, how I feel about it personally, Jorge is my Fighter of the Year, but that's only because he was coming off that win with Darren Till, the fighter who wanted to fight him, Ben Asperin, talked a lot of trash talk and insinuated that Jorge was a chicken, a coward, yellow, you name it, it was it, and then Jorge made UFC history by knocking the man out in a record-breaking knockout. It was, if you blinked, you missed it. So at this particular press conference, both fighters, again, stress the fact that it's not about trash talk, the journalists who were asking the questions, they didn't really ask that great question. Some of them, I thought you can't, you all are repeating yourselves, and check out the press conference. I'm not going to go into it on air, but the gal with the leather and the nails, if I ever make it to the show, I'll make sure that I'm dressed to my nine, she'd look fantastic. Okay, so... the fact that Nate has created this bad bleeper-bleeper belt, the Dio's brothers, they make history in my eyes to me. They both are vegans. They both are cannabis smokers. They made 2018 and 2019 a very interesting for me as an office MMA fan, even though Nick has retired. I will say that at the press conference, one of the journalists got booed by asking Nate, how can you say you're tough when you're a vegan? The guy got booed. I don't blame the people, but I wouldn't have booed him, but that was... it was inappropriate.  That's how I look at it. For me, eat what makes you feel good, eat what you eat. I just got into lamb. I will probably not give up meat anytime soon, but I can totally respect a vegan stance about not eating meat number one, and if they're a fighter, that is incredible. So, at the press conference, the fans and the press, everyone looked happy. Everyone is happy to see these two guys, the consummate professionals. They just fought and tweeted with the UFC for years about getting paid the way he should, and there's a very famous video clip of when a wrestler there, CM Punk, went into his MA debut, and the soundbite went viral. Later, Nate was seen as a prophet because he said, look, this WWE guy is coming into our turf. I've been working here for peanuts, fighting for peanuts, and this guy's going to make more money than anyone in the room because he's a big draw, and it's not fair. So, I think that's one of the reasons why the Diaz brothers retired a bit. I'm not sure it might have been other reasons, but I'm glad that he's going to be at MSG, Madison Square Garden this November, fighting another man who doesn't really care about the trash talk. He's there because he means business, and it's for the business. So, kudos to both of them, and I wish them both of luck. Both guys are so well-liked by the fans that, yes, you can root for two fighters at the same time, but only one will win. One man walks in that octagon, but one will walk out the winner. May the best man win. And I think that that is just about it for me. Today here at Octagon St. Leveau, I'm your hostess, Betty St. Leveau. I'll be seeing you soon. I want to thank Orca for their continued support of the show. I want to thank Nix, Molly Walpere, Kredak, Mind Smash, M.A. On Point, and of course my man, Al Paco the Sorus, for helping me travel the path of MMA, UFC, Fever. Until next time, love you all, and love everybody. Ciao.


