 All right, I love this stage. I think it's one of my favorite parts of this conference. But it's like when you're up here, you feel like you're having to step into the danger zone. OK, I've broken the wall. Now we're good. I'm Hampton Catelyn, at H. Catelyn, because I'm kind of a Twitter whore. You should follow me. I tweet lots of very, very interesting things, also completely stupid things. I work at a company called Move Web. The last two years, we've been kind of a stealth startup. So basically, nobody knows what the hell I've been doing. But we're Jim knows. We run a bunch of mobile sites, Macy's and sports authority and a whole bunch of them, but kind of been building a platform on the back end that we'd be releasing this fall. So look forward to the future of me pimping that. I'm mostly known, or I used to be known as the Hamel guy, but that's changed. Thank you. That's kind of changed. You search by being the SAS guy. But the problem with that one is it kind of has to come with a caveat, which is that I only invented the idea of the modern pre-compiler language and the core concept and design of SAS, but other people have worked way harder than me to mature the language, make it usable. And without them, SAS would be a footnote, and most of the crazy cool features are their idea. So there you go. It's a little more complicated kind of relationship. But I'll take it, the SAS guy. All right, so what I'm talking about is, yeah, the user, your user, the animal. And this is really about ourselves. This stuff applies to your users, but it applies to all of us and how we think about ourselves, how we think about our coworkers, our friends, our family. Programmers were extremely analytical, all of us. I mean, it's so funny when we have a thing at MoveWeb where, I think I started this, I'll kind of call people and I'm like, you're being an engineer right now. And I do kind of mean it derogatorily, because generally it means you're thinking so analytical about a problem. Oh gosh, just try to get an engineer talking to a marketing person, or try to think one for a second as an engineer, and you're like, but why? That's not, I mean, it's close, but not, oh, right. It's a powerful thing. You're like, well, yes it is powerful, but we try to break things down into boxes. And we also, well, because this is what you do in your program, right, you're obviously taking a very complicated real life problem and trying to break it down into little bits. And we also then believe in rationality. All of us here, if you're a programmer at all, you believe in the core, your job is to rationalize. You believe in a world where things can be ordered. And so we like to think of ourselves as purely logical animals, right? I mean, how many times when you find a bug, do you kind of look back later and go, or like when you find, when you're like, huh, that's like impossible. Somebody else was supposed to put that there. I was thinking correctly about that problem. I understood everything about it. You know, okay, I guess, get blame. All right, I did type that. But you know, we don't think about what we don't know, right? We're, and this, what the career is. I mean, it's a normal thing, but you don't know everything. And oftentimes problems are a lot blurrier. So one of the things that kind of the core concept here obviously is we're animals. This Darwin, you know, threw this bomb into the middle of Western culture of this idea. I think, you know, obviously biologists and stuff had been working previous to him. We knew we were, we knew we had fleshy substance. We knew we had a brain, we had a heart like an animal. But, you know, we didn't really fully get the concept of us being, you know, equal with other animals. And that's still an uncomfortable idea for most of us. But I love, Dawkins has this awesome image of, you know, if all the mothers, your mother and her mother, her mother, and they all held hands. And this is talking about the mitochondrial Eve, which is our, everybody's great-great-grandmother. You eventually end up that they're holding hands with something that would be like, you know, a predecessor to a chimpanzee. And then from there you can go and they're holding hands all the way back to, you know, to a modern-day chimpanzee. And that would roughly go around the earth. But like how amazing would that be to see that, right? Like this real, visible, clear concept that, whoa, I mean, we are special, but okay, we're that too. Now this is a complicated idea. Because the way that Western culture has been, like our most religion had been, it teaches that, especially Christianity, that we are flawed people. You were born sinful, right? You can only become good by, you know, joining a monastery, becoming an ascetic, something like that, right? That's how you do good. Or salvation, obviously, is the primary message. But this idea that we are