 This is the OGM weekly call on Thursday, February 9th, 2023. Sorry, Ken. Go ahead. I was brought up by someone in Congress whose name I won't mention because there's so many of them, I don't know who he's actually called. But there's an issue of trust out there right now, especially in institutions. There is this issue of trust. And what you just said, it's a big issue, good for lots of conversations, reminded me that of my favorite Peanuts cartoon, which has Lucy gets her test in grade school, and it says explain World War Two, and then it says use both sides of the page if necessary. And I think there's even, I think I found the cartoon once. Oops, got a spell properly. How is everybody? Real well. Oh, by the way, I don't know if you... There's a beta that I happen to be part of for the new brain web client. Yes. Which is stunning in what they've achieved. Can you like give your first opinions? Yes. So the problem was that the brain desktop client was exceptional for those who found it resonated with their own ways of thinking and connecting. The web client was not. It just never kept up, and they were able to rebuild a few years ago, the desktop client from scratch, and they have done the same thing with the web client in still like pre-pre-early beta, but it's a similar experience and yet also new. So in the sense that the thing that I'm most excited about and you might be as well is that anyone who has never used the brain would now be able to use it much more like a regular website. It has kind of a pseudo Wikipedia feel to it in the sense that it has navigated your parent thoughts, if any of you understand how the brain works. Parent thoughts are all now in a column down the side like a standard navigation of classic old school websites. And then you scroll down through the content area and then at the bottom, there's all the child thoughts. And they're all full text instead of the little snippet. And it just felt natural right away in a different sort of way. And I'm excited about it because I've been trying to think about how I was going to build a website with the content that I've been producing in my frameworks. And I realized, oh, I can just pull a Jerry and share my brain. And it's going to be a site. It's a site. That's just how it works. And it's not pixel by pixel, but it's content and navigation, which for me, that's great. Are you just muted yourself by accident, Scott? Yeah. Or maybe not by accident. No, that's it. Thank you for that. Mark, any thoughts and then a question for Mark. I could do a screen share of the beta. Do you think it's okay? Many marks here. Oh, sorry. Mark Trexler. I don't know if that would be okay. I don't know if that would be okay either. I would second that with Mark. Just a couple of additional thoughts on the beta. The point is exactly through that. Hopefully this gives new users a totally different experience than they've been able to get before. And that's what many of us have been pushing the brain for for years. Now, obviously a lot of people are immediately saying, well, let's now make the web client replicate the desktop, which really shouldn't be the goal. So hopefully they don't end up going in that direction. But now they've got one-way links, which is a hugely powerful tool in the desktop. That's now implemented in the web client. So it allows us to structure conversations in ways that we never could before in terms of directing people to information. And the Plex isn't gone. Just to be clear. I mean, you can choose to see the Plex or not in terms of the blue squiggles. You don't have to go just into the Rome-like website interface. You can choose, which is a good thing. I will note just in terms of the idea of extracting content from a brain into a website. Pete and I developed that technology about a year ago so we can actually extract content directly from a brain into an actual tool. So if that's of interest, I'm happy to share that information with you. I will note that just one quick comment about that. Thank you, Mark. Jerry, your brain tends to be thoughts and links and not as much content. I was very excited about this because mine is more, is kind of half and half. And I'm working more and more on the content side. And so that to me is, it fits really well with that. I don't know how well it will fit with your brain, but it won't get in the way because the Plex is still there. So I think it still works. Okay, enough about that. That's okay, Scott. Thank you for raising the issue and I'll just clarify a couple things for anybody who's not that close to using the brain in any way. Maybe two points to make. One is that funny enough, the brain has always had a sort of an uptake problem where people look at it and they go, ooh, that's really cool. And then very few people sort of stick on the up ramp. And a lot of people just don't wind up making a habit of it. And I have an amateur theory that people have very different kinds of mental representational systems. And I don't know what the canonical or set of these is, but I know that mine falls into, ooh, that display makes my brain go, oh, that's how I think. That's how I envision things happening. And in fact, once I started using it, I would get into a conversation with somebody, not be near my laptop. And as they were talking, I'd be like, oh, that's not in my brain yet. And I would picture in my mind's eye an expression I've always really liked, my mind's eye. I would picture in my mind's eye where it was going to go. And then I would make a little note to myself and when I sat back down, I would harvest that or curate it into the brain, et cetera, et cetera. So for me, the display was always like being, and I understood why other people would be like, ooh, looks like a ball of spaghetti. I'm not sure what's going on here. But then there's been this interesting force where Mark, who has made a business around having brain data on climate change and all connected issues, he and also the inventor of the brain have been trying to figure out ways of doing brain sort of things that don't look like the brain, that look more like a standard webpage. And I have a thought in my brain about how the desktop metaphor and Microsoft Office are kind of the tractor beans of death to innovative software. Because people are used to Office and they've kind of been trained on how to do PowerPoint and stuff. And so when anything looks a little too different, it gets kind of sucked into this vortex, into this event horizon, and then often just gets killed. And that's my story of Prezi, presentation software that I used to love to use, that I got pretty good at using, that I used for many screen casts and speeches. And then they basically redesigned Prezi twice the second time they sort of lobotomized it. They basically killed off the endless zoomable whiteboard. I could not get to it anymore to do the thing I used to do with Prezi, so I stopped using it. And it was a better storytelling tool than the brain was. So the first thing I want to say was that there's this interesting sort of contrast between the brain as a display and it's its own engaging thing and just trying to get brain kind of relationships and connections visible and usable to people who don't necessarily like that kind of display. How does that work? And I'm extremely interested in that as well. And in trying to figure out how to make brain data more accessible. I'm in the middle of that quest in like five different ways. Judy, question from you. Well, I was just going to pose as a thought concept how we might discuss the difference between tracking and mining in one direction going for depth and connectivity, which is what the brain more does, which triggers thoughts, but doesn't necessarily give you the dive. You get to choose which of 17 connecting thoughts might be worthy of additional breadth of information. And it seems to me we're dealing with two different types of knowledge capture and human behavior. And I love that we're developing the compliment of doing the dive that's probably more user friendly in some ways because if you're not the person who hops from idea to idea, the brain would be difficult or at least a little challenging. I love the brain because that's how I think. But I think that the doing this in a bimodal and perhaps there be other modes as well as we evolve is really an important concept and thinking about how we might make clear those patterns of behavior for people who want to explore and sort of help define that would be a good idea maybe. Thanks, Judy. I track most of what you're saying, but I use the one of the things I love about the brain is that it's not just an ontology of events and facts and things or a taxonomy. It's in fact kind of a blackboard that has a very, very simple organizational scheme that I appropriate in lots of different ways. So I go