Podcast appearances and mentions of sara well

In this podcast episode of "Giant Robots On Tour," hosts Sami Birnbaum and Rémy Hannequin explore mental health in the age of artificial intelligence with Sara Wilder, a Therapeutic Life Consultant and Licensed Clinical Social Worker. Sami shares his own brief foray into psychotherapy before transitioning to tech, highlighting the relevance of mental health in today's rapidly evolving technological landscape. Sara, whose path to therapy was influenced by her personal struggles and a desire to help others, discusses her unique approach as a Therapeutic Life Consultant, which blends traditional therapy with direct coaching and consulting. Sara elaborates on her journey and how the COVID-19 pandemic pushed her towards integrating technology into her practice. She transitioned from in-person sessions to virtual consultations, emphasizing the impact of this shift on mental health and brain function. Sara's interest in AI stemmed from her need to scale her business and her desire to use technology to aid her clients. She discusses her experience with AI tools like ChatGPT, both the benefits and challenges, such as generating relatable content and addressing AI "hallucinations." Sara highlights the importance of using AI ethically and maintaining human oversight to ensure the authenticity and accuracy of AI-generated outputs. The conversation also delves into broader concerns about the impact of AI and technology on mental health. Sami and Rémy discuss the addictive nature of technology and its parallels with substance addiction, emphasizing the need for self-imposed boundaries and emotional intelligence. Sara shares insights into how AI can be a valuable tool in therapy, such as using AI for social anxiety role-playing or to generate conversation prompts. The episode concludes with a discussion on the balance between leveraging AI for efficiency and maintaining human connection, stressing the need for ongoing education and ethical considerations in AI development and deployment. Follow Sara Wilder on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sara-wilder-lcsw-lcas-ccs-9753517b/). Visit her website: sarawilderlcsw.com (https://sarawilderlcsw.com/). Follow thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Transcript:  SAMI: Yes, and we are back. And this is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast, the Giant Robots on Tour series coming to you from Europe, West Asia, and Africa, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Sami Birnbaum. RÉMY: And I'm your other host, Rémy Hannequin. SAMI: Okay, if you're wondering where Jared is, we finally got rid of him. No, that's a joke, Jared, if you're listening. He was my previous co-host. You can go back to our other podcasts. But we've got Rémy on board today. And you could take a look at our previous podcast, where we introduce the Giant Robots on Tour series, where you'll find out about all the different co-hosts. And you can learn more about Rémy's sourdough bread. Joining us today is Sara Wilder, a Therapeutic Life Consultant, Licensed Clinical Social Worker, and Clinical Addictions Specialist. Okay, Sara, this is going to sound a little bit strange, but, actually, once upon a time in my own life, I kind of wanted to be you, not exactly you because that would be even more strange. SARA: [chuckles] SAMI: But before I got into coding and tech, I was interested in psychotherapy. And I started a course and, for different reasons, it didn't work out, and I never pursued that career. But what's really interested us about you is the work and research you're doing around mental health in this new world of AI, artificial intelligence. You have a really interesting talk coming up at the CreativeVerse Conference in North Carolina. And we actually have Fatima from thoughtbot who's going to be presenting at the same conference. And you're specifically talking about prioritizing mental health in the age of AI. And there is so much we want to ask you about this. But before we do, I always like to go back to the start with my guests. Everyone has a story, and I'm interested in your journey. What led you into the world of therapy? SARA: Well, to unpack that, it's, like, probably way too long for this podcast, but in a nutshell, I had no idea what...I did not want to be a therapist when I grew up, so thank you for wanting that more than me. But I landed here, I think, partly just because of, you know, I always wanted to help people. I never really knew what that was going to look like. I thought it maybe was going into nursing or more of the medical side. But really what landed me here and made me stay here and really choose to stay in my profession...because, at one point, I was like, no, I'm not sure I could do this for the rest of my life; this is a lot. But it was really my own suffering. I had to take a really hard look at where I came from, what I had gone through, and why I wanted to just, you know, like, help people, but then try to keep changing how I did that. And I'm glad I chose to stay put in this kind of therapeutic, you know, life. Therapeutic life consultant is a term that I kind of formulated myself because I'm not quite a traditional therapist anymore. I'm not sitting in an office with the couch. We talk a lot about our relationship with our mothers. But I have more of a personality that's direct and kind of coaching. And I want to go more into consulting and help people understand how to do their own healing work using my clinical background of being in diagnostics in different hospital settings, stuff like that. And because I had to do my own work, and I had to understand how to make sense of how my pain and my suffering was holding me back, and how I could turn that really into something that could help me thrive. SAMI: Yeah, I think that's really powerful. I think that's a really powerful place to be able to come from, you know, to be able to kind of take your own challenges and the things that you've struggled with. And it's kind of like almost sometimes you have...the best teachers are the people who've gone through it themselves. And I can imagine that's been quite a journey. If only we had a longer podcast, right? SARA: [chuckles] SAMI: We could go into all our journeys. But it's super interesting. And, specifically, what has then kind of propelled you more towards looking into the tech aspect of it, right? So, I'm assuming...well, AI, at least, is relatively recent. And so, I'm assuming when you started out, it was more, like you're saying, a therapeutic setting, a life coaching setting, and now there's this sort of other angle, which is kind of coming into it. So, how did you end up getting involved or interested in the tech or the AI side? SARA: I am an entrepreneur myself. When we go into what we call private practice, there is an element of business that most of us don't know. They don't really teach you business in social work school, and I kind of had to figure it out. But what really pushed me off that ledge to just figure it out and fly was COVID. And I, you know, went from a traditional office with the couch to being virtual. And it was going to be temporary, but I made the decision, and it was quite a difficult decision, given what I had already experienced in helping people through that transition, you know, going from traditional office spaces to at-home working. But it was, yeah, I really had to understand the impact of technology on my practice, let alone my life. Working from home is a very different lifestyle when it comes to understanding what mental health means. You know, working from home and brain health is a big focus of, you know, what I discuss with my clients and educate them on. But more recently, and this is kind of how I got into the conference, when I started realizing that a lot of my own mental health was...I needed an outlet of creativity of something to be able to help me cope. I realized my business, and my content, and my passion could be that. So, I had to figure out how to scale myself. And I'm still learning AI. I have an assistant, and she helps me. I have to use her to help me use ChatGPT because it is a beast if you don't know not only just learning the program but learning how to use it and also for it to really be authentic and not necessarily something that, you know, the bot just develops content for you, and you don't make it your own. So, it's a big old brain twister. And the concept of perception is very delicate, let alone with AI. But when you bring it into the tech world, it's a completely different type of language. RÉMY: Since you started working with AI, you mentioned ChatGPT, have you noticed answers or generated content that is either incredibly useful and accurate, and, on the other side, other content that might be, I won't say disturbing, but at least not exactly what you would expect from a human? SARA: Yeah, absolutely. It kind of weirds me out to, like...because I use it to kind of help my creative flow, like, if I have a blog post that I need to write. And it's very important for me to, you know, bring myself into my writing. So, when I started with ChatGPT, and it brings up something, and I'm like, who ever says that? Like, no one says that. Like, that's completely maybe like, you know, just it's a little bit unrelatable and a little stiff, I guess, is the best word I can use. And then, I go through the processing of like, okay, let me figure out how I would write this. I feel like it does help me. It does prolong the process a little bit more. But I have also, yeah, so just kind of relatability factor, for me, is the first thing that sticks out. But the other thing that I've learned a little bit more about listening to, you know, other podcasts and just trying to educate myself, which is a funny term because we use this, you know, in my field of mental health all the time, is it comes up with hallucination. So, it will fill in gaps of, you know, whether it be data, or in a statistic, or whether it's just a concept that it kind of makes up to kind of fill and have fillers in what it produces, which I'm still new to understanding what that really means. Like, yeah, it definitely can be some...and it needs to be something that we fact-check as well since it's just pulling from the general abyss of the internet, and that's not always the most accurate, you know, place of reference in general. SAMI: Yeah, I can vouch for the abyss of the internet not always being the best place to find yourself [laughs]. There's some rabbit holes we've probably all been down. But it's so interesting because I find that the world has woken up to the impact that social media has had on everyone's mental health. And it almost feels like that was our first experiment with how tech can really impact us as a society and as individuals. And so, we've kind of seen that experiment and how that's played out, and I would argue we've probably failed. We've probably had this social media wave. And whether you'd look at it from a government perspective or a healthcare perspective, I don't actually think we've handled it well. And it's almost, like, now we're on the cusp of our second experiment, right? This is now, okay, no longer social media. I mean, that is still relevant but put that to the side for a second. And you've got AI coming out with all these chatbots, generative AI, whether that's across images, text, and the impact that is going to have. So, I feel like the space that you're in is huge. I think you spoke before we started recording about, like, there's a mental health crisis. What do you see, or what concerns do you have given what we've seen with social media, the impact AI can have on our mental health? SARA: You know, there's a lot of different points here, but I think I'll just go with the first thing that comes to my mind is the limits. There are not many limits, let alone...so, tech in itself, but just in our own natural human world, as individuals, we have to learn what boundaries are. We have to learn self-imposed limitations or else someone else is going to impose them on us, and that just doesn't feel as good when someone puts their own limitations on our reality. So, when we bring this into tech,...and I also include...since my background is in addictions, I started realizing that correlation between, like, technology, the boom of access to information is really...it's a pleasure concept, is that when we have a thought and we can just go get information about the answer and it's immediate, that immediate gratification teaches the brain like, oh, I can do this. I can handle this myself. We're not looking at the by-product of that anymore. And I think because we're dealing with it, we can't really...we're so in it now. We can't see that like, oh, this could potentially be a problem, because it is. We have become an immediate access world. I mean, even in rural...like, kids in Africa have a TikTok dancing. And they don't have running water in their communities, but they have a cell phone where they can get support. Like, I'm glad they can because that's great access. But they're not necessarily realizing the addictive aspect of what just being interconnected this way has on the brain, let alone the foundational understanding of what boundaries, and self-discipline, or just mental discipline would look like. So, then when you bring this, I think, into the, you know, the AI world, we're already on a shaky ground of abuse of information and having too much information and not knowing how to process it. And I think that's probably been...I know an issue, for me, is that when I have too much information, I can't necessarily ask questions very well because I'm like, what is the question? Like, I know my brain is oversaturated, essentially, with information as well as potentially chemicals at this point because I'm just working so fast, so fast, so fast. And I'm in my mid-thirties at this point. So, a teenager who's already dealing with impulse control issues because they're naturally developing, that gets really complicated very quickly. And that's what, in turn, we call attention deficit disorder, anxiety, autism spectrum. That's a little bit more complicated, but a lot of that intersects to be like, well, what are we dealing with? We're dealing with immediate gratification and a sensory processing issue because we're looking at screens, and our brains don't know how to adapt to that let alone regulate that. SAMI: That makes so much sense. I guess it's because it's kind of a world that we all inhabit, right? As much as we talk about this and sometimes we like to think of the other like we're talking about someone else, I've found this in my own life as well. I'm addicted to my phone in ways, and I'm also seeking that immediate gratification. And it's almost, like you said, that dopamine hit, right? If there's a piece of information I want or there's a video that I want to see, it's there, and it's immediate. And when you say these things, I guess it's kind of...it's a bit scary. And then, I wonder, on a more macro level, why, as a society, do we do this to ourselves? I don't expect anyone on this podcast [chuckles] to have the answer, right? But I'm always interested, like, if we're aware of this and we're cognizant of what's going on, and, Rémy, feel free to jump in on this as well, like, as a society, why are we doing this to ourselves? SARA: Now, by no means is this...like, this is just my answer, and I don't have the answer for everything. But I've had...sometimes as a therapist, you have to fill space and come up with an answer. So, my hypothesis is that it's natural human behavior. I think our brains...we are, you know, survival of the fittest. That's natural. Like, at the end of the day, we're going to fight for our life. And life really comes down, in my perspective, it comes down to, like, we have suffering, and we have pleasure. However, we've learned now that as an evolving, you know, species, that we are one of the only species that can build executive functioning skills in our brains and have different parts of that that we have to kind of understand the baseline. Survival has gotten us so far, and we've made a lot of great headway with that. But pleasure is not sustainable. Pleasure is a beautiful concept to have in life. But when we talk about what's the goal of life, we want to be happy. Happy and pleasure are actually two very different things to the brain. And a lot of it is just a matter of space being used. Pleasure and dopamine is actually a very small part of the brain, whereas happiness expands and is able to circulate chemicals, and synapses, and energy throughout the rest of the brain but that it has to be a conscious choice. And I think a lot of people don't realize, yeah, you're making choices. I'm not saying, like, no one doesn't have, you know, some degree of free will, but if you're dealing with any degree of stress, emotions, cognitive bias in general, you're not making an actual, like, expansive choice about what options you have to expand your consciousness and your brain capacity. RÉMY: I like the way that today we realized that a lot of things related to this is chemicals that we all have, which remove a little bit the guilt when you are addicted, you know, because it can happen to anyone. But also, it's a reminder that it can happen to anyone. So, nobody is immune to that because that's how we're built. And I really like this approach. It's just natural, which means it's okay to feel it. But it's also dangerous to anyone, so anyone should address it. And, again, if you feel like you're losing it and losing to addiction, it feels good to just know that everybody is entitled to, unfortunately, to feel that at some point in their life. SARA: I love that you mentioned that, and that's absolutely one of my goals is to break down the stigma of...when I use the word addiction...and I don't do small talk that well because I'm just like, let's talk about some real things here. This is what's going on. And it's scary to think of, like, addiction and what that means because of how we've seen it. And I don't know what it looks like particularly in the countries that you're from...a little bit. But I know, here in America, it's messy. It's hurtful. It's a lot of suffering. It doesn't make us feel good to even think about that, which is why I try to teach my clients how to manage and regulate that because it does not discriminate. It's your brain. It's doing its natural thing and how you have to train and just learn how to train that. And it can get better, for sure. But yeah, I really try to break through, like, it's not something that we need to keep being scared about because that is actually what gives it its power. It gives that restrictiveness and that isolation and breaks that connection from each other. And that's ultimately what brings us out of an active addictive cycle is connection. SAMI: Yeah, it's really interesting because technology it almost masks that by making you feel really connected. Like, I'm connected to all these people and all these things, but I don't feel that connection. And that really resonates with me when you talk about the difference between pleasure and happiness. So, I hope my parents don't listen to this. But when I was in university, I'm pretty sure I had a gaming addiction. So, I used to live in the loft in my house. I don't know what you'd call it in America. Maybe it's called the attic. I was at the top floor. So, essentially, I had...oh, back then, it would have been a PS3, and I was seriously addicted to Call of Duty, playing online. And I remember doing just all-nighters, like, really often. I remember it got to a point where I would almost have to reset my whole sleep cycle because I ended up in a situation where I'd be awake in the night kind of always playing all night because I couldn't put the game down, and then sleeping during the day. And to get myself back into a normal rhythm, I'd have to force myself to stay awake for 24 hours. And I would even consider myself someone who doesn't have an addictive personality. But when you were saying about the difference between pleasure and happiness, like, it was definitely hitting that dopamine, and it was pleasurable, but I didn't feel happy. Like, once I stopped, then there was all those feelings that Rémy described, which is, oh no, what have I done? I've wasted so much time and all that guilt that comes with it. So, it's really interesting. And I guess it's also a bit like a codependency, which is something I've seen that you've touched on in your work as well, which I understand to be an unhealthy reliance on a human relationship. But I'm guessing we're probably seeing more of that and unhealthy reliance on tech software products and AI. Is that something you're seeing in your therapeutic work as well? SARA: Oh, absolutely. Codependency it's a big topic to unpack. And I'll say it's a balance. We're never going to not be codependent on something because it literally...we're supposed to work together. We need each other to survive and to grow. But the unhealthy parts of it is, I think, because...I'll just speak from my own experience. I was never taught what emotional intelligence was when I was a kid. I grew up in a very middle-class, non-diverse part of the United States, where I didn't understand the foundational, like, what are boundaries? What are emotions? They try to teach you. And I think that's been something that is going to take people a while to understand. But there is an unhealthy part of it because it's just mixed with...and confuse people of what do we actually need to need other people for. And it naturally sends us...I think this is primarily where relationships become a point of the discussion is relationships are necessary. But they're less successful if you don't have a relationship with yourself as a foundation because that's naturally going to help you realize that you don't need this one person. And you don't attach to a person out of necessity and out of survival or else, yeah, you're going to lose a huge aspect of your identity because you didn't have much of one to begin with. And so, that's ultimately what I teach and educate people on when I work with them in session is just what codependency really is. We're going to be codependent on something. I'd rather you be aware of it. Denial is just dangerous in general. But being aware of how these things show up, you have a better of a choice now. And free will comes back to really in your control without less consequence over time or less negative consequence over time. [inaudible 20:44] my brother, though, Rémy. Call of Duty...[inaudible 20:48] the attic, it was the basement, but yeah. It doesn't discriminate against gender, but for men...he's also in the military. So, it was a very good outlet for him before he went, you know, active duty or [inaudible 21:02] and just self-expression. You don't have to talk about things. I don't think this discriminates against country by any means, but I know for America, I try to stay in my lane with just speaking about Americans, is that men have been put in a very tough position when it comes to mental health because society reinforces: keep it together; be the provider; just deal with it, and painted this picture of, like, you don't have and can't express emotions. And then, we wonder why guns are an issue. We wonder why drinking and alcoholism is an issue and, you know, in the male population. MID-ROLL AD: Are you an entrepreneur or start-up founder looking to gain confidence in the way forward for your idea? At thoughtbot, we know you're tight on time and investment, which is why we've created targeted 1-hour remote workshops to help you develop a concrete plan for your product's next steps. Over four interactive sessions, we work with you on research, product design sprint, critical path, and presentation prep so that you and your team are better equipped with the skills and knowledge for success. Find out how we can help you move the needle at: tbot.io/entrepreneurs. SAMI: So, there's a lot of concerns. There's a lot of worries, and there's, I guess, negativity around tech and AI. Is there any silver lining? You know, some things we're getting from tech as we already know it, perhaps social media but also AI. Is there anything that we can look at and be like, actually, that will enhance our mental health, improve our society? Are there any positive things that you see coming from it? SARA: I love that question because it is a heavy conversation. I tell people, if you're considering therapy, like, you got to consider it's a full-time job to intentionally lean into the heaviness of the reality that we live in. There's a lot going on right now. I kind of surprise myself every day as to why I do have some degree of hope. But I think that's also just because I see people recover every day. I am grateful for that because not everyone gets that experience. If you're working more of a tech job and you're looking more at coding, and data, and screens all day, you don't see change from the human perspective. And if anything, if you go outside these days, it's just tense. We're extremely inflamed. I don't care what country you live in. We're all experiencing the sensory, like, I see it as...I was not good at chemistry, but one's like, when you heat up molecules and they move really fast, like, that's combustion. And it's about to be summer, so it's about to even be literally hotter. I'm not going to say it's going to get worse. But I say that to say I do believe there is a degree of hope because not only do I see it, but I also see...I'm connected to communities who are doing work from what I kind of...is stealth and, like, covert. You're not really going to see goodness and kindness in the abundance of negativity and darkness, but it is there. And I also like to say that I educate people every day where it changes...maybe not everyone's going to change in that regard. But as an individual in a network and a system, if one person's changed, the system automatically changes. And little by little, over time, I think the pendulum will swing back in a place where it's like, oh yeah, no, it really is happening. And I also kind of see it in this mental health crisis. Change comes out of crisis. It's unfortunate, but if we don't have a big enough reason to look at something, then we tend not to fix it, you know, be proactive. I mean, one of my goals is to get from this reactive place into a proactive and preemptive, you know, wellness space for people, but that also does have to be choice. But I think it really has to start with people understanding and committing to themselves and taking care of themselves, which is why I also am hopeful is because that's a lot easier than trying to get other people to change for you. If you can commit and commit to yourself, and taking care of yourself, and prioritizing you being self-focused, not necessarily selfish because a lot of that gets a bad rap of like, oh, I'm being selfish. We do it a lot out of defense, which is why I think it's not that effective. And so, like, oh, I'm just going to be selfish. I'm going to do what's best for me. You're also locking...you're doing that out of reaction typically because you're not realizing like, oh, I feel hurt because this person didn't prioritize me, so now I'm not going to prioritize them. I'm going to prioritize me. And what I mean intention and recovery comes down to like, when people hurt you, you still have to choose not to hurt them and not pull away. And so, I think if we can all understand...and it's a tough concept to stay in your lane. It really is. But if we can all try to stay in our lane and focus on taking care of ourselves, that is what I believe is going to make the most impact. SAMI: And do you feel AI could help with that? Could we use AI? I'm interested how, like, specifically with regards to the tech, could that be part of this? SARA: Absolutely. I think there's some foundational knowledge that needs to be done and work that needs to be done in each individual before AI can just kind of come in without creating, like, more intense dependency on it. But I know there are agencies here locally. I can't remember the name of...I was trying to remember this earlier. I met them at a networking event recently, but an agency who uses AI to help with social anxiety and role-playing when it comes to situational circumstances and exposure. So, me as a therapist, I love doing exposure. I, for the most part, am an exposure exercise for some people is, you know, we open up and talk about, like, these things that people don't feel safe to talk about with their general networks. But AI, I've started kind of dabbling in, you know, I have some clients who deal with, you know, some, like, delusional disorders, schizoaffective disorder, where they didn't grow up in families where any of the, like, really important foundational concepts were discussed, or they were shut down. So, they're naturally trained to just stay in their head. And, in turn, you build a distrust with all the thoughts you have in your brain. And I encourage my clients to have conversations with ChatGPT just to be like, "Hey, what's up? What's going on?" And telling it what it is that they need, to just normalize the communication of being like, okay, I'm a little nervous to go on a date. I don't know what to say. Can you help me with some ideas of what questions to ask to get to know someone? That, I think, is a lot less intimidating sometimes talking with me because my energy is easily transferable. And that can scare some people because I can get quite excited about, like, "Yo, you did that. That's great." And they're like, "Whoa, that's a lot." SAMI: I'm loving your vibes. SARA: Oh [laughs]. SAMI: It's good energy. I'm enjoying it. SARA: Well, thank you. But I have a couple of clients that...talk about an investment, and I've told them this, and I was like, "I am going to pour into you." Because they just never had certain experiences at the right time to build a degree of confidence that would get them to the next place in life, where they realized like, oh, I can do that. Failure is not that bad, and it's different for everyone. But I do think AI can help in that regard. It also can become a little bit challenging. I had a discussion on this with a colleague of mine who works in cybersecurity, and we were talking about AI and the intersection in relationships and the impact on intimacy in relationships, mostly with heterosexual relationships. But there, yeah, it can go a very different direction than hopeful. And it can cause harm or conflict in some relationships because it's easier to talk to a very structured computer bot than it is to a woman per se. But I think it can help as well to build a foundation for people to get to those points where you can be assertive and reflective in your experiences, build emotional intelligence over time to help relationships. RÉMY: At thoughtbot, we have worked on projects that implement AI, and we are becoming more familiar with training models. One thing that concerns us is doing this in an ethical and safe way. What tips would you have for people who are actually creating models and driving change in this space? SARA: I'd say the first thing that comes to my mind, though, and this is kind of going to go into my talk during the conference, how do you know you're connected with your own reality? I think that's the hardest part about the tech world is like, it's the boundary. Your brain does not know the difference between a computer screen and your reality. The biggest difference is your senses. And that's kind of been the...it's what's caused a lot of the problem with tech is that, you know, here we're having this conversation. I can see y'all. I can generally take into account what your environment is like, but I can't experience it the same way as if I was not sitting in the room with you. And I think that is when you teach people how to activate their own realities, you know, teach them about their body and the somatic work, especially with trauma. When trauma is involved, is you have to know how to activate the here and now and train your brain to know what your reality is or else you're going to get lost in the sauce of, like, everyone else's reality, let alone opinions, but especially in the virtual world. So, being able to know your sensory activation, how mindfulness is, that's a huge term, honestly. We could unpack that for 30 minutes itself. But that sensory activation is a huge part of mindfulness is being able to experience a thought that can trigger something of a reaction and being able to effectively detach from it without judgment, you know, it's training. It takes a lot of training, but senses are huge, and being able to, I think, ethically venture into that world of, you know, using the virtual space, using AI to train and be effective. SAMI: Yeah, I want to pick up on something you said before because it kind of scared me [laughs], which I don't mind [laughs] saying that to you, right? Because I've got this fear that probably other people have also considered as well is people say about AI taking jobs. So, as a coder, we know AI is becoming more proficient at coding. Maybe other designers, other people in the tech world have this fear as well so much so I actually mentioned this in a previous podcast. I taught myself some, like, real physical skills because I thought when AI takes my job completely, well, at least I'll be able to do something. I actually taught myself to silicone a bathroom. And if you know, you have those silicone beads that kind of go around a bathroom, so the water doesn't get in between the grating and the tiles. So, I remember when I was learning it, thinking, well, if AI does take our jobs, at least I'll be able to do this. But that's where my brain goes sometimes. And then, when you were mentioning about using it in a therapeutic setting, like, oh, well, it can actually be helpful to chat to an AI bot about certain scenarios that you might be trying to work through in therapy. So, I guess the question is twofold. Number one, do you see AI having a big impact in a therapeutic setting and coming in and almost disrupting that industry? And also, what tips do you have for the majority of people who are now concerned that what is life going to look like, and what is it going to be? And will we all have jobs? SARA: I think what's important is to understand what happens to the individual when fear is at play before we can even get to the bigger question of like, will AI take our jobs? But I'll start from the end. There will be some jobs that are taken by AI. But what you're talking about Rémy is, yes, there is a huge power to know how you can connect with your own life and AI. Even if you have a job that is in tech and can be overrun by AI, you still have value as a human being. However, you're not going to feel that way, one, if you have a lot of fear because we have to understand why you can't connect with that. But because value is an invariant, to value something, you have to be quite intentional with training your brain to understand value, and you can do that if you know what fear does to your brain, and it's...quite simply, we've all heard it. It's the stress response: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. So, when you're having a perceived threat, it doesn't mean...external is not the only threat. We threaten ourselves all the time with our own thought process based off of the experiences that we've had and trigger our own fear. And your brain essentially is like, hold up, no, we're not going any further. There's a risk here. We're going to stop you. So, this is where a lot of people, like, have those moments. I could stare at a wall for, like, 10 minutes, but it's actually, like, almost two hours if I'm stressed out to the point...because I'm processing too much information, but it's also triggering a stress response for my brain. And we just get saturated and stuck in that moment. So, being able to know, okay, this is happening, then we can actually come back online. So, I use the brain as a computer metaphor quite often. And when we know that we're in that fight or flight response mode, we can in turn engage so that...I actually have an acronym for fear that I'm going to be debuting at this conference. I'll just go ahead and debut it for y'all, a little sneak peek since you guys may or may not be able to be there. So, that fear is...we usually as an acronym, if you've ever heard this, is F everything and run. And I'm going to define it as the F would be the fight response, fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. So, if you know that's going on, you can address it. The E would be engage. So, engage with your present moment, and that's where your body is, the one thing that tends to be in that present moment. And then, the A is accept. A lot of times we have to accept that we're maybe stuck. We may be at a problem. We may need to take a break. Accepting the things that we can't change in that moment is going to make a big difference on how we come back online on our brains and be able to understand, like, AI is a threat, but it's not going to take over everything, right? And then, the R is redirect. So, redirect to something that is going to change your perception of what the original trigger was. And so, I think if people can understand how they work and how the brain is actually self-protecting, it's very, like, it's like, whoa, we're not going to let you do something completely destructive. But it cannot distinguish the severity of the threat, let alone can it not...actually, there's a lot of people who've trained their brain to not experience fear. Fear is what is supposed to keep us safe. So, it is just perceiving like, hey, AI could take our jobs, but it's also not giving you the context that you brought up, Rémy, about it's not going to take everything from us. It's actually supposed to be here to help us in [inaudible 36:23]. And it's also dependent on us. So, if we're creating fear in the AI, then yeah, it's going to learn that, and it, could, I don't know, I can't tell the future in that regard. But we have plenty of things that don't have to be tech-related that AI won't take from us. And a lot of that is the natural world if we can keep it alive and value it enough. RÉMY: I have one question for you. It might not be very in sync with the train of thought we're having because it's more related to the beginning of the episode. But you mentioned sometimes rebuilding confidence with people and building confidence and building the ability to trust yourself and to make your own good decisions. It feels like, to some extent, it can be rebuilding yourself. How do you deal with such a big action, such a big project? I mean, it's something that could take life to do so. SARA: That's a great question. And sometimes it will take people's lives. I don't handle the whole rest of their life. I tell people like, "I'm going to give you some foundational things." And I do a lot of training. I'm very direct, which is why I have that therapeutic life consultant of like, I'm going to take my vast amount of experience, things that people are probably not going to experience and help them build a security in themselves and, over time, prepare them for when they deviate from that. I tell people, like, especially if you have loved ones still living, depression is never going to just leave. The concept...there's no cure. It's being able to be prepared for when things happen in life versus feel completely unprepared. I just came out of a season of grief of, you know, I walked away from a relationship, as well as then trying to still maintain my business, still trying to maintain my clients and those relationships, let alone the relationship with myself, and then put my cat down, you know, like, you know, he was a child. I had him for 14 years. So, like, life is going to continuously happen. So, I'm not trying to figure it all out, but I'm trying to get people back to a point where they can understand how to find security for themselves. Since mental health has been such a taboo topic for a long time, there is quite a bit of backlog, and that's what we're seeing. I don't know what it looks like in y'alls countries, but here in America, there is this rush of people. I need a therapist. I need to go to therapy. And we're at a shortage. Therapists can't necessarily help all, like, at once. And we also have to maintain our own mental health, or we're not going to be very helpful to people. But really, it comes down to how you build that security with yourself and know and not anticipate, but be prepared for when there's something else that happens that disturbs your own peace. Because if you have an understanding of what peace looks like for you, and you can't necessarily control it, but you can influence it, and facilitate it in your life, then you have a stronger foundation to be able to endure, you know, potential loss of a loved one, hopefully, no time soon for anyone here, or out, or listening, but it's just the reality. And that's part of, you know, my story of, I experienced a lot of loss from a young age, and it worked against me for a long time because I had no idea how to process and regulate energy and emotion in my body. And so, what it looked like was me holding on to repressing anger, not having a relationship with the natural emotions that we can't get rid of. You can't get rid of emotions. I wish I could just, you know, vomit them out and just be done with it and be like, okay, cool. We can all be stable. That's just not...that's not going to happen. I think that also is what makes us, you know, a great species and building, you know, great things in this world is emotion. Tech was built off of passion and emotion. Did it cause some disarray and probably hurt some people in the process? Yeah. But I think we can reduce that from happening if people understand emotional intelligence and not just work, work, work, work, work. It's a new age coming to that. And I've, hopefully, been working on myself enough to be able to sustain helping people understand and shifting over to that new type of perspective of we can't do things the way that we've been doing them. We just can't. It's not sustainable. The human species will suffer from it and the earth will as well. SAMI: Yeah, thank you so much, and just for bringing that level of transparency and honesty. It resonates with myself, and I'm sure it will help so many other people who are listening. We could talk to you for hours. I mean, there is so much. And some things we just did not have time to get into. But thank you so much for the time that you've given us. And it's been really insightful to look at AI and tech that we work with as consultants at thoughtbot on a daily basis from this perspective and look at it from this angle. If people want to get a hold of you, where would be the best place? SARA: Finding my website is a big thing. That's just, you know, kind of the portal. So, that's sarawilderlcsw.com. Sara with an out an H. And then, also, venturing into this tech world, I have an app interface now that I have put together to kind of be a centerpiece for mental health resources, not only just, like, hotlines. That information is on my website as well. But if you want to start doing your own work little by little, you know, having a centralized spot as well as not too much information. There's plenty of stuff you can Google about mental health. But this is vetted by me and organized to a point where they can, you know, one worksheet can make a difference, where you're just reflecting and taking, you know, 10-15 minutes to read through it and see how you can apply it in your life. It's called Power in Perspective. SAMI: That's great. Definitely, I recommend go and check it out and check out Sara on her website. And if you can get down to that conference, that is, again, North Carolina called CreativeVerse, and you'll have the opportunity to hear Sara in person as well as Fatima from thoughtbot who's also presenting. If you learned nothing else from today, then just remember: fear has an acronym for F everything and run. I guess that's my big takeaway. You also got a chance to hear about my gaming addiction. No one tell my parents. And you can find notes and a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, you can email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. I always leave you the same challenge, and that challenge is to subscribe. We've got some great guests lined up, and you'll hear about it first if you subscribe. And feel free to leave any comments on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. We do check them all, and they're really helpful. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Check her out at mandymoore.tech. Thanks for listening. See ya. AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at: tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at: referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions.

