Hello and welcome to this new segment of CD spectroscopy and MOSBAR spectroscopy for chemist. My name is Arnab Datta and I am an associate professor in the department of chemistry IIT Bombay. So we are now looking into the applications of MOSBAR spectroscopy. So far we have covered how the ligand and its properties can regulate where the isomer shift of a MOSBAR spectra will come up. So today we are going to take one more example and we are taking this example of an iron 2 salt. However, there are different ligands bound to it iron fluoride, iron chloride, iron bromide and iron iodide and if I look into that delta value for the salts they are as following 1.40 for iron fluoride, 1.20 for chloride for the bromide for 1.15 and for iodide it is 1.10. So we can see as we move from the fluoride to iodide we are slowly moving towards the more negative direction of delta values. Now the question is why? So for that we want to take a look into the structure of this particular complexes and over here we are looking an iron 2 sample is interacting with fluoride ions 2 of them and this interaction and its properties are going to control how the D-electron density and the resultant D-electron density is going to change and how it will affect the MOSBAR spectroscopy parameter the isomer shift. So now if we look into all the system iron fluoride, iron chloride, iron bromide and lastly iron iodide and over here you can see all of them the common factor is the iron plus 2. So obviously the difference you are seeing is not for iron because it is remaining the same the difference is happening what is there on the anion side. So that is creating the problem I should say the differentiating factor is the anion now how we can explain that. If I look through this iron and this anionic interaction iron is remaining constant all over the changing factor is over here how it is changing. So iron plus 2 if I want to talk iron plus 2 in terms of hard soft acid based rule it is more actually on the intermediate side that means it is actually staying more on the softer side soft in nature compared to iron plus 3 whereas what will happen if I talk about hearts of system for this anions fluorides are actually hard chloride is also hard bromide is something in the intermediate and iodide is a soft in nature. So what is that particular factor that defines whether it is a hardened soft it is a polarizability all of them has a charge of minus 1 so charge density is going to be the important factor all of them has a charge of minus 1 but fluoride is a very small iron. So it controls its charge very strongly so it is very difficult to change the electronic distribution around the fluoride so that we can change the charge distribution. So it is very difficult to do that so they are less polarizable and in that case hard. So this is the polarizability factor would come into that is with heart. Chloride on the other hand is very much similar but its size is a little bit larger than fluoride. So over here it will still be hard but the hard nature between fluoride and chloride fluoride will be harder compared to chloride whereas bromide side the size is increasing further so that will be slowly moving to the soft nature and iodide is the largest of all charge is still same minus 1. So because it is a large size and same charge is much easier to control the charge density and even change it alter it so that is why the polarizability is on the higher side as we go down over there and on the lower side on the top of the group. So they belong to all in group 17 iodide is the highest polarizable molecule so it will be the soft in nature or softest in nature among theses fluoride on the other hand is the lowest polarizable and it will be the hardest among all the system. Now iron 2 it is interacting with all of them I am not going into which will be more stable or not that depends on the stability between the hard and hearts of interaction but I am trying to understand how the electron density is moving around. So when it is a softer nature iron bromide and iron iodide they will be more on covalent nature because they are softer in nature so they will be much more interested to share the electron density among them whereas chloride and bromide they will be more in ionic nature. So the ions will like to keep their charge and electron density more closer to themselves rather than sharing it. So that is defined over there this ionic this is in covalent nature and if it is ionic in nature this iron fluoride and iron chloride what will happen the iron is going to keep its D electrons to itself whereas in covalent nature D electrons will be shared and over here it is minimal sharing because all of them are iron plus 2 so it is having 6 D electrons to start with all the 6 electrons most or more or less remain as it is for the case of iron fluoride and iron chloride but iron bromide and iodide it is going to be sharing the electron density with the anions bromides or iodide and over here when it starts sharing if I lose S electron density it will be lowering the D electron density so it will lower the shielding effect again if I have a low shielding effect what is going to happen my S electron density in the nucleus is going to affect it which is nothing but psi 0 square it is going to be a high value when there is low shielding effect. So, psi 0 square value how it is going to differ it will be the highest for this iron iodide because most of the D electron is moving out as much as possible AC electrons are not feeling any shielding effect it has all the chances to go in the nucleus and psi 0 square will be high but it is going to be lowered on iron fluoride case because most of the D electrons are staying as it is there and as we know delta value is again depending on delta R by R and psi 0 square sample minus psi 0 square source and over here you can see the delta R by R is a negative value because iron 57 actually shrinks down in size when it goes to the higher excited state i equal to 3 by 2. So, this is negative and this value is constant I am using the same source the sample value higher the value it will multiply the negative number and it will go towards the negative region and that is what is actually happening over there because psi 0 square value for the sample as you figure it out is high for the iodine says multiply the negative number and that is why it is having a lower value on the negative side on the fluoride case it is on the most positive side that it can be because it has the lowest psi 0 square. So, even if it is multiplied with a negative number it is actually most on the positive side and that is what is actually happening over here the difference we are seeing it is mostly generating from the AC electron density how much it can be there on the electron which is connected to the shielding effect which in turn is connected to the D electron availability on the iron and that D electron availability of the iron is controlled by the ionic or covalent nature of the complexes over here iodide being a soft nature ligand it tried to bind with iron 2 plus much strongly doing a covalent bond and moving the electron density out of the iron and that is why in case of iodide we see that it shifted towards the relatively negative side from 1.4 to 1.1 again it is not the absolute negative value we are discussing we are discussing about which particular direction this is actually moving out. So, with that particular example we would like to stop for this particular segment where we have explained how we can take a look into the covalent and ionic nature of the ligand and the molecule to figure it out what will be the isomeric shift for the MOSBUS spectroscopy and over here this also show us that how we can use the MOSBUS spectroscopy to figuring me out whether my molecule is having a covalent nature or an ionic nature during the bond formation. So, with that we would like to conclude over here thank you thank you very much


Hi everyone, I'm already having fun with my my client here We were just having a bit of a laugh before this recording. So I think you'll enjoy this video I'm with one of my clients Marina Smerling and really looking forward to introducing Her to all of you and having her share some of the wisdom She's gained in building her coaching business and also the kind of wisdom she offers to Her clients. So first of all, hi Marina. Hi George. It's so lovely to be here with you Yeah, thanks for doing this. It's I know it's late over there for you right now. So thanks for staying up for this So let me first give everybody a context of what you do and I'll just kind of read your official bio And we'll kind of go from there Marina is a life and relationship coach and she has supported hundreds of women in creating thriving Relationships that are founded on radical self-acceptance, and maybe I'll have you talk a bit about what that means or to you Marina supports women in working through their intimate relationship challenges Composting their underlying feelings of shame into radical self-love and Saying yes to what brings them joy Marina's work draws upon over a decade of training in NBC nonviolent communication as well as the Hakomi methods mindfulness and Sematic-based approach to transformation and also non-dual spiritual practice. There's so much we can talk about Here we might we might not tip dip our toe into some of this stuff because there's so much here But anyway, I love I love the work you do, but let's start given that most of the folks watching this We are working on building their own business of some kind Some of them are just starting out and some of them are further along Maybe you can share given that you have a fairly successful coaching practice. So what have you learned? In building this and there's yeah, I'll just kind of let you share what's what's coming to you. Yeah, okay Well First I just want to say hello. It's all of my fellow entrepreneurs and risk-takers It's nice to feel your companionship through the the Facebook ether And this is gonna be on YouTube as well. So ah and the YouTube ether. Thank you. Yeah Yeah, you know for me the biggest thing that I have learned about Doing business daring to do what I love and attempt to make a living doing what I love is It's funny I want to describe it as being a little bit crazy When there's this fabulous blast of thunder here in the background in Florida as I say that.  