And welcome to Moments with Melinda. This morning, my guest is Robert Costanza. How are you, sir? I'm doing well. How are you doing? Thank you so much. You're joining in from London. Yes, I am. Yes, you are. So thank you for being on my show. Let me tell my viewers just a little bit about you because there is so much. But let me share with my viewers. Robert Costanza is Professor of Ecological Economics at the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London. He is a fellow in the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and the Royal Society of Arts in the UK. He is an overseas expert in the Chinese Academy of Science and currently a senior fellow at the Stockholm Resilience Center in Stockholm, Sweden. An affiliate fellow at the Gund Institute at the University of Vermont and a Detow Master of Ecological Economics at the Detow Masters Academy in Shanghai, China, and as an honorary professor at Australian National University. Does that sound about right? Yeah, that's enough.  And I got in my research review, Bob, I just got exhausted. So I don't know how you do all you do, but the list goes on and on about all your accomplishments. I could say the same about you. Well, thank you.  Now, in layman's terms, can you explain to my viewers your life's journey through your work and what it is you hope to change in the human dynamic to save our species? Yeah. Okay, I'll try. Maybe I'll go back to my PhD work which was in systems ecology. I studied with HTO at the University of Florida and so the idea there was to look at the whole system. Not just the pieces but how all the pieces, you know, fit together and how they behave, you know, over time, what's the dynamic interactions among all of those systems. I think we don't, we don't spend enough time thinking in that way about our complex world. That led to, you know, trying to incorporate economics and how the economic system functions, you know, into the into the whole picture so it's not just the market. It's really the economy embedded within society embedded within the rest of nature and understanding that it's the rest of nature we're part of nature as well. It's us and all the other parts of the system. So I think that's a, you know, a needed perspective if we're really going to create a sustainable and desirable future, which I think is what we're all trying to do. We want to create a better world where, you know, we can provide well-being, sustainable well-being for, or at least a majority if not all the people on the planet. So to do that we have to understand how that system works, and we also have to understand how to, how to transform, you know, from where we are into, into this, into this better world. So that's been my, my quest, I guess, over, over that time. And as you know, I spent, I spent eight years there at the University of Vermont. And the, the, the Gund Institute there back in 2002 as a, as a way to pursue that, that, that broader agenda and the whole field of ecological economics is really about, about that. You know, how do, how do we understand the whole system it's a transdisciplinary approach and I don't think we'll, we'll really be able to solve these problems from the perspective of any one academic discipline, because those are are usually too narrow in their, they're not putting the whole system together. And I think there's been, yeah. It's all interconnected, right? Yeah, it's all connected. That is the basic principle of economics. But I think it needs to be taken much more seriously, particularly now in the, in the Anthropocene Epic, you know, that we're currently in where we know that our impacts on our ecological life support system. And our impacts on our, our social life support system are also being, being threatened, you know, so we're, we're facing many crises going forward. And we, we are approaching several tipping points, both on the biophysical side, but also, hopefully on the, on the social side, you know, if we really want to solve these problems, I think we have to really make the kind of transformational changes that that are needed. Well, we're going to get into that in my interview, because I unfortunately I may not be as optimistic as you are. Now we both are the same age. We were born in the same year. We were actually born in the same state. But that's about all we have in common, but we did work together a little bit at the Gund Institute and I'll get into that in a little later on the local economy. Now you have co-authored over 600 scientific papers and 28 books, and your work has been cited more than 130,000 times in Google Scholar. You've been interviewed more than 350 times. And here I am, you're 350 first, which I'm very, very honored to have the opportunity to spend some time with you, Bob. Now I want to focus on who you are. I mean, what, who is Bob Costanza and what brought you to your extraordinary life's work, bringing together the power of economics to support the future of our species. Talk to us a little bit about that and share a little bit about your childhood. Okay, well, I was born in a little town, I was born in Pittsburgh, actually Pennsylvania at Allegheny General Hospital, but the town I spent my first seven years in was kind of an infamous little town in Pennsylvania called DeNora, Pennsylvania. And two years before I was born, they had this smog incident where there was a temperature inversion in this, you know, a little river valley steel mill town, and they had a temperature inversion that lasted for a week.  