 We can get going now. My name's Mitch, and I guess I've met most of you before. But this is my contact information here. So feel free, please feel free to contact me any time for any reason. I love helping people any way I can. And in China, all over people are used as telegram and Facebook Messenger and Hangouts and all these different things. In China, everyone uses WeChat. Everyone. If they can afford a smartphone, they use WeChat. So that's my WeChat ID. If you're ever in China, you'll need that too. But I keep it going all the time because I go to China for a month or two or three sometimes every year. And I've been doing that since 2003. And I can contact with people from China all the time. And from going there every month, well, every year for at least a month, I have my own warped perspectives of what goes on in China. And I'm not necessarily correct. But it seems to resonate even with people in China. So I like sharing this stuff. And China does have a lot to offer. So I do want to start off since you're a captive audience with this slide because I like ranting about this. So I am a happy worker. Most people on our planet are not happy workers. When we think of a worker, we usually think of someone toiling away doing something they don't even want to do. And they're only doing it because they're getting, hopefully, enough money in order to buy food and shelter. And they're spending so much time doing all these things that are just so, at best, innocuous. Things that aren't helping each other but not hurting each other. But so many things we do for work are actually hurting ourselves and the people around us and even the planet. So I think it's really important that we find a way to get the resources we need in our lives in a way that's good for us and hopefully good for the people around us. And even good for the planet because we spend a third of our lives at work. A third, like eight to 10 to 12 hours a day, if you're in Silicon Valley, they expect you to come on weekends. And then we sleep eight hours a day. And if you're like the average American who watches an average of six and a half hours of screen time every day, when do you have time to even explore, let alone do something that you feel is worthwhile? But I actually turned TVs off for a living and I like my job. So I invented this key chain called TV Be Gone. And I started selling them in 2004. And I didn't do it to make money. I just did it because I fucking hate TV. I'm a TV addict. I watched TV every waking moment of my childhood. I was totally depressed. I tried to escape life into it. And it took over my life. And as an adult, I learned I can quit. I can actually explore and try things that I actually love doing and learn to live a life I love. But when they started popping up everywhere in public places, I got rid of TV for my apartment in 1980. And somewhere around the early 90s, they started popping up everywhere in public. Can you imagine that the world at one point does not have TVs everywhere you look? It's kind of hard to imagine at this time, because every pub, every restaurant and cafe, every airport, every train station, none and none schools. So anyways, when I started seeing them everywhere, I couldn't do anything about them. But I am a geek, so I knew that I could create a remote control to turn them all off. So I did. And it turned out that other people like that idea oddly enough. And since 2004, when I started selling them, I've sold a half a million of them. And it's the only way that me and 12 friends have made money for the last 13 years. Yeah. So it was just because I explored and found some things I like. This was one of them. And it really took over a big chunk of my psyche. And I was obsessed with it. And it turned out other people liked it too, because if you just think about all the cool things you do, if you come up with something that you really are obsessed with and love, chances are other people find meaning in that as well. And if people find meaning in you doing something, those are the kind of things that people might pay you to do. And maybe you could make a living doing the cool thing that you think is just totally awesome. So this actually does tie into what I want to talk about, which is really like hacker spaces and the whole hacker maker scene in China and about what China has to offer each of us. China is this amazing place. Of course, it has a big central government and as all central big central governments go, it's not really there for the benefit of its people. But unlike my country, people and in many places in Europe, people in China actually do get some interesting things from their government. My government, I just give them my tax money and they blow up people in other countries. So anyways, doing TVBegone got me invited to my first hacker conference. And it changed my life forever in so many ways. But finding my first hacker conference was totally amazing because here's a place like here. Here's like 100, 150 people who are here who have things they really love doing. They don't necessarily have time to do it all the time, but when we're here, we're sharing enthusiastically all these things that we love doing with each other and learning from each other. And it's really high because of that and that's one of the reasons I think we're all here. Sadly, that's not what it's like in society at large where most people, as I said earlier, are just toiling away at some activity that other people are paying them to do hopefully enough so they can get some food and shelter so they can live their lives. After the conference is over, you have to go back into that world and then wait for the next conference. My third hacker conference was Chaos Computer Camp in 2007 and there was a talk, amongst all the other cool things, there was a talk about how to start your own hacker space. And I thought that was really an amazing idea because then maybe we don't have to wait until the next hacker conference just to be surrounded by people who really love what they do. We can have a community all day, all night, all year