 This is the Rex check-and-call for December of 2018. It is Wednesday, December 19th. I have a poem to take us in. It is by the poet Grace, sorry, Joy Harjo, H-A-R-J-O titled Grace. If you want to follow along, I will post it right now. Link to it in the chat and here it goes. This is, she dedicated it to Darlene Wind and James Welch. I think of wind in her wild ways, the year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway in the cursed country of the fox. We still talk about that winter, how the cold froze imaginary buffalo on the stuffed horizon of snow banks. The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated broke fences, crashed our thermostat dreams and we couldn't stand it one more time. So once again, we lost a winter in stubborn memory, walked through cheap apartment walls, skated through fields of ghosts into a town that never wanted us in the epic search for grace. Like coyote, like rabbit, we could not contain our terror and clowned our way through a season of false midnight. We had to swallow that town with laughter so it would go down easy as honey. And one morning as the sun struggled to break the ice and our dreams had found us with coffee and pancakes in a truck stop along Highway 80. We found grace. I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands or a white buffalo escaped from memory. But in that dingy light, it was a promise of balance. We once again understood the talk of animals and the spring was lean and hungry with the hope of children and corn. I would like to say with grace, we picked ourselves up and walked into the spring thaw. We didn't. The next season was worse. We went home to Leech Lake to work with the tribe and I went south. And wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it. Beautiful, no? I love the imagery of a stuffed horizon of stillbanks. It's just, it's, the language is really rich. It feels really personal all over there. That kind of sets us up for a check-in call for December. This is our last one, last one for 2018. Then suddenly we're gonna be in 2019. I'm not quite sure how that happened. And if anyone would like to just talk about whatever is happening in their life that is rexie, that would be great. Well, I'm sorry. I like both eyes for researching. Go ahead, McKellie. That I only have 30 minutes this morning, but I was missing all of you because it's been a while that I've been able to be on a call with you. And so I thought I'd just jump in for a little bit. But I was looking at the list of books that I read this year and the notes that I had made about passages that stuck out to me and a couple or more than a couple of times. It was largely around, I didn't know I was strong enough to do this thing until I just went ahead and did it. And so that kind of was a nice review of the year. And actually I think part of a conversation that we had had probably last year about the lack of, not, you know, sorry, maybe the fact that we are the grown-ups in the room, right? We keep, in terms of the political climate, there is kind of some conversation around, oh my God, like who is watching the store? And that kind of the realization that, oh, it's we, we're the grown-ups in the room now. And so this theme throughout this year for me around, you just put your head down and do the work and don't think too much about whether or not you can or can't or if it's gonna work or not, you just go do the work. And so that's been a really fun, good, feels like a very satisfying kind of thing to be like, oh, that's right. We don't have to be freaking out about it, whatever it is, if you're just putting your head down and doing the work. So that's where I'm at. And it's kind of tied into all of this. We hired a new executive director for the Consortium for Service Innovation and I could not be happier about it. We found a great, great person, super excited to work with him. I think it's just gonna be fantastic. And that was a huge sort of heavy, big, weighted worry for me for a lot of the year. And he's been in the Consortium for a while, right? He's been a participant part of the group. So he knows exactly what's going on. He's been in the initiatives. He understands the language. It's a really good fit, it sounds like. It's a really good fit. And he actually instigated a lot of the work around one of our big initiatives, which is fantastic. He just totally kind of embodies what we're about. So it's really fun. That's awesome. Have you had to sit down in a looking forward session yet with him or? Not a huge looking forward, but many sort of like here's where we're at right now kind of conversations. Sweet, should be a lot of fun. Looks like 2019 will be super interesting for you guys. Yeah, I think so. That's my scoop. Love that. Thanks. Thanks, Helen. Hi, Susan. We're just checking in to see. I had a poem a little earlier started us off with that. I don't know when you log in. Hey, Kevin. How you doing? Happy belated birthday. I bet he can't hear you yet. Yes, you are still logging in. Now you're muted in case you wanna jump in. But good to see you. We're doing a rex check in to see what sorts of things we've been up to from the rex perspective. So just going around and seeing if anybody wants to wants to check in that way. And Kevin, what's new in your world? Oh, Susan, go ahead. And you'll need to unmute. You're presently muted, Susan. You're still muted. Let me unmute you from here. Okay, go ahead. And that's twice in two days, isn't it? Ah. Go for it. So, yes, I've been working with MediaX at Stanford, which some of you know about. They're the industry partnership arm of H-Star at Stanford. And have been wrapped up in helping them design something called a visiting bots program. And so I might mention it before, but it was Martha's idea and Martha Russell's idea who set the habit to sort of just, I don't know, I just popped into her head one day. Let's put it that way. Okay, so we're thinking of bringing a number of bots. We have a proposal in industry partners are being, et cetera, to bring a number of bots of various kinds to Stanford to go back to school. Partly to take them to the research labs, to kind of on a carousel of research, to research labs to see whether there's any pickup on what interesting questions might be raised by these actual real world robots and how they're being used. And I'm liking it a lot. At first I was dubious, then I laughed and now I'm deeply engaged. And it will, I hope, provide a place for me to actually get some real world data and interest on this whole business of how we interact, conversational modality, I guess I will call it these days. I can't quite find the right term for interactions with these things we're building. That's my biggest thing. And I just read Jose San Marro's, the stone raft, he's a Nobel Prize winner Portuguese, if you don't know him, took me a long time to read the book and I thought it was the most amazing novel I've read in years. So I highly recommend it. It's setting is the splitting off of the Iberian Peninsula from Europe and floating around. And it's a kind of, I wouldn't say it's an allegory, almost of life in the sense that here are these people who suddenly find their, become an island and are off and it's all about how people adjust and how they, and it's very funny. And how it's sort of a giant plus a change, you know? And it's at the end of the book it's heading south into the Atlantic. And I've never read anything by him. He'll paste his Wikipedia page here. I've never read any of his novels. So it sounds super interesting. Yeah, yeah. He writes in the, and is translated in the romance style of extremely long sentences, paragraphs that are, you know, a page and a half long and all one sentence. And you just, you're just drawn along, right? And it's so terribly, terribly human in the face of this great catastrophe or maybe not. Super interesting. There's the setting of the Stone Raft triggers memories of a book called Life Raft. Sorry, Life Boat, Life Boat by John Stillgo who's a Harvard historian who writes in the introduction like turns out nobody's written a history of the Life Boat, like how did it come about what happens and so forth. And it's a fascinating book for a bunch of reasons. One is we got all the moving parts wrong for a really long time. So the David's that swing the boat out, that try to lower the boat into the water, that was a mess forever. You do not wanna get into a square stern. If the stern is cut off, that's not as good as if it has a pointy stern because if you have to land on a beach, the ones with a square stern are much more