breadth and depth in the brain all the time. And sometimes I will just and depth is metaphorically up down kind of is in fact sort of depth, but not really. But I can do detail. I can get pretty grainy in terms of what depth is. This morning, Leif Edmondson sent me a link about Donna Zahar and her books about quantum management and hire. And I went down a brief rabbit hole sort of following some of that. And I went back to a video I had seen before about about Don Ren Heyi, which is Hire's management theory. I was just trying to understand it better. And that was like detail. That was depth. You're right. There's depth there too, but you have to know how to mine it. And I think putting it in the framework of alternate ways to mine it is great. Exactly. And the brain doesn't let you hide the detail when you want to hide the detail. When you just want to tell a story and follow a red thread through the brain, everything else that's related shows up and interrupts the audience whoever you're trying to tell this to and makes it more confusing. Part of what I love about the brain is that my approach to information is I find an idea. I look up the idea. I look up anti's of the idea. I look up cousins of the idea because I want to scope the whole field and test the premises that are involved in the basic idea. And that's just how I think. And it's what I do when I'm online. So if I pick something, I'm not on there for five minutes. I'm on for 20 or 30 because I'm exploring all these other rabbit holes around it. So I think just contemplating the different ways that people acquire information and what the purpose of how they're acquiring it is behind that also. So I think this is great. This is exciting. Which is its own large topic and super interesting topic. Just the whole idea of how do we discover things? How do we not take? How do we connect? How do we share? Every one of those is a great layer to this question. And germane to today's topic about how we choose what we discuss. That could be a map that would take us a long distance into the future. Indeed. Indeed it is. Let's go Stuart Scott Doug. Yeah. So quickly as a person who is not a technologist, I was listening to this conversation with a different set of eyes. Jerry, you used the phrase before minds eye. I love the phrase hearts ear. Hearts ear. Beautiful, beautiful phrase. Anyway, one of the things that Scott said early on was, has anybody used the brain or something like that? And immediately my mind went to, oh yeah, I used my brain back in 83. That being said, from there I went to, oh, one of the things I've been saying of late is that in the world today, we seem to have an epidemic of stupidity. We really have an epidemic of stupidity. And I thought that that might be an interesting question for us to talk about today or an interesting topic for discussion. I'm not sure where it would go. It might be fun to even talk about the instances of stupidity that we observe as we look around at the world. Stuart, thank you. I'll put that in the chat and we'll come back to it when we've tapped a little bit more in this first topic. Thank you. Topic idea, I'll expand upon it a little bit. Idea of a phrase I ran a class from James Clear in the Atomic Habits book, reduce the scope but stick to the schedule. And I found that very helpful in my own personal stuff. For example, instead of trying to exercise for an hour or 30 minutes, you do a minute. But you do it every time so that you actually reduce the scope but you stick to the schedule. And so you build the habit that way. And what I realized was that was something that I was thinking about in a bigger sense. The idea of scope creep is a form of hiding. So I'm not going to, you know, I need to figure out a website designer before I can publish my framework which I haven't written yet. But I'm going to use the idea in my head that, oh, you know what, the reason I haven't published that is because I haven't found the right web design program. Well, no, actually I haven't actually created the thing. I have, but that's for the point of reference. And what I hear a lot of times in our own open-minded, very curious, you know, wonderful group, what we'll do is we'll say, oh, well, I'm interested in this thing and I'd like to do X. Oh, well, have you thought about, well, what about, and then suddenly now instead of talking about the rain in California, we're talking about solving the global weather and food and political climate problems that we have along with everything else. And it feels like, okay, well, we didn't, but did we affect any of those even if we changed an opinion? And so that's my topic's suggestion is this idea of, for those of us who are wanting to be action-oriented, either in a grand scale or a small scale, does this idea of reducing the scope but sticking to the schedule make sense? Scott, thank you. I am very attracted to your neck, your other sentence of scope creep as a form of hiding, which I can empathize with way too much. And then we're hitting this kind of problem a little bit in the sense doing calls, in the sense that we're trying to pick a topic to sense do originally, and we're getting somewhere, we're meeting Mondays at 1030 Pacific, I think, if you want to join us and please do. There's a sense doing channel on the matter most. But when we hit masking is like, well, okay, how do we constrain the question to make, to sense do something we can actually bound? And then one of the issues with masking is a bunch of people are like, hey, nobody's going to command me to do anything. The whole broad issue of mandates is really big. And it's right there. And how do you address it in a way that connects to the scope of the masking question and still doesn't let you drift out into Never Never Land where you're talking about monster issues because everything is deeply intertwined. And that's kind of how it works. But I really like the topic idea, Scott. So we'll get a couple more ideas and then narrow back down. Dr. Breitbart, you are muted. So I'd like to turn around the telescope. And the idea that each person's internal mentality, perception, sensing, receiving, processing, responding, reacting to is different. And might it be really interesting to explore how to surface and make explicit that domain? So in working together, figuring out who's bringing to what part of the elephant in a collaborative frame or context, that there's a factor for those differences, strengths and sort of weaknesses in the way I process information versus the way you process information and the way I organize and learn versus the way you organize and learn. And this sort of like is also reflected just to reconnect to the brain conversation. That the biggest challenge with the brain, my experience with the brain in collaborative context is a tool is that I need to drive because if people are just given willy-nilly access to enter, if the conventions aren't consistent, if the tagging isn't consistent, and there's no way of surfacing and having a conversation about my experience, having a conversation with the uninitiated about that because the patient's factor drives them out, like forget about it. I don't want to learn how this thing operates. So I just wanted to add that to the brain, Max. Thanks, Doug. And I think anybody on the call who in the pandemic was invited into a Miro board or a Miro board to collaborate on whatever has tasted the thing you just described, sometimes a little too viscerally. Mr. Nelson. Yeah, I'm glad I was able to join today. Thanks for being at the start of the call. I love that you're here. Yeah, well, it does happen sometimes on Thursday. But I wanted to pick up on what Scott was saying about focus and scoping and maybe scope it even further. In my experience in the policy world, so often being in the right place with the right idea is so important. And sometimes it really helps to focus if you can determine where is the pressure point? Where is the decision that's going to be made in the next few months that you can impact? And it can be a corporate decision about a product. It can be a policy decision. It can be a procurement decision. But I've spent a lot of my life following 17 different threads. And then every so often I'm ready to just jump on something and just put 110% for a month or two, gather the right team, generate the publicity needed, and change the world. You can really do that if you have the right people at the right time and the right pressure point. And so that would be my challenge to the group is how can you find that and how can you be ready? Me, it's this weird balance. You have to be like you, following almost everything, but at the same time knowing when to play and when to mobilize and how to get the resources to do that. So just a thought and hope it's useful. Thanks, Mike. Is there a bridge that