 This is an Inside Jerry's Brain Call on Friday, February 8th, 2019. We are talking about unschooling, and in particular, and I'll open this up in just a second, but in particular, once you start thinking about unschooling creatively, it opens up these very, very beautiful design questions that I will bring into the conversation. But we were just about to hear from Lars, who is in Copenhagen. Is that where you are now? I'm at home in Copenhagen Friday night. Yes, it's unusual. But good for Friday night. And I couldn't leave the unschooling topic alone. It was just amazing, and a great chance to join you wonderful people. I was actually on the way to bed, but this was like, hey, this is super interesting. Let me join this. Sorry to intercept you on your way to sleep, but very happy to have you here. I know Lars through a group that's doing exponential change. Lars, do you want to give a little background about that part of you? Happy to. I am a dain as you can hear from my accent, and a father of two boys, seven and nine. So learning and education is a very big topic. I'm very passionate about learning. I never liked schools, though, until university where I could dive into what really was my interest. That was, you know, the math and physics and all of that. I became a nerd and have been doing technology since then. But now it's more like the value that technology can bring to humanity. That's what interests me. So my technology background is really useful. And I'm a serial entrepreneur at corporate careers. And the corporate careers taught me that the life is full of limitations that are being created by us human being, right? The same that I discovered throughout the school system. I had similar experiences to Judith. I was super bored in school, actually. And my teacher always told my parents, like, so Lars never raises his hand. So we're concerned if Lars knows, you know, the topic. But when we ask him, he always has the right answer. So they just left me alone, actually, which was nice. And I really, it was just nice to be left alone, but it's super boring, right? What a waste of time, right? Everybody's done. It's crazy. It's crazy. Sometimes when I'm talking about education and I'm in front of an audience, I will say, think back on your whole educational career, the number of teachers you had. And think of a number that represents the number of memorable teachers you had. The ones who affected your life, who were especially good, who, you know, understood you, whatever it might be. But what is that number for your whole educational career? And usually, typically, it's between three and five. That's the number most people come up with. I would say three. Yeah. And mine is like four-ish, I think. If I go to grad school, I add a couple more. Yeah. I went into the grad school realm. I got up to six or seven if I included multiple undergraduate and graduate people. Yeah. And it's interesting because you continue to find mentors even after that. And so I could add a couple people who fall into that category in the 30 to 60 age bracket. It's also really interesting because I just got off a call earlier that was about how work ate the world. Basically, work, his thesis is that long ago, work was toil. Nobody really wanted to work. And through a series of things, including the Protestant work ethic and a vapor and a bunch of others, we basically idolized work to the point where work is not just instrumentally good. Work is not just maybe even satisfying, but work is sort of the supreme good and should be the goal and the target of your being. And we spend our prime hours at work with our colleagues, et cetera, et cetera. And he's trying to crack that thing open and sort of question it and question, why did we let work eat our lives and what can we do as a countermeasure? And it's really interesting because a piece of that has to do with play. And then another piece of that has to do with learning. And a video I've been meaning to shoot, but I just haven't sort of gotten around to it. Basically, I have a Venn diagram with three circles, work, play, and learning. And way back when, if you scroll back through the little time bar, these three circles were completely overlapping. And we grew up in society doing what needed to be done for our village. We got graduated responsibilities as a little kid. And in many places, not everywhere, but in many places, work was actually sort of fun. Like you got to learn, you got to be with everybody who mattered, doing the thing that kept everybody alive, et cetera. And then through modernism and a bunch of other forces, these three circles became extremely separate circles in the Venn diagram. They barely overlap, which is weird because then work is not supposed to be play. You're not supposed to be humorous. You're not supposed to bring your outside self to work. These barriers are now falling, thank God. But if you look at mad men or the organization men or any of the prototypical or texts of management, it's like this is very serious business. And then we separate out learning episodes where maybe you go to executive education or something, but really you need to know everything you're going to know for your job before you show up for your job. And then there was a stage called university where you got that, right? Which is nuts too. So what I'm seeing that I think is healthy right now is the re-blending of these three circles. Certainly work is more casual. Certainly lots more people are floating away from jobs where they have to be somewhere nine to five and put in their, you know, face time and all that. And in some sense, when I talk about unschooling, I'm also talking about adults. I don't care about age group at all. One point I make early and often is that the compulsory education system, one of its multitudinous flaws is that it segregates kids into one-year cohorts we call grades. And that in doing so, it right away snips away a whole bunch of abundance that's present in the room or in the school or in the town because when Susie teaches Bobby his numbers, she's learning and he's learning. And when you get to school, it's like the fourth graders want to be sixth graders, but the sixth graders don't want anything to do with the fourth graders. For God's sake, no. Which is ludicrous, completely ludicrous. So one of the goals and one of the design questions I have that we're going to hit in a little bit is like, well, how do we create learning cohorts that cut across age groups? Like how do we make that work in some interesting way? Go ahead, Judy. You look like you'd like to throw something out. Well, an example of that in a small school that my daughter attended, which of course falls under the category of privilege, but it also offered the front-end care that I needed for an extended day and a variety of other enrichments. But one of the things that they did that I think was quite helpful was that they had structured roles of upper schoolers, you know, maybe two years ahead, fourth graders working with second graders on conflict management or experiments or on projects in the school. And so you've got this sort of closer at hand role model than this teacher that's 30 years older than you. Yeah. Who's kind of daunting. And that was a part of every student's sort of duty or role was to mentor or be connected up to a kid a couple years behind. Yeah, they had a whole code of behavior that was pretty progressive. And I think it actually came out of ancient Jesuit heritage. A lot of the teachers have been Jesuitly educated, but it was fascinating. And I was really impressed with the social value and responsibility that was being instilled in how this works. You know, what is your responsibility as part of the class if you see something that's being this inappropriate or if you see something that might somebody get hurt or whatever. And I think that kind of social learning gets lost when the class size is too big. Yeah. And the teachers have election plan they have to plan to and somehow they think they have to teach to the test, which isn't at all what the testing was ever intended to be about. And it minimizes the students ability to synthesize new information. Yeah. Since you mentioned the Society of Jesus, I thought I'd bring them up because they have the different Catholic orders. They were the ones about education more than anybody, right? So lots and lots of schools of all different levels, universities, what have you, all kinds of interesting things. And there's very interesting stories about the Jesuits travels in the world. Jesuits in Japan is super interesting. There's, gosh, I thought I had more about it there, but Pope Francis right now is a Jesuit. Here's the suppression of the Jesuits. Spain actually expelled the Jesuits. You know, Spain was the most expelling everybody, but I didn't realize it's expelled the Jesuits as well in 1767. So anyway. Well, intellectuals are always experimental free thinkers, though, is that that's the challenge of free education in the freest sense is that you question everything. You know, a fact is only a fact until you've tested it to make sure it really is a fact. And I think that's a dimension of education that's gotten lost along the way in many instances. Oh, for sure. I can remember people saying to me, you believe it? It was a quizzical look from a teacher. Well, we've managed to politicize education. I