 I am sorry. I cannot manage the house. Thank you. Yes, you can do it. This is not a wine. Dear colleagues, we have reached exactly half of our school. Two and a half days. And now we should continue our session. And I am pleased to give a floor to Mr. Prusak. I told Ron Young that to keep you awake, I may sing this presentation. I know, but I'm not sure I'll really do it. Now, sir, there's nothing that surpasses it. I could try. If you don't like it, it'll knock you on your ass. Years ago, when I was in college, I used to sing at a bar for money. Those were a long time ago. So, I'll try to speak a little or make this a little shorter, because I know you're all dying to take your place in the sun. So, the United States has about 85 to 90 government agencies. And the United States is a rich country, full of technology, full of smart people. None of them do anything good with knowledge, not one except NASA. Every government agent in the United States does nothing with knowledge except NASA. Some of the intelligence agencies may do a little, the CIA and the 16 other ones. But they talk about it, but they don't do anything. NASA was different. And I'm going to tell you why it was different and what they did. And some of it has good lessons for you. It's not just talking about an interesting story. There are things you could learn about this. When I was at IBM, I ran a multi-client research group. So, we had about 50 organizations that paid us a nominal fee. And we did collaborative research on knowledge, less was known about it then than is known now. And much to my surprise, a fellow came from NASA. I was very happy to have him. I like rockets. It's a very sexy and exciting sort of place. But I asked him, I said, do you do anything about knowledge? And he said, well, we have enough knowledge to go to the moon. But it's unsystematic. It's uncoordinated. And we'd like to think about starting a knowledge type of work. I was really very surprised because it doesn't happen much in the United States. So, why did this succeed and it become a big success at NASA? Why did it succeed there? And again, this is contextual. It's true for NASA. It may not be true for your organizations. But it's worth hearing about. For one thing, almost everyone who works there is smart. Stupidity is hardly ever used as a factor of why things happen or they don't happen. But some people are smart and some people are stupid. And some organizations attract stupid people and some organizations attract smart people. NASA, you just had to be smart to do the work. They weren't prejudiced. They weren't bigoted. But you can't work there. One of their t-shirts they give out that says, it is rocket science. So, you really just can't be dumb to work there. Generally, smart people and smart firms are interested in knowledge more than stupid people and stupid firms. It's just true. You can argue or you don't have to believe it, but take it from me. I've seen over 500 knowledge projects and I'm sure I'm right. That generally firms that... Because if you don't can't imagine the value of knowledge, it's an intangible as Ron was saying and I was saying. If you can't imagine it, why would you put money and time into it? You need imagination and you need an understanding of the role of knowledge in human development and in running a firm. So, NASA is smart people. The work they do is extremely complex. I would think it's a little like you do. Running, sending a rocket to the moon is pretty complex stuff. I don't know if there's anything more complex that human beings do, but it's got to be in the top five. One time when I was working there, they asked us to draw a model of all the countries and companies that contributed an idea or a piece of work to the Apollo 13 moonshot. I said, sure we'll do that. We can model that. We had like 10 people. We quit when we found 3,000 organizations. So that's how 3,000 contributed something. Intellectual capital, a washer, a piece of rubber, whatever. I said, that's enough. This can't be done. Not by humans. You can maybe have Siri do it now, but it couldn't be done then. The other thing about NASA that made it different is that I think it's the only government agency, and this may be true throughout the world, where people didn't have to work there. They actually could work and make more money in the private sector. They choose to be there. Many people who work for governments work there because that's the best job they can get. That was not true with NASA. There were aerospace engineers, computer scientists, energy scientists. They could work other places. So that gives it a certain sense of pride, which also sometimes works against knowledge. Anyway, that's what makes it a different place. And why I was ripe for knowledge management. So this fellow, Ed Hoffman, who's the hero of my little story, I had him do a presentation. I said, Ed, NASA's gone to the moon. They sent satellites all over the universe. I said, they must manage knowledge. How could they not? I mean, dogs don't do this. God didn't make it happen. How does it happen? He said, well, people manage it three ways. They have