Did you know that a lot of dating advice is fear-based advice, especially the advice given to women? Especially around the area about making a man miss you. And we're going to talk about the idea of missing someone in a much deeper sense in a few moments. But I want to lean into this conversation because quite frankly, it's rather appalling some of the advice women get when it comes to men. And I think the book, The Rules, initiated all this, and this happened over 20 years ago, especially in the area of playing hard to get by making it difficult for a man. And by making things difficult for a man, the idea is if you create tension, if you create a sense of fear, this sense of fear will make him miss you. For example, playing hard to get by creating that space, that might make a man miss you.  And make sure you post your fabulous life on social media because he's going to see how fabulous your life is on social media and he's going to come running to you and want to claim you because your life is so fabulous, right? And by that space in between he's going to miss you. There's all different types of game playing. Sometimes it's creating situations where you're flirting with other men to make a man feel more fear-based with you.  But let's think about this for a moment. Fear-based advice, advice that's designed to create fear in another person might, okay, that might work temporarily. In that temporary state of fear, he may come and temporarily claim you. Yeah, temporarily claim you. You've heard that men are hunters. What do men hunt? Do men walk around hunting? I want a relationship. I want a relationship. I just want a relationship. Is that what they're hunting? Are men competitive and they're in the hunt always? What about this idea of the advice that you're given that you need to create mystery? Because in that mystery, he'll feel that sense of longing and in that sense of longing, he'll miss you. Let me just tell you something, folks, especially those of us in midlife.  We are riddled with childhood wounds and traumas and adult traumas that have piled on over the years. Do you remember something called the midlife crisis? By the way, midlife crisis back in the 60s is tamed to the midlife crisis that human beings are experiencing today. And it's quite fascinating because let me pause for a moment and say this. I want you to think about the younger generation for a moment. Those 20 or 30-year-olds that are getting advice from 40s, 60s, or even 70-year-old folks. I want you to think about those folks in their 40s, 60s, or 40s, 50s, 60s, or even 70s. There is a huge population, especially those people that are single right now in that age demographic. Roughly 75% of those folks are single. Now, or let me refame that, 75% of those folks who are single are divorced. Let me correct myself. Our single are divorced. Could you imagine what advice divorced people are giving to the younger generation? Why don't you think about this? And a lot of this advice is designed to create fear. Think about it. Men and women alike are trashing each other at really horrific levels. They're trashing one another. Could you imagine if you're even a younger person and imagine that you went through a divorce. You were 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 years old. Imagine your parents and the animosity that might have occurred during a contentious divorce because these days, most divorces are rather contentious, especially because they're fraught with a lot of legal issues centered around money. Could you imagine what this does to the emotional well-being of a young person? Could you imagine the fact that they can't see a real success level out there to be in relationship, especially since the average divorce rate is 50%? Why am I bringing this up? And I know I went on a tangent, which I normally do, folks. If you follow my channel, I'm going to go down a lot of rabbit holes because each rabbit hole has some really significant bits of information that can actually help you understand the dynamics of how much of a clusterfuck it is out there in the dating marketplace. So why I'm bringing this up is because a lot of advice is based on creating fear and not real deeper connection with another human being. I'm going to repeat that. It's a lot of deep fear. And by the way, it makes it harder to determine who's emotionally mature enough to be in relationship. This is why I created my private coaching program. By the way, you can check out the link here to schedule a free discovery call with me. The reason why I bring this up is merely if you want to do a better job of vetting and you want to brainstorm with someone, then schedule a discovery call with me to see if working with the coach is right for you. But really, here's the more important question I want everyone to lean into, because this actually demonstrates what makes a man genuinely miss you in a moment. In a moment, I'll share that. But what makes a man miss you? It's that woman who is in her empowered self.  It's that woman who is actually genuinely loves on herself. This is why I wrote my book, What the Heck Is Self Love Anyway? A Journey of Personal Development, Self-Help, and Spiritual Work, so you can actually begin to operate not just in the dating realm, but in your own life from a place of empowerment. Folks, we have a society that is riddled, as I said before, with childhood wounds and traumas and adult traumas that makes them have negative patterns and limiting beliefs in their life, which makes it very difficult for them to actually lean into a healthy, happy relationship. The reality is, is most humans these days have terrible or weak emotional maturity or relationship skills. If you're not familiar with my chart, if you're brand new to my channel, my regulars know this, here's my chart on emotional maturity and relationship skills. By the way, this is not a fact. It's merely an opinion. While I suggest that 20% have clinical issues, I'm talking about people, most likely borderline personalities, bipolar personalities, sociopath personalities, narcissistic personalities, just in a few. And while they're capable of being in a relationship, there's a good chance if they're not doing some level of real deep healing on themselves, those are really challenging people to be in relationship. And while I say 20% of the population is healthy, and I'm being rather ridiculously generous when I say 20%, most everybody is dysfunctional. This is why game playing works, because it temporarily works on the dysfunctional human beings. But I'm assuming that you want a healthy, happy relationship. I'm assuming that you want to be in a relationship with a man who actually is capable of leaning into something what I call commitment.  And what's missing is a deep level of commitment. You know, it's interesting, I posted a meme earlier today on Instagram, I just thought of it while I was just sharing this with you. But I want to share this with everybody. Look at this meme I posted. Love is a commitment to protecting another person's heart with the same passion, with the same passion you use to guard your own heart. Now, I don't like the word guard, but what I think it's really saying the word is I'm going commitment and trust in love is saying your feelings matter to me as much as my own feelings matter to me. This is why I'm such a big proponent, folks, to doing a better job of vetting people, because if you're going to give your heart to someone, if you're going to invest in someone, you want to invest in someone who actually cares about your feelings as much as your own. You know, trust isn't just about fidelity. Trust is, can I really count on this person? Unfortunately, we will have sex without little or no trust built in the relationship. This is why, folks, if you follow my channel, you know my rhetoric. Before the penis goes inside the vagina, read the book Eight Dates by Drs. John and Julie Gottman. And at least, read chapter one together about trust and commitment before you give your heart to someone. Look, let me crack my neck for a second. Okay. Sex is part of the decision-making process. Let's be honest. Women tell me, hey, look, I want to check the goods out before I'm with them, before I give my heart to a man. A man wants to also do the same. Sex is a way we bond with one another. But before you give your heart, really give your heart to another person, then I invite you to do deeper question asking to determine, are you on the same page with one another? And how this happened is through radical honesty and laying your cards on the table right from the get-go. In fact, you can even ask a guy to reverse engineer this relationship.    Invite them to go out into the future and reverse engineer what this relationship looks like between the two of you before you ever really give your heart to a guy. Listen, most men are good guys. Let me just say this.  You are in charge of your relationship, Destiny, not a man. Ladies, you have been so habitually give your power away to men and it's no wonder you're feeling unhappy in this process and oftentimes you blame men for your problem instead of looking inward and saying, what could I've done differently? So why am I sharing all this? What does this have to do with missing a guy? Well, the bottom line is this, if you really want to forge a healthy, happy relationship where you really bond with each other, then I invite you to do the following. I'm going to share those three things right now that make a man miss you. But I want to say this, missing is a function of appreciation. Let me repeat that. Missing somebody is a function of genuine appreciation. Breathe that in for a moment. When somebody genuinely appreciates you that time apart is when they actually think about you because they appreciate you. And I want to share with you three things that I have learned, especially in my new relationship that makes me appreciate this person so much more than I have with previous relationships. Now number one, men appreciate women where they can be their hero, the act of service. And what better way to be in a sense of service to someone is when you ask a man for help or his advice. Let me repeat that. Help or his advice. This is a great way to engage with a man when you say, Hey, I'd like to have, I'd like to get your advice on something. I'd like to get your advice on something that actually makes a man feel respected because that means you're genuinely value what he has to say. I repeat that you genuinely value what he has to say. In other words, and it gives him an opportunity to step up and rise to the occasion because people don't want to give advice out here cavalierly to anyone. So when you say, Hey, I'd like to get your advice on something, maybe it has to do with finance. It maybe it has to do with doing some. I remember a woman asked me and my advice on the tile she wanted to get for her kitchen, just to give you an example, whatever that advice is that you need from someone because you got to determine that for yourself. When you say, I'd like your help or I need your advice. That's a great way for a man to step up, be your hero, be an active service. And this is one stepping stone to help him appreciate you. These are little things that you can do and there's more than three things. I'm just laying out three for today. Number two, I love this one. Get together as a group. Get together with groups of people. Listen, if you follow my rhetoric, you know, the pathway to a healthy, happy relationship is social activities, hobbies, mutual interests, spending time with family and friends, traveling together, teamwork, building skills, both in your personal and professional life, and intimacy, both physical and emotional intimacy. That is the