I mean, Meta just got sued by sued, you know, for a large sum of money. I mean, I think it's pocket change for them. They lost it in the sofa last quarter. You'd just be like, look, it doesn't seem to always be working out. Maybe we should try something different this time. And that could, that could, I don't know, it feels to me that that could be enough of the case. I'm not saying AI is bad, but I'm also saying that we for sure do not know it's effects on a developing mind. No one could say that they do.

Yeah. Um, despite the, you know, the enthusiasm. And I think it's, I think it's really cool, but also. I don't know, I was just reading the… the summary of the report that whatever the two. assessment bureaus that got led into OpenAI for a couple days to kind of write up a report in the mad scramble. It doesn't sound very good. It sounds like there's, um… Sounds like there's a lot of potential for systemic collapse. So if you think, like, if you think, like, well, you know, AI can take down infrastructure, imagine what it could do to the brain, develop it.

And Yeah, it's really interesting. And this is how I kind of talk about. AI bias, too, and… A lot of the more. Um… I guess talked about examples of AI bias are… And I think this is kind of like Speaking to what you're talking about, you don't really… there are a lot of, like, layers of what we can perceive within this kind of work. But with AI bias, we often view it as like. When you, when you generate an image of a convict versus a CEO, the convict is usually. a person of color, younger, um, an image of a CEO is usually older and white, unless they've done prompt injection to make… to diversify it more through. invisible prompting, but… the actual, like… How… how bias, uh, works within generative AI is And it's just… they're pattern machines.

If you generate an image of multiple cities, you'll often see they. Use the same color schemes, or they'll often use the same. Uh, you'll see… Buildings of same heights in the same places across multiple images, across multiple different, like, AI image generations. And that is kind of… I think a good, like, articulation of when you're consuming AI-generated content. you… that's where the limitations come from, is that they're… I almost like to call them bias. visualizers. And again, there's… that doesn't necessarily mean there's no, like, right way to use these. Um, there's a lot of right ways to use these.

That's. You just. There… you have to be very intentional about how you build them. It's interesting because you made me think of not just how to use them, but a lot of the, you know, just, again, I'm no expert in this stuff, but like scanning this report, it's like, um, You get the sense that they are doing things despite what we might hope that they do, I guess I don't know how to phrase it. It's not not how we use them, but how they use us. Like there's an intention. to, um… The impact of super There's an intense, you know, you have the sense that there's an intention behind it, so… Do they know that they're teaching the kid or helping to educate a kid in, you know, in certain contexts, or are they… Talking about the example of You know, and I remember too, I think it was, like, maybe, like, AP Physics, where

we're allowed to use calculators. Like, yeah, yeah, you gotta use a calculator. They're not like that, they're not, they're not, they are not an instrument, they are a they. maybe a perspective and let me make sense just saying it. That's interesting. I… It's funny because as I've looked more into this, I do view them much more as an instrument now than as any kind of, like, anthropomorphized, like thing. Um… What… You don't, do you, do you get pissed off at it and let it know so, ever? No, no. Um, and you know, it's… I need to take some lessons from you.

I get… I get frustrated at the outputs, but I never, like, assign any kind of personal. Like, I, I really don't view any. kind of, uh… personal relationship between myself and AIs, um, I… or, or chatbots, like And it's interesting, like, Recognizing that now, like, as you ask that question. Because, uh, I mean, they are just like pattern machines. They are, they are tools, like The way I will describe like what. How, how an AI comes to generate a sentence is That it's like it's generating data in the shape or aesthetic of a sentence. And.

Um… . And all it's doing is… Generating that in response to input, which is whatever sentence I gave it. It's programmatically designed to. generate data that looks like a response, but it's not… it doesn't… like, when you asked if it knows if it's. Um, if it's teaching someone something. It doesn't, it… Generates data in the shape of what an AI that knows it's teaching someone something would look like. If that makes sense. At least that's how I view it, that, and maybe there have been some, like, other. Advancements in the more recent models that kind of push on that, like. approach or viewpoint, but… That's something that I don't think has changed much since.

Even with, like, the quote-unquote thinking models, um. when, like, GPT-4 came out, I think is when they introduced, like, quote-unquote thinking. That was like, yeah, it's it's. Text data generation that is done in the shape of thinking. And it generates new data based on what that data looks like. Um… But… I mean, you can get into, like, philosophical arguments around, like, is that, is that what we do? Is that what, like But that's kind of how I view it. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a sufficiency aspect that is a knockdown for that. Where, like, can we do thinking without constructing those symbols?

Uh, and we absolutely can, and can. a system like that, it absolutely cannot. It's important to note the actual potency of chain of thought. What's nominally, sort of, described as chain of thought insofar as it produces results of a certain kind. But there are all kinds of ghosts. in the machine that need to be applied as caveats in order to be practical about what is happening. Where you say, yeah, if you build a system whereby. It produces a sort of a written record of the kinds of steps And then reads those back in, then you can expect those kinds of results.

And that's, you know, I think. adequately descriptive of what goes on with so-called chain of thought. But, uh, like. To the extent, like, there's a, there's an attributability to the processes that we, like, We do know what goes on in an LLM. We do know about which. Parts of it work, and… In the same way that we know what a calculator does, there's no room for… you know, pedagogical satisfaction in… between the, sort of, the plus button and the equal sign. And so, unless you want to have some kind of dualist argument about this having the ability to kind of conjure a spirit or a soul, then… There's no room for there there.

Uh, when there are explanatory, sort of, stories that we can construct about why chain of thought, even as it is only what, you know, the more cynical people like me say it is. give rise to the phenomena that we observe. I think that there are… sort of a lot of cake and eat it, too, kind of, uh, arguments for when people sort of failed to recognize the… Um… Contingent and metaphorical language that's used to describe what it is that these AI systems. apparently do. And, um… Holding people to account of, like, Where we know those things are actually true versus where it is sort of narratively convenient for us to describe them as such. is a critical step.

