Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for coming. I'm going to be addressing the topic today of cultivating empathy. But before actually diving into this, I wanted to take a couple of seconds to explain. The previous presentation that I had planned to give, called Will the

Real Technologist Please Stand Up, was actually focused on complete failure of empathy. It was focused on the use of the phrase, person is not technical, and how I think that that limits our ability to be successful in our projects, in our communities, and in our companies.

And fortunately, I have given this talk before, it has been videoed, and I have spent the last month in the company of some really great folks in the Chaos Computer Club scene, as well as in the FrostCon community here. And I've realized that all of you are wonderful people, and you don't need me to tell you that it is unkind to assume that your colleagues do not know what they are talking about or what they are doing.

So I'm just going to skip that talk entirely. But if anybody wishes to view it, I'd be happy to give you the URL so you can watch the video. Instead today, I thought it would be great to address a topic that is incredibly near and dear to my heart, which is empathy and its role in our ability to have successful software projects, successful teams, and successful interpersonal relationships.

And I believe without empathy, we are not going to be able to build good products, build good communities, and just be the best individuals that we ourselves can be. So it is through the cultivation of empathy, which is a learnable skill, that we can

create better bridges between ourselves and amongst one another as we try and get good things done. So let us dive right in. I originally gave this presentation with my colleague Diana Guenther, who is another cool person in the German-free software world. She lives in Berlin. And when we had talked about what we wanted to do for our first ever presentation together, we felt like empathy was an incredibly

important topic to focus on because we had both experienced a lack of empathy, failures of empathy in projects that were very important to us. And it had left us feeling tired, burned out, sad, right? And it had caused us to walk

away from things that were particularly important to us, and we no longer spent any time on it. And we felt like it would be very important to talk to people about ways in which they could create empathy within themselves and bring that to their projects so that there would be less burnout and more happy people.

So Diana is not here, but she is here in spirits with me today. So why does empathy even matter? Obviously, it is important to explain what empathy is for those who may not be fully familiar with the term. Empathy is the idea that you are able to actually feel and experience what another person is going through.

This is distinct from sympathy. Sympathy is being able to feel bad for another person's bad experience while it's bummed out that you got bit by a dog. But empathy is actually being able to realize, like, your leg must be in pain. I

should probably take you to the doctor immediately and make sure you've gotten a rabies shot, etc. And empathy is incredibly important because without it, we're not actually able to effectively interface with other human beings. I don't know about the rest of you. I'm not actually an extrovert. I play one on TV. I'm actually an introvert.

So interacting with other human beings is somewhat difficult for me. But I also find that if I try to put myself into another person's shoes and really experience things the way they feel about them, I'm able to be a much more effective collaborator and negotiator. So it is through empathy that we create harmony in all that we do.

And this is also really importantly about you, too. A lot of the examples I'm going to give in this talk are about making sure that your interactions with other people are good and it's all about kind of how they feel about your interactions with them. But frankly, there's a lot to be said for the enlightened self-interest of empathy, right?

If you actually want to be an effective negotiator, get things done in your projects. If you want people to listen to you when you talk instead of just waiting for their turn to talk, actually caring what they have to say and being sympathetic and empathetic to what their motivations are is a crucial part of that.

So as I'm speaking about the benefits that others will have in their interactions with you, remember that those same benefits accrue to you as well when you're having these interactions. So empathy is actually a choice. This is something that a lot of people find surprising.

A lot of people think that empathy or having the feelings is some kind of innate skill. You're either born with it or you're not. This is not to diminish anyone's experience who is neuroatypical and may have difficulty with empathy. But in general, empathy is something that can be learned even for those who are neuroatypical and find that empathy is difficult for them.

When we say that empathy is a choice, this is actually supported by several scientific studies. And a bunch of them that are pretty cool are referenced in a recent New York Times article called Empathy is Actually a Choice. It's cited in the slides, which will be online later. But two studies that spring to mind that I read after finding this article.

One is that people will, interestingly enough, avoid situations in which they think their empathy will be triggered. So if you understand that you will come across children living in poverty in a particular country, you may choose not to go on vacation there.

Because it will make you feel bad that these young people are living in poverty. I think that that is very interesting because it shows us, again, that empathy is a choice. This is not something that we're innately born with. And it also seems to have some pretty interesting implications as well for incentivizing empathy, right?

