 All right, so hello, my name is Bilal. I think half of you guys probably already know me, and that's not saying much because we're in a very intimate setting. Actually, I'm probably gonna rush through the slides because most of the people here already know a little bit about my background and some of the work that I've done, and I'm gonna go through the slides for the benefit of the people streaming and of the new friendly faces, hello. And after that, I hope that we can begin a conversation about this topic, about good is hard. Show of hands on the internet, how many people here want to use their lives and their work to do something they consider good? One, two, well, most people. Okay, yeah, me too. Because I guess when I was younger, I get a lot of the motivation and drive was to be successful, and the success was externally motivated and designed as an image of success that didn't really appeal to me. And so as I was growing up, I was trying to figure out who am I and what do I have to offer? And so this is gonna be a brief set of shots about some of those questions that I've asked. Oh yeah, also, somebody told me if I was gonna talk about good is hard, I had to talk about Eek the Cat. And to be honest, I don't know Eek the Cat, but who here does? Anybody? Yeah, okay, the camera guy knows he's Eek the Cat, and I bet you a lot of the people streaming know Eek the Cat because Eek the Cat is a television superstar. And one of his lines, one of his quotes is, it can't hurt to help. And he apparently goes out to try to help, and then over and over repeatedly gets hurt trying to help. And so I didn't know I had a mascot, but I was really glad to be talking with some of the Uber nerds here, and they're like, well, he's like totally Eek the Cat, man. I'm like, what are you talking about, Eek the Cat? And so I looked it up and apparently, hi, my name is Eek. I have a problem. I'd like to help. And so this happened in 2012 when I had been doing hackers based stuff from the States trying to think about, I guess, when the economy collapsed in my last year of college, I was wondering, what do we do now, guys? Like, we're gonna take a job, but there's no jobs. And then hackers based at the same time started elbowing, basically going from a couple dozen to hundreds and more just in the States. Mostly because of the situation that we were in, there was no jobs, but there was a lot of tools in the market and there was a lot of empty space. So space plus tools plus board people equals potential for hackers based breeding ground. It's like a Petri dish. And so America set a blossoming, blooming, all sorts of multicolored dyed haired weirdos gathering together in the abandoned warehouses. And so I got really excited about this and I did a little documentary tour. And then when the Arab Spring happened a couple of years later, I was like, oh, this is perfect. It's like the same sort of thing. A bunch of unemployed young people and maybe it's gonna be that same sort of breeding ground now for the Middle East. And so this is me in Baghdad doing a workshop with a bunch of LED throwies because the power kept cutting out. And that was the beginning of me trying to share something that I thought was beneficial. And of course people were like, oh, you're bringing tools. Well, guess what? We have problems. And I was like, oh wait, you can use tools to solve problems. And that was kind of the beginning of this because before this I was really just a curious nerd who liked art and making stuff. I was making laser cutters so I could do graffiti. That was mostly what I was doing. But once I started going to the Middle East and I was like, I got tools. And they were like, oh, great, because we got problems. I was like, oh, it's like a match made in hell. It was awesome. And so they were like, okay, so in the hospitals there's no power, so how about you just do something to help us keep track of people's hearts while they're in hospitals. And I was like, you know what? Because I was terrified of Baghdad I only booked a three day ticket. This is not a three day problem. So how about I give you the tools and then point you to Instructables or another website on the internet and you figure it out. And I kind of did that. I gave him some stuff and then I posted something on Instructables being like, I did this thing. I took a bunch of arduinos into Baghdad and they got problems. And then amazingly enough, this is where something cool happened. This is why you need to share. My friend Mortaba steps in on the comments section. I didn't know him back then. And he was like, hey, I'm probably the only guy in Iraq who knows about arduinos. Like connect them with me. So I connected them with a bunch of doctors that had this problem with the power cutting out. And he made this rapidly prototyped sensor that they would take around in the hospitals. And then I was like, okay, I was kind of on a roll. And I was like, oh yeah. Well, let me continue to move further into this thing. I was inspired because people kept encouraging this sort of work, being like, hey, you're like an activist now. Congratulations. You're not just like a geek who likes art. I'm like, oh cool, I'm an activist now. I'm not just a geek who likes art. I was like, why don't you like your 3D printing is the next cool thing that everyone wants to do cool stuff with solve problems with it. And I was like, oh, great idea. And so I started thinking about how to use 3D printing to