mean, one of the things that's, I guess, conventional wisdom among policy people and others is that, you know, give me the child at age seven and I can mold the adult. And then the institution of education becomes the political instrument for crafting the next generation's worldviews. And we've seen that over and over and over in culture after culture, right? And once you centralize the bureaucracy of education, one of my other problems with the compulsory education system, you have a channel through which you can force everybody to adopt a curriculum or to not do certain things or whatever. And one of my, you know, just in terms of... In Texas, you can edit history too. Pardon? In some states, you can edit history too. Well, that brings us to the Texas School Board, which is one of my favorite dark subjects in the sort of whole world of education. Lars, I don't know how much you know about this, but there are, you know, hundreds of school boards. There used to be thousands of school boards that were extremely local. Now they've gotten kind of skinny down. But the Texas one happens to have an outsized influence on everybody else because most of the school boards don't have a very big budget. So they don't have any hands on deck to evaluate textbooks and do what a school board might be doing. So they'll follow whatever the Texas School Board says. And so conservatives figured this out a long time ago. So 10 of the 15 Texas School Board members are actually conservative. And so when history and science textbooks start to eliminate slavery or evolution or do other kinds of things, or even when the books become pablum, when all the spice is taken out of the books because I don't think I read a good history book until I was 35 years old. Like, most history is pretty much crap. So part of the reason is the politicization of curriculum, which accompanies the centralization of curriculum. So let me just pause for a second on this and I'll walk into unschooling next. But just any thoughts in your heads right now? What are you thinking? Go ahead, Lars. I'm curious about the Copenhagen and European system because my education has been in North America. Fortunately, with a number of rather progressive groups, but also I was intrinsically rebellious. So I'm curious though because I have a sense that there's a more holistic approach in Scandinavia but I don't know for sure. Yeah, I keep hearing that in Denmark we have one of the world's best education systems. So I'm really sorry for everybody else. Thanks. I'm really sorry. It's a longer story. I'm creating quite a significant for myself initiative to actually overcome some educational challenges we've had in the school system in Denmark with my oldest son in particular. But it's a whole different story. But one thing that I wanted to kind of weave into this as a parallel, when we talk about mentoring the younger, the next generation, a couple of centuries ago, maybe even not that long ago, we lived like many generations under the same roof and that was kind of a pattern around the world I believe. So the grandparents took care of the grandkids while the parents were in the fields and at least Denmark has been an agricultural society for centuries. So it was a normal way of living and learning. So you would learn naturally from those older and younger. It was a natural way of learning and we kind of took all that away. So elderly generations are being put into elderly homes and the small kids are put into kindergarten and the parents are just stressed and overburdened and nobody gains from any of this. So that's kind of what popped into my mind when I listened to you. We may have a holistic view on education but it is for sure a system that was designed decades ago to please the teachers and to make life easier for the teachers. You would carve out these blocks of time so you could handle the planning of the teachers and their daily life but nobody really looked at the kids and their learning. So in my opinion it's a disaster and the more I think about it the worse it gets in my head. Let me talk our way into some of the design questions that I wanted to point to and I wanted to get there through a little bit of exposition of unschooling and why and what and how and how I came across it in particular which is through this essay called The Six Lessons School Teacher that was written by a retired New York high school teacher named John Taylor Gatto and was published in The Sun which was a reader submitted essay magazine that I used to subscribe to for a while but the first issue of this I ever saw was the one that Doc Searles actually mailed to me in the U.S. Postal Service with this essay called The Six Lessons School Teacher and in The Six Lessons School Teacher Gatto says, look, nominally I was your child's English teacher but let me tell you what I was actually teaching them. I was teaching them that I am God in the classroom that only I determine what curriculum you will study. You are being taught to surrender your will to a predestined chain of command. You will turn off when I tell you to stay in class where you belong, et cetera, et cetera and then other people piled on to this creating this kind of rubric called the Hidden Curriculum of School or Schooling and it's called the Hidden Curriculum because the explicit curriculum is what we're trying to teach you and it's funny that curriculum is the race track so it's from Latin, the curriculum in Spanish, correr is to run so this is basically the race you're running in order to learn things as your curriculum and so the Hidden Curriculum of School basically adds then that hey, we can reduce your worth to a grade or a test score we're just never going to leave you enough time to dive deep we've designed the school around averages this all by itself is a great digression there's a terrific book, The End of Average by what's his name, Todd Rose and he basically says that thinking only in terms of averages has screwed up all sorts of things because there is no average, we are spiky it doesn't work as a good description so one of the things that critics of the school system have proposed is something called unschooling which is a very poorly named discipline because you don't want to be the negative of something the un or the non or the anti or whatever it's just an unappealing title so some people call it self-directed education so there's a group called ASD the Association for Self-Directed Education which is a very high function I love them, sorry the Alliance for Self-Directed Education founded in 2016 Peter Gray, a psychologist who is excellent is the founder of ASD I'm his biggest fan I think I'll give you a raise for your money on that one and here's a collection of some of it he publishes a lot in psychology today so he's got a lot of writings about unschoolers and unschooling, super interesting I like how he's challenging people's perceptions about it exactly and so unschooling is in some sense just anything that liberates you from the structures of capital S school and I read John Holt's book he wrote a bunch of books the way back when but in one of his books he talked about the difference between a small S school and a capital S school, a little T teacher and a capital T teacher for example and a capital T teacher and a capital S school was the place you had to be this is your assigned teacher and you've got to be in this school or we're going to punish you or punish your parents or whatever but if you as you grew up decided you wanted to go to a military school and you wanted to clip the lawn with like toenail clippers and that was your idea of a good time cool, that kind of a school should exist and if it was your choice to be there then it's kind of a lower case school or you know look at guilds as schools or dojo is the metaphor that I'm using around up Keto as a school so he doesn't say that there shouldn't be teachers although I tend to prefer the word learners or learning to educators, teachers or schools I will put a comment on that because to me a school is a building the purpose of the building is learning and you can teach, it's pretty hard to teach it's a lot easier to learn exactly and you just reminded me of another great design question around done schooling one of the things that I used in an adult course on science and leadership was the cycle of experiential learning which most salmonist scientists haven't heard of if they're not psychology people but it's basically you have a premise, you design a way to test the premise you do the experiment, you evaluate the results and you start over it's kind of a continuous loop because you look at what you learn and that's what learning really is all about and a lot of it was physical, not just intellectual historically you learned how to climb trees, you learned how to push a cow or hay in addition to learning why you did it that way so the hay wouldn't fall apart and you could get it to the cow or whatever and we've changed our whole system to sort of try to funnel feed it as cognitive content or force feed it out of context so that it's not very interesting I was greatly bored it's like I don't need a person or this group to do this let me have the book and I'll go read the book and come back it was kind of my attitude and teachers eventually just let me check out and do that at my desk but it was a weird thing because I always