And that smog incident caused 20 immediate deaths and several deaths afterwards and my mother had a miscarriage as a result of that incident. And I think it, yeah, it was one of the first sort of fatal air pollution incidents in the world. And that was followed by similar incidents in London in 1952 and LA the famous LA smog and I think all of those together led to eventually the Clean Air Act and the creation of EPA and etc. You know, the environmental movement, but it was the recognition that, you know, this, this sort of rapid progress and focus on industrial production and growth had some significant side effects, negative side effects that needed to be addressed if we really wanted to create a better world. So another result of that incident was they closed down the steel mill eventually, and my father and family and we all moved to South Florida, where the air was cleaner. And I grew up mainly in, in South Florida, and went eventually went to went to school at the University of Florida. Yeah. Well, I was raised right next to the Bethlehem Steel Mills. Okay, so we even more in common. Yeah. And I have I carry that, you know, in my lungs. I mean it's there when you're raised. Yeah, and I never read Deborah Davis's book when smoke ran like water. I have not. I think take a look at that one is really it's a it's a good history of the denora incident and some of the other ones I was talking about and and and the repercussions of that. And there are people in this country who would like to return to those days who would like to get rid of all the regulations and go back to where we're all breathing really stinky air and then killing ourselves so. Yeah. Go ahead. No, go ahead. Next question. Your childhood is really important and that's and that's that's now I'm not so sure how clean Florida is how was I think coming to Vermont was probably a good thing for you to do because Vermont's air still is pretty pure when she say. Yeah, no, I really love my time. My time in Vermont. Beautiful, beautiful state. Yeah. And we do miss. Especially those long winters, you know, with snow up to that. I love that. I just, I just, I'm a big winter person. But anyway, and back in the days in Pennsylvania, I remember six foot snowstorms or in five foot snowstorms that we used to have back in the day when we don't have those anymore. So at what point in your life, Bob, did you realize that the power of the purse had the ability to wake up humans to save their planet. I mean that connection between the economy and the planet and humans well being. I'll go back to my, my PhD days, because I think that that opened my eyes to how these things were all connected. And, and you, and you know that that economics does control a lot of the decision making that goes on at many different different scales. My PhD research had to do with land use changes and land use planning and what happened to South Florida, you know, historically over time and how that whole sort of development pattern was was going on and what was driving it. You know, and obviously was not driving it in a direction that that maximized the quality of life, where the, where the population is driving it in direction that maximized, you know, the, the profits of the developers and, and, and other feedbacks like that. So, you know, if you want to change those, those kinds of systems, you have to understand, you know, how, how they work and where the leverage points are. And that was what I've been trying to do since, since then. That's been your life. Yeah. So, so you're, you're an intellectual and, and in many ways, the researcher and, and, and a scientist. But politically, if we can't change our world politically, that makes things a lot harder, wouldn't you say to be well I think I think like, like I was getting at it's all part of this larger system and how we govern ourselves is a is a huge, huge controlling factor. So how do we make, how do we make decisions, you know, as, as groups at multiple scales, you know, from, from families to companies to, to countries, you know, to the, to the whole planet. So the process of decision making, I think is a is a key part of it and governance governance in general, you know, and I think, I think democracy is a great idea, and we ought to try it. How do we actually get a truly democratic governance system because I think currently in the United States and in many other countries I call themselves democracies they're not really democracies and they're plutocracies and various versions that are controlled by by special interests, not by the, not by the, by the will of the, of the people. And I think that as part of that process that that there's an effort to divide and conquer rather than to, than to build a shared vision. And I think that's what we're, that's what we're seeing. So, how do we build, you know, a strong and a true democracy. Vermont, I think has some interesting examples, you know, the Vermont town meeting as a, as a sort of direct democracy kind of kind of thing is one is one example that we could, we could potentially build on but, but I think the, yeah, we need to do something quite, quite different and more with our governance institutions and I think people are beginning to realize that, that the current, the current system is really not working, is not leading to a better life for most people. And that is a huge problem but it's also an opportunity, you know, that that you need those sort of crises in order to, to make the kinds of changes that I think we're, we're after. So, the latest book I published is, is titled addictive to growth. What's the societal therapy that we need to overcome these problems and framing our problem as an addiction I think is, is useful because it makes you realize that simply, simply understanding the problem and simply understanding the solutions is often not enough, you know, to make any significant behavioral change we've known about these problems for, for decades, and we've also known about the solutions for decades but we haven't really made progress because we've been, you know, framing those solutions and in a more of a confrontational way in a way that doesn't necessarily lead to behavior change. So, I think that's, that's our challenge how do we, how do we really understand that process well enough to begin to build the therapy that we need to overcome these, to lock in, you know, the sort of the addiction that we're, that we're stuck in. Well, it also comes down to inequality because