Meeting Asim Hussain, the Green Software Foundation’s Director, is always an uplifting experience and this episode makes no exception. A patchwork episode where we talked about: 

When we finally have the chance to meet with Asim Hussain the Director of the GSF, the episode becomes a crazy mailbag one where we talked about: 

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Asim [00:00:07 ] "We have a very specific way of working. If you're in a working group and you do not like what is happening, you have to say the words I object. It can't just be like a strong argument. You have to sarcastic a magic incantation. You have to say the words, I object."

Gaël [00:00:30 ] Hello, everyone. Welcome to Green IO, the podcast for Responsible Technologists Building a Greener Digital World. One byte at a time. Our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. Quick note from our European-based listeners. You are invited to the first Green IO Conference in Paris on December the 8th (2023) for free. I partnered with API Days to bring you an amazing line-up, starting with Aurore Stéphant, Tristan Nitot, Théo Alves Da Costa and all the teams involved in the 2023 Sustainable Digital Challenge. The link to register is in the episode notes. Hope to see many of you.

Gaël [00:01:20 ] In the small but growing community of people coding with our environment at heart. The GSF, the Green Software Foundation, is getting a lot of traction. Big companies and universities are joining almost on a weekly basis. Dozens of open-source projects around the globe participated in the 2022 hackathon. The numbers of LinkedIn followers have doubled in less than the semester, if not a quarter. And a quick glance on the Green Software Foundation website will give you a good idea of all the tools and methods they provide to decarbonize software. But what's in it for a software engineer or a designer who could get lost in this vibrant library? Where to start and what to use for which needs? What are the limitations of these tools today? I seized the opportunity of meeting Asim Hussain, (the Green Software Foundation director) at API days, London, in September - where we were both talking about tech sustainability - to ask him to join the show. Between fellow podcasters because Asim and Chris Adams are the regular hosts of the great Environment Variables Podcast. He gladly accepted and voilà, hi Asim. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today. 

Asim [00:02:38 ] Thanks, Gaël. Thanks for having me.

2 Gaël [00:02:40 ] So, Asim, before we deep dive into the GSF tools, I have the question I wanted to ask you since I've started following your work. What's the connection between Microsoft, Intel, JPMorgan, the European Space Agency and psychedelic medicine?  

Asim [00:03:00 ] Hmm. Well, there's hopefully no connection between them and psychedelic medicine, other than the fact that I was employed (in these sectors). I've had quite a long career working in various areas, including, space and finance. And for a long stretch I was actually self-employed, teaching and training courses in teaching. Then I joined Microsoft six or seven years ago, I think, in the recently reformed developer relations division. And I was doing JavaScript developer relations focusing on the audience, but then I eventually I was the EMEA regional lead for developer relations over there. And honestly, that was just an opportunity when the whole organization shifted. It was a big reorg. Everybody was struggling to figure out "what are we going to give Asim"? And I just said, "Hey, look, I've been really part of this movement around green software. I'm talking to all these people. It's a passion area of mine. Let me incubate a team that lets me focus in on this golden question, and the stars aligned and they allowed me to just focus in on that area. And that's when I became the Green CAT advocacy lead at Microsoft. And then eventually I just moved over to Intel. And that's how we launched the Green Software Foundation. So that medicine is kind of completely tangential to all of that. So, about seven years ago, honestly, I used to suffer from very significant depression. And I really went through quite a few different modalities. I was looking at meditation - it used to be a very large part of my daily routine as well as just a number of other things that I would I was trying. Meditation is extremely powerful. I extremely recommend meditation. But then I discovered actually for many, many decades psychedelics were actively being used, and as treatment mechanisms. There are over 20,000 academic peer reviewed papers on the use of psychedelics in a wide variety these areas. But then it just got banned by Richard Nixon because he didn't like the people who were in the psychedelic movement and he wanted to find reasons to put them in jail. And that unfortunately, just spread. It's just a really unfortunate thing. And then it became illegal and the way he made it illegal was he made it illegal. So there was a schedule one, which means there are no medical uses for it.  Cocaine FYI is schedule two. So, you know, that's an interesting little thing that that speaks right now. 

Gaël [00:05:52 ] That's crazy. 

Asim [00:05:54 ] Now what's happening is, based on the large polymer study that Tim Ferriss funded, which is in the Johns Hopkins University, there's this big resurgence of research in this space. Australia just legalized that. There are multiple countries in the world which are changing their legislation over it. And there's been a large kind of movement over the last couple of years to really explore this space - sometimes it's called the psychedelic medicine movement, sometimes it's called plant-based medicines. And yeah, I've been doing a lot of those, mostly ayahuasc