 So first of all, it has to be data oriented in that sense. It has to be something that is a spreadsheet, is a database, is something like that. And obviously it has to come from an appropriate source. So once you have that, then we're looking at that data and we're trying to think, okay, obviously no one wants to read a 200 page report. Nobody wants to be handed a giant spreadsheet and be like, here, look at this and try and figure out what's going on, right? Like that's just not the way that people operate, right? So people are looking for something that catches their eye because the first thing that you have to do is you have to win their attention, right? So we have to figure out what is the thing that's gonna catch their eye. And once you have their attention, what do you hit them with, right? So we're looking for facts. We're looking for data that stands out in that way. And once we have the item that we think can do that, then we build a framework around that. We build a media angle around that. So it's all about winning people's attention, holding their attention. Once you have their attention, you have to hit them with something that delivers insight and gets them to keep reading and keep looking. And so we're really just building a process around that. So we're looking at that to try and create that or stimulate that curiosity in people so that you have this fact or you have this initial visualization that captures people's attention and gets them to want to learn more and gets them, rather than being stuck in your bubble and just consuming what is coming your way, you actually wanna actively seek out more information so that you can learn more on the subject. For me and from our company's perspective, our view is basically like, we're trying to take things that are complex and make them simple. Generally speaking, it's about stuff that's future looking and it's stuff that relates to if you're an investor, it's your portfolio or if you're in business, it's your company's future. If you're an entrepreneur, it's how you need to build your business for the future or that kind of stuff, right? So it's like, what can we help people with in terms of the decisions they make now with respect to their future? So the speed of technological change is important. The speed of economic change is important. So is GDP per capita increasing or decreasing and why is trade increasing or decreasing? So looking at those factors, business segments generally, right? So is this particular industry taking off something like cannabis, right? Is this industry taking off or is it going to hit a lull? And so people are trying to figure out what opportunities there are in the future based on these emerging industries or emerging countries or what have you and you have to know if they're for real or not. So yeah, it's the rate of change but it's across a wide spectrum of different categories. Because that's, it's something that's measurable and it's also something that we can visualize, right? So from that perspective, and that's kind of like, yeah, that's the number one thing that we'd be looking at. Someone's opinion may contradict yours. Where's my friend Allen? It's all about your perspective. Who are we and what is the nature of this reality? Five, four, three, two. What's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Allen Sacian. We are still onsite in the beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada. We are now going to be talking about data visualization and so much more. We have Jeff Desjardais joining us on the show. Hi, Jeff. Hey, thanks for having me. Thanks for coming on the program. I'm so pumped for our conversation. Jeff is founder and editor-in-chief at Visual Capitalist, which is a digital media company that exclusively publishes rich visual content on investing and business. With annual user growth doubling each year, Visual Capitalist reaches over two million people per month with clients such as McKinsey, BlackRock, the UN and the World Bank. I love what you guys do. I love the way you make these rich data visualizations. It is so important to take the complexity of this world that we find ourselves and try and make it relatable for people and to try and inspire them towards their own self-actualization, towards our eradication of ignorance. And you guys do that and you do it across a myriad of fields, which is another thing that I find super inspirational as our show is very polymathic like that as well. Jeff, this has been going on nine years now. You guys have covered such a wide array of topics. You guys have 21 people in staff, designers, researchers. I mean, it's so cool seeing what you guys have produced. So I wanna start things off by asking you about how you guys even find what to figure out to show in the complexity of the world. There's so many things, there's so much information, actually being able to structure that and disseminate it. Teach us about that style of process and also how it changed from nine years ago until now. Yeah, wow. So I think that that process started as something that was really more of a gut instinct than anything else. So when we started and how we got to where we are today, it was kind of finding things that we thought were particularly interesting or that really helped people get that little bit of insight that could be either water cooler talk at the office or it's the thing that inspires them to do the next big thing, right? And getting people to have that little tidbit of information that they can now talk about, whether it's that fact or that insight or whatever it is, we wanted to deliver that on a daily basis to people. And so that's, it's changed over time, which is weird. It was very intuitive to begin with and we were just kind of looking at what was catching our eye, what was something that were like, when you heard that fact, you're like, wow, that's something that really inspired me or got me to think. And over time, we've been working to codify how we come up with that. And because now we have a bigger team and so we have other people that have to be coming up with this stuff on a daily basis as well. It can't be me or someone like Nick Routley who's our managing editor. We can't be coming up with it all the time. We have to be, as to be something that's systemic throughout the organization where we're all looking for that kind of information. So how has that changed over time and what is it like today? That's an interesting question. And I think that probably the best way to do it would be to think about it in terms of data, which is how we always think about things, right? So things that are very qualitative or things that are opinions or things that are not looking at it from a quantifiable independent perspective. For those items, they just don't really work with our process. So first of all, it has to be data oriented in that sense. That has to be something that is a spreadsheet, is a database, is something like that. And obviously it has to come from an appropriate source. So once you have that, then we're looking at that data and we're trying to think, okay, obviously no one wants to read a 200 page report. Nobody wants to be handed a giant spreadsheet and be like, here, look at this and try and figure out what's going on, right? Like that's just not the way that people operate, right? So people are looking for something that catches their eye because the first thing that you have to do is you have to win their attention, right? So we have to figure out what is the thing that's gonna catch their eye. And once you have their attention, what do you hit them with, right? So we're looking for facts. We're looking for data that stands out in that way. And once we have the item that we think can do that, then we build a framework around that. We build an immediate angle around that. So it's all about winning people's attention, holding their attention. Once you have their attention, you have to hit them with something that delivers insight and gets them to keep reading and keep looking. And so we're really just building a process around that. I love how you put it from the perspective of this. When you give them some sort of data visualization, it's about catalyzing some sort of inspiration or further awakening or realization that then makes it fun for them to go and share it with other people to say that, hey, I now know this. It's become part of my knowledge base. And now I share it with other people and they go, wow, I didn't know that. And it makes for a more aware world, a more factual world, a world where ignorance can decrease at a more rapid rate and collective objective knowledge can increase at a more rapid pace, which is extremely needed. And then I also like how you put it how through the evolution of visual capitalists, there's been a process where you guys have to figure out, it's been, you are a part of the attention economy as are we and it's not only people see that you're here to catalyze that inspiration and that awakening, so they want to work with you, they want to watch what you're doing, but furthermore is you do have to figure out how to make it so that this 100 page report on a specific topic, you do what we do in many ways, which is you have to parse it for the most profound, most awakening stats. And then you have to visualize, you have to visually represent it for people in a way where they go, wow, that was good. And there's so many different ways to visually represent it. And I would love for you to actually explain those ways as many people just see like pie charts as like such a common mathematical representation, bar graphs, there's many of these different ways to represent data. And infographics have become really popular where it's multiple percentages with visualizations along the way. And so let's have you explain the process of when you do encounter something that's super profound and awakening, you want to then parse it, you want to then represent that data and how do you pick what medium to represent it as? Yeah, that's a great question. And the answer really varies depending on what type of information it is and what the subject