So, very quickly, I'm gonna say this now that I'm actually live here. If you're in the edges or the back of the room, unless you just don't like people, which is totally cool, that's all right. I'd love to see if you could kinda come in a little bit so I can actually look at y'all instead of doing one of these. So, hi, I'm Ernie, and I missed you. I missed you. Wow, these are like the friendliest hecklers ever. So, I took last year off from submitting to and attending conferences to do some self-care and just to step back and think about what I really wanted to talk to you all about if I could share only one thing. And this talk is that thing, so I'm really happy that you came to see it, but I'll be honest, I'm a little nervous too. So, seeing all of your faces right now. So, I'm hoping this public speaking thing is kinda like riding a bike. I'm an engineering manager at a company called Splice. Unlike what seems to be every other company here, we actually don't use Ruby, we use Go. And I'm not actually even hiring at this moment. So, this isn't a pitch to come work with me or anything like that. I'm really happy Splice let me come spend time with y'all and I wanted to thank them. I'm really excited to be in Pittsburgh too. This is one of those places that feels like home for me because I actually grew up about an hour south of here. So, it feels like coming back home. How many of you drove to the conference? Me too. I actually drove from Louisville, Kentucky. Now, I've always considered Louisville to be the south. We say y'all after all. But people have told me that Louisville is the Midwest. And we're at it yet when I've told them, well, I'm originally from the Pittsburgh area. They've told me that this is the Midwest.  I'm no geography buff, I'll admit. But it seemed to me obvious that Midwest should probably be center a little bit west of the middle, you know, not like far west, just Midwest. But as you probably already know, this isn't the case. And I say probably no because sometimes I think that the tech community at large, especially those of us who work in some of the usual places, we have a different take on geography altogether. In the tech community, you've got the East Coast and there's like some things that happen there. And you've got the Pacific Northwest and there's some stuff that happens up there as well. And then, you know, there's the West Coast where there's always one more thing happening.  The rest of this, the Midwest. Anyway, I'm a curious guy and I wondered why we called something mostly East of the West Coast, the Midwest. So I did some research. Now, because the Northwest Territory was between the East Coast and the far West at the time, the states carved out of it were called the Northwest, makes sense. Okay, now by the early 19th century, anything West of the Mississippi was considered the West. By the late 1880s, we'd settled further West and most of the states highlighted here had been considered Midwest. By the time we'd settled the Western Prairie, this Western most highlighted row of states from North Dakota to Kansas became part of the Midwest. And this is in fact the current definition that is used by the US Census Bureau today. Now, I want you to notice two things here. First, neither Louisville nor Pittsburgh is in the Midwest, which, I mean, they're close but they're not there, so, you know, we were right. The Midwest is, though in fact, centered a bit West of middle. It's just that the definition of middle changed. So the middle was the Mississippi. And this is completely natural to people at the time, even though it takes a little bit of curiosity and research for us to come to now. Anyway, I thought that was interesting. I thought it was worth sharing. But this does conclude the history portion of our talk. From here on out, we're gonna turn back to something that's from your own educational history. You remember story time, right? Whatever happened to story time? I mean, when did we decide that it was only for kids? When did we stop getting something this awesome? Do you remember your favorite question when you were a kid? I'll bet it was a single word. A question that you ask over and over until it frustrated the grownups? You know the question I'm talking about, don't you? Questions why? When we were kids, we were constantly trying to make sense of the world around us, try to figure out how the world works. And why is the tool that we actually used to do that? We know that there's gotta be some reason for things. And we're pretty sure, not completely sure, that that reason's worth knowing. So, especially whenever it's coming to rules, right? For instance, like why do I have to go to bed at 8 p.m.  So why can't I have chocolate chip cookies for breakfast? Or maybe why shouldn't I drive my little sister and myself off the go-kart track after a heavy rain? That last one might just be me, but you get the idea. So, we would pepper the grownups with why after why until they would eventually get frustrated and they would give us a predictable answer. Because I said so. And that's a really unsatisfying answer as a kid. Especially because we all kind of knew what that really meant was I don't know. But I don't know is an answer that adults wanna say. They're not comfortable with that. It's a lot easier to tell people that this is just how it is. And I think this is where a real tragedy occurs. Because at some point along the way, we learn that it doesn't pay to be too curious. We stop asking why and then we start to take certain things for granted. Now, I call this a tragedy because whenever we stop asking why, whenever we stop being curious about and just we start accepting some answer as the way it is, as good enough.  We build up a worldview. But now, you're probably wondering where this is going. And that's fair. So, as I've been doing this conference speaking thing for a while now, no matter how often I do it, I can't get past the idea that all I'm really doing is stating the obvious. And yet, I can't help but notice that no matter how many times and how obvious I think these things are, we don't always act like it, myself included. If they're so obvious, then why don't we live like they are? So in this talk, like other talks I've given and other talks that you're gonna hear throughout this conference, I'm gonna stand up here and I'm gonna tell you some things that have become obvious to me. And there's a good chance that your instinct is gonna be to react in one of two ways.  