 Board to the cloud. Ooh, it sounds so, so good. Welcome, everybody. This is the Rex call for Friday, June 15th, 2018. I find it hard to believe that we're halfway through 2018, but there it is. The evidence is in my little calendar. The poem I have for us to start is titled Questions by Rachel Richardson. It's a relatively modern poem, as you will see. Questions by Rachel Richardson. If there's one true thing, it's that Google will make money off us no matter what. If we want to know what percentage of America is white, as it seems we do, what percentage of the population is gay, as it seems we do, what percentage of the earth is water, the engine is ready for our desire. The urgent snow is everywhere, is aligned by Edna St. Vincent Millay. And many have asked, apparently, where am I right now? Also, when will I die? Do you love me? Maybe up there generating high cost per click, but not as high as how to make pancakes, what time is it in California? So many things that I wanted to ask you now that you're gone and your texts bounce back to me, undeliverable. Praise to the goddess of the internet search who returns with a basket of grain, 67,000 helpful suggestions to everything we request. How to solve Rubik's Cube? What to do when you're bored? How old is the earth? How to clear cash? What animal am I? Why do we dream? Where are you now? Come back. So I'll read it again. Questions by Rachel Richardson. If there is one true thing, it's that Google will make money off us no matter what. If we want to know what percentage of America is white as it seems we do, what percentage of the population is gay as it seems we do, what percentage of the earth is water, the engine is ready for our desire. The urgent snow is everywhere, is aligned by Edna St. Vincent Millay and many have asked apparently, where am I right now? Also, when will I die? Do you love me? Maybe up there generating high cost per click, but not as high as how to make pancakes. What time is it in California? So many things I wanted to ask you now that you're gone and your texts bounce back to me, undeliverable. Praise to the goddess of the internet search who returns with a basket of grain, 67,000 helpful suggestions to everything request. How to solve a Rubik's Cube. What to do when you're bored? How old is the earth? How to clear cash? What animal am I? Why do we dream? Where are you now? Come back. So welcome everybody to our June installment, check-in call for Rex. I would love to just sort of see where we are. I've just come back from a slightly whirlwind trip to the East Coast for a week, which was wonderful. But I'll check in a little bit later as we go through. Would anybody love to sort of say where they are and if anything, Rexy is happening in your existence? Anybody? Mark, Esty? I'm happy to go. This is April and I apologize. I'm not on video today, so I can't see exactly who's there, but Jerry, I'm happy to go briefly. Please jump in. So I've had a very Rexy last 10 weeks or so and I'll keep it brief. But basically I am emerging from a kind of cocoon that I have been in since mid-April. And the main thing is that I have just, well, the class finishes officially next week. But I have hit the pause button on much of what I'm doing, which I can come to in a minute, but I've been doing a yoga teacher training class, which has been a dream of mine for a few years now and not with the goal of teaching yoga, but I definitely love that I have a new credential now and I can teach it if I want. I taught my first 60-minute class on Tuesday, which I love, but on at least two levels, it feels very Rexy. One is simply doing the deep dives into yamas and niyamas and yoga principles and paths of life and all the rest that I think I was shocked by just how Rexy all of that was and how well it aligns and all of that, yet some of the stuff coming from 2,000 or 3,000 years ago, I would be happy to host a call at any point in time for anyone who's interested in learning more about all of that, but I've just been immersed in a very different way of thinking about the world and not just what I do, but how I am in the world. So that has been extraordinary and then on a professional level, it's interesting. I knew that taking this course would impact how I looked at my portfolio and how I think about what I do, but I think at a more profound level or equally profound level also, this was the first time ever in my life that I kind of hit the pause button to this degree and did something that actually felt quite unsettling in terms of particularly because I work for myself and so making a ship like this is a big deal and it was very unsettling, but it cracked some stuff open and it's interesting, I use the term cracking open very deliberately because I think so often when we think about cracking open, we focus on the cracking, which is almost like something's broken, but in this case it was the opening and I was just amazed by how much I realized that in order to do a lot of deep work, you have to hit a pause button, you have to in my case be in one place to do this. All of these things that I think I took for granted before, but I now look at this and I go, wait a minute, the only way that a lot of this deeper internal work can happen is if you do take those other steps that feel very frightening or unsettling or whatever and I know this sounds really vague, but I think this manifests differently for everyone and for me it