scale in the mentoring track is my pleasure to introduce you today to Yask, who will be talking to you about how you don't really know anything. And I was told that it was previously known as you are all idiots. So he's going to do his own introduction, but let's give him a warm welcome. Thank you. Thank you. So I'm going to start with this disclaimer. If you don't like some of the things I say, I'm sorry, I'm just telling you how the world works. And if you have a problem with that, you've got to complain to whoever you think made it, be that Zeus, Poseidon, Thor, Ram, Yahweh, or the Judeo on the mountain. Or be content that evolution definitely did the best it could. Don't shoot the messenger all in all. Now I'm going to start with some images that you're probably familiar with. By the way, the part where I left myself, I just skipped. My name is your sports lead. I work as community manager for own cloud. And I hope I won't insult you all too much. Back to the image. So I don't know how many of you have seen this. So you know that A and B are exactly the same shades of color, even though it must certainly doesn't look like that. Then again, these lines are horizontal and they don't look like it. And this is not a GIF. It's a JPEG file. If you look closely, you can see the JPEG artifact. So we call these visual illusions. And really, that's a misnomer. Because there's nothing illusionary about them. They're just images. Just stuff that you look at all day. And it's not the image that has anything funky going on about it.  It's this gray matter here that's making a mess out of what you're looking at. Not the image is fine. There's no lying there. It's not a mirror trick or anything like that. So I think this should worry you. Because I'm going to get to a couple of things you might not want to know. But then again, you must have read the description of the talk. So I hope you know. So this is a picture of our brain.  But I hope you all get a point. So the green part, both the light green and the dark green, that's the part that does this messing up of the images you look at. It's a visual cortex. It's been either evolved over millions of years or carefully designed by one deity or another. It's quite a complicated piece of machinery. But then again, it's designed to do what it does. Look at stuff. You get input from your eyes and it gets processed in multiple stages. It's really quite interesting if you're interested in this kind of stuff. A lot of this has been emulated in computers. It does like edge detection with algorithms. You can quite easily, you know, emulate that. I mean, in theory, if you would lose a part of that brain, we could probably actually replace it with a computer. I mean, you know, there's a lot of connection issues. But the processing we can do pretty well. So it's reason we want to understand how it works. But it makes mistakes.   You've been doing that since you were born. And you have a brain that's specifically designed to look at stuff all the time. Now, I'm going to talk about what you do with the front part of your brain. It's roughly equally big. It's a frontal lobe there. And it's where, among many other things, you know, logical thinking is supposed to be. Unlike the part on the back, it wasn't exactly designed to do that. Not at all. You have to learn it. You might remember math classes. That's fun, right? It takes years to learn how to read and write and all this stuff. And you don't do this a lot. Actually, researchers in this area, depends on who you ask. But if you would ask them, how many times a day do you really, seriously, consciously, deliberately make a decision? They will say either once or twice a day, once or twice a week, depends on who you talk to. Some believe it's even less. Some say you never really consciously make a decision. It's your subconscious that does it all the time. So this might be a surprise for many of you. You think you make decisions all the time. Let me tell you about a little experiment they did, which I find fascinating. And it's been replicated thousands of times. Well, probably more than dozens of times. So it works like this.  You can do it in five minutes, you go out in ten minutes, you can do it in an hour. Your only task is to decide autonomously when to press the button. There are no screens in the room, there's no subconscious machinery trying to make you do anything, nothing. You do get one of these funny hats on with all the wires because they're checking what's happening in your brain, but that's it.  So the red part, that's the primary motor cortex, it kind of prepares the movement. It's quite interesting how that works too, by the way, when you think of a movement, roughly the same activity takes place and when you actually execute the movement. But that's a different thing. This is like an activity that happens before you move. Now, with these devices, you can measure this activity happening approximately 600, 400 to 600 milliseconds before the movement takes place. So if you're looking at a brainwave, you can, about half a second before someone does something, you can say, oh, he's going to click on the button. Now, what they've done is they started to interrupt people in their time. So the moment they saw the activity, they said, oh, stop, stop. Did you already decide to click? You know what the answer was? No, but they can reliably predict that you will click, but you don't know it yet. So what does that tell you? Well, your consciousness clearly didn't decide to click yet. Your brain already was going to click. So you didn't make the decision consciously. This was quite interesting to discover, as you can imagine. And since then, a lot of research has been done in these areas, and that's where you get to the point where some researchers believe you don't make conscious decisions at all and consciousness is just watching what's going on and makes you think you're in charge. Big conversation. The point of all of it is that we've been doing pretty amazing stuff. I admit. But at the same time, this is not primarily what we do and what our brains do. On one hand, we all think we're very smart, and these guys, they were quite brilliant in their own ways. Yes, but at the same time, they were very flawed. I mean, take Mr. Newton on the bottom right here. He himself believed that his research into alchemy had far greater relevance than the stuff he did related to the apple and gravity. I mean, right now you think what? But yes, seriously, he thought that alchemy was the thing. He tried to find the philosopher's stone, turn stuff into gold. He tried to find the elixir of life. Seriously, he did. So you might argue there might have been something a little off here with this very intelligent man. So was this just a lack of knowledge?  Well, we generally accept that silly. I mean, the guy on the bottom left, I'm pretty sure really did believe Zeus did live on Olympus, right? It's fascinating sometimes. So let's talk about math for a second. I'll make my point, don't worry. So throwing dice, gambling, is pretty old. This stone was found in Egypt, and not recent, but it was found recently, but it's old. The Egyptians were using this.  How big is that chance? Anyone? One and 20. Exactly, Minto. So let's say I throw again. How big is my chance on a six? One and 20. So we know that, right? And we also know that if you throw twice, the chance to get a six two times in a row is one out of 20 times one out of 20. So, well, let's say we're all very smart as humans. I'm not talking about any of you in particular, just in general. We must have figured that out quite a while ago. Did the Egyptians know it? Who thinks that the Babylonians discovered this? Hence. Egyptians, then. Who thinks the Greeks discovered this? Come on, 300 before Christ, they were smart guys. One hand, two hands, three, four. All right, all right, all right. The Romans, somewhere 300 after Christ. Let's go a little later then. How about the great Muslim philosophers in the year 1200? No? Yeah, you're right. It took until 1565 until the Italian, no less, figured it out. And he only, well, he didn't publish it ever, as a matter of fact. It was only published after his death. And he didn't even know this multiplication rule. The only thing he knew was there was something with multiplying the chances, but he didn't really get the how or what. So we've only known this for 400 years, which for something as common as gambling, can you imagine if you would have gone back in time with the knowledge you have today of this one thing, you could have won the entire ancient world by just playing dice, because I loved playing dice, because you understood chance. It's not like they didn't think about it. They did. So just to get an idea how long this took for us to get a clue. Now, but now we know, right? Now we've learned that, you know, if you throw dice twice, you know, the second throw is not related to the first, or not. Why the heck does this still exist? That makes no sense. If we were even half rational, now with our big heads, this would not exist. In the middle of a desert, nonetheless. So why? Well, for the same reason that you can't count the black dots. And the same reason that this still is not a gift. Your brain is just not very good at this stuff. You think you are, but we have countless limitations. We are just not that terribly clever. So, well, I mean, if psychologists do anything, one of the major things I guess they should be doing is, of course, studying this, right? What's wrong in our head? Now, they call it cognitive biases. And they are fundamental consistent biases. So mistakes we make consistently, reliably. You can absolutely count on people making certain mistakes again and again and again, because it's wired, hardwired in our brain. It'll come back again and again. I mean, Wikipedia actually notes that it's often studied in psychology and behavioral economies.  Right? That's what I should be doing. So, let's talk about statistics a bit. Because I was just talking about dice.  Think. How did you learn that 9 times 9 is 81? You know that all, right? Do you calculate that when I ask 9 times 9? You remember it, right? Your brain is not that good at calculations. Your memory is pretty pay-ish. I mean, lots of issues with that one. We'll get to that. But memory is used a lot by your brain to determine chances. Now, there are issues with that. Let's say you have a key ring and there are two keys on it that look very similar. We all know, statistically speaking, that the chance that you grabbed the wrong key is 50%. But we also all know that in reality, you grabbed the wrong key about 70%, 80%, right? That's how it works, right? So why do we think this? Well, this is because if your brain asks itself, gosh, how often do I grab the wrong key? It doesn't calculate it. It looks in your memory. Now, it happens to be the case that the way memory stores stuff is influenced by a lot of things, including emotions. And we tend to get a little more emotional when something goes wrong than when it goes right. So that's what you remember. That's why you think it goes wrong. And this is also why people are afraid of flying. Because every time a plane crashes, it's in the news. We won't forget. So when you have to decide whether to drive or fly, you ask yourself, gosh, is flying dangerous? Your brain says, well, I can think of a couple of cases when it went wrong. Yes, it's dangerous. Let's not fly. And this is pretty hard to get over, even if you recently know that it's not dangerous. Lots of people still need bloody therapy to get over their fear of flying. So this isn't just a thing that influences how much you think something happens. But it goes a lot deeper. It's really a belief in your brain that flying is dangerous because it makes this mistake. It really makes you afraid. It's not a superficial little fact, but it's more of a belief. It goes really deep because it's the way your brain works. And your brain tends to rely on these heuristics, these biases, and make these mistakes again and again and again. I mean, we know this one. I mean, I'll give you a couple of seconds to read it. We know that correlation doesn't necessarily imply causation, but there's another ex-carsity strip where he plots out the incidence of cancer and the use of cell phones. The conclusion inevitably will