connects the scoping as hiding question to the epidemic of stupidity? Can we bring those together or are those really substantially different topics? Because I like them both. I love the epidemic of stupidity, but the only bridge I see is that finding the right pressure point means finding the people who aren't stupid. And that's the challenge. And when I heard epidemic of stupidity, I had to think of yesterday's House government oversight hearing about Twitter. If you haven't read the Washington Post article and the New York Times article about this hearing, you need to. It was over the top. Either the Republicans have jumped the shark or I fear they've actually gone beyond the event horizon. They are now in a black hole of stupidity and there is no escaping. I mean, it was absolutely astonishing. There was no logic. They would say three sentences and contradict themselves three times. It was astonishing. So much to say about what's going on in Congress right now. Ken, then Rick, then Mark Carranza. So the phrase epidemic of stupidity has a nice ring to it, but I actually there's two things. One, who's we and two, the stupidity seems to me to be much more collective stupidity than individual stupidity. And Bertha Matrona says we should recognize all humans, even the least intelligent among us are geniuses in the sense that we live in the coherences of language. We can coordinate our coordination. And collectively, we seem to have many structures that do not bring forth the level of intelligence so the people that make that up. So I just wonder if we can set the cuteness of epidemic of stupidity aside as a label and dig underneath and say, what does that really mean? Are we led by stupid people? Do intelligent people who come together fall into some kind of trap where they're unable to make intelligent decisions together, which we see often, but not always. So it just it seems to me that obscures a lot of stuff. And if we're going to talk about that, I think we need to tease that apart and really figure out what are we talking about when we say that? I'm going to read with you and maybe reframe what you just said in that. I think the label is cute and enticing in exactly the way you described. And I believe you have opened the conversation on the topic, right, in what you were saying, because yes, and let's like, let's dive there when we come back into the topic. Rick Denmark. Yeah, just to echo what Ken was saying, I was having the same reaction, actually. I mean, it's it's cute. It's really just dealing with the symptom. It's not dealing with some of the deep root causes. So I would I would suggest reframing it in a way that expands it out and looks at it from a more of a lifelong intergenerational learning process that we have yet to develop to co-create and co-design an equitable, regenerative and sustainable future. Basically, we just don't have the educational systems, the formal ones, the academic, religious, et cetera, et cetera, which had been woefully inadequate to be able to prepare us to deal with our wicked problems in the 21st century. So I think we have to elevate the conversation to the issue of learning lifelong learning. Thanks, Rick. Mark C. Yeah, I'm not sure that we're pausing in between speaking in this round. We are not using the pause protocol and we could. Yeah, but I wanted to echo exactly what Canon and I think it was a Rick just said and I posted that stupidity as a phrase might itself be a stupid trap, an attraction point to our own stupidity to actually think that other people are stupid and not us. That's really stupid. I want to kind of tie them together with the notion of what I'm going through recently is something called dysregulation. I can be dysregulated individually going through a situation where the death of a friend triggered something trauma in my life for the death of my mother. I didn't realize I was going nuts, dysregulated, not dangerously so, but just acting really, really weird, not sleeping. But there can be dysregulation mutually how the Republicans and Democrats can't talk to each other because there's kind of a mutual dysregulation. There's not a way of making sure that we come to an equilibrium together. And that's not stupidity. It is not stupidity. It is not having the one ability to see that that dysregulation is happening. Number two, ability to pause and say, oops. Oh, yeah, we're actually talking past each other. We have to stop and pause and kind of like say, let's solve this dysregulation problem first before we try to do other kinds of problem solving because if we do, we're just going to keep on hurting each other, bonk, bonk, bonk, bonk, bonk. Now, certainly in terms of hiding, scope creep, a lot of people don't want to let go of, oh, no, no, no, no, we have to solve global warming now, otherwise we're going to die. No, actually, we need to solve the dysregulation between number one, each of the parties on their own where they're dysregulated internally and number two, the dysregulation between the parties so they can't talk to each other to solve global warming. That is putting doing scope creep as hiding or hiding the actual problem, which is the parties can't talk to each other because oh my god, we have to solve global warming before we die. Now, I hope that was clear, concise, short. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. I'm going to pause for a moment. I'll bring this back in. I'm really interested in scope creep around stupidity. And I think there is a nice bridge here in the sense of Mark C, you just proposed a sort of a thesis or a theory around stupidity that we would be looking at the wrong issue. It's really dysregulation that's the issue. And each of us probably has in our heads a fully-fledged or half-fledged or fledgling theory about why these things are happening and what's going on. One of the things I like about there's an epidemic of stupidity out there as a teasing headline is that it causes those scripts to sort of show up in our heads and start lighting up a little bit like oh yeah, because this, because that. And I'd be very interested in hearing from whoever feels they've got a narrative like that why or what, how that might work. So what I'd like to do is go into a little bit of silence and then ask whoever has a thesis or and it doesn't have to be like a white paper with footnotes. Just a just a I think this plus this plus this equals something we can call the epidemic of stupidity. And maybe if you have it like and this is my thesis of the root cause like Mark was just pointing to emotional dysregulation. And Mark I don't think you were necessarily saying that that is the root cause but that if we don't fix that we can't fix the other sorts of things. So let me go quiet and I have a thesis of my own but I will not go first. So I will wait for whoever wants to step in just break the silence and jump in with a thought. I'll jump in Jerry just because it prompted the thought. And that is that I think what's going on is attempts to escape reality and massive doses from everyone around them because of overstimulation inability to see what they can do about it leading to mass confusion and the epidemic. It's a powerlessness response. Thank you. Anyone else feel free to build that out or to offer a different theory. Hi Jerry and hi everybody. Thanks for letting me be remote but and yet available or present at least to the extent that I can. I'm parked now so I have fewer distractions. An image came to me when we said epidemic and stupidity and it was kind of like the reverse. It was it sort of said what would be the preconditions for insight and presence in a conversation and how are those preconditions often if not almost always missing. And high up on the list of preconditions is safety. So people feeling like I don't have to you know drop I don't have to do scope creep to squeeze into this conversation. I you know I can say something half baked and I won't be attacked for it. Maybe somebody will build on it. So there's you know there's a couple of ideas there. There's safety. There's goodwill. There's the acceptance as someone said I think we can you know everyone has something to everyone is a genius in a in a narrow realm that they don't share with others which is their own particular experience. And the question is how do you leverage that. How do you make it available to others. How do you respect it and then include it. Okay just a couple thoughts. Thank you very much. Mike you're next but if you want to just pause a little bit between what everybody says that'd be great. I had forgotten about the new paradigm. I do I do think that's very good to listen to the key points from the previous person and digest it. I'm going to build on a couple things that have already been said but I I like the idea of asking you know what why do we seem to be