had questions and they didn't have time for questions they were too busy pushing so I just went to force feeding here in my brain the force feeding of geese to make foie gras is actually a reasonable metaphor for what happens these days in our educational system partly because everybody says oh my god there's so much to learn so we have to squeeze it down into your innards when in fact a kid who's curious is going to absorb these things and build mental models around them because what generally happens with the force feeding is you cram for the test you study for the test, the teacher's teaching to the test you're packing as many bits of whatever as you can into your head that's god willing you pass and then you flush the buffers because now you have to do the same thing again and again for each of your new 5 or 7 subjects and so it's not actually building a context there's some experimentation but a lot of those budgets are gone etc and then what's interesting here is and I'll stick with the slightly morbid analogy of foie gras because there's a really interesting TED talk about Eduardo Sousa Eduardo Sousa in Spain who basically sells foie gras but he didn't like the cruelty of the way that foie gras was made and so he went and he found a beautiful beautiful place in Spain a place that is like biologically super diverse and he created heaven for geese he made it so that this was a must stop stop for geese and that they would naturally fatten up and then he would disappear and it's like hey where'd Bob go? and Bob just became foie gras but he basically created heaven for geese and it's known as ethical or natural foie gras it is expensive, it is a gourmet treat for people who like that kind of thing but it's a completely different approach toward that whole process and unfortunately we're busy force feeding our kids knowledge much of which they're never going to use they absolutely don't need and then we're going to avoid miraculously teaching them a whole series of skills that might really come in useful in their lives like conflict resolution, how to have a good relationship home budgeting, you name it there's any number of things that we actually don't teach them here's an anecdote, my daughter got to college and we were big on letting her participate whatever we were doing she was the only woman in her suite of six at Yale that knew how to clean the toilet she said you can bet I'm teaching them fast mom because I'm not going to do it for everybody we also knew how to hook up TVs and do a bunch of random things and she was the only person there who didn't have both parents and grandparents settling her and she called me and said you know I just want to let you know there are all these people here and I said well do you think it would help be helpful if we came over well no not really I kind of know where I want to put my stuff well why are you calling me then well I just thought you should know because they're kind of asking where my mom and dad are well tell them we're off doing something but it was fascinating that whole dynamic and I did not realize until that moment that we were so different than a bunch of other people in what we thought was the natural way to operate I love that so let me click on the topic of this call just so that we can dive into it a bit and what I'd love to do is add to this list explore the list and Lars in terms of the educate for life project that you have going I'm trying to figure out how to frame my part of it so that I make room for answers to these questions Lars can you put your educate for life some sort of link to it in the chat so that it's available later very happy to so for example one of my questions that came out of unschooling and considering unschooling is how do we find how do we form good learning cohorts for anything here the examples I use are I might want to create a learning cohort that's going to last one evening for two hours to learn to make cocktails or I might want to create a learning cohort to learn like conversational Mandarin which might take five years and I want to be completely blind or indifferent to age differences it could be that for Mandarin a seven year old a 17 year old and a 70 year old are just great in a learning cohort together and they might not and I don't know enough about the kinds of chemistry that it would take to form good cohorts so just for fun I collect personality profiles in my in my brain so here's hold on it's going to get really crowded in a second here are personality types tests and profiles so Myers-Briggs is buried in here some place along with the Enneagram, Fishers for personality types five dominant personality dynamics the five factor model which is pretty famous FFM the Kiersey temperament sorter the Johari window IQ tests intercultural development inventory little lusher color test and this is just the peas there's a scroll bar down here so if I scroll to the right you'll see there's a bunch more later in the alphabet the Reese profile, Socionics, SCARF Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness which are those motivate you etc etc so pardon? I guess I don't I've never gotten why we need tests or why we need buckets in this sense well lots of people are trying to hack people like how do we become more productive how do we perform better how do we make better teams is a big one I mean Myers-Briggs took over a lot of companies because it was a method of saying oh okay so you're an ENTF or whatever else we should couple you with this other kind of person and I don't know that there's any studies that have shown that this actually ever paid off so here's an article that I saved from Vox magazine why the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless right here's another article say goodbye to MBTI the fad that won't die by Adam Grant who wrote about givers and takers and all you know all that kind of stuff so I point to personality types for sort of two reasons because it's kind of a two-edged sword on the one hand there's a whole bunch of these who knows which ones work it's confusing and well on the other hand could we borrow from some of these things to create some some sort of process that helps groups form well right that helps us create good learning cohorts good teams high functioning teams and that helps these teams just improve over time I'm very interested in that question like how do you know when you're in a good learning cohort how do you improve that cohort's sort of functionality over time I think that's a really interesting design question and for example this is this is a this is going to seem like a strange example but the game fortnight is really popular right now Lars any of your kids playing fortnight yeah yeah my youngest one but it's on the way out there's the new wave is coming something new excellent something else take its place and fortnight is a battle royale game which means the last one standing wins the game and what's interesting about it is that it's free to play so you can just download the software and go play but there's a whole bunch of stuff you can spend money on inside the game which is why the average revenue per user for fortnight is way higher than google or facebook or anybody else they're making buckets of money doing this but the way you enter a game is you go to a lobby and you wait until a hundred people have collected up in the lobby and then all hundred of you drop into the new terrain and there's only going to be a hundred of you in that particular game until it's done in a couple hours so you know in that time you have to try to hunt down everybody else and shoot them how nice but what's turning out is that fortnight is a social phenomenon that fortnight is becoming the place where kids hang out right it's the place where they sit and chat and they're treating the game as background entertainment this is super interesting to me and it means that we might need to look further afield for how do we form learning cohorts well it might turn out that a really good e-sports team is a really great learning cohort and that we can learn something from those places don't know but I'm really open to those kinds of investigations here and partly I'm asking should there be a service that does matchmaking like this or is this much better served as a practice as a method that people can adopt and then they'll go find people in different platforms and places you've touched on a number of different perspectives to this and Peter Gray is one of them right if you ask him he will say they will find their own way right they are going to find who they're going to learn from don't even touch them don't get in their way I'm a believer in that but if you live in our society with that believe you will have a lot of enemies you will have everybody chasing you because how can you leave your kids to just seek their own learning you know you've got to put them into a system of some sort you need to feed them the knowledge everybody is going to hunt you down until you complete that with you I mean not that my daughter didn't go through all that but I'm not sure we need to do it that way but I have a just a teaser for you Jerry in terms of a speaker or something because a wise person as a mentor once said you know this whole concept of mentorship is overly complicated so it's really two things if you see somebody do something that's very effective