You need a financial advisor with the freedom to focus on your specific needs. Whatever your goals, Reeve Potter can create a game plan tailored to you. Call Reeve at 432-0777 at Pikeville, Kentucky to learn more. This Halloween, not only will Pikeville be hosting their annual trick-or-treat, there will be three mystery houses giving away additional prizes to three lucky winners. So we're doing the Mountain Top Media Trick-or-Treat house, Mystery House. This year we're doing it all in the city of Pikeville, all within the city limits. We have three separate locations that are going to have a special prize for a special person. So basically the way this works is you go up to the house, you ask your standard trick-or-treat, but you also need to ask, is this the, and then we'll give you more information about which clients have a special house. The first kid to ask if it is the YMCA Mystery House will receive a Nintendo Switch Lite. The first kid to ask if it is the Walters Mazda Mitsubishi Mystery House will win a scooter. And the first kid to ask if it is the Paul Howard Jr. for County Attorney Mystery House will win a hoverboard. It's super simple to participate. All you have to do is ask if that is the specific mystery house. Just get it in your mind to ask every house that, well, you're going to win something. Don't forget that it's all within the city limits of Pikeville. So no one outside in the outer parts of the county is going to be participating all in the city of Pikeville here today. The Mystery House giveaway will be held at the same time as Pikeville Trick-or-Treat from 6 to 8 p.m. October 31. For Mountaintop News, I'm Brianna Robinson.


For a mission into space, Gemini 5 was actually kind of boring. It was a long duration test of the fuel cells astronauts would need to go to the moon, but the crew took some incredible pictures, and that's what we're looking at today on Vintage Space. Gemini 5 was first and foremost a long duration test, but after fuel cell and thruster issues, Gordon Cooper and Pete Conrad were forced to basically drift along in orbit for the bulk of their flight. But during that flight, they had some pretty interesting photography objectives to kill the time. The Synoptic Terrain experiment had the astronauts take high quality images of some choice spots on the planet, sites that were poorly understood given the state of the art of aerial and orbital photography at the time, and also sites that might be analogous to features on other planets. Like the rift valleys extending from Turkey through Syria, Jordan, the Red Sea, and eastern Africa going as far south as Mozambique. This naturally occurring feature on the earth, NASA thought was going to be analogous to the rails on the moon, Reels that Apollo astronauts would be exploring before too long. The Synoptic Weather Photography experiment focused on clouds rather than on surface features. The purpose here was to gather images that would supplement satellite photography and generally increase our understanding of global weather pattern. It was something that would be just as useful in helping understand weather patterns on earth as well as weather patterns on other planets. There was also a Zediacal Light Photography experiment on Gemini 5, one NASA hoped would solve a mystery. The Zediacal Light is a haze that is seen at twilight and before sunrise on the plane of the ecliptic. By photographing it, NASA hoped to figure out what exactly its source was. Gemini 5 accomplished its photographic goals and took some unbelievably striking images in the process. Using an unmodified Hasselblad 550C medium format camera with film magazines that could be swapped out depending on the light situation, the images were taken mostly straight down from above the target site. And perhaps because the global pollution level was lower, the colors are amazingly vivid. I've created a gallery of some of my favorite Gemini 5 mission images over on my blog Vintage Space at Popular Science. So check that out, the link is below. And let me know in the comments what your favorite Gemini 5 mission is or from any of the Gemini missions and share a link so I can see it. For Vintage Space content every day of the week, follow me on Twitter as AST Vintage Space. And with new episodes coming every Tuesday and Friday, don't forget to subscribe right here so you never miss an episode.


The whole point of an interview is to be tough from the beginning, and he didn't do that. And there's a million things about his own country that he could have asked about him. You're talking to the president of Russia, and I use that word in air quotes. He's not the president of Russia. He is the dictator. He is an actual dictator. People who soft pedal this are wrong. There's no independent judiciary. You cannot say what you want. The number of people, the number of artists who have spoken up against the war in Ukraine, who have had to exile themselves or have been exiled to the Gulag are too many to count. I mean, an American was arrested yesterday in Moscow, a ballerina who is of Russian background and is based in LA because she gave, and this is according to the Russians. This is not our interpretation of this, $51 to a charity in New York that supports Ukraine and Ukrainian refugees, I believe is actually their remit, but $51. And she is facing life in prison in Moscow. This is not a country that is, you know, Victor Orban's country. There's opposition.  That is not the case in Russia. So Tucker Carlson has the opportunity that most of us don't have. And I think he squandered that opportunity, but I will agree with his act that the question was good. If he started with that, I'd say, oh, God, this is actually going to be a good interview, but he ended with that after allowing Putin to filibuster in a absurd version of Russian history for about 30 minutes. Yeah. You know, there was another clip that I want to play that's of Tucker Carlson. You know, he's he's pressed about these very questions that you raised, Michael, about why didn't you bring up any of the human rights abuses, any of the repression? It was at the World Government Summit where Tucker was kind of reflecting on the Putin interview, and he gives a defense of his interview style. And I'm curious what you think of this defense. So Ian, could you roll that clip? You should challenge some ideas. For instance, you didn't talk about freedom of speech in Russia. You did not talk about Navalny, about assassinations, about about the restrictions on opposition in the coming elections. I didn't talk about the things that every other American media outlet talks about. Why? Yes, this is my question. Because those are covered and because I have spent my life talking to people who run countries in various countries and have concluded the following, that every leader kills people, including my leader, every leader kills people. Some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people. Sorry. That's why I would want to be a leader. That press restriction is universal in the United States. I know because I've lived it. I've asked my former, I've had a lot of jobs and I've done this for 34 years and I know how it works. And there's more censorship in Russia than there is in the United States, but there's a great deal in the United States. And so at a certain point, it's like people can decide whether they think, what countries they think are better, what systems they think are better. I just want to know what he thinks. That was the whole point. Yes. What's your reaction to that? I mean, where does one begin?   But I mean, you start with this idea where when he was, you know, got this interview, he did a little piece to camera on the top of the hotel in Moscow. I think that's the Trump hotel, too, by the way, where the accusations in the steel dossier supposedly took place.  No one is actually interviewing him. And of course, all the people who have wanted to interview him have said, you know, we put in requests and we're getting nowhere. So for him to say that everyone asked that question, but start the entire process of the interview teasing the interview by saying nobody talks to him except for me.  Because you're the one who gets that opportunity. Nobody has, particularly since the invasion of Ukraine, and you don't ask anything. But the equivalency, I mean, all leaders kill people. Okay, well, we can say that that is broadly true, right? But that's saying that, you know, that there's no difference between, you know, homicide and manslaughter. And if you're, you could say Joe Biden kills people because America, you know, eliminated some Houthis last week. But that's not the same thing as poisoning somebody who is a meek little journalist or a rather strong and robust opposition leader. That's not the same thing. To say that all leaders kill people, the presumption is that all types of death that you could ultimately be blamed for are the same. They are not.  Excuse my language, but it's unbelievable that I did a thing when Navalny was murdered. I went to every major Russian newspaper, major, you know, mainstream Russian newspaper, all of which are controlled by the Kremlin. There wasn't a mention in any of them for two days.  Go watch Steve Rosenberg interview Lukashenko in Minsk, in Belarus, and it's amazing that he was not assassinated right after the interview, but Steve Rosenberg just doesn't care. He knows what his job is, and he's been allowed to stay as the kind of token opposition in Russia, but he actually went over the newspapers too and said, you know, there was maybe one or two paragraphs, but of course, people don't get their news from just state newspaper, older people do obviously in Russia, but there was no mention anywhere, none. I mean, that's forbidden by the government. Tell me an example of that in the United States, and I will tell you why you're wrong. The thing that has been really bothering me about this is there's an entire contingent of sort of anti-war libertarians who are taking this Tucker soundbite and really running with it.  