pathway to building the deep roots of trust. And by doing activities with other people, with friends and groups of people. All right. So I want you to think of the TV show for us boomers, you know this one, and maybe even you, Jen Xers. The TV show, I Love Lucy. Now, those who remember the show, remember there was Ricky and Lucy, the primary stars of the show, and the two neighbors, Fred and Ethel. Now, each week, Lucy and Ethel would somehow get into some calamity and the guys would have to solve the problem. Kind of goes back to the first thing I talked about getting help, getting advice, solving problems, right? But what that did was it formed a bond with these four people. And what's interesting is this bond together, when you're bonding with other people, you appreciate your partner because they are part of this process. Do you remember when Ricky and Lucy decided to move to the country to raise little Ricky and Fred and Ethel are crying because they're moving out of New York and Ricky and Lucy are crying because they're moving out of New York? But what happened in the next episode? Fred and Ethel got the place next door. Now, this is a TV show. But the point is when you do things as a couple, when you do things as a couple with other people, you actually begin to appreciate your partner as being part of the couple, them together. This is why it's, folks, I know so many of you are locked up into what you call relationships, but you barely spend most of your time on these devices. This is where you spend most of your time on these devices, texting and talking, texting and talking, texting and talking, texting and you're not really building the deep roots of trust. Men fall in love when they're doing something with somebody. It's not all about being in the bedroom and it's definitely not all about talking on the phone. Folks, you know, I engaged, I recently engaged in a long distance relationship, but in the 90 days, in the 90 period, 90 day period of time, we spent over 40 days together. 40 days, 24 seven. That's literally every other day. That's not a long distance relationship. That's even more than a long distance relationship. More in the sense that we create and we've done social activities, we've done things with groups of people.  Ultimately, the only, here, I shouldn't say the only, the most likely way two people are going to bond with each other is through those social activities, hobbies, mutual interest, spending time with family and friends, traveling together, teamwork, building skills, both in their personal and professional life, intimacy, both physical and emotional intimacy. That's the pathway to deeper trust. And the third way to get someone to miss or appreciate you, this is one of my favorites. It's what I just talked about. It's a mutual hobby or activity you do together. A mutual hobby or activity you do together. One of my dear friends was in a relationship with a woman who each weekend, they went hiking together. I mean, they would hike both, by the way, Saturdays and Sundays, they were constantly hiking together. And in that activity, he bonded more with her. In that activity, bonded more with her.  This was about a decade ago. And on our second date, she pulled out a deck of playing cards. And she said, are you into gin rummy? I said, yeah, I kind of can play here or there. And we started to play. And I'm very competitive and she was kicking my butt.  And I found I missed when we when I stopped seeing her. I still wanted to play gin rummy with somebody. It is through that fun activity.  Now, I got to tell you, I can't stand reality TV shows. I really can't stand them. And I like that it's now without commercials, at least with the channel we were watching on. Why I was interested in 90 Day Fiancé and and arranged is it's because about relationships. So I actually could get into those from a human behavior perspective. But last night, the new episode came out and she happens to be at home right now. So we put on what's that we put on video chat. We synced up our TVs at the same time and we started to watch the show together. Why I'm bringing this up is we both got involved in this show. I know people that get involved in a variety of Netflix shows. And you look forward to unpacking the show with another person. That's something I appreciate about my relationship is that that we have these activities that we have these mutual interests. And if you will, a hobby together, because that allows us to bond with one another. And when you bond with someone, you like being with them, then you appreciate them. And when you're apart, when you appreciate them, you miss them. And so I hope I've laid out those three things. And there's much more than three that can actually gain you to get a man to appreciate or miss you. I'll just read them again. Ask for his helper advice. Do things with other couples or as a group. Do things as a couple as a group. And lastly, find that mutual hobby or activity that you're both into that you both find that you bond with one another, because these are the healthy, happy relationships that tend to go the distance.  Did you have a good day? I hope you had a good day. Let me text that. How's your day going? Did you have a good day? I hope you had a good day. To quote from Seinfeld. All right. I think you get the gist of where I'm going. Does this make sense? Does this resonate with you? Please let me know. In fact, I'm even going to invite in a prayer, God, universe, spirit. I invite that kind of relationship where we have amazing chemistry together. And we have that sense of communication and compatibility with one another where we do shared activities, hobbies, mutual interests, spending time with family and friends together, teamwork, building skills, and that intimacy. And we share the same values and we want to build the deep roots of trust to allow our relationship to flourish because we have decided that commitment and caring about one another is our priority in life. God, universe, spirit. I invite that in. All right. I hope you've enjoyed my prayer as well. All right. This will be the space where we ask questions. If you have a question to ask of me, post a question in the chat box. If you're listening to it, whichever direction it is right now, this way. No, it's this way. No, this way. Over there is the chat box. If you have a question, write the word question and post the question there after, or you can purchase a super sticker, super chat, or a super thanks if you're watching the replay. There's a little dollar sign in the super chat or in the chat box. All the monies from the super sticker, super chat goes to a scholarship fund in the name of my son, Connor Asley. He's my son right there. That's his dog. His dog just passed away. That's Connor who passed away four years ago in his honor. I've started a scholarship fund to defray the cost of personal development and to donate to charities like the Hoffman process and insight seminars. So if you have a question, write the word question or purchase a super sticker, super chat. All right. And let's start the Q and A. All right. Let's just keep swimming. I noticed someone did do a super sticker earlier and I just want to acknowledge them. Barbara, thank you so much for the $2 super sticker. I really appreciate it. All right. Let's see if we have a question from anyone. We have a lot of dialogue going. 90 day fiance is so ratchet. I'm not sure what you mean by that. I do believe reality TV shows suck, but you know what's interesting about that? You know what? Let me share something. But while we're waiting for questions, you know what I find interesting about that show?  Think about that. You have 90 days to decide if you want to marry this person. You know, I think more relationships should be intentional about that. So I like one of the facets of the show is you got to do it. You got to make a decision quickly. You got to figure out. And I think people would be better served to dive all in 24 seven, see if you're a good fit for one another and move on if it doesn't work out. Anyways, that's just my two cents there. All right. The power of cheese says Jonathan question. How do you feel about a woman having multiple suitors non sexual? So great question. If I'm dating a woman that has many men going after her, I bow out. I had to listen if I'm going to invest myself with one person at a time, then I prefer to only date a woman who wants to date one person at a time. If now let's be clear on a meeting versus dating meeting multiple people. That's just meeting. If you meet someone for the first time, that's a meeting. If you meet them a second time, that's just a follow up meeting. If you begin seeing them after that, that's dating. And if someone has multiple has multiple dating, I have no interest in dating them because if I'm devoting, if I'm going to give my attention to get to know one person at a time, I would prefer the same thing. Now that's just my point of view. Listen, you have to do what's right for you. I just want you to think about this for a second. Let's say you have four men that you're dating. And of those four men, they're dating four women. They're going out with four women each. And that four women is going out. Can you see what a clusterfuck it is? If everybody is just looking for the next best thing, you're never going to really get to know a person. A moment ago, I talked about 90 day fiance.  Maybe we should do more of that. We just locked people in a room for 90. Listen, if you want to date me, then let's lock each other in a room for 90 days and see how well we get along. I'm saying this tongue in cheek, but maybe that's what we should be doing. Just a little thought out there. But that's my two cents on that one, Power Cheat. Thank you so much. Ivana says, long distance, how to keep the flame after four great dates has happened in Europe blank ago. And I'm very into this guy. Good luck on that one. You know what? Dating overseas, I think, is the likelihood of success is so minimal, minimal, minimal. Unless you have a plan to actually take the distance and bring it close together, all the talking and facetime in the world rarely ever works out. Is there exceptions to the rule? Yes, but it's rare that it works out. That's just my two cents on that. All right. Question. Can a person go overboard with compliments to a person such as their doctor? You know, I do believe there's a balance in communication.   If you're giving, giving, giving, let's just look at it this way.  But if you're giving this many compliments and they haven't even done one, they're not even on the list, yeah, it's a little overboard.  