Mr. President, can you recall your feelings when you took the Oath of Office as President for the first time? Well, it won't be easy. I do recall that day with great clarity and all, but all of it, the coming to the White House first, the being taken down to the scene and then appearing before those thousands and thousands of people stretched out in the mall and it was a kind of an unreality about all of it. But it was an awareness of what it meant in my life and I mean an awareness of the importance of the occasion and at the same time a great prayer in my mind that I could meet the responsibilities. A lot of people have told us that one of your great strengths is that you had an agenda of just a few big things that you wanted to change. Can you tell me what your girls were? Well, yes. The country was in the economic doldrums, double digit inflation, great unemployment, the economy stagnating, the people in the country seemed to have lost kind of a belief in themselves and in the country. Also there was the matter of national security. On any given day, half of our military planes couldn't take off for lack of spare parts. Half of our naval vessels couldn't leave port for that or lack of crew. So I'd been determined that we had to restore the economy and I'd been asked many times in campaigning if I ran into the deficit problem because we'd been running deficit spending for almost a half a century with only a few years scattered here and there where there wasn't an annual deficit. And I would be asked questions about what would I do about national security and the spending for that in the face of a deficit and I said there I would have to choose national security. And so we set out to restore the economy. I had some definite ideas on that. One of them was a very controversial one and that is that having a degree in economics I believed and from experience in our own history that the best way to increase government revenues was to cut the taxes, not spend them, to restore incentive. And we had a wide range of tax rate cuts and it worked. There was a sizable increase in our revenues as those tax cuts took effect and there still is today. So it was to get that done and then the other in I had always believed that there was a kind of a hunger for a spiritual revival if you could call it that in our country. Not only a revival in those things of morality and family and so forth but in our nation as a whole. And we set out to do that and I hear from a great many people who say that they have now a restored belief in our country. Sometimes when you speak about the United States as moving forward as being number one when you speak about American pride that's not quite so easy for people who are not Americans to relate to. Do you ever worry about that? Well no I think there's something you have to remember about America. This is the melting pot. All of us by our way of ourselves or our ancestors or our immediate parents came to this country from some place else.  All of us still have a feeling of attachment to our original sources. And so I think that still is a part of our makeup. And it doesn't mean that we're denigrating what is happening anyplace else. It just means that we want to live up to the heritage that's been given us. You sought to create a new climate for business in those early years of the administration. Recently there have been some problems. Some of the stock market is down. Some of the business indicators, the economic indicators are not so good. How confident are you that the country is truly competitive? Well all of those things that we had to deal with there and I know I haven't explained them very well to you all the facets of it. The signs we are in the 65th month of a sustained economic expansion and that is the longest period of expansion in our nation's history. There is a thing in our country called the potential employment pool. All of those people that if they did or wanted a job are available for work. The highest percentage of that pool is employed today and has ever been true in our nation's history. So I think that never mind a stock slump or something in the market I learned in economics that there's nothing so timid as a million dollars. So that isn't a valuable or a valid sign and I think that all the signs are there from employment and the fact that we have gotten inflation under control down from the double digit figure that it was. And so I believe that our economy is on a sound basis. We went with you when you made your speech in Notre Dame for Knudrockney and you said there that manufacturing industry really was not in difficulties. At the same time it's impossible not to notice as you look around you in South Bend that have been problems. A lot of plants have moved to Mexico or abroad. Do you think that government should be doing something about restoring the competitiveness of the American industry? Well we have a program of trying to restore competitiveness because our standard of living as you know is so high that rates for production here, cost of production is higher than in a great many countries. Now that isn't something we're not going to do away with our standard of living in order to bring a bit more competitive. All we ask is a fair playing field with other nations. But I would like to point out that in this broad nation of ours average figures for the nation of course do not apply to every sector. There are going to be pockets of unemployment where let's say a plant, a manufacturing plant closed because there's no longer a market for its product. I think back to some earlier days of what happened in the companies that made buggy whips when the automobile came along. They had to find new jobs someplace and this is true. There aren't signs of actual economic decline nationwide. There are areas where they were concentrated around a particular industry and that industry has changed. In some instances it's changed because of technology that they find that they can produce with the development of machines and so forth. They've developed a way where they don't require as many employees. But we have as a result of that a mobile society. People are accustomed in this country to leaving and going to other areas. And you will find areas in this country where they're begging for employees right now in the nation's capital here. Last Sunday the local papers helped wanted ads. Those are those ads, I don't know whether you do it in England but with hundreds of advertisements on one page. Seventy-four full pages last Sunday, employers looking for employees. In general over the past eight years in the United States as any other time there have been winners and there have been losers. How do you feel yourself about the losers? I think that anyone who is faced with need and true no fault of his own or her own, yes government can play a part in helping them. My criticism and one of the things that we sought to change and are still seeking to get changed in the nature of welfare reform is that it's one thing to help someone to once again become self-sustaining. And it's another thing when government then introduces a welfare program that actually preserves the jobs for the bureaucrats and makes the dependence of that individual permanent rather than seeking to bring them out of that to where they can earn their own livelihood. You mentioned the budget and the budget deficit earlier Mr. President. It was surely one of your clearest mandates when you were elected to balance the budget. The United States is now the biggest definition in the world. How do you feel about that? Well I'm just as critical of it as I was before I got here. I knew of course the budget by that time was a trillion dollars. And I knew that there was no way that you could balance the budget in one year without pulling the rug out from under any number of institutions. But I said that we must set out to get us on a downward path to where we could look ahead and see a date certain that we would be balanced. And at that point also I advocated an amendment to our constitution that would make permanent the necessity of a balanced budget. But the budget had been getting out of control for a number of years as I said earlier. We hadn't been balancing it for more than half a century. Now what happened back about 15 years before 1980, the middle 60s, President Johnson's administration adopted a program called a War on Poverty. And it was a great program of government programs, help and so forth, one kind or another. Poverty won in that war because beginning in 1965 to 1980 in those 15 years the budget of the United States government multiplied to almost five times what it had been. The budget deficit multiplied to 52 times what it had been. So when we came here it was built in to the structure and it has just kept on doing this and our fight with the legislature in all these years has been to continue working at the cuts that would bring this down to the day in which we could balance it. In general are you frustrated by the difficulties that any president has with working with the Congress when it's controlled by the other party? Yes, there are some frustrations and I don't know