Hey there lads and ladies, it is Petrifying Pumpkins here and welcome to 18 things you need to know about The Walking Dead Onslaughts. 1. The Walking Dead Onslaughts is a first person virtual reality game that focuses on both melee and ranged combats against undead enemies. So do not expect to be able to play this game without a virtual reality headset. 2. The game is going to release on PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift and Steam VR simultaneously. As of yet, there's no news of an Oculus Quest version but perhaps it might be a bit too intensive for that platform to handle. 3. As of record in this video, Onslaughts is set to release on the 29th of September, that's only about a month away from now but it is still possible that it could be delayed so please do not get mad at me in the comments if that happens. 4. The game is being advertised as being 25 euro and dollars on Steam right now with a 10% discount if you pre-purchase there. So you can probably expect that to be the price across all platforms. Pre-ordering the game nets you a couple of character skins and gold weapon variants. As of right now, the game isn't available to pre-order yet on PlayStation Network. 5. There is a Deluxe Edition also available at $5 more that includes extra weapons made famous by The Walking Dead TV show such as Negan's famous Lucille baseball bat. 6. The Walking Dead Onslaught will need the Move Controllers to be playable as its combat systems are built around real motion. So do not expect DualShock 4 support and do not expect Aim Controller support either. This game seems built around needing two tracked hands so that means Move Controllers just like Saints and Sinners. 7. Onslaught is being developed by Servios, a studio well known in the virtual reality space for creating several well-regarded virtual reality games, including RawDazza and Sprint Vector. Their name behind this project should inspire at least some level of confidence. 8. When Onslaught was initially revealed, Servios had planned on including a co-op mode. However, this had to be cut during development so that the studio could focus on the single pair story and making that as good as it can be. It remains to be seen if the co-op mode will ever resurface in the future as some kind of updates or DLC. 9. Unlike this year's The Walking Dead Saints and Sinners, Onslaught will be based directly on the Walking Dead TV show rather than the graphic novels. As such, it takes a more realistic style approach versus the cartoonish look of Saints and Sinners and the Telltale Walking Dead series. 10. Players will take control of Darrell Dixon for the main campaign as he tells his story to a stranger he meets. Darrell actors from the show will return to voice their characters in this game, including Norman Reedus for his character Darrell. 11. The story will take place between the 8th and 9th season of the television show and Servios were able to work with the risers from the TV show to make sure it fits in smoothly with continuity. 12. The story will see Darrell and Rick at odds with one another as Darrell's story focuses on him trying to save someone whilst Rick is more concerned with rebuilding their society. Expect the two to butt heads throughout the campaign. 13. Outside of the main campaign, there will be another mode called Scavenger mode. This mode has been described by Servios as being infinitely replayable and in this mode players can control not just Darrell but also iconic The Walking Dead characters Rick, Michonne and Carol as they go out on supply runs for their home Alexandria. 14. The game will feature an arsenal of 24 weapons. Each will be customizable to suit the player's preference and play style. 15. Players will spend time upgrading the settlement of Alexandria made famous in the show with players deciding what parts to upgrade with their limited resources. Upgrades to Alexandria will offer benefits to the player. Players will also need to make trade-offs between the good of the player and the good of the community when making these decisions. An example given to ScreenRant was the option to buff the player's combat abilities or upgrade a building to provide food for the settlers. 16. Servios developed what they call a progressive dismemberment system that will allow players to engage in visceral real motion combat. This will include D-limbing, which is a word I did not know existed, carving and impaling amongst other contextual interactions. Servios have also developed what they call the melee restraint system, which sounds very similar to what we saw in Saints and Sinners, essentially allowing players to grab an enemy, push them and throw them away. 17. While other video games based on the TV show version of The Walking Dead have not fared very well, Servios have spent over two years working on this adaptation to make it solid and they've had access to some of the same resources that the TV show has according to ScreenRant. 18. COVID-19 did slow the production of Onslaught down a little bit, but Servios were able to adjust to the new working from home style to get the game ready on time. There you have it, 18 things you need to know about The Walking Dead Onslaught. Let me know in the comments how you're feeling about this upcoming title and I hope you learned something from watching this video. Before I go, let me give a huge thank you to my Patreon supporters whose names are on the screen right now. Thanks to their support, this channel can stay moist. In particular, let me shout out the top to your Patreon supporters, Chrom, Pete Hawkins, Chopped517, Daniel the Pumpkin Patch Kid and Tradition. Thank you very much for that incredibly moist generosity. If you would like to help support this channel, you too can go over to patreon.com for its last petrifying pumpkins, the link of which will be in the description below, but if you don't want to do that, I'll be happy with the likes, comments and all that usual shite too. Finally, let me thank Decepticon for letting me always use his tracks in my videos. You can find him in the description below at Decepticon.com and you can also find him in all the usual music places like Spotify, Bandcamp, all that kind of stuff. That is it for this video lads and ladies. I will see you in the next one. Stay moist.


Before we continue, I want to tip my hat to the excellent introductory-level book Exploring Black Holes by Taylor and Wheeler. The late John Wheeler was the physicist responsible for coining the term black hole, and some of the topics and terminology in this video were motivated by this book. Imagine, rather whimsically, that we have a global observer who we'll call the bookkeeper. He has a clock that measures time T. He spies a distant tiny asteroid floating in deep space, and he sends a team of robots to build a physical coordinate system using this as its origin. The robots measure off a distance of one light second from the asteroid, and construct a solid ring with this as its radius, which they label with the coordinate r equals one. They measure out another light second, and build a second ring, r equals two, and so on with all the rings lying in a common plane. Since there is no significant gravitational field in this region of space, spacetime will be flat, and Euclidean geometry will hold. So we know that the circumference of a ring with radius r will be two pi r. Now attention turns to the second coordinate. A beam of a light is shot from the asteroid in the point where it intersects each ring as marked as coordinate phi equals zero. The beam is rotated by, say, 45 degrees, and coordinate phi equals 45 degrees as marked off, and so on. We now have a complete two-dimensional coordinate system. Anyone can figure out where they are by noting which ring and angle marking is nearest, and the bookkeeper can follow anyone's trajectory by noting what r and phi coordinates they pass by when his clock reads some time T. Now very whimsically, let's picture the robot construction team depositing more and more mass onto the asteroid until it eventually becomes a black hole. From previous discussions, we know that a ring with radial coordinate r will still have a circumference two pi r. However, the black hole will curve spacetime such that the locally measured distance between rings is no longer equal to the difference of their r coordinates. We visualize this as the rings being on a curved surface such that the distance between them as seen from above is less than the distance between them as measured on the surface. Now we launch a satellite and track it as it falls freely in this curved spacetime. The satellite has a clock that reads time s, the proper time for its trajectory. For each value of s, the satellite can record its current r and phi coordinates as well as bookkeeper time T. These are the values predicted by the equations of motion. At the same time, the bookkeeper can keep track of the satellite coordinates as a function of his time, T. We can also have local observers positioned at rest on the rings. They will measure proper distance sigma, where an increment d sigma is greater than an increment dr by a factor of one over square root one minus two m over r. And they will have their own clocks that measure local time. An increment dt local is less than an increment dt by a factor square root one minus two m over r. In an appendix video, we derive the equations of motion and explain how to solve them numerically. Now let's look at what they predict for a satellite released from rest near a black hole. The object starts at the upper right corner of the coordinate grid. We plot its position versus bookkeeper time T. The satellite initially accelerates, but then slows and comes to rest at the horizon. Now we plot position versus satellite time, s. The satellite accelerates continuously until it hits the horizon. At that point we stop the animation, not because the satellite stops, but because the equations of motion break down at the Schwarzschild singularity. Let's illustrate these two different views of the motion on a single plot. Here the vertical axis gives the r coordinate. We'll have the satellite fall from r equals five. The thick black line at the bottom indicates the horizon. The horizontal axis corresponds to time s for the satellite and t for the bookkeeper. The red dots show the satellite's perception of the motion while the blue dots correspond to the bookkeeper's view of things. While the satellite records itself as moving ever more rapidly toward the