And I'd like to suggest that either of these reactions is problematic because your initial reaction to what I say has a lot less to do with what I say and more to do with how what I say and how I say it squares with your view of how the world is or, and this part's even more important, I think, how your view of the world should be. So since no two people have a worldview that's exactly the same and we're gonna have differences in what we find obvious, I wonder if that's part of what makes statements that start with obviously so irritating because someone making an incorrect presumption that their worldview is shared by you can feel really uncomfortable. But there's real opportunity to learn about each other and ourselves in the space between reacting and hearing. If we can just take a breath and kind of sit through the discomfort for a moment and remain curious, asking questions before snapping the judgment. So through the rest of this talk, you're going to have an opportunity to practice this. You're gonna see a bunch of slides like this one with obviously in the top left corner and a statement that might prompt a reaction, positive, negative, or otherwise from you. And I'm gonna invite you to resist reacting and instead just stop, take a deep breath and ask yourself three questions. Each time you see an obviously slide. So try to commit these to memory now because I'm gonna give you time to use them later. The first one, is it? What's my initial instinct? Is this obvious to me or is it obviously wrong? The second, why? Why do I hold my opinion? Why might this other person hold theirs? And third, so? So what? If this is obvious to me, then what would living from this truth look like? How might it change the way I think and the way I act if I really believed it? Before we get started with story time, I feel like I need to get something out of the way. For the longest time, when I would go out to speak at conferences, people would come up to me and they would act like they knew me and I found it really weird. And then I got to thinking and I realized that they weren't really wrong. And I think that's because for the most part, the things that I do and say in private aren't really much different than the things that I do and say in public. And I tend also to be really open and vulnerable with strangers. I'm not necessarily sure that I recommend that. That's not necessarily always the safest thing, but I don't actually know how to be any other way. For example, I'm just gonna guess here, but I'm thinking probably most people aren't comfortable getting on stage and intimating the precise quantity of testicles they currently have, provided that number is non-standard. But whether, I'm glad somebody enjoyed that. But I've always been very open about my experience with testicular cancer and it's not just the big things. It's maybe cancer sometimes, but maybe other times it's my emotional state or anything else really. I've always just sort of defaulted to being open and vulnerable. And that's unlikely to change. It's definitely not gonna change before the end of this talk, so let's just deal with that. I'd like to tell you three stories for today's story time and the first one is gonna be called Doogie. When I was growing up, my first job from the age of 13 was having a paper room. But from the time I could drive, I started to look for something like a real job. Now, as you probably know, for a 16-year-old, your career options are somewhat limited. But I had decided at the outset that I didn't wanna work in fast food because it seemed like a really stressful job for the money.  I thought this was supposed to be fast food while he waits. It just seemed like way too much stress for the money for me. They really do have a stock photo of everything, by the way, if you were wondering. So I didn't want stress. As a kid, I actually struggled with undiagnosed IBS. So if I was stressed, I was likely to have some serious stomach issues. Now, I had missed a lot of school due to that, but my parents mostly thought that I was faking it at the time. They also told me that I needed to be realistic, that everybody has to start somewhere. But they had raised me to never stop asking why and I really wasn't too keen on accepting their, that's just the way it is, answer. And so it was after working my network, which mostly consisted of teachers at the time, that I found myself working my first real job as a commissioned appliance salesperson. And this was like 16 and I'm being trained to be an appliance salesperson. So that was kind of cool, definitely not fast food. My coworkers were all in their 30s, 40s or older. And so they had taken to calling me doogie after the title character, the TV show about the youngest doctor had just completed its run around them. Now, to be fair, I kind of see why. We both had very poofy hair. But I mean, look at that face. You buy a refrigerator for me, right? So the first cool thing about working in retail for me was that I found out that I was actually okay at dealing with people. And this was a huge revelation because I know you're going to find this hard to believe but I was not a popular kid in school. And so I didn't have a lot of opportunity to find myself in social situations. The second cool thing I found in my new job was it takes a little more explanation. So I lived in what was then and still is one of the poorest counties in Pennsylvania and my family was not an exception to those demographics. What wealth did exist there was largely the result of coke and coal mining about a century before feeding into the steel mills in here in Pittsburgh. And that wealth had long since dried up or moved away. Now, as a result, for many of the people that were walking through those doors, the appliance they were about to buy represented a very significant investment. So I learned everything I could about every appliance and I could rattle off size and brand and everything else from just a model number. And I paid a special attention to the things that would actually come back through the doors needing repairs that just were regularly breaking down. So when a family would come through the door, I would listen carefully to what they were looking for, what their budget was, and then I would help them find the most reliable appliance for their budget. The one with the best warranty too, because I knew there was a good chance they couldn't repair or replace this thing that failed. So that was the second cool thing about working in retail. I was able to really help people and their families in a tangible way. It was a really good feeling for a teenager especially when someone would come through the door and ask for me by name because they'd had a good experience. Now in the sales business, especially in appliance sales, Spiffs are a term you grow very familiar with. Is there anyone out there that already knows what I'm talking about when I say Spiffs? So a few. For the rest of you, I'm gonna explain. So Spiffs are an incentive program that manufacturers, they pay a salesperson directly for selling specific products. So Spiffs oftentimes are worth way more than whatever you might make on a commission. So for instance, in my wonderful job, I could sell a $1,200 refrigerator. I would get three quarters of 1% as a commission. So I'd make nine bucks off that sale. But a Spiff on that same refrigerator might be $25 or $50. Now the cool thing was that some really reputable companies that made quality products offered Spiffs. So it was kind of like free money really in that case. You were gonna sell these things anyway. Except it wasn't for us. Because when we would sell a product, that manufacturers had a Spiff on, my boss would actually forge our signatures on the Spiff forms, collect the pay that we would do, and then repurpose it toward lower quality or older products. And to give you an idea of what we're talking about here, in our warehouse we had things that still came in harvest gold and avocado. If you're familiar with those colors, there's gonna be very few people that know what I'm talking about here. So he had made his own Spiff forms then, designed oh so beautifully in Sharpie. And then he would have us fill those out instead. Now I found out this was going on. I didn't really care. I mean I was a kid, I didn't need the extra