whether it's one party alone. There has always been a kind of a contest there and you can go back over the years and see where Congress has sought to restrain some of the constitutional powers of the president and that has continued and there are some areas in which they have restricted the president and restricted him in such a way that I think it acts against the best interests of the country. Do you feel that as president you're losing that battle with the Congress? Well, we've more or less held our own. There may be some things here or there where they have increased their attempt to control but the fight goes on. Many people would never have believed back in 1981 that you would be flying to Moscow, that you would be negotiating with the Soviet leadership and even apparently getting on quite well with the Soviet leadership. When did you decide, when did you feel like change your mind about negotiating with the Soviets? No, I have always felt that there should be negotiation. I've always felt that that was the answer, not an eventual war as so many people I think have built into their thinking that it's inevitable some day, that kind of contest but you have to remember when I first came here in the first few years I was here the Soviet leaders kept dying on me. I met with some but not in the sense that we've met now, well with this present leader. Yes, we will be having the fourth summit when I go to Moscow but I came here with a belief that what was needed was realism and strength. The realism meaning don't be lured into a détente because it sounds good or to make a treaty in which you shake hands and yet you know that the evils are still going on. Realism was to make evident that I had a clear view of what the differences were. Strength was in the building up of our defense structure and some things such as when I came here they had leveled or aimed at Europe and the great targets of Europe, the intermediate range nuclear missiles. There was no counter weapon in Europe against that. The NATO nations had asked this country prior to my arrival for us to provide a counter weapon and so it fell to me to begin the installation of those. The Soviet Union protested about our installing these weapons and I offered an alternative. I said look we're willing to not put those weapons in there if you will eliminate yours. Let's have a zero zero agreement between us and those weapons. Well they walked away from the table, they wouldn't even discuss it. We went ahead and installed the weapons and one day they came back and said they'd like to talk zero zero with us and I think this was another evidence that strength, you have to deal from strength. Do you still think of the Soviet Union as an evil empire? I have to because of the many things that are being done there to their own people not just to other countries where they have sought to influence them and make them communist allies but in looking at their own people, in denying people the right to practice religion. In the virtually taking away of the children from the family with regard to its raising and its education, all of the things of that kind, the person whose career can be destroyed in the Soviet Union simply if he expresses a desire to emigrate and suddenly he's among the downtrodden and the unemployed, the labor camps for political prisoners that are there just simply because they don't agree with some of the government's policies and yes I find that evil. I think that they are still violating many of the principles that they agreed to in the Helsinki Pact with regard to human rights. Many of your closest conservative supporters are troubled by your arms control policy. They're afraid that it really could seriously put the security of the United States and of the West at risk. What do you say to them? I say to them they don't know what they're talking about. I have said many times a nuclear war cannot be won and should never be fought. I was very interested to hear the foreign minister of the Soviet Union repeat those words himself not too long ago. Now the present power, the policy that existed when I came in called the Mutual Assured Destruction was a policy based on both of us having enough nuclear weapons that if the other one started a war with nuclear weapons you could retaliate. Well what kind of a defense is that in a nuclear war how could there be a victor? Where do they live after those nuclear weapons have exploded all over the country and made it radioactive? The people who once lived in Chernobyl still can't go back there to live because of the poison. So my feeling is that we start eliminating these nuclear weapons and getting rhythm but I am also very determined that after the present treaty before we proceed any further with such as the tactical battlefield weapons then we must negotiate before we do that we must negotiate a reduction of the conventional weapons down to parity to make sure that one country won't have an advantage over the other. Why have you insisted on keeping the capability to build a strategic defense initiative as opposed to deter? Because that is the ultimate way to get rid of nuclear weapons, to make them obsolete. If you have to face shooting them with no knowledge as to whether you can get one through to its target then why go on with those costly weapons? And I asked in the very beginning I'm not a scientist but I had brought in our people and our military leaders and I said is it worthwhile, is it possible to look and see if there cannot be developed a defensive weapon? There's been one for every other offensive weapon since history began, a defensive weapon that could actually intercept those missiles as they came out of their silos on their way. They came back to me after talking all over and said yes they think this is worth investigating. We have made great progress now. We know that we are on the way to such a defensive program and I have never considered a bargaining chip to give away and return for eliminating a certain number of missiles. My thought is that once such a thing is proven practical then we can all take a look at our nuclear weapons and say we don't need these anymore. In fact I've told General Secretary Gorbachev that if and when we were able to establish there is such a weapon we know they've been working on such a thing for 15 years longer than us but if we should get it first I'd be willing to share the information with them to hasten on the basis that we all get rid of our nuclear weapons. Are you afraid that I'm sorry that's wonderful Mr. President it's just the right bank for us. I can understand the argument for the strategic defense but isn't there a danger that insisting on SDI would miss a historic opportunity of doing a deal with the Soviets on ballistic missiles. Well no it seemed perhaps that way when at Reykjavik when we finally found ourselves agreeing completely on the eventual elimination of all of the weapons and then the General Secretary put the price on that as our stopping the development of SDI so I came home. Well we're now back negotiating on a treaty to cut in half the strategic ballistic missiles. Many people in Europe perhaps illogically are afraid both that SDI might be a sign of a weakening American commitment because the United States could defend itself but also that arms control agreements would also be a sign of a weakening commitment. What do you say to those people. Well I have said it to them I have met with our NATO allies and all of them and made it plain exactly what I see as the goals not for just us but for all of us all of them too and I think they see now they had a I can understand it they'd been led to believe that maybe this nuclear umbrella which was part of the basis for NATO was going to be eliminated and leave them facing that gigantic conventional force there and I convinced them that no that we had nothing of that kind in mind and that there would have to be the inclusion of conventional weapons as we went further in any any agreements and I think they are all very satisfied now because that is our first line of defense. Before we leave the subject of nuclear weapons can you say something about the personal burden of being president in a nuclear age. How conscious are you of the fact that that decision is ultimately yours. Well I think you are conscious of what could happen and you certainly wouldn't want to be presiding when such a thing takes place but I have always felt it's you are in you aren't you don't become president you are given temporary custody over an institution called the presidency and with that go some responsibilities and if you were willing to raise your hand and say I do so help me God the time inauguration why you have to accept that these are now your responsibilities. Do you literally lose sleep over those responsibilities. No I sleep pretty well after I've said my prayers. What do you understand by what is called the Reagan doctrine. The Reagan doctrine was based on the recovery of that economic slump that we were in and putting it on a firm basis such as the reductions in tax and so forth to put doing that. It was also based on my belief that one of the great strengths of