 This is the Rex monthly check and call for August 2019. Today is Wednesday, August 14th. The end of summer is in sight if you're in the Northern Hemisphere. The days are beginning to get shorter and feel shorter. It's crazy. And we start usually with a poem and I will read Nicky Giovanni's Choices, which goes as follows. If I can't do what I wanna do, then my job is not to do what I don't wanna do. It's not the same thing, but it's the best I can do. If I can have what I want, then my job is to want what I've got and be satisfied that at least there's something more to want. Since I can't go where I need to go, then I must go where the signs point, though always understanding parallel movement isn't lateral. When I can't express what I really feel, I practice feeling what I can express and none of it is equal, I know. But that's why mankind alone among the animals learns to cry. Well, I'll read it again. Choices by Nicky Giovanni. If I can't do what I want to do, then my job is to not do what I don't wanna do. It's not the same thing, but it's the best I can do. If I can't have what I want, then my job is to want what I've got and be satisfied that at least there is something more to want. Since I can't go where I need to go, then I must go where the signs point, though always understanding parallel movement isn't lateral. When I can't express what I really feel, I practice feeling what I can express and none of it is equal, I know. But that is why mankind alone among the animals learns to cry. And here's the link for the poem. Oh, Susan, greetings. You are muted by default, so we cannot hear you yet. Yes, the setting I have on my Zoom room and with larger groups, it turns out to be important. Yes. Greetings, did you catch the second reading of the poem? I did, the first one too. Oh, brilliant, thank you. I know someone I need to send that to. I was thinking that same thing. Excellent, excellent. Well, there's the link and it was an Oprah's choice somewhere along the road, et cetera. Mr. Whitzel, how am I without this fair day? Hi, everybody. Hey there. Hi, David. You have clearly traveled out to some beautiful riverside gorge. If you get a time to spend in Vermont, you just should absolutely do it. Even if it's virtually. Yeah, exactly. We were just back a couple of days ago, less than an hour out of town toward the River Gorge on the Columbia in a beautiful, beautiful park, seriously gorgeous and lovely sand underfoot. It felt like we were a couple of hours away from town, but it was close by, so nice discoveries. Good, let's go around and do a little bit of recce check-in, like what's been on our radars lately that feels like it's in the spirit of this recce thing or more and more I'm heading into a design from trust thing. So when I check in, I'll describe that a little bit, but anybody want to go? And it doesn't have to land right on recce stuff because we usually find our way toward recce matters as it goes. Go ahead, Peter, I haven't seen you in a long time. It's great to see you Peter. Thank you. There are a couple of things I wanted to share. So as you, so first is the work at academy, art academy, and then the other piece is an inclined engagement that I'm doing about ambiguity. Cool. So the art academy, I probably can put a link here. So what I want to share about the art academy at the end of the year, at least in this fourth year, first of all, we have to present our work in front of an external jury. But in this year, we also had a course on art and culture, which was given by a lady called Fiorella, and she had, it was so enjoyable. And she speaks in, I mean, she talks about art in a very poetic and a philosophical way. So I started writing down all her, all the sentences that came out of her mouth naturally, because it really sounds like poetry. And it touched me quite deeply. So there are some links on my blog post. The origin of this is in Dutch. And I did a Google translate of it with some minor editing. So probably the English is terrible, but it's the best I can do. Cool. And so this link is about the sort of things that she says. So like a statement like the chessboard is emotionless. I think it's absolutely fabulous. Or like, when is something becoming tiring when you cannot determine your own tempo? Wow. And you can take a small step, but take a huge space at the same time. Or the brain is like an office, the house with rooms. Sometimes you need other keys. And so it's full of that. So that's a share. And there are some other stuff about the academy like what we were asked to write and select in terms of work. So I won't go into that. And then the other thing is about ambiguity. It's something, it's a client. I cannot name the client under such strict NDA. But I started using some of the work or the input that we got during these calls from Haimes Kijsko, who wrote or who spoke about Bani sometimes ago. Oh yeah, yeah. Jamei, you mean? Jamei. Yeah. Sorry, I didn't pronounce it well. I was like, when did we have a guy named Haimei on the call? I'm like, Haimei, Haimei. Ah, it's Jamei. And he invented Bani as a reply to VUCA. Correct. And what does Bani mean? I will go ahead, Peter, and I'll also put it in the chat. Stands for the B of brittleness, the A of anxiety, the N of nonlinear and the I of incomprehensible. Yes, that's right. Incomprehensible. I do not think that word means what we think it is, but still. But it should mean that. Yeah. So I did a little post on that as well, which I will put into the blog. Where's the link here? I'm basically quoting Jamei. I don't know how to pronounce this. Jamei, it's just like the French never. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. This client work. There's Jamei. On the table. We're just talking about you. There we go. Uh-oh. Yeah, I know. It gets worse from here. Don't worry. Sorry, I had a last minute. You need to get this done by yesterday kind of request. So literally as in like 15 minutes ago, so I had to crash and get it done. Well, thank you for joining. And Peter was just telling us about our client project. If divulged, he would have to kill us all, but it's about ambiguity. And he wrote a post in which he quoted your thinking on Banny. Do you see in the chat his link right now? Actually, I'm one of those awful people that has a Google alert whenever my name gets mentioned online. So your early warning system, your dues line has in fact alerted your emergency response system that you've been mentioned. I saw it and he used a giant picture of me. Oh my God, seriously? Is it the one in the narrow jacket with the pink? No, no, no, no. It's actually, there's a story behind the picture. I don't know if you know the story, Peter. I don't. It's a picture that I took of myself in Sarajevo doing a running a scenario project on the future of Bosnia Herzegovina for the US Agency for International Development. It was my 50th birthday. Literally the 50th birthday. I was sick as a dog running this. So basically halfway around the world running a project for a group of people who didn't think they had a future and just felt the weight of the world on my shoulders. And that's the picture that you used. OK. So now back to you and Peter and to continue. Sorry, sorry. That's OK. No, this is a great interlude. Thank you. So the client, so what we are doing. So I have teamed up for this thing with NextWorks, which is the company of Peter Henson and the client. And I'm the lead designer of basically a leadership offsite where I'm trying to combine what I did in the past with InnoTribe, which was starting to feel like immersive learning experiences and do this at a smaller scale for a group of 16 high potentials of a client. And so the client asked us to work out something that stretches those 16 people in able to deal with ambiguity and uncertainty. And so it's a week program. And as we go through the week, we are basically in the design turning up the volume of ambiguity the further we go into the week. And we use all sorts of means. So we have also an artist with us that is doing custom-made immersive soundscapes in 360 degree sound, that sort of thing. So it's really a very cool project. But the Bani thing, since you first mentioned it, Chameis, it still was simmering in my head. And so the client was thinking in terms of ambiguity and uncertainty. As I write in the blog, it basically spurred for the VUCA world. And I said, I'm going to inject this Bani thing in here. And there are some other blog posts coming in. So what I'm doing in this blog post, so the visual metaphor for the ambiguity is the kayaker in the white water. And it's basically written here, but the kayaker can navigate the wild water or the white water by experience, by immersive experience, literally immersive experience. And so it's part of, because you also mentioned when you talked