Sara is a team lead at thoughtbot. She talks about her experience as a professor at Kanazawa Technical College, giant LAN parties in Rochester, transitioning from Java to Ruby, shining a light on maintainers, and her closing thoughts on RubyConf. Recorded at RubyConf 2023 in San Diego. -- A few topics covered: Being an Assistant Arofessor in Kanazawa Teaching naming, formatting, and style Differences between students in Japan vs US Technical terms and programming resources in Japanese LAN parties at Rochester Transitioning from Java to Ruby Consulting The forgotten maintainer RubyConf Other links Sara's mastodon thoughtbot This Week in Open Source testdouble Ruby Central Scholars and Guides Program City Museum Japan International College of Technology Kanazawa RubyKaigi Applying mruby to World-first Small SAR Satellite (Japanese lightning talk) (mruby in space) Rochester Rochester Institute of Technology Electronic Gaming Society Tora-con Strong National Museum of Play Transcript You can help correct transcripts on GitHub. [00:00:00] Jeremy: I'm here at RubyConf, San Diego, with Sara Jackson, thank you for joining me today. [00:00:05] Sara: Thank you for having me. Happy to be here. [00:00:07] Jeremy: Sara right now you're working at, ThoughtBot, as a, as a Ruby developer, is that right? [00:00:12] Sara: Yes, that is correct. Teaching in Japan [00:00:14] Jeremy: But I think before we kind of talk about that, I mean, we're at a Ruby conference, but something that I, I saw, on your LinkedIn that I thought was really interesting was that you were teaching, I think, programming in. Kanazawa, for a couple years. [00:00:26] Sara: Yeah, that's right. So for those that don't know, Kanazawa is a city on the west coast of Japan. If you draw kind of a horizontal line across Japan from Tokyo, it's, it's pretty much right there on the west coast. I was an associate professor in the Global Information and Management major, which is basically computer science or software development. (laughs) Yep. [00:00:55] Jeremy: Couldn't tell from the title. [00:00:56] Sara: You couldn't. No.. so there I was teaching classes for a bunch of different languages and concepts from Java to Python to Unix and Bash scripting, just kind of all over. [00:01:16] Jeremy: And did you plan the curriculum yourself, or did they have anything for you? [00:01:21] Sara: It depended on the class that I was teaching. So some of them, I was the head teacher. In that case, I would be planning the class myself, the... lectures the assignments and grading them, et cetera. if I was assisting on a class, then usually it would, I would be doing grading and then helping in the class. Most of the classes were, uh, started with a lecture and then. Followed up with a lab immediately after, in person. [00:01:54] Jeremy: And I think you went to, is it University of Rochester? [00:01:58] Sara: Uh, close. Uh, Rochester Institute of Technology. So, same city. Yeah. [00:02:03] Jeremy: And so, you were studying computer science there, is that right? [00:02:07] Sara: I, I studied computer science there, but I got a minor in Japanese language. and that's how, that's kind of my origin story of then teaching in Kanazawa. Because Rochester is actually the sister city with Kanazawa. And RIT has a study abroad program for Japanese learning students to go study at KIT, Kanazawa Institute of Technology, in Kanazawa, do a six week kind of immersive program. And KIT just so happens to be under the same board as the school that I went to teach at. [00:02:46] Jeremy: it's great that you can make that connection and get that opportunity, yeah. [00:02:49] Sara: Absolutely. Networking! [00:02:52] Jeremy: And so, like, as a student in Rochester, you got to see how, I suppose, computer science education was there. How did that compare when you went over to Kanazawa? [00:03:02] Sara: I had a lot of freedom with my curriculum, so I was able to actually lean on some of the things that I learned, some of the, the way that the courses were structured that I took, I remember as a freshman in 2006, one of the first courses that we took, involved, learning Unix, learning the command line, things like that. I was able to look up some of the assignments and some of the information from that course that I took to inform then my curriculum for my course, [00:03:36] Jeremy: That's awesome. Yeah. and I guess you probably also remember how you felt as a student, so you know like what worked and maybe what didn't. [00:03:43] Sara: Absolutely. And I was able to lean on that experience as well as knowing. What's important and what, as a student, I didn't think was important. Naming, formatting, and style [00:03:56] Jeremy: So what were some examples of things that were important and some that weren't? [00:04:01] Sara: Mm hmm. For Java in particular, you don't need any white space between any of your characters, but formatting and following the general Guidelines of style makes your code so much easier to read. It's one of those things that you kind of have to drill into your head through muscle memory. And I also tried to pass that on to my students, in their assignments that it's. It's not just to make it look pretty. It's not just because I'm a mean teacher. It is truly valuable for future developers that will end up reading your code. [00:04:39] Jeremy: Yeah, I remember when I went through school. The intro professor, they would actually, they would print out our code and they would mark it up with red pen, basically like a writing assignment and it would be like a bad variable name and like, white space shouldn't be here, stuff like that. And, it seems kind of funny now, but, it actually makes it makes a lot of sense. [00:04:59] Sara: I did that. [00:04:59] Jeremy: Oh, nice. [00:05:00] Sara: I did that for my students. They were not happy about it. (laughs) [00:05:04] Jeremy: Yeah, at that time they're like, why are you like being so picky, right? [00:05:08] Sara: Exactly. But I, I think back to my student, my experience as a student. in some of the classes I've taken, not even necessarily computer related, the teachers that were the sticklers, those lessons stuck the most for me. I hated it at the time. I learned a lot. [00:05:26] Jeremy: Yeah, yeah. so I guess that's an example of things that, that, that matter. The, the aesthetics or the visual part for understanding. What are some things that they were teaching that you thought like, Oh, maybe this isn't so important. [00:05:40] Sara: Hmm. Pause for effect. (laughs) So I think that there wasn't necessarily Any particular class or topic that I didn't feel was as valuable, but there was some things that I thought were valuable that weren't emphasized very well. One of the things that I feel very strongly about, and I'm sure those of you out there can agree. in RubyWorld, that naming is important. The naming of your variables is valuable. It's useful to have something that's understood. and there were some other teachers that I worked with that didn't care so much in their assignments. And maybe the labs that they assigned had less than useful names for things. And that was kind of a disappointment for me. [00:06:34] Jeremy: Yeah, because I think it's maybe hard to teach, a student because a lot of times you are writing these short term assignments and you have it pass the test or do the thing and then you never look at it again. [00:06:49] Sara: Exactly. [00:06:50] Jeremy: So you don't, you don't feel that pain. Yeah, [00:06:53] Sara: Mm hmm. But it's like when you're learning a new spoken language, getting the foundations correct is super valuable. [00:07:05] Jeremy: Absolutely. Yeah. And so I guess when you were teaching in Kanazawa, was there anything you did in particular to emphasize, you know, these names really matter because otherwise you or other people are not going to understand what you were trying to do here? [00:07:22] Sara: Mm hmm. When I would walk around class during labs, kind of peek over the shoulders of my students, look at what they're doing, it's... Easy to maybe point out at something and be like, well, what is this? I can't tell what this is doing. Can you tell me what this does? Well, maybe that's a better name because somebody else who was looking at this, they won't know, I don't know, you know, it's in your head, but you will not always be working solo. my school, a big portion of the students went on to get technical jobs from after right after graduating. it was when you graduated from the school that I was teaching at, KTC, it was the equivalent of an associate's degree. Maybe 50 percent went off to a tech job. Maybe 50 percent went on to a four year university. And, and so as students, it hadn't. Connected with them always yet that oh, this isn't just about the assignment. This is also about learning how to interact with my co workers in the future. Differences between students [00:08:38] Jeremy: Yeah, I mean, I think It's hard, but, group projects are kind of always, uh, that's kind of where you get to work with other people and, read other people's code, but there's always that potential imbalance of where one person is like, uh, I know how to do this. I'll just do it. Right? So I'm not really sure how to solve that problem. Yeah. [00:09:00] Sara: Mm hmm. That's something that I think probably happens to some degree everywhere, but man, Japan really has groups, group work down. They, that's a super generalization. For my students though, when you would put them in a group, they were, they were usually really organized about who was going to do what and, kept on each other about doing things maybe there were some students that were a little bit more slackers, but it was certainly not the kind of polarized dichotomy you would usually see in an American classroom. [00:09:39] Jeremy: Yeah. I've been on both sides. I've been the person who did the work and the slacker. [00:09:44] Sara: Same. [00:09:46] Jeremy: And, uh, I feel bad about it now, but, uh, [00:09:50] Sara: We did what we had to do. [00:09:52] Jeremy: We all got the degree, so we're good. that is interesting, though. I mean, was there anything else, like, culturally different, you felt, from, you know, the Japanese university? [00:10:04] Sara: Yes. Absolutely. A lot of things. In American university, it's kind of the first time in a young person's life, usually, where they have the freedom to choose what they learn, choose where they live, what they're interested in. And so there's usually a lot of investment in your study and being there, being present, paying attention to the lecture. This is not to say that Japanese college students were the opposite. But the cultural feeling is college is your last time to have fun before you enter the real world of jobs and working too many hours. And so the emphasis on paying Super attention or, being perfect in your assignments. There was, there was a scale. There were some students that were 100 percent there. And then there were some students that were like, I'm here to get a degree and maybe I'm going to sleep in class a little bit. (laughs) That is another major difference, cultural aspect. In America, if you fall asleep in a meeting, you fall asleep in class, super rude. Don't do it. In Japan, if you take a nap at work, you take a nap in class, not rude. It's actually viewed as a sign of you are working really hard. You're usually working maybe late into the night. You're not getting enough sleep. So the fact that you need to take maybe a nap here or two here or there throughout the day means that you have put dedication in. [00:11:50] Jeremy: Even if the reason you're asleep is because you were playing games late at night. [00:11:54] Sara: Yep. [00:11:55] Jeremy: But they don't know that. [00:11:56] Sara: Yeah. But it's usually the case for my students. [00:11:59] Jeremy: Okay. I'm glad they were having fun at least [00:12:02] Sara: Me too. Why she moved back [00:12:04] Jeremy: That sounds like a really interesting experience. You did it for about two years? Three years. [00:12:12] Sara: So I had a three year contract with an option to extend up to five, although I did have a There were other teachers in my same situation who were actually there for like 10 years, so it was flexible. [00:12:27] Jeremy: Yeah. So I guess when you made the decision to, to leave, what was sort of your, your thinking there? [00:12:35] Sara: My fiance was in America [00:12:37] Jeremy: Good. [00:12:37] Sara: he didn't want to move to Japan [00:12:39] Jeremy: Good, reason. [00:12:39] Sara: Yeah, he was waiting three years patiently for me. [00:12:44] Jeremy: Okay. Okay. my heart goes out there . He waited patiently. [00:12:49] Sara: We saw each other. We, we were very lucky enough to see each other every three or four months in person. Either I would visit America or he would come visit me in Kanazawa. [00:12:59] Jeremy: Yeah, yeah. You, you couldn't convince him to, to fall in love with the country. [00:13:03] Sara: I'm getting there [00:13:04] Jeremy: Oh, you're getting Oh, [00:13:05] Sara: it's, We're making, we're making way. [00:13:07] Jeremy: Good, that's good. So are you taking like, like yearly trips or something, or? [00:13:11] Sara: That was, that was always my intention when I moved back so I moved back in the Spring of 2018 to America and I did visit. In 2019, the following year, so I could attend the graduation ceremony for the last group of students that I taught. [00:13:26] Jeremy: That's so sweet. [00:13:27] Sara: And then I had plans to go in 2020. We know what happened in 2020 [00:13:32] Jeremy: Yeah. [00:13:33] Sara: The country did not open to tourism again until the fall of 2022. But I did just make a trip last month. [00:13:40] Jeremy: Nice [00:13:40] Sara: To see some really good friends for the first time in four years. [00:13:43] Jeremy: Amazing, yeah. Where did you go? [00:13:46] Sara: I did a few days in Tokyo. I did a few days in Niigata cause I was with a friend who studied abroad there. And then a few days in Kanazawa. [00:13:56] Jeremy: That's really cool, yeah. yeah, I had a friend who lived there, but they were teaching English, yeah. And, I always have a really good time when I'm out there, yeah. [00:14:08] Sara: Absolutely. If anyone out there visiting wants to go to Japan, this is your push. Go do it. Reach out to me on LinkedIn. I will help you plan. [00:14:17] Jeremy: Nice, nice. Um, yeah, I, I, I would say the same. Like, definitely, if you're thinking about it, go. And, uh, sounds like Sara will hook you up. [00:14:28] Sara: Yep, I'm your travel guide. Technical terms in Japanese [00:14:31] Jeremy: So you, you studied, uh, you, you said you had a minor in Japanese? Yeah. So, so when you were teaching there, were you teaching classes in English or was it in Japanese? [00:14:42] Sara: It was a mix. Uh, when I was hired, the job description was no Japanese needed. It was a very, like, Global, international style college, so there was a huge emphasis on learning English. They wanted us to teach only in English. My thought was, it's hard enough learning computer science in your native language, let alone a foreign language, so my lectures were in English, but I would assist the labs in japanese [00:15:14] Jeremy: Oh, nice. Okay. And then, so you were basically fluent then at the time. Middle. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, well, I think if you're able to, to help people, you know, in labs and stuff, and it's a technical topic, right? So that's gotta be kind of a, an interesting challenge [00:15:34] Sara: I did learn a lot of new computer vocabulary. Yes. [00:15:39] Jeremy: So the words are, like, a lot of them are not the same? Or, you know, for, for specifically related to programming, I guess. [00:15:46] Sara: Hmm. Yeah, there are Japanese specific words. There's a lot of loan words that we use. We. Excuse me. There's a lot of loan words that Japanese uses for computer terms, but there's plenty that are just in Japanese. For example, uh, an array is hairetsu. [00:16:08] Jeremy: Okay. [00:16:08] Sara: And like a screen or the display that your monitor is a gamen, but a keyboard would be keyboard... Kībōdo, probably. [00:16:20] Jeremy: Yeah. So just, uh, so that, they use that as a loan word, I guess. But I'm not sure why not the other two. [00:16:27] Sara: Yeah, it's a mystery. [00:16:29] Jeremy: So it's just, it's just a total mix. Yeah. I'm just picturing you thinking like, okay, is it the English word or is it the Japanese word? You know, like each time you're thinking of a technical term. Yeah. [00:16:39] Sara: Mm hmm. I mostly, I, I I went to the internet. I searched for Japanese computer term dictionary website, and kind of just studied the terms. I also paid a lot of attention to the Japanese professors when they were teaching, what words they were using. Tried to integrate. Also, I was able to lean on my study abroad, because it was a technical Japanese, like there were classes that we took that was on technical Japanese. Computer usage, and also eco technology, like green technology. So I had learned a bunch of them previously. [00:17:16] Jeremy: Mm. So was that for like a summer or a year or something [00:17:20] Sara: It was six weeks [00:17:21] Jeremy: Six weeks. [00:17:21] Sara: During the summer, [00:17:22] Jeremy: Got it. So that's okay. So like, yeah, that must have been an experience like going to, I'm assuming that's the first time you had been [00:17:30] Sara: It was actually the second time [00:17:31] Jeremy: The second [00:17:32] Sara: Yeah. That was in 2010 that I studied abroad. [00:17:35] Jeremy: And then the classes, they were in Japanese or? Yeah. Yeah. That's, uh, that's, that's full immersion right there. [00:17:42] Sara: It was, it was very funny in the, in the very first lesson of kind of just the general language course, there was a student that was asking, I, how do I say this? I don't know this. And she was like, Nihongo de. [00:17:55] Jeremy: Oh (laughs) ! [00:17:56] Sara: You must, must ask your question only in [00:17:59] Jeremy: Yeah, Programming resources in Japanesez [00:17:59] Jeremy: yeah. yeah. That's awesome. So, so it's like, I guess the, the professors, they spoke English, but they were really, really pushing you, like, speak Japanese. Yeah, that's awesome. and maybe this is my bias because I'm an English native, but when you look up. Resources, like you look up blog posts and Stack Overflow and all this stuff. It's all in English, right? So I'm wondering for your, your students, when, when they would search, like, I got this error, you know, what do I do about it? Are they looking at the English pages or are they, you know, you know what I mean? [00:18:31] Sara: There are Japanese resources that they would use. They love Guguru (Google) sensei. [00:18:36] Jeremy: Ah okay. Okay. [00:18:38] Sara: Um, but yeah, there are plenty of Japanese language stack overflow equivalents. I'm not sure if they have stack overflow specifically in Japanese. But there are sites like that, that they, that they used. Some of the more invested students would also use English resources, but that was a minority. [00:19:00] Jeremy: Interesting. So there's a, there's a big enough community, I suppose, of people posting and answering questions and stuff where it's, you don't feel like, there aren't people doing the same thing as you out there. [00:19:14] Sara: Absolutely. Yeah. There's, a large world of software development in Japan, that we don't get to hear. There are questions and answers over here because of that language barrier. [00:19:26] Jeremy: Yeah. I would be, like, kind of curious to, to see, the, the languages and the types of problems they have, if they were similar or if it's, like, I don't know, just different. [00:19:38] Sara: Yeah, now I'm interested in that too, and I bet you there is a lot of research that we could do on Ruby, since Ruby is Japanese. [00:19:51] Jeremy: Right. cause something I've, I've often heard is that, when somebody says they're working with Ruby, Here in, um, the United States, a lot of times people assume it's like, Oh, you're doing a Rails app, [00:20:02] Sara: Mm hmm. [00:20:03] Jeremy: Almost, almost everybody who's using Ruby, not everyone, but you know, the majority I think are using it because of Rails. And I've heard that in Japan, there's actually a lot more usage that's, that's not tied to Rails. [00:20:16] Sara: I've also heard that, and I get the sense of that from RubyKaigi as well. Which I have never been lucky enough to attend. But, yeah, the talks that come out of RubyKaigi, very technical, low to the metal of Ruby, because there's that community that's using it for things other than Rails, other than web apps. [00:20:36] Jeremy: Yeah, I think, one of the ones, I don't know if it was a talk or not, but, somebody was saying that there is Ruby in space. [00:20:42] Sara: That's awesome. Ruby's everywhere. LAN parties in college [00:20:44] Jeremy: So yeah, I guess like another thing I saw, during your time at Rochester is you were, involved with like, there's like a gaming club I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your experience with that. [00:20:55] Sara: Absolutely, I can. So, at RIT, I was an executive board member for three or four years at the Electronic Gaming Society. EGS for short, uh, we hosted weekly console game nights in, the student alumni union area, where there's open space, kind of like a cafeteria. We also hosted quarterly land parties, and we would actually get people from out of state sometimes who weren't even students to come. Uh, and we would usually host the bigger ones in the field house, which is also where concerts are held. And we would hold the smaller ones in conference rooms. I think when I started in 2006, the, the, the LANs were pretty small, maybe like 50, 50 people bring your, your, your huge CRT monitor tower in. [00:21:57] Jeremy: Oh yeah, [00:21:57] Sara: In And then by the time I left in 2012. we were over 300 people for a weekend LAN party, um, and we were actually drawing more power than concerts do. [00:22:13] Jeremy: Incredible. what were, what were people playing at the time? Like when they would the LANs like, [00:22:18] Sara: Yep. Fortnite, early League of Legends, Call of Duty. Battlegrounds. And then also just like fun indie games like Armagedtron, which is kind of like a racing game in the style of [00:22:37] Jeremy: okay. Oh, okay, [00:22:39] Sara: Um, any, there are some like fun browser games where you could just mess with each other. Jackbox. Yeah. [00:22:49] Jeremy: Yeah, it's, it's interesting that, you know, you're talking about stuff like Fortnite and, um, what is it? Battlegrounds is [00:22:55] Sara: not Fortnite. Team Fortress. [00:22:58] Jeremy: Oh Team Fortress! [00:22:59] Sara: Sorry. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I got my, my names mixed up. Fortnite, I think, did not exist at the time, but Team Fortress was big. [00:23:11] Jeremy: Yeah. that's really cool that you're able to get such a big group there. is there something about Rochester, I guess, that that was able to bring together this many people for like these big LAN events? Because I'm... I mean, I'm not sure how it is elsewhere, but I feel like that's probably not what was happening elsewhere in the country. [00:23:31] Sara: Yeah, I mean, if you've ever been to, um, DreamHack, that's, that's a huge LAN party and game convention, that's fun. so... EGS started in the early 2000s, even before I joined, and was just a committed group of people. RIT was a very largely technical school. The majority of students were there for math, science, engineering, or they were in the computer college, [00:24:01] Jeremy: Oh, okay. [00:24:01] Sara: GCIS, G C C I S, the Gossano College of Computing and Information Sciences. So there was a lot of us there. [00:24:10] Jeremy: That does make sense. I mean, it's, it's sort of this, this bias that when there's people doing, uh, technical stuff like software, um, you know, and just IT, [00:24:21] Sara: Mm hmm. [00:24:23] Jeremy: there's kind of this assumption that's like, oh, maybe they play games. And it seems like that was accurate [00:24:27] Sara: It was absolutely accurate. And there were plenty of people that came from different majors. but when I started, there were 17, 000 students and so that's a lot of students and obviously not everyone came to our weekly meetings, but we had enough dedicated people that were on the eboard driving, You know, marketing and advertising for, for our events and things like that, that we were able to get, the good community going. I, I wasn't part of it, but the anime club at RIT is also huge. They run a convention every year that is huge, ToraCon, um. And I think it's just kind of the confluence of there being a lot of geeks and nerds on campus and Rochester is a college town. There's maybe like 10 other universities in [00:25:17] Jeremy: Well, sounds like it was a good time. [00:25:19] Sara: Absolutely would recommend. Strong Museum of Play [00:25:22] Jeremy: I've never, I've never been, but the one thing I have heard about Rochester is there's the, the Strong Museum of Play. [00:25:29] Sara: Yeah, that place is so much fun, even as an adult. It's kind of like, um, the, the Children's Museum in Indiana for, for those that might know that. it just has all the historical toys and pop culture and interactive exhibits. It's so fun. [00:25:48] Jeremy: it's not quite the same, but it, when you were mentioning the Children's Museum in, um, I think it's in St. Louis, there's, uh, it's called the City Museum and it's like a, it's like a giant playground, you know, indoors, outdoors, and it's not just for kids, right? And actually some of this stuff seems like kind of sketch in terms of like, you could kind of hurt yourself, you know, climbing [00:26:10] Sara: When was this made? [00:26:12] Jeremy: I'm not sure, but, uh, [00:26:14] Sara: before regulations maybe. ha. [00:26:16] Jeremy: Yeah. It's, uh, but it's really cool. So at the, at the Museum of Play, though, is it, There's like a video game component, right? But then there's also, like, other types of things, [00:26:26] Sara: Yeah, they have, like, a whole section of the museum that's really, really old toys on display, like, 1900s, 1800s. Um, they have a whole Sesame Street section, and other things like that. Yeah. From Java to Ruby [00:26:42] Jeremy: Check it out if you're in Rochester. maybe now we could talk a little bit about, so like now you're working at Thoughtbot as a Ruby developer. but before we started recording, you were telling me that you started, working with Java. And there was like a, a long path I suppose, you know, changing languages. So maybe you can talk a little bit about your experience there. [00:27:06] Sara: Yeah. for other folks who have switched languages, this might be a familiar story for you, where once you get a job in one technology or one stack, one language, you kind of get typecast after a while. Your next job is probably going to be in the same language, same stack. Companies, they hire based on technology and So, it might be hard, even if you've been playing around with Ruby in your free time, to break, make that barrier jump from one language to another, one stack to another. I mean, these technologies, they can take a little while to ramp up on. They can be a little bit different, especially if you're going from a non object oriented language to an object oriented, don't. Lose hope. (laughs) If you have an interest in Ruby and you're not a Rubyist right now, there's a good company for you that will give you a chance. That's the key that I learned, is as a software developer, the skills that you have that are the most important are not the language that you know. It's the type of thinking that you do, the problem solving, communication, documentation, knowledge sharing, Supporting each other, and as Saron the keynote speaker on Wednesday said, the, the word is love. [00:28:35] Jeremy: [00:28:35] Sara: So when I was job hunting, it was really valuable for me to include those important aspects in my skill, in my resume, in my CV, in my interviews, that like, I'm newer to this language because I had learned it at a rudimentary level before. Never worked in it really professionally for a long time. Um, when I was applying, it was like, look, I'm good at ramping up in technologies. I have been doing software for a long time, and I'm very comfortable with the idea of planning, documenting, problem solving. Give me a chance, please. I was lucky enough to find my place at a company that would give me a chance. Test Double hired me in 2019 as a remote. Software Consultant, and it changed my life. [00:29:34] Jeremy: What, what was it about, Ruby that I'm assuming that this is something that you maybe did in your spare time where you were playing with Ruby or? [00:29:43] Sara: I am one of those people that don't really code in their spare time, which I think is valuable for people to say. The image of a software developer being, well, if you're not coding in your spare time, then you're not passionate about it. That's a myth. That's not true. Some of us, we have other hobbies. I have lots of hobbies. Coding is not the one that I carry outside of the workplace, usually, but, I worked at a company called Constant Contact in 2014 and 2015. And while I was there, I was able to learn Ruby on Rails. [00:30:23] Jeremy: Oh, okay. So that was sort of, I guess, your experience there, on the job. I guess you enjoyed something about the language or something about Rails and then that's what made you decide, like, I would really love to, to... do more of this [00:30:38] Sara: Absolutely. It was amazing. It's such a fun language. The first time I heard about it was in college, maybe 2008 or 2009. And I remember learning, this looks like such a fun language. This looks like it would be so interesting to learn. And I didn't think about it again until 2014. And then I was programming in it. Coming from a Java mindset and it blew my mind, the Rails magic also, I was like, what is happening? This is so cool. Because of my typecasting sort of situation of Java, I wasn't able to get back to it until 2019. And I don't want to leave. I'm so happy. I love the language. I love the community. It's fun. [00:31:32] Jeremy: I can totally see that. I mean, when I first tried out Rails, yeah, it, like, you mentioned the magic, and I know some people are like, ah, I don't like the magic, but when, I think, once I saw what you could do, And how, sort of, little you needed to write, and the fact that so many projects kind of look the same. Um, yeah, that really clicked for me, and I really appreciated that. think that and the Rails console. I think the console is amazing. [00:32:05] Sara: Being able to just check real quick. Hmm, I wonder if this will work. Wait, no, I can check right now. I [00:32:12] Jeremy: And I think that's an important point you brought up too, about, like, not... the, the stereotype and I, I kind of, you know, showed it here where I assumed like, Oh, you were doing Java and then you moved to Ruby. It must've been because you were doing Ruby on the side and thought like, Oh, this is cool. I want to do it for my job. but I, I thought that's really cool that you were able to, not only that you, you don't do the programming stuff outside of work, but that you were able to, to find an opportunity where you could try something different, you know, in your job where you're still being paid. And I wonder, was there any, was there any specific intention behind, like, when you took that job, it was so that I can try something different, or did it just kind of happen? I'm curious what your... The appeal of consulting [00:32:58] Sara: I was wanting to try something different. I also really wanted to get into consulting. [00:33:04] Jeremy: Hmm. [00:33:05] Sara: I have ADHD. And working at a product company long term, I think, was never really going to work out for me. another thing you might notice in my LinkedIn is that a lot of my stays at companies have been relatively short. Because, I don't know, I, my brain gets bored. The consultancy environment is... Perfect. You can go to different clients, different engagements, meet new people, learn a different stack, learn how other people are doing things, help them be better, and maybe every two weeks, two months, three months, six months, a year, change and do it all over again. For some people, that sounds awful. For me, it's perfect. [00:33:51] Jeremy: Yeah, I hadn't thought about that with, with consulting. cause I, I suppose, so you said it's, it's usually about half a year between projects or is It [00:34:01] Sara: varies [00:34:01] Jeremy: It varies widely. [00:34:02] Sara: Widely. I think we try to hit the sweet spot of 3-6 months. For an individual working on a project, the actual contract engagement might be longer than that, but, yeah. Maintainers don't get enough credit [00:34:13] Jeremy: Yeah. And, and your point about how some people, they like to jump on different things and some people like to, to stick to the same thing. I mean, that, that makes a lot of, sense in terms of, I think maintaining software and like building new software. It's, they're both development, [00:34:32] Sara: Mm hmm. [00:34:32] Jeremy: they're very different. Right. [00:34:35] Sara: It's so funny that you bring that up because I highly gravitate towards maintaining over making. I love going to different projects, but I have very little interest in Greenfield, very little interest in making something new. I want to get into the weeds, into 10 years that nobody wants to deal with because the weeds are so high and there's dragons in there. I want to cut it away. I want to add documentation. I want to make it better. It's so important for us to maintain our software. It doesn't get nearly enough credit. The people that work on open source, the people that are doing maintenance work on, on apps internally, externally, Upgrades, making sure dependencies are all good and safe and secure. love that stuff. [00:35:29] Jeremy: That's awesome. We, we need more of you. (laughs) [00:35:31] Sara: There's plenty of us out there, but we don't get the credit (laughs) [00:35:34] Jeremy: Yeah, because it's like with maintenance, well, I would say probably both in companies and in open source when everything is working. Then Nobody nobody knows. Nobody says anything. They're just like, Oh, that's great. It's working. And then if it breaks, then everyone's upset. [00:35:51] Sara: Exactly. [00:35:53] Jeremy: And so like, yeah, you're just there to get yelled at when something goes wrong. But when everything's going good, it's like, [00:35:59] Sara: A job well done is, I was never here. [00:36:02] Jeremy: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how. To, you know, to fix that, I mean, when you think about open source maintainers, right, like a big thing is, is, is burnout, right? Where you are keeping the internet and all of our applications running and, you know, what you get for it is people yelling at you and the issues, right? [00:36:23] Sara: Yeah, it's hard. And I think I actually. Submitted a talk to RubyConf this year about this topic. It didn't get picked. That's okay. Um, we all make mistakes. I'm going to try to give it somewhere in the future, but I think one of the important things that we as an industry should strive for is giving glory. Giving support and kudos to maintenance work. I've been trying to do that. slash I have been doing that at ThoughtBot by, at some cadence. I have been putting out a blog post to the ThoughtBot blog called. This week in open source, the time period that is covered might be a week or longer in those posts. I give a summary of all of the commits that have been made to our open source projects. And the people that made those contributions with highlighting to new version releases, including patch level. And I do this. The time I, I, I took up the torch of doing this from a co worker, Mike Burns, who used to do it 10 years ago. I do this so that people can get acknowledgement for the work they do, even if it's fixing a broken link, even if it's updating some words that maybe don't make sense. All of it is valuable. [00:37:54] Jeremy: Definitely. Yeah. I mean, I, I think that, um, yeah, what's visible to people is when there's a new feature or an API change and Yeah, it's just, uh, people don't, I think a lot of people don't realize, like, how much work goes into just keeping everything running. [00:38:14] Sara: Mm hmm. Especially in the world of open source and Ruby on Rails, all the gems, there's so many different things coming out, things that suddenly this is not compatible. Suddenly you need to change something in your code because a dependency, however many steps apart has changed and it's hard work. The people that do those things are amazing. [00:38:41] Jeremy: So if anybody listening does that work, we, we appreciate you. [00:38:45] Sara: We salute you. Thank you. And if you're interested in contributing to ThoughtBot open source, we have lots of repos. There's one out there for you. Thoughts on RubyConf [00:38:54] Jeremy: You've been doing programming for quite a while, and, you're here at, at RubyConf. I wonder what kind of brings you to these, these conferences? Like, what do you get out of them? Um, I guess, how was this one? That sort of thing. [00:39:09] Sara: Well, first, this one was sick. This one was awesome. Uh, Ruby central pulled out all the stops and that DJ on Monday. In the event, in the exhibit hall. Wow. Amazing. So he told me that he was going to put his set up on Spotify, on Weedmaps Spotify, so go check it out. Anyway, I come to these conferences for people. I just love connecting with people. Those listening might notice that I'm an extrovert. I work remotely. A lot of us work remotely these days. this is an opportunity to see some of my coworkers. There's seven of us here. It's an opportunity to see people I only see at conferences, of which there are a lot. It's a chance to connect with people I've only met on Mastodon, or LinkedIn, or Stack Overflow. It's a chance to meet wonderful podcasters who are putting out great content, keeping our community alive. That's, that's the key for me. And the talks are wonderful, but honestly, they're just a side effect for me. They just come as a result of being here. [00:40:16] Jeremy: Yeah, it's kind of a unique opportunity, you know, to have so many of your, your colleagues and to just all be in the same place. And you know that anybody you talk to here, like if you talk about Ruby or software, they're not going to look at you and go like, I don't know what you're talking about. Like everybody here has at least that in common. So it's, yeah, it's a really cool experience to, to be able to chat with anybody. And it's like, You're all on the same page, [00:40:42] Sara: Mm hmm. We're all in this boat together. [00:40:45] Jeremy: Yup, that we got to keep, got to keep afloat according to matz [00:40:49] Sara: Gotta keep it afloat, yeah. [00:40:51] Jeremy: Though I was like, I was pretty impressed by like during his, his keynote and he had asked, you know, how many of you here, it's your first RubyConf and it felt like it was over half the room. [00:41:04] Sara: Yeah, I got the same sense. I was very glad to see that, very impressed. My first RubyConf was and it was the same sort of showing of [00:41:14] Jeremy: Nice, yeah. Yeah, actually, that was my first one, too. [00:41:17] Sara: Nice! [00:41:19] Jeremy: Uh, that was Nashville, Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's, yeah, it's really interesting to see because, the meme online is probably like, Ah, Ruby is dead, or Rails is dead. But like you come to these conferences and yeah, there's, there's so many new people. There's like new people that are learning it and experiencing it and, you know, enjoying it the same way we are. So I, I really hope that the, the community can really, yeah, keep this going. [00:41:49] Sara: Continue, continue to grow and share. I love that we had first timer buttons, buttons where people could self identify as this is my first RubyConf and, and then that opens a conversation immediately. It's like, how are you liking it? What was your favorite talk? [00:42:08] Jeremy: Yeah, that's awesome. okay, I think that's probably a good place to start wrapping it. But is there anything else you wanted to mention or thought we should have talked about? [00:42:18] Sara: Can I do a plug for thoughtbot? [00:42:20] Jeremy: yeah, go for it. [00:42:21] Sara: Alright. For those of you out there that might not know what ThoughtBot does, we are a full software lifecycle or company lifecycle consultancy, so we do everything from market fit and rapid prototyping to MVPs to helping with developed companies, developed teams, maybe do a little bit of a Boost when you have a deadline or doing some tech debt. Pay down. We also have a DevOps team, so if you have an idea or a company or a team, you want a little bit of support, we have been around for 20 years. We are here for you. Reach out to us at thoughtbot.com. [00:43:02] Jeremy: I guess the thing about Thoughtbot is that, within the Ruby community specifically, they've been so involved with sponsorships and, and podcasts. And so, uh, when you hear about consultancies, a lot of times it's kind of like, well, I don't know, are they like any good? Do they know what they're doing? But I, I feel like, ThoughtBot has had enough, like enough of a public record. I feel It's like, okay, if you, if you hire them, um, you should be in good hands. [00:43:30] Sara: Yeah. If you have any questions about our abilities, read the blog. [00:43:35] Jeremy: It is a good blog. Sometimes when I'm, uh, searching for how to do something in Rails, it'll pop up, [00:43:40] Sara: Mm hmm. Me too. Every question I ask, one of the first results is our own blog. I'm like, oh yeah, that makes sense. [00:43:47] Jeremy: Probably the peak is if you've written the blog. [00:43:50] Sara: That has happened to my coworkers They're like, wait, I wrote a blog about this nine years ago. [00:43:55] Jeremy: Yeah, yeah. So maybe, maybe that'll happen to you soon. I, I know definitely people who do, um, Stack Overflow. And it's like, Oh, I like, this is a good answer. Oh, I wrote this. (laughs) yeah. Well, Sara, thank you so much for, for chatting with me today. [00:44:13] Sara: Absolutely, Jeremy. Thank you so much for having me. I was really glad to chat today.