America is that it is a federation of sovereign states and our constitution from the beginning provided certain rights and laws that belong to the state level where they were in charge and over the years again the Congress had passed bills that invaded that right and was taking more and more federal power to where it almost looked as if the federal government was trying to make the states just administrative districts of the federal government so I had pledged also a return to this federal system and we have been working at that there was also a part of that was as I said earlier this need for the people to once again recognize their responsibility as citizens because our constitution is different from most all of those in the rest of the world in that it is not a document in which the government says what the people can do ours says we the people tell you the government what you can do and I wanted to restore all of that so that was part of it including the dealing with the nations abroad and seeking to help wherever we could developing nations throughout the world to understand democracy and to choose democracy and free enterprise as their as their path. Mr. President perhaps one of the worst crises of your presidency arose over what's called the Iran Contra affair what what was the driving force behind that? It is something that with all of the investigations by the committees and the special investigators and so forth has been completely missed overlooked and distorted we have been trying for a long time behind the scenes to bring about peace between Iran and Iraq we knew that we were not the favorite people of the Homeini because of our relationship previous to that with the Shah now we knew also that well let me put it this way it started with this by way of a third country in the Middle East we were informed there were some representatives of Iran not of the government who wanted to make contact with the United States to see if they could not establish a better relationship and they put it on the basis if you remember at that time not too long ago we were hearing every day that the Homeini's days were numbered and that he might not live out the week and these people were representative of one of the factions which are still there within that country as to who's going to be in charge when he is gone this third country recommended them said their credentials were honest so we accepted and we sent some people had to be a covert operation because if they were discovered they'd be executed and after our people had met with them for a time and that we too would like to have that better relationship they made the proposal that they would have more confidence in our people were meeting with them because there was no one like the Secretary of State or anything of that kind not to have a covert operation you couldn't do that that that would convince them that these people they were talking to were able to contact the top of government here and represented the top of government and they put out that that if they would sell them literally what amounted to a token force it didn't change any balance between Iran and Iraq of those missiles those tow missiles this would reassure them but also it said it would strengthen them in the coming factionalism about taking over the government because they would present these to the military not the revolutionary militia but to the military and this would give them a prestige and they would have to have the help of the military now this was presented to us I told our people over there that we had a policy that we could not do business with any country that supported terrorism which Iran does they made a pretty good case for themselves that any government of theirs would not support terrorism and finally I said there is a pretty good way they could establish that if we do the thing with the weapons we've got some hostages held by the Hezbollah which we know has a relationship with Iran and would they use their influence to see if they could free our hostages now this was what happened and I okayed the shipment which was I'm legally entitled to do as president to not to the kidnappers to these people and when some of our people said well it's good to look like arms for hostages I said wait a minute if your child was kidnapped and you didn't believe in paying ransom but you found there was an individual that you believed had the power to get your child back you wouldn't mind doing something for that individual and that was the basis upon which this was done. In view of the way things worked out do you regret taking that decision? Well I regret one thing some of the people in the cabinet when we talked about it who opposed it never opposed it on the ground that it was arms for hostages they said if it ever becomes known it will be made to look like we had traded arms for hostages well they were right that's exactly what has happened and the media has helped in that and sold the opponents of our program but I don't know you can't sit by when you know that you've got citizens of your country who are held in savage captivity by barbarians of that type and here was a plan and I would call your attention that before this thing was made public two hostages had been released and I was told that there were two more coming out in 48 hours well they never got out because someone getting wind of this in Iran tipped off a scandal sheet over there in Beirut and they published it and then our press took it up went wild with it and it was known and distorted and it was then that I found out a number of things that had been kept I had not known but I am the one who went before the press here and before the Congress and told them what the plan had been and now what we had just discovered about the extra money and so forth we had gotten our 12 million dollars for the two missiles and it was only when this scandal broke that I discovered that there was more money in a Swiss bank account someone had raised the price on the missiles. Mr President as you look back on your years in this office what do you think has been your greatest achievement? Sometimes I think just staying alive but no seriously I think that we have as I said earlier about the economy we have implemented a number of the things that we set out to do. There are some things we haven t achieved yet that I still think are a part of this whole program but I guess I m most proud of the change in attitude in the part of the people and evident among our young men. Do you know that when I came here most of our people in uniform young men in uniform they wouldn t go into town in their uniforms on a Saturday night they changed in civilian clothes and I came here with a mission I took up with the military as to how to restore a pride in the uniform so that they would be proud to wear that uniform go down the street and let people that passed them on the street be able to say a kind word to them when they saw that uniform and that has happened. One of my greatest prides is to has to do with the young men and women in uniform in our military. They are all volunteers they re the highest level of intelligence and education that we ve ever had in our military. Mr President throughout your career and I d like to ask you a few questions about the other stages of it at the moment but you seem to have a consistent knack of being good at persuading people to agree with you to believe with you. What is the knack of this salesmanship? Well maybe it s because clear back when I was governor of California I issued an order to my cabinet and to all the people around me I issued the same order here that no decisions would be based on the political ramifications. We would make a decision to do or not to do something based on is it good for the people and I have stuck to that and I think that s it. It isn t any time that I go running and saying hey we must have this because it ll be politically helpful no. We ve stuck with that and maybe that s part of why I have some success in persuading them.  