about Bani, also the possible responses to it, which I documented also in the blog post. So the anxiety, and we had a discussion about it like a year ago or two years ago. Initially, you said it's empathy. And then we had a discussion about agency. That may be another way to deal with anxiety. So basically, the kayaker finds her stability by having gone through the white water many, many, many times. And so it has become an automatism. And so the metaphor in a more abstract leadership type of context is the stability comes from the authenticity, integrity, and the personal agency of the person in the kayak, in the white water, in the Bani world. I'm going to there are two more posts coming. They are published. They are written, but not yet published, which built upon this. One is about is saying, who is the composer? And the other posts. The other one is more ambiguous. Yeah, the other post is in draft still. Imagining worlds you believe in. And I'm trying to mix the Bani world with something really, really cool I discovered. It's a book by a guy called Ian Cheng. And I think it's also in one of my recent blog posts. The book is called Emissary's Guides to Worlding. It's absolutely fascinating. Ian Cheng, who is an artist, performances, installations, and so on. Let me see where I wrote that down. That's in my annual update, I think, about books. Emissary's Guide to Worlding, got it? Yeah, I mean, my English is getting worse and worse. I had written down a misery. And I don't think that's the same meaning. I don't know. Correct me if I'm wrong, but. I don't know, misery and worlding does seem to be a natural fit for me these days, yeah. There is this link that I'm adding here about the post that I did about an update of what I'm doing these days. So you can skip the first part, which you can for this call. But there is somewhere in the middle books, and there is the cover page of Emissary's Guide to Worlding. It's a, yeah. So not to do too many spoilers here, but he's talking about four, he calls them masks. I would call them archetypes or voices that call upon the artist in creation modes. And the four voices are the director, the cartoonist, the hacker, and the emissary. And the emissary's role is to create a world that is alive. And he also has a world aliveness score, which is basically the usage of the world versus like a mathematical break one on two, like, yeah. So the usage of the world and the presence or the activity of the creator. So the less the creator is involved in the world and the more people are using it, the more the world comes alive. That's the story. I highly, highly recommend it. Stop here. Anybody else? I love the image of dealing with him. You get better at dealing with ambiguity by immersive experience. And I love the image of the kayaker, in part because I can't stop thinking about how scary it is to get in the kayak the first time. You're going to have to do this a lot. And that's going to be scary a lot of times before you get to the point where you're like, ah, OK. I have enough embodied experience to kind of get through this. That image will stick with me for a long time. And for me, something similar, which is not my sport. I've gone back to Aikido. So I'm doing that as my sport, which has been really, really great. And a lot of it is about your relationship to your partner because Aikido is always partner work. You're doing something with someone else. They throw you. You throw them. You kind of switch roles all the time. And it so happens that one of our teachers in class has been spending a lot of time on give your weight to your partner. And the two roles are called nage and uke. So uke is the attacker who eventually gets thrown. Nage is the one practicing the throw. And you flip roles again. So it's funny because if I'm ever in an actual fight, I'm going to need a very polite and well trained attacker. And if the attack on the wrong foot, I'm going to have to say, no, no. Can you switch your stance? This is going to work out fine. Let's begin again. Exactly. Can we start over? And I'm not trained yet on knives. Can you put the knife away and just come in with your hand and grab me on the wrist like this? And then I'll be great. But I say all this because I think that the relationship between partners and Aikido is quite similar and has a lot of lessons to the relationship to the kayaker and the water in terms of balance and forces and relationship. Like part of what a really skilled kayaker understands is this tippy balance point where they know when they're going to rotate and get sucked under and they know when they're not. And they know just how far they can turn, not turn, how to avoid the eddy over there, how to aim and steer with just enough energy that they don't get tired, but they're going to make really great use of the river. Any number of things. But there's so much detail in the relationship and there's so much information in it and what you get good at when you get experienced in either art is the information provided by all of the contact and all of the cues of the environment in that relationship. And that's cool because it gets you paying attention in the middle of turbulence. And a lot of one thing, which probably carries over nicely to kayaking as well, sometimes you're doing a very complicated throw. It looks like a really weird thing. You're doing this, then you do that, then you do this. And when you kind of master it more or less and you're in the middle of it and you're looking around and you can see what's happening and you know what's next and you don't feel fear and you're kind of in the middle of chaos, but you don't feel fear. That is a really good feeling, right? And so I think also that the reason really good kayakers stretch themselves and go into dangerous sort of situations is that they have understood how to be in that danger and how to master the control of themselves and their craft in that situation. And for junior people that's scary and for them it's not and there's some aspect of mastery shows up there. So just a couple of riffs on that, Peter. When you mentioned kayaking in the conversation, I know you were talking about whitewater kayaking, but what came to mind are the videos that I've seen and I just posted a link to one of people encountering whales when they're kayaking in relatively still water. And I think that's another interesting metaphor along those same lines. Because you think you're in still water. You are in still water. And then suddenly there's something massive and transformative rises up and overturns you. And so that's that's relevant with metaphor as well. Awesome. Anyone else other thoughts? All right then. Would anyone else like to check in? After that. There's a whale to rise out of the waters. I have a whale. You have one? Yeah. Or what kind? Well, recently I had been told to write a couple of blogs and I thought, well, no, why not? So it's not so much ambiguity that I'm after this. It is in this as it is paradox. And it was sparked by an email sent to me by a neighbor who is also was previously a colleague. We've both moved in different directions about writing political things for, well, what to do about climate, how to write about climate change, how to talk about it. All kinds of things. There's a nice piece, which I will add on to the chat here of someone who went to a workshop of George Lakoff sometime in the late mid 2000s and who pointed out, I don't know if you know George Lakoff of George Lakoff? Yes. Know him personally. I know him personally too. He was for a long time back in my linguistics days. Back when Chomsky walked out of the talk out of the Linguistic Society of American Meetings when he, George Lakoff and I'll give his name in a minute, started talking about semantics and that was not supposed to be part of the linguistic theoretical edit price. Anyway, those were bloody years. And how that's good for communicating. Anyway, my little paradox is, and I always have to have something energy. And this is negative energy that's making me write this. So we're going from the sublime to the ridiculous. Anyway, so I've gone back to something that some of you may have heard me talk about here on the sociality of work and the sociality of learning. And let's see, how can I get into this quickly? Calligraphy. Okay, good. We're done then. All right, so I'll just go in. I've noticed that pretty much work in the future of work world that I happen to reside in, at least some of the time, is on a purely practical level. This business of reduction of work to skills and tasks, obscures, among other things, the social dynamics that it takes to hold everything together, to put together all those little pieces to actually get the work done. And as you know, some of you will know, I've actually labored with and done myself a