Podcasts about transcript below

Episode: 245 This episode I read a story that I wrote 10 years ago.  Transcript Below. Music: Fresh Fallen Snow by Chris Haugen (YouTube Library) Art by ChatGPT. To see a video of the recording of this episode, become a patron at patreon.com/saturdaymorningmedia Mentioned on the show: FOLLOW GRANT http://www.MrGrant.com https://instagram.com/throwingtoasters/ ©2024 Saturday Morning Media/Grant Baciocco  Transcript: Thomas Mouse on Christmas EveBy Grant Baciocco Thomas Mouse brushed the last bits of cookie crumbs from his whiskers with his paws.  His nose twitched slightly as he did.  When he was certain he was now crumb free, he stood from the spool table and crossed to the door of his one room mouse hole.  He checked the lock, twice.  Always twice at night.  It was secure.  Confirming that it was indeed locked, he let out a little sigh. His toes made tiny clicking noises as he scurried over to the small Christmas Tree he had set up in the corner.  Tree was not the right word.  Tip of a branch from a tree was more like it.  A small clipping of an evergreen that was just the right size for a mouse sized tree.  A single bulb on top, a red one he had found in the garage last spring, illuminated the room.  He had rigged together some wire and hooked it, carefully, into the main to get it to light.  Gingerly grabbing the rubber insulation of the wire that ran to the main, he lifted it off.  There was a small spark and the bulb shut off, the room thrown into darkness.  He stood still for a moment, until his eyes adjusted.  He was helped by the light from the night sky creeping into his window.  He set the wire on the floor and turned towards his bed. Again his toes clicked against the concrete floor of his room as he made his way to his bed.  The bed, the cap of a spray paint can with cotton packed down inside of it, was warm and inviting .  After turning a few circles to make sure the cotton was to his liking, he lied down.  His head hung over the side of the cap as he looked out the window into the night sky. At the top of the tiny window, one he had chewed himself when he moved in, he could see a tiny sliver of the moon, hanging in the sky like a smile.  He looked up at if for a good long while.  He looked at it for so long, he swore he saw it move slightly on its journey across the night sky.  His eyes started to droop as his body relaxed.  Just as his eyes were about to close for good that night he inhaled slightly. “Merry Christmas, moon.” His eyes closed and Thomas Mouse fell asleep. ©2014 Grant Baciocco/Saturday Morning Media

Hey everyone, this is Alex and can you believe that we're almost done with Q1 2024? March 2024 was kind of crazy of course, so I'm of course excited to see what April brings (besides Weights & Biases conference in SF called Fully Connected, which I encourage you to attend and say Hi to me and the team!) This week we have tons of exciting stuff on the leaderboards, say hello to the new best AI in the world Opus (+ some other surprises), in the open source we had new MoEs (one from Mosaic/Databricks folks, which tops the open source game, one from AI21 called Jamba that shows that a transformers alternative/hybrid can actually scale) and tiny MoE from Alibaba, as well as an incredible Emotion TTS from Hume. I also had the pleasure to finally sit down with friend of the pod Tanishq Abraham and Paul Scotti from MedArc and chatted about MindEye 2, how they teach AI to read minds using diffusion models

In today's episode of the podcast I talk all about money mindset and how important this is as a business owner. I also give you an activity to do that may help your money mindset!   KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST  Your money mindset can have a big impact on your business. A scarcity mindset: You are scrambling around to make money, you are worrying about paying bills, you worry there is never enough, you say you can't afford it, you are jealous of those who have more, you worry about competitors, you are scared of change, you believe there is only so much, you hope others will fail and you don't set any goals.An abundant mindset: You are grateful for everything, you notice the small things, you cheer others on because you know there is enough to go round, you are willing to take risks, you are generous, you want to learn more, you know there will always be more, you think big and set goals, you share your knowledge, you are inspired by others ahead of you and you believe there is enough for everyone. The activity – make a list of the negative thoughts you have around money, then re-write those negative thoughts into better thoughts. Think about what you would say instead. Write down 3 things that could make you feel abundant.   THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…  Keep that abundant mindset – it really will help you and your business.  HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS  Why is money mindset important? 03:20 Scarcity vs Abundance 04:16 Money mindset activity 10:55   Transcript Below   Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. How are you doing? So we are nearly at the end of the summer holidays. In fact, if you're listening to this, as it comes out, we've probably got about a week left.   And although I love my daughter and my stepson. I'll be very glad when they're at school and the house is a bit quieter and I can crack on a bit. That will be great. How have you managed? It's-it's hard. Like it's really hard trying to do all the things and not trying to shout at them on a minutely basis. It's really difficult.   So like I said, I formally be quite glad that they are back at school and I'm confident that you might feel that way too. Okay. So today we're going to be talking about money. And specifically your thoughts around it. So I have, I guess I didn't really think about money in the way I think about it now. Definitely not.   I think, I didn't think it was important when I started my business. I saw it as a very practical thing. You know, I asked for money, people give it me if they have my service and I didn't think much about money mindset. In fact, I didn't even know it was a thing if I'm honest. And over the last few years, five, six years, I've been doing more and more and more work on it.   And now I feel like I'm really happy with my mindset around money and actually the difference it's made to me and my business has been quite significant. So even though I am not the world's expert on a money mindset, and actually that's on my list of amazing people to get on is someone who can talk about money.   I do want to take you through a session that I did at last, at the last SOAR I did, which was in June. I think. We do one in November as well, which is coming up and in a few weeks time, the cart will open again for the Academy for only like four days. So obviously if you get to join then you get to do the November event.   So this is one of the activities we did in the event. The event, isn't like, it's not like an event where I bring speakers and you just sit into some speakers all day. It's a really practical event. I do bring speakers, amazing and different speakers that you don't find everywhere else. And my sessions are all around doing practical stuff.   So I did this whole session on money mindset because having done all the work I've done doing all the coaching I do in...

Today's episode of the podcast is an interview with the lovely Amy McLaren who is the CEO of three passion-led businesses - Lady Strength where she takes women on trips that get them to leave their comfort zone, a charity called Village Impact where they help build schools in Kenya and a luxury Airbnb!    KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST  Take one step at a time and just put one step in front of the other. You can learn so much about yourself when you are put in an uncomfortable situation. It took 3 years for Amy to write and publish her new book. Your legacy and the impact you have on the world starts from the little things we do every day. We can all do more good in the world. Giving back doesn't have to be a huge gesture – you can start small. Just be kind - in life and business. You may never know how much of an impact a simple act of kindness can have one someone. Living with passion doesn't have to be expensive and you don't have to change your whole life. Do more of what makes you happy and brings you joy to fulfil your passion. This could just be small moments of your day, not your whole life. There is no point doing something that makes you unhappy or feel unfilled. We are all here for a purpose and to do something. People never forget how you make them feel. It is important to encourage our children that they can have what they desire, but they have to work for it! Take a moment to check in with your life and ask yourself if you being intentional with your time and what you are doing. If this was it – would you be happy?   THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…  Do more of what makes you happy and brings you joy!  HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS  An introduction to Amy – 05:00 Women in business – 18:45 Turning passion into purpose – 21:46 The myths about living passionately – 29:48 Leaving a legacy – 35:04 True happiness in your life – 45:05   CHECK AMY OUT:  https://amymclaren.com/passion-to-purpose-book/ (Book – Passion to Purpose) https://amymclaren.com/ (Website)   Transcript Below   Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. How are you doing? So if you are new around here, welcome, it's lovely to have you here. If you've been listening for a while then welcome.   You're still very, very welcome to be here. Also, if you've been listening for a while and you feel like sharing this podcast, I would be so very grateful. It's like with everything you have to just keep working at it and working at it and working at it. And even though we are over 200 episodes, we still keep, to keep having to work at followers and get the podcast in front of people. So I would really, really appreciate it. And by all means, tag me in, and then I will share your post to my audience. I would really appreciate that. So anyway, thank you for that. Um, okay. This week we have an interview. And it's a really, really good interview.   It's with a lovely lady called Amy McLaren. And you know, when you meet someone or you talk to someone and you think, "Oh my God, you are like so genuine and nice, such a lovely person." Well, that's exactly what I felt when talking to Amy. She was just so nice. We had such a nice chat. It was really, really good.   Amy is a mum of two. She's a CEO, adventurer, a tea lover. When I say I love tea for those of you know, I mean, gin. So I don't think she means that, but I think she does like gin as well. A ceiling pusher, first-time author and a people connector, experienced maker ride-or-die friend, Peleton crusher, wife, Airbnb entrepreneur, and Founder of Village Impact and Lady Strength.   That's an amazing bio. So basically Amy came on to talk about the fact that she has a new book coming out. The premise around the whole book. So the book's called Passion to Purpose and she's put together this book to talk about how you can take yourself from living...

Today's episode of the podcast is an interview with Melanie Moore who is the UK's leading vision board expert and award winning coach who inspires her clients to tap into their vision. Melanie is on a mission to help millions of people dream bigger, think bigger and act bigger. We talk all about creating your vision, the tools you can use to do this and the law of attraction/action.    KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST  You have to create a vision for what you want. 4 pillars – abundance, health, relationships and environment. Your vision is always the destination. Tapping keeps us in alignment, motivates us to take action and you can use it on ANYTHING. We can rewire our conscious brain and clear past traumas with tapping. EFT is a cross between acupuncture without needles and modern day phycology (NLP and CBT techniques). The key to manifestation is to focus on what you want, rather than what you don't want. You need to start thinking that you are lucky and good things do happen to you. Start by getting clear, then let go and finally look at your vision. You have to start with the end goal in mind then work backwards. The more you focus on something, the more the universe knows you want it!   THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…  Life is a beautiful journey – we have good days and bad days, good chapters and not so good chapters. There are sometimes lessons we have to learn.  HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS  An introduction to Melanie – 07:01 3 tools to create your vision – 15:31 Manifesting – 24:46 The law of action – 34:20   CHECK MELANIE OUT:  https://melaniemoore.mykajabi.com/a/2147488683/D6naBZxz (Tapping into your big vision live – online event!)   RESOURCES MENTIONED:  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gentle-Birth-Method-Month-Month/dp/0007176848 (The gentle birth method book) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Habits-Highly-Effective-People-Powerful/dp/0743269519 (7 habits of highly effective people)   Transcript Below:  

In today's episode of the podcast I talk about your season of life, your business life and how this impacts on the work you do and how you can manage it.   KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST  You can have a business that you love, makes you money and creates the life you want AND manage your life outside of work. It is okay to have a day off! Track your time – how are you actually spending it? We can make more money but we can't make more time. Your life will look entirely different to someone else's – it is about what is working for you and what you want to do. Delegate, delete or defer – can you put it off? Give it to someone else? Or just delete it? When you look at your day as a whole, can you take anything off your day that you really don't need to be doing? If you are doing a repetitive task over and over again – you don't need to be doing it! Someone else could be doing it for you. Ask yourself - Does it make the boat go faster? Is it getting you closer to where you want to be? There may be changes you can make in your life that will free up your time and give you more headspace. If you can get someone else to free up your time – you could then do more for your business and move forward.   THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…  Everyone has different lives, situations and priorities – we are all doing the best we can, in the circumstances!  HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS  What is a season of life? 02:36 How to manage your time and set boundaries 09:15   LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S EPISODE  https://detoxkitchen.co.uk/ (Detox Kitchen)   Transcript Below:  

Today's episode of the podcast is an interview with Shayla Boyd-Gill who is a family, freedom and affluence mentor and creator of Luxe Your Business. She shows women entrepreneurs how to have it all whilst doing what they love. We talk about how you can sell without feeling horrible, your money mindset and how she juggles home-schooling her 6 children whilst running a successful business.   KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST   Show up with confidence and as a business from the start. Your business needs to work for you – giving you the freedom to not have to sacrifice your time with your family. Give people the skills so they are not reliant on you – otherwise they will always have to come back. When you sell a high ticket item, you need to bring value to your customer and deliver what you're promising. You have enough experience to sell your high ticket item. People will pay for what they want. If you don't have an abundant mindset, you will prevent yourself from asking for what you truly want. What money stories are you carrying? What are your beliefs? Did something happen around money in your life that has changed your money mindset? Higher ticket clients save you time. When your clients have invested more money – they will do the work. You can't sell when you're desperate – people will feel that energy.   THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…  Until you stop treating yourself as if you are a liability, you will always struggle to charge your worth – remember, you are an asset!  HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS  An introduction to Shayla 05:36 Showing up with confidence 11:29 Juggling being a mum and a business owner 18:55 Creating the schedule you desire 26:05 Selling higher ticket items 30:40 Money mindset 33:20 Working with high ticket clients 38:44   CHECK SHAYLA OUT:   https://shaylaboydgill.com/ (Website) https://www.facebook.com/shaylaboydgill/ (Facebook) https://www.instagram.com/shayla.boydgill/ (Instagram) https://twitter.com/shaylaboydgill (Twitter)   RESOURCES MENTIONED   http://www.teresaheathwareing.com/emailmasterclass (FREE Email Masterclass)   Transcript Below   Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. How are things? So this week I've got a great interview for you, but before we jump into that, I just want to remind you again, that I'm going to be doing a live email list-building masterclass. It's going to be about an hour long. There on the 29th of June. And if you head over to teresaheathwareing.com/emailmasterclass, then you can find all the details. But basically we're going to look at how to get your first 100 subscribers and the do's and don'ts of building a list.   Some of the pitfalls you should avoid, and some of the ways to help accelerate building your list. So, if you want to join me for that, then please do come along. I would love to see you and you get to pick my brain, ask me questions, which you know is always nice. Okay. This week we got an amazing episode because I interviewed the very lovely Shayla and I'll do her proper intro in a sec.   But basically we talked about money and charging and selling. Things that I think most of you listening are probably like, "Ooh, not so much thanks." And I think I know lots of you are female. And I think for women, sometimes that is a very difficult thing to do, to have faith in what you charge. To feel strong about what you charge and to go out there and ask for it.   And we often, I see this a lot with my members. They undercharge, they, they think I'm not worth that money or they think I can't possibly charge up money or someone's not going to be, think I'm worth it. And I would say, I think that's more of a feminine thing that we think like that. So this episode is a really good one because not only does she talk about How to sell a high ticket item without being sleazy and horrible. And

Today's episode of the podcast is an interview with Christoph Trappe who is a digital based brand strategist. Christoph has been named as a top content creator, digital marketer and thought leader. Christoph is a journalistic story teller and we talk all about live streaming – how to tell a story and have confidence!   KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST  Journalistic story telling is telling the story around what people need to know in an engaging style – so people want to read it! Think about what you stand for and what is unique about you – this is what you need to focus on when you tell a story. If you are going to go live you have to be realistic and accept that things do and may go wrong! Before going live - think about what you are going to talk about and how you are going to talk about that topic. Aim for around 40 minutes for your live stream. Decide how often you will go live and commit to it. You have to get used to the idea that people may not show up. If you are streaming into a platform you use a lot, someone will most likely show up! You can stream in multiple places at one time. Try to do a solo episode if you are just starting so you can get used to it, then move on to interviews. It is a lot easier and more fun when you have guests! Going live is not as much prep work for you if you have less time.   THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…  Don't overthink it, don't feel bad and just keep pushing forward.  HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS  An Introduction to Christoph 02:25 What is journalistic story telling? 03:31 How to tell stories for your business 05:52 Going Live Book 09:42 Things that could go wrong 11:34 Getting started with live streaming 19:05 What if people don't show up? 22:47 Should you go live in multiple locations? 25:29 Solo vs interview 30:15   CHECK CHRISTOPH OUT:  http://authenticstorytelling.net/ (Website) https://fb.com/ctrappe (Facebook) https://instagram.com/christophtrappe (Instagram)   RESOURCES MENTIONED  https://www.amazon.com/Going-live-Live-stream-podcast-people-ebook/dp/B08TW3J3YX?dchild=1&keywords=going+live+christoph+trappe.&qid=1612027452&sr=8-1&linkCode=sl1&tag=theauthstor09-20&linkId=e5eb3a5f872712f03079531ae9939abb&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl (Going Live Book)   Transcript Below  Hello and a really warm welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. How are you doing? So as I'm recording this, the sun is shining. My windows are open and the birds are singing. How very grateful I am for a lovely sunny day. Because honestly I just miss the sun so much. If you're not in the UK, then. And you don't know what our weather is like, we do, you know, we have nice summers, but it's not as nice as California, which obviously it's sunny all the time.   And because haven't been to chapel we've had, what's felt like a really long winter. Anyway, also that was such a precious thing to do. Talk about the weather. I'm not here to give you a weather rundown. So this week I've got a podcast interview for you. I'm interviewing Christoph Trappe who is a US based digital brand strategist.   He has been picked as one of the top 14 content marketers and a top 24 digital marketers. And then top 100 CX thought leaders. He's a journalistic storyteller and we talk all about Livestreaming. And we go into the kind of conversations around how easy is it to be a storyteller and what sort of things you needs to do as well as some of the confidence in livestreaming.   So I think this should be a really good one. I am a big fan of telling stories. If you receive my emails, you will know I am. Uh, I like to explain things in a story because I think you understand them better. Anyway, I'm just going to let you dive straight in. I feel like I should intro more, but I think we're good.   I'm going to link off to everything in the

In today's episode of the podcast I talk all about how you can use the knowledge you have of your perfect customer to create content for social media they are going to love!   KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST   We have to think about our perfect customer when we are posting on social media. When we think about our perfect customer, we have to go deeper than just gender, occupation, location, etc. We need to know what their pain points are, what their aspirations are and what they do in their spare time. A pain point is a problem your customer has that your product or service fixes. Understanding who your perfect customer is really helps you to create content that really serves them. People love emotion – post content that gets their emotions. If you have your perfect customer at the heart of all your content, it will ultimately perform better as you are speaking directly to them.   THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…  Before you post ANYTHING on social media, think back to your perfect customer and make sure your content is interesting, valuable or entertaining for them.  HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS  Defining your perfect customer 07:12 How to create content for your perfect customer 22:10   LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S EPISODE  https://teresaheathwareing.com/captivate-podcast/the-importance-of-creating-your-own-customer-avatar/ (How to find your perfect customer – podcast episode) http://www.teresaheathwareing.com/buildmylist (Build My List Course) https://www.instagram.com/dollarshaveclub/ (Dollar Shave Club) https://www.instagram.com/marthabrookldn/ (Martha Brook)   Transcript Below   Hello and really warm welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. How's things. So I thought I would just have a quick check in and a quick hello. If you've not listened for very long, or if you're brand new to the podcast.   Welcome. I am really grateful that you've decided to listen to this and you know, see what I've got to say, which is lovely. You'll soon realize my style is very natural and you know, I like to call it authentic slash maybe a little bit unprofessional, which is hilarious. Cause I came from corporate worlds or has to be really professional.   But now it's like, I just want to be myself in my business. So, you know, so I just come as I am, as it were, you know what I mean? And, and do this episode just chatting as if you and I were sat having a coffee. I would be having uh, probably two shots of whatever. Cause I like strong coffee with some oat milk, but I particularly like the utterly barista edition.   I don't know if you can get it anywhere else of UK, in case you're wondering. So I'd be starting with that or we'd be at in the evening. And I would be having a drink gin and tonic, probably one of the most expensive super gins that got there because I seem to naturally have expensive tastes even without trying.   And or I'd be with lots of Prosecco or maybe a nice Chardonnay. I love the Chardonnay. The shopping went through really bad patch. Didn't it? When people thought it was like a cheap drink, but I, we've got friends in California, we go to California quite a lot when we're not in lockdown. And, uh, California Chardonnay is just the best.   Anyway, I didn't come on here to share with you my drinks, um, that I liked to drink, but yeah, I record it as if we're just chatting. I don't tend to, when I say I don't tend to edit it a whole lot, Phil, the editor he does. But you know, he doesn't take out my ramblings. So yeah. So I just come on here, I chat, I share all things, marketing and small business marketing with you guys.   And. I love hearing from you. I think it's so nice when you guys reach out, when you share on social, when you tell me you've listened, tell me what you've got from it. And I get it right. I totally understand, because I...

Everyone has heard of Beeple, but not many people have heard of John Karel. The hottest NFT platform currently is not on Ethereum but on Tezos. HicEtNunc.xyz is the platform. We talk about Karel and his move from Ethereum to Tezos and how climate change plays a crucial role in the move. We also discuss the aesthetics of John Karel's artistic style. What influences we see in it. We talk about how John Karel has in such a short space of time become influential within the artists that make up the HEN collective. Transcript Below; ----------------------------------Sabretooth: Welcome to the Floor is rising podcast. We talked about NFTs I'm sabretooth with me is Kizu. Kizu: So today's topic is really about another artist that has been very active in generating a lot of attention. For his art on a different platform. And that artist is John Karel. He has basically been the, hot new property on the block. I think his artistic style is one of the things obviously, but I think a lot of, attention has also been paid to the platform that he's active on, which is a Hic Et Nunc, which is Latin for here and now, hic Et Nunc which has been abbreviated to hen or hen. And specifically the blockchain and the token that it's being active on is, Tezos. Sabretooth: Tezos, is one of those OG layer, one blockchains. They did their ICO, you know, ancient like six years ago to 2015, I believe raised around $500 million. And basically since then, no, one's heard a peep about. basically anything happening there. Most people have kind of written them off. And lo and behold, in sort of Feb, March of this year, 2021, this sort of platform, Hic Et Nunc, just comes roaring on the scene. Basically out of nowhere. And as of today a lot of people say that it's sort of, up there with open sea as the largest NFT platform in the world, essentially. And a very unlikely story to come out of Tezos. No one knows exactly how and why it became so popular, but the topic for today's conversation, John Karel I think personally is somewhat responsible for that popularity. I mean, he was. Quite early on the platform. Kizu: I think that there's a bit of a deja VU element I think, in, in Karel's work. That's not to say that, you know, Beeple's work isn't derivative or doesn't have references to, you know, early two thousands, 2010s internet culture, which it does, obviously. I think that's very much foregrounded and I think it's a big part of. The way that it's resonated with particular than slightly younger gen YZ demographic. And I think there's something similar in John Karel except that I think that the kind of timeframe that's referenced is a little bit earlier. Specifically, if Beeple is more like a 2010s meme based kind of, aesthetic, I think Karel's is about 10 years prior to that, I think there's a, there's an early two thousands Y2K kind of like retro computer graphics. Very strong style to that. Obviously a lot of the works are animated, kind of GIF like things. There's obviously some similarities with Beeple but there's a little bit more of a hearkening back retro element specifically I would say. And I think that he's mentioned this in interviews. He's very cognizant of these references and specifically this timeframe at the same time, he does seem to be very aware of pop artists that have dealt with similar material specifically pop art from the sixties, like Warhol, Oldenburg. I think the color palette is pop, it translates well on the screen. The more vital elements, I think with any NFTs, it's obviously a visual medium, specifically it performs well on a screen as opposed to obviously like a canvas . There's a flatness to it. Perspective wise, it's quite flat and it's pixilated. All of those things identify it, as a kind of like internet native or screen native medium. He's known for the series with a skeleton . That's just one of his main characters. The color scheme skews...

In Japan the Shichifukujin or Seven Lucky Gods appear in a boat on the first day of the year to impart various kinds of luck on those they deem worthy. Transcript Below. You can also find me on: Twitter: https://twitter.com/UncannyJapan Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/uncannyjapan/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thersamatsuura Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/uncannyjapan/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqAtoUS51HDi2d96_aLv95w Website: https://www.uncannyjapan.com/ Intro and outro music by Julyan Ray Matsuura: here. Transcript: Pre-Intro Intro: It’s January first, early morning, and there you are shivering on a beach, looking out over the ocean at the first sunrise of the New Year.  The sky and water are tinged orange, scarlet and gold. A tiny sliver of sun just visible on the horizon grows. But as it does, there, backlit against the beauty, is something else. A boat. As the sun climbs, the boat is getting bigger, closer.  Until it is so close you can read the sail flapping in the wind. There, splashed in black ink is the character for Baku. Baku, the dream eater. A little jolt of deja vu runs through you. Ahem: episode 65. Oh, look. It’s so close now, you can make out people on the boat. They’re all standing stoic, hair and robes blowing in the wind. They’re getting so close, you can now count seven of them. They’re such a motley crew. Then one of the passengers, the one whose wearing armor and carrying a spear looks in your direction, stretches out his long arm and points at you. Who are these boat people and why are they coming for you? What do they want? Intro: Akemashite Omedetou (明けましておめでとう)! Happy New Year! I hope this first podcast of 2021 finds you healthy and well. Today we’re going to talk about the Seven Lucky Gods. In Japanese, Shichifukujin, literally Seven Lucky Gods. Where Are the Seven Lucky Gods from? They are indeed an varied bunch, coming from India, China, and Japan. A team of lucky gods, each with his or her own colorful story, that while found in artwork all year round, make a special trip down from heaven on January first, to visit for seven days. They’re here to bestow good fortune to those they see fit to have it. Through history they were at one point or another worshipped separately, but in the Muramachi Period they were brought together and are often, but not always, found grouped together. More likely than not, when they’re all hanging out together, they’re on their boat called a takarabune (宝船) or Treasure Boat. I’m going to talk a little bit about each one, but before that, real quick, a little about nationalities. Three of the gods, Benzaiten (弁財天), Bishamonten (毘沙門天), and Daikokuten (大黒天), are originally found in Hinduism, so of Indian descent. Fukurokuju (福禄寿), Hotei (布袋), and Jurojin (寿老人), are from China, coming from both Buddhism and Daoism. And lastly, there is Ebisu (恵比寿), who I did a whole show on back in episode 28. The Leech Boy Who Became a God. A very strange story goes along with him, if you’d like to listen to episode 28. Who are the Seven Lucky Gods? So let’s run through and learn a little about each lucky god. And why not start with Ebisu, the sole Japanese in the bunch? Ebisu (恵比寿)is the god of prosperity and wealth and of having an abundance of food. He’s the patron of fishermen, too. That’s how you can recognize him in the bunch. He usually carries a fishing rod in one hand and a fish in the other. I’ve always like Ebisu because the town where I live, being a fishing town, has a yearly festival dedicated to him in November. It’s quite lively and packed with outdoor stalls selling lucky Ebisu-themed goods for businesses big and small. I see his image a lot. Oh, and he’s also got his own beer named after him. Yebisu beer. So check out that label next time you grab a can. Now to Daikokuten (大黒天), who kind of looks like Ebisu. Squat, funky hat, smiling face. But Daikokuten doesn’t have a fish or rod, instead he carries a big hammer, used to grant wishes, and a bag of treasure. Daikokuten actually originated from the god Shiva in the Hindu tradition. Which you would never imagine looking at him. These days he’s the lucky god of agriculture, rice, cooks, farmers, and bankers. Because bankers need gods, too. You know. You’ll often find him paired with Ebisu when displayed at restaurants or businesses. Moving on. We have Bishamonten (毘沙門天). Remember the fierce-looking god who pointed at you from the boat earlier. The one wearing old fashioned armor and carrying a spear? Well, that is Bishamonten, also from the Hindu tradition. A god of fortune and battles, authority and dignity. He is the protector of those who follow rules and behave. Not only is he carrying a spear, but he also had a tiny pagoda or stupa in his other hand. Next. Benzaiten (弁財天), Benten (弁天), Benten-sama (弁天さま), or Benzaitennyo. Also from Hinduism originally, the only female in the bunch, she comes from the goddess Saraswati. You’ll find her carrying a biwa, stringed, lute-like instrument and a white snake. She’s the patron of artists, writers, dancers, actors, and geisha. Now look over there at the very tall, very old fellow with the long white beard, walking stick, and scroll. This lucky god comes from Chinese Taoism and does resemble an old Taoist sage.  Oh, and on that scroll of his is written all the wisdom of the world. Sometimes you’ll see him with a white stag or maybe cranes or tortoises. He symbolizes longevity and his name is Juroujin (寿老人), and sometimes thought to be the incarnation of the southern pole star, Nankyokusei (南極星). He’s the only lucky god thought to be based on a real person. The god that sometimes confused with Juroujin is Fukurokuju (福禄寿). Also from China, he’s thought to be the reincarnation of the Taoist god Hsuan Wu. He’s cool in that he doesn’t have to eat (I guess the other gods do) and he can raise the dead. You can find him hanging out with a turtle, a crow, or a deer. While also carries a cane and scroll similar to Juroujin, he’s easily identifiable because of his great big, long head; no hat or covering. From him you will procure wisdom, luck, longevity, wealth, and happiness. Lastly on the takarabune is Hotei (布袋) and you might be familiar with him. He’s the image often confused with the Buddha until the day you learn the Buddha wasn’t overweight. Hotei has a big ol’ fat belly and is laughing hysterically. He is the god of contentment and happiness. He’s said to be a guardian of children, diviners, and barmen. He carries a big cloth bag that never empties and can be used to feed the poor and needy.  Next time you see Hotei note his long earlobes. In Japan those are called fukumimi (福耳), or lucky earlobes. Even now if you have long lobes your Japanese friend might tell you, you have fukumimi. You’re lucky! Occasionally you’ll find the long-foreheaded Fukurokuju missing and in his place, Kichijouten. Kichijouten is another goddess who also goes by the name Kisshouten or Kisshoutennyo. There is a story of her being the wife of Vishnu. She is beautiful, happy and fertile You can recognize her by the Nyoihouju gem she’s holding in her hand. An interesting bit of trivia, is that while usually you’ll hear about the Seven Lucky Gods, every once in awhile, you’ll hear about eight. No, it’s not that Fukuokuju AND Kichijouten are both in the gang. Nope. It might be because okame, remember her?, the rosy cheeked plump lady of luck has joined the group. Or perhaps oinari, a fox god, who looks after agriculture, rice, tea, sake, merchants and sword-smiths is hanging out with the other seven. So there you have it, the Seven Lucky Gods and their Treasure Ship. So let’s imagine that Treasure Boat riding in from heaven and the Seven Lucky Gods on board waving at you, tossing handfuls of good luck, longevity, happiness, contentment, business success, plenty of food, beauty, wicked sword-smithing skills or fertility, if that’s what you’re going for. There is something for everyone. Thank you all for listening listening. I hope everyone of you have a truly wonderful 2021. I’ve still got loads of topics for the show, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear ideas from you. If there is something you’d like me to talk about or look into, please let me know. I can’t promise, but this year I’m going to try and work patrons and listeners ideas in as episodes. Oh, remember in November or thereabouts, I mentioned I had a little goal to get 200 patrons by the end of the year? Well, I did it. I mean, I didn’t do it. You did it. So an extra big thank you for that. And finally, don’t forget to be on the lookout for my new other show: “The Soothing Stories Podcast”, which will be me reading some interesting classic stories with chill sound and music. The sole purpose being to escape the woes of the day for a little while. The first episode will launch on January 27th or 28th depending on where you are in the world. I’ll let you know more next time we talk and of course on social media. As they say in Japan: Kotoshi mo yoroshiku onegaishimasu (今年もよろしくお願いします) which translates into something like, I hope to continue our good relationship this year. Thanks again, and I’ll talk to you again in two weeks. Bye bye.  

Making Conversations about Homelessness Count! In our first episode we speak to Paula Senior from the YMCA. Paula is a fund-raising officer and the event that raise the most is the annual Sleepout which raises much needed funds for the night shelter.  Paula shares how the Covid-19 pandemic has stretched them to the limits and how the have risen above the challenges faced by the homeless. Please support the conversations around homelessness as this has affected your host Wendy Harris in her past. You will be moved by Paula's pivotal moment - All about a boy and the conversations that followed. To follow and support the YMCA in raising awareness please follow these links: https://twitter.com/YMCA_Burton https://www.facebook.com/burtonymca https://www.linkedin.com/company/burton-upon-trent-and-district-ymca https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulasenior/ TRANSCRIPT BELOW -  Timestamps 00:00:00:    Introduction 00:01:43: Covid-19 and 2020 00:04:27: History of the YMCA 00:06:25: Having a conversation 00:08:47: Sleep Out 00:11:47: Sleep Out 2019 Target 00:12:06: Winter Night Shelter 00:13:05: Join Wendy, and help out 00:14:50: Paula's Pivotal Moment 00:22:21: Wendy's Story 00:23:12: Where do you go to the toilet? 00:26:00: Reaching out to the YMCA 00:26:49: Final thoughts   Interview Transcription Wendy Harris: Welcome to Making Conversations Count.  Our podcast where we share inspirational stories from business leaders, and they tell us all about their pivotal moment.  Today, I am really excited.  I've got Paula Senior from the YMCA joining us, to share her pivotal moment.  Hello, Paula. Paula Senior:  Hi, Wendy.  Thank you very much for inviting me on here. Wendy Harris: Now, tell everybody about the YMCA and how we first met. Paula Senior:  I worked for YMCA in Burton.  We are an independent charity based in Burton‑on‑Trent, which covers homelessness, people at risk of homelessness, food bank, mediation.  A whole breadth of services.  I do fundraising, for YMCA Burton.  I am passionate about the course. Wendy you I met about three years ago, I think now.  We started talking, met each other a few times.  Then we've had some really good conversations haven't we, about your work, what you do, what I do and life really. Wendy Harris: Yes, a shout out to the LoveBiz and the lovely Sue Crooks that started that Ladies Network.  Certainly, I'd heard of the YMCA, but I really had no idea about the work that the YMCA does in terms of homelessness.  As you know, Paula, I've shared my story quite publicly.  It is 21 years ago now that I was made homeless with a six-year-old round my legs and I was pregnant at the time.  So, had I have known about the YMCA then, things could have been different, which is why I'm happy to support the YMCA now.  I am guessing that this year has been an incredible and challenging time for you at the YMCA. Paula Senior:  Yes, absolutely.  I mean it's a very difficult time for lots of people, hasn't it?  The year that Covid came and changed everything.  Obviously as a charity supporting some of the most vulnerable people in the community it has been particularly challenging.  Not just on the basis of keeping everybody safe.  There are 71 people that live with us, which is a considerable number of people.  Age range from 18 to 64, and that is men and women, all vulnerable for a number of reasons.  Some with some very complex needs, so being in lockdown for them is very difficult to understand and to cope with.  Without all the other complex things going on in life.  You know, we've all felt that haven't we, with lockdown?  It's been particularly challenging at times. For business as well, but from a charity point of view, aside from the wellbeing side and keeping everybody safe, we've had a massive massive drop in income because we had ten events cancelled, which obviously brings income into the charity.  Food bank donations dried up overnight, literally.  Then we rely completely on the support of our community, so churches.  Groups like LoveBiz, networking groups who have always supported us with food bank collections.  Obviously, could not meet anymore and therefore weren't able to have a collection and donate food.  So, the flip side of that is the demand for the food parcels went completely through the roof, because children were off school and families trying to feed children, navigating furlough, navigating and worrying about job losses; just surviving. Having children at home, some of those that would have had meals provided in school.  There was a massive impact on families.  So, demand through the roof and supplies completely dropped.  We have struggled.  It has been challenging, yes, definitely. Wendy Harris: Yes, looking after people physically by giving them somewhere safe to stay.  You are looking after them by feeding them so nourishing them, but you are also having to take care of their mental wellbeing as well, aren't you? Paula Senior:  Yes. Wendy Harris: Because the emotional and financial strain that perhaps losing a job and a lot of this -- you can't lay blame anywhere, can you? Paula Senior:  No, no. Wendy Harris: It's really difficult because you've got to just take what's happening and go with it, haven't you? Paula Senior:  Yes, and I think also you will understand this as well, Wendy, like most of us do.  When people are struggling, when there's change anyway, without it being such a massive change that they may lose their job, they're home-schooling.  Someone they knew is poorly with Covid or just poorly anyway that's navigating life.  All these things compound to people's wellbeing and mental health, don't they? Wendy Harris: Yes, because it's not just about one person neither, it can be about a family and their extended family. Paula Senior:  Yes. Wendy Harris: It is where does it stop?  It's such a complicated situation to be in.  This is why I invited you on the show.  I wanted the YMCA as a UK-wide charity.  Is it global, Paula? Paula Senior:  It is global.  In the UK specifically are 114 YMCAs. Wendy Harris: Wow. Paula Senior:  That is just in the UK.  We are all a separate charity in our right, we are all independent and we all offer a different level of service or provision.  So, it is 176 years today the global movement of YMCA. Wendy Harris: We're getting a history lesson as well now. Paula Senior:  When that was set up by a man called George Williams in London in 1844, he had gone to London because his family had deemed he may get into the wrong crowd, if you like.  So, it was the Industrial Revolution, probably the wrong crowd means perhaps going to see girls or hitting up with friends for beers.  Nothing substantial like we might deem today. He went to London as a young Christian man and realised that there wasn't anywhere for people to meet, to be able to meet safely and talk or just to develop friendships and that's how the YMCA formed originally.  So, 176 years on, there are 114 separate YMCA's now.  Some YMCAs don't offer any housing, but they do a lot of youth work, so around 18 to 25 years old is their real focus.  Helping them to navigate, I guess, and give them support that they absolutely need to have a good future. Wendy Harris: Yes, transition isn't it, into adult life. Paula Senior:  It is. Wendy Harris: That parents sort of say, "Go learn your own lessons", to some extent. Paula Senior:  Yes. Wendy Harris: Some say, "I'm going to do it on my own", but who would have thought that way back then in the Industrial Revolution that George Williams said, "We've got nowhere that we can have a proper conversation that counts". Paula Senior:  Absolutely, yes, that's true Wendy, yes. Wendy Harris: Yes, a man after my own values then as well.  Who'd have thought we'd have found that out today. Paula Senior:  Yes. Wendy Harris: I'm guessing that you must have difficult conversations with individuals as well as some really rewarding conversations, because it is not just the negative impact of being homeless or being out of a job.  The work that the YMCA does, really does transform lives and you've got some real good success stories, haven't you? Paula Senior:  Yes, totally.  You're absolutely right.  It's not all negative.  It may feel like that when someone comes to us for help, whatever that help is.  Whether it's a food parcel, or a family that are navigating difficult courses with relationships at home.  We work around homelessness, support and prevention really.  So, a family where there is young people perhaps in their teens, 14, 15 struggling at home, for whatever reason.  The family's in conflict. We offer a mediation service which again is a free service to anybody to access.  I think at any one time there's about 12 families open to receiving that support.  That is all around conversation.  So, the mediator will say he holds the safe space, for a conversation to be held respectfully and openly.  Because where there's conflict, that can't happen.  It becomes a blame game and people aren't listening and don't want to hear; but in the space that he holds and asks the questions so that people can listen and converse through conversation clearly.  That's part of his role. Wendy Harris: It facilitates the change in behaviour, in attitude in mindset, in approach. Paula Senior:  It does. Wendy Harris: To everything doesn't it?  Yes. Paula Senior:  Part of that service usually, what generally happens is that a mediator would meet both parties so the young person and their parent or the parents or sometimes it's extended family members if the young person doesn't live with parents.  So, he will meet them both separately to talk to them about what they want to achieve.  What their aim is as part of the mediation.  Then they meet usually somewhere independent because that also takes away the emotion. Now, of course, Covid's changed that as well.  So, he cannot go into their home and they can't come into our site.  So, those conversations are still taking place.  They are taking place on Zoom, like many conversations now, because it is still critical that those conversations take place. Wendy Harris: Keep that communication open is really important. Paula Senior:  Yes. Wendy Harris: I know that you have different events that you do throughout the year by going to networking and encouraging people to bring food for the food banks and I know that you have done raffles as well.  We have all brought gifts and everybody wants the Prosecco. Last year I was involved for the very first time in one of your events, because some of the ladies said, "Let's do the Sleep Out", and you'd launched the sleep out in a graveyard.  I went, "I'm only doing it if we're going to go extreme".  It was a real-life changing night.  It really brought home a lot of things.  I think a couple of weeks ago I shared the video of the morning after I've not slept.  It's still getting views.  I think it's really important that it's carrying on again this year, but there's a difference to it this year because Covid has had to allow for some changes.  So, Paula, tell us.  How can we get involved in Sleep Out which is tomorrow? Paula Senior:  Anybody can take part in Sleep Out.  It's an event we've been running for many years.  It's our twelfth year this year, Wendy, and it is a key part of what we do.  The main thing is it raises awareness of homelessness, which is absolutely key and the services we offer but also it raises much needed funds for our services to continue. So, yes, flipped on the side.  This year we're going to a whole different level and it's going to be a virtual event tomorrow.  So, we're asking people to take part.  Still give up your bed for one night only.  We're asking people to sleep in their garden, they can sleep on their kitchen floor, sleep in their workplace maybe or their drive or their courtyard, whatever.  Or even to sofa surf. Wendy Harris: Yes. Paula Senior:  Because there are many, many hidden homeless people that sofa surf night after night after night.  That have no fixed address, that have no secure home to go back to and don't know sometimes from one night to the next where to go. So, instead of all coming together and sleeping in the graveyard like you took part last year, or at Pirelli Stadium, we're asking you to still do that.  Give up your bed for one night but do it virtually.  But we'll still be connected Wendy.  We're still going to have those conversations that we had last year with everybody about why we do our work, why it's important, why people are helping us.  The case studies for the success stories for those that have asked for help and worked with us to change their lives, because it is life changing.  It absolutely is, so, yes.  Tomorrow 6th November and we're live streaming through the night so that we've got people talking.  We've got a busker playing called Chris Baldwin.  He's a local musician, brilliant guy.  He would be with us normally, so he's just going to be playing some tunes as well. Wendy Harris: Keep spirits up, yes. Paula Senior:  Yes, we still need to be connected and that is really important to us, because we couldn't do what we do without everybody's help. Wendy Harris: Absolutely.  I know last year you set a target and you reached it.  What was the target last year?  What did you raise? Paula Senior:  Okay, so last year the target was £50,000 to get from the event.  We raised £50,259, which is an incredible amount of money. Wendy Harris: I know a big chunk of that goes towards the night shelter, doesn't it, which is open over Winter for people to just come in from the cold. Paula Senior:  Yes, in the last couple of years we've operated what they called the Winter Night Shelter, which opens on 1 December and runs till 1 April.  It's the harshest nights of the Winter really, where people just come and spend the night.  Safe place to stay, warm, hot food. What we have been doing the last 12 months, has been working really really hard around prevention and working with the rough sleepers.  To try and get them housed and to try and get them some stability to be in a place to live independently.  To live independently, safely, without risk of losing their home.  So, we've done a lot of work with people that were sleeping rough.  Also, the night shelter so everybody that came to the night shelter we worked very closely with last year. When Covid struck and we went into lockdown, we managed to get 18 rough sleepers temporarily housed overnight, within 24 hours. Wendy Harris: That's going to be important job for you to get involved with this year, because of course Winter's fast approaching isn't it, so I would like to let all our listeners know that me and my daughter -- my daughter wanted to come to the graveyard last year but she was too young.  She's 12 this year. Paula Senior:  Yes, that's right. Wendy Harris: She made me promise that we did it together this year.  We've basically said we're going to set up camp in the office, which is the log cabin in the garden.  It'll be freezing. Paula Senior:  Yes. Wendy Harris: And she's asked for her school to help promote with the fundraising for that.  I am sure she is going to be excited to take part with everybody else on the live streaming and to hear the busking.  So, we'll share the details of how you can help.  If you feel that you can put your hand in your pocket for the cost of a Costa coffee, other brands are available.  Everything helps. Paula Senior:  Sometimes people think that they have to donate a large amount of money or they have to do something really significant.  Actually, for example, for somebody who has no birth certificate or no ID, because it's been lost or stolen or whatever.  It's £12 to replace that.  They can't access any services until they have some ID.  So sometimes the first point of call to help a rough sleeper is to get a replacement birth certificate.  They have no money. Wendy Harris: Yes, absolutely. Paula Senior:  So, we're paying for the £12.  So, sometimes just the cost of probably a couple of days lunch that people might have paid ordinarily, or sandwiches for the week or a couple of coffees in the week will make a difference to someone's life, definitely. Wendy Harris: Well, if we're going to get kicked out the pubs at 10.00pm that extra pint. Paula Senior:  A couple of pints, yes. Wendy Harris: Just throw it the YMCA's way.  I know it will make such a huge difference to what we do. Paula Senior:  It does, Wendy. Wendy Harris: Going back to how we met and our love of conversation, I'm guessing that there must be a pivotal moment that changed your view on life that had an impact on what you're doing now, perhaps.  Paula, share with us what your pivotal moment is, please? Paula Senior:  Just a little bit of background.  I used to be a safeguarding officer in an education setting.  So, we are going back now probably six years or so, and I was supporting a young man who was thrown out of his parents' home on his 16th birthday.  Really nice young lad, a few issues going on in his life, but a really good lad. I had a conversation with him probably most days that he attended and really got to know him.  He was actually in quite an abusive relationship, but he was staying with a partner's family and not having a great time.  So, I'd support him regularly.  I helped him to get some finances to get things together.  He had nothing, just living with this family.  So, I met him in September, fast forward to November I hadn't seen him for a couple of days, and I'd been ringing him, leaving him messages.  Wouldn't answer and he turned up at my door.  It was 12 o'clock, it was a Friday, and it was the first Friday of November.  He came and he looked absolutely dreadful.  "Do you want someone to go and get you a drink?  Have you eaten?"  He wouldn't sit down; he was very edgy.  He was kind of pacing round my office and he said, "I've come to say goodbye, I've tried to kill myself.  I can't go on, my parents don't love me, I just can't go on with life.  I'm failing at everything". So, I did manage to get him to sit down for a minute.  He was very very edgy and when you're talking to somebody who's reached this point, it's often difficult to converse anyway.  He showed me what he'd done to himself the night before.  He'd tried to cut his wrists, it's the most awful thing I've ever seen.  I said, "Right, I'll go and get you a drink, just sit and wait".  Well, he said, "No, I've come to say goodbye.  I want to say thank you because you've actually listened to me.  You have listened to me every time I've come in moaning, crying, telling you how I feel, and you've not judged me.  You've just listened.  Give me some advice, what to do etc, etc.  So, I've come to say thank you".  I said, "Just wait, just wait", I was trying to process, "What am I going to do.  I need to keep here because I don't want him to leave the building.  I can't obviously force him".  I said, "I'll go and get you a drink", "No, no, no, I'm going", and with that he was gone. Stormed out of the office, left the building and I had to obviously follow all the processes and the protocol.  I had to ring the police, I had to submit his photo.  He had no relationship with parents at that point.  Then if I'm absolutely honest, I broke my heart because it was a young 16-year-old lad who needed just someone to give him some stability, to listen and help him through life.  There's only so much I can do as the safeguarding officer.  So, he left the building and by coincidence, that was the night I was doing my first Sleep Out.  I didn't work for YMCA. Wendy Harris: I was going to say, it has to be the anniversary tomorrow then. Paula Senior:  Yes, I had never done sleep out before, I was doing it that year with some team friends.  Off he went.  I also rang the YMCA, because I'd started to develop a relationship with them through my safeguarding leads to get them to come in and do some drop-in sessions.  So, young people can go and have a chat, and break down some barriers about you know what we do and the help that's available. I had a call about 4.30pm that afternoon to say they'd picked him up.  The police had found him outside his parents' address.  He had put a note through the door to say goodbye to them too.  They'd picked him up, they'd taken him to hospital, and he'd had the help that he needed on that time.  He went back home to live, actually, for a period of about three weeks, but in that time, I'd also made contact with the YMCA again, to see if he could be housed at that point.  If something should break down.  Now, he did move in with the YMCA, three weeks after. He carried on with his studies.  He did come and see me every time he was in college.  He came in every time he attended, and he got through his qualifications and did brilliantly.  That was a real moment, that conversation that we had although to me it felt like it could be his last day and to him, in his mind, it was.  It wasn't but I listened to him and I was listening not to just respond but to listen to what his needs were.  What were his needs in that conversation?  His needs were help, support, stability and that conversation allowed me to understand that and to find that for him, I guess.  Support him to access that service. I didn't work for the YMCA at that point and never thought I would if I am honest.  So, then fast forward a little bit, I left my job, took redundancy.  Via a chance conversation the day before I left I was invited to the YMCA by the mediator, who had been working with me to say, "Come and have a cup of tea, and see what we do".  I thought I knew everything about what they did, obviously, but I didn't.  I had a cup of tea and he said some, "I just have a feeling we will meet again at some point".  Fast forward six months and I start work there through a chance opportunity and I absolutely love what we do. I believe in what we do, and I believe in the life-changing opportunities that we can give to people because I've seen it.  I've seen it first-hand, absolutely.  I see it all the time, I see the people that come in.  That feel they have nothing and leave six months later with the world at their feet.  With hope, that's what we offer, hope. Wendy Harris: Yes. Paula Senior:  Through conversation and through support. Wendy Harris: You've given me goosebumps, Paula. Paula Senior:  It was a very difficult conversation. Wendy Harris: It's very clear that he'd identified somebody that would understand the subtext of what he was trying to say, because at 16 that maturity of conversation hasn't developed yet, has it? Paula Senior:  No, that is true, Wendy, yes. Wendy Harris: There is lots of emotion.  By listening to him, you knew what steps to take.  Even though he'd had gone home, you were already making the next steps available to him. Paula Senior:  Yes, totally. Wendy Harris: Before he even knew that that was what was going to happen. Paula Senior:  Yes, absolutely.  I saw him, actually, not so long ago.  He was around and about, and he's got a little family of his own now.  I felt a bit like a proud mum really. Wendy Harris: Yes, I mean that is testament to your actions and being able to react and to then have the conversation with the right people to help him as well. Paula Senior:  Yes. Wendy Harris: I love that a chance conversation with the mediator was sowing a seed in your mind. Paula Senior:  I know, we did talk about that actually when we meet up.  He says, "Do you remember when you came?"  "Yes, I remember."  I never dreamt I would work there.  Why would I?  I would never dream that I would be working there. Wendy Harris: Now, you are there.  You have been there how long? Paula Senior:  Four and a half years now. Wendy Harris: Four and a half years. Paula Senior:  Yes.  It feels like forever, I've been there forever. Wendy Harris: I bet it still feels like you're learning every day. Paula Senior:  Always.  Always, because everybody that we meet has a different story to tell.  I couldn't even begin to tell you all of the reasons why people need help.  There's many.  We're all individuals aren't we, at the end of day. Wendy Harris: Yes, yes. Paula Senior:  So, we all have our own reasons.  The people that come to us for housing, again no two people are the same, they've all had different circumstances.  I think the message for everybody is it could happen to any one of us. Wendy Harris: At any time.  As I say I was pregnant, at the time, I'd put my first marriage behind me.  Left some gap, met somebody that I thought was my next forever and overnight from going to bed to waking up I was told to leave.  In no uncertain terms. Paula Senior:  Yes. Wendy Harris: My car was packed, "You can collect your stuff later", and that was it.  It was like, "What do you do?  You're in a daze".  All you can do is get in the car, and go because I'd got my daughter, she was six. Paula Senior:  Yes. Wendy Harris: I was just fortunate that I had somewhere to surf. Paula Senior:  Yes, but not everybody has that. Wendy Harris: Yes, not everybody does.  So, I came close.  So, I say technically I was homeless, and I was, to all intents and purposes I had no fixed abode. Paula Senior:  Definitely. Wendy Harris: But I was very fortunate that I had support and I just think of all those people that don't.  There was one of our mutual friends that said being a woman in the Winter, where do you go to the toilet? Paula Senior:  Yes. Wendy Harris: It is the most basic of things that sleeping out for one night brings home to you. Paula Senior:  It does.  I think Wendy, you will probably agree.  What I took away from that Sleep Out that first night when I was sitting at 2.00am in the morning, wide awake because I was freezing cold, even though I was layered up.  Just listening to the sounds around me, I was very very safe because I was in a stadium with lots of people, but I felt quite vulnerable and I would be terrible.  I'd be frightened to death sleeping rough. Wendy Harris: The compounding idea of sleeping rough was that we were sat in the church drinking tea at 4.00am because you once get up and need to go to the toilet, and you've got a toilet to go to, the idea of actually going back to sleep is quite hard. Paula Senior:  Yes. Wendy Harris: So, you sleep a little on and off, but if you add that up, a weeks' worth of sleeping like that.  I was battered after one night. Paula Senior:  Yes. Wendy Harris: A week and what that does to your capacity to think clearly, I can't imagine. Paula Senior:  Absolutely. Wendy Harris: Make that a month, make that a Winter, make that years of continual homelessness and you are then a shadow of your former self. Paula Senior:  Feeling very disconnected from life, really. Wendy Harris: Yes, mental health is one of my pet passions.  I will do anything to support that and anybody and help anybody, so we'd better get an early night tonight, Paula. Paula Senior:  Yes, make sure you've got the sleeping bag. Wendy Harris: We're going to need it, yes. Paula Senior:  Yes.  I am sleeping on my kitchen floor, I am.  That's my plan for tomorrow. Wendy Harris: Are you? Paula Senior:  Yes. Wendy Harris: I wish you luck and I look forward to joining you on the livestream with Alice and everybody else that's joining.  We'll stick the links to the YMCA fundraising page.  I know it's on Virgin Money, I think? Paula Senior:  Virgin Monday Giving that's right, yes. Wendy Harris: I know my personal page is the WAG Works because it's named after the office, but you can go directly to the YMCA.  Honestly, I don't care who gets credited with the money so long as the money comes in.  That's the most important thing. Paula Senior:  Thank you. Wendy Harris: Paula, I really thank you for sharing that pivotal moment with us.  I applaud you for sharing.  I'll be thinking of that anniversary tomorrow as well.  Also, sending a little prayer up to say, "Do you know what, thank goodness he's got his own family to look after now".  That's made all the difference. Paula Senior:  Yes.  Thank you, Wendy. Wendy Harris: If anybody wants to reach out to you, Paula, where can they find you? Paula Senior:  You can call me on 07754 045869 or my email address is paula.senior@burtonymca.org.  Of if anybody needs any help which is obviously crucial as well, for anything, the number is 01283 547211 and we're based in Burton town centre, opposite the Asda Island.  We say it's a grey curbed brick building, with flats either side.  Someone's there 24/7, the door never closes.  We are always there for anyone. Wendy Harris: If you know anybody that needs help pass those numbers on.  That'd be great.  Thank you again, Paula. For those listeners that are tuning after 6 November, we survived the Sleep Out, we're still raising funds for the YMCA so please check out those donation links if you can.  A pound is all we're asking.  Anymore is fantastic. We'll keep you updated and if you follow us on social media, we will give you a total nearer to Christmas when all the penny counting has been done.  Thank you so much. Thank you to all of my guests for sharing their contact details.  When you reach out to them don't forget to mention the podcast show, so that they know exactly where you have come from.  That will help them out. Thank you listening to the Making Conversations Count Podcast.  It's been a pleasure to have you join us today.  Please make sure you subscribe at www.makingconversationscount.studio/subscribe.  That way every episode we release will come straight into your inbox and you'll never miss a conversation. Thanks for listening.  

In this week's podcast episode I'm speaking to the lovely Jennifer Spivak who is the CEO and founder of an all-female Facebook and Instagram Advertising agency, working with women entrepreneurs to make more money and smash the patriarchy! We talk all about why Jennifer does what she does, ad funnels, building connections with your audience and setting boundaries in your business. KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCASTDon't get too creative with your ads, keep it simple. Send cold audiences to a sales page with all the information they will need. Price qualify to eliminate people who are not your target audience. Tell people who you are and what you do, don't make it too salesy. It's okay to put people off your service if they are not the right match for you. Don't be afraid to have boundaries with your lead generation. Decide what your non-negotiables are - You are the business owner, it is your business. Show your potential customers your credibility, your personality and also your vulnerability. Talk about your story and the lessons you have learnt along the way – relatable to others. We need to build connections. Remarketing to a small audience isn't too expensive. You don't have to add value every time you post, you can also talk about you and what you do. THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…Ads don't always have to be salesy, give your audience an insight into who they are buying from and show off your personality, because no one else is you! HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISSAn Introduction to Jennifer – 10:27 Support for domestic violence – 16:20 Ad funnels explained – 25:00 Setting boundaries in your business – 32:45 Email marketing to a cold audience – 44:15 Remarketing – 58:50 Example ad content – 01:04:40 LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S EPISODEhttps://teresa-heath-wareing-b3a9.mykajabi.com/newsletter (Join my mailing list) https://jenniferspivak.com/ (Check Jennifer out!) Transcript Below  Teresa: Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. How are you doing this week? So I'm jumping straight in. I've got a great guest for you today. You know, one of the things I love about doing the podcast is that I get to learn from people and I particularly like it when it's a subject or it's a conversation, where I don't know, or it's different to how I think, or I learned something new because it's just really nice to have that opportunity to be the stupid person in the room, asking the questions and really kind of getting something new. So I love it. Now when I saw, or when I was approached, I should say for today's podcast guest, I,   I looked at what she was saying, and I looked at what she wanted to talk about, and it kind of, uh, I don't want to go as far as they triggered me cause it wasn't that bad, but it did make me go, "Oh, okay". Because her leading title was "Why you don't need lead magnets." Right. And if you listened to this podcast regularly you know, I am a big fan of a lead magnet. So I was like, you know, almost just a little bit defensive a little bit, like, "Come on then what, what you say in what's this about then?" And I decided that I needed to interview her. I needed to have a conversation with her and find out what her strategy was and why she did it.   And also like. As the interview went on, other things kept coming up when it was almost like take everything I've ever told you and turn it on its head. Like seriously. It was kind of crazy. Brilliant, amazing, funny, like all at once. So. Obviously we have particular strategies for doing things, and I have the kind of lead magnet way and loving them with emails and talking about the customer, not about yourself.   And that's the way, obviously I tend to work, but I love it when someone shows me something different or does something different and what I love even more is that she's got results to prove it. So what I think you're going to get from this episode is

THIS DICTATION IS ON QUICK TEMPER AND THE DICTATION BROKEN DOWN FOR 3 DIFFERENT SPEEDS TO PRACTICE. THE FIRST READ IS FOR WRITERS AT ABOUT 100-120 WPM, SECOND READ IS 150 TO 160 AND THE LAST READ IS 160 TO 180. THANKS A BUNCH FOR LISTENING AND SUPPORTING! TRANSCRIPT BELOW. SANDRA'S STENOGRAPHY & SHORTHAND DICTATION https://archive.org/details/dictateracollec00wardgoog/page/n166/mode/2up QUICK TEMPER A matter not unworthy of remark is the almost universal claim laid to that supposed to be desirable possession, a quick temper. "I have a frightfully quick temper, " is an assertion often made without any sign of regret, rather with self-complacency. And how often, when with the intention of saying something pleasing, we remark upon the sweetness of a friend's disposition in person, we are met with the reply, Oh! you're quite mistaken; I'm one of the quickest tempered people in the world! " given in a tone that does not imply modest depreciation of a compliment, but a decided sense of unappreciated merit. Now this willingness--eagerness it may even without exaggeration be called--to be convicted of what is acknowledged to be a fault strikes one as a curious anomaly. No one would answer, if told, "You are very truthful, " Oh, no I'm a constant liar, nor if complimented upon consistent attention to his own business, would respond, "On the contrary, scandal-mongering is my favorite occupation. " At least, no one would give any of these answers in the serious way in which the claim of a hot temper is made. May there not an underlying this inconsistency and explaining it a misconception of the real meaning and source of a hot temper? To many minds, this undesirable trait seems to be the outcome of many admirable qualities. To be hot -tempered means inferentially, in such mental vocabularies, to be generous, large-minded, unselfish, and after a little lapse of time--forgiving. But I maintain that it means exactly the reverse of all these things. If a man be quick--tempered, if he give way to anger quickly, he is not generous, for he shows no regard for the comfort of those around him; he is not unselfish, for it is safe to say that in nine cases out of ten his fury is kindled by some fancied slight to himself, and is allowed to blaze simply as an illumination in honor of his self-esteem; he is not forgiving, because though he may recover quickly from his aberration, and soon be perfectly urbane to the whilom victim of it, the restoration is simply forgetfulness, and to forget the injury inflicted upon another by his own hasty words is by no means synonymous with forgiveness of injuries he himself may have received. Last of all, he is not large-minded. I am convinced that a quick temper is an unfailing indication of limited intelligence and lack of mental quickness. If the mind was large enough to grasp the true relation of things, to see how small a point in the universe this temper-rousing episode occupied, and if it could see this quickly, the outburst would be averted. From the DICTATOR PG 164 --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app · Charity Promotion: Democracy Works: This advertisement is part of a charitable initiative in partnership with Democracy Works. howto.vote --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/sandra-clay/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/sandra-clay/support

TRANSCRIPT BELOW* *nhạc chương trình thời sự* Người dẫn chương trình (Host): Xin kính chào và cảm ơn quý vị đã theo dõi chương trình thời sự buổi tối của đài truyền hình Việt Nam. A: Anh đang xem thời sự à? B: Ừ, anh đang xem. Hôm nay có nhiều tin tức mới lắm. A: Thế ạ, hôm nay có tin tức gì mới vậy anh? B: Tin tức về vi-rút Corona A: Hả? Em tưởng ở Việt Nam đã không còn virut corona nữa rồi. B: Ừ, nhưng hôm nay vừa phát hiện một người có virut Corona A: Trời ơi, người đó ở đâu vậy? B: Người đó ở Đà Nẵng, ông ấy đã đến bệnh viên Đà Nẵng. Anh nhớ em đã nói cuối tuần này, em và gia đình em sẽ đi du lịch ở Đà Nẵng, phải không? A: Vâng, đúng rồi ạ. Gia đình em đã mua vé máy bay để đi Đà Nẵng. B: Anh nghĩ em không nên đi nữa đâu. Bây giờ ở Đà Nẵng có virut Corona , rất nguy hiểm A: Vâng, có lẽ em sẽ không đi nữa đâu. Em phải nói với bố mẹ em. B: Ừ, bây giờ khi ra đường em nhớ phải đeo khẩu trang nữa nhé. A: Vâng ạ, em sẽ nhớ đeo khẩu trang. B: Em còn nước rửa tay không? A: Em hết nước rửa tay rồi. Một lát nữa, em sẽ đi siêu thị để mua nước rửa tay. Em sẽ mua cho bố mẹ em nữa. B: Ừ, em nhớ rửa tay thường xuyên và không được chạm tay lên mắt, mũi, miệng đâu nhé. A: Em nhớ rồi. À hôm trước, anh nói với em là anh sẽ đi gặp bạn bè, đúng không? B: Ừ đúng rồi, anh sẽ đi gặp bạn và thầy cô giáo ở trường đại học của anh. A: Nhưng bây giờ đang có virut, anh cẩn thận nhé. B: À, vì bây giờ đang có virut nên có lẽ mọi người sẽ không gặp nhau trực tiếp nữa, thay vì đó, mọi người sẽ gặp nhau online, quay Zoom chẳng hạn. A: Thế hả, tiếc quá. Gặp mặt trực tiếp vẫn vui hơn chứ. B: Ừ, nhưng an toàn số một mà. A: Em hy vọng sẽ không có nhiều người bị nhiễm virut nữa. B: Ừ anh cũng hy vọng vậy. Anh tin là người Việt Nam đều biết phải làm gì để bảo vệ sức khoẻ. A: Vâng, anh cũng nhớ ăn nhiều trái cây, vì trái cây có nhiều vitamin và tốt cho sức khoẻ nhé. B: Ừ, anh biết. Anh còn nghe nói nên ăn nhiều tỏi (garlic) vì tỏi có thể giúp chúng ta không bị cúm đấy. A: Thật thế á? Vậy em sẽ nấu nhiều món ăn với tỏi. B: Ừ, nhưng nhớ ăn kẹo cao su sau khi ăn tỏi nhé. A: Em biết rồi. Thôi, bây giờ em đi nấu cơm đây. B: Ừ, anh sẽ giúp em A: Hôm nay anh muốn ăn món gì? B: gà nướng tỏi, rau xào tỏi, cơm rang tỏi. A: Hả, cái gì cơ? Anh chỉ ăn tỏi thôi à? B: Ừ, tốt cho sức khoẻ mà.