animals, you know, in dark animals, a bad kind of animal. I don't mean, you know, Dawkins nice, aren't we all hugging each other kind of animals. That our true nature is darkness, that we're kind of horrible. And if left alone, we destroy and maim, and just all of this, right? And so, you know, here's this idea, and this definitely got mixed in with race around the same period. You see a lot of racist literature using Darwin. Because the idea that the savage, right, they're like an animal, right? And then there's the poor, helpless, super, super glowing white woman who's, you know, being terrorized by people who are more animalistic than her. And then this concept starts going into the modern era, and we have pieces of shit like this. I hate this book. I'm sorry if you like it. I just seriously, seriously hate it. It doesn't make any sense. It's like, so here's the plot of the novel. I think they were shipwrecked. There's all these kids. They're going to boarding school or something. They end up on an aisle. Oh, yeah. Well, I'm sure everybody's in here in the middle of reading Lord of the Flies today. So, I think I'm just going to spoil this like your eighth grade teacher did. So, here are cliff notes. Come on, right? So, you know, they end up on an island. Everything's going all right. There's no adults around. The kids kind of start to build a society and do voting and make government. And then just all hell breaks loose. They just start killing each other at the end, and they're beating this one kid, and then there's tyranny, and they like the whole island on fire, and then like the adult shows up in the end, and they're all like, oh, what us? We didn't do anything, right? And there's this idea that if they're not adults around, that we just go straight into this horrible, animalistic, destructive path, right? And, you know, I look at things like, you know, I love looking at the stars, but I love looking at cities, right? I love seeing this beautiful escape of San Francisco, my new home. And it's just, it's gorgeous, right? Was this built by people who are just trying to completely murder everyone every second of the day, and then just, oh, we happened to build this? Or you look at my favorite feat of engineering, I just, the Concorde, just, like I actually, I got the chance to walk into a Concorde that they had in a museum, and just like I actually like teared up, like it was just so beautiful, the machine, that just, you know, it only actually crashed by the way because of, I think it was a DC-10. It's one of the worst built planes in history, and it took off and a piece fell off under the runway, and then the Concorde hit it. So thanks, DC-10, just proving the point that you're the worst design airplane in history, you even took out the Concorde. Yeah, but we look at these feats of engineering, oh, sorry, here's the last one. Oh, now it doesn't really show up. So this is an eye optical map thing, has anybody, have you guys had this done, this crazy machine? Yeah, this blew my mind, I'd never had it done. And it caused, though, my optician was like, she looked at it and she goes, huh, that's interesting. And I'm like, whoa, top 10 things I did not want to hear come out of your mouth. So there's this like giant thing up in the top left corner that's not supposed to be there. And she's like, have you been in the Amazon recently? And I was like, no. Yeah, she's like, oh, then it's probably nothing. But I've never seen that before. And I'm like, all right, so. Yeah, technology. Yeah, but you know, it poses a question, how do we build on this, right? And this is not something that the Lord of the Flysites, that's a new term, they haven't not struggled like how does society exist, right? And the kind of prevailing concept has been that the government, education, the church, and your family structures are what keep us from devolving into craziness. I think it's totally wrong. I think it's the experiments that have been done are showing this is absolutely not true. We organize, if anything, if you people put people on an island, they will form something and they will try to work together. And that's just our ancestors didn't, well, I'll get to this, I guess I'm gonna have myself. Our ancestors didn't survive because they just stabbed each other all the time. It's not a really good method. And so there's this concept called strong reciprocity. What strong reciprocity is, is basically I'm an individual, so in the most basic kind of economic and human model, you know, if I see a wallet, I steal it because I just got an advantage. If nobody saw me, it's fine. Like just being selfish, right? The kind of Adam Smith just, we just take, we take, take, take, that's all we do. It actually, strong reciprocity shows that we will actually cause harm to ourself. We will harm ourselves in order to ensure cooperation in the group. Like it's almost