Leandro, you're in Gibraltar for the festival for the first time and you drew against the world number two. How does it feel? Well, I am very happy, incredible for me. Well, the game was very unclear and the final position is a perpetual check and well, I am really excited for the result and the game was very interesting. Very interesting game, but I have to say that I felt you were doing pretty well and almost better if Abbey looked like he was in trouble. Yes, I think that when he played the B-shop G4 and I played 95, your best move was B-shop P-6. He played B-shop P-5 and well, I can play H-3 and G-4 and pressure the B-shop and well, I think that I take initiative, but well, but he played very well and good defense and well, but I think that I was playing a good game. How much of it was preparation? Well, I prepared Grunfeld, Nims O'Indian, Slav, but he played Chebanenko. They players play all openings and it's impossible to prepare. I think that he played Chebanenko for the first time in your life. Right, it's obviously very difficult to prepare against these guys. Now coming to your last position where you went F-6 and after Rd3 it forces this perpetual tactics. Did you see this, foresee this? Yes, yes, when I, when you say that when I play, ah yes, yes, yes, yes, the position is, it's danger for him and well, he think in the analysis, he say to me in the analysis that when I play F-5, the position is very, very unclear and well, he say that I can play a queen for F-7 and this position is slightly better for me, but well, I view the draw. You're obviously very happy with that result and for all right reasons, we wish you all the best for the rest of the tournament. Well, very thanks, well, I want to fight all tournament. All right. Best of luck.


I'm here to talk to you about local and remote teams. And who here was in the last talk as well? It was an awesome talk, wasn't it? They really did a great job with that. I'm gonna cover some of the same things. It'll be a little different, it'll be from my perspective, but yeah, I really enjoyed listening to Glenn and Maria tell their experience as well. So my specific perspective on this is looking at hybrids where we have team members who are local and team members who are remote and how to get the best of combining those two styles. So I wanna start with a quick poll. If you would raise your hand if you today are primarily someone who works locally in an office, not maybe not every single day, but most of the time you're in an office with the rest of your team. Okay, maybe half. And then how many of you are primarily remote? The other half, makes sense. How many of you would like to do the other? Okay, so that's what we're gonna focus on is some of the advantages of each, why you might choose one versus the other. I think there's a lot of value in each one and I've done both and I enjoy both and there's a lot to look at there. So an introduction, a little bit about me first. My name is Ben Klang. I have been doing Ruby for 10 years, doing open source for 20. A lot of my appreciation for remote work comes from open source, where when you're doing open source work most of the time it's remote anyway. Your collaborators are in other parts of the world. Previously I founded a company called Mojolingo. We were a software consultancy. We were a remote first company from day one. About 12 people, not a huge organization, but definitely learned a lot from that experience. Today I'm vice president in business technology for power-humor modeling. It's a much larger organization. About 2,000 people in the company, 51 in the technology department. We have seven scrum teams, six states, four countries. And really about half and half when it comes to local versus remote or local versus distributed. And again, I want to stress, this is my experience. You know, it comes from what we've done in the past and what's worked well for us. I would say that everything you hear today has come from something we've learned, something that hasn't worked. And I'm sure that some of the things that we do today we will find better ways to do tomorrow. And that's okay, that's just part of the process. So I want to start with a little bit of background. Like what kind of teams exist? What are we talking about when we talk about remote teams? And I want to emphasize that when I say team, I'm really thinking of a fairly small unit. I'm thinking of three to five people, not the entire department say, but the actual people that you depend on day to day. The kind of people where if they're not around, you would end up blocked, right? So first of all, local teams. That's a pretty easy one, right? People in the same building. Not really in the same building, but in the same floor and in the same room even. I'm reading that people who are just separated by as little as one floor start to lose some of the benefits of being a local team, right? Some of that face-to-face interaction is lost when you have to go out of your way to interact with them. So local teams, we're focusing on people who are physically co-located together, preferably in the same room. Another one is remote teams. Again, pretty intuitive. People who are spread out in many different locations. Sometimes it'll be at home. Sometimes it'll be in a coffee shop. Sometimes it'll be in a coworking space. We actually do have one guy on the team who for some reason just loves coffee shops. He will spend his entire morning in a coffee shop. I couldn't deal with the noise, but he works for him. And then there's a third type, which are mixed teams. So this is a type of team where you have most of the people on one physical location, and then one person who's kind of an outlier. This is, to me, this is an anti-pattern. I don't really want to talk about it much other than to say, I strongly advise that you don't do it. This can lead to isolation, right? This can lead to this one person being left out of conversation. This can lead to people not having the same level of understanding about what's going on within the business, what's going on within the team, what's going on within the software being developed. And sort of another spin on the same topic is where you have one team that is split into two parts. So you have a part of the team in one location, part of the team in the other. Again, you'll end up forming clicks. There'll be small communication patterns referenced to Conway's law earlier, right? When people are communicating together, the organization will develop that way. So again, I don't recommend this style either. So I'm gonna say something that may be controversial. Maybe you agree with me. I just ask that you hold your pitchforks until the end and I'll explain why I think this. But I feel pretty strongly that local teams win. They're the most effective, most efficient way to develop software. I don't think, I think that all else being equal, if you can control for everything else, having everybody in the same room is gonna be the fastest way to deliver what you want. And I say this myself as a hybrid employee spending about half my time on site, half my time working from home. I say it as someone who founded a business that was remote first and successfully remote first. I was very happy with that company. And I say this as a manager of three remote teams and one local team. I think it's better for communication. I think it's better for camaraderie. Better for brainstorming and for resolving issues. And even Scrum teaches, we follow Scrum pretty religiously and one of Scrum's big things is, get your teams co-located, right? So this isn't just me saying this. This is kind of the wisdom being taught. So then why even talk about remote teams? If local is clearly the way to go, why would this even be a conversation? That's because we wanna be remote. A lot of us wanna be remote. Just from your hands I saw earlier, half of you are doing it and another good chunk of you would like to swap whatever you're currently doing. So there's a really great Stack Overflow article or rather survey and it came up with 53% of people looking for jobs want some kind of remote option is a top priority in seeking a new position. Which means if you're trying to hire these people, this is a major competitive advantage for you. If you have remote options in your employment, then you have the attention of a very large number of job seekers right away. Additionally, 11% of remote workers report higher job satisfaction or I should say the job satisfaction is 11% higher among people of remote options versus purely local. So it's not just about acquisition. It's also about retaining the teams that you have, keeping them happy. Happiness is correlated with productivity and with longevity within the organization. So this is a big deal, right? And I do wanna touch on something I think that Glenn and Maria said very well, which is that not every position can be remote and within our organization we've called out a few specific types of positions that we don't, we will not consider remote applicants. The two that are kind of obvious are application support and infrastructure support, the people that day-to-day have to interact with some of the end users. We are self-hosted, so we have our own physical infrastructure and we have the teams that manage that infrastructure. We want them local in case something breaks, they can unplug it and replug it as necessary. And the third one, which is a bit of a shift for us is junior development teams. So we actually, we did a first time for us, experiment a year ago, where we put together a team of developers who were junior and paired with them a mentor to bring them up to speed and we did it as a remote team. And it