Hello, magical folx! This week we're discussing A Dream so Dark by L.L. McKinney, the second book in the Nightmare-verse series! In this episode we're making predictions about the future books in the series, talking about “urban” fantasy, and coming at you with some major Star Wars: Rise of the Skywalker spoilers (you've been warned!). For a refresher for what happened in the last book, check out our episode on A Blade So Black. Here are all the things mentioned in this week's episode! Let's start with a question! What are you wearing when you feel your most powerful? We mentioned The Neverending Story Dr. Martens – the badass shoe of choice! Ship It by Britta Lundin AAVE Sex Education Season 2 – We highly recommend the show in general! Buffy the Vampire Slayer (tv show) The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (tv show) Throne of Glass tv show? Yes! ACOTAR movie? Also, yes! Action Item: Read Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad and check out Leesa Renee Hall's Patreon. Transcript Below (or access the pdf version) As always, we'd love to be in discussion with you, magical folx. Post or tweet about the show using #criticallyreading. Let us know what you think of the episode, anything we missed, or anything else you want us to know by dropping a line in the comments or reaching out to us on twitter or Instagram (@thelibrarycoven), or via email (thelibraycoven@gmail.com). You can also check out the show notes on our website, thelibrarycoven.com. We really appreciate ratings and reviews on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or any other platforms. Help us share the magic by spreading the word about the podcast! Please support our labor by leaving us a one-time tip on Ko-fi or purchasing books from our Bookshop! Even better yet, become a monthly patron via Patreon and you can unlock a bunch of exclusive perks like mini-sodes, bonus episodes, and access to our community of reader-listeners on Discord. The podcast theme song is “Unermerry Academy of Magics” by Augustin C from the album “Fantasy Music”, which you can download on FreeMusicArchive.com. JK, it's magic is recorded and produced on stolen indigenous land: Arapahoe, Cheyenne, and Ute (Kelly) and Chickasha, Kaskaskia, Kickapoo, Mascoutin, Miami, Mesquaki, Odawa, Ojibwe, Peankashaw, Peoria, Potawatomi, Sauk, and Wea (Jessie) You can support Indigenous communities by donating to Mitakuye Foundation, Native Women's Wilderness, or the Navajo Water Project. These suggested places came from @lilnativeboy Episode 31 A Dream so Dark transition [00:00:14] [Bright, whimsical music plays]. jessie [00:00:14] Hello! And welcome to “JK, It's Magic,” a bi-weekly podcast in which two bookish besties discuss (mostly) YA fantasy through the lens of intersectional feminist criticism. Why? Because critique is our fangirl love language. And because talking about books is pretty magical. I'm Jesse. kelly [00:00:29] And I'm Kelly. And in this episode, we are discussing A Dream So Dark by L.L. McKinney, the second book in the Nightmareverse series. And I didn't write a plot synopsis before recording. So fuck it, we'll do it live. [laughs] The novel picks up right after the battle that ended the first book. Alice is grounded and people are in trouble. And lots of villains come out of the woodwork and Alice has to go into Wonderland. But she also accidentally goes to Japan. And then there's large battles and that's what happens. [laughs] jessie [00:01:09] Chaos ensues. There's chaos. Lots and lots of chaos. transition [00:01:13] [bright, whimsical music plays] jessie [00:01:18] All right. Initial reactions, I think, as you all know at this point. I love L.L. McKinney. I follow her on Twitter and I just love everything about her. She's great. So you have to know that I love this book, too. It was fast paced and super fun. I loved getting some additional POVs this time around. So I stan, I guess. Like, yeah, I really enjoyed it. kelly [00:01:41] No choice but to stan. jessie [00:01:43] Yeah. [chuckles].

This episode is an introduction to what this Podcast will be all about. I love Scooby-Doo, I'm a big fan and I think anyone who's a fan of Scooby-Doo will like this Podcast. Please give this introduction a listen, I go over what I will be doing during this podcast like talking about episodes from What's New Scooby-Doo? and I also talked a little about my thoughts on the characters in this episode which I will talk about more during the next episodes as I notice more things about them. **Also fun fact I named my podcast Meddling Pawdcast after the Meddling Kids and Pawdcast instead of Podcast because Scooby-Doo is a dog and I love plays on words and puns.** Transcript Below; Hi Everyone, How are you Scooby Dooby Doing? This is a new Podcast about Scooby Doo. In this podcast I want to share my views about Scooby Doo, the characters, and also discuss the episodes. I want to start the podcast with What's New Scooby Doo as this was the first Scooy Doo series that I ever watched as a kid. I also recently bought the rest of all the volumes so I'm rewatching them for the first time in a long time so let's discuss the episodes. I am a huge Scooby Doo fan and if you are fan too then this is the podcast for you. I am by no means an expert there are Scooby Doo films I haven't seen yet and I haven't watched every single episode of every Scooby Doo ever but you don't need to watch every single thing to be a fan. I just want to share my enjoyment with you all and hopefully you'll find some enjoyment of your own. This is supposed to be something to have fun with and enjoy so please feel free to ask questions and I will try my best to answer them or start a discussion with them. I encourage you all to watch these episodes again alongside me so that you can enjoy these episodes again because they really were great

Byron Low is known as the, “technical guy who has the ability to connect”. While he is an introvert and process oriented, he thrives on solving problems with his clients. His entire career has been dedicated to improving the lives of others, now you can listen to Byron and during this episode you can learn: How curiosity can be a driver in your life and work How introverts can be as creative and entrepreneurial as extroverts Career decisions are made from necessity as well as design – and that's ok Being interestING isn't enough – you need to be interestED. How you take your thoughts – and turn them in to tools! Follow us and explore our social media tribe from our Website: https://leadership-hacker.com Find out more about about Byron on here Website: https://www.byronlow.com Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA Read the full episode Transcript Below:   ----more----   Introduction Steve Rush: Some call me Steve, dad, husband or friend. Others might call me boss, coach or mentor. Today you can call me The Leadership Hacker. Thanks for listening in. I really appreciate it. My job as the leadership hacker is to hack into the minds, experiences, habits and learning of great leaders, C-Suite executives, authors and development experts so that I can assist you developing your understanding and awareness of leadership. I am Steve Rush and I am your host today. I am the author of Leadership Cake. I am a transformation consultant and leadership coach. I cannot wait to start sharing all things leadership with you. On today's show, we have coaching catalyst, the technical guy with the ability to connect. It is Byron Low. Before we have a chance to speak with Byron. It is The Leadership Hacker News The Leadership Hacker News Steve Rush: In the news today, wherever you turn to receive your news, you are likely to bump into the phrase “new normal”. What is the new normal? I asked this question to a group of my professional colleagues, network and associates to evaluate what hasn't happened yet - the future, a label of a new normal as to whether that helps us or holds us back? Labels can often be referred to guises, mind-sets and other things that help us frame how we see the world and how we respond; and that's really important if we're trying to make a change or a step change in how we behave in order to change our behaviour. However, when we start thinking about strategically, giving labels could often send us to thinking back to what normal was vs. new possibilities and new thinking. Overwhelmingly, the research I found through my network suggested that it was unhelpful to give the “new normal” its credence in our current status quo because it was helping us to refer back to biases, and of course, what's happening isn't normal and is unlikely to be normal because normality, as we knew things in the past, is never going to be how things will be in the future. In order to think strategically and thoughtfully, it's high time now to accept things how they are, adjust our approach because life will go on and what is normal tomorrow might not be normal the day after. What is not normal the day after could be completely different. So let's drop the labels of “new normal”, let's just focus on how things are,  be present, be in the moment and control what we can control. On a lighter note, from the not so normal, Loch Ness Monster watchers around the world are intrigued to find that in this period of lock down that Nessie has made a reappearance. A 55-year-old Irish hospital clerk caught what he believes is the legendary creature. Caught on camera it swam around the Irish loch on Monday. The official Loch Ness monster sightings register. That is right, there is one! confirming the footage, which shows something unexplained emerging from the Urquhart Bay at around 8:11 a.m. It is only the second sighting of the Loch Ness monster this decade. And I wonder, is that normal? Or just the new normal? That has been The Leadership Hacker News. If you have any news, insights or information you would like to share with our listeners. Please get in touch through our website or our social media channels.    Start of Interview Steve Rush: On today's show, I have got coaching Catalyst, Byron Low. He has been a coach for twenty-five years, been included as part of strategic leadership of twenty two plus start-ups. And he's the technical guy that people connect with. Byron welcome to the show. Byron Low: Thanks, Steve. Steve Rush: So twenty-two start-ups. Twenty-five years as a coach. That is an inordinate amount of experience to be able helping you and your clients with, but for you, your first business entrepreneurship, if you like, started when you were in high school. Tell us, a little bit about that? Byron Low: Yeah. Ever since I was a little kid, I have been one of those people that was curious and interested in a lot of things. Steve, I was the kid that read encyclopaedias and I am sure I know that in Europe you all have encyclopaedias. But in America, that was not a popular thing to do. I read encyclopaedias as a as a child, so that always gave me this…I have and always have had this very voracious appetite for knowledge. I will give an example. When I was younger, we had a family set of encyclopaedias. But ask him for us a special kind of encyclopaedia called Jane's Encyclopaedia of Aviation. And he said, What is that? I said, well, it is a special encyclopaedia of just airplanes. And he looked at me like, what? Why would you want that? Well, I learned when I was a kid that my dad grew up on the eastern seaboard, of The United States, and when he was a kid. He had these cards and I got to see them. There are these cards that were the silhouettes of all of the German of the axis powered and also the allied powered airplanes, and the silhouette was looking down on it. You could see the actual airplane, and that really led me to this interest in just learning about that. So I learned all about World War 1, World War 2, all the aircraft and I had them all memorized, and I also learned about all manufacturers from, you know, from the very, very beginning. So I learned about all the different kinds of cars. My curiosity was always very, very strong, and that led me to want to start different kinds of businesses and I have always been kind of very kind of entrepreneurial. When I was even younger before high school. I was the one that kind of organize the youth activities and sports in my neighbourhood. I help people kind of get together and do things and even then, I was an introvert and I am still an introvert. But there was something there that was very enterprising. Steve Rush: And enterprising I guess, comes from those thoughts you are having. So introverted people will take on that information, energy and power from their internal source where extroverted people obviously get their energy from external sources and people and surroundings. But that's not atypical for entrepreneurs to be coaches, is it? How did you wrestle with the internal dialogue that was saying, “I am introverted, but yet I still need to be extroverted and go out and find new things and new ways of working?” Byron Low: That is a good question! I think even when I was younger; I was drawn to athletics, even though I was kind of a nerd in a sense or even as a boy, a technical person. I very much was drawn to being athletic and being involved in sports. I remember my family originated - you know, they are all in northern U.K. in Scotland. And I remember learning about cricket and even rugby and obviously football, your football and I remember having learning that I had cousins in Scotland, but I wanted to learn about their game. But I didn't really have any context for learning that, but for me, it was about learning the American sports of football, basketball and baseball and tennis, which were all the things that I played. The world of athletics is an external world and you can be an introvert and be an athlete. Absolutely, but that's really kind of how I bridged the gap with my internal world. Because you're right, introverts have this very, very large interior world. Mine as an introvert, It is vast and how I made the connection to the external world was through sports. And I absolutely love sports and I learned how to affiliate with others through sports, and it still is, it is a love of my life. I mean, I am actually very, very much missing that today because there are not any sports right now. I actually have a son who is 16, who is a baseball player and he very much wants to be a competitive baseball player someday. I am actually living through him; I can see in him what I had when I was younger in this intensity of wanting to be a better athlete. Steve Rush: So your exploration of other people and other activities is your external energy, I guess, right? Byron Low: That is right. I think my externality came in two places. It came both in academics working either with my classmates, because I remember even when I was in school, I remember a time when I was a freshman, I was taking a class in physics and learning about physics. And there was this one time where I was answering the questions in physics, but I was answering them in Spanish because the class I had before Physics was Spanish, so instead of putting velocity, I answered that the question of physics velocidad. So that became kind of a joke between me and my physics teacher. It was just simply that external world of academics and also the external world of sports in school that was really kind of where I was able to connect with people, so to speak. Steve Rush: Got it, so then you progressed from high school, interestingly, what was the business you created in high school? Byron Low: It was real simple. I had a friend in high school, whose family owned land, and they had a lot of trees on their land, and his grandfather actually had a wood splitter, which once you get the tree, you fill the tree and you knock it down and you chop it up with a chainsaw. You put the segments of the tree and a splitter and it literally splits those segments into firewood. It was a firewood making business. Steve Rush: Brilliant, so from there then the technical side, that technical curiosity that you share earlier, that led you into moving into the field of engineering, right? Byron Low: Yeah, I worked as an engineer for a few years with a company in Phoenix, Arizona called Garrett Turbin Engine Company. They were private; they were not a defence contractor, they were a private company that made small jet engines for private aircraft. That company eventually was purchased by another company, and I'm not even sure today if those engines are even in existence because our biggest competitor is a massive company out of the East Coast. It was a fun time, one of my most fond memories was… there was a time when we were working together as engineers. I think about, you know your basic cubicle setup and there was this one particular instance where I came across a problem where I thought I had a differential equation, and a differential equation is a specific kind of math problem and I called it out, “I think I've got a differential equation” and everyone around me came over to look at it and right then, because we are going to talk later about how to turn thoughts into tools and this is an example of how to turn thoughts into tools. I had a thought at that time. Oh, everyone is interested because it was kind of rare to run in this differential equation in real life work situation. We are not math class we are bunch of engineers. Every single guy that was on this little problem solving exercise, and again, I'm the youngest guy but I get everyone together, and we were all in this big area and everyone has as a blank piece of paper. And it was going to be a race. Who is going to solve the problem first? And I happened to be standing behind a guy from Iran and a guy from Bangladesh, and they both started to answer this differential equation, and I knew how to solve the differential equation and I could see my other American colleagues trying to answer the differential equation. But when I looked over the shoulders of these two men who we're doing the same thing, the way they went about it was absolutely bizarre to me, which led to another conversation where these two guys ended up sharing with everyone else there. And no one knew that the way these guys thought of math and numbers was completely different than everyone else. The point is, is that the way that the gentleman from Iran, the way the gentleman from Bangladesh and then there was even another guy from Nepal, another guy from India, they all had very, very similar ways of answering the question. I promise you the answer, they question, they answer, the problem but they almost answer the problem in reverse, and it blew all of the North Americans minds, all of us. And that was an example of taking a thought I had and literally turned into a tool in real time. It was all about discovery. It was all because I was curious, and I was not afraid, even though I was the most junior. I was the least intelligent of that group. I had the least experience but I did not care because I wanted to know. I wanted to know the answer. I wanted to find out something, and it was absolutely fascinating. Steve Rush: And do you think that is where you got the bug to become a coach? Because all great coaches need the ability to ask those great questions. Those restless questions, the teasing curious “pokey questions” as I call them. Is that where that kind of start for you? Byron Low: Yeah, I think so. Most children, they identify with one parent. Some of us are blessed to have two, and I had two but with my two sets of parents, I identified with my mom. I long to connect with my dad, which I did not really have a great connection with my dad. But I definitely connect with my mom, and my mom was the was the extrovert. She was relational and I was the introvert but because of her intense curiosity, almost to an annoying level. My mom passed away several years ago. I took her to the grocery store and I had to go run an errand while she was in the grocery store, and when I came back. By this, like seventy-five years old. I come back to pick up my mom. My mom is still on the first aisle of the grocery store, and she is having a conversation with someone. She has been talking to the exact same person for like twenty-five minutes, and I thought she was going to be finished with her grocery shopping. But that's an example of my mom. My mom gave me this ability to connect with people, even though I am technical. So to answer your question, absolutely. It is a combination of having the ability, but also working on the ability to connect with people. Even though I am technically even though I've got this, I've got all these questions. I have to find a way and I try to be as creative as possible. I have to find a way to ask questions that are not offensive. They are not off putting. They are not intimidating because I love working with smart people. But if you're the smartest person that can be intimidating, I don't mind being smart, but I don't ever have to be the smartest. What I want to be is. I want to be the most interested, not the most interesting, but the most interested. I want them to feel that I genuinely am curious and I want them to think that is almost that in itself is some kind of interesting as well. Steve Rush: You know, it was that very thing that drew me to you when we first connected was that whole kind of technical-introverted yet coach, because most coaches I speak with and most coaches I work with, generally are more extroverted than introvert. So what was the kind of catalyst for you then to become a full time professional coach to help others?  Byron Low: You know, I have been doing this work for a long time, but I think it was during the economic contraction we had back in 2008, 2009. I was doing mostly consulting, and I was doing some coaching and it was really out of out of necessity. This is also a lesson, I think that there are times in life we think we have a plan. But life gives us an opportunity that we have to adjust and it really wasn't something I was planning on, Steve. I was not necessarily planning on a career of being a coach. It was during the economic contraction. We as a family went for a significant amount of time without income. I had to cash out all of our savings in order to survive, but then the launching and really, the commitment to coaching as a business. I tell this, even as I am working with clients, if they are willing to make a change in their career, if they are willing to change their career, going into a different kind of industry or wanting to make an adjustment. The way I made this this decision for me and again, this is for me, but this is also the advice I give. And I would love to hear your thoughts. I tell them for me personally, I had to do this because I feel like I had no other choice, and it wasn't like I wanted to do this. I happen to be very good at it, and I really, really love it, but it was never a plan but I also think it is important that there has to be that full commitment. Does that make sense? Steve Rush: It makes load of sense, and I think anybody who has been brilliant, successful and has longevity in any career, they always truly invested in that career don't they. They are not distracted, you know, on part time this and part time that, they are all in, and I think that is what makes a difference. And I wholeheartedly agree with that and sometimes that's forced upon us through a situation and other times it's through purpose and drive, right? Byron Low: That is right. Steve Rush: When we spoke last, one of things that really intrigued me about our conversation  too was the way that you apply quite scientific approach to some of the activities that sits within a coaching experience. And you describe listening as a science. Tell me, what is the reason that you look at something that will do naturally, quite scientifically? Byron Low: I think partly is where I am coming from. Coming from that technical perspective, that is my strength. That is where I am going to lean on, and when it comes to listening, listening is an incredibly relational thing to do. I am relational, I think. Because of my relationship with my mom and the examples of people that I had in my life, but I think that the reality is, is that I look at it as something that we all can obviously grow in. I don't care how technical you are and I have had clients who are the most technical people that you can imagine. You know scientists or Medical Doctors or Attorneys or, you know, Accountants, Economists, PhD. I honestly believe all of us, no matter where we are coming from. We can look at listening. Listening is one of the most incredible tools we have in our arsenal. All of us can have a tool kit that is very well equipped and that we can constantly be growing in our capacities, in our abilities to listen. It is very simple. Because I am technical, I don't necessarily think it's scientific, even though I do think that there are parts even how our brain is made that actually can help with that.  Because the bottom line is, is that ultimately it is a choice. It's like you said earlier, it's a choice. It is commitment, when we are committed to listening, listening first; it goes back to what I said earlier, I had a really good friend who passed away. He actually played music my wife and I, our wedding and he learned from a very young age because his dad kind of called out to him and said, John, do you want to be interested or do you want to be interesting? And I remember hearing that for the first time when I was in my early twenties working with John, and John was the most intelligent human being I've ever met. He was an absolute genius, but he was actually fascinated being interesting but I learned from him that I can listen. I can learn and also, again, I can lead with that curiosity. Steve Rush: And if there were, people listening to this ironically and thinking how do I practice, better listening. Any tips, techniques that you could share? Byron Low: First of all, I think you have to be interested. I think you have to be focused. I am not doing it now, but most of the time when I am on a call with a client; I am not sitting in front of my computer. I am now because I am literally hardwired into my computer and this technology is using this over the Internet. Most the time I am on my phone and when I on a call with a client, I am actually walking. I walk up to up to 15 miles a day, and the walking takes me away from my computer and it forces me to hear them. You literally have to hear people before you can listen to them. So you have to have a good connection and it is absolutely frustrating, frustrating for me. Really been out of shape if I can't hear. I mean, physically hear. So the point is, is that you have to be able to hear them. You have to have a good connection. When I talk with other coaches, most of their coaching practices face to face or I am talking with a prospective client and they want to meet face to face if they are local. I am happy to do that, if it works out for both of our schedules but it really is not necessary to meet face-to-face and today's virtual world with what is going on in the world today where many of us now are at home, I don't think that's necessary. I think as long as we have a good connection. I think we can listen, but it takes a commitment you have to want to listen. Steve Rush: Sure, and I wonder if your natural introversion plays to that strength actually, doesn't it? Well, you don't need to see an experience other the people. You can internalize that yourself.  Byron Low: Yeah, it is funny. Whenever I am on a Zoom meeting with clients or company of sorts and they always ask me, why don't you turn on your webcam? I tell them I don't have a webcam, and they don't believe me. I said, no, really, I don't want you to see me. I actually love anonymity. I don't ever want to be famous. Whenever I am on Zoom or another kind of screen share tool, I turn off the ability to see them. I think you are right. I think that really does lend itself really well to the interior world of the introvert. Steve Rush: So we spoke a little earlier about the whole foundation for coaching for you particularly is around turning thoughts into tools and I know that is really big for you and certainly a big technique that you use with your client. How did that come about? And how do you now help other people turn their thoughts into tools?  Byron Low: You know, I truly believe that as a practitioner and as a coach, that's one of the things that is a differentiator that sets me apart, is that I have a high level of curiosity which leads itself to I really want to learn a lot, and I tend to read a lot. And because I read a lot, I find tools. I am consistently sending articles to clients that I read, I think that might help them. And it could be as simple as just as an idea or a thought that I get or I want to glean from an article. I learned a long time ago. We are all familiar with the concept of “either/ or” thinking. Right? Steve Rush: Right. Byron Low: It is “either this” “or” that and it is very binary, It's either yes or no. It is either black or white. I am really a proponent of not having that kind of thinking, as much as the thinking that is “both/and…” A “both/and”, kind of thinking that is really open more to possibilities, more to the idea can we ask two more questions. And the idea of seeing that as a tool when you look at the things that I read or the things that a client is going through, I really wanted to help them see that it really is going to be up to them and how they want to apply something. They need to have a shift in their thinking that is not binary. It is not about, you know. Can it be this or that? It could be both. It could be both and we can actually use that the word and it can be both/and something. So the possibilities of having of thinking like that versus thinking that is more cut off. It opens up the window of possibility. That is exciting, and I think that ultimately when we think about providing people those kinds of tools and turning thoughts into tools, it really is about and this is really, really critical. It is about the people. It is about all of us. We have to be able to listen to ourselves. Because, Steve, I believe that you have all the tools you need in order for you to become the best version of you. But it's going to be important for you to be able to hear yourself. And that's really what I believe and I convey to my clients. It is my job to set up the relationship and the conversation so that they can hear themselves, because those tools, those thoughts, they are not my thoughts. They are their thoughts; they are the client's thoughts. So it's really critical for them to be able to hear their own thoughts. I would also add it is critical for them to see themselves, because when they hear themselves and they see themselves that is when the beginning of change occurs. It can happen because that is when we be become more self-aware. But the hearing of those thoughts, that's the first step of capturing the thought that can become a tool. If they don't have the ability or capacity to hear themselves to capture that thought, they can never see the thought become a tool. Does that make sense? Steve Rush: Huge amount of sense and it plays to the whole mind-set Philosophy too doesn't it? So what you described as the “either /or” that very much plays to a fixed mind-set, it looks for evidence you got. Whereas when you ask “both/ and…” that plays to the unconscious part of the mind that has all of those thoughts, deep rooted, that are unconscious that we don't maybe listen to every day that we drag out, and that give us the foundation for the new tools, right? Byron Low: That is right. Steve Rush: So once we have done we've got a this thinking going on, how do you then distil all of those huge amounts of thoughts and experiences that people might be having. How do you distilled that into, “right.. here are the tools that are going help you”. Byron Low: It is going to be different for each client I am working with. But I think the important thing for all of us that when we're having conversations with people be at coaching conversations or just simply personal interactions, it's critical. That all of us that we meet the other where they are. That we don't have expectations, that we don't force people to be something that they're not. So along with this willingness to listen and the willingness to literally physically hear someone. It is also this willingness to be kind of non-judgmental or open or accepting of them. I think that as a coach, I have to and I want to. This has been a hard lesson and I remember learning this was back in about 2009-2010, when I was first starting my coaching practice. I was talking to a psychologist and he was talking about trying to remove the judgmental language from my vocabulary where I was, and again, this is a little hard to conveyances in such a short amount of time. But the idea of, it is actually possible for us to be with another and to switch off this idea of judgment. And it led to a tool that I have, which again, I like tools, I like creating tools. And the tool is, it's called the “AUAC”. Awareness, Understanding, Acceptance and Commit. Awareness, Understanding, Acceptance and Commitment. The awareness is really the first step. We have to be aware and then understanding is we have to understand ourselves. We also have to be willing to understand the other and understand and the other is not only hearing them, but listening to them but at the same time, which the understanding leads to this idea of acceptance. And if you are ever around our family, because I have you know, I have three children and a wife and a dog and we have a beautiful family. If we ever had an argument as a family, which we had many arguments, we would slow down the argument a little bit and would say, okay, it is not about agreement. I am not asking you to agree with me. It is about can we understand each other? If we can understand each other and we really can get to a point of acceptance where I accept what you are saying. I accept the situation. I accept, you know, the conditions that we are in, then we can finally get to a commitment and that ultimately is action. But we have to get to a place where we can understand each other and it absolutely is a waste of time when we're trying to get someone to agree with us. And that judge mental language that I had then, the judgment of thinking that I had, it was just ingrained in me even as a child. And it's still there, Steve but when I hear it in myself or when I see it in other people, I'm more sensitive to it now. In the last 10 years of coaching, I have had the privilege of coaching people that have completely, utterly different world views than I have. And that doesn't mean I can't coach them. It just means that I have to suspend that judgment and be able to accept them where they are. That is how I have grown, as I have been able to help others. I have be able to learn how to listen, but also learn how to understand, but ultimately how to accept and it has been a lot of fun. Steve Rush: That is really neat, and I think understanding each other is so much easier than trying to agree with each other, because we come from our own perspectives and we come with our own biases and our own experiences of the world, where actually if we can just find that common ground, then we move forward quicker, right? Byron Low: Absolutely, but I think some of our families are kind of rooted in this argumentative, almost pugilistic culture where we like to fight. We like to prove our point, and oftentimes, when we are in a thinking mind-set like that, it is a very fixed mind-set. We are not really even listening to the person. We are listening to our own thoughts about what we are going to say next, because we want to destroy that person. I have watched debate. I have watched different debates on, it could be a political debate or it could be a different kind of debate. But the idea of debate, what if debate was about understanding versus just simply about destroying the other? And I think even within our own political systems, if we all kind of got together to try to solve the problem versus trying to prove that we're better than someone else, I think we could get more done. But I don't know the whole political system and the process. It doesn't seem to be, you know, oriented towards that as much as is oriented, like you said, towards getting people to agree with them and to me, I just find that to be a glorious waste of time. Steve Rush: I could not agree with you anymore. Well, this part of the show Bryon we ask our guests to share some of their top Hacks. In your case top tools, so what will be some of your top tools that you can share with our listeners? Bryon Low: You know, I've got three. The first one is knowing yourself. I think its absolute critical that as we grow as leaders, it starts as we grow. The seed starts in our own heart as we learn about ourselves. We have got to learn. You know, ultimately what we believe, who we believe we are, what we stand for. There is a really famous book out right now by a gentleman. His name is Simon Sinek is world famous, Start With Why. I think knowing yourself and starting with why is absolutely critical. Simon also has one of the most watched TED talks ever on how great leaders inspire action, because I think all great leaders and as a leadership hack, all great leaders, they know themselves. The second leadership hack is really about being honest, and what that means is being honest with what you have and graciously accepting what you have. If we are all honest about what we have, and we are all growing, that is really the point. And it's really about progress equals happiness and that's not something I've coined that actually comes from Tony Robbins, because I believe it's absolutely true. I believe that if we are progressing, no matter what. I even share this with my 16-year-old son because he wants to play, you know, competitive baseball and I would say to him, it is about progressing as long as you are progressing. We are good. You know, some days we're going to have good days or we can take two steps forward and a step back where we've made progress. Some days it is two steps forward and three steps backward. So we are actually we did not go very far that day, but that is okay. But the point is, is that if we're honest about what we've been given, what we've been entrusted and we do the best and really it's an effort thing. There is a book by Carol Dweck and Carol Dweck, D-W-E-C-K. She is the foremost expert on Mind-set, and in her book Mind-set, she talks about this. It is really about that effort. So my leadership hack is know yourself, and then to be honest. And lastly, as you can imagine, it's about being curious. I want to lead with that and for some clients; I encourage to do the exact same thing. For others, that is not their thing. But ultimately, it's about looking at the world as a world of possibilities, as a world of wonder. And I do so not only do I want to know myself. I want to be honest with what I have, and I want to work hard. I also want to be curious, because I believe that if we are curious, there is that idea that curiosity can lead to great questions and great questions can lead to other great questions. And to me, that sounds like a fun life.  Steve Rush: And lifelong learning also means you never get bored and you never get stale, because there's always something new you can go back to and incidentally, Carol Dweck is a bonus hack. Carol Dweck, as part of her famous work around mind-set. One of the things that I often help my kids and my clients with is the whole power of YET. So you can't fail at something but you just haven't been successful “YET”. It create's just a different mind-set that helps people think about next possibilities vs. closing down actions and activities, so great hacks. We have also become familiar in asking our guests on the show to share their “hack to attack”. So this is a period in a time where something's gone wrong, where maybe you've screwed up, but it's now become part of their learning. Part of the way that they do things and it is playing part of their future. What will be your hack to attack? Bryon Low: My hack to attack has to do with connecting with people. I have a tendency like a lot of us do. As a matter of fact, in this last week, I probably have had a half a dozen conversations with folks who have spent their careers committed to the companies that they were working in. And because they were committed to the companies they were working in, they never, ever really worked on themselves. They never really worked on their career and if that sounds like you, I get it. The challenge I had was I suffered from that. Which is really a form of myopia where you're so focused and intense on what you're doing, you're not necessarily thinking about yourself or your career, you're thinking about the company you're working for, which has great benefits for the company, not so great benefits for the individual. But what I also learned when I was just thinking through this process with Steve was not only was that true for me in my career, but it also was true for me in connections and people that I was working with, because whenever there was a change, whenever there was a change of location, a change of job. What I have learned was and I have always known this, but it just kind of. It was stark. I am not very good at keeping up with people. Look, I have no idea who is going to listen to this, but if there are people that are in my past that are listening to this, I am sorry. I understand that I have the capacity to relate. I do and I know that because there is a friend that I reach out to a couple of times a year, and we are always able to kind of pick up where we left off. Always and it is always deep and it is always meaningful. But for some reason, with keeping up with people, and when social media came on board, you know, back in the early 2000s and someone actually talked me into joining Facebook, and the whole idea of Facebook for an introvert is like it's very, very stress inducing. And I only did it because I was talked into it and I hated it from the very, very first time I was on Facebook, but just because I hate Facebook. I remember one time I was actually on Facebook and I have all these people that are connected to me, and while I was on Facebook looking at someone, someone started talking to me and that literally freak me out to have someone talk to me when I was on Facebook. I did not understand it, but the point is. Is that I think I have a lot of room for growth and opportunity to remain and stay connected with people and that takes effort, that takes work, that takes time and ultimately, I want to do that. And I think when I look back, I think people could feel a little confused by my lack of consistency there. Steve Rush: And I guess this will absolutely play part of education for others listening to this, who are also introverted, who struggle with that. Conversely, of course, if you are extroverted and struggled to relax, struggled to be introspective and reflective. The same is absolutely true, just poles are different, right? Bryon Low: Right and that really is something I think that with my extroverted friends and family that are almost like because I told you my mom was an extrovert. She had a very large family of sisters and brothers. My mom spoke to almost every single one of her siblings every single week on the phone. I have two brothers and a sister, and let me just say I don't. I know I am not going to be my mom, but I have to get better in this. And I want to get better but the bottom line is, I really do a very poor job at this. Steve Rush: Comes back to one of those hacks, know yourself, you know, these things and therefore, part of your not getting it right in the past, you're able to work on it for the future. Right? Bryon Low: That is right, and I like what you said about what Dweck said yet. And even the utilization of something like Facebook. I have not figured that out and it is an opportunity for me to learn more. And I'm on Instagram, I'm on Twitter. I don't know what I'm doing. Honestly, Steve, but I am open. I want to learn and I want to build to make those connections.  Steve Rush: And learning by experience is often the best way. Bryon Low: Absolutely. Steve Rush: So if you were able to do bit of time travel, get back and bump into Byron when he was 21, what would be the advice you would give him? Bryon Low: You know, the first advice is I would say just relax, because I come with this. This supercharged intensity about life, about myself. I even had a professor one time. Tell me, Byron, you practically vibrate. What she meant was that there is a level of intensity that I have it can be off putting. It can be intimidating, but I think what I would tell my younger self, because I have such and again, if you remember what Carol Dweck would talk about with a fixed mind-set person, and I think I was very fixed mind-set when I was younger. They feel like they have to be the best. They feel like that, there is this like compulsion and it kind of pushes them. I don't necessarily feel that today but I think when I was younger, I would really want to and again I would have a caveat. I can give my advice to my younger self, but the caveat is this, my younger self would accept it. I would say relax. Number one, relax and just allow your curiosity, your interest, your ability to connect with people. Just lead with that and have fun. I think there were times when I allowed my intensity to kind of rule and situations. Give you a personal example. To this day, I have never consumed alcohol and I remember had a colleague years ago. Say, the epiphany was, wow, you have never actually had any way of having that edge kind of off, of you. Because everyone knows me as intense. And no, I've never had a buzz, ever. And there's a reason for that. I come from a home, a home life where alcohol was abused, so I did not get to see the positive side of alcohol. I am not against alcohol at all, as a matter of fact, I have conversations with my children. I believe I am been very open but the reality is, is that I think that there is an intensity as a young person, there is almost this drivenness were there was not a terrific amount of grace that I was giving myself. And what I would do is I would just simply say, it's going to be okay. You are going to be okay, just take it easy. And I would not necessarily say for me to drink. That is not the answer; the answer is to be a little more accepting of myself and to be a little more forgiving of myself and to be a little bit more self-compassionate to myself, if that makes any sense. Steve Rush: Yeah. Lots of lessons there isn't there, and also, interestingly, if you look back on some of those key instrumental activities as part of your life, they're forming your work now and that's fantastic news. So Byron, if folk were listening to this and I wanted to find out a little bit more about your work, maybe connect with you through some social media. Where would you like them to find you? Bryon Low: I am on Facebook. I am on Instagram and Twitter but I think the probably the best places is to go to Byron Low, B-Y-R-O-N L-O-W, bryonlow.com. You will get to see the kind of work that I do. And if you want to reach me, you can reach me at my phone numbers on the website. You can also reach me through email byron@byronlow.com. I would love to hear from you and but that's probably the best and the most direct and primary ways of getting hold of me. Steve Rush: I will also make sure that we've got your contact details in our show notes Byron as soon as folks listen to this. They can click on the links and connect with these straightaway. Bryon Low: Excellent.  Steve Rush: So finally, it is just for me to say that I have really enjoyed connecting with you. I have really enjoyed you being part of our extended leadership hacker community. And, you know, there's no question that as a technical guy, you absolutely have the ability to connect and I'm sure that's going to be the case through our listenership. Byron, thank you ever so much for being on The Leadership Hacker Podcast. It has been a super pleasure to be speaking with you. Bryon Low: Thank you, Steve. I very much appreciate it, and it was a lot of fun. I appreciate it and I hope the best for you and your listeners and for you and your family. Steve Rush: Thank you Byron, take care.  Closing Steve Rush: I genuinely want to say heartfelt thanks for taking time out of your day to listen in too. We do this in the service of helping others, and spreading the word of leadership. Without you listening in, there would be no show. So please subscribe now if you have not done so already. Share this podcast with your communities, network, and help us develop a community and a tribe of leadership hackers.  Finally, if you would like me to work with your senior team, your leadership community, keynote an event, or you would like to sponsor an episode. Please connect with us, by our social media. And you can do that by following and liking our pages on Twitter and Facebook our handler their @leadershiphacker. Instagram you can find us there @the_leadership_hacker and at YouTube, we are just Leadership Hacker, so that is me signing off. I am Steve Rush and I have been the leadership hacker.    

Angela Foster is a nutritionist, health and performance coach who works with athletes, entrepreneurs and CEOs of global organizations. She is also the CEO of My DNA EDGE. In Hacking Your Leadership Health – You will learn: How after fighting for her life she found her life and work passion The relationship between sleep and leadership performance How our physical and mental performance are integrated Not all stress is bad for you and your team How physical fitness improves your brain function What Biohacking is and how it can enhance your health and your performance.   Follow us and explore our social media tribe from our Website: https://leadership-hacker.com Find our more about about Angela on here Website: https://angelafosterperformance.com Angela on Instagram Download Angelas Short Course on Sleep here Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA Read the full episode Transcript Below:   ----more---- Introduction Steve Rush: Some call me Steve, dad, husband or friend. Others might call me boss, coach or mentor. Today you can call me The Leadership Hacker. Thanks for listening in. I really appreciate it. My job as the leadership hacker is to hack into the minds, experiences, habits and learning of great leaders, C-Suite executives, authors and development experts so that I can assist you developing your understanding and awareness of leadership. I am Steve Rush and I am your host today. I am the author of Leadership Cake. I am a transformation consultant and leadership coach. I cannot wait to start sharing all things leadership with you. On the show today, we have Angela Foster. Angela helps global business leaders and their teams transform their mind and body for lifelong high performance. Before we get a chance to speak with Angela, it is The Leadership Hacker News.  The Leadership Hacker News Steve Rush: In the news today, Billionaire Paul Singer leads his Elliott Management hedge fund, pre-warned two months ago his employees should start preparing for a month long quarantine, well before any town or city had mandated a lockdown. Mr Singer sent an internal memo on the 1st of February to all his employees in all his firm's offices around the world, saying try and make arrangements that you do not have to leave your home for a month if it becomes necessary. He didn't have a crystal ball; what was playing out here was strategic thinking. The Elliott Fund Management founder is well known for being really cautious about anything that could affect markets, including crazy things like solar storms. In his memo, he added that his workers should have access to sufficient food, water and medicines and did not start telling his employees to start working from home until local authorities had to. But by then, his employees were well informed, and this memo wasn't focused on investment strategy but employee safety and it didn't address investment decisions. The firm had hedges of course, that naturally helped protect his investments from a downturn but of course, in any business, it's our employee's well-being, their state of mind and their response to any challenges that are critical helping us move through situations. Systems thinking is about developing strategies, strategy is about the future. Therefore, strategic thinking is thinking about the future and that includes some crazy stuff that we would have never anticipated could happen. But if it did, “what if” and “how” would we respond to it? In my teaching and coaching around strategic thinking, there are four things that we typically do when faced with thinking strategically. The first thing we think is we think about the preferable. What are the things we want? And that is formed often by our desires and our worldview - possibly unhelpful. We look at the probabilities of things happening. We manage our risks and our investments and our business decisions, and then what are the plausible things that could go wrong and could go right? But when we talk about the art of the possible, we don't often talk about the art of the possible. Because to get there we need scenarios, wildcard events and crazy thinking to really unlock future thinking and patterns and this does not mean we change our investment or business decisions. It means that we are thoughtful, that if these events did happen in the future, how would we manage them? So here's the thing. Right now, in amongst managing a very turbulent and unpredictable business environment, are we strategically thinking today? Are we thinking what if? Are we scenario planning around some crazy ideas that might happen? Possibly could happen even if they are improbable and not that plausible today? If you are not, now is the time to really turn strategic thinking on its head, it could be a lifesaver for you, your well-being along with your staff and your business at some point in the future. That has been The Leadership Hacker News. If you have any news, insights or information you think our listeners would like to hear. Please get in touch through our social media sites.   Start of Interview Steve Rush: I am joined on today's show by nutritionist, health and performance coach who works with athletes, entrepreneurs and CEOs of global organizations. She is also the CEO of My DNA EDGE; we are joined today by Angela Foster. Angela, welcome to the show. Angela Foster: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me here today. I am pleased to be here. Steve Rush: So, this is a great opportunity for us to learn from not only a leader of a business, but somebody who works with other leaders, but fundamentally about leadership health and well-being and nutrition, but your career didn't start out that way. So I understand that you started out as a corporate lawyer. So how did the transition take place? Angela Foster: Yeah. So as you say, initially was a corporate lawyer and I was working very long hours. As you can imagine, in one of the top city firms, putting together international deals, flotations sort of mergers and acquisitions and I think that at that stage, I kind of really undervalued my sleep will be one thing. And I was really that sort of classic type-A personality where I would push myself very hard. I am pretty competitive, wanted to get the best deal done for the client and kind of neglected things. But I really got away with it and I think that classically, you know, when we're in our late 20s, early 30s, that's pretty easy to do, and then when I started a family, that's when things started to shift a bit because they were competing demands on my time. And also, most importantly, on my energy, and I unfortunately suffered with post-natal depression pretty severely and I think that was actually as a result of the way that I'd kind of push myself so hard and got sort of burnout, and then that eventually culminated in me. You know, my kids came down with a cough. I sort of caught it and basically that manifested in me in double pneumonia, viral and bacterial. That kind of went the wrong way, it went south very quickly and so as urgently admitted into hospital fighting for my life. And that created a big shift in me and what I wanted to do and kind of, I guess, is kind of a bit of a woo woo moment where you look introspectively and yourself. And was I really living the best life that I wanted to? And when I made a full recovery, fortunately for me. With very little long term damage to my lungs, that really kind of started me off on a quest to see initially, well, how can I actually optimize my health and not just get back on track. But be stronger, fitter and healthier than I was before and got me very much into the performance arm of health, and then helping other people to do the same. And it was really about how can I combine optimized health with high performance? And then I realized that actually sustained high performance, that the optimal health is the very foundation of that. If you want to sustain that over the long term, so that is really how I made the transition. Steve Rush: It demonstrated that you really have now got a true vocation in life, haven't you, as a result of that experience? Angela Foster: Yeah, I have and I think that, you know, sometimes-bad things that need to happen in a way for good things to take their place. And that's very much been the case for me. You know, I definitely value, that experience has really taught me to value my life and practice gratitude on a daily basis in the morning. And it's also given me a newfound love of something I love. I was always a pretty kind of fit and healthy person, but this has really enabled me to take it to another level and to help as many people as I can. Steve Rush: Yeah, for sure and of course, now, given the environment that we're all working in, many people are having to think about their work, their life and the way that they do things. In fact, many people now working from home and the opportunity that has presented itself in amongst this crisis could actually be one of those greatest opportunities for us to look a little bit more introspectively. Our health, our well-being as leaders. And how we might do things. What do you think some of your top thoughts or tips around taking this as an opportunity to really focus on our well-being and health? Angela Foster: I think as you as you say, this is the perfect opportunity to do that. I think for many people, they know in their kind of their heart of hearts, really, that maybe they have been neglecting not necessarily all areas of health, but one or more. And the ones that come up commonly is people maybe haven't been sleeping enough, whether that's quality sleep or duration of sleep, or maybe they haven't been exercising as much as they should have been, maybe they haven't been getting outdoors and getting much fresh air because they've been stuck in offices or meeting rooms or travelling. Maybe, you know, they are buying food out and they have not really looked at their nutrition and thought much about how that really fuels their body. And now that we're all in this quarantining phase, we've actually got a bit more time on our hands, and I think it's a real opportunity. With that has come obviously an element of stress and quite a big element of stress for many people, because particularly for leaders, they are managing teams. They've got concerns over what's going on with the economy and their business and whether they can keep those staff on long term. There are many challenges, but again, that in itself as well is an opportunity to think, well, actually, how have I been managing my stress as a whole? And now that I am at home, maybe I've got time to bring in some more stress management practices as well. That will make me a better leader and more resilient and I can also then use and inspire my organization with as well.  Steve Rush: Often colleagues are looking to their leadership at times like this to role models, and new thinking, behaviour. So this is a great chance to do that, isn't it? Angela Foster: Yeah, absolutely and I think it is you know, it all comes from the top, as you say and I think that if we can use that extra time, that we have to focus on these practices. And that's really what I'm trying to do and I'm sharing with my clients and with organizations, you know, you can change the way that you do business, so a lot of the talks that I was giving that were live and it is properly the same for you. That were in person original, they can now actually be done online, so we still got that connection but if we can inspire people to really make good things come out of this and to become mentally and physically fitter than we were before, then that can only be a good thing. Steve Rush: So let's unpick some of those things that you mentioned that could be great aid and assistances for us now. Firstly, let's think about power of sleep. What role does sleep play in high performance as leaders? Angela Foster: So sleep is super important and as you know from the story, I just shared. You know, it something that I under-valued, partly because it was not valued for me in a corporate law firm, we would often neglect our sleep and actually push through all night on many occasions or with very little sleep. And actually, the science that's emerging around sleep is stronger and stronger in terms of its support that it does for everything in terms of our mental cognition, our memory, our focus, our immune system. Importantly, that we really need to be bolstering at this point and also our exposure to more kind of long, not just immune system in terms of viruses and bacteria that we might be exposed to, but also our long term immunity from chronic diseases. But if we want to lead effectively, then it's important that we have optimize our physical and mental performance and they're very integrated. And, you know, Mother Nature, if you think about sleep, why has Mother Nature not dispensed with it? You know, all those years ago when we did not live in houses and we felt protected, it actually made us very, very vulnerable to be asleep. But it's so vital for our health and I think that now that we've got artificial light and we stay awake. You know, we can binge watch things like Netflix if we get into them. We maybe don't focus enough on our circadian rhythm and being in alignment with that. And actually the benefits that come from that, so we know that it's not just the length of sleep. Yes, most people need around seven, somewhere between seven to eight hours of sleep per night as an adult. But it's not just that duration. It is actually looking at the quality of the sleep that we are getting, so the sleep architecture is as important, if you like. So making sure that we are getting into that slow wave, deep sleep at certain parts during the night and that we are also getting enough REM sleep. All of these things and enough light sleep people underestimate that the light sleep, which makes up almost half the night, is also important. But we need the sleep for pruning back memories. We need it for emotional regulation. We need it for that deep repair and we need also to regulate our metabolisms as well. So there's so many things that happen that I think people could really begin to look at that and actually prioritize that, you know, we know that everyone has a slight differences in their circadian rhythms. We kind of fall into one of four key groups, and that is a very genetic thing, but for the most part, we need to be optimizing all clocks, if you like, with the rising and the falling of the sun. And then within that, there's variations of sort of an hour or two in terms of are you more of a night owl? Are you an early morning person? And you can find out this information either by doing something like a DNA test, which would do a lot with my clients or even by taking Dr. Michael Breus questionnaire online, which will actually give you your sleep chronotype. And then people can use that information to start to understand not just how to sleep better, but also the best time to do everything and get their best work done, which we have, more opportunities to do now that we're working from home. Steve Rush: And the importance of natural light is essential to our well-being, too, isn't it, because we are surrounded by computers, laptops, cell phones, iPods. How does that play into that sleep? Circadian rhythm, you talked about. Angela Foster: Yeah, that plays a big part. So as you as you rightly mentioned there, we are exposed to a lot of light and unnatural forms of light and we're learning more and more what that light is doing. You know, time will show the damage that it is doing, but there seems to be some links even with things like macular degeneration in terms of exposure to that artificial light. But it also is disrupting our circadian rhythm by keeping us awake for longer and exposing us to blue light at times of day where we wouldn't have had it before. Now, in terms of your sleep, and how well you are going to sleep actually starts with the way that you start the day. So while being at home in particular. I would encourage people to get outside as much as they can in the early morning. That is really important for resetting the circadian rhythm so that you're going in line with nature and your natural body clock. You can also use things to actually limit the exposure of blue light inside. So for example, there all daywear glasses that you can use that protect your eyes. You can use red light blocking glasses. They are called blue light looking glasses, but they have like a red tinge. I track my sleep on with something called an Aura Ring, and that is very, very useful. And I can actually see what my deep sleep and REM sleep proportions are and what I found is that if I am blocking out the blue light in the evenings, even whether that's through work or watching television or even just lights that you've got on. Maybe if you are reading that, actually I will get enhanced deep sleep when I have done that and they are really easy to pick up, you can pick them up on Amazon. Swan-x, for example, or a good brand, and that really helps to enhance your deep sleep and that has been a big kind of game changer for many of my clients. Steve Rush: It is really fascinating stuff. I worked with the investment bank in the Southeast Asia and they had this philosophy of power napping on the job. What is your take on power napping? Angela Foster: I think power, is brilliant as long as you are not somebody that is having problems with sleeping at night, so I think you need to be careful when you're doing it and it's not too late in the day, but I think it's brilliant. I mean, one technique that works really, really well is to have a power nap after lunch and to have a small amount of caffeine immediately before having that nap. So that by the time that you come out of the nap, you've got the boost of caffeine coming in. Not something, you can do late in the day, but it is really powerful. The thing with napping is making sure that the nap is sub sort of 20 minutes, because once you go over 20, 25 minutes, you're actually going to start going into a deeper sleep and then you need to go through the whole sleep cycle. Generally, one sleep cycle is about 90 minutes long, so that is why people will find that if they have a nap often and they wake up 40 to 45, 50 minutes later, they feel really groggy. And that's because that's not really a map now that's a sleep cycle, so you want to keep it quite brief, but it's very good in terms of recharging and then powering up for the rest of the day. Steve Rush: So it is not a replacement for evening sleep. This, is a reboot sleep, yes? Angela Foster: Yes, it would be and I think if you're somebody who's a good sleeper at night, then you could try that, I think, or if you're somebody who generally sleeps well, but for whatever reason, your sleep has been disrupted one night, then that could work well. But I think that if you are someone who really on a continual basis struggles to sleep at night, then you may find that napping during the day disrupts it further. These things, always trial and error, and what I find is the best thing you can do, like with anything else, is to always be testing it, you know, tracking it and then tweaking it and then looking back and seeing what results you're getting. Steve Rush: Like anything to get good at it, you need practice and evaluation, right? Angela Foster: Yeah, absolutely. Becoming a good sleeper sometimes does take a bit of work for some people. Steve Rush: Another thing you talked about a little earlier, and again, a by-product of most leaders. Is that there is an element of stress, that comes with managing businesses, and teams, and products and so on, so forth. So in your experiences. All, stress a bad thing? Angela Foster: I don't think all stress is a bad thing. I think that when stress is sustained and continuous, that is when it can become a bad thing. In terms of evolutionary, we were designed to have a short period of stress and then recover. So if we were met with a threat, we would have to kind of fight or flee and then we would have that recovery time. What is happening in modern society is that we are bombarded continuously with so many stimuli in terms of emails coming in and so many platforms as well that we are all communicating now. And then we've got the additional stress, particularly in a leadership role as well, that can combine to increase cortisol levels pretty high, and when we have high cortisol, we end up with other problems that start to come in, so we get increased inflammation in the body. We get higher levels of blood sugar, so going back to that evolutionary model, if stress is designed to get us out of a tricky situation, as soon as cortisol goes up, what happens is the body dumps glucose into the blood. Now, that is fine when you've got to actually physically fight or flee, but if you're just sitting at your desk anxious or maybe awake at night, that glucose isn't required. And so when glucose goes up, then we have another hormone that's triggered. We have insulin that is then triggered in addition to cortisol, which goes up to try and remove the sugar from the blood. And this causes its own set of problems so it can lead to high blood sugar, insulin resistance, weight gain, in addition to the inflammation that it's causing from the cortisol and also from the release of glucose and insulin. So I think when we have sustained stress is actually causing underlying problems in our body. That is not to say that all stress is bad, so controlled doses of stress can actually make us much more resilient and higher performing. And, you know, there's a few ways that we can actually do that, which I share with you. For example, exercise is the one that people know the most. It is the most accessible, so if we think about when we are doing exercise. Whether it is cardiovascular, or strength work, we are creating microtears in the muscles, you going to make them a stronger over time or we are putting a little bit stress on the heart with cardiovascular work to actually make that heart muscle much, much stronger and perform better. Now, we can use that in other areas as well to help with resilience. So one of the things that I love to do, actually, and I encourage my clients and at first, they are a bit like, oh, no, I don't want to try this, is called showering. And that, again, is a form of stress. These controlled doses of stress are known as Hormesis. So Hormetic stress is a small amount of stress that's designed to make the body stronger and so cold showering is one example of that because actually if you start the day. I actually love to do a workout, and then take a warm shower, and then finish it with cold. You come out feeling amazing and on top of the world, and actually, that, again, is just stimulating the small amount of stress. It is also mobilizing some of the white fat in the body into brown fat that can be used and burned is energy, so there is other benefits as well but that helps in terms of resilience as well. Is very similar to fasting, for example. Again, that is another form of Hormetic stress, so if we are doing a sort of 12 plus period of fasting, we are putting the body under a bit of stress there is some ketones that are being released, which can actually help to enhance Brain function and mental performance. And we're strengthening the body and the body's allowed to kind of do some cellular clean-up at the same time. So to answer your question is a bit long winded, but not all stress is bad, but controlled doses of stress of certain types of stress can actually be helpful. Steve Rush: And I guess in your experience working with athletes is those little micro wins almost that gives them the edge and their performance? Angela Foster: Yes, absolutely and athletes actually push themselves incredibly hard. But if you look at them, we were talking about sleep. They really, really do value their sleep. You know, I think if you look at Roger Federer, he sees for like 12 or 14 hours a day, because I think often the mistake people will make this mistake when they are under stress as well, is they will think, well, I do want to push myself too hard. So maybe if I am working really, really hard, then I shouldn't be exercising that hard and actually exercise again strengthens the immune system. It enhances our production of natural killer cells. But what is a problem is if we're under recovery, so is not so much that people overdo things. It is that they under recover. Steve Rush: Got it, so if we start to think about some tips, techniques and hacks that the folks listening to this show can take away and practice in their leadership roles. What will be your top leadership, hacks they can apply for their health, their well-being and the way that they lead? Angela Foster: Yeah, sure. We have spoken a lot about sleep and I would encourage them to definitely focus on sleep and to track it and to start to understand what works for them and to create a very solid evening routine. People often very focused now on their morning routines, which is brilliant. But actually to have that wine down routine so that you are recovering and repairing is really important and it becomes more important as we age as well. So we know that things like Alzheimer's tend to develop decades before we actually begin to see symptoms and some of that is genetic. You can look and check if you have something known as the APOB Gene, which predisposes you to that. But making sure that you're getting enough sleep is absolutely vital to sustained performance. And to that leadership and the brain kind of washes itself as we're sleeping. So it is really, really important, so I'd say prioritizing sleep at a time like this and making sure that you're having that wine downtime in the evening, that you're limiting blue light, you're having alcohol. It might help you fall asleep, but you are probably going to wake up later and you are not going to be getting the quality of sleep. So keeping alcohol away from bedtime by at least three hours. Eating earlier, now that we are all working from home, we have the opportunity to do that as well. So that enhances the repair work that can go on during the night. The other one, I would say is in terms of actually come back and thinking, what exercise have you been doing and focus on getting physically fitter. The benefits for that are not just for your body, but also for your brain. So again, we were talking about controlled forms of stress. This helps to release BDNF in the brain, okay, so that's brain drive nootropic factor and that helps to build neurons and synapses and it also protects existing ones and exercise is a powerful way to help the production of BDNF, so it's also produced during sleep. The biggest inhibitor of BDNF is stress, and so I think building in stress management practices, particularly as people are under an extraordinary amount of stress at the moment, even just turning on the news is highly stressful at the moment in terms of what we're being fed. So making sure that you are taking time to relax and getting the practices like meditation and mindfulness based practices and maybe some yoga in is going to really help as well. Steve Rush: Clear head equal clear body and a clear mind equal great performance, right? Angela Foster: Exactly, and I think it is easy to get bogged down otherwise. People often neglect it but actually, it starts with you. So focusing on these things can really, really help. Steve Rush: Some of the work you have published, and some of your article. You talk about Bio Hacks, just describe for the listening in, what a Bio Hack is, and maybe what one of those could be that we'd implement as part of our leadership routines? Angela Foster: So biohacking is essentially using hacks, as you say to work with your biology, to enhance your health and your performance. So is basically using things that can unlock the best version of you. So these range from very simple things to using more advanced sort of biohacking technical gear. So some of the biohacking that I use with my clients is, for example, pretty much everyone I work with will do a DNA test so we can understand that their own genetics, so I don't believe there's one size diet, the fits all at all. Personalized nutrition is the first place to start because we all processed things like carbohydrates and fats, for example, in very different ways, and so what you will see is that some people will say, well, the ketogenic diet has been absolutely amazing for me. Having a high fat diet has improved my mental cognition and they credit a lot of their performance with that. But that could be disastrous in someone else. It could actually cause real problems in terms of their cardiovascular health if they fall into a category and it is a smaller category than we first thought. But around sort of 10 percent of the population will not process saturated fats in as preferable way as maybe the rest of them, and so that predisposes them to things like heart disease. Similarly, some people will process carbohydrates much, much faster and so they will get this release of sugar into the blood much more quickly. And that predisposes them to things like diabetes and also high levels of inflammation. So that's just kind of one area with DNA testing, but that is a hack in itself and it's so simple to do. It is like a 60-second mouth swap that you can do at home and you can start to understand. You can understand your sleep, your circadian rhythm. You can understand what the most optimize for fitness is for you, so that is an example of a biohacking. Some of the more sort of advanced ones are, I might use say and you may have heard of the Muse device. It gives you some form of neuro feedback, so it is a meditation device and again, these are all simple things that you can do that don't cost a lot. I think that's two or three hundred pounds to buy and you put it on and essentially, it will take you through a guided meditation in a short space of time. You get actual feedback directly on whether you are in the zone and whether you are getting that kind of more calm, clear state of thinking and the way they do that is you'll have birds come in and sing when you've got into that slow way state, so you can actually track at the end of your meditation. It sounds quite competitive, doesn't it, for meditation? We can actually see, well, how many times was I in the zone? So as you're gently bringing your thoughts back, you will then hear the birds singing, so that's like an example of it.  Another one would be red light therapy. So, for example, I have really kind of high end red light at home that I'll go and stand in front of first thing in the morning and that simulates the sunrise. In the winter months, it is great or if you have missed it when it is very early in the summer. But also red light enhances the health of all mitochondria, which are these little energy powerhouses in our cells, so it's improving our physical health and these are strong enough to kind of go through into the internal organs. So we know things like the brain, for example, very mitochondrial, dense and so that can help and it can also help with skin health and anti-aging. So there's lots of different ones that I use, and then they're simple ones. You know, like if you want to offset some of the positive charge that we're getting from all these devices and things, then you can go down and just walk outside barefoot and actually do some grounding and earthing. So some are free and some are kind of fun sort of things to play with. They kind of toys, if you like, but they have some pretty significant health and performance benefits.  Steve Rush: These are some super hacks. Thank you for sharing those, and I am kind of sat here thinking I just need a dash out and get some of these. Where I go and buy these? It is really stimulating from a leadership perspective. It is really stimulating I was thinking me, so I'm grateful for you sharing that. Angela Foster: Thank you. Steve Rush: As we get to this stage of the show, also we want to find out from the leaders how they have been able to face into adversity and how they then used that adversity for future learning now, we call this Hack to Attack. Now, you've already shared the biggest hack you're probably likely to face was being faced with a near-death experience and then pivoting your career. But if you were able to kind of go back and reflect around a time where that was relevant or something hadn't worked out, so anything else that you could share. That would be you Hack to Attack.  Angela Foster: Yeah, I suppose what I do is I think. There is always times and I think now we are going through a pretty revolutionary time where everyone is experiencing a massive shift maybe in the way that they do business. Even for people who maybe already were working a lot from home or had teams that were and maybe already done a lot of stuff online. They probably still need to pivot a bit but it feels scary when you look at it as a big thing like that. What has been most powerful for me is a daily review. So each day I will sit down and ask myself a series of questions of how did everything go? Did I do what I set out to do? So have I shared enough value with people today? Have a major difference in people lives today? And what have I done to do that? And what could I have done better? And actually what I find is that enables me to pivot more often, and I think that's what we all being needed to do, maybe on a bigger scale at the moment but actually looking down and thinking, well, how is this working? And is it working in the way that it should? People often don't do that and then things get left for longer and then you need that big shift, which is obviously what happened with me, right.  I had neglected it, ignored it, ignored my health, and then it took a big thing for me to get back on track. And so that's taught me now that I guess I have less of those experiences where I need to make a big shift, because it's sort of incited me really to do more daily micro reviews and constantly just make these little small changes so that you can pivot more easily. And so I'd encourage people to do that, because even now, it might seem quite a big thing that's coming at you and there's going to be big changes ahead. But actually you can start to review on a daily basis what's going on, how you done things differently if you've been moving your meetings, for example, online and doing more across zoom. Are you still making those connections in the way you could before? you still connecting with your team? What else could you be doing? Could you be putting more in the diary to be with them? You know, its social connection is so important in organizations, but also for health. And we can see that with the blue zones, which if your audience are not familiar with the blue zones or pockets across the world where we are the longest lived.  So these are small sections of populations that are very diverse. They are all the way around the world. Things places like Okinawa in Japan. There is one in California, in Sardinia and Dan Butler is the guy that kind of led a lot of the research. Was looking into these places, if they have the highest number of centenarians and the lowest incidence of chronic diseases, how have they got to that stage? And he looked at. Was it diet? Was it lifestyle? What was it? And the common thread that came through was this social connection and cohesiveness, right from kind of Great grandparents right down too babies, there were other things like movement, and the way that they eat, but this was really the common thread. And so it's kind of a long winded answer, but I think it's about looking at how you're doing things on a daily basis, reviewing and then just making those even micro pivots as you need to as you go through and kind of really chunking it down. Steve Rush: And of course, making those micro pivots will mean that we are less susceptible to that big event or the big stress and therefore it perpetuates almost, doesn't it? Angela Foster: Exactly, and you're much more dynamic as well in that sense and ready to move and to change because you're more aware you're bringing into your conscious mind much more in terms of what you need to do and as you say, there are smaller steps that you can do. So I haven't had since then as many I wouldn't say there's been huge events. Of course, we have to make changes and even now, like I am making changes to my business every day because the things that I would do in person can't happen at the moment. And so, you know, I'm looking at and thinking, well, actually, how can I distil my knowledge in a different way, you know, when I might have been talking to teams of people in person and making a difference, how can I do that now? Make that information accessible by recording and putting it into membership sites and areas or courses that people can download and actually use to learn. And I think, yeah, that's what we need to be doing. And I think what it's showing us really is it's bringing forward, so if you feel the same but you know, when you go in and you talk, for example, at your children's education and you look at the jobs that they might be coming into, they are actually going to have to change and reinvent themselves. And we knew they were going to have to do this because so many things were going to be potentially replaced by robots that they were going to have to be much more dynamic in their enterprises and in the way they approach things. And I think what this virus has done is actually suddenly just shunt us all through that process all at once, and so it's really going to be doing everything that you can to stay on your A-game and that is basically optimizing your mind and body. And I don't think you can separate the two, they are one and they constantly feedback to each other. Steve Rush: One hundred percent agree with you, and I think this will also just help create that reflection for leaders as well as to, you know, are they mutually exclusive in people's lives or are they part parcel of their personal well-being and development, too? So brilliant so far. The last thing I would like to ask of you is if we were able to do a bit of time travel, go back to when you were 21 and bump into Angela then. What would be the advice that you would give to her? Angela Foster: Interesting, so a few things. I think the first one would be, and this definitely where I coach my children is to follow the thing that really lights you up. And for me, I think I wanted to be a lawyer, but I wouldn't say reading long case studies, case notes, sorry and cases from judges was really my passion. So I loved the thrill of closing the deal and certainly as a partner in a law firm at the higher end, you know, you are doing all of that negotiating. And that was a huge amount of fun for me, but the journey to get there was not a passionate one for me. You know, law, was not my love, if you like. Whereas having had the experience that I have had and completely changed direction. I absolutely love what I did. You know, I wake up every day excited to learn more, share more, give more and I think that if I could go back to myself at 21. It would have been to say, follow your passion, find out what that is, because you will always become successful at the thing you love and don't rush it because actually everything takes time and everything takes longer than you expect it to but follow your heart in a way. Because, you know, business is challenging, is extremely rewarding, but it is challenging at times. But I think if you're doing something that you really, really enjoy, then that's going to help you in every respect. Steve Rush: It is true, isn't it? You don't find anybody who's really successful at something where they're not equally as passionate, you just don't find it. They don't exist, if somebody is successful, it's because they're passionate. It is because they have that investment in what they do. Conversely, if they are not passionate or not interested, then you never see that success. Angela Foster: No, that is true and I think you live it, don't you? That is the thing. Steve Rush: Right. Angela Foster: You know I am passionate about getting people as physically and mentally healthy as they can. And obviously I had to look at both because my physical health had taken a decline alongside my mental health, and that's why I say they're so related. But I live that lifestyle and I love it and I think, yeah. No, you are right. I think that is where success comes from. Steve Rush: Now, you have already started my thinking today as to what I am going to be doing next. And as soon as you know, we're done today, I'm going to be off doing a few things that I hadn't thought of before we have spoken today. Now there's lots of ways that people listening to this podcast can find out. You also have a very successful podcast called High Performance Health Podcast, and that is available, I guess, pretty much everywhere. That, would be right? Angela Foster: Yeah, that is available on all the kind of main platforms that you would find. Podcast, yeah. Steve Rush: And I would encourage our listeners to take a listen to that too, as part of their leadership thinking and behaviours too. And were else can folk find out a little bit more about the work that you're doing at the moment?  Angela Foster: So they can find me on my Website, which is angelafosterperformance.com, and they can find me on there. If they want to kind of get a bit more kind of tips in terms of how they can sleep better, then I've got a free sleep mini course, which they can just go to bit.ly/smart-sleeper that's there, and also they can follow me on social. So I'm kind of active across the three main platforms, less so on Twitter, but on Facebook, LinkedIn and also on Instagram and that's Angela Foster. Steve Rush: And we will make sure we put those links in the show notes as well. So people, when they listen to this, can click on those links and go straight to find out a little bit more about what you're doing. Angela Foster: Brilliant, thank you. Steve Rush: So finally, just for me to say, I had a really good insight that, you know, there was a science behind leadership and our brains are a powerful tool in the way that we work, but our bodies are equally as important, and I just wanted to say thanks for bringing that science to leadership today, Angela. It has been really super insightful and I know our listeners will love it, and it goes without saying thank you for appearing on The Leadership Hacker Podcast.  Angela Foster: Thank you so much for having me here today. Steve, I have really enjoyed it, really enjoyed our conversation and I love what you are doing with The Leadership Podcast. I think it is absolutely brilliant, so thanks again.  Steve Rush: You are very welcome, thanks Angela.   Closing Steve Rush: I genuinely want to say heartfelt thanks for taking time out of your day to listen in too. We do this in the service of helping others, and spreading the word of leadership. Without you listening in, there would be no show. So please subscribe now if you have not done so already. Share this podcast with your communities, network, and help us develop a community and a tribe of leadership hackers. Finally, if you would like me to work with your senior team, your leadership community, keynote an event, or you would like to sponsor an episode. Please connect with us, by our social media. And you can do that by following and liking our pages on Twitter and Facebook our handler their @leadershiphacker. Instagram you can find us there @the_leadership_hacker and at YouTube, we are just Leadership Hacker, so that is me signing off. I am Steve Rush and I have been the leadership hacker.