was really a matter of you're not gonna travel for 10 weeks, which completely unraveled me and at the end of 10 weeks of not traveling, to be totally honest, like I wanna not travel more, which I would never have guessed and never would have thought I could get through or it just had layers of insights that never even hit my radar when I originally decided to take the leap and sign up. So anyway, that's my REXY experience and again, anyone, there's just a world of interesting REXY-ness in what I've learned and I tabulated since mid-April, it was a 200 hour course, but I've actually spent 250 hours in the last two months working on this stuff. So I got a lot of info, got a lot of resources and again, at a later time, I'm happy to dive back in. Thanks, Jerry. Thanks, April. It's lovely and it's been lovely to just be there watching you go through this and see what word takes you and what questions it opens up, all those kinds of things, it's been delightful. And if anybody's curious about the question to sort of the yogic principles and concepts and how they work, go ahead and ask, this is an interesting path of inquiry these days, I think for both of us, principally for April, going forward. Jamey, what's up? Hey, Estie. Jamey, what's up in your role? Well, Taki Cardia event on Monday. That's not good. Wearing a halter monitor all day yesterday or day before yesterday and into yesterday. And so I might be heading towards an early retirement. No, I don't know. So that's been kind of where my brain has been at lately. Other than that, I've been... So one of the amusing things in the conversation with the doctor about all that was that recommendations don't drink as much coffee and avoid thinking about stressful things. So... Your career is good for that. Your career is perfect for not thinking about stressful things. So I've been avoiding thinking about stressful things. And other than that, I've been still working on the same kind of stuff I was talking about a month ago, you know, the projects on the future of climate, projects on the future of climate activism or action, the future of trust. Then thinking about when do we want our machines to lie to us? I mean, we already do that to a certain extent. And any of you who've ever set your alarm clock 10 minutes fast, you're basically asking your alarm clock device to lie to you. And what's interesting is that that can work for a lot of people, even though they know that the clock has set fast. And it turns out that there's been some research lately about what doctors are calling open-label placebos. That is placebos where the patient is informed that this is a placebo. And here's 15 minutes on how the placebo effect works. And it's nearly as effective as a straight-up deceptive placebo. And that's usually as effective or more effective than actual pharmaceutical products. In many cases. Altogether, too many cases. Yeah. Well, I wouldn't want a placebo for appendicitis. But so basically this notion of an open-label placebo broadly conceived to, you know, if we know our machines are gonna lie to us sometimes when it's good for us. You know, so, you know, imagining situations where people who wanna get places early, their machines start lying to them about when they're supposed to be places. Well, if you look at behavioral economics and all the nudge kind of stuff, I think that there's a really nice sort of blurry boundary between your quest there and what they say to do. And a whole lot of sort of policy setting. How do you design environments and policies and default settings in particular? So that you're steered toward good behavior. And if that means making something appear more urgent than it otherwise is, that would seem to be a motivator. Or if you want to, you basically have your self-driving car give you a display of speed that's slightly faster than you're actually going to satisfy that need to get there quick. Or play the sound of wind rushing past the windows because the damn things are gonna be so quiet. I mean, they'll be smooth, they'll be electric. It's not going to sound like we're going anywhere, right? So might you introduce some wind noise or some other kind of experience that makes you feel like you're going fast enough that you'll get there in time? Well, there's actually been a lot of talk about the fact that electric cars are silent. This is really an issue for the blind. For pedestrians altogether. I mean, the cars sneak up on you. Exactly. And so there's, in some cases, you're starting to see electric vehicles with artificial sound. And it just starts with that as we become, as we start using more and more electric vehicles, we're probably going to want to personalize the sounds our car makes. So basically, the car sound is the ring tone of the 2020s. This has been a wish list item of mine for a decade, I think. I've wanted to be able, if you have an electric car, have a dashboard, make it sound like a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, make it sound like a Mack truck, whatever it is. So that as you sidle up behind somebody, they're like, whoa, whoa, and they turn it. It's just you and it's a little sled. Or then you have all these licensed sounds, like I want my car to sound like the Millennium Falcon. Exactly. Ooh, that would be good. Yeah. With a little pew, pew, pew of laser guns firing. Here you go. Whenever you have bad traffic and something. You're running your headlights. Or