After seeing Leibniz's mathematical work, Huygens suggested he read the works of Pascal. Huygens also posed this question to Leibniz in 1672, finding the sum of the reciprocals of the triangular numbers. In other words, 1 over 1, plus 1 over 3, plus 1 over 6, plus 1 over 10, and so on. After reading Pascal's treatise on the arithmetic triangle, Leibniz created his own variation known as the harmonic triangle. So let's consider Pascal's triangle. Except for the sides, which are all ones, every entry is the sum of the two entries above it. So for example, this 10 is the sum of 4 and 6. But suppose you formed a triangle whose sides were the harmonic sequence, 1, 1 half, 1 third, and so on. Then fill in the remaining entries as the sum of the two entries below. So this 1 half, it should be 1 third plus something. And so we find that something, that's 1 half minus 1 third, gives us. And 1 sixth plus 1 third is 1 half. This entry 1 third, well that should be 1 quarter plus something. And so we can find that by subtraction. 1 twelfth. 1 sixth, well that's 1 twelfth plus something. Also 1 twelfth. This 1 quarter is a fifth plus something, which works out to be. This 1 twelfth is a twentieth plus something, and we find that. And we can fill out the rest of the entries in the harmonic triangle. Now consider any entry, say 1 half. It's the sum of the two entries below it, 1 third and 1 sixth. But 1 sixth is the sum of the two entries below it, 1 twelfth and 1 twelfth. So 1 half is a third plus a twelfth plus a twelfth. But lather, rinse, repeat. 1 twelfth is the sum of the two entries below it, 1 thirtieth and 1 twentieth. 1 twentieth is the sum of the two entries below it, 1 sixtieth and 1 thirtieth. 1 thirtieth is the sum of the two entries below it and so on. And so we see that this entry, 1 half, is the sum of all of the entries along this diagonal. And we can summarize that in the harmonic triangle. Each entry is the sum of the infinite series of the next diagonal, beginning with the term below and to the left of it. Leibniz also noticed that the denominators along the kth diagonal of the harmonic triangle are k times the entry of the k plus first diagonal of the arithmetic triangle. So if we look at the denominators along this second diagonal, they're two times the entries along the third diagonal of the arithmetic triangle. Or if we take a look at the entries along the third diagonal, they're three times the entries along the fourth diagonal. And what this means is that we can also use the diagonals of the arithmetic triangle to sum the reciprocals of the entries of the arithmetic triangle. So again, that third diagonal of the harmonic triangle tells us that 1 half is the sum, but each entry is three times the entries of the fourth diagonal, and so that'll tell us what the sum of the reciprocals of those entries are. The harmonic triangle allowed Leibniz's sum a number of different series. Leibniz also considered the series where the denominators were products of successive odd numbers. To sum this series, Leibniz noted that this reciprocal of the product of successive odd numbers, 1 over 2n plus 1 times 2n plus 3, could in fact be rewritten as a difference. And so that means 1 third is 1 half, 1 over 1 minus 1 over 3, 1 fifteenth is half of 1 third minus a fifth, 1 thirty-fifth is half of 1 fifth minus a seventh, and so on. And so our series can be rewritten. And in modern terms, this is a telescoping series because all of the terms after the first term collapse, and so our sum is just 1 half. These results convinced Leibniz that any series could be summed. And so the natural question to ask then is, what else can we use these series for? And in particular, he began to apply series to geometric objects. And here's where things get a little bit strange. So given any curve, we can view dy as the difference between successive values of the ordinate. So to Leibniz this meant that at some x value we have a y value, at the next x value we have a different y value, and dy is the difference between the successive values of the ordinate. And if we sum up the y values over some interval, we get the final ordinate. So Leibniz wrote this in the following way, where this symbol is a 17th century s, and it's a shorthand for sum. Moreover, if two consecutive points on a curve, whatever that means, differed by dx and dy, then the ratio dy over dx is what we would now call the slope of the tangent line. And at this point, things should all start to look very familiar to those who've taken calculus. And over the next few years Leibniz developed what we now recognize as the rules of differentiation. So as a single example, we'll consider the product rule. Leibniz explained the product rule. dxy is the difference between the products of successive values of x and y. So that means that dxy, well, it's the difference between the product xy and the product of the next x value with the next y value, x plus dx times y plus dy. We can expand that out and get our final result. And at this point Leibniz says the following. This product, dxdy, is infinitely small in comparison to the others, so it may be neglected giving us dxy is just xdy plus ydx. And this is the product rule we're all familiar with from calculus. And in a 1684 publication, Leibniz gave most of what we now recognize as differential calculus. And unfortunately for Leibniz and really mathematicians everywhere, Leibniz set off a rather contentious debate over who really invented calculus. And this debate had far-reaching consequences, and we'll talk about those later.