What? Do you think of yourself as a politician? No, ex-actor. How important is Mrs Reagan s advice being to you in this job? Well I want to tell you that this is a help meet such as I think every man dreams of having a relationship that sort of matches your dreams of marriage when you were an adolescent but she doesn t as the so many people in the media have tried to intimate she doesn t come down and get involved in affairs like disarmament or anything else. She does what she advises me and what she thinks is good for me and I feel free to confide in her on the things that are going on and then at the same time she is the I think one of the finest unpaid employees of the government because as a first lady she isn t an employee but what she has done with regard to the drug program nationwide and how she continues to work with that and a few other interests of hers. She is a tremendous help as a matter of fact she s a help just by my knowing that she s up there for when I go to meet her at the end of the day. Keeping dogging your footsteps we went among other things to Dixon and found it a lovely place to talk to a lot of people who had known you. Can you say something about what values you acquired or learned in Dixon that have helped you in a political career? Oh my goodness yes you know I ve often thought that our children were born and we tried to raise them under a handicap. We lived in a large city and I ve often thought that there s something out there in small town America rural America that where you know everyone and are known by everyone in the community that is different than being anonymous in a large city and being able to go down the street and no one knows who you are cares. We were not well off as a matter of fact we were poor by any standard but I never knew a time when my mother wasn t finding someone in the community that was worse off than we were and she was helping them. Did your mother specifically plant the ambition of a public career in your mind? No as a matter of fact without her knowing it she planted in my mind the first ambition the entertainment world. She had been in a hometown talent or home town talent club that put on plays in the small town and she gave readings I don t think that goes on anymore but would be invited to go to a club meeting and so forth and then recite whether it was comic or dramatic or whatever and when I was a little boy she kind of got me interested in memorizing things that s why I could recite the Jacqueline or the Robert W s service a couple of those poems but I had two great interests in my education in addition to getting an education and they were athletics playing in the athletic teams and being in the entertainments in the class plays and the drama club plays and so forth and even though I got my degree in economics when I got out of college and was forced in the depths of the depression to face up to what did I really want to do I realized it was in some part of the world of entertainment. The Democrats in California used to say you were only an actor. Do you think being an actor actually helped in a public career? Yes, very definitely. Actually I did not suddenly change and say I want to be a politician. I made a speech I always believed that you have to pay your way so in Hollywood if you don t sing or dance you wind up as an after dinner speaker and so I was out on the mashed potato circuit quite a bit. I always did my own speeches and talked on what I was interested in and this led to my making a speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater in his presidential campaign that was played on national television and as a result of that speech a group of prominent party members came to me before the 1966 governor race in California and claimed that I was the only one who could bring the party together it was quite divided and split up and win the election and I thought they were crazy and I said no you pick someone else and I ll campaign for them do that. Well they kept after us till pretty soon Nancy and I couldn t sleep we thought well what if they re right and we live with ourselves if we keep saying no and finally I made a proposal to them that I would go out on a circuit throughout the state of speaking making speeches and come back and tell them whether they were right or wrong and I came back and told Nancy that I thought maybe they were right so I finally gave in and you know I was well into the campaign before I realized that I wouldn t be back in show business by November when the election time came suddenly dawned on me I might win and that was the end of show business for me. Before that when you were with the screen actors guild in Hollywood you encountered the evidence of just how strong left wing influence was there how important was that to changing your political ideas. Well I don t know that it changed my political ideas so much as it did give me a real understanding of the communist menace. I had been on the board of directors of the screen actors guild and I came back from the service after four years in World War II and back to the board and discovered that something was going on in Hollywood and there are some 43 unions in the motion picture business and some of them had were way off on a tangent and they called a jurisdictional strike. Now this was not a fight with management this was a fight that they believed that another union was doing the work that they should be doing and it threatened to close down the motion picture industry well the responsibility hit the screen actors guild if we aligned ourselves in that strike with the other side the picture business would close you can t have a picture business if you haven t got anyone in front of the camera and I made a motion in the board that we inject ourselves into this fight by inviting both sides and management to sit down at a table with us as the third party the neutral party to see if we couldn t find a peaceful solution and it was out of this meeting every day for months that I learned what was going on and I was helped along when pretty soon some of the people from our own FBI made contact because of what they saw I was doing then I d become president of the screen actors guild and they came wanting some advice some findings from me on people that I had dealt with and so forth and I got an insight into what was happening to the motion picture business and I set out to do everything I could to stop that kind of takeover of organizations like that and we won in a sense is that what you re trying to do on a world scale well I never got over realizing I could recognize the signs and that was one of the reasons why I said that just as they were doing this but they were doing it in the mean in the way of not trying to convince the people but in having a takeover at the top just like their own country is and I said why don t we spread the word about democracy to these emerging countries so that they will know there s an alternative to this other what were you just going to ask? I was going to ask you about the day that you were shot at the Hilton Hotel and what your feelings were then because I think in a way Mr. President that was one of the moments that solidified your popularity in the country the way you dealt with all of that I think it was a crucial thing and do you agree? The only unique thing I think about that was that I got all the way to the hospital and walked into the emergency room and when the nurse came to meet me I said I m having trouble breathing I didn t know I d been shot. That s extraordinary. I thought when the Secret Service man jumped on my back after throwing me into the car that he d done the damage. Yeah I thought he d broken a rib and then when I started to spit blood I thought that the rib had punctured a lung. Yeah that s amazing and when were you first to wear what had happened? When they got my clothes peeled off of me including cutting off a suit that I was wearing for the first time a brand new suit they found up here the wound under my arm where the bullet had hit me there and I was not aware of it. What had happened is the bullet carried off the side of the car as I was coming to the car went through the space between the door the the hinge space and caught me right here. Your microphone is off and the producer would love to get this in the program could you just mind starting to the beginning of the story it s a great story we just wanted to try again. What did I say? Can we just have a minute to do that? When I said the last question there they stopped. I m sorry. Oh my goodness yes. Mr President I wonder if you d tell us about the day when you were shot at the Hilton Hotel. Well I think the most unique thing about that was that I heard what I thought was firecrackers and the next thing I knew was Secret Service man standing behind me literally picked me up and threw me head first and dived me into the car the door waiting there and I got in the car and he got in behind me the door was closed and we started away and suddenly I felt the most awful pain that you could imagine and I hadn t felt it up till then. I didn t feel a bullet hit me or anything and I said to the agent who was in the car with me I said I think you broke a rib when you jumped in on top of me and just then I coughed and I had a handful of frothy blood and I said and I think the rib broken rib was punctured along and he by this time was telling the driver George Washington Hospital and we were on our way well I finished off my handkerchief with the blood and I finished off his because I kept coughing and it kept getting more difficult to breathe we got to the emergency and I got out and walked into the emergency ward and the nurse came to meet me and I said I m having trouble breathing and just about that time my knees began to get rubbery the next thing I knew I was on a gurney and it wasn t until I cut my clothes off of me which included a brand new suit I was wearing for the first time and then found the wound back up here where it had gone in the pain had come when it had hit that seventh rib and the pain came when it glanced off the rib and then went on down through my lung and ended about an inch from my heart and that was about the time then that they told me I had been shot. I hadn t known it. Thank you. Be careful of the wires.