the people who are, who are on the bottom rung of our, of our economic well-being don't have the ability to think about things the way that other people do. And even with the town hall meetings in Vermont, if you have an hourly job and you can't take a Tuesday off to go to town meeting your vote isn't counted. Yeah. Anyway, go ahead on that. No, no, that's, that's a huge issue. And I think that's, that's something that really reduces our societal well-being, you know, the fact that we're, we're destroying our social capital by having such huge gaps in income, income inequality. And I think that's, that's part of what has to, that has to change. And it certainly can change. I mean, you know, since at the end of World War II until 1980 or so we were reducing income inequality in the US and in most other countries. You know, we were, we had, you know, progressive taxation, we had, we had a, we're building the welfare state. And it was only after the sort of Reagan Thatcher neoliberal changes that that started going back in the opposite direction. So it leads, it means that we do know, we didn't know how to solve the problems. But it's going to take, it's going to take a different political, you know, agenda. And I think that's got to be forced, you know, by a large civil society movement. Movement of movements. I mean, it's not, it's going to take the coming together of many of the, of the movements that are, that are out there today for climate justice and social justice and etc. You know, we're all, I think, heading in the right, in the same direction, but are not really coordinated. There's a group I'm involved with called the well-being economy alliance that's trying to do just that. They're bringing all of these movements together. And I think until we can get that critical mass and have it actually begin to affect the decision making and the system. And yeah, I don't think we'll be making much progress. And time's running out. So can you talk to my viewers a bit about some of the solutions that you have uncovered, whereby the way that we look at our work and our economic well-being can and must consider the planet. Yeah. Well, I think one of the key things is to first recognize that we have to change our fundamental goals for for economies for societies. I mean, part of the part of the problem is that that the conventional economics and politics, you know, is focused on GDP growth as being the solution to all problems, you know, and if economies stop growing in GDP terms, then it's a disaster. And in fact, we know that that's, that's not the case. That, in fact, GDP growth has some very negative side effects that we've been able to to document and measure and compare with GDP. And we haven't been making genuine progress when you look at the impacts of growing income inequality and growing environmental damage. You know, that sort of cancels out all of the growth in GDP income and GDP growth has only gone to a very small fraction of the population, the top one or even the top 0.1% of the population. So, you know, making that, that clear that we're, it's not GDP growth that we need. It's really improvement in societal well-being. And what is that involved? It means, you know, a more equitable distribution of wealth and income.  It means, you know, staying within planetary boundaries. You know, dealing with climate change, climate change is one of our major planetary boundaries that we're exceeding but also biodiversity loss and nitrogen cycling. So there's a, you know, a list of these, but recognizing that we live on a finite planet and that we have to understand those limitations, but also understand how to produce well-being for everyone. And yeah.  I mean, even if you just go across the border from Vermont into Canada, it's very different the way that they take care of. And in this country of lines and lines and miles and miles in San Francisco, miles and miles of homeless who are being ignored and let go by our society. So the whole concept of a socialist political framework. Well, certainly Scandinavia and countries that take these ideas much more seriously are doing I think a lot better. Not that they couldn't also be improved. And what you want to call it, you know, if you want to call it socialism and I'm happy with that term, but I love that.  But what you're saying Bob is that when we lift society up the planet he the planet has a time to heal when people are struggling and they're suffering. They can't think about the things that we need to think about in order to save our species. Yeah, and well we need to take society and we need to take the rest of nature into account so I think it could be, you know, eco eco ism as well, or a whole system ism. I like this, I actually like the Swedish term log on, which means just enough that everybody, everybody should have just enough, not too much not too little. And that philosophy for life I think we'd all be much better off as they are as they are in Scandinavia in general. So, so where would you, to be perfectly honest where do you see us as a species in the direction that we're going. Well, I think we're at a critical juncture, you know, I mean I think his historically civilizations collapse and have collapsed. So, I think there's, you know, there's there's certainly a good likelihood that that this civilization can can follow along unless we can, we can do something differently. And I think we have certainly have the tools now to be able to see the future, much, much better than these historical societies have been able to and we can also see the, you know, the possibilities, much better than historical societies had been able to. So whether we can use that information in in new ways to prevent the collapse and to make a smoother transition into a steady state, you know, sort of sustainable and desirable future. I think that's the, that's the challenge and I think that's what we, we have to work toward. Do you feel that the younger our hope, because our generation.  