 All right, good morning, everyone. So today's talk is going to be very low key. We're just going to share some stories and think a little bit about what it means to tell stories. And then I'll leave it up to you to connect this with your own work and your own life. So let me start by telling you a little bit about my own connection with fiction. As Matt said, fiction is one of the best ways for us to understand ourselves. But the question is, why? Why is that even true? Humans are, in my mind, rather interesting. We don't have any other form of intelligence to compare ourselves to. So we just have human intelligence to go by. So I don't know if this is a universal of all intelligences or something very unique to Homo sapiens. But I posited that humans are incapable of understanding the universe unless they can take it inside themselves and turn it into part of their story. We have a tendency to treat the randomness of the universe as plot elements in a story we construct for ourselves. This is neither good nor bad. It just is a feature of human cognition. This is why, when we're trying to understand a lot of scientific concepts and so forth, we have a hard time doing so. It is actually almost impossible to find someone to give you an explanation of something, say, the theory of evolution without them attributing some kind of plot element to it, some kind of ultimate cause. It's because we humans are not capable of processing the universe as essentially a series of random events. We must impose a plot on it in some manner. We must find a purpose. This is neither good nor bad, all right? So I want to start by thinking a little bit about what story actually means. And it turns out there's a really interesting story behind it. So the word story for our language is very much related to history and both derive from the same French root. After the Norman conquest, the English language fundamentally transformed itself by importing a huge number of Latin-based French words. And history and story were not distinguished as distinct things for the longest time. So when you said you were telling a story, it could be a history or it could be a tale for entertainment. And when you said that you were recounting a history, it could be a chronicle of true events or it could be a narrative constructive entertainment. The two were basically interchangeable until fairly recently. And this is why even today journalists write stories, even though they are the first drafts of history. So you might wonder, OK, well, surely the Anglo-Saxons had a word for a story before the French came and imposed this on them. And you will be right. The actual Anglo-Saxon word for story is spell. Spell still survives in that narrative sense in words like the Gospels, which are literally good spells, good stories. And in words like spellbound. When you're spellbound, you are actually being enraptured and held in place by a story, not necessarily incantation. Spell did not acquire in the meaning of magical incantation until, again, fairly recently. It was displaced by history and story. But I think there's something really powerful there. A spell, OK, a spell, that's what a story is. A spell is a thing emanating from the human mind that transforms the world. I think that's what a story literally is. And it's also a way for you to take the world into yourself and incorporate it into part of your being. So I want to run a little exercise with all of you. So think about some abstract concept that's very important to you, say patriotism or freedom or faith or hope or whatever. And just focus your mind on thinking about what the word actually means to you, what images come to mind. If you were forced to define for yourself what it is, what are the memories and what are the things you rely on? Just take a few seconds to think about that. So for me, the word I'm thinking about is love. And I can tell you about C.S. Lewis's Four Loves. And I can tell you about all the definitions of love and all the meditations on love by philosophers. Really all that. Don't get at the heart of what love means to me. What I think about whenever I sort of think about this word is I think about my grandmother. I think about my grandmother when I was a very small child. I remember I was working at the family dining table at my homework. And my grandmother was sitting next to me to keep me company. And she was knitting a sweater for me. And I looked over and I could see that because she had arthritis and her fingers and joints were very swollen and it was hard for her to move the needles. It was very difficult. And so I asked her, grandma, does it hurt? And she says, yeah, it does. It actually hurts a lot. So I say, well, why don't you stop? Why are you doing that? And then she said, well, I don't want you to be cold. That is the core memory, if you will, the foundational story of what love means to me. And no matter what happens for the rest of my life, I will always go back to that memory to define what it means. Same thing with many other words. Courage for me will always mean on the playground my friend who decided to stick up for me when no one else would. That is the definition of courage. And I was trained as a lawyer but I went through years of classes and seminars on legal ethics and so on and so forth. But I will never, never understand what it means to be a lawyer without remembering the judge I clerked for and how she worked with me and taught me what it means to treat every litigant's claims as seriously as I could. This is true for all of you, I suspect, that when you are thinking about abstract concepts and abstract ideas, you always go back to some foundational story that defines for you what that thing actually means. We humans are incapable of understanding abstractions without concrete stories that embody them for us. Stories are the means by which we embody values and enact them. This is true not only at the level of individuals but at the level of entire societies. We have foundational narratives that define for us, that encode for us