All right, good afternoon everyone or morning as the case may be. Thank you so much for joining and being here today. On behalf of SoCAC Global and my firm Titan Partners, I wanna thank you for attending this webinar. My name is Andrea Minelli and I'm a senior advisor at Titan Partners, the strategy consulting firm that focuses on education from early childhood to lifelong learning. In much of our work, we partner with high impact organizations that are working at the intersection of mission and financial sustainability. Organizations that are driving scale and important education and learn to work solutions that are working. Today, we're here to talk about a critically important issue in the future of work, what we've called retooling the relationship between workers and employers, transformative models in the future of work. I'm joined by a group of experts that are ready to share what their organizations are doing, each representing a different model and an innovative solution and what they're doing to transform the sector and learn to work. I'd like to introduce Beth Kober, Chief Operating Officer of the Markle Foundation, Yigal Krizzambam, founder and managing director of the ETF at JFF Labs and Leila Makoreshi, Chief Business Officer of Merit America. Before I turn to them to introduce the organizations further, let me lay out a couple of ground rules, we're gonna go until 1.50, I promise you will all get off at 1.50 East Coast time so that you can get on to your next meeting. Any questions you have, please put them in the chat. We will try to address them one by one, we're not gonna have a formal Q and A, but I can assure you we'll get to them or we'll get back to you. This will be recorded and will be available on the SoCAP website tomorrow. All right, let's jump in. I'm gonna say a couple more words to set the stage. When we talk about workers and retooling the relationship between workers and employers, what and who are we talking about? There are many well-known facts, anywhere from 40 to 60 million Americans, nearly half the American workforce are working in jobs that don't earn a living wage. Many, if not most, do not have a two or a four year degree. They're trapped with little or no options. Higher ed has failed them, it's too expensive, they don't have the time, the knowledge, or the wherewithal to find alternative pathways to a sustainable job. Also, employers need people. They may not know who these people are or how to retrain or help them along the way. These are the workers we're talking about, these are the employer challenges we're talking about and these are the organizations that are solving those problems. Both coming up with innovative solutions involving the public and private sector and they're working to scale. 40 million Americans is not a small number and we need things to work at scale. So without further ado, let's get to our panelists. Beth, I'm gonna ask you to introduce yourself in your organization. Hi everybody, my name's Beth Cobert. I'm the Chief Operating Officer of the Markle Foundation and in that role, I'm very proud to lead our work with so many partners in the Rework America Alliance. Markle has been focused on workforce issues for many years, but when COVID hit, all of us sort of stepped back and said we gotta think about how to do something differently in its scale to bring things together. So we created the Rework America Alliance. It's a group of about 40 organizations including employers like Walmart, Workday Zurich, Microsoft and Google. It's worker-facing organizations in civil rights groups like the National Urban League, Unitos US, Goodwill, Rural Lisk, it's unions, it's technology companies, capabilities provider, it's incredible partners like the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and McKinsey who've been with us in the tour. And what we're focused on is the workers that Andrea just described. Workers who have great skills and talent and experience but may not have that bachelor's degree that has been too much of a barrier of getting them to the right place. And so we are working on connecting organizations that reach workers to organizations that reach employers so that employers can find that great talent that can help those workers thrive and help their companies thrive. And so we bring these groups together in partnerships with efforts around how do we improve the effectiveness of career coaching that workers can get? How do we help those frontline staff better serve these job seekers? How do we help employers learn different ways to look for that talent, find that talent and advance that talent? So it's taking those things together and taking what works and spreading them across with this whole set of terrific partners including, frankly, everybody on this Zoom. So great to meet you all.  Yeah, hi everyone. Thank you for having me, Andrea, Titan and Socap as well as my panelists, appreciate it. Egal Kersenbaum, I'm the Founding Manager of the Employment Technology Fund at Jobs for the Future Labs. We got to work on that name a bit. It's quite a mouthful, but that represents kind of the mindset that we're bringing to this work. And so we are an early stage impact investment fund that is investing in technology companies that are upskilling, training and connecting low-middle income earners into better career pathways and economic mobility. And we are housed within Jobs for the Future which is doing similar work but in a variety of different ways as well. And so that marriage together is pretty powerful and we'll talk about a few examples and how that drives impact in the market and Andrea's favorite word scale. So we're gonna talk a little bit about that. We're a team of four, so we're a small but mighty team. Our team represents individuals that we're seeking to support myself who came to this country as an immigrant, had to learn English, went to a community college then a four-year and kind of, you know, clawed my way into the impact investing role. But we're really, you know, trying to create access and opportunities for those who are like ourselves as well. So that's about me, the fund, passing it to Layla. I don't know if we love Andrea. All right, I'll just jump in with a quick intro as well. Thanks so much everyone. My name is Layla MacCurecci I'm the Chief Business Officer at Merit America where I get to oversee all of our funding streams. So our philanthropic funding from foundations that make our work possible as well as our earned revenue streams to ensure our long-term sustainability at scale. So Merit America is a nonprofit. We prepare low-wage workers for in-demand careers. Our model is unique in that it works for people to work and it's built for a national scale. But I think our Y is actually best demonstrated by our learners. So I just want to take one step back and share a little bit about Janelle.  I think I can stop right there and it's clear she can handle any challenge just of that one statement. She has over $40,000 in student debt but no degree. She is working full-time and earning $30,000 a year. So if you were Janelle, let's pause for a second and just imagine that that was your situation. What would you do? How would you support your family and what would you pursue? So before Merit, there actually weren't that many options out there for Janelle. She is working full-time. She has six children. She can't afford to take a setback from her work to pursue college and plus she tried that once and didn't work out for her. And she doesn't have the time or money to attend a full-time training program or a boot camp. And as Andrea said and Beth and you all referenced, there are between 40 to 60 at Merit. We use the number 53 million Americans like Janelle. So working adults who are really stuck in low-age work. And Merit is designed, we are a talent provider. So we're a training provider. We're designed specifically for these 53 million folks. We've served over 3,000 learners or about three and a half years old so relatively new as well. The majority of our learners identified as BIPOC with an 84% graduation rate. And what I'm most proud of is that our average post-program salary is $50,000, which represents a wage gain. So an increase in salary of $18,000 per learner per year. And we're just getting started. Well, we're just about four years old and over the next three years, we're on track to drive a billion dollars in wage gains across the US. Before I wrap up, I was inspired by Yagal sharing a little bit of your personal stories. I'll share this a second about myself and why I got into this work. I'm a first generation American myself. My parents were immigrants. They came from Iran and our family got to experience firsthand the results of rampant income inequality and what happens in the country where these conditions exist. So they flood the revolution followed by eight years of war. And when I became a parent myself, I have two boys, a big part of my life outside of merit. I wanted to find a way to address the income inequality that exists here at home. And so feeling like I get to do a small part in stopping history from repeating itself is sort of what drives me each day. And I'm so excited to be a part of this panel today. Awesome. I think Andrew might be having a little technical difficulties. So I may play host for this next question. We'll see how I do. I'm not a great host, but no. Okay. So I think this one will kick it to Beth to go first. But the Inflation Reduction Act among other dramatic world events is big news. How are these external factors shaping market dynamics and the workers we're all focused on? You're doing a great job pinching. So when we think about the Inflation Reduction Act and some of the other measures that have been put in place over the past number of years whether it's the CHIPS Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the American Rescue Plan. We see this as a bit of a once in a lifetime opportunity to say there is going to be real demand for an opportunities for workers to take on roles that can lead to the kind of family sustaining wages, the growth progression, the stability that so many seek and haven't been able to access. Particularly workers of color and women for whom these jobs just have not been a viable path forward. So how can we take this opportunity? There are all sorts of features in these programs focused on these emerging in-demand fields whether it's in semiconductors, clean energy, manufacturing or infrastructure. And the question I think we think about with our partners and I know my fellow panelists think about is how can we make sure that this chance of economic opportunity, one gets captured and two gets captured in an equitable way. And there's lots of programs whether it's in tax incentives for businesses to hire from registered apprenticeship programs, whether it's grant programs, not from the Inflation Reduction Act but from the previous bills like the Good Jobs Challenge which are focused on really saying we're going to make this recovery an equitable recovery, we're going to engage. I think one of the things that's really important in all these is thinking about how do you engage the government and business, education providers, traditional providers and innovative providers like Merit America? Where can the kinds of organizations that you got funds fit into this picture? So I think there's a real opportunity for everyone to come together around this as a catalyst so that we all will