I'm not, you know Intentionally advocating for public humiliation, but I really think that Being in business means risking humiliation. It means risking being disliked risking You know so-called making a fool of yourself risking rubbing folks the wrong way like every day of My work that I that I do something that's public. It could be as simple as a public Facebook post Sending a newsletter out into the unknown and not having any clue how it's going to be received I have to face the possibility of being judged ridicule disliked Etc and yet doing it anyway because there's something that's so important in me that wants to come through Even it's just if it's just for one or two people who Are going to be moved and impacted by it, but when I say being crazy I mean really Cultivating a willingness to take risks as a way of life in order to Let whatever gifts you have inside of you come through. I don't I have maybe there is a path that's safe, but I sure as heck have not found that path and That's the biggest piece that I've learned and I want to advocate to others is like, please Please be willing to take risks in order to let whatever the precious gift inside of you is in order to allow that to come through I'm so glad you started there because I don't think we can hear it enough. I don't think I can hear it enough and those Watching this, please feel free to comment below and let us know what you think about that It's interesting. You talk about the safe path because I think so many of us. Yes, we know that entrepreneurship is risky You know, sometimes people think well entrepreneurship is risky because you might lose money or something like that, but you're right It's not it Building an authentic business. We're not just like doing something Purely logical or cognitive based and like oh, this is a good financial investment. We are Vesting our souls into this thing That's right. And and therefore we're investing our sense of Identity also in some way. Yeah, we're revealing ourselves and what if people don't like that? Yeah inherently vulnerable So how Do you deal with that? You do that regularly and I hope folks will read your your writings. I'll put a link of course to Your Facebook page and your blog is a beautiful writing, but how do you deal with that? Yeah? Oh Lord, this is the million dollar question. Yeah, I know there's so much here, but give us a little bit of flavor of how How you work through a little bit of that. Yeah. Yeah, I love it To be totally honest a large part of it is for me cultivating a sense of connection with the divine and That comes in many forms for different people whether it's God or Jesus or Moses or you know the universe or Your dog, maybe, you know, I love my dog a lot like my dog could be my God like whoever or whatever it is It's just God spilled the other way So many forms of the divine so many legs um but really cultivating a sense of Purpose and a sense of something or someone has got my back and really for me letting myself learn to trust that in my bones is What allows me to take these risks day after day after day? Having a sense that in the end, you know, if everybody does throw Tomatoes at the screen upon, you know watching this very video that okay, God's got my back My dog's got my lap, you know But like like ultimately in the end. I'm not going to be alone That's the biggest part of it and then of course the practices that I teach my clients to around self empathy Holding the sweet parts of myself that so want to make a difference that so want to share that are so scared and want to be accepted Okay, how do I tend to those parts as well? So in a way, I want to say it's both tending to the very very human parts of me and Cultivating a connection with the divine at the same time. Oh, that is so sweet. Hmm. Yeah. I was just you know When you said that your dogs got your lap.  Yes. Yeah. Oh, there's a puppy. Well, he's three, but he will be forever my puppy That's that's amazing. Yeah, that's that's so so true And okay, so another Another lesson, you know in our pre-conversation for this recording Another lesson you've been learning is about being yourself. Yeah, even though you have mentors and Teachers you look up to so talk about that. What is that? What does that mean for you? Yeah? There are so many reasons To convince ourselves and to convince myself that what I have is not worthy of sharing that so-and-so is already doing it and not just doing it but doing like an amazing job of it and Who the heck am I to put myself out there to think that there's something unique that I have to contribute? I do have amazing mentors I do have amazing friends and there's lots of amazing people in the world doing great work, so it's not hard to find reasons to Knock ourselves down and to be like I'm just gonna you know keep myself under the carpet under the bed whatever and let somebody else do it In a way this comes back to that sense of faith and and real deep trust that Even though, you know, I have my spiritual teacher who's doing You know beyond words amazing work and I have my friends and I've got you know Colleagues that there's something unique in here that can only come through me and can only come through me Risking that vulnerability Risking putting myself out there and making a bad impression. It's you know having the tomatoes thrown virtual or otherwise That it's only through this risk taking that there's that the something precious God given universe given, you know dog given whatever your belief is Implanted in me to be to be offered as a contribution to this world and Again, it requires a tremendous risk in my experience to Put my attention and my faith in that trust Rather than in all the fear-based beliefs of not so-and-so is already doing it. I'm just gonna you know keep my head in hiding keep my heart in hiding so All of this truly going into business for myself has been nothing less than a Full-on spiritual journey and a spiritual practice It really comes back to that again and again and again for me and I'm guessing for so many others as well Yeah, yeah, absolutely beautifully said. It's Yes, it that is actually that is one of the common questions I get actually it's like well Yeah, who am I when this brilliant teacher thought leader? Is already doing it so well and has so many people following them Why should any of them decide to read or watch my thing? That's right, but it always surprises me that you know There is a certain advantage to not being a thought leader or Yet that people the advantage is that People feel like they can relate more to us when we share what's going on with us fellow human Yeah fellow humans and what insights we have the sharing of it There's a certain innocence to it when you're not yet a celebrity or a thought leader that is irreplaceable and There we go You're here to being frickin human. Yeah and relate to a bowl relatable. Yes relatable fabulous.  There's so much there obviously and we have a few minutes only So is there something is there a tip or some? Yeah some insight. Yeah You want to bring forth? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I'd love to see how quickly I can do this Yeah, okay, so here's the bottom line One thing the single takeaway I would love to offer is for folks and intimate relationships if you are human more likely than not you have occasional conflict with your partner and My experience of what I work with my clients around is how the heck do we disentangle our Fundamental needs for understanding acceptance for love, you know Belonging all these beautiful things that are innately in us these longings from our strategies our favorite Strategies for getting those needs met and our strategies usually involve our partners It's I want my partner to understand they want my partner to love me. I want my partner to hug me right now and In my experience, it's Disentangling our frickin precious human needs from our favorite strategies for meeting those needs that allows our Relationships the spaciousness that they need to thrive and it restores to us our empowerment and our own sanity and so two quick tips I want for for everyone around this is When you're in conflict Three things number one, can you ask yourself? What is it that I need? What am I fundamentally longing for that all human beings need? It's not just you respect care dignity support safety, right, etc Number two How else can I get this need met? Right, and we've talked a bit about spiritual practice. So I want to go right there again How can I experience this need being met with my sense of the divine, right? So for me, it's often it comes up a need for Fundamental acceptance for knowing that I'm good, right? How can I how can I connect with my sense of God and remember? I am loved. I am accepted. I am cherished in God's eyes You can do it with a friend. It doesn't have to be God a friend or family member And then the second piece is find whoever is the young one in you who got triggered if you're in a fight with your partner more often Than not there's a young part. That's knocking on the door saying I want help Find the young one put them on your lap Hold them and let them turn around and face you to start to get those needs met So it's in this case. It's me telling my young parts. Sweet Marina. I love you. I accept you I cherish you. I adore you and I'm in this process. I'm reclaiming my power Starting to feed myself these needs I've been longing for rather than taking my claws into my partner's skin and demanding These needs of him. So wow, that's the short and sweet version You've just given the overview of like a lifetimes work. Yeah, essentially Wow, so You know if anybody resonates with this, I hope they'll reach out to you I'm sure you've written something about this on your blog so folks can go in more But you know if they want to reach out to you for Considering you know working with you for coaching You can really help somebody Unpack that in the context of their own current relationship and help them to create the exercises and you know The customizing these kinds of things for that person, right? That's right to help them implement this So this is beautiful really really good. Um, I would love to ask you if I mean we have a few more minutes if that's okay, okay? Just a few things in your bio, right that I think might find interesting Or you know just maybe we've heard these things and I'd love to hear your explanation and what what these things mean So nonviolent communication and VC so many people have heard the idea I think a lot of people and some people may be watching this have been trained in it or have taken classes or yeah Write a book, but what what does MVC to you? What does that mean for you? Yeah? I Want to have the short and snappy answer here. I know but you've Kind of So describe it to somebody who is maybe spiritually aware, you know Someone who's into mindfulness or or into into spirituality or into personal growth, but doesn't know a lot about it Okay, great. Yeah So the heart of NVC is this notion that everything we say Do and think is an attempt to meet some universal human need Right named a few that care belonging acceptance safety security, etc And it's through our capacity to lift our I want to say the veil of judgment from our eyes lifting that veil of