discuss reading, writing, and everything in between and beyond. I'm your host Dr. Rita Forsyth, coming to you from Maui on the ThinkTech live streaming network broadcasting from our studio in downtown Honolulu. Today we're talking to renowned author Juliet Blackwell with over 25 novels translated in 11 languages. She believes in the magic of language, travel, and cultural exchange to open hearts, minds, and souls. Welcome Juliet. Oh, thank you, Rita. So nice to be here. It really is. I'm so impressed with your work. I haven't read all of your books, but I've read a lot of them. You penned the New York Times Bestselling Witchcraft Mysteries, the Haunted House Renovation Series, and I know the Art Lovers Mystery Series was nominated for the Agatha Award. Congratulations for that. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, that was the very first, the first book in that series was the very first book I ever wrote and it was nominated. So that was really nice. That was like a little plunge into the mystery world. It was very fun. I'm also impressed that you live in a 100 year old house with extensive botanical gardens in Northern California and you spend a lot of time in Europe and Latin America. I imagine you find inspiration in those places with the people and the culture. Always, always. Yeah, I think you had mentioned that I believe in the magic of travel and cultural exchange and I really do. I think there's nothing quite like being in a different country and seeing that people do things differently and they see the world differently and they have different histories. They come at things very differently, different religions. I find that I'm also, as you know, I was an anthropologist. I was trained as an anthropologist, so I think it's probably in me very deeply to want to just see how other people do things and connect in that way.  I did. I did. I actually, I'm still ABD. I'd never got that dissertation then, but went on to other things and started writing fiction, which is a heck of a lot easier than writing academic dissertations.  It's a, you know, that's fiction is a very different animal, but it was when I first started writing fiction, it was such fun because I didn't have to make any footnotes. I didn't have to look things up. You know, it was really fun and very freeing that way. Well, how did you get started? What inspired you to become a writer of fictional novels? You know, I think it was just because I've always been a reader. Apparently, I don't remember this, but I have friends from college who said that I always, that one day I would write a book that I used to say that, and I don't remember saying that, but apparently I said that. So I think it was probably always in my mind the way it is for a lot of people who are readers. I think anybody who loves the world of books, it's always like, oh, I wonder if I could do that and how fun would that be? So, yeah, so I was working, I had given up anthropology and I was working actually as a faux finisher and painting murals. I was a professional artist for a while and I was working in San Francisco in an old mansion in Pacific Heights in the middle of the night, one night, and thinking to myself that I heard somebody in the, what was supposed to be a vacant building. And I remember thinking, wow, this would be a great place for a murder mystery. The faux finisher who winds up dead in a mansion.  And this was a while ago, I think when what we now call cozy mysteries, they were just beginning. And I had read a series that featured a woman who was a chef. And then, you know, I remember thinking, oh, I wonder if there's someone who's a faux finisher who has my job because my job was a lot about going in and out of really expensive homes.  So I just thought, oh, this could be a really fun main character. And then the other thing is I've always been fascinated by art forgery. So I made the protagonist, Annie Kincaid is an ex art forger who's trying to go straight as a faux finisher. So that's the conceit of that first series, which is really fun. I want to go back when you were talking a little bit about your travels and learning how different people live in different cultures. And, you know, that's the power of books. And that's what this program is all about. How books can bring you places that you maybe can't travel physically. And your writing sure does that for me. Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, I mean, now that I write the books, so many books, well, my mystery series are all set in San Francisco, but now I also write books set in France. And I know that perhaps, especially the last couple of years, people have really wanted to do some armchair traveling. And that's that's really fun to be able to share some of the places I've been with with readers. That's really, really fun. A staycation with your novels. Yes, exactly. Speaking of France, you're going to read one of my favorite letters from Paris. And thank you for reading a few pages for us. Of course, of course. Would you like that now? Yes, please. Okay. Okay. And as you're setting up, I know your mainstream fictions are often dual timeline, contemporary and historical. So that's fascinating. They are they are. Yeah, I enjoy writing a contemporary story and then having some sort of historical mystery that connects to modern day times. You know, partly it's just because it's fun. It's fun. I've always loved old things and it's really fun to to have people go in search of something from the past. But of course, I think that the past reaches out and affects our present, whether we know it or not. And so I really enjoy that aspect of things. Yes. Wonderful. And then letters from Paris. Yeah, it is the the contemporary story is a a woman who decides to go to Paris on this quest to find the origin of something that she found many, many years ago as a young girl in her grandmother's attic. And she's from a small town in Louisiana. And so the the bit I was going to read is actually from from when she's a small girl, she's a young girl. And she's hiding in her grandmother's attic because her cousin's mean to her and she's just up there. And she's had a hard, a hard childhood up to this point, but her grandmother is sort of her savior. And so one of the reasons she goes to Paris is that her grandmother actually urges her to go. Here's I'll just start reading a few pages. The oppressive heat drenched her in perspiration within moments, but chance cherished the privacy, the thrill of having a secret layer. She passed lazy stifling summer afternoons up there with a big jar of sweet tea, safe from Jessica and her gang, calling through what Mama called the treasures of a lifetime, even though it was mostly junk, old albums full of curling photos and faded snapshots. She always searched for photos of her mother. A mildew scented baby clothes, boxes containing bowling trophies and military papers, and an old pink crib missing two spindles. But then she spied the wooden crate. It was shoved shoved up under the eaves, way back behind cardboard boxes that once held dog food or laundry detergent, but were now crammed with school papers and yellow doilies and handmade Christmas ornaments. A tension fragile was stamped in red ink on the top and sides. Manipulate avec attention. A return address read Moulange Lombardy, 17 Rue de la Rochette, Paris, France. Paris, excitement surged through her. She tried finding the crate open with her bare hands, ignoring the pinch of splinters. No luck. Then she rummaged around until she unearthed a metal wreath holder in the box of Christmas supplies. She shoved it into a tiny gap under the top of the crate and used all her weight to push, with a loud screech the rusty old nails gave way. Chance lifted the plank. Inside was a mix of sawdust and newspapers and crumpled up scrap paper. She swept them aside and caught her breath at what was revealed. A sleep right there in the box was the life-sized face of a lady. Her eyes were closed, but she smiled just barely as though she knew a secret. She probably used to be beautiful, Chance thought.   She would have looked pretty hanging on the wall, maybe over the TV so they could look at her during commercials. Right next to the free calendar from the bakery in town, Remy's old army photo and a blue, black, and green finger painting with spider in its web that Claire had made in second grade and Mamma had framed and hung with pride. Chance stroked the mask's fragments, feeling their curves and contours under her fingers. The pieces were heavy, made of thick plaster. On top they were slick with a satiny sheen as though sealed with varnish. But when she ran the pads of her fingers along the edges of the broken bits, they felt gritty and raw, putting her in mind of the rough gray rocks that scraped at her bare feet when she clumped over them at the beach. Chucky dust coated her hands when she pulled away. Chance rubbed the white powder between her thumb and fingers, wondering who the lady was and how she came to be in her mamma's attic, all the way from Paris. Chance hesitated, then glanced over her shoulder to be sure she was alone. Of course she was, no one but her ever came up here, but still. She squeezed her eyes shut, blew out a long breath to help her relax, then reached out both hands and laid them on the lady's broken face, waiting to see if the figure would talk to her. This was exactly the sort of thing that made Chance weird, a misfit, and invited the wrath of Jessica.  Chance knew that, but sometimes it worked. Sometimes when she had been hiding from her father in the little triangle formed by the couch shoved up against the wall, she would hold one of her mother's old handmade clay figurines, a little pig, an elephant, a harbor seal. Close her eyes and hold her breath and she could feel them move, come alive just for her, right there in the palm of her hand.  So now Chance closed her eyes, laid her hands upon the face and concentrated. Chance was patient, she waited a long time, but the lady refused to speak. Maybe it only worked when it was something her mother had made, Chance thought. Maybe this was her mother's way of speaking to her from beyond the grave. But quiet or no, Claire liked the face in the box. The lady looked so kind, so gentle, and she sure did look like she had something to say, but that she would take her own sweet time to say it. Chance wondered, maybe she remained mute because she was broken. What if she brought up some of the glue from her craft box, she could piece her back together. Chance turned her attention to the paper surrounding the sculpture, one after another. She smoothed them out against her thigh, sticky with sweat. She tried to make out the words, but though Mammal insisted on speaking Cajun at home, Chance was still learning to read and write in French. But she sounded the words out as best she could. One paper seemed to be an old grocery list, she recognized a few words, a rico ver, guajo, com de terre. A handful of scraps appeared to be phone messages, receipts, rough sketches of faces and hands, a list of measurements. And then she spied the letter. It wasn't much of a letter as far as letters go. It had been torn in two, but Chance rifled through the box and found the second part. The halves were easy enough to match. The calligraphy set it apart from the other scraps. The writing was slanted and dramatic, hard to read. The ink had faded to an earthy sepia tone, and the paper yellowed, as though over the years the two hues had reached out to each other, trying to merge. The heavy paper had been folded once and dated fancies fafier, no year, no context, no address on the letter. Written in French it said, my love, my dearest, Olivier has agreed to help. We can wait no longer. We must act. I will be waiting. Take nothing with you. In a different handwriting, less sure with ink splotches, as though written by someone accustomed to holding a pen, were the words, he will never let me go. Chance turned the paper over, then emptied the wooden crate, searching for more, but that was all there was. Her hand shook as she reread the letter, sounding out the words. It was something special. She was sure. Maybe this was it, Chance thought. Maybe this was the secret, the special purpose for which she had cheated death. Tell me again, maman. Tell me about my mama. When the car went off the road, why didn't I die too? The Lord's got something special planned for you, Chance. You mark my words.  