like being, it's not the same thing as hugging nice, but it's being super nice. You're losing out so that rules can exist and things can happen normally. And so there's this thing called the ultimatum game that is the link. I would prefer you, yeah. Yeah, just Google it. It's like the first result. That's a lot easier. But it basically works like this. Wow, I wasn't gonna copy and paste. I'll put on slideshare. You can go to it, download the whole thing, copy and paste, or Google it. So this is, I think I can explain this a little better verbally. So basically you get two people and you give some amount of money to a person A, right? So I think $10 is kind of the standard amount they've used. So you give them $10. And much like, imagine it's after a heist, right? We got the goods. Now I figure out how to split it. And this person A gets to make a complete ultimatum decision of how they split it. 50-50, I'm taking it all, you get nothing. You get $1 and I'll keep nine, whatever. What happens is person B has only one thing they can do, accept it or reject it. If they accept it, they get the money. If they reject it, nobody gets shit. And what ends up happening is, so yeah, basically if somebody offers me a dollar, right? If I reject it, I just lost a dollar. I got nothing in the end, right? I didn't have any success. If I accepted even though the guy was kind of a dick, I got a dollar, right? I came out ahead. And they found people by huge, huge margins. I mean, this has been done a bunch of times. Obviously the margins kind of changed. But definitely people choose to harm themselves. If it's unfair, they say, no, I don't want anything. You're not getting anything. We have this really, really strong sense to kind of for right and wrong, for doing what needs to be done, for making sure that people are acting fair. And the funny part is, so this experiment, a lot of the people were like, well, it's not a lot of money, right? Obviously one dollar, given to me the finger, it's kind of nice, it's a nice little free, it's cheaper than a movie ticket. Then they went to Indonesia and I think did $300 or something and it was like half of a year's salary for the people that had to do it. And they found that by country, the line exactly what was considered fair. Some countries, like former Soviet states, people were willing to accept less. They thought that was fair to not get as much. But industrialized nations, right around the 50-50 mark, you see an immediate spread. And even with like half a year's salary, people would just lose out, just to punish the other person for not playing fair. And there's so many different studies, all sorts of, a lot of them way more complicated than this. But it just, it really shows you, there's something going on here. So this is wrong, this is totally wrong. I mean, it's much more complicated at minimum, right? And when we look at something like war, right, isn't that the thing we think of the most craven, horrible, human thing? I mean, what's the worst about humanity? It's this. Well, if you think about it, all these guys who went to war, did they go for glory or money or fun? No, like they went out of sense of duty and what was right. You know, whether whichever side you wanna pick is right, obviously probably neither is. But people are going, and their whole lives, they have a girlfriend, maybe a kid, they are putting their life on the line. I mean, that is amazing. Like, can you imagine doing it? Like, I will die. That's the other, that's the outcome. I'm going, I will probably die. But it's worth it to me to do that. It's so funny, the war that one of the worst things is actually a really great indicator of just how nice we are. So maybe we should trust our users a little bit more if they're probably willing to die for right things. So here's a, this was surprising to me when I started working at Wikimedia a while ago. That basically only 75% of the articles had ever been vandalized, ever. So I don't know, Michael was like, that's a lot. And I'm like, I assumed writing scripts and stuff, it'd be 100% because you can do a lot of damage really quickly. That's all of them that have ever, sorry, 75% have never been vandalized, right? It's only 25% have. So it's way, way less than, at least I was assuming, did anybody else hear? I think people were that nice. I assume, or he talks about Wikimedia, oh, you vandalize it all the time. And even more, 50% of the vandalisms were caught in four minutes or less. And that is not organized by the Wikimedia Foundation. That happens organically. They did not, there's no system, they didn't put it in. It just, the community organized around that. So stop designing just for the bad. And how we do that is you make bad behavior ineffective and reward good behavior. So Wikipedia, to roll back, one button. That's why it's no fun. Oh, I vandalize a page, click. All