Welcome back. I'm Dr. Harriet Hall, and this is lecture three in a series of ten lectures on science-based medicine. In the last lecture, I talked about CAM in general, and now let's look at some specifics. Of all the things in alternative medicine, chiropractic is probably the most widely accepted. Thirty percent of Americans have visited a chiropractor in their lifetime. It's not so popular in other parts of the world. There are 50,000 chiropractors in the United States, but about half the countries in the world have no chiropractors at all. Chiropractors are not medical doctors. They can say they're doctors because they hold the D.C. degree, Doctor of Chiropractic. If a chiropractor calls himself Dr. Jones and doesn't explain, his patients may assume that he's a medical doctor. Some people don't even know there's a difference. They think chiropractors are just MDs who specialize in the back. Most customers go to chiropractors for treatment of back pain, but some people go to chiropractors for all their health needs and for health maintenance and prevention. That's a mistake. These claims were made by a chiropractor in the comments on the science-based medicine blog. They are all false. Chiropractic is not a science. It's a pre-scientific belief system. It is not based on neurology, anatomy, and physiology. It's based on a myth, the myth of the so-called chiropractic subluxation. Chiropractors are not doctors of the nervous system. Neurologists are doctors of the nervous system. Chiropractors are more like physical therapists. And there's no evidence that chiropractic care improves health or quality of life. I'm going to tell you how chiropractic originated, what chiropractic theory says, and why science rejects it. I'm going to tell you about some of the complications chiropractic can cause. I'm going to show you that chiropractic is a magnet for quackery, for unproven and implausible tests and treatments. I'm going to tell you about some of the harmful and unethical things that some chiropractors do. And finally, I'm going to tell you what chiropractors do that really works. And I'm going to give you some guidelines on how to choose one. Chiropractic is not a science. It's the brainchild of a single individual who invented chiropractic all by himself in a single day. The day was September 18th, 1895. It says so right there on his monument. The inventor had no training in science or medicine. He was a grocer and a magnetic healer named D.D. Palmer. He based his whole theory on one patient. He thought a bone was out of place in a deaf janitor's back. He pressed on the janitor's back and thought he had replaced the bone, and immediately the janitor said he could hear again, according to Palmer. According to the janitor's daughter, her daddy remained deaf until the day he died. We'll never know what really happened, but we can be sure that nothing Palmer did to the janitor's back could have restored his hearing.  He didn't know that the nerves to the ear are all in the skull, with no connection to the spine. And today, few of any chiropractors would even try to treat deafness. But Palmer was convinced, and from this one case he extrapolated, to say that he had found the one cause of all disease. Really, he thought that all disease was due to subluxation, bones out of place, 95% subluxation in the spine, and 5% subluxations of other bones. He didn't test his idea to see if he was right. He knew he was right, so he proceeded to develop a thriving practice cracking backs. Now, think about the state of medicine in 1895. Conventional medical treatments of the day were just as likely to harm as to heal. Pasteur, who discovered germs, died in 1895, and the germ theory of disease wasn't yet widely accepted. The first antibiotic didn't come along for another 50 years. In 1895 was the same year Rintgen discovered x-rays, so when Dee Dee Palmer thought he felt a bone out of place, he had no way of verifying it. Dee Dee Palmer lived in a pre-scientific world, and he didn't know any better. But modern chiropractors don't have that excuse. Don't confuse chiropractic with osteopathy. DO is Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine. DC is Doctor of Chiropractic. Chiropractors and osteopaths originated about the same time, and they did the same back manipulations, but the osteopaths thought they were restoring blood flow, and the chiropractors thought they were restoring nerve flow. DOs accepted scientific medicine, and today an American DO gets the same training as an MD plus training in spinal manipulation techniques. In the United States, DOs have to pass the same licensing exams as MDs, and they take the same internships and residency training. They practice mainstream medicine, and they seldom do manipulations once they're out in practice. For chiropractors, manipulations are their main reason for existing. There are three parts to chiropractic theory, subluxation, nerve impairment, and innate. Subluxation is the idea that displacement of bones is the root of all disease. Palmer imagined that he could feel bones out of place in the spine, and he thought he could put them back. Nerve impairment is the idea that all body functions are governed by nerves from the spine, and that displaced bones interfere with nerve function by stretching or compressing nerves where they exit the spine. Inate. Palmer thought a mystical vital force called innate was transmitted through the nerves, and that realigning the spine would restore proper flow of innate, which would cure disease. All three of these ideas are false. First, subluxation. Subluxation is a medical term for a partial dislocation. You can see real subluxations on x-rays. The picture on the left shows a torn finger ligament that has allowed a subluxation or a partial dislocation or slippage. The x-ray on the right shows a complete dislocation of the same joint. Actual bone displacements are obvious on x-rays. The chiropractic subluxation is not. Chiropractors think they can see subluxations on x-rays, but different chiropractors see them at different locations on the same x-ray, and radiologists don't see them at all. When chiropractors were tested on before and after x-rays, they couldn't tell a difference. When chiropractic schools were challenged to produce sample teaching x-rays demonstrating subluxations, they weren't able to do so. When a chiropractor produces an audible crack in your back, he may tell you it's the sound of the bone popping back into place. But it isn't. It's just the same kind of sound you get when you crack your knuckles. It's produced by gas rushing in to fill a vacuum when two bones are pulled apart at a joint to create a potential space. It creates a little bubble with a big sound.  Well, it probably wasn't. But some orthopedic specialists worry that repeatedly forcing a spinal joint beyond the normal range of motion may stretch the ligaments. It might loosen the joints and make the patient more prone to developing back pain. We don't know if that's true, but some patients do seem to become addicted to adjustments. The more they get, the more they seem to need. Chiropractors originally believed in boop, bones out of place. When that theory couldn't be demonstrated on x-ray, they said silly things like, well, there is a displacement that's enough to cause disease, but it's too tiny to show up on an x-ray. Eventually, they had to give up on boop. They redefined subluxation and said it was a complex of functional and or structural and or pathological articular changes that compromise neural integrity and may influence organ system and general health. Does that even mean anything? I think it's just gobbledygook. A disease like diabetes is defined so that every doctor who evaluates the patient will make the same diagnosis. But this vague definition of subluxation can be interpreted pretty much any way you choose. It really just amounts to a pretext, an excuse to treat anyone the chiropractor wants to treat. Some chiropractors are now rejecting the subluxation concept entirely. A recent study by chiropractors found no supportive evidence for the chiropractic subluxation being associated with any disease process or creating suboptimal health conditions. They concluded the subluxation construct has no valid clinical applicability. But the law still defines chiropractic in terms of the subluxation and the word subluxation is still very much in common use. The second part of chiropractic theory is nerve impairment. Palmer thought all body functions were governed by nerves from the spine. They aren't. He didn't know about cranial nerves and he didn't know about hormones. And apparently he didn't realize that some spinal nerves exit through the sacrum and the sacrum can't be manipulated. Today with organ transplants we know that you can sever all the nerves to an organ and transplant it into another person's body and it still works just fine. And true subluxations don't necessarily affect nerves. You can have a subluxation without nerve impairment and you can have nerve impairment without subluxation. In a condition called spondylolisthesis true subluxations have occurred and you can see them on x-ray but they may not cause any pain or impairment unless the displacement is very advanced and the pain is usually muscle pain rather than nerve pain. One condition where nerves are affected is a ruptured disc. When a disc ruptures the disc material breaks through the fibrous annulus and puts pressure on the nerve. But there is no displacement of the bones with a ruptured disc. Chiropractic claims that pressure on a nerve impedes the flow of messages through the nerve like stepping on a garden hose as in this picture from an early chiropractic advertisement. Today we know that's faults. Nerve impulses don't flow like water. They are electrical impulses and today we can actually measure nerve conduction speeds. In carpal tunnel syndrome the nerve is compressed in a small area at the wrist. We make the diagnosis by showing that the nerve conduction is normal above and below the wrist and slowed only across the area of compression. And just how easy is it to pinch a nerve? Well here's a picture showing how the relatively small spinal nerves come out of a big hole between the vertebra. The spine is built to allow movement. The cross section on the right shows the available space in white in the diameter of the nerve in black. It shows that there's plenty of room so that even a large displacement of bones would not cause a problem. One pathologist took a spine from an autopsy and he showed that you could bend the spine into a U-shape before there was any impingement on spinal nerves. If nerves were that easy to pinch, this woman would be in real trouble. The third part of chiropractic theory is innate. Innate is a mystical power that maintains health. It is a semi-religious concept. Indeed, Palmer actually thought of making chiropractic a religion at one point. This is a diagram that chiropractors have used to show how the patients innate is influenced by the chiropractors