Podcasts about their english

I have noticed over the years that younger online Filipino workers are really good.They have more skills and experience than the VAs I hired ten years ago. Their English is also a lot better. Culturally, we have more in common.I'll explain why that's the case in this episode. But if you want to see these workers right now, you can find them at Onlinejobs.ph.

Many kids in the U.S. are learning English as an additional language. For some, it may be their second, third, or fourth language.  Their English skills can vary widely, too. Some kids may speak conversational English and need to learn academic words, like “add” and “subtract.” And others may be learning a lot of words in English and in their home language at the same time. So there can be a lot of different starting points for what some schools call English language learners or multilingual learners.    As a parent, it can be hard to tell if you're seeing common challenges that come with learning a new language. Or if you're seeing signs of a learning difference, like dyslexia or ADHD.  Fortunately, schools can help in both of these areas. And part of that help could include an IEP, or Individualized Education Program. On this episode of Understood Explains, host Juliana Urtubey will share how.    For more resources, including a transcript formatted for easy skimming, visit the episode page on Understood.Timestamps:(01:52) School supports for multilingual learners  (04:32) Myths and facts(07:47) Evaluations and IEPs(10:24) Your rights as a parent or guardian  (12:00) Key takeawaysRelated resourcesFor ELL families: Why and how to partner with teachersListen: Understanding common IEP challenges for families of colorHow to help if English language learners are struggling in schoolUnderstood.org is a resource dedicated to shaping the world so the millions of people with learning and thinking differences can thrive. Learn more about Understood Explains and all our podcasts at u.org/podcasts.Copyright © 2024 Understood for All, Inc. All rights reserved. 

This week on the show we make mille-feuilles - the "thousand layer pastry" to celebrate 1,000 reviews of The Earful Tower podcast. Thanks to all who've left reviews over the years. You might know a mille-feuille as a Napoleon, a custard slice, or a vanilla slice. But we all know it as delicious, especially when it's freshly baked.  For this episode, you'll join our team as we prepare this iconic dessert at Cook'n With Class, complete with some pastry and chocolate tips from the chef.  Please click here to book a class with Cook'n With Class, and write "The Earful Tower" at checkout so they know I sent you. If you book before the end of March 2024 I'll send you my PDF guide to Paris for free as a thanks! Their English-speaking cooking classes are a delightful blend of fun, education, and gastronomy. Designed for culinary enthusiasts of all levels, they offer a unique opportunity to explore French cuisine through hands-on experiences in a welcoming atmosphere.  *********** The Earful Tower exists thanks to support from its Patreon members. From $10 a month you can unlock almost endless extras including bonus podcast episodes, live video replays, special event invites, and our annually updated PDF guide to Paris.  Membership takes only a minute to set up. Thank you for keeping this channel independent.  For more from the Earful Tower, here are some handy links: Website  Weekly newsletter 

This week on the show we welcome back Diederick de Jongh, the owner of Flora Magnifica, which sells the finest faux flowers in France. He was last on the show in 2021, but since then he has changed locations of his shop to be further north in the Marais by a famous bistro. We chatted about business, Paris, and his new project supplying flowers to cultural heritage institutions around France. We also talk about what happens to a small shop in the Marais after it features on The Earful Tower podcast! How to visit Flora Magnifica Address: 58 rue des Tournelles, 75003 Paris Hours: Open Tuesday – Sundays For more information visit their website here and follow them on Instagram here This episode was brought to you by Cook'n With Class, click here to book a class with them.  Their English-speaking cooking classes are a delightful blend of fun, education, and gastronomy. Designed for culinary enthusiasts of all levels, they offer a unique opportunity to explore French cuisine through hands-on experiences in a welcoming atmosphere.  *********** The Earful Tower exists thanks to support from its Patreon members. From $10 a month you can unlock almost endless extras including bonus podcast episodes, live video replays, special event invites, and our annually updated PDF guide to Paris.  Membership takes only a minute to set up. Thank you for keeping this channel independent.  For more from the Earful Tower, here are some handy links: Website  Weekly newsletter 

Is Paris a safe city? The truth is, it's probably about as safe as any other big city.  In other words, you need to be smart when you're here. And this week on the podcast, American content creator in Paris Amanda Rollins shares her tips and tricks for being street smart in the City of Light.  Amanda has made a name for herself on her wildly popular social media accounts as American Fille, where she shares how to stay out of trouble in Paris (and many, many other things).  Find her on TikTok here (over a million followers!) and Instagram here.  The chat spans lot of other topics too! This episode was brought to you by Cook'n With Class, click here to book a class with them. I did the sauce-making class and LOVED it. Their English-speaking cooking classes are a delightful blend of fun, education, and gastronomy. Designed for culinary enthusiasts of all levels, they offer a unique opportunity to explore French cuisine through hands-on experiences in a welcoming atmosphere.  *********** The Earful Tower exists thanks to support from its Patreon members. From $10 a month you can unlock almost endless extras including bonus podcast episodes, live video replays, special event invites, and our annually updated PDF guide to Paris.  Membership takes only a minute to set up. Thank you for keeping this channel independent.  For more from the Earful Tower, here are some handy links: Website  Weekly newsletter 

If the words "French Revolution" seem daunting to you, then you're not alone. It would take a whole series of podcast episodes to truly understand it all - and luckily for us - podcaster Mike Duncan has done exactly that. His Revolutions Podcast is world renowned. In this episode of The Earful Tower, he breaks down the French Revolution to its simplest essence. You could call it "The French Revolution For Idiots", where I, your humble host, play the part of the idiot and ask all the questions you are too shy to ask.  As for Mike, a self-confessed "complete history geek", you can find more of his work via his Twitter page here.  This episode was first aired on The Earful Tower in 2019.  This episode was brought to you by Cook'n With Class, click here to book a class with them. I did the sauce-making class and LOVED it. Their English-speaking cooking classes are a delightful blend of fun, education, and gastronomy. Designed for culinary enthusiasts of all levels, they offer a unique opportunity to explore French cuisine through hands-on experiences in a welcoming atmosphere.  *********** The Earful Tower exists thanks to support from its Patreon members. From $10 a month you can unlock almost endless extras including bonus podcast episodes, live video replays, special event invites, and our annually updated PDF guide to Paris.  Membership takes only a minute to set up. Thank you for keeping this channel independent.  For more from the Earful Tower, here are some handy links: Website  Weekly newsletter 

Lina and I discuss how circumstance has led to us raising our nearly three-year-old son in French, Swedish, and English.  This episode was brought to you by Cook'n With Class, click here to book a class with them. I did the sauce-making class and LOVED it. Their English-speaking cooking classes are a delightful blend of fun, education, and gastronomy. Designed for culinary enthusiasts of all levels, they offer a unique opportunity to explore French cuisine through hands-on experiences in a welcoming atmosphere.  *********** The Earful Tower exists thanks to support from its Patreon members. From $10 a month you can unlock almost endless extras including bonus podcast episodes, live video replays, special event invites, and our annually updated PDF guide to Paris.  Membership takes only a minute to set up. Thank you for keeping this channel independent.  For more from the Earful Tower, here are some handy links: Website  Weekly newsletter 

In this informative episode, we explore what it's like to live in the Philippines as a digital nomad and entrepreneur. I will take you through the unique culture and way of life in the Philippines, sharing my personal experience of living in the country. I will also discuss business opportunities in the Philippines and ideas to set up a business. Areas to stay: - BGC - McKinley Hill Businesses to start: - Long-term rent with sublease agreement to set up Airbnbs at BGC - BPO (Business process outsourcing) - Recruitment Going out: - Forbestown Road in BGC (European-styled tables on the sidewalk - good for wine. Classy enough to meet quality people but not too classy to meet the show-offs (except for Dr Wine). The best place on that street is Bistro Madrid by Terry's. - Buccaneers Rum & Kitchen in Makati - great to meet people. You can talk to anyone and people will talk to you. - Revel at The Palace at BGC if you're into loud unrefined popular music, ordering bottles to affirm your social status, and standing around just one table. No good techno there. The best thing about the country: - People who smile, talk to you, and are hospitable. I love Philipino people. I really do. They are bubbly and fun to hang out with. Their English is the best in Asia. Most people I met speak better English than me and I even learn new words from them. Fo' real. What I don't like: - Not much access to healthy food. Not many Bali-styled smoothie bowls, healthy poke bowls, and steaks are quite pricey for the weight that you get. Too much junk food everywhere. Most that I've seen ever.