matter is and how you want to get that message out to people. So for us, lately we're trending towards doing things that are more, I mean in the social media world where you're just looking at something on Instagram or a tweet or whatever, like you really need to capture people's attention with that thing. You can't expect something that's kind of, you know, just a part of something bigger to be what drives people in to read more and implores them to examine a topic deeper. So what we're looking for is first of all, what is that one tidbit that we can pull that's going to capture people's attention? To do that, I think that it's really an examination of what fact is going to be something that triggers something in someone's mind, that triggers insight or gets them thinking or it's something that they've never heard before. And to figure that out, you have to really have a good sense of the media environment, you have to have a sense of who your audience is. And as I said at first, that was a gauge that was fairly intuitive that I was operating on, which was like, okay, I think that our audience is going to be really surprised to learn that, for example, the median age on all continents, when you look at that, the median age of Africa is 18 years old. That's a crazy fact, right? And when you look at something like that, for me, it just jumps off the page. And I'm like, if we show this in an appropriate way, for example, the way that we did show that is we used colors to represent the scale of median age across all the different continents. And of course, Africa stands out by its color. Compared to about 35 or so as the median age. And Europe is even older, it's in the 40s. And so you have this color spectrum where everything is 30s and 40s and then you have one that clearly stands out. And so we're thinking about it, not only in terms of the fact that is important, but also when we visualize it, how are we gonna pull that out? And what devices can we use? Which as you alluded to, we have a variety of different visual things that we can leverage. So are we putting this in a specific type of chart or are we using a map or are we using a particular color scheme that's gonna help us show this thing? What are the different elements of storytelling that we can implore to tell this, right? So are we, is it going to be a narrative or is it going to be something that has characters or archetypes? Or how are we gonna actually show this from a storytelling perspective as well? So we're trying to put all these different pieces of the puzzle together. And at the end of the day, if we do it right and if we do it the best possible way, it's going to be in the case of that, the map on median age, it's gonna be something that stands out and you're like, holy crap, I now see that, you know, not only have you learned this fact about Africa, but it actually really tickles your imagination and now you're like, okay, well, what does that mean for the world? What does that mean for the future of society and what does that mean for our perspective? What does that mean for the future of business? So we're looking at that to try and create that or stimulate that curiosity in people so that you have this fact or you have this initial visualization that captures people's attention and gets them to want to learn more and gets them, rather than being stuck in your bubble and just consuming what is coming your way, you actually want to actively seek out more information so that you can learn more on the subject. I really appreciate how you take something that can be written as a fact of Africa and median age 18 and just have that be just a message that goes out, which maybe has a chance of sticking in people's essence at maybe one or two and 10, let's say, whatever, just as a, let's play with these numbers. But then when you add the actual visualization component of showing that they are the color, let's say light green on the map and then you have these colors of like darker red in Europe and US and in America's Asia, et cetera. And then people see that, wow, and then you have that spectrum that shows them that gradient of coloration. It lands it maybe in three out of 10 or four out of 10 people just with the visual in addition to it. So you're already, you know- With the text. With the text, exact. The visual plus the text can land it in more people's essence as it will make it better for them to retain it, share it with people down the line. So that component being crucial. And then also there is a there's a storytelling component to it which is it's maybe not only about selling it logically but selling it emotionally. And so it's kind of like, can you pair together the brain with the heart? And I really like this way of viewing it because it can be in a sense something along the lines of, you know, Africa's median age being 18 and then comma, how do we, how are they going to catalyze the future? Something like that. Which then kind of gets people excited about, well, interesting. Well, then how are they going to catalyze the future then? How is that big imagination explosion going to affect the rest of our world? And then that kind of hits the heart side of things. Right, hitting both sides is really important, right? Because it's all about how people learn and absorb information. And the truth is that we do it in so many different ways and people are all very different, right? So we know, and it's our business that, you know, 65% of people are visual learners, right? And so that's the majority of people. And our thought process is that the majority of people are actually not getting most of their information in the way that's best for them to learn. Which is actually really tragic, right? If we want everybody to learn and to pick up as much information as possible, it needs to be in a format that they're gonna pick it up in. And if all we're giving them is like, here's a long report, read it. Man, we've all been to high school, right? How many people in high school are people that are going to learn that way, right? A lot of people learn by doing. A lot of people learn by visuals. A lot of people will learn by audio, a podcast, right? So you have to have different things and different formats for people. And so for us, it's about stimulating that visual format for that large chunk of the population that needs to learn that way. And you're right, you can add in other elements to it. It doesn't have to be purely data. Data can be a tool and it can be a really powerful tool. In a lot of situations, it might not be the best way to lead a story. Other ways, or maybe you wanna create context around something and data isn't the appropriate way to do it. Maybe it's instead a narrative or storytelling or maybe it's asking a question. Yes, yes. I like that. So then the combination of the stat with the combination of the visualization with the combination of the story, the heart, component could land in five out of 10 peoples. Yeah, and it could resonate with that many more people just by curating the content in a way that catalyzes the deepest amount of awareness shift, which is ideally what we want to see happen with the content around the world in creating more signal. I mean, we talk about this so much on the program, but just the importance of taking these hour-long conversations and compressing them into knowledge graphs and having one for every single episode. These are things that we want to do as we scale and that by doing that, you have this medium that is, okay, if you do want to watch an hour-long conversation on the subject, do it. If you want to explore the couple minute infographic knowledge graph on what was discussed, it's there as well. There's a highlight reel of a couple minutes. And so you have all these different ways of exploring the content in that subject because maybe you only wanna watch the five minute highlight reel on the biotech episode, but then you wanna watch the whole hour on the data visualization, but then you only wanna read the infographic on the blockchain conversation that happened last week. So that's another big part to this, which I think you guys do add a good amount of story. Is it on every single one of the posts that you make? You add your own researchers and visualizers have a body of text in addition, yeah. Yeah, and one other interesting thing about that as well is when you're looking at producing a piece of content, as you know, it's not only about that big piece of content, it's about chopping it up and creating different ways to access that content. And what's really useful I think about some of the stuff that we're able to do is we're able to take something that is like a 200 page report somewhere else, condense it into that five minute read, and then if someone wants to just like, okay, I don't wanna commit all this time to reading this giant report, but I can commit five minutes to read this quick infographic that explains this complex subject. The great thing about that is that you're hopefully going to stimulate a percentage of that population that's looking at that and they're gonna be like, you know what, actually I might wanna read the larger report because this is a subject I'm now interested in and I now have that, I'm now an active learner and I wanna go and learn more about it. Yeah, yep. Man, this has so much to do with efficacy of knowledge dissemination. I love that. And we have a lot to explore as well that I'm looking forward to talking to you guys about after our convo. I wanna touch on, there seems to be so much knowledge to pick to condense and further disseminate and given the sheer breadth and depth that has been unleashed with the information technology age, how are you guys even picking? Yeah, so where can you start on that question, right? It's, I mean, the reason that we exist in the first place is I think that there is a lot of, not only a lot of information and topics to cover, but there's also a general clutter of information or misinformation or whatever you wanna call it, stuff that is not actually super useful. And so where we start? So I think that for me and from our companies personally and from