horizon, indicated by the red line always curving downward, the bookkeeper sees it first accelerate, then level off and finally slow down, indicated by the upward curving of the blue line near the end. Let's zoom in on the behavior near the horizon. There seems to be nothing special about the horizon from the satellite's perspective, but for the bookkeeper it represents an absolute limit of the satellite's motion. As the satellite gets closer, ever longer intervals of time pass for the bookkeeper. No matter how long he watches, the bookkeeper will never see the satellite reach the horizon. From these curves we can calculate apparent velocities. The vertical axis is the r coordinate, and the thick black line at the bottom represents the horizon. The horizontal axis shows velocity, with rest at left and increasing toward the right. The left blue curve is the satellite's velocity as perceived by the bookkeeper, dr, an increment of r coordinate, over dt, an increment of bookkeeper time. This starts at zero and increases as the satellite falls, up to a maximum of a bit more than point three, at r a bit more than two. It then rapidly decreases back to zero as the satellite gets closer to the horizon. The right red curve shows how fast the r coordinate changes from the satellite's perspective, dr over an increment of satellite time, ds. This also starts at zero, but continues to increase as the satellite falls. Now let's simulate the satellite falling from a point closer to the horizon, r equals 1.1. Once again the satellite sees itself as always accelerating, speeding right up to the horizon, while the bookkeeper sees it as accelerating and then decelerating, never reaching the horizon. And again, the apparent velocity plots reflect this. As we might expect since the satellite started its fall closer to the horizon, the maximum velocities are less than for the previous case. Not only does the bookkeeper see the satellite slowing down as it approaches the horizon, he sees all processes on the satellite slowing down too. Here we plot 100 clicks of the satellite's clock as it nears the horizon. Satellite time s is shown on the horizontal axis, and the increment of s between each tick is uniformly one millisecond. The total elapsed satellite time is 100 milliseconds, from s equals .585 to s equals .685 seconds. The corresponding bookkeeper time is plotted on the vertical axis. The total elapsed bookkeeper time is about 7 seconds, from a bit less than t equals 3 to a bit less than t equals 10. That's about 70 times the elapsed time experienced on the satellite. And this apparent slowing of time rapidly increases the closer the satellite gets to the horizon. The last three ticks of the clock shown on this plot are seen by the bookkeeper to take 389, 643, and 2308 milliseconds. This time stretching increases without limit, and the final clock tick seen by the bookkeeper would last forever. As a result, the frequency of any signal sent by the satellite, including light or other forms of radiation, will be seen by the bookkeeper to decrease to zero. That is to be infinitely redshifted. So, in a more accurate representation of the bookkeeper's view of the satellite's fall, the satellite initially accelerates, then slows down, and finally fades from sight as it approaches the horizon. Physics tells the bookkeeper that the satellite comes to rest at the horizon, but he never actually sees this. Now let's look at the velocity of the falling satellite as measured by local observers at rest on our coordinate rings. Their measurements of length and time differ from the bookkeepers. The bookkeeper sees the satellite velocity as the change in r-coordinate over a change in the t-coordinate. The local observer will measure the corresponding increment of proper distance, d-sigma, which is dr over square root 1 minus 2m over r. And she measures an increment of time, dt-local, which is dt times square root 1 minus 2m over r. Our velocity measurement is the ratio of these increments, d-sigma over dt-local, which is the bookkeeper velocity dr over dt divided by 1 minus 2m over r. As the satellite approaches the horizon, bookkeeper velocity approaches zero, but so does the factor 1 minus 2m over r. When we plot this for the fall from r equals 5, the red curve at right, we find that it starts at zero and continually increases. As the satellite nears the horizon, the locally measured velocity approaches one. In our units, that's the speed of light. For the fall from r equals 1.1, locally measured velocity once again starts at zero and then approaches the speed of light at the horizon. So approaching the event horizon, the bookkeeper sees a falling object coming to rest and fading to black. The local observer see a falling object approaching the speed of light. The same object is seen by different observers to both approach the smallest possible speed rest and the largest possible speed, that of light. This is the scenario that we somewhat crudely tried to visualize using the embedding diagram. Viewed from above the surface, corresponding to the bookkeeper's view, an object does indeed appear to slow down in its motion toward the black hole. But the same motion viewed by local observers displays no slowing at all. If things are so bizarre near the horizon, it's natural to ask what happens at the horizon itself. And if it's possible to pass through the horizon, what happens inside? Our problem is that we can't solve the equations of motion across the horizon because the form of our metric, from which everything is derived, is such that as the r-coordinate approaches its horizon value, the metric coefficient of dr squared blows up. This is the Schwarzschild Singularity. And yet our solutions show that the satellite speeds right up to the horizon. And local observers see it approaching the speed of light. So it certainly seems like the satellite would cross the horizon. Either that or something catastrophic happens there. To get some insight into this, let's look at the gravitational acceleration that would be measured by local observers at rest on the coordinate rings. The equations of motion for an object starting from rest look like acceleration in the r-coordinate equals minus m over r squared. Here are the double dots above the r-indicate acceleration. But the r-coordinate does not measure proper distance, so this expression is not the acceleration that would be measured by local observers. Instead, an increment of local measured distance equals an increment of r times the factor of 1 over square root 1 minus 2m over r. We have to add this factor to get the formula for acceleration that would be measured by local observers. But this expression blows up as we approach the horizon. Here's a plot of gravitational acceleration, which is also the gravitational force per mass versus the r-coordinate. As we descend toward the horizon, this grows arbitrarily large. In our system of units, acceleration is seconds per second squared. In other words, one unit of acceleration corresponds to going from zero to one light second per second in one second. That is, from rest to the speed of light in one second. The speed of light is about 300 million meters per second. One at Earth's surface is roughly 10 meters per second squared. So one unit of acceleration in our system corresponds to about 30 million g's, a truly astronomical quantity. Now we can understand how it is that no matter how close to the horizon an object falls from, it approaches the speed of light as seen by local observers. The closer to the horizon we are, the greater is the acceleration. And this grows arbitrarily large, arbitrarily close to the horizon. With an arbitrarily large acceleration, we can get an object to go from zero to the speed of light in an arbitrarily short period of time. Let's look at our metric again. Outside the horizon, r is greater than 2m, and the expression in parentheses is positive. Therefore, it's possible, at least in principle, to remain at rest, that is to have no change in the r-coordinate while having a change in the time coordinate. For dr equals 0, the metric reduces to ds squared equals a positive number times dt squared. Now, let's see what happens inside the horizon. There 2m is greater than r, so 1 minus 2m over r is negative. We show this explicitly by writing it as minus 2m over r minus 1. We can no longer have dr equals 0, because this leaves us with ds squared equals a negative number times dt squared. A positive number cannot equal a negative number. It follows that inside the horizon, no object can be at rest. If it falls through the horizon, moving toward r equals 0, it must continue to do so. Nothing can stop its motion and bring it to rest, not even in principle. So, at the horizon, gravitational force becomes infinite. And inside the horizon, you cannot remain at rest. You can only move toward the center r equals 0. Although the bookkeeper coordinate system can't describe motion across the horizon, coordinate systems which themselves are in freefall can. Details are given in the Taylor and Wheeler text. What can be said is that inside the event horizon, at least according to general relativity, no information can be transmitted to the outside, so no one outside can confirm a prediction of what happened inside. No stationary local observers can exist, and velocity measurements relative to a fixed frame cannot be made. We've seen that according to stationary local observers at fixed values of the arc coordinate, a falling object always approaches the speed of light at the horizon. Extrapolating this curve, we might expect that inside the horizon, the object is falling faster than the speed of light, but we aren't justified in extrapolating this curve inside the horizon because no stationary local observers can exist there, not even in principle, so the plotted quantity is not even defined. Likewise for the gravitational force measured by stationary local observers, what can be said is that no experiment performed anywhere, even inside the horizon, will ever measure an object moving locally faster than the speed of light. Everything that falls into the black hole ends up at r equals 0 in a finite proper time. The source of singularity is a singularity only in certain coordinate systems, such as bookkeeper coordinates. In other systems, such as freely falling coordinates, it's not a singularity, and motion across the horizon is readily described. However, the center at r equals 0 is a true singularity. There the curvature of space time becomes infinite.