Your Crypto Is Being Tracked - Your Passwordless Future - How Safe is WhatsApp? - Business Email Compromise - Facebook Lost Your Data - Ransomware Prevention Cheaper Than Cure Cryptocurrencies were thought to be like the gold standard of being secure. Having your information stay private. Maybe if you don't want to use regular currency and transactions. But it's changed. [Following is an automated transcript] We have had such volatility over the years when it comes to what are called cryptocurrencies. [00:00:23] Now I, I get a lot of questions about cryptocurrencies. First of all, let me say, I have never owned any cryptocurrencies and I do not own any crypto, crypto, uh, assets at all. Most people look at crypto currencies and think of a couple of things. First of all, an investment. Well, an investment is something that you can use or sell, right? [00:00:46] Typically investments you don't really use. It's like a house. Is it an investment? Uh, not so much. Uh, it's more of a liability, but people look at it and say, well, listen, it went from, uh, you know, what was a 10,000. Bitcoins to buy a pizza to, it went up to $50,000 per Bitcoin. There's a pretty big jump there. [00:01:10] And yeah, it was pretty big. And of course, it's gone way down and it's gone back up and it's gone down. It's gone back up. But the idea of any kind of currency is can you do anything with the currency? You can take a dollar bill and go and try and buy a cup of coffee. Okay. A $10 bill and buy a cup of coffee, um, in most places anyways. [00:01:33] Well, that sounds like a good idea. uh, I could probably use a cup of coffee right now and get a tickle on my throat. I hate that. But if you have something like Bitcoin, where can you spend it? You might remember Elon Musk was saying, yeah, you can use Bitcoin to buy a Tesla. Also Wikipedia would accept donations. [00:01:54] Via Bitcoin, there were a number of places online that you could use. Bitcoin. In fact, there's a country right now in south central America that has Bitcoin as its currency. That's kind of cool too. When you think about it, you know, what is, so what are you gonna do? Latin American country? Uh, I'm trying to remember what it is. [00:02:16] Oh yeah. It's all Salvador. The first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin is an official legal. Now there's a number of reasons they're doing that and he can do it basically. You know, if you got a dictator, you can do almost anything you want to. So in El Salvador, they've got apps that you can use and you can go and buy a tree taco using Bitcoin using their app. [00:02:42] So there you go. If you have Bitcoin, you can go to El Salvador and you can buy all of the tacos and other basic stuff you might wanna buy. But in general, No, you, you can't just go and take any of these cryptocurrencies and use them anywhere. So what good are they as a currency? we already established that they haven't been good as an investment unless you're paying a lot of attention and you're kind of every day buying and selling based on what the movement is. [00:03:11] I know a guy that does exactly that it's, he's a day trader basically in some of these cryptocurrencies, you know, good for. But in reality, is that something that makes sense in a long term? Is that going to help him long term? I, I don't know. I, I really don't because again, there's no intrinsic value value. [00:03:33] So some of the cryptocurrencies have decided, well, let's have some sort of intrinsic value. And what they've done is they've created what are generally known as stable coins. And a stable coin is a type of cryptocurrency that behind it has the ability to be tied to something that's kind of stable. So for instance, one that really hit the news recently is a stable coin that is tied to the us dollar. [00:04:01] And yet, even though it is tied to the us dollar and the coin is a dollar and the dollar is a coin. They managed to get down into the few pennies worth of value, kinda like penny. so what good was that, you know, it has since come back up, some are tied to other types of assets. Some of them say, well, we have gold behind us. [00:04:24] Kinda like what the United States used to do back when we were on the gold standard. And we became the petrol dollar where countries were using our currency, our us dollars, no matter which country it was to buy and sell oil. Well, things have changed obviously. And, uh, we're not gonna talk about. The whole Petro dollar thing right now. [00:04:46] So forget about that. Second benefit. Third benefit is while it's crypto, which means it's encrypted, which means we're safe from anybody's spine on us, anybody stealing it. And of course that's been proven to be false too. We've seen the cryptocurrencies stolen by the billions of dollars. We've seen these cryptocurrencies lost by the billions of dollars as well. [00:05:14] That's pretty substantial. We get right down to it, lost by the billions because people had them in their crypto wallets, lost the password for the crypto wallet. And all of a sudden, now they are completely out of luck. Right. Does that make sense to you? So the basic. Idea behind currency is to make it easier to use the currency than to say, I'll trade you a chicken for five pounds of nail. [00:05:41] Does that make sense to you? So you use a currency. So you say the chicken is worth five bucks. Well, actually chicken is nowadays is about $30. If it's a LA hen and those five pounds of nails are probably worth about $30. So we just exchanged dollars back and forth. I think that makes a lot of sense. One of the things that has driven up the value of cryptocurrencies, particularly Bitcoin has been criminal marketplaces. [00:06:10] As you look at some of the stats of ransoms that are occurring, where people's computers are taken over via ransomware, and then that, uh, person then pays a ransom. And what happens when they pay that ransom while they have to go find an exchange. Pay us dollars to buy cryptocurrency Bitcoin usually. And then they have the Bitcoin and they have to transfer to another wallet, whether or not the bad guys can use the money. [00:06:42] Is a, again, a separate discussion. They, they certainly can than they do because some of these countries like Russia are going ahead and just exchanging the critical currencies for rubs, which again, kind of makes sense if you're Russia. Now we have a lot of criminals that have been using the Bitcoin for ransoms businesses. [00:07:07] Publicly traded businesses have been buying Bitcoin by the tens of millions of dollars so that they have it as an asset. In case they get ransom. Well, things have changed. There's a great article in NBC news, by Kevin Collier. And Kevin's talking about this California man who was scammed out of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cryptocurrency. [00:07:33] Now this was a fake scam, which is a fairly common one. It. It tends to target older people who are lonely and a romance starts online and they go ahead and, uh, talk and kind of fall in love. Right. And it turns out she or he has this really almost terminal disease. If only they had an extra, a hundred thousand dollars to pay for the surgery. [00:08:05] You, you know the story, right. So he was conned out of the. What's interesting to me is how the investigation and investigative ability has changed over the years. Uh, probably about five years ago, I sat through a briefing by the secret service and. In that briefing, they explained how they had gone and very, quite cleverly tracked the money that was being sent to and used by this dark web operator who ran a site known as a silk road. [00:08:42] And that site was selling illegal things online. Oh, and the currency that they were tracking was Bitcoin. Yes, indeed. So much for cryptocurrency being secure it, five years ago, the secret service was able to do it. The FBI was able to do it and you know, they couldn't do a whole lot about it. But part of the problem is all of your transactions are a matter of public record. [00:09:13] So if someone sends you a fraction of a Bitcoin. That is now in a ledger and that ledger now can be used because when you then spend. Fraction of a Bitcoin somewhere else, it can be tracked. Well, it is tracked is a hundred percent guaranteed to be tracked. And once it's tracked, well, government can get in. [00:09:37] Now, in this case, a deputy district attorney in Santa Clara county, California, was able to track the movement of the cryptocurrency. Yeah. So this district attorney, okay. Deputy district attorney, not the FBI, not the secret service, not the, the, uh, national security agency, a local district attorney in Santa Clara county, California, not a particularly huge county, but. [00:10:07] Uh, she was able to track it. And she said that she thinks that the scammer lives in a country where they can't easily extradite them. And so they're unlikely to be arrested at any time soon. So that includes countries like Russia that do not extradite criminals to the United States. Now getting into the details. [00:10:26] There's a great quote from her in this NBC news article, our bread and butter these days really is tracing cryptocurrency and trying to seize it and trying to get there faster than the bad guys are moving it elsewhere, where we can't. Grab it. So she said the team tracked the victim's money as it bounced from one digital wallet to another, till it ended up at a major cryptocurrency exchange where it appeared the scammer was planning to launder the money or cash out, they sent a warrant to the exchange. [00:10:58] Froze the money and she plans to return it to the victim. That is a dramatic reversal from just a few years back when cryptocurrencies were seen as a boon for criminals. Amazing. Isn't it? Well, stick around. We get a lot more to talk about here and of course, sign up online Craig peterson.com and get my free newsletter. [00:11:24] There have been a lot of efforts by many companies, Microsoft, apple, Google, to try and get rid of passwords. Well, how can you do that? What, what is a password and what are these new technologies? Apple thinks they have the answer. [00:11:41] Passwords have been kind of the bane of existence for a long while. And, and if you'd like, I have a special report on passwords, or I talk about password managers, things you can do, things you should do in order to help keep your information safe, online things like. [00:11:59] Bank accounts, et cetera. Just email me, me, Craig peterson.com and ask for the password special report and I'll get it to you. Believe me it it's self-contained it's not trying to get you to buy something. Nothing. It is entirely about passwords and what you can do again, just email me, me@craigpeterson.com and we'll get right back with you. [00:12:22] Well, you know, give us a couple of days. Passwords are a problem. And over the years, the standards for passwords have changed. I remember way back when some of the passwords might be 2, 3, 4 characters long. and back then, those were kind of hard to crack. Then Unix came along. I started using Unix and, uh, when was that? [00:12:47] Probably about 81. And as I was messing around with Unix, I. They used to had a couple of changes in how they did passwords. They added assault to it. They used basically the same cipher that the Germans used in world war II, that enigma cipher, which again was okay for the times today, we have much more powerful ciphers and the biggest concern right now, amongst real cybersecurity people. [00:13:14] Government agencies is okay. So what are we going to do when these new quantum computers come along with their artificial intelligence and other things, that's going to be a bit of a problem because quantum computers are able to problems in fractions of a second. Even that traditional computers cannot solve it. [00:13:40] It's a whole different thing. I want you to think. Something here. I, if you have a handful of spaghetti, uh, now we're talking about hard spaghetti, not cooked spaghetti and they all dried out and they are a varying links. How could you sort those into the smallest to largest, if you will, how could you find which ones were the longest, perhaps? [00:14:08] Which ones were the shortest? Well, there's kind of an analog way of doing that and there's a digital way of doing that. So the digital way for the computer would be. To measure them all and compare the measurements and then identify how long the longest one was. And then maybe you'd have to go back and try and find that. [00:14:27] So you can imagine that would take some time, the analog way of doing that. Cuz there still are analog computers out there and they do an amazing job in certain tasks, but the analog way of doing that is okay. So you take that bundle of various length spaghetti and you slam it on the table. What's gonna happen while those pieces of dried spaghetti are going to self align, right? [00:14:54] Uh, the shortest ones are going to be down at the bottom and the tallest one's gonna be sticking out from the top. So there you go. There's your tallest, your longest pieces of spaghetti, and it's done. Instantly. So that's just kind of an idea here, quantum, computing's not the same thing, but that's a comparison really of digital and analog computers, but it's the same type of thing. [00:15:17] Some of these problems that would take thousands of years for digital computer. To work out, can just take a fraction of a second. It's absolutely amazing. So when we're looking at today's algorithms, today's programs for encrypting things like military information, secret telegrams, if you will going back and forth in inside the secretary of state embassies worldwide. [00:15:43] Today they're considered to be quite secure, but with quantum computing what's gonna happen. So there are a lot of people out there right now who are working on trying to figure out how can we come up with an algorithm that works today with our digital computers and can be easily solved by quantum computer. [00:16:06] We have a pretty good idea of how quantum computers are going to work in the future, how they kind of work right now, but this really gets us to the next level, which is kind of cool. Franklin. That's a, a little bit here about cybersecurity. Well, how about you and your password? How does this all tie in? [00:16:26] Well, there are a few standards out there that people have been trying to pass is it's no longer the four character password you might remember. Oh, it needs to be eight to 10 characters, random mix of upper lowercase, special digits, character numbers. Right? You remember those? And you should change it every 30 days. [00:16:45] And those recommendations changed about three or four years ago when the national Institute of standards and technology said, Hey guys, uh, pass phrase is much better than the, what we've been doing because people are gonna remember it and it can be longer. So if you are using like, I have some pass phrases I use that are 30 characters or more. [00:17:09] And I mix up the case and I mix up mix ins on special characters and some numbers, but it's a phrase that I can remember and I have different phrases for different websites. Cause I use a password manager right now. I have about 3,100 entries in my password manager. That's a lot. And I bet you have a lot more passwords or at least a lot more websites and accounts than you realize. [00:17:40] And so that gets to be a real problem. Well, how do you make all of this work and make it easy for people? One of the ways that, uh, that. They're looking at using is something called the Fido alliances, um, technique. And the idea behind Fido is actually similar to what I do right now. Cause I use one password.com. [00:18:03] I have an app on my phone and the phone goes ahead and gives me the password. In fact, it'll. Put it in. I have plugins in my browsers. It'll put it right into the password form on the website. And then it'll ask me on my phone. Hey, is that really you? And I'll say yes, using duo and TA I'm logged in it's it's really quite cool. [00:18:28] Well, Fido is a little different than that, but kind of the same, the whole idea behind Fido is you registered a website and the website will send a request to the Fido app. That's on your phone. So now on your phone, you'll use biometrics or maybe, uh, one time pass key, you know, those six digit keys that change every 30 seconds. [00:18:54] And so now you, you, uh, on your phone, you say, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's me. That's good. That's me. Yeah. Okay. And then the app will exchange with the website using public key cryptography. A public key and it's gonna be unique public key for that website. So it'll generate a private key and a public key for that website. [00:19:17] And now TA a, the website does not have your password and cannot get your password. And anytime you log in, it's going to ask you on your smartphone. Is this. And there there's ways beyond smartphones. And if you wanna find out more about passwords, I've got, again, that free, special report, just Craig peterson.com. [00:19:42] Email me, just email me@craigpeterson.com and I'll make sure we send that off to you and explains a lot about passwords and current technology. So Fido is one way of doing this and a few different companies have gone ahead and have invested some. Into final registration, because it requires changes on the websites as well in order to. [00:20:08] With Fido. Now you might use a pin, you might use the biometrics, et cetera, but apple has decided they've come up with something even better. Now there's still a lot of questions about what apple is doing, but they are rolling it into the next release of iOS and also of Mac operating system. And you'll be able to use that to secure. [00:20:31] Log into websites. I think Apple's gonna get a lot of traction on this and I think it's gonna be better for all of us involved here. We'll see. There's still a lot of UN unanswered questions, but I'll, I'll keep you up to date on this whole password technology stick around. [00:20:51] There are ways for us to communicate nowadays easy ways, but are, are the easy ways, the best ways, kind of the question here, frankly. And part of this answer has to do with WhatsApp and we'll talk right now. [00:21:07] Many people have asked me about secure messaging. You probably know by now that sending text messages is not secure. [00:21:18] In fact, it could be illegal if you have any personal information about. Patients or maybe employees, you just can't send those over open channels. So what apple has done for instance is they've got their messaging app and if the message is green, it's just reminding you that this is a text message. Now they stuck with green because that was kind of the industry's standard. [00:21:45] Green does not mean safe in the apple world when it comes to iMessage. Blue does. So they've got end to end encryption. So if the message is blue, that means the encryptions in place from side to side, there are on the other end of the spectrum. There are apps like telegram, which are not. Particularly safe. [00:22:06] Now, telegram has pulled up it socks a little bit here, but in order to have end to end encryption and telegram, you have to manually turn it on. It is not on by default. I also personally don't trust telegram because of their background, things that they've done in the past. So, you know, avoid that. [00:22:28] WhatsApp is something I've been asked about. I had a family member of a service member who was overseas, ask if WhatsApp was safe for them to communicate on cuz they didn't want third parties picking. You know, private messages, things you say and do online with friends and family are not necessarily things there are for public consumption. [00:22:51] So the answer that I gave was, well, yeah, kind of, you might remember Facebook getting, uh, WhatsApp. They bought it and deciding they were going to make some changes to the privacy settings in. now that was really a big mistake. They said we're gonna add advertisements. Well, how are you going to effectively advertise? [00:23:15] If you don't know what we're talking about, have you noticed advertising platforms? If you look up something or someone else in your house looks up something, if your neighbors are looking up, so. They assume that you might be interested in it as well. So what do they do? They go ahead and show you ads for that brand new pair of socks that you never really cared about, but because the algorithms in the background figured, well, yeah, that's what you've been talking about. [00:23:45] Well, let's pass out your pair of socks. So if Facebook is going to. Add into WhatsApp, what's going to happen. Are they going to be monitoring what you're saying? And then sending you some of these messages, right? These ads, because of that, a lot of people started looking for a more secure. Platform and that's frankly, where Moxi Marlin spike comes in kind of a fun name, the bloom in this case, but he started a company called signal. [00:24:21] He didn't just start it. He wrote the code for it, the server code, everything. And the whole idea behind signal was to have a guaranteed safe end to end way to communicate. A a third party with a friend, a relative, et cetera. So signal is something that I've used in the past. And I used from time to time now, as well, depending on who I'm talking to. [00:24:49] And it does allow you to send messages. It does allow you to talk. You can do all kinds of stuff with it. So now, now there's an issue with signal. It's disappointing. Moxi has stepped down from running signal. There's a company behind it in January, 2022. And he said, you know, the company's begin off. They can run themselves. [00:25:12] He's still on the board of direct. And the guy who's currently the head of signal is also a very privacy kind of focused guy, which is really good too signal by the way is free. And you can get it for pretty much any platform you would care to have it for a very, very nice piece of software. I like what they've done. [00:25:34] Now the problem is that some of those people at signal have decided that they should have a way of making payments inside signal. So a few months ago, they went ahead and added into signal, a piece of software that allows you to send. Payments online. Now this is a little concerning, uh, and the let's talk about some of the reasons for the concern. [00:26:06] Basically what we're seeing is a cryptocurrency that Moxi himself helped to put in place now, you know, I guess that's good cuz he understands it. It's supposedly a cryptocurrency that is privacy. Focused. And that's a good thing. Well, what type of crypto is it? That's privacy focused. And how good is it going to be? [00:26:33] You know, those are all good questions, but here's the biggest problem. I think that comes from this. We've got our friends at Facebook, again, trying to add crypto payments to their various messenger and, and other products. We're seeing that from a lot of these communication systems, cuz they can skim a little off the top legally, right. [00:26:55] Charge you a fee and then make their money that way. But. What happens when you put it into an encrypted messaging app? Well, bottom line, a lot of bad things can happen here because now all of a sudden you come under financial regulations, right? Because you are performing a financial. Function. So now potentially here, there could be criminal misuse of the app because you could have ransomware and they say, reach us on signal. [00:27:34] Here's our signal account. And go ahead and send us crypto. it's called mobile coin by the way, this particular cryptocurrency. Uh, so now all of a sudden you are opening up the possibility of all kinds of bad things happening and your app signal, which was originally great for messaging now being used nefariously. [00:27:59] I think that's a real problem. Now, when it comes to money transfer functions with cryptocurrencies to say that they're anonymous, I think is a hundred percent a misnomer because it it's really pseudo anonymous. It's never completely anonymous. So now you've increased the legal attack surface here. So now the various regulators and countries around the world can say, Hey. [00:28:28] This is no longer just a messaging app. You are using it to send money. We wanna track all money transactions. Right. And so what does that mean? Well, that means now we need to be able to break the encryption or need to shut down your app, or you need to stop the ability to send money. So the concern right now with signal is we really could have some legal problems with signal. [00:28:56] And we could potentially cause some real life harm. On the other side of, this is what Moi Marlin spike has been really driving with signal over the years, which is we don't want anyone to be able to break into signal. So there's a particularly one Israeli based company that sells tools that you can buy that allow you to break into smartphone. [00:29:24] And they're used by everybody from criminals. You can even buy some of these things on eBay. And they're used also by law enforcement agencies. So he found that there was a bug in one of the libraries that's used by this Israeli soft. To where that causes it to crash. And so he puts some code into signal, at least he threatened to that would cause any of the scanning software that tries to break into your smartphone to fail to crash. [00:29:56] Yeah. Yeah. Kind of cool. Greg Peterson here on online, Craig peterson.com and really you are not alone. [00:30:14] I got some good news about ransomware and some bad news about B E C business email compromise. In fact, I got a call just this, uh, just this week from someone who had in fact again, had their operating account emptied. [00:30:31] Ransomware is a real problem, but it, it's interesting to watch it as it's evolved over the years. [00:30:40] We're now seeing crackdowns driving down ransomware profits. Yes, indeed. Ransomware's ROI is dropping the return on investment. And so what we're starting to see is a drive towards more. Business email compromise attack. So we'll talk about those, what those are. And I have a couple of clients now that became clients because of the business email compromises that happened to them. [00:31:15] A great article that was in this week's newsletter. You should have received it Tuesday morning from me. If you are signed up for the free newsletter. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. You'll get these usually Tuesday morning. It's my insider show notes. So you can kind of get up to speed on some of the articles I'm talking about during the week that I talk about on the radio. [00:31:43] And of course talk about here on the radio show and podcast and everything else as well. So what we're seeing here, according to dark readings, editor, Becky Bracken is some major changes, a pivot by the bad guys, because, uh, at the RSA conference, they're saying that law enforcement crackdowns try cryptocurrency regulations. [00:32:11] We've been talking about that today and ransomware as a service operator. Downs are driving the return on investment for ransomware operations across the world all the way across the globe. So what is ransomware as a service? I think that's a good place to start because that has really been an Albert Cross Albert Cross around our next for a long time. [00:32:36] The idea with ransomware is they get you to download some software, run some software that you really should not be running. That makes sense to you. So you get this software on your computer, it exfil trades files. So in other words, it takes files that you have sends them. Off to the bad guys. And then once it's done that, so it'll send like any word files, it finds Excel, other files. [00:33:06] It might find interesting, uh, once it's done that, then it goes ahead and encrypts those files. So you no longer have access to them and it doesn't just do them on your computer. If you share a drive, let's say you've got a, uh, Gdrive or something else on your computer that is being mounted from either another computer or maybe a server. [00:33:31] It will go ahead and do the same. With those files. And remember it, isn't just encrypting because if you have a good backup and by the way, most businesses that I've come into do not have a good backup, which is a real problem because their, their backups fail. They haven't run. I, I had one case where we helped the business out and it had been a year and a half since they had a successful backup and they had no. [00:34:00] They were dutifully carrying home. Uh, these USB drives every day, plug in a new one in, and the backups were not running. Absolutely amazing. So anyhow, ransomware is a service then. Well, so they they've encrypted your files. They've exfiltrated. In other words, they've taken your files and then they demand a. [00:34:24] So usually it's like this red screen that comes up and says, Hey, uh, you know, all your files are belong to us and you need to contact us. So they have, uh, people who help you buy Bitcoin or whatever they're looking for. Usually it's Bitcoin and send the Bitcoin to them. And then they'll give you, uh, what's hopefully a decryption. [00:34:50] Now what's particularly interesting about these decryption keys is they work about half of the time. So in other words, about half of the time, you'll get all your data back about half the time. You will not, it's just not good. So if you are a small operator, if you are just a small, bad guy and it's you and maybe somebody else helping you, you got your nephew there helping you out. [00:35:14] How are you going to. Help these people that you're ransoming by the cryptocurrency. How are you going to threaten them with release of their documents online? Unless you have a staff of people to really help you out here? Well, that's where ransomware's a service comes in. The whole idea behind Raz is. [00:35:38] You can just be a one man shop. And all you have to do is get someone to open this file. So you go ahead and register with the ransomware service provider and they give you the software and you embed your little key in there, so they know it's you. And then you send it off in an email. You, you might try and mess with those people to get them to do something they shouldn't do. [00:36:03] And. That's all you have to do because once somebody opens up that file that you sent them, it's in the hand of these service guys and ransomwares the service guys. So the, these ransomwares of service people will do all of the tech support. They'll help people buy the Bitcoin. They'll help them pay the ransom. [00:36:25] They'll help them recover files, you know, to a certain extent. Right. Does this make sense to you? Yeah, it's kinda crazy. Now I wanna offer you, I I've got this document about the new rules for backup and again, it's free. You can get it. No problem. Just go ahead and email me, me@craigpeterson.com m@craigpeterson.com because the backups are so important and. [00:36:52] Just like password rules have changed. The rules have changed for backups as well. So just drop me an email me@craigpeterson.com and ask for it and we'll make sure we send it off to you and is not trying to sell you more stuff. Okay. Uh, it's really is explaining the whole thing for you. I'm not holding anything back. [00:37:11] Well, these ransoms, the service operators, then get the payment from you and then pay a percentage anywhere from 80% to 50%, sometimes even lower to the person who ransom due. Isn't that just wonderful. So our law enforcement people, as well as in other countries have been going after the ransomware as a service providers, because if they can shut down. [00:37:40] These RAs guys just shutting. One of them down can shut down thousands of small ransomware people. Isn't that cool works really, really well. So they have been shut down. Many of them there's one that just popped its head back up again. After about six months, we'll see how far they get, but it is a very big. [00:38:06] Uh, blow to the whole industry, you know, ransomware really because of these O as a service operators has become a centralized business. So there's a small number of operators responsible for the majority of these thousands of hundreds of thousands of attacks. Really. It's probably worse. So couple of dis big groups are left the KTI group and lock bit, and they've got more than 50% of the share of ransomware attacks in the first half of 2022. [00:38:40] But now they're going after them. The feds. And I think that makes a whole lot of sense, right. Because who do you go for while you go for the people who are causing the most harm and that's certainly them. So I expect they'll be shut down sometimes, sometimes soon, too. So. Ransomware had its moment over the last couple of years, still a lot of ransomware out there, still a lot of problems, but now we're seeing B C business, email compromise tactics, and I did a. [00:39:14] At television appearance, where I was working with the, um, the, the newsmaker or whatever they call them, right. Talking heads on that TV show and explaining what was happening. And the most standard tactic right now is the gift card swindle. I should put together a little video on this one, but it was all, it's all about tricking employees into buying bogus gift cards. [00:39:43] So this, this good old fashioned Grif is still working. And what happened in our case is it, it was actually one of the newscasters who got an email, supposedly from someone else saying, Hey, Uh, you know, we wanna celebrate everybody. And in order to do that, I wanna give 'em all gift cards. So can you go out and buy gift cards? [00:40:10] And so we messed around with them. It was really kind of fun and said, okay, uh, you know, what denomination, how many do you think we need? Uh, who do you think we should give them to? And of course we knew what we were doing. Their English grammar was not very good. And it was really obvious that this was not. [00:40:30] The person they were pretending to be. So that happens and it happens a lot. They got into a business email account, the email account of that newscaster. So they were able to go through their email, figure out who else was in the business, who was a trusted source inside of the business. So they could pretend that, uh, that they were that newscaster and send emails to this trusted source. [00:41:01] And today these business email compromise attacks are aimed at the financial supply chain. And once these threat actors are inside, they look for opportunities to spoof vendor emails, to send payments to controlled accounts. And the worst case I know of of this is a company that sent $45 million. To a scammer. [00:41:28] And what happened here is the, this woman pretended to be the CEO who was out of the country at the time and got the CFO to wire the money to her. Uh, an interesting story. We'll have to tell it to you sometime, but it it's a real problem. And we just had another one. We've had them in school districts, look, 'em up online, do a duck dot, go search for them and you'll find them right. [00:41:56] Left and center because social engineering works. And frankly, business email compromise is a clear threat to businesses everywhere. I, I, as I mentioned, we had one listens to the show, contact us just last week. Again, $40,000 taken out of the operating account. We had another one that had a, I think it was $120,000 taken out of the operating account. [00:42:25] And another one that had about $80,000 taken out of the operating account. Make sure you're on my newsletter. even the free one. I do weekly free trainings. Craig peterson.com. Make sure you subscribe now. [00:42:43] Facebook's about 18 years old coming on 20 Facebook has a lot of data. How much stuff have you given Facebook? You know, did you fall victim for that? Hey, upload your contacts. We'll find your friends. Well, they don't know where your data is.  [00:43:00] There is an article that had appeared on a line from our friends over at, I think it was, yeah. Let me see here. Yeah. Yeah. Motherboard. I was right. And motherboards reporting that Facebook doesn't know what it does with your data or. It goes now, you know, there's always a lot of rumors about different companies and particularly when they're big company and the, the news headlines are kind of grabbing your attention. [00:43:34] And certainly Facebook can be one of those companies. So where did motherboard get this opinion about Facebook? Just being completely clueless about your personal. well, it came from a leaked document. Yeah, exactly. So I, we find out a lot of stuff like that. Right. I used to follow a, a website about companies that were going to go under and they posted internal memos. [00:44:08] It basically got sued out of existence, but there's no way that Facebook is gonna be able to Sue this one out of existence because they are describing this as. Internally as a tsunami of privacy regulations all over the world. So of course, if you're older, we used to call those TIAL waves, but think of what the implication there is of a tsunami coming in and just overwhelming everything. [00:44:37] So Facebook, internally they're engineers are trying to figure out, okay, so how do we deal? People's personal data. It's not categorized in ways that regulators want to control it. Now there's a huge problem right there. You've got third party data. You've got first party data. You've got sensitive categories, data. [00:45:01] They might know what religion you are, what your persuasions are in various different ways. There's a lot of things they might know about you. How are they all CATA categorized? Now we've got the European union. With their gen general data protection regulation. The GDPR we talked about when it came into effect back in 2018, and I've helped a few companies to comply with that. [00:45:26] That's not my specialty. My specialty is the cybersecurity side. But in article five, this European law mandates that personal data must be collected for specified explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes. So what that means is that every piece of data, like where you are using Facebook or your religious orientation, Can only be collected and used for a specific purpose and not reused for another purpose. [00:46:04] So there's an example here that vice is giving in past Facebook, took the phone number that users provided to protect their accounts with two factor authentication and fed it to its people, you know, feature as well as. Advertisers. Yeah. Interesting. Eh, so Gizmoto with the help of academic researchers caught Facebook doing this, and eventually the company had to stop the practice. [00:46:31] Cuz this goes back to the earlier days where Facebook would say, Hey, find out if your friends are on Facebook, upload your contacts right now. And most people. Right. What did you know back then about trying to keep your data private, to try and stop the proliferation of information about you online and nothing. [00:46:53] Right? I think I probably even uploaded it back then thinking, well, that'd be nice to see if I got friends here. We can start chatting, et cetera. Well, according to legal experts that were interviewed by motherboard who wrote this article and has a copy of the internal me, uh, memo, this European regulation specifically prohibits that kind of repurposing of your phone number of trying to put together the social graph and the leak document shows that Facebook may not even have the ability to limit. [00:47:28] how it handles users data. Now I was on a number of radio stations this week, talking about this and the example I gave, I is just look at an average business from the time it start, you know, Facebook started how right. Well, you scrape in pictures of young women off of Harvard universities. Main catalog, right. [00:47:52] Contact page, and then asking people, well, what do you think of this rate? This person rate that person and off they go, right. Trying to rate them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All that matters to a woman, at least according to mark Zuckerberg or all that matters about a woman is how she looks. Right. Do I think she's pretty or not ridiculous what he was doing? [00:48:13] It just, oh, that's Zuckerberg, right? That's. Who he is not a great guy anyways. So you go from stealing pictures of young ladies asking people to rate them, putting together some class information and stuff there at Harvard, and then moving on to other universities and then opening up even wider and wider. [00:48:37] And of course, that also created demand because you can't get on. If you're not at one of the universities that we have set it up for. And then you continue to grow. You're adding these universities, certain you're starting to collect data and you're making more money than God. So what do you do? Well, you don't have to worry about inefficiencies. [00:48:58] I'll tell you that. Right. One thing you don't have to do is worry about, oh, GE we've got a lot of redundant work going on here. We've got a lot of teams working on basically the same. No, you've got more money than you can possibly shake a stick at. So now you go ahead and send that, uh, money to this group or that group. [00:49:20] And they put together all of the basic information, right. That, that they want. They are. Pulling it out of this database and that database, and they're doing some correlation writing some really cool sequel queries with some incredible joins and everything else. Right. And now that becomes part of the main code for Facebook. [00:49:43] And then Facebook goes on to the next little project and they do the same thing. Then the next project, then the next project. And then someone comes along and says, uh, Hey, we. This feature, that feature for advertisers and then in that goes, and then along comes candidate Obama. And, uh, they, one of the groups inside Facebook says, yeah, yeah, yeah, here, here we go. [00:50:07] Here's all of the information we have about everybody and it's free. Don't worry about it. Right. And then when Trump actually bought it and hired a company to try and process some of that information he got in trouble. No, no, no, but, but the Obama. The whole campaign could get access to anything they wanted to, again, because the data wasn't controlled, they had no idea who was doing what with the data. [00:50:34] And according to this internal memo, they still don't know. They don't even know if they can possibly, uh, comply with these regulations, not just in Europe, but we have regulations in pretty much all of the 50 states in the us Canada of course, has their own Australia, New Zealand think about all the places Facebook makes a lot of. [00:50:59] So here's a quote from that we build systems with open borders. The result of these open systems and open culture is well described with an analogy. Imagine you hold a bottle of ink in your hand, the bottle of ink is a mixture of all kinds of user data. You pour that ink into a lake of water. Okay. And it flows every. [00:51:22] The document red. Right. So how do you put that ink back in the bottle, in the right bottle? How do you organize it again? So that it only flows to the allowed places in the lake? They're totally right about that. Where did they collect it from it? Apparently they don't even know where they got some of this information. [00:51:43] This data from kind of reminds me of the no fly list. Right. You don't know you're on it and you can't get yourself off of it. Right. It is kind of crazy. So this document that we're talking about was written last year by. Privacy engineers on the ad and business product team, whose mission is to make meaningful connections between people and businesses and which quote sits at the center of a monetization strategy monetization strategy. [00:52:10] And is the engine that powers Facebook's growth. interesting, interesting problems. And, and I see this being a problem well into the future for more and more of these companies, look at Twitter as an example that we've all heard about a lot lately. And I've talked about as well along comes Elon Musk and he says, well, wait a minute now. [00:52:32] Now I can make Twitter way more profitable. We're gonna get rid of however many people it's well over a thousand, and then we are going to hire more people. We're gonna start charging. We're gonna be more efficient. You can bet all of these redundancies that are in Facebook are also there on. and Twitter also has to comply with all of these regulations that Facebook is kind of freaking out about. [00:53:00] Well, it, for really a very good reason. So this document is available to anybody who wants to look at it. I'm looking at it right now, talking about regulatory landscape and the fundamental problems Facebook's data lake. And this is a problem that most companies have not. As bad as Facebook does, but most companies, right. [00:53:25] You grow. I, I have yet to walk into a business that needs help with cybersecurity and find everything in place as it should be, because it grew organically. Right. You, you started out with a little consumer firewall, router and wifi, and then you added to it and you put a switch here and you added another switch behind that and move things around. [00:53:48] Apparently looting is one of the benefits of being a Russian soldier. And according to the reports coming out of Ukraine, they've been doing it a lot, but there's a tech angle on here that is really turning the tables on these Russian looters. [00:54:04] Thanks for being with me today. I really appreciate it. And I'm honored, frankly, to be in front of this micro. , this is really something, you know, we, we know in wars, there are people that loot and typically the various militaries try and make sure, at least recently that that looting is kept to an absolute minimum. [00:54:27] Certainly the Americans, the British, even the Nazis during world war II, the, the, uh, the socialists they're in. Germany, uh, they, they tried to stop some of the looting that was going on. I, I think that's probably a very good thing, right. Because what you end up with is just all of these locals that are just totally upset with you. [00:54:56] I found a great article on the guardian and there's a village. Had been occupied for about a month by Russian troops and the people came back, they are just shocked to see what happened. They're giving a few examples of different towns. They found that alcohol was stolen and they left empty bottles behind food rappers, cigarette buts, thrown all over the place in apartments and homes. [00:55:25] Piles of feces blocking the toilets, family photographs torn, thrown around the house. They took away all of the clothes. This is a code from one of the people, literally everything, male and female coats, boots, shirts, jackets, even my dresses and lingerie. This is really, really something. The SIUs didn't do this, but now Russian. [00:55:49] Military apparently does. So over the past couple of weeks, there've been reporting from numerous places where Russian troops had occupied Ukrainian territory and the guardian, which is this UK newspaper collected evidences suggests looting by Russian forces was not merely a case of a few way, word soldiers, but a systematic part of Russian military behavior across multiple towns. [00:56:16] And villages. That's absolutely amazing. Another quote here, people saw the Russian soldiers loading everything onto Euro trucks, everything they could get their hands on a dozen houses on the villages. Main street had been looted as well as the shops. Other villagers reported losing washing machines, food laptops, even as sofa, air conditioners. [00:56:41] Being shipped back, just like, you know, you might use ups here, they have their equivalent over there. A lady here who was the head teacher in the school. She came back in, of course, found her home Lood and in the head teacher's office. she found an open pair of scissors that had been jammed into a plasma screen that was left behind because if they can't steal it, they're gonna destroy it. [00:57:07] They don't only leave anything behind. They found the Russians had taken most of the computers, the projectors and other electronic equipment. It, it, it's incredible. So let's talk about the turnaround here. A little. You might have heard stories about some of these bad guys that have smashed and grabbed their way into apple stores. [00:57:27] So they get into the apple store. They grab laptops on iPads, no longer iPods, cuz they don't make those anymore. And I phones. And they take them and they run with them. Well, nowadays there's not a whole lot of use for those. Now what they have been doing, some of these bad guys is, is they take some parts and use them in stolen equipment. [00:57:53] They sell them on the used market, et cetera. But when you're talking about something specific, like an iPhone that needs specific activation. Completely different problem arises for these guys because that iPhone needs to have a SIM card in order to get onto the cell network. And it also has built in serial numbers. [00:58:16] So what happens in those cases while apple goes ahead and disables them. So as soon as they connect to the internet, let's say they put 'em on wifi. They don't get a SIM card. They don't. service from T-Mobile or Verizon or whoever it might be. So now they disconnect to the wifi and it calls home, cuz it's gonna get updates. [00:58:36] So on download stuff from the app store and they find that it's been bricked. Now you can do that with a lot of mobile device managers that are available for. All kinds of equipment nowadays, but certainly apple equipment where if a phone is lost or stolen or a laptop or other pieces of equipment, you can get on the MDM and disable it, have it remotely erased, et cetera. [00:59:02] Now, police have had some interesting problems with that. Because a bad guy might go ahead and erase a smartphone. That's in the evidence locker at the police station. So they're, they're doing things like putting them into Fairday cages or static bags or other things to try and stop that. So I think we've established here that the higher tech equipment is pretty well protected. [00:59:26] You steal it. It's not gonna do you much. Good. So one of the things the Russian stole when they were in, uh, it's called, uh, I think you pronounce it. Uh, Mela me pole, uh, which is again, a Erian city is they stole all of the equipment from a farm equipment dealership and shipped it to Chenia. Now that's according to a source in, uh, a businessman in the area that CNN is reporting on. [00:59:59] So they shipped this equipment. We're talking about combines harvesters worth 300 grand a piece. They shipped it 700 miles. and the thieves were ultimately unable to use the equipment, cuz it had been locked remotely. So think about agriculture equipment that John Deere, in this case, these pieces of equipment, they, they drive themselves. [01:00:26] It's autonomous. It goes up and down the fields. Goes any pattern that you want to it'll bring itself within a foot or an inch of your boundaries, right. Of your property being very, very efficient the whole time, whether it's planting or harvesting, et cetera. And that's just a phenomenal thing because it saves so much time for the farmer makes it easier to do the companies like John Deere. [01:00:52] Want to sell as many pieces of this equipment as they possibly can. And farming is known to be a, what not terribly profitable business. It certainly isn't like Facebook. So how can they get this expensive equipment into the hands of a lot of farmers? Well, what they do is they. So you can lease the equipment through leasing company or maybe directly from the manufacturer and now you're off and running. [01:01:20] But what happens if the lease isn't paid now? It's one thing. If you don't pay your lease on a $2,000 laptop, right? They're probably not gonna come hunting for you, but when you're talking about a $300,000 harvester, they're more interested. So the leasing company. Has titled to the equipment and the leasing company can shut it off remotely. [01:01:46] Right? You see where I'm going with this so that they can get their equipment in the hands of more farmers cuz the farmers can lease it. It costs them less. They don't have to have a big cash payment. Right? You see how this all works. So when the Russian forces stole this equipment, that's valued. Total value here is about $5 million. [01:02:07] They were able to shut it all. And obviously, if you can't start the engine, because it's all shut off and it's all run by computers nowadays, and you know, there's pros and cons to that. I think there's a lot of cons, but, uh, what are you gonna do? How's that gonna work for you? Well, it. Isn't going to work for you. [01:02:28] And they were able to track it. It had GPS trackers find out exactly where it was. That's how they know it was taken to Chenia and could be controlled remotely. And in this case, how'd they control it. Well, they completely. Shut it off. Even if they sell the harvesters for spare parts, they'll learn some money, but they sure can be able to sell 'em for the 300 grand that they were actually worth. [01:02:54] Hey, stick around. We'll be right back and visit me online@craigpeterson.com. If you sign up there, you'll be able to get my insider show note. And every week I have a quick five. Training right there in your emails, Craig Peter san.com. That's S O N in case you're wondering. [01:03:20] If you've been worried about ransomware, you are right to worry. It's up. It's costly. And we're gonna talk about that right now. What are the stats? What can you do? What happens if you do get hacked? Interesting world. [01:03:36] Ransomware has been a very long running problem. I remember a client of ours, a car dealership who we had gone in. [01:03:47] We had improved all of their systems and their security and one of their. People who was actually a senior manager, ended up downloading a piece of ransomware, one of these encrypted ones and opened it up and his machine, all of a sudden TA, guess what it had ransomware on it. One of those big reds. [01:04:09] Greens that say pay up is send us this much Bitcoin. And here's our address. Right. All of that sort of stuff. And he called us up and said, what what's going on here? What happened? Well, first of all, don't bring your own machine into the office. Secondly, don't open up particularly encrypted files using the password that they gave. [01:04:32] and thirdly, we stopped it automatically. It did not spread. We were able to completely restore his computer. Now let's consider here at the consequences of what happened. So he obviously was scared. Uh, and within a matter of a couple of hours, we actually had him back to where he was and it didn't spread. [01:05:00] So the consequences there, they, they weren't that bad. But how about if it had gotten worse? How about if they ransomware. Also before it started holding his computer ransom, went out and found all of the data about their customers. Right. Would, do you think an auto dealership would love to hear that all of their customer data was stolen and released all of the personal data of all of their customers? [01:05:27] Right? Obviously not. So there's a potential cost there. And then how long do you think it would take a normal company? That thinks they have backups to get back online. Well, I can tell you it'll take quite a while because the biggest problem is most backups don't work. We have yet to go into a business that was actually doing backups that would work to help restore them. [01:05:54] And if you're interested, I can send you, I I've got something. I wrote up. Be glad to email it back to you. Uh, obviously as usual, no charge. and you'll be able to go into that and figure out what you should do. Cause I, I break it down into the different types of backups and why you might want to use them or why you might not want to use them, but ransomware. [01:06:18] Is a kind of a pernicious nasty little thing, particularly nowadays, because it's two, two factor, right. First is they've encrypted your data. You can't get to it. And then the second side of that is okay, well, I can't get to my data and now they're threatening to hold my data ransom or they'll release. So they they'll put it out there. [01:06:42] And of course, if you're in a regulated industry, which actually car dealers are because they deal with financial transactions, leases, loans, that sort of thing, uh, you can lose your license for your business. You can U lose your ability to go ahead and frankly, uh, make loans and work with financial companies and financial instruments. [01:07:06] It could be a very, very big. so there are a lot of potential things that can happen all the way from losing your reputation as a business or an individual losing all of the money in your operating account. And we, again, we've got a client that, uh, we picked up afterwards. That, uh, yes, indeed. They lost all of the money in their operating account. [01:07:31] And, uh, then how do you make payroll? How do you do things? Well, there's a new study that came out from checkpoint. Checkpoint is one of the original firewall companies and they had a look at ransomware. What are the costs of ransomware? Now bottom line, I'm looking at some stats here on a couple of different sites. [01:07:52] Uh, one is by the way, KTI, which is a big ransomware gang that also got hacked after they said we are going to attack anyone that. Uh, that doesn't defend Vlad's invasion of Ukraine, and then they got hacked and their information was released, but here's ransomware statistics. This is from cloud words. Uh, first of all, the largest ransom demand is $50 million. [01:08:20] And that was in 2021 to Acer big computer company. Uh, 37% of businesses were hit by ransomware. In 2021. This is amazing. They're they're expecting by 2031. So in about a decade, ransomware is gonna be costing about $265 billion a year. Now on average, uh, Ransomware costs businesses. 1.8, 5 million to recover from an attack. [01:08:52] Now that's obviously not a one or two person place, but think of the car dealer again, how much money are they going to make over the year or over the life of the business? Right? If you're a car dealer, you have a license to print money, right? You you're selling car model or cars from manufacturer X. And now you have the right to do that and they can remove that. [01:09:15] Right? How many tens, hundreds of millions of dollars might that end up costing you? Yeah. Big deal. Total cost of ransomware last year, 20 billion. Now these are the interesting statistics here right now. So pay closer attention to this 32% of ransomware victims paid a ransom demand. So about her third paid ransom demand. [01:09:40] Last. it's it's actually down. Cuz my recollection is it used to be about 50% would pay a ransom. Now on average that one third of victims that paid a ransom only recovered 65% of their data. Now that differs from a number I've been using from the FBI. That's a little bit older that was saying it's it's a little, little better than 50%, but 65% of paying victims recovered their data. [01:10:11] Now isn't that absolutely amazing. Now 57% of companies are able to recover the data using a cloud backup. Now think about the different types of backup cloud backup is something that can work pretty well if you're a home user, but how long did it take for your system to get backed? Probably took weeks, right? [01:10:34] For a, a regular computer over a regular internet line. Now restoring from backup's gonna be faster because your down link is usually faster than your uplink. That's not true for businesses that have real internet service, like, uh, ours. It it's the same bandwidth up as it is down. But it can take again, days or weeks to try and recover your machine. [01:10:57] So it's very, very expensive. And I wish I had more time to go into this, but looking at the costs here and the fact that insurance companies are no longer paying out for a lot of these ransomware attacks, it could be incredibly expensive for you incredibly. So here you. The number one business types by industry for ransomware tax retail. [01:11:31] That makes sense. Doesn't it. Real estate. Electrical contractors, law firms and wholesale building materials. Isn't that interesting? And that's probably because none of these people are really aware, conscious of doing what, of keeping their data secure of having a good it team, a good it department. So there's your bottom line. [01:11:58] Uh, those are the guys that are getting hit. The most, the numbers are increasing dramatically and your costs are not just in the money. You might pay as a ransom. And so, as it turns out in pretty much every case prevention. Is less expensive and much better than the cure of trying to pay ransom or trying to restore from backups. [01:12:24] Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson. You can get my weekly show notes by just going to Craig peterson.com. And I'll also send you my special report on how to do passwords stick around will be right back. [01:12:42] You know, you and I have talked about passwords before the way to generate them and how important they are. And we we'll go over that again a little bit in just a second, but there is a new standard out there that will eliminate the need for passwords. [01:12:59] I remember, I think the only system I've ever really used that did not require passwords was the IBM 360. [01:13:09] Yeah, 360, you know, you punch up the cards, all of the JCL you feed the card deck in and off it goes. And does this little thing that was a different day, a different era. When I started in college in university, we. We had remote systems, timeshare systems that we could log into. And there weren't much in the line of password requirements in, but you had a username. [01:13:38] You had a simple password. And I remember one of our instructors, his name was Robert, Andrew Lang. And, uh, his password was always some sort of a combination of RA Lang. So it was always easy to guess what his, what his password was. Today, it has gotten a lot worse today. We have devices with us all of the time. [01:14:01] You might be wearing a smart watch. That requires a password. You of course probably have a smart phone. That's also maybe requiring a password, certainly after boots nowadays they use fingerprints or facial recognition, which is handy, but has its own drawbacks. But how about the websites? You're going to the systems you're using when you're at work and logging in, they all require passwords. [01:14:31] And usernames of some sort or another well, apple, Google, and Microsoft have all committed to expanding their support for a standard. That's actually been out there for, for a few years. It's called the Fido standard. And the idea behind this is that you don't have to have a password in order to log. Now that's really kind of an interesting thing, right? [01:14:59] Just looking at it because we're, we're so used to having this password only authentic. And of course the, the thing to do there is make sure you have for your password, multiple words in the password, it should really be a pass phrase. And between the words put in special characters or numbers, maybe mix. [01:15:21] Upper lowercase a little bit. In those words, those are the best passwords, you know, 20 characters, 30 characters long. And then if you have to have a pin, I typically use a 12 digit pin. And how do I remember all of these? Cuz I use a completely different password for every website and right now, Let me pull it up. [01:15:43] I'm using one password dot com's password manager. And my main password for that is about 25 characters long. And I have thirty one hundred and thirty five. Entries here in my password manager, 3,100. That is a whole lot of passwords, right? As well as, um, software licenses and a few other things in there. [01:16:11] That's how we remember them is using a password manager. One password.com is my favorite. Now, obviously I don't make any money by referring you there. I, I really do like that. Uh, some others that I've liked in the past include last pass, but they really messed. With some of their cybersecurity last year and I lost, lost my faith in it. [01:16:33] So now what they're trying to do is make these websites that we go to as well as some apps to have a consistent, secure, and passwordless sign in. and they're gonna make it available to consumers across all kinds of devices and platforms. That's why you've got apple, Google, and Microsoft all committing to it. [01:16:56] And you can bet everybody else is going to follow along because there's hundreds of other companies that have decided they're gonna work with the Fido Alliance and they're gonna create this passwordless future. Which I like this idea. So how does this work? Well, basically you need to have a smartphone. [01:17:16] This is, I'm just gonna go with the most standard

