of the duo that organizes this series. Jessica Burton, the executive director of the Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative is my partner in crime for the series. We're delighted to be in our third year. This is our last presentation of the season. We are taking our little summer recess. Everyone can enjoy their warm Wednesday, main evenings, and we'll see you back here in September. Tonight, we're very excited to have John Hagan, the president of management to be our last speaker of the series. Welcome, John. Thank you. When I showed up about five o'clock, the room was full. Chairs all the way to back, I thought, this is great. I didn't know it was gonna be such a popular talk. So anyway, then everybody left and the chairs got put away. But you're here, so thank you for coming this evening. Hearing what I've got to say, and I hope to hear from you as well. So as I go through this presentation, just jump right in if you've got a question or an idea that you'd like to share. Some of you, see if I ever heard of Man-O-Map before, just, okay, there's a few. Okay, that's really good. So let me explain who we are. We're a science-driven, nonprofit sustainability organization. We were founded, this is our 50th year. We were founded in the little town of Man-O-Map on the south shore of Massachusetts, part of Plymouth, Mayflower, The Rock, and all that, Man-O-Map is there. And we started out as an avian, a bird ecological research organization, and over the years we grew into what much more than just birds, really a sustainability organization. Because we realized we actually couldn't save birds if all we ever did was work on birds. We had to start engaging the rest of the world. And so really about 25, about midway in our evolution, we started to branch out and say we need to be working with the for-profit, even though we're a nonprofit, we need to be working with the for-profit sector. It's really in the driver's seat for how we humans use resources, and we built a lot of programs around engagement with the for-profit sector. And now that's about half our work, is with the for-profit sector, with everything from fishermen, to institutional investors, to the grocery sector. Hannaford is one of our partners here in Maine. Farmers, port authorities in Argentina, our work now spans pretty much the entire Western Hemisphere. So if you don't know much about us, go to our website, learn more. There's some information out on the table. Pick up our most recent magazine and learn a little bit more about us. This talk that I'm doing this evening is something that's been in progress for probably eight or nine years now. But I gave it, I gave the most recent iteration just a little while ago to my staff in Manimat, at the headquarters. I've got to say, we also have an office in Brunswick, so I go back and forth every week to Mastery's that live in Maine. But I gave the talk to our staff and one of my department, the head of our climate services department, said, John, that is the most depressing talk I've ever heard. So the good news is, I got that memo earlier, so I've improved it for you this evening. But also I'm really proud of the fact that my staff, don't mind telling me exactly what they think about my talks. So here we go. I am going to take you down through the Valley of the Shadow of Death for a little while before I bring you back up to the Promised Land. I promise we'll end on a positive note, but there's a lot of dark things that we need to talk about, sort of coming out of social psychology these days that try to explain what's going on in the world. I promise you I've got a solution. And I'm gonna tell you, it's only eight words, I'm gonna tell you now, in case you fall asleep, later on in the presentation, if you just remember this, you'll have all you need to know. Now, I'm a scientist, I'm an ecologist by training, so I can say this was some credibility. For a long time, we thought that science was what mattered that we needed to lead with our knowledge. And what we've discovered is if we want science put to use, we need to lead with the relationship first, quality relationship based on honesty and integrity, then science will be used. So I'm gonna talk a lot about this tonight, but that's all you need to remember. I'll come back to this at the end, that's my take home message. Now where this all started for me, this subject started for me, was in the Maine North Woods about 1992. And I was still back in my bird research days. Manomet was very interested in what impacts forestry, forest practices were having on bird populations. There were a lot of declines at the continental scale, and many of the species declining used forests. So I was in Massachusetts at the time, I said, well, who owns the forest in our part of the world? We should be working with them in understanding what's going on. Well, if you know Maine, I'm assuming you're all living Maine now, or spend most of your time here. And you know the northern half of Maine is just a big blank spot on the map. There are no dirt roads, but there are no paved roads. And you know, the towns, Greenville and Millinocket and Ashland are kind of on the edge.  It's growing and producing trees and paper and timber. So I said, well, we should start working with the timber industry, understand what forest practices are doing to birds. And we did, and the timber industry was very receptive. And we studied just about everything there was to study at the time, spent a lot of time in the remote parts of northern Maine. And after three years, I discovered that this was the mid 90s. Is anybody here in the mid 90s? It's okay to rate. Anybody go back that far? All right, thank you. Forestry was a big contentious issue in the 90s. And one of the big issues was clear cutting. There was a lot of public outcry over clear cutting, like what you see in this aerial photograph. And so we wanted to know the impacts of clear cutting on bird populations. Did lots and lots of so-called point counts in clear cuts and middle-aged forest and mature forest and old-growth forest. We covered the whole gamut. And after about three years of work, our central conclusion was clear cuts are actually pretty good for birds. And they're not good for some species, but they're good for others. Like they're not good for the oven bird, which is shown here. But if you're a chestnut-sided warbler, they love clear cuts and the scrubby regeneration that comes back from them. And there's lots of other species that like that young forest after a clear cut. So I was a lot younger in 1992. I didn't know a whole lot, but I knew how to count birds and do science. And so I just sort of, I started giving talks to groups like this about the amaze that clear cuts weren't biological deserts after all. Like you read about in the newspaper and magazines that they actually had ecological advantages. And yes, there were places you didn't wanna do a clear cut, but there were places you could. And that young growth is a part of a natural process too that creates habitat for birds. So anyway, as a young lad at the time what caught me off guard was that it was not a popular message about birds using the clear cuts had any positive effects at all. And I just didn't understand that. I thought this is really good news. Everybody ought to be happy about this. And everybody was not happy about that. And I just couldn't figure out, wait a minute, this is science trying to add information to the public discourse. And there was a backlash to it. And I have basically spent the last 25 years trying to figure out how science works or doesn't work in our society. And I'm gonna show a lot of evidence that it's gotten worse rather than got better in the last 25 years. But in, and I was kind of alone and felt awfully alone thinking about these kinds of things till about 2004 when a guy named Daniel Sarowitz published a paper titled, How Science Makes Environmental Controversies Worse. And I thought that is great because that's exactly what I did in 1993 with clear cuts in birds. And here was a peer-reviewed science paper that started to dig into what's going on with science and how could it possibly be that it makes some things worse, some public conversations worse. And of course, the scientific community just raked Sarowitz over the coals for suggesting that science isn't the be all and end all. So anyway, but at least it gave me a little bit of license to think about this some more and try to understand it more. And really, since that paper, he's an ecologist by training or I think he's an ecologist by training natural resources. But since then, the social psychology literature in the last decade has just exploded in helping us to understand how people process information. And I'm gonna talk about that. And hopefully have a, I'm tangled up here. Hopefully have a solution. Now, fast forward to the about eight years ago, Manomet was every organization, if you're around for decades like we are, you gotta do the rebranding thing because you need new logo and you need new language and all that. And we were in this process of needing to rebrand, we called it a brand refresh because the board didn't wanna do rebranding but it was a brand refresh. And so we got a new logo and hired a firm from New York, fancy firm called Fenton from New York City that came and helped us do a brand refresh. And the principle that the lead, the project lead working with us, her name was Jennifer Hahn. And she was giving like branding 101 lecture to the staff at Manomet. And oh, this is great. Got an authority from New York talking to us about branding. They specialized in non-profit work. And Jennifer said during like 10 minutes into her presentation to the staff, if facts mattered, we wouldn't be here. I said, Jennifer, you're talking to a roomful scientist. Facts matter, you can't say that to us. But her point was really well taken because what she was essentially saying is look, we studied sustainability and birds and climate change and a lot of serious stuff. And she said, she was saying, look, if people just read what you write and publish, it would be a no brainer, we'd go fix all those things. But since we're not, apparently you need something more than just getting your science out there. So anyway, that really, I remember it's a purpose, it's that quote of what Jennifer said that day and I've been thinking about it ever since. And more recently, some of you may know Daniel Kahneman. He just won the Nobel Prize in economics I think a couple of years ago. And with respect to climate change, he said, if you were to design a problem that the mind is not equipped to deal with, it's climate change. It's distant, it's abstract, it's contested. It is not going to be solved by presenting more evidence. Wait a minute, this is the biggest issue maybe humanity has ever faced and more science isn't what's stopping us, he's saying. So okay, well maybe we need to think about this a little bit differently. Then I think it was about a year ago, a little over a year ago there was a paper in the journal Science, the premier scientific journal in the world that had an article that said fake news spreads faster than true news. So that's problematic. If the truth doesn't move as fast as falsehoods, what do we do about that? Why is that going on? And just in the last five years or so, there's been a lot about sort of anti-intellectualism, anti-science and you just got to wonder, well what's going on with that as well? And everybody can, might have your own hypothesis about what's going on. But there's, I mean things have changed in the sort of 30 years that I've been as a scientist and functioning as a scientist. A lot has changed and it's a strange world we're living in right now. So anyway, these are two really good books about the trends that we're seeing. This is another one. I like a book where the title just, you don't even have to read the book because the title is a sentence and you don't need to go any further than that. But there's a lot that's been written about this and you just, at least for me, I just like I want to stop and think, well what in the world is going on here? I need to understand this. And it goes all the way back to the birds in the clear cut thing that I experienced way back. So I want to talk a little, this is kind of a very high level talk. You might say a little bit abstract, but I think at the end there will be practical things you can do or think about in terms of reversing these trends that we're talking about. But, and I've explored this whole subject from all different angles. And these are just things I put together. You may feel differently and that's fine. But I think part of what I see is going on is an erosion of trust. And there have actually been surveys, survey done that goes back to 1970 asking the question of the public. Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can't be too careful in dealing with people? And it gives five different options. And so this is a graph of the percent of respondents who say can trust. This can trust each other. So over four or five decades now there is an erosion of trust in each other in our society. And I think this is part of the story. People just don't trust each other anymore. People don't trust scientists as much as they did before. Well, speaking of scientists, what about, this is sort of trusting each other overall. What about trust in scientists, people like me? Okay, well, maybe scientists are doing, the data don't go back but a couple of decades, almost three decades. But what about trust in science? Well, that looks not so bad. Maybe we're holding our own in the face of the larger issues in society. Well, let's see. I guess I'll go one step further. I don't know quite what to say about this, although what if you break out that one graph I just showed you by political party? Okay, so this is the same question but just Democrats answering the question. So it looks like scientists trust with Democrats is getting better over time. So if you've got any statistical thoughts at all and you're integrating the previous graph I showed with this graph, you know what I'm gonna show you next, don't you? So with Republicans, the scientific community trust is decreasing over time. Now what's up with that? I don't know what's up. I'm not gonna tell you the answer to what's up with this but it's a really, I think it's an interesting insight into what may be going on with science in our society. So why are these, if trust is eroding and our belief in science is, our belief in facts is a society is eroding. What, you know, really, who cares? Does it matter very much? You know, just trend. Well the problem I see with it is if you ignore facts you can actually get things wrong. It can cost you money. It can, if you've got any economics social or environmental values, things that you care about, that you wanna keep, you kinda need data to not make terrible mistakes. So, and secondly, so that's one thing. We just, don't we need facts to not make mistakes? They can be very expensive. But secondly, when we're running into really complex problems like say climate change, that economic, social, environmental, it's a tangled, complicated, complex problem, you actually need to come together as a society to solve that. Democrats can't solve climate change. Republicans can't solve climate change. It's going to take both of them, both types. It's gonna take everybody to solve that problem. So when we become polarized like this, it makes it harder for us to tackle complicated problems and yet we've got some of the most complicated problems ever. The timing is terrible for us to be so polarized when our problems, the complex problems are sorta through the roof right now. So it's not a good trend. Remember I'm gonna solve it at the end. So hang in, hang in there. But first we're going down into this valley of the shadow that I talked about. I've done a lot of reading, especially in the last decade, read lots of books, read lots of scientific papers. What I've tried to do in the next 15 minutes is take some of the essential things I've learned from all this reading and give it to you and the short version. And there are seven different things that I wanna talk about. I could have done a lot more, but these are the big ones as far as I'm concerned. One of the best books I read that really cleared it up, cleared up a lot for me and explained the buzzsaw that I ran into, that's kind of a pine, buzzsaw I ran into with the clear cuts and birds back in 1992 was explained by this book by Roger Pielke called The Honest Broker. And he talks in this book, it's a short book if you're interested in science and how science works, I recommend it. He breaks issues down just simplistically into what he calls abortion politics and I changed, he called it tornado politics, I changed it to cancer politics because it suits my argument better, but it's the same principle. And what he, the point he made was that if you've got an issue that needs science that we all agree on the outcome, more science is good, people will embrace that. So who here wouldn't like to cure cancer?  Yep, seein' noise, okay. So if we had more science that helped us understand how to cure cancer, we'd be for that, yay. Then take another issue like abortion which has been in the news again recently as you probably know, and think about, is there any science that we could, scientists could produce that would change your view on abortion? Probably not. So in fact, think about it, when is the last time you changed your mind about a major societal issue? We don't change our minds very often, no matter what. So what I, what this book helped me realize was the clear cutting thing, I had birds in clear cuts, I could take people out, you can count them yourself. I'm not making this up, they're singing in clear cuts. It did not, it was an emotional issue for a lot of people. And so science just didn't help. In fact, it kind of made things worse. So this book explained to me there are issues where science can help and everybody will be for it and issues where more science probably isn't gonna help. And it helped me start to think now, is this gonna be one of those or one of those issues? And it just sort of gave me a little comfort in knowing, it wasn't all me, it was sort of the emotional elements of the issue that I was working on at the time. Okay, so that's one, think of, if you're struggling with an issue or you're debating an issue with someone, think about whether if you're debating with somebody it's probably an abortion politics type issue. Climate science, climate change has unfortunately become kind of one of those type topics, which is strange because it wasn't 20 years ago. It's shifted somehow. All right, second thing I learned and some of these, like five years ago, a lot of these ideas, confirmation bias, you didn't, nobody really knew about or heard about much. The social psychology has come so far that you hear about this a lot now in the press, in the media. So you may be familiar with some of these ideas. Confirmation biases is the idea that we all, even scientists, seek information that reinforce what we already believed to begin with. And we gravitate to knowledge, we gravitate to the facts that support what we believe. And we tend not to gravitate to the facts that dispute what we believe. It's normal, we all do it. Scientists do it, it's just, it's what it is. We, you know, I could say as scientists we work really hard to try not to do that when somebody says something, spent a lot of time thinking about climate change. So when somebody challenges climate change, I try to read what they're saying and understand it because I wanna know where they're coming from. Is there merit to it? So I try to train myself to pay careful attention to the things that don't conform to what I believe. Maybe I'll change my mind, I don't know. But anyway, we all have this confirmation bias thing going on and it's good to be aware of it. Okay, passion is the reason, is the slave of passions. David Hume, a philosopher back in the mid 1700s, had this quote, you may have heard it, this quote has been used a lot. And so it goes back a couple of centuries. But the idea is that we think we're reasoning rational, logical beings and we can be, but our emotions are gonna win every single time. And it's related to the confirmation bias and absorbing information that supports us. So it's important to remember if you're emotional about a particular issue, watch out, because you're especially vulnerable to confirmation bias at that point. And if we weren't emotional beings, what use would there be in living really? So we're gonna be emotional, but we need to, Hume was saying we need to recognize that our emotional brain is in the driver's seat and our reasoning brain is just serving our emotional brain. Okay, next idea, there are only seven, so hang on. If only we could educate them. I don't know how many times I've heard this in my career. And it kind of drives me crazy to, partly because if, well, I'll explain, in this study done about a decade ago by a Harvard, I'm sorry, Yale, I think Harvard because I go to Boston all the time, it's that other school, Yale. And the study hypothesized, this has to do with perceived risk of climate change in relation to how much your scientific literacy. So they hypothesized that if you have low scientific literacy, if you can't answer the 10 basic science questions about something and you score low, that your perception of climate risk would also be low. And that if you knew more science and got it right, your perception of risk would be higher. You get the graph, it's their hypothesis, it made perfect sense to me as anybody thinks about it. You know more, yeah, oh, now I've got the facts. I'm worried about that now. So then they went out and did, this was their hypothesis, they collected data and this is what they got. So what's up with that? How is it that the more literate you are, the more scientifically literate you are, really there's no change, maybe a little bit decrease in your perception of risk. So the reason I'm emphasizing this is because if the more knowledgeable people, more knowledge isn't seeming to affect how people view the issue. So as a scientist I'm thinking, wait a minute, I thought science was supposed to be helping. It's not, I need to know why. Because my whole life is about putting science to use and if it's not working, I need to know why. Because maybe I shouldn't just keep producing more of it. So again, why is, why, why would this happen? So they, fortunately the researchers had other information about the participants and their scientists, so their social scientists, so they have to make up crazy names for their study groups and they call one group the egalitarian communitarians, and the other group the hierarchical individualists. And I would just simplify it to say Democrats and Republicans or liberals and conservatives because I don't know why they have to, it's kind of like why you have to make up names for really, I think they actually had the political persuasion of the people involved in the study as well. But essentially the green line that, let's just call them Democrats for the sake of making it simple tonight, they already believed there was a lot of risk, whether they had low scientific literacy or high, they perceived the risk to be high. And if you were a conservative or Republican, you perceived climate science as a low, climate change is low risk, didn't matter how much you knew about it. So what's going on that your knowledge is not actually affecting your perception of risk in this case? That's why I was, if only we could educate them, they're already educated. That's not the issue. So what is the issue? And I don't know that I have, I don't know that I actually have the answer to that. So I'm just posing the question, that's really strange. All right, number five, the backfire effect is, I'm gonna ask who's heard of the backfire effect? Okay, one, it's been in the news more lately and I asked a room of 400 people about a year ago and nobody raised their hand at all. So we're getting better. The backfire effect is related to all of these other things that I've been talking about. In fact, all these, I'm up to five, they're all related in one way or another.  