money. So I just kind of kept on selling what I thought was gonna help the customer. And I missed out on some money but I was okay with that. Eventually I got called back to the boss's office. I'm gonna do my best boss impression here. Gee, buddy, come on back here. That's actually how he talked. He also did call everybody buddy and it was just up to you to figure out who he meant whenever he would say that. Gee, buddy, I noticed you hadn't been selling my Spiff's. Don't you like money? Well, the rest of our conversation consisted of me explaining to my very principled stance on selling what's right for the customer, building loyalty and my values as a person who cared about doing right by people. But he was having none of that nonsense, none of it at all. So that's how I lost the most lucrative job my teenage self could have hoped for. And yet it wasn't all lost. Some new things became obvious to me based on this experience and that's gonna give us a chance to practice what we learn. So get ready to stop, take a deep breath and ask the questions, is it why and so? So first it became obvious to me that other people, even people who mean well, don't know what you're capable of. Even though my parents, they had told me that I was gonna have to settle for a fast food job, I held out for something that felt better to me. And it could have gone a different way, but it didn't. And I found out that I ended up being perfectly capable of doing a job that surprised them. And if I'm being honest, it surprised me too. I didn't expect to like dealing with people and I didn't think I was gonna be very good at it but I learned that even I don't know what I'm capable of until I try. Now, even though that job might have just been selling appliances, I had found a way to accomplish something greater while I was there. I found a way to help people and having that purpose helped me put up with some very, let's just call it suboptimal working conditions. I've come to believe that you can do any job with a greater purpose than the one that's been set out for you. And this has really been a key to finding happiness in my work for the years that I've been in this industry. I left that job with a sense of self-worth and self-respect that I hadn't had up until that point. I learned that I could take an active role in defining what I was capable of and what I would choose to do and what I would put up with. And that made me a happier person as a result. My boss might have thought I was a loser but he needed my consent to define me as such. Truth was, I had stood up for my values and that made me anything but a loser. Our next story is one we're gonna call 50 cents. Now my first technical job was working, this guy, was working technical support at an ISP. The more observant among you are gonna notice this is not a photo of me but this is in fact the most menacing technical support representative I have ever seen in my life. Look at that expression. You've seen that expression before. You've seen it. Okay, so you're gonna have to forgive me for using stock photography here but the only photo that I could find of me from this era of my life was this blurry and poorly framed photo of my neo costume from the company Halloween party. Anyway, I had started working there when the office was a short drive away for me but when we acquired another office, we purchased another ISP, I decided to stay on with the aim of working my way into a systems administration role. Now I had become a lead technical support rep at that point and I had been training all the people that were starting at the new location so I thought that voted pretty well for my prospects. So I put up with now an hour long commute each way to get to this office. I was being paid hourly as well, $6 an hour to be exact. This meant I had to clock in. So I left home early every morning because I wanted to be sure that even if I hit unexpected traffic I wasn't gonna be late. Still, one day after I had clocked in and got logged into my headset, I was told I was late. I was surprised because I had clocked in on time and being the insolent youth that I was, I told my boss to check my time card.  So to be clear now, we're talking about a difference of maybe three minutes here, not too much. I told her if that was the expectation she should schedule me five minutes earlier. I got written up for having an attitude problem. She wasn't wrong. Maybe I picked the right stock photo after all. After that, I suspected my prospects there maybe weren't as hot as I had thought. So I suppose it was a bit lucky then that I got hired into the systems administration role that I was hoping for under a new manager before she had a chance to fire me. I got a 50 cents per hour raise and I was promised another 50 cents per hour if I was doing well in that role within six months. This meant I was now making $6.50 an hour as a full-time systems administrator. Yeah, I see some of you know how much work that was. So anyway, I stayed on an assist admin role for just under a year and I had set up a ton of monitoring and automation scripts there. Eventually I was offered a job at another ISP for 750 an hour. That was gonna be the sole technical employee. This was gonna mean I was gonna take network administration, systems administration, server builds, tech support, everything for that low, low price of 750 an hour. Now it was a massive increase in responsibility for a very tiny increase in pay but I felt like I had hit a dead end where I was. My company still hadn't even come through on that additional 50 cents an hour I was promised. Those two quarters were two of the things that I brought up when I gave notice that I was leaving to the vice president. He was furious, by the way. After all I've done for you, he bellowed. I was just a kid after all and he thought he was gonna be able to bully me and I'm still kind of surprised that I had the presence of mind to remain calm and remind him that while I appreciated being given the position, he had to acknowledge I did a good job for the money that he had paid me. I felt a little bit weird explaining to a VP the basics of an employment relationship. Though he agreed I had done a good job, he had me escorted out that day. But after I was gone and the answer is to why didn't we handle this? Who handled this? Kept coming back, well that was Ernie. I was rehired a year later for more than twice what I was making. The VP who had yelled at me no longer worked there. I probably wouldn't have gone back if he had and I found myself having learned some more obvious things from the whole experience. Now this is your cue to remember to breathe and ask the questions and some of these are gonna be a little more probably uncomfortable than the last batch so be warned. First, you set your own asking price. When I first took this job, I felt thankful to just get a job period and I never even asked what they paid, never thought about asking for a specific salary. My answer had been yes before I'd even been told a number. But I would have had to justify my asking price and when I started, I would have had a hard time justifying any price because I didn't know my value. So you need to know your value. Did I become twice as valuable in the year that I was gone? Was I capable of twice as much work? Of course not. It was just that my absence for the year made it clear to my company that they weren't quite