likely to swamp and roll over on the way into the beach. You want one with sort of double bow, pointy bows. But then the interesting part was that suddenly there's a microcosm of the world in the lifeboat and you have only what you have. And there's a chapter on what gets put in lifeboats and whether the food is fresh enough to eat or whatever but is there a map, whatever. And also what knowledge gets put in the lifeboats. And the most interesting thing to me was in that moment where we transitioned from the age of sail to the age of steam and steamboats took over moving in the waterways. A steamboat is like a bus or a taxi. A sailing ship is completely subject to currents and prevailing winds. So your average sailor, the lowest ranked sailor on board a sail ship knew if you saw an island whether you should try to get around and go toward it or not. Your average landlubber has no idea. And so a lot of knowledge that would really hinge where your survival would hinge on it while you were lost at sea was lost when we moved to the age of steam because then you had people who were just a fireman down stoking the steam engine with coal who knew nothing about the ocean necessarily. They knew how to run a steam engine. So it's these generational transitions. It's about what we learn about how it works. It's about stories of all that. Probably useless to the stone raft but an interesting sort of parallel. It's very similar in its... I mean, these people, there are five people who the protagonists, if you will, who are moving along and they start out... They run into each other. It's sort of... I didn't know if it had a plot line but I guess the plot line is how the island is moving. So it turns out the five people, one of them turns out to know how to manage a horse when their dishavot breaks down. And they're just traveling around and trying to see what's going on and getting away from the coast when it looks like they're gonna run into the Azores. The island's gonna run into the Azores and then immediately it takes a right shift and doesn't run into the Azores and everybody, it has to adapt to the fact that it's no longer a collision and they can all move back to the coast. It goes on like this. Well, and there's a person who's a historian, a history teacher. And so when they land in certain villages in Spain, they decide to go to the Pyrenees because they've never been to the Pyrenees and the Pyrenees have been cracked in half and they can go up there and see what it looks like to get to the top of the Pyrenees. Anyway, he has great stories about things. And one of the lines that I remember is something about how it was that there was a great battle in this one place and I won't go into any of the details except there's a lion there that says, well, nothing really changed much because the dynasties and all of the rest of that, people were very used to people sneaking in through the back door, kings sneaking in through the back door and how that life just sort of went on in spite of all of those major political decisions that were being made. Very cool, thank you. Kevin, what's your world look like? What have you, you have a series of new calls and initiatives coming up or that have just happened? Can you hear me? I unmuted. Yes. Okay, good. Yeah, I was fortunate enough to one of my board members let me borrow her house in Kewa Island. So I did a retreat recently and did about a hundred pages of writing and catching up on reading. I was finishing, I had only gotten halfway through and never finished McGilchrist's master and his emissary book. So I got through the rest of it and it was worth the price of admission. So I'm glad I finally got through that. I saw that he was in New York, McGilchrist with John Cleese doing a seminar together. And I said, that would have been great but I wasn't available. Amen. Choice flows are testing the future work. There's a lot of NDA or mutual NDA work that I can't discuss but there is work going on thanks to you, Jerry with Institute for the Future where we're going to provide some quantitative support for the qualitative work that they've done on work and learning skills to provide some quantitative scaffolding to the rigorous work that they've already prepared. So that's really good. That will first emerge in the future of assessment workshop that I'll attend in Austin. So we're doing that. We're also using the Tanjo bots to animate some of the narratives. So those nine market pipes that they have will actually be reading every day and showing interest in new things that are occurring on the web on a daily basis. So we'll animate those archetypes. One of the things that's interesting is that we have been able to advance that machine learning to the point that what most of the major companies are offering as a kind of a monthly price for doing something in the cloud. We're now offering on a year basis at the same price the ability for you to have your own brain access to the source code and basically do what we did in the PC industry that you saw us, you participated in the advisory council, Jerry, is bypass the IT and the CIO's office and be able to have at a department level your own brain for a hobbyist cost as it were so that they can run their own experiments. So we're doing that in CSAT, auditing, marketing, voice of customer research. So it's pretty interesting to see that blossom because both the price point and the ability to run it in a disconnected environment it's kind of skiff ready for a lot of applications where otherwise you'd be sharing data with a large company that you would perhaps prefer to hold inside the confines of your own work area. And as in Sacramento recently, we're running a brain program for the North Carolina Community College System and I've teed that conversation up with a California Community College System which is considerably larger, there are 115 campuses and two and a half million applications sent in a year with 600,000 accepted, we're thinking about so how would we look at that data and improve their game in terms of onboarding their student population for success inside that system? So I could keep going, I'm having fun and I'm getting paid for it and that's all good. That's great, the latter part, so tango.ai is the bot company, right? Right, I'm on the board of that and I spend probably a day a week with that team now. They were recognized as a Gartner Cool Vendor in the fourth quarter of this year, so they're getting some interesting exposure. They should probably send a bot to the Visiting Bots program at MediaX, sounds like, or I forget, did you hear Susan Stuckley talk about the Visiting Bot program? Yeah, I mean I heard it, yeah. Yeah, I did, I mean what happened? There's certainly, Susan, if you wanna have a background conversation, glad to do that and kinda compare notes because one of the things that's interesting is every one of these machine learning or AI capabilities functions best when it's narrow, right? And what, so it really depends on what it has been taught to do. What ours was trained to do, Susan, was to read the Dewey Decimal System and read human language and put it into those buckets just like you were in a library. And so it's created another 1800 of its own category since we've turned it on. And so that base learning is then applied to other language sets or other things like customer complaints or contracts and reading in there and finding out where the potential compliance problems are and pointing that out to a human being so they can look at it in more detail. So. I will absolutely get in touch. And the Dewey Decimal System, I love the Dewey Decimal System. I was at an Aspen Institute round table on the future of libraries and how to use bandwidth. And toward the end of that session, I said, you can look at what you're doing. I've looked at how you get educated. And the question is, how many of you in the future wanna be librarians and how many of you wanna be information scientists, right? Because I think that there would be a lot of people who would show up at the library for an information scientist that might not show up for a librarian or vice versa, that there's role for a both and. But right now, as a community, you don't portray yourselves that way. And increasingly, I think that that's, the library should be the most connected, most wired place in a community. It should be the place to go to find both connectivity and to not only be able to find, but to create, okay? So many of these places should become creator spaces, not just find information spaces. So anyway, provoked it a little