Hi, my name is Fritz and I am from Kavoron, but currently residing in Ukraine. I have been teaching English for two years and have had a two years classroom experience before taking the IEEE course, but I never knew how to address certain activities and situations in the classroom properly, which I now know because of the relevant information that the IEEE course has provided to me. I completely enjoyed the whole session and I am currently using some of these methodologies in my classroom and the results are very encouraging. I actually learned more than I expected. Most importantly, the ESA method can proudly address myself now as a more confident and qualified teacher with an upgraded CV. The content was well structured and keeps a balance between grammar units and vital teaching methodologies. The support team was very polite, friendly and always available. I would grade this as one of my greatest achievements and would like to say this course is highly recommended to those of you who love teaching and you will definitely not regret taking this course. Thank you very much.


from the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering Hoshokon 2018, brought to you by Hoshokon. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage here live in Las Vegas for the first ever security conference around blockchains called Hoshokon. It's put on by Hoshokon, an industry participant, small but intimate and the smartest people in the industry kind of coming together, trying to solve and understand the future for security as it relates to blockchain. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Next guest is Neil Kittleson, who's the CEO of Encrypt, formerly the NSA's variety experience with security across the board from early days. Many waves of technology innovation had a panel here talking about securing the blockchain and the nuclear codes, basically implying that if you had to secure it, the nuclear codes. Welcome to theCUBE. Well thanks, thanks John, it's great to talk to you. That's exactly it, right? So the blockchain is meant to really provide high assurance for a lot of really big transactions, right? So the internet evolved over time to hold information, to share information, but it was never meant to conduct transactions. Now we do a lot of e-commerce on it, but it wasn't meant to be unchanging, right? But the blockchain is. And so the idea is, if we lose control of that, if we don't secure it in a way that we can protect our most important digital assets, then it's not good enough for anything. And so that's why I compared it to, you know, what would it take to secure something like the nuclear launch codes on it? Clearly we wouldn't, you know, there's no reason to. But it's a mindset. It shifts your focus on, okay, think that level of impact. Absolutely. Money.  That's catastrophic if you lose it, right? And yet we don't always treat it that way. We haven't made the systems easy enough to use for the general user, right? You know, so we talk about adoption, right? You know, I mean, let's talk, so if you don't mind, let's talk about adoption, right? That's why we're here is we're trying to figure out what's it going to take to get to the next billion users in crypto? What has to be easy? And we don't make it easy today in a secure enough way. And it has to be baked in from the beginning. It can't be like, okay, I built an app, I built some architecture, I'm doing some blockchain. Oh, by the way, security is really hard because we have to make it so complex for users because it's complex in general. Right, and if we build the app first and we get it deployed to say even 50,000 people and then we go back and say, you know what, we need to build this, it's more expensive, right? It's harder to do, it delays deployment, and it confuses users because now they're changing the way that they're interacting with that application. Let's talk about the adoption in context to architecture. It's one of the things that we've been covering, certainly the CUBE folks know in our audience, cloud computing has changed the architecture of how people deploy IT and technology to DevOps, horizontally scalable. You've had a lot of experience over the years and generations of computing evolving through the trend lines. Here, the architecture is interesting. So if you think about the architecture of security and blockchain in general, the security paradigm has to be compatible with a new architecture. So it's kind of a moving train at multiple levels, right? So what is the preferred architecture? What are some of the blockchain architects and or, if you're going to have token economics, you're going to have to have certain business model and or workflows that ties into the technology enablement. How should people think about an architectural view to make the adoption or user interface or user experience or where the expectation is kind of new? So does it all come together? So I'm challenging people to think about it differently, right? So the blockchain in itself is really pretty secure, right? It creates an immutable ledger, immutable record. Where we're going to get in trouble and where we do get in trouble is when you start to transact with it, right? Where you start to actually use a device, right? Whether it's your own phone or it's a