round of people encouraging each other to explore and do things that are really cool, that are really wonderful, that we find meaning in doing. And that inspired me to start Noisebridge and some other people who were at Chaos Communications Camp 2007 started NYC Resistor and Hack DC in NYC Resistor in New York City, Hack DC in Washington DC and Hakturi in Philadelphia. We all helped each other and within a year there were a whole bunch of other people who had been watching this, within a year there were a hundred new hacker spaces. Within a year after that there were 500 more and we still keep helping each other and it's just really amazing and we get together just with this idea that we're gonna enjoy it and even if they're doing something as simple as soldering, like these people are doing, look how happy they are. That's what happens when people come together just wanting to share what they do and enjoy the time together. But anyways, this all grew, teaching soldering at Noisebridge was just a handful of people. I've been doing it every Monday since 2007 and it just grows and now I can do up to like 50 some people at a time, whatever, big, small, it doesn't matter as long as we're sharing something that's meaningful for us. And but going to these things has started getting me invited to go all over the place. I started, of course, manufacturing is much less expensive in China as we all probably know. I tried to manufacture in China, in the US locally but the price was three times as much and the quality was about half as much. Not a good combination. So I found people in China who could do it for me for really good quality, for really good price, who treated their people well, paid them well and treated the environment well. It was not easy to find that in 2003 when I was doing that, but it was possible and I did that and the difference between that company and the cheapest company I could find was 25 cents per unit. And I thought it was worth paying 25 cents per unit in order to treat people well. If I'm making this thing to make lives better for people I don't want to do that at the expense of others, right? So anyways, China is one of the places I was going. I'm giving talks all around the world in workshops. People started asking me to do that in China. Of course I'm talking about hacker spaces because they're awesome and the more I did that, the more people in China asked me to do that and other people start talking about hacker spaces in China, some people open hacker spaces in China. There's some really cool ones there and there's all these people talking about hacker spaces in China and it filters up to local governments who see all the benefits of hacker spaces for economic development and also for education and they tell their superiors and they eventually filtered all the way up to the top of government and I've got a picture for that too. So anyways, doing workshop tours all over the planet including China, this is the first maker fair kind of thing there called a maker carnival in 2012 and doing manufacturing in China. This is my first company and I met all of these people and with my pigeon Mandarin could kind of talk to them and they're actually really cool people and they make enough money from one three month contract to pay for their living and their family for the rest of the year and they're allowed up to two contracts per year so they actually get a bunch of extra money and it's pretty cool. At this place, other places aren't so good. Yeah and then just a little taste of the manufacturing testing is kind of weird because these people have all used remote controls before but they never did that at work but here they are testing TV begun at the end of the assembly line and of course it does work and then after that they package it and this is my new company and this was when I was in China just like three months ago making the latest batch of TV begun that includes all of the latest off codes for all the new TVs out there and my new company is much smaller and more responsive to the needs of me and my small company. So anyways, here's the first big talk I gave. This is one of the sort of the make magazine kind of China called Gua Keur and they invited me to the Panasonic Center and they were standing room only and I'm talking about hacker spaces and talking about things in ways Chinese people really don't like to hear which makes people pay attention to me because like, oh there's this white guy there. He's saying weird things, come on, check it out and it works and this grew from like just talking to university students and little kids at school to things like this and then talking to, this was in October, talking to 1,200 bureaucrats and the translator was doing a terrible job and I could tell because when I would say something they just had blank faces and they didn't laugh and they didn't look surprised when I said death and Chinese people hate hearing that word so but anyways I think they kind of got the idea of what I was trying to say because afterwards people actually were asking me questions that were worthwhile but this stuff really did filter it's a huge part of the Chinese government pushing what they call maker education and the maker movement or even the hacker movement and it filtered all the way up to the top of government and here is the head of state, Premier Li, visiting a hacker space started by the person who runs Seed Studio that's with three E's it's a first open hardware company in China and they opened up a hacker space so that people could get opportunities from them and Premier Li visits it and makes this huge media show out of the whole thing and says this, Hacker Spaces is the future of China and not to be left behind the president of my country at the time not nearly as bad as the current one created the White House Maker Faire and he's looking at this Marshmallow Launcher that this incredibly cool geeky kid created Joey Hoody so yeah, Hacker Spaces, I'm talking about Hacker Spaces all of us here probably know it so I won't harp on this but Hacker Spaces really are about