Does that make sense? Allow space for them to do it for you. All right. Great question, Dee Dee. I appreciate that. Thank you so much. I want to acknowledge Stephanie. Thank you for your insights and advice. My son's name is Connor, too. Much love. Thank you so much for donating $19.99 to the Connor Asley Fund. I really appreciate that money is going to go to insight seminars or the Hoffman process. Thank you so much. Karen writes, question. I have only one breast due to breast cancer. How do men feel about this and when is a good time to bring it up with a potential sex partner? This is a great question. I've known many women who've had a mastectomy or double mastectomy over the years. And actually, I know one woman who's had a double mastectomy and she met her man on match.com and eventually they got married. I think they dated for about two years and then they got married and I think that was three years ago now that I think about it and she was a client of mine. So what's most important is how you feel about yourself. If you feel good about yourself, he's going to feel good about you, too. The reality is we're rarely that naked with each other anyway. And so listen, as men age and as women age, listen, we all have a fantasy of being with someone younger because we all have a fantasy of looking quite younger than what we actually are. That's the fantasy most people are living in. In fact, it reminds me of a meme I'm looking up right now. It says the sad part about growing old is that no one can see you're still young on the inside. The reality is if you hold that space inside yourself, of feeling young and good about yourself, I think you're going to be able to lean into that conversation quite easily. If you're operating from a place of fear, of rejection, you're already being rejected because you're rejecting yourself. This is why I highly recommend coming back to my book not or my book what the heck is self love anyway, a journey of personal development, self-help and spiritual work. By the way, there's a link to get the books I recommend. You know what? I'm also going to recommend another book. This is a great book by Bernay Brown, Daring Greatly. Daring Greatly, I highly recommend reading this book because I want you to step into your empowerment because the reality is whatever is the time you tell them when you feel safe, when you feel good about yourself, and if it's sincere and from the heart, you can't say the wrong thing to the right person. So that's my invitation. Does anyone else agree with me on this? Give me a thumbs up. If you do agree, give me a thumbs up. Share this video. Please subscribe to my channel if you're brand new to watching this. I hope this resonated with you. All right. I want to thank Ivana for her super sticker of $3.99. I appreciate it. All right. Winnie asked a question. I didn't see it. Hold on a second. I saw someone say, oops. All right. Wow. Wanda says, how do I question? How do we even get a man to have conversation? Most can't manage a good conversation. Ask him questions. Ask him questions. Ask him questions. Ask him questions. That's going to get him talking about himself. And if he doesn't, do you really want to be with someone who can't talk? That's no fun to me. So that's my invitation for you. Ask him questions.  There's a couple reasons for that. Some men are sexaholics. Some men are detached. Some men, sometimes when you get really close to someone, you need to detach momentarily. And that's why some men go sleep with other women. The other thing is women are easy to bed these days. The reality, look it.  It's about connecting with someone's heart. If it's solely about pleasure, then have all the sex you want. I'm not here to judge when you have sex, but I'm here to say I believe sex should be reserved for two. Nowadays, I believe this more so than ever. It should be reserved for people that want to connect at a heart-centered level. So your question is a tough one. Why does this happen? It happens for a variety of reasons. What most likely didn't happen is you didn't build a strong connection with each other to determine if you're a good fit for one another to explore a long-term relationship. In these days, because sex is relatively easy to get, you know, I saw a meme. I posted this on YouTube. I saw a meme on, bear with me a second. I saw it that said something like this. Bear with me. It's going to take me a second to find it. The meme said this. Tinder. In the United States, 35% of Tinder users are relatively young people, but I heard it. Someone says, I heard a joke on campus. First base is hooking up. Second base is talking. Third base is going out on a date. And fourth base is dating. The sad part is these days, most people are hooking up and they're not actually dating. So the point of dating is to determine if you're a fit with another person. How do we get there? Through radical honesty and laying our cards on the table. That's my invitation for everyone is to begin to approach the process with way more intentionality than they currently are doing it. All right. Great question there. Queen, thank you so much. Let's keep swimming. Cecilia. Stephanie says my suggestion maybe is that you're overthinking things just the thought no offense intended. I didn't see what was said. So all right. Didi says question. What does the divorce transition relationship also apply to a widower? Great question. So what she's talking about is transition relationships and the fact is widowers, widowers are very, you know, it's interesting. Being with the widower is very challenging because if they truly love their wife and if they had to go through some sort of emotional trauma during that person's transition, it could leave a rather deep scar wound. The reality is, is most humans these days have had multiple, multiple relationships or they've had one long-term relationship and they actually haven't done the healing over their past relationships or maybe a transition. True healing requires maybe going to therapy or seeking some real spiritual advice to heal before someone is ready for a new relationship. I can tell you after my divorce, I kept saying, I want a relationship. I want a relationship. I want a relationship. I told that for two straight years and every time I get close to someone, I'd say, I'm not ready for a relationship. I'm not ready for a relationship. I'm not ready for a relationship. I wanted that companionship connection and sex, but that really, that ability to commit took a lot more for me to get to that space because for the longest time, I just wanted that connection with another human being. I didn't realize the importance and the value of trust and commitments. This is why I repeatedly talk about this book, Eight Dates by Drs. John and Julie Gottman, and I bring this up because chapter one, Lean on Me, Trust and Commitment right there, chapter one. Let's go to chapter one for just a second. This is really important to understand. You, everybody should, by the way, there's a link to all the books I recommend below, but this is all about having those tough conversations early on. Where is this chapter? Anyways, I recommend getting this book. I'm going to just stop on that, okay? I hope I answered your question. Thank you so much. All right, let's keep, everybody's having a conversation here. If you have a question for me, write the word question and post it there after so it makes it easier for me to find. Jade says, sex should be reserved for connection at a heart-centered level. I'm beginning to believe that to be much more true than ever before. I'm a guy, listen, for the longest time, I dated, had sex and really no attachment. I've certainly shift my perspective on this because I've learned, and this might grow some people out, but I prefer to have a heart-on to go along with my heart-on, okay? A heart-on to go along with my heart-on, and I know that might offend a few people, but that is what makes it more enjoyable to connect to someone with that level. All right, Winnie says, is it a red flag if he doesn't have any friends? You know, red flag means ask better questions, ask deeper questions. I think people that don't have friends have very lonely lives, and people that have lonely lives lead isolated lives, and when they lead isolated lives, they might have a hard time actually developing a relationship with someone. I'm not saying that as an absolute, I'm just saying that as a possibility. So yes, I think it's, red flag simply means ask better questions, and that's what I would do in that case, okay? All right, my neck is killing me, guys. I wish I could crack it. We might end up shortly. Jade says, understanding the importance of trust and commitment, yes. Let's see. Paul says, question, what are your thoughts on Romeo and Juliet, any particular takeaways from the story, from your perspective? You know what, Paul, it's been so long and it just, at the moment, I just don't, you know what, I don't want to comment on it. I just, it's been so long that I, you know, the story escapes, I'll be candid with you.  I guess the question is, what particular parts of that story are you looking to unpack and are more than willing to have that conversation with you if you point out the specific area that you want to discuss? So thank you so much for that question. I appreciate it. If you have a question, post a question and write the question there after or purchase a super sticker super chat. It looks like we have a bashful group tonight. You know what, I think this will be a great place to wrap up today since we have a bashful group and no questions are popping up. Listen, folks, ultimately getting back to the original conversation about appreciation. I think the sad reality today is people are dating simply for that level of companionship, connection and sex without any real level of deep exploration of commitment. And when companionship, connection and sex is so readily easily available and the need for commitment isn't, it makes it difficult to build the deep roots of trust in the relationship. And those deep roots of trust are built through social activities, hobbies, mutual interests, spending time with family and friends, traveling together, teamwork building skills both in our personal and professional life, intimacy, both physical and emotional intimacy, that builds the deeper roots of trust. And my invitation for folks and it's not just trust, it builds real genuine appreciation for another human being. This is why when I say this, rather than focusing on the gameplay way people focus on dating today, I invite you to focus on the more important things in a relationship is how do you build deeper appreciation with one another. This is why I recommend a variety of books. I highly recommend reading the book Emotional Intimacy by Robert Masters.  And believe me, intimacy is a lot more than just sex. It's about really connecting at a heart center level. So I invite you all to explore this by doing some research, by doing some work, by talking to real intimacy experts, and then using these tools when you're actually in the dating process, when you're in the relationship process, and you don't need to have multiple suitors like our one person asked, and hoping that you can sift through the forest through the trees, or the needle in the haystack. Is this sinking in? Is this resonating? Please let me know. Hit that thumbs up. Let me know it's resonating with you. All right, I'll take one more question since I just noticed it. Question. When I tried to bring it up six months into the relationship we broke up, now a year in, I've met his family and friends, kids, but still know I love you. He's always busy. Should I move on?  That's a question I ask. Because shouldn't you reserve physical intimacy for people that are genuinely connecting with your heart? Boy, I mean, I think, listen, what I love you means to me. At least when I say I love you, it means I'm here. You matter. We are important. I've got your back. I'm not going anywhere. And I only want you. Let me repeat that. I'm here. That means I'm present. You matter. That means you're just as important to me as I am important to myself. We are important. That means the relationship is a separate entity. I've got your back. That means we're part of a team. I'm not going anywhere. I'm fully committed.  Folks, that's the kind of relationship I invite you all to have. And if you've spent six months with someone and you can't reach that level of saying that to one another, then what's the point other than companionship, connection, and sex? Are you building deeper commitment with one another? That's what I invite you all to do. Is that helpful? Who asked that question? I forgot who asked. Oh, Liz. Was it Liz? Yes, Liz. Does that help? Please let me know. All right. Stephanie says, sorry, Jonathan, but I look. You got people talking. Hey, I love the chat tonight. Thanks so much for your channel. Thank you for your super sticker earlier. I really appreciate it. All right. I might take one or two more questions. Carney says, question. What is your opinion on getting involved with someone in the same workplace as you? What's that old saying?  