[00:00.000 --> 00:00.860]  I hacked for China.
[00:02.560 --> 00:02.920]  Wait.
[00:06.810 --> 00:07.490]  Wait for it.
[00:09.570 --> 00:10.410]  Here's Zimmer Barnes.
[00:10.570 --> 00:10.830]  Take it away.
[00:10.930 --> 00:11.110]  Thank you.
[00:11.210 --> 00:11.850]  And sorry for the delay.
[00:14.110 --> 00:14.550]  Hello, HOPE.
[00:14.890 --> 00:16.850]  My name is Zimmer Barnes and I hacked for China.
[00:17.230 --> 00:18.090]  I'm sorry about that.
[00:18.310 --> 00:18.630]  Thank you.
[00:22.760 --> 00:23.800]  So China moves fast.
[00:23.900 --> 00:25.060]  I'm going to move pretty fast, too.
[00:25.320 --> 00:28.060]  The first thing I want to tell you is that China is pretty weird.
[00:28.240 --> 00:30.040]  This is a statue in Beijing.
[00:30.040 --> 00:33.820]  I'm not sure if it's supposed to be anti-Wall Street, but it's certainly bizarre.
[00:35.320 --> 00:38.320]  China is changing really quickly and there's all kinds of stuff happening.
[00:38.560 --> 00:40.420]  It's a really ancient culture.
[00:40.580 --> 00:43.460]  This is the Forbidden City that was built hundreds of years ago.
[00:43.640 --> 00:45.000]  But it's also really high tech.
[00:45.340 --> 00:47.740]  This is probably my favorite shoe of all time.
[00:48.220 --> 00:51.800]  This came out of a 3D printer at a university in southern China.
[00:52.800 --> 00:56.800]  And the same university has this giant hexapod robot that's locked in this room.
[00:57.440 --> 01:00.020]  It can't leave the room because it's too big to fit out of the door.
[01:01.300 --> 01:10.160]  There's a really cool startup I found where they teach kids how to use wrenches and nuts and bolts and build a little house and they give them tiny hard hats and they're adorable.
[01:11.240 --> 01:16.660]  This is an artist that does different monster art on postcards that she hand draws.
[01:17.420 --> 01:21.220]  This is from an event called Play Plus Make that was at a high school.
[01:21.220 --> 01:26.540]  And this guy made a robot arm Iron Man thing out of LEGOs.
[01:26.980 --> 01:32.700]  And here's another item that was done at Play Plus Make where high schoolers made their own dress.
[01:33.140 --> 01:36.680]  I think this would go really well with the Tyrannosaurus Rex skull shoes.
[01:37.660 --> 01:41.260]  Of course, no talk of China would be complete without wonderful Chinese English.
[01:41.260 --> 01:45.560]  This happens constantly where the English is not quite what they mean.
[01:46.420 --> 01:50.840]  And you're always going to be stuck in meetings that are basically buzzword bingo.
[01:51.060 --> 01:58.060]  So much so that I made my own buzzword bingo because there's speakers that can say the word innovation seven times in three minutes with a straight face.
[01:59.780 --> 02:04.960]  So I did say that in my description that I would give you some information if you are planning on going to China.
[02:04.960 --> 02:06.040]  So I wanted to go through that.
[02:06.820 --> 02:10.320]  Number one, the app that runs China right now is WeChat.
[02:10.660 --> 02:17.080]  It's social media, it's messaging, it's ways to pay for things, ways to buy a plane ticket or a train ticket.
[02:17.540 --> 02:19.060]  It's just absolutely everything.
[02:19.360 --> 02:22.200]  But I'm told that you may want to put it on a burner phone.
[02:22.580 --> 02:31.440]  Just like Facebook can be a backdoor to the NSA, WeChat can be a backdoor to the Chinese Communist government, which you may not want accessing the rest of the contents on your phone.
[02:32.260 --> 02:33.960]  I think it's important to learn Chinese.
[02:33.960 --> 02:38.200]  I really like Chinese Skill for Android and MindSnacks for iOS.
[02:38.540 --> 02:42.740]  If you want to pick up some vocabulary really quickly, that'll help you in emergency situations.
[02:43.580 --> 02:45.860]  There's a great Shanghai startup called Italki.
[02:45.980 --> 02:48.420]  And Italki is a social network for language learners.
[02:48.600 --> 02:54.940]  You can go online and find someone who speaks the language you want to learn to speak, pretty much any language you can think of.
[02:55.160 --> 02:59.880]  And you can teach them English and you can learn Spanish or Chinese or Tagalog or whatever you want to learn.
[03:00.660 --> 03:06.860]  It's always important in China to remember that Google, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Gmail, and a bunch of other stuff is blocked.
[03:07.820 --> 03:11.660]  WhatsApp and Telegram seem to work fine as of June of this year.
[03:12.380 --> 03:14.000]  You're probably going to want a VPN.
[03:14.400 --> 03:17.260]  I really recommend Arc VPN for iPhone, which is free.
[03:17.820 --> 03:20.020]  An Express VPN or Lantern for Android.
[03:20.780 --> 03:27.780]  And there's an email account called QQ, which I found really helpful since it's difficult to access Gmail.
[03:28.740 --> 03:35.260]  A lot of the toilets in China don't have soap or toilet paper and sometimes no sink.
[03:35.660 --> 03:38.840]  So you would definitely want to bring hand sanitizer and wet wipes so you don't get sick.
[03:39.300 --> 03:41.960]  And as always, if you're vegetarian or vegan, you want to be careful.
[03:42.120 --> 03:45.800]  But especially in China, because they put tiny bits of meat in just about every dish.
[03:47.720 --> 03:49.540]  There's some really relevant Chinese facts.
[03:49.760 --> 03:51.280]  China is really in the middle of a pivot.
[03:51.540 --> 03:56.820]  For the past several decades, their economy has been growing because their working age population was growing.
[03:56.820 --> 03:59.120]  There were more people joining the workforce than were leaving it.
[03:59.400 --> 04:00.180]  And that's changed.
[04:00.320 --> 04:01.560]  That's finally different now.
[04:01.840 --> 04:04.420]  And you're seeing a slowdown in their economy as a result.
[04:05.140 --> 04:12.140]  Nevertheless, they just committed to a nearly $1 trillion investment in technology infrastructure as of April of this year.
[04:12.460 --> 04:16.960]  So some of this investment is going to go towards traditional infrastructure, bridges and roads.
[04:17.380 --> 04:21.680]  But a significant amount is going to go towards technology, primarily Internet access.
[04:22.380 --> 04:26.080]  They're making massive investments in Kenya and other West African nations.
[04:26.800 --> 04:33.780]  And one of the reasons why it's important to study China is that they've kind of skipped decades of development that we in the West experienced.
[04:34.320 --> 04:36.820]  Things were pretty stable in the United States.
[04:36.840 --> 04:39.680]  Whereas for China, things change every five to ten years.
[04:40.080 --> 04:42.980]  And this model is being exported to a lot of developing nations.
[04:43.200 --> 04:46.860]  So by studying China, you can see the future of a lot of other nations.
[04:47.840 --> 04:54.240]  Of course, since it's China and it's a communist regime, there's a lot of civil rights crackdown on speech.
[04:54.560 --> 05:00.600]  There were some feminist activists that spoke out and had their cell phones and computers confiscated, were arrested.
[05:00.760 --> 05:01.780]  They're not able to leave the country.
[05:02.080 --> 05:04.120]  There's huge restrictions on reproduction.
[05:04.820 --> 05:08.740]  A woman has to get a license from the government to get pregnant.
[05:08.980 --> 05:09.860]  She has to be married.
[05:09.860 --> 05:17.100]  If she's not married and she gets pregnant, she's very, very heavily encouraged to get an abortion.
[05:17.540 --> 05:21.560]  Sometimes even having her family members arrested to encourage her to have an abortion.
[05:22.300 --> 05:25.300]  If she does have a child, the child is born without a hookah.
[05:25.580 --> 05:27.700]  This is essentially like a social security number.
[05:27.880 --> 05:33.520]  So the child is not able to access public education or public hospitals for the rest of their life.
[05:34.520 --> 05:37.660]  There's also big restrictions on immigration right now.
[05:37.660 --> 05:40.480]  It's very, very difficult for foreigners to get a working permit.
[05:41.400 --> 05:45.780]  The Chinese government wants these higher paying jobs to go to Chinese citizens and not foreigners.
[05:46.140 --> 05:47.460]  So it is difficult to get a work visa.
[05:48.980 --> 05:52.020]  That said, there's a huge government-backed pivot towards entrepreneurship.
[05:52.460 --> 05:54.760]  And anything that has the word maker in the title.
[05:55.280 --> 06:04.320]  Right now, there's a lot of people in the maker community in China that are frustrated that there's a lot of scams popping up that will just say that they're a maker of something, something, blah, blah, and get money for the government.
[06:04.320 --> 06:13.260]  And they don't actually have any kind of bottom-up or grassroots educational qualities that we would recognize in a maker space or a hacker space.
[06:14.480 --> 06:19.160]  And, of course, since I'm talking about China and I spent most of my time in Beijing, I would be neglecting...
[06:19.160 --> 06:24.580]  I would be neglecting in not telling you that a lot of people die in China from pollution.
