 Better Listen presents a talk based on the book Present Shock with Douglas Rushkoff. I'm excited to hear Doug talk about it. He's going to sort of lay it out for you, the ideas of Present Shock, and then we're going to talk a little bit, and then you guys will have a chance to ask questions. So why don't we give him a round of applause? Thank you. I like that Maslin quote, the idea of rather than necessarily saying anything particularly new, you know, writing a book that basically brings into awareness stuff that we all kind of know, but don't really say, because then the function of the book at that point then is what? Is to bring people into the present, right? It's basically, it's like this is stuff that we know, but we're just so distracted that we don't, that it's not, oh that's kind of cool, that's simultaneous, that a book can do that, you know, that a book can, or the experience of reading a book, of actually just doing that, what in today's culture, taking that radical step of deciding to actually open a codex, as we used to call them, and read this thing for eight or nine or ten hours. I mean that's probably the most radical thing about this book, it's just that it's a book, right, that I would take two years away from tweeting and writing, you know, 800-word articles that are supposed to somehow encapsulate everything, and I would just, when I started this book as a way of keeping myself going, actually there were so many distractions that I started to keep a list alongside the book, this sort of margin list in the comments section of Microsoft Word, of all the things I was turning down in order to write the book, so like there's this party, and there's this talk I could have done, this money I could have made, this article I was supposed to write, all the things I wasn't doing, and that thing got so much bigger than the actual text, that I just, I had to stop, you know, so I understand that even you guys being here, I mean there's a lot of things we could do other than come into a room with other bodies, you know, in a community, in your local community, and celebrate the publication of a book, but I don't know, I feel like this is kind of what it's all about. The thing that occurred to me, I guess part of the reason I wrote the book in the first place, was, you know, I was always a fan of digital technology and what was going to happen, and I saw digital technology as really an answer to the slacker dilemma that I was facing, you know, in the late 80s and early 90s there was this movement, we called ourselves slackers, and basically it was those of us who got out of college and there weren't really jobs for us, and the only alternative was really to become...