It used to be, I want you to think about the 1960s in the TV show Mad Men. It used to be right around the 1950s and 60s, the number one place to meet people outside of college and high school, the town you lived in was the workplace. But now that can be a very problematic thing to do. Think of all those lawsuits you see about executives and entertainment and stuff like that. But at the same time, the beauty of dating someone you know at work is you know them. That's a real benefit. They're not a stranger to you. These days, these devices were meeting total strangers.  That's just my opinion on it anyway. Does that help? And by the way, follow your human resources guidelines. Let me just say my disclaimer, follow your human resources guidelines. I hope that helps, Carney. Thank you so much. Ah, let's see. Great question. Question, any tips for traveling with my boyfriend or girlfriend? Excuse me. It's a good question. I'm trying to think my trip to Cancun. You know, I think first off, if you're traveling with a partner is to decide how you're going to split the financial aspects of the relationship, having that conversation and finding out, finding out, knowing each other's strengths and weaknesses with each other really helps. Like my girlfriend spoke the language of where we went to. We used her strengths in some areas and we use my strengths in other areas. So basically my strength was putting up her luggage in the overhead compartment and she did the rest. But having a conversation about the trip, maybe thinking of the potential, possible problems that can happen and having a dialogue about it ahead of time, being better prepared might help you have a smoother trip together than going in blind just expecting that you both know something. Paul, does that help? I hope it does. That's a great question. Thank you so much for asking. All right. Jennifer says, what do you think about sexy text flirting? Is it too much? Well, I guess it depends on if it's the first conversation or you're in a fully committed relationship. I like the occasional flirty texts. You know, the cute emoji. What's my favorite emoji? One of my favorite emojis is just the kiss emoji. I like that. I think that's flirty. I think there's a time and place for flirty text messages. I think maybe not with the first exchange with someone you meet online, but certainly once you develop a relationship, I think it's good to incorporate sexy flirty communication with one another. I think it's a great thing to do. So that's my invitation for you. And thank you so much for that question. Fox says, listening from London, you're amazing. Jonathan, thank you so much. All right. Liz says, that helps me. Jonathan, workplace crush going on here. Well, I wish you all the best. Liz says, I'm confused because he doesn't open up and never talks about his feelings. I know he cares. I even asked him to let me know what we are and he changes the subject. Doesn't sound like a person that's on the same page with you. So I think that would be important to communicate when you're on the same page with one another. Cecilia says hugs, Jonathan, do attachment styles predict intensity or other? If you're not familiar folks with the book attached by Amir Levine or Rachel Heller, I highly recommend reading this book and checking it out. This is a great book to understand love attachment styles that cause a lot of the frustration in the dating process. I also recommend reading, by the way, all the books I recommend are listed below. Recommend getting the book, Getting the Love You Want by Harvelle Hendricks and Helen Hunt. This helps you understand what's known as the Amago. I am A-G-O. Google that. Harvelle Hendricks, Helen Hunt and the Amago. I am A-G-O. This will help you understand why you choose the wrong person over and over and over and over again. All right. I think this will be the last question because it caught my heavy question. How normal is it to expect men engaging in prostitution? Women have been told this is normal for men to do. It is perfectly normal or not normal. Women wonder about this honestly. I think of all the guys I know, my circle of friends, my male circle of friends. I'm pretty sure none of them have gone to a prostitute. I feel pretty confident about that they haven't done that. Although I'm not suggesting it hasn't happened, I think in some ways I see a lot of people that might consider it because what's the old saying? What's the benefit of why you pay a prostitute? They can leave.  That is probably the exception, not the rule. I suspect a very small percentage of men go to prostitutes. When I say small percentage, I believe it's less than 5% of men. It's probably less than two, but I could be off. That's just my opinion. I just know the circle of people I run with wouldn't go to a prostitute and that's just my two cents on that one. As Tweety Bird, Tweety USA says prostitutes equals STD. Actually, I think they actually are much safer. By the way, that might not be true. Prostitutes probably are more protective of themselves and dating in the current marketplace, you probably have way more STD. I'm not sure that's the case, but that's just my two cents on that. Folks, I hope you got value from this live stream today. I know we covered one of the most important conversations I think that is to have and is to understand that missing is a function of appreciation. When you develop a relationship where you can genuinely appreciate one another, when you're apart, you miss them. That's my invitation from this conversation today. I hope this resonated with you. If it did, please hit that like button. Please share this with your friends. Please subscribe to my channel. I hope you found value in this. As always, if you find value in this, please post a comment below. I'd like to hear your thoughts. I'm going to wrap up this video as I always do.  I'm going to reach into the camera and give you a hug of love if that's okay. I'm going to ask you to turn to someone, a pet, a teddy bear pillow, and give hither them a hug of love because hugs are a great source of love. Let's face it, we could all use more love in our lives. I want to thank Jennifer and Jamie and Ouija and Empower of Chi and Queen and Stephanie and Deborah's in the house. Sorry, Mr. Question. Nadia, Tweety, Paolo, Paul, everyone who, Patricia, everyone that posted a comment. Thank you so much. I want to wish you a super duper, wonderful, fantastic evening. Take care. Bye now.


Sorry about that. Okay. So let's try it again. Hello, my name is Matthias Kirschner. I work for Free Software Foundation Europe and I'm here today to talk with you about the core values of software freedom. Before we start, I would like to get some feeling about the values here in this room of you. So I would like to ask you the question three. First, who here thinks that your government's military should not operate in other countries? Okay, thank you. Then the next question, who here thinks that it should be mandatory that you should be vaccinated? Okay. And now the last question, which is a religious question, and I was told I shouldn't do that, but well, I still do it. So who of you thinks that Emacs is the best editor or operating system? Okay. I think there are some tendencies, but beside that it was quite diverse from what I saw here. So when we talk about the values of a movement, it's good to look where this movement is coming from. So in the beginning of computing, when you got a computer, you also got the source code. You could do with the software whatever you wanted to do. Nobody was there and cared what you do with it. Then over the time, companies realized that they can make a profit by restricting the excess to the source code and by restricting who can do what or what not. So and this got established more and more until in the early 1980s. This restriction triggered the start of the GNU project and the creation of the Free Software Foundation and they defined again what software users should be allowed to do. And they came up with this definition here with those points. They said that every user of software should be allowed to use it for any purpose. That everybody should be allowed to study how it works and understand what those things are doing around us. And that you can share the software again with others, modified or not modified. And that you can always make improvements to the software, that you can change it. So they noted that down a little bit like defining what was the normal behavior before. Explaining that's what they want to do. And they started to write software and make sure that everybody gets software under those terms. Now some time later, there were also other organizations. They also explained what software, what users should be allowed to do. It's 10 points. I can't remember 10 points. I can remember four points. In the end, it's the same thing. When you think about it, what is this? Some people call it a car. Some people say it's a mini. Others say it's a BMW. Some people might call it a vehicle or a computer on four wheels. However they call it, it's the same thing. It highlights different aspects of it. Certain values which are connected are highlighted higher like the brand or what it does or how you would like to be seen by others. And the same is true for those other terms which are around free software. You can say free software, you can say open source, Libre software, combine them. In the end, it's the same software I'm talking about here. So when I say free software, in this talk it's the same as when someone else is saying open source software. Most other people say open source software. So now there was this movement and they started to write software to allow people to use, study, share and improve it. Now there were some people coming to this movement and they misunderstood some things. So one part was often that people understood that in this movement we care about that the software is available for everyone without any costs so that you can have greater software. And they thought that that's one of the values which is connected there. Everybody should get it without having to pay for it. So that's also why from time to time we get emails or people ask us, oh, there's someone violating the principles of free software. They ask for money when you want to download it so it can't be free software. Also in app stores, they say, well, if you have to pay for this app it cannot be free software. I have to check and find another app. The free software movement, it's not about money. You can make money with this software. You can share it with others. You can ask for money for that. You can also share with others. Not ask for money for it. Give it away at greatest. So the money part is nothing which defines the values of this movement. There are many people in here who make money with it. There are others who do it and don't want to have money for it. Now, other people thought that because some prominent examples in free software are handled by that that with free software everybody needs to be able to participate. And everybody needs to be able to become part of the group of people developing something so that you have an open development model. And that's something which is sometimes happening with free software but you are not forced to do that and there are many examples where this is not the case. So with free software, we don't tell people how they should develop the software and with whom they should do it.  