Okay, let's get started. I'm sure people will continue to trickle in due to the room numbers being printed three different ways in three different places. Also, confusingly, my colleague Ian is doing a session right now called Creating a Culture of Performance, which was intended to be kind of a playoff of the title of this, and then the joke cut a little too close to home when they got scheduled at the same time. So there we are. So welcome, you should be here creating a culture of empowerment. Today, we're going to talk about how the open source philosophy can be applied to management and organizational culture. My name is Todd Neinkirk. I'm digital strategist, CEO and partner at Four Kitchens. If you want to get a hold of me, that's how Todd at FourKitchens.com. You can follow me on Twitter, Todd Ross, warning in advance, it's mostly bad puns. So before we get started, I want to talk a little bit about this talk itself. This is a really unusual talk for a Drupalcon, because first of all, it's not about Drupal. It's not about the web. It's not about technology. And it's not even about process. Instead, it's about how we can apply the open source philosophy to management teams and people. There's going to be a lot of talk about feelings and structure and how people communicate and psychology and neurology and linguistics and things like that. So I want to thank all of you if you're out there who helped select this session. This session has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the sessions that you will be seeing at Drupalcon. And I think that that makes it special and a little bit risky. And I hope it pays off for you. Also, you're going to hear me talk a lot about what we do at Four Kitchens. That's because that's my experience. We're not bragging. This is all stuff that we've learned through successes and failures, mostly failures, the vast majority of which are failures. This is nine years of trial and error. We don't have all the answers. We're still working through a lot of these things. So again, I'm going to refer to Four Kitchens a lot because that's my experience. And finally, my opinions are based on my experience working within the United States. I've given this talk in other countries and a lot of this stuff doesn't apply. So for those of you from Europe or Latin America or Asia or anywhere else, we realize that there's going to be a lot of discussion of culture and what culture means and that varies drastically from place to place. So I understand if some of these things may not apply to you, but I hope that the underlying principles are something that you can at least think about and might guide your practice and you could adopt them wherever you're from. I am here today because I want to help people run better companies by making their teams and their leaders happier. How many of you here are business owners? How many of you are leaders within your organization? How many of you are neither? Thank you for being here. We are going to talk about some very specific tactical, practical things that you can bring back to work. You do not have to be a business owner or a leader within an organization to affect change. And I'll explain why a little bit later. So I want to tell a story. Two snacks per day. The summer of 2015, height of the .com bubble, I was working at a startup called Cyber Expo. Nobody's ever heard of it. That's okay. Cyber Expo was an organization that installed internet kiosks in shopping malls all over the country.  But 15 years ago, you didn't have internet enabled devices in your pocket at the ready all of the time. If you were in a shopping mall and you wanted to look up the cost of different items at different stores or if you needed to check your email or whatever you wanted to do, just hang out and aim chat with your buddies, you would go up to one of these giant kiosks that had 12 of these extremely durable waterproof, childproof computers with plexiglass all over them and super heavy duty things. And they display ads across the top and big flash ads. It was kind of a mess. But it was a big deal and we were in something like 50 or 60 shopping malls all over the country. This was, of course, at the height of the .com bubble and it was that summer when everything burst. So, of course, everybody started to feel a little bit edgy about their jobs and where the funding was coming from and, you know, would they still have a job in six months? And then one day, I don't know if it was in July or August or when it was, but one day we got a company-wide email that said, effective immediately, you're still welcome to have snacks from the break room like those little bags of Doritos and coaks and things like that, but you can only have two a day. Period. End of the email. Okay, what did that do? Right? Morale? Okay. What were people thinking? Can't afford snacks anymore? Can they afford me? Anything else? There's some other stuff. Making arbitrary rules because it feels good. I haven't heard. That's true. That's true. So, let's think about what it takes when you put a rule in place. When you put a rule in place, what do you have to do? Enforce it. Right? How are you going to enforce this? Is this now somebody's job? Is that operations assistant or office manager or whatever? Are they going to have to spend their already busy day walking by people's desks or did they have a checkout room for the snacks where you, you know, I would please, may I have a 45 cent bag of Doritos? May I please have a can of Pepsi and then they write your name down on a list and then you get your allotted two snacks a day. Is that somebody's job now? To sit in the break room? No, of course not. So, then whose job is it? The CEO? That's an interesting one. I wish. Self-regulation. But let's say that doesn't happen. Who's left? Your peers. Your peers. So, what was happening now? Everybody was looking at everybody else and thinking, Todd had three snacks today. We're going to go out of business because I am. Right? That's what happened. It became everybody's job to police everybody else. So, more than morale going down the toilet because they were afraid for their jobs, because they thought, let's do the math by the way. Let's very quickly do the math. You go to Costco. Back then, this was in the Dallas area. All we had was Sam's Club. You go to Sam's Club. You get those giant snack packs of, I don't know, 60 bags or whatever for, let's say these things cost 30 cents a bag. Let's make it easy. I'm going to make it easy on myself because I have to do math on the fly in my head. I don't have these in notes. 50 cents a bag. 50 cents a bag. Okay. Two snacks a day. That's a dollar a day per person. $5 a week. Let's say I'm working about, let's make it easy again. 50 weeks a year. So that's $250 a year per person. $250 a year per person. And there were probably 20 people at the organization. So $5,000 a year in snacks. Is that anybody's salary? Is that going to save anybody's job? $5,000 a year? No. What's the point? So everybody does the math. The first thing they do when they get an email like this is they're like, ugh, like, okay, they can't afford me. I'm going to lose my job. I wonder how much they're spending on snacks. Now everybody wants to know and they start to add them all up in the fridge and everybody's passing it around. And now suddenly the snacks are an issue. What should they have done instead? Any ideas? I'm sorry? Double the snacks? That's interesting. Your quota has doubled from four to two snacks a day, right? Very 1984. Production has tripled, but it's been cut in half. Close. That's an interesting idea. They should have gotten rid of them completely. Just get rid of them completely. Sorry, there are no more snacks in the break room. Oh, well you still think they can't afford snacks anymore. You might still sit down and do the math, but nobody put the number two in your head, right? Just say, hey, we're phasing out the snacks. Sorry about that. Done. That's what they should have done. People would have known we got to tighten our belts. I get it. Money is money. This is an investment kind of thing. It's no job lasts forever. I understand that. People are forgiving generally. But when you start to limit it to something like this that feels arbitrary, people do the math and they start to freak out. Okay, that story is going to inform the rest of this afternoon's talk. We're talking about the culture of empowerment. Culture and empowerment. Let's talk about culture first. What do I mean when I say culture? The dictionary, the good old dictionary these days, it's dictionary.com. The dictionary defines culture as the behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a social, ethnic or age group. Now your workplace is a form of a social group, right? You spend not quite a third, but again, let's make it easy on me, a third of your life at work, eight hours a day at work. That's a lot of time. That's a social group. That's as much time as you spend at home not sleeping. I believe though that culture goes a little bit deeper than that and science and history and things like this reflected. Culture, what does it do? It affects how you think and feel about a group. The culture of that group affects how you think and feel about them. I'm going to illustrate this right now. Let's do a little bit of an experiment. I want you to think about the culture of the United States. What is the culture of the United States? Just think about it for a moment. Oh, hold on, hold on. Just think about it silently to yourself.  