was successful, I wanna say that the people who went through that program are all with the company still today and they're absolutely valued members of the team. But what we found was it was harder to support them and mentor them in the ways that they deserved. It was harder to establish the kind of communication to jump over to the whiteboard and explain some kind of complex process. Then it would be if they were local. So going forward, we've started saying that all junior developers, we wanna put them at headquarters where they can be mentored with other team members and given that the attention that's necessary there. So what are the benefits? What are the benefits of enabling teams to be remote? And I'll start with benefits to employers. First of all, obviously it's a broader applicant pool. If you're looking in one location, best case scenario, you're kind of saying give me the best person within 50 miles. That's just a small pool to begin with no matter where you are. If you can open that up and say give me the best person plus or minus three hours, suddenly you have a lot more options to choose from. And ultimately what you really wanna say is who's the best person for the job? So as your organization continues to expand and as you can start to form teams in multiple locations, as you can start to organize teams around locations, you're not just looking at one geographic location or even one time zone, you can actually look around the entire world.  It has advantages like taking better advantage of referrals. So the people on your team are going to refer their friends, hopefully. If you're a place that they want to work, hopefully their friends also want to work there as well. And if those friends happen to not be in your city, you might not have the opportunity to work with them. It definitely improves things like time to hire. So as we grew, we had to grow, we doubled in size twice over the last two years, basically double each year. And the only way we could do that was looking remotely. We just couldn't get a big enough stream of candidates looking only locally. So that was a major shift for us. But it also increases the opportunities for diversity. I think that the last talk mentioned this well, you know, if you're a mother with a newborn child and you don't want to or can't easily get to the office, that's a limiting factor, right? When I was a single father, my daughter would come home from school at 3.30 and I could be home to be there with her. That was a big deal for me, right? That meant that if I was tied to an office, I would have to drive home to do such a thing. And that's not feasible, right? But if I was able to work from home, I could be there for her. So that was a big benefit for me. So let's start with the benefits to the employees as well. I talked about being home when my daughter got home from school, it's more than just that. It's also a choice of lifestyle. For myself, I like living in the city. I like being in an urban area. I like not having to have a car. I like being able to walk to shops and restaurants. That's quality of life for me. A very good friend of mine, he had five kids, has five kids. They lived about two hours away from the office. So two hours one way to drive from his house to the office. And at the time, the company we worked with, this was 10 years ago, they did not have remote options. It wasn't on the table. So every day he would drive two hours into the office and he would work full day, and he would drive two hours home. So four hours of his day. By the time he would get to the office, he had already been up for at least two, probably three hours. He was tired from the drive. He was stressed from dealing with traffic. And then even at work, sometimes he would be trying to figure out how to make his commute better, trying to find just the right time to leave to avoid traffic, or started looking at train schedules to try to figure out, is there another way for me to get to the office? No doubt that impacted this productivity. There's just no way you can be as effective when you're spending that much of your energy getting yourself physically to a location. So getting to live where you choose and being able to do so remotely gives you that flexibility, gives you the option of picking the lifestyle that's right for you and being able to have the job that is right for you as well. So one size does not fit all. And then there are mutual benefits. Things that benefit both the employer and the company. Life is not static. The one thing we can count on is that it will change. What has actually happened with a lot of our team members is their life situations have changed and they have needed to move. So one of my favorite examples is a very good friend of mine. He was living in the UK. He got married to a Brazilian and they wanted to live in Brazil. If his employment had been tied to his physical location, then we would not have been able to keep him within the organization. And he's a very strong developer. So that was important to us, like having him be a part of organization while he still was able to live the life he wanted to do and allow his life to evolve in the way he wanted to evolve it. That's important. So that gives him the ability to transition his life while retaining the stability of his employment. And it gives us longevity of someone who's a valued team member, somebody who knows and we've already invested teaching him about the organization. Those are things that benefit both sides pretty well. So location independence adds longevity to employment, which is a win for both sides. All right. There are challenges. No surprise, right? Remote's not all easy. I hope everybody had brought a pencil and paper. I'm going to give you the three most important bullet points. Remote work. Everybody ready for this? Okay. Number one, communication. No surprise. Communication is the biggest challenge to remote work. What may not necessarily surprise you is that number two is also communication. And number three is communication. Right? Got it? Okay, sweet. Communication challenge number one. My favorite, time zones. Love time zones. Hate time zones. Time zones were the biggest factor in figuring out how and where to grow the team because while we don't particularly care where you live, we do care that you have the ability to communicate with your team. We do care that you can support each other. We do care that you can ask the questions and get answers and get unblocked. So we have a rule of thumb. A team should not spread more than three hours total. Not plus and minus three hours. Three hours total, right? So we try to group things, and these circles are not exactly representative, but the point is that we try to group teams such that no one is more than plus or minus three hours than anyone else in their team, and that gives a nice amount of overlap to the workday. Now you'll notice that some of those circles are decidedly longer than three hours. And as I mentioned earlier, one of the benefits of smaller teams is you can orient your teams in such a way that the teams themselves are within that three hour rule. But across the organization, you can have multiple teams and you can spread the work around that way. So that does work. Communication challenge number two, being able to understand things deeply. Not just superficially, but truly understand the work you're doing and why you're doing it. I love this quote by George Bernard Shaw. The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. So you might spend a bunch of time trying to explain what we're building and why, and depending on how you do it, you may or may not have actually been heard. I think this is one of the reasons we love whiteboards, because when you can get up and draw something, it pictures worth a thousand words. It makes it so easy to explain relatively complex concepts when you can map them out like that. The problem is that doesn't really work so great when you're remote, right? You can't just pull up a whiteboard. We've tried lots of online whiteboarding tools, and they all are kind of disappointing in one way or another. But you have to replace that somehow. So we lean a lot on video conferencing. We lean a lot on screen sharing. Screen sharing is huge.  