right, that wasn't fun. Like it's not a, it's actually by empowering other users was the real solution, right? It wasn't, oh, we have to put in, if we put a capture for something, I don't know, whatever. Or lock everything down. No, it's actually the openness. In fact, you can, you could roll back good commits just because you felt like it. They can roll back yours, and again and again. And it just works out. And also reward good behavior, particularly for Wikipedia, they started to think of barn stars forever ago, which is basically modern badges, but all driven by the community, no algorithms involved. So why do we do this stuff, right? Why are we nice, right? And it's about cooperation. It's about that we all succeed. Our ancestors did a much, much better job if they were nice, right? The asshole died. I mean, that's what happened. So if I'm an asshole and I get cancer and I die and I have some kids around, and I'm in a tribe, they're probably not gonna take great care of those kids if I was really horrible to them or killed their brother or stole from them or whatever, right? They're like, nope, nope, out, done. If you're a nice person and you help them out and made tools and do your expertise and traded fairly, they might take care of your children. That's something we do today. So let's just talk more, the most important topic here, me. genie.com, I have 5,084 of my direct ancestors are charted on there now. Those are all grandparents. This isn't cousins and shit. Honestly, it's so bad, I think. I don't care about them, I'm like, whatever. But this is a list of just one of the chains, the one I've gotten back the furthest. So my dad's up there and his father and his mother and you can keep going. But basically what I'll highlight is, so these are ones with Wikipedia articles that I just highlighted. All the way back to King Einstein, Huff Darsons, Feed the King. It would pass William the Conquerer, by the way. I'm gonna pass that. Honestly, once you're willing to conquer, people have done the research. It's a lot easier. So these are the pictures of the Wikipedia articles of those people. Handsome, handsome bunch. So, do you guys know the movie Braveheart, I assume? It's Michael's most hated film. So that guy, oh, I'm totally blanking. What was it again? Robert the Bruce, sorry, I wasn't gonna figure that. So Robert the Bruce, one of the characters, he's my 22nd great-grandfather. So what? Yeah, are you guys just thralled with this? You can get my autograph later. You guys are the same. That's the crazy part. Everybody here, every single person in this room is exactly the same in this regard, right? It's a great article. This is actually a link. You probably should follow in The Atlantic. Awesome article about this, but I'll kind of step you through the basics. You have two parents, one generation back, right? Go back another, four, you have four grandparents. You have eight great-grandparents. We can maybe, this is how we calculate the fourth generation. We keep going, if we get a 28, we get 268 million, and that was about 1100 AD. And roughly 35 generations ago, or 961 AD, not that long ago, if you actually, like, England had kings and stuff at this point, 34 billion ancestors. There were 400 million people on the planet. So something's funny here, right? These numbers don't add up. Maybe some of us are cousins around here. And that 400 million thing, that's people who are alive. Not necessarily successful ancestors. It takes a lot more to be a successful ancestor. You have to be well-liked. You need to have money. You need to raise your kids well. It's actually, you have to raise your kids so that they will have kids. You can raise kids and have it so they won't have kids, right? Just birthing isn't enough. You have to continue the process. So in the community, they can find a job. They can get money. Then when a plague comes, they might be helped out. They would be able to go someplace. So of these guys in this shot, that is not an ancestor. That one isn't, that one isn't, that one isn't, that one isn't, that one isn't. Let's see how fast I can go through this. None of these guys, none of them, none of them. Nope, not even that guy. None of them are successful ancestors because dead people can't have babies or raise them. It's a very clear fact. So if you were in the site of a losing battle out of those 400 million on the planet, you didn't get much. You're not probably none of your grandparents were in that shot because they are dead. So what does this mean? It means that your ancestors are very likely, again and again, gonna be rulers, right? You're an emperor, you have like 400 concubines. Well, they had kids, that's 800. They're all fed incredibly well. They're given good positions. They make you become a mayor of a town, get married again. So it's highly selected towards if you just start doing genealogical research, just go up any one of your lines. Each one, you can get up to, you know. The one I showed you is one out of 34 billion that I could have followed, right? But I happened to hit that one. So there's a lot of options. You will hit that and you also will, if you have a spouse and you're generally from the same global genetic pools, you will be related. So enjoy that. Yeah. Also, it's Charlemagne if you're European at all. Actually, you're related to them. Genghis Khan, I think everyone on the planet was good calculation. He traveled around a lot, right? It was 1,300. 