 People often ask me, why words? Like, are you kidding me, an entire project about words? But words are very powerful. If you can teach a person the right word, you can actually change aspects of the entire ecosystem overnight. And I'll give you three examples. When consumers learned the term cage-free, their first thought was, hang on a second, chickens are in cages? Like, people only thought of chickens as something that they bought, wrapped in plastic in the market or from a carton of eggs that they got. They never really connected that to a chicken in a cage. Or the fact that actually chickens are in battery cages, sometimes three at a time, with their beaks like snipped off so they don't take each other to death, right? So, but when consumers learned cage-free, they suddenly said, wow, I just personally would like to have a chicken on the cage. I'm gonna vote for a cage-free egg, right? And so an entire vertical of the food industry overnight was suddenly exposed and it had to change. The same thing happened with hormones and milk. The same thing is now happening with antibiotics with meat. When consumers are given visibility, when a 10-year-old girl can tell her mother, mommy, I don't wanna get that chicken from a fast food place because it's antibiotics and chicken, then you know that the traditional industrial agricultural model is crumbling because of that visibility. Douglas Gayton is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas, brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Doug is the founder of Lexicon Sustainability alongside his partner, Laura Howard Gayton, which they founded it in 2009. It is the Lexicon of sustainability, the Lexicon of food, and really Lexicon of pretty much everything that we're dealing with in today's day and age. The Lexicon's work accelerates the adoption of practices that build more resilient food systems and help combat climate change. Douglas is an information architect, filmmaker, photographer, and writer. He has created award-winning work at the boundaries of traditional and converging media since the early 90s. He directed Know Your Food series for PBS and Growing Organic for the US Department of Agriculture and has authored two books, Slow Life in a Tuscan Town, which I have actually right here. And I'll show you a little bit of that before we'll also touch upon it. And Local, The New Face of Food and Farming in America. Douglas, it's my sheer pleasure that you're on this show. Thank you so much for being on today. Thanks for having me. So as I mentioned in your wonderful biography, you have accolades that I could go on forever. And thank you, you kept it short for me and my listeners, but I really want to give you credit where credit is due. You've done this book, you know, slow, fabulous work, beautiful artwork and craft. Harder than hell to get to Germany, by the way. So it's not highly available here. So it took months before I could see it. And Local is still on its way, by the way. But it is just a different way to put food in a different perspective. And it's art, it's beauty, it's the basics of life, you know, how we start out our energy needs. And I just thoroughly enjoyed it. And everybody who sees it when they come over to my place are like, I have this amazing piece of artwork and most of my friends are foodies as well. So I just want to thank you for your work over the years and all you do. And I'm glad that we can talk about that today. First and foremost, I want to start out with kind of a question to ask how you've been. But I want to caveat it or kind of lead it in in a certain way. You've been doing this for some time now, 2009 with Alexicon, you and your wife. And you've seen quite a bit. You've seen, you know, the United States, the farmers, the frontline workers. And you've been thinking about food, thinking about how our systems have been broken. Has any of that given you a little bit of resilience, a little bit of the help to not only see what was coming but to kind of weather all the craziness, not just food insecurities and the pandemic, but all the other crazy things that we've experienced these last two years really. Well, when we began the Alexicon sustainability, we had a very simple charter, which was, we felt that if you could explain the most basic concepts of how a food system works, if you could puncture, if you could look behind that veil of opaqueness, which really defines how our food systems work. If you could give people greater visibility into the food that they're buying, that they're putting on their tables, and allow them to make purchases more aligned with their values by seeing the food system for what it was and voting for the food system they wanted to see, that you could actually change how the food system worked. And when we started out, the dominant way to explain challenges in our food systems was to show the ills of industrial agriculture and to show pollution and to show animals that are raised in confined and very unsanitary conditions. But my partner, Laura, had a very sobering view on that. And she said, we're not gonna focus on those negatives or what she called crisis pornography. And she said, the Lexicon's only gonna show solutions. And it's harder because often solutions are like of the popular mechanics magazine variety. If we will walk on the moon in 2020 with, we will be driving cars in the moon in 2020. So it has to be real, not Buckminster Fuller's Diamaxian car real, but real for the masses. And so the challenge of the Lexicon has been to find those solutions. But the upside of that is, I only see solutions. I only know amazing people. So how could I not be optimistic seeing all of the amazing ideas that people have, all the amazing insights and innovations that they've introduced and all of the changes that have come from those insights. So I'm always optimistic because I have the benefit of being surrounded by amazing people that really represent what change looks like. That's beautiful. Have since you've been going around and seeing some examples and some different ways of doing our hood systems, have you implemented any of those into your life and maybe seen, especially during the pandemic that it's just a better model to operate on or that you're kind of already applying those things into your life and has that given you any resilience or any kind of a made it easier for you and the family to weather some of the craziness going on. The toilet paper hoarding and whatever else we saw. Well, you know, when we began the lexicon of sustainability project, it was to focus on the language, on the words, on the key terms, the key concepts that experts use when they talk to each other. And we figured if we could take those terms and concepts and translate them into a form that a general person could understand that would be the first step by raising people's literacy, that would be that first step to changing the food system. People often ask me why words? Like, are you kidding me an entire project about words? But words are very powerful. If you can teach a person the right word, you can actually change aspects of the entire food system overnight. And I'll give you the three examples. When consumers learned the term cage-free, their first thought was, hang on a second, chickens were in cages. Like people only thought of chickens as something that they bought wrapped in plastic and that, you know, in the market or from a carton of eggs that they got. They never really connected that to a chicken in a cage. Or the fact that actually chickens were in battery cages sometimes three at a time with their beaks like snipped off so they don't take each other to death, right? So, but when consumers learned cage-free, they suddenly said, wow, I just personally would like to have a chicken on the cage. I'm gonna vote for a cage-free egg, right? And so an entire vertical of the food industry overnight was suddenly exposed and it had to change. The same thing happened with hormones and milk. The same thing is now happening with antibiotics with meat. When consumers are given visibility, when a 10 year old girl can tell her mother, mommy, I don't wanna get that chicken from a fast food place because it's antibiotics and chicken, then you know that the traditional industrial agricultural model is crumbling because of that visibility. And still, when people ask me about the single term in a lexicon, the single term, that's the most important, I always say it's local. I'm like, I already know that term, you know? But the thing about it is when we came out of the Second World War, we had mastered this principle of the economies of scale. And we had the Americans that fought wars in the Pacific and in Europe at the same time and somehow won both of them. Why? Because they really understood the economies of scale and they applied it to a wartime effort. But afterwards that was applied to our food system and the entire food system in the United States but it also did across Europe. So a small town on a local level that would have that bakery and they would have that butcher and they would have all the