 I am very honored to introduce our next speaker, though, who is going to talk to us about a lot of the nature of open collaboration and open governance. How many people in here know William Hurley, a.k.a. Whirly? It's been around open source for a while. I just saw somebody tweet out a picture of Whirly at a Linux con circa, I want to say 2002 with a long board going up an escalator. Whirly has gone on to big things. He created, he's an author and innovator. He started a company called Honest Dollar, which was purchased by Goldman Sachs last year. I think just for the name. Sorry, I couldn't resist. But he's really been working with open source and creating innovative technologies his entire career. And, you know, his position now at Goldman, I think gives him a unique window into critical systems that affect all of our lives, and I'm excited to hear from him. Please welcome Whirly. There you are. Look at all over for us. All right, thank you. So, yeah, so all of that was true. And Mark Hinkel's the one who put the picture out. And I appreciate that. Where's Mark? Thank you for doing that, Mark. I appreciate that. That was a trip down memory lane. I really didn't need, but it's okay. So, I am in between two state-of-the-union type talks, and this is nothing like that. Essentially, I'm also gonna try to get this back on schedule. So this next 15, 20 minutes is probably the least valuable investment of your time so far. But that's just because if I help set the expectations lower than the rest of the conference, right, it's gonna be amazing. So, I wanna talk to you about how the impossibilities open source are endless. A few years ago, I spoke at another open source event, and everybody was talking about how we did it. Like, all software developers pretty much use open source, and all these mass systems are built on open technologies, and I don't know that we're quite there yet. But before I do that, I wanted to talk to you about something else. I wanted to talk to you about the law of unintended consequences. Because I think that's really valuable at where we're at in the development of technology and the lifecycle of open source right now. To do that, I wanna frame up a story from another organization. So I'm a member of the IEEE, and I go and I do a bunch of stuff with them, and one day, they call me, and they said, Whirly, we need to make some money. Cause they're an organization too, right, a non-profit, and I said, I said, lots of money? And they said, oh yeah, lots of money. And I said, how are you gonna do it? And they said, don't worry, we have a brilliant idea. See, we've got this guy, Tim Decker, he's this artist, but he's not just any artist, he's a speed painter, and we think he can help us make this money really fast. And I said, what are you gonna do? They said, well, we're gonna have him do three portraits, and we're gonna have him do Einstein, the Statue of Liberty, and Steve Jobs. And I thought, well, those all go together perfectly. So I said, okay, that sounds great. And they said, how are you gonna do it? And they said, well, we're gonna auction it off, but we're not just gonna do any auction, we're gonna auction it off, we're gonna make all that money on the internet. And I said, well, that's pretty good. And they said, well, you know, since we're using the internet, we like you to get to tweet these things out. And I was like, why? And I said, well, you have as many followers as Vanilla Ice. I thought, well, that's interesting comparison. And they said, but if you tweet it out, you make a lot of money. And I said, well, there's only one question I have. You know, my concern here is that it might break the entire internet. And they didn't believe that. I said, but I do wanna see you make all of this money, so I've got this. I said, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna take my wallet out and I'm gonna give you $500 for each of these paintings in this auction. And then I'm gonna tweet them out so we know what happens there. And then the next thing I'm gonna do is just let you wait for the money to come in because it's just gonna roll in according to your plan. And I can get back to my more important plans been working on for quite a while now. And so we did this Einstein painting sold. It did great. It had a bunch of bids. And Statue of Liberty, it also sold. But a really interesting thing happened when we got to the Steve Jobs portrait. And that's where the law of unintended consequences come in. You all know this. I don't have to preach this to you, but there's basically three types of these consequences. There's an unexpected benefit. So some positive outcome that comes out of this. And of course, there's the unexpected drawback and the perverse result. And so what happened with this is Steve Jobs painting had one person that bid on it. It was me for $500. And nobody else bid on this painting at all. So a few weeks later, this giant box shows up in the office and everybody's trying to figure out what it is. And I mean, this thing is huge. And I was like, I don't know what it is. I got back from traveling. I opened up the box and lo and behold, I'm now the proud owner of a giant portrait of Steve Jobs head signed on the back by Tim Decker, which is amazing. And it's really menacing. Look at that face. I mean, it's not like so. So I thought, well, this is clearly an unintended consequence. I was just trying to help these guys out. So there's a perverse result, which is I have a giant menacing portrait of Steve Jobs staring down at me in my office 24 seven. There's unintended drawback, which is for some reason, people are fascinated by