computer, right, you're transacting with it and people don't have the security mechanism that was built in there. You know, and it goes back to what we've talked about for the last 20 years, whether it was with the trust computing group, the global platform, or I think the design standards. So you've got probably in this PC, you've got the, well, I guess it's a Mac. It's a Mac, yes. So in your phone, right? In most computers, you've got the security primitives that you need to use hardware to secure those transactions, but we're not using them. Yeah, we've been waiting for that kind of killer app to use hardware to secure transactions and blockchain might just be that. Let's talk about the hardware because that conversation is coming up a lot here in the hallways. Stodial services, custody, these are kind of the business conversation that converts into technology, which is, okay, hardware is actually a good time to actually implement this. Google's doing a lot of stuff with their two-factor authentication with a hardware component. You hear Stephen Spray get rivets talking about a solution that he has. It is at the time, it's like the perfect storm for just a simple hardware solution. I think it is, and you're right. It has to be simple, right? Hardware solutions can get complex. We can make them too difficult to use, but they don't have to be. Like I said, we have the primitives built into most of these devices. I mean, the billions of devices. Yeah, if you've talked to Stephen, you've heard him talk about the number of devices that are carrying the primitives he needs to use for his hardware. But if we don't make it simple enough, then users won't adopt if they won't use it. Have you used a hardware wallet? I'm sure you probably have, if you have one that most of us have. Right, it's not a simple process today because it requires external pieces, external components. It's not a workflow that we understand. It's not something we've been trained to and grown up with. And it's interesting. I was also talking to Steve off camera. He didn't, because he had the interviews over, but we're talking about the supply chain compromise. And obviously Bloomberg kind of had the story, they had the facts wrong, but we kind of understand that this hack has been out there for a while around modifying and or root kit on the boards. You have a bracat had a live demo on stage in 2015 where they actually showed malware that could not be removed from boot memory. So I mean, this is not new, right? But the supply chain has always been, and you've been in the government, you've got to know where all the components are. So the old days, hey, outsource it, manufacture it in China, build it the cheapest way possible. Commodity, DRAM went down this path years and years ago and Japan dominated that and it was low commodity, low margin, or high commodity, low margin. And then Pentium comes out. So you're starting to see that hardware supply chain changing. What's different now? What do people got to do to make sure that the hardware is better? What's your opinion on that? Well, I don't know if it needs to be better, but what we need to know is where the hardware came from. We need to know that the hardware is what we expected it to be. That's a really unique question. We all buy hardware all the time and you just expected if it came from Vendor X that it's what you expected. And let's talk about something even simpler. Let's not talk about maliciousness. Most computers you buy are built to order today, right? You order all the different components. When you get that at home, you don't check to make sure you got the actual RAM that you asked for. You know what's on this? You have no idea. None of us do that, right? And likely the vendor doesn't really have a great record to know that absolutely they put in there what you specifically wanted. Now they intend to, right? But there's a lot of room in that for changes to be made that aren't expected. Like I said, for good or bad, for malicious or non-malicious intent. So what that means is that we really need to get used to saying, you know what? I got this new piece of hardware that I'm going to conduct transactions with that are really critical to my financial survival, my personal privacy. And we can't trust them until we know we should be able to trust them. So that's where hardware comes into play. What are some of the trends you're seeing in the hallway conversations you had here in your talk? Obviously people grab you after and talk to you in the hallways. What are some of the hallway conversations that you've been having here at OSHOCon? You know, the most common question has been how do you convince people that security is important? I mean, which is a really, really basic question.  