that you like notice figure out how they did it and then try it and if you see somebody do something that's terrible notice and vow never to do it and to a large extent that's social modeling because if you notice things that are effective you're learning as an adult just by observing and you can explore it with that person if you choose to or you can find out by watching them do it more than once you kind of break the code and part of what I'm trying to overcome is our socialization or our reticence away from just doing what you just said so once your boss or colleague had said go do this you were like oh that sounds like a healthy behavior then you started doing that before that moment you're in a company and you don't know whom you should or shouldn't talk to or you're in a at the supermarket or in a school setting or whatever it is and there are rules and norms that kind of keep us separate from each other so part of this and Lars I completely agree with you like we should trust that people are going to sort this out and give them as much liberty to go do it in whatever way occurs to them I'm trying to figure out how to help more people realize that this is something they ought to be able to do and ought to try to do and that permission to experiment in this direction is being up somehow I understand I just wanted to say I was just tossing on some other people's kind of ways of describing how to learn but essentially if we follow Peter Gray just to stay with him for another one second we are going to do the people living just around us I think back to the old tribes and our world is so well connected today we have access to each other like the three of us do right now because of technology and suddenly we get together in a split second with just the right people actually I'm sure we can figure out algorithms and stuff to kind of who we are, what we want to do, what we should be doing which is what Skyhive is kind of doing the founder was speaking at one of our community sessions very interesting work by the way and then get us connected to the people that we should be learning from or with whom we should be experimenting I think definitely there are a lot of services that needs to be created from here on absolutely agree so partly I'm trying to figure out how to get outside of the normal school paradigm of oh we have project based learning so let's create some software that does project based learning and sell it to a school district as far away from that as I can while still harnessing that I mean like great so somebody's written good software that manages projects that sounds wonderful but how do we step outside of the structures and assumptions of the school system to help anybody who wants to learn go learn like crazy why do you need to connect with the school system I don't I'm trying to avoid it my mental model is being brainwashed by the exponential organizations but I keep coming back to the model of the core and the edge and I consider the school system the core when we talk about education and I want to avoid it as well because I haven't really found much that was a value in that system unfortunately so what I think it's time to do is to create something new on the edge of that which means let's just stay clear of the education system as we know it let's get as far away from it as possible experiment with something new can be all sorts of experiments for all sorts of reasons with all sorts of good people involved learn and see how can we create alternatives to the whole school system and some of these initiatives will die because they cannot work others will grow and families will gather around the initiative that seems to be working and adding value and essentially one day this is my big big dream it might take 100 years to get there 200 but my big dream is one day we can replace everything that's known as the education systems today we can replace it by a whole new paradigm love that I'm just catching it oops sorry paradigm love that and I totally agree so let me go back to sharing the questions and Judy as you were talking earlier about a school is just a building one of the questions that I don't think I have here so a question I do have is if the kids aren't in these penitentiaries that look like schools then where are they like where does education take place where does learning take place that is a question I think but another question is what happens to school infrastructure needs to be told I'm very negative about infrastructure and institutions I think the educational systems at all levels is very antiquated and it's going to take an upheaval which is starting to happen because of enrollment issues and cost issues and overbuilding of buildings and all kinds of stuff but it's time for a revolution and I think Lars is probably right although I'm hopeful that there could be a grassroots thing where what's best flourishes on its own and just because it's good and works others try to do it and it's going to be very ambitious some more and eventually it becomes a movement it's going to be tremendous resistance though because then you've lost that control of the population that you talked about historically because they're completely educated are very iconoclastic I went to Copenhagen here because last time I was in Copenhagen or maybe a couple of trips ago and the kids were mixed in age groups but there was like a lower third, middle third, upper third and all the kids were just mixed into these different thirds and you moved your way up the school structure physically as you got older and kind of advanced through the grades and it was like the physical design of the school was trying to accompany open plan a whole bunch of other things and I'm forgetting the name of it I thought I'd see it here under Copenhagen but I'm not seeing it right now I'm seeing a whole bunch of other stuff but it was quite interesting and partly my answer to what happens to the school structures is I'm hoping that the schools become venues that you can check out just like at any company these days there's a flat panel display by the door of every conference room and every lab and it tells you who's got it booked for the next hour it's awesome, schools have rehearsal rooms with pianos in them, they have biology labs with beakers and safety gear and Bunsen burners, they've got stuff they've got playing fields for athletics that's terrific, why don't we let anybody in the community come through and use them and then a topic we haven't touched at all which I think also needs to be on this list is safety, how do we make this whole thing reasonably safe because we're talking kids and I think one of the big reasons for preserving and even doubling down on the current penitentiary system of school design, post Columbine and post all these shootings since then is we need to actually turn these things into fortresses with armed people inside in order to keep the kids safe when in fact I believe the exact opposite is true somehow we probably could do with a whole topic of discussion what is the key that opens learning because if you once get that lock open it's pretty hard to close the door if your curiosity is assuaged or you're reinforced or whatever it is at whatever age it starts it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle so if we could work on that unlocking concept or potentiation concept or what do you want to call it it applies at every level because people get really excited when they learn something new on their own it's kind of like your two shits thing Jerry and I took that one away I really like it yeah thank you Lars I can explain it in a second Judy I'm coming at this partly from the belief that children are naturally curious that they're born curious but we managed to socialize that out of them exactly that by the time they even get to grade school we have to somehow re-spark this love of learning and love of you know being curious and whatever else but that the compulsory school system yet another critique of it it's instilled in preschool as it was with my daughter she's very determined about protecting that so she actually transformed her school to fit her rather than the reverse that's excellent and at every teaching point along the way she was an outlier because she was so self-directed and I don't know exactly how we did it I'm just great but it's partly because I had the same experience you had Lars I mean if you're totally bored and you have a lot of capacity you find something else that's fun to do that's satisfying and as you do that you get hooked on that self-driven satisfaction or at least I did so if we could figure out some exercises that would allow individuals to experience that I think that's far more inspiring and likely to last than any sort of institutional approach love that let me backtrack for one second to describe the two shits to Lars Lars this comes out of my working on design from trust and then identifying unschooling as being a category of things that are designed from trust alongside the sharing economy and microfinance and open source software and a bunch of others I've got a whole bunch of examples that I curated in my brain and what I've discovered is that when people hit any of these systems they very often have two predictable responses the first one is oh shit this is impossible what a stupid idea I can't believe anybody's trying this