Don't you forget it. Those last words were her grandmother speaking to her. Of course. I don't know how you knew this, but that was the favorite part for me of that book. Oh, that's wonderful. That was absolutely my favorite part. So I have a question, because I kept reading after that, of course, and how do you mesh the backstory of Chance as a little girl and her adult adventures in Paris? You know, I think that Chance, and she also goes by Claire now, but Chance was her nickname when she was small. And she did have this very tragic beginning where her mother drove off the road and it was perhaps a suicide or perhaps not, but Chance was saved. And so her grandmother and then her father turns out to be an alcohol abuse of alcoholic. So she goes to live with her grandmother, and her grandmother keeps assuring her that she was saved her reason that she had something special to offer. So then when we see her as an adult, we first meet Claire when she's working in Chicago, and she has a lucrative job. She's been able to help her family. Her family's a very working class family, so she's been able to help them with a very good job in Chicago, and she's happy about that. But I think part of her has always felt that she was actually saved for a reason, that when her grandmother kept telling her that there was something special about her. And so when we first meet her, she doesn't know what that is. She doesn't know whether she's special and whether she has something more to offer. And I just like the idea that this that this figure and also I should mention that the Lancaneux de la Sain, which is the name of the face that she's found, this face from France is actually very well known in France. It's an actual face. Oh, it really is? Yes, it is. It's a very, very famous hanging that a lot of people hung on their walls because everyone was curious as to who she was, this woman. She was a very mysterious woman, and they called her like the Mona Lisa of the Sen because she has this little smile. But she's hung in the studio of people who make death masks. So the assumption was that she killed herself or was killed. And she drowned in the sin. So they call her the unknown woman of the sin. Anyway, so when Claire finds this face, she thinks, Oh, maybe this is the thing that I'm really meant to, especially when she goes back as an adult and she sees the face again. And she thinks, Oh, you know, this captivated her when she was young, and maybe she should go and see where this face is from. It's from Paris, and it has a maker on it. So she actually decides to track it down. And then when she gets to France, she realizes that it's just it's really quite mass produced. And it's not that unusual this face. And yet she does look into the story of who the woman might have been. And then that's that's the backstory that we have in this book is the story of the woman. I love that book. So you're going to read again for us, this is going to be a little bit of a different tone. Yes. What will you be reading now? Yeah, I thought it would be fun to read a little from one of my mysteries, because they are different, a different tone. My mysteries tend to be pretty fun and funny. And they, of course, they they deal with murder. So, you know, there's always that. But and this is just a short section. And it's actually not about the mystery per se, but it's one of the things I really enjoy about about writing things here in San Francisco or in the Bay Area is that I get to learn so much about local history. So this was a chance. And actually, I was, I base I base this book, it's called A Ghostly Light. And I based it on a an actual lighthouse that's off the point of Richmond. And it has a Victorian house on it. And it's just a fascinating place called East Brother Lighthouse.  So in and in the story, of course, the protagonist, Mel Turner, has gotten herself, she's a she does. She remodels old homes. So she's a it's the haunted home renovation series. And she renovates old homes. And then she has not too long ago discovered that she sometimes finds ghosts behind the walls. So that's, that's part always part of the mystery. The mystery is always very human. The murder is very human. But there's there's often a little ghostly presence. So so this one in this case, she's been hired to renovate this old lighthouse that's on an island here in the San Pablo Bay, which part of the San Francisco Bay. And then she's she's investigating the family that had lived there before because she thinks she saw something. She thinks she saw a woman in the tower in a lighthouse tower. So now she's speaking, she's at an archive in San Francisco, a historical archive. And she's speaking to a librarian named Trish. Then Trish will be speaking first. To me, the most interesting aspect of Lighthouse Island doesn't have to do with the architecture. But the fact that for many years the lighthouse keeper was a woman, a woman lighthouse keeper, as in my ghostly apparition interesting. She nodded. Was that common? I wouldn't say it was common exactly, but it certainly wasn't unknown, Trish said, warming to her subject. Back in the day, lighthouse keeping was one of the few professions women could perform that paid them the same as their male counterpart. Are we talking back in the 19th century? As far back as that, she said with a nod, many years before women had the right to vote in the United States, an impressive few were landing federal positions as light keepers. Several female lighthouse keepers in the Great Lakes, for instance, even had lower paid male assistants working under them, which was virtually unheard of at the time. That's fascinating. How did a woman even become a lighthouse keeper? Did they just respond to ads or most for the wives or sometimes the daughter of a keeper? The skills required for lighthouse keeping are very specific. Not only did keepers have to have knowledge of the lamps and the clockworks, but they also needed the dedication and grit it took to live in isolated harsh locations battered by winds and rain. And the bravery to climb the tower during a storm and scan the water is looking for trouble. Most times the official male keepers were assisted by their wives, especially when there wasn't an official assistant keeper. And for instance, when they were sick or as they grew unable to climb the steps, that sort of thing. Upon the keeper's death, his wife or daughter sometimes applied to take over. They could demonstrate they had the skill and experience to do the job since they were already there. So they chose to stay on despite the isolation. Just like the man, a lot of those women wound up keeping the lighthouse the rest of their lives. I suppose it can be addictive, that kind of solitude and beautiful views to boot. A wistful note came into her voice. I think I would do quite well, frankly, as long as I had enough books. And that reminds me of one thing I read that lighthouses had their own little lending library of sorts, a box of all sorts of books, novels, poetry, the Bible, would be delivered by the regular supply belt or the tenderships. After a few months, they would swap out the box for a new one. A lighthouse bookmobile. How cool is that? I used to love the bookmobile when I was a kid. So can you tell me anything about the woman who kept the bay light on lighthouse islands? This is what I'm telling you. There was some information on her in the stolen file. I could practically see the wheels turning and Trisha's head as she stared at her computer monitor, clicking her mouse furiously. I'm sure I could dig up some names and dates if you could give me a little time. But boy, it steams me that somebody would steal that file. What's the deal? We digitize as much as we can, but scanning everything in the collection is a huge project and it's not as if the historical society is rolling in money. Those files always have tidbits of information not found elsewhere. Newspaper clippings, archival notes, ephemera we haven't had time or resources to upload. What this society needs is a sugar daddy. Wait, here she is. I remember because the names were so interesting and so apt. From 1899 to 1905, the official keeper of the bay light was George Vigilance. The job then went to his wife, Ida. Did they have any children? According to this, they have one son, Franklin Prescott Vigilance, but I remember now. Remember what? He let out a sigh. There was a tragedy. Their young son disappeared and George had an accident while looking for him and died. The boy disappeared, probably drowned. It was a common hazard as one might expect on an island, but young Franklin's body was never recovered. And his father George died while looking for him. According to the report filed with the lighthouse authority, his wife, Ida, said that George was working on the clockworks at the top of the tower when he thought he spied little Franklin's red and white striped shirt on the shoals. He ran to find him, but in his haste tripped and tumbled down the lighthouse steps, all the way from the top, raking his neck. Ida found him at the bottom of the stairs. There was a lot of that going around. Trish looked up from the computer and blinked. And Ida took over after George's death. I asked. She nodded. Ida Vigilance was the official keeper for the next 10 years. I was betting that Ida had stayed on at the baylight a lot longer than that. I suppose it wasn't absolutely certain that the vision I'd seen at the top of the tower was Ida Vigilance, but it made sense. And I was going to assume the little boy who pointed to the tower was Ida and George's young son, Franklin. So Ida remained on Lighthouse Island alone, true to her name and ever vigilant, lighting her lamp, mourning her husband, and searching for her missing son for 10 years. That would be enough to drive the most down-to-earth person around the bend. There you go. Right way to end. Well, it was such an honor having you read to us. Having the writer read their own words is amazing. I don't think I'm the best reader, so I appreciate that. It was really a wonderful experience. So thank you. Well, thank you. Well, that's all the time we have today. I want to thank Juliet Blackwell for being my special guest, our broadcast engineer, our floor manager, and J. Fidel, our executive producer. A special mahalo to our underwriters. And thank you for joining us. Books, books, books. We'll be back in two weeks. Until then, read, write, and create your world. Book, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at think.kawaii.com. Mahalo.