be able to look back and say that was a sea change and we all did our part in making it happen. That's awesome. And a great segue to some of where my head was going with the Inflation Reduction Act which is really the large investment in manufacturing and clean energy jobs. And to your point, both the direct effects will be job stimulus, more roles going to clean energy, manufacturing, onshore, et cetera, right? But there'll be some really interesting knock-on effects that may not be as apparent. So with that investment into manufacturing clean job space, we're likely to see more entrepreneurs and innovation jump in as a knock-on effect as well. And those are the types of companies and opportunities that I'm particularly excited about finding and investing in and that can ultimately lead to impact down the line as well. And so it's exciting, it's large investments. We have companies, one of which I'll just tell you because factory fix, for example, is helping manufacturers find upscaling and connect talent to open roles, having livable jobs and wages and are doing a fantastic job and are certainly likely to benefit from these types of acts as well. So Layla, I'll kick it over to you and it looks like Shalomi is back. And she's back, cool. All right, wonderful. Yes, we completely agree Inflation Reduction Act is definitely an important step in the right direction for workers to be paid fairly. We are glad that there are incentives for companies to pay well and penalties for companies that say they will, but fail to follow through. And of course, cleaning the right incentives and environment for clean energy is not only critical for our economy, but also for combating climate change. So we're all around in the future. And what's exciting is Merit's model the way that we work, we are job agnostic. So we actually select paths, training paths that align to career paths based on criteria like really strong starting salary, upward mobility, high employer demand, recession resilience and being a good fit with our model, which is fully virtual and online. So of course we're expecting green jobs to be in greater demand as a result of the act and we're actively exploring the best way to prepare learners for them. Beth also mentioned a couple other opportunities I just wanted to highlight and share. Merit would be incredibly excited as many of our partners, if one day we got to the point where Pell Grants were made accessible to cover short term training programs like Merit, I think that would just do incredible wonders for the scaling up of all the solutions out there. And then ARPA funds, we are still working with states on implementing their ARPA funds and using them effectively to get folks trained. So that is still a live stream of work happening and then the Good Jobs Challenge from the Department of Commerce, which I think Beth also mentioned, we're in several conversations right now exploring with cities and states how we could be an implementing partner supporting larger partners using the Good Jobs Challenge funding. So I think there's an entire array of opportunities and no provider, certainly Merit on our own, can't make the changes commensurate with the scale of the problem. So figuring out these public-private partnerships I think will be a really exciting part of the solution moving forward. Leila, that's awesome. And I just wanna say it's the mark of a phenomenal panel and they really don't need the facilitator. So I was just testing you all and really giving our audience a little excitement, right? So you stop me if I repeat anything but I hopefully can just, I wanna pivot us a little just bringing off what you just said, Leila, to that idea of bringing people together in collaboration, right? Because Beth, I see Markle and the Rework America Alliance is really doing that hard work of knitting together these entities that don't talk to each other which is why we know the gaps exist, right? The funds could be out there but people don't know how to access them. They don't know how to make it work on the ground and we've got both a national issue but how to take it regionally is also really important. Could you speak to how you do that knitting? Sure, and I think this is the core problem, right? What we are trying to do is take talent, real talent with real capabilities and potential who can't have had barriers to get into these great opportunities. Usually you have companies who are saying, I need more talent. You've got training institutions, education students who say, I can help fill whatever skill gaps made exist but they're all sort of talking to each other and fundamentally they have to come together or there is no impact for the individual and no impact for the company. So we've explicitly built this concept of partnership into the Alliance and how we at Markle do our work. We are in the cities where we're working take Austin where our work on the ground is led by the National Urban League. We are explicitly working not with the National Urban League to just enhance the way they're operating but to connect them with others, with the chambers, with others in Austin to do that there and similar places. Because when you get people together what you often get is this, oh wait, I didn't know that blank, right? I didn't know that you could help source candidates if we're looking for talent. I didn't know that no really you have these programs that people could take apart of. And so it's being very explicit about saying what are the barriers in the end-to-end process from an individual who's got talent and aspiration and the career at the other end and how do you knock each of those down? How do you provide more information so an individual has confidence that they can follow that path? With help from McKinsey and the Fed and the Urban League we created a job progressions tool you can actually go find it. That helps the individual say if I'm starting off as a frontline front of house manager in a restaurant what are real careers that would get me to my next gateway job and from there to a target job? And do I need training or not? Is it accessible to me if I've been justice involved? So it's very practical. And I think the key to making collaboration and partnerships work in this space is to make it very tangible and practical. That's what the companies, the funds do because otherwise they don't have a business model. And I know, because we spend a lot of time with Merit and Record, that's what they're doing and thinking about what are the roles where training will really make a difference and we're gonna do those roles and not talk about it. So it's bringing people together, it's getting them together in the virtual or real room and saying, what are the steps we can take to get the flywheel running? And once it does, they tend to build on itself. So it's about that initial partnership that came. And Beth, I'm gonna push just a little because like how did you do it? You know, like we, these problems have existed, right? You guys have been at it and you know, with great leadership and a lot of hard work but like where's the secret sauce and the incentives really, that's what I'm asking. So sure, I think there's a couple of things. One, it is really for our role, we view our impact is the success of our partners and you gotta take yourself out of that, right? We are successful when Mikasa in Denver does more to connect workers to opportunities in Denver and uses that to get funding and to build the case why they should be a recipient of some of these great Department of Commerce grants. It's when you take our partners like MZ Burning Glass, now LightCast and they say, okay, we've got this tool that can help people create better resumes. We can put that forward. It's partners like Google and Microsoft who say, you know, this training stuff, we can do this, we have this. How do we get this out to people? How can you work with these different organizations say, you know, their goal is that they've made commitments to make this training available for free to support people. They gotta get it to people. How do you bring people together? So it's doing that. And I'd say the other piece I'll come back to is we really focus on what's the first next step you can take. That'll make a difference. Let's do that. Because that enables the organizations to start working together and they discover the second step and the third step. And it's going into them with an idea that they're each gonna take these, our partners at the Urban League, we need those, goodwill. The goal of the initial places where we started is for them to take those things back and spread them across their network. So you make it tangible, specific, and think about scaling from the beginning.  And I know we need those powerful umbrella organizations like Mark, all the rework America Alliance pushing everyone in the right direction. But I want to zoom down now, like a little bit more to kind of the ground level. Cause I think that's where Merit America and your value proposition really resides kind of direct frontline. Could you just tell us about what you think some of the key success drivers are? Because there are, I'm glad there is a whole ecosystem of providers who are trying to solve this problem. But you guys seem like you've been particularly effective. Could you talk about the success drivers? Yes, absolutely, really happy to. So Merit, we're focused on both scale and impact. And we have three pillars to do that. Number one is best in class coaching. Two is scalable technology. And three is a laser focus on what employers need the most. So I'll just take a moment to expand on those three pillars. We combine best in class coaching with scalable technology to teach technical and professional or soft skills. And really our secret sauce is based on our coaching staff. They're super integral to our model. I think they're what drives the difference between having really great content out there and then having folks successfully complete the content and be able to use it to access a great job. So we support our learners and folks who are coming into us from industries like hospitality, the gig economy or retail. It might be a little bit more unfamiliar with how to navigate the corporate world. They do incredible work building learners confidence, working on imposter syndrome, teaching learners to advocate for themselves in professional settings. At the same time, we know in order to be able to make a dent, we have to figure out how to transform that secret sauce that coaching that real life humans do into a model that can scale. And that's where our internal technology infrastructure comes in so that this model can be accessible even when we're serving tens of thousands of learners a year. So we're learning right now, which of our touch points need to be automated and which actually have to stay in-person, live with coaches, not in-person, sorry, virtually, but with human coaches to be effective. And what we're really excited about is once we're confident in the solutions that work, we'll make all these innovations open source and share them with the entire ecosystem so that other players can incorporate whatever they find valuable in their models as well. So essentially our learners work with their coaches online, asynchronously to fit around their work schedule, their family schedule, and we make up your training with us that the end may earn an industry-recognized certificate. For example, a Google career