paying me what my value was. Now I should have been making that value clear while I was at the job and honestly before I ever took it. But to know your value with any degree of certainty, it isn't enough to rely on other people to tell you. You have to know what you value in order to know that what you're getting from the job and giving up for the job is a fair trade. Now at the time I left, I was leaving money on the table because I overvalued the experience they were getting me by dumping lots of work in my lab. And truly that did have value, getting the chance to do the work. But there were other things that I drastically undervalued at that time and one of them especially. When I was young, it was really easy to undervalue my time. After all, I mean, it seemed like I had so much of it to spend. And we've all heard the phrase time is money for so long that we can be forgiven for being so willing to trade time for money. If we're not careful, we're gonna make that trade for a long while before we truly understand the opportunity cost of the trade that we made. I spent all of my 20s gleefully trading time for money with no concern for what I was giving up in order to do so. I traded my time freely in exchange for money to buy things to own that in turn owned me. And I can't point to a single one of those things today. A while back, I decided to have this license plate made to remind me of what the car I drive and the toys I collect them out to in the long run, nil. Time is the most non-renewable resource that's ours to give. It's something that we're all running out of. And while it's true that we can exchange time for money, that exchange rate is highly variable and our supply is subject to all sorts of things that are outside of our direct control. For most of us, we don't know time's value until we spent a good deal of it already. I don't have any special claim to this particular truth, by the way, this is something we've been aware of for thousands of years. And yet, if it's so obvious, why don't we find ourselves acting like it is? For the longest time, I didn't know my value because I didn't know what I value. So ask yourself, what do you value? If you're having trouble answering that question, I'd suggest an easier one. Where do you invest your time? If you can answer that, you'll begin to understand what an employer is truly asking from you in exchange for that paycheck. And depending on your answer, you might start to get pretty frustrated with the choices that you've been making. I know I was. It's obvious to me now that commuting is unpaid labor. I was spending two hours a day going to and from my job. Back then, I could do almost anything we needed from home. And if you're a software developer today, there's absolutely nothing that says you can only be productive whenever you're sitting in a very specific chair in a very specific office in a very specific city. The high-speed internet connections many of us have in our homes today are far faster than the DS3 lines I had at the office back then. And we have fantastic communication tools that use all that bandwidth. If you're spending time in a commute every day, is that time that you actually want to invest? Are you getting something out of it?  And if that's really true, then pretending that work happens at a specific hour or in specific locations is just plain silly. What do you actually need to do your job? Maybe you say I need a computer or I need a text editor and sure, that's part of it. But a huge part of what you're being paid for is just thinking. Now I've had some of my best ideas in the shower and I'm pretty sure my company doesn't consider my shower to be part of there or any other office. If your company doesn't support a distributed team, then it's only disadvantaging itself. It's ludicrous to me that companies say they're looking to hire the most talented people, but often mean the most talented people who are currently located in or willing to relocate to San Francisco. Yes. I don't mean to pick on San Francisco. It's a lovely city, but it's an easy one in this particular case. Do you think that it might be possible that some of the most talented people in the world don't fit those criteria?  Running a distributed team takes more work. For starters, developing strong written and verbal communication skills are a must on a distributed team. But strong written and verbal communication skills are important anyway. Programming is written communication and there's a whole lot of communication that goes on before you ever start coding. All other things being equal, I do believe that a team full of strong communicators will be the team without them every time. So if your company intentionally limits its candidate pool to a tiny subset of the world's most talented people, by insisting they live in a specific location, all so that it can build a team that requires less intentionality and discipline in communication, I think it's reasonable to say that they're fighting at least one arm tie behind their backs. If a company claims it's distributed and then wants to adjust your salary for a market rate, please do me and yourself a favor and ask them why. If the company is actually running a distributed team, the value they get from you is not dependent on the location you work from. Plus, stop and think how ridiculous this is for a second. If you choose to move somewhere else of your own accord, does your company change your salary?  Does it matter? Since when is it up to a company to determine what your standard of living should be as opposed to paying you based on how much value the work you do? You might say, well, what about those of us who want to live somewhere with a high cost of living? That's absolutely a choice you're free to make. It still doesn't affect how much value you deliver to a company, though, and I think that making your salary depend on where you live, it really kind of dilutes the impact of that choice. That's a choice that you have a lot of power with. So we're back to discussing how we determine our work again. It's never gets old. So there's nothing like a cancer diagnosis to get you thinking about what you really want to have to show for your time.  What you might not have known is that my mom was also a cancer survivor. She was diagnosed with and treated for breast cancer in 2012.  