And then my CIO's favorite, flow charts. Don't be afraid of the flow chart. This maybe took me 15 minutes to put together. There's no color. It's a bunch of boxes, a couple errors, and a little bit of text, but it really conveys very quickly some things we're trying to get done. And so this has become part of our culture, and we're even trying to encourage more of it. The point here isn't to burden you with documentation. The point here is to communicate as clearly as you would on a whiteboard. And if you start to build that into your culture, you can partially solve this problem of deep understanding. All right, communication challenge number three. Perceptions and distractions. Everyone knows Dilbert? If I can't see them at their desk, how do I know they're working? It's a real problem, right? Anyone dealt with this? Yeah. Point to your bosses everywhere. There's a flip side to this, though. As a remote employee, my team leader is always multitasking. How do I know if she's taking me seriously? A lot of our communication happens in videoconference. Videoconference, for most of us today, means working on a laptop. So if I'm speaking with someone on my team and we're having a great conversation, it is really tempting. Really tempting just to alt-tab, pull up email, answer something, answer a quick instant message. That is so destructive. It's so destructive that the conversation is happening. It's even worse when you do it in a stand-up or a retro and you're not paying attention to the team. That's something you have to fight. It takes conscious effort. It doesn't come automatically. You've got to put that away. In addition, you need to make sure that... Back to the first point about... If I can't see the team, how do I know they're working? You need to also make sure you proactively manage up. Talk to your supervisors. Let them know what's going on. For us, a lot of that comes through dealing with tools like Pivotal Tracker and Coderviews. A lot of it has to do with retrospectives and, excuse me, stand-ups and sprint planning. Those are opportunities to communicate within the team about what's going on, but also to communicate about progress, so people know what's happening. I'll talk more about that in just a second. So that's kind of an overview of some of the benefits and challenges. I want to be really specific and talk about how we do it. These next few slides are going to talk about what we do at Power2 to work through these challenges. We understand that there's value in both styles of work, local and remote. We understand there are business realities of acquiring and retaining the people that we want on the team. And then retaining has a lot to do with happiness. So we needed to find a way to get the best of both of them. First, we looked at structure. Small teams. Three to five people. That is a big deal for us, is keeping it small. And if a team starts to get too big, we don't hesitate to split it apart into smaller teams. And also consistent teams. They believe we're not trying to mix local and remote. You can put two people in one location on the same team, but if you do it, they need to act as if they're remote. They need to be on video conferences on their own computers, and on the same, they have parity at the communication layer with everyone else in their team. So it doesn't feel like there's just two people and then the rest of the team. Back up one. Okay. Then we have process. Scrum. As I said before, we're a big believer in Scrum. And there's this sort of related concept of Shu Ha Ri, which is where in the beginning you do it exactly like the book says. And we're probably at that point now. Most of what we do is doing our best to stick to the principles exactly as written without too much variation. And then the next step for that is Ha, which is where you understand the principles and you can start to bend the rules where necessary to adapt to your situation. And then there's a mastery level, which is where you completely understand everything and why the rule exists in the first place and then you can break the rules whenever you want because the rules no longer exist. Sort of like the matrix, flexes his arms and the walls bend. I want to do that. So for us, that process, it's really important to have the right and the right parts for managing the communication, ensuring the communication with remote teams. Standups, if nothing else, give you an opportunity every day to make sure you communicate with everyone on your team. It's really easy to do, right? If we were all remote and just focused on our pull request, it's so easy to get into the editor, push the code, move on to the next thing and not even talk to anybody. But standups at least, if nothing else, will give you a chance once a day to communicate. And retrospectives as well will bring that to the surface. And it's just, again, another way to checkpoint communications, make sure they're happening regularly. Of course, you have to emphasize remote-friendly communication. We do a lot with code reviews. Every single piece that goes to production has had a code review. It's one of the three criteria we require to ship code. Obviously, text chat. A lot of people use Slack. We have a tool internally called Connect. It's the same concept, but it's critical because it facilitates communication within our development team, but also within the larger company. Anyone can talk to anyone at any time. That's critical. Video conferencing and screen sharing, I mean, I've already given the examples for that, but, again, without the ability to pull up a whiteboard, being able to at least look at the same thing and talk about it makes a big difference in facilitating communication. And then, as I said, diagrams. Love diagrams. It is my goal to, at least once every 90 days, spend some time face-to-face with everyone on one of my teams, just to have that personal relationship with them. We also do lunch and learns, and I got to give credit to Jill who's in the audience and probably modified I'm calling her out right now, but she did a lot to make lunch and learns happen for our team. She did a great job with that. And that has been not only helpful for onboarding and bringing new people into the organization. It's also been really helpful in just getting people talking across teams. As we emphasize small teams and as we grow, we end up adding more teams, they don't necessarily communicate as much as they would otherwise. So lunch and learns are a great way to get a larger group together. And then she was telling me yesterday she wants to do coffee dates, which I think sounds like an awesome idea. So I think we'll be doing that when we get back. All right, so we've talked about how we're doing it. I want to talk about one more topic which is how we optimize for the different styles. First of all, we're going to talk about how we optimize for local teams. For the teams that we have decided will be local, whether they're development or support or DevOps, there are a few things we can do to make them more productive, to maximize the benefits that they have. First, we built a headquarters that has a lot of collaboration space. I mean a lot. Probably at least within our department's sort of area of the building, at least half, maybe more than half of the space is dedicated toward collaborative areas. So when you build up, there's power to plug in. There are, I don't know if those little puzzle piece chairs are. They're sort of like bean bags, but it's sort of not. But it's just a more casual space where you can discuss things. And we use that space not only for internal conversation. And I think this is really important. We use it to also talk to the business. These two rather serious-looking fellows are from our talent acquisition department, and we're in the process of building some software to help them automate some of the work that they're doing. This is them coming into our area and speaking with the guy in the red shirt, it's an application support guy, and he's explaining some of the features we're delivering and some of the bugs that we're addressing. And so this is communication not only for within the team, within the department, it's also communicating out to the business. So there's a real danger if you have an entirely remote team that nobody can see that stuff just happens and nobody knows about it. This is part of our effort to make sure that the business knows what we are up to and then on that same kind of vein and actually even more outbound, we have this area called the Knowledge Dojo, which is very much modeled on the Apple Knowledge Bar concept. We have this area which is outside. It's in a very public space, a hallway where a lot of people walk by, and anyone who has a technical issue of any kind can walk up and ask questions. You know, I need help with a mouse or printer ink or I have trouble with the application. And again, it's just putting a very public face on what we're doing and why. Ultimately, if you do this right, if you build the kind of connections with the rest of the business, what it does is it lowers resistance. I don't know, I don't think I mentioned this early on, but the business we're in is homer modeling and the company we're in is in many ways traditional. Very local, very much. People come into the office, you saw the people in suits, that's because they actually wear suits. And we're a little different. Not only do we not wear suits, a lot of us just aren't even there. So we need to manage that. We need to let them know that we're working with them, so it lowers the resistance to enabling remote work. And then finally, as developers, sometimes you just have to get away from the noise. So we have these little pods we built. There are 12 of them. For the people who are local, they become their office. And then for the people who are remote, whenever they're at headquarters, they can use them as office space. They're quiet. They're away from the noise. And then the colorful lights, besides looking really awesome in this picture, if the light is red, it means you're busy. You don't want to be disturbed, and please leave me alone and come back later. And if it's green, you can come in and have a conversation. All right, that's what we do for local. What can we do for remote or distributed teams? Daily stand-ups. I'm just going to hit that point again. That is a big part of how we manage the communication, how we keep the communication good. And we don't have to take them too seriously, as Darren is showing you. What else do I want to say? The other thing I wanted to say about this is this is kind of an interesting team. This team has since been reorganized so that they are now entirely local. But at the time this picture was taken, three of the people were physically in the same location, and two of them were in remote locations. But the reason I show this is this is a good example of getting everybody on the same playing field. You'll notice everybody is at their own workstation, on their own computer talking and communicating as peers. So the guy in the bottom left and the guy in the bottom center and the guy in the top