certificate in IT support for data analytics. And then that brings us to our third pillar, which is working closely with employers that's really critical to our success. We all know that training is only useful if it transforms to an actual job opportunity with family sustaining wages and with affordability built in. And so that's why we work with very strong P partnerships with employers and government entities who sponsor or hire our learners, companies like JPMorgan Chase, Amazon is a big partner of ours through their Amazon Career Choice Program, states like Connecticut, coalitions like 110. We really enjoyed our work working on Scale Up and Beth's team. So all these different partnerships are a critical component to making sure we're always linking learners with actual job opportunities. And because there are paid partnerships, they're really important for our financial sustainability in the long term so that we can exist at a scale that's reasonable as we grow. Lastly, I'll just mention a really exciting recent development, which is this $100 million Google career certificate fund that we helped to co-design with our partners at Google and in social finance. So in this fund, Google is actually sponsoring learners up front to access training like providers such as Merit. And then when learners receive a job above a certain salary's threshold, they repay a portion of their training costs back into, ooh, sorry about that, back into the fund at 0% interest to work partnership funding for future learners. So these are a couple of examples of how we work with employer partners and we're always looking for new, wonderful partners or just individuals to volunteer for mock interviews, which is a really fun, inspiring way to engage with our learners and get to know our model. And putting those three pillars together at Best in Class coaching, scalable technology and focusing on what employers need most. We're driving the $18,000 average wage gain per learner per year. And as I mentioned, then the North Star we're obsessed with is getting to that $1 billion mark over the next three years and working with our partners on the call today and many others to transform how we approach education and workforce development. Leila, that's so cool. And before we pivot to Yigal, who I know knows something about financing as well, I wanna push on that topic a little, that tripartite partnership with Google and social finance because to me, as I was thinking about your model, I was like, great, but how are we gonna keep finding this? How are we gonna keep finding this? And like, there's great places like Markle and other foundations and philanthropists that we know have now turned their attention to this sector, but that word sustainability, that to go with mission, tell us a little bit more about that thought around the funding of this so that in the long-term, some of these evergreen things may become more of a reality. I'm so glad you asked this, my favorite topic. This is financial sustainability of these models. Yeah, I think the short answer is we can't rely on philanthropy alone. Even if you bring your per head cost down to, three, four, $5,000 a learner times $50,000 learners a year, year after year, there's just not that much philanthropy doesn't exist in our sector to support organizations at scale. And that's why at Merit, we're really focused on earned revenue streams as well. So we charge employers who hire our learners exactly the same way they would pay a traditional staffing firm to source talent or we partner with governments or companies to sponsor learners up front for upskilling or retraining. And then of course the Google fund is a really exciting example that we hope to show a lot of success that other corporate players may replicate or maybe even policy makers will replicate that model or ideally both will replicate. So there's a constant revolving supply of funding that's really tied to impact. Like if you do your job well and someone gets in place and they have the ability to repay a portion of their costs and there's a really strong time between the funding and direct impact which we're excited about. And philanthropy will be important. We are a nonprofit and we don't wanna move up market in our target market. So in order to reach the learners we're working with we will always subsidize that they not pass on the full cost. So our philanthropic partners are incredibly, incredibly important. We work with many leading funders in the space Google.org, Ascendian, Charles Koch Foundation and many others across the board and they really do help make us accessible but we have to pair that funding with earned revenue for that sustainability and to be able to operate at scale. Great, super, super interesting. So you go on that note, using capital and creative ways for both to catalyze and to have impact. Why don't you tell us a little bit more? You might have done some of this in the intro but just the fund idea and how to use capital in a catalytic manner to really, I see your fund, correct me if I'm wrong is fueling the innovation layer. Where are the good ideas coming from? And the ones that are gonna help people progress either with learning about jobs, getting upskilled or trained and a variety of the other things. Jump in. Yeah, happy to share a little bit more on the origin story which I think we'll answer or tie in nicely to this conversation. And so the Employment Technology Fund was launched in late 2017 with the support of Walmart, Kellogg, Joyce and ECMC foundations and really they were focused on what they saw as a gap in the market and the gap was a layer of risk capital flowing to early stage technology companies that were serving the needs of low wage workers. There was plenty of capital and innovation and entrepreneurship focused on white collar workers as you probably not too surprised about but there was a gap. And so they say, hey, we're, you know been funding in traditional ways. Let's try something new and innovative. How do we pool together capital? So if you've ever worked with five foundations getting them to do something together is an innovation in and of itself. And so, and I think a lot of that was thanks to some folks on this, you know on this call as well. But so that was the first innovation. Second was using philanthropic capital to take that risk position in for profit technology companies to drive impact. That is, you know, more acceptable or more common now I would say, but back in again late 2017 that really wasn't the norm. There were a few entities out there doing that. And I think, you know through our demonstration of ETF we've been able to crowd in other sources of capital as well as other funds that are doing similar work. And I think that was one of the, you know theories or theses behind ETF as well was a demonstration effect of how do we get others to follow suit and to use philanthropic capital to drive innovation and technology investments. And so we launched in late 2017 with all of that in mind. The other pieces that were really important for us at the time was supporting entrepreneurs with lived experience with the problems that we're trying to solve. In addition to that was using our capital in a way that would drive innovation and impact in geographies and cities that was overlooked and underserved. And so from kind of a macro fund level thesis we were really focused on innovation. So driving and building the ecosystem of entrepreneurs building technology companies that serve in the needs of low middle wage earners crowding in non-traditional and traditional sources of capital to drive change as well as supporting entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds and underserved communities that would lead to higher impact solutions in our view. So that was a pilot fund we launched we made some investments in 2018 and to our surprise or to our hypothesis there was a market there. The market was actually fairly robust. There was impact, there was financial return. And so we decided to double down our efforts and scale the fund as well and our support of entrepreneurs. And so I just want to finish and I saw you come up with me but I think what's interesting as we step back and kind of reflect on the early days is that the impact of COVID has been wild, right? There's a bunch of different impacts but acutely in my work there's been a much more focus and appreciation for essential workers, frontline workers. And along with that has come a much higher degree or more entrepreneurship and innovation targeted to solving issues for these individuals. At the flip side there's been a lot more capital flowing into the space as well. And so that gap that we talked about initially has kind of evolved in a way, right? Like the ecosystem has evolved and where I think ETF still has a unique voice and all of us still have this role to play is really around finding and supporting the highest impact best outcome solutions in the market. And there's a lot of money now just kind of spraying but it's really around like who's bringing the rigor, the pedagogy and having the outcomes that are really desired by all of us. And I know Marin America is doing that for sure. Others, certainly our portfolio companies are doing that. But I think that's an interesting evolution of the space. So I'll stop. Super, super interesting, Yol.  And I came off mute honestly because where I was gonna go with you just to push a little further was the talk a little bit about this decision to embed within JFF. And when we talk about networks and partnerships, what Beth was talking about, what Layla was referring to, I see, I believe a little bit of a rationale for why you live where you live. Right. No, of course. And so initially when we launched, as I was describing, we launched by ourselves. And so in 2019, we were acquired or merged with Jobs for the Future. And the rationale there was really that, capital is a commodity, anyone can give capital. But how do you provide the expertise, the networks, the partnership building for early stage companies to help them scale? And so that was really the theory behind ETF joining JFF. And it was how we could better serve our entrepreneurs. And by better serving our entrepreneurs, we understood that they would be able to scale their companies and drive impact to a higher degree. And so we've done that, we've embedded with JFF. We're now, you know, JFF's de facto impact investment fund. And we are leveraging all corners of JFF to support our entrepreneurs. For example, we have a Center for Apprenticeship and Work-Based Learning that helps support one of our portfolio companies on ramp. We have some of our work-based learning and corporate partners and things like that supporting our portfolio companies. So too many examples to provide maybe here, but certainly that hypothesis has borne fruit and we're, I don't know what the expression is, but it's been a good marriage so far, so. Yeah, that's great to hear. And I think what I wanna emphasize to our listeners is having been close and observed some of the people and doing their work on the phone. This is hard work, like let's not kid ourselves. This is really hard. From the thinking part to the conceiving part to carefully constructing your models and what you're thinking about, whether EGAL is talking about funding people that have the lived experience, whether Layla's talking about, I mean, gosh, how hard it is to even find and reach the individuals that