Okay, back again. That was not a picture of the United States. That was my desktop. Okay, back to it. How did these images make you feel? I'm sorry? Awful. Oh my goodness. Okay, we're getting right to it. Awful. Awful. I'm sorry? Complex? Conflicted? Stereotypes? Excessive? Sorry? I still couldn't hear that. I apologize. Bigger go home. Gluttonous. Entitled? Entitled. Lots of different things. Now, some of those images, we all feel a little bit differently about, like the soldier, right? Some of us might react to that and think, here's somebody serving our country. I'm proud of this image. Some people may look at that and think I'm afraid of this image or that I don't feel quite as positively as that other person did, right? It depends on your point of view. It might be politics. It might be personal history. The point is, everybody here has a slightly different reaction to all of those things, especially in some. None of us here agree on the culture of the United States because we all react a little bit differently. The majority of us in this room being American, I assume, but not all of us. We all react a little bit differently to that. So there really isn't a culture. There is not a homogenous defined culture that we all subscribe to, right? Yet we're all in it and part of it. This is because culture has many layers. Culture isn't just about national identity. It's influenced by many other things. So there is a common underlying human culture. Anthropologists, social scientists, psychologists have all observed, for example, that there are an underlying set of emotions and facial expressions that are recognized across the globe regardless of culture. It could be tribes of people who haven't been contacted by the Western world to highly industrialized countries. A smile is a smile. A frown is a frown.  It means the same thing the world over, regardless of culture, language, or anything. Language informs our culture. It informs our culture in very, very, very deep and profound ways. For example, there are, how does this example go? I'll come back to this one in a moment. I have a better example later. Language is a big part of our culture. How we speak informs how we think. You go from one part of the United States to another, from California to Philly to New York to Texas. We all use different language, right? That language reflects and both informs our culture. We have national cultures. The United States has a different culture from Canada. The two are very similar in many, many, many ways, but that is still a defining line. Nations have different laws, and laws both reflect and inform the underlying values. Universal healthcare or not is a value, and that informs culture. There's local culture. I already talked about Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, everywhere. Even a suburb outside of Austin where I'm from is a little bit different than Austin itself, local culture. Then, of course, there's the culture of the self. Each one of us has unique experiences, levels of education or things that you've studied, different family histories, different backgrounds. That's your personal culture. All of these different layers make up the culture that each one of us experiences. That's what I mean by culture. We're talking about the culture of empowerment. What is empowerment? What do I mean by empowerment? Again, goodoldictionary.com. Well, of course, it's the giving or delegation of power or authority. That's what's being given, but what's being received? What does it mean to be empowered? It's four things. First is autonomy. It's the autonomy to decide what you will do and how you will do it. It's freedom to challenge without fear of reprisal. If you challenge somebody, if you say, I don't think that's a good idea, and you're told to shut up, you're not truly free, right? You're not empowered. You should be able to speak your mind and not be sidelined or cut out of the club or fired or locked up. It's the power to effect change. You actually have to be able to make change and effect change in order to be empowered. To be told, but not actually be able to do anything, you're not actually empowered. And finally, ownership of the outcomes. So you have the autonomy, freedom, and power, but you have to be responsible for the outcomes of what you do as well, good or bad, success or failure. You have to be able to own that. So it comes down to these four things. Empowerment is these four things. Again, autonomy to decide what you will do and how you will do it. Freedom to challenge without fear of reprisal. Power to effect change. Ownership of outcomes. In other words, empowerment means controlling your destiny.  That's how I see it. So what? Why does it matter? Why is it important? And why is it important in a business context? Why are we talking about it here at a professional conference? First, empowerment makes teams happy. It increases productivity, quality, and retention. When people feel like they have destiny over the work that they're doing, they're happier. People want to have control over what they're doing. Empowerment makes your clients happy. The happiness of your team is infectious. Your clients see that. They hear it every day. They pick up on it in the tone of emails and conversations they have. The quality of the work, as I mentioned earlier, is going to be higher. So the clients are going to be happier, obviously. Your team is more enthusiastic about the work. And everyone on your team has the power to do what it takes to solve the client's problem. So the client can go to anybody on the team and say, I've got a problem with something. And your teammate can say, I'll take care of it. I got it. I can do something about that. But instead, they say, oh, that's not really my department. Or yeah, I don't know. My boss just told me. Or like, that's just kind of how we do it. Or one of those things. That erodes the client's confidence. And will ultimately turn them away. Finally, empowerment enables leadership. So the majority of you are business owners or leaders, as we discovered earlier. This actually means less work for you. When other people are empowered, they have been delegated to. It means you have less on your plate, which means you can do what you're supposed to be doing, which is leading, which is finding new revenue streams, building your organization, thinking ahead, learning about Drupal 8, whatever you have to do to remain competitive, you can start to think ahead. How many people here have said to your significant others or your friends or your coworkers or whoever at some point, I feel like all I'm doing is reacting instead of planning. This is very common. I probably say this once a week. That's what it is to run a business. You are constantly reacting to various problems. But the more you can delegate and the more you can empower other people to handle it, the less you have to be that top of the funnel. So I promised tactical, practical advice. I'm going to get to that in a moment. That's where we're going to spend the majority of our time. But I want to inform because I believe in explaining the why. It's the whole Simon's neck, like get to the why. It's true. So I want to talk about what has guided these specific actionable pieces of advice before we get into them, so that you understand where I'm coming from. First, build a company you would want to work for. So think for a moment. Just for a moment, then I'll ask for input. Why did you start a business? Why did you do that to yourself? Why did you start a business? Thoughts? It was an accident. So you were doing a thing that you liked and you had to do it more and you wound up hiring people and then suddenly there's a company now. Very common. Anybody else? You don't want to work for anybody. I'm sorry? That's a good point is that sometimes when you go into consulting, you think you want to be your own boss, but in fact all of your clients are your bosses. That's true, actually. But not wanting to be your own boss, not wanting to have to work for anybody. So you probably had some experiences in the past that were negative as it related to working for somebody, right? I don't mean to, I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but you probably at previous jobs were not very empowered. You didn't have a lot of control over things and you thought, I don't want to deal with this. I'm going to strike out on my own, right? You didn't feel like you were trusted. Boy, we're going to get to that in a moment. All right. So on accident, I didn't want to work for anybody else often because I had bad experiences and I don't like work because nobody trusts me. They don't empower me. They don't do all these things. So people want to be empowered, right? And one of the reasons why you want to be, one of the reasons why you start businesses is because you want to be empowered, right? You know already from personal experience how important empowerment is because you left a steady paying job and struck out on your own, risking it all because you wanted to be empowered. That's how much you wanted it. That's how much everybody you work with wants it. Now think for a moment, would you work for yourself? Think about your style as a business owner or leader. Would you work for yourself? Just think about that. So that was the first guiding principle. Build a company you want to work for. Two, give people control over the destiny. Treat your coworkers as responsible professionals and adult humans because that's what they are. They want to collaborate with you. You want to collaborate with them. They are not children that you need to manage. Collaborating leads to mutual respect and in the knowledge industry what we do, people are extremely self-motivated. They're very self-reliant. They teach themselves new things every day. Everybody here taught themselves what they do. There really isn't an established college level program or anything like that for web designer development. We had to sit down and figure it out for ourselves. What's GitHub? Watch some videos. Read some how-tos. Go out and do it. That's how we learned. That's how we learned Drupal. So these people who have the self-motivation and the self-direction and this ability to teach themselves, well, they want the freedom of freelancing. Chances are many people who currently, with whom you currently work, used to be freelancers at some point, but they want the security of a full-time job. They have the personality and the desire of a freelancer, but they're looking for the security of a full-time job or to work with another team that inspires them. So you have to let them succeed or fail, just as you would allow yourself to succeed or fail. That's what it means to give people control over their destiny. And finally, trust, right? They didn't trust you. Make trust the center of your culture. Trust facilitates