right are roughly 10 feet apart from each other in their cubes. But whenever it came to team communication, they would level the playing field to ensure that. I talked about getting face-to-face as a way of enabling remote communication. And this is a big part of it. So it's not just for work. We do a lot of work. We do this three times a year. We call it Create. We bring all the developers, all the remote workers, two headquarters. We bring all the remote communication support teams that they work with. We bring in the infrastructure teams they work with. And we find... It's not a hackathon exactly. How would you describe it? Basically, we take goals and projects that are hard to get to in the normal cycle of development. Sometimes they're bigger picture architectural things. Sometimes it's a cool feature that we just couldn't work into the normal flow. And we'll go build it. We'll spend a week building it. What's cool about this, and what's cool about this kind of emergent behavior was that the teams self-organized and they did it in different configurations than their daily teams. So when they're out in the field, maybe you have this group over here and this group over here, but when they actually came to this session of headquarters, they picked completely different people to work with. And that's beautiful for the kind of personal connections that are necessary to both grow and also to get questions answered beyond your team. And of course, it's not just work. It's social too, right? So we have both structured and unstructured time where people can... We were doing some kind of weird game show thing. So that's one of the structured examples. We've done go-karting. Almost killed somebody, but it's okay. He survived. But it's important, right? Because these are things that are hard to do in your remote. It's hard to build those social connections and the trust that comes from goofing off with somebody. All right, so in summary, three things I would say. When you have a local team, you want to optimize those face-to-face interactions. That's your core strength, right? You've got people there. You want to give them as many opportunities to communicate with very high bandwidth, both internally and externally. Second, you want to develop the tools and practices that are necessary to make remote work successful. And this doesn't happen automatically. It takes effort, it takes conscious thought, and it takes evolution, and that's the status quo. Whatever you're doing today is great, but there's always something you've been doing better. And the retrospectives are... and create are big parts for us for analyzing that process, finding ways, finding what's working, finding what's not, and then finding what can be better. I want to give you two links for further reading. I want to thank Martin Fowler for a really awesome article that guided a lot of my early thinking about how to build distributed teams. He goes into some more detail on some points I kind of glossed over here, highly recommended. And then weworkromotely.com when we were hiring specifically for remote developers. This is where we would advertise and got great responses. It's such a focused demographic, I think, that helped a lot. It's also associated with a book that the guys at 37 Signals put out called Remote. It's the website that goes along with that book. That's it. So my name's Ben Klang. I'm at Beklang just about everywhere, GitHub, Twitter, et cetera. And thank you very much. I'll try to repeat the question. One of the slides I had a team that was hybrid, the mixed that I said was a bad idea. And the question I think was when we did bring them in to make them a local team, how did we handle that transition and what happened to the people that were remote? Did I get that right? So a couple of things. One of the people just started coming into the office more regularly and he was already in the area but it wasn't a big deal to start commuting, right? The other one was in Australia and he's kind of an interesting story. He came in the organization by a fluke. To be really honest, I missed that he was in Australia when I started the interview process, but by the end of the interview process I was so impressed with him that I said, we got to make this work. And he was great because he actually worked really hard. He, for probably seven months, eight months lived on East Coast time in Australia. Which, God bless him. I couldn't do it, right? But anyway, we ultimately actually had sponsored him and had him move to the United States. So no one on the team was let go. We did reorganize to put them all together. But we made that happen organizationally and they were all on board with it. That team in particular, it was a positive thing for them. Right? So to repeat the question, what kind of mix is the situation? And I'm not sure if you were the only person that was in the outsider or one of a...  And then to your point, you were having conversations and decisions being made sometimes without that person just because they were spontaneous. And then how do you deal with that? It's tough. If you find yourself in that situation, the only advice I can give you is that you have to be very conscious about it in a mode where they can be observed by the person remotely. Text chat is probably the best place for that. I don't think there's an easy answer. I wish I could give you one. Our philosophy has been just don't do it wherever possible. You can somewhat help that by keeping your team small. There's less of a risk of that if you're only having to manage three or four people. If you're keeping the team small, it's harder to have one person remote.  But yeah, I hear you. That's a difficult situation. And I would... Best thing I can say is just try to avoid it. That's a good question. So the question is, are there certain types of projects or I guess to extrapolate certain kinds of work? Or projects? The technology... Okay. That are better suited to local versus remote. Yeah. Well, so projects that require you to physically touch things like putting a server into a rack, that's an easy one, and that's really what led us to wanting those teams on site. In the development space, I'm trying to think of any project where it's purely writing code where we have that issue. Nothing comes immediately to mind. Everything, once you get past that physical realm, as long as you have a way to communicate, I can't think of any... I think that either can be made to work effectively. With the provisor that you're doing all the other things, that you're doing stand-ups, you're doing retrospectives, and that you're gathering the team so that the communication is occurring naturally. Oh, one thing I didn't mention is besides just the three times a year, if we have a big launch for a big feature, we'll bring the team to headquarters for a week and we'll focus on the stories of that feature and the payoff for that lasts. We might spend one week on site figuring all the pieces out, and then for three months, they have a really good, clear picture of what they're trying to build, and we're mixed right now. What's my recommendation for getting past that? To make them work. To make them work. When we did it, we had the same problems that I've talked about where people felt isolated, people were left out of decisions, and what we tried was a lot of video conferencing, a lot of text chat, a lot of notes in wikis, in pull requests, written documentation, and then would try to encourage people to remember when you had a pull-up conversation to go dump the artifacts from that into something that everyone else can see. It can be done. My personal opinion is you've just got to be superstar, focused on proactively pulling those people closer and closer to make sure that it happens, and I think that's hard. I just think human nature is too easy to have a quick conversation without actually informing anyone else. My advice would be if you can try to reorganize such that you don't have the mix. That takes time. I'm not saying it's easy or automatic, but it can be done. I just think it's hard, and I don't think we will do it again if we can help it. That's interesting. In your company, it's mandated that you have teams that are mixed, some remote and some local, with the goal being to ensure consistent culture. What are the ways you can address the culture arguments while not doing it in a mixed team mode? Right. Tactically, some of the things I talked about, the lunch and learns are good because they cross teams. Because they happen regularly, in our case, every two to three weeks, depending on how excited people are about finding something to present, at least everybody's coming together for that. The other thing we do, is every week, we do demos on Friday. Again, that's the entire department. Everybody gets together, everybody sees what everybody else is doing, and everybody gets to ask questions. In some cases, in this case, right now, we have two teams who are working on alternate sides of the same feature. One happens to be local and one happens to be remote. In those cases, we are trying to do more. We put them in a single chat room. Those are all really small answers to your questions. I think the bigger answer is, the answer to culture itself is culture, is getting people to understand each other, to respect each other, and to want to communicate with each other. All of these other things kind of grow out from that. I don't think culture is easy. I think it's conscious, and I think it can be done. And again, bringing people together so that they get that face-to-face time helps with that. Does that help? Good. Anyone else? Awesome. You've been a great audience. Thank you very much.


Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States and Mrs. Reagan of the Kingdom of Nepal and the United States of America. Nancy and I welcome you to the White House and to the United States of America. It's a particular pleasure to have King Berenda back in our country for the first time since his student days. We hope that you will again feel at home and among friends here, not only at the White House, which you visited as crown prince, but throughout our country. And Queen Hajware, this is your first visit to the United States and we hope that our goodwill and hospitality will encourage you to return again. The United States and Nepal are on opposite sides of the globe. We face different challenges and our cultures symbolize the diversity with which mankind views the world. Yet our ties have grown stronger since our countries established relations in 1947. The vast distance which separates us is bridged with a miracle of modern communications and transportation. Our distinct cultures are linked in our people's common commitment to peace and human progress. In Nepal, Your Majesty, you've set forth to win the battle against illiteracy, disease, hunger, and poverty. The challenges you face on the frontier of modernization are formidable. The very topography, which makes Nepal one of Earth's most beautiful sites, makes your task more difficult by limiting the amount of arable land and complicating communications. Although improved health and nutrition in your country has saved lives, it has also increased the pressures on finite resources. Education and information have expanded the horizons of your citizens, but have also raised their expectations. Your development program, which began some 30 years ago, exemplifies the wise and progressive leadership provided by your family. From your grandfather's decision to seek modernization down to the present day, your people have been blessed by something money cannot buy – wise leadership. This coupled with your country's hardworking people, tremendous hydroelectric potential and access to substantial technical and financial support from the international community all represent opportunities for dramatic progress. America is proud that for a third of a century we've played a part in your development efforts. The record reflects the close partnership of our governments and peoples. We plan to continue American investment in Nepal's economic development during the next five years, including the funding of new agricultural research and training projects, areas which Your Majesty has identified as vital to improving the well-being of your people. The Peace Corps will also continue its important work in Nepal. More than 2,000 volunteers have served in your country – one of our largest Peace Corps posts. The 180 volunteers presently there are carrying on their fine tradition of competence and compassion. Your Majesty, you, your father, and your grandfather before you have been the architects of Nepal's efforts to build a better future. In the political arena, your reforms are enlisting public participation in identifying national goals, thus guaranteeing that your people have a stake in their future. The United States respects these and other initiatives Your Majesty is making to develop popular institutions consistent with the spirit of the Nepalese people. There is every reason to be confident that your goals of economic progress, political stability, and national security will be reached. America is happy to offer encouragement and support in these noble efforts. Your Majesty's moral leadership in condemning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is much appreciated here. We should not forget the heroism of the Afghan people in their fight for the freedom and independence of their country. We are also grateful for the courage your nation has shown in the cause of peace. Nepal has been willing to do more than just cast a ballot at the United Nations. It has volunteered its military personnel to serve in some of the world's most troubled areas, giving depth and meaning to Nepal's commitment to peace. The world needs more nations like Nepal which are willing to help shoulder the burden of preserving peace as well as advocating it in world forums. Once again Your Majesty's, welcome to America. We look forward to getting to know you better as a means of enriching the deep friendship which has always characterized our relations. Mr. President, Mrs. Reagan, ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to thank you Mr. President and Mrs. Reagan for this welcome ceremony and for the warmth with which my wife and I along with the members of my entourage have been received here. I also wish to convey to you and through you to the government and people of the United States greetings and good wishes of the government and people of Nepal. For me, it is also a nostalgic moment. I recall with fondness the time I had stood by my August father, late King Mahendra, on a similar occasion in a similar setting here in 1967. I do not feel a complete stranger to this land. Indeed, I come to you in the spirit of a friend who has had the benefit of studying in one of your leading institutions of learning. Inspired as Nepal and the United States are by the common goals of striving for freedom and dignity of man, it is also a fulfilling experience for me to be back here again. Mr. President, few things in the history of man have been as eventful as the discovery of this new found land. It gave birth to a republic known not only for its inspiring ideals, but also for the most epoch-making feats of scientific endeavor. Viewed from this angle, America stands on the very forefront of modern history. Indeed, what the United States represents is a harmonious amalgam of high human and material achievements rarely surpassed elsewhere in the world. As a nation that has brought about such profound changes, it is only natural to look up to this country in joining hands with the rest of the world to herald a new age of peace, understanding, friendship and prosperity for all. Committed as we are in Nepal to these ideals, we hold you, Mr. President, in high esteem and wish to see the United States as a bulwark of peace and stability, cherishing the belief that all nations of the world, whether big or small, rich or poor, developed or developing, must have a place under the sun. It is in this spirit that I look forward to exchange views with you, Mr. President, on matters of mutual interest. I also hope to meet other leaders and seek the opportunity to renew my acquaintances with friends. I am confident that our visit to this country will be fruitful as well as memorable. Thank you.


So, good morning, this week we are trying to understand protein ligand and protein-protein interaction. So, in the last class I explained that why protein-protein interaction is important because all the cellular communication happens through protein-protein interaction or some interaction of proteins with other molecules and we looked at different methods that can be used for protein-protein interactions. So, two important aspects where they are to understand protein-protein interaction like how, like what is the thermodynamics involved there and what kind of structural change happens. So, for thermodynamics we looked at some of these techniques that can be used to derive the thermodynamic parameter like isothermal titration calorimetry, ITC or SPR surface plasmon resonance, these are the two widely used techniques for deriving the energetics or thermodynamics involved in protein-protein interactions. We also looked at some of the structural techniques that can give the structural aspects of the complexes like X-ray crystallography, cryoelectron microscopy, these two are high resolution techniques. Other than that like a SCC, size extrusion chromatography, analytical or tracentipugation, the dynamic light scattering, static light scattering, some of these techniques can give you shape and size of the complexes that are formed. So, they also you can decipher some of the characteristics of the complexes that forms upon interactions. And I try to end why NMR, kind of like why NMR is the better techniques because it gives both these parameters, the thermodynamic parameter of these interactions as well as structural parameters of these interactions. So, NMR is uniquely placed to understand protein-protein interactions and also looked at what are the requirements for that. So, we will be starting from there, what are the requirements for the NMR spectroscopy and just to rewind a little bit what actually NMR can offer either from the labeled protein like 13CN15 labeled protein or an unlabeled protein. So, you can illustrate this structure using some restraints, restraints can be NOE-based restraints, nuclear overhouser effect that measures the through space distances between these two nuclei. You can measure the dipolar restraints using like using RDC and all those so you can like from these you can measure the distance restraints, torsion angle restraints and orientation of the bound vector. So, using all of these restraints one can get the high resolution structure of the system in solution if you are doing solution state NMR. Then we can also measure the diffusion using some of the like techniques that NMR has called DOJI where you can measure the hydrodynamic radii, some additional techniques can be used to measure the RG like MD and all those can be used and NMR also can offer the dissociation constants. So, this we are going to now discuss little more detail. So, structural details using NMR can be find at atomic resolution and then we can also get the quantitative kinetic parameters for such measurement. Therefore, we can say that NMR is uniquely placed to offer the structure as well as the thermodynamics of the protein-protein interactions. So, that is what the summary from the last slide. So, it can gives you stoichiometry with what ratio these two partner interact, what is the kinetics, what is the rate of the interaction and what are the thermodynamic parameter involved in the