When someone wants to talk to you, you don't listen to them and you ship the software, sell it to someone else, give them all the rights associated with it, the source code. And yes, it's free software and it's absolutely fine to do that with free software. While on the other hand, it is also possible that there are 15 universities around the world which are developing software altogether and students can also participate, professors can participate, but the software says it's just for academic purposes. So it's violating one of the other values but it's an open development model. Also, in free software, we see that sometimes those development models, they change. So people, someone is violating the principles of the software freedom movement. They published the source code before and now we haven't heard from them for six months. It's possible that people who develop free software that they from time to time focus on other tasks and during that time they don't listen to others and they just make sure they can ship a new product and during that time they don't listen to any feedback and they don't want to have anyone else in their group and afterwards it might change again or they decide that maybe they can write better software if they don't ask for feedback by others. That's all possible with free software. Free software is not deciding about the development model. Now another thing that happened over the time was that people said that they wanted to introduce other beliefs, other values for free software as well. So we saw before it was that you should be able to use study, share and improve the software and then there were others who said like, yeah, but there's one other thing we should add there to make sure that this is something which I value. So one prominent example of this is that there were people who said that free software should not allow military, used by the military because we don't want that the software we are writing that this is used to kill people. And I picked this example because there was a lot of discussion about this in the free software movement. So first of all one of the questions which came up was when there are people who want to kill other people will they care about what values we have defined in our software licenses? So if someone is violating some other principles of human behavior will they care about what we write down there? That was something which was a question there if that's a useful tool to achieve that. The other question which popped up there was what does it mean, military use? So a pickup truck, is it military use if you use free software in there? Can you use it when it says no military is allowed to use it? If you mount a machine gun on it you will see many conflicts around the world where this is used similar to a tank. So how far will you go there? How will you define this? It's a difficult question how far this is going. Does it also mean the company which is producing those cars is not allowed to use the software anymore? And so there are many challenges there to think about how to do this right if you want to accomplish it that this is not happening. And one other important thing which we realized in this debate was that depending on where you are coming from you have a different opinion about that. So there are countries where the military is mainly focused on firing guns, firing tanks and so on. There are countries where the military is responsible in case of catastrophes, floods, fires. I mean when you see big burning woods, forests the military might be responsible for that. In some countries the military is partly responsible for emergency first aid situations. So depending on where you are coming from what you experience your opinion will also be different there. And there are also other debates. Another example here is that people said like the question before that the software should just be used by people who are vaccinated or by companies who make sure that their employees are vaccinated. So someone thought that there is a health problem and maybe we can fix that inside free software as well. The question which came up with this example is then also mainly how much more power do we allow developers in comparison to users? How much of their value system are they allowed to transfer to the users of the software? And that's a tough one because there are way more examples like this. And there are examples which are very broad. You are not allowed to do evil, you are not allowed to harm people and many, many more things about labor laws, about environmental issues, about animal rights, about nuclear power, about genetic engineering and many, many things. So think about how this could develop in a world where you have so many different political beliefs, so many different religious beliefs, so many different cultures where people are growing up, different education. What can happen there? And so one thing to consider here is as free software programmers we often like our licenses and we also saw that by those licenses we accomplished a lot in our sphere to enable users to use study, share and improve software in the area. The question we should ask ourselves is if for other beliefs we have, for other values we have, if this is also the right tool. If we should use the same hammer we are using to fix our problem for other problems we have in our society. Or if maybe there are other solutions to this, how we can influence laws, how we can change social norms, how we can change markets or architecture in some areas. So that's something we should really consider if software licensing is the right tool for other beliefs we have. In the end till now the free software movement always came to the conclusion it's too tricky to add other things there. And over the time growing more and more it will not become easier because there are more beliefs in the free software community. So after 35 years it becomes difficult to find another joint value we have which brings us back to the four freedoms I mentioned at the beginning that they are at the moment the common base, the common values in the free software movement. So to explain it a bit more again that every person around the world can use the software for anything without asking for permission. Everybody is allowed to do whatever they want to do with the software. And that's a big thing when you think about this because everybody here in the room even if you're not lawyers when someone asks you can I use the software? You can say yes absolutely sure yes. If someone asks you can I do this with the software? You can say yes I'm absolutely sure. So everybody is allowed there to use it for whatever they want to do. That's not a common thing before and for a lot of other areas that's not common that everybody is treated equally. And it makes sure that the users of software they have some balance between them and the developers of the software. On the other hand there is still the value that you should be allowed to study how this works. So everybody around the world is allowed to understand what the software is actually doing nobody is prevented from that nobody is forbidden to get education how this important technology is working. We don't keep stuff secret we enable everyone here to learn this and we also allow everyone to share the software with others again. So when you fix the problem for yourself you're not limited how to help others around you. You can ask for money for that but you can also give it to someone else who doesn't have money so you can help someone who is in the need of also fixing the problem but wouldn't be able to afford it like you were able to afford it. So that's something which is deep in there in free software that you are always allowed to help others and to work together with others in solving problems. And you are always able to improve software. So every individual, every organization, every company, every government they are not forced to use software like someone else intended them to do. Following the assumptions someone else decided, following the rules someone else decided for them they are always able to change the software to fit their own needs. So my argument is that at the moment those four freedoms those define the values we have in the free software movement. And software freedom it's one piece in the puzzle. So we have many problems in our society or many of you see several different problems and free software in a lot of those issues is an important part in there. But it's not enough. So you have all those different things free software is fixing one part of it and is fixing this I think pretty good. So we always should think about if you want to enlarge that or if you should stick also to some of our history to the UNIX principle have one thing which solves one problem and find other tools to fix other problems. So when we look where we are with software freedom nowadays there is still a long way ahead of us. There are many areas in our world many regions many tasks where software freedom is not a default. There's a long way there for us to achieve it that all humankind can benefit from this. And if you compare that to other freedoms in our society we are at the very early beginning. So think about the freedom of the press. How long were people fighting for the freedom of the press? It's hundreds of years now. And what is the situation? There are people, a lot of people think it's a good thing to have that. Well let's ask about that the general population about software freedom. Then there are many countries where you have freedom of the press but you are still struggling to exercise it in practice. And there are countries where you had it but then it was removed again. And there are many countries where they never ever had the freedom of the press. And you have people who are actively working against it and removing it from people. So if you compare this with software freedom I'm pretty sure that the next decades we will have to work on this because we will need more people to work on this like other freedoms where people work for and which are other important parts in this puzzle. So freedom of the press is also one piece of the puzzle. It doesn't fix all the problems people see. It fixes one thing and you need other pieces in the puzzle to lift the life you envision to live. So I think it's important that when we work on software freedom we focus that we get not distracted too much about other issues around us. It's easy nowadays to be distracted about all other things. So there are so many problems everywhere around us but again the same as with the freedom of the press like if you stop working for this because you also want to fix this and you want to fix another problem and you want to fix another problem you will never achieve any progress with the core part of what you are working on. So we need to focus on those values which we have and to give you an example here I also have other beliefs besides free software. So and one strong belief I have is that I'm active in the Wilderness First Aid group and we are helping people to understand how to behave in emergencies and I believe that people should not civil sleep be insured or die because of the lack of proper training in this area. And I join a group which also values this and which wants to make a progress there and I'm active there. Also lots of them they don't care about software freedom. They don't agree with me on my other values. So that's sometimes hard. You can imagine, I mean you notice from other areas as well when you are then forced to work a little bit differently because people don't agree with you on other beliefs but it's something which I think is important that when you are