Income tax 2021 2022 depreciation of rental property part number three. Get ready to get refunds to the max diving into income tax 2021 2022. Most of this information can be found in publication 527 residential rental property tax year 2021 IRS website irs.gov irs.gov. We're focused in on line one income of the income tax formula. We would have a sub schedule basically being an income statement with income and expenses. Expenses basically being deductions to net then is what rolls in to line one income of the income tax formula as well as eventually page one of the form 1040. This is the schedule E in essence that income statement schedule and it's the supplemental income and loss. We're focusing in on the rental real estate. So now we're looking at the cost or basis. This is a key type of calculation for the calculation of depreciation and just for the treatment of like property plant and equipment. So note that property planting equipment is not something that we're typically going to be expensing at the point in time of purchase. We have to do something that's basically an accrual kind of concept. Even if we're on a cash basis, even if we paid cash for the property planting equipment, we have to put it on the books as an asset and note that the tax return doesn't have a balance sheet. We only have the income statement, which is in essence this form schedule E. But we do have a sub schedule possibly a depreciation schedule which has a balance sheet account of these property plants and equipment assets. And then we're going to have to take the benefit of the expenses in the form of depreciation over the useful life or whatever life. The tax code allows us to allocate the expense over noting that we would like smaller lives. We would like to take the expenses earlier. We're always thinking of trying to in the taxes and where the taxpayer where usually our mindset is I'd like to take the expense earlier. I'd like to have this the life of the depreciation shorter. Therefore, and I'd like to be able to take the expense now instead of instead of basically putting on the books as a depreciable asset if I could, because that would typically be beneficial for taxes. Also note that the basis then the adjusted basis, which is you can think of kind of like as the adjusted cost is also going to be in effect when you sell the property, because it's going to be the sales price minus the basis in essence. So the basis is going to be important for a sales type of transaction as well as we've record depreciation. The basis in essence goes down or your kind of book value from from an accounting term terminology goes down. So the basis of property you buy is usually its cost. The cost is the amount you pay for it in cash in debt obligation in other property or in services. So you can think of obviously the cost of something as what you paid for it if you paid cash for it. If you took out debt for it note you're still taking out the debt, but you're paying cash in essence for the property. So now you have incurred debt and you might use the property as collateral, but you're still paid for the property. The property is still yours. Remember the bank doesn't really own the property. For example, if you have a home and you have like 80% finance to the home, you're like the bank owns 80% of it. Not true. The bank has the ability under certain circumstances to take recourse on the home if you were to default on the loan, but the bank has no ability to do anything with the property.  No, it's a loan. It's something different. So in other property, obviously you could pay in like other property, for example, or giving goods and services. Those are all still forms of payment that should be included in the cost of the property. Your cost also includes amounts you pay for sales tax charge on the purchase freight charges to obtain the property installation and testing charges. So the things that we had to incur in order to purchase the property are also going to be included in the property. If you're talking about something like a piece of equipment like a refrigerator we talked about before or something like that, the freight to get it to us as well as the installation is also included with the price as something you got to basically capitalize. You can't expense those items. You would think you would like to, right? We would like to generally be able to say, well, maybe I have to capitalize the refrigerator, but not the freight. I'm just going to expense that and not the installation. I'm going to expense that because that would be better for me. I would like to expense what I can, but no, because those things were used in order to get the thing, the refrigerator in this case, installed and ready to go. So generally you would have to capitalize those items. So exception, if you deducted state and local general sales taxes as an itemized deduction on schedule A form 1040, you don't include as part of your cost basis the sales tax you deducted. So sales tax, you could deduct on schedule A either your income tax, which you probably would do if you were in a high cost of living state or your sales tax. And so if you deduct the sales tax, you can't basically double dip and get the double benefit from the sales tax. So loans with low or no interest. If you buy property on any payment plan that charges little or no interest, the basis of your property is your stated purchase price, less the amount considered to be unstated interest. So whenever you have a loan, if the loan is over like an extended period of time, then you have to assume there's got to be interest in it because otherwise it doesn't make sense, right? So if the loan is structured in such a way that it doesn't state what the interest is, they just say you got to pay this amount of payments or whatever, then you got to kind of assume that there's interest involved in the loan because any reasonable loan that took all information into consideration would include interest because we're aware of the time value of money, we're aware that money later on isn't worth as much, so you got to kind of figure out what the interest would be. So the unstated interest and original issue discount the OID in Publication 537. So you can look at that and do more research on that kind of thing as well in Publication 537. Real property, if you buy real property like real estate such as building and land, certain fees and other expenses you pay are part of your cost basis in the property. So when you buy the real property, obviously if you look at like the closing statement for example, you're going to have the cost of the property itself and then you can have all this other stuff that you had to do to organize the purchase of the property. A lot of that other stuff is like in similar to when we talked about the refrigerator needing freight and installation, we have similar stuff with the property, all that stuff was needed to get the property ready to go, ready to be rented or whatever, therefore it should not be expensed, which is the thing we would like to do, just to expense all that stuff earlier, right? But no, we got to put it in terms of the cost of the property because that was all included in what needed to be done to get the property ready to go.   So you might think, well, why can't I just expense the real estate taxes here instead of capitalizing them as part of the purchase price? And that's because the prior owner is the one that incurred the real estate taxes when they were the owner of the real estate. You were not the owner of the real estate when the taxes were incurred and you can imagine a scenario where the prior owner could either pay off the real estate taxes themselves that were incurred when they owned the property and increased the sales price that we would then be paying or they could say that they're not going to pay the real estate taxes and we're going to pay the real estate taxes that they incurred and possibly reduced the sales price. So you can see it's kind of packaged into the sale in that instance. Now you might look into it a little bit different if it was a purchase for a personal residence because note that we're not basically packaging it together for the rental property in that sense and you have those itemized deductions for things like taxes and the mortgage interest on the Schedule A so you can look into that in more detail. We're talking about the rental property specifically here. So you can't deduct them as taxes paid. If you reimburse the seller for real estate taxes, the seller paid for you, you can usually deduct that amount. So in that case, we're talking about our real estate taxes that the seller paid for us. So then we wouldn't include... And then if we basically deduct that amount, then we wouldn't include that amount in your basis in the property. And obviously the questions that come up here are whether or not I can deduct these amounts now as expenses or whether I have to include them in the basis of the property and I would rather deduct them now but I can't do both obviously. That would be like double dipping again. I can't take a deduction for something and include it in the basis of the property which I would eventually get a deduction for in the form of depreciation or possibly in a decrease in the gain when I sale the property calculated as the sales price minus the basis in the property. So settlement fees and other costs, the following settlement fees including closing costs for buying property are part of the basis in the property. So we've got the abstract fees. We've got the charges for installing utility services, legal fees, recording fees, surveys, transfer taxes, title insurance, any amounts the seller owes that you agree to pay. So again, anything that the seller owes, whatever categorize it is, it would be an expense to us possibly just like the taxes if we incurred it but you could see if the seller owes it, it was incurred when they had the property. So it's really just a negotiation of the sales price. We're just taking on something that they owed, we're paying part of their debt which you can imagine the same scenario, they could have paid off their debt and then increased the sales price. So it's really just a negotiation of the sales price. So such as back taxes or interest, recording or mortgage fees, charges for improvements or repairs and sales commissions. So when you go to that long list of the closing document, a lot of that stuff is going to be included as part of the cost of the property. So the following are settlement fees and closing costs you can't include in your basis in the property. So we got number one, fire insurance premiums, number two, rent or other charges relating to occupancy of the property before closing. Number three, charges connected with getting or refinancing a loan such as points, discounts point, loan origination fees, mortgage insurance premiums, loan assumption fees, cost of credit report and fees for an appraisal required by a lender. Also don't include amounts placed in escrow for the future payment of items such as taxes and insurance. So these items, if they're not included in the basis, you record them in some other way you would think, right? So you'd say the fire insurance premiums, usually if you're talking about insurance, it's a prepayment. You paid for it before you got the use of it so it might be on the books as like an asset or a prepayment or possibly an expense. Number two, rent or other charges related to occupancy of the property. So if it was rent that is being paid, then you might be, if you paid the rent, you might be recording the rent expense at that point in time. Charges connected with getting or refinancing a loan. So when we talk about the loan, now you're dealing with the loan process, not basically the purchasing, so the points and the interest and so on that would have to be recorded with relation to them. If you had to basically prepay the points we talked about, you might have to put those on the books as basically another asset that you would amortize over the life of the loan and so on. So assumption of a mortgage. So if you buy property and become liable for an existing mortgage on the property, your basis in the amount you pay for the property plus the amount remaining to be paid on the