interaction. So, these are the some of the parameters that can be derived from PPIs. So, let us start how we can get all these parameter, what we can aim for from the signal that comes in NMR. So, let us take two molecule like a say here is one molecule and it interacting with small molecule like this now and changing its conformation something like this. So, there is a on rate of association, there is a off rate of dissociation. So, that is what happening these two conformation is changing upon interaction now so that means there some exchange is happening there and we can define this exchange phenomena called chemical exchange where two or more state, two or more state during the time of recording of NMR spectrum that changes. So, this we can define as a chemical exchange and we are going to use this term and again and again. So, it is a simple two or more state are in exchange when we are recording the NMR spectrum that is a chemical exchange. So, typically when we record an NMR spectrum you get peak like this now these peaks has few property which can be deciphered to understand what is going on upon interactions. So, if there is a free protein you get peak like this but when it forms complex you can also get peak like this and just comparing these peaks you can learn a lot about what is going on. So, let us analyze this peak in a simplistic term. So, when you record a peak what we get a resonance frequency which you can measure in hertz or radian per second or in simple term chemical shift that is in ppm. So, that is a that gives the position of the peak right the resonance frequency is the position of a peak. Next parameter what we get intensity of the peak how high it is right so intensity and the third parameter that we are going to get is a line width how narrow or broad it is. So, three parameter just by recording a simple 1D NMR spectrum we can get the chemical shift right. So, chemical shift is given by omega that is can be denoted in ppm radian per hertz or radian per second or hertz and intensity gives the height of the peaks and lambda. So, what these three parameters basically denotes in such case. So, let us see first and most important chemical shift what it gives the frequency at which it is resonating. So position of the spectrum now resonance frequency omega or the chemical shift tells about the chemical characteristic of that particular nuclei. So, when it is in free form it has one chemical characteristic when it is in bound form it can change its characteristic. So, resonance frequency may change upon complex formation. So, this is the first readout that we can have. Next one is intensity of the peaks. Now, intensity tells about how many molecules contributing for that particular intensity. So, peak height or the intensity tells about the relative concentration thus can tells about the population and size of the nucleus resonating at that particular frequency right. So, how many molecule contributes to that particular frequency that is given by the peak height right. The third parameter is a lambda the line width right. So, line width in the NMR spectrum depends upon relaxation property of that nuclei which is basically T2 or the correlation time what it tells. So, suppose molecule is like a small. So, that means it is its relaxation time will be of one kind molecule forms complex it is now slowly tumbling that is a correlation time how fast or how slow it can tumble. So, it is a slowly tumbling its peak will be broad. Now, the line width that we are getting here is telling the characteristic whether it is a small molecule or what is a big molecule. So, these three parameters just from recording 1D spectrum we are deciphering what is the resonance frequency, how many molecule contributes to it and whether it is relaxing fast or slow what is the line width. So, using these actually we can already a start understanding the protein-protein interactions ok. So, let us divide this protein-protein interaction into two parts, first part where we are looking at the protein, another part where we are looking at the molecule small molecule right a ligand. So, here is our protein P and here is our ligand L right. So, these two are forming ligand protein complex.  Now, in this case when we are understanding protein-ligand interaction we can either probe on the ligand side this one or we can probe on protein side or we can probe simultaneously both that is the ability NMR has that we can probe both of these and it can bring the information about which nuclei in the ligand are involved in the binding. So, as we mentioned like we will be dividing this protein-ligand interaction into two, one first is ligand based detection and another is protein based detection. So, for few like a few slides initially few one or two lecture we will be focusing on ligand based observation and then we will shift to protein based observation. So, let us start with a ligand based observation.  Now, because of this ligand has some property its small molecule protein relatively is bigger molecule it will have some property and when it forms complex it will have its own third property. So, if the ligand is small it will slowly relax that means lines are going to be sharper it will has fast diffusion translation on diffusion is small molecule. So, it will be fast diffusion and it will have a positive annoying and there will be minimal spin diffusion like there are not too many spin. So, spin diffusion will be minimum on the ligand side. Now, protein since it is a bigger molecule it will be fast it will have fast relaxation like here the lines will be sharper here lines will be relatively broader it is a bigger molecule. So, slow diffusion it will have negative annoying and since there are too many spins in protein so there will be fast spin diffusion when it forms a complex now complex is a bigger molecule and even if we are looking at the ligand molecule it will have fast relaxation because now it has formed a complex right it is a tighter complex. So, the lines will be broader it will slowly diffuse it will have negative annoying and of course it is in the vicinity of many spins therefore it will have fast spin diffusion. So, these are the parameters are going to change even if we are looking at the small ligand molecule because now upon complex formation the overall size has increased. So, first relaxation slow spin diffusion negative annoying and fast spin diffusion will happen right. So, let us let us delve deeper into how we can design or why we can understand the ligand detection detected NMR experiment. So, here assumption is our ligand is unlabeled and protein is also unlabeled right. So, we are not going to isotrically label any of these this is smaller one protein is bigger one. Few of the experiment that has been developed and I am going to discuss in detail one is called saturation transfer difference another is called water log C these two experiment I am going to explain in detail. Now, saturation transfer difference as NAMS name suggested it is a difference in the saturation that the molecule can absorb right. So, that is a like a 20 years ago this technique was developed and this was widely used for throughput screening of the binders for a receptor or a protein molecule this is quite widely used. So, we are going to discuss in detail how saturation transfer difference works and how we can use for screening the binders. The declaration here for SCD it is a size ratio dependent. So, there has to be size ratio difference like our size ratio consideration for ligand and protein and another important phenomena that we have to take care that there should be no signal overlap with the protein. So, ligand should have one range of signal protein should have another range of signal at least where we are saturating it there should not be overlap then only we can understand the SCD and no spin diffusion within the ligand. So, typically small ligand should be there. So, minimally the spin diffusion should happen for SCD to happen. Now, water loxie is another technique which basically exploits the surface pocket of for binding right. So, if a molecule a small molecule binding to a receptor there is a surface of binding right. So, it exploits basically what is at the surface and the small molecule actually should tightly bind to receptor and there should be fast exchange rate and ligand should be accessed then only water loxie can be used for understanding it. So, water loxie little bit later I am going to come back but these are the prerequisites for water loxie. So, let us start with saturation transfer difference spectroscopy STD NMR that is what in short it is called. So, here is our ligand molecule, here is our protein molecule. Ligand has some protons which is resonating at delta A protein has some protons which is resonating at delta B and these two are basically in fast exchange that means their binding should be in order of loosely called it is order of micro molar range right. So, Kd should be 10 to the power minus 6. So, this is one of the prerequisites for STD to happen. There should be difference in the molecular weight. So, typically this should be Dalton, few Dalton and those should be kilo Dalton. There has to be in fast exchange when they forms complex that is a protein ligand complex. Now, saturation will be transferred what we are doing we are saturating the signal exclusively saturating the signal that is present in the protein molecule and since the saturation gets transferred it will be transferred to ligand molecule and that is what we are going to take a difference. Once we are saturating protein molecule what is the signal of the ligand molecule and when we are not saturating protein molecule what is the signal we take the difference and that will tell whether ligand is binding and or not binding and if binding where it is binding. So, essentially you can find it out epitope that binds to the receptor molecule. So, how saturation we transfer we are saturating on the protein molecule. Now that saturation can only transfer if they are they are binding so they are in close contact close proximity. So, binder