be good and to help. And one of my first ideas was my cousin who recently passed away has an amputated leg because of sanctions and because of not being able to get good diabetes medication or healthy food or because Iraq sucks, diabetics often die. And so he did, but before he did, he lost his leg. And I thought maybe we can make him a more comfortable prosthetic socket because he was not moving a lot. And I thought if we can help him move with less pain, it would move his blood around and he could keep more of his toes on his other leg and so on and so forth. I was just trying to make the guy mobile. And so we made a scan of his leg and we kept on going. And I was using it to help build up the hackerspace community. Cause back then in my head, I was thinking, oh, you know what, in the West, a lot of the tools that people are using are to make like flame throwing unicorns and they take it out into the playa. This is sort of my experience in San Francisco and like Burning Man culture mixed with maker culture, hacker culture in the Bay. And I thought, you know, maybe if we like started with projects that weren't blinky lights, started with people looking at open source and DIY tools as a way to adjust problems, it would begin this path, this culture. And you know, now that I think about it, this is totally, I'm thinking about it right now. It's like my own personal trajectory was because of curiosity and interest and play. And it wasn't about like go out and solve problems. But what I started doing was inspiring people to address an issue instead of inspiring people to think about what matters to them, at least back then. So I did a bunch of this stuff that I don't know quite so much about. And it was really great. And we helped people connect with each other. That's Salah Zayn over there, who is one of the co-founders of the Hacker Space in Baghdad. 16 at the time, he's wearing a noise bridge shirt. It was my noise bridge shirt, by the way, it's not his noise bridge shirt. I want it back. Salah, looking at you. And so that was my experience in Baghdad. And I just kept doing these kinds of things. This is a quick project that I did in the south of Iraq with Geiger counters, because one day, after doing this work for some time, people started inviting me, being like, oh, you're like one of those technical people that is interested in NGO stuff. I'm like, I guess, yeah, sure. And so I came to this talk and they're like, here's some NGO people, here are their problems. And see what you can do. And I just literally just happened to have passed through the media lab and picked up one of these Geiger counters, because I thought it was another interesting open source tool that could address challenges and could be an inspiration. So I brought it as just inspiration. And then somebody was like, yeah, so in the country, in the part of the country where I'm from, there's a lot of depleted uranium and people are dying and kids are sick. And that's my problem. That's like what I want to use my NGO to address. And so I thought, hey, let's go to Basra and see if we can use these tools to identify if there's higher concentration of radiation because currently nobody is admitting that depleted uranium is a problem. It's still used in modern warfare. It's still considered a legal type of ammo. And they dumped tons and tons of it on Iraq and they don't actually call it a toxic waste zone. But it is. At least that's what it seems from some of the research. Okay. And then as I've been doing this for some time, more and more of these organizations that are popping up, like the Global Humanitarian Lab, which is in Geneva. And some point, basically there was a turning point in my life when I started doing prosthetics for amputees because 3D printing can make custom size shapes and it was really a good application for prosthetics. And so I started getting interested in this and somebody invited me to LA to help work on some hands with him. But when I got there, this is when I started thinking about intentionality in a totally different way. Up until this point, I was just super excited and jazzed and trying to go from like one project to the next, just trying to get people excited about making, building and creating these community spaces together. And then at that point when I went to his house and there was four television cameras and then me as like the sole engineer and my friend that I just happened to bring with me and I realized that it was a giant TV show and that I was getting swept up in like this image creation thing. And that's when I started thinking about this quote basically from Foucault, which is people know what they know. They frequently know why they do what they do, but you can never really know what the impacts of what you do is going to be. So a really quick story. A couple of days ago, I was in Cairo with my dad and my dad bought a piece of bread and he gave some homeless persons a beggar basically a piece of bread because they looked hungry and they were really appreciative and that inspired my dad to buy a stack of bread and to pass it out and basically he started a riot where people were like ripping bread out of each other's hands and there was a fight in the street and so my dad in his kindness and his good-hearted nature thought that he was doing something that was going to be helpful and beneficial but in the end had some unintended consequences. And so basically this is the graph of the world and