lot of work practice analysis and negotiated agreements between people. And one sees that there is a lot of hidden work that's never acknowledged. Unseen, a hidden, invisible shadow work. Now there's even a book about ghost work, about all the people who do all the stuff for machine learning that just gets disappeared. And here's data from a natural example from a tortured customer service interaction. It happens to be mine. Otherwise, as you will see, how else could I've gotten this data? No way. Anyway, and who could have imagined, think of this as I go along, who could have imagined all these players in this single customer experience who was tracking all the social interaction it took to begin to resolve the matter? Who could have imagined the complicated technical system, actually a technical social system that emerged from integrating legacy systems, automation, task driven work, for all those people they wanted to hire who wouldn't need any complicated skills. So here's the situation. The refrigerator was two and a half years old, no longer under warranty. It stopped cooling, freezer and all, sometime on Sunday, February 11th, a couple of years ago. Right after the warranty timed up. Yes. I learned about this from my guests on Monday morning, February 12th. My guests, in this case Airbnb guests. So it was urgent. Monday morning, February 12th, it took until Wednesday, March 21st, a month later, a tech rep finally showed up, came in, diagnosed the problem, it needed a new compressor. The compressor would be shipped to me. Little did anyone know that the reigns of 2017 would cause a main road to collapse into a mudslide and UPS couldn't or wouldn't deliver, but that was only one of the minor things. So here are the players. The refrigerator, the owner of the refrigerator, the guests of the owner, three friends of the owner who have suffered through this, the sister of the owner who also suffered through these stories, the man who manages the off the grade electrical system at the owner's property and who had to be consulted frequently about what to do next, the manufacturer who should have been a player but isn't, the store where the refrigerator was purchased which should be a player but isn't. The extended warranty service purchased as a service was being sought and provided by a home services provider with a good name and who had provided service at the owner's home four to five times over the last 33 years. The service provider, a contractor to the warranty service, eight technicians, T1 through T8, at least five customer service reps on the phone for the warranty service, two people at the service provider with functions unknown, UPS both at the national and the local level. And the road crews. And the road crews. Well, they weren't even there yet. Contact information the owner had to provide or find out during the service included this. The reason I started keeping this was I was to do a map myself so I could figure out what the system was because it was just too impenetrable. So there was the information I had to provide or that I had to find out or figure out during the service much of which was not easily obtained. So the owner's landline number with voicemail, the cell phone number with its own voicemail and text. The owner's email. A lot of no reply email from the warranty service. Customer satisfaction increase via email only for the last two tech appointments out of eight. The property address where the refrigerator is located. The gate address for the property address of the refrigerator which everybody kept getting confused. Warranty services phone numbers, service providers phone numbers, text messages from the warranty service, text messages from one of the eight techs, voicemails on calls from the warranty service provider both the owner's and landline and the cell phone, et cetera, et cetera. And cell phone calls from tech three, four, five and six, the UPS website, UPS and mental heart, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so in the end the eight techs were involved. Four techs didn't either come because they ran out of time, had a truck breakdown or because even though the refrigerator had been diagnosed with a faulty compressor which somehow didn't make it through the system. They ended up with not enough time assigned so you had to ask for three hours. And I had to double check every time a tech rep was assigned to come out to work on this compressor that to make sure that it was a particular kind of service that was at least three hours off. Was this all at Longridge? Yeah. Okay, so just a side note for everybody else. This is on a property that is three miles down a windy mountain road on the other side of Silicon Valley toward the ocean. But it's only 30 minutes from Silicon Valley. It's a short hop but once you hit the gate that lets you down that windy road, it's another three miles down really twisty roads that you're saying some of that road was wiped out? Yeah. Oh my God. Well, it happens. The other thing we got wiped out was the skyline. Happens to me all the time. I'm here in the Pearl in Portland and we have a like road wiped out that means we can't get out of dodge for, you know. Anyway, you can resume but I think people need to understand the challenges of actually getting to the property as well. Yes, yes. Yes, it's not all on their side. Right. They should have sent- Whiff to handle something like this. Okay, so. This is what a drone delivery starts with a real good, by the way. They would come to the gate address. I once waited an hour and a half at the gate address and the guy who was supposed to come out was about 50 feet from me the whole time. There's no cell phone service there, right? So we didn't find each other. This goes on for six weeks. Anyway, let's see. The compressor was sent to the wrong address. It was sent to 3400 Long Ridge Road but UPS couldn't find that. So they took it to the office in UPS. By that time, the road skyline had caved in and we couldn't use it. And so it was a three hour round trip to UPS to pick it up. Now all these questions are about scheduling and communication between the warranty service, the service provider, the tax and the owner. No one can talk to anyone else. No party can see the other's websites. There were double bookings. The booking I was told was not the one that was on the books. I mean, whose books were they on? Six weeks without a refrigerator was onerous. Now, of course this is annoying, but my question is that the whole system seemed to be predicated on individual people completing a task often by themselves, probably gig workers. It stands as a glaring example of what happens when getting work done cuts out the opportunities for repairing misunderstandings, opportunities to make sense of inconsistencies. And now that I'm stuck. But anyway, that's what I've been pondering and trying to get to, okay, what is it I really think people could hear about this? But it just strikes me that it's a really good example of the sociality of work. The sociality of work. The interactions either between and among individuals or between and among the various social entities, whether they're formal or informal, play a role in getting work done. And yet that's all been disappeared. I got a note from a colleague who said, well, but it's sort of strange because in Uber you have all this evidence, et cetera. And then I said, well, just on the surface and it's a one-to-one thing and maybe they have the same skills, I don't know. But then I recounted a Lyft experience which I will not bore you with, which I did write down and I threw out all the data one day in a fit of cleaning. But roughly it was that I got to San Francisco Airport, left the phone and taxi cab, it fell out of my pocket. Got into the airport, couldn't find my telephone. I had my Mac, I looked up, find my phone. My phone was on the Bay Bridge. Traveling on over to, it turns out Berkeley. Yes. And I managed to reach the driver. And it turns out he had to go to Oakland and he wasn't gonna make it back in time to give me my phone. So I thanked him and I, but he confirmed that the phone was in his car. So I called Lyft and I talked to a nice woman who from the health situation, she said, but I can't contact the driver. I'm not allowed to contact the driver. I said, well, what should he do with it? This is starting to remind me of the refrigerator. Well, what you should do is tell him to take it to, I don't know how it landed there. I'm missing a piece of the story, but it landed in the San Francisco court, city court building in Lost and Found. So then I talked to a nice lady several times. By then I was on my trip. I was in Ohio and I was talking to her every other day. Very nice. She said, well, maybe I can mail it to you. And then we discussed whether we'd get to Ohio or whether she should mail it to my home address or everything else. Then we discovered that she can't mail it to me. It's not allowed. And somebody else probably can't pick it up for you because they don't have your ID. Exactly so. Exactly so. So eventually I drove to San Francisco and I went to the, now, I mean, this really, I mean, it's all owners. We've all had bits and pieces of it. Those two examples stand out as just a stark picture of systems that are completely untethered. So, and intentionally so. Yeah. Now Kelly's consortium deals a lot in break fixed situations and has for quite a couple of decades, when did the consortium start? 