you're hunking your horn and it makes laser sounds. Anyway, so that's the way my brain works, kind of wandering off in those Brownian motion thought patterns. Does this raise any thoughts for anybody else in the call? This idea of technology lying to us on purpose is a desirable trait. Well, for example, there's the notion of speed limits, where the theory is, OK, so you have a 60 mile an hour, 100 kilometer an hour speed limit. But it's actually safer to drive more or less in synchrony with other cars, which are usually going faster than the speed limit. So it's kind of an issue there. How should the self-driving car behave? Because there you're asking, do you want your car to drive safely? Or do you want to drive legally? Or you flip that around, are you asking your car? Are you programming the car to break the law? And also, when people are used to speeding someplace to get there and they cut their time really, really thin in their schedule, how do you convince them to solicit the vehicle with enough time to get there so that there is no concern? And it's all done pretty safely. But when people prize their time in that way, maybe one way is to make the experience of being in the future pod so fun that you actually want to solicit it well ahead of when you actually need to get there. The data point that prompted this line of thinking for me was seeing yet another story about a patient in a memory care facility, a patient with Alzheimer's, asking about when they're dead now for a decade spouse. And the question of do you, the humane thing would be to lie and say, oh, they've stepped out. We'll be back later on today. And not to say, oh, no, your spouse died and make them go through that moment over and over and over again. So presumably then we'll want our medically assistive systems when they start to become verbally interactive. We're going to want our machines to lie to us like that as well, lie for humane reasons. And so that was the starting point for the thinking about under what conditions do we want our systems to deceive us and not simply to lubricate things like, yes, I'm sorry, there was traffic on the road and I drank too much and so I overslept. I think Estie wanted to jump in. Yes, please. I had to go get the power cord for my Mac about to lose its battery. Oh, no. So I wanted to say one thing in response to Jean-Mai, which is that or your question about technology lying to us, which is I prefer to think of it as signaling and conversing with the combination, the nested set of the layers of yourself and the layers of your world than lying. And so which harkens back to your openly labeled placebo effect, right? When I decide to adopt that strategy, irrespective of how it's actually playing out in my mind, whether I'm believing it in some way that might be detected or measured, which I don't think we can, I've agreed to signal myself and have that interaction on that basis. And I think that's lovely because it starts from a place of a conversation all the way down and be, I make reality without being grandiose about it. It's a recognition of that. Anyway, handing it back to you. I like that. Thank you. Anybody else? Any thoughts on the contact? Where this went for me eventually was thinking about when do we want our machines to say no to us? No, I won't. I'm sorry, Dave. I can't do that. Or I'm sorry, I'm not going to break the speed limit. Or I'm sorry, sir. I'm not going to fire on this village of civilians. So having military systems that obey not just rules of engagement, rules of war, military systems that won't commit war crimes will be really important. But that means systems that have the capacity to say no. And I think there's going to be a lot of cognitive dissonance about the idea of armed machines that will refuse to obey us. Yeah. So the context of autonomous lethal force really kind of shifts that discussion into a different gear. Anyway, so this will be one of my head non-stressful. There may be the need to make evidence look less compelling when it's not that certain. Like some things may read as cues that seem like, well, this is the right person we should attack or something like that. Susan. Oh, I was going to go back to the everyday side of it. Sure, please, because autonomous lethal force is one of those downers. And we need to keep Jamei thinking about cheerful puppies and kittens for a while. I've been, as some of you know, I got a little annoyed that when I was thinking about interacting with chatbots, that, well, it wasn't just that they didn't work all that well, but that they seem to have been designed without any understanding of how conversation works, actually. And so I was just going to throw out that probably, probably going to be, and there are three literatures on it, three fields. And I happen to know a little bit about all three. One, partly because I was a linguist, and so pay attention to this. But when you look at human interaction and at conversation in particular, then we play all kinds of games in conversation. And the timing is exquisite. I think that issue of timing is also going to be a fun one to sort of have. I've met one person at Quartz, actually, who is paying attention to this. And they're trying to kind of work on it from a conversational perspective. So I'm proposing, I have proposed, that we think of conversation and what we know about it, how it proceeds as a metaphor for interaction with our machines. I