As-Salaam-Alaikum-Khawwati-Nuh-Hasrath. Wasim As-San welcomes you to lecture number 10 of Marketing for Non-profits, MKT 628 at the Virtual University of Pakistan. The component of learning I'm going to talk about right away is on drivers of behavior change. In other words, I'm going to talk about all those factors responsible for manifesting the consumer behavior consumers show while they make a purchase decision. In the context of non-profit environment, the consumers have to make a decision about whether they are going to change their behavior, opting for a certain program or not. Therefore, it is extremely important for the marketer to understand why consumers behave the way they do until he has that kind of understanding. There is no way that he can come up with the right strategic marketing plan because a lack of understanding of the consumer is not going to let the marketer move forward in terms of the strategic process. Consumer behavior is a complex phenomena. It develops over time. It does not form itself overnight very quickly. It is something which is an evolution. And the factors that basically are responsible for the behavior are your personality, perceptions, the values and beliefs. We all have certain outlook toward life and that is the internal phenomenon of everybody's personality, the way they look at things at life. And then there is a certain mechanism which figures itself at the once you respond to the external phenomena, thereby forming our personality traits, giving way to developing our perceptions and then building certain values and beliefs. The ones that we have is set of values and beliefs. That influences the way we behave and the way we make decisions whether to opt for a program or not opt for a program. The fact remains that the marketing people have to undertake a lot of effort trying to reveal what exactly triggers such influences and the studies carried out by the different marketing people tell us that they all have to look into the areas of sociology, psychology and demographics in particular because these are the variables which went put together for a very good ground for the research design that you put together to carry out marketing research and to find out what these influences are and how they come into play and then let people behave the way they do. We all know that the marketing basically is a combination of so many disciplines and therefore we call it an eclectic discipline. It draws on certain properties of sociology, psychology, demographics, economics, statistics and therefore marketing people have to look at all those variables which are helpful to come up with the right kind of the marketing research to unearth all the factors responsible for driving the consumer behavior. I would summarize it by saying that without understanding this consumer behavior the marketer is at a loss to come up with the right plan. Central to the consumer behavior is another phenomenon which we call the role of exchange. The factor of the matter is that until the time an exchange has taken place the behavior of the consumer is not fully manifested. The consumer shows his behavior by taking his time going through the exchange process and then deciding or not deciding in favor of the one which the marketing people want him to establish. In other words, if marketing people want the consumers to quit smoking then consumers have to go through a certain process whereby they weigh the costs they have to pay and the benefits they derive by paying those costs. To explain this phenomenon I am going to come up with quite a few examples because the way I am going to talk about rather elaborately so that we all have an understanding very clear about the concept I am talking about. Nothing moves in terms of the exchange until the consumer has shown his behavior by way of weighing costs versus the benefits. What are the costs in an NP environment and what are the kind of benefits which the target market enjoys by paying those costs. Let's talk about the different examples one by one.  Right from the point you left your home to the point the process is complete and you have donated the blood. You have also gone through a process of little bit of pain but the fact is that the cost that you have paid toward all that is the inconvenience. The benefit that you get in return is a great satisfaction on your part for serving a very noble cause because you know that your blood is going to save a few lives and the cost is less than the benefit which you perceive is much higher. So until the time you are convinced as a consumer that the benefit that you have derived out of the cost that you have paid is far greater than the cost themselves you are not going to change your behavior. So that you are actuated to take a certain decision and to start behaving in a certain way only when you are convinced that the benefits are going to far exceed the costs. Another example of this phenomenon is quitting, smoking. There is an NPO and you are a part of that that is working on a program for motivating people to quit smoking and a smoker pays a certain cost when he goes through the process of exchange. Let's take a look at his cost. Well, the sacrifices he gives in terms of saying goodbye to certain set of values and a certain set of habits which he has formed over the number of years is the cost that he pays toward changing his behavior. Once the behavior stands changed, the meaning, once he has quit smoking he derives a tremendous benefit of feeling a little healthier and having the feeling that he is going to have maybe a longer, healthier life to lead and that is the benefit which is perceived by the consumer. An NPO working for improving the environment of a particular city or of a particular locality starts emphasizing on having a greener place and there are activists who are working on this particular exercise and they are convincing people to be aware of the benefits of a greener environment. People who don't really care about greenery, they cut trees and they think vegetation is no good. As a matter of fact you see it is kind of an eyesore, a very weird kind of feeling of course but the fact remains that there are people who are not really far for a greener environment either that they don't like it or they are not aware of the benefits of having a greener or living in a greener environment. So this is the kind of awareness which marketing people have to create and to generate for people to be sensitive to the cost that the marketing people are working for and working on. When you convince people or your team of activists convince people of the outcome of a greener environment and you think that people have changed their behaviors and they have started working on all those factors responsible for making the environment the greener you generate a kind of achievement and a sense of satisfaction on part of all those who have been a part of that exercise meaning the target market who has started behaving in that particular way because they know that if not immediately somewhere down the road the environment is going to look much better than it is today and which is going to be healthier for not only them but also for the coming generations. Another example of cost versus benefit is that of the food bank. Let us go back to the hypothetical situation of a food bank that has the mission to alleviate hunger or to contribute toward alleviating hunger in a certain locality. The costs that people have to pay for accepting meals which are distributed either free of cost or at a subsidized price is something which you may find very interesting but the fact remains that there is a cost even when they pay or they don't pay. The cost is a compromise which they might perceive of their self-respect, self-dignity and self-worth. They may start thinking that accepting these kind of meals is going to be below their dignity and they are going to be a focus of criticism or maybe sarcasm by all those who are associated with them. What's going to happen if people, their friends, their family members find out that they are accepting food which is being distributed free of cost or for that matter at subsidized rates. So you need to have a team of marketing people, volunteers who are activists who are trying to convince people most of the time to start accepting the kind of food which you have started distributing. Let us go to the other example of the nursing home and take an analytical look at the factors I just talked about in terms of self-dignity, self-respect and self-worth. You may have to undertake a very extensive effort trying to convince people who happen to be relatives, friends or family members of the elderly people who you think should be spending their latest years at your nursing home or at the facility where you have taken upon yourselves to offer medical and nursing care. Not only medical and nursing care but also the other social activities which you think if you make your residents a part of are going to play a very positive role toward the remainder of their lifespan. You want to give them a feeling that they are still relevant to the society and they have come to the nursing home not to count the remaining days and wait for the terminal point of their life rather they have come there to enjoy life and for that it is not them that you are going to convince that you have to carry out an exercise to convince their near ones and dear ones. So these people once they are convinced of the operational efficiencies of your facility and of the mission of your program are then going to allow their elderly relatives to enroll themselves as residents of the facility that you are running. An important point that you might have noticed in this example is very similar to the one that I talked about previously on the food bank and that is the involvement of people who do not really happen to be your target market but part of the target audience, overall audience and people who are working either as volunteers or activists or any set of those individuals who may have influence over the real target market. We have seen that the role of exchange is very important and very central to the concept of consumer behavior and therefore costs and benefits that I have talked about in relation to all these examples happen to be the two biggest drivers of consumer behavior. Even in the latest two examples that I just talked about the costs that people pay are much lower than the benefits they derive by getting enrolled to the programs that you are offering either as the food bank or as the nursing home. So until the time your target market is convinced that their benefits are going to far exceed the costs that they have paid toward any program that you may talk about they are not going to change their behavior or they are not going to manifest a change in the behavior which they may change somewhere along the line. Don't forget the fact that the job of the marketer is to influence the behavior and influence the behavior in a way that the market ends up changing it. There is no guarantee that the behavior will automatically change. We can safely say that costs and benefits happen to be two very important drivers of the behavior to change but experts think that these two are accompanied by two more factors that come to their help and complete the model for the behavior change and I am going to show you that model with the help of a little graphical presentation which is going to make clear what those factors are in addition to costs and benefit. Let's take a look at that. Here on this slide as you can see we have customer right in the center because customer happens to be the focus of the whole activity and it goes without saying that we are talking about a customer centered approach. The very first driver is the benefits which you see on the right hand side on top and designated as B. You can see why I am starting with benefits and not costs. If you move leftwards counterclockwise you see costs also influencing the customer. So this is what I talked about, costs versus benefits. Customers have to pay a certain cost in order to derive certain benefits and those benefits have to be much greater than their perception of the costs which they paid toward bringing about a change in their established behavior and this costs factor is designated as C and we are moving from right to left counterclockwise.  