25 years ago. Okay, 25. What would you do? Yeah. I mean, what's the lesson you take away from this? I mean, I find this as a student of work practice, I see this happening and I go, you guys are just really, this is not going to work and you won't know that it's not working. Right. And it's largely because people don't design from trust, right? It's the intent of bringing in the lowest cost resource to do the work and people, the idea that we can, once we collect enough data about what our customers are doing, we can then automate everything and move to the lowest cost resource to solve any emergent problems is completely false because once we capture the things that we know our customers are having problems with, now we have to solve more complex, more interesting new problems, right? And so we have exactly the wrong people in place to do that once we have formatted. I completely agree with you and I've been telling a story something like that before and I guess I should have been paying much more attention. I think I should have fallen on. So we just, well, so we just because this methodology that we've developed over the last 25 years is really good at capturing known issues and moving them to self-service. And because we have discovered that once the people, you need a high skill set of employees to solve new issues, right? The best way to get them to work together to solve new issues is to put them in a situation where they can collaborate. And so this new, this emergent model, which we call intelligence warming, we just published a paper on in April. It's sort of everything we know about this model. I put a link in the chat, but it's about how to help people collaborate, how to get the best person to answer the question at the point that it's asked, right? Without going through 35 service providers and you have to build your system from trust, right? You have to enable the people who are capable that you are enabling the most capable, not designing a system that mitigates the risk of the least capable. And so it exactly dovetails into Jerry's work, right? Around how we're building these systems because it's the amount of inefficiency built into both of those stories really like makes my anxiety explode. Well, exactly. And so you can imagine I was exploding in two directions. One, refrigerator to get fixed because I had paying guests and also because I could see how it all got to be there. And I agree that many things, okay, but the drum I have been beating on, okay, for the last 35 years, okay, and which has been written about and encoded in various many ways starts from a different kind of place. And we should have a real serious conversation, but basically, because maybe I don't have to do all this work practice analysis, maybe I could just advise people to do that. I mean, that's a big question. Well, and the trick is, I suspect you have a much broader perspective than we do, right? Because we grew up in high tech customer support and that's what the perspective that all of our stuff is written from. But I think in both of these situations that you described it's a, how do you do that from across, across organizational, across company. And across these systems that don't talk to each other. That's right. Even the modern ones are designed to not talk to each other. And the others are sort of accidental, right? Yeah. Just to offer another little piece maybe, which is you're busy calling these people and then like dictating phone numbers and addresses and saying, I'll meet you over here. Why isn't our communication accompanied by an artifact that is like a web page or a wiki page where all the relevant information about this particular case can live. And it's not like you haven't told people for 30 years how to get the long ridge. So instructions on how to find you, what to do in case of a problem, whatever, whatever. Could just live in a little module that you're like, oh yes, they're gonna need to get here. So here's that module. Well, and I give them those and they never make it through the system. Well, no, but partly what I'm saying is there's no way for all of us to see this same sort of thing. You're busy giving them little links and piecemeal stuff through whatever narrow little pipe you have to that particular rep. And there's no place for this all to live. And why not? Right. Well, because we don't trust people. Would I put that all out there? Yeah, I'm living out here by myself. Well, this could be a private communication between you and whoever it is you're dealing with, but then all the parties involved could see the shared information about, here's the make model of the fridge in question, blah, blah, blah. Right, this is Doc Serials VRM work. Yeah, there's a piece of that as well. In terms of like, here's the information that I am willing to put out into the world and here are the people I'm going to allow to see that information for this period of time or whatever. Right, exactly. So is there such a thing? Not yet. Well, not that I know of that is working on a scale that we need it to work on. You could hack it. Well, I mean, I think, yes, yes. And yes, I mean, we could. You could easily hack it together, though. Pardon? You could hack it together. You could basically create a Google Doc and just give a few people permission to go see it. And if they had permission in their call center to go on the Institute and open the document, I mean, there's a whole bunch of permissions and other sorts of things. But the technology to share and talk through and collaborate kind of exists. Yeah, well, we all know that's not true. Yes, but one thing I did do, and I should probably do again, was we were awfully worried about getting health care out here and research the helicopters when we were building the house. And I had a one-page thing framed by the back door that had all the information, health information, everything, everything to give to a provider. The fire department was completely blown away when they arrived by that. And they said, how come not everybody does that? Yeah. Do I now have one by the back door? No. That's how far we've moved forward. Oh, well, I'll stop on this. But I think the point I kind of want to, I mean, it's just a small point. But this rush, I mean, every conversation I go into, whether future work conversations, it's all about. And they say, oh, these are the skills people are going to need. And I'm thinking, how does anybody know what those skills are? IBM used to have 4,000 skills. They're never updated. And who in the world now knows what skills are needed to get anything in particular thing done now that we're completely specialized? Why do we even think this could work? Peter just put a link to the digital asset grid. Do you want to talk about that? That'd be good. Yeah. So when I was at Swift in 2012, we showcased a project that was called the Digital Asset Grid, which was, in essence, an evolution of Doc Searle's VRM concept. So Doc Searle has been working with us at the time on this. He was one of the advisors. And so were people from Respect Network and so on. We're all working on this. So we built a full-blown prototype that basically allowed to share any type of information with any node on a network. And I think the key image on that heart's in there. The two key images on that blog post, it's the camel in the water, which is the metaphor for the human in the sea of data. So it's like the fission in the water. It's a camel in the water. And the other is the square that says, location writes who and trusts. So to the point that I think Jerry made just in the call, we used a particular technology. It doesn't really matter what the technology was. It was XDI, XRI, or something like that. Today, they would call it blockchain. It doesn't matter. The technology doesn't matter. What we found is that the real hard thing to do in communities of trust, it's to agree on the rules of the game in terms of expressing location where the data sits on the rights that people have on that data, where they want to give to the third person on that data, who is all about identity, which is still an unsolved problem and levels of trust, which has to do with also