love that. You heard the joke, what's the most important thing about humor? Timing. Yes. Yes. Which was exquisite as you did it. Yeah. And I think it's normally done a different way and altogether, right? But you know, I figured we, you know, want to know. Yes. And can you point us toward the three bodies of literature or just mention them briefly or something? Because I think that's really interesting that people in very different kind of academic disciplines are looking at this or practical disciplines are looking at this issue. Right. One of them is the work in AI in particular, on dialogue. And in particular, working on and actually interacting with robots more recently. But it's been going on since the 80s. This is also like the emotional interaction and that kind of stuff right now. Well, there are people who do that. But I was thinking more of the sort of a little more boring at the level of detail. And emotion does come into it. But you know, people who study this stuff tend to be, wow, never mind the people I read. Like figuring things like that out. OK, so that's one body of literature. One of the names associated with that is a good friend of mine, Barbara Gross at Harvard, who is just now retiring. And probably has had a lot of impact on that. So then the second one is linguistics. Now Chomsky told us a long time ago that it wasn't good to worry about every day how people actually used language. Now that Chomsky's no longer holding as hostage, there have been some very interesting things coming out. In linguistics as well, mostly from England, not surprisingly. They were never as enamored of the Chomskyan agenda as we were. And so there is a new book called, oh, I can't remember. Anyway, it's just out. And it's a good read for any of you who want to, I'll send it in a minute. The third thing is the conversation analysis stuff that came out of sociology and ethnomethodology way back starting in the 60s. The founder and the most insightful person still died very early in his life. And so it's been carried on. And it's known by conversational analysis. And that's where some of the stuff is on. There's a whole body of work there. And I've hired lots of those people over in my years to, for various kinds of things, very practical applications like trying to understand what's going on in conversations between the, well, on call centers. And I apologize for all of this. But it takes two to end the conversation. And that's why you can't get off if you're polite. Hmm, I love that. I remember in grad school, I got to wave a lot of the core courses in business school. And so I went to all other places. And I took a course from Ed Helheim's in the education school. And the stories I learned there from cultures around the world are the stories I told later. And nothing from the business school really sort of seemed that memorable. But all these other stories about how we are in society with other people seem more relevant. It's interesting. And then when you throw technology in the mix, it's really complicated. As Jamea was just illustrating. Yes, very cool. Susan, anything else on your radar that's on the RECSI side it's long since we're checking in? Well, there's a pop-up next week that Todd is having. Yes, Todd will. Yeah. Anyway, I'm preparing that. Yes, we're working on it. Yeah. OK. So more news on that for everybody shortly. We'll send an email around explaining what's up. A pop-up for X-Call. Excellent. Also, I should say I have to get up this call at the top of the hour. So we may be able to reconvene elsewhere or we can just hold the call then. But I have a different call I must be on at 10 AM my time. So shall we walk around? Todd, do you want to check in? Sure. I think one thing that I would love to share that I've been working on and thinking about is I have a client in the organizational culture space who wanted to build a team of culture coaches who are experts at intervention. And it's given me like a six-month journey of how would I train someone to help improve organizational culture? Something that's so complex, something where long-term strategic planning doesn't work. And it really, that iterative process culminated last week and the chance for me to give a talk and a workshop at a culture conference on culture hacking. And I've got great feedback and really look forward to sharing some more ideas around it. But the main idea being that if you want to shift organizational culture, things like values and mission and purpose are all extremely important. But there's also the capacity to start shifting culture from the edge anywhere in the system. And it involves being able to develop some shared principles, some intentions, even with a small team or a couple people, and then approaching it with an experimental mindset. So I've had a fun week with companies reaching out and sharing examples of how they've been hacking their own cultures. So yeah, I've really enjoyed it. I think it's very rex-y work. And how I got there, I'm not quite sure. It's just been something that's unfolded over time. Todd, do you have an example of what kind of thing people have tried to hack? An easy one? Sure. So there was a manufacturing company who had a very common stereotypical problem between labor and the administration, kind of the people on the floor and the people in the office. And the way that they had approached this in the past was we're going to have company