judgment from ourselves and off and off of others and Starting to connect with what's the underlying need that's motivating that person or motivating me to do this thing That I'm judging the heck out of that. We start to soften towards ourselves that we start to cultivate compassion for ourselves And that then we can begin to empower ourselves with okay What are the strategies that I really need so if I'm upset and in a bad mood? And I'm just generally like taking out on my partner and run Getting on his case about dishes in the sink, you know If I'm asking this question, what's truly important to me? Well had a frickin hard day and overwhelmed I really have a need for Spaciousness in my life, which the sink is just one small manifestation of I could begin to ask first of all, there's the softening Oh, God, I really love space. I really love spaciousness All beings need space. I'm not alone in this. This is a good need and Then I can ask how else in my life can I cultivate some spaciousness? That's going to go far beyond the dishes and dishes in the sink. So there's an empowering quality in addition to the Compassion inducing quality That's my short answer. Wow. It's beautiful. And again, there's a lot there to unpack Yeah What about the Akomi method and I know this I think a few people I've heard of the Akomi method What's your Something about it. Yeah, I so love Hakomi How I Understand and how I work with Hakomi is it's a body-based and mindfulness-based practice that says You know, whatever I'm acting out in the world, wherever I get stuck wherever I feel challenged It typically reflects some false core belief and it's through addressing those core beliefs and learning to correct them to replace them with Ones that serve us and I'm feel empowering to us that we you know free ourselves up But the the uniqueness of Hakomi in here is that it says it's through slowing down And it's through paying attention to our bodies that we can access these core beliefs When we're just in our mind We miss something and it's through the slowing down process that the unconscious can present itself So when I work with clients around when I sense there's a deeper There's a childhood issue there. I will often use Hakomi to help my client access their Their unconscious truths and their unconscious core beliefs that are running the show but without their conscious Permission for these parts to buy to run the show So it's a really beautiful and graceful method to go about transformation The farthest thing from many other methods that I met that feel like very Hammery and like whippy and loud thundery. I don't know if any of this is coming through We heard a little bit. Yeah. Yeah it feels very organic and honoring of Being an honoring of the speed of being and the way that our bodies naturally Release our defenses Yeah, wow amazing amazing. Yeah, it's work. Yeah, so Just wrapping up this conversation. How if somebody is watching this and is resonating with you How do they work with you? What's the next step? Yeah? Reach on out. Yeah, I'd love to talk with anybody who resonates with anything I've shared You can check out my website shameless heart calm You can just email me directly marina at shameless heart calm and I would love to get to hear from you Yeah, it's a great great domain name too And just to clarify you work with women. Yeah, and a few cool men Okay Yeah, well, thank you marina for doing your work. It's beautiful and Those who are you know, I think people in your audience are blessed by your presence by your writings by your support and Even your Facebook personal timeline is pretty pretty great to follow Personally, I like what you post there too. So I'll put the links in there so folks can follow you and connect with you and Thank you. Thank you for what you do Such a pleasure to be here George. Thank you for having me. Yeah, thanks


We're not starting until we get a loud a round of applause. Come on. You didn't have to do that. Thanks everyone. That's a bright light. Stand over here. That's better. How are you all? Good, cool. Yesterday some of you guys came into the session I ran. A little wave. Hope you enjoyed yourselves. Thanks for coming back for a second one. We're going to do a little activity. I reckon we've got a half an hour. What we want you to do is come up with a top three list of something. How's the accent? Everyone getting the Australian? It's all clear. Are you confident that we can organize ourselves to come up with a top three list? Raise your hand if you're confident we can do it. Everyone in the room is going to participate. Show me your hand if you're skeptical. There's no way we can get. There are about 68 people in the room. You guys are actually good at organizing 68 people to agree on something. We'll just sit and watch. What we're going to do is put the clock on and run a series of very short iterations. Typically around three minutes. We'll do three, three, four, four, four. We're going to run six iterations. What we're going to do is ask you to interact at different scales. We'll start with pairs, then fours, then eights. Then at the end we're going to have 64 people coming together to agree on something. Anyone got a topic that they'd like to volunteer? I'll give you one if you don't have one. Favorite agile technique. We're looking for the top three favorite agile techniques. Your job after you've figured out what the top three most valuable agile techniques are is to go and coach and support and practice those things back at work next week. We don't need to explain how those things work. You know all that stuff. You're experts. You're here at the conference. We'll just have 65, 66 odd people agree what the most important things to focus on are and you'll know because that's a big enough crowd to figure things out. Sound good? Cool. Everyone mobile? Anyone on wheelchairs or crutches? Abdul here, my partner in crime. Thanks Shruti. That was a good call out. He and I will wander around the room and just check out if anyone's stuck. Raise out and sing your hands. Call out and we'll come and help. Our main job is to watch the clock because you're going to do the organization. When I shout out, hey, next round go from two to four people. Look around, find the four people. We're not going to give too many instructions. You guys are adults. You can work that stuff out. Make sense?  Has anyone got any smart questions? All right, cool. The most useful tool in this session is going to be the clock. Are you ready? First thing you need to do is figure out who your partner is, pairs, form pairs. Everyone got a pair? This is the hardest bit. Form a pair. If any of you get left out and there's an odd number of people in the room and somebody's left out, just grab one of the other pairs and become a threesome. All right, are we done? Is anyone not in a group? All right, just turn to your left or your right and join the pair next to you. Great. Okay, so just to reiterate, round one, we're going to debrief at the end and have a conversation as well. Hi, welcome to the session, guys. This is why projects go late. Hiring takes a while. It takes a bit of time to onboard people. So you guys have just walked in. Just follow the instructions. Don't worry about it. It's going to work out. First thing I need you to do is grab your pair. Right? Everyone's in pairs.  You two, form a pair. The group activity is we're going to come up with our top three list of agile techniques or practices. Right? And that's what we're going to prioritize. Okay, we don't need to work out a big long list. We don't need to know what 16 or 17 is in the list, do we? Because we're just going to focus on the top of the backlog. Right? You good? You ready? Does anyone want to go, by the way, now that you know what we're doing? No one wants to bail? You do? Yeah? There you go. Okay. You ready? The clock is about to start. In three minutes between the two of you, you're both going to have worked out what your favorite preferred agile technique or method is. Right? And then what we're going to do is we're going to do a round after that. And we're going to do a round after that. You ready? Set, go. You ready? Put a question, shout it out. You done? Okay, cool. We're prioritizing, right? At the moment, we've probably got about 34 different ideas. Okay? So let's converge a little bit more. Each small group, grab another small group that's near you. So you're now a medium-sized group. Can you do that? Right? Spot a group near you. Everyone make sure you've got the next round ready. And do it again. Right? The one most important agile technique that you guys think is worth focusing on. Just one. So who's talking? Are you guys in it? So it's you four and you three? Or you're all together? How's it going so far? Oh, gosh. How's it going so far? Thumbs up. There. There. How's the conversations going? You're liking the conversations? You're ambiguous. I'm not having fun. Right? Okay. You're welcome to leave if you don't like it. If you're ambiguous, you're bored. You don't need to stay. I don't want to waste your time. Just kidding. I do like wasting people's time. It's my job. My management. We're going to do it again. Right? So is everyone feeling okay with the conversation so far? Yeah, good. So now you're going to do the next level. It's going to get a bit more complex because we're going to get to larger groups. So do you mind all standing up? Everyone on your feet. Right? And I just want you to know that you're welcome to use the stage. You're welcome to use the front of the room. It's going to get a bit crowded. Maybe if I do a bit of social organizing, if you guys come and stand over here you guys come and join them. Yeah? So that's one group.   Come on up. And you guys maybe move to this front center table and then back corner. There's two groups over there. So one of them move over to this front table. You guys all stage. Come on, stage. Get up here. No one, don't worry about it. No one's going to be listening to your talk. Right? And then the guys that were standing over there the guys that were standing over there go to that table. People in the corner you go to that table. Yeah? If you're new in the room just come over here and then you guys, you're a group so you can have that space there. Right? I don't know what happened. I said the people that were standing have instructions, right? This is management. We're incompetent.  Right? So if you're in that group over there, go to that table. Right? Visualization, transparency. Okay. So the people that were over there went to that table. Now the people that were in that corner go to that table. You're good.      