0:00:14 Katherine: Hi everyone, thanks for joining us again for another Reality 2.0 podcast. I'm Katherine Druckman and with me today as always, is Doc Searls, and a few other people. This is a little bit of a different approach we're taking this time because we're in a little bit of an unprecedented situation, so we're having kind of a round table discussion.

We have Petros Koutoupis and we have Kyle Rankin and we also have Shawn Powers and I hope you recognize all those names if you've been listening for a while, you've heard from all of them.

But I wanted to let them each introduce themselves and I'll give you a little bit more about me too.

I have worked from home for a long, long time as have we all, really, both with Linux Journal, and now I'm working remotely as a software engineer.

And so for us, our work life hasn't changed that much, but everything else has changed tremendously. And we're gonna talk about that a little bit more, but I'll hand it off to, let's say, Shawn. Wanna go first?

0:01:22 Shawn: Absolutely, I'm Sean powers. I know this group from Linux Journal. Looking at the names across the top here, this is the Linux Journal crew from way back when. I'm currently doing online training, so this is kind of my jam, right, teaching over the internet and working from a home office.

Now, yeah, I'm doing IT training, online and I guess that's about it. Nothing else has changed since the last time I talked with you guys on the podcast. My life is boring.

0:01:54 Katherine: Okay, And Doc, let's just remind everyone of where you are in...

0:02:00 Doc: Right now physically I'm in Santa Barbara, California. We came out here a week and a day ago from New York City, from a strangely empty airport on a full plane because everybody was going home, or to wherever they knew they were gonna have to hunker down. And so, that's enough for now. And I can fill in other details later.

0:02:29 Katherine: Awesome, Kyle?

0:02:32 Kyle: Alright, yeah, so I'm Kyle Rankin, and I work full-time as a Chief Security Officer at a company called Purism and we are a completely remote workforce. So everyone works from home here. So I've been working here for about two years and working from home that whole time and then before that, I worked at a couple of different startups where just because of where I happen to live in the Bay Area, commuting is a nightmare here, so I've been able, over time to claw my way into positions and turned down other positions so that I could get a place where I could work from home more and more. So now it's full time doing that right now, I'm physically I'm in the North Bay in a van outside of my house on lockdown.

0:03:19 Katherine: Yes, dnd we definitely wanna hear more about the vanlife and working remotely.

So, Petros, tell us what you're doing.

0:03:28 Petros: I do a whole lot of nothing.

0:03:31 Katherine: That is not true.

0:03:35 Petros: So I've been working remotely on and off for many years now with various startups, but currently I have been remote with Cray now though the Packard enterprise, working remote with a bunch of other remote employees building the back-end storage for super computers. And yeah, that's what I do know, alongside little things here and there, but it's been the remote life, like I said, on and off for the better part of the last decade.

0:04:08 Katherine: So maybe one of the first things we should talk about is, How is this situation a little bit different from what we're used to like that, anybody feel?

0:04:19 Petros: My kids are home.

0:04:21 Katherine: Yeah, that has to be a big challenge. Obviously, not all of us have kids, at home, but I wonder how people are coping with them.

0:04:29 Doc: How are you doing with that, Petros?

I think you're the only one...

0:04:36 Petros: Not at all, because now they were supposed to have spring break in a couple of weeks, but now the school is switched to an e-learning set up. But what's happening is, I do a lot of screaming.

To get them to do their school work, they finish early because how much can they do from a remote e-learning environment? And then the rest of the time, they play video games, fighting with each other while I continue to scream and hopefully nobody hears on the other end of the conference call.

0:05:15 Katherine: The struggle is real.

0:05:19 Petros: Yeah, so there's a lot of me muting my mic and hope that it's muted when I try to get them to stop fighting, but it's been rough the past week alone because of what's been going on in current global pandemic affairs.

0:05:42 Katherine: Yeah, so speaking of e-learning, so Shawn, I don't know if people may not know this, about you. You have quite an extensive background in... Well, educational systems, yes? I wonder if you could weigh in a little bit on what's going on with teachers at having to...

0:06:00 Shawn: Yeah, so my full-time job used to be... I was the tech director for a K-12 school district in Northern Michigan.

So after that, now I'm working for CBT Nuggets making online training. But this new world that we live in, teachers are all of a sudden being forced to do that e-learning to make Petros scream.

So we do that, e-learning. And most of them never done that before, and so we had no prep time. All of a sudden, students were sent home and they have... teachers now have to teach them.

The big thing is that especially elementary teachers are struggling trying to come up with what that even means.

We can give them software, we can get them Moodle, we can give them Google Classroom, we give them Zoom, we can give them Microsoft Teams, whatever platform their school might offer, that's just software that's like a shiny hammer is just a tool, but they don't necessarily know how to teach kids remotely. And like I said, it's especially an issue with elementary students, the middle school, high school, college teachers and professors are handling things a little better because usually those have some sort of online element anyway, or at least the students are familiar enough with being online that they can adapt. But, boy, I had a meeting on Monday, it was the last actual meat space meeting I've had. Monday morning I went into a school to help teachers try to figure out what they're gonna do because we're off for a week and then they have to start doing this e-learning.

And the elementary teachers were just kind of panicked.

I have no idea what that's gonna look like. So I don't know an answer to that. I know that this isn't a plug for my company, but company's given me some time off to create some free training for teachers. Just simplistic like, "This is how you set up a Google classroom," because while that seems really easy for tech people like you and me, if you're an elementary teacher, who doesn't use a computer for very much, things like that are just foreign... So that's what I'm doing, I'm hoping to make some free training that is simple and concise, and can help teachers adapt a little bit.

0:08:09 Katherine: That's actually really nice to hear.

So, something that I've thought of, and it's a concern of mine, and I don't know if you know the answer to this but what happens to the kids who don't have computers at home? There must some obviously...

0:08:23 Shawn: There are and even more than that, there are people who have no internet access, or even access to get internet. So the computer part what we've done, and I think what a lot of schools are doing are checking computers out especially if you're a district that has Chromebooks or something. Check them out, so students can take them home and use them. The majority of students in rural Northern Michigan here have internet access, but there's probably about 15% that not only don't have Internet access, but where they live, there's no access to broadband, there is no cell phone coverage enough to have any sort of a data plan.