[00:01] Sara: Ready to create rock solid relationships with the people that matter most to you. [00:05] Sara: You are in the right place. [00:07] Sara: My name is Sarah Payne, and I'm a master. Certified relationships coach. And each week I teach you how to create the connection and love that you desire, because you know that the quality of your life is directly related to the quality of your relationships. I'm so glad you're here. Safe episode for you, where I get to interview Marie Poulter, who is a life coach and who specializes in helping people overcome their habit of viewing ***********. And I think this episode will be really insightful for you if either you want to stop looking at *********** or you have someone in your life who wants to stop looking at ***********. Marie's take on *********** is possibly different than any other way that you've thought about it before, and I think that it's so enlightening and refreshing. So tune in to listen to how to overcome your own habit of viewing *********** or to help a loved one who also wants to overcome their *********** habit. And if you want to know more about Marie, you can find out information on her website. She has some resources there and information about how to work with her, and the website is pornographyfreedom.com. All right, I look forward to hearing about how you like this episode. [02:12] Sara: Hey, Marie, welcome to the podcast. [02:15] Marie: Thank you, Sarah. Glad to be here. [02:17] Sara: I'm so glad you're here. This has been a long time in the making. Yeah, we've been talking about this for a while. [02:23] Marie: Yes, it tell. [02:25] Sara: Will you introduce yourself to my audience? [02:28] Marie: Okay, so my name is Marie Poulter, and I am a certified life coach, but I now focus on helping people who want to stop looking at *********** stop looking at ***********. And I think that's really a big key just to start out with. It's people who want to stop. I get a lot of people who are like, will you tell my husband how bad this is? Will you tell my kids how bad this is? That's not really where we're going with our coaching business. We're not trying to do that. There are some really good organizations who are making that stuff happen, but our focus is on those who want to stop, who really have a moral compass for whatever reason. It's just morally, it's not what they want to be doing. Often they're like a high functioning, successful person who has goals and dreams and can really do good at a lot of areas in their life. And for whatever reason, they just can't quite become free from ***********. So that's who we really focus on. And I make it sound like it's men, but we do have women that we work with, and it is definitely both genders, and both genders struggle with this. Men typically are introduced to it at a younger age, and research shows that they are often introduced as early as, like, nine years old. And so my heart goes out to all the little nine year olds right now in 2023, who are devastated that there is a part of them that just hates this when they see it. And then it kind of makes me emotional. Sorry. They're devastated about it, and then they kind of like it, and they don't understand why. And so they start to develop this identity that maybe something is wrong with them. And then we're going to fast forward 20 years, and they've created a life they love. They still have this one little dirty secret, I guess, that they kind of call it, and that's the people we really, really want to help because there's so much misinformation. We were just raised in a totally crazy place about the facts around *********** view. And so I'm so excited to help people with that. [04:38] Sara: I have so many questions already. I'm writing them down because I don't want to interrupt you because you're giving so many nuggets away. But what inspired you to want to work with people who want to stop looking at ***********? [04:50] Marie: So I guess if I back up a little bit and explain where I even found life coaching from. I'm an educator. I have a teaching certification or teaching degree, and I always knew that I love teaching, but I always felt like there was going to be something more. And I would tell my husband, someday I'm going to go back and become a therapist, a counselor. I want to help people more than just teaching them. And so I continued on in my life, raised five kids, or was in the middle of raising five kids, but I noticed that a lot of things happening in my life were just kind of out of my control. I felt a lot of times like, this is just happening to me, and I don't know what to do about it. One such instance was my little son that was six, and he was really struggling with anxiety, and I was so frustrated with him. He was, of all things, anxious that I wasn't going to pick him up from school on time. I'm the mom that gets in line second or third every day. I kind of like getting there, and I'll read for a few minutes, just have some downtime, and so I would get in line and be there. There was one day of all the days of all of my kids that I can't remember, I was a few minutes late, and he had grabbed on to this little anxiety from this one day, and it was all he could see. So I came across something on Instagram that was like, you want to help your kids with anxiety, and it was free. And something happens when something's free, we tend to not do it right away. Right? [06:09] Sara: It's free. [06:10] Marie: Threw it in my inbox for a few months, and then when it kept continuing. I ended up opening it up, and I did what the suggestion was, and it was from a life coach. And Sarah, I'm not kidding. Within one day, the anxiety was just gone. And we haven't ever dealt with it again. This little guy, his name is Chase, and he's now 15, and he is so cute. With anxiety or negative feelings in general. As soon as he sees them coming, he's been trained to say, oh, there it is. And he goes through the process that we process and release emotion, and it's so cool to watch him. So when I saw that, when I saw that in him, it just turned something on in my brain, and I was like, wait a minute. Are you telling me that we have power to change our lives the way that we think, the way that the six year old thinks, that he can actually change something so drastically and affect his result? It just blew my mind. And so I started following coaching and then eventually got coached and then became a coach. And one of the biggest things that I was so excited about was this issue that I had seen in so many family members and loved ones around me. It was kind of quiet. If you look back 30 years ago, 20 years ago, even ten years ago, people with *********** issues, when we would hear about them, we would just be, like, shocked and devastated and so scared. I remember so vividly talking to a church leader about a loved one, and I was so scared for this loved one. And the church leader, in all of his, well, meaningful guidance and love, just said, you know, it's a tough one. They never overcome this. It's pretty hopeless. And I remember my stomach just sank. But there has to be something else. You can't just tell me that they're just sunk. And so when I learned about coaching, it started clicking. What if all these people aren't sunk? What if there actually is an answer for them? And maybe some of the information that we've got is wrong and maybe we can retrain our brains and we can think in a different way that creates success with this. So I had four little boys at the time and one little girl when I started coaching. And I started focusing so much on how do I help them at this tender age when I know they're going to see ***********. 91% of kids by the time they're 16 have used ***********. So we're silly as parents to think not our kids, right? [08:33] Sara: Gone are the days when we can protect them from it. [08:36] Marie: You can have every filter, you can have all the restrictions, you can have a Gab phone, which there's some great things with that, but they are going to see ***********. Research shows that it's factual. So when I started realizing that I could give my kids tools and that I could help them avoid this 2030 years down the road. Then it really started me getting excited. And then as things happen, I started coaching people individually. And I'd be coaching these men and women and they would so shamefully tell me what I've really been struggling with is ***********. I said I was coming to you for marriage coaching or just general coaching in general. And really it would come down to *********** a lot of times. And so as I coached them, it was so humbling to see that so many of the things that they thought were not even real and we could change their thinking and retrain their brain to do something completely different than they'd ever done before. So it's a multileveled process with *********** because there's a lot of emotions that they've been escaping emotion for years. But then one of the things that's really, really big is the lack of understanding of human sexuality. And this is where it got really exciting for me, because I was working with people for a couple of years with ***********, just one on one, and we were seeing great success. And then it hit me. They kept asking me questions that I really wasn't equipped with. I'm over sexualized. I just have a really high sex drive, and I have some pretty perverse ways of thinking about things. And I realized that I was a little bit out of my league. And so my husband is a physician and he's a pain management doctor and anesthesiologist. And I would ask him after I'd worked with a client, I would say, hey, tell me about this. Like with human sexuality, how does this work? How does the body work? Like that? And so he would start giving me information, and I'm like, Wait a minute. They're not hypersexualized. They're not perverted. They were created as humans. We're all created to be sexual beings. And so I brought my husband on board, and he is such a foundational part of the education for my clients because for the first time, they have so much relief. They're like, oh, I'm not disgusting. [10:55] Sara: There's nothing wrong with me. [10:56] Marie: Yeah, there's nothing wrong with me. And even teenage girls and young elementary age kids, they're not getting the information. Like, you were created to be a sexual being. And we're kind of getting that in 2023. We're getting to that place a little bit where we can recognize that that's who we are, that we're created sexually. But I feel like finally, for the first time in my life, I'm taking back sexuality from the yucky, dirty *********** industry and putting it where it belongs, that humans are created as sexual beings and there is healthy sexuality there. [11:37] Sara: Good. [11:38] Marie: So the difference, I think, is that *********** is degrading. Sexuality is not degrading. We have so many people who go into shame with *********** that's the number one thing is shame. [11:48] Sara: I was going to say is that the number one challenge that your clients face is the shame. [11:52] Marie: The number one challenge is just the shame. They are so embarrassed. And a lot of them like, if my wife knew, if my mom we hear this a lot. If my mom knew, bless their hearts. I want to say, though, too, Sarah, that most of the people who want to stop looking at *********** are incredible husbands, incredible workers, incredible students. Whatever phase of life they're in, they're incredible. They're honestly some of the strongest men that I've ever known. And so to be able to work with them and help them see this from a totally different standpoint has been so gratifying. [12:28] Sara: So how do you see this, particularly the shame around ***********? How do you see this affecting the relationships that matter most to your clients? [12:39] Marie: Wow. So research shows there was this big research study a few years ago that showed that men this was just for men. They would rather admit to having an affair if they were married, cheating on either their girlfriend or their wife right. Than they would admit to *********** viewing. [12:57] Sara: Why do you think that is? [12:59] Marie: That's mind blowing to me, right? There's so much pain we have created in our society an awful you are awful. You are disgusting. You are dirty. And don't get me wrong when I say this. I am not talking at all about abuse of any kind. We don't work with if they have a fascination with children or using someone in any way, we get them to the right sources. That's definitely not what we're doing. We are working with healthy brains who want to stop looking, but all of them will come to us and say, I'm addicted, and this is so shameful. [13:36] Sara: Okay, so that label addicted. Tell us more about that because that seems like it could be very detrimental. [13:43] Marie: It's so detrimental because addicted, that is like back to that church leader, right? Like, you have got a label on you. You may as well just put it on your forehead. It's never coming off. [13:54] Sara: And it takes away agency. Like it takes away their right to choose. [13:57] Marie: You have no power. I have multiple stories from clients saying, well, I went to a counselor, I went to a church leader, I went to a parent. And they said, studies have shown that this is harder to quit than heroin. I don't know where those studies were. They're not true. [14:14] Sara: Yeah. [14:15] Marie: Not even real. But how damaging when you hear people say, that is the plague, you have the plague. Right. That's so hard. So there is just so much shame around it. So much shame, so much fear. And then you will have different I don't know what who do I want to say that you hear different leaders of different whether they're thought groups or religious groups or whatever, saying that it's going to lead you to you're going to murder somebody or abuse somebody or you're going to ruin your whole life. That's really scary way to live. [14:53] Sara: And then we wonder why they're ashamed and don't want to tell anybody and they can't tell. [14:57] Marie: Yeah, there's a story of a why. [14:59] Sara: They'D rather admit that they're having an affair than even if they weren't, they'd. [15:02] Marie: Rather just be like, oh, it's an affair, rather than just an affair with my computer. And I get that it's a very sensitive issue. And it's really hard for a spouse or a girlfriend because there is that physical component where they feel like they're being cheated on. And so there's some education for the spouse or whoever's in the relationship with this person because they really have to if they want to be a part of this habit change, then they have some work to do on their own brains. [15:29] Sara: Can we talk about that for a second? Because I'm thinking of my listeners and of course I know that there's some that are like, I need Marie's help, and so we're going to talk about how they can get more help from you. But I'm also thinking of the spouse or the mother or the parent who's thinking like, so and so in my life that I care so much about, really needs this. They need to see that this is a problem. [15:55] Marie: Yeah. And to that, again, it has to be from the person. And we all know if you're eating chocolate cake every day and somebody else tells you you need to stop eating chocolate cake, you're not going to stop eating chocolate cake until you decide that you want to stop eating chocolate cake. But I think that sometimes we'll say the spouse right. We'll say that it's a female espouse. And your husband needs to see you're thinking. He needs to see how tough this is. If you can approach him with, I'm not going anywhere. I'm here for you. I'm going to learn as much about what's going on for you as you are. I'm willing to go all in and I'm not leaving. So often they're like, if I don't get this figured out, she said she's leaving. The shame, fear, and then my whole life is ruined. [16:43] Sara: Some tough, tough things like an ultimatum. [16:46] Marie: Too yes. [16:48] Sara: Which we want to give space for the partner who feels betrayed. [16:52] Marie: Too absolutely. There's big betrayal that happens there. But there are also things that we can do with our brain retraining us right. To look at what is a fact here. Am I really being betrayed? And then set your boundaries. Of course. Set your boundaries and figure things out together. But this is probably a little bit silly that I use this example, but I ask spouses sometimes. So let's say that you have this online shopping habit you got going on, and sometimes the husband will be like, hey, we have to stop doing this. We don't have the money for this isn't healthy. Very seldom do you hear a husband it's like, I'm leaving you if you don't quit shopping at night. [17:33] Sara: Right. [17:34] Marie: But this is tricky because they're like, no, but this is another woman. So we invite spouses, learn as much as you can. And there are coaches who coach with that. In fact, that will be part of our program, where we will have a coach that specifically works with betrayal and. [17:49] Sara: That there is a way. I just want to make sure that that spouse knows that there is a place and a space where you can be in where you actually don't make their *********** use mean anything about you. [18:02] Marie: Absolutely. It isn't about you. And that's one of the things to recognize, too. I would say that 99.9% of the clients that we work with discovered *********** and started struggling with it years and years before they met. You were going to be with yeah. And so then we put it back on the moms, and then the mom's feel terrible. Right. [18:23] Sara: I was going to say, what about the mom who's hearing this? What would you say to her? [18:27] Marie: Yeah, so the mom, if you're my age and you have four, three adult sons, right, and one that's 15, then the work is for you too. To figure out, how do I train my brain to have a relationship with this son that maybe is struggling with this? And rather than beat yourself up and be miserable about it, to train yourself to see things the way they really are, to see the facts, to see this. This didn't have anything to do with you either. [18:55] Sara: This is just one so good. I think that it is work so worth doing as a mother to separate yourself from your children's choices. For all the moms out there, that is work worth doing. And I think about the mom who maybe has little kids that are like five, six, seven years old, who's just like, how can I just get this to never be a problem in my kids lives? Yes, that might be the wrong question to ask. Tell me what you think about that. [19:27] Marie: And I guess I'd say yes, it's the wrong question, but also the right question in some ways. And actually, you should probably get there's. Another coach, actually, my sister, and she is actually coaching moms on what to do, moms and dads, parents, how to create resistant, *********** resistant children. And if I could have had that as a child, that would have been amazing in so many aspects, not just ***********. Right. We've been raised by parents who are like, don't feel your feelings, don't think about things too much. And now we're shifting to where we're learning more about that. And so there are ways that parents today can say, oh, if I can teach my kids how not to escape emotion, how to understand what's going on in their brain, and to process emotion and release emotion, that's a big step in the right direction towards becoming resistant to *********** in the future. Because I don't know that I explained this earlier, but it's really important to recognize that *********** viewing is not about sex. It's always about an escape. Escape from your feelings, escape from whatever. Yes. Whether that was boredom. Some people, even when they get really. [20:43] Sara: Excited, it can be a quote unquote positive emotion, right? [20:47] Marie: Yes, from emotion. [20:48] Sara: We do it with food too. [20:50] Marie: Totally. We do it with food. And I invite the people in relationships with my clients who are viewing **** to just have some mercy and some grace towards the person who is struggling and wants to stop. How would you feel if we saw everything that you did, every piece of cake you ate, everything that you shopped when you didn't need it, every way that you escaped from emotion, if you were in the spotlight for it and everybody's watching, like, you're going to be in big trouble if you don't stop this. So what that does usually is help the client get in a safe space. If they can get in a safe space in their own head and in their own future, knowing that I'm safe here, I can change. Then we can totally work together to create new habits and to let go of the old habits. So right now, I think it's an important thing to point out we have multiple, multiple people just in my little realm of influence that have not had the desire for ****. So it's not just, we're going to help you how to stay away from ****. They lose the desire to look at ***********. [21:56] Sara: So this isn't about you teaching them to resist it forever? [22:00] Marie: No. In fact, I love this well, I hate this story, but I love this little story. I met a man just randomly one afternoon and he was asking me we had some downtime, I was purchasing something from the place he worked. And so we had some downtime, just sitting there, small talk. And I ended up telling him that I work with people who struggle with quitting ***********. And he just slammed his hand down onto the desk and said, where were you three years ago? And I kind of laughed and he said, no, 200 pounds ago, where were you? And he said, I went to get help for years with ***********. My wife had said, I'm leaving if you don't get help. He had struggled with *********** for over 30 years and he said, I haven't looked at it in several years, but I have gained over 200 pounds. [22:43] Sara: Wow. [22:45] Marie: And so yay for him for stopping ***********. But there's a better way. There's a way that we aren't just replacing what those emotions, right? The emotions that we feel, the negative emotions, we're not just going to a different outlet. And so it's exciting. There's so much excitement, really, when you look at it, that you can retrain your brain, you can think a different way. And along the way, you can create a healthy sexual life, the one that you want to have. There's no shame in that. And so some marriages right now that I'm seeing, they're flourishing with some of my clients more than they ever had before. Because they've got right information. [23:24] Sara: Yes. They release the shame. They learned how to process their feelings instead of looking at **** or replacing it with something else. And then it just frees up so much space in your brain to connect with the people that you love. [23:36] Marie: Yes, it really does. Another thing that is really exciting that when you let go of **** and viewing that and that burden, you actually can start creating the life that you want. So we see a lot of people taking up weightlifting or biking or hiking, and it's not because they're replacing it. They're like, I have a new life. I have a new lease on life. There is so much brain space taken up with shame where these poor individuals have spent so much time in just this. I'm living a double life. I'm living a double life. [24:08] Sara: Yeah. [24:09] Marie: That is not addiction. Addiction is you are all day, every day. You cannot have a job, you cannot have relationships, you can't do anything. That's addiction. These are habits that we're dealing with. [24:21] Sara: No, I love that I once heard that distinction. If you can go without whatever it is you are telling yourself you're addicted to, if you can not view **** while you're at work, then you're not addicted. Or if you can think of people say that they're addicted to food. [24:36] Marie: Right. [24:36] Sara: Well, can you go like 4 hours without eating? Then you're not addicted. [24:40] Marie: Yeah. [24:42] Sara: So good. So do you have any more advice for someone who wants to stop looking at ****? Where would you have them start? Aside from, of course, hiring you, which you'll tell us how they can get in contact with you. But what's one first step that they can take? [25:01] Marie: 1St 20 steps. I'm kidding. Okay, so first I would say is to start just noticing when you view ****, what happened just before. [25:09] Sara: Okay. [25:10] Marie: And you will start to notice you're escaping some emotion. There is something negative that happened that is causing you to view ****. Just that one little step really opens up your brain to be like, oh, this is a possibility that I'm just escaping. [25:25] Sara: And it might be something like some kind of shame attack. But it also might just be like, I'm bored. Right? [25:30] Marie: Totally. Yeah. It can be I'm bored, I'm frustrated. Something happened at work, something happened at home. Or just also like, it's this month. There's nothing much going on this month. Or I just got done. We find a lot of times that somebody gets home from vacation, you think that they're just on top of the world. Right. It was just an amazing experience. But then just that what I had to look forward to. Yeah. So just notice what happened before. I call it backwards. Dot to dot. We all remember when we were little kids, right? And we just dot to dot. If you dot to dot backwards, you will find that there's some emotion tied to this, and that's exciting. If there's emotion tied to it, we can work with emotion. You can work to do something different. Right. But if you're an addict, you really can't. But when you have a habit, you can change that. [26:16] Sara: Oh, so good. So just with curiosity, pay attention to what was going on right before they started looking at ****. That's the first step. [26:26] Marie: Okay. [26:26] Sara: And how can they get a hold of you? They want to learn more. [26:29] Marie: So I have just been coaching. We've just been doing one on one coaching, and we decided that I've only have so much time in my life and I can say the same thing over and over again to create that foundation right. The facts that they need about healthy sexuality and what's going on in their brain. So we just created a course that will give access to more people, and I don't have to keep saying the same thing over and over again. So you can find information about that. It's pornographyfreedom.com. And the course is called Freedom from ***********. And I'm really confident that that is what the future holds for upcoming generations to come. We all have cell phones now, right? It's everywhere around us. And we can either wring our hands and be like, oh, we are just in trouble. It's just everywhere. I think the more education that we get, the more understanding that we get of our emotions and our brains and healthy sexuality. In a couple of generations from now, they're going to be like, oh, remember that *********** thing? We got this. [27:29] Sara: I love that. I love that. [27:31] Marie: It's really hopeful. [27:33] Sara: Yes. So hopeful and so just inspiring that this is not something that has to be a problem for you forever or for your loved ones forever. There really are solutions, and it's so much easier than what they're doing now, which is living in shame. What's the word? It's like helplessness, right? And hopelessness. [27:58] Marie: Just hopeless and helpless and dark and just scared. There's just a lot of fear out there. [28:02] Sara: Yeah. So pornographyfreedom.com is where they can yes. [28:06] Marie: And I have to say that I just overcame a lot of fear, and I'm starting an Instagram page. For some reason, this is just so something I never wanted to do. So Mariepolter coaching. [28:18] Sara: They can follow you there as well. Hey, go check Marie out. Thank you for being here, for educating my listeners so much on thank you. [28:28] Marie: So much for letting be. [28:31] Sara: Yes. I can tell it's like oozing from you. And it doesn't have to be something that is a burden for the rest of their life.

Sara Well spent 12 years as a critical care trauma nurse on the acute side. She watched again and again as her facility's money was put into much less pressing issues than staffing and saw how it impacted not just care and quality outcomes but overall revenue.She saw how archaic many of the systems in place for staffing were, and with her tech background realized that this comprehensive issue was a scalable solution with a huge addressable market. Nurses are often perceived as a cost rather than a revenue driver. They have been historically under-appreciated despite how much their presence and work directly impacts the length of stay which is not always covered by insurance.The flaws already present in the healthcare conveyor belt were exacerbated by the arrival of the pandemic. An estimated 500,000 nurses were lost to COVID fatigue, switching to other less taxing professions. At the same time many new travel nursing and outsource labor companies began to pop up, luring staff away from their traditional in-house positions with the promise of higher pay. These companies then sold the nurses back to the same types of facilities they came from at a much higher cost. Though facilities were able to get staff quickly and easily, it was not cheap and cost them the integrity of their in-house teams.Dropstat seeks to re-empower healthcare organizations, working with them to update and automate safe staffing processes, and give total transparent insight into their labor costs.They see the most important relationship as the triad between patient, provider, and the organization that brings them together.Dropstat uses machine learning and AI to predict a facility's staffing needs 60 days in advance.  are able trace increased costs of standard labor and premium labor costs whether its agency or overtime bonuses. With this data they create patterns and recommendations and feed them back to the client.When asked about the problem of staff leaving for a $2-3 raise Sara had some powerful insight to share. She states that just like those serving in the military, healthcare workers see death and loss on a sometimes daily basis. But while the military has instigated an entire culture of comradery and airtight family dynamics within groups, the same is often not present in healthcare.  Sara concludes that if a facility is able to culture hack and ensure with authenticity that nurses feel loved, valued, connected, appreciated, that they are the key to aiding the aging population, they won't have to worry about losing staff because of pay. FOLLOW SARA AND DROPSTATWebsiteLinkedIn RELATED EPISODESEp. 94: Innovative Solutions to the Staffing Shortage in HealthcareEp. 71: Combating Staff Turnover & Burnout In Nursing HomesEp. 42: Healthcare Workers Need Self-Care During Covid-19

To read Sandra Enimil's Blog from Harvard's celebration of Fair Use Week that is referenced in this podcast episode, go here: https://blogs.harvard.edu/copyrightosc/2023/02/22/fair-use-week-2023-10th-anniversary-day-three-with-guest-expert-sandra-aya-enimil/ Sara: So, welcome. This is a live version of the copyright chat with Sandra Enimil from Yale University Library. We are here, and celebrating Fair Use Week. Welcome. Sandra: Da, da! That's the trumpet sounding. Sara: Very exciting. It's the tenth anniversary of Fair Use Week. I'm super excited, and I'm even more jazzed because we have a pending Supreme Court case. Sandra: Very exciting! Sara: Tell us about it. Tell us what you think about it. What do you think about it? Sandra: Alright! So the case is Warhol v. Goldsmith, and it is a very exciting case, I mean. There's the thing of there being, two artists, you know, who are being, you know, not being pit, but they are pit against each other, and a third artist, you know, is the subject of the photograph of which you know one of them, you know made it.  I think it's a really very beautiful photo of Prince. And then it became an Andy Warhol—Andy Warhol treated series of full of photographs and paintings, and whatever. The original photographer, Lynn Goldsmith, then, you know, finds out that you know this image has been “Warholized” basically. And you know, contacts of Warhol Foundation to say, this is my image using my image. What's going on? Nobody's asked for permission. Nobody has a license, and the Warhol Foundation says it's fair use. Actually, we're gonna go to court and get the court to say that it's fair use. We're just, you know, you know. You go away. Goldsmith does not go away, and she, you know it, you know, pursues it. And now we're at the Supreme Court waiting to see, like what the court is gonna say about is this fair use? You know we heard, I think, at in the hearing, the oral arguments we heard, you know, transformative being tossed around. We heard questions about why this particular image? Why didn't Warhol, you know, take his own image. Interestingly, you know, we don't hear anything about Vanity Fair, who they license the image, and then they just gave it to Warhol and said, Hey, do your thing with this and he didn't like not even mention anymore. That is like, so how that works. Okay? They license it right? Sara: That's an interesting point, because they licensed it for the 1985 version. Sandra: Right, right. Sara: They knew they didn't have another license, but you know we know why, right? It's the deep pockets, and they're going for the deep pockets and Warhol made all the money off of it right? Sandra: Like, who is right, who has a deep pocket? Right? Yeah, Warhol made all the money. Sara: Not Vanity Fair. Sandra: Warhol made all the money. Yeah, yeah. So yeah. Sandra: So you know I and I still like it not even sure how I feel about the whole thing. I am, you know, really kind of like is, this is, is, is it not? Is it fair? Is it, you know, like thinking a lot about it? And I, it's actually it's like this, I'm going into a tangent. So apologies. But Kyle Courtney host, the Harvard's that has a fair use blog for on Harvard's system, and you know, every year he asks folks to write something about fair use and I was just like kind of struggling with what I wanted to write about and decided, okay, I'm gonna write about this case. But kind of not really. So writing about something that's real tangential. Again, and it's about the use of likeness. So it's about it's basically about Prince. It's about subjects and photos, and they're people's ability to say, yes. So certain things happening with images that you know contain their likeness and then I'm gonna find a way to loop that back around the fair use at some point tonight, while I'm you know, finishing it up and crying. You know as you do as a forget procrastinator. But I just you know I've just been thinking a little about that about the use of his likeness, and how this is the set. It's the center of the dispute, but he's not really even part of it. Much like Vanity Fair. Like he's not even part of this, I mean the considerations around him is not really a part of it. Sara: Yeah. The part where I saw him come into it the most frankly was during the oral argument, where there were weird ways, one where people were joking about whether they, the Supreme Court justices, listened to Prince. Like what? And then also because one of the arguments about the transformative nature of the work was that the original photograph was supposed to be vulnerable right, and that the new photo by Warhol was meant to like be like pop culture and like commercialism and all this. So that was like the transformativeness arguably. Sandra: Right and that's what the you know. So his side is trying to try to make that argument of that. They needed this photo. They need because it's an early photo of him. And they needed to use that, because, of course, the common is like, why can't you use to use anything else or take up another photo of him? Or you know as Warhol has done in the past. He's taken his own photos, and then, you know, done his. The extra process that he does to things, or paid for licenses, which he's also done before. And so they're like, well, why this photo? Because you could have done anything else. And so that, yeah, that was their response was that it had to be this one because of the reasoning of the original, and how it looked and presented. Sara: But I, okay, I I know you're presenting it, as this is what they're arguing. Sandra: That's what they're arguing. Sara: But like the extent that they made the comparison, I really bought this comparison, which was they made the comparison to this Campbell soup cans right and saying like, Oh, well, why do you do it? Of Campbell's soup. He could have done it for Cheerios. He could have done it. It's like, yeah. But he wanted to do that brand, because that was the brand that was like comfort comforting like, you see, it. And you're like your kids sick, and you gotta buy them like the Campbell's soup right? Sandra: Yeah. Sara:  And like that was the that was what he was going for, and same thing like he could have gone for another image could have gone for another artist. Sandra: Yeah. Yes. Sara: But he didn't want to. This is what he was doing. And like also, are we seriously going to start telling artists like Warhol? Which brand they should critique like a you know what I mean like it's I don't know like I'm not. I don't wanna be in that business. Sandra: I don't know. So the thing that's like awful, you know, I cause I like, I said. I have been all over the place with this, too, and like listening to a bunch of different commentary about it. And I'm just like, you know, Warhol and Goldsmith. They're both white, but one is a woman, and one is a man, and I like thinking about like the dynamics of that. You know that he feels like he could just take this thing from her there, you know I'm you know. That's in there and then also, like, you know, Prince, like I said, he's just he's just there, kinda you know, like he's not, you know, not even getting like the prints like it's Prince kind of thing. It's just he's just there, you know, as the black artist, you know. So I just I don't know. I have like so many things that are circling around in my brain, rattling around. Sara:  I like that. Our, I mean, I hadn't thought of that point of like the gendered point, and also the fact that, like, you know, she really didn't get it paid a lot right. Sandra: No Nope. She didn't get paid. She didn't get paid a lot, and then it's like when she goes to say, Hey, what's happening here? There isn't like, Okay, maybe. Or maybe there was I don't know we don't know about. I don't know that, you know. They didn't offer her something. Maybe they did. But you know what we know from like the filings that they came and said, we want the court to tell us that what we did was okay. And I'm just like I don't know. I'm kind of struggling with that, you know. Sara: But that's where. Okay, yes, but that's how every good, fair use case happens, isn't it? I mean, like. Sandra: You know, I know I'm on pins and needles and like know how it, how it, how it's gonna end up right? You know. Sara: Well, I also wonder. And I really, really do wonder this, how it could or would impact libraries at all. And I said this about the second circuit opinion, where they said, like, you can't change art into art. That's not transformative and my response to that is well, you know, libraries aren't really in the business of making art so. But if they start making new transformative decisions, right decisions about the purpose and character that could impact us a lot. So it depends on what they have to say. Right? I'm back to. It depends. Sandra: I mean, I think, like the how we sometimes get stuck with transformation is like, we think it has to be like a whole new thing. And I think for a lot of the work that we do. You know. Obviously, it's not everything, but for a lot of it. It's not transformative. It's like kind of working in the same direction as the original thing. But you know we have a smaller audience, or we're only using this. A portion of it, you know there are a number of other things that really help us if we don't have that transformative piece of it from the first factor. But yeah, I also don't know how it will impact us. We're not alone in that.  I think in a lot of the amicus briefs that kinda went around, you know, at least from the library perspective. It was like, we're just concerned. We don't. We're not saying which way to go, but you know we're watching. Sara: Yeah, it's kinda like, do no harm right like, do no harm.  Supreme Court like you can decide what you need to just leave us out of this. Sandra: Yeah, please please don't ruin the Fair Use part and make it very against, but worthless to libraries.  Do I think, you know, there's definitely especially with, like, you know, this particular Supreme Court, like, what are they gonna do you know? And the thing about oral arguments is like it doesn't give you anything like you just are listening. And it's interesting and blah blah blah, but they never. They're not really showing their hand. Sara: Sometimes they do, but I felt like in this case it was hard to tell. It was very hard to tell. Sandra: Sometimes. Yeah, yeah. It was hard to tell. It was hard to. Yeah. It was hard to tell from this from these arguments, though very interesting, though. Sara: Yeah, it'll be. It'll be super interesting, I mean, no matter what happens, I'll be interested to read the case and to try to understand it, and then to like, look at the tea leaves and try to see what impact it might have it's it will inevitably have some impact. Because I mean, look at the Campbell. The last case that we had with the Roy Orbison on fair use so long ago, I mean, that has had a massive impact. Sandra: Yeah. Sara: So I do agree with the first, do no harm. Yeah, but you know, yeah, I mean, cause you know, Campbell give gives us, you know, the articulation of transformation. Sandra: And but you know, I think it's interesting that we go to the Supreme Court. It gives us transformation. But in hip, hop, you know there was where it should have been like a whole bunch of folks like, okay, so we can sample and like the things. And that actually didn't happen. How they go interesting. Yeah, cause you would have thought that people, you know, we transformative. This, you know, came out and helped a lot of other at industries along with the music, industry and hip hop in particular, where it shows have been the case where. Now rely on and say and talk about. I'm making a comment about this, so I can go ahead and sample this. It didn't turn out that way and went a different tact, which I think is really fascinating. Sara: Yeah. I wonder why that is. Maybe that's a difference in the community. Sandra: Oh, yeah, for sure. And you know, maybe one day when I can invent more time, I'll write something about that. I mean, a lot of people like thought about it and mentioned it, but I really wanna know, like, why, why not? Sara: I think you should do that sooner rather than later, for a special issue that's coming up, that I might know something about. I see what you're saying, and like I've had conversations with. So a friend of mine is married to a jazz artist, and like that's another area where, like jazz artists like, they steal from each other all the time, and nobody like gets mad about it, because it's just part of the culture. And that's the culture of it, right? Sandra: That's the culture of it. And yeah, I definitely think there is. There's something interesting about it. I think there's something interesting in, you know. Now we have, you know, mash-up artists. And yeah, some of them definitely license. And you know they are. You know they are licensing things, but not all of them. And they're not getting in trouble. Sara: Well, this has been so fun. And actually, I love the way this conversation went, because it was like just it just turned many ways as one does, and I I hope you all enjoyed listening to this podcast. Sandra, thank you so much for joining me for fair use. Week! It was such a blast, and may all your fair use adventures be risk-free. Sandra: Amen! Thank you. Sara: I really appreciate talking with you. Thank you. Sandra: Bye, everyone.

Joël is joined by a very special guest, Sara Jackson, a fellow Software Developer at thoughtbot. A few episodes ago, Stephanie and Joël talked about "The Fundamentals" (https://www.bikeshed.fm/371) and how many of the fundamentals of web development line up with a Computer Science degree. Joël made a comment during that episode that his pick for the most underrated CS class that he thinks would benefit most devs is a class called "Discrete Math." Sara weighs in! This episode is brought to you by Airbrake (https://airbrake.io/?utm_campaign=Q3_2022%3A%20Bike%20Shed%20Podcast%20Ad&utm_source=Bike%20Shed&utm_medium=website). Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack. Earlier Bike Shed Episode with Sara (https://www.bikeshed.fm/354) The Linux man-pages project (https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/) Gravity Falls (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1865718/) Elm types as sets (https://guide.elm-lang.org/appendix/types_as_sets.html) Folgers ad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7LXSQ85jpw) Brilliant.org's discrete math course (https://brilliant.org/wiki/discrete-mathematics/) mayuko (https://www.youtube.com/@hellomayuko) Transcript: AD: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. And today, I'm joined by a special guest, Sara Jackson, who is a fellow developer here at thoughtbot. SARA: Hello. JOËL: And together, we're here to share a little bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Sara, what's new in your world? SARA: Actually, I recently picked up crocheting. JOËL: That's exciting. What is the first project that you've started working on? SARA: I don't know if you happen to be a fan of animation or cartoons, but I love "Gravity Falls." And there's a character, Mabel, who wears many sweaters. I'm working on a sweater. JOËL: Inspired by this character. SARA: Yes. It is a Herculean endeavor for my first crochet project, but we're in it now. JOËL: That does sound like jumping into it and picking a pretty hard project. Is that the way you typically approach new hobbies or new things, you just kind of jump in and pick up something challenging? SARA: Yeah. I definitely think that's a good description of how I approach hobbies. How about you? JOËL: I think I like to ease into things. I'm the kind of person who, if I pick up a video game, I will play the tutorial. SARA: It's so funny you say that because I'm definitely the type of person who also reads manuals. [chuckles] JOËL: [laughs] I'm sure you've probably, at this point, read many sections of the Unix manual. Longtime listeners might recognize you from a previous episode we did on the history of operating systems. SARA: Yes, I am an avid reader of the man pages. In fact, I wish every command-line tool had man pages or at least more detailed man pages. Reading man pages, reading technical documentation, really, I feel like goes right in line with things like needlework, knitting, crocheting. You're following a very technical pattern description of what you should be doing, how many stitches. It's almost algorithmic. JOËL: Do you feel like the fact that you've read a lot of man pages and now that you're getting into reading crochet patterns, do you feel like that's helped you maybe become a better technical writer when you write documentation? SARA: Definitely. Yes. [laughs] There's a common meme going around on the internet of how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich: open jar, put knife in jar. And you see somebody putting the knife in handle first because it wasn't specific enough. When you're looking at a crochet pattern, it needs to be written very explicitly, and in the same way, technical documentation needs to be like that too. It needs to be accessible for every audience, well, most audiences. JOËL: That's a big challenge because you want to give enough detail that, like you said, you don't accidentally use the wrong end of the knife to spread your peanut butter. But at the same time, if you give all the little details, you lose the forest for the trees. And people who know how to use a knife are going to struggle to use your documentation. SARA: That is true. That's why I think it is very valuable to do something that you recommend very often, especially when writing blog posts or call for papers is, defining the audience. Who's this for? JOËL: Yeah, knowing your audience is so important when it comes to any kind of media, even if it's a talk or an article, or I guess, a crochet pattern. SARA: Precisely. JOËL: Does the crochet world have sort of the concept of patterns aimed at beginners versus patterns aimed at a more advanced audience? SARA: I would definitely say that is the case. There are more advanced stitches and techniques that you would generally not see in a more beginner pattern. And in more advanced patterns, at least speaking from a knitting perspective...I'm pretty new to crocheting, but I've been knitting for a while. In knitting patterns, simpler techniques might not be described in such detail in a more advanced pattern. JOËL: So a couple of weeks ago, Stephanie and I were discussing the fundamentals, how much of the fundamentals of web development line up with a computer science degree. I had made this comment on that episode that my pick for most underrated CS class that I think would benefit most developers is a class called discrete math. SARA: I remember this class. It was a love-hate relationship. I am a big fan. JOËL: Would you describe yourself as a math person? SARA: I don't think so. No. JOËL: Because I know I hated math for the longest time. And I don't really find that math, in general, has been that helpful for software. There's kind of the stereotype that I'll sometimes hear from people when they find out that I write code for a living. They'll say things like, "Oh, you must be so good at math." And it's like, no, calculus was really hard for me, and I struggled and did not like it. SARA: I feel like that's a big reason why folks go into programming; the computer can do the math for you. JOËL: Right? It is a computer. It is a math machine. SARA: I mean, how many folks in computer-related fields got their start on a TI-83, programming in that thing? JOËL: A lot of people. Someday it might be fun to do an episode on the sort of common origin stories that you hear from people in the software industry, a lot of people programming a calculator, a lot of people I hear coming from Neopets. SARA: Yeah, Neopets and MySpace, editing the profile pages with CSS, HTML. JOËL: But that's an episode for another time. I think, in my experience, discrete math was not like all the other math that I did. It felt so practical, like, this is math for programmers is how I felt it was even though that's not how it's sold in university. What was your experience? SARA: My concept was very much like, this is logic. This is very hard. By hard, I mean firm way of looking at the world and defining the logic behind things when you think about proofs and set theory. JOËL: So we've been throwing around the term discrete math, and many of our listeners might not be familiar with what it is. If you had to describe discrete math to someone who is not familiar with it, what would you say? SARA: Math that's discrete. [laughter] Sorry, sorry. JOËL: What does discrete mean? SARA: When I think of discrete math, I think of logic, definitions, how data relates to each other, that sort of thing, as opposed to ones and zeros. JOËL: Yeah, discrete math; it felt like it was very much like a grab-bag class. It just involved so many different branches of math, and you kind of get a little bit of an intro of like ten different topics, all of which apply and are helpful when you're writing software. So I got a little intro to a couple of different forms of logic, propositional logic, and predicate logic. I got an intro to Boolean algebra. I got an intro to set theory, an intro to combinatorics, talked about recursive functions from a mathematical perspective, an intro to graph theory. Probably like a few more. There are like ten different things. You just got a little intro to them, spent a couple of weeks on each topic. But I felt like that was enough to give me a lot of value that I still reference on a daily basis in my work. SARA: Absolutely. One of the parts of discrete math that really stuck with me are computational models like Turing machines, pushdown automaton, finite-state machines. Learning about those, analyzing them really helped me break down algorithms and break down my code and look at, okay, for this specific input that I have for each of these variables, what are we doing? JOËL: So what does that look like in your daily work? You've got a complex card, and you see that it's a difficult feature to implement. And in your mind, you say, okay, let me try to describe this as a finite-state machine, and maybe you draw a diagram or something like that. SARA: Yeah, I will, actually. I'll draw a diagram, or I'll draw like a pseudocode out on paper. I'll think about all the different kinds of inputs that I would expect or not expect, which itself is not finite, but we try. And then what is the output that I would expect? What is the outcome that I would expect from, say, a user enters one, a user enters Sara, a user enters purple? What would the outcome be? Do I have those vectors captured in my code? And that also goes into TDD. JOËL: Do you feel like knowing about Turing machines or finite-state machines has made it easier for you to PDD? That's a connection I haven't heard before. SARA: Yeah, I think so because a Turing complete computational model is deterministic. That means that every possible path that could be got into from where you're at any path exists between the two. Sometimes it might mean rejection or an error, but the path has been defined. And thinking about that when it comes to tests, I feel like has been so helpful for me of like, I can't just think about the happy path. I can't just think about it's exactly what it needs to be. It's also what if it's not there? What if it doesn't exist? What if it's 0? What if it's empty? What if it's a different data structure? JOËL: That's really fascinating to me because I feel like I encountered some of these practical applications of it much later when I was learning about types and learning about Elm and sort of that community's approach to designing data structures. And one thing that they say a lot is that you should make impossible states impossible when you design a type, and the way that they tend to approach that is thinking of types as if they were sets. And so you think of a set of...the Boolean type is a set that has two elements because there are true and false. An enum might have, you know, if it's a three-element enum, that is, three elements. But then you start having things like records which are kind of like a hash in Ruby, which might have, let's say, two elements in them. And if it has a Boolean and an enum value, now those two multiply times each other. And so now you have two times three, six possible states. And maybe the problem you're trying to model only has five, and so you've sort of inadvertently added an extra state. They tend to talk about it a little bit more through the lens of sets and the lens of combinatorics, which are other elements of discrete math that give you mental models to deal with this. And so talking about all the different possibilities, that's combinatorics. Thinking of a type as a set and talking about its cardinality, that's set theory. So those were things that I would do when I was writing Elm programs on a daily basis, but I never made the connection back to finite-state machines. SARA: I feel like those marry so well together, those concepts. You can see combinatorics and set theory of objects and of where they can go. And that goes right into graph theory. JOËL: Oooh, I love me some graphs. SARA: [laughs] JOËL: Listeners of the show will know that I am a huge fan of dependency graphs and as a tool and as a model that can be applied to a lot of things, so thinking in terms of maybe the dependencies of your program like packages. But it can also be in terms of tasks to be done and so thinking in terms of a larger feature, breaking it down into smaller features, all of which depend on each other. And depending on how that dependency graph is structured, what order do you need to complete them in order to ship them independently? SARA: I love that. And it reminds me of graphs that represent state, like, finite-state machines sort of things where you can actually infer where you're going to end up based on where you are for certain types of graphs. And I feel like you can use that in programming. You can use that in proofs where you have the, okay, you've solved for the zero case. You've solved for the one case. Now let's solve for N+1 anytime in the future. This all feels very full circle in my mind. [chuckles] JOËL: I think that's very apt. And a really powerful thing that I've noticed is having different mental models to approach the same problem or different logical or analysis techniques to interact with the same problem. And so when you look at something through the lens of a finite-state machine, or through the lens of a graph, or through the lens of a set, or through the lens of combinatorics, you might be looking at the same problem. But by having different perspectives to look at it, you gain different insight and hopefully helps you come to a better solution. SARA: Absolutely. And I love that discrete math gives us those different tools to be better programmers. It's something that I enjoy. And I enjoyed the classes as much as they were extremely difficult. And I love the idea of being able to share those tools with other people that might not have learned about them. JOËL: You were talking about seeing things from different perspectives and how they kind of line up. There are some equivalences that I found were really fun between, let's say, sets and Boolean algebra, the operations that you can do. So things like ANDing two values is similar to doing an intersection on two sets, and ORing two values is similar to doing a union. Interestingly, we have preserved that in Ruby. Array has operators where you can combine arrays using set operations, and it has the single pipe, which we typically read as OR to union two arrays. I want to say it has a single AND that you can use. It's used to intersect two arrays. SARA: I actually used that sometime within the last year, I remember. JOËL: So, if you've ever wondered why those two particular operators to do set operations instead of a union method, now you know. SARA: I love set operations. I recently made an update to thoughtbot's internal tool hub, and I used set unions there. [laughs] MID-ROLL AD: Debugging errors can be a developer's worst nightmare...but it doesn't have to be. Airbrake is an award-winning error monitoring, performance, and deployment tracking tool created by developers for developers that can actually help cut your debugging time in half. So why do developers love Airbrake? It has all of the information that web developers need to monitor their application - including error management, performance insights, and deploy tracking! Airbrake's debugging tool catches all of your project errors, intelligently groups them, and points you to the issue in the code so you can quickly fix the bug before customers are impacted. 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JOËL: If you had to sell a colleague on the value of discrete math, what would be the example that you would use? SARA: What if I told you that you would never have to wonder what the results might be in a given situation of true and false? JOËL: That's deep. Do you want to know all the secrets of the universe? SARA: Let me introduce to you truth tables. JOËL: Oh, I love a good truth table. Yes, such a simple tool, but it pays so much. SARA: Absolutely, especially in a world where we have unless as an operator. JOËL: Unless gets me so much in Ruby, especially when there are compound expressions. So you say do something unless condition one or condition two, and then I have to think, wait, when does this happen? SARA: I have to read it to myself in English, not this and not that. [chuckles] JOËL: So that's interesting because when you translated that in English, you changed the operator that's being used. SARA: I totally did. JOËL: Unless a condition or other condition. And your brain was smart enough to flip that; mine is not. SARA: [laughs] JOËL: But what's happening here is, and you would learn this in a discrete math class, De Morgan's Laws that say what happens when you negate compound conditions. And you have to negate each of the individual conditions and also flip all the operators, so all the ANDs turn into ORs and the ORs turn into ANDs. And so I always have to remember to do that in my mind when I see an unless or when I see someone negating a compound condition. So now, in my mind, every time I'm reviewing code on a pull request, and I see negating a compound condition, it's just a sort of red flag for there's quite possibly a bug here. And maybe leave a comment asking the author, "Did you really mean to do this?" And like you said, maybe even write out a truth table just so that myself I know that the correct behavior is happening. SARA: It is a good example of a code smell because if it's hard for you to understand or me to understand, sure, it made sense when it was written, but code is read more than it's written. It should be easy to read and understand. So it's definitely easy to introduce a bug at that point like you were saying, worth commenting on. JOËL: You log on to your machine at the beginning of the day, open up a PR, and you're just like, oh yes, I love the smell of De Morgan in the morning. SARA: [laughs] Nothing like De Morgan in your cup in the morning. JOËL: [laughs] Yes. Oh, now I really want to -- SARA: A DeMorgan in the morgen. [laughter] JOËL: Now I really want to see a spoof of that Folgers ad. SARA: [laughs] For some reason, the jingle is escaping me, but it's there. JOËL: It's an ad for a brand of American coffee. SARA: Yes, for those that were not in America during the '90s to see the commercial, [singing] the best part of waking up is De Morgan in your cup. JOËL: [chuckles] That was amazing. SARA: [laughs] Hopefully, we don't get a copyright strike for that. [laughter] JOËL: You know what? That is the sell for why you should learn discrete math. SARA: Yes. What are some other ways you find discrete math around in your day-to-day life? JOËL: I think the most practical part is working with Booleans because writing conditional code writing Boolean expressions is something that I do multiple times every day. And I think anybody who's done programming for any length of time gets some amount of intuition around working with Boolean expressions. Having spent a little bit of time studying them, you learn some patterns. You learn ways of working with them. And a common thing that I will often see in Ruby code is people will overuse the if expression when you could have used a Boolean expression instead. So I've seen things like if condition return true, else return false, which is just identity. I've also seen more complex things which will say, "If value one is true and value two is true, return true; otherwise, return false," or some fancy things with early returns that, in the end, are just reimplementing Boolean AND. So knowing about a little bit of basic Boolean algebra, being comfortable with combining things using AND and OR rather than just writing early returns, I think, gives a much richer toolkit and something that is much more scalable. And, of course, for those situations where there are complex conditional code, having truth tables as a tool in your back pocket is just absolutely invaluable. SARA: 100%. When those get so complex, definitely realizing it's worth maybe breaking up a chain of Boolean logic into separate mini-methods if you need to. There's nothing like seeing a whole bunch of stuff ANDed together that are only kind of related. [laughs] JOËL: There's a form of logic that you dig into as well called predicate logic, and there's a whole set of things you can do with it. But two things that stood out to me were these two operators that apply a condition to a whole set of values. And they either claim that a certain thing is true for at least one of the elements in a set or for every value in a set. And the interesting thing is that if you claim that something is true for all elements, in order to falsify that claim, you only need to find one counterexample. You don't need to check every item. If I can find one, and maybe it's the first item in this set that is wrong or that contradicts the logical statement that I'm trying to make, then I've immediately disproved your entire statement because you claimed that this was true for every element. SARA: And it's hard learning these sorts of fundamentals from computer science; it's hard to not apply that to real life and hear somebody using a statement, "Every this, all of that." I immediately come back with, "Well, some of them." [laughs] I'm that guy, yep. JOËL: The person at the end of a conference talk who puts up their hand and says, "So this is not really a question. It's more of a statement." SARA: [laughs] I found this one example. Yeah, I'm a stickler for specificity, for sure. Thanks, discrete math. JOËL: It definitely helped me be much more nuanced in the way that I speak. I tend to not speak in absolutes or superlatives because of that class. SARA: Yeah, I very frequently use the term a non-zero amount of times to describe, for example, there exists one in a set. JOËL: There's also another interesting aspect of this, which is when you see a chain of ANDs, so condition, and condition, and condition, and condition, and condition, you're effectively making the assertion that something is true for all elements or that all these conditions are true. Therefore, it only takes one for the whole thing to evaluate to false. And I want to say the fancy name for this is annihilation, where you can have a giant chain of conditions that are ANDed together, and they're all true, but if any single one of them is false, then the whole chain evaluates to false. SARA: And this is where you can get a little clever with the order in which you put those in your AND where you have the least heavy lifting checks first so that they fail first. Or if you have things that need to check for nil, check them after. Check the basic stuff first. Let it almost short circuit; let it fail fast, as they say. JOËL: Yeah, these are all performance tricks that I think, even if you don't have a discrete math background, you might have picked up. You know about short-circuiting. You know about trying the cheap checks first. And now you know a little bit of the theoretical background of why. SARA: [singing] Where do we go from here? [laughs] JOËL: So we have these sort of logical operators that will claim that something is true for all elements of a set or at least one element of a set, and those are kind of theoretical. They're useful if we're trying to set up a logical proposition. But these exist in code, in Ruby, as part of the enumerable module. Enumerable has two methods; they are any and all. And you can use those methods to claim that all items in an array will evaluate to true when the given block runs or that at least one evaluates to true for items in that array. SARA: What's the word where you're taking out some of a set? Slice but not slice. There's intersection [crosstalk 26:46] union, so not a set theory one, no. JOËL: Like getting the inverse? SARA: Maybe. I don't know. JOËL: I feel like there's a term for getting the inverse of a set. SARA: Not the inverse. JOËL: Because you can get the inverse of the intersection or something. SARA: Yeah. I think I'm just going to go along the lines of being able to slice out what you want with select and how you can then chain an enumerable on that. JOËL: Okay. Okay, I see. So you're making a connection from enumerable to set theory. SARA: Mm-hmm. JOËL: Excellent. SARA: Even if you don't necessarily want every item in your enumerable, your array, your hash, you can use things like select and reject to get a subset for a certain condition, and you can slice out based on a condition. And then you can then apply any or all to that. And so I want all of the even numbers, and now for all of these even numbers, such and such should be true for the set. JOËL: So now we've made a connection between enumerable and predicate logic. And we've also made a connection to set theory. SARA: It's coming full circle again. [laughs] Discrete math is everywhere. JOËL: So if you use the enumerable module in Ruby, which you should be (It's one of the best parts of the language.), you're doing discrete math every day, and you didn't know it. SARA: You're welcome. JOËL: So we've seen that a lot of us are interacting with elements of discrete math every day and that learning a little bit about it more formally can help us be a bit more mindful in how we code every day. It can give us the mental models to solve and analyze problems that we encounter daily. For those listeners who might want to dig a little bit more deeply into discrete math, do you have any resources there that you recommend? SARA: Well, not sponsored, but brilliant.org is a pretty good resource for things like math, computer science, for the very least. I'm sure it has other courses, but those are the ones that I've kind of looked at on some YouTubers' free trial. [chuckles] And I liked their approach to teaching, and I think it has got a low barrier to entry for learning these topics. I would definitely recommend that, so brilliant.org JOËL: It's funny you mentioned that they sponsor a lot of technology, science, and math YouTubers. So for those listeners who are interested in checking it out, maybe look up some YouTubers and see if they have a free sign-up code. SARA: Mayuko is a good YouTuber for that. I believe she gets sponsored by Brilliant occasionally. She's a software engineer out in California. JOËL: Clearly, we're not sponsored because we don't have a code to give out. SARA: [laughs] Sponsor us, Brilliant. JOËL: [laughs] Host at bikeshed.fm SARA: [laughs] JOËL: All right. Well, with that, shall we wrap up? SARA: Yeah, let's do. STEPHANIE: Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. JOËL: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeee!!!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.