If people are going to avoid situations where they feel like they will lose something by being empathetic, then clearly there are ways for us to create situations in which people feel that it's worth their while to exercise empathy. We'll talk a bit more about that in a couple of moments. The other interesting study that was referenced was the fact that empathy is something that can be learned.

And it is a skill that is teachable and that you can prime people to feel empathetic. So researchers specifically were trying to understand if people could have a better understanding of the experiences of people who were of a different race than they were.

And they found that if they just told people, like, yes, empathy is a skill, you can totally learn this stuff, people had much more empathetic reactions to people who were very, very different than they were from both a physical appearance and socioeconomic strata perspective, simply by having that information made clear to them and explicit.

So empathy is a choice if this is not something that you have been practicing, or if you have someone in your life who just says, hey, this is kind of how I am, I'm just a jerk, you could politely suggest to them that they do not have to be this jerk, or you could just spend less time with them, which was personally my process. So I highly recommend walking out on people who are not empathetic after you have attempted to suggest them, they might want to try it.

So in the process of learning empathy, you have to start actually not with your feelings around other people, but you have to start with self-awareness. And self-awareness is actually a relatively difficult process, or we would not have phrases from ancient Greece saying, physician heal thyself.

Obviously this has been part of the human condition forever. There are some really easy and useful exercises that you can do to sort of understand your own reactions to situations, and it starts out as simple as journaling, right? So what did you experience today? How did you feel about it?

What were your reactions to situations? What did you find particularly frustrating? What did you find particularly compelling? And how would you want to replicate those experiences for other people? I suggest to you that if you are attempting to replicate frustration for other people, you may not be enjoying this talk, that's cool.

There's a coffee stand down the hallway. We will not mind if you prefer coffee to empathy. So as you go through and you start making note of what was important to you, what was significant to you, what impacted you, start thinking about what the implications there are for other people. And also, what are the ways in which your feelings differ from others and why do they feel that way?

I actually had a lot of success in sort of exploring this process through art. Most of the time, I'm not a big fan of art, particularly the non-modern art, and I had a really good friend of mine who was an artist by training.

And so I forced myself to go to many museums with her so that I could understand why she was so excited about rubber plasticky mats on the floor that were kind of like nuclear waste tinted scary things. And finally, after a couple of rounds of this, I finally started to understand that it

wasn't so much about beauty or aesthetic vision, it was about a reaction to a piece. And that was incredibly effective for me because otherwise I basically just thought this was all a huge waste of time and a real bummer. So I was able to learn by, again, focusing on that experience and focusing on trying to understand why this was significant to someone else, even if it wasn't significant to me.

So we're going to leap into the part of the talk that is about pragmatic advice because I hate it when people stand at the front of lecture halls and tell me that I should do something and they don't tell me how. Because I think that's very irritating. So I'm going to go over ways that individuals can work on this as well as how you can build empathy within your organization.

So step number one, practicing active listening. Are folks in the audience familiar with the term active listening? I see a couple of nods. I see a couple of hands. Okay. So some folks are. For those who are not, active listening is a component of nonviolent communication.

And the school of nonviolent communication, the process thereof, teaches us to unlearn ways of communicating and communication patterns that we are socialized with that basically remove our empathy and connections to other people. So the easiest way to think about active listening is to, when you're engaged

in dialogue with someone, to be a mirror for what they have said to you. So when you're having that discussion, you know, take in what someone has said, repeat it back to them, and also verbalize things that you have heard, but also anything that comes to you as an aspect of body language as well.

So if I were to tell my dear friend that I was very nervous because I was giving a presentation today, but I figured it would go well because I had practiced a lot and it would be a friendly audience, so it's going to be fine. Then as part of the process of active listening, you know, the response to the long lines of I hear that you're nervous. I also hear that you're excited.

I also hear that you've put a lot of work and thought into this process. I think you're going to do great. An active listening isn't just useful because it, you know, is a process of making sure that you've understood the other person. I think that is very important because frequently we hear what we want to hear or perhaps we're not listening as closely as we want to be.

And this gives us the opportunity to be corrected by the person that we're in dialogue with. But I also actually think that it's important because it forces us to slow down and actually take in the information that someone else is transmitting to us.