this, right? Because if you're in a building, I work in WeWork and you walk somebody's office, and all of a sudden you see this giant portrait of Steve Jobs, you got like, there's a story there somewhere, right? And there's not, unfortunately. So I've disappointed hundreds of people. And then there's unexpected benefit. It's inspirational, just not the way you think it would be. And that's because when I'm sitting there working really hard and I get to an idea, I turn around, because I always turn away from my computer when I'm thinking, I see this giant picture of Steve Jobs looking down some menacingly and think, you know what, F you Steve, and I turn around and I make it happen. So it works. But when I was first in open source back in the day of the long boards and less facial hair and less gray hair and less a lot of things, actually more hair, one positive there, I kept hearing all these companies I've gone and talked to at the time. This is way back in the early days. Companies were afraid to open source. They're giving away the company jewels, so to speak. They're doing all of these things that are, they're worried about the unintended consequence. What if we do this thing we think is doing a good thing, but it damages our company, our share price or whatever the case may be. And I'd actually like to get everybody here to think about something else. I'd like to get you to think about the unintended consequences of not doing anything, right? It's kind of that old Rush song because none of you listen to Rush, right? Nobody in this room. It's a band from Canada. They've been around for a little while. But you know, if you choose the Eclipse Foundation for the win. Excellent reference. But you're Canadian, so it doesn't count. Unfortunately, sorry. We needed someone from like Kentucky to say that. And they'd be like, whoa. So the thing is, what's the unintended consequences of doing nothing? What's the unintended consequences of like, hey, we're all gonna keep doing these projects. It's great. But where can this open collaboration, where can this open source kind of philosophy take us? And so the first area that I'd like to encourage you to think about is quantum computing. And that's what this is if you've never been inside one. And basically, right down here is a little tiny set of atoms. And the rest of that's pretty much cooling. And it's in a big empty box. If you hit the box like that, probably takes them three months to reset that thing. But quantum computing is gonna cause for an incredible shift in everything. In security, encryption, in the development of pharmaceuticals, in millions and millions of things that we do. And I think this is gonna be one of the biggest things that happens and people have talked about it forever. And yes, there are like four quantum computers in the entire world. So we don't have to worry about like crazy AI or robots yet, but this is vital. And I think this should be democratized. I think everybody should have an equal playing field in this quantum space. I think it's incredibly important that we build emulators and things so that people can develop the hardware and build an open source operating system and build an open source programming language on top of that or incorporate other programming languages that already are open source. So that's one area I'd really like to point out to you. The next area is biohacking. How many of you guys do any biohacking? None of you? I completely do not believe that, because okay, that, right, yeah, obviously. There's more than one, because some of you were talking to me at the bar last night all about going to the biohacking conference in Austin. And I saw several of you there, but people get weird when they don't wanna tell everybody like, well, see, I'm trying to get this thing implanted because it kinda creeps people out. But biohacking is huge and pharmaceuticals and all the different things that go with it. People right now, a lot of software engineers are micro dosing, right? None of you, though, right? You guys know what micro dosing is? There's a micro dosing is set of 100 milligrams of LSD. It's like 10 milligrams of LSD and you get in a flow state. And somebody said, you should try that. And I was like, no, fuck that. I'm also from Austin. Nobody's really dropping a lot of LSD in Austin. They're doing things, but it's not that. But all of this technology around biomechanics, bioinformatics, biosystems, a lot of it is very proprietary. Even in the biohacking community, it seems like a very heavy software developer type community, lots of very creative innovators, thinkers. There's a lot of protection around ideas. There's a lot of protection around things. This is very dangerous. I think this would be a great thing to take some open innovation, some open collaboration to. I would like to know that in that time that I think, maybe I should try something like the micro dosing or the implant or the whatever, that there's a bunch of people who have done it who are willing to share that experience with me and the outcomes and there's data on it and things because we're not talking about messing with the computer in this area. We're talking about messing with your body. And while I have nine lives, you guys all only have one. So you want to be very careful. This is a super fascinating area to me. The third area is architecture. I travel all around the world and we live in such a great place for all of the politics and everything aside. We have a lot of things other people don't have, especially in the area of architecture. We don't have really great architecture, but there's a lot of