Sara Well founded Dropstat with a mission to make healthcare more efficient and humane. Her passion and commitment to that mission are truly inspirational.  In this conversation, Sara discusses her journey from nursing to tech founder, how she came up with the idea for Dropstat, lessons learned while piloting with enterprise customers, and more.  Timestamps:(0:00) Introduction (1:43) What is Dropstat? (3:53) Coming up with the idea for Dropstat and how did COVID affect the business (8:33) Selling to enterprise and the difficulty of behavior change (14:01) Lessons learned on how to choose the right beta customers (17:57) Journey from nurse to tech founder (23:12) Early signs of PMF (29:23) Acquiring customers early on (30:55) Collecting customer feedback (33:04) Grand vision for Dropstat (38:21) Lightning round Guest contact info:https://www.linkedin.com/in/sara-well-35a943168/ www.dropstat.com Sponsor: This podcast is brought to you by grwth.co. Grwth offers fractional CMOs, paired with best-in-class digital marketing execution to support early-stage startup success. With a focus on seed and series A companies, Grwth has helped a number of SaaS, digital health, and e-commerce startups build their go-to-market function and scale up. To learn more and book a free consultation, go to grwth.co. Get in touch: https://www.linkedin.com/in/moshehp/https://twitter.com/MoshehPhello@pmfpod.comwww.pmfpod.com

You can listen to the oral arguments yourself here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/audio/2022/21-869 Pia M. Hunter is a Teaching Associate Professor at the University of Illinois College of Law and the Associate Director for Research and Instruction at the college's Albert E. Jenner Jr. Law Library. She holds a J.D. from the University of Illinois College of Law and a Master of Science from the School of Information Science at the University of Illinois. Prior to joining the law library faculty, she served as Visiting Assistant Professor and Copyright and Reserve Services Librarian at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) where she researched and developed best practices for copyright and fair use for instruction for the UIC campus. In 2013, she led the initiative to create Fair Use Week, an annual celebration that highlights the fair use doctrine and its significance to artists, students, faculty, librarians, journalists, and all users of copyrighted content. Sara:                    Welcome to a live recorded episode of Copyright Chat today. I am so excited to bring you the wonderful Pia Hunter. Welcome, Pia. Pia:                      Thank you, Sara. It's a pleasure to be here. Sara:                    So if you didn't know, Pia is a law librarian at the University of Illinois College of Law and a founder of Fair Use Week. Tell us about that Pia. Pia:                      Oh, gosh. Fair Use Week is, first of all, it's so wonderful that it's, we're coming up on a 10 year anniversary in February, 2023. I'm truly excited about that, but it is the result of a, a meeting of librarians back in 20 12, 20 13, and we were talking about the significance of fair use and not only how important it is to academics and scholars, but to everyone, to, to artists, to people every day who create content, everyone. And so we were discussing how wonderful it would be to set some time aside each year to acknowledge fair use, why it's significant in our everyday lives, and promote it to everyone so that we can take up the banner and protect this, right? Because I know that it's an affirmative defense in terms of the Copyright Act, but there are things we can do under fair use, and we, we use fair use every day. And so Fair Use Week is designed to promote and, uh, inform people about that. Sara:                    That is really exciting. I keep forgetting, we're coming up on the 10th anniversary, and this is a really interesting time p to be talking about fair use because as we know, the Supreme Court is addressing transformative fair use right now. Pia:                      I am, I'm not afraid to admit that I am a bit nervous about this case. I Sara:                    Think I, I think I said that in a nervous tone, , Pia:                      I think you said, I think your tone certainly reflects my, my feelings on the subject. And I'm looking forward to our discussion because a lot's been happening lately. Sara:                    Yes, a lot has been happening. So if you haven't been paying attention, let's get you up to speed. There is a very exciting case involving the Andy Warhol Foundation and a photographer and the late great singer Prince. So this is a really fun case that is up at the Supreme Court. Of course, it started below and in the lower court, um, the Warhol Foundation had one on its fair use claims where Andy Warhol borrowed, I say borrowed in a nice way. Um, the photograph of this famous photographer who took a photo of Prince, and he originally had, had permission through licensing to use the photo for an inspiration in a magazine article. But later on they, they, he had another reproduction and he did not have permission, and he claimed fair use. And in, in the Second Circuit Court of appeals, they reversed and said, Nope, it was not a fair use. And the issue at the Supreme Court was all about purpose and character of the use and whether it was transformative, which is, oh, scary to me because the last time Supreme Court addressed this was 1994. Pia, tell us some more about kind of what the arguments are on both sides. Pia:                      Okay. The arguments from the Goldsmith side, that's the original photographer, the artist, is that basically the Warhol Foundation has not produced this content in any way that is transformative. And when we went into oral arguments, there was a great deal of discussion about factor one, what is the purpose and character of the use? And the justices were really clued into fi trying to determine how the photograph was diff different in what ways from the Warhol piece, which is an artistic rendering and has been produced many, many times in several prints and sold over and over again. There's also, and on the Warhol side, they're claiming that it's a transformative use, that even though the commercial purpose of is the same and similar, that Warhol by taking the photograph and creating a painting from it. And from that painting came several other prints that were licensed and sold and so forth and so on, that this is a completely new work. Pia:                      And the justices seem early on to be pushing back against that because if you look at the photograph and you look at the paintings and the prints and the reproductions, you can s it's obvious that those come directly from the photograph. And this is what's troubling to me because I think for so many years there's been a lot of talk about transformative use in terms of a fair use argument. And quite frankly, I think transformative use has dominated to the fact that it has overshadowed some of the other factors that are just as important. So this case may bring some balance back to looking at all four factors, because if you consider all four factors, then this could very well be a fair use. But if you're basing it solely on whether the, the level of transformative, then we run into, into some difficulties. Sara:                    That's an interesting perspective. I think, um, I agree with you that on one side they're arguing that, um, it was just the same use, right? So I think that the, the thing that troubled the court here was that on the one hand, this photographer was in the business of licensing her works to, um, vanity Fair and other magazines. And that was the purpose that Andy Warhol also used his work for in this instance. Now, to me though, Andy Warhol in general has very different uses for his works, right? His works hang in many mag in many, um, museums, people come to see his works. They're not only used in magazines. Now, I'm certain that this photographer also could have her work in a fine art museum, but I do think that there are broader uses for a Warhol work. Um, and a lot was brought up about the other Andy Warhol case, the famous soup can case, right? Sara:                    Where the judges said, oh, well, this is not as hard a case in that instance because the soup cans were used for a different purpose, right? And normally the logo on Campbell's soup cans was used to market the brand. And of course, um, the use by Warhol was to show mass consumerism. Um, one point that the, the, uh, uh, photographers, lawyers made was that he had to have some necessity to use that particular photo. I wonder what you make of that argument, Pial, because the justices seem to be kind of buying into that a little bit. Pia:                      They did seem to buy into that a little bit. And the necessity argument is one that I find fascinating because it was ne it was necessary to use the Campbell soup can in its entirety, it's, it's it's logo, it's symbol. You look at that automatically and you recognize that it is Campbell's soup. So the necessity argument and Warhol's subsequent series of that discussion sparked a discussion of consumerism. When you, when I look at the Prince photo, I'm a little . It's funny, I am such a huge Prince fan that when I look at the Prince photo, I think that it's Prince. So it has to be necessary . And I know that's not a legal argument. It's more than mentality, I think for me than anything else. But looking at this, it's, it's, it seems that the justices are buying into that, that philosophy. I'm not sure how sustainable that really is in the long term. Pia:                      He could have picked any number of photos or images to do that exact same thing. It didn't not necessarily have to be prints, but because it was print, I think that lends itself to the argument about the fourth factor and commercial use and market for the work, because he's doing what is considered a reproduction. And I know that the, uh, Martinez, Mr. Martinez, who's the Warhol's attorney, used the term follow up work. And in my mind, that is the same as a derivative work, which falls to the bundle of rights that is reserved for the owners. So as this goes on, it'll be interesting to note how they, they, they parse out each factor and really examine what's happening in terms of the original content. Is it truly a derivative work? What's the difference between a follow up work and a derivative work? I mean, I think it's, it's a subtle nuance there, if there is a difference at all. And they're gonna have to examine each of these factors closely. So this, this may be something that, that justices appear to embrace now in the early stages, but I think that, that, that may change as time goes on. 1:                         Yeah, I think that's interesting. And I, I agree with you that one of the cruxes of the, the issue here was what is the line, or where is the line between a derivative work and a transformative work? Although to me, that's always been the question, right? That's always been the million dollar question in these types of cases. It just was made even more salient here because one of the things that they were pointing out is if you have a film, for instance, a movie that is an adaptation of a book, you would never say, oh, sure, that's a fair use. You would always think they need to get a license because the natural progression of a best seller is, oh, yes, let's make a movie. And of course, you want the person to be encouraged to make the book in the first instance. And so they need a piece of that economic pie, right, to incentivize creation. Sara:                    But, um, in this instance, was the photographer ever going to make a print, a painting print of her photo? I don't think so. So I really discouraging her in any way. Um, but of course she would be happy to take that license, right? I mean, she would be happy to take a license, especially for her work in a magazine, which I think is where they got caught up a lot during this case. And I wish they had not stuck to only that part, because I know Warhol's attorney pointed out this was a series, right? Yes. Warhol did not make just one print. He made a series of prints and the copyright was claimed in the entire series. And so only one of those photos, I think it was called Orange Prints, was used in the actual magazine article. And so maybe they could even find, okay, well, that one wasn't all right, but the other ones were is that, can you split the baby that way? Pia:                      I'm not sure that you can. And that's, that's an excellent point that you make. And that's a part that's been troubling me for so long. Also, the original license, Goldsmith did this painting, took the photograph, licensed the photograph to the magazine for an artist. It did not say Warhol for an artist to make a a, a rendering from the photograph. So he was licensed to do the work. However, in the process, he actually created additional pieces. The Silk Screen Painting series is what it's called. There were two screen prints on paper and two drawing, and all of these are referred to as the print series. Some of the originals were sold, some reproductions were printed and sold and licensed and sold to other people. So it we're looking at, it's, it's fascinating because I'm still always coming back to the, or the terms of the original license. Pia:                      How much leeway did he have in the original license that the magazine purchased from Goldsmith to make a derivative work? Because that's really what it is. They license access, a use of the photo for someone else to build something upon that. That's the first thing. And then the second thing, the Goldsmith attorneys are arguing that this case is significant because it's really fighting about the individual rights of the creator versus someone who has the power and the, the name recognition of Andy Warhol. So because, uh, someone who's famous decides to take and, and use a work and create something out of it in their own fashion, then that would give those people who are in a financial position or famous artists, uh, more power and authority to use people's works than say, someone like me who would come along and make a stick figure derivative or something like that. So that's another issue that I'm, I'm curious to, to see how that's gonna go. Sara:                    Yeah, I think that the argument goes, you know, Warhol makes it, and it's a piece of art. I make it, and it's what just not great, right? Pia:                      , it's just a photo. So the question becomes how does, how, how are artists able to protect their derivative uses while still leaving fair use on the table for other creators to come and use as well? Because otherwise, what we're doing is we're going to squash creativity and people's desire to create new content. Sara:                    Yeah. And that also leads me to think about appropriation art, right? Pia:                      Oh, yes. A favorite topic of mine Sara:                    Is a whole other variety of art. And is, would this, I mean, if they rule that it has to be some necessary purpose, like with, um, the, the attorneys who are protecting the photographer, does that just quash any kind of appropriation art? Pia:                      The potential for that is so great that that is really another part that, that I find troubling. I am not a fan, as you well know of the Richard Prince series, uh, he's an appropriation artist, started many years ago with the Marlborough ads. He's done some things with, uh, catcher and the Rye, taking a, a copy of Catcher and The Rye, leaving the print on the cover, the exact same except in place of the author. He's put his own name. There's the Instagram v prince that's going on right now, Cariou v Prince, back from the early two thousands. So this is an artist who specifically takes people's work and either displays his name on it or does something really, really different. Not different in terms of maybe size, but an exact replica. So a case like this would have a direct effect on the current case that's working its way through the courts now, gram v prints and, and other sorts of things. And it would, I'm thinking about memes and other derivatives that we take for granted and things that pop up across the internet that people find funny and creative. What happens with those? Sara:                    Yeah, what does happen with those? I mean, I think, I think with memes you can make a stronger argument that you're not usually trying to make any money off of them. Exactly. You might, you might win more on a factor four analysis. And that was one of the things that they pointed to quite a lot, uh, at least, um, the Warhol Foundation attorneys, when they were asked about, well, what about, you know, some really creative new film that is based on a book, but it's so different, right? Why isn't that a fair use? And the response was, well, you know, look at factor four. It's still highly commercial, so that even if it is different, it might still be a derivative. So I wonder if the part of the challenge here was that they were really trying to narrow in on the first factor, but, but we always try to weigh them together, right? Always in my mind, they go together. And so trying to parse them out makes it really hard. Pia:                      That's absolutely correct. And I, in this instance, parsing them out seems necessary because the first cat factor we know is, uh, what's under discussion now. But then you move on to the, the second factor. This is highly creative, uh, purpose in nature of the work, and, and you're moving through the factor. You get to factor three, you're looking at the amount, well, it was used in its entirety. So the, the, the second and third factors are almost sort of, uh, settled. And that brings us back to one in four. How is it being used? How is it the Campbell soup, uh, series that Andy Warhol created? It was an obvious commentary to many. I'm not sure the commentary in this respect is so obvious. Goldsmith claims that the photograph was showing Prince in a, in a sensitive way, a way that he's not frequently depicted in album covers and other sorts of, uh, photo shoots and different things. Pia:                      So she was capturing a certain vision of the artist in vulnerability. And the Warhol claim, I believe, if I remember correctly, is that they were not, they were exploiting that in different ways and, and making, uh, a different rendering of that original work. But I had a discussion with someone who is not into copyright law at all, and showed them the pictures because they'd been hearing so much about the case, and they made a very interesting point. Uh, when you look at the Wizard of Oz in black and white, and my mother in particular is a fan of, uh, old film Warren movies and so forth and so on. And she says, I don't like the color. I don't like it when they add color to it, it's, it's different to me. And that argument swings both ways because when I showed the, the port the photograph to someone and they looked at the color, uh, that that Warhol added, and the creativity that he placed upon the photograph, that person said, I don't see much of a difference. They just added color. It's the same thing. But someone else would look at that same rendering and say, it's completely different. It's, it's different. To me, there's an aesthetic. So when you're looking at art in this way, do we have to become art critics to make this type of assessment? And I think that's why this case is so troubling to me because there, it, some of this really is subjective. Sara:                    Well, I think that the Supreme Court justices also were troubled by that. And, and we're asking, you know, how do we decide this? Right? And, um, do we need expert testimony? Are we supposed to be asking what the artist intended? Right? Some of the early fair use cases kind of looked at the artist's intent. And then of course, in this case, Andy Warhol's deceased, so no one can look at his exact intent. Um, so it, it does get pretty troubling because do we want the Supreme Court justices to start guessing and becoming art critics? And the other thing that they were mentioning was, which level of generality are we looking at in terms of the comment? Are we looking at that this was used as magazine cover, and so was this one okay, done, right. That's the level of generality. But if that were the case, I think that that many of the cases, including the Supreme Court cases, would've come out differently, right? Sara:                    Because we had the two live crew song. If you look at the Campbell case, um, Campbell versus Acuff Rose from 1994, we had a two live crew song, and we had a pretty woman song. They're both songs. Okay, we're done. I mean, that level of generality doesn't work. But in that case, they said it was a parody of the song and that was why it was fair use. Um, and so what is, what is the, the conclusion here, right? Is it that it's, uh, different in the way that it is portraying prints? Because it is fine art. I mean, the, the second circuit below seemed to say they were transforming fine art into fine art, therefore we're done here. Pia:                      That, that, that seems to be, that's how I took it as well. And the other part about the Campbell case is that not only was it recognized as an obvious parody, the commercial use was the same, but the audience was significantly different. So your Roy Orbeson fans are not going to be listening to Luke Skywalker and two live cruise rendition of a song with the same title. So the, the impact on the, the effect upon the market is limited because we're looking at different audiences. Whereas here, it's the same sort of thing. It's going to a magazine and the types of, and the same type of magazine, if not the exact same magazine that was used for the Sara:                    Original, I think it was, I think it was, I think it was just the the parent company Pia:                      Conde Nast, Sara:                    Yes. Yeah, it was the same one because it was Vanity Fair and then Conde Nast. But here's the thing, uh, it sounds like then you're, you're almost getting into the fourth factor and the commercial, um, impact. However, if you read factor one carefully, it says purpose and character of the use, including whether it was a non-profit or commercial use. And so the commercial use can impact factor one as well. So technically the, the court could say, well, maybe it does comment somehow, but it's the same commercial impact or the same commercial use for the same exact audience. Um, I still wish they would address the other works in the series though, because I don't think they were aimed at, you know, magazines. I think they were just aimed at the fine art community. And I do think that's a different audience than people who are interested in that particular photographer's work. There are a lot more people who are interested in Warhol's work and his comments on commercialism and society, unfortunately than this artist. I mean, I think that's just the truth of, you know, what Warhol's work sell for. And one of the things they briefed was, yes, her work doesn't sell for as much as his work does, which to me it means they have different audiences, don't they? I mean, maybe not for this particular magazine, but in general they do Pia:                      In general that I agree in general, they have very different audiences. But here there's not going to be an opportunity for Goldsmith to recover for renderings of this paint of her photograph that Warhol created that are hanging in museums now, that are in people's private homes now because there is a series of silk screens and then there are the various reproductions, it's the orange prince reproduction in published in the magazine that people purchase at a newsstand or got, or however way they get their content. That's what sparked this controversy. And because she, I don't believe that she would've, she wasn't even aware that this had happened. And so you're right, the audiences are completely different. Uh, people who paid to have Andy Warhol's Warhol's version hanging in their living rooms or museums that are, are, are holding this work now, would not have paid for that photograph. And that's, that's, that's, that's a great case for the audiences being different, but it's this one single use in a magazine that could upend the way we are able to look at fair use in terms of these types of works. Sara:                    Will it? Because here's the other thing, couldn't they just, I mean, to me, bad facts make bad law. Okay? And these are bad facts. Pia:                      These are bad facts. These are terrible facts. They're Sara:                    Terrible facts. So couldn't the Supreme Court just say, okay, we agree that, that, you know, Warhol did comment in a different way, but you know, we still agree ultimately that it was a derivative because of this, this, and this based on these particular facts, right? And so could they, shouldn't they limit it to this case? Cause the facts are so bad, Pia:                      You are making my argument . I want them to limit it to this case. The facts here are terrible. Any, any move to make this case new precedent would be devastating for artists everywhere, uh, for creators, for for, for, for people who have existing works, think of how many things would unravel based on this, uh, a radical decision of that nature. And I can see, I'm optimistic because when you hear the oral arguments, you, you listen, I, I, I actually, I listened the first time with my eyes closed, and then I'd used your method, which was very good. Thank you very much. And I read the transcript while I listened a second time, and you can see them wrestling with all of these pieces and really trying to come to an accord and a deep understanding of, uh, the artist's rights, the rights of the Warhol Foundation. And I can see that they're casting an eye to a fu to the future to understand how this is going to ultimately affect creators and, and, and people who are trying to make content. Because this case has the potential to, uh, stifle so much creativity and so many new works that, uh, the public will be deprived of having. So I'm hoping that that, is that what you suggest? I'm, I'm gonna call that the most reasonable compromise. I'm hoping that that's the end result. Sara:                    Well, I am too. And I think, um, you know, given the last Supreme Court case, the Google versus Oracle case, you know, I do have hope. I understand that the Supreme Court has overturned lots of precedent, very long standing precedent, even very recently in the abortion case. So I mean, they are, they can do it. I don't think they're going to, in this case, I, I'm hopeful that they're gonna limit it. And if they do, um, decide that, you know, maybe this wasn't a fair use, that it won't be as sweeping and terrible, um, as it could be. That's my hope. But I, I, and I did see them wrestling with the creativity and the free kind of speech issues in the oral argument. And I saw some of the even conservative justices, you know, asking questions along those lines, which made me a little bit hopeful. Pia:                      That's exactly right. And they're, they're, they're looking at all of these different factors necessary or least useful. I, I know that the Goldsmith side is, is presenting almost a new sort of test. That's the part that I wanted to say mm-hmm. . And that test, if adopted would be devastating. So I'm really hoping that your, your, your recommended compromise is something that the justices can, can, can use to find some sort of middle ground. Sara:                    I don't think there's any basis, I'm sorry, all due respect to the Goldsmith's, um, lawyers here, but I don't think there's any basis for coming up with some new test based on these terrible facts. It's, it's just a bad, it's a bad way to go. And, and we have lots of precedent out there building on the Campbell case and the Campbell case in, in no respects, as anything has to be necessary, it does say you have to avoid the drudgery if you're only creating the new thing to avoid the drudgery of coming up with something new. It does say that, but that doesn't say it has to be necessary. Pia:                      It doesn't. And, but, but facts this bad required some creative and quite frankly, brilliant individual to come up with a new test. That's the first thing. Otherwise, there's no argument to make. And the second thing that I wanted to mention is that the government requested leave to argue, and they were granted leave to argue. So now you have the, uh, solicitor general sitting at the table with Goldsmiths. So the government has a vested interest in this. And I wonder how that looks to people who are examining this case from the outside, the fact that the government has taken up the argument on the Goldsmith side. What does that do for, uh, copyright law moving forward? Yeah, what does that say? Sara:                    That's curious, right? Yes. Because, um, it's, it's a little bit strange. And what is their interest necessarily? I mean, I, I'm assuming they're saying our interest is to correct is to protect authors, but you know, we also have the interest of the other side, which is, you know, the limitation on the rights of the authors, which is guaranteed by fair use. And as pointed out, even in the definition of derivative works, it still says as limited by fair use. So where's the government's involvement here? Why are they involved in the first place? Pia:                      That's the question I'd like answered. , back to the constitution. We go for the creativity and make sure ensuring that people are able to consume this content. That's where we need to start. Yeah, back to basics. Sara:                    We really do need to get back to basics. And I I will expect this, um, decision to come out soon. They haven't been taking a whole lot of time deciding cases. It's already been a little while since the oral argument. So, uh, we will definitely keep you posted and maybe we'll have a, a, a debrief after the opinion. We Pia:                      Can have another conversation. I think we have to, don't Sara:                    We? I think we do. So I, um, I hope this, you found this useful and interesting, and I will link to the oral arguments from this, um, podcast episode so you can follow along and listen yourself and come up with your own decisions about where you think this might be headed. I think the Supreme Court sounded pretty rigorous on both sides, so it wasn't obvious to me who they were favoring. Um, but I'm, I'm, I just hope they don't do anything drastic. , Pia:                      I concur. . Sara:                    Well, Pia thank you so much for joining and, um, we'll, we'll speak again soon. Pia:                      Yes, thank you for having me. And, uh, fingers crossed. Sara:                    Fingers crossed.

Why does the history of computing matter? Joël and Developer at thoughtbot Sara Jackson, ponder this and share some cool stories (and trivia!!) behind the tools we use in the industry. This episode is brought to you by Airbrake (https://airbrake.io/?utm_campaign=Q3_2022%3A%20Bike%20Shed%20Podcast%20Ad&utm_source=Bike%20Shed&utm_medium=website). Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack. Sara on Twitter (https://twitter.com/csarajackson) UNIX philosophy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy) Hillel Wayne on why we ask linked list questions (https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/linked-lists/) Transcript: JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. And today, I'm joined by fellow thoughtboter, Team Lead, and Developer Sara Jackson. SARA: Hello, happy to be here. JOËL: Together, we're here to share a little bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Sara, what's new in your world? SARA: Well, Joël, you might know that recently our team had a small get-together in Toronto. JOËL: And our team, for those who are not aware, is fully remote distributed across multiple countries. So this was a chance to get together in person. SARA: Yes, correct. This was a chance for those on the Boost team to get together and work together as if we had a physical office. JOËL: Was this your first time meeting some members of the team? SARA: It was my second, for the most part. So I joined thoughtbot, but after thoughtbot had already gotten remote. Fortunately, I was able to meet many other thoughtboters in May at our summit. JOËL: Had you worked at a remote company before coming to thoughtbot? SARA: Yes, I actually started working remotely in 2019, but even then, that wasn't my first time working remotely. I actually had a full year of internship in college that was remote. JOËL: So you were a pro at this long before the pandemic made us all try it out. SARA: I don't know about that, but I've certainly dealt with the idiosyncrasies that come with remote work for longer. JOËL: What do you think are some of the challenges of remote work as opposed to working in person in an office? SARA: I think definitely growing and maintaining a culture. When you're in an office, it's easy to create ad hoc conversations and have events that are small that build on the culture. But when you're remote, it has to be a lot more intentional. JOËL: That definitely rings true for me. One of the things that I really appreciated about in-person office culture was the serendipity that you have those sort of random meetings at the water cooler, those conversations, waiting for coffee with people who are not necessarily on the same team or the same project as you are. SARA: I also really miss being able to have lunch in person with folks where I can casually gripe about an issue I might be having, and almost certainly, someone would have the answer. Now, if I'm having an issue, I have to intentionally seek help. [chuckles] JOËL: One of the funny things that often happened, at least the office where I worked at, was that lunches would often devolve into taxonomy conversations. SARA: I wish I had been there for that. [laughter] JOËL: Well, we do have a taxonomy channel on Slack to somewhat continue that legacy. SARA: Do you have a favorite taxonomy lunch discussion that you recall? JOËL: I definitely got to the point where I hated the classifying a sandwich. That one has been way overdone. SARA: Absolutely. JOËL: There was an interesting one about motorcycles, and mopeds, and bicycles, and e-bikes, and trying to see how do you distinguish one from the other. Is it an electric motor? Is it the power of the engine that you have? Is it the size? SARA: My brain is already turning on those thoughts. I feel like I could get lost down that rabbit hole very easily. [laughter] JOËL: Maybe that should be like a special anniversary episode for The Bike Shed, just one long taxonomy ramble. SARA: Where we talk about bikes. JOËL: Ooh, that's so perfect. I love it. One thing that I really appreciated during our time in Toronto was that we actually got to have lunch in person again. SARA: Yeah, that was so wonderful. Having folks coming together that had maybe never worked together directly on clients just getting to sit down and talk about our day. JOËL: Yeah, and talk about maybe it's work-related, maybe it's not. There's a lot of power to having some amount of deeper interpersonal connection with your co-workers beyond just the we work on a project together. SARA: Yeah, it's like camaraderie beyond the shared mission of the company. It's the shared interpersonal mission, like you say. Did you have any in-person pairing sessions in Toronto? JOËL: I did. It was actually kind of serendipitous. Someone was stuck with a weird failing test because somehow the order factories were getting created in was not behaving in the expected way, and we herd on it, dug into it, found some weird thing with composite primary keys, and solved the issue. SARA: That's wonderful. I love that. I wonder if that interaction would have happened or gotten solved as quickly if we hadn't been in person. JOËL: I don't know about you, but I feel like I sometimes struggle to ask for help or ask for a pair more when I'm online. SARA: Yeah, I agree. It's easier to feel like you're not as big of an impediment when you're in person. You tap someone on the shoulder, "Hey, can you take a look at this?" JOËL: Especially when they're on the same team as you, they're sitting at the next desk over. I don't know; it just felt easier. Even though it's literally one button press to get Tuple to make a call, somehow, I feel like I'm interrupting more. SARA: To combat that, I've been trying to pair more frequently and consistently regardless of if I'm struggling with a problem. JOËL: Has that worked pretty well? SARA: It's been wonderful. The only downside has been pairing fatigue. JOËL: Pairing fatigue is real. SARA: But other than that, problems have gotten solved quickly. We've all learned something for those that I've paired with. It goes faster. JOËL: So it was really great that we had this experience of doing our daily work but co-located in person; we have these experiences of working together. What would you say has been one of the highlights for you of that time? SARA: 100% karaoke. JOËL: [laughs] SARA: Only two folks did not attend. Many of the folks that did attend told me they weren't going to sing, but they were just going to watch. By the end of the night, everyone had sung. We were there for nearly three and a half hours. [laughs] JOËL: It was a good time all around. SARA: I saw a different side to Chad. JOËL: [laughs] SARA: And everyone, honestly. Were there any musical choices that surprised you? JOËL: Not particularly. Karaoke is always fun when you have a group of people that you trust to be a little bit foolish in front of to put yourself out there. I really appreciated the style that we went for, where we have a private room for just the people who were there as opposed to a stage in a bar somewhere. I think that makes it a little bit more accessible to pick up the mic and try to sing a song. SARA: I agree. That style of karaoke is a lot more popular in Asia, having your private room. Sometimes you can find it in major cities. But I also prefer it for that reason. JOËL: One of my highlights of this trip was this very sort of serendipitous moment that happened. Someone was asking a question about the difference between a Mac and Linux operating systems. And then just an impromptu gathering happened. And you pulled up a chair, and you're like, gather around, everyone. In the beginning, there was Multics. It was amazing. SARA: I felt like some kind of historian or librarian coming out from the deep. Let me tell you about this random operating system knowledge that I have. [laughs] JOËL: The ancient lore. SARA: The ancient lore in the year 1969. JOËL: [laughs] And then yeah, we had a conversation walking the history of operating systems, and why we have macOS and Linux, and why they're different, and why Windows is a totally different kind of family there. SARA: Yeah, macOS and Linux are sort of like cousins coming from the same tree. JOËL: Is that because they're both related through Unix? SARA: Yes. Linux and macOS are both built based off of different versions of Unix. Over the years, there's almost like a family tree of these different Nix operating systems as they're called. JOËL: I've sometimes seen asterisk N-I-X. This is what you're referring to as Nix. SARA: Yes, where the asterisk is like the RegEx catch-all. JOËL: So this might be Unix. It might be Linux. It might be... SARA: Minix. JOËL: All of those. SARA: Do you know the origin of the name Unix? JOËL: I do not. SARA: It's kind of a fun trivia piece. So, in the beginning, there was Multics spelled M-U-L-T-I-C-S, standing for the Multiplexed Information and Computing Service. Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson of Bell Labs famous for the C programming language... JOËL: You may have heard of it. SARA: You may have heard of it maybe on a different podcast. They were employees at Bell Labs when Multics was being created. They felt that Multics was very bulky and heavy. It was trying to do too many things at once. It did have a few good concepts. So they developed their own smaller Unix originally, Unics, the Uniplexed Information and Computing Service, Uniplexed versus Multiplexed. We do one thing really well. JOËL: And that's the Unix philosophy. SARA: It absolutely is. The Unix philosophy developed out of the creation of Unix and C. Do you know the four main points? JOËL: No, is it small sharp tools? It's the main one I hear. SARA: Yes, that is the kind of quippy version that has come out for sure. JOËL: But there is a formal four-point manifesto. SARA: I believe it's evolved over the years. But it's interesting looking at the Unix philosophy and seeing how relevant it is today in web development. The four points being make each program do one thing well. To this end, don't add features; make a new program. I feel like we have this a lot in encapsulation. JOËL: Hmm, maybe even the open-closed principle. SARA: Absolutely. JOËL: Similar idea. SARA: Another part of the philosophy is expecting output of your program to become input of another program that is yet unknown. The key being don't clutter your output; don't have extraneous text. This feels very similar to how we develop APIs. JOËL: With a focus on composability. SARA: Absolutely. Being able to chain commands together like you see in Ruby all the time. JOËL: I love being able to do this, for example, the enumerable API in Ruby and just being able to chain all these methods together to just very nicely do some pretty big transformations on an array or some other data structure. SARA: 100% agree there. That ability almost certainly came out of following the tenets of this philosophy, maybe not knowingly so but maybe knowingly so. [chuckles] JOËL: So is that three or four? SARA: So that was two. The third being what we know as agile. JOËL: Really? SARA: Yeah, right? The '70s brought us agile. Design and build software to be tried early, and don't hesitate to throw away clumsy parts and rebuild. JOËL: Hmmm. SARA: Even in those days, despite waterfall style still coming on the horizon. It was known for those writing software that it was important to iterate quickly. JOËL: Wow, I would never have known. SARA: It's neat having this history available to us. It's sort of like a lens at where we came from. Another piece of this history that might seem like a more modern concept but was a very big part of the movement in the '70s and the '80s was using tools rather than unskilled help or trying to struggle through something yourself when you're lightening a programming task. We see this all the time at thoughtbot. Folks do this many times there is an issue on a client code. We are able to generalize the solution, extract into a tool that can then be reused. JOËL: So that's the same kind of genesis as a lot of thoughtbot's open-source gems, so I'm thinking of FactoryBot, Clearance, Paperclip, the old-timey file upload gem, Suspenders, the Rails app generator, and the list goes on. SARA: I love that in this last point of the Unix philosophy, they specifically call out that you should create a new tool, even if it means detouring, even if it means throwing the tools out later. JOËL: What impact do you think that has had on the way that tooling in the Unix, or maybe I should say *Nix, ecosystem has developed? SARA: It was a major aspect of the Nix environment community because Unix was available, not free, but very inexpensively to educational institutions. And because of how lightweight it was and its focus on single-use programs, programs that were designed to do one thing, and also the way the shell was allowing you to use commands directly and having it be the same language as the shell scripting language, users, students, amateurs, and I say that in a loving way, were able to create their own tools very quickly. It was almost like a renaissance of Homebrew. JOËL: Not Homebrew as in the macOS package manager. SARA: [laughs] And also not Homebrew as in the alcoholic beverage. JOËL: [laughs] So, this kind of history is fun trivia to know. Is it really something valuable for us as a jobbing developer in 2022? SARA: I would say it's a difficult question. If you are someone that doesn't dive into the why of something, especially when something goes wrong, maybe it wouldn't be important or useful. But what sparked the conversation in Toronto was trying to determine why we as thoughtbot tend to prefer using Macs to develop on versus Linux or Windows. There is a reason, and the reason is in the history. Knowing that can clarify decisions and can give meaning where it feels like an arbitrary decision. JOËL: Right. We're not just picking Macs because they're shiny. SARA: They are certainly shiny. And the first thing I did was to put a matte case on it. JOËL: [laughs] So no shiny in your office. SARA: If there were too many shiny things in my office, boy, I would never get work done. The cats would be all over me. MID-ROLL AD: Debugging errors can be a developer's worst nightmare...but it doesn't have to be. Airbrake is an award-winning error monitoring, performance, and deployment tracking tool created by developers for developers, that can actually help cut your debugging time in half. So why do developers love Airbrake? It has all of the information that web developers need to monitor their application - including error management, performance insights, and deploy tracking! Airbrake's debugging tool catches all of your project errors, intelligently groups them, and points you to the issue in the code so you can quickly fix the bug before customers are impacted. In addition to stellar error monitoring, Airbrake's lightweight APM helps developers to track the performance and availability of their application through metrics like HTTP requests, response times, error occurrences, and user satisfaction. Finally, Airbrake Deploy Tracking helps developers track trends, fix bad deploys, and improve code quality. Since 2008, Airbrake has been a staple in the Ruby community and has grown to cover all major programming languages. Airbrake seamlessly integrates with your favorite apps to include modern features like single sign-on and SDK-based installation. From testing to production, Airbrake notifiers have your back. Your time is valuable, so why waste it combing through logs, waiting for user reports, or retrofitting other tools to monitor your application? You literally have nothing to lose. Head on over to airbrake.io/try/bikeshed to create your FREE developer account today! JOËL: So we've talked a little bit about Unix or *Nix, this evolution of systems. I've also heard the term POSIX thrown around when talking about things that seem to encompass both macOS and Linux. How does that fit into this history? SARA: POSIX is sort of an umbrella of standards around operating systems that was based on Unix and the things that were standard in Unix. It stands for the Portable Operating System Interface. This allowed for compatibility between OSs, very similar to USB being the standard for peripherals. JOËL: So, if I was implementing my own Unix-like operating system in the '80s, I would try to conform to the POSIX standard. SARA: Absolutely. Now, not every Nix operating system is POSIX-compliant, but most are or at least 90% of the way there. JOËL: Are any of the big ones that people tend to think about not compliant? SARA: A major player in the operating system space that is not generally considered POSIX-compliant is Microsoft Windows. JOËL: [laughs] It doesn't even try to be Unix-like, right? It's just its own thing, SARA: It is completely its own thing. I don't think it even has a standard necessarily that it conforms to. JOËL: It is its own standard, its own branch of the family tree. SARA: And that's what happens when your operating system is very proprietary. This has caused folks pain, I'm sure, in the past that may have tried to develop software on their computers using languages that are more readily compatible with POSIX operating systems. JOËL: So would you say that a language like Ruby is more compatible with one of the POSIX-compatible operating systems? SARA: 100% yes. In fact, to even use Ruby as a development tool in Windows, prior to Windows 10, you needed an additional tool. You needed something like Cygwin or MinGW, which were POSIX-compliant programs that it was almost like a shell in your Windows computer that would allow you to run those commands. JOËL: Really? For some reason, I thought that they had some executables that you could run just on Windows by itself. SARA: Now they do, fortunately, to the benefit of Ruby developers everywhere. As of Windows 10, we now have WSL, the Windows Subsystem for Linux that's built-in. You don't have to worry about installing or configuring some third-party software. JOËL: I guess that kind of almost cheats by just having a POSIX system embedded in your non-POSIX system. SARA: It does feel like a cheat, but I think it was born out of demand. The Windows NT kernel, for example, is mostly POSIX-compliant. JOËL: Really? SARA: As a result of it being used primarily for servers. JOËL: So you mentioned the Ruby tends and the Rails ecosystem tends to run better and much more frequently on the various Nix systems. Did it have to be that way? Or is it just kind of an accident of history that we happen to end up with Ruby and Rails in this ecosystem, but just as easily, it could have evolved in the Windows world? SARA: I think it is an amalgam of things. For example, Unix and Nix operating systems being developed earlier, being widely spread due to being license-free oftentimes, and being widely used in the education space. Also, because it is so lightweight, it is the operating system of choice. For most servers in the world, they're running some form of Unix, Linux, or macOS. JOËL: I don't think I've ever seen a server that runs macOS; exclusively seen it on dev machines. SARA: If you go to an animation company, they have server farms of macOS machines because they're really good at rendering. This might not be the case anymore, but it was at one point. JOËL: That's a whole other world that I've not interacted with a whole lot. SARA: [chuckles] JOËL: It's a fun intersection between software, and design, and storytelling. That is an important part for the software field. SARA: Yeah, it's definitely an aspect that deserves its own deep dive of sorts. If you have a server that's running a Windows-based operating system like NT and you have a website or a program that's designed to be served under a Unix-based server, it can easily be hosted on the Windows server; it's not an issue. The reverse is not true. JOËL: Oh. SARA: And this is why programming on a Nix system is the better choice. JOËL: It's more broadly compatible. SARA: Absolutely. Significantly more compatible with more things. JOËL: So today, when I develop, a lot of the tooling that I use is open source. The open-source movement has created a lot of the languages that we know and love, including Ruby, including Rails. Do you think there's some connection between a lot of that tooling being open source and maybe some of the Unix family of operating systems and movements that came out of that branch of the operating system family tree? SARA: I think that there is a lot of tie-in with today's open-source culture and the computing history that we've been talking about, for example, people finding something that they dislike about the tools that are available and then rolling their own. That's what Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie did. Unix was not an official Bell development. It was a side project for them. JOËL: I love that. SARA: You see this happen a lot in the software world where a program gets shared widely, and due to this, it gains traction and gains buy-in from the community. If your software is easily accessible to students, folks that are learning, and breaking things, and rebuilding, and trying, and inventing, it's going to persist. And we saw that with Unix. JOËL: I feel like this background on where a lot of these operating systems came but then also the ecosystems, the values that evolved with them has given me a deeper appreciation of the tooling, the systems that we work with today. Are there any other advantages, do you think, to trying to learn a little bit of computing history? SARA: I think the main benefit that I mentioned before of if you're a person that wants to know why, then there is a great benefit in knowing some of these details. That being said, you don't need to deep dive or read multiple books or write papers on it. You can get enough information from reading or skimming some Wikipedia pages. But it's interesting to know where we came from and how it still affects us today. Ruby was written in C, for example. Unix was written in C as well, originally Assembly Language, but it got rewritten in C. And understanding the underlying tooling that goes into that that when things go wrong, you know where to look. JOËL: I guess that that is the next question is where do you look if you're kind of interested? Is Wikipedia good enough? You just sort of look up operating system, and it tells you where to go? Or do you have other sources you like to search for or start pulling at those threads to understand history? SARA: That's a great question. And Wikipedia is a wonderful starting point for sure. It has a lot of the abbreviated history and links to better references. I don't have them off the top of my head. So I will find them for you for the show notes. But there are some old esoteric websites with some of this history more thoroughly documented by the people that lived it. JOËL: I feel like those websites always end up being in HTML 2; your very basic text, horizontal rules, no CSS. SARA: Mm-hmm. And those are the sites that have many wonderful kernels of knowledge. JOËL: Uh-huh! Great pun. SARA: [chuckles] Thank you. JOËL: Do you read any content by Hillel Wayne? SARA: I have not. JOËL: So Hillel produces a lot of deep dives into computing history, oftentimes trying to answer very particular questions such as when and why did we start using reversing a linked list as the canonical interview question? And there are often urban legends around like, oh, it's because of this. And then Hillel will do some research and go through actual archives of messages on message boards or...what is that protocol? SARA: BBS. JOËL: Yes. And then find the real answer, like, do actual historical methodology, and I love that. SARA: I had not heard of this before. I don't know how. And that is all I'm going to be doing this weekend is reading these. That kind of history speaks to my heart. I have a random fun fact along those lines that I wanted to bring to the show, which was that the echo command that we know and love in the terminal was first introduced by the Multics operating system. JOËL: Wow. So that's like the most common piece of Multics that as an everyday user of a modern operating system that we would still touch a little bit of that history every day when we work. SARA: Yeah, it's one of those things that we don't think about too much. Where did it come from? How long has it been around? I'm sure the implementation today is very different. But it's like etymology, and like taxonomy, pulling those threads. JOËL: Two fantastic topics. On that wonderful little nugget of knowledge, let's wrap up. Sara, where can people find you online? SARA: You can find me on Twitter at @csarajackson. JOËL: And we will include a link to that in the show notes. SARA: Thank you so much for having me on the show and letting me nerd out about operating system history. JOËL: It's been a pleasure. The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review on iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. If you have any feedback, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me @joelquen on Twitter or at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. Thank you so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. Byeeeeee!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