Is anyone here management? You know what I'm going through, don't you? Yeah. It's not fun. Alright. We're going to do it again. That's because I'm holding a secret, right? And everyone wants to know what it is. So we're going to go again. We're going to hang on to three minutes again. And same job. Right? Just come up with one most vital, useful, agile practice technique method. People have asked questions, right? Is Scrama thing that can fit into this? Is daily? No, you're just after one. Right? So at the end of this whole session, we're going to be looking for three. Right? But right now, all I want is one. Right? So if you've got three in your list or if you've let your list build up to six and you've gone, we'll sort it out later. Now's the time to purge it. Alright? We good? Shall I start the clock? Okay. Clock has started. Three minutes. Just one. Just one. Just a question. Sorry. Wrap it up. Shh. Quiet everyone. Alright. Does anyone fail to get agreement on that round? If you're a team that didn't get one good outcome, everyone's got one. If you've got more than one or if you haven't solved the problem, put your hand up. Haven't solved the problem. You guys, you're good. You guys, you're good. You're good. You've still got time to solve it. Right? Okay. Hmm. I reckon we're going to do two more rounds. We're going to get there. Alright. Go again. Three minutes. Before we do. Sorry. I've got to do the organizing thing. The light screws my eyes up. You guys over here. Alright? You two together and you guys up on the stage. You're good? Come on. Come on. Come on. Time is money. Let's get moving. Come on. Come on. Come on. Project's going to be late. Okay. We know where the groups are. We can see they're all in play. Three minutes again. One best agile method or technique. What is it? Did you get a decision? Did you get a decision? No? Did you get a decision? Yes. Did you guys get a decision? Yes. Alright. Cool. So now I've got this awkward thing of three groups. You can't pair up three groups. What am I going to do? Right? Except these guys haven't got their priority yet. Cool. So everyone up on the stage. Everyone in the room up on the stage. Go on. Can't fit. Okay. Over there. Yeah. Collaboration exercise. Abdul says get everyone on the stage. That's an activity. Everyone on the floor over there. Just crowd around the floor over there. Move. Get walking. Down there. Right? I'm the center of the group. Come here. Come. Come. Come. Come. Come. Come. Don't trip over the wire. Push that under the chair. Alright. Is everyone in the center? You people that are taller. You've got a moral authority over the rest of the group. So you can argue your thing really strongly. Right? So this is it. You're still making decisions. Abdul, my three minute clock is on the table next to you. So he's going to set the clock off. You've got three more minutes.  It would be weird if you did it in ten seconds, but go for it. Box on. Three minutes. Go. Is anyone able to turn that light off? You're still in the middle. You're still in the middle. You're still in the middle. You're still in the middle. You're still in the middle. You're still in the middle. 30 seconds. 30 seconds. Okay, time's up.  Go on.  You can sort it out as you sit, but go to your seats. I need the answer in just one minute. Sit down. Sit down. So what we'd like to do is we'd now like to round this activity out with a couple of questions for you. I'm potentially the laziest public speaker in the world, except Abdul's even quieter and does less than I do, so it's a tough gig.  Obviously the first one is what was the number one? Retros? Cool. Number two and three? Backlog grooming and sprint demos. Yeah, cool. Good one. Thanks. Do you agree? We're experts. It doesn't matter. Alright, cool. That was an activity in self-organising, wasn't it? We didn't put too many rules in place. We just set some goals and then did the group thing. The rest of the decision-making protocols was your deal. So as you went through that activity, can somebody throw out or shout out some of the methods you used to achieve the outcome each round? Voting? Yeah, raising hands and voting. Any others? Did you do that when there was two people? No. Right, okay. What else? Ask for justification, explain yourself. What else? Hang on, hang on. Yeah, that's called the hippo principle, right? The highest paid person. You voted? That was a show of hands. Hang on. Right, yeah, cool.  What can we get done? Yeah? Right, so as the group went from two to four to eight, one person ended up being the voice of the other people. Yeah, that's an interesting one, isn't it? The outcome was, say that again. Right, so putting it in context of like, you know, it's kind of safe to file because we're at a conference and just talking stuff. How engaged were you all in the last conversation? Was anyone, just show of hands, like, you know, we're all friends here. Anyone just standing batches going, oh, I don't have skin in this game anymore.  Were you that person? Really? Yeah, yeah, there they are. At a 60-something people, the three people just kind of backed off. That's nice of you because you made room for other people to exhibit their leadership. Good on you. Do you want to throw a question out? What rules did you create while during this process of self-organizing your friends? So that's an effective communication, a signal to the rest that I'm calling a topic. Anything else, guys? Any other rules? Nothing else? Right, so you narrowed down your similar items into one. Anything else? Those are two rules. We can go on to the next question. Alright, we're about to get a lunch but you guys don't mind two extra minutes to you. The hard question, right? The hard question. What did you learn about decision making in this activity? What lesson can you draw from this activity? So just do this so we can kind of focus. Right, so what might you do back at work? Pardon? Why not? Right, yeah. Who's going with a purpose? Yeah, going knowing what you're trying to achieve. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, cool. Prepare for meetings and stuff. The more forcefully you assert your position, the less likely it's going to be the outcome. Yeah, yeah. That's interesting, yeah. Yeah, cool. So there's like a certain level of base understanding in this room about what agile is. So you didn't have to go and explain the basics to people. I imagine in product and process projects, I mean, most people that you're talking to have a clue what you're doing but not everyone, right? Yep. Oh, interesting, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, so that's unusual, isn't it? Like we go to work and there's certain people that make all the decisions and the rest of us just go and do it, right? And we did this activity of deciding together, right? If you send a survey to 60 people, how many of them are going to respond and how long is it going to take to get the response? And is there a good dialogue and mutual understanding? And then when all the responses get back and like 32 people say let's do this and the other people say let's do that, how are they going to feel about the outcome? That's different to this. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And don't get me wrong either. Like I know in the real world that like people are in different buildings in different cities and all that sort of stuff and you can't put everyone in a room all the time. But when you can, why wouldn't you, right? Any other last little reflections from this side of the room? Right. Yes. Just taking the microphone. Go on. The way it was organized was very nice. The beauty of this decision making was a group was there, they made one decision. When we merged with another group, they only had to decide between two points. Like, you know, so the decision making was far more easy. Had it been a complete list versus a complete list, then or even a three in place, it would have been a big challenge. So even in a real life situation, we could use this kind of concept between solving between teams. Absolutely, right? So yeah, I just want to repeat that back.  Last comment. Just want to add that when you're onboarding a new bunch of stakeholders, they always come with a context of their past and that needs to be recognized because you had a discussion within the context of what you had and that recognizing the context of what their one point is you need to understand. I'm having a hard time locking onto that idea. So the idea being we all come from different backgrounds but going through this activity gave us an opportunity to kind of bring some mutual understanding to the table. But then still you're making assumptions about where people are coming from. Yep, cool. Or not actually, because sometimes you can just make a decision. It's a lightly held decision and you can change it later, right? But yeah. And so when we talk about backlog items and the stuff we're going to do in the next two days, maybe the consequences aren't as big as the stuff we're going to do for the next six months. So I just observed maybe there are people from a different cultural background but not Indians. Anyone wants to share, did you notice anything different about how the group dynamics are here? Anyone wants to share something? Is it how exactly you would have done back in your own cultures? Or did you notice anything different after observations? I actually think it was quite collaborative. I think there was more engagement here than there might be. I'm from Minnesota and we're really passive aggressive. Right. So people are more likely to not share what they think until something they really object to. But here was I think was really collaborative and people were sharing ideas and speaking up. Yeah, great.  So our group decision making process is different. Thanks for sharing. So I guess we'll just wrap up now. I learned this from Alastair Coburn, the agile manifesto guy, and he came to Melbourne one day and ran a meet up and did this activity and I thought it was really interesting watching the dynamics of decision making and how they changed from group to group and then thinking about that in the context of like the corporate life of rules for how you do things and how just in a simple activity like that, the rules in which you make decisions change rapidly because the context and the needs of the situation change. And so if we instead focus on the goal and the group dynamic, like how many people can hold a conversation together and so on, you provide very simple constraints and you help people move forward and achieve their outcomes. So it was interesting to me and that's why I shared it with you guys. Now potentially this is a technique and a method that you could easily share out to the workplace.  If you want Naresh is saying shut up, you've got to finish. Yeah, I'm finished now. Yeah, yeah cool. So I'm wrapped up right now. So if you want to ask us any questions we'll be here for the next few minutes and thanks for coming. That's it. That's it. Thanks. Thank you very much.