bit, was fun. And I'm staying with that conversation. I got my first paying job at a library after mowing lawns. And so I have a deep interest in seeing this resource thrive, but it needs to reinvent itself. And it really has been a little bit too comfortable in being able to ride these changes. And so it needs a little bit of disruption, a lot, a little. Okay. And they have really nice real estate in most metropolitan areas and most little towns and all that. So they really do need to rethink what they're doing. It's great. I'll tell you, if any of you happen to visit where I live in the Raleigh Durham, North Carolina area, I encourage you to go see the library, visit the library at North Carolina State University. It is a gorgeous new collaborative space. And it's state of the art. The only drawback is that they put the books into an archival space and they have to be retrieved by robots. And I find the experience of wandering the stacks and having something just pop out at me because I'm looking at the stack to be something that is missing when you have to go get the bot to retrieve it from a, you can see it getting retrieved, but it's in a glass enclosed space to preserve the books. And I'm a wanderer, I'm a little bit too promiscuous. So I like the regular stacks. Maybe they could change the bot they're using and have one that actually has, you see little hands, you put your hands inside of little guide devices, you then see little hands moving in front of books and then you can pick a book out, you can open it on it, you can look at the next one, but not see a better bot. The hole you would need is a camera, right, that would go along with it as it was roaming. Yeah, I mean, I'm for that. I mean, there's a little bit of the tactile, I still like to hold a book in my hand, right? I mean, Kindle isn't the same, but Kindle is so, the advantage for all of you that I like is that you can get a sample of a book before you buy it. And if you like the writing style, then I go and buy the real book. So I thank Amazon and Kindle for giving me the opportunity to sample things before I buy a book that, you know, otherwise would have been quickly donated because I got into it and I said, oh, I actually don't like this thing. Thank you, Jerry. Thank you for letting me out there. Yeah, thanks, Kevin. And actually one more question for you, Kevin. Sure. Which is, when you're talking about creating brains for organizations, which part of your activities was that connected to? Because I'm not figuring out where the brains are coming from. So all the Tonjo machine learning brains, right? Because the brains part is taking a data set and ingesting all of it. You know, think of data analytics as knowing the question you wanna ask and, you know, the answer is in the haystack like the needle in the haystack. And the easiest way to find the needle is burn the haystack. In machine learning, we're analyzing the entire haystack figuring out why the needle is where it is. We can shake it a little bit, see it drop and look at the patterns that emerge. So, you know, that's the glory of some of this is that you don't know what you're gonna discover when you ingest a lot of information and randomly let it, you know, suggest hypotheses. Some of which, you know, from a human standpoint are nonsense, but they're all valid and you pick out, you know, human beings have to pick out the ones that are worth pursuing. So it's a lot of, at this stage it's a lot of fun, right? There's also a lot of like nuclear energy. You know, there are a lot of, you know, dark purposes that we're seeing perpetrated on people with this stuff, but we're trying the good stuff. Excellent. Thank you. Yes, Susan, is the visiting bot program involved at all and like good, friendly AI or making sure that these bots are not harvesting our neurons for evil purposes? You know, I should mention this has not yet been announced. So don't, don't brood it about too broadly. Well, we hope it will be. Yeah. Right now, right now this is put out in the spirit of, yeah, well, my personal interest is, one of them is to see how people react in academia to actual real things that have real robots that are out there and actually functioning. Pardon? When you talk about robots, are you talking about embodied intelligence, you know, actual physical things roaming? Are you talking about bots, i.e. web? We're talking about both and we're starting with, I hope we might start with chat bots, but we're starting with actual embodied robots. Okay. I was assuming chat bots all the way. That's interesting. What? Cool. I was assuming chat bots all the way. So the idea that you have physical robots visiting is interesting. Yeah, I mean, the other place that we should compare notes, Susan, is I'm looking for those embodied intelligence systems in healthcare automation and elder support, looking for those for, you know, for which ones we should select an important, do human factors on to make available in other cultures. So we should have a conversation about that too. Yeah. Absolutely, everything. Very cool. Thank you. April, do you want to check in just a tiny bit on your recent quest? You are still muted. Where did the button go? Mouse over. Here, I'll unmute you. There, my entire dashboard at the bottom just disappeared. I don't know why. Last one. Yeah, so that's why I was shrugging my shoulders. Hi, everyone, and happy holidays. And a couple of you know some of my updates already and some of you know, do not. I think, and it's interesting, I mean, I always struggle a little bit on calls like this where we know each other professionally and we also have friendships where it's like the update on like what I'm doing or the update on like what I'm thinking about or how my, I think for me in particular this year of like how the internal and external interface and all the work I've been doing with yoga and all of that. So I kind of want to keep this brief but immediately for some reason I'm like, it's not just about what I'm doing. It's about this year has been just an extraordinary exploration of the internal workings of why, not just why I do what I do, but how I can show it more fully in the world. So that continues to be a process of evolution. Earlier this month, I hadn't done any deep yoga related immersion since teacher training finished in June, but two weeks ago I did a 30 hours over four days intensive on, it was titled Finding Your Authentic Voice. So that was super interesting. It wasn't so much about yoga or philosophy that sort of thing, but basically how do we show up in the world? And that was perfect for where I am right now in terms of the theme of voice because since I had any kind of major update, I think with the Rex cohort this last fall, September, October, November, as Jerry knows well, were just an outright sprint for speaking. Couldn't be more happy with the audiences I've managed to get placed in front of, but in three months I did more keynotes and public speaking than I typically do over the last few years than I've typically done in a year. And that has really confirmed to me that moving forward, I really want to push hard on the speaking honestly because I love it. I absolutely just the more I do it, I feel alive. I love what I get to talk about that sort of thing. So part of this year has been as I reflect back by 2018, not that I've hit the pause button in that I've been like less busy, but I have filled my time with quite different things. And I realize now that particularly when I hit the pause button to do yoga teacher training in which was most of Q2, where I really didn't do much in terms of advisory or anything like that, I now see that the purpose of that was not only to learn more about yoga, but it actually was to create the space for other stuff that had actually been on my periphery that I cared deeply about, but I simply didn't have the hours in the day or the mind space for it to shift more to the center. And so that takes some time to realize how those pieces fit together, but I love it. And basically looking forward, I did a little bit of a five years back, five years forward kind of retrospective perspective. And what I'm really focusing on now and kind of the big updates I suppose are two, one is that I really just wanna go full throttle on developing a speaking portfolio, which is easier said than done, but for some reason I'm getting traction and I can tell that things are finally clicking. And so there's that. And I'm happy to talk about the things I've been talking about and that kind of thing. It is still largely sharing economy, new economy, future of work. And last month, my last keynote was actually about an area that I want to lean more into. The title of my final keynote was actually new perspectives on citizen leadership. So looking at the concept of citizenship and how it's changing and how we are living more and more in a world where you can have multiple and layered identities. Obviously people can have many passports and things like that, but just the notion of citizenship is really changing in this world in which we are more local and more global and the nation state itself is kind of falling away, although you wouldn't believe that if you only read the headlines. Which is a perfect segue into the other big update, which a couple of you heard a little bit about yesterday, is that I am finally after 20 years of thinking about different variations and asking myself questions and deciding that I really wasn't ready. 