How Private is Crypto? What About WhatsApp and Signal? Cryptocurrencies were thought to be like the gold standard of security, of having your information stay private. Maybe you don't want to use regular currency and transactions. It's all changed. [Automated transcript follows.] [00:00:14] We have had such volatility over the years when it comes to what are called cryptocurrencies. [00:00:21] Now I get a lot of questions about cryptocurrencies. First of all, let me say, I have never owned any cryptocurrencies and I do not own any crypto assets at all. Most people look at crypto currencies and think of a couple of things. First of all, an investment. An investment is something that you can use or sell, right? [00:00:42] Typically investments you don't really use. It's like a house. Is it an investment? Not so much. It's more of a liability, but people look at it and say listen, it went from what was a 10,000. Bitcoins to buy a pizza to, it went up to $50,000 per Bitcoin. There's a pretty big jump there. [00:01:03] And yeah, it was pretty big. And of course, it's gone way down and it's gone back up and it's gone down. It's gone back up. But the idea of any kind of currency is can you do anything with the currency? You can take a dollar bill and go and try and buy a cup of coffee. Okay. A $10 bill and buy a cup of coffee in most places anyways. [00:01:26] That sounds like a good idea. I could probably use a cup of coffee right now and get a tickle on my throat. I hate that. But if you have something like Bitcoin, where can you spend it? You might remember Elon Musk was saying, yeah, you can use Bitcoin to buy a Tesla. Also Wikipedia would accept donations. [00:01:45] Via Bitcoin, there were a number of places online that you could use. Bitcoin. In fact, there's a country right now in south central America that has Bitcoin as its currency. That's cool too. When you think about it, what is, so what are you gonna do? Latin American country? I'm trying to remember what it is. [00:02:05] Oh yeah. It's all Salvador. The first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin is an official legal tender. Now there's a number of reasons they're doing that and he can do it basically. If you got a dictator, you can do almost anything you want to. So in El Salvador, they've got apps that you can use and you can go and buy a tree taco using Bitcoin using their app. [00:02:31] So there you go. If you have Bitcoin, you can go to El Salvador and you can buy all of the tacos and other basic stuff you might wanna buy. But in general, No you can't just go and take any of these cryptocurrencies and use them anywhere. So what good are they as a currency? we already established that they haven't been good as an investment unless you're paying a lot of attention and you're every day buying and selling based on what the movement is. [00:02:59] I know a guy that does exactly that it's, he's a day trader basically in some of these cryptocurrencies, good for. But in reality, is that something that makes sense in a long term? Is that going to help him long term? I don't know. I really don't because again, there's no intrinsic value. [00:03:18] So some of the cryptocurrencies have decided let's have some sort of intrinsic value. And what they've done is they've created what are generally known as stable coins. And a stable coin is a type of cryptocurrency that behind it has the ability to be tied to something that's stable. So for instance, one that really hit the news recently is a stable coin that is tied to the us dollar. [00:03:46] And yet, even though it is tied to the us dollar and the coin is a dollar and the dollar is a coin. They managed to get down into the few pennies worth of value, kinda like penny. so what good was that, it has since come back up, some are tied to other types of assets. Some of them say we have gold behind us. [00:04:09] Kinda like what the United States used to do back when we were on the gold standard. And we became the petrol dollar where countries were using our currency are us dollars, no matter which country it was to buy and sell oil. Things have changed obviously. And we're not gonna talk about. The whole Petro dollar thing right now. [00:04:30] So forget about that. Second benefit. Third benefit is while it's crypto, which means it's encrypted, which means we're safe from anybody's spine on us, anybody stealing it. And of course that's been proven to be false too. We've seen the cryptocurrencies stolen by the billions of dollars. We've seen these cryptocurrencies lost by the billions of dollars as well. [00:04:58] That's pretty substantial. We get right down to it, lost by the billions because people had them in their crypto wallets, lost the password for the crypto wallet. And all of a sudden, now they are completely out of luck. Does that make sense to you? So the basic. Idea behind currency is to make it easier to use the currency than to say, I'll trade you a chicken for five pounds of nail. [00:05:25] Does that make sense to you? So you use a currency. So you say the chicken is worth five bucks. Actually chicken is nowadays is about $30. If it's a LA hen and those five pounds of nails are probably worth about $30. So we just exchanged dollars back and forth. I think that makes a lot of sense. One of the things that has driven up the value of cryptocurrencies, particularly Bitcoin has been criminal marketplaces. [00:05:53] As you look at some of the stats of ransoms that are occurring, where people's computers are taken over via ransomware, and then that person then pays a ransom. And what happens when they pay that ransom while they have to go find an exchange. Pay us dollars to buy cryptocurrency Bitcoin usually. And then they have the Bitcoin and they have to transfer to another wallet, whether or not the bad guys can use the money. [00:06:25] Is a, again, a separate discussion. They certainly can than they do because some of these countries like Russia are going ahead and just exchanging the critical currencies for rubs, which again, makes sense if you're Russia. Now we have a lot of criminals that have been using the Bitcoin for ransoms businesses. [00:06:49] Publicly traded businesses have been buying Bitcoin by the tens of millions of dollars so that they have it as an asset. In case they get ransom. Things have changed. There's a great article in NBC news, by Kevin Collier. And Kevin's talking about this California man who was scammed out of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cryptocurrency. [00:07:15] Now this was a fake romance scam, which is a fairly common one. It. It tends to target older people who are lonely and a romance starts online and they go ahead and talk and kind of fall in love. And it turns out she or he has this really almost terminal disease. If only they had an extra, a hundred thousand dollars to pay for the surgery. [00:07:45] You, you know the story, so he was conned out of the money. What's interesting to me is how the investigation and investigative ability has changed over the years. Probably about five years ago, I sat through a briefing by the secret service and. In that briefing, they explained how they had gone and very, quite cleverly tracked the money that was being sent to and used by this dark web operator who ran a site known as a silk road. [00:08:22] And that site was selling illegal things online. Oh, and the currency that they were tracking was Bitcoin. Yes, indeed. So much for cryptocurrency being secure it, five years ago, the secret service was able to do it. The FBI was able to do it and they couldn't do a whole lot about it. But part of the problem is all of your transactions are a matter of public record. [00:08:52] So if someone sends you a fraction of a Bitcoin. That is now in a ledger and that ledger now can be used because when you then spend. Fraction of a Bitcoin somewhere else, it can be tracked. It is tracked is a hundred percent guaranteed to be tracked. And once it's tracked government can get in. [00:09:15] Now, in this case, a deputy district attorney in Santa Clara county, California, was able to track the movement of the cryptocurrency. Yeah. So this district attorney, okay. Deputy district attorney, not the FBI, not the secret service, not the national security agency, a local district attorney in Santa Clara county, California, not a particularly huge county, but. [00:09:44] She was able to track it. And she said that she thinks that the scammer lives in a country where they can't easily extradite them. And so they're unlikely to be arrested at any time soon. So that includes countries like Russia that do not extradite criminals to the United States. Now getting into the details. [00:10:03] There's a great quote from her in this NBC news article, our bread and butter these days really is tracing cryptocurrency and trying to seize it and trying to get there faster than the bad guys are moving it elsewhere, where we can't. Grab it. So she said the team tracked the victim's money as it bounced from one digital wallet to another, till it ended up at a major cryptocurrency exchange where it appeared the scammer was planning to launder the money or cash out, they sent a warrant to the exchange. [00:10:35] Froze the money and she plans to return it to the victim. That is a dramatic reversal from just a few years back when cryptocurrencies were seen as a boon for criminals. Amazing. Isn't it? Stick around. We get a lot more to talk about here and of course, sign up online Craig peterson.com and get my free newsletter. [00:11:01] There have been a lot of efforts by many companies, Microsoft, apple, Google, to try and get rid of passwords. How can you do that? What is a password and what are these new technologies? Apple thinks they have the answer. [00:11:17] Passwords have been the bane of existence for a long while. And if you'd like, I have a special report on passwords, where I talk about password managers, things you can do, things you should do in order to help keep your information safe, online things like. [00:11:34] Bank accounts, et cetera. Just email me, Craig peterson.com and ask for the password special report and I'll get it to you. Believe me it's self-contained it's not trying to get you to buy something. Nothing. It is entirely about passwords and what you can do again, just email me, me@craigpeterson.com and we'll get right back with you. [00:11:56] Give us a couple of days, passwords are a problem. And over the years, the standards for passwords have changed. I remember way back when some of the passwords might be 2, 3, 4 characters long. and back then, those were hard to crack. Then Unix came along. I started using Unix and when was that? [00:12:16] Probably about 81. And as I was messing around with Unix, I. They used to had a couple of changes in how they did passwords. They added assault to it. They used basically the same cipher that the Germans used in world war II, that enigma cipher, which again was okay for the times today, we have much more powerful ciphers and the biggest concern right now, amongst real cybersecurity people. [00:12:43] Government agencies is okay. So what are we going to do when these new quantum computers come along with their artificial intelligence and other things, that's going to be a bit of a problem because quantum computers are able to solve problems in fractions of a second. Even that traditional computers cannot solve it. [00:13:10] It's a whole different thing. I want you to think. Something here. I, if you have a handful of spaghetti now we're talking about hard spaghetti, not cooked spaghetti and they all dried out and they are a varying links. How could you sort those into the smallest to largest, if you will, how could you find which ones were the longest, perhaps? [00:13:37] Which ones were the shortest? There's an analog way of doing that and there's a digital way of doing that. So the digital way for the computer would be. To measure them all and compare the measurements and then identify how long the longest one was. And then maybe you'd have to go back and try and find that. [00:13:55] So you can imagine that would take some time, the analog way of doing that. Cuz there still are analog computers out there and they do an amazing job in certain tasks, but the analog way of doing that is okay. So you take that bundle of various length spaghetti and you slam it on the table. What's gonna happen while those pieces of dried spaghetti are going to self align, right? [00:14:22] The shortest ones are going to be down at the bottom and the tallest one's gonna be sticking out from the top. So there you go. There's your tallest, your longest pieces of spaghetti, and it's done. Instantly. So that's just an idea here, quantum, computing's not the same thing, but that's a comparison really of digital and analog computers, but it's the same type of thing. [00:14:45] Some of these problems that would take thousands of years for digital computer. To work out, can just take a fraction of a second. It's absolutely amazing. So when we're looking at today's algorithms, today's programs for encrypting things like military information, secret telegrams, if you will going back and forth in inside the secretary of state embasies worldwide. [00:15:10] Today they're considered to be quite secure, but with quantum computing what's gonna happen. So there are a lot of people out there right now who are working on trying to figure out how can we come up with an algorithm that works today with our digital computers and can be easily solved by quantum computer. [00:15:34] We have a pretty good idea of how quantum computers are going to work in the future, how they work right now, but this really gets us to the next level, which is cool. Franklin. That's a little bit here about cybersecurity. How about you and your password? How does this all tie in? [00:15:51] There are a few standards out there that people have been trying to pass is it's no longer the four character password you might remember. Oh, it needs to be eight to 10 characters, random mix of upper lowercase, special digits, character numbers. You remember those? And you should change it every 30 days. [00:16:09] And those recommendations changed about three or four years ago when the national Institute of standards and technology said, Hey guys pass phrase is much better than the, what we've been doing because people are gonna remember it and it can be longer. So if you are using I have some past phrases I use that are 30 characters or more. [00:16:33] And I mix up the case and I mix up mix ins on special characters and some numbers, but it's a phrase that I can remember and I have different phrases for different websites. Cause I use a password manager right now. I have about 3,100 entries in my password manager. That's a lot. And I bet you have a lot more passwords or at least a lot more websites and accounts than you realize. [00:17:03] And so that gets to be a real problem. How do you make all of this work and make it easy for people? One of the ways that that. They're looking at using is something called the Fido alliances technique. And the idea behind Fido is actually similar to what I do right now. Cause I use one password.com. [00:17:24] I have an app on my phone and the phone goes ahead and gives me the password. In fact, it'll. Put it in. I have plugins in my browsers. It'll put it right into the password form on the website. And then it'll ask me on my phone. Hey, is that really you? And I'll say yes, using duo and TA I'm logged in it's really quite cool. [00:17:48] Fido is a little different than that, but the same, the whole idea behind Fido is you registered a website and the website will send a request to the Fido app. That's on your phone. So now on your phone, you'll use biometrics or maybe one time pass key, those six digit keys that change every 30 seconds. [00:18:13] And so now you on your phone, you say yeah. That's me. That's good. That's me. Yeah. Okay. And then the app will exchange with the website using public key cryptography. A public key and it's gonna be unique public key for that website. So it'll generate a private key and a public key for that website. [00:18:35] And now TA a, the website does not have your password and cannot get your password. And anytime you log in, it's going to ask you on your smartphone. Is this. And there's ways beyond smartphones. And if you wanna find out more about passwords, I've got, again, that free, special report, just Craig peterson.com. [00:18:59] Email me, just email me@craigpeterson.com and I'll make sure we send that off to you and explains a lot about passwords and current technology. So Fido is one way of doing this and a few different companies have gone ahead and have invested some. Into final registration, because it requires changes on the websites as well in order to. [00:19:25] With Fido. Now you might use a pin, you might use the biometrics, et cetera, but apple has decided they've come up with something even better. Now there's still a lot of questions about what apple is doing, but they are rolling it into the next release of iOS and also of Mac operating system. And you'll be able to use that to secure. [00:19:48] Log into websites. I think Apple's gonna get a lot of traction on this and I think it's gonna be better for all of us involved here. We'll see. There's still a lot of UN unanswered questions, but I'll keep you up to date on this whole password technology stick around. [00:20:08] There are ways for us to communicate nowadays easy ways, but are the easy ways, the best ways, the question here, frankly. And part of this answer has to do with WhatsApp and we'll talk right now. [00:20:23] Many people have asked me about secure messaging. You probably know by now that sending text messages is not secure. [00:20:34] In fact, it could be illegal if you have any personal information about. Patients or maybe employees, you just can't send those over open channels. So what apple has done for instance is they've got their messaging app and if the message is green, it's just reminding you that this is a text message. Now they stuck with green because that was the industry's standard. [00:21:01] Green does not mean safe in the apple world when it comes to iMessage. Blue does. So they've got end to end encryption. So if the message is blue, that means the encryptions in place from side to side, there are on the other end of the spectrum. There are apps like telegram, which are not. Particularly safe. [00:21:22] Now, telegram has pulled up it socks a little bit here, but in order to have end to end encryption and telegram, you have to manually turn it on. It is not on by default. I also personally don't trust telegram because of their background, things that they've done in the past. Avoid that. [00:21:43] WhatsApp is something I've been asked about. I had a family member of a service member who was overseas, ask if WhatsApp was safe for them to communicate on cuz they didn't want third parties picking. Private messages, things you say and do online with friends and family are not necessarily things there are for public consumption. [00:22:06] So the answer that I gave was yeah, you might remember Facebook getting WhatsApp. They bought it and deciding they were going to make some changes to the privacy settings in. now that was really a big mistake. They said we're gonna add advertisements. How are you going to effectively advertise? [00:22:27] If you don't know what we're talking about, have you noticed advertising platforms? If you look up something or someone else in your house looks up something, if your neighbors are looking up, they assume that you might be interested in it as well. So what do they do? They go ahead and show you ads for that brand new pair of socks that you never really cared about, but because the algorithms in the background figured yeah, that's what you've been talking about. [00:22:55] Let's pass out your pair of socks. So if Facebook is going to. Add into WhatsApp, what's going to happen. Are they going to be monitoring what you're saying? And then sending you some of these messages, right? These ads, because of that, a lot of people started looking for a more secure. Platform and that's frankly, where Moxi Marlin spike comes in a fun name, the bloom in this case, but he started a company called signal. [00:23:30] He didn't just start it. He wrote the code for it, the server code, everything. And the whole idea behind signal was to have a guaranteed safe end to end way to communicate. A third party with a friend, a relative, et cetera. So signal is something that I've used in the past. And I used from time to time now, as well, depending on who I'm talking to. [00:23:56] And it does allow you to send messages. It does allow you to talk. You can do all kinds of stuff with it. So now there's an issue with signal. It's disappointing. Moxi has stepped down from running signal. There's a company behind it in January, 2022. And he said, the company's begin off. They can run themselves. [00:24:19] He's still on the board of direct. And the guy who's currently the head of signal is also a very privacy focused guy, which is really good too signal by the way is free. And you can get it for pretty much any platform you would care to have it for a very nice piece of software. I like what they've done. [00:24:38] Now the problem is that some of those people at signal have decided that they should have a way of making payments inside signal. So a few months ago, they went ahead and added into signal, a piece of software that allows you to send. Payments online. Now this is a little concerning and the let's talk about some of the reasons for the concern. [00:25:09] Basically what we're seeing is a cryptocurrency that Moxi himself helped to put in place now, I guess that's good cuz he understands it. It's supposedly a cryptocurrency that is privacy. Focused. And that's a good thing. What type of crypto is it? That's privacy focused. And how good is it going to be? [00:25:34] Those are all good questions, but here's the biggest problem. I think that comes from this. We've got our friends at Facebook, again, trying to add crypto payments to their various messenger and other products. We're seeing that from a lot of these communication systems, cuz they can skim a little off the top legally, charge you a fee and then make their money that way. But. What happens when you put it into an encrypted messaging app? Bottom line, a lot of bad things can happen here because now all of a sudden you come under financial regulations, right? Because you are performing a financial. Function. So now potentially here, there could be criminal misuse of the app because you could have ransomware and they say, reach us on signal. [00:26:33] Here's our signal account. And go ahead and send us crypto. it's called mobile coin by the way, this particular cryptocurrency. So now all of a sudden you are opening up the possibility of all kinds of bad things happening and your app signal, which was originally great for messaging now being used nefariously. [00:26:57] I think that's a real problem. Now, when it comes to money transfer functions with cryptocurrencies to say that they're anonymous, I think is a hundred percent a misnomer because it's really pseudo anonymous. It's never completely anonymous. So now you've increased the legal attack surface here. So now the various regulators and countries around the world can say, Hey. [00:27:26] This is no longer just a messaging app. You are using it to send money. We wanna track all money transactions. And so what does that mean? That means now we need to be able to break the encryption or need to shut down your app, or you need to stop the ability to send money. So the concern right now with signal is we really could have some legal problems with signal. [00:27:53] And we could potentially cause some real life harm. On the other side of, this is what Moi Marlin spike has been really driving with signal over the years, which is we don't want anyone to be able to break into signal. So there's a particularly one Israeli based company that sells tools that you can buy that allow you to break into smartphone. [00:28:20] And they're used by everybody from criminals. You can even buy some of these things on eBay. And they're used also by law enforcement agencies. So he found that there was a bug in one of the libraries that's used by this Israeli soft. To where that causes it to crash. And so he puts some code into signal, at least he threatened to that would cause any of the scanning software that tries to break into your smartphone to fail to crash. [00:28:53] Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Greg Peterson here, online Craig peterson.com and really you are not alone. [00:29:09] I got some good news about ransomware and some bad news about B E C business email compromise. In fact, I got a call just this just this week from someone who had in fact again, had their operating account emptied. [00:29:27] Ransomware is a real problem, but it's interesting to watch it as it's evolved over the years. [00:29:36] We're now seeing crackdowns driving down ransomware profits. Yes, indeed. Ransomware's ROI is dropping the return on investment. And so what we're starting to see is a drive towards more. Business email compromise attack. So we'll talk about those, what those are. And I have a couple of clients now that became clients because of the business email compromises that happened to them. [00:30:10] A great article that was in this week's newsletter. You should have received it Tuesday morning from me. If you are signed up for the free newsletter. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. You'll get these usually Tuesday morning. It's my insider show notes. So you can get up to speed on some of the articles I'm talking about during the week that I talk about on the radio. [00:30:38] And of course talk about here on the radio show and podcast and everything else as well. So what we're seeing here, according to dark readings, editor, Becky Bracken is some major changes, a pivot by the bad guys, because at the RSA conference, they're saying that law enforcement crackdowns try cryptocurrency regulations. [00:31:05] We've been talking about that today and ransomware as a service operator. Downs are driving the return on investment for ransomware operations across the world all the way across the globe. So what is ransomware as a service? I think that's a good place to start because that has really been an Albert Cross around our next for a long time. [00:31:30] The idea with ransomware is they get you to download some software, run some software that you really should not be running. That makes sense to you. So you get this software on your computer, it exfil trades files. So in other words, it takes files that you have sends them. Off to the bad guys. And then once it's done that, so it'll send like any word files, it finds Excel, other files. [00:32:00] It might find interesting once it's done that, then it goes ahead and encrypts those files. So you no longer have access to them and it doesn't just do them on your computer. If you share a drive, let's say you've got a Gdrive or something else on your computer that is being mounted from either another computer or maybe a server. [00:32:24] It will go ahead and do the same thing. With those files. And remember it, isn't just encrypting because if you have a good backup and by the way, most businesses that I've come into do not have a good backup, which is a real problem because their backups fail. They haven't run. I had one case where we helped the business out and it had been a year and a half since they had a successful backup and they had no. [00:32:52] They were dutifully carrying home. These USB drives every day, plug in a new one in, and the backups were not running. Absolutely amazing. So anyhow, ransomware is a service then. So they've encrypted your files. They've exfiltrated. In other words, they've taken your files and then they demand a ran. [00:33:14] So usually it's like this red screen that comes up and says, Hey all your files are belong to us and you need to contact us. So they have people who help you buy Bitcoin or whatever they're looking for. Usually it's Bitcoin and send the Bitcoin to them. And then they'll give you what's hopefully a decryption. [00:33:38] Now what's particularly interesting about these decryption keys is they work about half of the time. So in other words, about half of the time, you'll get all your data back about half the time. You will not, it's just not good. So if you are a small operator, if you are just a small, bad guy and it's you and maybe somebody else helping you, you got your nephew there helping you out. [00:34:03] How are you going to. Help these people that you're ransoming by the cryptocurrency. How are you going to threaten them with release of their documents online? Unless you have a staff of people to really help you out here? That's where ransomware's a service comes in. The whole idea behind RA is. [00:34:25] You can just be a one man shop. And all you have to do is get someone to open this file. So you go ahead and register with the ransomware service provider and they give you the software and you embed your little key in there, so they know it's you. And then you send it off in an email. You might try and mess with those people to get them to do something they shouldn't do. [00:34:49] And. That's all you have to do because once somebody opens up that file that you sent them, it's in the hand of these service guys and ransomwares the service guys. So the, these ransomwares of service people will do all of the tech support. They'll help people buy the Bitcoin. They'll help them pay the ransom. [00:35:11] They'll help them recover files, to a certain extent. Does this make sense to you? Yeah, it's kinda crazy. Now I wanna offer you, I've got this document about the new rules for backup and again, it's free. You can get it. No problem. Just go ahead and email me, me@craigpeterson.com m@craigpeterson.com because the backups are so important and. [00:35:38] Just like password rules have changed. The rules have changed for backups as well. So just drop me an email me@craigpeterson.com and ask for it and we'll make sure we send it off to you and is not trying to sell you more stuff. Okay. It's really is explaining the whole thing for you. I'm not holding anything back. [00:35:54] These ransoms, the service operators, then get the payment from you and then pay a percentage anywhere from 80% to 50%, sometimes even lower to the person who ransom due. Isn't that just wonderful. So our law enforcement people, as well as in other countries have been going after the ransomware as a service providers, because if they can shut down. [00:36:21] These RAs guys just shutting. One of them down can shut down thousands of small ransomware people. Isn't that cool works really well. So they have been shut down. Many of them there's one that just popped its head back up again. After about six months, we'll see how far they get, but it is a very big. [00:36:46] Blow to the whole industry, ransomware really because of these O as a service operators has become a centralized business. So there's a small number of operators responsible for the majority of these thousands of hundreds of thousands of attacks. Really. It's probably worse than. So couple of dis big groups are left the KTI group and lock bit, and they've got more than 50% of the share of ransomware attacks in the first half of 2022. [00:37:18] But now they're going after them. The feds. And I think that makes a whole lot of sense, because who do you go for while you go for the people who are causing the most harm and that's certainly them. So I expect they'll be shut down sometimes soon, too. Ransomware had its moment over the last couple of years, still a lot of ransomware out there, still a lot of problems, but now we're seeing B C business, email compromise tactics, and I did a. [00:37:50] At television appearance, where I was working with the the newsmaker or whatever they call them, talking heads on that TV show and explaining what was happening. And the most standard tactic right now is the gift card swindle. I should put together a little video on this one, but it was all, it's all about tricking employees into buying bogus gift cards. [00:38:18] So this good old fashioned Grif is still working. And what happened in our case is it was actually one of the newscasters who got an email, supposedly from someone else saying, Hey we wanna celebrate everybody. And in order to do that, I wanna give 'em all gift cards. So can you go out and buy gift cards? [00:38:42] And so we messed around with them. It was really fun and said, okay what denomination, how many do you think we need? Who do you think we should give them to? And of course we knew what we were doing. Their English grammar was not very good. And it was really obvious that this was not. [00:38:59] The person they were pretending to be. So that happens and it happens a lot. They got into a business email account, the email account of that newscaster. So they were able to go through their email, figure out who else was in the business, who was a trusted source inside of the business. So they could pretend that that they were that newscaster and send emails to this trusted source. [00:39:31] And today these business email compromise attacks are aimed at the financial supply chain. And once these threat actors are inside, they look for opportunities to spoof vendor emails, to send payments to controlled accounts. And the worst case I know of this is a company that sent $45 million. To a scammer. [00:39:57] And what happened here is the, this woman pretended to be the CEO who was out of the country at the time and got the CFO to wire the money to her. An interesting story. We'll have to tell it to you sometime, but it's a real problem. And we just had another one. We've had them in school districts, look, 'em up online, do a duck dot, go search for them and you'll find them right. [00:40:24] Left and center because social engineering works. And frankly, business email compromise is a clear threat to businesses everywhere. I, as I mentioned, we had one listens to the show, contact us just last week. Again, $40,000 taken out of the operating account. We had another one that had a, I think it was $120,000 taken out of the operating account. [00:40:53] And another one that had about $80,000 taken outta the operating account. Make sure you're on my newsletter. even the free one. I do weekly free trainings. Craig peterson.com. Make sure you subscribe now. [00:41:10] Facebook's about 18 years old coming on 20 Facebook has a lot of data. How much stuff have you given Facebook? Did you fall victim for that? Hey, upload your contacts. We'll find your friends. They don't know where your data is. [00:41:26] It's going to be a great time today because man. This whole thing with Facebook has exploded here lately. [00:41:35] There is an article that had appeared on a line from our friends over at, I think it was, yeah. Let me see here. Yeah. Yeah. Motherboard. I was right. And motherboards reporting that Facebook doesn't know what it does with your data or. It goes now, there's always a lot of rumors about different companies and particularly when they're big company and the news headlines are grabbing your attention. [00:42:08] And certainly Facebook can be one of those companies. So where did motherboard get this opinion about Facebook? Just being completely clueless about your personal data? It came from a leaked document. Yeah, exactly. So I, we find out a lot of stuff like that. I used to follow a website about companies that were going to go under and they posted internal memos. [00:42:38] It basically got sued out of existence, but there's no way that Facebook is gonna be able to Sue this one out of existence because they are describing this as. Internally as a tsunami of privacy regulations all over the world. So of course, if you're older, we used to call those TIAL waves, but think of what the implication there is of a tsunami coming in and just overwhelming everything. [00:43:08] So Facebook internally, they, their engineers are trying to figure out, okay, so how do we deal? People's personal data. It's not categorized in ways that regulators want to control it. Now there's a huge problem right there. You've got third party data. You've got first party data. You've got sensitive categories, data. [00:43:31] They might know what religion you are, what your persuasions are in various different ways. There's a lot of things they might know about you. How are they all CATA categorized? Now we've got the European union. With their gen general data protection regulation. The GDPR we talked about when it came into effect back in 2018, and I've helped a few companies to comply with that. [00:43:56] That's not my specialty. My specialty is the cybersecurity side. But in article five, this European law mandates that personal data must be collected for specified explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes. So what that means is that every piece of data, like where you are using Facebook or your religious orientation, Can only be collected and used for a specific purpose and not reused for another purpose. [00:44:34] So there's an example here that vice is giving in past Facebook, took the phone number that users provided to protect their accounts with two factor authentication and fed it to its people, feature as well as. Advertisers. Yeah. Interesting. Eh, so Gizmoto with the help of academic researchers caught Facebook doing this, and eventually the company had to stop the practice. [00:45:01] Cuz this goes back to the earlier days where Facebook would say, Hey, find out if your friends are on Facebook, upload your contacts right now. And most people. What did you know back then about trying to keep your data private, to try and stop the proliferation of information about you online and nothing. [00:45:21] I think I probably even uploaded it back then thinking that'd be nice to see if I got friends here. We can start chatting, et cetera. According to legal experts that were interviewed by motherboard who wrote this article and has a copy of the internal me memo, this European regulation specifically prohibits that kind of repurposing of your phone number of trying to put together the social graph and the leak document shows that Facebook may not even have the ability to limit. [00:45:53] how it handles users data. Now I was on a number of radio stations this week, talking about this and the example I gave, I is just look at an average business from the time it start, Facebook started how right. You scrape in pictures of young women off of Harvard universities. Main catalog, contact page, and then asking people what do you think of this rate? This person rate that person and off they go, trying to rate them. Yeah. All that matters to a woman, at least according to mark Zuckerberg or all that matters about a woman is how she looks. Do I think she's pretty or not ridiculous what he was doing? [00:46:35] I, it just, oh, that's Zuckerberg, right? That's. Who he is not a great guy anyways. So you go from stealing pictures of young ladies asking people to rate them, putting together some class information and stuff there at Harvard, and then moving on to other universities and then opening up even wider and wider. [00:47:00] And of course, that also created demand cuz you can't get on. If you're not at one of the universities that we have set it up for. And then you continue to grow. You're adding these universities, certain you're starting to collect data and you're making more money than God. So what do you do? You don't have to worry about inefficiencies. [00:47:20] I'll tell you that. One thing you don't have to do is worry about, oh, GE we've got a lot of redundant work going on here. We've got a lot of teams working on basically the same thing. No, you've got more money than you can possibly shake a stick at. So now you go ahead and send that money to this group or that group. [00:47:41] And they put together all of the basic information, that, that they want. They are. Pulling it out of this database and that database, and they're doing some correlation writing some really cool sequel queries with some incredible joins and everything else. And now that becomes part of the main code for Facebook. [00:48:02] And then Facebook goes on to the next little project and they do the same thing. Then the next project, then the next project. And then someone comes along and says Hey, we. This feature, that feature for advertisers and then in that goes, and then along comes candidate Obama. And they, one of the groups inside Facebook says yeah here we go. [00:48:25] Here's all of the information we have about everybody and it's free. Don't worry about it. And then when Trump actually bought it and hired a company to try and process some of that information he got in trouble. No but the Obama. The whole campaign could get access to anything they wanted to, again, because the data wasn't controlled, they had no idea who was doing what with the data. [00:48:50] And according to this internal memo, they still don't know. They don't even know if they can possibly comply with these regulations, not just in Europe, but we have regulations in pretty much all of the 50 states in the us Canada of course, has their own Australia, New Zealand think about all the places. [00:49:12] Facebook makes a lot of money. So here's a quote from that we build systems with open borders. The result of these open systems and open culture is well described with an analogy. Imagine you hold a bottle of ink in your hand, the bottle of ink is a mixture of all kinds of user data. You pour that ink into a lake of water. [00:49:34] Okay. And it flows every. The document red. So how do you put that ink back in the bottle, in the right bottle? How do you organize it again? So that it only flows to the allowed places in the lake? They're totally right about that. Where did they collect it from it? Apparently they don't even know where they got some of this information. [00:49:58] This data from reminds me of the no fly list. You don't know you're on it and you can't get yourself off of it. It is crazy. So this document that we're talking about was written last year by. Privacy engineers on the ad and business product team, whose mission is to make meaningful connections between people and businesses and which quote sits at the center of a monetization strategy. [00:50:22] And is the engine that powers Facebook's growth. Interesting problems. And I see this being a problem well into the future for more and more of these companies, look at Twitter as an example that we've all heard about a lot lately. And I've talked about as well along comes Elon Musk and he says wait a minute now. [00:50:41] Now I can make Twitter way more profitable. We're gonna get rid of however many people it's well over a thousand, and then we are going to hire more people. We're gonna start charging. We're gonna be more efficient. You can bet all of these redundancies that are in Facebook are also there on Twitter. and Twitter also has to comply with all of these regulations that Facebook is freaking out about. [00:51:09] It, for really a very good reason. So this document is available to anybody who wants to look at it. I'm looking at it right now, talking about regulatory landscape and the fundamental problems Facebook's data lake. And this is a problem that most companies have not. As bad as Facebook does, but most companies, you grow. I have yet to walk into a business that needs help with cybersecurity and find everything in place as it should be, because it grew organically. You started out with a little consumer firewall, router and wifi, and then you added to it and you put a switch here and you added another switch behind that and move things around. [00:51:54] This is normal. This is not total incompetence on the part of the management, but my gosh, I don't know. Maybe they need an Elon Musk. Just straighten them out as well. Hey, stick around. I'll be right back and sign up online@craigpeterson.com. [00:52:13] Apparently looting is one of the benefits of being a Russian soldier. And according to the reports coming out of Ukraine, they've been doing it a lot, but there's a tech angle on here that is really turning the tables on these Russian looters. [00:52:30] This is really something, we know in wars, there are people that loot and typically the various militaries try and make sure, at least recently that looting is kept to an absolute minimum. [00:52:45] Certainly the Americans, the British, even the Nazis during world war II the the socialists they're in. Germany they tried to stop some of the looting that was going on. I think that's probably a very good thing, because what you end up with is just all of these locals that are just totally upset with you. [00:53:10] I found a great article on the guardian and there's a village. Had been occupied for about a month by Russian troops and the people came back, they are just shocked to see what happened. They're giving a few examples of different towns. They found that alcohol was stolen and they left empty bottles behind food rappers, cigarette butts, thrown all over the place in apartments and homes. [00:53:39] Piles of feces blocking the toilets, family photographs torn, thrown around the house. They took away all of the clothes. This is a code from one of the people, literally everything, male and female coats, boots, shirts, jackets, even my dresses and lingerie. This is really something. It, the Soviets didn't do this, but now Russian. [00:54:02] Military apparently does. So over the past couple of weeks, there've been reporting from numerous places where Russian troops had occupied Ukrainian territory and the guardian, which is this UK newspaper collected evidences suggests looting by Russian forces was not merely a case of a few way, word soldiers, but a systematic part of Russian military behavior across multiple towns. [00:54:29] And villages. That's absolutely amazing. Another quote here, people saw the Russian soldiers loading everything onto Euro trucks, everything they could get their hands on a dozen houses on the villages. Main street had been looted as well as the shops. Other villagers reported losing washing machines, food laptops, even as sofa, air conditioners. [00:54:53] Being shipped back, just you might use ups here, they have their equivalent over there. A lady here who was the head teacher in the school. She came back in, of course, found her home Lood and in the head teacher's office. she found an open pair of scissors that had been jammed into a plasma screen that was left behind because if they can't steal it, they're gonna destroy it. [00:55:19] They don't only leave anything behind. They found the Russians had taken most of the computers, the projectors and other electronic equipment. It's incredible. So let's talk about the turnaround here. A little. You might have heard stories about some of these bad guys that have smashed and grabbed their way into apple stores. [00:55:38] So they get into the apple store. They grab laptops on iPads, no longer iPods, cuz they don't make those anymore. And I phones. And they take them and they run with them. Nowadays there's not a whole lot of use for those. Now what they have been doing, some of these bad guys is they take some parts and use them in stolen equipment. [00:56:03] They sell them on the used market, et cetera. But when you're talking about something specific, like an iPhone that needs specific activation. Completely different problem arises for these guys because that iPhone needs to have a SIM card in order to get onto the cell network. And it also has built in serial numbers. [00:56:26] So what happens in those cases while apple goes ahead and disables them. So as soon as they connect to the internet, let's say they put 'em on wifi. They don't get a SIM card. They don't. service from T-Mobile or Verizon or whoever it might be. So now they disconnect to the wifi and it calls home, cuz it's gonna get updates. [00:56:45] So on download stuff from the app store and they find that it's been bricked. Now you can do that with a lot of mobile device managers that are available for. All kinds of equipment nowadays, but certainly apple equipment where if a phone is lost or stolen or a laptop or other pieces of equipment, you can get on the MDM and disable it, have it remotely erased, et cetera. [00:57:11] Now, police have had some interesting problems with that. Because a bad guy might go ahead and erase a smartphone. That's in the evidence locker at the police station. So they're doing things like putting them into Fairday cages or static bags or other things to try and stop that. So I think we've established here that the higher tech equipment is pretty well protected. [00:57:36] You steal it. It's not gonna do you much. Good. So one of the things the Russian stole when they were in it's called I think you pronounce it. Mela me pole which is again, a Erian city is they stole all of the equipment from a farm equipment dealership and shipped it to Chenia. Now that's according to a source in a businessman in the area that CNN is reporting on. [00:58:06] So they shipped this equipment. We're talking about combines harvesters worth 300 grand a piece. They shipped it 700 miles. and the thieves were ultimately unable to use the equipment, cuz it had been locked remotely. So think about agriculture equipment that John Deere, in this case, these pieces of equipment, they, they drive themselves. [00:58:33] It's autonomous. It goes up and down the fields. Goes any pattern that you want to it'll bring itself within a foot or an inch of your boundaries, of your property being very efficient the whole time, whether it's planting or harvesting, et cetera. And that's just a phenomenal thing because it saves so much time for the farmer makes it easier to do the companies like John Deere. [00:58:58] Want to sell as many pieces of this equipment as they possibly can. And farming is known to be a, what not terribly profitable business. It certainly isn't like Facebook. So how can they get this expensive equipment into the hands of a lot of farmers? What they do is they lease it. So you can lease the equipment through leasing company or maybe directly from the manufacturer and now you're off and running. [00:59:26] But what happens if the lease isn't paid now? It's one thing. If you don't pay your lease on a $2,000 laptop, right? They're probably not gonna come hunting for you, but when you're talking about a $300,000 harvester, they're more interested. So the leasing company. Has titled to the equipment and the leasing company can shut it off remotely. [00:59:51] You see where I'm going with this so that they can get their equipment in the hands of more farmers cuz the farmers can lease it. It costs them less. They don't have to have a big cash payment. You see how this all works. So when the Russian forces stole this equipment, that's valued. Total value here is about $5 million. [01:00:11] They were able to shut it all. And obviously, if you can't start the engine, because it's all shut off and it's all run by computers nowadays, and there's pros and cons to that. I think there's a lot of cons, but what are you gonna do? How's that gonna work for you? It. Isn't going to work for you. [01:00:32] And they were able to track it. It had GPS trackers find out exactly where it was. That's how they know it was taken to Chenia and could be controlled remotely. And in this case, how'd they control it. They completely. Shut it off. Even if they sell the harvesters for spare parts, they'll learn some money, but they sure can be able to sell 'em for the 300 grand that they were actually worth. [01:00:57] Hey, stick around. We'll be right back and visit me online@craigpeterson.com. If you sign up there, you'll be able to get my insider show note. And every week I have a quick five. Training right there in your emails, Craig Peter san.com. That's S O N in case you're wondering. [01:01:22] If you've been worried about ransomware, you are right to worry. It's up. It's costly. And we're gonna talk about that right now. What are the stats? What can you do? What happens if you do get hacked? Interesting world. [01:01:38] Ransomware has been a very long running problem. I remember a client of ours, a car dealership who we had gone in. [01:01:49] We had improved all of their systems and their security and one of their. People who was actually a senior manager, ended up downloading a piece of ransomware, one of these encrypted ones and opened it up and his machine, all of a sudden TA, guess what it had ransomware on it. One of those big reds. [01:02:12] Greens that say pay up is send us this much Bitcoin. And here's our address. All of that sort of stuff. And he called us up and said, what's going on here? What happened? First of all, don't bring your own machine into the office. Secondly, don't open up particularly encrypted files using the password that they gave. [01:02:33] and thirdly, we stopped it automatically. It did not spread. We were able to completely restore his computer. Now let's consider here at the consequences of what happened. So he obviously was scared. And within a matter of a couple of hours, we actually had him back to where he was and it didn't spread. [01:02:59] So the consequences there they weren't that bad. But how about if it had gotten worse? How about if they ransomware. Also before it started holding his computer ransom, went out and found all of the data about their customers. Would, do you think an auto dealership would love to hear that all of their customer data was stolen and released all of the personal data of all of their customers? [01:03:25] Obviously not. So there's a potential cost there. And then how long do you think it would take a normal company? That thinks they have backups to get back online. I can tell you it'll take quite a while because the biggest problem is most backups don't work. We have yet to go into a business that was actually doing backups that would work to help restore them. [01:03:52] And if you're interested, I can send you, I've got something. I wrote up. Be glad to email it back to you. Obviously as usual, no charge. and you'll be able to go into that and figure out what you should do. Cause I, I break it down into the different types of backups and why you might want to use them or why you might not want to use them, but ransomware. [01:04:15] Is a kind of a pernicious nasty little thing, particularly nowadays, because it's two, two factor, first is they've encrypted your data. You can't get to it. And then the second side of that is okay I can't get to my data and now they're threatening to hold my data ransom or they'll release. So they'll put it out there. [01:04:38] And of course, if you're in a regulated industry, which actually car dealers are because they deal with financial transactions, leases, loans, that sort of thing you can lose your license for your business. You can U lose your ability to go ahead and frankly make loans and work with financial companies and financial instruments. [01:05:00] It could be a very big deal. so there are a lot of potential things that can happen all the way from losing your reputation as a business or an individual losing all of the money in your operating account. And we, again, we've got a client that we picked up afterwards. That yes, indeed. They lost all of the money in their operating account. [01:05:24] And then how do you make payroll? How do you do things? There's a new study that came out from checkpoint. Checkpoint is one of the original firewall companies and they had a look at ransomware. What are the costs of ransomware? Now bottom line, I'm looking at some stats here on a couple of different sites. [01:05:44] One is by the way, KTI, which is a big ransomware gang that also got hacked after they said we are going to attack anyone that. That doesn't defend Vlad's invasion of Ukraine, and then they got hacked and their information was released, but here's ransomware statistics. This is from cloud words. First of all, the largest ransom demand is $50 million. [01:06:11] And that was in 2021 to Acer big computer company. Now 37% of businesses were hit by ransomware. In 2021. This is amazing. They're expecting by 2031. So in about a decade, ransomware is gonna be costing about $265 billion a year. Now on average Ransomware costs businesses. 1.8, 5 million to recover from an attack. [01:06:41] Now that's obviously not a one or two person place, but think of the car dealer again, how much money are they going to make over the year or over the life of the business? If you're a car dealer, you have a to print money, right? You're selling car model or cars from manufacturer X. And now you have the right to do that and they can remove that. [01:07:03] How many tens, hundreds of millions of dollars might that end up costing you? Yeah. Big deal. Total cost of ransomware last year, 20 billion. Now these are the interesting statistics here right now. So pay closer attention to this 32% of ransomware victims paid a ransom demand. So about her third paid ransom demand. [01:07:27] Last. It's actually down. Cuz my recollection is it used to be about 50% would pay a ransom. Now on average that one third of victims that paid a ransom only recovered 65% of their data. Now that differs from a number I've been using from the FBI. That's a little bit older that was saying it's little better than 50%, but 65% of pain victims recovered their data. [01:07:55] Now isn't that absolutely amazing. Now 57% of companies are able to recover the data using a cloud backup. Now think about the different types of backup cloud backup is something that can work pretty well if you're a home user, but how long did it take for your system to get backed? Probably took weeks, right? [01:08:19] For a regular computer over a regular internet line. Now restoring from backup's gonna be faster because your down link is usually faster than your uplink. That's not true for businesses that have real internet service ours. It's the same bandwidth up as it is down. But it can take again, days or weeks to try and recover your machine. [01:08:39] So it's very expensive. And I wish I had more time to go into this, but looking at the costs here and the fact that insurance companies are no longer paying out for a lot of these ransomware attacks, it could be incredibly expensive for you incredibly. So here you. The number one business types by industry for ransomware tax retail. [01:09:13] That makes sense. Doesn't it. Real estate. Electrical contractors, law firms and wholesale building materials. Isn't that interesting? And that's probably because none of these people are really aware, conscious of doing what, of keeping their data secure of having a good it team, a good it department. So there's your bottom line. [01:09:40] Those are the guys that are getting hit. The most, the numbers are increasing dramatically and your costs are not just in the money. You might pay as a ransom. And as it turns out in pretty much every case prevention. Is less expensive and much better than the cure of trying to pay ransom or trying to restore from backups. [01:10:06] Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson. You can get my weekly show notes by just going to Craig peterson.com. And I'll also send you my special report on how to do passwords stick around will be right back. [01:10:24] You and I have talked about passwords before the way to generate them and how important they are. And we'll go over that again a little bit in just a second, but there is a new standard out there that will eliminate the need for passwords. [01:10:40] I remember, I think the only system I've ever really used that did not require passwords was the IBM 360. [01:10:49] Yeah, 360, you punch up the cards, all of the JCL you feed the card deck in and off it goes. And does this little thing that was a different day, a different era. When I started in college in university, we. We had remote systems, timeshare systems that we could log into. And there weren't much in the line of password requirements in, but you had a username. [01:11:18] You had a simple password. And I remember one of our instructors, his name was Robert, Andrew Lang. And his password was always some sort of a combination of RA Lang. So it was always easy to guess what his password was. Today, it has gotten a lot worse today. We have devices with us all of the time. [01:11:40] You might be wearing a smart watch. That requires a password. You of course probably have a smart phone. That's also maybe requiring a password, certainly after boots nowadays they use fingerprints or facial recognition, which is handy, but has its own drawbacks. But how about the websites? You're going to the systems you're using when you're at work and logging in, they all require passwords. [01:12:10] And usernames of some sort or another well, apple, Google, and Microsoft have all committed to expanding their support for a standard. That's actually been out there for a few years. It's called the Fido standard. And the idea behind this is that you don't have to have a password in order to log. Now that's really an interesting thing, right? [01:12:37] Just looking at it because we're so used to having this password only authentic. And of course the thing to do there is make sure you have for your password, multiple words in the password, it should really be a pass phrase. And between the words put in special characters or numbers, maybe mix. [01:12:59] Upper lowercase a little bit. In those words, those are the best passwords, 20 characters, 30 characters long. And then if you have to have a pin, I typically use a 12 digit pin. And how do I remember all of these? Cuz I use a completely different password for every website and right now, Let me pull it up. [01:13:21] I'm using one password dot com's password manager. And my main password for that is about 25 characters long. And I have thirty one hundred and thirty five. Entries here in my password manager, 3,100. That is a whole lot of passwords, right? As well as software licenses and a few other things in there. [01:13:48] That's how we remember them is using a password manager. One password.com is my favorite. Now, obviously I don't make any money by referring you there. I really do like that. Some others that I've liked in the past include last pass, but they really messed. With some of their cybersecurity last year and I lost my faith in it. [01:14:08] So now what they're trying to do is make these websites that we go to as well as some apps to have a consistent, secure, and passwordless sign in. and they're gonna make it available to consumers across all kinds of devices and platforms. That's why you've got apple, Google, and Microsoft all committing to it. [01:14:32] And you can bet everybody else is going to follow along because there's hundreds of other companies that have decided they're gonna work with the Fido Alliance and they're gonna create this passwordless future. Which I like this idea. So how does this work? Basically you need to have a smartphone. [01:14:50] This is, I'm just gonna go with the most standard way that this is going to work here in the future. And you can then have a, a. Pass key. This is like a multifactor authentication or two factor authentication. So for instance, right now, when I sign into a website online, I'm giving a username, I'm giving a password and then it comes up and it asks me for a code. [01:15:14] So I enter an a six digit code and that code changes every 30 seconds. And again, I use my password manager from one password dot. In order to generate that code. So that's how I log into Microsoft sites and Google sites and all kinds of sites out there. So it's a similar thing here now for the sites for my company, because we do cyber security for businesses, including regulated businesses. [01:15:41] We have biometrics tied in as. so to log into our systems, I have to have a username. I have to have a password. I then am sent to a single sign on page where I have to have a message sent to my smart device. That then has a special app that uses biometrics either a face ID or a fingerprint to verify who I am. [01:16:06] Yeah, there's a lot there, but I have to protect my customer's data. Something that very few it's crazy. Actual managed security services providers do, but it's important, right? By the way, if you want my password. Special report, just go to Craig peterson.com. Sign up for my email list. [01:16:29] I'll send that to you. That's what we're sending out right now for anyone who signs up new@craigpeterson.com. And if you'd like a copy of it and you're already on the list, just go ahead and email me M E. At Craig peterson.com and ask for the password special report where I go through a