innate. Kind of like ESP. I don't know what that little trap door in the patient's head is supposed to be. The cadaver I dissected in my gross anatomy class didn't have one of those. Does this sound a bit like New Age you create your own reality nonsense? This is not science. This is a philosophical position called vitalism. The idea that some unmeasurable, undefined, undetectable life energy invests material bodies. There is absolutely no objective evidence that any such force exists. Vitalism has been soundly rejected by science. Like many myths, this one has a grain of truth behind it. Doctors don't heal patients. The body heals itself. Medical treatment only makes it easier for the body to do that. But the healing isn't accomplished by any woo-woo force. Healing occurs through physiologic processes that can be detected and studied. Chiropractic manipulations can cause harm. Neck manipulations can cause strokes by damaging the vertebral arteries. Here's how it happens. This is the normal position of the vertebral artery going straight up the side of the neck into the base of the skull. When you turn your head, it kinks. Now, arteries are pretty elastic and turning your own head is usually no problem. But imagine being jerked into this position forcefully during manipulation or having the joint forced beyond its normal range of motion. That can cause a small tear in the delicate lining of the artery. Sometimes this causes immediate damage from bleeding, but sometimes the tear is temporarily sealed with a clot. And later on the clot breaks loose, travels to the brain and clogs an artery, causing a delayed stroke as much as several days later. With a delayed reaction, the connection to manipulation may be missed. How often does that happen? Well, by one estimate, 20% of one kind of stroke, basilar strokes, are due to spinal manipulations that works out to 1,300 strokes a year in the United States. Patients with basilar strokes who were under the age of 45 were five times more likely than controls to have visited a chiropractor within a week of the event. Chiropractic strokes are underreported. Neurologists who see stroke patients don't routinely ask about chiropractic care and if the stroke is delayed, the connection may not be apparent. This is Sandra Netty. She was a healthy 40-year-old woman who was feeling fine, but she went to her chiropractor for a maintenance adjustment that she thought would help keep her healthy. When the chiropractor used a rapid thrust maneuver on her neck, she suddenly felt dizzy and unwell. When she complained, the chiropractor didn't recognize that it was an emergency. His only response was to offer to sell her massage services. He let her try to drive herself home, and she only made it part way. Doctors found tears in both of her vertebral arteries, one of them three inches long. As the stroke progressed, she developed locked-in syndrome, an intact mind locked in a paralyzed body. She was in pain, was unable to eat or breathe on her own, and was able to move one arm just enough to type on a special keyboard. She sued. The chiropractor later admitted to the court that after he learned he was going to be sued, he had forged Sandra's signature on an informed consent form. Chiropractors have tried to defend themselves by saying the patients who had strokes had come to them with neck pain because they were already in the early stages of a stroke, but Sandra had no neck pain. Neither did Lori Jean Mathiason. She originally went to a chiropractor for pain in her tailbone. By one account, she had a whopping 186 manipulations over a six-month period. I haven't been able to confirm that, but other sources said she had over 20 neck manipulations. With the last one, she went into convulsions on the chiropractor's table. The chiropractor's only response was to try to revive her by slapping her face. She died in a coma three days later. Even when patients do have neck pain, if chiropractors can't identify patients in the early stages of stroke, they have no business manipulating their necks. We don't know the actual risk of stroke from neck manipulation because the appropriate studies haven't been done. Strokes are undoubtedly rare, but if a drug had the same small risk of stroke and so little demonstrable benefit, then it would almost certainly have been taken off the market. Here are some of the other undesirable effects from manipulation. Half of patients experience local discomfort, headache, tiredness, and radiating discomfort. More serious complications include broken bones, herniated discs, disability, paralysis, and even death. I read about one family that kept going back to the same chiropractor until three family members had suffered strokes. Some chiropractors deny that manipulation can cause strokes, but their insurance companies are aware that there's a problem. In 2002, 9% of the claims paid by the major chiropractic insurance company were for strokes. That isn't proof that they were caused by manipulation, but it is proof that the insurance companies can't deny that there's a problem. When it comes to quackery, chiropractic is a veritable duck pond. Chiropractors are quack magnets. They adopt every new idea that might increase their patient count, no matter how crazy. And they keep using quack methods even after they've been disproven. I'll give just a few examples. Moire contour analysis maps the surface of the body and supposedly picks up asymmetries that help locate disease areas. It doesn't work. Chiropractors have been using these gadgets for almost a century. They run it down your back with a prong on either side of the spine. It's supposed to pick up temperature differences to pinpoint subluxations. Unfortunately, the needle also moves when you press harder, so it's really easy to fool yourself. For patients who don't like the idea of having their back forcibly cracked, the activator is a spring-loaded device that can be adjusted to various impacts that can be as light as a finger tap. This machine that looks sort of like a drill press is a special activator that taps a specific spot on the atlas, the top cervical vertebra, at a carefully calculated angle. Adjusting the atlas is supposed to fix the entire spine. Applied kinesiology is a bogus muscle testing technique that a whopping 43% of American chiropractors use to diagnose allergies and other conditions. They believe it even works by proxy. This chiropractor is diagnosing the little girl by testing the strength in her mother's arm. This is a toughness device. The operator rubs his fingers on the detection plate and claims to feel a stickiness when the device is positioned over a subluxation. It's totally bogus. It was banned by the FDA in 1980, but it's still being used. In 1991, 3.3% of chiropractors were still using it. In 2007, the FDA confiscated 96 of them. As recently as 2013, the California Board of Chiropractic examiners disciplined chiropractor David Monago for using one. Some chiropractors use a variety of other bogus tests and treatments. This is just a partial list. It includes things like homeopathy and divination with a pendulum. I won't read the list now, but you can find it in the course guide. Chiropractors used to routinely take full spine x-rays that exposed the pelvis and reproductive organs to unnecessary radiation. They were mostly out of focus because of the different thickness of the body at different levels. They still do a lot of unnecessary x-rays. X-rays are not indicated for most common cases of low back pain. They may recommend repeating x-rays at frequent intervals to assess progress, which is silly because subluxations don't show on x-ray. The only legitimate reason for x-rays is to make sure there are no fractures or tumors or anything else that would be a contraindication to manipulation. CME, or Continuing Medical Education for Chiropractors, often amounts to courses in practice management to boost their patient count. They often engage in unethical advertising. D.D. Palmer's son, B.J., was a publicity genius and something of a con man. He had a favorite saying that the spine supports the ribs, supports the skull, and supports the chiropractor. He was interested only in making money. They put blind ads in the newspaper that don't reveal that they're chiropractors, even though that practice is prohibited by the ethical guidelines of their own organizations. They offer to mail you free medical reports about new discoveries to treat back pain or whiplash or to cure ruptured discs by space age technology with no need for surgery. There are no new discoveries, just minor variations on old techniques, and they have to sneak this information to you by mailing you a report at your request because the FTC would not allow them to make false claims in direct advertising. They do anything and everything to drum up business, like the free exam and the double scale at the county fair that diagnoses everyone as lopsided. I mean, just try standing on two scales and getting them both to register the same weight. These free exams are guaranteed to find subluxations in every customer, and chiropractors will tell you that everyone needs regular chiropractic adjustments to maintain normal health. Some chiropractors give very bad advice. Less than 50% of chiropractors support immunizations, and some are adamantly against them. Many are against water fluoridation. Many of them give diet advice based on unsubstantiated theories, and they sell diet supplements and vitamins out of their office at inflated prices. Many of them try to persuade their patients to avoid conventional medical care, claiming that it's almost always harmful. Some want to be your family doctor, but they're not trained to fill that role. Some of them have missed obvious diagnoses that required referral. In one study, a patient went to several chiropractors complaining of the symptoms of a heart attack. Instead of rushing him to the ER, they all offered him chiropractic adjustments for his pain. In another study, chiropractors failed to recognize that a high fever in a very young infant was an emergency. Most of them just offered to adjust the infant's spine. Many chiropractors create a chiropractic neurosis by doing lifelong maintenance adjustments and convincing patients that every symptom they get, every sniffle or itch, is a reason to run back to the chiropractor because it means their last adjustment has slipped. A chiropractor in my town in Puyallup, Washington had a website where he claimed that childbirth stretches the baby's neck up to two-and-a-half times its normal length. I tried to tell him that if childbirth could do that, he wouldn't have a baby anymore, just a corpse. It's impossible to stretch a baby's neck that far. The bones don't stretch, and they can't separate because they're tightly bound by muscles and ligaments. Just try stretching your Thanksgiving turkey's neck to two-and-a-half times its normal length. It can't be done. His website also claimed that every newborn should be adjusted as soon as possible after birth, preferably right in