You know, human rights, women's rights, disability rights, racial rights, we were all about that Earth Day was our generation but we failed, we failed. You know, other generations that have come after us and, and I feel like some of the future, the hope for the future for humanity is embedded in our youth. Would you agree with that. Well, certainly, as it always has been. But, and I think it's not, it's not a hitting one generation against others. But I think, I think we all need to work toward that toward a better future. You know, us, us oldsters to leave a better legacy, but it's for who for the, for the younger generation. So, you believe in all of our interests. Sorry. You believe we've done that. Not very effective. We haven't. I feel like. So I, so I wanted to, that's not, but that's not a reason to give up. No, or, or to harp on, you know, the, the remaining problems. I think the, I think the issue is how do you, how do you make progress and how do you, how do we overcome the barriers that were, that we're still facing. Right. So it's, you know, it's, it's easy to get, it's easy to give up. Well, I will never give up, but I personally, when I'm doing lectures, I always somewhat apologize for the fact that, that we tried, we did try and somehow somehow we didn't do enough. And here we are, where we are today as a species. So, why are humans so reluctant to move in directions that are in their best interest. In their best interest for the children's children. It really does come down to economics. And so often it's the money that stands in the way of progress. Talk to us about that. Well, I think it's more the, the addiction that stands in the way of progress and money is money is a vehicle, you know, for, for motivating that it's, you know, it's, we end up in these, these social traps, as they're called. It's a situation where we feel like we've invested so much in the current, the current system that we can't, that we can't change. So there's some really interesting games we could talk about that, that show how that, how that functions and how psychologically we tend to, we tend to, you know, put too much emphasis on trying to preserve what we have as opposed to change things for the change better. So I think it's a psychological issue with the way humans behave. But I think, I think it's also something that that can be overcome with the right therapy. So who provides that therapy. It's a societal problem and I think that therapy has to come from at least parts of society. And I think for the situation we're in now it's going to take, like I said, a movement of movements it's going to take, you know, not just the younger generation but the, but the whole population that that recognizes that we can't go on the way we are but what's the missing element now I think is a clear shared vision of the kind of world that we're trying to create. You know, people don't, don't have that shared vision they don't see what's possible. And I think that's what we, that's what one thing I've been trying to, to produce how do you, how do you convey that we could have a much better world where, you know, inequality was much lower where we're dealing with climate change we're solving all these problems we've achieved all of the SDGs, and everyone's going to be better off you're going to be worse off than they are now because I think the conventional mindset is oh, you know, if we, we do all these environmental things everybody's income is going to go down and we'll be better we'll be worse off well, I think that's the opposite of what what the case would be. For the majority of people and even, and even for the rich people, you know, chasing their peers and trying to keep up with, you know, the other billionaires does not make does not make people particularly happy. So if you really, you really want if you really want to improve people's life satisfaction and well being. You know, hold different kind of social and economic system, and one that can actually help preserve the planet as well.  And that's part of the, that's part of the addiction. You know, it's that it's a narrow subset that's being positively reinforced by the current system and doesn't want that system to change, even if it does lead to the long term destruction of the system. So, yeah, those are the forces that we need to deal with. We have to deal with it in a world where democracy is being attacked and especially in this country. I mean, thank heavens for the Supreme Court's decision yesterday. But it, it, our democracy is being attacked and fascism is taking hold. And how do we create anything like a shared vision when those who have the wealth want to keep control of humanity's future. I mean, it's, it has to come down to the people rising up. Yeah. And, and making that change and unfortunately, well, or fortunately, humans will do that. Right. Do you do you will and they have in the they have in the past, risen up and challenged and challenged the regimes that that we're suppressing them. So we've seen historically, you know, both sides of both sides of the story, both of both, the relations collapse but also, but also we've seen, you know, radical transformations happen in relatively short periods of time. So it's not like it's impossible. And I think we are, you know, at a in a period when there are so many, you know, converging crises that, you know, in a sense, it opens an opportunity it opens the door for, for, you know, significant changes like we're talking about. And in fact, you could argue that, you know, you don't, you don't really have a chance to make those changes until some, some, some major crises, you know, have made it a possibility. So, you know, if the smoke in New York City and Vermont remains in the air for for long enough and we begin to see, you know, the implications of the loss of our democratic institutions. I think it's things can turn around and relatively quickly. Relatively quickly, I'm hearing that from the, from the mind of Bob Costanza. Relative. So your