Like the scale at which this is happening also matters a lot to me, right? Like for example, a case that, you know, tons of people have been in my mentions all day today and then a whole bunch last week about how, oh, you know, Tucker's so wrong about press freedom in the US and all these things. Well, what about the Assange case?  So like this is something that's like, we're reporting on, we're interviewing the relevant people. We would love to secure an interview with Julian Assange himself. He's in prison in Belmarsh and so currently Stella is who is available to us. I am sympathetic to his cause. I do not think he should be in prison for publishing this material. Absolutely, but to some degree, like the thing that was bothering me so much about this, other than the fact that we literally have engaged with Julian's case and, you know, been reporting on it is the fact that the scale at which this type of thing happens in, you know, each country when we're making comparisons also matters a ton, right? The Assange case is completely, you know, unacceptable that, you know, by the way, the Trump Department of Justice was the one that's trying to extradite him, right? But, you know, it's completely unacceptable that that type of, you know, persecution and encroachment on press freedom is happening in the U.S. Also that case sticks out to some degree because it's a rarity compared to what happens under Putin's regime. And to me, these degrees matter even if I oppose it always and everywhere. Yeah, I mean, I think it's worth looking at just the data on this, like to figure out how bad is Russia? Is it just kind of, you know, is America like Russia light? I don't think so because like every single pick your freedom index and it's gonna rank Russia at the bottom. This is the 2023 index of economic freedom which is done by the Wall Street Journal and Heritage Foundation. Gives Russia an overall score of 53.8, 53.8 and ranks it at 125. Nigeria is right above it. I love that. Nigeria is right above it. Niger's right below it. You know, very low property rights, judicial effectiveness, business freedom. The only thing that seems to be good at all is, well, it looks like trade freedom went up a little bit. I don't know if that's because of, you know, opening up more trade with China or something like that. Labor freedom also went up because they're no longer like relying on Soviet slave labor. So props to Russia. They're doing great these days. They're very proud. Here's reporters without borders. The 2023 index puts them at 164 out of 180. Here's just a couple of highlights. All privately owned independent TV channels are banned from broadcasting except for cable entertainment channels. That means no BBC, no Euro news, no France 24. There's many laws relating to freedom of expression that have been adopted in recent years including defamation and fake news laws were amended in order to incorporate them into the penal code at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Distributing false information about the Russian armed forces or any other Russian state body is now punishable by up to 15 years in prison.  But we're not in a situation where you're getting 15 years for criticizing the federal government. So it's, you know, it's worth just dwelling on the data. And there's one more here. This is the democracy index, which is put together by the Economist Intelligence Association or Institute Unit, thank you. And it's just showing kind of the, all the following indices of democracy. We linked to all our sources. So if you wanna dig into how they arrive at all these, you definitely should. But my point in that is like you can, you don't have to cherry pick anything to, you know, find pretty broad consensus across the globe that in terms of freedom, Russia is not, you know, the US is not biting at Russia's heels or anything. Yeah, the Soviet Union used to do something funny in occupied countries to the same. So for instance, East Germany, they had a Christian Democratic Party. They had an SPD, the Social Democratic Party.  So in the parliament, you'd give one seat in the Fox comma to like the SPD or the CDU or something. And it was just a complete joke. The same thing was true in Russia until recently with medium. So you had three places, Rain TV, which is an interesting documentary, but it's not a great documentary but gives you a lot of background on how that came into being Echo Moscow, the radio station, which is off the air now too. And the guy who started and ran it is like controlled opposition at this point, a very old white-haired journalist who's just, you know, says what the Kremlin wants him to say at this point. And Nivella Gazeta, the newspaper, which is where Anna Politzkaiva was a reporter and she was shot in the head for reporting on war crimes in Chechnya and keeping in mind, I always find it incredible that the so-called anti-war people who don't appear to be opposed to war always, particularly when it comes to Ukraine, the invasion of Ukraine, you know, that Putin solidified his power in 2000 with the Second Chechen War. And what created the Second Chechen War was a series of apartment bombings in Moscow and the outskirts of Moscow killed 250 odd people. There was one that was about to blow up and it didn't happen, but it was a training exercise. That's what the people were seeing. If you go, if you look at that case, there's a number of people, the economist who's reported on this, it's a conspiracy theory that seems to be true. And a number of very, very serious people have reported this, Alexander Litvinenko reported on this, that it was blown up, those apartment buildings were blown up by the FSB with the purpose of launching the Second Chechen War and then solidifying Putin's power. Litvinenko reported that and then he was poisoned in England, in a foreign country by members of the FSB who are now actually in the Duma. Alexander Lugavoy, who is the man who actually poisoned him is in parliament, in Russian parliament in the Duma as a member of the United Russia Party, as a member of Putin's party. That was his reward for killing somebody on foreign soil who dared to write about the apartment bombings. I mean, there are a lot of people that love conspiracy theories, Tucker loves conspiracy theories.  He's full. The guy who allegedly blew Obama back in 2009 or he's playing.  I didn't believe it, but it was pretty fun. But he doesn't believe this. I mean, why not this conspiracy, which is one that is more consequential than any other that I can think of, I'm particularly for the peace in the Middle East and in the region of Russia, all of this that solidified Putin's power and allowed him to obtain more and more power. If you've seen the early 2000s, there was a sense when George Bush said, I looked into his soul. And then of course, John McCain very famously said, I looked into his soul and I saw KGB, which was more accurate than what George W. Bush said. But there was a point at which, okay, this is the way Russians rule. This is way Russia always has been. It's never been a democratic country. It had a very, very brief experiment with democracy in the 90s and it was sort of disastrous and as it went through the 90s, Boris Yeltsin became more authoritarian and then handed the keys to Vladimir Putin, who by the way, the interesting thing gives him the keys to the two and he's old and drunk and infirm at this point and calls him on the night of his election victory. He's the self-appointed, he's going to take over for Yeltsin. And he never called him back. This is an incredible thing, this video of this. They were filming a documentary in the rage that existed in Boris Yeltsin at the time. He was like, he didn't call me back. I mean, are you kidding me? He's like, I'm waiting for his call. I was like, no, no, this was, once he took the reins of power, there was no giving up on the reins of power. He was not loosening that grip at all. And in doing that, of course, you have to shut down all independent media.  I mean, the number of people that have been poisoned, I mean, Navalny was poisoned. Viktor Yushenko was poisoned because he was someone that was drifting towards the West and Ukraine. Vladimir Karamurza, who I've actually spent some time with, Peter Varyslav, who was the kind of manager of Pussy Riot, who I've also spent time with and is a very fun guy, was also poisoned. The Screepalls in London were, or in Salisbury were poisoned, defectors from the KGB.  How did he want it? You ask any... Is David Sacks peddling this stuff too now? Of course, yeah.  But this attitude is somebody who comes from people who have not read a thing or know nothing about modern Russia. And there are people that are close to Putin, that are not his enemies, who have confirmed this, that the thing is when you betray the motherland, they will go to no length, to no end, like if you do everything they possibly can to punish you for it. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our new show, Just Asking Questions. You can watch another clip here or the full episode here. New episodes drop every week, so subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel to get notified when that happens or to the Just Asking Questions podcast on Apple, Spotify, or any other podcatcher. See you next week.


