Now, it's not true that most of the apartments in this condo building will rent us. Most of the people in the condo building own the condos. They were the ones fighting it out. They were the ones disagreeing. They were the ones who delayed fixing the building. So who's responsible to start this off? I got we were connected by Ben Burgess. I think in the wake of the Steven Crowder, I believe debacle or depending on your perspective, wonderful phenomena. You reached out to Ben and said, I would like to debate Sam and I was down. And so here we are. Let me, well, I'm not going to make you comment on the Steven Crowder thing. Let's move on from Steven. Yeah. So all right. So okay. So with this said, what shall we discuss libertarianism? Well, I mean, I'll just clarify. I'm not exactly a libertarian. And I know this is probably in the weeds for you guys, but I like to differentiate myself on them and not an anarchist. I'm not a complete subjectivist as many libertarians are. But sure, we can we can discuss free markets and we can discuss capitalism. We can discuss debate them or whatever you want to present it. All right. Well, I mean, let's start with free markets, because I of the the opinion that there's really no such thing as a free market. And that markets only really can exist, particularly in this day and age, but in general with with a, you know, with a with government, essentially, that governments create and structure markets. And that there really isn't a free market. It's really just a question of, you know, how the market is structured in such a way and who it benefits. Well, what's a question is, is what is freedom? That is, what does it mean to say there's a free market? Freedom is the absence of coercion. It's the absence of force. It's the absence of an authority that says this is how things have to be.  Free market is a system in which the government exists. But the role of government is to protect rights, to protect individual rights. It's to leave you alone to make choices based on your values, based on your pursuits, based on your choices, to leave you alone to do all that and to protect you from other people who want to do your harm. So you need government because you need a monopoly over the use of force. But other than that, the government should leave you free. And that's what free markets mean. It means where the government is not dictating to you how we should live, what products to buy, how much to pay employees, etc. But I mean, do you think we have free markets in this? No, I don't think we've ever really had free markets. I think we've gotten close to it. I think it's gotten close to and I think it's possible to get free markets in the future. And I think to the extent that we get towards free markets, to that extent, we're richer and better off and more flourishing. I want to circle back as to who the we is in that. That'd be great. But what would you in and look at the market that we have for, let's say, labor and products and whatnot, and explain to us what you perceive as the lack of freedom there and what you think is obviously supported and structured by the government, but still represents freedom? There's massive amounts of lack of freedom in labor markets, for example. Minimum wage is a lack of freedom. Requiring employers to play benefits is a lack of freedom. The restrictions on firing and hiring, many of the discrimination laws are an example of a lack of freedom. Any intervention of the government in a voluntary activity, in a voluntary exchange between two individuals that is that is not cost, that is not illegal, but is illegal.  That's not fraudulent. That's not fraudulent, let's say. That's not fraudulent. Okay.  I think that if you're going to have a if you're going to have a tax system, taxes should, I mean, taxes should be flat and they should be as close to zero as possible. And they should be simple and everybody should pay exactly the same. There should be no breaks and corporations and corporations at the end of the day don't really pay taxes. They pass it on to consumers and they pass it on to employees. So, corporate taxes make zero sense from anybody's perspective because the economics of it is workers pay corporate taxes. It's just a hidden employment tax. And I mean, I don't I don't think that's necessarily the case. Every economic study out there shows that at the end of the day, the corporate tax is either paid by consumers in higher prices or by employees in lower wages. There is no such, shareholders pay very little in corporate taxes. Shareholders, shareholders. And who pays? There is no such thing as a corporation. It's just an excess of contracts, right? No, I mean, the corporations will will pay taxes on the on on exchanges of goods. They will actually pay money to the government. You're suggesting that they just pass on all of those expenses. They may. If there is no such thing as a corporation, Sam, corporations are just people, right? So, who, who, which are the people within the corporation that actually pay the tax? Well, the entity, the entity, but they but the entity, the the the cash sitting in the bank account of the entity is owned by shareholders, right? So, if if if it's either shareholders are paying the tax or they pass it on yet, but it's their property. Legally, it's their property. It is not their money yet until it's passed on to them. And then which case the government takes apart.  It's not his money yet. Well, to the extent that you have a contract with him when he has a claim against you. But then I give money to the government as well at that moment. They have a claim against you as well. So, it's in that sense, it's their money. And do you have and so you don't think that there's any type of coercion that is set up in between this relationship that is a function of government, for instance, like protecting property rights, like building infrastructure, like shielding those individuals who are surrounded by the corporation, which is a legal protection that the worker may not have. You don't do you see that as a government intervention. So let's take them one at a time, right? So protecting property rights. No, all the government there is doing is protecting something that's mine. It's not the governments. The government is just recognizing the fact that I created something and it is now mine and it's protecting my ability to use it. That's what property rights mean. Rights are not something that government grants you. It's something that is recognized. It's a principle of human interaction that the government is protecting. So rights are not things. Rights are freedoms of action. All rights mean is it's a recognition that you are free, free of coercion and that the government's job is to protect that freedom. And property is the same thing. You know, I earn something. It's mine. The government is protecting my ability to keep it. Okay. So the government, it's not just a question of the government recognizing you're right. It is a question of the government deploying its power in defense of that right. And it's also defining that it's yours, right? It's not defining it's mine. The reality defines that it's mine. It's the fact that it's mine. You know, if I could use something. Yaren, hold on for a second. If reality defines that something's yours, how is it that we, what is the use of, why do we have courts that very often have to step in to define who's this is? Because we often disagree about things out of reality, right?  Now it's a question of do we know and there's disagreement about what happened? So there are disagreements about property rights and that's why you have a court system. But the fact is somebody owns this stuff, somebody created it and therefore it is of somebody's before you had government, before you had a government. Hold on, wait, wait, wait, I want to just focus on this because on one hand you say it is, we know who owns this because it's reality. But in fact, you're also acknowledging that different people can have a different view of reality. So we have disagreements. Yes. Okay, we have disagreements about the reality of who owns this. Yes. And one person's right and one person's wrong and that's the job of the courts is to help us decide that. In other words, the government decides who's ownership, who's going to have that ownership right. And it's not just a function of you built this. I mean, property exists before you get there. But it can be, I created this, but we also have regimes for who owns the creation of that. Slaves built quite a lot, for instance. That's not free markets, right? We're talking about what would happen in the free markets.  But that's not what we're talking about, right? We're talking about under freedom what happens to property rights. And what I'm saying is that you create, you pay Matt a certain amount of money, that's his. That's a contract between you and him.  That is now all the government is going to do is say, okay, if there's a dispute between you and Matt, the government's going to say, what did Sam promise Matt? What is there for Matt's? What is Sam's based on that promise? So the government is there to intervene when there's a disagreement between you. But the property rights allocation, the amount of money coming into you, and then the amount of money you give Matt is voluntarily decided between you and Matt. Matt has a property right claim against what you promised him. That's all. I mean, property rights are not that hard. They are, you work, use, and then you get stuff. Yeah, my father's an attorney, right? Whose entire career has been resolving these type of disputes. So it's not complicated. But it's not just a question. It is the government that comes in and ultimately decides and shapes the property right. I mean, sure. And that's why we want government, we want a government that is focused on doing a good job shaping, not shaping property rights, but recognizing property rights, doing it objectively, doing it transparently, and not getting bogged down with the millions of regulations and controls and millions of things that we have today. Rather, if we lived in a simple free market world, government would have one job, it would be relatively easy and things would be a lot simpler than they are right now. And your father would probably not have a job. I'm sorry, I don't mean your father, but there'll be a lot fewer lawyers in the world. I understand. So what would that look like? And how would that work? I'm very curious about that. If government was more, in your aspirational view of the world, what would, how would that work? How would we determine property rights, let's say? Well, I gave you an example between you and Matt, right? So Matt would have a property right over what you paid him, right? Whatever contractually you promised to pay Matt, that's now his. And then if he went and he bought a home, there is a role for government to have a registry, but that's about it, of who owns what so that there's not a lot of confusion about, you know, who owns a piece of land. But that's it. There's no, you know, he would buy it from somebody. Now it's his because he acted to gain it. He could, as a consequence, do with it. Basically, what he wanted, he was now his home. Could he burn plastic on it? Well, if the plastic was not harming his neighbors, if his neighbors were being harmed by the burned plastic, then they could sue him to prevent him from burning it. So I mean, again, the common law is all, what's that? Sue him in the government's courts. Well, I'm not against government. I believe governments are necessary. And governments are there to protect you from harm. So they would have to sue him in the government's courts and show harm in order to stop him. So governments are there to do this one thing. So I'm not against the government. No, I understand that. I'm trying to get when they're very limited. You're wrong. I'm trying to figure out how your world is different than the one that we're existing in. Because when you say do harm, who defines that it's harmful? So I'll give you an example. Wait a second. So Matt and I, I don't know without I don't know, you know, sort of like at birth that the inhalation of the burning plastics are are are going to do me harm.  