Here I am going to talk about all those constituents who are responsible in the example of the food bank for convincing people that accepting from the food bank is not below their dignity. So they are the people who are known as others. In the example that I gave you on the nursing home all those activists or all those friends, relatives and family members of the prospective residents of the nursing home are going to form this particular classification which is others and designated as O. So in other words what we have seen here is as per the experts claim that it is not just the costs and benefits that are the prime drivers of consumer behavior or staging a change in consumer behavior while influencing their behavior. It also are two more factors because one of which happens to be others. So in other words the role played by other people in this kind of an equation is extremely important and alongside costs and benefits they play their respective role. When you move rightwards you see the fourth factor of self-efficacy designated as S. This is a factor which according to experts states that people in many instances are confident of bringing about a change in their behavior because they are aware of the consequences of not changing the behavior like if they happen to be smokers they know that smoking is not good for health and therefore bringing about a change with by quitting smoking toward their behavior is something positive and something healthy. Something the people or their peers are going to approve of but still these people have certain inhibitions which keep them from bringing about that change which is desired by the marketer and therefore the job of the marketer here is to give the kind of final push to the thinking process of the target market so that it can bring about the change which otherwise it thinks it can bring about by itself. So why wait for the target market to act on their own? The marketing people in these kinds of situations could jump in and they give the final push to the thinking process of the target market. Doing so they are actuating the target market to make the final decision about the behavior change and something which the market thinks they can do by themselves. They have the confidence of achieving the desired results. The marketing people give it a push and they make it happen in a way that consumers have this positive thinking that they played a positive role toward influencing themselves and bringing about the desired change. As long as the marketing people can achieve their results it doesn't really matter who gets the credit and in this kind of a situation I think a smart marketing person would like to give credit to its target market. The credit can be given by having certain testimonials as part of the communication campaign where the customers can talk about the behavioral change brought about through their thought process and also making the marketing people part of the joint effort which was put together to bring about that particular change. These two factors others and self-efficacy work hand in hand with costs and benefits and through the examples we have seen that others play a very important role whether we are dealing with a situation like the food bank or the nursing home the fact remains that the role of others is extremely important. Now this role can be positive as well as negative. So what happens when their role is negative? Well the US marketing people can have got to put together a campaign or put together certain efforts in which you can exert upon the target audience that is against your interests in a way that they get convinced which means that in such situations the US marketing people have got to convince not just the target market but the broader environment, the broader target audience and that target audience consists of others and these others form some very significant constituents of the whole setup and until these constituents are taken on board your objective cannot be fulfilled and your goals will not be scored and therefore the drivers of consumer behavior are extremely important to understand so that the US marketing experts can put together a strategic plan which reflects your analytical thinking in terms of consumer behavior and what really drives that consumer behavior. Having understood the value of the role of exchange we now move on to another set of learning that is about types of exchanges because we already have seen the central role of exchange toward consumer behavior and the impact it has when consumer manifests his behavior while opting for a program and not opting for a program and we are talking mostly positively and therefore let's talk about changing his behavior and making the marketing people's mission achievable and implementable. Coming to types of exchanges which is the topic of the component let me tell you that there are two different kinds of exchanges the one is what you call two-party exchange and the other is multiple-party exchange so in other words depending upon your situation and the program that you have undertaken you either deal with just two-party exchange or a multiple-party exchange and complexity of exchange is there for various varying situations I'm going to explain this concept with the help of examples also and I'm going to refer back to the examples that I have been talking about for the reason of maintaining consistency the building blocks of knowledge will make more sense if we drop on the same or similar examples that we have been learning and the application of different concepts of non-profit marketing will make more sense if we drop on them over and over again so let us be very consistent about building these blocks of knowledge a two-party exchange is a pretty straightforward kind of a thing and it is something which is given by one party and taken by another and obviously we are talking here about costs and benefits because one party pays costs gets a benefit in return and that benefit in return is the gotten out of the exchange that has taken place and marketing people are instrumental in creating that exchange and trying to bring about a change in the behavior of the target audience so let us move on to the multiple-party exchange because that carries more complexity than a two-party exchange this is not very straightforward it has so many dimensions to it and those dimensions are the ones that I have been talking about and we all are on the same page hopefully on those dimensions and basically those are about different constituents that we have been trying to connect with each other in order to make our program rather coherent and cohesive so here we are talking about certain additional parties who are part of the exchange and since these parties are going to have a lot of influence over the decisions that the marketing people want their target market to make these parties play a very important role going back to the example of the food bank it is the activists or the bunch of volunteers who convince the target market about they are accepting the food distributed by the food bank similarly when we talk about the example of the nursing home let us now look at that example from the standpoint of the cost marketing and the cost marketing relationship let us talk about hospitals and hospitality businesses, meaning restaurants and also hotels who are willing to extend some kind of help in kind to make sure that the nursing home operates in certain social matters just like a hospitality facility in other words they should have all the features exhibited by hotels and restaurants a place where those residents do not feel they have been abandoned a place where they feel that they are spending the remaining part of their life in a very comfortable way so these people or these constituents or these others factor play a dominant role because they have an influence on the decision process of yet another others group that is going to make the decision for the residents and that is the family members friends and their relatives because they are the ones who are going to make the decision about their elders whether to go to the nursing home or not and let me add here just for the sake of interest that nursing home is not something negative it generally is the perception here nursing homes are going to be the thing of the future given the fact that most of the young people or other young couples are going to be in the job market because of the economic factors and there may not be people left at home to take care of the elders and it is because of that reason that elders are shifted to nursing homes they are not shifted to nursing homes because their young ones do not like them and they want to abandon them that's not the fact and therefore the marketing mindset in terms of developing this kind of a facility in years to come there may be a good point for you to ponder back to the multiple party exchanges we have seen two examples fitting very well into the concept of the multiple party exchange and those two examples are the ones I keep talking over and over again and I would like to say again once again that all the concepts that we learn we learn those in a sequence component after component but when it comes to application of those concepts to the actual practical world you have to drop on so many different concepts simultaneously at the same time and then looking at the overall marketing situation in terms of strategy formulation and strategy execution and implementation and therefore talking about these concepts in relation to the same example is going to help you with the world you come up with a marketing plan for any given NPO the important thing about the the constitution of the exchange especially when it comes to multiple party exchange is that you as marketing people have to influence not just the target market but all those constituents that are connected with the target market and therefore you are going to have to deal with all those parties that are related to the target market after having understood the types of exchanges let us now move on to the duration of exchanges well there are of two different types the one is a single transaction or a single time exchange whereas the other one is kind of a continual exchange which continues over a number of years what is a single time or a single transaction exchange is again a pretty straightforward thing the example of this kind of exchange could be the medical treatment given to somebody in case of an accident and this takes us back to the example of human services another example could be getting inoculated because that is kind of the one time thing there are certain inoculations which are carried out just once in the lifetime of a human and there are others that are repeated like the ones in five years or something like that so this also is kind of a fixed exchange which is a one time thing we have to pay more attention to those exchanges which are continual which are continuing over a longer period of time here the marketing people have to reinforce their message to the target market because they want the changed behaviour to stay the meaning once a change has been achieved then the job of the marketing people is to make sure that the change doesn't