working in one group that you focus on the goals and the values of this group and in the other groups you focus on those other ones. So when we are in the free software movement we should think about how many values do people have to agree with to be part of the movement and to help us to accomplish it that software freedom is the default. So how many things do you have to agree with? When we see the three questions at the beginning and those three circles here we have a smaller group here than we have now here in this room if we all have to agree on those. So that's a challenge to think about what are those values for us and how will they develop in the future. Will it be those four ones? Might we find others where we agree with? I don't know maybe. But one thing which is also important here is that there is a difference between the free software movement and groups active in software freedom in the software freedom movement. So there are groups which have more values than those four values I mentioned that use, study, share and improve. So we as FSFE we have other values as well and they define how we work but they are not deducted from that we are free software organizations they are mainly coming from that we are European we are used to certain laws we grow up with social norms around us with a certain education the people who founded the organization they had certain values and talked about that a lot so that's something which is then also of course something which is inside an organization also it might not be written down some part is written down in a constitution other parts they are not written down so that's true for all the other organizations working there some they value other things besides those the core values of software freedom the thing which I think is important there is to think hard about when to split up so when are there beliefs that you don't agree with when do you have to split and so that's a tough question because some values they are very deep inside us and it's tough to say like I still work with those other groups with these other people also they are completely different from myself and completely different from how I think we should live but yeah I would like to encourage you to before you say like let's split to think about if this is really something where we have to split for and or if we can agree that those are our core principles there are other values which we also believe in which we fulfill in other areas which we work for in other areas and which are not a block of us to still work together with many others to make sure that free software becomes a default so I think that in the free software movement we will become larger way larger and we that also means that we will be more diverse more diverse than we are now we will need way more people around the world to get active in this and it will happen I'm sure about that that also means that we will be challenged and we need to continue to be respectful and we might sometimes be even more challenged on this regard to be respectful to someone else who has a complete other background than we have and while doing that I think it's important to focus and not get distracted with all those other beliefs around us but focus on software freedom in this movement and focus on the other beliefs in our other work so that's my part thank you very much thank you any questions up here I'll start there hello so thank you for your talk it was great so no system is perfect right from the beginning every system needs to change and the same holds true for the free software let's call it like this rules that you showed the ten ones as the time goes by we see that the free software is threatened by some companies by some licenses and so on and so forth let's not be specific here I agree with you that do one thing and do that well as an engineer I think that's so but we also need to think that we need to adapt the rules that we have for what we want to achieve as the time goes by so do you see that those ten rules are sufficient and will be sufficient or do you think that at some point once the attack patterns on the free software change we will have to adapt also thank you I think we already adopted over the time so there were some challenges where there was some change there like with how to translate these values to other technology and there will be challenges with that for I mean there are already challenges like with network services where you have to think about how do you translate this in this area and there are some some dry standard could we maybe also add something to our licenses to make that easier to counter attacks in this area there are also other technologies when they are coming up like artificial intelligence the question is like what role is free software playing there and it's possible that I mean you need to translate that and what it means I also mean that that people have the same possibility as they had before with the other technology people you need other freedoms as well so for example you might additionally to exercise the same things you were able to do in the past alone with software freedom you might need other freedoms or other other tools there as well like with data, access to data and how data is handled I think that the situation like it was 20 years ago is also on a regulator level completely different for the government what people could ask for or not there if it's necessary because of technological change that in some areas government might also have to regulate to make sure that people can still exercise rights which were before given by software freedom but I think that a lot of that will not mean that the software freedom part will be enlarged but it's that we see that as a society to achieve certain goals we need to add other parts in the puzzle as well again so thank you up here hi thanks for your talk so I know since day one that free software is free as in freedom and not as in free beer everybody that has spent some time has heard this at some point but very recently I had a problem because so there is an add-on for Thunderbird which is called send later and it's free software and his developer recently put up a kickstarter because he said that since there is the change of APIs in Thunderbird he needs to rewrite the add-on from scratch and the problem that he was facing is that this needs time and the commitment that he can support only if he gets these donations and he was thinking about basically making this software non free anymore because he wanted to put a license to use free software and as a supporter of free software well this was disappointing but at the same time I see the problem that this guy has because he says I maintain 10 plugins that are free software for Thunderbird I need to do a lot of work and only a very small fraction of the people that are using these plugins actually support me through donations and I have asked him if this campaign is successful are you going to still make your source code available and he said I would like to do that but I fear that if I do that somebody else will take the code and remove the license in part and publish it again with another name and so this doesn't work because then at this point I will not have an income and I cannot continue doing this so what should I tell to this guy to try to give him an answer because I want that this software remains free but I also understand that this is just a guy and it needs to buy food and that's it I mean it's coming back to the general question there are lots of the things I explained here I can understand this and I can see where this is coming from I mean if someone if you are a pacifist and you write software and then afterwards you see that other people are killed with your software that's a problem for you and there might be the situation but it's more important for you the values of software freedom or the value of pacifism and that you say I stop writing software which might be used for this and you might decide that you write proprietary software if you believe that with this you could rather accomplish that the same thing like when you had a business model and it worked at a certain time then times are changing this issue that large corporations are threatening some business model of smaller software companies and they try to to balance that and by adding clauses to software licenses which make them proprietary I can fully understand those companies I mean when you see that well if that continues like that the company will cease to exist or my employees will be looking for some of the other big companies or not then that's a tough decision and it's never that there are absolute values in our society you always have to balance it what is more important now for you is it now in your situation is it software freedom or is it maybe at the moment more on making sure that your family gets enough food on the table or that you can pay your employees and that's for a lot of the cases that's something you need to balance and we have that in many many other areas you can be in favor of one value you can be in favor of the other value and then you see oh they are conflicting so you are in favor of freedom of movement on the other hand you are in favor of better environmental regulations and then you see oh I cannot drive into the city because they say with my diesel I'm not allowed to do this so there's always this balance you have to see and in the end I mean what you can help some people is to see if they can still make it work with free software in the situation if it's possible to do this sometimes there might be cases where it's not for some time then it might balance again there is another development and it's possible again to do it in a similar way that's something which is something which is changing all the time and you know a person is that you understand it you can try to see what solutions there are that you tell the users well I would like to do it with software but if you don't give me money I can't so I can either make it proprietary or I can make it you can give me, you can pay money for this it could also happen the person makes a software proprietary and all the users say well I used the software because it was for software so I will not pay software when it's not proprietary so you might also not get any money so that's all tough decisions I think we're doing quite okay on time we'll do a few more one more here first thank you Matias for a really compelling talk I have a comment and a related question the comment is again thank you for telling us that values can be in conflict with each other as proponents of software sometimes we as a community can be accused of being too idealistic and be too strident in our values so when they are in conflict as the examples you said we need to be humble and always look for opportunities that some of our own values might be in conflict with other values my specific question which is related to that is you said in the use category everyone for any purpose restriction not read or agree with any terms as somebody who contributes occasionally to free software less so than you I'm very concerned from a personal liability standpoint and I like the liability part of MIT or Apache or all these licenses that say you may use it but you may not sue me what is your response if somebody takes my software disagrees with that term I'm going to sue you at me with a lot of corporate money which I cannot match and say well I disagree with your no liability clause I'm going to sue you anyways because your software caused me billions of dollars in loss I need to make sure that the no liability clause if anything is enforced so what do you say in response to your not read or agree with any