the delivery room, and that delaying chiropractic treatment until puberty could cause irreversible damage. This is nothing but the most errant bull spit. Baby's bones haven't even finished forming. They mostly consist of separate ossification centers in a cartilage matrix. Here's a chiropractic ad for earaches. Ear infections are the number one reason for children to visit a chiropractor, but there is no evidence that chiropractic works for ear infections. Chiropractors can get away with claiming that it does because most ear infections will go away on their own without treatment. Occasionally, they miss an infection that does require antibiotics and complications like mastoiditis and brain infections can occur. They make other claims for pediatric conditions like colic, but there is no evidence that chiropractic benefits any pediatric condition. Many authorities feel that no child under the age of 12 should have chiropractic treatment period. A skeptical chiropractor named Samuel Hamola says that manipulating children is scientifically indefensible and it puts children at risk for things like brain bleeds and periplegia and fatal brain and spine injuries. It also delays diagnosis of treatable illnesses like cancer and meningitis. I found a chiropractic website that had a cynical list of ploys to deliberately undermine the parent's trust in their pediatrician and get them to bring their kids to a chiropractor for their primary care. An example, examine a child's spine and say, hmm, like you found something worrisome. And then ask mom if the child breastfed more from the right breast or the left breast. Whichever she answers, say, I thought so, and then ask, did your pediatrician ever ask you that? Chiropractors come in different flavors. These are their professional organizations. The International Chiropractors Association is for straights. The American Chiropractic Association is for mixers. The straights limit their practice to chiropractic adjustments only. The mixers may add anything from massage to voodoo. There is also a small group of upper cervical or nuca practitioners who only work on the top vertebra in the neck. Even most other chiropractors think that they're wrong. They follow the whole in one theory. The idea that if you adjust the atlas, the top vertebra, the rest of the spine will somehow magically fall into alignment. The picture supposedly shows how health and healing messages come from the brain down to the atlas vertebra, but can't get past it if the head and neck are misaligned, which is nonsense. They take unnecessary x-rays. They draw lines on x-rays before and after treatment, and they pretend to show improvement by drawing the lines slightly differently. They claim to treat everything from allergies and ear infections to multiple sclerosis and epilepsy. There's a nuca practitioner in Seattle that I call the no-touch chiropractor. One hand over the other and makes a cracking sound in her own wrists while remaining about an inch away from the patient's skin. Sometimes, instead of using their hands to adjust the atlas, they use a machine like this. It provides an impulse to a tiny spot at a precisely calculated angle. They call this atlas orthogonal. And there's another small, slowly-growing category of reform chiropractors who reject the subluxation concept and try to provide evidence-based care. They limit their practice to short-term treatment of musculoskeletal problems. There aren't very many of them, and they're hard to find. They essentially operate as if they were physical therapists with special expertise in the back. It's hard to see how they can call what they're doing chiropractic. Chiropractors have lots of satisfied patients, and they do help people. Chiropractors do well. They provide effective physical therapy for back pain, and they offer sympathy, explanations, and support. The doctor says, I don't know why your back hurts. Here, try these pills. The chiropractor says, I know exactly why your back hurts, and I can fix it, and I can keep it from recurring. It's satisfying to have an explanation even if that explanation is wrong. And he provides lots of personal attention, hands-on care, and wants to see you again soon and your whole family too. For benign self-limiting conditions, the chiropractor may keep the patient entertained long enough for the condition to resolve naturally, and that may keep them from trying surgery or other treatments that might have dangerous side effects. And they're good psychologists. They know how to please patients who are dissatisfied with their regular doctors. There is one treatment they use that is really effective. Spinal manipulation therapy has been proven to work for low back pain, but it isn't any more effective than other forms of treatment. In one study, it didn't work any better than just giving the patient a pamphlet about back care. But it may offer more rapid relief, and it's a reasonable option for patients who want to avoid pills. But there's nothing uniquely chiropractic about it. DOs, physical therapists, please use it too. If a chiropractor offers to provide spinal manipulation therapy for back pain, that's acceptable. But if he claims to be adjusting your spine to correct subluxations, that's not acceptable. Neck manipulation has been proven effective for neck pain, but it's no more effective than general mobilization, and neither manipulation nor mobilization will work unless they're combined with an exercise program. Chiropractic has many of the hallmarks of suicide. It has its own journals and publishes studies, but they're of very low quality. They publish a lot of case reports and uncontrolled studies designed to impress readers that chiropractic works, not to find out if it works. Science makes progress. Chiropractic doesn't. Science rejects things that have been shown not to work. Chiropractic doesn't. They just keep adding more adjustment techniques to over a hundred now. They haven't tested them against each other to see if some are more effective than others. They just want to have the freedom to choose any treatment they want. This book is a travesty. It's a matter of visceral aspects of chiropractic. It's a textbook intended for use in schools of chiropractic. It's about treating disease in other parts of the body instead of just the spine. It claims that chiropractic can treat asthma, colic, ear infections, disorders, menstrual pain, and a host of other internal disorders. The subtitle claims it is an evidence-based approach. But I read this entire book and I didn't find anything in it that could be classified as evidence-based medicine or science-based medicine. Their concept of evidence is anecdotal reports, uncontrolled studies, and poorly designed studies that have never been replicated. If you still want to consult a chiropractor about all this, here's how to choose a safe one. Look for one who rejects subluxation therapy, who doesn't take unnecessary x-rays, who doesn't use quack procedures or tests, who doesn't do preventive or maintenance adjustments, who doesn't promote unproven dietary supplements, who doesn't pretend to be a family doctor, who doesn't treat young children, who doesn't demonstrate antagonism to scientific medicine, who doesn't discourage immunizations, who limits his practice to short-term treatment of musculoskeletal problems, and who knows when to refer. The skeptical chiropractor Samuel Homola used to tell his patients, I can't predict whether manipulation will help you, but let's try it for three treatments. If it's not helping at that point, we'll stop. Remember Lori Jean Mathiason's multiple treatments over six months? Don't you think she should have realized before that point that it wasn't working? Pick a chiropractor who's wearing the hat on the left. Trust me, I'm a scientist, rather than the one on the right.  I think I've made it clear that chiropractic is not science-based, but let me add a few horror stories. In a recent online forum, chiropractors were arguing about whether you could ever die if your spine were kept in perfect alignment. Some of them thought you couldn't die. Since everyone dies, I guess they thought that no one's spine is ever kept in perfect alignment.  He has never had an immunization, and he claims that he can't catch anything because his spine is in alignment. Incidentally, he happens to be morbidly obese.  I met a chiropractor who diagnoses allergies by having the patient hold a sealed glass vial of allergen in one hand while he tests their muscle strength in the other arm. If their muscles seem weaker when they hold a vial, that proves to him that they're allergic to the vial's contents. He suspected one patient was allergic to something at work, and he didn't have a vial of bowing. So he just had the patient think about bowing, and that worked just as well. A child in my neighborhood had died of meningitis because he was treated with chiropractic adjustments instead of antibiotics. I asked if the family had sued the chiropractor, and I was told that they couldn't very well do that because the treating chiropractor was the child's own father. His false beliefs killed his own child. A friend of mine had a narrow escape. He had a backache that just wouldn't go away, and on a Friday afternoon he made an appointment for Monday. On Saturday, his back pain stopped, and it never came back. Chiropractic must really be powerful if it works by just making an appointment. Remember the post-hoc or go-prop-to-hoc fallacy from lecture one. If he had seen the chiropractor on Friday, and the pain went away the very next day, who do you think would have gotten the credit? He probably would have thought the chiropractor was a miracle worker, and he would have kept seeing him forever. So to summarize, chiropractic is a pre-scientific belief system. It's based on a myth, the subluxation. It has tried to establish scientific credibility for over a century, and has failed. Sometimes chiropractors help people feel better, but they can also cause harm. When chiropractic does help, it's not really anything uniquely chiropractic that helps. If a chiropractor offers spinal manipulation therapy for short-term treatment of certain kinds of musculoskeletal pain, he might be able to help you. If he offers to adjust your subluxations or to treat problems elsewhere in the body, he's not to be trusted. In the next lecture, I'll talk about another CAM that is highly overrated. Acupuncture.