community it's about community, it's not about making a thing it's really cool and we can all make things it's really wonderful and we have fun doing that but that's not what it's about it's important and that's what brings us together but we're there as a community to encourage people to explore and try things and learn and share with each other and when people do that again like here's some people soldering I mean that's what I do, right? I like soldering and look, they're happy and people come together and when they come together in this community and they do want to make some things of course they want tools and it can be all sorts of different tools this is one in Ann Arbor, Michigan that does things all mechanical and they do amazing mechanical things big and small and they've got all the tools to do that and I want to say what my definition of hacking is because most people in the world including China when they hear the word hacker or hacking they think of people who break into other people's computers and steal shit that's what the mainstream media called people doing that in the 1990s and that's what they still call it so but as it was defined by the Model Train Club in MIT in 1953 before most people even heard of computers hacking is taking resources, devoting it to your project using those resources any way you want to make your projects cool, seeing what works what doesn't work and then sharing it with others and doing that overall because it's incredibly enjoyable we all love doing that stuff and there's that one and we do it because it's totally wonderful we love doing that and it really is more than just doing things in a certain way it's a way of I guess the battery's out so I think I can talk loud can you hear me? Cool so it's really a way of looking at things it's a way of living it's a way of being and when you do this you might find things that you really love and other people probably if you do this you'll probably find things you love and then chances are good that other people might love it too and then you can have an idea then for a startup that isn't stupid I don't know if you've noticed but close to 100% of all the startups are stupid that's because the first thing they think of is I'm gonna get rich how am I gonna get rich? I'll do a startup what should the startup be about? people are doing apps I'll make an app yeah it'll be orange whatever but if you explore and find things you love other people might love it too and then you might find an opportunity and then you can start a startup that isn't stupid you don't need to do that when you hack you absolutely don't need to do that but if you wanna do anything entrepreneurial you definitely have to start by hacking you have to make time and then explore and find things and so all good entrepreneurs are good hackers to be a good hacker you can do so many different things being a good entrepreneur is just one thing you could do so this excites bureaucrats of course anything can be hacked electronics, computers and all these things we think of with art and science and craft and ourselves I learned to be a person who loves living my life starting from a total depressed blob of a kid the first half of my life was awful but I learned to live a life I love by hacking my life we can hack our communities, our societies and the planet and everything needs to be hacked because everything needs people like us and pretty much everyone to join in and teach and share and learn and see things in this way that we can share our resources and help our poor little planet out and our people and other beings on it so anyways there are a bunch of tools anything from electronics and fabrication and little hand tools and art and there's art class at Noisebridge cooking there's lots and lots of wonderful cooking going on unique and novel ways and even wonderful traditional ways and it's for people of all ages it's for everybody on our planet race and age and everything it doesn't matter and this is what makes Hacker Space's fantastic learning environments because people explore, the courage to explore they find things they love once you find a project you love you're super motivated to make it as awesome as possible so you learn what you need in order to make it as awesome as possible and you're motivated to learn those things unlike at schools where you're only doing it because you're told you have to but overall they're supportive communities for people to explore and do what people really find meaning in doing and this is how innovative things come about innovation is a buzzword now bureaucrats are primed to hear that word if you use that word along with the word creativity and economic development and education then maybe they'll even let's go of some currency and let some people who actually want to do something worthwhile do those worthwhile things and I found this works incredibly well in China but in many places around the world so when people explore and do things that they really want to do they're doing things that are perfect for them and if it's perfect for them it's probably perfect for the people in their surrounding community and that's something that again maybe there's opportunity in that but it's unique, it's something really cool and these are just people working on drones in Agdeburg but yeah, it's perfect for your own community and maybe it's good for starting a startup that isn't stupid. So China, back to China now all that stuff applies to talking to bureaucrats in China. There's a lot of stuff in every country especially one that's been around for two and a half millennia without a break. It has a lot to offer not only the people there but the world but there's some economic problems there that they're facing. The biggest economic game so far there has been Western companies going there and paying Chinese manufacturers to make things for the Western companies that are then shipped halfway around the world. Well that brought the Chinese economy from almost feudal up to one of the biggest economies in the world in a very short amount of time and