mortgage. So in other words, what normally happens is you've got a seller who owns the home and they have a loan, a mortgage on it, and then you, the buyer, take out your own mortgage or your own loan in order to pay off the seller who then pays off the loan that they have and they get to keep the difference. So you've got kind of two loans that are out there, one from the original owner and the other one that we kind of come up with when we make the purchase. But you can, of course, set up the process where you, the purchaser, are purchasing the home and you just assume the loan that the seller has. So in that case, then, what would, you'd have to say that whatever the loan was plus the, plus whatever you paid above the loan amount you would think would be the basis in the property because you assumed their loan, you paid off their debt or you assumed their debt. You would leave them of their debt. So example, you buy a building of 60,000 cash and assume a mortgage of 240,000 on it. Your basis is 300,000, right, because you paid them cash of 60,000 and you didn't take out a loan yourself to pay the price of 300,000. So you can see the normal way this would work is they would sell it for 300,000 and then we would take out a loan in order to get the 300,000 to pay off the seller who would then take that money and pay off the 240,000 that they have to pay off and they'd keep the 60,000. But instead, we just assumed their $240,000 loan and just gave them the 60,000. Therefore, we're still, the basis is still 300,000 because we relieve them of their loan obligation by assuming it. So separating costs of land and building, if you buy, if you buy building and your cost includes the cost of the land on which they stand, you must divide the cost between the land and the building to figure the basis for depreciation of the building. So this is important because remember, land is not depreciable, right? Land is because it doesn't deteriorate in value, at least over human lifetimes, it doesn't go away, right? Unless, you know, if it gets sucked up under the sea or sinks or something, there was Atlantis before, but normally the land doesn't go away and the building will deteriorate. So that's why we're going to assign depreciation to the building and not to the land. But when I bought the property, say I paid this 300,000 for it, I didn't say I'm going to pay you so much for the building and so much for the land. That's a problem because when we put it on the books, we're going to have to do that. We're going to have to break out between land and building. Now you might be able to get some help from your property taxes because sometimes the property taxes try to do an assumption about the value of the land and the building. They might charge you different taxes based on that. And that can give you some indication as to what the allocation is between the land and the building. But you've got to break it out in some way. Obviously, we would like to assign more to the building. Why? Because I want depreciation. If I assign more to the land, then I never get a benefit from it until I sell it, right? If I assign it to the building, then I can depreciate it as we go. So obviously, we would lean towards the estimate and it's just an estimate, right? So we would be leaning towards wanting to get the estimate normally more on the building side of things so we can get a tax benefit from it by depreciating it and expensing it. So the part of the cost that would be allocated to each asset is the ratio of the fair market value of that asset to the fair market value of the whole property at the time you buy it. So if you aren't certain of the fair market values of the land and the building, who is certain of these things, right? It's completely arbitrary. You can divide the cost between them based on their assessed values for real estate tax purposes. So that's what most people do just to not get in trouble, right? You say, well, the state allocated it this way. So I'll do what the state says and use that same allocation. So example, you buy a house and land for $200,000. The purchase contract doesn't specify how much of the purchase price is for the house and how much is for the land. And it never does, obviously. We're not saying, hey, I'll pay you. We're not going to haggle over the break between the land and the purchase price. So the latest real estate tax assumption assessment on the property was based on an assessment value of $160,000 of which $136,000 was for the house and $24,000 was for the land. So we look at the property taxes. That's what they assessed the property taxes on. Notice that these amounts are the latest property taxes that may not line up to the purchase price that we paid for the home, but we can still use the same kind of ratio that they used to get an idea. So you can allocate 85%, which is the $136,000 over the $160,000 of the purchase price to the house and 15%, which is $24,000 divided by $160,000 of the purchase price to the land. So it's 85, 15 breakout between the two, adding up to 100, of course. So your basis in the house is $170,000, $85,000 of $200,000, and your basis in the land is $30,000. So we're breaking out the $200,000 by $170,000 for the building, $30,000 for the land. That seems pretty good because we'd like to put more of it on the building because I want to get a depreciation expense. Basis other than costs. So you can't use cost as a basis for property that you received in return for services you performed. So obviously you've got to take into consideration services if that was part of the purchase price that you had, not just the amount that you paid in exchange for other property. So if you paid them so much in cash and you gave them other property, then part of the cost is going to include the other property. You can't just use the cost in terms of the cash as a gift.  So that's going to mess up our basis calculation, which is based on two self-interested individuals making a market transaction from your spouse or from your former spouse as a result of a divorce. So clearly a divorce type of agreement is not to disinterested individuals making a market transaction. So that's going to skew our calculation or our assumptions with regards to the cost of an item with a market transaction as an inheritance. So when you're talking about an inheritance, once again, you inherited something. So that's not a market transaction. So we can't really obviously record it at cost at the point in time of inheritance. So there's going to be some special rules. We'll have to take into consideration to figure out what the basis will be in that instance. If you receive property in one of these ways, you can see publication 551 for information on how to figure your basis. So in other words, if these items happen, you don't have like a normal arms length, as they call it, arms length transaction, market transaction, which would help us with the basis. That's how we assume what the value of something is because we have two self-interested informed individuals that have contrasting needs negotiating with each other and coming up to a cost. If you have some of these other items involved, that's going to complicate that transaction and or the thing that we use to purchase the property is going to complicate the transactions such as purchasing with services or other property and so on. So if those things are involved, you can go on over to publication 551 and look into what will the basis be in those instances for more information on it. So adjusted basis to figure your property's basis for depreciation, you may have to make certain adjustments increasing and decreasing to the basis of the property for events occurring between the time that you acquire the property and the time you place it in service for business or the production of income. The result of this adjustments to the basis is the adjusted basis, increases to basis. So what kind of adjustments do we have? You've got the increases here. You must increase the basis of any property by the cost of all items properly added to the capital account. These include the following, the cost of any additions or improvements. So we purchased the property and then we improved it. So if we improve the property, then like the same kind of thing is involved here. If we improve the property, you might say, well, can I expense it when I improve it? Well, if it was a repair, maybe, but if it's an improvement, that means we got to capitalize it. And if you did the improvement before we put the property in use for its rental purposes, then it would be included in the basis of the property. So the cost of any additions or improvements made before placing your property into service as a rental that have a useful life of more than one year amount spent after the casualty to restore the damage property. So after a casualty, you restored it, the cost of extending utility service lines to the property legal fees such as the cost of defending and perfecting title or settling zoning issues.


A film in three minutes. The Thin Blue Line. What are some of your favourite documentaries and why? Do they expose burning injustices at the hands of bad actors or nation-states? Do they shine a light on never-before-revealed truths which have been buried or gone unnoticed? Do they push the boundaries of visual style and editing techniques not yet seen before? Or have they done all of the above? Errol Morris' Oscar-winning The Thin Blue Line acts as one of the best examples of documentary filmmaking, revolutionising not only the approach and style of documentaries for a generation, but changing also the life of its subject. Released in 1988, the film documents the conviction of Randall Dale Adams, a labourer looking for a job in Dallas, Texas, who, in 1977, was sentenced to death and later life imprisonment for the killing of Texas police officer Robert Wood the previous year. Adams, who protested his innocence from day one, would be forced to serve 12 years of his sentence for a crime he did not commit, whilst the real perpetrator, Juan David Harris, would be imprisoned for other crimes at a later date and features in the film. What follows in Morris' astute interviewing of the cases witnesses, attorneys and commentators is a tragic miscarriage of American justice, revealing to us the ease in which innocent people can suddenly be consumed by the apparatus of the law at the hands of aggressive state actors. Morris would break from the previously held documentary conventions and forge new ground by shooting recreations of the moment of the murder, each one based on the differing testimony from multiple witnesses. These recreations, a Rashomon-esque technique later used by countless productions, pushes the film beyond the frame backdrop of the interviewees and highlights an artistic approach of presenting facts and figures to the audience. This style is combined with the ingenious collaboration from composer Philip Glass, whose ethereal soundtrack for the film works majestically with Morris' visuals, creating an uneasy soundscape that neither soothes nor discomforts the viewer's ears. On Morris' critics, who accused him of using artistic license when shooting re-enactments of the murder, the director has said, I don't believe truth is conveyed by style and presentation. I don't think that if it was grainy and full of handheld material, it would be any more truthful. Oddly enough, people don't want truth. They want to avoid having to think. If anybody really thinks that truth and style are one and the same, that if you obey a set of documentary conventions, truth magically pops out, well, that's not the way it works. Whether you agree or disagree with Morris' approach to documenting real-life stories, the film blue line's impact on cinema and television is undeniable. The director's tireless research and unique presentational style, whilst biased in the favour of the wrongly convicted Adams, pushed the limits of what audiences had come to expect from what documentaries could achieve. And although Adams would later take Umbridge with Morris' perceived ownership of his story, the fact that his conviction was overturned speaks volumes about the impact a documentary can have, not just on the subject, but on us as the audience as well.