picnics, and we're going to invite families. And we're going to have all-company meetings. And we're going to have town halls. And they were trying to do all of this convergence at this strategic planning level. And they were saying that it didn't have much of an impact. So taking a hacking approach, what they did is one experiment was we're only going to hold an administration meeting if there's somebody on the labor side who's involved, regardless of whether it's finance, marketing, budget planning that is just going to be, as a matter of principle, that that's the way we do things for three weeks. So they're in the midst of that now, but already they're getting conversations that are surprising. So an insurance company also was having trouble with siloing, and they decided that they wanted to hack their meeting structure rather than their meeting participants. And their intention was, we'd love to see more cross-pollination, more energy. And their way of hacking was we're going to begin each meeting with 30-second storytelling that if you're in the meeting, you need to come prepared to tell a 30-second story. So this is early feedback, but one thing that I love is that they're showing creativity. As part of my workshop was, you need to be able to design some of these hacks in context. So we could come up with a book of 500 hacks, and that would be useful. But you still have to decide which ones are relevant to the intentions that you're bringing together. Yes, and there are books of 500 hacks. I'm sure there are, yes. Yeah, but you're right, it's Indigenous's best in terms of longevity. It's very cool. I like these things. And I think the more organizations can share a sort of creative ideas for some of these hacks, the more they can try them out and kind of go back and forth. So having somebody in each of these communities cutting across might be a useful service to provide somewhere, or even if it's just a dumb LinkedIn or Facebook group. But talking about culture hacks, culture change in different ways. Just saying it out loud and telling these stories, there's a lot of payoff to it. Yeah, definitely. Todd, if you're interested, this sounds like a great topic for a Rex Popup call if you want some more help from the posse. Ah, I didn't even think about that. That's funny. You're right. Yes. Exactly. And then culture change is that big thing, right? Everyone needs culture change. Few people know how to do it. So this is a big thing. How do you turn a ship? So I think the topic in general is great. And I think your work in specific would take us down to a particular level and approach that would be super interesting here. So consider that. Yeah, Todd, do it. I love that idea, Todd. Please do it. Excellent. Bo, do you want to check in? Just as a side note, Bo and a friend of ours and I yesterday watched a Mary Shelley, a biopic, basically a period movie about the life of Mary Shelley, the author of the Frankenstein. And the movie is not about Frankenstein. It's about that era and their lives and all of that. It was pretty good. But what was really cool is that our friend Arnie and Bo are both really expert in the whole era. So it was like going to a baseball game, sitting next to somebody who knows why the third baseman just stepped twice to the left. And it was like that. It was really fun. So Bo, do you have any Brexie things to check in about? Well, yeah, I guess I'm continuing on my love affair with Virginia Woolf's mind. Just read The Voyage Out. And previous to that, I read To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway. And Jerry got some of this conversation yesterday. But now that I've read so much, I can audit back in my mind from Jane Austen to the Bronte sisters to George Elliott to Virginia Woolf. And I have to say, I think Virginia Woolf is just one of the, she's so amazing. And I was telling Jerry yesterday, I mean, what I really like about her is, specifically, The Voyage Out is a feminist novel. And you've got Virginia Woolf, where she was born in the Victorian era, grew up in the Edwardian era, and then, boom, in World War I. And she's severely modern. So in this novel, she takes a young woman and includes women of all different ages and backgrounds around her and goes forward. What I like about novels is you can take your ideas and you can set them going in a whole universe. So The Voyage Out is The Voyage Out of this pretty much, it was one real, but the metaphorical one also is a young woman going into life. And why get married? Why have children? Why anything? And it's just the whole book. I put tabs on my books if I like something. And this novel just ended up with so many, more tabs than any ever. I think Bo might be challenging April in the use of post-its for this purpose, but yeah. Because Ms. Woolf, I think my guess is when she wrote this novel, this was her first novel. And often, novelist's first novels are not exactly strong because they're trying to get published and they're just trying to, you know, well, not Virginia Woolf. Virginia Woolf, I think she wrote this novel like, if this is the one novel I get done, it's going to have everything I think about in it. And I don't care if you like it, I'm doing it. I mean, because she's just fearless. And so I don't know. I've just been like, it's been rolling in my mind these last days. And I've just been reading passages to my wife, like, look, Virginia Woolf covers what life is