2019 is going to be finally officially attempting to write my first book. And it's going to be a culmination of everything that I've done thus far, but also with this wrapper of citizenship. And I guess we should put that in quotes because it's not the right term yet, as we talked about yesterday and elsewhere. There simply aren't the right terms. We don't have the vocabulary or the language to describe what's going on and how we see ourselves and the narratives we tell ourselves about who we are. And that plays out with regards to everything from how we live and work, to things like the sharing economy and how we connect and transact with others, to things like microfinance and how we finance and can get access to funding in capital, how we live, how we work, talent and mobility and what it means for governments as well. So I worry a little bit that I could boil the ocean if I tried to explain the book right now. I am up to my eyeballs in the proposal and my goal is to get a draft of that done, hopefully by the end of this month and to really push hard on that so that my speaking and writing can link together. And most of all, I'm really focused on how do I build a bigger platform for what I do and do it in a way that feels authentic to me. So let me pause there, because that was probably enough. Thank you. That's a really nice intro. I'm wondering if anybody has any suggestions, comments, questions, hands are clapping. Join the Writers Guild. Any thoughts or advice? Kevin, you've written a couple books? Yeah. Join the Writers Guild, April. Okay. And so you have a community of authors that you can be part of. And yeah, this will help your speaker's bureau with the next wave of placements, for sure. But then what else do you want to do with it? Because you won't make, unless you are one of the notable exceptions, like the, or of Ivory, so, you know, that 10-1-hundredths of a percent, you're not going to make a lot of money writing a book, but you can make a lot of difference because it shows that you have distilled, concentrated knowledge about something, right? And that opens doors, right? I would also encourage you to make sure that you use this moment in time to talk to anyone on the planet, because if you're writing a book, you can write and you'd say, I'd like to talk to you, I'm writing a book, and most people will take your call, all right? If you're not writing a book, they won't, all right? So anybody you have ever wanted to talk to, this is the moment, all right? Yeah, thank you for that, and maybe a little bit more context around it. So one is, and I just put the link to the retreat that I went to, I have no false hopes about, I'm actually looking at this, a book itself, right now, my expectation is that it will produce zero income and may actually cost me something, but that over time, it's much more about a longer-term build and also just as a little bit of context, those of you who've known me for a bit longer, like 20 years ago, as long as I can remember, people have been saying, when are you gonna write your book? Like when are you gonna do it? And for a long time, people thought I would write a travel book and I always just resisted, it felt like it was about me and it felt like it was a memoir of some sort and I was like, that is just not the kind of way, that's not the book the world needs and that's not the way I wanna spend my time. And then, but over the last two, three years or so and I've been thinking about the layers of, I guess, expertise that I've been developing and I've never sought to be like the best at X, but I love the fact of being among the best at knowing something about X and Y and Z and so looking at kind of the overlaps and the interstices and how that has shaped my worldview and so it was really about 12 months ago that I started feeling, well, the other piece being, because of the speaking where people have been like, well, just write a book, write a book so you can say you've written a book as if it's like something you can tick off a list and that never felt quite right either. But over the last year or so, I've just felt these ideas and the distillation of ideas but the combination of ideas and observations and experiences at the 50 yard line of different themes and issues playing out is that it began to feel like a book was starting to come out of me as opposed to it being something I was trying to fit into a box. And so I went to this thing called Story of Summit. It's an absolute delight but basically spent a week earlier this fall in the midst of right at the beginning of my travels. This took place in Spain and I happened to be in Portugal for business so it worked out really well but it was basically one week with a woman who professionally helps, her DBA is the book doula, so she midwife's books and I've known her for years and it's her annual retreat where if you're already serious about writing a book you can get to the point where you have a pretty good outline for a proposal and in my case I went, I sort of gifted myself the week and said it is time for me to figure out once and for all right now whether I'm ready to write a book. So that was kind of the milestone I set for myself and after that week it became very clear that not only was I ready but that I was actually pretty well on the way to having a table of contents that I love and that sort of thing. So Kevin all of what you're saying is like you're hitting just like the sponge of a brain and I'm doing a lot of competitive landscape research like and what I love is there's some stuff that's adjacent but there's not nobody touch wood that I found this far is really looking at the, again the overlaps. So there are a few books about the sharing economy, there are a few books about citizenship but they're not at all looking at a holistic sense of where this means the world may be heading. Are you, you haven't shared anything but what comes to mind is if you're trying to get people to have a different perspective in other words trying to turn the notion of what it means to be a citizen on its head all right as it were. The book cover should be which you have already created a brand for is you in a handstand, the name of the book is Handstand Turning Citizenship on its Head. Nice. That's, well here's what's funny. That's what comes to mind based on what you're saying. That's good. I can see it, okay. Yeah, well and I wanna, we can shift from each other speaker to each other people on the call. No, no, no like I love I'm just real I don't wanna hog the call but Kevin this is great. The funny thing is I've been spending a lot of time early on it seemed like there is an opportunity actually to develop some new vocabulary. A lexicon, a new term of sorts right and that might even become the title and I've been part of multiple conversations in different communities that are trying to crack this nut so to speak and nobody has come up with anything so either I come up with that word or I am gonna have to kind of step back and say this is an emerging space in which case I actually I do talk a lot about flipping things upside down on their head sort of new perspectives on the world as well as citizenship and in this case I'm not, I should say and to be clear it's not a political book. I'm not trying to get dogmatic. I'm not trying to convince people that something's changing. I'm trying to actually show them that it is like read between the lines of what we read in the news. Read between the lines of how people are living and working and meeting their needs. Read between the lines of obviously technology and this stuff like it's like the toothpaste is out of the tube but we haven't actually paused to take note