Welcome to another edition of Unfettered Freedom, your bi-weekly GNU slash Linux news video podcast. Packing so much freedom into each episode, it ought to be illegal. There's so much freedom packed into this podcast, 4 out of 5 neckbeards recommend this podcast versus the proprietary alternatives. On this episode of Unfettered Freedom, Linus Torvalds has some thoughts about the new M1 Max. He wants to see Linux running on those things. Also, what are the most popular snap packages in 2020? We're going to take a look at some of the analytics and see what people are actually downloading and installing as snap packs. We have two Linux distributions, Fun2 and Cebion, they have decided to join forces. Also, Fedora, they're thinking about switching away from pulse audio as their default audio server to pipe wire. And SystemD, it wants to change how you manage your home directory. All of this and more on this edition of Unfettered Freedom. I am your host, Derek Taylor, also known as DT or Distrotube over on YouTube and on Library. This podcast as well as all the video content on the Distrotube channel is community sponsored. Because of the community support that I received, there are no corporate sponsors or product shilling in these episodes. So if you'd like to support my work, I'd greatly appreciate it. Please consider subscribing to Distrotube over on Patreon. And our first story is the comments recently by Linus Torvalds on the new M1 powered Macs. So Linus Torvalds has always been a fan of Apple hardware. He has actually ran MacBooks before he had a MacBook Air, an 11 inch MacBook Air that he ran for many, many years. And he always spoke very highly of it. Of course, he runs a Linux as the operating system on those devices. He doesn't actually run Mac OS. But the problem with these new Mac lineups, these M1 powered MacBooks is that they are not going to be able to run Linux. And Linus Torvalds really doesn't like that. So recently over at the Real World Technologies Forum, Linus was asked about his thoughts on the M1 powered MacBooks that are coming out. And Linus said, quote, I'd absolutely love to have one if it just ran Linux. And that's the issue. So a few months back, Apple announced that they were going to move away from their x86 processors and move over to using ARM processors, which is gigantic news. And it's kind of interesting, you know, that's really going to push ARM forward. They started making their own silicon chips, these M1 chips. And you're going to say, well, Linux runs on ARM. So why wouldn't Linux run on these new MacBook devices? Well, the problem isn't necessarily their CPUs. The problem is going to be all the other stuff on that MacBook. It's because the CPU is not the entire computer, right? It takes a whole bunch of stuff to actually make a computer work. Linus says, quote, the main problem with the M1 for me is the GPU and other devices around it, because that's likely what would hold me off using it because it wouldn't have any Linux support unless Apple opens up. So this is closed hardware. They're never going to share with you the technical specs of this hardware that Apple's creating. So unless they open that up and share it with the community, no one can really make Linux work on these devices, right? Until you tell me what your GPU is doing until you share with me some of the technical details. I can't write a driver for it. So unless Apple is going to make Linux work on that device, no one can unless they open it up. Now, if they open it up to the community, share all the hardware specs and technical details that they need to share with the Linux team, for example, I promise you Linus Torvalds and his team will make Linux work on those devices.  They would make Linux work on those devices, but it's up to Apple to open that hardware up. Now, Apple has had a love-hate relationship with open source in the past. They've never been forthcoming with sharing these kind of hardware details in the past. And it's becoming increasingly this way with Apple. Matter of fact, this M1 hardware that they're putting out, the Google Chrome team has been running into what they call showstopping bugs with the Chrome web browser running on the M1 Macs. Linus was asked, will Apple ever open up their chipsets? And he said, quote, it seems unlikely, but hey, you can always hope. So there's his thoughts on that. I guess Apple has not been forthcoming with this stuff in the past, so you don't expect them to ever do this in the future. It's kind of like until these companies show you that they can change, you just assume they're always going to be like that, kind of like Microsoft. For decades, Microsoft was so anti-free software, anti-open source, anti-Linux. For a while, they really had to prove it to us that they were actually serious about working with the open source community and doing good stuff with open source software.  But Apple hasn't even gotten onto that road yet. Linus goes on to say that he's not sure he would buy one of these devices anyway because even if getting Linux to run on it wasn't an issue, he says, quote, my personal hope would be for more cores. Even in a laptop, I don't care about the 20-hour battery life. He says I'd rather plug it in a bit more often, but he wants eight big cores. And what he's talking about here is, of course, his particular workflow, the more cores, the more processes, the faster, probably, you know, compile times for the kernel or whatever it is he's doing on these devices. So for him, it's all about, hey, how many cores can you fit on that thing? I don't need 20-hour battery life. I know Linus in the past has also talked about he doesn't like loud laptops. He doesn't like spinning fans and things like that. He really wants a quiet machine. They asked him about the 16 gigs of RAM that are going to be on these current models. And I believe that is actually the limit. They're going to ship with 16 gigs. And I think that's all you're going to get. He says, quote, 16 gigs is actually OK because I don't tend to do things that require a lot of RAM. All I do is read email, do get, and kernel compiles. So he doesn't need, and he specifically says, I don't need 64 gigs of RAM on my laptop. He has 64 gigs of RAM on a desktop computer that he has. And he says, that's a specialty machine. He does some huge parallel builds on that machine. That's why that's a very beefy workstation. But on his laptop, he says 16 gigs of RAM, more than what he needs. Linus mentions that when it comes to RAM, typically the people that need a ton of RAM are the ones that are doing multiple VMs or working with huge raw file photography and video. And I would agree with that. That's why I have 64 gigs of RAM on my workstation as well. It's because I do a lot with VMs and of course I do a lot with video. So some interesting comments there from Linus Torvalds. Do I personally think Apple is going to respond in a positive way to these comments? I doubt it. Unfortunately, Apple is going in a direction right now where they're actually trying to make their devices more and more locked down. They're not trying to become more and more open. They want you to be completely locked in to their ecosystem, to their hardware. Right to repair is a big deal with Mac right now because you can't even get your MacBooks repaired unless you go to an official Apple repair shop. So I don't see them ever opening things up unfortunately. And our second story is what are the most popular snap packages? So last year in 2019, Canonical released a report stating what the most popular snap packages were and they broke it down by various distributions because of course snaps are just not in a boon-to thing. You can get snaps working on pretty much every GNU slash Linux distribution as long as it runs SystemD. So I thought it would be great to take a look at this year's report because they just released some data about the top five most popular snap packages in 2020 by distribution. And what's really interesting is the list is very different depending on what distribution you're running because some distributions of course are very geared toward just your standard consumer desktop person. Some of them are more geared toward development. Some of them are more geared toward web servers and things like that. So it's going to be a completely different top five depending on what distribution we take a look at. So if I take a look at this article here by Brian Fagioli over at Beta News he breaks down the report here nicely in some columns here. The top five snaps per Linux distro for 2020. And let's start with the far right column here. Those of you watching the video podcast because the far right column is a boon-to. And I think that's the one to take a look at first because of course snaps are in a boon-to thing. A boon-to is probably the most popular desktop Linux distribution. So you would expect because of the large number of users and the large number of users actually using snaps that that's a pretty good representation of how popular these particular programs are. And in a boon-to the most popular snap is VLC. Now that's interesting. I've actually installed VLC as a snap on my Arco Linux that I run on my main workstation and the snap pack for VLC it just works. Why did I install VLC as a snap? I can't even remember why I did it. Obviously VLC is in the standard arch repositories but for some reason I installed it as a snap and it works and it works just fine. Number two on the list for a boon-to code, VS Code. You want to install VS Code and of course it's packaged as a snap because the standard binary builds of VS Code are not free and open source software. They're licensed under a proprietary software. So that's probably why they package that as a snap and they don't have that in the standard of boon-to repositories. Number three is Spotify, again not free and open source software. It's proprietary. Number four is the canonical live patch. I don't know anything about canonical live patch. I think that has to do with updating your system as far as kernel updates and things like that. I haven't actually played with a boon-to lately so I'm not really sure what that's about. Number five and the top five for a boon-to is GIMP. I have installed GIMP as a snap pack and the snap for GIMP works just fine as well. Now there are five other distributions that we have the top five snaps for. We have Manjaro, Fedora, Debian, CentOS and Arch Linux. Now let's start with Manjaro because Manjaro is really for the desktop Linux user much like a boon-to so I would expect the list to be very similar. But there are some different things in here. Number one on Manjaro's list is Spotify. Number two is VS Code. Number three, Skype. Wow, I didn't know that many people were still interested in Skype. Of course, I guess because of the lockdown and the pandemic a lot of people are doing video conferencing and video chat. So for Manjaro, number three is Skype. Number four is Zoom. Make sense. And number five is Discord. Make sense. A lot of video chat stuff for the Manjaro list. Now where things get really interesting, once you get into some of the distributions that are more geared toward development or especially server. So Debian and CentOS are both here. And in both Debian and CentOS, the number one snap pack is Certbot. What is Certbot is this program put out by the Electronic Frontier Foundation that does HTTPS for your website. So Debian and CentOS are often used on web servers. Matter of fact, they're probably the two most popular distributions if you're going to do web servers. And that would make sense. Why Certbot is the number one snap on those particular