what these values are. I am a fantasy novelist and I write epic fantasy. So forgive me if I keep on thinking about our lives in that way. I really do think that all of this are in some manner like the great epic heroes of old, right? Like Adam or Gilgamesh, we are born naked and helpless into the world full of confusion and chaos. Into that nothingness come our first guardians, our parents or caretakers and they become for us our angels and our gods. They give us our first mythologies. The way they love us become the way we think about love and the way they hurt us become the way we understand pain. We acquired this mythology with which we then understand the world and over time our friends, our foes, our lovers give us more and more of these stories. Every time they come to us, they do something that embodies their values. Those stories become part of our mythology. And later on when we find out what our quest is, our armor and our repertoire of spells of these stories, they stay with us as we go on our quest throughout our lives. And later on in our old age when we die, we have nothing but the story of our journey behind us. We are, our shroud is our spell. That is it. We are like Merlin in the end wrapped in that story of ours. And then we go into the void with nothing behind us other than that story. That's it. Our entire lives is about telling that story, constructing that story. And again, this is not true just for ourselves, but for families, for professions, for entire nations. We, the politics of our country can be summed up by a struggle over the story of America. That's what it is right now. Great stories for cultures are stories that are fought over every generation. Every new generation must recommit to those values and retell those stories. That's how it is. A people was not defined by blood or religion or land or any of those things. It's defined simply by a story. All nations are fundamentally just stories. And it is the only thing worth dying for and living for. All right. So as you can feel, stories are very important to me. That's why I make my living telling stories and constructing stories. But let me tell you what happened to me during the pandemic. During the pandemic, I saw something else about storytelling that I hadn't realized before, which is that stories are magical and magic can be both good and terrible. What are conspiracy theories other than mass storytelling exercises? I was surrounded by horrifying stories and stories of hate, stories of division, stories of fear, stories of terror, stories of oppression. For the first time in my adult life, I felt unwelcome in my own country. It was a horrible time. There were people saying incredibly nasty things and threatening me. It became a place where I lost faith in the very idea of storytelling. I always thought stories could give us hope, connect us with our deepest values and make us feel to be human. And then I realized stories have a darker side. It could potentially lead people to hate and to go to war for the most wrong of reasons. I simply could not write anymore. I actually lost all ability to write. And I had a crisis of faith. I was wondering what's the point of storytelling at all? All my life, I've been telling stories about how humans are imperfect, but we are capable of perfecting ourselves. And now I was faced with a reality that I could not accept. Science fiction writers have always imagined that if there were an existential threat to the human race, we would put aside our differences and come together. And the pandemic proved the exact opposite. There was an existential threat and our reaction was to prepare, to accuse each other and to go to war. It was incredible. Honestly, that's the only word I can think of. So I stopped writing altogether. I couldn't tell any stories at all. And of course, being a working writer, I had deadlines to meet. And I was faced with the fact that for the first time, I had a case of writer's block, if you will, that meant that I couldn't fulfill the deadlines that I was signing up to do. So being a computer programmer, I decided to solve this problem the most natural way, of course, which is to program some artificial intelligence to do the work for me. I thought if Ken could no longer write, surely Robo Ken could write. So this was long before the days of Chachi BT, okay? I mean, it was being developed, but it wasn't actually published or anything like that. So I was struggling on my own. Now, in my other life as a computer programmer, I had been interested in machine assisted or machine augmented creativity for many, many, many years. In fact, even back in college, one of my first programming projects was this little robot, if you will, that wrote Etna's Vincent Millet style sonnets. So this is something that I returned to over and over again. So I decided to essentially, I didn't have a gaming PC, I didn't have a very powerful graphics card, and so I had to leverage Google's platform to do this. But TensorFlow was very cool. So I ended up writing essentially a little language model, trained on my own work. I was very conscious about this. I didn't want to train it on anyone else's work. I wanted to train it on my own work to see if I could get Robo Ken to write something that I could turn in. And of course, the results were terrible. Now, those of you who do machine learning know that you need a lot of input for this to work. And because I consider myself a pretty productive writer, but even so, I did not have enough data for this to work. So this was the result, okay? Now, it's actually kind of fun because I could see that there were things in there that evoked my concerns. There were almost thoughts that I could almost imagine came out of myself, but this was clearly a dead end, okay? So by the way, this is one of the reasons why I'm not particularly excited about generative AI as it exists now, because essentially what generative AI now is, is an attempt to recreate and imitate and replicate what has already existed. This is fundamentally a different process