with that there's a rising middle class there's a strong economy there people of course are demanding and should be paid much more so labor costs are much higher now and also their economy is doing better so the exchange rate is going the wrong way for Westerners to go over there and be economical. Energy prices keep going up so shipping costs halfway around the world are higher. All of that adds up to things not going too well economically. Also like everywhere in the world their education system is really problematic. They have been doing examinations there for over a thousand years and they're hyper focused on getting the best test scores so they can get into the best kindergarten and if they're good in kindergarten they can do the best test scores to get into the best primary schools and secondary schools and universities. Like the university that I'm often helping with education there to turn it into more project based two million people apply every year and they only accept 2000. There's a lot of competition it's really intense and they focus only on the test and not about learning and it's gotten so bad that there are these cram schools now that train people into not thinking when they're learning and taking these tests. Because if you think you take more time per question and if you take more time per question you don't do as well as the people who don't think so they're training a generation of people to not think. Not a good situation. So people who run the show there a lot of these people really want to make things better and they're seeing hacker spaces as a way of doing that. But anyways, this is what could happen in the eyes of bureaucrats and they don't want to see that happen and when there are problems to solve their opportunities and China with a billion people and all the manufacturing and all the parts and materials coming from China and an education system even if it was focused on tests there's a lot of resources there to use for them and the world. But some things need to shift in China because they've been focusing on these tests for so long like I said that's become problematic. Creativity is really scary there because their failure is scary everywhere but there if you fail even if you don't do something perfect it's so shameful people are afraid of even trying something without knowing they're going to be really good at it and they can't be really good if they're first starting because when you first start you suck. You have to spend 10,000 hours doing it and then you become great and if you love it then you become really great. So anyways, all of these things need a little bit of a shift and that's why they were calling for outsiders like me and other people to go in there and talk crazy talk and it seems to resonate and a lot of people there are ready and all it needs is some weirdo to come along just poke and people have permission and Hacker Space starts and they start all over the place and it's been really cool to see these things happen and like once there's people exploring and finding cool things then finding ideas that might be worthwhile for a startup and they might have some possibility of success as a result then we can have a co-working space where people can bring their little company into reality and they even get training for specific things for their company and that's what incubators are for trading some equity for that training and China is looking to this as part of their future and same with economically depressed areas in the United States and in Europe and I'll just poke at education again because most of us experience education that looks more like this and it's all become about tests and tests aren't learning. If you learn to do well on a test that means you're a good test taker. That school in China the one I mentioned is called Qinghua they are the best test takers in the planet. If you ask one of those people okay here's a few things and I've got this problem to solve what would you suggest to start working on this problem? They look like you're about to shoot them. They're terrified of that but if you ask them answer these 50 test questions they're on it. So anyways education doesn't have to be about taking tests which is supposed to be about evaluating learning but it's not about learning anymore it's about the tests but bureaucrats like that but now some bureaucrats in high places in many countries around the world are actually pushing for real education and project-based learning really works so making that part of your education is good. So a lot of schools not only in China but all over the world are having hacker spaces as part of their education because education can look like this and it should. So hacker spaces are becoming part of schools. Again when you explore and find things you find projects you love and you're motivated to take a class like when I was in undergrad and I was working on my music synthesizer on the side at this teeny little lab that didn't give me any credit in school but it was a great place where a whole bunch of geeky people came together and we all helped each other with our projects doing robots and I was doing music synthesizer and someone was even making a flying machine and this is all in like the 1980, right? And we were doing innovative stuff for back then and it was really cool whereas every other lab was doing military stuff funded by the US military they were doing stupid shit like missile guidance systems while we were actually doing something worthwhile. And I found that I didn't know enough in order to make really awesome nasty noises with my synthesizer so suddenly the digital signal processing class was something I wanted to take rather than something I had to take. That's because project-based learning is an incredible motivator as we all know from the projects we do at our various hacker spaces or in our communities. So and all of this I've been talking about is why hacker spaces have grown from about 40 or so in 2007 to over 3,500 and this is actually an old picture from Hackerspaces.org because now China is just as