distributions. MicroKates is number two on CentOS's list. And then we also have LXD, Helm and Debian's list. We have Postman. So these are all server related applications for the most part. Some Kubernetes stuff in here. The Arch Linux list is interesting because Arch is also mainly for the desktop user. Not too many people use Arch on servers. You can, but being rolling release typically is just for your standard desktop user. It's list Spotify, Skype, Discord, VS Code, and Anbox, which is, I believe, for Android development. So that's interesting that that made that list. Now one of the omissions in the list here, these popular snap packs, because so many people got mad when Chromium was only available as a snap on Ubuntu and then, of course, on Mint and then Mint decided we're just not going to do snaps because we don't want to force people to install Chromium as a snap. Chromium is not even in the top five most popular snaps on Ubuntu. It was in the top five in 2019, though. It was number four. Also, I know for a while, Ubuntu was installing a lot of the standard GNOME applications in its flagship edition, Ubuntu. Like the calculator and things like that were all a snap. So I don't see any of them in the list. Overall, my take on this list is that the lockdown, the pandemic and the lockdown has really affected the way people use their computer. I mean, just that Manjaro top five list, the fact that three of them are video conferencing software, Skype, Zoom, and Discord tells you a lot about how people are using their computers in 2020. Also, the fact that VS Code was spotted on several of these lists. A matter of fact, five of the six list VS Code was in the top five snap packs. So that's becoming very popular to use on Linux. I think some of that has to do with Microsoft being a little more friendly to Linux and to the open source community these days. And our third story is two Linux distributions you probably haven't heard of. They are kind of waning in popularity these days. As a matter of fact, a few weeks ago, I remember commenting on one of my videos that I love Sabion. Sabion is a Gen2 based Linux distribution that does some really nice stuff. And it just doesn't seem like I ever hear about it anymore. They haven't had a release in forever. When you go to their website, it doesn't look like there's much activity. Their forms don't see any activity. And Fun2 is kind of the same way. I can't remember the last time. I even heard about Fun2. Nobody mentions it. So both of these projects were kind of stagnating. And what they've decided to do is to join forces. So both on the Fun2 website and the Sabion website, we got this announcement that Fun2 and Sabion have decided to join forces. Now, that doesn't mean that they're going to completely merge into one project or anything like that. I think they're going to keep doing their own separate thing, but they are going to work on some collaboration for some things. For example, I know Fun2. You can use Eqo, which is a package manager, I believe Sabion created, because the standard package manager in Sabion, I think you can also use that in Fun2. I haven't actually looked at Fun2 in many, many, many years. I've never actually looked at it on the YouTube channel. But that's probably some areas where they can maybe make their lives a little easier, as far as doing a lot of duplication of work. Hey, you know what? Why don't you guys do this and we'll do that. And then we can share our work and we can still maintain our own separate distros, but at the same time, you know, not really wasting a whole lot of time trying to reinvent the wheel when somebody else has already solved this problem. I'm just going to briefly read a little bit of the announcement on Fun2's forum. They said, quote, Sabion is a great open source project and has an amazing reputation for delivering an easy-to-use Linux desktop that is built using Gen2. For quite a while, Fun2 has been supporting the Sabion effort because we believe in what they do. Over the past several months in chatting with the Sabion team, it became really clear that we shared a vision. We were also working on several next-generation technologies that were a good complement to one another. We decided it would be more powerful and fun to combine our efforts into one larger effort. So that is what we are doing. And just briefly, I'm going to go to the Sabion website and just very briefly read this line from their announcement, quote, Fun2 Linux is a community-developed Linux meta-distribution based on Gen2. Fun2 Linux is optimized for the best possible performance on the latest Intel and AMD hardware. Fun2 is led by Daniel Robbins, the creator of Gen2 Linux and actively developed by the Fun2 community. And that's one of Fun2's claim to fame is that the person that started Fun2 was the original creator of Gen2 Linux. So what are my thoughts on this? I think this is great news. I love when I hear open source projects actually combining forces, doing collaborative stuff instead of constantly trying to do their own thing and you get all this duplication of work and just wasted time. And I love the fact that Sabion and Fun2 are doing this and I think both of these projects need to do this because I was really worried, especially for Sabion because I really like that distribution, full disclosure, I've been a patron of Sabions before, trying to help them with their development and I really want that particular distribution to succeed because it is a Gen2-based distribution but they aim to be easy to install which we've got a few Gen2-based distributions that are easy to install, but they want to take it to the next step, a clean polished desktop that looks good, easy to use. They want to be what Ubuntu is to Debian. Sabion wants to be that to Gen2 and for a while they weren't succeeding at that. A few years ago, Sabion was pretty popular. You saw people running it, you saw screenshots of Sabion and everything but really in the last two or three years, its popularity has just completely went away. You just don't hear anything about it and I think a lot of that is just development right now is slow on it. There's no new releases when you go to download their ISOs, you get some pretty old ISOs. So I'm pretty excited what Sabion and what Fun2 do now that they're combining their efforts a little bit and I will definitely be taking a look at their new releases when they get around to releasing some new releases for probably take a look at both Sabion and Fun2. And the fourth story I want to talk about is a story I just came across earlier today and it kind of shocked me. It's not really a story but just somebody on a mailing list for Fedora, they are just putting it out there, hey, is it time? Can we go ahead and switch away from Pulse Audio and Jack and go ahead and try to make PipeWire the default audio server in Fedora. And when I read that, I thought, wow, is the guy that wrote this crazy? That's like a medium. But Fedora is like this. Fedora, they're not afraid to experiment sometimes with their releases because Fedora is kind of an experimental distro anyway. They want to just throw stuff out there, see what sticks. They want to try it out in Fedora before it rolls out into something like Red Hat oftentimes. So over on the mailing list, Ben Cotton wrote this summary here. The change proposal is to route all audio from Pulse Audio and Jack to PipeWire Audio Damon by default. And he goes on to say that all desktop audio on Fedora is handled by the Pulse Audio Damon. Applications make use of the Pulse Audio client library to communicate with the Pulse Audio Damon that mixes and manages the audio streams from the clients, yada, yada, yada. The proposal, of course, is to replace the Pulse Audio Damon with a functionally compatible implementation based on PipeWire. So, hey, and then he also talks about Jack because if you're not going to use Pulse Audio on Linux, typically you're going to use Jack. He talks about all pro audio is handled with the Jack client library, which talks to the Jack server. This proposal will install a Jack client library replacement that talks directly to PipeWire. So everything you're doing with Pulse and Jack, we want to just reimplement everything so it's really talking to PipeWire. And I think that's a bold move. I really do.  We know this. Audio on Linux, the audio server situation on Linux has never been good. Pulse Audio has been around for more than a decade now and it still has issues. Jack has been around forever. And Jack also has issues. It's kind of a chore to set up. And even when you use it, the inputs and outputs and routing everything to where it needs to go, it's a mess. And if PipeWire can at least match what Pulse Audio and Jack currently do because I'll be honest, I don't like Pulse Audio. I can't stand Pulse Audio. There's so many issues I have with audio doing what I do with video and podcasting and things. You'll be surprised how often I have problems with Pulse Audio. I'll open up Pulse Audio Volume Control and whatever my inputs and outputs and everything are completely different from where they were the last time. I did something with them. Who changed this stuff? I didn't change it. It's like Pulse Audio. There's a gremlin in the audio server that goes in and changes all of my settings. And I can't stand it. So what are the advantages of moving from Pulse and Jack over to PipeWire? Well, according to Ben in this post, he talks about PipeWire having more flexibility, better integration, better performance, of course. And he also mentions better security, which I'd never considered the security aspects with the audio server, but he goes on to write, quote, PipeWire enforces per-client security. Object visibility and the actions on them can be configured independently per-client. This makes it possible to enforce a security policy for sandbox applications such as Flatpak, which Fedora is heavily invested in Flatpak. So I guess all of that makes sense. Now, this proposed change is for the very next release of Fedora. Fedora 34, which is coming up in, what, eight, nine months. Fedora often doesn't release on time, though they typically release when ready, but sometime in 2021 we'll probably get Fedora 34 come out and will PipeWire be the default audio server? I hope so. If it is, I will definitely install Fedora 34 on my main production machine, because I have extra drives anyway. I don't even have to wipe out my Arco installation. I'll install it on an extra drive and I will make some videos using Fedora 34 with PipeWire because I want to see PipeWire in action. It's been a project I have been following a little bit as far as the news on development, because we've got to move away from pools. We just have to. Now, just one brief aside, I did notice today that Pulse Audio had a new release. Pulse Audio 14.0 is released. And the release announcement here, the release notes is a massive page. Now, when you release something and you have to basically release a novel for the release notes, that just tells you what