of how these things are layering on one another and I mention this because and this is just a fun sort of anecdote. Earlier this fall I had a chance to speak alongside Richard Thaler who won the Nobel Prize last year, you know, behavioral economics and he told me the story of how he got to his ideas and as he puts it he's always looked outside the window of academia or business or whatever and how people are really living and decades ago he began to see disconnects between the economic models and formulas he was being asked to develop by his advisors and like the reality of how people were living and he kept looking out the window and he kept getting in trouble from academics, from CEOs but he said I couldn't resist like the reality is on the street. The reality isn't in these models and metrics and he got bashed for that for decades and then finally when we started to see that man is not homo, we are not homo economic us totally rational that sort of thing but that we're messy and all of that and obviously that leads to the Nobel but I had this sense of, I mean not at all to compare myself to Richard Thaler but for me it was like my equivalent of that of like debunking some of the myths that we have around citizenship but the different layers of citizenship so individual citizenship, corporate citizenship and of course what this means for governments who right now are the gatekeepers for how we define citizenship through passports and borders and that kind of thing. You're in the middle of the Schopenhauer progression and if your book is coming out in terms of instead of your ideas being stupid that they're being actively opposed on the way to becoming common wisdom the act of opposition will help you. Yes, thank you. I have to go guys. If you need anything April, let me know Susan looking forward to hearing from you and really enjoy being part of this jury when I can join. Have a great new year. Thank you for being here. Thanks Kevin. Thanks Kevin. I love to Heidi. And April I wanted to re-ask a little part of Kevin's question and you can pass on it if you want just even for thinking about it but in the best of all worlds, the book is out you finished it, you're happy with it three to five years forward. What does it allow you to do? What are you doing in the world that's different from what you do now because of it? Great question. I don't have entirely the answers but part of what I wanna do and part of the bigger picture context is when I reflected on going back to this sort of looking back, looking forward and the last five years, I mean, here's where I'll just like immense gratitude and touch wood, but like the last five years for me have been phenomenal. Like I've built something that works. I have expertise that people want. In some ways it's been way better than anything I imagined I could have done five years ago at the same time and that's mostly from an advisory perspective. And at the same time when I looked forward I was like, right, so if the next five years are about helping companies get smarter, helping startups grow bigger perhaps, you know, the things that I've been doing I was like, that is just not the impact or the extent of the impact I want to have. So this has to do, what I'm not sure is whether I want to focus more on the individual level, the organizational level or the government level. I definitely want the book to lead to more speaking and thinking and all of that. I think I would love to get more involved in conversations with organizations and that's both public and private sector who really are the levers of change around how some of this is going to work. So I think about for instance, and again to go back to an example I know some of us are very familiar with Estonia. Just yesterday they published Estonia eResidency 2.0, their white paper on the next chapter. They're blowing the lid off of what they've been doing thus far. I was interviewed as part of that process. I think I was the only non Estonian. I loved it. Estonia is still teeny. I mean Estonia is like peanuts in the global context in this way. Yet I think that five years from now they will be even more of a leader in terms of building open systems, thinking along the lines of bridges, not borders and all that kind of stuff. And so I want what I don't yet know and what I hope I think the process of writing the book will help me gain clarity on also is where in that Venn diagram I need to be best positioned. And I'm not sure whether it's the, I love the government end of things. It could be a real shit show to be honest globally. I also really love the idea of engaging more with younger people, which is the one part of my portfolio the last five years I've spoken to some universities, but it's the one piece I think that has been most missing from what I do. And I don't want to become a coach kind of thing, but how can I actually develop something, a tool, a framework going beyond resources? How can I develop something for people who are still at a point in their life that they haven't committed to a specific career or location or budget or that sort of thing. So there's a piece in that as well. And I just don't know or am I gonna go create something that simply doesn't exist today? I don't know, I don't think the last five years have shown me for sure that I actually value independence and flexibility and having something that's lightweight and nimble rather than building an organization, I value that immensely. So I don't know that I go build some kind of institution, but I think I need to align myself and maybe even, I don't know, I could go in house at some point for an organization that is really on the cutting edge of this stuff. So I don't, the answer is I don't know, but those are some ideas. That's great, thank you. I really appreciate your ruminating with us on that lots. Anybody else with thoughts that that pulls up? Otherwise, I was gonna ask Todd, if you'd like to check in in particular, I'm curious about the workshop work you're doing with Marty and anything else that's kind of wrecks you on your horizon, but that kind of thing. I guess that definitely qualifies as RECCY since- Your volume is really low. There, how's that? That's a bit better, yeah. Go ahead. That qualifies as RECCY because we just completed the pilot program of a leadership course called Leading from Being with RECCY fellow Marty Spiegelman. And it really represents probably my biggest shift of this past year from chasing opportunities to being more grounded in my being and pursuing relationships and what's in front of me. And the work with Marty, it was delightful. I will post a link here in a second to explore how do we shift our state of being rather than prescribe for us what our actions need to be. And it was a combination of Marty's work and consciousness and mine around heart opening, which were really using the same language to talk about, different language to talk about the same thing. So we had great feedback from the seven initial participants and now we are going to, thanks Jerry. Now we're going to launch a second cohort about a month from now as well as a few people we're going to continue on to a second phase who did the pilot program. What is the structure of the program? How long? How often? Six weeks of group calls that are 90 minutes in length and then a two on one calls with each of the members to explore how this applies to their work, their evolution. And Marty, I told Marty that today would have been a great day to show up, but she's on a cruise right now. Nice. Is the cruise, is she traveling on her own or is this like a mindfulness, like is it part of a... Is this vacation or is she part of the content of the cruise? Yeah. No, she's pure enjoyment for her. Good. Whereabouts? Are we allowed to ask? She didn't tell me. I don't know which ocean she is in. At first I assumed it was Alaska, but I think it may be some place warm. Knowing Marty right now, she is splitting the Pyrenees and sailing the stone raft up into the heights of some landmass, I'm just saying. It is Marty. I wanna say something else about this year though in the delight of these monthly calls and just the energy of them, that is a very rex-y thing that we've got going right here. Kind of the free flow of it, not feeling limited to topic. So Jerry, this is a good thing we've got going. Thank you very much. It feels good. It's a nice, it's an interesting space and I'm just super interested in spaces and humans in spaces in particular. So this is in some sense an experiment in that and it's lovely to see where it goes. Cause my MO