our perspective, our view is basically like, we're trying to take things that are complex and make them simple. Generally speaking, it's about stuff that's future looking and it's stuff that relates to, if you're an investor, it's your portfolio or if you're in business, it's your company's future. If you're an entrepreneur, it's how you need to build your business for the future or that kind of stuff, right? So it's like, what can we help people with in terms of the decisions they make now with respect to their future? And so the things that we choose are things that we think can play into that. So for example, if you're an investor, how the demographics of the world are shifting in the longterm actually is a really important thing for you, right? It affects everything because that means everything from the amount of old people versus young people is gonna play a role in terms of the solvency of governments, right? If you have too many dependents and not enough working population, that's gonna create all kinds of problems, right? Or if you have a ton of young people and few old people, that's also gonna play out in your economy as well. So this is gonna have different impacts in different places. Or as far as demographics go, things like immigration and things like that have an impact too. So understanding what's happening globally with that will empower you to make better decisions as an investor. Or if you're leading a company, you also need to know what's going on with that too, right? Because what your next move is gonna depend on, like do I move into the Indian market? Do I move into the German market? Like you need to have a sense of what's happening there, right? And so the future-looking aspect there is really important. So demographics is an example of a topic that we weigh into a lot. But there's many others as well. But the ultimate question is like how does this topic, is it something that's applicable on a global basis to people that they need to know for this stuff? Is it something that is going to have profound effects on doing business or making decisions? Is it something that you can do something about? Because if it's something that's changing and you can't actually make changes in your life or portfolio to deal with it, then it's kind of a moot point. So yeah, we're looking at those kind of things to try and figure out what are these forces that we're going to that are gonna influence the future and then what is the data around those forces that is the most poignant? Whoa, all right. So we have where you started us off with taking what is the continuation of our initial earlier conversations about having this objective dissemination of crucial knowledge that is completely against the streams of misinformation, propaganda. I mean, the Internet Research Agency, there's all of these places that have deep roots in trying to disseminate things that are in a sense evil or bad or trying to catalyze harm in some ways. And then you have these great sources that need to be tried to propped up onto pedestals around the world. And we like talking about, yes, visual capitalist, yes, our show, yes, in a nutshell. There's all these other great channels that are trying to do their absolute best to get you content around awakening that's really, really solid data that's being compressed and shared with you. But then this next point that you bring up, which is that how do you do things like show where entrepreneurs or scientists or artists or other people from around the world, investors, how can you show them what is coming up that is exciting next? And because it's not only about showing these trends from where you see 2020 heading, where you see the future heading in the roaring 2020s that we're about to approach with all of the internet of things, blockchain and crypto, neuro tech, biotech, AR, VR. I mean, it's all over the place, quantum computing where things are heading. And so you gotta show them that angle so you have to be aware of all of those different fields and how they're changing the landscape, but also like you indicated demographics, am I gonna be taking my company next or making investments next into Germany or India? And how do I know based on the demographics in those regions and something that's also complex to know is that you do have to have some sort of an idea of the zeitgeist of those countries because in India a lot of young people right now are using a very Gen Z-esque platform called TikTok. And so you gotta know like, well maybe it's important to teach the companies that are trying to market into India about how to make 15 second videos. Dancing videos. Dancing videos. So yeah, so this whole process, you gotta know about the zeitgeist of that country. I mean, there's so many things. Of course there's Hinduism and there's Sikhism there's all of these also spiritual and religious sorts of things that are also very important to consider what are the main exports of Germany versus the main exports or imports of these countries of India. Yeah, I mean there's a lot of information to take into consideration, right? The, I mean we don't really see ourselves as a group that's trying to get all of that information in one place. I think that's more of a Wikipedia or Google's mission or something like that, right? But what I think we can do is I think we can we can add some pressure and pull on that lever that gets people looking in the right place, right? We can help people find, when you're looking at an 80-20 rule or something like that for like, of all the things that you mentioned about India and Germany, which of those things actually matter, right? For someone that's looking at making an investment or going into business there, right? There's certain things, that 20% that's gonna make the 80% of the difference, right? So we can use our ability to parse information and to visualize it and to hopefully show some of those areas that are particularly interesting. That's like, this is what matters here and you should try and learn more. Before you do anything else, you should learn more about that. So we can direct people into the right places by highlighting information that is particularly poignant. Yeah, I like the focus on that Pareto that 80-20, that's so crucial. Well you can't do everything, right? And also if we try to go too far into the weeds, then people are gonna be like, well what are you talking about, right? You're talking about this random subject in this random country and it doesn't really have an effect on my day-to-day life or it doesn't have an effect on my future necessarily. So you have to, we have to figure out which of these items are gonna be the most interesting and most compelling to people and also what's going to have the biggest effect on the future. Okay, so given the subject of business and investing and demographics of a rapidly changing information technology world, what do you guys look for in terms of signal, in terms of that 20% that you're going to visualize for people? Yeah, I think generally speaking, the best signals are going to be business signals, right? So growth, like the rate of change of something. So the rate of change of population is going to be very linked to what kinds of opportunities are gonna be there and what's happening in the business world there, right? A country that's depopulating is gonna be a very different situation than a country that is doubling in population, right? Or, so percentage growth is one thing obviously, I think. A rate of automation. Sure, yeah, no, absolutely, yeah. So if you're looking at it from the technological point of view, the rate of automation is going to be a big component of that when you look at places like Korea or Japan or what have you. I mean, it's going to be ultimately a very different society and situation than it is going to be in somewhere that's where everything is manually done, right? And so those have different implications for investors and for business people and for people and for society at large, right? Yeah, so when looking at business, it seems like your number one is population. Well, like rate of. Demographics, rate of change in terms of that. Yeah, rate of change in general, right? Rate of change in general. Okay, I see. Number one is rate of change and then under rate of change is kind of like demographics. Correct, yeah, different categories. Different categories. So rate of change is kind of like demographics as people are the most, in a sense, valuable way of understanding rate of change. Like again, is population decreasing or increasing? What is the rate of change that it is increasing or decreasing at? Because these are the people that are going to be engaged in the world that are going to be the ones that are trying to create more value in that country, that are going to be bringing their ideas into that country, et cetera, into the world. So then there's that as a measurement of like economic success and stuff like that. But then the next thing that could be under this rate of change is like how quickly technology's evolving in that country. Yeah, so the speed of technological change is important. The speed of economic change is important. So is GDP per capita increasing or decreasing? And why is trade increasing or decreasing? So looking at those factors, business segments generally. So is this particular industry taking off something like cannabis? Is this industry taking off? Or is it going to hit a lull? And so people are trying to figure out what opportunities there are in the future based on these emerging industries or emerging countries or what have you. And you have to know if they're for real or not. So yeah, it's the rate of change, but it's across a wide spectrum of different categories. Because it's something that's measurable. And it's also something that we can visualize, right? So from that perspective, and that's kind of like, yeah, that's the number one thing that we'd be looking at. Yeah, I like the ways of visualizing where emerging markets are heading. Because it gives us both a insight into the importance of figuring out the best ways, I think, to democratize the fruits of