[06:24.900 --> 06:28.800]  Right now, air-related deaths are estimated to be 4,000 per day.
[06:28.800 --> 06:32.040]  So that's not 4,000 a year or a month or a week.
[06:32.180 --> 06:35.420]  That's 4,000 people dead every 24 hours from the air pollution.
[06:37.200 --> 06:41.640]  Internet.org recently put out some interesting statistics which I think are relevant.
[06:41.920 --> 06:47.080]  Right now, about 38% of the human population uses the Internet at least once per year.
[06:47.280 --> 06:50.460]  So if they use the Internet once a year, they're counted in this 38%.
[06:50.460 --> 06:55.520]  This is going to change really rapidly because they identified three reasons why most people weren't online.
[06:55.520 --> 06:57.340]  They said there wasn't enough infrastructure.
[06:57.700 --> 07:05.020]  There's moonshots by Google and Facebook and a lot of investments by China and other governments to get the technology infrastructure to people that don't have it.
[07:05.180 --> 07:07.060]  So I think that's going to change over the next five years.
[07:08.000 --> 07:09.840]  Affordability, I think the price is going to come down.
[07:10.140 --> 07:17.180]  Price for technology always tends to trend towards cheaper and I think we're going to see huge changes over the next three to five years in this area.
[07:17.820 --> 07:18.820]  And then relevance.
[07:19.100 --> 07:23.000]  There's people that get online and then there's no information really that's geared towards them.
[07:23.000 --> 07:25.560]  And so this is changing for two reasons.
[07:25.740 --> 07:29.940]  One, there's more and more people that are learning English which is pretty much the language of the Internet.
[07:30.400 --> 07:35.000]  And also there's more and more content on the Internet that isn't in English but it's in someone's native language.
[07:35.380 --> 07:38.100]  So for that reason, I'm optimistic on all three of these fronts.
[07:38.320 --> 07:44.060]  I think we're going to have twice as many people on the Internet soon and that's going to change a lot of stuff we may not expect.
[07:45.400 --> 07:49.420]  For me, going to China was a little bit... there's a selfish reason I wanted to go back.
[07:49.420 --> 07:52.440]  I've been there three times and that's that I write down ideas.
[07:52.840 --> 07:57.560]  And when I went to China, the ideas that I were writing down, it just exploded.
[07:57.960 --> 08:04.820]  Sometimes I would write down like 100 ideas a year and I went to writing down like 100 ideas a week while I was in China.
[08:05.120 --> 08:07.360]  Every 100 ideas I name after a color.
[08:07.480 --> 08:08.820]  So my first 100 ideas is cinnabar.
[08:09.060 --> 08:11.400]  My second 100 ideas is vermilion and so forth.
[08:12.040 --> 08:17.260]  And so I went to China with less than 500 and I soon was writing down thousands of entries.
[08:19.120 --> 08:20.880]  So this was from the first trip to China.
[08:21.780 --> 08:26.040]  Mitch Altman, who many of you may know, goes to China once a year, invites people along.
[08:26.300 --> 08:29.920]  He's doing a hacker trip to China this year if you're interested in being a part of this story.
[08:30.740 --> 08:32.440]  And this was my first trip.
[08:32.540 --> 08:33.380]  I'm the guy in the red hair.
[08:33.500 --> 08:35.580]  I decided to dye my hair to stand out and I guess it worked.
[08:35.800 --> 08:39.160]  I was supposed to be in China for 30 days and I ended up staying off and on for two years.
[08:39.900 --> 08:44.580]  But the other big person I want to talk to in this group photo is Ben Koo.
[08:44.860 --> 08:49.000]  He's in the bottom row, second to the right, older guy.
[08:49.440 --> 08:50.620]  And he's really awesome.
[08:50.760 --> 08:51.880]  He has a PhD from MIT.
[08:52.480 --> 08:55.220]  And he was one of the first beta testers for Java.
[08:55.740 --> 08:58.860]  So he has a really, really rich technology background.
[08:59.120 --> 09:02.660]  And he really wanted to have a hacker in residence program at Tsinghua University.
[09:03.680 --> 09:06.180]  So you might as well ask, what is a hacker in residence?
[09:06.560 --> 09:08.800]  This is a phrase that was coined by Mitch Altman.
[09:09.040 --> 09:12.560]  And the original idea was that it would be similar to an artist in residence program.
[09:13.020 --> 09:15.680]  But instead of creating art, you would create technology.
[09:16.080 --> 09:21.120]  So someone could go to a new place and be surrounded by new people and get new ideas.
[09:21.600 --> 09:25.660]  He originally envisioned this to be hackerspace to hackerspace, but the funding never materialized.
[09:26.360 --> 09:30.320]  And so this was something that he and Ben talked about.
[09:30.520 --> 09:32.560]  And Ben really liked the idea of having a hacker in residence.
[09:32.660 --> 09:35.400]  And I really, really wanted to get the job.
[09:35.540 --> 09:37.720]  And so I tried really hard.
[09:37.740 --> 09:40.680]  And he brought me in for a six-week trial period.
[09:41.480 --> 09:45.320]  So while I was there, like I said, the air quality is a huge problem in China.
[09:45.680 --> 09:51.020]  And in addition to the particulate matter, there's also something called volatile organic compounds.
[09:51.300 --> 09:53.740]  These are things like formaldehyde, benzene, ammonia.
[09:53.980 --> 10:01.660]  This is coming out of car exhaust, cigarette smoke, paint, construction materials, glue, plastics, a ton of stuff.
[10:01.660 --> 10:02.540]  It off gases.
[10:02.840 --> 10:10.260]  It's really dangerous for your lungs and can also be hazardous to your health and your neurological functions as well.
[10:10.380 --> 10:15.380]  You may not be able to think as clearly if you're surrounded in this soup of volatile organic compounds.
[10:15.820 --> 10:18.480]  And one of the best ways to get rid of them is with plants.
[10:18.480 --> 10:26.460]  There's a Dr. Wolverton at NASA that found out that plants' root systems, different kinds of plants, can remove volatile organic compounds.
[10:26.900 --> 10:30.940]  So some of them you can see in the background here are chrysanthemums, money plants, and peace lilies.
[10:31.420 --> 10:35.040]  This is a German exchange student, Konstantin, at Tsinghua University.
[10:35.240 --> 10:40.540]  And together we built a system that's based on windowfarms.org, which is an open-source hydroponic system.
[10:41.120 --> 10:45.780]  And the money plant in particular really, really took to it and improved the indoor air quality.
[10:46.940 --> 10:48.560]  This is it in Ben's old office.
[10:50.460 --> 10:53.760]  So in this six weeks I wrote down 600 ideas.
[10:54.080 --> 10:56.480]  And this was a huge departure from the past.
[10:56.520 --> 11:02.080]  So I really, really wanted to get back to China and eventually convinced Ben to bring me back for six months.
[11:03.020 --> 11:07.180]  But in the three months I was in the United States, I kept writing down ideas and I wrote down another 600 ideas.
[11:07.860 --> 11:10.820]  And my brain was kind of melting from this, but I wanted more.
[11:11.680 --> 11:15.860]  I got to Tsinghua University and they're in the middle of building their ice center.
[11:16.280 --> 11:18.840]  This is now the world's largest maker space.
[11:19.120 --> 11:21.860]  It's six stories above ground, two stories below ground.
[11:22.140 --> 11:28.280]  The sub-basements are necessary because there's some equipment that's too heavy for the upper floors.
[11:28.860 --> 11:32.240]  And so it was being constructed and he said he didn't have access to it.
[11:32.320 --> 11:33.040]  He couldn't show it to me.
[11:33.160 --> 11:34.180]  I couldn't see it.
[11:34.520 --> 11:38.220]  And so since my job title was literally Hacker in Residence, I just broke in.
[11:38.480 --> 11:40.840]  And so these are some photos I took after I broke in.
[11:41.580 --> 11:43.460]  And this is before anyone else is really in there.
[11:43.540 --> 11:44.900]  So it's just kind of a big empty room.
[11:45.220 --> 11:46.940]  But I saw a lot of potential for this.
[11:47.080 --> 11:48.760]  And that potential has really been realized.
[11:48.820 --> 11:53.820]  A lot of students are using this maker space and this like vast, vast, vast amount of equipment.
[11:53.820 --> 11:58.860]  You can produce stuff at scale at the ice center, which is really exciting from a maker point of view.
[12:00.140 --> 12:03.120]  This is one of the sketchiest photos I have in the slide show.
[12:04.360 --> 12:08.120]  The speaker before me mentioned nootropics and that was something I was really interested in.
[12:08.540 --> 12:09.800]  And I made smart gum.
[12:09.980 --> 12:13.600]  I didn't have anything really extra special or spicy in here.
[12:14.280 --> 12:17.840]  B vitamins, ginkgo biloba, Panax ginseng, caffeine, L-theanine.
[12:18.240 --> 12:21.040]  And I made chewing gum that was really, really popular in the United States.
[12:21.040 --> 12:22.160]  I wanted to make some in China.
[12:23.020 --> 12:26.860]  But in China, caffeine pills are illegal and I was grinding up caffeine pills to get the caffeine.