For more information about the Standing Committee on Copyrights and Related Rights, see this SCCR website Sara:     Welcome to another episode of copyright chat. Today I have Winston Tabb joining me from Johns Hopkins University he's the University Librarian and a longtime expert adviser to the copyright and other legal matters committee to the IFLA organization. Welcome. Winston: Thank you. Sara: It's so nice to see you and to see you on the verge I understand of your retirement? Winston: Yes. I think it's going to happen sometime. I just don't know exactly when because I had agreed to stay until my successor was in place. So the process is moving along. I heard a rumor the day will come soon. Sara:     Well, congratulations! And I know throughout your career you've had a lot of interest and expertise with international copyright issues, both with the copyright and other legal matters committee and with the World Intellectual Property Organization. And I wanted to take this opportunity to kind of pick your brain about that process of how we the United States and IFLA engage with the World Intellectual Property Organization. From what I've heard, it seems to move pretty slowly and it's a very political process. But, correct me if I'm wrong. Winston: Well, I think one of the first things to understand is what an unusual organization the World Intellectual Property Organization is. Within a particular subgroup, the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights, which is the one with which we engage, I don't remember how many branches there are at WIPO, but that's the most important one for us. What I couldn't believe when I went to my first meeting and it still amazes me is that you can have an organization with, I think, 185 of so member-states and WIPO functions entirely by consensus. That is, there is never a vote taken in the sense that you would have your normal body where 51% of the people would be able to prevail if they can do that. So any one country, whether it's Russia or Ukraine, the largest or smallest country, can really bring things to a halt. And that's why it is so frustrating sometimes because the progress is so glacial. On the other hand, when you do have a victory in an environment like this, it's really a major one. So the most important thing that has happened, I believe that the 20 or so years that I've been engaged there is the adoption of the Marrakesh Treaty and it almost didn't happen and took quite a long time several false starts and starting over. But part of the reason that happens in actual fact is because of the necessity for having consensus. Sara: Yeah, that's a really good point. I mean, I think most people in the world, or I guess maybe not most, but many are aware of that treaty. And it seemed like a pretty smooth process from the outside. But can you give us an insider's view a little bit of how long this was pending and what happened with the treaty? Winston: Well, as I said, there were several false starts. So, I went to WIPO for the first time in 2003, which is the time when I was appointed to be the chair of IFLA's copyright committee. Of course, I was just amazed at how things worked and how they didn't. My very first meeting that I went to was of the cultural administration group. I think you're gonna be working with them, if I understand right. So, we're working on some kind of instrument that would deal with cultures and I was so fascinated to see, but sitting at the table were people from various minority groups. The Sami from the North and the Maori from New Zealand were actually part of the official groups. And it was a very substantive discussion. So I was expecting it to be like that when I went to other meetings such as to the meetings of the standing committee on copyright, but it was definitely not the case. The Standing Committee on Copyright it members of federal agencies only. The United States usually has people there led always by the Patent and Trademark Office because they are the executive branch, but also generally at least one person from the US Copyright Office. But I was really kind of amazed when we first started working on what came to be the Marrakesh Treaty to find that there had been a lot of efforts in the early 1990s to have such a treaty and they finally just completely collapsed. So, this was like a second start. And you never know exactly why something works the second time around. I don't think it was just because we all had t-shirts which we probably wore saying “stop the book famine.” But I think that really helped as a way of kind of characterizing what it would feel like to be blind, able to have access to books it was a book famine. That word famine really just captured people's attention. Nevertheless, it did take at least six or seven years. I can't even remember quite how long it went. At first everyone was kinda just nice about it. And then there's the publishing industry that began to realize this might actually happen. They began to be very, very oppositional—really oppose almost every aspect and were able quite often to get other national entities to agree with them. Probably the most negative force against this treaty and the one that I believe was most susceptible to the publishers was the European Union. So this is another thing that is very unusual about the SCCR, which is that when we're in session, it is possible for someone from Luxembourg to speak or from France in their national capacity. But really the authority speaking comes from the European Union representatives. Of course, in a way it represented  the bureaucrats who speak for that entire group. And the EU was just not willing to have any part of this until this moment that I will never forget in Marrakesh. We finally met and the negotiations were going on. But the EU was not moving. And I saw the then Director General do something that I never saw before or after which was essentially to call out the EU in the public session and basically say you are continuing the book famine. If we can't make some progress here after we've gathered, and made so much progress and get to the finish line, it's going to be on you. And you can just feel the moment when the publishers and their representatives to the EU understood that they were getting ready to come under a very black cloud, so to speak. So it was really one of those wonderful turning moments right in the middle of that week. And then things fairly quickly came to a close, but it was at least a 20 maybe even a 25-year process. So I try to think about what I think our first Copyright Treaty for libraries was only introduced in 2005 or 2006 I think we first began to shop it around. So if you're taking a long view and compare it to what happened with the blind, where we're doing okay. We have to take solace. Sara:  So it's interesting because you are pointing out that the only folks that really have a voice at these treaty discussions are official representatives. So how are the publishers then getting their voices heard? Is this through independent meetings? Do they come to the meeting as an observer? How are they involved? Winston: Yes. Well, they're involved in exactly the same way we are. So one thing I will say about the standing committee on copyright or related rights is very open to NGOs that wanted to come. Usually the very first agenda item after adoption of the agenda is the addition of new members. And so we've never had a problem about that. So we're often actually seat them side-by-side with the publishers that are all as usual people from the licensing agencies. I'm sorry. It's been so long since I was actually there. But we're all sitting there together, representatives from all the NGOs with our label in front of us. Almost always, member states are invited to speak first, and then if there's time, then we will be invited to speak. And I will say, I think we've been treated very fairly. When I put my light on saying I want to speak, I'm almost always the first or one of the very first people who is invited to make what we call an intervention. Sara:  Okay, so. they're there talking with the EU. They're also participating in the group discussions. That makes perfect sense. So, after Marrakesh, where do you see the SCCR headed? What is the next kind of issue that's on the horizon? Winston: Well, the very biggest issue that's on the horizon and the longest there is a broadcasting treaty. So there are basically right now two major issues before the SCCR. There are a few others that are kinda crept in, like the Russians wanting to have theater stage directors rights. But the two topics that are given, roughly four out of the five days, more or less evenly divided are the treaty on broadcasting and then the treaty for libraries, archives, and museums. That one has been under discussion. It was under discussion the first time I went, and it is still under discussion. Glacial progress is made. Then one of the things I need to be clear about another oddity or feature of the SCCR is that regime change really matters. So you can be moving along very nicely and suddenly a country's regime changes. This happened to us very explicitly with Brazil. We had two very, very strong supporters from the Brazilian copyright office working with us very closely who were advocating for us, and would often introduce articles or motions that were in our favor. And one day we were there and they had this panic came across their faces. We found out the regime had changed. They had been summoned home. And the next people who came from Brazil had no interest in library. So that's a whole other reason that it takes so long to get things done because you develop relations and then those people vanish. Another problem is that people who are there usually, not for the United States, for example, who really do come from our federal agencies, but most of the people representing countries there are the ambassador of that country to the United Nations in Geneva. And so they don't have any copyright expertise. There may be meetings that are going on across town, one of the other United Nations agencies, so they may have to divide their time. And of course, as is true with diplomats, they usually have a two or three-year posting. So it's been a constant reeducating for the people who are actually representing the countries and have the vote. So that's another factor that complicates what actually makes speed and possible. We're in the constant educational mode, which is enjoyable from one of view, because you are training people. But it's really sad when you see someone who's really been a strong, fervent supporter from one of the country's depart. And you know, you may not get a good replacement. And you have to start all over again. Sara: It's curious to me that the strong supporter doesn't then talk to their replacement. Because it seems to me that the education could be within the organization instead of from the other participants. Does that ever happen or is that pretty rare? Winston: It does happen and I  could name examples. I won't necessarily here, but there are countries where that has definitely happened. But again, these people are diplomats who aren't necessarily in copyright. They may have much more concerned about human rights, which is across the street, or international trade, which is down the road. So they don't necessarily think that this is even an important topic as compared to others that they would really highlight as putting up the top of the list for their successor. Sara: Well, that makes sense, but it's also seems like it's unfortunate for those folks who are invested. And when you're talking about libraries and archives, are you talking about the ongoing discussions about how we have, for instance, in the United States, exceptions for libraries and archives for preservation is that they issue because I understand Kenny Crews wrote a report years ago for WIPO, kind of outlining the world and how different countries have different laws on this topic. Winston: Yeah. Well, I would say there are three major things that have been wonderful for libraries during the time that I have been working at SCCR. The first one I already talked about was Marrakech. From beginning we're able to see the end of that. The second was that we were invited by the WIPO secretariat in 2003 or 2004, fairly early on in the time that I became engaged, we told them one of the things that was really, really difficult for all of us to know, actually, what were the conditions at all the member states. And WIPO is quite eager and willing to fund nonpartisan kind of activities. And so they asked us to suggest three or four people who might be able to undertake such a study. We put Kenny at the top of our list. I think at the time he was still a Columbia as the copyright librarian. He was engaged to undertake this work, but he did, and it was published. And he was invited to come and do a presentation for, I think a half-day and take questions from the member states about it. So it was the very first time I think there was ever one central place where you could go to see, well how many countries actually have an interlibrary loan provision. About a decade later, WIPO asked Kenny, if he would update that study, which he did. And it's on the SCCR website and has become very, very useful for all of us and providing data that we can actually use, both in our oral presentations that we make, but also in our meetings with the various regional groups. So if I could take another kind of a side note, one of the things I didn't mention, that's also an interesting factor of how we work as a group. Each region has a group, there's an African group, there's a Latin American, Caribbean group, and so on. There is also what's called group B. Which is really the European Union, Canada, the United States. So it's going to be the more developed countries or in a group. And then there's a small subset of the countries of the former Soviet Union and China as its own group, but indicates what we often do both before we get to Geneva, but also while we are there is to arrange meetings with these groups. So quite often at seven o'clock, on a Wednesday morning, we're going in and sitting down with all the representatives from the African countries and talking with them about not only what we want in general, but about what the situation is in those countries. And we've tried with some success to always have a librarian from one of those countries with us because people really prefer to hear someone from Algeria talking about what Africa needs more than they do about someone for the United States. So that's been a wonderful way of making inroads. But again, all of those groups have a one-year term for the chair. So you may have a year when you've got someone from Algeria who loves libraries. The next year? You may get someone from Togo, has no interest at all and doesn't even want to have the library group come and talk to them necessarily. So that's another thing that this constantly changing in interactions with people, because the people changed and then the roles change as well. But anyway, the whole study that was done by Kenny. I think that was one of the most useful things the SCCR has done, and that was our recommendation, but at their expense with something that is still very, very proud of. Sara: You mentioned also there's turnover of the Secretary General. And you also mentioned how instrumental the secretary at was in getting the Marrakesh Treaty past. Does it depend a lot on who that person is? Winston: Yes, it definitely does. And I think what happened with the Marrakesh treaty is that there's a 10-year term of the Director-General and that person's term was coming toward the end. And it's very unusual for that person to be reappointed. So he knew he's going home to Australia. And I think that really made it maybe easier from a practical sense to really press as he did. The good news for us is that we had as the most, the former chair of the standing committee on copyright, the copyright office of Singapore works. And when it came time to choose a new Director General, he was chosen out of several different applicants. So we now have at the top level, within the World Intellectual Property Organization, someone who is himself a copyright specialist, has direct experience of having lead the SCCR for a five-year term. He has continued to be very, very supportive of us. Sara: And what year is he now and his tenure term? Winston: I think it may be so hard to remember anything during COVID. I think it's the fourth year or maybe the fifth, something, something like that, but maybe four years. I think. He also has been very instrumental in helping us get one thing done. The last big thing that I'm really particularly proud of because it is tangible, and that is the preparation is something called the preservation toolkit. So during COVID when meetings weren't being held but there was still hoping there can be some progress. I did reach out to the director general as well as to the Assistant Secretary General who's working in the copyright arena to see if there wasn't something we can do in the preservation. Because that seemed to be something that everyone understood was a problem. But not every country you really has the authority to do copying even for preservation purposes. So what eventually happened was that they said, well, why don't we prepare a toolkit? And that term is extremely important because within the odd way in which WIPO works, a toolkit, didn't require the approval of all the member states. It didn't have to be discussed with the member states, doesn't have to be adopted by the member states. It's a tool that countries may use or not use. So that's why it was able to proceed. Something's better than nothing. I think in this environment. And I'm especially happy we did it because of some of the things that have happened in the course of the preparation of it. Things like the war, Ukraine, things like floods, things like fires, and the National Library of South Africa and the museum and Rio has really made it very clear that if you don't do some preemptive preservation, it's too late and it needs to be cross-border If it's truly gonna be preservation. So the secretary did commission representatives from each of our sectors, libraries, archives, and museum, to prepare this toolkit that has been prepared. And it is going to be presented on-site reading in Geneva at the very end of this month. I'm so sad I'm not able to go to this effect because it exactly coincides with my retirement dinner. So I really didn't have much of a choice about it, but by the end of September, this will have been released, introduced and then we, as librarians at our friends at the archives and museum world, can begin promoting it and using it. We hope that will at least be able to get preservation provisions in national law as well as kind of moving us, we hope toward international instrument at some point that really deals with the cross-border issues. Sara: That sounds like really important work, especially given as you mentioned, all the disasters we've been having. And we're going to have more with natural disasters and fires. And I mean, you name it right. Hurricanes. I think climate change is really threatening our collections and our collective memory institutions. Winston: We keep making the point that after the things are gone, they kept the preserved. It seems so obvious, but this need that you don't have to even prove at this point that something is deteriorating. You just need to be able to get copies of it somewhere that are safe. And that requires that it be at a different location. Maybe ideally multiple locations, even if it's just about to find out at some point, how many is enough? One thing I didn't really mention at the beginning, I should have, because it's a really important part of our collaboration. When we first began, it was libraries. And we actually drafted something we called TLAB the Treaty for Libraries Archives and Museums. And I was really happy working with archives and museums over time that we were able to get them engaged with us as well. So we now have a draft treaty called TLAB treaty for libraries, archives, and museums. And the three entities work very, very closely as we saw with the development of the presentation toolkit. But there was one representatives from each of the sectors that were very much involved in preparation of that. So that's a great step forward as well. I think that thinking about how libraries, archives, and museums are much more alike than they are different and we worked together, not separately or against one another. Sara: Yeah. And I think your point about the many copies is really important because it's not only that you've made the copy which is important, that's a first step. But then if that copy is held on-site and the site is destroyed, you still don't have the copy. So, the cross-border issue really seems central. And I hope that we're able to make some progress on that, too. Winston: I think that it's a fairly, fairly easy within SCCR contexts, it's kinda crazy to say, but I can imagine getting instrument that provides for the preservation. I think the hardest part is going to be about the access part. One of the things we keep saying there needs to be able to be access. You can't just have something that was copied in Algeria and it's being housed in the library in Paris, but can never be open. So, at some point, there has to be reasonable trigger event that would enable the preserve work to actually used. And there are people who still are arguing, yes, but when that happens, there needs to be a fee. And that's it, kinda battle that we'll have to find with the people who want to monetize everything, but at least it's a step in the right direction. And even if we could get, each country has its own preservation provision, that would be a step forward in the right direction too. I think we forget in the United States how it was lucky we really are never entirely satisfied or will we ever be? But when I think about provisions that we have an compared to a lot of our counterparts, including the European Union, we actually are much better off with mitigate them. I think that's true and I think it's part of the reason that this work at, at the international level is so important is to really show that these provisions are important and that these provisions help libraries, archives, museums, and our patrons right to gain access to materials. I think that's something that the United States can really lead on. Well, we keep just saying our information is borderless. I mean, this whole idea that goes back to an era when a book was one place and then it might be the next. Just like that now and I think again with the passage of time and seeing how the Internet has developed and so on. People knowing their hearts, if that really is true, they may not want to get that embedded in a way that is really useful at the national or international level. But there's no denying that we have to be thinking about things not at national level, international level, because of the way in which information is created and shared and stored today. Sara: Very true. Well, this has been a really fascinating conversation. I've learned a lot and I hope the listeners appreciate it too. And congratulations on your well-earned retirement. It sounds like you are going to continue to do wonderful things. I look forward to many, many more years of your engagement with international copyright. Winston: Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed it, bye.

Sara Well is the Founder & CEO of Dropstat, an organization that solves staffing issues in hospital systems in a way that ensures safe patient care and delivers better outcomes. Today, Jeff and Sara discuss her truly unique journey from critical care trauma nurse to SaaS Founder. Sara highlights the risks associated with understaffed hospitals and healthcare centers, the value she places on taking care of her employees, and the benefits of being a founder with intimate internal knowledge of the industry.Episode SponsorSmall Fish, Big Pond – https://smallfishbigpond.com/ Use the promo code ‘SaaSFuel'Champion Leadership Group – https://championleadership.com/Key Takeaways01:05 – Jeff introduces today's guest, Sara Well, who joins the show to share her unique two-phase journey from healthcare to tech11:13 – How short staffing impacts patient care16:16 – How Dropstat is helping to solve the critical issue of short staffing in healthcare27:53 – Benefits of being a founder with intimate internal knowledge of the industry and challenges Sara has encountered throughout her journey36:42 – Jeff takes a moment to thank one of today's sponsors, Champion Leadership Group37:15 – Sara's proudest accomplishment as a founder and the importance of valuing your team44:30 – How Sara balances everything that goes into running her own company47:13 – Best practices Sara implements to improve as a leader48:45 – The value mentors have provided to Sara54:39 – Is access to capital different for female founders than it is for male founders?1:00:32 – How Sara persuaded initial investors1:02:08 – The most crucial lessons Sara has learned from her experience as a founder1:05:10 – Advice Sara would give to her younger self1:06:48 – Jeff thanks Sara for joining the show and lets listeners know where to learn more about DropstatTweetable Quotes“My downtime was all focused on what's happening in the markets and learning about how the leading companies are solving problems and making decisions.” (07:52) (Sara)“Every time you give a nurse more patients than what's called the ‘Safe Staffing Ratio,' assuming they're all critical care patients, each patient has a seven percent increased risk of mortality.” (12:04) (Sara)“The way that we help solve this solution is we created the first total staffing supply chain management product. So, the typical process is, ‘I can't find staff. There's a number of solutions. I'm going to call or ‘textuade.' If that fails, I will go to two-sided marketplaces or expensive, outsourced staffing companies, or I'll hire travel staff. Dropstat says, ‘Hold on a second. You have an entire inventory that you not even accessed.” (17:57) (Sara)“When you have better staffing, that is the most cost efficient decision that you could make. You're driving revenue. You're driving better reported quality of care. And, today, patient satisfaction scores actually drive the reimbursement for hospitals.” (24:37) (Sara)“I think a huge challenge in this staffing shortage is also going to be - not even so much the pay - it's going to be a lot of how do we build a culture that really nourishes people.” (35:31) (Sara)“We're constantly creating ourselves as leaders. And, we're constantly building the team around us as well. The leaders that we were yesterday shouldn't, ideally, be the leaders we are tomorrow.”...