And let's say you tell the facts you know about whatever the subject to someone that might disagree with you a little bit. Maybe you don't know what their position is but you share your factual knowledge with them and the result is they actually become more entrenched against you than if you just hadn't said anything at all. This gets back to if only you could educate them. Well, you just tried.  It's called the backfire effect. It's been well studied and replicated in lots of social psychology studies in the last five or 10 years. So, I mean this just drives me crazy. If you, as a scientist, if I share my knowledge, what I know about birds and clear cuts and it just makes things worse, what am I supposed to do with the rest of my time on the planet? Well, I don't know but it's nice to know that this effect happens because how many times have you tried to argue with someone over the Thanksgiving dinner table when you got relatives you wish weren't there and you're debating some particular issue and you think, well, I'll just let them know what I know and then I'll show them. And it just gets worse.  So, it's called the backfire effect. Now, there have been a couple studies since recently, 2016, that have shown it does not always backfire. And I wish I could tell you, I don't know yet why this happens, but there are circumstances where you can share facts and I think it's where it's a de-emotionalized, that's a word, where there's not a lot of emotion, you can share facts and you can actually get through or maybe somebody's trying to share facts with you and trying to get through to you. If you take the emotion out of it, it's easier and you may not get that backfire effect. So, that's a good lesson because knowing about the backfire effect, if you can get the emotion out of the conversation, it might work better. One of the things I've discovered is on climate change because I don't know where you all stand on climate change but I'll believe it because I was right up on it. But a lot of people don't and so it's one of the abortion, climate change, vaccines. These are kind of issues that, what's up with them? They're issues that we struggle with in society today.  Why aren't you passionate about your work? Well, yes I am. But if I introduce the emotion into it, it's going nowhere with who's sitting across the table from me. So I take the emotion out of it and I also try to focus on, the mechanism of whatever I'm talking about. Like with climate change, one of the things that works and if you find yourself in a conversation with someone about climate change, you might use it sometime. I mean, what's going on with climate change is not complicated. We've known the physics of climate change for like 130 years and what happens is when shortwave radiation comes into the atmosphere and bounces off the earth, it gets converted to longwave radiation. Infrared radiation, hang with me, you're gonna be able to use this, I promise. And greenhouse gas molecules like CO2, the bonds that connect the carbon to the oxygen start vibrating when they're hit by infrared radiation as opposed to the ultraviolet that comes in. These molecules vibrate. It's not your fault, they just, they do. So it's not a, you see how you kind of take the emotion out of it and it's just physics that these bonds vibrate and so you put more CO2 in the atmosphere, you got more molecules vibrating and when things vibrate, they heat up. So if you can get people to understand, I guess this is sharing science, but you're kind of taking them into a zone of discovery and you're leaving the emotion behind and if you can get to that place, then you'll be more effective. So the backfire effect. Okay, groups, groups, bind and blind, this really, one of the best books I've ever read was this book called A Righteous Mind, Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. And his, just great book, covers a lot of this social psychology from many different angles, but he says, he makes the case that we, when we hang out with people who are like us, we tend to reinforce our positions, we tend to reinforce our entrenchment or belief about a particular issue. So groups bind us together. We like hanging out with people who see the world like we do, which is sort of natural to want to do that. So groups, like-minded groups, bind each other together, if you will, but they also blind us to alternative viewpoints. So groups, bind and blind. And he makes the case that you really need to hang out with people who are different from you. And so I've never done this before, but I think I'll try it and see how it goes. You can not participate if you don't want to, so you can opt out. But let me just ask, how many, think about a political spectrum, left, Democrat, right, extremes. Let me just say, raise your hand if you're willing, if you are just somewhere a little left of center or more left of center. Okay, thank you for participating. Now, raise your hand if you're a little bit right or a lot right. Okay, see, that's a problem, because you're all alike, or you're somewhat alike. So we tend to hang out, you tend to come to talks like this because there's probably some liberal progressive talking about science. But it's not good if we're hanging out with people who just think about the world or see the world like we do. And I would say at Manimat, we actually, by design, seek out people who see the world differently from us because we need them. We need, number one, we just need them. We need them participating. In whatever it is we're doing. But secondly, we need their perspective and their knowledge. And they always have a different perspective and a different knowledge set than we have. And we can't solve the problem without them, usually. So we learned a long time ago, don't hang out with people like ourselves. Hang out with people who are different from us. And being a nonprofit, it's really easy to find people who see the world differently in the for-profit sector because usually they're driven for lots of good reasons by some financial goal either they're being told to or... So they've got a financial thing they really have to attend to. Well, those of us in the nonprofit sector are just trying to make the world a better place. If it takes 50 years, that's fine. We're not in any big rush. So it's an entirely different way of looking at the world. But what we've discovered is when we partner with a for-profit, they get things done really fast where it takes us forever to get anything done. No one, they've got resources and money and people and they can move, but you... And this is the secret. You don't need science. You need a relationship of trust with that person. Okay, so the last thing that I learned I'll maybe the most disturbing and then I swear I'll stop telling you these things. A paper in 2011 that argued that we humans have evolved to win and not to be right or correct. This one really bothers me and I can't... I don't know what to do with it. It's a good thing I got the silver bullet solution because this would otherwise drive me crazy. But if you think about it, think about politicians who are just very charismatic or say are very persuasive. It doesn't really matter whether they're telling you the truth or not, the facts don't matter too much. Is there effectiveness as a presenter? So I've really been trying to improve my presentation skills ever since I learned this because apparently what the facts don't matter. My presentation matters. So this is a good point to remember because the somewhere in human evolution we must have passed the point and we're just not gonna get killed by the lion. We figured out how to solve that. So those problems went away and your effectiveness at persuading the tribe became more relevant to leaving offspring behind. So it's kind of a plausible idea. Churchill put it best, I love this quote by Churchill, of all the talents bestowed upon men, he's sorry for the faux pas and not including women because you're all guilty too. Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory. He who enjoys it wields power more durable than that of a great king. Same thing that the scientific paper was trying to say as well. So being a persuasive presenter matters a lot and probably more than the facts. Okay, so I'm gonna transition because this is where this seemed to be going. We're not actually doomed, but I found this book and I haven't read it, but I thought it would make a good transition to the next section. So let's go back to my line lead with the relationship, follow with the science because I have found that if I follow this, all that other stuff one through seven doesn't matter. I can overcome all that stuff if I just follow this rule. And I'm not saying it's only eight words, it's easy to write, it's harder to do, but I've gotten good at it over the years. And so Manimat, my organization, we work with fishermen, investors, dairy farmers, I mentioned some of these earlier timber companies, retailers, small businesses, big businesses, crayfish farmers in Louisiana, ranchers. It actually tends to be, it's on average, I'm not casting aspersions, but it tends to be a conservative group of folks that are in these fields, not all of them of course. But we, the timber companies out west were a really big challenge to have a conversation about climate change with, but we succeeded because we built a relationship with trust first. And eventually we were able to talk about the science. But if you think about it, and the way we think about it at Manimat, like I said earlier, we need, for the subject areas we work in, we need all these people helping. We can't do it without them. So you can either take them all on, which some groups will do, I don't have a problem with that, it's just not what we do. So what we try to figure out is build a relationship of trust with them and then get something done. And it has never failed if we put relationship first. Then science just takes off, that's the beauty of it.  Because it's not that science doesn't matter, it's just it's not enough.  