[12:27.360 --> 12:33.400]  And so instead, I switched to a simple syrup and infused green tea into it to try to make a green tea syrup.
[12:33.780 --> 12:38.640]  And then since I couldn't get chicle or gum base, I wanted to use beeswax.
[12:38.860 --> 12:46.500]  And if any of you are chemistry majors or if you've worked with beeswax before, you know this was an absolute failure because beeswax is hydrophobic and doesn't absorb the stuff at all.
[12:48.260 --> 12:50.920]  But on the plus side, I'd had another 600 ideas to write down.
[12:51.020 --> 12:51.940]  So that was fun.
[12:52.880 --> 12:56.460]  Meanwhile, Mitch was making another trip to China with a huge, huge group.
[12:56.700 --> 12:59.640]  And we wanted to surprise them in Beijing and give them a really warm welcome.
[13:00.260 --> 13:04.680]  I'd previously been invited to this art show by Gloria Chang, who I'd met the year previous.
[13:05.700 --> 13:11.980]  So Gloria Chang was the IT person for the artist Ai Weiwei, who was under house arrest at the time by the communist government.
[13:12.420 --> 13:18.280]  While he was under house arrest, he had full access to the Internet, including his Instagram account, simply because of Gloria.
[13:18.740 --> 13:26.300]  I'm sure there was an army of IT people on the other side working for the communist government to stop her, and they were not able to stop her.
[13:26.380 --> 13:27.100]  She's kind of a badass.
[13:27.660 --> 13:30.200]  And she's also an artist, and she invited me to this art show.
[13:31.360 --> 13:35.700]  So this is Josh Harkes, who runs 155 Chao Chengdi, or at least he used to.
[13:36.260 --> 13:41.680]  This is a giant styrofoam disc installation that's going outside of the building on the second floor.
[13:42.860 --> 13:48.540]  And we really wanted to... this is another art piece by another artist in Beijing.
[13:50.020 --> 14:00.120]  And I met a woman there named Jo, and she really had this cool idea that we could collaborate and get hackers to create art, and get artists to say something about today's technology.
[14:00.500 --> 14:03.840]  And so for this show, we tried to get hackers and artists to work together.
[14:04.540 --> 14:05.500]  This is Tudor.
[14:05.620 --> 14:07.060]  He made this really cool spray paint art.
[14:07.780 --> 14:10.560]  This is the spray paint art piece I did called the Broken Heart Factory.
[14:11.300 --> 14:17.340]  This is a really pretty well-known artist, Tori, who has installations in Europe and the U.S.
[14:17.700 --> 14:21.320]  And this was his China Invaders piece based on symbols that he'd seen.
[14:22.060 --> 14:25.040]  This was a piece done by an artist named Crystal.
[14:25.300 --> 14:32.960]  And so she had a problem in that men were sending her pictures of their dicks, and she didn't want them to do that, but they kept doing it.
[14:32.960 --> 14:37.100]  And so she asked them, like, I don't want to see a picture of your dick, but can I use it in an art piece?
[14:37.300 --> 14:48.140]  And so when she was a little girl, she had a program that you could put sparkles and like cute anime eyes and stuff on photographs, that she and her friends had taken of themselves.
[14:48.300 --> 14:54.860]  And she did this as a kid, and she thought it'd be really funny to put sparkles and snow cones and hamburgers and stuff on these dick pics.
[14:54.860 --> 14:56.380]  So this is blacked out.
[14:56.560 --> 14:59.700]  But the next slide I'm going to show you is going to have men's penises in it.
[14:59.920 --> 15:05.680]  And so if you don't want to see that, now's a great time to check into Pokemon Go, catch something, or check your email.
[15:06.500 --> 15:07.180]  Are we ready?
[15:09.200 --> 15:12.480]  So you can see there's like sparkles, there's Barney in the top left one.
[15:12.680 --> 15:14.120]  I just really love this art piece.
[15:15.840 --> 15:17.840]  So the best was Jo herself.
[15:18.060 --> 15:20.000]  She made an art piece called The Rainbow Ride.
[15:20.240 --> 15:25.480]  So this is a three-wheeler electric vehicle that's sold and is pretty widely used in China.
[15:25.480 --> 15:29.120]  And she spray painted a hot pink and put rainbows all over it.
[15:29.700 --> 15:32.120]  And she goes around China collecting people's stories.
[15:32.340 --> 15:39.180]  There's this inviting little private area where you can write down any story you want, anything you want, and you can put it in the box anonymously.
[15:39.360 --> 15:47.740]  And so she uses this to go around China and get people's stories from areas where maybe they don't have a chance to tell their story on the Internet as easily as you or I.
[15:48.240 --> 15:52.360]  And she has a special focus on women's stories and stories from people that are LGBT.
[15:54.240 --> 15:55.340]  This was in Halloween.
[15:55.520 --> 15:57.240]  We set up the Rainbow Ride and got a few stories.
[15:57.820 --> 16:03.420]  So Jo is unfortunately wearing a mask in this picture, but I'll show you a picture that has her face in a minute.
[16:04.600 --> 16:07.920]  Another thing we wanted to do was have a big welcome party for the hackers.
[16:08.200 --> 16:10.580]  And so we created something called Task Force XX.
[16:11.140 --> 16:23.640]  And so this was a way to get more women in technology because both of us were frustrated that we kept meeting really intelligent women, but they didn't have the same social networks and access to things that a lot of men in China did.
[16:24.300 --> 16:25.620]  And so we...
[16:26.240 --> 16:29.900]  I was also frustrated at the kind of engagement hackers were getting.
[16:30.060 --> 16:36.740]  They would come from China and they could meet people that maybe weren't as interested in them as I thought they should be.
[16:37.020 --> 16:40.580]  I think if someone's really, really brilliant, I just want to ask them a million questions.
[16:40.820 --> 16:42.380]  And I didn't think they were getting asked enough questions.
[16:42.620 --> 16:45.980]  So I wanted to introduce them to intelligent women that would ask them questions.
[16:46.740 --> 16:48.140]  And it turned into a big success.
[16:48.300 --> 16:51.160]  This is at a bar called 8-Bit that has a bunch of old school video games.
[16:51.780 --> 16:59.440]  And so it was a great mixing and a ton of conversations that I missed that were probably really awesome.
[17:00.300 --> 17:04.640]  This guy bought this video game that he made himself and we played it a little bit.
[17:05.280 --> 17:08.500]  And the woman in the white jacket there is Joe, my partner in crime in China.
[17:10.240 --> 17:14.500]  So meanwhile, people said that they really liked my hydroponic system.
[17:14.980 --> 17:17.600]  They liked the concept of it, but they said it was really, really ugly.
[17:18.840 --> 17:21.200]  And meanwhile, the iCenter was open for business.
[17:21.400 --> 17:23.840]  This is Woody standing in one of the top ballrooms.
[17:24.500 --> 17:28.780]  He has a lot of different job titles, but basically he runs the day-to-day operations at the iCenter.
[17:29.880 --> 17:31.240]  And so I turned to Instructables.
[17:31.360 --> 17:32.960]  This is the portable prefab playhouse.
[17:33.060 --> 17:33.820]  I didn't design this.
[17:33.960 --> 17:35.540]  It's on Instructables for everyone to download.
[17:35.540 --> 17:38.020]  And so I liked it, but I didn't want it in wood.
[17:38.120 --> 17:39.560]  I wanted it in clear acrylic.
[17:40.240 --> 17:49.080]  And I started constructing it and made this really cool little greenhouse that was maybe a little bit more aesthetically pleasing than my previous PVC monstrosity.
[17:50.740 --> 17:55.120]  Unfortunately, this was a total failure, too, because the suction cups didn't really stick to the acrylic very well.
[17:55.240 --> 17:56.280]  So I was back to the drawing board.
[17:57.780 --> 18:00.020]  But I did have another 600 entries, so that was exciting.
[18:01.220 --> 18:05.180]  Joe and I continued to do Task Force XX even after the hackers returned to their home countries.
[18:05.860 --> 18:08.620]  There was a contest by the British Council.
[18:09.020 --> 18:14.780]  They gave away money and access to a hacker space to artists that wanted to blend art and technology.
[18:15.020 --> 18:19.100]  And we helped artists apply for this program and had another party in Mixer.
[18:20.560 --> 18:24.200]  We had a Christmas party where we wanted people to hack a Christmas tree.
[18:24.660 --> 18:30.620]  And both of us noticed that we were getting a lot of foreigners to our events, but there weren't as many Chinese women that were coming out.
[18:30.760 --> 18:34.480]  And so we decided to switch the poster to all Chinese.
[18:34.800 --> 18:36.040]  And we got a really great turnout.
[18:36.260 --> 18:39.480]  And it was more 50-50 between Chinese and foreigners.
[18:41.060 --> 18:48.660]  And we didn't know that the bar was going to let us do this, but we just kind of brought in soldering irons and we had people drinking and soldering at the same time, which miraculously wasn't a disaster.
[18:50.180 --> 18:55.740]  And it was great because Mitch taught someone how to solder and then they would teach someone else to solder and they would teach someone else to solder.
[18:55.940 --> 19:00.320]  And there was this chain of people, just people teaching each other basic electronics.
[19:00.700 --> 19:03.140]  We had modeling clay and straws and art supplies.