hope for the future. So tell me your hope for the future of our species. Give me, give us something positive to think about as we're joking on the air. From your brilliant mind. What hope do you have? No, I think it's, I think there is a positive vision that's, that's possible. I didn't, I didn't say it's, you know, inevitable. It certainly is equally likely, if not more likely that the collapse scenario would happen. But I think it's our challenge. It's our, it's our opportunity to go in the other direction and to say, you know, let's, let's create this, this better world for ourselves for our children, et cetera. And I think getting that message out, getting that hopeful message out, can motivate, you know, a large enough fraction of the population to really make these changes happen. How do we get that message out? That's that I leave to you, Melinda. Well, I'm leaving it as your book addicted to growth. Society therapy for a sustainable well being future. And this is your book that you just released. Yes. And it's available in local bookstores. And so I want to encourage my viewers to pick up a copy of Robert Costanza's new book. This is your life's work. You've been doing this since I met you back when we were trying to put together a local, our local currency. Remember that? Oh yeah. That was Burlington, Burlington bread. Burlington bread, man. I mean, I still have a few in my drawer. What a novel. And it ended up morphing into a VBS project of the barter system. And it ended this, you know, local and all these businesses now through VBS are basically bartering their services and stuff. So it, it did create some really good stuff and from, I think, months, kind of leading the way on a lot of this stuff, would you say? Oh, for sure. Yeah, definitely. We are. So what is your next project you have anything that you're working on or you're just taking your book around and moving? Several things. I was, I was actually at a, at a conference at the European Parliament several weeks ago on beyond growth. So they are actually talking about this, you know, and the European Parliament and the president of the commission was there and gave it, gave it a nice speech about limits to growth and how we need to move beyond, beyond GDP as that. So I think there is some, some progress being made. And I think we need several things. One is an alternative to GDP, you know, that we can use to monitor and measure our progress toward, toward this, this better system. And actually we did a class last term where we had the students go and look for all of the alternatives to GDP that have been proposed. And they found 350 so far. It's not like people haven't been thinking about this, you know, for, for a while and more and more intensively. But in fact, that's, that's part of the problem. There are so many different alternatives that nobody knows, you know, which, which ones to use. So I think the next stage is to try to build a broader consensus about what, what the alternative, you know, measures of progress should be. It worked a bit on the genuine progress indicator in Vermont as far as I know is still using the GPI. And I'm not sure what kind of political influence it has if any, but partly because probably it's not as broadly shared and, and, you know, as, as GDP is, but I think that's, that that's coming. So there's several projects underway to try to build that that consensus and at least the EU is, is partly behind that movement. There's also the well being economy governments group. There's a small subset of, you know, Vanguard governments, including Scotland, Iceland, New Zealand, Finland, and Canada actually just joined in Wales. And, you know, their, their agenda is well being rather than GDP growth. You know, so the United States part of that. Not yet. No, why not. You know, we've been trying to potentially get at least some states in the US to be part of that. But is Vermont is Vermont Vermont would be a great one to join. So if you're interested in if you're interested in helping to push that agenda I can I'll put people in contact with you. Thank you. I will. I'll make happen. So that would be good, you know, a well being economy government in in Vermont, you know, New Zealand has gotten a lot of traction on that and created the first, you know, well being budget for their for that for the country. Take a look at Nicholas Sturgeon, the first, first Minister of Scotland has a really good Ted talk about this that they should recommend people taking a look at. But, of course, like any of these, these things I mean she recently stepped down as First Minister, Jacinda Ardern, I think is stepped down as Prime Minister of New Zealand. I think she's going to be a professor at Harvard actually I think now. But, but I think those kinds of movements can and will begin to happen more, you know, we have more more governments saying no, we understand that you have to get beyond. Beyond GDP we understand the issues and the crises that are building up, you know, I think they can't, they can't avoid them any longer. And so there's got to be some, some radical changes. And so, keep the faith. Thank you Robert. Thank you so much for your time you are my hero. And I really appreciate all the work you've done in your career to move the needle and helping to save our planet. And to my viewers. Thank you for joining us and I encourage you to, to pick up Robert Costanz's new book addicted to growth, societal therapy for sustainable well being future. And you can get a little I hope it's at the local bookstore up there at Phoenix books. I'm sure it is. I hope so. And Bob, I'll get you back on again and we'll follow this in a few years and see how well we've done and until then I wish you well. And when you get back to Vermont check in with me and, and I'd love to move meant to get Vermont to sign on to this, this organization that's helping to move the needle. So thank you. And to my viewers you have a beautiful day. And I will see you shortly. Thank you. Bye bye.