go away this is the equivalent of maintaining your customers on the commercial side this is what you call customer loyalty on the commercial side and it is because of that loyalty that they stay with one particular brand and you as a non-profit marketer have to make sure that the influence that you have you have exerted over the target market as a result of which the target market has sort of the broader body change stays there for times to come and for that you have to continue your marketing effort you are not to stop it there and this again you see is the equivalent of customer relationship management because the CRM on the other side of the management and the marketing let's take the example of smoking the smokers have a tendency to go back to smoking once they have left it behind and the job of the marketing is to reinforce the message over and over again so that people don't really undo the behaviour which is to their benefit and therefore the marketing effort goes on and on we have to develop a requisite understanding of consumer behaviour this may sound like a very generalised kind of a statement because I already have talked about the role of exchange and the types of exchange and what really influences consumer behaviour but the understanding should not stop there at the model of BCOS which has become the acronym and it may also be pronounced as B cause because that really makes it easy for all of us to remember what are the four drivers of consumer behaviour here in this particular component I would like to develop understanding on part of all of us what are the other marketing considerations that you have to bring into deliberations when you are looking into the consumer behaviour why people behave the way they do I keep saying this sentence again and again because it really speaks volumes and starting with the simple concept of application of the principles of marketing mix to dilating on those principles and getting into positioning and segmentation and communication campaigns and so on and so forth the whole thing is very comprehensive and therefore we have got to understand why consumer behaviour the way they do one of the basic considerations is understanding of demography the reason I talk about demography is two different segments of the market cannot behave in similar ways just try to look at one segment which happens to have low income distribution now here I am talking about demographic features where low income distribution feature is this segment going to respond to a cause which deals with improving the environment of the city I mean you are talking about making the city green and you are talking about the need not to cut trees you are talking about the need to have more vegetation here and there you think that you should be talking with a segment of the market which is low income and low education in terms of its demographic features I think the answer is going to be no a straight flat no and therefore an understanding of the demography is extremely important when we are dealing with the different market segments and are trying to establish their behaviors what are the values and beliefs and how those values and beliefs could be influenced with the help of your programs with the help of the social pressures which you and your side build up to make people change their sets of values and beliefs and therefore the demography is the foremost when it comes to understanding the consumer behavior we have fully understood the role of demographics in understanding consumer behavior now we have got to elevate this understanding to a little more sophisticated level of psychographics we have got to understand what are the similarities of features exhibited by people originally belonging to different demographic groups so in other words we have got to mark where the demographic lines cross each other in order to get into the area of psychographics where people from different demographic groups have similar qualities or similar features in terms of the marketing perspective let us talk about an example of a musical concert in which you are going to organize as an effort rather as a one-time promotional effort toward generating funds therefore of course a noble cause that you are working on the major objective of organizing this concert would be who to invite and who not in other words who are the people to whom you really can sell tickets and you take a look at different demographics and then attempt to look for those features among those segments of population that have a similarity or that may have a similarity of thinking and passion for the cause that you are promoting and also the event that you are organizing so here you are not going to have people who have a dislike for the musical concert and people who may come to the concert may come from a broad demographic base so with the help of psychographics you determine what kind of features give a common sense of the passion to a broad spectrum of the population that originally belonged to different demographic groups you will be in a better position to understand the consumer behavior if you really look into psychographics as a matter of fact without psychographics it is hard for the marketing people to move forward toward their strategic process and much of it is going to be talked about in the coming components as part of the segmentation but we have to wait until that time the next factor or the marketing consideration that is very important toward understanding consumer behavior is the factor of causation we have to understand what causes what we have to develop links between the different behaviors why is it that a young group of people or a young segment of people like to donate toward a certain cause it may be the cancer treatment facility or the kidney treatment facility and if young people are donating toward that cause we have to determine why is it that? Is it because they happen to be young professionals or is it because the young people with disposable income are in the process of improving their social values which was not the case previously I mean I am just talking hypothetically and I am not saying that young people never had good values or young people are improving their social values I am just talking about a hypothetical situation to draw on a certain concept why is it that the elderly people like to donate more toward a certain cause again you see a cancer facility or a kidney treatment facility is it because they have fulfilled all the responsibilities of educating their children and the marrying their children and now have a lot more disposable income and donating that disposable income toward a social cause is very dear to them so you must know as marketing people who are the segments who could be your target market and how they behave and why they behave so once you have all these facts and figures you can put together your marketing strategic process much more appropriately than otherwise why is it that people in the middle ages are constrained to make donations towards certain noble causes despite the fact that they have been approached and the marketing people really have worked on them but still there is no way that you as NPO marketing managers are in a position to extract the kind of funding which you are expecting is it because they have a lot more commitments than those young professionals who are still in the early 30s or elderly people who are fully fulfilled they are all worldly responsibilities so once you have an accurate set of information about the different segments know their demographics and psychographics you are in a better position to connect different constituents of the marketing plan and make your program more effective the question here is we have developed the understanding of the links responsible for developing relationships between the one cause and another meaning the cause for donating money is that you have some beautiful values and you want to donate towards a particular noble cause and you happen to be young you are a young professional you have a lot more disposable income and so on and so forth but why is it that the people have underlying motives why is it that they behave the way they do I mean I am talking out of hypothetical situation that those young people may have good values and they may have a lot more disposable income than people from other segments of the demographic base but the question is we have got to understand that in a more appropriate in a more structured way which is more authentic which is reliable well there are two different sources to determine that the one is through experience if your management team happens to be very experienced in terms of your programs then the cumulative experiential cash or the corporate memory, the corporate knowledge they are so great that you always can draw upon them and come up with decisions which in most of the cases are accurate so drawing on your experience and making decisions on the basis of your positive past experience is one of the sources of knowing why the links develop between different causes and what really is it that actuate people to behave in a certain way the other source to establish all that is through we all know marketing research and we can establish better structured findings by way of conducting marketing research and then get into a more organized marketing program and as part of the marketing research what we try to establish is not only why people behave the way they do but also get leads into forming different segments and so on and so forth so one thing leads to another and that is going to be the topic of the coming segments of learning thanks for


The Tom Wood Show, episode 592. Prepare to set fire to the index card of allowable opinion. Your daily dose of liberty education starts here, the Tom Wood Show. Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the show. Talking to Stefan Kinsella today because he's got one of those sharp, sharp minds. He thinks clearly, he writes clearly, he writes and speaks very precisely. He helps to clarify my own thinking. And I thought we'd talk about some areas of libertarian thought or some questions where we're liable to get off track or get confused or maybe not really know what the right libertarian answer is. So it's always fun to talk to Stefan who is a libertarian legal theorist. He is the author of Against Intellectual Property and many articles that are of importance in libertarian theory will be linking of course to his material and his contact information at tomwoods.com slash 592. Now let me tell you one quick thing. I don't know why this happens but one episode out of a hundred, the recording software I use just fails completely and you have no warning that it's going to fail. It's recording perfectly fine. You can watch the clock going and then boom, no recording when you're all done. It's Pamela by the way, Pamela for Skype. Now you really need software to be 100% reliable, right? You really do. So if you have an alternative to Pamela, I would grab it. Right now I don't have time to figure out an alternative. So thank goodness, thank goodness Stefan was recording the episode on his end. So whatever Gremlin was trying to screw with me, we got the last laugh here because Stefan was doing the recording. So in this episode, his audio will be better than mine because he's recording himself basically locally and then me through Skype. So his audio will be better than mine. That's the reason. And then at the end, apparently the connection got dropped, which there's no reason Pamela shouldn't have still recorded. I mean that's no reason you should record what you have but anyway, ridiculous Pamela. Anyway, the point is at the very end, I'll jump back in on my end here and wrap it up because just as I was wrapping it up, the connection