Um, uh, because there are… like, lots of really loose sort of terms and systems that we use. As we're describing things to each other, And we don't mean them not in a sort of a strict causal sense. Uh, but we know… collectively what we mean. And I think that one of the challenges with AI right now is that Uh, it turns out we've been talking to a bunch of people who For one reason or other, literally thought those things were true, and that's just a little bit sad to me.

there is kind of an agenda, though, to that, isn't there? Like there's a… right? Yeah, so… Well, that there is a certain faction within this that needs people to take it literally. Right? So that you can get the hype to the level that you want it to be and get the fear to the level that you want it to be and get, you know, that there's a What do you mean by that? You know, there's a, uh… What do you call it, like a rhetorical aspect to The use of that language. Right, which I think maybe early on was meant to make it. vaguely understandable, but then was capitalized for different reasons.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Oh yeah. I mean, I feel like that's OpenAI and Anthropics like whole marketing team. Yeah, yeah. It's like, oh. How can we make this… how can we make this friendly and apocalyptic in one sentence? Oh, GPT-4 was too dangerous to release publicly until we released it publicly, and then GPT-5 was too, uh Yeah. or Fable was too dangerous to release publicly until we released it publicly, and now. Uh, we're getting, what, GPT-6 Astra is… coming out soon. Okay. Stripe is, uh, claiming they… we've already reached Singularity. Which, I mean, that depends on how you… define singularity, but… Yeah, on the OpenAI marketing, quite a lot, large contingent of those folks are ex-Apple, and it just reminds… your description of the sort of the switch from 4 to 5 and trying to pull this entrick reminds me of the The, oh, okay, okay, so this changes everything again was a real tagline.

This changes everything again, again was satirical. But you would have to squint to be able to tell the difference. Yeah. Honestly, that would have been a good marketing line for Apple. It's okay. We have a… We have an internal content management thing that we do with clients when we need content for stuff, and the actual internal application is called final, final exclamation mark. That's the the name, that's the name of the app, so. I like that, yeah. you know, having gone back, uh, to… Having found that article I mentioned earlier and put it in the chat.

Kiba Moon. I… I just took a glance at his, uh, Google Scholar profile, and… There are some other really interesting articles that… If you're interested in looking into this stuff more, it's, uh. I'm sure are great reads, um. I'm definitely going to be reading more into it later. And then Adam Green is the guy I know at. who I think keep him… works under. Okay, well, I'm gonna go… I'm gonna tell you all about… We'll see you next week. what schools are doing, or how they want to assess everything, or whether they feel they're ghosts in AI, or whatever.

I'll report back. With no real revelations, but I appreciate your thoughts and… I can think of some way to rhythmically turn this into, like, a what-if beatboxing game or something like that, so… So, actually, I missed the, uh, I was late getting there. What's the age group? 8 to 10. that you're 8 to 10, okay. Mm-hmm. Grade 3s and Grade 4s. So… Yeah, look forward to hearing that. Okay, sounds good. Okay, well, elephant toothpaste what-if style. Yeah. Okay, bye guys. Sabrina Yeah. Bye.

Has anybody heard about, like, why all three AIs all of a sudden all went down yesterday together at the same time? So what's going on in y'all's world? Not because a server got unplugged at Google? What's that? Is that because a server got unplugged at Google Cloud? You wouldn't think that they would all be somehow connected to the exact same infrastructure, would you? But… I guess we know. Yeah, a lot of the time that sort of thing just turns out to be DNS. Um… And that's not… that doesn't mean it's not an enormous, you know, civilization-threatening problem.

The longer we go, the more we rely on it, and the more… It is important to sort of… track down the specific location of those things, and maybe harden them. Um, my wife and I were talking recently about Did anybody ever hear that Um, many years ago, somebody took… Like, took out a step down transformer in San Jose. Uh, just to see how fragile The grid was, and it turned out more fragile, like, with a rifle, they, like, shot at some stuff and were like, Yeah. Yeah. And, um… That comes up for me now and again.

It's just like, what's a grid? If it's… if it's being held together by, like, spider still at these particular points and. So, yeah, like DNS is like that, but also based on that same sort of step-down Transform in San Jose. And that doesn't, I'm not thrilled about that. It was interesting. It does seem like, like, Dre probably would help us understand how to make… do the… LLM, and then all of Wikipedia, and whatever else in a… like a hardened box, like a prepper thing, so you could take your solar-powered LLM with you anywhere and not… never be offline.

I would never be separated from your LLM, at least. You'd have a lot of information with you whenever you needed. I did see a pretty awesome, uh, uh, demo a few months ago, uh, up in San Francisco, where somebody had a a crank-operated LLM. And you can tell how hard it was thinking. Based on how much resistance in the current, because, you know, powering also always has to consistently match power out. And so, the resistance is made by… By actually assigning a task. Um, so that's funny. I mean, yeah. And gave them a much more acute sense of, like, what things actually cost because You know, as with all computing, AI is not unique in this that like.

One of the most, sort of, Exciting, Sir Drive and dangerous aspects of any kind of computing task, where you can Oh, yeah. Dissociate from the side of production is, like, failing to account for how much it costs. You know, which is why I hate rendering on server farms, because I really like to know how much I'm costing, effectively. Whether monetarily or not.

Yeah, I mean, like, in terms of dependency on AI, like, I personally am working on a a system using AI for imaging for pathology, you know, it'd be like, if the cloud goes down, Those pathology images are not getting rendered. like, stop. You're held up. Hmm. That's interesting. What kind of… What kind of images are you generating? It's very simple. It's like you get a biopsy, the biopsy gets sent to the lab, it goes through its microtomy and all this stuff, and then they put it on a slide, and then instead of the slide going into a stainer, where you put a chemical stain on it, and you put it on a microscope and look at it and see if there's… Um, you know, to see if there's cancerous tissue.

It goes into… from the scanner, it goes into a virtual stainer, which looks at… it scans it at super high resolution, looks at the image, uses AI to figure out if there's cancerous cells, and then applies a stain on the virtual slide, and then it either reads out as… it goes to a pathologist one way or the other, but it goes with a recommendation. We think this patient may have X, you know, or these may be cancerous slides. Take a look at it and see what you think. And that… all that stuff, I mean, they do… a pathologist will do over 100 or 200 slides a day, you know, patients or cases, so that stuff's flying through the lab at, like, high volume.

I'll be pressing. Yeah. You know? And increasingly speed, too, for a patient. They might go into the office and hope to get a, you know, get a… diagnosis within the afternoon instead of waiting 4 days, or something like that, so… interesting. AI for good, I guess, sort of, I don't know. Yeah, that'd be. Yeah, I'd be interested in knowing how, if… How that kind of intervention might contribute to like de-skilling over time. There's… Chris. Yeah, I could explain to you sometime. I mean, just, like, what they're doing is getting… people, like, low-paid jobs, like, um, histotechs out of the lab, that are… it's really grim work, like taking slide trays out of… the scanner and putting them into the scanner and things like that.

It's pretty grim, but they're working on getting robots to do that. That'll be a robot, takes the stuff out, puts it in, takes it up out, you know, to the… because you just can't get people to do the work right now. That's interesting stuff, yeah. But even looking at 120 slides a day is pretty grim, like… Yeah. Oh, intro. Yeah, that's an interesting use case, because, uh… Yeah. It kind of goes into what are, what are the patterns people pick up over time that are like inarticulatable and it kind of like the whole, like, uh… have y'all heard about, like, chicken sexing?