Sara: Welcome to another episode of Copyright Chat. Today I have a special guest and member of the ALA Policy Core. I, too,  am a member of policy core cohort three, and so is my guest today Timothy Vollmer welcome Timothy. Tim: Thanks for having me on. Sara: And so, I'll call you Tim for short because that's what I usually call you and Tim and I had met each other previous to becoming members of the policy core through copyright circles. I know Tim works at University of California Berkeley, with Rachel Sandberg and Tim, why don't you tell us a little bit about what you do there and and your previous work history. Tim: Yeah, sure thing. well I'm the scholarly communication and copyright librarian at UC Berkeley, and we have an office that helps scholars, understand, copyright law, the publishing process. We also deal a lot with various intellectual property and information policy issues that come up in, you know, teaching and research and an academic writing. So, we intersect a lot with copyright challenges copyright concerns that researchers have probably some of the same things that you experience working at a large academic institution. But before I was here at Berkeley. I also worked for Creative Commons for several years. And I'm sure a lot of your listeners are somewhat familiar with Creative Commons. This is a nonprofit organization that provides free copyright licenses for sharing all types of creative works, and the licenses really help provide increase sharing on more open terms, then you know the default. all rights reserved. Copyright regime. And I've also worked actually with the American Library Association, a long time ago, I was a Technology Policy Analyst at the ALA Washington office. And there we did a lot of research, and also policy advocacy on technology and other legal issues that are relevant to libraries. So thinking about things like intellectual property and copyright issues. Broadband policy, and also like organizing and educating alien members on copyright issues that come up in our library work. And then as you mentioned, I've been a part of the a la policy core, and we're part of this. The third year the third cohort. Sara: Well, it sounds like you've had a variety of interactions with the library community over the years and also the copyright community so it seems like a perfect fit for your current position, and obviously we were both drawn to the ALA policy core. And I personally was really interested in doing more advocacy with the United States Copyright Office, and just getting to know how to make an impact on policy nationwide because, of course, so much of what we do as librarians, is to try to get access to information for our patrons and copyright is one of those ways right that we try to get access is, people think of it, a lot of times as a barrier, but I think of it as kind of one of those ways of means of access right through a lot of different ways sex, you know copyright exception section one await of the Copyright Act and fair use and things of that nature. But I wonder what drew you into deciding to join the policy core. Tim: Yeah, some of the same reasons for you. I think there's oftentimes like a public conception that copyright is like a bad or like a negative thing, but in my work, you know, working with the LA Creative Commons and now working in a library. I think our role is really to educate and push on our users to exercise their copyrights and then flex their copyright muscles because because oftentimes, there are like you say limitations and exceptions such as fair use, and we need and are able to take advantage of these. And it's an important thing that we can work on together with regard to the alien policy core. I've really wanted to learn how to become a better advocates around a lot of different library issues especially some of the issues that we deal with on a day to day basis, you know, working in academic libraries. So, looking into ways that we can help push for improvements and updates to copyright law. I'm looking at digitization issues. Access to research issues, open access publishing those types of things. But I also wanted to get the more sort of plugged into policy issues, and other advocacy work for different types of libraries which I don't have that much experience with. I did start out working in a public library and also worked at the Wisconsin State Law Library and those are really interesting jobs as well but I kind of wanted to know how to advocate better for for other types of libraries as well and see how we can contribute to those space spaces. Um, so as a policy core has really provided a kind of a broad overview on how to do that and it also incorporate many different types of librarians and library workers so of course you and I are working in college and research libraries, but there's a a broad spectrum of other people so we have school librarians and people who are working in public libraries. And people are working in community libraries, those types of things. So I think the policy core has really given me and this is sort of what I wanted out of it, a better understanding of not only the issues, the policy issue that those libraries sort of encounter, but how we can work together to advocate for better outcomes. Better funding better public policy outcomes for all types of libraries. Sara: That's a really great point and I often when I teach about copyright at the high school at the University of Illinois. A lot of my students are surprised when they realize just how much copyright will impact their work right as, for instance, a school librarian or a public library and I mean copyright is kind of one of those all inclusive topics and so it has really given, both of us I think an opportunity to grow our network and to kind of understand what the different areas are that different people are struggling with through the pandemic there's been a lot of funding issues, there's been a lot of broadband issues. And it's been really interesting to kind of learn what people are handling right now and and and it seems like right now there's also a lot of fights ago about freedom of information and right you know different books that are on the shelves that maybe parents don't want to see on the shelves in a children's library or a school library so there been so many different issues that we've been hearing about which has been really interesting. Tim: Yeah, you're totally right like issues around intellectual freedom around broadband access for libraries, these are ones obviously that maybe you and I don't deal with on a day to day basis but it's important to be able to advocate for them, and with them for other library workers and other libraries as well. Sara: Yeah. And so we have the opportunity. Not too long ago to go to Washington DC and to have a face to face meeting with our cohort of course our cohort began in the middle of Kovats so normally we would have done that much earlier but I thought that was one of the most useful parts of our training because we learned some really fascinating. Media techniques right and we're kind of putting the hot seat with, you know, pretend that you're doing like a video interview right now and what what is this going to look like. I found that really challenging but also really interesting and helpful in terms of training and I've had some similar training here at University of Illinois but I felt like this was even more targeted because the folks doing the training or media specialist. What did you find to be a kind of the most rewarding part of your training as part of the policy core. Tim: Yeah, um, I will say that media training was a little bit outside of my comfort zone, I guess, but I really appreciate that we were able to do it, especially in the context of understanding how to best communicate a message with the decision maker or a member of Congress, or with the media because crafting a clear, concise, usually short message about a policy topic that you're advocating for is really crucial. You know, one thing I was actually involved with last year as a part of the policy Corps was doing a virtual Hill meeting with a staffer on on library funding issue so we were advocating for an increase in a library funding. And, you know, one thing that was really interesting and important to know about in this meeting was really short, it was like a 10 minutes, like zoom meeting with a staffer and something that we talked about going into the meeting as we were as we were kind of building up. What we wanted to talk about and how we wanted to deliver it it was like the understanding that a lot of these staffers. They cover, you know, 10 issues or more. And maybe library is just one of them, or maybe they only deal with library issues in their capacity as someone who's involved in education. So, sort of understanding that we need to craft a very sort of deliberate and concise message about the policy ass, or the policy issue that we're talking about, is really important so that was one of the most interesting pieces from like the media training that I sort of took took took away from it, but also lots of other great sort of tips around how to, how to host like events, how to get your message out in a variety of different forms so obviously it's not all just meeting with legislators, it's about creating campaigns and doing social media and thinking about sort of online messaging. And I know we do a lot of that sort of in our work as well. And then, you know, kind of talking a little bit more broadly with regards to the policy core and maybe some of our issues. There are a lot of different ways that we can we can advocate, you know, one of them is talking with policymakers and entering into conversations and relationships with staffers that deal with intellectual property and library issues. But another thing that you mentioned earlier is dealing with institutions like the corporate office, because a lot of, not necessarily policymaking, but a lot of public input and advocacy actually runs through groups like the copyright office. So looking at the various sort of ways and venues for advocacy around library and copyright issues, is something that's been good for me it's particularly with regard to the policy car, and I think it's been good for other people as well, just to kind of understand where are the leavers that we can pull and push to get better outcomes for my library policies. Sara: Yeah. and when you were mentioning the day on the hill I participated in that as well the virtual one and it was really tempting when meeting with a staffer to just jump right into like. Here are the 5 million things that our library has done for you, you know, and here are the things that we need for the community and to continue doing this. But Shawnda Hines from a la policy was in my meeting one of my meetings and instead of law, allowing us to kind of launch in she, she started with a question, and she said to the staffer. What is your experience in libraries, do you have a library card, and it was amazing because the response to the staffer was, oh I worked in a library all through college. So not only, you know, almost, almost everyone I won't say everyone but almost everyone has been to their library right so they have some experience, but this woman had more than the average amount of experience when she had been in the library, every single day working behind the scenes and really knew the struggles of the library and was a real, true library supporter and so after that, after that knowledge, it was so easy to have that conversation because she was she said right off the bat I worked in. I worked in the library all through college and I really love libraries and I really support them. And it's like okay so you're on our side like you know, you don't have to do this hard sell here, you know, and it's still important to like make your points but it was really key to make that emotional connection with her because I think that if you just forget about that, then you don't hear what their personal story is their personal connection, you might miss that golden opportunity right because if you're if you're looking for funding for a specific thing maybe they have experienced with that thing right I mean, right now, the issue is broadband for a lot of libraries right because students from school, potentially don't have internet. Well, guess what, what if the staffer you're talking to grew up in a rural area. What if they had no internet at their house like they would have a personal connection to what you're talking about and you would never know that. And so you really want to make that connection if you can. And I think, you know, one of the things that I learned also during that time Shonda spoke with us at the policy core training and said, You know, there's a fine line between, you know, people kind of treating libraries as, like, Oh, that's so cute. You're the library, you know, versus like you're a serious part of our society right so you don't you don't want to make it like, oh, didn't you go to story time when you were five, you know it's not a library story but like to understand that we that librarians and libraries really have an impact on our society, and that we need to fund them because if we don't students can't necessarily go to school or students aren't going to learn or, or, you know, if you don't have that access. You may not learn about science, or some other area that that you know you could have a future doctor who really doesn't have access to these types of books at their school and comes to the library and read about it, or who knows what the experience might be right. I know I read about a, an astronaut who grew up, and he was just tied to his local library right and always reading about like outer space and just had this big dream and became an astronaut one day I mean, these are the kinds of things that libraries can do. And, but trying to really make, make it real for somebody and I think so starting with that human element. To me, that was a really great lesson not to just launch into the logic, because we all just want to start with like here's why we need this money, you know, right, right. But if we can connect with them on a human level like on a personal level, it's going to make it a lot easier. Tim: Yeah. Right on. Another thing I was thinking about is, um, you're right and asking those probing questions and trying to connect with policymakers on a personal and emotional level is really key, but also doing our homework as well so how did have how have they voted in the past, around library issues. What have they supported what have they been maybe not so great on sort of understanding their history a bit with with libraries and and pulling those things up and having that those data points on hand is really helpful going into these meetings with decision makers. Another thing that we did, which I think is really important in any sort of advocacy meeting and ask is coming, prepared with local data and stories and impact. So, you know, in the meeting with the legislative staffer for representative Lee in my district, I talked a little bit about how the Oakland Public Library, which is, you know, the city where I live in how they were making content available and services available during the pandemic and pulling out two or three or four top things that they were working on, which could and should require more funding to continue. So coming up with those local stories and hearing from people on the ground is really important. In addition to, you know, really communicating the importance of funding or improving policies for libraries more generally. Sara: Yeah, that's very true having those data points but also those stories of like real life scenarios. During the pandemic despite my being a copyright librarian who never does circulation, I was actually working in circulation, because we were kind of all hands on deck. I mean, we had a lot of folks who couldn't come in at all due to, you know, underlying medical conditions or family members with underlying medical conditions like before we have the vaccine available. And we really had a call to the whole library saying you know who can come in and help so I had, I learned how to do some circulation, you know, which was really good and and and it really gave me some sort of knowledge of, you know, on the ground, of what my colleagues go through on a day to day basis but it also gave me that crucial contact with patrons because I was really missing that interaction. And so, you know, the pandemic really gave us an opportunity to like change our skill set a little bit, and to also like get to know our other colleagues like I don't normally work in circulation so I don't necessarily know all my colleagues in circulation and so I got the opportunity to kind of spend time with them and to learn our patrons a little bit more and see what they were you know what their needs were. So I think that there are a lot of stories like that and the public libraries really were doing tremendous thing, you know, this is an academic library but the public libraries to we're doing tremendous things during the pandemic right to keep to keep everybody reading and keep everybody engaged because really like we couldn't for for quite some time in Illinois we couldn't leave our house. So, you know, if the students couldn't get on the internet and if you couldn't, you know, read books at your house, then you really didn't have a lot to do, and especially education wise. So I think those stories are really important, I think you're right. And I really valued getting to know you know some different levels of service and different people in the library too. So, I guess one. I wanted to change the topic a little bit and talk about you know what we've done. Copyright wise, since we've been a member of the policy core. And one of the big issues that still isn't resolved, is the CASE opt out for libraries you want to tell us a little background about that and how we were engaged with that. Tim: Sure, so maybe to back up a little bit. So, the CASE Act passed at the end of 2020 and C stands for the Copyright Alternative to Small Claims Enforcement Act. And this was a law and the aims of the law was to provide an alternative venue for copyright holders to pursue smaller dollar copyright infringement cases, instead of filing a federal copyright law suit which costs a lot of money, typically, and can take a really long time. And so, the case act sets up this copyright claims board that sits within the corporate office. And the point of this copyright claims board is to adjudicate these smaller copyright infringement proceedings. And we should note that these proceedings are voluntary. So if you have a claim brought against you. So if someone accuses you of infringing their copyright and wants to take you before the copyright claims bar, you don't have to agree to go through that venue, you can opt out as an individual. And that's a really important feature of this law. And this is a from a library perspective, we see it it says concerning law for variety of reasons. So, one thing, thinking about copyright and how copyright interacts with libraries and with researchers. We know that researchers and teachers, they leverage these limitations and exceptions to cart braid all the time like fair use. So, you know, researchers use images or copyrighted content within their own original research, because we all know that scholarship builds on the works of others and there are important limitations to cooperate that allows faculty and researchers to be able to do this. But sometimes that might not be communicated to rights holders, you know. So, what we see coming out of this case that would be possibly, you know rights holders brain these infringement actions against, you know, a scholarly researcher, because they think the scholarly researcher improperly used a piece of copyrighted content when in fact, perhaps a scholarly researcher was including that content under one of their rights under copyright like fair use. So, there's a big concern that when this copyright claims bar actually gets up and running. Are we going to have a ton of claims being brought against researchers or even students for incorporating copyrighted content under fair use in their research and teaching, and what are the implications of that going to be, you know, of course the limits on what the monetary damages within the case act and within this copyright claims or are some are a lot less than what they would be with a normal federal copyright lawsuit, but they're, they're not nothing You know, there's a cap of $30,000 per infringement proceeding and another that's nothing to sneeze at. So, one way that this CASE Act is concerning is that you know it might be, it might be a chilling effect for researchers they might think twice about incorporating others copywriting content into their scholarship, if they're afraid that they're going to be brought before this copyright claims board for use that should be covered under fair use. But another piece of that is concerning is during the implementation. So, the Copyright Office has been engaging in NPR, and then NPR m sound stands for a notice of proposed rulemaking. And these are things where the corporate offices looking for feedback from the public on how a particular law should be implemented. So, the corporate office has issued several, several of these NPR around the case act, about how it should be implemented, once it actually is up and running. And one thing that was up concerned for library is it for libraries is that while libraries and archives institutions can preemptively opt out of this. What it doesn't extend to our library workers so workers like you and I, who are working within libraries and we deal with copyrighted content on a daily basis, you know, we provide information and guidance around digitization projects, we're involved with things like interlibrary loan, we deal with copyrighted works. So what the NPR and was asking for is. We know that libraries and archives as institutions are opted out, but they held in their, in their first sort of draft of this. Well, we're not going to provide that, that, that opt out for library workers, And we thought, and a lot of libraries are on country thought that this could be a very negative way to pursue for the copyright claims board because us working with copyrighted content on a daily basis. We provide education. What we don't want is library workers to be dragged before the copyright claims board for infringement claims for things that we know and we are operating in good faith, under our limitations and exceptions to copyright. So maybe you want to talk a little bit more about sort of the advocacy and how we organize around that aspect. Sara: Yeah, so we saw the proposed rule come out and it basically said that even though, as you said, the library can opt out preemptively and basically just opt out once and say, You know where this library is not going to participate in these. Small Claims Act cases. They, the US Copyright Office, read the CASE Act as only applying to libraries and not to their employees and kind of did so under an agency, sort of analysis saying, well, this is, you know, the employees can still be liable, potentially, it's just saying that there's no like vicarious liability here for their lawyer, and my reaction to that was that that doesn't make any sense right just because the reality is that libraries do not do the work, the work on a daily basis of the libraries is done through their employees, and therefore if you don't want to hold libraries liable. You shouldn't hold their employees liable. It makes no sense to me right. It's like basically don't go after the deep pockets here at the Library, which doesn't even have that big of pockets but go after the, you know, staff member who made the copy that doesn't make any sense. And I really don't think that that's what Congress intended. When they enacted the case act and so what we did was the LA policy core members Tim and myself and Carla and along with la kind of came up with this, this, this letter that folks could use if they wanted to submit it to the copyright act in response to their proposed rule, and it was just a form letter but allowed folks to put in their individual, you know position their name and what they do that, that gives them concern. So for instance, I said you know I'm a copyright librarian at the University of Illinois. And if you are going to enforce this against me in the scope of my employment, that's a problem because I deal with copyright every day. This is my job right I have to make you know various determinations for my own news I provide folks with information about copyright. And so, you know, I could get 10 of these notices every day, you're going to get sued every day. And so the reality is it would really stifle me from doing my job. And so a lot of folks responded in fact the Copyright Office still has not issued their final rule on this and said that they had thousands of these notices because one of the notices from library futures had an Excel spreadsheet with thousands of responses and there were at least 135, I think, responses so they got a lot of feedback from librarians, basically saying this is not going to. This is not a good thing. Right. I wanted, I still think the door is open. If Congress really feels that they the Copyright Office got it wrong to come through and say, No, you know, they I guess they could amend the case act and say, no, this really means also employees. I did reach out to Senator Durbin, from Illinois, saying hi Senator Durbin I know you supported the case act but you couldn't have possibly meant that this doesn't apply to library employees right and trying to put it on his radar because I know the final rule isn't out yet but if the final rule does still apply. If the Copyright Office says it does still apply to library employees within the scope of their employment. Then I really think my next step is going to be to talk to Congress and say, Is this really what you meant because I don't think so. Well, I still hold out a little bit of hope that we made some progress with our arguments. And our common sense to the copyright office but we haven't heard back yet. So what do you think Tim. Tim: Yeah, I think you touched on a lot of good points there, um, one thing. Well, first off, I mean I'm really glad that the corporate office has issued these NPR M's because it does provide a public venue for citizens and organizations to provide feedback and commentary on how our particular this particular law should be implemented. And that is important, and the Copyright Office, there are reading these you know so it's great that we have this venue. And you mentioned that there are a variety of different ways to respond. Like so. Some of some organizations such as the library. Copyright Alliance. Individual universities and libraries I know from the, from speaking from the University of California. We submitted a letter, which was signed on but I think almost all of the UC schools, talking about what the negative repercussions of including library workers as subject to these proceedings would be, and we provide very detailed and specific examples, and also talked about the legal aspects of it, like you mentioned, have some discussion around this idea of agency law, so that you know if the library itself is able to opt out, why isn't the library able to delegate that opt out to those who are working for it. So on the one hand, we have institutions and schools, writing detailed responses to the CRM. And also we have the public who are able to provide individual stories like you and others, and and also just anyone can can file a response to this NPR. So it's important to kind of like, hit it at multiple levels, because the corporate office is reading these. It's good that we've provided detailed responses. And it also good that we're hearing from the public, and from those workers that it's going to affect. Another reason that this is really important is that you know the CASE Act has been around for a few years, but only at the end of 2020 and did it gets pushed through into becoming a law. And the way it did that was attached to a gigantic piece of spending legislation. And this is very problematic because there's not really any opportunity then to have some back and forth and to have feedback from the communities that it was going to affect you kind of got pushed through at the last hour before the end of the year, along with a ton of other bills. And there was not that much opportunity for libraries and library workers to comment that that point. So it's good that we can use some of these NPR on processes to lay out the issues and lay out how we think they should be improved, especially for the Ah, so we're going to keep our eyes open for that final rule and see, see where that goes. I mean I would read a huge sigh of relief, if, if we were able to sway the copyright office, and if they do find that when a library ops out its employees are also opting out. But if not, like I said, then, you know, I will still feel that there's some, some advocacy work to be done with with Congress and to say, Hey, is this what you meant because you have the ultimate word of what you met on the other side of that though. You know there is still work going on behind the scenes to challenge the the court or the board claims board when it does start hearing cases as unconstitutional. So there are a lot of things going on here and it's, nothing's going to get resolved, super quickly. I would say that this is one of those things we need we all need to keep an eye on because as things progress, we'll know more and more and we will will need to kind of react to those changing environment. So it's a good thing to have to be aware of. It's a good thing to keep track of. And, you know, I believe that the, they will start hearing actual claims in around June, at the latest that seemed like that was what they were doing so well I'm thinking going to start hearing some of these final rulings coming out very soon. Another thing that we're doing, and I'm sure you are and other schools as well is doing a little bit of education around what this law means and what does it mean. So for our library users or our university, communities, if we were to receive one of these claims notices. Of course we know that everyone has the ability to opt out. But it's really going to be up to the individual. To determine that but we know that libraries can help provide education around some of these copyright policy issues on our campuses and we're starting to do that right now. And also being in communication with our legal departments within the universities because they're going to probably want to know about these things as well, you know to what extent, our faculty or students or researchers, getting these notices. What are they going to do about them and how can we provide education, you know with the knowledge that we can't really provide legal advice but how can you provide education to help our communities make good decisions about what this means and how they might want to proceed. Sara: And that's a really good point there so we, you know, as, as you mentioned, Tim. This is going to be an issue for for everyone really whether or not the libraries, and their employees can opt out because we've still got scholars and students and other folks who could potentially be sued. The other issue is that it does exempt. At least University of Illinois writ large because it's a it's a government or state institution, which seems to kind of go hand in hand with sovereign immunity, where, you know, the University of Illinois cannot be sued for copyright infringement in federal court, either due to sovereign immunity. But then it leaves the question of what about the employees of the university within the scope of their employment, how does that work out. And so there are still some questions that really don't have great answers. And it's very similar to the library opting out, and the employees, maybe being on the hook what's, what do we have what happens when the professor is in a similar situation so it'll be really interesting. I mean from from a standpoint of like a lawyer, right it's kind of interesting to see this play out and see these cases go forward but from a standpoint as a librarian it's a little frightening, to be honest with you because I would not want a patron say faculty member to come to me and say I just got this, you know, what do I do, and then oh I got this two months ago I forgot to opt out now I have to go. You know, and then see what happens it's like that would be scary and not a fun experience so yes we definitely need to educate folks so that they do know if they can opt out and figure out why they might want to opt out versus go through. I mean, in my opinion, and this is not legal advice but I would, I would opt out every time I mean, I'm not sure why would go to this board, and you know willingly. Because, you know, federal court is much harder for them. There is, it's harder for the plaintiff and there's a lot more they have to pay and go through. So, I'm not sure what what would motivate someone to go to the small claims court I'll be interesting to see what types of cases end up there, although that scares me to that some of the claims that end up there the folks who, you know, didn't really pay attention to the notice and it just laughs and then all of a sudden, they have they have to go. I don't like that idea, because, to me that's not really voluntary that's just like I didn't really pay attention. Right, but I'm thinking that's going to be some of the cases unfortunately because that's that happens in, you know, in regular court too is you get what's called a default judgment because the other person just never shows up. And, and that can be good for the plaintiff but it's that's never going to be good for the defendant and if they are professors or students. Tim: That's not good. I wouldn't like, I would not like to see that happening so yeah i think one possible mitigating factor is, it seems like the law and the corporate office has been doing some due diligence, about what gets put into these notices and making sure that they are official, they are served using the how other things are served on people so sending you a notice through the mail, sending a bottle up notice within that 60 day window if you didn't get the first one, it'll be interesting to see actually how it plays out. But hopefully there are some of those measures that are set up that will allow people to be able to have information to make those decisions. Before that 60 day window runs out because you're right. Otherwise, we're just going to have a lot of default judgments because people are going to be like well what is this and is this just spam or as am I being trolled here I don't know so that's all uh to be determined yet. Well, and even in, even in quote unquote regular court right default note default judgments happen, and even there where you have to show proof of service right that you know they were personally served and and the the notices are very clear and, you know, you have to do this and answer within 20 days and whatever folks still don't get their act, gather all the time. Now of course you can't opt out. In that instance like you know you have to show up it's like, no, don't even do anything it's like they just sit there then they get a default judgment so I'm a little concerned and I'm especially concerned I'll tell you about students, because I do think professors I think professors if they get this notice like, yeah, they're probably going to try to figure out what to do. I could see a student just being busy and just thinking like, I'll deal with it later and then forgetting about it. Sara: I could see that happening. And that would bother me a lot if that's if that happened because I know some students will be right on top of it right and and finding out all the information they need to but but yeah I just will see maybe I would hope that, that, that people aren't just go, you know, raring to go and try to sue up as many students as possible I mean that just seems like a terrible outcome of this limit of this legislation which I do think some of their goal was to deal with, you know, photographers, for instance right who posts maybe some of their work on their website but other people are stealing it and things like that and I do understand that, you know, there are issues with folks who are saying, well, I I'm losing money but I don't have enough money to go to the federal court system. I think that's where they wanted, that's like the sweet spot where they wanted to get this legislation to hit but you know I really hope that it doesn't play out in a different way. And I know the legislation also I think you pointed out recently, to me at least was that there's kind of an anti trolling mechanism, kind of trying to prevent folks from just spam, you know suing everybody. Tim: Yeah, there was a there was a provision of one of the most recent NPR, that suggested that there be a cap by Bob, I believe, 10 claims, per year, per rights holder. So I think that that could help because I think one of the fears, when we saw this originally is. Well yeah, they're just going to be copyright trolls that are sending these like hundreds of them out, you know, and see what sticks against the wall or see which they can get default judgments on but if this actually does go through where there's an actual limit, I think that would go a long way into tamping down on some of the abuse that a lot of people have been critical of this process. Yeah, so I i hope that is the case and that we don't see an you know an abuse of the system. Sara: Well, it's been a really great chat we've had here and I want to respect our listeners time so they feel like they can, you know, go and do some advocacy on their own and one thing we learned through a la is tag, tag your congressperson tag your legislator, if you're doing something on Twitter. And it's you know about your local library doing something amazing, or you need funding for something or what have you tag folks on twitter, so that they see it. Tim: Yeah. Right on, I mean there's so many issues that are that are coming up over the next few years, relevant to copyright in libraries. I mean, we have controlled digital lending, we have a lot of these state ebook laws that are being challenged now. There are other things that will come up within the next year or two. So it's important to stay involved, it's important to to engage with decision makers and there's a variety of ways of doing that. We can do it through social media. We can do it through getting involved in organizations like like the ALA, we can subscribe to like legislative alerts. We can help out in some of the organizing that sort of new groups are doing, like library futures. And just follow along. There's a lot of ways that we can all work together and be involved in a lot of these policy and copyright issues that affect libraries. Sara: Yeah, and that's a great point because one of the things that we also learned it, and policy corps that it's not just about us right. I mean, we are learning these tools and we are going to, we are empowered to pass them along and and so I hope this episode kind of inspired listeners to get more involved in to follow their local legislators on Twitter and kind of see ways that they can advocate for libraries as well. So, and also obviously pay attention when a la has a policy alert and wants you to call your local senator or your local legislator, you know, give them a call because that's one of the ways that we can make an impact right.

You are tuned in to Copyright Chat. Copyright Chat is a podcast dedicated to discussing important copyright matters. Host Sara Benson, the copyright librarian from the University of Illinois, converses with experts from across the globe to engage the public with rights issues relevant to their daily lives. Sara: Welcome to a fun and exciting and unique episode of Copyright Chat. Today, I am here at the Copyright Conference at Miami University, live, creating an episode of Copyright Chat along with Will Cross. We've been talking about the Scholarly Communication Notebook and my podcast's involvement in it, in teaching and learning. And our audience has live, live polled, decided that what we're going to talk about today is potential liability under the CASE Act and sovereign immunity, which is a very timely topic. So I'm very excited to talk about this. There's a lot going on at the Copyright Office with the CASE Act and their proposed rules. So I would love to see if a member of our audience has a question they'd like to start us off with, about either sovereign immunity or the CASE Act. Yeah, someone just posted that the October 4th deadline is weighing heavily on them. It's September 29th and we have until October 4th to respond to the call for comment. Will, have you made any comment to the Copyright Office in response to that call? Will: That's a great question, Sara, and I wonder if it would be useful to give a very quick, like 30-second overview of the topic just so people know what they're thinking about. I see several hands raised as well. So I'll, I'll say that, that very quickly, yes, I've been involved with several, several groups including the EUIPO that I know you are part of as well, and Sara, you released a really nice ALA-sponsored resource in this area. So yeah, we've been thinking about this issue a lot. We did a webinar last week talking to a bunch of different librarians as well. So I see several hands raised. Sara: Yeah, I think Alvin, would you like to ask a question? Alvin: I work at a land-grant, and we should, should, enjoy sovereign immunity. Does that immunity extend to librarians and the scope of their job? Sara: That's a really good question. And, so, sovereign immunity generally would protect individuals who work there in the scope of their employment, at least protecting them from large damages. So I'll use an example. I think most of us on this call are aware of the Georgia State University case, right, where Georgia State was sued for their E-reserves policy, where they said that a flat percentage could be copied from a textbook for E-reserves use. And of course, we know that there's no flat percentage that equals a fair use. And the court actually said that at one point in the case, which was helpful to us copyright librarians. So, that doesn't mean that they're immune from suit. It does mean that they would be immune from the large damages, because that's what sovereign immunity protects, right, from copyright damages. So what they could obtain, in that instance, is an injunction, telling folks to stop doing whatever they're doing that is potentially violating the law. And that's what the plaintiffs, Oxford University Press was one of them in that case, sought. The word of caution about that case is, it lasted a really long time. So even though in the end there were no damages at stake, the case kind of went on and on, and of course, during that time, you incur attorney's fees and other things. So, and I would add as an aside, and someone posted in the chat also, under the CASE Act, state and federal governments are also immune from liability under the CASE Act, presumably following sovereign immunity. However, and one of the things that is a little unclear is, does that extend to employees? And it really should. But if you read the last US Copyright Office proposed rule, they made some really weird claims about agency law, which seemed to make a distinction and say, well, they didn't say employees when they talked about opting out, so maybe they aren't talking about employees when they're talking about state and federal governments? I don't know. I personally think that probably employees shouldn't be held liable under CASE Act either under principles of sovereign immunity, but as we all know, it doesn't prevent you, even in federal court from being sued. It prevents you from incurring damages. It would then say, okay, well, they have less incentive to sue you because they're not going to get those big statutory damages, but they could still sue you and go for an injunction. Will, that was a long answer. I'm going to let you clarify or add your two cents or correct me if I said anything wrong, cause Lord knows I do sometimes. Will: Well, there's two of us, so hopefully between the two of us we'll be okay. No, I think you said it really well. It's important at the outset to say that these are two, sort of parallel aspects of the law, that sovereign immunity specifically says if you are a public institution, a state institution, those damages are not available. But exactly as you say in Georgia State, the, the plaintiffs were not really interested in damages. They were interested in coercing people into accepting a blanket license, right? That was the endgame for them. So that's the first piece. The CASE Act is specifically the Small Claims Tribunal that you described, that is there, in theory because copyright lawsuits are so expensive and complicated, right? The number that's being thrown around a lot, is what, $276,000 or so, is what it costs to, just to basically begin a suit in federal court. So, so, that speaks to the, both the cost of suing somebody and potentially the cost of being sued, even if there are no damages, as those attorney's fees can certainly add up from there. The question then about whether individuals can either opt out or just say, “I'm an employee acting within the scope of my duty, I shouldn't even need to opt out. I'm, I am covered in this case under basic, sort of fundamental principles of agency law.” That, I think, is the heart of this, this comment that's coming up due October 4th, is how we think about library employees in that space. And I, and I think several people have said this and it's absolutely right. Libraries can't do anything without librarians, right? The, the building doesn't get up and walk around and scan books or whatever, right? It's the people doing the work. So, any sort of opt out or exception that said, “The library is immune from suit, but all the individual people can be sued.” is sort of illusory. It doesn't do anything useful, right? So, from my perspective, it's hard to make a good faith argument that librarians shouldn't be considered, sort of, protected by both sovereign immunity and the broad sort of limitations that the CASE Act provides as well, when they're acting within the scope of their employment. And we can have conversations about scope, scope of employment, and that sort of thing as well. But, but to me, that's the, that's the baseline piece of it. The other thing I wanted to say at this stage is it's important, I think, to articulate the sort of privileged nature of libraries and librarianship generally, that this is a core principle in copyright law, that what libraries do is society serving. It meets the mission of the progress clause. So, libraries have this whole, you know, set of copyright exceptions in Section 108. If you've ever put that weird notice on your photocopiers or scanners, that's what you were doing in that context. So, so not only is it a weird reading of agency law to say, “We want to protect the institution, but not any of the people doing the institution's work.” It also sort of flies in the face of the core policy judgment that Congress and the courts have made in terms of saying, “Libraries are really important. The work they do promotes the progress of science and the useful arts. We need to make sure they have the space to do that good work.” So that's, that's my soapbox that I was on for a long time. Sara: I get that. I think, whenever you engage in advocacy with a public body, right, you're not usually, your name is attached to it. And if you're stating what you do for a living and you know, you're, you're potentially letting them know what you do and why you do it. At my library, and this may not be true of others, my name is already out there and what I do is already out there, right? I'm listed very publicly. My resources, my library guides have my name on them, right? So, to me, it didn't raise any specter of liability that I wasn't already kind of dealing with. I think the title copyright librarian kind of indicates, oh yeah, I do have to make fair use assessments and people do come to me and ask questions about copyright information. Of course, I don't make other people's fair use assessments, but I guide them and empower them into making their own. I would say the person who posted here said that they are engaged in interlibrary loan. Again, I, I know what interlibrary loan is, right? That means that you are scanning copyright protected works. That's the nature of the job. And I think most people know that as well. And so to me, hopefully that doesn't really raise any additional liability on your part when you submit something. But of course, I can't promise that there aren't copyright trolls out there, right? Unfortunately, they already exist. I think the benefit in us submitting these comments is that we're trying to let the Copyright Office know that this will impact our daily work. And the goal here, at least for me, in calling for large collective action, is that I want the Copyright Office to understand the impact, that this proposed ruling would have, right? The proposed rule that they put forth about the opt-out provisions said, you know, yes, a library or an archive can opt out, one time, of the CASE Act or Small Claims Act proceedings, and then they never have to worry about it again, right? If someone tries to sue them, they, they opt out automatically. And the benefit of that is that if you forget to opt out, you can get a default judgment against you, right? And then all of a sudden you have damages. And so that's why that was, as Will said, libraries are protected and archives are protected if they do this one time, right? Because our society and our Congress understands that what we do is important. That what we do shouldn't be interrupted constantly by little lawsuits, right? That the library can't function in that way. But what they don't understand, what the Copyright Office doesn't understand, I think, and what Will said quite brilliantly, right, was the library isn't making the scanning. The library, you know, the library is just a building. It doesn't do anything. The library only does things through its employees, and if the employees are constantly being sued, guess what, the library might as well shut down. And so, if Congress really wants to protect libraries from being sued constantly and having to remember to opt out constantly, they should also protect employees from the same. And so, this is what, um, this is why I encourage advocacy. And my real sincere hope is that we will move the needle on this. This was a proposed rule by the Copyright Office. It's not final. And I'm really hopeful that through collective action we're able to convince the Copyright Office that they got it wrong. And if we do that, then our goal has been met, right? Having your name on that document is not going to subject you to any potential liability because you, when your library opts out, it will also cover you. And that's the goal. Can I promised that goal will be met? No. Unfortunately, advocacy is always like that, right? You, you do your best and you hope that it makes that impact. But I do think it's worth doing. I think advocacy is worth doing, even if it does mean that we have to put our name on a public document. Will: Totally agree. And I see we've got an anonymous question I want to address in just a second, but before that, I just want to jump on what you're saying and plus one it as well. There are a surprising number of cases where some larger sort of legal policy fight is happening and librarians can sort of get swept up in it in different ways. I think about the Kirtsaeng case a few years back, where there was this large and sort of technical conversation, about, you know, whether works were lawfully made under this title and what that meant geographically. I don't think most people were thinking about libraries when that litigation was happening. But several library organizations wrote amicus briefs to the Supreme Court and said, “Don't forget about us while you're weighing all these other policy questions, please don't let us get sort of squished underfoot for these big other conversations.” And not only did we get the outcome we wanted, we got some language in the opinion that basically said that “The work of libraries is important, a different ruling in this case would have an adverse effect on libraries and librarianship.” So that was part of our calculus. I think we have some nice case studies where we said, properly, “You might not be thinking about us, but please do in this moment to make a decision that recognizes that.” Sara: Great, I do see that question about whether you can make an anonymous comment. Do we know the answer to that, Will? Will: I think it was answered in the chat, which is that you can, but it's still recorded in certain ways. There was also a person wrote in and asked to, to ask a question here anonymously. So if it's okay, I'll read that one out. And then I see Jonah has his hand up as well. So the question is sort of a strategic one and it asks, is there a risk in, risk involved in stressing how much effect this might have on our daily operations, when we know that some folks in the Copyright Office seem to already think libraries are sketchy, and library users especially, are sort of sketchy edge users, like it does in a sense that confirm the, I think, wildly inaccurate, but existing bias, that like where “We were already sort of looking at you with side-eye and now you're coming back and asking for more protection. What's up with that?” And I think there's something to say around sovereign immunity with that. But Sara, I'm interested how you would respond to that question. Sara: So I think what you're saying is when you write this letter saying how it might impact your daily work, are you going to get kind of a, more scrutiny, I guess, into what you're doing. My answer would be no, but I also didn't, when I wrote in, I didn't write every single thing that I do on a daily basis, in very great detail, right? Because I first of all, like I just, I need to protect patron privacy. So like, that is foremost right? In everything we do, we all know this, right? So I would never say I scanned this thing for this patron or you know, a specific thing. But what I did say is that I routinely make fair use determinations for my own teaching and for my own library guides and my own educational outreach that I do on campus. And it would be hindered if I would have to respond to these lawsuits for everything that I did, right? It would just it, and it might also put me in a position where the risk gets higher and higher, right? I mean, fair use is a risk assessment every time. And so I don't think anyone would look askew at that, only because what I say that I'm doing is really typical. I mean, I'm not I'm not doing anything atypical. And I don't know what you could say that they would feel like is pushing it too far. I mean, I see, I see your point. Maybe if you get into, we're doing controlled digital lending and here's how many books we're scanning and all this, right? Maybe they would think that was pushing it far, but I even think there, many libraries are publicly stating that they're doing controlled digital lending. So that's not even anything super controversial. So I guess, I, I don't think so, but I wonder what you think, Will. Will: Yes, I mean, I think that's right, and along with what you said about fair use being a risk assessment, fair use is a muscle as well, right? And so I think, I personally think there's real value in getting on the record some of these concerns even if we don't win the day. So that as the conversations about the constitutionality of this stuff and other things are there, that that's out there. The piece that I do understand is that they're historically, the Copyright Office has not always been a library-first policy body, right, for better or for worse. So I, I, I could imagine somebody saying if I was talking to a judge or a legislature, they often love libraries, but this particular context feels different. The other piece I wanted to bring in is, we included sovereign immunity in this conversation because that's been kind of a third rail in this space and it's not the same thing, but I think in terms of the way policy folks are thinking about it, it overlaps. So just to quickly share that context, my state, North Carolina, relied on sovereign immunity for some pretty aggressive use of photographs of Blackbeard's ship, without, sort of going through the steps that they maybe should have done. That's for a court, and not for me, to decide. And last term, the Supreme Court upheld sovereign immunity. They said that sovereign immunity should exist. Even in this context where this doesn't seem like the best case study. Like, if I wanted to defend sovereign immunity, those set of behaviors or not, the model set of behaviors I would have brought forward. Sara: And just sovereign immunity means that a state or federal government cannot be sued in copyright for damages, for money. Not that they can't be sued, right? Because we all know that they could for Georgia State purposes, right, for maybe an injunction or, injunction means stop doing that, right? Whatever you're doing, stop it. But that they can't get those statutory damages. Sorry. I'm just interrupting you, go on. Will: No. Thank you. Sara: I like and I also love the fact that it was a pirate case. Will: Yes. Sara: Yeah, there's nothing better than a case about copyright that involves a pirate, just saying. Will: At last we find when piracy is the right statement, finally, when using the term so much. Anyway, one of the results of that is the court's opinion basically said, “Under current law, sovereign immunity stands. But if you have concerns, the legislature can do something about it.” So this large study was launched to try and determine whether or not we should revisit sovereign immunity. It, we could spend some time talking about that report. I think it, it, the people watching it came in with a set of expectations that weren't necessarily met by the data they found on the ground. But, at least to me, that creates a sense that people are sniffing around the broader concept of sovereign immunity and saying, “This, this blanket shield from liability makes me suspicious and skeptical.” And these larger questions about the policy values of that liability are being asked. I think there's a really overwhelmingly strong way to articulate why it's important to have that immunization and that protection both for sort of nerdy, you know, principles of federalism reasons, but also for actual on the ground work. But if there's already an environment where people are launching studies trying to undo or remove sovereign immunity, having the conversation about how librarians are treated under the CASE Act may touch that third rail in some places. So I, the thing that really resonated to me in that question was that, that sense of like, “These are stormy times, I'm going to be careful where I stick my umbrella.” Or something. Sara: Well definitely, and folks have been, folks being legislators, had been kind of attacking sovereign immunity. And the Copyright Office has done their own inquiry into it. And for now, at least, according to the Supreme Court and the Copyright Office, there is no viable evidence of you know, enough harm to individuals through sovereign immunity that we should breach sovereign immunity or get rid of it. However, yes, that's an ongoing thing and it kind of continues to poke, rear its head, right, because the Copyright Office will tell them, “Well, we don't have enough evidence right now, but come back to us in five years with another report,” right? I mean, that's kind of what happens. It's like “Gather some more evidence.” And they had a horror story, a parade of horribles of, you know, that poor individuals, and some of them I really did feel for, I have to tell you, I was there during the hearings and they were saying like, “The university stole this and made all this money. And then they told me to go away because the sovereign immunity,” and that does happen. I'm not going to lie it does, but I mean, that's not what, that's not typical. I mean, at my university, my general counsel joined me for the sovereign immunity hearings, and, you know, we consider ourselves good faith actors. Like, if we find out that a faculty member has done something illegal or copied something, put on their website, we immediately go take it down. We say, “Okay, we need to do something about this right away.” We don't just say “Too bad, we're not going to pay any damages,” right? So it's, it's just, it does happen. It's unfortunate. But I think that it's pretty rare. And I think that was what the Copyright Office concluded, that the evidence really just didn't show that it's widespread enough to create that kind of irreparable harm that we would need to pierce sovereign immunity. I see Jonah's had his hand up for a while, so Jonah - Jonah: So I've seen several commentators and Will just mentioned a moment ago that there was some question about the constitutionality of the CASE Act. I was wondering if both of you could expand a little bit about why people feel that the CASE Act might be unconstitutional. And also, I assume that unconstitutionality applies to the entire framework of the CASE Act and not just vis-à-vis, like library employees. Sara: That's right. And great question, and I'm not the most familiar with these arguments, so I'll let Will jump in, but my understanding is that it has to do with the tribunal, and that it's not an official court. And I think that's the concern, that you've got, not, not a real, it's not a real court, right? It's, it's appointed by, these are judges appointed by the Copyright Office to handle these claims. Over to Will. Will: That's exactly right. The Seventh Amendment talks about the right to trial by jury. And obviously you can opt out of your trial by jury in some cases. But the CASE Act, by creating this weird tribunal, that's not necessarily even in the article 3 constitutional space, that's where judges tend to live, generally, there's this question about whether people's rights are being impacted in some way. Because it's this sort of weird, made-up, quasi court where you don't have all of your rights and protections, but it does still seem to be bind right? You can't lose under a case tribunal and then just kick back to the federal court if you don't like the results. So are we locking people and especially through this, right, the, the, if you get an email or if you don't get an email because it went to your spam, telling you that you have been accused and you don't respond, you're stuck with whatever judgment they have. So if, you can, without getting any opportunity to trial by jury, or even in some cases, any opportunity to meaningfully understand that anything has been raised, and you're bound by that, there are, I think, serious constitutional problems there as well. People have also, I think, rightly asked some questions about whether this is described as a small claims process. Well, where I sit, $30,000 is not small claims, right? That's, that would be a real life-changer for me in some ways. So, from the perspective of a large international rights holder, $30,000 might be the thing you find in your couch cushion or whatever. But I think that the claim that “This is just for the little stuff, you know, up to $30,000,” feels a little maybe disingenuous or just out of tune with the way most people's lives and finances work. Sara: Right. And one thing that I struggle with is how this court would be compared with administrative judges, for instance. Because I think their argument on the other side would be like “This is just like an administrative court where we don't have all the same rules as, you know, regular court and you don't necessarily have a trial by jury, but we have delegated our rights to this administrative court judge.” You think that's going to fly here, Will? Will: I have stopped trying to predict the Supreme Court over the past year or two as it has continued to surprise me. If we could go this podcast without using the word Chevron at any point, that would make me super happy. I do not know, To me both the equities in the constitutional arguments seem pretty compelling in terms of questioning it, but it would, because that's where I sit and that's the world I live in and those are the issues I think about. So I, I would like to imagine that the Supreme Court would take a close look at this, but I would like to imagine a lot of things. Sara: Yeah. No, and I do think, that that's, I think that's going to be their response. And again, I don't, also don't know how that would turn out. I do also know, I think the Electronic Frontier Foundation is looking into this and very serious about suing, but they have to wait till they have a real case. So I think they have to wait until someone gets sued, and then they'll have standing to bring a lawsuit. Until then you don't have, so standing is, is one of the requirements we have to file a lawsuit. You can't say well, “Prospectively, I'm just mad about this.” You have to have some real damages happening to a real person, a real plaintiff. So I think that they're gathering up what they can in the meantime and all their arguments, and they're kind of waiting for the first plaintiff to come along who says, “Yeah, take my case and let's fight it constitutionally.” That's my understanding, and I'm, I'll definitely be on the sidelines cheering them on, or happy to help them if I can in any way. Will: Yeah, I feel the same way and I imagine there will be a certain amount of plaintiff shopping. Who is the most, you know, who, who is the best example of why this is problematic set of practices. Sara: Great point. Will: Something to watch. Sara: We have a question in the chat that other people are, are kind of saying “Me too!” So I'm going to read it out loud here. It says “I'm organizing an email to our library staff to alert them about the CASE Act so they can submit their own statements, and I'm pushing for an institutional statement. I'm wondering if I should reach out to faculty at my institution. Would this potentially affect faculty as well. Those working on OERs are using course reserves, for example. Or is this more librarian oriented?” So the opt out provision is for libraries and archives specifically. And so, generally, I would say, “Will the CASE Act impact faculty?” Probably so, right, and that also depends on whether you're a public institution or private institution because we again, don't know how the courts are going to look at sovereign immunity. And they've, they've allowed and said, state and federal governments can't be sued under the CASE Act, but we don't really know how that's going to play out in terms of individual employees. So there's that. But in terms of this opt out, if you're trying to have people respond about the opt out specifically, that is about library employees and archival employees. Will: Well said, I'll ask the follow-up question to you and if other folks want to jump in as well, what, if anything, are you going to do to prepare your non-library employees there? Are there a series of workshops coming out to say, “This is a wacky thing. It might never affect you, but if you're interested, here it comes.” Or how are we as a community thinking about educating beyond the libraries in this matter? Sara: That's a really good question. And, and for me, I feel like it's a little early, only because these proposed rules are still coming out. Like there's another proposed rule that came out just today. And I got it in my e-mail and said, “Okay, too long, didn't read yet, but will, right?” So I think it's such a moving target that I'm not prepared yet to reach out to faculty generally, but I do think it will be important once we kind of know where the playing field is and what's going on to have some, some strategic conversations. Like first, I'm going to have strategic conversations with library administration. Like, even if we are state and federal, a state or federal library, which we are at University of Illinois, if the opt-out provisions are extended to employees, I'm, I'm going to push that we just file the opt-out regardless, because it would cover our employees. That would be my ask to my administration, if we get what we're asking for in this push right now. Secondly, I would have to say, yeah, to faculty and say, “Let's have this conversation. What is this thing? What is this small claims court? What are the potential outcomes and how does this impact you?” And then again, big question mark, “We are at a state government institution, how does that impact employees?” And I would also really encourage them to understand that they can always opt out no matter what. So even if you can't opt out preemptively and do it once and it's going to apply to everything, which is, of course a good scenario, you can opt out for every single suit. And then that would say to the person, “Hey, sue me in federal court.” Now, we know how sovereign immunity works in federal court, right, at least currently. And so that would give us some measure of protection there if we're not sure about the CASE Act outcome. And so, you know, without giving legal advice, which I'm not allowed to do in my role as copyright librarian, I would try to let them know, like here are the options, right? The option is you go to this court and try to argue that because you're a state or federal employee, you know, they can't sue you, but, you know, I don't know how that's going to turn out. Or you can opt out and say, “Hey, you would have to come and sue me in federal court.” And we know that's pretty cost-prohibitive for them. And we also know that they can't get damages against you there. So I would let them know these are their options and of course, everyone has to make their own decision because I might have a faculty member who knows a lot about this and is like, “I'm really angry, really angry that they're suing me, they shouldn't be. So I'm going to fight this.” I mean, hey, more power to them, but like, I'm not going to tell them to do that necessarily. I'm going to give them options. Will: Thank you. Yeah, a couple of people, Molly Keener, and others have added in chat, and it sounds like they're doing basically the same thing. “We're keeping high level administration aware, we're talking to counsel's offices. But it's a little early.” I also wanted to, I think Nancy in the chat mentioned that if you're especially at a larger institution, the question I get sometimes is like “I work in the library, so I'm going to write on behalf of the library where, I work at NC State, so I'm going to write.” And at most institutions, especially as Nancy says, large institutions, there are pretty clear rules around who can and cannot speak and write on behalf of the institution. So if I submitted comments on behalf of NC State, our legislative advocacy people would murder me and you would never find my body, right? So, so be aware that there are a small set of people who can speak on behalf of the institution, and that there are probably people on your campus who have big feelings about who is doing that work. Sara: That's a really good point. And on the flip side of that, I've been really fortunate to work with those government outreach folks at Illinois to get their kind of permission, if you will, to speak on behalf of the library and the sovereign immunity instance, for instance. I'm, I coauthored a letter on behalf of our institution with our counsel's office. So if you go through the right channels, you can get those permissions, but you have to be aware that you need that. You can't just go ahead and do it. And also usually you need the Dean of the library to say it's okay, the counsel's office to say it's okay, the government relations folks to say it's okay, and just to go through a variety of, of processes. When things come up really quickly like this, this current call for responses, I just signed it on behalf of myself individually because I sometimes I don't have time to run through the chain of command, right? Like to know like, okay, I need to go to this person and this person then this. Like, just because you have permission to do it once doesn't mean it's kosher to do it again and again and again. So I had permission, like I said, on sovereign immunity to really speak up on behalf of the university. But I don't have that permission like as a blanket statement. It's a really good point. Any other questions? Take it away. Will: So Susan Kendall asks whether we can share some communication that you would have the library administration, that those of us who are not lawyers, can use with your administration. I don't have anything in my back pocket, but it seems like a great service. Some group, whether it's EUIPO or ALA, or whomever, could do is to say, “Here's some model language to let people know what's happening with CASE, here's some model language that's targeted towards faculty” and you know that there is a broad need for that. So that might be something that maybe somebody has already done. I'd love to learn about it. And if not, it would be great if somebody could do it. Sara: Will, I love that idea. And I think in terms of when we move forward, I think that we are, that would be a great service, right? To have some standard like “Here's language to communicate about CASE with your employees. Here's some if you're a public employee. Here's some if you're a private employee, here's some for libraries, here's…” something like that would be such a great thing. And I am a member of the ALA Policy Corps group and I think that would be an awesome project for us. And again, I would say it's a little early for that in terms of how we can, we can't predict the future about CASE. So we gotta wait a little bit and then I'm really, fingers crossed, that the lawsuit about constitutionality actually goes forward and we can get rid of all of these concerns, but it's just a moving target. And unfortunately, that's, that happens a lot with copyright, right? It's, it's, it's a moving target a lot of the time. So I do, I think we should have some sort of repository for that kind of information. And I, I, I think it's a great idea. There's a question, did the Library Copyright Institute create a sample of language that could be used? I don't think so, but I do know, you know, if you look at the comments that have been posted about the CASE Act, there's a lot of good information you can gather. It's all public. Will, do you know of anything that they created the Library Copyright Institute? Will: We did a webinar on this last week and we borrowed your language. We said “This is what ALA has provided. This is a nice way to, here's some specific verbiage you can borrow, but also here's a nice way to frame, sort of introduce the idea, provide your context, give specific examples.” So that's the thing that was circulating in those slides that should be available, the recording should be available at this point, but that's not LCI's credit, that's ALA's credit. We were just sharing their good work. Sara: You know, everyone has their own unique perspective and we all have different ways of looking at things, right? And so it's really good to get, just a variety of perspectives, about all the things that are happening in copyright world. Kenny is obviously a wonderful person to talk to always because he's just a really nice person. And I have a Copyright Chat episode talking with Kenny. So I recommend you listen to it if you're interested. He of course authored the famous Copyright Checklist, that most people use for fair use. I recommend it to folks all the time. And in our, in that particular episode, we were talking about the copyright guidelines in Circular 21 and how they're really outdated. Other questions? Audience Member: I do. So what is next? How should we proceed in the coming months, while we kind of wait to see what comes down? And once those things come down, the final rulemaking, what the court looks like, what are ways we can work together to move forward? Sara: That's a great question. I mean, I think one thing that I would recommend to everyone here, is to sign up for the US Copyright Office Notices. This is how I learn about what's going on with the CASE Act and the new rulings and things, right? Instead of hearing it from someone else, you can hear it directly from the Copyright Office. So I highly recommend that, and read, read the proposed rulings as they come out. And if you feel that there's something that you or your library could respond to, pass it up to your dean, pass it up to general counsel and keep them apprised of what's going on because things are definitely still moving along and not solidified yet. So keep on being engaged in that process because I think it's really important that we are aware of how it's, how it's moving. And then once, once we have some final idea of what's going on, hopefully the ALA Policy Corps or someone else can put out some really helpful, useful information. I'm thinking like the SPARC information that they have about the state by state laws on OER, right? They're just so good. I love their website and their tools. If we can come up with something like that, that's just really short, but really comprehensive, I think that we could be doing a really great service. So maybe come up with your own stuff and we can kind of put our heads together and come up with that documentation because I think we're going to need a lot of outreach to our faculty and to fellow librarians about how this might impact our work. Will: Yeah, that's, that's a great point. And the question that you mentioned a moment ago is, is if this constitutionally goes away next term, have we spent all this time getting people invested and raised all this awareness, and then suddenly it's like “What happened to that CASE thing you said was going to ruin the world?” “Well, it just went away.” So as, as we were talking about engagement with faculty, that's one of the issues that I'm really thinking about is, one, getting faculty to show up for a website on copyright Small Claims Tribunal can be challenging. So I'm, I'm wondering if other people are having that, like, is this something faculty and others aren't going to care about until they're being sued and it's too late. Like, is there a way to say “This might be nothing. It might be really important, but you need to know about it now. Because once you get a notification, it's probably too late for us to do anything about it.” Sara: Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's too late for us to do anything once they get a notification as long as they didn't sit on it. Because I, I just read, the one thing that I did read is that you have 60 days to respond to the notice under the proposed rules. Again, nothing final, which is quite a long time, if it got to the right place. Like Will was saying, if it got in your junk email or went to the wrong location, like that's just a problem. But if, if a faculty member does come to me and they have the notice in hand, I think that's a really good time to have that kind of “Here are your options” conversation, right? I mean, you could do nothing and then you could get a default judgement. That's not a good idea, right? Default judgment means “You didn't even bother to show up, pay these damages, because this is what we've decided.” So that's bad, and right, your options are, you know, opt out and decide to say, “Hey, you know, I'm not, I'm not engaging in this process. If you want to sue me, take me to federal court” or respond, right? And then you can respond with, “Hey, this was a fair use,” or “Hey, this is, I'm a government employee” or whatever your defense is, but of course you don't have any guarantees that how that's going to turn out because these are the judges, judges are not real, they're not federal judges, they're not necessarily trained. And even federal judges on copyright sometimes get pretty confused. They get a little turned around. So I've had experiences as a practicing lawyer that you wouldn't believe or I have a motion that I think is a slam dunk and I get denied. And then I have another motion that I think there's no way in heck, this is going to go through and the judge lets it through. So judges sometimes do wonky things. So it's important for people to know that too. Even if they're like, “I know I have a fair use. I know that this is permissible, that's so obvious.” That's why, yeah, judges sometimes make mistakes and I think these judges could too, right? Will: You would hope. And I'm sure the argument is, these judges are going to have that specialist training, so they'll be especially well-prepared. So then the question is, who's going to give them that training? Is CCC's version of a copyright webinar, is it ALA's, et cetera. So that specialization you're right, is a problem too. Sometimes comedic levels, at the federal level, whether the specialization that these judges have means they are more sophisticated or just more invested in one view of the doctrine is a different thing. Carla, please go ahead. I'm sorry. Carla: No, this conversation brings something to mind for me in that happened back when I was in college, which was during the time of Napster in the late 1990s. And I met one of my friends for lunch and he was looking very depressed. He had gotten notice from a music company and they said “We saw you've been sharing our music illegally online, that you can either pay $3,000” in the late 1990s to a college student, which was terrifying, “Or we will sue you.” And you know, something I was just thinking is, could we see with the CASE Act, copyright trolls saying, “Hey, we're going to see you in small claims court. But if you don't opt to do that, we're going to take you to federal court, or you can just make this all go away by paying us X amount of dollars and we'll leave you alone.” And the chilling effect that might have, do you think that's a possibility? Sara: I definitely think that's a possibility and I think that, that's part of the art, the goal of outreach, right? Is to educate people that they can opt out and that they don't have to pay that money, right? So yeah, it's, it's, it's definitely a possibility and, and if folks are just unaware of what this is, right, they think, “Oh, I'm going to go to court, I better pay this” and they don't even know. I know that the notice is supposed to tell you about the opt-out provision and all of those things. But, you know, some people just get really scared. You get a letter in the mail saying you have to pay this money. And you think, “Oh no, I have to do this,” right? You just want it to go away. And so I think that is a real possibility. Will: Yeah, I've, I've dropped the phrase, but somebody basically described the CASE act as a copyright troll factory. I think there's, there's something to that. Nancy, I saw your hand raised. If you'd like to ask a question or jump in, please do. Nancy: Yeah, I, I realized that what I was thinking about is, is rather tangential. But with respect to trolling, those of you who work in academic libraries may have seen some of this lately. I've seen an increase in people who put some kind of vaguely copyrightable measurement tool online. And then other people use it without permission, which is only questionably a copyright violation anyway, forms are not usually very copyrightable. But the people who made the form, some people really seem to have gone full trolling model on this. Their form is out there primarily to get people to use it. And then once people have used it, if they publish on the research they did with the tool, they are now threatening the authors with lawsuits. I don't know if they're getting payments, but they are getting retractions. Which is, I'm concerned about, just because that's not a correct legal response to this kind of, if it is a copyright violation, retractions are not the right answer. But, but I think that the over, as I said, this is tangential, that's why I put my hand down. But it is an illustration that the trolling model already exists, and has both some monetary drivers and some other weird drivers that I don't understand. Sara: Yes, it definitely does exist. And as Jonah was pointing out, there is someone who is licensing under Creative Commons and then using that to sue people, which is even worse in my opinion, it's like you're using Creative Commons to trap people into violating the whatever you put on there and then you're suing them. It's just mind-blowing. But yes, I think, I think unfortunately, some people are trying to trap people into using their thing and then suing them. But I would agree that a retraction is maybe not the way to go. And also someone, I wish someone, would just fight that, right? And get a court to say, “Hey, by the way, this isn't even copyrightable.” But the problem is, and we all know this, going to court is not free, right? You can't go, most people can't just go to court and say, “Okay, I'm going to be pro se.” You have the court filing fees, you have to show up and you have all these deadlines. It's a very complicated process, so it's not as easy as all that, although I wish someone would fund it, maybe EFF, and like, find out if there is someone they could defend and really push the issue. Because if this is happening again and again and again, it needs to be dealt with, in my opinion. Will: And good discussion in the chat on the, sort of the rise of copyleft trolls. There's an article in there documenting the practice, and then Creative Commons has been working recently on updating their license enforcement language to say, “It's your right, but what we hope the community will do is follow this set of practices.” Sara: Yeah, Nancy, Nancy is like “Exactly what academic author is going to say, “I'm going to defend this and see you in court, sue me” and then like get their own lawyer.” I mean, it's just so expensive, so we really would need an organization to take that on. Agreed. But it would be great. Other questions. This has been such a fun conversation. I just have to say this was a really fun thing to do. And I'm so happy that you all were so engaged. I just, the time has been flying by and I've been really enjoying it and it was fun for me to be on the other side, right? Not to be the one asking all the questions, but to get to answer some of them. So I really enjoyed engaging with you all. I hope this will inspire some of you to listen to other episodes of Copyright Chat and to give me your feedback about those and to get engaged with them. And maybe use the Scholarly Communication Network output that I come up with about teaching with Copyright Chat, or come up with your own ways to teach with Copyright Chat. I've actually used, that, that method with Gordon Spiegel before. And I did it live in a class. I played the episode and then I would stop it. And as I asked him a question, I would say to the class like, “What's your answer?” right? And have them kind of figure out if they knew the answer to a common copyright myth. And it was a really fun way of holding a live class. So you can even use the, the podcast live during class. There are just so many different ways to use it for teaching. So I really hope that some of you are inspired to do that. Will: Yeah, thank you for saying that. That brings us back to the sort of the SCN conversation at the top that this can be a “Your final assignment is create a podcast.” instead of writing a research paper that gets thrown away, it's there, or, “Take two podcasts and remix them in different ways.” All the pedagogical opportunities here, I think are really, really exciting and important. Sara: Or come up with a new module, right? “Find one of Sara's Copyright Chat podcasts that she didn't turn into a teaching module and come up with your own teaching module” and then add it in to the OER right there. Just so many, possibilities are endless, but I do love the idea of creating your own copyright podcast, which is kind of fun. Because I just think I've had assignments like that where I've gotten to create something myself and I always find them really, really engaging. And active learning is just, for me, a lot more rewarding. Any, any other final comments from the crowd or things you would love to hear a Copyright Chat podcast about? Because I'm always looking for ideas. If you have other topics that you just think, “Hey, you really should do a topic about this.” Oh, a music one, ooh, that's a really good idea. I should definitely do a music one. “Do you use videos from Copy Talk as part of educational material?” So I don't have videos on the Copyright Chat because it's a podcast, but I do have sometimes links to readings and sometimes links to other videos and things so, that I'll put with, so I always have a transcription of the podcast because obviously some folks can not engage with it, if they're hard, they have hearing struggles, so I always have a transcript available. And with the transcript is where I put additional materials. Will: I was just going to say, one of the things I really appreciated about this session is the way you've demystified the technical aspects. I think if you said to somebody out of the blue “Do you want to make a podcast?”, they'd go, “That sounds really complicated and difficult.” And I think this has been a nice demonstration that it's actually not as challenging and not as big of an ask as it could be. And obviously the opportunity to have some intro music from ccMixter, or right, you can sort of walk that copyright walk in terms of the way you build resources and, or rely on fair use to play a short clip from something. You could ask students to demonstrate their understanding of those concepts in the way they build the podcast. Carla: So, as we're nearing the end of the podcast, I just want to express my deepest thanks, first off to Will and Sara, for this wonderful and very informative discussion on the CASE Act. I know this has been in so many folks' minds and I am welcoming every learning opportunity I can get on this. And I think this has been an exceptional one. My deepest thanks also to our participants. It has really warmed my heart over the last few days to see how much you all are engaging with these presentations, the conversations going on in the chat. I just think this is so fantastic and the chat will be preserved. I know there's some questions about that, so you can download that, and I'm happy to pull links out of the chat, to put in a document that we can ask later. Before we close out, any final thoughts to share, Will and Sara? Sara: I would just say, I'm so happy to see so many people engaging with copyright here in this room today. And just keep on, keep on doing that, right? I mean, I'm always learning something new about copyright every day. And copyright is one of those fun things that changes a lot. Right, as someone was pointing out, “You should talk about music, cause there are a lot of new cases and it's changing a lot”, right? It is. And then the Music Modernization Act changed it even more, right? That's what makes it fun is that it's, it's a moving target, something that you can always learn something new about. I never claim to know everything about copyright because… Kenny Crews might know everything about copyright, but not me. But I always, I just have a passion for it. And I think that's what you need to have if you want to be a copyright librarian and if you're interested at all, reach out to me, we are a really great group of people. We are a really nice group of people and we help each other. It's been, it's been a fabulous career choice for me. I've really enjoyed working with everyone including Karla and Will, and Nancy on this call, and Emily. And I just really can't say enough about it as a career choice. So if you're thinking about it at all, feel free to reach out to me, and I'm happy, I'm always happy to chat with anybody, especially because I love Copyright Chat. Will: Yeah, I'll say the same thing, but not as well, as I've been doing for most of the session today. I, I, it's a really fun community to be part of, and I'm really excited about resources like Copyright Chat and the SCN, that sort of capture the community conversation. And it's not just like “This is the expert and we're going to shut up and listen to them.” It is, “Let's talk about this as a group and share different experiences.” I think we'll get a better and more robust and more invitational, and inclusive as well, understanding of what this body of practice is and can and should be. So I appreciate everybody adding your voice today and I'll second Sara, what she said, please reach out anytime. Questions like “I'm new to the field, and how do I deal with that?” or “What do you think about this?” We're all very happy to have those conversations. Sara: And shout out to Molly and Sandra. I mean, it's just a really fabulous group of people. I cannot say enough about my copyright colleagues. They are just wonderful people also. If you're at all intimidated and you say, “Ooh, it's law, I just don't want to get engaged,” like, talk to us, because really, really you can do it. And especially if you find it really interesting and fascinating and you know, you just really want to learn more. That to me is a sign that you're, you're interested, right? And so, even if you don't want to become a copyright librarian, if you're just like, “I'm going to be the go-to copyright person at my library.” Hey, everyone needs that. That's a certainty. So, and then, don't feel afraid to ask questions when you have them. Because again, I mean, we, we ask questions all the time, and no question is a bad question, and I'm always happy to engage with people, so please, please reach out, and thanks for joining us today. It was so much fun.