have to be that cancer causes cell phones. It's pretty interesting because that's what the numbers say. When I studied psychology, in my first statistics class, they gave a really beautiful example of how people can misunderstand statistics. It's not directly about causation. Did you know that there's a relationship, a correlation between cancer and handbags? Everybody was like, what? Yeah, yeah. If you have a handbag, you're more likely to get cancer. And this is true. You can look it up. This is a difficult fact. Why is that? Well, it's called a spurious correlation. It's caused by something else. Yeah, there happens to be correlation between something else and handbags and that something else and cancer. That's being female. If you're a woman, you're more likely to get cancer than a man. You're also more likely to have a handbag. There comes a relationship between handbags and cancer. But we are bestowed by this. We automatically think that this comes with that that has to be a causal relationship. No, there isn't. And the fact that you walk over a certain path and the tiger attacks you is not that path that makes it or the holy tree that made the tiger go away after that. That might have helped that you climbed in it. So we make a lot of mistakes. And this goes in many different directions. Another thing I really like, I'm going to give you a scenario. You're going to tell me what you do. Let's say you're going to buy a television, an expensive one, $5,000. So, well, you picked your TV and you're about to check out, pay for it. And somebody behind you in the line says, hey, dude, across the street, they're selling the same TV for $4,995. Are you going to cross the street for that? How many of you would cross the street? Two. Yeah, I guess so. All right, different scenario. You suddenly are in need of a pen. So you walk into a store and they sell a pen, but it's crazy expensive. It's going to be $5. Somebody behind you in line says, hey, you crossed the street, sell the same pen for only one. Who's going to cross the street? Uh-huh. I know. Does it make any kind of sense, certainly speaking? No, it does not. Don't we know that? This is us. We're not logical. We're not rational. Heck no. There's a massive list of these things. Illusion of superiority. More than half of us think they're smarter than average. We all know that's not the case. They've done a study and they ask from people a bunch of trivial questions. You know, who's the current president of the United States and stuff like that. Who's the rights chancellor of Germany during World War II? Most people know that stuff. And then at the end, they say, look, after each question, if you were really, really, really sure that you're right, like 100%, no doubt about it, you would bet your house on it, then, you know, check this box. What percentage of those questions that people get wrong? 20. Good luck. That would cost you a house, right?  This is not only in the direction of confidence, by the way. It can only also go the other way. If people do a difficult task and you ask them to estimate whether they do compared to the average, they will actually go the other way around and they will think, gosh, this was so hard. I must have performed worse than average. You might probably know this other thing. If you studied for something and you learned something that was really complicated from then on, you will believe it's simple. Anyone can do it, because I can. Again, we are not good at estimating stuff. So this is a list of biases from Wikipedia. As you see it's long. There are some really fun ones. The well-traveled road effect. If you travel a certain route from home to work, the more often you've traveled the route, the shorter you'll think it is. There you go. Many more. One of the fun ones actually brings us back to an earlier image. Not this one though, the ones that are so weird. And it's the naive realism effect. I'm going to quote it completely. It is the belief that we see reality as it really is, objectively and without bias. That effects are plain for all to see. That rational people will agree with us and that those who don't agree with us are either uninformed, lazy, irrational or biased. Because of course we aren't biased. And again, there are countless more. And the thing is, these have an effect on us and our behavior in our society in general. And there's the Dunning-Kruger effect. Unskilled people overestimate their ability in something while skilled people underestimate their ability.  But the people who don't know what they're talking about don't have that problem. We must have had this experience at birthday parties, right? So a lot of these effects can be played and they are being played. And there's the endowment effect. People require more pay to give something up than they would pay to acquire it. So you can give something to people and then offer them money or offer them something to give it back but they don't want to do that. They will want to keep it more than that they would have paid for it in the first place. It's a nice trick, right? You can use it if you want to sell stuff. There's also the decoy effect and supermarkets love this. A choice between A and B is going to be influenced by an entirely unrelated object C. For example, if C is similar but not better than either A or B, that's a funny thing, right? So if you have two bottles of wine in the store that you can buy and there's a $30 bottle and a $40 bottle, a lot of people will go for the $30 bottle. So then you introduce a $60 bottle because then they're all going to buy the $40 bottle. This really works. That's why you always have an extra expensive item in the store. They don't sell it. They don't want to sell it. They just want you to buy a more expensive product that's just below it. It's called the decoy effect. And there's a lot of stuff like this. There's the mere exposure effect. The more you've seen something, the more you'll like it. It's as simple as that. Again, there's a massive list. I have a whole bunch more of these and you know I'm going to save you guys from it. The thing is, some of these, I mean look, the wine bottle thing, okay, they try to get you to buy more. It's not cool, but hey, we all don't believe any of these nonsense anyway, so we all think we're rational. We're not influenced by the bottle, so you don't have a problem, right? This one is a little more scary. So we think that our opinions influence our behavior. They do, less than you think, but they do. And we also think that our opinions are based on what we know about the world. Experiences we had, things we read, newspapers, et cetera. In reality, your opinion is pretty much entirely predictable by simply asking for the opinion of your friends and family. Sorry to say it and in some cases it's not the family, but it's really your social circle that defines your opinion about stuff. And I'm talking about stuff like who should be the president of the next United States. If you would have had very different friends, you would have liked the guy on the other side of the aisle, and I know a lot of you will go like, no way, but really, seriously, believe me, as much as you would have crossed the street for the three bucks and not for the five. Believe me. So let me ask you a question. It's 2016. How do you get the opinion of your friends these days? How does it come to you? How do you know what, you know, your friend thinks about political stuff? Through them, right? So if they will change their algorithms a little bit, because that timeline, I mean, who knows how they construct it, right? That's magic. It's not purely based on time, right? It's not based on anything simple. It's a complicated thing, what they think you will find interesting. So they can change it a little bit, just a little bit. Now, just make stuff about a certain presidential candidate that's positive, a little more likely to be higher up, negative stuff a little down, and do the other for the other candidate. They can change the elections. And no one will ever know, and you will never be able to prove it unless you really catch the people who wrote the code which you can't because, you know, the MCA and 50 other laws and rules and reasons, right?  Does it work? Yes, it does. It's true, this stuff works. The reason they're not using it that much is because it's not so strong. Yes, it influences you, but you really aren't going to buy Coca-Cola because of that. Your brain kind of classifies this information and it will immediately discard it if, like, information from a higher value comes in. You know what information of the highest value is? What your friends think. Any other information will be discarded because of what your friends think about something. And again, that's how you get that. I'm not even talking about the information access that could rectify the whole problem because that's these days controlled by a search engine. Now, all of this that I've been talking about has been assuming that you're sane, healthy, well-educated and not drunk or stoned or anything else. If you go out in the desert for a couple of weeks too fast and, you know, think about beautiful things, you'll go hallucinate and come up with even more interesting conclusions. It's not difficult to hallucinate. You can just dance for a few hours or, as I said, go into the desert and fast. And of course, there are lots of interesting mushrooms. I, as Dutch person, should know and do. So I hope I've convinced you that there is a bit of an issue here.  It can be abused, it is being abused. Now, honestly, I don't think Facebook is doing this stuff right now, by the way. I mean, they're a very big company. They have so much money that if you would want to buy them in the sense of make them do this by money, you would have to come with a lot more money than even US presidential campaigns are wasting on advertising. So I'm not terribly worried that it's happening now. But we are working really, really hard at building a surveillance state, as you might have noticed. Now, we're spending hundreds of millions on storing all our information and building an infrastructure, both legal and technical, to do this stuff on a scale that's insane. I mean, China is actually doing some really interesting stuff. They're trying to gamify politics and trying to incentivize people. Via their friends, fascinatingly, they've been watching this talk, except that I haven't given it before. They're trying to basically give people a score based on their behavior. Do they do sports, healthy stuff, but also what political opinions they have and how often they talk about politics. In China, the rule is dumped. So it's a simple one. And then this score can have effects on your life, right? I mean, whether you can buy a house with a certain mortgage or not. But your score affects that of your friends. So they will put pressure on you to behave. That's very clever. And I do think if we're not careful, stuff like this is going to come here, too. But back to us. So a lot of these biases, they've been studied because, of course, people think, okay, how can we deal with this? Can we compensate for these? Now, I've got good news and bad news. For some of them, yes. We can compensate for them if you're aware of them and have the mental energy to deal with it. So especially things like preconceptions like racism and sexism, you can compensate for quite well. But you need to be aware of it in the moment. You need to have the mental energy.  It takes energy. When you're afraid or tired, you will again be, you know, well, less nice than you should have been. But we can do something. There's just training to be done, but it's limited. Now, the thing is, you're all highly educated, I'm guessing. Most of you are pretty smart.  So you think these biases, for me, they're less bad than for other people, right? Well, it's actually the other way around. The thing is, our brains are smarter. So they're better at stuff, in general. And one of the things that many of these biases rely on is your brain lying to you, as I mentioned at the beginning.  