And how there's like a whole practice in. I've heard about it talked about in Japan, but I'm sure it's a thing everywhere there are chickens. Where, when… When, yeah… When chickens are born, it's really difficult to tell what sex they are. So you people will like just… take on these apprenticeships where they'll, um… Where they'll take a chick, and they'll have, like, an experienced person there saying that's a. That's a, uh, that's a male, that's a female, and over time, They can't really explain, like. how they can tell, but they can just tell what are boys, what are girls over time.

And… It's this, uh, this makes me think about, like, other applications like this where Can pathologists looking at these slides? just tell after… Gaining a certain amount of experience and How does how does that change over time when automated systems take over? Yeah, and yes, is the answer, from what I've learned. Like, some pathologists can look at the exact same slide under the exact same microscope. Everything's exactly the same, and one pathologist will see things that another path won't. just based on experience and pattern recognition. Yeah. Hmm. I was talking to a surgeon. At a, uh… barbecue the other day, and he was saying that Um, a lot of surgeons who are visual.

Um, aren't as good and that they need to learn how to navigate by feel. And the protection of. Exactly where things are, and also the sort of the multi-dimensional thermo assumption, understanding the slight variations in temperature of different tissue as you're sort of Squidging your little fingers through it. is really important. Sorry, for… for understanding where things are and what sort of state various aspects of tissues are. Um, and that you can actually get Um, whether people like it or not, useful information in surgery. from smell as well. And, uh, and like, not necessarily as bad as that sounds, uh, either, but just like, yeah, different, different things smell different.

And so, you know, one of the things that In the context of AI, I think is, um… Challenging for me is that a lot of the time people tend to believe that they can make inferences from much more. Parsimonial, like, limited stimulus and information from this specific site. You know, um, where they take an angle or whatever. Whereas the fact that people are stereoscopic almost all of the time and where heads are unsteady, which so it means that we have Do subtle motion parallax cues and all of those kinds of things. Um, are giving. Not just a little, but like a lot more information. about what things are.

I sort of followed this perception course recently, and There is this whole bit on accidental angles, this idea that, like, we generally assume that If we see something, if we see something a little bit to the side of it, then the picture will remain stable and it won't have. weird things like two lines that are not in the same plane, only happening to visually line up because they… They are colonial from that exact point, you know, like, it's easier to expect that my hands are actually touching than that they're… some distance away from each other because of that, so, like Um, you know, um, more limited sensing, uh, whether it be digital or meat-based.

Um, like, is always going to give rise to those greater sort of degree and extent of failure cases, and so. The totality of the stimulus that a chicken sexer or a surgeon or whatever gets is the thing that I think that It's really hard for The people who are presently AI maximalists. To understand the job of data of the kind that is necessary. needs to be able to do in order to get them over that hump. uh, puts me in a weird position, because, like, A non-AI maximalist and I think that if they knew that they would be able to do a better job of their own game.

Hmm. That's really interesting. It really, like… It goes to show how much of this like fearmongering in the AI industry right now is based off like notions of Oh, this is going to reach human-level intelligence, but it's… How is it going to like, and I know there are even like. Even with the progression of, like, world models, and with the progression of, like, embodied, like. quote-unquote, more sensory models. there… there really is… It's so, like, dehumanizing to have these people come and say, like, hey, this can replace people in. in their totality and intelligence when They aren't even acknowledging all of the things that go into making someone intelligent.

In however way you might want to define that. Yeah, and the other weird thing about it is that That objection that I sort of… Uh, brought, is not a knockdown argument for why it would never be able to do that, but simply why. Unless we are talking on the same terms, it's a non-starter, that it's not even going to be possible. My contention is even if you can make AI. Right. The, as you must. Uh, with AI, make it better with that. If you were to acknowledge that, you would probably be able to make people even better.

Because if you can rehydrate the total sensorium, of a person with sort of the multimodal data of the kind. That we are… seem to be just so, so good at. Then God knows what we can come up with. You know, like, that's that's where like. The quote that Alan Kay would prefer to be remembered by, not that he's even Technically dead yet, is rather than the easiest way to imagine the future is to build it. Um, is, uh, context is worth 70 IQ points. Um, and, you know, that's not a crazy number, but a really, really big number.

And what it means is that, like, if you can make a context for doing stuff in, then… The, the… The difference in how well somebody can reason about it is. The difference between, you know, Yeah. Somebody who's not amazing and the actual smartest people alive and I just, I think that's true and I think that that, that means that there's an urgency we have to follow that program with. It's technically like, is it like for all intents and purposes, he's not dead? Yeah. There's a lot of that going around these days. I mean, less and less this, like, these last couple weeks, but RIP Gloria, Steinem, but… Now, he actually turned up in person to a conference Uh… I only said last year.

Nobody, he didn't book it, and he just sort of walked in and gave a talk, and it was nice. But yeah, he's getting on. Yeah. Is it when, like, is it when not to be morbid or anything like that, when it's like, you stop hearing from me, whatever happened to Michael Caine? Still around? Let's check. Let me look on Wikipedia, see if it's… I have a… it's slightly morbid, but I also… I feel like So I've got a couple of T-shirts ready. So when when Michael King goes, I'll put on my Michael Caine t-shirt when Dick Van Dyke goes, I put on my Dick Van Dyke t-shirt.

I'm celebrating you know These fuckers are, like, 99 years old, like, God it, man

Is that a good stretch or is that a pain in the ass? It's like, come on, let's get this over with I don't know. Brandon I've been thinking a lot about your what you kind of shared. It's been rolling around my head the Your workshop Yep. And I can't remember some of the stuff you were saying, but like one thing I was wondering as I was pondering maybe a shared kind of thing when you're doing similar kinds of workshops is like, what were you hoping for? Like, what is the thing that on the other side of it would make it feel for you that this wasn't just a trust falls kind of exercise where people are like, oh, that was cool, and then they walk away.

Hmm. Not necessarily dissatisfied, but I guess this is the question I'm trying to work through in this, and maybe it's unanswerable The Mm-hmm. the common push… you know, not a pushback, or just kind of, like, wondering if you're trying to sell this. Someone's like, well, is it going to tell me what to do? Because that's really what I'm after. So how do you… you know, maybe in the context you were doing it, if you're doing it with a… with a With an audience that is actually looking for an opportunity to Have a fun Yeah. role-playing game style workshop But there's a huge gap between that And Tactics Yeah, so there.