Do you have a business goal? Do you just want to start your business? Well then I hope you are ready for this episode.     In this episode Barbara Grochowska discuss the three elements you need to reach any goal, but especially a business goal.     We will be discussing:     Gaining clarity! How and why you need it when starting on a journey. Making a plan! Do you understand the steps it will take to get you to your goal? Execution! You can’t reach that goal if you aren’t setting yourself up for winning by creating great habits from the get go.     Episode Mentions:     Neuro-linguistics Programming (NLP)     Tony Robbins     Positive Psychology     Atomic Habits by James Clear     Working with Barbara Grochowska:     Website: https://www.barbaragrochowska.com/     Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BarbaraGCoaching/     Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/barbara_grochowska/     Email: barbara@barbaragrochowska.com     Free Goal Setting Cheat Sheet: Here!     Read the Transcript Below     Welcome to rich in differences with your host, Brooke, where we discover what works for you in life, health and business. We are not Legos and one size does not fit all. So grab a good drink and come listen to different perspectives as we see what sticks for you.     So thank you for listening to rich in differences. And today we have guest speaker Barbara Grochowsa. She's hailing from London today where is extremely hot. Thank you for being with us. Barbara.     Thank you for having me, Brooke.     So I've interviewed Barbara before for one of my classes and she is amazing. She is a great teacher and coach so I can't wait for her to teach her lessons for today. I'm going to read something that I found off of her application that I felt was very insightful and very much how most of us feel in the, in the service space industry. Is it okay if I read a part of your, your application answer Barbara?     Yes, Absolutely.     All right. So she wrote to me in the application. I've lived a great part of my life on autopilot pleasing people. And going through the motions of every day and at last I had to wake up call, which made me become brutally honest with myself and what I wanted in life. I didn't have the skills at that point to change the things around as soon as possible, but I was determined to pave my own way to my ultimate freedom and being control of my life, which I feel like, a lot of us have that moment. And I love the fact that you bring up, bring up the point, like you didn't have the skills at that time, but you're a willing to get the skills in order to go the path you wanted to go. What happened at that time and what did you end up, you know, learning or creating to help yourself move forward on your own path?   So at that time when I realized, and I was living on the autopilot,  I was married, I had a beautiful house. I had everything that I wanted to have, when I was in my twenties and I thought, I just hit a jackpot and I was happy at the time, but everything came down to pleasing people. I  was pleasing people instead of just being myself. I just got into the part of my health, my ex-husband’s family and hoping the things work out and also the thinking of like everyone was getting married around me. Everyone was getting, you know, buying houses, going through different things. And I felt like, Hey, I need to do that too because everyone else was doing that. But then there was some problems in my marriage and before, actually I turned 30, I got divorced and that was the best up call for me because that opportunity helped me to realize that I really need to live my life. I literally didn't know at that point what I'm going to do, but I felt such a beautiful freedom of the, I can do whatever I wanted to. No one's going to stop me. Obviously at that time, you know, it was like I was, everything was new for me at that point and I just, you know, I wasn't exactly sure what that's going to be, but I knew I just going to do something, just something, like extraordinary, something that I haven't done before and not to worry about, you know, all the people, other like part of the family. They were judging me. So he was really, I really need that, like the wakeup call because that's why I was able to find my identity, my voice. Cause during that time when I was married, you know, it was just following others and as I said before, placing people.     Yeah, no, I totally understand. I've definitely been there with the pleasing people in the divorce and finding out afterwards, like after your divorce, realizing I can do whatever I want to do. I can be whoever I want to be. There's, you know, I'm not having to change myself or twist myself into something I'm not in order to make other people happy. So I totally appreciate that. What did you end up deciding to do?     So I felt at that point I'm just going to be a rebel. I went parsing a lot hard and loud and I actually, I moved countries for like six months. I just needed a break from UK. So I actually moved to New Jersey and stayed with my sister and I thought that time, who helped me to figure out my next step in life. Because at that point I just quit my job. I still, I was at the uni, but it was everything online so I could just take the study with me. But then, you know, as much as I had a lot of time to thing in insights, I just didn't, it didn't feel right for me over though. Like I just couldn't, I couldn't get the idea. Maybe I put, I think I was putting too much pressure on myself as far as trying to figure out what's going to be next for me in life. So after that I decided to go back to London and then, you know, it's not like I figured out right away, the moment I touched down in London that yes, that's what I'm going to do after what I think after a couple years I was, I got a path of self-development and I started listening and reading more about that and about, you know, how we can change our mindset and, and you know, all of those great things that we can, you know, enhance our life experience. It was my friend’s influence as well. I was talking to him, um, about becoming a coach and he's kind of, I think, you know, these are traits that place for people in your life that had just come in and they teach you a lesson and then, so sometimes they were spies, sometimes they will go, and he was one of those friends, he just, you know, introduced me to like the NLP and coaching and introduced me to different parts of service developments as well. So that's what I started, you know, getting more into coaching. I mean, I wasn't coaching at that point, but I was, I started researching and I thought, Whoa, you can actually make money coaching people. Because before I was, I was pretty ignorant when it came to coaching and self development, I was just, I had this kind of, you know, background where you should have figured out, you should figure out all the things, how to live, how to take care of yourself and so on. And you know, is it the black and white? That's it. Thanks to him actually. And I was able to see that, it's not the point, it’s not the case and there is so much more to life. The exploration of your bribe and yourself. It's so much beautiful when you take a time and you are actually willing to do the work as well. So that's where I decided to pursue this coaching path. And I liked, you know, the neuro linguistic programming. I found it very, you know, fascinating. And I was at the same time, I was, watching a lot of YouTube videos with Tony Robbins and all other, you know, influencers who they're, um, pioneers in this app development. And that was just like fascinated about it. I was just like, wow, I really want to do that. And even though, you know, looking back, even before I got married, I used to, you know, I like to inspire people. I like to, you know, bring the positivity into life and so on, but didn’t actually paid attention to that. So actually, you know, I looked into becoming a coach then I couldn't just go in and do the coaching because I didn't, I literally didn't know where to start. So I had to, I started researching, I hired a coach to help me to build my online business too. Honestly, it's, it's so hard when you haven't done anything like that before. It is so important to get a mentor or you know, some training course to find out how to do that because you can try to invite everyone in the world. But it's just so much time consuming. But if you can…     She's laughing cause I'm over here shaking my head vigorously. It really is hard if you don't have someone there to kind of help you guide the way some.   Absolutely. And then I came after that, I came across something really cool because I didn't want to only focus on motivation. I also wanted to combine like healthy living as well because for me health is so important. And since I remember I always make, I used to make like different things in the kitchen, like put all the like superfoods into my, in some nice movie like exercise during fasting and so on. And it was cool. I really enjoyed it. So I really had to make this decision, you know, am I going to be a coach who is just to the left coaching and just do it with the mindset, Oh am I going to be health coach? And I felt, you know, I couldn't, you know, at that point I didn't know I could just merge them. And the training that I did actually last year, it helped me to combine both of them and actually even enhanced that pretty much at the moment, human potential coach. So that involves everything like the mindset that have hacking positive psychology, everything to enhance, you know, your persona to help you find out who you are and how, you know, how you can perform at your best in your life. That, you know, I had to, you know, this course was this, this training was amazing. Helped me to acquire the skills that I needed to work with people. It gave me the container, how to actually hold the session with both the clients, how to work with them and you know, how's actually listened to them and how to read them. Because, you know, life coaching. It's not that you go into tell someone you have to do this and that and you will be fine. It's like exploring this person to find out exactly what's going on and, you know, direct and, or using the powerful question to have him or her to find their own path because me telling them what they're going to do is just, it's not gonna work because what has worked for me if I work for them, they need to find their own solution.     Yeah. So that was my journey of finding the skills [inaudible], It's just, that was the beginning of my journey because I learn every single day. I learned something different. I read different books to learn to, you know, to serve better as well.   Oh yeah. It's definitely a continuously growing yourself as well. Your learning doesn't stop. No one's learning stops.     Yeah, exactly. If you don't, there's no growth, as someone said.     Yes. Okay. So you are going to come on here and talk about on getting clarity on your goals and creating plans and steps and executing, which I'm sure is something that you've obviously utilized in your own practice in order to get ahead in your own practice. So what would you like to say on those steps?     So the first step would be to actually find exactly what you want to do. You need to find the clarity. It's, whatever it is. If it's in a business or there is something, a personal thing, take a time to actually find what you want to do. Describe it. Like be very precise. If you for example, struggling with that to find what that is. Take a time, just go unplug from everything. Just go for a walk or meditate, whatever works for you. Take a time, visualize that. Visualize what that is you want to do. Because if you don't have clarity, there's no point. You won't be able to find the right steps to get there. Because, it's just doesn't work that way. Otherwise you could just go into, go from one point to another one and then you cue. You would keep changing mind all the time. So the next step, is they have to be very honest with themselves on where they are right now and say, you know, the gap between where they are right now and the place where they want to go or what they wanted to, and from that point they need to write down what skills they need, what it's required to get from that point to where they want.   I agree.     Yeah, it's theirs. I don't know. For me personally, it took me a while to find the clarity, but then the moment I did, I was like, there's no, there was no distraction. I was just pretty focused on what I wanted to do and that was my path and it just took me way, you know, shorter time to get where I wanted to go. The third step to, you know, to reach the goal. This is, I think that will be the hardest part because there's some of elements you need to, yeah, to make sure you get there. You need to break down the goal you need to decide what will take you to get there, like you need to sit out like [inaudible], for example, how much time you need to put into your work each day. Can you do that? I was actually, last time, I just finished everything I broke, which is called atomic habits. I would just recommend to everyone, cause this book tells you exactly how to design the habits that, you know, there might be a small ones, but with stacking them over the time will help you to develop the daily routine. But you don't need to force yourself where you don't need to try to look for the motivation of doing the steps necessary steps to get where you want to go. You know, motivation, what works for a very short time. But if you've got the system down is like on, it's kind of, it's afterword becomes as a autopilot, but it's the good of the pilot to just, you just, for example, you get up in the morning and if you want to get fit, you get up, put you a running gear on and you're out of the door or just go into the, to the gym and you exercise and so on. So you need, you know, this is the part where we, people have to like break the goals, decided what's the rituals, habits they need to adopt for them to get where they want to go.      All right. So this reminds me of kind of like going to college. So anybody who's been to college or even in high school, they used to do it to bring you into the guidance counselors office and y'all would go over what classes you're going to take and what's your goal. And like in college you do the two, like, what are you majoring in this year? And so here are the 120 credits you need in order to major in this. And it's kinda like it sets up the steps for you and you know where you know what the end goal is and you know everything you've got to do to get to the end goal. And a lot of times that's exactly how you need to be in life as well. Like here's my end goal. Like you said, what are all the steps I need to take to get there? And then I need a schedule that in my life so I can be making that progress. I always just reminds me of like going to college and how a lot of times we don't do that. We don't treat it like we're trying to get a degree and that we have to have these markers in place and we have to make the time to get those, reach those markers and then eventually we do hit our goal. And so that's us what those kind of reminds me of. It's like, remember when you had the, you know, go to college and you had the schedule and you had the plan and you had to show up and you know, you had to have all that in place or else you are never going to graduate with your degree.     Yeah, absolutely. It's like you becoming your own parents, because it can be wishy washy. Like, ah, I'm just going to do it tomorrow and then the tomorrow comes and it's not fair. Like now there is no negotiation. You just get up. Don't make a shake, sit down and do what do you need to do. And you know, I kind of I miss on one side, however, I didn't miss that. Being in college, you actually know you don't, you don't need to do the work you sat because you've got the major and you know exactly what steps they, the steps were given to you. You're on your own. Yeah. You need just figure out yourself, but then you can make your so much fun as well and enjoyable at the same time. Yeah. It's just, it's all about mindset as well.     All right, so you kind of, I'm pretty sure he talked about this a little bit because you said that you determine what you wanted to do and then you knew kind of the steps you wanted to take. So my question had been like, you know, what happened to get you started? Or maybe what happened after you started your journey and you created, you got clear on your goal, you created your plan and you started executing it. What are some of your outcomes from it?       Oh, that was, I'm just slapping it. It was just like love, hate relationship with my goal, pretty much. I really had to be honest with myself. I provided massive vision of myself of what I want to do, what I'm up to, what I want to have and what I want to be in like in five years, you know, I had to be very specific because if you're not specific, it just kind of do things, whatever I feel like. But when I decided whatever you wanted to either designed it designed like the steps of, you know, what would go into take, what would take for me to get the, and you know, it wasn't easy to follow through and I'm still in the process, you know, it's, even though I've created some sort of system, it's, this is something that I'm still working on. You know, that there are good days, bad days, there's some days that are really struggling to get up in the morning and just, just get all with this task and just do what I or I supposed to be doing. And during those times I've really, I take a time to remind myself what I'm working for, this is the, that is my motivation. Because I've been doing that for quite some time now. I've developed the ritual like even a morning ritual where, for example, in the morning like I get up like five o'clock in the morning, go for a run. Then when I came back, come back that I have some time for myself, and then I spent at least hour to answer my CO's or emails and then having my breakfast and then go to work. And then in the evening, I tend to work with my clients. When I look at it right now. Or even when I looked at it like let's say two years ago, I thought, well, what's happened with my free time? It's like, what's happening with me? Meeting with friends, actually being so scheduled, being so organized, giving more freedom of, you know, spending actually creating the relationships that actually matter to me. Not spending some random times with people that I don't like, or they don't happy to grow or they know they criticize or something like that. They don't believe what I do. So that was, that was, you know, I love, I love that. I have to say, as I mentioned before, the good days and bad days and having the, you know, visualization practice helps a lot. So yes, I'm just thinking of who else helped me to actually create that. Yeah, what's happened? Sorry.   No, I was going to say, I know you gave some pretty good ideas. Being honest with yourself. That's a big one. Most people just think that they're going to create a plan and then they're just going to fit it in. Like I'll just make it work and that's just not how life works. You actually have to create a schedule and plan it in and also you know, understanding that this plan is a, like a living, breathing thing. Like it may not be exactly as you created it, you know, two years ago. So you probably are going to adjust it to fit as you grow and your life changes. It also will have to adjust as well and showing up and making like it sounds like you have like set hours. Like this is what I do now, and I do this every day or at least is to the best of my ability and you know, everything else you know that has to wait. You know, like this is business hours for me, so you know, you are calling me up and saying you need a ride to the airport. This really isn't going to work right now because I'm working, you know. So it's like the idea of also being strong in your, the times you are set and keeping to them as well. So I feel like you've given a lot of information, but if you got more we'd be more than happy to hear it.     Yeah. Actually, you mentioned about the scheduling. We are so happy with doing that to do list and thinking like, Oh, we're gonna crump all of it in one day and it's going to be brilliant and I got to move so fast into achieving my goal. It doesn't work that way as much as much we could have such a good intention to, you know, to do as much in one go, but Hey, that, you like, I'm so guilty of over-scheduling hoping that you know, our monitor that and you know, that's going to have to get it done in the next week. Oh actually, you know, this actually doing the projects or the goals that they want to achieve. Like normally achievable within a month. I was planning, Oh let's just do that in one day or one weekend. No, you have to be realistic. You work at, you will burn out you will hate the process. So fear artistic of how much time each task is going to take. And for example, if you finish, don't feel bad about that. Sometimes things happens. You have another day to complete that.     Yes. Grace to self.     Yeah.     It's important to show grace to self as much as we show grace to others. All right, so I know you've given already some ideas, but if you were to teach someone how to start this, like what exactly would you say? Like should be like their first steps in getting started. Do you have like, like grab a journal, grab a planner or like how would you teach someone to sit down and do this, you know, get clarity on their goals, creating a plan and then executing.     Hmm. So the first step would be I would recommend everyone to just unplug completely. Not to like turn off the TV, turn off you YouTube, you don't want to have an influence or anything like that on I think to disturb you and even like going for a walk, just go for a walk, clear your mind and think of what you really want. If it's for example, if it would help you to put the words on the paper, do what it's because only that way you can find the clarity of the goal. Obviously with the time it might change, like slightly different direction but right at this point unplugging, cutting out on the distraction on side to side. It's the first step to actually to get the, you know, the get the clarity on the goal.     Okay. That's it and it's excellent. I totally agree and I think it is in part like you brought up like, it's important to bring up, like you said, like it can change over time. I feel like a lot of times we get stuck on this idea that once I write this down, this is it. This is all I'll ever do, and our brain goes, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. What if we want to do this? Who do we want to do that? Oh my God. You know, you're, you're cutting everything else out. But the truth is you've got to start somewhere though. Once you got landed somewhere, as you grow, you can pivot as necessary when you're ready or when it's appropriate to. So don't get locked up in the idea that this is it, but you do have to start somewhere. So yeah, getting away and making some sort of decision like this is what I'm going to focus on right now is very important to get in getting started on that journey because I'm the world's worst with that.     Oh God. I think I, I'd like to add to that point that that's, that is don't chase every tiny object on the way. And now everyone, there's so much noise out other, you know, people though you think different things, just be unique. Be yourself. Find the thing that works for you. That's it.   Barbara, how can people work with you these days?     At the moment I provide one on one coaching so they can just go to my websites and just book their discovery session so that can had the testers, a taster as well of my session, my coaching style. Excellent.   And take it from there.     All right, so I'm going to put her website information down below in the show notes so you'll be able to find her if you want to work with her. And are you on any social media these days, like working people kind of maybe follow you in your work?     Sure. So I am on Instagram, which is BarbaraGrochowska, G R O. C H. O. W. S. K. A. I know it's a hard run, and I’m on the Facebook because well, which is, I couldn't get the same [inaudible] but it's Barbara G coaching. That's the another place people can find me as well.       Excellent. And again, I'll put that down below in the show notes so you can just simply click on the link and go right to her, right to her page and her information. All right, Barbara. I believe that's it. I appreciate you coming on here and chatting and teaching us all about your steps and your journey. I think your journey is great and I love how raw and honest you are because truth is none of us have it all figured out and it is a work in progress for the rest of our lives essentially. It never gets completely figured out. So thank you for coming on here and chatting with us. Thank you so much for having me. All right, pop tarts, us all for this week remembers send in your thoughts, your feedback, your ideas, your questions, and your drink of choice, whether it be alcoholic or non alcoholic, and be sure to send in the recipes so you can be featured on the show. And don't forget, subscribe. So you can be around for when I feature you on the show and it gives some good content. Here's to another week. Cheers.    

If you’re the kind of person who is scared to create social media content on the fly or just doesn’t have time to do all of that copying and pasting (plus brainwork to come up with that perfect viral post), there’s an answer for that, systems   As Brooke explains, the key to creating a consistent online presence is having the right system. You want a system that makes it easier to create content while saving you time. You also want a system that will let you schedule ahead of time, because life happens.   A social media management tool can do all of this...and a whole lot more...    Listen in as Brooke shares how using a system and the right social media management tool allowed her to maintain a consistent online presence, no matter what was going on in her personal life at the time.   Major Topics in the Conversation What is a social media manager and what are some common ones? Why your business needs a social media manager tool like Hootsuite or Buffer Behind-the-scenes look at Brooke’s system for managing her social media Why your social media system should focus on your needs Keeping a social media presence when you’re not prepared to post   Special Moments in the Episode [0:30] What is a social media manager? What are some examples?   [1:02] Why use social media managers?   [2:18] How to use social media managers as a business   [6:00] Using social media managers to create a consistent presence...when your life hits an unexpected turn   [8:04] How do you social media?   Learn more:   HootSuite   Buffer   MeetEdgar   Canva   AirTable   Kori Linn - Burnout Specialist and Coach   Janice Chaka - Podcaster and Travelling Introvert     Free Training - Eclectic Entrepreneurs   Unsplash.com - Royalty Free Photos     Brooke's Social Media:   Facebook   Instagram   Pinterest     Disclosures    *Disclosure: Some of the links above are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. *   **Rich in Differences Podcast is not intended to diagnose, prescribe, treat, or cure any disease, physical or mental. Any advice given on the Rich in Differences Podcast should not be construed as a prescription, a promise of benefits, claims of cures, or a guarantee of results to be achieved. The information, instruction or advice given by Rich in Differences Podcast is not intended to be a substitute for competent professional medical or psychological diagnosis and care. You should not discontinue or modify any medication presently being taken pursuant to medical advice without obtaining approval from your healthcare professional.   As a listener/reader, you must take complete responsibility for your own physical health and emotional well-being.       Transcript Below   Welcome to Rich In Differences with your host Brooke. Where we  discover what works for you in life, health and business. We are not legos and one size does not fit all. So grab a good drink and come listen to different perspectives as we see what sticks for you.   Welcome to Rich In Differences. This is your hostess with the mostest Brooke. And today we're gonna be discussing systems in particular social media managers. I am in love with social media managers. So what is a social media manager? It is something like Hootsuite, Buffer, MeetEdgar and it's essentially a website you go to, you sign up for it and you link your social media accounts to it and you're able to create posts and schedule posts to be posted in the future. And the application itself will do the posting.    So it's like do all the setup and then the system just does it for you. And this has been a game changer for me. I dislike creating social media by the seat of my pants. I am definitely a planning and organizing type of gal. And if I have to try to come up with witty or you know very thoughtful posts out of nowhere I don't enjoy it and it doesn't come off as true to me. So I use social media managers to help me plan out what I want to post and then it gives me the ability to be as creative and as in-depth as I want to be.   So I want to think about someone you follow that their post always seems really thought out really well written and they post quite a bit. And you're probably thinking "my gosh how does she or he come up with all this content and how are they so consistent with it" more than likely they are using a social media manager. So here's how I use it. You're going to get a very in-depth look in behind the scenes of how a person may use a social media manager in their business.   So we're going to go with the idea of guests interviews because it's what I do. When I have a guest interview coming up I look at first off who's coming up? What are they talking about? I listen to the interview, I've probably heard the interview five hundred times before it's even put out into the world. And I look for certain things like I'll sit down and pick out quotes and look for amazing pictures on unsplash.com, which by the way is an amazing web site. If you are looking for royalty free photos and I will jump on canva.com I'm a canvas beast and I will create social media posts for my Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest accounts. I'll take these pictures and I'll put them with the quotes and just create something fun to put out there, just for this one episode. I'll also research any sort of articles that I feel like are relevant and if my guest speaker is someone who blogs or does podcasts themselves or puts any sort of media out into the world I'll see if I can find something that's relevant and I'll collect that as recommended readings. I will also create a blog post of my own from the episode and any other information. So if they're giving me a freebie that's something I'll collect and I take all this information and I put it into my Air Table because I use AirTable.com for my podcast, everything podcasting is put in to my Air Table and I will go on to my social media manager and I will sit down and schedule out about two weeks worth of posts just on this single episode for this guest speaker. It allows me the time to actually sit down and also research like for example hashtags, if I'm doing Instagram then I'm going to want to have relevant hashtags for this guest speaker.    And again all of that information goes right into my Air Table next to their episode. And so all this information is right here at my fingertips and I simply go into my social media manager I click Monday at 11:09 A.M. because my social media manager says hey this seems to be the time that most people are looking at your post and I post a quote. Then Tuesday maybe I post a recommended reading from my guest speaker and Wednesday I'll post their freebie that they're giving out. And I'll do this all the way up to the time of their episode.    And this again allows for me to sit down and really think things out and really put my own creative spin on how I want to market this episode. For example Corey Lin's episode if you were to look at my social media at that time I had quotes right, but her quotes were on pictures that people were writing in notebooks. And then I have Janice Chaukas episode about podcasting and her pictures were different and she didn't really, we didn't really, do quotes we did tips. So I really get to sit down and put my creative spin on this and that gives me the time and the space to do so, then I'm putting something out the world that's more like me.    The second thing that having a social media manager does is it allows you, and allows your business to keep going when things do not go well for you in life. So here's an example. A little over a week ago my grandmother passed away and it was very unexpected and my entire family including me was in shock and grief set in pretty quickly and my life came to a standstill. She was a huge part of our family. She was always there for us. And you would, we would call her the matriarch of our family and so her passing was a big, big deal. And for me and I'm sure for the rest of my family life kind of just went still. And that includes my business. A few days after her passing I started getting notifications on my phone about people liking my Facebook posts and making comments and I thought to myself but I'm not making any posts. What are people liking and commenting on? And I opened up my Facebook and lo and behold there's all my scheduled posts.    I had completely forgotten that I had scheduled weeks worth of posts already. So essentially I schedule about a month's worth of posts and so I kind of just honestly just forgot about it all in my grief and shock. But the social media manager did what it was supposed to do. It scheduled or sent out the posts that I had scheduled. And so to the rest of the world my business look like it kept going. Even though behind the scenes it had come to a complete and utter standstill.    So a social media manager allows you to also be prepared. And I wasn't even thinking about that when I started using one, for when the inevitable happens. Something in your life will happen that's going to cause you to come to a standstill. That's life. And so having good systems in place kind of allows for your business to keep going even though you may not be at that time. And if you are a natural planner or organizer this is really going to resonate with you. If you're finding yourself having a hard time keeping up with your social media this may be a good option for you.   As a matter of fact why don't you let me know how you do your social media? What works for you? Are you a fly by the seat of your pants type of person? Do you use a program? Do you hire someone? How do you do it? There is no wrong way. There is just simply what works for you.   All right pop tarts that's it for today.  And today I'm going to leave a message to my nanny who passed away.   Hey nanny I already miss you. I have to say you were the most honest person I have ever met. I'm not quite sure how you treated the rest of the family but I can safely say that you never sugarcoated anything for me and you helped me have a good footing in the real world in the realistic side of things because of it. I hope you're keeping an eye on all of us and I love you.  

It seems like everyone, their mother, and their cat is starting a podcast these days. That being said, finding good advice for starting a podcast isn’t easy. With so many gurus and courses, it can be overwhelming for newbie podcaster.   That’s why we sit down with Janice Chaka, host of The Traveling Introvert podcast, who shares the stories, humor, and advice she gained from 2 years as a successful podcaster.   Unlike most “newbie podcast advice” people, Janice focus in this episode is content. Janice shares how she continually finds ideas for her podcast, and why goals (as well as boundaries) are important to your life as a podcaster.   Major Topics in the Conversation How do you capture ideas for future episodes? Why the first 7 episodes are critical to your podcasts;s growth Why your first goals should NOT be vague like “get more followers” How to set realistic (aka SMART) goals as a podcaster Why you don’t need to be on every social media channel to succeed Why follower count isn’t everything Finding the right-sized podcast mentor for you   Special Moments in the Episode [2:43] How Janice captures new ideas for episodes [3:34] What makes Janice’s podcast a success? [6:20] What tips would you be a newbie podcaster? [6:44} Where are some places new podcasters can get help? [12:00] What is your business’ pain point right now?   About Our Guest Janice Chaka is a podcaster, introvert coach, mentor, speaker, and founder of The Career Introvert. She is also the organizer and host of the Podcast Virtual Summit and the Get Your Podcast Started Facebook group.   Learn more:   Email   FREE resources   Janice Chaka on LinkedIn   The Traveling Introvert Podcast   The Career Introvert website   The Career Introvert on Instagram   The Career Introvert on Twitter   The Career Introvert on Facebook   Get Your Podcast Started Virtual Summit   Get Your Podcast Started Virtual Summit Facebook group   Other Resources   Podcast Movement Anchor Libsyn iTunes Pat Flynn’s course WhatsApp       *Disclosure: Some of the links above are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.     **Rich in Differences Podcast is not intended to diagnose, prescribe, treat, or cure any disease, physical or mental.   Any advice given on the Rich in Differences Podcast should not be construed as a prescription, a promise of benefits, claims of cures, or a guarantee of results to be achieved. The information, instruction or advice given by Rich in Differences Podcast is not intended to be a substitute for competent professional medical or psychological diagnosis and care. You should not discontinue or modify any medication presently being taken pursuant to medical advice without obtaining approval from your healthcare professional.   As a listener/reader, you must take complete responsibility for your own physical health and emotional well-being.   Transcript Below   [00:00:04.390] - Brooke Welcome to Rich In Differences with your host Brooke. Where we discover what works for you in life health and business. We are not legos and one size does not fit all. So, grab a good drink and come listen to different perspectives as we see what sticks for you.   [00:00:21.580] - Brooke Welcome to Rich In Differences and this is Brooke your host. I have with us Janice Chaka as our guest speaker for today. She's giving me the thumbs up because I actually got the name right.   [00:00:33.500] - Janice Yes you did. Nailed it as I said you would.   [00:00:37.060] - Brooke Thank you. Thank you. So Janice has a podcast called The Traveling Introvert. Could you tell us a little about your podcast. And how long you've been doing it.   [00:00:45.640] - Janice I have been doing it two years. Just I think it's time around now because something came up and I was like, oh it's it's been two years and a little bit about it. It started off, It's basically me ranting into the void for five minutes about whatever might have popped up in my life. Normally it's either HR related, travel related, or like running your business related. One of those three topics but super, simple, quick. People have said it's like having a quick coffee chat or like over the water cooler complain with me.   [00:01:16.990] - Brooke I could see that. Would you call yourself an introvert?   [00:01:19.420] - Janice Most definitely. I'm actually dreading the fact that when this comes out won't happened but I've got a conference coming up where normally I can go in and out of the conference and take breaks and they tell me "No actually we're going to livestream it. So no one can go anywhere."   [00:01:32.410] - Brooke  Oh no.   [00:01:36.300] - Janice Yeah.   [00:01:37.660] - Brooke Outside your comfort zone?   [00:01:38.970] - Janice  Oh yeah.   [00:01:43.330] - Brooke So is your podcast the same as it was when you first started or did it evolve over time?   [00:01:48.760] - Janice I like to say it has evolved as I have grown as a podcaster. However, yes we've got a tagline on the end that's slightly different and that's changed as I've pivoted in my business. I now get people who write in and ask me questions that I get to answer on the podcast. So that's changed. Apart from that it's still basically therapy and me venting into the void.   [00:02:14.830] - Brooke That's probably why so many people relate to it! I will be honest, that's what I'm looking forward too, I'm looking forward to getting people's responses and being able to answer their questions as well. So that must help with material and content creation?   [00:02:29.460] - Janice It does and then stuff just pops up every day and then your like, "oh I didn't see that coming". Well I'm gonna I'm going to talk about that. There's a podcast in that. Now my partners got to the point where they're like "Oh this thing happened. Your going to podcast about this arent you?"   [00:02:41.770] - Brooke Do you keep notes on your phone of all the different things that come up?   [00:02:45.970] - Janice Yeah normally. So I have a friend who I have an ongoing WhatsApp voice conversation with.   [00:02:51.480] - Brooke OK.   [00:02:52.130] - Janice So I will message her. Just because I'm better with audio, so it's saved and then I might make a note. I have a project management thing that I use and so I have a list of episodes. I could write "talk about so and so" and it will go in there. To answer your question, yes. Always have a place where you have notes because ideas and stuff come up randomly so you should have one single place where you always put the stuff.   [00:03:15.160] - Brooke I think mine's just notes on my phone, and it always happens and I'm driving too. So it's the safest time for me to be making notes in my phone.   [00:03:21.500] - Janice Voice memos, voice memos rule.   [00:03:26.860] - Brooke  Yes. So what would you say has been the number one reason your podcast has been a success.   [00:03:33.660] - Janice Wait my podcast is successful?   [00:03:35.220] - Brooke I would say so. Come on now, if you have people coming in with questions, I would say it's somewhat successful.   [00:03:43.240] - Janice Well I'll tell you what for the first three months I didn't tell anyone it existed, it was just for friends. Why is my podcast successful? I think it is because what you listen to is kind of what you get. It's also like when people coach with me I'm very much like if you want sunshine and flowers and unicorns. I'm not that person. Here's my podcast, this is what it sounds like, this is what you get. If you don't like it, now's not the time to sign up. I think it's been successful because a couple of things happened one I went to podcast movement and Glass box were running this competition and I won the competition and so I got free advertising for a week. That helped.   [00:04:20.320] - Brooke Oh wow that is awesome.   [00:04:23.030] - Janice Yeah thanks. Glass box.   [00:04:24.320] - Brooke Yeah.   [00:04:25.720] - Janice So now I use them religiously. I also think I've gotten better at telling people. I have a bag, a swag bag that I walk around with and so people are like well (the Traveling Introvert) that's an oxymoron. Introverts don't travel and then I have to go and school them and then we come back and listen to the podcast.   [00:04:41.800] - Brooke Aww nice, that's clever.   [00:04:47.430] - Janice Yeah I don't know, people seem to like it. Thank you people I appreciate you. It's real, it's just me and I think people get value from it.   [00:04:55.390] - Brooke Yeah, I could see that totally. So when we first talk you mentioned the concept of pod fade which is something I actually had never heard of. So I imagine if I've never heard of it others have probably not heard of it either. So would you care to describe what pod fade is?   [00:05:11.290] - Janice Oh I wish I had the dictionary definition. I'm sure Urban Dictionary has this somewhere but basically when your podcast starts you're all excited and you pump out a bunch of episodes and then life happens. And you slam into that like a truck. And you're scared to sort of get back on the horse again. And so there's maybe seven to ten episodes out there, something happens and then you stop podcasting and now you've taken a break. You're scared to go back because you think your listeners will be mad at you or you get overwhelmed or whatever it is.   [00:05:40.570] - Janice  And then you stop podcasting and there's some statistics with Anchor and with Libsyn. Anchor is a free site that you can use, I think over 64 percent stop after seven episodes and then with Libsyn I think it's a huge percentage. So if you go and look and I choose for example Itunes is which is the graveyard of podcasts you'll see a lot that are still new and noteworthy but haven't actually done anything for the past year.   [00:06:07.750] - Brooke That's weird.   [00:06:09.790] - Janice They say their working on that. So it might be fixed but it's been an ongoing process. Because people are like "I want to be on new and noteworthy" and the rest of us are like no it's not a thing.   [00:06:19.750] - Brooke Yeah ok. So if someone wanted to start a podcast what would you recommend in order for them to avoid the pod fade?   [00:06:29.290] - Janice  One thing? Because I could go on about this.   [00:06:31.600] - Brooke I mean you can give as many tips as you want, I am listening. Right here.   [00:06:39.280] - Janice Most people who start it might deal with their business, some people start as a hobby and that's that's awesome because then you're just rambling on about Game of Thrones or whatever it is that you're doing and your goal is much easier if you're doing it as a hobby. If you're doing it with regards to your business your business goals and your podcast goals should intersect in some way shape or form. Or why are you doing it? With those goals they should be a way to measure them. Make sure to measure. We all forget about the smart goal thing all of the sudden when we become podcasters "I want listeners" and that's not a goal. I mean it can be a goal but that shouldn't be what it is. Can we have someone email you and ask you a question? It doesn't have to be a huge audacious goal. It could just be someone's listened to me and I've provided value and so they've felt compelled enough to get out their phone and actually sent me an email like that takes more effort, that's more than a ticking like or follow that's actual commitment. Keep it whatever works with you, I was super stoked when someone emailed me. It's like someone actually listened to me and they e-mailed me from the other side of the world, because that's the other thing people forget anyone can listen to you anywhere. So we tend to make a podcast very focused in a specific geographical area and you don't have control of that. You can't be like only people in the US can listen to your stuff or only people in the UK.   [00:07:54.750] - Janice Yes to stop pod fade make sure that it fits in with your lifestyle not the other way around. Most people will find that their podcast take over their life with editing or social media and all that good stuff. So beforehand do an intro or test episode where you fiddle with everything and figure out what works. Figure out: how you want your sound to be, whether you want music in between, jingles, intros, outros, how long all of that takes, how long the editing, takes how long your social media takes, and then you'll know exactly how long each episode is gonna take you and then you look back at your life and your calendar and your like. Uhh. And don't do that "I'm gonna make it work" thing because that doesn't leave room for error, children, hurricanes, life, getting a new job because that sucks you up for 90 days too.   [00:08:37.840] - Janice And the systems and workflows write down everything that you do. It can change over time. But when you're recording, OK I have to switch this on, this toggle has to be this setting, I need to check all of these things to make sure it all works. When you have it all written down there's less decision making for you to do and less time for your brain to be like. I don't know. I'm confused. So workflows systems automate as much as you can. Don't go and try and be on every single social media platform. Pick one, do that for six months and get it down, get it automated get a system then move on to the next one. We have enough hats on as it is as podcasters. But the main thing is the goals. Because if those two don't work and then you come back six months I was like Well I don't have 18 million followers how do I get more followers. And it's not necessarily the amount of followers you have it's how engaged they are and how invested they feel in the podcast.   [00:09:27.490] - Brooke All right then that was a lot. I liked all of that. I'm going to have to go back and write all these down when my microphone can't pick it up. All right. So if someone wanted to start a podcast where would you recommend they start?   [00:09:45.340] - Janice All right so there's two schools of thought here. Obviously I'm going to say you should come and join my podcast group. That is what I should say.   [00:09:53.080] - Brooke Yeah.   [00:09:53.200] - Janice That's the "get your podcast started" group on Facebook and now on Facebook you can personalize it so you literally just look for "get your podcast started" groups and it will magically appear. A lot of people go with Pat Flynn because he is the O.G. of podcasting and he has a course and it's all free and it's all him. But he also has a huge team behind him, and production, and money. Not everyone has that luxury. Try and go with someone who is in line with what you're doing or has done what you've done and it's just a little bit ahead of you. Not like all the way up ahead of you so they're making the same mistakes that you have made and it's in recent memory rather than oh I did this thing like five years ago when I talked to the president of X Y and Z.   [00:10:32.150] - Brooke I like that. Then it's a great piece of advice. Getting someone who's just a little ahead of you. So they do remember what you're going through because sometimes I do feel like a lot of people who are veterans do forget. And then they have great advice but the advice is for where they're at. It's not for where a new person is at and I feel like that's easily forgotten sometimes. What is the one thing you wish you knew when you first started running a business?   [00:11:00.830] - Janice I suppose to be prepared for this and I thought about it and there's so many things. The biggest, biggest, biggest thing and I'm not really a huge mindset believer but we go through our lives starting at school, and we get told what to do. WeSome of us go through university, we get told what to do. We have a job, we get told what to do. But if you're a business owner yes you have clients who tell you what to do. But you actually have the power to tell them no. No that's not how that works. And we forget this and we feel beholden to the paycheck the money that oh they're gonna ruin my reputation and all these other things but I wish that earlier on in my business career in my life I realized that I could push back and I could say no. And it's almost a self worth thing. Because you're scared to say no to the money, you're normally in such a stage where you want the money and so you say yes to everything and that ruins you quicker than anything else because then you're not happy when you're working and that's one of the things you want to be. I mean you don't want to be over the moon happy but you want to be okay working. So when becoming your own boss and treating your business like a business remember: you are the CEO, you're the strategist behind your business.   [00:12:03.800] - Brooke Absolutely. So what is one fear or thought that keeps coming up for you as a business owner?   [00:12:09.050] - Janice We kind of talked about this earlier, my newsletter. Not my zone of genius. I have a list. Technically I have a list for my podcast as well and that's a whole other thing. I know kind of what I want to write but part of me is like how personal do I want to get? Because I don't, I'm a very private human being. But people keep going on about the no trust thing it's like how much is too much and how much is too little? How often to write. Because I committed to messaging every Thursday and I committed to doing a rolling stock of different topics but right now I'm really focusing on this one topic. So all I want to do is write about this one topic. Do you guys mind? So I'm getting feedback because sometimes as often as you might be asked hey click this link or this link some people just read the email and don't respond to you or give you feedback. And as business owners we want to get better and we want to do stuff that works for you. But if you don't tell us and communicate with us we're not gonna do it. So every time I get a feedback form from any company that they specifically like ask "hey Janice we want you to give feedback". I will do it because that's what I would want as a business owner.   [00:13:10.400] - Brooke Awesome. Thank you. So how can people work with you these days?   [00:13:14.880] - Janice So having said that email is my choice communication. People message me on Facebook and I'm like "I'm not on here." I even have a message on my Facebook page if you message it says "Hi I'm out helping other introverts, I check this maybe twice a day, email me." Email me at: Janice@thecareerintrovert.com you can find me at thecareerintrovert.com,  Facebook: careerintrovert, LinkedIn: Janicethecareerintrovert anything careerintrovert appart from like Snapchat, I'm there. The best way to contact me is email though and if you want to work with me this is what I do. I help people launch their podcast, less overwhelmed with goals, with systems workflows. Because one thing about podcasting is you want to be consistent and the only way not the only way but my way of doing that. There's many ways to do. The thing is to have systems and workflows in place and obviously record in advance so you have a batch of stuff so that you can still live your life and it fits in with your lifestyle. I had someone ask in my group the other day "why are your podcast episodes so short" and I was like "because it fits in with my personality which is short and sweet." It fits in with my lifestyle. I travel a lot so I need to batch record and I'm going to do that like five minutes here five minutes there and then be done with it. I didn't want to spend a lot of time editing there were lists of things I didn't want to do. So that's how my podcast is the way it is. So I help you with all that I help you with workflows, I help you with systems, I help you with your goals and making sure they're in line with your business and your podcast and all that good stuff. That's pretty much it, amplify your voice. Mainly introverts but I also work with extroverts because I like people.   [00:14:52.820] - Brooke I was going to ask you where can people follow you. But you kind of answered all that in the first question as well. I would probably say because your a podcaster the best way to kind of get to know you and follow your work is probably through your podcast.   [00:15:04.020] - Janice Oh yeah.   [00:15:04.900] - Brooke So all of this information is going to be below in the show notes: where to find her, how you can work with her and all of that. You don't have to go find your pen and paper right now. I believe that is it Miss Janice, I think we answered all the questions I have written down here.   [00:15:18.530] - Janice Thank you.   [00:15:19.530] - Brooke All right Pop Tarts that is all for this week. Remember send in your thoughts, your feedback, your ideas, your questions and your drink of choice whether it be alcoholic or nonalcoholic. And be sure to send in the recipes so you can be featured on the show. And don't forget to subscribe. So you can be around for when I feature you on the show and to get some good content. Here's to another week. Cheers.  

For many people, taking the time to sit down and write on a daily basis is something we just don’t have time for.   Yet, a daily writing ritual is a powerful tool if you are looking to change your thoughts and your life.   The best part is, you can see a massive life transformation with just one sentence in a day.   In a conversation with coach Kori Linn, we learn how to leverage the simple practice of daily writing and different ways you can adapt it to work for your life.   Major Topics in the Conversation The daily writing ritual Kori Linn started in 2011 that changed her life How to adapt a daily practice to your life The importance of getting your thoughts on paper-so you can work with them The power of taking small steps to make big transformation   Special Moments in the Episode [1:37] Why Kori started a daily writing practice back in 2011 [2:20] How Kor’s daily writing practice evolved and adapted [3:48] The reasoning behind a daily ritual [4:20] Getting those ideas in your head on paper [7:38] How do you get started with a daily ritual, like writing practice? [11:00] Why small steps lead to big life shifts [12:51] Kori’s upcoming projects   About Our Guest Kori Linn is a burnout coach with experience working as a freelancer, in the corporate world, and other experiences. She uses those experiences and her creativity to build programs and coaching sessions for women at risk or already experiencing burnout. She is the founder of Kori Linn, LLC.   Learn more:   KoriLinn.com Kori on Twitter Kori on LinkedIn Kori on Facebook   Other Resources   The Artist’s Way by Julie Cameron What are Morning Pages? (Julia Cameron’s website) Gratitude Practice, Explained (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence) Daily Writing Practice (Kori Linn’s Freebie Created for THIS Podcast!)   Subscribe To Rich in Differences Podcast Itunes Stitcher Google Play Spotify   **Rich in Differences Podcast is not intended to diagnose, prescribe, treat, or cure any disease, physical or mental. Any advice given on the Rich in Differences Podcast should not be construed as a prescription, a promise of benefits, claims of cures, or a guarantee of results to be achieved. The information, instruction or advice given by Rich in Differences Podcast is not intended to be a substitute for competent professional medical or psychological diagnosis and care. You should not discontinue or modify any medication presently being taken pursuant to medical advice without obtaining approval from your healthcare professional. As a listener/reader, you must take complete responsibility for your own physical health and emotional well-being.   Transcript Below   [00:00:04.200] - Brooke Welcome to reach in differences with your hosts for rediscovering what works for you in life. Health and business we are not like those and one size does not fit all. So you grab a good drink and come listen to different perspectives as we see what sticks for you.   [00:00:20.910] - Brooke Hi Kori. Thank you for joining us today.   [00:00:23.370] - Kori Hi Brooke. Thank you so much for having me.   [00:00:25.890] - Brooke So Kori, I have to ask what is your drink of choice today?   [00:00:29.790] - Kori Well it's still morning on the West Coast where I live. So right now my drink of choice is coffee. But if you want to talk about my favorite drink right now I'm very much into. Rosé.   [00:00:44.310] - Brooke Ohhh. That's nice. I like rosé.   [00:00:45.740] - Kori It's a nice summer drink. I like it all year round. But it's summer now.   [00:00:50.310] - Brooke Awesome. Right now I am having Pinot Grigio because we recently just hung a flat screen TV up on the wall and that was quite an ordeal. So I'm drinking afterwards.   [00:01:02.370] - Kori Very nice.   [00:01:21.960] - Brooke Awesome. Thank you. So Kori can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do?   [00:01:26.670] - Kori Yeah I would love to. So I'm a life coach and I live in Seattle and I work with women who are experiencing or at risk of burnout. But my background is actually in creative writing and so I've had a creative writing practice that I do in the morning since 2011 and I've incorporated that into my work as a coach and my clients as well.   [00:01:49.740] - Brooke Wow. 2011 that is a really specific time. Can you tell us like What made you start doing a daily writing routine back in 2011?   [00:01:57.690] - Kori Definitely yeah. I remember it was 2011 because it was the summer after my first year of graduate school. I was studying at the University of Washington getting my math during finals in creative writing and having a really hard time. And so I read The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron which is a great book.   [00:02:17.610] - Kori It has lots of useful stuff for mindset and for creativity. And one of her recommendations is a practice called morning pages. So in the beginning I did morning pages in her style. And then as the years went by I really turned that practice into something of my own design.   [00:02:36.270] - Brooke And exactly how was it turned into your own design?   [00:02:39.570] - Kori That's a great question. Over the years and especially the more I learned about life coaching and coaching concepts even before I was a coach the more I would kind of create very specific prompts for myself. And Julia Cameron style you literally just get up and write anything. It can be anything at all for three pages first thing in the morning but I wanted to focus on specific things like the way you can use a gratitude practice to rewire your brain to pay more attention to positivity. So I started doing prompts about what's going well, what do I like, and what do I love, where was the light showing up in my life and at some point I would also create containers for what we would typically consider the negative feelings because I wanted a space to feel those in a very specific way so I would create that space in my morning pages as well.   [00:03:33.930] - Brooke Thank you. So what changed?   [00:03:36.030] - Kori That's a great question. Yeah. So when I began my writing practice first of all I was a little bit horrified at all of the thoughts that were in my head. I remember the first set of morning papers I did that for the first three pages were just three pages of me listing all the things I thought that I was failing at like in life. So a little a little melodramatic maybe but that really was what it felt like for me then. But the first thing that I learned from morning pages was how to write without censoring myself and because I was in a creative writing program that served me really well. I remember going to a class after that where we did a free write for like five minutes and I just had a ton of stuff on the page because I'd gotten very into that practice of just keep going. Just keep going.   [00:04:26.130] - Brooke All right. And so as you continued to do it what else changed. Like as you continue to move forward how did it evolve? Did you evolve any? Did you change your thoughts change?   [00:04:39.570] - Kori Yeah. Well it's interesting because in the artist's way Julia Cameron does talk about like changing your thoughts and developing new thoughts. She doesn't talk about it in the same way as life coaches but there are a lot of ways in which doing the work in her book was like my pre thought work. And for listeners who aren't familiar with thought work is just the practice of noticing meaning and sometimes changing the thoughts that we're thinking and creating new thoughts on purpose so that we can create different results in our lives.   [00:05:11.550] - Kori Julia Cameron kind of was my prerequisite that I didn't realize was a prerequisite. So I did see all these changes and in the eight years that I've been doing this practice I've gone from being in grad school. And then I was a bartender and then I was a freelance writer and then I was in corporate America and now I'm a coach. So this is a tool that's gone with me through so many different phases of life and that has really helped me understand myself and what my mind was creating. And then when I got into some of those changes that were more difficult for instance going and working in corporate America when my old story was that I didn't have the right background for that it really required learning to tell my story in a new way. And all the practice I had this morning pages helped me get a handle on that.   [00:05:59.810] - Brooke OK so what would you say is the biggest benefit from doing daily writing practice?   [00:06:05.870] - Kori The biggest benefit to me of having a writing practice at all is that you create a relationship with yourself and a space to have that relationship. And when you get things on the page you can really understand them in a different way than when you're just thinking them in your head when you're thinking you can be very immersed in your thoughts when you put them on the page you can see them much more clearly and then you can work with them. But then the other thing that really happened for me is that having this practice over so many years has allowed me to see all the different things I can do with writing. Now my writing is very directed and there's a freebie that I am sharing with shows like the very specific question I ask myself now.   [00:06:50.540] - Kori  But it's very much about helping my brain rewire to see all the data of the things I am doing that are working towards creating the changes I want to see in my life. And that's a way to help you notice what's working and feel better about that. And it feels good to do that but it's not just about feeling good. It's about the fact that when you feel good and notice what's working you do more of what's working. So it's really a tool that actually creates real world changes in my life.   [00:07:22.610] - Brooke That's awesome. That makes me when I start writing daily now in the morning. I don't do that but that does make me want to to start doing that because it would be interesting too to see that to see your thoughts and your right about the idea of being immersed. I like the way you put that being immersed in your thoughts versus being able to see them on a piece of paper is like almost the difference between standing in the middle of the road and standing on the sidewalk.   [00:07:48.680] - Kori Yeah.   [00:07:49.400] - Brooke So yeah I like that.   [00:07:50.600] - Brooke  I know it's good. To me it sounds silly to ask the question how would you teach someone to start doing a daily writing practice because it sounds like it's in the name, like a daily writing practice. Is there some tips or advice you would give because you know there's a lot of us to start the writing and then we stop or we just feel like just writing just just don't got the time for writing. So yeah. How would you go about teaching someone how to start a daily writing practice.   [00:08:18.020] - Kori Yeah I think that's actually super important because on the surface level it's like yes if you want to write then you sit down and write but what we know as coaches is that it's not that simple. There's all kinds of things that people want to do that they aren't doing all the time. I'm sure even us included that's part of working with the human brain and being a person in the world. So my number one piece of advice would be to create consistency first. So for instance if all you can commit to is writing one sentence a day. I love that I'm like "This is a great one sentence is plenty." People have a tendency to dismiss small steps but everything big and amazing and beautiful is made of tiny steps, tiny movements. So some coaches call this minimum baseline I like to call it too small to fail because I think that's funny and when things are funny it helps me to do them. But the idea is I want it to be so easy for you that it's easier to do it than it is to avoid it. You know what I mean.   [00:09:29.180] - Brooke  Yes   [00:09:29.710] - Kori Yes. So if all you do is write one sentence then I want you to like give yourself a gold star, maybe literally, go get some stickers that you like that kind of thing. But when you do something small and then like really notice like I'm doing it I'm doing it. That's how you create a new habit and a new pattern. And once you've successfully done that for a week, two weeks, maybe even three weeks then maybe you go up to two sentences and again people always are like that's not anything but it actually is because one sentence a day is three hundred and sixty five sentences. Obviously in a year. And when we get like these grooves of habit begun it's much easier to ramp them up.   [00:10:16.550] - Brooke That's awesome. And this reminds me of when I teach my pole classes I have to teach the women the same thing but in a more physical way. Just because you come to class and you can't already climb the pole doesn't mean that you'll just you're never going to be able to get there. And a lot of on start with not even being able to do the first exercise into it fully and they think I've done nothing. And I say "no you've done plenty." You've done a lot. Because that one little motion that you did was enough to start building the muscle you need to make it through that first step." And sure enough after a few repetitions, a few classes, now all of a sudden they're going to the next step. No matter how small it is it is still progression. So in all progress builds on itself. So I just had to throw that in there because I love seeing how my physical classes translate into the coaching side of it too.   [00:11:15.650] - Kori Yes I totally agree with that. I think I think it's a cultural story we have. That in order to make progress you have to do something big. And if people learn nothing else from me I want them to learn that they can make a monumental change in their life by starting with a very extremely tiny movement or choice today and learning to celebrate those tiny shifts and those tiny new habits is one hundred percent how you get to the big transformation.   [00:11:53.630] - Brooke Yes I totally agree that.   [00:11:55.790] - Kori Julia Cameron in her book the way she teaches the morning pages is like I said you just write three pages. And I was able to start like that. But I do not recommend it because it took so much willpower for me to do those three pages. That's why I think that the starting small approach is so powerful because just because you can do it the other way doesn't mean it's fun or enjoyable or that you get better outcomes. I think I think you don't get better outcomes. I do think you get the best outcomes by starting small.   [00:12:25.910] - Brooke So Kori where can people find you these days?   [00:12:28.760] - Kori People can find me online at www.korilynn.com. I am also on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. And it's the same spelling everywhere.  I love to connect with people.I love to talk obviously about lots of stuff but mostly coaching and writing   [00:13:00.380] - Brooke Awesome and so below we will have all of her information in the show notes so you can simply go online and click on her links. How can people work with you these days?   [00:13:11.090] - Kori Right now I'm working with people one on one. My main program is called Learning Burnout and it's all about de-programming burnout culture and reprogramming on purpose so that you can live the life you want to live.  I think what is really important to know about that is for most people, for me or my clients, we still want to work really hard. We still want to crush it at work but it's about learning to show up and work really hard in a sustainable way and not a way that leaves you feeling overwhelmed exhausted and depleted. And I do that work all online so I take clients from everywhere in the world. I just had a client in the Netherlands, that was super fun. She was my first international client and then I'm also developing a new program called Fall Back in Love and it's for people who aren't necessarily burnt out but they don't feel as in love with their career and their work as they want to and they know that they could. So it's about recreating that feeling of love but in a job context which I think so many people want and yet we don't know how to get that we don't know how to figure that out. So that's an upcoming offering I'm working on.   [00:14:34.940] - Brooke Great. And what we'll do is when an offering is available I'll go ahead and add that to the show note so people can find you that way as well.   [00:14:45.260] - Kori That sounds amazing. Thank you so much.   [00:14:47.810] - Brooke Thank you. And I appreciate your time.   [00:14:50.070] - Kori Anytime. I love chatting with you and your audience and it's just super fun to have these conversations. So thank you so much for having me on the show.   [00:14:59.660] - Brooke All right. Pop Tarts is off this week. Remember, send in your thoughts, your feedback, your ideas, your questions, and your drink choice whether it be alcoholic or nonalcoholic. And be sure to send in the recipes so you can be featured on the show. And don't forget to subscribe so you can be around for when I feature you on the show and it get some good content. Here's to another week. Cheers.    