empowerment. You can't actually empower someone until you trust them. And they don't act on that empowerment until they trust you to let them succeed or fail. So own mistakes yourself, admit failure yourself, demonstrate through action the culture that you want to build. And finally, solve, don't blame. What happened? Let's figure out how to make sure that doesn't happen again. You still have to hold people accountable, but simply blaming somebody, that was Todd's fault. Well, nobody wins because now you've just, you made me feel terrible. You've made everybody else afraid that they're going to be called out in the carpet. Instead, you want to create a culture where myself, Todd, myself can stand up and say, yeah, that was my bad. I dropped the ball on that. And here's what I'm going to do to make sure it doesn't happen again. That's really powerful, right? You want everybody to feel that way. So let's get tactical. Let's talk about how to actually do this. First and foremost, language, language, language. Language is everything. So language actually is thought. This is the example that I mentioned earlier about the culture of language. Common sense dictates that language exists because we have thoughts in our brain that need to get out and have to be communicated to other people. That's kind of when we think about language, you know, think about it for a moment. What does it mean? You know, why do we have language? Why is it a thing? Most people would land on that conclusion. And in fact, that had been thinking for, you know, hundreds of years within philosophy and then later psychology and then later on neurology. But in fact, linguists and neurologists in the last, I don't know, decade or so have discovered that individuals that do not possess language do not possess thought. Therefore, language is thought, not a representation of thought. Language rewires your brain to give you the power to form thoughts to begin with. Thoughts beyond hungry, angry, sad, cold. Without language, we're, we revert to a almost animal like state. There are countless examples of, you know, people who were, I don't know, found in a cave or, or, you know, twin sisters recently who had escaped into a forest and they had developed their own language between the two of them. This is the kind of thing that like you sort of see in like weird sci-fi or maybe in a cartoon or something, but it's, it's there because it's real. People want to develop language because they want to be able to think. It's part of it. It's just in our DNA. It's what we do. So because language is thought and because the brain is physically rewired, every time we make a memory or reach a new conclusion or learn a new pattern or a new idea, language is writing pathways, physical pathways in our brain. Actual neurons are branching out and attaching to one another based on the language we use every day. So think about how many times you say I instead of we, or when you use the dreadful word employee and think about what that means to people. What does it feel like to be called an employee or worse his or her employee? As if you're owned. That's not very empowering, right?  Like, I could leave anytime I wanted to. You don't know me, right? They're not your employee. They're not an employee and they're certainly not your employee. It's your colleague, your teammate, your coworker. This kind of stuff is regarded as cheesy in the corporate world.  We laugh at it because it's cynical because the people who put that stuff on their wall generally don't mean it.  But the underlying message is true and means something and is powerful. So let's take it back, right? We, not I, team, not employees, it physically changes the brain. Ask for input every day. I don't know where I heard this piece of advice, but it's fantastic. And it's something that people I work with have heard me say, I don't know how many dozens of times people want to be heard more than they want to be agreed with. So one more time, people want to be heard more than they want to be agreed with. They don't necessarily want you to agree with them, but they want their opinion, concerns, questions to be heard. Just getting something off your chest is really powerful and listening to somebody, really actually listening and confirming that. And even if you don't agree and you can say, thank you so much for that feedback, I really appreciate that you had the courage to come forward and say something about it. I don't agree with you and I don't agree with you for the following reasons, but I want to let you know that I take what you said to heart and I've heard you. And I might be wrong. And if I'm wrong, we'll try it and we'll figure that out and we'll fix it. Also, people talk a lot about open door policies. Open door policies are great. My door is always open. Come on in and we'll chat. It's one thing to have an open door policy. It's another to actually invite somebody inside. Set aside time that forces people to have a conversation, a real conversation. We're all very busy people and you as business owners and leaders, you are regarded as the busiest of busy people and nobody ever wants to bother you. That's just a true fact. So you might have a physical, literal open door or you may have, you know, an open chat room that you keep or whatever channels of communications that you keep open. But the fact is they won't really walk inside all that much because they don't want to bug you because they respect you and they like you or they're afraid of you, whatever it is, they're not going to actually talk to you unless you set aside time that is focused, that is one on one. So even in the creation of this presentation, I went to our team and I said, I asked, what does empowerment mean to you? How do we empower you? How do we not empower you? Even this presentation itself required input from everybody at the organization. Finally, oh, well, thank you. I've never gotten a clap on that line. I appreciate it. Thank you. And finally, when talking to somebody, ask questions that demand real answers. So how many of you have done check-ins that start with, and I've done this to poor Elia here, how many people have check-ins to start with? So how are you doing? I'm fine. How are things? They're okay. I mean, they're great. So you have to ask questions that make people stop and think. If you could change one thing about this organization right now, what would it be? You can't say, I'm okay, everything's fine to that. You're really asking, and people stop and think, so, hey, how are you doing? Oh, I'm fine. What are you most stressed out about right now? Oh, man, where do I start? And that immediately betrayed. They're not fine. They're stressed out. They're not okay. So ask questions that are really incisive. The three that I like to ask are, what are you most stressed out or worried about right now? What are you most excited about right now? And if you could change anything at this organization right now, what would it be? You can look at their list of these questions. People have written books upon books upon books about things like this, but those are the three that I really like to fall back on, and they're easy to remember. So you're asking for input, but you have to get that input through feedback channels. So you have to provide these feedback channels that are first and foremost accessible. People can actually get to them reliably like half an hour every two weeks. We're going to get on a video chat. We're going to talk. That's accessible. Or if you're hard to get a hold of because you live in a completely different time zone and you're plus 17 hours or whatever it is, that's not very accessible to people, right? You have to be easy to get a hold of. So that's accessible. Non-argumentative. Don't be defensive when getting feedback. Well, you know, I'm really having a problem with it. Well, they're like that because they're, you know, so don't, don't worry about it. Well, okay, you're arguing with them. Just let them say it, hear it, listen to it. And if they want an explanation, ask if they want one. And finally, genuine. This is a big one. You have to actually want this. If you don't really want feedback and you're not going to be good at this and you're not going to ask good questions and you're not going to have time to do it, it shouldn't be you doing this. You need to empower somebody else to handle all of this for you. If you're not genuine and your desire to do it, people pick up on that immediately because you're not acting on it. You're not attentive. You're not really in the zone. And you know what? That's okay. It doesn't have to be you that does all of this stuff, but somebody has to do this. This is important. So if you can't do it genuinely, find somebody else who can. Hire the right people, obviously, but think about some things during the onboarding or recruiting process. Do they share the same values as your organization? Do they share the same values as you as a person or your clients? There's something that I like to do called the airport test. I lifted this concept from Greg Knattison, who is a longtime droopler and he's somewhere around the conference today. The idea of the airport test is during an interview, imagine yourself stuck in an airport with this person for eight hours. How does that make you feel? It's kind of a tough one. So I wrote about this once. It was an interview for some magazine and I talked about the airport test. I was real proud of it and I was like, I got my name in the magazine and you know, talking about the airport test and that's pretty cool. And then I made the mistake of reading the internet comments. And very first comment said, sounds like this is a great excuse for discriminatory hiring practices. And you know what? They're right. They're right. I had to own that. That's true. The people that I'm going to get along with in an airport are going to be people like me. I don't know what exactly that means. I could guess, but you know what? They're right. And I didn't have an answer to that, except it made me think really long and hard about whether the airport test is actually something that I should be talking about. I'm going to throw that out there because I don't have an answer, but I want you to know that not everybody's right all the time and that hiring the right people doesn't necessarily mean people like you, however you choose to define that. But I think there's some truth to that. I do believe in like deliberate diversity, but that wasn't what I meant by it, but I'm just, I have to own that. That's true. Another concept everybody talks about, slow to hire, fast to fire. Just do it. Take your time hiring people. Make sure they're a good choice. As soon as you get that feeling in the pit of your stomach, like, oh, this just, every time I've gotten that three months later, I think back to that moment, I'm like, I should have, I just should have done something then. You know, you really have to do that.  