those emerging markets. Otherwise, we have the same scenarios where over 50% of all new wealth that is created goes to the top 1%, which is this continuous process that we're all experiencing. But then we don't mimic nature in the sense that these large trees are sequestering carbon and nutrients and then distributing them across roots and fungal systems to smaller trees and seedlings. That same process is very clearly not happening in our wealth inequality scenario. And so I really like this idea of, can we get more people to figure out ways of microfinancing the emerging markets and then having it so that people can just put $100 into those emerging markets and then get the fruits from that or have inclusive stakeholders as the social contract that makes it so that environments and cities and future generations actually get on pieces of the pie, as well. I like how you talked about GDP and trade in that sense, which are economic measurements, but they also don't necessarily take into account the measurement of someone's spiritual enlightenment or their own well-being and health. So this is also tough because we want to try and visualize components like that. So this is why we talk about on the program that something along the lines of, that takes the full biometric readout of your level of spiritual enlightenment, which may be something around EEG, EKG, your microbiome, et cetera. And could potentially give us an idea of how many of these 1,500 billionaires and global ruling elite that run countries and the big companies, et cetera, how many of them actually have a deep sense of interconnectedness, of unconditional love, of deep presence, versus egotistical tendencies and self-dealing tendencies. And so I'd love to see data being visualized in that regard as well because it's great to see yes, investing, yes, business, yes. At the same time, can we also see the level of spiritual actualization that this planet has and the deep importance of that moving forward to make sure there's less suffering, make sure there's more sharing and more love and compassion. Yeah, so one interesting area of overlap is that, and I don't think I would equate it to that spiritual element 100%, but I do think that, like we do visualize a lot of data around things like happiness, right? So, and I think happiness is going to be as sort of, it's as universal of a measure of that stuff as you can have, because I think when you talk about spirituality, I think people are gonna think about that in different ways, right? People of different religious faiths or people that are people on the meditation side of things, I think all of these people will interpret that as a different kind of thing, right? Whereas I think happiness is a pretty universal thing where you can say, okay, are you happy? Yes or no, right? And I think whether you talk to someone from Guatemala or if you talk to someone from Russia, like, are you happy or sad? I think even given different cultures and language, I think these are gonna be fairly, it's not gonna be perfect, but it'll be fairly universal terms, right? And so what's interesting is that we have looked at things like what are the happiest countries in the world? What relation is there between happiness and wealth or GDP per capita, things like that? And it's not going all of the way to what you're suggesting, but it's a way to, it's a framework to help begin to understand it and to understand it from a perspective that at least has that somewhat quantifiable aspect to it and there's some really interesting results actually, which is that in terms of GDP per capita, right, which is the amount of economic production per person in a country, that's actually linked to happiness up till a certain point, right? So once you get people to a certain point, a certain amount of GDP per capita, that actually raises their happiness levels significantly. This is- Clean water. This is obvious, right? Shelter, food. When you think of it, it's pretty obvious, right? Which is like- Exactly, having access to the most basic things, the most essential things, the very like bottom parts of the sort of like pyramid of needs, right? That you have to go through, like Maslow's hierarchy kind of thing. I mean, like if you can provide those basic things, that's gonna get you to sort of like medium level of contentness. And then after that, it's, as you know, it's like self-actualization and things like that that are gonna be sort of that next thing that you have to get to, right? So that's where things start splitting off, right? Which is like, once you get to that minimum level of happiness that you can get to from material stuff, now this giant spectrum of countries that are all over the place in terms of happiness, and some that like actually punch above their weight and many that punch below their weight respective to where they are on the economic spectrum. Latin America actually is really well known for punching above their weight in terms of like their happiness level is much higher than you would predict based on GDP per capita, which is interesting because then you have to ask yourself what kind of cultural norms and what kind of trends in Latin America are contributing to that. Are there things we can learn from that and apply to other cultures and or your own life, right, to be happier? Yeah, versus the, and also the seeing the opposite where GDP per capita can be high, but levels of happiness and wellbeing are low, which makes it feel like there's something about the- Is there's a disconnect? There's a disconnect and the matrix environments that we've built, I think maybe the ones to blame in that sense because, you know, looking behind this backdrop of that we have on the program today, we have the concrete jungle of downtown Vancouver here. And as beautiful as it is to have these wealth creation machines that are cities, we also understand deeply that there are literally if you think about nature per capita in metropolises, it's shit, it's crap, it's bad, it's poor, it's very low. We don't have our beautiful interconnection and interdependence with water present here, with trees, with animals, with other plants, with things that we are deeply interconnected with. That's why light pollution so we can't see our beautiful stars. There are so many aspects to this that take us away from the happiness and the wellbeing so that it makes it seem like, yes, we can take these things from, you know, why, what are the philosophies, the morals and the ethics of places like Latin America where they have a higher level of happiness and wellbeing than their GDP per capita indicates? Well, what can we find out from that? But also, what can we find out from areas that have lower levels of happiness and wellbeing? And I think that it's probably feelings of a lack of self-actualization, lack of feelings of separation, lack of feelings of interconnectedness. Being stuck in a day-to-day grind, basically, I think is a big factor as well. I think a lot of people in cities, regardless of whether in New York or whether you're in San Antonio, I think that it's a lot of people that live in cities are sort of on that. How do you escape that day-to-day? Okay, you wake up, go to work, do your thing, come back, turn on TV, go to bed, wake up, go to work, do your thing. That's hard, right? How do you escape that? So I think that's totally a question that's worth asking, which is what are the ways, on both sides of the spectrum, why is Latin America happier than you would guess and why are certain places, and certainly in Western economies, there are certain ones where they're less happy than you would expect. What are the differences? What is the delta? And if you can determine what those things are, culturally, then there's something that you can apply that information. Yes, yes. I think this speaks again very highly to the importance of figuring out these variables that are influencing the specific trends that we're talking about in this last point. And it does take a lot of skill. It takes a lot of nuance, it takes a lot of multivariability analysis. You can't try and think in binary terms here. There is, you can't have cognitive bias or cognitive ease happening. This is gonna take a lot of cognitive resources and a lot of patience. It feels a lot like, I relate this point a lot to archaeology and anthropology in the sense that we have very deep species amnesia. We struggle with understanding that just a hundred years ago, we discovered the code of Hammurabi. We just discovered something that's almost 4,000 years old that gives us a deep understanding of the first primordial ideas of constitution and what it was like to try and codify an evolving city of people. And think about how many more things like that are buried across the planet. And so it's gonna take a long time for us to focus our resources on excavating out those specific things in order for us to gain a better nuance and multivariate view of what our species was actually like in the evolutionary process. And so if you're on the feeds every single day and you're looking at these instant posts from seven minutes ago, someone post some news article, really think about how much time they spent excavating out the data from that. Because the 24 seven news cycle and the click baby-esque mentalities of the attention economy business plans are not focused on nuance and multivariability in the gray area and what's gonna take you more cognitive resources and what's gonna take them more time to research and visualize. Whereas places like visual capitalist simulation, we're trying to do our best to take that, that longer period of time to come up with the most important gray area and nuance and visualize it in ways that make you have a better understanding of the reality that we're in. Those are two, that in a sense is black and white. That is very binary, the difference between those two things. Of course there is some gray area, but really it's like, are your sources that you're looking at today, deeply nuanced, complex, taking their time, visualizing it in a specific way or are they just trying to feed you something that you click on