cut out. So anyway, that's way more information than you need, but I'm giving it to you anyway. I want you to know what goes on here at the show. So off we go. Talking to Stefan Kinsella, whom I am very glad to welcome to the show right now. Stefan, welcome back. Thanks Tom. Glad to be here. I got a whole bunch of these things to talk to you about because you sent them to me. So it helped me to come up with some ideas of things we can talk about. There's so many things we can talk about, but I love these little bite-size errors and fallacies that even I myself, I'm sure, have fallen into in a few cases, but it helps us to get our thinking clear and straight. So let's see here. Let's start with one that's a little theoretical, but is pretty fundamental to libertarianism. There is this idea that we believe in the idea of negative rights, and our opponents believe in positive rights, and that negative rights are things that don't actually require us to do anything. They require us simply to refrain from doing things. So that is to say, if I don't strictly have a right to life, I have a right not to be killed. If I really say I have a right to life, that could mean that I have a right to you putting me on a kidney dialysis machine, but I don't actually have that right. I don't really have a right to property in the sense that if I don't have any, then my rights are being violated. I have a right not to have my property taken from me. So those are negative rights. A positive right would be I have a right to a Cadillac. That's the basic distinction between these things. What am I missing in here? How am I misstating this in your view? Am I misstating it? Well, I think it's largely correct. The insight here that libertarians are drawing on is the idea that they recognize that rights and obligations are correlative. If you say someone has a right, that implies an obligation on the part of someone else and vice versa. So that's why they're correlatives. Every time you say someone has a right to something, it implies other people have a duty or an obligation to respect that right. And if it's a positive right, that means the right to be provided with something, that means other people have the right, have the obligation to provide you with it. So whenever you announce that there's a natural human right, a positive right to education or food, which is by the way, in like these United Nations declarations of human rights and things like that, and like in the four freedoms, these kind of things, freedom from want, freedom from fear, these kinds of things. When you announce that someone has a positive right, you are in effect saying that other people are your slaves because they have an obligation to provide you with these things. And that's the libertarian intuition in opposing that and saying the only rights are negative rights because that only imposes negative obligations on others. The right, as you say, the obligation to refrain from hurting other people. The imprecision here is that it leaves out the possibility of positive rights and positive obligations that do exist because of your actions. In other words, what we really should say is we're against unchosen positive obligations. Okay, all right, all right, yeah, give me some examples then. Okay, so there's a couple of obvious examples. One example that I think most libertarians would not disagree with is an obligation that arises as a result of an act of aggression. So as a simple example, if I bump someone into a lake, I have an obligation to rescue them to try to reduce the harm I've done to them already. By contrast, if I'm walking by a lake and I see someone drowning, I don't have a positive obligation under law to rescue them, maybe a moral obligation, but not a positive obligation. But in the case where I'm responsible for the harm caused to that person, I do have a positive obligation. So you can acquire positive obligations and someone else could acquire a positive right by virtue of an act of aggression. So that's one example. And I think that's not that controversial, but it does add a nuance to the, you know, so you have to say unchosen. And I would say it's chosen here by your action.  Another case which is a little bit more controversial among libertarians is children. And maybe with you and I, it's not as controversial. I would, in my view, when you choose to procreate and bring a dependent, needy, rights-bearing child into the world, you are in effect putting that child in the position of someone you pushed into a lake. They're going to drown because you put them in that position. A young baby is helpless and can't survive on its own. So I think that you have put that baby into a position of natural need and you're the natural provider as the procreator, as the parent. So in that case, I think there's an argument that could be made for positive obligations on the part of parents to their children. But it's chosen. Again, it's chosen by your actions. Now, have you written on that? I know people who have, because I'm asking because I want to have a really robust show notes page for this episode. Yes. In my article, How We Come to Own Ourselves, I talk about it. And then I have another blog post, which I can send you the link to, which I go into in a little bit more detail. And of course, this goes into the abortion question, too, which we probably don't want to get into here today. But you could extend this to the whole issue of abortion. All right. I've also done an episode on that. So I'll link to that. Yeah, this is already, I've already got great links and we've only been talking for about five seconds. So, okay. All right, that's good. There are a couple of things here that I actually want to jump ahead to, because I'm surprised at them. And what I love is discovering that I haven't been hardcore enough. I love these discoveries. Oh, darn it, that guy is right. So I picked out two sort of, two principle, legal principles that everybody takes for granted. And when we hear them repeated, we just assume they're probably old. And so therefore, they're probably compatible with libertarianism, because they're probably just, you know, old examples of respect for rights that go back to the Magna Carta or whatever. But maybe they're not. So for instance, well, this one I think actually goes back to some Republican policy proposals of the past 30 years, the idea of loser pays in court, especially given that there are obviously frivolous cases that are brought against people. And if you lose, it's thought that you should have to pay the legal fees and the expenses incurred by the other person. You're saying that's not libertarian. I don't know what your argument is. And that's why I'm asking you. What is it? Right. I think I read some time in the past. People used to say it was the American rule or something, but it's basically the everywhere but America rule. A lot of other countries apparently, and I'm not an expert on the other legal systems, but it's more common for the prevailing party in a lawsuit to be able to collect the fees from the party who loses. In America, it's more usually, unless there's an exceptional case, everyone pays their own fees.  In other words, if I sue you for harming me and I win, I should be able to collect damages, but you should also have to pay for my attorney's fees because you forced me to go to court to do that. The problem with, there's several problems with this. First of all, the law we have now is largely unjust. And so what you would have happened in a large number of cases is you're just magnifying the damage done to the victim of an unjust law. For example, if someone is sued for patent infringement, let's just assume that we don't like the patent system or some aspects of it. Someone is sued some innocent guy for making a product because it infringes their patent. Now, let's say the patent holder wins because we do have a patent system in the country and some patents are actually valid under the way the law works. Well, then the plaintiff would be able to recover attorney's fees. Now, the plaintiffs usually are corporations. They already have an overwhelming advantage when they threaten someone with some of these lawsuits, antitrust lawsuits, copyright lawsuits, patent lawsuits, other lawsuits, because if they sue a smaller person, the legal fees alone could run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, on top of statutory damages like $75,000 per infringement for copyright. So they can be millions of dollars of damages. So you have someone who is running around and they get sued and they're facing unimaginably high damages already. So there's a big incentive for them to settle even if it's unjust and even if they could win, they just can't afford to do that. If you add on top of that another penalty, which is they have to pay the attorney's fees, it just makes the whole situation even more unbalanced. It's a little bit like the situation faced by defendants of the criminal system when the prosecutor charges them with dozens of years in jail for some fairly minor offense, which is not even a real offense under libertarian principles. And they don't even want to risk going to jury trial, so they plea bargain and they go to jail for 10 years or something like that. So it's this power that it gives plaintiffs. In my view, what we should have is a losing a version of the loser pays rule, but it would only be the losing plaintiff rule, the losing plaintiff pays. So for example, if I sue you for for patent infringement and I lose, then I as the guy who initiated the action, basically who initiated the aggression in the courts, I should have to pay the defense costs of the person who was exonerated. I was going to say, because otherwise, it does seem like I could just really annoy people all day long by filing frivolous suits against them. So it seemed like there should be some version of the rule. I think it should be a one-way rule. Basically, the person who institutes the suit should have, I would not be opposed to them having to pay the costs of the person that they're hauling into court, but someone who is hauled into court should not have to pay if they lose. If they just stand up and defend themselves, they shouldn't have to pay. Here's another one. Aggressors are not innocent until proven guilty. All right, go. Okay, this is a good one. Yeah, this is fairly trivial, but this is a statement people make, not just libertarians, but everyone, and I think it's a result of the fact that we give some credence to the basic rule of the Bill of Rights and natural rights and natural law. Over time, we start becoming legal positivists in the sense that we start thinking of these rules that are in the Constitution and that are in our legal system, and even that are good rules, that they're really part of natural law. But we have to distinguish between what's called civil rights and what are natural rights. A lot of the rights in the Constitution are there just because there's a government. And one of them is the presumption of innocence, for example. The presumption of innocence is simply a way to make the government bear the burden of proving that someone is guilty. It doesn't mean they're not really guilty. Now, if you get technical guilty, it means someone who's adjudicated to be guilty, but if you go by that standard, then it really means very little in libertarian terms, because even if you're adjudicated to be guilty, the court may be wrong, the jury may be wrong, and they may not be guilty. So in our sense as libertarians, guilty means someone who actually did the crime, right? Someone who's really the bad guy. The government needs to go through a process of proving that, right? The state needs to have a burden of proof of proving that. So we have an epistemic issue, right? We have an issue where we have to have knowledge about who did what. So we come up with these what we call prophylactic rules, things that bind the state, that slow down the state, that restrict what the state can do for the sake of individual and overall liberty. But it doesn't mean that in reality, someone is innocent until proven guilty. If someone murders someone, they are actually guilty. They just haven't been proven to be guilty by the legal system. So when journalists or when everyday people say something like, well, did OJ do it? I don't know. He's innocent until proven guilty. That's just a standard the court has to follow. And it's good that the court has to follow that standard because we're limiting what the state can do. We're making the state have high burdens to overcome to put someone in jail. But it doesn't mean we can't have an opinion. It doesn't mean we can't say someone is guilty.  