need the help as much as they want it. It's hard sometimes to reach them or what Beth is talking about. She made it sound pretty easy. I don't know. Getting all those people to the table to agree. I do think we can all agree, COVID and the times have made people look around and say, we have to cooperate more. We have to solve this problem. And I don't wanna throw our higher ed colleagues under the bus, but higher ed in this country has not served this population. And so I think everybody is just kind of saying, what do we do? So we now have these nascent ideas, more than nascent. We're serving thousands, tens of thousands. Layla, what are the obstacles, Beth? What are the obstacles EGAL? What are the obstacles to scaling? Why can't I snap my fingers? I'm very impatient. And why can't we reach a million tomorrow? I know this is a complicated question, but before we hit our lightning round, I wanna talk more about obstacles to scale so that people can hear what still is on your mind. Can you share a couple? Yeah, Layla, go ahead. Okay, a couple of thoughts. So prior to Merritt, I worked at Coursera where scale was not a challenge at all, overall. Tens of millions of learners, incredible experience. And yet when we looked through the data that people who are benefiting EGAL mentioned this in his previous remarks, so people who are benefiting from the solution that exists at scale today are not the population of people who need it the most, right? It's someone who might be transitioning from an investment maker to a software engineer. Oftentimes folks already have some level of credentialing in higher education. And I think the challenge of scale with a really impact-focused model is really about sustainability. We just can't, again, this is an issue that's so obsessed with, bring them back to it again. The philanthropy on its own doesn't exist to find a model at scale, especially a direct service-oriented model that's not just a technology solution. And at Merritt, we think it's a combination of tech plus touch. At least for now, we're not at a place where tech alone with no human interaction, we don't think or we haven't seen success at widespread scale for the learner population we're working with. There's just so many complicated human dynamics and so many years of systemic racism that have brought us to where we are today. So we do think a people element is really important, but we can't just do it with people because that's too expensive and we can't get to scale. So if we bring in technology to make the solution more viable, more scalable, more accessible, then the question becomes how do you operate that at scale? How do you fund it at scale?  So our goal is to get to 80% self-funded and only 20% philanthropy. The 20% will still be a very large number when we're at scale, but really important to bring in those earned revenue streams. And that challenge, that obstacle brings us to where does that earned revenue come from? We think if we're providing a valuable service to a company by going out, spending the time and money to recruit learners, to train learners and to support them in their job application process that we should be compensated for that service that we're providing exactly the same way staffing firms get compensated for the service that they provide, where it just happened to be focused on a much more diverse talent pipeline. And that's not easy. It's not easy to convince a company, hey, you have no problem paying grandstand or roundabout half, we're doing the same work and actually more because we have to recruit and train in-house just cause we're a nonprofit that doesn't mean you shouldn't pay for that service. And we've actually learned that when companies do pay us because we've tested the model both ways, it's a better experience for the learner. They have a better recruitment onboarding process and experience, and we're better able to serve the company's needs because we can assign a customer success manager who really focuses on what that specific recruiting team that specific talent acquisition team needs and tailor our service to their needs and priorities. So it's really a win-win for the company, for the learner and for us because we can be sustainable and grow. But it's definitely an obstacle but it doesn't happen easily at the same time. I think you've identified with a lot of specificity for our listeners, some of the things that are on your minds. Beth, Yagal, anything to add on the scale question? So plus one to everything that Layla said, I think the other part is trying to find this balance, right? When we go and work in communities, we know that Austin is different from Minneapolis, is different from Atlanta, is different from Los Angeles. Yeah. So those organizations, those communities want the thing that is most tailored to them. On the other hand, there are many things that are common between all those places and what the needs are and what the employers are. So there's this real balance between being responsive and tailored and actually listening particularly to the voices of the people in the community about what they need and what is important to them without going too far along in customizing everything because then you're gonna get caught in both the time and complexity and challenge of execution. So what you're trying to find is a way to customize efficiently and effectively. If you think about scale and the concept of manufacturing, you think about Henry Ford and the Model T and it was black. Black, everyone was the same car. That's how you got scale. In the world of technology, you can do a lot more things, but there's a balance there and it's trying to get that balance right that is tricky and hard and necessary, but not too much. And how do you get organizations to understand that and again, they have to own this. They're the ones who are gonna, the employers have to own it for them to commit to hiring people and advancing them and workers in the organization that support them have to own it to feel like this is really a program designed with me, not just for me. And that's when they embrace it and can really bring people to it. So you gotta get that customization responsiveness right without each one being custom made. Yep, so true. Thank you so much. You got any reflections on scale before we go to our lightning round? I'll be quick. From an entrepreneur perspective, I mean, there's a myriad of challenges to scale that we'll do another panel on, right? From ETS perspective, what we would really like to see is capital that's sitting on the sideline be a little bit more catalytic in their thinking. And so you have billions of dollars in endowment capital, you have billions in dollars of university money, asset manager money, high net worth money, that's sitting on the sideline, Kennedy, and we could be, not me, but I mean, if you want, not me, but we as a broader field could be using that money to really drive impact and innovation and change. And it's hard, high risk investing that takes time. And so you need a long window, but that's really what I would see to scale some of these solutions more broadly. Fantastic. Okay, learners and listeners, that was a call to action from our three panelists if I ever heard one about what's needed to scale. So just to close, we've got just really three to four minutes left. What do you, in one minute or less, where are we gonna be in five years? Are you optimistic? How do you see the future? Beth, let's start with you. I'm always optimistic. So I'll say yes. I think the future will feel very, hopefully, will feel very different in terms of how employers think about the benefits to them of the investment in their workforce, how workers will have accessibility to both the training and the funding they need to pursue it, but an understanding about what's really gonna help them achieve their goals, and that this whole process will be much more fluid as opposed to, because you're gonna have to like five years from now we're gonna be talking about what are the next five years jobs? Will it fill these clean energy roles or we'll be starting, but what's coming next? And so I think we need this much more permeability between I'm working and learning, but at the same time in a way that fits with my life as opposed to I do all of one, then I do all of the other, and I do all of one. That won't work for workers, that won't work for companies, and that won't work for the country. Great, Yigal, how about you? Yeah, real quick.  I mean, these are the people that are really solving the challenging problems. They're the ones innovating, they're the ones dedicating their lives to really creating something scalable and high-impact, and that gives me serious hope, and in five years I expect all of them to be massive companies having generated massive impact. We'll be watching them, that's for sure. Layla, bring us home. All right, happy to. So in five years, we hope there'll be a world in which people can build careers based on merit and not just money. And that means affordable pathways that merit and so many others are working on will be accessible for anyone regardless of their education background or their socioeconomic background. So we've talked a little bit about college today that will continue to be the right path for some, but for those who don't have the time or money, we do hope and I do, I am optimistic that accessible programs will continue to scale. And I'm optimistic very quickly for three reasons. One is we're seeing more and more companies remove college degree requirements, which is a critical, critical step to moving the needle on folks coming in through these alternative pathways. Second, I do see lots of continuing potential and public-private partnerships working with state and local governments to bring models like merits to scale. Governments are such great connectors and sources of knowledge on the specific needs of their constituents. And I think we're sort of in a moment right now focused on workers and workforce development and I'm optimistic we can continue to leverage the public-private partnerships for scale. And then lastly, just pointing out that we're, we're just one operator in an ecosystem. We've talked so much today about partnership and I think we are, I'm optimistic that there are so many opportunities for us to come together and share our best practices and also our mistakes. So we don't make the same mistakes. Things like open sourcing our technology, collaborating on policy, et cetera, just to make sure that those 40 to 60 million Americans who are stuck actually have a viable path forward. And most importantly, I just to close, I think I'm mostly optimistic because I get the chance to talk to learners like Janelle every day, who I mentioned at the beginning. I'll just close out with what happened to Janelle after she graduated. Now she is a technical project coordinator making $50,000 a year. So $20,000 wage increase. And she said, these are her words. I'm doing work that I love in a role with actual upward mobility. And she just bought a new home. So if you can't find optimism there, I'm not sure where to find it. What a great way to end. I wanna thank our panelists. Thank you so much. Thanks to our audience. Thanks to Socap Global. You can probably see and join all of these people at the Socap Conference, October 17th to the 20th in San Francisco. I know there'll be opportunities to access it online. But thanks again to everyone and have a great day.