surrounded by noise and and stupidity and I'm going to be controversial here and say part of it is we've gotten out of the business of believing in standards. I'm a huge fan of Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance partly because it was all about quality you know pursuing quality and you know making you know your your bike as good as it could be and but just quality was a theme. I I don't see quality being a theme anymore and and even worse we seem to have completely forgotten ethical standards. Everything is about the law and so you hear the republicans well not the republicans let me be very clear the maga republicans the trump supporters saying well you know he didn't break the law but he was so far beyond any ethical system I mean whatever ethics you believe I mean what what what what some of the what's been documented not and particularly around January 6th it just is preposterous so I I guess I'd ask the question whether we we need to raise the idea of standards and believing in standards there there just seems to be this idea that everybody's values are the same we have to accept everybody's standards and there there isn't any kind of path towards a better world because everybody's got their own path I do want to make very clear I'm not saying there's a universal truth and I'm not saying that we can we can have a very concrete standard but I I think just as there isn't a way to know exact truth we can at least know the way towards more truthiness you know we can we can get closer and so that's that's my controversial statement and I'm sounding a bit like the old-school moralists and Robert Bennett but I really worry that we're not teaching our kids to accept some kind of rules to live by thanks thanks Mike I believe that Zoom shows us all the hands raised in the same order just the the sequence in which they were raised so I'm not going to necessarily queue in who's next and whatever so I think everybody sees that Ken and Stuart have their hands up so if you will pause between I will let us sort of self-steer for a bit before I say what I was going to say I want to mention how easy it is to see Mike looking relaxed with his hair a little bit messed up not in a tie just sort of like Mike I hope you're having a good time down there in pump springs for four more hours before I go to rainy Seattle okay so I was having this conversation last night with with an old friend of mine that we've known each other since 1970 and we talk every week and he's on the east coast and you know I said I'm not I'm not one of those people who I love bumper stickers and memes but I usually don't find any that kind of reduce the world down but this one actually does this one this one is like I don't judge people on their political position or the religious position I judge them on whether or not they're an asshole and we're talking about we have to Mike's point not just lost standards but one of the standards is you you you don't get if you're in a position of power the right to degrade and diminish other people and to marginalize them you know that's not a right that's given to you so by virtue of attaining a position of power whether it's in a corporation organization you know a government or whatever it is family and this idea of goes back you know to the moral of of the golden rule of treating people well and I come back to the dawn of everything and how prior to the Europeans rise in the world in the indigenous world chiefs had no power except the power of persuasion they and often if they were seen as wealthy they had to give their wealth away or people wouldn't listen to them so all they had to persuade people was their ability influence and to do that they always had to point to what works for the whole how do we make sure the decisions we're making are good for the tribe that they're going to serve us all and that was their place of power to stand in and I think we've got such an individualistic ego driven culture that we have forgotten what that's like and that's robbed us of power and it's increased the amount of stupidity in the world also where there's a there's a huge focus on you know who's the smartest guy in the room not usually who's the smartest woman there but who's the smartest guy in the room and we have to defer to them and when it comes to the level of complexity we're dealing with in the world today no one sees the whole picture so we've got to be a lot more humble in saying you know what do you think and 20 plus years ago I read an interview with Michael Eisner who was a CEO of Disney at the time he said you know we used to believe that the best ideas were only going to come from the creative department now we know that janitor could have an idea that would be a billion dollar movie so we encourage every single person no matter who they are if they work at Disney they have the right to speak up and make suggestions and that's something that I think we're really missing in many of our collective governance processes is who gets the right to speak so simply broadening that out would help a lot in terms of dealing with our collective stupidity and I think what we're trying here with the let's pause and let what people say sink in is one way to deal with collective stupidity um there's one more point I wanted to make oh um the idea of education yes our education systems failed us but you know what people a very long time in our history we didn't have formal education we had informal education and apprenticeships and whatnot and palo ferry wrote you know a pedagogy of the oppressed there are many many people in the world who have little access to education and yet they make wise decisions and how do they do that you know you don't have to have a phd from harvard in order to be a smart person um there's a story from the farm workers movement where uh it looked really bad for them the the the farmer the the farm owners had you know outlawed any organizing on site and so uh they gathered a church and says our Shiva says I don't know what to do I know I give up I've tried everything I can and we're we're out we're best at every turn there's a long silence an old woman in the back of the room who had no formal education so I have an idea you know they can't stop us from from worship maybe we could set a truck up right outside the gates of the of the farms flatbed truck and put an altar on it and people would come and they could they could pay their respects in the altar and while they're there they could talk to get organized and that's how they did it and so you know they can't they can't fault us that that's our right for religious purposes and and that didn't come from you know the the the big CEO that came from a very humble woman who said I have an idea and they listened to it so I think a lot more humility humility is one of the uh antidotes to stupidity if you ask me just saying I don't know what do you think um tell me more about that uh I just read Ed Shine's book Humble Inquiry Ed Shine passed last week at 92 I think you can get it online for free it's a fantastic book it's short and it's all about humble inquiry how can we how can we step back and and really see and appreciate other people thank you so I think this conversation is exactly where I would hope it would have gone in terms of throwing out the notion of collective stupidity or whatever phrase you want to use that was just a phrase to kind of engage in some ways and God is laughing God in quotes laughing you know look what I provided and and look what you are doing and I think we're we're kind of um being an example right now about how any system starts to bend back on itself after a ways you know capitalism comes to mind and and an individual and personal freedom certainly comes to mind because um look at what you know many of the people in the uh in the congress are doing in the name of you know um personal freedom I get I get to do this I appreciated what you said rick earlier about education um because I think as a foundational level you know we need to be re-encultured slash re-educated uh in in a different way in a different in a different mindset um and and the last thing that I wanted to say is um it and I think somebody said this in this call a few weeks ago you know nation states will take wise action when they've exhausted all other possibilities um the shit hasn't really hit the fan yet on a massive massive level and I've said this before um and until that you know happens people are still fucking around you know to use a term a term of art and then that's what's going on now everybody seems to be pushing their um um power I think I read recently that um BP has decided that they would um forget all their plans about sustainable alternatives and for the next 10 years they're going to just pursue fossil fuels again you you talk about if you talk about