So this is a very typical scenario we see in clinical practice where you have a patient 74 year old male presenting with cognitive decline going on for the last two months and memory loss as well as some speech difficulties. And MRI brain, as you can see, we have different sequences, FLIR, T2 post contrast showing you a very ugly necrotic enhancing mass with a lot of swelling and edema in the right cerebral hemisphere and also has some areas of restricted diffusion in the solid part. And if I have to show you the perfusion maps, it's very vast or you can see the blood volume is markedly increased in the solid enhancing part of the tumor even over here. One of the things I struggle with is trying to exactly localize where this enhancing necrotic mass is just based on the axial images and that's where I would suggest that everybody should look at the sagittal reconstructed images. And those are very helpful to decide. For example, based on the information I get from the sagittal images you can see that this tumor is actually in the temporal lobe only. It's not involving the frontal lobe, probably going a little bit into the insula over here, but definitely not involving the frontal lobe. All the edema and swelling is in the temporal lobe. And this is what we typically see with primary de novo GBMs. The reason I would like to call this a primary de novo GBM IDH wild type is because of the age, more than 40 years, this patient is 75 and presenting with subacute neurological deficit. Now we also know that these tumors are really bad tumors to have and this is what happens. This is a scan done a year and a half. I'm not showing you all the follow ups. This patient did undergo all the therapy regimens available, including surgery initial debulking, followed by standard stoop regimen and even a vastan therapy for the recurrent tumor. But you can see the tumor is clearly increasing in size. It's progressive and this unfortunate patient ended up dying after 20 months of the initial diagnosis.


It's always a bit weird when someone does a review of an audio product, right, because I can't exactly just put the audio here for you guys to hear. So I'm really just going to have to talk about it, and I know that you probably don't want to hear that, but if you're looking for a review of Bliss Coded Sound, well, then this is going to have to be what you're going to listen to. This is the best I can do for you. So in the nutshell, Bliss Coded Sound is a like a binaural beat track or an isochronic tone, but it's also neither of those things. It's like a really well put together audio track that's designed to take you from one state of consciousness to another, okay? Now you may have seen the one free video that they posted on YouTube. If not, I will link it in the description, but really this is a spectacular sound wave product. I've reviewed binaural beats before, but none of them have really come close to this, and that's because the way it's made is it incorporates the sacred geometry that is found throughout the universe in things like the shell of a snail or the spiral of galaxies. These things also tend to share the same mathematics, the golden formula, right? So they've managed to find a way to incorporate that mathematics into a sound and then blend it with sort of relaxing ambient noises to make it sound nicer, and they've also managed to overlay subliminal messaging in some of their products as well so that you can learn things or improve things while you sleep, right? Is this sounding familiar from Lisa Dreamy? Because it's the same sort of principle. You're giving your subconscious mind messages while you're asleep, meaning they're more likely to be accepted because there's no filter. There's nothing, there's no conscious object sort of gatekeeper standing there saying no, that thought's wrong. The subconscious thoughts are just absorbed and accepted because you can't argue with them. So in a nutshell, bliss coded sound can give you really good subliminal messaging treatment. It can get you to overcome things like anxiety, all sorts of things, you know, it's all mentioned on the website, but really the best thing you can do if you are interested in bliss coded sound is just to listen to their sample. Click the link in the description, listen to the sample that they've put on the site and read people's testimonials, right? Because I know that this sounds a bit weird, it sounds a bit too good to be true, but that's because it's just not widely accepted by society. It's just one of those really, like special products, I guess you could say, that people just haven't widely accepted yet because, well, they're just not ready for it I guess. So if you are interested, or even if you're just curious and you have no idea what bliss coded sound is, it's the most effective brainwave entrainment track that I've ever experienced or tested or even heard about. And that is quite a big statement considering I've tried dozens, probably hundreds of different binaural beats from all sorts of different companies and producers. This is better than most of them, if not all of them. And it's not just one of those things where, you know, I say something and you sort of have to take my word for it, you don't because you can listen to the sample on their site and within minutes, within less than a minute in fact, you will feel the effect of this stuff. This is not one of those marketing tricks that binaural beats companies use often. This is different because you can listen to it and feel the effects even if you're skeptical and that's the really important distinction. I was skeptical because it sounds insane, but then I listened to it, I felt the effects and now I use it. So long story short, go and check out their website, listen to the track and just see what you feel. Let me know what you experienced and I hope you enjoy it.