These are the steps you need to do in order to create a document in Google Docs. After logging into your account, make sure you're in the drive. Right above the word drive is the word create. Click on create. You have a couple different options. You can do a Microsoft Office style document, Microsoft presentation like PowerPoint, an Excel spreadsheet, a form to collect data, or a drawing. We're going to just make a regular document. Click on the type of file you want. It will open up. The first thing you need to do is rename this. It will always be called untitled document. Click up here in the top corner. Type in what you are going to be naming the document, and then use it just like a normal word document. And you have created. You're done. As soon as you type everything, it will always say all changes saved and you're all set. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.


Hello, Stefan. Hey there from Ritje. How are you? I'm doing just fine. So first of all, as I said to you before, I will introduce yourself to the Italian audience and as I just am reading now from your website, you are a registered patent attorney, a labor Italian theorist and lecturer and the director of the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom and the founding and executive editor of Libertarian Papers, and of course, you are a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.  Would you be able to explain a little bit about your background and just briefly do? Sure. I'd be happy to. Yes, I'm an attorney and a longtime Libertarian and Austrian student of Austrian economics. I live in Texas. I'm from Louisiana, which is a civil law state similar to Italy and France and the continental legal traditions. So my legal training was from Louisiana State University and the civil law system. But I've long been interested in Libertarian theory and economic theory and I say for over 20, 25 years. And I have been heavily involved with the Mises Institute and with the sort of more radical Austrian related and anarcho-capitalist worth body and type theories and also those of Hans Hermann Hoppe. And started a Libertarian journal a few years ago, Libertarian Papers. And my legal practice is primarily as a patent and copyright and intellectual property attorney. So that's my legal expertise. In terms of Libertarian theory, I've always been personally interested in economics and legal theory and rights theory. And not so much in intellectual property theory. I just started writing about it because it wasn't really settled yet in Libertarian theory. And I wasn't comfortable with the theories I had heard about patents and copyrights. And when I started practicing in that area as a lawyer, I started thinking as a libertarian more and more about it. And I finally, after doing a lot of research and thinking came to the conclusion that the reason that the previous arguments in favor of patent and copyright, like by Ayn Rand and others, the reason that it was unsatisfactory was because that they were actually wronged. And that there had been a big mistake made early in American history and early in the American and the worldwide libertarian movement in assuming that patent and copyright are legitimate types of property rights. And my conclusion is that they're not and that they're actually nothing but anti-competitive state grants of monopoly privilege, which undercut property rights and undercut the free market and undercut competition and in fact are explicitly aimed at reducing competition. You'll see supporters, you know, we can't have a regime of unbridled competition. We have to tame competition with these laws and that's exactly what we do. So that's basically my approach on this. Oh, that's good. So for what I understand your libertarianism basically is strictly linked to your specialization in legal things. Am I right? Well, I would say not. I would say that my legal knowledge has helped inform my arguments, maybe make them a little more sophisticated and take into account things about law that confuse other writers, but I don't think you need to be attorney to understand this stuff. And in fact, I think usually most attorneys are worse than the average layman on these issues because they have absorbed a good deal of legal, legal positive. Yes, I see. As Bruno Leone wrote so brilliantly about freedom and the law. So no, I was a libertarian long before I was an attorney. It's just that I'm interested in legal theory because I can write about some of it, but really it's just rights theory. Okay, I see. Yeah, in our website, libertarianation.org, we recently talked about your book. It's called Against Intellectual Property. So you were asking about what's the basic argument against IP for those who had not heard this argument before or it approached it? Basically, yes. So I would say that, and look, when I came out with this argument of my own in 2000 or so, it wasn't as pressing of an issue, but in the last 10 or 11, 12 years, it's become more of an important issue and I've written more articles on it, other people have, and so I've seen different ways to sort of explain this. So I'll kind of give you a little summary of I think the best way to look at it. And I think it's this. First, we shouldn't take the government's labeling of things for granted. And when they call it property, it doesn't mean that it is or should be. And if we understand the origin of these laws, and basically intellectual property is a term the government uses and lawyers use to refer to several types of legal systems, primarily patent and copyright, but also trade secret and trademark. And every one of these systems is different. And the two that are of most concern are patent and copyright. So let's just look at those. If you look at the history of these, these basically arose during the age of mercantilism and protectionism and state censorship in the, say, 14, 1500s in Europe. And they were explicitly recognized as, in the case of patents, monopoly privileges granted by the state that had nothing to do with invention. For example, in England, someone would get the monopoly on playing cards, even though they didn't invent playing cards. Of course, the crown would grant this for favors, you know, to give a favor to this company who would owe the crown loyalty back the other direction. So basically it was impoverishing consumers and harming competition and harming competitors for the sake of a relationship between the patentee and the crown. And in the case of copyright, it arose because of the advent of the printing press and the state and the church's loss of control over what, you know, could be present. Right. So they were losing their control of what ideas could be presented to the masses. So the government established the stationers guild of the stationers company, which had a monopoly on the printing press. And of course they would only print what the government or the church approved of, et cetera. And finally these things became enshrined in legislation in the case of patents in the statute of monopolies. They weren't afraid to call it a monopoly. And the statute of monopolies was meant to stop this practice primarily because of all the abuses, but it carved out an exception for inventions. So they said the crown can't grant all these monopolies to their friends, but the government can still grant monopolies if there's an invention. And in the case of copyright, it was the statute of Anne in 1709. This is in England. And that basically gave a monopoly to authors instead of the publishing guilds, which had previously had it. But the primary reason was so that authors could be free to publish their works so they didn't have to get permission from the guild. So copyright originally was meant to, in a way, give the author the freedom from censorship by the state. It wasn't really meant to give them a monopoly over it so they could stop publications of the works, but just so they had their permission to do it. And in the case of the statute of monopolies, it was again meant to restrict, radically restrict the power of the government to issue monopolies. And so when the United States was established as our current form, a clause was put in the Constitution in 1789 that authorized the Congress to grant patent and copyrights to promote inventions and writings of authors and things like this based upon these existing models. So it was sort of a utilitarian thing. It was never considered to be a natural right. It was just a civil right. And it was just based upon the hunch or the assumption that if we have these kinds of laws, maybe it will promote, you know, novels and books and paintings and musical innovation. But it was not based upon the empirical evidence. It was just an assumption. And the original law in the U.S., which has become the model for a lot of the modern IP systems of the world, was about 14 years originally. And the 14 year period for patent and copyright came from the assumption that you need to protect a merchant from competition, from his competitors for about the length of two consecutive apprenticeship terms. You know, they had apprentices back then. They lasted about seven years. So they said, well, if you have protection for 14 years, you have time to train two apprentices and what you're doing. And that's enough protection from competition. But then there was a backlash in Europe and in the U.S. over the next, say, 50, 100 years against these monopolies. And so the advocates of these monopolies and the government and the advocates, which had at this time gotten to be dependent upon these monopolies because they could protect themselves from competition, started using the term property to describe it because for pure propaganda purposes, they just called it a property right because everyone was in favor of property. So this is why we started calling them property. But just because the government and special interests call it that doesn't make it so. You could also, of course, call your right to receive welfare payments from the state of property right, but that doesn't make it make it so. You might depend upon it, but it doesn't make it so. So the basic problem as I see it with patent and copyright is that it's the state giving the right to a person to tell someone else what not to do with their own property. Basically, in civil law terms, it's called a negative servitude or it's a veto right, right? Now, in private law, you can acquire such a right by contract. So for example, you could pay me to agree not to build my house more than 30 feet or 15 meters tall. And so you now have a partial property right over what I can do with my property, but because I agreed to it. But what the state does when they grant a patent or copyright, they're giving a negative servitude to the holder of the patent for the copyright over the property of everyone else in that jurisdiction. So if I'm given a patent over, you know, a steam engine, then I can prevent my competitors from using their own property to make a steam engine shaped in a certain way. And