 Good morning, John. In your last video, you were talking about how often stories of great accomplishment are told as stories of individual genius rather than, like, collective progress. And I feel like we've talked a lot about this on Vlogbrothers. I wrote, like, a couple of books about it. So forgive me if I've got a lot of thoughts about, like, why this is the case. So I think a lot about teaching and education. And one thing that I know for sure is that you cannot know everything, and yet we have to understand enough about the world and how it works in order to, like, live it. And there are a bunch of different things that allow us to do that. One of those things is having access to real information about the world. This thing is just about the quantity of information. And it is, in general, what we think of when we think of education. Sometimes we get so focused on imparting the quantity of information so that you have, like, all of the necessary data about the world that we have to simplify a lot of stuff, and that simplification actually comes at the cost of other parts of what is necessary to, sort of, like, have the tools to live in the world. Let's have an example. When it comes to the invention slash discovery of the smallpox vaccine, there are, like, three things that you should know. One, smallpox was very bad, but we cured it. Second, we did that with a vaccine, basically, that's very much like the vaccines that we use today that work by exposing people to an attenuated form of the pathogen. And third, there was a person who figured it out some way. And those first two things are facts that are important to have in your head. But the third thing is just a story. And I think oftentimes we simplify stories to make them good so that we can have, like, context to hang these important facts on. We do this a lot in education, and I don't think it's a problem. Simple stories, especially good ones that fit into established frames that people are familiar with, are really good ways to help people remember stuff. But it turns out that the story itself is doing a ton of work in the overall scheme of what education should be doing, which is, like, giving you systems with which to understand and interface with the world. But as I said a moment ago, you may have forgotten we've been all over the place. Quantity of, like, bits of information is only one part of education. Education also gives us lenses through which to understand the world, and those lenses are often stories. They also give us shared lenses, shared knowledge, shared values, shared worldviews, all these things help us live together and work together and communicate. And so it's super worth asking in what ways individualist stories serve learners, and by learners I mean human beings, and in what ways they don't. I often find myself on the anti-individualist side of this debate, but I think that's mostly because, like, we focus on that so much. This does not mean that I think people aren't served by individualist stories. I think we are. People should understand that to some extent we are responsible for our own fate, and that outcomes are definitely dependent on how hard and how much and how smart people work. Not wholly, of course, but in part, and I think it's also really important to note, that, like, this is more the case for people who have fewer barriers than for people who have more barriers. And so individualist stories work a lot better for folks for whom, like myself, a lot of barriers were really low. But I also think the focus only on individualist stories can do harm, you know, in part because a lot of people can't see themselves inside of them and not just in the traditional representation matters way, which it does, but, like, also just in the way that many people have barriers that other folks don't have. That's something to fight against, but it's never going to be something that we are entirely free of. And so I think it's important to, like, have stories that recognize the fact that nobody does anything alone and also nobody contributes not at all. Like, if only through conversations we have with our friends and family, everybody adds something to the human story. So obviously we should fight against the urge to individualize every accomplishment that happens, but also we need to teach people that we are, at least to some extent, responsible for our own destinies. We need to remember that the stories we tell aren't just tools with which to learn things, they are the thing we are learning. And also we should know that acknowledging, or in my case, reveling in the fact that nothing is possible without the contribution of millions of people both alive and dead is good! That doesn't lessen individual accomplishment. It should increase our pride and our ridiculously badass species. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.