will see the effect of this saturation that is happening on the protein molecule. We saturate by irradiating these resonances and that can be transferred to the protein molecule. So, as I mentioned the KD for binding should be in micro molar range and size difference between the ligand and target should be about 15 fold. So, if we are taking 100 Dalton of ligand it should be 1500 Dalton of the protein molecule or bigger even is better. So, that is how that is the one of the prerequisites another is they should have a micro molar binding. So, typically while doing experiment we take small concentration of protein which is in micro molar and ligand should be in millimolar range because we are detecting on the ligand. So, ligand generally should be high access so that we can get exclusively signal coming from the ligand molecule. Now peak from the ligand bound to protein R is not expected that even may not come and a particular protein signal is irradiated. So, what we are doing as we saw while doing the experiment we are irradiating the signal or the resonances atoms present in the protein molecule and the effect we are observing on the ligand molecule. So, so here like suppose these two peaks this is from ligand molecule this is from protein molecule you can see this is intensity is high and little bit sharper. This is the intensity is low because we have taken low concentration lines are broader. Now we irradiated the protein molecule and since they are binding the effect of that irradiation is being seen on the ligand molecule so you see intensity of the ligand has decreased and this of course has vanished. So, this was published by Mayer group in Anguante, Simi from 20 to 23 years ago and this has become really popular in industry for drug discovery and design. So, what we are doing we are selecting a signal in the protein that can be irradiated like this is a typical protein 1D spectrum you see there will be some uphill shifted peaks which can be selected for the irradiation so typically methyl peak can be chosen. Now in this case ligand will not come ligand i is going to be only in this region so we are saturating one exclusively protein peaks and since they are binding we are going to see the effect here. So, this is the typical pulse sequence we irradiate selectively so there has to be a selective pulse a pulse terrain that we can have that selectively we are irradiating on protein signal and here the ligand signal are absent and then we are detecting like mostly on the ligand signals. So, this is the reference 1D spectrum from the ligand and now we did STD we irradiated protein this is the STD spectrum so then we take a difference of these now we can get the basically some of the peaks that got lower intensity so that means STD is happening and if there is no STD happening there will be no signal. So now where there is a effect is seen intensity will reduce for the binder for nonbinders when you take the difference between the reference and STD and MR the signal will vanish so that means those are nonbinder right so that is what you get in STD. So let us take one of the example so suppose this molecule is binding to a protein binding to a receptor we take the proton NMR you can like you can find it out all the peaks that are there A B C D E you can find it out then we did STD NMR saturated on the protein and detected the effect of that and then we took the difference of non-saturated versus saturated how do you do not non-saturated you saturated minus 20 ppm or plus 20 ppm where there is no resonance and when you are saturating you are saturating at the methyl peaks and you take the difference of these two 1D spectrum. One case we saturated somewhere here minus 20 ppm another case we are saturating here these two 1D subtracted and upon subtraction whatever peak is being illuminated is seen here. Now you can see we are seeing only say out of those many resonance we are seeing only D E B and F right D B so that means here D E F and B so these are the atoms that are binding to the receptor or the protein. Now not only we find bind like a binders this is the binder but in the binder which are the atoms that are binding. Now this is a great help right when we are doing high throughput drug discovery we are starting with a 500 compound just by recording two 1D NMR in few seconds we find it out binders what are the binders so that gives us lots of clue. Now our medicinal chemistry friends can come and they start modifying few of these groups and make it a stronger binder or weaker binder depending upon what is the necessity. So medicinal chemistry can be invoked here to make it better binder or weaker binder. Now epitopes is very important for drug optimization the binder optimization and that is what STD NMR offers to us. So like even like there are if suppose there are like a stereo specific questions comes or isotope sorry this isotope isomers comes in that case also you can find it out which is the binder. So for an example let us take two of these compound six methyl tryptophan and seven methyl tryptophan they are suppose binding to a protein molecule right. So we have a mixture of this and we recorded a 1D spectrum we can assign these so red peaks are coming from seven methyl tryptophan and blacks are coming from six methyl tryptophan. We put the protein receptor for these we did STD NMR like we saturated on protein at where there is a signal of protein and where there was no signal of protein we subtracted these two spectrum and here we got an STD spectrum. Now you can find it out like just by comparing that the black one peaks are available that means six methyl tryptophan out of these two was a binder and seven methyl tryptophan does not matter. So just a simple experiment where the human serum albumin as a protein was chosen and this six methyl tryptophan and seven methyl tryptophan out of these two were able to differentiate the binders right. So corresponding STD NMR you can find it out which is the binder which is the which is not binder great. So that is a that is a great tool for drug discovery. So just as a schematic here I am showing we have taken a protein target and we have mixture of ligand just for cartonistic representation I have taken here the square shape sorry rectangle shape the oval shape and the diamond shape ligands and we are doing now drug discovery which is binding right which out of these which ligands is binding. So today we recorded the STD NMR like here is a reference NMR here is a binders NMR and we figure it out that these oval shapes has binding to the receptor or protein target not the others. So you can even change the saturation time and you can find it out by doing couple of more 1D spectrum how better they bind. So that we will be discussing little more in detail right. So now that was the critical NMR parameter that can be like a critical NMR experiment that can be used for analysis of the binder. So now NMR analysis of protein ligand interaction like a ligand line with as I said when they are in free form they will have sharper line and when they binds since they are some tumbling slow the line will be broader. So as we have seen before line width directly related to molecular weight so upon binding the line width will be broader. Now so yeah a small molecule is order of magnitude lighter than a typical KDA and therefore they have sharper line these guys will have broader line and small molecule has generally sharp line protein has a long broad line. So small molecule binding upon a protein now lines become really broader and just looking at the line width which is given by T2 one can find it out. So these are the few like a few example of that the size difference should be 15 fold and you can see when the line width are becoming broader so as you can see we can monitor this ligand to protein ratio as we are increasing the ligand here free ligand it is a sharp line but like when binding becomes tighter and tighter you can see line becomes broader. Just looking at the line width even one can find it out STD is another experiment which tells about the binding property of the molecule. So to summarize this line width based analysis sharp line for ligand small molecule binding to protein it is a broad line. So narrow line, slow relaxation or fast tumbling and broad line because of the fast relaxation or slow tumbling for large protein. So looking at the line width one can find it out the binding probability or the binding capacity for a binder okay great. So two of the ligand based methods I discussed today to just give you an overview application of STD one can determine the KD that little bit more detail I am going to discuss in the coming class. So not only binders you can determine the KD association and dissociation constant K on and K operate and receptor can be of any type of protein either soluble or even membrane interview. So I am going to discuss this how you can use this for even the membrane integral protein to find it out the KD the binders using STD NMR and yeah the whole cell can be even used and at the minimum the need of protein is down like a 30 picomole you need really tiny amount of protein your ligand should be high but proteins should be very low to do STD NMR. So this has emerged as one of the powerful high throughput technique for drug discovery STD NMR of course I explained to you line widths. So in the next class we are going to use the advanced concept of STD NMR for determining the KD using like a whole cell lysate we can take it and how we can use this for say drug discovery the elucidation of binders. Another technique that we discussed briefly at the beginning of this lecture was a water log C. So we are going to also look at the water log C in the coming lecture and these are the ligand detected NMR techniques for understanding the protein ligand interaction then we can move to protein-protein interactions ok protein ligand interaction where we are going to look at the protein side not the ligand side protein side ok. So with this I would like to close today thank you very much see you in the next class. Thank you.