Seriously. You will notice that people who believe in alien abduction, still, after everybody walking around with a cellphone that can make pretty good pictures, those people are usually well educated, and they're not stupid. And that's a thing, because if they were stupid, they would have been convinced by the facts by now. It sounds silly, but this is really the case. The higher educated, the smarter people are, the better they are at finding cognitive strategies to make themselves believe stuff that is just nonsense. So you can't solve all of this, and we probably have it worse than a lot of other people, actually. I can't really help you solve it. But I can help you with a couple of social skills that will at least make a couple of things a little better. Now, I have to say, Ex-Cassidy Rocks, I've taken for this part of the talk, I've taken a bunch of his pictures. You should really look it up. If you have questions, you can now ask them at any time or now, before I'm going to go into this or during. But I'm going to try and talk a little bit about social interaction. So I'm not going to get too many much into the biases, because the problem with them is you can't really do much about them. What you can do is try and be nice to other people. You'll be surprised how much that helps with a lot of these. So, I'll talk about communication AFK, as they call it. Now, I'm going to talk about three points. I'm going to talk about opening and having conversations, giving and receiving feedback, and working with other people. So let's talk about having conversations. Now, a lot of you are probably aware that in real life, the communication is not abstracted from the hardware layer. So it matters what you look like, whether you dress and whether you have a nice hat or not. I like the one over there, by the way. So the protocol is not abstracted away, so you have to care about this stuff, right? And the problem is communication itself. I mean, there's no proper RFC process. It's not standardized. It's totally under-documented, and there's a lot of redundant elements. Now, usually, when you have a conversation with people, it goes a little bit like this. Hi, how are you? Fine, thank you. Which, by the way, is redundant. It doesn't have to be true. You just say it. And then you go back, and you say, I'm fine, thank you. How are you? Do it the other response again with, I'm fine, thank you. Now, here it gets interesting. The local differences are massive. The conversation I just described, which is utterly normal for the vast majority of you, irritates Germans beyond belief. And this is true. They think it is dishonest to ask people how they are when you're not interested in it. Doesn't that make sense in a German way? It does, right? This is true. So my wife, she's from Brazil, and she moved to Germany about five years ago. And the difference was amazing to her. The thing is, when you get a new job in Germany, it's totally different from Brazil. In Brazil, on the first day, somebody would show you around the office, and then you would basically shake hands with every new colleague, and as soon as the guy or girl who shows you around is gone, they will probably come to your desk at one point or another, talk to you, have socials chat, how many kids do you have, where do you live, and how's the weather, and everything else. In the evening, you all go out to a pub somewhere, get drunk together, get to know each other a little better, and you'll probably have a bunch of new Facebook friends at the end of the evening. That's how it works in Brazil. In Germany, it's slightly different.  Nor the next day, nor the rest of the week. And the first time you get a first Facebook friend, it's probably after half a year at minimum. Now the thing is, they're both being polite, just in their own way. So in Brazil, people think it's polite to come and introduce you and tell you that they're all there for you and they want to help you, et cetera, and you're part of the family. They think it's polite to let people figure out their own way, don't bother them too much, don't flop them with all the social nonsense, just let them find out their ways and then, of course, whenever they have questions, they can come. They're both being polite, they're both being nice. How do you deal with this? Well, first of all, be extra nice yourself, because that never really goes wrong, although it does sometimes upset the Germans. I'm not joking about that.  I mean, it's a live in Berlin. I'm Dutch, but I live in Berlin and I love it. But it's still weird that people say, hi, how are you?  Yeah, yeah, I'm fine, thank you, how are you? This is still weird for me, but in Germany, people will genuinely find this insulting. I'm not joking. It's none of your business. You are asking someone you don't know how they are? You force people to talk to a stranger about how they are. This is seriously considered a violation of privacy. You're laughing, but this is serious. People in Germany, they don't like Americans. This is one of the reasons. They think it's all this stuff that's weird people. So don't assume bad intentions. People are usually being polite in their own way. My wife really thought they all hated her at work.  Nobody came and talked to me. I mean, she's now been working at different companies, and she's used to it now, but that really took some time and effort. This is not easy. She's not terribly communicative herself, so this was quite tough on her in the beginning. So it's different.  I think, you know, in my experience, Americans are usually very friendly. I mean, you might still, I'm sure, have your own opinions of the people from there or there or there, but believe me, compared to Europe, you're doing just fine. But for you, I can definitely recommend a slightly thicker skin because you do get upset rather easily and try to be a little more direct, especially to the Northern Europeans because they don't want to get subtle hints. They really won't. And also, you won't be able to insult them that easily and don't compliment too much. Really, it's... Like, I had my job interview with my boss at SUSE for SUSE Community Manager about seven years ago, and in this first conversation, he started to say, guys, for the beautiful resume, and, you know, and he went on and on. And at some point I said, okay, can I please interrupt? This is making me feel really uncomfortable. I mean, more than two compliments in one phone call? Please don't. It doesn't work for me. I'm Dutch. I come from an island where they basically look at the world this way. You're doing your job really well. That's the very minimum, so don't expect any compliments for that. If you go above and beyond it, we'll consider. So I had trouble with taking compliments. I still do, by the way. Starting with applause, I still find weird. It's a little too much. So these differences are bad. I'm not even talking about Asia, right? Japan, China, I mean, these gaps. I mean, we're talking here, U.S., Europe, right? I mean, well, first of all, let's be honest, a lot of you are European, genetically speaking, but there's a massive gap there. So keep that in mind. Now, this was starting up, and the key you need to understand is when you say, hi, how are you? I'm fine. Thank you very much. This is essentially a handshake protocol and there's no data transfer. I mean, for you again, this is all familiar, but for Europeans, when I say it that way, everybody goes like, ah! Ah! Now I get it. This is just a handshake protocol. No data transfer. It's a key. But after the handshake protocol, that's where data transfer starts. Now, often in social setting, you start with small talk. This is not a programming language. It's the other one. Now, a good way of looking at small talk is that it is about decreasing your page rank. Now, I know a lot of you are probably not a big fan of SEO, but on a personal level, you need to do a little bit of that, too. It's not about the content, but it's about your reputation. So keep the conversation light. It could be fun to talk about the kid who puked at a birthday party or something, but don't talk about family member who died. That's too heavy, really. And when you talk about the weather, just stay away from too many telemetry details. Just keep it generic. You know, like, it was good or bad. The amount of participation is not really terribly relevant, as in most people don't care. Now, I want to help you a little bit with some issues, and I'll give you a second to read this one, because I think it's rather common for people. Again, ex-cacity understands us, I think. What you need to understand is that this is very normal. Pretty much everybody has it. As a matter of fact, there is a bias here. It's called a spotlight effect.  In reality, they don't. Now, some people have this more than others. I mean, I personally, when I walk past a group of people, oh, my God, I really think that they're looking at me always. I hate that. I feel so...  People have it a lot. Some people don't have it. But the fact that you always think that they're judging you, almost everybody has it. And in reality, believe me, people are way too busy with themselves. They don't judge so much. They don't have time for that. They're both thinking this. That's a thing.  It's called the imposter syndrome. I don't think it's officially a syndrome, but I think it makes a lot of sense. And a lot of people have this kind of anxiety. And I think you should look at it a little bit different. Now, it means, as long as you're uncertain, it means you're still open to learning. You want to get better. If you wouldn't, you'd be psychopath. See, that's a good thing. And if you don't have it, maybe you should be worried. Now, there are multiple causes for this. As I said, it's a bias. It's something that's built into our brains. And again, it completely helps you with that one. But being aware of it helps. And one thing you need to realize is part of it is that we only see the outside in the finished work.  I can never do this. You don't know how much time I spend on it. You don't know how many other people they asked, how many times they were up late at night looking on the Internet, trying to find out the right snippet of code to do something, you only see the finished work. But when you do it yourself, you're painfully aware of all the steps that are needed to get there. That's why you tend to underestimate yourself in this regard, compared to other people. It's the same in having a conversation. You think it goes easy for other people? Well, ask them if you look as uncomfortable as you feel. You probably don't. Which means they might feel just as uncomfortable as you do. You're just thinking that they don't, just like what they're thinking about you. This is something a lot more of us have in common, than you think. When you have this thing called a networking session, I know a lot of geeks really go like, oh, no, no, a networking session. No, thanks. That's horrible. You're basically there to be judged. Well, if you look at it that way, you'll definitely never have a fun time. You'll never understand why there are people who for some crazy reason actually don't mind being at a networking session. But the key here is that you need to find something that genuinely interests you about the other person you're talking about. This is a very plain and simple tip. If you're in a networking session, you don't find the other person interesting, walk away. Seriously, try to find someone you find genuinely interesting, and ask after the stuff that they do that you do find interesting, and you'll be just fine. If you're listening, and you're asking the right questions, and you don't need to think about all this stuff, because you have found something you find genuinely interesting. If you start to worry like this, clearly the other person is interesting enough, you should move on. This is a very simple key. I know in reality, of course, it's a lot harder to actually do, but try to keep that in mind. If you have one of these things where you need to be social to people, you can't ask them whether they've recently upgraded their kernel that makes life a lot harder, because then you don't have anything to talk about. There are other things in life you can talk about. Personally, for example, I find it interesting to figure out what people do. In the sense of, you're a neurosurgeon, but what do you do? You're not cutting in people's brains all the time. What do these people really do? They spend a lot of time behind the desk doing paperwork, I guess. When you have a conversation with a patient and then you try to figure out what happened to them, and then you try to find out based on their behavior what's wrong with their brain. How does it work? This is fascinating stuff. Believe me, almost everybody, when you really dig into what they do, it's quite interesting. A lot of them will be like, I work, but if you really start to dig, most people are interesting. They don't think they are, so they won't talk about it too much, although there are people who think they're way too interesting. That's a whole different story. When you dig a bit, most people are interesting, especially the ones who don't really want to talk about themselves in my experience, who do actually interesting stuff that just don't really get it. They think it's interesting, but they don't think anybody else would notice that it's interesting. Now we work, a lot of us at least. This is starting a conversation, even in the most horrible situation where it's called networking session. I want to talk a little bit about this thing of getting feedback. I mean, this is another thing that you will encounter at work and that most people hate. You don't have to be a geek to hate having to give feedback to colleagues or having to get it. On the other hand, feedback is core to learning. You can't really learn if you don't get feedback on your performance, so you need it, you need it, and other people need it. So it is useful to be able to give feedback in the right way.  