I mean, why isn't Hitler innocent until proven guilty? So he's been proven guilty by the facts of history. You don't have to have a legal decision. So I just think we should be careful trying to import into everyday understanding of life and our everyday conclusions and judgments about people, the rules and the procedures that apply to courts. We don't have to be bound by those. That's a very good point because you often hear these kinds of expressions about innocent until proven guilty just in casual conversation.  Now wait, I saw the guy do it. No, he might have, he attacked me. I saw him. I'm supposed to say he's, yeah, believe me. I was there. I'm not calling him the alleged attacker. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And there have even been times when the guy, like I've heard journalists say alleged attacker, you know, they're just so used to saying, like even after the guy's convicted, they're still calling. Well, and honestly, I think one reason for that, Tom, is I believe that's a fear of libel lawsuits or defamation lawsuits. So if we did not, if we did not have defamation law, there would be a lot less tiptoeing around things like that, I believe, by journalists and by others. People would just say, look, it looks like the guy's a murderer. Yeah. Yeah.  He's not an alleged murderer. I shouldn't be laughing about brutal killings here. All right. Let's talk about spam or hacking. I like talking about things where you could imagine non libertarians saying, how could a libertarian possibly handle X problem? And even libertarians themselves who will write to me and say, I want to be able to say there's some libertarian response to the issue of spam, but yet it's not obvious to me what it would be. So how have you worked this out? Yeah. And one background piece I've written, you might want to have a note to is my piece with Pat Tinsley in the QJ AE called causation and aggression. So that's sort of background theory for this. It's a way of looking at what we should be responsible for. I think you and I talked earlier, I think it was you in a previous show about the emergence of the how there was a common law developing in airwaves, and then the FCC sort of expropriated the field and took it over in the early 30s or something like that. In spam, something similar has happened. There have been some cases like the cubby versus compuserve case and others, which have addressed this spam issue, which I think the right way to approach it from a libertarian point of view is to simply think what is prohibited and what is permissible under libertarian principles. Think about a neighborhood situation. You own a home, you live next to neighbors, there's a common sidewalk or whatever the sidewalk is, but you have a private sidewalk leading up to your door. You have a door knocker, a doorbell on your front door. Generally speaking, if a neighbor walks up to your door and they knock on your door, they are using your property. They're using your land, they're using your door. The question is, is that a trespass or is that a licensed or permitted use? What we would normally say is that's a permitted use because the standards in the area, by having your house in a certain oriented a certain way without having no trespassing sign up, you're inviting certain innocuous uses like that. The whole thing is rooted in the idea of property and property control.  In that case, they are a trespasser because they're using your property without your consent. Now my view hacking is basically using your computer without your consent because no one really wants their computer to be hacked. Now it is true that the person that's doing this is sitting in Bangladesh or somewhere and they're doing it over the internet. They're using a mechanism. You're all connected to an internet, to a network. So they are basically causing something to happen using signals and using electrical circuits, but they're manipulating the actual internal operations of your computer. The same thing with spam.  They're putting stuff on your hard drive.  My point is it's basically like a remote control use of your property without your permission. And so I think that could be considered a type of trespass. Let me give you a more concrete example. Let's suppose you have a neighbor and they have one of these remote control drones in their house and you can see into their living room through their window and you have a device that you're able to control their drone in their house.  I would say that's an act of trespass because you're commandeering one of their resources without their permission. So that kind of analysis I think can show why spam and why uninvited telemarketing calls, all these kind of things can be types of trespass or maybe a nuisance. All right, I'm sorry for just jumping from one to the other but I've got so many of these great ones you sent me and I want to get the answer. I actually for this one I've read your answer and I think it's just absolutely airtight. It's this idea of creation as an alleged source of property rights that look I created this and therefore I own it. Right. And this a lot of obviously we see this a lot of times when it comes to IP. Yes. But I don't think it's necessarily the concept is not necessarily tied to IP. No. Creation and property rights one doesn't follow from the other unless by creation you have some kind of homesteading in mind but creation in and of itself does not give rise to property rights. So let's hear it. Well, yes. And some people what they'll say is if you homestead a virgin piece of land in the middle of the wilderness then you've in effect created that land because it didn't exist before in some sense because no one was observing it or valuing it. You can play games with words like that and you can say that every act of homesteading is an act of creation and that's fine but then there's some equivocation involved because they switched the meaning later on. The reason this is something to get straight the reason it's important to get this issue straight is because it can lead to confusion. So let me tell you my view on this is the following when people say that creation is a source of property rights I think they're wrong because they're conflating two different things. There's a source of wealth and there's a source of property rights. Those are two different things. It is true that if I own a raw material and I use my labor and my intellectual abilities and my creativity and my ideas to transform it I might transform it into something newer and better that is worth more to me or to someone I might sell it to. So in that sense creation is a source of wealth but it's not a source of property rights because to do that I have to already own some underlying resource my body and some resource that I'm transforming and I transform this thing that I own into something that's more valuable and that makes it more valuable I increase the sum total of wealth in the world or for me but there's no new property right involved I have a a piece of raw steel and I transform it into a horseshoe now it's more valuable because I can use it for something but I already owned the steel that was in the horseshoe I've just rearranged its shape and by the way Mises and Rothbard and even Ein Rand have statements that say almost exactly this that really were just rearranging materials in the world. The reason I say creation is not a source of property rights is because there's only really two or three sources of property rights number one you acquire something that was unowned that's homesteading that's lock in homesteading you do something to make sure labor with it to put up a border around it to create a visible objective connection between you and the thing that other people can see that's one way to acquire ownership and the other way is to get the thing from someone who previously owned it by contract or by some other conveyance right there is no other way that you can imagine that why creation is a source of ownership and let me just give a couple of examples where creation is neither necessary nor sufficient for ownership okay it's not necessary because as I said if you just you're the first one to stumble across an unowned resource you didn't really create the resource so creation is not necessary you you're an owner of the resource because you were the first one to use it not because you created it okay and it's not sufficient because let's imagine I have a small a small factory or a company and I hire someone to take my resources like my my raw iron and make horseshoes with those now the laborer is actually the one creating the horseshoe in a sense because he is changing the shape of the metal into a horseshoe but he didn't own the raw material and we have a contract as employer employee where he doesn't own the the result either he gets paid a wage that's what that's what our contract is so that shows that creation is also not sufficient for for ownership so basically it's just a mistake people are right to think that creation is a source of wealth but it's not a source of property rights Stefan I want to talk about the rest of these on a future episode but for now tell people once again how they can follow you because a lot of times people listen to you and they want more so how do they get more cancella just stefanconcella.com all right that's my conversation with Stefan I was trying to thank him but Skype wouldn't let me so I just want you to know I was thanking Stefan urging people to check out stefanconcella.com and tomwoods.com slash 592 let me give you a few parting notes Monday will be another debate episode we can believe that oh yoy yoy Lou and I do intend to carry on by the way into the general election we'll do those debates as well anyway before I let you go three little links to remind you of number one Bernie Sanders did very well in New Hampshire so you need my ebook Bernie Sanders is wrong to help bolster your arguments how do you get that ebook you can either go to bernieiswrong.com or you can text the name Bernie to 33444 whatever is more convenient but grab that thing it cost you nothing and you know it's a book like come on what's going on here I mean you got to love that so that's one thing second thing is I've often told you that I will help publicize your blog and I'll give you a bunch of free tutorials to help get you up and running as a blogger and I had somebody in my supporting listeners group not too long ago say that the woods tutorials on this are among the best materials he's seen for beginners so I will give you these and they're they don't take too long to watch but there are about two dozen of them showing you how to do all different things basic things like posting a post or putting a picture in a post but also more advanced topics like what if there's something you want to put at the bottom of every post you know like hey sign up for my newsletter or um you know if you're new here click on these links or whatever and you want that on every single post how do you do that it's not obvious how you do that but I'll show you in just a few minutes how you do stuff like that so all that stuff is there you get those tutorials and you get the free publicity if you get your hosting through tomwoods.com slash publicity you'll see the the links there how to sign up for web hosting and if you use my link for that then I'll gladly give you these free goodies and it's easy to do I even have a free video that's right up there on tomwoods.com slash publicity showing you how to be up and running in just five minutes so no more excuses you want to jump into the world of blogging no more excuses tomwoods.com slash publicity and finally today I'm speaking to you on February 12th 2016 which means that the rocket languages 60 off sale has begun and they're only doing this for the first 750 courses sold or the next couple of days whichever comes first so you got to grab yours 60 off is ridiculous you don't have to take out a mortgage finally to have a really good language course uh because if you look at some of the other courses good grief they cost a fortune but this is inexpensive plus 60 off check it out tomwoods.com slash rocket enjoy your weekend we'll be talking debate on monday become a smarter libertarian in just 30 minutes a day visit tomwoods.com to subscribe to the 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Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's theCUBE. Covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you by Blockchain Industries. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage in Puerto Rico for Blockchain Unbound. I'm John Furrier, your host. Here, covering all the action in Puerto Rico as the global society and industry come together. Our next guest is Marshall Taplitz. He's the Chief Strategy Officer and Co-Founder of NinjaNYNJA.biz. Check out their site NYNJA.biz. Marshall, thanks for joining me. Thank you. So talk about what you guys do. You guys are doing some disruptive stuff. Tell us about what you guys do then it will jam into a conversation. Sure, so are you familiar with WeChat in China, for example? Okay, great. So I've personally been living in China 15 years. So we've watched kind of the birth of the Chinese internet which, as we know, is a little different than the regular internet. A lot of mobile users. A lot of mobile users. 800 million China mobile subscribers alone. And WeChat basically is a platform that started off as just a messenger but basically what it's done is it's integrated into every facet of Chinese society. To give you an example, you go to a restaurant, you scan a QR code, the menu comes up, you pick the food, you pay for the food, it comes, you walk out. Everything like that is in China. Everything like that is in WeChat in China. So what we've done is we've kind of taken this concept and we're working on a global version of it that's cryptocurrency based and we are working specifically with Chinese companies in order to help them go global as part of the China One Belt One Road program and working with companies like Alibaba, what have you, in order to help Chinese companies go overseas and take what they've built in China but operate globally with cryptocurrency. And you guys in China or, because it's been hard for companies to start companies in China. So you're living in China or you're working in China? So because we live in Shenzhen, right next to it is Hong Kong. Hong Kong is where our company is based. Hong Kong, as you know, previous British colony, the legal system and the financial system, everything. So you're Domicile in Hong Kong, that's where you're based? Me personally in Shenzhen, but the company is in Hong Kong. Yes, and we also have a Wyoming corporation in the US. Shenzhen's where the action is, that's where WeChat is. That's right. Alibaba's got Alipay and then there's more business to business with their app. So I get that WeChat's been highly successful. In fact, we have a huge following on WeChat. SiliconANGLE and Wikibon, it's free content but that brings up the question of Chinese kind of showing the way with mobile expansion. Their uses are heavily mobile savvy. That's right. This is pretty obvious when you think about it, but in America and around the world, that's going to translate to the new user experience. So in your opinion, how would you describe the expectations that users have? Because you're living on the front end of the wave of what mobile's doing. There's a lot of gamification going on, it's kind of creepy, but what is your view of the expectations that users have and what's different about what's currently available in the web stack and the 20-year-old e-commerce stacks that are out there? I think the most important thing is reducing friction. You don't want to be using platforms where you cannot do it wherever you are, whenever you are. You don't want to have to go through payment processes, you don't have to re-authenticate yourself across whatever platforms you use. And interestingly, when I first went to China, it was all about copying what was in the West but actually it's kind of the opposite now. So we basically want to take this concept of a frictionless digital life and make it a global opportunity and especially with blockchain and cryptocurrency, you have that really as an opportunity because if you look at all the apps that are out there and the platforms that are out there, the only ones that have gone past a billion users, WhatsApp, Instagram, whatever, are the free ones. But as soon as you layer in payment, it becomes very locked. And as big as WeChat is and as big as Line is, but ultimately it's locked into the RAM and B system or in Korea, what have you. So the cryptocurrency is really the first opportunity that the world's had to create platforms that can get up to a billion, two billion, three billion users that are able to pay. And we just think that's a once in a lifetime opportunity and we want to be part of it. So I got to ask you about the impact that cloud computing has had on this. Obviously we've seen cloud computing destroy the data center model, allow people to get time to value faster mobile on top, big data analytics, using data, all this stuff's awesome stuff. So the question is, is that that's kind of a horizontally disruptive view. So these stacks that are built old way where I got to own the stack end to end. Yeah, this was standardization in the lower end stack. But now you're thinking about more of a horizontal. I got jurisdictions, I got regions, I got countries, we got sovereignty. All of these things are in the melting pot of the cryptocurrency blockchain, decentralized applications are major impacts to all those things. How do you see that playing out? Because that's kind of what developers worry about.  Exactly. I got Neo, I got this, I got that. So the plumbing is totally a moving train right now. That's right. But the business models are pretty obvious. So there's like a business ops thing going on what DevOps did for cloud. Exactly. You got this new abstraction thing going on with this world. What's your view on that? Do you agree or what's your take? Well you pretty much nailed it. I mean basically what's happening is over the last 10 or 15 years, people have finally accepted that having your own server is kind of silly and most people now will just spin up whatever they need in terms of resources on the cloud. But over the last couple years, you're really going more toward edge cloud where the way the clouds work is that basically it's pushing to get the least amount of latency and store the data as close to the user as possible. And then there's also regulatory in some countries now in terms of if your users are from this country you have to legally store the data in this area. So this is all kind of evolving. And if you look at the blockchain technology, I think it's the payment version of that. So for example, everyone's always concerned about getting in and out of fiat currency and how am I going to get back to dollars and this and that. But I think what's going to wind up happening is this is going to get pushed toward the edges and there will be opportunities and ways with exchanges what have you to get in and out. But more importantly, it's going to be like just other currencies. So for example, I live in China but I come to the US a few times a year, I also travel to Europe. I have some dollars, I have some euros, I have some renminbi. When I leave China, I don't immediately sell every one of my renminbi. I just keep it because at some point I'm going to need it. And I think what's going to happen in the cryptocurrency space is especially on the larger blockchains like Ethereum and Neo, what have you is people are just going to get used to keeping some of it and they're going to stop worrying about what the exact exchange rate is and how am I going to get in and out and this and that. And they're just going to start treating it as part of their currency stack that they keep. As long as there's some level of stability, it's just like, I remember when I was growing up, there was no euro, every country had their own currency, right? You had the French Frank, you had the Swiss Frank, the Deutsche Mark, Lear, et cetera, et cetera. That's right. But you're seeing that the viability of the money aspect. That's right. There's two things that we've identified in analysis. And I was talking about it last night, I talked about this morning on theCUBE is the killer apps for blockchain cryptocurrency, these types of apps is two things. Money and marketplaces. That's right. Everything else is just kind of circling around those two more. But certainly that's the main part of it. Money, moving around. So the UK just announced with Coinbase, the financial content authority, reading the news yesterday has essentially said we're going to allow for the fast payment system to convert to Fiat. This is a government, the UK is the nation. This is the beginning to your point that if they don't get up to speed, the edge of the network will democratize them and kind of circle the wagons, if you will. So it's already happening. Yeah, and I think what governments are starting to realize is, hey guys, this is just a technology and not only do you don't really have jurisdiction to control it, but also that you don't even have the technical means. So Wyoming is a good example of regulation coming into place that just kind of accepts the presence that this now exists, right? And they're not going to try to make it something and fit it into the old way. So, and in terms of the stability of these coins, I think it is important because people want stability, but in other ways, if you don't look at the exchange rate, it's actually way more stable than the current system. And I'll give an example. In the last month or two, the prices of cryptocurrencies have dropped almost like 40%. Now, if the stock markets and the global FX markets drop 40%, you'd have blood in the streets, but the crypto market is asset-based instead of debt-based. And because it's so structurally sound, it's able to handle these wild swings without actually collapsing the system. So in many ways, it's way more stable. And then as the market caps and the buy-in of these currencies get bigger and bigger, of course it's going to be more stable over time. Well, I mean, it's stable from a failed standpoint, but a lot of emotional instability. People losing money for the first time. But that's just because they're speculating, right? They're speculating, and then if they're down, they feel like they lost, you know? But that's life.  