Mara Cozzolino is one of the best and brightest mokuhanga printmakers working today. Her work delves into the silence and simple moments, sending us face to face with the solitude and beauty that only nature can bring us. On this first of two episodes dedicated to Mara's work and journey, we speak on her early attempts at mokuhanga, what traveling and attending mokuhanga workshops around the world has done for her current work, and how she believes in the power of mokuhanga as an art form.  This episode of The Unfinished Print is dedicated to our friend, Tim Whyte. Please follow The Unfinished Print and my own print work on Instagram @popular_wheatprints, Twitter @unfinishedprint, or email me at theunfinishedprint@gmail.com Notes: notes may contain a hyperlink. Simply click on the highlighted word or phrase. Mara Cozzolino's work can be found on her website, And on Instagram. Mara also takes care of the International Mokuhanga Conference Instagram page. shina - tilia japonica,  is a specific plywood harvested for its sustainability and versatility in mokuhanga. It is a soft wood great for colour blocks but limited in its ability to hold thin line work. McClain's sells blocks, here. MI Lab - Mokuhanga Innovation Laboratory is located in Tōkyō. It is a place set up for learning mokuhanga. The artist-in-residence program, having been held since 2011 on Lake Kawaguchi near Mt. Fuji, is an application based program hosting international mokuhanga practitioners who are looking to move their work forward. More information can be found, here. hanshita - is the preliminary drawing or sketch pasted on your woodblock, for the key block, and subsequent blocks of a multi block colour print. One can use a printer and spray tack, or a more traditional method of drawing on the paper itself and pasting with rice glue. One can also draw onto the block themselves, or use a soft plastic acetate to transfer the kentō and key block to the other blocks. Skies the limit. Motoharu Asaka - is a master woodblock carver located in Tōkyō. His Instagram,  and FB page, and website are a few ways to see his work. David Bull - is well known around the world as a modern scholar and preserver of the Japanese woodblock print and it's process. Mokuhankan, woodblock.com, Twitch, and his YouTube channel are a few ways to see his work and what he is currently doing. mica - a mineral which, when ground into a fine powder, has been used to add a sheen or shine to woodblock prints. David Bull demonstrates this, here. Woodlike Matsumura   - is a supplier of woodblock print equipment, tools, and information. Jinbōchō - is an area in Tōkyō predominantly known for its plentiful array of used bookstores. Some information regarding the area can be found, here. Yamada Shoten - is a woodblock print art gallery located in the above mentioned Jinbōchō area of Tōkyō. Here they sell and exhibit woodblock prints of all types. Their English website can be found, here. Laura Boswell - is a lithograph and mokuhanga printmaker based in England. A very talented and busy printmaker, Laura is constantly evolving her work, and creating some of the finest prints you can find. Her interview with The Unfinished Print can be found, here. Her website can be found, here. Paul Furneaux - is an artist based in Edinburgh, Scotland. His work is a fabulous blend of colour and geometric shapes. By blending his mokuhanga, with other types of mediums such as chiné colle, etching, and even sculpture. Paul creates powerfully unique works. His website can be found, here. intaglio - a type of printmaking which uses etching into a copper plate (or other metals) and pressing the paper onto the etched grooves. A MoMA video can be found here, regarding this process. Katsushika Hokusai -  (1760-1849) is one of the most famous woodblock print designers and painters in history. More information can be found, here. Kitagawa Utamaro - (b. ? - d. 1806). A famous ukiyo-e print designer who helped create many amazing prints of women (bijin). Savvy Tōkyō has a fun article about Utamaro, here. Utagawa Hiroshige - (1797-1858) was a painter and print designer known predominantly for his landscape designs of Edo, (100 Famous Views Of Edo) and the Tōkaidō, (The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō), the main road which leads one from Tōkyō to Kyōto. sōsaku hanga - an art movement of the early 20th Century which redefined how people looked at the Japanese print. Ronin Gallery in NYC has a great overview, here. kentō - are the registration marking carved, or stuck onto, the woodblock in order to align all of your blocks together into one unified image, when printed. Traditionally it is an “L” at the bottom right of your block (kagi),  and a flat bit to the center left of your block, (hikitsuke). McClains has a great pdf about the kentō, here. opening and closing credit background music:  “Static Age” by The Misfits, Reel Platinum, 1985.  © Popular Wheat Productions Disclaimer: Please do not reproduce or use anything from this podcast without shooting me an email and getting my express written or verbal consent. I'm friendly :) if you find any issue with something in the show notes please let me know. The opinions expressed in The Unfinished Print podcast are not necessarily those of Andre Zadorozny and of Popular Wheat Productions.          