stupid action you know there it is but it's operating on a certain value set you know they're doing the best they can within the the mindset and operating principles and values um that are motivating them you know you know fuck the collective you know and the hell with what all the science is saying um we're going to maximize our profits right now and and that I think is the is a foundational edge um what many of us are are pouring into Rick you need to unmute yourself Rick thank you no I just um put a series of big herodicious questions into the chat box and those questions are not meant to be read um they're not to be set out alive they're meant to be read sorry because it it takes time to digest them um and I just reiterated something I asked earlier about um how we need to co-evolve lifelong intergenerational learning platforms for different purposes and you know I think the the epidemic of stupidity is is a great um sort of point to make a counterpoint I don't want to go down that rabbit hole because it's problem focused and it's not really focusing on innovation solutions and so I don't think we've really taken the time out to zoom out and really think more deeply about how to design systems and if you just think in the amount of money that's gone into designing artificial intelligence uh in a very short period of time if we were to really step back and really to design our human systems in a way that were beginning to address the three questions that I put there I would pause it we'd get the greatest minds together and develop governance structures simple rules educational processes that would be able to help us avoid repeating history over and over again um so my only hope is that there will be a a humanitarian technological synergy and revolution where the best of both sides can get us out of this morass so if you want to read I'm not going to read the questions out you can read them in your own time um but it's food for soul pausing thank you rick that was beautiful and um I agree people first not technology first and it's really hard there's a syndrome that I'm running into with my relationship with Kate um we call it in our pet language too much mark TMM where mark is really dominating the conversation because he is really smart and he thinks he's really smart um and he's not listening to Kate um recently I spent uh a night at 18 Lansing beautiful new apartment building penthouse that some friends have rented in con hill downtown san francisco and uh three guys um all in their thirties or 20 and um me at 60 and they just had so much energy and I stayed up all night with them which was dumb because I didn't sleep the night before too much male and I'm noticing that here on our conversation that our own stupidity is not having more women on this call I think we need to look at our own stupidity before we point out other stupidity um and you know my stupidity first which is more important than your stupidity thank you very much anyway um we're coming to the end of the call thanks for saying I was happy to be here thanks thank you mark and thank you also for reminding us to pause um I use the chat sometimes to take notes I just don't hit return so I'm going to tell a quick story this is my this is my amateur theory about amateur theory to address the question of the epidemic of stupidity uh as background two things one I was convinced by Adam Curtis's documentary uh uh way back when that we are in a non-linear war that basically information warfare is cheaper than bombs and bullets and it turns out that Russia was really good at non-linear warfare and appears to really suck at warfare on the ground as we're learning in Ukraine but but I I was convinced a while ago by hyper normalization is the name of the documentary that that we're sort of in this battle and um I also believe that separately that people humans are really smart like people are really smart and some people who seem really dumb it turns out when you ask them about baseball or quilting or something they really give a shit about they have memorized everything they know their stats they they like you know and and people who are poor are really smart uh most of us wouldn't last a couple days in a favela or or a slum someplace we would die very very quickly because there's so many things you have to do just to keep alive and stay alive and be safe in places where there's constant danger and most of us live in little cocoon sort of bubble wrapped lives where there's very little actual danger present as long as sort of the the cash keeps flowing through our system to keep all the barriers up but for me like I think that a lot of the stupidity we see is has been around a lot but it's strategy to mean uh I have a another another piece of amateur thesis is that the the story of human history is a fight in the cockpit over the joystick of control over whatever country or entity you happen to live in and the the parties that make it into the cockpit which are very few because usually we have elites who are fighting over the joystick they each think they're gonna they're about to lose they each think the other side is going to kill them off and knife them in the back it is a desperate struggle and the winners in retrospect always thought they were about to lose and all you know it's just nasty and every now and then they run the airplane into the ground and kind of wipe out their society and bad things happen either because they made stupid decisions within the system and destroyed it like you know Mao and Stalin killed like 20 some million people individually through really stupid decisions just look at the four pest campaign in China where they basically starved you know possibly 10 million plus people because they eliminated all the sparrows which had been eating all the insects so I think of our stupidity or our processions of stupidity as part strategy because stupid people who are fearful are easier to manipulate and there's a whole bunch of political parties that have gotten really really really smart on sociology psychology anthropology group dynamics and all that kind of stuff and they're like hey if we can keep people scared and afraid they will grab they will seize any narrative that floats by and we have lots of really great narratives that'll make them even more afraid and that's what's happening so so we are in this world where then then fold into this some new technologies that have shown up that lower the cost of communicating to zippity-doodle basically there's a there's a fixed cost of getting online which is a device of some sort and then a connection of some sort and beyond that everything else the cost is your time information freely is super conducted around the world and we and worse the platforms not email but the the major platforms Facebook etc their business model is addiction and stalking basically data mining our stuff and invading our privacy they want addiction so the platforms are not designed to help moderate modify or change all of this and they're designed to float like cute cats and people's morning toast bread avocado toast and whatever else through which makes us in some sense sort of stupider and then my whole quest started 35 years ago when I realized I hated the word consumer because our world has been consumerized and when we're treated as mere consumers instead of as citizens we lose that sense of standards and rules and order we lose that sense more importantly of interdependence and so this notion that we are in this little sucker together and that we need to sort of figure out how to how to make the world better together or we're all screwed because this thing doesn't naturally drive itself we actually need to steer together rather than be fighting in the cockpit over the joystick and I hate that I revert so often to the fight over the joystick metaphor but I do because I just see it happening so often all the time and I see actively the things that are happening on the street as strategy and you know Steve Bannon to me is a brilliant strategist and you know he's like pretty much on my evil spectrum on my naughty list but but he is really really he's one of those people who's figured out a lot of these social dynamics and is busy coaching leaders around the world on how to use them and it's working so well that in country after country we are evenly split you know and and and a piece of this is what legislation do you create that'll that'll buy you a victory even if your stances are unpopular and so Citizens United basically says money doesn't matter in politics so guess what we're just going to pour insane amounts of money into politics and that's going to help us win and it does so all these things happen because the ground rules that we've said are too easy to corrupt and because we've lost touch with each other and can't figure out that