typically, the thing I like best in bringing humans together is to sometimes not have any target at all, but often to put a question in front of a group or have a particular goal, but then just see where it goes and sort of help us collectively go out into that space and examine it and make it better and see what we can return to the person who was willing to step out and say, well, I'm working on that and this is what I'm up to. Like how can we make that journey richer, better, et cetera. So it seems to work out reasonably well. Bo, any rex-y things in your horizon? I knew it would come to me. Okay, yeah, well, I'm going to Alaska today to be with these family and our mothers just built this house on the bluff overlooking this river. It's huge, really big space. And I really can't wait to just finish and finish the waves by Virginia Wolf there listen to classical music. What I like to do when I'm in the winter is I have really warm clothes like shilling jackets. I like to go out in the snow and sit down and hang out. That's what I like to do. I learned illustrator and Photoshop that way actually on a snow bank in Wyoming reading the book. So that's what I'll be doing. That sounds great. You're not driving up to take the Jeep around a lot. You know that Alkan Highway, one day I will take my Jeep up but that would be a lot of fun. It's closed now. It's not open in the winter that highway. So, but that I have actually thought of it. I found out someone had done it the other day was telling me about it and it sounds really fun. It's the closest town. Sorry. Go ahead. Closest town is, what is it? Is it an anchorage? Yeah, no. She lives, this is the town that Sarah Palin lives in. Oh, interesting. Okay. One note car or something like that? I just, I have a mental block about the name of the town. Isn't that a cat? It's an actually really nice town. It's like a W. Yeah, so I- And you can see Russia from there. Yes. Yes. Which is the extent of her foreign policy knowledge but still, still, it's something. Yeah. So Bo, you really do have to take that trip. I took a trip with a former partner. We, I called it the Seattle Sprint and then we took the ferry and then we drove around all up over Alaska and the Northwest Territories and dipped our toes into the Arctic Ocean. And it's just like in the cattle oil roads in Canada, the ones that they had for in World War II. It's a, oh, it's just absolutely worth doing. Yeah, I have the perfect vehicle to do it. It holds 40 gallons of fuel. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yep. Oh, I should do it. And it's very shiny when it hasn't been covered in mud yet, so. Yeah. Oh well, as a friend of mine said, she said, oh, you bought another dirty car. So yeah, go for it. Yeah, thank you. Cool. Cool, cool. Well, thanks Bo. And also to put back in your brain, anytime you wanna do that call about sort of Victorian novels echoing the shift into the industrial economy and the rexie aspects of that, let me know. I'm always interested in that particular theme, so. Whenever you feel right, we'll book the call. Okay. And then I'll shift over to me because I wanted to put something in front of the group and see what y'all think. I've redesigned the Design from Trust website and Design from Trust is one of the major themes that's come out of my 25 years of worrying about the word consumer, which turned into exploring the word trust. And Design from Trust is a process that has lots of scales to it. So it's everything from the design of social institutions to the design of cities, down to the design of corporations, down to the design of a human life and how you might interact with other people. So here I'm sort of taking one slice out of that and I redesigned Design from Trust to basically appeal directly to design firms and see if I can locate a design firm that would like to create a practice called Design from Trust. And actually just go do it, build it out. And I'm wondering, and you don't have time here to listen to the videos, but some of you might have heard some of these videos because I've put them out before, but is this sound like a reasonable approach? What else comes to mind? Are there design firms that might jump on this that you've heard of? If you wanted to connect with somebody or forward them a link to the site, that would be fantastic. But I'm trying to figure out, I would love to find a design firm anywhere on the planet that thinks this is a good idea and help them do it. I'm reminded here that W. Edwards Deming, the inventor of TQM and sort of the quality movement in the US, he got no attention from American firms for years and years. And then Toyota was like, oh yeah, this thing. This thing is really cool. They brought them in. They invented the Toyota production system and went crazy on all these quality ideas for years and almost killed off the American auto industry, which was building rattle trap cans of expensive and easily obsolete metal and tin. So I'm trying to figure out where's a really good home for this because it's partly a listening practice, but partly also the design methodology that patients have already been doing and the recent last 15 year explosion excitement about design thinking is actually really good prospecting or feeder material for design from trust because design thinking involves going to where people are having the issue that you're trying to solve or the proof, observing with care, having empathy for the participants and then prototyping solutions. And those are not bad things to get good at, right? I like that a lot about design thinking, but design thinking a lot of people know is also kind of tapped out. It doesn't carry you any further than that. So there's been a lot of backlash against design thinking, but this idea of listening with care, of empathizing and observing and all that I think is really good here. So let me pause for a second and see what this brings up. Oh, just a primary, Jerry. Yeah, I remember you championing blogs with Ed Williams at the time, seeing they're almost gonna give up on it. I remember you championing Wikis. Why the whole world has changed again and again, turning on things that people were horrified and frightened of, which were blogs and self-publishing and Wikis and taxed folksonomies. You've been doing this a long time and I think about it time after time, these things that have changed our world, which were all people were scared to death of. Done. Thank you. And I think a little piece of the frustration is that I would love for this to exist better in the world and I'd love also to make a living in getting these things out in the world and all that stuff hasn't really fallen in place that well. Susan, I have not talked to any attorneys about this. attorneys are generally, and it's interesting because we all know a bunch of really clever attorneys who've done fantastic things with creative of other issues. Yeah, I was just thinking that I was thinking that the legal profession designs from, I mean, they sort of make their living and they wouldn't have to as the comments said, comments, things and you might find a, you might find a, you know, a sympathetic soul somewhere in that community who sees the problem of always going for, okay, what could go wrong? I mean, I think it's terribly important to think about what could go wrong and not be stupid about it, but we legislate very soon in some cases. I mean, once things get out there. One of my sayings along this vein is that we pass laws when discourse fails. And we don't pass laws when discourse fails as well. And Jerry, we talked about this briefly. I, picking up on both Bo and Susan's cues in different ways, I continue to ask the question and not that there has to be one answer to this, but like what kind of design? And we talked about products and services and systems and ways of thinking, you know, and there are different design firms that specialize in different kinds of design. You have, you know, urban planning firms are design firms, but mostly architects and infrastructure specialists and all that. Then you have firms that do products and, you know, the next cup or squeegee or whatever and then you have those that do more tech design and then you have those that do systems design and organizational design and also like not to try to over complicate this but that sense, I feel like there's probably almost a hierarchy of where this would be most fruitful what the lowest hanging fruit is. And even going back to the lawyers, yeah, as a lawyer, there are some kinds of design where lawyers are gonna get involved really fast and