I'll try to make it a little more concrete. Because there are three elements to basically giving feedback in a way that can actually use it. This is the key. It's about giving feedback that's useful. Now, first of all, it needs to be timely. Second of all, there's a question of where you do it and there's a question of what things to give feedback on. So the first one is about time and place. And this one is actually simple. Do it quick. Do it private.  So if you come complain about it a week later, they barely remember and they most certainly won't be happy with getting feedback on something they barely remember, because it makes it pretty hard to do something with it. So if you see something do something that you think they shouldn't and they should be aware of, first of all, realize you would do them a courtesy to tell them that. If you do it properly, they won't be angry at you. Really, most people take it quite well if you do it in the right way. It's really important to do it in time. If you wait to the next day, that's usually already way too late. Wait to the next break. Catch them at the toilet or something. Private place, not other people around. And that's really important. The second key is the markup of it. So how do you do it?  Now, the key is to really describe what the other person did without using any judging words.    So make it personal. Now, obviously, when we're talking about code, that's a bit tough. I do get that. When we're talking about personal stuff, it's a lot easier, right? If someone was very loud in a meeting, you'd just say it made me feel very uncomfortable or try to be as concrete as possible.  It could work. But try to make it about you because the fact is that it's then about you and how you took it and from their perspective doing something about it is doing you a favor. And people are often a lot more willing to do you a favor than to fix something that you're whining about. Right? So it's a much more friendly way.  Try to be concrete. If you do X, then Y happens and Z breaks. That's the kind of stuff people can deal with. Also, don't try to immediately give them a solution. Let them just first soak it in. Don't start with a solution. Always be specific. That's the key. And never say always or never. Why? The reason is it needs to be reasonable and real otherwise people can't really deal with it. Now, the third important thing in feedback is that you have to seek balance. Don't overdo it. So effectively you need to allow error codes. Introduce the fact that you're going to get feedback. And then the trick is to sandwich it.  I mean, you must have heard this, perhaps, at one meeting or another.  You give the negative thing. And you answer the positive thing. It makes it feel a bit you know, artificial perhaps. But it really does work. As long as you're concrete in all three, so complement needs to be as concrete as a piece of criticism. You're awesome. Yes, it's nice to hear. But if the other person can't really tell you why, it doesn't mean half as much as when they can. You know what I mean? Same with applause, by the way. It's way too generic. So, and then you need to give people time for feedback. As I said, you need to let it soak. If they need to complain, if they need to say, well, I see it different, just let them vent. You need to give people time to process it. And, you know, also don't expect too much, by the way. You should not give feedback on things that they can't fix.    But I really like your eyes.  This is okay. But not if you'll never drive with them again.  So try not to give feedback on things that just frustrates people.  And by the way, there's nothing you can do about it. That's not nice. Try to be nice, as I said earlier. That's much better than that. More karma. The other thing is you have to realize this is a pretty interesting thing that you see in a lot of self-help books. You know, how long it takes to break habit. Does anyone know the magic number? I've heard four weeks, but hey, a month, approximately. But this is self-help book knowledge, not psychology knowledge, as in, I don't think anybody really did the test. In my personal experience, it's roughly right. But if you think about this, that means you can change about 12 things that you don't like about yourself at best per year. I don't know about you, but I can make a list that's quite a bit longer than 12 things that I'd like to change about myself. The fact that you try to change three or four of them at a time probably explains why you don't change any of them. Yeah? So if you're giving feedback, you expect someone else to immediately stop talking so loud in the meeting the next day, and from then on forever, well, you might be expecting a little too much. So don't give them feedback on 12 things that are wrong in the last hour. Don't expect them to change right away and be gentle in their minders. Give them time and tell them that you give them time. I get you want to immediately stop talking loud because you always do it, and I get it. It takes time to change that. Try to help people and give them room for it. And also for yourself. Don't be angry at yourself if you still haven't done X, Y, Z. Because these things take time. Really, these ingrained behaviors can take a long time to fix. 90 days might just be right. Although I really hope I will at the same time because, my God, that's for a year. How am I on time, by the way? We're almost there, right? I have a few more things on negotiation. I'm going to talk about the orange for a couple of minutes. Now, yeah. You can read this later.  It's about negotiation, and I'm going to do that as last slide. I will skip the other parts on it. So, when I started it again, we got this really cool story in negotiation theory. So, if you're trying to fix a problem that you have with someone else, trying to find the common ground, you need to keep this story in mind. So, there's Alice, Eve, and an orange. I'm talking about the fruit, not the color. Sorry for that one. So, Alice and Eve, they both wanted an orange. Now, how are we going to deal with this? Well, they can fight it out. One of them will have the orange and a little bit of blood, and the other one will have a lot more blood, crying in the corner, and no orange. That's one negotiation tactic. A lot of people love it. It's not particularly effective, but it works. It's a compromise. So, you cut the orange in half. Both have half an orange. In many cases, it means both are unhappy, but at least, you know, you're compromised and you avoided all the blood. Now, the goal of negotiation that you need to keep in mind is to find a really better solution. And believe me, that doesn't exist. You know, if Alice and Eve would have talked to each other, and they just have tried to figure out why the heck they both wanted an orange, they would have discovered that one of them wants to have a glass of orange juice, and the other one wants to make an orange pie. If you're a little bit at home in the kitchen, you will know that for an orange pie, you need to peel. For orange juice, you just need the inside. So, they would have talked to each other. They could have both had everything they wanted. So, the next time you need to negotiate something with someone, try not to think about the blood and the cutting stuff in half. The Bible has another one more beautiful story, right, on the cutting in half. This is not the optimal way, and this is not the optimal outcome. Most negotiations have an outcome that might not always get to 100% for both parties, but definitely more than 50%. And there are even situations where you can get more than 100% for both of the people, if you just figure out what you want.  I'll keep it at that. Thank you very much.


The beauty about spending the time and effort in packaging your cup is that it brings a whole new element of status because at the end of the day when you're holding a Starbucks cup it gives you a different feeling and that's the reason why people are willing to pay three four bucks just for a cup of coffee because the green logo gives you a status upgrade and on top of that aside from Starbucks there are multiple different brands that gives you a certain feeling it is something that stands out from the crowd just by holding the cup it gives you a completely different status now if you're having trouble finding design and inspiration for your coffee I highly recommend you guys to check out Pinterest Pinterest is where I get a lot of my different ideas and also of course Instagram allows you to find out all these trendy different places


Hi and welcome everyone to Afghanistan, Women's Adventure and Travel Writing with Maxine Rose Schur and Diane LeBeau. They will be in conversation with Matthew Felix. My name is Taryn Edwards, and I am one of the librarians at the Mechanics Institute of San Francisco. And this event was produced in collaboration with the San Francisco Writers Conference. Together, the conference, the Mechanics Institute, we strive to provide high quality learning experiences for writers at low cost or free. And so this event clearly qualifies. I'd like to thank those of you who elected to support this event by paying a little something to attend. It really does go a long way to help the Institute do more in these challenging times. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Mechanics Institute, we are an independent membership organization that houses a wonderful library, the oldest designed to serve the general public in California. We are also a cultural event center and a world renowned chess club that is the oldest in the nation. Right now, we are slowly transitioning back into being fully open. And we are still, however, hosting many virtual events, but in some ways, virtual events are better because we can enjoy them from our living rooms. At any rate, I encourage you to consider becoming a member of the Mechanics Institute. It's only $120 a year, and with that, you help support our contribution to the literary and cultural world of the San Francisco Bay Area. So let me introduce our speakers tonight. We have Diane LeBeau, who has worked for women's rights in Afghanistan, ridden a camel through locust swarms on the Libyan Sahara and searched for Amazon women's descendants amongst Mongolian horsewomen. Her writing has appeared in many anthologies and other publications and received myriad awards, and in particular, her book Dancing on the Wine Dark Sea, a memoir of a trailblazing woman's travels, adventures, and romance, is available at Book Passage and Amazon, and most importantly, is available in the Mechanics Institute's collection. We also have Maxine Rose Schur, who is an award-winning children's book author, travel essayist, and writing instructor. Her travel memoir, Places in Time, is about her around-the-world journey. It has received prestigious awards, and then she has a picture book called Brave with Beauty that was named the 2020 Best Picture Book of the Year by the Northern California Book Reviewers Association. And surely, the Book Reviewers Association are going to know which is the best picture book. And then last but not least, we have Matthew Felix, who is a regular moderator for the Mechanics Institute, and he is also the program director for the San Francisco Writers Conference podcast, and is an author himself and a publisher and book marketing expert. So, thank you all, three of you, for coming tonight. Before I turn the floor over to you, I do want to ask that our guests use the chat space to post your questions. We will get to them at the end of the interview, and if you feel like you don't have time to concentrate both on thinking of questions and watching the show, I will send you a link to the event's video in a couple of days. It will be posted on our YouTube channel, so I'll send you the link to that. Anyway, thank you so much for coming out tonight. Are you ready, Matthew? I'm ready. I've been ready all day. I'm excited to be here. Thank you for having us, Teran. Really appreciate it.  