One of my favorite lines ever is from the film Fight Club, which I find hilarious to quote in a talk about empathy, but there you go. So when they're talking about why they go to support groups for people who have diseases when they themselves are physically well. And one character says, when you're dying, people really listen. And the second

character interrupts him and says, instead of just waiting for their turn to talk. And I think that most of our lives focus on just waiting for our turn to talk. And that is a huge bummer, right? Because it cuts us off from really absorbing the dialogue we're in. It stops us from being present and it stops us from actually, you

know, caring about what someone else is saying because we're constantly focused on ourselves. And if we're constantly self focused, we're not actually changing what we're doing. We're going through a status quo routine that really is not going to lead us to anything that's better or more effective. So the process of active listening, once again, mirroring back what someone has said to us, looking for confirmation before moving

on and really slowing down and being present in the moment as part of our communications so that we can effectively learn. Oh, this one's my favorite because this is something I love to do for funsies. The process of cultivating empathy can be hugely stimulated by reading fiction.

How many of you have spent most of your childhood with your nose in a book? That was totally me. So apparently it has been proven by wonderful people who write scientific papers about things that are completely obvious to the rest of us, but it's good that it's been proven by science. That reading fiction creates an empathetic response in the reader. It's actually called a transportive experience.

So the idea that as you read, you get into the mind and mindset of a particular character or characters and through this process of simply reading fiction, the activity of the brain creates an empathetic reaction.

This is what happens when you get to the end of a book and you're crying because all of your favorite characters are dead now. Thank you, Mr. Martin. And you're just shat and bummed out and you look and turn to your friend and you go, everyone's dead! And they go, I don't understand why you're reacting this way. It's because you've had that transportive experience, right? You've built empathy through the process of learning about these characters.

I think that this is valuable because one, any excuse to read all day is fine with me, but two, I think it's actually really valuable for those of us who are introverted or who are neuro-atypical and somewhere on the spectrum because it's not always easy for us to deal with other people and you get really overstimulated.

Everyone at this conference is really nice, but wow, there's a lot of you and after a while I just want to go and hide in the bathroom, which is fine. You can do that. But, you know, a book is never going to necessarily overstimulate you. So, again, reading fiction is an excellent way to cultivate empathy through that process of the transformative experience.

Alright, also extremely important, being curious and avoiding assumptions. So, how many of you will be walking along and you hear somebody laughing and you assume they're laughing at you? Okay, I see no nods. This is great. There are a lot of times in our lives where

we have particular thought processes about what's going on around us and they have nothing to do with reality. Or, for example, we have a really negative interaction with one of our co-workers and we feel like that means that that person doesn't like us or it means that that person doesn't respect our opinion. And really, they had, you know, horrible acid reflux that day and they were coming down with a cold, which is what was really happening.

And instead of having an open and candid dialogue about that process, we just sort of proceed along the assumption of whatever it is that we've assumed. And this is dangerous because assumptions are fundamentally evil. We really have no idea what's going on most of the time with other people.

We have to work really hard to understand what's going on with ourselves as complex, you know, physical and mental beings. So, assuming that we actually understand what's going on with other folks just creates issues. So, take the time to ask people what's actually going on with them. And this can be an incredibly frightening process, right?

It's never enjoyable to walk up to someone and say, so, that conversation we had yesterday where you were kind of cranky. What was going on? Was it my hair or you're just not feeling well? Again, scary. It's a scary process. But I think what you'll find in your actual day-to-day experience is if you take the time to actually do that,

one, people will respect you for asking instead of making assumptions. And you'll also be able to have those kind of dialogues in the future where it will be a lot less awkward. Because people will realize that you're genuinely invested in having an effective interaction

with them and not just assuming that you already have all of the answers. So, transitioning to the part where we talk about how organizations can create better empathy. It is extremely important when you are building out a company, a team or a project to be explicit about your value system.

And this is, you know, this comes down to something like to the effect of creating a mission statement. What are your goals? I know most people probably think of mission statements as some kind of BS that corporations put together where they're like, we are going to be the best manufacturer of corn flakes in the world.

Well, that's terrific. I like corn flakes, but I have no idea how to measure how you become the best cornflake manufacturer in the world. And frankly, that has no impact on my life. However, if you look at effective mission statements, effective value system statements, one that springs to mind for me is ThoughtWorks.

So, ThoughtWorks has a great page on their website where they talk about the importance of social justice to their business. And that they will always ensure that one of the pillars of their work is to create a sustainable world that is effective and supports people who have less privilege, less economic access, who may be living in war-torn countries, etc.

And this is not typical for most businesses. Most businesses will happily make charitable contributions, but they don't say to every single customer who visits their website that social justice forms an important and primary cornerstone of their operations.