Do you ever find yourself comparing your business or yourself to other people? Comparing our  businesses against those around us is as human as it is ubiquitous. With social media, this phenomenon has reached new levels. We see everyone’s biggest hits and massive business breakthroughs every day. It’s easy to get trapped in other people’s good news. Often times, seeing all these things are harmless, but sometimes it can be destructive. But can a pattern of comparing our businesses or ourselves to others have harsher effects on how we perceive ourselves? Yes, it can. When you start looking around for what other business owners are doing, you fall into a compare and despair mentality trap and you begin to feel like a loser. You eventually lose the energy you had going, you begin to doubt yourself and your business strategies, and finally you begin to spin. In today’s episode of Rich in Differences we’ll talk about the compare and despair mentality in running a business and also the importance of following our journey. Episode Spotlights Example of Compare and Despair Scenario As a pole dance instructor, I find that a lot of times my pole dancing instruction has a lot of good similarities to what we learn in real life. It puts it into a more physical idea versus just a mental idea. Let’s say I'm teaching 10 girls how to climb a pole. I will give them the instructions and we do it. Then I’ll explain it again and do it a second time because people rarely get things on the first try. But then I’ll always have a few girls who just don't seem to understand what I'm saying and that is totally normal. I’ll ask them like, “Do you just not understand? What's going on?” They're like, “Well, we just don't get it. It doesn't make sense.”  Or, “I'm having a hard time.” So, is I'll drag one of my more advanced students over to my pole and I'll say, “All right, I want you to teach it.” They'll teach it their way and all of a sudden, the few girls that weren't getting it, they'll start getting it. They totally understand now what to do. Here's the thing, me and my advanced students were teaching the exact same thing. We were both teaching how to climb a pole. Yet, my version of the instructions did not reach to everyone. Those who didn't get it, got it from her version of the instruction -- the advanced student's version of the instructions Discover What Sells Your Business We can all be teaching the same thing, but that doesn't mean you're going to get every single person. When you really learn that what sells your business, especially if you are a service provider, is you, the better off you'll be because there is enough business for everyone. While you know someone who might have a prettier website than you or a better opt in or better pictures or more advanced like tech going on their website, they're only going to reach their people. They are only going to communicate well with the people who can hear their instructions. That's not everyone, just like in my class, not everyone understands my instructions. The best way to get everyone on the same level is to include different versions of those instructions.  You're just a different version. You're out there you're saying it your way. You’re packaging it your way. You're handling it your way and the people who hear you and who resonate with you, they're going to be attracted to that. Your Vibe Attracts Your Tribe. That's getting clichéd, but it's true. Your vibe will attract the people who want to work with you. When you look at other people, you have to remember that that's their journey, and they're attracting the people that want to work with them. Your job for your business is to get out there and attract your tribe. Sell it your way. Use your mannerisms and be you. How to Beat the Compare and Despair Mentality When you start to feel the compare despair mentality creeping in, take a step back and remember that you are on your own journey. You're out there to get your own customers and those customers are meant for you. Remind yourself that there is enough business out there for all of us. We like to discuss the abundance mindset and coaching. But a lot of times we forget that when we're in our business. In our business, that's when scarcity mindset really kind of creeps up on us if we're not careful. This is one of the ways that scarcity mindset shows its face. You have to remind yourself, there is enough for all of us. Resources: Free Resource Library Course: Mindset Matters Looking to create your own course: Membervault Looking to collaborate and take some useful classes: Eclectic Entrepreneur  Subscribe To Rich in Differences Podcast Itunes Stitcher Google Play Spotify    *Disclosure: Some of the links above are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission   **Rich in Differences Podcast is not intended to diagnose, prescribe, treat, or cure any disease, physical or mental. Any advice given on the Rich in Differences Podcast should not be construed as a prescription, a promise of benefits, claims of cures, or a guarantee of results to be achieved. The information, instruction or advice given by Rich in Differences Podcast is not intended to be a substitute for competent professional medical or psychological diagnosis and care. You should not discontinue or modify any medication presently being taken pursuant to medical advice without obtaining approval from your healthcare professional. As a listener/reader, you must take complete responsibility for your own physical health and emotional well-being.   Transcript Below [00:00:24.070] This is your hostess with the mostest Brooke. All right. So I recently got a message today. I say recently got a message today. I recently got a message and it happened to be today from a young lady who was talking about her compare and despair mentality in running a business. And they got me thinking about really how common that is. And even I can be drawn into that trap. And I just wanted to come on here today and let's talk about our journey and the importance of following our own journey.   [00:01:00.550]  There is enough business out there for all of us. There really is. And what I explained was I'm a pole dance instructor and I find that a lot of times my pole dancing instruction in my class. It has a lot of good similarities to what we learn in real life. It puts it into a more physical idea of the version versus just the mental idea. So let's say for example I am teaching 10 girls how to climb a pole and I'm given the instructions and I've been doing this for many many years so I got the instructions down pretty well.   [00:01:39.070]  And I explain them and we do it. And then I explain it again and I do it a second time because, you know, people rarely get things on the first try and rightfully so, it is the beginners class. I teach beginners class. I probably should have mentioned that. So they'll, you know, it takes a few times and that is totally normal. But then I always have a few girls who just don't seem to understand what I'm saying. And again that i s totally normal since I've been doing this for years I totally recognize signs and I ask them I'm like, you know, do you just not understand like like what's going on and the like well we just I just don't get it.   [00:02:13.840]  You know does it make sense or I'm having a hard time. So what I'll do is I'll drag one of my more advanced students over to my pole and I'll say all right I want you to teach it and they'll teach it their way and all of a sudden  the few girls that weren't getting it all of a sudden they're getting it like they totally understand now what to do.   [00:02:35.230] And here's the thing. Me and my advanced student were teaching the exact same thing. We were both teaching how to climb a pole. Yet, my version of the instructions did not reach to everyone. And those who didn't get it got it from her version of the instruction. The advanced students version of the instructions. We can all be teaching the same thing but that doesn't mean you're going to get every single person.   [00:03:10.570] When you really learn that what sells your business, especially if your service provider, is you. The better off you'll be because there is enough business for everyone. And while, you know, someone who might have a prettier website than you, or a better opt in, or better pictures, or more advanced like tech going on on their website,  they're only going to reach their people they're only going to communicate well with. The people who can hear their instructions and that's not everyone. Just like in my class not everyone understands my instructions and I have learned that the best way to get everyone, you know, on the same level is to include different versions of those instructions.   [00:04:04.450]  So you're just a different version. You're out there you're saying it your way. You're packaging it your way. You're handling it your way and the people who hear you, who resonate with you, they're going to be attracted to that.  You're going to attract your tribe. Your vibe attracts your tribe. And I know that's getting cliche, right, but it is true. Your vibe will attract the people who want to work with you. So when you look at other people you have to remember that's their journey and they're attracting the people that want to work with them. Your job for your business is to get out there and attract your tribe. Sell it your way.   [00:04:51.090]  Use your mannerisms. Be you. So this week when you start to feel to 'compare and despair' I want you to take a step back. All right, I want you to remember that you are on your own journey and you're out there to get your own customers and those customers are meant for you. OK? And to remind yourself that there is enough business out there for all of us right now. I know we like to discuss the abundance mindset in coaching, but a lot of times we forget that when we're in our business. In our business we start to really see that scarcity mindset really kind of creeps up on us if we're not careful.   [00:05:30.960]  And this is one of the ways that scarcity mindset shows its face. So you have to remind yourself there is enough for all of us.   [00:05:40.190] All right Pop Tarts. That's it for now. As usual we're going to leave a message to my dad. Hey dad, I saw you in an awesome shirt today. I wonder who bought that for you. She's got some really good taste. Love ya!    

Do you always allow your emotions and fears talk you out of taking decisions and risks that could be valuable to your life or business? If so, you're not alone.   Emotions are important. They can impact the decisions we make and compel us to take action, both small and large, about our lives. Our emotions control how we interact and talk to people, how we spend our time, as well as how we handle opportunities and challenges.   In this episode, we’ll discuss the importance of collaboration and talking to others. In the last two episodes, we discussed a few techniques and ideas for learning emotional management. But how do you know what is normal and what is not? Listen in!   Episode Spotlights   In order to determine what is normal or common, you need to talk to each other and be willing to be vulnerable.   It is very easy to get immersed in your own thoughts and emotions and it can become hard to differentiate between what is normal or common, what is a personal issue, or something you should truly be concerned about.   Five Common Fears Among the Business Owners:    Fear of failure  Fear of success Impostor syndrome Perfectionism The inner critic   You’ll be amazed at the number of people who walk around scared they’re going to fail.   If you spend your day thinking negative thoughts, you’ll be depressed and end up thinking that those statements are true.   By sharing your thoughts with others, you’ll realize how normal or how common those thoughts and fears really are.   Fear is normal, but you need to learn that not all fears require you to stay up all night long hating on yourself. Actually, no fear should have you doing that.   When you have someone to bounce your inner turmoil off of, you can start to see what is really common and maybe what isn't.   Then you can make better decisions on how to handle it when those emotions start to come up in predictable ways and common situations.   Collaboration and talking to others is important because you begin to see the things worth looking at, and the things that you can turn away from.   Resources/Links Mentioned in This Episode    Website: Rich in Differences    Rich in Differences Facebook page    Brené Brown: Website     Ways to Subscribe to Rich in Differences Podcast:  Itunes    Stitcher    Google Play    Spotify     Looking for some FREE Resources:  Free Resource Library    Eclectic Entrepreneurs   Some great resources for business that I personally use  MemberVault   *Disclosure: Some of the links above are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.   **Rich in Differences Podcast is not intended to diagnose, prescribe, treat, or cure any disease, physical or mental. Any advice given on the Rich in Differences Podcast should not be construed as a prescription, a promise of benefits, claims of cures, or a guarantee of results to be achieved. The information, instruction or advice given by Rich in Differences Podcast is not intended to be a substitute for competent professional medical or psychological diagnosis and care. You should not discontinue or modify any medication presently being taken pursuant to medical advice without obtaining approval from your healthcare professional. As a listener/reader, you must take complete responsibility for your own physical health and emotional well-being.     TRANSCRIPT BELOW   All right, Pop Tarts, welcome to Rich in Differences, I'm your hostess with the mostess, Brooke, and this is part three of three of our series in emotional handling. Man, I'm going to tell you, I got like notes and it is really hard to like, look at my notes, and then also have like a frank discussion, because part of me is like, go back to the notes, Brooke, because you're going off, onto another, you know, tangent. And then a part of me is like, but this is serious, too. Oh, my God, problems of a podcaster. All right. In this episode, we will be discussing the importance of collaboration and talking to others. In the last two episodes, we have discussed a few techniques and ideas for learning emotional management, but how do you know what is normal and what is not? Okay, now, I do hate saying normal because there is an argument for well, who can really say what is normal. However, for the sake of time, we're going to go with the word normal and common, because I believe we have a slight idea about what I mean. In order to determine what is normal or common, we need to talk to each other, we need to be more willing to be vulnerable, Brene Brown anyone? We need to be talking to each other. It is very easy to get immersed in our own thoughts and emotions and they can become hard to differentiate between what is normal or common and what is very much a personal issue, or something we should truly be concerned about. Remember, monster under the bed versus man coming through the window. So, fear, again, is such a great example, especially when it comes to us business owners because so many fears loved to be activated when we're trying to run a business. So, as a business owner, in our life, we all experience fears. But in business, there are five common fears that show up among the business owners I work with. They are: Fear of failure Fear of success Imposter syndrome perfectionism inner critic. Be sure and go and comment which one plagues you the most. Mine would probably be the fear of success, which is interestingly enough, a fear that is not very much talked about. You would be amazed at how all of us are walking around scared we are going to fail. Thinking no one wants what we have to sell. Who are we to teach this idea? And we walk around hearing our moms, dads, partners, critical friends voice judging everything we're doing. Imagine a day and you might already be here, where you spend it thinking thoughts like, “I suck, and this is never going to work. I can't do this. I'm not smart enough. What if no one buys my program? What if people see that I'm not a million-dollar badass yet? Why would anyone listen to what I have to say? It's already been said by better, more well-spoken people.” All day you thought this to yourself, by the end of the day, I bet you would be depressed and absolutely positive that all of these statements are true. You would go to bed thinking you are truly a loser that does crap work and that no one wants to buy your crappy product. All right, let's change it up, now. Now imagine a day where you start to have the sauce and you call your business bestie or go to my Facebook page, Rich in Differences and say, “I am going out of my mind. I am totally thinking that my work sucks, and no one is going to buy it, I mean, who am I to be teaching any of this? I mean, so and so is already teaching something similar and makes millions, how will I ever be able to compete with that?” And then your business bestie goes, or me because if I catch you in the Facebook group, I'm going to be telling you, “Damn, first off, breathe. Second, do you know how many times I have had those same exact thoughts? We all have those thoughts, especially when we're about to launch something new into the world. I remember so and so talking about herself eating a gallon of ice cream scared to death that she was going to fall flat on her face regarding this deal.” Do you think you would go to bed feeling anywhere near as bad as the first scenario? Fear is normal. But you need to learn that not all fears require you to stay up all night long hating on yourself. Actually, no fear should have you doing that. But you get the point. When we have someone to bounce our inner turmoil off of, we can start to see what is really common and maybe what isn't. Then we can make better decisions on how to handle it when those emotions start to come up in predictable ways and common situations. Because emotions can be predictable if you're paying attention, which you will learn and Episode one and two and if you're doing those techniques. Each time I go to launch anything, the night before I have butterflies in my stomach, I get a little sweaty if I'm being honest, but I don't let that rule me. I know I'm nervous but I'm no longer thinking that I'm terrible, my work is terrible, or everyone is going to hate it, being nervous is normal. So, collaboration is important, talking to each other is important. Because we begin to see what are the things worth looking at and what are the things that we can turn away from? Go to my Facebook group, start a conversation. Have a question, have a fear, not sure what your next steps are? Not sure if you're in the right mental space for your launch? Or wherever you are in your business. Come talk to us and come see how normal or how common those thoughts, the emotions, those fears really are and let us help you. Because that's what this podcast is about, it's about helping you. Alright, pop tarts, that's it for the day. I hope you enjoyed this three-part series. Be sure to subscribe, and come on and tell me what you thought, tell me if you're doing it, tell me if it works, tell me if you think it sucks. I mean, come on, I need to know what's working and what's not working for you. Or if you have any ideas or questions or thoughts or whatever, and just hit me up. Alright, pop tarts, we're going to leave a message to my dad. Hey dad, so glad you listened and no I'm not embarrassed by the fact that you actually like some of my work and it is okay to tell me that and it's okay to like my post, appreciate your support. Love you.  

Emotions are an essential part of our lives. One minute we are happy and laughing, the next frustrated or the next discouraged. Our emotions whether good or bad, high or low they have a tremendous impact on our physical, mental, and emotional health.   How can you control the damaging emotions like anger, temper or resentment?   In general, emotional control is not something that is taught to us. As we get older, it really starts to affect our decisions and it affects all every aspect of our lives including our business. If we don't understand how to get a handle our emotions, then we end up being ridden by them.   In this episode, we'll be discussing three techniques to teach you how to gain control of your emotions. We're going to learn how to get out of the road and onto the sidewalk with your emotions.   Imagination Time Imagine standing in the middle of the road and there are several cars and trucks headed your way. These trucks and cars represent your emotions. If you don't know how to get to the sidewalk, then you are in serious trouble.   Usually, we’ll let those trucks and cars run us over, leaving us desperate to make any quick decision that will get us out of harm's way, the quickest. Even if it is not the best decision, no one has time for rational thinking while standing in the middle of speeding traffic.   Now, imagine yourself standing on the sidewalk looking at those passing cars and trucks. It's a different point of view. Notice that the cars and trucks or your emotions have not stopped their travel. They're still going to happen.   Now you're observing the traffic instead of being in the middle of it and you can make better decisions based on that traffic that is passing by.   How do you learn how to do that? We're going to be discussing the 3 techniques that I was taught is still used today to keep me on the sidewalk and not in the road.   Three Techniques on How to Gain Control of Your Emotions   Breathing We’ve all heard about deep breathing. But sometimes we need a reminder and sometimes we need to actually do it instead of just saying in our heads, “Yeah. We already know this” You already know it, but do you actually do it? Make note of how you feel -- your physical awareness. How's your heart? Where's your mind at? Do you feel heavy? Do you feel right? Do you feel happy or sad? Then take three deep breaths. Now make note of how you feel. More than likely there is a difference. Maybe you feel calmer. Your heart slows down. Maybe your mind quiets a little. Maybe your shoulders relax. Breathing is an amazing technique and it's best used when you're in the middle of an emotional situation in which you need to gain back control. Deep breathing, you can do it anytime. And no. You don't have to do 10 deep breaths. You should take three deep breaths or one huge breath. That's enough to stop the physical reactions that are happening in you. That's what deep breathing is good at. It stops the physical response. If you're a woman, more than likely, you have this wonderful skill of crying when you are frigging angry. This helps slow down or stop the crying. When you feel that big old ball of emotion coming up, take a deep breath and it will slow it all down.   Grounding When people hear grounding, they think of, “Take your shoes off and go stand out in the grass,” or, “Go for a long walk in the nature.” But when you're in the middle of something that's causing you to be emotional, more than likely, you don’t have time to take off the shoes and go stand underneath the tree. That's not to say that those aren't good ideas, but they're not the best ideas when you need something to work now. These techniques are meant to teach you how to deal with things now.   What to Do For Grounding Wiggle your toes and feel the sensation of your toes wiggling together. Once you've honed in on the sensation of your toes wriggling together, that skin to skin contact, now try to feel the solid ground underneath you. This is a very good way to ground yourself when you don't have time to take a walk. So, take a deep breath and then start wriggling your toes. While breathing stops the physical emotions, grounding stops the mental reactions. When you start becoming energetic in your head, you start to leave your center. You start to go off into another place. It's hard for you to concentrate on what's happening now and in a calm manner if your mind is going 100 miles an hour and floating off into different areas, because you want to be prepared to defend or you’re having a bad memory, or whatever the case may be. Grounding takes you from all over the place and brings you back to you again. It brings you back to center and back to the present. It's a wonderful way to come back to yourself and not be drugged around by your emotions.   Physical Awareness Physical awareness is all about learning how to feel your emotions. That means when you are feeling anything, actually describe how it feels. Does it feel like a hard knot at the bottom of your stomach? Does it feel like a heavy weight upon your chest? Is it large? Is it small? Is it a hairy ball that's stuck in your throat? They can't seem to get out of the way. Is it warm? Is it cold? Is it dark? Is it light? Is it sharp? Is it smooth? Really get into what that emotion feels like. What happens when you do that, it teaches you to understand what is really happening versus just assuming you know what is happening. For example, every emotion has a spectrum, but most of the times you won't ever hear anybody talk within the spectrum. A lot of times we hear people speak in the vague. Like, “I'm angry, I'm sad. I'm happy.” Most of the time we don't hear people talk about their emotions in a defined manner. Like, “I'm disheartened, dismayed, displeased, disquieted, edgy, concerned. I feel dejected, detached, or I'm feeling interested, intrigued, invigorated, involved, gratified, hopeful, inquisitive and I’m feeling pleased and pleasant and perky and peaceful, overjoyed enlivened, engrossed, amused, alert, affectionate, adventurous, absorbed, confident, contented, cool, curious, and dazzled, and delighted, eager…” the list goes on and on. Each spot on that spectrum has a different way it feels, but you can't understand the differences and how an emotion feels on the spectrum, if you can't even identify how the base or the overall emotion feels. Physical awareness gives you that skill. It gives you the skill to start to define what's actually happening. Are you actually angry or you just nettled? Are you happy or do you just feel content? These are all important. When you understand what's actually happening on inside, you're able to make better decisions. Summary All of these things will help you remove yourself from the road and put you onto the sidewalk. Emotions, they're going to happen. Feelings, they're temporary, but they're going to roll through like those cars and trucks. When you stand at the sidewalk, you can get a good idea about what's coming, and what to expect, and how to best prepare for it, and how to cross the street if we need to. We can't know these things if we don't understand how to slow our physical reaction with breathing, how to slow our mental reaction with grounding, and how to truly identify what is going on the inside. When we do those things, we can make better decisions in life and in our business. Fear is a great example of this. Fear, for most of us, is a big old, scary monster. A lot of times we don't know how to move through it. Through these techniques, you can learn how to identify fear and the different types of fears and know what to expect when they come. Instead of running and hiding, because you’re being eaten up with fear, because you’re standing in the middle of the road getting hit by the cars and trucks, you’ll be able to see the path through. Always take time to really hone in on what's going on inside of you because you are going to know best about what's happening and how to handle it. Resources:   Free Resource Library Course: Mindset Matters Looking to create your own course: Membervault Looking to collaborate and take some useful classes: Eclectic Entrepreneur    *Disclosure: Some of the links above are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.    **Rich in Differences Podcast is not intended to diagnose, prescribe, treat, or cure any disease, physical or mental. Any advice given on the Rich in Differences Podcast should not be construed as a prescription, a promise of benefits, claims of cures, or a guarantee of results to be achieved. The information, instruction or advice given by Rich in Differences Podcast is not intended to be a substitute for competent professional medical or psychological diagnosis and care. You should not discontinue or modify any medication presently being taken pursuant to medical advice without obtaining approval from your healthcare professional. As a listener/reader, you must take complete responsibility for your own physical health and emotional well-being.   TRANSCRIPT BELOW   Hey, everyone, welcome to Rich in Differences, I'm your hostess with the mostess, Brooke, welcome. This is our first full episode so I'm excited to get started. Actually, this episode is going to be one of three. I figured I would start with a three-part series because these first three episodes are what I teach anybody I coach. And these three things were taught to my, by my own coaches and therapists. Believe it or not, we coaches, get coached too, all right. So, what I'm going to be talking about in this three-part series is emotional control. I don't believe this is something that is taught to us, in general and as we get older, it really starts to affect our decisions, especially in our business, it affects all of our lives. I don't mean to be like, especially in business, but this is a business podcast. However, that being said, this is totally valid for everyone because our emotions follow us through every aspect of life. If we don't understand how to get a handle on them, then we end up being ridden by our emotions. So, in this episode, we'll be discussing three techniques to teach you how to gain control of your emotions. Now this will be part one of a three-part series and in this episode, we're going to learn how to get out of the road and onto the sidewalk with your emotions. All right, imagination time, don't roll your eyes. Most of you are probably driving right now so you have all the time in the world to picture in your mind's eye when I'm about to describe to you. Now, imagine standing in the middle of the road and there are several cars and trucks headed your way. Now these trucks and cars, they represent your emotions, and if you don't know how to get to the sidewalk, then you are in serious trouble. As we usually are with our emotions, we'll let those trucks and cars run us over, leaving us desperate to make any quick decision that will get us out of harm's way, the quickest, even if it isn't the best decision. No one has time for rational thinking while standing in the middle of speeding traffic. Now, I want you to imagine yourself standing on the sidewalk, looking at those passing cars and trucks. It's a different point of view. Notice that the cars and trucks or your emotions have not stopped their travel, they're still going to happen. But now you're observing the traffic instead of being in the middle of it, now you can make better decisions based on that traffic that is passing by. So, how do you learn how to do that? Next, we're going to be discussing the three techniques that I was taught, is still used today to keep me on the sidewalk and not in the road. Alright, pop tarts, we're going to be discussing our first technique, breathing. Now, don't roll your eyes, right, because we all know we've all heard breathing, breathe, deep breath, it's all good for you. But sometimes we need a reminder and sometimes we need to actually do it, instead of just saying in our heads “Yeah, we already know this.” Yeah, you already know it, but do you actually do it? So, right now, I want you to make note of how you feel, your physical awareness. How's your heart? Where's your mind at? Do you feel heavy? Do you feel light? Do you feel happy, sad, like, where are you at? And then I want you to take three deep breaths with me. All right, you ready? Here we go. In. Out. In. Out. One more time, in and out. Now make note of how you feel. More than likely there is a difference. Even I feel calmer, your heart slows down, maybe your mind quiets a little, maybe your shoulders relax some. Breathing is an amazing technique, and it's best used when you're in the middle of an emotional situation in which you need to gain back control. Deep breathing, you can do it anytime. And no, you don't have to do 10 deep breaths, I do not do 10 deep breaths and I can't imagine what I would look like if I was in the middle of a heated discussion be like, we got to hold on a second, I need to take 10 deep breaths. I mean, I usually do one to three, usually is one, huge one, if I'm being honest. And that's enough to stop the physical reactions that are happening in me. And that's what deep breathing is good at, it stops the physical response. So, if you're a woman, more than likely you have this wonderful skill of crying when you are frigging angry. This, this keeps me from crying. When I feel that big old ball of emotion coming up. I take that deep breath and it slows it all down. The next one is grounding. Now when people hear grounding, they think of, take your shoes off and go stand out in the grass, or go for a long walk in nature. But when you're in the middle of something that's causing you to be emotional, more than likely, you don't got time to take off the shoes and go stand underneath the tree. Now, that's not to say that those aren't good ideas, but they're not the best ideas when you need something to work now. And these techniques are meant to teach you how to deal with things now. So, what can you do for grounding? Wiggle your toes, and I want you to feel the sensation of your toes wiggling together, and once you've, kind of honed in, on their wiggling, or not really so much the movement but the sensation of them wiggling together, that skin to skin contact. Now, I want you to try to feel for the ground underneath you. Can you feel the solid ground beneath you? This is a very good way to ground yourself when you don't have time to take a walk. So, sometimes we don't have time to take that walk. So, take a deep breath and then start wiggling some toes. Grounding is good because it stops the mental reactions. While breathing stops the physical, grounding stops the mental. So, what does that mean? When you start becoming energetic in your head, you start to leave your center, you start to go off into like another place and it's hard for you to concentrate on what's happening now and in a calm manner. If your mind is going 100 miles an hour and floating off into different areas, because you want to be prepared to defend or you're having a bad memory or whatever the case may be. So, grounding takes you from all over the place and brings you back to you again, brings it back to center, brings you back to present. So, it's a wonderful way to come back to yourself and not be drugged around by your emotions. Next up we will be discussing physical awareness. Alright, so we just finished discussing grounding, but this last one I bet you've never even thought of. And you're probably thinking I'm crazy, God knows I thought I was crazy when I first did it. Physical awareness is all about learning how to feel your emotions. Now, what does that mean? That means when you are feeling anything, actually describe how it feels. Literally. Does it feel like a hard knot at the bottom of your stomach? Does it feel like a heavy weight upon your chest? Is it large? Is it small? Is it a hairy ball that's stuck in your throat? That can't seem to get out of the way. I know some of you just laughed at that, because God knows I just laughed at that in my head. Is it warm? Is it cold? Is it dark? Is it light? Is it sharp? Is it smooth? Like really get into what that emotion feels like because what happens when you do that, it teaches us to understand what is really happening versus just assuming you know what is happening. For example, every emotion has a spectrum but most of the times you won't ever hear anybody talk within the spectrum. A lot of times we hear people speak in the vague, so like, I'm angry, I'm sad, I'm happy. Most of the time we don't hear people talk about their emotions in a very defined manner. Like I'm disheartened, dismayed, displeased, disquieted, edgy, concerned. I feel dejected, detached or I'm feeling interested, intrigued, invigorated, involved, gratified, hopeful, inquisitive and feeling pleased and pleasant and perky and peaceful, overjoyed, enlivened, engrossed, amused, alert, affectionate, adventurous, absorbed, confident, contented, cool, curious and dazzled and delighted, eager, the list goes on and on. But each spot on that spectrum has a different way it feels, but you can't understand the differences and how an emotion feels on the spectrum if you can't even identify how the base or the overall emotion feels. Physical awareness gives you that skill. It gives you the skill to start truly identifying what's actually happening. Are you actually angry or are you just nettled? Are you happy or do you just feel content? These are all important. And when you understand what's actually happening on inside, you're able to make better decisions. So, all of these things will help you remove yourself from the road and put you onto the sidewalk. Emotions, they're going to happen, feelings, they're temporary, but they're going to roll through like those cars and trucks. But if when you stand at the sidewalk, we can get a good idea about what's coming and what to expect and how to best prepare for it, and how to cross the street if we need to. But we can't know these things if we don't understand how to slow our physical reaction with breathing, how to slow our mental reaction with grounding and how to truly identify what is going on the inside. When we can do those things, we can make better decisions, in life and in our business. Fear is a great example of this, fear, for most of us is a big old, scary monster. And a lot of times we don't know how to move through it. But through these techniques, you can learn how to identify fear, the different types of fears and know what to expect when they come. I used to be, I would get so nervous about doing anything regarding asking someone who I thought was a mentor, instead of a peer, to help me on something. And I would have these fears of like, “this person is going to think I'm stupid. They're going to hate my idea. Oh, my God, what are they say? No.” And I would talk myself out of it. Like, I'm pretty sure there's a lot of people who do this. I'm not the only one. But when I learned how to use these techniques, I saw fear coming a mile away. So I needed to ask someone for help regarding one of my programs, and I was hoping that she would be willing to give me some advice, though, she definitely did not have to. And as I sat in the chair waiting to speak to her in her office, I started, I had started to have those thoughts. But then it was interesting. So, instead of letting those thoughts just sit around in my head, beating me up, it literally was like I had stepped onto a sidewalk. I was like, “Oh, look, there's fear.” Then fear come to say what it needs to say. So I tell fear “You know what fear? I think we got this. I don't think this is going to be the end of the world, and even if they do say no we're going to go ahead and do this.” And I just went ahead and did it, regardless of the fact that fear had come rolling on through. So, I made a better decision, instead of running and hiding, because I was being eaten up with fear because I was standing in the middle of the road getting hit by the cars and trucks. I was able to say, I see you, but I think I can see the path through, and I think we're going to make it so I'm going to go for it, you know, and I did, and I got the yes. So, always take the time if you can to really hone in on what's going on inside of you, because you are going to know best about what's happening and how to handle it. In the next part of the series, we're going to be discussing how to take back control of the bus. A lot of times our emotions are the ones driving that bus instead of the bus driver i.e. you. So in the next part of this series, we will be talking about, taking back the bus. Be sure to subscribe and join our Facebook group, Rich in Differences, where we will collaborate to see what works best for you and your business. Have any questions you would like to be answered in an episode, be sure to email me or ask in the Facebook group. Alright, pop tarts. At the end of each episode, I'm going to leave a special message to my dad, my biggest fan. So, here goes “Hey, Dad, call me if you want to go to lunch sometime this week. Love you.”  

In the bus of your life, which one would you rather be? A driver or a passenger? Many people are passengers on their bus. Only few people are driving the bus and are in control.   In the last episode, we talked about how to get out of the middle of the road and get on the sidewalk with three techniques of breathing, grounding and physical awareness. Today, we're going to be discussing how to become the bus driver of your life, instead of a passenger on the bus.   Imagination Time   Imagine a bus that's full of passengers and a bus driver. The passengers on this bus are your emotions and the bus driver is you.   Who's driving the bus? Is it you or is it one of your emotions? 9 times out of 10 it's an emotion.   When we lack the ability to calm our mind and listen to our emotions, they tend to take over our buses and drive to whatever destination or whatever route they want, regardless of you and what you want.   All emotions are valid. If you're ignoring what is going on, they're going to become stronger and louder.   Let's discuss the monster under the bed versus the stranger coming into your window. Think about your four-year old even if you don't have one.   When they come out of the room and they tell you there's a monster under their bed. Do you believe there's a monster under their bed? No. You calm down the child. Maybe you check under the bed for them and then you send them back to bed.   Imagine the same four-year old comes out and tells you someone is wiggling their window. Is it possible someone could be trying to break into your house?   Life is full of ‘monsters under the bed’ fears and ‘strangers breaking into my window’ fears.   If you don't know how to identify which is which, then you will react to all fears the same way.   How to Identify Fear   Listen to what your emotions have to say.   Emotions have a point, they exist for a reason. We'll keep going with the fear theme.   Fears point is to keep you safe. That's all it wants to do. Anything even slightly outside your comfort zone will send it into panic mode.   Think of the four-year old child. The child will respond to the monster under the bed the same as someone wiggling their window.   You have to know the difference of which fear it's worth looking into and which is worth just soothing the four-year old and putting him back to bed.   We want to get to the point of being able to recognize which is which, so we can respond appropriately.   How you respond is key. When you listen and respond to your emotions, your emotions feel that they are least being heard, and will continue to let you drive the bus without a full blown coup.   What Happens When You Start Listening to Your Emotions Versus Just Trying to Ignore Them.   They become less monsters in your head and heart.   They become what they simply are: an emotion.   Emotions are temporary. They're only here for a time and then they move on.   Some cars drive slower than others, but they do move. Imagine yourself driving a bus and fear has something it wants to say. Instead of freaking out and just letting it take the wheel, you ask it to sit up next to you in the passenger’s seat.   Your emotion is allowed to tell you what is going on. It is here you get to decide the next steps. Does this fear need further investigation or action like a stranger coming through your child's window?   Or is it a false alarm like the monster under the bed and it just needs to be soothed made to understand that you've heard it, but you know better and that will be moving forward.   Either way you get to make the decision, not the emotion.   Practice the techniques from episode one and then also start incorporating listening to what your emotion is trying to say.   All that's on that bus is different versions of you just trying to give you input. If you can learn to hear what they have to say, you can make better decisions on where to take that bus. What routes to take that bus. How fast or slow to drive that bus. When to drive that bus and when to stop and slow down.   All of it is just feedback and you can learn that your emotions are friendly tools that you can use to better understand yourself and how you are reacting to the world.   When you're armed with that type of information, you can make more empowering decisions.   Resources:   Free Resource Library Course: Mindset Matters Looking to create your own course: Membervault Looking to collaborate and take some useful classes: Eclectic Entrepreneur    *Disclosure: Some of the links above are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.     **Rich in Differences Podcast is not intended to diagnose, prescribe, treat, or cure any disease, physical or mental. Any advice given on the Rich in Differences Podcast should not be construed as a prescription, a promise of benefits, claims of cures, or a guarantee of results to be achieved. The information, instruction or advice given by Rich in Differences Podcast is not intended to be a substitute for competent professional medical or psychological diagnosis and care. You should not discontinue or modify any medication presently being taken pursuant to medical advice without obtaining approval from your healthcare professional. As a listener/reader, you must take complete responsibility for your own physical health and emotional well-being.       TRANSCRIPT BELOW   Welcome to Rich in Differences, I'm your hostess with the mostess, Brooke. Hey pop tarts, hope you had a wonderful week and I'm back again to do part two of our series on emotional handling. So, last episode, we talked about how to get out of the middle of the road and get on the sidewalk with three techniques of breathing, grounding and physical awareness. So, today, we're going to be discussing how to become the bus driver of your life, instead of a passenger on the bus. Here we go again, with this imagination. Imagine a bus that's full of passengers and a bus driver, the passengers on this bus are your emotions and the bus driver is you. Now, I want you to see who's driving the bus, is it you or is it one of your emotions? Nine times out of ten, it's an emotion. When we lack the ability to calm our mind and listen to our emotions, they tend to take over our buses, and drive to whatever destination on whatever route they want, regardless of you, and what you want. So, all emotions are valid and if you're ignoring what is going on, they're going to become so strong that they will take you over. Let's discuss the monster under the bed versus the stranger coming into your window. Think about your four-year-old, even if you don't have one or want one. And they come out of the room and they tell you there's a monster under their bed. Do you believe there's a monster under their bed? No. You calm down the child, maybe you check under the bed for them and then you send them back to bed. Now, imagine the same four-year-old comes out and tells you someone is wiggling their window. Is it possible someone could be trying to break into your house? Oh yeah, there is. So, a real fear is started. Life is full of monsters under the bed fears and strangers breaking into my window fears. If you don't know how to identify which is which then you will react to all fears the same way. Alright, so what do you do? You listen to what your emotions have to say. Emotions have a point, they exist for a reason. So, we'll keep going with the fear theme. The first point is to keep you safe, that's all it wants to do. Anything even slightly outside your comfort zone will send it into panic mode. Think of the four-year-old child, the child will respond to the monster under the bed the same as someone wiggling their window. But you have to know the difference, which fear it's worth looking into? And which is worth just soothing the four-year-old and putting him back to bed? So, we want to get to the point of being able to recognize which is which, so we can respond appropriately. But that is the key: how you respond. When you listen and respond to your emotions, your emotions feel that they are least being heard, and will continue to let you drive the bus without a full-on coup. So, what happens when you start listening to your emotions versus just trying to ignore them? They become less monsters in your head and heart, they become what they simply are, an emotion. Like in episode one, the emotion will drive on by, emotions are temporary, they're only here for a time and then they move on. Some cars drive slower than others, but they do move. So, imagine yourself driving a bus and fear has something it wants to say? Instead of freaking out and just letting it take the wheel, you ask it to sit up next to you in that seat that is like just behind the driver but to the right. You know, which one I'm talking about. Here, your emotion is allowed to tell you what is going on. And it is here you get to decide the next steps. Does this fear need further investigation or action, like a stranger coming through your child's window? Or is it a false alarm, like the monster under the bed? And it just needs to be soothed, made to understand that you've heard it, but you know better and that we will be moving forward. Either way you get to make the decision, not the emotion. So, practice the techniques from episode one and then also start incorporating listening to what your emotion is trying to say. Really, all that's on that bus is different versions of you, just trying to give you input. If you can learn to hear what they have to say, you can make better decisions on where to take that bus, what routes to take that bus, how fast, how slow to drive that bus, when to drive that bus, when to stop and slow down, all of it is just feedback. And you can learn that your emotions are friendly tools that you can use to better understand yourself and how you are reacting to the world. And when you're armed with that type of information, you can make more empowering decisions. In the next episode of this three-part series, we will be discussing the last part of emotional handling and that is talking to another person and the importance of getting some outside feedback. All right, be sure to subscribe and head on over to the Facebook page and get some engagement going. Let me know how I can help you, ask questions, see if there's someone else in the group that could possibly help. We're all here to support each other. That's the point, is I want you to be able to be the best business owner that you can be. Man,that sounded like we were in kindergarten there for a second. All right Pop Tarts, as usual will be leaving a message to my biggest fan my dad. Hey, Dad, yes, yes, I do have to call you out after every episode. Love you.      

Hey! It’s Keith from Mind of the Modern Man – the website and podcast about a guyin his 40s, living life and telling stories. A while ago, I shared the story while I was observing a little slice of life, stuck in the waiting vestibule of the local Pep Boys. As I sat there, I took to my laptop and typed down what was happening all around me. Today I share the podcast of this story – I call it – My Time With The Admiral. Read the Transcript Below (full story at MindofModernMan.com): I’m sitting here in the ‘waiting room’ of the local Pep Boys – it’s time for the family SUV to go through an oil change. As I sit here, I’m really enjoying the life buzzing all around me. Ever do that - just sit there and look around you and try to figure out the stories behind what you’re a first person witness of? For this next hour or so, we are all sharing this small sliver of our life. Strangers pulled together with a common need – a professional to do to our vehicle what we can’t. More at MindofModernMan.com