Mae'r ardyngellryd yn ymddangos, mae'r ardyngellryd yn ymdill. Mae'r ardyngellryd yn ymdill, ac yn ymdill mae'r ymdill yn ymdill. A'r ddweud yw'r bydd yw'r ddweud, ond mae'r fwyaf yn ymdill. Mae'r ymdill mae'r ymdill yn ymdill. ac mae'r bwysig yw bod yn cyffredig. Mae'n bwysig yw'r hwnnw. Dwi'n fyddi'r ffordd y galler y ffordd. Mae'r bwysig yw unedlau'r cyffredig. Mae'r ffordd yn cyffredig. Mae'r bwysig yn fuddi'r hyn. Mae'r barsbyg. Mae'r bwysig yn cael ei ddweud. This is how narcissistic parents speak to their children, but after all of these things have been said and done to the narcissist, you later try to be involved with them. You try to have a relationship with someone who has never seen what real love is. All they've seen is manipulation. All they've seen is lying and they've learned that being caring and loving is not a good idea. They learned at a young age that you need to manipulate and lie to get what you want. You have to tell people what they want to hear. Everything you see from the narcissist is what they've learned throughout their lives from other people, especially people in their family. Love is not something that they can accept.  They were taken for a ride. They were cheated. They were tricked. Which is why no matter how much love and care you give to the narcissist, no matter how much you try to show them that you're in their corner, you're on their side, they've never seen anything like that before. They've never seen that in their lives because of their parent or because of their surrounding environment. They don't believe that they are lovable. They don't believe that they are able to be loved. They don't believe that they are good enough to keep you. They believe that at some point they're going to mess it up and the more you try to love them, the more you're just going to realise how messed up they are. That's how they're thinking, which is why they begin to hate love. If you try to love them, they see it as an insult. It's something offensive to them, which is why they end up becoming so bitter and resentful towards you.  We care for people who don't even care for us. We don't realise that we're not getting anything back in return. There's no reciprocation, but this is how the dynamic is able to play out between someone who is kind and caring and someone who is broken. Because you are drawn to it, when you see someone in need, you can't help yourself, but you're doing it for the wrong people because you don't realise that not everyone should be loved equally. Empathic people want to help, they want to give their assistance and then they want to come back to see how things are going. They want to stay in contact because they have to continue until something is finished or else they won't feel right about it, which is why empaths are perfect for narcissists because they can trick you, they can fool you, they can make you help them, they can make you try to fix things and you may want them to see that their actions or beliefs are wrong, you may want them to realise and admit that they made a mistake or behave badly, but when you do that, they turn against you, they become very oppositional to you, they start to become a duty or responsibility that is hard to bear because they start doing things that you have to fix or repair, they deliberately mess things up, they cause worry and difficulty, they become very annoying and tedious, they're always causing trouble, they're always up to something, while you're helping them with all of these things, it just makes you wonder why they can't just begin to live in a good and sensible way, but they are doing this deliberately and intentionally because they know that empaths will overlook the abuse, they will overlook unfairness and dental treatment, things that other people would not tolerate, which is why they love empaths, but then they also begin to hate them because it reminds them if someone is loving and caring for them, they should be getting better, they should be correcting the errors of their ways, they should be becoming a better person, but they're not because they can't receive love, they don't understand love, it doesn't make any sense to them, they think you're just trying to use them, they think you're trying to manipulate them, that's what they were taught by their parents, people are not real or genuine, they're all fake, they're all trying to get something from you, so the narcissist is not going to let that happen to them, they're going to cause disruption, they're going to act out and because you love them, you may put in a lot of effort, you may try to help them, you may try to fix them, but it just makes them worse and worse, once they can see that you're still going to put in the effort, it just makes them test the waters, it makes them up their game, it makes them ramp up the abuse so they can see how much you really love them, they just see it as a game, they will do all of these second twists of things to you to see if you will put up with it a to make you show more concern, to make you more involved, when really you should be running away, you should be getting rid of them, because if you continue to be involved, despite how they have treated you, you will become their grade A supply, because they're deliberately doing all of these things just to see how far they can take it, to see what you're willing to tolerate, to see how much you can take before you finally cut them off, they don't even care about the relationship, they just want to see what they can get away with, there's no such thing as a relationship with a narcissist, it's always a game, they make fun of you, they make a fool out of you, because they don't believe that they can be loved, and many of them don't want to be loved, the more you love them, the more they will see you as a fool, because this has happened to them before, but you need to recognise that a normal person would not sabotage help, a normal person would not behave that way when someone is trying to take care of them and make sure that they are treated well, they wouldn't get worse, they would get better, when you are giving your love, care and assistance to someone, you should be receiving something in return, you should be receiving gratitude, appreciation and respect, but you never got that from the narcissist, they don't understand that these things they're doing come with consequences, they don't realise that by doing all of these things there's going to be a negative or unfavourable response, something that will later affect them, they don't want to deal with that, which is why many of them later disappear, or they will want to pick up from when things were good, when you choose to invest your feelings and emotions into someone, you need to ensure that this person is reasonable and sensible, you need to ensure that they are in their right mind, so that they can understand love and receive it, without trying to destroy it. Thank you for watching, I hope this video resonated with you, please like, comment, share and subscribe. If you would like to donate, my PayPal link is in the video description, coaching queries, you can email me at coaching.nartivivert.uk. Thank you for watching and I'll talk to you soon.


Welcome to a new project camp video. So today we are in India to visit Aravill, which might just be one of the largest communities in the world So Aravill is based in the south of India near a town called Pondicherry and this community is big like really big 1360 hectares, which is about two and a half thousand football fields Over 3,000 people live here and many nationalities from around the world Mostly Indian followed by German French Italian and a long list of others Yeah, many different nationalities because the goal is to have a place where men and women from all countries around the world Can live in peace and harmony together a place to realize human unity Which sounds impressive. We started by a French woman and Indian man in the 60s and nowadays is still running apparently They also don't use any money. I've seen and heard a lot about this place. So I'm very curious to check it out So let's have a look Alright, so we arrived on a big parking space with uber tuk-tuk and many buses This feels a bit like entering an amusement park selfies everywhere souvenirs everywhere lots of it Some are made in Aravill and some are just And if you're lucky you can get to see their golden ball or get a ball of ice cream. There are many tourists here It's it's kind of boring and even though this science house. It's not a tourist destination It definitely feels like that Honestly, this is not what I expected at all very commercial Shops everywhere selling things and even banks to get money But the impressive thing about our of us that it's big like really big let me show you on the map I mean they even have a map See within this community. There are many little sub communities So the touristic part is just one tiny element and this map might look like random chaos That's my fault because the city is actually very well-planned. See inside Aravill. There are four main areas The residential zone focused on making a nice living place This is the largest area the cultural zone here You find things like research art sports the industrial zone and this is where things are made and manufactured and the International zone and people living here are grouped by the continent where they're from sort of their small version of the planet And around these four areas is the green belt a 400 hectares area around the city for organic farms or charts forest and wildlife areas And finally in the middle. There's the peace area a point where the whole community is built around with this building as the key center point the matrimander This structure is seen as the spiritual center of the community a place for meditation It's really an impressive piece of architecture to witness and you can see it somewhere being built in the background of many old pictures Because it took 37 years to complete. So many old members have contributed in some way to build it It's very big if you compare it with the size of a human Really an impressive piece of artwork And the inside looks rather surprising. It's a lot like a 60 star trek setting in there all white But it's not allowed to take pictures in here. So here are some images from the good old tourist center Here there's even a 3d model But overall spirituality is a big central element doing inner work Now there's another big community center point here Which is food and there are many places to eat or our kitchens within our will itself But the biggest one is the solar kitchen where every day a thousand people eat So it's in this building and we're gonna have some lunch So here you can see what's from our will a D is from our will And the plan cut is made here So welcome to the solar kitchen, my name is Laura I live here I'm a newcomer. So this kitchen solar kitchen is a collective kitchen where all the inhabitants can come and eat It's a veg kitchen vegetarian kitchen where people can come and eat from Monday to Saturday And it's based on solar energy and there's also a diesel backup in case there is no sun Yeah So here we've got sesame for the protein some pickles Which is very Indian with chili and all Some jaggery there When I don't eat at solar kitchens sometimes I come here to food link. So they have fruits vegetables here Coming from the farms of our villainy and here. There's some nuts Jam pickles peanut butter From our oh from our villain. Oh, there's only