What's up everybody, Jason here for jazzyfascadespace.com. Happy new release day guys. 2023 Panini Gold Standard Football. Six box half case break. Pikachu is number one guys. And here we go. So everybody bonding straight up. A little double last bomb mojo though for Will. Probably the timing of the Rams and the Titans. Now of course it is a six box half case. Meaning that of course you're going to rip half of this case open for number one. The other half is going to be for number two. So if you want to grab your clue on the next one guys. Usually the way we do it is left or right. Six on the left, six on the right. One, two, three for the left side. Four, five, six for the right side. And we roll dice. Left side. So these two will be for number two guys. And I'll put these right here. Keep holding the frame. Alright well. Always the same box design. Always a fun one. Let's see what we got here guys. Vic mama. Alright we got Jerry Judy to 99 for the Denver Broncos. Going all over. And B.J. Ozilard for the Cardinals to 30. Winner Chad. Christian Watson, mother low relic to 299. And Rashid Rice. Rashid Rice starts to 399. A.A. Ron. With the Chiefs. But a little last ball mojo. Cooper Cove. Mother load to 299. First game back of the season. Against my Eagles and he just shredded us in the first half. We adjusted. We adjusted. Andre Reed for the Bills. Nice Golden Oldies. Autograph to 99. Bills going to Jeffrey. And last one here. I'll put a little Tank Bigsby. Nice two color patch. Number 23 out of 24 for the Jaguars. That's awesome. Matthew Slade with the Jags.  You can see a little ding right here. Gold standards tends to be like that. Quality controls not too good early on with some of these releases but for the most part you will have some nice cards you will have some cards that might be a little bang up. But it's a normal common thing with this product. I don't know if it's maybe the only good cards are just obviously like how tight this pack is sometimes. So I'm going to try our best to try to keep them in good condition here. Leave them in top of them as quickly as possible. Whoa! Gold Dust out of 24. Lamar Jackson. I don't know if that's a variation shorter print card. Obviously it's out of 24. Very nice card. Ravens going to David B. Then of course we have a Traylon Burris here. Alec Pierce. Nice mother low there at $2.99. Leonard. Tank Dell. Houston going to David B. But another Cooper cup rally at last by Mojo. Chad Bilan out of $1.99. Out of $1.99. Patriots. That's going to Willen. And look at this guys. Anthony Richardson. Woohoo! Nice two color match. That is a 4 out of 49. One off the Jersey number. Anthony Richardson. There we go. And of course Colt Leonard on the board already buddy. Alright we've got Nolan Smith for the Eagles to $49 and James Conner to $99 for the Cardinals. Jerry Judy. Gold Rush Relic for the Denver Broncos. Broncos going to Oliver. Jonathan Mingo newly minted Relic. Carolina Panthers going to Eric. Justin Herbert Relic for the Chargers going to Iowa. We've got Marte Mapu out of $1.99. That's going to go to the Patriots and Will. And then Jalen Hyatt to $149. Dual Relic and autograph. Going to Jerry. Max 3. I guess we'll just use this though. A little Gen G. 2 out of 5. That looks like a clean looking card. And Tyree Wilson back to back greatest. One. And a redemption right here at the top.  All of these cards are autographed. Do they have autographed hot boxes? Oh no actually this says 5 in 5 autographs are memorabilia cards. Oh. We actually have a box that's going to have all autographs. No memorabilia cards. Ok well let's go with the redemption first. Rookie autographs. That's going to the Seattle Seahawks. John. That's Zach Charbonneau. They're running back out of UCLA. They're running back out of UCLA. What a hand-on hooker. Golden debuts to $99. Detroit Lions. Pat Wolff. We got a Will McDonald 4th to $199. Stinson Bennett. Patch autographed to $149 for the Rams. Last spot mojo. Going to Will. And then this really cool gold strike. Marquis Colston to $99 for the Saints. Saints going to Bryan. Awesome. Alright so sorry I freaked out because usually I know it does say 5 autos or usually says that or 5 autos or 5 relics but usually it's pretty even where it's like couple relics, couple autos but that one kind of freaked me out. We'll take it. We'll take all autographs. Alright for reals. We'll take all those boxes. Alright out of $49, Jalen Hyatt and St. Paul Bargley back to back giants. James Conner. Nice hatch. Look at that. Jesus. 9 out of 10. Cardinals going to shadow. Beautiful card. How about a little Stefan Diggs 5 out of 10. Four color patch. Bills. Nice patches here on this one here. And Kalil Shakor to $199 for the bills. Back to back hits. Another one there for Jeffrey. Rashi Rice. RPA to $99 for the chiefs going to 8A Ron. Last one is Cedric Tilman. Newly minted relics. Alright last one here. Gold standards look pretty hot guys but you know minus the Anthony Richardson feel like we're kind of lacking some of the other bigger rookies although we have a really really thick pack here so it could be something nice. That second half could be pretty juicy guys. Gotta go grab some teens in that one. Dak Prescott at $99. Tony Pollard at $99. Couple Cowboys there for Eric. We got a DeAndre Swift. Nice relic there for my Eagles to $299. Nice patch there. Michael Mayer to $24. Newly minted. Little JJ. Relic. Vikings. We have Alan Fanica out of $99. Gold jacket signatures. Well to be fair Mike out of all the other quarterbacks like CJ Strout, Will Levis, Bryce Young they're all exclusive fanatics so that's why you don't see them pulled. The only thing we hope to pull is like their very low numbered relics. Maybe one on one shield stuff like that because all you can really get is catches and numbered cards. But I'm talking more like Dijon and you know some other other ones there. And the last one here is Jaylen Hyatt to $49. Nice one there for the Giants. Yeah so it seems like we always only pull right after the only one that didn't sign exclusive. Which I think is smart right? I mean just sign everywhere. I wonder if you just make more money that way anyways. Alright so there you go Giants with the last hit there. But again also some very nice kids coming out of here. I've seen gold standard in the past. I definitely think we can do a little bit better. But we did get the Anthony Richardson on this half but looking for some other rookies potentially in the second half guys. All in all some very very nice stuff with some nice patches. Some cool throwback vets as well. And like I said we did get that Anthony Richardson of course on this half. Looking forward to the second half. But a lot of really nice stuff. Gold dust is a cool one. But yeah thank you guys. Appreciate it. Jaspyskatespricks.com guys thank you.