things, those all disappeared because it was cheaper to get bread even if it came from a thousand miles away. So we lost that local infrastructure. If we wanna rebuild a more accountable, a more at scale food system, if we wanna build a system that's more related to our own lives, we have to go from economies of scale to economies of community. We have to return things to a local level. And as we come out of COVID, we're very well aware that the first connection that people are gonna make is to their communities. They're gonna reenter communities, they're gonna reenter relationships in their community. And for many people, that's gonna be connected to food. And we feel that coming out of COVID, people are going to make more aligned purchases, not just to eat local, but to eat that change that they wanna see in the world, to have their food purchases and their re-engagement with community really connected and reflected by the types and kinds of food that they buy. I love that, that is so beautiful. There's already in that alone some deep dives, some things that we could get in right at the beginning because as you mentioned so nicely regarding the cage freeze and it's free range. And then it's already that just alone with eggs has already started to really progress and even go forward to a different vision of where we need to be. I'm in Hamburg, Germany, and so it's really unique. Now all the egg cartons that you see there, obviously the majority of them are very biodegradable cartons, kind of new materials, but they almost think do humans lay eggs? Because every now in all our boxes of eggs, there are cartons of eggs, there's these pictures of families. You see the actual farmers, and they're usually in an open field and surrounded by some hens and that, but it's a, and then actually this year already was groundbreaking as well, kind of even the step beyond that in the future where Singapore was the first to approve cellular meat, chicken meat on the market and kind of lab-grown chicken meat in the market. So that's a whole nother terminology and way of looking at the future, whether it's GMO, not GMO, all of that's highly modified, but there is a huge evolution in that. And I see that as well. The message that I'm really struggle to get people to connect with or to get that transition to be made with most people is a lot of us or a lot in the world were disconnected from our food. We don't know where it's made, how it's produced, and you've said it before in some of your talks, walk down the street, close your eyes and let some stranger put some food in your mouth and then eat it. And you can tell it more eloquently than I do, but the same respect is with a lot of us, we've been doing that for years, but to me, it doesn't make any sense because a measurement of energy, the basic energy need of humanity of us, our physiological need is breathing food and water. It runs our battery, it regulates our temperature. Measurement of energy is a caloric unit. And so that's how we survive, how we going. So it'll be like buying a car or a cell phone or something and you're not gonna know how you're gonna fill it up with gas or charge the battery or how are you gonna be able to use it the next day? Food is what we need to charge our battery. And so just that reconnection to food and how it is and get the behind the scenes which I see in your images, your pictures from the farmers, from the food producers, from those, I don't know, front lines of the right word to get us to understand how that complex system really works again and how important it is to our lives is a big thing. And the question in that is really, are we close? Are we getting there? Do we have a long way to go in this education or empowerment of people that grasp that basic need that would be kind of been leaving up to others? Well, you know, you mentioned a gas, you mentioned fuel and you mentioned our bodies require fuel every day. Energy, yeah. And a car also requires fuel and it has a gas tank. And it's interesting because it's fairly refined piece of equipment, you know, it's a fairly sophisticated piece of technology, a car. And they figured out that certain engines function better with different kinds of fuel. So they literally make it impossible to put a diesel into a car that burns gas like you literally just can't get it in. And some cars even require different types of gasoline, you know, different octanes. And it says right there, you know, when you buy your gas, there's different octanes you can buy, right? We also learned that some fuels weren't good, you know, they had to be unleaded, right? So they've learned all these things. They literally govern what goes into the engine of a car. And yet we don't do that with our food. You can put anything down there you want. There's nothing, there's no regular, even when people know things are not good for you, you're able to put anything down there. So that degree of application of knowledge that's used for the fuel of a car for some reason is not applied to the fuel that goes into our own bodies. So, and there's a number of reasons, you know, you could say there's a number of culprits, you know. One of them is that we came out of an economic model where people were more than willing to spend 30% of their disposable income on food. And that food that they got as part of that equation, that agreement was mainly whole foods. And one of the consequences of a economy of scale model is that instead of growing for nutrition, we now grow for price. And so instead of eating whole foods, we're now eating foods that have ingredient decks on the back where we can't even pronounce half of, you know, half of what's listed there. So there's a tremendous gulf that we face. The automotive industry made it very simple to govern one into a gas tank. We've yet to do that. Now people wanna have freedom. People don't wanna be told what to do. But there's a flip side to that. Right now our food systems globally are so opaque that we have no idea who grows our food and how it reaches us. And to have that knowledge in a global, because now it's a global series of supply chains and supply webs to be more accurate. With all these ingredients aggregated, so if you're a large company making breakfast cereal, your wheat could come from any of 25 places around the world. It's all blended and aggregated. So you can't really know, right? So even a food company that would like to have greater accountability over their ingredients literally can't do that in a market. Now people talk about blockchain and they say, well, you know, you're gonna be able to track every ingredient on the course of its journey. But even that is more theoretical than practical because blockchain is really based upon the supposition that everybody's gonna track every piece of valuable information on every single ingredient. But who's gonna pay for that? Who's gonna bear the cost of that information? So information comes at a cost. Transparency isn't free. Not only is the transparency not free, but if we even had that information, if I was to say that the corn you're buying results in a tremendous amount of agricultural runoff, phosphorus and nitrates, and those lead to dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico that cover a thousand square miles every spring. How would you even understand or be able to connect that to a bag of corn chips or corn flakes? And so not only is there not enough information in the system, but there's not enough literacy. There's not enough fluency for people to actually make educated decisions that would allow them to direct purchases to more equitable, sustainable models. And so it's just a tremendously complex problem. Partially, I would argue, it all boils down to a restriction of information flow or the lack of information flow. And so people are denied the opportunity to make purchases according to their values or based upon knowledge of how the food system works and how they'd like the food system to be. I think that you've touched upon three different things I'd like to go into. One is really that they don't even have the choice or the information or the ability to make that choice between different products. Now, I think that in the US, it's getting better. There's more transparency, especially whole foods in some places, but there's still a lot of food deserts and food places, especially here in Europe and in other parts of the world that aren't such developed countries. There's not even a choice. You get, excuse my French, shit, shit and shit, there's not much choice of fresh or super foods. And if you want that choice, it's like a hunt. You're going on a journey, you're going on the safari to find the best organic fresh and there's some actions and efforts involved in doing that. And that's because the majority of the food industries, the food systems controlled by so many large players who have the biggest share of brands and biggest share of the markets and are done with industrial agriculture that there's not really that choice. If you were to go to a supermarket where you'd say, okay, well, here's the organic