products of our will here Papaya green papaya So that's my our card Okay, so time to explain this money thing. See there's still money floating around everywhere But this is mostly used by people for the outside and short-time visitors For people that will stay longer. They can use this our card You can use it to buy basic things like food soap toothpaste And you get credit on it by putting money on it because young members have to pay to be here So in a way that method is still very similar to normal money So the money part does get a bit more interesting for old members and business owners because there are many little different Businesses in our of ill from making soap to carpentry Having a spirulina farm owning a gas house and they all generate income and they have an interesting way How to structure that so we're going to visit Arayali who's making eco bricks. So let's have a look at his factory My name is Mohan. I'm an auto-villain I started this company called Arayali. I joined Arayali in 2008 And I started this unit to produce earth block This is the size the standard size of the bricks. We are regularly producing and people are very much interested In this break. It's a solid break which has been produced with 5% cement 15% sand and 20% 80% red soil This is the manual press. We have been using for more than 10 years People are very much interested to do use this brick now So we are not able to supply bricks to them so then we bought this machine and it helps us to produce More quantity of blocks in a day and then we are trying to meet the demand and by that way we are helping people to Construct houses with these bricks How many bricks do you make a day in this machine? We can even produce 2,000 bricks in a day So and how does it work now because you run a business, but your profit is it for you? Is it for Arayali? Where does it go? It's an Arayali unit and one-third of the profit should go to Arayali Arayali developments Two-third stays again for Arayali, for units development And all the Arayali's are paid maintenance So is it also that you would get the same as the people working here or no? Is it different because some of the people are getting more than me because Because they are physically working there for example, mesons are getting about 800 rupees per day So an Arayali student get more than 20,000 rupees per month So if you're comparing with the salary with me It's 15 to 20,000 rupees. Thank you very much. Thank you. We'll get out of the sun now because it's getting warm for you Thank you So basically all the money earned with these little businesses like a restaurant goes to development of Aravill So it doesn't go to the individual Aravillian But it's spread out between the community and everyone gets paid they say in maintenance So you get food, housing and some credit on your Arakart to buy your own things It's kind of a big difference compared to how the rest of the world works And one of the things I just cannot not see when walking around here is all this waste on the streets So they dump it like next to the road and this is quite a problem in India in general But also in Aravill so all the trash is being dumped burned and it just creates a mess And but luckily there are also some people in Aravill that really tried to do something with all of this waste So let's have a visit to the Eco Center. Hi, I am Parani. I will take you round for the eco-scivist to show what we are doing in the eco service So here all the waste from Aravill is coming in. Yeah, this is a waste coming from Aravill So we have a 360 pickup point all Aravill This one of the truck we have a two truck this one of the truck We pick up all the waste with this the waste is coming here This is a all kind of waste like a plastic paper mixed waste all is here So one of the back from there it goes here? Yeah, yeah When when the community was segregating like a six category which come here The Amma will segregate here 83 category. So the 83 category It will split it like you know how we need it and how to send it to recycling plant So what are a few categories you have? We have here the metal aluminum Newspaper plastic waterproof that white paper and KD Different aluminum I have to say also all the 83 category but not 83 here When the Amma set out, it's all come here. You can see here the tetra pack and dog food here We have all the glass This is oil container. It's come from solar kitchen tear form Crushed tear form was over here This is a PVC plastic Which is a non-recyclable. So one of the option which we are trying with the tear form How to use it because the plastic it take like 600 years tear from its old life will be staying So we don't know what to do So we making out of that plastic and the thermocol tear form out of the bricks here And also you can see that over the roof They also we using Cooling When you go in you can see how cool inside That's that's that from here When you feel that you can feel that and this is for the community members, but this is when the children come I have to give a class How to do what to do Why we need to do to help them to sort out their waste yes like a tool for them to Yeah, at least if I show this one They will understand what what really we are doing And would you say the trash that you see around Aroville on the streets or a bit close to the road? It comes from from visitors of the villages is from that not to villagers and visitors Mostly they put visitors that so much tourists one day like you know 3,000 to 13,000 People coming per day So minimum like half season I can say like in the heart season 3,000 but now that the busy season now 13,000 The one of the most impressive things about Aroville might just be all the land that they regenerate it because when the people came here in the 60s this whole part of India basically was just dry rocky sand Like it's basically looked like a desert nothing was growing there and throughout the years They planted over a millions of trees and now it has this rich green forest which is full of insects plants and trees So a much more lively Ecosystem, so let's have a look at one of those communities that is still living in the forests and huts taking care of all these trees So I was just going to edit the video and I realized there's no audio underneath this entire interview And why are you not focused? Man, I don't know what happened. I really need better gear But sorry shake was nice, but for now, I'll just do the interview with a voiceover So this is shake a super cool guy He's originally from India done work that Instagram and Asana in San Francisco as a software developer Now here to live community life and he was showing us around explaining all the details of their work addressing the importance of forests and trees in our life and how they can transform a desert area into a rich ecosystem and This is actually a massive and super important topic for the future of mankind So we'll cover it later in the project come video in depth, but one of their main achievements here is retaining water It's like their gold. It's life for the land and so because they managed to do this They actually now have a little lake to swim Where are you from? So because this was a desert area waters are scarce So that's why they have dry compost toilets, but they also have developed funny tools to be a bit more conscious about the water use So let's say you want to wash your hands Instead of having one big cup You put it in this cup with a little hole So the water comes out in a bit slower pace, but it's still pretty good to wash your hands So it's a small clever tool to use less water And finally we're gonna meet Jürgen an old member who's been here since the early days He actually helped planting a lot of these trees, but that's not what I want to talk with him about I'm kind of curious to just hear him out. What's it like to live over 40 years in Araville here is perspective So we're gonna meet him at his house, which he actually built himself This is on rat. This is okay Yeah, my name is Jürgen. I'm originally from Germany go up in Cologne and I came to India in 1973 Together with a friend Coming to all we was that we had written to the mother of the orb in Russia 72 and ask her whether we could join the orbit experiment and then she wrote back to us that this was fine and Whenever we are ready, we should come Then we came the next year and We flew from Amsterdam to Delhi and then we were Going to take a train to Pondicherry but When we arrived at the airport in Delhi then all our money was confiscated Indian money that we had changed in Amsterdam and we had all the receipts everything and we thought it was totally legal But it was not So they took away all our money and then we went out of the airport with nothing no PISA No whooping No, you're on a thing Mostly people who come to over there come because they feel some kind of inner call Some people come here by what you call accident and some people they They are they have been here, but they really don't they haven't even understood what all is even after 10 years so Then you have some people who are very devoted Then you have some people who are more into let's say Research of what spirituality in the Indian context really means Of a tree or window and the mother are part of but not the central idea then the other people who feel that That everything around all has to center to the bin or my own window and the mother but I Don't think that even open door the mother would have envisaged this kind of attitude. I would say and all the At the beginning plans were being made Master plans and all kinds of things of how this area should be developed in order to be a model city That didn't really work out either It's when you look at the surface and when you look at the development that has taken place It really has hardly anything to do with this master plans that have been made at one time With the exception of the matrimonial which always wanted should have been the center of all which it is geographically but It's a personal it's a personal thing for some people its personal development the matrimonial is very central and for other people it doesn't really make any difference because Spirituality is something that you develop within yourself and it is something totally beyond anything material You can't build a temple or anything and believe that this is going to help your spiritual advance you You follow something completely different and you also have to be open for New and different developments in the sphere of spirituality Because it's a it's a never-ending process of of growth and Yeah, do you have anything else you want to say to YouTube world? We wish everybody the very best Yeah All right, so the conclusion so I would say the size of this project is just impressive so many people so much infrastructure School dentists hospitals. They have it all they even figuring out their own currency Which I think it's impressive to do at this large scale can learn a lot from that I'm kind of surprised about the sustainability of the project I mean you have some solar panels bio digesters as some food is being grown but not that much But I would also say it's not really their main purpose of existing because they're more focused on the inner self So I spoke into many people here about the future of Aravill and they seem pretty divided some people still stick to the old plan that was made in the 60s and some think it needs to change and That gives a lot of freedom for people to interpret it in their own way But it's also lacking a little bit of leadership like no one really knows where the project is going and on the one And it's nice, but sometimes it also seems like people are a bit lost on what to do So I don't know if it's a good or a bad thing But it's just an observation and then you have the bittersweet part of tourism on the one hand is nice because it brings a lot of new People to Aravill they get to know the culture they buy local products So it helps to support the local economy But it also adds this weird commercial layer where people come here to consume the place and you see Properties going up in price in this region because hotels are being built and set up So personally not a big fan of that commercial layer into the project Now all the people gonna be upset in YouTube You should make money, bro But I would say overall impressive that this place exists and it's already been existing for 50 years Imagine back then that people came here in the middle of India in this desert place to set up this new society So respect for everyone that actually had the courage to do that Overall, I would say a lot of things learned from it probably also a lot of mistakes being made But I got a lot of new knowledge for Project Kamp which I need to digest So thanks for watching and see you in the next Project Kamp video