[19:03.560 --> 19:07.940]  And we make this just gaudy monstrosity Christmas tree.
[19:08.180 --> 19:11.120]  And here you can see Mitch Altman wearing a silly clay hat.
[19:13.440 --> 19:22.720]  I continued to work on the hydroponic system and refined it down, made it a lot simpler, a lot cheaper, something that's maybe more aesthetically pleasing, but still functional for windows.
[19:23.220 --> 19:32.960]  And for that reason, Woody scheduled a maker's night for me to teach Xinhua students how to set up their own hydroponic system around the campus or in their dorms or wherever they wanted to put them.
[19:33.280 --> 19:36.620]  And so this is one of the systems that a Chinese student helped me create.
[19:36.940 --> 19:38.040]  This is from our workshop.
[19:38.320 --> 19:39.780]  I think a lot of people had fun.
[19:40.400 --> 19:44.820]  There's air pumps pushing water and there's this water going everywhere and there's plants that need to be repotted.
[19:45.020 --> 19:47.600]  So it's an incredibly messy workshop and I think we had a lot of fun.
[19:48.420 --> 19:51.500]  This is another system we set up in another classroom at Xinhua.
[19:51.900 --> 19:54.760]  And this is just a really funny selfie because Woody has long arms.
[19:56.600 --> 19:58.640]  So meanwhile, I continue to work on my smart gum.
[19:58.840 --> 20:07.540]  I found a food grade gum base on Taobao, which is kind of the Chinese Amazon or eBay, except it has literally everything, like way more than it should have.
[20:07.540 --> 20:11.860]  So they have everything but food grade gum base, but someone finally found it for me.
[20:12.040 --> 20:13.440]  One of Ben's assistants, Echo.
[20:14.000 --> 20:17.780]  And so I got some, I mixed it together and it was absolutely awful.
[20:18.100 --> 20:22.120]  This stuff had the consistency of fruit leather and I don't think anyone should eat it.
[20:22.280 --> 20:28.320]  And so that was another miserable failure on the smart gum pass, but I had another 600 ideas to write down.
[20:28.320 --> 20:29.380]  So that was nice.
[20:30.780 --> 20:33.980]  My big software project was supposed to be gold star.
[20:34.260 --> 20:40.040]  I really liked doing 30 day challenges and I wanted an app where I could just like give myself a gold star for the day.
[20:40.180 --> 20:45.500]  If I did my push ups or took photos or did whatever I was supposed to do for my 30 day challenge.
[20:46.340 --> 20:47.460]  Which was fun to code.
[20:48.520 --> 20:51.700]  And in doing so I attracted the attention of Lass and Julia.
[20:52.260 --> 20:54.200]  And they had this idea called market cookie.
[20:54.720 --> 20:59.060]  Where you could, it was basically a Tinder like interface where you could swipe left or right for advertisements.
[21:00.000 --> 21:04.640]  And companies could do A-B testing so they can test two different kinds of advertisements and see which one was more popular.
[21:05.320 --> 21:09.440]  And so the company never took off, but I got really good at doing interfaces in Xcode.
[21:09.440 --> 21:13.560]  And I was able to do it without, without even writing code.
[21:14.300 --> 21:17.540]  So for another Chao Cheng Di art show, this was now in the winter.
[21:17.840 --> 21:20.960]  And it moved from a smaller building to a bigger building a few blocks away.
[21:21.460 --> 21:25.060]  This is a really cool like, I don't even know what this building was originally supposed to be.
[21:25.180 --> 21:28.220]  But now it's a giant art center and bonfire area for people to drink.
[21:29.340 --> 21:31.940]  And so I made this choose your own adventure story.
[21:32.540 --> 21:34.940]  All in Xcode and Swift for iOS.
[21:35.580 --> 21:37.240]  Where it had eight different alternate endings.
[21:37.240 --> 21:43.500]  And when I explained to artists that I made this without writing any code, they were really interested in having access to the technology.
[21:43.700 --> 21:46.660]  I think a lot of this stuff is unnecessarily obtuse.
[21:46.820 --> 21:49.700]  And there's a lot someone can do even if they don't know how to write code.
[21:50.100 --> 21:54.460]  And so I did a class of build your first iOS app without code.
[21:55.000 --> 21:58.220]  And I worked with the Beijing Women's Network, Ellen in particular.
[21:59.140 --> 22:02.560]  And so there's not that many nonprofits in China.
[22:02.580 --> 22:03.800]  It's difficult to get that status.
[22:04.080 --> 22:07.000]  And there was one that was funding domestic violence charities throughout China.
[22:07.000 --> 22:12.560]  And these were still really, really rare to have a center for abused women.
[22:12.760 --> 22:17.600]  And so we did this class and half of the money raised went towards the nonprofit.
[22:17.960 --> 22:19.280]  But a bunch of people turned out.
[22:19.640 --> 22:23.380]  A lot of people really liked getting the skills and donating to a good cause.
[22:24.960 --> 22:29.260]  So at 155 Chaochengdi, there were some other really, really cool art projects that I wanted to show.
[22:29.400 --> 22:34.340]  This was a Chinese artist that did dozens and dozens and dozens of little paintings.
[22:35.400 --> 22:38.100]  This is another, I guess you could call it performance art.
[22:38.620 --> 22:42.260]  She's taking a red marker to her face, like everywhere she sees a defect.
[22:42.680 --> 22:48.020]  And just kind of, in my eyes, commenting on modern makeup and this obsession with physical imperfections.
[22:48.980 --> 22:53.200]  And so what I did, I had now just over a thousand ideas.
[22:53.480 --> 22:54.600]  And I wanted to share them.
[22:54.700 --> 22:56.120]  So I wrote them down on pieces of paper.
[22:56.260 --> 22:59.540]  And I really wanted to have the perfect way to show them off.
[22:59.800 --> 23:02.200]  And so in China, we don't have Western toilets.
[23:02.320 --> 23:03.020]  There's squat toilets.
[23:03.080 --> 23:04.840]  You have to squat down to poop.
[23:04.840 --> 23:07.900]  And then if you use toilet paper, you can't actually flush it down the toilet.
[23:08.340 --> 23:10.260]  There's a water shortage throughout a lot of China.
[23:10.560 --> 23:11.900]  Beijing in particular is really dry.
[23:12.080 --> 23:14.540]  So all the toilets are low flow with no U-bend.
[23:14.940 --> 23:17.440]  So you can't flush toilet paper, it's gonna clog.
[23:17.640 --> 23:20.020]  So there's a little trash can that's just ubiquitous in China.
[23:20.380 --> 23:22.940]  Every stall has this little trash can you can see.
[23:23.060 --> 23:25.140]  For you to use toilet paper, it's really gross.
[23:25.480 --> 23:28.940]  And so I decided that was like the perfect delivery mechanism for my ideas.
[23:29.400 --> 23:32.200]  And so I had this quote from a rapper named Wax.
[23:32.200 --> 23:34.040]  Nothing I've ever done has been a failure.
[23:34.240 --> 23:35.360]  It's just some shit I did.
[23:35.520 --> 23:38.560]  And the next thing I do will just be another thing that adds on to that pile of shit.
[23:38.900 --> 23:41.900]  And so I had a warning that these aren't actually covered in poop.
[23:42.160 --> 23:46.180]  They were ideas wrapped in toilet paper and invited people to reach in the trash can and grab them.
[23:46.360 --> 23:47.040]  And people did.
[23:47.160 --> 23:48.760]  And people like some of my ideas.
[23:49.560 --> 23:50.900]  This later turned into an e-book.
[23:51.060 --> 23:55.520]  It's for free on Smashwords, $2 on Amazon, Ramblings of a Mad Scientist.
[23:55.640 --> 23:58.280]  These are the 100 ideas that I had in the trash can.
[24:00.060 --> 24:05.260]  So my residency at Tsinghua University was six months and I had an absolute blast.
[24:05.600 --> 24:11.260]  And afterwards I had a choice of whether to go back to the United States or stay in Beijing and smash the patriarchy with Joe.
[24:11.460 --> 24:12.200]  And I chose to stay.
[24:12.440 --> 24:15.960]  And we thought the best way to smash the patriarchy would be to have a feminist makerspace.
[24:16.460 --> 24:19.260]  We went around looking for spaces and ideas.
[24:19.700 --> 24:23.180]  And one thing that really, really influenced us was what was happening in Hong Kong.
[24:23.180 --> 24:27.960]  So Hong Kong is a special administrative zone of China and still has elections.
[24:28.180 --> 24:28.860]  It has free Internet.
[24:29.700 --> 24:30.940]  It's a total...
[24:32.440 --> 24:36.900]  It's totally different from the rest of China, which is really controlled and locked down with the Communist Party.
[24:37.400 --> 24:40.760]  And one thing they're doing is they're protesting the Communist Party infringing...
[24:40.760 --> 24:44.500]  Or what they see is infringing on their civil liberties and making it more Chinese.
[24:45.360 --> 24:51.440]  And there's a special region near the Yomate stop in Hong Kong where there's a lot of free culture.
[24:51.700 --> 24:53.500]  Like, free is in beer culture.
[24:54.060 --> 24:55.400]  And free is in freedom as well.