the same thing with books. So basically the problem is that these grants of copyright and patent or infringements of property rights because it takes away my right to control my property that I used to have full rights in it. And now the government has given a partial control right to someone else. So in effect, it amounts to censorship. It amounts to trespass is what it amounts to. It's a redistribution of wealth and of property. Now, there's a lot of other arguments against these things. Abuse, empirical reasons. For example, there's no empirical evidence whatsoever that these rights promote innovation. In fact, there's every evidence that they hinder it. And it gives the state power and it gives the state the power to censor us and literally censor us. For example, just the other day, the famous movie, The Godfather and the novels by Mario Puzo. The estate of Mario Puzo wanted to authorize a sequel to Godfather and Paramount Pictures is suing them under copyright because they have the assignment of that to stop them from writing this book. Now that is literally censorship. That is using the power of the courts to block the publication of a book. And this has happened many times. And of course, giving this power to the hands of the government and the special interests is dangerous as we see in this recent SOPA case, the Stop Online Piracy Act, which the government could use as an excuse to have almost complete control over who can post on the internet, which is very dangerous for people who believe in freedom and the power of the internet. Yeah, in your book, page 44 against intellectual property, actually, you talk about something like that. You say, basically, you're talking about John Goldmagnon, like caveman. Basically, he built a log cabin on an open field. And basically, other people are trying to imitate him. And we start to build in the whole cabins. But the problem is, he got a copyright on that. And basically, he is telling the other neighbors not to build the log cabin of the same shape or the same design of his log cabin. Basically, it becomes, like you say, a partial owner of a tangible property of the others. Yes, because he can stop them from. Yes. Now, of course, most advocates of IP like Ayn Rand would say that's a ridiculous example for two reasons. They would say that these rights can only apply in an industrial society. But it's a little bit hard to understand why what they believe is a natural right only comes to exist in modern America, but didn't exist in early society. And number two. Should be universal and it should be. It should also be perpetual because regular natural rights do not expire.  So Ayn Rand and most advocates of IP come up with an argument that it should be finite like last 20 years or something like that. And I think they come up with that argument for two reasons. Number one, they realize there's something wrong with making it perpetual because we would still all be paying royalties to the heirs, you know, to the descendants of these cavemen. Every time we wanted to cook food with fire or use a wheel or whatever. And number two, because the U.S. Constitution put a limited time on it. And Ayn Rand and others have till this point in time viewed the early U.S. government as an almost libertarian model for us to follow. Like we almost got it right. So whatever's in the Constitution must be presumptively libertarian. And I think that's just a mistake. The Constitution was not libertarian. It was a centralizing document. It's full of contradictions. It's just a piece of legislation crafted by special interest groups and politicians. And we have to stop thinking, in my opinion, of the U.S. as some libertarian exemplar and of the Constitution as being a libertarian guideline for the kind of society that we should have. Yeah. So, yeah. So, yeah, basically talking about U.S., basically you introduced me, my other question. In some interviews, and also now, you are accusing U.S. basically to force other countries in the world to use their legal intellectual property system. Right. Give me some example of this. And why do you think the U.S. are doing this? I mean, I don't think we're worse than other countries as a general matter.  But as Professor Hoppe points out in one of his books that when you have a relatively liberal internal economy, then that tends to make the government more imperialistic because they have the resources to get away with it. And you can see that in the U.S. history, although the propaganda is that we're peaceful and democratic. We have a war about every 10 years over the last 200 years and people always come up with an excuse for every one of them. But it's the case. So the U.S., actually because of its dominance for about the last 75, 100 years has thrown its weight around and has become extremely imperialistic in terms of, or the better word would be extraterritorial. We basically assert our laws extraterritorially more so than any other country in the world that I'm aware of. For example, our tax laws. I don't think there's a single industrialized nation where the government claims the right to tax its citizens when they don't even live in their country and earn income in that country. But the U.S. does. So even if I move to some country that doesn't tax me at all, like say Singapore, then the U.S. will tax me on the difference. And we're also very, very extraterritorial on our antitrust laws and our drug laws as well. In fact, there's a law being proposed right now that will make it a crime for an American citizen to plan while in the U.S. to go to a country that has legal drugs and use the drugs. So for example, if I'm planning a trip to Amsterdam, let's say I'm a dentist and I have a convention in Amsterdam. If I'm there, I plan to smoke some marijuana because it's legal. That is actually a crime under, or that is a proposed federal crime in the U.S. to plan to do something that's legal when you get there. And that is insane. It is insane. But by the same token, the IP laws have been pushed by the U.S. government at the behest of the special interest groups like the movie industry, the MPAA and the music industry, the RIAA and other content creators to twist the arms of other countries to adopt ever stricter U.S. type copyright and patent laws. For example, Bosnia, Spain, Canada, Russia, China, Panama, other countries just in the last few years. The WikiLeaks scandal revealed a bunch of cables from the U.S. State Department to Spain where basically the RIAA and the MPAA were writing Spain's laws for them. And often we do it under the guise of a trade agreement. What they do is they do something sneaky. A treaty is usually negotiated out in the open where people can see what's coming. But if you do a trade agreement, which is usually bilateral but not always, it's done in secret. And then the government just approves it. And so they sometimes put these provisions in these trade agreements that really should be part of a treaty. And they do it under the guise of a trade agreement so that they can escape scrutiny. They did this in the ACTA, which had to be exposed by the law professor in Canada, Michael Geist, and a sort of WikiLeaks type expose. And then Barack Obama, our president, signed it the other day without even getting the Senate's approval because he said it's not a treaty so we don't need the Senate's approval. On the other hand, the theory is that it's binding upon the U.S. and international law so it's still really a treaty. And right now there's a negotiation going on with the called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It's going to be a multilateral trade agreement between the U.S. and several Asian countries. And it will force them to adopt these types of laws. In the case of Russia, Russia has long wanted to be part of the WTO, the World Trade Organization. And the U.S. is saying, no, we're going to block your membership until you adopt U.S. style IP laws. So we use our weight quite often to try to force other countries to adopt U.S. style laws either with just pressure or with bribes or with trade agreements or even with treaties like WIPO. So a couple of months ago, I think not just a month ago, there was a case of the shutdown of a mega upload website that was distributing some, well, quite a lot of millions of files of music and videos with copyright. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Why they did it? Well, we know that why, but how they did it? I think it's quite incredible that they were able to act on another jurisdiction, another country's jurisdiction and do what they did. It was really incredible for me at least. My understanding is that, I think it was the FBI, worked behind the scenes for months trying to build their case and to get the cooperation of other governments, including New Zealand, of course, where the arrests were made. And also, I think Hong Kong and one other country, I forget the other country, maybe France or Singapore. And so it wasn't technically a violation of sovereignty because they got the countries, they got New Zealand's permission to do it. But of course, could you imagine New Zealand police swarming with black helicopters, 69 SWAT officers onto Houston, Texas and arresting some citizens over here? We wouldn't put up with that. So that's another example of extraterritoriality. But I think what's going on is you have the movie industry and the content industry. I mean, it shows that the government is in their pocket because the government doesn't really care. They're just doing this for power and to please one of their big donor bases. So I think what's happening is you have the possibility of piracy and that changes the business model that these content producers have been able to rely on. And they don't want to adapt. So they always go to the government to try to get the government to basically protect them from competition so they don't have to adapt. Sometimes they're successful, sometimes they're not. I mean, they've had to adapt to color television and radio and movies and, you know, the whole deal. Video VHS players and cassette recorders for taped music and now digital music and CDs. And they hate it every time there's a change. And so they're resisting the change.  