Craig was on with Jim Polito. We talked about some of the latest warnings and problems people are having. If you are using Microsoft, I get it. I understand why you're not doing the updates but, man, it is essential. We talked about Organized Crime, Russia and Iran and then we also discussed a little bit about my Security Summer Summit. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: Hillary Clinton and CyberSecurity — In What Universe?  What Did You Say? The Forever Recordings of Alexa The Landscape of Streaming TV is Changing be prepared to Pay More IoT Insecurity Its a Problem for Businesses and Consumers Alike Didn’t Update Your Outlook — Watch Out For Iranians Hacks O365 Non-Security – again Crypto trust is costly and hidden Organized crimes latest drive-by’s attacking website visitors --- Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors. Airing date: 07/09/2019 The latest warnings and problems people are having with Microsoft and updates and a little bit about my Security Summer Summit. ---  Craig Peterson Hey, good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Mr. Polito this morning. We talked about some of the latest warnings and problems people are having. If you are using Microsoft, I get it. I understand why you're not doing the updates but, man, it is essential. That is what I talked about with Jim this morning. We also discussed a little bit about my Security Summer Summit. So, here we go with Mr. Jim Polito. Jim Polito The man the myth, the legend, I'm talking about our tech talk Guru Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir. Craig Peterson Hey, good morning, Jim. Jim Polito Craig, always a pleasure. Missed you last week. It is still a pleasure to have you here. We have to get right down to it. We got like, I must pull out the Godfather theme here somewhere. Do I still have that? Geez, I should have probably should have checked it, beforehand. But I should pull up the Godfather theme. Organized crime is doing some drive-bys. But they're doing them in cyberspace. No more, old Al Capone days that the car pulls up and those machine guns, the Tommy guns, blaze out the windows where mobsters dropped to the sidewalk. Now, this is online, right? Craig Peterson Yeah, exactly. We don't have to worry about the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Yeah. But we all do have to worry about this. Organized crime has been doing some innovative things, at least for them. Right. Jim Polito Good. Good. I agree with you. Craig Peterson When you think about organized crime and muscle men and paying the protection money and everything. Well, this is just a step up or down for them? Yeah. Jim Polito Well, they always go where there's an opportunity. I mean, I used to report a lot on organized crime. Mostly Cosa Nostra, you know, the Italian five families from New York. I used to cover and report on them because we had a crew of the Genovese crime family, out this way. But there are a lot of other organized crimes, Eastern European, Asian and 20 some odd gangs. It's all over. These guys are doing it online. Seizing the opportunity, because that's what did they say to Dillinger? It was a Dillenger or other guys that said "why do you rob banks? Well, that's where the money is," you know? Craig Peterson It's a fascinating thing because there are so many vulnerabilities. The NSA made a statement, and that is something they've never done before. You are old enough to remember when NSA stood for "no such agency." They deny the existence and everything else. Well, for the first time, ever, they've come out and issued a warning because there doing drive-by downloads going on. That is where they use your machine to mine Bitcoin. Now, that's just a huge, huge thing. They are using some features in your web browsers, which, again, kind of shows it's time to go to a privacy browser. The NSA issued a warning, now, because apparently, there are at least 10 million computers here in the US that are vulnerable, Windows computers, of course, that are vulnerable to some of these significant drive-by problems as well as attacks. Remember that President Trump pulled back an offensive attack that we were about to launch. It was going to be a kinetic attack against Iran. We were going to take out their missiles and take out those radar installations. What we did instead was we carried out a cyberattack against them. Yeah. And we went after those same installations with cyber attacks. We also went into Russia's power grid a few weeks ago, and we quite literally flipped the power on and off a few times, to let them know, we weren't happy with something they did. Now, the NSA issued a warning, as well as the FBI. I got an alert from the FBI about this, again right now. They are warning that the Iranians are attacking us directly. They are going after us. They're using some software that they've cobbled together from some open sources, but they're using some software that will wipe computers, it just deletes everything. It doesn't try and hold it ransom or anything. What they're trying to do is strike back at us economically. Iran is now deploying it. It's just amazing. The warning out there right now, that Iran is coming after us in a cyber way. You've got that organized crime was using drive-by downloads and is trying to hack in. We've got nation-states are like Russia and China that are invading our systems. We just found out last week, the FBI and other intelligence agencies are saying that we have had all of our major phone companies records have been taken by the Chinese and have been monitored by the Chinese for years. Then we've got the organized crime going after us using our machines to mind Bitcoin, literally mine money, as well as steal from us. We've got Iran who is on the offensive, right now, attacking our business computers as well as our home machines. You know, here's the disappointing part of all of this, Jim. 80% of the time, the attack can be stopped by just going back to the brass tacks and making sure your machines are up to date and patched. It has to be automatic. We have over 10 million devices now that are out there, Windows machines, that have not still have that unpatched vulnerability. Look at the Equifax hack. The Equifax hack happened because there was an uninstalled patch that was about eight months old. The Target hack, the TJ Maxx target all hacked because of an HVAC contractor. Can you believe we're talking about the system that controls the heating and cooling the air conditioning system for a retail store? A contractor installed them, and that contractor had remote access to track those systems so they could monitor them. The bad guys this unpatched track access point and they went in and hacked target. Jim Polito That's a way to sneak in. We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru. At the end of the segment, we're going to give you a number. If you text, My name, Jim, to that number, you'll get all the information like how to protect yourself from this and other things. Standard data and text rates apply. So, Craig, it's straightforward. It's just that people aren't doing what's out there and available to protect themselves. Craig Peterson I think they have good reason to. You know, I don't want people to feel bad. Lies and misrepresentations have them confused. You go in you, you buy a router at the local Staples store, and you install it in your small business. You think you're all set. Well, no, that has to be patched. Right? Yeah, some routers will automatically apply patches. But the other big problem is they say Microsoft has been mistreating consumers for decades. I mean, slapping them in the face and kicking them around. And they've done worse for small businesses. We could go on for hours on this one. But when you install a patch from Microsoft, look at the last two months look at patches from Microsoft. They broke computers. And I mean, most machines to which they were applied. Microsoft, sometimes it's the first choice. Here's our Patch Tuesday patches. So all these patches hate to install them, there were almost 80 critical patches last month from Microsoft. So when you install them and they don't work, and they break your computer, and you can't get your work done, and you can't get the paperwork out to the court and time, I've had calls from listeners on that one. Right? Law offices, I've got a four o'clock deadline and my machine, I can't do it. My Windows machine is trying to do an update or whatever. So, I don't blame the people. I don't blame consumers. I don't blame the small businesses that aren't doing them because they have a reason to be afraid. However, there is a real and present danger, right. We have the bad guys trying to go after you. That's also a real and present danger. There are some services out there. I'm going to be covering this as part of my security summer summit. That's free summit I'm doing this summer, on what to do. There is software out there that will do the updates for you. Some companies will do it for you. We'll talk about that. But I can't blame them, Jim, because Microsoft has been frankly, lying to them because of how they have entirely just misused people for profit. Jim Polito Alright, so look, let's get folks in touch with you. So they'll know about this. And the way we do that is you text My name to this number. Craig Peterson 855-385-5553. Just get out your smartphone and text, Jim to 855-385-5553. Jim Polito Standard data and text rates apply. Craig will provide you with this information plus a lot of other stuff this week, and he won't annoy you. He won't sell your name, and he won't be selling you anything. So, there you have it. What have you got to lose, other than the information? Having a ton of knowledge on how to protect yourself. You'll get that from Craig. Thank you very much. Craig Peterson All right. Thanks, Jim. I'm glad you're back and then glad you had a great vacation. Jim Polito Thank you, sir. Craig Peterson Bye-bye. Jim Polito All right, when we return a final word --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Message Input: Message #techtalk Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Craig was on with Jim Polito. We talked in some detail about some of the 50 years that have passed since we landed on the moon and the massive changes we have seen in technology. Why Google and Facebook and the whole social media thing are a direct threat to our democracy.  These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: Apple has a problem with Zoom and so should you  New MacBooks Coming Did You Turn of Tracking? Guess What?  Apps are Still Tracking You. Chinese Ministry of State Security Attacks Major Companies Internal Networks Hollywood on the Skids with Virtual Stars Worried About Privacy? Steve Wozniak says Delete Facebook Got Chinese Security Cameras? Just Try to Remove them. ---  Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors. Airing date: 07/16/2019 50 years since we landed on the moon. Changes we have seen in technology. Google and Facebook and the whole social media thing and the direct threat to our democracy. ---  Craig Peterson Hey good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson, here. We are in for a hot pot time here northern New England is supposed to get up to 99 degrees this weekend. It's going to be hot. I heard this morning down in Phoenix it's going to be 115, but you know Phoenix it's it is a dry heat. I've got to admit that it's just not as bad. I've been to Phoenix quite a few times, and I think it's not bad at all. Up here, man that humidity supposed to be high. It's going to be uncomfortable. You know, I don't know how to live in Florida or not. Where do you retire? Anyhow, I was on with Mr. Jim Polito. And we spent a little bit of time talking about the moon shot and some of the technology out there. But we delved into some reasons that I bet you may not have heard before, maybe you thought about I don't know you guys are pretty smart about why you might want to read move your Facebook, login, get rid of that account, but Google and everything. This whole social media thing and what's been happening online is a direct threat to our democracy. So here we go with Mr. Jim Polito Jim Polito On this anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11 to the moon. First man on the moon. I'm sure if he were working, then he would have been right there at the forefront. Joining us now. Our Tech Talk guru and good friend Craig Peterson. Good morning, Craig Peterson Sir. Hey, good morning. Oh, that I could have been like goodness, I remember it. So well. Sitting there, watching TV. Oh, man, I was working in my uncle's store selling penny candy. Yeah, for those who aren't aware, candy used to be a penny. Jim Polito I remember, we shut the store. Yeah, the whole thing. Wow, son of a gun. I still remember it as a little kid, little boy, and wanting to be an astronaut. Remember, with my brothers and my parents watching it on a black and white TV. And then Teddy Kennedy crashed his car off a bridge and Chappaquiddick. And, you know, he was lucky that they were going to the moon because everybody was paying attention to that instead of him. I remember the day after it was the first time I had ever seen color in the newspaper on the front page Craig Peterson Yeah, was a color picture of the moon shot of the moon landing. It was such a time in America. And at the time, I was living the great white North thing. Yeah. And even up there. It was, it was the thing of things. It was just the most incredible thing ever. I don't know that we'll ever have it. If not, then I don't think a Mars landing would have anywhere near the No, no. Jim Polito Yeah, no. It was different back then. I mean, technology was reasonable compared to now. And what people expect? No, it would not be as big of a deal. The entire world would never be transfixed as we were then. No, not like we were back then. But back then, you know, guys like Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. They were, you know, they had some ideas, and they were smart guys like you. And Steve Wozniak was one of the CO creators of apple. But now he is saying, delete your Facebook account. If you want any online privacy, what's this all about, Craig? Craig Peterson Well, this is huge. And I think most people know a little bit about the online privacy for were you mentioned to a friend on Facebook or one of their different platforms, remember, they own that, you know, they have their messenger platform and Oculus, they've got a whole bunch of different platforms. Now, if you mentioned something else, platforms, most people are aware, all of a sudden you start seeing ads for it. And you know, what, what are they trying to do? We've known forever, that Facebook isn't the product. We are the product. They're trying to sell advertising to various vendors out there. I don't think that comes as a surprise to anybody. I think Steve Wozniak had a point about this, too, when you read this particular article from the Daily Mail, remember, this is out of the UK, we don't see this kind of coverage much here in the States. But he says, you know, he's worried about everything. So let's have a look at what's happening. Next year, we've got got a big election coming up. And we've got people who are on the line who are going around, right, talking about the election. But before we get into that, I want to get into one more point about this. How does Facebook make money? The bottom line is they make money, by selling your information to advertisers, so that they can place an ad in front of you. Now, personally, I would prefer to get an advertisement for cars when I'm thinking about buying a car, right? I'm not interested in enlargement or other types of products. Yeah, that you used to see online all of the time. I'm just not interested in those. However, what they're doing now is they're trying to manipulate your decisions. Now. Okay, that makes sense. Should I buy shreddies or something like corn flakes? If shreddies is advertising? Well, that's a Canadian cereal. Jim Polito Shreddies, one sec, advert ties with Facebook, they're going to pull up an ad, that's a breakfast cereal, they're going to pay for it. Craig Peterson So now Facebook's job is to manipulate you in potentially subtle ways to buy the product of that advertiser. Now, how did they do that? You know, back in the day, if you follow somebody on Facebook, you would see everything that person said. Now what Facebook does is it manipulates what it's showing you. And it's shaping the results "for your benefit." Air quotes around that. In case you're wondering, yeah, and the idea of for your benefit is right, they don't want to waste your time. So they're only going to show you the postings that contain words like Happy birthday, or Congratulations, or little posts that are popular amongst your friends. But they can use psychology, and they do use psychological tricks here to manipulate you into thinking, wow, maybe I should eat some breakfast cereal this morning. And they'll do that by showing you articles, postings and things that are related to products that they're promoting. So they're trying to manipulate your decisions to get you to buy more things to get you to buy things that maybe you wouldn't have bought before. Okay, so that's a fascinating point. So let's move on to Project Veritas. Now, Project Veritas, if you're not familiar with it, this is this guy that runs around, for those that aren't sure what's going on here, and he does undercover reporting. He's the guy that found all kinds of stuff out about Planned Parenthood and selling baby parts. I think everyone's heard that on the news, right? So he had an article that came out that and he brought it up online courses of videos on YouTube, and YouTube almost immediately shut it down. Right. And there's a very intriguing story on the new site called Spinquark (https://www.spinquark.com/) S-P-I-N-Q-U-A-R-K that you might want to check out. And it's looking on LinkedIn. And it has pictures of the pages there on LinkedIn. So if you go to spin, Clark, you'll see it's like the first link on the page. But they went to LinkedIn. And they found who is working for Facebook, who is working for Google, who are the top people in these different companies, and they put up snapshots of the Facebook pages with their names blurred out 31 of these senior people are people who came straight from the Obama campaign. Twenty-five of them from the Clinton campaign. Fifteen of them are former from the DNC. Five of them are directly from Pelosi's office. So we were talking about manipulation, the distillation of results. According to the Los Angeles Times, this just came out last week, and they're talking about a study by a professor in California, who was looking at the search engine manipulation effect. And the ones that he looked at the people he looked at, he had 47,000 searches by dozens of undecided voters in the districts of newly elected democrat reps and Porter router and Levin. And what he found was that there are an estimated 35,500 people's votes. These are voters who are on the fence. They were persuaded to vote for democrats entirely because of the sources that Google sent to them. Jim Polito Wow. Craig Peterson Now, same things happening with Facebook, you have this many people just very high super high percentage of people working for Facebook working for Google, who came straight from the left-wing politicians who are known to be manipulating search results to favor them who have come out. And some of these people have publicly said that the Trump election was an absolute travesty, and they're going to do everything they can to make sure it doesn't happen again. Jim Polito Did the Project Veritas uncover that Yes, precisely? Craig Peterson Now you have an understanding of why someone like Steve Wozniak line like people like me are saying this is and the Los Angeles Times although you know, they've been taking potshots at this, this study. But even the LA Times is saying, hey, people, not only can you be tracked online, they are tracking you online. You are their product, but they are manipulating you. Wow, in every way they possibly can. Okay, so this is a much bigger story than I think most people we're aware of, Jim. Jim Polito Look, this story. Other important stories. Did you hear that folks, you can get them from my friend Craig Peterson, even when he's not here? And all you have to do is text My name to this number Craig Peterson 855-385-5553. That's texting Jim, to 855-385-5553. Jim Polito Standard data and text rates apply. But that's it. He won't try to sell you anything you. He won't annoy you. And he will provide you with this kind of information. There are so many things that Craig and I could talk about every week, so much information he gives to me. We don't have the time to do it all. But you can get it all from him. Craig, Thank you. That was fascinating. I appreciate the time, and we'll talk to you next week. Craig Peterson Hey, take care, Jim. Thanks. Bye, bye. Craig Peterson Hey, I reached out to a few of you guys who are on my email list to see if there's something I can help you with help your business with more particularly when it comes to security. So if you haven't responded to that email, please do let me know. Also, don't forget, we've got our security summer coming up here in just a couple of weeks. I'm going to make that happen. Keep an eye out on your email for that as well. We're going to go through 24 brass tacks, back to basics getting your business up to a mainstream security standard is what we're starting to call this thing. We might have something there. It covers the things you need to be doing you should be doing, whether you are a CEO, we're going to help you with governance, if you are a home user, what you should be doing in the home. And then also if you're the designated IT person for your business, what you should be doing for the company as well. So we have three different tracks. Keep an eye out. We are working hard on this. All right. Have a great day. We'll be back tomorrow with the WGAN and the interviews happening there. Bye-bye. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Message Input: Message #techtalk Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Craig is in the WGAN Morning News with Ken and Matt. This morning we talked about Deep fakes and the future for actors, Why you might want to delete Facebook. and About the new Apple MacBooks. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles:   Apple has a problem with Zoom and so should you  New MacBooks Coming Did You Turn of Tracking? Guess What?  Apps are Still Tracking You. Chinese Ministry of State Security Attacks Major Companies Internal Networks Hollywood on the Skids with Virtual Stars Worried About Privacy? Steve Wozniak says Delete Facebook Got Chinese Security Cameras? Just Try to Remove them. --- Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors. Airing date: 07/17/2019 Deep fakes and the future for actors, Why you might want to delete Facebook. and About the new Apple MacBooks. --- Craig Hello again, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I've been thinking about maybe trying to send out a little survey. I don't know, would you guys respond to it? About what content you really would like to see in my security summer? I may end up doing that. Let me know if you think that'd be a good idea because I'm, I'm looking at what we put together, and it's six weeks, five episodes per week. And should we do that I'm looking out my window here. And there's a deer right outside my window eating the grass in the backyard. They've been eating our flowers, and they got into our tomato plants and ate them all. Right now she's just sitting there eating wagging her tail. The chickens are staring at her. Watching her out there. That is so cool. Anyhow, what topics do you want me to cover in this free security summer summit stuff? Please let me know, and I'll be glad to, to bring you up to date on that. Anyhow, this morning, I was on with our friends Ken and Matt. And we got into a couple more things here more about deep fakes. And what is going on? What's the future for actors? And are they going to put these deep fakes humans right out of business? And we talked a little bit more to about deleting Facebook, and I even came up with a couple more reasons to get rid of some of these things and stop using Google and stuff. I don't know. I don't think I'll ever completely stop. But anyway, here we go. Matt Gagnon It's that time yet again, ladies and gentlemen, Wednesday at 738 means it is time for a technology update from Craig Peterson tech guru extraordinaire, a friend of the show, and he joins us now Craig, how are you? Craig Peterson Hey, good morning doing well but I am not looking forward to these high temperatures Ken Altshuler From Oklahoma. That's the difference between you and me, Craig? Ken Altshuler Yeah. I was going to ask you about the MacBook Pros. Once again, I have to bring my computer into Apple to fix the T key that fell off. But rather than that, I want to talk about Steve Wozniak first, who, of course, one of the Apple founders, who is saying, and I'm shocked by this, he says, You should delete Facebook. I can't believe he suggests that. Craig Peterson Exactly. Well, you know, we've heard so many reasons to remove Facebook right to delete your account to destroy all of that information. And most of them have to do with privacy. And you know, it's a legitimate argument. But it also sucks. Matt Gagnon FaceTime, or what is it that you call my face? Face my face by my face? Yeah, my face, Ken Altshuler Face, my face, face, Craig Peterson Face to face. There you go, My space. One of the big reasons for this something that I'm sure Matt knows about it. We've had some fascinating revelations that came from Project Veritas. These are guys going to go and do these interviews with people and they tape them without anybody's knowledge, and then they report on it. Well, there is a huge deal going on right now when you are talking about Facebook and Google. And remember, Facebook isn't just Facebook anymore. Now they've got a bunch of different platforms that people are using to communicate. But the real big deal has to do with the manipulation that's going on. There's a new site up right now called Spinquark (https://news.spinquark.com/), you might want to check it out. And the first link there on their homepage takes you to a fascinating article. And what these guys did is they went online to LinkedIn. And they searched around LinkedIn for the senior people on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. Were talking about the upper-level managers, directors, etc. And what they found was in all of these companies, of the predominance of them were left-wing, I mean, really left-wing. They found 31 people who were senior people in the Obama campaign and administration, who were all senior managers of these social media companies. 25, associated directly with the Clinton administration, and the Clinton Foundation. 16, who came straight out of the DNC, the Democratic National Committee, and five who worked directly for Speaker Pelosi. When you're talking about people like this, who are involved in very high levels on everything from who should be censored, what should be censored, and what can be said. Then have some of these people coming out directly saying that we cannot allow a mistake like President Trump to occur again. We must do everything we can to stop it from happening again. The Los Angeles Times is even reporting on this right now. Although it came out a few months ago. There was a psychiatrist out there in San Diego, who had done a bunch of research, he looked at several people 47,000 searches that were done by undecided voters. And he looked at three specific newly elected democrat reps from 2018, Porter, Rouda and Levin. He looked at the searches that were done in their districts to try and figure out is there a tie? And if these conservative people had a point. His research found that based on their searches about 35,500 undecided voters or who were on the fence could be persuaded to vote for democrats. How? Entirely due to the "news" that they saw on their feeds from these social media and news sites. We've got to think when we're thinking about a Facebook account, or even at Google, where we're doing searches about things from poisonings search results, which can be kind of fun sometimes to do. So what will happen is someone's searching for something, then you can manipulate the search engine to give them a different result. And maybe it should carry through a Facebook. So for instance, when you first got your Facebook account, and you followed someone, you imitate the celebrity, you would get all of their posts and your feed. And then what Facebook did is they said, Hey, listen, you know this is a little much, we should probably give them information we think they might interest them. If someone mentions a birthday or Congratulations, those are more likely to show up in your Facebook feed, then anything else, frankly. If they are friends of yours and are sharing something more likely to show up in your feed. But now it's come out just this past week, that, in fact, for part of what they're doing is they are purposely manipulating your feed to sway you. Now, when we're talking about influencing you to remember how these guys make money, they make money through advertising, they make money by selling things. So if they have an advertiser that's selling something that you might not otherwise be interested in, show you that end. But it turns out that there may be a lot more manipulation going on, then we thought, and they might even be trying to get you to do into a whole new category of products. Or in this case, also the Los Angeles Times reported. And this is professor, author of algorithms of oppression, how search engines reinforce racism, how they are using their power, by being such big powerhouses in the social media search spaces, to manipulate undecided people. That's what this particular study was about, into voting for the Democrats. So fascinating stuff, you know, because you, you get information from every direction. And nowadays where we've got these photorealistic videos, where they're pasting people's faces, other people's faces on to other people's bodies, etc. And it's hard to tell, how can you know what's right or wrong? You have to listen to Ken, Matt, and Craig. Mm-hmm. Ken Altshuler All right, we're on with Craig Peterson the tech guru joins us periodically. Now let's talk about MacBook Pro. Shall we buy new ones or are they're not changing. The keys now are that you just you're never going to give up the key thing? I'm not, and it is unbelievably irritating to me. Yes. Craig Peterson They are. The latest rumors are they're going to whole new design. They're getting rid of the butterfly design entirely. After three iterations, I think it has been event butterfly keyboard design, that has been a disaster, they are going to be switching. And what it does mean is a slightly thicker computer. I think it's like a few millimeters thicker. Like who cares, right, two or three millimeters, it's going to be slightly thicker. To use different technology, they're not going to go back to the old Chiclets designs, which I kind of like, but they are going to change it. So can you can about time rest easy. Yeah, this is a rumor. You don't know this, the Chinese manufacturers that all of a sudden cancel. So other keyboard orders because they got a large order from some Unknown, Unknown manufacturer. It's all tied back to Apple. But they did do a couple of significant changes here recently in the Mac Book line just within the last two weeks. And those do not have these significant changes yet, so we should be seeing them come this fall. Matt Gagnon We're talking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over the world of technology. Craig, I have to ask you about one of the more interesting stories here in your rundown about the future of acting because you see increasingly in a lot of movies. Actors do age to look sort of kind of like they used to 20 years ago you're seeing dead people come back into movies. Well, exactly. I mean, you got the new Star Wars movie coming out later this year the test her, and she's dead. And you had the guy from the very first Star Wars movie, who was put into the last the Rogue One Star Wars movie there. There are holograms of dead people like singing with people in Vegas. You know, there's just crazy stuff happening. I guess the question comes down to this. Will we even need actors anymore in the future or work everywhere? Can we can we can produce? It is, you know, fake or digitally created person to act for us and the future? Craig Peterson Do you remember the movie, Simone? Did you see that with Al Pacino? Matt Gagnon I did see that movie, believe it or not? Craig Peterson Yeah, it's spelled S-I-M-O-N-E. Exciting movie because it's taking this on head-on. And what happens in this movie, it just the basic I'm not going to give it away here even right on what writers in this movie. But it's an artificially created actress. And you have someone who is still voicing that who's always talking who's again doing the acting. That's our next step. You even will have an actor like the terrible job they did with Carrie Fisher phase in Rogue One was awful. Matt Gagnon Targeting grandma off-target was not that great either. That way. There's that uncanny valley thing where it's like, and you could tell Something's Weird About It. You know, even though it sort of looks real. It looks a little rubbery or something. Something's messed up with it. Like they're not quite there yet. They're closed, but they're not Ken Altshuler All the way scar. Craig Peterson Yeah, it'll be about five to 10 years. And here's why it's going to take a little while. Our brains are excellent at being able to tell the difference between phasers, and you know, you think about it, and how can we tell you two apart? You guys look identical? No, we do. Ken Altshuler We like twins. Craig Peterson It's like twins, and it's like five years different. You know, you could argue it. So how can we tell people apart? Well, because our brains have become very, very good at recognizing faces and, and flaws. So anything that shows even a little wrong, you look at like if you look at somebody get plastic surgery, most of the time, you can say oh my god, they need to see a new person plastic surgeon is you can tell. So it's going to be a while yet before we get to this. We've got the further live interaction with Dumbo. And with the Lion King, that's coming out with some animation. CGI, this computer-generated stuff is excellent. When there's not a human face a real human face involved. Stylized, it's very acceptable. For instance, a leader I don't know if you saw that latest movie, where again, it's computer-generated, but it looks computer-generated. Yeah, they made the eyes big and stuff to say, yeah, yeah. So that you don't catch it. How long man, it's not going to be very long, frankly, we're going to be able to with within five years, we'll see this being relatively commonplace. And within ten years, only the best the biggest blockbusters are going to have real people, you know, in every role in there. Because there are some things that humans can't do, even if they have a stunt double. And you will be able to do with science fiction and stuff with some of these fake actors here. Frankly, I think it's kind of cool. I think it's kind of scary. You know, I think we've talked before a little bit about the risks to our security. When it comes to this. We've already got new emails coming in telling the CFO to send money to some vendor that isn't a real vendor, and they're trying to scam us right with phishing attacks. Artificial Intelligence is going to get more involved with this. That's going to improve it dramatically. That's why I say in five to 10 years. I think most actors and actresses are not going to be able to have a job doing that anymore. Voice actors probably sell for a while, but even that's going to go away. Matt Gagnon Well, considering the Emmy nominations and probably wouldn't be any significant loss anyway. Craig Peterson Tech guru joins us every Wednesday. 738. Thank you, Craig. We'll talk to you next week. Craig Peterson Hey, gentlemen, take care. Bye-bye. Ken Altshuler Alright, so we're going to go to a quick break here. When we come back. Craig Peterson If you do have suggestions on topics you want me to cover in this security summer, email me at Craig Peterson dot com. That's me at Craig Peterson dot com. All right, everybody. Take care. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Craig was on with Dan Ferrantino sitting in for Jim Polito. We talked in some detail about some of the things that are going on right now. Did you know that there are retaliatory strikes from Iran going on right now? Unfortunately, they are aiming them directly at your business? We went through some of the details of that what you can do. I gave some real-world examples and solution. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: Trumping Iranian Aggression  Is Your App Safe? Maybe Not! Are You Ready? Iranian Cyber Counter Attacks ---  Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors. Airing date: 07/02/2019 Iran, Russia, Boeing and Keeping Safe  Craig Peterson Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Danny this morning because Jim is on vacation. We talked in some detail about some of the things that are going on right now. Did you know that there are retaliatory strikes from Iran going on right now? Unfortunately, they are aiming them directly at your business? We went through some of the details of that what you can do. I gave some real-world examples and solution. So here we go with Danny. Danny Ferrantino That music means it is Tuesday morning and our tech talk guru, Craig Peterson is joining us. Good morning, Craig. Craig Peterson Hey, good morning Danny. Good job, Danny Ferrantino I try and try and try. You're kind enough to send us the show notes early. Looking through the show notes. There seems to be kind of one correlation between all of the topics. Everyone's out to get me, buddy. Craig Peterson That's the bottom line. It isn't just the government coming after you for tax money. Now we're not only supporting the some of these people who are on welfare, maybe down on their luck, etc. We're also supporting people living in Eastern European countries, their entire families, extended families. There is one story from last year, or maybe it's two years ago now, this lady over there in Eastern Europe. She did what's called from doxxing. That begins with figuring out a little bit about some companies she found a guy who was at a Facebook page had a LinkedIn profile. She found out that he was the president of this company. You know, a midsize, a small, medium-sized company. After finding out more about the guy, she sent a link a LinkedIn to him, and a Facebook request friend request saying remember me back from school, you know, using the information she had she knew what school he went to because he posted it online. She did some more research on the business website. Of course on the business website, it says, here's the CEO. Here's the CFO here, all of my top guys and gals. She researches them, find out more information about them. She spent time watching the CEO and followed him for a while. She found out he was going on vacation to the Bahamas, not the D.R. Okay. So he will probably come back alive. She figured out okay, well, this is when he's going on vacation. By the way, criminals breaking entering now, robberies at homes home invasions are also using the same technique. They know when you're gone during the summer time because you post it on social media, and they use that all online information to figure out who you are? If you might have good assets, and then they break into your house while you're gone. Because you told them you're going away for a week. Danny Ferrantino Yep, I got it. Craig Peterson Yeah, exactly. In this case, the CEO is out on vacation, and he's pretty unreachable. She has found out what his email addresses, calls up, and gets his password reset. Yes, this takes a while to explain all of this. But it only takes about two-three days worth of work. She sends in an email off to the CFO saying posing as the CEO, "Hey, we got this new vendor, they're critical. We haven't paid them in three months". "If we don't send them the money right now, they're going to cut us off, or our manufacturing is going to shut down in the business. I need you to wire this money, Right now. Danny Ferrantino I see where this is going. Craig Peterson She got the CFO to wire $45 million out of the country. Now, the FBI is saying that, and the secret service as well, in the briefings I've had with them that it only takes 90 seconds for all that money to be unreachable almost guaranteed. It was in this case, as well. She's supporting not only herself the rest of her life, her family and her the extended family the rest of her life, and it is all because of what people are posting on social media. What we're doing with our devices.? So if you go to my company and mainstream dot net online, Danny, there is an Officer's page like everybody else has. Right? You've seen them here's our senior staff. So you go to that page. But ours is quite different, and it says due to security concerns, we're not telling you, sucker. That's what we need to start doing ourselves with our data with our businesses and our business data. Because they are out to get you, Danny, Danny Ferrentino Everyone thinks that you know, you want to be all-inclusive, and let everyone know and try to sell yourself online. More times than not that can come back to hurt you as you just discussed. Craig Peterson Yeah, look at how great we are. We have all these attorneys here from H-A-AR- VARD, you know, they have Native American blood and all these other things that you want to highlight. However, bragging about them, now, in this day and age can be dangerous. Even in press releases, we used to say a lot more than we say now because they are using it against us. I regularly see businesses, small businesses, here's another one where they had about $80,000 that was stolen right out of their operating account. Now, that's money that they need to stay in business. A group operating out of China took it, and it was, obviously, a big deal. The company spent 10s of thousands of dollars flying over to Hong Kong, trying to file police report trying to get their money back and they never did. Craig Peterson Now we've got this thing going on with President Trump and Iran. Of course, there was a whole thing in place, and we're going to bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran. If you remember the early 80s, that little ditty. And he pulled it back. And what did he do instead? I don't know if you follow this. But he decided, here's what we're going to do. It wasn't reasonable. They shot down an unmanned drone, and it was not a reasonable response for us to drop bombs and maybe kill 150 people. Well, in what he did instead was he launched a cyber attack against Iran. It is all from what we can gather and public statements and everything. He began a cyber attack against the Iranian infrastructure that controls the missiles that launch the missiles. Also, do you remember this thing with Russia and the power plant? Where we flicked Russia's lights on and off a few times to let them know we were in their systems. Danny Ferrentino Hey just to let you know, we're here. Yeah. Craig Peterson Yeah, exactly. So now Iran has started attacking. They've increased their attacks now, primarily on our businesses, because they're trying to hurt our economy. They're using some special malicious software designed to wipe the contents of your computer. They're not going to bother holding it ransom. They want to put you out of business. It is straight from the Homeland Security Department. We have to be careful now. The Homeland Security is warning us that there's been a dramatic increase in Iranian hacking, and what are we doing, Danny? Our businesses are not protected. It's crazy. It's like 95% of our companies are easily penetrated. They have said that two-thirds of all companies in the SMB space will be compromised this year. That's what they're expecting. Two-thirds. And we're not doing enough about it, too. Danny Ferrentino We're talking with our tech talk Guru, Craig Peterson. Craig. Now, this isn't new with the hacking the cybersecurity. Why is it that people are just so far behind the eight-ball on something like this? People like you that are out here telling us we need to do something. Is it people don't care? Is that they don't believe it's going to happen to them? Craig Peterson Well, I, I talked to a lot of people, as you know, because I run these webinars for the FBI Infragard program. And I have a lot of clients, up pick up new clients every week, and help them out. And so here's what I hear the most right? It is confusing. It is overwhelming. They feel like they have no control over it, and there is nothing they can do. None of which is true, by the way. But at the same time, I also think that they have legitimate reasons to feel that way. You know, the software they bought, they bought Norton Antivirus and so they're all set. They purchased this Symantec software or whatever. Both companies, by the way, have had employees, high up like the CEO or Executive V.P., saying their software is useless today. I can't blame these companies for feeling that way. So I'm trying to help people I know there's a lot of businesses that can't afford to hire me. So, Danny, what I'm doing this summer for everybody that's on my email list, everyone who's on my text list is going to get an invite, I'm going to be doing a dozen 15-minute if you will give or take, webinars. It's my security summer. It's 100% free for anyone who wants to attend. We're going to go through the brass tacks of what you need to do, the basics, let's get back to the basics. Let's make sure you're securing your stuff, let's find out what the data you have, what your data assets are of your small business and medium business and what you need to protect them. I'm going to help people understand this. And, you know, I've got my fingers crossed, that we're going to help move that needle. I've helped a lot of businesses, over 5000 so far, move the needle. I am doing this for my listeners. As you were mentioning earlier today, 76% of mobile apps have flaws, that are allowing hackers to steal passwords, to get into bank accounts to find your texts and things. What this goes back to the unprofessional nature the people who are writing software. Did you see what came out about Boeing? Sorry, I am rambling a bit. On Boeing with their 737 Max 8, did you hear what came out yesterday? The software in the Boeing jet has that is having problems right now. It turns out some of that software had been written by software developers in India, who earned $9 an hour? You know, it's, how do you know how good that software is? Do they do proper code reviews? Do they have the senior people in place that understand the security implications, that understand all of the flight systems? You can't fix a problem with a computer if you don't understand all of the components involved? So I, I put a lot of blame on some of these businesses trying to save money on the bottom line. They are not hiring the experienced technical people, and I know a few people, quite a few that, that have significant experience programming and managing projects for 30 years that are having some trouble finding work. Why? They want to hire the young kid, is it going to be with them for the next 30 years, right? It's a, what do they call that, where you're you're not going to hire an older person, age discrimination. Danny Ferrantino You've got to have the experience. They don't know what they're doing, Craig. And so that's why there are so many of these issues nowadays with these either be poorly written code, or poorly written security measures or whatever else. And unfortunately, a lot of our cyber enemies are picking up on this. Craig Peterson Very, very true. I blame Microsoft. Here's why. Okay, you know how easy it is to program. Nowadays, it's drag and drop. It's like, if you want to build the car, you pull this transmission off the shelf, and you put it on top of this frame. Nothing by that you had to bolt together, by the way, you drop them on, and all the parts fit together. But when something happens, all you have is a red light on the dashboard, and you have no idea it's a problem with the transmission the drive, train somewhere, right. Or maybe you have a low tire. Bill Gates made it so easy for so many years for people to write software. And on one side, it's terrific, I'm glad that he's done that because we've got some great software because of it. But, on the other hand, we are now surrounded by people that are considered professionals. Look at the average small business their I.T. person is whoever likes computers the most. They I.T. professionals, they haven't worked at all these different levels. That's what the whole security summer is going to be about. I'm going to let everybody know. So you can attend you'll know which sessions There are so that you can go the ones that apply to you the most I'm not charging a dime, but for this, okay, so it's simple. I'm trying to get this information I'm trying to help the Small Business/medium business that says to an employee you're my computer gal now because you like computers the most. This security thing, as you pointed, out is enormous. We've got nation states coming after us who realize what our weaknesses are. Right now we've got Iran coming after our businesses, massively, as a retaliatory strike. Danny Ferrantino Well, Craig, as always, great stuff and now that you've scared me straight,   --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Message Input: Message #techtalk Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Craig was on with Jim Polito. Today, they discussed the latest tech to help you change behavior and why we must be concerned about Deep Fakes and what they could result in. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: Shock Away Those Bad Habits The Concern About Deep Fakes and Why?  ---  Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors. Airing date: 06/25/2019 Behavior shock therapy and Deep fakes Craig Peterson Hey, good morning, everybody and a shout out to the UNH CEO group I'm going to be speaking to today. I am Craig Peterson. I am excited about today's presentation because I work with a lot of businesses and unfortunately for CEO's I usually get passed off to the technical people who report to them which means they only get my information and insight second hand and filtered. However, today, I am speaking to a large group of CEO's of some pretty fair sized businesses as a presenter to their mastermind group, and I am honored to be able to speak with them. This morning. I was on with our friend Jim Polito. He has a big radio show down in Massachusetts that covers most of the state, and parts of Vermont, Rhode Island and I think he can be heard in Connecticut too at least in the eastern parts of it. Anyhow, we got busy today talking a little bit about some of the articles in the news. Jim Polito It is one of the most popular segments on the show. I'm talking about our tech talk guru, Craig Peterson. He joins me now. Good morning, sir. Hey, good morning. All right, listen, are you trying to turn me into Pavlov's dog? Are you telling me that I can shock myself of my bad habits? Craig, don't lie. I got them. I got the documents from you. Do you say I can be shocked out of bad habits? Craig Peterson Well, have you ever had a habit like smoking, for instance? Or maybe you ate a little too much? Jim Polito Oh, I never overeat? I was a smoker and quit cold turkey? A long, long, long, long, long time ago. But I yeah, I mean, I have some bad habits. I mean, getting up every morning and doing this show, some people would say is a bad habit. Craig Peterson Well, one of the things that I've used for a while and I've tried this before, and it kind of worked for me actually, for getting rid of a bad habit is to put a rubber band around your wrist. Yes. And you know, so you think about smoking, or you think about eating that chocolate bar or you thinking about something. And all you do is you take the rubber band, you pull it back, and you let go, and it snaps against your wrist. And it's a kind of negative reinforcement. Have you tried that one before? Jim Polito No, but I've seen people do it. I know other people who quit smoking, and they put one of those thick rubber bands around their waist. And every time they think about smoking, they snap that rubber band. Yeah. Negative reinforcement. Craig Peterson Yeah, it's called aversive therapy which is the more scientific name for it. The idea is with that your brain no longer likes the habit does every time you go to do something, you know, you get that negative reinforcement. So there's a company out there called Pavlock now. They have an exciting twist on this one. What Pavlock has is a basic type watch unit, it's kind of it's a little bigger than a watch. But it's designed for the same type of thing you can buy this for 199.99 or 200 bucks. What happens is, when you're thinking about something, you want to break the habit, you push the lightning bolt on it. Now to me, that's a bad sign. This thing's going to send us 350 volts into your arm. And if anything's going to do it, it would be a burst of therapy that had 350 volts onto your wrist. Jim Polito I think my God, I mean, Craig Peterson It gets better, Jim. Jim Polito Go ahead, continue, please. Craig Peterson Okay, here's how it gets better. You can have your friend or your spouse install an app on their smartphone for this thing. You don't have to press that lightning button, and they can open the app. Craig Peterson Here's what happens. Bottom line is everything vibrates and beats, and it zapped until the user gets up and does something that's their morning shot clock. Jim Polito You mean I am sleeping in bed, and you're telling me, I could set it for 3:15 am, which is when I get up, and I'll be laying in bed, dreaming that I'm sitting on some beach, not in the Dominican Republic, but sitting on some beach having a drink and my lovely wife is with me. And then all of a sudden it vibrates and shocks me. Craig Peterson But it gets worse. If your wife gives you one of these as a present, be very careful, she might have installed that app an at any point in talking to me. Jim Polito Yeah, yeah. Craig Peterson I guess the idea is if you start, you know, if you're not brave enough to take it 350 volts jolt, when, when you're picking up that pack of cigarettes, but she is she's just going to hit that button and off it goes. It's available online. Right now, Pavlock P-a-v-L-o-c-k you can buy it now. Jim Polito You know, what people don't realize is the simplest of Pavlov's experiments with the dog was ringing the bell and then feeding it and so and then it got to the point where he would ring the bell, and the dog would salivate because it knew it was going to eat? Well, the other thing he did was electrocute the dog, too. And I won't tell you where he attached the electrodes, but let's say, Pavlov was someone studying behavior and psychology, could have used a little help maybe himself. All right, let's go on to something else. Deep fakes. I found this fascinating. We're not talking about the deep state. We're talking about deep fakes. Please explain that, sir. Craig Peterson Well, this is an exciting new offshoot of technology. And you're going to be seeing these more and more. And it's frankly, going to get dangerous. This technology. I think Jim could start a war. Here's what it is that the idea behind deep fakes is and something that's not new. You've seen photoshopped pictures, and there were a lot of models that said, I want a reasonable photo of me I want people to see what I look like without removing those lumps on my legs and you know, the blemishes and the scars and everything right? They go in and coach Photoshop, which became a picture to make them look perfect, practically perfect in every way. Well, what's happening now is with deep fake, they're able to do some amazing things. Think back to Lord of the Rings. You remember in Lord of the Rings, and there was that character Golem who was crawling around right? And that was a real actor back in the day. Now he didn't look like darling wasn't in a Golem suit. But he had these golf ball like things all over his body. What they did is use a computer to shoot the video, the computer equipment then located these little golf balls that were all over him to figure out how the actor was moving. That's how they made Gollum look like he was moving like it might be a natural character or something. Right. But you know, that was probably 10s of millions of dollars to do Golem back in the day. Today, you can do something very similar for no money. The way it works is you get you all you have to do is have a sample of someone on video. There's one out there right now of an actor Kit Harrington who was the actor who played Jon Snow in Game of Thrones. Well, several people are criticizing season eight of Game of Thrones, myself included. Yeah, I thought that they did a poor job. You can find this right now. If you go to YouTube. You can search for this, and you will see Kit Harrington in costume as Jon Snow in character apologizing for some of the mistakes that people are complaining about in season eight. Jim Polito Like the Korean coffee cup. Yes, stuff. Craig Peterson Exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you know, the weak scriptwriting some of the other stuff he's complaining about in there. That is called a deep fake. And what it is, is they just took a video of him, and they put somebody they manipulated his face. So they shot a video someone saying those things, and the computer, just a regular desktop computer, superimposed this guy's face and his facial expressions onto Kit Harington. Something very similar was got about, what three weeks ago to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, you remember that one? Oh, yeah. Yeah. And yeah, and so she was anchored or altered, I should say to make a sound like she was slurring her words like she might have been drinking. And that's where I think the whole war thing might come in. Because whoever controls the data controls the future. And that's a quote from CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He was also the victim of a deep fake, himself. Jim Polito Yeah, no, I've heard about this. And, you know, there's a lot we can talk about what we, you know, they could embarrass you or hurt your product. But you went right to what I think is the most important thing about this, you could have a deep fake of a world leader saying something that they never said, that could lead to war, just because that could be a form of terrorism. Say you have Vladimir Putin saying, we're going to attack the United States tonight or something like that? You really could. Craig Peterson Yeah, and it's difficult to tell. What's happening right now is the military, as well as law enforcement, are now both involved with some of the deep fake stuff. And they've come up with some technology to detect the deep fakes, and we might be able to recognize one, okay. But this was is a pertinent point, saying the smaller country like Iran might have no idea how to do that. For instance, look at Iran right now, with this whole thing with the drones. We have the GPS data, and we have the computer-generated maps, we can show you exactly where our drone was. Well, Iran produced a map too. It was hand-drawn by somebody with a crayon saying, here is where the US drone was, yeah. Okay. So, so how do you compare those, where's this going? It is difficult is going to be a game of one-ups-manship. I think within ten years, we're going to have a real problem. One of the things that have been done to try and stop the fake and to help with the detection. At one university, they created two artificial intelligence machines that had neural nets and could self learn. They had one that created the fake, and then they had the other to detect the fake. And they communicated back and forth. The one creating deep fake got very good at it. But the one that was catching these also got very good at it. Jim Polito Oh, my God AI, in five or 10 years from now. Wow. Jim Polito Well, look, folks, there's nothing artificial about Craig Peterson's intelligence, you just got a little bit of it. And you should get on Craig Peterson's list. It's not the naughty list. It's a nice list. He'll send you the information that we discussed today. Plus a whole lot of other stuff. And when there's a big hack or something goes wrong, you've got Craig Peterson on your side, he won't sell your name. He won't do anything else with it. But you should text My name, Jim, to this number Craig Peterson 855-385-5553. That's text Jim to 855-385-5553 Jim Polito Standard data and text rates apply, and it's a great thing to do. Craig, fascinating segment today. I look forward to talking with you next week. Craig Peterson Thanks. Take care, Jim. Jim Polito You too, Bye-bye. All right, folks. Don't go anywhere. When we return. --- Don't miss any episode from Craig. Visit http://CraigPeterson.com/itunes. Subscribe and give us a rating! Thanks, everyone, for listening and sharing our podcasts. We're really hitting it out of the park. This will be a great year!  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:  

Craig was on with Jim Polito. Today, they discussed the latest goings on with Huawei and China tech manufacturing, the unprecedented actions by the NSA about the latest Microsoft vulnerability and Russia hacking and our response. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: Week After Week Vulnerability After Vulnerability  CEOs and Business Owners Aren't Taking CyberSecurity Seriously - And Are Facing Huge Penalties Do you have a Chinese smartphone?  Huawei is the 2nd largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, but they rely heavily on U.S. tech for their production.  President Trump said enough. ---  Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors. Airing date: 06/18/2019 Security Summer, NSA Warning on Microsoft Vulnerability, Russia Hackers, China technology issues Craig Peterson Hey, good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here, I guess I'm committed now. Yes, I am going to do a summer security summit. You're going to hear why the security summer summit is essential. We're getting closer to having to do it, now. I was on with Jim Polito this morning. We discussed some of the problems currently inherent in our relationship with China, and what does that mean to our military to our defense. What's China doing right now? What's Russia doing right now? I also talked about real-world stats from this week that I have seen. And what those mean? So, you know, you can listen, and you can hear it, I think this is one of the best segments I've ever done. So, if you've ever liked my show, you're going to love this today. We're going to solve a few of your problems as well. So, here we go with Jim Polito. Jim Polito He is the man the myth, the legend, the Tech Talk guru and our good friend Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir. Craig Peterson Good morning, man. Have you seen Huawei stuff? Are they in trouble or what? Jim Polito I love that you say why way. And no one knows how to spell it. Being the massive Chinese communications company, Huawei? And it's spelled with an A. Don't ask me why. Yes, I have. And I'm anxious. I just read that. Is it the F 35. fighter, Jeff? That had one of the circuit boards in it made by a Chinese company? I don't think I like that. Craig Peterson Yeah, we've had some issues with those before. Yeah, we have the F 35? A, B and C are amazing aircraft, by the way, they kind of nailed it. Did you see, by the way, Turkey, it looks like we're not going to ship them any more military gear? And Poland wants some of our f 35's. There is some very cool stuff, Right? Yeah. Here's the problem and we've had them before, we had some upgrades made to some of our older fighter jets. And they required a new processor board. So, the software was mainly the same. They just wanted the more modern, faster chips. It's like, you might be running a new version of a piece of hardware and still running Windows 10, or Mac OS, for instance. We got these boards in, and thank goodness, we did some in-depth testing on them. Why? Well, it turned out that China manufactured them and the chips had some designed and embedded software to allow a third party, get some information and possibly even take over our fighter jets. So I'm glad that this whole thing is going on with President Trump and China, where we're now putting these tariffs on. We now have manufacturers, U.S. manufacturers who have already moved some of their manufacturing out of China, China. Yeah. Some of its back in the states and Apple is beginning to make some of their gear now in Texas, from soup to nuts. Jim Polito I don't have any problem with that. So, what's Huawei doing now? Craig Peterson Well, Huawei, of course, came out and said, Hey, listen, there's no link between the Chinese government and us. Just because we're socialists and the government owns us, and we're part of the People's Liberation Army, that doesn't mean you shouldn't like us. So, they're saying there's no link. Well, you know we have banned, Huawei from getting access to any U.S. technology. Google's cut them off from Android, chip manufacturers have cut them off from their chips, etc., etc. Now they are admitting, Well, maybe just maybe, our revenues are going to be down a bit, perhaps $4 billion. This year? Jim Polito Couldn't happen to a more helpful bunch of guys. No, look, Here's the deal. I don't mind trading with anyone. Part of the reason that we keep our automobile industry, alive and well in this country, is that during World War Two, and we had to mass produce, aircraft, tanks, all those other vehicles. We took all those car factories, and you ask anybody who's a serious car collector, and say, hey, yeah, I want a car. I want a G.M. from 1943. Sorry, no such thing. That's because they were putting out B-17 or something else in that plant. Same thing with Ford. But I worry that Craig, you know, we do a lot of that production for electronics and gadgets overseas. Isn't that going to be the same and the next war as a factory that built cars in World War Two? Craig Peterson Well, there are a couple of interesting points here. One, you're right. And here's why. We've got for instance, of you know, the whole Clinton selling our uranium to Russia, right? If we go to war, forget about it. We're not there. We're going to seize that just like we if you buy a Bayer aspirin, right. The whole Bayer company was taken over by the United States in World War Two. TaDa it is a U.S. company right, so there's that side of it. On the other hand, when it comes to making chips, you have foundries that have to grow these crystals. It's a fantastically exciting process. Right, here in the northeast, right where we're at right now, digital equipment corporation used to have a foundry, here. A bunch of Texas Instruments, a bunch of different companies all had foundry plants, and they were growing and making their chips. What came of those them when those buildings went for sale? They destroyed them before the premises got sold. We didn't want someone else to get a hold of the technology on how they grew the chips and how they did all of this, right? We have almost nothing left here in the United States. Intel, yes, they're making some stuff here. AMD is making some here, and other people are. If, for instance, we went to war, would we need to wonder if our f35 has the U.S. made in control technology? We could, but the problem is kind of what you just outlined. You won't be able to find a chip to put into your computers like you couldn't find your G.M. car during the war. You won't be able to get chips for consumer use, etc. We have a limited capacity to make these things and what capability we do have, would go entirely towards the war effort. But remember what Putin said, he said, the next war is going to be over ones and zeros. Yeah, it is going to be a cyber war. What is one of the best ways for cyberwar, then to maybe infiltrate my boot block with an infiltrated Chinese plan. Or, of course, China is already doing things against us coming against us and sending us poorly designed circuit boards. Boards that are guaranteed to fail. Boards that are designed to collapse once the jet takes a hit from a microwave beam, let's say, it's enough for that chip to fail, as it isn't adequately protected. They design these things that way. Anyway, we have got some issues here. But I've got to say good news. Apple is very upset with our friends at Intel because they've messed up some of Apple's production abilities, they want to come up with new equipment, Intel's been slow, everybody else is faster now. I predict by the end of this year that Apple is going to have a low-end laptop that does not rely on anything except U.S. designed and produced Apple chips, entirely, including the central processing unit. Excellent news, I think overall, for the U.S. and our economy and, and for our, hopefully never, future war footing. Jim Polito We're talking with our good friend, Craig Peterson, at the end of this segment, we're going to give you a number. And that number. Will, if you text my name to it will connect you with Craig. You'll be able to get this information. A lot of other excellent information. Standard data and text rates apply. Craig, I want to ask you, It came out this week, that there that the United States was hacking into Russian power grids. And you know, there were those, the Trump administration rather upset that some of this news got out. Then that, you know, became the story? Well, maybe Trump wasn't told because they didn't want him to know, we might have shared that information. Hey, the bottom line is, Craig, from your perspective, I bet we should be hacking into their power grid because they're breaking into ours. We need to be able to show them just like we did during the Cold War, that there's mutually assured destruction. If you knock out our power grid, we will immediately knock out yours. It'll be just like we fired missiles at each other, which actually, is what prevented us from firing missiles each other, the MAD doctrine or mutually assured destruction. Craig Peterson Yeah, this is such an interesting question. And unfortunately, only we've got a couple of minutes here. Here's how I look at this. Let me give you a statistic, a personal statistic, you know, already that what I do is I help businesses, large and small with their security. I help multinational corporations down through little doctors and dentists and distributors and manufacturers, right. So, I've been in the middle of this now for about 30 years, and just this week, I was looking at a firewall for a small company, and I was looking at their website and saw as many as five hack attempts against their website, per second. Wow. That is per a second, okay. If I can extrapolate numbers here, we're talking about Russia billions of times throughout a week or a month, trying to get into our U.S. controlled systems. And, you know, in answer to your MAD question, I think you're right. President Trump authorized our Cyber Command to start offensive operations. And that means our Cyber Command is now doing what everybody else has been doing for 10-plus years, look at what happened with Sony and North Korean hacking. We were sitting on the sideline. I'm glad to hear we're getting offensive. I'm not surprised in the least that we were into the Russian power grid. Poor little Putin over there. I am getting a little teared up, you know, heaven forbid, he's getting hacked. I have seen evidence of this forever, China and Russia. But I have to tell you this, looking at these stats, with my customers getting nailed, with millions of attacks. Russia and Putin are actively coming after us, actively pounding us, looking for ways to get in. Think of that, people, they are beating everything all the way around, not just as a gate, but on all the walls, looking for doors, the windows, everything, Craig Peterson That's what they're doing right now. And I, and I must remind everyone, that is is okay, it's fine. If you don't use me as your computer security company. I get it. Okay. The NSA did something unprecedented. They warned us, the National Security Agency - our hackers in chief, if you will, that there is another major, huge, huge security hole in Windows, I mean, huge. We could see the whole world's computers go down again, as we did a year and a half ago, almost two years ago. The reason that that could happen is that people and businesses haven't patched their systems. It's that simple. We're ignorant. We've got people who are saying, Well, you know, I'm scared, it didn't work last time. I don't know what to do. It's too confusing, etc., etc. Jim, I'll tell you what I'll do for the audience here. I'm going to have a security summer summit, and It is going to be free, 100% free. We're going to get back to the brass tacks because I am seeing every one of my clients getting nailed, something awful. (not successfully but attacked none the less) I don't want that to happen to anybody here. I get texts from the audience almost every day with questions and problems. I get emails nearly every day. I don't want this to happen to anybody out there listening. Those who are listening here, you care. You're trying to do something. However, your vendors aren't taking care of you. I'm going to show you how to do it yourself. I guarantee it. I'm going to do that. Give me a few weeks to get something together. But that's going to happen this summer because we are under attack like we have never been before. All right. Jim Polito It is why we have our tech talk guru here. Now look, text, my name to this number 855-385-5553 just text Jim, to 855-385-5553 standard data and text rates apply. You'll get all this great information. When there's valuable information like he just discussed, it'll get to you. He will not sell your name. He will not try to sell you anything. And it's an excellent service that our friend Craig Peterson offers to our listeners. Craig, thank you so much for the time, buddy. We'll talk to you next week. Craig Peterson Take care, Jim, thank you. Jim Polito Great session with Craig Peterson. A final word when we return. You're listening to the Jim Polito show, your safe space   --- Don't miss any episode from Craig. Visit http://CraigPeterson.com/itunes. Subscribe and give us a rating! Thanks, everyone, for listening and sharing our podcasts. We're really hitting it out of the park. This will be a great year!  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:  

Craig is in the WGAN Morning News with Ken and Matt. This morning,  we touched on a whole bunch of topics in the news. We discussed whether we should trust Google.  We talked about Autonomous vehicles and the societal implications and I talked about two-factor authentication and how you can protect yourself from sim-jacking. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: You Need Two-Factor Authentication Even If Google Screwed It Up?   Autonomous Cars — Are they ready for Prime Time? Why Are We Still Trusting Google?    --- Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors. Airing date: 06/12/2019 Can You Trust Google?, Security Summer, Autonomous Cars, Two-Factor Authentication --- Craig Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I heard "Big Papi" took his first steps in the hospital today. So, that's good. It brings back thoughts of everyone that has family and friends in the hospital that aren't celebrities and people that are injured. My thoughts and prayers go out to everybody every day. It's just a reminder of how fragile things can be in this life. This morning I was on with our friends Ken and Matt up at WGAN. And as usual, we spoke about a few different things. We had quite a little conversation about trusting Google, should you trust them? Can you trust them? There was a surprising revelation that came out, in fact, just last week about them, and what they've been doing, during the previous 14 years, a significant security problem. We had a chat about two-factor authentication, and I gave them workaround, a way to make it safe, even if you have to use text messages SMS for two-factor authentication because that's not secure. But there is a reliable way to do it. We talked about a little bit more of course about autonomous cars which are all in the news again, and what's the safety factor there? How far away are we? I took a couple of different angles than I made with Jim Polito on that discussion today, as well. So here we go. Also, don't forget, we've got our security summer, starting up in July, I will start sending out some emails next week, things have been crazy around here. As you can imagine, with all of the companies now getting hacked, and the losing money coming to me, and you know, everyone in the security business, which, of course, is way understaffed. And shout out to those of you who are trying to get into security, I got another email this last week from someone that was starting into a security career, and he's in his 50s. So there's something to be learned there, I want to encourage everybody. Remember the adage, "You can teach an old dog new tricks." It's a terrible saying. But you can learn a lot of this stuff, you really can. And there's a lot of people out there who have been trying to convince you that you can't do that, really all you need is their little bit of anti-virus software, or whatever it is, you know, they're selling that to you. Because that's all, they have. That's all they know. Well, they're not doing you any favors. They are trying to mess with you. You can learn this stuff. That's what the security summer going to be about this year, and I'm going to be teaching this some free classes. You know, I get paid for doing this too. And if you want more in depth, then you're probably going to want to sign up for one of my courses. But I want to get this information to everybody. Because if you know me well enough, you know, I got hacked. That was 30 years ago, about now, a long time ago. And it scared the daylights out of me. And I started to learn about this and trying to figure it out. It's taken me years, decades, to get to the point where I'm at now. And I am excited to share a lot of this with you. Just watch for my security summer. If you want to find out more, email me at Craig Peterson dot com, ask any questions that you might have. And I'll make sure you know, when I'm starting this whole little program up, because I want you to be aware of all of the major points here, right, I'm not trying to turn into security experts, that takes quite a bit of work. However, I do want you to be familiar with all of the problems. All the talk about hacks that have happened, how it happened, what should have been done by those companies give you an idea, but as well as what you can do to protect yourself a few tips on how to protect yourself, it's going to be kind of a busy summer. And if you sign up, and you'll be able to get a notification as to when these little courses are going to happen. And I'm going to leave them up for about a week or so you know because it does get stale. And I do need to revisit them. I don't want want to put them up blankly for the world to see forever. So keep an eye out. Email me at Craig Peterson dot com, and now we'll go to Ken and Matt. I want to encourage you guys, and you can learn this. There are the people that just been messing with you. You know the bottom line. Ken Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us at 738 every Wednesday, and this is 738 on a Wednesday, which means you're talking to Craig Peterson. Craig. Welcome to the program, sir. Craig Hey, good morning. It is a Wednesday but is it every Wednesday? Today? Ken That's a good point. And you know what it is a lie in and of itself because I believe we did not talk to you last Wednesday. So it's most Wednesdays. Craig That's true. Yeah, I took a bit of vacation. I'm a motorcycle guy. And I have a motorcycle that is 32 years old. It's a 1987 BMW with 143,000 miles on it now. The only thing I had to do is replace the rear wheel on that bike. It's just been a phenomenal bike. So, I went up to like George in New York, and we rode around with some buddies for a week. And it was just fantastic. Ken Well, good. But that doesn't mean tech news stops. I hopped on your website, Craig Peterson dot com. To see what kind of top stories you had there and you have one topic here. Why are we still trusting Google? Can you answer that? Matt Great question. Well, they did say early in Google's history that they that their whole operating philosophy was Don't be evil, right. Are they evil? Now? Did you notice they took that off of their website? Right? Craig Yeah, exactly. I don't know why we're still trusting some of these different companies out there. They are selling all kinds of information about us. And, you know, that's not necessarily a bad thing when you get right down to it. Because, frankly, do you want to see car commercials all the time? Or would you rather see a car commercial when you are looking to buy a car, right? And, again, goes back, Matt, to what you've said many times, and that is if you're not paying for something, you might want to consider that you're the product and not the customer. And they have been doing all kinds of things. We're selling our data. But the other big problem that came out very recently, within the last couple of weeks is that in fact, Google has been storing our usernames and passwords for people that were using, basically their G Suite services. But it's been out there for 14 years in the clear. They're pretty good about security, although Android itself isn't the best out there. But now their G Suite customers are a little upset because of what's been out there. I was talking just yesterday with an employee who had been working at a company that was collecting personal information. They were collecting home addresses, phone numbers, and they were taking donations and were selling them. It was a great little company doing just all kinds of super things to raise funds for some good charitable organizations. It turns out they were using Google Forms to collect all this personal information about donors. You know, come on, guys, we cannot trust Google, we're using more and more of these online websites, software as a service. Think about Google Sheets, for instance, as well as Google Forms. And we're putting data in there that may end up getting exposed. We should not be doing that. Think twice about it. In our profession, we refer to this as shadow IT or shadow information technology. Historically, we had these big rooms, these big glass rooms with all of the computers in them. And we had true professionals that were running them, and making sure data was being kept safe, and information was not being stolen and leaked out. Now we've got the marketing department going out and creating contracts with companies that have online services, we have the same thing happening with sales and manufacturing and distribution and our purchasing managers are our data is not safe, and it's never been less secure. So be careful what you're putting out there, what you're given to Google what you're given to these other companies because frankly, it's a real problem. Matt Craig Peterson, our tech guru, joins us, most Wednesdays at this time to talk about the world of technology. And today is one of those days, Craig, while you're talking, I'm looking at a story on CBS This Morning about Uber's secret self-driving test facility for their self-driving autonomous cars. I know you had a story also about whether or not autonomous vehicles are ready for prime time. And I think it does beg the question, how prepared for prime time are these things? I know, it's a conversation I've had several times, and it seems like the older the person I'm talking to the more it freaks them out that there's no driver behind the wheel. I think it freaks everybody out. It just freaks out, you know, people in their 50s, 60s, and 70s a lot more than it does everybody else. But statistics, you know, are being what they are, you know, often they can be safer, then human behind the wheel. So what do you think? I mean, are they close to ready to take over the roads? Craig Well, I really like I mentioned this yesterday. I liked this story that came out in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago. And it said that autonomous vehicles, these self-driving cars are 90% ready and all we have left is 90% to go. In other words, yeah, there's a lot of things that look like we're ready to go and it might be just a few more years, and we'll have autonomous vehicles. In reality, it's probably going to be quite a while yet. And you talk about you know, older guys like Ken and myself who are over 30. And we're looking at some of these things. And we're concerned because we've seen failures before. Do you remember Cadillac v 864? Matt Back then, I wasn't much of a car person. Ken I did have a Mustang in 1960. Matt Do you remember the Corvair? Unsafe at any speed? Craig I do, and you know, Ralph Nader thing, we still have Nader dots on our tires. But that was an example back in the early 80s of Cadillac trying to make cars more efficient, the engines more efficient, and they had a V-8 engine. And what would happen is if you got onto the highway and you started driving, of course, at highway speeds, you're going down the road, you don't need as much horsepower to keep a vehicle going at a pace as you need to get the car starting at that speed. So they said okay, well, we're going to have the system that automatically shut down cylinders. So you'd be a V-8, and you'd be just roaring up and you getting on the highway and you're often running. Then it would cut back to six cylinders, even four cylinders. The concept was wonderful. But what ended up happening is that engine would say, as you're at a stop sign, oh my I need more horsepower, counteract the braking. Of course, They were not thinking about the brakes very well at the time. And then the car would lunge into the intersection so that you could get t-boned. Fast forward not very many years, and we had the Toyota with a sudden acceleration problem. That turned out to be a software error, where much the same thing was happening. A car would jump into the intersection. We're not going to get into all of the details behind it all. But I think with age comes from experience. And we've had some horrible experiences over the years with vehicles and some of this newer technology. So Matt, to answer your question, a lot is going on the autonomous vehicle space. In some cases, the cars are much, much safer, you look at millions of miles driven, compare human drivers to these autonomous vehicles, and the autonomous vehicles almost always win. But we also now have prejudices against the self-driving cars, social warriors are, you know, get on your horses here. Because there are people who when there's an autonomous vehicle on the road, or they think it's a ton of mess, they behave differently. Now they've been tested have been run, I don't know if you've seen any of these pictures with autonomous vehicles, where they took the driver's seat, and they made it quite a bit deeper, think of thicker padding on that seat. And they hid a driver inside the driver's position. You could not see them unless you looked exceptionally close. You could not see that there was a driver in the vehicle. Then the driver just drove around, caught down and of course, the cameras everywhere so they could see what the people's reactions were. People were going out of their way to mess with the car. They pedestrians were jumping in front of it. Vehicles were cutting it off, slamming on their brakes, doing everything they could to make it so that autonomous vehicle would get involved in an accident. I don't know. Maybe they're just trying to see what it would do. Of course, it wasn't an autonomous vehicle. There's a human driver in there. We, as a society, as people, are not ready for these yet. And frankly, I think the Wall Street Journal's right - We're 90% of the way there. And honestly, we have 90% of the way to go. Because there are so many things, we haven't even considered yet. Ken When he joins us, most Wednesdays at 738, to fill us in on tech news. We at the radio station. I don't want to be critical of our radio station. However, they started this two-factor authentication. So every time I get some on my email, they have to send me a text message with a code. I think this is a royal pain in the butt. I want you to tell me they shouldn't do that. Craig Okay, can they not do that. Ken Thanks so much. Thank you for joining us today. Craig I will leave it at that. Yeah, here's what's going to, first of all, there's a big problem with the way they're doing it. That is that there is something called SIMjacking or hijacking of your SIM card. So if they're sending you a text, that is very dangerous. What's been happening is that if you are a target, now they're not doing this in a broad fishing attempt. If you can are a target, and the criminals know they want to go after you, they can now take over your cell phone, and they will get the text. So it doesn't do a whole lot of good from that aspect. We use something called DUO. D-U-O, which is fantastic. For two factor authentication, we use something called Yubi keys, which are very good as well. If your company's requiring you to us a text message for authentication, there is a relatively safe way of doing it. And that is you can use something like Google Voice, assuming your Google account has not been hacked, right. But Google Voice, where there is no SIM card, there is no cell phone that SIM card to hijack. If you use this and it is what I do for places that have to have a text message sent for two-factor authentication. So if they have to send you a text message, it goes to Google Voice. I have my own little phone company, and I use that as well. That way the text message will come in via an app to your phone, you can check the app, and now you're reasonably safe. But yeah, in this day and age, you know two-factor authentication is something that that does make sense. We do have to draw a line, and that one does it make the most sense. I'd like it to authenticate you at most every four hours or once a day, particularly for emails, if you have to do it every time. It gets a little bit old, pretty darn fast. But you know it's the reality of today's world. Matt Craig Peterson, our tech guru, he joins us at this time every Wednesday to find out exactly what's happening in the world of technology. Craig, we only have a couple of minutes left. So lastly, I will ask you whether or not you judge everyone on social media? Are you part of the mob that rules everyone? Craig Oh man. I am not. I don't jump on anybody's back. I just had that happen to me with a significant hacking group. As you know, I run the national webinars for the FBI Infragard program. I'm pretty visible out there in the security world, right. I do lots of radio interviews and TV and stuff. I posted an article on my website and got jumped on by a small mob out there. We've got to be careful remember it's so easy to say something negative online. Our kids are getting bullied every day. Bullying seems to be quite a habit nowadays. I don't know what happened to free speech. We have these militant people out there these fascist like the Antifas. Total fascist don't want to hear what you have to say. And these internet mobs have become a real thing and a very negative thing. From my viewpoint. Anyways. Ken Good news as our tech guru joins us most Wednesdays at 738. Thank you, Mr. Peterson. We will talk to you next Wednesday. Craig Take care. Matt All right. Thanks a lot, Craig. We appreciate it.   --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553  