knew this 13 day in a row. You know 3 city. 3 city situation was coming up with travel so you know I knew with with all of our say 5 or 6 guys that you know are going to be in there pretty much every day that it's probably going to get each of them at least a day. You know judgey included. So I guess a little bit that I know it's coming but I don't necessarily look at it weeks out ahead or anything like that you're kind of looking at it. Sometimes 2 in 3 days out you know based on you know what what's what's the opposing rotation you're facing when does it make its sense to get give this guy a day based on maybe who we have that we can put in and is a good match up so there's there's a lot of moving parts I guess that go into it. But kind of look at it and little weekly chunks I guess. And with with Gary back in the lineup what what's been his mindset the last couple of days since since you made the the change there. Good good. I mean he's been ready to go. Hooked up as a there's a good teammate as he always is. He's been working behind the scenes to prepare and looking forward to him going out there hopefully impact on us today. And with judge you know a few times you said the long game is what's important posting 140 150 times he mentioned that as well. Is that kind of unrealistic that kind of number at this point just because you know he's already missed 4 games. It seems like this is these kind of stretches are going to happen over the course of the year like that you know not just put a precise number on it. But it seems like that that number that range is not going to happen is that fair to to guess. No. I don't think I mean I think it's silly to try to guess on it now the proof will be in the pudding will look you know we get down to September where you know we'll see where we're at and and we can revisit that. I expect him to you know I expect them to be a regular force throughout the year and we'll pick our spots to where we get him off his feet to to preserve that as best we can and to be proactive as best we can but you know. I mean I guess you can go ahead and speculate on what the numbers going to be I think it's a little silly to do that at the end of the April. You know the proof will be in in and if if he's able to do it throughout the year and you know at this point I feel like he will be able to


I'm Alex and I will be talking about Component, which is our vision of the secure mobile platform. But why do we need this anyways? It's always a bit hard to keep up with all the security incidents, incidents that happen and originally I plan to use as a motivating example. Something from last year where Google keep tracking your location and sending it to its servers, even though you had location disabled. But then last week I came across this news from a German newspaper, which said that the German Federal Police is able to monitor your messaging, your WhatsApp traffic, for example, or any other messenger that matter. And how do they do that? Are they able to break the crypto? As you may or may not know, the encrypted and current messengers is pretty strong and the protocols have verified partly and so on. No, they do not have broken the crypto or anything. They get your messages before they get encrypted and after they have been decrypted for the other way. And that's a problem with your platform actually. So they install a trojan horse on your mobile phone and get the messages even though you're doing encryption. Sadly, that's a problem and we're going to talk what our ideas are, what to do about this. So first, I will tell you a bit about the challenges we have and why these smartphones are so problematic when it comes to security and strong encryption. Then we talk about our objectives in the project and I will tell you what we are using, what technologies we are using, what the architecture of a trusted system should look like. And that's another interesting question to also get that trojan horse problem under control. How can we implement a high assurance, a trust worthy platform so it really, that's what we want to do and cannot be hacked. And I will tell a bit about how our platform is looking like or what we plan for the future. And of course, what the current state is and what we do in the future. So there are actually a couple of problematic, three big issues in smartphone platforms. One thing is at the hardware level and this is really nasty as the isolation between the radio networks you're using, be that Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or even the radio network, they are not very well isolated. And so it is possible that an attacker that's on the radio network that has, for example, set up a fake base station or set up a fake hotspot, he can bring your device under control and subsequently actually do what the police and also malicious hackers are doing, get access to your data. There are a couple and all of these examples are from the last year. There are a couple of incidents that demonstrate clearly that this is an issue. For example, the Broad Pone weakness last year where someone, which allowed an attacker to get your application process under control from a Wi-Fi network. So without any interaction, no clicking some malicious link or open an email, you're not supposed to open.  Another example is the, it's a blue-born, something comparable to this, but over Bluetooth you can't even have your Bluetooth disabled and your device not in discoverable mode doesn't matter. So unless you have patches for this, someone could take control over your device without your interaction. And lastly, that's also a hardware issue. The basement processor, which is the one that's actually talking to the radio network, has had the same issues in the past. And I also was something with Huawei chipsets, I believe, in the last year, which is comparable and could be exploited from the radio network. That's obviously not good, but there's more to come. You may have heard of the stage fright vulnerability. That was something that came up in July 2015. Millions of devices were affected by that and it was as simple as sending you some media content like a video stream and then allow and exploit. It would be able to exploit the media server, which is the central thing, that does all the media decoding in Android and take control over your device because this has rather high privileges. I did some calculations, I got the figures because I was wondering, is that resolved meanwhile? That was 2015 when the stage fright was in the media and was a hot topic, but since then, as you can see in the graphics, the number of critical bugs actually has not really declined. Sometimes it's only a handful or one or two bugs, but sometimes we also have 10 or 20 bugs per month that affect this multimedia subsystem and can potentially be used to get your system under control.  There are these third class of privacy issues, privacy leaks. The Android platform is not really built for keeping your data private because private information is considered the oil of the new digital age, so people want to get your data, of course, though. Several incidents, it's all from the last year, like the one I mentioned, Google was tracking you even though you had the location service disabled. There was, for example, that thing with that keyboard that would send the suggestions you had in your address book into the cloud, and then that was a bug, but then this could end up in a different person's keyboard and you suddenly had contact information of someone else as a suggestion in your keyboard. So apparently the current platforms do not do very well when it comes to keeping your information really private. So the question is, and I have answered that for myself, would you really do your banking application with that kind of platform given that it's rather fragile and there are so big attack surfaces? So we want to do something about that with the component project. Firstly, of course, it's open source, you would have expected that, and it's going to be a platform for mobile devices. And the goal is to run unmodified Android apps on a completely new operating system, but with high trustworthiness, so eliminating all the issues or hopefully most of the issues that I've just mentioned. Firstly, we want to prevent, we want to protect applications from getting compromised, we want to confine applications, so they cannot, a bug in one application cannot influence another application or the whole system. And thirdly, the user should remain in control so that no one can decide to, for example, feed the location information into the cloud without the user really knowing that or even being able to switch that off. But why are current systems so problematic, actually? Why do we see all these issues? So what we see here is a typical overview of a monolithic system, and the problem here is that we have large monolithic personal portions like the Linux kernel, and they implement complex features. And so when one, for example, uses that media framework that we have here, or the kernel, this belongs to its trusted computing base. That means all that needs to be correct for the application to work correctly. And if there's a bug in any of these millions of lines of codes, then this can also affect other applications if they share one of these big monolithic blocks. And the consequences is that the probability that we have some bug that can be exploited and has an impact on other applications is rather high because the trusted computing base is so high and the chance for critical errors. The issue now is we cannot really avoid that complexity because media decoding is a complex process, networking is a complex process, but we can manage it cleverly. And for this we use the Genote OS framework, which is another open source project, and it has the nice property that it has a recursive system structure which facilitates a small trusted computing base. So if you see the tree here, there's a root, which is the parent of all the other processes, as you might know it, and this parent has control over all its child processes. This will typically be a microcode, which only does resource control in separation in the system and the parent needs to create