Deconstructing America's History of GenocideThis special podcast episode features a panel conversation hosted on November 20th by Reclaim Collaborative in collaboration with ESJ and Art of Citizenry as part of Reclaim Black Friday, a campaign calling on brands to redistribute a percentage of their sales to Indigenous and Black land-based organizations instead of running sales during Black Friday weekend.A Deeper Look into Indigenous + Black ErasureWhen having conversations about Thanksgiving, it is important to acknowledge the first people to encounter the Pilgrims, the Wampanoag Tribe. It is unfortunate that while most of us know so much about the Pilgrims’ journey because of the way we have been taught history, most of us don’t know the name of the community that was first colonized in what is now known as the United States of America. This is one simple example of how Indigenous people, or Native Americans, have experienced centuries of dehumanization, genocide, and erasure.“Land back is rooted in this idea of literally getting to stewardship and restoring that ancestral relationship with the land, and letting Black and Native people lead that conversation around that movement.”- Charlie Amáyá ScottAddressing histories of exploitation takes deconstructing the systems we operate in. One simple step we can each take is acknowledge the people on whose land we reside.“My family has always taken it as a day of resistance and resilience. It's been much more from an aspect of this is what we do traditionally, as Diné people, which is coming together and celebrating each other.”- Emma Robbins on ThanksgivingThis year marks 400 years since the Mayflower arrived on Plymouth Rock. We must critically analyze the story we have been told and by who. It is time we deconstruct, rethink, and rebuild a more just future. Reclaim Black Friday is a campaign focused on redistributing to Indigenous and Black land-based organizations because it is important to acknowledge the original stewards of this land and return it to those who have historically cultivated regenerative and healing relationships with the Earth.“Reparations as a whole isn’t just a racial justice issue, it’s also a climate justice issue.”- Kai RameyIt is important to hold space for reclaiming and healing, recognizing the trauma and genocide that is widely celebrated through what has been painted as an endearing holiday of gratitude. Black Americans, descendants of American Chattel Slavery, were taken captive and brought here to America for textile and agricultural work—building the wealth of this country. The dehumanization, exploitation, and abuse that Black people have had to endure for centuries continues today as Black Americans still face injustices and inequities in most spaces.“As a Black person, or as an Indigenous person, we're always in the position where we're having to do the work to undo the things that we never had any part in to begin with.“- Katie PruettDespite directly contributing to the wealth of this country, when enslaved Black Americans were freed, they did not receive reparations. Today, Black Americans collectively experience one of the highest poverty rates of any group in the United States. Our acknowledgement of this horrific truth and examination of how we can provide support without causing further damage, is a necessary step if we are to be part of creating real systemic change.How can non-Black + non-Indigenous people help dismantle the systems we operate within without falling into the trap of white saviorism?Redistributing wealth is a small way we can give back the stolen wealth and land we have all benefited from. It is by no means the only way nor is it a panacea. White individuals in America have directly and indirectly contributed to harmful cycles of exploitation by the nature of this country’s history. It is therefore, the responsibility of white and white passing individuals to help dismantle the systems that cause harm.There is a lot of power that white folks do have in the world we live in today, but I think it’s more important to cede power in very silent ways and by that I mean not taking up space.- Kai RameySo what is white saviorism?It’s a little bit of guilt and a little bit of “Hey, look at what I’m doing. I’m doing good, but I want you to know I’m doing good.” But let me tell you something -- when you’re really about that life and you really are here for change, you don’t get to donate $10 here and there. You have to give up some power and some wealth and you get to be uncomfortable and you get to feel how we’ve been feeling for centuries.”- Katie PruettReclaim Black FridayThanksgiving is steeped in America’s history of genocide and theft from Indigenous people. The weekend of frenzied consumerism that follows further contributes to issues of racism and classism in this country. Reclaim Black Friday is dedicated to amplifying the work and voices of Indigenous and Black leaders, and a call to action for redistributing wealth to those who have suffered the most because of historic and continual exploitation in America.Join Reclaim Collaborative November 27th - 30th for Reclaim Black Friday, a campaign calling on businesses to not offer discounts, and instead redistribute a percentage of total sales to Black and Indigenous led land-based organizations. This campaign aims to address the problematic history of Thanksgiving. Learn more and take the Redistribution Pledge!Reclaim CollaborativeThis episode of Art of Citizenry Podcast is brought to you in collaboration with Reclaim Collaborative, a values-aligned affiliate network. We are on a mission to build and foster an inclusive community of brands, content creators, and industry experts dedicated to dismantling systems of oppression across all aspects of the fashion and lifestyle ecosystem. We believe an intersectional and collaborative approach, one rooted in trust and respect, is necessary to create widespread systems change. Learn more!Additional Resources + LinksInterested in reading some of the resources I reference during the episode? Check out the links below curated with support from Charlie Amáyá Scott + Katie Pruett:Pre-order ESJ Issue 7 about Reclaiming SpaceArt of Citizenry Podcast Episode 6: Voluntourism, Mission Trips + Dismantling the Savior ComplexRacism and the Logic of CapitalismFrom Capitalism and Racism: Conjoined TwinsTruthsgiving: The True History of ThanksgivingDecolonizing Thanksgiving: A Toolkit for Combatting Racism in SchoolsCNN Visits Tribe for National Day of MourningMashpee Wampanoag Tribe welcomed Pilgrims, but loses land on eve of ThanksgivingA Collection of Treaties published by the Oklahoma State UniversityThe Henceforeward PodcastEricka Hart’s podcast: Hoodrat to Headwrap[Book] An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the US by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz[Book] Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria by Beverly Daniel TatumThanksgiving-specific Resources:The Thanksgiving Tale We Tell Is a Harmful Lie. As a Native American, I’ve Found a Better Way to Celebrate the Holiday by Sean Sherma via Time MagazineDo American Indians celebrate Thanksgiving? by Dennis Zotigh via Smithsonian Magazine.The Invention of Thanksgiving by Philip Deloria via The New YorkerThe Wampanoag Side of the First Thanksgiving Story by Michelle Tirado via Indian Country Today.The True, Indigenous History of Thanksgiving by Alexis Bunten via BioneersAs A Native American, Here’s What I Want My Fellow Americans To Know About Thanksgiving by Corinne Oestreich via Huffpost.Thanksgiving | Native Americans | One Word by The Cut via YoutubeThe Indigenous Peoples Thanksgiving Alcatraz Sunrise Ceremony Draws on the 1969 Occupation to Inform Native Resistance by Ray Levy-Uyeda via TeenVogueNational Day of Mourning ResourcesUnited American Indians of New EnglandThanksgiving 'National Day Of Mourning' For Some by AJ+ via YoutubeFor many Native Americans, Thanksgiving is a day of mourning by Pamela Kirkland via CNNNative Americans host ‘National Day of Mourning’ on Thanksgiving via Al JazeeraThanksgiving: The National Day of Mourning by Allen Salway via Paper MagazineWhat is National Day of Mourning? How Anti-Thanksgiving Day Started and Everything To Know About It by Kelly Wynne via NewsweekMashpee Wampanoag Tribal Status RemovalTrump administration revokes reservation status for Mashpee Wampanoag tribe amid coronavirus crisis by Rory Taylor via VoxU.S. Appeals Ruling In Mashpee Wampanoag Land Case by the AP via WBUR NewsThe ‘Thanksgiving Tribe’ Is Still Fighting for Food Sovereignty by Alexandra Talty via Civil EatsConnect with Our Guests_“There needs to be an intention to build with others. We can't have this future that we're dreaming of if it's just by ourselves.” _- Charlie Amáyá ScottCharlie Amáyá Scott is a Diné (Navajo) scholar born and raised within the central part of the Navajo Nation. Charlie reflects, analyzes, and critiques what it means to be Queer, Trans, and Diné in the 21st century on their personal blog, dineaesthetics.com, while inspiring joy and justice to thousands of their followers on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. Their English pronouns are they/them and she/her.Kai Ramey is a community organizer, poet, land steward, & dog dad in Yanawana / Somi'Sek formerly known as San Antonio, TX. They work with Roots of Change community garden and Trans Lifeline, a trans-led resource organization. He has a passion for BIPOC connection to the land as well as Black & Indigenous rest as resistance. Follow Kai on Instagram.Katie Pruett is the founder and editor-in-chief of ESJ Magazine and has been working to make sure representation exists within the sustainable fashion space, and that real conversations that lead to accountability and action are happening in fashion. Over the past year, her work with the magazine has expanded to create a bigger platform for Black women and femmes, and women of color to take up space in ethical and sustainable fashion. Follow ESJ on Instagram.Emma Robbins is a Diné artist, activist, and environmentalist with a passion for empowering Indigenous women. As Director of the Navajo Water Project, part of the DigDeep Right to Water Project, she is working to create infrastructure that brings clean running water to the one in three Navajo families without it. Through her artwork, she strives to raise awareness about the lack of clean water in Native American nations. Robbins is also a 2020 Aspen Institute Healthy Communities Fellow. Follow Emma on Instagram.[Moderator] Julysa Sosa is a Native Xicana visual artist whose work focuses on evocative storytelling, drawing out the obscured imagery existing on the periphery of life experiences. Her work embodies a search for identity and often creates dreamy, moody visual translations of her reality, dreams, and ancestral memories hidden deep in the psyche. Julysa received a BA in photojournalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is currently based in Yanaguana also known as San Antonio, TX. Follow Julysa on InstagramAnd of course, don’t forget to follow @reclaimcollaborative on Instagram too!Thank YouThis podcast is dedicated to creating a safe space to discuss and challenge topics surrounding how we each navigate our personal advantages and disadvantages. I want to extend a special thank you to our panelists, Amaya, Kai, Emma and Katie along with our moderator, Julysa for sharing their valuable insights. These conversations are not easy, and involve revisiting years of generational pain and trauma.Finally, thank you for listening! Please subscribe, download, and leave a review for Art of Citizenry Podcast — I appreciate your love and support! Also, if you want to connect, please feel free to follow me and share your thoughts with me on Instagram @manpreetkalra + @artofcitizenry.