One of the unfortunate things about the Linux community is there are a lot of people in our community that love to hate on certain projects. And sometimes they like to throw unnecessary hate at certain projects. For example, snap packages. Snap packages. There's a lot of things to be critical about snap packages because I have some complaints about snap packages. You know, I could list some of the reasons that or some of the areas I think canonical could improve with snap packages. But I don't go out of my way to nitpick and find things that are not really issues with snap packages and then try to make a big deal about it. For example, one of the biggest complaints I see on the internet about snap packages is the fact that it pollutes your list block command, the LSBLK command at the command line, which lists all your drives, all your partitions on your system. And snap packages are actual mounted file systems on your computer. So when you do a LSBLK, every snap package installed on your system is part of the output now of LSBLK. And a lot of people just lose their minds about that because I guess they find that just distracting that, you know, if I do a LSBLK, you know, these first 19 lines here, these loopback devices, those are all snap packages that are installed on my system. Let me zoom in a little bit so you guys can see that.  And you're typically not going to have snaps installed when you're doing all of that initially when you're doing a base arch install. So you're never going to see this stuff. I guess some people have a need to run the LSBLK command all the time. I don't know why, but if you did and it bothered you that these loopback devices were here, LSBLK has a flag. If I do LSBLK-E for exclude, give it a number and the number needs to be this major number. You see the loopback devices are all seven. So just exclude seven and run the LSBLK with that flag and that number. And now it just has my actual devices, right? These are all of my SSD drives and partitions here, right? Without any of the mounted snaps. So for you guys, one of your biggest complaints about snap packages is the LSBLK command. Just use the exclude flag and you know what, set up an alias for it, right, if it bothers you. I don't want to have to type dash e space seven because that's four extra characters I have to type now thanks to them dang snap packages, right? Just make a bash alias for it. Another criticism that people often talk about is the speed of snaps, which I understand snaps. Some snaps are slow. I've experienced this, oddly enough, I only ever experienced that on Ubuntu because Ubuntu has snap packages already installed out of the box on their recent versions. And some of those programs that they install as snap packages for whatever reason do tend to load slow. But oddly enough on Arch Linux, ArchBase Linux distributions where I've installed snaps such as Arco Linux here in front of me and Manjaro and Endeavor, other Arch based systems. I never really experienced those slow snap packages. For example, one of the most common programs that I tell people to install is snap packages is a game called ZeroAD and ZeroAD I've installed it as a snap many times on various systems and it just launches. It launches like a native package, like it just comes up, right?  If I do a snap list on my system, let's see what snaps are installed. I don't have very much installed, but here is a good graphical program. The snap store, which is basically just the GNOME software center, although it connects to snap craft and lists all the snap packages, right? So if I do snap dash store, let's launch that and wait a second. I mean, it launched almost immediately, right? We had that loading screen up front, but that was it syncing, I guess, the repos for snap craft so we can actually tell us what software is available. But that application, that application window came up almost immediately, right? I mean, as soon as I hit enter, let's do that, right? It's up, right? So I understand that's not for every snap package, right? There are some that are slow, but again, I think a lot of people complain about the speed and many of them probably have never even used snap packages. I see this, there's way too many people that complain about snaps and I get the feeling that a lot of these people don't really know what they're talking about. They haven't actually used this stuff. Now I will say some of my complaints with snap packages because I do have some complaints. I do think, again, Ubuntu, for whatever reason, does snaps worse than their distributions? Like some of the recent versions of Ubuntu I've taken a look at on the channel, you know, some of their applications launch very slowly. I don't know what they're doing with their snaps that other distributions aren't doing, but Ubuntu snaps do tend to be a little slower. I don't know why. The other thing that has really put people off with Ubuntu in particular is the fact that they're installing snaps by default, which I don't have a problem with that.  It's their distribution. They can do that.  I had a problem with that because it's almost like you're tricking people where they think they're they think they're installing a native package. But what they're getting is a snap package. I didn't like that personally, but really the only real complaint, the legitimate complaint that people should have with snap packages is the fact that the snap store, the snap servers are proprietary closed source, right? Canonical controls those things. They're the only ones that have control of that thing. And that really prevents it from ever gaining widespread adoption, right? When we talk about snaps, flat packs, app images, flat packs and app images are going to have much wider distribution among various Linux distributions, because most Linux distributions are not going to want to install snaps when they have no control over the server, right? All of that is locked down. Canonical owns it. It's closed source proprietary. And I think that's that's a big deal. And that's something that Canonical should fix. They should open source the whole thing. And I've said that many times over the years. But again, just because I have that complaint with snap packages and honestly, they're not my favorite packaging format, I would prefer to use app images if I can find an app image or maybe even flat pack compared to snap.  So now I've got to make up stuff, make up reasons to hate it. Oh, it's slow. Oh, the LSBL command has too much stuff in it. I can't read that extra 30 lines of loopback devices in the LSBL command. I'm going to lose my mind. No, I don't need to do that. And you guys don't need to do that, too.  And I don't want you guys to do that. So when you see somebody, especially complain about that LSBLK problem, give them the dash E flag or just tell them to read the man page. And before I go, I need to thank a few special people, Devon Gabe James Matt, Michael Mitchell, Paul Scott, Wes Allen, Armoredrack, and Chuck Commander, Angrie Diochai, Dylan George, Lee, Lennox, Ninja Maxim, Mike Erion, Alexander, Peter Arsham, Fodor, Polytech, Red Prophet, Steven, Willie, these guys. They're my high steered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this episode would not have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. It's just me and you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and open source technology, please subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right guys, peace. You can even install Emacs as a snap.