a lot of conversations with their friends, with the people in their practice. They talk to the local people who do what they do. They don't talk to other people, but they talk to their own little groups. After that, they talk to people in their networks. There are 14 centers in NASA, separate centers in the United States. The one everyone here, Houston. Houston, we have a problem. That's Cape Canaveral, where the rockets took off. But there are 12 others. There's one in California, Caltech, or the Jet Propulsion Lab, which is very, very complex work that the Nobel Prize winners in Caltech work at. And they don't talk to each other. Sometimes they do, but generally, their own little separate silos. So people have networks they develop. The longer you're there, the richer your network. So they manage knowledge through conversations, through networks, through reading. But that was it. And relationships with universities. Unsystematic, uncoordinated. Is that an optimal way to do something? It worked, but it's deeply suboptimized. You waste a lot of time, and you don't know who's around the corner who might really be able to help you. There's no way to know that. There's a radical innovation that occurs in a center. There's one in West Virginia, for example, and it sticks in the United States, out in the country. If anything happened there, no one ever learned about it, because no one wants to go there. So you'd never hear about it. But it could be something useful, but you'd never know it. So it's unsystematic. Organizations can exist, not managing knowledge. That's one of the problems we have with knowledge management. You can run an organization without it. People who exchange novel but in a very serendipitous, unorganized, undisciplined, and unsystematic way. But it works. People do. The world's gotten by without a lot of that. It's just better to manage the knowledge. Manage it in the sense that's worthwhile. I don't mean top-down management. But I mean, doing what you've been talking about, what we talk about here. So I ask that happens. What the hell are you going to do? These people are very set in their ways. They do have Nobel Prize-winning scientists. They're not going to change their behavior, because you tell them to. You know that, and I know that. How are we going to do this? So he hired me as a consultant, and eventually I became the main consultant to NASA. And knowledge, not that. I don't know anything about physics. It's about knowledge, believe me. I couldn't pass calculus in high school. I'll take another term just to pass it. But Ed Hoffman was an odd duck, and he has another valuable lesson. He has a PhD in social psychology. He's a social scientist. And when they hired him, many people said, you must have been hired by mistake. What are you doing here? I'm not kidding. They thought he was... And times he felt like quitting, because he'd go to meetings, and there'd be 10 people with physics, PhDs, or engineering degrees, and they'd say, what have you got to contribute? That's sort of a nasty sort of thing. And he got tired of explaining, well, there's some value. We do know something about human behavior. There's something useful to know about how people act, but they didn't really buy it. Over time, he has a very affable personality. He's just a friendly man. And over time, he built up networks, and people stopped asking him that. But because it's Dr. Hoffman, people always assume there was a PhD in physics. After a while, he didn't say no. He just nod. Made life easier. But he said, I can get things done now. I've risen up enough in the hierarchy that I can get some fun there. He said, what are we going to do? This is really a somewhat of an intractable problem. I should have given it to you for your projects. What would you do in a situation like that? So we started. We began to think Ed and I share a tremendous belief in the power of stories. He had it, and I, both of us came from the same source, that he grew up a mile away from me in Brooklyn, New York. And we each grew up in a tough neighborhood. There's a lot of fighting. None of us were good fighters, but we sure could talk. What gets you out of fighting keeps you to tell people, oh, my father's a policeman. They leave you alone. So we'd make up stuff. And we realize stories rule the world. They're the most powerful. We all live by stories. We live by giant stories. They're called metanarratives, like religion. Or science. Those are enormous stories that explain things. Religious, and I'm not saying one's better than the other. I'm sort of agnostic about those things. Religion explains the universe. Science explains the universe. People, those are metanarratives. That paranoia explains the universe. We all live by, so we enact stories. You grow up thinking you're one way and you live and die by what you're told. People kill each other over stories. I was at a conference once in Hawaii about ten years ago. I gave a talk and there was a professor there from the university in Serbia. We're having a lovely talk, having coffee and all. And another man walks by who's also at this conference. And this guy