this will never work who is going to let you sleep in their bedroom and take over their house why would I step into a stranger's car what do you mean nobody owns the software and it's just out there for anybody to look at right all these things provoke a very counterintuitive there's a danger here kind of response that's either visceral your heart your throat clamp up whatever it might be and then at that point you either bail you leave the thing because it's so counterintuitive it's sounding that it couldn't possibly work so you go away or you try it and many times when you try it you begin to understand that something weird just happened because oh shit this thing actually works that's the second shit is like oh my god this thing actually is starting to work and we're not having that conversation openly about what made it work why does it work what else works like this how is that working which is why I'm doing everything I'm doing I'm trying from trust because I'd like more people to figure out that there are many many systems like this that already exist and work just fine in the world occasionally we bump into them and when we bump into them we bark our shins and we're like oh shit this shouldn't work right like Wikipedia you know if you had gone to a venture capitalist with a plan for Wikipedia in 1998 they would have laughed you out of their office and yet there's this Wikipedia thing which is always one of the top ten most trafficked websites on earth and is the only one of the ten that does not leave any cookies on your machine stuff like that so that's partly that part of it and now we can kind of want to slander back and pull harder on the how do we light up people's this is parallel to how do we light up people's level of learning again or whatever that is because these sorts of experiences are an experience of personal agency and one of the words I really like here is the sense of agency which is the sense of responsibility and authority and permission to do something to improve your world and one of my critiques of consumerism is that it removes our sense of agency my job as a good consumer is to buy more stuff or to solve the problem through a pill or a service rather than designing or making or inventing the thing or you know whatever helping other people with the thing or whatever else we've consumerized our way away from this sense of agency and therefore again I come back to the question that Judy just asked which is how do we provoke spark light up this sense that it's good to be serious you can maybe experiment there's a lot of stuff out there to fix it's okay for me to try to do it it's okay for me to ask other people all those things that we've kind of broken and it's normal for it not to work the first time and it's unlikely to work the first time so then just like figure out what was off and try again but it is there I mean the older we get in a system that doesn't allow this the more likely we are to lose it but it is in us and my kids are seven and nine I see it all the time they have it but they need to seek it when they come home from school because and then they would challenge themselves in Minecraft and then and you know yeah okay I'll not take all your day with this story but yeah no it's just my nine year old he was the first one to learn to read in his class even though the teacher said we cannot get in contact with him the psychologist said there's something wrong with him and so on and so forth long story and maybe there was he got this diagnosis of autism and ADSD at least they explained why he couldn't thrive in a noisy stressful school environment but he is a bloody good learner and one psychologist kept telling us Lucas can probably not learn what he's supposed to learn and at elementary school I said listen I mean this is not an argument I just wanted to tell you that when he comes home he's programming mods for Minecraft he figures out the gravity level of gravity that is needed to make sure that the arrow he's shooting in the game hits the right spot in the wall he figures this out when he comes home by himself he taught himself pretty fluent English in six months from YouTube we don't speak English at home you know so tell me again that he cannot learn right and these are the people monitoring the kids everywhere so they have it and they exercise it whenever we give them the chance to do it but we don't give them the chance to do it that's the problem we are the problem a friend of mine seven year old or something like that was disciplined in school for fidgeting and it's like man what are we doing what are we doing so was mine until we we went to this because my son has this now we figured out he has autism and ADSD so we were very lucky to have this course a weekend course offered we went there a lovely couple Danish couple teaching the man has ADSD and the woman has autism so they knew exactly how it feels like and the first thing I learned it's been a problem for a long time because when my son was sitting at his desk in the school class he was always you know he had to touch something and I knew from very early on he learns actually best when he is playing with something but I couldn't explain it and the teacher certainly didn't allow it he has to sit still don't touch anything right when we got to this course this man that was teaching us through the weekend he said you have to you need to carry something in your pocket that doesn't distract the people around you so secretly you can fidget and you can do what you have to do you cannot learn you cannot concentrate you have to do this it's the only thing that works and exactly we started we found something that didn't take too much space Lucas could carry this around suddenly he goes quiet he can fidget he will focus on whatever task he has at hand everything works right don't ask him not to touch something that's great I love that story thank you Lars it's really lovely a friend of mine a grown up friend of mine when she attends a conference or whatever she takes a large drawing pad and pastels and sits on the ground and spreads them all out and you know if it's the first time you've seen her do this she will tell you hey I've discovered that I have to do this so that I can be present for the meeting if I'm not just sitting here doing and letting that part of me pay attention here it all gets mixed up and I can't actually pay attention there but you had to hack her own personality and skills and perceptual systems to get there and I'm trying to figure out how do we help everybody do that sooner in life that's a good question but I just want to say I think we are all hacking ourselves in some way we're all conscious about it, some are not and maybe we're not aware how we need to hack ourselves but sometimes I often jogging on the beach here I'm fortunate to live just by the beach here in Copenhagen now and because I really enjoy it and it's my reset and I figured out that's my way of hacking me I just perform so much better when I've done it and others have to do something else but this is what we should learn in first grade I think this is who are you, how do you function and when are you not functioning and why is that and how can we help you to hack yourself but actually it's worked the other way around we are being punished if we are not compliant to what society demands of us like sit still and check it out there's a sort of controversial topic of learning styles and I had a call recently about this where a friend of mine who objects to the idea of learning styles sort of educated me a bit about it but I don't think I've internalized what he said yet it was Clark Quinn who knows a lot about this and basically one of the problems is that learning styles they sound impossible in school because what do you mean this kid has to learn in a completely different way I can't modify the curriculum to adapt nicely to what they want blah blah blah blah so within the school system as currently designed learning styles sound like a complicated mess in the world one of the services I would like to have would tag up all the resources in the world by learning styles just meta tags, meta information so that once I decide that I want to learn everything through musical metaphor because I'm a really great musician and I'm not but let's say music is my entryway to mathematics which happens a bunch to people other people it's cogs and gears as they're opening to mathematics different metaphors carry for us once we figure that out why can't somebody, why can't the crowd have helped us overlay on the world a series of meta information that guides us more rapidly to those kinds of resources and this doesn't mean that forever in life we're going to be that kind of learner I'm not trying to peg people in some way I'm trying to facilitate their discovery of things that accelerate their learning so that's another great design issue the dichotomy that was the dichotomy of do you learn by listening or do you learn by reading that was one of the earlier dichotomies that was encountered in my world it turns out I can actually do both but I thought I could only do it by reading interesting so I listen to things and write them down because the writing down helps imprint them but it's actually the reinforcement one example that's also used is the difference between knowledge and knowing and here the usual explanation case