Craig was on with Jim Polito. Today, they discussed the latest goings on with autonomous vehicles These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: Autonomous Cars - Are they ready for prime time ---  Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors. Airing date: 06/11/2019 Autonomous Vehicles Craig Hey, good morning, everybody. A little update on Ortiz, he got flown into Boston, the Red Sox flew him in. He's a Boston general, I guess he had like a five-hour operation. And they did more to help with his gunshot wound. It's just crazy. Anyhow, Mr. Technology got pumped off this morning. If this happens, sometimes I'm on a phone call. I am, you know, calling in on the phone to the radio station. I'm talking to them. I got knocked off, and I don't notice that I got knocked off, right. Well, it happened this morning. We will go into some detail about autonomous cars and what that all means including automatic lane change features and those types of things. That's what we talked about this morning with Jim Polito. I thought it was interesting. In fact, that's all we talked about. There are some implications to all this autonomous technology that I don't think many people have really thought about Jim Here is our friend, one of the most popular guests on the show. And all around great guy Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru. Good morning to you Craig Craig Hey, good morning, Jim. Jim Craig we've been spending the morning, the gentleman and I talking back and forth about autonomous cars or self-driving cars. We even get into discussing that adult film that was shot in the front seat of a self-driving Tesla while it was going down the road. We don't need to get into that here. What we want to get into is the question, are these cars ready to hit the road? Are they really prepared to hit the road? Craig It's an excellent question. The answer is, and I love this, this explanation that the Wall Street Journal had here about a month or two ago. They were saying driverless cars are 90% here. There's only another 90% left to go. Jim See you get it. You get the Tech Talk stuff. And then you get a little bit of comedy. Don't forget to tip your server. So yeah, it does seem that way. Oh, yeah, we're there. But don't try to take a left turn. Craig Yeah, exactly. There is a long way to go. There's a lot of acceptance problems still. In fact, I don't know if you're aware of this. But right now human drivers are quote, unquote, these so-called driverless cars. You probably haven't seen one of these. Jim Oh, you know what I see it the social justice warriors coming out now. Does the car has feelings? I don't know. Craig Here's what's been going on. Several companies have been trying to figure out how people will respond to driverless cars. So what they've done is that they've modified these vehicles, so that they change the driver's seat. So the person is actually sitting there. But they're sitting inside the driver's seat, and they eat. Unless you look very closely, you can't tell there's a person there. And then they have the driver drive the car around. So from just a casual observers point of view, it's just a car driving. You know, it's kind of like those, those body suits. I don't know if you've seen them, and you know, they're completely covered head to toe, yet you can see outright, yeah, the same sort of thing, except they're covered with the fabric of the seat. So they drive these things around. And they've been doing experiments trying to figure out what are we going to do, how we're going to do it? And how people are going to respond things like, you know, do we put a cow catcher on the front or pedestrian capture, right? Do we need to have lights indicating, hey, pedestrians, I'm going to start moving forward now, or I'm going to make a left turn all of these types of things? They've been finding people bullying the cars, knocking them on the hood, stepping into the way of them. Jim Oh, my God, you can't do that. These cars have feelings. Craig Let's make it even worse. Here's what happened here. When these pretend autonomous cars are driving in traffic, and people notice the car, other vehicles will do stupid things to mess with the autonomous vehicle. They will pull right in front of it, they'll break hard. And the quality of the studies is saying that people are trying to confound these cars, overrule them exploit the driverless vehicles. It has the automakers and tech firms really concerned. Obviously, there's one thing to have technology that works great in a lab, or maybe it works great on the streets of Phoenix, which is where a lot of these tests are going on right now. However when you've got a greedy human driver, and we've all seen them, and of course, it's not on the other guy. Jim Of course, it's never the guy in the other cars, always. Jim The connection is gone bad. He can't hear me. I'm going to drop the call and have him call back. Because we've lost him. Basically, to recap, where Craig was right now is that Yeah, you've got people out there seeing an autonomous car thinking oh, let me see what will happen if I drive in front of it. Or if I do this, it'll mess things up. That is not good. That is not good. And you know what that is? That's going to be an issue. When you have 50%, autonomous cars on the road, and then 50% of people just driving, because you know this is not going to happen overnight, everybody's going to have a self-driving car. It's just not going to work that way. The way it's going to work is some people are going to have them only like right now very few a tiny percentage of people have a car that will self-drive right now. And that's, that's what worries me. Oh, and by the way, if I can just add here a little personal thing. And I think Steve, you'll get a kick out of this is that, I do know that a substantial portion of the people listening to us right now are in cars. So, what if they could be in the car and be watching a video? You know, or listening to you and me? Jim Yeah, well, I mean, the two hours of the show is simulcast if you have charter TV three, channel 193. In general, they're sitting there watching Game of Thrones rather than looking at the road. Yeah, yeah. Well, no, but what I mean is I'm talking job security. I'm being very selfish about this concern. Oh, well, we're fine. Were you sure? Jim Oh, yeah. These things? Oh, yeah. I mean, I got I just, I understand what Craig is saying, but I don't I just I don't see how and he sort of touched on it. I don't under I don't see how the autonomous vehicles and humans are supposed to interact together. I just I don't really trust either of them. I don't trust humans behind the wheel. And I don't really trust robots behind the wheel, and you couldn't put the two of them together. I think it's a disaster. Know, people. Look, you will talk about looking for insurance claims gamble, throwing themselves in front of cars, people. Yeah, it's one thing to mess with them. It's another thing to be able to sue Tesla and then get rid of your you know, Geo Prism and gets yourself a nice little upgrade. Jim Yeah, well, we'll wait a minute. Hold on think I think about this. Okay. Not to be all science fiction here. But you know, with the, you know, with the artificial intelligence, the whole like the matrix, that movie, like the Terminator, that movie. What if all of a sudden, you know, the car gets mad at you for smacking it on the hood? And speaking of slapping it on the hood. Here is Craig back. I'm sorry, Craig, that connection just went south. You couldn't hear us. And you're, you were like in a tunnel. And again, I think it's the phone. I don't think it's anything other than that. I know, the machines are trying to shut you down. But yeah, Craig, I see you smack the car in the hood. And once we have artificial intelligence, it wants to get even with you. And then it's like, the movie Stephen King the book, Christine. And it's, it's running over your car? Craig Yeah. Well, here's another aspect of this. And then Sorry, I lost you there I was going on the spin and then nobody. But let's look at, for instance, people's driving culture. And there's a great article that just came out in Fast Company about a week ago, as well. It was talking about people's preference to drive versus flying. What they found is that people today, if it's a five-hour drive, no matter how long the flight is, if it's a five-hour drive, and if they're going to rent a car, on the other side, two-thirds of people prefer to drive. Yeah, and the numbers changed dramatically. If you've got a 10-hour drive, obviously, the vast majority of people want to fly. However, if it's in the tournament vehicle, a truly autonomous where they can have a nap, they can be there reading, they can be working, having meetings, that number goes way up. And what they found is even in the longest drive that they were looking at, which is a 45-hour drive, right now only one in 10 people would prefer to drive themselves. It's a handful. Think about driving to the airport, right all the crap you have to go through. But with an autonomous vehicle that changes to one in six people would prefer to drive themselves on a 45-hour drive, which means a quarter these stats of the airline industry would lose at least 10% of its travelers. And we're also looking at this change, it's also going to make it so that we don't have to expand our roads. They're thinking we could get, you know, 10 years more on the roadways that we're building or expanding than we would otherwise because the vehicles are going to be moving more progressively. You're not going to have somebody who hits the brakes and causes a major slow down and accidents and things. We're not there yet. There are a lot of companies working on it. Remember Fiat-Chrysler, they just broke off their talks with Reneau, yeah. And they turned around. And they got an agreement with his self-driving technology company in California called Brora. We've got another company out now with what's called LIDAR tech. They just got 170 million dollar funding round for self-driving cars. And this is just fantastic technology. And I've talked with the inventors before. This is the this is going to happen. But as we talked about with the Wall Street Journal, we're 90% there, and we only have 90% to go. Because part of the problem, Jim is we don't really even know what problems we're going to. We're going to have just as we talked about, people believe in these autonomous vehicles. Yeah, we're going to be taking small steps and even Elon Musk is aiming towards the small step category now and is stepping back slightly from as a tundras vehicle stuff, but-but they're coming and they're going to be I think they're going to be a godsend, especially when we're our 80s. Right. Well, Jim For the elderly, I think, and for people who may have some type of mobility issue. I think they are going to be helpful. Craig Peterson is our tech talk guru. Now we went off on this topic. He's got many more like, Can you still trust Google? So, if you want to get this information, text My name to this number 855-385-5563. So text Jim, or any questions you have 855-385-5553 Alright, standard data and text rates apply, and you'll get a lot of information, and Craig Peterson will not annoy you and not try to sell you something and not sell your name Craig thanks so much for that. We really appreciate the time. Craig Hey, thanks. Take care. Jim. Take care Jim When we return a final word. You're listening to the Jim Polito show, your safe space. --- Don't miss any episode from Craig. Visit http://CraigPeterson.com/itunes. Subscribe and give us a rating! Thanks, everyone, for listening and sharing our podcasts. We're really hitting it out of the park. This will be a great year!  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Craig is in the WGAN Morning News with Ken and Matt. This morning,  we got into a whole bunch here about some lawsuits that are in the works on your behalf against Intel. A little bit more about Huawei, but we went into some details on this whole idea of China owning and providing some 97% of precious metals. And those are now getting pulled into this entire trade battle. And some serious time talking about the wake-up call that new grads are going to get when they report for their first job after Graduation. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: Intel Has A Problem and So Do You  Colleges Graduates Are Up For Rude Awakening When They Show Up For That New Job The U.S. Has Had Enough of Huawei and China!   --- Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors. Airing date: 05/29/2019 Intel Vulnerability and Inevitable Lawsuits, Huawei, China and Precious Metals and College Graduates Get A Surprise. --- Craig This morning I was on with, of course, Ken and Matt and we spent some time talking about some of the issues of the day. We got into a whole bunch here about some lawsuits that are in the works on your behalf against Intel. A little bit more about Huawei, but we went into some details on this whole idea of China owning and providing some 97% of precious metals. And those are now getting pulled into this entire trade battle. And some serious time talking about a wake-up call for grads. So a lot this morning, and here we go.   Matt 738 on a Wednesday means Craig Peterson joins us as he does now Craig How are you this morning?   Craig   Hey, good morning doing well, I hear you getting chickens.   Matt No, I'm not getting chickens. But my wife says she wants chickens. I think that this is a fad. But, hey, it's possible, you never know.   Craig Well, we have chickens. I've had them for years. They're easy to take care of, and they do keep the bugs down. If you want to get rid of the ticks, which are nasty this year, then chickens can help, but Guinea hens are supposed to be the best, but they are loud and obnoxious.   Matt Yeah, no, I'm not going be doing that.   Ken Neighbors would love that, of course, a better than the rock concert and whisper.   Ken So, Mr. Peterson, who you, by the way, you can go to Craigpeterson.com any time and get his newsletter and find out all about tech stuff. Doesn't every computer have Intel in it? Everything has Intel Inside. So, are we all screwed here?   Craig Yeah, this is a really, big deal here. And I just don't get it. They seem to be getting a pass. You know, Ken if you if someone came to you, I know you deal primarily with marital laws,   Ken I do.   Craig But if someone came to you says, Hey, I bought this device to do this job. It's advertised to do it. And it's only doing it about half as well as advertised. Would they have a case? Would there be a class action to suit?   Ken Yeah   Craig It doesn't seem to be happening here. Here's what's happened. Pretty much every Intel chip made back to 2011 has a significant security flaw. The industry is putting it in 9.5 out of 10 as far as vulnerabilities go. As far as how bad this is, some Intel chips going back afar as 2007 have these flaws well.  Intel has come out and said okay, well, here's what we're going to do, and we're going to release a patch that you can apply for our chips. If you want to be safe, you have to apply this patch. And you have to turn off hyperthreading. Well, Apple, who uses Intel chips in its desktops and their laptops, has said that doing what Intel tells you to do will force you to lose about 40% of the performance on your computer. That is amazing. It's appalling. And Intel is even said Listen, you know if what we'll do, we'll do some patches for the chips going back to 2011. But 2007 forget about it, you guys must buy a new generation of chips if you have a computer with chips made during those five years, that are vulnerable to what's called ZombieLoad, which is the latest nasty piece of hardware problems from Intel. If you have chips made in those five years, Intel isn't going to do anything for you. It is amazing. Now it depends on your circumstance, you know, you may not be fully exposed to this. But this is the second time that there's been a significant flaw discovered in Intel chip security flaw in the last six months. And this one's even worse than the last one. So Intel saying, "Well, is only classifying it as a medium threat." And frankly, if you have a stack of software protecting your computer, and you have a firewall and next generation one that's inspecting everything coming in, including the JavaScript, etc., etc., then, then you might not be very vulnerable.   Craig But the people that are going to be really, really, really ticked off about this are people who run cloud companies. If you are running your stuff in the cloud, think of it like a salesforce.com, Amazon or Microsoft Azure, which have massive clouds of computers, they have to turn on all of the patches and fixes which means turn off hyperthreading, applying the microcode fixes, etc. They are instantly losing up to 40% of the capability of their server speeds. It is going to result in a huge and more likely a massive lawsuit, I'm sure. We're also going to see I would put money on this gentleman. By the end of this year, Apple will say Adios to Intel, and for their lower end laptops and maybe even some lower end desktops, they will no longer use Intel. But will switch over to a proprietary chip design that they've been using for their iPhones and iPads for a while. More and more companies will be doing that. It was just this week, Intel's most significant competitor AMD released stats on how they don't have these vulnerabilities, right.  There's always something. AMD has some new chips using processes that Intel has not even been able to get close to perfecting yet. So AMD is going to be rising dramatically, Intel's going to be falling sharply. I am not giving any investment advice. Okay. I'm not an investment advisor at all. But I'm talking about their presence in the industry. It is an industry game changer. I think in this case, that whole Intel Inside advertisement they used for so many years is going to bite them. Many people in the IT biz are angry with Intel right now.   Ken Talking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us now, as he usually does on Wednesdays. And this is a Wednesday ladies, gentlemen, not a Tuesday, it's the second day of the week for us, but it is the third day of the week. Today Craig, when you graduate from college these days, let's say the class of 2019, for instance,  and you head off into the job market. And you know, for years you've had kind of certain types of prospects and certain expectations about what you have to do after you leave college and go into the quote "real world" end quote. Things are changing in that respect. Do you think that kids are going to be having to deal with a little bit more of a higher expectation as they are entering the workforce?   Craig   Yeah, this is an excellent article from the Wall Street Journal, and I put it up as well for some more information. There Wall Street Journal's call this a wake up call for grads. Entry-level jobs that are out there and of course, there are many of them are, is anything but any more. In business, and we could talk about this for a long time, but these jobs have been at the low-end jobs are saying well forget it, we're not going to pay these minimum wages, it's not worth it to us. We'll automate, right. Case in point, being a McDonald's. Many people had their first job at McDonald's. However, now what we're finding that automation and outsourcing, have taken away so many of the lower end jobs. Even when you look at a business like journalism, you used to have people combing other people's newspapers doing clipping, clipping services to get some ideas, beating the streets reading the letters to the editor. Now, that's entirely automated. So graduates now are expected to operate at a much higher level than they ever have had to perform before. And when you're looking at skills, these technical skills required in jobs, the turnover is just so fast and new skills, that your future employers are going to be expecting you to be productive almost on day one. Gone are the days where an employer will say in reality, we don't expect anything out of an employee for the first three months. And then it'll be six months before we get anything truly productive. We have employers out there right now who are looking for people to start making sales calls. For instance, on day one great example, so much. The Wall Street Journal article had quotes in here from IBM, who has 330,000 people who are saying we need people who can adapt. So, if you are graduating from college, and it's anytime soon, you are going to have to adjust and fast. Gone are the days like with my father, who at how old is he? I think he said he was 18 years old, and he started working for the Royal Bank of Canada retiring at 65, from the Royal Bank of Canada. And then he took a contract doing some third-party work for about five years at the Royal Bank of Canada. Now we're going to be switching jobs quickly. We have some industry leaders who are saying the best advice they can give to the younger kids is switch jobs and change careers be very flexible. And that is an entire shift from the generation before mine. We baby boomers even had, on average three to five careers. So things are changing guys in a massive way.   Matt We have on Craig Peterson. He joins us every Wednesday at 738 even though we have Memorial Day Monday and so this is Tuesday for us. Great, I can't pronounce the company. I keep messing it up who-who the one in China. How do you pronounce that? It comes up with bad we're not buying things from anymore.   Craig   Huawei, Huawei,   Matt Huawei, sort of a salad age.   Ken So, explain to us what that's all about. I mean, are they evil?   Ken  10:52   Is it that bad?   Craig The question is, are they evil? Some companies claim that they are and others that claim that they're not. You might remember this scare a few months back where servers and Amazon and elsewhere were found to have some hardware on the motherboard that was not part of the schematics designed by major manufacturers like Supermicro.  They said to Huawei. We want you to manufacture this product, China, and we want this done this way. Here's a schematics make it and ship it back to us. There have been a lot of scares, some of them turned out to be, pretty much, correct. There was a bit firmware put on the boards, maybe a little hardware that shouldn't have been there. And then we announced a trade ban with Huawei and of course, we're in a big fight with them. The Canadians arrested their CFO just a lot about three or four months ago for the United States, who has a warrant out on their CFO.   Craig The problem is that we getting going here is the installation of 5g hardware, made by Huawei. So there was a ban put in place where we could not make a trade with Huawei anymore. Google said, "okay, we're going to honor that, and we will not sell them Android OS anymore." Other hardware manufacturers that were licensing their technology to them, also pulled it back. And the government realized that Huawei is the number two smartphone maker in the world, now that they have passed Apple.  So, they are going to be hurting people here in the US. Now, military bases have stopped selling Huawei, all of what, almost two years ago, because of some of the questions around them. Here's where we stand right now, if you have a Huawei handset, the US Commerce Department has given them a 90-day reprieve on all of their hardware patches, and software and licenses. So, for 90 days, they can send updates, patch phones that people have purchased and can get everything they need, but when that window closes, Huawei won't be able to get any more updates from Google Android for security and other things.  Huawei is scrambling, maybe to have their little version of Android because it's open source, but it gets very complicated. Intel, Qualcomm Broadcom, they all make chips, they have all pulled out of Huawei. If you have a Huawei phone, you have 90 days to get all your stuff together get patches and maybe to a new operating system. I would recommend if you have Huawei, it might be time to consider moving to a different hardware platform, seriously. As ride with Huawei is not going to be a fun ride.   Matt We're talking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us at this time every Wednesday. Craig, ordinarily I'd let you go. But I do have one question for you that I would like to get your perspective on if possible. On Drudge right now, the headline is about rare earth materials. This one isn't on your list of stuff. However, I know that you know that rare-earth materials make up most of our circuits and cell phones.  There's a lot of elements that are necessary for the production of smartphones, electronics in general, right. And virtually all of them come from China. It is not essential because there are places in America where we could do it. There's a, you know, a couple of great places in California, which would be fantastic if they allowed us to use them and we could and dig into the earth. But we don't do that, and we get them mostly from China. And now China due to the trade of dispute between the United States and China,  China is now threatening to slap either tariff or restrict our use rare-earth materials as leverage in the trade war against the United States. Since we're so dependent on it. So, thoughts on that? I mean, you have an entire country, addicted to technology and their smartphones and all these things. And you have a single country, which is a current trade adversary that controlling all of the elements necessary for the production of those things. It seems like a recipe for disaster. Don't you think?   Craig It sounds like it. The last numbers, I saw, show that China has been providing something like 97 percent.   Matt Yep   Craig Yeah of some of these rare earth materials that are used in the manufacturing these electronics. Here's how I've been looking at this because I have been following it. We've got, obviously a bit of a trade war going on. There been a lot of people for years who've been concerned about China, buying up some of these rare-earth plants around the world. We're not that worried in the electronics industry about it, because as you pointed out, we have our own,   Matt Really?   Craig Well, in the short term, there is going to be a hit, no question. But we have our own. Also, on top of that remember much of it, look at the uranium one deal, that uranium is coming from the United States. And ultimately, if we need to gain access to some of the rare-earth materials that are here in the US or, or are in the ground and mined by some of our partners worldwide, all we have to do is call China and say get lost. We don't care if you own it on paper, we are grabbing control of it. And that's what the talk in the industry is right now. That we will use eminent domain to grab back resources in our country and friendly countries to gain access to it because it is critical for both military and civilian use, like our cell phones and computers and the manufacturing of them. Also, there are alternative ways to do some of this manufacturing. And the big one. Number one is it it's so cheap to buy these rare-earth materials from China, we don't even bother recycling most of our gear. And much of the rarer stuff that we need can be recovered from existing electronics. So, that's another angle that we can use to protect ourselves.   Ken Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us every Wednesday 730. Craig will talk to you next Wednesday. Craig Hey, take care, gentlemen.   Matt   Bye-bye. All right. Thanks a lot,   Craig So, with that, hey, I am going to be making some changes to this podcast. And I hope they're going to be what you guys want to hear. It's going to be a little bit more security focused and a little less of the interviews because I've found that, you know, often I end up talking about the same essential topics on all three different radio stations. So, I'm at the very least,  think I'll do cut it up so that we have the best of the three on the individual topics. I haven't decided yet, and we might have me going through each of the issues individually and not even include a whole bunch from these different radio stations. Anyways, as always let me know what you think text me@craigpeterson.com. I've got to throw this out. My heart goes out to everybody in the Midwest and elsewhere. Tornadoes or other natural disasters have hit them. It's been quite a week, two weeks. I blame it on the Canadians. Okay, Canadians listening. Sorry about that. But anyhow, it is the cold air that's a problem. We have so much cold air that's hitting this warm, moist air that's come up from the Gulf from the south. And that is responsible for causing these storms this year, according to the meteorologists and that makes sense, right? That's what you need for a storm, a cold front hitting a warm front. And the fact that we have such cooling going none from some of this cold air coming from the north and hitting this hot and moist Southern air. It's creating a lot of tornadoes this year. So my heart and prayer go out to everybody impacted. Take care of everybody, and we will be back on Saturday. Bye-bye. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553  

Craig was on with Jim Polito. Today, they discussed the latest in Chinese offensive military weapons.  This new Chinese armored attack vehicle that can launch a swarm of autonomous drones. They also talked about the absolute need to install Parental Controls for some of these streaming and social media sites.  These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: Lack of Media Parental Controls Contributing to Suicides Ready For An Autonomous Robot Army? ---  Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors. Airing date: 05/28/2019 Chinese Have A New Offensive Weapon and Why You Must Install Parental Controls. Good morning, everybody. Hopefully, you had a happy Memorial Day. I certainly did. I spent it with friends and some family as well, business associates, you know how that all goes but having the freedom to be able to associate with the people you want and have a fantastic barbecue that came to us at a very high cost. There are a lot of people out there who want to run our lives, control our lives. And my gosh, have you watched the series Chernobyl, if you haven't seen Chernobyl on HBO, you should take the opportunity to view it. Chernobyl shows some of the significant ultimate pitfalls of socialism, and what it does to us. Here we have all of these people who are willing to put their lives on the line, even though there may be significant issues with why we are somewhere, why they think we shouldn't be there. Just the fact that they are volunteering to do it, that they're stepping forward, and so many have lost their lives. My heart goes out to them and their families. And thank you, thank you, thank you. You know, I came to this country, I'm an immigrant myself. And I am so glad I have the opportunity to be an American, to be a citizen of the United States and to be with so many like-minded people. I'm sure many of us disagree on things. I know. I've got people who vehemently disagree with me, Wow! There are trolls out there. Overall, I think we agree that we have a right to free speech, although so many on the left don't appreciate it. They want that to squash free speech. We still have it, and there's been an enormous price that paid to protect that right. Sorry, this was not meant to be a lecture. Okay. I do want to go to our friend, Mr. Jim Polito. We had a great conversation this morning. So, right now, we'll go to Jim. Also, I'm going to be changing the format of these podcasts here a little bit in the weeks ahead. So, some might be a bit delayed. Some might be just changing dramatically. We'll see how it goes. Be sure to let me know what you think about this podcast and maybe some changes you'd like to see. Just me at craigpeterson.com. Here's Mr. Polito Jim: Welcome to our good friend, and Tech Talk guru with, Wow, with a full plate today. Just like the cookout yesterday on Memorial Day. Here is Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir. Craig: Hey, good morning. Yeah, I had a great Memorial Day yesterday, I was impressed with those gentlemen from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. And the work that underway there. It's kind of a letdown to be on after them. Jim: This Morning. You're all very, very important. No, no, that was good. That was a good lead-in for you. And speaking of Vietnam, I want to talk to you about this autonomous robot army. Now we've, we've discussed World War three and how it has already begun in cyberspace, but there's still conflict on the ground. And then my question to you is, is it going to be run by machines and drones? Craig: Yeah, it kind of looks like it might be at least for the most part. Now. We've got China who has licensed from Russia, this, this thing, about the size of a Humvee, more or less, right. It's a small military vehicle. And what China has done with this vehicle is to combine this technology with the knowledge they gained from producing drones. Think of all the drones we have flying around our country. Did you know 80% of the drones that we buy, civilian drones, are made by one manufacturer in China. They've got this technology down, nowadays. But what is surprising is that China has been accused, even recently now, of sending GPS coordinates for these drones back to China. Jim: Whoa. Right. They are using the products they sell us to spy on us. Craig: Exactly. And in this case, to map this out, right. They can map where things are because the drones are taking pictures or video and equipped with GPS and cell capability. A beta test has been conducted to see what it might be sending, and it looks like GPS coordinates. It is all a fascinating, albeit troubling problem. What China has done now with this kind of Humvee type thing is they have installed launchers. And these launchers are designed to launch small military drones. Now, it makes sense to have a drone that was associated with let's say a Humvee, right, a small drone, you can launch, you can see what's around you may be on the battlefield, see if there's EDIS in the road up the head, all these things makes a lot of sense. It appears that this particular vehicle, which is being advertised online right now by the Chinese manufacturer, has been sold, by the way, to other countries. It is comes equipped with four of these drones that are for reconnaissance type drones. However, it also has eight other drones, known as killer drones. The idea with this platform is that they can go to any place that you want to and drop a very, small bomb with high explosives on it. We saw something like this happen in Venezuela late last year to the President of Venezuela. Yeah, the big, you know, burst in the air up front, was a from a drone, what do we do? Situations like this could be very, very, bad because think of a drone army coming after you. But let's put a bunch of pieces together. Craig: China is number one in the world right now for facial recognition, which they are using to track all of their people, right? They're not citizens. I guess civilians would be a better term to call them right, in a socialist state. They are tracking these citizens and know if they jaywalk, they lose the social credit points, or other things happen, and it gets to the point where they can't even get on a train or fly anymore. If you're China who has these drones, and they are in a small vehicle like a Humvee. They can be used to go to any location. The next step is, if they're not there already, is to identify a face or a person and have them go after that person. Thank you. Yeah, the biggest scary thing is what you might call a drone cloud. So let's think about a hundred drones looking for one person. Jim: Yeah. And so I mean, we see that stuff in the Terminator movies, and you know, the drone looking and getting a facial recognition scan, and then going after that person. I mean, that's science fiction. Not anymore. Craig: Not anymore, and that's downright scary when you get right down to it. This armed tactical truck is loaded with what they call blowfish, autonomous drones, by the way. It's reminiscent of the Borg and, and Terminator, but it's here. So your question, what can we expect in the next world war? Well, we are sure to see nation-states and going after our infrastructure, our base technology, and instead of them sending out a whole bunch of troops onto the ground, all they have to do is send out some of these anonymous elements, drones, and they could take out almost anything. So now you know why the White House Secret Service and all these other people are so concerned about it. The FAA has gotten involved, with not only the licensing of drones, that happened before but in setting up drone routes and tracking them. These things have become very dangerous. Jim: Wow, we're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru. And at the end of this segment, we're going to give you a number you're going to text my name, Jim. And you'll be able to pick up all of this information plus a lot of other stuff. And that's what I want to get to lack of parental media controls, is contributing to suicides. Tell me about this Craig Craig: I hate this story. It's very, sad. And it goes back to a study that was just completed by the National Institute of Mental Health. Dr. Amen, he's a doctor down in New York City. And he deals a lot with brain injury and helping people recover from it. If you know someone that has had brain injuries like the football players, right, the concussions and things take a look at and check out Amen Clinics online it is just phenomenal the treatments they are doing there. Craig: What happened here now, and I found out from Dr. Amen about this. There is that there is a TV show on Netflix right now called "13 Reasons Why." Yeah, this is a story of a teenage girl who took her own life, left behind 13 audio cassettes for her friends to listen to, to unravel the reasons why she killed herself. That so there is a study that was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. And it appeared in the Journal of the American Academy of Child adolescent psychiatry and analyzed five years of suicide rates amongst people between the ages of 10 to 64. Now adults, basically over the age of 18, showed no significant change in the month after the show was released. However, the kids, from the ages of 10 to 18, showed a 30% increase in suicide, the month after that show was released. Okay. We've got to remember, and this even goes to giving kids iPads, iPhones and going on the internet, all of this stuff, young kids brains are still under construction, right? And our, you know, our brains develop until your mid-20s. Girls brains typically develop faster than boys, and we know that, right? But this is very, very, scary. Our physical brains aren't mature until the age of 25. One of my kids, who is I think he's 25. Forgive me, I have eight, so I'm not sure. I came down, and he was playing this video game. I have never seen such violence. It just it blew my mind. I don't even want to describe it on the air. I sat down and talked to him about it. Now for me, It was shocking, but to him, it was just a game. And there have been debates over the years as to whether these types of games are hurting kids or if they matter or don't matter. One thing I can see is desensitization. And now with this latest study about this movie, this video series, this TV show called "13 Reasons Why" it seems apparent that it is dramatically affecting the younger kids. And that goes back to what you started with, again, using parental controls, we have to turn them on because this show is not rated for kids to watch. And if we don't have these controls turned on this 30% bump in suicide rates can't is directly attributed to it. But my gosh, the correlation is very scary. Jim: That is something that we can prevent. I mean, we can't prevent everything, and there are always kids may have other issues but you know, you can reduce the risk. There's a lot of great additional information that Craig has, and unfortunately, we don't have a lot of other time. So Craig for folks to get the this these stories and other things they need to text my name, Jim, to this number Craig: 855-385-5553 that's 855-385-5553 Jim: Standard data and text rates apply folks Craig will not sell your name to somebody else, and he won't hack you. Craig that was a great segment. Thank you so much for your time. Craig: Right. Take care, Jim. Bye-Bye. Jim: Take care. Bye-bye. All right, we have a very important --- Don't miss any episode from Craig. Visit http://CraigPeterson.com/itunes. Subscribe and give us a rating! Thanks, everyone, for listening and sharing our podcasts. We're really hitting it out of the park. This will be a great year!  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Craig is on with Jim Polito. Today they discussed hackers getting into medical devices and endangering people. They also talked about Huawei and the problems they are facing. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: Hospitals Push Device Makers To Improve Security Following Cyberattacks White House Cracks Down On Huawei Equipment Sales With Executive Order ---  Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors. Airing date: 05/21/2019 Dangers Of Medical Equipment - Why Huawei Is In Trouble Craig Peterson 0:00 Hey, good morning everybody Craig Peterson here. I say good morning for a couple of reasons. One, it's morning when I'm recording this, and secondarily, most people listen in the morning. But we have some people that listen on the weekends only, some people when they're at the gym in the evening on the drive. So hello, hello to everybody. It's just good morning is such a nice greeting, I think. Here's what happened today. I was on with Jim Polito, we talked about the latest in the Huawei battle that's going on there, the second largest cell phone manufacturer in the world right now. And we are at war with them. It's a very interesting story. So we talked about that, as well as medical devices. If you're in the hospital, if you're in the hospital business. You gotta listen to this because we talked about what's really going on behind the scenes with some of the cyber issues that are present with our medical devices. So here we go with Mr. Jim Polito. Jim Polito 1:01 He is one of our most popular podcasts when we put his segment up because people want to know what he has to say. And I am talking about our tech talk guru. And good friend, Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir. Craig 1:17 Hey, good morning, Jim. I loved it. I saw the sun yesterday. It was warm. I'm happy. Jim 1:23 You know, aren't Canadians, the descendants of vampires. I mean, don't you guys have trouble if there's, if there's you know, more than say 12 hours of sunlight in a day? Don't Canadians have a problem with that? When it really impacts their health? Craig 1:42 You got it backwards actually, because it in the summertime the sun never sets. Jim 1:45  Oh that's right. Craig 1:49  In the wintertime it never comes up. You see. So yeah, you got it backwards. Yeah. But But I will tell you this, that the veins do migrate deeper into the tissue so when summer comes it's a little much. My ideal summer day, it was always about 72 degrees with the sun out. Right. That was a beach day.  Jim 2:16 Yeah. That would be a Canadian beach day. Actually, you know, in all honesty, that would be a beach day for me too, because I don't like it too hot. I can maybe I should have been born Canadian because I can't take that temperature a little bit more. And I would like all that sunlight during the day, you know, but I couldn't take it. Interesting. Craig 2:35 We used to be out playing as kids, you know, back in the day when you had free range kids. Jim 2:44 Free range kids. Organic, organic, free range kids. Craig 2:48 Free range, pasture raised. Yeah. And we would be out. You know, we go out in the morning and on our bikes, and whatever we'd like kick the can and hide and seek and a little baseball. And in the winter of course you play hockey, but but because it's the law up there. But you know, going out in the daytime having a good old time. And I remember one night we were out playing and it was it. My mom came hunting for us, which she never did. Right. So she wouldn't see us after about 7:00am. And it was like 10:30, 11 o'clock at night. And it was still light out. Right. And she was out there trying to, where have you been all night? We've been playing, yeah, because you just didn't know. It's such a different world. Jim 3:30  It is. it is. Well no, and people this is the time of year that people begin to go on cruises to Alaska, because you have the midnight sun. And no, I would like that. So here's what I don't like, you know, I'm in the hospital, and I'm hooked up to a machine. And all of a sudden Vlad, from Eastern Europe, hacks into the machine. And whatever that machine is doing for me, he decides to change it or I've got a medical device implanted in my body or I use one for myself. It's not implanted me. I mean, these types of things. You You sounded the alarm years ago, that that the the medical information hack was going to be the new battle ground. And now is it medical equipment hacks? Craig 4:21 Yeah, this is a huge deal a lot of people really aren't aware of there's there's some peripheral, you know, understanding of it. And you've got some too right? You mentioned medical devices, the heart pacemakers for the people have. Those, many of those are hackable and how it's been demonstrated that they have been hacked, or a big study late last year that happened to over in the UK, looking at some of their gear now. And they found CT machines that were imminently hackable, you know, we had Wannacry last year, we're kind of worldwide, it's still out there still kind of floating around. And it costs the UK health service 150 million dollars. But it isn't just hacking the computers on your desktop, because there are computers everywhere. We have clients here that are in manufacturing. And they've got these huge machines that are out on the floor that that do various types of cutting and drilling and different parts of the manufacturing. And people don't really sit there and think well, what's inside that machine? Well, this one client machines they've had now for probably 20 years. And you know, they fix them when something goes wrong. These machines are multiple, multiple, multiple millions of dollars to buy new. And in some cases, you can't even get them new anymore. Like for instance, a big shaft for a ship, there's only one machine in the country that can make these big enough for our larger ships. Well, those machines that this client that called us into to fix their problem, we're running Windows XP, and they had them all hooked up to their networks. And they had a flat network. So things spread across their network. So when we're talking about the medical devices, everything from infusion pumps, biopsy, imaging tables, the CT machines I mentioned, have computers in them. And most of the time, we're talking about a manufacturer of a machine, in this case, a medical machine, not a security company. So if it works, they ship it. So now here's what's happening, the hospitals are starting to freak out. Because these machines, let's say the CT machine gets compromised. The odds are really good that they you know, they're not getting into the CT machine, so that they can you know, empty the bank accounts because the CT machine doesn't have that information in it. Jim 7:05 Or maybe just as a joke, like I'm getting a CAT scan of my head, and they erase the brain, you know, the doctor gets the results. And it's like, God, everybody was right. There's nothing in here. There's nothing in here. Craig 7:20 I'm not gonna laugh too much. Because there's there's a classic case of a machine that had software that was bad and killed people. Jim 7:31 Great. Oh, that's great. I'm going to the CAT scan machine and it basically turns into a microwave is what you're saying. Okay, yeah, so I'm like a bag of microwave popcorn. Great. See, that's why I am actually taking this seriously. Because when I saw this when you sent it to me, I said, this is important. And we're talking with our Tech Talk guru Craig Peterson about hospitals sounding the alarm, you gotta protect devices and equipment from hacking. Craig 8:07 Remember, the federal government required under the HIPAA law and regulations that we automate so many systems that we move everything to digital equipment, so hospitals and doctors offices have been focused on that trying to get that done, trying to be safe. And let me tell you what a nightmare that still is out there. And they haven't paid attention to this. So now hospitals are demanding from the device manufacturers information about exactly what's inside each one of these machines. Are you using a version of Linux an embedded Linux, an embedded Windows, a full Windows or some other operating system? What are you using inside of these machines? What version of it and the hospitals are now working on tracking what versions of software they have, so that they can demand from the manufacturer when there's a known vulnerability that that vulnerability gets fixed. And hospitals have gone to the next level? And they're going to people like me, saying, Hey Craig we have a potential problem here. We have a machine, we don't know what's in it. And we don't know how valuable it is. And so we do what's called a penetration test against the machines. Are do these machines have any vulnerabilities that are known that can be easily penetrated? So really, what we're talking about now is our hospitals having to become security experts in order to keep their equipment online, at the very least. And secondarily, make sure that these machines aren't compromised in such a way that it could really adversely affect patients health. Jim 9:48 Wow, we're talking with our good friend Tech Talk guru Craig Peterson. About the well, all the news in tech. But this is one of the big ones protecting us. How about Huawei, I always pronounce their name wrong. They're basically the big Chinese company that, Huawei, thank you, manufacturers. equipment, basically communications equipment. And the President said, Whoa, I've got an executive order here. I don't want these guys producing stuff. Well, one, I think it's part of the terror of war. But the other part of it is, I think the Chinese are sneaking stuff into the stuff that they build. Shall I use the term Trojan horse? Craig 10:41 Yeah, that's an appropriate one, frankly, because we do have companies here in the US that have received Huawei hardware and have found code in there that is malicious. Jim 10:54  Yeah, see? See? Yeah. Craig 10:56 Now was it put in because Huawei, remember now people forget what a socialist government is. And China is a socialist government. They're communist government, which is a type of socialism. And everybody there works for the communist government, right. And so they are trying to have a leg up on us. They want the first shot over the bow to be fired and the next war to be a cyber shot, because it's just easier to deal with it harder to track down. So President Trump put a bit of an embargo in place against Huawei in the US. Now we've had one for over a year, when it comes to military equipment, even US military bases, they can't sell Huawei. But now it's gone even further. So what happened was Google was the first company to step forward here. And this was just yesterday, I guess it was, stepped forward and say, Hey, listen, we are no longer going to provide Huawei with the Android operating system. Now remember why we just passed Apple to become the second largest cell phone manufacturers, sales in the world. So it goes Samsung and Huawei, so they can't get Android. And if they can't get updates for Android operating system security updates, that anybody that owns a Huawei handset or other piece of equipment, like what you're talking about the stuff that runs some of our networks, is in big trouble. So just late yesterday, President Trump came out and said, Okay, well, Google will let you give Huawei security updates so that they can be dispersed to people here in the US and around the world because everything that's important. But man, we are, we are in the middle, not just of a sanction war here. But this is part of potentially a hot war that could erupt with China. Jim 12:52 Yeah, you know, like you said it, I've heard it from others, World War Three has already begun. The just, it's just going going on in the cyber world. Not not, it's not traditional warfare. It's going on in the cyber world. Craig 13:07 It's behind this behind the scenes, but we just got to make sure people back to basics, back to basics, the basics you need to for your security, and you'll be ahead of the game. Jim 13:18 All right, and you'll be ahead of the game if you stick with Craig Peterson our Tech Talk guru. And if you text My name to this phone number. Craig 13:28 855-385-5553. Just text Jim to 855-385-5553. Jim 13:38 All right, standard data and text rates apply. And Richard, I mean excuse me, looking at the name Richard and talking to you. Isn't that great? Isn't that great? I can't do two things at once. Again, thank god Craig Peterson can. And Craig will not try to sell you stuff, hack you, whatever. So anyway, and Craig you are one of our most popular podcasts. And of course, folks if you want to hear anything more out of this, we will podcast it for you after the show. Have a very good day Mr. Peterson. Take care. Craig 14:17 Thanks. Take care, Jim. Now back to basics as we talked about in there. Remember what we're talking about when I say back to basics, I am talking about making sure that you have your 123 backup that you have your grandfather grandson, son backup, make sure that you've got also your WiFi secure your network secured, that you have some anti virus some anti malware that you have detection software running on those machines that you keep your machines absolutely up to date with the latest patches. I usually wait a week okay, so not necessarily up to the second. And once that's all done keep an eye on it all those are the basics. And don't forget about it. I have a course. I thinking about releasing a back to basics course. I don't know what you guys think. Let me know, me@CraigPeterson.com. Take care guys. Talk to you tomorrow. --- Don't miss any episode from Craig. Visit http://CraigPeterson.com/itunes. Subscribe and give us a rating! Thanks, everyone, for listening and sharing our podcasts. We're really hitting it out of the park. This will be a great year!  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Craig is on the Jim Polito Show this Tuesday morning. Today the talked about the cost of healthcare, Google's new feature, and about Facebook being protected by the government. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: Facebook Is A Government-Protected Monopoly Google Confirms It Will Automatically Delete Your Data — What You Need To Know ---  Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors. Airing date: 05/14/2019 The Real Statistics About Healthcare - Facebook Using Guns To Stop Competitors - New Google Feature Craig Peterson 0:00 Oh boy, hey, Craig Peterson here. I don't know, would you call this a full pile? I'm not sure. You know, you have some people out there like Ann Coulter. Have you seen her book Shut Up And Sing where she's all upset about Hollywood, because these people that really don't know anything about a topic, go and shoot their mouths off, right? And, and they're just actors or singers. So just, you know, do your singing and get lost, right, you don't really know what you're talking about in the political realm. So I don't know that this morning. I was on with Jim Polito and he had been talking this morning about healthcare and what Bernie Sanders has been saying as well as other candidates running for the Democrat party nomination. And I just I could not bite my tongue. So you're gonna have to let me know what you think. Was this a shut up and sing moment? Obviously, I know what I'm talking about here and as you listen to the interview, you'll realize it as well. But it is so upsetting to me. So anyways, we talked about that. He got me going with Facebook again this morning. And you know the protections that Facebook has that most people don't realize you know that Facebook has, they're keeping competitors out of the market at a point of a gun quite literally. And a little bit about Google and a new feature they're coming out with that everybody should turn on and and once it's on I'll let you know about that. So anyhow, here we go with Mr. Polito. Make sure you send me let me know really I'm serious here. Let me know what you think was this at total full powers, is this something I should do? I know most of the people listening are tend to be libertarian, like I am. Some are conservative. There's some that are you know, confiscal conservative, and some are of you know, socially, not so conservative. And I get it this but this I think affects, I know, affects every last one of us. Let me know what you think me@CraigPeterson.com. So here we go with Mr. Polito.  Jim Polito 2:12 Here he is. Uniquely qualified to explain everything you need to know in the simplest of terms, our good friend and Tech Talk guru. Former Canadian, Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir. How are you? Craig 2:28 Good morning, man. You're talking about healthcare. They're like three topics this morning I got to talk to Jim about. But this is one that is going to kill people. People will die. Jim 2:40 Yeah, I mean, tell us about Canada. How lovely it is. Craig 2:44 Oh, I do not have you you know, as you know, and many listeners might not but I was born and raised in the Great White North. And being from Canada. I have most of my family's still up there brothers, sisters, parents, uncles, everybody, aunts and people somehow point to Canada as being some sort of a great place and, and Bernie talking about how expensive it is here and we're going to cut costs and and your great explanation of hey, it's already heavily subsidized by those of us that do carry insurance. So I thought I'd just point out a couple of things Jim. Craig 3:27 If you look up right now and I sent you a couple articles. I texted them to you, hopefully you got them.  Jim 3:33  No, we got them. Craig 3:36 I sent them to the right number, not some, oh okay. Bottom line here, per capita healthcare spending in the US. Okay. So per person here in the US annually it's a little north of $10,000. Now, look at some of these European countries like the Netherlands, Austria, Austria, Belgium. It's half the spending it is here in the US. Now, what do you think it would be like in Canada, right. It's Bernie's talking about all these efficiencies you're going to get when you get the government involved when you don't have the insurance companies. When you don't have the competition. It's going to get cheaper. Well, in Canada as an example here, this is from the Fraser Institute out in BC. They are a nonpartisan independent Canadian public policy Think Tank. And what they've come up with here the average spent on a healthcare per person in Canada is almost 50% higher than the US right now. Jim 4:44 I am, I am sorry, but that is that is impossible. That is impossible. That is fake news. You are making up those numbers. Mr. Peterson, I am sorry, but I have to hold you accountable. Craig 5:00 A typical Canadian family quoted the Fraser Institute Vancouver, British Columbia will pay $13,000 for healthcare in 2018. That's what the bottom line was. And it varies based on how much money you make. Now this is actual payments, people okay. This isn't the government paying on your behalf. This is the hidden taxes and the direct taxes that goes specifically for healthcare and nothing else. So we're paying 100% more than most European countries, the average, by the way, in Europe is about $5200 a year. We're paying more than 10,000. And Canadians are paying on average, almost 13,000. That's $70 less. 13,000 a year for it. And some families in Canada, if you have an income outlet of $300,000, you are paying $40,000 in taxes for your healthcare, explicitly for healthcare. So government involvement doesn't make things cheaper. Now and to top it all off, the care in Canada My mother has had a pancreas attack here, pancreatitis, and so she's up there in a hospital. Now. You're not gonna believe this, Jim and Bernie, there's no way he's gonna believe this. She spent three days on a gurney in a hallway, in the hospital, she needs an MRI, but they can't get her one. The waiting list for MRIs  is longer than some people's life expectancies that need them. This is my mother. And they're paying 50% more than we are.  Jim 6:51 Yeah. People just don't realize, all you have to do is look at the registry of motor vehicles and say, okay, these are the people who are going to be running my healthcare. Man, seriously. Jim 7:04 By the way, with all due respect to a lot of fine people who work for the registry, because I know fine people who work for the registry with all due respect there, though. No, no, absolutely, absolutely not. Craig 7:16 It's the efficiency of the registry combined with the heart and soul of the IRS. Jim 7:23 Wait a minute, that deserves a... (RIMSHOT)  Alright, let's, I  appreciate that. And that's good, Craig 7:29  Sorry about that. I had to say something. Jim 7:33 No, I'm glad you did. We're so glad that you did. Now I want to talk about a couple of things and you said you had some stuff you wanted to talk about. But I want to talk about Google. I have been erasing all of my Google history and and going through all the different things. And I have noticed that I'm not getting those annoying ads for the last thing that I looked at online or the last thing I searched. And that you know, they keep telling me, Jim, this isn't, you know, it's not going to help with your suggestions, but I don't care. I know what I want. I'll look for it myself. Craig 8:13 Yeah, it's I think this is great news. Okay. And I frankly, I think this came from Facebook, you know, staring down the highest fine ever in US history. And so what Google has been doing, they've had for a while now, controls you can go in and you can manually turn things off. That's what you've been doing. Right? Jim 8:33  Right. Exactly. Craig 8:35  Here's what they're doing right now. They will within the next couple of months here probably as early as June. You can already go to Google account. There's simple on off controls for location, history, web and app activity. But what they're adding is auto delete controls. Because if you're searching for new pair of shoes, right? A there's nothing wrong with being ads for shoes. But you don't want to see that for the next six months or whatever. Jim 9:04 I don't. I use that example earlier. Yeah, looking for a specific kind of loafers for the summer. And it's like, okay, I already got them, I don't need the ads anymore. Craig 9:16 Well, they're gonna have a rolling delete function, you can choose a time limit between 3 and 18 months, after which all of the data is going to be automatically deleted on a rolling basis. That I think is great. Yeah, it's a little bit of a privacy thing. It's a balance really, between absolute privacy that Apple afford you and what Google and Facebook have been doing. I think it's great. So keep an eye out for that. We'll make sure we'll let you know when, when that actually happens. So you can turn that on, Jim 9:50 That is good. We're talking about Craig Peterson, a tech talk guru. At the end of this segment, we're going to give you a number and other than the Canadian stuff unless you want to include it in that that stuff that you texted me. He'll give you everything we talked about today and more. An d I will explain to you how to do that. Craig, Facebook, you know, I am a free marketer. Facebook, people have been talking about busting it up about the monopoly busting. First of all, I don't know how you, you do busted up if you wanted to. But what are your feelings? Craig 10:31 Well, I think it could be for instance, they could split out things like some of the advertising, marketing, and you know, they've been buying various apps and things. There's ways to break them up. But personally, I think we've got two basic problems here. One is the government, if you're too big, you are too big to fail. And so businesses don't look at it and say, well, if we paid two billion dollars to buy this other company, that's going to hurt our cash position, or maybe it's not going to be worth it. Maybe we're going to go out of business and lose our phony baloney jobs on the board of directors. Okay. So we come in and we bail out companies. So that's the first problem. And therefore they continue to grow, grow bigger and bigger. And then the Anti Trust Act, and it comes in the government says whether or not they should be able to merge. Free market, they probably should be able to do whatever they want to do, but let them fail. Okay. Number two, the biggest problem I have right now with Facebook and many others is in Facebook is being protected by the federal government, not just from failure, like if they were really hurting financially, but they are being protected because of the way our patent laws are written now. Remember, they were rewritten not too many years back. Right? And the Constitution, they it says that Congress is supposed to promote the product, rest of science and useful arts by securing for limited times the right to their discovery, writing. Okay. So what the government's doing now is they're allowing Facebook to say, Well, you've got a business process, you've got a way of selling advertising, you've got a way of connecting families and people together, etc, etc. So the government is now enforcing the monopoly. So you can have another little Facebook come up. So right now you you've got somebody that is kicked off of Facebook, demonetized on YouTube, whatever it is. problem was, they would go to a different platform, and they'd be often running, there shouldn't be a half a dozen Facebook competitors out there right now that are doing quite well. But because of the way the patent laws are written, and they don't need to be this way, they are not conforming with the basics of what the Constitution says. But because the way they're written, Facebook can take their lawyers, can sue the company to death very, very quickly. Yeah, so they're just not bothering to try and compete. We've got to take the right to an invention, codified that in law, but an idea is not an invention. The next logical step in software is not an invention, you can tell upset about this, because I had this happened to me. I've had Microsoft do this sort of thing to friends of mine. It's a terrible thing. And it's resulting in a real bad situation in the economy for consumers. Jim 13:30 I couldn't agree with you more. I could not agree with you more, because it's just that I think it you know, like people talk about where's the conservative Facebook? Where's that? Where's their Facebook for that? We know that when you do a Google search, there's evidence to suggest that you're going to get CNN, you're going to get CNN, New York Times, and you're going to get the Washington Post, even though those are not the sites with the most volume and that's just not fair. And there should be competition in that market. All right. We're out of time Craig but we're not out of material for the listeners. If you text my name to this number. Craig 14:21 855-385-5553. That's 855-385-5553. Jim 14:25 You will hear from my passionate friend Tech Talk guru Craig Peterson. And he'll provide this information to you. Standard data and text rates apply, and he will not annoy you and he won't sell your name to somebody who will try to sell you a supplement. Okay, so don't worry about it Craig, great segment. Thank you so much for your time. Craig 14:49 Hey, thank you. I'm gonna climb down off my soapbox and get back door. Jim 14:52 No. You get on that soapbox anytime you want a great job, Craig, thank you very much. Craig 14:57  Thanks. Jim 14:57  All right, a final word when we return. You're listening to the Jim Polito show, your safe space. Craig 15:03 Whoo, I think maybe I'm finally calming down a little bit. Well, it got me going. Anyways, have a great day. We'll be back on tomorrow. Take care everybody. Bye bye. --- Don't miss any episode from Craig. Visit http://CraigPeterson.com/itunes. Subscribe and give us a rating! Thanks, everyone, for listening and sharing our podcasts. We're really hitting it out of the park. This will be a great year!  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

What do Insurance Companies say about Cyber Attacks?  It might surprise you. What is two-factor authentication and should you use it?  Today I discuss my thoughts on this What automatic feature has Google added, Listen in, for more info on this Should we have government protected Tech monopolies? My thoughts about this and more For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment; it might contain errors. Airing date: 05/11/2019 Cybersecurity Breaches Are Your Fault - Can't Make Insurance Claim - Google's New Automatic Feature - Facebook Is Government Protected Monopoly Craig Peterson 0:04 Hello, everybody, Craig Peterson here, Hey, are you a business owner? Do you work in a business? Are you may be a little concerned about cybersecurity? And maybe you have insurance for a hack. I know a lot of insurance companies have been kind of adding that type of rider on lately. Well, I got some news for you today. The whole thing here about two-factor authentication and Apple, you know, the most security you can have the best security is something you have along with something, you know. Well, that's what 2FA is all about. And we're going to talk about that, what Apple's doing, what you can do, and what we do ourselves and for our clients to keep data safe. Google, Oh, my gosh, they are doing something good. We'll tell you about that and how to take advantage of they're forgetting a promise that they've just made. A really interesting response here from this is a company we use called Duo and their CEO talking about cybersecurity today. And he says the businesses are doing a whole lot of it. But too much funding is going into cybersecurity right now. Because there's so much money that's getting into the whole cybersecurity realm. The CEO and founder or co-founder of a company called Duo, D-U-O, Security. They were bought recently by Cisco. And we were using them before Cisco bought them. It's funny. That seems to happen a lot to us. Meraki, we were Meraki guys. And then Cisco bought them. Duo guys, and many others, Snort and the list goes on and on. But he said that cybersecurity and the investments that funding going into them is way overhyped in a lot of breaches because we're getting the basics wrong. That is absolutely true. And I got to tell you that now. It's not overhyped in that you're not at risk, because you are we've seen the statistics, the hard statistics, even from people admitting that their businesses were hacked. More than half of all businesses say they have already been hacked. Okay. So that's not what he's talking about. He's talking about the money that's going into funding some of these cybersecurity startups. And I can really see this, I understand what he's talking about here. Because so much of the vulnerability that we have is pretty darn basic. And it goes back to passwords. And in the case of Duo Security, the whole concept of two-factor authentication. So here are the basics. In case you're wondering, we're talking about fishing scams. A couple more here. But phishing scams, of course, are those emails that come in that make it look like whoa, wait a minute, now. This is a legitimate email or it's not and then people fall for them. Right. So the basics are phishing, scam, stolen password, and employees using devices that are not up to date or patched. And that's what we really, really emphasize with our clients. One of the biggest services we offer is making sure the machines are all patched up. We do it right. So something messes up. You know, it's our problem and we take care of it. Craig 3:42  Stolen user credentials leading cause of breaches. We know about, for instance, Senator Maggie Hassan from New Hampshire and her staff member who admitted to stealing passwords using a keylogger apparently on this senators computer are they. I don't know could even make a movie about this, it'd be pretty boring, wouldn't it frankly. A good book about that, by the way, A Thousand Miles, look it up if you haven't read it already. But smart attackers are going after people now not just systems because that's where the money is. It's kind of the basics. Now, this guy is a very interesting guy. And let's talk about Duo here for a minute, we are the full disclosure a Duo reseller. D-U-O, you can find them online. And they have some very cool technology that we tie into these special fobs, these special little USB keys that allow us to identify ourselves and who we are. So here's what happens too. We have it tied into, for instance, our iPhones. So if we try and log into a system that's, that's privileged, you know, particularly something that has any form of customer information on it, the system comes up and says, Okay, I need to authenticate you. So it now sends a special message to our iPhone. And the iPhone has a thumbprint reader on it. So we have to unlock our iPhone. And then we're going to Duo, and Duo's telling us because it popped up on our phone, hey, somebody is trying to gain access. And then you accept it. You say, yeah, that was me, it's fine. And you give it your thumbprint and a code. And now you can log into that website, you can get on to that computer, you can use that software. DUO is just absolutely fantastic. And frankly, it is crazy important for you to have something like this in your business. And that takes us back to what Apple is doing right now. Some people are annoyed by this, Apple's two-factor authentication. I don't know if you're using anything but remember what I just said the most secure way? Well, the most secure way of securing a computer is to unplug it, rip out all the wires and put it in a vault, right with no electricity. But if you needed to be able to use the computer, two-factor authentication works. And that's part of what Duo is providing here. And just texting, texting, phone numbers back and forth, doesn't cut it, by the way. It sends you a message and you respond because people can steal your phone number. And then life gets really complicated, doesn't it? It gets really competent very quickly. And we've seen that again. And again, people stealing, for instance, Bitcoin accounts, but also stealing access to regular bank accounts and tens of thousands of dollars have been stolen out of it. So what Apple did is this is pre-Duo, pre-a lot of these things, is Apple said well wait a minute, most of our customers have multiple devices. So when I logged onto my computer sitting right here in front of me today, it had a message because this is an Apple computer. And it had a little message and the message said, someone just started using your account on this day and time at this location. And this is the type of computer, was that you? And of course, it was me. So I said yeah, cool. But before I logged into this computer, and I was installing a brand new wealth new to me, right, it's actually kind of old MacBook Air. And I put my account on there and I put my Apple credentials on there. Apple sent a special message to my iPhone saying hey Craig somebody is trying to log on creating an account, etc, etc is this you? So with Apple's two-factor authentication turned on, every time you attempt to sign into an account, you're going to enter your password. And then you're going to receive a second security notification that might come through on your desktop, on your laptop on your iPhone, on your iPad on your iWatch right? Actually, Apple Watch, they should have called it iWatch. Craig 7:59 And then usually it looks like a text message. It's not a text message. In this case, it's actually built-in, it's a utility part of the operating system, it gives you this six to eight digit code, and you entered into the website. Now in most cases, the websites are going to send you a text I already explained why that's a bad idea. And why it's a good idea to use Duo, it usually takes us a few weeks from start to finish to get a company switched over to Duo, because there's a lot of configuration that has to happen and training that has to happen. And you have to get the right little devices for people to use. But here's what you should do. If you have an Apple device, you should be using their two-factor authentication, because it gets around all of the problems you have with Android devices, for instance, that are receiving SMS messages again, that's what I use Duo, it works on Android as well. So make sure you turn it on, don't turn it off, you're going to get it's going to say Apple ID verification code. And you have to pull that up from another Apple device where you're going to click Allow. But what amazes me, frankly, is that there is a lawsuit going on right now and some people are frustrated and upset about this if you can believe it. So here are some claims in the lawsuit. Apple turned on two-factor authentication without his approval. This guy's name is Brodsky. Yeah. Well, he's trying to help you, you idiot. Two-factor authentication takes too long to set up. No, it doesn't. It's difficult to use. No, it's not. It can't be turned off. After using it for 14 days what logging into a device can take up to five minutes. Oh my gosh. So you might think that you shouldn't use it or simply turn it off like this Brodsky guy that's brought this lawsuit, and I'm sure it's just one of these deepest pockets lawsuits, just like these lawsuits that we're hearing about all the time. Oh, you offended me, you have to remove that because it offends me. Really? One person, a dozen people out of how many millions, we're not offended by that. Forget about it. Okay. But you know, Brodsky is correct that you only have a 14 day trial period. But that should be enough time to figure if you want to use two-factor authentication. And after that's passed that 14 days, you have to continue using it. So the bottom line to everybody out there, use two-factor authentication. If you can, don't use your cell phone for it. Craig 10:35  Now, let me give you a little insider secret that I've never heard anybody else talk about. But I think is really handy. You can get a phone number from Google Voice. Have you seen this? Again, another service that I used before Google bought it, Google Voice, they'll give you a phone number, it's free. Now they're going to record your phone calls and your voice messages. They take the voice message, they turn it into text and they text it to you it comes up in their app, it's really, really, really handy. Obviously, you don't want anything too confidential on Google Voice. However, here's the win, when it comes to a Google Voice phone number, or within many cases with a VOIP provider Voice over IP provider, when it comes to these numbers. They can't be stolen from you. Because there's no Sim, there's no little chip, a little SIM card that you put into the phone. That's how people get in around this. That's how people are stealing phone numbers. So if you use your Google Voice number for a website that does not support things, like Duo. So it doesn't support full two-factor authentication, you're going to be all set. It's going to be really nice. So little trick there, right? It can't be stolen it not the normal way anyway, they can't just do the cloning or duplication or try and get your sim move to another phone because there was never a sim there in the first place. Craig 12:40  While we're on Google and before we get to our little warning here about the insurance for cybersecurity and CIOs, I get another Google thing. This is from the Associated Press and it was published in Forbes magazine. This is a win I think for everybody. But you have to know about it. In order to take advantage of this. I'm glad they're doing this. Facebook here another story. They are a government protected a monopoly. And they certainly are. I've had problems with patent law for quite a while particularly when it comes to software and processes. You know, way back when there's a great story. It's up on my website, http://CraigPeterson.com. 1954, you've heard this story, I'm sure if you've ever taken a business class. Ray Kroc does that name ring a bell to you? Ray Kroc, K-R-O-C. How about Illinois? How about just outside of Chicago? Anyways, this guy Ray Kroc in 1954 visited a hamburger stand in Southern California. And Ray was selling milkshake mixers and was very interested in how these brothers Richard and Maurice, were able to sell so many milkshakes, this small stand, and I think it was they ordered a four milkshake mixer. So it did four milkshakes at the same time. So he started to look into this about more, a little bit more a little further. He was really impressed. freshly cooked hamburgers delivered to the customers based on an assembly line. Of course, we're talking about Richard Maurice McDonald here in case you didn't know and Ray Kroc decided, wait a minute now this looks absolutely amazing. It works, so well. Ray Kroc stole the idea. You know, he tried to work out a licensing deal and everything. We're not going to get into the whole story here. But the success of McDonald's led to Burger King, Burger Chef, Carl's Jr. Hardee's, Jack in the Box, that used to be one of my favorites when I lived in California, and hundreds of other small hamburger joints and of course, that led up to what we have today with Quoba and other different types of fast food restaurants. Well, the evolution of fast food in America would have been completely different if the McDonald brothers could have applied for a patent to claim exclusivity for the idea of using an assembly line to make hamburgers. Craig 14:44 Intellectual property, you know, look at article one section eight of the Constitution. Congress was charged to promote the progress of science and useful art by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. Craig 15:07 Well, the McDonalds brothers, McDonald brothers did not go for a patent. They didn't apply for this federal protection for their design because it was not a writing, or an invention. They just use existing technology more reasonably and more efficiently than others. And the way it's supposed to work in the patent office is that if something is an obvious next step in the evolution of a business evolution of a process, the evolution of a machine, it's not patentable. However, because there are so many patents being applied form because there's so much technology involved and so much knowledge they need patents are being given willy nilly, it's absolutely amazing. But the greater good was served by allowing businesses to reverse engineer these clever ideas that they saw in patents and spread it from sea to shining sea. Reverse engineer, not just things in patents, because of course, you have a certain amount of exclusivity. But people would take it, they look at the patent, they would modify it enough so that they could start producing something that wasn't covered by that patent. Well, today, fast forward to Facebook and Google and other social media platforms that are banning people for their political beliefs. And in reality, in a healthy society, in a healthy economy where we didn't have the type of crazy overextended patent laws that we have here. Facebook would have been reverse engineered 20 times by now. And people who were banned would have simply gone somewhere else. Well, instead of that our government and the way these laws are set up now is protecting Facebook and these other companies at the point of a gun. Right? Because it breaks the law, see what ultimately happens to those guys and gals that show up in your door? Do they have a gun with them? Or don't they right? So Facebook and other social media sites and other companies are government protected monopolies. They've been able to convince the patent office that their business and their business model is an invention that should be protected by intellectual property laws. Now we have the Department of Justice and the federal courts out there acting as strong arms, strong men, making sure nobody competes with them because they say, this is our business process. We have our process patent on that. Craig 17:41 And then, of course, they have enough lawyers to protect it. Craig 17:44 You end up with people like Mark Zuckerberg, who has a crazy, crazy wealth. But is he really helping to further even other sites that are out there social media sites, of course not? He buys them if they're doing fairly well. And he squeezes them, even when he's buying them. So Zuckerberg didn't invent anything, he didn't invent the computer, he didn't invent the microchip. All he did was started messing around with Atari Basic programming when he was a kid. to reward someone who's the first to use an invention to arrive an inevitable function only crushes the competition. And that's what we have today. So that's my word for today. Facebook is a government protective monopoly. And we have to change our patent laws. We've got to set it up so that these obvious inventions if you will, just aren't covered by it anymore. Craig 18:48  Okay, let's get into Google here, let's finished that one up. And then we'll get into the insurance and our big warning to Chief Information Officers and business owners. Google will now automatically delete your data for you. This just came out about a week or so ago. This was in front of the Google IO Developer Festival. That was last week as well. But in their security blog, the product managers for Google search and maps say that Google is going to make managing your data privacy and security simpler. So you can already go into your settings in your Google account, you can get simple on-off controls for location history, web and app activity, which I do I have that turned off. And you can choose to delete all or part of that data manually, which I've also done. First, I downloaded it because I wanted to see what Google had about me, right. And what's going to be rolled out now is what's called auto delete controls. So you can set time limits on how long Google can save your data, that going to be huge. They're saying that this is going to arrive within weeks and new controls are going to apply to location history, web browsing, Google searches, app activity data to start with, you're going to be able to choose a time limit of between 3 and 18 months afterward, the data will be automatically deleted on a rolling basis. So thank goodness. But remember, you can already manually delete it if you want. But the ability to delete automatically is long overdue, and I think it's going to help us right. I don't mind them tracking my searches and saying well Craig is looking for a new car, so I'm going to show him this ad because this new car is going to fit. But I don't want that following me for the rest of my life. I don't want to see the car ads after I bought a new car right? So being able to have that automatically purged I think is going to be absolutely phenomenal. Craig 20:53  You got to see this video. This I found this on Digg and I put it up on my website http://CraigPeterson.com. Wow, this is a video that was taken by a guy working inside a scam call center over in India. This is a webcam view that he shows the software they're using. You can listen in on some of the conversations. And this is in a city called Kolkata. I guess. K-O-L-K-A-T-A. Craig 21:21 I don't think that's Calcutta, Kolkata. Craig 21:25 And there's a group of scammers hunting for victims to swindle and what they do and how they do it. And you know what? You got to watch this again http://CraigPeterson.com, it was a bit of a shocker to me. But these guys think that that they have just as much right to your money to your house to your belongings as you do. And they do everything they can to steal it from you. And why not? You're just a rich American. What do they care? Right? Craig 21:50  Okay, on to this. This is from Forbes magazine. Again, up on http://CraigPeterson.com. A new cybersecurity report is out there warning CIOs if you're breached or hacked, it's your own fault. Now think of that when it comes to cybersecurity insurance so many businesses have been purchasing. In fact, this is one of the topics I'm covering. UNH extension here to mastermind is the insurance side of cybersecurity. And what does it mean to you? What does it mean to me? The majority of businesses in the US and UK are still leaving their doors wide open to attacks. I'm going to be doing some training coming up here before summer. So keep an eye out for that on what to do how to lock up your business before summer comes okay. Craig 22:41 But for all of this focus, we've had on cybersecurity, all of this money that's getting invested. Most of us are still incredibly overexposed.  It's just crazy. These attacks can wipe out your business entirely can stop it for maybe a few hours or, or something somewhere in between. But there was this new cybersecurity survey that was conducted by endpoint management specialists. And also some market researchers Van Bourne, Vanson Bourne. They questioned 690 operations and IT security decision-makers across the US and UK found that 60% of the organizations had been breached in the last two years. And 31% said they'd been breached more than once. What's going on people? Are you just confused? Craig 23:36 Make sure you sign up, http://CraigPeterson.com/subscribe. You can get my free training and I have completely free training, not upselling. Okay, I have my paid courses as well. But I'm trying to get the word out. Okay. The vast majority of the successful attacks are using known vulnerabilities in well-known software that has already had patches available by software vendors. The next one down is people falling for email attacks, which can also be prevented. No, they can't be prevented by going out and buying Barracuda spam firewalls. And no, okay, you got to do this right. But my goodness, my goodness, the CIO's team doesn't actually even know in most of these cases here, what the hardware is, it's out there, what software it's running on how they're going to patch it. They don't even know the machines exist. And we see that even in small businesses, you walk in how many computers you have, well, we just have three. And then you start poking around, you find out Oh, wow, they've got this Android tablet, an Android phone is connecting to the business WiFi. And therefore now the business computers are completely exposed. Plus people are working from home, they're using their laptops, using computers right from home. So now that whole network is exposing, that computers now exposed to the home network to the business network, because they're not using the VPN the way supposed to VPN is supposed to be used because they're using the wrong software. Again, and again and again and again. And again. You know, even the IT people, you know, we run into brake fixed shops all the time and the so-called managed services vendors that just have no idea what they're doing. None. Because all they have to do is no more than you know, listen, everybody, it's your responsibility to make sure your business is safe and you cannot pass it off. Okay, here's a quote again. This is from Samir, in the article you see up on my website about CIOs, it's your responsibility. A Forrester industry analyst who's tracking 150 or so security companies said that he's hearing about 5 or 10 new ones almost every weekend security space. And each one is talking of bigger and worse threats and the rest. Craig 26:09 It's just absolutely amazing. It's I see it again. And again. People go when they take a course. they've got their course on security. And now they think that they're an expert, right? No, a two-week course, a six-month course does not make you an expert. And I know there are a few of you guys because you've reached out to me who listened to this on the radio or on iTunes or on YouTube, who have signed up for cybersecurity classes. I think that's a great thing. But also those people aren't thinking that, well, I've got my shingle I'm now an expert right? No. Six months in an intensive cybersecurity course is going to get your career launched. And God bless you. You're in a great community. Great career ahead of you. Okay, where there's going to be a five-year career or lifetime career. But those people cannot be the people who are running the cybersecurity for your business. You're the one that has to take it. Take that bull by the horns. If you are one of those people, reach out to me, me@CraigPeterson.com. I am more than glad to share resources with you. Absolutely free ok. Me@CraigPeterson.com. I can help you out. So frustrating because remember, this happened to me 25 years ago, and I got it taken care of back then. And so I understand where you're at, I was there. I almost lost my business because of a hack. And I don't want you to lose yours. Okay, or your job or your career. Anyhow, me@CraigPeterson.com. Make sure you subscribe to my weekly newsletter. You'll get security updates what's happening out there http://CraigPeterson.com/subscribe. Have a great week everybody. We'll be back on Monday. Be back with Jack Heath on Monday during drive time and the Jim Polito drink drive time. Ken and Matt and much more. So keep an ear out. Or look me up, http://CraigPeterson.com. Take care. Bye-bye. ---  Related articles: Brain Scans Reveal A ‘Pokémon Region’ In Adults Who Played As Kids Facebook Is A Government-Protected Monopoly Google Confirms It Will Automatically Delete Your Data — What You Need To Know Apple’s 2FA Might Be A Nuisance (But You Need To Turn It On Anyway) New Cybersecurity Report Warns CIOs — ‘If You’re Breached Or Hacked, It’s Your Own Fault’ ‘Too much funding going into cybersecurity today’: hacker turned CEO What It’s Like In A Scam Call Center Baltimore City Hall Computer Network Infected With Ransomware Virus, Officials Say --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Craig is on the Jim Polito show. Today they talked about the Space Plane that could take you from NYC to London in less than an hour. They also talked about the facial recognition technology used in airports. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: ‘Spaceplane’ That Could Fly From NYC To London In 1 Hour Makes Breakthrough Departing The U.S. From An Airport? Your Face Will Be Scanned ---  Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors. Airing date: 05/07/2019 New Space Plane - Airport Face Scanning Jim Polito 0:02 He's here, that music means that he's here. But you know what he's always here because at the end of this segment, I'm going to tell you how you can keep in touch with our Tech Talk guru Craig Pearson. But here is the man right now. Good morning. Craig Peterson 0:16 Hey, good morning. And speaking to that we've got a kind of a big deal going on right now with Dell. I'm going to be sending out some information on that today. Jim 0:27 Oh, what's going on? Craig 0:28 Oh, man. Jim 0:31  Oh, boy. Craig 0:33 Yeah. Well, we know that remote support can be handy. But it really looks like what's happened here with some of these computers. And, and we're going to be picking up and get into more specifics later today. But they have put into the machine itself, the ability for people to do remote support, and it has full privileges. Jim 0:56 Here we go. So Dell. You're getting a Dell dude. So Dell put this in, I mean, you know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, they put this in, so that it would make it easier for them to help you. So that when you're talking to somebody in Mumbai, on customer service, that they can help you. But now the bad guys know how to do it. Craig 1:23 Exactly. So it's a remote assist vulnerability, it's kind of a very bad thing. Because it does allow anyone basically on your network. So another computer's been compromised on your network, it allows that computer to be able to get on take over and have complete control of your computer. And it gets very concerning when you talk to you about businesses, with the large numbers of records that are store personal information, confidential information. And when you're talking about servers that might have millions of records them. So it's kind of a very big deal. So keep an eye out because I'll be sending them or specific instructions on what to do later on. Jim 2:09 All right, and we'll tell everybody how they can get on that list. And it's very simple. And it's very helpful. Okay, so let's get to this. The technology now exists. It's not Buck Rogers stuff. It's not Star Wars. The technology now exists to be able to have a craft, I guess I would say an aircraft leave New York or DC, with passengers and then land in London, One hour later. Is that that true? The technology exists? Craig 2:51 Almost. It's less than an hour later. Jim 2:54  Wow. Craig 2:56 It's absolutely amazing. Going from London to Australia in four hours. What we're talking about is a plane. And it's designed to go off into the highest levels of the atmosphere kind of skimming outer space, if you will. Well think about the Space Station, for instance, that's orbiting the Earth, the entire Earth in 90 minutes. It's moving very, very fast and when you get into outer space, certain problems go away. But other problems raised its ugly head. And one of the things that's really been a problem, and this was a problem for the culprits as well. I bet it's something you've never thought about here. Jim. Jim 3:40 Go ahead. Lay it on me Alexandria Casio Cortez. Craig 3:46 Here's the issue. If you're in outer space, one of the huge problems you have is what you do with the excess heat? For instance, think about are our bodies right now when you get hot you sweat. And it helps to cool down your body. If you're standing in 70 degree air. Are you cold or hot? You're probably okay. Right? Jim 4:15 Yeah. You're about comfortable. Yeah. Craig 4:16 How about 70 degrees water? Jim 4:19  No. Craig 4:21 And the reason for that of course, is the water is pulling the heat out of your body. How about in a vacuum? There is nothing to pull the heat away. Jim 4:31 No, there isn't. Craig 4:33 And so many people think all outer space, it's cold. It's absolute zero. And you know, and it's easy to get rid of the heat. It is not easy to get rid of the heat. And it's been one of the problems was the we've had to solve over the years. What do we do with the excess heat for creating? When it come to these airplanes, and this is true with the Concorde, they are restricted because one of the things you don't want to have happen is have your engine melt as you're trying to fly, right? Jim 5:02 Right. Because the heat has to, right, the heat. I mean, in normal atmospheric conditions, it's going to cool. Craig 5:07 It will cool. The Concorde even is limited by this problem. Well, they just solved the problem. Jim 5:17 What did they put like an air conditioner in the engine? Craig 5:20  Yeah, exactly. How did you? Jim 5:23   You know what I didn't even I didn't even realize how brilliant I was. I didn't. Craig 5:29 The company's called Reaction Engines. And they made this precooler that can take the temperature of the compressed air because you remember, these various types of engines, jet pipe engines. Let's leave it at that. Keep it simple. Compressed the air, and they can take that air in the engines move it from 1000 degrees Celsius to room temperature in one 20th of a second. Jim 5:58 Wow. Craig 5:59   It's actually absolutely amazing. Which means now they have solved the last major problem with a high speed hypersonic travel. Jim 6:10 Okay, so let me get this straight. You know the Concorde, which no longer exists? It was a partnership between British Airways on Air France. supersonic jet, I think they were getting you there and what three hours? Craig 6:26 Yeah, mos two is about where they were running. And yeah, it was just it was a few hours I think. Jim 6:34 Okay. So we can go faster because the engine won't overheat. How high up are we going? Craig 6:45 Well, this is this is really neat, when you're talking about faster, our jet fighters etc, can go mos 2 mos 3-ish, as difficult. This can go up to mos 25. Jim 7:00 Wow. That's 25 times the speed of sound, Craig 7:03 You got it. You're absolutely right. Jim 7:05 That's a heck of a sonic boom. Craig 7:08 Isn't that something? So it's going to get high high up in the atmosphere, right on the edge of the atmosphere. It's going to travel kind of get along 25 times the speed of sound, and get you to where you're going anywhere. You can get anywhere in the world in less than four hours with this engine. It is really exciting. We haven't had a big breakthrough like this in a very long time. You know, rocket engines World War Two is kind of when we got, of course. And this is the very next stage here. It's a different engine, it's got that supersonic air intakes the coolers, compressors, and rocket engines on the back. But it is an absolute revolution. And we can expect to start seeing these planes, you know, just in still early testing stage and another five years or so. But it is just absolutely amazing. And once again, without the aid systems in on this. The European Space Agency. The UK Space Agency. And we're talking about technology for cooling using tubes that are thinner than a human hair. With liquid helium in them. So it is very, very cool. And I think it's something AOC might have an issue with. Jim 8:36 .  Yeah, that's I was gonna get at because you know, she wants us all to be on trains and boats. And unless you can make a boat that can get to London in an hour, you know, in Australia in four hours? I don't know. Craig 8:50 Yeah, well and they're also, this isn't just these guys. But there is another race going on right now. There are few jets that are expected to hit the market in next few years that are supersonic and are going to be flown all over the world. They tell some of the problems that have been existing remember the Concorde was designed for the 70s? Jim 9:14 I know. I know. You go to museums now to see the Concorde. I remember the course they only had one crash in their entire history. And it was because it was a piece of debris on the runway in Paris that caused the problem. But no, they had a great safety record. It was very expensive, but people loved it. Craig 9:35 Yeah. This is the future of this along with flying trains. Maybe that's what they should call it. A space train. Jim 9:43 Yeah. If you call it a train, she won't know the difference. All right. We're talking with our good friend, Tech Talk guru Craig Peterson, and all the information here and then this information he talked about with Dell, he'll get to you and I'll tell you how you can do it at the end of the segment. But before we go, so before I get on this plane that's going to get me to London in an hour. My face will be scanned. What's what's that all about? Craig 10:13 You saw that didn't you? Jim 10:13 Yeah, I did. In the material you sent you're going to scan my face for what? Craig 10:18 Yeah, well, it's already started happening. And this is kind of interesting, because the US Customs and Border Protection is using some facial recognition technology already at 15 airports. And what they're doing is they're matching the faces against passport photos, and what's called open source records, things like everything from drivers licenses through pictures that you might have posted online on social media, etc. Okay. So with the 15 airports that are out there, they've already had 15,000 flights if they want to just what they do is they have the camera right by the Okay, so they know you're about to leave the country. Of those 15,000 flights, over 2 million passengers have been scammed. 7,000 passengers were already caught as overstays on their visas. Craig 11:19 7,000. And that's what the system and only started in 2017. So Customs and Border Protection is very interested in getting this in use in all airports across the country. It's also been key in identifying imposters, people who trying to enter the US don't match because you remember they're matching it up passports. If you don't match up record for that driver's license or passport, your face doesn't match. They will flag you right then in there for additional inspection. Remember it's kind of like 911. They used to have tables set up right by the gate. So they're going to be doing that again. But I gotta say with 15 airports catching 7,000 people who are here, effectively, illegally. I don't know if we can even say that anymore. Right? Jim 12:10 Well you can say it on the show Craig. Feel free. Craig 12:16 Once they spread this out it's really going to cause havoc for people who are in the country illegally. People who for instance, might have been apprehended as a border, given a court date to show up didn't show we have their photos. If they go anywhere near the airport, they're going to be caught. Jim 12:37 Wow, now that facial recognition, or application of that technology doesn't bother me. Craig folks can get this information plus a whole lot more plus the problem with Dell you discussed earlier. If they text my name to this number. Craig 12:57 855-385-5553. That's text Jim to 855-385-5553. Jim 13:10 Standard data and text rates apply. And you'll get all this important information plus more as Craig just said. When an issue comes up, he will send it to you, he will not bother you. He will not try to sell you something Craig thanks so much. Always a pleasure. Craig 13:27 Thanks. Take care Jim. Jim 13:29  You too. Bye bye. All right, a final word about nicknames when we return. You're listening to the Jim Polito show your safe space.  --- Don't miss any episode from Craig. Visit http://CraigPeterson.com/itunes. Subscribe and give us a rating! Thanks, everyone, for listening and sharing our podcasts. We're really hitting it out of the park. This will be a great year!  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