everything out of its own resources and has the full control so it can also again remove the resources. And so we can start building a recursive system structure where every child also makes up such a tree and again has control about the subtrees. This allows for a small trusted computing basis. If you see that orange application here, the trusted computing base is only what's upwards in the tree and maybe services that are used. And we can even reduce further the trusted computing base so the Cray application for example could implement some very complex functionality like a whole network stack or a driver. But if we have another application that's a trusted wrapper, for example, does encryption transparently, then we do not need to trust that network stack because packets are encrypted before they are sent out. And so this is outside of our trusted computing base. Genote supports a number of interfaces for legacy apps also. For example, a virtual machine environment where it can run complete PC operating systems, it can run QT apps, POSIX apps also and there's a device driver environment for reusing existing Linux device drivers. If you want to know more about this, the micro-colonel death rooms where the creators of Genote are around. So now when we have these components that make up the trusted computing base, there's a second question. How do we make sure they do the right thing? For this, we use Spark, which is another open-source technology. This is a language that's made for building high-integrity applications. It has a strong type system which helps a lot. It's designed, the language is designed for avoiding errors. And what's in particular nice, it has formal contracts so you can define invariance and pre-imposed conditions. I have a Spark example program on the right. And as you can see, there's an analysis tool that checks these invariance. And in line 11, for example, you see that something is wrong. This function is supposed to calculate the absolute number of something that's passed in there, integer x is passed in. And what we do is if x is greater than zero, we return it. If x is below zero, then we return minus x. So that's something that probably most of you would think is a correct absolute function that calculates an absolute value. But if you run the Spark tools, they say, okay, here's something wrong, because if you put in that minus 2 billion something number, then this is an error. And the reason is that in two complements representation, we just, the range of negative numbers is higher than the range of positive numbers. So we cannot represent such a large positive number, and that the tools catch. And you can, as they're in the command, as the command suggests, if we say, okay, x must not be that small. We can add a precondition that then prevents us from putting so small values into that function. And so we can, the tools catch that issue. You're flexible in what, how deep the verification goes. You can only do data flow analysis and catch issues where uninitialized variables are used and so on. And you can go down to really prove, to really prove the absence of runtime errors. So you get no exceptions. And to do not do out of area indexes and such kind of things. If you want to learn more about Spark, there's the Adaf room where there will also be talks on Spark. Okay, let's put that together. What do we want to do with these technologies? This is an example that we have built to get rid of these hardware and network related issues. So I told you that an attacker can attack your phone via the radio network because the baseband processor may have a flaw and then the isolation between baseband and application processor is not strong, partly per shared memory. And so once in the baseband processor, also the application processor can be accessed. And what we have done is using the G-note framework. You don't see all the components here. Right now it's abstracted away. We have the G-note framework. It's running on a microchannel called NOVA. And on top of that, we built a Spark component which is denoted as firewall here. And what it does, it's connected to a virtual machine running Android, running a version of Android. And all the communication between that Android and a second device, which is also running Android, which is running a standard Android phone distribution, that does actually implement the communication with the radio. That's how it looks like. So really on the right side there's the G-note base system. You have the virtualized Android on the right side, can really interact with it, and it's connected via USB with the phone that's actually only running the baseband software. And in between, this is a lock window, what you're seeing, all the messages between baseband and application processor get filtered and validated in a Spark component so that if someone would send a message that exploits, for example, a buffer overflow, this would get mitigated, this message would just get dropped so that on the right side, the virtualized Android is protected from any attack from the left side. And of course, as they're connected by USB, there's no direct connection anyways. Okay. Another thing that I was mentioning is that you have little control over what's going on in your system. Someone can, an attacker could just take, for example, an app that's sending all your contact information to the internet. We want to do something about that too while using resource filters. That is, the app system in Android typically is very cost-grade, so it's an all-or-nothing thing. You grant an app a permission to get your contacts and it can get all the contacts. If you don't grant that permission, then it may malfunction or crash completely. And when it has the permission, it can do actually everything that's associated with that permission. And when you think back to that Spark component we built for the baseband firewall, you can think of the same concept for Android applications and the permission. So our vision is to put a filter in between the Android app and the rest of the system and so it's possible to precisely track what the applications are doing and then enforce a user policy that's far more powerful than what's possible on Android right now. Okay, so our general goal in the end and we are only on the way right now is in contrast to what you get suggested, typically you don't have to update very often because the security is enforced by trusted components where we have proven that they do the right thing. You may also in the future or the platform click on any link that you like because it cannot do harm to the overall system. And of course you should be able in our vision to install any arbitrary app from any app store without any problems. Of course using cellular Wi-Fi and Bluetooth networks should not be a security issue as it is today. And of course I don't know whether you have an antivirus but it shouldn't be necessary and it shouldn't be there because it increases your tech service anyway. And of course the vision is that you should be able to do sensitive tasks like banking or controlling the industrial system on the platform. Right now we have Android, as I said, only in a virtual environment, so a complete Android. It's also not running on a phone yet. The system is running on a PC right now but the vision is to really bring it on a phone and to port the Android runtime which we are currently working on onto the Geno platform directly so we can run unmodified Android apps without all the rest of the Android and with tight control through trusted components. In the future for this we need to create such a bridge between these two worlds, the Android world, the Android runtime and the Geno system and of course we want to build more of these protocol wrappers that we have done for the basement processors so we can also have trusted wrappers for Bluetooth Wi-Fi and so on. And of course we need to bring this on a real telephone so it's actually usable on a device. Everything we built is open source, as I mentioned, under AGPL. We develop it publicly so if you want to get in touch or try it out, you can do this on GitHub. Yeah, and if you want to get in touch with us or have questions or suggestions then send us an email. Thank you, are there any questions? Yeah. We are going to solve the problem of the policy data. Yeah, so the question, if I get this right, the question was if we can do more fine-grained policies than the Android permission system and for example deliver random data instead of real contacts, how would we solve the problem of the user making the right decisions? Was that the question? We do not have a solution there. We have other systems like the exposed framework which try to solve that, but honestly currently we are on how to really do the technical control of these things level and that would be an open question actually. One could think that an application can only read out contacts that it has written in there itself and they get tagged somehow, but we don't have a full concept of that so far.


Many of the players are guiding fans through their travels via social media and Instagram seems to be the most popular platform. Spirits were high when the journey to London began following a 9-in-1 homestand in which the Yanks took firm control of the American League East. As they made their way to the plane, players were dressed for comfort so they could settle in for a flight that's the equivalent of nearly 3,500 miles. The team landed in England early Thursday morning and since the Yanks had some time to themselves before getting down to business, they made sure to hit up some of the most popular sites London has. With so much history there, it'd be hard for anyone to fit everything in during an extended stay, so the Yankees did their best to squeeze in the tourism during their off days. And no matter what happens on the field, it's already been a trip they will remember for the rest of their lives. This is not a players-only excursion. Some of them have family members along like Cece Sabathia whose wife Amber is part of the traveling party. And there are also Yankees officials on the trip in addition to legends who are serving as ambassadors for the franchise. It has been a fun time, but now it's time for the team to get down to business at London Stadium with their matchups against Boston.


In just about any cafe in Sicily, you could find granita and brioche. Sicilian food is a major influence to their culture and strongly impacted by their past. Classes like MWR's cooking courses give the community an opportunity to learn more about the culture while enjoying tasty treats. I came to this class because my girlfriend is here visiting and we're trying to experience as much of the Sicilian culture as we can during my time here and during her visit here. So we just figured this is another great way for us to experience Sicilian culture and some of the food and learn how to make it so we can share it with other people. Learning how to cook like a Sicilian is a great way to better understand the community in which we live. I think anybody that would want to learn more about Sicilian culture and Sicilian food should definitely come to this class. I think that by immersing yourself in learning how to cook and share this with your friends and family, you're helping them learn more about the Sicilian culture. Visit sigmwr.com to find out more about these classes. Reporting from Naval Air Station, Siconella, I'm Petty Officer Sean Hillier. I don't like to imagine.