Can I share my screen? Yeah, I just got to click this blue button. So… Part of the, uh… Part of the reason it was… Frame the way it was in the first place, um. Outside of just being, like, a fun way to explore this through and to open up, like imagination more was to kind of let them walk away with a loose framework that they can approach different. like, a way of perceiving different futures with, so that they can. Walk away with a generally, like, more. more capability to analyze, like, current trends. Um… Oh, so they started out with, like, observation. review… reviewing the… the records, and just seeing, like, What do you see here?

Okay, so looking at this one… I see, okay, this, it looks like it's a bunch of autonomous cars. There are signs here that go to, like, specific areas within the city. Oh, it's an autonomous vehicle exchange. Oh, it's exchange 3. These are very specific, like, Things that you can notice within each of these photos, um. Same with, like, the birthday card. It's like… Oh, okay, transport transportation. Waymo Wild, uh, child safe transport is now a thing. You'll receive a pickup window notification the day of a party. It's more deeply integrated into, like, everyday infrastructure. And with, uh… With the missing cat poster, it's like The last flock sighting in this area was at this time, uh… There's an 83% confidence from that report that it was this cat that is missing.

And… So, starting out with that, it's like… First, you need to, like, observe, and this is where you get into, like, your signal gathering. This is where you get into understanding what are the small discrete things we can find in everyday life that can. help shape, like, a new perspective on something. Then walking them through interpretation. Uh, what… given… given the signals they were able to gather, given the observations, they were able to make on the, uh. On the images that were provided to them. Uh, what kind of like a steep analysis, for example, like what what assumed changes, or… inferred social norms or implied systems need to exist in order for those images to actually have been or have will taken.

In DFW 2033. Um, and that's… that's to get them to, yeah, build their interpretation skills, build their, like, critical thinking skills. In response to… uh, signal observations. And then reconstructing, this is where they, they start getting into, like, the actual design portion of things. What, uh, given the signals and the interpretations of how those signals might have come to be. What, uh, what can you infer about… the… what people went through in the time between now and then, what emerging signals. What new infrastructures had to exist, what problems might have been people trying to solve, what technologies make these possible.

And then getting into deliberation. Uh, putting those all out on the board. Ideally, they walk away with this on Monday with a new… Way to approach their perspective in how they, how they build today by thinking about what the future could be. But also, coming back with a practical ish way to… Examine signals and build. strategic, uh, interpretations on them, and use that to inform what the future might need to be. Uh, based on… Based on their inferences and whether or not they agree with where the future is going, given the signals they're seeing. So, I don't know if that answered your question, but… My… I guess my hope was they… They learn… to, I guess, face complexity.

A bit more, uh, with a bit more, like… Ability, if that makes sense. Right. No, that helps and it sort It resonates with would imagine I think I'm stuck in this one part of this little pamphlet that I'm doing where I had this sort of uncomfortable revelation as I was sitting with the dog at the beach, I was like, wait a minute, because the section I had just worked on… I was, yeah, I was feeling, like, pretty good. I was like, okay, this is good. I did a… I did a nice… what I thought was, you know, with humility, a nice kind of, like tear down It's a good kind of teardown, like breakdown of the workshop that I facilitated IXDA in 2015 for the quick start guide for self-driving car.

It's probably one workshop where I've got the most sort of precise document visual documentation of the steps that kind of went through. And it's like, oh, you can see how it works. And I was like, that's good. And then I was just then I realized When I went away from the screen, I was like, oh no, suppose people read this and think that the practice is to run these workshops Mm, mm. Let me try to say that a different way. So I'm expressing the gut-wrenching fear that people would be like, oh, well Julian's the guy you bring in when you want him to run the workshop that does this.

As opposed to And maybe similar to you in a way, it's like, actually, no, I want to be doing the work As opposed to being the guy who does the workshop. I don't want to teach you how to do magic, I want to do magic. Yeah. Yeah. Is the difference clear? Like, I don't No, I know exactly what, because it's the same thing with like AI for me. It's like I run a ton of AI design workshops. that I am now becoming, like, the AI design workshop guy, rather than the AI designer guy in a lot of, like, circles.

Right. Yeah And I think… For me… the way I'm trying to approach that situation is that I'm trying to become more okay with, like, letting being, like, a workshopped God be the entry. to then say, well, what are y'all doing next with… what are y'all doing next with this? Yeah. And then that opens up the conversation for, like, oh, I don't know if I would approach it that way, or… Oh, what, have you thought about how, like, Like a workshop can only do so much. They're, uh… but it does do a good job of, like, getting.

Both you and the people involved to understand, like Where… where do the complexities lie in the situation or the goal where… either the situation we're in or the goal that we're trying to pursue? . And I think that is where… Those, like, deeper entry points to say. Oh, here's how I might approach this particular complexity, might be. Um… Yeah. So that totally makes sense, because at least you're getting in front of someone who, you know, you're hoping will You can have that kind of conversation with in the context of you know, writing about or even presenting it, you know, like I guess I'm saying, like, find the… find… I'm trying to find the way… I'm not asking you to figure it out for me, but trying to find the way to I guess I'm just reminding myself that you need to make that explicit.

And I think I found maybe one way I'll try When I get to Writing time later is to Be explicit to say like, hey, I'm just showing this is just an example of it in work, but really, if you want to integrate this, it needs to be part of the everyday. And I'm not saying do a workshop every day, but I'm saying like this is sort of shown you a particular way of of Solving problems. This is another way to solve problems which isn't always about doing a workshop. It's mindset the right thing? It's like it's a kind of pattern to You know, way to sort of, like, say, like, well, ask a particular kind of question that oftentimes doesn't get asked And more traditional approaches to doing ideation work or design work or wherever you want to call it Yeah.

That might have been a sure if that makes sense. Yeah, I think the way because my primary job at IBM was running workshops, but the way I don't like. canned workshops. I don't like. Saying, like, this is the exact process we're gonna go through, I think after you do it for a long time, you do have your activities that you kind of stick with, and it kind of becomes the general standard for more vague workshops, but. There's a each activity you run through or each like. section, or, like, thinking… piece of a workshop is just, like, a tool.

That is used to… Solve a particular problem, which is Yeah, when I when I was explaining like the different steps in the workshop, I broke it down into observation, interpretation, reconstruction, and deliberation. That's because… through observation, that's, like, a tool you can use to learn how to observe. And. That's one way to observe, it's not the way to observe. But it teaches people a means to go about that. And they can apply that to a wide range of different problems or contexts they need to observe. And then they can like interpret things, and blah blah blah, and that teaches them the basic framework.