I know that after the past year plus year and a half, however long it's been now, we've done so many Zoom events and things that a lot of us are tired of Zoom. And so it really means a lot that you would join us tonight for this event, which we're all really excited about. So thanks again for that. Let me just give you a quick rundown of kind of how tonight's going to go since we do have two authors that we're going to be talking with. So first, Maxine is going to give an overview of her book, Beauty to, wait, Bravery to Beauty. Did I get that right? Brave with Beauty. Brave with Beauty. Thank you very much. In which chronologically comes before it happens in the 15th century, I believe. And so we're going to start with Maxine's book, and she's going to talk about that. Now we're going to move on to Diane's book, which is a more contemporary collection of her travel, memoir experiences and memoir, a part of which includes her tales in Afghanistan. And then I'm going to interview both of them. We'll be going back and forth and I'll be asking them about their experiences in Afghanistan, travel and travel writing. And then we will end up, as Teran said, we'll wrap things up with 10 minutes of Q&A. So yes, if you have questions while we're conducting the event, feel free to send them our way using the chat feature. For those of you who don't know, if you go to the bottom of your screen, there's a chat icon, click that chat icon and then you can just type in your questions there. Otherwise, you can just hold off until the end. And I think that's it. So without further ado, let me turn it over to Maxine, who's going to talk about Brave with Beauty. Go ahead, Maxine. Great. Thank you, Matthew. And thank you, Teran. Thank you both for arranging this wonderful evening. I'm always excited to be talking about travel. So without further ado, as Diane will be sharing her more obviously recent experiences working with women in Afghanistan, I'm going to give you a glimpse of the Afghanistan that I knew, which was actually half a century ago when I traveled there. So I had come to Afghanistan in 1972 and I came there with my husband at the time, whose name was Steven. And we actually traveled in a van in the dead of winter, we drove from Switzerland to Afghanistan on what is now turned the hippie trail. When I came to Afghanistan, I was very young and very naive. I'd never heard of Afghanistan. I swear to God, I hardly knew. I didn't know anything about it. And so I felt when I got there that I had not only traveled so far in distance, but I had traveled really, really far in time. I mean, I felt I had traveled back to the Middle Ages in Herat, the ancient Western city where we mostly stayed. There was no sidewalk. There was no railroad. There was no fire hydrant gas station. There was no pharmacy. There was no grocery store. People, most people got around by horse and buggy or by donkey or by camel. There was very little electricity as people lit their homes with oil lanterns. The customs official who at the border, before we drove into Herat, didn't have any shoes. He was barefoot in the snow. And we had met an Englishman who had broken his arm and was just told to go into the bazaar and buy a big bag of plaster while they tried to find someone who knew how to make a cast. So that was Afghanistan in 1972, scribes lined the street to write letters for the mass of people who were illiterate and the cripples were just let out to beg in the street, no matter what their age, you know, five year olds to 90 year olds were begging in the street. To give you another glimpse of Afghanistan at that time, here's an excerpt from one of the essays in my book. And it's titled A Memory of Herat, and it describes our first day in the city. After breakfast, we headed toward the center of town where high on a hill rose the great ancient Citadel originally built by Alexander the Great. A wind had blown up and the air was so very dusty that I held a handkerchief over my face as we walked.  We asked a Pashtun man nearby, what in the world was going on? Sugar. It's about the Russian sugar, he told us. The housewives want sugar, but it comes from Russia. And we never get enough for everybody. So the first ones in the door will get the sugar. You see, the women are very angry. Just then a policeman who was trying to keep order climbed upon a chair and unbuckled his leather belt. And with it, he lashed with sharp, even strokes. He lashed the women with his belt and they ran screaming like yelping dogs. And the Pashtun man sighed. It's always the same now, he said. From where you come from the United States, we answered. Oh, America. OK, I heard your king has gone crazy. King. Oh, you mean Nixon? Well, yeah, maybe. Yeah. Well, never mind. Come into my shop and I'll give you the best tea in Herat. His dusty shop was cluttered with silk, turkman robes, beautiful rifles and laid with mother of pearl, huge necklaces of lapis lazuli, tiny purple purses embroidered with mirrors. And also, as in many of the shops, was a box of glass bangles. And each bangle was etched with a saying from the Koran. Coca-Cola bottles, he explained. The foreigners leave them and we make jewelry. We watched and he grabbed three small china cups and we watched with uneasiness as he went into the street and washed the cups in the gutter. When he came back, he dropped a bright green cardamom seed into the china teapot. He measured the tea leaves with his fingertips and then he poured hot water from an aluminum kettle that was bubbling on the wood stove. My name is Mohammed, he said, smiling and turning to Steven. Excuse me, but your wife is the only respectable woman I have seen in Afghanistan.  Good foreigners are good for Afghanistan and bad foreigners are not. I can tell you are good foreigners. Allah bless you both. I pulled my old scarf tighter around my head. You have tourists in Herat now, Steven commented. Yes, tourists, they all come for something. The young ones for hashish, the older ones for antiques. Oh, the Russians are here, too, but you will see more if you go to Kabul. What do the Russians come for? We asked for oil. What else? Of course, many Afghans don't even know this, but I have a friend in Missouri, Sharif. He is how you call it, geologist. He says to me, there is oil in the Hindu Kush and the Russians know this, but they don't want anyone else to know it, even us, especially us. They will keep it secret until they want it. Here, take more tea. Muhammad poured the tea and sat silent for a long while. He softly rubbed his pockmarked face, and it was obvious he was deep in thought. Are you worried about the Russians, I asked? They will, he sighed, get their way. There will be terrible things happening, maybe an invasion. He sighed again. In the end, it will be all right. There will be long years of war. The world will not understand. But in the end, Afghanistan will still be Afghanistan. Same donkey, different saddle. Before we left, Muhammad gave us each Bakshish, silver tribal rings and set with carnelian in glass. Go with Allah, he said quietly. We thanked him and we wished him well. We were three shots down when he called to us. We turned to see him standing in the doorway, waving goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. He shouted, see you in the second life. We continued on to the Masjid Ijami, the Friday Mosque, built in the 12th century of brilliant blue tiles laced with poetry. The metallic blue couplers of the mosque's minarets merged with a sharp blue of the winter sky. And from the mosque, in the far, far distance, stood six towering minarets silhouetted against the snow-capped mountains. And these minarets were all that remained of the great college and spiritual center designed and built in the 15th century by Queen Goharshad, Tamerlane's daughter-in-law. But now from a distance, the clay brick minarets lost their colorful tiles and they resembled only factory smokestacks. Years after my travels, those once glorious minarets among the vast runes of a great educational and spiritual complex haunted me. And I wondered, who was Queen Goharshad? And I began to research and then I discovered extraordinary facts about this impoverished backwards country. First of all, I learned that many historians believe Queen Goharshad was one of the most powerful women in history. In the mid 15th century, for 50 years from her throne in Harat, she ruled with her husband over the Timurid Empire, which stretched from Turkey to the doorstep of China. And she is considered one of the greatest patrons of the arts. In her day, in under her reign, music, calligraphy, fine art, painting, poetry and architecture flourished as never before. In fact, this is the most astonishing fact. In the 15th century, Florence was called. I mean, sorry, Harat was called the Florence of Asia. The Queen was not only a patron, she was also a great artist herself. She was a poet and an architect. She helped design the magnificent complex. And those who saw it said it was that they were the most beautiful buildings in the world. And they later became the model for the Taj Mahal. And so those years, many years ago, seeing the vast ruins of Queen Goharshad's complex, I was inspired to learn about Afghanistan. And I had learned that it was very, very different from the medieval place I visited. And they chaotic medieval place that we see on television. Afghanistan had once been a prosperous economic powerhouse on the Great Silk Road. It was a world center of not only art, but of science. It was in Afghanistan so far removed from what we see today. And this knowledge led me to research even more. And to write the picture book that Matthew had mentioned called Brave with Beauty, which tells the story of Queen Goharshad and how she was known as the priceless gem. And in fact, she sold her gems. She sold all her crown and her jewelry to fund these great municipal projects. And I'm just going to close with these point words of a 15th century historian who said of her reign, from the time of Adam until this day, no age, period, cycle or moment can be indicated in which people enjoyed such peace and such tranquility. Thank you. Oh, that was so beautiful. And what a poignant moment to end with. Thank you as well, given the current situation in particular. So thank you for that. So many great moments in that. And I have your book, but I have not read it because you sent it to me right before I ran off for my trip. And I only take one backpack, but I am definitely reading that book now. So thank you for that. Wow, beautiful. Beautiful. Thank you. OK, if we may now, Ms. LaBeau is waiting in the wings, ready for her time in the spotlight. And so, Diane, if you would like to bring us from the 15th century closer to some temporary contemporary times with Afghanistan, but also talk about your your other travels as well as they are detailed in your new memoir, Dancing on the Windarcy. Take it away, Diane. Thank you. And also, you had asked me to talk about travel writing. So we're going to talk about that. So first of all, to tout my book, Beautiful Cover. And people ask why I wrote this book. And when I was around four, I was writing books, even though I didn't know how to write, but I had a blank book. But