fresh, clean, good label, good process or good sustainable food with the good certifications and labelings. And here's the other choice, you know, whatever it is, high industry or sugars and preservatives and chemical foods, usually you don't have that choice. And people are hungry at that moment or they're struggling with their time. In that moment, they're at the grocery stores or going for dinner or that there's not a lot of foresight or planning in advance because of the way we've lived our lives. So that was one thing. The other thing that you really touched upon that I find is interesting that I want to make a little bit clearer to my listeners, what you, and tell me if I'm wrong. In 2008, all, we had a big financial crisis and turnaround in our world where all investments left of fine tech and technology and real estate and other investment models to invest in everything in food systems. And most investments turned to investing in food systems which turned food into a commodity. And a good friend of mine, Carolyn Steele, wrote the book, Satopia in Hungry City. She really says it so eloquently. When you cheapen food, you cheapen life. And what it did is it turned food into a commodity that what you said earlier, how can we make it as cheap as possible, as fast as possible. It doesn't matter what the ingredients lists are in there. Because it's a commodity. We're selling it actually for cheaper than you can actually normally produce it for. I mean, a mango for, or an avocado for $1 or $2. There's no way the true cost with the shipping, transport, marketing, labeling, packaging, water, harvest, et cetera. And so that point in 2008 when we turned food systems into a commodity has really gotten us in a bad situation today that that's what when we talk about food system transformation move, that's where we wanna get out of and get into. And so I'd like, if you don't mind just on those two points, if you have any more things to add and maybe help clarify for us all a little bit deeper into those trains of thoughts that you touched upon. Well, when you have an agricultural model that is endeavoring to feed many people, and when you have an agricultural model that is no longer locally based, a model that has an international, a global footprint, then the motivations for how that food is grown totally changes. So are the previous dominant agricultural model in the world was to recognize that food is fuel. And so people grew things for their nutritional value. The dominant model today is price. People grow things and succeed by having the lowest price. And there's a number of ways that they do that. I've mentioned economies of scale by consolidating and lowering all of the, and lowering the unit costs on something by aggregating all of those costs that would be borne by many small companies having shared and centralized by one larger company. And so that's that principle of the common skill. But another thing happened also, which is globally what many people refer to as true cost accounting. This idea that to get the lowest price possible, you just have to strip away as many of the responsibilities and costs from the real price of something so that you don't bear that cost. And therefore the buyer, the consumer doesn't have to bear that cost either and that who's gonna bear the cost, it'll be society. So when you have an agricultural model that for example in the beef industry, for example, where sub-therapeutic antibiotics are not given to animals because they're sick, it's actually given to animals because it's the fastest way for them to weight gain. And so you, and of course they're in highly confined, they live in a highly confined environment where they're highly susceptible to disease, but really they're really giving these sub-therapeutic antibiotics because it's the fastest way to have weight gain. Well, why is weight gain important? Because these animals are sold by weight and the longer time you take to feed that animal, you have all these other associated costs. So therefore the external cost of that is you then have a degradation of people's ability to fight off infectious diseases which leads to higher hospitalization costs. And so all of the societal costs that are born from a cheap system, not paying workers the proper health insurance premiums or a proper living wage, by not paying those costs, then you create a societal cost. You've got to pay welfare costs, you've got to pay healthcare costs for those, like for those workers. You create air pollution, you create water pollution. Those are all societal costs that are spun out of the costs that is in the food product and born by people, by you and I, right? There has never been a mechanism that's allowed us to capture the real cost of food. The real cost of food that's born out of a model that's based upon selling something for the cheapest price. I mean, for most Americans, and I certainly can't speak for this the will, but for most Americans, they're buying their food from the same store where they buy their tube socks, where they buy the antifreeze for their car. So that's how highly consolidated the U.S. food market is and to break that model, to get out of a model of simply selling food for the lowest price, stripping away all of the costs of something. We have to completely rethink what the purpose of food is for, right? Right now, we're spending 8% of our, of our incomes, of our disposable incomes on food and we probably would need to spend more, especially when you think of the connection between cheap food and diminished health outcomes. I mean, it's no mystery that the highest incident of type two diabetes, obesity and hypertension just happens to be in the same geographic areas where people have poor health outcomes that are completely based upon living in low-income communities with not a lot of access to fresh food and not having enough money to actually buy that food. So there's those, those those connections there. There's also the other aspect of creating instruments, physical instruments, tools that allow us to distinguish right in the supermarket the difference between food born out of an industrial model and food that is more, let's say, purpose-grown, more value-driven. And instead of growing for price, we have to grow for the nutrition that's in food. We have to find a way to actually understand the bio-nutrients that are present in one type of food versus another. And there's all kinds of tools that are now coming onto the market, little handheld tools that you can actually put up to a tomato or put up to food and you can now start to understand what those bio-nutrients are. In the future, these tools will be ubiquitous. You will have a greater understanding of what's inside something and you'll be able to make a, you'll be able to distinguish between something of higher nutritional value and something of lower nutritional value. And we can then kind of return back to that period that preceded this industrial period that we're in now, where people bought things based upon its nutritional value. And do you think those tools are needed or will be needed because the industry globally won't change? And so we'll need tools like that to make that discernment because it'll be up to us to take more control of that. Or do you think that that'll only be a temporary transition to mainly a food system in the future that is one that's not driven by commodity or price? That's one that's operated more on total cost accounting, to true cost, total environmental cost, fair trade, fair wage and those type of principles that are more that eventually we get away from looking at the labels as much and into a system where we're, say, no, the food systems have now been fixed and we're kind of on the same page. I don't think it'll ever be a point where food systems are fixed. You know, I don't find it particularly useful to demonize any player in a global food system, whether it's an NGO or a large food company. I don't think that, you know, I don't ascribe to the notion that large food companies are inherently evil. I ascribe to the notion, however, that large food companies can and should do better and take a larger responsibility to return us to food systems that are more equitable and more resilient. So it does no good to demonize anyone. It does no good to make someone the cause of what ails us. But what it does, but what I do think is helpful to do is to recognize that our food systems are blind. We have supply chains and supply webs where food moves around the world, where there's not any preservation of identity, of provenance, a sense of where something comes from. And so when there's a lack of identity, there's a lack of accountability. And so if a grower knows that they're growing and selling into a system that is not going to recognize them, is not going to police them, then there's less motivation to use practices that are beneficial to all of us. And the flip side of that is, if a food company is buying from a blind supply chain where they have no idea who they're sourcing from, then they have a fairly low incentive to look for purchases that