And so teachers are not only teaching their online classes, but they have to come up with paper handouts that they are coming up with a way to deliver and even that, are they mailing it to them? And I think so far, that's what they're doing because it's not a huge number, but what a nightmare. And then, are they gonna mail them back?

Who knows how that's gonna actually work?

But yeah, it's an issue because we're such a huge country geographically that there are still places with no internet access, and it isn't even a financial thing, it's just, there's just no options.

0:09:34 Kyle: I know where I live, because it's not quite as rural and spread apart, at least our district is checking out computers and that's sort of thing. They're also our local ISP, Sonic that I use... And then also Comcast are both offering free internet access for the next three months to anyone who doesn't have it, who needs it, who has a kid so that they have an option, but yeah, the question I'm wondering about, especially for elementary kids, is if you have someone, my son's in second grade for instance... And while he's a good student and sits still and all of that, I know there's plenty of kids that have a hard time sitting still in a classroom when there's a teacher right there to correct them. How is that going to work when they're sitting in front of a computer looking through a camera at a teacher or something, you know that, I'm assuming, parents, some parents will just have to sit right behind their kids the entire time.

I mean, I have no idea how that's supposed to work.

0:10:32 S1: Yeah, that's a good point, I actually... So I take a Hebrew class, so learning Hebrew, and we've gone online and I'm an adult and I'm used to sitting and concentrating and working in front of my computer and I am having a hard time. It's a different experience. It fundamentally is... And you have to get used to it. So I can't imagine now a bunch of squirming first graders and whatnot, are gonna handle this and at the same time, their parents are very likely working at home at the same time, and can't necessarily keep an eye on them. They're Petros, and they're gonna drive Petros crazy.

0:11:09 Kyle: What if Little Tommy just runs away from the computer for a while, goes and plays with this toys. What's the teacher going to do exactly? In the classroom, "Tommy, get back to to your desk," or whatever. In the computer world, there's no real--nothing that the teacher's gonna be able to do to keep the class in line.

0:11:31 Doc: I'm wondering what happens institutionally, here, especially if this goes on. At first, it was gonna be maybe a week or two weeks, but now there's no horizon, to this. That's not a clear horizon.

Of course the summer comes along, but in the summer, you're expecting to go out doors, right?

And I, several of us, at least two of us I think I used the term lock down which is a prison term. It's not something that we're used to experiencing in the everyday world. So I'm wondering if there's any learnings that are coming, like okay but this is working so far, or is it all too early for that?

0:12:15 Shawn: From my standpoint, it's way too early. I think that there are many schools who have taken a week or so off, just to let the teachers prep so I think they were just starting to see it really happen. And I'll throw one more thing out there and then I'll stop 'cause I've been talking this whole time, but special needs kids, or at risk kids, that's something that's difficult to handle, in the school environment, so those kids are gonna be, not to use a cheesy cliche term, but they're gonna be left behind, again, and it just breaks my heart, so I don't have an answer to that other than it's like one more thing that is just gonna be a struggle.

As schools say they're starting to say We're not gonna be open for the rest of the school year, that's half a year gone anyway. I'll stop cause I'm getting depressed.

0:13:01 Petros: To Shawn's point... Yeah, in our school district our children were... Or at, I should say, our teachers took a couple of days to figure and sort things out and they ended up deciding to rely on Google Classroom. The kids were able to check out their Chromebooks and bring them home, and every day is a new agenda that the teacher publishes early in the morning, then we have to have other assignments turned in, but the thing is, it's a learning experience for everyone, not just a learning experience for the kids because this is the first time that they're having to deal with this, but also learning experience for the teachers because again, this is the first time they're having to deal with this, that it's a grade school, so they, fortunately and like Shawn pointed out earlier, they fortunately have the tools. It's just knowing how to use those tools and it's not that they're, illiterate or aren't capable of knowing or learning how to use tools, it's just they're learning as they go along, which is part of the challenge. And my wife also helps out, it's not just me screaming at the kids.

0:14:14 Kyle: I think one of the outside of education, I think there's going to be a lot of learning in terms of remote work, because there are a lot of companies that have allowed remote work before, and I've been part of companies that have said "Yes, certain people can work with home sometimes," but it's very rarely been successful, because unless the entire workforce is working in remotely, you typically don't build the kind of tools. Anyone who's working remotely become the second class citizen unless you do it well.

So for example, you'll have a conference meeting where 90% of the participants are in a room together, and there's the two remote people who are calling in, and then the microphones and the conference room are just horrible, and so they can't hear you or you can hear then that sort of thing, and that's just one minor thing. In addition to all the other there's all kinds of other infrastructure in an office where it assumes that you're physically going to be there, that breaks down if you're not. So I think for the first time for many companies, this is the first time where they will be forced to actually make their work from home infrastructure work, because they will all be using it.

And when the boss can't get something to work or is something is a... It will all get fixed. And then people will actually experience what it's like to work from home on infrastructure that works with everyone using it for the first time.

My prediction is that at least some of these people, when everything gets back to normal, really won't wanna go back, they will have settled in, it'll be a couple of months where they have settled into this, lifestyle, and I'm already hearing about how all these people are. I'm learning to bake bread and I'm doing all these things that they didn't do before because they were spending hours commuting to work and away from their family. So I think a certain number of people will have a hard time giving it up. And when you have companies like Twitter, for instance, that recently announced that they're focusing more on remote workers because of some of the struggles with their super expensive San Francisco headquarters. I could see a lot of start ups and other just large San Francisco companies saying maybe it's not worth it to have this really expensive real estate here.

0:16:22 Katherine: So that's an interesting point and actually a really great segue. Thank you, Kyle. So I'm wondering since this started happening, I've been thinking about open source software, so open source software has for a long time been developed by distributed teams. They don't necessarily work together, they're involved in the same project, they may work for different companies and they're all over and they're contributing to the same thing. And it has, I think, worked well and people involved in these projects, are used to working in this way, and I just wonder how can those of us who have worked in that environment for a long time help everybody else who maybe isn't used to this. I think that, so what I do, so I don't know how I got so lucky to work with so many, so many smart people on, so in my whole life really, Linux Journal, and now working with the smartest Drupalers there are, but everybody's all over the world and it gets done and it gets done really well. So I just wondered, we all have a little pieces of that wisdom and I wondered if there are things that we could impart to people just even basic things.