LostXpat Host Bert Diggs has been to over 50 countries.He dives deep into cultures, getting to know local customs, local cuisine, the people, and their drink. He is also the host of LostXpat, a YouTube channel dedicated to travel with tens of thousands of followers.  Show NotesFollow Bert on InstagramLostXpat YouTube ChannelTheme music by: Ruel Morales Audio Transcript Brian Schoenborn: Hello. Hello. Hey, everybody. Our guests today has been to over 50 countries. He’s dive deep into cultures, getting to know local culture, local cuisine, the people, and their drink is also the host of lost ex-pat, a YouTube channel dedicated to travel. He’s got tens of thousands of followers. We’re here to talk a little bit about that, uh, as well as a little bit about what’s going on with coronavirus.[00:00:26] Give it up for my friend Bert Diggs.[00:00:28] My name is Brian Schoenborn. I’m an explorer of people, places, and culture. In my travels, spending over 20 countries across four continents, I’ve had the pleasure of engaging in authentic conversations with amazingly interesting people. These are their stories, on location and unfiltered. Presented by 8B Media, this is Half the City.[00:00:56] First of all, let’s get that day drink, and then you gotta get a beer in while we’re having this, uh, corona lock down time.[00:01:04] Bert Diggs: It’s crazy, man. It’s makes sense that everybody’s talking about, it’s the only thing that anybody can talk about. But I think like, you know, it’s nice to get a little bit of a break and kind of talk about other things too.[00:01:14] Brian Schoenborn: Right. You know, like, so just, you know, so for the listeners at home, you know, I’m, I’m in LA. Uh, Burt’s currently in San Diego, although we met each other, uh, back in Beijing, oddly enough, during our times there. How did we meet? I’m just trying to, I’m just trying to remember that cause I remember it was a pretty funny story.[00:01:33] Bert Diggs: But, uh, the way we met was we were both sitting. I was sitting behind you on that. I was sitting behind you on the train in Beijing, going to the airport. We were both heading to the airport. Airport express. I was talking to this girl that was sitting next to me a pair of way that like, I was just kind of chatting and rough, you know, hitting on her and they kind of way then Chinese, you were, you were kind of like looking at me like, how’s he doing?[00:02:00] He’s going, he’s going good. And then after the girl got off the train, we started talking about how we like living in Beijing and how easy it is to make friends and you know, talk to girls. And it’s just. Good experience over there.[00:02:17] Brian Schoenborn: I remember that like, cause I was sitting there just kind of minding my own business.[00:02:21] I don’t remember where I was going. I was going somewhere, but uh, doesn’t matter. But, uh, I was sitting there minding my own business and I saw this girl being talked to and I saw her responding and stuff. I heard like. Western Chinese, right? Like non native Chinese speakers saying like how, and stuff like that.[00:02:38] I’m like, ah, this guy.[00:02:41] Bert Diggs: I was telling her, well, you have a boyfriend, you’re hateful. And that’s how I always talk to the girls, you know? And that’s how it works, man. You know? I mean, Chinese people are very, uh. At least in my experience. Like you said, they’re very, it’s very easy to make friends. You know, they’re very warm. Uh, they like to work hard, but they like to party too.[00:03:04] Brian Schoenborn: They’re very appreciative if you come and enjoy their culture and their country, and if you even make like the slightest attempt to try trying to learn their language, it goes like miles.[00:03:15] Bert Diggs: It really helps a lot when you’re meeting the local Chinese. If you can speak even. You know, a bit of Chinese, you know, 30 different sentences very fluently and understand 60 sentences or 80 sentences or just even.[00:03:31] 200, 300 words. It’s good. It’s all helpful when you live in China. Yep. That’s for sure. Absolutely. And just, you know, I kind of segwayed really quickly away from the Corona virus and don’t we, we’ll get back to that. I know, I know. Bird’s got some stuff he wants to talk about. Hell yeah, that’s what I’m talking about right there.[00:03:49] Brian Schoenborn: Cheers, man. Oh yeah. Just casual beers. Um, but, you know, we’ll get back to some of that coronavirus stuff as well because, um, you know, Bert’s got a pretty unique perspective on it. Um, based on his experiences. Um, but I want to kind of cover some of those things first, right? Like, you know, uh, tell me about like, how long were you in China?[00:04:07] I mean, I’m on the other places, like, I want to talk about some of these other spots too, but like how long were you in China? And like, what was, you know, what were you doing there? What was your overall experience?[00:04:16] Bert Diggs: So, right when I got into China, it was January 14th, and coronavirus was still just kind of an up and coming topic four.[00:04:26] Woah. And we knew that we’ll handle a couple hundred cases, possibly. And they didn’t know. No one knew exactly how bad it was until 22nd or 21st, I think it was 23rd they locked up one. Mmm. And. Close it down. They didn’t close the flights like exiting Mohan going to other countries, but they locked the country up just to contain the virus.[00:04:49] They didn’t know that it was so bad at the time and like how many people were really infected. It’s, it’s such a big delay. So they, they did probably didn’t know at that time that there was a 14 day lag on everyone who got infected and how big the situation really was in the end. It was, it was really a shock to everybody.[00:05:10] I was in Portugal on January 5th and first heard about this virus, this pneumonia. And that’s why I decided to buy a couple of masks from, be shocked in Portugal, like maybe 50 masks or 25 masks. I just bought them randomly and just to keep them. And then later on they came in really handy after this all came out, you know, cause there was no masks in Beijing.[00:05:39] You could not buy a mask that was a proper surgical mask. Or in 95 you would have to spend a lot more money, like four times the amount. Geez, well, I mean, but even just the concept of getting a mask, when, when you start hearing about things happening, I mean, that comes from time spent in China, right? Like, they’re very, like, at least, you know, at the time that I was there, people are very conscious, you know, whether it’s because of the pollution, the smog, right.[00:06:04] Or whether it’s, you know, if they have a cold or something, like they’ll wear a mask to prevent other people from catching whatever they have. Um, and, and, you know, you spend a couple of years there, like you and I both have, um. You kind of become, I don’t say I ever got used to it because I hate wearing masks.[00:06:20] I like, it drives me crazy. Um, but I’ll do it when it’s necessary, but even just knowing that that’s kind of, you know, having spent that much time there where, you know, you get used to that culture of people wearing things when you know, when whatever is not perfect. Um, it’s probably an easier decision or more natural decision even to make, like when you’re sitting there in Portugal and you’re first hearing about those.[00:06:43] Yeah. Because you know, you’re getting on a flight for 15 hours to get back to China or go to a United States. Um, I mean, no, that you’re going to be exposing yourself to more viruses. So, I mean, I didn’t actually wear the mask on the flight from Portugal to United States. But from the United States to Beijing, I did actually wear a mask for part of the flight cause I was just a little bit, you know, worried, paranoid, whatever you want to call it.[00:07:11] In the end it was, it was for good, for the better. For every one’s better. Yeah. I think I did. I did actually have a little bit of a sore throat when I was leaving. America to go to China. I had like a little sore throat, so I was wearing a mask. People were wearing masks actually on that flight cause they did hear about this ammonia and Woolwine.[00:07:33] And so that was the 14th of January. So you were, you were in China on January 14th how long were you there before you. Before you came back to the States? Oh, I was in China until February 6th but I didn’t come back to the States on that flight. I went to Malaysia for about 20 days, and then I was in Indonesia for almost a month, so I was outside of China because I just wanted to get out of turn.[00:08:02] I didn’t know how bad I was going to get by February 6th when I was leaving. Already. You could only go to very select countries like Italy. You could go to Malaysia, Thailand. You could not go directly to Singapore. You’d have to wait in Thailand, if you want to go to Indonesia or Australia, like these two countries decided they need people out of China for 14 days before they’ll accept them into Australia or Indonesia or Singapore.[00:08:31] So you had a self quarantine even that earlier. Uh, yeah, kind of self quarantine. It wasn’t a mandatory quarantine. It was a, according to you, the I decided to do with myself because I don’t want to be one of the people spreading this virus. Very careful. I just wanted to quarantine myself a bit. I still went out, but I wore a mask if I went out and.[00:08:53] I stayed away from people like at least 10 feet away. I typically stayed. Uh, there was some little roads in Malaysia where you really couldn’t stay 10 feet away, but I did my best to wear a mask and waited 10 days until I took off the mask. Any time I was outside, I want to get back to Malaysia and Indonesia because I love those countries.[00:09:12] But I’m curious first, like, uh. You know, you were in Beijing for what, like three weeks it sounds like. What was the overall, uh, like feeling or vibe while you were there during that time? The feeling. Was like a ghost city, like apocalypse, just kind of like it is now in America. It was really interesting to go out and kind of film.[00:09:38] I was also very careful when I went out and Beijing was not a hard hit city at all. Only a couple of hundred cases at that time. There was like 24 cases in Beijing. When I first started filming. By the time I was leaving Beijing, there was uh, around 200 cases. So it grew really fast. Because the people from Mohan left for aging and other provinces around, and.[00:10:01] Luckily they didn’t go to Beijing that much. They mostly went to Hong Jo Fujin and also they went to like Shanghai area, just like more nearby cities. Right. So for those that don’t know Chinese geography, um, Beijing to Shanghai is roughly the same distance of like, I want to say San Francisco to San Diego.[00:10:24] No, it’s, it’s, uh, there’s a further five hours, five hours on a bullet train. So, um, I mean, it’s like a three hour flight, three hour flight. I mean, it could be, it could be like Boston to like Orlando. It’s almost like that, but not quite, it’s kind of like that. Maybe Boston to Virginia. Okay. Yeah, that’s, that’s pretty much close enough, I think.[00:10:54] Anyways, it’s fair. It’s a fair distance. And those other cities, like Uber is, it’s fairly close to Shanghai. It’s not, uh, it’s much further away than Beijing is anyways. And then Fujian is near the, near the sea. Uh, basically the city that, um, is on the sea with the streets of Taiwan, with Taiwan on the other side.[00:11:14] Um, and then Hong Jo is, uh, next to Shanghai. Anyways. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so, uh, very close to Shanghai. And then you’ve also got Sue Jo, very close to Shanghai. All of Amway is pretty close to Shanghai. Uh, that’s really famous for the yellow mountain and whey province. And then, um, I don’t know, there’s just a lot of different places.[00:11:38] Shanghai is actually a better place geographically because you’ve got a lot of interesting places around it. Beijing is great. It’s an amazing city, but there’s not many places to go. If you’re looking to go venture out to other cities and explore and see other places, honestly, like Beijing, there’s hub a and there’s Shannon young, and these places are really dry, cold, really not places you would love to go to travel to.[00:12:07] Well, yeah, all around Shanghai. You got really beautiful places to go. Like hung Jo, Sue Jo. So Joe is supposed to be the Venice of China and how Joe is like this beautiful Lake, and like everyone goes there for vacation and then yeah, Juan Shawn is the mountains. You’ve got that only a couple hours away from Shanghai.[00:12:27] So. But yeah, you do have really beautiful places around Beijing and high row and some other places that have got some cool mountains, but just not as much. It’s definitely different. But also like, I mean, I would even say like, at least for me, a possible reason why they might be traveling to those other cities more is cause it’s closer.[00:12:46] You know? It’s also got the natural beauty and you know, Chinese people love getting outside. So I, you know, I’m in LA, right? One of the most populous cities in the country, if not the most populous. Um, I don’t know my numbers, but you know, it’s notoriously bad with traffic. Yeah. Right now, traffic is starting to pick up a little bit.[00:13:05] I think it’s starting to tick up, but for like the last month or so, it’s been. So listeners, if you’ve never been to LA, I’ve never heard about it. Heard about the traffic situation, like people measure distance and time in LA versus miles, because like, it could take you an hour or more to go five to 10 miles, right?[00:13:27] Depending on the traffic. But these days, you know, going five to 10 miles could take, you know, 1520 minutes. Like it’s, it’s not stewed. The roads are so empty. Even though there’s been a bit of an uptick, and that’s really the way it should be because otherwise, I mean, this virus can spread so many different ways, and even when you’re on a bicycle, someone breathing really heavily driving right past you with a bicycle.[00:13:54] If they’re not wearing a mask that. That breath of air, not even a cough, just a breath. It gave me air and blow in your direction and actually infect you, and maybe it will be a small inoculation, but it we’ll still infect you. It could be a really good thing to get inoculated with a very small part of this virus if you get a big inoculation.[00:14:17] A lot of people say that. That’s the people that go to the ER and have to get the breathing tubes in there in their throats, and the ventilators and the PPD machines and all this stuff that you need to do all this stuff. So the best thing, I mean, I’m not saying get infected, but it’s good to get a smaller infection.[00:14:36] That’s why if you wear a mask, you can get a smaller inoculation into you. And if they’re wearing a mask, it’s also a smaller inoculation into you. So if everyone is wearing a mask. Everyone is giving each other less dose of this virus, and if not even just eliminated the virus completely. So that’s why I think everybody should have been wearing masks many months ago, or even just a facial protection head thing, even though it may not be a CDC certified mask and 95, uh, whatever surgical mask, even just a cloth.[00:15:11] A towel napkin. The best napkins they say are the blue napkins that are, they used to dry cars a lot of the time that you heard about this, the blue napkins inside of your. Mask, like this is the best way to protect your, like it blocks a lot of that air. The virus particles, the breathing particles. So yeah, there, there is actual studies been done on the best materials that we can actually get access to right now.[00:15:39] That blue fiber, what they wash cars with, it’s kind of a cloth called, I’m going to look it up real quick. It’s disposable. I’m from Michigan originally. Dude, it’s a big car state, so I know, I know what you’re talking about. Blue cloth or cars. What the fuck is it? It’s just as 50 pack blue shop towels. So shop towels.[00:15:57] Yeah. Shop blue towels. Look at this one right here, Scott. Shop towels. Exactly. That’s, that’s exactly what they say. It’s a 200 pack right there too. So that’s a 200 rent, 200 shop towels in a, in a box. You can just lie in that in front of a T shirt or something. Right. Or your mask, however you make your mask.[00:16:17] I mean, everyone’s going to make their mask differently, but if you put that and the area that’s like right next to your face, you are blocking a lot of the particles, very similar to a surgical mask. And the closer we can get to having that kind of surgical mask protection or. And 95 protection without that little tiny ventilator.[00:16:36] The little plastic thing that lets the air out. That’s actually not what you want for this because it doesn’t protect the people around you. You don’t want that little plastic thing. They kind of a little bit ventilator. You don’t want that one. There’s an 90 fives without that little plastic thing on the outside.[00:16:52] Well the United, so I’ve been doing some research on this as well cause I, you know, I know some. Mass manufacturers and different parts of the world. So I’m trying to do my part, it’s not that easy. You know, it’s kind of a shit show right now as far as all that’s concerned. Um, but, uh, I have learned quite a bit about mass over the last couple of weeks because of that.[00:17:10] And from what I understanding the end 95 just basically means that 95% of particles that are in the air that you would inhale are blocked. So you’re only getting 5% of whatever that is. So, you know, whether that’s a mask with a ventilator or without a ventilator. Um, it’s still the same amount of blockage.[00:17:31] I don’t know if it’s called a ventilator. It’s just that little plastic thing that, um, or maybe it’s not a, maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s not a ventilator, but it’s, I know what you’re talking about is that plastic piece where it’s like it lets you breath easier. Yeah. We use those things in Beijing when the smog is really bad because you know, you want to breathe.[00:17:51] In a little bit easier, but you also breathe out easier too with that little plastic thing there. And so for smog and pollution, that is the perfect mask. So that’s what we were using in Beijing. Whenever it got to be. Very high PM 2.5 if it was super high and it makes it so like you breathe out easier, you can breathe out the particles that are coming from your mouth, your lungs.[00:18:16] But unfortunately, that’s exactly what we don’t want. Right? Because then if you’re infectious or you’re contagious, then it doesn’t stop that spread. Yeah, and that’s the whole point. We just want to cut this thing down and make the. The are not, which is the transmission level. So this one has gotten or not one person is infected and it affects two to three people on average.[00:18:41] No matter what we do, and if we really bring this down, we can bring that are not down to below one, which will make this virus go extinct, but it’s going to be very hard for that considering this virus is a airborne virus that all you have to do is breathe in a room for a certain amount of time and you’re going to infect anyone that walks in that room.[00:19:02] Well, it’s crazy how much information is coming about coming out about it. You know, like at first they were like, don’t worry, at least the U S government at first was like, don’t worry basket’s it’s not going to help. Then they changed their fucking mind and then the saying, Oh, it’s, you know, three feet of distance now, six feet.[00:19:17] And I read something the other day that said, it can spread on the sole of your shoes up to 13 feet. Like it’s fucking crazy, dude. Like nobody knows what’s going on with this right now. The only thing we can do is. You know, try to be safe, you know, keep ourselves inside. And if we have to leave, you know, make sure you’re wearing a mask and gloves and sanitizing and all that other shit.[00:19:37] Yeah, definitely. Wash your groceries. I mean, depending on if you think they could have been touched multiple times by multiple people. I see lots of people touching the things inside without buying them. I mean, it’s, it’s just habits that we do. Yeah. We have to try to learn to break. It sucks, man. I miss human touch.[00:19:59] I want to hug. I want a hug more than like anything else, right? I’m just like, come close. No, I want a real skin on skin contact. I had a dream last night that I kissed a girl. That was my dream. I was like, Oh my God, it’s crazy. I’m like, man, I missed that. You really don’t know what you got until it’s gone.[00:20:25] Right. The feeling is touch and you know, you could just, how’s that feeling of you don’t care about. Hugs and cuddles. Yeah, you can be hard. You can be hard all you want, dude, but you know, you’re just taking it for granted. You know, you get it. You just like, man, maybe it’s going to, some dudes are like, Oh, I’m so hard.[00:20:42] No, don’t touch me. No. Get the fuck outta here, man. You know, when you can’t be touched, that’s when you want to be touched. It doesn’t take a fucking hard ass man to fucking turn that shit. I’m a hard man. I was a fucking 50 caliber machine gunning Marine active duty, and I just want to fucking hug, man. I want a hug.[00:21:03] No, I know. I know what you feel right now. Things that we go through, like when we’re with the significant other, at the time. And you know, we’ve had too much of them and too much of that amazing special time with them, and then go for a one month without them or whatever. Then you’ve got literally, you could go for anything.[00:21:26] Like you’re just so desperate for affection, thirsty. I was hanging out. I was, um. You know? So I’m, I’m also, I’m managing a Chipotle right now in Beverly Hills. It’s of my side hustle, keep my finances stable while I work on my other stuff. And this old lady came in and actually the the, so first of all, it’s super fucking slow.[00:21:47] We’ve lost like. 60 to 75% of our business. Um, but secondly, like the people that are coming in the last few days, I’ve been so like, they just don’t want to leave. They just want to have a conversation. You know? I think there’s like, I think there’s like 67 year old lady who was like flirting with me and she’s just like, she’s just like, don’t you think this is all over blown?[00:22:09] I’m like, no. I’m like. We’ve got to, we’ve got to take care of people. We’ve got to stay in. We’ve got to keep the distance still. Everything that she goes, I am almost 70 years old. She’s like, I don’t care if this thing kills me. I’m like, you fucking, you’re gonna have like 30 more years of life. Are you kidding me?[00:22:23] Like, come on, especially in this day and age, like you can’t really live to be 120 if you’re 50 right now, you might live to be 120 they might come out with some machines that can just rejuvenate yourselves. You never know. So. The thing is, you know, I don’t think the people like. Elon Musk or bill Gates, they’re not going to die early.[00:22:44] They’re going to be 120 hundred and 30 if not, they’re going to be a mortal dude. They’re going to live forever. They’re going to find a way to like put their brain into like some sort of like robot contraption, like the teenage mutant Ninja turtles live forever progressive on the finding of helping them live for a longer time.[00:23:07] I mean, maybe not bill Gates, but I think they’ll get. He might want to live forever. I mean, he’s got enough money. Why not just one person? He his mind, he’s so smart. I mean, he’s a literal genius, but the fact that he was able to predict the pandemic and talk about it in details back in 2015 and talking about how.[00:23:32] Everything would happen, how we are not prepared and how it would be a coronavirus from a animal. You didn’t say bat, but he said everything else was pretty much directly correct and that this could have been from a bat or a. Pig or I guess a one of those are middle pangolin or whatever. It’s maybe, maybe, I don’t know, man, like I don’t want to, I don’t want to conspiracy theorize too much, but like from what I’m kind of gathering, like just my hunch based on the information that I’ve read over the last couple of months, it doesn’t feel so much like it was a wet market thing.[00:24:15] It feels more like, you know, and those virus, the CDCs and , the, the virus  virus lab or whatever it’s called, and they’re both fairly close to each other and they’re both, you know, a hundred, 200 yards away, something like that from the wet market that they blamed it on. Yep. I wouldn’t be surprised. I’m not saying it’s a manmade thing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were researching Corona viruses and bats and somehow it got out, you know, like, like accidental or on purpose.[00:24:48] Like I’m not, you know, I’m not trying to, I’m not playing that game. Like I’m not going to sit here and think like, China did this on purpose to fucking like. Bring the world to its knees and like take over. I’m also a saying that, you know, if it was an accident, they sure as hell are taken advantage. You know?[00:25:08] I mean, that’s, that’s just my impression. I mean, you know, they, they suppressed information like they always do. Uh, and now suddenly they’re, you know, they’re trying to be the heroes and you know, maybe. Change the world, order that kind of stuff, and send people to other countries to help out with this whole pandemic, which is good.[00:25:26] That’s a nice thing of them to do, but it’s good. I think, yeah. I wish that we did take it more seriously back in the early times of January, and I guess it’s just, it was really unforeseeable that it would come to this and how it, it could be 14 days dormant in your body and spread and get so infectious and so contagious with the people that you come in contact with.[00:25:50] Even though you have no symptoms, it still is going to be giving you all the people around you presence. They don’t want. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. Three weeks ago, if you told me, Hey, Robert, I got a present for you, Corona man. Be like, yeah, maybe I’m going to get a 12 pack of curls. I know. It’s definitely not a good present.[00:26:17] Again,[00:26:21] I sit there, you know, I just think like, I remember in like December, I’m going, all right. 2020 is going to be the year we’ve got a 2020 vision. This shit’s going to be, this is the year everything’s going to fucking rock. Everything’s going to fucking change. Here we are over a quarter of the way in and the entire year has been fucked and just like.[00:26:49] I hear, I hear this thing goes away by April. Yeah. All better. By April we got 15 and we’re going to be down by zero. By next week, it’s going to be zero by next week. It’s gonna be magical. It’s gonna be as if this never happened. Yeah, right. Dude, LA, I dunno. I dunno. San Diego is, but LA is like, Oh, I guess California in general is shut down until may 15 for sure.[00:27:16] But I do. I’ll tell you what, based on, did you hear the governors, um, the press conference the other day? It’s talking about the criteria to reopen. Yes. In saying that we have to wear a mask. If you work in the restaurant, you got to wear a mask and maybe a face shield and gloves, whole new procedures. Like we’re not opening up in the way that we think we’re opening up.[00:27:37] We’re going to be in a bio containment center everywhere. It’s going to be a safety zone. Yeah. Um, but like, what we should be doing, how he’s doing it is the safe way and the safe way is the best way. When it comes to this virus, we might even have to close off the border to our friends in Nevada and Oregon and whoever else is not taking this thing seriously right now because we’re in Ohio.[00:28:02] Those guys are writing and in Michigan too, like I’m from Michigan, dude, I watched these guys just the other day. They did this whole fucking riot in their cars, and then they all get out of their fucking cars and real estate capital. Like, what better way? What better way to fucking kill yourselves protesting assholes like Jesus Christ?[00:28:22] You know? It’s like, it’s almost like now’s the time for survival of the fittest. This is the Darwin awards right now. This is how we’re going to avoid idiocrasy from happening. Idiocracy to beat. All the dumb asses are going to die from protesting, and it’s not funny, but it’s not what will happen to the irony.[00:28:42] What will happen is actually their grandparents will die, not them. They’re going to be okay because their immune system’s fine. They’re going to be spreading this thing with their parents and their grandparents and whoever else is got a little bit autoimmune disease. So. What they’re doing is really not fair to anyone.[00:28:59] It’s not them who’s going to die. If I get chronic tomorrow, I’m probably not going to die considering I’m drinking a smoothie every day with like, yeah, I don’t know, kale, blueberries, lemon peel, lemons, just so much good stuff in there, and then I’m taking my zing, taking my , taking my vitamin C. These things are the Corona killers.[00:29:19] I mean, people. Or talking about like, you know, Corona cures. There’s no cure on a Corona cure. There’s only making your immune system very high and very Mmm alert, right? To make sure that you’re always going to be killing that Corona. If you end up getting that Corona, at least you’re not going to be getting it in your lungs.[00:29:38] You’re going to get B. Cutting it off at its source. So yeah, the more zinc you got, the more vitamin D three, the more vitamin C, uh, you get  B3 comes for free. It comes from the sun, so sit in the sun. Sunbathe for 15 minutes in LA. If you’re in Washington like Washington, the state, it’s a bit more cloudy. So maybe you’ve got to sit out there for 30 or 40 minutes.[00:30:03] Well L is a bit difficult too though, cause it’s a densely populated city. It’s a, you know, it’s a concrete jungle. The beaches are closed. So the only place, the only people that have the luxury of sitting out in the sun is, you know, if you have like a rooftop in your apartment building or if you’ve got a yard.[00:30:18] Right? Yeah. Um, but there’s a lot of people, I mean, I have a yard, I guess, but there’s a lot of people out there that don’t, and you know, they can’t exactly lay on the sidewalk. I mean, I guess they could, but. You know, then you’re exposing yourself to other people, like walking around you or whatever, you know, like it’s not ideal.[00:30:35] Yeah, you’re right. LA is definitely not the best place for this, but it’s a lot better than New York city for sure. For sure. If you have a back porch, you’re pretty rich, so that’s good. I mean, there’s, if you have a balcony in New York city. I mean, you’ve pretty much got millions of dollars, I’m guessing, because it’s not cheap to get like a massive balcony.[00:30:54] And I have a nice size apartment. I think in New York people are like typically sitting in their living rooms and they have a small window. That’s the typical New York apartment. Yeah, no, I know. I lived in New York for like three years and yeah, real estate comes at a premium. If you have a nice balcony, like a decent balcony, you would actually want to sit out.[00:31:14] And hang out on and look at the sun and emphasize even shining on you. That’s good too. But like, yeah, that’s, it’s going to be costing you like four thousand five thousand seven thousand dollars per month if not 10,000 I don’t know. Like it’s a lot. If you got the room, just one room in that apartment, that’s probably quite a few thousand dollars I don’t know.[00:31:35] Right. I just, I mean, I just think about my time in New York. I mean. I was there when I feel like I was a trained for this for my time in New York because I was there when hurricane Sandy hit. So, uh, where I was, I was actually in Hoboken. So just outside of Manhattan on the Jersey side, and we, you know, we lost power.[00:31:55] For like two weeks, I think. Something like that. Uh, everything was shut down. Um, red cross was outside my building. National guard was in town. Uh, people were people. People were, um, taking an inflatable boats. And like paddling down the streets because it was so flooded. And even that was dangerous because you don’t know if there’s like a down power line or whatever.[00:32:20] Right? So like most of us were stuck. We were confined to our homes for like two weeks. Um, I thought that was shitty, you know, and, and we didn’t have power. Right? So like, here, like, this is like, you know, the whole world, it’s been months, right? At least we have power. At least we have the ability to, you know, talk to each other from Las, San Diego or.[00:32:41] Or other parts of the world or wherever your families and friends may be from, you know, we have that ability to see each other, but I mean, just imagine if like, it feels like a global hurricane, right? Where power was knocked out all over the globe, you know, for like a mother fucking crazy. It’s really crazy.[00:33:01] And the fact is that when we go out. And we get Corona virus, we may need some medical attention and we end up overwhelming our hospitals. And that is what really kills a lot of people because people need the hospital, not just for Corona, but for other normal procedures. And people can’t get their normal procedures done.[00:33:23] And that is also what’s killing people. People need their x-rays to make sure their cancer is not getting bigger, but they can’t go to the hospitals now because Corona is best, the hospitals. So when people are saying, yeah, we’re going to have church on Sunday and we’re going to be having a blast with everybody in need, people need to have.[00:33:44] The Jesus Christ during this time around, everyone’s going to be depressed and it’s not going to be good. Okay. No, I mean, we need to all stay home and not go to our Baptist church in Louisiana or Florida or Ohio apparently. I mean, these places are all having their church service, worship God, and that’s really good, but we cannot be doing this at this time.[00:34:07] It’s just such backwards thinking. People are dying, not just from Rona virus. It’s from cancer. Somebody died in my family today because they couldn’t go to the hospital. They were more scared to go to the hospital and get coronavirus then to go to the hospital to get themselves fixed up. And someone died this morning in my family, my aunt died because she told me last week, I can’t go to the hospital right now because if I go, I’m going to get Corona and I’m going to, in fact, the whole family.[00:34:37] My grandma died a week ago at 98, man, and she, um. Her kids were allowed to see her finally. Mmm. After they had to like Pat, they had to get tested and all that other shit. Um, and then like the funeral, like nobody was allowed to go to it, the gathering of 10. So it was just basically her children and theirs and their spouses.[00:34:58] So like me and all of, she’s got like 25 plus grandkids. And even more great grandkids. She was 98, you know, and like none of us, none of us could even go to the funeral. Did you see it coming from months or is it something that happened? No, it wasn’t Corona related. She’s old. She’s 98. She’s had dementia for like five to 10 years.[00:35:21] Um, she’s lived in an assisted living home for like the last three years. So, you know, we, we knew it was calming, but then apparently like what had happened was she. I think she got pneumonia and then, but the doctors are like, no, we don’t think it’s Corona. Maybe it is. Maybe, you know, it’s, I’m like, what the fuck it was?[00:35:42] Maybe it wasn’t right. Like regardless, because of the, um, you know, the small gatherings order or whatever, like there couldn’t be any more than 10 people there. And so it was her kids and her and their spouses. Um, so it happened kind of fast, but it’s just, it’s just crazy for me to think like, you know, all of these people, not only the 30,000 people, what is it?[00:36:00] What’s the number? Right now, I think it’s like 33,000 or something. 30 something thousand people that died from Kroger virus. So over 30,000 deaths so far. I mean, if, if my, like if my grandma, for example, there’s, there’s other people that are dying for other reasons as well, and you can’t have your last moments.[00:36:20] No. Like it’s fucking crazy, dude. I think that last moments are overrated. I think that the best moments are weeks before your last moments, and me talking to my aunt last week is a lot better than talking to her. Right on her last moments, talking to her last week, it was like I wasn’t even expecting her to pass away.[00:36:41] I didn’t know she was. It’s going to be so sick now. It was just one week ago. I talked to her and she was fine. She was just talking about how they’re not going out there being really careful. They’re cleaning the groceries. Uh, my, my cousin is in charge of the grocery shopping and cleaning them and making sure nothing, it’s getting inside the house, but the fact is Pennsylvania is affected so much with the coronavirus.[00:37:08] I think they’ve got more numbers now than California and Pennsylvania is a. Smaller state. It’s a big state, but it’s a smaller state than California. So, um, she’s in Pennsylvania right now, and that is why she did not go get her normal routine doctor to check her up and make sure that she’s fine because of coronavirus.[00:37:30] I mean, that’s the real reason. We are like ending lives early. Because of coronavirus and that just goes back to that lady that I was talking to at the store. She said, Oh, I’m almost 70 it’s okay if it kills me. I’m like, not okay. People are sudden this and that. Well, that too. Of course. Yeah. Anyways, stay safe.[00:37:55] People. I want to talk about something else. Let’s talk about something nice. We’ve been talking and we’ve been hammering hard, pretty hard on the Corona virus stuff. Um, I want to talk about some, some lighter stuff. I want to talk about some good memories. Like I want to talk more about the travels. Like I want to share some travel stories, man.[00:38:11] Like, yeah. So how long were you in China? Like in total, cause you were there for awhile. Yeah. I’ve been living in Beijing for almost 10 years. It’s coming up on 10 years now, so yeah, it’s actually a full on nine years, but yet almost coming up on 10 years, and I really love Beijing as a city and coming there.[00:38:35] For vacation is also really fun. That’s how I originally fell in love with the place, because you know, going out clubbing, you know, you never know how your night is going to end. It’s the most exciting thing to go out and you just. Don’t know what will happen when you expect it to be home by 11 or 10 30 at night.[00:38:54] You’re like, yeah, this is a quiet night. I got to work tomorrow, seven in the morning, got to teach some classes, ABCD for the little babies or something. When I first came to China, this is what I was doing. But um, yeah, you just decide you’re going to be. Going out for a couple of drinks with your coworkers and then you ended up, you know, it’s seven in the morning and you are still out, and you’re like, well, now I gotta go to work.[00:39:19] I know like I was there for less than four. I was about three and a half. But, uh, you know, when I, when I went to China, I’d never been there. I’d never been to Beijing. There’ve been anywhere in China. My Asia experience was limited to Japan at that time. So I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t speak the language.[00:39:34] I didn’t know anybody. I just, I went because I was going to try to find my path, right? Find my passion or purpose or whatever. But one of the things that I found amazing was. The Chinese put such an importance on Guangxi, which is, you know, it’s a Chinese term that basically means relationships, right? And like that’s how they do business.[00:39:52] That’s how you like go places in the world, move up, whatever. A lot of building that she is sitting around a plastic table and shares outside of a restaurant. Eating a shitload of food, uh, drinking beer, you know, smoking everybody else’s cigarettes. Cause you know, they’ve all got regional cigarettes. Um, that’s the reason I started back smoking.[00:40:15] Actually. I didn’t smoke for nine years until I went to China. Um, now that’s a habit I gotta kick again. Um, but you gotta play with them, right? You gotta, you gotta play, you know, and you’re eating and drinking for hours, smoking cigarettes. Eventually the bite geo comes out, the Chinese rice wine, especially at those weddings.[00:40:31] You know, you got Joe with those grandmas that want to drink with you at the weddings. Like if it’s an old grandma, of course you’re going to drink with the old grandma. Like she only drinks every year, and she’s having a great day to that day, and you’re going to. Tell her you’re not going to drink with her.[00:40:48] So yeah, you have to drink the by Joe. I’ve never actually been to a Chinese wedding in China. How is that when you first get to the wedding, everyone is a little bit awkward and not really feeling really that like friendly. And then right about after everyone does like the first three toasts, they start warming up to you and as the only Y, the only foreigner there at the wedding, you’re getting asked to drink with everyone.[00:41:19] When I say everyone, I mean everyone’s, and you’ve got to tell them, Oh, shall eat yen nigga by Jack. Hi, she do Ty Gola. Alcohol is too high portion. I need to get less. Yeah. Like basically give me a small shot because alcohol is too high and I’m going to get super drunk. Yeah. And then those grandmas are saying, no.[00:41:43] Gone Bay and like full glass and drink it all. That’s what the grandmas are doing to you and you’re just like, Oh no, this is, this is not good. How many shots of by Joe? 8% alcohol. You’re feeling pretty ripped. You have it by Joe Berks. Come on. Right about. Now I want to describe by geo first, like, let me, so before we get into the Baidu of birds, let me describe what by geo looks, smells and tastes like.[00:42:13] Okay, so you can get by. GBG is the number one selling alcoholic drink in the world because it’s the drink of choice. It’s like a national drink of China, you know, purely by mass. Everyone drinks it at 1.6 billion people drink it. Yeah. You can get bottles of Baiji from his cheapest $2 to like thousands of dollars.[00:42:33] Right. Exactly. The, the cheaper stuff, but it all looks like water vodka when it’s clear. Right. Uh, the cheaper stuff smells like paint thinner, and I think it might even taste like paint thinner too, now that I think about it, like it says. It’s rough. It’s rough. So there’s a pineapple flavored by Joe that’s a little bit more easy to drink.[00:42:59] It still tastes horrible, but the pineapple one, you know what I’m talking about, right? It’s a pineapple flavored by Joe. Actually. It masks the taste a little bit. Yeah. That one is only around 35 to 40% alcohol, which is a lot more doable than the. Arigato by Joe Wood, which is the North Chinese stuff by Joe.[00:43:20] The Argo is like, that’s the real stuff that puts it hair on your chest, and it’s literally like. Rocket fuel. Once you save it automatically just makes your throat hurt and you know, you already feel your liver working really hard after just one sip of that stuff. The next day, you just kind of, if you can remember what happened that night, you’ll realize, yeah.[00:43:47] Yeah. That’s a big help though. Yeah. You’ll realize you don’t want to drink by Joe again for real until the next time they push you into doing it. Normally you’re not going to get pushed into drinking crappy by Joe. You’re going to get pushed into drinking the like. $50 range of by Joe, maybe 30 40 $50 range, so that’s a bit easier.[00:44:14] It’s a bit easier on the lungs and the stomach and the taste buds for sure. The biter that you’re talking about though, is the one that you get from the supermarket called . This is the bio that kills people’s liver a lot faster than the other by Joe that they say is. Better. But yeah, they’re all pretty bad for you.[00:44:32] I mean, directly translated means two fish head. Take everyone. It is, right? Yeah. No. So the best bio that you can get is in the Southern province. Made it like a, like a special old factory or whatever it’s, it’s called. Um. Oh, what’s it called? Mmm. Oh, sorry. There’s  and then there’s the, uh, again, no, I know. I know what you’re talking about.[00:45:04] I just can’t think of what it is right now. It’s, uh, uh, uh, shit. What the fuck is it? Hold on. I’ve drank it so many times. I know. We do. It’s, um, hold on. I’ll look it up. I can remember. I’m looking it up. I’m going to pay it. Uh, the really good brand of by Joe, which everybody drinks. It’s made in great Joe, I think.[00:45:31] No, no, it’s high. It’s called . I’m out of time. So Mount Tai by Joe is the one that they make you drink at the weddings typically, and there’s a very expensive Mount side by Joe, and then there’s the cheaper one, and normally you’re drinking the middle range wine that’s like $50 or $60 a bottle like Mount height can cost.[00:45:53] Around $1,000 if you get like a vintage bottle of now, Ty, or even a lot more than that. Um, I don’t know if you recall, but I, I produced a English premier league soccer event, uh, Manchester United versus Liverpool down in Melbourne. Then after that happened, I was working on putting on another event just like that in, um, Kwaito, which is right next to Shinjin.[00:46:19] Uh, next to Hong Kong. Like that area? No, clay with an H Joe. Yeah. Kwaito is like right next to Shenzhen. It’s kind of a suburb of Shenzhen. Anyways, uh, I went down to visit this guy, this, this investor guy, like four different times, and he, he owns like a bunch of different hotels and a bunch of businesses and shit.[00:46:42] Cheers. Cheers. Boom. Uh. And every time we went down there, he treated us to lunch in one of his hotels. So we had free Chinese food, but he also kept busting out this type of bio geo. It came in a box, you’d open the box, and I was a, it was a ceramic bottle with a seal that you had to crack. You had to like crack the seal to prove that it’s real shit.[00:47:11] And it’s not like bathtub bide, you know? But that’s high quality shit though. You know what I’m saying? Like you gotta crack the fucking ceramic seal on the top and then you can open it. Yeah, you gotta you gotta make sure that’s real. Because in China they got little fake alcohol everywhere. Man. Blind.[00:47:32] It’s like India and China both produce a lot of fake alcohol. Beer can be faked and it, Oh dude, die dude, beer. I can’t even, I’ve heard so much about Yanjing is like the bud light of China basically. Um. But, okay, so Yanjing maybe is like the Bush lighters. It’s like, it’s not that great, but it’s, it’s all over the place.[00:47:56] It’s cheap. Like you get these big, like one liter bottles basically. And I heard that there’s so much, um, counterfeit Yanjing that nobody even knows. The retailers don’t even know what’s real and what’s not. So like there’ve been times that multiple times where I’d buy two bottles of Yanjing. Right? Take a sip of one and I take a sip of the other one, one after the other, and it seems completely different.[00:48:22] Yeah, fucking nuts, dude. But like they just don’t produce the beer very well. Like it could be 3.3% to higher. That’s what they say on the bottle. Like, so for Chinese alcohol, they don’t measure the amount of alcohol. I think they just row. The stuff in there into the batch and the main, whatever you get is what you get.[00:48:45] You know, sometimes you can get a really good Yanjing and Qingdao and then another beer could be so bad and really awful tastes. He cannot even drink even to subsidize because it’s just so nasty. Yeah, but chin chin dies a little bit more consistent though, because the Qingdao beer comes from the city of Qingdao, which was once a German.[00:49:06] Uh, I don’t know if it was a German port or there, there was some German control there sometimes. So Qingdao down actually plays and acts a lot more like a German city than it does a Chinese city. Yeah. Qingdao is really nice city to visit in China and very touristy, and they do have some tourists are touristy architecture.[00:49:28] Some of it is fake and some of it actually is real. Like the church, I guess is real. Apparently that is like from the early 19 hundreds it was around doing like the boxer rebellion kind of era. So actually Ching dollars made all throughout China. It’s not just made in Qingdao. They make it all around, so it’s not right.[00:49:47] So it could be faked and it could also be made for real. It doesn’t matter. Like which beer. It’s better to drink the local beer when you’re in China because you know it’s more likely to be. Really made there cause it’s cheaper if it’s locally produced. They don’t have to import it. Like a lot of fake beers are a Qingdao actually.[00:50:06] Cause Qingdao is a more desired brand. So if in fact he’s going to make a beer, they’re going to make Qingdao. Oh, you’re actually worse off getting the Chine doubt. If you were in a city. It’s in like, um. No shit and John or a city that’s in inner Mongolia or dong Bay like, Hey, long Chong and these places, you’re a lot better off getting the local beer over the Qingdao beer because chin dock could be made by the factory cause[00:50:35] Brand that they really like to tap the lies on these, these fake beer makers and the beer could be fine. You can drink fake beer and you’d be fine, but you know, one out of a hundred batches or one out of a thousand batches are going to be the beer that has got a little bit too much formaldehyde that ends up killing some people.[00:50:55] And you know, there’s been foreigners that have gone to these countryside places in China. That drink the, and they just have the worst hangover after drinking five or $16. It’s even the same as being in a place like Beijing. Like you’d go to the like, so there’s huge clubs in Beijing, right? And they’re all right around the soccer stadium.[00:51:15] They’re all like right. Literally right around the soccer stadium. And they offer free alcohol, free liquor to, to foreigners. And nine times out of 10 it’s fake shit. And you wake up with the worst hangover ever. Uh, that’s not a good idea to get the alcohol from them. You can get one free booze free for a reason.[00:51:35] Yeah, you could, you could get one or two drinks, but you will feel it in the morning. But don’t be drinking that one all night. You will feel it for two or three days. So like I would say that, yeah, two drinks from the free place. It could be okay if you’re just drinking the rum, the Bacardi is. Maybe not fake.[00:51:54] It’s what somebody promoters have said, like the party said, maybe not. We don’t know if it’s fake. If the Procardia is fake, that’s okay. It’s made with the sugar and it’s not the same as whiskey where they gotta like get that concoction made just right. The chemicals or Cardi is just, you know, sugar and it’s rough.[00:52:17] I mean, rum is just a lot more easy to make. And not mess up then having fake whiskey, and I can understand they want to make their fake whiskey, but no, actually there’s one club I went to that has got a really good blueberry flavored whiskey. That is one that doesn’t give me a hangover and it’s free. So there’s a club called, Mmm.[00:52:43] Oh wait, what’s it called? Oh, okay. Um, it’s been a while since I’ve been there. Elements goatee, don’t teach. Shimmer. So go to your West gate. And that’s where most of the clubs aren’t as something like elements. It’s circle. Uh, it’s not circle. It’s next to circle though. It’s the newest one. Like, I guess that one.[00:53:07] You probably have been there before. I went away for two years though, dude. So, I mean, it’s been around for two years. It’s been there for two years. Anyways, sorry that I can’t remember the name, but, uh, no worries. Uh, it’s the same place that live used to be, you know, the, it’s called life. I think they remodeled it and turn it into a new place.[00:53:29] And so live was the biggest club in Beijing for that short amount of time. You know, it’s just like, who has the biggest club is the best live bar. Live bar was massive, and now that they reopened it again, we branded it. I guess a new owner or something and yeah, they, uh, call it something else, and that is the place where foreigners can actually get a free drink and have a whiskey that’s blueberry flavored whiskey.[00:53:57] It’s a bottle that’s made, I think in Taiwan or China. It’s a Chinese whiskey or Taiwanese whiskey. It’s really good though. Uh, anyways, it’s a really off topic thing. It’s pretty silly to talk about a blueberry whiskey in one club in Beijing. But that’s okay. Mark it right there. Exactly. But I mean, if you can see, if you can get 1% of the population in China, you’re fucking made.[00:54:18] Right? Like that’s what people always say, but no. So, so we went off on this little tangent, but I’m sitting here thinking like, the whole, like, the whole thing about that was like, this guy, uh, treated us to, you know, lunch and Baiji or they had a crack with a ceramic, like a little off the top of ceramic and had to crack it with a hammer kind of thing.[00:54:37] And he would go around from person to person. Like we had a table of like, you know, the big round table, right? With the lazy Susan kind of thing in the middle, like we so often see in China, right? So you can move the food around. There’s probably like 10 people at the table and he’s just going from person to person to person, just like shot anybody.[00:54:55] Like before we do the shot, he would say a little something nice. Oh, I’m so glad you’re here. You know you’re a vital part of this thing, blah, blah, blah. Shot. Alright, next person. Oh, I’m so glad you’re here. You’re part of this thing, but shot, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Then he makes his rounds and then the next bird, like the person who was right starts making his rounds and then the person after that makes their rounds and then it’s just a whole fucking circle.[00:55:20] So like, you know, you get. Every single person is just getting fucked, you know? And it’s, and it’s, it’s one of those things that I’ve experienced in China at least. I mean, I’m sure you feel the same way. Maybe not, but like in China, in America, it’s like if you’re the guy that gets too drunk, you’re that guy, right?[00:55:40] Yeah. Nobody wants to be in China. If you get really fucking drunk, that’s like a badge of honor. Yeah.[00:55:52] No, but they respect you for it. They respect you for it. They want to keep you around. They can trust you more when you get drunk with them and like hang and not give away cigarettes, like to be the whorehouse and get to go do their things that though her house and everyone’s going to keep their secrets even though.[00:56:11] Everyone’s got a family at home. It’s, it’s kind of a trustworthy thing. It’s just in general, this is a lot of Asian culture, like Japanese and Chinese and Thai and whatever, Korean and whatever. I mean, I even think of it like this, like growing up, I’ve got two brothers, right? Growing up. If, if me and my brothers did something naughty or bad together, then we had that on each other and stuff.[00:56:36] One of them would try to tell him the other one. Oh, well, I can do this too, or I can do that. You know, like, fuck up. Don’t say a word because I can do, I can tell you about that. You remember that time? It’s kind of like that, I think, you know exactly. Like, I got one finger pointing at you, but three fingers are funny right back at me and we’re all fine cause we’re all going to be in trouble.[00:57:04] If you give away any secrets, I can trust them. When they got secrets from them, you got dirt on each other, you know, you can move forward. Exactly. Um, I want to talk a little bit about, um. Some of these. I love Southeast Asia. I want to just talk about that dude. I’ve been looking like the last week I’ve been looking at like cost of living in places cause I’m just like, once this shit all blows over, I’m just going to fucking move to a fucking Island and Southeast Asia.[00:57:34] But you know, something like looking at different spots or whatever, but like, you know, you’ve been at, you’ve spent significant time in Southeast Asia. Yeah. You’ve made some videos about like me and Mar and Malaysia and other places, Vietnam, I’m sure. Um, I’m just kind of interested in like, you know, where, where have you been?[00:57:53] And like, tell me your kind of impressions of each of these places because this is, it’s fantasy time since we can’t go anywhere.[00:58:02] Yeah. I mean, so to break it down, you’ve got Southeast Asia, which is probably one of the most diverse places in the world for having like so much cool, great food that’s original. That’s unique. Um, the epicenter is Thailand. Like Bangkok is the melting pot of Thailand. So yeah, Bangkok is great for the food.[00:58:24] And then you got Cambodia, which is also a cool place to go, at least quite a few years ago. It was a really awesome place to go. It’s changed a lot. So I can’t say that it still is. Amazing experience that it used to be. Well, yeah, Vietnam is still amazing. It’s probably the second best food in all of Southeast Asia.[00:58:45] Just like amazing, absolute gourmet French food and Asian food mixed together in a melting pot. So don’t get me started on Southeast Asia. I really love getting you started on Southeast Asia. Let me ask you about Cambodia. I’ve been to Cambodia. Okay. I spent, since you went there five, five, five years ago now, five years ago, I spent eight days in Cambodia.[00:59:12] I love Cambodia. Five years ago. Well, let me, well, let me tell you, I, um, I spent four days in SIEM reap where Angkor is anchor watt, whatever, all the time. Yeah. Anchor Watson. That’s about as much time as you want to spend in SIEM reap. I started running out of shit to do. Yeah. It’s got some fun like bars and stuff.[00:59:30] Some pub. Yeah. Bar street. Yeah, sure. Um, I’ve got plenty more to talk about when I put out my story, which I’m working on, um, about that stuff. But like non Penn, the capital city, that was, I spent four days there as well. And that was a completely different experience for me. Man. It’s a little bit dangerous there, but like if you just watch it back, kind of like, Oh, you’re going to be fine.[00:59:54] Well, like that, the minute I fucking landed, dude, like I was taking a took, took from the airport to my hostel and, uh, I just felt like everybody was looking at me like, they’re either three, they’re hungry or they’re plotting something. Yeah. And sure enough, my phone got jacked and nom pen. I, you know, I’d already been through Southeast Asia for like two months and then a non pan of all places.[01:00:21] My phone got jacked. Yeah, no, it’s definitely like the South America of Southeast Asia. It’s a little bit wild West over there. I don’t know. Another place that’s got so much stuff going on as far as crime goes. Out of all of. Southeast Asia. I mean, there’s some pockets in the Philippines that could be not so good, honestly.[01:00:47] And even Vietnam could be bad in some areas. Cities. And Thailand too. And you know, everyone’s got some pockets, but you know, but Kim, Cambodia, Cambodia is a unique though. And here’s why. Like if you understand the history of Cambodia, right? Like the late seventies or the Kemiah Rouge, when POL pot took over and said were declaring this year zero and they committed genocide on their own, people, you know, killing, they were killing everyone that was educated.[01:01:14] Plus their parents, you know, their grand parents, grandparents, whatever, plus their children and all that shit. Um. So to quote poll pod, it was something like completely killing the tree from branch to root, right? They eliminated an entire multiple generations of educated people, you know, so like I feel for Cambodia, I love scenery.[01:01:40] I want to go back to Cambodia and hope that it’s getting better and that they have been getting a lot better over the last five, 10 years, from my understanding. Um, but there’s a whole generation from like 79 to like. The late nineties basically that it was a country of just uneducated people. And so when you, I mean, when you have some of that, sometimes the crime can be a little bit higher because people are struggling for food.[01:02:04] They’re struggling for their way of life. You know, they’re, they’re struggling too. They’re struggling. Everyone’s struggling. The entire country is struggling together. And this communistic a utopia. Facts are the facts right. I was just going to talk about these days, Cambodia is changing and it’s not in a good way.[01:02:25] So you, it is. Okay. You know, SIEM reap is almost the same as it always was. It’s got more Chinese tourists, which is really good. I like Chinese tourists bring a lot of cash and a lot