in a 24 seven news cycle? You know, I looked through your YouTube feed and I was a little bit surprised. I didn't find any outrage in there. You know, that's how you get clicks. I don't know if you knew that, but I was looking through and it was a little bit disappointing to see that clearly you don't understand today's modern economy. But yes, no, I mean, if you're not geared towards that and if you're not geared towards those clicks, then hopefully you're on the others. And you know, I think we found a bit of a way to, I think we've been lucky in the way that we've been able to sort of hack that side of things, which is like the nuance, complex, hard to understand that side of the coin is the way worse end to be on if you're trying to make a business of it, right? It's really hard and I think that you have to use everything you have in your toolkit to get that information out in a way that actually has some element of, you know, word of mouth spread to it or you capture someone's imagination. I wanna take this analogy where you like, you take what you basically created as this beautiful data representation or nuanced data representation at Visual Capitalist, but then what you do is this multivariate long process that you took with this, you find again, just like the best way to story tell it and given the attention economy, given that what is the one graphic that we wanna add to the poster, what is the one sentence that hits both brain and heart in the poster. And we say that when we develop stuff too, right? Because we, our writers spend so much time figuring out the topic that they're, they go through all the research, they go through all the topic and then you have our design side and they spend so much time designing the whole thing. But at the end of the day, there's this, there is this information economy element to it, which is like, I always tell them that like 50% of the outcome of a post that we're creating is basically going to be determined by what is the title of the post? What is the image that shows up when you see it on an email blast or in social media or whatever? And what is your description of that, right? And it's sad to say, but that, those three things have a huge, they determine the predictability of like whether this thing is going to have a million views or whether it's gonna have 10,000 views. And in our business, we want to skew things towards getting more eyeballs on things than fewer, right? And of course we do a lot of things because we just find them interesting and we wanna get some eyeballs on them as well, right? But so trying to, how do you do that balance, right? And so the way that we frame something is hugely important in terms of getting eyeballs on that so that more people can learn about that subject. And yeah, it's hard. And it's one of the ways that we've been able to sort of hack into the, that it's not the outrage side of things, but it's certainly the attention span, social media side of things, which I think that yeah, people want to be outraged and people find ways to be outraged about our things anyways, even though they're like very data-driven, which actually is one of the most mind-boggling things that we experience on a day-to-day basis because we get emails all over the place that's like, why did you color this country, this color? And like, don't you know that this color represents something? It's like, okay, well, whatever, I don't know. Like it's just a color scheme, right? So there's all kinds of funny stuff there, but no, I mean, but we try and hack at the best that we can so that we can get some of the best of both worlds, right? Maybe in a way it's viewing maybe some of the more cancerous essences of the attention economy as one disgusting way of doing it. And then it's viewing some of the more, these are like strategic, it's tactfulness is what it is. It's compression, it's synthesis and dissemination. And rather than a click-baity cancerous manipulation propaganda, on this side it's like, we're trying to catalyze enough enlightenment around the world that eradicates suffering faster, that increases objective truth faster, that makes it so that people are able to collectively prosper faster. And so that's the side that we're coming at. And I like being able to distinctively view those things because I think it's becoming very clear, very fast that people are experiencing the death of mainstream media and the rise of independent media, but it has to be, not only yes, being catalyzed by the, it is being catalyzed by the giants of distribution in many ways, but to be able to patron those independent media organizations, if you do believe in them, is very important. Visual capitalist just, you guys just sold out your first book, Visualizing Change, which is epic that you guys had a sell out for the first book. But you and I were talking about this before we started and you have a new book coming out in 2020 as well, which we're very pumped for. But we were just talking about this before we started, all that data from Visualizing Change was from 2018 and what happens in the exponential technology information age is that 90% of all new data is created in these most recent two years. And then, so you guys have to be looking at basically the end of projecting towards like the end of 2020 as you're trying to make the next book. Yeah, the best aspects of Visualizing Change are the ones that are either timeless. So like we did a couple of things that are historical. So those are timeless. Thank God, right? Other things that are projecting the future out to something like 2030, like some of those things are pretty good too. But anything that's talking about data this year, last year, last couple of years, it all feels 100% out of date right now when I read through it, which is why we decide not to print additional copies of it. But yeah, it's all driven by the speed of technological change is definitely one aspect of it. I think also having data from two years ago or even one year ago is just not optimal if you're trying to make decisions about something. And also the trends and the focuses that people care about have changed a little bit too, right? The zeitgeist, I guess you could describe it as like the feeling of what's important and what's not important. I think there's certain aspects of the book that I already feel a couple of years down the line are not as important as they were at that time. And so how do you, when you're a data-focused company, how do you, and each thing is something that can go out of date, how do you navigate that, right? It's an interesting question, which in the next book that we do, I think we're going to be trying to optimize for that, which is like, how do we focus on data that's going to be relevant for the next five years? Yes. And there are projections out there done by a lot of great organizations and companies that I think they could lend that data to us that I think would be good for accomplishing that. So look forward to the next, and we knew this would be a challenge with our first book. As we put it together, we knew, oh man, this is going to feel out of date in five years for sure. But it actually felt, it was like only a couple of years before it felt out of date. So that's mind-boggling to me. Now let's have you give a couple examples of what is data that is historically timeless that you're able to visualize. And then versus data that is 2016, 17, 18, even 19-esque data. We see this today where it's very almost obsolete in a sense to be talking about what was happening with the social media companies and the election and all that type of stuff. It's already kind of like, ah, that's what's happening now. Versus what is being projected out to like 2030s where everyone's talking about, everyone's going to have AR glasses, we're all going to be connected to 5G all time, blah, blah, blah. So how do you guys, yeah, let's talk about those three different categories. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, so one of the most interesting things when you're looking back at this previous book that we did and some of the data sets that I think have not been timeless, one of them that really stands out is we have a visualization in there about the number of ICOs for cryptocurrency that occurred over the course of, I don't know, maybe it was over 2017 or 2018 or whenever there was sort of that boom happening. And now not only is, like the feeling about crypto is already different, right? People are thinking about the blockchain, but they're thinking about the blockchain in terms of like how it's going to affect the future of business and society. And not as much about the investment side of all these ICOs happening and people throwing money in this new, a new white paper for a new cryptocurrency and all that kind of stuff, right? So that's kind of just disappeared off the radar. And not only has the ICO become less relevant now because of like token offerings and like the whole ecosystem has basically evolved. So not only are they not happening but they're not even really relevant anymore. And so then the question is like when you're looking back at this data from that particular year, is it even useful at all anymore? Unless if you're looking specifically at what happened that year, I don't think it's useful in any context. So that's an example of something that did not stand the test of time. And so it's like, okay, no more stuff like that, right? Let's cut that in the next book. But when you look at something like, okay, so maybe world debt showing that in terms of dollar terms and showing that in terms of debt as a percent of GDP and that kind of thing. World debt changes sort of fast, but not that fast. Whether it's, so we did one a couple of years ago and it was at, so government debt was at 60 trillion. We did it this year and it was at up to 69 trillion. So yeah, there's a difference there over the two or three years, but it's not a game-changing difference. And then when you look at debt to GDP of different countries, there's a couple of countries that change, but for the most part, the US is hanging at 104% debt to GDP. Other Western