The government writes regulations and makes determinations through the EPA, let's say, that it does do harm. And that's the basis of the my argument that his burning does harm there. How is this to the extent, to the extent what are how is that world different? How that's your fantasy world? How is that different from our existing one? The difference is this that how much you pay mad is not an issue of harm. How much you pay mad is not an issue of harm. That's true. Burning plastic, if it really does harm, in some sense, your world and my world look the same if there's harm, right? The way to prove harm would might be a little different. But at the end of the day, if there's harm, it will look the same. If you beat Matt up, if you whip him, right, you try to enslave him, he brought up slavery before, then the government would intervene to stop you from doing that both in your world and in mind, right? But where the difference happens is your choice of whether to pay mad health care or not. Now, I don't know if you're required to pay him because maybe you're too small of a business to do so. I don't know how many employees you would need. But at some point, you know that there are hundreds, if not thousands of regulations that dictate how you and Matt should treat each other that have nothing to do with harm, have nothing to do with force, have nothing to do with coercion, have something to do with some kind of social policy. We believe that everybody should have health care there for the best way to do it is to employers and we will force employers to provide that my government would never do. If you want to pay mad health care, you guys can negotiate, maybe he prefers to get cash, maybe he doesn't want you to pay his health care. You would have contractually you would decide with Matt on that relationship. Does your government have corporations? In other words, does your government give certain benefits? So you raise the limited liability issue, so let's deal with the limited liability issue. I mean, a little bit limited liability issue for the most part is a contractual issue. It is an issue that relates to the relationship between debt holders and shareholders. Basically, debt holders are saying we're willing to lend you as a corporate entity money in exchange for not and we know by doing this it's in the covenants of the bond that we can go after the individual wealth of shareholders. That's a voluntary decision that they made. Now the government has recognized that, called it a limited liability corporation, but it's recognized a contractual dispute. Now you cannot lend, you can choose, you can choose not to lend a corporation money because you think it's too much of a risk and you'd rather be able to actually go after the money of the shareholders. That's all it is.  But Yaron, there may be voluntary between the debt holder and the shareholder, but in terms of the corporation and the public, the public doesn't volunteer for any of that. I, as an S corp, have certain protections that amongst people I've never even met before. What are you protected from? From people outside? I'm protected from my personal wealth being sued. Let's say I infringe upon someone's copyright, I pay that all in pre-tax dollars. If they come after me and they sue me, I am... Put aside taxes. Put aside taxes. I'm fine if you want to get rid of the limited liability that corporations have with regards to third parties that do not have a contract with the company. Sure. I mean, I don't think that's an issue. I would also... But the pre-tax stuff, let's put aside, because as I said, corporations don't actually pay taxes, your employees do. Well, I mean, they're pre-tax relative to the past. I mean, I wish everything was pre-tax. I'm not a big fan of taxes, particularly not today. I don't doubt that. But what of all the advantages that these entities get from society that workers don't necessarily get? Like, for instance, I make my living on the internet, largely established by the government that becomes a commercial vehicle for me. I am a trucking company, and I make my money through having high quality infrastructure in a way that I take advantage of that other people either don't have the resources to take advantage of or don't. There are, I mean, just the idea that I have that much more property that needs to be protected by the government is an advantage that I have over these, when I get into a contract theoretically with a worker, etc., etc. So a few things. I don't believe government should build infrastructure. I don't think it's necessary. I don't think it has been necessary historically. So in my world, you're asking about my world, right? The trucking company would not be writing off of what you had paid into through it. It would have to pay for its use of infrastructure through tolls or whatever, to a private, to somebody who built the road through tolls or whatever. And I think tolling is pretty simple right now. I think all infrastructure could be built and be more efficient and be more productive on a private basis. Let me just say something about the internet.  And while it's true that government funds funded university programs and academics and so on, that ultimately created the basis on which the internet was built. Sure, but if the government is going to fund something like university research, it funds a lot of university research, 90% of it is garbage and you never see once in a while you see something that produces a result. And then we saw the government did it. The government did very little of it.  Some of it turned out to be good. Now the idea that research wouldn't happen if not for the government is bizarre. Research was happening well before government started funding it. But it's true that once the government starts funding something, it crowds out everybody else. That is, you don't expect private funding of university research if the government is going to do it. You know, in some of the biggest innovations in all of human history happened at a time when government was funding exactly zero research. And that was during the 19th century in England and the United States where there was no government funding of any research. And we got electricity and we got the steam engine and planes and so on. Where did that wealth come from? It came from people producing and creating and building. And a little bit of like the triangle slave trade and all of that. But the slave trade is wealth destroying. No, the wealth trade is wealth destroying. Let's be very clear about this. The south was poor, the north was rich. It's one of the reasons the north won. Slavery from an economic perspective. You keep raising slavery. I need to answer this question. Slavery is, first of all, immoral and evil and so on. But it isn't a net economically destructive force. It is not a productive force. It would have been a lot more wealth created without slavery and indeed much more wealth was created post-slavery than it was pre-slavery. So I know the easiest thing to do when the 19th century is raised is to say, but it's all slavery. But that's just economic and historical foulness. I don't want to stay on where we were. So let me finish my point about the internet. Because Matt interrupted me. The point is that the internet, yes, some infrastructure with regard to the internet was produced by government. That would have happened even without the government. That is this plenty of capital flowing into research throughout the last couple of centuries without government flowing into it. So yes, you are using a private service. I assume YouTubers make you a lot of money off of your show. Good for them. Yaron, let me just address some of those. First of all, in terms of the slavery, I have interviewed at least a half a dozen authors who have written extensively that the northern wealth was just as tied into the free labor and created the entire cotton industry. And it had knock-on effects throughout the world, including in Britain, because you had zero input in terms of labor. And cotton at that time was incredibly labor-intensive to produce. And when you have the ability to produce that labor for nothing, virtually nothing, it has knock-on effects. Can I just say one thing about that? And then I'll let you... Slavery has existed forever. We've had slavery. How about the triangle slave trade? Matt, please. Slavery has existed forever. The fact is that something different happened in the 19th century, and it wasn't some innovation with regard to slavery. It was the discovery and the use of capitalism. And the fact that slave labor was mitigated. If you look at the actual wealth created during the 19th century, almost none of it was created as a consequence of slavery. And I know there's a massive political agenda of painting the 19th century in that way, but it is distorted and it is wrong. And if you look at the places in the world without slavery that has taken the same principles as capitalism developed in the 19th century in the United States, they developed wealth as fast, if not faster, than the United States. So the slavery issue is just a massive perversion and distortion. And it's sad to see that that is the critique of... Listen, let's just table this because I've literally interviewed a half a dozen people. I know, and experts at this who disagree. Political angle on it, absolutely. I'm sure you haven't interviewed the experts that would mitigate that. I have actually talked to many libertarians before who've made this similar argument, but without the data. But nevertheless, let's go back to just even your description of the internet. Now, your argument is a counterfactual that's impossible for any of us to argue, which is the internet would have existed even if the government hadn't spent all this money on research, which by the very expense of it is indicative of it is research that they're going out there and they're laying a lot of bets on stuff that doesn't necessarily pay off, which of course, capital is highly reluctant to do. We see it in the context of the COVID, right? Like you would not have had without the billions of dollars that were pumped into these private entities without the guarantee of distribution, even if this stuff didn't work, you wouldn't have seen the COVID vaccines developed at the same rate, you wouldn't have seen so many of them. Sam, none of that is true. I mean, I encourage people to look at the critiques of the entrepreneurial state. I mean, you're referring to a book called Entrepreneurial State where she lays out the case