obliterated with little dots as Europe and North America because this guy visited a hacker space Chihuah in Shenzhen, China and made a big media show out of it and said this hacker spaces is the future of China for economic development and education and so every bureaucrat in China knows that they have to start a hacker space in their local area but they don't know what hacker spaces are so they're building spaces that look like this. They're empty co-working spaces and they think that if they build a thing that looks like it belongs in Silicon Valley or what they believe looks like something from Silicon Valley because they've never been to Silicon Valley but they believe they've built a building that looks Silicon Valley-ish that magic will happen just like in Silicon Valley. It doesn't work that way. Silicon Valley happened because there were a whole bunch of weirdos so this is San Francisco, right? This is a place where weirdos collect. A whole bunch of weirdos in the 1970s wanted computers for their home. No one thought of weird stuff like that back then but these people thought of it and they thought the technology was good enough and they got together, they couldn't do it on their own, they got together in community, the homebrew computer club and they figured out many ways to do it and some of those companies still exist. One is the biggest capitalized company in the planet now because people explored and found things they loved and then you helped each other in community to make it happen and that's what needs to happen there and there are cool hacker spaces there and here's just a few pictures from some cool places. I mean this should look familiar to all of us. There's a lot of cool stuff happening there and these are just some of the places that I've been to recently and you know in the Chihuahua. When bureaucrats make a big deal of something there is possibility and in China there's a ton of money coming down from the top. Unfortunately it's going into the hands usually of people who are building those stupid, empty co-working spaces but there are a lot of people who can take that money, who care, who know, who understand and want to help others who can build community from the bottom up to make something cool happen. Things like this rather than this. So China does have lots of resources. There's manufacturing. If you make something and you want to share it with the world there's places now around the world. There's places in Germany that are actually quite competitive with China manufacturing now and that's gonna start happening more and more as China gets even better economy. But still if you're gonna make 500 or more of something to share with the world to make money or otherwise whether it's open source or not I mean everything I do is open source. TBGON that I've made a living with for the last 13 years me and 12 friends a sustainable business is open source. And it works great that way because I want people to turn off TVs. The more people that do it the better and the more excited they are the more they talk about TV gone the more people buy my thing. How can that be bad? It works great. So anyways there's open source companies in China now because it makes sense. All the copycat things they don't call it open source but it essentially is they all share all the information with each other it's all available for free online and they share that stuff freely. You have to be able to read Mandarin and talk Mandarin because that's the only language they do it in but it's all there it's amazing ecosystem and you can find companies that treat people well pay them well treat the environment well and give you good quality and good price and the difference in price is minimal from the worst and the best companies and Shenzhen is pretty amazing place. This is the beginning of a video of a friend of mine from Noisebridge who in the markets in Shenzhen built his own iPhone just by buying parts there and he has the video that went viral and like five million people have seen it it's kind of crazy and when he walks around Shenzhen people point at him. So Shenzhen has this area called Hua Chong Bay which has everything you can imagine for electronics and it's outrageously cheap and it's really fun to go there and you know not just LEDs and tools but you know just anything and if you go there and you're even decent at haggling and struggling with hand waving trying to communicate with translate programming with Mandarin and whatever language it's really fun but Hua Chong Bay it's just zillions and zillions of these things this is just one corner of one floor of one building out of this whole area of town it's really it's totally cool and there's all these maker festivals that are really huge it's really fun to check those out there's all those cool hacker spaces there's schools and universities that teach people how to use CNC mill and you get to actually hands on to learn these things it's incredible what you can learn just by going there for a little while. They also have some of the most amazing signs on the planet. This is like I think my favorite this sign is bigger than this and it says this on it nobody knows what it means and some of the signs are kind of scary that's inside of a PCB manufacturing company doesn't it make you warm and fuzzy? China's not all good but stuff like that's disappearing but stuff like this is everywhere and there are a lot of really cool companies there including a few several open hardware companies DF Robot makes all sorts of resources for people to make robots and the owner of the company came from a hacker space in Shanghai, Xincha Jian and MakeBlock is a company that makes resources they started with a incubator that I'm a mentor for called Hacks, H-A-X and they had a crowdfunding campaign that was successful and now they're a really big company and they treat their this is their company this is where they work every day this is like a hacker space it's really a fun place to be and Seed Studio is the first open hardware company and they help people make even small quantities of