nations are around the amount that they were at before. Japan is still the biggest in terms of debt to GDP. So when you look at all these things, they haven't really changed that much over that period of time. So something like that, I would be a lot more confident. Make sure that we're getting the very latest data before publishing. And then if you look at that three years from now, four years from now, it's still gonna be approximately the same unless some cataclysmic world event happens where it changes that, right? So in instances like that, you can be a little bit more sure that it's gonna be the same. And then here's the thing, is if you're talking about something that's fast-moving, like crypto, and you're talking about something that's slower-moving like debt, how do you capture something that's fast-moving but, but you can still timeless and you can still predict out that's going to be interesting. So that's the toughest area to deal with. So with something like that, I mean, you really have to be looking at, I guess, you have to be able to have, I guess, like historical precedents for something like that happening and like a comparison that you're looking at this topic and you're like, yeah, I can see that growing and growing and growing. So cannabis is an interesting one, right? So cannabis is interesting in that, like alcohol, it had a period where you weren't allowed to buy or sell any, right? Which obviously that happened a lot earlier for the alcohol situation, but it is analogous to the cannabis situation in that it was black market for a long time and then it all of a sudden emerged into a legal market or it's emerging into a legal market. And so there is some precedent there and you can make that comparison back to booze and the early 1900s and that kind of stuff. So stuff like that is interesting in that it's emerging, it's new, it's going to be a big difference maker in terms of it's gonna have an impact on the world, but when you look at it, you have the feeling that it's not gonna go anywhere, it's not gonna disappear off the face of the earth like ICOs did, it's going to keep going and it's going to follow that historical precedent in some shape or form where it's going to, as society continues to become more accepting of it, as governments are pressured to be forced to be more accepting of cannabis use and things like that, like it's hard to see that momentum reversing direction, right? What would have to happen for it to reverse direction? Something crazy would have to happen, right? So I think something like that is a good example of something that's not only emerging, but it's also something that is unlikely to revert or disappear. I like how one of your sweet spots that you're listing for us here is the ability to identify what is a prominent emerging market that's catalyzing serious business and technology change around our world. Yet, yeah, like you said, is not easily gonna be reverted and that how do you find then the most important points around an emerging market like cannabis to show and to inspire people to get involved with, awaken to and involved with to try and get, again, the fruits democratized to many people. And that does seem like a really important way to be able to build the future of visual capitalist. So you were giving us the example of books. That's a really big one. How often are you publishing one of these, these really strong syntheses and visualizations? Are you guys, on all of your subsections, you have so many subsections on visual capitalist, are they, is there like an equal distribution to a post in all of those every, you know, at least every week or every couple of days? Or, and then how often are they being blasted out in the mailing list? And then we'll also hit on the venture cap or the visual capitalist plus as well. We'll talk about that. Sure, so right now we publish one thing a day. Our goal is to publish four things a day or five things a day to build our way up to that. We also want to divide things upon a, we're thinking a North America and international spectrum in terms of the content that we publish as well. And for now we publish one thing a day and we email it out once a day. And that is enough work for 21 people, which is, which speaks to the amount of effort that goes into producing these things. But, and also speaks to the effort that will be involved in order for us to scale to four or five things a day. I don't think that we can become a source of news or media that is going to be hitting tens of millions of people unless we're hitting a wider variety of topics, unless we're hitting with, there's more quantity to what's being published. And so, and you also have to have those big, really crazy projects in there as well that are just like you look at and you're like, how did they put this together? Because this is so much information. So, you know, those really like moonshot kind of projects. And right now it's hard for our team to have the capability to do some of those. But we wanna do things like that as we grow and scale as well. So, yeah, I mean, it's going to take a lot more effort and a lot more, I think, solidifying our processes. And just like what you stated at the beginning, which is like, how do we actually find things that are worthy of being put in this format? I think that's probably the hardest question because whenever we hire someone new on our content side, they think, oh, maybe this will work or maybe this will work. And a lot of the time their instincts aren't necessarily in the right, they're like, they're close to the right place, but they're not necessarily in the right place. And so how do we find a way to guide people to that? And how do we, and part of our mission as well, which I don't think that we talked about, but I think is relevant, is that we want to take our ability to simplify complex information and we want to teach the rest of the world how to do that. Let's talk about that. I love that. So what we're doing in addition to scaling out and building out what we're doing and the VC plus, which is our sort of like premium extension beyond our normal stuff, is we're also going to be building something called, it's tentatively called Visual Capitalist University, which is way too grand and way too fantastic for what it will actually be. So I mean, maybe it will grow into that eventually, right? But what we really want to do is we want to build a foundation of knowledge so that anyone can say, okay, I have all this information, but how do I turn it into something that's compelling that gets eyeballs that allows people to simplify this complex topic? I think that's something that can be used by companies, organizations, individuals, nonprofits. Everybody in today's information age and in today's media climate, where there's just so much stuff, so much content being turned out every single day and there's so much clutter there and so much information. I think that it's something that really could help people figure out how to take things to the next level in terms of getting their story out, getting their information out. And if we can leverage that, not we, Visual Capitalist, but society, if we can leverage these techniques amongst a broader, other types of information, stuff that we don't cover and get that out to people just as efficiently, I think that's going to be a huge step forward in terms of helping people understand more, helping people cut through that clutter of, I mean, when I look at my social feeds every day, it's a disaster, right? I'm just like, I don't want any part of this. Yes. Luckily, I have geared my following, the people that I follow on places like Den, to other people that do great stuff similar to what we're doing, so I do find really good stuff in there, too. But it's still such a tough environment, and I can only imagine if, for example, you live in an area where you don't know interesting people or you don't know people that are talking about the things that are happening in the world, you haven't moved beyond that sort of local scene of people around you. And for some people, maybe that's what they like, but other people might just never have the opportunity to find out what's happening in the rest of the world, which is why I'm a big fan of things like traveling and experiencing new things, and all the things that I'm sure that you're a fan of, but some people in their information feed, they aren't able to venture out of their bubble either. And that's unfair to them that they can't see things from other sources and use their judgment, use their problem-solving abilities to parse this information and understand what's real and what's not real and to learn about the world from not just one perspective. So there's a real challenge there, and coinciding with that, something that we did talk about briefly before this conversation is there's all kinds of media and news deserts out there as well. Locally in North America, all of the local news sources have all been, well they've all been struggling because of Facebook and Google taking their ad money basically, right? So they've all been consolidating and all been being bought up by the same people, and now there's a lack of diversity, a lack of independent sources, and then of course that also happens on the rest of the media side too, right? All of business media or all of news media, all of these, there's a lack of, or there are independent sources but they're not prominent enough yet, and we need to get people out of their bubbles and to see a range of opinions. We need to get them thinking critically about what are your beliefs and how do they compare to all these other beliefs? We need to get people not worked up about hearing beliefs from another side of the spectrum, because I think that's the gut reaction for a lot of people and a lot of smart people that I know right now, right? They hear an idea from a different side of the spectrum and they are like, oh my goodness, how could anyone ever think that that's the right thing to do, right? And I'm like, well, there's a lot of people and a lot of people have different values and you really have to understand