is writing a bicycle where I can have you read a book about it you can watch a video, you can do whatever you want and you will not know how to ride a bicycle until you've actually hopped on a bicycle and managed to balance it down the street there's a real big difference between having it up here and having the physical ability to steer and manipulate and then a thing I realized about is, and I've been using it for 21 years now is that when I'm curating things into my brain it forces me into system 2 thinking so whatever I'm looking at I have to ask a series of questions I mean I don't have to, I just naturally go is this worth remembering? if yes, where do I put it, where does it belong what do I call it, what else do I connect it to and then on those kind of fun days that are too distracting oh my gosh, look at this shiny object over here and then click, click, click, zoom, zoom, zoom and like a couple hours have gone by, but that's a different story but curating what I care about has been very helpful to me in going deeper on all of it and then in being able to find it later and then add to it, right? I think you're on an important thread because for me it's sort of like chasing an idea and the idea can come anywhere, it can be a sentence in a novel that somebody else who read the novel doesn't even remember but it triggered a thought sequence in my brain that then triggered another question that wasn't answered in the novel that I either dug out of my brain or I went somewhere to look something up or I made a note that I need to understand this or I connected it to another book and I'm grabbing over here to see if I can find the quote that's relevant sort of adjacent to what I first read and the same sort of thing happens with music you know you get a melody stuck in your head and then it leads you to a bunch of other things so I think that notion of metaphorical knowledge or something or the linkages is an important concept that needs to be peeled down more and my favorite thing is the sort of the connectivity between things. I'm a pattern finder it's one of my superpowers is seeing and explaining how things that seem really really different from each other are in fact pretty similar on some dimension in some way and that can lead to lots of insights it's one of my favorite things to do in the world and it's something I'm actually trying to do more officially for more groups so Lars I don't think you know this but you know that I own the domain Jerry'sbrain.com which is the call we're in right now is part of inside Jerry'sbrain I also bought the domain pickjerrysbrain.com and I'm interested in being an on-demand sort of brainiac coming into things like a Zoom meeting listening, participating, doing some screen sharing with permission during and then possibly doing a five minute summary afterward of like what I thought or what I would do in your shoes or whatever but I think this is a new role that organizations could use it's part memory it's part context, it's part devil's advocate I think the connectivity is a very important word I'm sorry Lars I'll stop in a second connectivity because one of the things that I discovered much more clearly after I was retired and not having to produce work product all the time and also not having to problem solve for many people all the time was that what I was really interested in pursuing was the connectivity of everything basically everything connects to everything in unreal superpower whatever it's just it's all connected and you can get very metaphysical about how it's all connected as well I'm not going to go there right now but the question of connectivity and where the string theory sort of leads you is really fascinating and the creative people are overwhelmed by the multiplicity of connections and it doesn't matter whether they're creative physicists or artists or musicians or dancers you know they live in a world of connection and they are sponges for all of the content and there's something that I believe is intrinsic about that in terms of human capacity but I think it's intrinsic and then can be easily disrupted or encouraged by early life experiences Agreed and I'm unclear whether that's trainable or teachable or something like that I don't really know yet I know that I do run a podcast for nine years and I would take notes and do a report back at the end of each podcast and then I trained someone else to run a podcast and told her about the process and taking notes and whatever and at the end of the very first one she reported back and she said Jerry at the end of the call I looked down on my notepad and I had written nothing I had not written down a word which was the point at which I was like oh so maybe taking notes during a podcast and hosting the conversation is sort of a skill well we didn't have a chance then to develop exercises or a methodology or something to see whether she could go further than we didn't do more of them but I was really intrigued by that I was like one thing that that led me to was and I'll go back here to my brain because I wanted to share oh shoot I thought I had it here basically what are your superpowers right because most of us aren't aware of our superpowers most of us are not aware we think everybody else thinks like that mine is synthesis synthesis in terms of pulling multiple diverse things together that most people don't even think are connected that's one of them so here we go discovering your talents and superpowers needs to go under great design questions there we go and this is also next to scaffolding for learners which I put it nearby so do you have a questionnaire to lead people to their superpowers? I do not that would be an interesting thing to develop at the most simple level there's the book finding your element it's primarily focusing on children but it's written so the parents can work with the kids around this it's a wonderful book it's not specifically around superpowers but it is about finding your element and it's got three steps first is interestingly turn down the noise because in order to figure out your talents and your elements you need to hack yourself back to what we talked about earlier meditation avoiding all the opinions coming from the outside just shut it out for a moment and then change your perspective with the second step about mind mapping yours and others assumptions about you and third step is what are you doing? do you have a plan to do or not? maybe you want it in here as a link and it's not this book the element of finding your passion is it a different book called finding your element? here it is finding your element it is it's a different book finding your element yeah cool thank you I will add it right now there was another one by the same author something about creative schools was on the cover I'm a big fan of his work everything he's been writing is so relevant and interestingly he's the most watched talker ever it doesn't come by incident there's something the world knows we have to do something about this yes and no because his TED talk is incredibly popular and I don't really see the world swinging toward what our conversation here is about I think that we still have an uphill climb maybe he's got some good jokes maybe that's what captivates us he's giving a clear call to action we have to change this and join me contact me if you want to do something about this he's very clear in his call to action yet no we're not seeing much happening so I'll just connect it to discovering your talents and superpowers there we go so let me head back here and it's actually after midnight where you are Lars do not feel like we will be insulted if you need to crash and go to sleep I wanted to throw in also the VARC question can I just call it? it's a gentleman named Richard Fielder Richard Fielder F-E-L-T-E-R Richard Fielder he got it and he has a question here we go chemical engineering wrong Richard Fielder probably the index of learning styles is what he was part of a building which suggests that there are 8 learning styles and Judith mentioned some of them already so it's about being a visual learner or a verbal learner or a sequential learner or a reflective learner or a visual learner I've never really worked with it but I use it in a presentation I do sometimes maybe I should try it out someday very cool I will add it to learning styles something we could do offline would be big questions self-examination questions self-examination questions what are the three things in your life you felt best about doing for instance if you look at three of them from different settings are there common elements that might be your superpower yeah so there's probably other ways to come at that but I think exploring the questions is more important than how you teach the topic if what we want to enable is self-learning which becomes self-enable which becomes self-actualization then the discovery is his own reward yeah exactly so here's Felder and here's the index of learning styles so what's missing here what other things should find a home here I don't know if enablement is the right word but some concept that is affirming a universal affirmation concept is I think critical to learning and it's opposite to teaching which tends to be critical so affirmation of the learners you mean yeah but it's actually sort of self-affirmation but it may start out by external affirmation too