a massive effort that Pulse Audio is as far as an audio server. And that's why it's hard to replace these things. You can't just up and replace Pulse Audio in a day. And that's what is kind of scaring me with Fedora 34. We're moving from Pulse to PipeWire. Hey, we'll see. And the fifth story is SystemD wants to change how you manage your home directory. So of course, this is about Lynard Pottering, who is the creator of SystemD. Recently, he has been touting this new plan of his to completely change the way we do our home directories on Linux. So for a couple of years, Lynard has been talking about this. He's been talking about what he calls SystemD-HomeD. I guess it'll be the name of the project. So with the name HomeD, I'm assuming it'll be a daemon running. I don't know. Typically when you name processes with a D at the end, it is basically telling you that's a daemon. But anyway, SystemD-HomeD is going to be a new component for SystemD that reworks how we do our home directories on Linux. That's Lynard's quote there. He says, quote, adds strong encryption that makes sense. It supports automatic enumeration and hotplugged home directories and more. And he especially wants to get away from having to do things outside of your home directory for your home user. He's talks about, quote, I personally think that we should go towards systems where slash Etsy is generally not writable. What he's talking about here is for your home user, for example, what if you want to change your password? Well, that's written to a file somewhere in your slash Etsy folder, right? Slash Etsy slash pass WD or wherever it's at. And you have a lot of these configuration files and slash Etsy that have things to do with user stuff, user configuration. And he's like, why is that stuff there? Why is that in the root directory? Why is that in root, you know, slash Etsy? Why isn't that in the home directory? And I think he has a point there. And really when you're talking about the slash Etsy folder, that is specifically for configuration. That's really what that directory is designed for. And Lenard argues that creating or updating users should not be a configuration change, right? It shouldn't, it doesn't make sense why that stuff is there. He goes on to state that the current UNIX architecture, it mixes states with configurations and they're not the same thing. That's what he's trying to separate. Lenard goes on to say that he really wants to see built-in encryption home directories. And that's an interesting point because I do think in the year 2020 it is a little strange that we are not more into encryption as far as when it's on the desktop. Like that's not really a standard yet. Most people don't encrypt their drives. I know I don't. The reason I don't is I fear losing the passwords, losing the keys, and you can't get into that encrypted drive and, you know, if you lose the key to that drive you're just completely hosed at that point. You're never going to be able to recover that data. That's why I don't encrypt my drives. Pottering goes on to state though. One of the problems he has with the way encryption is done now is this weird situation where, quote, imagine booting up a laptop using full disk encryption, supplying your decrypting password, and then being asked to supply another lesser password to access your account on the network. And I agree that's a little strange because the really super strong password that gives you access to all the data on the computer is the one that actually decrypts everything. You know, is the decrypting password to let you have access to that encrypted disk. Why do you then need to add other passwords, you know, logging in as your user, getting access to the network, right? Because those are so much lesser passwords. I agree. It's probably not necessary once you have encrypted home directories as a default. There's no reason to have to worry about all the other passwords at that point because you couldn't even get into the thing unless you were you. Overall, I think he's got some interesting ideas about the home directory. Now, a lot of people are very, very negative with SystemD having anything to do with your home directory. SystemD is already your net system in many cases. It's your network manager and it's your cron job manager and everything else. There's so much that SystemD does on your system. It's not really in a net system. It handles many, many, many important things going on on your computer and a lot of people are like, well, it touching my home directory, that's just too much. Well, if you have a problem with it touching your home directory, you probably already shouldn't be using SystemD. You should probably be using a Linux distribution that uses an alternative, a net system. So I've never been one of these people that's a SystemD hater. I've never been one of those people that trashes Lenard pottering because he created SystemD. No, no, no. I trash Lenard pottering because he created Pulse Audio. And that is it for this edition of Unfettered Freedom. This was Unfettered Freedom Episode 12. Now, I release a new episode of Unfettered Freedom bi-weekly. That means every other week, every two weeks. That does not mean twice a week, guys. Every two weeks. So look for Episode 13 of Unfettered Freedom in two weeks. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of the show. They're my highest-tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, Episode 12 of Unfettered Freedom would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, those of you watching the video portion of the podcast. All of these names. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because the Distro Tube channel and the Unfettered Freedom podcast is sponsored by you guys. And I'll see you in the next podcast is sponsored by you guys, the community. If you'd like to support my work, look for Distro Tube over on Patreon. Alright, guys. Peace.


Welcome to Digital Asset News. I could stop stories in cryptocurrency and digital assets and back them down to bite-sized pieces. Today we've got some great stories about mass adoption with just a sprinkle of a scam. So first up, Bitcoin ain't going away. It's only going to get stronger, says US Congressman. Any state centralized monetary systems never end well. Also, Open removes liquidity from Uniswap after 370,000 stolen in DeFi exploit. And this actually is going to piggyback on the video we did from yesterday. And finally, Coinbase follows Huobi in supporting DOT crypto domains-based payments. And at first glance, this doesn't look too fantastic, but when we really begin to it, this is a massive step forward as far as mass adoption and ease of use. And actually, I was so excited about this news. I partnered up with Unstoppable Domains and they're giving away a hundred bucks just for watching this video. So at the very end, we're going to talk about it. But first up, let's take a look at the market. So it's August 5th. It's around 12.40 p.m. Texas time. It looks like Bitcoin, a little bit of a rally. What's going on? 4% up. Looks like we're almost at 11.7. So I'd like to see that 7% for the week. Fantastic. Ethereum is pushing the boundaries of 400. I'd like to see that. XRP 30 cents. Watch out. Tether zero. Tether is Tether's Tether. Bitcoin cash still in there. Don't understand why. Cardano is down a little bit. Bitcoin SV also in the top 10. Sure. Litecoin up 3%. Fantastic. Chainlink up just a smidge. And man, I gotta tell you, Chainlink has been on a massive run. I do not know when it's going to come down. There has to be retracement at some point. What goes up must come down. Things aren't in perpetual motion and they can't go the stratosphere without a little bit of a setback. But Chainlink is bucking that trend. So all the Chainlink holders, congratulations to you. Tip of the hat for holding on. Binance coin up 6.3%. Very nice. There was some news as far as a Binance or Binance is going to release one of their debit cards. I was watching a coin bureau's video. Fantastic stuff. Watch that as he talks about that and compares it to crypto.com, which is pretty interesting. I know there's a lot of people who are not too happy with crypto.com right now.  I don't know. EOS, Tezos, everything's looking pretty good. So a little green, mostly green. And I like to see that. So let's break into, actually, I want to start with the scam article real quick. So yesterday, we were talking about different alternatives to Coinbase. And I had talked about Uniswap. And I was so impressed with it because it was so easy to use. And I actually could get the Celsius token, which I can't get anywhere else. And I was just amazed. It was a decentralized exchange, very easy, very simple. And of course, I talked about connecting my Ether wallet to the Brave browser. You can also connect your ledger to the Brave browser. It's just awesome. So I was so impressed to actually put it on to the spreadsheet, which is the exchange and wallet information tab. This is everything you need to know as far as all the alternatives to Coinbase. I just had a lot of problems with Coinbase. So I just made this list of all the alternatives, all the things that I have used or am currently using. And it lays out everything as far as like fees and all that stuff. So there's a description in the, in every one of my videos, you can check it out. But what I did here is I put up Uniswap because I was just so impressed with it. But there is a little caveat here. And I said, Uniswap is awesome, really liked it. But I did say use it at your own risk, click here to see what I'm talking about. And when you click here, it goes to this article, which talks about the open. Open coin removes liquidity from Uniswap after a bunch of money was stolen. So let's break in. I need to talk about this so everybody's protected. Anyhow, it states here, attackers have exploited a vulnerability in the open ETH put contract to walk away with more than 370K. This happened yesterday. The traders used flash loans. We've heard about this before these flash loans and DeFi to buy Ethereum pot O tokens are put out tokens put out tokens from Uniswap. They then reportedly choose an ERC 20 token in this case, the USD C coin as collateral and exercised the trading option. The result was a double spend or double transfer, which effectively stole the collateral.  I mean, that's the whole point of this is to have a decentralized system. And it's a trustless base. And then you got these people. And that's just how it is.   