You know, you've got the privacy attacks with a lot of social media and internet companies. If somebody today doesn't believe that security is important, I don't know if you'll ever convince them. So that becomes a question of how do you get them to adopt it? And you know, getting your family members to adopt two-factor authentication when it's not as easy as not adopting it is sometimes a hard push. One of the things I worry about just kind of just because I'm paranoid sometimes is that, you know, what is going on with my kids? I got four kids, 16 to 23. You know, I got a Wi-Fi in my house. I got a password on it, but I'm sure it's been hacked. They're downloading music, movies. I don't know what they're doing. They're gaming. I mean, their service area in my house is pretty much who knows what's going on. I don't even know what's going on in my network. This is kind of just in my mind, a little paranoid, but that's what average people think about these days is like, okay, I got my own home network. I got these things going on. I'm out in the wild. Is it a device-centric security model that we're moving to?  So, yeah, I don't leave my wallet at the restaurant when I'm done with my meal. So these are kind of a device-centric philosophy. Is that a better direction, you think? So I don't know that you can yes and no, right? For the personal devices, but now, you know, if you go to most networks, right, with IoT, you may have 40 or 50 devices on your network. You know, things that don't move, you know, you may have a light bulb that's got a key to it, right? It's really about making sure that you own it and that you own the keys. I mean, that's what security all comes down to, right? It's key ownership. So when you take a look at how you do that, we need systems in place that help us understand where those keys are, what they're doing, and how we cut them off if we need to. That's awesome. Well, I wanted to get into what your company's doing, but I also want to talk about the trip I had in the Middle East, General Keith Alexander was with us on, with Amazon all across the new region. I know you worked with him at the NSA. And, you know, one of the things he's doing in his new startup is crowdsourcing. We're hearing some of that in here as well where people are using crowdsourcing as a way to have a security mechanism. Is that something that you think is viable? Do you think that this crowdsourcing idea is going to be helpful or it's just a small piece of the puzzle? I think it's a small piece of the puzzle. I think it's the opposite end of the spectrum than a device-centered hardware component. I think it takes both pieces. It's a matter of making sure you know what you have and that you use only what you trust and that you're able to connect to the network in a way that you're comfortable. And then that crowdsource piece comes in to make sure that you're monitoring kind of all those transactions. So you're a big believer, I'm assuming, based on the conversation that hardware and software combination is going to be the preferred user interface for... It has to be. I think we've proven that over the last 20 years. Cell phones are a great example of that. Although we do get some spoofing today and that's been a big talk of this conference, it's not as prevalent as it was in 1994. I mean, I like the idea, too, of we want to know what's in my computer. I'd love to go look at a blockchain ledger and say, here's what's in my Mac. That's a good use case of blockchain. But what if you didn't even have to go look at it? What if every time you booted it up, it checked it against a record that was on the blockchain that said, this is what your Mac should look like. And it said, you know what? You can go ahead and connect to the internet. Go ahead and conduct that transaction. That's a great act. Go ahead and... That's a great use case. I saw it encrypt your company. What are you guys doing? What's the main focus of your opportunity that you're pursuing? So we formed it in May of this year to focus on blockchain security. When I left the agency, I realized there was this really big gap in the conversation people were having around it. I think it's a transformational technology. Is it a skills gap, technology gap, all the above? What are you seeing? It's both, right? You've got computer science graduates come out without a good understanding of hardware security. It's not being taught in most curriculums. It's a general understanding of how to apply the hardware against it. It's a general misunderstanding of what you can trust, right? You know, we've got a generation now that have grown up with iPhones in their hands. They just assume it's okay to use. It's just saying you mentioned the computer science programs. I mean, I grew up in my degree in computer science in the 80s, so we had to learn computer architecture as a double E class actually.  Now it's a little bit different and more diverse. Certainly there's a lot of, you know, new opportunities within computer science. So it's broadened, certainly. In the skill gap, that's what comes up a lot. We hear, obviously, more cybersecurity jobs are open than ever before. Automation is a term that's been come known in the cloud business where, you know, you start to see that now. Security Ho Show's got this automation component that they're adding in for tooling. Is the tooling, and for developers who are actually building stuff, out there, is it early innings? How would you put the progress of some of the tooling? That's reliable.  