than what creativity is. This is fundamentally a different thing than what we are trying to do as creative writers or creative individuals. So the fact that this failed shouldn't really have surprised me that much, but anyway, it failed. So this was a dead end, okay? So I said, okay, so turning to my own words and turning them around isn't doing anything. What else can I do to reconnect with storytelling? So I turned to my children, right? So I realized that one of the best things about being a parent is you get to reconnect and rediscover the stories that you enjoyed as a child again, right? So as I mentioned earlier, I say that stories are how we encode values and stories are how we connect with our values. So then that means stories we tell our children presumably in deepest, most fundamental as a society go to from the stories we tell our children, what values are most important to us? What do we consider to be so important that we must give them to our children as their first mythologies, right? So what I'm gonna do is just read to you from a few of these stories that I loved and I love reading to my kids. And then we're gonna go through them and see if we can discern some values out of them, all right? This is the exercise I went through during the pandemic. In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit, not a nasty, dirty wet hole filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat. It was a hobbit hole and that means comfort. Halfway between Poole's house and Piglet's house was a thoughtful spot where they met sometimes when they had decided to go and see each other. And as it was warm and out of the wind, they would sit down there for a little and wonder what they would do now that they had seen each other. One day when they had decided not to do anything, Poole made a verse about it so that everybody should know what the place was for. This warm and sunny spot belongs to Poole. And here he wonders what he's going to do. Oh, bother, I forgot. It's Piglet's too. And here is one from Frog and Toad. One morning, Toad sat in bed. I have many things to do, he said. I will write them all down on the list so that I can remember them. And I love the list because it says eat breakfast, get dressed, go to Frog's house, take walk with Frog, eat lunch, take nap, and then play games with Frog. Now that is a to-do list that I would like to have. Okay, and then one of my favorite stories, good night moon. Good night room, good night moon, good night cow jumping over the moon, good night light, and the red balloon. Good night bears, good night chairs, good night kittens, and good night men's. Okay, so what are we supposed to discern from these stories, right? So I spent a lot of time thinking about it and I realized that these are actually really wonderful values that the story try to teach us, right? So there are a set of values that recur out of these stories and in fact, I find them to be fairly universal. You can get them out of stories we tell children from across the world in different societies. One of them is humans are creatures of society. It's this society that is very important to us, right? We crave to be close to our friends. We crave seeing them. Like, Poole doesn't even care about what they do. He just wants to be with Piglet. It's the being with each other. I remember when I think about my grandmother, the fact that we were just sitting together, that was wonderful and I wish that could happen again. She had passed away a long time ago, but that's what I miss. It's this idea of being each other's presence which the pandemic denied us and which I missed so much. And I realized that a lot of us, a lot of us say that we miss our college days and it's not necessarily because college was wonderful in some particular way. It was because that was one of the last times when we were still very close to our friends and we could walk over to see them anytime we wanted to. And as adults, we no longer have that luxury or most of us don't. If we do, that is very, very lucky and beautiful. And the second thing that we teach our children that I think is actually incredibly important is being playful is important. Humans are meant to play, right? That there's a reason why play games is on there as a to-do item because that is what we're meant to do. We are meant to be playful creatures. We're meant to be curious and playful and engaged with the universe in that way. We were never meant as creatures to spend our time being quote unquote productive in the capitalistic sense. We know plenty of research showing that hunter-gatherer spend a few hours making a living and the rest of the time was spending telling stories and casting spells at each other, right? Being playful, being engaged, just being curious about the universe. That is what we were meant to do and that is one of the values we care about and we tell our children how important it is. The next value that I discern from them is the value of being rooted, okay? We love this feeling of being connected with our environment, with our neighborhood, with our society. Much of the dissatisfaction of modernity comes from this alienation, the sense that we are not rooted where we are. Again, in the modern world, we're told that we should be rootless. We should think of ourselves as packages of talents to be deployed by global capitalism wherever we think we are most efficient and can generate the most value. But that is not our purpose. Our purpose is to be rooted where we are at home, where we can be with our friends, where we can actually play, where we can feel the sense of being rooted and the sense of belonging, all right? That's something that we sorely lack and which we tell our children is important. The next value I got out of it is empowerment, the sense that we want to have a sense of control of our environment. Why is a hobbit hoe so wonderful? Because it's a home that you control. It's not some cookie cutter, high-rise thing that you're not allowed to modify. You have control over your own environment. You have the