So what would you explain to someone? Because I have two, a lot of friends that have two schools of thought. That's a total scam. Don't associate with that, too. Oh my God, that's the next biggest wave. Let's get our surfboards out there and let's get on this. Sure. There's a multiple set coming in. It's the biggest thing we've seen. Sure. And everything in between. How do you explain it to people for the first time? It's just your traditional curve of, you know, there's early adopters and what have you.   And usually, when you have some money on the line, you pay more attention. So if speculation is what gets people interested, and it gets them watching it and understanding the technology and using it, then I'm all for it. But people shouldn't be speculating with money they don't have. Anything could happen in the short term. You know, nobody knows what's gonna happen with any specific currency, but in terms of the technology itself, this is a revolution way bigger than the internet itself. This is where you're getting not only communications like the internet, but finance and governance and all as one, programmable money, programmable contracts, it wipes out finance, it wipes out legal, it wipes out governance in many ways. So this is a huge evolution in human society, and we've termed this open unity actually. And so we believe that society has to reach a state of open unity in order to go into the singularity as we would envision it wanting to be as something that's under our control. Yeah, and I think one of the things, first of all, that's a great statement, well said. I'll just kind of put some reality on that connected dots is that if you look at the trajectory of cloud computing, Amazon web services was laughed at years ago. EC2, S3 came out, compute, storage, basic building blocks, it has a lot more services. What cloud did for software developers and what they've disrupted from a business standpoint, DevOps, is proven, and what open source has done, even going back to the old Red Hat days and Linux, as it now a tier one global citizen in software, you look at those two trends, you can connect that dots to what you just said. That's right. And what made cloud great was they made application developers have access to programmable infrastructure. Exactly. You're talking about a whole nother level of software programmability, money, marketplaces, society.  That's exactly right. So when a programmer wants to start a business, instead of going to create an LLC and getting their EA, EIN, tax ID, or whatever, and when they want to go into Europe and dealing with that and then trying to open a bank account, which is almost impossible internationally now, instead of that, you just have your SDKs and your APIs, whatever, and you've got access to money program at it. You can take money, you can move money around globally, frictionless, permissionless, with governance, smart contracts. They might not even in SDKs dashboard. Exactly. It's a console. Click, smart contracts, governance, turnkey. And one of the things we're working on with Ninja, in particular, is this kind of on-demand marketplace and putting together decentralized teams for work. And this is all driven by smart contracts. So one of the issues with the economy is the huge booms and busts that people have in the economy. And if you look at the root cause of that, my personal opinion is that it's because of payment terms. So for example, if I do work for you, and then you, what do you call it? I do work for you, and then there's an invoice, but it's not due for 30 days. Now your business may be structurally sound, but the truth is your cash flow is all over the place. With blockchain technology, we can actually do real-time payments. You can be paid minute by minute, hour by hour, real-time program contract. So we're going to create very flat, even money flows through the entire economy globally, and we're going to just completely remove these booms and busts that are really nothing more than just cash flow issues that are compounded and compounded at a global level. I mean, I lived through the dot-com bubble. I was actually part of it on the front end, on the euphoria side, as well as on the crash, part of the whole search paradigm, Google right there, keywords, all that stuff happening, growth, massive growth. So I saw the scammers in there, or the bubble people we called them, but the reality is everything happened. There was pet foods online, you could get shopping delivered to your house. So again, to your point, there's little euphoric right now, but what's different is you have now community data. See what I see happening is it's not a major bubble crash because self-government, self-governing, self-governance is a community dynamic. So I think there's going to be a lot of self-healing inside the networks themselves. You're already seeing it here. I mean, a lot of people, bad actors being identified, investors flight to quality, looking at quality deals. Interesting times, your thoughts. Well, I mean, we've been through many evolutions of society. We've had serfdom, we've had monarchies, we've had representative democracies, we have all these things. And I mean, I just think the next evolution is decentralized governance, right? And we don't even know what that means yet, because it's just starting, but I think we can all, if we close our eyes and really think about it, I think it's pretty obvious what the issues are with our current system and not just the US, but globally. And I think we have an opportunity here to build in kind of organic program governance. And what's really special about blockchain technology is if I program it to do X, it's gonna do X. So we don't need to, I don't need to know who you are to trust you, right? I don't need to worry about where we're gonna sue each other, or where we're gonna have arbitration if things go wrong. We're just gonna make an agreement, and we're gonna program it that way, and that's it, right? And now the next phase is I could build on top of that, trusting that that's just gonna happen. So you can create these chains of trust, and that can happen anywhere in the world. So I think this is a whole other thing.  Well, in many ways, in terms of the architecture, you could absolutely think of it like that. The reusability, the leverage is amazing. All right, I want to just end the segment, Marshall. Take a minute to end the segment, to talk about what you're working on. Ninja coin, ninjanynja.biz. You guys have a product, you've got a blockchain-enabled platform. You got a coin. Take a minute to explain what you're working on. Basically, we want to provide the tools and services to help people live in this new reality. So in order to basically function in the world that we're entering into, we're going to need tools that far surpass what's currently available in terms of the messages, the websites, all these things. We need to be operating at a level that takes communication completely frictionless, payment completely frictionless, and governance completely frictionless. And we have to put this all together. And that's what we're doing with Ninja. We're starting with a global communicator, which is basically, if you want to take WeChat, Telegram, whatever, but we have about 50 additional features that really take communications to the next level. And then on top of it, creating the baseline with cryptocurrency payment and also smart contract wizards and helping people kind of get these teams going and get paid and organize their financial life in a decentralized way. So we're just basically going to be the next generation of these messenger type platforms with blockchain integrated. And what you're going to see is that over the next couple of years, you're going to get to the first companies that are achieving not just a billion or two billion or three billion users, but paying users. And we're going to be one of the probably three to five platforms that are offering tools at the global level like this. And have you done an ICO already or not? We've just started our private ICO about two weeks ago. We're getting tremendous support in Asia. Quite frankly, the US is not seeing it as much. Is it a utility token or security? Utility token. And I think it's really telling interesting. Coming here, it's the first time I've been doing the presenting. We spoke yesterday at the D10E and we also spoke at D10E in Korea a week or two ago and the response is incredible. And I think the reason is because The Asian market gets it. Well, they're already living in this world within their own confines in terms of the messenger with their payment and governance built in. So when I tell them that, we're going to do this globally with crypto, immediately they get it. I'm having trouble here, especially in these five minute pitches, which is ridiculous. Yeah, it's like a chop shop. And it's just, I don't know how to, I don't know how to communicate the idea within this short timeframe. So what I'm looking for while we're here this week is just to find people who really want to take an hour or two or even people like yourself who want to do interviews and just kind of really talk to people and really explain what we're doing. Well, platform is complex. A lot of, not a piece is to it. It's a system, but the value you offer is essentially offering developers who are building products for tools that you've built so they can scale faster. That sounds like your value. That's right. And although I can't say specifically, we're also working on a deal that's going to get us started with about 15 million active users on day one. So it's very exciting and we're really, really excited about it. Coins to be utility measures what? Sorry? Well, your utility coin's going to be measuring what? What's the main token economics that drives? For the ICO economics? For your Ninja coin. Yeah, so basically we're releasing five billion tokens. 45% of them will be sold. There's a five cents of token. So the hard cap by definition is about 112 million. And we've, actually we're planning to do the public sale in April, but we may cancel it or postpone it just because the private sale's going really well. But we'll see how that goes. But in terms of once it's live, this will basically be the utility token of the entire ecosystem. So anybody, not just within our Ninja app or platform, but even people, I don't know if you know, XMPP Federation like back in the day. So if you could think of us as the next version of XMPP Federation, but using cryptocurrency in order to avoid bad actors by making it very expensive to do bad things and very cheap to do good things and globally. So it's like Twitter, you can create a bot instantly, but if there's coins involved, you'd have to spend to get it. That's right. And also people could spin up nodes that are basically their own Twitters and decide if those Twitters of their own, their Ninja boxes of their own are either just internally or you could specify specifically contacts or group of contacts or other nodes. That's a great way to get bad actors out because it costs them money. That's right. If email came out today. And it's decentralized, there's no single spot. That's right. If email came out today when cryptocurrency existed, there would be no spam because it would be expensive as hell to send more than a few a second, but it would still be free for everybody generally. And you wouldn't even have spam. So we think we could do that for messaging globally. Great. Marshall, thanks so much for coming on. You really appreciate it. Check out Ninja. Marshall Taplets is the chief strategy officer and co-founder of Ninja.biz. Check them out online. Check out their websites in Asia. Bring in that culture of mobile and fast moving real time apps to the rest of the developers. It's theCUBE coverage in Puerto Rico for blockchain unbound exclusive two days of coverage. We'll be right back with more after the short break. Thanks for watching.