And by being explicit about these values, this not only informs all of the people who come and wish to interact with you about what your organization does and what you stand for, it also informs the work of all the people operating within your organization. If it is universally understood that a particular value is held and that all of your work should be inherently supporting that value,

it empowers people to act in the best possible way, right? To actually work in support of that pillar instead of it being kind of a vague, hand-wavy, we care about doing good in the world.

Depending on the values of your organization, I would also suggest making your values as inclusive as possible, right? Not every community is welcoming, not every project is welcoming, so being very explicit about your inclusivity is important.

Has anyone ever heard of the Dream With project? I see no nods. Okay, these people are super cool. So, once upon a time, these folks decided they wanted to fork LiveJournal and make the LiveJournal code base wasn't advancing very quickly and it was just kind of a bummer interacting with folks. So, they wanted to create a safe space online for people to do blogging and journaling.

So, the Dream With project came along and it was one of their first processes. They created a diversity statement that basically said, we welcome absolutely everybody. Cool. And then they went into explicit detail about absolutely everybody and what that means and they talked about wanting women to participate in their project.

They talked about wanting differently abled people to participate in their project. And it sounds like, you know, you're going to get this litany of silliness, but it's actually, you know, it's a paragraph. It's very concise and it's very clearly welcoming that they want everyone to come, whether they are technologists for many years, people who are just getting started, people who may have not felt that there was a welcoming space for them before are welcome here.

So, if you use your favorite search engine to look for diversity statement, you'll find this single paragraph. And what they found after publishing this was that they had a ton of contributor interest. 70% of the developers on the project were women.

When you look at typical numbers in open source software, it ranges between 2 to 10% of contributors are women. People kept contributing over the long term instead of mostly just doing drive-by patches. And it was because they felt like their work would be valued because somebody

took the time to explicitly say that they were wanted and that they were appreciated. So, as an organization, when you're setting yourself up and continuing your processes, be very, very explicit in what is important to you. And it is my personal value that you be very inclusive. I think you should be as inclusive as makes sense for your organization or your project.

Make sure that you're working with the people that you want to work with. Discourage hippoing. Anybody heard of the term hippo, besides these cute little animals on screen? I have one human who has heard the term hippoing. Two humans who have heard the term hippoing. Three humans who have heard the term hippoing. Do I have four? No. No optioning. So, hippoing is the concept that the highest paid person's opinion in the room is the only one that matters.

So, you can sit down and have a really great discussion about how to implement a particular feature or what process you should follow or what you should have for lunch. And people are having a great and spirited discussion and debate.

And at the end of it, the highest paid person's opinion in the room says, we're going to do it this way. We are going to have tacos for lunch. And, you know, it's quite clear that that doesn't actually work for anyone. It doesn't work for the situation. But everyone is expected to nod, smile, and do what this person has just stated is the most important thing to do.

Well, I've always heard this said as the highest paid person's opinion in the room. I also think it's relevant to us to think of it as also the person in the room with the highest level of prestige. Because there are a lot of projects that we all do as volunteers where we're not actually getting paid. But it may be that the project lead is hanging out in the room and we will immediately defer to that person because they have the highest level of prestige.

And that's not necessarily useful either. And this is an area where leaders are really important, both in things like business where you're paid and in volunteer projects. Because the person to discourage hippoing is that highest paid or highest prestige level person, right?

Human beings have spent a lot of time in organizations where we have been incentivized to be very hierarchical in our thinking. And where we're used to being punished if we don't follow the mandates of the person in the room who is the highest paid person. So, if you are in fact the hippo, like, encourage open dialogue amongst the people that you're speaking to and that you're spending time with, right?

So, don't say we should do X. Ask people what they want to do or ask people what they want to think about it. Think about that idea. So, when I have been in the past managing developer relations teams, if I have suggestions about what I think we should do, I don't say we should go out and immediately speak at the following 15 conferences about product blah.

I say I think that it would be important for us to target these communities and probably speak at these conferences. But I'm not really sure about these four and frankly I'm not even sure this is the right list. What do people think?

And again, that shows people that this is an approachable problem, I'm an approachable person and they don't just have to nod and smile and do whatever I say. Which is good for me because that means I'm actually learning something and it's good for them because they don't feel like they have to show up to work every day like automatons implementing whatever system I have said is the right one.