0:17:35 Shawn: One of the first things I think we need to point out is that currently it's not normal. I've worked from home for over a decade and the past couple of weeks, I have been so much less productive just because of the chaos the world is in. I posted a blog entry I said, "Welcome to the world of working at home or welcome to telecommuting. This is not telecommuting it, This has just been a crazy time... Yeah, so that's one important thing for people to realize that if it feels weird and you're not productive, it's not the norm as far as adjusting. Yeah, I just wanted to put that out there. That what they're experiencing now is not normal. Most people are not working on the same kitchen table that their kids are eating fruit loops next to them, because the kids happen to be home all day too. That's not normal.

0:18:19 Katherine: That's a good point. And then frankly, everyone's mental health is taking a hit because everyone's very stressed out, and it's the stress of the unknown and it's... There are so many things that are so abnormal, and so unprecedented that even those of us who are in a routine and a daily work from home, go to your home office, set up your screens and your Zoom. We're still having to face this, the newness of the current situation and it is very hard.

0:18:56 Kyle: I was gonna say, yeah, I think there's a couple of things when you were talking about a distributed team and how a lot of free software has been developed using these distributed teams that were working remotely and how it's been successful. I think part of that, that maps well to regular companies, and I'm mostly speaking from my experience here at Purism and since we both are distributed globally and everyone's telecommuting is... You have a bunch of people in a lot of different times zones... And if you're lucky, part of someone's workday time zone, criscrosses with your time zone. But for people who are on the pacific time zone, in the US talking to someone who's on the eastern side of Europe, there's a big difference between those times. And so, you only have a little bit of cross-over and what that causes is a great importance on asynchronous communication, so for example, in our case, when something really needs to be done and answered, we use email for that.

Can you hear the chicken in the background? I'm just checking to... No, excellent, that's even...

I don't know... And I wanna hear the chicken. The chicken supression system's working.

Yeah, okay, excellent, good. Yeah, the chicken noise cancellation system is okay. Good anyway, yeah. So, for example, we try our best to not make critical decisions within a chat room unless every single participant is in there, and in that case we treat it like we're having a group meeting on a subject, but what tends to happen, especially if you spend a lot of time zones that you will have two people, let's say out of a group of five who should be decision makers, on something chatting about an issue. They may come to a consensus themselves, but if they were to just move on from that decision and decide it's settled, then everyone who just didn't happen to be floating in the chat room at the time misses out. It's the same as if you call a meeting and make a decision and only two of the five people show to the meeting or even more accurately if you just show up in a kitchen in the office kitchen and run into somebody else and then chat impromptu about something. So what we try to do is make heavy use of tickets and email, which can both be asynchronous to either, in the case of ticketing you can track issues and have a discussion within comments on tickets to have different view points, and the same with email threads for things that there's an assumption that chat, you might wake up and declare chatroom bankruptcy.

I tend to do that for rooms, if someone hasn't explicitly called me out by name, to ask me something, if I just go to a room in the backlog is pages and pages. Because I was asleep, but half the company was awake. Sometimes I just, I wake up and read a little bit and just say, "Well I'm declaring bankruptcy on this channel, because there's just no way to keep up with everything," but email is a completely different matter. If it's an email, then every single email is read and responded to that needs to...

0:21:53 Doc: It's an interesting thing, and you said about the dealing internationally is a... A really big one. One of the reasons I mean I...

I just woke up from a nap, before this call, which started at 2 o'clock West Coast time because my wife, who was also a Linux Journal veteran is involved with... It doesn't matter what it is, but it's... But many of the people on it are in Europe and so they are not just eight hours ahead of us, but nine hours, and maybe even 10, and they're not only calls that happen at crazy hours for us, but there are texts and they text and so... And that's another reason why the asynchronous thing could work a lot better.

We haven't worked out the social part of this thing yet. So for example, we decided this morning that we would turn off, she would put her phone on Do Not Disturb and I would put the alarm on my phone, so that that's just one small way that we're beginning to cope with living in a world where we have many people in different times zones. That, by the way, was one of the big advantages of being in New York. New York is only five or six hours behind but it's just, it's also the... We haven't worked that even the manners yet, on a lot of this stuff. What's the right way to interrupt people in the physical world? It's weird enough, are we elbow bumping each other, we're just not even how to be with each other in the physical space, we have to go out for food. It may seem irrelevant but I don't think it is. In Asia, for example, it's especially in China, it's just considered a bad practice to go without a face mask. Even if having a face mask on doesn't necessarily protect you that much.

I was just bad manners to go out without a face mask when there's when anybody's sick or thought to be sick and we have work... We just haven't worked a lot of that stuff out yet. It's gonna take some time.

0:24:08 Shawn: In this awkward silence. I'll just iterate.

0:24:12 Katherine: Okay, no, that was me talking with... But, so this is an exercise in learning, to use Zoom, even though I have used it many, many times and I used it every day. Don't forget to unmute yourself.

Yeah, asynchronous communication is a really important reminder. So I think one of the reasons probably that... So, Drupal development happens heavily on Slack. Slack is the thing, and I think part of it is just the threaded communication because when you've got to talk to somebody in Switzerland, and then somebody in Australia, you can't rely on something, a chatroom that's going to... Well, that you're going to have to declare bankruptcy on because you need those threaded conversations and so any tool email, Slack whatever it is. I think respecting those time zones is a big part of it.

I actually was in the... Go ahead, Kyle. Go ahead.

0:25:12 Kyle: I was just gonna say that when I finish the chat, is that You can... Two, three, five people can have a conversation at the same time without it being rude because you're waiting for someone else and you feel rude interrupting someone and chat, you can have a bunch of people typing at once and it's not considered rude you can... And so you can get a lot if everyone types fast enough to make it work, you can get a lot more progress in terms of group meetings in chat compared sometimes to a phone call or a video call because on a video call or a voice call only one person can talk at once. And you're always just like we're doing here, we have a lot of us on here we're approaching the upper limit for having sort of an efficient group chat because once you get further beyond this if everyone wants to say something, it just takes forever to wait turns, whereas in the chat everyone can say theit thing.