term part I mean that's something which courts already also had to deal with from what I heard the cases I heard the question there is what have you done there I mean you wrote a software with good intention and others are using it for something completely different maybe even but you don't have any business relationship you put the software out there you are able to use it so it's a present and with present usually it works differently about liabilities so if they use it for one purpose and you did not do something intentionally wrong then I would say that most same judges should say well that's okay you are not responsible for that which will happen in any other cases as well if you do something like you write an article and you think we have freedom of the press and then someone comes like I sue you because you violated another law or another value we have so that's something which in the end it's if you want to be in the safe side don't write software because the same thing could also happen partly with proprietary software with some proprietary software so yes it's something which again it's not isolated the values we have here it's embedded in whole society with laws, with norms where there are challenges over the time those are changing different different level of how important certain values are for the society and I think at the moment you would be pretty safe in most countries I know of but yes you can never be sure well thank you very much for this very elaborate and well argued argument of the perfect is the enemy of the good now following your argument which is basically by limiting the set of values that we require others to share with us we can include more people in our group which makes us larger and stronger now following this to the logical conclusion is I arrive at okay that's limited to the very very core set which in terms of licenses let's me arrive at some BSD or MIT kind of license which I don't really like to arrive at so how do I resolve this and still arrive at more like a copy left license like GPL which does put more restrictions and requires more shared values than the other ones so everything I said here can be accomplished with every free software license we have so that's not about copy left or non copy left and I would also when we think about this and sometimes brought forward as an argument that copy left is not a restriction to those freedoms or those values I think it's the other examples I talked about they are all outside of the software area there so they are about other values what was accomplished with copy left is that we try to protect those values over the time and that's something which in some cases might work and others might not work but all of what I said it's not connected to copy left or non copy left to a license which also includes some patent clauses or not that should all be possible with that so did that answer your question or I think it's one of the challenges before when there was the question about will we adapt over the time yeah copy left is one of those things where people thought about like how do we protect those values over the time what can we do about this and they are already some kind of going towards some corner cases so if you add way more it's getting problematic with those other values but with this as they were also very early in the movement I would say that the general acceptance of those is still quite okay one more up there was that a finger for a question yes no yeah any more so in that case I would like to thank you all for being here we have a booth the FSE booth is in the building K on level 2 I would like to thank all the supporters and donors of the FSE who enable our work please also support our work for software freedom and big applause to the organizers of the FOSSTEM team and the volunteers here for making sure that we can all come here and share those ideas and have those discussions so thank you very much


As we develop our skills with anything, but especially programming I find, I get to a point where I feel like, you know, I've got a really powerful tool here and I can use it to solve all sorts of problems. I don't really need to do much to develop my skills with different tools within this programming language. I fall into this trap frequently and those of you that have ever taken a workshop for me know that I learn something every time I teach a workshop. Well, I'll do something or someone will ask me to do something and I'll do it. I'll be like, huh, that worked. That's really cool. Well, that happened this past week within my lab meeting. In my lab meeting, we have something like a journal club that we call Code Club, like this, where a different person will present and I've been asking Nick Lesniak, a grad student in my lab for a long time to give us a presentation on the stat functions. These stat functions are really poorly documented within ggplot, they're part of ggplot. You see like stat underscore, we saw stat ellipse a few episodes back when we were making those ellipses around our ordinations. Well, Nick gave an awesome presentation on stat summary and it was so awesome that I'm interrupting all the other videos that I had planned and I'm doing it right now because I think stat summary is awesome and you need to know about it.  Well, it adds what we'll call a summary layer to our visuals and that's exactly what I'm gonna talk to you about in today's episode of Code Club. Hey, folks, I'm Patch loss. This is Code Club and I can't believe that I'm so excited up to learn a new function in ggplot and to share it with you, of course, that's the exciting part of sharing it with you. And what is it doing? Well, we've seen it previously with stat ellipse. And so if you recall, we had an ordination. So it was a scatterplot with continuous on X, continuous on Y, we had clouds, different colors for different disease statuses for our samples. And we wanted to put ellipses around the different clouds of points to kind of highlight that those points were all grouped together. And so we use stat ellipse and didn't think much of it. Perhaps we thought, well, why isn't there a geom ellipse? And what's actually happening now that I think about it and learn more about these stat functions is the stat ellipse was adding a statistical layer on top of our ggplot plot. So remember the ggplots are their layered, right? They've got different layers on them. We've got the data, we've got the geomes, we've got the scales, we've got the labels. Well, we can also add a statistical layer. And that statistical layer with the ellipse was drawing a two-dimensional distribution around our points that fit like a multivariate distribution. Well, that is a summary of the data, right? And so then using probably a polygon geome, it then drew the polygon with like, you know, a hundred sides or whatever the default is, summarizing the shape of that distribution, which is pretty cool. But that only makes sense now after I've learned about stat summary, which is what I wanna talk with you about today. So what does stat summary do? Well, if you recall from the last episode, we made a bar plot of the average inverse Simpson diversity index, it's a measure of the complexity of a community for samples from three different diagnosis or disease status groups. We also put error bars indicating the standard error. But what I had to do before I created that bar plot and those confidence intervals was that I had to summarize the data. I had to do a group by summarize to get the mean to calculate the standard error. And we also got the end to know how many points were there. Then I had to then plot that data as the input to GG plot. Well, let's say instead of the mean, I wanted to put the median or let's say instead of the standard error, I wanted to put in some kind of confidence interval, some other type of confidence interval, perhaps say like 25th to 75th percent tiles, right? Things like that. Well, then I'd have to go back to that table that group by summarize workflow, update that and then rerun my plot. What if we could do that directly in our GG plot pipeline? Well, that's exactly what we can do with stats summary and that's why I'm excited to share that with you today. Because again, looking ahead to alternatives to the bar plot, I can now see where the stats summary function will really come in handy so that we can show all of our data, which was again, one of the knocks against the bar plot along with summary statistics on top of that, right? So we're gonna get exposure to that today and then we'll see that repeated as we go along because again, I think this is a great tool and my bad habit whenever I learn a great tool is to use that great tool everywhere. Again, here's our code as we left it at the end of the past episode. If you would like to get a copy of this code, please be sure to check the link in the description below that will take you to a blog post where you can get the code that I am starting with if you would like to get instructions and information on how you can install R, RStudio, the tidyverse, get the data I'm working with, check out the video that I've got linked above here. That will give you all the instructions you need to get going. I'd love to have you work along with me and to try this out yourself and even experiment. All right, so again, we are loading our libraries up at the top here. We're loading in our metadata and our alpha diversity data. We then join that together. I've got some colors for healthy diarrhea and case situations. I now have this summary data frame that as I mentioned, I take the metadata alpha, I group the data frames by the disease status and then I get various summary statistics. I then take this and then I feed this in as my input to ggplot. I'd rather not have to do this summary for a couple of reasons. So first of all, it's actually, it's more code. It's more code that I have to maintain. It's not as flexible, right? If I want to update it and perhaps use the median or I wanna use a 50 or 95% confidence interval, there's a lot of code that I have to change in here to get it done. Also, if I wanted to show the data, the raw data with the bar plot, then I'm gonna have to display two data frames in my ggplot workflow and that's just a pain in the butt. So what I'd like to do is get rid of all this. And what I'll do is I'm gonna go ahead and for now I'm gonna delete this. But I still need to get these three variables for my ends and the way I can do that would be like with metadata alpha and pipe that to count on disease stat and remind myself that I have to run everything up ahead of that to make sure it all works. And so now I get this data frame out that has my disease statuses and my ends, which is exactly what I had here. So let me call this disease count and I can pop this in here for these three and it's a lowercase and I noticed. And so that all works and should be good to go ahead and put in those access labels when we get there. Now, the next thing that I want to do is I'm using metadata alpha, I'm not using inverse Simpson summary anymore. So I'll go ahead and replace that. So we'll do metadata alpha, good. And now we come to our geom error bar and geom call. And I'm gonna leave these here but I'm gonna comment them out for now. And instead what I will do is ggplot aes along my x, I still want my disease stat, my y, I want to put the inverse Simpson and my fill, I'm gonna say disease stat. For the most part that looks the same except now instead of the mean men and max variables, I now have inverse Simpson replacing that. And so where am I gonna get that mean and max? Well, I thought you'd never ask. We can now do stat summary, open close parentheses and let's try the default and see what happens. So we'll go ahead and run this. So if you look at the output, what we now have kind of resembles what we had with the bar plot where we've got a point to represent the mean and we've got plus or minus one standard error.  