why people do things. This is a guiding star for many people in corporations. Does this or does this not increase shareholder value? And I'm wondering what my guiding star was. So after a lot of these situations as I was growing up as I was going through these experiences as I was pursuing my curiosity, as I was pursuing what I thought felt good and right to do and then started getting uneasy about it, I started wondering like what it like, I want to at least get the two bullet points from Foucault down like what I'm doing, right? Like I want to know and why, right? And so I tried to start understanding my own guiding star and one of the two examples actually after I was in this state and the person who actually gave me these two examples sitting right over here, hello, Quinn. I came up to Quinn one day and was like, oh my God, Quinn, I don't really know what's going on. I don't even know like good or bad or, you know, sometimes I'm wondering about if I'm kind of pursuing external validation or accolades. And Quinn was like, just one second, I got two amazing stories for you. And so she gave me these really two great stories about people who succeeded at doing something good with their lives. And you know that because they got one of the most prized achievements that a human can get, which is, I don't know if you can tell that's, that's Alfred Noble on a coin and that's Noble Prize. So who here's won a Nobel Prize? But if you did, it would probably be pretty sweet, right? I would be really impressed. I'd want to talk to you. Okay, so Fritz Haber, if anybody knows him, he won the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking research in nitrogen fixing. And the reason why Fritz Haber needed nitrogen fixing is because there was a blockade from South America of Guano coming into Germany because Germany was taking all that bat crap and turning it into bat boom. They were turning poop into bombs because that's where you get nitrogen from and nitrogen is an important component in bombs. Fritz Haber's genius was to say, oh my God, the air is mostly nitrogen. And if we can fix the nitrogen from the air and turn it into something that we can use in explosives, we could basically turn, create explosives from thin air. And he did that. And you'd think that wouldn't have earned him a Nobel Prize, but because of the third point of Foucault's quote, which is you never really know what the outcome of what you're gonna do is, he happened to feed a hungry planet. World War II, industrialization was happening. Polio was eradicated basically. Tons of more people were surviving the first five years of their life and we had an explosion in population that we couldn't really feed unless Fritz Haber fixed nitrogen and was able to create a lot of fertilizer for our plants to feed a hungry planet. So he won the Nobel Prize and I'm sure if he was here, it would be really exciting to talk to him even though he has a really twisted and dark life, including making chemical warfare and one of the stories that I know about him is his wife shot herself because she was so disappointed in him, she couldn't bring it to herself to shoot him so she shot herself and he was like, oh man, my wife is bleeding to death but I really need to go see if the chemical weapons that I made are working. So he went out to the front lines that same day as his wife was bleeding to death basically and he was like, yep, chemical weapons work real good. Look at him struggling to breathe. Anyway, so Fritz Haber is one messed up dude. He still won a Nobel Prize after doing that. After, yes, people knew and they gave him that gold little coin thing. I couldn't believe it. Anyway, so now we got to this guy. Look at the sweet cutie face. His name is Antonio Igas Moniz. I'm sure I'm mispronouncing his name but he was a sweetheart and we know this because of his journals. His journals were full of little descriptions about how much he cared about his patients and how much he was really sad to see them struggling. He was a psychologist back in the day basically and he realized that if he just disrupts some of the brain using a delicate procedure in which you remove a tiny portion of the skull and squiggle it around with a popsicle stick, they actually calmed down. And so he figured out this one simple trick to help really deranged and mentally disturbed patients actually have a life of sanity or partial sanity. And it was supposed to be used in the most extreme of cases because you literally had to remove a portion of the skull. His protege basically figures out this thing where if you put your fingers right over here, you'll feel a tear duct. It's like this little gap in your eye socket. And he's like, oh my God, we don't need to cut the skull open anymore. We can just shove an ice pick through people's eyeballs. Right? And this is so much simpler. Yeah, yeah, you can feel it. If you shove an ice pick over there, it's one step closer to your DIY at home lobotomy. Please do not try this at home. But he tried it all over the country. World War II ended and it's just a matter of the timing of it that a bunch of people were coming home from the trenches, totally disturbed because of the toxic gases that Haber made. And so these stories are kind of like intertwined. It's pretty crazy. And they're like, oh my God, the world is so awful. I can't believe this Haber guy, his wife shot herself. And then he still went out to the trenches. And so they're really, really