She was undergoing chemotherapy and I really wanted to be with her. Additionally, my daughter was going back to college. Now we have the same birthday and she was turning 21 on the same day that I was turning 40. So I really wanted to celebrate with her and we were gonna be driving her back to college anyway. And because I worked at Spice Engineering and we are a distributed team, I didn't have to make a choice. I got to drive with her and my wife back to her last year of college and help her move in. I got to be a bad influence on her. We got to go out and celebrate our double birthday which was a big milestone for both of us. I also got to celebrate other important milestones like her first drink. And then I got to drive home to Fayette County and visit my mom and the rest of my family for a week and a half. I got to toast lollipops with my youngest nephew at his second birthday party. I got to spend all of this time with the people that I love most without neglecting the people on my team whom I also love. I didn't have to take any vacation time and my time spent traveling had exactly zero impact on my team at Spice. When I wasn't working from a hotel room or my parents' house, I was working from this really sweet office that looks like it's straight out of the set of Mad Men with my best friend of 35 years. On my drive home, I discovered that I could tweet and dictate notes via carplay. So I was even able to write part of the outline for this very talk while I was driving home and tweet a lot. Now, we are blessed to work in an amazing industry that affords us this kind of freedom. Would it really have been worth sacrificing these experiences to work somewhere that required me to put my butt in a very specific chair, in a very specific office, in a very specific city to do a job I could do anywhere? Look, I don't say any of this to make anyone jealous if this isn't your situation right now, but to explain why I feel so strongly about the value of distributed teams. A company that lets its team members work distributed creates space for the kinds of experiences that last, space where there otherwise may not be any. A company that lets people spend time with the people they love, no matter where those people are, that's a company that values people. I believe that if you care about people, you're going to attract people that care about people. If you care about people, you're going to treat those people with respect and dignity and not like cogs in a machine. If you care about people, the people who work with you will find putting people first as natural as breathing and your company and products will be better for it. Now, you may be thinking to yourself, well, that's all well and good, but it takes sacrifice to put a dent in the universe and I want to work with people that are willing to make that sacrifice. But here's the thing. People are an important part of the universe. Scratch that. People are the important part of the universe. When you talk about making a dent in the universe, what do you really mean? If you don't impact people in some meaningful way, who is going to care? Who's going to remember you when you're gone? Isn't that what we really want? To have touched people's lives? I'm so happy to be part of a team that gets that. As my mom's condition worsened, I went home more often, driving every other week. One Saturday, not long after I left to head back to Louisville, my dad sent me these texts on the right there about a package he'd received. I listened to Siri read the text, but I couldn't understand what he was talking about. So I called him, and he explained that my company had sent 20 handwritten cards and chocolates from different members of the team, and they were addressed to my mom. He read the first one to me from my VP Juan Pablo, and as he did, we cried together. It explained the purpose of the cards. I had expected them to be sympathy cards, but these weren't that. The team had written 20 letters about me to a woman they didn't know, expressing how through me she had touched their lives. Last month, I lost my mom. If I hadn't been part of a functional distributed team that put people first, I wouldn't have been able to visit my family every other week for months. I wouldn't have had the opportunity to spend as much time as I did with her. It's likely I wouldn't have been with her when she died, and I would have missed out on making memories that I'm gonna cherish forever. So if you ever find yourself questioning the value of building a functional distributed team, the value of people, I hope you'll remember this story. Last story is a quick one. So hay rides were kind of a big thing when I was growing up. Anyone else? Big thing, hay rides? Yeah. So yeah, one guy. Yeah. So there was this hay ride that I went to in junior high, and it was at a church. Afterward, they had a bonfire with hot chocolate and s'mores and stuff, but unless you get confused, I'm not pictured here. I'm pictured here. Now by now, you've detected a theme.  As we've established, I wasn't a popular kid, and just like every school dance I'd ever attended, I was a wallflower. So I was leaning up against the wall being a perfectly acceptable wallflower, and I wanted you to take a moment to appreciate how much effort that takes in an era where there aren't smartphones.  Then suddenly two cute girls appeared, and they were talking to me. And I was skeptical because I was like, well, it's a church thing. They'd probably have to talk to the dork standing over there all alone. But still, I had to do something. And so this was my inner monologue around that point. And yes, I really was trying to think of what a cool person would do. So if I had a phone that had internet access, I might have been able to figure this out, but I didn't have that, and I was left to my own devices. So I thought of the coolest person I knew, Arthur Fonzarelli from Happy Days. After all, who's cooler than the fawns? The answer's no one. No one is the answer you're looking for. So I tried to strike this particular pose, propping my foot up against the wall that I was conveniently leaning on, only there was a window there. So I put my foot through the window, sent glass kind of shattering down on top of these kind grandmotherly types. And that was, yeah, I made an impact, all right. It was not the impact that I had planned to make. And it wasn't the last time that I would do something that wasn't really true to who I really was in order to try to fit in with what I thought people wanted from me. But we don't have time for all of those. So through this and other experiences like it, I came away with what might be one of the most important lessons that I ever learned. Look, life is hard. It's also pretty awesome, lots of the time. And it's most definitely worth it. But yeah, life is hard. So maybe live just one of them is a thing. We throw the term authenticity around a lot to the point where it's lost almost all meaning. Even corporations and brands try to be authentic. Just seeing or hearing the word can bring on a kind of a strong impulse to react. So if you're feeling that impulse, just breathe with me for a second. We're almost through this. You're not a corporation and contrary to what some might say, you're also not a brand.  So what does it mean to be an authentic human being? To me, the easiest way to describe it is living one life. Being my authentic self means that if I check out tomorrow, the people I know could still have a discussion with me in their heads that know what I would say and what I would do because they got to know me, not the me I thought they wanted. Living an authentic life is leaving something behind of the real me to remember. And thankfully it's also a great way to have real and genuine relations with the people around you today. But what does your authentic self look like? We're all still figuring that out. It's okay. People change. People grow. Maybe you're still trying some things on for size and that's totally fine. But when you do find something that fits, I hope you'll actually take note of it. Why is not just a question for others, it's a question we ask ourselves. You may remember I said when we stopped asking why we accept an answer is good enough. We lay another brick in the foundation that affects how we interpret what's going on all around us. We start to build up our world view. That affects what seems obvious to us, how things are or how things should be. Living by what's