electronic projects and mechanical projects they're a good resource China also has a lot of really amazing artists I don't know if you know who this guy is that I met his name's Ai Weiwei he was arrested and he had his head beaten in by the Chinese government and he's not really a fan of the Chinese government anymore even though he lives there they took his passport away but they gave it back so mixed bag with China some things are opening up some things are closing not as bad as my country I think but anyways they've got better trains than Switzerland no shit so you know they do go up to 400 kilometers an hour and they can even stop and food everywhere you go people eat food that's the way if you have any kind of dealing with any company the first thing they do after just meeting and saying hi is they bring you to dinner and you have stuff like this it's and it's so cheap and so good and everywhere in China it's different you know saying Chinese food is kind of like saying European food and it's all good it's just amazing and I'm vegan and like it's super easy for me to get fantastic food everywhere it's just great and there's co-working spaces that are really fun places as well as all the hacker spaces and incubators like hacks that I'm a mentor for there's also this website called Taobao Huacheng Bay that electronics market in Shenzhen is amazing but Taobao is kind of like Amazon sort of but the Chinese version you can buy absolutely anything there and it will be delivered to your door perhaps excuse me perhaps the same day but definitely the next day one time a few years ago we saw that tablets were super cheap and we thought they were really crummy but they're really cheap so for like 30 dollars a bunch of people ordered a few different ones to see if any of them actually work it turns out they all do this was several years ago and now they're even cheaper we ordered them from Taobao and they got at eight o'clock on Saturday night and they arrived before eight a.m. on Sunday they've got this infrastructure down but it's not just electronics as you can see like dresses and dish soap and luggage anything absolutely anything including industrial like a big industrial crane or a bulldozer and they'll deliver it to your door so I have this project that you can play with it in there if you want to it's a music synthesizer kit and all the parts if I source all the parts in the United States it costs me 12 dollars and 85 cents I think it came out to if I do it on Aliexpress it's about eight dollars but if I do it on Taobao it's even cheaper so you can see these prices are amazingly cheap if you do these little speakers from Mauser or Digikey these cost seven dollars U.S. seven dollars and 30 cents I think if you do it from Aliexpress it's considerably less but if you do it from Taobao it's 30 cents 29 Euro cents and same with 18 Mega 328 the microcontroller inside of Arduino's if you buy them one from the U.S. it's about two dollars and 50 cents if you buy them from Aliexpress it's less if you buy them from Taobao it's 37 cents you know and you do the whole thing and also there's PC board places this is an open hardware company started by dangerous prototypes who became famous for doing a thing called Bus Pirate but Ian went to China to do stuff and work with Seed Studio who sold Bus Pirate there he met his boyfriend and they've been living there ever since and they've started all these different resources for people including really cheap PCBs that you can order anywhere in the world Dirty PCB is just one resource that does that Seed Studio does it and so do others but using these kind of resources you can see the difference in prices between sourcing things in U.S. or Aliexpress where the cheapest Taobao and when I was in China I got my next batch there so I can make hopefully my next versions of the Music Synthesizer Kit cheaper so that other people can afford it to make all of this you know I've been going to China every year because of manufacturing and when I saw that Bunny Huang who's this amazing engineer, hacker who first hacked the Microsoft Xbox yeah, the Xbox he became super famous for that and he does all this manufacturing he does consulting for people he goes to China all the time and does stuff he thought it'd be cool to offer a trip to China and a bunch of people I know went on that trip and they really loved it and I thought I would do the same thing he wasn't going to do anymore so I started Hacker Trips to China and the first Hacker Trips to China was in 2009 there were no hacker spaces in China and I was just beginning to give talks like I was talking about all this stuff and but we had a great time visiting manufacturers and Huacheng Bay, the electronics market and other things that are of geeky interest and then meeting geeky people who would show us what they love about their hometowns wherever we go and but it grew in popularity and then I met this guy as a professor at Qinghua University the one I mentioned earlier and he's holding this sign up at Beijing International Airport for us and he's saying I hope this doesn't get too popular a picture because I might get in trouble but by now the head of state Premier Lee is talking about hackers faces so he won't get in trouble he'll get a feather in his cap but we took this funny picture of the first Hacker Trips and wearing Mongolian hats with red stars on them and at a temple and you can visit manufacturers that if all you have to do is contact them and say can we visit they say sure wear these bunny suits and you can come in and it's fun so and then giving talks at schools we people who want to on the trip can share their enthusiasm for their weird projects and show that if you do something it's not because you're guaranteed to make money and you're guaranteed to succeed and all this high status stuff that people strive for you do it because it's enjoyable and then maybe if you want to then you can try something and maybe you'll have some possibility of success but you have to start by exploring and so we're sharing with all this and this was last year