regulatory compliance and what happens if something goes wrong and who gets the liability. Basically, who can sue who, which has to be part of a trust model. So it's not a technology. So there is a lot of thinking that has been done in this project on how to share digital asset grids. So we had a big show about that in Osaka. There is, I think, a video about that somewhere on the internet. And two weeks later, the company decided to kill the project. Yes, of course. But that's been my experience for years, is that you can build these things. They work. Yes. And then they're killed. I mean, that's its own dilemma. How many of us have actually, I mean, if you ask how many successful projects that have done what I set out to do and mind you, there are very simple things most of the time, ever actually went forward. And I think this is a forward in ways that are unseen. Yeah. And it came to them 10 years later, which is lovely. So this is a lovely, go ahead, Peter. Yeah, the lessons learned from this, why did it, why was the project killed, basically? I think I can summarize them in three. Buckets one is the name, the brand of the project. Two, it's positioned this within the problem thinking of the customer. And third, it's be very aware about the stretch or the discrepancy between the language that the project people have developed and the people that have to listen to the people who have been working on the project. So they start talking a language that is not understood anymore by the others. The point on the name of the project, as you can see, we have this really fancy name, digital asset grid. So I always tell the story. Imagine that you have a conference for bankers and there are two conference rooms. And on one conference room, it says digital asset grid. And on the other one, it says mobile banking. Where do you think the bankers go? And the customer thing, it's not necessarily to say that this is solving a particular problem, but it's positioned in a constellation of existing problems that have to do with regulation, with trust, with that and that. And it can address a number of those problems. But you basically talk the language of the customer. Long story short. Stop here. And let me just jump in with I was just giving myself a little reminder in the chat. And Maltke is super interesting. So for me, it's just there's also Tyson, right? Mike Tyson. Everybody has a plan. Then they can make it hit. Clearly he was thinking about Maltke. Clearly Tyson is a student of Maltke. You're muted, Jermay. We don't hear you. I think I know what you said. Do have to do with how Mike Tyson smokes $40,000 worth of marijuana a month. $40,000? That was a headline yesterday. And I was like, never mind. I don't even. Must be really good marijuana. Maybe that's what it is. It's the best. It's artisanal. Artisanal. Artisanal weed. So this question sort of pops up in a couple of ways. I want to broaden out to a question that's in the back of my head, which is, how do projects survive as intended? And Susan, when you were sort of telling that story and kind of asking that question, I was reminded about grad school. And in grad school, one of the interesting lessons I had was I was taking courses simultaneously from Russell Akoff, one of the inventors of systems thinking, and from Ed Bacon, who was the city planner of Philadelphia for 50 years. When I took his course in the architecture school at Penn, he was 74 years old, used sexual metaphor and meant it. And was really super interesting. But his projects for the city of Philadelphia got crippled in different ways. So it was interesting to see what got through and what didn't, because Akoff consulted to Alcoa, Martin Marietta, the governments of Mexico and Iran, Anne Hauser-Busch, Mars, a whole series of companies that really actually followed his volvo, a whole series of companies that actually followed his advice. He's one of these quiet behind-the-scenes consultants who changed a whole bunch of things, who's gotten more famous with age, because people rejected his ideas a lot early on for a variety of reasons. Then there's this other question of, when something changes, is it people or place or institution that got changed? Then I'm landing on the people side more and more and more, because when the people who were part of something really fascinating, when they leave and graduate and go spread the ideas to somewhere else, it's very seldom that the institution retains the capacity to keep doing the thing. It seems to me that the people's capacity and the match between what they learned and what they were good at somehow really flourishes and works. And once they leave, founder leaves the project, and suddenly things goes haywire. Or other people come in and fund it, and they decide to turn it this way instead of that way. Who knows why, but I'm coming back to more and more, it's about humans in particular. And if we can develop a lot of humans and get them to speak and collaborate very openly, then maybe the idea is to disseminate more like a gas through the medium, and the broader idea survives better that way. Because in the old days, when it was just a human, if they left their ideas unless they published a book or something, remember books? Like, how does that work? Go ahead, Susan. I was just gonna add to that that, yes, but I mean, I think what I convinced myself of also over time is that that's not enough, and we've been doing that, and we know how that goes. We keep forgetting that there is something called practice, the way things work around here. And that those create social boundaries. And the people who do the real work of keeping those ideas or embedding those ideas in organizations or across organizations, there's a whole ecology at work. And different types of people it takes for this to work out. But the practice is where it's grounded and lives and is effective. If you don't have a practice or you haven't thought about that or you haven't discerned, that hasn't been moved or people have not been attracted to it. And at that point it becomes an adaptation adoption thing. And it goes off and it flies off in all kinds of directions, which is fine. It's just gonna do that. That's the nature of human. But the fact that this is a socially bounded, sometimes the boundaries are really strong like glassy lights, but socially bounded entity, if you will, it's not quite a thing. Is where that, that's where the sustainability comes from. And longevity. See, I have, I completely agree that it's people in this situation. My experience of why it's people differs a bit. A lot of it comes from competition over territory. In my experience, in my personal experience, and I wanna generalize too much, but my personal experience across a variety of industries from the entertainment world to the insulting world to business strategy, the more that an idea is linked to a person's identity of a person, the more that their successor, either direct replacement or somebody coming in that taking on some of those responsibilities wanna push it away. Because it's not invented here. I want to make sure that you know this is my territory. And I've been on multiple project that got killed suddenly, seemingly out of the blue because somebody new took over at a higher level in the company and said, no, that was my predecessor's project, it's gone. I'm not interested in that. That is not thinking of the government, are you? Actually, none of those are government. In my, those we have all been corporate. That's the interesting way. I'm no doubt, no doubt. But I'm saying that there is a very strong sense of, it's not just that the institutional knowledge has gone, it's that the political support has gone. And it's incumbent upon the successor or the replacement to create an artifact that identifies with them, not simply taking on and enhancing the existing artifact. I couldn't agree more, right? I think that if we want to address that, however, I mean, it's sort of like, okay, what do we have to work with in this system that we think is dysfunctional? We keep trying to redesign the system. I don't think we can. I don't think the nature of social and human whatever can be redesigned, exactly. It changes, right? And you can change it in certain ways, but it's not going to change wholesale. So sometimes it does. Sometimes really big things break and really big things change. I mean, there's moments of huge institutional change. And then there's centuries of institutional stasis. So the moments of punctuated equilibrium are rare. I'm reminded here of a- If we want to make that happen. Yeah. I'm reminded here of a story that I think, this is like a decade and a half ago I heard, and I think it was about the military, but in the military they generally switch you, you switch posts every two years. And it turns out that