0:26:05 Shawn: It's difficult to get used to things like... So we're in a Zoom right now, to click the raise your hand button. That just doesn't feel natural, right? We're used to having conversations and even in this podcast how many times have we politely interrupted each other, just so we could say what we wanted to say... And that is different. And the company that I as all over the planet, to if the world really, was flat, it would sure make things a lot easier.

The but yeah, we have people in South Africa and London and both coasts of the US and probably somewhere else I'm forgetting some in Japan now, and so trying to find those times of We can meet. Yeah, it's tough. Slack is also our company uses Slack for everything because it is this centralized threaded conversation thing. So, serious things actually happen in Slack because it's not quite chat, right? It's not like it is but it isn't. I don't know, it feels like a...

I can't really explain it. If you're a Slack user, you know what I'm talking about, it's just the way you can communicate and if somebody doesn't respond right away, that doesn't, it feels normal kind of thing? So I think there are tools that are being developed for the idea of a round earth, with different time zones and I'm thankful for that. Because otherwise, yeah, it makes it really challenging.

0:27:19 Doc: So, a question for the brain trust here, one of the things that I'm sensing is that this plague, may be elevating the Big bad companies, because they're... People, you know I'm watching Zoom win.

There are several other conference systems, but Zoom seems to be the one that's emerging, and I could see them becoming the slack of conferencing, Slack won that one. There are a lot of people I know in families and elsewhere that are moving back onto Facebook, if they were off of it because that's the way the... That's where they can get together with a bunch of other people. The threshold of creating a group on Facebook is very, very low. The system works well enough and I kind of... I'm concerned about that, but I also see a... Then Katherine brought us up earlier, maybe been before the call, that we're also watching privacy get thrown out the window. In many ways, people are less concerned about that. There's a... What we're making, the all-purpose metaphor is war. "We're at war with this disease," or "We're at war with something or other," and a brilliant book, very depressing, written by Chris Hedges, who was a Pulitzer or multiple Pulitzers, I think winner of... As a reporter on war for The New York Times, many years ago, and he's trying a little bit of a crazy over the... Over recent years, he's very much on a very, very far left but his war reporting, was brilliant, and he wrote a book maybe about 20 years ago called, "War is the Force That Gives Us Meaning" and one of the things he talks about in that is that in a war you throw the laws out.

We don't need laws.

I mean, we're under martial law right now. That's what's goingon, we told everybody stay indoors like it's an air raid, and by the way, don't come out. And rebuild your institutions, maybe some of the people can stay out like the people delivering packages for Amazon and the rest of it but it's, I really worry because freedom is a very big part of what brought all of us together in the first place, that freedom and the things we make for ourselves and a lot of these virtues, the virtues of free software, the virtues of self-reliance, a lot of other things, some are elevated like the self-reliance one, but I'm really worried about privacy, for example, which was under attack already, and is now, for example end-to-end encryption is soon the back doors are gonna go in and there they are, and we're not going to get rid of them.

0:30:21 Katherine: I'm glad you brought that up because there are a few concerns. One is that people are not gonna pay attention to things like the earn it bill that they need to pay attention to, frankly, but we're too distracted...

0:30:29 Doc: Tell us about that, The Ear it bill?

0:30:31 Katherine: The best source of information is probably just go to EFF. They're posting about it constantly. It's a bill introduced that will basically hold tech companies liable for information or anything that is sent through their system. So if somebody organize... My interpretation of it is, somebody organizes a terrorist attack on Facebook, or exploits children in some way through some platform that they're now held liable. And basically, the concern is that this is the first step towards encryption backdoors and possibly basically making encryption illegal, but I encourage everyone to read up on that because it really is very important. But then there are some other concerns and that is, there's been news in the last few days. A couple of things, one is basically malware apps. People are... People are terrified right? So they're gonna download some app that is supposed to be tracking the disease, but is actually malware so that's one, and then another one, is various groups, and governments are using the same kind of questionable technology that they use to track down terrorists, in theory, to track the spread of disease. And this is one of those things where... Who's gonna stand up and say No? Let's not use the technology at our disposal to stop a pandemic. Of course, we're gonna say, "Yeah let's go for it."

But the problem is, is that, is that it introduces the potential to bring in some kind of scary exploitation along with it. What are we giving up while we're not paying attention, is my biggest concern, I think. And anyway, I'm sure you all have a lot of thoughts on that.

0:32:35 Doc: So people know the "earn it" is "earn" like you're earning a wage, but it's the eliminating abusive and rampant neglect of Interactive Technologies act and it grants sweeping powers to the executive branch and there's an eff does have some stuff on that. So if you look that up, I mean, last night I heard somebody who I think of as a privacy advocate, talk about how having this particular [I'm using hand gestures, here, but this is Radio] thermometer, right. This is a thermometer that can report your temperature and how the company that makes this thermometer, I forget the name of the company, but it's an electronic thermometer that reports your temperature back to the company, but the company is way ahead of the CDC in knowing where the outbreaks are going to be. The social upside is enormous to this. It's a real life saver. And I don't even know, I don't remember the name of this company. If the company if the reporting of one's temperature to this company is in fact an opt-in thing and it's very clearly articulated and people are doing it for a social good voluntarily. I don't have a problem with that, but the way she was talking about it, is that actually, they don't do that, they just have this data on you, which is more like the typical American tech way. And yeah, I'm worried about where that one goes, and that's just one example of it, but we have to note that on the one hand, there are real serious possibly life-saving social benefits to this potential. Or actual loss of privacy and privacy on the other hand, and how do we weigh that and how do we approach that is the learning that's gonna come out of this that we need much better ways of controlling what we disclose about ourselves, and under what conditions and making sure that they're anonymized, that we keep a record on that and that's an audit-able record that we can go back and, and then deal with the company on which by the way, the CCPA in California, actually does to some degree, it doesn't close the barn door but allows you to get some horses back if the barn door has been left open, but... Or is the learning going to be great? We're a lot better off if our lives are fully exposed and we've lost all our privacy because that's gonna help us stop disease, or terrorism, which is the last big thing.

0:35:20 Shawn: And that's the thing, right? So, this is another situation, one that is, I think, easier for us to identify with, whereas if we're talking about a company... Having our data so that they can target ads for us, it's easy to say That's a horrible misuse of our data, our privacy is so important. This is terrible, we should stop it.