This weekend, Saturday 5 and Sunday 6 November, Noir et Blanc organizes the Brussels Hi-Fi show in conference centre Blue Point Brussels. A multitude of brands can be heard in more than 20 rooms, while top people from a number of suppliers are present, such as Timo Engstrom from Engstrom, Jeremy Brown from Monitor Audio, Mike Picanza from Spender Audio and Thomas Brieger from Octave. Two-meter session creator Jandawa Kruske will be present at CAF. My colleague Jaap Vinsla and myself are present to give presentations on both days. Jaap is a specialist in network technology and gives a presentation entitled Streaming Audio Networks. My presentation is about the equipment that can be found in the audio chain after the network. The streamer, also called the network player. I am going to answer two questions that I am often asked. What types of streamers are there and why do they sound so different? After all, bits are bits. On Saturday Jaap starts at 11 am and 3 pm. My presentation will follow that at 12 am and 16 pm. On Sunday we do the other way around. I start at 11 am and 15 pm and Jaap then starts at 12 am and 16 pm. Brussels is French speaking but unfortunately Jaap and I don't speak that language enough to give a presentation. So we are going to do the presentation in English. We look forward to seeing you. Conference Center Blue Point has ample parking spaces.


The goal of Project Bazia is to bring together Sudanese refugees from around the world and unite them in the belief that regardless of where they live, they are all one people. Ryan Knoblock spoke to the program's founder, Bazia, about his organization's mission. Bazia, tell me about your project. Project Bazia is about how to put the kids of South Sudan together, unite them over a diaspora. A diaspora is like everywhere in different countries. We can say Canada, Australia, South Sudan, Europe, anywhere in South Sudan. And how many are there throughout the world? In America, I have, in the United States, only like 100,000 South Sudanese in America. And I believe in Canada, we have 675. And in Australia, we've got close to 800,000 of South Sudanese in Australia. And what are the goals of your project? The goal is very important. It's about education and about letting them learn how to be a good citizen of the United States and in all the countries in the world, even in South Sudan or in America. The best way to do it, to the United people, you've got to have a goal. We're going to be here today because we're going to have one of the tribes of South Sudan going to have a dance. And then I'll put it to be a kids better than the big people. That's keeping the legacy of the child of South Sudan still traditional in Africa. Let's talk about the dancers for a bit. What kind of, what is the dance that they're going to be doing represent? It presents one tribe. If I put it in the big name, it's supposed to be a Lua. A Lua under that tribe, we have Asholi, we have Nuer, we have Anuak, and we have Asholi. All this is one tribe, but it's kind of different door on the same tribe. And it means something to them. And that's one of the, the long story back in the day in the United States, when they bring the slave people from Africa was, a lot of them was from Lua tribe. So it's just, like, it means something to them. And is this a troop tour of the United States, or do you have plans for the mid-tour? Yeah, we have, we're thinking about Dallas, Texas, we're thinking about Jacksonville because I have a trip for 2014. For the kids of South Sudan, I'm going to sponsor some kids to take them to Disney World. And it's kind of any child born in any country know what they love to be in Disney World. And what kind of support do you provide for the South Sudanese diaspora that's here in Maine? In Maine, I'll talk about, I can just make example for myself. To be in the United States was one of my dream, and I can say I'm American child dream. I'll talk about all the stuff about the system, how to make them to be a good citizen. And when I say a good citizen, it's about the book. That means to take the law and understand the law in the good way because it will save your life in the better way. Because the key for all that is about education. The more we educate them in education, and the more we take the education and put it in a simple life, we'll see the result better. Does the society need education and then use the education in the life? You will see the difference. What kind of challenges do the South Sudanese have here in the United States? One of the challenges is because since we have a lot of different tribes, sometimes it's hard to unite them. But what I believe, what I'm doing, I'm thinking about the child. When you say a child, because the grown people, the father of the mom of the cousin, they're already grown, I can say they have a brain set up. But for the kids, I believe they're easy to accept, they're united in a good way. Do the children, I know that they want to preserve their own culture and their own heritage, but at the same time they want to integrate into the United States society as well, how do they manage that balance? Oh, okay, good. One of the things I'm working on, it's like teach them to be a good citizen. And teach them, when you say American dream, it's not to just follow different directions. It's about respect, it's about education, and be a dependent. The only key for that is how to teach them. And the child is almost, if you have a direction, or pick the right model in the front of them, they will look at it as an example. Because there's nobody born to know everything. But if I'm born before them, and I've been through a life, and I just look at it, if I'm educated, I need to go back to teach my own people. That's a simple matter to start, look at the volume of the education, and trust that to the kids. If people want more information about your project, or want to help you with it, where can they go for more information? You can go through my website. I got projectbazilla.com. That's one of, you can see what I do, if you want to be a part of it. You can look at the website, and you will feel free. If you want to be a part of it, to become a friend, or you want to donate for the project bazilla, you'll be willing to go online, you'll see all the information you need to know.


Welcome, I welcome you all to this introductory video of the course Sandhi in Paninian Grammar. In this introductory video, I will introduce you to the aim of the course and the topics that we shall be dealing with in this particular course. Sandhi is considered to be very important in Paninian Grammar. When we learn Sanskrit, we come across Sandhi at a very early stage. Given any string of Sanskrit, the first task that we have to do is to split this particular string into its constituents or its components and in order to do so, we need to have knowledge of Sandhi rules. For example, if we take the very famous verse from Srimad Bhagavad Gita, namely, which was recited by me just now at one go. Now the first task that we undertake is to split this one utterance into its constituents. If we know the rules of Sandhi, it would be easier for us to mark such constituents and split them and then we proceed to understand the content of this particular string. So, Sandhi splitting is the primary task in order to understand the content of any string. After the knowledge of Sandhi rules, we split this particular string in its constituents in the following manner, karmani, eva, adhikaraha, te and so on. And then we proceed to understand the meaning of this particular verse. This is the significance of Sandhi rules. Sandhi is considered extremely important in Paninian grammar, high level of significance. Sandhi is considered to be the mark of the finished, completed, finally derived form of the sentence fit to be used in the usage. In the Paninian grammatical tradition, Panchasandhi prakarana is very popular. In the later Paninian grammatical tradition, in the 17th century celebrated text composed by the great Bhattu Jivikshita called the vayakarana siddhantakamati, Panchasandhi prakarana is introduced right after the saudhna and the paribhasha prakarana. There are five chapters which make this Panchasandhi prakarana, ach sandhi, hal sandhi, visarga sandhi, swadi sandhi and also prakriti bhava.  Prakriti bhava is unique primarily because it states the sounds remaining in their own form without getting any modification. This is actually not a sandhi but this is a contrastive description related to the sandhi and that is why this is also included in the Panchasandhi prakarana. In this course, we shall study sandhi in the light of this Panchasandhi prakarana which collects sutras from ashtadhyayi together and classifies them according to these classes. We shall also study examples and we shall also train ourselves in splitting the constituents using the sandhi rules from actual Sanskrit sentences. We hope that this course will be useful for those who want to learn Sanskrit, who want to decipher the constituents of a given sentence on their own using the knowledge of sandhi rules. This will also help those who want to develop sandhi splitters and sandhi generators. Thank you.