are more in line with their values. Increasingly, and this is the thing, again, I only, I always see amazing people doing amazing things. Now, some of the leaders of some of these big shifts are the largest food companies in the world, why? Because consumers are their lifeblood. If consumers don't buy their food, then they don't really exist as a company. And increasingly, as consumers become more aware of how the food system works and that they can vote for the world they wanna see directly through purchases, food systems, I mean, food companies, large food companies are very aware of that. And there's a lot of amazing people at food companies because don't forget, a company is just a bunch of people. So within these companies, there are lots of amazing people really trying to figure out how they can use their purchasing power and their force to be, can they be a force for good? And so, as I said, I always had the benefit of seeing many things that don't bubble up to the surface and get seen by a wider public. But that's why I'm always optimistic about what these, I'm always optimistic and I always see where these opportunities are and the work that people are doing. That's great. And one last question to that. Is that what you meant when you say the food systems are opaque or when you use the word opaque? Is that kind of the back story to that? Or is it a different meaning that you mean? Yes, the central tenant that drives all of our work is that when you look at change to food systems, you can talk about things on the level of the United Nations or the FAO or nations making certain decisions, right? You can talk about that in terms of companies. You can talk about that in terms of producers on the ground. You can talk about that in terms of consumers, right? Those are like the four areas that are all constantly pulling and pushing change and transformation, right? In the middle of all that is the supply chain. The most boring thing, you know, the thing that ends any dinner table conversation when people ask me what I'm interested in and when I say supply chains, that's kind of the end. And then we talk about dogs, right? And yet these are the gears responsible for all the machinery that moves food from one place to another. And the system change is in those gears. But the problem is that a purchaser has, is confronted by an opaque, in other words, a supply chain where they can't see anything. They don't understand where this came from, who grew it or how it was grown. So if they want to, I don't know, support agribusiness as an example, how could they do that? They could say that they want to do that, certainly laudable, less meaningful though, if they actually can't show that they are literally at scale, not just, you know, we bought some, we bought, you know, we bought some papayas over here by this person who did this one thing over here. I'm talking about at scale, right? If you wanted to do something at scale, you'd need to be able to see into the supply chain. Don't you see what's happening in it? So you could say, I'm sorry, this right here, the externalities are so bad, not only for your community, but for the world, we're just not gonna be able to buy that anymore, right? You can't send signals into the marketplace as a purchaser of the food system that you want to support if it's completely anonymous. At the same time- It's not open and transparent if you can't see behind- If you cannot see, if you cannot put information into the exact moment where a purchase is made, if you can't fill that moment with information, how could you possibly, possibly change the food system? It's not possible. So all of this stuff that people talk about, it's really irrelevant. The only relevant thing is, how do you, at that moment of a purchase, get enough information in that, so that the purchasing decision reflects the world you want to see? It's not simple. In that part. Thank you. Yeah, actually, we could talk for hours because that's a love sustainable supply chain, open transparency, distributed ledger technology using blockchain as an emerging tool to possibly help solve that problem. How can we get full traceability, accountability on a secure ledger to do that? And I'm working with a couple of companies who are coming close, trying doing some good things here in Europe, but there's many more to come. We have lots of room for improvement, lots of optimism on how things can only get better and make that empowerment, so to say, in that purchasing decision and moment a lot more less opaque and no more transparent. So I love that. That really kind of ties me into my first big question for you and I'll kind of let you answer it, but then if we have to caveat why I ask it and how it ties to our food systems and the greater world, do you feel like you're a global citizen and how would you feel about a world without borders, walls, division of humanity, one from another? And I'll even caveat a little bit now why I ask that question. During this time, Germany is in the greatest lockdown that has had so far since the pandemic and we've got Brexit and lockdowns all over the world. During this lockdown time, the only thing that has been global citizen is food, the pandemic, air, water and species who are crossing borders all the time, but the majority of us kind of stuck behind this human zoo. You know, you see my human zoo and I see your human zoo. How do you feel about that thought or that maybe even push towards the greater question and globalization that might be underlying in that question? Well, one of the unhappy consequences of a global, you know, global food systems that are really dominated by large food companies is that they have to source their ingredients everywhere they can, right? And in doing so, and in effectively building out a model that externalizes all costs, they then export that concept all over the world. So you have, whether it's corn or wheat, you have people growing commodity crops all over, especially the developing world, utilizing that same principle of externalities to, you know, cutting out all the negative externalities and growing something and just passing on a commodity at the cheapest price. You deplete the environment in those places around the world to feed a global food market, but also what you do is you displace the traditional foods that are there. And so you don't really have culture without food. They're kind of one and the same. So when you displace the traditional foods that define a culture with foods that are grown for an international market, then you contribute to this culture of anonymity, you know, this global culture. Borders, borders are good for what they, you know, as containers, as vessels to hold something, you know? But we cannot, you know, we cannot deny that we live obviously in a global society. I'm an American. My, you know, my grandparents came from Spain and came from Italy, right? So obviously the United States is a melting pot of many cultures, right? That contribute, you know, to the fabric of what makes America what it is, right? So you can't say, you know, borders are, you know, are very effective in value for some things and less for others. In terms of the borders of culture, well, they've been completely destroyed by a global food market that has brought in all these values from the outside that have not only changed how things are grown, but also how people eat. I mean, it's amazing. Like you look at a country like Mexico, you know, all these countries are dealing with obesity and they're dealing with diabetes. These countries never faced these things before with their traditional diets, you know? These are diets that people ate because of the nutritional value that they provided, right? And so we've turned people away from the traditional role that food has played in those cultures and we're all the poorer for it. I think that one of our initiatives, Reawakened, is specifically about that. It's about the importance of agribiodiversity on so many levels. You know, I mentioned earlier that for me the most important term is local and yet it's the term that everybody laughs at because it's like so obvious, but yet, yes, it is so obvious. And we need to return to a model that reconnects people to their communities and places food back in a very important role in defining and extending the importance of culture and the connections that that brings to a community. I find myself come from an area where there's a lot of food orchards and a lot of farming going on, a lot of local food, although brought over, I'm from America originally, so brought over from Denmark and from different parts of the world from early migrators or early colonists. So I can really understand that localization. I don't wanna pay devil's advocate, but I do wanna kind of open up maybe some broader thinking. So one organization that we never talk about, especially in our circles or others, is there's been one organization working as a global citizen in this globalized model for decades now, and that's the World Trade Organization. And they're the ones behind these supply chains, whether