at what's the name of the place? Oh yeah, Jiangzhou High School Number Two 20,000 students it's kind of a big deal so we were talking to all these 20,000 students and they know English there it's amazing these little kids well not so little high school kids know English and they were into it they totally loved it and I have no idea what Jiangzhou High School Number One is but the principle of this school has been pushing for project-based learning and wants to get away from tests he's been pushing this and he's got the friend of his in the Ministry of Education for this area of China and they're pushing for this it's really difficult though because students before they were students well if they were ever before students because parents before the kids even born is planning the kids life out getting them into the best kindergarten to get into the best school, et cetera, et cetera to the best universities and this is all before they're born so the kid only knows test, test, test, test, test and if you say okay let's take time off of these tests and actually do something worthwhile and the kids are going yeah this is fun but what about the tests and they tell their parents and the parents are like what about the tests so it's a problem it's a big problem how do we shift that so we had a meeting there and they invited us all this and it leads to things that look like this and talking to lots of bureaucrats so it's actually fun talking to these people they actually do wanna make a positive social change and there are people high up in government listening to them and they wanna deal with these social problems and I think that's awesome like that is happening in other places like Luxembourg invited me to go over because they want every single school public school in Luxembourg to be project based and have hacker spaces as part of their curriculum of course that's easier in Luxembourg where there's a total of 43 schools in China there's something like two and a half million if I'm remembering correctly but yeah it's really amazing so anyways just in case you're interested I'm planning another hacker trip to China and this is the best machine porn video I think possible this is slow motion of a spring making machine that we visited last year this actually a spring is made once per second yeah a machine porn it's wonderful but anyways if you're interested go to noisebridge.net and search for China trip and everyone's welcome and I'm also working on a hacker and residence program Tsinghua University is helping with this to a little degree and this is the kickoff of their hacker and residency and I was the first hacker and residence there and we did this kung fu hacking thing which was really silly but a lot of fun and yeah but by the end of August I hope to have hackerinresidence.org going so that anywhere in the world Europe, China, North America, South America, Antarctica if there's anyone there can an organization can have a free page there's no advertising it's just something I'm doing cause I wanna help spread the joy so yeah this was we were doing it on hackerspaces.org but it's kinda cumbersome there but there's a lot of cool stuff there cause it's a wiki but having hackerinresidence.org just an organization has a about page and then they can have residency opportunity pages and they decide how people want to apply and you've all heard of artists in residence maybe where an artist can come to a community share their thing mentor people learn stuff from that community and go home or somewhere else and share what they learn and cross-pollinate it doesn't have to be just visual art though it can be everything that we all do and a lot of these places like Tsinghua has a huge budget they paid me not a huge amount but $800 a month plus housing plus a bicycle plus a gym pass plus food so and all my expenses paid plus the 800 which goes a long way in China and plus my expenses going there and back and some places have even more budget than that and some places it's just a little hacker space oh you don't have any budget we can't pay for your travel but we have a desk and some tools and cool people but whatever it's up to each organization what they wanna offer and what's required Tsinghua the only thing I had to do was have one workshop but of course while I'm there I did lots cause it was fun and I worked on lots of my own projects while I was there too so anyways it's just sort of a little bit of what I do related to China and elsewhere and I like doing this stuff cause I think our planet is really in need of some help people on the planet need some help you know what percentage of people on our planet think that their life is awesome I think very small percentage and that's really got to change I would love to see 100% of people on our planet feeling that their lives are amazing right now there's like 4,000 or so hacker spaces on the planet maybe that's 100,000 people that have opportunities that they have to offer and have the benefit of this kind of community but we need millions of these for people to be able to have these kind of opportunities there's 7 billion of us here and maybe through all of this we can find means of getting whatever resources we need in order to live lives that are totally amazing without spending all of our time working some job that we don't like or just it's okay or even if we like it doing it too much whatever I mean there's so many possibilities let's explore them let's make opportunities for everyone and anyways that's what I want to do for as long as I'm alive so here's my contact information again and thanks for your time so maybe got time for any questions if there's any or comments and you talked about the government in China supporting various hacker spaces but when we were there and went to Shenzhen, I think it's called, yeah and they told us that they didn't want any support from the government because they would have to do things say that they didn't want to and I thought it was a similar situation in Shenzhen DIY although I wasn't quite sure because of the language barrier but I want to