But they want to put the fear of God into regular law abiding citizens to try to just ring a little bit more extorted cash out of them to make them, you know, pay for a song or a movie three or four times over their lifetime instead of getting it once and just using it. So I think that's what's going on there. And the problem is that now you have other, let's say more legitimate business models whose legal viability is now in doubt because, for example, Dropbox, which is a popular service here, which people use to store stuff in the cloud or any cloud based or even YouTube. Now the question is, are these services even legal? Are they basically, you know, under the threat of a government takeover like happened to mega upload? And so if that happens, we're going to lose a huge benefit of the wonderful ability to share information that the internet provides us. And basically you are introducing my next question that is basically you say that intellectual property and corporate basically it's a humbling innovation. And basically because all these companies are basically trying to be friends of the government and to avoid people to copy their books or music, they are basically humbling innovation and they're stopping this beautiful, wonderful world that is the internet specifically. Yes, and I think there's other ways you can look at it as well. I mean, the entire justification for these laws, according to the advocates of them is that it is necessary to and promotes innovation. So because these laws are at least at first glance, they're an infringement on liberty, then you would think that the burden of proof is on these people to prove their case. And of course they have never tried to or been able to.  In fact, it looks like these things hurt innovation in several ways. It distorts innovation. I mean, for example, remixing is very frowned upon. And so lots of musical forms and movie and audio visual forms that might borrow use remixing to build upon previous styles probably never arose. So we have what we have what Bastiat talked about the scene and the unseen. I mean, we see what we have, but we don't see what we're missing in the terms of invention and innovation. You know, if you know that Apple and Microsoft and Samsung and Google have the smartphone smartphone industry locked up with an oligopoly because they have the patents. They can sue each other and make deals and settle. But small players can't enter the market because they don't have a big war chest of patents that they can use as a retaliation. And so they basically just don't even get into that area because they know that it's futile. So if a company chooses not to try to innovate and make new cell phones, then they're not innovating. So innovation is lost because companies are afraid to even try to make a product in an area. And why would you spend R&D research and development dollars on a product that you can't sell? So there's no doubt that some innovation is lost because of patents. And the other thing is it's pretty clear that these things act like a huge tax on society. And of course, when you when you rob society of wealth, then there's less means available to engage in R&D and innovation in the first place. So there's a lot of reasons to believe that these these legal systems put a damper on innovation and freedom of speech. But the thing is, sometimes when we talk, when we libertarians talk with other people that are no libertarians about these issues. And sometimes also to some other libertarians that are in favor of intellectual property. Sometimes what they say is that basically you are leaving other people to do some plagiarism on other people work. And so is there like a third way like something in between like an alternative way to see this to avoid plagiarism. But at the same time to leave people to copy work. Well, let me let in this I don't I don't know if this is a language issue or not because I have this problem even here in the US. First of all, intellectual property laws are extremely technical and complicated and it's hard to be an expert and understand them all. So you will have people confusing different types of IP quite regularly. So for example, like earlier you use copyright for something that should be patent. Now, you know, that's understandable because no, it's OK. It's just people don't really understand how these laws work. And yet they have arguments in favor of them. And so for example, plagiarism really plagiarism just means representing that you are the author of some work when you're not. And that has almost nothing to do with copyright copyright. Typically in a typical case of copyright, let's say I copy the latest Steven Spielberg movie.  You know, I just copy the exact movie and I just give it away or I sell it. If I don't describe the title, then no one will know what they're getting and they won't bother copying it. So copyright infringement doesn't require plagiarism. And plagiarism, I believe is a very minor problem because even in a copyright free world, almost no one would plagiarize because they would be a laughing stock. It's a sort of a non problem. So for example, you could tomorrow publish one of Plato's early books under your name. That doesn't violate copyright law because that is now in the public domain. But if you put, you know, Fabrizio's Republic online, who would buy it and why? Yeah. And if they did, then they might have a claim for fraud. And so to the extent you're doing it on a mass scale, you're going to be suffering a lot of damages and these problems are self-defeating. So I would say if you stick with patent and copyright, the only way that you could have that would protect it would be by private contract. And some libertarians have argued that you could create something similar to patent and copyright by using contract. Murray Rothbard suggested this might be possible to some degree and other libertarians go much, much further. But the problem is patently copyright by their nature or what's called in rim rights, their rights against property, their rights go against the whole world, whether you have a contract with them or not. Just like your right to not have your home broken into or your car stolen doesn't require you to have a contract ahead of time with the thief or the trespasser, it's just a right of good against the world. And that is how people that advocate IP view it. And there is just no way to create that with contract. You'd have to get a contract with everyone in order to keep the secret from leaking out or keep people from copying it. And furthermore, let's say we imagine a model where you publish a novel and you require everyone that downloads a copy of it from Amazon to sign an agreement saying, I promise I won't use this book in a way you don't approve of or I won't copy it or I won't share it with people. And if I do, I owe you a million dollars damages because if the damages are $10, it's not going to be really a disincentive. So who would buy a book really? What consumer would buy a book, a $10 book that is going to give them potentially a million dollars in liability and that they can't learn from and use and share with their friends? I think they would just move to the next publisher. So I think that these contractual models could never get everyone and they couldn't get many people in the first place at all. I think the solution is for people to recognize that in our world of the internet and copying that there are good things about it and bad things about it and not necessarily bad, but there are challenges to the business models of the old days that didn't exist in the past and people have to adapt. You have to accept that if you release information into the world, which you do, like let's say you release a new invention, a new product with an innovative feature. Well, you're doing that because you want to sell products and so you're going to trumpet this feature. You're going to tell your customers, this new ink pen has a great system of delivering ink, so buy me. But of course, if it's successful, then that's going to send a profit signal into the market and it's going to attract competition. That's how the free market works. And of course, you're going to have imitators and emulators and that's how competition on the free market works. So emulation and copying, which are not plagiarism, it's just imitating what people do that is popular with consumers, is going to happen and you have to realize that's what's going to happen when you start selling this product that pretty soon your profit margin is going to be eroded and you have to be prepared to keep innovating or find some way to keep your customers loyal to you. So you just have to find a way to accept the fact of copying and find other ways to make a profit. Yeah, sounds good. I agree with you completely. Now, something completely, well, not completely different, but something that is related to last month's of Republican primaries in the States. What do you think about Ron Paul and what do you think about libertarians that are trying to get into politics? Well, of course, you have to distinguish between what we call small L libertarians and big L libertarians. Capital L libertarians is a member of the libertarian party and that's the type of person that believes in or is interested in or involved in electoral politics and voting. Personally, I'm an anarchist and I don't vote and I don't see much hope for electoral politics. I don't blame some libertarians for trying that, but that said, I would say that Ron Paul has been a very unique figure in American political history and he's about as good as you could ever expect, I think, for a politician that has actually gotten elected to a significant office. He's a force grade, he's a good libertarian, he knows Austrian economics very well, but I think he has zero chance of winning and I think the best thing he's done is to introduce people to ideas of limited government and Austrian economics. Although, you know, the one negative is that his constant refrain is we have to get back to the Constitution and I agree with him that if we were to have a more strict interpretation of the Constitution, we would move in a more libertarian direction. But number one, I think that's unrealistic, the Constitution is not self enforcing, it's just a piece of paper and if you put the people in charge of enforcing it, in charge of interpreting it, then of course they're going to give it a maximal interpretation and even if we were to adhere to it to the letter, we would still have a very big, unlibertarian, central state. So I think that the one danger of talking about the Constitution is you give the state legitimacy because people say, well, you do have the right to vote and well, we do have a Constitution that does set some limits on the state. So I think the best thing he's done is to publicize these ideas and to make people realize that maybe the pro-war kind of views a lot of Americans have is not good. So I think he's a great guy but I don't see much hope in electoral politics for saving us. My view is that the only thing we can count on is a gradual enlightenment of the populace and I'm a little bit pessimistic that we can do that from just preaching to people because it hasn't worked yet but I do have some hope that economic literacy can improve over time by just by osmosis because for example the fall of communism in 1989-90 taught people something. Most people now, even if they're sort of socialistic or leftist, they know that central planning just doesn't produce prosperity. They know this. They're not fully consistent but I think the overall worldwide economic literacy went up dramatically after the fall of communism. So my hope is that with increasing prosperity over time because of the internet and technology and population growth and some countries emerging out of totalitarian