here in one paragraph. Let me read it to you. Because, yeah, she can do that. That's awesome. Anyway, so that's what I've been doing. You're reminding me of a book I read long ago called Life Boat by a Harvard historian named John Stilgo. And he said, like, nobody seems to have written the history of a life boat, so here we go. And one of the things he says is that life boats, when they're in use, oh, you have deer on the porch. Wow. Beautiful. This is a home in Longridge on the other side of the hills from Silicon Valley. And look, there we are. Wow. Isn't that great? Thank you, Susan. Thank you. That's wonderful. So in Life Boats, Stilgo says, look, nobody's written about this, and one of the things he says is that once you're sort of trapped on a life boat, it's a microcosm. It's different social strata. It's very experienced sailors mixed with, you know, passengers who are scared stiff. It's whatever. And it's only what you have in the boat that matters. So what did you put in the boat before you needed it in an emergency, all of that kind of thing. So it's the same thing only compressed into a little dense packet, but that's not a deal. You can't imagine how relevant that is to this book, The Voyage Out. She takes English people and puts them in a town in South America in one hotel. So it's exactly that same thing. And she does it quite incredibly deliberately, you know? So one of the subtexts here is that Bo and I are trying to figure out how to have a Rex Popup call around how Victorian and pre-Victorian literature describes the kind of changes we talk about here or I talk about, about how did we lose faith in people? What happened in the Industrial Revolution? What did we lose? What did we miss? What's going on? And many of these authors were chronicling that in their novels. And in some cases, they could talk about these things explicitly. In other cases, these were sort of hidden narratives that you have to scratch around for a little bit. So I think all of that is very interesting fodder for our Rexy discussions. No, add a little bit to that. I mean, one thing you can really see definitely in the Victorian time is you still had the last messages of totalism, of I live in the village and I work here and I know what my life is and everyone knows what I am and who I am to everyone else. And it's also falling apart. And the Bronte sisters were really covering it. And there's this novel called Shirley, which just, you got the Luddites. You've got the disruption of their families, the disruption of their lives. So it's really clear. And I think I got to read Max Weber next, by the way, Jerry, to get ahold of this, because Max Weber invented the word capitalism, everybody. Hello, I didn't know that till yesterday. I've had his book and I'm like, I got to read that. Anyway, so you see those novelists knew the past was leaving. I think it was leaving. And so they did. They chronicle the time when human beings have a place. And I think right now we're so used to none of us having a place. As places are being broken up, we're becoming more nomadic, all of that. Yeah, and who I am. So reading it, and I guess Jerry could tell you, or I'll tell you, a way I like to stay in the present is to stay half in the past, because I don't want to get so enamored with the present and think, because this end of history bias that everyone seems to get. Oh yeah, we're in the greatest time ever. This has never happened before. Bullshit, it's all happening the same thing. So and the other thing I do all the time is I invest. And one of the reasons my history and economic history and also this literature helps me stay, have the right perspective and not get caught up. And so yeah, that's the way I operate my life. So I'm either reading The Financial Times, Niconos, or Virginia polls, right? That's the way my life runs every day. OK, love that. Thanks, Bill. Mark or Estie, you want to check in? Yeah, I just wanted to make sure I shared that as a result of what I think of as the first time we did this format of going around and talking about the wrecksiness in our lives and my uttering the meme that was weaving through my mind at the time of New Grammar of Productivity, that A, I've been collaborating a lot with Todd and feel very activated in general on this being in the world. Susan knows of and has also kind of witnessed this activation and been pinged a few times. I'm both delighted and chagrined that she's doing her pop-up this coming week. And meanwhile, the Todd Estie action from this group a while ago to do a pop-up has been kind of pushed out in favor of other things, I think. Anyway, I invite Todd to give his perspective here. But I want to thank you and this group for that one small thing, intervention in some way. Also, Jerry, yesterday I went and watched the video link that you sent. Oh, I did, yeah. It was PDF talk. Yeah, it was. It took me quite a while to untangle my brain from PDF meaning something else. Anyway. It's not the format of the document format. Yes, exactly. It was interesting to watch that the response attenuated over the hour or so. But I had not seen you do the Prezi live and all of that. It was lovely to see the format and the ability to just make words dance, the choreography of bits of text that you did there. And it was really effective messaging as well. I also watched the Pia, the woman that came after you. Pia Mancini. And found her message and visuals to