of, or maybe you're not, but the case that the internet is funded by, it was funded by government. I encourage people to look at the critiques of the entrepreneurial state and look at exactly what was funded, what was not funded, and what would have happened if free market, if those elements that are still free in our markets had stepped in and turned the internet into what we know of it today. I don't believe that's true of COVID either. The fact is that the only reason we have a vaccine today is that two companies were set up completely in the marketplace, not funded by government, Moderna and Bioengine in Germany. Set up trying to create mRNA technologies for all kinds of, and they were ready, they were ready. Moderna was heavily funded by the NIH prior to this. No, it wasn't funded by the NIH. Again, research on which Moderna later took was funded by the NIH. Sure. Again, if the government is funding all research, you're not going to be able to find a company. It's not funding all research, it's funding all. That is the longest shot. I mean, no, that's not true. I'll give you one example. I'll give you an example of exactly what you're saying. When we discovered there was COVID out there, there were many researchers and scientists out there who wanted to jump in and try to get funds to do research and to develop drugs relating to COVID in March of last year. Yet they couldn't because the government bureaucracy was such that they couldn't get the grants, the grand authority wasn't there, they couldn't switch the authority from what they were doing to something else. The people who jumped in were the private sector. Now it's true that the government stepped in and said, we'll buy everything you're to produce. As if in a free market, that couldn't have happened, right? As if in a free market, insurance companies don't have any incentive to do exactly that. I know you'll pull a face, but we could lay down a scenario where profit-seeking, profit-maximizing evil corporations actually seek to buy as many vaccines as they can because it's cheaper than actually paying for treatment in hospital, which is what would have happened in a free market. But look, we can argue about the factual and the counterfactual. To me, the deeper issue about free markets is not, can we draw these scenarios? Because I think if you gave me enough time, I could draw you the exact scenario of what would happen at a COVID and a free market. And a lot fewer people died than under the 600,000 that died in the world in which we have the government involved in it. The government was an obstacle at every step of the way. It didn't do its job. It didn't test screen and isolate, which is its job. It wouldn't let private enterprise produce tests until it was way too late. The CDC insisted on making the test themselves, and it was a lousy test.  Could it be much more efficient if it was done in the free market? We could go over all of these in great detail, and I could present a counterfactual, and you'll say it's counterfactual, so who cares? But the essential is this. I don't believe that the government telling you what research to do. I don't believe the government building infrastructure. I don't believe the government getting involved in our lives is moral, or right, or just. The only government is forced, government is coercion. The only time coercion and force is justified is in self-defense. And it has no business. The government has no business. The majority has no business in telling me what values to pursue, what education to get, what research to do. That are choices that need to be left to individuals and not to central planners. Alright, Yaron, let me, I'll get to the morality of this, because, you know, we may have a different value system, but there's a couple of things. I just want to go back to what you were saying about the infrastructure. The government doesn't need to pay the infrastructure. They could charge, the private entities could charge tolls for corporations who you would say at that point would then pass it on to take out of their workers' pay and charge to consumers, I would imagine, right? There's no reason why the toll is any different than a tax in that regard. Well, any expense, a toll is just an expense, right? And there's no reason a tax is not any kind of expense, right? Somebody has to pay. We also know that one of the things that, and maybe this is just a question of immorality to you, but we have roads that go to just about everywhere in this country.  We even have bridges to know it. And we have bridges to know where it is true. There are definitely abuses within our system, like there is in any system, whether it's corporate or not. But the whole point is, is that private corporations will only seek profit. We know many, many stories. I'm sure you must know, you know, have heard stories of medical inventions that are built that are maybe helpful to a very narrow amount of people and their private corporations don't support it. I can tell you that living in an area where there was a tremendous amount of Lyme disease, there was a Lyme vaccine that existed 40 years ago. That was about 70% effective, but it was just not profitable for the company at the time. And maybe there's one coming back now with some government intervention and support of that because the profit motive is such that it wasn't compelling enough. So we're going to see a Lyme vaccine in a couple of years now. That's really bizarre, Sam, because if you think about the number of drugs that are being researched and being produced and being investigated, and the number the FDA approves and the cost that the FDA, the amount of money that the FDA causes a drug to cost these days, the idea that is private enterprise that is restricting drug supply, and not the FDA and not government restricting drug supply is bizarre. And the fact is that, for example, I'll give you a quick example. There was a drug that people who had arthritis swore by this because they live in excruciating pain, and there was one drug that would actually actually reduce their pain. And the government stepped in and said, you know what, but 10% of you have an increase in heart disease. Therefore, we were drawing the drug, and it's illegal. Even if you choose to take on the risk of heart disease, to reduce this excruciating pain, we the government have decided you cannot access this drug because we the government know what's good for you. So instead of me and my doctor making a decision based on risk that is personal to me, the central planner now dictates, no, no, no, 10% risk is too much that the drug is off the market. The reason we have so few drugs in this country is because the FDA has an incentive to be super risk-averse. It is going to be blamed for any damage that happens but never blamed for a drug that's released that actually going to cure something or actually help us. So, you know, this is all completely twisted. Profit motive is what gets us around more drugs, not less drugs. What is that drug? I forget now, but it was like 10 years ago, it was on the market, it was a hugely popular drug, and they withdrew it because there was an increased risk, the 10% increased risk of heart disease and those receiving it. What do you do about the problem that we had with let's say Oxycontin, where doctors were making these decisions with their patients but because of the intense profit motive and because of frankly, in some respects, the failure of the FDA and the fact that the statutory protections were not strong enough, in my opinion, that we ended up having this use and ultimately abuse of Oxycontin that led to a massive opioid epidemic. So, I for one believe that drugs should be legal, and if people want to abuse them, they have every right to abuse them. It's sad. But the point is the doctors gave us to, excuse me, wait, the doctors, you said this would be a decision between the doctor and the patient, and I'm suggesting to you that a significant part of the overdose that we see in the addiction was not a function of people making a choice to be addicted or to abuse drugs, but was rather a profit motive on the part of Purdue and subsidy. Have you ever had surgery? I'm just curious.  I have friends. And when the doctor offered you an opioid, let me just finish. Let me just finish. The profit motive drove these salespeople and this company to make doctors believe that this was not addictive in the way that the doctors understood oxycontin could be or that this type of opioid could be.  I'm shaking my head because no doctor believed it wasn't addictive, and particularly they couldn't believe it after they actually saw their patients come back over and over again to ask for more. So maybe initially you're right, but at some point you have to ask. We have a tremendous amount of corrupt doctors in this country. And we have a lot of corrupt doctors in this country. You're making an argument that to allow, listen, your own, just listen to what you've just said in the past two minutes. I know. You have said we need to allow doctors to have an unfettered relationship with their patient, and all of these doctors knew they were giving a highly addictive drug to their patients, and they turned the other direction, which led to the incredible overdoses. I think that's right, but look. So why am I suggesting we should trust doctors? Yeah, because I think we live in a system where we encourage people not to take personal responsibility, doctors and patients not to take personal responsibility for the decisions that they make, and we encourage corruption. I think because we have an SEC, for example, we have more corruption in financial markets. I think because we have an FDA, we have more corruption among doctors because doctors now rely on guidance from above rather than making personal decisions. Let me just finish this point about OxyContin. Look, when a doctor offered me, this is years ago, when a doctor offered me opioids after back surgery because I was in tense pain, I said, you know, maybe not, right? These are addictive, right? I knew that. You knew that. Everybody knows opioids are addictive. Everybody knows opioids are addictive, and what we do is we shrug off. Do you know anybody who's ever been addicted to that pain medication? Yeah, and they rationalize it away, but they knew what they were doing. They knew what they were getting into, and it reduced their pain so they was excusable, and they could justify it to themselves because the pain was going away, but it doesn't take much research to discover. You just do a Google search, even five, six, 10 years ago, and you would have discovered that any one of these drugs was addictive. We don't want, we don't want people to take personal responsibility. We don't talk, doctors say have personal responsibility about the decisions they make. Let me ask you this. They want to give that decision authority to some guiding authority like the FDA. Is mRNA vaccines, are they safe? Yeah, I think so. Well, I mean, if I Google it, I can find just as many hits. Oh, God. Yeah, but you're saying that it's... But just use your mind a little bit. You give differentiate between the conspiracy theory nonsense and the reality. I just want to be clear on what your argument is here. Your argument is that the literally tens of thousands of deaths that we've had as a function of addiction that started with OxyContin, you're