[24:55.760 --> 24:59.020]  And one of these places is 18 Pitt Street, which is kind of a free community center.
[24:59.200 --> 25:00.940]  And it's kind of a free hostel too.
[25:01.100 --> 25:03.560]  They have a bunch of beds upstairs and it's free to stay there.
[25:03.680 --> 25:06.500]  And there's a donation box on the wall and no one cares how much you donate.
[25:06.960 --> 25:09.160]  There's a vegan restaurant called So Boring.
[25:09.620 --> 25:13.860]  And you can order a meal and eat it and just leave because everything's free.
[25:13.860 --> 25:15.300]  Everything's based on donation.
[25:15.900 --> 25:17.320]  There's a coffee shop like this too.
[25:17.640 --> 25:21.560]  There's a whole street area where there's stuff for sale with a donation jar.
[25:21.760 --> 25:23.780]  So you just take whatever you want and you pay whatever you want.
[25:24.340 --> 25:32.300]  And Joe and I both stayed at 18 Pitt Street and we fell in love with this free model of inviting people to make a donation if they want to and providing stuff for free.
[25:32.920 --> 25:36.460]  The flip side of this is that a lot of foreigners in China are making a lot of money.
[25:36.660 --> 25:39.740]  You can make a lot more money teaching English than you can being a Chinese engineer.
[25:40.020 --> 25:43.280]  And so there's just a huge difference in the amount of disposable income.
[25:43.820 --> 25:46.220]  between Chinese hackers and foreigner hackers.
[25:46.760 --> 25:48.940]  And so for that reason we really really like the free model.
[25:49.460 --> 25:52.300]  We started looking around and there was this house by a sweet old couple.
[25:52.500 --> 25:55.860]  They bought this house for their son but he didn't want it and it was too big for them.
[25:55.960 --> 25:56.820]  They wanted to rent it out.
[25:57.460 --> 26:00.040]  And so it became our maker space.
[26:00.740 --> 26:04.360]  And so one of the... these are kind of our founders.
[26:04.660 --> 26:07.780]  And there's a lot of people that volunteered and I'll try to introduce you to as many as I can.
[26:07.780 --> 26:11.400]  But on the far left is Mao Yi, which is Chinese for sweater.
[26:12.120 --> 26:15.760]  I just two days ago learned that her parents didn't actually name her sweater.
[26:16.080 --> 26:20.120]  She just made up that name because she thought it would be easier for foreigners to remember.
[26:20.320 --> 26:22.620]  And I was bitterly disappointed that her real name isn't sweater.
[26:24.520 --> 26:28.020]  And then to her left is Joe, who you met earlier.
[26:28.760 --> 26:33.140]  Next is Dr. Truda Sundberg, Joe's girlfriend and our partner in crime.
[26:33.140 --> 26:34.900]  And then the ugly guy's me.
[26:36.560 --> 26:38.460]  Mao Yi is a really, really great artist.
[26:38.800 --> 26:42.640]  And she took this old, like, we can do it poster and made woman can do it.
[26:42.780 --> 26:45.340]  So these Chinese characters woman means we.
[26:45.540 --> 26:47.900]  So it says we can do it, but it also sounds like women.
[26:48.060 --> 26:51.080]  So it says we can do it, but also women can do it, which I thought was clever.
[26:52.080 --> 26:56.620]  And we just invited a bunch of people to a grand opening and we had no idea what we were going to expect.
[26:57.160 --> 26:59.580]  Joe has a ton of contacts at the LGBT Center.
[26:59.580 --> 27:02.720]  I had some contacts at people that were studying at different universities.
[27:03.160 --> 27:06.200]  And we just kind of wanted to throw a bunch of geeky people together and see what would happen.
[27:07.120 --> 27:08.240]  And it was a huge success.
[27:08.420 --> 27:09.860]  We had a ton of people turn out.
[27:11.820 --> 27:14.660]  And people have continued to contribute to the space.
[27:16.260 --> 27:17.380]  Mao Yi was nice.
[27:17.840 --> 27:25.700]  She was nice enough to make this short video of a run through of QSpace.
[27:25.700 --> 27:26.760]  So I wanted to play this for you.
[27:27.980 --> 27:29.140]  So welcome to QSpace.
[27:32.540 --> 27:34.180]  So this is our main room.
[27:34.960 --> 27:35.380]  There's the art.
[27:35.460 --> 27:37.040]  This is our art room and supply room.
[27:38.480 --> 27:39.880]  This is me putting together a chair.
[27:40.020 --> 27:41.840]  This is kind of our maker space and art room.
[27:43.920 --> 27:44.720]  This is our kitchen.
[27:44.720 --> 27:46.680]  And this is Sini making some food.
[27:47.440 --> 27:50.440]  We do a lot of vegan workshops and community dinners.
[27:51.540 --> 27:52.800]  This is our really awesome rooftop.
[27:52.800 --> 27:55.880]  We want to do some urban gardening, rooftop gardening up here.
[27:57.640 --> 27:58.680]  And here's Joe again.
[27:59.280 --> 28:00.520]  This is Dr. Truda Sundberg.
[28:01.420 --> 28:04.700]  And the cool thing about our maker space is that we actually have beds.
[28:04.820 --> 28:05.460]  We have people...
[28:05.460 --> 28:06.560]  People can crash the night.
[28:06.840 --> 28:10.200]  And it's kind of sort of not really a pay-as-you-want hostel.
[28:10.460 --> 28:19.240]  And we have a ton of people that really like this because the subways in Beijing stop running at like 11, which is insane.
[28:20.920 --> 28:24.420]  So there's a bunch of really, really awesome women and men that contributed to Q-Space.
[28:24.640 --> 28:25.280]  This is Elna.
[28:25.460 --> 28:26.660]  And she really likes silk screening.
[28:26.980 --> 28:29.260]  This T-shirt that I'm wearing now I made with Elna's help.
[28:29.440 --> 28:31.840]  She helped people design their own T-shirts and make them.
[28:32.340 --> 28:33.220]  This is Crystal.
[28:33.500 --> 28:37.820]  And when she wanted to silk screen something, she wanted to silk screen a uterus on these pants.
[28:38.460 --> 28:43.320]  And so there's this giant red uterus that looks like a period stain and it's hilarious.
[28:43.880 --> 28:47.260]  And so she's a hip-hop artist and Q-Space is kind of quiet during the day.
[28:47.260 --> 28:49.920]  And she was able to refine a lot of her lyrics.
[28:50.060 --> 28:54.380]  And she did this performance in Beijing, which is a total blast to go to.
[28:55.700 --> 28:58.020]  So this is a few really cool people.
[28:58.340 --> 28:59.520]  So there's Sini and Soli.
[28:59.880 --> 29:00.960]  There's Joe and Truda.
[29:01.620 --> 29:05.160]  The guy in the orange plate and the black shirt is Calomorph.
[29:05.360 --> 29:06.420]  And he's really awesome.
[29:06.580 --> 29:08.540]  He's just... he's the most prolific inventor I know.
[29:08.780 --> 29:12.180]  He 3D prints some new design like every week or every other week.
[29:12.180 --> 29:15.040]  And he just really loves 3D printing.
[29:15.560 --> 29:19.600]  The other guy closer with the glasses is Ichi.
[29:19.800 --> 29:27.340]  And Ichi really, really knew IT very well and set up our Internet with 5G access, which is extremely rare in China.
[29:27.560 --> 29:33.360]  And also gave us access to his private server so we could have a huge amount of digital content that we could share with members as well.
[29:34.620 --> 29:35.800]  So this is Calomorph.
[29:36.040 --> 29:40.040]  He did a class on 3D design with 123D and 3D printing.
[29:40.320 --> 29:47.260]  And a lot of people that would never have thought to get interested in 3D design and 3D printing showed up and are now using those skills.
[29:47.880 --> 29:49.880]  I got to 3D design my first thing.
[29:49.960 --> 29:57.560]  I designed this ugly bracelet, which I thought would be cool to wrap your power cable or your earbuds or earphones around and you could carry it on a bracelet.
[29:58.140 --> 30:06.360]  But it was really stiff and Calomorph suggested using a more flexible PLA plastic, he made this cute little swastika bracelet.
[30:07.980 --> 30:09.860]  And we really wanted to make it even smaller.
[30:10.240 --> 30:18.080]  And so since USBs are magnetized, this was our current model where you can plug in the USB and it will stay put because of the magnet.
[30:18.480 --> 30:23.460]  And then you can wrap it around your wrist and have a little notch to put the extra bit of cable.
[30:23.840 --> 30:27.840]  The notch wasn't quite big enough to hold the cable, so we're still working on this design.
[30:29.720 --> 30:35.620]  Every week, QSpace has like an activity roster and there's a bunch of stuff that was really surprising what was popular and what kind of bombed.
[30:35.980 --> 30:42.120]  One thing that has really had a runaway success is Dr. Truda Sundberg's research methods.
[30:42.720 --> 30:45.960]  So she has a PhD in social policy and has done an immense amount of research.
[30:46.180 --> 30:49.400]  And there's all kinds of people that are writing theses and dissertations.
[30:49.400 --> 30:53.780]  And she's really helping them refine their research methods to make their papers as good as they can be.
[30:53.920 --> 30:55.460]  So that's been a runaway success.