1,300, yeah, it's like, that's the ones that they can track. I think it's actually bigger if you work out that they left. Also, sorry, the other point is these are great kings, right, asshole kings didn't work out so hot, right? They came in with swords and killed everyone who was your kid. And they probably became the town jester if they lived. So your users are, this is a legacy. It's your legacy, all of us. We're not the people who died. People who sucked. That is not our grandparents. They were cool people. So when I hear this, this just buries me. And I hear it from more operations people than anything else. Just, I don't know what that means. But our users are so stupid. They always do X or, oh no, no, our users are too stupid for this. I hate that. I hate that attitude. You're the one that's stupid if you're doing something that wrong that's causing them to do that, right? Like, that's our job to make sure that things are clear and make sense, right? But to treat your users with such derision to assume that they can't behave normally on your site, that they won't act like adults, they won't do a good job. That is so shit. That's such a bad way to build something. And you end up with just a lockdown, kind of weirdly insulting tool that doesn't actually do anything. You wanna make your users feel smart and helpful. That's the, if you can do that, I mean, have you ever used a site where like, do people use like Cora and stuff or like Stack Overflow? Anybody like actually use that? Like, I know that people do and they feel so good. Like you really do, you get a little buzz. I use TripAdvisor and I write reviews on there. And it sends me an email telling me how many people have read my review over the last week. So it was like, I wrote one for a resort in Hawaii we really liked. And it's like 5,000 people read this review. And I'm like, that is so cool. That makes me feel so good. Just like right in the middle of the day, I'm like, all right, I did some nice, right? Because we wanna feel that, that's, we all got here, we're all live because our ancestors did useful things and good. You know, I'm not saying that they were puppies and handing out cash on the street corner, right? That's not my definition of good at least. That's stupid probably. But that wasn't nice. You wanna make your users feel smart and helpful and also powerful, right? You wanna enable them to do things, give them the power to achieve. The other part, by the way, I just kinda wanna insert here, I hate it when people do just throw up a wiki and call that support. It's not, it's not the same thing as Wikipedia either because you don't have a community yet, right? You really have to work at it. That is not support, okay? Don't ever do that, I think engineer, this is when I tell people with thinking like an engineer, it'll be like, oh, well, we put up a Cora or like Stack Overflow clone. So, support's sorted. You're like, what? No, this is hard. So we have to help people be good. You wanna give feedback if you send out emails, if you send a hey, how are things going to your customers? Thanks for doing that on our wiki. That's the kind of thing that gets people interested. So I just wanna go really quick into some good design. Yeah, unlikely spots. For making people feel really good about themselves and empowered as users. And this is where we're simulating, or stimulating that part of us that was bred to want to feel good and important. And I'm gonna focus on Farmville. One of the most derided things in history for a lot of reasons. But it has some really, really cool stuff in it if you kinda step back and look at what they're actually doing. So I love, right down here, first of all, it's about your social status. That's what they're showing you. How many friends do I have? Right, lots of Facebook users do this a lot. It's up towards the top. You don't need to see that list. You know who you're friends with. But it makes you feel like, oh, I'm liked, I'm liked, I'm liked, there's a subconscious I'm liked. Yeah, yeah, this is good. People like me, yay. Like counting your birthday messages on Facebook kind of thing, right? But down here, we're like, oh, we have neighbors. We have a group, a community. I feel important, I feel good. We have this shows up. A pink cow showed up on your farm. She can't