sustainable or not. And that is one that did not really stop to a big degree during the pandemic, during the lockdowns and continue to go. And now we're getting these satellite data up to date for numerous years now. And you see these different views from outer space through satellite data of ship movements, of different movings around the map, and it kind of creates this different image of the map or the world and how it really works behind the scenes. And then when you go, I'm also a big fan, local, regional, I have involved in Germany's oldest and largest organic farms and are really big on, let's do it local and let's do it diverse with a lot of options and get back to those indigenous, local, not only species, but way that we eat and produce food instead of relying on a lot of outside. Specifically here in Germany, it is extremely hard if you were to take out and only keep the things that were made in Germany or even in Europe, in the grocery store cells, you would be more than 60% of the food that's in there would have to be removed because the rest is only local in Germany and a lot of cabbage, a lot of potatoes, a lot of apples and some other things, you know, kale that you would, you know, green coal and a lot of pig meat and animal meat, but otherwise there, and you think that that is a good diet, is that the one that's culturally needs to be there for the future? And so I wanna say, how do we get back to a local one that is like in Mexico, one that is good for the culture, good for their health and their weight, gives them the proteins that they need and not get into some Frankenstein type of a local one that's not very diverse, you know, how do we do that locally? Have you run across how to do that? Have you put some consideration into that? Absolutely, you know, many people drink coffee. Coffee is not grown where they live. Many people like salmon. Salmon is not raised where they live. When you talk to people who support local food systems, they say, you know, we should get everything locally, but you know, traditionally, cattle are raised on the most degraded land, the land that has little use for anything else except putting animals on it. So you often don't find that land in your region either. I'm always amazed in the United States, the state of Colorado doesn't have one poultry processing facility in the entire state, okay? Most states in the United States had 100, 200, 300 mils for grains. Many don't have any anymore. So not only are some areas not designed, you know, to actually produce the types of foods that we now eat in our diets, but they also don't have the infrastructure anymore if they wanted to, right? That dismantling of infrastructure took place when we consolidated our food systems both in the United States and Europe, you know? I'm reminded of, I was once sent up to Alaska to document the most sustainable way to fish for salmon in the world. Yakutat Alaska, how'd they do it? Well, the Department of Fishing Game for 30 years had put a weir across the river, which is a series of pipes that make it like a wall, and they would count every single salmon that went through. For every 3.1 sockeye salmon that went through, they knew that they could only catch one at the base of the river, because if they just caught one, they would maintain the viability of the population. 30 years of data had showed them that. And I went up to document it, and as with all my information artworks that I make, I let the people, all the words in the images are the words of the people. And I let, you know, the woman, this amazing woman, Shannon Negus, Shannon said to me, I hope you don't call this picture terminal fishery, because that's what is, it's the terminus of the river where she was gill netting these fish. She said, you know, I want you to call it connected market. And I said, connected market, what is that? And she said, well, people of all these values for things that they buy locally, you know, when they go to the farmer's market, they won't ask a million questions before they make that purchase. But yet they would never think to ask those same questions for something that comes halfway around the world, like salmon, for example. Why can't we create a system where people can know all about that salmon so much, in fact, that they can use the same values that they would use for something that's local for something halfway around. If we do that, we create a connected market between a purchaser who has their own values and they support somebody over here, halfway around the world, who's doing good for their own community and their land and their culture by growing something or produce something in a certain way. And they meet in the marketplace, they're connected. And so you actually can support these values for things that you're never actually gonna be able to see. If we could create a connected market model, if we could create a model where there's more visibility, again, in that blind supply chain. If we could create a connected market where purchasers can buy things according to their values that benefits somebody over here, it will also ironically get this person over here to grow something in a way because they now understand that the purchaser actually cares. That this purchaser actually cares about what they're doing to their land and what they're doing in their community. And this person halfway around the world says, you know what, I'll even pay a little bit more for it because I would want that in my own community as well. If we can raise a purchaser's literacy and then creating a visibility in the supply chain so that a purchaser sees that this will actually be rewarded, that's how you change the food system. But again, it's about that supply chain that is blind. How do you cure blindness? I love that, I absolutely love that. Thank you so much. We've got so many things to talk about. So I'm gonna move on to a few of the other questions because I think we've addressed that quite a bit. You offer an amazing amount of tools to empower people around food, around words, around images, around movies. So you have the Food TBD app and you have a couple of apps, I believe. And then I don't wanna slaughter and I'd really like it if you can kind of describe it. You've described a couple of them already but it's almost the way you do photography. It's hundreds to maybe thousands of photos and then into a collage and I'll let you explain it more eloquently how that process works. But then it just doesn't stop there. Then you add the words to it and I'd like you to maybe describe that and what you call that. And it's a fabulous way to understand the world of food and some of the things you've talked about. So the PCA total cost accounting you've done. I love the one about the truck and the cow or the two trucks and the two cows image as well around many other topics that are just fabulous that you've done, if you could explain that. Then I wanna go a little bit more into some of the other tools and projects and things you're working on but people need to be aware of not only the time work and effort of what you've been doing since 2009 and well before and your great skills as a filmmaker and a photographer but how this empowerment and education through these tools that you provide are just really short, concise, sweet, a lot sweeter than and shorter than I can speak to describe a complex problem. Well, to answer that requires unpacking a few things. So first of all, the style of storytelling that we use changes based upon the audience that we're trying to connect with. I would say that we're pretty much agnostic. We are just as comfortable making a website or making something for a classroom or making a film or making a book or making an exhibit or an artwork. It really is, we're more about the idea and we really believe that as storytellers we need to really focus on the portability of ideas. You've got to meet people where they are and so you can't just assume that people will find you on YouTube or on some other platform which is why we put our work everywhere. We also, for the most part, give the work away for free which is a different type of a model, let's say. In terms of the information artworks, it's a style that I have developed over 20 years. First and foremost, I'm a filmmaker. I never really thought that much about photography, mainly because it had two really, well, three significant limitations for me. One is what I was seeing was always much bigger than what the viewfinder and the camera would show me. That was very frustrating, right? Second, a filmmaker tells a story and stories are always set in time. There's a beginning and the middle and an end but a photograph is a single moment. So that's for a storyteller that's fairly limiting to have a single moment. Third, when you see a photograph, people love to say that a picture's a thousand words but not really for me. For me, a picture is really a thousand questions, right? When I see a photograph, I'm always wondering so much about it. I remember a photographer telling me once, people never understand that what's really the most important