[30:56.120 --> 30:57.360]  Of course we have maker night.
[30:57.720 --> 31:02.500]  We've taught code, we've taught Photoshop, we've taught Xcode, we've taught electronics.
[31:03.180 --> 31:06.060]  People can make a LED throwie for the first time.
[31:06.720 --> 31:07.380]  Excuse me.
[31:07.620 --> 31:09.720]  And we also have community dinners and film night.
[31:10.040 --> 31:15.500]  One thing that's been started is LGBT film night once a week that QSpace has hosted.
[31:15.500 --> 31:20.180]  And we've had a ton of people come out to see the films and it sparks really interesting conversations.
[31:21.280 --> 31:23.840]  This is a photo that Maui took of Soleil and Sini.
[31:24.160 --> 31:29.240]  And because of the space and the art supplies at QSpace, I was able to make this into a one-meter portrait.
[31:29.880 --> 31:34.580]  So this is crayon wax that I melted and then I blew on it to splatter it.
[31:34.660 --> 31:36.400]  So every single one of those splatters is my breath.
[31:37.340 --> 31:42.220]  I was doing it with Tori and I turned to him and I said, Wow, doing this makes you so lightheaded.
[31:42.460 --> 31:44.720]  He says, I can tell, that's the third time you've told me that.
[31:44.720 --> 31:46.320]  So that was a lot of fun to make.
[31:47.640 --> 31:48.560]  This is a friend.
[31:48.780 --> 31:49.940]  This is Monique.
[31:50.080 --> 31:52.320]  And she's originally from Florida.
[31:52.700 --> 31:54.500]  This is her at 155 Chaochengdi.
[31:54.700 --> 31:56.740]  Her art piece was people putting up graffiti.
[31:56.920 --> 31:59.480]  They had spray paint cans and ads that put up.
[31:59.660 --> 32:02.040]  And then she would go behind and paint over it.
[32:02.200 --> 32:06.280]  And there's just layer and layer of paint of weird awesome content and then she would cover it up.
[32:06.360 --> 32:07.900]  And weird awesome content and she would cover it up.
[32:08.200 --> 32:11.660]  Just to talk about different ways there's censorship in China.
[32:12.820 --> 32:14.580]  She's a really, really talented artist.
[32:15.000 --> 32:17.840]  And she ended up doing art classes at QSpace.
[32:18.040 --> 32:19.840]  We had... I don't have photos of this.
[32:19.960 --> 32:25.060]  But we did live figure drawing, nude drawings at QSpace, which was a lot of fun.
[32:26.540 --> 32:29.440]  So there's some other people at QSpace.
[32:29.560 --> 32:31.820]  You can kind of see the library area behind them.
[32:33.820 --> 32:41.060]  And to go without saying, I wrote down over 600 ideas just being surrounded by these awesome women and men at this really creative space.
[32:42.180 --> 32:46.940]  And once I got back to the United States, I had my smart gum with actual ingredients.
[32:47.280 --> 32:50.760]  With real caffeine and with real gum base.
[32:50.940 --> 32:53.740]  And it's much better if anybody wants to try some.
[32:53.840 --> 32:55.220]  I brought a boat load.
[32:56.880 --> 32:59.200]  And to me, this is just what a hacker space looks like.
[32:59.320 --> 33:01.220]  And a lot of people are surprised by this.
[33:01.660 --> 33:07.240]  I had someone at the Xinhua News Agency ask me if coding was too hard for women to learn how to do.
[33:07.460 --> 33:13.020]  And I had explained to her that the word software engineer was coined by a woman because women originally did software engineering.
[33:14.360 --> 33:20.360]  I had another person who was at a... like he does corporate maker spaces.
[33:20.920 --> 33:23.740]  And he asked what QSpace was doing to attract women.
[33:24.140 --> 33:29.400]  He asked me if we were doing more textiles and sewing that attracted the women folk, which got me really angry.
[33:30.180 --> 33:36.200]  And so while we're talking about problems in China, I think it's fair to talk about problems in the United States and in the tech industry as a whole.
[33:36.760 --> 33:43.000]  So right now, top universities in the United States are graduating black and Hispanic engineers at twice the rate that they're being hired by tech companies.
[33:43.000 --> 33:46.900]  It's not the case that people of color don't have the skills for these jobs.
[33:47.160 --> 33:48.920]  The problem is that they're simply not being hired.
[33:49.620 --> 33:56.440]  Perhaps more disturbingly, there was a study done by Karen Snyder with over 700 women that had left the tech industry.
[33:57.680 --> 33:59.320]  And she was wondering why that was.
[33:59.480 --> 34:03.340]  Why did they get into the tech industry as an engineer and why did they leave?
[34:03.660 --> 34:12.840]  27% of the women she polled, over 700 women, said that serious discrimination from coworkers and bosses was one of the reasons why they left the tech industry.
[34:12.840 --> 34:15.200]  And many of these women left the tech industry for good.
[34:15.360 --> 34:16.840]  These are things that we can change.
[34:17.100 --> 34:29.440]  We can hire more people of color and we can change our culture to be more accepting of women and people of color and LGBT Americans and people from different countries and really for everyone.
[34:29.640 --> 34:31.960]  This is a really solvable problem in my opinion.
[34:33.040 --> 34:36.080]  There's this really great quote from Ed Lazowska.
[34:36.080 --> 34:39.240]  He's a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle.
[34:39.680 --> 34:43.700]  He said, engineering, particularly of software, is a hugely creative endeavor.
[34:44.020 --> 34:47.360]  Greater diversity, more points of view, yields a better result.
[34:47.660 --> 34:49.080]  And I couldn't agree with this more.
[34:49.620 --> 34:52.740]  Of course, these are problems that we should solve because they're the right thing to do.
[34:52.900 --> 34:55.200]  But it's also going to create better technology.
[34:55.200 --> 34:57.480]  And I think we all deserve better technology.
[34:57.740 --> 35:02.140]  And the way we can do that is letting in more people from incredibly diverse points of view.
[35:02.540 --> 35:06.260]  So we can have the most robust and creative and awesome product imaginable.
[35:07.440 --> 35:09.560]  So I had two really different experiences.
[35:09.840 --> 35:11.800]  I was hacker in residence for a major university.
[35:12.160 --> 35:13.180]  And I was at QSpace.
[35:13.400 --> 35:15.220]  And obviously at QSpace, I didn't get a salary.
[35:15.660 --> 35:18.040]  So money was a really big difference in this.
[35:18.040 --> 35:21.160]  I'm really excited about hacker in residence programs spreading.
[35:21.720 --> 35:25.340]  But I'm concerned of them spreading to universities or small companies.
[35:25.660 --> 35:31.820]  Where all of the funding for the hacker in residence is controlled by a larger bureaucracy or larger structure.
[35:32.260 --> 35:36.060]  That may not want to just let a hacker hack on whatever they want to hack on.
[35:36.580 --> 35:40.320]  A lot of times at a university, they want the end goal to be a lesson plan.
[35:40.580 --> 35:43.840]  So this kind of restricted the types of programs that I could do.
[35:44.060 --> 35:47.320]  Because they really wanted me to tunnel vision and focus on creating a lesson plan.
[35:47.320 --> 35:50.360]  Instead of just creating whatever random stuff I wanted to do.
[35:50.840 --> 35:52.840]  And of course companies are going to be equally restrictive.
[35:53.180 --> 35:58.340]  If they're investing in something, they want that investment to be returned as quickly as possible.
[35:58.880 --> 36:04.760]  So one thing that I think would be helpful is turning to the 18 Pitt Street and QSpace model of free.
[36:05.160 --> 36:06.580]  And asking for donations.
[36:07.140 --> 36:09.700]  There's a ton of crowdfunding platforms up right now.
[36:09.880 --> 36:10.920]  And I'm really excited.
[36:11.600 --> 36:14.500]  I know that hacker in residency programs are going to catch on.
[36:14.500 --> 36:21.020]  And I really hope that they go in a direction of each hacker having their own individual funding source.
[36:21.320 --> 36:25.200]  So that they can get their funding from an Internet community and from students.
[36:25.740 --> 36:28.760]  And therefore have a lot more flexibility on the types of projects they can work on.
[36:28.960 --> 36:33.900]  And not just be solely focused on creating something to make a lesson plan or to make a product.
[36:34.900 --> 36:37.980]  I'm personally really happy about a website called Patreon.
[36:37.980 --> 36:44.660]  If you're not familiar with it, people can contribute a certain amount of money, even if it's just a dollar, to an artist they like.
[36:44.660 --> 36:48.620]  If they're creating music videos or they're creating art or web comics that they enjoy.
[36:49.120 --> 36:52.440]  And right now, there's not a lot of technologies using Patreon as a platform.
[36:52.640 --> 36:54.160]  And I'd really like to see that change.
[36:54.400 --> 37:00.800]  I think it would be really exciting to have a hacker in residence that can go to universities that can't really afford to pay them.
[37:00.800 --> 37:06.880]  And they don't need to be paid by the university directly because they have a huge following online that are interested in giving them a dollar.
[37:07.460 --> 37:13.900]  I think this would mean that hacker in residence could create all kinds of really exciting projects that could be totally open ended.