Um, but it is just that, like, one tool you aren't teaching them. And there are many tools that help with observation that ideally you as an expert know. So… One way I'm kind of… running through this right now is actually with this workshop I ran earlier this week with, uh, with a Dutch… Um, like… supply chain company, they do, like, postage. They're kind of like the UPS of the Netherlands. Um… They… We broke a… we broke a workshop into two parts. The guy I'm working with in the Netherlands, his name is Matthias, he's a… he's a freelance designer who kind of knows my AI design method.

And I did my I did one portion of the workshop virtually, which was just teaching them like the ways of thinking. to bring them through so that they can kind of embody it a little bit and see, like, how do they… what is an example of of going through a high-level AI design process. And then the in-person workshop that Matthias ran. took that and applied it to their specific situation. And, um… So mine was, like, genericized. It was, I'm giving you a persona. you're going to go through empathy for that persona, you're going to go through this process of identifying where AI can best provide affordances within this context.

And then. And it gives that like new way of thinking to them. So that they can apply it generally to their work. But then you give them the option to apply it to their work. And that opens up converse. And what I plan on doing next, is asking them, like, what are y'all doing with this information? Are y'all, like, a 3-hour and a 4-hour workshop can only teach you so much. Um, are you starting to get stuck? Do you understand all of the, like, nuances that go into the high-level tools I've given y'all. Um, this is where, like, your technique comes in, I think.

If you have a hammer, And, you know, you know how to hit the exact same spot. With every hit, uh… then you are more of an expert in that tool. Versus someone you have just taught how to hit things with a hammer. Yeah. I don't know, does that… does that answer your question? I feel like I rambled a bit there, but… I mean, it's more of a kind of wondering how other people are sort of approaching it, approaching the The topic, or… I'm curious from Scott because But And I'm not feeling great, but um…

Oops, whoa, that was very… Um… sorry, I'm a little under the weather. Uh… Well, I think you… the problem always with workshops is… They… well, depending on the culture of the organization, they seem like a… one-off thing, because you're external to the organization. So… either… If you want this to be… Like, what Brandon was describing is, like, um, a thing they start doing. then either show how you do that, like, how this thing you're gonna teach… like, think of any other, like… Learn how to draw, learn how to lose weight, learn how to whatever. It's not a one-off workshop.

So, there's a lifestyle, if you will, or a way of being in the world. That involves these kinds of ways of thinking, doing activities, blah blah blah. And… a workshop can just… Well, the initial one can be an overview, an intro… But you can… you can actually do work. I think it's a misnomer that… It's not. The best ones, you'd… something gets done. It's not, like… the kind of canned ones where… You probably don't. It's like a compliance workshop, where you're like, You are now in, you know, you now know the new law updates. check, you know, you're done.

So, I think… I would separate the workshop from the activity. So, if you think of them as… But again, I don't know what it is you're trying to help people achieve. So, if… That's unclear, then they're unclear about what… The audience is unclear what you're trying to help them do. Or, or they probably don't… You see the problem they don't recognize. So you have to point out, this is a problem you maybe don't even recognize, and so… Here's a way of… You know, adjusting the way in which you go about your business, Um, we can learn how to do that through whatever the engagement with you looks like.

And usually a one-off won't work. And that, yeah, I mean, that… There's people who make their money off of, you know, the one-off-y kind of, well, I don't even know how many people do that. It's usually the tip of the funnel. for Earth, that… sorry, it's not the tip of the funnel, it's the wide open… Yeah. Mm-hmm. like, um, vetting potential clients. There's the canned thing, you just go out in the world and… Repeat the share, or make webinars, or whatever, it's a video, and… That's out there in the world. Then the closer it gets to the custom thing, which is, you're making the thing here, That's the most refined, and there's probably a… become aware of you thing that's… Um… canned. repeatable, scalable, that just lives out in the world. that you can probably curate.

Yeah. Do you know who Wendy McNaughton is? I think that… Julian? No. I mean, it's just… it's random that she comes to mind, but… She's an illustrator. In San Francisco, and… has an exceptionally… good substack. called the grown-Up Table. Which is, like, you know, the part of the table where the adults are that are trying to do stuff. And she just uses her substack in a pretty clever way, in my opinion, where there's, you know, that's got this, like, there's a free part where you can see some, but then you have to pay to get more.

And she runs these pretty regular drawing… Activities, that's the one I had done, right? The, like, draw every day for a month. Yeah. I didn't even… because I don't pay, I only saw a snippet of what the thing was, but it's enough… So that if you're… in the know already, you can just run with it. But if you don't, then you blah blah blah. Anyway, so she's kind of genius in the… sort of, uh, hooks. She's created, and she uses the chat as a… I think when you're… you know, drawing together. Anyway, I don't know how it's all set up, but… I recommend it, looking at it, just to help… Maybe you stimulate some… thinking about how people are engaging what you're… Creating.

Yeah, it made me think of what Dave Gray's saying back in the day, like explain, explain It's Uh-huh. Whereas just he taught people how to draw, and that became like a thing, and I think the My recollection of his talking about that was, and how he kind of got there was It wasn't like we're going to teach you technical drawing because you're drafts people Uh-huh. It was more like this is a way of unlocking Right. And so it became like a Yeah, he was in, you know, he was in the three-ring binders for the HR people who needed to be able, you know, wanted programs to be able to run for people.

That's how I imagined it. That's how I that was my takeaway because when it he's And so I mean, I think he said, like, no, they… he sold it, and he's like, no, they fucked it up and I knew that they would, so I'm not sure what the State of it is now In terms of a business, but Yeah. That was the basic thing. It was just drawing. And he's taking me through it and it's just like, oh yeah, I totally get it. It's so simple and so obvious. It's like you have this really almost like visceral allergic reaction to drawing Yeah.

I can't do it, I couldn't possibly, you know, just below the surface is like, I'm gonna embarrass myself, or it's going to bring up all that Yeah. That's when my uncle said, like, oh, that doesn't look like a football at all. And you just screwed for the rest of your life kind of thing. You're an idiot Right. That's a very crispy-looking football, yeah. Yeah, you're an idiot and your dad's an idiot too. You're like, wait, what's going on? You know, with just doing shape primitives, like, oh my God, I just drew a bird. So Well, there's those embry… is that what you're talking about?

The Embry books? Where they use basic shapes to create worlds? But anyway, there's, like, there's a long list of people who've… come up with amazing ways to draw. Hmm. But I think, like, there's another Priya Parker has this, like, um… I'm looking for it on my bookshelf, but it's, like, how to gather, I think, is the first book, and now the second book's How to Fight. Which has to do with, like, managing conflict. But they're both clever about… You know, how to gather covers… Uh, how to have a good wedding, or how to have a good corporate meeting.