for all kinds of reasons, some of which are justifiable and some of which aren't. I mentioned to you, I think that like product design, usually that, I mean, that's a pretty straightforward. Is a product safe? Is it ethically sourced? You know, all of that and you get, the moment you get lawyers in that is when you have products liability. If a product explodes, yeah, lawyers are gonna be involved and to some degree you might want them involved or whatever, but like, I'm not sure designed from trust is the useful, is as useful when we're talking about a product that needs to be safe and not explode as we are, the design from trust is those designs that touch human relationships in a deeper way than a product. So it's more service, it might be urban plan, there's an element that urban planners are already doing that's trust-based. I don't know that they're calling it design from trust, but anyway, I call this out because I think it's a way to look at this. If you look at the second line on the website, I name particular design disciplines. I'm not talking about the website. I'm talking about you asked, are there design firms that we know of who are looking at this? And I think that to save you from doing outreach to dozens of firms to if you could pick one or two of those kinds of design from trust to start, this isn't, you know, I'm trying to guide you and focus you in a clear path to get to where you wanna go. And I don't think that means treating design from trust as a generic concept, as a generic thing. Yeah, I don't think so either. I mean, once upon a time when Ideo was born they were a product design firm. They made like my first Sony and some Apple products and they made physical stuff. And then over time they changed their business and the interaction design and a whole bunch of other things. So they're much broader at this point. And that kind of saved the company because they're, you know, just making products is one particular very narrow thing. And so I think I need to find my way into the places where these broader kinds of design are in fact happening. So I agree, but I think that assuming too much about the limits of what any particular company does will limit my search. So why don't I try to cast a net to find the people who are doing these kinds of things? Yes, I'm saying prioritize within that. That's all. Anyone else, any thoughts? I think there's a lot of them in the design from Trustbase, it comes across. I mean, my first reaction was, really? We don't do that? And then of course, the kinds of example that you gave it was abundantly clear that we assume the worst about people. And I keep going back and forth. I've never figured out whether that's probably just the wrong question. That's so, but there is definitely a, it's a principle. You know, it could be along with other design principles. It could be a design principle point. Thank you. I'm just curious, do you see, so would you see, I'm not sure how to take that, would you see this as linking or attaching on to something else that's already in the design firm or that this would be a separate? Cause I look at this more as like a, it's interesting. It could be a sort of standalone thing or it could be, you know, building a design from trust practice that can be many, many, many things. What? I wasn't even, I wasn't necessarily going there. I mean, I think it's the kind of thing that's going to thrive in a networked way because that's where it is. And I do think the idea of looking for people who are already in various communities who are already up to this, I mean, the legal point was just one where I thought, oh, right, there must be people thinking along these lines, even in that community, I shouldn't say it that way, in that community. And yeah, so if you wanted to practice design from trust, I think you'd want, you'd want to be able to be in more than one community, be more than one area at once so that you could trade off right away. You know, but that's if you're very focused on building that, building that. I don't think it has to go in a design firm. I think that it's probably past the moment where you're going to attach it to design thinking. Jerry, I don't know whether you would agree. I'm trying to leap frog design thinking, but pick up the best of it. Yep, yep. Does that answer your question? Is it design? Are we stuck? My, so my Zoom is kind of freezing everybody. I don't really, I think my Zoom is maybe like buffered full or something. So I'm contemplating stepping out of the thing, rebooting Zoom and coming back into the conversation. But if you can hear me fine, I will make it through. You can hear you fine, Jerry. Okay, good. We couldn't for a moment there, but it's okay now. Thanks. Yeah, I need to troubleshoot this. Todd, any thoughts? Yeah. I don't think we know what it'll look like or what the value is until somebody actually experiments with it. Like I'm hoping that some firm will say, that sounds interesting. And you, and you, and they're just open to trying it. I mean, the very, we're almost forced to trust designing from trust because there's definitely an application layer. There's a mindset shifting layer. Right. I'm hoping, I'm hoping that someone just says yes to an experiment and we learn by doing. And I, my- There's thoughts? Go ahead Susan. I'm just gonna say my immediate thought on that is there have to also be, I guess my first thought is about any new idea is somebody must have thought of this. Somebody must have tried this. Is there must be, there must be also examples of that around. And I think I would look, perhaps, this isn't just a place that I know about. So it's the place I go, look, it's my lamppost. But anyway, looking at the time when the blocks and the Twitterverse and all the rest of that stuff was coming around. And this might be just too, too, too boring, but it would be interesting to see what policy decisions will take in by large companies, for instance, in that world. And having lived inside a large corporation I think many actually, but mostly from the outside. There's more that goes on than meets the eye, obviously. And often they do allow experiments to start without any whatever. And in a company like IBM, for instance, that thinks of itself as values-based, this is one place where they just sort of figure out their values in this space and say, go ye forth and behave according to these values. Which is a kind of trust. Because I think the thing is so big you can't do anything but that. Sorry, I was screen sharing a little bit and then everybody's audio cut out. So I think I stopped the screen sharing because I think my machine is confused. But Susan, I think there's hundreds of movements that are doing this. They just don't call it design from trust. So I've collected up everything from Wikipedia, how the internet works, open source software, open science, open journals, amateur science, traffic calming, unschooling. I mean, I've got my long collection. We've had many calls around in recs. We've had calls around a lot of these topics because that's kind of the focus of our attention. But what happens when I went into a design without trust culture? I guess I was looking for that collusion. That's really interesting. I mean, so for example, unschooling, right? I had a Lyft driver some years ago, took me to SFO and we determined pretty quickly that he and his partner were unschooling their two daughters. And then I laughed and I said, so how are your parents about this? And he laughed and he said, well, his parents were just fine. They got it and they understood it. But the in-laws were a problem. And they were really balking because this is about your children's future and you're pulling your kids out of school or whatever. And that's the interface where design from trust unschooling meets reality. And so I did the personal democracy forum keynote talk. Here we go. Oops. I did the personal democracy forum keynote talk this year. And in it, I explained that most systems that are designed from trust provoke two responses. The first one is oh shit, this will never work, right? This is impossible. It's counterintuitive. It's stupid. Why would anybody do things this way? And then the second response after having tried it and seen that it might be working is oh shit, this seems to work. How do I rearrange the neurons in my head? How do I get more of this? How do I lean in? How do I do this? So I call this the two oh shits, the two shits response. And it's very much the interface between our current belief systems, our assumptions about things need to be done because people