In this week’s Saturday School, we break our sixth season streak of epic, emotional and honorable love stories, and as we hit the turn of the century, we look at “Asian films about Asian Americans” from an entirely different, warped mirror. We’re talking about 1999’s “Gen X Cops” and 2000’s “Gen Y Cops,” which is like a who’s who of Asian American/Canadian/Australian actors who briefly ruled the Hong Kong film industry, when the powers-that-be there were thirsting for new talent and caught some ABC fever. You got Daniel Wu, Maggie Q, Nicholas Tse, Stephen Fung, Edison Chen, Jaymee Ong, Terrence Yin -- and post-“Clueless,” pre-“Anchorman” Paul Rudd (“the dark days of Paul Rudd”) with bleached blond hair playing an FBI agent that says things like “You're the one going to the bamboo Alcatraz!” But back to the ABCs: Their Cantonese isn’t great. Their English-language acting is only debatably better. But they’re hot, they don’t give a fuck, and that’s kind of exactly what Hong Kong needed for this new type of hero leading high-octane action flicks with explosions, evil foreign adversaries (like Paul Rudd), nonsensical plot twists AND ROBOTS. History showed that this archetype of an Asian American too-cool-for-school sexually-liberated renegade, a la Edison Chen, wasn’t going to represent the future of the Hong Kong film industry. And probably for good reason, because Asian Americans from the other side of the ocean might have found it all a little bit embarrassing. But looking back, for a brief moment, Asian Americans were ruling the box office in Hong Kong. How did they pull it off? Did they totally improvise their own English lines because nobody behind the camera could tell them otherwise? Probably. And it was kind of glorious.

Courtney talks with Jared about Athletic Training in international schools, interning with the Philadelphia Flyers and his company Good Practice, LLC. If you work with children as a teacher, as a coach, as a field trip chaperone, this conversation is for you! 04:36 Promoting Athletic Training 08:53 MAIS Conference: there is something for everyone 12:45 I may have helped the Flyers win the Stanley Cup 15:01 Working abroad in China 18:41 A part of the whole community 22:19 Using wellness as a tool to collaborate 23:19 Good Practice LLC: advocate for sports safety 31:26 Their English is going to be better than your French Links:https://www.mais-web.org/https://www.goodpracticellc.com/ https://twitter.com/GoodPracticeLLC

Biathlon Boycott Find out why the US biathlon team are boycotting a World Cup event in Russia this month, despite the IOC lifting their ban. A member of the US team, Clare Egan, tells us they’re making a stand against doping in sport and believe the IOC lifted the sanctions too soon. Zimbabwe to Zambia in a chicken wagon We find out how the footballers of Matabeleland qualified for the ConIFA World Cup in England in May - a tournament for nations and regions not recognised by FIFA. Their English coach, Justin Whalley, tells us the story of their qualification and the fund-raising taking place so they can take part in the finals. Peace in our time Peace Proscovia was never meant to leave her village in Uganda and never meant to get a University degree either. But now she captains her country in Netball - and will do so at the Commonwealth Games in April - and is studying for a Masters in Marketing. Get in the hole ball World No 3 Justin Thomas has a fan ejected for shouting while playing a shot at the Honda Classic. So should golf fans be allowed to openly root against players as in other sports? Or have the players put up with shouting from the galleries for too long? The former tour professional Andrew Murray and golf writer James Corrigan offer their opposing views. Going downhill fast Millie Knight is a visually-impaired ski racer who represented Great Britain at the Winter Paralympics in Sochi aged just 15, coming fifth in both the slalom and giant slalom. Since then she 's won the World Championships in Italy and is a big favourite for a medal at the 2018 games in Pyeongchang. As they hurtle down the slope, Millie and her guide Brett Wild talk via a Bluetooth headset.

节目组：The Screen Age 荧屏时代 节目名称：Rogue One: A Star War StoryF: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Screen Age. This is your old friend Flat.B: This is Bob Bee. Flat, did you see any good films recently? I heard that there are many star-studded films.F: Oh, I don't quite like those kinds of movies，it's just meaningless commercial films with embarrassing point.B: I agree with you. Even the science fiction movie, Arrival, is so boring that I almost fall asleep when I saw it.F: But I would like to recommend to you the prequel of Star War, Rogue One. I almost became fans of Star War.B: So, why not introduce it to our audiences.F: Sure, let's begin.F: The story begins in the early years of Galactic Empire. Orson Krennic, a high-ranking Imperial military officer and a group of people come to find Galen Erso. His aim is to get Galen to come back to the work for the Empire.B: In order to protect his daughter, Jyn Erso, Galen tells her to run away. Jyn's mother is killed when she tries to stop Orson and Galen is taken away.F: Then, fifteen years passed, the Empire is plan to create a weapon capable of destroying entire planets.Meanwhile, on the planet Jedha, a pilot who has defected from the Empire and wants to join the Rebels. He escaped from the empire and carries a message from Galen which is really important.B: On the planet Wobani, Jyn is being transferred with other prisoners, but suddenly Rebel forces break in and free them. And then they go to the moon Yavin 4, the location of Rebel base of operations.F: The Rebels think that finding Saw Gerrera and the captured pilot is paramount to find out what the Empire is plotting. So they go to Jedha. On the way finding Saw, they meet Chirrut Imwe, a blind warrior and Baze Malbus, they help them to find Saw.B: After they find the pilot, Jyn gets the information form a hologram sent by her father. In the message, her father says that there is fail-safe in the weapon, Death Star, explode it and the entire thing dies.F: Knowing the important message, Jyn and a dozen other rebel fighters head to Scarif to find the Death Star plans. And they named their ship as Rogue One.B: After a furious war, they finally get the plan and send it to the Rebels. However the planet Scarif is destroyed and all the fighters are sacrificed.F: I must say, I'm impressed by the performance of Wen Jiang and Donnie Yen. To be honest, before seeing this film, I think that if Chinese actors go to play Hollywood film, it will be embarrassed. Not only the language but also the performance style. But in this film, the two Chinese actors really did a good job. Their English is good and the two characters played by them are really cute.B: Donnie Yen also show his wonderful action performance in this film. Seems like he is carrying the Chinese kongfu to the galaxy.F: The main actress is played by Felicity Jones, who also played the wife of Hawking in The Theory of Everything.B: This young actress really got a talent. And her two front teeth really drew my attention.B: It is said that in a good prequel, everyone should die in the end of the movie. So Rogue One is a good prequel. It had everything required to make a great movie.F: Indeed. Even I haven't seen the previous Star War movies, I can feel the excitement. When I heard the sentence, “May the force be with you”, I was as excited as the die-hard SW fans were.B: It's better than The Force Awakens, without too many light sabers and Skywallkers.F: Time flies, so this is today's movie, hope you like it.B: And may the force always be with you.F: 最后感谢制作张安康。See you next time, Bye.B: Bye.节目监制：刘逸超 编辑：赛碧乐 毕鑫屹 播音：赛碧乐 毕鑫屹 制作：张安康