And when we say Kashi, it was built as a Yantra with seventy-two thousand shrines and one-hundred and eight main temples. The idea is to connect the micro and the macro or the individual and the universal. We must not only be proud of it, we must preserve it. I bow down to the man for bowing down to those ladies and those hard-working men. The Prime Minister dedicated the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor to the people of the country to believers and devotees and in fact helped realize a dream that had been dreamt by none other than the father of our nation Mahatma Gandhi over a century ago who had wondered when visiting the holy city of Kashi, of Banaras, of Varanasi, why is it that those that we worship cannot be kept in a state that befits them? Why can't we accord our deities the glory that we deserve? Today, Varanasi and Mahadev was restored in the glory that they deserve. The politics aside, what is the significance? Why is this important for us as a country and a culture? Joining us now on the news or agenda, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev. Thank you very much, Sadhguru for having spoken to us to begin with, to begin with. As a Shivbhakt yourself, what are your thoughts today?  So I would say I am a slave but I project it like he's my partner but actually a slave because every step and turn in my life has been guided that way.   What is my thoughts about Kashi? It's very important that time has come in the world where the world has to move away from divisive dogmas and philosophies and ideologies. This is what Kashi Vishwanath means. Vishwanath, as you know, it means the lot of the world, that means it is for all life on this planet. And when we say Kashi, it's a tower of light. What is the significance of a tower of light? And how does a place become a tower of light? We must understand Kashi as a mechanism. I'm using the word mechanism very consciously because it was built as a yantra with seventy-two thousand shrines and 108 main temples, fifty-four of them for Shiva and fifty-four for Shakti giving equal significance to masculine and feminine and forming a body. It's like a living body, why seventy-two thousand shrines is there are seventy-two thousand prananattis in the body, so it's a mega human being sitting there. And the idea is to connect the micro and the macro or the individual and the universal. So this is an instrument to transform and transcend the human being to areas and spaces that individual human beings by themselves may not be able to do. Not everybody is steeped in spiritual practices. How do they find expression to their longing? Because there is no human being in the world who doesn't have a longing to touch aspects and dimensions of life which are not yet in their life. Everybody wants to. Some people may invest their time and energies to do that consciously, others here and there aspire for it, maybe instead of genuinely seeking within themselves they will have a drink or they will drug or they'll do something. But you must understand all these are aspirations to touch something of the beyond. So here we in this culture, in this Sanatana Dharma we created instruments through which you could touch. Even ordinary people who don't have, who are not steeped in spiritual sadhana, they can also have an opportunity to transcend and transform their way of being. If not in their early life, at least towards the end of their life they must go to Kashi to do this. There have been many attempts like this in the country, there are many places like this. But Kashi is a very, very daring project. A few thousand years ago the size and the complexity and the sophistication of what it is is truly incredible and unfortunately today a lot of it is lost. But this is phenomenal that once again some revival has happened. The first time I went there some journalist came to me and asked, Guru, what is your impression of Kashi? I said, it's fabulous and filthy. They didn't like it. I said, see this is the reality, you better address the filth. Fabulous is there, nobody is missing it. But if you do not address the filth, fabulous could get buried in the filth. Here we are, at last Kashi has a revamp, Kashi has a some amount of if not the whole system being revived, at least a part of it is being revived. I think this will go a long way for many, many people who aspire for this, who want to be there but cannot be there simply because of the way it was being conducted. So this is a huge step in that direction. One must understand this is about Vishwanath. This is about an inclusive process. This is not an exclusive process, this is about everybody. I hope everybody gets this message and also the temple also is conducted in such a way it does not discriminate between one and the other. During times of invasions, during times of occupation, during times of British rule, they evolved rules to stop other people, other nationalities and other religions, they are used to stop at one time. I think that is largely gone, it must completely go. Anybody who wants to come, it should be open to them because this is about Vishwanath ji. Absolutely and when you say it's filthy and fabulous, yes it may offend certain sensibilities but you are an August company because it was the father of our nation who over a century ago said that when people come visit us from across the world and they look at Kashi, what will they think if this is how we keep our deities but why did it take so long? Was it the Orientalism or that you sort of glamourized squalor, why did it take so long to rejuvenate something that was apparent to everyone? See, it's not that we gramalag romanticize our squalor, not at all. I think it's because since pre-independence, there has been a thing but particularly post-independence, we are being shy of our culture because we want to project ourselves like we are westernized and everything because if you have to be modern, you have to be westernized. It's only now in the last five, ten years that there is a resurgence that you can be proud of your culture, you can be proud of who you are. This has come back fortunately in common people. It's a very positive thing because no nation will move forward in a big way if they're ashamed of being who they are. So I think that was a significant part and apart from that, without political will that could have never happened, fortunately it's come together now and it's great. It doesn't matter what is the history, there's a painful history behind Kashi, we can forget that and look forward to how Kashi can be a glorious thing because Kashi, well Mark Twain went on to say it's more ancient than the legends. And when people had not thought of Rome, there was Kashi. When Athens had not really manifested in human mind, there was Kashi. When the phenomenon of Egypt had not happened, there was Kashi. So Kashi is the most ancient living city on the planet and India as a nation, we must not only be proud of it, we must preserve it and nurture it in such a way that it will draw people. Kashi by… by a single… as a single force can handle nearly fifty percent of India's, you know, tourism as such. I must tell you this, when I happened to be in one of the large hotels there near Kashi, in the hotel everybody… I mean everywhere, they were only projecting that place as a destination for Saranath, that is… that is the Gautam Buddha's first place where he thought. But what they forgot was Gautama also came all the way to teach near Kashi because he thought that is the best location for him to teach. But today it was being projected that way, I spoke to the management and told them, what is happening here? There is no mention of Kashi. In Varanasi there is a hotel and no mention of Kashi, it's all about Saranath. They said, no, all our clients are from Japan and other Buddhist countries, nobody else comes. So essentially it had become… this I'm talking about twelve, fifteen years ago, essentially it had become that only very common people, village people, rural people will come to Kashi, the elite will never come to Kashi because of the conditions that were there and only the Buddhist tourists were coming to go to Saranath. We must understand that Gautama himself chose to do his first teaching near Kashi because if at all if you had to teach anything of significance, if at all if you had to get an audience who will understand what you're talking, you had to go to Kashi at that time, that's how it was. And this was a center of knowledge, this was a center of spiritual process, above all a center of transcendence and it's fantastic, it's being at least reasonably revived. Hmm. Would it be an overstatement to say that India could just be on the brink, Sadhguru, of a cultural renaissance, where we finally get to acknowledge ourselves as a culture and a civilization and be proud of it? I would say India is under... in a cusp where if we do a few right things in the next few years we could be a cultural