It's gotta be about the relationship. So my advice for solving, if you're sort of struggling like I am and with the world today and like, what is going on? Have we all taken leave of our senses? These are my three things you can do. These are what I do and they work. Build a relationship with someone that sees the world differently from you. It takes a lot of fortitude and patience and it takes not talking a lot to do this. But try to find somebody that's, you know, bearable that really does see the world differently from you and hang in there with them. Develop a relationship with them, listen to them and you will be pleasantly surprised at what you can get done with them. It might take months, it might take years, but it works. The second thing that we do that works is come up with a specific project with a very specific objective that you can all both or all agree to that requires both of you to solve and just get to work on that project. And if you, like I did that with, I don't get to do a lot of research anymore, but I started a project four or five years ago with clam diggers in Maine trying to figure out why the clam populations were declining and this thing called the green crab is eating the clams and it's a long story, but it took me two years to develop a relationship with that constituency so that we could do anything on the ground. But once I had that relationship, there was nothing we couldn't do. So we started working on all kinds of ideas to solve that problem. So my point is sometimes it can take years. You kind of gotta know where you wanna go, what your destination is, and you're probably not gonna end up where you wanted to go. That's the other thing, when you build relationships like this, they're not actually going where you wanna go. That's the other thing you have to reconcile at some point. They're not going where you want them to go and you're not going where they want you to go. You end up going somewhere that's completely different but they're both of you. So yeah, that's okay, we can do that. So you gotta let go of whatever that destination that you want them, it doesn't work. That doesn't work in this approach. You gotta let go. And third, it just permeates everything I do and we do it man and man and it seems silly, it's only one word, but we do a lot of listening. And I know things and as a scientist, know a lot of technical facts. I just don't talk about that stuff until the time is right. I do a lot of listening. And it takes a lot of patience to listen, a lot of patience to listen, especially when you know that that's just not true. You wanna say it's not just not true. But you're better off, you're better off, it's just not saying it right now. If you build a relationship of trust somewhere down the line, two months, three months, six months, you can share that thing you know and it will be received entirely differently. Afterwards. So listening, it's like listening to my clam digger friends, it took me a while to see the world they saw. It took a lot of work and I just, there was language I didn't, there's all kinds of language, colorful language, but just words and things that they knew about the flats that I didn't know and could never have known, that they taught me over time and I just did a lot of listening. And once they trusted me, anything was possible. So I've seen this, so I don't know, it's like I said, the world seems to have taken leave of its senses, polarization and politics and we seem more divided than ever. All the data support that we're more divided than ever. But to me, this is the solution and it's not easy, it's one by one, it's bottom up stuff, not some policy or law passed by Congress. It's bottom up stuff of building relationships. And so even though I'm a scientist, I think relationships are our problem, not technical. This climate change is not a technical problem, it's a relational problem to me. We know how to solve it right now. We're not solving it because we don't have the relationships that we need to solve it. So I didn't get that, so I had it on here, but not on there. Anyway, this is a great book on how to listen. So why would you need a book about listening? But this can help you with that. So the point is there's a lot of hope but it's gonna be, I think, through relationships and probably not passing laws. It's not that regulations and laws are bad or wrong, it's just, boy, do we need better relationships in our society given the challenges that we have right now. Okay, so I'm gonna stop, because that's all I have to say. And if you've got questions or thoughts or comments or examples of something you've done where, yeah, that worked for me or that didn't work for me, can you help me understand why? Be happy to. In your work, what has been your experience in building relationships with indigenous people and tribes? Yeah, in most of the areas that we work, we haven't crossed with those parts of civil society right now, so not a lot is the answer. Some of our fisheries work in the down east part of Maine does intersect with indigenous people and that's going really well, actually, because indigenous people have a good, better understanding than many of sort of how natural systems work, especially fishery systems. Would you explain a little more about the projects that you... Some examples, good question, because I tend to enjoy the high level stuff and you just, can you tell me some specifics? So I mentioned the clam project work, we're trying to, we're out in the mud getting dirty, trying to figure out how to save soft shell clam fishery from green crabs and we've got a study to cover the flats with netting, fine mesh netting that actually does keep the green crabs out.  We haven't been able to get it to work financially yet because you gotta buy the net and you gotta buy seed clams and it costs money and if you're a clam digger, you need at least, you need to double your return to put the investment in it, but at least we got the tech, the raw technique down. So that's one example. Rebuilding a fishery that and the green crabs are coming on because of climate change. So seems like everything's leaked to climate change. Another one is I mentioned Haniford earlier, so we've got a project with the grocery sector whereby we go into, we work with whatever the chain is and go into the stores and show them really easy things they could do to save, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and save money. So it's, and they love it because it's fun. It's not like some sustainability person coming and telling them what to do. So, oh, I didn't, I see the freezer doors were open. If I just had an employee go around every hour and close those freezer doors, they could save $5,000 a year in energy costs. I'm sorry, I'm really, you got me going into the weeds, so I'm gonna go. Another example in a grocery store is you ever been in the produce section where sometimes the carrots are falling over the edge of the shelf and they're covering the vent that recirculates air that keeps the vegetables frozen, or not frozen but cool. So when produce is falling over those vents like that, it makes the system work harder and uses more energy and releases more greenhouse gases. So we say, okay, every couple of hours have the person in the produce section go and open those vents up and you'll save a lot of money. One of your, part of your presentation, I think it was seven groups of man-mints trying to work with that are maybe don't see things to exactly how man-mint does. It was like timber companies and tailors and all. Can you give a concrete example there of how working with one of those groups, your objective or man-mint's objective changed and the entity you were working with also changed? I remember the timber company thing that we've got going on now is called the Climate Smart Land Network. And the idea is to engage timber companies like I did a long time ago in Maine, but nationally who own a lot of timber land in the US to get them to begin to manage their forest land so that it's resilient to the climate of 2050 and 2100 say. So what we want, first of all forest, the, let's say do the forestry lesson in 15 seconds. Forest contain a lot of carbon, keep it out of the atmosphere, filter a lot of water and forest produce clean water for us. They have a big role to play. It is habitat for songbirds like I showed earlier. So forests are really important for a lot of things society cares about. All you want is clean water, you care about forest. So we man-mint want forest to be able to make it through the next century with the changing climate that we know is already happening. Well, so we wanted to engage the timber companies because they own land, they got people, they're out managing land every day. Wouldn't it be nice if they had the science to manage it in a way that makes their forest more resilient? So that was our objective. So one of the companies we wanted to participate was in Birmingham, Alabama. And I'm from the South, so I can talk about the South. But Birmingham, Alabama is like the anti-climate state in the Union. Look at any pole climate. Alabama would be the last place you would go. Well, anyway, so we were sitting in the boardroom with the president of this timber company and I was saying, you know, we want you to join the Climate Smart Land Network.  And he said, well, John, you seem like a nice guy, but you know, we watch the news and read the papers and one day it seems like climate change is a problem and the next day somebody says it isn't. And so we just don't know what to believe. And I said, you're right. How could you know what to believe when you're getting messages like that? It's a confusing time. And so what I was doing, I didn't realize it at the time, I read the social psychology later, I was just trying to get through that meeting and survive. But what I was doing was legitimizing his view of what he was seeing. And that defuse and sort of lowered the tension right away because I said, you know, you're right. You should be confused based on what you're seeing. If you join the network, you won't be confused anymore because we make it so easy to understand what's going on and you can put that to work in your land base at your own pace.  So a week later, they call and say, sign us up.


And so talk to me then about that funder gain versus the societal good. What does that mean in the eyes of Nia and Brittany and how do we really address this in our community? Brittany, are you ready to bring up our favorite funder to hate on? Sure. I'm ready. This is such a good one because they're so huge and everybody knows. So the classic example, it's Amazon and Amazon Smile. Amazon Smile is all about funder gain.  When the reality is the societal good that they do through those funds are minuscule. It's like 0.00001%. Yes, right. So they're getting all this like free publicity and really they are. Yeah.  And so you're able to say, hey, look at this company doing all these great things. When in reality, we know that they're actually doing a ton of harm in all these other ways. Even basic ones, like they're not paying taxes which would amount to way more than any other philanthropic giving. So we know that there are plenty of funders out there that are continuing to utilize these power dynamics that shift so that they are getting way more gain than any community would. What do you say to that? Well, I would say that nonprofits, their biggest asset is their reputation and their mission. And we're so quick to give it away. Oh, that was powerful. I feel like everyone needs to hear that again. So as a nonprofit, our biggest asset is our reputation and our mission and the work that you're doing and we're so quick to give it away.