Item number SCP-1432 Object Class Euclid Special Containment Procedures Recovered instances of SCP-1432 are to be placed in a filing cabinet in the containment chamber. A standard television set and DVD player are provided for testing purposes. Personnel are not permitted to remove instances of SCP-1432 from the containment chamber for any reason. Police station communications are to be monitored for murders involving an unusual DVD. In the event of such a report, a recovery team will be sent in to retrieve any instances of SCP-1432 and any individuals potentially exposed to SCP-1432's effects. A D-Class personnel is to be a suspected instance of SCP-1432 as an entirety and then be evaluated for indications of SCP-1432's effects. Following testing, any individual affected by SCP-1432 is to be reclassified as a D-Class personnel in place of solitary confinement. Testing for instances of SCP-1432 that have been posted online must be conducted on a regular basis. Such instances of SCP-1432 must be eliminated immediately and their IP address traced is possible. Description SCP-1432 is a 17-minute silent video sequence which has been found on numerous generic DVDs in a variety of locations within the United States. The sources of these DVDs currently remain unknown. DVDs are placed in the mailbox of individuals apparently selected at random. The video sequence consists of an abnormally large doll pursuing a young Caucasian female in a short white dress in high-heeled shoes through a series of rooms and corridors with disparate levels of lighting. The size of the doll is inconsistent over the course of the film with the doll being portrayed as larger or smaller in order to fit through different areas, although the doll has never shown changing size. Near the end of the sequence, the doll corners the young woman in a large high ceiling room. There is then a break in the video for 44 seconds before the female's body is seen lying motionless on the floor of the room. The camera gradually moves up the body to reveal if the doll's head has replaced the female's head on the body, at which point the video ends. Subjects viewing at least 5 minutes of this video sequence will experience the effect of SCP-1432. SCP-1432 causes subjects to believe that both they themselves and all other humans and animals are artificially constructed dolls. Subjects believe that both their bodies and key characteristics of their personality or extreme cases of their entire personality have been artificially constructed by an unknown being or group of beings. This effect has proven immune to all anesthetics currently in the Foundation's possession. This effect will result in clinical depression at approximately 89% of subjects. In addition, 73% of subjects will attempt to kill at least 100 individuals. If successful, they will then systematically dismember and or disembowel the corpse of those they have killed in an effort to prove to others that they are all artificially constructed toys. Non-psychopathic subjects will exhibit intense emotional distress during this occurrence, but will invariably believe that this distress has been implanted in their personality by their creators. It is currently unclear whether this compulsion to kill others is a direct effect of exposure to SCP-1432 or a natural psychological reaction to SCP-1432's actual effect. The initial instance of SCP-1432 was recovered from a police station in ██████, Ohio, on November 5, ██████, following a police report that a 12-year-old male, hereafter referred to as Subject-1432-01, had murdered and disemboweled both of his parents in reviewing a DVD. The Foundation recovered the DVD in Subject-1432-01, who was reclassified as a D-Class personnel after several interviews and extensive testing. Interviewed, Subject-1432-01, Interviewer-Researcher ████ forward, this interview was the first conducted with Subject-1432-01 following the subject's initial containment. Begin log Please state your name and age. I'm 12 years old. Very good. Now you believe that you're an artificial toy? Is that correct? I am. You are. Everyone. Everyone I met is. Probably everyone is. I don't know. I… It's okay. As you were a toy. I watched a video, don't remember much of it, about a doll I think or something, but after that I knew.  How could I not have seen it sooner? Everyone was. Everyone. Just toys. Everything I felt. That time I hit a home run for the first time, my love for my parents, my dog, all just someone playing with their toys. But if you didn't think like this until after you saw the video, don't you think it's possible the video could have made you feel this way? Affected your mind somehow? Subject exhibit signs of anger? No. The guy who made the video, he was warning people, don't you get it? He figured it out, and he wanted other people to know. Because people need to.  It's okay, I understand. So did you try to tell your parents about what you found out? Subject exhibit signs of extreme emotional distress? I… I did. They didn't believe me. I kept explaining it to them, but they just didn't understand. I… They… I… Had to show… Showed someone. I had to let people know. I… The only way was to… It could have just been anyone else. I wouldn't get the opportunity like I did with them, but… I understand. You had to do what you thought was right. Subject exhibit signs of extreme emotional distress? They're so smart. They know… They know the only way you find out is to show people what's really inside. So they put in this. They… They program you so that you don't. They make it so hard. It was… All those memories. But I had to. I… I… I know. It's okay. Subject continues to exhibit signs of extreme emotional distress? I'm a good person, right? I had to. I really did.  It will be alright eventually. I promise. End log. Closing statement. Subject was escorted back to sleeping quarters. Researcher… Subsequently requested and received a Class C amnestic.