If you want to join our cybernetic army of the future, just get at me after the presentation. All right. So this presentation is about redesigning enterprise platforms at scale. And it's really meant for anybody in this room or watching this online that has ever wanted to take something bigger than themselves and make it a reality. Because this project I'm going to share with you took many years and thousands of people's efforts to make happen. And so you're going to find out what it really took and a lot of the struggles along the way from my perspective. So before I get into it, if you don't know about ServiceNow, we are basically the platform that the largest, most successful businesses in the world use to run their businesses. We are that operating system for enterprise workflows. We're used by 80% of the Fortune 500 companies, including companies like Disney, Siemens, CERN, NASA, you name it. It's a huge number of companies. And myself, I am the SVP of platform product experiences at ServiceNow. I also founded ServiceNow's design organization. So if you're wondering why a product guy snuck into your design conference, I can also do design. And we'll talk about design, don't worry. My opinion, someone who's great at design is great at product and vice versa when you're talking about UI products, products that have a front and for people. So it's the same coin, different side of that coin. So a lot of times when people ask me about platform and platform design, the way I try and explain it is it's like designing a city. And when you're designing a city, you have to think about things far in advance of their existence. You have to consider things like infrastructure, roads, sewage systems. Where will the industrial area be, trade, commerce, security services, fire protection, all these kinds of things need to be thought about. And when I joined ServiceNow back in 2013, we'd created a city. It was ServiceNow's platform experience. But it was a city of antiquity. It was a city with good bones, but it needed to be modernized. And so what we're going to do, what we're going to go through in this presentation is how we would be able to seemingly overnight transform the experience of those folks living in that city from one of antiquity to being in a city that is a modern metropolis. And it's going to be of zero effort for them, not going to get in the way of their lives. They're just going to wake up the next day and suddenly the experience of ServiceNow's platform is going to be an order of magnitude better for them than it had ever been before. Now, every story has a beginning, and for me the beginning was in 2013 here when I joined ServiceNow as a product manager working with a small team of top engineers, including the founder of the company, Fred Luddy. And I remember that week looking at ServiceNow's platform UI for the first time back in 2013. And I thought, what did I just sign up for? Because it was terrible. So I remember looking at this thing and Fred, the founder of the company, is on the other side of the room coding and I'm next to another engineer and I just motioned him to come over and I whispered to him, pointing at the screen, I said, this is terrible. And the guy's looking at the screen and he's like, yep. And at the time, the company wasn't the behemoth it is today, but it was still pretty big in 2013. And so I said, the next thing I said, I said, how is this company? And the guy's looking at the screen, still sort of smiling, I don't know. We didn't know. It didn't make any sense. He was pretty new to you at the time. But the great news was that I was going to learn why ServiceNow, even with this antiquated UI, had been so successful and well loved in the market. I would be going on an innovation journey with the founder of ServiceNow, Fred, here over the next couple of years and I learned that the extensibility, the customizability, the flexibility of this platform to be able to automate any workflow in any business was sort of the secret sauce. And you didn't need a degree in computer science to be able to make it work. If you knew how to use SQL, you were halfway there. So together, we ended up building a bunch of products designing and building them. So one was this task board system, visual task boards. Another one was our collaboration system inside our platform. It was a native platform capability, as well as our first mobile products. And a host of other ones, as well as improving, iteratively, the UI that I'd first seen my first week. And as we went through that journey together, the team of about eight people grew to something like 60, 70 folks. And is the way things go, the first people were really high quality, and so they ended up sort of self-selecting high quality people. So by the time we got to this much larger size for this accelerator team we'd built, it was just a really cracked team of folks. And they were all product-minded. So whether they were engineers or designers or QA folks or they were product managers or program managers, they're all very interested in the outcome for customers. And as we hired all these very high quality folks, one of the people we hired, a good friend of mine, pictured here, Aaron, showed a lot of talent for really casting out into the future. And for my money I would call this person a kind of a visual futurist. And Fred noticed this talent in Aaron early on. To the point that one day he just came up to Aaron and said, what would the ServiceNow platform UI be like if you could just reimagine it? And don't worry about our existing customers and technical constraints and all that sort of stuff with our existing data model. Just what would it be like? Do you think that's something you could take on? And Aaron said, yeah, I think you could do that. And then he said, well, how long would you need? And he said, well, just three months. So we're like, OK, we'll see you in three months. Three months later he comes back and he shows us this full motion prototype that really challenged a lot of our assumptions about ServiceNow's platform experience. And it personally really triggered a lot of the early thoughts I'd had when I joined about the old UI. And I started thinking about all the products we'd built along the way. And it really got me thinking that maybe now was the time for us to completely reimagine ServiceNow's experience on the platform. So I took some time off, went on a trip to a really remote region in Baja, Mexico, without internet or electricity or running water, any of those things. And I went surfing during the day. And in the evening I would just look up at the sky and think about all of our customers, their workflows, the internet, data, all the stuff that you do when you do that kind of thing. And I came back from that trip energized and super fired up because I had a vision of where we could take this company in 10 years from then. And it was called ServiceNow 2026. And I presented it to our product development organization. And basically it went through a few key points. One of the facts of the future was going to be that we'd have hundreds of products that we'd be selling to our customers by the year 2026. And they would be building thousands or maybe even millions because that was one of the things about our platform. You could build your own applications on it. And every customer ended up building hundreds, if not more, applications when they use ServiceNow. So there'd be so many applications on the platform. And then everything in the world was going to become connected. IoT was becoming a thing even in 2016. And every single thing would have an IP address. And so the world was going to get a lot smaller from a connectivity perspective. And then of course, as a result of all these items being connected, there'd be a lot more data. And if there was a lot more data, things would become much more complex. And that would cause us to need what we're talking about in much of this conference over the last couple of days, the need for AI, because you have all this data and you have all this complexity. But you need data to train AI. So one hand sort of washes the other in this case. But even back then, it was a thought we'd had. And it was realized that our platform UI was not ready for that future. So coming to the development organization and pushing this out there and saying, this is what the future will be like, it was very important. Because you can't make a future-proof product if you're not able to predict what the future will be like. So this was the prediction. And people were really excited, thought it was good. And so what were we going to do about it? Well, I propose we need to create a modern, scalable platform experience that we need a platform-first approach to designing and building cutting-edge products. So we need a design system that will be ready for that future. And that information would have to come to you intelligently. In a future world where there's so many products and so many devices and so much data, it just wasn't practical to expect people to go find what they need. The information has to come to you. So everybody was super excited by this. There was a lot of interest. Let's get this going. But right around that time, a couple unexpected curve balls were thrown. So Fred Lutty, the founder of ServiceNow, ended up retiring. And the executive team, who had built a really great relationship with, also ended up retiring. They'd been so successful that they felt like they'd accomplished what they'd set out to do. And so they all decided to retire at the same time. And a new executive team came in. And there was a period of a lot of disruption. And so the accelerator team that we had built, as part of that, ended up getting broken up. And the engineers in this team ended up going into engineering. The product managers ended up going into product management. And the designers, well, they ended up with me. So because we'd built design as part of our discipline, creating products at ServiceNow, the new management team leading ServiceNow. So Troy, you seem to know what you're doing with design. Why don't you continue building out design at ServiceNow? So it was a little bit of a disappointment to lose that team, especially when we were just about to embark on this exciting platform journey to reimagine ServiceNow's platform. But that happens. And so I went all in on building ServiceNow's design team. We acquired another agency in San Diego, California and combined our designers with the design agency designers. Worked out great, about, say, 80% to 85% of those folks are still with us today, six years later. So that's pretty good when that happens. And that became the core design team at ServiceNow. And now I want to say we have something like 650 folks in the design organization. It's very healthy. But it really started with this core team of, they're not all in this picture. It was probably about 70 to 80 people that were the core team at ServiceNow designing for the future. So as part of the acquisition, this other company that I led the acquisition on had some developers, too. So brought them in. And then I said, great. I've got engineers. I've got designers. There's a few program managers here. And I told the engineering team. I said, hey, let's work on ServiceNow's new platform experience. You guys know how to code. And we've got the designers. We can start this up and make it happen. So we started working on some prototypes. And then I got disruption coming in again. The folks leading ServiceNow thought that they should find somebody to lead design that had more experience. Because I never led a design organization before. And it was a tough time. Effectively, I ended up having someone to report to you that had a lot more experience leading design orgs. And it was a big