arguing that the doctors were unscrupulous and the patients failed to understand the implications of the medicine they were taking and that, okay, this is where our world views really diverge because I don't believe that we can have a functioning society where every patient each has to know the implications of every medication they're taking so they can fact check the doctor who apparently is willing to be unscrupulous to the extent that they can because they're aided and abetted and encouraged to be corrupt by the existence of government agencies. I don't disagree with you. That would be a rotten world, but I don't believe that's the kind of world you would get. I believe that is a world that we have gotten because of the kind of role we've allowed government to take. We have delegated to government authorities so much of our personal responsibility both as doctors, as pharmaceutical companies, and as individuals, that yes, you cannot just take the world as it exists today and snap your fingers and yes, everything happens. Incentives matter. And when you create perverse incentives, which is what the FDA has created, you get perverse results. And that's what we got. And you're getting the same with MRNA right now. The reason there's so much conspiracy theories about this is because people have lost trust in our government and you get one central authority saying thumbs up, thumbs down. And we're living through that. It's a sad and horrific state that we have right now where we're not trusting scientists because scientists don't believe members of the elite. You've just described the entire opioid epidemic as a function of unscrupulous. I think it's a function of the system that we have today, which involves the FDA unscrupulous doctors, yes, and ignorant patients. But you're suggesting in the absence of the FDA and the government that everyone would trust Pfizer or that they would all do the right thing because why? How would the incentive structure be different? First of all, think about what happens if you don't.  It's a big deal. But let's take that world. Because that's an interesting thing because I'm thinking about the builders of that building in Florida. Now maybe they would take a hit now if we knew who they were. Maybe they're still in business. But it also suggests that the way the corporations, which we know, and you've made it clear, are just people who have a legal protection.  That CEO and that CEO, they're gone and they've profited from it. So if the company goes bankrupt, because they, I mean, the Sacklers made billions. Yeah, they don't have them. They don't have those billions anymore. Oh, they do. They very much do. They don't. And they were pretty far off before this. I literally just interviewed the guy who did the story on the Sacklers. They very much do have billions of dollars. But again, I don't think they are the only party responsible for what happened there. And a lot of people are getting off the hook on it.  Like, no, it is, you know, there's no guarantee in life. Look, we have the system you want or close to it. And a building inspector went into that building and returned every 10 years, the government sent the building inspector into the building in Miami, and they still didn't get it. They still blew it up. And I would argue the private, the private owners of that building did not respond to it. The point is this that in a world in which the government doesn't have a building inspector, let me finish this thought. And then I have to run, unfortunately, right? Because I don't have a lot of time. Let me finish this thought. In a world in which I imagine there are many people that have a clear interest in keeping the building from collapsing. Certainly the owners of the building and the people who live there. Now look, mistakes are going to happen in any system, mistakes are going to happen, right? No system is going to guarantee that no buildings ever collapse.  But I like the incentives of the building owners, the people who own the condos, more than I like the incentive of the building inspector from the government. No, it didn't work in this case, man. It didn't work in this case. But I said that sometimes, sometimes things are going to go wrong. But you know what? I also like the incentive of in a free market, not in the world in which we live now where everybody hides behind the government of the insurance company that ensured that building because they've got a lot of claims that they're going to have to pay now and they're going to take a big hit. They, in a free market, they would have set an inspector. Now in the world we live in today, they don't because they will land the government inspector, which probably was not a good idea. The government inspector made it quite clear that there were problems there. The private inspector, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. The private inspector is also the engineering company that was in there. The private owners of that building made the decision not to fix it. Now, were there a stricter government regulation? Then why are we worried about it? Then they made a decision and they suffered the consequence. Because there's 100 people who made a decision who made a bad decision and suffered the consequences of it. I'm not justifying the building collapsing. I'm saying that people make decisions.  The point is that there are, you know, what you want is for the people who make the decision to suffer to benefit from the consequence of their actions. If I make a decision to take oxy cotton, knowing it's addictive and I become addicted from it, that's my problem, not yours and not mine and not anybody else's. I believe people should pay for the mistakes that they make. I think that we have gotten to the rub between us, that for you, the morality, as far as I can tell, is that consequences, if they can be directly attributed to a mistake that individuals make, that's just the way it is. For me, my morality, I guess, to use it your term, is that society should try and diminish and mitigate the suffering of other people. That's a big difference to you. Now, my view is if you want to mitigate the suffering of other people, you should be able to do that freely. To force me to help you mitigate the suffering of other people because it's your value, but if it's not mine, that is immoral. It's immoral for you to impose your morality on me even if you're in the majority. I have to say too that every, well, not every, but many of the conversations I've had with libertarians, the ones who are more coherent, and I count you as one of those, ultimately comes down to there's a certain frustration that they have that the vast majority of Americans subscribe to the idea that society should mitigate mistakes that people make, you know, like things like that society should be designed that way and that it is frustrating for people like you to live in a country where most people feel that way. Oh, absolutely. We try to educate people not to feel that way. But yes, I would like to live in a place where people are free to aggregate their efforts together to mitigate problems that they see fit on a voluntary basis. I don't believe in coercion. I just don't believe in force. I don't believe anybody has a right to force somebody else to protect property. That is protect. I'm all for protection. I'm protecting your life. Police should protect your life. I don't. I think property is an extension of your life, but life is property is part of your life. I mean, you can't separate the two. If I need to produce stuff in order to live, what about government protecting your life? If you if the building falls, like it's not every one of the 150 people who died and they're made that decision. Sure. Children didn't. They were shareholders of a building and they they had represented shareholders or owners and they were responsible with decision making that they the decisions they make. But it's to protect your life from somebody else using force against you. It's not from nature. I mean, a hurricane might blow through here. I'm in Puerto Rico right now.  I do expect the government to protect me from somebody trying to shoot me in the street. Did the government help putting electricity back on there? Well, the government destroyed their electricity grid and then it rebuilt it in in as bad of a shape as it was originally. So the next hurricane will go out again. Was that drug incidentally people are saying it was Vioxx? Is that the case? Vioxx, yes. Thank you. It was Vioxx. Yeah, my understanding is that was a recall that they did themselves. But it's but maybe that's incorrect. No, it's the FDA forced them. Vioxx had been taken by some 4 million Americans out of those patients who took Vioxx. The arthritis drug may have caused approximately 140,000 heart attacks resulting in an estimated 60,000 deaths. This is according to an FDA investigation. I mean, may have may have caused notice may I mean imagine if they did that with the vaccine may have and and also why can't I make that decision? Why can't I make decision whether I want to I want to take the risk of heart attack and would you smart a guy than most people who have the ability to assess all I don't I don't assume that I actually have a high opinion of most human beings and think that they can make decisions for themselves and I think it's a it's the the philosophy king and your philosophy king mentality of a play dough where they you get to the site for other people. It's good for them. You're right. You have kids. I do. I have. Yeah, you know, when you have little kids, it's a little bit tough to be doing all that medical reading, right? It's absolutely tough. It's absolutely tough. And part of the reading is finding a good pediatrician so that you somebody you can trust who's not going to deceive you. And that's not easy. I'm not saying life's easy. It's crossed, fingers crossed. No, it's not about fingers crossed. It's not about fingers crossed. But okay, I do need to run. I know. I appreciate the time and stability. Thank you. Have fun. Yeah, it was. Bye.


Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host as always, Krista Burns here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event.  There is some disagreement in the world about what you call these things or what people want to call these things, but whatever you want to call us, we are here live online every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. Call us whatever you want, but join us. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. We do record all of our shows and post them on to our website. They get put up on our YouTube channel for the Library Commission so you can go ahead and watch anything that you couldn't attend live there. Both the show, the live show on Wednesdays and the recording recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So go ahead and share it with anyone you want to out there to check up on what we're doing. And we do a whole mixture of things here, presentations, interviews, book review sessions, mini-training sessions. Basically anything is library related. We will have it on the show. We do have Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes do sessions. And we also bring in guest speakers. That's what we have this morning on the line with us today from just south of us, down in Kansas, is Robin Hastings. Hello, Robin. Hello, Christa. Hello. And she is there, as you can see her picture there, she is the Director of Technology Services at our Northeast Kansas Library System, just over the border, kind of, from Nebraska. Yep, we go all the way up to the Nebraska border. Cool. And she's on the line with us remotely from down there. She's going to tell us everything you ever wanted to know about the cloud. That's a little too, not too intimidating, I hope. Yeah, not too intimidating. Or just the things you might want to know about the cloud that are library related, hopefully, the ways and things you can do with it to help do some things, maybe say it a little differently, more efficiently, whatever, in your library. So I'm just going to hand over to you, Robin, to go ahead and take it away. All right. Thank you very much. I will tell you right now, I'm recovering from a cold. So if I drop out for a moment, it means that I have muted myself, so I'm not coughing in your ear. I'll try to do that. And also, on the slide that you've got there now is my email address. If you have questions or comments that you want to make, that's the easiest way to get a hold of me. I'm almost always connected to my email and always willing to talk libraries and technology. So happy to take questions or comments or just hear what you guys are doing, especially if something I have said has spurred you on to try something new. So we can't really start with a discussion of the cloud without defining it, of course. I usually use two different definitions for cloud. There's a very basic simple definition that I use for most folks, which is cloud is server and computing resources somewhere that isn't in your building. It's a way somewhere. And so you're using the resources through the network, and you're using them as they are hosted by someone else, which is a really basic definition, but it kind of gets at the point. One of the things that I have heard from folks when I give this definition is that they don't realize a lot of cloud stuff is exactly the same kind of thing that you have in your building. It's just that it's elsewhere. There is, however, another definition that's a little techier, and it is software and resources that require specific elements to be considered cloud-based. It requires specific software and architecture that allows the data to be scalable, so one day you may only have five visitors, the next you have, you know, 3,005 and your cloud architecture can handle that. It can span servers, so if you want to add more resources, you can just plug in a new server and it will automatically come up. It has to be multi-platform, which means because it's on the network, any kind of device should be able to access the service for it to be a cloud service. So whether you're accessing it from your desktop computer or from your iPhone or from your connected refrigerator, whatever kind of device you have, you should be able to access your cloud services through that. One of the things that a lot of cloud services have, and not all of them do, but is on-demand self-service, that means for Gmail, you can go and create your own account. You don't ever have to talk to anybody, you don't have to make a call, and you don't have to wait for someone to approve you or do something in the background. It's on-demand self-service. I'm not sure that's a necessary definition of the cloud, but it's becoming a really common element of cloud-based stuff. And then finally, measured service. In the past, when I would rent or lease a space in a server farm, I would pay for the machine, the number of gigabytes of transfer, the amount of storage space. All of that was included in what I paid. Cloud services generally don't charge for hardware-based stuff. They will charge for the amount that you use. So they measure your service, whether that's bandwidth or storage or computer cycles, processing cycles, however that happens to be measured. You're being charged for what you use, not the hardware resources involved in that usage. And that's kind of why cloud computing tends to be so much more cost-effective than buying a server and sticking it somewhere, because most servers, and I forget exactly where I read this statistic, the most servers are only used to about 10% of their capabilities.  And so most of the time you're paying for server resources that are not being used. With cloud services, as you move stuff into the cloud, you're only paying for what you use. So that can really save some money when you are looking at server resources and that kind of thing. With all that definition being said, I'm not a purist in any way, shape, or form. I consider things to be cloud services that are not 100% conforming to this definition. But at least they hit the high points. And so some of the stuff that I talk about may not have on-demand self-service, or it may not be something that specifically can move from one server to another very easily, but it hits the high points. Robin, I think that this is such a new-ish area that I think that's probably why the concept of what it is is changing and still being discussed, too, of what could or couldn't be considered cloud, and it's not really a set-and-stone type thing. Right, exactly. And the elements of the definition that I've come up with are basically from the NISO and ISO. I have no idea what it stands for. I can't remember right off the top of my head, but it comes from that definition. But that changes on a fairly regular basis as technology changes. Okay, so what kinds of things are cloud-like? Some of you may have run across some of these initialisms or acronyms before. And these are the most popular of the cloud services. The SAAS is Software as a Service, and that's going to encompass things like your Gmail and your Google Docs. It will encompass pretty much most of what I talk about today actually is going to be a Software as a Service. It's any software that normally in the past you would have had on your computer.  So you're actually accessing the cloud-based version of email. And so that is a pretty wide range of services, and I'll talk about a lot of them this morning. The next most popular version is Infrastructure as a Service. Most of you have probably heard of Amazon Web Services. This was the first really big cloud infrastructure where you can actually rent server resources that are bare. You're not necessarily buying an operating system or a particular piece of software. You're actually buying the computing resources to run an operating system or a piece of software or something like that. And so that's what Infrastructure as a Service is. And a lot of libraries have gone from having, you know, seven or eight servers in their basement running various server applications to offloading that onto something like AWS. Microsoft has an option now called Azure. Is there cloud service? And then of course Google has cloud resources as well. And they all offer the infrastructure for your applications as a service. And that's what that AAS is. And you'll occasionally hear PAAS platform as a service. And this is kind of a combination of the first two where you're buying both the infrastructure and a particular set of software pieces that are specifically tuned and put together for developers. We don't see this as often in libraries. Maybe really big libraries that have developers on staff, but it is something that you'll occasionally see mentioned. So I thought I would bring it up. Let's see. Yeah, there we go. So that's the definition portion of our webinar today. Now we're going to talk about taking that definition and making it useful for libraries. And some of the things I'm going to talk about are cloud ILSs. And ILSs, there are very few really cloud-based services that match all of those definitions I gave you, but they are becoming more and more externally managed and hosted ILSs that are pretty close to cloud-based. So we'll talk about some of those. Web hosting is kind of a traditional cloud-based service, but that's something that is also available for libraries to use. Backups, those are moving to the cloud. Computer management, and by this I mean both managing a computer for maintenance and doing kind of computer desktop stuff, moving that to the cloud, but also managing computers in a lab situation like in a computer center. I'll talk about a little bit of both of those in that slide. Email and document creation storage. I'm going to mention Google a lot, I have a feeling. But that is kind of, that's your office and email and the cloud. And that is moving ever more into the cloud. Even Microsoft is starting to push people into using more cloud-based word and Excel as opposed to the downloadable stuff. And for libraries, sometimes that can be, again, that can be a really handy thing to do because it offloads a lot of the updating and that kind of thing off there. So we'll talk about that when we get to that slide. Social media, your social media is generally in the cloud. Social media really does fit the definition of cloud-based to a T. So if your social media is in the cloud, the way you manage it should be in the cloud as well, right? So we'll talk about that a little bit there. And then finally, we'll talk about some of the graphical editors that are in the cloud, kind of as we're talking about different software that is up there as well, but focusing on graphical editors because we're all familiar with the 800-pound, at least $800 gorilla in the graphical world Photoshop. There are options if you can't afford Photoshop. There are options to that. So graphical editors and all kinds of other types of software project management stuff, those are all moving to the cloud as well. This is my choice of image for leading into the ILS on the cloud. This is about as far from cloud-based as I could find on Flickr. So with that in mind, what the past has been, we'll look at the future. WorldCat web management was one of the first commercial cloud services ILSs to the market. It was perhaps not the absolute first, but it was the first biggest one. It was from OCLC, and so it was put up as a completely cloud-based way to manage your library through WorldCat and OCLC services. Jason Griffey led the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, in using it before he left to become a world-hopping library consultant. He was the IT manager there at the University of Tennessee, and he really led that project and was a definite innovator in getting that going for the University of Tennessee, and he talks an awful lot about it, the process in his pattern recognition blog, a quick Google search of pattern recognition, and Griffey will bring that up pretty quickly. He talks a lot about what his thinking was, what the process was, what the benefits were, and I think some of the issues that he ran into as well. So if you're interested in going in that direction for your library, that's a really good firsthand account of how they managed it. Slightly less cloudy, but definitely still hitting most of the definitions, is COHA, which is an open source, not commercial, but an open source ILS that a company called Bywater from New Zealand is, well actually I think the company, I'm not sure the company isn't actually in New Zealand, most of the folks are here in the US, but it originated there, I believe, correct? It originated there, yeah, I think so. And I know the, yeah, a lot of the first people who worked there