power to change the environment, to turn it into, this is the last value and the most important, to turn it into a part of your self-definition. The little bunny in Good Night Moon says good night to all these objects. Why? Not because they're objects. Because each object has a story connected to it. Each object has become part of the bunny's personal mythology. We love to be surrounded by objects that have stories in them that tell us who we are. We use these stories, these tools around us, these objects around us, a storytelling tools. They tell us who we are. They tell us why we are. They tell us what we want and what we yearn for. So society, play, rudeness, empowerment, and self-definition. These are the values that we encode in stories we tell our children that we claim to be the most important values. And yet, ironically, as adults, we do not live like this at all, right? These are the values we claim to be incredibly important to our children yet we do not live like this. Repeatedly, we are told that we need to be productive and not playful. Repeatedly, we are told that society is not that important as much as being, maximizing our potential as packets of talent for global capitalism. We are not empowering our own lives and we are not pursuing self-definition as the most important goal of them all. And most importantly, okay, I'll tell you this, none of these values are about turning, turning within yourself and swirling your own words around in the time to generate robo-ken. They're all about connecting with others, connecting with the outside world. All of the values that we care about are about extending ourselves out, connecting with the universe, making the universe part of our story and making ourselves part of the universe's story. We cannot get out of our own depression, our own solipsistic sadness by turning into ourselves. We have to turn out. That's the only way to get out. And so I did end up writing a story and it is about AI, but it's actually written by me, not so much by the AI. I did end up using some of the words that the AI generated, that they were just sort of seeds. I ended up writing the story about what it means to be human, even though it's called 50 Things Every AI Working with Humans Shouldn't Know, but as you can imagine, this is really a story about what it means to be human. And it is a story about those values that I care about so much. That's how I got out of it. I got out of it by reconnecting with our deepest values about what stories are actually meant to do and to remember my grandmother because my earliest stories, my earliest stories were told with her. We told each other's stories. We made each other part of our stories. All right. So I wanna give you a quote from Ursula K. Le Guin, which I think is very, very valuable. And it's Le Guin talking about writing. And she basically says that you need to understand that artists are not people who just reflect reality, whatever that means, who reflect facts. They are actually trying to get the truth. And the truth is not about facts. She says the truth you get from inside. I wanna be very careful about this. The inside Le Guin is talking about is not a solipsistic prison inside your own skull. That's not what she means. She means about going inside the collective unconscious. That vast interior terra incognita that connects us all and from which all true stories emerge. Le Guin says this about artists, but I would argue that this is true for all of us. So let's go back to the metaphor I had at the beginning where all of us are epic heroes on our own journey. All right? I haven't actually completed the story. So when you begin, right? I said that you were naked, alone, helpless, and you acquire your earliest mythologies from those who care for you, from your friends, from your foes, from your lovers. But you don't remain a child forever. Like every epic hero you also grow up. And at some point, right, you find yourselves like Dante in midway through life's dark wood. And what do you realize? You realize that you are no longer merely the hero of your own story. You are now an angel or a demon to those who come after you. The way you love them is the way they will understand love. The way you hurt them is the way they will define pain. You are an angel and a demon to all those who come after you. You are also a powerful, magical, spellbound figure in the stories of all those who depend on you, who are in your lives. We are not merely the heroes of our own story. We're also important players, supporting players or perhaps even inspiring guides in other stories. That is the only legacy you will leave behind. It is not true that like Merlin, you will fade away with nothing but your own shroud around you. No, you will live on in thousands of copies in the stories of all those that you touch. We live in webs of stories and that is how we're defined. We are the heroes of our collective stories. So, what does this mean? It means you have to think very deeply about what is your story and what is the story that you're trying to tell with your own life. Because remember, you cannot pass on your values merely by defining them and proclaiming them and lecturing about them. That's not gonna do anything. You actually have to turn them into stories in the lives of those you touch. You actually have to be, to put it mildly, be your value. You have to embody those values through your own actions. That is the only way for you to pass on your values and the only way for culture to survive. That's all culture is. Just millions of people re-enacting and embodying those values over and over again. That is the point of the American experiment. America is not an idea and it is not a set of orders and any of that. It's all of us who consider ourselves Americans trying to embody the American value over and over again, generation after generation. And it's true for all of you, whatever it is you do, how do you become the best X that you wanna be? You have to embody those values and carry them out over and over again. And so