But now, yeah, like you said, we're talking about if this data is being used to save lives, our own lives, should we think through what we're allowed to and I think maybe that is the answer is we should have the choice to do that and I don't know if the company that you're thinking of is Withings or not, but I actually have a site in things 'cause I have one of the...

I hear thermometer that actually keeps track.

0:36:06 Doc: I have their original scale, which I got, because it was a French company and they had a really great privacy policy. Then they got bought by Nokia who sold it to somebody who sold it to somebody else. They don't have that policy anymore.

0:36:17 Shawn: Actually, Withings owns it again.

No, no, we do it. Oh no, you're way had me on this.

Yeah, I'm a big Withing person. I'm moaning a wings watch right now, so in a...

0:36:27 Doc: I have an Apple Watch, here that I have in order to do heart monitoring, and Apple has actually a very, very good policy on that if people are wondering whether they actually follow it or not, but I think they do, where they don't have the data. I can do an extra electro-cardio gram that I could share with my cardiologist I, which I have, but Apple doesn't know it. I mean, it's entirely my data and they have a really good policy in respect to sharing data on a permitted basis for research purposes. That I think should be a model for everybody else, but I don't have the sense that everybody else is following the same kind of model because a company like Apple makes money other ways, they don't make money in the spying business. And whereas Google does, and Facebook does and some other companies do.

0:37:21 Shawn: I have to admit. And you're right about Apple. Their privacy policy is shockingly tolerable, I guess.

0:37:29 Doc: Yeah, it's simple and it's good. It's basically good manners. It's none of our business what you do with our products and we're not gonna pay attention to that and if you want us to, for diagnostic purposes will do that, but we're not in that business, and we're not interested in being in that business.

0:37:49 Katherine: So something that's actually concerned me for quite some time time is... So I've been reading little bit about... So law enforcement agencies actually get around the fourth amendment by literally just buying marketing data, who needs a warrant when you can buy all the information you need as a... pretend you're an advertiser you can have it right and now, and that's a scary thing, right? But now the same technology, arguably used for good could also very easily be used for nefarious purposes. So taking the example of the epidemic and let's say you've identified people who are positive and you can round up the location out of everybody who has been within six feet of that person and warn them, or potentially require them to be tested, which is a whole other conversation, but it's things like that that make sense, I suppose, but can raise some kind of scary questions.

So I, I think that's something that's worth thinking about. Do I want a government, a corporation or whatever, to know, to have that information about me, I don't know.

0:39:11 Doc: So let's take the example of Clearview AI. Clearview AI is the biggest perpetrator of this, clearview.ai. And if you look them up, you're gonna find a zillion stories. But basically, they have by far the apparently the most advanced facial recognition and we may have talked about this before, on the show, but... But facial recognition is something that us as humans, my personal feeling about this is that the only entities that should know somebody's face are other people and their dogs and other than that, nobody else should know your face, however for the crime solving, incredibly helpful... for tracking people, incredibly helpful, for solving old crimes, for solving cold case files, all sorts of things, it's really helpful. And police departments all over the place have found it very useful. And they buy it and supposedly they sell only to those, but do we want only the police departments to have our faces on file? I, it used to be... They'd want your mug shot on file. But I don't want, I haven't committed any crimes worthy of having a mug shot. So, and I rather like not having a mug shot, but if the State of New York or the State of California has my virtual mug shot, by simply scanning the world and finding lots of instances of me that they can pull with AI, a version of me that they can see, so think about it with this pandemic thing. Let's say, it gets really bad, and let's say it kills geezers like me, but it's not gonna kill young people, and there are young people going around that are carriers and are known to be carriers and we have enough intelligence collectively to know who's a carrier or that when we get tested that, it goes on that we start pull really pulling together like other countries, to really good medical records on everybody.

And that on our records is that we are carriers of the novel Coronavirus and could possibly spread it. And some young person goes out to a bar, they're not supposed to go to and they get spotted under a kind of Martial Law, they could get hauled in, that's... And it's for the good of everybody, right? Well, you, you got out you shouldn't have been out. We're all trying to keep people from getting killed here. We caught you, we're gonna take you back in. And we have a surveillance state, and that's one of the choices. There was a Zoom with 73 people that I was on this morning, which by the way had the raised hand it was in a better UI than the one I just saw that I'm using here. I don't know how that works, but anyway.

And this guy from the Red Cross said that there are basically two different approaches we can take to this in and one of them is the all surveillance top-down the government runs it, the companies are involved in it, we gather all the intelligence we possibly can, and we manage this thing in a somewhat centralized way where we're pulling in intelligence from distributed sources.

People are involved in it, but basically it is topped-down and draconian. And that's an approach that's the Chinese approach, it's not the American or European approach, but it's one that's on the table and it can be applied to other things as well, where it could be... We're perfecting ways to deal with pandemic issues that may not just be disease or just threats. Anything that's a threat to the state or to whoever is in charge. We can pull this stuff together and that's... Anyway, I'm concerned about that.

0:43:12 Katherine: Yeah, it's a slippery slope. And you bring up things like clearview AI and I always... My question is, "What makes us trust law enforcement?" Not to get overly political, but there's nothing that exempts a law enforcement officer from being the guy who misuses the technology to stalk his ex-girlfriend, you know?

0:43:35 Kyle: Beyond that, there's a follow-up article with clearview that showed that were some of their clientele were just wealthy individuals who loved the ability to be in a room and take a picture of someone that they were maybe in one case, the guy would take pictures of people, his daughter was with the... And then get their dossier, stuff like that.

0:43:56 Katherine: Yeah, that was massively disturbing incredibly so yeah, and let's not forget that governments are not always acting in our best interest, again, not to get overly political, but... Yeah, I sure wouldn't wanna be in an ICE detention facility, right now.

0:44:12 Doc: Exactly the state of New Jersey is the first one to say to forbid the use of Clear view AI to their police departments. They said that's the step too far.

Would they say that now? They said that about a month ago, month and a half ago, would they say it now? It's an interesting question...

0:44:32 Katherine: Yeah, and I think that is the question. That is the question at the heart of our conversation, I think, is that what are the unforeseen consequences of having to take these extreme measures right now?