in this procurement or planning office, basically the average length of a project was like four, five, six years for anything that anybody started. And so they would be switching administrators every two years, every administrator needed to put their mark on the department. So basically wouldn't pick up and continue to completion the projects that their predecessor had left and started a whole bunch of new things that would predictably die because every two years they'd shift desks. And it took them a long time to figure out that this was hurting them. At which point, maybe they change what they do, right? Maybe they change the institutional design because I didn't know this, but I'm fascinated by institutional design. Would never have predicted that. See, I would have predicted that. About me? Oh, no. Baby, what's that? What's that referring to? Institutional design. Yeah, yeah, like I could not have told you in grad school that I would love institutional design and that that plus kind of strategy plus the scripts in our heads would be a major piece of what I'm just absorbed into. Yeah. And in all of this, I'm always looking for what is the Wu Wei? What is action through least action? What is the tiniest thing that we can do that causes a catalytic shift of consciousness or intention or approach or understanding or relationship that suddenly shifts things into a different mode of being? You're thinking Akito again. Yeah. And what happens when the unit that needs to, I sound, I don't mean to sound, I sound challenging. I'm just trying to figure this out. Yeah, we too, we too. We're not taking this as a challenge. It says I completely agree with it. I'm going to, why are we still here? Why have we, I mean, what is it that we're not understanding about the human condition? I think Dave has the answer to that. He's been very quiet, but I think he knows the answer to that one. Okay. Only if it involves Jin. Not enough Jin? That's probably it. I can imagine that's true too. So speaking from my little single methodology sort of kind of test bubble here, right? So the consortium has developed this methodology called KCS, which is knowledge centered support or knowledge centered service now. And it's a method by which we capture, structure, reuse and improve information or knowledge, right? So specifically in support environments. And it's a double loop process. So that's capture, structure, reuse, improve is the reactive loop. And then there's a reflective loop, the evolve loop. So in which we look at all the patterns that we've captured from the A loop. So one of the things that we have said is that this methodology, it's not so different for frontline support agents because if they encounter a new problem, they're taking notes anyway. We're just asking them to do it in a slightly different location so that the rest of the organization can benefit from the knowledge that they capture. It's a huge difference for the first and second line managers because we're asking them to stop counting things like average handle time or a number of cases closed or we're asking them to stop counting activities and start trying to measure value, which is a huge disruptor for them. In addition, we're asking them to start acting as coaches for their support agents or knowledge workers as opposed to managers, top-down managers. And as a result, one of the things that we say is that we've never seen a KCS implementation work without a KCS coaching model. So this is also a little bit my check-in in terms of what I've been working on and thinking about lately, in which we have, I think, completely eroded this idea of coaching in terms of like, well, I have to go get coached now, which means I get to go here with all the things that I've been doing wrong, as opposed to sort of an act... Yeah, right. Let me give you some feedback. Like, here's what I think you're doing wrong. And so as opposed to kind of the true intent of like an executive coaching model, which is what would you like to get better at? Like here I am to help you with your personal goals. And so I just went to a KCS coaching class which I had not ever done before, with the woman who developed this coaching methodology for our methodology. And it was completely inspiring because it was two days of people talking to each other about how they wanted to interact, right? How they were gonna be in a room together and what kinds of things, how they were gonna support each other and giving really focused attention to the relationship as opposed to the tool, which we always blame, right? Well, I can't do this thing because the tool won't let me capture it in this way and it takes too much time, blah, blah. Or, you know, the complaining about the people, it was a, we're gonna actually sit down and talk about, like we are putting some formality around the way we wanna interact with each other. And I think that this is a huge missing piece around our entire organizations, right? Especially as we go to sort of like the skills and processes of work. We recognize that there's a need for sort of this human interaction and there's also a total sort of, we have no structure around how to have a difficult or uncomfortable conversation, right? Because in addition, we're supposed to be very pleasant and getting along with our coworkers and being, you know, in the process or whatever as opposed to being people together in a process. So I've been thinking a lot about how I think that this is maybe the way we shift if what we really wanna have is sort of a trusted network of people who are solving problems together, right? And the network is bigger than just an organization. It's all the people who you have to have fix your refrigerator. That there are perhaps skills that we're not teaching or there's expectation of communication or relationship that we're not at all setting. There's a huge opportunity to sort of say, let's be coaches for each other. Let's set aside some time to actually talk about what you want, how you're gonna get there, you know, what's next for you, what's not working. And then we can switch roles and do that for each other because we keep talking about bringing our whole selves to work, except that there's actually no space to arrive as your whole self. So that's all I have to say about that. I was just gonna say, there's so much, there's so much this right about that. I mean, I can, from my rat hole. Yeah. Yes. From my rat hole. I recognize a lot of what you're doing and thinking that works too. It also works. It also works too. Once we were trying to reinvent, I mean, it was one of these impossible cases where management wanted to shut down the nice office in a suburb of Dallas and move everybody into a refurbished chicken warehouse north of Dallas. Got tons hospitable. Oh yeah. And they wanted to combine, they wanted every customer service rep to be able to handle the three main jobs. Technical support, sales, paper and toner, you know this case, and three million. So, right, and pay them $5 now. So we said, we can do this. And we did. We, you know, and we did it on many on the same principles that you had, but we also, first we had to show the people themselves what each other knew. We videotaped their work as they were working and we picked out the people I had on the project. I didn't. Picked out scenes that were emblematic of collaboration. And cooperation. So somebody would be on a phone and you'd see somebody pulling something out of there. This is back in the day when you did not screens, but paper and handing it over the computable wall to the other person, oodles of this stuff. You know, you're already doing it. So then we set up a learning environment with all three functions, two people from each so that they would be able to compare notes in a U-shaped thing. And we started to, and again, you know, started to just expose people to mimicry, imitation to all that with a reflective loop. You know what? After a long time, months, okay? They had, we had it down that they were doing, they were got there, the goal was $400 per person per day of sales and various other things. And we actually got it there. Wow. Now, and then to go back to Jamis Point, they shut the project down. Partly because there were three managers who were gonna lose their jobs. Oh, wow. And well, there was only gonna be one survivor, right? They were gonna, it was either gonna be the billing person or the, or somebody new, right? And it happened to be that the, actually cried when that happened because it had been such a successful thing. Anyway, the chairman of the CEO of the company happened to be on our board. I was at the Institute for Research on Learning at the time, we had a board meeting and told this story. And he said, oh, I guess we shut it down too soon. Wow. And there are many lessons to take from