think about this. You're not there just to tell a selfish story about yourself. You're there to help others tell the stories they wanna tell. If you don't believe that you're living according to your deepest values, then change that. This is the great thing about life being a spell or a story. It is not finished. It's not published. It's not fixed on the page. You get to write the next chapter. If you do not like where your story is, you are welcome to change it. You are in fact the only author. You are empowered to change that, to turn the story into the story you want to live and to tell the story that you can tell. And so that's the thing I will leave with you. Think about what values are important to you and what are the values you wish to embody? How do you wish to become like Virgil de Dante, the guide in other people's epic stories? Because only by doing that will you get to live your best story and to tell the story that only you can tell. Thank you. So I love the little time for Q&A. So I think if any of you have questions, I have about 10 minutes to take questions. Come up to the mic. You can walk up to all the mics. Ken, I love your speech. And particularly in the beginning, you mentioned about the source. I know what you believe is love. And then you have done some experiment with generative AI. So do you find that AI can understand and love and then can be sharing the love? That's my question. OK, thank you. So gosh, let me put it this way. Here's what I think about AI. I'm incredibly interested in the potential of AI. I just don't think we are quite there yet. I find it very interesting that our current obsession with AI is how well it can imitate what humans do. And the imitation being the key here. There is a fundamental assumption that if the imitation is good enough and we can tell the difference, somehow that's the same thing as the real deal. And we actually know that's not true. I mean, deep in our hearts, we know that's not true. I do think that if we can develop AI to the point where it's actually a separate fundamental consciousness of the universe, then it will be incredibly compelling to listen to the AI about how it experiences the world. We've only had human intelligence as an example. We've never had to deal with another intelligence at our own level or higher. So if we can get to the point where AI can actually be a separate intelligence and really experience the world and truly engage with the universe in the same way that we do, then I think it will be incredibly compelling to understand how we are fundamentally different and how AI, even though it's based on this, may in fact do things differently. I'm incredibly inspired and thoughtful about the idea that someday AI can allow us to tell stories that we cannot tell by ourselves, that it will allow us to discover values that we only discern dimly. We're not at that point, and today's AI is nothing like that. So if you were to ask me the question, does AI understand love and does it experience love? Today, the answer is a definitive no, but I don't know about tomorrow, and I don't know what's going to happen the day after tomorrow. I'm much more hopeful about what AI can allow us to do that we cannot do, not merely what AI can imitate. That's not interesting to me at all. Great, thank you. Can I? Thank you. Hi, thank you so much for this presentation. It spoke to my soul, and I just am so glad that you're here to speak with us. For folks who are not able to make their own robo-ken but have not yet decided what their story is or are not sure that their story is worth telling to others, what recommendations do you have to help them pass that hurdle? Oh, wow, thank you. That is a great question. So I'm not very wise, even though I'm old, but I do think I've learned a few things in my life. I will say this. The one bit of advice that I love to give people, which I don't hear a lot of, is please, please, follow what you're enthusiastic about. Your enthusiasm is a better guide to what your quest is than almost anything else. I think we do, our children, a great disservice in this country by emphasizing over and over again this idea of being productive. The idea that they need to, for example, college education should be measured by after 10 years from graduation what the return on your investment is. This is the most idiotic thing I've ever heard of and I do not understand why we keep on repeating it. That is the worst way to measure what a college education is about. It's just dumb, I don't have any other words for it. I'm sort of flabbergasted, really, when people bring that up. No, that's not the point. The point is you need to figure out what you're enthusiastic about and what you wish to play at, okay? Find the thing you wish to play at and just do that and pursue that. Let me tell you what, it is much, much easier to find the thing you're enthusiastic about and to be good at it and to just play at it and make something beautiful and then figure out how to make people pay for it. That's much easier than the other way around which is find what people are paying for and then try to make yourself love that thing, okay? You cannot make yourself fall in love. So don't do that. Which is why I find the advice of forcing people to pursue careers in STEM or finance or engineering so stupid. Help find out what people are enthusiastic about and have them do that. That's the only thing that matters. And we are all too afraid to be enthusiastic about something and to pursue that. So just to your original question, the answer is you have to find out what you're passionate about, what you're enthusiastic about and to just do more of that and to find a way to make people pay you for it. You can invent ways for people to pay you. Trust me, that is a much more fun problem to solve than the other way around. Good morning. In classic writing, there's the hero's journey where our hero Ken faces an existential challenge. Pandemic loneliness, isolation, threats from the outside. Who's your helper? Who is the Sherpa that helped you