0:44:44 Doc: So here's a second thing, there's a... among the discussions we've had here in Santa Barbara, but we can have them anywhere. I'm sure you're having them in all your locations. I'm especially curious about you Shawn because of your involvement with the schools and all that, which is that we remain physical beings, which means we're local, and a lot of problems are solved best locally and that's one of things we're talking about. You're in Santa Barbara, where we are.

Even if people are not seeing and touching each other, they're very aware of each other's presence, and who's... And checking in on each other and sharing intelligence about... We found out yesterday, what of the stores that are open opened early for seniors?

I'm a senior and probably tomorrow morning between seven and eight, I'm gonna go in at seniors hour when the shelves are freshly stocked at some of the local stores.

And an interesting thing about that is that misinformation that somebody said this and I tweeted it, that when I forget exactly how it went, but when the going gets tough, the market for bullshit drops to zero, when lives are at stake, the market for bullshit drops to zero. And we saw that happen with Trump. He had to stop bullshitting. He couldn't bullshit anymore. Yeah, he had a... You know a way this is a serious thing. I'm just gonna say serious stuff because I could play at the bullshit game for as long as that worked but I can't right now.

But at the local level that's always been the case when I lived where there are floods and earthquakes and when we had what we called a debris flow in Montecito, which is one zip code from here two years ago, everybody who had any knowledge of anything weighed in and helped out and there was no bullshit whatsoever, there was... And I'm wondering if the no bullshit imperative at the local level, applies in some generalized way, that's starting to emerge or we can at least think about.

0:47:03 Shawn: I can say we're here in rural Northern Michigan. I know for the education part, the parents are being very un-parent, like when it comes to cooperating and that sounds bad, but I say that as the husband of a teacher and somebody who worked at a school for a lot of years, parents I think lose track of the humanity of the people who are educating their students. I think that we've seen parents be far more patient and understanding and also just on a local level. You mentioned you have natural disasters, there. We don't really have that much up here in northern Michigan, but I've seen online. It's nextdoor.com, which I don't like but it's a thing that everybody around here signs up for. And so I get these email notifications about people saying, "Hey if there's anybody who is concerned or at high risk and they want things delivered or they need their dogs walked, or they need something done at their house. Just let me know. I'm able to come and do things for people and these are people that we don't even know and so it's helped me remember that while human beings are the absolute worst they're also the only thing that makes it all worth while, just when we can humanize each other, I think we see the best in humanity and if nothing else, I think This is making a see each other as people who are vulnerable. So, I'm hopeful, I'm hopeful that the horrible-ness of this pandemic is going to humanize each, everybody politically, personally, all of the issues that we struggle with I think that the needs of the many are going to hopefully open the eyes of the many as well. You thought I was going Star Tek there and I didn't.

0:48:51 S1: Thank you, Shawn. That was perfection. I do hope there are some positive things that come out of this. I think there's an opportunity for innovation. There's an opportunity for a lot of positive.

0:49:05 Doc: That is a big... I wonder, and I don't know if one us have anything to report yet? I said earlier that one of my fears is that the big companies take over even where then they already have, but I also think inevitably there are gonna be lots of ad hoc and then perfected and formalized forms of software approaches to things that is gonna uncork a flood of innovation when this thing's over or even as it's going on, does it anybody know of any of those? That are in the works right now that are...

0:49:36 Shawn: I can tell you that there are restaurants that do online ordering, and delivery that have never considered that in the past.

0:49:42 Doc: Yeah, this one in our family that's doing that. And here's an interesting story about that on the one hand, and it's really sad. That is my sister-in-law. She had to lay off some people. But on the other hand I, I... She's come up with a whole new menu, which is just basically... Okay, here's the thing, we're making a meal here's it, here's what it is. Yeah, so let's go to be tacos with this and that. But they're actually doing the thing that's an instant hit in a way is three-course meals, "Okay here is the complete prix fixe meal here's the wine that's matched with it here if you want that, that's what we're selling tonight and you can drive by and pick it up, be we'll put it out on the back here.

We don't have to touch each other. Had a little backyard backside of the restaurant, thing.

And that's working so far, that's kind of innovation on their part.

0:50:35 Shawn: And that'll probably stick, right? I'd do that.

0:50:39 Doc: It might stick yeah, yeah, a small thing here. And this is not an innovation but there's a... We live on a hill side, we're way up on we're five hundred feet up over looking to the Pacific, but the hill goes up to 1000 feet behind us and the kind of thing that if it were in northern Michigan, it would be a state park.

It was just some streets in the suburbs of California, but up the street I see this little boy trying to play basketball without a basket and he just has a ball and he is throwing it up where he would imagine a basket is... And they're on a steep driveway. And he keeps losing the ball going down the hill.

And so I went up the hill and I said, "Hey look, I've got a flat driveway here. I actually built it as my own little basketball court, so I could practice. It's the only sport I was ever at all good at and it's long gone. I should have 4%, now and I was... And it was great. We had... And they know that they can come down here and shoot hoops if they want. And I got to know this guy I never met him before, he's got... We exchanged stories about how we're coping and the rest of it is pretty interesting stuff and neighbors are being made that weren't before, because they're stuck at home, which is interesting.

0:52:02 Shawn: That is interesting and here's my hope that those kind of relationships can continue to happen and grow and ironically, in a time where we're not to be around people, the people that who are around us, might become more a part of our lives, whereas this kid might come and play basketball in your driveway instead of you trying to keep kids out of your driveway. Because if they get hit, they're gonna sue you...

0:52:28 Doc: Exactly.

I hate that I...

I would never have done that, but you're right, that's a perfect perfectly good example. How that might work.

0:52:36 Petros: I would do that.

0:52:38 Shawn: You would sue Doc? I get that.

0:52:41 Doc: Get outta my court.

0:52:45 Petros: My biggest concern about all of this is the bounce back at a certain point, while normalcy. I guess it depends on how we define what normalcy is right?