the kind of oh I think you could do that if you want if you try, if it doesn't work the first time try two more whatever but this notion of even with adults I've seen that people don't want to fail system is structured to punish you if you fail and you will intrinsically fail if you're creative or almost never works the first time you're lucky if something works one out of three in research and this is also something that's very culturally specific in Europe there's not as much tolerance for failures in the US, in the US we have all these myths of the entrepreneur and the bootstrapped everything in Japan and Korea and Asia much much lower threshold for failure in fact in Japan still it took me to realize this recently in Japan if you go off the beaten path of the job and the career with one company for life you may not make it back into any of the big companies so if you're a high performance individual and when you're 30 years old you got a job at Mitsui Bank and then you decide to go to a startup for a couple years good luck getting hired back at any of the Koretsu it's crazy yeah what other questions are we are we missing here the chronicle hiring theory though which is to identify those entities you don't like and then hire the people that left them interesting because they were smart enough to get off those ships yep I like that and a similar paradox is if you're looking for talent don't call people who think like you and say who do you know that I could get in touch with call people who style you hate and ask them if they have any people that might fit in your organization and they'll give you the names of the people they don't like and they're probably the ones you want to talk to interesting yeah it is intentionally creating high diversity teams is the way to success and so separate separate from the learning topic but clearly connected one of my big fascinations is the general friction in the world between political points of view and approaches toward you know what's going on and I had an inside Jerry's brain call two days ago that was like well are things getting better or worse what's up with that what's the deal you know should we be optimistic or pessimistic liberal etc etc and I think that when I think that partly we don't know who has an opposite point of view to ours because we can't imagine what the actual opposite might really even be because the spectrum in our head the dimensions in our head are this but it turns out that your opposite is over here it's not it's not on the line that you draw your head maybe I don't know and then and then in some cases these differences are so substantial or so profound that those people can't find a way to collaborate and what you create is chaos from being and I love diversity and I prize diversity I'm trying to figure out how do we get people to adventure more with diversity when they probably feel as I'm trying to express right now that every now and then that turns into chaos because you're just coming at things from two different places and you can't find any connecting ground hmm let me just throw one thing into into that mix there it's very interesting my my seven-year-old leaners he and he's in a small private school and it's so small they don't have really any facilities so they really use the city including theaters and everything wonderful and they just went to the theater yesterday and I was asking him what was it about and he couldn't really explain it and his teacher also couldn't explain it but I found out now that it was about two ladies and they were very different from each other one wanted to make all the decisions and being the control and the other ones were struggling and they had very opposite views of everything but the whole point of this play was that they they they actually managed to get along and they could learn so much from each other and there were many many good stars coming out of these seasons but I want to get to his theater and art can be one vehicle to let us experience this sometimes we also tend to revert to the written words and the spoken words but myself included being a bookworm and a mathematician but I really come to appreciate music and arts and as a way to experience you know parts of life that we never really thought about including this I think experience and express in different ways yeah express in different ways Mr. Linton late but somewhat here greetings glad to see you sorry I couldn't catch the rest of this that's alright it's been recorded so if you have an interest you can go back and listen I will I will do that I can share the screen that has been sort of in the middle of the conversation about some of those great design questions excuse me yep and we're getting near the end of our 90 minutes so what closing comments might we each have for the topic I think that there are many interesting things to touch on as a closing comment one of them is the way we self-assess if it's about self-learning and self-directed learning you know is it important to measure our progress at all it's kind of pre-programmed in my head but I don't like it I don't like to think about it maybe we don't need it but if we do the self-assessment test like the personality test that we talked about earlier I just wanted to mention I found it here the Bertram Phora Algorithm Bertram and then Phora F-O-R-E-R this is super interesting and essentially many use it as evidence that you cannot really find any value whatsoever in personality tests because this particular test actually was a hoax it was like thousands of students over half a century that took this test and regardless of what they how high they scored on accuracy right it turned out they got the same description every student got exactly the same description of their own personality all of them thousands and thousands of students so do you believe that the personality test really works so maybe we just need to appreciate our individual superpowers and our individual ways of learning and sharing inspiration with each other and give up all about self-assessment and boring stuff like that so that will be my call to action let's give up sanity I did that years ago and it's been so easy ever since hasn't it it's so much simpler and I think that like learners have a lot to learn from life hackers for example and life hacking can get a little obsessive but life hacking is people experimenting with what helps them sleep better, be healthier, learn more, whatever it might be how do they improve their lives and I think life hacking is a tremendous sort of mainstream act of learning and experimentation with oneself so I like that a lot and then also Lars something I'll ask you and we should sort of talk about this separately in terms of the educate for life project given that I'm trying to set a table like this how do I frame this for other participants in educate for life and how does this fit because I'm pretty familiar with the sprint process how do we work this so that it fits nicely in the sprint process we don't have to answer that now I have the answer excellent I love that I like this pop up your idea about the whole pop up thing that comes into not suddenly but he will be there for 15 minutes or whatever agreed and Jerry will be there he will facilitate a Jerry's brain thing around whatever topic you're working on and then Jerry leaves again and you could do that with every team it's just my thought that'd be cool I'd like that, Judy any thoughts I'm sort of intrigued by the notion I'm going to jump into the chat room about interpersonal compatibility and how that affects learning and there's a funny test called the FIRO-B I don't know if you've heard of that fundamental interpersonal compatibility orientation but it essentially allows for self-assessment along social behaviors of inclusion control and affection and so if you're very individualistic and you don't care about being included that'll affect how you appear to the group how you interact with the group etc it's complicated but it was actually designed for military for compatibility in close quarters like submarines so the teams didn't self-destruct and it turned out to be a very good learning experience for a leadership team to do that exercise with a facilitator because we were misinterpreting each other's actions based on what they meant if we did them and not what it meant when the other person did them so interesting and there's probably a bunch of really interesting angles on this like the knowledge of the presence of the test might affect group dynamics just per se and then there's in thinking fast and slow Kahneman writes about in the introduction he writes about how he was in the Israeli Defense Forces he was part of an elite group of people who were evaluating the next generation of leaders and they would supervise they would observe people in very high stress exercises where they had to make life and death decisions and the group that was observing was rating these people for their future leadership potential and then they did this for years and years somebody did a study on the actual outcomes of those people in the field and then they compared the ratings from the group with the actual outcomes and discovered that there was correlation of NADA and predictive value in this group's assessments of the best leaders in these training situations but that didn't stop this group from