states like China, that over time we will just have more and more wealth and more and more freedom for practical reasons and people will just sort of get used to that idea and gradually become more enlightened to the point where the government's legitimacy gets more and more restricted. That's my hope. But the problem is that now governments are trying to stop the internet and they're trying to control it because they understand this wonderful tool for the enlightenment of the masses. So in the future there's going to be a struggle between the freedom of the internet and the government that are trying to stop it. So I think a front line for us libertarians I think is going to be to protect the freedom of the internet. Even before, well, I wouldn't say before the real world issues but I think it's one of the front lines where we should fight the most. I agree. That's why I think it was heartening that you had this massive uprising in the U.S. over SOPA and now even ACTA and I believe even in parts of Europe now there are some protests in different countries against ACTA. In a way this is the internet seeing an error and trying to route around it. So my hope is that the government, which is incompetent if evil, will always be behind and by the time they really wake up to the threat that the internet is it will be too late for them to stop it. Maybe you'll have a dark net, maybe you'll have an underground internet which won't be as good as what we have now but it may be enough to let us outrun the state and finally outrun it all together. Yeah, probably, yeah. But there are other two kind of libertarian schools out there. The one we talked about is the Rome poll. So trying to get votes and to be voted for a presidential election and trying to change things from within the government. But there are the type of libertarians that are trying to escape from the government. Just thinking about, for example, Patrick Friedman and his institute. Seasteading. Yeah, thank you. What do you think about this strategy? Do you think it's a winner strategy or? Well, I think it's worth trying. I'm glad that people are trying and there's also some kind of experiment being tried and I think Honduras with these kind of free trade zones. They're thinking about setting up. I just don't know. I think that the ultimate problem is that the states have, they're seen as having legitimacy and they're seen as necessary by the people. And as long as that's the case, let's say the US and the Western powers will stay in power and they'll have a lot of military might. And they're only going to let these little regimes get away with so much.  Yeah, next day. So there's only so much you can get away with. So even if you have this floating island nation, I think they have to be careful not to ruffle the feathers too much of the big states. And so the more successful they are, the more dangerous, the more imperiled they are, maybe. I don't think that's, I think part of the problem with that solution also is that, and you also have something in New Hampshire in the US, the Free State Project. The problem is that the people that are able to do these things tend to be people that have less to lose.  And it's going to be a big cost to you to give up your $500,000 a year job in a big city like Houston, let's say, and move to New Hampshire where you can make $20,000 a year selling soap or whatever they do there. So the point is it's going to tend to attract people that are not always the most successful in society and maybe more marginal to some degree. I mean, I don't want to put down the people that are trying it. But I just think it's sort of internally limited and how successful it can be because of that. I mean, who's going to go move to a cruise ship just for freedom? Someone that doesn't have a lot of economic prosperity already. So I think the powerful people are always going to be the ones. It's the same reason the candidates for the Libertarian Party tend not to be the best candidates because the people that have really good political skills have more to gain from joining the Republican or Democrat Party. So I think it's worth trying, but I don't know, maybe if we can one day have space travel that's really affordable, maybe someone will just go off and start their own colony. That's the way to do it. Yeah, I hope so. Just now, the last question, and then we can finish this nice conversation. What do you think about the future of Libertarianism? Because, okay, I'm pretty young, I'm just 30, but since Libertarianism has been in the public, there's been so many changes because we know Mises Rothbard and Rand were just writing books and there was no possibility for them to spread this idea. But now, our generation has this powerful tool that is the Internet. Do you think we are existing right now only in the Internet and we are disappearing from the real world? And is this dangerous or do you understand what I'm saying? Yes, I do. I've heard those kind of criticisms of the Internet. I don't agree with them. I think that there's been a wonderful melding of the real world and the Internet. People use these social networks as part of their lives and I think there's nothing wrong with it. And I think it is the most powerful potential tool of all human history, maybe, maybe next to the printing press or something. So I think there's a lot of hope there because of that. And I also do have some hope because the young people I see today, and not just the Ron Paul types, but young people now seem to me to be more soft Libertarian than in my youth, which is only 20, 30 years ago and certainly more than 40, 50 years ago, they tend to be pretty understanding of economic freedom and also very socially tolerant, which is a soft Libertarianism. And I think they're also getting to be very resentful of all the burdens that the older generations have placed on them for the debt and social security obligations and the social welfare state. And it may take a while before the older generations die out or lose power that the younger generations can finally start to rebel, but that is my hope. I'd say the young generation is my biggest hope. And, of course, the Internet makes access to ideas of liberty at all levels, you know, popular and Lurockwell.com to Mises works to blogs and, you know, online courses and speeches makes the information more available. So I think that this is the biggest time for optimism ever. And at the same time, the state has gotten more dangerous as well. So my hope is that we keep growing and that people become, as I said, ever more economic. See, I think the only hope for humanity is that if people become economically literate, because I believe that you can never have a society unless most people are decent in their impulses. And I think most people are. If they aren't, then we're doomed and we're just going to have, you know, fighting and chaos. But I think the problem is people don't have consistency or economic literacy. If they had that combined with their natural decency, then they just wouldn't approve of most of these legal policies that we have now. So I think over time, economic literacy really is the most, um, most important thing. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I agree with you. And what about the libertarianism today? Do you think we should be able to communicate more between countries? I know that it's a shame that there is like this language barrier that sometimes limits our communication. For example, now we are using the internet and you are in Houston, I'm in London, and it's quite incredible that we are communicating right now. Thanks to the technology. Do you think we should put more efforts, we libertarians, and communicate internationally between the United States or Europe, within Europe, or even with other countries like developing countries in Asia? I do. I do. Well, I think we're doing, a lot of us are doing that already. Um, maybe we should try more, but I think it's developing nicely. I remember when I was, um, I lived in London for a while as a student. And I was just amazed by the, the, all the international students say across Europe, who because of your railing or inter railing or whatever you call it over there. Um, probably the prospect of bombing each other would be more inconceivable to them than their parents' generation. Um, so I think that's a good thing. And I think you see something like that happening on a global scale now with the internet. Um, one thing I've always loved about the libertarian movement and the Austrian movement is when I go to Auburn, Alabama for Mises functions, or when I go to Modrom, Turkey for the property and freedom society functions of Professor Hoppe. There are people from all over the world there, usually Europeans, but, you know, different nationalities. And I have never once seen any jingoism. Everyone listens to each other for their ideas. And, um, you know, if an American speaks about something, he might be the one criticizing America or if someone else is criticizing US, he doesn't get offended. And the same thing with other countries is there's almost no, um, nationalism left anymore among these, the young people interested in ideas, which I've always loved. Um, so I think we've come quite a long way, even in my lifetime, and I think it's a good thing. And I do think the internet is one of driving forces behind that now. And, you know, when you have more and more libertarians, I mean, there was only maybe a couple dozen in the world, 40, 50 years ago. Now we have so many that, you know, you could speak to me and then you can probably find a volunteer to easily transcribe the, um, you know, the lecture into Italian. And even if you can't, you could probably pay someone on some really cheap service on that you could find on one of these websites somewhere. So it's more and more possible to overcome these barriers. And plus it seems to me that English is becoming a pretty de facto second language, which I don't know if it will be English, but it seems like it is for now. I don't think it's going to be Esperanto. So it's good that there's at least there's one language most people will learn as a second language. And so they can find ways to communicate. So that's how I see it. But I think as a person, as an individual, we have an obligation to seek the truth and to try to do the right thing, even if we think it's hopeless right now. Because, you know, think of people like Mises who fought for liberty during the fascist years. And I think things are much more hopeful for us than it was for him. So we have really no excuse not to keep fighting. Yeah, not to try. Yeah. Okay, Stefan, thank you very much. It was really nice to talk with you. And hopefully now we can publish your interview in our website, LibertarianNation.org. And well, after a couple of days trying to translate this in Italian, but thank you very much and see you next time. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Good luck with your group. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Bye.