All right, we will get started. Did you guys have a good conference? It's a biased audience, like I always say. The ones who didn't have not stuck around. Yeah, I mean, just wanted to thank everyone for coming in and making this a great experience. I think the speakers, again, everyone did a fantastic job in keeping the audience engaged. I know Woody had a challenge during his first session, but he kept going. And people really appreciated that. So I think the feedback, generally, from the sessions has been very positive. And I want to thank all the speakers for doing a wonderful job traveling all the way. The volunteers did a fantastic job making sure the sessions were running on time. I think that's, again, something we really take pride in in terms of keeping the time and not letting the whole thing snowball. So I think everyone did a fantastic job. And last but not the least, all the attendees, I think you guys supported us, made sure, even when things were not perfect, you kind of took it as your own conference and tried to run it, so kind of greatly appreciated. And of course, our wonderful sponsors who've helped us put this event together want to thank them as well. I think we have folks from Zoho, Lean Wisdom, ThoughtWorks, and PM Power Consulting. So again, thank you all for the wonderful support in supporting this conference. Again, I keep saying we don't do a lot for the sponsors, but hopefully you did get some value and would continue to support the conference in the coming year. And of course, like I've said, next year is the 20th year, and everyone's expecting something spectacular. So I was suggesting that we do the conference outside India. That wouldn't be fun. A lot of speakers come to India because they like the Indian food, the Indian people, and the Indian tradition and things like that. So that's going to get missed. So we'll keep that. So I think, again, the plan is to keep the next conference again in March time frame that's originally when Agile India used to be running. So we moved it this year on a short notice, but we want to move so that we can continue it in March. And then there's some predictability for people saying, yes, March is when the event is, and they can plan things around it. Before I get into announcing some winners of some contests and stuff like that, if there are any questions still unanswered for you folks, I know someone was asking me, how do I become a volunteer for the conference? So every year when we announce the conference, we call out for program committee members, and we also call for volunteers who can come help us run the event. So since you've all been part of this event, for sure you will get an email from our side. It also, if you're following us on any social media, you'd also see it over there. So for sure you would kind of know when the next event is happening, and we would be doing the call for the program committee, the call for proposals as well. This time we had very little time, so we couldn't actually do the call for proposals. We ended up selecting speakers mostly from our own past experience, but next year we'll go back to using the open submission and doing call for proposals from there. So you have opportunity to participate in the conference on multiple fold, one is by submitting proposals to speak at the conference, being part of the program committee to help select, give feedback to the speakers, improve their proposals, and lastly by volunteering at the conference and helping us run the show and making sure it continues to be a good show for everyone. Cool, so that was one question I think folks had. Any other questions that are not answered yet? Everything's answered, okay, cool. I think I just wanted to then quickly announce the winners of the contest that Lean Wisdom folks were running. So I think they had a certification voucher worth 50,000 rupees contest running. Yesterday I think they had two winners, Senthil Kumar from Ford and Rohit from Z Omega. I don't know if you were around. And today they had Kiran from Prakati Private Limited and Balaji Rao from PP. These are the two folks that won the contest today. Are they around? Oh, your colleagues, okay. I thought you won the contest. Cool, did Zoho have any announcements to be made? You've already distributed all the prizes in. So the enterprise plan for the Zoho sprints, so if anyone's interested, they can still avail the offer. Cool, all right. With that, I think there's not much, so we can all go back, continue. Hopefully you'll take some lessons back from here and come back next year to tell us how that's helped improve things back at your company. That's one thing that, at least I'm very proud of, that every year we hear from people that they learn stuff from here, they've tried something, they maybe invented some of their own stuff, and then they come back and share that with us. So that's what keeps the community growing and learning from each other and we wanna keep that spirit going. So we'd appreciate to, and would love to hear what were your takeaways and how you've tried to implement them at work. Cool, does anyone want to share a story from something that they learned and tried? Just as an example, from past few years, some lot of familiar faces trying to put someone on spot. Siddharth? I mean, while I could share stories from the past, I'd like to share something from this conference, like from yesterday or the day before. Jules had this talk about, particularly we were doing retrospectors and how you can sort of, yes, thank you. Sorry, I didn't know if she was here or not. But she had a very interesting talk about how you could, if you want to do retrospector, how do you move forward? So how do you think about, okay, what is the best possible path that you could? And what is the worst possible future that you could find yourselves? Which is very different, we were doing retrospectors for what I had done. And we were in the actual act of doing a retrospective and my colleagues and I, we actually tried Jules's technique and I thought it was significant improvement on what we were trying to do before. And I don't know what will come out of it, but the retrospective that we did was super useful in my opinion. So that's a story from the day before yesterday. So good evening folks. So I'm from Zoho, I'm Kritika. So we've been associated with Agile India since 2018. So the very reason why we do it every year or we try our best to be a part of this event is, you know, irrespective of how many attendees attend the event, it is all about the quality of conversations that you engage with, right? So that is always been great with Agile India. So I'll have to always give the credits for that. So that's something that I would like to share with all of you. And also I really enjoyed Mr. Richard's workshop on team transformation. And I just wanted to share one point about that. Personally, I'm just taking back the team transformation canvas with me and I wanna put that one into practice very desperately because there are a lot of cultural factors that, you know, might have an influence on how you work or how you build a team's emotional intelligence, right? So in India, especially me being from South India, I can very confidently tell that, you know, we have this tendency to romanticize a few things. At the same time, normalize a lot of things, right? So we do not talk about the personal issues or issues at workplace very openly or very transparent. We don't do it. You know, most of the teams or most of the businesses in the corporate culture, it's mostly work-driven or output-driven, right? So you just tend to overlook a lot of things like, you know, it could be your mental health that is having, that is just putting you into a bad light that day or it is just not your day. But, you know, you are in this constant frame of mind where you think, oh, what is my manager gonna think about me or is it going to put me into the bad light if I'm just coming up by myself and the public or whatever it is, right? So this specific workshop that Mr. Richard did, it is all about, you know, showing you and, you know, I would not want to say the system's hypothetical or something. I really wish we live in this ideal world where we are just filled with all non-judgmental, healthy, you know, corporate folks where you just tend to discuss issues very transparently because we emote in different ways. If it's just not your day, people emote in very different ways. So one could be an introvert or one could be an extrovert or one could be an ambivert. You never know, your peer wouldn't know. How would you actually signal it out, you know? Not everyone is very vocal about what they think. So that specific workshop was something like, ah, this could work, man. So, you know, so I just really want to put that into practice and I would highly recommend teams here or, you know, I'm just here to just spread that word or I'm just here to recommend that workshop to more people.  