find a home. Will you ask your friends to help her find a home? Just emotional baiting. They just picked a character, put a name on it. All this is, it's a post on me on your wall. I mean, there's no gameplay aspect to it. There's no cow. The cow isn't sad. You don't collect cows. There's no cow bonus you get for the day. Like you just do this and a fictional cow is helped because you post it on your wall. Helped, I don't know, right? Like this is the stuff that just, it's going right towards that core psyche of us feeling like, oh, Cher, oh, look, I helped. And then the one I, I love this design touch here. So if you go to one of your friends' farms, they say, hey Hampton, these crows are destroying his crops. Please help get rid of them. Okay, if you hit accept or cancel, it is the same damn thing. It doesn't do anything. There's little animated crows on the field. But if you didn't go there, they're not there. They only appeared because you went to the farm. It's not a real thing. Crows is not a gameplay element to Farmville. They're just there to make you feel helpful, to make you feel good, right? This is like, it's like a machine that is crafted to trick us into feeling like helpful, nice people. And that sounds horrible. Yeah, but I love it. But if you hit cancel, it's the same thing. There's nothing. And I love, yeah, how the hell does this work? Most programmers, we love analytic. What does that mean? Was there a field that a database entry get in? Are we gonna calculate it? Can we put it in Hadoop and figure out what's happening? I love this quote so much. It gets pointless. Yes, at first you get sucked in, wanting to get all the ribbons, all the trees and all the animals, and wanting to plant different crops. Get buildings and beat your friends. But finally, when you do all this, which is about a month if you try, the game stops having any point. This is a game review by a traditional game reviewer. Missing the whole point here, right? I mean, clearly he says it's pointless. Missing why people do it. Well, I don't get it. I got all the gold, right? And I'll say I did play, I played for like a week or something, and I was like trying to like, I was playing like SimCity or like one of the simulation games. I'm trying to like build out things and make more money. And then, yeah, then it dawned on me. I'm like, whoa, okay. It doesn't have any of this backed up because that isn't the point. That isn't what they're trying to build. So maybe you should make some of your apps a little bit more like Farmville. Just a concept. All right, so let me wrap up here. First of all, we are animals, face it. Go talk to a therapist if you need to. I think this is really a crucial thing to understand about yourself. It's a positive thing if you really look it the right way. We're mostly good, and we can even say that empirically. And I'm using good fairly loosely here. You know, they're not petting kittens on the street thing. Oh my gosh, hold on. I have enough time. Mini rant. Pets. If an alien species came down and saw that we were feeding these little creatures in our homes, spending money on them, economic resources, worry, time, effort for things that are basically evolved to invoke in us emotions. They make faces that we respond to. They act like they love us. Sorry, that was terrible. But it's true. Like there's this, we are so nice that another creature figured out how to hack the system. Right? Like that's amazing. Aliens would be like, wow, you guys are so stupid. What are you doing? It's just, does it work? Is it working for you? Lord of the Flies is horrible. Write your eighth grade teacher, tell her or him to stop. They should not be giving this stuff out. What a horrible way to start off your life in literature, right? Oh yeah, everyone's horrible. Yeah. You have awesome ancestors. Everyone here, all of our shared ancestors, because high cousin, high cousin, high cousin. They're awesome. They're awesome people. And they must have been because that's the only, you probably had some duds in there, right? But that was lucky, that was lucky. But they probably had kids who were awesome. And you wanna make your users feel special, important. Treat them with that respect that they're like that, right? We wanna give them kingdoms. We wanna give them that feeling of empowerment. We wanna give that to them. And if we can make that, if we can give them the chance to do these things, then we can do something really, really amazing. I just wanna say a happy birthday, Michael knows this has been said like nine times. So he said, yeah, see that look, see that look right there. That's the, that's the look I'm used to every morning. You can follow him on Twitter at Mallory's. Happy anniversary, Chip. Chip. Chip. Chip. Chip. It's Chip. Chip. Chip. I love that picture still. All right, yeah, follow me at HCatlin. And thanks for listening.