bummer. I was really bummed out about it. But looking back, I also had a lot to learn. So becoming a more effective leader and also learning more about myself, an important part of leadership is self-awareness. So in that time period, I had some training, some executive training, and things of that nature that really helped me grow as a leader. And so in balance is probably a good thing. But it was difficult at the time. It was a difficult moment. So anyhow, eventually, as things started to accelerate, there was interest not in building out the new platform UI. I'd had a hard time selling that idea at the time. But there did become an interest in creating the design system. And I'd thought a lot about that problem in the context of ServiceNow's platform. And it was an interesting challenge. We needed to enable the creation of modern products. But we not only had to enable creation of our products, but as I mentioned earlier, all of our customers' products. And we don't know what they want to build, because that's the whole thing with a platform. You can do anything with it. So it makes it a lot tougher to build your design system when you're not sure who it's for. Because there's an infinite number of use cases. And you don't even know all the roles. Here's a great example, prompt engineer. If someone would have told you prompt engineer five, six years ago, you'd say, what? What's a prompt engineer? So there's always these new roles being created across all the industries. And so how do we do it? So effective, I won't get too much into this. But basically, the way around this whole problem of chasing after every single persona and every single use case is to look at the ways people solve problems, because there's only a finite number of ways you can solve problems, and then to allow all of the engineering teams to coalesce around the different problem solving techniques to build out the components that are needed with the designers. So initially, when I floated this idea, it was considered to be a little bit radical, and it was sort of put in as a plan B. But eventually, it was seen that would be the only way to get it done in a reasonable time frame. And so we got involved, myself and a few other brave folks, and led the creation of ServiceNow's design system. And this approach was 400% more efficient than the traditional persona-driven approach that you'd expect. It also leveraged the new tech stack we were building. And it was very helpful for me, because a new leadership team that had come in that had some thoughts about me thought, hey, actually, this is actually pretty good stuff. So that's great, because I was going to need that political capital to do some other things, like build out a new platform UI at ServiceNow. Because I still hadn't given up on this. I thought about it all the time. I'd come up with stuff on the weekend. I'd be whiteboarding. I couldn't stop after coming back from that trip. I couldn't stop thinking about how we needed to do this to future-proof this platform for our customers and to make sure the next generation of employees had something great they could work with. And finally, there was interest, because after we built the design system, lots of folks were building products inside ServiceNow that looked modern. But the customers are now seeing modern products that were all getting loaded into this super old clunky UI. And they were getting frustrated by that, saying this thing just seems really herky-jerky. We're not happy with it. And so the largest business unit or division at ServiceNow, they were seeing that as a big issue, because they sold a lot of products. And if they all had to go in the center of this old, outdated UI to go from one product to the other, customers were dismayed with that. And so they approached me and said, there's something you can do. Do you have any ideas on how we could fix this problem? We want your help to fix this problem. And I said, yes, I have a solution to that problem. And so with that, I then went back to the team of people that were interested in solving this problem at ServiceNow. And I said, great news. We're going to build a new platform UI. And I think it was like the third time, so they were probably like, oh, here he comes again. But no, I said, I'm serious. We're going to fix this. We're going to unify the experience of all the products on the platform. We're going to modernize the visual design. And we're going to take it farther than that, because those are the requirements that the division asked for. But we're going to take it to the next level. We're going to future-proof the platform architecture, the UX of the architecture. And we're going to effectively create the operating system of the enterprise. That would be the goal. And so with my leadership team, we spent a lot of time figuring out how to describe this when we landed on the operating system of the enterprise. So with that, I started a bunch of lanes of work, because I'd gotten funding effectively to chase down this problem of a disjointed experience across products. And I was going to solve it with a new platform UI. And set up a team to do research. Obviously, we had visual design explorations here. We wanted to create a different feel for the UI and not have it look so dated. And then the UX architecture team started doing analysis of how we could properly scale this thing for the future. And everything was going great. But there was one problem. And that was our navigator. So this horrible, really gross UI, some customers ended up falling in love with it over time. It's like Stockholm syndrome. You fall in love with your kidnapper. That's what this is. And it didn't matter what I did. They loved it. OK. Now, here's the deal. We're talking about, at that time, probably $5 or $6 billion in revenue a year. I'm not going to tell them no. But on the other hand, it's gross. So big problem, because they loved it. But new customers said this is ugly and it's hard to use. And we needed one solution. I didn't want to do what some other competitors had done in this space and make some clunky like this and that UI, like slack mule force. So you go into classic and lightning, and I was like, no, no, no, no. And so at this point, Aaron and I started collaborating pretty closely. It got pretty heated. We spent a few months going back and forth on what to do. And it got to the point where, and there's a good lesson in here where I thought, I need to go to somebody who's just like these customers who like the old UI. So I went to the service now's CTO. Definitely not a design guy. He would tell you that. But he had a perspective. And so we sat down with him over the course of a few meetings and really got his point of view. And if we could just blow up the old UI and just start over or not, and he was adamant, no way. I love our old UI. So with that, those few meetings, Aaron and I were walking back to the design studio one Friday evening. And while we were walking, I was talking with him and I said, you know, while we're in our last meeting there, I noticed a flash of inspiration in your eyes. And I said, I think I've got something of my own up my sleeves. I said, why don't you think about it over the week and we'll meet on Monday morning. And so we ended up getting together on Monday and working on a new UI experience that would form the basis for service now's new platform navigation. And so as you can see here, what this allowed us to do was keep that old left nav UI that customers have gotten used to, but it also allowed you to pin and unpin it. And so if you're into the old UI, you can keep it pinned. It's just like it used to be in 2004 or whatever. And if you're a new user or into a more modern experience, you can unpin it and get it out of the way and just use a pull-down menu. And so with this design, we were able to satisfy the needs of both existing customers that like things to be in the past and also excite new customers, since things wouldn't look so dated. And it also had the added bonus of when you move it out of the way, it lets you just control Canvas. So with that, we were super excited. And we went to the president of Service Now and the GMs of all the different divisions and presented the pitch for the new platform UI. And of course, when you do something like this, it sounds scary because it's a huge investment and it's risky. But I explained during the pitch, I said, hey, we're not doing anything others haven't done before. Microsoft, Apple, and a host of others, all of them have gone on this journey. And this is part of the journey of a company becoming a permanent fixture in the ecosystem. And so by the end of the presentation, everybody was on board. Funding secured. We're in good shape. Except this is like right when COVID hit. COVID hit like two weeks later. And not only that, I ended up getting a new boss and we had a new CEO about a month or two before then. And so everything was thrown into disarray as I'm sure all of you remember. And it was at that point one of my employees came to me and said, do you really think you'll be able to pull this off? And I said, yes, there's no question because we are certain about what we're setting out to do. And in a time of uncertainty, certainly pays dividends. And so I saw this as an opportunity. Never waste a good crisis. Everybody had to work from home. Everybody's distracted. And we had a crystal clear plan of what we wanted to build and why. And that plan was to make a more productive platform experience to modernize and look and feel, to make it personalized and contextual, and it'll work for all of our customers old and new. So while everybody was a bit discombobulated due to COVID, of course, we had clarity. And so from there, we started to mobilize all of service now in this new remote world with those clear marching orders. And it ended up becoming the largest engineering project in the history of the company. We had a few thousand people working on this at support across the entire organization. And it was driven from design because I was still working in the design organization at that time, but it wasn't driven through design. And what I mean by that is it wasn't just about the design. It was about creating value for customers. And when we would interact with other departments, I would make an effort to speak with them in a language they would understand. Let me give you an example here. This is the multi-year project plan for the new platform UI. And I put this together over a weekend, simply so I could share it with our program management teams so they could get an understanding of how many teams this would take, how long it would take, who'd be involved. Of course, they'd do something far better than this. But it was a bridge, right? It was a bridge. And similar efforts were made with folks in product management, of course, and in engineering. And so then after about, you know, by that time I'd say, you know, close to 20 months of work, we ended up releasing ServiceNow's new platform UI to great fanfare. It's not normally the kind of thing you see for a platform experience. And because of all the great coordination we'd done as a company on it, it wasn't just the platform UI. So we'd had the platform UI, but as part of the release, we'd shipped out over two dozen applications with the release that leveraged all the great tech improvement of Next Experience. And it was really just an awesome show of everybody working together to get to an outcome that mattered to customers. And some of the things we heard from customers they were in awe, you know, that it's just a huge improvement.  