They need help. What's the status in your mind of the ecosystem around platforms and tooling and open source? So over the last 10 years, there's been a great push to create better tools. A lot of it was done in the open source. A lot of it was done around Linux because it would work. Windows, honestly, Microsoft has done a great job in getting secure boot implemented on every PC they supply. You know, Apple does a great job with their boot security, but they're not making available, and mobile is probably the worst example, right? The TEE, the trusted execution environment, which is the secure space in a mobile phone, isn't open for most developers to access, right? So, you know, that hardware component isn't there. It's not available, so. Yeah, I know. I always get these updates when I go to China. Hey, Apple has an update for you. Would you like to download it? Like, hmm, is this really Apple? Right. I mean, no, turn off my iPhone, right? I mean, this is kind of the interception of the fraudulent, some of the malicious things that are going on, and that still is a concern, but I think generally speaking, you got entrepreneurs here, and I noticed at this conference in some of the earlier investor conferences we've been to, there's a ton of alpha entrepreneur activity. Real smart people trying to build durable technology and solutions. This is the main focus, so it's kind of like, and the capital markets, as we know, is pretty much in the toilet right now, but, you know, it's still growth. And so we're trying to unpack that. What's your opinion on entrepreneurship? Because every trough is always an uptick, and we'll probably see some growth in those companies that survive and thrive will probably be the leaders. Right. What are you seeing? What's your opinion of the landscape of ventures out there? So, the crypto market's been really interesting. It's all been focused on consumer and crypto. There's, and even on the floor today, there's a big push into the enterprise market for blockchain deployments. Simba's a company that's got a great tool set here today to help big enterprises understand how to deploy smart contracts into a blockchain and the enterprise. To me, the exciting part is the use cases outside of cryptocurrency and tokens that blockchain brings to the marketplace. I think that's where we'll see the next wave of entrepreneurship come into play. Andrea's side on stage had a comment. It's like, hey, you know, one of the Q&A sessions. Substitute, I think your best proposal is substitute database with blockchain. If it reads the same, it's probably not revolutionary. Absolutely. Him teasing out essentially that the, you know, the old guard being replaced with the new guard, same models to new faces. You know, taking over the industries that not really changing them, so to speak. And security kind of hints to the same way where if you're going to have a distributed and decentralized architecture with IoT, with all these things connected with digital assets and digital devices, security's going to be thought differently. What's your current take on how to tackle that world? I mean, is there a certain approach you found? So, I'm not sure I'm going to answer your actual question, but there's this really interesting debate. Like you said, Andrea said, you know, if you can replace database with blockchain, it's probably not the right fit. And a lot of early crypto adopters have made that argument. Jimmy Song says that publicly all the time, right? There's no place for blockchain in the enterprise essentially, right? And you can talk about ways, but the blockchain offers something to an enterprise that doesn't require the distribution. It offers the ability to create immutability, right? The inability to change that record, which we don't have in most cases today, in a fairly simple and easy to deploy way. And it offers smart contracts. So if we go back to the use case we talked about where every time a machine boots up and it creates a record of that machine and writes it, we've never had that capability. We've tried, when I was at the agency we built a system that sort of did that, but it didn't have the same sort of underlying strength of mechanism. It will allow us to trust it forensically almost. You know, I interviewed Jimmy Song at the consensus event and I don't necessarily agree with him on that point because I think there's use cases in the enterprise that actually make blockchain very viable. And it's almost like the cloud world. You'd have public and private hybrid coming. I mean, so that's kind of my take on it because it's interesting. IBM has been advertising heavily and others are looking at supply chain. There's low hanging fruit opportunities. Let me talk about the computer supply chain. So supply chain is a chain. It's a value chain and value chains now are changing. So you can track it in a way that's efficient. Why wouldn't that be a use case? So that's kind of my opinion. Do you agree with that? Absolutely. I mean, I think the distributed nature for crypto makes a lot of sense, but the blockchain in a non-distributed manner and the permission to blockchain makes a lot of sense for a lot of different use cases in big organizations. I agree. I've talked to different people that have just tried to replace databases with blockchain because it sounded cool. Yeah. Raising money or want to get some attention, get some momentum. I want to ask you a question in your new venture and Crips because you talked to a lot of folks out there. Certainly your historic and pedigree is amazing and security and you've seen a lot of things, I'm sure. What have you learned? What's your observation? What's the learnings that you can take away and share from your conversations? Is there any patterns that you're seeing emerging that could help people either navigate, understand, orientate towards something that they might want to use? What have you learned? So I think the biggest thing I've learned is that this community is the most diverse community I've ever worked with in technology. You've got people from all walks of life and it's absolutely amazing.  