Hello everyone, my name is Michele Bordi, I come from Italy and I'm going to tell you about how next cloud save our work from COVID-19 emergency. I work for the municipality of Macerata, a 43,000 inhabitants city, Marcus region, in central Italy. Our company network is based on classic window ducted directory domain, implemented by virtual machines. Our employees work with personal home directory and share data among 10 departments and many more operational units for a total of 8 terabytes of files. All data are managed by a windows file server with SMB shares, each mapped to users and groups. Almost every software used in our company is based on SAS solution. We always made our best to promote this kind of solution in order to support platform independence and then point customization and troubleshooting. Before COVID-19 emergency we had been experimenting smart working solutions for the most one year. Project started in April 2019 with one tenth of users working from the houses for one day a week. Our users have been working with personal laptop connected through with private network to their work spaces, implemented by Microsoft RDS session hosts. This solution was very good for such a small setup because it guaranteed a very low learning curve to our users. Working with a RDS Windows session host is basically the same thing of working with your personal computer. Anyway, we know that this solution could not scale up very well in the future where all our employees will become remote workers. Moreover, sending up a VPN for each user needs some precious configuration time to be spent for every laptop. Anyway, our smart working project was growing so well but suddenly COVID-19 came to Italy and our lives changed much. We needed to send back all our employees to their home as soon as we could without stopping our activity. With a municipality and our core business is to give support to our citizens in such a difficult time. So we had to face the problem of expanding our remote working infrastructure from 21 users one day a week to 250 people connected every working day. We couldn't follow our performance solution based on Microsoft RDS because we couldn't provide enough resources to our data center in order to support the needed session host for every concurrent user. Moreover, it would have been very hard to give enough bandwidth to all our users to full access to SMB shares through VPN connections. Time was short and we needed to find some other way. So we focused on our main goal. We already had cloud-based management software, including our email system. So we just only needed a way to allow access from our users to their office data in a safe way. There is where NextCloud comes in help. We already tested the NextCloud solution in a classical fashion but in order to speed up deployment of our data and minimize learning curve impact on our users we chose to take advantage of external SMB mounts feature. In this way, we were able to give each user access on its personal home dear based on anti-directed user ID and organizational unit shell mounted for M1. Anti-directed permissions on file were still active and authorization was guaranteed. All of this providing the NextCloud web interface safe and marvel-free and avoiding to install any kind of software in our user personal computer. Microsoft remote desktop services with VPN client were still used for just only some customized setup like those legacy application with client server structure. NextCloud gives us the opportunity to allow our user to be ready to work from home in less than a week with minimal impact on our infrastructure and finances. Thanks to its intuitive interface, learning curve was lower than expected. COVID emergency has been tough but also a powerful boost to grow up people's IT skills faster. Our users now do things unthinkable until some month go. NextCloud web does very much in this, even if in a bit unconventional setup we're now ready to save to a full and native cloud based experience. Thank you for your attention.


to the cloud. Okay, the recording is back on. Can you confirm that it's on? Does it show for you? Yeah. Okay. Yes. All right. Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining the Jenkins Advocacy and Outreach SIG meeting. Today is August 25th. So I have on the agenda a quick GSOC update, DevOps world and Jean-Marc, I thought perhaps if you might want to speak about Hacktoberfest yet, if not, it's fine. But I wanted to give you a couple of minutes here to speak about it if you have anything. Yeah. The anything is very short. So I'm planning to start the communication part via the developer list and updating and writing a blog post. So this should start now in the coming days. Been working on other things before, but so we start the campaign now, calling for Hacktoberfest issues on all the projects and getting everything organized for Hacktoberfest. So we're ready to roll. Is there anything that you want to do a call out, especially here mentioned here that you want to call out to where you need assistance or participation? Participation from the maintainer crowds and the developer crowd. This definitely from the outreach besides reviewing blog posts and things like that. So normally I'm good. Okay. So normally for the next SIG meeting, the communication should be out and this project should be rolling. Collides a little bit with DevOps world, but we'll manage. And there's no shame in promoting about it at DevOps world as well. Yeah. So I will and we can really use that as a jump board to promote it towards maintainers and developers, but also potential contributors. So yeah, yes, I will use that shamelessly. Okay. And if there's anything that you would like with regards to like, I already ordered