All right, we're just here at book soup. Just bought a how to win friends and influence people looks good, right? Ali, yeah, and she got a kitchen, I mean not a studio 54 book She likes to party. I Get asked a lot, you know, what's the secret if you're completely broke if you're trying to do big things without a doubt your ability to Have powerful social skills, whether it's networking whether it's finding mentors finding investors It all comes down to a few principles always use by the way $100 bookmarks. Why? It's not to show off is to remind you that if you read this book, there's a lot of value in it not just Financially but in all ways in life. So we're gonna head back to the office here. Let me see if I can get you in brought the Ferrari out So I you know watch the edge here don't scrape So the most powerful things that I've learned when it comes to social skills You all right you in there? I'm gonna try to sneak in here without getting hit. Whoo Sunset Boulevard's a bitch The number one hold on guys Sneaking all right, so When you're first starting out, it's very easy to get intimidated, right? Why?  I don't know what happened to my hair the top down on this thing spiders are awesome, but Don't go too fast. Anyway So the first thing is don't get intimidated. You got to stay cool every human is on the same path No matter how powerful they are today in a hundred years. They'll be dead. Keep that in mind No matter how beautiful somebody is They won't be beautiful in a hundred years. All of us are on the same path And since we're all on the same and I actually read an interesting book I think it's by Mladenow the guy the physicist from Caltech and he said all humans are descended from 70 women Humans are very close to each other So don't get intimidated because being intimidated and showing a lot of weakness to people Will inevitably turn them off. No one wants to be around somebody who's desperate. So number two Is don't be cocky So sometimes people are either too shy and intimidated or they're flipside You can't post up one time. I made a mistake. I had a billionaire guy And it's what the first Ferrari I ever had not this one another one And I showed up at the airport and I was trying to act all cool like I was you know Can you press the start button? And by the way, I shouldn't talk too much. Probably nobody wants to hear from me Holly's a little bit shy, but you moved here from Kentucky. I did you were miss, Kentucky So she knows Donald Trump If you're looking at the political race, but you didn't know anybody here and you had to network You know And you're not she doesn't really get into you don't get intimidated. You're pretty cool under pressure She didn't even need this book. She even need those hundred dollar bills. She's a capricorn though Capricorn's always appreciate a hundred dollar bills bookmarks Anyway, so The number two thing, you know when I rolled up on this guy in Ferrari at the airport He was a billionaire. It didn't impress him. He was like dude. I got he told me he goes I have a fleet of Ferraris. He's like what'll impress me about you is you just showing me what you know Which leads to number three? You got to know stuff and a lot of people say Ty How can I you know be persuasive?  So the beauty is no matter where you are in the world. You could be Broke like I was broke sleeping on a couch 40 bucks in your 47 bucks in my bank account You could be in the same situation dead whatever it is You can still know a lot of stuff because you can pick up a book you can go to put you can go on YouTube now You can start to become knowledgeable and you don't have to be knowledgeable about everything Warren Buffett The billionaire investor says just have a circle of confidence. Just keep your knowledge in a tight circle and you'll impress people So there's a lot more things check out the book You've never read it before right She's gonna read it And along with that that's a badass coffee table book if you never heard the story I used to own a lot of nightclubs, so this is like the original nightclub studio 54 By the way, check out this shirt somebody made for me the good life health wealth love and happiness and it's got my Website somebody mailed this so whoever mailed this to me Thank you for the president and you want to hold the camera while I drive for a second I Can't go too fast. There's a lot of people on sunset All right, that's how fast you could go people always are like dude. Why don't you go fast on these videos? I'm like it's Hollywood guys. You see Phil turn the camera around. That's about how fast you can go So anyway Here you can hold it again. So here's a question for you.   I believe people helped me when I was starting out They didn't always help me with contests or money, but they gave some time They my mentors taught me what they knew and so I believe in investing back in other people So I'm doing this thing so subscribe here Wherever you're watching this make sure you subscribe because I'm just gonna pick randomly from the subscribers every Friday And I'm doing some flash contest stuffs too and at the end of the year. I'm gonna pick somebody So give him a car. Okay, so anyway subscribe. Oh, by the way, what's the number one thing you ever learned about people dealing with people? Treat others the way you want to be treated old school golden rule can't beat that. All right guys peace out


abakina got the serve to win it? That's the thing. Five, four, Mukavar respect, yeah. All right, tiebreak, live tiebreak, I'll be, it'd be great to have a tiebreak to finish this epic match, but Mukavar's gonna have to break back. Fruvatova sisters, exactly, Nuskova is also one, coming through.  Yeah, she's played like 13 hours this week. It's crazy. And she hasn't looked hurt. Like the tape on her legs, I don't know what that's doing, because whatever it's doing, it's making her, it's almost like numbing her legs because she is not looking injured at all, even though the tape suggests otherwise, she's moving like she's got nothing wrong. Vondrusava, yeah, another one. There's another one. Your thoughts on the winner in both the Men's and Women's Indian Wells? Shriontek and Fritz. Shriontek, by the way, waiting in the back, playing some football, trying to get ready for her match, which is coming up straight after this. So stay tuned. It is coming up next. Okay. Can Rabakana serve this match out? That is the question. Look at this tape, it's just for show. Look, I mean, I wouldn't go that far. I would say it's more for maybe precaution, right? It's caution. Well, she's got her legs taped up, maybe out of a habit or a ritual as well. Some players need to tape up their legs because of, it's superstitious, right? It's something they do and they want to keep the routine and tape the legs up and work the last match. Might as well keep it going. But I think it's probably more precautionary, right? Just in case her legs do feel sore, at least the tape's got it, we'll hold them together, keep them attached. All right, 5-4, Rabakana serving for the match. So we've got a 4-0 Rabakana into the 4-0 Mookova. Back in our Rabakana. Cross court into the slice of Mookova. 4-0 from Rabakana is good. Mookova slices it in to the 4-0 Rabakana. Mookova slices again to the 4-0 Rabakana. Again to the 4-0 Mookova on the stretch. Rabakana, backhand in the net. Love 15. Love 15 now. Number two match points were saved. And what a way to start the day. And an epic day, an epic day today. I think the men's match is a fire. I mean, we've got Sina Fritz. Elkres FAA, I mean, those two matches alone should be semi-finals or even finals, right? Love 15, Mookova trying to get this break back. She's broken a few times today. First serves a fault from Rabakana. Second serve. Second serve is we gotta return.  Mookova with a great return. Love 30. All right. Are we going the distance? Is this really, are we gonna get a break here, Chad? Love 30 as Rabakana serves. Out wide the 4-0 Mookova. Good serve, 4-0 goes in to the 4-0 Mookova. And Mookova hits it out. 15-30, 15-30. Still a chance for Mookova to get this break back. Fiontech eager to showcase day of the road to prediction. Man, it's gonna, is the next, I don't expect the next match to equal this epicness because it's Fiontech and she doesn't usually like to play three-hour matches. She wants to, she likes to play one hour. But I'll tell you what, if the next match is not that good, I mean, I'll be disappointed. But also, I won't be greedy as we had a back-in, a back-in rally sliced there from Mookova into the find of Rybakina. Fiontech Mookova down the line's long, 30-all. Mookova has to get this game. Otherwise she loses. 30-all, 30-all. As we get a serve again, a serve again from Rabakana. She's two serves away from getting out of this match. Get into the semis, her first big tournament since, or big result since the Ashura and Open Final. And her first ever Masters 1000 semis, that's, I mean, that's incredible. She's never made a Masters 1000 semi. All right, 30-all. As we're just serving to the find of Mookova, return goes into the front of Rabakana. Won her from Mookova inside out to the back end of Rabakana. Into the back end of Mookova, Rabakana gets the point.  Rabakana's match point number three to take us, or take us to this Fiontech match and take herself to the semis, tomorrow, semi-finals day, women's, stay tuned. Rabakana, one point away to start in the day off on absolute fire. Again, thank you so much for joining us. Don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already. Biggest match of the week so far. So thank you for that. Three and a half thousand people here. Ridiculous. Anyway, serve. Down the T's and A's. That's how you finish a match. Alina Rabakana gets it done, gets the job done. And look, Mookova, I think you can all agree, is way higher ranked than she should, way lower ranked than she should be. She should be top 30. I mean, we're looking at a top 30 lady, top 20. If she's healthy, but Rabakana's too good. Rabakana too good. She didn't fluke the Australian Open Final and she wins in three GGs. Love that for Rabakana. Okay, so half of the rematch is secured. Rabakana is in. If you're leaving, we'll see you tomorrow for the semis. If you're staying, I'm gonna send you to the next match because we're going to Sfiantec taking on Castella. The winner plays Rabakana and you know what we want. I mean, come on now. I think we all watch Sfiantec, right? We want the rematch. We want the Australian Open rematch because we wanna see that match as many times as possible just like Sabalenke Sfiantec. Even Sabalenke Rabakana, nobody's talking about that final.  Replay the Australian Open, right? Why not? Go over there, talk amongst yourselves. I'll be back in about five to grab, oh, we gotta grab a tea. But man, good fight in nearly three hours for Alina Rabakana. She had to fight. That was a fight. Seven, six, six, seven, six, two, six, six, four. Rabakana gets the win over Mukherba Sfiantec's next.


I came in 1951 and I stayed until 1976. I was in an office where we built the firing tables for the Army weapons systems and I had been teaching school for four years and I was content but my goodness I came down here and got a tremendous increase in pay and that was $3,100 a year. Well the first part of my career I worked as an analyst. My title was research mathematician and you know the expression if you enjoy your work you'll never work a day in your life. Well that was the way it was for me. My college guidance counselor saw the job posted in the local post office in Norfolk. Got a hold of an application, got a phone call, came up for an interview and was selected for the job. And I think that was the main thrust they wanted me to work on was how do we put together an effort to acquire supercomputers. And so I was very happy. I enjoyed my job. It was a nice place to work. The people were wonderful and to think that there is a computer which in my day took up an entire room. Now that same possibility is on something you hold in your hand. Absolutely astounding. I knew nothing about computers. It was totally a new new thing for me but I felt I was up to the challenge and I felt it sounded like really interesting work and real challenge. The problem was that supercomputers were costing about $25 million and you had to get it into the army budget and it might not stay there. So they had had a mixed bag effort of trying to get supercomputed and had to work. So that was one of my first big tasks aside from managing the two groups was how do you put together a program that convinces the army that BRL can get a supercomputer. The computers gave us the information that we needed to prepare tables that the troops found useful in the field and I can remember distinctly people calling up and requesting tables for people in Vietnam. And they were always so appreciative when you got them off the shelf, failed them immediately and they had them in a short time. Well it gives you a good feeling to to feel like you're helping out out the soldier in the field and I wanted to make sure I was accurate with my calculations because I knew lives were at state. I think it's a wonderful opportunity for a young person to do something worthwhile for you yourself and for the country and I and to find a job that is so rewarding. I found it that way and and to this day I'm very grateful to have had this job. So we went from there and that was quite a long effort and that led to effectively what became an army supercomputer program and then later I wound up being the army representative on the DOD wide super computer modernization program that was mandated by Congress. Congratulations ARL on your 25th anniversary. Happy 25th anniversary to the army research laboratory. Happy 25th anniversary ARL.