renaissance for the entire world because for the first time we have an anger generation who are... who want everything to be logically correct. They are not willing to take dogmatic teachings, philosophy, philosophies which had no... of no relevance. They want to live here well, they don't want to go to heaven. This has become a strong movement everywhere in the world. I'm traveling across the world, I see everywhere in every university that I go, they are fascinated by what we have to offer because this is one culture which taught through every aspect of life. This is one culture which explored human mechanism like no culture ever explored. I'm not saying this with the pride of being Indian, which I am, but I'm not saying it with that I've looked very closely at various cultures around the world. Nowhere else has anybody looked at human mechanism and the possibilities of being human with as much profoundness and detail as this culture has, I think if we present it properly it is the future of the world. Many people also look at it as a secular state aligning itself with a religion. First Ayodhya, Ramjanmubhoomi and now this. How does one draw the line between acknowledging and accepting your culture and ensuring that the state doesn't side with the religion? See this comes from imported ideas that we have, that we think my religion and your religion. That is… that has never been the toss of this culture. We have always referred to this as sanatana dharma, that means it's an eternal culture. If something has to be eternal, the only way it can be eternal is by being all inclusive. That is… that is the fundamental because this is about human consciousness. This is not about God, this is not about going to heaven, this is about transforming and transcending human consciousness to a different level of experience and understanding and above all an expression of life. So we must understand this. This whole divisions of my religion versus your religion comes from belief systems. This is not a culture of belief systems. This is a land of seekers. Here I do not know is the basis of our existence because we identify with what we do not know because what we know, how much ever we know is just a speck in the universe, but what we do not know is boundless. So we always identified with what we do not know and we were always seekers, we were not believers. This is the fundamental difference between dogmatic, religious processes and spiritual process that one believes something that they do not know, another understands that he does not know and seeks to know. So Sadhguru, would you say because you know there is constantly this dilemma, a lot of people say that if you are head of state, can you at the same time say, yes, I am a Hindu, Hinduism is my culture and at the same time say, yes, we are a secular state, we are a secular government. Can we embrace both? See secularism is a way we administer the country. That means every sort of human being can exist here. This does not mean everybody has to throw away whatever their subjectivity is. You know just now two or three days ago I was talking to a very eminent group of scientists, neurologists, physicists and others from atop university in the East Coast and I was just telling them, see the large power, I mean the last part of nineteenth century and a large part of twentieth century has been spent by science just looking at the physical aspects of the existence with which we have got many comforts and conveniences like never before. We have more comforts and conveniences than any generation could ever imagine. But are we well? We are not well simply because we have never addressed the subjectivity of life. It is time in twenty-first century modern science addresses the subjectivity of life, not only human beings. We have not even seen other creatures are alive. Every day two hundred million animals are slaughtered on the planet. Every day trees are cut, every day things are happening and we are completely ripping the soil apart because soil itself is a living entity. In this culture the farmers never entered the land without bowing down to the land. Without bowing down to the soil he never stepped on it because we address the subjectivity. It is only by addressing the subjectivity, by exploring the subjectivity life will be really good that human beings will experience life in, in its fullness and in its richness. Otherwise we have everything and we have nothing. We have become the most destructive species on the planet because we have addressed only the physical part of life. We have not taken charge of the subjectivity. This is very, very important how we treat each other is essentially lack of subjectivity. We do not even understand the other human being is as alive as me. Forget about trees, animals, soil are completely forgotten those things. But we, most human beings do not understand if you have a different skin color, you are you are… I don't think you are a human being.  It is time the scientific focus also moved to, moved towards subjective explorations and this is what Kashi represents. I think this is the future of the world, but we need to present it properly and that's exactly what's being done in Kashi right now. The presentation has improved, nobody can improve Kashi, it is only the present dispensation is improving the presentation of Kashi and that is wonderful. It is so interesting you mention how we treat each other, Sadhguru, because today among one of the many gestures, I don't know if you saw it because you're in a different time zone altogether. The fact that those people who have worked for the last two years, they've used their hands, they've helped construct the entire Kashi Vishwanath Dham, the corridor. The Prime Minister made it a point to go out of his way to honor them as Karmayogis and dine with them. Just that gesture ties in with what you were saying about this representing not just a religion but a culture and a way of being. Would you think? Yes. See this has been the way if you go to… especially in southern India because northern India has lost most of its temples like that. In southern India we have magnificent temples which are engineering marvels by themselves. You'll feel proud of being human. How did they build these temples a few thousand years ago? The kind of engineering that it takes, the precision that it takes. So at any time nobody put their name on it. No architect has signed his name on the temple, this is designed by me. In culture we know who designed it but he never put his name.  This has been our culture, unfortunately monuments have been built like this that once the monument was built, their hands were cut off, their fingers were cut off so that they don't go and build anywhere else. That has been the culture that came from elsewhere but this is very important and I'm, you know, I'm really… I bow down to the man for bowing down to those ladies and those hardworking men who are out there because it is they who build a nation really. And you know the cultures which have come from abroad, that's the final question I want to ask you because that's always been the elephant in the room and always something that we tiptoe around. The fact today that when the corridor was being dedicated to the deities, the prime minister stood there and said that there were terrorists who came and they tried to destroy us but every time there is an orang zeb, this country made sure that there was a Shivaji. Will we ever make peace with a history that we have tried to either deny or whitewash? See, by denial we will not transform. It is very important, we do not identify the present generations of other communities with what the… historically what people did here. It's very important because this is… we need to understand our investment should be for the next generation. How to transform the unborn child, how will they live in this country and in this world? That should be our focus. Well, terrible things have happened to our forefathers. We can't fix that. Nobody can fix the past but we don't have to forget the past because if you forget the past, you may go into the same pit once again. So we must understand we should not connect present generations of people with previous generations of invest, you know, what do you call them, aggressors of the past. It's very important that invaders and today's generations should not be connected. All Indians should look at how we can focus on future generations. The unborn child is our responsibility. We may not see their faces right now, how we keep the land, how we keep this nation, how we keep the world for future generations will… is a clear statement of what kind of human beings we are. And hopefully the unborn child will also grow up confident in the knowledge of what his or her culture is. Pleasure is always, Sadhguru, speaking to you. Thank you very much for joining me and I hope to see you soon in Kashi. Yes, we will. Thank you very much. Namaskar.