upset and traumatized. So it's post-traumatic stress, right? And so I think this guy's name was William something or another. Anyway, Monance's protege goes around with ice picks and then does a road show. There are pictures of him doing two lobotomies simultaneously left and right handed through people's tear ducts because their children were not paying attention in class. It's like the early Ritalin was an ice pick through the face. And so this guy, guess what else he got? Monance got the Nobel Prize too. And it's all about that third clause in Foucault's statement. You never know what you're gonna do is going to do. And so if we're gonna talk about Fritz Haber real quick and see how this cookie continues to crumble, all that nitrogen that he fixed is now running into the Gulf of Mexico and creating giant plumes of life or death. I'll leave it up to you to Wikipedia later. Okay, sorry guys. Thank you for being such a great audience. I wanted to go from there to talk about how these questions are still coming up for me in my work. And after that time, I started really questioning what is the purpose of all this open source and all this hacker stuff that I've been doing? What do I really want to do? And initially I thought I wanted to continue down the line of trying to address global challenges with these approaches. And so I participated in Poc. I went to Egypt, sorry, this is Lebanon where there was a trash crisis and I started trying to figure out how to address some of the problems with trash, with DIY solutions. And that's unintended consequence. And then the last thing that I did was my most recent experiment, which is I decided that I didn't really understand my own intentions because I was coming in from afar. I was kind of dropping in and being like, oh man, global challenges are a problem. Let's use some of these tools that I know about and that I have in my circles to try to address them. And then I thought, no, it doesn't really make sense. In order for me to feel authentic about my creativity and about my generosity, I need to make friends with people. So this is a bunch of, I think this is all Syrian refugees, but this is a bunch of Syrian refugees at an organization and we were doing a design thinking workshop. Okay, so design thinking, if anybody knows, is part of this whole line of research into human-centered design, trying to talk to people about their lives to derive the solutions that you create. Rather than sitting there being like, oh, I got an Arduino, what can I make? It's talking to people and then deciding from there what to produce. And so a lot of the global NGOs and semi-governmental organizations have this problem with a bunch of refugees coming to their country, a bunch of problems in their country from trash to electricity to water, and they're wondering how could they combine this natural resource of human brains and the unnatural challenges of garbage in the streets to encourage people to start projects to address some of those challenges. And they thought that the best way to do it is to encourage projects from the youth that don't have jobs and to fund them and to teach them design processes. And I did that, I did that for a year. And at some point, I just started not really seeing returns, I guess. I felt like we were using so much resources and the outputs were so limited and that the most that we were doing was actually creating a safe space for them to make friends with each other and that was actually, first of all, that's really cool, okay? That in and of itself is a really awesome thing to do. And at the end, I just started wondering what I was doing with all of my work and I decided that I missed what brought me to this place to begin with, which is my own personal creativity and excitement and energy. And so, although I went first from that to, hey, I have to share this idea of a sense of agency and capacity to the tools, creating solutions, to me directly doing this sort of research and sharing to finally being like, wait, you know what, maybe I should just go back and start making stuff that is really fun. So I started working on some natural language processing projects and also I think I found one clever trick to combine these two. So I started a small project with my friend called Pitchworthy, where I get to do the designing and the programming of the developments and manage a team and it's really fun, but the outputs of it are connected to this sort of mindset and process of encouraging people to continue to start projects. And that's kind of where I'm at. I actually wanted to, hopefully I did that quickly and that we still have, yeah, it's like 17 minutes, shoot, son. So we have a bunch of time and I want to see where people are at. I want to get feedback first on some of the things that I just shared and some of the challenges that I talked about and some of the ways that I've went about resolving those and see also where people are in their lives and some of the ways that they've tried to do good and maybe some of their doubts if you'd be willing to share. We can even turn off the microphone. I'm sorry, streamers, it's going to get personal. So you got to look away, all right. Man, I'm weird. Okay, so if anybody is willing, I'm going to say that we'll get into this little circle and have a discussion on some of these topics. First of all, like quick intros, like where do you come from? What have you been up to? What colors do you like? Okay.