Some people are uglier than others. And they just steal from people. So that's one of those things. Anyhow, it states according to blockchain records, the attackers received both their original Ethereum deposits and USD C options in August for the blog from open, the platform estimated losses from these point at 371 to 60, but said the amount may change. This is what they state. This exploit allowed an attacker to double exercise O tokens and steal the collateral posted by certain sellers. And they talk about how they actually pulled the coins off and they pulled the liquidity. So open realized something was happening within the day. And that's amazing, you know, to just be aware of what's going on and then to plug the whole that quiet that quickly. So tip of the hat to open. And this is what they state. They had removed the liquidity from Uniswap. And they said, Hey, all this is just yesterday at 11am roughly, it seems that there has been an issue with some O token contracts. We're working hard understanding the issue so we can let help or so we can help users as best we can. We have removed liquidity from Uniswap in the meantime, would be best to not open new vaults in the moment. And I got to tell you, I appreciate this kind of openness because in the past, we've seen a lot of businesses be very shadowy and not give the information out when there is a breach that is like, Oh, no, no, no, nothing's wrong here. You know, move away citizen, nothing to see here.  We're going to fix this right now. That's, that's great. That's how businesses should go. Anyhow, attempting to prevent further abuse of this loophole, open receive 4 and 39 170 USDC of collateral from outstanding vaults using a white hat attack, effectively returning it to put users.  And according to open co-founder Alexis Galba, in a discord chat session, the platform has offered to buy any ETH put O tokens at above market prices, which she said were 20% above the best ask price at dairy pit. And I gotta tell you, that's how you do things.  I will make sure this is corrected and moving forward will not happen again. And that's leadership and that's business and how it should run. I do appreciate that greatly. And I always remember the latest launch for SpaceX, Elon Musk said he was interviewed. And I cannot believe that guy doesn't have a massive ego.  Honestly, if I did all the things that guy did, but, but the interviewer said, you know, you know, what do you think about this launch? And he says, well, he goes, if everything goes and goes as planned, which we think it will, then I owe everything to the team around me. And it's a great, a great day. If it fails, it's because I did something wrong. And it's all on me. And that's how it should be done. So hats off to open, even though it may have made a mistake or whatever else, I just want to make sure everybody knows from now on, there's going to be a little disclaimer used you on risk for uniswap. But work pretty well, just that there's some issues with it. Any let's move on to the top story. So this guy, this is my new favorite congressman, Tom Emmer. And this was on the Palm Pliano podcast, which if you haven't checked it out, it's really good. Matthew Palm Pliano, he's been in the crypto space for quite some time. Digital Creek, he's the founder. And he brings on some pretty great guests. And this is no exception. So what happened in this episode is Emmer, he said a lot of different things, but some of the highlights were this. He states, as we come out of the crisis, talking about the coronavirus right now, Bitcoin ain't going away. It's going to get stronger. And now the acting comptroller of the currency or OCC, Brian Brooks, who was previously on the legal team of Coinbase, is saying, hey, institutions, you can start banking this stuff. You can provide a home for it. You can start working with it. And yeah, I think banks are going to do that because I don't want to miss out. And he was referring to Brooks recent statement that banks in the U.S. are allowed to custody cryptocurrencies, a move widely supported by everybody. Well, not everybody.  And some people are worried that the banks will turn on us because, you know, just like they do with fiat, they take in fiat, there's fractional reserve lending, and they'll take in a hundred bucks, and they'll lend a hundred bucks or whatever the criteria is. I don't know if it's 3% back in and 97% out. I don't know, but yeah, it could destroy the whole value as people start to, you know, deposit their Bitcoin, per se, right? And then they give them some kind of paper equivalent, which beats the whole purpose. But that's not a story for today. Let's just go on with this one. So the congressman also defended Bitcoin in the wake of the recent Twitter hack, saying that Bitcoin isn't the problem, centralized control is. And during the podcast, he clarified, he said, look, Twitter's the problem. And he's got a point.  Bitcoin didn't screw up Twitter. Your security was not adequate. They hacked Twitter and you're going to have bad guys all over the place. And that's true. It wasn't, it wasn't a problem with Bitcoin, which people said, Oh, there's a hack and it's Bitcoin. It's not the issue. The issue was Twitter messed up. And again, they should take ownership of that. He also explained that this is why he doesn't like centralized control. An example, Chinese Wuhan and the local government just shut everybody down since it was in control of fiat currencies. The government has your currency all on a card. And guess what? If you lived in Wuhan, they shut you down. You couldn't get a ride out of Wuhan to another city. You couldn't go get some groceries unless the government released you to go get the groceries. So Nina say more about what I don't like about centralized control. Before I move on, I know there are some people who were in China and now they are out or they are somehow getting access through whatever, poor, private VPN or whatever else to actually access these videos because I've got people who have lived in China or living in China. So I'm going to ask you that same question. Did that actually happen? Did the government shut down the ability to pay for things when you were over there during the pandemic? I would just like to know that.  Not sure if they did, but that's what the congressman has talked about. So need to verify that. Emmer added that when Facebook's Libra Crip, the currency was for his proposed, he thought, oh, great concept, but who's going to be in control? Someone's got to be in control. And he talks about studying as a book called The Road to Serfdom, written by economist and philosopher Frederick Hayek. Emmer pointed out that in a centralized system, there always has to be someone or some group that decides the allocation of money. That's never a good thing. So I appreciate this guy because he's looking into the past as far as the control of the centralized government, the central bankers, the Federal Reserve and how they are dictating the monetary policy, which is leading to a type of collapse. And when he talks about these things, he goes, this is why Bitcoin is fantastic because it is decentralized. So he's not afraid of it. He's going to embrace it. And that's why he's my new favorite congressman because I'm hoping he can bring things forward. And he is on the financial committee. So that's a great thing. But he does state here, now that works out pretty good, talking about decentralization or centralization, if you're the one that's in the group or is that guy. But after a while, if you're not in the group, if you're not the one making the decisions on the allocation, this thing always ends one way. And there's never been good, no matter what, no matter where it's been tried. And yeah, I like a person who can talk about history because you don't know where you're going unless you know where you've been. Finish it up. He says, I think we're just moving into that next phase, which is why crypto, the area excites me because I do, because do I think that the government has a role? Yeah, I'm not going to say no, I don't think it has a big role, but it has some type of role. And I love this quote. I think people can beliefs themselves.   And that's the same thing I talk about. Now, on this channel, we talk about scam the day sometimes. And the only reason I bring it up is to educate people not because I feel like everybody's dumb, but I feel like if they know these types of things, especially the newbies who are just getting into it are like, Hey, is this an airdrop? Looks like an airdrop. I don't know what an airdrop is. Maybe this is an airdrop. And then all of a sudden they're, you know, giving their Bitcoin away or, and they think, Oh, this is just how it goes. But that's not it. So I think people are smart. If you give them enough information, they will usually make the right decision. Not all the time.  But in general, I think people are smart enough to govern themselves for the most part. Anyhow, so I need to follow this guy. Here's you on Twitter. We follow him there. Great. Tom Emmer. So real quick, I want to talk about the Palm podcast because there was, there was two things and I haven't watched the whole thing. I watched about half of it and it was fantastic. So I definitely, I'm going to link this in the description so everybody can watch it because it's really interesting, the things that he has to say, but there's two things that I need to make mention. The first thing is this congressman's vision. Tom's vision of where crypto is going. And because it's on the financial committees, this is the guy that we want there. And this is the guy that could help with mass adoption. So let's take a listen. Experience. I wanted to be part of the financial services committee because I believe our monetary system, our opportunity, our financial system, at least in the past, has been what separates the United States of America from every other country on the face of the planet. It is the definition of our freedom. This is the only country where you and I, at least we used to be able to, it's getting worse because these do-gooders with election certificates keep rushing in to save us all from ourselves and they cause more trouble than they do solve problems.  