that. But even in the audience, you know, with the CEO to tell them a story of, this is what you wanted to have happened. This is how it happened. This, it happened on the front lines. It can be repeated, which I then, it took me another, me another, you know, seven or eight years to get a situation such that I could actually use that model and move it into another organization. Well, and the other thing we talk about with KCS because this also is a threat in which people are like, wait, I'm not going to give you all my knowledge then you're going to fire me, right? In which, the conversation then has to become, your job is not delivering known answers. Your job is solving new problems. And so if you think your job is delivering known answers, that job's not going to be around that long. So you might want to come play with us in this space. But the other, there's a tool that we use to help people get through the executive revolving door, which we call the strategic framework, which just puts on a single sheet of paper, the stakeholder, the benefit or the goal and the measures that we're using to, to, you know, say that this is working. And it amazes me how few people actually spend an hour to sit down and write it all down. Because we're like, if only when you're, you know, new vice president walked in, you could be like, remember how the CEO said he wanted to do this? This is how KCS is contributing to this thing. You could just hand them a piece of paper and talk them through it. And they're like, yeah, but it takes so much thinking. Oh, okay. Well, you know, that was why I jumped on another opportunity when I was at IBM to try to embody, as one of my principles is, if you have to leave your work to do something, people won't do it. They just won't. They don't. So what if the work had to be done in the same place that the traces of what got done work? So IBM at the time had come up with, oh, what was it called? Connections, a social media platform to end all social media platforms. And it was so complicated. I mean, I remember, I tried to use it. I embodied the method in connections. So that if you use the tools and did anything to get your work done, it automatically collected that kind of, not distilled information, but at least collected artifacts along the way, which I found were much more easier to use. People say, write a letter that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and they give you a template. What if you had four or five examples that you could just copy from? So, well, you know, and then the CEO changed. And then they expanded the consulting function that they were supposed to be doing it in. I don't know what the, I mean, this is a wicked problem. I mean, these are all wicked problems. And I don't think they're solved. I think they're resolved. A-Coffee's to talk about dissolving problems. Dissolving problems, yeah. Because he would reframe, he would reshape whatever the system was. And sometimes it is really simple. We've got 15 minutes left in our call. Would anybody else like to check in and throw something different into the conversation for a moment? Sure. Yay. Yay. So I just got back, you know, maybe two weeks ago from a very last minute trip to Dubai. Last minute as in the tickets arrived on, or tickets were purchased on Monday, I flew on Thursday. The Emirates business, so. Oh, nice. That works, that's nice. Yeah. This is for the, Dubai is hosting the World Expo 2020. And so through a zany set of misadventures I've gotten involved with one of the groups that is doing immersive content for one of the pavilions. And it was, they basically had been writing scripts and getting handed to one person and then to another and they say, this is great, make these changes. And several iterations of that. And eventually they said, well, why don't you just come out here and we can talk in person and get this done. And that's fun. And so basically dealing with this crew of people who none of them are actually from Dubai. There was a Scottish guy who runs an international construction company, a British guy who manages all, you know, the overall pavilion. It's basically the guy I work with is British but living in China. And I'm sitting there basically doing rewrites on the fly while people are talking about things. And so they love me. Basically because I was able to turn stuff out really quickly. You were way too flexible. With reasonable quality. I don't know that problem. Sherry knows that problem. Yes. But, and it was fine. There was a moment though that really shook me and nothing to do with the project itself but where I was and what was going on. The Gilroy mass shooting happened when I was there. And then the morning after one of the Scottish guy comes up and says, you know, I heard about what happened in California and I immediately thought of you and I just want to offer my condolences. And that's really wonderful. It was very touching and I was very grateful. At the same time I felt ashamed. You know, here I am, you know, and I literally halfway around the world. And, you know, I'm having people offer me condolences about stupid shit happening in the United States that only happens in the United States. And it was just a moment of, well, I'm really happy to have that moment that this point of human connection. I really, really, really wish that they didn't. That wasn't happening, that all of this wasn't happening because it was very uncomfortable. And I said, kind of humiliating to feel, because, you know, and later on after he had a bit to drink, he said, you know, what the hell is happening in the United States? But, you know, this shit happens, you have no control over and yet it is connected to you. And I know that has nothing to do with being a particularly rex-y event, but it was, in many respects, kind of the standout moment of an otherwise, you know, tedious and brief trip to the other side of the planet. Yeah, but the story you just told is pointing to a really rex-y conundrum in the world right now, which is what is motivating people to go shoot people up. And one of the big threads heading into this is the Great Replacement Theory. And it's basically that white people fear that white people are gonna be at least in the minority and maybe just wiped out, white genocide, it's called. And these people are convinced that this is happening and that they are being heroes by creating terror, such that people who are not white, who are presently in the U.S. will leave and other people will not be motivated to show up. They think they're playing a heroic role in that. And people who are white will take up arms and take action with their inspiration. Exactly, and so that sort of seems to be happening because this thing is snowballing. And my fear is that we're just seeing the front tail of a much larger movement to do basically a one-off insurgency where you can't catch who's doing it because it's not a bunch of people that got together, it's a bunch of people who are individually motivated and through what's available today could arm themselves, train themselves, motivate themselves and post a video on Facebook, et cetera. So how do we interrupt that script? How do we earn enough trust to be in that conversation? And by the way, the people on the other side of that conversation are finding camaraderie, community and sort of heroism in doing this. And they've talked each other into this point of view. And to me, it's like after Sandy Hook, after like an elementary school shoot up, I'm like, there's something completely twisted here that we can walk past babies, children being shot dead in a school and think that the answer to that is, let's give every kid a Kevlar backpack and let's have fewer doors and guards on the doors and arm the teachers. I'm like, there's something completely screwed up about a society that is contemplating those answers to that problem, right? And so for a future call, because we've got 10 minutes left on this one, maybe we can dip our toes in those waters because to me that's one of the big issues on earth. And that one resonates with and is coupled with the shift to the far right around the world, largely blamed on immigrant populations, which is kind of a broadening of the great replacement theory. There's a series of beliefs about what's happening longer term. I mean, and what's weird is that the great replacement theory is a demographics issue. It plays out over decades. This is long-term thinking on the part of a whole bunch of people who are then taking short-term action to interrupt this thing they think is happening. That's what's weird. This is very long-term planning. Isn't that what we're asking them to do? Take a look at the long-term and think in terms of big systems and then take action that you think will interrupt. Think globally, act locally, yeah. And