So we'll have to do it on a routine and we must normalize speaking up for ourselves actually at workplaces. We must normalize talking about mental health issues at workplace. We must normalize being not okay at work and we must normalize being okay with not being so productive all the time and we must normalize having failures as well, right? It's not going to be always our day. It's not going to be always our time, right? And I think when the world starts normalizing that it's going to be everyone's day, right? And with that note, I would just like to sign off and thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Krutika, very well said. And we've become an evangelist for the session. So that's great. Thank you, very well said. Hi, everyone. My name is Usha. One common theme which I've heard from many speakers is the power of small improvements, tiny habits. So this that I've heard in the form of different messages reminds me of an incident when my son was small. Now my son is about 14 in the 10th standard when he was about two to three years old. We would often try to get him to swim in the kids pool. He was very afraid of water. We tried so many things. Cokesing him or giving him some motivation didn't work. Once we had gone to a resort in Kerala for a vacation and an idea struck us. We just told him, this is just a big tub. He used to love taking bath at our tub at home. So an idea struck us. We just told him, this is a huge tub. Just jump in and he jumped in. Very surprising for us. Now when I hear of this power of tiny things like 1% improvements and all that, it reminds me of that incident that make the change look small going through any transformation, make it look like those series of tiny things and small improvements. And this is one takeaway I'm going to take from this conference. To break down any change, any transformation into those series of tiny things, small improvements towards making people enjoy the change that they are going through. Thank you. My first time met narration 2006 as part of Agile India 2006. And since then I've been frequent into these conferences. So one thing, each one of us put us into that little spot and you have to arrange an event within your organization. How does that feel? What effort it takes? It takes good amount of effort. A lot of us want somebody to do it for us. And now think the amount of massive effort that narration team, every volunteer, every speaker, every reviewer puts in to make this flawless learning experience for us. Can we have a good round of applause for years of work that was the set of people I joined? Next thing that I would like to also share with all of you is that we all come from very different diversified experiences. And in here, one, the space becomes quite bias-free because we meet people who are from different organizations and might be facing similar challenges that we haven't worded for ourselves. When we listen into those perspectives, it gives us different dimension for dealing with those challenges back into workplace. And that makes workplace lighter easier in terms of dealing with, right from the mental space, also the physical engagement when we reflect into these experiences. Not all of us would use every tip of here, yet it does impact the way we act going forward. That's all. All right, anybody else? Hello, everyone. I've been associated with Agile India since 2021 and that was my first virtual conference with Agile India. I was a volunteer. It was such an experience when I felt included. I also saw the lineup of speakers, the various areas that we were talking about, whether it was technology, product, coaching, consulting. So the diversity and the inclusiveness was something that really attracted me. It also encouraged me to think beyond, get the confidence. So in 2022, I decided to send out a proposal and let's see what happens. I got selected and I got to speak as well. And this year, when I think it was December, I was so surprised. I was like, oh, we just had it in November. Now again, it's happening. I said, don't think again. Just book your tickets, buy and come here. And the experience has been fabulous. And what I'm going to take away, I think one of the things I keep hearing and I wanted to learn was how do you get things done when you have bigger problems, when you're working with organizations. And one of my biggest takeaway has been, and multiple speakers have spoken about it, in terms of finding those influencers, doing those experiments. And just go for it. Don't look for the moment. If you find a space, you find those influencers, those small experiments, just go for it. And I think that's going to be one of my biggest experiences or learnings from Agile India 2023. So thank you the entire team. And thank you. Anybody else wants to share? So I know, and I've been connected with Naresh since 2005. I still very vividly remember when he had come to the MBA college called NMIMS in Mumbai. And he was speaking about Agility over there. And that was very new to me. It was, I think, yeah, in 2005. So, and I was really intrigued, like what it is, how it is. Then couple of years later, he conducted one of the sessions at NMIMS. It was a two-day session. And I still remember the first person that I'm a senior person that's there from the industry, Jeff Pate, and he was there during that time. And it just changed everything for me. And since then, I've been almost like barring a couple of them. I've been here with them every year. And every year I come, it just surprises me that the kind of people that come over here, the kind of learnings that's brought by all, the kind of speakers that we have got, it's amazing. And what we all always say, it's not about one time effort that's there. It's about the consistency with which these sessions have been organized. So I want to really thank from the bottom of my heart to Naresh that the level of consistency that he has maintained has been awesome. Thank you so much, Naresh. Thank you. This is all now turning into me talk. It's supposed to be about what you're taking away from the event, all right? I have been here for the first time in person at Agile India. And last year, I got to attend it online. So from the content point of view, I'm not surprised. And that was the motivator, in fact, to book my tickets and come all the way. In fact, I'm more than happy. I delivered more than what I expected in terms of all the talks that I got to attend. And also, all the people I got to connect with. I got to appreciate so much similarity in the industry, so much of the same problems. And also, some of the experiences of how people do it differently, that's something I really want to take away from my conversations. But from the talks, I started appreciating so much more the importance of psychological safety, about how it starts from me, my point of view, my mindset. And that's true in teams with leaders everywhere. So yeah, that's my takeaway. Thank you so much. Just want to acknowledge two people who've done a lot of work. I mean, the speakers probably know Natasha. She's been coordinating. So just wanted to, it was a nerve wrecking experience for her trying to put a physical conference together. But she's done a fantastic job. All the speakers are very thankful and everybody else for making sure everything ran so smoothly. And Mr. John over there, trying to play with this camera. So what's interesting, I don't know many of you know, but John actually did a keynote for us in 2012. And then, you know, he liked it so much that he's now part of the team. But he flew all the way from New Zealand. He said, there's no way I'm going to miss this. I want to be in person. And so thanks again John for everything. Like all the videos, the marketing, it's all John with his experience trying to do the best to spread the word. All right, with that I think we will bring this to a closure. Thanks again and look forward to seeing you all next year.