Hi everyone, thank you again for being here with us. And it's really my pleasure to introduce you all, Vitalik Buterin. Thank you, Vitalik, for joining us here for this fireside chat. Thank you, Brian, it's great to be here. So we first met in 2015 in San Francisco on your original road show for the Ethereum ICO. And I was really impressed by the vision for the Ethereum ecosystem. And it's one of my greatest regrets in life, not having jumped in with a small bit of investment that day. I admit, I was completely daunted by the prospect of what you were building, and I didn't think it was possible. So when we met a year later in Shanghai, it was clear that I was mostly wrong. And in my new role at Hyperledger, I was intent on making sure that we didn't second guess this community being built, even while Hyperledger was set to really explore the more permissioned side of the blockchain space. These days, I like to think that, well, we're more full spectrum at Hyperledger with Hyperledger Bezu and other efforts that bridge these two worlds. You know, so what we're here to do is talk about the future of Ethereum and how it relates to this thing called the enterprise. But I wanna start on these early days. So let me ask, even before Ethereum kicked off, you participated in the early days, in the development of the Bitcoin ecosystem and the Bitcoin code base. What was it about those early days of that open source community around Bitcoin that made it so accessible to a young Vitalik? And I think one of the fascinating things about the Bitcoin community early on is just how it managed to extract and bring together many very different kinds of people, right? Because crypto as a whole is itself a very multidisciplinary thing, right? You have the cryptography, you have the math, you have the economics, you have the monetary theory, you have the social and political implications, you have businesses trying to do things with it. And there are definitely many different people, like even back in the community in 2011 that just came at it from all of these different perspectives, right? And sometimes the perspectives were very different and there was even some healthy and vigorous debate on the Bitcoin forums back in 2011. This was back before they were even called Bitcoin talk. And I was interested in a lot of things at the time, like I've always been interested in math. I've been interested in cryptography, I was interested in economics as well. So I'm interested in, I guess, the bigger questions of life and the human civilization. So the Bitcoin community definitely had some of all of that and it was just a great forum to just talk with other people that had all of these different and interesting ideas. And then also there was this just vibrant community of people that was just willing to come in and help and build whatever needed to be built, right? Like, you know, we needed to build a Bitcoin client and there was this community of course developers that was working on and improving the client. We needed to build Bitcoin wallets. People came in and just made wallets and you know, you needed a way for people to see what's going on in the blockchain, people just came in and built block explorers. So there was this great kind of community collaborative feeling there at the time, which I definitely really like. And that's definitely one of the things that I definitely really value and care about really trying to support in Ethereum as well. Yeah, well, sometimes when we in the open source community talk about the community and about how things work, we can sometimes, sometimes I'm guilty of making it sound like spontaneous combustion, you know, like these things just happened and we didn't know why or how. But when you think about the Ethereum ecosystem now and like the role that the foundation is playing and others, are there specific things like you think about or that they think about in terms of helping foster the right kind of community around, especially the development, the open source community around the development of Ethereum? Hmm, I think having a good open source community, definitely, like there's a lot of different ingredients that I think you need to get right. Like one of them is just that, like the ecosystem needs to be one that's kind of open and welcoming and like if someone wants to come in and contribute, they actually can go and do that. Like it's definitely easy to just even accidentally fail at that and like accidentally just gonna end up either driving away contributors when you don't need to or just like not making it clear that there's things where people just can go in and participate. Also, I think Ethereum has been kind of successful just because of what it is, right? Like it's not a kind of finite bounded system in the sense of just here's one thing that you can do with it and like this is money or this is a domain name system or like this is one thing. It's an open platform and people can just go into and like build their own interesting and amazing things. And just like having that space is also, I think, important for having an ecosystem that developers are excited about. Also, I think there's just like, you do have to get the economics, right? And this is one of the challenges of this community, right? Like especially with crypto that like on the one hand, well, like I think like the biggest difference I think between crypto projects and the ecosystem and say the open source ecosystem of the early 2000s is that like there's money involved and there is like a significant amount of money that I've got of floating around.  And on the one hand, like this needs that you actually have an opportunity to like try to even compensate people who are doing really important work, which I think is important, right? Like you can rely on volunteers for some things. You can rely on volunteers for smaller projects, but the challenge with kind of just relying on volunteers and if going forever is that like first of all, you're not going to necessarily attract enough people. And also like if you have this ecosystem where like some people are contributing for free but then other people are making millions off of it, like that just feels very unfair to people, right? And like that is a legitimate challenge of the crypto space as well, right? That like sometimes you do have this imbalance and like you make this one valuable tool and like, okay, maybe you can get a grant but then you make this other thing where like you've come up with a way to stick a coin in the middle of it and you know, you get like $25 million of VC investment flying at you. And like that's an imbalance and we've definitely tried to do our best to address that imbalance and like at the same time as trying to prevent like the Ethereum Foundation itself from sort of being an overly dominant pull in the ecosystem. So that's also a challenge. And other important challenge is just like appealing to the kind of diverse community. Like, you know, not everyone that might want to contribute speech-singlish that's probably the most obvious example. And like just making, you know, our content documentation, everything's like accessible and a different language is trying to actually engage with all the local communities as something that we've valued and we've tried to do for a long time as well. Cool. Like so many different pressures at play and compared to like the idyllic early days of Apache or Linux or something like that it sometimes feels like these pressures can really create such an intense kind of pressure cooker environment. Well, some of those pressures increasingly feel like they might be coming from people trying to adopt these technologies for enterprise uses.  But really some of these are for very prosaic use cases, right, for settlement systems, for regulatory reporting or auditing, that sort of thing. How much are those pressures on the backs of the core Ethereum developers? How much are you thinking about this? You know, especially with the design for Ethereum too were these kinds of use cases and needing to support those use cases on your minds as you're designing the F2 design. Yeah, and I think like enterprise users of blockchain are definitely really important. And I think like the biggest way in which ETH2 in particular can help enterprises is just having more scalability, right? That's because, you know, right now transaction fees are high. And one of the challenges with the transaction fees being high is that like first of all, it just prices out users but like it prices out different kinds of users differently, right? Like it, I think the people who get priced out first often are just like, you know, the people that wants to use the blockchain for like doing based on non-financial things like whether it's, you know, supply chain tracking or even things like ENS or like just about everything that's not moving high value crypto tokens around. And so when the fees go up to $10, like, you know, all that's left is like, well, there's some high value domains and then there's like a lot of moving crypto tokens around and our vision in Ethereum has always been to be this platform that's open to all of these different applications where, you know, the limit is just your creativity but if in practice, just the economics make it so it's only viable to do a few things then in some ways that's like a big limitation on how much of our mission we can actually accomplish. So, you know, the dream of scalability, right? As you know, we have rollups and rollups already exist for some applications and now general purpose rollups are coming very soon, right? Like Arbitrum recently released their thing on mainnet and then Optimism has a kind of limited rollout on mainnet that they've been totally expanding over time. ZK sync has been making great progress, right? And at the same time, we've been working on charting which kind of improves the base layer itself so that at the base layer, you have something like a hundred times more scalability, right? So charting times 100, rollup times 100, the two multiply times 10,000 and like the hope is that you can simultaneously like make the platform able to handle more users and like reduce transaction fees, right? And so, you know, it's like supply and demand, right? You have like more supply and so, you know, you don't have like all of these users kind of bidding against each other so hard. So if transaction fees can go down then, you know, we're hoping by a factor of a hundred but we'll see, then that like opens the door for all of these other applications again. And like, there are a lot of people, you know, even in enterprise that even wants to use the public chain, right? Like there's, you know, like EY and like the nightfall, I think it was there's like the baseline protocol. There's all of these amazing groups trying to like do a public chain based enterprise things. And again, I get like, I definitely believe in kind of the public chain, I guess, because like I don't even know what wants to see a future where, you know, like enterprise and kind of, you know, the people have to be these kind of two different polls that are either different universes or kind of you as opposing each other. Like, you know, we should have an ecosystem where, you know, the enterprises and everyone, they can just all live together. And the ecosystems can kind of plug into each other and benefit each other much more. And the, but the challenge is that, you know, if you want anyone to be building on the public chain, then, you know, the transaction fees have to go down and then also privacy issues have to be solved. And that's like the other benefit, right? Like you have all of these like very diverse, different groups, like just building and working on this technology and like everyone can just use each other stuff ideally, right? So I'm optimistic about that future. Good. And you mean it isn't as easy as just increasing the block size by 10x? No, no, Elon said it was. So I thought that was that, that was the case. And obviously one of the big changes coming up in Ethereum 2 is the move from proof of work to proof of stake, which a lot of people are concerned about the energy consumption of main net of cryptocurrencies in general, you know, how much was the environmental concerns on your mind as you were designing 2.0 is the move largely driven by that or were there other motivations? And I think it's definitely a major reason why people wants to move over. I think like the consequences of, you know, the amount of like energy and even just stuff that proof of work says those consume are pretty significant, right?  Like you're still taking away energy that could be used by other people and like, you know, we've seen like in Iran, they're the government's been angry because of like electricity being displaced for political villages and so forth. And then there's hardware and hardware hasn't sold environmental costs. So going from that to a consensus bottle where the economics are fully virtualized, which is, you know, proof of stake is, right? Like we've even talked about like proof of stake validators just being kind of like virtual miners, right? I know they're like miners, except, you know, it's all kind of digital and just simulated by the system and that just like, completely solves all of these problems. So, you know, we don't even have to argue about them and we don't have to just like, get into these lengthy debates of like, you know, who's using coal and who's using solar and like, is the solar actually solar and all of this stuff. Like, no, just like, make a system where, you know, the resource requirements as a whole are just more than a thousand times lower. Like that's definitely, I think it's definitely a big motivation for us. And obviously, of course, at the same time, there is kind of the more selfish factor, which is that if you reduce, like the fact that you need so much electricity and like hardware, like you also need to pay for that stuff and to pay for that stuff, you just have to like print a huge number of coins and that you got like, you know, it does risk the economic sustainability of the system. That's kind of the, you have to choose between, you know, either the supply of coins, just kind of continuing to go up nonstop or potentially risking security going down to very low levels. And like, once again, you know, it's a proof thing we don't have that trade off. So I think, you know, it's good for the Ethereum community, good for the users, good for the world. It's always great when things wind up that way. Yeah, that's great. And just as a wrap up question, what is the one technology you think in the Ethereum ecosystem as a whole that you're most excited about when it, when you think about the needs of enterprises or the needs of getting this kind of infrastructure adopted by the mainstream of society? What kind of infrastructure? I think like some of the higher level stuff that I'm most concerned about. So I think like we've talked about privacy and I've talked about it a lot previously as well. And it's definitely important, right? Like, you know, you don't want Twitter for your bank account, right? And the nice thing about like combining blockchains and cryptography is that you have a lot of room to just like make all of these like different compromises between them, you know, privacy and what your other goals are. And you can kind of much more freely define like what it is you're actually getting. And at the same time, you know, the blockchain has this verifiability and auditability. So, you know, if you like need like, if you want need like whether for an audit or investigation or something like proof that, you know, here's things that happened before and like, look, I did everything the way I was supposed to be doing like you can and you can just kind of selectively reveal whatever information you want, right? Like, so there's a great future for like improving privacy. Security I think is also important, right? Like, I still remember and frequently link back to the Bitcoin magazine article I wrote in 2013. This was like a Bitcoin wallet security. And there are these kind of nightmare stories of, you know, a guy has a half a million dollars of Bitcoin and then he wakes up and then he doesn't have half a million dollars of Bitcoin. What happens? I don't think we know yet. But, you know, you can have someone's computer, someone's computer can get lost. If you write the words down on a piece of paper, someone can steal the piece of paper, the piece of paper can get lost. You know, there's just all of these things that can happen. And like, I've talked about ideas, like I've talked about things like multi-sake, wallets and social recovery wallets and all of these things to try to like reduce the risk that things like that happen and like actually make like cryptographic keys or at least kind of blockchain wallets a more viable way of like authenticating a person.  And I feel like, you know, we're gonna continue to see improvements in the future. So, you know, once again, like it's both, like for me a big concern and a worry, but it's also something that I'm very excited about seeing fixed because I know it is gonna be fixed. Yeah. Thank you so much, Vitalik.  And I see this pattern repeated, whether it's the early days of the internet, people were concerned, we can't use it for commercial purposes because it's this research thing and it's unreliable. Then they said that about open source software. I, you know, there's that transition point in like the late 90s where it's like, okay, maybe we can use this for enterprises. And I think that's a similar transition point we're at when it comes to thinking about the full spectrum of blockchain technologies. And I think the Ethereum ecosystem is playing a key role in that transition. So thank you so much for your time and looking forward to talking with you again soon. No, thank you, Brian. And thank you for just all the great work you've been doing with our Prologer. Very sweet. Thanks.