thing about the photograph is all the stuff that's not in the picture that's all around you. I was approached by PBS, which is an American public broadcaster, to do something about slow food. And I was living in an Italian town. And I really wasn't that interested in making a film, to be honest with you. I had done so many of them. And the problem with films is that you have a large group of people. It's like the famous writer, Thomas McGuane, who wrote Bushwack Piano and a number of other novels, American novels, he became a filmmaker for a time and translated his books into films and he quit. And he asked him why and he said, I used to love writing novels. I just have this thing where I sit down and I pound out the story. But making a film was like walking around with a 50,000 pound typewriter in your back. All spontaneity is lost, right? So there's a lot of spontaneity that's lost when you have a large crew. And so I said to PBS, I'd love to make do some photographs. And I went to the first woman who I would always see in my village walking around with a straw basket filled with all of these herbs. And so finally, one morning I just followed her with her empty basket and I saw her go across the road and go into a field. And I said, you mind if I take some pictures? And she looked at me like I was crazy. And I took all these pictures. And when I took the pictures, I realized that I needed to know what was she was picking. So I read all these questions on the photograph and I went back to see her the next day with the picture with all the writing on it. And she said, I knew it, I knew it. And I said, what? And she said, I knew there was going to be something interesting and unique. And there you go. Yeah. Our listeners won't be able to see this but they can go to YouTube and look and I'll include all the links. But here it is, it's just absolutely amazing. And so I wrote all these words on it and she said, I knew it, I knew it. I said, what? She goes, I knew it wasn't going to be just one of these photographs. It was going to be a picture with writing all over it. And I looked down and I said, oh my God. So in that picture of Daria that you're showing, she appears, I don't know, five times in the picture because I was able to show a passage of time of a woman walking into a field, stopping, picking up some herbs, coming up to me, showing me what she had gathered and then continuing on her way home. So I really realized that for me, I had found a way to essentially create a flat film, create a story that had time, that showed everything that I was seeing and that answered the questions that anybody would ask if they were to look at something. And so that style of storytelling, these information artworks, this approach, is something that we've continued and we've now done almost 1,000 of them. So I mean, this is hard to see because I'm holding it up but here's the image, but then the book is so unique that you can lay the words over it and you can see. And the way you're explaining it, Douglas, is just absolutely amazing and local is, in my opinion, also very great for the US and the way you tell the stories. And I've heard, give me if I'm wrong, but that you basically just give away these works of art, you blow them up into big posters or big canvases and then you give them to people to do their own displays of galleries or presentations around the United States. Yes, what we decided at the very beginning of the lexicon is that we were in an arms race with vested interests that control the narrative of our food system. They have advertising dollars. They have access, but what they lacked, we always felt was authenticity. And so we made a mission to find the foremost practitioners, the experts who really understood what food was and we said to them, if you collaborate with us, we will go and we'll make these images together and then it'll be your words, not ours, your words on it and then we will get it to places where you can never go and we'll give it away for free. And then we found funders to actually fund. So instead of having one show that would just travel to museums around the world, we thought, why don't we flip that completely upside down? Why don't we say, anybody can be a curator anywhere and anybody can apply as long as they're not a curator. So we had a second grade class in one town in America. We had a public library in Mexico. Suddenly they kept on coming in the most unusual things and we said, okay, tell us five places and we will send you the show in a box, you get to keep it. You have to be a lending library for anybody who would want it. The result of that is that now five years in, we've had 2,000 something shows in the United States, millions of people have seen these works that otherwise wouldn't have because of inverting the model. It also proved very early on a key thesis for us, which is that if you wanna change food systems, those networks on the grounds are there, they're primed. They just need the information. They just need the tools and then they'll do the rest. And so we help them by creating and giving away films, making books, making exhibits, creating curriculum from kids up to college students. I even teach at universities like around the world, this principle of what we call total storytelling because you don't know, but you have to assume that in those audience of people that you're educating, there's gonna be a segment of them that are gonna be those key transformers in their communities or even later in food companies of the change that we all wanna see. That's so beautiful. I mean, and it's been very successful. I mean, the people, the amount of shows, not only the books that you've done, there's videos and short films that go along with most of all of these topics and all of these works of art that you've done as well. And so that you're touching on all the different senses in some respect as well to get that message out there. And I've gotten a lot of feedback, but I also see just by watching them and following them and looking at your app and the interactions, that the resources to be empowered, to gain that knowledge, to kind of play your part, whether a consumer, a business or whatever, the opportunity is there. And I thank you for allowing us to go on this journey with you. And I hope you guys don't give it up for a long time that you're still on it and we're just getting started. You were at the United Nations General Assembly, the 73rd session of the United Nations. And we're on a little panel talking about safeguarding the world's food supply. And I don't know if you also took your works of art as well there, you've done that. And so you've been on high levels with the United Nations, but you've also done some unique things under the metro or subway station under the US Department of Agriculture to show those artworks and to raise the awareness to get the USDA to change the farm bill, to think more about the long-term ripple effects of some of the decisions that they can make and the influence that the layperson has a voice. So I love that very optimistic, positive, good way. It's a good way to storm the US Department of Agriculture in a beautiful artistic way and still get the results that you need with a different medium. And so I love that you've done that. And that leads me really into you're doing some things now moving forward to the United Nations Sustainable Food Systems Summit for the United Nations is really working on some food icons. And I don't know if you can tell us about those two things and about the icon system and some of the things you're involved in because really we're at a historical point. It was actually the food system summit was supposed to be last year because of the pandemic's kind of moved forward to this year and be some more time in September in New York, we hope, but there is a lot of momentum around food because it's one of the biggest factors to draw down a lot of the human suffering and the environmental problems we have. And so we really are starting to rally around this information, the lexicon, what we need to hear and understand. So would you tell us, get cats up to speed on some of those things? Absolutely. So the lexicon is language-based. Our theory of change is that words are the building blocks of ideas. If I teach you the right words, not only can you not unlearn them, but you're now have a higher degree of literacy that will make it so you can both speak about something but also understand something that you wouldn't have had previously. So words might be the most diabolical thing that you could possibly introduce into a culture. But they are very nation-based in the sense that their language changes from country to country in many cases. And so we have a food system solutions accelerator called Green Brown Blue that really looks at how do we confront these great challenges and how do we create a mechanism where large food companies can collaborate with NGOs and academic institutions to tackle these things, to tackle these great challenges. And one of the things that we looked at was how do we really create an