are so awful. And I'm promoting design from trust in an era where we're increasingly I think being told and shown that people are even more awful than we thought they were. Like, right? The world is just look at all these idiots and autocrats being elected and things just going down the tubes. And my answer in the middle of this is that the answer pretty much is trust. And I have lots of stories to tell about how and why. Lots and lots. And probably what I haven't done is told enough of the stories. To enough people. To enough people, exactly. So I'm trying to figure out, all right, who understands this vortex of activity would appreciate that there's now sort of a label process and not quite a formal methodology but a whole bunch of moving parts that can turn into a methodology available and can put it together and put some people behind it because I'm very happy to go sell the first engagements, run them, do the whole thing, frame it up. This is what I'd love to do. And I was doing this a bit with Sun Corp, the Australian insurance company in 2015 until they had a new CEO who blew up the group that I was working with. And I'm having conversations with just those people this afternoon. They continue. Oh, excellent. I'm really glad, cool. Yeah, I meant to mention that, but yeah, yeah. So I'm about to hear, they've got seed funding and they started a company, a separate entity for this effort of augmented reality and insurance strategy. I mean, why not? Why not? Awesome. Maybe they'll be ready for you again. Awesome, I love it. Maybe, don't know, don't know. I could use some, I think the most useful thing for me right now is feedback on why people might not be hearing what I'm saying, how to say it differently, what experiments, whom to talk to, that kind of thing. Cause I'm really trying to work my way down that path. Right. And I'm trying to get sort of a, walked out an improvement gradient where I can aim better toward what people can hear. And I know, I mean, Bo, you just recited a bunch of things that I'd seen early on. I'm often early to a lot of things. I have a lot of appreciation for where people are and what they can hear. What's funny is in a meeting with humans, I have no trouble at all meeting them where they are and drawing them into deeper waters. Piece of cake. I know this, I know this problem. Piece of cake, I can do that. In the abstract or coming in from the outside trying to convince somebody of something, I may be saying things that are just not audible to them. I may be whistling in the upper ranges and dog territory instead of human territory, but I don't know it yet. I remember when we were doing that Wharton covert thing, Jerry, when you and that IBM guy were talking about open source to all those East Coast corporate executives. Oh my God, do you remember that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Talk about taking away from them. And that was long ago on a planet far, far away. This is the Wharton executive education program. We had a bunch of Wharton fellows they were called. Jerry Wind was the head of the marketing department at Wharton. He was the head of this thing and I was his West Coast wing for a while. So it was fun. We truly blew those Wharton Courts minds dragging them through Silicon Valley. Wow, that was really interesting. Did you do an actual tour with them? Yeah, we were on the bus. It was like road show. I love to. Valley. Yeah, we used to do this at IRL, but we hired limousines for people with white limousines because we thought they should experience Silicon Valley, but this was back in the 90s. Yeah, this was the 90s too, I think. Right, Jerry? Was this the 90s, Jerry? Yeah, this was the 90s. Yeah, yeah. This was the 90s. Do you remember how horrible and frightening eBay was? There were people outside the door lined up to work here. I mean, after that, I mean, did you remember how bad eBay was? Wow, they were frightening. And then it wasn't Oracle who was his competitor, the guy that locked himself up in a closet with a calculus textbook and a copy of MindCamp. Who was that other software guy who, Database Freak, we went to his company. That was frightening. Anyway. It's fun. It's fun. Huh? Not PeopleSoft, was it? Anyway. Ah, the good old days. Yes, just. We were there, man. Right. We're still here, though. Yeah. Now, Jerry, it's over. I know, my Zoom froze again for a while, so. And we're close to the end of our time. So any wrapping thoughts? One question for you. So is this why you're not writing a book? I mean, I may be over-interpreting because people keep telling me to write a book. And the thing is, you have to settle down on one thing. And that's just not what lands with, it lands with people who read those books. Doesn't mean you shouldn't have one. Yeah, I'm extremely tempted to write. Sorry. I'm extremely tempted to write a book and it's sort of lying by my side and I'm trying to figure out, I'm supposed to focus on one thing, so I'm trying to figure out which of the one thing is to focus on. And I will confess that it's very, very hard. Would the book be designed from trust? The book I'm thinking of writing is, what if we trusted you? But then there's also a book designed from trust perking away as well. Well, could, I'm just gonna suggest, and we haven't talked about this much actually at all. What if we trusted you is the title of the intro chapter for a book titled, Design from Trust, or Design from Trust is three chapters in a book that's titled, What if We Trusted You? The second thing you just said is actually the current setup, Design from Trust is at present one chapter of a book titled, What if We Trusted You? Yeah. And then it's one chapter and then it becomes book number two. Yeah, exactly. Because that seems totally natural. Yeah. I'm still worried about this word trust. Say more. I remember when I first heard Francis Fukuyama talk about his book, Trust. And I don't know, it just seemed to me a glimpse of the blinding obvious. So what's not obvious? I mean, I went through that with your right, that was what I explained before saying, really we don't, well, I guess we don't. It doesn't have that, it's just rude. You know, but I like the title, What if We Trusted You? That works. And I gotta say, Susan, like it's, I think I had some initially years ago some reaction similar to yours. And then you just start unpacking Jerry style. Yeah, exactly. All the ways that we don't. And I mean, I think the intro itself becomes so powerful that you just go, holy crap, I keep reading. Yeah, that's the holy crap. You need holy crap in the first chapter. Yeah, I think you get there like first paragraph and you get like, but like, yeah, exactly. And, and all of the things we take for granted. Mandatory sentencing, one in four people closer to it on the planet, USA, USA. What if we trusted you? Well, but also not, there are untrustworthy people and there are untrustworthy companies. Absolute, there, it's, well, Jerry, it's your thing about naive trust, blind trust versus essential trust. So I wonder, I mean, this to me screams, screams out, jumps out that I guess it's a little bit of a chicken and egg, but this having a book then automatically helps, would, should help build your platform. My gut says, you don't wait to write the book to then reach out to design firms. You pursue the two in tandem, but that that book becomes something that, I don't know, I'd love for all of us to, sorry, I'm getting pushy now, but I'm like, I'd love for all of us to be able to hold you accountable to actually getting that done. Cause I know you've wanted to for a long time, but it hasn't happened. How can we help you, how can we help you be accountable to your goals? Or maybe that's not one of your asks. Uh-oh. I froze him. I know, my zoom is not really unhappy. You froze with a not great look on your face as I said that. Sorry. And I don't mean to- Did I have RPF? Yeah. Yeah. Let's just- Yeah. So I'd love to figure that out. And everybody's frozen on my zoom right now. So I'm just gonna- Yeah. There we go. All right. And we're near the end of our call time. So I'm, when we're done, I'm gonna reboot my computer. It's okay, we can hear you all right? Back. Yeah. I think we should probably wrap. Yes. I'd love to figure out how to- Yeah. Yeah, exactly. We will- So just let this be a cliffhanger then. We shall figure this out and report back at the next check-in next month. All right. We're signing off. In the meantime, I hope everybody has a phenomenal end of year. And the 2018 is the year we figure everything out. Bye. 2019, bring it on. Bye. Thank you.