We're gonna come out of this. We're gonna survive, but what is the future going to look like? You know, in the case of restaurants? A lot of them are adapting to the current situation, even though the restaurants themselves are physically shut down for dine-in patrons, at the end of the day some of them are adapting doing a take-out model, while others are just shutting down officially. But even after that, once everything is... the dust has cleared are people gonna continue going to eat out? Is there a confidence in the way restaurants are kept and maintained and limit the spread of disease? Is there gonna be confidence in that... What is that market going to look like? What our other markets going to look like, ones that maybe haven't been able to adapt so well? The industries that you and I are in all of us, we're in the tech industry. So saying working remote, we're able to adapt with great more than others, but then there are some industry like... What about that mom and pop-owned hardware store, obviously, the big box stores like your Home Depots or your Lowes, they're gonna be okay, but then you have the little places that may not survive beyond this so on the local scale I anticipate a lot of change and maybe not.

0:54:36 Shawn: Depending how long it goes too, I think we might see a we might see a post-Depression type mentality when it comes to income and buying goods and going out to restaurants. We know the older folks who are penny pinchers and have all this food in their cupboards because of the lacking that they had, depending how long this goes, it's not gonna be the same, but I can already see myself not going out to restaurants as much not even because I'm concerned about the health issues, but just because I... When we were stuck at home, we were healthier, and I know how to cook now, and Kyle picked on me a little bit, or it wasn't me he was picking on, but I make some pretty mean sourdough bread now.

0:55:23 Katherine: Oh, I've seen... It's very impressive.

0:55:25 Doc: I wanna get back to it. I made sourdough bread, 1000 years ago and I wanna started doing it again.

0:55:30 Shawn: Well, hey, if you wanna starter I know a guy that can hook you up. I have, I really... And I've named them each, Gus and Belinda.

0:55:37 Doc: Does he ship sourdough? Does he ship a starter?

0:55:42 Shawn: I'll ship a starter. I'll ship a starter for you. You would be not even close to the first person who has some of my starters.

0:55:49 Doc: Wow, okay yeah, I wanna take you up on that. That'd be great. Yeah, we'll work that out.

0:55:52 Kyle: Yeah, I mean in terms of small business I even for myself, there's a local brewing supply store that I get ingredients, when I'm making beer.

And when I was rushing back at the beginning, early part of this week, I was out working from the van out remote, my version of social distancing was pack the family in a van and go out to a camp site away from everybody and work out of there, as long as they have a good cell signal it works, but when our county was gonna go, I suspected our county was gonna go on lock down, I realized, well, I need to head back here, and I started thinking along the way. Well, what do I need to get? One they go on lock down all of these different stores are going to close, and I realize, "Oh wait, I need to get, I wanna have a batch of beer going." Because if this stuff extends for a long time, it would be nice to have that going.

And so, I planned... Well, I'm gonna get back on such a day, the next day I'm gonna make a little trip over to the supply store and get my ingredients and sure enough, they announced the lock down that night, which meant that everything was shut down.

And so I found myself having to order online where normally I would never do that, I would go to support my local guy.

0:57:06 Shawn: And so then you just bought all the toilet paper you could and call it good...

0:57:09 Petros: Yeah, I bought as much Stella as I could to hold me.

0:57:14 Doc: He's got his Stella.

0:57:16 Kyle: Shawn, this is where your bidet really comes in handy, I mean, you should get sponsored.

0:57:25 Katherine: Well, I hope your local brew shop guy is able to pivot in some way.

0:57:34 Doc: Here's a business that may actually go away to some degree. And this is one where, that's affecting me very personally, which is the conference business. I make money speaking and we have a conference also, there's the internet identity workshop, IIW, our 30th one was coming up at the end of April, and it's going to go virtual, right? We're gonna go online for this thing and that's gonna be a fun experiment.

I mentioned we will come back. It's not a corporate type thing, it's an un-conference, there are no speakers, we're not paying anybody to come in and talk, we have our sponsors only buy food. That's been a weird one because they can't buy food, this way. We're just gonna have a sponsor some rooms or something like that, but there's another conference I'm going to, in Germany. I was gonna be paid to go to that. That's almost certainly not gonna happen. In a 9/11. after 9/11, I lost a lot of money.

Because a lot of conferences, just shut down. When the airlines aren't working, conferences aren't working and I... And the airlines aren't working right now, some of them may fail, and that's gonna be an interesting thing. I think we may even see the obsolescence of the conference as we knew it where you had to have this big gathering. I think it's a serious question because they said they were not insured, whether South-by is gonna come back, that's a real... A real risk that South by Southwest may be done. I suspect not, but I'm also wondering whether it'll get the same attendance they ever got before or if a lot of the sponsors that had to eat gigantic costs this time around, are gonna wanna come back again and show off their stuff in the old way. It's gonna be an interesting thing.

0:59:32 Katherine: Yeah, I'm actually in the middle of a conference right now, which is kind of funny, there's a Drupal event called Midcamp that happens in Chicago and they just switched it to an online event, and they're having all the same speakers are doing their sessions over Zoom. And I've been watching some and it's actually, they've done a great job, but yeah, is this it? We lose so much losing that hallway track. I would hate to see a lot of events go away, but this is, it's unprecedented.

1:00:04 Shawn: also, I talked about this just in a while. A truck cam which I brought back. I haven't done that in a decade I got a... Yeah, it's on YouTube, but talking about conferences, they're all getting cancelled and a lot of Zoom, this is actually the first time I've used Zoom. Is this talk here. But a lot of the things that I'm attending now, are all online. But we're multi-taskers. This is what we do for a living. So, if I'm watching a conference or a speaker in a window, I'm also doing this over here, and I have a terminal window up here, and I'm debugging this over here, and I'm sending an email here and I'm slacking over here, a part of the thing I talk about in the truck cam is, Are we going to have some way to get immersed in it? And I hate to bring up virtual reality, but I love VR and it's just one of the things I love. But is that a way that we're gonna be able to immerse into a thing where we can actually pay attention because if it's gonna be in a window, like the Zoom Window? I just texted a friend of mine in Alaska while you guys we're talking... And that's because one, I'm a horrible person. But two, because it was accessible, it was right there and a... Yeah, and when you're in a conference, you can talk to the person next you about what's for lunch, but it's different than doing different things on your screen, and I worry that we're gonna lose a lot. The hallway track is a good point too, that's a huge part of conferences. That's a huge part of anything you attend in person, is what happens at lunch, and what happens when you're waiting for somebody to come in and... Yeah, yeah, I don't know how we're going to fix that. If like Doc you brought up... I don't know that we're ever gonna have conferences like they were. All these cancellations and how the companies that had to cope with it. We're kind of inventing a solution for a problem we didn't know we had... And I don't know if the traditional conference is gonna come back like it has a...