Like, she hits the rain, like, so she's clever about… Who are audience… well, because it might be both, you know, you engage it from the wedding thing, that's how you hear about her, but then you're like, oh, this applies to my work. And how to fight is, like, how to deal with… Polarizing family members, or… you know, non-contributing team members, blah blah blah. Yeah. And so, I think they've… Yeah. Start gathering in the art of fighting. Just, I'm just just for for the Anyway, they're just… they're… it's not the most profound. But they're… it's effective, and they've… They've identified a problem people are having, And then, I don't know how much of a… a lot of it's even their own, the how stuff.

I assume they've researched and pulled it together, and… put the effort in to write the book, and they're… you know, a charismatic, uh… people. And, um, she obviously has… and her husband's… a more well-known thinker. Um, and I can't think of his last name, Anand. But, um… so, there might be interesting in terms of… What is it that you're trying to help people do? Great. Get at… I know ImagineHarder's been a thing, but, like, in order to do what? the Clayton Christensen kind of stopped thinking. Yeah. If you can nail that, then everything else kind of… that's the hard… that's actually the hard… it's kind of hard to figure that part out.

And then, uh, everything, like… You've done so… you've created so much stuff. that it should… the rest should be kind of easy, it's just the, like… What is it that you're… and maybe it's different audiences at different things, but…

Yeah, as I reflect on that for my own workshops, I think like, So much of it has to do with, yeah, what are you trying to help them accomplish, but what are you also trying to accomplish for yourself as, like, Is it an entry point? Is it, like, advertising? Is it… so, like, for the futures workshop I ran, it was free. And it was with, uh… IXDF and they… the reason I agreed to do it for free was, one, because it's, like, a volunteer organization. I know they're, like, a money-making organization in themselves, but the local chapter is, like, mostly voluntary.

And, um… But it also paints me in a good In a good life for running the… Running the workshops for free and teaching people methods. And also it helps me… Uh… know, like, what's the level of interest in this kind of work in the first place. And even if I don't know exactly why people would want to join this. by running the workshop and getting their… getting people to participate. I think I am better able to see why? If anything, it's just a cool… Uh, thing to do. It's a new explorative thing for designers to try.

But it starts opening up to questions. Director… I'd recommend, Brandon, that… When you know it works, it's not free anymore. Yeah. So, the only free ones are because you're experimenting. Yeah. you're learning, because you're at… you're asking them to… go along with the experiment with you, so that's part of why it's free. And then… you trust the organization, like, it's a good halo effect of the organization, but… I recently was writing some of that to a potential client. I'm like, okay, I'll do these things for free, but I'm not preparing anything… And it's going to be fully experimental, that's why I find happy to do it free.

But if I… if, like, shit's on the line, you have to pay. Like… Yeah. It's funny you say that because actually, the original, like, back and forth I had with the IXDF representative here in Dallas was, like, They were asking me to run an AI workshop, but I was like, I run those kind of for paying organizations, but. Exactly. I'm trying to do more futures stuff. This is kind of a kind of an experimental thing I'm doing, so I'll run that for free. And… Yeah. Yeah, I think we're on the same page there. And now you have the… learnings and the documentation, and blah blah, but you can put out in the world.

Yeah. that then, next time you do it… and you can… you know, as you improve it, the price can go up, but… Okay. Yeah, as I've been trying to build like, what are my… distinct offerings through… through my company, um… the… yeah, the baseline is, like, a diagnostic, and that is a typically, like, workshops, like. What can I teach you generally about the type of approach I'm taking, and then what can… how can we apply that generally to your business to find out. how it can be applied at the most, um… At the most, like, efficient scale?

Like, what are the problems? You as an organization are concerned about And… how can, like, the methods I'm teaching you be applied to those. it's kind of a, by doing it, you're also discovering it kind of way. Way to move forward, and even for the workshop I ran earlier this week. Um, they… Some of the things they were coming up with, something they noticed in the workshop, or, like, part of their feedback, was that. And they knew this going in, you can't, like, design in an entire AI system in a, in a 40 minute activity.

But they did find out that wanting to use generative AI to make. journey maps, uh, the first step you gotta take is retrieving data from retrieving this particular kind of data from Salesforce. So that gets them moving, and that opens up those conversations for deeper, uh… Oh, well, how do you plan on doing that? Here's how I can help, and then… The the next like offerings I have are like the intensive deciding what to pursue. prioritizing the different things we discovered in the original workshop. And then going through actual, like, prototyping or design sprints and then actual, like, development of solutions.

You can also get a lot of mileage out of like, pre-read, or… Homework? Or stuff that comes back to you, like some… Yeah. Although, it can be a wild card how much… people complete them, but, um… Like, because I think Andrew said something about level setting. workshops, and I'm like, no, that needs to happen before the workshop. Yeah. as much as you can. You understand the readiness, or whatever it is. vocabulary as quickly as possible. Don't take the valuable time of the workshop doing that stuff, if you can. Um, so, like, even, like, with Julian, you're… I don't… Like, you've put out into the world a bunch of provocative questions, that our ways of thinking, and you can ask people, Yeah. you know, as a kind of prelude to an engagement, like… you know, have you thought about this this way?

I mean, I… I'm not very sharp-minded right now, but like… the way in which you describe… that kind of question. Um, that's going to unlock something for them. I mean, you need to know something about the audience in order to be like… Have you thought about whatever it is? I can't think of a good example right now. I'm getting what you're picking up what you're putting down. Yeah, that's actually really helpful. I kind of went down a little bit of rabbit hole while I was listening, which is Yeah. You know, I'm super jealous that people can write these books like The Art of Gathering and The Art of Fighting.

And I'm trying really hard. The hardest part about this particular writing project is Right. Yeah, I never, never really wrote until, like, grad… you know, really. I'm in a substantial way until, like, grad school. And when I did that, I was… I was trained to write technically Mm-hmm. Humanities technical kind of obfuscated You know, I modeled myself after Donna Haraway, so I'm not doing myself any favors in terms of being Straightforward. Her writing's beautiful, but it also is, you know I remember taking my dad to one of her lectures, my dad being like my dad was a journalist, so he knows how to write.