It used to be, now we've got all kinds of options, one of which I don't want to see government screw up and that's the crypto area. But we can sit down with somebody that wants to join us in taking a risk. They want to help us by providing necessary capital that allows us to open the next great Harley Davidson in our garage, the next great metronic in our garage, Walt Disney. And I mean every one of these companies that started with an idea in the garage, that's what makes this country frankly different from every other country in the face of the planet. So as he's talking about that, first of all, I like his outlook. There's some things that are just a little bit wacky with him, but what are you going to do? He's a politician. That's what politicians are. But I will say that when we start to talk about all these different major corporations like an IBM getting into blockchain and everybody's worried like, oh, they're going to take over and they're going to dominate everything else. All the big companies always started off as just some little idea like he talks about in somebody's garage. Look at Apple, look at Microsoft, look at Airbnb. It all started with a very simple idea that grew to something massive. Why didn't big corporations take over? Because they are so bloated with top heavy management and they cannot be as nimble as a small startup. So when we start talking about cryptocurrency assets, I will put my money on the small guy as opposed to big huge corporation. They can't move and can't shift and can't pivot because they have too much overhead. So the next part, this is the last part where he's going to pull back the curtain. This was fascinating to me because he has met with the Federal Reserve and this is the mentality. So let's take a listen. It's funny. I'm going to tell you as a side story, that I got here, I get on the financial services committee. One of the first things we got was a meeting over at the Federal Reserve with then Chair Yellen and Dr. Stanley Fisher, one of the board members and Jay Powell, who was then one of the governors, whatever you call them, their titles. And I asked them what they were doing to create more opportunities in the financial services industry. And back then, Pomp, I was talking specifically about bank charters, right? Which, by the way, I think the action by Brian Brooks last week could be very good when we talk about banks, but we can get to that in a minute. I said to them, you guys have been suffocating the lower end of the financial services spectrum. Dr. Stanley Fisher, God bless him. I don't really know him. But he told me, his response was, well, it's because they can't keep up. The smaller banks can't keep up with the computer technology. He said to them, hey man, why don't you come to Minnesota and we'll go up to Halleck, where I think they're still using the old-fashioned ledger, and they're keeping track of everybody the old-fashioned way. No, you guys got to get out of the way. You get so involved. So again, that's the problem with power. Once you have power, it's hard to let go. It's hard to relinquish what you have, and that's the problem with the Federal Reserve.  And hopefully, Tom here will pass some bills, write some bills, and be on the right side of history as far as cryptocurrency and digital assets go. All right, let's talk about some more mass adoption in our next story. So next up, Coinbase follows Huobi in supporting .crypto domains-based payments. And again, at first, I was like, great, unstoppable domains. We talked about that a little bit ago about how you can change some things over and get some domains. And just like the early days of the internet, when people were buying up like pets.com and casper.com and they sold the domains for millions of dollars. So I kind of see that as what's going on right now. But there's a new wrinkle to this. And I think it's interesting. So Coinbase Wallet now allows to register and store .crypto domains, which is great. Huobi does the same thing. And so does Gemini, featuring payments through domain handles instead of cryptographic addresses. And this is huge. This is what I thought what it was going to be like two or three weeks ago when I first learned about it. But that's not the case. So here's what's going on. Coinbase users can now send payments to each other by simply typing a .crypto domain instead of using the long form cryptographic addresses and stop the domains, told Coinbase. Great. By introducing the new integration, Coinbase Wallet joins Huobi, which announced the same feature in late June. Coinbase will also custody .crypto domains, just like Gemini, where you can store your domains there, which people are like, well, why do I do that? We got to understand. There's some huge entities who are just buying up .crypto domains like nobody's business because they want to be like the internet in 1995 or four when everybody was buying up the .coms. That's why you can't get good .coms anymore because they're all bought up. So now we have an ability to buy .crypto .zil domains. So they're getting bought up quickly. So this is the time to buy them. So anyhow, Coinbase is going to allow you to store the domains there as far as Gemini and Huobi, I think, as well. But let's take a look at what it appears to be when you pay with a public key versus .crypto domain. Now, most of you know this, but I just want to make sure that everybody's up to speed. So this was the video that we first talked about, Unstoppable Domains. I'll link it at the very end in one of the end cards. But what I said here, and this is in the description of every one of the videos, is going to talk about a Brave browser and then it's going to say, Unstoppable Domains. Simplify your sending and receiving crypto addresses. So you go from this with this big long, I mean, it's not that long, to be honest, right? But if someone comes with you on the street and go, hey, man, what's, you know, how can I pay in Bitcoin? Oh, well, let me, let me tell you, it's three PFS, one QS, QXJ. No one's going to do that.  But how cool is this? You take that and just go, yeah, just send us down likes.crypto. Just send us down likes.crypto. That's all you got to do. If you don't have your phone on you, or if you want to remember it later, you want to post anywhere or whatever, then likes.crypto or whatever it is, it could be, you know, potatofoot.crypto or tomatocoin.crypto or whatever else it is, right? You just have to register it and unstoppable domains. And what's cool about that is you don't have to use a Bitcoin address and Ethereum address and XRP address, a Zillica address or whatever address that you have for all your different cryptos. Dan likes.crypto accepts all of them, just like potatofoot.crypto or whatever you have like johnsmith.crypto. When you set it up, it can accept all the cryptos that you've ever had or have ever thought about having. So that's great. And I'm going to show you how that works right now. And then of course, if you want to sign up for it, here is the link. That'll be in the description of every one of the videos. Click on that, make sure you go in the right place. So let's take a look at what that appears to be when you do that with Coinbase. So this is on the Unstoppable Domains website, and you got Tim Draper here, and he's going to tell you all about it. So Tim, if you don't know, is one of those people that likes to invest in startups, you know, the little stuff like Hotmail and Uber and whatever else. Now, has he had 100% winners? No, but he's picked some right ones. And cryptocurrency, especially Bitcoin, which he predicts to be 250,000 soon, is one of his babies. And he also, I believe, is investing in Unstoppable Domains. So let's take a listen. Today, I'm excited to share that you can now use Unstoppable Domains inside the Coinbase wallet. You can send money to Tim Draper. Crypto. Yeah, don't do that. But anyway, you can send money to Tim Draper. Crypto, and you don't have to know my public address, and it will come right to me. And so it solves all the complications of sending Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency because the public address is now your name.Crypto. So. All right, so great. So here's how we do all that. We're going to sign up for a .crypto, right? We're going to find whatever it is that we have. Jane Smith, John Doe, .crypto, whatever else, right? And then once we're logged in, we have everything. We're going to click these three dots here, and I'll stop all domains or three bars, the menu. And we're going to go to My Domains. And there's danlikes.crypto. We're going to click on Manage. So this is where we can put in all the different cryptocurrencies that we're going to use for our danlikes.crypto. Now, do you want to select the initial one? Sure. Let's take a look. And here they all are. Lots of them, right? I need to add my Zillica, and my Litecoin, and I'm not going to add Litecoin, and my Bitcoin, but I'll do that later. I'm just, I haven't got around to it. So that's pretty much it. And then once we're done, we just click on Save Changes. And that's all. Again, you just put in your, you know, danlikes.crypto, Jane Doe, .crypto, and then you send away whatever you want to do, because you have all your different crypto wallets and or receiving addresses in one place, which is pretty cool. Also, you can also store your non-fungible tokens like crypto keys and stuff like that. I'm not big into that thing, but sure, any kind of digital asset, sure you can put it right there. And the last thing is the giveaway. So the giveaway is going to be very simple. Unstoppable domains, I partner up with them because I like what they're doing. And I like things that are moving things towards mass adoption. And they actually reach out to me a couple of days ago, hey, we're giving away just free money, essentially.  I just don't, I just don't, I get why they're cool and everything, but I'm like, I don't really like them. However, I was reminded that it's not what I like. It's what everybody else likes. And with the economy, the way it is, I'm sure everybody can use a hundred bucks, right? So what, why wouldn't I do that?  So here's what we're going to do. So it's $100. And we're going to do it every day for the next three days. So a $300 total, it's going to be given away by unstoppable domains. So all you got to do is leave a comment and the comments just eat the 10K. That's all I got to say, eat the 10K. And you need to put in your dot crypto address. So whatever you sign up for, or if you already have one, just put that in, you know, Jane Doe dot crypto, Jane Doe, John Doe, whatever it is. And then just put it in the comment section. And then we'll at random, I'll have unstoppable domains at random pick the winner. And I will show the winner actually getting paid $100 and Ethereum, excuse me, it's going to be an Ethereum not dollars. So you need to like we just talked about, like I had in my wallet of Dan likes crypto. So I have my Ethereum address linked to it. So wherever you have your Ethereum, put it right there. And then unstoppable domains will choose the winner at random. And they will give away $100 worth of Ethereum. So right now that's like 0.25 roughly. So that's it for today. Just want to give some random shout outs to all the members who joined up to Dan. And just so you know, there's a link at the bottom, it's, it'll just tell you to join up. You don't get anything special. It's a buck 99. It's kind of like a tip. I always think of it like that. But for all the people who just joined up, Mike Menardu, Justin Ross, Justin Ross, David Worm, Frank Weinheimer, that's a good one. Let's see. David Sontag, like that. Chuck C, that's a good one. Donald Davidson, Joseph F, who else we got? David Mills, Mosaenal, very talented guy, works a lot with Photoshop, does a lot of different things with cars and everything else. Very nice stuff. Duckberg, Duckberg, and Marky Searcy. So thanks everybody who has signed up. If you liked those videos, there's going to be two more that's going to pop up on your left and right. Go ahead and check those out. I have no control over those, just like the ads you may have seen in the beginning. If they were a spam, I have no control over that. That is all YouTube, just like the two videos they're going to pick right now for you. So go ahead and check those out and I'll see you on the next one.