It is after 5pm on a weekday and you are still here, so thank you. This talk is called the social coding contract, but because the talk lengths are a little shorter I had to compress it, so this is the contracted edition. My name is Justin, I live and die on Twitter, so if you'd like to give me any feedback or talk to me or be my friend, that's a great place to do it, it's at Sorrel's, my last name. If you have something longer than 140 characters you want to tell me, hello at testdouble.com is a good way to get a hold of me. Open source is good, right? Companies work with other companies, building things that together, like, you know, they couldn't build separately. Never before have startups ever had, like, you know, they have this mountain of stuff that they can stand on and they just have to lay a little, little, little bit on top and then they can develop entirely new products very quickly and never before has like one person at a desk been able to independently change the world as an open source maintainer. But as a maintainer I often ask, is open source really that good, really? Because, you know, companies love consuming open source but they really hate when you need to like submit an upstream patch or if you want to like extract a library from your product and open source it. And a lot of startups I see hoovering up all this free stuff like a grab bag but then they don't understand the, by using stuff that they don't understand well, they're opening the door to like maintainability nightmares a year or two years down the road. And a lot of maintainers I know are really burnt out, they have a lot of negative interactions with other people on the web and they just want to quit. So today I'm just like going to put a magnifying glass on a handful of issues that are facing open source with the hope that that becomes a thing that people get in the habit of doing so that collectively we can have a sense of action about what we need to do. Only then can I hope that like, you know, people start coming up with creative ideas, maybe leading to some new solutions, services, ways to fix some of these systemic problems and then hopefully, you know, reach some point of relief and then we're done. But like I said, I'm not very ambitious. Our goal today is just to talk about a few problems facing open source that we don't normally discuss. We're going to cover a few different areas. One is the Jenga Tower of Dependencies that we've built for each new project.  Talk a little bit about trust and marketing and open source. And then finally, share some ideas about how we communicate online, as well as where I think open source is headed five, ten years down the road. I like to start talks off with term definitions. So this is a definition of the word ideology. They do not know it, but they are doing it. So ideology is sort of a negative space that explains our actions as opposed to like a political affiliation that we ascribe ourselves to. This is a quote from a dude named Karl Marx. I hear Marx is really popular in Utah, so I figured I'd start with a Marx quote. So Karl Marx's, that quote comes from the book Capital, and the reason it's interesting is it exists at the intersection of philosophy and economics. And so does open source, right? We have this altruistic share, share alike mentality, but meanwhile there's tons of companies making bucket loads of money off of open source, right? So if you view like in Marx terms, capitalistic economic progress over time, in the beginning, every person was out for themselves, but eventually specialization occurred. You could have maybe find vegetables at one vendor, meats at another vendor, and through that efficiency of scale, that opened the door to art and recreation emerging. And that's like the foundation of human culture. As time went on, industrialization just kind of blew the lid off that because now at a single location you could get all the commodities that you needed. Freed people up, had a lot more time. And now from my bed on my iPad, I can order most of the things that I want and get it in two days. Like this is progress. But where does that progress lead? There's a rumor that Amazon is using big data now to actually preemptively ship stuff that it thinks we might order to fulfillment centers near us so that it can get same day and next day delivery. And it's forcing a lot of people to ask questions like, how is the march of progress of technology and economics really changing the dynamic of what human civilization was built on? So that's an example of an unintended consequence. Another unintended consequence of economies is the industrialization of our food system. If you've seen the documentary Food Inc., it has this really aggressive tagline. You'll never look at dinner the same way, but I feel like it would have been more honest if it was like four like at least a month. Because it's not like we're gonna quit eating, right? These are systemic problems. And if you look at progress over time, awfulness just naturally accretes because we're focused in one direction. And then there's a moment where we all freak out. And you might think that's the point where we try to make things better, but nothing stops that train because things are too systemic. The best we can hope to do is maybe bend the curve after things get a little bit worse. So that's a little bit about economic progress. Let's talk about dependencies, dependency tooling, because that's really been the story of the last 15 years of open source. If you chart open source's progress over time, in the beginning, we just had a bunch of files out there. Like in C, we had headers and C files. And if I was writing an application, I'd have my headers, my C files, and if I needed somebody else's code, I would literally have to go fetch it somehow, pull it in, check it in, depend on it directly. And then it lived on from that moment forth as part of my application. It was my job to maintain it. And that was a hedge from pulling in too much because if I didn't understand it, I couldn't take care of it. Makefiles were a great innovation because now I could have my application up there with logical dependencies. I could say depend on libxml, and it lived in this other directory, and I would build and link against it. And it would live on as its own version thing apart from my logical application. Java was another big step forward because you could have compile ones run on multiple platforms. So I could build my stuff, but then go out to a website, download a jar, throw it on my class path, and depend on it very conveniently. It was so convenient that a new meme emerged that's been dubbed transitive dependencies. A transitive dependency is the dependency of our dependency. So I go download a jar, and it says, hey, I depend on Apache Commons.  And it not only helped us focus like libraries to be significantly smaller, but new entire stacks of productivity emerged within a language ecosystem for the first time. Ruby took all that and then automated it with Bundler. So now I have my code on top with its dependencies on a handful of gems. And then all of the version resolution necessary between themselves and also with their transitive dependencies is handled for me at install time. And so now I can have transitive dependency graphs of arbitrary depth without necessarily having to think below the explicit dependencies. NPM just takes us even further still, right? Because in Node.js, there's no rule that says we can't load the same library at multiple different versions. So a trivial implementation of NPM would just be able to say, hey, here's your dependencies. And then just grab, like a tree, all of the recursive dependencies underneath it. And if you've ever dug into your node modules directory, you can see it goes really, really deep down. In fact, as a library maintainer on every single major node module that I've ever maintained, I've gotten the issue eventually from some Windows user saying, hey, this exceeds Windows Max file path limit of 256 characters. I can't install your thing. Sorry. All of this is short-term progress. That's attainable for every new project that we do. And it's available to us for the low, low price of long-term fragility. Louis C.K. talked about this on his TV show. It's true. Everything that makes you happy is going to end at some point. And nothing good ends well.  We're all going to cry soon. Look at what I brought home. I brought home us crying in a few years. Here we go. Count down to sorrow with a puppy. The Louis C.K. of open source, Gary Bernhardt, he had this great quote. He said, build a small but non-trivial Rails app. An empty app has 50 gem dependencies. Yours will have 75 to 100. Go away for six months. Update all your dependencies. Your app no longer works. It's absolutely true. But it's easy to start a Jekyll blog. It's easy to install SAS. It's easy to generate a Rails app. It's always easy right now, never in a year. When we think about our application, we tend to only think about the code that we write as being our app, because it's what we're directly responsible for. But of course, whatever we ship into production is really what our application is. And I encourage us to shift our mindset to think more along those lines when we think about what our overall responsibility is as developers. Because while it's never been easier to ship something into production, the stuff that we're shipping has never been more net complex. Taking examples from just like a node in particular, let's say that I have a module here as a library maintainer and I depend on orange triangle at version C. There is nothing stopping one of my dependencies from depending on version B of orange triangle, maybe one of its dependencies depending on version A. Now admittedly, this is foolish, but it happens in some cases that I might call orange triangle to when I depend on and get a domain object back that's as of version C. And if I pass that into the other dependency which passes it into version B, what happens? Will it blow up? Will it work? As a library maintainer, I'm never thinking about this. I don't have any automated tests for this. If it's working, it's by total happenstance. And yet this is like how node works. Another thing that sucks is that libraries can explicitly declare like I'm specifically this version at C of orange triangle, but I can't prevent that from having maybe a very loose specifier or some other dependency. And so at install time, what the end user is gonna get is just the latest and greatest of whatever red square is. So one day on our project Lineman.js, every new install started failing like from March 3rd on, it's got inundated with emails. What turned out to be happening was that that particular dependency blew up because red square became too new and it became incompatible and some post install script was exploding. And so what we had to do is we actually had to fork it, create our own, push that up to NPM by fixing that red square to the last maintainable version or last compatible version. And that resolved our issue, but now we have this other thing on GitHub and NPM that we don't care about, that we don't understand, that's not gonna get new updates just to resolve this quirk in this otherwise very convenient dependency management system. So it's easy to freak out with edge cases, but I wanna convey the message that like, obviously the code we write is the code that our application needs and I think that we understand that the code that we depend on is there because it's convenient, it helps us do our job. And I think we're even willing to give the fact that the first layer of transit dependencies, yes, that confers some complexity but it's probably necessary, but we go much deeper and it just starts to feel risky and like how often does your team discuss your transit dependencies, transit dependencies? You don't, it's just mysterious. And that's why I think a lot of people have been lampooning the phrase full stack developer lately because I think we've all gotten to the point where nobody can really claim to know everything that they stand on top of. So yes, make files are really painful. See build stuff really is awful, but