 Good morning, John. One of the things that we are asked to do as humans is to understand things that are far outside of our lived experience. Like, I know what a mile is. I've walked a mile, and I kind of know what a thousand miles is, because I've driven a thousand miles. But what about a million miles? We kind of break a little bit outside of our personal experience. But luckily, humans have had some time to develop tools to deal with this. These are important tools to develop. I want to share with you five of them. The Earth is around 25,000 miles in circumference. This is, luckily, almost exactly 40,000 kilometers. Both of those are easy numbers to remember. But are they easy to understand? Yes, kind of. I can take the thousand miles that I have driven and imagine doing that 25 times. That gives me an idea. But eventually, this strategy breaks when you have to start multiplying numbers that, on their own, don't make any sense. Like, I don't understand what a million a thousand times is, because those are both hard to understand numbers. So what do you do with that? Our minds have difficulties distinguishing between percentages and absolutes. Going from a hundred to a thousand is the same percentage increase as going from a hundred million to a billion. But in absolute terms, this is the difference between 900 and 900 million. So visualizations can be useful for helping understand these absolute differences. A stack of a million dollars is a whole lot smaller than a stack of a billion dollars. But visualizations aren't always easy to find or to create, so let's look at another way that doesn't require all that work. The classic example here is that a million seconds is around 11 days, and a billion seconds is around 32 years. I know what 11 days is like, and I kind of know what 32 years is like. Mostly I know that they are very different from each other. In the same way, the distance from the Earth to the Moon is around 250,000 miles, and from the Earth to the Sun around 93 million. Now that means nothing to me, but if you're going 70 miles an hour, you can get to the Moon in four years, and you can get to the Sun in a hundred and fifty. Now, that still kind of means nothing to me, because I've never driven a car for four years or a hundred and fifty years, but I get the scale of the difference. But, what if I'm less interested in, like, the relative difference between the numbers, and more interested in, like, the absolute impact of the numbers? Often, if I actually want to understand how big a number is, I don't look at the number. I look at the number per unit of relevant things. Oftentimes, I just like to divide by the number of people in the US, like 44 billion dollars is 130 dollars per person in the US, including all of the babies. 44 million dollars with an M is 13 cents per human in America. So calculating relative impact gives us some really good data, but not as much as our final strategy. Oftentimes, absolute numbers are not particularly useful when it comes to understanding the world. If you add up local, state, and federal spending, the government in the US spends around $20,000 a year per person. I actually have a pretty good conception of what $20,000 is, but I don't know what that number means. I have no idea if that is the right number. I could just go on my gut and say, that sounds like a lot or, like, not enough, like, I don't know. Instead, we can compare and we can see that the US and the UK and Germany and France all spend roughly the same amount per citizen. Norway, which has a bunch of money from oil, is about $30,000. India is about $1,800. These numbers are just a lot more useful in comparison to each other than they are in absolute terms. But if you track government spending per unit of economic production, you actually get a very tight correlation. Bigger economies have bigger state budgets, always. And there isn't actually that much variation from country to country. Almost as if a lot of the arguing is about relatively small policy differences. And it might actually be better to measure other things, like how effective tax policy is at reducing inequality in a specific country. Well done, Ireland. So experiential extrapolation, visualization, understandable comparison, relevant impact calculation, and of course, more useful metrics are all excellent strategies that do different things for us on our quest to better understand our world. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.