be major impacting. So thank you for that. And so anyone who hasn't watched that, I highly recommend it. And if you feel like you've seen Jerry do that thing before, then go like, I don't know, 50 minutes in when it shifts. Her picture of the map of the globe that was first with flags of nation states and then shifted to brands and social media. Brands, right? That was an unforgettable moment for me. Yes. Thank you, Esti. That's lovely. I'm thrilled about that. And I've known Pia a while. I've met her through IFTF because she's attended several tenure forecasts. And she's an IFTF fellow, right, Chamet? Fellow for good. You're muted. Sorry, I missed the name. Pia Mancini. Yeah. Thanks. Esti, thank you so much. Todd, were you about to jump in? Yeah, I was just going to piggyback on what Esti said. We have had an exploration with two or three others now for a couple months that has just been quite beautiful when you provide some structure and then let go of the structure and provide some structure and let go of the structure. When we know that there's some core idea here that's extremely rex-y around the new grammar of productivity, but we don't really know what needs to be done or how to talk about it. And it's a huge challenge to have an exploration like this and keep the energy in it. And Esti, because of her passion and because of her ability to let flow provide structure, I look forward to seeing where this is going to go, not just with a rex pop-up call, but I think we're going to have something to talk about for months to come. That's great. I think it probably has something to do with multi-minding, but I'm just guessing here. Thanks, Todd. Mark, would you like to jump in? Sure. So a couple of things. One is actually I'm going to be attending this local conference, which is kind of a local version of these more global, alia, authentic leadership and action conferences that were held here in Nova Scotia for about 11 years or so. And there's a theme of locality of working from bottom up or local up, which I think is very interesting to be following upon. And the other thread, and this relates to what April was talking about in terms of yoga and maybe also Jame, which is I guess what I'm calling the resting state of attention. And the context here is kind of the I think what a lot of us have recently realized, or maybe not so recently, is that through our tool system. And by the way, that's an Engelbartian term that I'm finding really useful that there's in terms of what he called the dynamic knowledge repository, that there's the tool system part of that, there's a human system. Although if you go to Engelbart.org website, the human system page says TBD or Coming Soon, which says something. This is Doug Engelbart who gave us the Mother of All demos, et cetera. Right, yeah. So the theme here is that we set up tool systems which monetize our short-term attention and therefore try to shorten attention and train it in being that way. And that that in effect amounts to what I would consider to be a direct attack on our resting state of attention. And the kind of hypothesis here is that that is the basis of sanity. And without that, it's really easy for any kind of actors to get in and undermine our democracy and whatever else that you wanna think of. And so the question is, well, how do we promote the rest, that kind of restful state of attention? And kind of what is that and so on. So that's kind of a major theme. That's super interesting. Yeah, I mean, like what is our idle state, right? Like when we're at peace and there's nothing like whipping through, what are we thinking? How are we seeing the world? What's going on? And do we ever, and do enough of us ever get to that place? Yeah, and there's a further aspect to it, which again is something I realized more strongly recently, which is that you can say, okay, there's a tool system, there's the human system, then there's what you could call the life system, and the three of those make up our ecosystem nowadays. And I think our sanity also depends on the life system and to the extent that we are more and more divorced from kind of our biological matrix, the wild wilderness, that that also affects that. And so again, that's kind of the challenge of, okay, in this kind of day and age, most of us are urban these days. The whole globe is mostly urban now. And at the same time, there are a lot of attempts to get back, to kind of reconnect with that kind of, or in other words, that our sanity is not just human sanity, there is a multi-species and multi-biological sanity that we also depend on. And maybe when we try to go to Mars, we're gonna realize that even more strongly because we don't even know what the basis of our lives are. So that's that kind of triple theme, a tool system, human system, life system, and how does that work with sanity, and the fact that we get these really negative feedbacks, which, we all help create this world, and then there's all these not totally anticipated effects where we're undermining our own lines, basically. Love that. I just wanna mention for SD a question, but I also wanna check in before I have to drop off a call at the top of your, but for SD, multi-minding I picture very much as these flows, these sort of interconnected flows over time, and I'm wondering what this resting state of attention looks like in a multi-mind perspective. That may be an interesting thing for you to, if you've