And that diversity has driven a thirst for knowledge so that people are completely open to discussions about security that they've never had before in other realms. So when I talk to them about hardware-based security, they get excited and want to learn more. And honestly, in the PC community over the last 15 years, I got a little pushback on that, right? They say, well, we've heard about that, we don't want to, right? It works the way it is. People here realize they're building something brand new and it's time to build it right and that they really want this to succeed for their own reasons, right? Whether it's a corporate enterprise or whether it's almost a crypto-anarchist, right? They've all got the same sorts of goals. And there's a cultural thing too. I think the Bitcoin money aspect of it, pretty much anyone on the age of 30 that I kind of take a straw poll on, it's like, oh, this is going to change the world. Like, can you describe it? No, no, but it's great. Right. I actually heard that in the hallway earlier. I'm having a phone describing somebody that never heard of Bitcoin, how it's going to revolution. Well, Neil, thanks for coming on. I want to ask you a final question. Five years, where are we in your mind? Shoot the arrow forward. What's happening in five years? How does these dots connect in the next couple of years? In your opinion. So I think that if we're able to lay in the groundwork today to make user accessibility to the blockchain easy enough and secure enough, I think you'll see that it grows in ways that we really can't imagine, right? You know, I can't predict the crypto markets, but I think you'll see people starting to use tokens in different ways. I think there's some incredible use cases for tokenization, for rewards programs, things like that. I think enterprises in the next five years are going to start to figure out what use cases make sense. I think they're going to see great efficiency. I think they'll see, you know, much greater scalability and ease of use. Use cases really are going to be driving all this. Absolutely. Well, I want to find a question since it's just popped in my head. I want to get this out there. One trend I've been hearing here at this conference and seeing it kind of boil in into this community is the conversation, not just about cryptography and security, cyber security on a global scale has now come in because of the hacks, because of the nation states, because of the geopolitical landscape.  It is. Not always, probably in the wheelhouse, a lot of these guys, but a lot of these guys are also kind of adjacent involved with cyber security. Your view of the impact, the cyber security pressure is going to have on the industry, this industry. So I think that you're hearing the conversation because suddenly security became really, really important to people personally, right? In the past, if you lost money with your bank account, it was refunded to you. Now if somebody steals your private key, you're out whatever money was attached to that private key. So it's very personal. So people have started to think about all the different things that they need to do to really protect those keys. I mean, it's almost an organic conversation that we've been trying to drive for 40 years in the space. Yeah, and one of the things I worry about is the whole regulatory aspect of this, because it can be a driver or an enabler and a driver, or it could be dampening innovation. That's always something to watch out for. I think there's a Senate discussion today about it. I think there's some great work going on in that space, both at senior levels in Congress, as well as the regulatory commissions. But it's going to take a lot of education. There's a lot of fear around this space. Well, Neil, thanks for coming on. I'm looking forward to having more conversations with you. Great to have you on theCUBE and sharing your insight. Give a quick plug for Encrypt. What are you guys doing? What's the update? What's the status of the company? How do people get a hold of you? Why should they call you? What's the update? Well, so like I said, we formed in May. We've grown faster than we would have expected to because there's a thirst for the sorts of things that we're doing. We're always happy to talk to any enterprise or a consumer about the use cases around the products that they have, how they'd fit into the blockchain environment, and how to do it securely, properly. So, Encrypt.com, N-K-R-Y-P-T. And you're in Maryland. We're in Maryland. We're in the DC area, so hey, cool, great. Absolutely. Well, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Live from Ho Show Con, this theCUBE's coverage of the first security conference. John Furrier, you're watching theCUBE. Stay with us for more coverage. We'll be right after this short break.