says, do you know who that is? I said, no, no. He says, that's professor so-and-so. He's a croat. He's from Croatia. I hate those people. His whole face contorted. Do you know him? He goes, no, I've never met him, but I hate them all. You hate all Croatians. Maybe some of them aren't bad. How do you know them? He said, in 1386, do you know what they did to us? I said, man, that was 700 years ago. I've been to Israel and the Israelis tell me that God gave them the land 7,000, 10,000 years ago or 8,000 years ago. And the Palestinians tell me that they got the land that long ago. And these people kill each other over stories. And if you think about it, we live and die by stories. They're not something like. How come I like that? How do human beings get that way? I'm sorry that fellow isn't here, the strength physicist. He loves this sort of stuff. But I've read theories, and I think this is correct. When human, homo sapiens were in the hunter-gatherer state. So before they settled down and had agriculture, they would hunt and they would gather food. Those people who could explain to others how to catch an animal would have an advantage. And if you could understand the story and act on it, you'd have an advantage. I think there's an evolutionary bias towards telling and understanding stories because it was the way to communicate how to survive. Your child is very sick. You could take the bark of a tree and boil it and drink the water. It's like a aspirin. Someone invented that story. It was reliable. It worked. So I think we've evolved. Truly, we've evolved to live and die by stories. Even the most people sometimes are skeptic about stories. Then I heard Richard Feynman, the great Nobel Prize winning physicist, said he thinks stories rule the world. That's all I said. It's good enough for him. It's good enough for me. So Ed decided to have NASA forums. We're going to try this. NASA forums where the leading scientists and engineers at NASA would tell a story about something, an innovation that they worked on. Hopefully it would inspire other innovations. Well, we thought this was the cat's meow. One of you said I keep using American terms. The cat's meow. That means it was great. So we thought that we'd call it the master's forum. And we booked a room, a conference venue on one of the sites. We picked an attractive NASA place in the near New Orleans. So if you like drinking, you can go to the conference and then go get drunk in the evening. And we invited some very senior people who had really contributed innovations, technological or organizational innovations. Well, they came. And we got quite a few people to attend because these people were famous throughout NASA. We didn't realize that engineers couldn't tell stories. We were stupid. We just didn't recognize the fact that they think stories are about the three bears or a Goldilocks or a Rapunzel. They didn't realize. So they just did PowerPoints and they were boring as hell. And it was a disaster. Even though what they said was true and interesting, no one people did their phones. It was awful. They said, if we do this again before we quit, we have to try this again. We have to teach them how to tell stories. Ed Hoffman, having a great sense of humor, says, you do it. I'm paying you, you do it. What do you mean me? How could I teach? How could I? Let's get professional. No, no, we don't have the budget. You have to do it. So I had a friend who's a writer, a writer of fiction in the town I live in. He and I undertook to teach the engineers how to be storytellers. This may have been the most difficult thing I've done, actually. Outside of raising children. It would be number two. So for the next masters forum, once again, we invited some very good people who've done some, one was an astronaut who actually Gus Grissom who actually has been in space. And we said, guys, we have a little, not training, we'd like to give you some advice on how to present your ideas. So what do you mean? Don't you think we know what we're talking about? I said, no, I know you know what you're talking about. But yeah, I'm in the most humble manner possible, the most modest thing. It's the way you speak sometimes, doesn't have the impact of an entertainer, let's say. We're not entertainers. We say, you are when you speak in front of an audience. And they got a little angry at me and complained, but Ed's stuck, and even Ed's boss, the chief engineer said, you are. There was a Canadian communication theorist. People don't remember him now and they're Marshall McLuhan. Have any of you ever heard of him? Marshall, yeah. You have to be old to know who he was. But he was a hot ticket years ago. He said, anyone who thinks there's a big difference between education and entertainment knows nothing about our other subject. It's true. So we got the first guy and we taught him how to tell a story. He said, tell us about your grand, guy had grandchildren. Tell me about your grandchildren. And he started talking. I said, can you merge it? You know, all stories have the same structure. If you ever have to teach someone this. Aristotle wrote about this. 400 BC. It's