Good morning. Welcome to the last day of DevConf. First week of the day. Yes. Next up is John Sullivan. It will be from a free software foundation comparing open source and free software to their dietary equivalents. Thanks. Good morning everybody. First things first, since this is the last morning talk of DevConf 16, can we just take a minute and give a round of applause to the organizers and local team that put us all together. Thank you guys. I'm standing. I don't know what's wrong with these people. It's been a really great experience for me. I've seen a lot of happy faces and happy feet around so I think other people feeling the same way. I'm definitely exhausted but very happily so and thank you also to the organizers for helping to make sure there's been ample vegan food to eat in the cafeteria. That's really helped keep me going. So we're gonna talk today about software and food and I don't mean dog-fooding which is usually the reference that we hear. It kind of sounds gross but about whether you use the software you or your project right. Instead I'm going to talk more about the analogies between dietary choices and software choices and I'm interested in this because I'm interested in free software as a movement and building that movement and in seeing comparisons between that movement and other social movements especially ones that seem to be more successful in terms of numbers and predate the one that we work in. I wanted to talk about this here because I would really love to see more public advocacy work for free software coming out of Debian and I think that would benefit Debian by paving the way for advocacy of the operating system and as well as for the project stated goals and missions and I think we have a lot of people in Debian who are really passionate and knowledgeable and really really good at explaining the importance of free software to the people around them and we definitely have an international community you know we our agents are everywhere because you can see anytime you come to one of these events and I'd be happy to volunteer my help within Debian to those projects and also to help drive any collaborative efforts that we can come up with between the FSS and Debian as organizations. But in general my interest in this started with reading this book called the Buddhist Revolution which is the history of vegetarian activism and honestly it's pretty dense but I've been learning a lot of potentially interesting things about the very long-term social movement that starts with a vegetarian movement in Western culture around 1600 which puts it probably a few centuries older than our movement the percept just celebrated 30th anniversary last October. So I start with this is the title but it's a bit of a ruse because I'm not really gonna talk too much about differences between free software and open source more of a jumping off point but I wouldn't be curious how many people have heard this before or seen anybody say this before anybody at least one that wasn't for me was it okay cuz I didn't come up with this I know that I've seen it somewhere but when I put this talk together I've been unable to find an original source to credit so I didn't come up with it but it gives us a place to start talking about the different motivations people have for participating in both free software and open source. I think that why this analogy sounds kind of clever is because we think of free software is going further than open source and we think a veganism is going further than vegetarianism. One thing I can tell you before we get going here is that the FSF mission is not to promote vegetarianism or veganism. I know that disappoints some of it. I've been vegan myself for about 18 years and three out of the FSF 13 staff are currently vegan and as executive director I do get the hiring but I promise that's not on the required qualification list over the years the numbers fluctuated quite a bit you know there have been times over the 13 years I've been at the FSF that I've been the only vegan on the staff but this is something I said recently the FSF takes no position on either Trump or veganism other than to say both Trump and vegan should use free software. This is overstating things a bit I realized after saying it because we do hold some positions that disagree with some positions that Trump holds for example we like the freedom to use software for encrypting communications became evident during the kerfuffle with Apple and the FBI that Trump does not support using encryption for communications but my point here is that at the FSF I try really hard for us to minimize the scope for disagreement you know we should hold only the positions that are truly necessary for it to hold free software ideals and to achieve our mission because it's the reality that free software has supporters from all across the political spectrum you know from libertarians to communists and that's probably how it should be because we see free software as an essential pre-conditioned essential building block of a modern free society because if we don't have that then otherwise our political speech our ability to associate with each other is filtered monitored controlled by the people who own the technology so even if you're on the Trump campaign trying to push your agenda you really should be using free software because if you're not you're not in control of how that agenda is distributed to people or if you're in communications but if we're going to build an effective movement we we need to not fracture this unity that we have across different political positions on other topics we need to make it as easy as possible for anyone to join the free software movement without challenging any more of their other principles and beliefs then it's absolutely necessary and that's hard to remember there's a lot of things that as an organization we want to use our you know the what visibility we have to speak out against things that concern us as individuals within the organization but I think it's it's really important and really important advocacy principle in general whenever you're trying to introduce somebody to a new idea so we don't have a veganism but I do have to point out the free software really loves animals you only have to look at the logos of lots and lots of free software projects to realize this this is a logo made a drawing made by Matt Lee so years ago at the FSS and almost everything in there is an animal or at least meant to look like an animal so food is a I think a good analogy for computer literacy in general and RMS in article that he wrote many years ago why software should be free talks about this the way that we take our freedom to modify food to prepare our own food for granted and how absurd it is to think that a chef who came up with a recipe could tell us no you're not allowed to put salt on your food only I'm allowed to do that on this food and I'll do it for you if you pay me but not so I get around to it you know that's kind of a proprietary software treats us we don't accept that treatment from food and I'm finding with the episode that a lot of our campaigns and advocacy efforts are really running into a problem which is just lack of basic computer literacy and knowledge in the general population and this isn't because people are incapable or because they're making poor choices it's just we've lost ground in this area and that means you know think about the the basic level of knowledge we all have about food because we all have to eat every day in order to be healthy you know we know that food is prepared by multiple people in a restaurant if you go out to eat that is prepared from a recipe that it usually involves taking different ingredients and combining them often with heat that if somebody makes a mistake and handles some ingredients improperly it can make you sick and you know that if you like the dish at a restaurant you can get a get a recipe and make something comparable at home you can make changes to it we know that food can be served on many different plates okay and still tastes the same and have the same nutritional value and we take all these things for granted but think about the equivalence for software you know how many people actually know that software is constructed by people working together in a language that is human readable and then transformed into something else and then if you had access to that human readable recipe you can make changes to it yourself or you could go and have the same thing from a different place that you can have the same software running on devices that look very differently and this is important because you know how many people actually know that if you wanted to you could run Android on an iPhone right in the general population people think that if you want to switch from Android to iPhone you have to go out and buy a new iPhone you have to buy a new phone or vice versa so this is becoming a real obstacle for us we can't convince people about the importance of source code or the importance of a culture of computers that shares source code among the people who work on it unless people understand what that is so I think we need to start looking for what the most basic elements of are that we are required in order to explain free software and do a better job promoting that kind of education and actually possibly doing some of it so I want to walk through this analogy between free software and vegetarian and veganism specifically as a subset of that food idea see how the Chofurki is made so when we're learning from other movements we can look at things like how they explain their message what imagery they use what reasons people have for participating in the movement what the movement proponents do to get the word out and learn from that we need to start with our definitions I'm going to go through these quickly because I think we all for the most part know here free software ability to run the program share it study it modify it veganism practice that's dating from the use of animal products particularly in diet and I thought this definition is interesting because it also refers to the philosophy that rejects the commodity status of animals besides just the dietary practice the open source definition is longer and more specific in some ways in the free software definition but it ends up pointing really to the same body of software and practice this is the point I want to emphasize because I hear strange things sometimes like people think that only copy left software is free software and permissively licensed software is open source software and that's not true when it comes down to it pretty much the same software licenses for all intents and purposes the same software licenses past the free software definition and the open source definition so when we're talking about what these terms mean and possible differences between them the differences don't come from the actual software itself or their licenses but and vegetarianism is a superset of veganism so some vegetarians may abstain from some animal byproducts but generally we call vegetarians who abstain from all animal products byproducts vegan so it's not just that you don't eat meat you also don't eat eggs or drink milk or cheese things that are made from animals we do have a vegan software license as I discovered while I was preparing the stock so you agree that you are not developing or manufacturing products and wear applicable to their ingredients which involves testing of any sort on animals you agree that you're not just any of the animal testing industry that you're not producing products that have animal byproducts you're not doing GMOs this is a non-free license also not an open source license it's been enforced oh no I haven't it's called the extJS license so that's the next step is to figure out what it's used I believe program that I was written for it's called extJS but yeah I had to know that existed until I started looking into this analogy but this is not free or open source because it and doesn't pass the Debian free software guidelines either because it restricts what you can use the software for you can't use it to hurt animals well I would hope you wouldn't use software to hurt animals but putting a restriction on that through the copyright license would make it non-free it's in Debian oh no okay well hopefully it's the dual license maybe it also changed licenses I just found this example as publication of license itself maybe it's not in use if it is please file a bug okay good Thunder JPL v3 which is a free software like so I want to go through the reasons why people choose to be a vegetarian or a vegan and I'm gonna present these reasons in the best light but you know don't understand me is advocating all of them or the FCEF is advocating them I think that each of these reasons leads people to different kinds of solutions and I'm gonna go through just the list and then talk about some of them more in depth so people don't eat meat because they think it's better for the environment because raising cattle for example takes water and plants because you have to feed the cattle so you can save resources by eating those things eating and drinking those resources directly instead of eating the animal afterward taste there are I know people who choose to be vegetarian just because they think meat is gross they're not particularly concerned about the ethical aspect or the environment they just don't like it health people think that meat can cause cancer or heart disease things like that so they view a vegetarian diet is being healthier religion we have Buddhist vegetarians in a long history of vegetarianism in India based on religious principles and cultural backgrounds meat industry excesses so it's not