[37:14.340 --> 37:20.360]  And then the company that's employing them would have a little bit less control over the mischievous stuff they get up to.
[37:20.580 --> 37:21.640]  And I think that would be for the best.
[37:23.200 --> 37:24.220]  So I'm Zimmer Barnes.
[37:24.360 --> 37:26.120]  See me this weekend if you want some free smart gum.
[37:26.560 --> 37:30.900]  I've got Ramblings of a Mad Scientist, which is a hundred ideas and inventions that I put out.
[37:31.060 --> 37:33.300]  It's two dollars on Amazon and it's free on Smashwords.
[37:33.640 --> 37:36.980]  You can friend me on Facebook at facebook.com slash zimmer.barnes.
[37:37.100 --> 37:39.640]  You can send me hate mail at zimmerbarnes at gmail.com.
[37:39.800 --> 37:42.600]  And I've got other crazy projects on patreon.com.
[37:42.740 --> 37:43.540]  Thank you guys so much.
[37:54.050 --> 37:55.410]  So it's now 1144.
[37:55.730 --> 38:03.330]  I think we have time for a few questions if anyone is curious about something about China or Q-Space or radical feminism or whatever.
[38:03.330 --> 38:03.850]  All right.
[38:04.870 --> 38:07.110]  All I have to say is hanyubi.
[38:08.230 --> 38:12.050]  And it's really awesome to see so much happening in my old neighborhood.
[38:12.290 --> 38:13.650]  I used to live in Wudaoying.
[38:13.910 --> 38:14.630]  Oh, nice.
[38:14.950 --> 38:15.970]  Two questions.
[38:16.270 --> 38:21.370]  The first is, I see that most of what you're doing is, you know, inside the second ring road.
[38:21.370 --> 38:24.190]  And that's a pretty far distance from Wudaoko.
[38:24.490 --> 38:30.330]  So was it hard to get students to come from the university to places like Q-Space with the...
[38:30.330 --> 38:33.690]  You know, I see that you have, like, you set it up so people can spend the night.
[38:33.790 --> 38:34.990]  And I assume that that's the intent.
[38:35.150 --> 38:37.690]  When the subway stops late, they don't have to take a taxi home, right?
[38:38.410 --> 38:42.410]  And then the second question is, I saw nothing happening in Qizhou Ba.
[38:42.590 --> 38:47.110]  And I'm wondering if that's basically dead now or if things still happen there.
[38:49.050 --> 38:51.430]  Yeah, I think it was really helpful for students especially.
[38:51.850 --> 38:55.230]  A lot of them have really restrictive rules about their dorms.
[38:55.370 --> 39:01.450]  So, for example, like, if they get in past a certain date, they have to, like, check in and, like, be, like, be scolded if they come in late.
[39:01.990 --> 39:04.130]  So having a space for them to crash was really helpful.
[39:05.290 --> 39:06.450]  We did stuff all over.
[39:07.490 --> 39:10.790]  So, 8-Bit is, I think, it's Gu Lo Da Ji.
[39:10.910 --> 39:13.130]  So it's a little bit outside of the second ring road.
[39:13.930 --> 39:16.430]  Q-Space is at Zhangji Zhonglu, which is pretty central.
[39:16.890 --> 39:25.950]  We did some stuff near Wudaoko, but there were also a lot of people throughout Beijing that hated to go to Wudaoko because it was so out of the way.
[39:27.010 --> 39:31.210]  And I'm afraid I haven't heard of the other, the second, your second question.
[39:31.550 --> 39:33.850]  Qizhou Ba, 798 Art District?
[39:34.110 --> 39:34.930]  Oh, 798, yeah.
[39:35.090 --> 39:39.390]  So, 155 Chaochengdi is in the 798 area.
[39:39.390 --> 39:40.150]  Oh, it's inside that.
[39:40.330 --> 39:40.450]  Okay.
[39:40.750 --> 39:40.930]  Yeah.
[39:41.130 --> 39:41.370]  Awesome.
[39:41.590 --> 39:43.590]  It's way out there, but it's a lot of fun.
[39:43.710 --> 39:43.890]  Yeah.
[39:44.070 --> 39:44.970]  Is there a subway now?
[39:45.510 --> 39:45.950]  Nope.
[39:46.130 --> 39:46.550]  Still no subway.
[39:46.770 --> 39:46.990]  Still no subway.
[39:47.130 --> 39:47.830]  Got to take a taxi.
[39:48.010 --> 39:48.310]  Thanks.
[39:49.350 --> 39:49.610]  Thank you.
[39:52.600 --> 39:53.380]  Anybody else?
[39:58.970 --> 40:00.430]  Questions, comments, concerns?
[40:01.650 --> 40:03.270]  Hatred about the new Ghostbusters movie?
[40:03.970 --> 40:04.410]  Pokemon?
[40:08.470 --> 40:08.910]  Hello.
[40:09.230 --> 40:09.430]  Hey.
[40:10.870 --> 40:14.350]  So, having spent a little time in China myself, I wanted to ask you...
[40:14.350 --> 40:14.510]  Yeah, hello again.
[40:15.170 --> 40:20.530]  I wanted to ask you how your perception of China has changed from when you first arrived to now.
[40:21.210 --> 40:23.410]  I think I was pretty ignorant of China when I first came.
[40:23.610 --> 40:25.510]  I thought I was going to have this totally alien experience.
[40:25.510 --> 40:27.630]  I was going to be exposed to this totally different culture.
[40:27.910 --> 40:33.410]  And then I got to China and there's Starbucks and McDonald's everywhere and I realized I'm like 400 years too late for the experience that I want.
[40:34.530 --> 40:38.010]  But staying there longer term, I think there are some big cultural differences.
[40:38.750 --> 40:48.110]  I think a lot of times people take stereotypes at face value and people will say like, oh, I'm Chinese and all Chinese people are this way.
[40:48.210 --> 40:49.150]  And I was like, well, they don't have to be.
[40:49.150 --> 40:50.650]  Like that's just your opinion.
[40:50.990 --> 40:51.810]  Like that's...
[40:51.810 --> 40:59.030]  So, I think a lot of people have these like really, really enduring stereotypes about China or about Chinese people or about all kinds of different groups.
[40:59.690 --> 41:02.330]  And so, I think that's disappointing and I hope that changes.
[41:03.090 --> 41:03.430]  Awesome.
[41:03.650 --> 41:03.910]  Thanks.
[41:04.210 --> 41:04.870]  Thanks, Scotty.
[41:06.750 --> 41:08.550]  I've got a question about your smart gum.
[41:09.410 --> 41:09.530]  Sure.
[41:09.530 --> 41:10.490]  Why do you think...
[41:10.490 --> 41:13.550]  Did you ever figure out why it was so hard to find some of the ingredients you needed over there?
[41:13.550 --> 41:17.170]  Was it just the regulation on things like the caffeine specifically?
[41:17.490 --> 41:22.130]  Or was there a reason why like you could not get just bulk like gum base?
[41:22.410 --> 41:26.030]  Because it seems like you can buy everything on Taobao and Alibaba.
[41:26.250 --> 41:28.530]  Taobao has literally everything except for gum base.
[41:28.670 --> 41:29.190]  It's really weird.
[41:29.710 --> 41:33.270]  Like literally, you could probably buy a helicopter on Taobao but not gum base.
[41:33.710 --> 41:35.330]  And I'm not sure why it's not there.
[41:35.810 --> 41:38.910]  In terms of the caffeine pills, China is just really, really anti-drug.
[41:39.130 --> 41:46.670]  When I was learning Chinese, my tutor wouldn't even teach me the word for marijuana because she was like, no, those are bad people and you can't have any marijuana in China.
[41:46.890 --> 41:50.150]  And then I get there and like 24 hours later, I'm like, you know, here, passing a joint.
[41:50.230 --> 41:51.430]  And I'm like, goddammit, I don't know what this is called.
[41:51.470 --> 41:52.510]  I asked and they won't tell me.
[41:53.930 --> 41:57.310]  So, yeah, China is pretty anti-drug to the point of banning caffeine pills.
[41:59.930 --> 42:05.210]  So, you had mentioned LBGT a few times and I wanted to know how is it...
[42:05.210 --> 42:12.070]  How is the social aspect or the cultural aspect as opposed to how the government treats LGBT in China?
[42:12.850 --> 42:14.030]  It's pretty exciting.
[42:14.230 --> 42:16.430]  So, there's an official LGBT center in Beijing.
[42:16.770 --> 42:22.550]  And there's more and more gay groups and charities that are forming a community.
[42:23.170 --> 42:25.150]  And QSpace is definitely an extension of that.
[42:25.650 --> 42:33.230]  We would really frequently get, you know, huge numbers of our members are LGBT, especially lesbian and trans women as well.
[42:33.670 --> 42:37.130]  So, I think we're... it's slowly becoming less taboo.
[42:37.330 --> 42:40.110]  In China, being gay is different from the taboo in the West.
[42:40.110 --> 42:44.150]  In the West, we have Christianity, so the taboo is on sexual practices being sinful.
[42:44.410 --> 42:49.850]  In China, there's certain things that you should do for society that you are required to do for society.
[42:50.530 --> 42:54.670]  And the biggest requirement is to provide grandchildren for your parents.