exactly true today. All stories have an ABC structure. There's a state. There's a disruption to the state and there's a new state. That's it. There's sometimes a hero or a heroine. Sometimes it's a good story. Sometimes it's a disaster. But it's only that. Once upon a time there was a kingdom and everyone's happy and singing. Then a villain comes to the kingdom. And then the town or a hero or a heroine kills the villain and everyone's happy and maybe they feel better about things. Lord of the Rings. The Iliad and the Odyssey. You name the story. It has that structure one way or the other. They all do. They're all cultures. So we began trying to teach these engineers how to do this. And it was slow when they said, wait a minute. I said, just tell it this way. Don't argue all the time. Big this guy. And they slowly began to do it. They wouldn't give a PowerPoint. So when one of them got on, I just pulled the plug. I wouldn't let him plug it in again. I said, you're on your own. You can't use this anymore. So I pulled the plug. So he can't use PowerPoint. What do you message? Just tell the damn story. And they did it slowly. And they saw the audience liked it. They stayed awake. Now these stories were pretty complex. Some of them really dealt with rocket science, deep issues in physics, deep issues in rocketry and engineering. But you could tell it as a story. Once there was a rocket, the rocket didn't work. We fixed it. Now the rocket works. I mean, that's what it was about. Everything else is detailed. Slowly it caught on. Slowly. So the next time we had a massive, we tried to do it twice here. The next time we had one, it was in the winter and they picked a place that was nice and warm. It was the Jet Propulsion Lab. It's near Los Angeles, near Caltech in Pasadena. So everyone wanted to come. And people began, we began to get more requests to come than we ever had before. We had it like this. We had to turn people away. It became popular. And after a while, they didn't even try to use PowerPoint and they got a little competitive. Hey, I kept them awake longer than you did. People got competitive. Now they had to show, sometimes people had to show formula. They had to show pictures of things. Make no mistake. I mean, we're allowed, you have to show a picture of a rocket or what, but just put in words and reading them. It's an enemy of learning. So it was very, very different. And it worked. And it gave Ed Hoffman a tremendous boost. If you want to start a knowledge program, do a pilot and have everyone love it. You'll get your budget. Don't start with a bang. Don't start with, we're going to roll out knowledge management. Generally, you're better off taking a little bite of the apple. Slowly doing something like that. So that was a huge success for him. The other thing that worked for him, and it can't, sounds like I told him I'm talking about, but he would tell stories about the success of knowledge management in other organizations. He'd go to these conferences and we'd hear about how well Shell is doing this. Toyota. He'd pick up from these firms how well the knowledge management program worked. Nothing succeeds like telling managers or executives another company's doing it well. Nothing. And tell it as a story. If you have to change one or two details, go ahead. You're doing the right thing. Don't worry about it. Don't be married to silly versions of the truth. Shape the story in a way to make your case. And tell the story with emotion and passion. Don't speak like a machine. It never works. There's a very good book about this called Made to Stick. Made to Stick. There's a picture of duct tape on the cover. By a man named Chip Heath, who's a professor at Stanford. But he wrote, how do you get ideas to stick so that when you tell someone an idea, they remember it? And it's a good book. It has five principles. One is tell stories and another is speak with emotion. Speak with passion. People respond. They stay awake. Don't do it via screen. Don't do it on Twitter. It's all crap. Speak to people. Look at them. And frankly, I can do this naturally because I've done a lot. Look them in the eye. Don't look at people when you speak to them. It'll stick. They'll remember it. It's a very good book. It's very readable, although he's a Stanford professor. He could write English. So Ed began to do this. He'd go to the senior people at NASA who were still skeptical. And he'd say, let me tell you what Shell is doing. Let me tell you what the Russians are doing in rocketry. Let me tell you what's going on in China. What Elon Musk is doing. That stuff caught on as did the masters for him. He then did another very clever thing, which we learned from a few other organizations. He made knowledge visible. This is a useful tool. I didn't mention it the last talk I gave here because I was saving it for this. NASA has these 13 centers. Those centers all specialize in different forms of knowledge that you need to do rocketry. But people weren't always sure beyond the simple words like software or rocketry. What was in those centers? What sort of knowledge is there? Where is it? What networks? What