a great label but it's the best thing I could come up with to talk about the category of vegetarianism which is not that it necessarily wrong to eat meat but that's the way that meat is raised and the animals are treated specifically is wrong and so you know they would maybe opt for free range chicken or cruelty free meat but would not eat meat at McDonald's for example the free again which is somebody who will only buy things that are vegetarian and not animal products but will happily eat something that's meat or an animal product that's given to them if it wasn't bought solely for them so for example something that was about to go to waste or a group dinner where food was bought for everybody and not specifically for them and then ethics so the belief that that's wrong to kill animals or it's wrong to keep animals confined is a popular reason so we talked about the environmental aspect and how this relates to software so I think that it does I think that even if you're not a programmer you may support free software because you benefit from the kind of software that's produced in a world where software is distributed in terms of respect the freedom of the users who do modify it and the developers so you can think of this as similar to the free press where even though you don't run a magazine or a newspaper you benefit from other people who do run those things having the freedom to speak their mind and share information without censorship if you don't have a free press then you get bad information even if you're not the one putting that information out there originally so I think this is a reason that we don't make enough use of really because it's one that appeals to everybody regardless of whether potentially appeals to everybody regardless whether they directly develop software or not one of the things we run into often is why should I care about the freedom to modify the source code if I'm never actually going to modify the program well because you have a better software environment a better software culture because any problems it makes it harder for people to mistreat users if things like backdoors surveillance mechanisms can be removed and the improved version with those things removed can be shared with everybody regardless of whether that person whether any of those users have the ability to make that change directly themselves I do have to also point out that we have seen direct impacts of proprietary software on the environment the way that Volkswagen for example and now others have been busted using software that lied on emissions test which has potential implications on the environment so maybe we can actually say that proprietary software is the environment but I say don't call it an ecosystem this is one of the points that RMS makes about language and framing that people like to talk about the ecosystem of software and free software and open source and ecosystems are things that sort of our systems that operate amongst themselves and that kind of understates our ability to influence our surroundings by adopting ethical stances making different decisions so it's a reason even if you don't worry as much about the civic term keep that concept in mind that we're talking about a culture but it's a culture of individuals who have agency that can take actions and change things not just a system that operates according to rules. Okay so I think this is a very popular reason for promoting free software that people who want to emphasize mainly that free software is better it works better it runs on more hardware and often people who subscribe primarily to this reason want us to focus less on criticizing proprietary software and the ways they can mistreat users and want us to focus more on making sure that the free software is better and can give a clear reason why a new user should start using it you know programs like Firefox went a long way by being not only free software but by being actually better than the browsers that they were competing with at the time and and both features that users cared about. So it leads you down the path of criticizing less and also down the path of investing more of resources in developing programs and improving the program. So as a vegan this has been one of the main ways that I've been an advocate rather than overtly talking to people much about the reasons I have focused more on learning to cook vegan food that tastes good doesn't all have to taste like stale quinoa and at the FSF we certainly brag about when free software is better and want to use that as an entry point but we also think it's important that people avoid proprietary software even when it's better at some things and if you know Mako Hill who's on the FSF board and also a long-time Debian developer has a great talk about this you can find called when free software isn't better and I think it makes some important points here but nonetheless we have to acknowledge us as an important and popular reason why people do get interested in free software and it's not just the actual advocating vegetarianism and software it's not just the actual taste it's kind of the structure and the assumptions that frame our understanding of these things so one thing I hear a lot when people are asking me about veganism is you know why do you have all these meat replacement products why do you have tofu hot dogs and chicken nuggets partly you know I think they really are for people who miss meat but I think they also come from a need to replicate the meal structures that we have so you have a protein and a vegetable and a starch and that's what a lot of people around the world have grown up with so we face this as an obstacle in free software because when people think or argue that proprietary software is better in some cases there's no objective measurement of that it's not objectively better but it is in more in line with people's experiences what they learn how to use and what they're comfortable with so you know the Windows desktop is not better than the Genome desktop it's just the people who have more familiarity growing up with learning in school what the Windows desktop looks like you know what that meal looks like so if you if you care a lot about meeting people you know at the location of those expectations and trying to make the software just work better for them then it leads you to things like the GIMP you know the project that made GIMP look just like Photoshop right so GIMP has I know professional artists using GIMP GIMP works as well as Photoshop if you spend time learning it but the interface was very different and so there was a project that just took the GIMP code and put the Photoshop interface on top of it and that's the kind of you know advocacy approach that this reason leads you towards I think this can be taken to extremes I learned recently that there is a veggie burger that bleeds when you cut into it this is the new thing made with beet juice to give that nice red color it also sizzles when you cook it so it's done some engineering work to try to make this very similar to the feeling of cooking a hamburger any guesses who's behind this no no but sort of our friend Bill Gates the company is called I believe Beyond Heat and it's backed by many people including Bill Gates and this kind of you know it's funny to me because and that's because we support free software and he doesn't but it goes back to that original point that you know our principles need to be focused on free software I might be kind of happy about Bill Gates doing this if it helps promote vegetarianism as a vegetarian but I am you know not happy about any of things he's done with as it relates to free software and the GPL so we have to stay focused on what we're actually trying to accomplish I was trying to think of analogies between like what is the equivalent of making a veggie burger bleed in free software things I came up with were you know there's occasional efforts to implement some kind of DRM in free software which never made any sense to me because the user can modify it can't really restrict them there's projects like Ganesh and Moonlight that serves originally mainly to make code designed for proprietary systems plugins proprietary plugins run on a free operating system you know maybe some of the pressure we experienced to make our desktop look like the Mac maybe maybe the best example is things like wine and labor office having to establish bug-for-bug compatibility with Microsoft they're sort of like making your veggie burger bleed help I think of the analogy here for free software is being free software being better in specific areas that are go beyond just like working well you know which is more into the taste category but in this we're talking about things that are in the security and privacy genre and this is a bit different also from the taste reason because it with this reason we still do focus on criticizing the shortcomings of proprietary software pointing out how it can be bad for you is a QE component of making the argument for health about how free software can be good for you and this is a reason that the episode does spend some time focusing on we have for example our email self-defense guide at email self defense that fsef.org is aimed at helping people get started using GPG for encryption for their email and we do in other places we have an ongoing campaign against bulk surveillance which emphasizes that free software is really important for protecting your privacy and personal security but similar to you know what vegetarian advocates say about diet and health free software can't guarantee your health right you can't guarantee your privacy and security we know lots of examples of security problems and free software but it's the best baseline to start from people have standing vegetarianism just because you eat vegetables isn't going to make you healthy you also have to do things like exercise or climb lots of steps every day so I think they're very similar in that way and it's kind of like the environment reason we can see examples of how proprietary software directly impacts people's health you know Karen samlers talk earlier this week about proprietary software running on her medical heart device and a lot of other people's devices and inappropriate things that that software has done show that proprietary software actually does directly impact people's health too in addition to being an analogy religion that's all I'm gonna say about this one you can guess where I stand on this question I think well actually there are the new Linux distributions I think people might have seen that are produced by religious who's winning them I see a lot of people who put both hands up we didn't ask about Ed but you know but there are good new Linux distributions that are are put out by groups with religious missions to I know there's all the way from Christianity to Satanism I've seen examples of groups publishing distributions because that gives them the freedom to present their mission in the context of an operating system so it's pretty cool in that way they can't control what windows looks like but they can put some of their religious materials into a Debian derivative distribution for example and ensure that people so just religion can be a reason for participating in free software as well the industry excesses reason I think of this I think this is pretty common made more common than you would think that people who care about free software but are quite willing to use some proprietary software as long as they view it as insignificant so the the problem with the main problem with proprietary software from this perspective is that it mistreats people that mistreatment can be solved either through regulation or through actually freeing the source code and distributing it as free software so some of this may be in the Apple versus FBI stuff because it's also disturbing comments from people saying that this made them happy because now they didn't have to worry as much about switching away from their iPhone to a more free software friendly platform because Apple as a company was taking a positive stance protecting the security and encryption of people using iPhone and that's yeah today tomorrow who knows but not a reason that we agree with at the FSF but a reason that's out there and we want to you know include people that come at it from this angle in the coalitions that we try to build free again also I think pretty common in free software that don't buy free don't buy proprietary software don't contribute directly to it but if it is in front of you and you can use it it's it wasn't bought for you we have the category of people who illegally copy proprietary software and use some free software and you know those viewpoints can be consistent if you have a general distaste for copyright law in general but it's also consistent with avoiding paying money to support proprietary software development I think this is a bit tricky we went to people to you know the FSF isn't advocating ignoring copyright licenses and so we can have much broader reform in that area because we rely on the power of copy left to protect us not only from copyright restrictions but also to protect users from patents eulahs things like that so just doing away with copyright law is not a tactic that's going to work for free software until we get broader reform in those other areas that are used to restrict users ethics I think we're going to go through a few aspects of this but there are many ethical arguments for free software I'm not going to try to cover all of them this is one of the most compelling ones to me it was from article by Evan Mogulin in 2003 called free software and the death of proprietary culture the important part being that if you could feed