maybe that was a healthy pain because it was a guard against pulling in too much that we didn't understand. Talking about things being awful, let's talk about life as a maintainer of open source. So I wanna convey the message like, open source maintainers are not these rock stars, they're not super humans, they're just people. In fact, the way I think of it is maintainers are just extra early adopters. So life as a maintainer usually starts off with searching for a thing you need and then finding that it doesn't exist yet. And so a lot of maintainers get there, start by just scratching their own itch, building something that solves their immediate problem and then a slightly less early adopter searches for the same thing shortly thereafter and finds the thing the maintainer made. And the role of early adopters is special because they'll see that they're one of the first users and then sort of like if you've ever been like hip to a really cool indie rock band, they get excited, they post it to Hacker News and then they start sharing it, right? Talk about how amazing it is, which puts the maintainer on a bit of a pedestal. But of course Hacker News being what it is, people are more than happy to pot shot at it and say it doesn't do X or Y or Z and now the maintainer's all, his ego's all wrapped up in it. To the point, early adopters remember they're not like necessarily any less competent than maintainers so very often they'll send in pull requests to fix those things and now the maintainer's happy again. It's crazy how quickly a maintainer's ego can get wrapped up in their libraries. And if you try to just draw a picture of what a library looks like, when it first starts off it's got all these jagged edges because it only solves the maintainer's problem. But as early adopters come along, they can help round that out with pull requests, issues, a little bit of engagement. What ends up happening is you get a more well rounded, ready to be consumed by the masses dependency and maybe that's your version 1.0. Or if you're like me and you're afraid of the implications of semantic versioning, that's your version 08040. And this is the point where this conversation should happen, let a maintainer talks to an early adopter and says, hey, let's own this together. Let's share this. I'm sure any early adopter would be really excited. I'd even settle for this conversation. Hey, let's make you a committer so you can help out in triage. And I'm sure that most early adopters at that stage would really stay engaged. But because neither of those typically happens at this point, maintainer may as well say, hey, let's never communicate again. Then early adopters say, sounds good, bye forever, and then they're off to the next thing because they're an early adopter. They're gonna find a new shiny bubble to play with. So why is it that maintainers tend not, why are all these solo bands out there of repository owners? I think the reason they don't share control is if you were to chart their happiness over time, it starts off with scratching their own itch, building something, getting some happiness, getting some acclaim for building their own thing. While owning that thing, they get to a releasable product, get some attention. And if they just draw a line and extrapolate, they can only imagine their happiness going up from there. But fear not because late adopters will disabuse them of this happiness every single time. A maintainer, as an early adopter, once it scratches their itch, they might not commit for a week or a month. And because they're like an early adopter, some new shiny thing will come along, distract them, and probably they'll whisk away and go focus on something else. But a late adopter has a very different set of priorities and they might look at all the same data and come to the conclusion like, hey, this is pretty stable because no one's touching it. There's a lot of stars, so that sounds like a safe bet. It's open source, so that sounds free. And a lot of late adopters come in long after the maintainer stopped even caring. So a maintainer's needs starts off with the small jaggy thing, but then the early adopter helps round it out. Eventually you get to something that you can kind of conceive of is what this dependency does. You could layer on every new user after that, like what their needs look like and that shaded area where the two overlap is where it does the job that the user thinks they need. But everything else that's unshaded area becomes a negotiation. Every late adopter at that point has to decide do I work around this, do I write my own code, do I send a pull request, do I fork, do I open an issue? Late adopters tend to be less eager to contribute their own source, so very often it just takes the form of complaining. So literally like two days later after a lot of late adopters tell me they're so glad for my thing, they'll put a stern look on their face and then I'll hear something like, hey, this doesn't enterprise my enterprise thing at all. And how could they miss something that's so obvious and important to me? And this is where entitled GitHub threads come from. Where the title is like, oh, there's missing some obvious important thing. It's supposed to do all this silly nonsense. I have this expectation and I reply and like, I'm sorry I didn't know how to do silly nonsense. And then instead of a nuanced subtle conversation about whether it should do silly nonsense, all of their coworkers just come in with drive by plus ones and I'm left made to feel bad. But if you think about it, it's probably a weekend, I'm probably at the park with my wife having another life, it's like perfectly good day, but now I'm glued to my phone feeling like I just let down these strangers on the internet because my thing wasn't good enough. And so I rush home and I hack, hack, hack and I commit and I implement the feature that they want. I come back and I say, hey, look, I spent all weekend on this, could you review it? Does this suit your needs? And then what happens at this stage every single time? I never hear from them again and that makes me sad. Why does it make me sad? Because I just took a thing I loved and I made it slightly worse by doing work for free for people who don't care, who might not ever use it and now I have the responsibility of maintaining that edge case or that branch of my code forever. So you chat the happiness over time like I was saying. And late adopters tend to have this effect of reducing how much happiness I get out of my projects and the point where I like, if you go on my GitHub profile after this and you find any repo that's more than like a year old and you want to adopt it, please do because I'm more than happy to get rid of it. Another category of people who take away our happiness are trolls, right? Remember, open source maintainers are not rock stars. Sometimes they look like it. And I think the reason that we tend to put them on that pedestal is because like a lot of open source maintainers have tens of thousands of GitHub followers. They seem pretty famous. And sure, I think we'd all admit that like even if you have a lot of followers, you probably have a couple of trolls but it's not that big of a deal. But remember like, almost all of the communication that we engage in online is asymmetric. That means like, we have no idea just from looking at that maintainer whether 60% of the people talking to them are actually people trying to give them a hard time or antagonize them. So when a maintainer quits and it's because of trolls, like often we're all surprised, like I don't get it, everyone loves that person. Seth Vargo actually left Chef, the company and Chef the open source project because of this. He wrote a really beautiful blog post about just like how trolls sapped all of the joy from his working life. And that's really sad. So trolls subsequently, you know, reduce the happiness further. And it's this point where maintainers are usually like the cry for help. Hey, I'm burnt out. Could somebody help me maintain this? Put up a little notice. Hello, is anybody there? But this is so late in the game. All those early adopters who could have been part of a community are long gone. The project's probably hard to maintain at this point. And this is exactly how projects die. So open source projects, I think that they tend to survive when the community that grows around them grows in proportion to their usage and their popularity. But I also am very keen to like worry that if companies are only consuming open source and they're not authorizing their people or encouraging their people to give back, I love this quote that Steve pulled up from Hacker News that many open source projects are a sort of corporate welfare. You know, what I think that we should all be doing is encouraging businesses that like preventing the projects the tools that we're building our businesses on, preventing those from dying is actually a pretty good, you know, risk mitigation strategy. It does make really obvious sense. And it's our job to convince, is it, that maintainers tend, you know, that open source engagement is a good thing. Let's talk a little bit about trust. So open source obviously requires adoption. You know, it's all optimized for it. And adoption requires getting somebody to trust you. So when we talk about open source and trust and dependencies, you probably only really conceive of your dependencies free application as the ones that you declared. That's explicit trust. But everything underneath the surface of that iceberg is implicit trust. We're implicitly just trusting that those dependencies sucked in good dependencies underneath them. And as a library maintainer, often, you know, like we don't even think about this explicitly, but you might ask me, like, how do we get people to trust us? The answer, of course, is marketing. And looking at marketing over time at open source is sort of a worrying trend. First of all, let's like look at Linus Torvalds' announcement of Linux in the early 90s. This is the Linux user group mailing list. And you can see he writes a handful of paragraphs here. But consider it, there's no catchy name. He doesn't name the project. He makes a self-deprecating remark that this is just a hobby. He goes totally off message and says it just supports one little hard disk. Linux, the thing that like most of the servers in the world are running, you know, if he released that today with the same kind of marketing message, you know, it wouldn't have even made the front page of Hacker News. That should make us pause. About a decade later, the AMP project is another good example. This is AMP's homepage still today. So you can see they got a logo. They've got a whole bunch of website stuff that's really neat. They even had a mission statement. And then they had foundation affiliation. Now like foundation affiliation, all this stuff you can see, it's just trying to confer as much trust as possible. Trust me, I'm safe. It's okay to adopt me. So the more dependencies that we have means that we have less time to vet each of them. And as we've gotten through Ruby and now NPM, as we pull in more things, we can't get through all 15 links about each individual project's mission statements. So we have like the canonical GitHub marked down read me, right? And if you look at these, there's a quick intro and then some quick, easy to follow steps and usually some mostly green badges up at the top of like our things passing. And that's what we use to judge whether or not we can adopt something. And it's only gotten worse because now a bunch of companies like Google and Facebook and so forth are sponsoring open source projects. So like this is a Google's Yeoman project. And here you can see that there's like a diverse group of engineers building a rocket. It's got gradients. It's got an authoritative tagline. It's got a one liner and then a walkthrough tutorial thing. It can generate a thousand different types of projects which is terrible, but a separate talk. So all of this is just optimized for making easier and easier for day one of using any dependency with no concern at all for day 1,000, whether that it's like because maybe you follow somebody like