I also noticed that women and girls were not exactly treated equally. And this wasn't that long ago, even though I'm a little bit older. And what? Well, I wanted to be a veterinarian and I was called. I was a pre-vet at Penn State and I was called in by my advisor who said, well, you we don't really want you here. You're just going to be just going to be married and have babies. You're taking the space of a man. So that was pretty irritating. And I sort of carve my own path. And that's what this book is really about, my different adventures over a couple of decades. It's a compilation of adventure, romance, little bit feisty stuff and learning about other human beings and their cultures, often focusing on women in different cultures. Now, Maxine talked about the history of Afghanistan. That was really beautiful. I have to say that things haven't changed that much in the villages. I always felt that I was going into medieval territory when I was there, although in the last 10 years, things have changed. By the way, I want to point out that I'm wearing Afghan necklace that I bought when I was there. So what while I was teaching and living in Paris, I met a number of Afghan women who were in exile there. And together with them and some French women, we decided to have a conference on the border of Afghanistan and help them form a declaration of the essential rights of Afghan women. And we did succeed in doing that. And at the time things were looking optimistic. The U.S. defeated the Taliban. Kofi Annan and Bill Clinton signed this declaration. I went back the next year for the Loya Jirga, at which I actually spoke as an American. And there the rights of Afghan women are written into their constitution more than we have in ours. But I want to give you a taste of one of my chapters, the first time I entered Afghanistan. I had never visited a war zone before and I couldn't help feeling anxious. Small villages of stone and mud dwellings grew visible as we angled in toward the Kabul airport. Our planes swept past bunkers and a graveyard of smashed planes and the cadavers of military aircraft.  A part of the world where civil war and foreign invasions were more normal than peace. We stepped off the plane into the country of light as Afghanistan had been called. It's actually a really beautiful country. A young Afghan American traveling with us said, I thought I wouldn't remember anything since I moved to the States when I was five. But now that I feel the air, I know that I'm home. Inside the terminal, young man and ragged brown garments who look straight out of the Middle Ages pleaded to help me with my luggage to earn 10,000 Afghanis, about 25 cents. A van awaited us. Don't worry that there are no seat belts, said the driver. I drive slowly, he floored it, racing up the wrong side of the road of the divided street against the oncoming traffic. Indeed, there seemed to be no traffic rules for stoplights in Kabul. Traffic moved like spilled milk, anywhere space allowed. Through the open window of our van, I bought the survival guide to Kabul from a street child. It said there's a lot to see, even if most of it is wrecked. On the way to the hotel, we passed bombed out houses, stores and even palaces near the center of town. Burned skeletons of buses were stacked on top of each other around the devastated former public transportation center. Women in Blue Burkas and street children baked at the windows of our van. Men with no legs, victims of mines negotiated the streets on makeshift skateboards and the traffic pleading for Bakshish or money. As we approached our hotel, I noticed the top floor had no roof. Only jagged remnants left behind by a past shelling or bombing. Affecting nonchalance, I joked to the driver that I sure hope our rooms would be on a lower floor. Such bravery during my visit, I experienced as women who ran secret schools for Afghan girls during the Talib takeover. Brave journalists, when we visited the Kabul film archives, journalists had plastered their film archives into the walls to save them from Talib destruction. I became friends with one legged Mujahideen, a warrior who had fought to protect his people. All his life and lost his leg in a mine accident. He's one of the most optimistic and cheerful people I know. I supported him and his family in rebuilding their home and went back to visit a couple of times. When I asked him how he remained so cheerful, Ashreef responded, leaning toward me, Diane, we have peace now and peace is everything. That was then. However, as you know, what's happening now is the nightmare. And just as a side little commercial, I urge all of us to give support, whether to local groups. We have some in the Bay Area, hosting refugees or international organizations. I can mention two women for women international or Afghans for tomorrow. So I have other chapters in my book and my book contains succulent tales for my life around the world, including the Middle East, North Africa, with some French and other romances along the way. As a travel writer and a curious woman, as well as a romantic and someone who believes in living as fully as possible. Over the years, I found that one of the best means to sink into a culture, into its depths, is through romantic entanglements. I follow in the heritage of Chaucer's wife of Bath, as well as Erica Jung's fear of flying. And as another aside, my book, by the way, is a terrific idea for spicing up your loved one's stockings in the upcoming holidays. Nice plug. Nice plug, Diane. That was so subtle. That was so subtle. So on a business note, I was asked to sprinkle in some insights about the art of travel writing. So I'll just do a couple. When you're on the road, I think of it like fishing.  It's good to be open, of course, to strangers to learn some bits of languages, to take notes on the spot and write when you're alone at meals and in your room at evening. My notebook is like my companion when I'm on the road. Your best writing may will happen on the scene. Sometimes the night before you leave, especially if you're going alone to a new place, it's like diving into an icy pool, but you just do it. And once you're there, you sink into your surroundings. And in fact, the water warms up. By the way, traveling as a woman also gives you some advantages because we're more perhaps acceptable to some culture. Certainly. What? No, just somebody unmuted themselves. Let's see. They're gone. They left. They just left whoever that was. I thought they didn't like what I said. Yeah. Yeah. I know I've been paying close attention to making sure everyone was muted, but somehow they unmuted, but then they left. So anyway, go ahead. Funny. OK. Anyway, traveling alone as a woman, you have an insight into culture. I had that in Morocco, certainly in Afghanistan. And also people befriend you, offer assistance, open up their lives to you. Sometimes one lead entices you, which gives you a reason to go. For example, some years ago, I heard that Cuba had something called the family law, which made it illegal for a man to not help with the housework of his wife was working outside the home. So I pictured, Manuel, you were under arrest. You did not take out the garbage. A wife could actually perform a citizen's arrest on such a loafer. That story is in my book. Sometimes disasters lead to gems of experience. People always expect everything to go come okey dokey when you're on the road. But as a writer, I mean, Tim Cahill says this, if nothing goes wrong, you have to have a spiritual experience to have a story to write. So it's good when, for example, one lonely night, I was in Honduras. And I had one of the last rooms. It was a holiday in the in the city. To go to Galpa and I went back to my room and the owner had given my room over to a chain smoking hooker who was one of her best friends and there was no other place to stay. So I as a result of spending a lot of time in the lobby, I met an actually very handsome archaeologist who was a specialist in the Copan ruins where I plan to go the next day. And so he and I ended up sharing a car and I had my own expert archaeological guide or another story which is called an Italian bedtime story. That's in my book. It's about being chloroformed and robbed on an Italian train. And one of my friends later said, Diane, you'll do anything for a story. And I can attest to that. I can attest to that. So, Diane, I'm going to have to cut you off because you've touched on some of the themes that we're going to talk about in the Q&A and we're kind of running out of time here. So I want to transition unless if that's OK.  And you said something along the lines of I'm going to paraphrase here. But you said, alone as a woman allows you insight into the culture. People befriend you. Can you speak a little bit to that? And then I'm going to ask Maxine your thoughts on this because a lot of times we hear, you know, a lot of my women friends say I'm not so sure I want to travel alone as a woman. I think you've traveled alone a lot. Can you just elaborate on that a little bit? And then I'm going to ask Maxine the same question to talk about her experience as a woman traveler. Sure. Well, for example, staying with Afghanistan, I got invited to women only parties. And they taught me to belly dance in the Afghan way. And they kept saying this was funny because they kept saying per hun to me. And I thought I was being too sexy, like they were saying whore. But when they took me back to my hotel, I said, what does whore hun mean? And they said, sister, thank you, our sister for being here. Nice. Well, what about your experience? You know, you just mentioned another favorite story from your collection is the one that you just mentioned where you get chloroformed. So there also there also can be sort of the negative side. And that wasn't necessarily because you were a woman or not. I mean, I I've run into enough dangerous situations myself. But but thoughts on on the flip side of that, because I love that example of because you were a woman and you're in this country where there's all women gatherings, that that's that's a great example. But what about some some of the flip side as well? Well, you mean negative things because some of the challenges and maybe some people have asked me that and there only been two times in my life when I was physically attacked and they were both here in the Bay Area. I walked down streets and Kabul in Marrakesh and I never had any physical violence. In fact, you're you're so it depends on the country, of course, but in Afghanistan, for sure, I just look so different. And I always dress modestly and have my head covered. But and also being a teacher, there's a great respect for teachers and writers. So I often played those cards. But no, I never I. One of my stories is how I spent a New Year's Eve in. In a Morocco and I ended up at a party where all the men were with me smoking hashish and the women were in the kitchen and at a certain point I was invited to see the new apartment of one of the young men. And I I sort of pushed the envelope. I have to say that. So I went into this strange apartment with three young men. And I thought, shit, what am I doing here? Sure. And then they said to me and the tension rose. Aren't you afraid being here with? No, you guys, you don't know you guys. Yeah. And I somehow out of me, I said, no, because I know that you're gentlemen and you will always take care of me. And all the tension swept away.  