We'll come back to that in a moment but what we're seeing is the mean plus or minus the standard error. And so if you look at the red message that came out that no summary function was supplied defaulting to mean underscore SE as a function. So this is a summary function that stats summary is using that as you can perhaps guess by the name, mean SE is calculating the mean and giving plus or minus the standard error. Which is exactly what we were plotting in our bar plot except we used the bar. So what we can do to kind of get rid of that message is that we can say fun data equals mean underscore SE. We can also use different geometries. That's using the point and range. So it's the point is the mean and the range is plus or minus the standard error. So we can show that with different geometries. So we could do geome equals bar and run that, we get our bars, right? We don't get our error bars and that's because we would need a different geome. And so we could do that with error bar. So geome error bar. And I'm gonna put that before geome bar because I want the error bars to fall behind it and voila, we get our error bars and similar to what we saw last time when we were plotting geome error bar, we could also do width equals 0.5 as an argument to make the cap on that error bar a bit more narrow, right? And so that looks pretty slick, very nice. And that works great. Something that we are seeing is that we have our legend here to the right. And as I've mentioned in the past, we can add similar to what we did with our geomes, we can add arguments there like show.legend equals false to get rid of that legend and to then give us the full breadth, right? So I created the same plot that we had last time without using group by or summarize or calling geome call. All of the heavy lifting for that plot was done in these two lines and that's replacing these two lines up here that I had commented out as well as that code up ahead up above that I deleted for doing all those summaries, right? So that's really slick. Now, an alternative, let me go ahead and put this in front. As an alternative to mean SE for calculating the confidence interval, I could also do mean clboot to get the confidence interval using a bootstrapping procedure that is a non-parametric approach. And again, if we run all this, we see, I believe, a taller confidence interval. Let me go ahead and move that to be in front of my mean. And so we see those confidence intervals. They're still assuming the data are normally distributed and mirror the mean. An alternative to mean SE and mean clboot would say be median, high, low. So let's use those for both and see what we get. So what we get out are much larger confidence intervals. These are the 95% confidence interval where we've got the median as the top of the bar as well then from the 2 1⁄2 to 97 1⁄2 percentiles. And so we see that the distributions are not mirrored across the median or the mean. This gives you a better representation of the variation in the data. So there are a variety of these different functions that we can use for fun data to summarize our data. The way these functions work is that I could say median, high, low, and then give it metadata, dollar sign, inverse, Simpson, run that, that will output a value for Y, Y min, Y max. And then stat summary with the GMI pick is plotting Y at the top of the bar and then the confidence interval are the Y min and Y max. Again, we also saw mean SE, right? And we can get again, the mean and the min and the max. And what we see actually is that the median is actually lower than the mean. The median is less than the mean and that we get these broader confidence intervals. Some other normally distributed things we could do would be say like mean, we saw a CL boot and then I believe mean CL normal. We could also do mean SDL, which will give you the mean and I believe it's two times the standard deviation. And so you can see two times the standard deviation would give you an error bar that's below zero, which is kind of a giveaway that the data are not evenly distributed or normally distributed around the mean. So that's not ideal. One of the problems with the bar again is that you're using a lot of ink for not much data. It hides the data on its own. It doesn't show the distribution. What we saw of course was with that high low we could get and the confidence interval we could begin to see what was going on in terms of the shape of the distribution. So let me come back now that we've looked at the functions and now let's look at the different geomes that we can use with stat summary. So when we talk about geomes, this geome with the point and the range is geome point range, which is what we've seen already. We could also do geome error bar, which will give us the error bar, but not the point. And so if you want the cap and the error bar, the point, you could also then do geome point, which will then give us the point and the error bar, right? Something to notice is that I'm not getting color anymore because I'm using fill disease stat. So if I change that to color disease stat and then scale color manual, then I get my point and my lines to have those different colors. If I want my bars, my error bars to be black, I could also do call color equals black, point will be colored and my lines will be black. And I can then change the individual sizes and arguments to get what I wanted. You know, I could change the width to make the cap more narrow. I could change the size with the point to make it larger, whatever you wanna do. So let's do one iteration of that to kind of give you a sense of what I'm talking about there. So again, with the error bars, I could say width equals 0.5. And then with the point, I could say size equals three. So I'll have a larger ball and a narrower cap on our error bars. And so again, this kind of gives you a sense of what we're looking at. One other thing to think about, and this is a little bit silly, that there's no real reason that we would connect these three points. They're not, we're not looking at temporal data or connectedness or pre-post, right? But to show you that we can connect these with a line, we could also do a geom line. And we could then, I think we need to add group equals one. And we'll run that. And what we should get now is a line between our three points. It's using the color from the previous one. So again, I could say color equals black.  We could, of course, put it behind or put this line before the previous one so the point sits on top. Anyway, hopefully you can see that I haven't actually calculated the median or the mean values or whatever these summary statistics are explicitly. That's all happening within stats summary. And you can now see that I can very easily change the statistic that I'm creating or I'm plotting and then showing it with these different geometries. I could also do ribbon, which will now create a ribbon between these points. And you see that's black. So that's clearly not ideal. Maybe I'll move that up and retry it. And so now you see that we've got this ribbon or polygon behind the points. Again, this is silly for this example, but I just wanna emphasize that you can use so many geomes with this function to get different appearances and what allows you to tell your data story the way you wanna tell it. So an alternative to geome error bar would be line range and I can then get rid of width as 0.5. And so this isn't totally different than what we saw before with point range, except that allows me to change the aesthetics or the appearances of the line versus the point. So before, if I had used a point range, then the whole point and range would have been colored by the diagnosis group or disease status group. And the size would have also for the line and the point would both be amplified by the three that I used, right? And so instead, if I use line range, I can modify the appearance of the line and the point separately. So I'll put this back to point, rerun this. Again, I think this is a much more elegant and simple depiction of the data than what we saw before with the bar plot plus or minus the standard error. We've got a lot less ink here. We're showing the median, which is a better depiction of the central tendency of the data. We've got the 95% confidence interval as calculated using the data rather than two times the standard deviation, which we saw had problems because we went below zero, which doesn't make any sense. And we get this empirically determined confidence interval, which is nice. Yeah, you know, you might quibble and say, it'd be nice to also include the data points here as well. I might push back and say, do you really want 155 points shown here? It might that just be a little bit over the top, too much information for our audience to look at. Sure, if you had like five points, yeah, show all the data. But if you have 189, 94, eh, probably not. One other thing to comment on is that our y-axis automatically went to zero because some of our diversity values were quite small. There is debate in the data-vis world of whether or not you need to include zero. For bar plot, there does seem to be consensus that yes, you should include zero because humans perceive things by area before we perhaps perceive things by position on the y-axis. I personally would like to include the zero on the y-axis as much as possible. And perhaps that means scaling your y-axis accordingly so that you have a good reference point on your y-axis. And that allows people then see like, yeah, this point is higher than the blue or the red, but it's also kind of twice the height, twice the value as the blue and the red. Anyway, I think that does tend to be a little bit context dependent as much as possible. I do try to include zero on the y-axis, but no, there's debate out there and it probably is more context dependent. So I hope this was interesting to you, as interesting as it was to me to learn a new function, something that I know that I will be using a lot more in the future. I can't tell you how many times they've made two data frames, one of the raw data, one of the summary data, and then in GG plot, I kind of use them together. And again, it's just a little bit kluji. This stat summary to me is a game changer for a lot of my types of data presentation so that I can do the summary within GG plot because I'm not gonna use these mean or standard error values anywhere else. It's not necessary to store it as a separate data frame. It makes my code simpler. And as we can see here with slight tweaks, we can already make our data visualization a little bit simpler and more powerful and impactful. Anyway, I hope you found this interesting. Go ahead and try this with your own data. I'd really encourage you to explore around with the different geomes that you can use that are really poorly defined and not really well described in the documentation. Try things out, see what happens. We'll be trying some of them out also in future episodes coming up here. Know of that to kind of keep getting practice. It's not enough to just learn the function. You have to keep using it to truly integrate it into your workflows. And I can tell you, I'm gonna be integrating this into my workflow. So I'd encourage you to check it out as well with your own data. So please tell your friends about what we've talked about here in Code Club and all the exciting things of new functions. It's not that exciting, but it's like Pat exciting, you know? Anyway, keep practicing with us and we'll see you next time for another episode of Code Club.