There is some big stuff going on this week we’re going to be talking about in today’s show so don’t miss out! Imagine a trip from the east coast across the pond in less than a hour. Problem solved. There is a really cool new engine technology that will allow us to go as fast as we want. Facebook in the News Again. Fines and Problems but he say’s he’s changed. Did you think Amazon was going to be the first to use drones to deliver stuff? Well, hey, guess what it ain’t Amazon. Another giant already got already FAA approval. Have you traveled recently? Well, there is a new scanner software/hardware that is being installed in our airports, we’ll talk about how that’s going to affect you. There is a new sign here for early dementia detection. If you can imagine, it has to do with the bad guys. This week I am introducing a new thing — Tools I use: We will start with this one. Slack Listen in to find out how we use it to increase our productivity. For all this and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment; it might contain errors. Airing date: 05/04/2019 Slack Bridging Email - Spaceplane Nearing - Was Zuckerberg Involved In Blackmail - FAA Approves First Drone Delivery - US Airports To Scan All Travelers - Phone Scams And Dementia Craig Peterson 0:00 Hello, hello. Good morning, everybody, Craig Peterson here. We're going to answer some questions for you maybe even questions you weren't aware that you had. Craig 0:15 But man, there is some big stuff going on this week we're going to be talking about. Craig 0:20 I want to start with this Spaceplane thing. I think that's really, really cool. The whole new story about the Zuck came out in the news this week. Craig 0:30 And did you think Amazon was going to be the first to use drones to deliver stuff? Well, hey, guess what it ain't Amazon. At we've got already FAA approval. And new scanner software hardware is going to be installed in our airports, we'll talk about how that's going to affect you. And a new sign here for early dementia detection. And it has to do with the bad guys. Some new creepy billboards you remember from Tom Cruise's movie, and where he's walked by a billboard and it greeted him based on an eye scan, retinal scan from a distance while there's some creepy billboards in London tracking shoppers and kind of cool what they're doing, kind of scary at the same time. And we will start with this one. And it's a tool that I use. And so we'll call this our tool segment today. And our team uses Slack. And if you're a business person, frankly, this works well, for different organizations, it could be your soccer team, etc. You can use it for free on the lower end. But I use it in business and we pay a decent amount of money every month. It's not like crazy. But it allows you to communicate, basically, it replaces email within our team. And it does a very good job of replacing email. They've been out there for about five years, you can find find them online at Slack.com, just like its name says. And they've been trying to kill email, which I don't think will ever go away because we're still sending emails. And now Slack is realized that and they've made email integration and important part of what they're working. So here's what they've done. They have integrated Slack with Office 365. They've also integrated it with email and calendaring, all directly into Slack. Now, that's really something cool. So in a few months from now, with Slack, you'll be able to mention people in a channel who are not necessarily in the channel. And it'll send them an email, or you can even send them a direct message and will route the messages to their email inboxes. I think that's going to be great replies that they make will come straight back into Slack. And the whole back and forth exchange will also transform a full Slack history if the person decides to join Slack. So very cool. I like this. And I'm thinking right now this might be a great way for us to do tech support. And when one of our customers emails tech support goes right into a Slack channel. Now it's not as good as what we're using right now we have some professional tools that track it all and age them and rate and grade and keep notes and stuff. But for the occasional person like somebody pops onto your website, and asks a question, that might actually be really good. So it's great, go check it out. If you're not using it already Slack.com Craig 3:43 Spaceplanes, we thought about these for a very long time. NASA has worked on them. Many companies have worked on. Do remember, the Concorde would travel twice the speed of sound. So what's that? Like 1200 miles an hour, remember the speed of sound, I think it's 600 and something miles an hour. So it traveled very fast, and remember it's faster, twice as fast as the speed of sound. And you could take that from New York to London and return all in the same day. It was just a phenomenal thing. And then they grounded them. That technology was old, it was 30 40 years old. They grounded them when one of the engines sucked some debris off of the runway into an engine and of course, caused the engine to fail. And you know what happened after that. It's pretty bad. Well, the idea of a space plane is taking that whole Concorde approach even further. So whereas the Concorde flew pretty high up, and it did break the sound barrier, if you get into near space, you can travel extremely fast, like some of the satellites are traveling, they orbit the Earth in the matter of minutes, what 90 minutes, I think it is for the space station up there. So you think about that. And wow, why can't we do that? Well, the main reason has to do with heat, can you believe that? Heat. Because you think about our space? What do you think of you think of cold, you think it well, it's going to leach the fluids right out of your body, the heat right out of your body because it's almost absolute zero in outer space. And, you know, that's just going to be terrible. So the biggest problem you have in space people think is, wow, how do I stop from losing all of my heat? Craig 5:32 Well, think about here on Earth, if you are, let's say it's just a regular day outside, let's say it's a nice day, it's 75 degrees outside. For those of you in Celsius, that you know, it's about 20 to 25 maybe degrees outside. And it's a nice day. Are you going to be out there with their sweater on and heavy coat? No, of course not 75 degrees, it's a nice out, the sun can be out, it can be warming you up, you might even be a little bit hot, right, if the humidity is up there. Well, if you're a little hot at 75 degrees, how about Have you jumped into a 75 degree pool? Craig 6:16 That water is going to cool you down very very quickly and you are going to get hypothermic. Then that's going to happen pretty quickly, right? You You're going to have to move you have to keep those muscles go and try and create body heat in order to not die right from from the cold. So what's the difference, then? Why is 75 degree air really nice, but 75 degree water is terribly cold and you can die from it? Well, it's the same type of trick when we're talking about space. The water, of course, is able to suck the heat out of your body and transfer the cold and right it conducts heat fairly well. Air does not conduct heat anywhere near as well as water does. So the air, you're actually kind of insulated, because it's not pulling, pushing the cold in and pulling the warm out. So you see the difference between air and water when it comes to how warm you feel and how cold you might be? Craig 7:26 Well, let's go to outer space. Craig 7:30 Is outer space less dense than water? Yeah. Less dense than air? Oh, yeah. Both right. So there is like basically nothing in outer space. So when you're in outer space, one of the biggest problems you have in space is how do I get rid of the heat I'm generating? Now I'm not saying that if your body was in space, you wouldn't, you wouldn't freeze and crack up and everything else. Okay, don't get me wrong. I'm being very simplistic about this. But in outer space, the real problem they have is getting rid of the heat. Machines inside the space station, generate heat, how do we get rid of that? Because we can't just dump it into the air. We can't use a water chiller right to dump it into the air. We can't just  put a radiator down into a lake or a body of water and have that dissipate the heat, can we because we're in outer space. There's nothing to conduct the heat away. It's a very interesting problem. And when I first heard about this years ago, I really had to think about it. Well, why did the Concorde fly at mach 2 and not faster? And you know, there's a number of reasons for that the type of jets, you know, you get into the ram jets, the scram jets and everything else. And I love this tech, it's so cool. Well, part of the reason it could not go faster is the same reason that we have trouble in space, they can't get rid of the heat, they couldn't get rid of the heat fast enough. And that caused serious problems. And when it comes to a Spaceplane, you've got serious problems there, too. How do you get rid of the heat from the engines. So if you launch in New York heading to London, you're going to go like almost straight up for number of miles, you're going to get into the very high atmosphere. And so that you have something to help you burn and combust and everything else. And then you're going to just run like crazy, until you get into the approach and in the new go back into the main atmosphere and go down. So how do you get rid of the heat while you're up there, and they haven't been able to solve it. Craig 9:47 But this week, this week, it was announced that they have solved that problem. A Spaceplane that can fly 25 times faster than the speed of sound, has passed this testing milestone. Craig 10:03 It can go from London to New York in less than one hour, and could go all the way from London to Australia in four hours. This is a project that the European Space Agency and the UK space agency BA Systems here in the US which of course is owned by Britain. Craig 10:25 It has been working on for quite a while and they came up with reaction engines pre-cooler for the plane. And this is technology lots of travel faster than before. And I hope you're sitting down because this absolutely blows my mind. The pre-cooler is critical because it's required to stop the engine from melting down. Because you can't get rid of the heat when you have that little air up there. And it's able to lower the temperature of compressed air in the engine for more than a thousand degrees Celsius to room temperature in 1/20th of a second. They can take it from 1000 degrees, down to room temperature to 70 degrees to 20ish degrees, 22 Celsius. That's absolutely amazing. This thing apparently has thousands of tubes inside it that's thinner than human hairs. They've got liquid helium that can cool the air as it rushes past. This is not so. So I looked up their timeline. Craig 11:35 They're calling this Sabre, S-A-B-R-E, the next leap forward in powered flight. And they are running behind a little little bit here, which is just too bad. But they they did hit this, this main problem. They did solve it. And they're about four years behind the ears. I can tell looking at this chart from BA systems but absolutely amazing what's happening with that. Craig 12:06 Okay, this, Zuck, let's get on to Facebook, who trusts Facebook anymore, right? But well, we're all still using it. Some people aren't using Facebook anymore. And they're not using it because why bother? Right? It's, I've got something else I like better. Heck, we're using Slack for internal communications or we're, we're doing however, right? People just aren't using it. The younger generations definitely don't use it. They've got all of their Snapchat type things. So the regular Facebook they're not using. So considering all of that, you know, this decline in Facebook users is not terribly surprising. But here's a problem that just came out. Craig 12:52 About 4000 pages have leaked Facebook company documents were obtained by NBC News. Now these things included emails, web chats, presentation, spreadsheets, meeting summaries, and they show how a Zuckerberg along with his board and management team found ways to tap Facebook's trove of user data including information about friends, relationships and photos as leverage over companies it partnered with Yes, indeed, Mark Zuckerberg is alleged to have leverage the information people working at companies that Facebook wanted to partner with. He used information to essentially blackmail them. Craig 13:40 So he was blackmailing. That's my word. That's not what NBC used. They called it leverage. I call it blackmail. He allegedly blackmailed people into making sweet deals for Facebook. He also used it to help his friends. It's just crazy. And in some cases, these documentation seems to show that Facebook would reward favored companies by giving them access to the data of its users and other cases, it would deny user data access to rival companies or apps. And I kind of wonder, thinking back to the Obama, the first Obama run where Facebook is alleged to have given Obama's campaign every piece of data it had, you know, which makes the whole thing with the Trump campaign look like a bunch of amateurs. Craig 14:31 I wonder if that was part of it. I wonder if that's going to come out of NBC would even report on it if it were true, right. Facebook gave extended Amazon access to user data because it was spending money on Facebook advertising. Okay, partnering with social network on the launch of its Fire smartphone. Yeah, wow. Just amazing. Another case Facebook discuss cutting off access to user data for messaging app that have grown to popular that was viewed as a company editor according to the documents. So all of this is rather interesting. By the way, on top of it all, Facebook is facing a record fine, could be as much as $2 billion by the Federal Trade Commission. So Facebook could be seen some hard times in the very near future.  Craig 15:30 Now, let's move on to this story about Amazon and delivery services. Craig 15:32 Amazon, you might know is putting almost a billion dollars into upgrading all of its systems to be able to do same day delivery throughout most of the United States. That my friends is a very, very big deal. And having same day delivery means they're going to take even more business away from other big box retailers. You know, Target and Walmart have both been struggling. We're trying to figure out how do we compete. And so Amazon doing same day delivery is part of its Prime service is really going to hurt them. So they're going to have to step it up. I like what Walmart's done. I don't pay much attention to Target. I'm not a Target fan at all. After their massive data breach, I just I said forget about it. I just don't need to go to a Target anymore. Plus that whole bathroom policy thing. But Walmart has done a lot with having the delivery of your goods being just you can pick it up, you can have it delivered to your house, pre-order it. You can sit in the store while they collect it. They've even got a nice little lounge area for you while you're waiting. You know, they're trying to compete on the ways they can compete and bravo to them.  Craig 16:58 Well, the next step beyond same day delivery is what? Next hour delivery, right. And we saw a couple years ago, it was 711, who tried it. Do remember that this little project that they launched, where they were delivering. The whole idea was they can deliver you your soda and chips for the big game at the very last minute. And I thought that was kind of cool. And it's not a bad idea for 711, frankly, but I guess it didn't work out too well for them because they certainly didn't roll it out further. Well, who's going to win the delivery game? Well, I can tell you here who won the first battle and this is from this week. Google's offshoot job just got the FAA is first go ahead for drone deliveries Google, not Amazon. So the FAA a week ago on Tuesday, authorized something called Wing Aviation. That's a part of Alphabet, which of course is Google Now. They authorized Wing Aviation to start delivering goods via drones later this year. They're going to start delivering commercial packages and unmanned aircraft in Blacksburg, Virginia. I don't know why they're the first ones but they're the first ones. They partnered with Mid Atlantic Aviation Partnership and Virginia Tech, as a participant in the transportation departments unmanned aircraft systems integration pilot program. Craig 18:24 Let's see, TDUA, I know it doesn't really spell anything. So maybe that's why maybe Blacksburg is where Virginia Tech is. This is really cool. This is all part of an initiative to accelerate drone integration to help the Department of FAA devise rules surrounding drones. It's a really important thing, everybody. Craig 18:46 This is the first time the FAA has granted a so called air carrier certification for drone delivery of items like food medicine, small consumer products, Wing plans to reach out to the community before getting started in order to get a sense of its needs. So this is going to be interesting, Amazon we know has been working on drone package delivery. But Amazon Prime Air for quite a while it's got development centers in the US, UK, Australia, France and Israel. George Mason University said a lot of students have some food and drinks be delivered via drone on the ground. We've seen ground drones as well, up in California at UC Berkeley, where Amazon has these little drones that drive around campus to deliver pizza and beer. I don't know about beer, but whatever it is the students can get there on campus. It's Wall Street Journal insane, it probably won't be until 2020 2021, before the FAA implements broader rules that lay out the land, the land really for delivering packages. There's a lot of issues here. But if you look at the picture, I've got it up on my website at http://CraigPeterson.com this drone. And it doesn't look like any drone you like you're likely to have seen before. This thing is called a Wing, it kind of looks like a wing. Actually, what it kind of looks like is a long stick with a bunch of blades on the side that it uses to drive around. So these things can be faster, cleaner, less expensive to transport stuff around our our cities. And did you hear that? Our Roomba just started up here. I got an automated drone, a little little device that crawls around the the studio here and cleans it up. So she's, she's off, I just hit the  switch. It's all controlled by WiFi. Craig 20:42 Okay, I reported earlier about Facebook, and this largest civil fine, it actually might be as much as $5 billion. I miss my note I had put down on that. Okay, if you're departing from a US airport, your face will be scanned, it's already being scanned in many of our airports. And this happens as you're going through security, you might not have known it. But here's what's happening right now the US Customs and Border Protection is going to expand the program and the use of facial recognition technology. And their goal is to identify just about every person leaving the United States on a commercial flight. Now remember US citizens in order to go out and go back in reasonably easily, you need a passport, right? And so they have your face, they have your picture. It's in a massive database, and they're going to start using it. They're already using this particular technology at 15 US airports already grabs a photo of you as you're approaching the airport departure gate. It's then compared to a visa passport applications to look for matches, and then create an exit records they'll know when you leave. Now I imagine they're going to keep track of when you come back as well. Craig 22:07 But if you don't have a match, you're going to get pulled aside for closer inspection by Customs and Border Patrol. Now that's kind of interesting too. Now in the fiscal year 2018 overstayed on these visas was a problem, right. But they didn't have much technology in place to try and find them. And they're saying this is in a report that came out from Customs and Border Patrol. But they're saying that they're going to be scanning 97% of departing commercial air travelers. And they're saying it's highly reliable. They've already scanned 15,000 flights. 7,000 passengers on those 15,000 flights were detected as over stays. Isn't that amazing? And they only started using the system 2017. So you can see why they look at this as an important tool to control access here and watch for visa over stays. Very interesting. Okay. Do you know somebody who's a little older? We only have a couple of minutes left here. Craig 23:16 One of the interesting signs according to see and n report here, interesting signs of dementia, an earlier sign is falling for phone scams. Craig 23:31 So what happens is a scammer call up and they have a cheery voice asking if you can use the first name. She doesn't remember entering the sweepstakes, but he assures her that she's won. What matters is that you've won all you need to do is we've got a unique investment opportunity for you, if you send 200 bucks, you'll get 2000 return. 10 times return on investment. So she transferred 200 bucks to them. And it kept escalating. And this according to Dr. Angela Sanford, this particular case, who practices geriatric medicine is St. Louis University Hospital, she was probably 10 or $12,000, into this before the niece became aware of what was happening. So this patient who was later diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment, had not scored super low on memory test. she said. The problem in her brain affected not the patient's ability to remember, but her ability to judge. So keep an eye out for the seniors, you know, this is a $3 billion dollar industry theft or defraud from millions of seniors. That's according to the DOJ. And these creepy billboards that are tracking shoppers over in the UK, we already know that London is or at least was the most surveilled city in the world. They have the most surveillance cameras up and they use it to identify people. Well, it's not illegal in the UK. And I don't think it's illegal in the US either to scan shoppers and not informed them that you're scanning. So here's what's happening. They have facial recognition software that doesn't recognize you like the, you know, Customs and Border Patrol is doing. But what it does is it recognizes your sex and your mood. So it knows well, we just had a bunch of men and their young men walk into the store, and they are happy, they're excited. They're sad, they're angry, it figures out all of the sound. So the Sunday Times over there in the UK, discovered 50 of these screens that show ads based on who's walking by, their sex and their mood. Isn't that something. And the companies are claiming they comply with the law, and the legal requirement. An outdoor in the first tech companies use this kind of tech. It's kind of interesting. They call it the lookout system. And it's being used on billboards. So you can see a picture. Again, it's up on my site at http://CraigPeterson.com. But there's showing this Swarovski I guess it is ad, oh, I see they're jewelry, I thought it was a clothing ad. And a big, big billboard, one of these bright LED billboard, and a little tiny camera on top kind of reminds me of an iPad or something right? And they measure your level of happiness or sadness, and they end dwell time. And they're changing the billboard based on the audience. So expect more of that in the future. I'm sure that's coming here. If it's not here already. Craig 26:48 Well, thanks for listening today. I appreciate you guys being with us. I ran a test the last couple of weeks over on YouTube. I put my shows up there and you know, I'm showing the articles and some photos and things, doing commentary, just like this show here on the radio and the podcasts that I do. And I'd love to get your feedback. Is it worth me taking the time to do that? Because man, I'm sinking a lot of time into all of this, keeping everybody up to date. If you think it's worth your time, let me know. If you want to check it out. Just go to http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube. Just my name http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube and it'll take you over there. And then email me@CraigPeterson.com and let me know. Just me@CraigPeterson.com. Let me know what you think. You can always send questions or comments and keep an ear out too. I've got another course coming up another three or four courses actually. Free courses, absolutely free. No selling involved. So keep an eye out for those two. http://CraigPeterson.com/subscribe to find out more. Have a good great week everybody. Take care. Bye bye. ---  Related articles: What Principles Used The Kentucky Derby Apply To Cyber Security Blackmail Afoot: Mark Zuckerberg “Leveraged” Facebook User Data To Fight Rivals And Help Friends, Leaked Documents Show ‘Spaceplane’ That Could Fly From NYC To London In 1 Hour Makes Breakthrough Departing The U.S. From An Airport? Your Face Will Be Scanned Creepy Billboards Are Tracking British Shoppers With Built-In Cameras That Target Ads Based On Your Mood Google’s Wing – Not Amazon — Has Landed The First Approval For Drone Delivery Falling For Phone Scams Could Be An Early Sign Of Dementia, Study Says Facebook Expects To Face Largest Ever Civil Fine For User Privacy And Data Breaches Slack Is Bridging Email To Chat, Improving Calendar Integration And Search --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Did you know that driving a Tesla or a Prius causes more CO2 emissions than a diesel car? Find out more as Craig talks about it with Jim Polito. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: Driving A Tesla Results In More CO2 Than A Mercedes Diesel Car, Study Finds ---  Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors. Airing date: 04/30/2019 Driving A Tesla Model 3 Or A Prius - Causes More CO2 Emissions -Study Out Of Germany Craig Peterson 0:00 Hey, good morning, everybody Craig Peterson here. And this morning, I had a really great chat. I use the whole segment with Jim Polito this morning. Because he was really into this study that I talked a bit about on Saturday. So we want to do even more detail than I did on my radio show that came out of Germany, showing that the Mercedes C220D, yes, the D stands for diesel. That Mercedes in over its lifetime emits less CO2 per kilometer than a Tesla Model 3. So here we go with Jim. Oh, and I got cut off in the middle. I'm going to be interested to hear what they had to say when that happened too. Jim Polito 0:47 Here he is. The man. He's not a myth. But he is a legend. I'm talking about our Tech Talk guru Craig Peterson. We're going to talk some interesting stuff about cars and CO2. Joining me now. Here he is, Craig Peterson. Hello, sir. Craig 1:03 Hey, good morning. How are you doing, Jim?  Jim 1:08 I'm good. I'm good. I was when I got the material from you. I said, Oh, boy, this is right up my alley. This is like the plastic bag ban. Everybody out there trying to do something, be a do-gooder. And then you're not really doing any good. You're actually making things worse. You're telling me that the zero emission Tesla Model 3 will actually produce more CO2, not out of its tailpipe but more CO2 than a Mercedes diesel. Tell me. I love it. Well, you know, I think that's why you put it at the top of the list for today. So you knew that I would, I would eat this one up. Tell me how this is possible. Craig 1:58 Well, this is really, really interesting. And it what it goes back to Jim, if I have to boil this all down, it goes back to government interference. And yes, I'm calling it interference, government interference in the natural course of Science and Technology. You know, what's happened here is similar to what happened when, remember we said, Oh, we've got to start making ethanol and putting ethanol into our gas tanks, because it's going to cut back on emissions, it's going to cut back on CO2. Remember that whole thing? Right? Jim 2:34   Yes, yes. Craig 2:36  And what state is of absolute first voting for the president in the nation when it comes to the primary? Jim 2:44 If you get rid of the caucus Iowa. The real voting is in New Hampshire. Craig 2:49 It is. But Iowa is number one. It's the first, right? Jim 2:53 Yeah. it is. It's a caucus. Yeah. Craig 2:55 And when what happens in Iowa, what do they grow? What's their economy out there? Jim 3:01 They grow that stuff. That they make into ethanol that clogs my old carburetor on my old Harley, yes. They make ethanol. Craig 3:13 Yeah. And it destroys small engines and everything else. So it has been a literal disaster. It is caused massive die off in the Gulf of Mexico, because the farmers are now trying to grow corn all the way along the Mississippi Delta, not delta, but the Mississippi River, right? They're trying to grow the corn to be able to make the cellulose to make the ethanol to go into our gas as as mandated. Remember, President Obama was trying to up into 15, or even 20% of the fuel we buy to be ethanol. So they're trying to grow it. They're using all these fertilizers that get into the water supply. And are killing, there is a huge have a have a look at a map, if you don't believe me, there is a huge die off hundreds of square miles of everything in the Gulf of Mexico, dying by the mouth of the Mississippi River. And we got major red tides caused by this. And another thing is okay, so it has been a disaster. And by the way, the ethanol in your gasoline has ended up causing more CO2 to go into the air than if we did not have ethanol than the gasoline. So there's an example of what happened when governments rushed into fear, right? Here's, this is another one now. There was a study some years ago, that showed that a Hummer produced less emissions, then the Toyota Prius. Jim 4:52 What? It that how we're gonna get to the Tesla 3 in this thing, because now you're getting close to a vehicle that's got a battery is that the key here? Craig 5:02 The battery is kind of the key. But there's one other thing that Hummer's going to last maybe a million miles with engine rebuild . Jim 5:10 Yeah. They are. They're very. Yeah, they absolutely are. Craig 5:13 Think of all of the energy that goes into manufacturing a new Prius every couple of hundred thousand miles. And then all of the energy that goes into making the batteries. Now the batteries are the killer here, when it comes to the Tesla Model 3, when it comes to the Prius and some of these other full electric cars that are out there right now, these zero emissions cars. And what happens is that they have to mine, of course, these minerals, right? Jim 5:43 Right. So for the battery. Yeah. Craig 5:46 Yeah, exactly. So one of the places they mind is in Quebec, just north of us. And they mind some of these minerals. And by the way, it is so toxic, that NASA uses the area around these mines in Canada, but at least not in the US, right? It's so toxic, that nothing lives for miles and miles, all vegetation is dead. There are no animals. And we use it, NASA uses it to test landers, lunar landers. Martian landers. Jim 6:21  Oh my god. Really? Craig 6:22 Okay, so you have all that toxicity. But anyways, they take that they ship those components via truck, via ship. And it makes quite a nice little trip, it goes to China, it goes to Japan, it goes back to China, it goes back to the US, it's made into a special kind of foam and everything. It's incredible. So add everything up. That goes into the manufacturing of that Tesla Model 3, everything. And then the amount of CO2, yeah, that's used are created. We're talking about that Tesla Model 3 being 20 having 20% more average emissions over its lifetime than this Mercedes Benz C220  diesel.  Jim 7:15 So let me just put it in, we're talking with our friend Craig Peterson our Tech Talk guru. Let me put it to this, right. So diesel, which is number two oil, it's it's also how I heat my home. Okay, that stuff that they pump out of the ground, don't refine as much as they refined gasoline. The stuff that is the dirtiest pump when you go to the gas station, because it's oil and it picks up dust and dirt and everything else that you put into a diesel engine and then fire up with glow plugs. Okay, that maybe make it a little faster with a turbo charger? That stuff is cleaner than trying to drive around in a Tesla or in a Prius. That's actually better for the environment. Craig 8:04 A hundred percent with like, now there's debate, you know, there's there's knots and things, but the emissions from the diesel are also heavier. So those emissions end up coming down to the ground. Of course now with these new clean diesels are just absolutely incredible. But you mentioned pumping it out of the ground Jim. These numbers include all of the manufacturing of the diesel itself and trucking it around and everything else. So again, here now I am rather I've known this for a long time, right? Because I've looked at these numbers for years. This is a new study that just came out of Germany. And... Jim 8:50 Oh, you know what it is. Danny, we Danny, we lost him. Do you know what happened? Danny 8:57  They're on to us. Jim 8:58  Danny. It's the green new deal. Danny 9:02  Maybe maybe was Elon Musk? Jim 9:03  Steve. Steve, did anything happen on your end? Did anything? Any sparks or anything? Nothing? No? You sure? I think he's calling back. Danny 9:15 Let's just assume it was Russia. Jim 9:19 Hold on. Is that you sir? Craig 9:22 It is.  Jim 9:24 You know what it was? Alexandria. It was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It was not the Russians, because so the Russians, the only thing that they make any money off of is their oil. So the Russians would not cut off what you were preaching there. It was AOC. So go ahead. Go ahead. I said it was talking about pumping in out of the ground. Craig 9:49 Right and you these numbers include all of that the pump it on the ground, the transporting it, the processing of it, as you mentioned, is much less processed than the gasoline is these are this is a study done in Germany, they make, you know, electric car emissions and other countries are going to vary a little bit depending on the mix of, of coal. And you know, New Hampshire even burns wood for some of the electricity, you know, some of the cleaner fuels, but it kind of gets me upset because this brings me back to something else. I gotta mention this Jim. I'm sorry. I'm going along in this segment. Jim 10:24  No it's ok. Craig 10:26 My daughter in, I think, you know, my one of my daughters is over in Norway now and she's helping to lead this project. Right. And Norway, they give a tax what they do in Norway, there's a 25% VAT. So sales tax on everything. So if you buy an electric car, they don't charge that tax.   Jim 10:50 If you buy an electric car? Craig 10:50 Yeah, exactly. And they're thinking about getting rid of it. But they're not sure. But the reason they like electric cars is it be keep it because it keeps their environment clean. They're not worried about these cesspools of chemical mixtures that are sitting in China and India and other places. Jim 11:12 Yeah. They're worried about their little pretty little, and that is See, that's the thing. This is where I and we've got to wrap it up now, where I go off on the plastic bag thing. Every community bans plastic bags, so we don't want to see them on the roadside. They're choking the whales. 90% of that plastic comes from India, Africa, and Asia. There are 10 rivers in the world that produce 90% of the plastic in the ocean, and none of them are in North or South America. None of them. There are 2 in Africa.  Craig 11:48    I wish it wouldn't knee-jerk, Jim. but it's. I don't know what it is. But people have gotten worse in knee-jerking nowadays. Jim 11:56 They don't want to feel like they're part of the cause. Look, environmentalism has become the new religion. That's my opinion. It's the new religion. But anyway, Craig, that was fascinating the explanation of all the filth that goes into building a wonderful, clean car. So if folks want that story and more information from our tech talk guru, all you do is text my name, Jim to this number. Craig 12:21 855-385-5563. That's 855-385-5553. Jim 12:31 That's right. And standard data and text rates apply. But it's a clean transaction between you. And Craig Peterson. He won't sell your name. He won't annoy you with constant text. He'll get you the information you need when you need it. Thank you, sir. Craig 12:50 Hey, thanks, Jim. Have a great day. Craig 12:54 Hey, everybody, have a great day. As you can tell, I was having some fun this morning with Jim and I'll be back tomorrow with more fun with Ken and Matt, and all of our friends up in Maine, throughout Maine, all of the stations were on up there. So keep an eye out for that. Also, if you missed my offer last time of this DIY cyber security course what to do, how to do it. I went through everything. I was just amazed. I printed it all up the other day. And I'm looking at close to a ream of paper sitting there on the printer. I haven't taken that off yet. All of the stuff I covered and that's double sided. It's just crazy, all this stuff. And I didn't print out the bonuses either. But anyways, I am going to be launching another course coming up, it's not going to be alive. I'm not going to do as much live coaching. And we're doing that to keep the costs down. So that's coming up in a couple of weeks. Make sure you're on my weekly show notes email list so you find out about it. Then that's just http://CraigPeterson.com/subscribe, you'll see it on my homepage to http://CraigPeterson.com. Get on that you're going to get my weekly show notes, including everything I talked about, with Jim and I talked about on my radio show and all of these other guys. And it'll come in your email box every Saturday morning. I'm planning on starting up another thing here shortly, where it'll probably be on Wednesday mornings, and It's a Security Thing. So that should be fine as well. And I'll let you know when that happens too. So have a great day. And we'll talk with you all soon. Bye bye. --- Don't miss any episode from Craig. Visit http://CraigPeterson.com/itunes. Subscribe and give us a rating! Thanks, everyone, for listening and sharing our podcasts. We're really hitting it out of the park. This will be a great year!  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