people. There's a company in Austin that makes housing reactive. If you guys have heard of them, it's reactive housing and they make housing for disaster relief. So disaster hits that can pop up these things that are way better than tents and families can live in and it's super cool. And there's things like that going all around the world and I'd love to see these projects get together. I'd love to see these projects come and kind of open source some of those ideas, kind of open source these things, go through and figure out, well, okay, we solved this housing issue in an emergency in a very specific way and we're willing to share that out with a bunch of other people, but right now that's again another very proprietary area of industry because it involves government contracts so there's a lot of money in responding to these disasters. But it's not just that, architectures for everything, for aqueducts, for clean water, all of these things would be very, very useful if they were more open. And that leads me to the next thing, which is education. Now there's tons of examples. I'm not saying that in any of these areas there's nothing going on open source-wise, that there's nobody doing it. They're saying that it's in its infancy at best. And MIT has put out classes, Stanford has put out classes and things going on, but I'm not talking about college level education. I'm talking about elementary education, middle school, primary school. This is a huge opportunity to go out and not just open source, the tools and the things, but open source, the actual information. I think that's really valuable and I'll tell you where I think it comes into play. It comes into play in homeschooling, right? Because more and more people are upset in the states with the public school system so they're doing charter schools and they're doing homeschools. Both of those things could greatly benefit from a much larger reservoir of open sourced educational materials, curriculums, tools, things of that nature. I think that's super important. And so for the last thing, this is funny, it's ironic, Bruce and I did not talk, but he kind of mentioned this, I think that we need to bring a lot more open source to politics. Not because of the red versus blue arguments you hear and all of these things, but because of what Bruce said. We are at a moment in time where we can do anything. I mean, I remember when I was hardware hacking back in the day, I would wait and we would make something and we would send it to some company that would mess it up and we'd get it back and then we send it to China and somebody would make it and it'd come back. And kids these days can go on to Sparkfun or wherever else and order up whatever they want and there's open source hardware projects and open source software projects and they can build all these things. And as that happens and as the internet of things happens and all of these other things, things like security become very concerning. When that happens, I believe that governments are primarily reactive that they don't respond. The difference between reaction and response being very, very simple to illustrate. One is a voluntary action and the other is not, right? When you react to something no matter what you think, that's an involuntary reflex action and I'd rather see governments and lawmakers respond to these things whether it be quantum computing or open source education or any of these things and Bruce brought up security I think that's an incredibly valuable point. We're at a time where technology has already been outpacing greatly anything that the government can try to keep up with or imagine and that means there's more and more reactions and it's gonna get worse and when quantum computing comes along it's gonna get even worse. By the way, side note, you know what all those quantum computers in the world are doing? They're trying to factor two large prime numbers. I had no idea why but I have a sneaky suspicion Bruce is not happy about that. So open sourcing government, what does that mean? Well, we've got open secrets and people putting information but I mean actually public-private partnerships where you actually have a foundation that is doing work just like Linux Foundation does with all of these member companies past 1,000 this year which is an incredible milestone Jim, congratulations. But all of the just like that relationship that a foundation, a group of open source advocates that work within the government and how many of you volunteer for any government stuff or participate in any congressional committees? See, that frightens the shit out of me. They're like forehands and that's a problem because everybody in here, how many of you have complaints about something doing with politics or the government? More than four of you? Okay, well there's a problem there, right? I mean, there's a huge difference in people who are taking action after the fact, people who are just bitching about things that have happened and people who are going to get involved early. You know, what would be great in combining the education and the government thing? An open source civics class. How many of you took civics in school, right? They don't do that anymore. So people are like, electoral college, what? And it's like, well, back when your old man was in school, they taught a bunch of this stuff and it means that you understand the system. If you understand the system and you participate in the system, then you can change the system. So that's what I'll leave you with. Thank you very much. I hope you guys have an amazing time this week at the conference. Jim, I'll hand it back over to you.