not already plumbed that terrain, I think that may be very juicy territory to go into. You're muted. Like I clicked the wrong button to reveal myself. I've been doing what I call embedded processing since about 6 a.m. So, and you didn't convince me to shift venues. Yes, and that, in fact, that resting state and a kind of return to, I was gonna say minimalist version, a minimal version of that between micro-decisions and micro-actions has been at the root of the notion of product support for multi-minding, of digital support. Yes, so anyone who wants to pop into the chat channel or otherwise communicate to me pointers and pieces of that, including April, I had noted that there might be a conversation from the... Yogic perspective. Yeah, what I call the compound word mind, body, soul with three levels, entity perspective. So... That sounds lovely. That sounds lovely. Thank you, Jerry, for asking and, right, open for all. Cool. Let me jump in quickly just to do an update. I'm really glad you liked the PDF talk. And, sorry, I'm getting an echo back from somebody's line, it might be SD. And the talk would not have been what it was had I not previewed it for April five hours before climbing on the red eye on Tuesday night to fly out to give the talk. And then April, I can see her brow furrowing as I'm going through it. It's just a 15 minute talk. And at the end, she's like, I'm not sure you wanna say what you said there or in the way you said it. And then she proceeded very nicely to make a bunch of points which were completely dead on. And I'm like, oh crap. So on the flight out and then in the next day, because I had a day to think about it and work on it sort of as well as several other little incidents that were popping up, I reworked the entire thing and then gave it on Thursday morning at the Crystal Democracy Forum and loved what I really enjoy what I gave, but it would not have been that had April not raised the issue that the thing I had been struggling for two months to write and create, I think the reason for the struggle was that I really was landing on the wrong field with the wrong vehicle, the wrong aircraft. So that got changed around a lot. I'd love to hear any comments you all have as it goes. I also attended my old Quaker meeting on Sunday. I went to a Wilton monthly meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, which I hadn't been to in a really, really, really long time. And there were six or seven friendly faces that recognized me and I recognized them, including one person who sort of had to be prompted to recognize me, but was an old friend. She's aging a lot. And it was just, it was really nice. Partly over the week, I was welcomed as family by multiple different small groups. One group was the Personal Democracy Forum because I'm part of their birth story in a way. Another group was Friends Meeting in Wilton. Another group was a family I stayed with after Friends Meeting. I went and visited old friends from a job long ago. We live in Connecticut. And so it kind of kept going that way. And it was really, it was a feeling of moving from sort of one recce atmosphere into another over time with care taken with old friends and things like that. So it was really, it was really lovely. And then the last thing I did on Wednesday before flying home yesterday and Thursday was I gave a disrupt speech during a sprint, a 10 week sprint that is done by the Exponential Organizations Group, which is sort of a big piece of what I'm doing these days to a big financial institution and watched as they sort of wrestled with issues and the staff of this company are smart and they're leaning in and they pay a lot of attention. So that was really good. But then somewhere afterward, I kind of heard a little side conversation because I took a very strong point of view in the talk. And I heard a side conversation of, hey, I'm glad you're here as one of the judges for the startups that happened after my talk because our opinion is a little different from what was put in the room earlier. And one of the things I'm sort of scratching my head about is how do I pull that conversation in the room? And there isn't really time to go there, but I'm interested in putting a strong point of view in the room, but I really love the thorny conversations that it can kick up. And those conversations sometimes get steamrolled or there's a feeling because we have things to do, that the rest of the day was spent watching 20 startup initiatives that these teams of staff had come up with, some of which were really, really good, but we were often running on that. And so there was a piece of conversation left behind that would have been very rexy to have. So part of what I'm pondering is can I bury an invitation in my talks for more of that conversation? Because up front I say, hey, some of what I'm gonna say might be really uncomfortable to you. So if you feel discomfort, notice it. But I don't open that door very much. So anyway, I'm gonna have to jump up and call in a minute, but anyone have any last thoughts for our call today? It was great to see everybody again. Feels really good. Yeah, it's a good rhythm. Really appreciate it. Thanks everybody. Any other closing thoughts? Thank you yet again, all of you. Thanks, Estee. Good luck with the progress on all these things. We will see you all on some pop-up calls and on our list and wherever else. So, bye for now. Okay, bye. Thanks all.