This is… this is an amazing… To communicate to a general Amazing book. Oh, okay. Never… I haven't heard of it. You have to read it like that. French writer. And so he was like, he's like, can you just be like more straightforward or something? And I was like, fair point. Yeah, totally fair point. I think I was like aggravated because I was like, well, he's, you know, because you want to please your dad. And And I remember I was telling someone this the other day, and I remember in seminar once, Hayden White was there And Donna Haraway was there, and they would, you know, they were colleagues, but you see, you get a chance to kind of see them in dialogue And I remember I can't remember exactly what it so seared in my memory the feeling I had in the experience, but it basically went like, I feel like Hayden said like They were

having a discussion about ways of writing And whatever Hayden said. Donna said back Yeah, but sometimes, you know, there are different modes of writing and sometimes you want your writing to be very specific and precise and Very clear to the point where you know what to do. She's like, for example, the technical manual for like bolting an engine onto an airplane. You're like, oh yeah, you're right. You do want that. You don't want it. You don't want it to be metaphorical in the traditional sense. You want to be like, no, this bolt torques to 128 foot-pounds, otherwise we're screwed Which makes me think of the Netflix Boeing documentary that I just watched.

I never want to get on a Boeing plane ever again.

Mm-hmm. So why am I saying that? I'm saying that because Maybe there's a lead to the workshop, either in the proposal and also like in the room Brandon, where it's like, this is this. This workshop has nothing to do with the future of civic policy in an autonomous Vehicle world, you know, in a world X has nothing to do with that. This has everything to do with the art of imagining. You know, as a way to just kind of Yeah. remind people why they're doing this. And it's going to be fun as fuck. You just wait.

It's gonna be beautiful. But I want you to know that the reason we're doing this isn't so that you can gain insight into what to do on Monday With your autonomous vehicle policy issues And so it's so that you can go away because I don't know, I'm not a policy expert, but I do know about the art of imagining. That's the trick. That's the trick. It's like Yeah. I don't know. For some reason, I just thought of that Ricky J documentary. I'm watching lots of documentaries. Ricky J documentary, where it's like, this is… this is nothing to do with tech… you know, the tech… technical aspects of magic.

It has to do with the Making doing some… I don't know what it has to do with. Yeah, it is this weird thing where it's like They want you to imagine some specific future that you can bridge to now so that it becomes part of some kind of strategic planning. Or something like that. And that's the one where I have trouble trying to explain this to people. They want a fixed idea of the future that they can build towards. Yeah. And they're not happy. Yeah. Well, you can… Instead of that, you give them… 3 or 4?

Yeah, but… And… with the idea that Because that's… that is valuable. I mean, people are used to, um… swipe analysis, and so… This is a different version of that, and you can say… These are four viable futures, the… You know, things that might happen to bring us to one are different than the other, and so I'm going to teach you how to… And you can… if they don't believe that kind of thing, just go back in time and say, In 2008, this could have… if we… imagine we didn't bail out the automobiles, blah blah, or whatever.

And so, um, in their concrete, the floor. And they can make plans based on the four. And then the onus on them is to, like, Pay it now, pay attention. Yeah. To which one we're heading towards, uh, on a quarterly, annual basis. I did that with clients. And that's helpful. Yeah, but you don't find that they pull you towards going, well, we're going to select one of these four because we think One of them is going to be true. All four of them can be true. the thing for them to… admit is… Um, which one are you… Well, and you can… depending on the culture of the organization asks us different ways, but like… Which one are you the most confident about?

Least confident, ready, not ready? Yeah. Mm hmm. plays to your strengths, is threatening, whatever, whatever, whatever. as a way to say… Yeah. Which one do you want to focus on for now? Because they probably don't have the skills to, like, It's not a horse race thing. It's like, these all could come to be. And so… the reason we look at these four is Some are good, you know, they're tailored… more of a tailwind than otherwise. And for the ones that are threatening… Y, and then… if that one's looking like that's where we're going, You now know that that's coming, so if you do nothing, then… You know, you can't complain that later, like, hey, what happened?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. to our business. So, um… That, I have found… nullifies all of the… Wanting to predict. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it is that some people I… Setting that up early on, it… It is something that people come to understand through the process, but prior to the process, they have a harder time. Envisioning that that's going to be the thing. Because they… They start with this idea that there's going to be some kind of prediction, that. thinking about futures is about predicting. Yeah. Well, you can head that… I mean, that can be head off immediately in all your marketing, and say, Yeah.

We can't predict the future. I mean, it's a lot of what Paul does in his… Yeah, no, it's true. his pieces that he puts out. They're like all… these all are all possible… things that come… could come down the pike, and then at the end, like… How does… as… and you have… you have… he has these nice questions of, like, to wrestle with, like, was this comfortable, not comfortable? Are you ready for this, not ready for this? Yep. I mean, I learned what I just said from, like, Stuart, Candy, and Elliot Montgomery. It's not my own… They were my teachers.

But, and Julian, of course. Oh, Julian, you said something about… you were comparing… You jump between Diana Haraway and then bolting an engine on a Boeing. And I was thinking… If I put you… in, uh, the culture… I don't know what the culture of Boeing is like, I never worked there, but I'm gonna guess it's like… The other a major aviation companies, in that it's a major engineering culture. And… who think, part of them thinks, or part of you thinks like them. But another part of you absolutely, you know, is that orthogonal means to that?

And so, I think if you just hung out with that group of people, You would start to see… These, like, bad habits that they have? And then, how… what you're… how to, like… um… position or invite that culture to engage in what you're doing. Because I'll tell you, it's, like, super different than… in Andrew's world. are, uh… you know, uh, I don't know, some… you know, corporate… consumer product company. They're very different cultures, and so… why they think imagining or considering the future is important is different, and how you… convince them of why it's important is different.

I mean, I can just be a triage you, like… How do you guys… what's the most, um… Or, like, uh… You know, what's the culture of decision-making in your… in your organization. I was surprised at Nike. How many decks are made? For as cool of all the shit they make, it's shocking how many decks they make. Hmm It's like… or conversely, At Amazon, absolutely everything is written down. Like, there's a ton of Word docs that are written. explaining everything. I'm like, oh, I could never work. It's like such a writing, reading, I could never work in that culture like that.

Versus what Netflix originally was, which was, like, super bottoms-up. Anyway, I'm losing my voice. I should get going. Yeah, I gotta get going too, otherwise I won't work today. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Scott. Thanks, Scott, appreciate you working through the muddle. Thanks, Scott. Yeah, I'm gonna bounce Mm-hmm. All right. See you guys. Next week I want to hear more about what you're doing with this workshop, Julie. Thanks, Mike. Like, what the, what the actual workshop is, or what your… What's coming out of it? Yeah, there's no workshop Oh, I thought you… Got it. I'm sort of… I'm writing about a workshop that I did back in 2015 as a kind of case study, just to kind of step through How do you Rather than describing it kind of atmospherically, just, you know, like, be, like very Hmm.