And here's some gaming keyboards. So hi. Hi, how are you doing, Nicholas? So here you're showing some gaming keyboards? Yeah, so this year at the show we have some new products. We have some new mechanical, full mechanical keyboards. If you see here, this is what we call our GX900L FM. FM for full mechanical. It has a full RGB backlight for every key. As you can see. It's like a pulsating, it's blinking. Sure, there's different functions for it. If you hit FM, insert. It has a function where you type the key and it causes it to spread out from the center. If you hit FM, home. FM, page up, makes it all light up. Different kind of light functions. Different kind of light functions. And here we have full six macro keys that you can, the individual can preset. To control their gaming experience more in depth. So these are the two brands, IKUN and ATEK. And this is the ATEK stuff. ATEK is our keyboard, mouse and accessory company. All IKON is our tablet company. And you are seriously into the keyboard and mouse. Lots of, you make a large quantities of all these mouse and keyboards, right? Sure, I mean we've been in the mouse and keyboard business for approximately 12 years. And during that 12 year period we probably shipped somewhere in 70 million pieces combined. So on average right now we do about 5 million units per year. In keyboard and mouse. And here's some of the different keyboards. You can show some of these different ones here. Sure, this is kind of our, we have some wired and wireless keyboard here. These are more kind of our entry level multimedia keyboards. Or kind of just some regular standard keyboards. Some of those. Some of them like this. Yeah, this is more of a remote control for your smart TV. And it has a full keyboard on it. To do nice keyboards you need the expertise to have expertise in designing good mechanical tooling and good to know how stuff works. Sure, and I mean you know ATEK's been doing this like I said for 12 years. We have our own plastic injection. We have full automated lines now that we can build all the keyboards on. You know there's a lot of different layouts that you need to understand for different countries. But we've been in the business so long that for us this is just second nature now. Nice. And here's some gaming mouse mice. And we can look at some wireless mice and also some Bluetooth mouse here. So Bluetooth mouse is starting to become much more popular in the market. What we found is that more and more laptops are getting thinner and becoming more like ultrabooks. So you have limited number of USB ports. So with the Bluetooth mouse it can last up to three months per charge or on the single battery. And you don't use up your USB port that you may need for other things. More and more that don't even have USB ports anymore. They just only have Bluetooth and USB Type-C. Sure and this is why we think that the Bluetooth mice are going to be more popular in the market. And then we look at some of these mice over here. So this is our GX88 mouse. So this is a full programmable mouse and it can be adjusted with weights. This is kind of more for the hardcore gamer out there. So that's the back plate and here's the weight box. So in the weight box the different sizes and different weights. This is more customization for the individual. Some may like the mouse lighter. Some might like the mouse heavier. So a good mouse is a heavy mouse. For gaming, yeah. So this here is up to 6,000 dpi. It's got four preset programmable buttons here. You can change the dpi on the go. That's for some good gamers. Down here is also another, what is this one? So this is kind of our entry level one. This is a heavier keyboard. It has a metal back plate on it. The weight is not adjustable. This is up to 2,500 dpi. And then with the software embedded in it, it can go up to 3,500 dpi. Okay, cool. So distributors from all over the world should check out all these. This one also seems pretty heavy. And it's a Morphus brand. This is the Morphus brand. This is really kind of a special keyboard here. If you look, this is all water proofed seal. So if a gamer is playing a game that spills his water or his foam. Which they do. They sweat a lot. You're not going to damage the PCB. Yeah. And you can remove all the keycaps. It's easier to kind of clean up too if you do have a small one. This is also a full RGB backlight. It has the same type of function as the GX900 that I showed you. With different presets. So this is it.  And distributors all over the world. Sure. Like I said, ATEC specializes in keyboard and mouse. We've been doing gaming products now for the past, I'd say six years. And we really kept up with the times and started using more advanced softwares with our products. So it gives the end user, it gives the gamer a fuller experience that they're looking for.