we're together one of the tools here is what I call denial of discourse attacks which is hey I know that you know Ken when you say we would like to like people deserve a place that the way to keep people from their place at the table and to keep winning the battle is to deny them the ability to talk to do denial of discourse and to make the arena for discourse so messy or painful or or irritating or dangerous that nobody will dare tread into it which means that when Lindsey Graham is incensed that somebody would would would say something against Brett Kavanaugh and impugn his character when when Lindsey Graham looks like he's about to explode that is theater that is pure and intentional theater to win a seat on the supreme court for a guy who very likely was a sex abuser as a young guy who was certainly a drunken bro etc etc but that's just a that's just a little scene in the theater of this strategic battle that's playing out at very high levels all over the place all around us and my answer to all of this is we need to figure out how to trust each other again that's why the unfinished 2020 talk that I gave is called trust is the only way forward I say some of this there I'll post the link to that talk here and I think that everything I just said is a fabulous example of scope creep because I'm sort of saying that that the question we're looking at involves all these large-scale social and political and economic dynamics in the world so that's my amateur theory of why we're facing an epidemic of stupidity I don't know that I think that it's perceptual it's temporary but it's intentionally driven it's like there's a bunch of people who are feeding us bread and circuses because being fearful and stupid makes you really really pliable so Jerry thank you for that really extraordinary exposition of more factors than I could keep track of as you were speaking that I think have you know value and validity and and and point us in in a direction and it has earned you I think the right to say yes or no to write a short chapter in a book called thoughtful citizens should you decide to undertake this sounds lovely before you you spoke so eloquently I was going to say the biggest challenge and I think everything you said points at this I mean a classic example I just heard somebody talking about you know republican strategy it's to prevent people from voting because of the current electoral college system and the the the number of you know senate seats available that they're not trying to win general elections they're just trying to keep power and control by gaming the system which is what I wanted to say one of the great things that I took away from a number of talks that I listened to by schmackenberger is that there will always be people who game the system no matter what you do and this is why kind of legislation is not the answer no matter what you do people will will game the system and in some ways that's what bannon is doing you know right now he's trying to play within the rules of the existing systems but his value set in the minds of you know so many of us would say oh that's you know he's he's operating in a in a in a way that doesn't care about human beings he only cares about power and control so this is that in some ways it's the it's the nub of the challenge we're on how do you create a system where people act in ways that quote we would think are responsible and to even add another layer of complexity it may not be a democratic system that actually gets us out of the morass you know it may be more of a more of a benevolent and I've said this before in this call benevolent authoritarian system that that that can bring us out of the system so in the meantime what do we do you know and I can only answer for myself you know I'm latched on to a few projects that keep me with some degree of satisfaction and I just keep working it with no sense of you know fruition but each of us has a piece of the solution I think that that's a true piece that we need to keep in mind that each of us has a has a little piece of the solution and so we we just keep putting one foot in front of another that's all that's all that's all we can do and and you know and boy if somebody's got a much better answer to that I'm all ears I loved your your referencing Ken humble inquiry or something something something like that thanks Stuart very much um where does this put us where we would like to go I think uh one of the tensions that arises in me around conversations about stupidity is that it could seem as a threat and it can constrict us into oh no oh no stupidity stupidity instead of what's the answer to stupidity you know we've been around a long time humans been on the planet for a very long time we only know a little tiny bit of our history the fact that we've made it here through all kinds of things means to collect we've been pretty intelligent up until recently so how do we instead of focusing on oh my god we're stupid what happens if we shift the focus to where are we smart what can we build on you know um I've had a lot of conversations about doomism and and I've really come I have no religion to speak of but I've really come to believe in the intelligence of evolution I don't think we got to where we are only to take ourselves out of the picture it could be we will do that but I really believe that um there is a larger native intelligence available to us if we listen at multiple levels individual right now we're listening to the the cells of our body it's a good place to start listening to the world listening to people listening to animals so I it could be I'm gonna I'm gonna float this as I just thought of this maybe maybe the antidote to stupidity is listening listening long enough and deep enough to find the place where stupidity is not stupid anymore because there's something under there that if we could grab on to and eliminate might wake stupid up in a very powerful way you're muted I came in late so am I correct and intuiting did I start when I'm ready to start I was very impressed that you picked up on the protocol given that you weren't here when you were sort of figuring that out so let me go for it well done well played I was I was listening in the into the silence so um two things um um one is that stupid is highly variable I mean humans are really there's a why there's a bell curve let's say of human intelligence and there's always going to be people who are less smart than others in certain ways but the other thing is that there is it's it's not a single variable metric and there's you know there's many different kinds of intelligence and people are smart in one and stupid in another we have our own profiles on that and so you know to Ken's evolutionary point I wonder about not not how do we get smarter but where do we need to get smart you know what are the critical adaptive capacities where we as a species or as a human culture need to get smarter now so I wonder about that and can I really like what you said about listening maybe being the hardest matter and it's it's it's it's it's something that's that listening sounds obvious but it's not there's a lot of subtlety to there you know listening is not the same as hearing because it involves constructing meaning involves actively constructing interpretation and relationship in the act of receiving sound waves um and how to listen to you not through what I already have and what I already know and what I'm already listening for um I was talking with somebody yesterday and wondering about how do we say this you know to some degree I'm living in my interpretations of my interpretations of my past and I'm living in my interpretations of my interpretations of you and my interpretations of your interpretations of me and all that's in the way of listening in the sense that Ken I think you're suggesting it so it's rich territory I would love us to come back on you know to that particular theme and another call you know staying with that thread and doubling down listening is a verb and on the other side of that is the person feeling heard which is being received and if you listen long enough and somebody feels heard enough there is this place that's possible to reach where there isn't the there isn't any stupid left not that I necessarily like the idea of imposing or projecting the judgment and that onto anything but um whatever the it is that's creating distance and space and lack of connection and understanding um and resonance um if if if I'm willing to invest the time um eventually there's a place of an opportunity for connection and for understand you know reciprocal and shared understanding recognition resonance respect I'm complete with that what Ken said about listening I completely agree with and pointed to a thought in my brain about we've been in an epidemic of not listening and I to me deep listening