a TJ Holloway Chuck, a really prolific author and you're like, I use his modules. And so I know that they're pretty good or maybe you look at how many stars or how many forks a particular project has. Maybe you look at the type, the flow of activity on GitHub or how many times it's been downloaded even though it's totally arbitrary. Even semantic versioning I think plays into this because somehow we as a civilization survived the last 40 years with totally ad hoc versioning. Why is it just in the last few years that we've all become such sticklers about this very specific versioning scheme? It's because we don't have time anymore to learn your silly versioning scheme. We need to know at a glance, is this safe to install and is this safe to upgrade? So all of that was just about explicit, you know, dependencies. We don't really even think about transit dependencies. And I just caution us to say like, the more people you're explicitly trusting, each dependency pull is gonna pull in an average of five other dependencies, you're implicitly trusting a whole bunch more. As we talked about marketing, remember it's not that marketing's good or bad but it's important to recognize when you're being marketed to. So that like, if you just never even conceive of it, you may well be led astray, right? By tempting marketing messages, promising something they can't deliver. Let's talk a little bit about what it's like socially and where I think things are headed. So first of all, all of these stick figures in this slide deck are a lie, right? Because what they intimate is that open source is a thing that happens between humans in real life. Of course, that's not how it works, how we actually communicate is email and GitHub issues and Twitter, all of it asynchronous text. So for most intents and purposes, we're no more than an avatar, a username, some emoji sometimes, and text on a screen. Evie, really this interesting tweet and I wish this didn't resonate with me but it really does, it's effed up that a lot of modern quote unquote discourse is optimized for whoever has the fewest feelings and the most free time. So when you're operating online, whether you're working remotely or on open source specifically, whenever you feel a sense of uncertainty between people or ambiguity or disagreement and especially if that starts to lead towards simmering disdain, email is probably not the best solution. I like to do, my policy is as soon as I feel uncomfortable with any engagement online, I try to pop up to a higher fidelity channel of communication, whether that's real time chat or if that doesn't work, we can always try a voice call or if the things I'm saying are making you cry, I can see you cry on a video chat and then we have this beautiful concophony of conferences everywhere, it's probably not impossible to actually meet up in person. So, the other reason that this strategy is great though is because it's terrific troll repellent, right? Where do trolls get their power, anonymity and a perceived lack of consequence? So if somebody's antagonizing you and you say, hey, let's have a Google hangout about it, suddenly they go away. Pro tip. Another thing I'd like to exist is I would love our tools to push us towards higher fidelity communication. So if what if we're in our GitHub issue thread, what if it actively encouraged us to start a chat? Gitter is a tool for chatting in GitHub projects or build a live example with JS bin in line right from there or start or schedule a pairing session with Screen Hero or something. So many like, I've seen like 30 post issue threads that I've engaged in go on for on and on and on and we can't reproduce and we can't figure it out.  And then they fix it. I wish that our tools were encouraging this. So this talk is really mostly just like, please make stuff like this guys, thanks. So what's the future hold? Where are we headed? So I kind of, I told you Bill a good saying that awfulness is piling up and that it's gonna get worse. So if we're here and it's gonna get worse, it's only fair to wonder what does this look like? I was stewing on this last year as Gogarucco was happening and I saw this quote come across the wire from Yehuda. Rust, the programming language, enables a whole new generation of high level programmers to write systems level code. And at first I reacted like, oh, good thing of all the instability and the dependency nonsense of our high level code. Why would I want that in systems? But the more I thought about it, I actually thought that this might be a good thing. I wanna talk about that. So if you think of innovation over time, originally of course we had low level, like close to the metal systems before we had high level ones. So most of the innovation and opens were started there but it eventually started creeping up. And then what I think of as like the last 15, 20 years, a lot of that's been focused on web development primarily. So yes, we've had a terrific run whether it's GitHub or all those dependency tool frameworks recently, but very recently you start to see a lot of that get ported back to system stuff with Rust and Go and all of the cool embedded robotics stuff that we saw this weekend. So if this is today's dependency culture and we're building tools, new tools that are like systems level stuff, how is it gonna translate? Are we just gonna cargo cult it? This is the thing that I was pondering when I started talking to some of my like aerospace engineering friends. And they remind me all the time that embedded in real time systems have grave consequences. What's the worst thing that could happen if you build a web app and it blows up? Healthcare.gov is a good example. It blows up and what does that mean in practical terms though? It means like people can't sign up for new health insurance policies that are like three to six months out. It's really awful.  People will literally die on the table. So it's just an order of magnitude difference in how we approach fault tolerance. So when I talk to my systems friends, they tend to convey it as adopting any dependency is really outsourcing our understanding of how to do a particular task. So if you think of it that way, layering over our application and any given dependency, yes that dependency in that shaded region is doing a job for us, but anything that it's doing that we don't understand, now we're incurring something I like to call understanding debt. And typically in high level web applications, we're used to understanding debt, but we don't give a name to it because we can pay it down pretty quickly by iterating rapidly. But of course, if you can't iteratively release what you're doing, then basically outsourcing a bunch of your understanding to a bunch of dependencies is probably not a good idea. Because if you compare a hosted system versus an embedded system, hosted systems are centralized, embedded ones are fabricated, shipped, and then gone. Hosted systems tend to have pretty short lives, but embedded ones might be ready to live 30, 40 years. Hosted systems are normally staffed by the engineers who made them over the course of their life. That's not true of embedded systems where they might just be an RMA or support process. Hosted systems usually have more than enough memory and CPU to be able to incur the cost of inefficient dependencies. But very often, embedded systems have to calculate under very, very tight resource constraints. And of course, hosted systems being connected are able to patch themselves readily, continuous delivery, all that. But a lot of embedded systems may have no network connectivity at all and no ability to be patched. Like shell shock, internet of things, that stuff is really more grave in embedded. So naturally, easy to iterate hosted systems, easy to pay understanding debt down. Much harder to iterate embedded systems. Maybe we shouldn't have so much understanding debt. So if systems engineers need a deeper upfront understanding of what gets built, I think it's important for us to visualize it. So if we have a web application on one part and landing gear on another in terms of software projects that we're doing, you really only need to buy on a video chat about how browsers work to build any web application. Your code does a little bit of domain object stuff on top, but it only really needs to understand its context as well as to understand the HTTP lifecycle, I guess. But you might need to know a lot about how planes work, about how very specific conditions and wind and temperature and all sorts of stuff that's specific to that model. So if we just took the design that we're used to of a thin domain layer with a bunch of dependencies underneath us and cargo call that over to systems, that introduces this entire danger zone of stuff that we don't really understand but that we really ought to in order to attain the level of fault tolerance that's appropriate. So what systems engineers typically do is they write a lot more of their own code or they actually have a process called qualified tools where they qualify rigorously and prove that their dependencies do what they're supposed to do. And if we were to try to do that, it would take literally like man years, right? To qualify something like Angular or Ember or React on our own as an individual engineering team. So keeping in mind that most open source tools are just a product of web development and you look back at this chart, sure, if this is today's perspective and this is like where we're developing a lot of similar tools like cargo for Rust and whatever's happening in Go, originally I was worried about cargo calling down but now I'm actually kind of excited about them together introducing like a new and broader perspective and conferring a little bit of that cautiousness and a little bit of that emphasis on understanding back up to the web. And that's my hope of where things are gonna go. So we covered a whole bunch of ground talking about dependencies, what it's like to be a maintainer, a little bit about marketing and trust, a little bit about the social side of things. Covered a lot around today. I talked really quickly, hope you all followed. I want to part on a positive note. I think open source can be way better. I think we can all do a better job encouraging our companies to take responsibility, audit at least what they use, look for bugs, contribute back, help strengthen, audit the security of the stuff that we're using. Startups, I feel like I could often benefit with a little bit of cautious wisdom and say maybe we should try to understand the stuff we're building a little bit better, move a little bit more slowly or if we don't have time for that and you just gotta get something out the door then be willing to burn it all down and rewrite version two from scratch. I like to call that the slow code movement. It's an excuse to use a turtle emoji. And maintainers, this is a two-way street, right? So I think maintainers on one hand need to be much more aggressive about inviting others to join them early on in the life of a project. But it's also our responsibility to kind of engage back. When we have time, when we really like something, offer up, hey, how can I help? Even when there's nothing that somebody could realistically do to help me maintain one of my libraries, I absolutely love to hear that. So if nothing else, you'll make somebody's day. So again, my name's Justin. My contact information, TestDouble is a digital agency. We're all distributed, we're consultants. So if your team might benefit from having some experienced engineers to work alongside you, please give them a touch. We're always looking for new cool project work. Like everybody else in the world, we're also hiring too. So if you're looking for a new gig, just email us at joyan at testdouble.com. I've got a whole bunch of cool TD stickers. If your friends don't know what TD is, it just looks like table cell. But if you're in the know, it's real cool. And then I think I'm gonna check down to Redeguana tonight. Tenderlove made me promise to go eat there. So if you wanna meet up with me and chat, or if you've got any questions or anything, I think I probably went over. So let's do that there. Yeah, thanks again.