libraries? He made a map of NASA's knowledge. A map, a physical map, the size. He, myself, and a couple of cartographers did it. And we handed it out. We had made 200. Nicely printed. They went with the director of NASA. The man around says, I want all 200. Go make another thousand. And he took them all. So we made another thousand. He wanted it. He could have it. People loved it. They hung it on the wall. No one had ever told anyone what was in those centers. What actually goes on there? Who were the people involved? Where were the networks? No one had ever done that. No one. I knew a woman who had the job of being a knowledge manager at American Express, a firm that does not have smart people and is just run by for money. But she got this job and she wanted to do something interesting. They had 14 data centers in American Express. It's a big place. It's a big thing. No one knew what was in any of them. People said, I think that's in Sri Lanka, the data center. But I'm not sure what they do know. So she spent four months and did, again, a map, a knowledge map of the data centers. After it came out a week later, she was the only person in her whole unit who ever got a note from the chairman of the board ever. He never left his office. And he said, this is really good work. Thank you. And she got a double promotion. Making knowledge visible. Do something small. Do something sharp. Low cost, high impact. What they call, probably the term is now famous, but Malaysia, once there are two projects there, they call it, go for the low hanging fruit. The mangoes you could just pick off. The low hanging fruit. Don't, I'm going to manage the knowledge of the whole enterprise. No one can. That's really setting yourself up to fail. I'm going to manage to do something low. Make a map. Have a forum where people tell stories. All these things were very, very successful. It really, so after a while, the US government called in the head of NASA and said, you know, we've been told you can't go back to the moon because nobody knows how to do it anymore, which was true. They didn't keep the records that well. Everyone retired. And they said it would take us two years to do it again. The government told NASA a bit of spectacular hypocrisy. You should manage your knowledge better. But the government didn't do it at all. It's remarkable. So the administrator had to say, yes, we should. Yes, we'll do it. And he turned to Ed and said, you have to be the chief knowledge officer for all of NASA. I don't want that. That job's the living death. As soon as people hear that I'm the chief knowledge officer, they're never going to work with me again because they'll think I want to control their knowledge that I'm big brother. You do this. You do that. What do you know? Now, and he was a friendly guy. People liked him. He had been there 30 years by then. He says, I don't want to do that. As soon as you say you're from headquarters, people, they don't want to talk to you. He said, you've got to do it. Our budget depends. We just have to do it. The president even wants you to do it. Once it's done, I should say. So he took the job. And the first thing he had to do, and this is, again, something used for those of you who work in organizations that are geographically dispersed, even a little bit. It's an important lesson. There are a number of models you can use. If you're trying to work with the knowledge in your organization, you need a governance structure. I told you that last time. Nothing happens without governance. Nothing. Everyone will say, oh, he'll do it. I'll do it tomorrow. Nothing happens at all. So what sort of governance structure works best? Well, there's not one model fits all. It depending on the country's culture, some of you mentioned this before, the region's culture, the sort of industry you're in. So we found there were four or five models of governance extant in the world, existing in the world. And I, because I like history of that, I gave them historical sort of names. The first was feudalism. There are models of knowledge management where there are lords, there's the king, and there are peasants. And there's the lord of knowledge. And she pays money to the king of knowledge, but the peasants just produce the knowledge and get nothing back. It's feudalism. Now that's a common model. There's enlightened despotism. Fancy word. Joseph the second, you had some enlightened despots in Austria. They helped build the city, actually. You have a very wise, smart person, but they were despot. They run the show. You can have unenlightened despots, just nasty people saying, I'm the knowledge officer. You do what I say. You can have pure autocracy, pure anarchy. Don't do anything. I have the job. I'm just going to take an apple that you managed to knowledge. These are different models. But the model that we thought was best for NASA, and I would defend this for a number of organizations, is the same model that Russia and the United States have for governance. Federation, the federated model. There's a coordinating effort in the central government, it's coordination. It's locally governed with