Yeah, I think I think that was, yeah, in hindsight, something to have to revisit. But, you know, I love what you just said about, you know, I've traveled a lot as well. And when people ask me, you know, about getting into dangerous situations, I have the same response that you do, which is the only place I've ever been held up at gunpoint is here in San Francisco in my own neighborhood. So yeah, I had two gun attacks here. Yeah, this was taken more than 10 years ago, right? Within a year. Right. So Maxine thoughts on traveling as a woman and maybe perhaps some recommendations also. And yeah, well, you know, I think it's it's not just traveling as a woman. I think there's another factor to it and that's traveling at a certain age. When I was a cute young thing, you know, a very naive and I was flooding around Greece wearing miniskirts when the miniskirts were banned in Greece. I was just like, you know, this is sort of innocent and I'm just grateful that nothing terrible happened. But as a woman, I've traveled so much on my own. And what I find is it tends to bring out as Diane was mentioning this kind of protective instincts in people. I mean, a few years ago, I went to China and my God, I never had to never had to even lift my suitcase. There was always some somebody would come and pick it up for me. You know, whether whether they saw my age or whether it was a woman, it actually was to my benefit. And I had just mentioned that I'm I'm going to Paris on Tuesday. And I, you know, Paris is my happy place, one of my favorite places in the world. And I think any woman of a certain age, what they say, what they what they call it in French is a woman, a woman of a certain age and a few crumbs. And that's me, you know, Kéke Miet, that, you know, you're never too old in France to be flirted with. And I just love that, you know, and it's not serious. It's just fun, you know, waiters and people in stores and everything. And so I think traveling as a woman has a lot of fun advantages and shouldn't be afraid of it. In fact, I just read that the largest demographic of people traveling solo in the world these days are women. And in fact, strangely enough, they're married women whose husbands don't want to travel. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Do you have any specific recommendations for for women like that who have said, you know what, I don't have my husband doesn't want to join me. I don't have girlfriends, perhaps who want to join me any. And maybe it's their first time sort of setting out on that sort of adventure. Any any recommendations? Well, I think if if you're not a season traveler and you want to travel because your your hubby's, you know, would rather stay home, I think one of the great things you can do is is just to get your feet wet, you know, dip your toes in the water is to join a tour group. There are there like overseas adventure travel and Paragreen travels. They have special tour groups that are just for women. And a lot of these women are married women who just want to, you know, meet other women their age and travel together. And that's a great first start before going off completely independently. Right. Like anything else sort of sort of practice. That again, Diane. Road scholar yet. Road scholars. Yeah. OK, so I want to get philosophical here for for a for a moment. So despite the pandemic, you know, you're going to Paris next week. I just came back from five weeks in Europe, despite the challenges. And clearly, that's because travel really really speaks to us on lots of different levels. So, Maxine, can you talk to sort of why do we travel sort of philosophically? And I know that's a big question that can take an hour. I think it's a very subjective question. I travel for a number of reasons. And one of them is going to sound very strange is. I like I like to know what I'm, you know, in our daily lives, we're so busy, we live a kind of external life, got to go to the grocery store. Oh, we got to do the laundry. Oh, people are coming over. I got to I got to make this food and I got to do this and that. And everything else. OK. But when I'm traveling, I am in my head more. I'm expiry. I'm I'm very, very experiential. And I'm beginning to get back in touch with myself, with what I love and what I'm passionate about. And that's a lot of that is culture and art. So that's one of the reasons that I travel. And I also find that when I when I travel, I love to read about a place beforehand, I like to know a lot about that place, which is the opposite of the way I used to travel when I was young. But I think it enhances, it just enhances and enriches my life. Diane, thoughts on why we travel? Well, for me, it's learning about other cultures and the world and people and getting to know individual people and really sinking into the culture. And in some cases, I'm working for issues. For example, women's literacy in Afghanistan. I've been involved with that. And along with what Maxine said, it's I feel so free once I get on a plane, just a big sigh.   But once I'm on the plane, I'm a free person. And and when I talked about earlier, I feel like I think it was Ralph Waldo Emerson talks about becoming a human eyeball where you just observe everything around you. And it's it's so freeing. I don't have to worry about cleaning my desk or going for groceries or anything. I just, you know, whatever comes up, be real, be ready to roll with it and and make some wonderful friends. I have friends like we all do, I think, all over the world. I've seen your desk and I don't think you've cleaned it for a while, actually. So let's just be clear about that. Let's just be honest, that that's not really something that you spend a lot of your ordinary time on. You can't quite see it. OK, so so so thanks for that. And yeah, I agree with everything you guys just said. You know, it's the same for me just getting out of our day to day. And then the perspective that comes comes with that. You know, Diane, you touched on something else with regards to sort of changing gears and talk about travel, writing. You know, you talked on well, it's not even just writing, but. You know, in the description for today's event, we mentioned, you know, the uncertainties, the joy that comes with some of the uncertainty of traveling. And you mentioned from a travel writing perspective that, you know, the disasters oftentimes lead to the gems. But Maxine, can you talk a little bit about that theme of how, you know, so often it's not necessarily what we've planned that ends up with our most significant experiences that often it's it's it's the unexpected. Oh, absolutely. Can you speak to that? In fact, if you plan it, I think that that's very scary because it can produce some really deadly writing. You cannot plan an experience. You know, I used to have a wonderful friend. She was like 97 and she said to me, you don't know an experience. And you you can't know an experience until you have it. And that's exactly the same. I mean, if I look at every single one of my of essays in my book, Places and Time, every single experience I've had, I couldn't I couldn't predict.  You know, I've met I didn't know I would become great friends with with with the Turkish fishermen. You know, who would know that all these crazy things would happen? You know, I'm talking about China again. I went to China a few years ago and people told me, oh, well, the Chinese aren't very friendly there. They won't be very nice to you. My God, the people were absolutely amazing to me. They went out of their way. I would never ever have a guest of the experiences that I had. So no, you know, you have to let life unfold when you travel. You just go with the flow and that will make for the best story, whether it's a whether it's a disaster or a very happy experience. Right. And so and so let's talk about that.  But I'm just curious, Diane, how did you make that jump from traveling to deciding, wait, I actually want to document my experiences and share my experiences? Well, I've always been a writer and actually I was at book passages, travel writers conference when it first started, I think the first year or so. And Don George, who's one of our local gurus, was running salon dot com. And I think I was in his seminar and I had written academic stuff, but usually about women in different cultures, including indigenous women, and Hopi women. So I said to Don, I have this story about how my love affairs often start and end in phone booths. It was before cell phones all over the world. He said, oh, my God, right. And I want to publish it. So I did it was and it ended up being a real success story called Love on the line. That's great. And Maxine, how did you how did you decide? Well, curiously enough on the the it was Don George, who also inspired me. But I think it was even before Diane LeBeau, because it was back in it. It was back in the eighties. I think it was the mid eighties. And he was speaking at a bookstore called Phineas Fog, Phineas Tea Fog or something like that. And I I was like this, you know, starstruck kid.  He was the editor of the San Francisco, the travel section for the San Francisco examiner. And what happened was I went to my brother-in-law's wedding in Marseille. He married an Algerian French woman and they had a very traditional Algerian wedding. And I wrote about that. I called it Journey into Marriage and he published that. And then he published everything I wrote after that. And so he kickstarted my travel writing career. I had won the Lowell Thomas Award for an essay that he had published. And after I won that award, I thought, wow, maybe I can be a travel writer. That would be a good reason to think it might be worth a worthwhile pursuit. Exactly. I love that Don is the common denominator here.  We'll have to make sure we'll have to let him know that he came up for both of you. That's that's quite a tribute. That was in the days when there was real travel sections and newspapers. And he he would publish all kinds of things that, you know, whether it was travel 20 years ago or whatever, if he loved the piece, he would publish it. Right. Yeah. So in the interest of time, I'm going to ask you guys just two more questions. One is a follow up related to travel writing. And then I do want to circle back to Afghanistan. But the question, Diane, what inch or what what advice would you give someone who's interested today in getting into travel writing? You you remember VATW, the former director or I forget what your title was. President, the former president of VATW Bay Area Travel Writers. What advice would you give someone who wants to get into travel writing today? Well, it's certainly changed because not everything is printed anymore. A lot of things are online. Certainly get with a group like Bay Area Travel Writers. And if you're in California, Left Coast Writers is another great one. Get a writing group. Go to bookstores, at least we used to say that. I guess I should say go online now and browse websites and and Internet possibilities and be ready to submit and don't be nervous.  You don't always get accepted the first time. And but check things out with with readers, with your friends. Tell your stories. You know, I had a getting this book done. I am a great procrastinator, but I was in Westminster Abbey a couple of years ago after we traveled around Ireland. We ended up back in London. And I went to the tomb of one of my gurus, Joffrey Chaucer. And I don't know if I even believe in this stuff, but I was kind of like meditating at Chaucer's. We're two and his voice came into my head that just said, just write your stories, just tell your stories. So I had a directly encouragement from Joffrey Chaucer. Well, between Don George and Chaucer, I mean, it's really hard to argue with with who we've got supporting both of you tonight. Maxine, any other thoughts on what you might tell someone who wants because it has changed so much. Well, it's it's a big topic and I actually teach a travel writing course. But one thing I want to say is when people say they want to get into travel writing, they have to understand what kind of travel writing they're talking about because there's so many different kinds. You could specialize in writing about specific destinations or resorts. You could be you could be a travel writer, write about golf or senior travel or write, you know, traveling with kids or maybe you want to write the literary travel essay. So I think first you want to sort of understand what is your passion? What do you what do you who are you understand what you want to bring to the world and then understand that, you know, unfortunately, now there's kind of a glut of travel writing, you know, online and there's so much. You know, we all know about the most far flung corners of the earth because somebody's written about it. So you're always going to have to have some kind of unique angle if you want to hook an editor these days. You can't just say, you know, the old editor mantra is that location is is not is not a travel article. You know, so I think that's very important.  