truly obvious to us is as natural as breathing. Maybe if we remain curious, we'll keep asking ourselves why and find values we didn't know we had. Truths about ourself we didn't know and we'll start living like we mean it. Look, striving to live an authentic life is vulnerable and scary and hard, but it's also really living and loving and connecting and it's so worth it. Maybe one day we'll find ourselves surprised when people we've never met think they know us and we'll be even more amazed when we realize they're not wrong. So with all that said, doesn't seem fitting to end our time together without sharing my own why. When I say my why, I mean some fundamental truth about what I find most valuable. It's an answer I end up with for many of the things that I do if I just keep asking why long and how. Why am I doing any of this? Why am I here right now? You might not know yet, but you've got the tool to figure it out if you're curious. For instance, earlier I told you, I think people are the important part of the universe. And we talked earlier about how a great place to start figuring out what we value is to look at where we spend our time. Start with where I'm spending my time right now with you. So I'll ask again, what's my why? I hope the answer is obvious right now. My why is people. More specifically, since you are a part of the group people, my why is you. And I'm gonna go one step further and say something that you might not expect to hear from the stage of a programming conference, but that's okay because you know now if you didn't before that I have no filter. I love you. Not the collective you. I told you I'm from the South. If I meant y'all, I'd say y'all. Or I used to be from Pittsburgh, so maybe Yens, but I mean that I love you. I don't blame you if you're skeptical because especially, I don't even know you yet. Especially since we use the term love for everything from family to french fries these days. I'll forgive you for being jaded. Thinking I can't possibly mean it. But see the thing is I don't have to know you personally to know that you are worthy of love so I'm willing to go out on a limb now. You are loved and worthy of love. Stay here with me for a moment and breathe and remember the exercise. You try it one last time with me. Is it? Is this obvious to me or obviously wrong? Why? Why do I hold my opinion? Why might he hold his? So, so what? What would living like I'm loved and worthy of love look like? How might it change the way I think and act? If I really believed it. It's harder like actually looking at y'all doing this by the way. So I'm willing to bet there are some people in the audience right now who don't feel that way. And if even one of you comes away from this talk recognizing how very much they're worth then I'll consider my time well spent. Anyway, thanks for letting me share some stories with you. I hope you'll share some of yours and I hope that you'll know by doing so you'll have made a dent in the universe.


The next question is from Alyssa Day Book. Can you become dependent on supplements such as multivitamins or is that a myth? It depends on the supplement. Multivitamins, no. Like if you're- Anything that your body naturally produces on its own and then you take it through a supplement, absolutely. Yeah, a lot of that stuff, you get what's called a negative feedback loop, right? So like hormones, for example, if you take a hormone, your body may stop producing that hormone. If you drink caffeine or take caffeine, because of the way caffeine affects the body, it attaches to particular receptors. Your body then starts to down-regulate their receptors and turn them off. This is why when you have caffeine the first time, you feel so much of it and then later you need more and more of a higher dose to even get that effect. But other things, not really like if, you know, like vitamin C or B vitamins or vitamin D, stuff like that, no, your body utilizes it or doesn't and doesn't really, you don't become dependent on them. Fish oils and natural components like that. No, either. Dependent, I would wanna know more what he means by dependent too, right? Are we talking about dependent because you're addicted to it or dependent because the body now stops producing it like you're- And you need it. Right. So I'd want a little bit of clarification on what they mean by dependent because to that, you know, back to the testosterone point, like I'm taking testosterone so absolutely my body's gonna down-regulate its natural. If I was already low, I'll be even lower because I'm now taking it, you know, exogenous. So for sure. But you're not gonna be dependent as like addicted to it to where you have to take it. Yeah, but the body does have a lot of these mechanisms. Cholesterol is a great example. So you can eat cholesterol and what'll happen is your liver will produce less to balance it out. So, and this is a wonderful mechanism the human body has. A lot of animals don't do this, by the way. Old studies on cholesterol use rabbits. They would give them a high cholesterol diet and the rabbit's cholesterol would go so high. It'd be scary. Doesn't really happen with humans, which is why they've removed cholesterol off that, you know, nutrients of concern list. So a lot of compounds don't do that and others do, it depends on what you're talking about. But like, if something has a profound effect on you, if you take like an herb, for example, like you take horny goatweed, that's a good one.  I could feel, man, I could really feel this working. Keep taking it and you'll probably notice that it has a diminishing effect. Now, all that being said, I still think that, I still think there's some things that we don't fully know yet and there's stuff that I know we can talk about that we've seen in our experience with somebody who gets most of their nutrients through whole foods versus supplementing on time just seem to do better. They do. So, and, you know, there's some theories around that, but there's some things that I think that we don't still fully know why that is, that you just don't get this. There's some delivery system there. There's, for some reason, the way we were supposed to consume those nutrients is still superior than to how we figured it out through vitamins. Find, show me in nature where you would find pure vitamin C with nothing else. There's nothing else, no cofactors, no sugars, no fibers, no other compounds, right? You don't find isolated nutrients in nature. It always comes with a lot of different things. So, yeah, you know, you take an iron from food, you'll absorb it differently. You're less likely to build toxic levels of iron, same thing with other nutrients and compounds, so that's a great, now here's the problem. Someone's like, oh, well, I'd rather have it from food, but then they don't eat good. So now you've gotten the worst of both worlds. Well, I think it's, yeah, and I think it's different in today's age with all the fortification of vitamins and minerals that make its way into almost everything versus like back in the day where people would have rickets or from real deficiencies because it just wasn't available in the diet and things. So I think back then it mattered a lot more in terms of like getting certain vitamins and nutrients, but today they pretty much stuff it in most foods. That's why salt has iodine. You ever notice that? Just regular old table salt? They literally