and how did the story end? I would say in this case there were many, many different guides that came along and helped me. And this will be sort of fun, I guess. So for the longest time, I couldn't write at all, right? I turned to Robo Ken. Robo Ken was a bust. And so one thing that helped a lot was to connect deeper with my children, to really be a parent. I think a lot of us actually don't spend enough time to be a parent. It's something that I strongly recommend to actually do it, to just sort of say, radically say that I'm not gonna be productive, I can be productive, but I'm gonna try very hard to be a human being and to be a father and to actually try. That helped me a lot. I thought a lot about what I was showing my children, what I was demonstrating to them. I was telling them these stories about how important it is to connect to play and so on. Yet all the time I was telling them, did you finish your math? Did you do your homework and all this stuff? It's very strange how conflicted and contradictory we are with our own actions. So that helped a lot for me to think deeply about my own hypocrisy. Another thing that helped a lot was to pursue my own passions. It turns out that for the longest time, I wasn't able to really engage in gaming in any capacity because I was so focused on trying to be productive and to do things that are useful. And I said, I can't right now, so I'm just not gonna bother. I'm gonna go back to the things I used to love as a kid, which was to play with these video game consoles. And I realized that there's a whole community of folks who love repairing and modding old consoles. So that was something that I picked up. There was something very beautiful about taking an old console and opening them up and then trying to figure out what was wrong with them and to get them to work again. And it was very incredibly calming to learn the skill and to become good at it and to sort of appreciate the artistry of these creations. When I'm opening up one of these old Game Boys or Game Gears or PSPs, I'm looking at the circuit board and I'm appreciating the beauty of it. And I'm realizing that I am connecting with the manifestation, a spell, if you will, cast from someone's mind. A designer came up with this layout. A designer came up with the way to fit these components in to make it do these beautiful things. A designer crafted this machine to be a storytelling machine to tell the stories that enthralled the entire generation. Zelda and Mario and so on and so forth. An entire generation, multiple generations now, have grown up on these global mythologies and they were enabled by this machine, which was the creation of someone's mind and the creation of a group of workers who hand soldered all of these components. When I think about it, it's incredibly moving how humans really are. We can imagine an entire industry of people who crafted stories for each other, who's devoted their lives to the creation of mythologies for people, to cast spells. We're magicians, right? Technology really is our epic poetry. It's our epic that we tell these grand stories to each other. So that helped a lot to learn and appreciate and connect with the minds of other designers and other creators. And also, something else that helped was for me to read the Dao De Jing, which is an old Daoist classic from thousands of years ago. Like most classics, it's one of those things where you think you know what it's about until you read it. I mean, I think all of you have had this experience. I remember vividly where before I read Moby Dick, I had this impression of it being a horribly boring and just completely not my kind of book. Then I read it and it was the funniest thing ever. There's something incredibly funny and irreverent and just all around random about the book. And that's never explained. People are always so, when you hear a commentary on Moby Dick, it's always so obsessed with the symbolism and how tightly constructed it was and so on and so forth. And no one ever seems to talk about how funny and loose and crazy and just, it's Melville following his enthusiasm wherever it took him. That was lovely. So engaging with the classic, Dao De Jing had the same sort of experience. I thought I knew what it was about, but it wasn't at all what I expected. And all of these things share the idea of, again, that as human beings, as artists, we connect with the collective unconscious, the shared interior all of us have. So that's what got me out. Thank you. Yeah, I think I'm running out of time unless I could keep on going or... Can you take her one more question? Okay, I'll do one more question. Wow, you just walked us all through an amazing story today and you've left your mark as an inspiring guide in my story. And I wanted to ask you, when and how did you realize you were a storyteller and not professionally, but in your life and in the lives of others? I, this is so funny. I do have a story about this and it's not the most... It doesn't reflect the best on me, I suppose. So here's how I knew. When I was in elementary school and this was back in China, so all the kids were walking to school, right? And my school was actually pretty far away. And the walk back was fairly long. I remember there being a few scary parts where there were some dogs that really scared me and I didn't wanna walk alone. So I wanted others to walk with me but I could not entice them to go out of their way to walk with me. So what I would do is I would tell them stories and I learned how to tell stories in such a way that they would have the right length. So if they wanted to actually hear the ending, they had to walk with me all the way back to my home. So years later, I realized that this is like my own version of what Dickens went through in David Copperfield. If you read David Copperfield, there's this scene where he tells stories to his schoolmates to entertain them and in exchange for his own popularity. And I was like, ah, I suppose all writers are connected in that interior way. So that's my story. Thank you. Thank you.