these different value systems and things. So it's an interesting landscape but our place in that is, our small place in that is trying to do what we can with data to help build that out. So people do see those different sides because the data doesn't lie, right? So to build out some of those things so people can have that foundation and hopefully we can start teaching other people how to do that, too. I really love this last bit on the Visual Capitalist University. It's probably going to make significant waves with the overall enlightenment and awareness shift around our world and the transition from heavy, noise-ridden content that is falling into tribalism and cognitive ease into more of the visualizing and storytelling of data that captures people's attention and hearts towards harmony, towards peace, towards prosperity for all. I love that aspect and it's great because it's the tool and we've talked about this with Ed Boyden on the show and so many other prominent scientists and people at the edge of their fields is that it's actually super important that when you get to an edge of something like data visualization and storytelling that if you can take and compact a tool and then share that with the world at large, then it makes it so that everyone can then come on board, use that tool and start pushing the edge further in all of their respective domains as well and I really like this a lot and it's going to be part of that tool is going to be the ability for people to share nuance and gray area but also in their ability to storytell data that lands in people's factual, logical brains but also in their hearts and emotions brings those pieces together across all of the different ways that you can actually visualize it as well that visualizing the data and having these great, like for me it's something along the lines of how can an average person take something like a unique piece of data and then be able to almost in a sense just have a bunch of maybe AI-created permutational designs of how that data could look and then pick which one they think is going to land in the hearts and minds of people around the world could it be that easy that I myself am submitting something like I mentioned on the show earlier in our conversation just like this idea of species amnesia and only recently discovering 100 years ago this idea of a code of Hammurabi and how the primordial constitutions and how archeologically we could find so many more of those and so maybe this thing that I want to share with people is about how there's so much opportunity for us archeologically around the planet to find these things and so where are the next destinations that we need to go? Where has the concentration and it seems like a big concentration has been in this area of like the fertile crescent and mesopotamia so maybe we do want to double or triple down on our efforts in those areas but then like the Amazon has another big or like these areas of the coastal cliffs. You know, Beckley-Tepi and things like that too. Yep, yep, very aware, I love that one as well. So yeah, so that's just the general idea then is how can we disseminate that in an image that inspires and in a post that inspires people to want to awaken to the potential of figuring out how our species even got here and we're knowing what you mentioned earlier too about the median age of Africa being 18 when the imagination creativity gets unleashed how can they have a tool like Visual Capitalist University to be able to disseminate? Yeah, and I think, I mean I think that the area that we can cover is only so small in the grand scheme of things right? On the archeological side of things, on areas like that, you know, I'm interested in those but we're not experts in those fields so we need people in those fields to take our skill set, the things that we've learned which we want to teach people. We need them to take those skills and apply them to their individual fields, right? So we want, I mean ideally, you have people that are at the best in all their respective categories taking these communication skills that we're going to be teaching and apply them to their fields so that they reach more and more people. And we can speak to the business and investing side of that but that's only such a small side of society, right? So we obviously can't cover everything. We've dabbled in a bunch of different areas but there's going to be a lot of people that are going to be better at teaching these things, right? And in science, right? Oh my God. We touch on some of the technologies that we think will influence the future as far as where growth will be and things like that but the explaining things like, I mean, going into the- The genetic engineering. Sure, yeah. Or like going like the subatomic level and all these kinds of things where it's like, I don't understand how any of that stuff works. I mean, like I'm interested in it but I'm not going to be the one to explain it to anybody. So I think that that's all stuff that we can, people that if they have the right skill set and if they learn what we now know we're trying our best to codify it and to make it so it's a system rather than just, one or two people's intuitions, right? And if we can do that effectively then all these other groups of people can take this and apply it, so. Imagine how much faster we could get to the second quantum computing revolution if quantum mechanics was able to be disseminated in a way that leveraged visual capitalist university skills. Correct. Yeah, I love stuff like that. Thinking about that is so powerful. How much faster can we push the edge and advance society in these great directions? And also, archeologically, like figure out where we came from and be able to show that to people more effectively to inspire them to want to double down on research in these areas and stuff like that. Okay, so Jeff, let's ask you about you guys have a majority of the business is sustained how? How have you guys been able to grow to a team of 21? Yep. Yeah, so primarily we're an ad-driven media company. So like any media company, well at least up until recently most media companies are driven by ads. So whether you're the New York Times or whether you're Forbes or whatever, like all of these groups had a large component of their revenue drive from ads. So on our end, what we do is we have two types of ads. We have native advertisements and we also have an area called the company spotlight. And so basically these are ways to showcase companies that fit within the areas of things that we're talking about, right? So like for example, if we're talking about augmented reality as an investing opportunity and we're saying, yeah, this is actually really interesting in space, our sales people will find an augmented reality company that wants to profile themselves on the site. And so we'll have a separate page for them. It's not something that is in the editorial feed or anything like that, it's just a separate page. We build them a really nice graphic that explains what they're about and we give them that landing page so that people can learn more about them if they want to and that's a paid thing where we're generating income from it. The company spotlight. Yeah, and then what we'll also do is through our daily email blasts or something like that we will throw in and add to direct people to that spotlight to learn more about that company. One more nuanced way that we also generate revenue is we will partner with people that we consider to be thought leaders. So we've partnered with Tony Robbins in the past to take his book, so he did a book on finance and investing. And so his team reached out to us and said, it'd be great if you took seven chapters of our book and you visualized them. That's great. And so what we did is we found the most compelling aspects of each of these chapters. We visualized them, we published them and of course when we published them we're linking back to the book. So it kind of ends up like the ideal situation there is it's a win-win-win, right? For us it's good engaging content, it's revenue. For them it's a way to showcase their ideas in a meaningful way, it's coming from an authority, someone that people know who he is, they respect him. And for our audience they're learning something and getting value out of it as well and if they find that valuable then they might find his book valuable as well. So you're connecting all these dots in a really useful win-win-win way. And it's the same thing when we work with someone like McKinsey is a good example of that too, right? They have all these PhDs and people that are putting together this massive amount of research but as I say, a 200 page document is only gonna be useful to so many, a very small spectrum of people, right? And so if we can find a way to take that information and parse it and find what's interesting out of it and publish it and say, hey, these are the key insights from this report and you guys might be interested to learn them. If you want more you can go here. That's another way that I think is a win-win-win where everybody gets value out of that, right? So that would be another way that we do it. And then finally, recently we've launched something called VC Plus and of course VC University would be in this category too of something that outside of the advertising realm that people would, we will have aspects of VC University that would be free and then of course we'd have aspects of it that would be paid where you can dive deeper and deeper and deeper so that would pay for us like making that content. But VC Plus is basically a subscription service that's a monthly, it's $5.73 US a month and it's basically for people that want the level beyond what we currently give out on the free side of things. So our main business will always be that free ad driven model so that everybody can get our information and everybody can get our data but for VC Plus members we go sort of an extra step of getting them involved. So we will be engaging them talking about them what do you want to see more of? What do you want to learn more of? We'll be doing stuff like going behind the scenes and