made it like a rule that you had to add it in the salt because people had iodine deficiencies. I mean, at the end of the day, I think there's tremendous value in everybody listening, doing blood work and getting a full panel and seeing where you're at. That's the best. And because, and do that a couple of times so you get a, you know, and spread it out so you can get kind of an idea of what you're, more than likely there'll be some consistent things that you'll see there. For example, with mine, I'm consistently low on vitamin D. I mean, yes, if I get more sun exposure and stuff like that, it seems to be a little bit better, but historically I almost always test low. So I'm all consistently- You see even more important these days. Right, to look at vitamin D especially. That's a great example. I take five to 10,000 IUs of vitamin D and I've been doing it for years and my levels are always in the middle. So like you would think, oh, you're gonna take too much, but I test regularly. So it's like, apparently I need to take that much vitamin D. I know people that they took vitamin D, got tested. Oh, it got too high. So you need to know, because if you don't know, you could be doing some problems. Even supplement, I mean, I just noticed from coaching and being out in the sun over the past few months, my elevated mood and just like energy and everything is insanely better. So just getting outside as much as you can is a big factor too.


All right, I'm going to be presenting today on intracite spatial analysis of seven open-air, middle caliphic sites in France. All of these sites just had lithics preserved, they're open-air sites, there weren't any bones or other material preserved, so that's why I'm really focusing on lithics here. So one of the things to know about France is that here's a geologic map just to show that there are some areas that are rich in limestone deposits where it's very, very rich in chirp sources. And in these areas, you can find a lot of open-air sites with a lot of material napping debris. So that's characterized, something just to keep in mind in the seven sites that I'll talk about today. And so here's the distribution of some middle caliphic open-air sites in France. Those in boxes are the sites that I studied in my analysis. And then I just included some others. And as you can see, they kind of match with these areas where we have up in the northern part of France a lot of limestone and a lot of chirp deposits and then the same in kind of the southwest part of France. And so this, the sites I analyzed were Betancourt, Poirnois, Villière-Adame, L'Affoie-Lis, François, Tainclouet, and Le Prisais. And all of these sites were excavated by INRAC, the Institut Nationale de Fraîche d'Archéologie Profétique. And so these were excavated prior to construction projects. And so they were excavated at very large scales and really in their entirety. So this is just one example. Betancourt in the north of France and L'Affoie-Lis deposits. So it's a very, very large scale excavation. We're talking about a hundredth of square meters. Here's another excavation, Poirnois. Also excavated at a very large scale. So they're really perfect sites to study intracite spatial analysis. And the sites in general, they really, there's quite a variation in terms of the density and the types of sites. So here's one extreme, L'Ado-Lis-de-Cantelouet, where it's actually situated on a, where the raw materials are coming out of the ground and it's just extremely dense. So there's a lot of complete nodules and a lot of reduction debris and very, very dense. But then on the other side of the spectrum, we have a site like L'Affoie-Lis, which is situated on a floodplain and it's very low density, has excellent preservation. There's in fact, host holes that were preserved and this kind of non-pedogenic, organic layer that's interpreted as a kind of bedding or mat. So it's really very exceptional preservations for the middle phyllolyphic. And you can see some activity to the centers of lithic napping. So those are kind of the extremes that I'm working with. Here I have plotted, I have put together all seven sites of the site maps. So all the dots are the lithics that were all piece plotted. And then I put them on the satin spatial on the same scale. So you can see L'Aquali, which is a very small site, Contre-Louet and Vossouille. These are both of the sites situated on raw material sources where it's extremely, extremely dense. And then some of the other sites like Lucrisse, Gatancourt, Fresnois, these are all the sites up in the north of France, Las Deposits. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm going to go down. Lucrisse is down south. But they're very large sites, not quite as dense. So the challenge here was I wanted to create a way of looking at these seven sites that I could compare them. I could compare these very small sites, such as L'Aquali, the distribution of lithics at that site to sites such as Villière-Adame, which you can see is very huge, or a site like Chancre-Lossouille or Contre-Louet where they're extremely, extremely dense. And I was also, most of this material was collect, this material was documented by the Inaquac reach researchers and they also did all the lithic analysis. So I wanted to make use of this just amazing data that they kind of try to bring together French and American traditions or French and North American traditions of lithic analysis. And then of course, because it's France, I also had really amazing refitting data. So I had all of these sites were subject to refit analysis. So I had that kind of level of that data set as well. So the first technique it came up with was to do something that a lot of other people have done with intracite spatial analysis. And that's just simply to make density maps to kind of look at the distribution of lithic pieces. And so this is just an example from one site, Betancourt. So I used ArcGIS to create a density map of the distribution of lithics. And then I wanted to segregate the high, the very dense, the areas very high density from the medium density areas to the low density areas. So instead of comparing high density areas to one another, like you might do in the pursuit of activity areas or something like that, I figured that this was probably the result of the same activity, lithic mapping. And so I just wanted to convert, okay, let's see what technical categories are in the high density areas, the middle and then the low density areas. And so I did this kind of analysis and I used contours. So these contours are just based on the density map to segregate these areas. And so I'll just go over the results of this one analysis. I just used these two sites just to kind of show you two examples, but it was the same at all the sites. This is Le Prisay and here's Breinois. So what I found, looking at the technological categories, I looked at, I grouped them. So you know, the French have done a really wonderful Chez-Naparatois approach to look at all the different technological categories, but I grouped them in just larger categories such as core maintenance plates. Well, of course, I kept Le Valois plates. Most of these sites a lot of were Le Valois or Discoidal Reduction or Debris, all the smaller pieces smaller than three centimeters. And so I tried to look and I compared, okay, what's overrepresented, underrepresented in each of these density areas? And