Your Strengths Have Everything To Do With Achieving Engaging Presentations Presenting can be a piece of cake for some, but can be a daunting task for others. But whether you are an introvert or someone who loves to be in front of an audience, how well you can capture your audience really depends on how you use your strengths. Do you focus on “wow”-ing your listeners with your dazzling approach, or do you focus on establishing genuine connection with them? Get insights from Lisa Cummings and Sara Regan as they champion strengths in presenting. Lisa: Hi everyone, it’s Lisa from Lead Through Strengths. Today I am joined by Sara Regan, one of our facilitators at Lead Through Strengths. You've heard a lot from me over the years and it's about time you get some new angles, fresh ideas on strengths, from other people who bring great content to Lead Through Strengths. Sara does just that. If her perspective grabs you, feel free to request her when you book your training events with us. Authenticity Through Strengths Makes Meaningful Interactions Lisa: So speaking of work, something that comes up constantly is people who have to do formal presentations, or they just have to present a PowerPoint in a meeting, and they get really in their head about the idea that they're not a professional presenter. They'll say — “I don't feel like I have charisma and I'm not that colorful, so how do I use my strengths? "Is it even possible to use strengths in a way to take a skill that I don't think I would be good at - and come at it from a new angle?” "Can you deliver engaging presentations if you're an introvert?" What are your thoughts on that? Sara: I think strengths can give us a lot of insight, certainly into how to do our best work no matter what kind of work that is, including presenting. And my own experience with this is, I had a lot of doubts initially you know given the work that I did which was more one-on-one, or working with small groups or being in meetings. But it's different than being a facilitator, and being the person who is at the front of the room for sometimes four hours, eight hours.  There's a level of energy that's required there and I really did feel like, I thought a lot about personality and what is the presence that's needed, and I did entertain how can I try to do it more like other people who I admired. And at the end of the day, I really just came back to, I have to do it, how I would do it, which is based on my own strengths.  And so for me, the facilitation style I think one of the ones that probably comes through the most is Relator. So Relator is a theme where I really want to be able to create conditions for people to have a meaningful conversation. I like to keep it real.  And so, I have found that if I show up as my most genuine and authentic self and not to feel as though I have to dazzle or be flashy, but just be real and create an environment where people can let their guard down a little bit, that's what I find works for me. And I feel like teams respond to that as well.  But I am aware that everybody in the room, this may be some Individualization theme as well, but everybody's walking in and they've had a different kind of day, they've got a different story, they have different background. There will be that apprehension or the skepticism, or someone's new in the role and they're wondering, “These are my colleagues, I'm not sure what to share about myself.”  Or there's someone up for promotion and they're wondering, “Gosh, my boss is going to be hearing everything I say about my strengths. What if I'm not communicating this in a way that's going to help me land that job?”  So I feel like I have a lot of sensitivity to that and I like to just get rid of, kind of help eliminate any of those worries, on the front end. So I feel like that's my facilitation style — is to help create the most conditions. And I've had to just embrace it, because I can't be anyone else and if I try, I just don't think it goes as well. Anxious About An Upcoming Presentation? Consider Strengths-Based Approach And Content Over Dazzle Lisa: It's true for everyone, isn’t it? I mean, I see so many people come in and they're like,  “Oh, well I have to do presentations now and I, (you've mentioned the word dazzle it always makes me think of), I'm going to dazzle you with my jazz hands.”  Of course, a few people have that style, but if you try to force it, it just looks weird. And then if I think of my experience with you, I mean, even thinking back to the times when I first met you...you make people feel seen. You make people feel like they're the only one in the room. It's a totally different way to give an engaging presentation. You're a great listener. I bet your Learner and Individualization combine to make you really curious about people. You're genuine and so many people want that over the stereotypical version of charisma.  But for some reason, that thing got out there like, “Oh, you need to be the best dazzler.”  So I love that you live out a style that isn't the one that pops to people's minds, but you can really demonstrate for them, “Look you can present from so many different angles. If you use your strengths, you could have all thinking talent themes. You could lead through Analytical and be the best at taking data and bringing new insights to people through that and stop worrying about the dazzle part. Start thinking about how you could amaze people through the insights you were able to bring and it could be through the content itself.”  So I just think you're a beautiful example of, not the first thing people think of, but they're moved when they're in the room with you and how many teams need a real experience or real genuine experience and how you just are the perfect model of delivering engaging presentations through your unique strengths.  Sara: Well thank you, Lisa. Lisa: All right, now that you have new ideas, it's your turn to go apply this in your life. Let us know as you begin to claim these talents and share them with the world — what it's like for you,  what is hard, what worked well, what you loved about the ideas, and we'll see you on the other side.  Bye for now. More Resources On How To Make Your Next Presentation Engaging We've mentioned authenticity a few times here as an important component of a great presentation. We highly recommend you also check out Lisa's previous conversation with Strother Gaines, where he encourages using your strengths to maximize the authentic “you” at work. He's a great example of actually having those aforementioned jazz hands to make engaging presentations. He's doing it genuinely - it's not put on. If you lead through Communication, you naturally have what it takes to thrive on genuinely interacting with other people, which often results in a highly impactful presentation. So harness it! Your audience will thank you for it. Another gem of a podcast interview Lisa had was with Michael Port. In this episode, you'll discover how to be self-expressed yet also able to flow from situation to situation with fluency, how to connect with the audience before the presentation, and a host of other useful nuggets. Don't leave the episode without checking out his book Steal The Show: From Speeches To Job Interviews To Deal-Closing Pitches, How To Guarantee A Standing Ovation For All Of The Performances In Your Life. Great resources are also up for grabs if you visit the Steal The Show website.

Podcast: The ALPS In Brief PodcastEpisode: Episode 15: 2017 ALPS Year in ReviewPub date: 2018-05-29ALPS recently released our 2017 Annual Report online. Mark Bassingthwaighte was able to sit down with ALPS CFO Sara Smith as she elaborated on a year that was marked by growth and excitement for the company.  ALPS In Brief, The ALPS Risk Management Podcast, is hosted by ALPS Risk Manager, Mark Bassingthwaighte. Transcript: MARK: Hello. Welcome to another episode of ALPS In Brief, The ALPS Risk Management Podcast. We're coming to you from the ALPS' home office in the historic Florence Building in beautiful downtown Missoula, Montana. I'm Mark Bassingthwaighte, the ALPS risk manager, and I have the pleasure today of sitting down with our corporate CFO Sara Smith. MARK: We're going to be talking today about the ALPS annual report which is just out. But before we get into that, Sara, can you just take a little time to share with our audience? Tell us a little bit about yourself. SARA: Sure. Thanks, Mark. My name is Sara Smith. I've been with ALPS for 15 years. Prior to that, I had a pretty diverse background working at retail and coal bed methane exploration. MARK: Wow. SARA: All sorts of different things. I didn't think insurance would be where I would end up, but I have found it challenging and fun and quite exhilarating at times. I've enjoyed my career here at ALPS. MARK: Very good. Very good. Well, we are here to talk about the annual report, the numbers from 2017 and all the good things that have been happening around here. Why don't we start with some of the most basics, the things that people are most curious about. Can you share a little bit about revenue? What's been happening? SARA: Sure. I think the exciting thing happening at ALPS is just our growth and we have a great trajectory going forward, but we also had a fantastic 2017. We saw growth in key states like Washington and Colorado, where we saw tripled digit growth- MARK: Wow, nice. SARA: ... which is super exciting, and so our overall top-line grew about 6%, which in this competitive and market environment, it's a great achievement. MARK: Yeah. Very good. Not only is growth important in terms of just an insurance company, but claims frequency is also a significant thing. What happened on the frequency front? SARA: Well, we started to think that maybe attorneys weren't having claims anymore the way the frequency number dropped. We have seen this in the industry overall in 2017, but it was great to see in ALPS as well. Our frequency dropped right below 3% so it was great, great year. MARK: Wow. Those are great numbers. Growth is not always built on just revenue in terms of playing with premium numbers and having savings and frequency. Can you share a little bit about what's happening in terms of policies, number of policies, number of attorneys? How are those numbers playing out this year? SARA: Both policies and attorneys grew over 7% in 2017 over '16. That translates to almost 18,000 attorneys in ALPS portfolio at the end of '17. MARK: That's a significant change from when we started all those years ago. SARA: It is. MARK: It's a very different company which is a good thing. SARA: It is a good thing. MARK: Another key component for insurance carriers is just, in terms of their overall stability as measured by surplus. What's happening in the surplus? SARA: Well, surplus is so important and so critical for all insurance carriers and, as a policy holder, it's something you should be concerned with when you look at your own insurance carrier. Basically, that is the actual money available to policy holders beyond what's established for reserves. It's the foundation of security and stability within an insurance company. Our surplus grew 6% in 2017. We're just up over $40 million at the end of the year. So we're in sound financial shape. MARK: Yeah and I think that's a good point in terms of having lawyers understand how insurance companies ... How to judge and determine how secure and stable a company is in terms of longterm presence in a market. SARA: Absolutely. MARK: Or just the ability to pay claims going forward. And these surplus numbers are key. I'd like, shortly, to shift into a little softer side of this discussion, but before we jump there, I would like to make our listeners aware. We have put up the annual report. As I understand it, it's all on our website, interactive. Do you have any comments about that? It's just ... Just go to alpsnet.com. SARA: Correct. MARK: I just encourage you folks, if you have any interest to dig into the numbers a little bit more, all of this information is available. Let's talk about the soft stuff in 2017. SARA: Yeah. MARK: You've shared some things about growth. Lots of great things happening with the company. Just fill us in. SARA: I think that sometimes there's a tendency to look just at the numbers and they tell a great story in 2017 but there is also a lot of foundational work that went into 2017 that is really priming the pump for 2018 and beyond. A couple of those things are ... We did a full rate study of our entire 30 years of data, right? What do we know about our attorneys and what do we not know? What are the assumptions we've made over the years and what are the surprises? So, that was a huge undertaking. Took a lot of time and I think we got some valid information out of that. SARA: The other thing we did is we heard from our policy holders that maybe there was some things that we could do in our policy forms that would be better and more customizable to them. We took a hard look at our policy and developed three new policy forms to better serve our customers. That is a tremendous amount of work. MARK: Yeah. SARA: We spent most of '17 working on that. Of course, that's just the easy part. Now, we have to ... At the end of the year, we started filing our forms and rates and policies in all of our states. So, now we're hurry up and wait and see what happens. MARK: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're also at a point where we're beginning to expand jurisdictionally. Any comments on what's happening there? SARA: Yeah, we have really put some effort forward to diversify our book both geographically as well as just from a demographic perspective.  We did see significant growth in Washington and Colorado and we're going to continue to see that expansion play out. We recently were approved in Texas and starting writing business in April. So that's really exciting. We're on the march to get the last couple of states and get our Certificate of Authority. I expect that our footprint will be much different by the end of '18 then it even was in 2017. MARK: And while we have been recognized as a national insurer, we really now are on the verge of truly being national in terms of just a presence throughout the entire United States, which is exciting. SARA: It is exciting. MARK: It really is. Lots of opportunities coming. There's been some investments in technology as well. Can you share a little bit about what we're doing? SARA: Sure. I think that the consumers ... Consumers overall are changing and they're changing their purchasing patterns and the way that they like to access their information. MARK: Yes, right. SARA: I think that it's hard for insurance companies especially. We all have legacy platforms and we have to sometimes just rip the band aid off. Start over. We are working on finally e-delivery and being able to get our customers what they want, when they want it. So I think it's a huge task and it's much more complicated than you think it would be, but we're getting there. MARK: Very good. Very good. That's pretty much what we wanted to share. Do you have any closing comments? Exciting things to look forward in 2018? What's on your radar? SARA: Wow. So, 2018 right now is ... I'm really watching our rate implementation and execution and making sure that we're doing that in the right way. I think that going into new states is super exciting. How do we build traction? What does that look like? What are we going to learn? Cause you know we're going to learn a lot. We just don't know what it is at the point right now. MARK: And I'm looking forward myself in terms of one of the guys getting on the airplane so we can go to a few new places. Get a few more miles but- SARA: Right, right, right. MARK: To meet some new folks out in these new states. Doing some lecturing and what not. They are exciting times. Well, Sara, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. To all of you listening, I hope you found something of value today and I encourage you, if you have any interest in learning more about what is happening here at ALPS, to visit alpsnet.com. There is a link to the annual report interactive and there's some great information there. In addition, if any of you have any questions or topics that you would like to see addressed in the future ... Or even speakers you'd like to hear on the podcast, please don't hesitate to reach out to me at mbass@alpsnet.com. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.  The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from ALPS Lawyer's Malpractice Insurance, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

Sara Rosett's  High Society series features Olivia Belgrave, an impoverished ‘lady' who solves upper crust scandals in a fabulous 1920's world of  fur coats and fashion, cocktails and country houses. Hi there.  I'm your host Jenny Wheeler and Sara talks about getting started in writing as a military wife, her three other contemporary cozy mystery series, and the favorite famous places that appear in her books. Six things you'll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode: Why the 1920s is a fab period for mysteriesWhat being a military wife taught herHow she manages multiple series What attracts her to mysteriesThe writers she admires mostWhat she'd do differently second time around Where to find Sara Rosett: Website: https://www.sararosett.com/  Twitter: @sararosset Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/srosett/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sararosett/ What follows is a "near as" transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions. Jenny: But now, here's Sara.  Hello there Sara, and welcome to the show, it's great to have you with us. Sara; Thanks Jenny. It's great to be here. Jenny: Now, Sara, was there a Once Upon a Time moment when you decided that you wanted to write fiction? And if so, was there a catalyst for it? Sara Rosett - Mystery author Sara: I can't remember a single specific thing that set me on this path. But I have always loved reading. I've always loved books. When I was a little kid, going to the library was my favorite thing to do. And I love mysteries in particular. So it's just something I've always loved, always wanted to do. I always wanted to write a book. The joy of the puzzle Jenny: It's interesting, you know, a lot of authors say that's their pathway. They adored books. And the library was the place that was their magic place. You've now got a very substantial back list of contemporary cozies and historical mysteries in several different series. But your most recent book, I think is Book Four in the historical series called Murder in Black Tie. You've mentioned that you've always liked mysteries. What do you think attracts you to mysteries? Sara: Well, I love the puzzle aspect to them. I'm always intrigued to try and figure out who did it. And I like the different settings you get, particularly in cozies as you get a close look at somebody's world. And you get to really delve into the time period and get to know it really well. I like that and I just enjoy the characters. Mysteries are usually a series. And so I enjoy going back to the same characters cos it's like visiting friends and you get to see them again. So mysteries are  awesome. The delight of the 1920's Jenny:  That's great. So Black Tie is the fourth standalone novel. Even though it's a series, they can be read as individual books quite happily, can't they? The series is called High Society Ladies Detective Series, and it features a young woman called Olive Belgrave, who is a member of the high society set, but is not particularly well-off. So she has to also assume some responsibility as a working girl in England in the 1920s. What attracted you to that time period and setting? Sara: Well, I think it's a very interesting time because there were so many changes going on. There are changes in technology, in travel. The roles of women were changing, entertainment and media were changing. And so it's a really interesting time to drop a character in and see what she faces. I've always enjoyed Golden Age mysteries, so I've always liked that time period. The two things blend together really well and also with the clothes. The clothes are great. Jenny: Yes, the clothes are great aren't they? For many women of that  class the obvious solution was to marry money if you didn't have it yourself. But Olive's got an independent streak, hasn't she? And she doesn't particularly seem to want to take that pathway,...