were from New Zealand, COHA has been, or New Zealand's been very big with COHA development. They are offering a cloud-based access to COHA. So here at Nichols, since 2008, we have been customers, and we don't pay for COHA, COHA is free. We pay, however, Bywater to host, manage, and kind of support our use of the COHA software. So while we use COHA here in Kansas, it's actually stored on a server in Rackspace, which is a web hosting and cloud service offering company in Texas. And I'm pretty sure that's where our server is, but I'm not 100% sure, it could have moved somewhere. That's kind of the joy of this cloud stuff, is I don't have to know all those details. All I know is that Bywater knows where it is, and they're managing it. And I don't have to worry about all of the headaches that come with servers, up to and including security issues, that's all handled by Bywater and Rackspace together. And Evergreen in Missouri is similar. I think they actually host the Evergreen service in Missouri, but it's not hosted in the individual libraries. They all connect to a central location in Missouri. So for the libraries, Evergreen is also a cloud-based service. Both of those are sort of cloud-based in that they are sort of self-serve, but not really. If you wanted to create a Ko-Ha web catalog, you can't just go to an online form and sign up and never talk to anybody and get it. So it's not 100% self-serve, but it is multi-platform. It'll work on my phone. It'll work on my tablet. It'll work on my desktop. It's scalable. If we need more services, we can get them very easily. They just kind of are very easy to add. Distributed, I think at one point, I have no idea right at the moment if that's still true, but at one point we had our catalog split amongst a couple of different servers. And the general point there is that we don't have to know. It can be distributed or not. That's not something I need to be aware of. And then we actually pay by the service model as opposed to buying a server and paying for server access. Oh, I'm sorry. Okay, and there are more announced every day. We'll hear in a couple of slides. I'll talk about yet another one. But moving on to the cloud is kind of the way things are going. So even if you have a server right now in your library that is managing your ILS, for next ILS, you will definitely have options. I'm pretty sure that triple I is looking at cloud-based options for service. So some of the bigger commercial ones are heading that direction. So you could probably stay with your traditional in-building ILS for a while, but I think the trend is heading towards being cloud-based more and more. And the web hosting, like I mentioned earlier, is kind of a traditional. It's been on the cloud for probably the longest of anything we've been talking about. But there are definite library-related and library-specific cloud hosts that I wanted to mention. The first one is LIS host. And Blake Carver was just on Encompass a couple of weeks ago. If you're a regular listener, you might have heard him. He was talking about security in libraries. And he also, along with being a library security expert and having a day job at Lyrasys, he also runs library information. Actually, I'm not sure. I'm not 100% sure what LIS host stands for now that I think about it. But it is a library-specific web hosting service that he provides. He has a lot of WordPress sites, and he really does tend to stick with just libraries. So if you want someone who understands libraries, understands the needs of security and patron confidentiality and all of that, LIS host is an awesome choice. And really, Blake didn't pay me to say that. But I do think he's got an excellent service going on there. But another one, just in case you want options, the library world also offers library-specific hosting. And they have a Cloud ILS. It's not as big. It's not as well-known as WorldCat. But it is a Cloud ILS that you can get with your website. I've not heard a whole lot about library world. I don't know that I'm very familiar with their service. But it's an option. And it's something that you can definitely look at. And then there are smaller options like in Kansas here, we have the Kansas Libraries on the web service, Cloud. And we offer 212, I think is at last count, libraries in Kansas, a WordPress site. And when I started at Neckles, this was run off of a blade server, which is one of those long, thin servers in the server closet at the building here in Neckles. And I moved it to AWS because basically the blade server died and we didn't have anywhere else to go with it. I moved it to AWS. And now it's in the process of being moved to Rackspace, actually, where we will actually have a fully cloud architecture, at which point we will no longer have to create websites for folks. They can create their own accounts, do their own thing. We can do this because it is free to libraries. The Kansas system supports it. So it's not, you know, libraries don't have to pay anything for this. It is paid for by their systems. And that is kind of where we're going in libraries with web hosting. Yes, and here in Nebraska, we have almost a very similar thing here, almost exactly what you're doing on Nebraska libraries on the web. That we run here out of the library commission, same thing. We run WordPress sites for libraries. Not sure exactly how many libraries we have in the group now. Looks like it's got to be about almost 100. I don't know the exact number, but yeah, we host them here through the library commission, same thing, free to libraries. If they need a website, we will do it for them. And it's been a very popular program, definitely, yeah. Oh, sure. Well, you know, free website and technical support and all that help. It's also, I mean, I'm sure if Kansas and Nebraska are doing it, while we are generally ahead of the curve in many things here in Kansas, and I know you are as well in Nebraska, if we're doing it, then other states are probably doing it. I'm just not aware of it. Because for the most part, that's not where I have lived. So if you're in a state other than Nebraska or Kansas, that's something you can check with your state library or commission or systems and see if that's something that they can offer for you guys, too. Backups. One of the things that I appreciate so much as a 90 person is cloud backups because I distinctly remember the days of having to change the tapes in a backup system and put some tapes in a box to take to a location 20 miles down the road so that we had backups that were physically secure. Today, and actually right before I left Murrell, I had switched us.  So I had switched us to using online backups. And we use online backups here at Neckles as well. And there are several options. Dropbox gives you two gigabytes of space per account for a personal single computer kind of thing. And that's awesome for computer level backups. If you just have a few computers that you want to backup, set up each person with a Dropbox or a Box.Debt, they do generally the same thing. I'm more familiar with Dropbox myself, but I'm pretty sure that Box.Debt, sorry, I'm still stuffy. Box.Debt does about the same thing there with the files system. So you set up a Dropbox account and you point it to, say, your My Documents folder. And every time you save something in your My Documents folder, it is automatically and immediately uploaded to the Dropbox cloud server. If you are like me and work at home quite a bit, you could then install Dropbox on your home computer. And everything that you've worked on at work is, by the time you get home, updated and at the final version on your home computer. This is useful in many different ways beyond just making sure that everything is backed up. But backups are a definite plus for that. If you want to do a more organization level backup, Crash Plan or Mosey Pro are options. Again, I've used Crash Plan. I've not used Mosey Pro, but they're very similar. With Crash Plan, you can pay either by computer or by amount of space used. And what we did at Merle was we had all of our individual computers backing up to a server, and then we backed up that server to Crash Plan, which meant we were really only paying for one computer and it was under $10 a month for unlimited storage. So if you consider how much you spend on tapes and driving things back and forth, or CDs, however you guys do your backups without the cloud, then you can see that this would be probably a much cheaper option. And then for a techie level backup, you've got the AWS, like I said when we were talking about the infrastructure as a service, you can buy just space to put stuff. And that's more of a techie option because it does require using a secondary syncing software to sync your information on your computer to the AWS stuff. For those of you who are kind of interested in that sort of thing, BitTorrent has a sync client that does a really nice job of that. But a lot of the smaller backup, not necessarily the bigger ones here, but a lot of the smaller backup places using AWS or Google or Microsoft Azure kind of layer behind their backups to store your stuff. So this is just kind of cutting out the middleman on AWS. It might be a little cheaper if you buy directly from the source. The main thing that I wanted to get across here on the backups is that if you have a backup plan that requires relying on a human being to remember something, it's going to fail. And likely it's going to fail exactly when you need it the most. People forget to save things to their USB drives or their tape drives or they forget to change shape drives. They forget to move things and then a fire happens and all of a sudden the server went up in flames with the tapes that were backing up. And you've got a huge failure on your hands. So I definitely want to encourage you, if you're not already, to look into this kind of thing because these are automated. Like I said with Dropbox, the minute you hit save on a file, it immediately syncs up to your Dropbox account on the cloud and you have immediate backups, no waiting. Crash plan, Mosey Pro generally do their thing overnight. So you may lose a half a day's work if something happens but you'll never lose more than that because it's automatic. That being said, even automated things like these cloud things need to be tested occasionally because we're still humans setting them up and mistakes happen. So do keep that in mind as well. But I just wanted to stress that as much the more human activity you have involved in your backup plan, the more points of failure you have and the more likely it is that when you most need your backups, they won't be there. Okay, well that being said, we'll go on to computer management and for just general computer management, file storage, a lot of people have file servers in their networks and their organizations that do file storage, and you can outsource that to something like Dropbox or Box.net. I don't have it on the slide here, I missed it completely. But there's also a kind of cloud-based updater called Ninite, and that's N-I-N-I-T-E, and it does updates of software. So everything from your browser to your office equipment or office software to plug-ins, flash, shockwave, that kind of thing. All of that can be managed through a piece of software that lives on your computer. That part's not on the cloud, but it actually uses the cloud to have clean