everyone on earth at the cost of baking one loaf and pressing a button what will be the moral case for charging more for breads and some people could afford to pay and this speaks to the food analogy and the fact that we can infinitely copy software at zero marginal cost what is the moral case for denying that right to copy and share in order to help the people around you and of course we're talking here not about not charging money for some service related to the software or even for the act of giving it to somebody that's allowed because they can go try to find that from somebody else for less or for no cost but the free software argument of why is should there be a legal moral restriction prohibiting that act in the first place there's also the political statement aspect of this the support for when you use free software you're making a political statement against the restrictions that are imposed by companies like Microsoft and that's kind of the social signaling ethical aspect that that makes it matter about what software we use personally even though if we're using something personally that's not the same thing as giving a piece of software to somebody under terms that attempt to restrict that person but at the same time if we use software that has those restrictions ourselves then we kind of send that signal that ethical statement that using that kind of software and therefore distributing that soft kind of software is okay and you know this I think led to this is you know the roots of the difference between the original difference between open source and free software so just a quote from RMS in his article about this that's going over the history that's open source was coined as a way to advocate for free software without raising the ethical reasons in order to get greater appeal in the business world nowadays things I think are a lot more complicated so the open source initiatives front page talks about software freedom in those terms now people say the word open source term open source but they mean the same thing as free software but we also still have people who are saying open source in order to not talk about ideals and in order to signal that they are fine with a world that has both free software and proprietary software in it so it's not really as simple as what was intended to be originally but it's still very complicated and so at the FCEP we still ask people to say free software in order to make it clear that they care about the ethical issues and not just the practical aspects of software or distribution mechanism it's not the ethical issues I think that free software is still the best term for some of the other reasons that were mentioned earlier as well but if you're going to try to act on these things for ethical reasons you run into a lot of challenges and it's hard to know where to draw the line sometimes the same thing with vegetarianism agriculture kills insects and animals walking kills insects which are animals so thinking about some similar challenges that we face in free software I was thinking about things like proprietary JavaScript you know that you are just trying to use a completely free operating system and a free browser and interact on the network and you are still being served bits of proprietary software without you even knowing it they're being run locally on your computer which does not inform you that this is happening this reminds me of the act of kind of walking around and accidentally stepping out and doing things when you're really trying hard not to or you might think of interacting with proprietary software when it's not exactly on your own computer but you know using an ATM machine checking out at a grocery store you know these places where it's in the environment you're still interacting with it even though you're trying very hard to not support it from an ethical standpoint so we know the mission of the FSEF and the Guinea Project because we subscribe to the ethical reasons for free software is to achieve a perfect world where there is no such thing as proprietary software that all users should be able to do everything they want to do on any computer of any size using only free software but we want to work with people who want free software for other reasons to and so I think part of the challenge here and part of why I find this interesting at all is because what initiatives can we design that appeal to the greatest number of those reasons that we went over you know what we need numbers in order to accomplish a successful movement what can we do to bring everybody together and for us we want to do that so we have an opportunity to talk more about the ethical reasons for free software but also because the larger the movement the more conducive the social environment is to free software the easier it is to be a free software advocate which is so what kinds of initiatives work towards all of the reasons that we talked about well I think labeling is one really important initiative that helps towards achieving a bigger and more effective movement no matter what reasons or background you're coming from so this logo is from the leaping bunny program by coalition for consumer information on cosmetics and this is a way that you can look at a product and know that it was not tested on animals which is something that's important to a lot of vegan and the point here is that if people want to make individual choices for any of the reasons that we talked about they need to know the information that's necessary to make that choice right and so what this logo does is comes from a trusted place and signals that something is good for people with these beliefs to purchase and it doesn't require them to do a bunch of research in order to know what to buy and there's different kinds of labeling for food and there are similar challenges here because if you're talking about let's say you go to a restaurant on the menu you says clearly a vegan or vegetarian that really helps means you don't have to ask a bunch of questions or know a lot about how the food's prepared but think about what we expected users when we're promoting free software like you should use a free program or how do I know what what a program out if a program is free or not you have to look at the license well where's the license well it's in the source code or it might pop up when you start the program and don't confusing well don't confuse it with all those other programs that say that free software but they're not actually free software and this is true by the way for open source to plenty of programs advertising themselves as open source which aren't open source so we have to find a way to get the information to users so that once they're inspired to care they have the ability to actually act on that and the knowledge to act on that so what kinds of labels could we have in free software well this is one example this product may contain material license to you under the GNU general public license or other open source software this is from the box containing a links this router and this reminds me I don't know about you but looks to me like a warning label and it's nice that they added the label about the GPL after we sued them but it's not really what we're going for here right we want a label that encourages free software not one that presents it as a warning about something that a product may contain so the F step has this respects your freedom label verification mark which you can read the criteria of that fsf.org slash ryf and it's aiming for this goal of making it easy once someone is inspired to care about free software to support businesses and buy devices products that respect their freedom and for whatever reason they care whether they think that free software will be better more secure ethical thing to do better for the culture this gives them a signal that this is a good product to support and one that will work for them so we've certified routers laptops 3d printers the aleph objects table out front has you know promotes their certification from the fsf which is awesome we've certified many products from them and this laptop running Libre boot was something that was certified it means it runs all free software and only requires free software it is it is a bit of a US centric mark which we could improve on I think but we do have the words available in some other languages and we could look for more symbols that would be universal it's not quite as easy as the bunny though like you know everybody knows the bunny you don't want to hurt the bunny but what's the equivalent kind of international mark for freedom we would love to improve on that the guillotine and one really exciting thing so for a long time so all the products that we'd certified this label is really only appearing on the website for purchasing the product or sometimes on materials that were included inside the box on paper but recently we certified this router from think penguin it's a mini VPN Wi-Fi router and they actually put the mark on the product right next to the you know FCC and other certifications so I think that's really awesome to see and really exciting for the growth of the program and then other than this labeling and these kinds of initiatives I wanted to highlight you know what I started with which is the importance of computer literacy and education gets to want to program you frustrate them for a day teach them how to program you frustrate them for a lifetime but you know we I think it's something both in the world of the ups up in the world of Debbie and we have an interest in just doing what we can in our communities to promote basic computer literacy I know that Luke here so Luke was yeah you are so you're talking about teaching and San Francisco public schools and I think that's awesome and that's kind of thing that we need more happening of you can do this on a volunteer basis in a lot of places or the F.S.F. we're talking about how we might want to organize some of these efforts to teach people the basics of computers and then of course during that course bring up you know the importance of having access to the source code as an educational resource and that way people leave with both a little bit of information about how computers work and a little bit of information about the ideologies that are involved with producing software so at the F.S.F. and for me personally the ethical reasons to use and distribute free software are the most important but in the meantime we we need to be the biggest movement that we can be and we need to look for the biggest wins across all of these different reasons that people have for participating in the movement and we have a movement that is centered on behavior you know the choices that we make to use or not use different kinds of programs and the terms under which we distribute programs that we may write ourselves and we should look for actions that mobilize communities and build bridges across all the reasons people have for doing you know they have they take the same action they have same behavior but the reasons for doing so are different so I think the analogy itself at the beginning you know sounds fun but doesn't really hold up it leads us to some interesting places to think about and there's a lot more to do to look at the relative success of the vegetarian movement compared to us and how we might copy some of it but you know people have a lot of reasons for participating in both free software and open source and we want to appeal to as many of those people as we can even when we think our own reason is the best reason so I encourage people to save free software in order to flag that their interest is in this as a movement but I also encourage people to look for ways to build bridges across the different reasons and different terms that people use so thank you some time for questions and conversation hi I'm I try to distance myself from fsf purely because of our mass behavior and that's the only behavior that I ever saw from that person because I'm relatively new to this open source and free software what is the plan for succession of ffs fsf post rms okay so two things in there one is that no one person is going to be the right person to appeal to everybody rms continues to build on his speaking engagements around the world to bring new people into free software but certainly the way that he approaches it we can see it doesn't work for everyone so but keep in mind that it is working for a lot of people and it is still helping to build the movement especially you know he had a speech in Mexico where he had 7,000 people turn up and the organizers told me they were going to have 7,000 people on his no way we'll send you 500 t-shirts that'll be plenty but I was wrong so but yes we need many more voices we need a lot of voices and so at the fsf we you know we have a board of directors that has many free software luminaries on it and we have I think we're pretty well positioned to continue the vision that rms started going forward if he decides to retire but even in the meantime you know we're trying to grow as an organization we've expanded by 50% in the last five years now it's only five people because that's growth from 8 to 13 on staff but it's been sustainable and I think we have a lot more going to do and that will add more voices out there more people that people can connect to of course we're a community we have a small staff and a large huge base of volunteers and supporters and a lot of the important activism doesn't come from us at all it comes from figuring out how we as an organization can raise the profile of people in their local communities doing advocacy work to people they know that's one of the things that we need to be a lot better at I think cool thank you John Sullivan