So no one ever says that about a platform experience. So that one really meant a lot to me. And it wasn't just, you know, these sorts of qualitative, we love it. You know, after we'd gotten this into production with customers, we saw approximately a 33% improvement in wayfinding productivity. So not only did it look and feel a lot better, it actually made them more productive, which was, you know, just as important. And I think we're on track by end of year. We're at two years now to see 90% adoption, which is unheard of in the enterprise platform space. 90% of our customers will be on Next Experience because they opt in. So for 90% of your customers to opt in to, you know, going with the new experience, that's good. Okay, so long project, lots of things, you know, lots of up and down. So what are the major takeaways? What are the things that I think everybody here should keep in mind when you take on trying to make a large project happen and take it to a successful conclusion? Well, the first one is you have to lead with a vision people can believe in. You have to take the time to really craft that vision that people can get behind because that's the difference between people just showing up and people bringing their best. Gotta have a vision they can believe in. Two, great outcomes are a team sport. They really are. It has to feel like it's a team. You cannot do it all on your own. That's something that I learned in spades during this super complex project. This one's super important in particular with design, you know, but it's true for all disciplines. Don't fall in love with your design. Fall in love with the customer. Fall in love with the customer. Fall in love with the customer. If you love the customer, you understand the customer. If you understand the customer, you will come up with the right design. Next, you have to know what you're saying yes to. If you know what you're saying yes to, you can say no to anything else. There's people I had to work with on this project I didn't get along with that well. Of course, a couple thousand people, there'll be a couple in there, right? But if I'm signing up for making sure that we're successful as a team to make this happen, that means I'm not gonna let those things get in the way. You have to focus on what's important. Know what you're saying yes to. And then the last one here is, you know, any big thing that becomes successful is really about persistence and resilience. You know, people will come to you during a project like this and say, you know, I don't think we can do it, or what if it doesn't work? You know, and you have to be there for them and let them know we're gonna do it, and it will work. And if it doesn't work, we'll figure out another way and it'll work anyways.   And you'll know you're the leader on the project if you look behind you and there's no one there. Because sometimes it comes down to you. You have to believe in yourself. It's super important. Okay, looks like we have just a little bit of time left. Thank you. I hope this is of use to you guys. And it's great seeing everybody. Check, check. Any questions, please raise your hands. We'll pass on the mic. Can we pass on the mic, please? Hey, hi. I'm Pratika. So I just have one question. So with any kind of design revamp, there is always some sort of a learning curve involved. How do we really ensure that the learning curve is not too steep, but at the same time, we're also not deviating from the existing user's mental model? I couldn't really hear. I'm gonna just hang out by this big speaker so I can hear that better. Repeat it, please. Yeah, so I would like to know with any kind of UX revamp, there's always some sort of a learning curve involved. Yeah. Right? So how do we ensure that the learning curve is not too steep? I mean, it's not very difficult for the users to learn the new products. And at the same time, how do we ensure that we don't deviate from the existing user behavior and mental model? Because of course, the customers and users, they are already in love with their product. So how do we ensure? I would just like to know your experience. How did you go about managing that? Yeah, so, you know, there's... Yeah, so when it comes to improving an existing product experience that's working, one of the techniques I employ is to go out to where the customer is and see how they're using it. As an example, it was not uncommon for me during this project and previous projects to go to a customer site and I'd ask them to see the most efficient person, the most productive person. The most productive person may be more clever than the other employees, but as a designer, you can democratize that cleverness by bringing it into the product. For example, they might have a notepad they set up or they might turn their screen 90 degrees or have a secondary application they're using or whatever the case may be. And so that's how I would usually look at how do I improve this product is I would go see what's going on and who is doing better with it and then it bring into the product any kind of innovation they had sort of made on their own. And I'm also very sensitive to just the fundamental truth which is in the enterprise space, it's about productivity. So if we can measurably demonstrate that the productivity increases by this instead of that, then we go forward with it. And if we cannot do that, then I typically am in much less game to making a change because as you mentioned, people get used to it and they love it and it becomes very important to honor that, to honor their productivity. Yeah, I can hear you, I can recite it. So how the designers and the developers work together. So for our design system team, we have an engineering team that's dedicated to creating the reasonable components and we also have a core design system design team that creates the core components. Because the company is fairly large and we create products as well as a platform, many of the design system components though, the more complex ones are actually built by the business units outside of the core platform and their designers, the ones that aren't part of the platform itself will end up designing those as well. That can be challenging and it is a challenge we have sometimes because you'll often see a case where two different businesses in service now will build a very similar component for themselves and then we need to go in and organize that situation but for the core platform componentry, it's all done correctly and there's a code base you can pull from and then we have all of our components are in the Figma library for the designers to be able to leverage as well. So it's definitely challenging. I won't tell you it's not without its challenges but at this point, we do have a true design system where a new designer, for example, can come in and within a few hours and they're putting something together as well as somebody who's in engineering. It's just we need to the more complex design component, design system components that are part of the BUs that business units that you may see some overlap. Hello. This is Soham. So I had a question that in most of the cases, the UI revamps in companies and large scale organizations that happen are very top driven ideas. Now, how do you ensure that everyone in the team is empowered to share the ideas in which the baby product can be more revamped? So does the revamp has to be always top driven or how do you ensure that others in the team members are also like empowered to, you know? No. What's the set up like? The revamp doesn't have to be top driven, you know? I mean, I wasn't, I mean, I'm still not running service now. I'm not at the top. You know, service now does a really good job of caring about the customer, very serious about customers. And so that in our culture is a very effective avenue to initiate change. So, you know, I had a challenge early on with this because I didn't do a great job of explaining what the problem was because I thought everybody understood. And sometimes folks at the top may not be as close to the products. And so I learned over time to take the time to explain the problem more before jumping into what the solution needed to be. So in the case of this project, there was a point where I ended up getting like, I don't know, like 200 comments from customers, you know, with a few folks on the team that gathered 200 comments where they were frustrated with the, you know, 20 year old user interface. And I ended up leveraging all that data as part of the pitch deck to the president of the company.  And that was very helpful. So yeah, I guess the important thing here is, and I don't bring it up in the presentation, but one thing I learned is the selling is so important. You have to know how to sell. If you're gonna pitch something and it doesn't matter what it is, you've got to know how to sell. And that means you have to know who your customer is. And the customer in this case is that audience. And so learning that those customers, being let's say the top people at the company, that their interest was customer feedback more than like Troy's hunch was an important thing to unlock so that when I'd speak with them, I would always speak with the customers is saying.


This is Corporal Samantha Hall, porting in from Joint Forces Headquarters. The Task Force is conducting a Deployment Readiness Exercise, or DREE, in preparation for America's worst day. A chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear event on home soil. Training event, training event, training event Task Force Center. This is a training event only. A notional event has occurred. The mission of the soldiers is to respond within 24 hours of such an event that assists local, state, federal, and tribal partners in saving lives, preventing further injury, and providing critical defense support to civil authorities. Such a rapid response requires ample practice. Today, the soldier's ultimate task is broken into an N-hour sequence, starting with the notification of disaster, or N, plus the amount of time following. At N-plus-one, or within an hour, each soldier must acknowledge they received a notification to their respective NCOIC. At N-plus-two, each soldier must report to their designated rally point. The N-hour sequence that we're on right now, we are currently at N-plus-one and a half in response to a nuclear detonation in the area of Seattle, Washington. So currently, we are loading all the A and B bags, the deployment bags for our soldiers here before we move out to our rally point. Well, N-hour one consisted of contacting an NCOIC, and N-hour two consist of us packing our bags and getting ready to go to the JFHQ parking lot. So right now, we're just here to report until N-hour two is over and then we're taken off. We hit our first time hack that we needed. All of our soldiers reported acknowledgement of the RAVE message, which is our message for notification of an incident. Very proud. We've been doing a great job so far, but we're going to knock this out of the park for sure. We're at the Reserve Forces Training Center in Lansing. So we're on an N-plus-four hour sequence. So we're just getting ready, getting stage to move, ready to respond. We are on N-plus-five right now, and we are on route to Southridge via convoy. So this is N-7.5, and the convoy just arrived at Southridge Air Base. Right now we're on N-hour N-plus-eight, getting ready to depart out to the location that we have to be at. So far it's gone very well. We hit every time that we needed to hit, and so far they're positive, they're excited, and they're ready. One thing is I'm proud of all of them with everything they do. Even with the changes we would get back and forth, they just stick to it and they go. Task Force 46 has proven successful in their first test of readiness to support the nation. However, more exercises will follow to prepare for the day we hope will never come. From the heart of Task Force 46, this is Corporal Samantha Hall reporting in.