So, again, encourage that dialogue. Make sure people really know their opinions are mattered and if you are, again, that person who is at the highest level of pay or prestige, it's really the onus is on you to make sure that that happens. Because otherwise people may feel that they are overstepping their bounds or

being argumentative and they're incentivized not to step up and push back. Ah, another favorite, don't flip the bozo bit. How many people have heard the term bozo bit? It is not just a cute little clown anymore. Alright, there is an awesome book written in 1985 by a gentleman by the name of Jim McCarthy called Principles of Software Development and it is about how to create effective software development teams.

This book is 20 years old now and it still has incredibly useful information in it, so highly recommend it. And one of the principles that Mr. McCarthy talks about as being devastating to software development organizations is this idea of flipping the bozo bit.

What this means is if someone makes a mistake, maybe it's their third or fourth mistake, you decide that they are never ever going to say anything useful. That everything that they say is stupid, that you don't really want them in your organization and you simply start ignoring them.

All the information that they provide is not useful. Any work they do is never going to be sufficient. You just kind of shove them off into a corner of your mind and want them to go away. This is not useful for a wide variety of reasons. One, if you truly feel that an individual is not going

to be able to contribute to your organization's success, be that your team or your company or your project, you're not doing yourself any favors, you're not doing them any favors, and you're certainly not doing their teammates any favors by having them stay. There's absolutely nothing wrong with simply saying, I think we've reached the point where we realize that this is not the right place for you to be.

We wish you the best of success in your quest. How can we help you do the next thing? Instead of dragging everybody kind of to a position of misery because everyone's kind of like, oh, yeah, we should be ignoring Joe. Joe's kind of... It's just, it's uncomfortable. It wastes time and energy and it's cruel to the person who's in that position.

But the other reason why it's not particularly useful is some people flip the bozo bit very early, right? I don't know how many of you have worked in companies where the expectation is that you have to always be right or you should never open your mouth.

I see a hand. I have been one of those humans at one of those companies. And so people are fearful of talking about their knowledge. They are fearful of displaying ignorance for fear that once they make one mistake in public, that nothing they say will ever matter again and that they will have the bozo bit flipped on

them and that they will lose all respect and that they will lose all ability to be impactful. And their relationships with their teammates will become immediately awkward. So, again, avoid this process. This can be really difficult for some of the highest paid people in the room.

This can be really difficult if you're an incredibly intelligent person because I think we have a natural tendency to become impatient or frustrated with people who aren't catching on to something as quickly as we are. And it can be really vexing or problematic. So just remind yourself if you're kind of having that moment where you're going, oh, my gosh, if you say one

more thing, I'm going to crawl under this desk and hide just so that I don't have to listen to you. Not effective. Don't do it. Remember that everyone makes mistakes. Everyone is human. And try to give this person the benefit of the doubt as they're continuing with their process, right? You're cutting yourself off from the opportunity to ever learn from this individual if you've decided that everything they say is a waste of time.

And if everything they say is actually a waste of time, part of your responsibility is to make sure that they're not there saying it. Very simple. And last but not least, create organizations where it is truly okay to fail.

I think that this is related to my previous point about flipping the bozo bit. How many of you have been at companies where everyone says, it's great, we like to iterate, let's fail fast, we're going to fix it, everything's going to be great. And then how many of you got a crappy performance review? How many of you didn't get your bonus? How many of you got fired?

How many of you got yelled at? How many of you got blamed for the problem? I think that we have all been in situations where we've been told that it's totally okay to make mistakes and then the actual response to those mistakes has been misery, complete misery, right?

So if you're going to create an organizational structure where you say it's okay to fail, it actually needs to be okay to fail. And there are a lot of ways to signal to people that it is okay to fail. One, not yelling at them I think is a pretty compelling way to do that. Some organizations actually celebrate failure with fail cake. Have people heard of fail cake? This is super fun.

So if you discover that there is a place where your process broke down and created a lack of usefulness, you compensate for this by having cake. So you have your post-mortem, or as I like to think of them, after-action reviews, go wow, it

would have been really wonderful if instead of this happening, bringing down the entire service for the last three hours, it would have been really great if instead we'd figured out that the load balancer was not functioning correctly, okay great. And as you have this discussion as a team, you have it over cake. And hopefully the cake is cute and in the shape to remind you of whatever your failure was.

It's really hard to be mad at somebody or to point fingers and say you suck, you suck, you suck, over a piece of cake. Mostly because sugar rushes make you a happier person. So again, make sure that you visibly demonstrate to the group of people that you're working with

as you're implementing processes that when you say it's okay to fail, you're not just full of crap. We've all heard it's okay to fail. It was not actually true. There are any number of ways to show that failure matters. It actually helps to make things better because people now know what to do next time so it's more effective. And just be explicit about it and make sure that your actions match your words as well.