versions of downloads and upgrades that you might need. And I mentioned the clean because I just read an article yesterday on how there are almost no download sites anymore that don't bundle malware or extra software of some sort into the downloads. It used to be that there were a couple of clean ones, SourceForge was clean. Now they're saying that SourceForge has even started doing it. So Ninite is one of the few places where you know you can go and get clean versions, and you don't even have to do it. You set Ninite up to run monthly, and it automatically updates all of your software that you've got set up, and it does it over the network from the cloud without any hands-on stuff from you. So that is definitely something to consider as well. Switching gears to public computer center management, a lot of libraries use some kind of time management solution. There are commercial versions out there, SAM, EnvisionWare, I keep wanting to say every note, but EnvisionWare, CASI. There are also some that are cloud-based in that you don't have the server running the time management software in your library itself, but rather it's hosted elsewhere. One of the first of the time management solutions that are cloud-based is Userful. Another one that is available sort of right now is Libkey. It's still being developed. It is not 100% out there for final use, but it is coming along, and it's probably usable now. We're actually going to start demoing it here at Neckles very soon. But it is hosted, it's kind of like our Kohak. It's hosted by someone else, in this case also Biowater, and they manage and maintain it, and then individual computers in individual libraries connect to our Libkey instance in the cloud, and that manages their time based on their library's rules and regulations. That is generally how Userful, and there are probably others that are becoming cloud-based as well. For Lab Management, this is really a school product, but it works really well in public computer centers if you want to be able to remotely hit a computer either to send a message or turn it off, or in other activities that you want to do from the desk, as opposed to having to go out into the lab and manage these computers. The only option that I've found that is cloud-based is Land School.  This slide is a little repetitive, I'm well aware. Email and Document Management is a pretty mature segment of cloud services, as opposed to some of the others we've been talking about where there are beta versions and all this. Email and Document Management is mature. It is something that has been in use for many years, and there are lots of options, and they all do about the same thing, because as one gets a feature the other two jump on, and so they're all sort of in the same general boat. Your choice is on kind of price point, although they're very similar in prices.  They all have a little bit of a different dashboard, a little bit different feel to them. Google Docs is one that is frequently used in libraries and schools and workplaces, and it does email documents, calendars just like SoHo Office, and Microsoft 360, which is where Microsoft is trying to push more people to using their online cloud versions of their software, as opposed to downloading and having to maintain and manage and upgrade and update and do all that with their Word and Excel and that kind of software. Most of us are familiar with cloud-based email. Even if you're not using it at work, you'll probably have a Google or Yahoo or a Hotmail account. Those are all cloud emails, and then document management, a lot of us are familiar with Google Docs or Office 360, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, so those are all your options for email and document management. Social media management. I'm curious to know how many of you, and I don't know if there's a way to raise your hand or whatever, but how many of you actually do manage your social media in any formal way? Yeah, there is a hand-raising icon that people can click on on your GoToWebinar interface. If you do use any of these or something else, maybe.  Click the little hand-raising icon on your interface, and we can see if we've got people doing it. But two so far. I don't actually use anything. Well, you mentioned Hootsuite there, which you could monitor multiple. I know you could use that because I used to use that to monitor multiple Twitter accounts. There are a couple of different ways to manage social media. You can passively just kind of get alerts that let you know when your library is being mentioned. The alert that I have here on the image that's kind of off to the side here, let me... Oh, well, that's not what I intended to do. This alert that's over on the side. Okay. That is actually a Google alert that I have set up to pull any news item that has the word library or libraries in it. There we go. That's what I wanted. You'll notice this is the query term, library or libraries. Eight new results for library or libraries is what I do the search for. And so I can get an alert every day that gives me kind of a way to just quickly scan through and see what's going on in libraries that day. A social mention does much the same thing. It's just slightly... It's a little bit broader as it doesn't focus specifically on Google News. And that kind of thing is just kind of a passive getting information kind of alert. See what people are talking about if your library is in the news or with social mention in Twitter or Facebook or that kind of thing. Management, which you mentioned, Hootsuite is one of the options. That's more both getting those alerts and getting the information into you and allowing you to schedule posts. And one of the things I really liked about Hootsuite was you can test when the best time to post out. So you can see if I post on Twitter at 9 a.m. on Monday and I post on Twitter at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, which one gets the most retweets, mentions, that kind of thing. And so you can kind of start fine tuning when you post.  I use Tweetdeck for that. We have multiple... I have my own Twitter account and then multiple ones that we run for the library commission. And Tweetdeck is Twitter's own, well, it used to be separate, but I believe they just bought it. Yeah, it's their version of the same thing where I have multiple accounts and I can have things that I can track, certain hashtags and whatnot all for different topics. And Tweetdeck is now available as a cloud. When I first started using Tweetdeck, it was a downloadable application. Yes. But it is now available on the cloud. So you can access it through your web browser. That's all I do now is I don't even do the downloaded one anymore. It's just easier. It's one of my tabs on my Firefox.  But I do fire it up. And then I start... I do searches for my Twitter handle, searches for the conference, hashtag, searches for maybe the topic of the conference. So I can catch things that people are talking about that who aren't using the hashtag. Right. And then maybe a couple of friends so I can see what they're doing and make sure and join them when they go out, that kind of thing. Of course. But it's very handy for that. And it's also handy for doing that same kind of search, having several columns, and keeping an eye on your library's Twitter handle and your library's event hashtags if you have them. And any mention of your library. And that's where what to track comes in handy. And you'll have to possibly refresh my memory on this, Krista. Can you do searching by zip codes on Tweetdeck? I don't know. I've never tried. I've just done like certain words, phrases, and hashtags. And I've got columns for different things that way. Yeah. I haven't tried it. I don't remember if that's possible or not. I know on some of these like Hootsuite and I know Sprout Social, you can limit your search to just Twitter users who are in a particular zip code. So that is kind of a handy thing for local libraries, of course. And hashtags we talked about that. People have entered have that put that information in their profile or something. Yeah. Yeah, it does. This is a quickie search. I don't see it really working, but yeah. No. Right, either. I don't know. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's, and I know when I've used it in the past, it is, it was a feature and I'm thinking it was on Hootsuite or Sprout Social, one of the two, that let me kind of filter out. I only wanted people who were talking about libraries in my general area.  Like Krista said, that only catches people who put their location in their Twitter handle. You're going to have to experiment with what works best to catch the most. Yeah, exactly. And that brings up the final thing to track misspellings. Don't just search for the properly spelled name. If there are common misspellings, use those as well because people do tend to misspell things on occasion. And finally, the last of the software that I'll mention, I talked a little bit about the 800 pound gorilla Photoshop. A lot of us cannot afford to have a computer lab full of computers that have Photoshop on them. So one of the things that you can offer that or use for the library itself is online graphical editors and storage spaces. For editors and creators, and these are editors that are full-fledged, you could actually create new images or edit images that are already existing. Pixlr and Splashup are two options that are very powerful. The part of the 80-20 rule that many of you would probably be familiar with is that 80% of people only use 20% of the features of any particular software. And Pixlr and Splashup encompass at least 20% of the features of Photoshop, if not more. So for the vast majority of what you need to do, these are going to be helpful. If you like the filtering options that Photoshop has, Photoflexer and LudaPik specialize in taking an existing image and adding filters or editing. I know Photoflexer has really powerful red eye removal options, and so that's an option there. And then of course for storage, and not just storage, but sharing of pictures. Libraries are big on sharing, and so not only for storage, but for sharing. Pekasa, which is a Google site now I believe, part of Google Plus. And Flickr is a well-known photo sharing site that has lots of options to let libraries offer images both from their events that they have and from their collection if you've got older stuff as well. I do believe the Library of Conquerors has a really nice collection of images on Flickr. It's a good place to go. Okay, so to finish up, we've talked about a bunch of different kinds of services, software as a service generally in the cloud. And when you're looking at these kind of services, some of the things you need to take into account first and foremost is security. I've heard a bunch of people talk about how they just don't feel comfortable putting stuff on the cloud because they hear so many break-ins and issues. But my feeling is those big services, they have a whole bunch of people who do nothing but security. That's their job. And at most libraries, we have nobody whose entire job is securing our services. And you can get by. Security by obscurity works for a little while, but not forever. There are too many bad guys out there scanning every single node on the network looking for something soft that they can hit and try to get in. When I worked at Merle in Missouri, we