STEVE: Welcome, everyone. Today I have a very special guest. I'm very excited. I actually have only met her only two weeks ago. It was pretty cool actually. I felt an immediate connection. Anyway, this is Jennifer Goodwin. How you doing? JEN: Good. How are you? STEVE: Fantastic. I'm doing really, really well. I was scrolling through Facebook, it was about two weeks ago, and ... I don't know if I've told you this yet, but I was scrolling through Facebook, and I saw an ad that you had out. It was ad for vets. I can't remember exactly what the ad was saying, but it said something like, "Hey, here is a way for vets to launch their businesses online." I immediately was like, "Whoa, this is so cool. Someone's going for this market?" I didn't know anyone who's been going for that. It's such a needed thing, being in the military myself. How did you even get into that? JEN: Absolutely. I grew up very patriotic. I didn't realize until this year that the veterans were my ideal client. How it happened was, I was always trying to help veterans that were, military guys and gals that needed help with the internet marketing and getting themselves to the next level. Most recently, I was volunteering at a local homeless veteran shelter where some guys and gals were in transition. I said ... Well, a little back story. Three years ago I was on a motorcycle, my first ride, and I was life-flighted off the highway. STEVE: Oh, my gosh. Three years ago? JEN: Three years ago. Twenty-five, 30 minutes into my first ride with a friend on Highway 95. We were set at 70 miles per hour. Road debris came out of everywhere. An 18-wheeler had blown his tire, and we couldn't avoid one of the pieces. It flattened the back tire. Needless to say, I took a nice, pricey helicopter ride to the trauma center, so I actually lost my business. I was down for a lot of time. Financially, physically, emotionally, I had to go through that trauma. I had a lot of time to think through in recovery, and I made a few decisions about my business when I got back to it, which I really just got back to it full-time this past January. I decided that I was going to partner with the right people and never sit on my ideas and make sure that I was launching all the things that I had written down in a book and that were collecting dust. One of the other pieces was that I was going to give back. Even though I was sort of starting over, I knew what I was doing. I had 15 years in the business. I was relaunching, but I still wanted volunteering and giving back to be part of that. I was literally driving to a veteran center in Jacksonville, Florida and just camping out in the chow hall every Thursday and saying, "Whatever you have, just bring it to me. Just bring me your website needs. Bring me your resume needs. You got a new computer and you need to know how to run it? Just bring it to me." Even some of the staff there who weren't veterans would say, "Hey, I'm going for this other job interview," and so I just made myself available every Thursday. It didn't feel like work. Then fast forward a couple months. A friend of mine that's pretty well-known in the veteran space, he's on the History Channel and got quite a following on social media, said, "I've got four veterans that need, like, yesterday." Just working through those clients, it just didn't feel like work. It just felt so easy, because they're so loyal. They're so grateful. Usually what they're inventing, we're writing about, is something I believe in, so I re-branded my business to be all about serving veterans. STEVE: That's incredible. I love that. I've noticed that a lot of the people that I interview, they never ask permission to go do something like that. You just showed up. You just sit down and every Thursday ... How long did you do that before you went to that re-brand? JEN: I only did that for a couple months, because I actually ended up moving out of the area and haven't found a new local shelter to go help with. Let me see. I believe I started ... January, February, March. Probably about two and a half months into that I re-branded. I was also talking with some coaches. Actually, one of the coaches I was speaking with, a female coach, she was a veteran ... or she is a veteran. She said, "Jen, I got my start helping my fellow Army soldiers, starting their businesses when they got out." I said, "This is my ideal client, the more I think about it." I said, "Is it that easy?" She said, "Yeah." Literally, within 24 hours ... I couldn't even wait to re-brand everything. I went to the team and to the social media images, and I started changing it all up. The first batch was a little bit rough and amateur. I just wanted to get camouflage in there. STEVE: Yeah. Yeah. JEN: That's probably one of the ones you saw or maybe one of the newer ones. Yeah, it was pretty quick. STEVE: Yeah. That's incredible. It's interesting that that's the way it worked out. I remember when I went through basic ... I'm obviously business-minded. I really enjoy it. It's my obsession a little bit. I was going through basic training, and it's hard at certain points. One of the things that kept me going mentally and emotionally was talking about business ideas with all these other guys. I ended up having it, and all these guys that would sit around, and we would just talk about some different strategies. To this day, I still talk to some of them, and they're trying to do business stuff. It's definitely clearly an awesome market. A lot of them are go-getters. Anyways, that's super cool. That's fantastic. JEN: Yep. STEVE: One of the things I've noticed too, though, is that immediately ... You were doing the same thing with me. I was blown away with that, "Hey, do you need help with this? Do you have VAs for this? I have teams for this." You are an absolute master with VAs. How did you get that way? JEN: Thank you for saying that. I love helping people. They ask me, what's my agenda sometimes, very few, but I say, "I just like getting a break from the paying clients, who are so demanding." It's like a break to just pull away and just go help people for free with no expectations, so thank you for that. I have been an entrepreneur my whole life. My father was an entrepreneur, made some money in the door and window business. Very early on ... Well, not too early. I guess my late 20's, because I went and got an architectural degree, a drafting degree, from 26 to 28, but as soon as I came out of that, I worked for someone else for six months, and that was it. I had worked for people previously, from 16 to 28, but I knew at that moment I did not want to work for somebody else, and I couldn't work for somebody else. It just felt like my soul was in jail. STEVE: Yeah. I like that. JEN: I left the corporate world, and I was working for an engineering company, and I co-advertised. I didn't even think you could do this, but I rented an exhibitor space at the kitchen and bath show in Orlando, Florida, way back when, and shared it with one of my competitors. I was turning away 95% of my lead. I was so lucky, because what I was providing was CAD drawings and artist renderings to interior designers and kitchen designers. They didn't have anybody that was serving them. Usually people that were drafts people were going to work for architects and engineers, and so the designer industry was left hanging. I filled that void. I was turning away so much business, I knew back then that I had to learn how to scale my business and learn how to use the software that was out there that was going to help me scale my business by leveraging the tools and the people. Very early on I started to outsource to other drafters and just caught the bug of outsourcing and marking up the work and being the middle man really. I was outsourcing right away. I ran with the CAD services for about four or five years. After teaching myself everything on the internet, everything that I could at that time ... The internet was much smaller then. STEVE: Yeah. JEN: It was easier to master. I re-branded into Internet Girl Friday, and I've been doing that ever since. Again, I did lose my business for about two and a half years, but I've been back at it now, and I have virtual assistants and developers. It's great, because in my mind that's the only way to scale your business, is to have a team to support you. That's what we're doing. STEVE: Yeah, and you clearly have that. It's so fascinating, though. I wish I could pull up the text real quick that you sent me. It was a long list of stuff that you were asking me if I needed help with. I was like, "Man, she's got the hook-ups." JEN: Yeah, I would say, if it touches the web, we can do it and mean it. People come to me and say, "Well ..." I have friends that, you know how the friends and family never know what you're doing with the internet, and they don't get it. STEVE: Yeah. JEN: I have a friend that called me. I said, "Listen, I've got 20 minutes to talk. What's up?" He said, "Sounds like you're too busy and you can't take on my work." I said, "No, I have a team for that. I can do it. We can do it." I'm hiring people all the time. There's no shortage of people out there that want to work, whether they're US-based or they're offshore. There's hundreds of thousands of workers out there that ... You can go to Fiverr. You can go to so many different sites and get people to help you in your business, and I take advantage of that. STEVE: That's amazing. When I was in college, that's really when I started getting the bug for this. Well, that's when I started getting traction, I should say. I always had the bug. I went and I started hiring these different VAs. My buddy and I, we were building this Smartphone insurance business, and we went and we hired out this guy. He was just like, he wasn't very good. We paid him $500 to build this really small thing. It wasn't big at all, and we got it back and it was awful, like, "What the heck?" That's why I started using click funnels, so I could do it on my own. Then another time came up and another time came up. I was like, "Man, I'm really striking out with these VAs." I'm curious how it is that you actually go find good ones, because that's a skill in and of itself that I don't think people realize you need to have. Not all VAs obviously are built the same. What process are you taking up? What are you having them do? How are you vetting the VAs for your vets? JEN: There's a couple different ways. I hate to say this, but I don't like the big outsourcing sites. I think it's really hard to find that needle in the haystack, and you have to spend a lot of time sorting through people that are really just looking at the dollars per hour; right? They're like, "No, I can't make anything less than $8 an hour." They overbid. I just don't like those sites. I never had great luck with them ever. STEVE: That's totally the opposite than what everyone else says, so that's interesting. JEN: I've done it for 15 years. If I had an army of 100 virtual assistants, do you know how much money I'd be making? If it was that easy, I would have just hired a team of people from there, but I've spoken to people for 15 years from those big sites. What I find works for me is I enter a couple of virtual assistant groups on Facebook. Whenever I have a need for somebody, I post the job on my blog post, and I'll send a link out to the virtual assistant groups and say, "Hey, by the way, this week I'm looking to talk to people that have skills in ..." whatever skill I'm looking for that week. That's worked out well, because I only get a handful. I might get 10, 15, 20 applicants. It's totally manageable. I have a forum on the blog post. I'm not going to field emails or phone calls or be scattered. I want them to just dump their info into a form, and then I can go back and look at, and I can say, "All right. I'd love to talk to these three out of 10 on Skype," or somehow. They say, "Hire two and fire one." Try a couple people out just on a small ... I work through baby steps when it comes to hiring a virtual assistant. Let's take one tiny task, not, "Oh, I found you. Here's all my money. Here's all my tasks. Talk to you in a week." That will just go wrong every time. You want to start with, "Can you contact me on Skype," because that's a requirement. That's my office. If they tell me they don't have Skype, they're out. It's that simple. You have to work my way in my company with my tools. I'm flexible, but you have to show up in my time zone. You have to speak my language. We start at the very beginning and make sure that those pieces are there before moving on to, "Okay, here's how you get into my project management system, and here's where you find your first task." I work closely alongside them and say, "Stay with me right here on Skype. Tell me, 'Jennifer, I'm starting Task A right now, and I plan to be done in 15 minutes, and I'll ping you back when I'm done, so you can review it.'" It's really micromanaged in the first week. As you get more comfortable and as they're trained a little bit more, then they can work on their own time. I literally do that every morning for about two hours, Monday through Friday, from, roughly, 9 to 11 every day, which is a lot of time when you think about it. I'm also mentoring virtual assistants, so I'm not paying the ones that I mentor that I identify in the group as being really smart and might have come from 15, 20 years of past corporate experience, so they have skills. They just don't realize how to translate them to the internet. Again, I love helping people, so I say, "Come on in as an apprentice. You can follow along. You can invite your friends to sit in your house and watch. It doesn't matter." I've hired people from that group as well. STEVE: Wow. That's fascinating. If the person is good, they might have friends that are good. Might as well bring the friends along and train them too. JEN: Yeah. I tell them, "Listen, I'm looking to build teams, so if you already know someone ..." I had this conversation just last night with one of Filipino VAs. She's amazing. I said, "I'm about to hire a few more, so if you know anybody ..." She's like, "Well, actually, I do have three assistants, and they work in my house with me. It's my goal to help these single moms that need some more income to get going." I said, "Great. Let's ramp them up." Yeah. STEVE: Awesome. That's fantastic. That's amazing. Eventually, what started happening was I was like, man, I literally have spent thousands and thousands of dollars on VAs for stuff that was not very good work. I was not happy with it. I started going through, not the same process at all. That's genius. I'm going to have to ... That's absolutely incredible. I'm going to have to think more about that and try and figure out how I can do that too, or I'll just ask you, hire you to do it. Do you have a particular freelance or VA site, I guess, that you like more than others, Fiver, Freelancer, Upwork? JEN: I love Fiverr. Actually, this morning before this podcast, I was looking on Fiverr for a virtual assistant but only because in the virtual assistant groups that I'm in on Facebook, I saw someone saying, "I'm not getting any traction as a VA on Fiverr. What am I doing wrong?" I clicked on the link which took me to their Fiverr account, and I said, "I'm willing to try you out. Contact me on Skype." Again, that's my first requirement. I use Fiverr for other services. If my dev team is too busy with some bigger projects, and I need to knock out some quick keyword research or a quick image, I can go to Fiverr and I can find it. It's just like any other service where you can see the ratings, but for some reason they have, they've made their user interface so easy to navigate and quickly see, "Oh, wow, they've had 200 projects. They're five stars on all the reviews for all those projects. I'm pretty sure they're returning good work, and it's dollars." Who can't lose $5; right? We spend that on a coffee sometimes. It's different from going to the big sites like Upwork and saying, you have to put your whole job description. You have to say, this is 30 hours a month or 30 hours a week, whether it's permanent. They make you jump through so many hoops before you even find someone. Then you might get a thousand applicants, and you have to sort through all that. It's too much work, where you can go to Fiverr and just browse really quickly and click on someone. You don't even have to click on someone and contact them, but you can just put your mouse over their little portfolio image, and it shows you how many jobs, how many stars. Very quickly you can jump into having an assistant or a vendor. I know there's a lot of controversy with using offshore vendors versus keeping it in the USA, and I do keep most of my work, 99% of my work, in the USA. Even my Indian development team is in the USA, strangely. When you're restarting, which is the mode I'm in now after the accident, you need that payroll break; right? You want to have assistants so you can scale your business, but you can't go out and afford the $25-an-hour United States VA, so it does help to go offshore. I do like the Filipino virtual assistants. They are super-smart, super-talented. Their English is perfect. They are very friendly and very accommodating. There's no language barrier like I've experienced with other countries. They're extremely affordable. Here's a little trick that I've done. I've gone to Wikipedia and typed up, "Countries with the lowest hourly rate," and it's mind-blowing and scary that there's some countries or areas of their countries where 50-cents-per-hour is the minimum wage. STEVE: Oh, man. JEN: That's not saying you can just go there and find a virtual assistant. Virtual assistants have to be a booming industry in a certain country for it to be valuable to you, but the Philippines are great. STEVE: That's incredible. There's a workaround that I have found that helps. I did a whole podcast on this actually earlier, because it's a frustrating thing to go through. The biggest things I've learned from Russell, you got to have people. The biggest things I've learned from my own things, you've got to have people. Otherwise, you as the entrepreneur get bogged down. You can't handle all of the tasks. This is definitely valuable information to hear. There was a workaround that I, to using VAs that I was figuring out too. Do you use Freelancer.com much? JEN: I have, but, again, I didn't use it much. STEVE: Yeah. It's a little bit challenging. There was one feature that saved my butt on a lot of different things, and it was the fact that you can post contests. That's actually pretty cool. I needed all these different images made, or I needed a tee-shirt design. I basically said, "Hey, I really want to motivate people, so here's the prize is $100 and everyone submit your work. I'm just going to choose one guy." It was fantastic. I got 80 or 90 submissions, and the whole week during the contest, I could talk back to them and say, "This looks good but change this." "This looks good but change this." I could rate all of their work, which was public to everyone else. All the work, the freelancers started pushing towards a different path as they watched my comments to other people. That's really the only trick I have for VAs. I haven't done anything else that you do with it. It kind of works, but what you do is a lot cooler, actually. JEN: I don't know. The contests sound pretty cool. I remember seeing them on Topcoder years ago when I was looking to build a software, and someone said, "If you don't have unlimited budget to build the software, present it as a contest." I thought that was fascinating, where they have a contest for one part of the software and a contest for another part. Then they have a contest at the end to put all the parts together. I thought that was fascinating. STEVE: That's incredible. Hey, there's a lot of people obviously who are trying to get into this space who want to do what you're doing. I know you alluded to it before, but what would be the first step to getting a good VA? JEN: I would definitely check out the virtual assistant groups in Facebook. It's a close-knit community. People can vouch for other people. There's some names at the top that know a lot of the VAs in the industry, so they actually have requests for proposal boards that you could sign up to and submit your work. Then you know you're getting a qualified VA, or you can find me and I'll point you in the right direction. I would check sites like FreeeUp. That's with three E's, F-R-E-E-E-U-P.com. STEVE: I've never heard of it. Awesome. JEN: It's new. It's getting a face-lift. The site is only about eight months old, I think. They've got some big plans. Nathan Hirsch, who's out of Orlando, Florida, he's doing very well with it. You can get VAs as low as $5 and up to $50 per hour, depending on what skillset you require. Check out the Filipino ... I can't remember the domain names off the top of my head, but there are a lot of Filipino virtual assistant sites out there that you can just Google it up, and it will pull up some of the top ones. They really are a great crowd for your everyday administrative stuff. I'm literally teaching my VAs now how to set up some of the beginning integrations of click funnel. STEVE: That's awesome. JEN: I have a checklist, and they can go through and connect the SMTP and the domain and do some of the basic setup. Then I can take it from there and build a funnel. STEVE: Fantastic. Just because you mentioned it, how are you using it with click funnels? I went through and looked at your site, and it looks fantastic. It's very clean. HowToGoVirtual; right? Dot-net? JEN: That's the academy site that we're launching. The services site, where all of our clients go through is InternetGirlFriday.com, and we're just like any other entrepreneur. We have multiple different sites. What happened was, I needed to get all of this information into other people's hands. I've got 15-plus years on the internet. Of course, you want to package that up and provide it online as a video course or some type of academy environment. I created a class to teach people the four steps of getting your business website launched, because you know how customers get confused about the internet. The internet is so big now, and there's so many steps, and the algorithms. They get approached by so many vendors. "What should I be paying for," and I said, "I've got to find a way to simplify this." Back in 2010, I think it was, I came up with a 12-step plan. Just a way to categorize everything you do on the internet came to 12 categories. That's it. I just wanted to show people, "Okay, Step 1 is your research and your keyword research and your competitive analysis. Step 12, at the end, is analytics." Everything falls somewhere in between, so that they had something that they could follow along. Not that every strategy goes in order, but the first four I call, "The foundation." You've got to do your keyword research if you're going to launch a website, and your competitive analysis, and you have to know what people are looking for, what your target market is looking for. Step 1. Step 2, building your website in a blueprint first. I think that's so important, because you need to get the SEO and the keywords that were revealed in the first step into your website. If you just hand your website over to someone, they might make it beautiful for the humans, but they're neglecting what robots need to see through Google. STEVE: Right. JEN: That's Step 2, build the blueprint. Step 3, build the website. Step 4, connect it to the search engines and some directories. Now you've got your foundation to go offsite and do all your marketing with whatever strategy you're deploying. I package that up into a course. I'm glad that I had the time off that I did, because when I came back to it, there was click funnel, and it was like, "Ah." Finally there; right? The funnel isn't new. The strategy isn't new. It's a little different, because, again, the internet is bigger and more complicated, but a sales funnel is still a sales funnel; right? We didn't reinvent the funnel. We just put the software together in one place, like Russell. All the steps that you used to have to do, you used to have to literally build a landing page, usually in HTML, because you needed it to be a certain way. If you needed a green check-mark versus a red check-mark, it was all piecework. Then you'd have to go to the next step, and you'd have to connect your email responder. Everything was daisy-chained together. It was so overwhelming, that most people didn't launch, because there was so much work. Even me, who has a team, knew how to do it for so many years, I could never launch, because it was overwhelming. STEVE: Yeah. JEN: ClickFunnels comes on the scene and it's all in one place. I don't use the term, "All-in-one" lightly. I don't give credit to many softwares. It's not an all-in-one where you're billing and all your other things are in there, but for the funnel it's all in one. Everything is literally in one place, and it's been so exciting to set up and to get going and to see that now I can literally wake up at 3 am, have an idea, and within two hours, have it going and some ads going, and it's launched. That's the exciting part. My clients are excited about it to. STEVE: That's so cool. That's so awesome. I remember when I first started putting things together for ... It was an artist actually that built the first site/funnel four or five years ago. I remember spending two hours ... No, it was two days, two full days, trying to make WordPress act like a squeeze page. JEN: I know. STEVE: It was the most hellish thing. It was awful. I remember just settling with something. I can't remember what it was. Neither of us liked it. I'm not a coder or programmer. I can read it. I can edit it, but I'm not at all a programmer, at all. I was like, "This is terrible." I almost gave up on the internet a little bit, because it was so hard. Then when click funnels came around, I remember I saw the presentation that Russell gave mine. I probably shouldn't have done this, but I didn't talk to my wife about it. I immediately bought it, and I started using it and building for other people. I was like, "This is the craziest thing." Now I dream in funnel editor. It's the funniest thing. JEN: Same thing, yeah, because back when you were creating your old landing page, which, again, is just one tiny piece of the whole funnel, I often went back and forth to, "Gees, I've got to hire a developer just to create a landing page page template in my WordPress?" Then that never got done. Then you go over to the third-party platforms that are providing fully landing pages. You're like, "I don't want to spend another $50 a month just to do this one piece, because by the time I'm done with the whole funnel, I'm spending a thousand dollars a month just to get it all connected. Yeah, it's been such a blessing, and I'm so excited. STEVE: I think my record so far with sitting here next to Mr. Russell Brunson, I think the fastest we put a funnel out is 45 minutes or something like that, a full one. It's like there's no way. He and I will still sit back and be like, "I can't believe we have this software," and he's the CEO of it. We'll be like, "Man, look what we just did. Look what we pulled off." He's like, "This little change used to cost me 10 grand. We're going to do it in 30 minutes." JEN: I remember testing my first webinar funnel, and I didn't have it completely set up, but at some point I got my reminder email, and I said, "Oh, look, how cool is that? I'm already getting the emails automatically." I didn't even set up the email, and I clicked on the link inside that said, "Your webinar is starting now." I clicked it 20 minutes late. When I did click it, it went right into the webinar that was playing, at the 20-minute mark. I said, "This is magic." STEVE: Yeah. So cool. I know I said we'd keep it to 30 minutes. You are amazing. I can't believe all the stuff you're pulling off is incredible, manager and builder of teams. I'm looking at all these sites right now. It's absolutely incredible and just crazy impressive. Where should people go if they want to follow you, learn more about you, even obviously use some of your services. JEN: Yeah. If you go to InternetGirlFriday.com, then you can find my social media, which is everywhere. We have Periscope and Instagram and YouTube and all that, and follow me on any of those. We're very active there. InternetGirlFriday.com is the service's site. You can contact me there. You can say, "Hey, I don't need to hire you, but I have a question," and I'll be glad to help. STEVE: Awesome. I appreciate it so much. Thanks. This is spur-of-the-moment, but this has been awesome. JEN: Sure. Thank you. STEVE: All right. Hey, we'll talk to you later. JEN: Okay. Bye-bye.   Thanks for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Want to get one of today's best internet sales funnels for free? Go to SalesFunnelBroker.com/FreeFunnels to download your pre-built sales funnel today.  

The story of Silas Marner, a man who lives for work and counting his coins. A classic english story is retold in the latest episode of Wishbone. Our guests Matti Frow and Lottie Cole Frow join the podcast to help us unravel this tale. Their English expertise helps us get into the mind of Wishbone and Silas Marner. Meanwhile Joe acts like a total jerk to Wishbone during this episode. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Subscribe in a reader If you cannot see the audio controls, your browser does not support the audio element or Right click to download the audio fileOr listen on Soundcloud!  When I first arrived in Moscow, I would take a seat in the restaurant and the waitrons would avoid me like the plague.I'm an Englishman in Russia. I'm part of the minority.It's strange to know that they aren't trying to be rude, they are just scared to talk to me. It's a necessity for Russian restaurants to have an English menu, but having an English waiter is another matter entirely. Often you will see the waiters tripping over themselves to find someone who can understand this strange alien. The bizarre thing is I guarantee they all own clothing that has some English expression or words on it. In the subway are English advertisements. Then why is the only phrase most Russians remember is "London is the capital of Great Britain?"I've even asked Russian strangers if they speak English, to which they reply to me in English; "no I don't speak English."Russians study English in school for 10 years- you still can't speak it? Really?The older generation I can forgive, but the younger generation it comes across as a tad ignorant (coming from  a semi-old dog learning a new trick.)I've written more than five books (Save the World Academy). It's safe to say I know a thing or two about English grammar. Though Russians learn English in school, their grammar and pronunciation is not ideal. They drag out their H's with a guttural sound (example; Harry Potter is Gary Potter) and they tend to replace 'th' with a prolonged 's' sound ( "I sink" instead of "I think.") The average Russian suffers from this as a result of the public school system. Their English teachers are not exactly Mr Belvedere (or native English) and pass on their bad habits to the pupils.  In other words a Russian is teaching them English.For arguments sake though, we can say most Russians know the fundamentals of English but suffer from lack of practice, or are either too embarrassed to speak. They love English songs... Don't they know what the person is saying? I'm also guilty of singing the las ketchup song but that's one in a thousand, not a thousand over one.Russians with a high command of English are clearly privately tutored (as that's where all the money is; £50 an hour session I'm told.)The fact they are learning English tells me they are thinking ahead (God knows the British could stand to learn Russian rather than some simpler languages.)Russian words themselves seem so long and dragged out you know for a fact you won't be able to recall it. It took me six months to say the metro station I lived nearest to.Next is manners.From a casual observer, it would appear that Russians are verbally mannerless. This isn't the case. Their language has a formal and informal. The formal automatically implies politeness without having to add "please" and "thank you" as often as the Brits do. It’s often bizarre to hear when Russian friends will say things like “give me this” instead of “can you please give me this.”Lastly, Russians tend to discuss things very heatedly. It looks like they are arguing to an English speaker, but in fact they are just discussing. Must be all the raised tonality that confuses me.Further observation required :) Thanks for reading and check out www.jamesbrough.com

If you’re out wandering the woods this weekend, you might want to keep an eye out for a ruffled mass of mushrooms stuck to the bottom of a hardwood tree. It could well be a maitake, or hen of the wood, mushroom. The fungi is delicious and has a meatier, more assertive flavor than average button mushrooms. “Their English name ‘hen of the woods’ is as such because they look a little like a slightly ruffled mother hen sitting at the base of a tree with her feathers all fluffed out,” explained Marie Viljoen, the author of the new book 66 Square Feet: A Delicious Life, One Woman, One Terrace, 92 Recipes. “So those ‘feathers’ are the part that you eat. Those are the caps of the mushroom.” Plucking the mushroom off of the base of an oak or beech is helpful for the tree, since the fungi is parasitic. For those interested in foraging for maitake, a few necessary words of caution: Never eat a mushroom you can’t identify with 100 percent certainty, and always thoroughly cook wild mushrooms. (In fact, you should probably always cook all mushrooms, regardless of the source. That’s because they’re not very digestible raw, explained Mycophilia author Eugenia Bone in a past Last Chance Foods episode.) One advantage of maitake is that you can also find them in gourmet grocery stores or at farmers markets. Viljoen pointed out that the commercially grown specimens require less work to clean. “If you buy them, they really come pretty clean because they were grown in very sterile conditions,” she said. “The store-bought mushroom is also slightly more delicate than the enormous, slightly tougher foraged version.” (Photo: Marie Viljoen/Vincent Mounier) Viljoen also quickly debunked two mushroom myths: First, you don’t have to carefully wipe mushrooms. Go ahead and wash them. “I find that if you wash them well, submerge them in slightly salty water, and then take them out and pat them super dry between really clean kitchen towels, your mushroom is just fine,” she said. Second, contrary to rumors, mushrooms are nutritious. “Maitake are quite high in potassium,” Viljoen said. “They contain niacin. They’re full of folates. They’re filled with antioxidants, so this is a mushroom you want to be eating. They’re good for you.” To break down maitake, she recommended snapping off the caps and using them as you would a regular button variety. The base, which is woodier, can be saved for low-heat drying over the course of many hours. “I tend to use the base cut up, sliced and dried,” she added. “The dried mushroom is delicious to make the base for a broth or a risotto.” Another way to use the entire mushroom is to make it into a soup, which Viljoen did and then brought into the WNYC studio to share. “The soup is very simple,” she said. “You start off with an onion base, sauté that, add the hen of the woods…. When they’re caramelized and brown, add whatever broth you prefer… and then puree the soup, and then that’s it.” Tune into the full audio above for her quick explanations for making maitake paté, as well as maitake butter. Also, check out a recipe from Viljoen’s new book for wild mushroom pizza. (Photo: Wild hen of the woods/Marie Viljoen)