stickers for the DevOps world community booth. So if you want to do stickers or additional signage, I know that I have one signage for a call for participation that includes Hacktoberfest, but also include GSOC. But if you want something specific to Hacktoberfest, we can work on it. Here, let me sleep on this. I already have some some ideas. I'm going to see what is feasible planning wise and so I think. Okay. The stickers. Put the finger or something interesting there. Yeah. Yeah. But so we will need to act fast. Exactly. This is what I believe. So yeah, I'm probably going to reach out to you one-on-one to explore a couple of ideas and so that we concentrate on the feasible ideas. Yeah. Okay. All right. Sounds good. Anything else that you or Bruno would like to add to the agenda? No. Okay. I just want to do an update for GSOC. Yeah. Okay. So I will start out with my action item. So I have an action item for myself to work on the monthly newsletter that Gavin suggested. And this is what he had suggested as these are samples that he has kindly given us. But basically it's getting a monthly update from all of the SIGs. And then we would post it on discourse and via a blog post. So there isn't requirement for us to create something fancy that will take up our time. But this is an example that he has given us. So I will take a lead on this as soon as DevOps world stuff dies down a little bit. So I think we're talking about monthly. So hopefully we'll shoot for, so we are in end of August. Holy cow. So September. So maybe something for October. But I will try to shoot for September. Okay. So good to me. Okay. So GSOC, Jean-Marc, I have here that, so September 5th to the 12th are the final week. Yeah. So what would you like to add? I give a short update there. So it's going well. And we're getting there. So the projects are slowly wrapping up. I had one-to-one talk with all of the contributors and they're very happy and making super progress and can be proud of what was achieved during this summer. I have them have a very close meeting with their mentors to be sure that they concentrate on the important things to wrap up their project. One of the things I would like them to do, but I will not put a deadline on that so that I don't interfere with the official deadlines, is that they write a blog post about their project, their experience and also explain to next year's potential candidates why is GSOC important and what they experienced from that. They will start to wrap up their project, as you said, September 5th or 5th and the deadline to finish is September 12th. And it's all lights are green for them to finish on that day. There's one project where we still need to have a confirmation that they have that. So we're reaching the end of that great experience and getting more and more pressure to get prepared for next year's campaign. So we have a lot of questions coming in for that and we should use and surf on that energy to get candidates prepared and have good proposals for next year. Yeah, and I think before we let the current GSOC contributors go, I think it would be a good idea for us to also tell them to come back and be a mentor. Yeah, at least continue contributing this at least and maybe be a mentor or start learning how to mentoring. Yeah, and I think their experience is still fresh and I know like Dharash has so much passion going into this and I think he would make a great mentor. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. All right. So good experience online, green for everything, great experience. So awesome. That's what we wanted to hear. Thank you, Jean-Marc. So for DevOps World, we currently have 15 sign up for the contributor summit. So that includes CloudBees folks and I think there's about seven non-CloudBees folks. So we have the capacity to fill the room at 30. So we need to do a lot more talking about this so that we can get more people to come. And I think from my experience, people wait until the last minute to join. So we got like five more weeks. So hopefully that we'll get that number up. I also included the sign up sheet here for those who wants to join us. So really quick. And then AWS reached out to us and they wanted to do two talks at the contributor summit but also they were hoping to get these two talks into the main conference as well. So at the moment, they have requested these two lightning talks. One is on the it's rapidly build and test your iOS apps with Jenkins on EC2 Mac. And the other one is migrating Jenkins Unity CI CD built farms to Amazon EC2 Mac instances. So I spoke with Marc and Marc says these would make great talks at the contributor summit because Bruno is doing a talk on Android. So this would pair it well. Oh, yes. Yeah. And so right now we are accepting them to speak at the contributor summit. Each of these were 10 minutes talks. But like I said, they wanted to also speak at the main conference. But at the moment, the event team is telling me that we have a lot of AWS talks in the main conference. So they will have to see. So it's basically their call. Yeah. But I also did ask them to help us promote the session. So we are accepting blogs. And we'll do a tweet and LinkedIn posts about their session. So hopefully they will follow through with that. But that's that is slated for beginning of September, September 5th that week. Yeah. So now it's just all hands on deck and helping to promote the event and getting people to come to the event. And hopefully they'll join us and be engaged with us at the contributor summit. Okay. Okay. So that is all that I have on the agenda. So lots for lots for us to do agenda is short, but does it mean we are short of things to do? You're right. Plenty to do indeed. Yeah. So let me stop the recording.