had a server that, as I said before, it had lots of storage room that was not being used, and we had very good bandwidth. And so they thought, oh, hey, this is a great place to put our cracked software and movies. And we had no idea they were there until the FBI showed up and took our server. So we were obscure. We had firewalls and all kinds of stuff in place, but nobody was charged with maintaining the security of our service. If we had file server out on the web, there's somebody watching. Somebody knows when something's happening. So that is why I tend to lean towards, yes, there are issues, but the issues are better contained and more, and quite frankly less, they happen less than in the cloud than they do in our individual organizations. When you're evaluating cloud service, take a look at the training that is available. A lot of services offer excellent training. Take advantage of that. And then think about your bandwidth capabilities. If you're taking some fairly processor heavy computation like graphical imagery and taking that from your computer and moving it onto the cloud, you no longer need to have such a powerful computer in front of you, but you do have to have a pretty good pipe connecting your computer to the cloud so that you can move those big images and move those things around. So if you're evaluating services, make sure you have the bandwidth to support the service that you're looking for. As you're moving into cloud-based things, the comfort level of your staff is important. It's always a good idea to provide training on these new services so that they understand the benefits, they become comfortable with the new workflows, and that kind of thing. So that's the training is definitely a help.  We all have to figure what is best for our particular organization. Thinking about features of the software, like I said, especially with the graphics software, because they are network-based, they're not as full-featured as your Photoshop or even GIMP if you're looking at the open-source software. So you want to consider that you may have people who just cannot do their work on these more limited things, and you'll need to buy a non-cloud-based software for them. And then convenience. I tend to find cloud services convenient in the extreme because I don't have to update them. I don't have to upgrade them. I'm not worried about the security. All of that is handled by someone else. All I have to do is use the software. So that's a big thing for me. And then, of course, price. Like I mentioned earlier, cloud software is generally going to be cost-effective for your organization most of the time. Not always. There are times when it will not be so cost-effective. So those are kind of things you have to work out yourself. Now, it's 11 o'clock. So I have been babbling at you for an hour. I would like to take this moment to do some shameless self-promotion and mention that the book Making the Most of the Cloud that I wrote a year or so ago is now available at Amazon. Find library distributors. You may even be able to find it at the library near you where you can read it for free. That's fine.  So if I have wet your appetite for cloud services in your library, this is a good next step. And I don't just say that because I'm the author. No, I just say that because I'm the author. Well, your book was one of the main reasons I grabbed you to ask you to come on the show is because of knowing about the book that you had written. Yes. I came to you from that direction. Yes. There you go. So that's what I have to say about services making the most of the cloud. I hope you guys enjoyed it. Were there any big questions? Yeah. Well, thank you very much, Robin. No, that was great. That's exactly what I was looking forward to myself. Some of those, as I said, are services I've used. I've used Pixlr, like I said, in Hootsuite, Dropbox. I can't remember everything else. As I said, we do WordPress here. Actually, WordPress is what we use for the library commission zone. We hosted on our own actual physical servers here. So we actually make sure we have the physical piece of equipment. But then, as I said, just like the Kansas libraries on the web, we then offer it as to the libraries, a cloud service. Right. So it's kind of both. Does anybody have any questions? You can type them into your question section of your GoToWeb in our interface. Nothing came in while you were talking. Maybe just taking notes furiously or keeping track of things. But just let everyone know while we're going through this, too, all of the websites and tools and everything that Robin did mention, I am saving into our delicious account. I got halfway through, and then I got caught up in other things. But before I put up the recording, all of those will be in there. So you don't have to worry about trying to figure out what they were. We'll have links to them. And the slides that you have there, Robin, will you send them to me or would you give me a link? I will. And I can link to them anywhere, whichever works for you. I will. I would have sent them earlier, but I was still working on them at nine. Hey, that's perfect. So whenever, yeah. So you'll have reference to that as well to look at as well. So anyone does have any questions? Use your GoToWeb in our interface. Type them in. I did have one thing that came up that I was thinking about, which I know we've experienced ourselves things. These cloud services are great. Like I said, I use a lot of them myself. Flickr, anything G, Google stuff. What happens, though, if these services close down and disappear? What is that? How can you be prepared for that potential? Especially for cloud services you're not paying for. That is something you should consider. One of the definitions of cloud services that I don't, I'm not 100% sure I agree with because there's a lot of discussion. But one of the things is that it's movable. You can take your data out of that cloud and move it to a different service in a different cloud with no real issues. For a lot of services like with the Google services, you can download everything in your drive to your computer. There's actually a little piece of software that Google Drive offers that syncs your cloud versions of your documents to your computer so that you can work on them offline. It also serves as if Google goes belly up tomorrow and everything goes away. You've got copies of everything on your desktop. Email is harder. You can download email from Google in archive bundles. But I don't know if too many people who actually do that. Yeah, that seems a little... Again, if you're relying on a human being to remember to do things for backup, it's just going to fail. I don't do it. I don't know of anybody who does. But the main thing that's kind of part of evaluating, one of the questions I ask when I'm looking at a new cloud service is how do I get my stuff out? That's what I was going to say. That's one of the things you'd want to put into your evaluation of it is do you want to plan for that you might need at some point and what way do they have to do that? Yeah. Absolutely. And I know this makes more work, but having stuff in multiple places to begin with. Yeah. There's a concept called LOCKS, L-O-C-K-S-S, and it stands for lots of copies keeps stuff safer. And that's a big thing. My Dropbox, I have my Dropbox on a laptop, on a desktop. It's just, it's everywhere. So if Dropbox were to go out of business tomorrow, I'd still have my data. Your stuff wouldn't disappear. Yeah. My stuff would disappear. And that's kind of, like I said, that's just something that if that is important to you and for some things it might be, for some things it might not, then that's something that you need to look at when you're evaluating. Cool. Well, it doesn't look like any other questions came in while we were talking. I think you're really comprehensive, so that's awesome. So since nothing really, nobody had any desperate questions at the moment, I think we will officially wrap up. If anybody does have questions, as Robin saw you, she did have her email on there, her Gmail at the beginning, and that will be included in this thing when we get the slides later. So definitely reach out to her for any questions or help you might need with using any of your cloud services. Awesome. Yeah. So thank you very much, Robin.  Well, thank you for inviting me. Yeah. Thanks so much. I was glad to have you on the show. Like I said, this is an important topic, lots of stuff every now and then. You see things about this coming up, so it's definitely something people need to be aware of. It's new in different ways to do, and I know a lot of libraries, I think one of the first things maybe that they encounter is either the Gmail or working into getting an ILS. That's some new way of doing it, being able to save money and do that better. But knowing that there's so many other options of things that you could do that you maybe didn't think about is great. Yeah. Awesome. So yeah, thank you so much. Thank you everyone for attending. The show is being recorded, as it always is, and will be available on our website here on the Encompass Live website afterwards. All of our recordings go right here and the link right beneath Upcoming Sessions is our archived Encompass Live sessions. And today's will be on here as well. We have all of our recordings here from all of our shows going back to the very beginning, which was in January of 2009, when we started the show. So you will have, like this one, you get a view to the link to the recording on YouTube, presentation on our SlideShare account, and then links in our delicious account. As I said, over here is where I was collecting the links as we were going through. I'll have to grab some more. I didn't catch them all during the show. And I did find Robin's book is both available, of course, to purchase on Amazon, and I found the WorldCat link in OCLC. So you can borrow it from a library up there if your library doesn't already have it. So that will wrap it up for today's show. I hope you'll join us next week when our topic is a local topic for us, Nebraska Access Expansion. Nebraska Access is our database website. We have lots of databases that are purchased by the library commission for the use of libraries across the state, and lots of changes are coming through. New lineup, new things, EBSCO changing, and so next week we will have our Nebraska Access team, I'll call them. Debra, Alana, and Susan will be on with us to explain exactly what's happening, when things are happening, and what's going on with that. So definitely do sign up for that show, or any of our other future topics that we've got listed here on our website. Also, Encompass Live is on Facebook. So if you are a big Facebook user, definitely do go pop over there and like our page. Once it gets loaded up here, there we go. I post reminders of when new shows are coming up. Here I do a reminder this morning saying, don't forget login right now on the fly for the show. And when our recordings are available, I do post about those to let you know when the recording's up. Here's the one from last week. So if you are big on Facebook, definitely do head over there and like Encompass Live. Other than that, that will wrap us up for this morning. Thank you, Robin. Thank you, everyone, for attending, and we will see you next week on Encompass Live. Bye-bye. Awesome. Thank you. Bye-bye.