Like how do I, no, no, no, no, this isn't going to work. This is weird. It's that kind of thing. You know, pay attention to that gut. Your gut is really powerful. Your gut is there for a reason. Pay attention to it.  I'm going to, I'm going to come back to that point a little bit later because that's a really key one that expresses itself in a lot of interesting ways. This one's going to be tough for some people. Go virtual. Some people call it remote. Some people call it distributed. Big one. How many of you have offices and most people in an office? Okay. Imagine that office going away. It's tough, right? At first you're like, can't do it. Nope. No way. That's impossible. We did it. We did it two years ago. It's one of the best things we ever did. We still have an office and we're trying to get rid of it now. We have an office that fits 25 people and on a given day, there may be four or five people there. We need, it's just, it's an albatross. We need it gone. This is why it empowers your team. It gives them the flexibility to work from home or anywhere. I want to go spend a month in the Bahamas and I'm going to work. They can do that now. Whoa. Hey, even better yet, you can all go work from the Bahamas for a month, right? Just think about that for a moment. How cool that would be. I've always wanted to sell my house and buy an RV and drive around the country and just be a nomad. You can do this. This is within your grasp. This is doable. It's going to require a major, major cultural change. There will be people who do not like this. There will be people who leave. But ultimately, a team is more empowered when they are distributed virtual remote. Hand in hand, let them set their own schedules to whatever degree possible. Some people call this flexible work schedules or maybe you, you have people all over the world in different time zones, but you've decided on having a certain set of hours that overlap and those are your core work hours and that's when you touch base. This is doable. You can think creatively. You can make it happen. Additionally, it's not just how people work on a Monday through Friday schedule, but it's how they work throughout the year. We have something called an open vacation policy. You can take as much vacation as you want whenever you want it for however long you want. Oh, well, then what's going to stop them from just going on vacation as soon as you hire them and then they never show up ever again? Well, then you fire them, right? Because they're abusing the policy. And if they're abusing the policy, they're not the right fit for your team because they're not responsible adults. This is a test. This is a test. Are they responsible adults or not? If they are, they can do this like responsible adults. Other valid criticism of the open vacation policy. Well, isn't that just going to mean that everybody's going to start competing over how little vacation they can take? Because if you haven't set a number, how does anybody know what the expectation is? They're right. They're absolutely right. We put this policy in place five or six years ago. That's a problem. Vacation time went down. It went down. So we are now probably on the cusp of instituting a minimum vacation policy. You must take a certain number of days every year. My one criticism to that policy was, well, once you say the minimum, the minimum is the maximum. Now you have a number and that's it. And we're back to where we started. The thing is, and we've gone back and forth. We actually, we track things like this and GitHub issues. We do all of our internal, like, I want this policy changed. Kind of the file a ticket in GitHub. It's the four kitchens management project in GitHub. And you file a ticket and you have a discussion. And this discussion is huge. And it's philosophical.  No matter what you do. There is, and especially when it comes to vacation, there's no answer because everybody has a different working style. Some people want an expectation. Some people don't. So you have to figure out what's the happy medium is and then expose everybody to the conversation so they know where everybody else is coming from and you engender empathy. Invest time and money in your team success. Professional development budget. Set one. Give people money to go to conferences. Give people money to learn things. Give people money to network to buy books, to get equipment they need to subscribe to services and try them out. How many people here have had somebody come to them and say, Hey, we should try this, whatever service I need to put down a credit card.  Just let them give them a debit card with money on it and they can buy it.  That tool might change your business, but you put all these blockers in the way. Well, I got to get this reimbursed. I don't want it on my card and somebody who has a company card, right tear that stuff down, give them access to funds. Put a limit on it, obviously, but give them access to stuff to use. They want to be better at their job. Facilitate that. This one's especially unnerving to some folks. Encourage personal brands. This is one of those like rising tide lifts all boats kinds of things, right? The better your individual teammates are, the more well known they are, the better your organization is going to be. The more sought out your organization will be overall because you are affiliated with these great people who are widely known. Yes, sir.  I don't quite know how. Yes, exactly.  Yeah, exactly. So good point. Thank you. I deserve to be called out on that. A lot of people hear something like this and they go, Oh, but if they're too good, they're going to leave. Oh, well, then there's something wrong with your organization or you just haven't set yourself realistic expectations. The fact is everybody is going to leave. They are going to get married and have kids. They are going to retire. They're going to die. Everybody leaves their job. You too will leave your job someday. So don't think about, well, they're going to leave. If I do this, they're going to leave no matter what someday. Wouldn't you rather they leave on terms that are positive for everybody else that they leave an organization that feels like you did everything you could to encourage them to grow and get better. And by the time they decide that, well, I want to do, I'm so good at what I do now. I want to go do bigger and better things and your organization to simply isn't supplying them and that's okay. Let them go because then they're going to leave happy instead of feeling like they've been suffocated and then they suddenly like were set free that they had this epiphany of like, I got to get out of there. And then suddenly they're very happy to leave. Wouldn't you rather be happy about the time they spent there than happiest about the last day at the job? Encourage those personal brands. Everybody's going to leave at some point. Don't let that stop you. Consider adopting agile methodologies. Scrum, Kanban, whatever you want to do. It allows teams to self organize around projects and problems. And self organizing teams are empowered teams. They get to decide what they're doing and when and all of that. And this is not a project management session, so I'm not going to get into it, but think about it because this engenders empowerment. Don't tell people how to do things. Set goals. Hey, by the end of the year, we need to have at least two people on our team that are really good at node. Okay, you don't have to tell people how to do that. If they're good at their jobs, they're going to make that happen. They're going to figure out the conferences you got to go to and the skills we need to develop and the projects you go after and all of that. Set goals, explain why that's a goal, why it's important, why everybody benefits. Let them decide. Telling people how to do things is micromanaging, right? Nobody likes that. Also, the tech and the tools that your team uses should be determined by them, you know, whether you're using Trello or GitHub issues or Jira or whatever issue tracking you use or whatever time tracking solution you use. Let the team decide that. They're the ones using it, generally not you, right? Let them pick the tools that work best for them. We switched from, in the course of the year, IRC to hip chat to Slack because we tried something, didn't like it, tried something else, didn't like it, tried something else. Hey, this works for now. A year from now, it might be something different. So what? The team loves it. How many people hate hearing people gripe about the tools you're using, right? Like, just, okay, change them. Just change them. Next project, change them. Done. Easy. Push people, set boundaries beyond what the person currently feels. Some people take power. They're like, oh, I want to do this. I'm going to go do this. Awesome. Like, those people are great, right? They're so much fun because they just do things and you're just so proud of them. And that's awesome. But some people need a little bit of a nudge. Some people need to be given that power. And at first, they're going to be resistant to that. They're going to say, like, I don't think I can do this, or I don't really know if I have time. Well, then you say, what do I need to do to free up your schedule to make this happen? What do you need to learn in order to be able to do this? And that's a habit that some people have to learn. Most people had to learn to take initiative. So you're in a position to help teach that. Accept that your team knows more about your work than you do. They're the ones actually doing it. I haven't personally touched code or design in about three years now. Everybody else at the organization, basically, knows more about the work that Four Kitchens does than I do. I have a different kind of job now. I not only accept that, I relish that. So they're deciding what we do. They decide what technologies we invest in. I listen to them, I listen to our clients, and we set the goals together. And finally, this is a practice. This is a practice like any other kind of practice. A musical instrument, yoga, meditation, whatever it is you're doing, you have to constantly exemplify, pursue, and praise it. Reinforce it. Regular conversations about what empowerment has done, how people have benefited from it. And one note, and I'm not quite sure where to fit this, but it's somewhere in this bucket. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness. You as business owners asking for help to make these changes is not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of empowerment. People feel empowered to say, I can't do this. I need help with this. The bravery it takes, we forget this as leaders and business owners. We forget what it's like to need help and feel afraid to ask for it. Because it's like, if I ask for help, then they're going to know that I'm an imposter, that I can't do this, and then like my cover is blown and I'm going to get fired. If they're asking for help, it means that they really respect you and like you. Own that, appreciate that. So empowerment really changes everything. It changes everything about an organization, about a person, about any level of culture. And when empowered, a person benefits the company, not the other way around. What I mean by that is, in the traditional working world, we have this model where the company is the thing that gives everything to a person. The company is giving me my salary. I get my benefits from the company. I get my 401k from the company. So this is the model that a lot of people think of. The company is this entity, this benevolent entity that is bestowing on me all the things that I'm so lucky to have. Income, professional development, career growth, social groups, all of that is given to them by the company. It's the opposite. When a person is empowered, they benefit the company. The company owes everything to the people in it. 100%. They control the own destiny, their own destiny, and the destiny of the company. So again, empowerment makes everyone happier and better at their jobs. Teams experienced increased productivity, quality, retention. Clients see an increase in the quality of work because everyone's happier and everyone can help them solve their problems. And it's less work for the leadership because business managers and owners can now focus on long-term goals. They can plan instead of react. We have just a couple of moments for questions, so I can maybe take just a couple. Yes, sir. Oh, that's interesting. Okay, let me repeat it for the recording. So you flip the idea of the airport test to be instead of, can you as a teammate be stuck in an airport for eight hours with this person? Instead you think, could our client stand to be stuck? Would we want our client to be stuck in an airport? Well, hopefully, I assume we wouldn't want any client to be stuck in an airport, but I understand what you mean. I like that a lot. I think that's a better way to put it. We are, after all, in the business of client service, and that's not discriminatory. Well, maybe somebody would think it is. I don't know. I'm sorry. There's a troll who would say, I'm sure, I'm sure somewhere. Yes, sir. Absolutely. Okay, great question. So for a remote company, how do you deal with the social aspects? Admittedly, we are still in a transitionary phase. There still is a physical office, and there is a break room, and there is a CAG, and all of that stuff, right? But there are only about four to five people there on any given day. I can tell you my own personal experiences, and I think that part of what makes one of the ways in which you replace that social interaction is that it's different for everybody, and everybody kind of creates their own thing. So here's my experience with it. I've seen on Slack that we have lots of topics channels, like people who are really into, there are multiple people who are into racing, like autocross and things like that. So there's like a racing channel that people can go, you know, share photos and time trials and whatever. There's a gaming group. So there's board gaming, desktop gaming, video gaming, probably about two or three times a week, I get on a team fortress server with, you know, there's Aaron in the back there, and two of my colleagues next door, Matt and John, they, we all play team fortress.  So you find ways to still, to be remote together. We'll have, we kind of actually do like a happy hour kind of thing where there's just a point at which we open up a video channel, and people can just kind of walk in or not, or I mean walk in, join or not, and maybe you're drinking a beer, maybe you're having coffee, whatever you're doing, but you just kind of sit around and chat, and it's on in the background, you may still be working on this screen, but you've got this screen over here with video, and it's sort of like a campfire kind of field, but you can go in or out, or if you need to focus on stuff, you can, you know, go focus on things. So that is the, I get that question all the time. That was my first question when, when we decided to do this, like, how are we going to maintain a vibrant social culture within our organization? You have to think of it like this. You're going to lose the thing you had, and you're going to gain something new and different. Yes? Elia, here's the, yeah, now you're on the mic. Um, one of the great things about having a remote team is that now I have friends everywhere I go. So we come out here to California, we have a couple of teammates out here, and it's exciting to see them because I don't get to see them every day. So it brings a new excitement to our team dynamic, I think. Well, thank you everybody. I see there are a lot of questions. Please come up. I'd love to talk about this. This is something I'm very passionate about. Unfortunately, we have to clear out the room for the next session. Thank you so much for attending. I really appreciate it. And by the way, if you want to stick around and watch one of my colleagues actually perform a musical about content APIs, I'm not kidding. He wrote a musical. It's happening in this room immediately after this. And there's a boff tomorrow for remote workers. There's also, for people who are really interested in remote work, I'll just feel free to, there's an event called Yonder, and it's run by Lullabot. It's a conference for distributed companies. Right now on aquee.com slash podcasts. There are two podcasts with Todd's remote teams talking about how to succeed at that. And another podcast with an aquee remote team. Thank you again, everybody.


Lipton Tea and Lipton Soup presents Inner Sanctum Mystery starring Miriam Hopkins Good evening friends of the Inner Sanctum This is your host Raymond Braddy as always to provide you with your weekly ration of screams, gurgles and blood All in the spirit of gentle fun I have no other object in mind Except to reduce you to sniveling racks of nerves and shudders Have you got a white sheet handy? You might wrap it around yourself in case a ghost shows up You'll think you're in the business and pass right on through you Now Mr. Raymond, don't be so silly. You know there are no such things as ghosts Who said that? Oh, hello Mary Bennett So you don't believe in ghosts, huh? And what's that standing behind you?  Well, you might You might tell the folks how much you enjoy Lipton Tea Just the other day a ghost and I were having a conversation about Lipton Tea Now here, here, here, enough of that Nobody is interested in what you and the ghost said about Lipton Tea No, let's talk about real people and the solid pleasure they get from Lipton They drink it at mealtimes, they serve it when friends drop in for a visit, and of course they often brew themselves a cup of Lipton's during the day Just because it's so nice to relax and enjoy that famous brisk flavor. Now by the way, that word brisk B-R-I-S-K is one that tea experts use Brisk means that Lipton's always taste tangy and bracing It's never flatter, wishy-washy Yes, you just don't know how good tea can be until you know how good Lipton's is Okay, Mary, uh, suppose you go fry me a cup of tea But keep the kitchen door open because you're about to hear the story of the Bog Oak Necklace It's an original radio play by David Driscoll And our heroine tonight is that beautiful star of stage and screen Miss Miriam Hopkins, who'll play the role of Emily I'll be calm, be calm I'll be standing behind you At least nobody can see At the edge of a lake, in a small New England town Two men are busy digging an excavation It's been like a cave around here once Yeah, old Miss Bristo used to own this property before She sold it to this here city man's building So I'll find trees once Let's dig, that's what we're getting paid for Hey, what's the matter with you, Polly? Look down there what I just hit with my shovel Oh, bone, cowish Cow, that ain't no cow bone, Jerry Hey, Polly, look, look at this with the bone No, I don't, this here must have been a graveyard once This here was never no graveyard, the river used to come right up to here Almost before the big flood, before they built the dam Hey, what are you doing, get your coat and hat Of course I am, hot and this Of course there must be, we don't have to look for that Polly But in our job, come on Digging away there, Mr. Warren, down towards the river And all of a sudden, Jerry kind of yell And when I ask him, what's the matter, he shows me this leg bone So I look and there's the skeleton right at his feet So I figure you being the county attorney here You're the man who ought to know first Yes, and now this place by the river that you're talking about That's right, he bought it from