And one thing I found and you were talking about older people traveling people enjoy writing for themselves or for their families. And a lot of my writers at SF State didn't really care if they got published or not. They just got joy out of telling their stories and having their children or grandchildren be able to read them. So I love that actually for people to write. Yeah, that's that's a nice. Can I just say one thing, Matthew? Yes, please do what when I teach travel writing, the biggest misconception that I see with my students is they believe that anecdote equals story and it doesn't. You can have the greatest anecdote in the world, but I'll be so jealous. I want that anecdote. I wish I had that. But how do you structure it and shape it dramatically for a story?   So great advice, fishing for the point, fishing for the arc. So I want to ask one more thing. We have 10 minutes left and I do I just feel as if it's important to kind of circle back to Afghanistan, given what's going on over there. So I know that neither of you have been there recently and you're not professing by any means to be experts in in what's going on or Afghanistan in particular, what's going on right now, since it's also recent. But I am just curious, you know, Diane, I know you have a relationship with with a family there and Maxine, I'm not sure what, you know, how much how plugged in you are to what's going on there now. But any thoughts, maybe I'll start with Diane about any insight or advice in sort of how those of us who have no experience with Afghanistan might kind of try to make sense of what is going on over there now. Well, we don't quite know, but it's really quite a disaster. I've been mentoring and sponsoring a young woman that I met in 2000. She had asked me to adopt her, actually, when I met her in Tajikistan and I've stayed in touch with her and her family. I've lost touch right now. She did get out last year and she got as far as Kazakhstan. I think that it's terrible. I understand that our government finally didn't know what else to do. It and what Maxine was saying, Afghanistan has been around for a long time. It's it's there's a was a book, a British book written called The Great Game that was made into a play at Berkeley Rep about over the centuries, how different colonial powers have tried to conquer and control Afghanistan. And everybody starts to leave. The only ones that chug along there are the Chinese because they don't try to take over the government. They just build railroads and use the resources of the country. So they I don't know. It's it's particularly sad for women and really tragic. Right. Right. There is no no answer at the moment. Right. Maxine, any any thoughts? I mean, again, to the extent that you can have any. Yeah, I yeah, it's I think it was inevitable what happened. I mean, it was it was bound to collapse in one way or another. I think what we're seeing worldwide is we're seeing a rise of extremism. We see it here in our own country, for God's sakes. So, you know, who knows what the future of Afghanistan will hold. The Taliban say, oh, they're going to, you know, let women let girls go to school or this and that. But, you know, how far can you trust the Taliban? You know, so I think we'll just have to wait and see. You know, in the meantime, we need these charities to support the people. And I would urge everybody to contribute. My book Places in Time is coming out in the third running next next year by Legacy Book Press and part of the money will actually go to help Afghan Afghan refugees. So I think whatever we can do in our small way would be helpful. And Diane, do you want to say thank you, Maxine? Yeah. And Diane, do you want to mention the two organizations that you mentioned earlier? Sure, Afghans for tomorrow and women for women international. That was actually started by a woman whose father was forced to be the pilot for Saddam Hussein and she escaped to the US eventually and started this organization. So it's it's a really legit organization, women for women international. OK, there's also global fund for women. OK, great. Thank you. So we have one question from Adele. And if anyone else has questions now is the time to throw them in the chat window. And if not, I have plenty more for our last six minutes. But Adele asked, what year was it when you first went to Afghanistan? And I think Maxine, you said 72 for you. Is that true? 1972, 72. And Diane, when were you first there? I was at the border in 2000 and we were supposed to go over the border. Our plane just fell down, whether it was bombed or we don't know. But fell down. So we had our meeting in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. So 2000, then I went back the following year after the Taliban were ousted in 2001. And then I was back in 2006 and things were looking so good. There were new restaurants opening, internet cafes, women were fully in school. The American University of Kabul and Kabul University offered me teaching jobs. I was almost ready to move over there. Mm hmm. Taryn, any, any. I know you often have questions or almost always have questions. I want to give you a chance as well. And if not, like I said, I have more. I guess I just have a question about the writing process. When you started your respective books, did you have a vision of how your book would turn out or did you just kind of? I haven't read either of them, but yet. But did you sort of write a piecemeal or did you have like this vision? OK, I'm going to write a memoir about this experience. Tell me more about how you're the genesis of your books. Well, a lot of my stories were published along the way and won awards, brag, brag, brag. And people started saying, well, maybe you should put a book together. And then I thought, well, what's the theme? And the theme throughout my writing and my life are the balancing of freedom and the need or the feeling to have desire to have love and intimacy and a sense of home. And I'm always an independent spirit. But how do you piece to get? You know, I don't didn't create a regular family. My family is kind of a patchwork around the world. So the stories were collected, and then I found that there was a theme going through them. So I started to put it together. And I worked with a wonderful editor, Linda Watanabe McFerrin, who's the director of Left Coast Writers. And she she's like an army sergeant, you know, and she finally, because I have a lot of other things going on and distractions. But we get together once a month at her home in Oakland. And I'd have to produce another story or I get browbeaten. Maxine, how did your collection come together? Yeah, you know, I had a lot of angst about my book because every single essay in my book Places in Time had already been published either, you know, by Don George in The Chronicle or Christian Science Monitor or Salon.com or somewhere. So I had all these disparate stories. But the one thing that tied it together, that that all these experiences happened on the one single journey. It was a year and a half's travel around the world. So I thought, well, how am I going to throw these together? And then I realized they're already to do was put a little glue in between the chapters to say, OK, then we went from here to there. And then bang the next because it works chronologically. And then the next story started. So it's basically one single journey starting in Berkeley, California in the 60s. Great. Yeah. So, Linda or Lena, I'm sorry. I'm not sure how to pronounce your name. She has a question. She asks and Maxine, if you want to take this first, how do you support yourself as a travel writer? Well, I don't. I don't know anybody who does. I think it's impossible. You know, you can't quit your day job. Yeah. Travel writing is a good thing. Pardon me. That's the million dollar question, right? Right. Right.  Well, I just I just interviewed Jeff Greenwald for the San Francisco Writers Conference podcast and that episode just came out last Friday. And I asked him that question as well.  And there's no there's so much less. It's also much more accessible. And I said, you know, what's the place of the travel writer and how do you make a living out of it? He's like, well, yeah, I don't almost no one is going. He compared it to being a star in Hollywood. You know, there will be a few people, Anthony Bourdain and Rick Steves, like there'll be a select few who are able to make a living from it. The rest of us are going to do it because because we love it. You love it. Diane, any any additional thoughts on that? Yeah, I do know some people, some of my friends or colleagues who earn their living, they piece things together. Sometimes regular columns and local papers. I myself, I taught college for 35 years. So that was, you know, a lot of my support. I also trained and showed Morgan show horses and bought and sold horses. So I mean, that's kind of a strange occupation. I suppose for a travel writer, but I do know a few people, but they mainly earn their living through tech writing, other kinds of writing, local papers. And there were a few like the late Lee Foster, who was a photographer and travel writer. He was a great marketer. I know another woman who lives in Sonoma, who writes for local papers and she's been a freelancer all her life, but not just travel. See, that's yeah, another point that Jeff made. And then I'll turn it back over to Teran, because I know we've reached the hour. But another really good point that Jeff made was he was saying that I don't know if it was Salon, for example, that, you know, five, 10, however many years ago, they might pay 1500 for a story, whereas now they might pay 200 or 300. So not only to Maxine's point earlier, has there been, you know, this tremendous amount of travel writing that's now out there, the prices, you know, what you're paid has just dropped. Tell me my first my first stories, for example, for a Bride magazine, I was paid $1,500 plus 300 for each photo. The good old days. Yeah, the good old days. Maxine, Diane, any last minute thoughts before, like I said, I turn it back over to Teran. Oh, I think I think also to add to that, the day of the press trips is over to write all the perks that went with being a professional travel writer. But I would just encourage anybody who wants to dip their toes into travel writing to really do it, because it's a wonderful when you write down what your own thoughts and feelings are about a place, you are strengthening your sense of self and who you are. And that's a very important process. It makes you slow down. It makes you observe. It makes you, you know, think just a little bit more about what you're experiencing. So I would encourage, you know, try it to that point. Would you like to say how people could study? Are you teaching now? I know you said you teach in general, but are you teaching now? Can I'm not teaching exactly right now? I do teach, I've been teaching at the San Francisco writer salon, which is on both on Balboa Street in San Francisco and in Berkeley, California. I teach children's book writing and I'll be teaching travel writing, but I don't have the dates yet or anything. Yes. OK, but people can go to MaxineSher.com is your website. Absolutely. And they can contact me for more information. OK, and Diane, you are at DianeLeboa.com. And Karen. It's a beautiful website created by Matthew Felix. OK, thank you. I did not create it. Somebody else created it, but I did I did take it to the next level. Yes, I spruced it up. I didn't create it, but I did spruce it up. So thank you for that shout out, Diane. And thank you, Maxine. Thank you, Diane. This is great. I love talking about Afghanistan. Thank you, everybody for coming. Yeah. So, Taryn, would you like to wrap things up for us? Yeah, I just wanted to, you know, thank everyone for attending tonight. And thank you, Diane and Maxine and Matthew for sharing your your insights. I mean, I'm ready to go somewhere and and write about it. Go, girl. Perfect. Perfect. That's it. And I just want to reassure everyone that the video for this event will be posted on our YouTube channel. And since you all have made reservations via Eventbrite, I will send you an email shortly today, not today, not tonight. No, it's late. Yeah, they were already here. They don't need the link. They were already here. But but I'll be in touch with the link to the video. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. Thank you, Taryn. Thanks Mechanics Institute. Thank you. Bye, everyone. Have a nice evening. Bye bye.