the coordinating function. Now, sometimes this doesn't work so well in various countries at different times. It becomes unfederated and a despot takes over. But generally the principle, Ron was talking about, the principle is a good one. So NASA 13 centers each center at its own chief knowledge officer. And it happens, coordinates their work. He helps get budgets. He gives advice. He finds speakers or consultants. These guys are pretty busy. But he also gets to learn the ground knowledge of dispersed organizations. If you're going to manage knowledge, you don't just want the official documents, believe me. You want what the U.S. Army calls ground knowledge. The knowledge of the worker doing the work. That's really what you want to understand. Even if it's tedious to you, that's what you really need to do. You cannot ignore that. When you ignore that, you become vacuous. You just began talking words about words. It's just flighty and gaseous. You really want to know. So if you have knowledge officers working on the sites, working in those centers, they are much closer to the work. What do you know in Washington? I've seen many, many heads of organizations. You see it when they broadcast on the U.S. television. Hearings with senior people. I'll give you an example. I mean, it's just so pathetic. So we have a big bank in the United States, Wells Fargo. And it was run by thieves. It was run by people who were crooked. And they came on television, because Congress called them in, and they said, oh, we knew what was going on with the bank. We don't understand what happened. These are people who never, ever step into one of their banks. Never. They sit in the offices. They have offices. They have a nice life, and they talk to one another. That's all they do. And that happens to a lot of it. Hierarchical types of management. Knowing if you want to know what's going on, where you work, you have to be there. There's no substitute for being there. None. You've got to get out of your office and look how people do. So here's this federated model, and it's worked very, very well. I must say, it's the most successful knowledge project among government agencies. I don't know all of them. At least in the United States, it surely is. And it gets, because their budgets, they were scrutinized by Congress, but they get approved. Ed retired last year, and he and I do some projects together. He just got taught. 32 years working for government. Stay much longer. You shoot yourself. But it still goes on. It's sustainable, and it works very well. So some of these lessons, again, I'm not telling you this because it's an interesting story, though it is an interesting story, but there are quite a few lessons here. You could learn things from. Big, complex, smart organizations that seems to be what most of you work in. What do you do? Everyone thinks they know everything. Everyone thinks they're very smart. You're hurting cats and smart cats, not stupid cats. You're hurting cats who have high IQs. What do you do with these people? And to say you're managing their knowledge, are you crazy? Get out of here. What do you think you are? And that's really what people might say. You have to be, you have to have a good personality for doing this. I've interviewed people, sometimes firms ask me as a consultant, can you interview five candidates to be the chief knowledge officer of our company? And you meet people, and they went to this school or that school, they're smart, and I said, this person is never going to do it. They have the personality of a log or a tree. They're never going to give in to anything. They're just walking smarts, but they have no soul, no emotions. I said, forget it. You have to have a certain personality, persuasiveness, empathy, speaking with imagination and care. That's the sort of people you want for this job. Not all jobs need that, but I'd say working with knowledge, you surely, if you're going to try to persuade people to work with you. You can't demand someone's knowledge. You have to sort of persuade them. Please, we'd like to work together. The knowledge of the group is much greater than the knowledge of any individual. Much greater. It would make us all great. It would make everything much better. But you have to persuade them. You have to have certain personal attributes. Not everyone can do this. It doesn't matter. You also don't have to know about knowledge management to try it. You could learn it. I would say in a week I could teach anyone enough about knowledge management to do this. So could a lot of people. It's not that hard. It's doing it, the actual enacting it. So don't look for people who've done very experienced or done that. It might be useful, but I'm not sure it's that important. Don't give it to anyone who's less than 10 years in the organization. The networks won't be rich enough or strong enough. You want people who've been there, who have friends, who help them. You really want to be there for a while. Maybe not 10. I'm just saying that. But at least five. The idea of management consultant, I'm sort of guilty of this, is that we'll come into your organization. We