international language that can be used by food systems so they're not country-bound or language-bound, they're international. And so we brought together a really amazing group in our accelerator led by an individual named Nathan Shedroff who's this extraordinary sustainability, design, food systems guru. And he led this group and include a lot of really impressive thinkers. And the outcome of that was a design system which we then took to Adobe. And Adobe has a design, all their icon designers are based in Germany of all things, right? And so we worked with a German team and they came up with a system for how you would create icons to explain our food systems. And then we in December announced a global challenge for designers all over the world to join this journey. And their designers 50, 60, I don't even know at this point how many countries now have designers, hundreds and hundreds of designers that are working on how you would create the visual language to explain regenerative agriculture, food security, climate change, true cost accounting, the circular economy of food, food waste, all of these large buckets that are international in terms of their importance and yet each of these faces, these barriers that are language-based barriers in creating the symbolic system, which could be used on everything from food packaging to websites to curriculum for, there's really limitless uses for them. We can start to create a standardized language but what's insidious and very amazing about the project is it's not an art project, it's a literacy project because when you see the icon, you then have to learn the word in your own language and then you see its connection to other things. And now you will never be able to unlearn that. And so it started out as a really benign global art project, one of the largest in the world. But ironically, it's really about how do you raise everybody's literacy to even start talking about these things. All of these things, Mark, they all get back to the supply chain, to the point of the purchase. If we can raise everybody's literacy, then they can start to look for, and if they don't find it, demand the information about the things that they now know are important. That's our model. Everything is about creating a more connected market, creating more information in supply chains and raising everybody's literacy. And it's not a book project, it's not a photography project, it's not a, these are all just tools that are used to service the larger goal, which is how do you introduce enough knowledge into the system, enough thirst for clarity in the system, enough opportunities to make purchases according to your values in a system that the system simply has to change? We would literacy, eco-literacy, literacy period, a different form of empowerment, which is really important. I mean, we talk about it in the sustainable development goals, you're doing a lot tied to the sustainable development goals as well, which is, it's an infrastructure, it's giving us back the basics that we should have had a long time ago or setting the bar higher in our basic infrastructural needs that we need to have so that we can really springboard off into these amazing futures now that we have this knowledge, this wisdom to apply and understand better. Once we have that understanding how that transparency, boy, boy, it just changes the world for everyone. So I thank you for that. And I mean, it sounds like you don't sleep either as you're doing so many things. When can we expect or do you have a rough timeline when some of those icons will be released? And the other thing is, as far as I know, they're supposed to be creative commons for everybody, kind of true literacy, free library type of thing for everybody. All of the work that I've spoken about today, you can either find now or you will find in the coming months on a new website we've created called ourfood.world. That site brings together our food icons global challenge to create this international visual language of our food system. It has our accelerators, green, brown, blue, which look at everything from single use packaging that's used in food to food as medicine. We also have there our global storytelling challenge called Reawakened, which is a collective action with many partners, but it allows the world to join us in telling the story of agri-diversity in their own communities. So I would certainly suggest that your listeners check that out. And then lastly, it includes an online community called Food TVD, where many people are sharing all kinds of really amazing ideas that are born out of the work that we're doing in these areas. People can look in later in 2021 for us to share out an entire expansive model that we put together on regenerative agriculture and on agri-diversity. And then we're going to work on aquaculture as we continue to build out our learnings and the partnerships that are producing all kinds of amazing tools to, again, to create more visibility in our food systems so people can make more informed choices. I absolutely love that. And I just want you to know our listeners as well that in the show notes and descriptions, those websites, I'm going to put the links so that people can go and find it, make it easy with clickable links there. There are quite a few. I think there's at least seven or eight, if not more, that we will include because, as you say, it's open, available, it's coming. There's more coming and creative commons. And we want to empower everybody to have these, to get the literacy to think about food, to have those things. So I really appreciate that. I want to go down a rabbit hole and then I'll wrap it up with three final questions for you. As a filmmaker, as a wonderful creative who is raising literacy, there's this dilemma that I want to talk to you about because I think you'll have an opinion. God, all the media that we've been watching the last five years, if not longer, is so dystopian. Whether it's a TV series, a movie, there's maybe a small handful, maybe not even five, non dystopian good visions of the future, of what we can envision, what a beautiful, resilient, desirable future would be like or even a future, if we achieved all the 17 sustainable development goals, what that would look and feel like? How would it feel like in a movie magic, a media type of a way to live in that future? But that we see that now. And the reason I asked this question on why it's important is when I grew up on Gene Roddenberry and Star Trek and many others, it was this beautiful vision of the future, very sci-fi, but it was pretty much all achieved or come close because we could see it. We could engineer, architect, create and design for it because we had something to see. Today we don't have that. Is there things that you know of or a way that we could collaborate or talk about, positive media series or things that show us a non dystopian world that we can start to engineer, create, work for, design for to achieve those goals, to achieve the Paris Agreement, to achieve that future instead of saying, nope, we gotta get ready to go to war or fight over water and food and this and that, you know? Well, I think first people need to see solutions. They need to see what works because when you see that somebody else has confronted the same challenges that you're facing and they put forth a plan, put it into action, received a tangible result, it makes the challenge that you're facing less daunting and might even provide you with a roadmap for what you yourself might do. So first we need to share the stories of what success looks like. Second, we should not assume that somebody else is going to solve the problem. The problem with crisis pornography is that by focusing on the problem, you think that you've done your work and actually you've done the opposite. You've contributed to this sense of the problem being insurmountable. And many movements also fail to understand the importance of showing what success looks like. The climate movement shows to use a polar bear on an ice flow as the metaphor that defines climate change. The problem with that is most people in the world are never going to see a polar bear. They're never going to see a polar bear. They're never going to walk on an ice flow. They're never going to know exactly what they did as an individual to put the polar bear on the ice flow. And they don't know specifically what they would do to get the polar bear off the ice flow. So therefore the dominant image to explain climate change literally removes you from having any responsibility for the solution. There are some climate groups that want to focus on taxing oil companies. And I said to them, why don't you instead get people to drive cars less? They would never do it. They would never do what they said. So it's people that are approaching the problem in such the wrong way that they will never actually achieve their larger goal. Behavior change comes from removing from someone the opportunity to continue doing what they're doing in the face of new evidence as it's presented. Behavior change literally steals the view outside of