1:01:45 Doc: Well, you know, here's the thing: conferences are made, they're funded by sponsors.

Okay, for the most part, not entirely. Some of them don't have sponsors, but sponsors are a huge part of it and marketing in general, and it's generally in a marketing budget is very discretionary, it's on the expense side of the balance sheet, right? They go looking for things they can cut, things are tough, what are we gonna cut here? We're cutting travel, we're cutting sponsorships, we're cutting our underwriting of the public television station or radio station.

1:02:25 Shawn: Health insurance. Sorry...

1:02:27 Doc: Yeah, it is, it's gonna be an interesting thing to see what happens there.

1:02:33 Katherine: I would like to just quickly plug DrupalCon.

I was a volunteer, actually this year on the sessions committee... So it's been a great experience, but DrupalCon is one of the many conferences that will be affected and they haven't officially made a final announcement, but it looks like it's gonna be postponed, but I would like to point out that the sponsors are really getting behind it and keeping their commitments. And this is a moment for the Drupal community to shine, and there's definitely just a lot of support. Individuals are contributing, they're joining the association, people recognize the... Let's say, threat to the community and are stepping up, which is actually a really nice thing to see.

But yeah, I think some very important events will continue. They'll come back in some form, but yes, this does fundamentally change everything, but before we go way too long, I wanted to make sure... I feel like we have neglected the van life topic.

I was so excited to talk a little bit more with Kyle about working remotely from his bad ass van.

And then I thought maybe we could save a little time for that.

1:03:50 Kyle: Alright, sure, yeah. So this is sort of a side benefit of if you're working somewhere that's fully remote, then typically, if you work remotely for a long time, you'll have a pretty nice home office set up at some point that works for you.

But in many cases, a lot of people that work from home will also sometimes they'll go to a co-working space or they will go to a coffee shop or that sort of thing, because they can work from anywhere.

Well, what we do, because my wife also works from home is when my son is out of school for a spring break or summer break or whatever it is. Sometimes we will decide to take, we call it a work-cation. Where we'll hop in the van. I have a cellular booster that I reviewed on Linux Journal that works really well that I turn on and if I have solid internet, then I can work and it's like anything else, where I will spend a couple of days on a weekend just days getting to a place and then once we're there, we'll spend the week we'll work from the van and get our work done for the day, and then maybe take it during lunch. If we're at a camp like go on a hike or something, come back after lunch and work some more and then around dinner time to do other things, sight see, and yeah, I found it to be really effective because you get a chance to be somewhere else in a different surroundings, but as long as you have that internet connection, you can get a whole lot done.

So I highly recommend it, it's just a nice break, from the schedule, where we get to go and be in places where we otherwise may not be able to, just because we can work from there.

Of course, it requires you to be responsible, a kind of person who can make sure you get all of your work done. So it may not work for everybody, but certainly works for me.

1:05:39 Katherine: and some incredibly beautiful places, I would like to point out. I follow every single photo you post, because they're amazing they...

1:05:48 Doc: What are some of the places you've been, Kyle?

1:05:52 Kyle: Well, let's see, so most recently I went over to the Owens Valley, which is on the other side of the Sierras.

1:05:58 Doc: Yeah, I love that.

1:05:59 Kyle: It's just gorgeous place and there's a lot of, especially on the west coast, of the United States, there's a lot of Bureau of Land Management camp sites that are free where you can stay for free for up to two weeks, there's no rest rooms, there's no... You have to be self-contained in your vehicle. But we are... And so you can just go to the site and you don't really have to pay anything and you're so show up in there at these gorgeous locations. So we've done that.

I've gone up the West Coast of the United States. One time I worked out of Bryce Canyon, which is a really great place to work out is because the campsites are right next to the canyon, so you can work out of the van then, for lunch, you could just do a hike down the canyon and see the entire site and hike back really quickly back to your back to your van when lunch is over, that sort of thing. So that's been great. I've gone all the way over. I met up with Sean on an extensive work-cation like this over to Michigan. Yeah, so I was driving all the way we drove, I drove from California, ultimately all the way up to the tip of the middle finger of Michigan and then all the way back over the course of it was about a three-week trip. A lot of it was I think one week was like a vacation, maybe I don't remember now, but a lot of it was just like a working trip where our long driving days would be on the weekends, we get those behind us, and then it somewhere and stay put and work for a couple of days.

1:07:29 Katherine: Basically living the dream.

1:07:32 Kyle: Yeah, we have so many plans for that. I have a cousin who's a park ranger in Carlsbad cavern, and I would love one of these days I wanna go and we're gonna do a similar kind of trip where we drive over there and get some private cave tours and that sort of thing.

1:07:54 Katherine: Well, on that note... That's a very positive note. Any parting words of wisdom for our listeners?

1:07:58 Shawn: Yes, me. Wash your hands.

1:08:02 Katherine: That's really probably the most important word of wisdom right now.

1:08:08 Shawn: Mic drop moment.

1:08:16 Doc: Okay, thanks everybody. Let's do more of this. This is a good one.

1:08:15 Katherine: Yeah, I think we should, especially as this continues as we had off into the unknown horizon. Let's talk more and frequently.

1:08:27 Petros: I have some parting words, if you don't mind.

I appreciate your teachers. They're obviously yeah, in uncharted territories, trying to do their best to make sure that your children's education continues as with little disruption as possible.

1:08:50 Katherine: And recognize the heroes out there that... Yeah, we have the obvious ones, we have the doctors and the nurses and every person involved in medical staffing, but you also have delivery drivers and you have people stocking groceries and people who are responsible for our supply chain or food these people, they're putting themselves at risk, and these are heroes at this point, and it's nice to see that people are, I think recognizing the importance of a lot of...

1:09:20 Doc: So, I anybody who's exposed... But because they have to be... That's a tough... That's a... That's a big one.

1:09:29 Katherine: On that note... thank you everyone. For hanging in this long, let's try and stay as positive as we can.