So that is all that I have to say about the process of cultivating empathy. This is sad little questions guys, so if you have any questions I would be happy to answer them. And if not, we can go and enjoy a delicious cup of coffee. I would also like, thank you, you can clap.

I do not know the lovely lady's last name but I know Steffi will be on in approximately at the top of the hour to talk about creating a culture of bravery. And I think that there are some of the topics that get touched on there as well about kind of interpersonal interactions. So I'm looking forward to her presentation and I hope you join me there as well.

Human. Yes. This is an excellent question. So the question is, when you are working in a company and someone has clearly demonstrated that they should not be there,

and you have flipped the bozo bit and it is a fair thing to have done. You can tell the person nicely not to come to work anymore. What do you do in an open source project? You can fire volunteers. It is actually very hard to fire volunteers but you can.

I think my favorite story about this, and it turned out really well, was very early on in the days of the subversion revision control system. There was a gentleman who would post constantly to the mailing list for subversion saying things like, you know, just random stuff. And it wasn't bad. It was relatively well thought out but this person just took a lot of time.

So they actually ran some stats on the mailing list and they figured out that 75% of mailing list traffic was created by this one human being. And this one human being also created like 5% of the code. And this was obviously not really working because everyone was very politely trying to engage with this person but they weren't actually helping.

So one of the maintainers actually asked for his phone number, called him on the phone and said, you know, we appreciate what you're trying to do but this is actually like taking a lot of time and energy and focus away from our mission and we wish you the best of success somewhere else. Which was a very awkward and painful conversation but this person nicely and delicately took it well and in fact went and volunteered their time somewhere else and that was great.

It can be very difficult to do this in volunteer projects because since there isn't necessarily like a stated hierarchy, you know, also if somebody is asked to no longer come to the office, people know they aren't coming to the office. With volunteers, it's not necessarily that clear cut.

And then you can have very unhappy people who behave badly when they're told that they should potentially seek their quest elsewhere. That is another entire talk, possibly a book, which we can discuss over as many beers as you wish. Excellent. I saw another hand.

Yes, other human, please.

Yes, okay. That's an awesome question. So if you are in the process of visibly demonstrating that failure is okay in your organization such as with a fail cake, how do you keep it from being a horribly shameful exercise where it's like you are so terrible that we give you cake?

So there are a couple of ways to do this. The way that I prefer to implement this process is I am the first person to fail miserably and I am the first person to have a terrible failure. So if I can – and I am the first person to call out my own failure as I'm serving cake, right? Like, wow, yeah, that time that I thought we should do this whole thing was a really bad idea.

And, you know, just hand it out and take the responsibility onto myself and also talk about what I've learned from it. So it's not just that it was a bad idea and it was shameful, but here are the things that we are never going to do again and here are the benefits that we are going to reap from not having gone through this again and just being really clear about it.

And the best way to do it is to make sure that when you implement this as a process, usually the person driving saying we should do things this way is probably the person brave enough to stand there and say like, whoa, I really screwed up. And once that's modeled in the organization as being safe, I think it becomes a much less shameful process.

But you have to start with someone who is particularly courageous and who is particularly able to put their ego on hold. I think if you start with the most timid person in the office and say, hey, here's your cake, it's going to go very badly. I would not recommend starting with that. Other nice humans. Yes.

So everyone would like to know if it is better if the individual who makes the mistake brings the cake or if it is better if the company provides the cake.

The stories on that one are mixed. It has been suggested that it is best that the person who makes the mistake brings the cake as sort of a an offering of love and peace to their teammates who may have stayed up all night fixing their mistake. I think that that has value. I'm just personally I'm not a big fan of like making employees be responsible for things that are business expenses.

So I've just got to like. Yeah, no, I think that that should come out of the cake fund. Hmm. I'm not understanding. One more time. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes. So I personally don't like that just because I think that there are enough places in which responsibility for creating business value or transfer employees unfairly. And that's a different rant entirely. So I think that you should do whatever works best for you. But it has been suggested that it is better for the person who made the mistake to purchase the cake and bring it as a as a gift of love.

And I can see the benefit for that as well. Other nice humans. Cool. Come back for stuffy's talk. It's going to be amazing. Thank you.