or whatever phrase you want to put around it is one of the remedies to that and tick not han is kind of my go-to guy for for things like that uh and he has a brief passage talking about the five wonderful presets where one of them is deep listening and loving speech and a while ago I made an amateur tour of belief systems and I have a I have a trick quiz about the 10 commandments in Christianity that I use really often I'll give the TL the R here which is I ask people what is the second commandment and frickin one in 100 people knows what the second commandment is and if there are commandments there's only 10 their commandments they were written on stone tablets you would think they would be important you would think they would be memorized or memorizable nobody knows the second the first is I am your god you're only god there will be no other gods before me the second in most of the 10 commandment write-ups because apparently there's a lot of variants is no graven images and if you go to any temple or any mosque on the planet they're obeying number two if you go to any church on the planet they are breaking number two every day and twice on Sunday ironically um and and it's like like what's up with that so I was looking around for good instructions for building a a good society and I landed on deep listening and loving speech and that's my favorite pair of instructions for running a good society because these are these are on ramps to being heard these are on ramps to building trust these are on ramps to treating one another with respect and maybe seeing our interdependence because when you listen deeply you feel how you and I are connected and what goes between us all those things become more palpable more visible and I think those things are awesome I think that's like a great way to go so so so and I'm open to all other suggestions for operating principles I will point to uh April took yoga teacher training a couple years ago and it was actually a really good course and I basically looked through her notes and started adding things to my brain and I added the yamas and the niyamas which are the absinances and the positive behaviors which are brilliant instructions for how to live a life and how to be in community they're really good non-grasping a parigraha go go go um there's a whole bunch of things that that are in other other faith structures that that I like a lot but uh but I'd be interested in if other people have uh their own favorite core nugget beliefs like I with that I'm complete so listening to all of this my first time here um I wonder if first how we framed the question and how we all sort of keep saying that maybe it's not about stupid but then keep referring to stupid um and then we keep saying it's about the system but keep referring to the individuals within the system and um critiquing parties individuals groups um and then we talk about listening and how difficult it is to listen through the lens that we have um and then we keep using that lens in conversation um I wonder if a lot of the difficulty that we have is that we're not really looking at what makes all of this arise we're looking at what has arisen and we have a society that we play as a game that we make the rules of the game and then when the rules aren't working for us we all want to change the rules um and then we blame the people who are trying to play within the rules and play blame the people who are trying to play with outside the rules but is the question the fact that we are living a game rather than living a natural way of living and you know the ideology of a system like the one we have I question whether that in itself is part of the problem and the the idea that we can see the world through something other than the lens we've been given is even a reality how do we see things with a language that already defines what we see how do we see things through a framework of what's right and wrong without the frameworks that preceded us to define what's right and wrong and so I don't know that we can truly listen without any of that and I don't think we could look at what's happening in our world without looking at the reality that the system we're all a part of is in itself a game that we've all subscribed to and that game and the rules we've set up in part define how we see ourselves and each other Jerry talked about everybody pulling for the joystick that only happens in an environment where we have two party three party four party system and everybody thinks that that's what you're supposed to be doing and then the way we solve it is well let's create another party or let's fix the parties we've got and it's like wait a minute it's the game that's the problem not the players because we're not going to be able to change the players the only thing we can do is change the game and the question I've been wrestling with is is there a way to do it without rules is there a way to do society where the game is not based on rules because whenever we set up rules we create another game that's ideological and structure rather than based on our nature I'm complete I know only a little bit about anarchism and our anarchists the things I think I know about them are that they got written into history as the bad chaotic people and we don't even we don't even think to look behind the curtain of anarchism because that's chaos anarchism equals chaos and it's going to be the downfall of civilization turns out when you pull the curtain back some what little I've done you find people who are trying to figure out an answer to the question Jose just posed to us which is how do you run a healthy society with minimal rules and no big hierarchy and no big two party system four party system whatever no fights over the joystick just how do you create and there are by the way many flavors of anarchism it's really interesting let me just share screen real quick because you will be amused in my brain I have collected anarcho capitalism or am cap which is popular these days anarcho communism pacifism primitivism syndicalism christian anarchism collectivist crypto epistemological free market individual insurrectionary rational relationship anarchy social anarchism or anarcho socialism synthesis anarchism and trenarchists each of which is connected to something so here's anarchism without adjectives and a bunch of other things so you can follow any of those trails down lots of different places and so I just kind of want to say that that there's a bunch of people who've done some really creative fabulous work that is labeled as anarchism and that one of the tactics one of the tactics in the arena that I was describing earlier or in a cockpit is to demonize the thing that's actually really smart and make sure that nobody goes and inspects it because if they actually inspected it with an open mind they would be like well crap we should do this and so I just wanted to expand a little on what jose said and it's a way of kind of walking back from our judgments about people that we dislike because many of them are playing the systemic game that's been set up they're just trying to maximize and do the best they can within the particular game slash um system people love rules that's why people flock to organize religion why and and this is a this is a piece of the epidemic of stupidity they don't want to think for themselves I remember when um obama and one of his campaigns what came out of his mouth was when times are difficult people turn to organize religion and he got blasted by it and all he was saying was that people don't want to think for themselves you know so they they they look for a uh some kind of a an authoritarian system that will tell them what they can and cannot do and and where I think we're pointing at in some ways is a system of values or an articulation of values that is inherent in um in human beingness inherent in human beingness in its in its in its highest form yeah humans do terrible things violent things but there is an aspiration for what we could and might be and yeah I mean history is filled with with examples of you know utopian societies of various kinds but the the notion of a set of values that people operate under I think is uh much more useful than the notion of um legislation of some kind because as I said earlier people game the system but right now we have a lot of people just trying to maximize they're winning within a system without regard to the human value I think I'm going to disagree a little bit with Stuart on people love rules um I think I think humans love predictability and predictability and rules are two different things and if you can offer me predictability then I think I'll follow I'll follow whoever gives me some predictability but if you're imposing your rules on me and they don't match my predictability of the world then I'm not so happy and