showing them like how we actually might work on a project. So like later this week we're going to be talking about something that we first published four or five years ago and it's evolved over time as we publish a new version every couple of years we're going to show them why and how it evolved over time and what decisions we made and they're going to look at that and they're going to be able to get an extra aspect of context there that other people won't get but I think that will provide value to some people. And then we also round up our top editorial picks each week of different other visualizations outside of our site that we think are really interesting or compelling and so our editors each submit a list of things that they found really compelling and you know that because it's coming from our team that they're going to be quality data driven visualizations that are going to be powerful and capture people's attention. So we put those all on a list and we send them out every Sunday for VC plus subscribers. I love the ways of being able to take what you're doing and create models of sustaining and growing what you're doing that are like you said win-win-win models that are models around the continued inspiration and awakening of people to really important knowledge. I'm happy that you guys have figured and we, our show still has to figure out really good ways like that as well. I wonder how many more opportunities exist like that that we still have to figure out where kind of like a bigger dog can come in like a McKinsey or a Robbins and can say, here you guys interested in taking what we're doing and compressing it visually. Yeah, I like stuff like that. That's really interesting. I wanna ask you some of the questions that we asked on the program that are really tough philosophically spiritually. Do you think that we're all one? You wanna give, okay so that might be a common question asked in these circles but maybe can you elaborate on that a little bit? So if you're pro all one side what are most people thinking if you're anti we're all one side what is the general thing? Because I can throw my answer in the context of that. So are we all one? Do we all come from the same source? Are we all interconnected? Is there really no separation? Whether you wanna call it God or the universe or the multiverse or whatever you wanna use as the words do we all come from one and are we all one? Well, I think we're all interconnected but that's just a fact of reality, right? Because when you look at complex systems and things like that, right? You have to be connected, right? Because the air that I'm breathing is literally the same air that you're breathing. Or the classic example of a butterfly flapping its wings in one place is going to determine something somewhere else. I mean there's all of these intercurrents happening all the time between not only people but everything else of every other object, right? And that's just a physical fact basically, right? Because everything that you do is going to and even if it is done in isolation it's ultimately going to impact someone else, right? Because if you stayed in your apartment all day and you did not interact with the outside world at all that's gonna actually affect your family and the friends that you had made before that and that impact on them is going to impact other people, right? Because they're gonna be sadder or they're gonna be, so any action you take is going to, as a fact, is interconnected with everybody else. When you look at it from a more base level perspective of like, do we all have that common, I guess, I think we all have common heritage. All the same species all coming from the same place. But today, I think that there's a sense that you need to look out for everybody else and you need to be cognizant of other people what they're going through. I don't know if I would say that we're all literally one conscience or one group in that way though. Yeah, like feeling into your process of going back and seeing that the lineage goes to one. Yeah, so that I 100% agree with, right? Because we all stemmed from the same root, right? So in that way and in the way that I described in terms of like physically being, everyone is interconnected in that way, I think in those ways, I think it totally makes sense that we're one. I'm not so sure on a more, I guess, conscious level of like, thoughts are all coming from the same place or interacting with one another. I think there is- Your thoughts are definitely changing me live. That's fair, but that is also the business that we're in. I think that there's a lot of people who aren't in that, in that, that's not their focus of life, right? Whether they're aware of it or not though, every single moment of stimuli that we're taking in is changing. It's true. And so that is the interconnectedness that I do think exists. But that has a lot to do with consciousness. That has a lot to do with our physiology. Sure, yeah. Their neurology. Is then the most upstream issue that we face our feelings of separation and our lack of feelings of interconnectedness? I think in modern society, that this is a concerning trend that we are more connected than ever, but less connected than ever simultaneously, right? It's a paradox, right? You can send information to almost anybody in the world in the blink of an eye, and we have people on our site from North Korea, like four people every year. I guess that's how many people have internet access there. But so you have this ability to connect and interact with people all over the globe, which is pretty crazy. But at the same time, I think there is a pervasive sense of loneliness felt throughout as well. And so this is a big paradox that we have to find a way to solve. And I think that tying into that paradox as well is a lot of the, I think a lot of the things that you guys touch on and some of the things we touched on here around information as well, because it's not only, at the same time, you're connected to all the information in the world, yet paradoxically, people are in more bubbles than they've ever been before. So that's the same thing, right? It's the same thing as personal connection. I have more personal connection to anyone else in the world, but people are feeling lonelier, but at the same time on the information side of things, you're connected to more information. On your phone, you have all humanity's information in one place. That's crazy. Yet people are in bubbles and seem to know less about what's going on outside of those bubbles than they ever have in the past. So that's a paradox as well. And so, what do we do about those? I mean, I know what we're doing about that second paradox. We're trying to get information out in ways that I think can help open up those bubbles a little bit. On the personal side, on the connectedness side, I don't know. But I think those two things tie in together. Yeah. And then, what do you think is the point of this reality? I think that there is, I don't think there is a point. You don't think there's any purpose at all to this being created? No, I don't think so. I think it's what you make of it. If you were making this reality, what could you see as the point of you making it be? If I made the reality, that is a really great question. I think that for me, I think it would be something along the lines of making sure that everybody is free in the most expansive definition of that term imaginable. So, not just free as in political freedom or economic freedom or something like that, but free to do anything that you choose in terms of being able to accomplish the things that you want to do to chase after the things that you're most interested in, to travel to where you want to go, to experience experiences that maybe you couldn't before. So, that is something that interests me. I do not think that that is the point of reality, but I think that that's part of my personal mission within this reality as far as I see myself. And so, if I were creating reality, I would be hugely biased in creating it in something that fits upon that kind of spectrum of things. I love your focus on degrees of freedom and just the word free. I like that a lot for self-actualization. Exactly. And for no one to tell you what you should self-actualize. Yeah, yeah. You're free to choose if you want to become the best writer, the best spiritual teacher, the best scientist. Whatever the thing is that you wanna actualize yourself in doing, you can do that. I think that that would be pretty cool. For you to be fully sovereign in your own adventure of consciousness. Exactly. I love it, Jeff. Thanks so much for coming onto the program and sharing with us what you guys are doing. I'm a huge fan and I'm really grateful that you came on. Thank you. Thanks man, really appreciate it. Thank you, thank you. And thanks everyone for tuning in. We greatly appreciate it. We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on the episode. Let us know what you're thinking about all the great things that Jeff was sharing with us. Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. Check out all the links in the bio below to visualcapitalist.com. Also their profiles on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, also Jeff's profile on LinkedIn. Go and follow them and go and share their content with your friends and families. Have more discussions online about the concepts that they're teaching and make it a common thing to try and yourself compress really important data and share that with the world. Also, check out the links in the bio below to our show simulation, help support us and to continue doing cool things like coming on site to great places like Vancouver to have epic conversations with people like Jeff support us on PayPal, Patreon, cryptocurrency, you can design cool merch and get paid. All those links are in the bio below. Go and build the future everyone. Manifest your dreams into the world. We love you very much. Thank you for tuning in. We will see you soon. Peace. That's a wrap. Cool man. That was awesome. That was really solid. Thank you. Whoa. That was great. We went into a lot of epic places.