What is a green car?  It might surprise you. So be sure to listen in today. Today I will unpack the problems with our new junior Senator Maggie Hassan. Yea, she hired someone who stole gigabytes of high-value data. What do you think of Facial recognition?  Well, I will discuss some of the problems with the FBI facial recognition program. WiFi? Is it bad for your health? I will talk about what a new study out of the Czech Republic found.   If you think that by going to the cloud, your business is going to be safe, you have another thing coming to you. I will explain why in today's show. Amazon? Wow, I can't believe they're doing this with books. If you have not heard about this, listen in. There are a number of mental health apps available for your tablets and smartphones. Do you know what data they share?  It may surprise you. For all this and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment; it might contain errors. Airing date: 04/27/2019 Driving A Tesla Increases CO2 Emissions - Sen Hassan Aid Stole Gigabytes Of Data Craig Peterson 0:03  Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. We're about to get started with another one of our Saturday shows heard every Saturday morning here on these iHeart Radio broadcast channels. Yes, terrestrial radio. And I also have it out online. You can find it all at http://Craig Peterson.com. Well, today we are going to be covering a couple of articles that I think might be a bit of a surprise to you. One of them has to do with green cars. Now, if you've known me for a long time, you know that green cars aren't green. But but there's a study out we're going to talk about that yet another study, remember the one that said that the Hummer H2 was actually, no it was the H1 was actually greener than the Toyota Prius, while the new study up right here in New Hampshire, that's where I'm located Senator Hassan, her aid, stole gigabytes of high-value data. So we'll talk about that. And what happens when a business or in this case a government agency, has one of their employees go rogue? The FBI facial recognition program is under fire. WiFi? Is it bad for your health? A new study out and a very interesting article from the Czech Republic on that. If you think that by going to the cloud, your business is going to be safe. You have another thing coming to you. New research out on that. Amazon? Wow, I can't believe they're doing this with books. You might have heard about this with 1984 that George Orwell book a little while ago. Well, there's a whole lot here we're going to talk about. And mental health apps, and what data are they actually sharing. So here we go with all of our news that's fit for today. Craig 2:02 So first up today, let's talk about driving your Tesla. Now they are cool. And I had a really interesting discussion with one of my daughters. She lives in Norway right now. She's running a huge project, autonomous ships for Kongsberg, which is just a huge shipping company. They well they make the controls and stuff for shipping. They just bought Rolls Royce marine here a few months back. And I was talking to her about Teslas because electric cars get a special subsidy in Norway. Now, here in the US, Tesla has already reached the 200,000 car mark. And the idea behind this was that they would provide, the federal government would provide extra money to help subsidize the purchase of electric cars, not just Teslas. But once they hit the 200,000 car mark, that subsidy would go away. And some of the Democrats in Congress are pretty busy right now trying to figure out how can they re-establish that deal, get that deal going again. And they may end up doing that. Well in Norway, they have similar things where the government is subsidizing electric vehicles, and to a very large point, because in Norway, right away, you don't have to pay the sales tax, which is 25% sales tax. Imagine that. And then it's a VAT, too. So it's not just the sales tax when you buy it, but there's sales tax every time a product changes hands, from manufacturing parts through distribution through the final retailer, and then you. So things are just crazy expensive there. And they have a great free market economy. Don't get me wrong, they are not a socialist country. None of the Scandinavian countries are socialist, but they are very heavily taxed and they do have a lot of government programs. So they were talking about getting rid of this subsidy, effectively a subsidy for electric cars, Tesla stock went down. And there's a lot of reasons it goes up and down, right? Well, here in the US what's the reason everybody seems to be giving for an electric car. Why do they want these electric vehicles? What's the big deal? Why does it matter? Well, here in the US, they're telling us this story that while it's more green, there's less carbon that goes into the atmosphere. And it's just it's a wonderful thing. And every Friday night, we get together all of us electric car owners, and we lock arms and we sing Kumbaya, right? And it's all because it's green. They're just wonderful vehicles. And you know that there's obviously some miss truths to that, let me put it that way. And in fact, there are there, it's just not true. And that's what the studies showing. In Norway, they're much more saying about this. And Norway, they're saying, hey, yeah, that these electric cars are not more green. But what we're trying to do is prevent the pollution in our environment, in our environment here in Norway. So we don't want these cars to, to be emitting all of this nastiness and trucks and things. We just want electric vehicles, we don't care that they're made in China and Japan, and that shipped all over, we don't care about the pollution they're causing worldwide and the fact that the recycling this stuff. It's just it's hazardous, right. But what we care about is we have clean air. Now, that to me, is a legitimate argument. I think there are legitimate arguments might be its cool technology. And the other argument might well be that you know, the air here tends to be a little bit cleaner. Now, of course, they're dumping all of the crap that there, their byproducts making these batteries in these cars. They're dumping them in the ocean in China and into the air and eventually gets here, all of this plastic in the ocean that's coming from these third world countries and communist countries that just don't care about it. Right. So this article is absolutely fascinating. And it's saying that driving a Tesla results in more CO2 than our Mercedes diesel does. So think about that for a minute. Diesel's have gotten a really bad name lately, because of some cheating that was done on an emissions test. Now, I put that cheating in air quotes, you saw that, right? If you're watching this http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube. You saw me do that? Well, the reason I do that is the diesel's are it's a different type of emission. And when the engine is cold, they run different currently, then when the engine is warm, or when it's hot. And some of these tests that were being done by our EPA and the European Union, don't really give the diesel vehicles credit. And you know, Europe, if you've been there, if you've rented a car, even if you were driven around, you notice most of the cars were diesel, because, in fact, a lot of the gases that are emitted by the vehicles, it's better if it's diesel, it washes down more quickly out of the atmosphere. But they're worried about the nitrous oxide and some other things that can cause problems for some people. So you know, hey, I get that. So hydrogen methane technology that is being used right now in the new diesel's has made a huge, huge difference. So if you look at this a little bit closer here, I'm going to pull this article right up on the desk area go see now you can see it on YouTube on http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube. Craig 8:02 It's touted as a zero-emission vehicle. Now we're talking about the Tesla Model 3, but in actuality, it creates more carbon dioxide dumped more into the air than a comparable diesel-powered car. And it's I love this article, when the CO2 emissions from the battery productions included, electric cars like Teslas are, in the best case slightly higher. We're talking about CO2 emissions here, in the best case, Teslas have slightly higher emissions of CO2 then a diesel engine, and our otherwise much higher and this is from a German Think Tank. And it's just absolutely fascinating here Daily Caller article that we're quoting from, and I love this picture they have of the Model 3 in the car show here in Toronto. So they looked electric car production in Germany, it's heavily reliant on coal power, we're in the US, of course, we burn coal, we burn wood, we have things that the left really hates, like, heaven forbid, we have nuclear power, which is course, frankly, the cleanest of all. And if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, we get off of their hands, and use some of this new nuclear technology that was invented here, 30 years ago, we would be in incredible shape, there'd be almost no nuclear waste at all, because we can re-burn it and certain types of reactors and things but people just got completely scared about it. California is requiring automakers to cut greenhouse gas emissions in cars, producing lower emission vehicles buying credits, which is making people like Al Gore very rich right? At the federal level, the US government's giving you a $7500 per electric vehicle tax break. It's it just goes on and on. A study here from the University of Cologne, talking about what they found in responsible energy, which forgets it, right, and who wants responsible energy policies, it's just not out there right now. But a study released to 2018 also found that driving electric cars might come with higher emissions of diesel vehicles, largely because of the lithium-ion production. For those that are unaware. This lithium most of its harvested in Quebec, NASA uses the area for miles, hundreds of square miles around the lithium battery mine, if you will. NASA uses it for testing lunar landings because there is no life at all. And then that is shipped off over to China for pre-processing and shipped to Japan, to turn it into a type of foam, is shipped back to China to finalize the battery components, shipped back to the US to be installed in the Tesla. Think about all of the carbon dioxides from that. A Manhattan Institute study from Tony teen found that putting more electric cars on the road would likely increase emissions compared to internal combustion engine vehicles. Now, you know that I have a libertarian band. So part of my dislike of this whole thing is that you know, come on people bottom line. Why should the government be the one that's deciding that's what the next best technology is going to be? Does that make any sense to you really doesn't make any sense that the government should be deciding, hey, listen, we're going to bet your tax money on electric vehicles rather than hydrogen fuel cells or some of these other technologies that might win. Again, let the private sector decide. And this is yet another area that our government has become socialist with a government trying to control the means production, the types of production, trying to incentivize it, etc, etc, right? Stuff that I obviously just don't agree with. But I guess you guys already know that. Right? Okay. Craig 12:12 So next up, let's see if I can make this work here for YouTube. That's http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube, I think it was this key combination. That didn't work. Yeah, I'm doing something wrong. So what I'm going to do is this, because I'm pretty sure that will work. Yes, there you go. Okay, so now you can see the article. This is from the Daily Caller, this is former senator has a son from New Hampshire, you know who she is what her one of her former aides now is in very, very much trouble. Now we know the Democrats have been, I'm going to say it, I'm going to say it out. Because this is true. They have been stupid when it comes to their IT people, they have not hired, in most cases, the people they should have hired, and we got a listener out there. So hat tip to Guy if you're listening, who have decided that because I keep talking about these problems with security, that he's going to take up a career in security. So he signed up for this six-month course, kind of getting started in cybersecurity. Once he's done with that, it'll take a year or so of him having real-life experience in it, and then he'll be really quite good. But man alive here, they missed all kinds of red flags about what this guy was doing. But here's the bottom line. This is a plea agreement that he did sign apparently extraordinary, extensive data theft scheme is what it was called. He installed keylogging devices that picked up every keystroke on these machines. So a keylogger, in case you're not aware, if you're using a keyboard, with a USB cable, and then that USB cable plugs into the back of your computer, as someone can insert on the back of that computer, one of these keyloggers and the way this keylogger ends up working is that you're typing your keys, and they're all being intercepted by this little USB device. So you might want to right away, especially if you are democrat senator, apparently, you might want to right away go and check the back of your computer and see if there if your keyboard is plugged in directly. Now, you know, if you watch for a while I use Macs, right? So here's an example of the mouse I use. And on the Mac, it's Bluetooth wireless, but it also has available here, a USB port, right? It's actually one of Apple's proprietary port. And I have the also the keyboard here. This is what I'm using on my iMac, in fact, to control the video that we're creating for YouTube on that iMac. So that's what that's all about right there. Okay, and that was really nice. It's really handy. But what Apple does is everything is super-encrypted. In fact, in order for me to configure this trackpad to my Mac, I have to plug it in via cable. It does some handshaking it automatically configured the iMac for this trackpad or this keyboard. Same things true for laptops of using external devices. So Apple has gone the extra extra mile. Craig 15:39 If you're using a regular Bluetooth keyboard like here's my other computer here. This is a standard older Mac, keyboard, and mouse I have it in the mount. So it's all together. But this uses regular Bluetooth and regular Bluetooth has encryption as well. So typically, generally speaking, your Bluetooth is going to be safer than using a wired keyboard or wired mouse because you can install these keyloggers right so that's kind of what I was getting at here. Craig 16:16  So back to our friend here at senator Hassan's office. What she did is or he did I should say is he installed these keyloggers so they usually have to come back to get back keylogger in order to read it. But remember, if you're typing on your computer, what are you typing? Oh, a username and a password. And usually, those are pretty well identifiable pretty easily identifiable. So apparently, Jackson Cosko worked with an unnamed accomplice and other Hassan employee who reportedly lent him a key that he used to enter the office at night and who allegedly tried to destroy evidence for him after the fact. So Cosko accepted responsibility for the events revealed by federal prosecutors in court last Friday. Apparently was doing it from July and October. But he really did a lot more than that. It kind of goes on here in this article from the Daily Caller, he sneaked into her office, reportedly multiple times at night gathered dozens of gigabytes of data, including usernames and passwords belonging to Senate employees, okay, like really come on guys. Tens of thousands of emails, internal documents, credit card information blog, the Senate employee social security numbers, blah, blah, blah. So be careful out there. These IT people are not what they appear to be in many cases. And of course, the huge thing with the Democrats. And I couldn't believe how they responded when it was disclosed that Wasserman Schultz's IT people had had just committed me incredible crimes all the way across the board. And she was throwing the tantrum or when they tried to investigate. In fact, I don't think the FBI ever got to fully investigate this thing. Craig 18:10  So anyhow, keep an eye on your IT people. Make sure you know who they are. Make sure they're of good character. It's easy enough to do basic background check nowadays, you can get them done for 20, 30 bucks online, just check in public record and make sure they look okay. Okay. And it's difficult. I get it. It's difficult to hire the right person. because, frankly, how do you know who the right person is? What do you know about IT? What do you know about security, it's difficult, you got to find somebody that's been in a long time. Craig 18:43  Alright, so next up, let's talk about this FBI problem here. This is from NextGov.com. I'll put it up on my screen here http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube. Of course, you guys the audio guys listen to the podcast. And here on iHeart Radio as well. You guys are my primary audience. Okay. But if you want to see some of these articles, I put them up here on the screen. But this is huge. The FBI reportedly has ignored, for the most part, the GAO, the Government Accountability Offices concerned over its use of facial recognition technology, in criminal investigations, its new technology, its kinda neat. They can scan all kinds of public cameras and photos as well as records, the FBI has to try and find suspects and close cases. That part's fine. But apparently, what they've been doing is they're pulling from a database of more than 30 million mug shots and other photos. And while they're doing this, they're looking for matches, right? Doesn't that make sense? And they're trying to find the matches, they're trying to get the right people, but they get bad matches, they get mismatches with people who were nowhere in the area. Okay, I get that. You figure it out, right, and you take care of it. But apparently what they've been doing is they have been going after them and prosecuting and trying to get convictions. The auditors and the GAO recommended that the FBI tests the accuracy of these things at least once a year, make improvements, etc, that are very interesting. So if you're charged nowadays by the FBI or local prosecutor, what's the right thing to do? Because you weren't in the area. You didn't do it. Are they going to convict you on bad evidence now because they trust the computer so much? I don't know. Craig 20:49   Okay, so next up from the TechRepublic, we got an article about WiFi, how many people complain about WiFi saying it's bad for our health? Well, another study out and I've been saying this for a long time. And man that I feel bad one time I was keynoting at an annual event for it was for a bank. And I was their keynote speaker for their annual shareholder's meeting and talked about the future of technology. Where it's going? What's happening? And a lady came up to me and said, so what do you think about radiation from phones, from cell phones? And I said, well, you know, I've been an advanced class amateur radio operator for many, many decades. I have had a lot of radiation from these radios exposed to me, I've never had anything happen. And most of the studies that have been done about ham radio operators have said, hey, there's nothing definitive about a problem. So bottom line, you know, doesn't really matter. It's not a big deal, that you have this happening. And then she said, you know, you can see the tears welling up in her eyes. And she says, Well, I think it was her husband had been diagnosed with cancer. And they said that it was because he had the phone up to his head all the time using it at work. And that work should be paying for all this medical treatment and, and pain and suffering and stuff. And man made me feel really bad. But the truth is, there are no strong ties between these various types of radiation. And the biggest problem I think people have is a misunderstanding. We call it radiation. But this isn't x rays. This isn't, you know, the radiation you get from outer space, it is non-ionizing radiation. And radiation from a scientific definition is just energy moving through space, it's not a big deal. So these new WiFi devices that are going to be rolled out all over the country for 5G, they're going to be everywhere. And that's one of the reasons you can get such high data rates. They are everywhere. And so you're going to be close to them. Even mount them on our houses, on telephone poles are going to be just everywhere. But the RF signals, these radio frequency signals that are generated by WiFi, by Bluetooth, by your phones, in any device that's sold legally in the US is tested. And you know, I'm not one for trusting government testing necessarily, right. But in reality, the safety limits are just incredible. You know, you're talking about 500 milliwatts, and I have routinely been transmitting at 50 watts, which is a lot more power, and I haven't experienced any problems and, and 100 watts on some of the HF bands and even higher. So studies just, there was one of University of Barcelona, looking at RF exposure of children, ages 8 to 18 in Europe over three day period, WiFi represented 4% of total RF exposure. 62% of the RF exposure came from cellular base stations. 23% from broadcast TV and radio. And 10% from a nearby cell phone. So the exposure is approximate point .001% of that of the safety limits imposed by the European Commission, which is even tighter than here in the US. So back to this article, again, TechRepublican on http://CraigPeterson.com. You'll see it. WiFi is just not bad for your health. Craig 24:45 So we're going to whip through a couple more here pretty quickly because we only have a couple of minutes left. If you think that switching over to cloud services is going to make you safe. I'm afraid there's another thing coming for you. Because right now cloud services are the Wild West. And various cloud services have various amounts of safety with them, if you will, they have really kind of an abysmal record. You think about all of these huge data breaches that have happened on the cloud recently. And it's incredible, like 2 billion records found on the cloud from one of these cloud services providers just in the last couple of months. So just because you're using Office 365, or you're using some other type of cloud services, Salesforce.com, etc, does not mean it's safe. Now, I'm not saying that they aren't relatively safe, but there's a new study out. And this is from the global phish report from Avanan. And they looked at 55 million emails sent to Microsoft Office 365 and Google G Suite account. Those are the big guys. If you have an email for your business, you're probably either with Office 365, or Google G Suite. And they found roughly 1% of all messages or phishing threats that use malicious attachments or links. And of those, 25% that were marked safe by the Exchange Online protection built into Office 365. And delivered to us. So just a little word of warning there. Just because you're using the cloud service does not mean that your emails are safe. Craig 26:31 I've got to bring this one up too. Amazon, they are burning books. And I don't know what to do about this. You know, remember Jeff Bezos said that he was going to be you know, open, they sell any books, he wanted the exchange of ideas, which is, of course, a very libertarian classic liberal way of doing things. But now apparently he is removing books from the store. We know already that he has removed books from people's iPads etc. So in February this year, they banned a number of books from white identitarian Jared Taylor, a book called The White Nationalist Manifesto by Greg Johnson. You may completely disagree with these guys. Right. But again, they need to have their voices out there as part of the public debate. They also banned, had bans on Holocaust revisionists books in 2017, a purge of all books by the controversial pickup blogger and author Daryush Valizadeh, I guess it is. Many others, many others. Amazon's refused, by the way, to take down a book defending pedophilia on first amendment grounds. They have not removed certain books that are up there that are anti-christian, even though there have been complaints about them. So they got to get their act together. Craig 27:57 And if you're using a mental health app, you can see it on my screen here http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube, be careful out there because of the data they're sharing. Alright, have a great week. I am out of time. We will chat next week and of course during the week as well on my podcasts. http://CraigPeterson.com/iTunes. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye. ---  Related articles: Driving A Tesla Results In More CO2 Than A Mercedes Diesel Car, Study Finds Former NH Sen. Hassan Aide Stole Gigabytes Of ‘High Value’ Data Wi-Fi Is Not Actually Bad For Your Health, Scientists Say FBI’s Facial Recognition Programs Under Fire Over Privacy, Accuracy Concerns Using Cloud Email? Office 365? You’re Not Safe From Phishing Attacks Amazon Has Been On A Digital Book Burning Spree For Months That Mental Health App Might Share Your Data Without Telling You --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Craig is on the Jim Polito Show. Today they discussed the phony 5-star reviews in Amazon.  These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: 5-Star Phonies: Inside The Fake Amazon Review Complex ---  Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors. Airing date: 04/23/2019 Inside The World Of Fake Amazon Reviews Craig Peterson 0:00 Hey, good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. This morning, we talked about five star phonies I went into in some depth here as to how does Amazon actually work? How are these Chinese companies selling products to us? And the problem that's arisen of many of them apparently getting five star reviews posted for products that are just junk. So how can you trust it? What can you do? Well, actually, we did get to that. Yes, indeed, with Jim Polito this morning. So here we go. Jim Polito 0:39 This is a much anticipated visit from our tech talk guru Craig Peterson, talking about something that I myself and many others rely on.You buying a product on Amazon, you look at the stars, you say why full five stars? I gotta read these reviews. Is it really that good? Well, are the reviews really true. Joining us now. Our friend Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir. Craig 1:08 Hey, good morning, you know, if you do check those product reviews before you make a purchase, you're about equal on footing with about 82% of American adults. Jim 1:19 Yeah, the guys, we had it, we had a chat, we had a chat about it. And we all have our own method of checking their reviews, if we're buying something that we've never bought before, like I, not if I'm buying like detergent, or, you know, something like that, if I'm buying a product I haven't bought before I've done my research. And then you know, I say well this one looks good. I read Yeah, we all have different ways of reading the reviews. But the question is, can I believe them? Craig 1:45 Yeah, and that's a really, really good question. Because if life has changed. Everything that's changed, you know, used to be, you could trust the name brand, because you knew they didn't want to mess up all of the money they've spent on advertising. And, you know, the name brand was in it frankly, and you know, you talked about Coke, for instance, and buying all of these other things. Coke has a name brand they're trying to protect. But when you're buying on Amazon, and the seller is someone in China, or maybe someone here in the US or somewhere else in the world, there's no brand name that you can trust. Right? There's, there's nothing that you know, so yes, we do look at those stars. And there's a really good article I put up on my website, and it's from The Hustle. And it's talking about what's been happening more recently on Amazon Now, we know Amazon trying to get the prices of everything down as low as t it can so they can pass some of those savings on to consumers and, and really kind of put its competitors out of business. Even Walmart's having a hard time trying to compete with Amazon out there. So one of the things, here's how it used to work, and it's still kind of works this way, I have a couple of buddies that do this. They go online, let's say they go to Alibaba, which is a kind of, you know, big place almost like eBay for businesses over in China. They they do analysis of Amazon, what's selling, what are people looking for, and then they go to Alibaba, they find a vendor that has a good price, and hopefully a decent quality, they order a bunch of them, they check them out, and then they ship them off to Amazon. So this is how this whole thing works. Amazon has them now in their warehouses, and Amazon charges the seller, just to have the product shipped and sitting there ready to ship out. Okay. And then of course, Amazon charges when it's sold. And you know, there's money exchanging hands all of the time. And that's what's been happening for quite some time. Well, what's been happening more recently is some of these Chinese companies are sitting there saying, why are we like having a middleman in the middle of all of this. And so these people here in the states that have been kind of, you know, buying and then reselling on Amazon, they have been bypassed now, in many, many cases. So you have these Chinese companies that are just going ahead, and shipping directly to Amazon here in the US to the warehouses, and so now those Chinese companies are paying the warehouse fees are paying the Commission's, but now there's no longer the markup of that middleman, who was based in the US whose throat, you could choke if you had to, and who's verifying things? Okay. So all of this has really changed over the last two to three years in a big way. And leads us directly to the five stars you're just asking about. Jim 4:44 And so how do I look, look? And then this isn't, this isn't doesn't have anything to do with the ethnicity of Chinese people, but you can't trust China, when it comes to a lot of this stuff. They don't. Craig 5:00 Yeah. You're absolutely right. Jim 5:02 I mean, think about what's been done with dog food, lead paint, all of these things that came out of China that we really can't trust them for in terms of manufacturing and businesses. So the five stars by cutting out the middleman, that five star to just be bunked. Craig 5:21 Yeah, it could be. And in fact, that's what's been happening here. This is a little bit of an in depth research that was done. And again, you can see the articles and all the details. They've got statistics and everything else about what's been happening out there. But he's talking about one of the highest ranked iPhone chargers, and it had an almost 4000 5 star reviews, and Amazon's Choice Label on it you saying in the article, and and he goes on to do a little bit more investigation because he was able to hop into this private Facebook group and talk with us Amazon seller named Lian Xi from I'm just guessing the pronunciations here, but what is joins out China? And she said, hey, listen, if you buy something, if you buy my product, which was an iPhone charger cable, charger, if you buy my my cable, I will reimburse you for the purchase and give you a $10 commission, if you go ahead and give me a five star rating on Amazon. Now, this is this has been a problem for a while. We have these influencers looking at Kim Kardashian and others who are online, who are pouting products who are saying we are the ones to you know, to believe. And I'm wearing this mascara because it stays on all day without ruining, right? And is this an ad? Is this not an ad? Is this a paid compensation? Where does the line start and stop? And that's what the Federal Trade Commission's been trying to figure out. And now, on top of it, we apparently have these Chinese resellers who are paying people to to do this. And, man, this has been a big deal for a long time. Okay. And, and the products break almost immediately. And yet it has 4000 5 star reviews. So what are you supposed to do? Jim 7:25 And you know, you used a good example, like a cord, an iPhone charging cord, like an aftermarket one, not one of theirs. We know if you get a cheap one, it busts in no time at all. It doesn't work. And if I see a great price, and a five star rating on Amazon, I'm going to be inclined to buy that. Craig 7:46 Yeah, but read these things. I guess some of these are amazing. Here's another example. This is from this bodybuilding enthusiast guy named Tommy Noonan. And he's looking at these testosterone boosters on Amazon, and you noticed that a product had 580 reviews, and every single one was five stars. And then he decided he read them. And this has always been the giveaway for me. And we've talked a little bit about this before, you know the languaging that's used. And it's like the morning did the democrats and out their talking points. And every single one of them is saying the exact same thing. So that's number one. And number two is people were reading things like I haven't tried this product, but and then they leave a glowing review. So I went on Amazon and I searched actually I just went to Google and search Amazon. And I found tons of reviews just like this. I never use this product but. Jim 8:44 So what you do is, yeah, and I've done that to see, I've done it before, to see if someone has lifted what they've written from somebody else. And I just cut and paste and drop it in Google and you see it comes up somewhere else. So you say you cut and paste that review, put it in there, and it pops up in a million different locations. Identical wording. Craig 9:09 Yeah, exactly. And it's, it's easy enough just to look and see even within one product, or most of these almost exactly the same wording. And now it's gotten even easier, Amazon has something else called Mechanical Turk. And Mechanical Turk is designed, it's fantastic for businesses, if you have something that needs to be done by someone. And it's a very repetitive task. And maybe you want to pay a cent or five cents to find me a picture of a kitty cat with this or that. That's what Mechanical Turk is all about. And with Mechanical Turk, you can even though this is against the policies, okay? But you can even have people post things, find things put things up. So all of this huge, beautiful infrastructure that's out there on the internet is being misused, and they're able to help thousands of people. You can have immediately, I could have 5000 followers for your Facebook page tomorrow, if you're willing to pay 100 bucks. And the same thing's true with Amazon reviews now I'm afraid. Jim 10:12 Well Craig, this has been great information very helpful to people, because so many of us who are shopping there. Now, folks, this information more in depth plus other information, plus when there's a big hack. You want to be on Craig's list, you want to be one of the people who's able to get a text from him and get this information. So here's what you do. You text my name, Jim to this number. Craig 10:46 855-385-5553. That's 855-385-5553. Jim 10:56 Standard data and text rates apply. And he will not bother you. He will not sell your name to somebody else. Craig, always a pleasure. But especially today, this was great information. Craig 11:09 Hey, thanks, Jim. Take care. Jim 11:11 Take care. All right, when we return a final word. Craig 11:15 I guess the bottom line here is things aren't always as they appear to be. I do spend some time with the reviews myself. And obviously I think everybody should nowadays. And what I didn't mention with Jim is that Amazon has a lot they could do in order to stop this from happening. But is it really in their best interest? I think ultimately it is. And they have been cracking down a little bit but I think there's still a lot more Amazon could do to become a trusted place to buy online. All right, Take care everybody. Have a great day. We'll be back tomorrow. Bye bye.  --- Don't miss any episode from Craig. Visit http://CraigPeterson.com/itunes. Subscribe and give us a rating! Thanks, everyone, for listening and sharing our podcasts. We're really hitting it out of the park. This will be a great year!  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Did you upgrade your Router?  If not you probably have been hacked by hacker groups have been hijacking DNS traffic on D-Link routers for months and I will get into that more today. Yet again, Facebook is in the news and again it is for their privacy and their cameras so i will discuss the implications of this. April 15 -- the date that looms over all of us each year. Have you considered the value of your Tax information to a criminal?  Today we will cover more on this and how you can protect yourself. The person who started this whole Walking Dead series has a brand new series that's coming out and she has some creepy thoughts about technology.  More on this Updates are important.  Guess who found out the hard way -- Yes that would be NYC IT.  Failure to update their systems brought the New York City wireless network down. So let's get right into it here. For all this and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment; it might contain errors. Airing date: 04/20/2019 Home And Small Business Routers Hacked - NYC Wireless Down Due To Lack Of Updates - Fake Amazon Reviews Critical - Amazon Show The Feed Walking Dead Channing Powell Craig Peterson 0:00 Hey, everybody. We are getting going here. Of course, Craig Peterson. We're going to talk about some of the major tech stories. This week, we're going to talk about the hacker groups been hijacking DNS traffic on D-Link routers for months. Now, what does that mean to you? What can you do about it? How can you detect it? Facebook, the privacy kings, right? What's happening with Facebook and their really creepy portal? Yeah, it's kind of interesting, that little camera they have. Tax info, of course, April 15, time to file the personal taxes. What is happening? What's the cost? What's the value of your tax information online and why would they steal it? The founder, the person who started this whole Walking Dead series has a brand new series that's coming out. And she's got some creepy things to say about technology. And we've got the New York City wireless network down, I warned you. Don't say I didn't warn you guys about that and what's happening. So let's get right into it here. Craig 1:12 DNS has, of course, been one of the most important parts of our internet for very, very long time. Time was we had to maintain hosts tables, we had to know where everybody was, we had to do hop routing, we'd send it to somebody that knew more, they had a bigger map of the internet. So you know, we had upstream providers and we would send it to them, we were all connected together. And it was really quite a hodgepodge. So DNS came out. And the idea behind DNS isa dynamic name system was to allow us now to have one massive name database. Now it was designed in the times when the internet was a much more friendly place. We didn't have bad guys out there running around, we didn't have opposition parties who are trying to shut us down, denial of service attacks and and hijacking domains. Well, actually, we kind of did have hijacking domains. Had a couple stolen from me back in the day, but it was a much more genteel place. And DNS was designed for a cooperative system. So if you want to go to Google com, or http://CraigPeterson.com or anywhere online, you could use the name, it would go to this DNS system, who would then look up that name, it would come back with an Internet address, and then that address would be used to route your data. Does that make sense to you? I, you know, I hopefully I explained that right. And simply enough. The idea is that we can using DNS just use names because as humans aren't great at remembering all of these multi multi digit numbers. And it's gotten even worse now with IPV6, but we're not going to get into that right now. So what's been happening with our wonderful little hacker group here, while the modems here from D-Link, ARG, DS-LINK, SECUTECH, and TOTOLINK, and you can see them here on my screen. You'll find them on my website, just go to http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube. And you can watch along here, but for the last few months, they've really been hacking a lot, I have the list of known routers that have this vulnerability that had been hacked. And this is based on a one of the security companies that went and had up, poke around, Troy Mercer's, the guy's name, Bad Packets, his name of the company. And he's saying there were three major waves, there is a wave, late December, early February, late March as well, in 2019. But these attacks are still going on, these hacks are still out there. And what they're doing is they're taking the DNS information that you would normally have in your router, and they are changing it to some of these malicious DNS servers. Now, I've got it up on my screen, I just pulled it up from this article, which you will also find on ZDNet, which is when we're talking about or right there and http://CraigPeterson.com, that's probably the easiest way to find it. And I send it out today in my show notes as well, my show notes email, but these are the addresses. So if you want to check right now to see if your router has been compromised, have a look for these addresses in your DNS settings. And the idea here is they change the settings on your router, it now provides those DNS addresses to your other equipment in your home or your office. So now when your other equipment tries to go somewhere online, they have the ability to intercept it, because they just say hey, yeah, Google isn't at 123 Main Street in Merrimack. No, no, no, it's at 1745 Lenin street in Moscow, and some how now your traffic in some going to Moscow? Well, in this case, right? This kind of looks like it's some Brazilian people. They're really trying to do this the most. But they've hijacked traffic that's been meant for Netflix, Google, PayPal, and some Brazilian banks. So the idea here is you try and go to one of these sites. And what do they require you to do? They require you to log in. Or maybe there's a cookie set in your browser that they can read and use to login. So they try and get you to login, get the information from you. And then now they've got your information, we already discussed why they want it. And we'll get into in just a couple more minutes too when we're talking about what's happening right now with your tax information. But they are using what are called bulletproof hosting providers, in case you're not familiar with that is these bulletproof hosting providers. And I'm going to stick their ASs here, up on the screen. If you're a total geek, you will find right there. There we go. Craig 6:01 There's AS's which are autonomous systems, part of the internet backbone. But bulletproof hosting providers will not provide information about their clients to law enforcement. And they try and prevent anybody from figuring out who their customers are. So these two hosting providers of the guys that are doing it, this has all happened before, there's a massive, malvertising operation. Sometimes they'll use these DNS attacks, in order to inject into the stream ads. We've had ISPs, legit ones here in the US who've been doing similar things. If you try and go to a site that doesn't have a DNS entry, guess what they're going to do? Craig 6:44 Yeah, they're going to send you to their site to their advertising. Craig 6:49 So that's what's been going on. If you are using any one of these routers button up on the screen, again, which are basically the D-Links, ARG, DS-LINK, SECUTECH, and TOTOLINK, as well as many others. Make sure you update them, upgrading them or replace them. And I went over this in quite a bit of detail in my most recent master course, about what is happening out there and what you need to be aware of. All right. Craig 7:21 So let's move on to our next article. This is something I warned everybody about last year. And then again, I warned everybody about just about a month ago. And as it turns out our friends at New York City, they kind of knew about it, too, but they didn't really do anything about it. And that is this New York City wireless network. And it is down due to a bug at least it has been down. They've been working on trying to get this thing back up online, which makes sense, right? Craig 7:58 And this has to do with failure to update. How many times have we talked about that being a real problem out there. And the failure to update in this case is all of our wonderful data that they're using to allow the police, fire departments and others to communicate. Now, the fire department is saying they got off of what's called NYC WIN which is their wide area internet. They got off of it a couple of years ago, they switched over to Verizon mobile data. And they're using that in order to communicate with the hospitals when they're transporting patients and things. But the transit officials can't remotely control 12,000 plus traffic lights, traffic cameras, NYPD license plate readers are down. This is according to the New York Post. It crashed on Saturday, April 6. Do you remember that date? Craig 8:55 Yeah, I warned everybody, right. Remember that one guy quoted him saying I am not going to be anywhere near an airplane on April 6th? Well, the the Department of it there New York City is paying Northrop Grumman about $40 million a year to run this network that cost them a half a billion to put in place and has been in service in for 10 years. And they never updated some of the core components. Why would you use GPS? Here's what's happening. Craig 9:28 The GPS, older GPS equipment had what's called a rollover event. They were using Okay, there's a little geeky but 32 bit counters, you remember the old 32 bit computers and you got upgrade you want 64 bit Windows and 32 bit Windows. Remember all that thing, while these older GPS units had 32 bit counters in them. And what that meant is come April 6th, they went from it's 5pm on April 5th to it's zero pm. It rolls back to zero, which goes back to the Epic, which I'm not sure what it wasn't GPS, and the Unix world it was 1970. But everything got messed up. So now all of a sudden, their traffic cameras, security cameras are all saying that they are down for maintenance because they are down and they're down hard. The same thing with license plate readers, not all of them, but the ones that were older, all are failing on them now. But they use GPS for the clocks. Now think about gridlock. Gridlock is a term that was invented in the city of New York. And what it meant was they have this grid laid out, right, it's all beautiful grid straight lines. And gridlocked meant that traffic couldn't move, because the lights weren't properly synchronized. And it was there for decades. And they they came up with that term. So they decided they had to synchronize all of the light so that traffic could flow properly. Well, traffic isn't flowing properly, because now the clocks that are in the light, the traffic lights that were using a clock coming from the satellites via the GPS signal. That GPS receivers not working, the clocks are now falling out of sync. Some of them I suspect pretty quickly falling out of sync. So now New York's in for more gridlock, hopefully, they'll get this fixed pretty quickly. But it's a very, very big deal. Police have been sent to spots with vehicle mounted readers where the readers are failing. And I kind of find that interesting, too, because you're talking about license plate readers really, that's a critical piece of infrastructure. I guess it is if you're trying to find people who owe money on parking tickets, but otherwise, and fire department and you New York with a patient care reports to hospitals, they've got that all fixed. They're saying they're all set and according to New York Post Northrop Grumman declined to comment is, is that a shocker? Is that a shocker to you as well? Craig 12:09 Yeah, of course, they're not going to comment on that sort of thing. Alright, so next up here, let's go to our fake Amazon reviews stories. This is just crazy here. Have you gone to Amazon? Have you used some of their review stuff? I know I have. And it's, it's you know, it's very handy. And I use it quite a bit, right. And that's kind of the stars that are that are on top of the page, and they put this up on the screen for you. Craig 12:42 And a five star reviews, can you trust them? Well this particular reporter from the Hustle, went underground and spent two weeks there and found out what was really happening. So gives a, actually, I'm not even sure what the name of the author of this article is. They don't mention their name, and they don't have credit. Okay, maybe it's Zachary Crockett, that might be it. Craig 13:11 So, here's what he said. He said he went to this private Facebook group, this underground Facebook group, and was chatting with this person named Lien Xi, an Amazon seller from Guangzhou China. And she offered him a deal. If he gave her a five star review. For her iPhone charger. Now he would need to buy the charger from Amazon. So that could be a verified purchase. And then what she would do is she would refund him via PayPal and pay him a $10 commission. So he was asking, Hey, isn't this illegal? And her response was? Well, that she didn't say no. She said what you will love is all she said right? So he looked up or product review. And you can see this on my screen here http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube. http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube.  Craig 14:09 But he found her iPhone charger on Amazon. And it had almost 4000 5-star reviews. Craig 14:19 Isn't that just amazing? Craig 14:21 Also got Amazon's Choice Label, which is very, very valuable. I know I use that. So when I'm looking on something on Amazon, I'm looking at the stars. And I'm looking at the Amazon's choice on the little black box that comes up. And then occasionally, depending on the price of the item, I'll scroll down to read the reviews. Well, apparently I'm not alone. And if you do the same thing, you're not alone, either. Because what it's saying here is 65% of us trust online reviews. 82% of American adults check the product reviews before making a purchase. I think that's low frankly, I think it's almost 100%. If you're an Amazon, right, it's probably 100%. But just generally shopping online is probably more like 82 I can see that. Craig 15:11 So research is showing that we're more swayed by a simple star rating than what the reviewers actually write. And I've got to also go Let me see pop hit head a little bit here. Some of these reviews and you might have seen stuff like this. I know I have. And it really upset me. You see reviews and he's saying this one product is looking at. this is another guy this guy named Tommy Noonan had 580 reviews, and every single one of them was five stars. But he recalls people would write things like I haven't tried this product but and then leave a glowing review. Well, does that smell like it's a setup, or what? It definitely does. Let me show you this here. Okay, on the screen again, http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube. Facebook reviews are boosting a lot of products. And I've seen stats saying it's 20% all the way up to 60% of these are fake. But look at this, headphones, it saying the fake reviews, the average star rating is 4.89 out of five. And the real reviews are 3.99. So that's a difference for headphones. I'm almost a whole star. Craig 16:28 Isn't that amazing? So it's showing up as five stars almost when it should be four stars. Then what happened is there's a guy out there who's doing some research. Fakespot is where you'll find it. Fakespot.com. And they came up with some of these stats. And they are absolutely shocking. When you get right down to it here I'm going to bring this up. So it's my absolute full desktop view here. So you can see this whole thing and in more detail. But there it is, right headphones, cell phone accessories, pest control, car control, sexual wellness, pet supplies, all of these things, vitamins and supplements, by the way, kind of the bottom of the list. They they only have a differential between fake and real stars of the quarter star here, bottom line. And then there's another one I want to show you here too. This is the search on unreliable Amazon reviews. This is a chart again, that I've got up on, you'll see it on YouTube. But they are hosting, Amazon's hosting 1.8 million vendors and sellers who are selling nearly 600 million items that are generating about 9.6 million new product reviews every month. So really the the big deal here, the big question is, how can you tell when they are fake? How can Amazon tell? If you're talking about 10 million reviews a month, how can they tell? Well, there's some ways to do it. They're kind of trying to do it. But I've got to say I think they have a negative motivation in trying to do it. I'm not sure it's all it's cracked up to be. Because by having these people shipping products directly from China to Amazon's warehouses in bulk. So they ship 10,000, 100,000 of these things to Amazon warehouses, Amazon, then prepositions them in warehouses close to where they think there will be people that will be buying them. And then those people who are looking to buy them can get them very quickly, right? That's the whole idea behind it. Craig 18:38 Well, you're cutting out the middleman, instead of having somebody buy it from China, ship it to the US and then ship them in with smaller quantity used to Amazon, the Chinese manufacturers effectively are shipping it right to Amazon, who ships that right to you. So that's saving you a lot of money, which I would prefer recently called a disincentive. Right? I don't think Amazon's purposely trying to be, you know, hiding things from us. But be very careful out there. Because there's been a huge rush in the marketplace, there are dozens of products that are almost indistinguishable from each other. And frankly, that's exactly what what they're taking advantage of right now. With these fake reviews, how do they get their product well known while they just make themselves a fake little review, right? That makes it easy enough. Craig 19:30 So let me pull up our next little article. And this is fascinating. And I am totally looking forward to seeing this when it comes out. And this is from Yahoo, and right now they just had a film festival over in Cannes over in southern France. And Channing Powell, you might have heard that name before. She's the lady who founded, who started Walking Dead. And she's been thinking about what's happening with technology now and what's happening with technology in the future. And this is an article from Yahoo News that they picked up from AFP Wire. But she says she is terrified of what big tech might be up to. She has a new show called The Feed. And it's premiering in Cannes. And that's the just this week, by the way. And my birthday, by the way this week as well. It's premiering and Cannes this week, and it's all about a dystopian future now who hasn't heard about dystopian futures? Right? That's it's all normal. Well, what she's saying is Elon Musk, and Facebook are both trying to develop technology that can allow you to remotely control things. But The Feed, this new Amazon series goes a step further. Not only can you control things with your mind, but people you can send your feelings, what you're seeing, what you're smelling, everything you can send it to someone else in social media. So someone else can live your life. Well, what happens if someone's in the middle of that, a company, like a Facebook or whomever. And let's say they're malicious, and they modify that, or they they play with your mind and your emotions, because now they can send emotions to you. And the cells, the smells, and the the eyesight, everything to make it seem real well, that's what this is all about. And she says that Elon Musk right now is developing a neural lace computer that covers the entire brain that you would control with thought, okay. She also goes in and talks about what's been happening at MIT, they have something that clips on your ear, and will do some remote control stuff for you. She's saying she's 39 years old, by the way, so she's not quite a millennial. But she's very concerned, you know, we got our iPhones with us all the time, and people just can't leave them behind. They're checking Instagram constantly. So what's going to end up happening here? There's some companies already in Belgium, in Sweden that are implanting chips into people. When here's a direct quote from here to that I totally agree with, when somebody like Elon Musk, who's a radical libertarian, who's inside all of this development and understanding of it. When someone like Elon Musk is telling government that you need to regulate us and stop us from doing what we are doing, that is absolutely terrifying, absolutely terrifying. And frankly, we're at a tipping point now. The Chinese government has already started a social credit score, where they will now we reward you or punish you, based on social credit that starts January 1, 2020. Craig 23:10 That's the tipping point. I talked last week on my show about what has happened in Venezuela, they have purchased the Chinese social credit system, where now you have a national ID card that you sir, everything from banking through voting, they know how you voted, they know where your money's coming from. And if you're getting any money from the government, they can, will and do control it. So maybe we're already past the tipping point, she doesn't say that she says, you know, we're really close. But maybe we are already passed it. And and frankly, that's scary. That really scares me the bottom line. Craig 23:49 Alright, so we've got a couple more articles. And we've only got a couple more minutes. So let's get to those pretty quickly here. Craig 23:57 Let's get that up on my screen. And I'm going to let's see. So let's talk about this really quick. And this has to do with your taxes. You have of course been paying taxes for years, right? Just one of the two things that that is certain than life, death and taxes. So this is an article from Fox Business and I got it up on my screen, YouTube or excuse me http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube. But we have our taxes out there. IRS is said to have the largest database in the world. And that doesn't surprise me. But here's how much it's worth. We filed W2s and 1040s. There's the business stuff that's out there. They are all available for purchase online. And you've heard these tips before use multi-factor authentication with your bank, right? Use a password manager, don't say passwords in your browser, file your taxes as soon as possible. So that with the bad guys file of false tax reporting your name, it's not going it's going to pop up a flag it's not going to go through. Don't give away personal information as you have to never transfer money based on an email, right? All the basic stuff. Well, here's how much your information is worth. I'm going to pull us up on the screen. Here we go right now. So basically, for $1,000, a hacker can purchase access to a US based bank account, file a fake return, claim the IRS refund and cash out through cryptocurrency exchange. And they will make more not 100% return on their thousand dollar investment. That's the bottom line here. So they're really are trying to do it. IRS is saying that there's 1.4 billion breach attempts every year, many of them are coming from nation states, which frankly, doesn't surprise me in the least. Why not? It's a good way to fund your operations when you get right down to it. Craig 26:05 And then we got one more article really quickly here. I couldn't believe it when our friends over at Facebook decided that they would go ahead, I just couldn't believe this, that they would go ahead and release a nice little creepy device. Craig 26:27 This is the Portal Have you heard about their Portal before? This is a device they were selling for 200 bucks and it had in at some pretty darn neat technology. And this technologies designed to be able to recognize faces in the room, follow faces. And you could call out to your family and friends you know really cool stuff that an article by our friends over at Boeing Boeing. Well, the bottom line is who wants to buy a telescreen from Facebook? Nobody trusts them. They were selling it six months ago for 200 bucks. Apparently, it hasn't been selling very well. And as part of Facebook's apology tour they've been doing for the last year, they dropped the price. So if you want Facebook to spy on you in your home, and track you and your face as you walk around the room, which is nice if you're cooking dinner and you're talking with someone and it's creepy if you're not, then go ahead for 99 bucks, you can get it right now as well. So that's it for today. Have a great week. We are putting these up online as well. You can see them at http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube for all of the YouTube people who want to follow it and we're putting our security tips up there and other things as well. So it should be a good time for all. Keep an eye out and please do subscribe. Follow me over there http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube. And I will be back next week right here. And I'll be here with Jack Heath on Monday morning and Jim Polito on Tuesday morning and an even more throughout the week. So keep an eye on my podcast and that's at http://CraigPeterson.com/iTunes. Take care everybody. Have a great week ahead. Bye bye.  ---  Related articles: 5-Star Phonies: Inside The Fake Amazon Review Complex Here’s How Much Your Tax Info Is Worth On The Dark Web NYC Wireless Network Down Due To Y2K-Like Software Bug Hacker Group Has Been Hijacking DNS Traffic On D-Link Routers For Three Months ‘They’re In Our Heads’: TV Series Tackles Big-Tech Nightmare Facebook Slashes Price Of Its Creepy Portal Home Surveillance Telescreen --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Are we living in a simulation? Craig is on the Jim Polito show this Tuesday morning as they discuss this possibility. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: Are We Living In A Simulation? This MIT Scientist Says It’s More Likely Than Not ---  Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors. Airing date: 04/16/2019 Living In A Simulation Craig Peterson 0:00 Hi, everybody, sorry a little late getting it out today. I had a couple of meetings this morning and just tied me up. Anyhow, I think you're going to love this one. I don't know how much you've thought about virtual reality and its impact on us, where it is going. But Jim Polito and I had a good conversation about it this morning. It's something I've been thinking about for going on 25 years now. Are we living in a simulation? Could this happen in the future? So here we go with Jim. Jim Polito 0:38 Here he is. The man who knows it all. Our tech talk guru and great friend, Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir. Craig 0:45  Hey, good morning, Jim. Jim 0:48 Craig, you're scaring me. You're scaring me because you sent the material for our segment. And one of my favorite science fiction movies is The Matrix. The Revolutions and you know, the Reboot. They were okay. I mean Reloaded. But I gotta say you telling me than an MIT professor says that the concept of The Matrix, which is that we're all in a dream world right now, everything around us is all imaginary. It scares me. Craig 1:29 I read a book years ago, I have this guy on my radio show, I tried to like the concept so much. And he was talking about something that a lot of our kids are really into now. And that's virtual reality, Have you tried any of this VR stuff? Jim 1:48  Just a couple of times, I mean, I like it. I think it's gonna I think it has some great applications for us. Yeah. Craig 1:56  Yeah. It does. They're using it now for medical care, remote doctors and things. It's just amazing. But you can still tell you know, it's virtual reality, but it's virtual reality kind of like cartoons were in the, in the 70s compared to what they're like today, you know. Today, you see some of the animated stuff like the new Lion King that's coming out. And it's hard to believe some of it just isn't real. You know, it's, it's, it's just amazing. Well, if we've got virtual reality today, that's like this, with the computers that we have and everything else, think of what virtual reality is going to be like in the next 10, 20, 30 years. Ultimately, you know, they're already working on this Jim, it's going to be indistinguishable from your regular life. So you're going to be able to see stuff and it's going to look real. You're going to be able to touch things and you will feel them you'll be able to smell things that are all around you. It's gonna be kind of cool because you can sit there on a beach in Fiji, in your home, in your living room chair. That's where it's all... think of that. Jim 3:11 Hey, listen, that's all right. I'm all good for that. As long as I'm in control of this, and I know what's real and what's not. What is this MIT professors saying about this what's not real? Craig 3:29 This is really kind of interesting. And I end the hypothesis is an interesting one too. And, you know, being a tech guy, I've been very interested this for a long time. You mentioned The Matrix came out in 99. There were two other movies that came out in 99 as well along the same lines. Well, this MIT professor's name is Virk, is saying that as well as many other people now including Elon Musk, if we're going to be able to get to a point where we can have virtual reality that is pretty much indistinguishable from the real world,w hat are the odds that we're not going to have simulations? What are the odds that we're not going to have things like you know, lived through World War Two? We've already got video games like that right? What's that called? Danny probably knows where, where you're in there to shoot them up World War Two game and you're you're going around and you just click on. Jim 4 :28  The Call of Duty? Danny 4:29 Probably Call of Duty. Yeah. Jim 4:30  Is it Call of Duty? Craig 4:32 Yeah, yeah. Call of Duty as an example, right. So when you're when you're in the future here, not the distant future, but the nearby future people are going to be playing games like Call of Duty. They're going to be on the beach are going to be having all of these things, and it will be quite real. Well, if you can have a simulation like that, in the future as computing improves, is that new technology coming up quantum computing, morphogenic computing and other things. In the future, we're going to have much more processing capability. So we could have things like The Game of Life. Now this, this goes way back, The Game of Life. And I don't know if you're quite geeky enough to... Oh, you remember that? Okay. Jim 5:20  I remember The Game of Life. Sure. We played it all the time. Craig 5:23  Yeah. And you had you had cells and they divided and things went on. The Game of Life where you started civilizations with certain parameters. The parameters can include there's water, does ice float or does it sink? Does this have a Game of Thrones world? Does that really exist and create those and spin them up? How about people who are in the school that at MIT and other places? Are they going to want to be able to use that technology to spin up a whole simulated civilization and have that civilization run out to see what history might have been like. So let's recreate our ancestors a hundred thousand years ago. And and start that simulation and see how they acted. Well, frankly, that's inevitable. That is going to happen. So let's crank that clock further ahead, let's crank crank it ahead 100 years 1000 years into our future we will have the capability to do that and have multiple simulations running on the same computer of entire societies. of entire civilizations crossing thousands of years. So if that's the case, if we can get to that point, ultimately what he's saying and many others have been saying is the odds are excellent that the millions to one, Jim, the odds are excellent that what we're living in is a virtual reality. That none of this is real. Because if there will be thousands or millions of these things spun up in the future, what are the odds that we are living in the very first, very initial society that creates this virtual reality? Jim 7:34   Oh my god. My mind got blown.  We're talking with Craig Peterson our tech talk guru. And it's like science fiction spilling over into reality and you know, Jules Verne, remember Jules Verne was writing these novels about man on the moon and all these other concepts that ultimately came to fruition and you know, are the novels of today doing that? And now you've got an MIT scientists saying, hey, how do you know you're not living in a, in right now in a virtual reality? Remember when I was young, the big deal was, hey, we could be, our universe could be inside a molecule in the finger of a giant in another universe, you know, like and that stuff used up blow your mind you'd be sitting there in college talking about that stuff. Just blow your mind. And yet this is really blowing my mind. This stuff. Craig 8:40 It is something. This is like we're in a marble hanging on a cat's collar in Men in Black right? It is highly likely. It's called a simulation hypothesis. There are some excellent books that have been out there now for 20, 30 years about this. And you look at the Wachowski's movie series, The Matrix and some of these others. I'm trying to remember what the names of them were there a couple more in 99 but this guy's name is Rizwan Virk, I assume it's a guy, a computer scientist, video game developer, and he leads the PlayLabs over at MIT, came out with a book and he took he kind of define the, the whole thing called it the simulation hypothesis. And I've thought about this, thoroughly thought about this Jim for more than 20 years. And I don't see any way that it's not a simulation. Now, that doesn't mean that these people that believe this, don't believe in God or the God exists, or the benefits of religion or anything else, because who's saying what's being used ultimately. But if we can, if anyone can get to the point where you can't tell the difference. Even think of the Fifth Day right? That Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. Jim 10:08  Yeah, yeah. I believe that you could download everything in your brain. Craig 10:11  Everything in your brain and his buddy was, and his girlfriend was virtual. She wasn't real. And yet, everything seemed real, you know, these types of things and these hypotheses been  around for a long time. So it's fun to play with. I'm not sure it does any good in any direction at all. Jim 10:35 Yeah, I know. I know other than blowing your mind and being good conversation. Especially younger. Craig 10:37 It doesn't matter, right. It's kind of the bottom line.  Jim 10:41 What difference does it make? If it's true, what difference does it make to me right now? I'm a Duracell battery. That's it. Craig 10:48 I don't think that's the case. Jim 10:51 If I am a battery, I'm definitely a D cell. Craig 10:58 Here we go. Rim shot, please. Jim 11:00 Here we go. Craig Peterson folks. Always blowing our minds so the great stuff. Now Craig Peterson can blow your mind to outside of the show. He the information that he provides to me and there was a lot of other stuff today butt I just picked this little Matrix like story you can get it to and also get updates when there's a big hack or something going wrong in the IT world Craig Peterson provides this for free to my listeners. He doesn't pester you doesn't try to sell you anything. And all you do is text my name to this number. Craig 11:37 855-385-5553. That's 855-385-5553. Jim 11:48  And standard data and text rates apply. But I suggest you do it. And Craig, awesome segment and we'll catch up with you next week. Craig 11:58 Hey take care. Thanks, Jim. Jim 12:00 Thanks. Craig 12:03  Hey everybody. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow. Bye bye. --- Don't miss any episode from Craig. Visit http://CraigPeterson.com/itunes. Subscribe and give us a rating! Thanks, everyone, for listening and sharing our podcasts. We're really hitting it out of the park. This will be a great year!  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Are we in the Matrix?  Well, An MIT professor says our whole experience could be a simulation thing. So we'll get into that today Are Amazon workers to your Alexa conversations? Well if they are it is for only max 30 seconds. They don't have context. I get it. It may be an invasion of privacy but could they tell anything about the context. We will delve into this more today Why are conservatives (or so-called conservatives) saying we've got to start regulating the internet?  I will be covering the reasons why today. Is China selling high tech tyranny to Latin America? And it's true, and it's scary and we will discuss it. Then there is Malware that is attacking our Critical Infrastructure sites.  Today. it's on our list to discuss.  We've talked about autonomous cars, and about insurance and liability for them before? However, the bigger concern is DATA!  Did you know that a car can generate about 25 gigabytes of data every hour, and as much as four terabytes a day? So, who's getting that data?  Listen in for my take on that For all this and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment; it might contain errors. Airing date: 04/13/2019 Government Regs Killing Internet - China Selling Tyranny To Venezuela - Russian Malware Infecting Plants Craig Peterson 0:00 Hello, everybody Craig Peterson here. We've got a lot of security and technology to talk about today, including one of my favorite topics, you might not be aware of this. But wow, you're going to love this.  It is from an MIT professor. And he agrees with me about this whole simulation thing. So we'll get into that in just a few minutes. I was watching the news this week. In fact, it was yesterday on Friday. And it was kind of crazy because they were talking about oh, my gosh, Amazon workers are listening to what you're telling Alexa and the, you know, invasion of privacy and all this other stuff? Really? Really? I don't think so. Okay, so we'll talk about that. What's really happening there. Your car? We know we've talked about autonomous cars are about insurance before? Where's the liability shifting? Is it something that you really have to worry about? Well, how about all of the data? It's saying right now, this is an article from Roll Call, that a car can generate about 25 gigabytes of data every hour, and as much as four terabytes a day. So who's getting that data? And what does it mean and what's going to happen? We've had more and more calls for government regulations over the internet. Now, we've seen a lot of those in Europe, we're going to talk about what's happening right now in the US. We've even got so-called conservatives, who are saying we've got to start regulating the internet, because, of course, they feel their voices are being squashed. So we'll talk about that. China selling high tech tyranny to Latin America. This is from the Washington Examiner, in kind of an intriguing headline. And it's true, and it's scary. We've got another piece of malware out there. It's called Triton. And now it is infected a second critical infrastructure site. This is a bad, bad thing. And one more that's in my show notes for this week. And we may not get to all of us on the air today, right. So make sure you visit them online, you're going to have to go to http://CraigPeterson.com. And you can subscribe right there to my weekly show notes. You get all of the top articles that I have found during the week, right there in the daily or the weekly newsletter comes out Saturday morning. Craig 2:43  But this particular one's interesting because 16 months ago, researchers were reporting and unsettling escalation in hacks, targeting power plants. This is from ArsTechnica.com. And we talked a little bit about that before. And, you know, we know about some of the compromises that happened, for instance, in Iran that was conducted by the US and Israel. But what's unprecedented in this attack is the use of advanced malware that is targeting the site's safety processes. So it's shutting down all kinds of things that are going to help keep the plants safe. And when you think about gas field pressures, reactors, reactor temperatures rising, it gets very, very nasty, you know. Some of this stuff is designed to automatically close valves to really mess you up. And when we say mess you up, we mean to make that whole nuclear power plant go into a meltdown. Craig 3;48  So what's happening with this? There's some researchers over at FireEye who are saying that this same security firm, by the way, discovered Triton, and it ties it to Russia, that they've uncovered an additional intrusion use the same malicious software framework against a different critical infrastructure site. So I guess the big question here is, Does this mean that countries like Russia, for instance, are using malware as kind of a first strike opportunity? Right? It's hard to trace, it's hard to prove that it's them that that attacked you. Right? How can you prove it? Craig 4:30 Well, frankly, you can't in most cases, it just has fingerprints, like the Russian language, or this is attacks we know, that have previously come from Russia. Those are the types of things that we've got to watch out for. And we now know that Russia has been involved in some this hacking. We know China has been involved in some. North Korea has been involved in some to let me tell you, it's a different world. And the next war we have is going to be a much different war, that's for sure. Craig 5:03  Let's talk about this China story here, where China is selling some high tech tyranny to Latin America. This is, as I mentioned, the Washington Examiner. And this is very, very concerning. Because what we found now is China has been working with these companies like Huawei, which we know about, it's been a very, very big deal. And Huawei's devices have been banned from US military bases, and from others, but it's also saying this ZTE, is tied into this. And we know about the concerns with 5G and ZTE and all of the stuff that's going on all this stuff they're doing. And we're getting really concerned now because what's happening is that China is taking these tools that they've developed in order to monitor their people within China and really displace the United States. They're putting all of the surveillance equipment all around the US and the Western Hemisphere. Well, not so much in Canada, although, obviously with 5G rollouts, we do have some of that Chinese equipment going up there. But they're supporting right now Venezuelan strong man, Nicolas Maduro, the current president who's really clinging to power, after the western democracies, I think all of them said, Yeah, you got to be out of there. And recognize the opposition lawmakers, the interim president, China has been exporting technology that helps a South American socialist to monitor and strong arm the Venezuelan people, which is what he's been doing for quite a while. So here's an example of politics being really promoted and expanded the power base due to some of this technology. So think about that now. China is really now intertwined in the Western Hemisphere and things that are going on. And they're able to surveil, monitor, surrounding the US, that's all part of the Asia Pacific influence that they've been building here for a while. And it's very concerning very, very concerning.  Craig 7:24 Maduro, by the way, paid ZTE as part of this, but to build a $70 million database and payment system for what they're calling a homeland card. Now, what's concerning about this is this so-called homeland card, that ZTE sold the technology to Maduro for is designed to be used to control access to food, to cash, bonuses, social services, a social credit system for a political control mechanism. In fact, it's even used to track your voting. So they know how you voted, it's recorded right there with the card, it goes into the database. This is all part of their smart card thing. And if you don't vote the right way, what's going to happen? It's just like in Chicago, right? If you don't pay the local Chicago thugs in the party that's in control in Chicago, you know, all of the criminal activity that's been alleged there for years, much of it's been proven, in fact, you end up with potholes in your street that won't get fixed, because you've been speaking out against the local candidate for the town, for the city, for the county, for the state. It's just it's still so corrupt in Chicago. It's unbelievable, how bad it is there. Well, it is much, much worse in Venezuela using these Chinese technologies that the Chinese have been building. Have you seen the Black Mirror episode, for those that are sci-fi fantasy, it is a series out of UK, it's a really, really good one. And the whole idea, the whole premise behind this particular episode is that every time you do something, you get social credit, or you get credit taken away from you. And this poor lady just ends up in a downward spiral and, and has no credit left, right? It gets to be really, really bad. Well, in China, now, they have facial recognition technology all over the place throughout all of the major cities. If you jaywalk, you get points taken away, because the computers know who you are. And now you don't have the social credit. And if you don't have the social credit, because you've done things that the socialist, communist government doesn't like, you cannot vote, you can't get on an airplane, you can't get on a train even they block you from those if you don't do what you're told to do. And if you're not politically correct. Free speech is just going down the tubes worldwide and very, very scary. So let's talk about friends speech here for a minute. Craig 10:01 Here's an article from the Daily Mail. And course they are ahead of us in some of this stuff, right? Free speech is outlawed in the United Kingdom. Now, it's legally outlawed in Canada, you cannot say certain things. You can't even ask legitimate questions, legitimate political questions. You cannot have a dialogue about certain things. You know, if you question about somebody's birth sex, and now they say, well, you have to use this gender when addressing me, or you're supposed to go on bended knee to his or her royal highness and request permission to speak to them what's going on? Because in Canada, and in the UK, if you say something they don't like, you can go to jail. And it's that simple. So there is no freedom of speech there. And in the US now, we've got these fascists running around, who are beating people up, threatening people, yelling, screaming, trying to stop free speech rights. And that is the definition of fascism, isn't it? It's a definition of socialism or communism, they all do it. They all try and stop free speech because they don't want the free exchange of ideas because their ideas are right. And the only reason it hasn't worked before is because of what? Well, because the other people weren't smart enough. We're smart, our generation is smarter than all generations that have ever come before us. Right? That is not what they say. So now we're tying technology into this. We're seeing it in China. Big time, big time. And we're now seeing it in Venezuela, as the current president tries to hold on to his socialist powers to control everyone's lives. And of course, people are dying, they're starving, They're digging through trash to try and find food. Right? A socialist utopia, just like the Soviet Union became? Craig 11:57 Well, now we're looking at government regulations. In the US over free speech in places like the public square. Is Facebook, the public square? Is Twitter the public square? Obviously not. But we passed laws in the US that said, Hey, listen, we're going to consider you as a public square, all you have is a faucet. And all of these ideas are coming out of that faucet. And therefore, we are not going to allow anyone to hold you liable for the things that your users say online. And that's the sort of thing that you expect from free and open fair discussions from a democracy, right? You expect that kind of free speech, and you don't want to have regulations or restrictions on the people that are providing those free speech areas, just like the public square. You could go get a soapbox, you could stand up in the public square, and you could say anything you wanted, no matter how crazy it was. Right? That that was the idea of the public square. That was the idea behind the laws that are protecting Facebook and Twitter and, and others online. Craig 13:14  Well, now we found that they are doing various types of censorship, let's put it that way. Google is being sued. And just this week, a big lawsuit was announced, because Google's showing search results that favor them versus their competitors. Now, I gotta say, if you're writing code that's going to give good search results, of course, you have to discriminate against materials that you don't consider to be, you know, up to your standard that people aren't looking at that aren't, aren't popular. Craig 13:52 But if you're looking for an unpopular opinion online, you know, remember, the majority isn't always right. Right? Slavery. The majority of people endorsed it, but it wasn't right. It was never right. So just because of the majority says something should be done. And just because political correctness would lead me to believe that that's what you should do. That doesn't mean that it is the right thing. Well, China's walled off a lot of Western services on the internet, you've heard about the Great Firewall of China before. The UK now is planning to hold executives personally liable for posts on social media that they consider harmful or illegal because remember, there's no free speech in the UK anymore. And this came out in the government white paper on Monday this week. They say this would put the country at the far end of internet censorship and further fuel, what they're calling now this splinternet. This is a term circulated for, you know, more or less a decade here, this gained some popularity recently. And this comes in the tail end of Mark Zuckerberg saying, you know, Facebook's chief, that he wants a common global frame that a framework of internet rules, which is never going to happen, right. Tim Burners Lee, you might remember him, he started the worldwide web's, software. And he came up with what he called a contract for the web that establishes an ethical sense of principles for the internet. A whole lot here. The New Zealand Christchurch mosques, massacre, you remember, this was very recent as well live streamed online. It's a heightened sense of urgency in New Zealand. They just knee-jerked, passed laws within two weeks that change the face of what's happening there. Huge debates in the US and the EU on curbing what they're calling incitement to violence. Now, obviously, you can tie this into, can I yell fire in a crowded theater? Right? There's a lot of things that you could do here. Craig 16:10 In free speech, that would step over lines like that. So how about the line for inciting to violence? What is that? What does it mean? Well, in Australia, there's a law now it's a new one that can jail social media executives for failing to take down violent extremist content quickly. A proposal in Britain that makes executives personally liable for harmful common content posted on social platforms. How do you define this? How do you define harmful content? Where is the line? If someone says, Oh, my feelings were hurt? Is that harmful? Well, of course, it is, because their feelings were hurt. So does that mean we can't say anything that might upset anyone again, refer back to that, that Black Mirror episode of the UK proposal, this is from a White House technology advisor, who's now over at MIT says that it's a very bad look for rights-respecting democracy to do what they're doing in the UK would place the UK toward the foreign the internet censorship spectrum. Craig 17:19 And the UK culture Secretary says, you like that? They got a culture Secretary over there. The Culture Secretary says the proposed laws will not limit press freedom. Okay, so where's the line on the press? Look what's happening right now, the Ecuadorian embassy in Britain. And you have a guy who is now under arrest, who's claiming he is a publisher, right? He published documents that were stolen by two military members, one was a military contractor and one, another military man who was working with secret information. Was he a publisher? Did he help them steal it by providing instructions on how to sneak classified information out? Was he a co-conspirator? There's just so much right now going on. And you know, when we're looking at free speech, I think free speech is almost absolute. Craig 18:23 If it can be shown that something caused physical harm to someone, you know, that's kind of where the my you're right to swing your fist stops where my nose begins. Now, obviously, at some point, while that fist is being swung, I'm feeling threatened. Craig 18:42 But where do you draw the line? Well, I think you draw the line at touching me, certainly at hitting my nose. And this is something that the internet pioneer has never really thought about. Remember, I've been on the internet since 83. Of course, it wasn't called that back then. We had different types of networks and things. But since 83, and free speech was always a big deal. We didn't really get free speech until September of 91 online, because it was still heavily controlled by the federal government. Remember it was a federal government research project that funded it, but then they kind of let loose of it in 91. But man, what a world out there.  Craig 19:22  Let's get into this Amazon article right now. I was listening to the news. I was watching a morning news program, in fact, this week, and they were talking about how bad it is that Amazon Alexa workers are sitting there listening to you. Okay, so that's one level. And then they said, Oh, and on top of it now, they won't call the police if they hear something that might be bad. Now, I like it. I like that, right. And I understand the first part. And I like the second part. Because you know, the second part, you don't have the full context, you've got a 3o second snippet. You know, somebody wakes up that that Amazon device, or that Google device, or whatever it might be. You wake it up, it records for up to 32nd, sends it up to the cloud, processes it, and then execute your command. So they're listening to max 30 seconds. You don't have context. You don't know what's going on. And you certainly don't want to destroy people's lives over a vague suspicion. Right. So I like that. I really like that. It's just like as when I spent 10 years in emergency medicine, we were all mandated-reporters. But we did not have to report unless we thought there might be something going on that's reportable. Craig 20:52 So I think that's a pretty straightforward thing. I think that's pretty simple to look at and understand because it didn't think that something was reportable, then I never reported it. And so different people had different bars, right? How high that was. Now, let's go to the first part of this where they were very upset that Amazon employees were listening in. Craig 21:17 It's very limited when Amazon employees are listening in and they're not listening to all of the audio coming from your house. So listening to at most that 30-second snippet, when you told Alexa, that you had a command for her. That's it. That's that simple. And what they're doing is they're using your audio to better the speech interpretation, better the machine learning, so that it understands how people are asking questions, what sort of accents they might have, how it works. For instance, when I talked to Alexa, I get great responses, because she understands me. She understands me speaking, hopefully, you guys do too. But my wife has issues with it. I have a son that has issues with it. And that has to do with your cadence, your clarity of speech, right, enunciation. And how do you improve your software? You improve it by testing. How do you test software, that design that's intended to be able to process human speech and understand what it's going for? Understand what the goal is of that human that's asking you to do something? Well, this is the only way to do it. Right? They don't have these employees that hear the audio don't have your name. They don't have your account number, they have no idea who you are, they don't have the email address. All they have is a snippet of sound, and how the Alexa voice processor processed it. So they can listen to what they can see was Alexa correct in parsing much you said? And was it correct in understanding your intention behind what you said? So it's pretty simple, it's pretty straightforward. Don't get too freaked out about this. And there have been court cases where Amazon has been asked for and did provide under court order, the audio that has been captured. But remember, it's very limited audio. And unless that device has been hacked, and you know, it hasn't happened in at least a couple of years that I'm aware of. If it's hacked, it is possible to make it so it's recording. But the way the hardware setup in that Alexa, it cannot record you, unless that little light is on. It's a physical hardware limitation that they purposely built into it. So it's not as though they can just turn on the microphone and life is good. It's like on your MacBook Pro, the hardware that when your camera is active, that light comes on. It's all designed in one piece. So unlike many Windows machines, you can't just turn on the camera and not have that green light come on. The same thing with Alexa. Now, if you have physical access to the device, there may be you know, there's always ways right ultimately, to get into that. Craig 24:22  Man, we are almost out of time. Three technologies that could create trillion dollar markets over the next decade. I got that from Barons, but it's up there on http://CraigPeterson.com. Very interesting. And they talk about some genetic stuff and quantum computing and material science. You'd find that fascinating, I'm sure and I have it up again along with all of these at my website http://CraigPeterson.com. And if you go to htttp://CraigPeterson.com/radio-show, you'll see my show notes, but you also get those in the email if you signed up. This is the one that I really am interested in. Craig 25:03 Are we living in an illusion? Did you notice back in 99, there were three movies that came out that were implying, inferring, opening our minds to the possibility that we are living in a simulation. And I had a guest on my show about that time. He's just a regular engineer. But he had done a lot of thought a lot of research and put together a book that was specifically addressing that question. Very thick book, very convincing book. And he did all the math behind it. And basically, what he said is that, eventually, any civilization will get good enough to be able to have a virtual reality that's indistinguishable from the real thing. Craig 25:52 And the odds are that within 20, 30 years from now, that'll be true here. You'll be able to plug yourself in one way or the other and live in whatever worlds you want to. Have a vacation in Fiji and just enjoy it and not have any jet lag okay. That's coming. So if that happens, basically he said the odds are millions to one that we are living in that timeline that invented this virtual reality. Craig 26:28 We may be all running this, this whole world, this universe that we perceive around us, is millions to one likely to be a simulation. We are not likely to be that very first time through. And what's interesting is this ties into a lot of religions as well. Because again, God created the heavens in the earth. He did it in six days. Oh, maybe he did. Maybe we're running in a simulation, and on a computer in somebody's basement? Who knows what we're doing? And are we all just artificial intelligence programs? So this is fascinating. When I get this book, Rizwan Virk, I may try and get him on the radio show. He's a computer scientist. Video game developer, he leads PlayLabs at MIT. And his book's called The Simulation Hypothesis. I love it. I love just the mental gyrations you kind of have to go through to think about this and the potential of being a simulation. Craig 27:33  Well, I appreciate everybody being with us today. We will be back next week. And course I've been releasing podcast now, six days a week. Most weeks, it's you know, it's between two and six. But most recent six weeks we have you know, It's A Security Thing where we're talking about current recent security problems businesses have had what could have been done to prevent them what you can do, and then also just talking about all these great articles that we send out in our show notes. So have a great day. We'll see you next week and thanks for listening. http://CraigPeterson.com for more. Bye-Bye   ---  Related articles: Amazon Workers Are Listening To What You Tell Alexa Mysterious Safety-Tampering Malware Infects A Second Critical Infrastructure Site Rise Of The 'Splinternet': Experts Warn The World Wide Web Will Break Up And Fragment As Governments Set Their Own Rules To Filter And Restrict Content China Selling High-Tech Tyranny To Latin America, Stoking US Concern Are We Living In A Simulation? This MIT Scientist Says It’s More Likely Than Not 3 Technologies That Could Create Trillion-Dollar Markets Over The Next Decade Your Car Is Watching You. Who Owns The Data? --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Craig is on with Jim Polito this morning. They talked about sextortion scams being circulated in the emails and about passwords and password managers you can use. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: Latest Tactics Used By Cybercriminals To Bypass Traditional Email Security ---  Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors. Airing date: 04/09/2019 Why Hackers Hack - Sextortion On The Rise And What To Do About It  Jim Polito 0:01 Welcome back. He's here and thank God because the cyber criminals are out there. Still trying to get into your email. Well, how do you protect yourself? Well you start with this man, our Tech Talk guru Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir. Craig Peterson 0:21 Hey, good morning, Jim. Jim 0:22 How are you, buddy? Craig 0:24 I'm doing great. We're just in a conference, in fact, out west and now I'm trying to get used to the time zone again, back and forth, back and forth. There's so much going on. Jim 0:34 There is and they're relentless, the cyber criminals in wanting to get into your email every time some other patches put up or some other security measure, they figure a way around it. So what's the latest that they're doing? And what can we do about it? Craig 0:50 Well, if you don't mind you, and let me let me explain something to the audience. Jim 0:53 Explain, I like that. Explain. Craig 0:58 Why are they doing it? And you get right down to it, you and I and everybody else around here. We're living here in this first world country. And we enjoy all kinds of things. At the conference, I spent some time with a few ladies from Zimbabwe and South Africa. And they're living there, this one lady is trying to help other women who are in abusive relationships there. Get out of that learn some skills. They make it $100 a month, in Zimbabwe. They do not have running water. Most of the days of the week the pipes are turned off, there's no water at all. They don't have the electricity that we have. It's just amazing. And they were just absolutely livid about what they called entitled, stupid people worried about everything from the type of plastic bag all the way on out. Jim 2:03 Don't talk about plastic bags. You're going to get people upset. Craig 2:10  Total first world problems, okay, I'm helping them by getting some use computers together, cleaning them up, I'm gonna be doing some free training for them on cyber security. So consider that type of person. And then then you can move on to Eastern Europe where it's more than $100 a month that they're making but they're not making very much. Jim 2:28  They're not making very much. Craig 2:31 So if they can somehow get their hands on your data, if they can, you know, these people aren't stupid. They're just in a bad financial circumstance. So if they can get their hands on your data, let's say one, one of my new clients had $100,000 taken out of their operating account, based on the technique we're going to talk about, okay. $100,000, and this was an Eastern European, that means they can not only support themselves for a year or two, but they can support their brothers, their sisters, their parents, their grandparents for a year or two. You know, the getting a $500 from someone is a huge win. Again, these women in Zimbabwe, that's five months worth of food and rent if they have to pay that. That's huge, huge money. So we're sitting here with our first world problems saying, well, why would anybody want to steal my credit card or my identity? Or get into my business bank account? Craig 3:40 Well that's why. Think think of the motivation of these people and how many people there, they're going to be helping? So I had to say that because. Jim 3:48 It makes sense. I'm glad I'm glad you gave that perspective, I mean, just about what they're dealing with. And and if they you know, it drives people to some things. Drive people to crime. Craig 3:59 They absolutely do and we just don't realize it so much of the time zone, we have a very interesting conversation at dinner the night before last, with these ladies talking about what's going on. So when you were talking about here with email is absolutely huge. Because again, these are just bad guys. And they are trying to get some money out of you. And they're using some new strategies to get past these email security gateways. You know, you have some of the lower end ones that you might get from a Barracuda or an online site, and there's ways to get past them. And that's what we're talking about just for a minute here. I've had a lot of listeners, contact me with these sextortion scams. Know, I've got them as well, I don't know if you have. But what will happen with these sextortion scams, which is a type of blackmail, and right now it's making up 10% send of all of the spear phishing attacks and email, and that number is rising. And if your employees are more than twice as likely to be targeted blackmail, then standard business email compromise. And so here's what happened. They send an email that has in the subject line, security alerts type of message. They'll include your email address, or even your password in the subject line. And they'll say something like, Hey, you know, we have video of you on this porn site. And they'll give you a password. Now remember, Jim, we've talked many times about do not put your password out on, you know, the same password on multiple websites?  Jim 5:52 Yeah. Because once they get one, they get the others. Yeah. Craig 5:57 They've got them all because it's the same one. So they'll either put your email, your email address, they'll definitely put your password into these things. And now all of a sudden, you say, Oh, my gosh, what happened? And whether or not you were on that site, you're questioning now wait a minute, they've got my password? Well, of course they do. If you use the same password everywhere, of course they do. And we're seeing brand impersonation is huge. One out of three times a impersonate a financial institution. Jim 6:34 And there is. Yeah. Craig 6:35 There it is business email compromises and blackmail is on the rebound right now. So one of the most common ones is impersonating Microsoft and my dad fell victim to that one. Thank goodness, my mom called me and said, you know, your dad's  talking to someone on Microsoft technical support? And I'm not sure. You know, one in five is a financial institution, the majority them now are sextortion emails with a security alert, subject lines and more than 70% nowadays, are trying to establish some form of rapport. Hey, we're trying to help you. Craig 7:17 Yeah, sense of urgency. And we're using name spoofing techniques. And it's getting past most of these lower end filters and gateways out there. So if you're a business person, and this is, you know, they're not all going to business email addresses, that's for sure. And they are not all coming from them either. Right now, the number one source of these sextortion and other emails, is Gmail. It's Google. Google's not even able to stop them from going out okay. Huge. So just stay ahead, you've got to have the right combination of the right technology, which isn't the cheap stuff, I'm afraid to say, you know. Look for something good look for Cisco's email firewalls. Look for the higher end ones. You know, even a Barracuda is better than nothing. Right? So have that, but also have training for your people. You know what, I'm going to dig up, there is a website that Google has put out, I've got the URL somewhere. I'll dig it out. I'll text it out to our listeners here later on today, once I figure it all out. But this is training. It's free, it takes five to 10 minutes, 15 minutes at the most. And what it does is it shows you on this website to type it asks for your name and email address, okay, now, they don't use it in marketing or anything. But the goal behind this is to embed it into these fake emails, they're going to show you they're not going to send them to you, they're just going to show you. And you'll see the email on a web browser, just like it will be showing up in your normal email client. And you can mouse over and over over so they teach you some techniques. And with what's going on right now, Jim, this is going to be a godsend. So I'll make sure I SMS them out. Probably this afternoon. Jim 9:13 All right. And it will tell you at the end of the segment, how to get to that stuff. But it's very, very important. Craig, you've got I guess the real tip here is you've got to make different passwords for every single account. And you talked before about a password storage system to help people with that. Craig 9:38 Right, exactly. So go into Jim's archives, and you'll find, here's what it is, okay, there's two password managers, I highly recommend. If you are a business user, absolutely use something called 1Password. So that's the digit one, followed by the word password, 1Password is the way to go. And it's absolutely phenomenal. And I've written this thing up about this, I'll try and send that out later today too. I'll try and send them both out. And then I use it for my family as well. But it does cost money to get the family options and to get the group options. And 1Password has multiple vaults so you can have a vault for your financial people, a vault for your marketing people, etc, etc. So I love that. And then the other one that is free, now 1Password does have free as well. Okay, just let me have all the advanced features which you don't need from normal, just normal use. LastPass is the other one. LastPass as in last password. And both of these tie into your web browsers, they'll create passwords, they will remember them, they work across all of your devices. It's huge. So start today. Change all your passwords and use one of these two password managers. Jim 10:57 All right Craig big help. Craig Peterson everybody. Now here's how you get all this information. This is how I know this stuff. And you'll be in on it too. Text my name, Jim, to this number. Craig 11:12 855-385-5553. So just text the word Jim to 855-385-5553 along with any questions you might have. Jim 11:26 Standard data and text rates apply. Craig will not sell your name to somebody, he won't hack you. This is all free. There's there's nothing, nothing you need to do about it. It's all free and he won't pester you with incessant messages but he will alert you when something big happens and tell you what you need to do. Craig excellent segment. Thank you so much for the time. --- Don't miss any episode from Craig. Visit http://CraigPeterson.com/itunes. Subscribe and give us a rating! Thanks, everyone, for listening and sharing our podcasts. We're really hitting it out of the park. This will be a great year!  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553