The director of the Children's Mercy Bioethic Center in Kansas City, Missouri. Many of us remember John, who spent 21 years here at the University of Chicago, leaving his professor of pediatrics, associate director of the McLean Center, and associate chair for academic affairs in the department of pediatrics. After leaving the University of Chicago, he spent two years as the John B. Francis chair in bioethics at the Center for Practical Bioethics, and then went on to Children's Mercy to start the Children's Mercy Bioethic Center. Dr. Lantos has served as president of the American Society of Law, Medicine, and Ethics, the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities, and he has also written or edited five books and has published more than 250 journal articles and book chapters on pediatrics and neonatal ethics. Welcome back, John. Thanks, Laney. Thanks, Mark, Barry, and Mary Ann if you're here, but especially Adam and Fiona, everybody knows one of the least desirable positions on Earth is to be one of Mark's helpers, and you guys have done fabulous work. Thank you. The first two talks might be called stories about doctors acting nobly when patients or parents act stupidly. This is going to be a talk about doctors acting stupidly, and it's really the story of mandating influenza vaccine and about a project we undertook with our hospital, the collaboration between the Bioethics Center and the hospital to figure out what to do about healthcare workers who didn't get their flu vaccines. And it's part of a larger story that's taken place societally, and I think there's been an interesting shift over the last few years, and it's really been sort of a drama in three acts. Voluntary immunization, which didn't work for motion of voluntary immunization through heavy persuasion, cajoling and all the things that Rick talked about. And finally, what we're starting to see, which is requiring immunization. That's one of those things where there's been a sea change, I think just in the last couple of years in the institutional policy, vaccines have been recommended for decades. Most hospitals offered them but didn't require them, and the immunization rates among healthcare workers were low, and suddenly in the last five years, people are starting to fire people. So let's look at how we got there. First of all, immunization kills people. 200,000 hospitalizations in the United States a year, about 50,000 deaths, 600,000 life years lost, and it's one of the leading causes of vaccine-preventable death. It's well known that there's no zocomial spread, especially among babies, children, and the elderly. And it's also well known that doctors and nurses are the vectors of this. 25% of unimmunized healthcare workers get the flu every year. They're contagious before they're symptomatic. Most don't recall that they had the flu when you ask them, you know, did you have flu-like symptoms? They didn't recall any respiratory illness. So you don't know when you're contagious. And even if you do, we don't stay at home when people surveyed healthcare workers. Most people say, oh, if I get sick, I'd just stay home. And if you asked them the last time you were sick, what did you do? More than half of them went to work. So the justification, usually when people do this, is they need me. I need to show up at work. Does immunizing healthcare workers actually work? This is an interesting question that I'm going to get back to at the end. There are some studies. If you actually look at the studies, they're really bad. But here's what they look like. 600-bed tertiary care hospital, 12 influenza seasons, healthcare immunization rates with a promotion of immunization program went from 4% to 67%. And nosocomial flu they reported went from 32% to 3%. That sounds pretty good. Although the CDC says 67% would not be enough to prevent this nosocomial spread. So it makes you wonder about the methodology. Similar study in long-term care facilities, healthcare workers offered free vaccine in some, not in others. So it was sort of a randomized trial. Vaccine uptake was higher where they were offered free vaccine, 50% versus 5%, and the mortality for patients in the long-term care facilities with free flu vaccine was lower than in those without, and this just is the graph from that table, as the vaccination rate for healthcare workers increased, the mortality rate for patients decreased. For children's hospitals, this is particularly important because premature babies are particularly vulnerable and there have been outbreaks in neonatal intensive care units. So if you look at how to prevent this, all the public health officials say prevention is the key, that staying home or wearing masks doesn't work. Immunization for healthcare workers has been recommended by virtually every professional society that has looked at that. Here's just the names of a few. The Joint Commission requires accredited institutions to provide flu vaccine, although not to require flu vaccine. And so there was widespread agreement that this was a good thing to do. And the question then is, what is wrong with healthcare workers and why don't they get immunized? And when you survey people, these are some of the reasons they give. The most common is, I never get sick.  And the belief that the vaccine doesn't work, which is probably the most interesting and subtle of the arguments because in fact the vaccine doesn't work all that well, not as well as most vaccines. And every year they're guessing which strains of flu to include and some years it works better than others. So the big question I think for policymakers, both nationally and institutionally, is what to do when people who should be smart enough to do the right thing don't do it. Act two of the drama were programs of aggressive encouragement and many hospitals, many institutions tried education and current encouragement, convenient access, and it led to modest increases in vaccination rates. The best programs got up to maybe 50, 75%. One of the best was Barnes-Dewish in St. Louis and not large non-profit healthcare organization with 11 hospitals, urban, suburban, and rural, three long-term care facilities, 25,000 employees, and they started a campaign with free, convenient vaccine. They took carts around, they went to where the people were, they gave publicity, they gave encouragement, they had lotteries, they wore badges, they gave stickers, they had educational programs, successful practices were shared and they got their vaccination rate up to about half or a little over half of healthcare workers. They were added to the quality scorecard with a goal of 80%. Leadership incentives were provided.  And that got them up to about 71%, 16%.  That was just not good enough. So then Act 3 was some hospitals started playing hardball. The first one was Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle and they said to their doctors and nurses, although I don't think they did it for every hospital worker, get vaccinated or get fired. There was administrative support. They went through the flu champions, education, etc., etc. And guess what? It worked better than voluntary immunization. 98% immunization rates, but the nurses sued. The Washington State Nurses Association is utterly opposed to this policy, appalled that the hospital would threaten nurses with termination, forcing nurses to receive the flu vaccine is simply wrong. I'm shocked, shocked that the hospital would threaten to fire anybody. Nurses must have personal choice. And the court upheld the nurses. The nurses won their case against the hospital, at least on the first round, but on a technicality. They said this was not in the labor contract that the nurses had negotiated as a condition of employment. So, without it being in a labor contract, they couldn't add a new mandate and this would need to be addressed in the next collective bargaining agreement. So it was a delay, not a victory or a defeat. Barnes-Jewish was the next one. I'm going to skip through this one because time is short and I want to get to what we did at Children's Mercy. But they put in a mandate after their encouragement program. They communicated it widely. The CEO endorsed it. The policy was implemented with free vaccines, multiple sites, exemptions for medical and religious reasons, but with a hard deadline. If you don't have your flu vaccine, you're suspended without pay. You get a 30-day grace period. If you're not vaccinated at the end of the 30 days, you're out of here. The religious accommodation required a letter from human resources, medical exemption, a letter from a licensed physician. And they got up to almost 100% compliance with 98.5% immunization, with a few people getting medical exemptions, a few people getting religious exemptions, and 8 or .03% of employees just leaving their job. Mercy then decided to implement a program similar to the Barnes program, but with collaboration with the new bioethics center. So we started surveying employees about attitudes, beliefs about mandatory flu vaccine. We found lots of interesting things about what people believe. It turns out the only valid religious belief is libertarianism. That is my favorite comment when we surveyed employees because somebody who said, I get the flu vaccine every year, but if you required me to, I wouldn't. But here were the top 10 reasons, and they're pretty interesting as we rolled out this program and announced two years ahead of time that we were moving from voluntary to mandatory. Some interesting things happened. So the two columns are the two years. The one I want to point out in particular is the number of people claiming a religious belief precluding them from vaccination doubled as the possibility of a mandatory vaccine approached. Pregnancy. Yes, pregnancy is a fascinating one too because as most of you probably know, flu vaccine is indicated particularly for pregnant women but a lot of people claim either pregnant or intending to get pregnant as a reason not to get the vaccine. We didn't allow that one had to be an allergic reaction or bad adverse effect. This year we put the mandatory, or last year put the mandatory flu vaccine, no more signing declination statements. It was for every hospital employee and volunteer, students, volunteers, contract workers. Medical exemptions had to get a doctor signing a thing. There was a clause in the policy that religious exemptions would have to be evaluated by the head of chaplaincy. They didn't actually do that, and he was a little wary of how he would go about measuring the sincerity. For bona fide exceptions, people had to mask from October to April, and there was a hard deadline of November 15th. The program worked. Few exemptions for religious and medical. Three people left the hospital and said I'd rather quit than get the vaccine. And the reasons for success, I think, were a multi-year program to raise consciousness. High vaccine rates prior with persuasion. One year heads up. Big administrative buy-in and support. Actually a collaboration between administration, bioethics, infectious disease, and quality improvement. Pre-vaccine, lots of education. And I think a compelling philosophic rationale. No child should get the flu from one of us. The interesting question is why the shift? Why did we go for 15 years knowing what was the right thing to do and not do it? I'm not sure what the answer is, but it seems like the libertarian arguments are actually losing in this context. So is this a rare example of people behaving rationally? Is it that we're becoming a police or nanny pick your tyrant state? There's not much evidence that this actually works. That is, I haven't seen a good outcome study that hospitals with higher immunization rates have lower rates of nosocomial infection. I think it may be a more rigorous sense of professionalism as part of the professionalism movement. Or it may just be putting our money where our mouth is. And if we're going to go around advocating vaccines for other people, we really ought to get it ourselves. I predict though that this trend is unstoppable and that within five years we'll look at places that don't have mandatory policies the way we look at hospitals that allow smoking or did during the transition period and that this is the way we will do it from now on. Thank you very much.