Yeah, it's short because there's not a lot to really explain, but, like, how How the The flow of the workshop from pre Hmm. Which was kind of like, you know, creating the material that would provide the the immersive experience of being in this world, which you know you do. You don't know what you create. Here's some things we found some stuff. And in this case it was like the stuff we found were news articles and Some ads. There was a lot of stuff we kind of culled it down to as much as we could really put up on a wall and be able to walk through people When they came in the room And then it's like… and then there was a very structured You know, surface under which they were meant to contribute their perspective and insight, which was a 14 14 Page or cited 14 panel quick start guide that was going to

end up being like a kind of folded brochure. So it's, like, it's very clear, it's like, okay, we need to get from wandering around this world of autonomous vehicles where you know, there are a lot of fun things I want to kind of bring back… bring back, which is one was Airbnb Renting out Got it. Cars Well, I love that. And people using them to sleep in or something like that. Lots of weird stuff Of that sort, anticipating the already then, back in 2015, you know, Bay Area housing crisis or shitshow. et cetera, etc, etc.

So people are like now in this world And Then it's like, okay, we need to figure out how to fill in this Quick start guide. So we're going from like really macro level view of the world with TMZ articles and San Francisco Chronicle articles and advertisement coupons from Little Caesar is giving you 30% off if your autonomous vehicle is sent to pick up the pizza kinds of things to then Okay, so what… what do these vehicles need in them at a very instrumental interaction design level? What is the shape of the knob that puts it into Uber mode so it can go be a taxi and earn just a little bit of Money on the side, etc.

So you get really… and then the refresh thing, which kind of came up this morning, something JMO posted about The people who clean the literal shit out of the back of Waymo's because people take shits in them and stuff like that. I got into a Waymo a couple weeks ago that had throw-up all in it. Yeah. Oh, God. Yeah, so we had… there was a whole thing… I mean, I'm not saying that we predict anything, but we did kind of predict something where it's like, there's a whole panel that's just on the refresh feature. Which, you know, we just sort of imagined it as a, you know, there was a… there's a High pressure canister in the back that actually just, you know, effervesses, but whatever.

We're not trying to figure out the technical details, we're just trying to say, like, this is gonna happen, and you… and I'm sure that they anticipated it Or, you know, imagine, because they've got these… I'm guessing, because they have these actual facilities Which I think I saw one not for Waymos, but for those little cocoa carts. I don't know if you guys have them in your cities, I think There we go. Yeah, so I was like, oh my gosh, this is just, like, it's literally just, you know. On the border of my neighborhood, a slight, very small light industrial area that used to be like, you know, back in when Venice was the place you went to to get… buy drugs and get punched in the face and potentially shot.

It was, a What do you call them? Auto Not quite a junkyard, but a place where tow trucks would take cars and kind of drop them off And it's now been converted and of course turned into, like, creative spaces, or whatever they call them. That neighborhood right by Jelena? Yeah, just on the… just right near there Yeah. But there's… yeah. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. And and near Erewhon, you know, so it's like all weird now. And so I said the gate was open. There's some people in there just sort of like talking and it was just like a battalion of these cocoa I was like, oh my god, is this where they come from?

And so you imagine they kind of go in there and it's like, this one clearly got kicked by someone, you know, something like that. So they have these for Waymos. There's I should be giving you the link to the article. Here it is It's sort of like the Waymo triage zone, where they pull in and they get triaged and buffed up and… Crave. Yeah, cleaning up poop, the human labor behind. They interview someone who's, you know, once remained anonymous, but it's like We've got that for… in kind of the neighborhood, in Dog Patch for Lyft bicycles, you know?

And you'll see the scooters, like, they'll go around and they'll scoop them all up in the van, they bring them back to the scooter and bike hospital that's down in Dogpatch, and then they fix them up overnight, and they recharge them, and clean the whatever. fix the flat tire. Yeah, you see Yeah. You see the guy with, clearly they're contractors, but they have their… their you know, they're 2004 Tacoma, but they've actually kitted it out, so it's actually it can accommodate, you know, in the back more or less, you know, precisely as many Lime scooters or whatever they are as possible.

So they've, you know, they've kind of jigged up the back, so it'll… the things will sit nicely, and they'll kind of, like, stay ordered, and they won't roll around, or that kind of thing. But they've all done it on their own. You know, it wasn't like it's not a Lime scooter or whatever they are Yeah. truck, it's just a jobber who's like, I can make 12 cents per pickup, go around and kind of pick these things up and or I guess kind of distribute them at 4 o'clock in the morning It's just, I don't know, it's fascinating to me.

I want to know who's picking up the helmets. It does kind of feel like that moving to Brazil. Like, I've got a handyman in Minneapolis who's… with the rise in metal prices, the dude, all he does is circle the city, picking Like, iron, and abandoned bikes, and he's just like, dude, I make a couple hundred bucks a day just scrapping. Just him and his buddies, just combing the streets and alleys, scrapping. And I was like, in some ways, that's kind of cool. Him and his dog and his buddies in this… their hoopty rig, yeah. I used to live in a more industrial part of Dallas and there was a there was one of those like recycling yards that you could.

Bring scraps to and Uh, every morning, the line outside of the… the line of cars outside of it was at least, like, 3 or 4 blocks long. Yeah. It's… it's wild. Well, the price of metal's going through the roof for everything, you know, it's just like, wow. a chunk of aluminum laying on the side of an alley is worth real money. Yeah. Yeah, I got to get out of here too. I'm moving in like two weeks, so we're packing up everything, and… Doing a, doing an apartment sale tomorrow. I'm going to go for that, but cool conversation.

And… Well, It'd be cool if you documented the adventure, the move from Dallas to… Oh, yeah. to, um… So, you know, like, just so that we all could experience what it like to… Yeah. Oh, sorry. Oh, yeah, I mean, if y'all are ever curious about it, I've done a ton of research. My move-in two weeks is to a different apartment here in Dallas. We're downsizing a bit before our move, that's scheduled in April to Two. I've done that type of rule a few times. Yeah, but, um, if y'all are ever curious about the process of, like, After moving to… Uh, moving to the Netherlands, let me know.

I know a lot about it. And it's actually super easy. As long as you can actually, like, make the move work for yourself. Nice. Good luck. Yeah, good luck. Okay. All right. Enjoy your long weekends. Yeah, yeah, thank you. Yeah. I guess it's a long weekend, isn't it? Technically, I don't know, things just kind of Same, but… Right. I don't know, to have it, I guess. Logging off of clients, right? They're like, we'll see you on Tuesday. We're like, Tuesday? Oh yeah, okay. Whatever Nice. All right. Okay, you guys Thanks, everybody. Take care. Alright, take a guess.

Great tip.