don't know anything about the industry. We don't know you, but we'll solve your problems. And people still, it's complete crap. Life isn't like that. Really, to understand an organization, you have to be there. Not so much read about it, you have to be there. Or else, be a very good listener and understand what's going on. So let's see. I think those are the main points I wanted to make. I know it's sunny out. You want to go... Okay. Why don't you... Any comments or questions? We'll let you go a little bit. I'll let you go a little bit earlier. Anyone want to say anything? Any comments, questions? Anything you'd like to add to this? In the back. So, I like the NASA theme. I think that's really interesting and a great example to kind of use in nuclear. But where are they now? And you said the guy that was running it is retired and moved on. So what's happened since that? And have they managed to, I guess, keep going in a successful direction? They're announcing next week the next chief knowledge officer. They interviewed six of the sort of center knowledge officers for them applied for the job and another person. And they're going to announce it next week. They have a new person. And all of those people have 10 to 15 years' experience at NASA. And they meet these requirements. I think Ed was particularly good at this. But they'll meet the requirements. Yes, the program continued. If it didn't, it would be really tragic. It really would be. Yeah, they're continuing it. They really... Congress watches them. They want them to do it. The directors want them to do it. And it's done under the radar. I mean, they don't make a big deal about it. I said, why don't we write a book about this? But they don't really want to do that for reasons I don't want to go into here. But they don't want to write about it. They've talked at conferences. But yeah, it's still ongoing. And there are lessons for everyone here. Again, I didn't want to just talk about a story that is sewage and errors. It's true for good lessons that are fungible, that are transferable. And just a comment a bit out of line, but it came to my mind. And now in my organization, they are talking a lot about the knowledge illusion, because apparently overconfidence and thinking that you know something well but you don't know it, is the basic reason for accidents and these kinds of errors and mistakes. You know, one of you was talking before, I was, I shook, he's not here. He said something that's so true. There was a French philosopher named Montaigne who lived in the 17th century, a very wise man, a very wise man. He said, every man over 50 who's successful never listens to anyone again. That's one of the truest things I ever heard. Montaigne was a big influence on Shakespeare who also said things like that. But it's true when people, there's a success trap. You know, they're successful. They say, I don't have to listen to you. I'm successful. You see it all the time. We're all prone to these sort of things. I mean, it's not, I don't want to pick out people. So you have to be persuasive. It's tricky. I mean, there are things that, it strikes me, I think some of you would agree with me, that are really important for success in life that I never, ever mentioned in school. At least not now. Persuade, how to rhetoric. It used to be taught in schools in the 15th century. How do you frame an argument? How do you speak so others listen and read by your arguments? Rhetoric, gone subjects. I live in a town full of engineers. The whole town is full. I'm the only one who's not. Whole towns, like Engineerville there. Because they're near a big MIT laboratory. And the schools make everyone in the town, all the kids, take a year of calculus including my own two children and went to the school. Someone did a study and found that less than 0.001% will ever think about calculus for the rest of their lives. But they make it required. So I wrote a big piece for the school board and said, why don't you make calculus elective, not required, and make rhetoric required? Because they'll use it every day of their life. It was like speaking Greek to a chicken. Man, they thought I was crazy. They said calculus, it's STEM, it's really key. They said, well, it's key for some things. But most of us, I don't take a year of it. I don't even know if the word means anymore. I don't know, all my friends took it. It gave me a migraine headache and I had no idea whether I forgot it immediately after getting a C in it. I am not against that. Of course I'm not. Mathematics is crucial, but it's not for everyone. Rhetoric is what we use in life. How do you persuade people? How do you make a case? How do you say things? I mean, so it's really very, very, I mean this is getting off top. But though it's part of the elements of rhetoric, one of them was knowledge. This is in the, there were seven things. If you went to the University of Bologna in 1430, this is what you'd learn, rhetoric and knowledge. That's medieval crap. It's truer now than it was then. That's it. Okay. Enjoy the sun. Enjoy whatever else you're doing. And we'll see you later. Okay, thank you.