what makes us even more wicked and frustrating is that a lot of the underlying facts are congruent with what they're fearing. In the United States, white people will be a minority by the middle of the century, very likely. Immigrants cause a lot of economic and cultural disruption, not always problems, but there are real issues around how well you have different cultures intermixed with each other, what are your norms coming into a society that might have different norms around women, around sexual minorities. And by having these idiots embrace these issues, it makes it harder for the rest of us to talk seriously about, okay, well, what does this mean? How do we adapt to this? Because I can tell you one thing, that the immigration problem, the immigration issue is not going away, it's actually gonna get a hell of a lot worse over the next couple of decades as we start seeing serious climate refugees. Climate refugees, exactly. Climate slash economic refugees from climate. It's the one thing that makes me think that Bannon might be smarter than he appears. That this might be, the whole immigration story might be Steve Bannon thoughts around climate adaptation. So Bannon, I think, is seeing these long-term trends and saying, awesome, we can play this up as a political movement and create enough stress that we provoke fear everywhere when we provoke fear. Everybody's long-term thinking shuts down, their ability to consider opposite points of view shuts down. If we can couple this fear with stay in the herd and a membership sort of part of it, we could run the table for a while politically. I think that's what's happening. Everybody's long-term thinking shuts down so our long-term thinking dominates. Right. What's interesting, I've been one of the things I've been looking at, there was a good interview with Ezra Klein and Wendy Phillips talking about the, you know, all right media on the platforms and how the platforms, you know, kind of are able to radicalize people by surrounding them with radical content. But then the media producers get rewarded with the metrics from doing that and then they actually move right. So they move people to the right and then that moves the media producers to the right which moves the people to the right so you extend the tail. So it's not like we're just, you know, having a static situation where this is happening, we actually have a situation where it's dynamically getting worse because of our media platforms and it struck me that like Trump is doing kind of the same thing. He moves out and says something to the right and his audience responds with, you know, send them back or something like that. So he says, ooh, that works. I'm going to go farther to the right, right? Which brings his crowd to the right. So there's actually a dynamic thing that's going on that's, you know, that's moving, that's splitting us up. And I was trying to figure out what the equivalent is on the left. It's a little bit harder to, you know, Medicare for all. Is that, you know, we're going farther left and we want healthcare for everybody? I don't know. But so many people will die. Yes. That's, that's the leftward version of this. I don't really know. But I haven't, I haven't spotted it. And I was, I was, yeah. Anyway, so, so what was, what was really striking me was I saw a post from Maya Zuckerman and she was from a New York Times article about how we surround, we, you're able to take these marginal entities and consolidate them into kind of a powerful platform, right? The alt-right, the alt-right is this bunch of marginal things, but YouTube takes them into a huge network. And I was realizing that I, that's exactly what I want to have happen around regenerative agriculture. I want to take a whole bunch of small, disaggregated kind of media platforms and aggregate them in a way that they become a social force. And it was like, oh, I want to do exactly what YouTube says. And it's what I'd like to do with design from trust, Jermaine. And you guys, I'll remember John Perry Barlow's declaration of independence of cyberspace. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Way, way back in the nineties. This, what we really hope back in the early days of cyberspace back when, you know, there was no web really, but there was Usenet. But there was a sense of this is an emerging phenomenon that will be transformative. We really wanted it to be a medium through which marginalized groups who thought they were alone could come together and create a space for each other and develop a kind of strength that they never knew they could have because they had been so alone, so diffuse. And we were right. And it sucks. One quote that I want to throw out here that I sent to Jerry for a different reason this morning. But it strikes me that it just captures a lot of my thinking in years now, which is the invention of the ship wreck. I got you're going to say the invention in the ship was also the invention of the global slave trade. But I guess six of one half dozen together. Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's fascinating. Because step back and pretend not to be a human form moment. It's, it's fascinating to watch this process in action. And I really fear where it's leading because one of the things that seems really patently clear is that when these marginalized but armed subcultures feel that their means of community will be taken away. 8chan is being shut down. The Donald subreddit has been quarantined. Which makes it like basically impossible to find unless you're already a member. They're not going to give that up. At least not. They're not going to give that up willingly or easily or without a reaction. And I don't know what will happen, but I fear what might happen if, if Trump is not reelected next year. Because there will be people who fight, who believe, well, there will certainly be people who will be motivated by, by Trump to believe that this was all a fraud, that this has been, that this was stolen, that, you know, your, your favorite president is being taken from you illegally by immigrants and by liberals. And by people wearing red glasses. And by people wearing red glasses instead of a red hat. Well, he's playing that up. Oh yeah. No, no. He's already saying that. I don't know if you saw it. Fourth term. Yeah, yeah. You know, you know, if, if the press, if the press was being honest, they wouldn't even need to have an election. So you just go ahead, another four more years. Yeah. I mean, just, and so I want to believe this is a bluster and noise and he will, and he will collapse because that is outside of this, this other kind of power that has, that has developed. That's probably what would happen. He's, he's, he's bluster, not a lot of power. He's desperate for attention and approval. But it works. But in this case, it's working. And there are people who don't, who won't be quite so ready to back down. Yay. I know. Welcome to the future. There'll be therapists in the lobby on your way out. Therapists on one side, pistols on the other. Exactly. And I just, as we wrap this call, I just want to offer some gratitude for the fact that as far as I can tell, all of us are working on this, chewing on this in our own way, and actually quite remarkably different ways that have these lovely dovetails into each other. That I really appreciate. And so thank you for showing up wholeheartedly and sharing of what you're doing. And Kelly is off the lie down in a dark room. Exactly. We need the like the sensory deprivation tank. I think it sounds time for the gin. Gin is a totally acceptable alternative to the dark room. I'm sorry that I, that this ended up being the last part of the conversation today. We sort of left without feeling, being able to build ourselves back up. We're going to end with a reread of Nikki Giovanni's choices. Just because I think it'll boost us a little bit. Although. It's a bit of a sad poem, but here we go. The choices by Nikki Giovanni. If I can't do what I want to do, then my job is to not do what I don't want to do. It's not the same thing, but it's the best I can do. If I can't have what I want, then my job is to want what I've got and be satisfied. But at least there is something more to want. Since I can't go where I need to go, then I must go where the signs point. Though always understanding parallel movement isn't lateral. When I can't express what I really feel, then my job is to not do what I don't want to do. It's not the same thing, but when I can't express what I really feel, I practice feeling what I can express and none of it is equal. I know. But that's why mankind alone among the animals learns to cry. With that, we'll wrap our check and call. Thank you very much. See you in a month and see you on the list in between. Thanks everybody. Bye. Nice to see you all. Bye. Yeah.