Secrets of Great Second MealsBy Sara Dickerman Intro: Welcome to the Cookery by the Book podcast with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors. Sara: Hi, I'm Sara Dickerman and this is my latest cookbook, "Secrets of Great Second Meals". Suzy Chase: The last time we chatted was about the "Bon Appetit: Food Lover's Cleanse" cookbook that you wrote. And you even had lunch suggestions based on leftovers from the night before. So you've been a leftover supporter for years now. Talk a little bit about that.Sara: Well yes, the Bon Appetit plans, because there were menus for two weeks of healthy eating, I started thinking about how to make it a little more reasonable, since it was based on home cooking. And even though we all love to cook at home, some days it's just too busy and just really trying to cook every meal at home would be complicated. So I thought about using beautiful leftovers and then reframing them in a way that made them feel new and fresh. So in the case of the Bon Appetit book, it was thinking about a lot of those proteins in salad form, in delicious, crunchy salads. All sorts of textures and all sorts of flavors. And it just reminded me how much I love that part of cooking, the cyclical nature of cooking where one meal trails into the next. I think it's a really beautiful aspect of cooking that allows you to treat your ingredients with the most respect. Of course it allows you to save money because you're not wasting as much food. But there's just something very natural about letting one meal inform the next.Suzy Chase: You take uncommon delight in putting together memorable meals out of the morsels in your fridge. And it definitely comes through in this cookbook. Can you give us a brief history of the L word?Sara: Sure. Leftovers, as such, didn't really have an existence until people had refrigerators, in the sense of a problem of having too much food left around the house. In the past, people probably would've eaten the stew the next morning just to use it up. But when refrigerators started being popular in American culture, first, in the late 19th century, it was ice-based refrigerators and then electric refrigerators, this idea that you have this food that was around and you didn't quite finish it and you could keep it for a while became an issue. And so around that era, at the beginning of the 20th century, cookbooks started to come out dealing with this new thing called leftovers. At the same time, women were encouraged to be very thrifty. This was the heart of the home economics movement in America. So housewives were supposed to use their skills and ingenuity to keep the household finances in good shape and to be creative and use up every little scrap of food in the house. That grew through the beginning of the 20th century. And crowning achievements in the mid-century were like Jello molds with every kind of knickknack in them. And of course the era of casseroles with tinned soup and, yet last, leftover turkey in the casseroles. And of course, naturally, that kind of cooking wore down people's palates and it lost glamour as we moved into the second half of the 20th century. And people got very interesting in farmer's market and fresh foods and really connecting with foods and experimenting with foods from around the world. And that homey cooking I think felt less of the moment at that point. What has happened recently? Well we're all becoming much more aware of the impact of our eating on the environment. So people are thinking a lot about food wastage, which wastes not just our money, our household money, but wastes water and it's a larger carbon footprint. So there is an activist movement that I'd say really got traction in England first and then came here. And you'll see people like Dan Barber really encouraging chef and home cooks alike to think about how much food gets wasted in our environment. There's an estimate that it's about 40% of food gets wasted in the United States. So it's a huge amount. And so I just combined that concern in my book with also the pleasure of creativity. And part of the joy of cooking in the kitchen can be, "Oh, I'm wasting a little bit less food but I'm also having fun thinking about this new environment for whatever I have around the refrigerator." It can make it really fun and a pleasing part of your cooking life.Suzy Chase: In terms of food waste, we're all thinking about food waste these days but no one really talks about this way of thinking and cooking and how it's really budget friendly too. And you mention that in the cookbook. Sara: It is. You need to know what you'll use. And if you can cook a few dishes that you know you'll enjoy and, if you have a family, your family will enjoy, and kind of cook a little more at the beginning of the week. Maybe you cook it kind of simply. Then you can reframe it and it takes a little less time the second time around because you've already cooked whatever that main ingredient is. And then it's also you're conscientiously thinking about different ways to frame your food, and so you have more fun and you're more likely to maybe eat at home instead of ordering takeout. And that also saves money of course. Suzy Chase: It's so expensive. Especially in New York City, you get all these extra charges, the delivery changes. So a family of three, you can easily rack up a $50 bill just getting Chinese food. It's crazy.Sara: Right. I never want to sound scoldy. I get bored very easily. I'm not the kind of person who can eat exactly the same meal days after days in a row. So that's where the fun and the creativity and the transformation comes to play, so that that simple roast chicken you had one day might become a chicken salad like on the cover of the book that has a wonderful ginger soy dressing. Or it might become enchiladas or it might become a Greek style lemon soup. It could go in any of those directions. And that allows for a little bit of spontaneity even if you're trying to be thoughtful.Suzy Chase: You write about the eureka moment. Talk about that. Sara: Oh, it's just, like I said, I think there's this pleasure that cooks take, and maybe not all cooks, but that when you figure out how a few things can fit together and improve each other. And so I think about that when I'm meditating on this little bit of extra pork shoulder I have around and I realize that I could add a little more flavor to the pork shoulder, like adding some annatto and it will taste a little bit like Cochinita Pibil. It won't be a classically prepared Cochinita Pibil but it'll have some of that lovely lemony annatto flavor, and that that could be reframed into tacos after I'd had it maybe in more Italian version of it the night before. And then you just start thinking, "Oh, and then I have that extra half of that onion that's in the fridge." And then I'll pickle that. And then, look, suddenly you have this new meal. And the anticipation of how that meal will come together is what I think of as the eureka moment. Soup is almost always an options. And there's a whole chapter in the book on soups. And that's often the way that you can figure out how to put all those puzzle pieces together.Suzy Chase: So I want to chat about a question you brought up in the cookbook which was if we revered these ingredients that were painstakingly grown in organic fields and handcrafted by food artisans, why do we not also appreciate them after the first meal? And I was wonder why don't we? We're so quick to throw it away.Sara: Yeah, I think we are. Well I think there's a few different camps I would say for sure. There are people who grew up and they just never liked leftovers. And they're a tougher nut to crack. But I think the key is reframing things and making things feel a little new and fresh. And then there's those of us who are more like me probably who just have good intentions and don't get around to it. And it's that delayed virtue thing that I think we all engage in a lot in our modern world. But it's true, I do think that there's a level of respect for ingredients that should extend beyond the farmer's market and extend into our daily lives. And it's always going to look glorious uncooked at the farmer's market. But what happens when it's in your refrigerator or in your freezer? And how can you really bring back that enthusiasm you had for the same thing before it was cooked and before you tried it? And I always say I'm easily bored. So I think of ways of layering in flavors and layering in textures. So even if I'm not preparing one of these recipes from start to finish, I have great condiments in my refrigerator door like a harissa or a gochujang, which are two different chili-based sauces. gochujang, from Korea, which has the miso-y fermented bean taste. And then harissa which has lovely warm spices like cumin and caraway in it. So those are things I would anoint this second-day food with to just bring in that vibrancy. Or maybe I'll grate lemon zest over top of something or add a dollop of yogurt to add a freshness. So always thinking about ways that you can, even very simple ways that you can add another layer of vibrancy to food after it's been in the refrigerator. Of course it can get a little less sharp tasting once it's been sitting in the refrigerator for a little while. So you need to think about ways of reviving food, but really taking pleasure in it.Suzy Chase: Give us some general rules on when to throw things out, like fish and seafood, vinaigrettes, moldy cheese or cooked meats.Sara: Okay, that sounds good. Well with fish and seafood, no one wants old, cooked seafood around. It just really spoils quickly. So I tend to use that the next day. Actually I love having leftover salmon, especially if it's been a little smoked, like if I did it on the barbecue. But I do tend to use it the next day. The one exception might be something like an escabeche, if you've made a vinegar-based marinade, you probably can get away with another day or two. But basically that's a quick thing. Just think of a clever thing to do the next day maybe for brunch. You could make strata and throw in some of the leftover barbecue in that case. With cooked meats, I think they generally can stick around for three days or so. The other thing I would say though is, because we sometimes don't get around to the leftovers we mean to, if it's something saucy or stewy I often just try to throw it in the freezer the next day rather than keep it around if I don't think I might get through it. And the freezer is always a good option for something that's got a lot of liquid in it. It's not such a good option for something that's like a dry roast, like if you just did a pork tenderloin in the pan. That's something you'd want to use from the refrigerator and not freeze. Oh, and then you asked me, the last question was cheeses. Now there's a few recipes in this book that I really love because they're custom made for cleaning out the cheese drawer. And I don't know about you but I have a tendency to get excited about cheeses. And when we eat through two-thirds of it, and then there's this funny little nubbin of cheese that doesn't look quite as pretty anymore.Suzy Chase: Yeah. Exactly.Sara: So all cheese melts together for the most part. And so there's some wonderful recipes. One of my all-time, classic, favorite things to make are gougeres, which are those wonderful cheese puffs. And you can mix those extra cheeses you have around the cheese drawer in a gougeres, and they're just so extraordinarily delicious. The other fun thing is that gougeres I've found bake up best for me if I've actually made the dough, piped them onto the pan and then freeze that dough. I find they bake better from the freezer. So not only am I saving this extra cheese that I've had around the refrigerator, but then I have them in the freezer. And if guests come over and I want a nice little appetizer, it's super easy to just pop into the oven for 20 minutes and you have these wonderful, crisp, fragrant, hot gougeres to serve your friend.Suzy Chase: This is funny. One time I asked Dorie Greenspan what she would offer me if I came to her house, and she said gougeres. I said, "I'll be over in 15 minutes. It's done."Sara: It's just they're so pleasing. Kids love them, adults love them. And very simple. If you want to get fancy, you can cut them in half and put [inaudible 00:13:26] as a little sandwich. But you can also just serve a big pile of them, and next time you turn around they'll be gone. Suzy Chase: So the other night I made your recipe for the sesame roasted winter vegetable party on page 47. It's such a unique way to roast vegetables. I always do the regular olive oil and salt and pepper. But yours mixes together olive oil, tahini, garlic, sea salt and sesame seeds. Describe this dish.Sara: Okay. Well, like you, I often just do the olive oil things. But sometimes I want a little more substance to a roasted vegetable and just a little more flavor. And so I love, when I'm working with sesame, to hit it in more than one way the sesame. So there's the tahini, there's the sesame seeds which toast up in the oven and get crunchy. And then the idea is you make just a big batch of those roasted vegetables. And you might them use them in a salad and just enjoy them throughout the week that way. You can puree them together and make a wonderful soup. But on their own they're also delicious. And that extra sesame flavor just gives them a little richness and a little depth.Suzy Chase: I'm so excited to have this recipe now because I'm so sick of the regular olive oil. It zipped up my vegetables. It was really delicious.Sara: It is fun. Actually roasted vegetables are great that way. There's a couple of other methods that I'll share, that aren't in the book, that I love to do. Sometimes it's really great to cook them simply but then hit them when they're just coming out of the oven with some fresh grated garlic and maybe a little parsley and maybe a little Parmesan. In that case, the hot vegetables hitting the garlic just really adds this big burst of aroma. And that's another fun way to have a little more fun with your roasted vegetables. Suzy Chase: That's a good tip. So here is a brilliant tip that was a light bulb moment for me in this cookbook. Hang a list of what's in your fridge on the front of the fridge. It seems so simple yet so effective. Sara: And one, I will tell you, that I go through phases with because I am a human too. Sometimes I'm better organized than others. But it is, it's true. If you know you have those things that are in the fridge, that's a restaurant, organizational tip. Knowing the inventory of your fridge is really helpful, so if you write it down or even if you just do a visual check. And also, of course, another restaurant tip that's so important is just to make sure to label what you put in the fridge. And again, it's not like I'm perfect with this. But I always regret not labeling things because something gets shoved to the back and then you don't see it. And then it's a week later and you're like, "Oh no, this was that lovely lamb stew."Suzy Chase: I know.Sara: "I intended to do something with it."Suzy Chase: It's the most defeating moment. You're like, "Oh, rest in peace lamb stew."Sara: Exactly. You know what I like to do? And there's many different ways to label. I have a roll of bright yellow masking tape and a sharpie hanging from my kitchen shelf, just like a lot of restaurants do. And I just try my best, even if I had a glass of wine at dinner, when I throw things in the fridge to slap that label just to say what it is. And then it really makes a big different. Suzy Chase: For my segment called My Last Meal, what would you have for your last supper?Sara: Oh, that's such a good one. It would be ... I feel like I just would want a giant bowl of spaghetti bolognese. I just love a meaty spaghetti sauce, I think it's just a childhood memory, with a lot of delicious cheese nearby. And a crisp, green salad too because you need something as a counterpoint. Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Sara: I'm on instagram @saradickerman. And then I've also started a new community on Facebook that I'm hoping people might enjoy that is Second Meals. And that is where people could share their ideas or their creations of great second meals that they've come up with or invented for their leftovers. And then I love Instagram. I'd say that's where I'm most active.Suzy Chase: I'm totally going to check out your Facebook group and join it. That's exciting.Sara: Great. Thank you so much. Suzy Chase: Well thanks, Sara, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast. Sara: Oh, thank you so much for having me. Really great to talk with you.Outro: Follow Suzy Chase on Instagram @cookerybythebook and subscribe at cookerybythebook.com or in Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening to Cookery by the Book podcast, the only podcast devoted to cook books since 2015.

  “The answer to life is in service to others.”   These are not just words spoken by Sara O'Meara, Co-Founder of Childhelp, it's the way she's spent the past 60 years. O'Meara and fellow Childhelp Co-Founder, Yvonne Fedderson, founded the organization in 1959. At the time, they were young Hollywood starlets. By chance they both landed roles on a project that would take them overseas. That assignment would change the course of their lives. Together they began rescuing so-called “throwaway children” in Japan and VIetnam. “We never dreamed it would be our whole life. We were actresses at the time,“ O'Meara says. . They went on to build 9 orphanages, a hospital and a school in Japan and Vietnam. The young actresses were quickly recognized as child advocates in the United States and they were personally asked by Nancy Reagan to lead the fight against child abuse here at home. So they did. “The Ladies” as they are famously known went on to build the very first residential treatment center for child abuse in our nation and defied all of their naysayers along the way. “Anytime you try to do anything good, you are going to have the other side that is not always as complimentary, and other people may find fault,” Sara O'Meara explains. “The main ingredient is perseverance. If you know something is the right thing to do you cannot let anyone discourage you.” Fedderson adds that every step has been guided by faith. “We pray about everything. God is the CEO of our organization … that's for sure.” Led by Sara and Yvonne, Childhelp built advocacy centers and group homes for children already affected by child abuse, created prevention programs like Speak Up Be Safe, which they hope to see implemented in schools nationwide, and established a National Child Abuse Hotline where trained professionals answer the phones in over 150 languages. And recently they added text messaging. Children in crisis can text 1-800-4-A-CHILD and receive immediate help. Now ages 85 and 84 (Yvonne points out she's younger), The Ladies show no signs of slowing down. On February 2, 2019, Childhelp officially kicks off its 60th Anniversary year with the “Drive The Dream Gala”, Chaired by international philanthropists Richard and Dr. Stacie Stephenson. The Gala, which is held in Phoenix, Arizona, draws a celebrity crowd, including longtime Childhelp supporters John Stamos, Kathy Lee Gifford and Cheryl Ladd, among many others. The Ladies left the world of Hollywood long ago. And while they still enjoy the glitz and glamour that comes with their fundraising Galas and events nationwide, what matters most is finishing the job they started in 1959. “As long as there is one hurting child out there, we are going to keep going.” On this 22 minute episode of Carey Pena Reports, The Ladies, in a rare sit down interview, talk about the power of positive change and what others can learn from their story of perseverance. For more information about Childhelp visit https://www.childhelp.org Transcript Carey: Hey everyone, this is a special edition of Carey Pena Reports. Today we are with two trailblazers who founded an organization that to date has saved and changed the lives of more than 10 million children. We sit down with them for a rare interview at their home in Paradise Valley, Arizona to talk about leadership and how you can't let anyone deter you from your dreams. Here's that interview. Carey: We are on location today talking about the power of positive change, and I am here with two very well-known change makers, Yvonne Fedderson and Sara O'Meara, the founders of Child Help. Thank you both so much for joining us today. Sara: Thank you for having us. Yvonne: We love joining you. Carey: Thank you for inviting us into your home and there is so much to talk about. You are celebrating 60 years of Child Help and we will talk about all of the incredible accomplishments, but first, I want to talk to you about the leadership lessons that you've learned over the years. Yvonne: Oh my gosh. Carey: Because you ladies were really change makers before it was en vogue to be so. Where did you find your courage in the late 1950s, early 1960s to stand up and say “we see a problem and we want to change”? Sara: Well, I think it was because we felt so deeply about what was happening to these children. We began taking care of the half American child that were known as throwaway children in Japan and Vietnam and so when we saw their suffering and the fact that these were God's precious children and they were not being taken care of, it was something we just had to do. That gave us the courage to speak out because remember those wars were not exactly popular wars, so to speak. Carey: The opposite. Yvonne: Yeah. Sara: Very much the opposite. Yvonne: Also, we were very young. Sara: Yes. Yvonne: And we just did it, you know? Carey: You saw something. Yvonne: We saw a need and we said we've got to do it and that was it. Sara: We're going to kill it. Carey: You jumped into action. Sara: But we never dreamed it would be our whole life. Yvonne: No. Sara: I mean, we were actresses at the time and so that's what we thought we would be doing, but it ended up that this became our life's mission, and then after we built the orphanages, we built nine orphanages, a hospital for orphans and a school … Yvonne: In Japan and Vietnam. Sara: In Japan and Vietnam. WE thought that that was it, and what happened is when we were speaking as keynote speakers about the Operation Baby Lift, because it was our organization that brought the babies over after the war ended, then Governor Reagan and Mrs. Reagan, Nancy and Ronnie, were there on the dais with us, and Nancy stopped Yvonne and me and said, “You're just the two to do this. You need to do something about child abuse in our country.” Well, no one had ever heard about child abuse. It was never, ever mentioned. All the laws protected… Yvonne: That was way back in '75. Carey: Yeah. Sara: Yes, and the laws protected the perpetrator, not the child. So, we did jump in to do that and state by state we had to help change laws so that we had safety for these children, and then we built villages for abused children, advocacy centers, the national child abuse hotline … Carey: It continued to grow and grow. Sara: It continued to grow. Carey: So Nancy Reagan encouraged you ladies. Yvonne: Oh, they supported us. Carey: She knew that you were the two to do it. So, you had a lot of famous friends, but that's not enough to make an entire organization as big and powerful as yours. What was it, do you think, Yvonne, inside you that made you believe that you could do it, because you have helped change and save the lives of millions of children? Yvonne: Well, we felt this was a calling for both of us because we were selected out of 500 actresses to go on this trip. So even at the time when were selected, we looked at each other and we said, “God must have a plan for this trip, for the two of us to be selected.” They didn't even know we knew each other. So for us to be selected was really something, and then when we found these children, we thought, “That's why we're here. We're supposed to help these children.” Well, one thing led to another. Then when we were asked to do this, we felt within our heart, and of course we pray about everything and we've always dedicated our organization to God. He's really the CEO of our organization. Sara: That's for sure. Yvonne: But we also were blessed to have many fabulous people to support us. Not only the stars, but we have volunteers who have been with us 30 and 40 and 50 years. Now, think about that. So it's become their mission also. Carey: A lifetime. Sara: A lifetime. Carey: A lifetime. Sara: Yeah. Yvonne: A lifetime. Carey: Now, they have so many great star stories. Can't even get into the whole Elvis Presley and all of this, because then I'd just become a fan girl, but I am interested in that passion, and just the concept that you saw when you started to make change that it was possible. Yvonne: Absolutely. Carey: And when you start to see that, because I think a lot of people who are watching and listening to this show, and this show is about the power of positive change, and sometimes we don't know our own power. You ladies were young. Yvonne: Everyone has it. Carey: Everyone has it. Talk to me about that. Yvonne: But they have to use it. Carey: And when you realized that you had it. Sara: We realized we had it when frankly we depended on God, because we always asked to be guided. We don't want our plan because that's a meager plan compared to what God has planned for each one of us. Yvonne: That's right. Sara: He has a plan for every single individual, and we can make changes. Everyone that is on this earth can make a change. They have to choose to want to make a change. That's the difference. They have to know that the answers to life is in service to others, and once you get that, then your life lives outside of yourself. It's not all about me, me, me. Instead you want to reach out. You want to make a difference in people's lives, and you can. There isn't anybody listening, anybody out there that cannot make a change, a difference in someone's life, but in a lot of lives if you so choose. Yvonne: We've been very blessed to attract people that have hearts like that, that want to serve. They have a servant's heart and they're very, very dedicated, and we really love and appreciate them, and all the people … Maybe they can't be a volunteer but they support us in other ways. Whatever way they help, it's wonderful and God will bless them for that. Carey: Because I want to point out that, I mean, you ladies are obviously beautiful to this very day, but when you went on this mission, you were young, hot Hollywood starlets, and you didn't have to put your sort of glamour aside to start rescuing children, but you felt that was your calling. Yvonne: But you see, everything kind of comes together. As you get older, you look back and you realize that being an actress was part of our life and it opened up many, many doors for us to … Of course, I married a Hollywood producer too, which helped, but all those doors opened up different things that help the organization. For instance, the stars. They were a great asset to our organization, but like I say, the volunteers then were great, so it's wonderful how God opens up doors when we open up our heart to serve him. Carey: Were there people along the way who tried to discourage you as Child Help continued to grow? Sara: Oh yes. Yvonne: Oh my goodness, big time. Sara: Every time you do anything good, you're going to have the other side. Yvonne: That's right, of course. Sara: That not always is very complimentary. Other people may find fault with anything that you do. The main ingredient is perseverance. If you know something is right to do, you cannot let anyone discourage you, and when we built the very first residential treatment center for child abuse in our nation, people were saying to us, particularly in social service, “Well, you can't do that. Nobody's been able to do that and you don't have a degree in social service and it will never be a success.” Well, from the day we've opened, it's been successful. That was 40 years ago and we've built other villages for abused children across the nation. So, you cannot let others define who you are and who you want to be. Yvonne: You know what Sara said when she said “when you know something is right,” it's so true because we knew the villages were right. We knew the centers were right. Every time we've opened a program or started a program, it's been a challenge, but when we know something or anyone knows something within your heart that's right to do, just like Sarah said, don't let other people discourage you. Keep your eye on what you're supposed to do. Keep your eye on the gold and you will make it through because it's right for you to do. Carey: Is there any sort of … and I know that you draw so much inspiration from your faith- Yvonne: Absolutely. Carey: Which is so deep and guiding in your life, but where else … I mean, are there sort of affirmations or is it the friendship between the two of you where when one is down, the other one says, “We can continue”? Sara: Well, we realize that it's so much easier when you have a partner, when you have someone that thinks like you do, they're mission driven, and yes, we help each other through our dark times. Everybody has problems. Everybody has obstacles in their families, in their personal life, in their business life. Yvonne: And we've been through it all together. Everything. Sara: Yeah, and so we do help each other through those times and that's been very helpful, but also, you never get through life as a success unless others reach out and help you, and so we have had many wonderful mentors in our life, to whom we could look up and see what made their lives successful and how they react to things, and so we learn from each other. Yvonne: And you also learn through everything that you go through. You think at the time, “Oh, this is terrible. We're never gonna make it through this problem,” but you do, and when you get through it, you use it on something great. It's a great lesson for us to grow. Carey: Let's talk a little bit more about Child Help for those listening and watching who aren't familiar with the organization. Child Help is dedicated to the prevention and treatment of child abuse. According to your website, over 10 million children have been impacted. I want to go through a few of the wins. You have built advocacy centers and group homes for children who have already unfortunately been affected by child abuse. You have created prevention programs like the Child Help Speak Up, Be Safe program which is spreading to more schools. Sara: All across the nation. Carey: In Arizona and across the country. Yvonne: We'd like to be in every school, especially here in Arizona. Carey: Yes, your goals are always lofty, and this one I think is … All of them are important but I love that you established this national child abuse hotline, which, by the way, I want to give out that number, is 1-800-4-A-CHILD, and this is done in multiple languages because I think in my mind about the moment when a child is scared and hiding and doesn't know what to do, and where do you turn? So you ladies have tried to think through those problems. Sara: Yes, and it's the only hotline that has degreed professionals answering the phones, not volunteers, so it's more than a hotline. They're therapists that can talk the child through it, and not just give out a number, even though we do that as well. For the first time in history we're having texting, and that's something else that is new. Carey: Thank you for reminding me about that because that's huge. Sara: It's very huge. Yvonne: It is huge because the children are kind of afraid naturally to talk about what's going on, but they're so used to texting that they go for like 45 minutes and tell you everything, so that's wonderful. Carey: How much does it matter to you that these children have the opportunity to see that life can be beautiful? Child abuse as a news anchor and reporter, I know that it is an uncomfortable conversation. Sara: There's no question about it. Carey: And a lot of people don't like to talk about it, but what is going on in a lot of homes is very, very tragic. How important is it for you ladies to give a resource to children who are suffering? Sara: It means everything because it means the change of their life. It also means they don't have to go through so much suffering. So many, many times we have had survivors come back and say, “Oh, if I'd only known about that 1-800, the number 4, A-CHILD, I could've gotten help, but they didn't know where to go, and they didn't even know they were being abused sometimes because it started so young, they thought everybody was abused like that. So, it means everything because what you're doing is giving safety to a child. You're giving them their life, because child abuse can rob you of your youth, of your young life, and it sticks with you a long time. It takes a lot to overcome that, and one of the first things we do when the children come into our villages is give them a sense of self-worth because they just feel that they're nobody. Sara: We had a child that came in with “bad kid” burned into his back with cigarette burns- Carey: Bad kid. Yvonne: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Sara: When you would ask him what his name was, he'd say “bad kid” because he was called that, and that's what he thought his name was. So, you have to really work with these children to let them know how precious they really are and that there's only one set of fingerprints and that's theirs, and they can make a big difference in their life. Once they know that and they understand how precious they truly are as a human being, the healing can start then, and so, yes, it means everything to see a life change. Carey: So, I'm thinking about all the people out there who are inspired by you and what you've been able to accomplish, and we cannot all be a Sara and Yvonne. You guys have created something truly special, but each in our own way we have the ability. Sara: Absolutely. Carey: Over the years as you've seen one child's life change and another child's life. Yvonne: Many child's … Carey: And then thousands and millions, it truly is a story about all things are possible when we really care. Yvonne: Absolutely, absolutely. Sara: There's no question about it. Caring is a beautiful thing. If you have a caring heart, it takes you down a pathway, a beautiful journey of life because when you truly care about people, you truly care about feelings, you truly care to make that child whole again, then what this does to you on the inside, it develops you as a person and it gives you the strength really from within. You may not know from which it cometh, but that's what gives us the strength, is in order to give back to another. Carey: Has there ever been, and I imagine I know the answer to this, but has there ever been a time where you think, “Okay, we're ready to retire” and- Yvonne: No. Carey: Because when I've been around you ladies, you have to-do lists that puts mine to shame, but you have already accomplished so much, but yet- Yvonne: But there's more to accomplish. There's always more to accomplish. Sara: There's more left to do. Yvonne: Yep. Sara: And we have great plans for developing other programs that have never been developed. We're kind of known as the trailblazers to get out there and start programs that have never been done before. We opened the first advocacy center with everything under one roof … police, the social services, the hospital … Carey: An integrative approach, right. Sara: That's correct. Yvonne: And this new one's going to be like that. Everyone involved. Sara: And then the villages, we were the first ones to open that. We're the first ones for the hotline. We're the first ones to have prevention in our schools, and so we're kind of the trailblazers in that respect. We're not afraid to take risks, but you have to in life. Carey: So let's talk a little bit about that, because I think that's a really important point. Sometimes it can be very scary to be the person- Sara: Yes, of course. Carey: Who says, “Well, we can do it a little differently.” Sara: And there are a lot of naysayers along the way. Carey: And there's a lot of naysayers. Yvonne: We might get scared within ourselves and talk to each other, but we don't let anyone else know. Carey: But how do you fight through that and see that, okay, I have this vision and I know that vision is something that we should try to test out? Sara: Yes, we're working on a vision right now that has never been done before that will integrate all of our programs. It will be literally a city, and so we're working on that now and we hope to see that come to pass. Carey: So you ladies, and I know it's not appropriate to ask age, but you're- Sara: We don't mind that you're asking our age. Carey: Do you care saying how … Sara: No. I'll be 85 in September. Carey: And Yvonne? Yvonne: I'll be 84 in April. Carey: So you're the younger … Yvonne: I'm the young one. Sara: … Your elder. Carey: I appreciate you saying that, because I think as a woman, I look at you ladies and truly you inspire me so much. Yvonne: Well thank you. Carey: To keep going and to keep building. Yvonne: Well as long as we have our health, we're going to continue right on, and we work every day. Carey: And you still see how much you can contribute to your vision. Yvonne: Yes. Sara: Yes, we hope so. Yvonne: But there are a lot of people that help us. Sara: Yes. Yvonne: We have a great staff, we have great volunteers as we mentioned. I mean, they're wonderful. We haven't done this alone. Sara: And look, you're helping us right now. You're getting the word out. Yvonne: That's right. Carey: It really is remarkable, though, to see that 60 years later, you are as enthusiastic, if not more, than when you were those young starlets who got sent on that movie assignment all those years ago. What does it mean to you to be celebrating the 60th year, to know that you've had this kind of impact? Sara: It's a wonderful feeling because we don't think … You know when you start something, you don't think, “Oh, well, in 60 years …” You have no idea. It's just one step at a time, but when we look back over these six decades and the children that have been helped through our organization, we realize that anything is possible. You have to set your goals, as Yvonne said. You have to continue on that pathway. Yvonne: Keep your eyes on the goal. Sara: And not let anyone deter you if you know it's the right way, regardless of what is said, what seems to be a lack at the time, whether it's monetarily or whatever. You'll have to know that it's going to be provided because … We talk about God a lot but we have to because it's the way that it's done. If we didn't depend on God, we wouldn't be here to celebrate the 60th anniversary and have helped 10 and a half million children. Yvonne: And we're just grateful that both of us are here and both of us have our health and be able to celebrate our 60th. Carey: What an incredible journey you've had together. Sara: Yes. Carey: I mean, really, your friendship is something for the ages. Yvonne: And our husbands were best friends. They had to be. Carey: I mean, it just defies what sometimes people think about women not being able to truly be in lockstep with one another, because I see it a whole different way. Sara: A lot of people said that. In fact, a lot of our celebrities that have been with us through the years, you know, Jane Seymour and Cheryl Ladd … Yvonne: Kathie Lee. Sara: Kathie Lee Gifford. Yvonne: The list goes on and on. They've been fabulous. Sara: They will say to us, “The greatest miracle is your friendship, because it's lasted so long and you can work together so harmoniously.” Carey: Yes, it's such a partnership, and on the subject, just as we close things out here, on the subject of celebrities, you ladies have some of the biggest and most extravagant, beautiful galas including the Drive The Dream, which draws a lot of celebrities. It's held in Phoenix, but you also do beautiful galas in California, but … Sara: And back in East in Washington and Tennessee and… Carey: All over, which are beautiful, extravagant affairs, but I do want to point out for the audience who may have heard about these galas, as I've been … and disclaimer here, I'm a volunteer on the Drive the Dream committee, but as I've gotten to know you, yes, the dressing up is fun and yes, the … That's all fun, but what matters to you is what's getting done with the money. Yvonne: That's right. Sara: That's right. Yvonne: That's right. Carey: That's what matters to you because you have big goals and dreams. Even at 84 and 85 years old, you still have a lot to accomplish. Sara: We do, and as long as there's one hurting child out there, we're going to keep going. Carey: Yvonne, what's your final message? Yvonne: We really hope that you young people will carry on when we cross over. We really pray that every night, because… Carey: I only feel like I could be a small portion of filling your shoes but I am so privileged to be a part of it because learning from women like you is really a blessing for me. Thank you both. Yvonne: That's very kind of you to say. Sara: Thank you, you're a blessing to us too. Yvonne: Thank you, and thank all those who are listening to this program today who support Child Help. We really appreciate it and we know the children certainly appreciate it. Their lives would be totally different without their help. Carey: For more information on Child Help, we would love for you to go to the website, ChildHelp.org. Thank you so much for watching and for listening to Carey Pena Reports, and you can find out more information on our website, InspiredMedia360.com. Take care, everyone. The post The Founders of Childhelp Succeed With Perseverance and Prayer appeared first on Inspired Media 360 TV - Inform | Inspire | Engage.

ALPS recently released our 2017 Annual Report online. Mark Bassingthwaighte was able to sit down with ALPS CFO Sara Smith as she elaborated on a year that was marked by growth and excitement for the company.  ALPS In Brief, The ALPS Risk Management Podcast, is hosted by ALPS Risk Manager, Mark Bassingthwaighte. Transcript: MARK: Hello. Welcome to another episode of ALPS In Brief, The ALPS Risk Management Podcast. We're coming to you from the ALPS' home office in the historic Florence Building in beautiful downtown Missoula, Montana. I'm Mark Bassingthwaighte, the ALPS risk manager, and I have the pleasure today of sitting down with our corporate CFO Sara Smith. MARK: We're going to be talking today about the ALPS annual report which is just out. But before we get into that, Sara, can you just take a little time to share with our audience? Tell us a little bit about yourself. SARA: Sure. Thanks, Mark. My name is Sara Smith. I've been with ALPS for 15 years. Prior to that, I had a pretty diverse background working at retail and coal bed methane exploration. MARK: Wow. SARA: All sorts of different things. I didn't think insurance would be where I would end up, but I have found it challenging and fun and quite exhilarating at times. I've enjoyed my career here at ALPS. MARK: Very good. Very good. Well, we are here to talk about the annual report, the numbers from 2017 and all the good things that have been happening around here. Why don't we start with some of the most basics, the things that people are most curious about. Can you share a little bit about revenue? What's been happening? SARA: Sure. I think the exciting thing happening at ALPS is just our growth and we have a great trajectory going forward, but we also had a fantastic 2017. We saw growth in key states like Washington and Colorado, where we saw tripled digit growth- MARK: Wow, nice. SARA: ... which is super exciting, and so our overall top-line grew about 6%, which in this competitive and market environment, it's a great achievement. MARK: Yeah. Very good. Not only is growth important in terms of just an insurance company, but claims frequency is also a significant thing. What happened on the frequency front? SARA: Well, we started to think that maybe attorneys weren't having claims anymore the way the frequency number dropped. We have seen this in the industry overall in 2017, but it was great to see in ALPS as well. Our frequency dropped right below 3% so it was great, great year. MARK: Wow. Those are great numbers. Growth is not always built on just revenue in terms of playing with premium numbers and having savings and frequency. Can you share a little bit about what's happening in terms of policies, number of policies, number of attorneys? How are those numbers playing out this year? SARA: Both policies and attorneys grew over 7% in 2017 over '16. That translates to almost 18,000 attorneys in ALPS portfolio at the end of '17. MARK: That's a significant change from when we started all those years ago. SARA: It is. MARK: It's a very different company which is a good thing. SARA: It is a good thing. MARK: Another key component for insurance carriers is just, in terms of their overall stability as measured by surplus. What's happening in the surplus? SARA: Well, surplus is so important and so critical for all insurance carriers and, as a policy holder, it's something you should be concerned with when you look at your own insurance carrier. Basically, that is the actual money available to policy holders beyond what's established for reserves. It's the foundation of security and stability within an insurance company. Our surplus grew 6% in 2017. We're just up over $40 million at the end of the year. So we're in sound financial shape. MARK: Yeah and I think that's a good point in terms of having lawyers understand how insurance companies ... How to judge and determine how secure and stable a company is in terms of longterm presence in a market. SARA: Absolutely. MARK: Or just the ability to pay claims going forward. And these surplus numbers are key. I'd like, shortly, to shift into a little softer side of this discussion, but before we jump there, I would like to make our listeners aware. We have put up the annual report. As I understand it, it's all on our website, interactive. Do you have any comments about that? It's just ... Just go to alpsnet.com. SARA: Correct. MARK: I just encourage you folks, if you have any interest to dig into the numbers a little bit more, all of this information is available. Let's talk about the soft stuff in 2017. SARA: Yeah. MARK: You've shared some things about growth. Lots of great things happening with the company. Just fill us in. SARA: I think that sometimes there's a tendency to look just at the numbers and they tell a great story in 2017 but there is also a lot of foundational work that went into 2017 that is really priming the pump for 2018 and beyond. A couple of those things are ... We did a full rate study of our entire 30 years of data, right? What do we know about our attorneys and what do we not know? What are the assumptions we've made over the years and what are the surprises? So, that was a huge undertaking. Took a lot of time and I think we got some valid information out of that. SARA: The other thing we did is we heard from our policy holders that maybe there was some things that we could do in our policy forms that would be better and more customizable to them. We took a hard look at our policy and developed three new policy forms to better serve our customers. That is a tremendous amount of work. MARK: Yeah. SARA: We spent most of '17 working on that. Of course, that's just the easy part. Now, we have to ... At the end of the year, we started filing our forms and rates and policies in all of our states. So, now we're hurry up and wait and see what happens. MARK: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're also at a point where we're beginning to expand jurisdictionally. Any comments on what's happening there? SARA: Yeah, we have really put some effort forward to diversify our book both geographically as well as just from a demographic perspective.  We did see significant growth in Washington and Colorado and we're going to continue to see that expansion play out. We recently were approved in Texas and starting writing business in April. So that's really exciting. We're on the march to get the last couple of states and get our Certificate of Authority. I expect that our footprint will be much different by the end of '18 then it even was in 2017. MARK: And while we have been recognized as a national insurer, we really now are on the verge of truly being national in terms of just a presence throughout the entire United States, which is exciting. SARA: It is exciting. MARK: It really is. Lots of opportunities coming. There's been some investments in technology as well. Can you share a little bit about what we're doing? SARA: Sure. I think that the consumers ... Consumers overall are changing and they're changing their purchasing patterns and the way that they like to access their information. MARK: Yes, right. SARA: I think that it's hard for insurance companies especially. We all have legacy platforms and we have to sometimes just rip the band aid off. Start over. We are working on finally e-delivery and being able to get our customers what they want, when they want it. So I think it's a huge task and it's much more complicated than you think it would be, but we're getting there. MARK: Very good. Very good. That's pretty much what we wanted to share. Do you have any closing comments? Exciting things to look forward in 2018? What's on your radar? SARA: Wow. So, 2018 right now is ... I'm really watching our rate implementation and execution and making sure that we're doing that in the right way. I think that going into new states is super exciting. How do we build traction? What does that look like? What are we going to learn? Cause you know we're going to learn a lot. We just don't know what it is at the point right now. MARK: And I'm looking forward myself in terms of one of the guys getting on the airplane so we can go to a few new places. Get a few more miles but- SARA: Right, right, right. MARK: To meet some new folks out in these new states. Doing some lecturing and what not. They are exciting times. Well, Sara, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. To all of you listening, I hope you found something of value today and I encourage you, if you have any interest in learning more about what is happening here at ALPS, to visit alpsnet.com. There is a link to the annual report interactive and there's some great information there. In addition, if any of you have any questions or topics that you would like to see addressed in the future ... Or even speakers you'd like to hear on the podcast, please don't hesitate to reach out to me at mbass@alpsnet.com. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.  

So how does a doctor know if we have high blood pressure because of diet, exercise, and health, or high blood pressure because we are nervous about being in a doctor’s office? In the end, we’ve got to take care of the high blood pressure, and in today’s lesson the doctor is taking the steps necessary to do so. Whether you say “hypertension” or “high pressure” we’ll give you the Portuguese to talk about how to make you feel better.DialogueSara: Ai Doutor, essa dor de cabeça está me matando, e de noite não durmo nada. Doutor: Há quanto tempo que essas dores começaram Dona Sara? Sara: Faz quase dois meses agora, mas nessas últimas duas semanas tem sido bem mais fortes. Doutor: Como assim, descreva as dores para mim. Sara: Bom, é mais ou menos como uma pressão, como se a cabeça explodisse, especialmente aqui atrás dos olhos. Doutor: Bom, deixa eu ver, a enfermeira já checou a sua pressão e estava 160/100. Parece que você está com hipertensão, e podemos começar com o programa de medicamento para controlar isso. Sara: Doutor, claro, estou um pouco nervosa, quando venho pra cá pra ver o senhor, mas não creio que eu esteja com hipertensão, não. É que eu fico nervosa. Doutor: Claro, muita gente fica nervosa quando tem consulta médica, mas lembra que sua pressão já era alta as últimas duas vezes que você esteve aqui. E eu já lhe disse que teríamos que dar uma olhada nisso. Sara: É isso doutor, eu fico nervosa cada vez que venho aqui. Doutor: Eu sei Dona Sara, mas não queremos correr o risco de você ter um ataque cardíaco. Sara: Concordo doutor, e pra falar a verdade a hipertensão é comum em nossa família. Doutor: Exato, vamos começar com esse programa de medicamento, e em duas semanas vamos checar a pressão outra vez. Sara: Está bem doutor, obrigada pela ajuda.Sara: Ay Doctor, this headache is killing me, and at night I can’t sleep at all. Doutor: How long ago did these pains begin, Sara? Sara: It’s been almost two months now, but in the past few weeks it has been much stronger. Doutor: What do you mean, describe the pains for me. Sara: Well, it’s more or less like a pressure, as if my head were to explode, especially here behind the eyes. Doutor: Well, let me see, the nurse has already checked your blood pressure and it was 160/100. It seems that you have hypertension, and we can begin a medication regiment to control that. Sara: Doctor, of course, I am a little nervous whenever I come to see you, but I don’t believe that I have high blood pressure. It’s just that I get nervous. Doutor: Of course, many people get nervous when the have a doctor’s appointment, but remember that your pressure was already high the last two times you were here. And I already told you that we’d have to take a look at this. Sara: That it doctor, I get nervous every time I come here. Doutor: I know Sara, but we don’t want to run the risk of you having a heart attack. Sara: I agree doctor, and to tell you the truth high blood pressure is common in our family. Doutor: Exactly, let’s begin medication regiment and in two week we will check your blood pressure again. Sara: OK doctor, thanks for the help.

So how does a doctor know if we have high blood pressure because of diet, exercise, and health, or high blood pressure because we are nervous about being in a doctor’s office? In the end, we’ve got to take care of the high blood pressure, and in today’s lesson the doctor is taking the steps necessary to do so. Whether you say “hypertension” or “high pressure” we’ll give you the Portuguese to talk about how to make you feel better.DialogueSara: Ai Doutor, essa dor de cabeça está me matando, e de noite não durmo nada. Doutor: Há quanto tempo que essas dores começaram Dona Sara? Sara: Faz quase dois meses agora, mas nessas últimas duas semanas tem sido bem mais fortes. Doutor: Como assim, descreva as dores para mim. Sara: Bom, é mais ou menos como uma pressão, como se a cabeça explodisse, especialmente aqui atrás dos olhos. Doutor: Bom, deixa eu ver, a enfermeira já checou a sua pressão e estava 160/100. Parece que você está com hipertensão, e podemos começar com o programa de medicamento para controlar isso. Sara: Doutor, claro, estou um pouco nervosa, quando venho pra cá pra ver o senhor, mas não creio que eu esteja com hipertensão, não. É que eu fico nervosa. Doutor: Claro, muita gente fica nervosa quando tem consulta médica, mas lembra que sua pressão já era alta as últimas duas vezes que você esteve aqui. E eu já lhe disse que teríamos que dar uma olhada nisso. Sara: É isso doutor, eu fico nervosa cada vez que venho aqui. Doutor: Eu sei Dona Sara, mas não queremos correr o risco de você ter um ataque cardíaco. Sara: Concordo doutor, e pra falar a verdade a hipertensão é comum em nossa família. Doutor: Exato, vamos começar com esse programa de medicamento, e em duas semanas vamos checar a pressão outra vez. Sara: Está bem doutor, obrigada pela ajuda.Sara: Ay Doctor, this headache is killing me, and at night I can’t sleep at all. Doutor: How long ago did these pains begin, Sara? Sara: It’s been almost two months now, but in the past few weeks it has been much stronger. Doutor: What do you mean, describe the pains for me. Sara: Well, it’s more or less like a pressure, as if my head were to explode, especially here behind the eyes. Doutor: Well, let me see, the nurse has already checked your blood pressure and it was 160/100. It seems that you have hypertension, and we can begin a medication regiment to control that. Sara: Doctor, of course, I am a little nervous whenever I come to see you, but I don’t believe that I have high blood pressure. It’s just that I get nervous. Doutor: Of course, many people get nervous when the have a doctor’s appointment, but remember that your pressure was already high the last two times you were here. And I already told you that we’d have to take a look at this. Sara: That it doctor, I get nervous every time I come here. Doutor: I know Sara, but we don’t want to run the risk of you having a heart attack. Sara: I agree doctor, and to tell you the truth high blood pressure is common in our family. Doutor: Exactly, let’s begin medication regiment and in two week we will check your blood pressure again. Sara: OK doctor, thanks for the help.