Ole Miss Emily Bristow And then we found this too Around the, well I guess you'd call it the neck That is where the neck would be Is there anything wrong, Mr. Warren? Where did you say you found this bone and this necklace? Well, Jerry and me is making a trench for a water pipe Or a river bank used to be, right near the river edge Leave the necklace with me, if I need any more help I'll get in touch with you That's all Yeah, yes Forty years, Emily Emily Bristow What do you want with me after forty years, Andrew? Look, Emily Well, these are old woman's eyes Look closer Take that away, take it away The barcode neck assembly Do you remember, presented to Miss Emily Bristow on a 24th birthday by By Andrew Warren Where did you get it, Andrew? It was found at the river edge and the property you've just sold Daisy Daisy It's come back to us, Emily After all these years It's come back to us The barcode necklace The necklace that meant the death of your sister Daisy Oh, Andrew Oh, Andrew Daisy there aren't two people anywhere as happy as we are Oh, good night Um, may I tell Emily? My... Yes, yes I suppose so She's your sister, she should know Good night, darling Look at that moon Smiling at you I'm going to close my eyes And I won't open them until you're down the road out of sight Good night, sweetheart Good night Good night, sweetheart Good night, moon Oh, young lady shouldn't stand staring at the moon that way Oh, Emily You frightened me so I... Did I? You had a nice drive with Andrew in the moonlight I hope Am I? Andrew, well... Andrew Yes Andrew and I We're...   Don't you feel well? Thank you, Daisy Emily, what's the matter? Why do you use that tone with me? Oh, darling, you're not feeling well Are you? I can tell by the look on your face Oh, come on Come on out into the night The moon is falling Let's walk up to the apple orchid After all, Emily Even though we're going to be separated It won't be forever Aren't you afraid to be out here at night? Afraid? Afraid of what? The apple orchid Every little patch that goes down the river I think you'd better go back now I'll go back? Well, what do you do? I'm going to stay here I wouldn't dream of going back to the house alone I thought you weren't afraid All alone? Of course I'd be afraid all alone Daisy I don't want you to marry Andrew Emily You know what you've just said?  Emily!  Emily! Emily, I wasn't running away Please let me go What are you doing with that necklace? Emily, no! No! I knew I couldn't trust you I knew I never should have told you No, Emily! You're joking me Well, girls, we'll be girls, I suppose That's kind of pity about a little Emily though Just think what a wonderful hangman she'd have made if she'd been born a girl Kind of cute, huh? Being taken for a little swing, that girl What a terrible woman she is, Mr. Raymond Oh, now listen, I like Emily She's so inventive Most women will do anything for a necklace but only Emily knows what to do with a necklace Now, please You know very well that the only thing you can do with a necklace is wear it Oh, yeah The only thing you can do with Lipton Tea is drink it Well, what's wrong with that? And Mr. Raymond, maybe you don't realize how often folks do drink Lipton Tea Why, it's the perfect beverage for so many occasions And that's why it makes sense to have a good supply on hand to buy the larger, more economical size packages And it is more economical that way, too Oh, yes, it's wise to have a large size package of Lipton Tea on your shelf It's a well-known brisk flavor that bracing, full-bodied taste makes Lipton always welcome Hmm, that gives me an idea Maybe we should have had Emily and little Daisy talk out their quarrel over a cup of Lipton Tea Oh, man, that'd be chummy But it's too late now Daisy is fetched out on the ground with a bog oak necklace twisted tight around her neck She's not sleeping now She's just dead to the world So, let's get back to our star, Miss Miriam Hopkins who plays the role of Emily Daisy, get up Get up this minute and stop teasing me You're not hurt that bad and you know you're not Please get up, Daisy You're frightening me Daisy Daisy, you're You're acting Just as though you were You were Say it You strangled me with a bog oak necklace You see, you see you wouldn't be talking to me if you were there You've killed your own sister because you were jealous That voice, Daisy's voice But your lips are not moving How can you be speaking to me, Daisy when your lips are not moving?   I murdered you Something dreadful will happen to me I've got to do something What can I do? A river A nether river Stone, yes With twine, strong twine Round around the stones And up beside the stone I could throw her into the water from the crag on the hill and the stones would make her sink to the bottom and then she'd never come back Never And who would know? Maybe when I get back to her she'll be moving and I'll talk to her No, she is dead She is... I'm running in the wrong direction It was over there that I...  You wanted to tie stones to her, didn't you? Throw her in the river I killed her because I was jealous You're as guilty as I am because you should have married me Yes, I am as guilty as you are What will become of me now? All my hopes, my ambitions If we can get rid of the body then we can get married after all It'll only take a little while for people to forget and then we can go away somewhere I never want to look at you again as long as I live I hate you I came back here to speak to you again I wanted to tell you I'd done a wrong thing But I ought to marry you I wanted to arrange with you about Daisy How we could tell her without hurting her too much I was heading toward your window when I saw Strangled with a bog oak necklace What have you done with it? Exactly what you planned to do because no woman would have the strength to do it I had rope in my robe I tied stones to the body brought a bit into the river with it dropped it overboard The plan works, you're safe If it doesn't, you'll die and I'll go to prison I'm going now The moon is down already Soon it will be dawn The necklace What did you do with the necklace? I left it Where it was? Around her neck Sound, the sound the necklace makes I have heard it every night for 40 years 40 years Now she's come back to it To me, tell me Andrew Where was it found? It's been there, at the bottom of the river all this time According to the flood last year Skeleton must have been swept into that old sewer The twine probably rotted away A long time ago That's the only explanation I can... Watch it! Down there at the bottom of the river, watch it! I'm going now Emily It's probably the last time we'll ever see each other I'll leave the necklace with you It was to you I gave it 40 years ago Emily What's that? The voice The voice I'm going Don't leave me Andrew, don't leave me No, no Come I've not been near that orchard in 40 years Come Emily No, you're young As young as I am Come with me We'll tell each other little secrets Won't we Emily Just as we used to Yes The crickets will be chirping And the moon coming up All as it used to be And you will be wearing your necklace The bark of necklace That Andrew gave you when he thought he loved you Instead of me You'll wear it the way you used to When you'd steal up there to the orchard to meet him Remember When he used to roll to the bottom of the hill And wait for you And you could stand in the orchard until you heard him whistle What happened? Come I can't run as fast as I can Come Emily, come I still want to You must run fast, run so much faster Through the apple tree All out of breath The apple tree The branches they're in my way I can't bend over No My voice sounded one night long ago When I wore the bug When I too was strangled Daisy Tell me your answer to Who gets choked first Me a lovely you If you'd be the first to strangle I'd appreciate your angle And when I learn That it's now my turn I'll gargle as nice as you Hmm What awful words to sing to such a nice song Oh, but listen, I sing so well And I can recite too Shall I recite you something suitable? Say a mother goose rhyme, huh? Mr. Raymond, you don't know any mother goose Is that so? I know one that you'll lovely Polly, put the kettle on Polly, put the kettle on Polly, put the kettle on And we'll all have tea Well, that's fine Only I hope Polly makes sure that it's Lipton tea That's right But I suppose there's little doubt That she'll use Lipton Because after all more people Drink Lipton tea than any other brand The reason for that is Lipton's famous brisk flavor Yes, Lipton tea is never flat Or insipid It always tastes full-bodied And vigorous Well, I guess it's all summed up By that word brisk Yes, folks, brisk is the word The expert use when they talk about Lipton tea So try it real soon, won't you? They say Of course, I just tell you what the gossip is And the morgues I visit They say That Daisy and Emily can be seen Almost any moonlit night Skull gently touching skull Floating through the old apple orchard As of yours If you'd like them in your home You could use their ration coupon Outside of rattling a bit When the wind blows They're very nice and companionable Especially on dark nights And in the summer You can always use them for scarecrows In your victory garden By the way This month's inner sanctum mystery novel Is The Outsider By A. E. Martin And now it's really time to close that there squeaking door Until next week at the same time When Lipton tea And Lipton soup will once again Bring you another inner sanctum mystery Produced under the direction of Hyman Brown So until then Goodnight Pleasant I wonder what our grandmothers would have said If they had heard about Lipton's noodle soup I'll bet they wouldn't have believed it possible That a delicious chicken noodle soup Could come ready to make in an envelope But if they'd tasted Lipton They would have agreed that it has an old fashioned Homemade flavor That it tastes just like the kind of chicken soup They used to make themselves And Lipton is economical too It costs less and makes more than canned soups So folks be sure to try Lipton's noodle soup And be sure to tune in next Tuesday night For another Inner Sanctum Mystery This is CBS Columbia Broadcasting System