then I used confidence intervals to see if they were statistically significant. And so when you look at the high density areas, well, they were overrepresented in things like the napping degrees, all those small pieces. Also things like cortical plates, core maintenance plates. So all of this debris that you would associate with napping. And then, but because these areas were such high in density, although they were overrepresented in these category, there were still a lot of usable legs, a lot of Le Valois, a lot of non-cortical pieces also in these high density areas. Now in the middle density areas, these are hypotheses to be hypothesized to be areas where you might see more mixing. So you might see intentional displacement of objects from where they were napped, but also a lot of things that were moved through trampling, through geological processes and other phenomenon like that. And so here we do see a mixture of napping debris and things like Le Valois, but then also products such as Le Valois Flakes or tools, non-cortical plates. So you see a mix of these two things in the middle density areas. And then in the low density parts of the site, we see overrepresentation of tools, retouch pieces, when we see overrepresentation of non-cortical flake, Le Valois Flakes blades. So this is kind of what you would expect as you look at the napping in one spatial location and then the movement of these lithics out to other parts of the site. But I wanted to also make use of that other data set, the refitting data set, which is really a, which would provide kind of what, whereas when you're looking at all the lithics together, you're seeing also a lot of noise. So when I'm looking at just a scale of the refitted artifacts, so all these pieces I know were at one spatial, one spatial location because they were in the same nodule together. And then I want to look at the spread of how these pieces spread out from one another because when I was plotting the refitting sets looking at the spatial patterning, I saw the same pattern over and over again, which was that there is always a few, the most were clustered in a small spatial area. A few were several meters away and then one or two was moved across the site. And so I wanted to find a way to kind of quantify this pattern I saw over and over again. So I decided to kind of do some measurements on the scale of each refitted group, refitting set. And so first I would measure, I would find the lithics that were closest together and I would met an all that were within one meter of one another, that would be in refitting group one, those that were between two and three meters of group one, that's group two. And then those lithics that were moved more than three meters away from group two, were putting group three. And so I chose these numbers just because it seemed like they captured that pattern the best. Also group one, this is one meter is kind of what a lot of experimental napping has shown that when you're napping, it usually stays within one meter of the napper. And so that's why I chose that for group one and then I just tried to look at what would capture this pattern the best in terms of the other groups. But either way, I measured this at the scale of each refitting set. And so in the end, because I had quite a lot of refitted material, I could look at some kind of robots pattern and the results from this analysis really mimicked what I saw at the scale of the assemblage of the whole. So when I looked in group one, so all these pieces fit tightly that were located tight together. Well, we see a lot of core reduction degrees, cortical flakes, core maintenance flakes, small pieces. There weren't as many debris places refitted just because it's very difficult to refit but in places where they were present. Of course, in the same thing with this group two, just like in the density contour analysis, we see a mixture of core reduction debris but also these products or these intentional pieces. And then finally in group three, we see these pieces that were moved intentionally across the site. So we've retouched pieces, lavala flakes and non-cortical flakes. So this is kind of matching what we see at the, from the other analysis. So I made this kind of schematic here just this little animation just to kind of illustrate what we're seeing here because together these two analyses are really documenting the formation of the site structure. So we have the introduction of a nodule to the site. It's reduced in one location and then some lipids are moved away from a multitude of processes, some intentional, some unintentional movements of geological. And then we see this happening again and again with different nodules. And then of course we also have the introduction of some lipids that were not mapped on site. And so we have with the refitting analysis, I have it documented on the level of each of these cores of each of these nodules. So you can see with each different color but then the density contour analysis maps the same kind of process but a little bit with a little more noise at the scale of the site. So together these can be two very powerful analyses that are looking at two different scales. And you can see that they really, like I said, they really document the formation of the site structure in these sites, especially these sites that are really focused on lipid napping. So they're really forming a lot of lipid napping is occurring in particular spatial locations where you find very, very dense debris. A majority is a core reduction debris but you're also getting a lot of usable blanks. They're opening a new core before they need to. There's still a lot of nice Livalva lakes and stuff like that being left in place. But these are areas where they're not really, they're not getting an economic push to use all of the available nice blanks because there is raw materials right there. So yeah, that kind of got into this but they can be considered raw material workshops but other activities are taking place there. So there is all this napping taking place but from each site there have been useware analyses and they found that there's a lot of other activities in terms of butchering, hide working, wood processing. And we can kind of just suppose that these activities are likely taking place on site because lipids are moving across site likely in some cases to be utilized there. Now of course in a lot of these sites lipids are also being removed from the site but certainly some activities are taking place at the site as well. And so this is the case of all the sites even those that are situated directly on those super dense sites right on lipid raw material on the source of the raw material. So yeah, like what I said they don't really need to economize raw materials there are plenty available but that doesn't mean they're not using really these well-established and operatoires that we know, you know the lavala method we know from a lot of different studies that it really does economize raw materials. So probably it's other things, you know like custom culture that is prompting them to use these extremely highly organized methods of core production. Well, I'm out of time but the main point is that together you can use these two methods to kind of look at site formation and to really understand about how lipids are being produced and utilized at archeological sites. So thank you very much.