continuing to do the same evaluations and rate the leaders they did not take apart this group they just kept doing it it's hilarious it's really good it's part of the introduction to the book and I'm like wow we are stubborn and you know this is off to the side but have you read the book Ender's Game yes in a while it's a fascinating model of interpersonal growth from a child to a leadership position you know you identify with the protagonist and then you read it a second time through and identify with the people who are trying to influence the development of the protagonist it's very multi-layered but it all has to do with different patterns of learning how this fricosis child became a leader through a combination of self-directed and facilitated learning very interesting which might fit with your topic somehow in a weird way exactly cool I don't think there's much to dig into Michael I'm sorry we missed you for the bulk of the call do you have any thoughts as you as you step through the green world well it's the biggest conundrum isn't it how do we know what we don't know and how do we encounter the not knowing of who we don't know before we find out how to know what we might know so I think critical inquiry is the key for me I have to say that some of my grandchildren are engaged in an unschooling experiment at this point and frankly I'm appalled not at the concept but at the practice that is being justified by the you know the community so I'm sort of Scottish in that area show me the cabbage I'm rather didactic so I didn't realise that Scotland was so close to Missouri oh yeah we started it huh the show me state well basically Scots are I mean the invisible hand Madame Smith's invisible hand was that a Scotsman would prefer to keep it locally invested than sending it down to the stock market that was all he said that was his invisible hand full stock that was it an invisible hand would guide him to keep it local you know well I don't think that's a Scottish characteristic particularly just about everywhere it's the same theory mind your own business but his thing was he never wanted bankers on the board they only give you money when you don't need it and they won't give it to you when you do so it was a self-funded company so just my sort of contribution toward wrapping the conversation it was an Adam Smith story which I happen to like which is that Smith and this I get from Melvin Brown Smith basically was funded by the tobacco lords his patrons were the very very wealthy sorry Glaswegians and Glasgow was prosperous because of its trade with the Americas it was the best sheltered port in the British Isles from those damn French and Spaniards so Glasgow gets very prosperous for three commodities sugar, tobacco, and cotton what do these three commodities have in common is that Glasgow? lovely, lovely so those three commodities have one thing in common which is slavery what is the thing that does not factor into Adam Smith's theories of capitalism slavery he ignores the very mechanism of his well yes quite very carefully so here's where I have that in my brain and I'm going to connect it to a thought that I've been curating recently which is my favorite nuggets in my brain I'm going to do an inside Jerry's brain call around this because it's really fun so these are the things that I believe that I've discovered in lots of different corners so the Spanish cult of ham was for outing converts basically which is brilliant, like you go to a Spanish restaurant you were sitting under ham that has not been cooked and is dripping on your head and if you are either Jewish or Muslim and pretended to convert that's terrible and that's from the book The Ornament of the World or Maria Rosa Menocal so anyway there's a whole bunch of things like that that are really really fun so we'll do that some other time but here's my favorite nuggets what's that other one of yours Jerry the sort of outrageous people contrarians so this is my favorite thought in my brain and here I have people like Alice Miller the psychologist Brene Brown who talks about vulnerability Lynn Ostrom and governance of the models of the commons and a bunch of others, cast of thousands George Fox the founder of the Quakers so I should do a contrarian's culture that's a good idea Michael would you be willing to lead a discussion sometime on the the challenge of critical thinking in contemporary society God know I have enough critical capacity to know my limits I'm a very superficial philosopher I wasn't looking for area right discussion I think the absence of critical thinking is one of my hot buttons me too so here's a note for that unquestioning acceptance blind obedience that makes sense so it's funny because when I explain design from trust to people I have to explain I don't mean naive trust I don't mean blind trust I don't mean an assumption that of good intentions by whatever's coming in but I also mean critical thinking serious skepticism sadly missing that was the the pedagology of the Scottish world was very prove it show me your evidence and so on I like Richard Feynman's breakdown of the scientific bullshit the cargo cults Feynman is a fascinating guy I really like him here's a simple parting our cynics frustrated idealists a lot of them are I mean apropos let's leave this on Douglas Rushkoff Jerry you're on he's recently launched a new agenda, a new direction team human on the basis that he's tried money and it doesn't work on systemic reform processes vis-a-vis the financial systems and he's thrown up his hands at it and that's the problem that I see time and time again is that people take a good run at something and their head hurts after a while they don't get a breakthrough they don't get the success so they dismiss it well that doesn't work we're not doing that anymore I think that's a big cultural problem I think it's very deep in North America and particularly in the US Canadians are a bit more flexible but Americans if I may call you that generally tend to sort of think well we did that it's done it's over and I'm a very beneficial assessment there but I'm noticing people abandoning ship I was on a workshop on Tuesday where they were talking about we've had it with prevention we'd better get on with adaption and it was so dismal because frankly they haven't tried their prevention yet they've just tried their own stuff let's try something that works we have a lot a lot of faulty logic, blind reasoning a bunch of sort of mismatched ideas going on the scripts in our heads really often are not working well and part of this was quite intentional because one of my beliefs is that part of what politics tries to do is to put scripts in our heads so that we'll follow their program not the other guys program so part of this is how do we spread how do we create a contagion of critical thinkers who will network together and figure things out at a local level and hopefully that will cascade upward into better solutions, better policies and a citizenry that's trustworthy well I'm sure it's at the local level I'm sure it's not at the time space differentiated heads in space in the world that we're in right now for I think you have more frequency you have a higher demand on authenticity in the local scene in a way what internet has done over the last 20-30 years is it sucked us all out of the local because it's so much better out there on the long tail and I'd really like to see all this coming down and local local is good local is really good it's nothing else we are all local relative to the cynicism as a result of frustrated idealism the thing I was just looking for in my brain that apparently I did not put in is that a lot of conservatives today in particular the neocons were Eugene McCarthy liberals they campaigned for McCarthy back in the day in Wisconsin they were totally into the liberal point of view and something about the 1960s destroyed their brains and flipped them to the other side politically philosophically this is like true with multiple of the neocons they started liberal and they flipped they got cynical, they got burned, whatever it was it was the summer of love, I don't know what it was but something in the 60s broke their faith in humanity and switched their reasoning or the scripts in their heads around this I'm very intrigued by this I just finished reading Red and Blue States by Steve Kornacki which is a really good history of Gingrich and Clinton and the politics of personal destruction and how political discourse got so blighted a lot of it really rests at the foot of Newt Gingrich who systematically went and destroyed the two sides ability to talk to each other so anyway, lots of things we should let Lars get some sleep any last thoughts Lars? I just want to say thank you so much for hanging out with me on a Friday night it's been wonderful to see you all Michael, we didn't have much time here together but some other time, yeah always another chance and Lars, if you ever want to build an inside Jerry's brain call around one or both of your kids, happy to do that on any topic they'd like cool, cool, let's do that it would be wonderful to go across the generations that way yes, it would, that would be amazing if you want to show them what a call is like and mention it, I'd be happy cool, done deal alright kids, have a great weekend, thank you have a good weekend, very good have a good one, bye bye everybody