ask you what your take was on that that these hacker spaces didn't necessarily like involvement with the government thank you great question we were talking about that in the hacker space design parent discussion as well money comes with strings and there's trade offs so some strings are more galling than others but yeah there's definitely like noise bridge we don't take any money from anybody unless there's no strings and I mean no if they ask you it's like here's a million dollars all you have to do is put our logo on the website we'll say no we don't need a million dollars we already have enough the way we're doing things Shenzhen is the first hacker space they definitely wanted to do it on their own especially back then when it wasn't supported at all they didn't know what government officials would be like they wanted to do things their own way and if you get government money you definitely have to do things that the government wants and it might be just filling out lots and lots and lots of forms you know what bureaucracy is like here they've been doing it for two and a half millennia they're good at it and I think they invented it so yeah there's lots of forms to fill out plus they can say we don't like this one thing you're doing you need our money stop that one thing and we'll give you the money right or they can say you know what you're doing is cool but you're not doing enough of this thing you know it should be up to the community what people want to do in their own community and not up to the funding source so there are trade-offs there is some money available now for people to basically do whatever they want there might be forms to fill out but there are some really cool spaces that I've visited that have started with government money and it's filtered down so it's just a local bureaucrat really the only string that I'm aware of is that you have to be able to have the CCTV the big TV network come in with the bureaucrat and shaking the bureaucrats hand while everyone in China smiles at you so but yeah you gotta be careful of that funding sources do matter which is why you know I quit helping Maker Faire when they took $10 million grant from the US military cause I don't wanna help the US military with the cool things that I do if they wanna take it that's up to them but I'm not gonna give it to them yeah so it's important to think about these things so thanks for asking about that Any other questions? You talked about the cheap manufacturing and the PCB manufacturing for example and that there are companies that do things better and to treat their employees good and some do not and my question is as a consumer here in Europe when for example ordering PCBs which I recently did for absolutely dot cheap and I can't imagine anyone is getting treated fairly or paid well how would you go about choosing someone there that treats them well without actually being there yeah that's really important to think about too with PCBs they're pretty bad all the way around I went to the so Seed Studio the guy who started that he calls himself Eric as it and Eric really cares about this stuff he treats his employees really well but they don't make their own PCBs they make their own once they have the PCB they can have the pick and place machine and all the super fancy stuff to do everything else they don't make their own PCBs so they looked around and tried to find the best ones they could find and the best one they could find was the one where that weird sign was with the eyeballs they found one better than that the next year and we visited that one as well but it's still you know if you go to a place in Europe or in the US there's government agencies that are overseeing things and even though they're underfunded the manufacturers don't want their employees to be the companies don't want their employees to be harmed so they enforce people to use safety equipment at the current PCB place for Seed Studio they have all the safety equipment there like masks and ear protection in places that are loud and other eye protection but people aren't using them and they don't force people to use them it's easier not to use them just to do your job and then go home seemingly it's not easier to spend some amount of time in the hospital dealing with all the problems that result from that I imagine but yeah so this is a problem so that's the best that they could find and I don't know how to find any better ones myself but the one that my manufacturer uses basically the same as the one in the Seed Studio uses but in Shanghai rather than Shenzhen I actually went to China to visit all these places and in 2003 there was no talk about this stuff on the internet that's when I was setting up stuff for TVBegone and I talked to a bunch over the phone and email and a bunch told me what I wanted to hear and when I went to visit them several were like black pits of despair they were really awful they were really awful but three were good and I went with the one that made for me it was really an advantage they made a third of all the remote controls in the planet so they actually helped me a lot with what I do and their PCB play they made their own PCBs so they did pretty good and they enforced their safety a little more than others with the company I have now they contract that out and they are kind of like that Seed one the safety stuff's there people are well trained they're well paid they're treated well but they don't enforce the safety standards but if you don't go there you don't know unless there's a network of people who are going there and looking and letting other people know that's all you can do so if you go with the cheapest it doesn't mean it's the worst cheap doesn't you know there's not necessarily a correlation between price and quality or price and how well they treat their employees so yeah you just have to either know yourself or know people who know and that's all we can do at this point cool well we're pretty much out of time anyways there's two minutes left but hit me up email here in person we chat if you have it whatever so thanks