[42:54.890 --> 43:03.270]  And so, by being gay, they're violating this, like, really intense rule that they have to follow and that they have to provide this for society.
[43:03.270 --> 43:07.750]  So, in China, it's the shame that you are being a bad child.
[43:07.870 --> 43:10.690]  Like, you're being bad to your parents by not giving them grandparents.
[43:11.090 --> 43:15.230]  So, it's less related to sex like it is in the United States, if that makes sense.
[43:15.510 --> 43:15.790]  Yes.
[43:16.170 --> 43:16.590]  Thanks.
[43:19.190 --> 43:19.970]  Interesting talk.
[43:20.430 --> 43:20.710]  Thank you.
[43:20.790 --> 43:24.650]  I guess I was in China in the early 90s before the McDonald's.
[43:24.650 --> 43:29.370]  So, I got to see the place, you know, all bicycles and all that.
[43:29.490 --> 43:30.290]  I was in Hong Kong.
[43:30.410 --> 43:35.430]  And it's actually more authoritarian than, I guess, people give it credit for.
[43:35.550 --> 43:39.230]  The British system sort of carried over with the...
[43:39.230 --> 43:41.470]  There's no change as now for the British.
[43:41.830 --> 43:49.570]  But I guess I was saying that there is a lot of authoritarianism in China still, yet there's been massive, massive development.
[43:50.230 --> 44:03.070]  And I guess with, you know, hacking, you know, spreading ideas, what are your thoughts of how the country has developed so quickly and it's gone so far in such a short period of time within a very controlled environment?
[44:04.030 --> 44:04.470]  Thanks.
[44:05.010 --> 44:05.270]  Thank you.
[44:05.570 --> 44:06.730]  That's a huge question.
[44:07.350 --> 44:12.170]  There's a really great book that I still haven't finished, but it's really, really good, called One Billion Customers.
[44:12.170 --> 44:19.890]  And it has a lot of stories from Westerners going to China throughout the 80s and 90s, before there was this really, really mass development.
[44:20.730 --> 44:23.290]  There was this crazy statistic that, like, basically...
[44:23.290 --> 44:30.650]  Like, so someone my age, there's a really good chance that they grew up in a household with no refrigerator, which probably for most of us in the United States, we did grow up with a refrigerator.
[44:31.170 --> 44:33.050]  And this changed within, like, ten years.
[44:33.190 --> 44:37.350]  It went from, like, virtually no one in China having a refrigerator to literally everyone having a refrigerator.
[44:38.350 --> 44:46.570]  So, I mean, there's people that are young that remember, like, not having indoor toilets and having, like, a ditch on the side of the road that you did your business in.
[44:47.190 --> 44:49.750]  So, China's changed, like, at light speed.
[44:51.810 --> 44:54.290]  And so, it's going to continue changing, too.
[44:54.950 --> 45:02.390]  There's, I mean, so, when I say you can pay for stuff with Qspace, like, I go to the vegetable market and I buy vegetables.
[45:02.530 --> 45:03.570]  I don't pay in cash.
[45:03.710 --> 45:05.030]  I pay with the QR code.
[45:05.310 --> 45:09.290]  And that's something that's not happening here in New York or really anywhere else in the United States.
[45:09.290 --> 45:13.670]  So, in some ways, China has really shot past the West.
[45:13.850 --> 45:18.190]  So, and they're going to continue to move forward at a really, really, really rapid pace.
[45:21.260 --> 45:21.840]  All right.
[45:22.060 --> 45:22.440]  Hi there.
[45:24.080 --> 45:26.800]  So, I'm really fascinated by the hackerspace concept.
[45:26.800 --> 45:33.260]  And similarly, we, in my hometown, we just started three months ago in a group called PubForge.
[45:33.400 --> 45:34.840]  And it's basically in an Irish pub.
[45:35.020 --> 45:35.740]  And it's like...
[45:35.740 --> 45:36.080]  Oh, nice.
[45:36.080 --> 45:36.360]  Congratulations.
[45:36.360 --> 45:40.260]  It's a software-focused, you know, co-working-ish hackerspace.
[45:41.360 --> 45:46.360]  And I guess my question is, you know, just how much of the...
[45:46.360 --> 45:53.860]  How much, you know, just in terms of like, I don't know, getting good traction and people like, you know, coming out, being coming aware of it.
[45:53.980 --> 46:01.260]  And, you know, was it more of a cultural emphasis on just like the openness and the, you know, welcoming nature of a space like that?
[46:01.420 --> 46:08.280]  Or was it kind of like the specifics on like, you know, some of the events, were they more tech-focused or yada, yada, like...
[46:08.280 --> 46:09.820]  We've thrown a lot of stuff at the wall.
[46:09.980 --> 46:13.100]  So some stuff is really technical and more stuff is more cultural.
[46:13.680 --> 46:15.400]  And really, Joe and I are just really social.
[46:15.600 --> 46:17.160]  We went out to 155.
[46:17.320 --> 46:18.720]  We did TechSourceXX.
[46:19.780 --> 46:24.140]  We... I went to a lot of lesbian drinking events and I was really nervous about that at first.
[46:24.260 --> 46:29.220]  They really liked me and I just kind of became a staple at this like lesbian weekly drink-a-thon.
[46:29.800 --> 46:33.400]  So we went out and drank a lot of alcohol and that helped us meet people.
[46:33.480 --> 46:33.620]  Yeah.
[46:34.840 --> 46:35.920]  That's what I would recommend.
[46:36.480 --> 46:38.800]  So good for you for doing it in an Irish pub.
[46:39.000 --> 46:39.160]  Yeah.
[46:39.360 --> 46:40.240]  That's a good start.
[46:40.500 --> 46:41.980]  I think we've got one more minute.
[46:42.240 --> 46:46.980]  So if I can really try to quickly get these guys' questions, then I can be out of here.
[46:47.120 --> 46:47.320]  Okay.
[46:47.320 --> 46:47.900]  Quick question.
[46:48.060 --> 46:53.760]  From my experience, the expat community in China is very...
[46:53.760 --> 46:56.320]  much segregated from the local people there.
[46:56.520 --> 46:58.720]  How do you incorporate these two communities in the world?
[46:58.720 --> 47:02.600]  Or like how do you encourage the local Chinese people to be part of the hack scene?
[47:03.280 --> 47:03.680]  Absolutely.
[47:04.060 --> 47:08.280]  And so that's one of the reasons why we changed our poster to being all in Mandarin Chinese.
[47:09.080 --> 47:13.960]  Because a lot of expats would know us and we could tell them what it said in English.
[47:13.960 --> 47:16.840]  And it was a lot more welcoming to people in China.
[47:17.220 --> 47:18.300]  The people that are Chinese.
[47:18.980 --> 47:20.380]  And now at QSpace...
[47:20.380 --> 47:26.460]  So I live there and frequently there would be more people speaking Chinese in the space than speaking English.
[47:27.200 --> 47:31.920]  We also have a Spanish corner night where we have people that can come and speak Spanish and make Spanish food.
[47:31.920 --> 47:34.960]  And like there's no English and stuff like that is really cool.
[47:35.180 --> 47:41.140]  So we're trying to reach out to as far beyond the like traditional like white hacker dude.
[47:41.520 --> 47:43.540]  That's kind of my demographic as possible.
[47:45.440 --> 47:47.020]  I enjoyed your presentation.
[47:47.540 --> 47:47.840]  Thank you.
[47:47.960 --> 47:52.140]  The best description I've heard of somebody visiting China are the six blind monks and the elephant.
[47:52.500 --> 47:54.700]  Everybody has a different experience depending where you go.
[47:54.860 --> 47:58.060]  And I did what you did 25 years ago except I chose to go to Nanjing.
[47:58.860 --> 48:00.420]  Nanjing was much more meiwenti.
[48:00.740 --> 48:01.980]  You know, a lot less government control.
[48:02.120 --> 48:03.020]  So it was a lot freer then.
[48:03.600 --> 48:04.940]  So yeah, I just enjoyed it.
[48:05.080 --> 48:06.080]  Kind of a time machine.
[48:07.020 --> 48:08.600]  Yeah, it's changed hugely.
[48:08.880 --> 48:12.740]  And it's the reason why I think it's a really good experience for everyone to go.
[48:12.880 --> 48:15.500]  Right now Americans can get a 10 year visa to China.
[48:15.780 --> 48:17.060]  So it's difficult to get it first.
[48:17.220 --> 48:21.340]  But then afterwards you've got it for 10 years and don't need permission from the government to go.
[48:22.100 --> 48:23.460]  So it's something I really recommend.
[48:23.840 --> 48:27.260]  And like I said, Mitch is organizing a hacker trip to China this year.
[48:27.260 --> 48:30.160]  So if you are interested you can be part of the story as well.
[48:30.640 --> 48:33.980]  And you'll see something from China totally different from what we saw.
[48:34.160 --> 48:35.880]  Because it'll be totally different a year later.
[48:36.480 --> 48:37.740]  So I think I'm out of time.
[48:37.960 --> 48:38.960]  So thank you guys so much.
[48:38.960 --> 48:39.120]  Thank you so much.
[48:39.120 --> 48:39.140]  Thank you so much.
[48:39.780 --> 48:40.080]  Thank you so much.