I think that's what's happening right now the predictability that we offered everybody about what was going to be true about this system and what it was going to do for us and for the world is no longer true and I think that's that's really the difference between the idea of rules and someone said don't we need rules and um I'm not suggesting that we need another idealistic way of framing not needing rules and that we build a intellectual framework around it per se but that we recognize that autonomy is an essential part of our lives and that whenever somebody tries to put their foot on us what how little or how big we all try to pull away and so how do we find ways to use collaboration as a way to to do things rather than um the imposition of rules on one another um to me that that's a big distinction between those those things done and just to jump in for one second and thank you Jose what I wanted to say was was a beautiful example of collaboration because as you spoke about rules and predictability you know it just it just language can be inadequate sometimes and we need the joint brains that we have to get to the place where we where we want to get so thank you so I had planned to read this poem back in January but things got in the way I chose this poem because I thought it was really good poem for the start of the year um and then last week we were talking about black history so I read you know ethyl rich knight poem but I wanted to share this with you it's it's called my soul has a hat and I really love this poem my soul has a hat I counted my years and realized that I have less time to live by than I have lived so far I feel like a child who won a pack of candies at first he ate them with pleasure but when he realized that there was little left he began to taste them more intensely I have no time for endless meetings where the statute's rules procedures and internal regulations are discussed knowing that nothing will be done I no longer have the patience to stand absurd people who despite their chronological age have not grown up my time is too short I want the essence my spirit is in a hurry I don't have much candy in the package anymore I want to live next to humans very realistic people who know how to laugh at their mistakes who are not inflated by their own triumphs and who take responsibility for their actions in this way human dignity is defended and they live in truth and honesty it is the essentials that make life useful I want to surround myself with people who know how to touch the hearts of those whom hard strokes of life have learned to grow with sweet touches of the soul I want to surround myself with people who know how to touch the hearts of those whom hard strokes of life have learned to grow with sweet touches of soul touches of soul. Yes, I'm in a hurry. I'm in a hurry to live with the intensity that only maturity can give. I do not intend to waste any of the remaining desserts. I'm sure they will be exquisite. Much more than those eaten so far. My goal is to reach the end satisfied and at peace with my loved ones and my conscience. We have two lives and the second begins when you realize you have only one. Mario de Andrade, 1893 to 1945, poet, novelist, essay, musicologist and founder of Brazilian modernism. I got a run. Nice to see everybody. Jerry, can you post the poem or link to the poem? I just did in the chat. Thank you. It's the lasallette.org. Strange. Yeah, just came up in chat. Thank you. Yep. Gil, it's up to you to top that. I can't top that. I'll just say that Jerry is very fast. That what what is? Jerry is very fast. I'm fast. Well, Pete Kaminski and I are like little bunnies. We're like. Not as fast as Pete, but he's not here. So you win the fast prize today. Mike, just closing is what I stuck in the chat was that we're talking about rules, but it's not clear to me what we mean by rules or differently about rules and norms and customs and whatever else I said here and habits and promises. And it seems that all of those are you know, extant in some way in human societies. And we're maybe mashing them together and would be useful to untangle them a bit. There is a thought in my brain. There's things we like and things we don't like and we give them names and kind of characterize them and lose some important distinction. That's it. Thanks, Gil. And we're near the end of our call. There's a thought in my brain. I just put a link to it. We pass laws and impose rules when discourse fails, but discourse is preferable to laws and rules in my mind. Spoken like a good anarchist. And I don't know if any of you watched the Warriors and the Blazers play last night. That only happens with rules. No idea what you mean. Basketball. No, I know that they're basketball teams, but I have no idea what happened last night. Well, it doesn't matter, but people, you know, these teams went at it for an hour and a half intensely within a framework of rules that was invented, you know, what, 150 years ago by some high school teacher who had kids locked in in bad weather and needed to figure out what he could do to divert them. And he set out a very, you know, 10 commandments, a small set of rules that organized the energies and those rules have evolved. And now we've got what we got. And it would, you know, without the rules, it would be a melee with a ball. I did a little work in Australia a couple of years ago and became a fan of all Blacks rugby. And rugby is a controlled brawl. Yeah. And it's astonishing. It's astonishing that more injuries don't happen, but they're very strict about the rules. And it's kind of like really strong gentleman out on the field. It's very strange. Gentleman in an Australian sort of way. Which, yeah, the word has flex. Jose, if you want, you've got the last word for today's call. I agree with Gail 100 percent. The words that we use and how we frame them had a lot to do with it. I think the idea that we can arrive at common understanding of what the norms are and that these norms evolve through experience and they work for us. And we pass them on to the next generation and so forth until they decided no longer works for them. Then that's one thing. But when we impose a rule that can't be changed. And that, I think, that's the issue. It's how do we create rules? It's the process of the creation of rules, the imposition of rules, and the ability of changing rules. There's a big difference between that and norms. One of my great sadness is the Trump campaign and administration was that he was getting where he was getting by breaking norms that were not actually hard and fast rules or laws. And I hate that. It turns out that candidates would publish their taxes and he was like, nope, not getting my taxes. And then there were lawsuits all the way until now to just try to get Trump's taxes. Well, that was a norm, not a law. And that was one of 100,000 that he violated. And he shredded open the Overton window of acceptable or at least tolerated behavior by breaking all those norms. And so that I really don't like the effect he had because it seems to say, gosh, we need to pass more laws to force people to do the things that he should have done as a citizen of the country. And the systems, just to pick up on that, Jerry, and the systems as so many depend upon voluntary compliance with what people see as traditional social norms. And then when you get an actor outside the norm, like Schmockdenberger said, you're always going to have somebody on the edge. So, you know, this is the human challenge that we have, that I think has been with us forever. How do you take care of the people who violate the norms? I mean, in many indigenous systems, when someone violates the norms, the majority sees it as, oh, we have failed as a society because this person has gone outside of the norms. And what do we have to do to bring them back within the culture and the system? How do we need to heal them so that they will operate within the norm so that we can have the kind of social structure that Jose was pointing to? And that we're all, I think, in some ways aspiring to. Well, another way of observing that is that we can be irate about Trump breaking all these norms. And I'm going to guess that a lot of us have done a bunch of our lives breaking norms, maybe even have identity. Mark Karanza, after a pause of your choosing, you will have the last word on this call. I have to run. Thank you all. Thank you. Gil's point exactly. As a former or hopefully former junkie from 18 to maybe like 25, I got used to thinking like a criminal. And it's incredibly useful when I want to get what I want or when I want to get someone else wants. And what can we learn from this breaking of norms? Rather than condemn it, how can we use it to our own advantage for the good? Thank you. Thank you all. See you in a week. I'll see you sooner. Thanks, Mark.