the dashboard of their car and replaces it with a different view that they now have to drive towards. You have to take away from people the perception of their role within their environment they're moving through and the direction where they're going. And that is presented by showing people what success looks like and orienting it in a way that it's aligned with the path that they already want to go on anyway. They just didn't know how. So the challenges are really, really great. But they're not greater than the force within us to move towards those solutions. That is our big motivator here. That's why we're always optimistic. We think always that people are highly adaptable. We think that, you know, how often in history has there been the dominant way of doing things that was replaced? Who would have ever thought that IBM would be replaced by much more nimble smaller companies? Who would have ever thought that the taxi industry would be displaced by digital technologies that change taxi cabs? Or that the hotel industry would be displaced by a new model that opened up people's homes and in aggregate created a tsunami effect that changed the hotel industry? There's always going to be disruptive solutions that are led by individuals who have the ability to replace the existing model. We have to remain optimistic that we have the ability to not only create those models, but to shift from our current path to join and build out and strengthen those models in the communities where we live. I would hope eventually I could sway you over to join a group of filmmakers and directors and creators to maybe create some positive TV series or media for the future for us to kind of strive towards, to engineer towards, eventually on some other projects and working on. The thing that I like a lot is I read a lot of books and I ask my friends sometimes and they're just like, where do you find the time? I don't have the time or they see a thick book and they're like overwhelmed because not enough time in the day or there's less and less viewers or readers out there. But I see that your works and the type of short, concise, the images, the lexicon, the literacy that you provide is very easy to digest. It's pleasant. It touches the senses and it's something that everybody can understand. And I'd like to, the word that you said is amazing. The words that you said where you said, we need to pick people up where they're at. We need to grab them where they're at and bring them to a different form or level of understanding. In Germany, there's a word the same, the most in the mention, that means we need to pick people up where they're at. And so I love that it leads perfectly into my hardest question that I have for you because it's around media and visions of the future and how do we reach these non-dystopian futures, positive, resilient, desirable futures? And that is the burning question, WTF. And it's not the swear word that we've all been thinking and pulling out our hair with this last little while. It's what's the future? And I don't want from a government or perspective, I just want to know from you, what's the future? What's the road? What's the hope, the optimism that we have to look forward to? I'm not, you know, I probably wouldn't want to give my opinion in what the future holds, but I think that we will never really transform the world around us if we are making decisions informed by naivete and ignorance. And we live in a world that's increasingly siloed. We live in a world where people value their opinions above facts. We live in a world where people have a very limited field of view that's defined by not only a constricted amount of information that they consume, but also a constriction in terms of the time that they spend even interested in consuming new information. So people don't spend that time. But also some of these things are generational. I remember a farmer in Minnesota, he's a corn farmer, and we were talking about all of these new ways of growing corn, and he kept on nodding at me and nodding at me and nodding at me. And I said, what, why are you agreeing with me? And he said, well, you're talking about all of these ways that we would change what we're doing. And I said, yes. He said, you're saying that this would result in less phosphorus and nitrogen running off into the waterway. And I said, yeah. And you're talking about this organic thing. And I said, correct. And he said, son, you need to understand one thing about farming. Change comes one death at a time. So we have to be really aware that. A lot of these things aren't going to be immediate. They might be generational. That's why in almost all of our work, we focus on younger people on helping them to mold. What their world view is. And I think that's also why we're so optimistic. Because there is a growing awareness among young people. That they were gypped. That they were given a very depleted and extracted. And that's why we're so optimistic about the environment that consumed an agricultural and an economic model. That wasn't resilient. That wasn't regenerative. And that there's a coming upon them. So. I guess if I look at the future, I just look at the future in terms of younger people. And doing everything we can do. To equip them. And I think that's what we need to take on the challenges that we fail to make. Beautiful, beautiful. I have three last questions for you in the really form. My listeners are kind of something to empower them or to give them something back that'll better their lives. And then, and then we're done. If there was one message you could depart to our listeners as a sustainable takeaway. That had the power as the power to change their life. Well, you know, everything that you purchase has a life. It had a life before you purchased it. And ironically, it'll have a life after you're done with it. And so people often. Failed to see themselves as. Playing a key role in the life of everything that they consume. And. With that role becomes responsibility. And I think that. We live in a society that consumes more than it needs. And I think if we reevaluated. Our role in the life cycle of things. It would make us much more aware of how much we don't know. About things. That we, that we consume. What should young innovators in your field be thinking about if they're looking for ways to make a real impact? I think that. As I've stated, dozens of times in our conversation. It's all about information flow. Some people or some mechanisms or some systems. They have a lot of experience or exhibit. Constrictions in that flow. Others. Have a venturi effect where things accelerate as they pass through it. The role of every storyteller. Is to. Create an acceleration effect. For information. And. The responsibility of every storyteller. Is to. Really focus on. Gathering those authentic stories. And those authentic people. And then taking on that responsibility to bring those ideas to a larger audience. The last question really is. What have you experienced or learned? With food filmmaking photography. That you would have loved to know from the start. I just always assumed when I started that everybody always just wanted to do the right thing. It was really naive. I just always assumed that everybody wanted to. To be a force for good. And that they all wanted to. Collaborate in every possible way and every possible form. To be. An agent of that change. And. That's not true. Because there's. Often. In embracing that change. You have to let go of. You have to let go of the assumptions that you once had. Alignments that you worked years to create. Products or companies. That took many hundreds of millions of dollars to build. So. Often to get people to become those agents of change means they have to cast away those things they've invested so much in. I was naive to think that that was a much easier task. I'm less naive today. Douglas. Thank you so much for your time. It's been a sure pleasure. We could talk for hours and hours because there's just so many. Things that we can get into more depth and substance and. You're so well rounded and. Our world views and where we need to go. I could just, I'd love to talk to you, but we're out of time. And I really appreciate your time. I thank you very much. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Thank you so much for your wonderful day. And unless there's anything else you'd like to share. Or say we're done today. Just that. You know, our work is based upon collaboration with people from all over the world. And so. You know, I certainly welcome your listeners to. Explore our work and to. You know, I really appreciate it. You know, I really appreciate it. You know, why didn't our community and go deeper into the conversations that we have. I don't know if you're planning on coming to Glasgow. But we'd love, I'd love to see you if you do. And the next time I'm in your neck of the woods, I definitely like to stop by and have a. In person discussion and see how we can. Do great things together. I really appreciate it. Have a wonderful day, Doug. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you.