I remember finding Dungeons and Dragons in the summer of nineteen eighty-three. It was June and we were all, me and a group of friends, staying at my friend’s house who was having a birthday after school had gotten out for the year. There was like five or six boys doing the normal birthday goofy stuff in the eighties at night and then the next day when we woke up and had breakfast, they all were playing Dungeons and Dragons and I had not been exposed to it at all. Not -- you know, like in eighty-three, it was pretty popular still, it was like, I think that was around the E T event and all that. But they laid out this map for this place called the World of Greyhawk and they had all these things and it was just kinda like whew. And that changed me forever, and I started marching, y'know, bought the books, learned the rules, started running my own games, sharing them with friends for almost forty years. So learning how to do all of that differently from systems that hit basically right as I was going into middle school, junior high, that was like hard printed in my psyche of how to run a Dungeons and Dragons game and now all of it was pretty much worthless. Not all of it, but, you know, ninety percent had to change, had to face change and getting through that process has been an exercise in focus. Learning how the data is stored in the software and how to access it ad hoc, because Dungeons and Dragons is live improv. There might be a story in it like you start here and you hope you'll end up here, but then the game starts happening and all the people are essentially improv artists playing the game. You just have rules systems to resolve tension sometimes like, you know, Indiana Jones, I take the idol off the altar and drop a bag of sand on it to prevent all the traps from going off, well that's just a roll but everything else is improv. You can, you know, what if Indiana Jones just grabbed the idol of the golden head in that movie and ran with it, didn't even bother trying to stop the traps. Doable. So, finding the resolution systems in the computer has been an exercise in…

What I wanted to share was there's this acronym: Ford F.O.R.D. you may have heard of it. It stands for family occupation recreation dreams. And that's supposed to be like an easy way to get to know someone and navigate small talk and at a level that's slightly more personal than just talking about the weather or whatever. Or like we end up talking about coffee a lot at work, we end up talking about beer a lot at work. It’s just stuff you have in common, right? And I think I may have shared in the past like having these sort of not rules, but like blueprints for conversation are really helpful to me. Like the example I always go to is if someone's sharing something difficult about their life with you, often they're not, they don't need problem solving. They just want empathy. They just want you to say, “I hear you. Wow, that sounds difficult, man that's a bummer.” And like my role in that conversation doesn't need to be anymore, it’s just done. My role doesn't need to be any deeper than that. They just want to be heard, you know express themselves. That's fine. But yeah, it's kind of trap, is like this person is telling me something wrong should I fix that like no, it's not the point of this conversation. So I don't know just the place I am, developmentally and I need those blueprints. Um, and so this this F.O.R.D is helpful, I think. Like another one that comes up at work all the time. How’s your weekend? Or what did you do this weekend? Which is basically what that R, recreation right? What do you do for fun? And you know, maybe they care about it personally or yeah, it doesn't really matter what the point is. It's just small talk, right? You're just getting talking, getting to know someone, have of fun. Maybe make a friend. It doesn't need to be defined purpose.